No, they may have used the Plasmatron name for the stadum displays (seems like they did), but this was something completely different. Most of the monster daylight-capable displays are ripoffs of Mitsubishi's DiamondVision, which actually uses three small CRTs for every pixel (or at least did in its original incarnation - I have no idea what they're using these days, but it has to put out a LOT of light...)
This sort of thing makes me wonder whatever happened to the Sony Plasmatron of a few years ago. It was based on a plasma switched LCD technology invented by Tektronix, and was supposed to be a way of building large screens using simple printing processes rather than the photolithigraphic semiconductor process used by LCDs, conventinal plasma screens, and thier ilk (including this OLED panel).
The real savings was supposed to be that the elimination of the clean room requirement and processing would allow screens to be almost arbitrarily large and *much* cheaper.
Sony even showed a working prototype at CES several years back (1996?), and said it would be available soon, but the technology has dropped completely out of sight since then.
Anybody know what happened? Inquiring minds want to know...
So let me get this straight: I share my mp3s for free, but in order for someone to download mine, or me to download theirs that they put up free I pay Napster $10 for the service of a search engine.
And in just what way is this at all different from Caller ID? This scam has been propagated by the RBOCs for years, and I'll bet most of the people reading this are paying for it.
Seriously, Caller ID shows that such a model can work, and that most people don't really mind paying so much as they let on at first.
(BTW: This is the reason why it's a good idea to get permanent per-line Caller ID blocking (if it's available in your state) for your line if you don't want to pay for Caller ID service - otherwise, you're providing the info for free that the phone company then uses to fleece everyone else.)
EJB is definitely providing the capabilities that deliver on Java's promise. It's just that it took 5 years (35 years in McNealy's Internet years = dog years equivalency) to finally reach that point.
In the meantime, others have developed similar (and arguably, in some cases, superior) capabilities. Also, Sun still has never really built and made widely available at low/no cost the tools to stitch all this stuff together as easily and transparently as Microsoft does. (Sun was *years* late recognizing the importance if real IDE's, a curious stance from the company that built the excellent Sun Workshop IDEs that were without peer for many years.)
I realize all this can be done, but it was too hard for too long, and so the world marched on - had Sun properly delivered on the promise of Java for components, Linux would be primarily a Java delivery vehicle rather than an apps platform in its own right, and projects like Gnome would probably not exist at all. My point was more that the Java backers missed the window of opportunity than that the concept is in some way invalid. Still, it appears to me that most Java developers (egged on by the host of "learn Java in the shower in 15 minutes" books) are indeed trying to use the language in ways that stress its weaknesses rather than its strengths.
And after all these years, there's still no good and standard way to find/locate/execute the local java environment(s) reliably across platforms. Java has enough of a head start that it may prosper on the server side, but it is quickly approaching irrelevancy on the client side - and if that happens, it means Microsoft WILL win in the end.
Of course it sounds like Java, it's a blatant ripoff intended to prevent Java from moving forward, especially now that Microsoft has been exposed poisoning the Java APIs to ensure that it is not truly cross-platform. (Never forget that preventing cross-platform capabilities is key to Microsoft's long-term strategy. Note that this means they could (in theory) ditch Windows and co-opt Linux and that doing so would suit their purpose just as well - Java, by it's very nature presents a very different sort of threat to MS, since it could make them irrelevant.)
The real reason Java hasn't already won this war, (aside from Microsoft's perfidy) is that people are still trying to use Java to write the same types of monolithic applications that Microsoft knows only too well are doomed to eventually fail under thier own weight.
Java *should* have become the premier way of building "software Legos" that would truly allow code reuse. There are a few bright spots in the enterprise space showing the promise of Java in this regard (IBM's San Francisco comes to mind), but by and large, Java developers and backers have only weakly delivered on Java's promise as a tool for making and using such software Legos.
It is this very failure to create good components in a timely fashion that led to Java's near-irrelevance on the client side. Microsoft will not make that same mistake, and they have a huge market share wave on which to ride thier new surfboard, as.NET hooks will doubtless appear as vital and unremovable parts of all Windows operating systems extending the capabilities that are already present there.
