Don't be silly. Most of these came with the computer, what planet do you live on?
From a planet outside the US. Here in Europe big OEMs like Dell are minor players, and instead most people buy from small whiteboxes shops. As a result, the OS is optional and you must explicitly ask for it (and watch the price jump 100 Euros or more). Many people will tell the salesman to skip the OS, since they already have it on another computer or they have a friend with a CD somewhere.
Here in Italy the only real ADSL provider is the ex-monopoly Telecom, but government regulations force it to resell DSL access to different distributors at wholesale prices, thus there's some competition. The cheapest are:
256Kbps down, 128 up 30 Euros/month 640Kbps down, 128 up 60 Euros/month 1Mbit down, 256 up 100 Euros/month
No bandwidth caps that I know of.
My own access is 320/128, but it seems that they recently uncapped it, because I regularly get 700 Kbits down, sometimes more.
Dialup access is free, but you pay for each call (local calls are not free here).
Or are you implying that your drive to work requires more mental capacity than my buddy piloting an apache.
No, but it requires that you keep you eyes on the road the whole time, unlike on an helicopter where you can look away and be sure that no dumbass will change lane in front of you.
If you can't glance at mapquest and keep your mind focused on the road as well, please don't breed, we don't want your genes spreading.
Right, because you can see what other cars are doing with your mind focus, instead of using your eyes.
That may be true for Amtrak, since the US allows his train infrastructure to rot.
Here in Europe no one would even dream about taking an airplane for small journeys. Trains are cheaper and faster, routinely doing 150-200 MPH, and without security delays, airport crap, and so on.
As I pointed out just 3 days ago, FAT32 is limited to 32GBs
It's not. I have a single-partition FAT32 80GB disk (I know it's inefficient, but for large files it's OK). Win2000 refused to format it. I had to put the disk into a win98 machine and let it format, then put back in the win2000 one.
will never need deceleration more than 1g, for example
All ground vehicles have a limit on acceleration and deceleration, exactly 1g, unless they grab the asphalt with something else than their tires.
1g means 0-60 in 2.5-3 seconds. This is what racing cars do, and what most good cars can do when braking (it's easier to make a good brake than a 500-hp engine).
And if you read the series, you discover that the Second Foundation is there exactly for this reason - to costantly nudge the chaos back in the right place. OK, that's enough of a spoiler...
wouldnt you want the break on the back wheel if youre only going to have one of them?
No, it's extremely dangerous. Rear brakes have really low braking power compared to front wheel ones (this is because the rear wheel tends to lift when decelerating), and in an emergency situation, you want to stop in as little space as possible. Plus, if you are on a slippy surface, the rear wheel will lock in no time and you will not brake at all. There are a lot of bikes out there with only one brake (the front one!). Those with only the rear brake tend to have a Darwinian selection against them...
The Latin word does not appear to have had a plural
And dictionary.com is wrong. The Latin plural of virus is virus. There's a class of Latin words that just don't change when used in the plural sense (as long as they are used as the verb's subject), and you have to derive it from context. Since this is unworkable in English, you get viruses.
has anyone ever seen a document emerge from a collaboration / groupware system better than one produced by a single knowledgable person?
Check out Wikipedia. It is a wiki encyclopedia, with more than 100,000 articles on lots of subjects. And growing at breakneck speed. A simple look to the Recent Changes page gets my head spinning. Maybe it's not a "document", but maybe it's even better.
Re:More Google ...
on
Google Turns 5
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If a black hole is a sphere, doubling it's radius increases it's volume by a factor or about 33 1/2! Since mass only doubled, it's density just dropped by a factor of 17?
Correct. In your sphere example, a 2x mass increase will not yeld a 2x radius increase, since the relation between the two is not linear.
But a black hole is not a physical object, it's an abstraction. The radius of a blackhole is defined as the distance where the escape velocity equals lightspeed. And that distance is directly proportional to the black hole mass, hence the 2x radius increase.
but if anything it seems a black hole would condense to some maximum possible density, and it would maintain that maximum possible density regardless of how much mass you add to it
That's probably true, since in theory a black hole is empty, except a point in its center where all the mass is concentrated at inifite density - so if you double the mass, you get double infinite density, which is still infinite:-)
Average density continues to drop as you add more mass. The black hole of the story, with billions of solar masses, is probably less dense than water...
Unless, of couse, the starting point itself is so far into the sequence of pi that it takes MORE space to store the starting point than the size of the binary stream itself
This is exactly the problem: the number of digits required to state the starting point would be on average of the same length as the string of digit you are interested in.
I once day-dreamed of the "perfect" compression algorithm, based exactly on the same idea. Downloaded from somewhere the first 50 million digits of PI. And, twenty minutes later, my example program was not compressing anything...
The large market share of cell phones was initially due to the fact that a cell phone was seen as a status symbol. But when all your friends have cell phones, you must have one too for purely practical reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, discovered more or less by the same people.
Don't be silly. Most of these came with the computer, what planet do you live on?
From a planet outside the US. Here in Europe big OEMs like Dell are minor players, and instead most people buy from small whiteboxes shops. As a result, the OS is optional and you must explicitly ask for it (and watch the price jump 100 Euros or more). Many people will tell the salesman to skip the OS, since they already have it on another computer or they have a friend with a CD somewhere.
Shouldn't that be
- Exium
- Ettium
- Optium (don't miss this!)
- Ninium
- Decanium (the old processor?)
Here in Italy the only real ADSL provider is the ex-monopoly Telecom, but government regulations force it to resell DSL access to different distributors at wholesale prices, thus there's some competition. The cheapest are:
256Kbps down, 128 up 30 Euros/month
640Kbps down, 128 up 60 Euros/month
1Mbit down, 256 up 100 Euros/month
No bandwidth caps that I know of.
