Heheh. We on the west coast *LOVE* it when people post contests by midnight, EST. Oh. Yeah. 9pm. Sure could be doing other things at the moment (taking a walk, watching TV with kids), but oh no, gotta get on the 'net because some crazy east ender decided to close it at midnight >G.
(for the humor impaired: the preceding was *humor*. specifically, sarcasm.)
Seriously, though, I've seen auctions where people do pay way more than *local retail* prices. If people are willing to pay $100 more than retail on a digital camera, and pay shipping...
I have a VCR that flashes 12:00 (two, both go --:--). Why? Too lazy to keep setting the things. Where I live, power outages > 1 hour happen a lot (not because of undercapacity. Because I live in a mixed overhead wire/underground line area, and idiots keep driving into power poles).
The effort required to reset the VCR's is tremendous: turn on TV. Press Menu. Go to Set up. Go to Clock. Adjust clock to current time. Press Menu. Turn off TV. Then boom. Next day, *another* blackout. I don't know about you, but I get really annoyed at having to set the blasted VCR every day for a week...
Plus, the people who use the vcr (not me) tend to play back movies rather than record (mine is auto time setting. Rather nice).
About the V-chip: Seems people here are knee-jerking again. Do you *HAVE* to use the vchip? Can you not set all the settings to the mode that corresponds "I want it all"?
Why aren't people angry at having to pay for something they don't use? (Although, I like the vchip-in-tv idea. At least it'll give the young'uns some electronics knowledge, rathern than the "Just unhook the wire here, hook it to this..." type knowledge).
I believe Fahrenheit picked 0 to be the coldest he could get in his lab (lots of salt water), and somewhere around 98 to be body temperature (because it divided so nicely into a lot of factors).
Just when he did that, the boiling point of water (or another body) screwed with his calculation, forcing him to rescale it yet again.
I like metric. I use it. But I like imperial for some things too (basically, for any measurement that has traditionally been done in imperial - people heights in ft/in, people weights in lbs). Also, it's a lot easier to say "1 foot" when estimating something that's around ~30 cm or so. I really hate, though, converting between units in imperial (miles to inches? uhh... 5280 ft/mi, 12 in/ft... bit inconvenient).
Plus hardware support. "The average user" probably has very wierd hardware in their computers (generally, all-on-motherboard type deals, winmodems, etc).
More games for Linux == good. Linux drivers for wierd hardware so people can use Linux games == even better.
Hopefully, soon there will be Linux drivers for everything a company makes. Be it software modems, integrated devices, odd-interface devices, etc.
>>That might be the case for small scale trials, but for real use in a national roll-out the situation would be different. When you put cash onto your Mondex card the bank does not "keep the money", it transfers it onto your card. ... >>Your objection is akin to saying that if you give the bank five pound coins and get a five pound note, then the bank is keeping your money and giving you a paper token in return.
(I prefer this way. less HTML typing.)
(*this).rant(true);
I don't know much about mondex, but do know of ways to part people of thier money.
1) Lets say mondex is a company (probably sponsored by a bank). You go with your mondex card, and want to put, say, $100 on it. The company takes your $100, and puts a figure representing $100 on the card. Simple enough.
Lets say you don't use the card for a week. In that time, the company would probably have put that $100 you paid for a profitable motive (investments as part of the money reserve). Thus, company makes a quick buck from your $100, before you even spend it. The company simply has locked your money away.
This already exists in real life. Bus passes. Buy 10 and save a couple of bucks on fares. Prepaid cards. Buy a card, and get 10 movie passes for a discount. Reason? The companies *want* your money ahead of time, so they can put it to proper use, while you, the purchaser, gets essentially a contract saying that the company will provide those services *in the future*.
Then again, lots of people seem to like big tax refunds... even though they're basically saying you overpaid your taxes (thus, the IRS, Revenue Canada, etc get free reign on your money to invest for a little while).
