I always junk the CD as soon as I get the book just so I can flex it properly to find info. It always annoys me because it means I can't return the book if it turns out to be useless. I try to determine that in the store before I plunk down the 60-75 bucks, but sometimes I'm wrong.
I favor books that don't have the CD for this reason, as a bonus it tends to save a few $$ too. I rarely return a book (maybe 1 in a 100) so it's more a matter of feeling denied my wallet vote than an actual monetary loss.
1/r^2 only applies to an access node. Once you are trying to go point to point you use antennas. If it's a dish your loss is entirely do to the media your passing through: Water vapor, tree's, etc.
The real bottleneck is that in air you can only use limited bandwidth (in the EE sense.) On a wire you get a huge swath of the EM spectrum, and then you get another huge swath on the wire you put next to it. Or, you get a small portion of a really high frequency EM when you install fiber, and again on the fiber you lay next to it.
Wireless is another LAN & MAN solution, not a backbone solution. Though I'm pretty sure there are microwave links being used to cross Nevada, and why not? Light travels 50% faster in air than in fiber... (EM in clean copper only travels at 2/3 speed too.)
NYU cut off my roommate's ethernet for running Linux. I had unplugged my box when he was portscanned so he was able to use my connection while he talked with the NOC people.
He was a music major so it wasn't hard for him to convince him he wasn't a hacker. They ended up allowing Linux as an unsupported OS after a couple weeks. I'm sure if you're polite your NOC people will end up allowing 802.11b with some kind of firewall requirement. The basic firewall in one of those all-in-one boxes would prolly decrease the vulnerability of the network to Microsoft WORMs. You'd have to know you're running a web server to forward port 80, for instance.
A 26-bit Z buffer is a great improvement, but the 30-bit color is so so. It will probably avoid some saturation issues with multiple lights and framebuffer operations but we really need floating point color.
I've heard talk about this from people at Microsoft and nVidia, something like 12 or 14 bits. Someone even suggested a sign bit. This would allow you to create an image where the highlights and shadows were all resolved and you could play around with the screen mapping to actually see it on a monitor. It would really help in film and print, but prolly the reason nVidia cares is because it allows you to use the framebuffer as a big SIMD machine and layer on many more effects than just using 10 or 12 bits linearly.
PS I don't work for either of them and don't know if they are officially going in that direction, just that some of their worker bees are thinking along those lines.
And very useful when writing a TSR. I recall my first experience with C involved my exclaiming, "What the f*ck! This compiler complains about accessing the interupt vector????" I used more colorful language though. All this 'C is evil' talk just has me scratching my head. C lets me write less assembler, I like that.
It's not that I'm in the stone age, while I hate Ada & ML I use Java whenever I can. Computers are about 2^42 times slower that I'd like them to be. I'm pretty sure I'll say the same thing in 10 yrs too.
If there for export into the Windows world at large I'd say bite the bullet and buy Visual C++ yourself, and hurry before you're forced to buy the.NET version.
If you're writing things for internal company stuff Cygwin will probably make you happier. You get most of the wonderful posix development environment without dealing with Microsoft oddities.
The reason for my duplicity is simple, you can write an app in Visual C++ that doesn't need a lot of extra redistibutables because it uses Microsoft's own DLL's. With cygwin you have to install cygwin on all the machines you want to run on unless you just stick with the basics, for which I'm sure the Borland compiler is fine anyway.
I'm assuming your not writing code that needs to be really fast or I'd recommend the Intel compiler, but that would make life really complicated.
Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.
Does that mean it doesn't have that annoying click? I can't use the Mimio we have because the sound is just too annoying. I wish they'd have picked something tonal if they had to have the markers emit any loud sound.
I'm pretty certain the 8086 was chosen because of it's ability to emulate the 8080 instruction set (I think the instructions matched but it was not binary compatable, you needed to reassemble).
