Calculators are all very well, but I want something that can do symbolic manipulation, stats, graphing, data logging & manipulation (ie {(x1,y1)...(xn,yn) -> (a1,b1)...(am,bm)}, where n=/=m. See, I can't even write something that simple properly). I want my input device to be a pen, not a billion buttons whose functions I cannot decode without a manual four times the size of the device itself.
It doesn't need to be super-fancy. B&W is fine, but some graphics would be nice.
At the moment, the best solution fo me is a small paper notebook. Is there an electronic device which can replace my notebook?
That's exactly what the Watt Balance method favoured by the americain team does. The method also requires knowing the local gravity though. That's much harder to get correct.
Yes. Two-strokes can be very big polluters and modern cars (even SUVs) are very clean. Roughly, mowing your lawn produces 50 times more CO/NOx emissions than driving to work once, YMMV.
To contrast, I've written a very long document, 600 pages, complete with autogenerated references, tables of contents, and so on, several hundred figures, graphs and illustrations in WP without difficulty. Word documents get unweildy very quickly, especially if you "fast save".
As someone who writes journal articles for a living and occationally has to produce camera-ready copy, I live (and occasionally die) in WP. Word is completely useless for scientific publishing.
Here's why:
Inserting unusual characters (div, del, gamma, etc...) is very easy in WP. In Word you need to find a seperate program (Character Assistant) and paste through the clipboard.
Figure placement makes sense in WP. Put a figure where you want it and it will stay there. In Word, who knows? Skip three pages, bump back a page, play the Word figure-placement roulette!
The equation editor in Word is for people who occationally write equations. There's no fast way to use it, just mouse, mouse mouse. The new WP one is just as bad, unfortunately. The origial WP one was strongly LaTeX based.
Reference generation (ToC, references, Figures, etc...) in WP just seem to work. Word's is wonky.
I could go on, but that's the flavour of it. Word is fine for uncomplicated documents with the occasional Excel pie-chart, but take it out of that narrow domain and it gets really squirrely. WP seems to cope beter with complex and heterogeneous documents.
Of course, neither hold a candle to LaTeX in terms of document generation. Bibtex alone is worth it. Unfortunately, the chemistry and environmental journals have all drink the WYSIWYG Kool-Aide. Oh to be publishing in Phys.Rev. B again!
Chemistry isn't much written about in the popular press. A shame really, becuse it can be facinating.
The classic is Michael Faraday's "The Chemical History of a Candle." Yes, that Faraday, the one capacitance units are named after. Amazon has a printing in stock.
Another, more from a materials science POV, but still of chemical interest: "The New Science of Strong Materials, Or, Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor" by J. E. Gordon. When someone naively comments that quantum effects aren't visible in every day life, you can smile knowingly after reading this book.
Phillip Ball also has a number of interesting titles, "Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water" is most relevant to your question.
Pretty thin I know, but those three should get you started.
It's a very significant difference: the right to run a business vs the right to guaranteed profit. Do you have the right to a job, or the right to find a job? Is there a difference between communism and the free market?
You get an opportunity in a free system, you don't get certain success.
That should get you started. There are hundreds more to choose from to suit all tastes. One of the best ways to explore the archive is baf's guide. For some really top picks, also be sure to check out the top few of each year's IF competitionhere for short games, and the XYZZY'shere for longer ones.
A major limitation is that Excel can only handle small data sets. A worksheet can only have 32000 rows (or is it 32k? I forget) and even fewer columns. That may sound like a lot, but it's not really.
XCom3 ship combat was not terribly complicated. You just pointed your swarm at the invaders and hoped too many buildings wouldn't get blown up in the process. Trying to control individual ships was futile.
Sucessful strategic and tactical level combat: MOM
MOM had a decent strategic level (move this stack here) and a decent tactical level (rangers shoot arrows, retreat). Tactics at the unit level made a huge difference in MOM. Horsebowmen ruled!
The real-time aspect is the thing that concerns me the most. I've tried to like RTS games, really, most recently Homeworld. They always degenerate into a mad frenzy of panning, rescaling and clicking, however. Good tactics go right out the window. Time pressure is a good play motivator, sure, but the player interface is usually so abysmal that us old fogies don't have time to execute any tactical disipline. The only game that came close was X-Com Apocolypse, and even it was not nearly as fun as the turn-based UFO.
