Bob is an illustration of a mistake made by the powerful, the alpha males, the high-ranking. These are people who do not want to perform hands-on activities themselves or make things happen directly. They want to express themselves through their direction of other people. They do not want to play the violin, they want to conduct the orchestra.
This is personality trait is not in itself good or bad. The same personality traits can enable a person to direct a group to achieve things that individuals cannot achieve by themselves, or it can result in tyranny.
The point is, it is a _rare_ personality trait.
Most of us _prefer_ to do it ourselves. We want tools, not servants. We want a car--one that becomes like an extension of our own body--not a chauffeur. We'd rather pop something in the microwave and have it in ninety seconds than watch a servant go scrambling and to try to get it to us in five minutes. We want something that acts on our intentions the way our hands do, not the way our office subordinates do.
There have been cases of people with trichromatic vision in one eye and dichromatic vision in the other. If I recall correctly, the other eye was deuteranopic and they perceived colors with that eye exactly as one would expect--yellow and blue hues only, but with varying amount of brightness and saturation.
I'm not sure that really cuts the Gordian knot, though, because it's possible that the presence of a trichromatic eye might change the way the brain encodes perception with the dichromatic eye.
By the way, what color do you perceive the part of the world that is directly behind you as being? Light? Dark? Uniform? Blurred? Or do you "simply" perceive nothing? Or the absence of nothing?:)
They "get it." Wikipedia is unique, but it is based on elements of traditional scholarship--citing sources--and journalism--the "neutral point of view."
As for the snarky comments on notability, they are misplaced. The bar for notability is very low and easy to surmount, and the community culture tends to support inclusion if there is even a shred of supporting evidence to justify it. It is mostly a problem for those who object _in principle_ to bothering to provide evidence, to self-promoters who believe they should be free to use Wikipedia to publicize themselves and thus _attain_ notability, to people who regard themselves as experts and believe that they are entitled to contribute material without supporting evidence on their own authority. There is also principled opposition by people who have a different vision of what Wikipedia should be than the prevailing view.
I have rescued a number of articles from deletion simply by citing sources. One example: an article, when originally created, read in its entirety as follows: "[name], AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net." As such, it was ripe for deletion. What did I do? I found the source, the Library Journal article that called her a "mover and shaker" and demonstrated that Library Journal found her notable. I found that she'd been mentioned in The New York Times, as one of the "credentialed bloggers" given press credentials to attend a political convention, the first time that had been done. I found a Wired article about her opposition to the Patriot Act's library provisions. By adding these to the article, I showed that she had _some_ notability and allowed editors to gauge _what that degree of notability was_. That turned out to be sufficient to prevent deletion.
The librarian was no more and no less notable than she was when the original article was inserted and nominated for deletion. All that changed was that I was willing to put in a little work, and show what amount of notability she had--more than me, less than Meryl Streep; what she was notable for (not just starting a blog); and who, exactly, had taken note of her.
It is not hard to get a new article into Wikipedia. In an incident that demonstrated Wikipedia at its worst, some Dartmouth students who didn't follow their class assignments well contributed breezy articles in promotional language about their fraternities and their a cappella groups. They encountered a storm of criticism that unfortunately turned snarky, unkind, and dismissive as irritable editors saw Dartmouth article after Dartmouth article. Meanwhile, it almost passed unnoticed that other students had contributed valuable articles, such as one about an unfinished Jane Austen novel. This was, of course, accepted, and nobody ever suggested that there was a notability problem, even though I never heard of it and I imagine you never did, either.
At least one pepper sauce company has been offering pure capsaicin since 2006. It seems like more of a publicity stunt than a product, but it's not fabulously expensive. Another company offers a 7,000,000 Scoville unit for $90 an ounce. Capsaicin was synthesized in 1930. I don't know whether it's cheaper to synthesize it or purify it from natural sources, but either way it doesn't seem as if military uses would depend on finding any particularly hot natural peppers.
I wonder whether it will turn out that these CDs have subpar track counts and playing time.
In the very early days of CDs it was common for a CD to have the same tracks and playing time as its LP counterpart--about forty minutes, tops. The days of the 72-minute de facto standard didn't come until much later.
It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic....
Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared....
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune....
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.
"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"
[Most of the story tells of how star approaches close to Earth, creating considerable havoc...]
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports....
The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
Some primary characteristics of a book: it can loaned to a friend; it can be resold; it can be purchased second-hand; it can be purchased once by a library and read by many people; it has a useful life of at least twenty-five years (for the cheapest paperbacks) to well over a century (just about any hardbound). Although there are minor changes in e.g. typefaces, punctuation, and other stylistic elements, the format is stable enough for a century-old book to be easily read. If you are able to read a Macmillan books, you can read a Houghton Mifflin or Random House book; there are no vendor compatibility issues. If you can read a book when it was published, you can continue to read it after the publisher goes out of business and shuts down all of its operations.
These have been characteristic of books for centuries. They are a fundamental part of the definition of a book.
Modern so-called "eBooks" have none of these characteristics. They are not books at all. It's self-indulgent to fuss about things like "formless" versus "definite" content. First things first: we need eBooks that are books.
1) I don't think those are "shock waves," just ordinary very-low-frequency sound waves. I think shock waves occur when a pile of sound waves are forced to stack up on top of each other and create an actual pressure discontinuity.
