So, looking for stars in a light-polluted sky is easier with a telescope, because it makes the stars appear brighter relative to their background.
Is this a joke? Light pollution turns the sky an awful pink-ish gray from what would otherwise be black, zodiacal light notwithstanding. That being the case, how exactly would it be easier to see a point source of light against a lighter background versus a darker background? (The answer? It's not. In fact, astronomers often use the limiting magnitude of stars visible with the naked eye as a measure of light pollution. The more LP there is, the smaller number of stars you will be able to discern with the naked eye, even if you are dark adapted and standing at the bottom of a well.)
With nebulae, comets, or other extended objects, especially where the object's apparent brightness doesn't exceed the sky's apparent brightness, the telescope doesn't help much at all.
Ludicrous! This is clearly being spoken by a person who has never looked through a telescope in their entire life. The apparently brightness of *any* astronomical object, be it a galaxy such as M31, or a globular cluster like M13, is entirely a function of aperture when magnification is held constant. The views of the Orion Nebula through a 4 inch reflector at 100x will be eviscerated by the same 100x view through a 20 inch reflector. (And yes, I have looked through instruments of both size, though I own a 12 inch reflector personally.) For views of the planets we have enough brightness to work with that light pollution makes little difference, but for just about everything else, it can ruin the view. You can barely make out M81 and M82 here in suburbia, but 2 hours a way they jump out of the sky at you.
Something like this may eventually make video conferencing useful. Anyone who has actually video conferenced with someone can attest to the lack of eye contact associated with both parties looking at their screen to see each other, rather than looking at the camera sitting atop their monitor. This lack of eye contact is very annoying, and I'd go so far as to say that it defeats the entire purpose of video conferencing in the first place. A camera positioned directly behind the video conference window fixes this issue entirely.
Once that is resolved, all we have to contend with is the severe bandwidth and latency issues that make most video conferences today an exercise in low quality, laggy futility.
All this talk of crimping versus buying premade is a false dichotomy. Ever hear of a punch down jack? Easy to do, vastly less prone to error then crimping an actual connector, and really what you ought to be doing anyway instead of having a hole in the wall with an ethernet cable coming through it.
So, nice, pretty punch down jacks on both sides, then premade patch cables between both sides and whatever they are connecting to. Reliable, quick, and easy.
I was actually using regular Adblock until a week or so ago when Google ads started showing up on Slashdot and other sites. Try as I might, I was unable to create a filter to get rid of them.
Adblock Plus took care of them instantly with the default list.
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here.
The planets, including Venus, are easily visible in the cities and are essentially unaffected by light pollution. Not that I'm suggesting that light pollution not be dealt with, just that not all hope is lost.
As for the ISS, with a magnitude of -2 or brighter, it is definitely visible anywhere. Check Heaven's Above for the transit times. Iridium flares are fun too!
Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several white, black, and blue pairs of socks for various purposes: school, work, dress, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant comfort, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose socks were whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen sock 'drawers' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your socks?
I think whether or not this is wrong depends entirely on whether or not money as changed hands at the time the error is noticed.
For instance, we would not consider a car dealership to be contractually bound to sell cars for $3000 a piece if a typo caused a zero to be left off the price in an advertisement. An advertisement or coupon simply does not constitute a contract.
In that same vein, I would argue that making an internet purchase is not a contract as well, or rather, at least not initially. Giving a company your credit information and clicking "Purchase" is not the same as handing another person cash and shaking hands, as that credit information must first be authorized and processed before money is actually transferred. Until that is done, the transaction (and hence, contract) has not been completed, and you the consumer aren't entitled to anything. Consequently, if an error is found at this stage, I see nothing wrong with a company cancelling the order in question.
If money is transferred, that is a whole different ball of wax. The deal is then done, and a business should be held to whatever price they stated. At that point they have taken your money, depriving you the use of it for anything else, and it is not acceptable for them to cancel the order simply because of their incompetence, anymore than they can call you up a month later and demand more money for an item you already purchased.
