It was a good example of what happens when costs are cut and contractors rob the client. A contracting company was called in to do radiography on a series of welds. They examined one easily accesable weld, and changed the lead ID numbers on each of a few hundred films to make it appear that they had examined several hundred welds. There were not enough staff to check the work of the contractor, so even such an obvious scam remained undiscovered until a pipe leaked. It's hard to look down on the Russians when such things happen. Some may argue that all of this happened long ago and couldn't happen now, but economic rationalisation is more prevalent now than it was back them.
The only thing that went wrong at TMI was the senseless media frenzy.
The court decided differently.
Chernobyl is a totally different situation. It was caused by porrly trained people performing a dangerous procedure
You have of course heard of the recent incident in a US facility where enough high grade waste was stored in close enough proximity to start pumping out some serious radiation. The people there were poorly trained as well.
Nuclear power was the shiny hope of the 1950's which didn't quite work out as expected. Ultimately there are cheaper and much, much safer ways to produce steam, and much better uses for radioactive materials than boiling water.
Australia can't affort to build and operate a nuclear plant - they are very expensive.
Also, you all may recall the recent news that British Nuclear Fuels has liabilities of 48,000,000,000 pounds sterling (I think you still come close to doubling that for US dollars). After more than thirty years of operation of nuclear power in the UK the debts are astronomical and still growing.
In the US, of course, the plants can break even by selling weapons materials at a cost calculated to keep them breaking even, which is why you only see nuclear power in countries that have nuclear weapons or aspire to do so.
As for safe and clean, ask someone in the Ukrane about that! Also remember that the grossest mistakes of Russian engineering have been mirrored in the past by corner cutting US entrepenuers (Three Mile Island).
A typical steam generated unit in Australia generates only 350MW. Power stations obviously have a few of these, each with their own boiler, turbine and half of a cooling tower.
It may be cheaper to build a few of these solar units than one enormous thing that can pump out 1GW.
The article mentions how annoying Clippy is, but says that MS researchers still think a 'helpful' interface is a good idea if done properly. Can anybody think of a good way to do this without it becoming annoying?
Maybe launch quake in a small window with clippy in front of you and a BFG in your hands?
Seriously, just blanking over the taskbar icons and scrolling a message over it should be fairly unobtrusive, so long as you can click on the message to expose the icons underneath.
The richest man in the world, doesnt have to worry about anything
With great power comes great responsibility.
If he sat back and did nothing, some enterpising soul would come along and take it all away from him - unless he has people that he trusts looking after his interests.
Just look at a bit of history, wastrel kings or sons of millionaries that blow their inherited fortunes.
A bunch of individuals out for their own who make clueless decisions to avoid any that would make them unpopular. In that situation, stupid stuff happens, and the "team" is only as good as an individual.
I saw this sort of behaviour in a tinpot little suburban volunteer civil defence organisation which had an ingrained culture of not trusting anyone with different skills to your own. In a training course I was told that "A leader can never admit that they are wrong, and using anothers idea just because it is better undermines disipline."
I've been stabbed in the back at work, but not very often. If you can't trust your co-workers it would be very difficult to get anything done that requires the work of several people with different skillsets - the guy who is an expert on subject "X" could be telling you anything and you wouldn't know.
On Survivor I'd be the first to go - I would suggest the unpopular but obvious, and would refuse to go with the majority decision if it was really stupid (camp in a river bed at the start of the wet season, eat wild pig when they are notorious for parasites that attack people too etc.(OK local knowledge helps, but some things are just stupid)) - so I would probably not survive long in a workplace like the one you've described.
It depends where you work. I've worked in some fairly nasty workplaces, but luckily I've never been in that situation. Most managers are mature enough to know that it takes time to bring new people up to speed in a skilled or semi-skilled position. If everyone has the same skills there could be a problem. If a competative culture has been deliberately created, so that there "can only be one" that gets the raise, then that wouldn't be so pleasant, and a lot of people are going to cheat to get the prize.
Talk bad about the boss around the wrong guy
One of my co-workers did that in the photographic darkroom while the boss was there - it scared the * out of him, but he kept his job for another seven months after that.
never trust anyone at work
Sometimes you have to or you can't do your work. When I couldn't trust my boss anymore over serious safety issues ("the radiography has been cancelled, it's safe to go in that manhole and get the equipment") it was time to leave.
Third rule is not to date women from work
If it falls apart one of you will probably go looking for another job. If it works you'll have trouble keeping work out of your home life - at least that's what's happened with the couples I've worked with.