2) I was fascinated to hear the background sounds of someone taking photos with a motorized SLR. That is, film... silver nitrate on polyester film. Is that a pro photojournalist? Do they still use film? Or just someone clinging to a nifty old piece of technology that still does the job?
3) Why would anyone choose the Imperial March from Star Wars, inseparably associated with Bad Guys, as background music?
...that the next time a pompous administrator says in public "nobody has complained about that," you know that he is lying. Settle for not just knucking under without saying anything at all. Settle for knowing, if you do know, that your complaint has reached someone who sets policy and that you're not just making things hard on a bunch of other ordinary workers whose job is to keep things running.
This is not nothing at all, but it's a small thing.
You can't change the world through indignation. You really have only three choices. First, be docile and do nothing at all. That's often a good option by the way. Second, make sure your concerns have been heard, even if they are dismissed. Or, third, be prepared to devote at least a year or two of your life to the cause of fighting this thing.
If you feel that spending a year or two toward the goal of getting the university to stop using fingerprinting gadgets for access to work-study jobs is worth it, and is what you want to do with that chunk of your life, you can probably achieve your goal. I dunno how. Work through the union if there is one? Start a union if there isn't one? Make appointments and personally talk to one administrator after another, calmly, until you figure out how to get the policy changed? Personally work out an actual proposal, including costs and benefits, for alternative security, so you're presenting them with something positive and their work all done for them, instead of just saying "don't do what you're doing?" Find a faculty committee that's interested in the question that you can swing to your side? I dunno.
OK, so you get the wavelength from the melted chocolate hot spots, but what's an easy way to verify that the frequency is really 2,450,000,000 hertz, from first principles?
Spin the turntable at 2,450,000,000 revolutions per second and look for stroboscopic effects on the chocolate?
Well, all I can say is I owned one from about 1994 to 1997 and I loved it. It served me well. Maybe not the greatest product Apple ever produced but FAR from the worst. It more than lived up to my expectations which, by the way, the Performa 6400 Video Editing Edition I replaced it with did not. (The Avid-designed video hardware and software acquired more and more glitches and bugs with each minor OS release. When I finally sold it, restored the original software bundle and was amazed to see how well the video editing stuff worked again! I'd thought the hardware was dying).
The only real complaint I had about the Color Classic was that the screen was not quite as sharp as the black-and-white screen on the MacPlus it replaced.
The hockey-puck mouse? Sure. The Apple///? Sure. eWorld? Sure. And how could they forget Lisa in general, and its Twiggy drives in particular? And we're ranking on Apple you can throw in Pages, that feels like it tried to be a desktop publishing program and failed, so they marketed it as a word processor. And you can throw in, or throw out, the crappy monitors Apple provided under their own name in the late nineties. And you can add all the babies that Apple unnecessarily threw out with the OS X bathwater; I know of nothing about preemptive multitasking that would force anyone to ditch resources and type/creator. They had clever-clever arguments about how you could get the same benefits without using resources, but either the arguments were wrong or they never followed through, because Mac OS X deteriorated into the same world of extension hell and documents never being associated with the right applications that Windows users have enjoyed all along.
But the rest of the stuff in the article is offbase. It's not very perceptive. It's just a couple of guys who don't like Macs taking random potshots. People who don't like Macs in the first place don't seem to "get" what the people who do like them, like about them.
This chart does not show much evidence that Microsoft is learning how to make successful products outside of its traditional franchises: desktop operating systems and desktop office applications.
They've failed at least twice with PDA/pocket type devices, at least once with mobile phones, at least once with portable music players (not quite sure whether PlaysForSure should be counted along with Zune).
Typically we see these stories when Microsoft is behind a competitor, but this time they are behind two: Apple, which has a solid phone success, and Google, which has all the buzz. They are behind these two companies despite having started before either of them, with Windows Mobile circa 2004... which in turn had the benefit of five major revisions of Windows CE, started in 1996 or something like that.
If Microsoft actually knew how to make a good telephone, they would have made one already.
I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket eBook in 2000 over the counter at Barnes and Noble. (The company and products were acquired by Gemstar and marketed for many years as the Gemstar REB-1200).
The device itself was fine. More than good enough. 20 hour battery life and that was for real. I read many long novels for pleasure on it. I took it on trips and loved the convenience of being able to carry eight full-length books with me in a device with the same size and weight as one trade paperback. Of course 2010 devices are better in every way, but the Rocket eBook was good enough.
What was not good enough was DRM.
I've been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar's record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn't exist, Gemstar customer service doesn't exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.
Because of another limitation of DRM--I couldn't share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn't, she didn't know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay. Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.
eBooks should cost far, far less than print books, not merely because their marginal cost of production is tiny, but because they deliver far less value than a print book.
I've seriously considered writing to Jeff Bezos and saying I will only buy a Kindle if he will arrange to get me free Kindle copies of all the books I bought, which the eBook industry has rendered useless piles of bits. The word theft gets thrown around rather casually with DRM gets discussed. Well, I feel that denying me access to the books I bought and paid for in good faith is theft. When the eBook industry, as represented by Amazon, is willing to make me whole, then I will start buying eBook devices and content again.