Microsoft is not stupid and realizes this. If they are successful in creating a large and powerful set of such Legos, it's "game over, man!" for Java, and needless to say, the more conventional methodologies favored by the open source community.
As much as people here love to hate Java, this may very well be a case in which "there can be only one". It's shaping up that the final two are Java and.NET, and as much as I'd hate to, if I were betting I'd have to put my money on Microsoft right now...
Oh, and it's the bsd utilities, of which GNU has an implementation, that we're in love with, not the GNU versions themselves. Many of us prefer the non-GNU versions (and particularly the real documentation instead of that wretched info system . ..)
Hear, hear! And don't forget the hideous and vile "--" options. GNU is not a requirement for Linux - I find Linux machines work much better when the proper BSD programs are installed than the GNU counterparts...
*EVERY* time this subject comes up, the slashdotters jump all over it pointing out "Microwaves aren't even ionizing radiation!"
Congratulations, you've proved to the rest of us you caught one fact during your physics classes.
Now think about this for a little while: Why in the world do you think it's necessary to rip the atoms or molecules apart to have any effect on them? Especially since we have vidence as close as the nearest microwave oven that proves RF can have a profound effect on organic material. Even heating is not the only plausible mechanism for damage - although it takes a fair amount of energy to destroy a molecule, they interact with one another at energy levels that could easily be interfered with.
Why is everyone so quick to assume we even have a clue what is going on here? We really know next to nothing about the health effects of microwaves. (And there are some studies by the way, that show quite disturbing results in microwaved foods as compared to other heating methods, indicating there may be much more than just heating entering into the equation...)
Keep an open mind - there's a lot to learn about here.
The sad thing is that niether Netscape or the Mozilla folks realize how useful this feature is.
Whether you use one of the public roaming hosts or your own private server, roaming profiles is the only way I've found to maintain my sanity when dealing with multiple machines and platforms.
This single feature is the only reason I haven't already given up on Netscape and gone to IE - it's that powerful. This simply MUST be in any final release... I need roaming a whole lot more than I need new features.
I certainly haven't tried (and am not likely to try) anything as bizarre as running Gnome on Windows, but I've tried both CygWin and U/Win (in several versions over several years.) These are the tools that make life in Windows-land bearable, and even productive.
In general, this is partly a matter of personal preference: I think U/Win is much more like "real" Unix than Cygwin, which has that annoying GNU aftertaste that many of us raised on Unix dislike. This is hardly a surprise, since U/Win came out of the AT&T crowd. Oddly, this means that the real Korn shell in U/Win (written by David Korn himself) is better than any of the ersatz Korn shells available for Linux, meaning Windows is now a better platform for my scripting code (which is generally written for ksh) than is Linux.
In general, I find U/Win to be more stable and complete, and it has from the beginning aimed to be the much-needed Posix susbsystem that Windows lacks. Also, it just flat works when you install it, while Cygwin generally requires several hours of non-productive fiddling and building just to get it working. This is non-trivial, because I would feel that almost any user could deal with scripts and U/Win installation, but only programmers could get those same scripts running on Cygwin. As always, YMMV.
Oh, don't be ridiculous, and the ad hominem attack is unwarranted. There are *really good* scientific reasons not to believe in evolution - see http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletters.htm, if you're not afraid to deal with the truth, that is...
I don't believe in evolution simply because the "science" that supports the idea is so apalingly bad, and would be run out of town on a rail if it weren't in opposition to religious claims, which gives it a perverse immunity to rigorous examination.
The word "catholic" means roughly, "universal". And the capitalizaiton is not a mistake, since the little c means implies this meaning, while "Catholic" carries the implied word "Roman" prepended to it.
This is why even us staunch Calvinists have no trouble affirming the Apostles creed, which contains a stement of belief in the catholic church, in spite of the fact that we have significant differences with the Roman church dating back to Martin Luther.
