No, NO! Pepsi is for those who think young. That is, if you think young already, Pepsi is for you. So far there is no evidence that Pepsi actually causes you to think young.
Seriously, why buy into a proprietary format which none of your friends have a player for, has almost no pre-recorded music, and doesn't sound very good (sorry, ATRAC compression is as bad as MP3 to my ears)? CD-R(w) is cheaper, can be played almost anywhere, and can even be used for things other than music. With CD-R, you can choose between uncompressed audio, mild compression that holds much more than MD and sounds better, or higher compression where you can put ten albums on a single disc (and still not sound much worse than MD).
What we need is a reduction and simplification of laws, not an expansion to explicitly govern every imaginable situation.
I agree. I propose we replace the US Constitution and all Federal and state statutory law with one simple law:
Don't be a dick.
Every legal action ever taken is the result of someone being a dick (or, perhaps, someone wrongly accusing someone of being a dick, in which case the accuser is being a dick). Almost any law you name could in theory be replaced by "Don't be a dick." Murder? That's being a dick. Theft? That's being a dick. Slander? That's being a dick. Building a web site full of images that can't be navigated by the blind? That's being a dick.
The next step now for the National Federation of the Blind, is to lobby the governemnt to make new laws that do explicitly apply to the web.
Right, because more laws are always the answer.
The judiciary's job is to interpret the law - and I don't think that interpreting the ADA to apply to the Web is unreasonable, nor does it entail "making new laws". It's obvious that the purpose of the ADA is to prevent Americans with disabilities from being excluded from services provided by a company, despite the fact that it isn't worded in a way that would apply to the web.
I'm all for having the judiciary stay within its bounds, but I don't think getting Congress to pass another bill for every new technology is a good idea. I'm sure any lobbyists that work for the National Federation of the Blind are jumping for joy at this decision, though.
I take it you've never run your web pages through the W3C Validator. It says the alt attribute is required on all img tags. Note that this is true of HTML 4.01 as well as XHTML 1.0.
Weed is cheap though, you can get an ounce of good stuff for around $300(on the west coast anyway).
Holy crap! Inflation strikes everything I guess. I remember prices like $100/oz not so long ago. Granted, that was here in Alabama and not the west coast.
Flourescent Lighting...
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 3, Informative
... doesn't flicker at 60Hz, it flickers at 120Hz. Your electricity is a 60Hz sine wave, so current flows one way, stops, flows the other way, and stops again 60 times per second. The light goes off momentarily at both of the stops.
A good flourescent system using an electronic ballast, however, increases the frequency to the kHz range and produces no visible flicker.
But we'll still probably all be DEAD and NUKED into oblivion within a decade!
You kids today. Who are you afraid of? Iraq? North Korea? The Taliban? HA!
Back when I was a kid, we had a real reason to worry about being nuked. We were standing toe-to-toe with the Ruskies, each with a nuclear arsenal whose total destructive force measured in the GIGAtons. And, our President was a senile old coot who had once been upstaged by a chimpanzee! So don't talk to ME about being nuked.
Americans couldn't comprehend reciprocating fuel mileage (Liters/100km rather than mi/gal)
Actually, it would be a lot harder to sell inefficient vehicles. Miles per gallon is actually backwards from what should really concern the consumer - how much it costs to go a given distance. The average consumer can't grok the extra cost as easily with mpg as they could with l/100km (or even gallons/100 miles, you don't have to go metric).
Example: A family is looking at minivans and SUV's. They've narrowed it down to a minivan that gets 20mpg and an SUV that gets 15. Small difference, right? Well, suppose the economy is listed as l/100km. It's now 11.8 versus 15.7. So, every 100km they drive will cost over a buck more in the SUV.
Anyway, he actually went back to the mainland in 1975 and lived for 11 more years after that, during which time several of his books (including "battlelield earth") were written, so i don't think there's much question whether he was alive during the time on the boat.
If Battlefield Earth were attributed to me, I'd want people to think I had actually been dead before it was written!
If I can specify everything in some absolute measurement - millimetres, inches, whatever - everything'll remain the size I want it and as readable as I want it no matter what display I happen to be sitting at. This is one of the very few reasons I liked the original MacIntoshes
That's a very good point - it's too bad Winblows has screwed up everyone's ideas of how things should work on a desktop monitor. The original poster was complaining about setting a display size by millimeters being confusing - good Lord, that's the way it should be done! It's pixels that are confusing. Why do I care how many dots there are on my screen? I should care how many inches I have to work with.