Quite correct. As is your point about the bearings. And possible structural issues, as the mounting for the two flywheels experiences those forces even if everything outside the two-flywheel "system" does not.
Yet my comment above remains modded at two points, while a reply saying "Two counter rotating flywheels will NOT cancel out each other!... the reaction forces are canceled out. However the combination still resist rotating along any axis other then it's axis of rotation" is currently modded "4, insightful."
If there's enough gyroscopic effect to matter, then the normal engineering way to deal with it would be to use a pair of flywheels rotating in opposite directions. Then, you can think of it either way, the gyroscopic effects cancel... or the net angular momentum of the two flywheels is zero so there is no gyroscopic effect.
There has never been a time when college professors did not complain about the poor language skills of their students. So it was, so it will ever be. The handwringing fails to take many things into account.
1) A lot of language learning occurs after people leave school, as they continue to absorb written documents for purposes directly related to their careers and their lives. If you are over sixty and you have anything you wrote in college, compare it to something you've written now. You'll be surprised. When my wife was in her twenties, I was disturbed by her inability to punctuate correctly, but I never said a word about it. Over the past forty years, she simply picked it up... from context.
2) The purpose of reading and writing is to communicate. Oh, sure, it is also there to signal social status, to insure cultural continuity by making it possible for year-2010 readers to read and understand year-1776 documents, and so forth, but, primarily, it is to communicate. In all likelihood these kids are fine at communicating between themselves using written language. Their problem is in communicating with professors. They will learn. There is no single way to communicate, as they taught us in Toastmasters, the first rule is "know your audience."
When communicating with professors... or with hiring managers via cover letters... one writes in complete sentences, with a topic sentence for every paragraph.
COMMUNICATING WITH BOSSES *Brief *Bullet points *Three per topic
In emails and online postings, emoticons:)
In ham radio and CB and tweets, various systems of abbreviation. And so it goes.
3) What's considered important in education changes, at a surprising rate. I was stunned to look at a 1900s high-school arithmetic book and discover that at that time students were expected to extract cube roots with pencil and paper. (You begin by grouping the digits in threes... the rest is a bit more complicated). We are always shocked that our kids don't know how to diagram a sentence. Then we go in to do a bit of substitute teaching and discover that the geometry students use axioms that we didn't use and call inorganic compounds by new names. Still, a physics student not being able to do a simple calculation in slugs and poundals? What's WRONG with kids these days?
4) And of course language changes. You read an old novel and wonder why they use a spelling like "Veg'table" or "Pleez" in a piece of dialog, because that's the way they're pronounced... isn't it? Yes, but a hundred years ago they were nonstandard colloquial pronunciations; "please" was properly pronounced as two syllables, "vegetable" as four.
One thing never changes, though. Nobody will let you split an infinitive. They always say "there's nothing wrong with it, but other people object to it, so don't do it."
"Our machines have determined that you are a security risk. Our machines aren't capable of stating any reason, so there is nothing you can point to to clear yourself. Our machines just have a hunch, a gut feeling based on their heuristics and rules. We can tell you what the heuristics and rules are, but not how applying them led to your identification as a security risk. You can cross-examine the people who wrote those rules in court, and they will testify that the code contains no known bugs, but you cannot cross-examine the machine that actually made the identification in court."
As always, inexorable mathematics guarantee that most of the identifications will be false positives. Say the machine fingers one traveller in ten thousand, and one traveller in a million is a terrorist; then even if it correctly identifies every terrorist, 99% of its identifications will be false positives. If you don't like those numbers, plug in whatever ones you think are plausible.
If this happened to me I would be so upset and hostile that it would induce suspicious behavior in me, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't want to pay more and get more, even if it's better value for the dollar. I want to pay less and get what I think I need. I want to make that decision. I don't want an unholy alliance in which The Government forces me to do what best for The Corporations.
The digital TV transition was different, because when it came down to it, those of us who prefer free broadcast TV still have that choice. (Most of us). We paid a one-time charge for a converter box, less than $20 with the coupon, ZERO DOLLARS PER MONTH, and life goes on. Yes, the transition was bungled, and the FCC lied when they said people who were getting adequate analog reception would get adequate digital reception, but by and large our freedom of choice was more or less preserved.
The important point is not that transition cost was small, the important point is that it was ONE TIME. The difference between what we have now--copper-wired POTS, plus DSL, plus broadcast TV, and the cheapest digital package from the three providers in my area (municipal electric company, Verizon FIOS, Comcast) is at least $30 a month. Not $30: that's $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 +... (Well, due to life expectancy, at least there's effectively a "senior discount!")
And the last time there was a big power outage where I worked, the spiffy new VOIP phone on my desk went out INSTANTLY. (No, in theory it shouldn't have, in theory there was no good reason, I'm just saying what happened). After about 90 minutes, nobody could get signal on their cell phone. (Again, there's "no reason why that should have happened," but it did). The older set of desk phones, which hadn't been disconnected yet, lasted a couple of hours. But the three plain old telephones that were still around, because it was easier to use with the fax machines than with any of the newer systems, were working fine five hours later. And based on admittedly decades-old experience, probably would have been working days later.
They will tell us that they can make the digital infrastructure just as reliable, and during the next big Katrina-like disaster the phones will all go dead and then they will tell us "but that SHOULDN'T have happened."