I never used a 8080, but I'm pretty sure you could just copy a.com executable from the then popular CP/M OS and run it in DOS on a 8086. It's been eons since I wrote a.com, but I'm pretty darn sure it's just a file you copy verbatim into a 64k segment and then jump to eds:0, where eds is the segment. If you use the OS/BIOS they must be compatible, but my guess is they did that...
I had an old workstation at home with dual PPro that I wanted to turn into a router. It had 5 fans, two on the CPU and three elsewhere. The case was a pretty big aluminium one so I took out all the fans and removed a CPU. It still wasn't cool enough by the place finger on heatsink test so I underclocked it from 200 to about 130, I couldn't get it any lower with my motherboard.
At this point it ran cool, but it wasn't quiet at all. The hard drive was the newest component and it was friggin loud. I took that out and made an LRP type floppy and now I sleep next to the thing.
This used to be a workstation that I woke me up from across the room even when I placed it behind a bookcase. But the real moral here is that you need to get rid of that hard drive, even if it goes to sleep quickly the thing can wake you up when it starts spinning to record some log or whatnot. I also got rid of of extra stuff like the power supply cover and tapedrive and what not that just weren't good for airflow. In terms of time spent the router would have been cheaper, but it was fun and the thing is flexible.
I think that If I ever build a fast machine that needs to be on all the time I'll just find a way to hang it outside my double pane windows. Long cables...
The moral of this story is that while yes, GIMP is sufficient for people's needs (read: web site graphics, basic file resizing type things, etc,) it's not in the same ballpark as Photoshop. It's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.
Gosh, I always grumble when it takes 5 seconds to start up that it's TOO much like photoshop;)
Seriously, while GIMP is years behind photoshop I think there is a chance it may displace photoshop eventually, simply because it's open. Consider if you're a graduate student inventing a new filter.. where are you going to test it? I'd feel a little better giving it to gimp and enforcing the patent against photoshop if they tried to use it without paying.
Even if that never happens and it keeps photoshop from slowing down on improving, GIMP has been successful. I no longer need photoshop since most of my uses are simple things like resizing or basic color correction.
Instead of bringing the cable down to earth.. or putting it atop a very high tower, why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on.
I think this is a good idea, but... Planes go really fast at high altitudes... The airstrip might have to be a mile long even if it had cables to catch the planes and slow them down (it would need this anyway since the planes are both light and have very little drag at those altitudes.)
I think the weight wouldn't be a problem since you are holding up much less mass and at a lower gravity.. It might need active control since the airfield is basically a wing and a light and airodynamic one at that if you design it properly. You'd need to keep your angle of attack close to zero. Since you need all this control anyway you could just use the wing/airfield to control orbit and location...
The tether would also most likely have to be conical in shape, thicker higher up, and thinner below to minimize the amount of carbon tubing used in the elevator. Well the cable that goes from the earth to orbit would need to be thin at the top and bottom, thick somewhere in the middle. The cable is actually part of the ballast so higher up it's not holding up the entire weight of the cable, and near the earth it's not holding much at all, but it needs some strength because air is heavy and tends to blow fiercely.
With your design it might be conical near the platform and get thinner as it goes higher, or have a fat in the "middle" profile, depending on the weight(no I didn't mean mass) of the cable.
I really think we'll have a rocket on plane solution long before the elevator, but the idea has it's charm.
So it is quite possible that there are older things in the rain forest, but we have no way of knowing.
IANB...
I'm loathe to say anything is impossible, but I highly doubt it. The reason clones weaken isn't because they get weaker but because their attacker's get stronger. The current favorites in the apple world are all about 100-150 years old and need shitloads of pestisides. But they were originally selected for hardyness not just sweetness and color. It's just their viruses and parasites didn't stop evolving. (Apple trees are cloned because they "go to seed." Meaning the children are nothing like the parents. Now I know what my parents were talking about.)
This bush can probably survive because there are few potential bugs in the neighborhood. In a rainforest there is so much life that something would evolve to attack it long before it turned 11kyo.
