Hmm... No product displays at the website. Just some diagrams and a a photoshopped display.
That said, I'm currently tied to CRT technology because a lot of the media I have to deal with is color matched. Since color on a CRT screen is unreliable... it changes if you look at your screen from a different direction... this could offer a great deal of help to people like me who are tied to heavy, bulky displays rather than sweet flat-panels.
Of course the key here is that they have to deliver everything they promise in the way of omni-directional viewing and color-correctness.
Antimatter costs far more than it's worth...
on
Antimatter Space Drive
·
· Score: 4, Informative
...At least to provide thrust for a vessel of any kind since it costs more energy (incredibly more, with current technology) to produce than it actually stores. The only advantage to using an antimatter/matter reaction as a propellant is the sheer efficiency of the reaction. You get a lot more push out of a lot less 'fuel'. If you can get away with carrying less total mass, then you don't have to accellerate or decelerate as much.
It's been theorized that the only reason that Terra has a moon is because early in our planet's development, it was split in two large chunks by a planetoid impact.
An early protoplanet slammed into Earth, vaporizing rock, etc... The force of the impact ejected a large part of the Earth's mass. It eventually cooled and settled into its own suborbit around the reforming earth.
This theory has been propped up somewhat by analaysis of the Moon's structure. Luna seems to be composed of rock like you would find in the Earth's mantle, but has a noticeable lack of a magnetic or electrical field, indicating that it doesn't have a lot of iron or nickel, which you would expect to find if it had formed independantly of Earth.
Bottom line-- The moon has the highest ratio of mass to its parent body as than any other moon in the Solar system. If we didn't arbitrarily consider Luna a moon, it would be a lot more correct to say that the Earth-Moon system was a dual planetoid system and not a planet-moon system.
In the Texas Panhandle, it's flat. Really, really flat. It's so flat, that on a clear day, you can look off at the horizon and see all 360 degress of it... faded blue depending on the humidity, but there nonetheless.
Now, what do you need for a good wireless connection? A flat, unobstructed line-of-sight to an antenna or a repeater.
Heh... by sticking atennas and repeaters on top of granaries, water towers, and high buildings, wireless ISPs in Amarillo and the surrounds are getting *amazing* distances with their wireless shots. You can drive 30-40 miles away and still get a good clean connection via a pingle-can antenna. Thusly, Wireless is taking off in a big way here. A good number of the people I work with are already using wireless as their main form of bandwidth and out and out refuse to go back to cable. Most everyone else is actively considering switching. Those who are considering other forms of broadband bandwidth are going to DSL and not cable.
Cable companies and media conglomerates are screaming and making a big fucking deal out of a non-existant problem in the name of gelaning control. What it boils down to is that the technology is changing too rapidly for them to effectively impliment any kind of contols. Sure, they can nail some of the areas in the U.S. where it's impossible to get DSL or wireless, but they can't go everywhere. If my understanding is correct, DSL is getting cheaper and cheaper, and wireless is getting better and better. Cable is a flash in the pan. A bright flash, but a flash in the pan nonetheless.
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 1
Heheh...
I write stories, essays, and do art projects. The information on my front page and on my FF page are just notes as to what kind of content I've added to my site.
I never ever discuss the parties I've been to. If I did, people-- namely me-- would get in a great deal of trouble.
I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Slashdot, for example, is a lot more of a news and current events site than it is Taco's personal weblog. k5 is more about essays and news. Occasionally, however, I'll stumble across a blog while looking for something else. If I don't know what it is at first, I tend to read it for a few seconds before going back.
LiveJournal blogs are the worst, IMHO. People go on and on about events and parties with people that 99.99999% of their readers have never met. Once I realize I've stumbled across something like that, I leave it as soon as I can.
Is it exhbitionism/vouyerism? If I read stories about a person's private life, I'd much rather they beging with a line like, "Dear Penthouse, I've always read the letters in your magazine but never thought that something like that could happen to me..."
