Yes but that assumed there was something there listening. Mars Express wasn't in position to listen until a couple of days ago and the Odyssey/Beagle link had never been tested because of the lateness of development of Beagle and given the current record for the US picking standards contrary to the rest of the world it probably wouldn't have worked if they had tried;-)
Interestingly when they turned off 405 line TV in the UK they waited for any complaints and bought the complainers new TVs. It will probably be the same for analogue. It's cheaper than keeping the networks running.
Some of us use our radios to listen to more than music. In fact I can't remember the last time I listened to a music station, or infact the last time I listened to a comercial one.
I'm interested in it not for the extra quality but for the additional programming. I probably listen to the radio more than I watch TV and there are some channels I can only get via freeview, sky or streamed over the net which is fine at home but not out and about, in the car etc.
Everyone is saying how slow bluetooth is and you should be using USB or 802.11b or g and that is fine provided you have those available. Bluetooth would be most useful to me for transfering images to my PDA or mobile phone for e-mailing from the scene via GPRS. This I have done with a Sony DV Cam which has bluetooth (and a built in e-mail client!).
As it happens I've been looking at good Digital Cameras and have decided on one partly because it has flash media compatable with my PDA so I can use that to send from the scene.
Most people in the UK are taught from an early age that George Stephenson (UK) invented the Rocket, regarded as the first commercial locomotive engine for railways. But the steam engine already existed (Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, UK), the steam-powered vehicle already existed (Richard Trevithick, UK), and for all we know the Chinese might have invented vehicles on rails centuries before.
But of course we were using railed systems for years before that except we used horse power. That's why the tracks a the funny width they are, 4'8" 3/4. It's apparently the width required to fit a horse in between the rails.
The Bill Gates of his era. Heard of Humprey Davy or Sir Joseph Swan at all? By the time that Edison had come up with his filament bulbLord Armstrong was already lighting Cragside, his home, with Swan's bulbs.
People don't always remember the people who are important. Only those with good publicity machines or who were right bastards.
Could someone please explain to me the British fetish for its Monarchy ? The government is now a constitutional democracy, so why is there so much homage paid to the archaic traditions and figureheads of the past?
Well in my view, as the Queen has few powers now and a President would just move the power from the prime-minister who acts like a president most of the time anyway there's no real loss in having a Monach and they are a good tourist attraction.
A Knight isn't part of the monachy and knighthoods, just like the other awards, are usually put forward, by others, for consideration. There are people like school care takers and people who have worked hard for charity who have got awards too.
A great example of this is the insane media land-grab over Princess Diana's death. Hundreds of thousands of people die in traffic accidents each year - why was hers so deserving of three whole months of media coverage, weeping, wailing, and moaning?
Don't know and I'm a Brit. No different I suppose to the press coverage of say OJ's trial vs others trials.
During the first few centuries of Christianity it's celebration was banned by the Pope but everyone ignored it. Who wouldn't ignore the banning of a good piss-up. Then in the fourth century the Pope created Christmyth as a way of subverting the original festival, retaining it and eradicating the original meaning by replacing it with his own propaganda. The date is now 25th December due to calendar changes in the 18th century hence the reason that 12th night is now 6th January and not the first as it used to be. Christ, as far as anyone can tell, if he existed was born sometime in September. The Solstice celebration is to ensure the rebirth of the year and the sun, hence the relationship with the birth of Christ. The Solstice also signifies the new year.
Modern Christmyth celebrations are about 90% Pagan with a small amount of Christianity overlaid. Evergreens, e.g. Holly, Fir trees, Ivy and Mistletoe or symbolise the hope of life. The feast is for celebration and is related to the old feast of Saturnalia. The colours of red and green relate to the God and Goddess and Santa Claus is a combination of St Nicholas and the Horned God aka Father Christmas who inseminates the Goddess to form the new year.
If it is dead (which is still a big 'if') then I won't be saddened. If the Europeans had decided to help us in Iraq, I might be thinking differently - but the major contributors to the project (as funding is based on GDP) -- France and Germany -- I feel little for their inherent failure.
Beagle 2 itself was a British project and I kind of remember that we had a fairly significant input in to the recent Iraq war. For one Blair was a useful translator of Shrub to English.
Yes many Parisians do come across of arogant but then so do many Americans.
