Re:What about water conservation??
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hong Kong is kind of unusual (at least, I've never heard of this being done anywhere else) in that they have two different plumbing systems. Toilets use salt water, and the rest of the system uses fresh water. This is because they have to buy their fresh water from mainland China, and it severely reduces their costs to use salt water for their sewage.
This reminds me of some article I read awhile back that mentioned that they could fit a breathalyzer on a credit card sized card. Why not just make every drivers license have a built in breathalyzer? It turns red if you're over the limit, and green if you're not, etc.
I'm glad you sort of brought yourself back to reality towards the end of your post, but your statement about Western companies desiring (because of profitability) that China remain Communist is just stupid and ill-informed.
First of all, you don't qualify at all what you mean - in China, the Communist system of government is just that - a system of government, and has had no bearing on their economic policies since 1988 when Deng Xiaoping decided to switch to a free market economy. Until then there was almost zero foreign investment in China, because no Communist economic system wants competition. Therefore, when you reference the "nicely centralized economic engine such as the Chinese government" you're demonstrating your total lack of knowledge in this situation.
Still, you have a vague point about it being easier to strike deals with a centralized government (which China still has), but anyone who's lived in China will tell you that their government is not as centralized in some areas as in others. China is intensely focused on developing autonomy as a nation, and therefore goes to greath lengths to ensure that a foreign company cannot dominate one of its markets - it's the balance between luring a foreign company in, then using the knowledge transfer to start up a competitor. This ensures that foreign companies ultimately face bigger problems than simply competing against rival corporations - they instead have to deal with a government that has a clear nationalist agenda.
Also - you cannot say that you're knowingly supporting human rights abuse when selling anything to the Chinese government. In many areas, an argument can be constructed that China provides a better, safer living environment than the US. The short of it is - there are different kinds of human rights violations commited by all governments, and at the end of the day - dissidents are going to be jailed whether they're tracked by MS Excell or Open Office Calc.
I know what you mean - I came across his book as a fifth grader and was completely blown away by his layout. The story, scenery, and ridiculous attention to detail really raised the bar from other railroads I've seen in the past. Plus, there was just something so authentic from the scenes that he designed, and in the book it talks extensively how he spent years planning his railroad, building a first test layout, then a medium sized one, then his masterpiece.
He's also really famous for the switching game that I think was called "timesaver" which was a couple of locomotives and cars on a board...I'm hazy on the details.
Anyway, all this talk is making me really wish I knew what happened to my book.
This reminds me a lot of the beautiful Gorre & Daphetid Railroad by the late John Allen. Hands down the most amazing layout I've ever seen, there used to be a book in print called "Model Railroading with John Allen". He revolutionized the hobby because he was a professional photographer and spent incredible time on the photos he would send in to magazines etc.
It's been awhile since I was a subscriber to Model Railroader (50 bucks a year for a student is steep), but in the early nineties it seemed like the convergence of computers and model railroading was finally beginning to happen so that people who weren't in MIT and were still interested in controlling trains with computers could begin to tinker.
Course, the ultimate limitation on model railroading seems to always be space, so I'm hoping that when I have some space in the future I'll be able to get a layout going again, and even have fun working on the computer aspect.
Doesn't it seem ironic that when reading the article you get this sense of the old Hacker idea "it's your job to secure it, otherwise, it's your fault if we get in"? The article even mentions that the tech who was responsible for the glitch was a Democrat and really doesn't treat the incident like the major Patriot Act deserving Act of Total Terrorism that politicians have been falling all over themselves trying to protect against.
My goodness. I've always wondered if there was anyone out there who ever thought Squeak was at all useful, and now I've come across one posting on Slashdot.
I'll be damned.
No disrespect, and I'm sure you have your reasons for liking it, but I've never ever had a worse experience than programming with Smalltalk in the Squeak environment. I had to use it for a school project, and I found 5 or 6 critical, repeatable bugs in the interpreter/environment. What a nightmare.
If you're able to use this environment to accomplish ANYTHING, my hat is off to you.
I didn't and still don't feel like I have an illness. The issue is more about approaching the situation and examining the scientific facts - my brain waves were not behaving in the "sweet spot" that researchers have observed is ideal for thought processing.