As for giving the bank 5 pounds (sterling) in coins and getting a 5 pound note, this analogy doesn't work, because you've gotten the same money back, and can use it. It would hold if no one TOOK the 5 pound note except the bank, though, and during which, the 5 pounds the bank has will be used to make a profit from before you decided to cash it in.
The same reason holds for why most companies wait until the last moment to pay their bills (eg. around the 25th-odd day of the 30 day grace) is to let the money sit and make some profit for the company, rather than give it to the other company to make a profit from.
Generally, unless it's a great inconvenience, it's probably cheaper to buy the mondex money as and when you need it. I.e., going to buy that $35 book. First stop, load $35 in the card, then pay for the book. Mondex won't make so much money then.
Personally, the only prepaid cards I have are photocopy cards, which have an average of oh, $.03 on them (not enough for a photocopy). Less money to lose if I lose them, and I've not given the card issuer my money to make money out of.
Yes. I have a bank account. Yes, the bank makes far more money off my money than I get from the bank in interest. Except, I get paid (however meagre that it is) for that money I lent the bank to use. Ideally, I'd get it in cash, and stuff it under my mattress, but my mattress doesn't make me any money (however pathetically little the bank pays me).
Moral? Unless you're making some money from it, avoid giving it away to other companies to boost their bottom line.
Hmm. We've got AutoCAD. Pro/E. Unigraphics. Missed another high powered one. MicroStation (at least it seems high powered from all the people who used MicroStation. I personally use AutoCAD [Hey, it works!]).
Yes. It's time for a new war to fight. The old "emacs vs vi vs cat vs ?" and "Linux vs NT" and "MacOS vs anything" etc are boring. Bring on the CAD/CAE/CAM/CADD wars! >G.
Although, I think I've heard of similar stories before, and there are always followed by the obligatory post:
If you see a fellow user going blue because WinNT has crashed, poke both eyes, twist the nose, and grab ears and shake simultaneously to restart. >G
Seriously, on/. a while back, there was an article saying the human brain has *built-in multitasking hardware*... Thus letting you chew gum and walk down the street (or in my case, writing this, watching tv, and typing)
>>2) The ability to go to the bathroom without waiting for a commercial wow. I am amazed. You know that happens a lot. Just like when I am in the movie theater. Or I tape a program and can't be bothered to stop it. >) Large amounts of temporary storage makes it easy to tape something for only 1 viewing without eaither wasting tape or wearing out a tape from overcopying. So what if I want to record more than 15 hours? Do I but extra "virtual tape"? Can I save and playback sessions in a conveinent format like tapes or DVD? How about exchange things with RePlay?
I have no answer to your wanting to tape more than 15 hours worth of programming (wow. they sell VHS tape that long?). AFAIK, you can probably just hook your VCR to tivo and perform the real taping session if you want to save the program. If you want more hard drive space, if it uses an industry standard drive (IDE, I think), I don't see the problem in quietly changing it... unless the hard drive comes with the bootloader.
That, and having (insert favorite browser here) generate all those little popup menus tends to slow down/. rendering (and subsequently, reading).
I don't mind doing it from time to time, but if I had to suffer through rendering (I am *NOT* about to switch to IE. Doesn't even install on my "NT Workstation With IE". Nice eh? Everytime I install, it says my IE installation was corrupt, retries installation, and promptly errors out. So I've given up), I'd reconsider even trying to moderate.
I believe Nyquist's Theorem states that to reproduce a frequency N, you need to take *AT LEAST* 2N samples/sec.
Say I make a low frequency wave, say 1hz to keep things simple. Make it a nice gentle sine wave, with peak values of +/- 1. Say I'm lucky, and using a 2hz sampling frequency, I sample right at the peaks (and troughs). The sampled stream is 1,-1,1,-1,1,-1... which, if played back, represents a *triangle* wave (although, if I did enough filtering, I could probably make a passable sine). If I took more samples, perhaps 4hz, I get a better result: 1, 0, -1, 0, 1, 0, -1, 0. SLightly better, but not by much. OK. try 8hz. 1,.707, 0, -.707, -1, -.707, 0,.707... Hmm. Seems much more like a sine wave.