Still a 11kyo plants makes me think there is probably a reason why our natural lifespans are limited. Maybe cuz populations that lived longer stiffled their descendants and hence lowered the fitness of the total population. I think that must have happened long before humans came along since the only animals that have a really long lifespan are fish and reptiles, no mammals that I know of. This last bit is just speculation, but I hope someone who can test the theory is thinking along these lines.
The last time I read one of the Ziff magazines, about a decade go, they did drop tests. First from reasonable heights and then from the 10th story of their building. (PC Mag perhaps?)
If it's a nice little Vaio or one of the IBM's just hope it never hits the floor. I have an old Toshiba that you could drop from about six ft a few dozen times, but eventually I lost half the hard drive due to bad blocks.
Digital Audio Through USB ports
Now, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but SGI workstations are known for their great audio capabilities.
I didn't know this, but isn't possible to have a much lower noise floor with USB? Since it's outside the box? These are Class A machines...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless your doing high end graphics and/or extremely bandwidth intensive stuff, x86 is MUCH faster.
Why would you buy an SGI if you weren't doing high end graphics work?
SGI's are really fast at what they are designed for, graphics. I use a P4 with an Nvidia card as my desktop system, but when I need access to the framebuffer for some real-time application I ask for one of the SGI's... Even a 2-3 y.o. one beats the best PCI you can buy, mostly because of that bandwidth. Which makes me worry about this machine, why isn't it using 1066 RDRAM? It can't be for cost reasons, I can only imagine they don't have the engineers to do it anymore...
(The compilers aren't THAT bad, buggy and hard to use but the code is faster than gcc code.)
I remember when I was an undergraduate the most celebrated IT policy was the implementation of 24 hour computer labs.
This isn't only for night owls, sometimes you had a paper due at 8:30am and the lab officially opened at 8am, but they had to boot the computers, refill the paper trays (there was always 24 hour access to the print queues), etc.
The other thing is internet terminals, we had hundreds of them by the time I graduated but it wasn't enough. These were really handy because you could study anywhere and still be able to check course web pages and the all important e-mail.
The 24 hour lab idea could have been better, as it was only one lab was 24 hours, the one with both macs & pc's. The digital editing lab wasn't open nor was the linux/windows highend PC lab (I tried to avoid that one cuz the frosh were always playing loud muzak on the PC-speakers, ugh). Plus, with just the one lab there were queues to use the better computers even at 5 am..
I had a PC and laser printer, so I can only imagine how dependent other students were on the labs. Though I remember the top IT person gave a speach about eliminating the labs a couple years before they were expanded...
Blackboard and even campus wireless seem like a waste of money, give it back so they can trade in some of those ramen for real food.
It is quite possible that a similar improvement could be achieved by GCC in floating-point intenisve code simply by supporting SSE2.
I'd pay for a gcc and linux distro that never touched the old FPU. I flinch everytime I have to insert a emms because I'm entering gcc land, especially if it's in a loop (only one right now, but I've had two nightmares where it came up.)
I think the Science Times ran something about moving the group velocity faster than c a year ago.
Plus my reading of this article leaves me thinking they were actually moving their signal at 2/3 c since they were working in a medium where you'd only expect light to travel 8"/ns instead of the 12"/ns in vacum.
It had plenty of bugs though. I don't think we really used in programs except for disk access, and often that was done through BIOS calls or just direct access to hardware. Of course, that meant an app might only work with IDE disks, two brands of mice and three video card pseudo-standards. And the apps did have patches, though I think not having the internet to distribute them was a major factor. Plus, security patches aren't as important when you need physical access to the machine to do any harm.
Remember you took out the DOS floppy when you loaded the app, there is a limit to the number of bugs in 8k of code;)
The fuels currently for rockets take more energy to produce than they give out. The point here is energy density, power/space and power/mass. Most of what the space shuttle and other rockets lift off the ground is fuel. If you had 10% efficiency at converting the oil to antimatter it would take less energy to launch the thing, it would cost less.