This bizarre attachment to pixels is screwing up the Web also. I should be able to set a width and height tag on an image in inches, and have the user's browser resize the image on the fly. That way, the image that is a nice banner for the 800x600 user doesn't fill the screen for the 640x480 guy and look like a postage stamp for the 1920x1280 geek.
First, you pick an isotope of an element which has a nice long half-life. Then, you guess at how much of that isotope was in the environment (and therefore the object you are dating as well) at the time period you assume the object was made.
Not exactly. Isochron dating takes a set of samples which formed at the same time from a common pool of materials (such as a rock including several minerals) and plotting points on a graph. Three things are measured - the abundance of a radioactive element (the parent) , one of its decay products (the daughter), and a different non-radioactive isotope of the same element as the decay product (the control). A graph is plotted, with the X axis being the ratio of parent to control, and the Y axis being the ratio of daughter to control. The correlation of the plotted points to a line indicate the accuracy of the date, which can be determined from the slope of the line. How it works is described in better detail at the link I gave.
The other assumptions are that there is a constant decay rate of the isotope
A fair assumption, since no counterexample has ever been shown.
and that the object being dated becomes a closed system, not seeping or leeching any of that isotope from its surroundings.
Changes in composition of the object will cause the points on the isochron plot to not be correlated to a line, and thus the contamination will be noticed and either the object will be declared unsuitable for dating, or a date can be given with big error bars.
Obviously you use yours a hell of a lot more than I do. I've probably used data about 20 minutes in the last month, and that's unusually high. It's been nice being able to go to a football game and keep track of scores at other games though.
But as bizarro fate would have it, my Visor with phone attached decided to jump out of my pocket onto the parking lot this morning. The Visor is ok, but the phone has lost its antenna and has something rattling inside it. So, I'll be off to eBay soon to get another. On the bright side, that means I'll have a spare battery, which will be nice since the phone eats them like candy.
I wasn't correcting the grammar, I was correcting the quotation (hence "my English Lit teacher"). It comes from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was first published in 1798, and English usage has changed a bit in the meantime.
I have a Visor Prism + Visorphone on T-mobile (the wireless company formerly known as Voicestream (the wireless company formerly known as Powertel)). I use the Visorphone's built-in modem to dial a free ISP, and get charged just the regular per-minute rate. Since my wife and I are on the family plan and share 800 minutes, it's not even an issue. Granted, I'm obviously not downloading the latest RedHat iso's, but it's fine for checking stocks, sports scores, weather, and such.
I'm not sure what the GPRS data packages for the Treo cost, but if they're too high plain-old dialup should work fine on it as well.
The unit also supports POP mail servers. This worked without hitch and was quite nifty. IMAP support would be nicer, but I suspect that it would be horribly slow over the phone's internet connection.
What?!?! Are you on crack?
IMAP is the perfect protocol for email over wireless internet connections. If you think it's horribly slow, you've been using Outlook Express's piss-poor implementation too long.
The huge advantage IMAP brings you is you only have to get the headers of the email. If you want to get the message, you can get the message, otherwise you save it for later. Also, your email sits on the ISP instead of in your phone/PDA/whatever with its limited storage space. It's also possible, IIRC, to download message bodies to read but not download attached files until later. Finally, with IMAP you can read your email on your desktop at home, then refer to it later on your (other device).
If I can't use IMAP, I'd rather use Webmail than POP. Blech.
You might also look into Mini-ITX systems. Not only are they fanless, but some of the cases use external power supplies which have no fan. And they're tiny - the motherboard is 17cm square.
since when have you been to an office and found it anything but abso-freakin'-lutely freezing?
When the air conditioning breaks, which in my office happens two or three times a year, usually in late July or early August when the temperature is cracking the triple digits and the humidity is measured by hanging a dry towel outside and seeing how long it takes it to start dripping.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a revolution... when do we guillotine Bill Gates?
Pepsi makes you think young
No, NO! Pepsi is for those who think young. That is, if you think young already, Pepsi is for you. So far there is no evidence that Pepsi actually causes you to think young.
Because MiniDisc sucks ass.