All I know is that I would rather walk hand in hand with my girl friend down the Champs Elise wearing a pentacle than doing the same on a major street in Washington. Can you honestly say that I could stick a pin in a map of the US and then go there and know I would be safe being myself?
No, but so far I'm batting 1.000
What does that mean in English? I don't get the reference.
Ok. It's a fair point and I didn't write a particularly good post. You are absolutely correct in saying that forcing someone not to do something is just as bad as forcing someone to do something. I'm currently in a bad mood because christmas is being forced down my throat everywhere I go.
Actually they are outlawing the wearing of any religious aparel and that includes the head scarf (rather than the veil) crucifixes, kipurs and the like. Basically they are saying our schools are secular and so all religious identity is banned. I really don't have a problem with that. People can believe what they like but I don't want it forced on me. The difficulty is that you have to decide whether something is religious or cultural and separate the two.
Probably about a third of the world's population drives on the left. For a start, off the top of my head, there's Japan, Eire, Indian, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwi, Kenya etc. etc. Once upon a time a quarter of the map of the world was pink (the colour for the British Empire) and most of them inherited driving on the left. Some countries have switched over as have others who weren't ex colonies but did drive on the left. In Europe for example either Sweden or Switzerland (I can't remember which) swapped over to be consistent with their neighbours.
In the 18th century the Montgolfier brothers launched a balloon carrying a man - The first ever recorded flight although the Chinese used kites when men strapped to them.
In 1852 Jules Cliffard flew a man in a steam powered dirigable air balloon - The first ever controlled powered flight.
In 1853 Sir George Cayley (who also invented flight surfaces such as flaps and rudder etc) flew his butler in an unpowered monoplane. Unfortunately his gunpowder engine didn't work well! (Basically an internal combustion engine using gunpowder explosions. The quality of the materials meant it kept blowing up). He had actually been successful in flying un manned gliders for the previous fifty years and is considered the father of modern air design. - The first manned flight of a plane.
In 1890 Clement Adler flew in a steam powered monoplane. - The first ever engine powered plane flight.
In early 1903 Richard Pearse, a farmer from New Zealand, flew a similar design but with a petrol engine - The first petrol powered manned flight.
In December 1903 a couple of bicycle makers got in to the act with a fairly primitive plane.
It just goes to show it's not whether you were there first just how good your marketing department is.
Too right. The 550 is twenty years old and a laugh. The 1100 is a big lardy unfaired bike and so against smaller sports bikes it's slow in a straight line but get to the bends and it's great fun hauling it from side to side, scaping the boots along the road and the like. My favourite ride, Yorkshire to the Lakes, is just like that.
The old "going too fast" chestnut. I don't like the phrase excessive speed I prefer the phrase inappropriate speed. In the UK 70MPH is legal on a motorway but is it safe on a raining or foggy day with limited visibility or with a lot of traffic on the road? Conversely is 100MPH unsafe on a straight dry road with little traffic and great visibility.
My bike accelerates faster than an average European car and stops quicker than an average European car (0-100-0 mph in 15 seconds) and as any good driver will say it's often safer to accelerate out of trouble rather than to break in to it (ask any traffic cop who's been properly trained). I have done 135mph on public roads with the right conditions. But in built up areas with children and pedestrians I will ride somewhat under the speed limit.
If speed per se was the factor then there would be deaths in motorbike racing all the time. There aren't and those that are usually not because of the "off" but because they get hit by another bike or hit something hard.
Then add those who have taken direct access and leapt from a 125cc bike directly on to an R1. The problem is that discovering the limits of a bike like that is at best dangerous and at worse lethal.
Discovering the limits of a 250cc bike is a lot safer. Personally I worked up from a 125cc bike to a 550cc bike to an 1100cc bike over the period of several years. Each time I learnt where the limits of the bike were and how they felt when they were starting to reach them.
Actually the most common danger to motorcyclists is alcohol. The majority of bike accidents do not involve cars, read the Hurt Report.
Probably in the US but not over here in the UK. One of the biggest rides locally ends up at a coffee shop that sells a great Hot Chocolate. All of my biker friends know that bikes are lethal enough without being under the influence. And that's confirmed by the fact that I have never heard of anyone I know being done for drunk riding.