Personally, I would pay more attention to the OS8 guidelines that the Aqua guidelines. IMHO, Aqua is a little broke. (Quicktime, anybody?) There's way too much emphasis on making computer controls look like real-life objects and not like computer controls.
As someone who's used OS8, OS9, Linux, and all the video variants, let me tell you that OS8 comes pretty damn close to being *golden*. Apple spent a lot of time making OS7-9 pleasant and easy to use and it shows.
...From various places. I have a low-end P3550 and a video out-card hooked into my home entertainment system. CDR and CDRW has all but replaced VHS for me.
Probably because there is nothing to be gained by buying a copy of movie or a song after pirating it, whereas for software you buy it for upgrades or tech support and for books you buy it so that you can hold it in your hands instead of reading on the computer screen.
By this same logic, most people who can download books can print them pretty cheaply if they don't use a laser printer. Upgrades can be just as easily pirated as original software.
You're right about the tech support thing about software. You don't get a nice cover or dust jacket with a downloaded book, either, and have to keep it bound in notebook.
By the same token, if you downloaded 'Lord of the Rings' on the internet, you didn't get extras like trailers, directors' comments, animated interactive menus, mini-posters, etc... When you buy a CD you get a lot of the same stuff. CD's are a bad example, though, because the Music industry is trying as hard as it can to give as little to their customers as they can get away with.
For a better example, when the Hellsing anime was released in Japan, I downloaded fansubs of the show online. When it was released in the U.S., I bought the DVD. Inside the Vol2. DVD, I got a cool miniposter of Alucard and Cellas, a post card, and a really neat Hellsign sew-on/iron-on patch.
'Command Line' is one of the finest explanations of the rationale behind GUI-interfaces you can read. It does an excellent job of explaning the differences between Linux, Windows, and Mac interfaces from a usability point of view rather than from a social or financial stance. This is good readin' folks.
. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly, however, have found that they can increase sales of their printed books by giving away the digital versions for free. This has also been my own experience with my self-published physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can browse the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if they like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of a printed copy.
It's funny. Publishers are starting to get what Microsoft has known for a while. 'Piracy' is in reality free advertising. Why don't the record companies and movie studios get it?
Is media automount in the kernel yet?
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Automount of removeable media like every other modern OS - Windows does it. MacOS does it. Even DOS 6.2 did it. Why doesn't Linux automount (please note that I did not say 'Autoplay') removeable media? (Note, I only use 2.4 kernels in servers. This may have changed recently, and I justed missed it, but...)
I wrote Larry Combest a few months ago complaining about the whole Berman thing. The form letter he sent back went on and on about how important intellectual property such as copyrighted media, trademarks, and PATENTS are to the economy, business, and corporate health of the nation.
Okay, Larry, Here's a real good example of how patents are HURTING health for our beer-loving neighbors to the north.
Yeah, we'll pay to bail out a company that's committed felonies, but we won't pay extra so that some poor woman can have protect her healthy by having breast-cancer screeings. Fuckwits.
Yeah, my first idea too. My workstation PC has this option in the bios. The MMPC didn't... I could buy a new mobo for $90-200 or go buy a cheap keybaord. *sigh*.
Recently, I put together a multimedia PC to play videos and listen to MP3s through my home entertainment system. Got everything installed and working properly and then planned to do all the actual operation of the computer with a mouse. No typing should be required to drap and drop files from a file-browser window into a media player, right? Even if text entry is necessary, there're no end of on-screen keyboard utilities. (Browsing the web is something that happens on my workstation, thanks, and not what I had planned for this guy.)
I built this guy in my office. After I've got everything installed and properly locked down (This machine will be on the internet after all), I pulled the keyboard out and started to test it. Everything worked fine, so I used a long stereo cable to plug the video-out into the video-in on my TV. Works just fine. So I shut everything down and move the PC into the living room and into my entertainment center. Get it all plugged in with no keyboard and the mouse conveniently located on the coffee table. Boot... Text post screen comes up.
KEYBOARD ERROR! Keyboard missing or not found. Please press F1 to continue.
Son of a bitch.