Re:A little quibble with the subtitle
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 2
Well, while Harrison's immensely superior solution used an engineering approach, one could argue that the problem itself was indedd of a scientific nature, but I think you're splitting hairs here anyway - Engineering is simply useful science.
Of course I'm an engineer, why do you ask?:-)
Re:based on the NOVA episode
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 2
I'd like to see some documentation for this allegation. In the Introduction in Sobel and Andrewes' The Illustrated Longitude (I recommend this version, which is the excellent original Sobel text with the addition of hundreds of beautifully printed photographs, maps, diagrams, and paintings), Sobel states how she came up with the concept for the book:
Will (Andrewes, coauthor of
The Illustrated Longitude) and I met each other over an exhibit of astrolabes at Chicago's Adler Planetarium in February 1992, but the subject soon turned to longitude. Will, as curator of Harvard University's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, invited me, a science writer, to report on the Longitude Symposium he planned to host nearly two years later in Cambridge Massachusetts. I hoped to attend the three-day event and write an article about it for a populat magazine... After months of unsuccessful petitioning, I finally found a home for my idea at Harvard Magazine just a few days before the symposium started."
This would tend to strongly indicate that your allegations of "plagiarism" are based on false information, especially since you provide no source or supporting evidence for your assertion, and it appears that she began work on the project well in advance of the Nova episode.
A few comments of my own:
Anyway, this is an excellent book, as is Sobel's newer work, Galileo's daughter, a fascinating look at the life of the genius through the surviving letters of his daughter to the great man. You come away convinced that she was fully as impressive as he was, and the book offers great insights into the complex politics and culture of Italy at one of the most interesting moments in its history.
Writing engaging history is not always easy, but Sobel is a master of the craft - despite the intrigue of the setting, it's no stretch to say that Longitude would likely have been yet another dry and soulless scholarly tome in the hands of a lesser writer. This book should be required reading for anyone that seriously considers themselves a technologist, and the Cinderella/Underdog aspect of the story has been rarely matched. (The better-than-real movie, Tucker, a Man and his Dream comes to mind as something as good in this regard, but its Hollywood exaggeration weakens it some.)
By the way, if you haven't seen the A&E Movie based on Longitude, I'd recommend spending a few hours on it the next time it's on. (Or see if it's in the video stores - I don't know, having not rented a video in years.)
Finally, anyone who likes this sort of thing should very seriously consider subscribing to American Heritage's magazine Invention and Technology, which has all sorts of interesting articles about the history and impact of teechnology.
Not only is GSM regarded as seriously technically inferior to CDMA by every well-respected authority on wireless, but there's the health angle, too:
GSM is a form of TDMA, and *every* study that has shown a linkage between cellphones and cancer (like the famous Adelaide study) has been using GSM. The ones that don't are nearly always using somethign else.
CDMA in particular, almost certainly has the most minimal impact on biological systems, since it's signal looks like low-amplitude, broadband noise, rahter than having the extremely fast and spiky high-power "square" waves of GSM and TDMA.
You can use GSM or TDMA if you want to - I'll stick with newer, better, and much safer wireless technology, thank you.
Agreed. Hemos is in way over his head here - he may be able to install Debian, a feat of some magnitude, but he obviously doesn't know beans about the American political system.
Case in point: In NO WAY did the US Supreme Court decision "transfer power from the states to the federal government" - in fact, what's happened is just the opposite: the US Supreme Court has *upheld* the US Constitutionally-granted right of the state legislature to determine the way in which electors are determined. This ruling simply says that the Florida Supreme Court had better have had a damn good reason to (apprently) violate federal law as well as Florida's own laws regarding the conduct and certification of elections. There's no way that can be construed as a "transfer of power".
Sorry, Hemos, but it's hard to get things any more backward that you did here. Leave the political commentary to those that paid a little bit of attention in seventh grade social studies class.