What most people are really interested in though is deep space travel, where chemical fuel just won't work at all. Even without gravity you still have inertia, and all that fuel has a lot of mass. And since there is very little friction in space you have to carry a bunch of fuel to slow down when you get there.
Well, that's easy enough to simulate. Walkg using a crutch or get around with a wheelchair, etc. See how long you'd like to be doing that, then compare that again with not being able to type.
Done it. I've sprained both my knees and had one leg mauled by a trained attack dog. But bruised fingertips had a larger impact on my life.
I just view typing as a major part of living. As I assume a few people here do as well. Just try tying your hands behind your back and try to download a speach recognition program and use it to post on./ and do some C++ and assembler programming;)
Now I've heard the arguement that she can get another job. Now, with your hands still tied, try cleaning your toilet or serving food to you're family, simulating two jobs she could get. You may do these in a different order if you like.
I bet you'd have a pretty lousy day.. I'd be sitting in the theatre watching a play in the wheelchair section.
Toyota prolly didn't ask for a jury trial. Jury's often decide an issue on basic fairness instead of a strict reading of the law. Corporations tend to shy away from them.
PS Did anyone notice McDonalds went back to thick 3mm styrofoam cups for their "good" coffee. They still have that snide warning about coffee being hot that they added after they burned millions of Americans with introduction of the super thin 1mm styrofoam cups.
You mean that an inability to type isn't as disabling as losing a leg? Whoda thunk it.
I for one would prefer losing a leg over losing my ability to type.
The decision really had me scratching my head until I realized supreme court judges have one of the 1% of jobs that don't require you to do anything as manual as typing or sweeping, much less clean a toilet. They read, debate a little and then give their law clerks a general idea of what to write in their opinion. The most manual thing they do is sign the thing.
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I always junk the CD as soon as I get the book just so I can flex it properly to find info. It always annoys me because it means I can't return the book if it turns out to be useless. I try to determine that in the store before I plunk down the 60-75 bucks, but sometimes I'm wrong.
I favor books that don't have the CD for this reason, as a bonus it tends to save a few $$ too. I rarely return a book (maybe 1 in a 100) so it's more a matter of feeling denied my wallet vote than an actual monetary loss.
1/r^2 only applies to an access node. Once you
are trying to go point to point you use antennas.
If it's a dish your loss is entirely do to the media your passing through: Water vapor, tree's, etc.
The real bottleneck is that in air you can only use limited bandwidth (in the EE sense.) On a wire you get a huge swath of the EM spectrum, and then you get another huge swath on the wire you put next to it. Or, you get a small portion of a really high frequency EM when you install fiber, and again on the fiber you lay next to it.
Wireless is another LAN & MAN solution, not a backbone solution. Though I'm pretty sure there are microwave links being used to cross Nevada, and why not? Light travels 50% faster in air than in fiber... (EM in clean copper only travels at 2/3 speed too.)
NYU cut off my roommate's ethernet for running Linux. I had unplugged my box when he was portscanned so he was able to use my connection while he talked with the NOC people.
He was a music major so it wasn't hard for him to convince him he wasn't a hacker. They ended up allowing Linux as an unsupported OS after a couple weeks. I'm sure if you're polite your NOC people will end up allowing 802.11b with some kind of firewall requirement. The basic firewall in one of those all-in-one boxes would prolly decrease the vulnerability of the network to Microsoft WORMs. You'd have to know you're running a web server to forward port 80, for instance.
A 26-bit Z buffer is a great improvement, but the 30-bit color is so so. It will probably avoid some saturation issues with multiple lights and framebuffer operations but we really need floating point color.
I've heard talk about this from people at Microsoft and nVidia, something like 12 or 14 bits. Someone even suggested a sign bit. This would allow you to create an image where the highlights and shadows were all resolved and you could play around with the screen mapping to actually see it on a monitor. It would really help in film and print, but prolly the reason nVidia cares is because it allows you to use the framebuffer as a big SIMD machine and layer on many more effects than just using 10 or 12 bits linearly.