Maybe, but you could get Kermit on just about every platform under the sun.
Which was why it was great. Back in the early 80's it was the only thing I could get for all of my hardware. In some cases I had X & Y modem and in some cases, X, Y and Z. But the biggest reason why was that, almost twenty years ago, I used to it transfer software, data and my thesis to and from my trusty BBC Micro to York University's VAX mainframe via another BBC Micro that was connected to it. It was the only way I got data to and from the outside world.
I run a team who's job is partly sorting out the sort of mess that this attitude to forking creates. If there are missing features etc left out then add them to the existing project don't fork.
Forking is inefficient. Where code is unaltered you have two sets of development teams debugging the same code. You can guarantee they don't talk to one another and so it may get fixed in one branch but not the other. Maintenance is then a nightmare. You end up with features scattered between the two (or more) code trees. It's a waste of effort and time.
We had similar problems where I work. Code reuse comprised forking and existing code tree to support the new hardware and features that a new project required. This mean that bugs would be fixed by one project team but another one would never hear of the fix. It also resulted in many variants of the same code wasting engineering time and effort.
Forking or Branching per se isn't bad it's not merging that is bad.
Instead, they are providing a 'branch' of XFree86 that will focus on being bleeding-edge and providing fast turnaround for development and testing, so that they can interface with the slow, bloated XFree86 organization to improve XFree86.
That's what's bad about OpenSource. Everyone wants to do the 'kewl' stuff an no one wants to do the grind that many of these projects need. I'm sorry but a hell of a lot of Open Source software just isn't carried out professionally. Yes you can leap in and add all sorts of cool and froody stuff but the boring bits like quality control, documentation etc gets left behind. Where are the code reviews, test suites and the like? It still has the feeling of bedroom hacker development. If I ran my development team like some of these projects are run I would be severely slapped!
I have a Linux PDA. I'm still using the software it came with despite trying open source alternatives every couple of months or so. Why? Because some functionality is missing because it's not kewl. The documentation is crap. It's as buggy as hell At least with the comercial variant time was taken to clean it up. Yes it may be technologically behind but it's reliable.
And then there's the common misconception that Open Source == Linux Development and Linux == UNIX. Both are wrong. I've can't count the number of times I've tried to use Open Source "UNIX" software to find it only works on Linux. I'm impressed at how far Linux has come and if you have a cheap PC then it's a great OS but it's still a toy OS compared to what I'm used to.
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Yes but that assumed there was something there listening. Mars Express wasn't in position to listen until a couple of days ago and the Odyssey/Beagle link had never been tested because of the lateness of development of Beagle and given the current record for the US picking standards contrary to the rest of the world it probably wouldn't have worked if they had tried ;-)
Interestingly when they turned off 405 line TV in the UK they waited for any complaints and bought the complainers new TVs. It will probably be the same for analogue. It's cheaper than keeping the networks running.
Some of us use our radios to listen to more than music. In fact I can't remember the last time I listened to a music station, or infact the last time I listened to a comercial one.
FM has something like a 15KHz cut off and most audio is transmitted about the networks (the BBC particularly) at 32Khz PCM.
I'm interested in it not for the extra quality but for the additional programming. I probably listen to the radio more than I watch TV and there are some channels I can only get via freeview, sky or streamed over the net which is fine at home but not out and about, in the car etc.
Everyone is saying how slow bluetooth is and you should be using USB or 802.11b or g and that is fine provided you have those available. Bluetooth would be most useful to me for transfering images to my PDA or mobile phone for e-mailing from the scene via GPRS. This I have done with a Sony DV Cam which has bluetooth (and a built in e-mail client!).
As it happens I've been looking at good Digital Cameras and have decided on one partly because it has flash media compatable with my PDA so I can use that to send from the scene.
Most people in the UK are taught from an early age that George Stephenson (UK) invented the Rocket, regarded as the first commercial locomotive engine for railways. But the steam engine already existed (Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, UK), the steam-powered vehicle already existed (Richard Trevithick, UK), and for all we know the Chinese might have invented vehicles on rails centuries before.
But of course we were using railed systems for years before that except we used horse power. That's why the tracks a the funny width they are, 4'8" 3/4. It's apparently the width required to fit a horse in between the rails.
Then again, nobody has any clue who invented rail transit.