Agreed. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure this means that any PC using this BIOS would violate Microsoft's PC9x standards (which call for suspend partitions to be type 84), and would result in the machine failing WHQL certification (or perhaps having it revoked.)
The importance of this is that like all OEMs, IBM's ability to purchase Windows at anything like a competitive price is contingent on 100% compliance with Microsoft standards. This could cost them big time if MS decides to stick it to them and revoke their certification or adjust their discount rate. (Losing the discount puts you out of business, since the OS proce increase can be greater than the total margin on the PC - this is what happened to AST a few years ago.)
I always use type 84 for suspend partitions even when working with Linux - it just works better.
Actually, so far as I know, the very first time this was done was in about 1993, when Marshall Rose and Carl Malamud introduced a really interesting free fax gateway network at Interop, back when it was the *only* Internet show. Their setup is documented in RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530, which precede 2916 by a fair amount.:-)
The system, called tpc.int (which was only about the fifth or sixth.int registered) was designed to let the then-new MIME deliver a TIFF/F format file via e-mail to a fax machine accessible to a remote fax server.
Shortly after it was launched using the awkward backwards phone number with every digit separated by a dot syntax, someone (and his name escapes me for the moment) hacked up a special DNS zone to eliminate the extraneous dots and reverse the number. This system is still in use today at tpc.int, where you can already address tpc.int servers by phone number the same way you have for over seven years.
If you've got some spare cycles and a lightly used phone line lying around, and unmetered local access, you should consider setting up a tpc.int server for your area. It's fun, and you'll learn a lot about MIME, mail processing, and neat DNS tricks in the process...
Framebuffers and hardware acceleration aren't mutually exclusive: Look at the way Sun does framebuffers for the right way (and the way the Linux framebuffer will do it if the developers have the sense God gave geese.)
... many suspect that Kennedy stole the election from Nixon in 1960 because of some strange returns in Chicago...
This isn't suspicion, it's fact. The missing ballot boxes from Cook county were actually found some time later. The ballots they contained made Nixon the winner of Cook County, and therefore Illinois, and therefore the nation.
Regardless of which party you tend to affiliate with, election history shows that the Democrats are far more likely to "fix" an election than Republicans. (Or is that just because they're just less competent in general, and so get caught far more often?):-)
You're treating your kid as if she was a computer or other machine, and foolishly believing that some sort of educational mumbo-jumbo is what children really need. Kids aren't "coin-operated" - you can't provide a "scientifically optimal" set of inputs to that amazing neural net and expect the child to be properly trained.
The one thing your child needs most is the one thing she will *never* get in any daycare environment: lots of individual personal attention and LOVE. If that's missing in the early years, there's no amount of psychobabble that can make up for it later. There are many, many studies that bear this out. This factor is statistically much more influential than race, economic background or any other. Gee, imagine that, children DO respond to love - who'd have thunk it?
How have I opted out of parental responsibility by choosing how my daughter will be cared for? I have taken responsibility for deciding what kind of environment she is in. I talk with her every day about what happened at "school".
Sorry, but you *have* abdicated your parental responsibility, and your need to justify your rationale makes it even more apparent. In fact, you made a careful decision of where to warehouse her when she's inconvenient to you.
I've got news for you - that kind of hovering is smothering. You get children that can't decide anything for themselves.
The evidence is very much against you on this. Kids that stay at home with their mothers (the jury is still out on whether fathers can be as effective in this role) are not smothered, but wind up as much more inquisitive and independent thinkers. Disagreeing puts you at odds with the overwhelming evidence of the superiority of home-schooled children (look up their average results compared to products of the government daycare schools for a real eye-opener!)
In short, you've obviously convinced yourself that what you're doing is right, but I'll bet you know deep down inside you're only finding excuses to selfishly do what *you* want, at the expense of your child. Read Doug Wilson's excellent book "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" or Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's "For the Children's Sake" for a more complete treatment of how we should really be thinking of these things. (BTW - my own children are not home-schooled, as I feel that in some cases, private schools are a superior option.)