Theoretically, the "best" digital sound would require an infinite sample rate, which would cause any wave to be reproduced exactly. Of course, this isn't possible, so "as best as physically possible" generally is the CD-rate, 44.1khz, 16 bit, stereo. Of course, I think the new DVD-audio standard is calling for a higher samplerate (96khz min), so it should sound much better (generally, it's better to take more bits than necessary and chop off the least significant, since the ADC process isn't perfect, and there's an error of 1/2 LSB).
Well, tubes tend to have two things going for them:
1) More linear
2) Easier to handle higher powers.
1) IIRC, the on a linearity scale, from least to most goes: BJT transistor, MOSFET, Tubes. Linearity is important in amplification, since you want to have a transfer function as close as possible to H = n, where n is a constant [such that Vout = nVin]. Most amplifiers don't have such a linear relationship (higher order terms, Vout = nVin + n1*Vin^2 + n2*Vin^3 +...), but hopefully, those higher order terms (these tend to be harmonics, etc) are very very small compared to the linear term - for a very small range of Vin. Once Vin exceeds certain limits, the straight-line approximation doesn't hold, and you get your lovely "overdriven" sound. Now, tubes tend to have the straightest transfer curves within the input range, while MOSFETs have a similar curve, it's not as straight as we would like.
2) Tubes are much easier to work with at higher powers - they have lesser cooling requirements (generally, tubes can reach 250+C safely (surface), while transistors generally max out around 125C. Also, high power transistors are generally *very* expensive.
This is from an EE point of view, I've not heard a tube amp yet so I can't comment on the "warmness" of the sound (hmm. Pink noise?)
If you look deep down at an actual CD player playing a CD, and compared it to the real stream, you'd find numerous errors. Most players don't use the EDC (error-detection code) at the end of each audio block, instead relying on the filters beyond the DAC and oversampling to take care of the bit-errors.
Generally, modern players read a block multiple times to accomplish a form of "error correction." There are two modes in a CD-ROM drive of DAE, though, "raw" and "cooked." If your ripper uses RAW mode (generally, faster), it reads the bit stream and makes no attempt at correction (hence, 'raw'). If your ripper uses cooked mode (which it should, for *good* ripping), the CD-ROM will try to use the limited error-correction data and multiple reads to get a good copy of the bits.
(sidenote: DAE is much harder on a CD-ROM drive than reading a data block because in a data block, the block number gets encoded into both the block buffer and the control buffer, whereas in an audio stream, the block number only goes to the control buffer - the drive can only look at the DAE and make a "best guess" at the block number. That's where the 'jitter correction' etc come into play)
Why not make it *mandatory* for people to vote? I know of a few places that do (90+% voter turnout. Those that don't face a fine).
After all, no one's restricting anyone's right *to* vote, just they *have* to. (Don't know if there are any precedents regarding forcing people to exercise their rights. Certainly different.)
Those that fail to do so, face a reasonable fine (say, $50 on the next tax bill?).
At university, their "sanctioned" POS system seems to run on.... WINDOZE 95!
Several times, I've seen "Press F3 to return to POS, any other key to quit back to Windows 95".
Then, there's always the cash register that displays the distinctive "Welcome to Windows 95" 'tips' dialog... (complete with My Computer, Network Neighbourhood, Inbox, Briefcase, etc icons!). I guessimate the tiny 6" monitor is running around 320x240 or something like that, but it's windoze alright (no apparent mouse... standard POS type keyboard ["Sandwich, 1.85" etc]). Wonder how they shut down "Oh. Press Drink, $1.50 and HotDog, $3 together, then press Taco, $3 until the bar reads 'shut down', then press Ice Cream, $1. Again Press Taco $3 until there's a dot that says "Shut down" and hit Ice Cream, $1 again." Hmm. Hungry Ctrl-Alt-Del's.
Then there's those POS that do run a Un*x variant or other...