PS I don't work for either of them and don't know if they are officially going in that direction, just that some of their worker bees are thinking along those lines.
Under DOS x = *NULL is perfectly legal
And very useful when writing a TSR. I recall my first experience with C involved my exclaiming,
"What the f*ck! This compiler complains about accessing the interupt vector????" I used more colorful language though. All this 'C is evil' talk just has me scratching my head. C lets me write less assembler, I like that.
It's not that I'm in the stone age, while I hate Ada & ML I use Java whenever I can. Computers are about 2^42 times slower that I'd like them to be. I'm pretty sure I'll say the same thing in 10 yrs too.
If there for export into the Windows world at large I'd say bite the bullet and buy Visual C++ yourself, and hurry before you're forced to buy the .NET version.
If you're writing things for internal company stuff Cygwin will probably make you happier. You get most of the wonderful posix development environment without dealing with Microsoft oddities.
The reason for my duplicity is simple, you can write an app in Visual C++ that doesn't need a lot of extra redistibutables because it uses Microsoft's own DLL's. With cygwin you have to install cygwin on all the machines you want to run on unless you just stick with the basics, for which I'm sure the Borland compiler is fine anyway.
I'm assuming your not writing code that needs to be really fast or I'd recommend the Intel compiler, but that would make life really complicated.
Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.
Does that mean it doesn't have that annoying click? I can't use the Mimio we have because the sound is just too annoying. I wish they'd have picked something tonal if they had to have the markers emit any loud sound.
I'm pretty certain the 8086 was chosen because of it's ability to emulate the 8080 instruction set (I think the instructions matched but it was not binary compatable, you needed to reassemble).
.com executable from the then popular CP/M OS and run it in DOS on a 8086. It's been eons since I wrote a .com, but I'm pretty darn sure it's just a file you copy verbatim into a 64k segment and then jump to eds:0, where eds is the segment. If you use the OS/BIOS they must be compatible, but my guess is they did that...
I never used a 8080, but I'm pretty sure you could just copy a
I had an old workstation at home with dual PPro that I wanted to turn into a router. It had 5 fans, two on the CPU and three elsewhere. The case was a pretty big aluminium one so I took out all the fans and removed a CPU. It still wasn't cool enough by the place finger on heatsink test so I underclocked it from 200 to about 130, I couldn't get it any lower with my motherboard.
At this point it ran cool, but it wasn't quiet at all. The hard drive was the newest component and it was friggin loud. I took that out and made an LRP type floppy and now I sleep next to the thing.
This used to be a workstation that I woke me up from across the room even when I placed it behind a bookcase. But the real moral here is that you need to get rid of that hard drive, even if it goes to sleep quickly the thing can wake you up when it starts spinning to record some log or whatnot. I also got rid of of extra stuff like the power supply cover and tapedrive and what not that just weren't good for airflow. In terms of time spent the router would have been cheaper, but it was fun and the thing is flexible.
I think that If I ever build a fast machine that needs to be on all the time I'll just find a way to hang it outside my double pane windows. Long cables...
The moral of this story is that while yes, GIMP is sufficient for people's needs (read: web site graphics, basic file resizing type things, etc,) it's not in the same ballpark as Photoshop. It's not even playing the same game, and it's ludicrous to say that "GIMP will eventually beat Photoshop." If you think that, you've never really used Photoshop.
;)
Gosh, I always grumble when it takes 5 seconds to start up that it's TOO much like photoshop
Seriously, while GIMP is years behind photoshop I think there is a chance it may displace photoshop eventually, simply because it's open. Consider if you're a graduate student inventing a new filter.. where are you going to test it? I'd feel a little better giving it to gimp and enforcing the patent against photoshop if they tried to use it without paying.
Even if that never happens and it keeps photoshop from slowing down on improving, GIMP has been successful. I no longer need photoshop since most of my uses are simple things like resizing or basic color correction.
http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~dt/
This is rather old, last year's SIGGRAPH and all, but I thought the even older artificial fish were always kinda cool.