No career or job is worth the damage it causes your children if both parents work. One of you simply must stop. (In the spirit of this poitical season, this is one of the chief reasons that cutting taxes for *everyone* is a good thing - I know way too many couples that need the second income just to pay the taxes...)
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No, they may have used the Plasmatron name for the stadum displays (seems like they did), but this was something completely different. Most of the monster daylight-capable displays are ripoffs of Mitsubishi's DiamondVision, which actually uses three small CRTs for every pixel (or at least did in its original incarnation - I have no idea what they're using these days, but it has to put out a LOT of light...)
This sort of thing makes me wonder whatever happened to the Sony Plasmatron of a few years ago. It was based on a plasma switched LCD technology invented by Tektronix, and was supposed to be a way of building large screens using simple printing processes rather than the photolithigraphic semiconductor process used by LCDs, conventinal plasma screens, and thier ilk (including this OLED panel).
The real savings was supposed to be that the elimination of the clean room requirement and processing would allow screens to be almost arbitrarily large and *much* cheaper.
Sony even showed a working prototype at CES several years back (1996?), and said it would be available soon, but the technology has dropped completely out of sight since then.
Anybody know what happened? Inquiring minds want to know...
That or use a future version of reiserfs, which could give you a database-like view of your filesystem.
I find future versions of trendy software to be pretty impossible to use in building a workable solution...
So let me get this straight: I share my mp3s for free, but in order for someone to download mine, or me to download theirs that they put up free I pay Napster $10 for the service of a search engine.
And in just what way is this at all different from Caller ID? This scam has been propagated by the RBOCs for years, and I'll bet most of the people reading this are paying for it.
Seriously, Caller ID shows that such a model can work, and that most people don't really mind paying so much as they let on at first.
(BTW: This is the reason why it's a good idea to get permanent per-line Caller ID blocking (if it's available in your state) for your line if you don't want to pay for Caller ID service - otherwise, you're providing the info for free that the phone company then uses to fleece everyone else.)
EJB is definitely providing the capabilities that deliver on Java's promise. It's just that it took 5 years (35 years in McNealy's Internet years = dog years equivalency) to finally reach that point.
In the meantime, others have developed similar (and arguably, in some cases, superior) capabilities. Also, Sun still has never really built and made widely available at low/no cost the tools to stitch all this stuff together as easily and transparently as Microsoft does. (Sun was *years* late recognizing the importance if real IDE's, a curious stance from the company that built the excellent Sun Workshop IDEs that were without peer for many years.)
I realize all this can be done, but it was too hard for too long, and so the world marched on - had Sun properly delivered on the promise of Java for components, Linux would be primarily a Java delivery vehicle rather than an apps platform in its own right, and projects like Gnome would probably not exist at all. My point was more that the Java backers missed the window of opportunity than that the concept is in some way invalid. Still, it appears to me that most Java developers (egged on by the host of "learn Java in the shower in 15 minutes" books) are indeed trying to use the language in ways that stress its weaknesses rather than its strengths.
And after all these years, there's still no good and standard way to find/locate/execute the local java environment(s) reliably across platforms. Java has enough of a head start that it may prosper on the server side, but it is quickly approaching irrelevancy on the client side - and if that happens, it means Microsoft WILL win in the end.
Of course it sounds like Java, it's a blatant ripoff intended to prevent Java from moving forward, especially now that Microsoft has been exposed poisoning the Java APIs to ensure that it is not truly cross-platform. (Never forget that preventing cross-platform capabilities is key to Microsoft's long-term strategy. Note that this means they could (in theory) ditch Windows and co-opt Linux and that doing so would suit their purpose just as well - Java, by it's very nature presents a very different sort of threat to MS, since it could make them irrelevant.)
.NET hooks will doubtless appear as vital and unremovable parts of all Windows operating systems extending the capabilities that are already present there.
.NET, and as much as I'd hate to, if I were betting I'd have to put my money on Microsoft right now...