If you can get this right, real-time without a god-damned frustrating interface, you'll revolutionize the industry and get all the girls. Until then the rest of us will keep re-playing MOO and MOM.
(Why do MOO 3 instead of a MOM 2? MOM was soooo much better than MOO.)
What *is* this problem that so many US citizens seem to have with paying taxes?
Most US citizens don't think governments do, or should do, much of anything. Also, anyone who works for government is, by definition, a crook, if elected, or a boob, if a public servant. Their highest ideal, the American Dream, is the business man.
So, paying tax is a waste of time, because the politicians embezzle it and the bureaucrats fritter it away. Taxes should be cut so that business can thrive. The free market is the best arbiter of social policy.
Most Americans are baffled by the idea that others in the world distrust corporations more than their own government.
Sure, companies are supposed to keep bulk chemicals in contolled-access inventories, and the good ones even do. The more usual case, however, is that there's always the back corner or that space under the stairs that nobody knows precicely who is responsible for and it's full of mysterious black barrels....
With regards to the acid accident, it sounds to me like the person poured water into a drum of anhydrous or conc. nitric. That will cause quite a nice explosion of hot acid, quite sufficient to injure someone. Water + acid is usually highly exothermic.
Nitric acid, in small doses, turn skin a sepia brown colour and makes it crinkly, like rough paper. In large volumes, it will indeed cause the blackening effect described in the article. When you were young, you were lucky enough to be playing with a fairly dilute mixture. Anything else and you would have hurt yourself. Concentrated oxidizing acids, sulphuric and nitric to name two common ones, really sting on exposed flesh.
The points made about mixtures are real concerns, however. At least the silicon industry doesn't use DMSO as a solvent. Solvents often aren't a huge worry by themselves, but what they carry can be quite dangerous. Also, the synergistic effects of many of these mixtures are unknown.
However, the article does have one great failing; it misses the recent industry moves towards closed-system loops. Solvent re-use greatly reduces costs to both the company and the environment. Unhappily, such success stories don't often make the news.
Finally, sorry, but I can't let this go by. Nitric acid is both a strong acid and an oxidizing agent (and thus can, potentially, be carcinogenic). Sodium hydroxide is a base, a corrosive, but has no redox action. There are few chronic health effects for a single NaOH exposure.
The "bunny suits" really are just to protect the electronics from the workers, not the other way around. They are typically made of very light material, like Tyveck, a cheap platicised paper product, or a bi-layer plastic film. Tri-cloroethylene, acetone, HF, HNO3 will all go through most of these materials in less than a second. Cloth suits offer no protection at all. A full facemask filter, a "gasmask", only offers a 50 to 100 times safety margin (if it fits and the person knows how to use it). For chemical exposure, that's nothing. A facemask might allow you a couple of minutes of exposure, rather than a second or two. Gasmasks are for escape, not for long-term use.
Level A spill response for a fab, the first-in people, calls for a full-body, sealed butyl-rubber suit (~1/4" thick) with a self-contained, overpressure air supply. The full suits with air give you a couple of hours in most environments. If there's radionuclear sources present, as there are in some fabs, all bets are off. In that case, you send in a robot. Alternatively, you cover the place with concrete and cross you fingers....
Workers generally vastly over-rate their protective equipment. Most employers provide the bare minimums (or less) and then these are usually only to be used for escape during an emergency, not (usually) for chronic exposure. Anybody in an environment that hasn't been trained and isn't properly paranoid about the chemicals they are using is a nutbar. Avoid them if you can. On the bright side, you usually don't have to plan retirement parties for these people either.
I ask not from a programmer's point of view, but from a user's: Will Mico ever talk to Orbit? Will Bonobo get down with KParts? How much work still needs to be done so that I can embed a Gnumeric table in a KWord document?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, 'cause all the Linux experience in the world won't help you with an ATI card.
You are.
Calculators are all very well, but I want something that can do symbolic manipulation, stats, graphing, data logging & manipulation (ie {(x1,y1)...(xn,yn) -> (a1,b1)...(am,bm)}, where n=/=m. See, I can't even write something that simple properly). I want my input device to be a pen, not a billion buttons whose functions I cannot decode without a manual four times the size of the device itself.
It doesn't need to be super-fancy. B&W is fine, but some graphics would be nice.