If you're so paranoid as to not let Safeway etc know that you buy a certain brand of chips every week, I suppose that you also don't:
a) drive, since the state will get your address, and *gasp*, know if you speed (besides, get a ticket and the insurance company will get a whiff of what you do!),
b) avoid online-anything, since credit card companies will know you buy stuff online, and what you buy, too! *gasp*. IP numbers are logged!
c) never, ever use the phone (phone company knows who you called!). Includes modem calls, too.
d) never go out, since there's cameras everywhere (and some in the streets, too).
e) heavens don't get seriously ill/hurt/etc, lest the hospitals et al enter in what foods you eat, what you did to cause the accident (?), etc.
Sure, maybe I may not apply for their cards, but certainly privacy shouldn't be one of the reasons. Ever shop for senior citizens? I'm sure they'll appreciate the effort. So who can say that you buy a bag of chips for yourself? Maybe you bought it for some old folks as a kind gesture.
Perhaps if it goes into a great big database somewhere, try to have fun screwing it up, making it inconsistent.
And like you said, you're free to shop elsewhere. Many ordinary (non-/.) people would probably prefer that the coupons they need are mailed to them. (Plus, many love coupons, and often buy enough of xxx because it's on sale to last them for the next 10 years. Penny pinching is important.)
Oops. gotta cancel this message! Lest someone tracking my packets gets a whiff that I spent 10-15 minutes concocting this!
I don't see the relation between organically grown fruits/vegetables and truck-ripening. There may be an indirect relation (i.e., farmer grows organically fruit/vegetables, and customer comes to farmer to buy), but that's limited if you avoid all the big stores and go direct to the farm.
Of course, "organically farmed" (I hate the marketing of "organic" - practically everything living on this rock *is* organic...) means to me that all natural products were used (no chemical based fertilizers, no chemical pesticides, etc. thus, natural fertilizers and using bugs to beat bugs are OK).
Most stuff is "truck-ripened" (including organically grown foodstuffs) because it takes 2-3 weeks just to ship goods everywhere.
Well, equipment curves aren't gaussian. If you plotted Failure vs. Time, you'll find two sharp peaks - at the beginning (close to Time = 0), and near the end (Time = ??). In-between it's a flat line (that's not near zero). Ideally, manufacturers would burn in equipment until it's in the "flat" region, but in this "gotta-have-it-now" age, I think testing is going down the tubes...
(The other end is because the device dies from old age. Of course, the MTBF numbers are just another statistic...)
Question is, are there any monitors that support this to the fullest?
My monitor max resolution at 85hz refresh is 800x600, and I run at this resolution (75 flickers! To me, anyhow. 60 is just too flickery to use.) Videocard has a nice 250Mhz RAMDAC, does plenty high refresh at high resolutions...
Hmm. Maybe I need a monitor with longer persistence.
On one of those wince palmtops (About the only M$ Windoze product that deserves the "win" prepended) (not the ones with the full keyboards, but the 3com palm wannabes), where's the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys?
*Gasp* no Ctrl-Alt-Del? *gasp* It's not windoze without Ctrl-Alt-Del!
In fact, a while ago, the GIF Constructor people were showcasing images done in the program, and commented on one good one "This was unfortunately done with the UNREGISTERED VERSION of GIF Constructor."
I peeked at the raw GIF file (yay! comments are plain text!), and at the end was "Created with GIF Constructor. Registered to xxxx."
Slashdot Mirror
It's 30,000, the population at UBC. Even though it seems like 60+k because of all the arts people greatly outnumber Applied Science people.
Heheh. We on the west coast *LOVE* it when people post contests by midnight, EST. Oh. Yeah. 9pm. Sure could be doing other things at the moment (taking a walk, watching TV with kids), but oh no, gotta get on the 'net because some crazy east ender decided to close it at midnight >G.
(for the humor impaired: the preceding was *humor*. specifically, sarcasm.)
Seriously, though, I've seen auctions where people do pay way more than *local retail* prices. If people are willing to pay $100 more than retail on a digital camera, and pay shipping...