The real reason Java hasn't already won this war, (aside from Microsoft's perfidy) is that people are still trying to use Java to write the same types of monolithic applications that Microsoft knows only too well are doomed to eventually fail under thier own weight.
Java *should* have become the premier way of building "software Legos" that would truly allow code reuse. There are a few bright spots in the enterprise space showing the promise of Java in this regard (IBM's San Francisco comes to mind), but by and large, Java developers and backers have only weakly delivered on Java's promise as a tool for making and using such software Legos.
It is this very failure to create good components in a timely fashion that led to Java's near-irrelevance on the client side. Microsoft will not make that same mistake, and they have a huge market share wave on which to ride thier new surfboard, as
Microsoft is not stupid and realizes this. If they are successful in creating a large and powerful set of such Legos, it's "game over, man!" for Java, and needless to say, the more conventional methodologies favored by the open source community.
As much as people here love to hate Java, this may very well be a case in which "there can be only one". It's shaping up that the final two are Java and
NEWS FLASH!
We already have a word for this, and it has the exact meaning described above.
It's "engineer".
Oh, and it's the bsd utilities, of which GNU has an implementation, that we're in love with, not the GNU versions themselves. Many of us prefer the non-GNU versions (and particularly the real documentation instead of that wretched info system . . .)
Hear, hear! And don't forget the hideous and vile "--" options. GNU is not a requirement for Linux - I find Linux machines work much better when the proper BSD programs are installed than the GNU counterparts...
*EVERY* time this subject comes up, the slashdotters jump all over it pointing out "Microwaves aren't even ionizing radiation!"
Congratulations, you've proved to the rest of us you caught one fact during your physics classes.
Now think about this for a little while: Why in the world do you think it's necessary to rip the atoms or molecules apart to have any effect on them? Especially since we have vidence as close as the nearest microwave oven that proves RF can have a profound effect on organic material. Even heating is not the only plausible mechanism for damage - although it takes a fair amount of energy to destroy a molecule, they interact with one another at energy levels that could easily be interfered with.
Why is everyone so quick to assume we even have a clue what is going on here? We really know next to nothing about the health effects of microwaves. (And there are some studies by the way, that show quite disturbing results in microwaved foods as compared to other heating methods, indicating there may be much more than just heating entering into the equation...)
Keep an open mind - there's a lot to learn about here.
The sad thing is that niether Netscape or the Mozilla folks realize how useful this feature is.
Whether you use one of the public roaming hosts or your own private server, roaming profiles is the only way I've found to maintain my sanity when dealing with multiple machines and platforms.
This single feature is the only reason I haven't already given up on Netscape and gone to IE - it's that powerful. This simply MUST be in any final release... I need roaming a whole lot more than I need new features.
I certainly haven't tried (and am not likely to try) anything as bizarre as running Gnome on Windows, but I've tried both CygWin and U/Win (in several versions over several years.) These are the tools that make life in Windows-land bearable, and even productive.
In general, this is partly a matter of personal preference: I think U/Win is much more like "real" Unix than Cygwin, which has that annoying GNU aftertaste that many of us raised on Unix dislike. This is hardly a surprise, since U/Win came out of the AT&T crowd. Oddly, this means that the real Korn shell in U/Win (written by David Korn himself) is better than any of the ersatz Korn shells available for Linux, meaning Windows is now a better platform for my scripting code (which is generally written for ksh) than is Linux.
In general, I find U/Win to be more stable and complete, and it has from the beginning aimed to be the much-needed Posix susbsystem that Windows lacks. Also, it just flat works when you install it, while Cygwin generally requires several hours of non-productive fiddling and building just to get it working. This is non-trivial, because I would feel that almost any user could deal with scripts and U/Win installation, but only programmers could get those same scripts running on Cygwin. As always, YMMV.
Oh, don't be ridiculous, and the ad hominem attack is unwarranted. There are *really good* scientific reasons not to believe in evolution - see http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletters .htm, if you're not afraid to deal with the truth, that is...