It's only been out since October 22nd, 2009. It seems a bit early to say that it "is far more likely than Vista to run decently on the computer you already own."
We'll find out, because I believe that upgrades to Windows 7 are far more likely to be attempted than Windows upgrades usually are. Because of Vista's problems, because of concern that Vista will almost be an orphaned product--not by Microsoft but by all the vendors developing for Windows, and because the listed system requirements for Windows 7 are the same as for Vista, a lot of organizations are going to want to move swiftly to put Vista behind them. Corporations will want to standardize. The safest choice is to throw out the computers with Vista installed and buy new ones with Windows 7 preinstalled, but the Vista computers are a little too new for that. The remaining choices are to drag feet on moving to Windows 7 or to upgrade, and this time I think many will opt to upgrade.
So, we will see.
I hope it will turn out that upgrading to Vista is smooth. Microsoft has shown that it can do it: the transition from MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5.0 was a model of what an OS upgrade should be.
But it is early for McCracken to be celebrating it as an established fact, rather than a reasonable expectation based on listed system requirements and Windows 7's reputation as being not much more than a service pack.
In "The African Queen," Katherine Hepburn's character asks Humphrey Bogart's character to make a torpedo. Bogart's character says something to the effect that "Lady, there ain't nothing so complicated as the inside of a torpedo. It's got gyroscopes, compressed air chambers, compensating cylinders..."
I remember once reading details about just how the signals in a 1200 bps modem worked... and modems at higher rates. It was just jaw-dropping how sophisticated it was. The reason why there was a distinction between "bps" and "baud" is that "baud" refers to the number of times per second the signal changes. Well, a 1200 bps modem only changes its signal 600 times a second... but it uses four different combinations of frequency and phase, so each signal combination signals two bits. That's bad enough, but the combinations literally increase exponentially. The 9600 bps modem actually requires the receiver to sense and distinguish sixteen different analog combinations (so that it can encode four bits at a time).
At the time I figured they had to be close to the theoretical limit, which depends on the bandwidth and the noise level. A phone line is only good up to about 3000 Hz. so the 2400 baud rate of a 9600 bps modem is changing about as fast as it can. The rest depends on how noisy the line is.
Theoretically, of course, you can signal at an infinite rate on a perfectly noise-free channel. Just send 3.141592653 volts on the end and measure it with a ten-digit digital voltmeter and, voila! You're sending ten digits at once. Except there aren't any ten-digit voltmeters.
I was frankly flabbergasted when they managed to cram 56 kilobits per second into a phone line. Of course, the 56 kb modems never really ran at that speed--they were always falling back to lower speeds because the phone lines were too noisy. Then they added compression, which didn't do much good because the ZIP files and JPGs you were sending were already compressed. In reality they were trying to cram 56 kilobits of data into a 33 kilobit bag, but it was amazing that it even worked some of the time.
But, lady, there ain't nothin' so complicated as the inside of a modem.
Those who remember the very good John Wyndham novel "The Day of the Triffids" (later made into a very bad movie) will recall that the population of most of the civilized world is transfixed by a spectacular show of mysterious lights in the sky. The first-person narrator is stuck in a hospital recovering from eye surgery with patches over his eyes and feels frustrated at being left out.
A few days later it turns out that everyone who saw the lights has gone blind, leaving the narrator one of the few people in the world who can still see.
The story suggests but never says that it is some space-based weapons system that was accidentally deployed.
So, when viewing mysterious and spectacular unexplained lighting phenomena in the sky, perhaps it would be prudent to keep one eye closed.
At this point, I'll bet that there have been more Sherlock Holmes stories written by "Holmesians" than were ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. And hardly anyone outside of a tiny circle of fandom knows any of them, and none of them have tarnished the reputation of the originals.
I suspect there are many people reading this who haven't even heard of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1974 ersatz "Sherlock Holmes" novel. It was a bestseller at the time, was adapted into a movie--and, I'm pretty sure, is well on the way to being forgotten.
First of all, there's right of first sale. Once you own it, it's yours and you can rent it, or sell it to someone else. I don't know how the studios think they can keep it out of Red Box or NetFlix's hands. The studios can refuse to sell it to Red Box or NetFlix, but unless they're really stupid they have to sell it to someone, and the miracle of the marketplace takes over and some of those owners will be happy to divert them to a willing buyer.
And it's not as if it were going to force people to buy the DVD. It's just going to result in a delay before most people see it. During that time, there won't be an opportunity for word-of-mouth, which is what really sells products, to build. There won't be a chance for people who aren't already sure they love the movie to rent it, then decide to buy it. There will be several more weeks for them to forget about the review they read when it was in the theatre. Several more weeks for them to be at the supermarket standing in front of the Red Box vending machine because they just feel like a movie tonight, and choosing some other movie.
And just that much incentive for people to tune out of the whole "legal" DVD marketplace, as the stuff that's available cheaply for rent becomes older and less interesting.
If they want to help their business, they should be trying to figure out how to get more product into the hands of consumers, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob is an illustration of a mistake made by the powerful, the alpha males, the high-ranking. These are people who do not want to perform hands-on activities themselves or make things happen directly. They want to express themselves through their direction of other people. They do not want to play the violin, they want to conduct the orchestra.