The effects of bio-response neurotherapy are very sublte, but they do show change - I still hate doing things that are pointless for any length of time, but before I had the training done, I didn't have the ability to concentrate on things that I really enjoyed.
I also couldn't get sufficient sleep - I was told that even though I was sleeping for 10-12 hours a day, I most likely wasn't getting enough REM sleep, and this was an aftereffect of ADHD. After therapy, I could get by with as little as 5-7 hours and feel much better.
I'm not saying this is a cure-all, or that it's a miracle drug, etc. I am saying that I noticed subtle differences in myself and how I behaved, and others in my family as well as close friends noticed change. The change was so drastic when I got back to school that my roommate of three years asked what had happened.
On a semi-humorous note, I'll never forget the time I was being trained when the UPS man came to the door. I was expecting a new laptop, so I quickly unhooked and ran to open the door. I'm sure it messed with the guy's mind when he saw me open the door with three electrodes attached to my head and act like nothing was out of the ordinary.
I am borderline ADHD, and I only found out several years ago afte I began having trouble with class and general management of time while in college.
My mom had a friend who had recently gotten certified in using this type of therapy on her daughter (who was severely ADHD), and they arranged for me to show up at their house knowing that because I was a computer science major and a geek, that I would be extremely interested in the whole setup. I walk in, express interest, and they offer to hook me up, and while they're explaining what's going on, they run a quick diagnostic which shows I could use some work on the machine (and that my brain waves are "sloppy").
To make a long story short, I went through three months of training using the machine, the whole time believing it was a placebo, but my entire family noticed the difference. I also began noticing that I was sleeping better and could work for periods of time longer than 30 minutes without feeling like i HAD to take a break.
To sum up, this is a very groundbreaking type of therapy that does work, and I encourage anyone on/. to research it.
I agree that spam is a social problem, but you need to qualify what you mean a little more. Technology is the enabling mechanism to this problem (that some people are willing to be jerks and abuse a medium). Computers are exceedingly good at cranking out spam, day and night, and the medium of email is exceedingly weak against protecting against this kind of abuse. The same kind of social problem exists in all communications mediums, but you don't see just anyone wardialing people to sell viagra and penis pills. Calling a million people is expensive and time consuming, spamming is not. Therefore, this is a technologically exagerated (sp?) manifestation of a very minor social problem, making your point all but useless when trying to solve it. You've got to solve the problem in this situation, which is the enabler - technology.
While we're all gloating over this admittedly funny situation the labels have put themselves in, rest assured that this cost will only get passed on to the artists eventually. Either artists will have to give up these types of royalties in the future, or they'll get used in some other way (maybe increasing hidden costs like legal fees or higher interested on artist advances, or perhaps just worse royalty agreements in the first place).
The end result is that this is a minor hiccup, one the labels are more than willing to trade in their effort to screw Joe P2P User or Joe Casual CD Borrower or Joe Fair Use User.
I found this comment amusing, and it is an interesting idea, but realistically, nobody carried their passport on them constantly while they're overseas.
Still, this deal is like the perfect marriage: the worst information company given the job of implementing the worst information idea.
Does this setup let you run USB devices from the legacy DOS apps? IE, can you print to a USB printer from the emulated DOS?
I realize this question is a little contrived, but I've got a friend who's accounting software was written for DOS, and he's having trouble getting printer support under it. USB for DOS doesn't exist, so I'm wondering how the emulation handles device support.
Course, I could RTFM, but then what's slashdot for?
I can consistently determine the difference between a CD and 192kbps in a double blind test environment. If it's a genre of music that I really like, and a band I know well, I can even do pretty well between a 256kbps MP3 and a CD.
This is on medium to low quality speakers.
If we're talking about headphones, I can tell every time between the CD and any lossy encoding method.
You obviously don't listen to music for detail, which is ok, that's fine, but stop sounding stupid saying that noticing fine detail in music is impossible.
I am an artist that has used MP3.com for 4 years to distribute the music that my band records. Back in the heyday, we even made several hundred dollars from people downloading our stuff as several of our songs were in the top 40 grunge chart.
MP3.com was a really cool service.