I don't believe in evolution simply because the "science" that supports the idea is so apalingly bad, and would be run out of town on a rail if it weren't in opposition to religious claims, which gives it a perverse immunity to rigorous examination.
The word "catholic" means roughly, "universal". And the capitalizaiton is not a mistake, since the little c means implies this meaning, while "Catholic" carries the implied word "Roman" prepended to it.
This is why even us staunch Calvinists have no trouble affirming the Apostles creed, which contains a stement of belief in the catholic church, in spite of the fact that we have significant differences with the Roman church dating back to Martin Luther.
Well, while Harrison's immensely superior solution used an engineering approach, one could argue that the problem itself was indedd of a scientific nature, but I think you're splitting hairs here anyway - Engineering is simply useful science.
:-)
Of course I'm an engineer, why do you ask?
This would tend to strongly indicate that your allegations of "plagiarism" are based on false information, especially since you provide no source or supporting evidence for your assertion, and it appears that she began work on the project well in advance of the Nova episode.
A few comments of my own:
Anyway, this is an excellent book, as is Sobel's newer work, Galileo's daughter, a fascinating look at the life of the genius through the surviving letters of his daughter to the great man. You come away convinced that she was fully as impressive as he was, and the book offers great insights into the complex politics and culture of Italy at one of the most interesting moments in its history.
Writing engaging history is not always easy, but Sobel is a master of the craft - despite the intrigue of the setting, it's no stretch to say that Longitude would likely have been yet another dry and soulless scholarly tome in the hands of a lesser writer. This book should be required reading for anyone that seriously considers themselves a technologist, and the Cinderella/Underdog aspect of the story has been rarely matched. (The better-than-real movie, Tucker, a Man and his Dream comes to mind as something as good in this regard, but its Hollywood exaggeration weakens it some.)
By the way, if you haven't seen the A&E Movie based on Longitude, I'd recommend spending a few hours on it the next time it's on. (Or see if it's in the video stores - I don't know, having not rented a video in years.)
Finally, anyone who likes this sort of thing should very seriously consider subscribing to American Heritage's magazine Invention and Technology, which has all sorts of interesting articles about the history and impact of teechnology.
Not only is GSM regarded as seriously technically inferior to CDMA by every well-respected authority on wireless, but there's the health angle, too:
GSM is a form of TDMA, and *every* study that has shown a linkage between cellphones and cancer (like the famous Adelaide study) has been using GSM. The ones that don't are nearly always using somethign else.
CDMA in particular, almost certainly has the most minimal impact on biological systems, since it's signal looks like low-amplitude, broadband noise, rahter than having the extremely fast and spiky high-power "square" waves of GSM and TDMA.
You can use GSM or TDMA if you want to - I'll stick with newer, better, and much safer wireless technology, thank you.
Sorry, but even the Communist News Network arm of the Gore media spin machine is reporting that the opinion is indeed unanimous...
Agreed. Hemos is in way over his head here - he may be able to install Debian, a feat of some magnitude, but he obviously doesn't know beans about the American political system.
Case in point: In NO WAY did the US Supreme Court decision "transfer power from the states to the federal government" - in fact, what's happened is just the opposite: the US Supreme Court has *upheld* the US Constitutionally-granted right of the state legislature to determine the way in which electors are determined. This ruling simply says that the Florida Supreme Court had better have had a damn good reason to (apprently) violate federal law as well as Florida's own laws regarding the conduct and certification of elections. There's no way that can be construed as a "transfer of power".
Sorry, Hemos, but it's hard to get things any more backward that you did here. Leave the political commentary to those that paid a little bit of attention in seventh grade social studies class.
Agreed. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure this means that any PC using this BIOS would violate Microsoft's PC9x standards (which call for suspend partitions to be type 84), and would result in the machine failing WHQL certification (or perhaps having it revoked.)
The importance of this is that like all OEMs, IBM's ability to purchase Windows at anything like a competitive price is contingent on 100% compliance with Microsoft standards. This could cost them big time if MS decides to stick it to them and revoke their certification or adjust their discount rate. (Losing the discount puts you out of business, since the OS proce increase can be greater than the total margin on the PC - this is what happened to AST a few years ago.)
