Woah there. Before you say too much, most sniper rifles have a muzzle velocity that is pretty much the same as most assault rifles. Indeed, sometimes the assault rifle has a *higher* muzzle velocity. (Around 2800 ft/s is a standard velocity for most sniper rifles. I've seen the M16 quoted at higher). There are really two other variables that are (part of) what dictates sniper rifle choice.
The first is accuracy. Sniper rifles are designed to give accuracy out to 1000+ meters. They often have floating barels so that resting on a bipod doesn't bend the barrel and defelct shots. They also tend to have longer bores as that leads to better accuracy.
The second is round size. The M16, for example, uses a 5.56mm round, whereas most sniper rifles use the 7.62mm NATO round. That added size gives more momentum and energy for the muzzle velocity, and hence more penetrating power.
A last word of advice, you might want to get your facts straight before taking a holier than thou attitude. (Yup, that's gonna come back and bite me in the ass.:) I do make mistakes though.:) )
I find positioning, spotting, doing support from cover, and the like to be fun. Then again, I'm not normal. I actually want to do sniping like a sniper. Concealing oneself, waiting patiently for that perfect shot, and then firing my shot. It isn't about the number of kills for me, it is about what I've done for the team. At times being a sniper is more effective for the team. At other times, being a grunt with an M4 is what is needed. I just wish more people would play for the team, not for personal glory.
First off, I'll admit that I like playing the role of the sniper in games. I have a certain fascination with snipers and their trade, and that naturally transfers to my game play. However, I should note that I am just as proficient (or even better, depending on the game) as an average foot soldier with my M4 (or whatever is appropriate for the game at hand).
Now, my biggest problem with sniper rifles in games is that they are too easy to use. A real sniper has to be an elite marksman to hit targets at a distance reliably. There are three things that contribute to this:
The first is bullet drop. Bullets fall like a rock. They just happen to be going forward really fast, so they go far before hitting the ground. So as a target is farther off, you have to aim up more.
The second is windage. The wind causes bullets to drift to the side. Actually, even without wind, the spinning of hte bullet causes it to pull to one side.
Putting these two together, the bullet would only pass through the crosshairs at the calibration distance (which is usually around 200-300m). When the bullet it closer, it is higher and to the right (or left, depending on spin direction) of the crosshairs, and when it is farther, it is below and to the left (or right) of the crosshairs.
The last thing is that, regardless of the need to load, the recoil of a shot throws your aim all out of whack. Just your *breathing* sends your aim out of whack. So how are you going to be able to automatically recover to the same place after a shot?
I think the incorporation of one or more of these elements into games would cause sniping to be much more difficult, and hence cause less people to be snipers.
I also want to mention that in real life, snipers usually carry their sniper rifles in a drag bag and use a light assault rifle like the M4 as their weapon until they reach the target location.
I'll save my rant on camoflouge and the lack of sniper guille suits for another time.:)
Haha. What part of California to you live in? I never quite considered the situation that dyer both living in the north bay (of San Francisco bay area) and in Santa Barbara. I usually just complain about all the people who drive slow in the fast lane, and then don't get over for you, even if you ride their ass. It's usually either old people or soccer moms, but I've seen real people do it too.:)
With around 425 replies so far (including trolls and flaimbait) I don't expect anyone to reade this, but I'm bored, so I'm going to write it anyway:
I've become *almost* entierly dependent on the internet for news and information. Everyday, there are about a dozen sites that I load up (including slashdot, google news, and my local news paper's site) to get my news. When I want to look up information, I always spend time wading through the internet, looking for it there.
I do, however, use real books for programming (O'Reilly mostly) and physics (my text books from college). I also tune into BBC World News every evening to get my overview of world news (and it doesn't hurt that anchor girl Mishal Husain is rather attractive).:)
In my upper-division cosmology classes I recall having a dicussion about this very question. It wen something like this (If my brain doesn't fail me):
Astrophysicists had seriously toyed with the question of wether other galaxies were anti-matter. Indeed, based off of EM radiation (light), there would be no way to tell, since matter and anti-matter both emit light.
Also, if the matter between them never interacted, there would be no way to tell, as matter and anti-matter are indistinguishable when completely segregated.
