How is the date format in PSH determined? By the system's locale? It would have been nice if they settled on ISO format dates for all command line use...
The Luxeon Cool White LEDs are the most efficient they make at the moment (just under 100 lumens per watt, IIRC) and are not at all perceptibly blue (I have a small array of them which I'm testing, in fact I find the colour of the light very pleasing - much more pleasing than the dull colour of incandescent or "warm white" CFLs or LEDs).
It's a racing car. Your family and your groceries won't fit in a Formula 1 car or Indy car either. It's not supposed to be a family car or anything approximating that, it's for racing.
Indeed. When I was at school, in 1990, we had some Acorn Archimedes machines, and I got a PC emulator for them. They could run PC emulation quicker than many PCs that were being sold at the time.
Speaking as a native English speaker who is learning Spanish, it's one of the things that hit you most from Spanish - much more so than English, Spanish relies on context to understand meaning. I don't think English has a verb used for quite as many meanings as, say, "quedar". The other thing that strikes me is this. All my computers are now set to Spanish, and so when I do a Google search, it returns Spanish language stuff first, but any technical search brings back about 1/2 the results in English still.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that the PRS wants you to pay for listening to publically-broadcast radio. The radio station has *already* paid the PRS, so this is double dipping. The PRS, incidentally, also wants you to pay if you listen to *talk* radio.
I'm not certain that Skype would work on a 3G network. It's not the bandwidth, but the latency. All mobile data networks I've used (GPRS, EDGE and 3G) have had *terrible* latency, and not only terrible latency but very unpredictable latency. If you use SSH over 3G, you'll find you type a bunch of stuff and perhaps 15 seconds later, what you typed will echo back. Other times, 3G latency is somewhat better, it only feels like doing ssh to a machine with a high load average on the other side of the planet. But the typical latency of the mobile data networks varies from poorer than 56k dialup at best to terrible at worst.
It is? I found it trivially easy to make new symbols, just draw them and convert them to a symbol in gSchem. "Draw/select all/convert" also works for making custom footprints in PCB.
Now the gSchem -> PCB bit would produce some challenges for people who can only use a GUI (it's not hard, but it doesn't have a push a GUI button to do it method). But symbol creation both for PCB footprints and schematic symbols was something I found extremely easy, just draw it and convert it to a symbol.
My desktop PC has been exclusively Linux for 6 years now, and I don't even have Wine installed (and never have installed it). I have no Windows systems at all. There is no need to touch Wine for the vast majority of desktop use.
Perhaps this is because there is more than one Slashdotter, and therefore it is entirely possible that, you know, different people on the same site may hold different opinions?
It was obvious 10 years ago
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Even 10 years ago, it was pretty evident that it was only a matter of time before TV became obsolete. Once you could inexpensively publish online, and once a PC could do full motion video, it was only a matter of time.
TV will hang on for a while yet, as will newspapers, and as will the odd brick and mortar game or music store, but the end is nigh for all of these things.
These people though are increasingly in the minority, and they are probably also in the minority that will be hardest hit by the economic slowdown - which is only going to hasten the inevitable. An increasing number of people find online delivery of digital media (music, games, software, etc.) so incredibly convenient that they don't even think of going to a high street store any more. For instance, although I have purchased (yes, purchased, not pirated) more music in the last two years than I did in the entire 10 years before that, I have only bought one physical CD (and that was mail order) - everything else has been through iTunes and eMusic. I have little desire to go to a physical store, and neither do many others - it means spending significantly more time getting to the store, having to drive/get the bus etc., and it's more expensive, and you can't sample the album first before buying.
Music stores, game stores - anything suited to online distribution - will almost certainly become extinct before too long - it's inevitable. Also, anything where people feel they don't need to touch and feel the goods first. Things like clothes stores will stay around for many years to come, same with stores selling appliances, because people want to look at the physical item. But anything where people don't particularly care about seeing the physical item first - it's only a matter of time before stores selling them in malls and high streets die out.
The trouble is - now there's things like "tagging" in social networks. You may have a photo of you tagged by someone else, not uploaded by you, not approved by you. So now you have to permanently live with the "policeman in your head" to make sure you do nothing that could be misconstrued, or some day might be deleterious to your job chances in case someone else tags you in a photo. A little bit like the care Winston Smith needed in Nineteen Eighty Four.