At the moment, the best solution fo me is a small paper notebook. Is there an electronic device which can replace my notebook?
Your prices are way high for Canada:
/mo. for phone
I pay:
$24 Local line
+$30 1.7/0.4 Mb ADSL
==================
$55
Compare that with cable 1.5/0.2 Mb service at $44/mo with TV service, or $54 without.
That's exactly what the Watt Balance method favoured by the americain team does. The method also requires knowing the local gravity though. That's much harder to get correct.
Yes. Two-strokes can be very big polluters and modern cars (even SUVs) are very clean. Roughly, mowing your lawn produces 50 times more CO/NOx emissions than driving to work once, YMMV.
To contrast, I've written a very long document, 600 pages, complete with autogenerated references, tables of contents, and so on, several hundred figures, graphs and illustrations in WP without difficulty. Word documents get unweildy very quickly, especially if you "fast save".
Here's why:
I could go on, but that's the flavour of it. Word is fine for uncomplicated documents with the occasional Excel pie-chart, but take it out of that narrow domain and it gets really squirrely. WP seems to cope beter with complex and heterogeneous documents.
Of course, neither hold a candle to LaTeX in terms of document generation. Bibtex alone is worth it. Unfortunately, the chemistry and environmental journals have all drink the WYSIWYG Kool-Aide. Oh to be publishing in Phys.Rev. B again!
Chemistry isn't much written about in the popular press. A shame really, becuse it can be facinating.
The classic is Michael Faraday's "The Chemical History of a Candle." Yes, that Faraday, the one capacitance units are named after. Amazon has a printing in stock.
Another, more from a materials science POV, but still of chemical interest: "The New Science of Strong Materials, Or, Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor" by J. E. Gordon. When someone naively comments that quantum effects aren't visible in every day life, you can smile knowingly after reading this book.
Phillip Ball also has a number of interesting titles, "Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water" is most relevant to your question.
Pretty thin I know, but those three should get you started.
It's a very significant difference: the right to run a business vs the right to guaranteed profit. Do you have the right to a job, or the right to find a job? Is there a difference between communism and the free market?
You get an opportunity in a free system, you don't get certain success.
You might want to read this to get started. Some excellent games in the archive include:
- Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
- Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
- Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
- Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
- Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.
That should get you started. There are hundreds more to choose from to suit all tastes. One of the best ways to explore the archive is baf's guide. For some really top picks, also be sure to check out the top few of each year'sIF competition here for short games, and the XYZZY's here for longer ones.
Life under a modern Ghengis Khan: Ragnarok in paradise:
A major limitation is that Excel can only handle small data sets. A worksheet can only have 32000 rows (or is it 32k? I forget) and even fewer columns. That may sound like a lot, but it's not really.
Also, Excel's graphing package is awful (poor layout control, clunky interface).
As a point of reference, it's more than double what I pay for rather worse service.
$55/mo. CDN for 3.5 Mb/800 kb service. That's about $35 USD/mo. I've been a happy customer for more than two years now.
A nit:
The original inhabitants of the planet play a significant role. They most definitely are not human, though.
OBPlug: Brust is the literary heir to Zelazny.
Kind Regards,
Counterpoints:
XCom3 ship combat was not terribly complicated. You just pointed your swarm at the invaders and hoped too many buildings wouldn't get blown up in the process. Trying to control individual ships was futile.
Sucessful strategic and tactical level combat: MOM
MOM had a decent strategic level (move this stack here) and a decent tactical level (rangers shoot arrows, retreat). Tactics at the unit level made a huge difference in MOM. Horsebowmen ruled!
Kind Regards,
The real-time aspect is the thing that concerns me the most. I've tried to like RTS games, really, most recently Homeworld. They always degenerate into a mad frenzy of panning, rescaling and clicking, however. Good tactics go right out the window. Time pressure is a good play motivator, sure, but the player interface is usually so abysmal that us old fogies don't have time to execute any tactical disipline. The only game that came close was X-Com Apocolypse, and even it was not nearly as fun as the turn-based UFO.
If you can get this right, real-time without a god-damned frustrating interface, you'll revolutionize the industry and get all the girls. Until then the rest of us will keep re-playing MOO and MOM.
(Why do MOO 3 instead of a MOM 2? MOM was soooo much better than MOO.)
Kind Regards,
Ask this question in ott.online for more answers.