It is basically a hardware HD x264 encoder that works in conjunction with your HD tuner. Hook it up to the component outputs of your cable/satellite provider's tuner box, use an irblaster to change channels, and you're in business. (MythTV's support is nearly stable now last I heard.)
You lose a bit of quality in the A/D conversion, but it does allow you access to 100 percent of your HD material. That is, until analog outputs are made illegal, though I suspect that is many years away from achieving fruition.
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
I hear this bandied about quite a bit, and while the age of menarche (the date of first menstruation for women) has been changing, it has been doing so for long before hormone-fed cattle and processed and/or GE foods have been around.
Take a look at this chart with sources here. As you can see, menarche has been decreasing in women since the 1840s, which makes it much more likely that it is nutritional changes and/or urbanization (specifically with regards to increasing population density - ie, more available mates means the body gets ready to mate sooner) that is causing the decline in the age of puberty.
Not that I don't trust the entirely speculative and paranoid hypothesis of internet crackpots and parents alike...
A few days ago I attempted to turn my original game boy on for the first time in about five years, and to my extreme disappointment it appears to be dead.
Can anyone advise me on any possible avenues of repair? I've already cleaned the battery contacts and put a fresh set of batteries in to no avail. I've got a tri-wing driver coming to me in the mail shortly, so I'll be able to open it up for a proper look, but I thought it would be wise to ask around here if anyone knows any common problems these old systems can have.
Well, if what you're saying is true, it runs contrary to what I've read in the past, and every bit of info that I just found via a quick Google search on the matter. Also, you'll find that many high end LCDs for graphics work are S-IPS, or some variant there of, such as the LaCie 319.
Do you have any sources to back up your claims? If not, I'm afraid I'll have to stick with my original statement.
Unfortunately, Dell is well known for swapping panels. It's referred to as the Dell Panel Lottery on forums across the internet.
In short, Dell has been known to swap S-IPS panels (a kind of TFT technology known for particularly accurate color representation) with various other kinds of cheaper panel technologies, all within the same model number. This is why many manufacturers, including Dell, refuse to list what technology they're using in the monitor specs, in order to reserve the right to use whatever cheapest panel they can find as they become available.
I purchased a Dell 2001FP a few years back that had a genuine S-IPS panel. When it started to have problems (specifically, a piece of tape or insulation began migrating onto the screen underneath the plastic of the panel) they sent me the newer model of the same line. It looked awful in comparison, despite having virtually the same specs. (It was a PVA panel, from what I found out later.) Luckily, after spending 2.5 hours (persistence is key in these situations; eventually it's cheaper to give in than to continue dealing with you) in a chat with a Dell support tech, and her manager, I eventually convinced them to refund my money in its entirety, despite the fact I had purchased the monitor about 5 months ago.
In any case, it pays to do a fair amount of research on a monitor before making a purchase. In the end, I ended up going with an HP LP2065, another S-IPS based monitor, which I have been very happy with. Things may have improved more recently though, so it may not be such a big deal these days.
I could care less about the ~$5 rebate, I'm just happy to know that Seagate (and hopefully other manufacturers) will be using the correct definition from now on. I know it's relative, but every year it seems like I'm losing more space on new drives. The 35 "missing" gigabytes from a 500GB drive is definitely a sizable chunk of storage.
This is my understanding as well, but should this be true, why is this so important? I mean, if you create two identical particles and observe the spin/charge/widgets of one, then observe the other, surely you would not expect it to be different, would you?
You can remap an unused button on most Comcast DVRs to perform the 30 second skip feature, as instructed by the really great howto over at the wikibooks on the Motorola DVRs.
The following technique can be used to map an unused or unneeded button on the "silver" remote to the 30-second skip command. Current versions of the i-Guide software will skip forward 30 seconds into a recording when this command is sent. A good choice is the 'A / Lock' button since many users don't need that function; you can feel both the '15-second-back' and '30-second-skip' buttons with one finger and move between them without looking. Another option is to reprogram the '15-second back' button, since PgDn already provides that functionality.