The INS Dehumanization of Foreigners Act is to blame. OK, so I joke, but having worked on a project in the US for a few years (before returning home). Here's my experience of the visa process.
First I was on an L1 as an intracompany transferee. I wasn't cheap to my company either - they did indeed pay the prevailing wage, and on top of that, a substantial international service allowance that paid all of my living expenses and then some (the ISA was something like double my actual basic living expenses). Since they are a big firm and have many people working in many different countries, they have a whole department that looks after people on international service. This department does things like visa paperwork. They are very experienced with it.
However, my visa application was refused (section 224g IIRC, "insufficient information") and the US Embassy demanded that I go and have a visa interview at the embassy. The ream of paperwork, incidentally, was filled out just like they had been doing successfully for some months - but they explained to me that every so often the embassy staff changes, and some new footling jobsworth rule changes, and they just start bouncing applications. I was just unlucky enough to hit a staff change. So I go up to London, where you have to line up outside the embassy at the crack of dawn for a good hour or so. Then you have to line up to get a delicatessen style ticket. Then you sit down and wait, while they call numbers.
You can't read a book while they are doing this - the numbers are called in seemingly random sequence, and you just know after your initial experience already with the embassy if you are reading, and miss your number, they won't call it again and you'll get sent home to repeat the experience some weeks later. So you sit and get bored. If you do decide to read, they have these "newspapers" around called something like "Going USA". The first half of which bizarrely seems to be dedicated to how terrible your own country is, how great the USA is, and what a good time your country folk are having running gas stations in Florida. The second half of the "newspaper" is dedicated to how they aren't going to give you a visa anyway.
Anyhow, after 4 hours, my number came up. The guy asked me a single question - what are the dates of service with your company? I told him. He said, "That's great, you'll get your passport back in about a week". They could have asked me that over the phone and saved me a completely unproductive day (and a great deal of expense). Now I have no quarrel with the guy who did the "interview" at the embassy, he was perfectly courteous and polite. But the whole bureaucratic machine is a red-taped mess.
I had a second run-in with the Embassy's bureaucratic machine again when my visa got extended. It was actually approved by the INS in the United States, all I needed to do was if I went back home on a trip, was to get the new visa stuck in my passport. The Embassy literally had nothing to do other than print the thing as it was already approved. There was another form to fill in for the Embassy (which merely duplicated all the information the INS already had when they approved the new visa), so I filled this in, sent it and the paperwork from the INS in the USA to the Embassy. They refused my new visa! My new pre-approved visa! Why? Because the form was out of date. So I downloaded the new form off the Embassy website and it was...exactly..the..same....as...the...one I sent, apart from the date at the bottom. Exactly the same. This bureaucratic stupidity cost me another couple of days as the new paperwork had to make yet another round trip.
Now I'm not singling out the USA here. My current next door neighbour is Albanian - she's very smart, has an engineering degree, and fluently speaks English, German and French (and of course Albanian). But the British embassy treated her like a liar and criminal - they were deliberately extremely unpleasant, rude and aggressive to her face (and indeed, she wouldn't have come here if it wasn't
I find it bizarre that the US and Canada don't have something similar to the Schengen agreement in Europe (in Europe you have the right to work in any country that's an EU member if you are a citizen of an EU member country). It seems that the US and Canada just have the free trade agreement but no freedom of movement agreement.
I suspect Apple did actually do some market research, and found out how many users use extra batteries or replace them, and probably discovered the number was very small. They probably also looked at how long people use their machines off the mains.
Most people I know very rarely use their laptops for more than an hour or two off the mains. My 12in PowerBook when new 4.5 years ago, had about a 4 hour battery life; today, I still get at least two hours of use from a charge. Now consider a battery that's 8 hours when new - to get down to most people's "battery doesn't last long enough" would take at least two half-lives of the battery, so probably between 4 and 8 years depending on how much the laptop is used off the mains. So the tradeoff of making a battery that lasts longer vice making an easily replaceable battery was deemed to be worthwhile.
The satellites weren't going roughly the same speed and direction - it was more like a "T-bone" collision; they were travelling at paths almost 90 degrees to each other when they collided:
For Linux users, even back to the early 1990s, S3 has been a synonym for "don't buy this graphics card". Even back then, they didn't release specs for their graphics cards, and they didn't even support VESA modes for graphics mode so their cards couldn't be used at all for X.