However, there are good reasons to believe that all of the matter is normal matter (well, meaning that a negligably small amount of anti-matter is still present): Collisions between galaxies and their particles happen all the time. Indeed, even the outter extent of our galaxy is meshing slightly with Andromeda (2 million light years away). With all these collisions, one would expect that if any of these galaxies were made of anti-matter, that a reaction would occur and emmit a *lot* of high energy (which would have a signature that we could deduce from spectroscopy). But we simply don't see this occuring.
Also, ass mentioned before in this thread, stars emit interstellar particles in the solar wind. This argument turns out to be the weaker argument, as usually stars are contained in their own galaxies, and each galaxy is probably either all matter or all anti-matter. However, this argument is a good explination of *why* each galaxy would only be either matter or anti-matter.
I really like Griffiths' book. In fact, when I saw the slashdot posting, my immediate thought was: Griffiths!
Seriously though, it is a really good book. Good examples, good theory, good explination, and a he really knows his stuff. He was very sure to make the conceptuals clear as well the math. QM is a bit tricky to conceptually understand and so having common pitfalls in conceptual thinking pointed out *really* helps.
-Jeff
P.S. - I'm a General Relativity physicist myself (although I'm currently stuck in the world of thin film optical coatings).
I've never done this, but here is what I would guess: + See if you can find a teacher to be the advisor fo the club if you get enough signatures (see petition below). + Make a petition to create the club, and get some signatures. You probably don't need that many. + Take it to the administration, preferrably in a group of students, in order to show that there is interest.
Of course, really, if you have the leadership abilities to run a club, you also should be brave enough to poke around in the administration and ask them what you should do. You can't be shy and be a club president--it doesn't work well at all.
Just to help keep reports balanced, neither of the 12" PowerBooks I've owned have had the wobble problem. They get pretty hotsometimes (although resettin the PMU seems to help with that sometimes), but mine always sits flat.
Re:As a programmer 20 some years ago...
on
Eleventy What?
·
· Score: 1
(Oops, mark me down as -1 Redundant! Someone already wrote about that alphabet!:) (Do I get any brownie points for adding a few extra details about it?... I didn't think so.))
-Jeff
Re:As a programmer 20 some years ago...
on
Eleventy What?
·
· Score: 1
Your usin' the old Army alphabet from WWII. Try the international radio alphabet used by NATO and civil aviation (among other things): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eigth, niner, alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot.:)
Now I'm curious to pump through the equations and see.:) ( Haven't done induced emf since I taught it to my lab students *last* April.:) Been focusing on thin films coatings, at the company I work for, these days.)
The reason power is transferred via high volatage AC power, and not any kind of DC power is simple: The lower the current you send down a wire, the less energy lost due to resistance. (P=IE, E=IR, so P=R*I^2). This is a major concern over long wires, where the overall resistance can be quite high. With AC power, you can transform from high current / low volatage, to low current / high voltage, and back quite easily. So you can put your powerplant far away from the consumer. However with DC, you can't do this. DC can't be transformed (at least, not easily?), and so you have to run it down the powerlines at the same voltage/current as the consumer will use, which is quite high. Hence, you loose a lot of energy on powerlines very quickly, and thus your powerplant must be close (within a couple miles actually) of the customers.
I should also mention (although I think I see posts saying this later on) that, indeed, the bike is a one loop conductor, and that the powerlines (via the right hand rule) have a varying magnetic field (because the current is varying), but the induced emf is very small. This is because the current in the wires is small, and there aren't very many of them, and you are 50+ ft away, and your bike is only one loop. I'd call the induced emf negligable personally.
I use tcsh for my day in/ day out usage. Bash was actually my first shell, but I didn't use it much (I used it to work with my web/ftp accounts on a remote server at the time). Since then, I have done a lot of stuff in tcsh, and have configured a lot of it to what I want to do. For normal interactive useage, it has been good to me.
However, I couldn't really recommend that you make shell scripts in it. I usually make my shell scripts for straight up sh (when I do make them), but more often than not, I use Perl or Ruby to get scripting jobs done.