So now my multimedia PC has a $9 walmart keyboard plugged into it that I'll almost never use.
Patterns don't really mean anything in this kind of circumstance since it's not a regular function. You might as well say that because you flipped a coin six times and it came up heads, heads, tails tails, heads heads, that the next two times you flip it it will come up tails.
Kramnik vs. D. Fritz is not random, but it's output is unkown, so it might as well be.
What I see is the following... Kramnik started strong. Uncertain of his oponnent, he forced a draw in the first match. Strongly, he won two matches, and then, feeling the stress of trying to outwit such a powerful machine, he drew. He lost the next two matches... one of them on an error... and drew the next one, rallying a bit. My guess is that he is mentally and emotionally exhausted from fighting such a perfect enemy. Those are the factors which will influence match 8... not the fact that he won or lost previous matches.
Isn't it sad that people who post links feel the need to post as AC's to keep from being modded down as karma whores?
Positive moderation, people! Positive, not negative!
That said, it looks like to me like Fritz is going to win this one. I would say that Karmnik is showing signs of fatigue from playing against a 'perfect' oponnent. If I were him, I'd try to take a few days off before the next match to regain his mental and emotional endurance for the last match.
Why would Microsoft every want to challenge the patents when they have enough money to buy this guy's soul outright?
If a potential patent challenge does ever get to court, who do you think is going to win? MS's $40bln dollar lawyers who have honed their skills playing delay games vs. the DOJ's anti trust suit or this guy and whatever pro-bono legal defense he can drum up?
Orbots was one of my very first exposures to anime-- even before I ever saw Macross (Robotech), Voltron. My next exposure was a rather good Voltron-like anime OAV that had been edited and dubbed into english by Funimation called 'Voltus 5'. I always considered both Voltron series to be pale imitatons of that movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Color on an LCD is unreliable, not on a CRT, assuming you do color calibration when you first set it up.
Hmm... No product displays at the website. Just some diagrams and a a photoshopped display.
That said, I'm currently tied to CRT technology because a lot of the media I have to deal with is color matched. Since color on a CRT screen is unreliable... it changes if you look at your screen from a different direction... this could offer a great deal of help to people like me who are tied to heavy, bulky displays rather than sweet flat-panels.
Of course the key here is that they have to deliver everything they promise in the way of omni-directional viewing and color-correctness.
...At least to provide thrust for a vessel of any kind since it costs more energy (incredibly more, with current technology) to produce than it actually stores. The only advantage to using an antimatter/matter reaction as a propellant is the sheer efficiency of the reaction. You get a lot more push out of a lot less 'fuel'. If you can get away with carrying less total mass, then you don't have to accellerate or decelerate as much.
It's been theorized that the only reason that Terra has a moon is because early in our planet's development, it was split in two large chunks by a planetoid impact.
An early protoplanet slammed into Earth, vaporizing rock, etc... The force of the impact ejected a large part of the Earth's mass. It eventually cooled and settled into its own suborbit around the reforming earth.
This theory has been propped up somewhat by analaysis of the Moon's structure. Luna seems to be composed of rock like you would find in the Earth's mantle, but has a noticeable lack of a magnetic or electrical field, indicating that it doesn't have a lot of iron or nickel, which you would expect to find if it had formed independantly of Earth.
Bottom line-- The moon has the highest ratio of mass to its parent body as than any other moon in the Solar system. If we didn't arbitrarily consider Luna a moon, it would be a lot more correct to say that the Earth-Moon system was a dual planetoid system and not a planet-moon system.
Exactamundo.
In the Texas Panhandle, it's flat. Really, really flat. It's so flat, that on a clear day, you can look off at the horizon and see all 360 degress of it... faded blue depending on the humidity, but there nonetheless.
Now, what do you need for a good wireless connection? A flat, unobstructed line-of-sight to an antenna or a repeater.