Instead of bringing the cable down to earth.. or putting it atop a very high tower, why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on.
I think this is a good idea, but... Planes go really fast at high altitudes... The airstrip might have to be a mile long even if it had cables to catch the planes and slow them down (it would need this anyway since the planes are both light and have very little drag at those altitudes.)
I think the weight wouldn't be a problem since you are holding up much less mass and at a lower gravity.. It might need active control since the airfield is basically a wing and a light and airodynamic one at that if you design it properly. You'd need to keep your angle of attack close to zero. Since you need all this control anyway you could just use the wing/airfield to control orbit and location...
The tether would also most likely have to be conical in shape, thicker higher up, and thinner below to minimize the amount of carbon tubing used in the elevator.
Well the cable that goes from the earth to orbit would need to be thin at the top and bottom, thick somewhere in the middle. The cable is actually part of the ballast so higher up it's not holding up the entire weight of the cable, and near the earth it's not holding much at all, but it needs some strength because air is heavy and tends to blow fiercely.
With your design it might be conical near the platform and get thinner as it goes higher, or have a fat in the "middle" profile, depending on the weight(no I didn't mean mass) of the cable.
I really think we'll have a rocket on plane solution long before the elevator, but the idea has it's charm.
So it is quite possible that there are older things in the rain forest, but we have no way of knowing.
IANB...
I'm loathe to say anything is impossible, but I highly doubt it. The reason clones weaken isn't because they get weaker but because their attacker's get stronger. The current favorites in the apple world are all about 100-150 years old and need shitloads of pestisides. But they were originally selected for hardyness not just sweetness and color. It's just their viruses and parasites didn't stop evolving. (Apple trees are cloned because they "go to seed." Meaning the children are nothing like the parents. Now I know what my parents were talking about.)
This bush can probably survive because there are few potential bugs in the neighborhood. In a rainforest there is so much life that something would evolve to attack it long before it turned 11kyo.
Still a 11kyo plants makes me think there is probably a reason why our natural lifespans are limited. Maybe cuz populations that lived longer stiffled their descendants and hence lowered the fitness of the total population. I think that must have happened long before humans came along since the only animals that have a really long lifespan are fish and reptiles, no mammals that I know of. This last bit is just speculation, but I hope someone who can test the theory is thinking along these lines.
Oh I meant to add this...
i ?1 14
http://www.mobilecomputing.com/printarchives.cg
The last time I read one of the Ziff magazines, about a decade go, they did drop tests. First from reasonable heights and then from the 10th story of their building. (PC Mag perhaps?)
If it's a nice little Vaio or one of the IBM's just hope it never hits the floor. I have an old Toshiba that you could drop from about six ft a few dozen times, but eventually I lost half the hard drive due to bad blocks.
Basically if it has a hard drive don't drop it.
Digital Audio Through USB ports
Now, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but SGI workstations are known for their great audio capabilities.
I didn't know this, but isn't possible to have a much lower noise floor with USB? Since it's outside the box? These are Class A machines...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless your doing high end graphics and/or extremely bandwidth intensive stuff, x86 is MUCH faster.
Why would you buy an SGI if you weren't doing high end graphics work?
SGI's are really fast at what they are designed for, graphics. I use a P4 with an Nvidia card as my desktop system, but when I need access to the framebuffer for some real-time application I ask for one of the SGI's... Even a 2-3 y.o. one beats the best PCI you can buy, mostly because of that bandwidth. Which makes me worry about this machine, why isn't it using 1066 RDRAM? It can't be for cost reasons, I can only imagine they don't have the engineers to do it anymore...
(The compilers aren't THAT bad, buggy and hard to use but the code is faster than gcc code.)
I remember when I was an undergraduate the most celebrated IT policy was the implementation of 24 hour computer labs.