However, I since I have not extensively used bash, I really can't tell anyone what I think about it (for comparisons). tcsh has always been good enough for me, and so I haven't bothered to configure bash on my system, but I'm sure if I took the time, I would consider it a good shell.
OO in Perl is so hacked. I love Perl (indeed, it is my second favorite programming language), but, as I said, the OO is a hack. So now I use Ruby. I like Ruby.:)
My only comment is that I'm an object oriented man. I think *very* much in terms of Objects, and find that I'm not as comfortable in non object oriented languages. As such, I find myself happier in languages like Ruby, Objective-C, and Java, than in C.
Of course, this is all just my opinion. I respect your opinion, and would go so far as to agree that when I'm not working in an OO language, I prefer to work in either Perl or C.
I guess I just felt obligated to support the OO languages.:)
Man. I tried the link to look at the ToughBook, and it was absolutely miserable. It is really hard to find specs on their computers. It is kind of like they assume you already know all the models and what they are. Even finding the prices was very awkward. You'd think that a company like Panasonic would work a little harder on their web pages?
My cousin works at a video store, and so our biggest thing is movie posters. We managed to get a whole stack of movie posters from him (some of them are for good movies and others aren't). We found that colourful ones really helped a lot.
Lighting is also important. We worked pretty hard to put lights in all the right places so that the room would be bright. What we found is that instead of shining the light directly out into the room, bounce it off the walls (which have the posters on it). If you put the lights sufficiently close to the walls, the bounced light will gain a slight hue from the posters, and liven things up. (The Charlie's Angels poster works really good for this, because it has bright pinks and oranges in it).
I should note that incadescent light get hot. When the light is at the place which gives the best reflection characteristics, the wall gets a little hot and is thus not only a fire hazard, but also can discolour the paint. We use compact florescents. I don't like the hue of them as much (too green for me), but after bouncing them off the posters, they look pretty nice.
I hot plugged a SCSI CD-ROM drive into my PowerComputing machine once, with interesting consequences. When I plugged in the data cable first. I then proceeded to plug the power cable into the drive. Now this next part surprised the hell out of me because I hot plugged that CD-ROM drive in that computer several times that day and nothing happened. But *this* time a big blue spark jumped about a three quarter inch gap from the power cable to the drive. I *immediately* dropped the cable and jumped back. The computer's circuit breaker tripped and the computer automatically shut off. Anyway, to make a long story not so boringly long, I connected everything up, turned the computer back on, and voila! Nothing was broken! I was completely amazed.
I'm working with a dev team on writing a full featured thin film engineering application (in house) written entirely in Java. Surprisingly, the thing runs fast enough to do all the intensive physics calculations!
I've also found that we were able to utilize the Swing API to get almost everything we wanted, including some very unique and handy components that I have been unable to easily duplicate in other languages.
Well, I would love to tell you more about it, but my NDA strictly forbids it. (In fact, I hope I'm not in violation now!):)
Good points everyone. And, indeed, I agree 100%. Using high enough energy, you can heat nearly anything with any RF frequency. And it is certainly easily doable with Non 2.4 GHz microwaves on things. (I'm aware of the birds on the transmitters, and even early RADAR engineers sitting in front of the transmitters to get warm), however those are really high power compared to a cell phone.
Keep in mind that the reason why microwaves heat things up is that they prey on a *specific* resonance frequency for water molecules. Microwaves starting a little ways off of this frequency, to either side, aren't going to vibrate the water molecules and hence not heat anything up.
This is not to say that the energy carried in the waves can't be turned into heat somehow, but the mechanism that microwaves use to do this just plain doesn't work. You *can't* make a microwave oven in the communications frequencies just by bombarding it with high power microwaves.
Not to mention there isn't a Brushed Aluminum version of NSToolBar, so Safari's toolbar must be configured in totally roundabout ways (like menus and dialog boxes). If they used Aqua like they are supposed to, then they could use NSToolbar and get great, intuitive, and powerful functionality "for free".