I have a VCR that flashes 12:00 (two, both go --:--). Why? Too lazy to keep setting the things. Where I live, power outages > 1 hour happen a lot (not because of undercapacity. Because I live in a mixed overhead wire/underground line area, and idiots keep driving into power poles).
The effort required to reset the VCR's is tremendous: turn on TV. Press Menu. Go to Set up. Go to Clock. Adjust clock to current time. Press Menu. Turn off TV. Then boom. Next day, *another* blackout. I don't know about you, but I get really annoyed at having to set the blasted VCR every day for a week...
Plus, the people who use the vcr (not me) tend to play back movies rather than record (mine is auto time setting. Rather nice).
About the V-chip: Seems people here are knee-jerking again. Do you *HAVE* to use the vchip? Can you not set all the settings to the mode that corresponds "I want it all"?
Why aren't people angry at having to pay for something they don't use? (Although, I like the vchip-in-tv idea. At least it'll give the young'uns some electronics knowledge, rathern than the "Just unhook the wire here, hook it to this..." type knowledge).
I believe Fahrenheit picked 0 to be the coldest he could get in his lab (lots of salt water), and somewhere around 98 to be body temperature (because it divided so nicely into a lot of factors).
Just when he did that, the boiling point of water (or another body) screwed with his calculation, forcing him to rescale it yet again.
I like metric. I use it. But I like imperial for some things too (basically, for any measurement that has traditionally been done in imperial - people heights in ft/in, people weights in lbs). Also, it's a lot easier to say "1 foot" when estimating something that's around ~30 cm or so. I really hate, though, converting between units in imperial (miles to inches? uhh... 5280 ft/mi, 12 in/ft... bit inconvenient).
Plus hardware support. "The average user" probably has very wierd hardware in their computers (generally, all-on-motherboard type deals, winmodems, etc).
More games for Linux == good. Linux drivers for wierd hardware so people can use Linux games == even better.
Hopefully, soon there will be Linux drivers for everything a company makes. Be it software modems, integrated devices, odd-interface devices, etc.
>>That might be the case for small scale trials, but for real use in a national roll-out the situation would be different. When you put cash onto your Mondex card the bank does not "keep the money", it transfers it onto your card.
...
>>Your objection is akin to saying that if you give the bank five pound coins and get a five pound note, then the bank is keeping your money and giving you a paper token in return.
(I prefer this way. less HTML typing.)
(*this).rant(true);
I don't know much about mondex, but do know of ways to part people of thier money.
1) Lets say mondex is a company (probably sponsored by a bank). You go with your mondex card, and want to put, say, $100 on it. The company takes your $100, and puts a figure representing $100 on the card. Simple enough.
Lets say you don't use the card for a week. In that time, the company would probably have put that $100 you paid for a profitable motive (investments as part of the money reserve). Thus, company makes a quick buck from your $100, before you even spend it. The company simply has locked your money away.
This already exists in real life. Bus passes. Buy 10 and save a couple of bucks on fares. Prepaid cards. Buy a card, and get 10 movie passes for a discount. Reason? The companies *want* your money ahead of time, so they can put it to proper use, while you, the purchaser, gets essentially a contract saying that the company will provide those services *in the future*.
Then again, lots of people seem to like big tax refunds... even though they're basically saying you overpaid your taxes (thus, the IRS, Revenue Canada, etc get free reign on your money to invest for a little while).
As for giving the bank 5 pounds (sterling) in coins and getting a 5 pound note, this analogy doesn't work, because you've gotten the same money back, and can use it. It would hold if no one TOOK the 5 pound note except the bank, though, and during which, the 5 pounds the bank has will be used to make a profit from before you decided to cash it in.
The same reason holds for why most companies wait until the last moment to pay their bills (eg. around the 25th-odd day of the 30 day grace) is to let the money sit and make some profit for the company, rather than give it to the other company to make a profit from.