At least the other two closed graphics cards makers do supply drivers for Linux.
Most of the day you're stationary, and can listen to internet radio on a fixed broadband connection. There is no extra cost on ADSL or cable for listening to 8 hours of streaming 64kbit radio.
Most people are mobile for less than an hour a day.
For the kind of routes the 747 flies, there IS that option. For example, British Airways has a "World Traveller Plus" - more legroom, mains plug for your laptop etc., and it costs about 1.5 times the normal economy fare.
I'm flying on BA to Houston in March. Being a cheapskate, I took the normal economy class (I fit the seats, and even in the cheap seats, you get free booze and free food). The return fare from London to Houston is £300 *all inclusive* travelling midweek (about US $450) which is tremendously good value for money, especially since BA's service (at least on that route) is first class.
I did check the other fares. I will not begrudge the First Class passengers getting on the plane first, or getting their own checkin desk and lounge. The first class round trip fare for the same journey is... £9000.
It also seems that WinCE (or just wince, as I prefer to call it) is neither one thing nor the other, it's trying to be a PC on a device that most certainly isn't a PC (they even call it Pocket PC these days) and isn't used like a PC. It makes it very awkward to use. Add to that the crashyness of Windows 95, and you've got a device that just gets in your way. And this ultimately is why I have an iPhone, and not a Windows Mobile device.
No, the UK government didn't buy salt/equipment because regardless of global warming to date, the UK's weather last week is a once-in-20-years event. It doesn't make sense to have lots of idle equipment for once in a 20 year event - it's far cheaper to take the disruption once every 20 years. And anyone who studies climate, such as the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre also advises that global warming doesn't mean that there will be an absence of cold weather, and indeed, global warming can paradoxically make some locales colder due to changing oceanic/atmospheric conditions.
The title is totally misleading. It talks about a small fraction of renewable energy technologies, and doesn't even recognise that the rare elements don't vanish into thin air, they can be recycled when a solar panel reaches the end of its useful life.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the date format in PSH determined? By the system's locale? It would have been nice if they settled on ISO format dates for all command line use...
The Luxeon Cool White LEDs are the most efficient they make at the moment (just under 100 lumens per watt, IIRC) and are not at all perceptibly blue (I have a small array of them which I'm testing, in fact I find the colour of the light very pleasing - much more pleasing than the dull colour of incandescent or "warm white" CFLs or LEDs).
It's a racing car. Your family and your groceries won't fit in a Formula 1 car or Indy car either. It's not supposed to be a family car or anything approximating that, it's for racing.
Indeed. When I was at school, in 1990, we had some Acorn Archimedes machines, and I got a PC emulator for them. They could run PC emulation quicker than many PCs that were being sold at the time.
Speaking as a native English speaker who is learning Spanish, it's one of the things that hit you most from Spanish - much more so than English, Spanish relies on context to understand meaning. I don't think English has a verb used for quite as many meanings as, say, "quedar". The other thing that strikes me is this. All my computers are now set to Spanish, and so when I do a Google search, it returns Spanish language stuff first, but any technical search brings back about 1/2 the results in English still.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that the PRS wants you to pay for listening to publically-broadcast radio. The radio station has *already* paid the PRS, so this is double dipping. The PRS, incidentally, also wants you to pay if you listen to *talk* radio.
I'm not certain that Skype would work on a 3G network. It's not the bandwidth, but the latency. All mobile data networks I've used (GPRS, EDGE and 3G) have had *terrible* latency, and not only terrible latency but very unpredictable latency. If you use SSH over 3G, you'll find you type a bunch of stuff and perhaps 15 seconds later, what you typed will echo back. Other times, 3G latency is somewhat better, it only feels like doing ssh to a machine with a high load average on the other side of the planet. But the typical latency of the mobile data networks varies from poorer than 56k dialup at best to terrible at worst.
Sure you can. And add a transparent proxy to change the headers to the false, moved-forward time.
It is? I found it trivially easy to make new symbols, just draw them and convert them to a symbol in gSchem. "Draw/select all/convert" also works for making custom footprints in PCB.