1. Press the "Cable" button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode.
2. Press and hold the "Setup" button until the "Cable" button blinks twice.
3. Type in the code 994. The "Cable" button will blink twice.
4. Press (do not hold) the "Setup" button.
5. Type in the code 00173.
6. Press whatever button you want to map the 30-second skip command to (ex: A / Lock). The "Cable" button will blink twice if successful.
Works great, though I use MythTV with the firewire output of my DCT 3412 (all of my channels, high-def and all, are unencrypted thankfully) so I don't really need the feature.;-)
Not to troll, but if you like the idea of a streamlined do-it-yourself system and are not interested in compiling every piece of software you install from scratch, check out Arch Linux. In my opinion it combines the best of both worlds: a great package system that doesn't require compiling everything, but allows it if you wish, and a strict adherence to the KISS and DIY philosophies.
I just switched from Mandrake 2005LE, and I'm really loving it so far. I think I got everything setup faster than it originally took using Mandrake's wizards!
Am I the only one that actually *likes* DST? As the antithesis of a morning person, I look forward every year to the one hour jump forward. I actually wish we could have permanent DST - nothing is more depressing than leaving work in the dark at 5pm (little to no natural sunlight for the entire day other than window light) where as I couldn't give a shit about the ride to work. What am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
So, looking for stars in a light-polluted sky is easier with a telescope, because it makes the stars appear brighter relative to their background.
Is this a joke? Light pollution turns the sky an awful pink-ish gray from what would otherwise be black, zodiacal light notwithstanding. That being the case, how exactly would it be easier to see a point source of light against a lighter background versus a darker background? (The answer? It's not. In fact, astronomers often use the limiting magnitude of stars visible with the naked eye as a measure of light pollution. The more LP there is, the smaller number of stars you will be able to discern with the naked eye, even if you are dark adapted and standing at the bottom of a well.)
With nebulae, comets, or other extended objects, especially where the object's apparent brightness doesn't exceed the sky's apparent brightness, the telescope doesn't help much at all.
Ludicrous! This is clearly being spoken by a person who has never looked through a telescope in their entire life. The apparently brightness of *any* astronomical object, be it a galaxy such as M31, or a globular cluster like M13, is entirely a function of aperture when magnification is held constant. The views of the Orion Nebula through a 4 inch reflector at 100x will be eviscerated by the same 100x view through a 20 inch reflector. (And yes, I have looked through instruments of both size, though I own a 12 inch reflector personally.) For views of the planets we have enough brightness to work with that light pollution makes little difference, but for just about everything else, it can ruin the view. You can barely make out M81 and M82 here in suburbia, but 2 hours a way they jump out of the sky at you.
Something like this may eventually make video conferencing useful. Anyone who has actually video conferenced with someone can attest to the lack of eye contact associated with both parties looking at their screen to see each other, rather than looking at the camera sitting atop their monitor. This lack of eye contact is very annoying, and I'd go so far as to say that it defeats the entire purpose of video conferencing in the first place. A camera positioned directly behind the video conference window fixes this issue entirely.
Once that is resolved, all we have to contend with is the severe bandwidth and latency issues that make most video conferences today an exercise in low quality, laggy futility.
All this talk of crimping versus buying premade is a false dichotomy. Ever hear of a punch down jack? Easy to do, vastly less prone to error then crimping an actual connector, and really what you ought to be doing anyway instead of having a hole in the wall with an ethernet cable coming through it.
So, nice, pretty punch down jacks on both sides, then premade patch cables between both sides and whatever they are connecting to. Reliable, quick, and easy.
I was actually using regular Adblock until a week or so ago when Google ads started showing up on Slashdot and other sites. Try as I might, I was unable to create a filter to get rid of them.
Adblock Plus took care of them instantly with the default list.
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here.
The planets, including Venus, are easily visible in the cities and are essentially unaffected by light pollution. Not that I'm suggesting that light pollution not be dealt with, just that not all hope is lost.