Still - why the hell would we want the content to be preserved? I don't want copies of my music floating around in some other record company's vault. They're doing the smart thing by destroying the music, otherwise, they could be accused for ripping off the most popular bands on MP3.com.
With today's web hosting market, bandwidth is cheap enough for bands to afford to distribute their music themselves, and if anybody is reading this and needs space for their band, my company (Cerebral Tech, Inc) will host you with no strings for ten bucks a month, just send me an email.
Just because a big record company is behind this doesn't mean its wrong - they're actually doing something that benefits us artists in the long run.
This is not an insightful post. Serious people use Oracle. Poor people use PostgreSQL. If you need Oracle, you will have to use it or DB2 - PostgreSQL just can't cut it on several levels with Oracle, currently.
Any CD you buy at Walmart by a band that normally has explicit lyrics will be a special "censored" version that has the bad words XX-d out in the lyric sheet, the CD packaging, and hissed out of the song.
up2date AFIK does not allow you to install new packages or upgrade old ones past major versions. Also, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't do very good dependency checking.
I agree with everything you said - redhat is not ready for the desktop, in my experience. RPMs are a nightmare to find and install, and compiling is really bad on redhat.
A friend got me turned on the Debian a few months ago, and now I'm a true linux convert - I run Debian and even have WINE for things I can't live without like War3 and Photoshop.
Debian makes installing almost entirely painless - you just type "apt-get install packagename" and that's it. Such a joy - it figures out your dependencies and everything.
The only beef I have with Debian is the install process, but even that's ok.
If you'd like some help, just shoot me an email or something.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but doesn't it seem odd that we're all expecting the cable companies to allow competition on a physical network that they built and own? If someone wants to compete with them, let them build their own network. Am I completely off base?
Listen, get a grip - when a component goes bad in a home grown system, you throw it away and buy a new one. Nobody cares - it's cheaper to just spend a hundred bucks or whatever then it is to dick with manufacturers. If you home grow, you home repair. Duh.
Slashdot Mirror
Hong Kong is kind of unusual (at least, I've never heard of this being done anywhere else) in that they have two different plumbing systems. Toilets use salt water, and the rest of the system uses fresh water. This is because they have to buy their fresh water from mainland China, and it severely reduces their costs to use salt water for their sewage.
This reminds me of some article I read awhile back that mentioned that they could fit a breathalyzer on a credit card sized card. Why not just make every drivers license have a built in breathalyzer? It turns red if you're over the limit, and green if you're not, etc.
I'm glad you sort of brought yourself back to reality towards the end of your post, but your statement about Western companies desiring (because of profitability) that China remain Communist is just stupid and ill-informed.
First of all, you don't qualify at all what you mean - in China, the Communist system of government is just that - a system of government, and has had no bearing on their economic policies since 1988 when Deng Xiaoping decided to switch to a free market economy. Until then there was almost zero foreign investment in China, because no Communist economic system wants competition. Therefore, when you reference the "nicely centralized economic engine such as the Chinese government" you're demonstrating your total lack of knowledge in this situation.
Still, you have a vague point about it being easier to strike deals with a centralized government (which China still has), but anyone who's lived in China will tell you that their government is not as centralized in some areas as in others. China is intensely focused on developing autonomy as a nation, and therefore goes to greath lengths to ensure that a foreign company cannot dominate one of its markets - it's the balance between luring a foreign company in, then using the knowledge transfer to start up a competitor. This ensures that foreign companies ultimately face bigger problems than simply competing against rival corporations - they instead have to deal with a government that has a clear nationalist agenda.
Also - you cannot say that you're knowingly supporting human rights abuse when selling anything to the Chinese government. In many areas, an argument can be constructed that China provides a better, safer living environment than the US. The short of it is - there are different kinds of human rights violations commited by all governments, and at the end of the day - dissidents are going to be jailed whether they're tracked by MS Excell or Open Office Calc.
I know what you mean - I came across his book as a fifth grader and was completely blown away by his layout. The story, scenery, and ridiculous attention to detail really raised the bar from other railroads I've seen in the past. Plus, there was just something so authentic from the scenes that he designed, and in the book it talks extensively how he spent years planning his railroad, building a first test layout, then a medium sized one, then his masterpiece.