Now the gSchem -> PCB bit would produce some challenges for people who can only use a GUI (it's not hard, but it doesn't have a push a GUI button to do it method). But symbol creation both for PCB footprints and schematic symbols was something I found extremely easy, just draw it and convert it to a symbol.
My desktop PC has been exclusively Linux for 6 years now, and I don't even have Wine installed (and never have installed it). I have no Windows systems at all. There is no need to touch Wine for the vast majority of desktop use.
Java never caught on? That's news to me....
Perhaps this is because there is more than one Slashdotter, and therefore it is entirely possible that, you know, different people on the same site may hold different opinions?
Even 10 years ago, it was pretty evident that it was only a matter of time before TV became obsolete. Once you could inexpensively publish online, and once a PC could do full motion video, it was only a matter of time.
TV will hang on for a while yet, as will newspapers, and as will the odd brick and mortar game or music store, but the end is nigh for all of these things.
These people though are increasingly in the minority, and they are probably also in the minority that will be hardest hit by the economic slowdown - which is only going to hasten the inevitable. An increasing number of people find online delivery of digital media (music, games, software, etc.) so incredibly convenient that they don't even think of going to a high street store any more. For instance, although I have purchased (yes, purchased, not pirated) more music in the last two years than I did in the entire 10 years before that, I have only bought one physical CD (and that was mail order) - everything else has been through iTunes and eMusic. I have little desire to go to a physical store, and neither do many others - it means spending significantly more time getting to the store, having to drive/get the bus etc., and it's more expensive, and you can't sample the album first before buying.
Music stores, game stores - anything suited to online distribution - will almost certainly become extinct before too long - it's inevitable. Also, anything where people feel they don't need to touch and feel the goods first. Things like clothes stores will stay around for many years to come, same with stores selling appliances, because people want to look at the physical item. But anything where people don't particularly care about seeing the physical item first - it's only a matter of time before stores selling them in malls and high streets die out.
The trouble is - now there's things like "tagging" in social networks. You may have a photo of you tagged by someone else, not uploaded by you, not approved by you. So now you have to permanently live with the "policeman in your head" to make sure you do nothing that could be misconstrued, or some day might be deleterious to your job chances in case someone else tags you in a photo. A little bit like the care Winston Smith needed in Nineteen Eighty Four.
The INS Dehumanization of Foreigners Act is to blame. OK, so I joke, but having worked on a project in the US for a few years (before returning home). Here's my experience of the visa process.
First I was on an L1 as an intracompany transferee. I wasn't cheap to my company either - they did indeed pay the prevailing wage, and on top of that, a substantial international service allowance that paid all of my living expenses and then some (the ISA was something like double my actual basic living expenses). Since they are a big firm and have many people working in many different countries, they have a whole department that looks after people on international service. This department does things like visa paperwork. They are very experienced with it.
However, my visa application was refused (section 224g IIRC, "insufficient information") and the US Embassy demanded that I go and have a visa interview at the embassy. The ream of paperwork, incidentally, was filled out just like they had been doing successfully for some months - but they explained to me that every so often the embassy staff changes, and some new footling jobsworth rule changes, and they just start bouncing applications. I was just unlucky enough to hit a staff change. So I go up to London, where you have to line up outside the embassy at the crack of dawn for a good hour or so. Then you have to line up to get a delicatessen style ticket. Then you sit down and wait, while they call numbers.
You can't read a book while they are doing this - the numbers are called in seemingly random sequence, and you just know after your initial experience already with the embassy if you are reading, and miss your number, they won't call it again and you'll get sent home to repeat the experience some weeks later. So you sit and get bored. If you do decide to read, they have these "newspapers" around called something like "Going USA". The first half of which bizarrely seems to be dedicated to how terrible your own country is, how great the USA is, and what a good time your country folk are having running gas stations in Florida. The second half of the "newspaper" is dedicated to how they aren't going to give you a visa anyway.
Anyhow, after 4 hours, my number came up. The guy asked me a single question - what are the dates of service with your company? I told him. He said, "That's great, you'll get your passport back in about a week". They could have asked me that over the phone and saved me a completely unproductive day (and a great deal of expense). Now I have no quarrel with the guy who did the "interview" at the embassy, he was perfectly courteous and polite. But the whole bureaucratic machine is a red-taped mess.