This is personality trait is not in itself good or bad. The same personality traits can enable a person to direct a group to achieve things that individuals cannot achieve by themselves, or it can result in tyranny.
The point is, it is a _rare_ personality trait.
Most of us _prefer_ to do it ourselves. We want tools, not servants. We want a car--one that becomes like an extension of our own body--not a chauffeur. We'd rather pop something in the microwave and have it in ninety seconds than watch a servant go scrambling and to try to get it to us in five minutes. We want something that acts on our intentions the way our hands do, not the way our office subordinates do.
We want to be Superman, not Napoleon.
There have been cases of people with trichromatic vision in one eye and dichromatic vision in the other. If I recall correctly, the other eye was deuteranopic and they perceived colors with that eye exactly as one would expect--yellow and blue hues only, but with varying amount of brightness and saturation.
I'm not sure that really cuts the Gordian knot, though, because it's possible that the presence of a trichromatic eye might change the way the brain encodes perception with the dichromatic eye.
By the way, what color do you perceive the part of the world that is directly behind you as being? Light? Dark? Uniform? Blurred? Or do you "simply" perceive nothing? Or the absence of nothing? :)
They "get it." Wikipedia is unique, but it is based on elements of traditional scholarship--citing sources--and journalism--the "neutral point of view."
As for the snarky comments on notability, they are misplaced. The bar for notability is very low and easy to surmount, and the community culture tends to support inclusion if there is even a shred of supporting evidence to justify it. It is mostly a problem for those who object _in principle_ to bothering to provide evidence, to self-promoters who believe they should be free to use Wikipedia to publicize themselves and thus _attain_ notability, to people who regard themselves as experts and believe that they are entitled to contribute material without supporting evidence on their own authority. There is also principled opposition by people who have a different vision of what Wikipedia should be than the prevailing view.
I have rescued a number of articles from deletion simply by citing sources. One example: an article, when originally created, read in its entirety as follows: "[name], AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net." As such, it was ripe for deletion. What did I do? I found the source, the Library Journal article that called her a "mover and shaker" and demonstrated that Library Journal found her notable. I found that she'd been mentioned in The New York Times, as one of the "credentialed bloggers" given press credentials to attend a political convention, the first time that had been done. I found a Wired article about her opposition to the Patriot Act's library provisions. By adding these to the article, I showed that she had _some_ notability and allowed editors to gauge _what that degree of notability was_. That turned out to be sufficient to prevent deletion.
The librarian was no more and no less notable than she was when the original article was inserted and nominated for deletion. All that changed was that I was willing to put in a little work, and show what amount of notability she had--more than me, less than Meryl Streep; what she was notable for (not just starting a blog); and who, exactly, had taken note of her.
It is not hard to get a new article into Wikipedia. In an incident that demonstrated Wikipedia at its worst, some Dartmouth students who didn't follow their class assignments well contributed breezy articles in promotional language about their fraternities and their a cappella groups. They encountered a storm of criticism that unfortunately turned snarky, unkind, and dismissive as irritable editors saw Dartmouth article after Dartmouth article. Meanwhile, it almost passed unnoticed that other students had contributed valuable articles, such as one about an unfinished Jane Austen novel. This was, of course, accepted, and nobody ever suggested that there was a notability problem, even though I never heard of it and I imagine you never did, either.
At least one pepper sauce company has been offering pure capsaicin since 2006. It seems like more of a publicity stunt than a product, but it's not fabulously expensive. Another company offers a 7,000,000 Scoville unit for $90 an ounce. Capsaicin was synthesized in 1930. I don't know whether it's cheaper to synthesize it or purify it from natural sources, but either way it doesn't seem as if military uses would depend on finding any particularly hot natural peppers.
I wonder whether it will turn out that these CDs have subpar track counts and playing time.
In the very early days of CDs it was common for a CD to have the same tracks and playing time as its LP counterpart--about forty minutes, tops. The days of the 72-minute de facto standard didn't come until much later.
H. G. Wells, "The Star" (1911)
It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic....
Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared....
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune....
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.
"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their
breath and peered at one another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"
[Most of the story tells of how star approaches close to Earth, creating considerable havoc...]
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports....
The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
Some primary characteristics of a book: it can loaned to a friend; it can be resold; it can be purchased second-hand; it can be purchased once by a library and read by many people; it has a useful life of at least twenty-five years (for the cheapest paperbacks) to well over a century (just about any hardbound). Although there are minor changes in e.g. typefaces, punctuation, and other stylistic elements, the format is stable enough for a century-old book to be easily read. If you are able to read a Macmillan books, you can read a Houghton Mifflin or Random House book; there are no vendor compatibility issues. If you can read a book when it was published, you can continue to read it after the publisher goes out of business and shuts down all of its operations.
These have been characteristic of books for centuries. They are a fundamental part of the definition of a book.
Modern so-called "eBooks" have none of these characteristics. They are not books at all. It's self-indulgent to fuss about things like "formless" versus "definite" content. First things first: we need eBooks that are books.
1) I don't think those are "shock waves," just ordinary very-low-frequency sound waves. I think shock waves occur when a pile of sound waves are forced to stack up on top of each other and create an actual pressure discontinuity.