He's also really famous for the switching game that I think was called "timesaver" which was a couple of locomotives and cars on a board...I'm hazy on the details.
Anyway, all this talk is making me really wish I knew what happened to my book.
This reminds me a lot of the beautiful Gorre & Daphetid Railroad by the late John Allen. Hands down the most amazing layout I've ever seen, there used to be a book in print called "Model Railroading with John Allen". He revolutionized the hobby because he was a professional photographer and spent incredible time on the photos he would send in to magazines etc.
It's been awhile since I was a subscriber to Model Railroader (50 bucks a year for a student is steep), but in the early nineties it seemed like the convergence of computers and model railroading was finally beginning to happen so that people who weren't in MIT and were still interested in controlling trains with computers could begin to tinker.
Course, the ultimate limitation on model railroading seems to always be space, so I'm hoping that when I have some space in the future I'll be able to get a layout going again, and even have fun working on the computer aspect.
Oops, you're right.
Doesn't it seem ironic that when reading the article you get this sense of the old Hacker idea "it's your job to secure it, otherwise, it's your fault if we get in"? The article even mentions that the tech who was responsible for the glitch was a Democrat and really doesn't treat the incident like the major Patriot Act deserving Act of Total Terrorism that politicians have been falling all over themselves trying to protect against.
My goodness. I've always wondered if there was anyone out there who ever thought Squeak was at all useful, and now I've come across one posting on Slashdot.
I'll be damned.
No disrespect, and I'm sure you have your reasons for liking it, but I've never ever had a worse experience than programming with Smalltalk in the Squeak environment. I had to use it for a school project, and I found 5 or 6 critical, repeatable bugs in the interpreter/environment. What a nightmare.
If you're able to use this environment to accomplish ANYTHING, my hat is off to you.
I didn't and still don't feel like I have an illness. The issue is more about approaching the situation and examining the scientific facts - my brain waves were not behaving in the "sweet spot" that researchers have observed is ideal for thought processing.
The effects of bio-response neurotherapy are very sublte, but they do show change - I still hate doing things that are pointless for any length of time, but before I had the training done, I didn't have the ability to concentrate on things that I really enjoyed.
I also couldn't get sufficient sleep - I was told that even though I was sleeping for 10-12 hours a day, I most likely wasn't getting enough REM sleep, and this was an aftereffect of ADHD. After therapy, I could get by with as little as 5-7 hours and feel much better.
I'm not saying this is a cure-all, or that it's a miracle drug, etc. I am saying that I noticed subtle differences in myself and how I behaved, and others in my family as well as close friends noticed change. The change was so drastic when I got back to school that my roommate of three years asked what had happened.
On a semi-humorous note, I'll never forget the time I was being trained when the UPS man came to the door. I was expecting a new laptop, so I quickly unhooked and ran to open the door. I'm sure it messed with the guy's mind when he saw me open the door with three electrodes attached to my head and act like nothing was out of the ordinary.
I am borderline ADHD, and I only found out several years ago afte I began having trouble with class and general management of time while in college.
/. to research it.
My mom had a friend who had recently gotten certified in using this type of therapy on her daughter (who was severely ADHD), and they arranged for me to show up at their house knowing that because I was a computer science major and a geek, that I would be extremely interested in the whole setup. I walk in, express interest, and they offer to hook me up, and while they're explaining what's going on, they run a quick diagnostic which shows I could use some work on the machine (and that my brain waves are "sloppy").
To make a long story short, I went through three months of training using the machine, the whole time believing it was a placebo, but my entire family noticed the difference. I also began noticing that I was sleeping better and could work for periods of time longer than 30 minutes without feeling like i HAD to take a break.
To sum up, this is a very groundbreaking type of therapy that does work, and I encourage anyone on
I mostly disagree with the parent.
I agree that spam is a social problem, but you need to qualify what you mean a little more. Technology is the enabling mechanism to this problem (that some people are willing to be jerks and abuse a medium). Computers are exceedingly good at cranking out spam, day and night, and the medium of email is exceedingly weak against protecting against this kind of abuse. The same kind of social problem exists in all communications mediums, but you don't see just anyone wardialing people to sell viagra and penis pills. Calling a million people is expensive and time consuming, spamming is not. Therefore, this is a technologically exagerated (sp?) manifestation of a very minor social problem, making your point all but useless when trying to solve it. You've got to solve the problem in this situation, which is the enabler - technology.