This isn't only for night owls, sometimes you had a paper due at 8:30am and the lab officially opened at 8am, but they had to boot the computers, refill the paper trays (there was always 24 hour access to the print queues), etc.
The other thing is internet terminals, we had hundreds of them by the time I graduated but it wasn't enough. These were really handy because you could study anywhere and still be able to check course web pages and the all important e-mail.
The 24 hour lab idea could have been better, as it was only one lab was 24 hours, the one with both macs & pc's. The digital editing lab wasn't open nor was the linux/windows highend PC lab (I tried to avoid that one cuz the frosh were always playing loud muzak on the PC-speakers, ugh). Plus, with just the one lab there were queues to use the better computers even at 5 am..
I had a PC and laser printer, so I can only imagine how dependent other students were on the labs. Though I remember the top IT person gave a speach about eliminating the labs a couple years before they were expanded...
Blackboard and even campus wireless seem like a waste of money, give it back so they can trade in some of those ramen for real food.
It is quite possible that a similar improvement could be achieved by GCC in floating-point intenisve code simply by supporting SSE2.
I'd pay for a gcc and linux distro that never touched the old FPU. I flinch everytime I have to insert a emms because I'm entering gcc land, especially if it's in a loop (only one right now, but I've had two nightmares where it came up.)
I think the Science Times ran something about moving the group velocity faster than c a year ago.
Plus my reading of this article leaves me thinking they were actually moving their signal at 2/3 c since they were working in a medium where you'd only expect light to travel 8"/ns instead of the 12"/ns in vacum.
It had plenty of bugs though. I don't think we really used in programs except for disk access, and often that was done through BIOS calls or just direct access to hardware. Of course, that meant an app might only work with IDE disks, two brands of mice and three video card pseudo-standards. And the apps did have patches, though I think not having the internet to distribute them was a major factor. Plus, security patches aren't as important when you need physical access to the machine to do any harm.
;)
Remember you took out the DOS floppy when you loaded the app, there is a limit to the number of bugs in 8k of code
The fuels currently for rockets take more energy to produce than they give out. The point here is energy density, power/space and power/mass. Most of what the space shuttle and other rockets lift off the ground is fuel. If you had 10% efficiency at converting the oil to antimatter it would take less energy to launch the thing, it would cost less.
What most people are really interested in though is deep space travel, where chemical fuel just won't work at all. Even without gravity you still have inertia, and all that fuel has a lot of mass. And since there is very little friction in space you have to carry a bunch of fuel to slow down when you get there.
Well, that's easy enough to simulate. Walkg using a crutch or get around with a wheelchair, etc. See how long you'd like to be doing that, then compare that again with not being able to type.
Done it. I've sprained both my knees and had one leg mauled by a trained attack dog. But bruised fingertips had a larger impact on my life.
I just view typing as a major part of living. As I assume a few people here do as well. Just try tying your hands behind your back and try to download a speach recognition program and use it to post on
Now I've heard the arguement that she can get another job. Now, with your hands still tied, try cleaning your toilet or serving food to you're family, simulating two jobs she could get. You may do these in a different order if you like.
I bet you'd have a pretty lousy day.. I'd be sitting in the theatre watching a play in the wheelchair section.
Toyota prolly didn't ask for a jury trial. Jury's often decide an issue on basic fairness instead of a strict reading of the law. Corporations tend to shy away from them.
PS Did anyone notice McDonalds went back to thick 3mm styrofoam cups for their "good" coffee. They still have that snide warning about coffee being hot that they added after they burned millions of Americans with introduction of the super thin 1mm styrofoam cups.
You mean that an inability to type isn't as disabling as losing a leg? Whoda thunk it.
I for one would prefer losing a leg over losing my ability to type.
The decision really had me scratching my head until I realized supreme court judges have one of the 1% of jobs that don't require you to do anything as manual as typing or sweeping, much less clean a toilet. They read, debate a little and then give their law clerks a general idea of what to write in their opinion. The most manual thing they do is sign the thing.