2) I was fascinated to hear the background sounds of someone taking photos with a motorized SLR. That is, film... silver nitrate on polyester film. Is that a pro photojournalist? Do they still use film? Or just someone clinging to a nifty old piece of technology that still does the job?
3) Why would anyone choose the Imperial March from Star Wars, inseparably associated with Bad Guys, as background music?
...that the next time a pompous administrator says in public "nobody has complained about that," you know that he is lying. Settle for not just knucking under without saying anything at all. Settle for knowing, if you do know, that your complaint has reached someone who sets policy and that you're not just making things hard on a bunch of other ordinary workers whose job is to keep things running.
This is not nothing at all, but it's a small thing.
You can't change the world through indignation. You really have only three choices. First, be docile and do nothing at all. That's often a good option by the way. Second, make sure your concerns have been heard, even if they are dismissed. Or, third, be prepared to devote at least a year or two of your life to the cause of fighting this thing.
If you feel that spending a year or two toward the goal of getting the university to stop using fingerprinting gadgets for access to work-study jobs is worth it, and is what you want to do with that chunk of your life, you can probably achieve your goal. I dunno how. Work through the union if there is one? Start a union if there isn't one? Make appointments and personally talk to one administrator after another, calmly, until you figure out how to get the policy changed? Personally work out an actual proposal, including costs and benefits, for alternative security, so you're presenting them with something positive and their work all done for them, instead of just saying "don't do what you're doing?" Find a faculty committee that's interested in the question that you can swing to your side? I dunno.
OK, so you get the wavelength from the melted chocolate hot spots, but what's an easy way to verify that the frequency is really 2,450,000,000 hertz, from first principles?
Spin the turntable at 2,450,000,000 revolutions per second and look for stroboscopic effects on the chocolate?
Well, all I can say is I owned one from about 1994 to 1997 and I loved it. It served me well. Maybe not the greatest product Apple ever produced but FAR from the worst. It more than lived up to my expectations which, by the way, the Performa 6400 Video Editing Edition I replaced it with did not. (The Avid-designed video hardware and software acquired more and more glitches and bugs with each minor OS release. When I finally sold it, restored the original software bundle and was amazed to see how well the video editing stuff worked again! I'd thought the hardware was dying).
The only real complaint I had about the Color Classic was that the screen was not quite as sharp as the black-and-white screen on the MacPlus it replaced.
The hockey-puck mouse? Sure. The Apple ///? Sure. eWorld? Sure. And how could they forget Lisa in general, and its Twiggy drives in particular? And we're ranking on Apple you can throw in Pages, that feels like it tried to be a desktop publishing program and failed, so they marketed it as a word processor. And you can throw in, or throw out, the crappy monitors Apple provided under their own name in the late nineties. And you can add all the babies that Apple unnecessarily threw out with the OS X bathwater; I know of nothing about preemptive multitasking that would force anyone to ditch resources and type/creator. They had clever-clever arguments about how you could get the same benefits without using resources, but either the arguments were wrong or they never followed through, because Mac OS X deteriorated into the same world of extension hell and documents never being associated with the right applications that Windows users have enjoyed all along.
But the rest of the stuff in the article is offbase. It's not very perceptive. It's just a couple of guys who don't like Macs taking random potshots. People who don't like Macs in the first place don't seem to "get" what the people who do like them, like about them.
This chart does not show much evidence that Microsoft is learning how to make successful products outside of its traditional franchises: desktop operating systems and desktop office applications.
They've failed at least twice with PDA/pocket type devices, at least once with mobile phones, at least once with portable music players (not quite sure whether PlaysForSure should be counted along with Zune).
Typically we see these stories when Microsoft is behind a competitor, but this time they are behind two: Apple, which has a solid phone success, and Google, which has all the buzz. They are behind these two companies despite having started before either of them, with Windows Mobile circa 2004... which in turn had the benefit of five major revisions of Windows CE, started in 1996 or something like that.
If Microsoft actually knew how to make a good telephone, they would have made one already.
...fooled me twice, shame on me.
I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket eBook in 2000 over the counter at Barnes and Noble. (The company and products were acquired by Gemstar and marketed for many years as the Gemstar REB-1200).
The device itself was fine. More than good enough. 20 hour battery life and that was for real. I read many long novels for pleasure on it. I took it on trips and loved the convenience of being able to carry eight full-length books with me in a device with the same size and weight as one trade paperback. Of course 2010 devices are better in every way, but the Rocket eBook was good enough.
What was not good enough was DRM.
I've been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar's record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn't exist, Gemstar customer service doesn't exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.
Because of another limitation of DRM--I couldn't share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn't, she didn't know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay.
Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.
eBooks should cost far, far less than print books, not merely because their marginal cost of production is tiny, but because they deliver far less value than a print book.
I've seriously considered writing to Jeff Bezos and saying I will only buy a Kindle if he will arrange to get me free Kindle copies of all the books I bought, which the eBook industry has rendered useless piles of bits. The word theft gets thrown around rather casually with DRM gets discussed. Well, I feel that denying me access to the books I bought and paid for in good faith is theft. When the eBook industry, as represented by Amazon, is willing to make me whole, then I will start buying eBook devices and content again.