Apparently my government monitored all telephone calls in the neighbouring country of Papua New Guinea using a system called Echelon, and complained bitterly and publicly that it didn't work when they didn't find out that PNG had employed mercenaries to put down a revolt. Needless to say, the system isn't secret anymore.
If seems awfully close to the practices of the old U.S.S.R.
It looks like the US is getting 1930's USSR problems and the ex-USSR is getting 1930's US organised crime problems.
Either place has problems, come to Australia, just don't come by boat or we'll push you back out to sea! And if the US gets restrictive communications laws we'll try to draft some that are even more restrictive!
Currently encyrption is not restricted here (which has enabled Australians and New Zealanders to work on such things as SSLeay while those in the US could only watch due to the threat of imprisonment), but laws have been proposed in the past, and will probably resurface in two or three months when the government gets back to work.
Didn't Nikola Tesla do something like this? I rember reading about a lamp that had no cords that the power went thru the air some sorta wireless that was safe.
He did. It's now called radio (he was eventually granted the patent). His experiments showed that it was incredibly inefficient as a method of getting electricity form one point to another along way off, but you don't find out until you try. I think transformers came out of that research.
As for it being safe, large amounts of RF radiation will turn you into a crispy critter.
All of the earth return work he did also looked very weird - apparantly he planted a light bulb in the ground near an AC generator and it lit up.
He has a reputation for being a crackpot, which mostly came from Edison calling him names over the DC (Edison) vs AC (Tesla) debate, and from a few psuedo-documentaties that came out in the 1970's (you know the sort- "What are these mysterious roads into the sea, are they proof that Easter Island was once part of Atlantis?" when twenty years before someone with scuba gear has proved that they were BOAT RAMPS!). All of those pencil sketches that are shown things like airships generating power by the potential difference in the atmosphere and broadcasting it were never published (that's why they are in pencil), and just get dragged out when someone wants to make Tesla the pin-up boy of the conspiricy theorists.
Blind solution - advantage of RF wireless over IR
on
Concept PC 2001
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· Score: 2
There's a blind guy I know that has a radio frequency wireless keyboard and has his PC sound output going to a short range FM transmitter (the sort that is used to listen to a portable CD player on a car radio). He walks around the house with his keyboard and headphones while his computer reads out the contents of web pages.
For those of us that can see and need to be in the same room as the monitor, the range and less dependance on direction or line of sight of RF over infra-red is an advantage. For example, my IR mouse can't quite make it from the lounge to the top of the TV set, so the sensor has to sit on an object at the same height as the mouse about a metre in front of the TV.
One possibility, which I don't think has a commercial solution yet, is to connect a transmitter to the RF-out on a video card, have it tuned to a spare channel and use TV sets wherever you go as monitors. The frequencies for TV are at the top end of the MHz range, so a very similar piece of equipment to the small, low power FM transmitters should do to job. Picture quality will not be fantastic due to NTSC (not the same colour twice) and PAL limitations. For those of us with one TV a cable would be better.
Now if I want to find out about US nuclear engineering I'll have to go to China and read their copy.
If I want to find out about US weapons I'll have to get a brochure from the manufacturer, or ask military in another country about how they perform in combat conditions (I'll just need to go to Latin America).
Seriously, any street map or telephone book has military value, but that is no reason to go overboard and ban them. If information is only a tool of the state, the state will soon run out of people that can use information.
They work in TWM, too, but the windows have a title bar whose bottom edge matches their top edge.
Of course! I'd forgotten that it's just the tab from the "tabbed window manager". Now that I think about it X will handle shaped windows even without a window manager running. A polygon shaped Xterm, or even something with bezier curves would be interesting, but well beyond me at the moment.
I beleive, in fact, that in E17, support for KDE/GNOME are gone. This is because E17's aim is to be a "desktop shell".
Or perhaps it's because E 0.17 is a rewrite and not everything that is in E 0.16 is implemented in it yet? The home page at www.enlightenment.org seems to indicate this.
If I could just reshape my terminal window so that it resembled a big L that would really help my workflow!
X can do shaped windows (Oclock, xeyes, xjig (jigsaw pieces as shaped windows on the root window) etc).
if we were able to change windows into whatever shape we wanted it would certainly allow for some boasting rights over M$
The recent M$ GUI's can also do shaped windows, maybe even as far back as win95.
We could have Lava-Gnome or Lava-KDE or whatever
Or maybe lava-term, any window manager newer than twm should be able to handle the shaped windows. Resizing the things in L shapes would either have to be handled by the app or by changing the controls in the window manager a fair bit.
It won't take too many methanol spills on the carpeting for somebody to bail on the whole idea.