The first railed transport system was in Greece at about 500BC.
that everyone knows the names of Edison
The Bill Gates of his era. Heard of Humprey Davy or Sir Joseph Swan at all? By the time that Edison had come up with his filament bulb Lord Armstrong was already lighting Cragside, his home, with Swan's bulbs.
People don't always remember the people who are important. Only those with good publicity machines or who were right bastards.
Could someone please explain to me the British fetish for its Monarchy ? The government is now a constitutional democracy, so why is there so much homage paid to the archaic traditions and figureheads of the past?
Well in my view, as the Queen has few powers now and a President would just move the power from the prime-minister who acts like a president most of the time anyway there's no real loss in having a Monach and they are a good tourist attraction.
A Knight isn't part of the monachy and knighthoods, just like the other awards, are usually put forward, by others, for consideration. There are people like school care takers and people who have worked hard for charity who have got awards too.
A great example of this is the insane media land-grab over Princess Diana's death. Hundreds of thousands of people die in traffic accidents each year - why was hers so deserving of three whole months of media coverage, weeping, wailing, and moaning?
Don't know and I'm a Brit. No different I suppose to the press coverage of say OJ's trial vs others trials.
Yule is the mid winter solstice.
During the first few centuries of Christianity it's celebration was banned by the Pope but everyone ignored it. Who wouldn't ignore the banning of a good piss-up. Then in the fourth century the Pope created Christmyth as a way of subverting the original festival, retaining it and eradicating the original meaning by replacing it with his own propaganda. The date is now 25th December due to calendar changes in the 18th century hence the reason that 12th night is now 6th January and not the first as it used to be.
Christ, as far as anyone can tell, if he existed was born sometime in September. The Solstice celebration is to ensure the rebirth of the year and the sun, hence the relationship with the birth of Christ. The Solstice also signifies the new year.
Modern Christmyth celebrations are about 90% Pagan with a small amount of Christianity overlaid. Evergreens, e.g. Holly, Fir trees, Ivy and Mistletoe or symbolise the hope of life. The feast is for celebration and is related to the old feast of Saturnalia. The colours of red and green relate to the God and Goddess and Santa Claus is a combination of St Nicholas and the Horned God aka Father Christmas who inseminates the Goddess to form the new year.
If it is dead (which is still a big 'if') then I won't be saddened. If the Europeans had decided to help us in Iraq, I might be thinking differently - but the major contributors to the project (as funding is based on GDP) -- France and Germany -- I feel little for their inherent failure.
Beagle 2 itself was a British project and I kind of remember that we had a fairly significant input in to the recent Iraq war. For one Blair was a useful translator of Shrub to English.
Yes many Parisians do come across of arogant but then so do many Americans.
All I know is that I would rather walk hand in hand with my girl friend down the Champs Elise wearing a pentacle than doing the same on a major street in Washington. Can you honestly say that I could stick a pin in a map of the US and then go there and know I would be safe being myself?
No, but so far I'm batting 1.000
What does that mean in English? I don't get the reference.
Ok. It's a fair point and I didn't write a particularly good post. You are absolutely correct in saying that forcing someone not to do something is just as bad as forcing someone to do something. I'm currently in a bad mood because christmas is being forced down my throat everywhere I go.
Actually they are outlawing the wearing of any religious aparel and that includes the head scarf (rather than the veil) crucifixes, kipurs and the like. Basically they are saying our schools are secular and so all religious identity is banned. I really don't have a problem with that. People can believe what they like but I don't want it forced on me. The difficulty is that you have to decide whether something is religious or cultural and separate the two.
apart from driving on the left hand side
Probably about a third of the world's population drives on the left. For a start, off the top of my head, there's Japan, Eire, Indian, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwi, Kenya etc. etc. Once upon a time a quarter of the map of the world was pink (the colour for the British Empire) and most of them inherited driving on the left. Some countries have switched over as have others who weren't ex colonies but did drive on the left. In Europe for example either Sweden or Switzerland (I can't remember which) swapped over to be consistent with their neighbours.
It just goes to show it's not whether you were there first just how good your marketing department is.
Too right. The 550 is twenty years old and a laugh. The 1100 is a big lardy unfaired bike and so against smaller sports bikes it's slow in a straight line but get to the bends and it's great fun hauling it from side to side, scaping the boots along the road and the like. My favourite ride, Yorkshire to the Lakes, is just like that.