Generally, unless it's a great inconvenience, it's probably cheaper to buy the mondex money as and when you need it. I.e., going to buy that $35 book. First stop, load $35 in the card, then pay for the book. Mondex won't make so much money then.
Personally, the only prepaid cards I have are photocopy cards, which have an average of oh, $.03 on them (not enough for a photocopy). Less money to lose if I lose them, and I've not given the card issuer my money to make money out of.
Yes. I have a bank account. Yes, the bank makes far more money off my money than I get from the bank in interest. Except, I get paid (however meagre that it is) for that money I lent the bank to use. Ideally, I'd get it in cash, and stuff it under my mattress, but my mattress doesn't make me any money (however pathetically little the bank pays me).
Moral? Unless you're making some money from it, avoid giving it away to other companies to boost their bottom line.
(*this).rant(false);
Hmm. We've got AutoCAD. Pro/E. Unigraphics. Missed another high powered one. MicroStation (at least it seems high powered from all the people who used MicroStation. I personally use AutoCAD [Hey, it works!]).
Yes. It's time for a new war to fight. The old "emacs vs vi vs cat vs ?" and "Linux vs NT" and "MacOS vs anything" etc are boring. Bring on the CAD/CAE/CAM/CADD wars! >G.
LOL!
/. a while back, there was an article saying the human brain has *built-in multitasking hardware*... Thus letting you chew gum and walk down the street (or in my case, writing this, watching tv, and typing)
Although, I think I've heard of similar stories before, and there are always followed by the obligatory post:
If you see a fellow user going blue because WinNT has crashed, poke both eyes, twist the nose, and grab ears and shake simultaneously to restart. >G
Seriously, on
>>2) The ability to go to the bathroom without waiting for a commercial wow. I am amazed. You know that happens a lot. Just like when I am in the movie theater. Or I tape a program and can't be bothered to stop it. >) Large amounts of temporary storage makes it easy to tape something for only 1 viewing without eaither wasting tape or wearing out a tape from overcopying. So what if I want to record more than 15 hours? Do I but extra "virtual tape"? Can I save and playback sessions in a conveinent format like tapes or DVD? How about exchange things with RePlay?
I have no answer to your wanting to tape more than 15 hours worth of programming (wow. they sell VHS tape that long?). AFAIK, you can probably just hook your VCR to tivo and perform the real taping session if you want to save the program. If you want more hard drive space, if it uses an industry standard drive (IDE, I think), I don't see the problem in quietly changing it... unless the hard drive comes with the bootloader.
That, and having (insert favorite browser here) generate all those little popup menus tends to slow down /. rendering (and subsequently, reading).
I don't mind doing it from time to time, but if I had to suffer through rendering (I am *NOT* about to switch to IE. Doesn't even install on my "NT Workstation With IE". Nice eh? Everytime I install, it says my IE installation was corrupt, retries installation, and promptly errors out. So I've given up), I'd reconsider even trying to moderate.
I believe Nyquist's Theorem states that to reproduce a frequency N, you need to take *AT LEAST* 2N samples/sec.
.707, 0, -.707, -1, -.707, 0, .707... Hmm. Seems much more like a sine wave.
Say I make a low frequency wave, say 1hz to keep things simple. Make it a nice gentle sine wave, with peak values of +/- 1. Say I'm lucky, and using a 2hz sampling frequency, I sample right at the peaks (and troughs). The sampled stream is 1,-1,1,-1,1,-1... which, if played back, represents a *triangle* wave (although, if I did enough filtering, I could probably make a passable sine). If I took more samples, perhaps 4hz, I get a better result: 1, 0, -1, 0, 1, 0, -1, 0. SLightly better, but not by much. OK. try 8hz. 1,
Theoretically, the "best" digital sound would require an infinite sample rate, which would cause any wave to be reproduced exactly. Of course, this isn't possible, so "as best as physically possible" generally is the CD-rate, 44.1khz, 16 bit, stereo. Of course, I think the new DVD-audio standard is calling for a higher samplerate (96khz min), so it should sound much better (generally, it's better to take more bits than necessary and chop off the least significant, since the ADC process isn't perfect, and there's an error of 1/2 LSB).