Quite correct. As is your point about the bearings. And possible structural issues, as the mounting for the two flywheels experiences those forces even if everything outside the two-flywheel "system" does not.
Yet my comment above remains modded at two points, while a reply saying "Two counter rotating flywheels will NOT cancel out each other!... the reaction forces are canceled out. However the combination still resist rotating along any axis other then it's axis of rotation" is currently modded "4, insightful."
If there's enough gyroscopic effect to matter, then the normal engineering way to deal with it would be to use a pair of flywheels rotating in opposite directions. Then, you can think of it either way, the gyroscopic effects cancel... or the net angular momentum of the two flywheels is zero so there is no gyroscopic effect.
There has never been a time when college professors did not complain about the poor language skills of their students. So it was, so it will ever be. The handwringing fails to take many things into account.
1) A lot of language learning occurs after people leave school, as they continue to absorb written documents for purposes directly related to their careers and their lives. If you are over sixty and you have anything you wrote in college, compare it to something you've written now. You'll be surprised. When my wife was in her twenties, I was disturbed by her inability to punctuate correctly, but I never said a word about it. Over the past forty years, she simply picked it up... from context.
2) The purpose of reading and writing is to communicate. Oh, sure, it is also there to signal social status, to insure cultural continuity by making it possible for year-2010 readers to read and understand year-1776 documents, and so forth, but, primarily, it is to communicate. In all likelihood these kids are fine at communicating between themselves using written language. Their problem is in communicating with professors. They will learn. There is no single way to communicate, as they taught us in Toastmasters, the first rule is "know your audience."
When communicating with professors... or with hiring managers via cover letters... one writes in complete sentences, with a topic sentence for every paragraph.
COMMUNICATING WITH BOSSES
*Brief
*Bullet points
*Three per topic
In emails and online postings, emoticons :)
In ham radio and CB and tweets, various systems of abbreviation. And so it goes.
3) What's considered important in education changes, at a surprising rate. I was stunned to look at a 1900s high-school arithmetic book and discover that at that time students were expected to extract cube roots with pencil and paper. (You begin by grouping the digits in threes... the rest is a bit more complicated). We are always shocked that our kids don't know how to diagram a sentence. Then we go in to do a bit of substitute teaching and discover that the geometry students use axioms that we didn't use and call inorganic compounds by new names. Still, a physics student not being able to do a simple calculation in slugs and poundals? What's WRONG with kids these days?
4) And of course language changes. You read an old novel and wonder why they use a spelling like "Veg'table" or "Pleez" in a piece of dialog, because that's the way they're pronounced... isn't it? Yes, but a hundred years ago they were nonstandard colloquial pronunciations; "please" was properly pronounced as two syllables, "vegetable" as four.
One thing never changes, though. Nobody will let you split an infinitive. They always say "there's nothing wrong with it, but other people object to it, so don't do it."
"Our machines have determined that you are a security risk. Our machines aren't capable of stating any reason, so there is nothing you can point to to clear yourself. Our machines just have a hunch, a gut feeling based on their heuristics and rules. We can tell you what the heuristics and rules are, but not how applying them led to your identification as a security risk. You can cross-examine the people who wrote those rules in court, and they will testify that the code contains no known bugs, but you cannot cross-examine the machine that actually made the identification in court."
As always, inexorable mathematics guarantee that most of the identifications will be false positives. Say the machine fingers one traveller in ten thousand, and one traveller in a million is a terrorist; then even if it correctly identifies every terrorist, 99% of its identifications will be false positives. If you don't like those numbers, plug in whatever ones you think are plausible.
If this happened to me I would be so upset and hostile that it would induce suspicious behavior in me, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And in other exciting news, IBM has announced a way to squeeze 96 columns onto a punched card.
I don't want to pay more and get more, even if it's better value for the dollar. I want to pay less and get what I think I need. I want to make that decision. I don't want an unholy alliance in which The Government forces me to do what best for The Corporations.
The digital TV transition was different, because when it came down to it, those of us who prefer free broadcast TV still have that choice. (Most of us). We paid a one-time charge for a converter box, less than $20 with the coupon, ZERO DOLLARS PER MONTH, and life goes on. Yes, the transition was bungled, and the FCC lied when they said people who were getting adequate analog reception would get adequate digital reception, but by and large our freedom of choice was more or less preserved.
The important point is not that transition cost was small, the important point is that it was ONE TIME. The difference between what we have now--copper-wired POTS, plus DSL, plus broadcast TV, and the cheapest digital package from the three providers in my area (municipal electric company, Verizon FIOS, Comcast) is at least $30 a month. Not $30: that's $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + ... (Well, due to life expectancy, at least there's effectively a "senior discount!")
And the last time there was a big power outage where I worked, the spiffy new VOIP phone on my desk went out INSTANTLY. (No, in theory it shouldn't have, in theory there was no good reason, I'm just saying what happened). After about 90 minutes, nobody could get signal on their cell phone. (Again, there's "no reason why that should have happened," but it did). The older set of desk phones, which hadn't been disconnected yet, lasted a couple of hours. But the three plain old telephones that were still around, because it was easier to use with the fax machines than with any of the newer systems, were working fine five hours later. And based on admittedly decades-old experience, probably would have been working days later.