It won't leave any red wine stains and shouldn't dissolve the carpet dye - it will just smell bad for a while until it all evaporates. You can use the stuff for cleaning, but ethanol is a lot better for that purpose. Ethanol also works well in a fuel cell, but is heavily regulated and taxed in a lot of places. Spilling the methanol on your skin is a bad idea (it diffuses in like ethanol, and like ethanol it athough probably not far, but it is a lot more toxic), getting it in your eyes would not be good at all. The stuff that gets you drunk is ethanol, the "Methylated Spirits" that is in a few countries was once almost entirely ethanol with a small amount of methanol added to allow more water to be boiled off. In most places the methanol is no longer in "methylated spirits" because it killed too many people that drank it.
Here is a Material Safety Data Sheet for methanol, which list what you should do when you handle the stuff.
Rather than focusing on where they are, we should be focusing on where they will be.
But we can't since melange isn't available.
Both are good, both are popular, and both should take the best from each other. What happens from now on will be interesting to see. The project with less developers may still produce something amazing that everyone wants to use.
I don't know much about NetBSD, but I several years ago it was described to me how easy it was to do a network install of the thing (insert floppy, fill in the IP address and a couple of other questions, then sit back and watch it install). A few distributions of linux have adopted the same idea. Most well written programs for linux will also compile on BSD - and probably the thing that influence users the most is the applications anyway.
Ultimately it's not a race and it never has been, it's a BMW vs Mercedes sort of argument (with Irix et al as a great big car carrying hovercraft - not so fast or airconditioned, but great if there are lots of people on board).
Actually, yes, IF I had the oppurtunity to evaluate it,
For instance, using the free version for evalution, and if it can do what you want it to, buying the full version? If it can't then it's a matter of either using something that does fit your requirements, or finding out if the full version has the different features you need. This applies to any aspect of engineering.
if you've used Qt/Free version at any point of development
Does that include evaluation as well? I suspect that it doesn't - othwise they wouldn't be able to sell anything. Playing with something to see if it can do what you want it to do is not development - since the immediate goal is testing and not a usable product.
Just because it would be trivial protection to break, doesn't mean it would not be illegal.
My point is simply that it would be very difficult to enforce, and things like the DMCA would stop them from bringing up any evidence. If it can be argued for a few days in court that it is criminal offence for them to examine binaries of companies that have obviously ripped them off, then it is not worth taking the time to even look (plus the ridiculous expense of going out and buying suspect software - we are not talking about M$ or Adobe with money to burn here).
It's probably time for me to shut up and let someone that's actually used both versions speak up .
Well, if you use X11 on it, you effectively lose all the built-in apps, which want to write directly to the screen buffer.
How about letting user input switch between the two display systems by poking an icon with a stylus or something? Also, your other idea (X in a window on the display which is owned by another display system) has some merit - XFree86 on win* works that way. The ideal would be to recompile the existing apps for X on that platform when X is working on that platform.
I seem to recall seeing on./ that there is a serious effort going on to produce a very lightweight X again.
Just because sharp haven't done everything for you doesn't mean it is useless - it looks like it could be the toy that the Newton promised to be but never was (even the calculator app used undocumented features).
Forget about easily porting existing applications
Try, but it still should be easier than porting to a palm.
I suspect that you would have to look around for a while in the Ukraine before you found an intelligent, informed person that still thinks that nuclear energy is "clean", particularly since they would have seen or heard plenty to the contary.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear power was the shiny hope of the 1950's which didn't quite work out as expected. Ultimately there are cheaper and much, much safer ways to produce steam, and much better uses for radioactive materials than boiling water.
Also, you all may recall the recent news that British Nuclear Fuels has liabilities of 48,000,000,000 pounds sterling (I think you still come close to doubling that for US dollars). After more than thirty years of operation of nuclear power in the UK the debts are astronomical and still growing.
In the US, of course, the plants can break even by selling weapons materials at a cost calculated to keep them breaking even, which is why you only see nuclear power in countries that have nuclear weapons or aspire to do so.
As for safe and clean, ask someone in the Ukrane about that! Also remember that the grossest mistakes of Russian engineering have been mirrored in the past by corner cutting US entrepenuers (Three Mile Island).
A typical steam generated unit in Australia generates only 350MW. Power stations obviously have a few of these, each with their own boiler, turbine and half of a cooling tower.
It may be cheaper to build a few of these solar units than one enormous thing that can pump out 1GW.
Seriously, just blanking over the taskbar icons and scrolling a message over it should be fairly unobtrusive, so long as you can click on the message to expose the icons underneath.
If he sat back and did nothing, some enterpising soul would come along and take it all away from him - unless he has people that he trusts looking after his interests.