The old "going too fast" chestnut. I don't like the phrase excessive speed I prefer the phrase inappropriate speed. In the UK 70MPH is legal on a motorway but is it safe on a raining or foggy day with limited visibility or with a lot of traffic on the road? Conversely is 100MPH unsafe on a straight dry road with little traffic and great visibility.
My bike accelerates faster than an average European car and stops quicker than an average European car (0-100-0 mph in 15 seconds) and as any good driver will say it's often safer to accelerate out of trouble rather than to break in to it (ask any traffic cop who's been properly trained). I have done 135mph on public roads with the right conditions. But in built up areas with children and pedestrians I will ride somewhat under the speed limit.
If speed per se was the factor then there would be deaths in motorbike racing all the time. There aren't and those that are usually not because of the "off" but because they get hit by another bike or hit something hard.
Then add those who have taken direct access and leapt from a 125cc bike directly on to an R1. The problem is that discovering the limits of a bike like that is at best dangerous and at worse lethal.
Discovering the limits of a 250cc bike is a lot safer. Personally I worked up from a 125cc bike to a 550cc bike to an 1100cc bike over the period of several years. Each time I learnt where the limits of the bike were and how they felt when they were starting to reach them.
Actually the most common danger to motorcyclists is alcohol. The majority of bike accidents do not involve cars, read the Hurt Report.
Probably in the US but not over here in the UK. One of the biggest rides locally ends up at a coffee shop that sells a great Hot Chocolate. All of my biker friends know that bikes are lethal enough without being under the influence. And that's confirmed by the fact that I have never heard of anyone I know being done for drunk riding.
Maybe, but you could get Kermit on just about every platform under the sun.
Which was why it was great. Back in the early 80's it was the only thing I could get for all of my hardware. In some cases I had X & Y modem and in some cases, X, Y and Z. But the biggest reason why was that, almost twenty years ago, I used to it transfer software, data and my thesis to and from my trusty BBC Micro to York University's VAX mainframe via another BBC Micro that was connected to it. It was the only way I got data to and from the outside world.
What a surprise. I put down Linux and get marked a troll. Slashdot where you can say anything provided it follows the party line.
No it isn't!
I run a team who's job is partly sorting out the sort of mess that this attitude to forking creates. If there are missing features etc left out then add them to the existing project don't fork.
Forking is inefficient. Where code is unaltered you have two sets of development teams debugging the same code. You can guarantee they don't talk to one another and so it may get fixed in one branch but not the other. Maintenance is then a nightmare. You end up with features scattered between the two (or more) code trees. It's a waste of effort and time.
We had similar problems where I work. Code reuse comprised forking and existing code tree to support the new hardware and features that a new project required. This mean that bugs would be fixed by one project team but another one would never hear of the fix. It also resulted in many variants of the same code wasting engineering time and effort.
Forking or Branching per se isn't bad it's not merging that is bad.
Instead, they are providing a 'branch' of XFree86 that will focus on being bleeding-edge and providing fast turnaround for development and testing, so that they can interface with the slow, bloated XFree86 organization to improve XFree86.
That's what's bad about OpenSource. Everyone wants to do the 'kewl' stuff an no one wants to do the grind that many of these projects need. I'm sorry but a hell of a lot of Open Source software just isn't carried out professionally. Yes you can leap in and add all sorts of cool and froody stuff but the boring bits like quality control, documentation etc gets left behind. Where are the code reviews, test suites and the like? It still has the feeling of bedroom hacker development. If I ran my development team like some of these projects are run I would be severely slapped!
I have a Linux PDA. I'm still using the software it came with despite trying open source alternatives every couple of months or so. Why? Because some functionality is missing because it's not kewl. The documentation is crap. It's as buggy as hell At least with the comercial variant time was taken to clean it up. Yes it may be technologically behind but it's reliable.
And then there's the common misconception that Open Source == Linux Development and Linux == UNIX. Both are wrong. I've can't count the number of times I've tried to use Open Source "UNIX" software to find it only works on Linux. I'm impressed at how far Linux has come and if you have a cheap PC then it's a great OS but it's still a toy OS compared to what I'm used to.