What about Joe Mama?
While we're all gloating over this admittedly funny situation the labels have put themselves in, rest assured that this cost will only get passed on to the artists eventually. Either artists will have to give up these types of royalties in the future, or they'll get used in some other way (maybe increasing hidden costs like legal fees or higher interested on artist advances, or perhaps just worse royalty agreements in the first place).
The end result is that this is a minor hiccup, one the labels are more than willing to trade in their effort to screw Joe P2P User or Joe Casual CD Borrower or Joe Fair Use User.
I found this comment amusing, and it is an interesting idea, but realistically, nobody carried their passport on them constantly while they're overseas.
Still, this deal is like the perfect marriage: the worst information company given the job of implementing the worst information idea.
Does this setup let you run USB devices from the legacy DOS apps? IE, can you print to a USB printer from the emulated DOS?
I realize this question is a little contrived, but I've got a friend who's accounting software was written for DOS, and he's having trouble getting printer support under it. USB for DOS doesn't exist, so I'm wondering how the emulation handles device support.
Course, I could RTFM, but then what's slashdot for?
I guess so on the speaker definition. When I meant medium quality, I meant around $2-300 speakers.
I was using LAME and a couple of other encoders that I can't remember off the top of my head to encode things for tests.
I can consistently determine the difference between a CD and 192kbps in a double blind test environment. If it's a genre of music that I really like, and a band I know well, I can even do pretty well between a 256kbps MP3 and a CD.
This is on medium to low quality speakers.
If we're talking about headphones, I can tell every time between the CD and any lossy encoding method.
You obviously don't listen to music for detail, which is ok, that's fine, but stop sounding stupid saying that noticing fine detail in music is impossible.
I am an artist that has used MP3.com for 4 years to distribute the music that my band records. Back in the heyday, we even made several hundred dollars from people downloading our stuff as several of our songs were in the top 40 grunge chart.
MP3.com was a really cool service.
Still - why the hell would we want the content to be preserved? I don't want copies of my music floating around in some other record company's vault. They're doing the smart thing by destroying the music, otherwise, they could be accused for ripping off the most popular bands on MP3.com.
With today's web hosting market, bandwidth is cheap enough for bands to afford to distribute their music themselves, and if anybody is reading this and needs space for their band, my company (Cerebral Tech, Inc) will host you with no strings for ten bucks a month, just send me an email.
Just because a big record company is behind this doesn't mean its wrong - they're actually doing something that benefits us artists in the long run.
This is not an insightful post. Serious people use Oracle. Poor people use PostgreSQL. If you need Oracle, you will have to use it or DB2 - PostgreSQL just can't cut it on several levels with Oracle, currently.
So what you're saying is, it's not expensive to release multiple versions, since the sales impact is so large.
Ahh, you've got to love circular reasoning.
You're just wrong.
Any CD you buy at Walmart by a band that normally has explicit lyrics will be a special "censored" version that has the bad words XX-d out in the lyric sheet, the CD packaging, and hissed out of the song.
up2date AFIK does not allow you to install new packages or upgrade old ones past major versions. Also, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't do very good dependency checking.
I agree with everything you said - redhat is not ready for the desktop, in my experience. RPMs are a nightmare to find and install, and compiling is really bad on redhat.
A friend got me turned on the Debian a few months ago, and now I'm a true linux convert - I run Debian and even have WINE for things I can't live without like War3 and Photoshop.
Debian makes installing almost entirely painless - you just type "apt-get install packagename" and that's it. Such a joy - it figures out your dependencies and everything.
The only beef I have with Debian is the install process, but even that's ok.
If you'd like some help, just shoot me an email or something.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but doesn't it seem odd that we're all expecting the cable companies to allow competition on a physical network that they built and own? If someone wants to compete with them, let them build their own network. Am I completely off base?
Listen, get a grip - when a component goes bad in a home grown system, you throw it away and buy a new one. Nobody cares - it's cheaper to just spend a hundred bucks or whatever then it is to dick with manufacturers. If you home grow, you home repair. Duh.