Well, tubes tend to have two things going for them:
...), but hopefully, those higher order terms (these tend to be harmonics, etc) are very very small compared to the linear term - for a very small range of Vin. Once Vin exceeds certain limits, the straight-line approximation doesn't hold, and you get your lovely "overdriven" sound. Now, tubes tend to have the straightest transfer curves within the input range, while MOSFETs have a similar curve, it's not as straight as we would like.
1) More linear
2) Easier to handle higher powers.
1) IIRC, the on a linearity scale, from least to most goes: BJT transistor, MOSFET, Tubes. Linearity is important in amplification, since you want to have a transfer function as close as possible to H = n, where n is a constant [such that Vout = nVin]. Most amplifiers don't have such a linear relationship (higher order terms, Vout = nVin + n1*Vin^2 + n2*Vin^3 +
2) Tubes are much easier to work with at higher powers - they have lesser cooling requirements (generally, tubes can reach 250+C safely (surface), while transistors generally max out around 125C. Also, high power transistors are generally *very* expensive.
This is from an EE point of view, I've not heard a tube amp yet so I can't comment on the "warmness" of the sound (hmm. Pink noise?)
Um, no.
If you look deep down at an actual CD player playing a CD, and compared it to the real stream, you'd find numerous errors. Most players don't use the EDC (error-detection code) at the end of each audio block, instead relying on the filters beyond the DAC and oversampling to take care of the bit-errors.
Generally, modern players read a block multiple times to accomplish a form of "error correction." There are two modes in a CD-ROM drive of DAE, though, "raw" and "cooked." If your ripper uses RAW mode (generally, faster), it reads the bit stream and makes no attempt at correction (hence, 'raw'). If your ripper uses cooked mode (which it should, for *good* ripping), the CD-ROM will try to use the limited error-correction data and multiple reads to get a good copy of the bits.
(sidenote: DAE is much harder on a CD-ROM drive than reading a data block because in a data block, the block number gets encoded into both the block buffer and the control buffer, whereas in an audio stream, the block number only goes to the control buffer - the drive can only look at the DAE and make a "best guess" at the block number. That's where the 'jitter correction' etc come into play)
Hmm. IANAL, and know of no such precendent...
Why not make it *mandatory* for people to vote? I know of a few places that do (90+% voter turnout. Those that don't face a fine).
After all, no one's restricting anyone's right *to* vote, just they *have* to. (Don't know if there are any precedents regarding forcing people to exercise their rights. Certainly different.)
Those that fail to do so, face a reasonable fine (say, $50 on the next tax bill?).
To mark the event, they could've sent the same first message off to the host... or did the lag from all the skrip kiddies/warez folks prevent that? >G
Speaking of ham radio, since MIR is more or less "abandoned," are the packet and voice repeaters still up (R0MIR, IIRC was the call)?
Or are they taken down already... }}:-(
(always in class, when MIR decides to fly over..., and missing a vital link between TNC->HT)
Actually, I know of one!
At university, their "sanctioned" POS system seems to run on.... WINDOZE 95!
Several times, I've seen "Press F3 to return to POS, any other key to quit back to Windows 95".
Then, there's always the cash register that displays the distinctive "Welcome to Windows 95" 'tips' dialog... (complete with My Computer, Network Neighbourhood, Inbox, Briefcase, etc icons!). I guessimate the tiny 6" monitor is running around 320x240 or something like that, but it's windoze alright (no apparent mouse... standard POS type keyboard ["Sandwich, 1.85" etc]). Wonder how they shut down "Oh. Press Drink, $1.50 and HotDog, $3 together, then press Taco, $3 until the bar reads 'shut down', then press Ice Cream, $1. Again Press Taco $3 until there's a dot that says "Shut down" and hit Ice Cream, $1 again." Hmm. Hungry Ctrl-Alt-Del's.
Then there's those POS that do run a Un*x variant or other...