I had a second run-in with the Embassy's bureaucratic machine again when my visa got extended. It was actually approved by the INS in the United States, all I needed to do was if I went back home on a trip, was to get the new visa stuck in my passport. The Embassy literally had nothing to do other than print the thing as it was already approved. There was another form to fill in for the Embassy (which merely duplicated all the information the INS already had when they approved the new visa), so I filled this in, sent it and the paperwork from the INS in the USA to the Embassy. They refused my new visa! My new pre-approved visa! Why? Because the form was out of date. So I downloaded the new form off the Embassy website and it was...exactly..the..same....as...the...one I sent, apart from the date at the bottom. Exactly the same. This bureaucratic stupidity cost me another couple of days as the new paperwork had to make yet another round trip.
Now I'm not singling out the USA here. My current next door neighbour is Albanian - she's very smart, has an engineering degree, and fluently speaks English, German and French (and of course Albanian). But the British embassy treated her like a liar and criminal - they were deliberately extremely unpleasant, rude and aggressive to her face (and indeed, she wouldn't have come here if it wasn't
I find it bizarre that the US and Canada don't have something similar to the Schengen agreement in Europe (in Europe you have the right to work in any country that's an EU member if you are a citizen of an EU member country). It seems that the US and Canada just have the free trade agreement but no freedom of movement agreement.
I suspect Apple did actually do some market research, and found out how many users use extra batteries or replace them, and probably discovered the number was very small. They probably also looked at how long people use their machines off the mains.
Most people I know very rarely use their laptops for more than an hour or two off the mains. My 12in PowerBook when new 4.5 years ago, had about a 4 hour battery life; today, I still get at least two hours of use from a charge. Now consider a battery that's 8 hours when new - to get down to most people's "battery doesn't last long enough" would take at least two half-lives of the battery, so probably between 4 and 8 years depending on how much the laptop is used off the mains. So the tradeoff of making a battery that lasts longer vice making an easily replaceable battery was deemed to be worthwhile.
The satellites weren't going roughly the same speed and direction - it was more like a "T-bone" collision; they were travelling at paths almost 90 degrees to each other when they collided:
http://www.obsat.com/images/Ir33coll_top.gif
For Linux users, even back to the early 1990s, S3 has been a synonym for "don't buy this graphics card". Even back then, they didn't release specs for their graphics cards, and they didn't even support VESA modes for graphics mode so their cards couldn't be used at all for X.
At least the other two closed graphics cards makers do supply drivers for Linux.
Most of the day you're stationary, and can listen to internet radio on a fixed broadband connection. There is no extra cost on ADSL or cable for listening to 8 hours of streaming 64kbit radio.
Most people are mobile for less than an hour a day.
For the kind of routes the 747 flies, there IS that option. For example, British Airways has a "World Traveller Plus" - more legroom, mains plug for your laptop etc., and it costs about 1.5 times the normal economy fare.
I'm flying on BA to Houston in March. Being a cheapskate, I took the normal economy class (I fit the seats, and even in the cheap seats, you get free booze and free food). The return fare from London to Houston is £300 *all inclusive* travelling midweek (about US $450) which is tremendously good value for money, especially since BA's service (at least on that route) is first class.
I did check the other fares. I will not begrudge the First Class passengers getting on the plane first, or getting their own checkin desk and lounge. The first class round trip fare for the same journey is ... £9000.
It also seems that WinCE (or just wince, as I prefer to call it) is neither one thing nor the other, it's trying to be a PC on a device that most certainly isn't a PC (they even call it Pocket PC these days) and isn't used like a PC. It makes it very awkward to use. Add to that the crashyness of Windows 95, and you've got a device that just gets in your way. And this ultimately is why I have an iPhone, and not a Windows Mobile device.
No, the UK government didn't buy salt/equipment because regardless of global warming to date, the UK's weather last week is a once-in-20-years event. It doesn't make sense to have lots of idle equipment for once in a 20 year event - it's far cheaper to take the disruption once every 20 years. And anyone who studies climate, such as the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre also advises that global warming doesn't mean that there will be an absence of cold weather, and indeed, global warming can paradoxically make some locales colder due to changing oceanic/atmospheric conditions.
The title is totally misleading. It talks about a small fraction of renewable energy technologies, and doesn't even recognise that the rare elements don't vanish into thin air, they can be recycled when a solar panel reaches the end of its useful life.