Kind Regards,
Note that STUPID Canadian tax on media!
Enlighten me, please: What tax?
www.dealsdirect.com:
Blank CD Cursor 80 Minute 12X CDRs - 50 pack spindle (NA), $44.75(CAD)
Do you mean the $1/CDR tax they never got around to passing?
Kind Regards,
That's just wallpaper and widgets. It has nothing to do with functionality. Sharing eyecandy makes no difference.
KParts and Bonobo need talk to each other. Standardizing on XDND was a good first step, but only the first.
Kind Regards,
Most US citizens don't think governments do, or should do, much of anything. Also, anyone who works for government is, by definition, a crook, if elected, or a boob, if a public servant. Their highest ideal, the American Dream, is the business man.
So, paying tax is a waste of time, because the politicians embezzle it and the bureaucrats fritter it away. Taxes should be cut so that business can thrive. The free market is the best arbiter of social policy.
Most Americans are baffled by the idea that others in the world distrust corporations more than their own government.
Kind Regards,
Sure, companies are supposed to keep bulk chemicals in contolled-access inventories, and the good ones even do. The more usual case, however, is that there's always the back corner or that space under the stairs that nobody knows precicely who is responsible for and it's full of mysterious black barrels....
With regards to the acid accident, it sounds to me like the person poured water into a drum of anhydrous or conc. nitric. That will cause quite a nice explosion of hot acid, quite sufficient to injure someone. Water + acid is usually highly exothermic.
Nitric acid, in small doses, turn skin a sepia brown colour and makes it crinkly, like rough paper. In large volumes, it will indeed cause the blackening effect described in the article. When you were young, you were lucky enough to be playing with a fairly dilute mixture. Anything else and you would have hurt yourself. Concentrated oxidizing acids, sulphuric and nitric to name two common ones, really sting on exposed flesh.
Kind Regards,
The points made about mixtures are real concerns, however. At least the silicon industry doesn't use DMSO as a solvent. Solvents often aren't a huge worry by themselves, but what they carry can be quite dangerous. Also, the synergistic effects of many of these mixtures are unknown.
However, the article does have one great failing; it misses the recent industry moves towards closed-system loops. Solvent re-use greatly reduces costs to both the company and the environment. Unhappily, such success stories don't often make the news.
Finally, sorry, but I can't let this go by. Nitric acid is both a strong acid and an oxidizing agent (and thus can, potentially, be carcinogenic). Sodium hydroxide is a base, a corrosive, but has no redox action. There are few chronic health effects for a single NaOH exposure.
Kind Regards,
The "bunny suits" really are just to protect the electronics from the workers, not the other way around. They are typically made of very light material, like Tyveck, a cheap platicised paper product, or a bi-layer plastic film. Tri-cloroethylene, acetone, HF, HNO3 will all go through most of these materials in less than a second. Cloth suits offer no protection at all. A full facemask filter, a "gasmask", only offers a 50 to 100 times safety margin (if it fits and the person knows how to use it). For chemical exposure, that's nothing. A facemask might allow you a couple of minutes of exposure, rather than a second or two. Gasmasks are for escape, not for long-term use.
Level A spill response for a fab, the first-in people, calls for a full-body, sealed butyl-rubber suit (~1/4" thick) with a self-contained, overpressure air supply. The full suits with air give you a couple of hours in most environments. If there's radionuclear sources present, as there are in some fabs, all bets are off. In that case, you send in a robot. Alternatively, you cover the place with concrete and cross you fingers....
Workers generally vastly over-rate their protective equipment. Most employers provide the bare minimums (or less) and then these are usually only to be used for escape during an emergency, not (usually) for chronic exposure. Anybody in an environment that hasn't been trained and isn't properly paranoid about the chemicals they are using is a nutbar. Avoid them if you can. On the bright side, you usually don't have to plan retirement parties for these people either.
Some reference sites:
The US Govt. Hazmat site
and what should be every spill responder's bible:
The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards
Kind Regards,
I ask not from a programmer's point of view, but from a user's: Will Mico ever talk to Orbit? Will Bonobo get down with KParts? How much work still needs to be done so that I can embed a Gnumeric table in a KWord document?
Kind Regards,
<pedantic>You've mispelled "Dan Akroyd".</pedantic>
HTH! HAND.
Kind Regards,