(setq RANT T) ; damn. too much LISP this week
If you're so paranoid as to not let Safeway etc know that you buy a certain brand of chips every week, I suppose that you also don't:
a) drive, since the state will get your address, and *gasp*, know if you speed (besides, get a ticket and the insurance company will get a whiff of what you do!),
b) avoid online-anything, since credit card companies will know you buy stuff online, and what you buy, too! *gasp*. IP numbers are logged!
c) never, ever use the phone (phone company knows who you called!). Includes modem calls, too.
d) never go out, since there's cameras everywhere (and some in the streets, too).
e) heavens don't get seriously ill/hurt/etc, lest the hospitals et al enter in what foods you eat, what you did to cause the accident (?), etc.
Sure, maybe I may not apply for their cards, but certainly privacy shouldn't be one of the reasons. Ever shop for senior citizens? I'm sure they'll appreciate the effort. So who can say that you buy a bag of chips for yourself? Maybe you bought it for some old folks as a kind gesture.
Perhaps if it goes into a great big database somewhere, try to have fun screwing it up, making it inconsistent.
And like you said, you're free to shop elsewhere. Many ordinary (non-/.) people would probably prefer that the coupons they need are mailed to them. (Plus, many love coupons, and often buy enough of xxx because it's on sale to last them for the next 10 years. Penny pinching is important.)
Oops. gotta cancel this message! Lest someone tracking my packets gets a whiff that I spent 10-15 minutes concocting this!
(setq RANT nil)
I don't see the relation between organically grown fruits/vegetables and truck-ripening. There may be an indirect relation (i.e., farmer grows organically fruit/vegetables, and customer comes to farmer to buy), but that's limited if you avoid all the big stores and go direct to the farm.
Of course, "organically farmed" (I hate the marketing of "organic" - practically everything living on this rock *is* organic...) means to me that all natural products were used (no chemical based fertilizers, no chemical pesticides, etc. thus, natural fertilizers and using bugs to beat bugs are OK).
Most stuff is "truck-ripened" (including organically grown foodstuffs) because it takes 2-3 weeks just to ship goods everywhere.
Well, equipment curves aren't gaussian. If you plotted Failure vs. Time, you'll find two sharp peaks - at the beginning (close to Time = 0), and near the end (Time = ??). In-between it's a flat line (that's not near zero). Ideally, manufacturers would burn in equipment until it's in the "flat" region, but in this "gotta-have-it-now" age, I think testing is going down the tubes...
(The other end is because the device dies from old age. Of course, the MTBF numbers are just another statistic...)
No numbers, but it's the approximate curve.
Added complication: Red Hat's public.
All you need is a shareholder asking Red Hat where their "due dilligence" is in protecting their trademark.
Ah, the nice world of stocks...
Here's a good question: Are we going to finally get some TRUE general purpose registers?! Say, like the aging (but nice) 68K processor?
I'm not a big fan of "Optimize code by choosing the right register" Intel x86 docs keep implying, as well as specific combinations of adressing modes.
350Mhz RAMDAC. Nice.
Question is, are there any monitors that support this to the fullest?
My monitor max resolution at 85hz refresh is 800x600, and I run at this resolution (75 flickers! To me, anyhow. 60 is just too flickery to use.) Videocard has a nice 250Mhz RAMDAC, does plenty high refresh at high resolutions...
Hmm. Maybe I need a monitor with longer persistence.
On one of those wince palmtops (About the only M$ Windoze product that deserves the "win" prepended) (not the ones with the full keyboards, but the 3com palm wannabes), where's the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys?
*Gasp* no Ctrl-Alt-Del? *gasp* It's not windoze without Ctrl-Alt-Del!
GIF Constructor does, too.
In fact, a while ago, the GIF Constructor people were showcasing images done in the program, and commented on one good one "This was unfortunately done with the UNREGISTERED VERSION of GIF Constructor."
I peeked at the raw GIF file (yay! comments are plain text!), and at the end was "Created with GIF Constructor. Registered to xxxx."