(I should note that I use a registered version of OmniWeb, but am currently running Safari because it is faster. But I still like OmniWeb better and will probably end up back on it within 2 weeks.:) ) If there was just some way to auto-sync my bookmarks everynight when I go to bed. Guess it is time to dig out Ruby and write a script myself... but I don't want to parse the XML.:)
I primarily use my iPod when on the go, and so it became most important for me to have a stand of some sort in my car.
When I first got it, the only good place to put it was in a slightly wider than iPod space between the driver and passenger seats (next to the e-brake lever). Unfortunately, it would often slide under the e-brake lever and be hard to get to. The sliding was also scuffing up the back.
So, I decided to make a stand that is custom molded to the odd shape of this place between the seats, and also hold my iPod at a reasonable viewing angle. (Although, I do tend to pick it up and hold it in front of me when manipulating, so one eye can be on the road!).
After a some thought, I decided to make my stand out of (of all things) a Cheerio's box. This was mostly because I considered it a prototype, and was planning on using 1/8" thick plastic for the real thing.
Now you would think that the cardboard, being so thin, would break. However with an X shaped support in the interior (and properly located to give some support to the middle of the iPod mating surface), I found that the thing is very surprisingly strong. I've had the stand for almost a year now, and it is still in wonderful shape. I guess I never will get around to making a plastic version -- no need to.
I've only ever heard it (in context to the Sun computer) pronounced Sole-air-us by everyone I know (both in the San Francisco Bay Area and when I was at UC Santa Barbara). In fact, it surprised me to hear it pronounced another way. That's not to say that it is right, just that I've never heard a Californian geek (or anyone, up until recently) pronounce it another way.:)
On a side note, I think I actually pronounce it Sole-air-iss, even though that last syllable should be `us'. (The `i' is like the `i' in `it', and the `s' is hard, like in `us'.) But I would argue that that is my pronunciation deficiency, and that `us' is the correct pronunciation.:)
-Jeff
P.S. - Is this going to turn into a debate similar to the lynn-ux vs lie-nux debate?:) P.P.S. - I (and most people I know) pronounce it lynn-ux, although the argument for the lie-nux pronounciation makes since considering Linus (lie-nus) wrote it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Woah there. Before you say too much, most sniper rifles have a muzzle velocity that is pretty much the same as most assault rifles. Indeed, sometimes the assault rifle has a *higher* muzzle velocity. (Around 2800 ft/s is a standard velocity for most sniper rifles. I've seen the M16 quoted at higher). There are really two other variables that are (part of) what dictates sniper rifle choice.
:) I do make mistakes though. :) )
The first is accuracy. Sniper rifles are designed to give accuracy out to 1000+ meters. They often have floating barels so that resting on a bipod doesn't bend the barrel and defelct shots. They also tend to have longer bores as that leads to better accuracy.
The second is round size. The M16, for example, uses a 5.56mm round, whereas most sniper rifles use the 7.62mm NATO round. That added size gives more momentum and energy for the muzzle velocity, and hence more penetrating power.
A last word of advice, you might want to get your facts straight before taking a holier than thou attitude. (Yup, that's gonna come back and bite me in the ass.
I find positioning, spotting, doing support from cover, and the like to be fun. Then again, I'm not normal. I actually want to do sniping like a sniper. Concealing oneself, waiting patiently for that perfect shot, and then firing my shot. It isn't about the number of kills for me, it is about what I've done for the team. At times being a sniper is more effective for the team. At other times, being a grunt with an M4 is what is needed. I just wish more people would play for the team, not for personal glory.
First off, I'll admit that I like playing the role of the sniper in games. I have a certain fascination with snipers and their trade, and that naturally transfers to my game play. However, I should note that I am just as proficient (or even better, depending on the game) as an average foot soldier with my M4 (or whatever is appropriate for the game at hand).
:)
Now, my biggest problem with sniper rifles in games is that they are too easy to use. A real sniper has to be an elite marksman to hit targets at a distance reliably. There are three things that contribute to this:
The first is bullet drop. Bullets fall like a rock. They just happen to be going forward really fast, so they go far before hitting the ground. So as a target is farther off, you have to aim up more.
The second is windage. The wind causes bullets to drift to the side. Actually, even without wind, the spinning of hte bullet causes it to pull to one side.