Heh... by sticking atennas and repeaters on top of granaries, water towers, and high buildings, wireless ISPs in Amarillo and the surrounds are getting *amazing* distances with their wireless shots. You can drive 30-40 miles away and still get a good clean connection via a pingle-can antenna. Thusly, Wireless is taking off in a big way here. A good number of the people I work with are already using wireless as their main form of bandwidth and out and out refuse to go back to cable. Most everyone else is actively considering switching. Those who are considering other forms of broadband bandwidth are going to DSL and not cable.
Cable companies and media conglomerates are screaming and making a big fucking deal out of a non-existant problem in the name of gelaning control. What it boils down to is that the technology is changing too rapidly for them to effectively impliment any kind of contols. Sure, they can nail some of the areas in the U.S. where it's impossible to get DSL or wireless, but they can't go everywhere. If my understanding is correct, DSL is getting cheaper and cheaper, and wireless is getting better and better. Cable is a flash in the pan. A bright flash, but a flash in the pan nonetheless.
Heheh...
I write stories, essays, and do art projects. The information on my front page and on my FF page are just notes as to what kind of content I've added to my site.
I never ever discuss the parties I've been to. If I did, people-- namely me-- would get in a great deal of trouble.
Slashdot, for example, is a lot more of a news and current events site than it is Taco's personal weblog. k5 is more about essays and news. Occasionally, however, I'll stumble across a blog while looking for something else. If I don't know what it is at first, I tend to read it for a few seconds before going back.
LiveJournal blogs are the worst, IMHO. People go on and on about events and parties with people that 99.99999% of their readers have never met. Once I realize I've stumbled across something like that, I leave it as soon as I can.
Is it exhbitionism/vouyerism? If I read stories about a person's private life, I'd much rather they beging with a line like, "Dear Penthouse, I've always read the letters in your magazine but never thought that something like that could happen to me..."
Funny you should mention that. I wrote a short rant about it in June:
http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=83
Personally, I would pay more attention to the OS8 guidelines that the Aqua guidelines. IMHO, Aqua is a little broke. (Quicktime, anybody?) There's way too much emphasis on making computer controls look like real-life objects and not like computer controls.
As someone who's used OS8, OS9, Linux, and all the video variants, let me tell you that OS8 comes pretty damn close to being *golden*. Apple spent a lot of time making OS7-9 pleasant and easy to use and it shows.
The Gnome Usability Report:
t /participant_mix.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_repor
I read this about a year ago. It does an *excellent* job of pointing out many of the inconsistencies and gotchas in any given linux desktop situation.
VirtualDub.
...From various places. I have a low-end P3550 and a video out-card hooked into my home entertainment system. CDR and CDRW has all but replaced VHS for me.
He's not demanding we galled it 'GNU/Trusted Computing'?
Probably because there is nothing to be gained by buying a copy of movie or a song after pirating it, whereas for software you buy it for upgrades or tech support and for books you buy it so that you can hold it in your hands instead of reading on the computer screen.
By this same logic, most people who can download books can print them pretty cheaply if they don't use a laser printer. Upgrades can be just as easily pirated as original software.
You're right about the tech support thing about software. You don't get a nice cover or dust jacket with a downloaded book, either, and have to keep it bound in notebook.
By the same token, if you downloaded 'Lord of the Rings' on the internet, you didn't get extras like trailers, directors' comments, animated interactive menus, mini-posters, etc... When you buy a CD you get a lot of the same stuff. CD's are a bad example, though, because the Music industry is trying as hard as it can to give as little to their customers as they can get away with.
For a better example, when the Hellsing anime was released in Japan, I downloaded fansubs of the show online. When it was released in the U.S., I bought the DVD. Inside the Vol2. DVD, I got a cool miniposter of Alucard and Cellas, a post card, and a really neat Hellsign sew-on/iron-on patch.
'Command Line' is one of the finest explanations of the rationale behind GUI-interfaces you can read. It does an excellent job of explaning the differences between Linux, Windows, and Mac interfaces from a usability point of view rather than from a social or financial stance. This is good readin' folks.
From the article:
. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly, however, have found that they can increase sales of their printed books by giving away the digital versions for free. This has also been my own experience with my self-published physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can browse the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if they like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of a printed copy.