My own access is 320/128, but it seems that they recently uncapped it, because I regularly get 700 Kbits down, sometimes more.
Dialup access is free, but you pay for each call (local calls are not free here).
A short but informative article about SMT is on Wikipedia
The parent comment was copied from This one in the Google IPO story. Nice way to get a Score:4
Or are you implying that your drive to work requires more mental capacity than my buddy piloting an apache.
No, but it requires that you keep you eyes on the road the whole time, unlike on an helicopter where you can look away and be sure that no dumbass will change lane in front of you.
If you can't glance at mapquest and keep your mind focused on the road as well, please don't breed, we don't want your genes spreading.
Right, because you can see what other cars are doing with your mind focus, instead of using your eyes.
Everyone is a loser, particularly Hollywood studios, the retailer community and, most importantly, the consumer,
The consumer has already lost when he's called a consumer instead of a citizen. This mindset speaks volumes.
That may be true for Amtrak, since the US allows his train infrastructure to rot.
Here in Europe no one would even dream about taking an airplane for small journeys. Trains are cheaper and faster, routinely doing 150-200 MPH, and without security delays, airport crap, and so on.
As I pointed out just 3 days ago, FAT32 is limited to 32GBs
It's not. I have a single-partition FAT32 80GB disk (I know it's inefficient, but for large files it's OK).
Win2000 refused to format it. I had to put the disk into a win98 machine and let it format, then put back in the win2000 one.
will never need deceleration more than 1g, for example
All ground vehicles have a limit on acceleration and deceleration, exactly 1g, unless they grab the asphalt with something else than their tires.
1g means 0-60 in 2.5-3 seconds. This is what racing cars do, and what most good cars can do when braking (it's easier to make a good brake than a 500-hp engine).
In reference to your bike (btw the link was broken) imagine if you had to brake with only the front tire!
You MUST use the front tire brake if you want to stop in any sensible way. Using only the rear one is a recipe for disaster, on bikes and bicycles.
And if you read the series, you discover that the Second Foundation is there exactly for this reason - to costantly nudge the chaos back in the right place.
OK, that's enough of a spoiler...
wouldnt you want the break on the back wheel if youre only going to have one of them?
No, it's extremely dangerous. Rear brakes have really low braking power compared to front wheel ones (this is because the rear wheel tends to lift when decelerating), and in an emergency situation, you want to stop in as little space as possible.
Plus, if you are on a slippy surface, the rear wheel will lock in no time and you will not brake at all.
There are a lot of bikes out there with only one brake (the front one!). Those with only the rear brake tend to have a Darwinian selection against them...
Grab a RedHat or Mandrake ISO and start playing. Installation is a quick and easy.
The Latin word does not appear to have had a plural
And dictionary.com is wrong. The Latin plural of virus is virus. There's a class of Latin words that just don't change when used in the plural sense (as long as they are used as the verb's subject), and you have to derive it from context.
Since this is unworkable in English, you get viruses.
has anyone ever seen a document emerge from a collaboration / groupware system better than one produced by a single knowledgable person?
Check out Wikipedia. It is a wiki encyclopedia, with more than 100,000 articles on lots of subjects. And growing at breakneck speed. A simple look to the Recent Changes page gets my head spinning. Maybe it's not a "document", but maybe it's even better.
It's even better:
sin( arcsin(0.5))
yelds 0.5
It knows about hexadecimal too
(try entering 0x2ff * 3)
The search is broken. Click on the "go" button and you will land on an article appropriately titles "Sex"
Is that why all loops in any language in any source code seem to use i and j?
No, it's because in early Fortran compilers integer variables were letters from I to N (because they are INteger, see?).
So, in Fortran you would start a loop using the first available integer variable, i, and then j, k and so on.
How that was carried on to other languages is a mystery....
If a black hole is a sphere, doubling it's radius increases it's volume by a factor or about 33 1/2! Since mass only doubled, it's density just dropped by a factor of 17?
:-)
Correct. In your sphere example, a 2x mass increase will not yeld a 2x radius increase, since the relation between the two is not linear.
But a black hole is not a physical object, it's an abstraction. The radius of a blackhole is defined as the distance where the escape velocity equals lightspeed. And that distance is directly proportional to the black hole mass, hence the 2x radius increase.
but if anything it seems a black hole would condense to some maximum possible density, and it would maintain that maximum possible density regardless of how much mass you add to it
That's probably true, since in theory a black hole is empty, except a point in its center where all the mass is concentrated at inifite density - so if you double the mass, you get double infinite density, which is still infinite
Average density continues to drop as you add more mass. The black hole of the story, with billions of solar masses, is probably less dense than water...
Unless, of couse, the starting point itself is so far into the sequence of pi that it takes MORE space to store the starting point than the size of the binary stream itself
This is exactly the problem: the number of digits required to state the starting point would be on average of the same length as the string of digit you are interested in.
I once day-dreamed of the "perfect" compression algorithm, based exactly on the same idea. Downloaded from somewhere the first 50 million digits of PI. And, twenty minutes later, my example program was not compressing anything...
From the screenshot gallery:
This gallery shows screenshots from the Diesel Engine(TM) rendered environments of Ballistics(TM).
How can you make a racing game with a Diesel engine??
What's the quality of the landlines in Italy?
Quality of the land lines is excellent.
The large market share of cell phones was initially due to the fact that a cell phone was seen as a status symbol.
But when all your friends have cell phones, you must have one too for purely practical reasons.
'man' is not recognized as an internal or external xommand,
Wow, windows has xommands now? What they did in XP, integrate a XOR function into standard output?