Just look at a bit of history, wastrel kings or sons of millionaries that blow their inherited fortunes.
I saw this sort of behaviour in a tinpot little suburban volunteer civil defence organisation which had an ingrained culture of not trusting anyone with different skills to your own. In a training course I was told that "A leader can never admit that they are wrong, and using anothers idea just because it is better undermines disipline."
I've been stabbed in the back at work, but not very often. If you can't trust your co-workers it would be very difficult to get anything done that requires the work of several people with different skillsets - the guy who is an expert on subject "X" could be telling you anything and you wouldn't know.
On Survivor I'd be the first to go - I would suggest the unpopular but obvious, and would refuse to go with the majority decision if it was really stupid (camp in a river bed at the start of the wet season, eat wild pig when they are notorious for parasites that attack people too etc.(OK local knowledge helps, but some things are just stupid)) - so I would probably not survive long in a workplace like the one you've described.
Either place has problems, come to Australia, just don't come by boat or we'll push you back out to sea! And if the US gets restrictive communications laws we'll try to draft some that are even more restrictive!
Currently encyrption is not restricted here (which has enabled Australians and New Zealanders to work on such things as SSLeay while those in the US could only watch due to the threat of imprisonment), but laws have been proposed in the past, and will probably resurface in two or three months when the government gets back to work.
It's funny how everything from "Myth: Linux is more secure than Windows NT" down is in very small print. Maybe they shrank the font after Code Red?
As for it being safe, large amounts of RF radiation will turn you into a crispy critter.
All of the earth return work he did also looked very weird - apparantly he planted a light bulb in the ground near an AC generator and it lit up.
He has a reputation for being a crackpot, which mostly came from Edison calling him names over the DC (Edison) vs AC (Tesla) debate, and from a few psuedo-documentaties that came out in the 1970's (you know the sort- "What are these mysterious roads into the sea, are they proof that Easter Island was once part of Atlantis?" when twenty years before someone with scuba gear has proved that they were BOAT RAMPS!). All of those pencil sketches that are shown things like airships generating power by the potential difference in the atmosphere and broadcasting it were never published (that's why they are in pencil), and just get dragged out when someone wants to make Tesla the pin-up boy of the conspiricy theorists.
For those of us that can see and need to be in the same room as the monitor, the range and less dependance on direction or line of sight of RF over infra-red is an advantage. For example, my IR mouse can't quite make it from the lounge to the top of the TV set, so the sensor has to sit on an object at the same height as the mouse about a metre in front of the TV.
One possibility, which I don't think has a commercial solution yet, is to connect a transmitter to the RF-out on a video card, have it tuned to a spare channel and use TV sets wherever you go as monitors. The frequencies for TV are at the top end of the MHz range, so a very similar piece of equipment to the small, low power FM transmitters should do to job. Picture quality will not be fantastic due to NTSC (not the same colour twice) and PAL limitations. For those of us with one TV a cable would be better.
If I want to find out about US weapons I'll have to get a brochure from the manufacturer, or ask military in another country about how they perform in combat conditions (I'll just need to go to Latin America).
Seriously, any street map or telephone book has military value, but that is no reason to go overboard and ban them. If information is only a tool of the state, the state will soon run out of people that can use information.
Here is a Material Safety Data Sheet for methanol, which list what you should do when you handle the stuff.
They're called UPS ground. The stuff is not quite ground up, but they had a fair go at it.
Both are good, both are popular, and both should take the best from each other. What happens from now on will be interesting to see. The project with less developers may still produce something amazing that everyone wants to use.
I don't know much about NetBSD, but I several years ago it was described to me how easy it was to do a network install of the thing (insert floppy, fill in the IP address and a couple of other questions, then sit back and watch it install). A few distributions of linux have adopted the same idea. Most well written programs for linux will also compile on BSD - and probably the thing that influence users the most is the applications anyway.
Ultimately it's not a race and it never has been, it's a BMW vs Mercedes sort of argument (with Irix et al as a great big car carrying hovercraft - not so fast or airconditioned, but great if there are lots of people on board).
Just think - Apocalypse now without Marlon Brando!
Selective edits could improve a lot of movies.
It's probably time for me to shut up and let someone that's actually used both versions speak up .
You have the X source.
You have the hardware docs.
You have the right to modify the source.
I seem to recall seeing on ./ that there is a serious effort going on to produce a very lightweight X again.
Just because sharp haven't done everything for you doesn't mean it is useless - it looks like it could be the toy that the Newton promised to be but never was (even the calculator app used undocumented features).
Try, but it still should be easier than porting to a palm.