As for the ISS, with a magnitude of -2 or brighter, it is definitely visible anywhere. Check Heaven's Above for the transit times. Iridium flares are fun too!
Anyone have a link to an HD copy? Not that I don't enjoy the utter lack of quality that comprises your typical YouTube video....
Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several white, black, and blue pairs of socks for various purposes: school, work, dress, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant comfort, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose socks were whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen sock 'drawers' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your socks?
Does anyone know a cheap source for legit XP Pro licenses, apart from peeling stickers off of trashed systems?
I think whether or not this is wrong depends entirely on whether or not money as changed hands at the time the error is noticed.
For instance, we would not consider a car dealership to be contractually bound to sell cars for $3000 a piece if a typo caused a zero to be left off the price in an advertisement. An advertisement or coupon simply does not constitute a contract.
In that same vein, I would argue that making an internet purchase is not a contract as well, or rather, at least not initially. Giving a company your credit information and clicking "Purchase" is not the same as handing another person cash and shaking hands, as that credit information must first be authorized and processed before money is actually transferred. Until that is done, the transaction (and hence, contract) has not been completed, and you the consumer aren't entitled to anything. Consequently, if an error is found at this stage, I see nothing wrong with a company cancelling the order in question.
If money is transferred, that is a whole different ball of wax. The deal is then done, and a business should be held to whatever price they stated. At that point they have taken your money, depriving you the use of it for anything else, and it is not acceptable for them to cancel the order simply because of their incompetence, anymore than they can call you up a month later and demand more money for an item you already purchased.
You can. All you need is this: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
It is basically a hardware HD x264 encoder that works in conjunction with your HD tuner. Hook it up to the component outputs of your cable/satellite provider's tuner box, use an irblaster to change channels, and you're in business. (MythTV's support is nearly stable now last I heard.)
You lose a bit of quality in the A/D conversion, but it does allow you access to 100 percent of your HD material. That is, until analog outputs are made illegal, though I suspect that is many years away from achieving fruition.
Actually, I'm an atheist, and thus was grabbing a 3600 DPI scanned copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
Really, it is simple coincidence that the month in question was also right around the time 720p x264 rips started showing up on Usenet...
I'm actually oddly happy about this. I was contacted in the past about going over the mysterious limit (I did about 400GB that month,) and since then I've been living in fear that I may go too high again and get my service cut for a year. Now that an actual known limit exists, I can easily monitor my usage accordingly via my WRT54GL flashed with Tomato.
A 250GB limit is more than fair, and as long as it is fully disclosed in advanced, I have no problem with it. Having secret, constantly changing limits with undefined penalties for violations is not acceptable for any contractually agreed upon service.
You may need to improve your reading comprehension.
"Find the file that is most taxing to play while still playing smoothly and run the script on this page with it."
So, what the page allows you to do is say this file, of X resolution, of Y fps, with a bitrate of Z plays perfectly on my system $SPECS.
I hear this bandied about quite a bit, and while the age of menarche (the date of first menstruation for women) has been changing, it has been doing so for long before hormone-fed cattle and processed and/or GE foods have been around.
Take a look at this chart with sources here. As you can see, menarche has been decreasing in women since the 1840s, which makes it much more likely that it is nutritional changes and/or urbanization (specifically with regards to increasing population density - ie, more available mates means the body gets ready to mate sooner) that is causing the decline in the age of puberty.
Not that I don't trust the entirely speculative and paranoid hypothesis of internet crackpots and parents alike...
A few days ago I attempted to turn my original game boy on for the first time in about five years, and to my extreme disappointment it appears to be dead.
Can anyone advise me on any possible avenues of repair? I've already cleaned the battery contacts and put a fresh set of batteries in to no avail. I've got a tri-wing driver coming to me in the mail shortly, so I'll be able to open it up for a proper look, but I thought it would be wise to ask around here if anyone knows any common problems these old systems can have.