I always use type 84 for suspend partitions even when working with Linux - it just works better.
Actually, so far as I know, the very first time this was done was in about 1993, when Marshall Rose and Carl Malamud introduced a really interesting free fax gateway network at Interop, back when it was the *only* Internet show. Their setup is documented in RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530, which precede 2916 by a fair amount. :-)
.int registered) was designed to let the then-new MIME deliver a TIFF/F format file via e-mail to a fax machine accessible to a remote fax server.
The system, called tpc.int (which was only about the fifth or sixth
Shortly after it was launched using the awkward backwards phone number with every digit separated by a dot syntax, someone (and his name escapes me for the moment) hacked up a special DNS zone to eliminate the extraneous dots and reverse the number. This system is still in use today at tpc.int, where you can already address tpc.int servers by phone number the same way you have for over seven years.
If you've got some spare cycles and a lightly used phone line lying around, and unmetered local access, you should consider setting up a tpc.int server for your area. It's fun, and you'll learn a lot about MIME, mail processing, and neat DNS tricks in the process...
Framebuffers and hardware acceleration aren't mutually exclusive: Look at the way Sun does framebuffers for the right way (and the way the Linux framebuffer will do it if the developers have the sense God gave geese.)
... many suspect that Kennedy stole the election from Nixon in 1960 because of some strange returns in Chicago...
:-)
This isn't suspicion, it's fact. The missing ballot boxes from Cook county were actually found some time later. The ballots they contained made Nixon the winner of Cook County, and therefore Illinois, and therefore the nation.
Regardless of which party you tend to affiliate with, election history shows that the Democrats are far more likely to "fix" an election than Republicans. (Or is that just because they're just less competent in general, and so get caught far more often?)
The fundamental question is this: Are those career aspirations more important than the welfare of your own children?
This is not a hard or trick question. There is one right answer, and it's not the selfish one.
You're treating your kid as if she was a computer or other machine, and foolishly believing that some sort of educational mumbo-jumbo is what children really need. Kids aren't "coin-operated" - you can't provide a "scientifically optimal" set of inputs to that amazing neural net and expect the child to be properly trained.
The one thing your child needs most is the one thing she will *never* get in any daycare environment: lots of individual personal attention and LOVE. If that's missing in the early years, there's no amount of psychobabble that can make up for it later. There are many, many studies that bear this out. This factor is statistically much more influential than race, economic background or any other. Gee, imagine that, children DO respond to love - who'd have thunk it?
How have I opted out of parental responsibility by choosing how my daughter will be cared for? I have taken responsibility for deciding what kind of environment she is in. I talk with her every day about what happened at "school".
Sorry, but you *have* abdicated your parental responsibility, and your need to justify your rationale makes it even more apparent. In fact, you made a careful decision of where to warehouse her when she's inconvenient to you.
I've got news for you - that kind of hovering is smothering. You get children that can't decide anything for themselves.
The evidence is very much against you on this. Kids that stay at home with their mothers (the jury is still out on whether fathers can be as effective in this role) are not smothered, but wind up as much more inquisitive and independent thinkers. Disagreeing puts you at odds with the overwhelming evidence of the superiority of home-schooled children (look up their average results compared to products of the government daycare schools for a real eye-opener!)
In short, you've obviously convinced yourself that what you're doing is right, but I'll bet you know deep down inside you're only finding excuses to selfishly do what *you* want, at the expense of your child. Read Doug Wilson's excellent book "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" or Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's "For the Children's Sake" for a more complete treatment of how we should really be thinking of these things. (BTW - my own children are not home-schooled, as I feel that in some cases, private schools are a superior option.)
No career or job is worth the damage it causes your children if both parents work. One of you simply must stop. (In the spirit of this poitical season, this is one of the chief reasons that cutting taxes for *everyone* is a good thing - I know way too many couples that need the second income just to pay the taxes...)