They will tell us that they can make the digital infrastructure just as reliable, and during the next big Katrina-like disaster the phones will all go dead and then they will tell us "but that SHOULDN'T have happened."
It's only been out since October 22nd, 2009. It seems a bit early to say that it "is far more likely than Vista to run decently on the computer you already own."
We'll find out, because I believe that upgrades to Windows 7 are far more likely to be attempted than Windows upgrades usually are. Because of Vista's problems, because of concern that Vista will almost be an orphaned product--not by Microsoft but by all the vendors developing for Windows, and because the listed system requirements for Windows 7 are the same as for Vista, a lot of organizations are going to want to move swiftly to put Vista behind them. Corporations will want to standardize. The safest choice is to throw out the computers with Vista installed and buy new ones with Windows 7 preinstalled, but the Vista computers are a little too new for that. The remaining choices are to drag feet on moving to Windows 7 or to upgrade, and this time I think many will opt to upgrade.
So, we will see.
I hope it will turn out that upgrading to Vista is smooth. Microsoft has shown that it can do it: the transition from MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5.0 was a model of what an OS upgrade should be.
But it is early for McCracken to be celebrating it as an established fact, rather than a reasonable expectation based on listed system requirements and Windows 7's reputation as being not much more than a service pack.
In "The African Queen," Katherine Hepburn's character asks Humphrey Bogart's character to make a torpedo. Bogart's character says something to the effect that "Lady, there ain't nothing so complicated as the inside of a torpedo. It's got gyroscopes, compressed air chambers, compensating cylinders..."
I remember once reading details about just how the signals in a 1200 bps modem worked... and modems at higher rates. It was just jaw-dropping how sophisticated it was. The reason why there was a distinction between "bps" and "baud" is that "baud" refers to the number of times per second the signal changes. Well, a 1200 bps modem only changes its signal 600 times a second... but it uses four different combinations of frequency and phase, so each signal combination signals two bits. That's bad enough, but the combinations literally increase exponentially. The 9600 bps modem actually requires the receiver to sense and distinguish sixteen different analog combinations (so that it can encode four bits at a time).
At the time I figured they had to be close to the theoretical limit, which depends on the bandwidth and the noise level. A phone line is only good up to about 3000 Hz. so the 2400 baud rate of a 9600 bps modem is changing about as fast as it can. The rest depends on how noisy the line is.
Theoretically, of course, you can signal at an infinite rate on a perfectly noise-free channel. Just send 3.141592653 volts on the end and measure it with a ten-digit digital voltmeter and, voila! You're sending ten digits at once. Except there aren't any ten-digit voltmeters.
I was frankly flabbergasted when they managed to cram 56 kilobits per second into a phone line. Of course, the 56 kb modems never really ran at that speed--they were always falling back to lower speeds because the phone lines were too noisy. Then they added compression, which didn't do much good because the ZIP files and JPGs you were sending were already compressed. In reality they were trying to cram 56 kilobits of data into a 33 kilobit bag, but it was amazing that it even worked some of the time.
But, lady, there ain't nothin' so complicated as the inside of a modem.
Given that the pieces tile exactly as if they were squares, I'm not that impressed.
I'm much more impressed by what Ken Knowlton manages to do with seashells.
Those who remember the very good John Wyndham novel "The Day of the Triffids" (later made into a very bad movie) will recall that the population of most of the civilized world is transfixed by a spectacular show of mysterious lights in the sky. The first-person narrator is stuck in a hospital recovering from eye surgery with patches over his eyes and feels frustrated at being left out.
A few days later it turns out that everyone who saw the lights has gone blind, leaving the narrator one of the few people in the world who can still see.
The story suggests but never says that it is some space-based weapons system that was accidentally deployed.
So, when viewing mysterious and spectacular unexplained lighting phenomena in the sky, perhaps it would be prudent to keep one eye closed.
At this point, I'll bet that there have been more Sherlock Holmes stories written by "Holmesians" than were ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. And hardly anyone outside of a tiny circle of fandom knows any of them, and none of them have tarnished the reputation of the originals.
I suspect there are many people reading this who haven't even heard of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1974 ersatz "Sherlock Holmes" novel. It was a bestseller at the time, was adapted into a movie--and, I'm pretty sure, is well on the way to being forgotten.
First of all, there's right of first sale. Once you own it, it's yours and you can rent it, or sell it to someone else. I don't know how the studios think they can keep it out of Red Box or NetFlix's hands. The studios can refuse to sell it to Red Box or NetFlix, but unless they're really stupid they have to sell it to someone, and the miracle of the marketplace takes over and some of those owners will be happy to divert them to a willing buyer.
And it's not as if it were going to force people to buy the DVD. It's just going to result in a delay before most people see it. During that time, there won't be an opportunity for word-of-mouth, which is what really sells products, to build. There won't be a chance for people who aren't already sure they love the movie to rent it, then decide to buy it. There will be several more weeks for them to forget about the review they read when it was in the theatre. Several more weeks for them to be at the supermarket standing in front of the Red Box vending machine because they just feel like a movie tonight, and choosing some other movie.
And just that much incentive for people to tune out of the whole "legal" DVD marketplace, as the stuff that's available cheaply for rent becomes older and less interesting.
If they want to help their business, they should be trying to figure out how to get more product into the hands of consumers, not less.