Putting these two together, the bullet would only pass through the crosshairs at the calibration distance (which is usually around 200-300m). When the bullet it closer, it is higher and to the right (or left, depending on spin direction) of the crosshairs, and when it is farther, it is below and to the left (or right) of the crosshairs.
The last thing is that, regardless of the need to load, the recoil of a shot throws your aim all out of whack. Just your *breathing* sends your aim out of whack. So how are you going to be able to automatically recover to the same place after a shot?
I think the incorporation of one or more of these elements into games would cause sniping to be much more difficult, and hence cause less people to be snipers.
I also want to mention that in real life, snipers usually carry their sniper rifles in a drag bag and use a light assault rifle like the M4 as their weapon until they reach the target location.
I'll save my rant on camoflouge and the lack of sniper guille suits for another time.
Haha. What part of California to you live in? I never quite considered the situation that dyer both living in the north bay (of San Francisco bay area) and in Santa Barbara. I usually just complain about all the people who drive slow in the fast lane, and then don't get over for you, even if you ride their ass. It's usually either old people or soccer moms, but I've seen real people do it too. :)
With around 425 replies so far (including trolls and flaimbait) I don't expect anyone to reade this, but I'm bored, so I'm going to write it anyway:
:)
I've become *almost* entierly dependent on the internet for news and information. Everyday, there are about a dozen sites that I load up (including slashdot, google news, and my local news paper's site) to get my news. When I want to look up information, I always spend time wading through the internet, looking for it there.
I do, however, use real books for programming (O'Reilly mostly) and physics (my text books from college). I also tune into BBC World News every evening to get my overview of world news (and it doesn't hurt that anchor girl Mishal Husain is rather attractive).
Okay. I'm gonna go do something else now.
In my upper-division cosmology classes I recall having a dicussion about this very question. It wen something like this (If my brain doesn't fail me):
Astrophysicists had seriously toyed with the question of wether other galaxies were anti-matter. Indeed, based off of EM radiation (light), there would be no way to tell, since matter and anti-matter both emit light.
Also, if the matter between them never interacted, there would be no way to tell, as matter and anti-matter are indistinguishable when completely segregated.
However, there are good reasons to believe that all of the matter is normal matter (well, meaning that a negligably small amount of anti-matter is still present): Collisions between galaxies and their particles happen all the time. Indeed, even the outter extent of our galaxy is meshing slightly with Andromeda (2 million light years away). With all these collisions, one would expect that if any of these galaxies were made of anti-matter, that a reaction would occur and emmit a *lot* of high energy (which would have a signature that we could deduce from spectroscopy). But we simply don't see this occuring.
Also, ass mentioned before in this thread, stars emit interstellar particles in the solar wind. This argument turns out to be the weaker argument, as usually stars are contained in their own galaxies, and each galaxy is probably either all matter or all anti-matter. However, this argument is a good explination of *why* each galaxy would only be either matter or anti-matter.
I really like Griffiths' book. In fact, when I saw the slashdot posting, my immediate thought was: Griffiths!
Seriously though, it is a really good book. Good examples, good theory, good explination, and a he really knows his stuff. He was very sure to make the conceptuals clear as well the math. QM is a bit tricky to conceptually understand and so having common pitfalls in conceptual thinking pointed out *really* helps.
-Jeff
P.S. - I'm a General Relativity physicist myself (although I'm currently stuck in the world of thin film optical coatings).
I've never done this, but here is what I would guess:
+ See if you can find a teacher to be the advisor fo the club if you get enough signatures (see petition below).
+ Make a petition to create the club, and get some signatures. You probably don't need that many.
+ Take it to the administration, preferrably in a group of students, in order to show that there is interest.
Of course, really, if you have the leadership abilities to run a club, you also should be brave enough to poke around in the administration and ask them what you should do. You can't be shy and be a club president--it doesn't work well at all.
-Jeff
Just to help keep reports balanced, neither of the 12" PowerBooks I've owned have had the wobble problem. They get pretty hotsometimes (although resettin the PMU seems to help with that sometimes), but mine always sits flat.
(Oops, mark me down as -1 Redundant! Someone already wrote about that alphabet! :) (Do I get any brownie points for adding a few extra details about it?... I didn't think so.))