Seriously, why buy into a proprietary format which none of your friends have a player for, has almost no pre-recorded music, and doesn't sound very good (sorry, ATRAC compression is as bad as MP3 to my ears)? CD-R(w) is cheaper, can be played almost anywhere, and can even be used for things other than music. With CD-R, you can choose between uncompressed audio, mild compression that holds much more than MD and sounds better, or higher compression where you can put ten albums on a single disc (and still not sound much worse than MD).
What we need is a reduction and simplification of laws, not an expansion to explicitly govern every imaginable situation.
I agree. I propose we replace the US Constitution and all Federal and state statutory law with one simple law:
Don't be a dick.
Every legal action ever taken is the result of someone being a dick (or, perhaps, someone wrongly accusing someone of being a dick, in which case the accuser is being a dick). Almost any law you name could in theory be replaced by "Don't be a dick." Murder? That's being a dick. Theft? That's being a dick. Slander? That's being a dick. Building a web site full of images that can't be navigated by the blind? That's being a dick.
The next step now for the National Federation of the Blind, is to lobby the governemnt to make new laws that do explicitly apply to the web.
Right, because more laws are always the answer.
The judiciary's job is to interpret the law - and I don't think that interpreting the ADA to apply to the Web is unreasonable, nor does it entail "making new laws". It's obvious that the purpose of the ADA is to prevent Americans with disabilities from being excluded from services provided by a company, despite the fact that it isn't worded in a way that would apply to the web.
I'm all for having the judiciary stay within its bounds, but I don't think getting Congress to pass another bill for every new technology is a good idea. I'm sure any lobbyists that work for the National Federation of the Blind are jumping for joy at this decision, though.
I take it you've never run your web pages through the W3C Validator. It says the alt attribute is required on all img tags. Note that this is true of HTML 4.01 as well as XHTML 1.0.
Weed is cheap though, you can get an ounce of good stuff for around $300(on the west coast anyway).
Holy crap! Inflation strikes everything I guess. I remember prices like $100/oz not so long ago. Granted, that was here in Alabama and not the west coast.
... doesn't flicker at 60Hz, it flickers at 120Hz. Your electricity is a 60Hz sine wave, so current flows one way, stops, flows the other way, and stops again 60 times per second. The light goes off momentarily at both of the stops.
A good flourescent system using an electronic ballast, however, increases the frequency to the kHz range and produces no visible flicker.
But we'll still probably all be DEAD and NUKED into oblivion within a decade!
You kids today. Who are you afraid of? Iraq? North Korea? The Taliban? HA!
Back when I was a kid, we had a real reason to worry about being nuked. We were standing toe-to-toe with the Ruskies, each with a nuclear arsenal whose total destructive force measured in the GIGAtons. And, our President was a senile old coot who had once been upstaged by a chimpanzee! So don't talk to ME about being nuked.
Americans couldn't comprehend reciprocating fuel mileage (Liters/100km rather than mi/gal)
Actually, it would be a lot harder to sell inefficient vehicles. Miles per gallon is actually backwards from what should really concern the consumer - how much it costs to go a given distance. The average consumer can't grok the extra cost as easily with mpg as they could with l/100km (or even gallons/100 miles, you don't have to go metric).
Example: A family is looking at minivans and SUV's. They've narrowed it down to a minivan that gets 20mpg and an SUV that gets 15. Small difference, right? Well, suppose the economy is listed as l/100km. It's now 11.8 versus 15.7. So, every 100km they drive will cost over a buck more in the SUV.
Anyway, he actually went back to the mainland in 1975 and lived for 11 more years after that, during which time several of his books (including "battlelield earth") were written, so i don't think there's much question whether he was alive during the time on the boat.
If Battlefield Earth were attributed to me, I'd want people to think I had actually been dead before it was written!
If I can specify everything in some absolute measurement - millimetres, inches, whatever - everything'll remain the size I want it and as readable as I want it no matter what display I happen to be sitting at. This is one of the very few reasons I liked the original MacIntoshes
That's a very good point - it's too bad Winblows has screwed up everyone's ideas of how things should work on a desktop monitor. The original poster was complaining about setting a display size by millimeters being confusing - good Lord, that's the way it should be done! It's pixels that are confusing. Why do I care how many dots there are on my screen? I should care how many inches I have to work with.