Strangely, the author fails to link to the Baen Free Library: http://www.baen.com/library/
It's funny. Publishers are starting to get what Microsoft has known for a while. 'Piracy' is in reality free advertising. Why don't the record companies and movie studios get it?
Automount of removeable media like every other modern OS - Windows does it. MacOS does it. Even DOS 6.2 did it. Why doesn't Linux automount (please note that I did not say 'Autoplay') removeable media? (Note, I only use 2.4 kernels in servers. This may have changed recently, and I justed missed it, but...)
I wrote Larry Combest a few months ago complaining about the whole Berman thing. The form letter he sent back went on and on about how important intellectual property such as copyrighted media, trademarks, and PATENTS are to the economy, business, and corporate health of the nation.
Okay, Larry, Here's a real good example of how patents are HURTING health for our beer-loving neighbors to the north.
Yeah, we'll pay to bail out a company that's committed felonies, but we won't pay extra so that some poor woman can have protect her healthy by having breast-cancer screeings. Fuckwits.
Yeah, my first idea too. My workstation PC has this option in the bios. The MMPC didn't... I could buy a new mobo for $90-200 or go buy a cheap keybaord. *sigh*.
Why this is a pain in the ass:
Recently, I put together a multimedia PC to play videos and listen to MP3s through my home entertainment system. Got everything installed and working properly and then planned to do all the actual operation of the computer with a mouse. No typing should be required to drap and drop files from a file-browser window into a media player, right? Even if text entry is necessary, there're no end of on-screen keyboard utilities. (Browsing the web is something that happens on my workstation, thanks, and not what I had planned for this guy.)
I built this guy in my office. After I've got everything installed and properly locked down (This machine will be on the internet after all), I pulled the keyboard out and started to test it. Everything worked fine, so I used a long stereo cable to plug the video-out into the video-in on my TV. Works just fine. So I shut everything down and move the PC into the living room and into my entertainment center. Get it all plugged in with no keyboard and the mouse conveniently located on the coffee table. Boot... Text post screen comes up.
KEYBOARD ERROR! Keyboard missing or not found. Please press F1 to continue.
Son of a bitch.
So now my multimedia PC has a $9 walmart keyboard plugged into it that I'll almost never use.
Patterns don't really mean anything in this kind of circumstance since it's not a regular function. You might as well say that because you flipped a coin six times and it came up heads, heads, tails tails, heads heads, that the next two times you flip it it will come up tails.
Kramnik vs. D. Fritz is not random, but it's output is unkown, so it might as well be.
What I see is the following... Kramnik started strong. Uncertain of his oponnent, he forced a draw in the first match. Strongly, he won two matches, and then, feeling the stress of trying to outwit such a powerful machine, he drew. He lost the next two matches... one of them on an error... and drew the next one, rallying a bit. My guess is that he is mentally and emotionally exhausted from fighting such a perfect enemy. Those are the factors which will influence match 8... not the fact that he won or lost previous matches.
Isn't it sad that people who post links feel the need to post as AC's to keep from being modded down as karma whores?
Positive moderation, people! Positive, not negative!
That said, it looks like to me like Fritz is going to win this one. I would say that Karmnik is showing signs of fatigue from playing against a 'perfect' oponnent. If I were him, I'd try to take a few days off before the next match to regain his mental and emotional endurance for the last match.
Why would Microsoft every want to challenge the patents when they have enough money to buy this guy's soul outright?
If a potential patent challenge does ever get to court, who do you think is going to win? MS's $40bln dollar lawyers who have honed their skills playing delay games vs. the DOJ's anti trust suit or this guy and whatever pro-bono legal defense he can drum up?
Orbots was one of my very first exposures to anime-- even before I ever saw Macross (Robotech), Voltron. My next exposure was a rather good Voltron-like anime OAV that had been edited and dubbed into english by Funimation called 'Voltus 5'. I always considered both Voltron series to be pale imitatons of that movie.
Hehe... Funny! (Who modded this down? Posting here to fix a bugged mod.)