-Jeff
Your usin' the old Army alphabet from WWII. Try the international radio alphabet used by NATO and civil aviation (among other things): :)
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eigth, niner, alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot.
-Jeff
Now I'm curious to pump through the equations and see. :) ( Haven't done induced emf since I taught it to my lab students *last* April. :) Been focusing on thin films coatings, at the company I work for, these days.)
The reason power is transferred via high volatage AC power, and not any kind of DC power is simple:
The lower the current you send down a wire, the less energy lost due to resistance. (P=IE, E=IR, so P=R*I^2). This is a major concern over long wires, where the overall resistance can be quite high. With AC power, you can transform from high current / low volatage, to low current / high voltage, and back quite easily. So you can put your powerplant far away from the consumer. However with DC, you can't do this. DC can't be transformed (at least, not easily?), and so you have to run it down the powerlines at the same voltage/current as the consumer will use, which is quite high. Hence, you loose a lot of energy on powerlines very quickly, and thus your powerplant must be close (within a couple miles actually) of the customers.
I should also mention (although I think I see posts saying this later on) that, indeed, the bike is a one loop conductor, and that the powerlines (via the right hand rule) have a varying magnetic field (because the current is varying), but the induced emf is very small. This is because the current in the wires is small, and there aren't very many of them, and you are 50+ ft away, and your bike is only one loop. I'd call the induced emf negligable personally.
-Jeff
Physicist, Programmer
I use tcsh for my day in/ day out usage. Bash was actually my first shell, but I didn't use it much (I used it to work with my web/ftp accounts on a remote server at the time). Since then, I have done a lot of stuff in tcsh, and have configured a lot of it to what I want to do. For normal interactive useage, it has been good to me.
However, I couldn't really recommend that you make shell scripts in it. I usually make my shell scripts for straight up sh (when I do make them), but more often than not, I use Perl or Ruby to get scripting jobs done.
However, I since I have not extensively used bash, I really can't tell anyone what I think about it (for comparisons). tcsh has always been good enough for me, and so I haven't bothered to configure bash on my system, but I'm sure if I took the time, I would consider it a good shell.
OO in Perl is so hacked. I love Perl (indeed, it is my second favorite programming language), but, as I said, the OO is a hack. So now I use Ruby. I like Ruby. :)
-Jeff
My only comment is that I'm an object oriented man. I think *very* much in terms of Objects, and find that I'm not as comfortable in non object oriented languages. As such, I find myself happier in languages like Ruby, Objective-C, and Java, than in C.
:)
Of course, this is all just my opinion. I respect your opinion, and would go so far as to agree that when I'm not working in an OO language, I prefer to work in either Perl or C.
I guess I just felt obligated to support the OO languages.
-Jeff
Man. I tried the link to look at the ToughBook, and it was absolutely miserable. It is really hard to find specs on their computers. It is kind of like they assume you already know all the models and what they are. Even finding the prices was very awkward. You'd think that a company like Panasonic would work a little harder on their web pages?
-Jeff
My cousin works at a video store, and so our biggest thing is movie posters. We managed to get a whole stack of movie posters from him (some of them are for good movies and others aren't). We found that colourful ones really helped a lot.
Lighting is also important. We worked pretty hard to put lights in all the right places so that the room would be bright. What we found is that instead of shining the light directly out into the room, bounce it off the walls (which have the posters on it). If you put the lights sufficiently close to the walls, the bounced light will gain a slight hue from the posters, and liven things up. (The Charlie's Angels poster works really good for this, because it has bright pinks and oranges in it).
I should note that incadescent light get hot. When the light is at the place which gives the best reflection characteristics, the wall gets a little hot and is thus not only a fire hazard, but also can discolour the paint. We use compact florescents. I don't like the hue of them as much (too green for me), but after bouncing them off the posters, they look pretty nice.