Well, if what you're saying is true, it runs contrary to what I've read in the past, and every bit of info that I just found via a quick Google search on the matter. Also, you'll find that many high end LCDs for graphics work are S-IPS, or some variant there of, such as the LaCie 319.
Do you have any sources to back up your claims? If not, I'm afraid I'll have to stick with my original statement.
Unfortunately, Dell is well known for swapping panels. It's referred to as the Dell Panel Lottery on forums across the internet.
In short, Dell has been known to swap S-IPS panels (a kind of TFT technology known for particularly accurate color representation) with various other kinds of cheaper panel technologies, all within the same model number. This is why many manufacturers, including Dell, refuse to list what technology they're using in the monitor specs, in order to reserve the right to use whatever cheapest panel they can find as they become available.
I purchased a Dell 2001FP a few years back that had a genuine S-IPS panel. When it started to have problems (specifically, a piece of tape or insulation began migrating onto the screen underneath the plastic of the panel) they sent me the newer model of the same line. It looked awful in comparison, despite having virtually the same specs. (It was a PVA panel, from what I found out later.) Luckily, after spending 2.5 hours (persistence is key in these situations; eventually it's cheaper to give in than to continue dealing with you) in a chat with a Dell support tech, and her manager, I eventually convinced them to refund my money in its entirety, despite the fact I had purchased the monitor about 5 months ago.
In any case, it pays to do a fair amount of research on a monitor before making a purchase. In the end, I ended up going with an HP LP2065, another S-IPS based monitor, which I have been very happy with. Things may have improved more recently though, so it may not be such a big deal these days.
You watched a movie about bologna.
I could care less about the ~$5 rebate, I'm just happy to know that Seagate (and hopefully other manufacturers) will be using the correct definition from now on. I know it's relative, but every year it seems like I'm losing more space on new drives. The 35 "missing" gigabytes from a 500GB drive is definitely a sizable chunk of storage.
And I quit reading your post when you forgot a period. Oh wait...
This is my understanding as well, but should this be true, why is this so important? I mean, if you create two identical particles and observe the spin/charge/widgets of one, then observe the other, surely you would not expect it to be different, would you?
You can remap an unused button on most Comcast DVRs to perform the 30 second skip feature, as instructed by the really great howto over at the wikibooks on the Motorola DVRs.
;-)
The following technique can be used to map an unused or unneeded button on the "silver" remote to the 30-second skip command. Current versions of the i-Guide software will skip forward 30 seconds into a recording when this command is sent. A good choice is the 'A / Lock' button since many users don't need that function; you can feel both the '15-second-back' and '30-second-skip' buttons with one finger and move between them without looking. Another option is to reprogram the '15-second back' button, since PgDn already provides that functionality.
1. Press the "Cable" button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode.
2. Press and hold the "Setup" button until the "Cable" button blinks twice.
3. Type in the code 994. The "Cable" button will blink twice.
4. Press (do not hold) the "Setup" button.
5. Type in the code 00173.
6. Press whatever button you want to map the 30-second skip command to (ex: A / Lock). The "Cable" button will blink twice if successful.
Works great, though I use MythTV with the firewire output of my DCT 3412 (all of my channels, high-def and all, are unencrypted thankfully) so I don't really need the feature.
Not to troll, but if you like the idea of a streamlined do-it-yourself system and are not interested in compiling every piece of software you install from scratch, check out Arch Linux. In my opinion it combines the best of both worlds: a great package system that doesn't require compiling everything, but allows it if you wish, and a strict adherence to the KISS and DIY philosophies.
I just switched from Mandrake 2005LE, and I'm really loving it so far. I think I got everything setup faster than it originally took using Mandrake's wizards!
Am I the only one that actually *likes* DST? As the antithesis of a morning person, I look forward every year to the one hour jump forward. I actually wish we could have permanent DST - nothing is more depressing than leaving work in the dark at 5pm (little to no natural sunlight for the entire day other than window light) where as I couldn't give a shit about the ride to work. What am I missing?