This bizarre attachment to pixels is screwing up the Web also. I should be able to set a width and height tag on an image in inches, and have the user's browser resize the image on the fly. That way, the image that is a nice banner for the 800x600 user doesn't fill the screen for the 640x480 guy and look like a postage stamp for the 1920x1280 geek.
On systems that automatically use /bin/sh on unknown files, the smallest possible shell script is:
w
Yes, a single character.
Actually, a zero-byte file will work as well. Granted, it doesn't do much. But at least it is guaranteed to be bug-free.
Is that why it took Deep Thought so long to execute it?
First, you pick an isotope of an element which has a nice long half-life. Then, you guess at how much of that isotope was in the environment (and therefore the object you are dating as well) at the time period you assume the object was made.
Not exactly. Isochron dating takes a set of samples which formed at the same time from a common pool of materials (such as a rock including several minerals) and plotting points on a graph. Three things are measured - the abundance of a radioactive element (the parent) , one of its decay products (the daughter), and a different non-radioactive isotope of the same element as the decay product (the control). A graph is plotted, with the X axis being the ratio of parent to control, and the Y axis being the ratio of daughter to control. The correlation of the plotted points to a line indicate the accuracy of the date, which can be determined from the slope of the line. How it works is described in better detail at the link I gave.
The other assumptions are that there is a constant decay rate of the isotope
A fair assumption, since no counterexample has ever been shown.
and that the object being dated becomes a closed system, not seeping or leeching any of that isotope from its surroundings.
Changes in composition of the object will cause the points on the isochron plot to not be correlated to a line, and thus the contamination will be noticed and either the object will be declared unsuitable for dating, or a date can be given with big error bars.
Obviously you use yours a hell of a lot more than I do. I've probably used data about 20 minutes in the last month, and that's unusually high. It's been nice being able to go to a football game and keep track of scores at other games though.
But as bizarro fate would have it, my Visor with phone attached decided to jump out of my pocket onto the parking lot this morning. The Visor is ok, but the phone has lost its antenna and has something rattling inside it. So, I'll be off to eBay soon to get another. On the bright side, that means I'll have a spare battery, which will be nice since the phone eats them like candy.
Could you explain that correction to me?
I wasn't correcting the grammar, I was correcting the quotation (hence "my English Lit teacher"). It comes from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was first published in 1798, and English usage has changed a bit in the meantime.
Just don't anyone say anything about firing a "Tom Cruise" missile at him.
Because Sprint didn't want to use GSM like all the other kids on the playground, they had to be different and go with CDMA.
Oh, and the ghost of my English lit teacher asked me to point out that it's "Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
I have a Visor Prism + Visorphone on T-mobile (the wireless company formerly known as Voicestream (the wireless company formerly known as Powertel)). I use the Visorphone's built-in modem to dial a free ISP, and get charged just the regular per-minute rate. Since my wife and I are on the family plan and share 800 minutes, it's not even an issue. Granted, I'm obviously not downloading the latest RedHat iso's, but it's fine for checking stocks, sports scores, weather, and such.
I'm not sure what the GPRS data packages for the Treo cost, but if they're too high plain-old dialup should work fine on it as well.
The unit also supports POP mail servers. This worked without hitch and was quite nifty. IMAP support would be nicer, but I suspect that it would be horribly slow over the phone's internet connection.
What?!?! Are you on crack?
IMAP is the perfect protocol for email over wireless internet connections. If you think it's horribly slow, you've been using Outlook Express's piss-poor implementation too long.
The huge advantage IMAP brings you is you only have to get the headers of the email. If you want to get the message, you can get the message, otherwise you save it for later. Also, your email sits on the ISP instead of in your phone/PDA/whatever with its limited storage space. It's also possible, IIRC, to download message bodies to read but not download attached files until later. Finally, with IMAP you can read your email on your desktop at home, then refer to it later on your (other device).
If I can't use IMAP, I'd rather use Webmail than POP. Blech.
You might also look into Mini-ITX systems. Not only are they fanless, but some of the cases use external power supplies which have no fan. And they're tiny - the motherboard is 17cm square.
since when have you been to an office and found it anything but abso-freakin'-lutely freezing?
When the air conditioning breaks, which in my office happens two or three times a year, usually in late July or early August when the temperature is cracking the triple digits and the humidity is measured by hanging a dry towel outside and seeing how long it takes it to start dripping.
I didn't expect a first post from SpanishInquisition...