-Jeff
I hot plugged a SCSI CD-ROM drive into my PowerComputing machine once, with interesting consequences. When I plugged in the data cable first. I then proceeded to plug the power cable into the drive. Now this next part surprised the hell out of me because I hot plugged that CD-ROM drive in that computer several times that day and nothing happened. But *this* time a big blue spark jumped about a three quarter inch gap from the power cable to the drive. I *immediately* dropped the cable and jumped back. The computer's circuit breaker tripped and the computer automatically shut off. Anyway, to make a long story not so boringly long, I connected everything up, turned the computer back on, and voila! Nothing was broken! I was completely amazed.
-Jeff
I'm working with a dev team on writing a full featured thin film engineering application (in house) written entirely in Java. Surprisingly, the thing runs fast enough to do all the intensive physics calculations!
:)
I've also found that we were able to utilize the Swing API to get almost everything we wanted, including some very unique and handy components that I have been unable to easily duplicate in other languages.
Well, I would love to tell you more about it, but my NDA strictly forbids it. (In fact, I hope I'm not in violation now!)
-Jeff
Good points everyone. And, indeed, I agree 100%. Using high enough energy, you can heat nearly anything with any RF frequency. And it is certainly easily doable with Non 2.4 GHz microwaves on things. (I'm aware of the birds on the transmitters, and even early RADAR engineers sitting in front of the transmitters to get warm), however those are really high power compared to a cell phone.
-Jeff
Keep in mind that the reason why microwaves heat things up is that they prey on a *specific* resonance frequency for water molecules. Microwaves starting a little ways off of this frequency, to either side, aren't going to vibrate the water molecules and hence not heat anything up.
This is not to say that the energy carried in the waves can't be turned into heat somehow, but the mechanism that microwaves use to do this just plain doesn't work. You *can't* make a microwave oven in the communications frequencies just by bombarding it with high power microwaves.
-Jeff
Not to mention there isn't a Brushed Aluminum version of NSToolBar, so Safari's toolbar must be configured in totally roundabout ways (like menus and dialog boxes). If they used Aqua like they are supposed to, then they could use NSToolbar and get great, intuitive, and powerful functionality "for free".
:) ) If there was just some way to auto-sync my bookmarks everynight when I go to bed. Guess it is time to dig out Ruby and write a script myself... but I don't want to parse the XML. :)
(I should note that I use a registered version of OmniWeb, but am currently running Safari because it is faster. But I still like OmniWeb better and will probably end up back on it within 2 weeks.
-Jeff
I primarily use my iPod when on the go, and so it became most important for me to have a stand of some sort in my car.
When I first got it, the only good place to put it was in a slightly wider than iPod space between the driver and passenger seats (next to the e-brake lever). Unfortunately, it would often slide under the e-brake lever and be hard to get to. The sliding was also scuffing up the back.
So, I decided to make a stand that is custom molded to the odd shape of this place between the seats, and also hold my iPod at a reasonable viewing angle. (Although, I do tend to pick it up and hold it in front of me when manipulating, so one eye can be on the road!).
After a some thought, I decided to make my stand out of (of all things) a Cheerio's box. This was mostly because I considered it a prototype, and was planning on using 1/8" thick plastic for the real thing.
Now you would think that the cardboard, being so thin, would break. However with an X shaped support in the interior (and properly located to give some support to the middle of the iPod mating surface), I found that the thing is very surprisingly strong. I've had the stand for almost a year now, and it is still in wonderful shape. I guess I never will get around to making a plastic version -- no need to.
-Jeff
I've only ever heard it (in context to the Sun computer) pronounced Sole-air-us by everyone I know (both in the San Francisco Bay Area and when I was at UC Santa Barbara). In fact, it surprised me to hear it pronounced another way. That's not to say that it is right, just that I've never heard a Californian geek (or anyone, up until recently) pronounce it another way. :)
:)
:) :)
On a side note, I think I actually pronounce it Sole-air-iss, even though that last syllable should be `us'. (The `i' is like the `i' in `it', and the `s' is hard, like in `us'.) But I would argue that that is my pronunciation deficiency, and that `us' is the correct pronunciation.
-Jeff
P.S. - Is this going to turn into a debate similar to the lynn-ux vs lie-nux debate?
P.P.S. - I (and most people I know) pronounce it lynn-ux, although the argument for the lie-nux pronounciation makes since considering Linus (lie-nus) wrote it.