My wife and I have had our Prius since last fall. The best car either of us have owned, bar none. Great mileage, plenty of pickup when needed, very low emissions (SULEV, ZEV being the only lower category). And the LCD touchscreen makes it fun to show off:-)
We recently took a youth group from our church to Tijuana from the SF Bay Area to build a house for a needy family, and I drove the Prius. We drove a bit more slowly than the speed limit (~65 MPH vs. 70 MPH) because our caravan of vehicles included a pickup with a large trailer. The Prius got 53 MPG on the drive down (about 500 miles), and did it on a single tank. For the 1000+ mile trip overall it got 48 MPG and did it on two tanks of gas. The lower mileage coming in part from the 2+ hour wait at the border to return to the U.S., during which we had the AC running to avoid the exhast fumes.
The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight (a 2-seater with higher MPG but smaller load) are now available. Besides Honda's recent announcement of the hybrid Civic, there's also been dicussion of a hybrid Ford Escape (their smallest SUV) and a hybrid Dodge Durango (one of their SUVs), though I heard the latter had been cancelled. (Around the time the govt. failed to pass the higher MPG requirements. Coincidence?)
Huang says that he started with absorptive dyes because the chemistry was easier, but that he also considered the possibility of needing fluorescents -- an idea documented in his notebooks -- because they were known to be more sensitive. ...
The disclosure, signed by Smith and the Hunkapiller brothers, says they conceived the sequencer idea on Oct. 1, 1982 -- just five weeks after Huang departed.
So, the idea of using dyes (instead of radioactivity) was his. He also came up with the idea of using fluorescent dyes because of their increased sensitivity. He also came up with the idea of running the fragments through a single 'lane' of tubing to isolate them. And using an optical scanner to identify them. And using a computer to decode the results.
Sounds to me like he had an awful lot to do with it. Whether or not that means the other part of the article (that the government should get them royalty-free) isn't as clear, but it sounds to me like Henry Huang was certainly an inventor of the process.
I am a news videographer (and granted, that is a different designation than commercial photographers) but there is no need to sign a release form for me to shoot a building.
This is precisely why it is different -- news vs. commerical. I could shoot all the pictures I want of private property (as long as I didn't trespass or otherwise break the law to do it), but as soon as I want to sell one of those pictures for anything besides news (e.g., to sell a product or as fine art to hang on a wall), a release is needed.
And as noted in my post, I agree that taking this to court is absurd.
IANAL either, but I am a still photographer. I don't know if the same laws apply to motion picture filming, but generally you need a property release when photographing private property. It's not black-and-white (no pun intended), because if you photograph something like the New York or San Francisco skyline which is full of private property, you don't need a release. See more information on releases. Note this is referring to commercial photography, not vacation shots.
I'm not sure what a judge would rule, but I would hazard a guess that if the buildings and signs in question are 'part of the scene', it would be OK, but if they took a Samsung building and morphed it into Sony HQ and made it a key part of the film, it wouldn't.
Regardless, I can understand Samsung, et al, being a little miffed, but I also find the idea of taking this to court absurd. I guess I wouldn't make a very good lawyer...
domestic: principal trunk system, end to end of country, is coaxial cable; fiber-optic distribution in Havana and on Isla de la Juventud; 2 microwave radio relay installations (one is old, US-built; the other newer, built during the period of Soviet support); both analog and digital mobile cellular service established
Internet country code:.cu
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 4 (2001)
Internet users: 60,000 (2000)
So they've got phones, ISPs, even celluar. In addition, it indicates a high literacy rate (95.7%) and long life expectancy (76.41 years, compared with 77.26 for the U.S.). The economy took a big hit when the Soviet Union broke up and stopped sending them $4-6 billion US a year, but has been slowly recovering, due to tourism and foreign investment.
But obviously it's not a perfect place to live, otherwise so many people wouldn't risk their lives on makeshift rafts and boats trying to cross to the U.S.
And while PCs may be expensive compared to the per capita income, obviously some people have them and can connect the to Internet, and it would seem that is what the Cuban government is trying to limit.
The main reason individual offices are avoided? Expense. You'll likely get that as an argument for a cube farm, regardless of what studies you can quote about productivity. I encourage you to stick to your guns, though -- point out short term cost gains vs. long term productivity of other arrangements. Office walls and cube farms both cost money up front.
If you do end up with a cube farm anyways, make the most of it. Give neighbors the right to have music turned down, and encourage or even require use of headphones. Some nice noise-cancelling headphones are even better.
When I worked in a cube farm, several of us made signs: Do Not Disturb if you really need to reach me:
try back later
send me email
leave a message
The signs were on strings and hung across the cubical entrance to physically block the way.
It took a while (it would have gone quicker if I could have given a shock to people who ignored it:-), but eventually people learned to respect the signs. Even the execs.
Looking at the letter it is very unclear...
No, looking at the letter, what I would say is unclear is the scan. I can't make out half the text on there. Unless that's a clean scan, in which case I think they're return rate is going to be pretty low:-)
"If you have enough plants, you can recover the metal through a smelting procedure, or you can simply dispose of (the metal) in a hazardous waste site," Burrell said.
No, you can't eat it. You can either smelt it to recover the metal for other uses, or bury it properly, instead of scattered across a former industrial site. The latter doesn't get rid of it, but it does (in theory) keep it from continuing to contaminate the environment.
Even if true (it smacks of urban legend to me), incandescent bulbs are very inefficient compared with fluorescent lights, either the traditional tubes or the newer compact fluorescents. Fluorescents last longer, too.
The idea behind the lights based on organic LEDs is that they will (a) be more natural colored than traditional LEDs, which are used in stoplights and brakelights (b) use even less energy than fluorescents (c) last even longer than fluorescents, too.
In the interior of the marshmallow, the microwaves' energy converts water into steam, which first puffs up the marshmallow and then, when the gelatin's elasticity limit is exceeded, breaks its way out though a hole it punches in the top.
Air bubbles may affect this process, but ultimately it's because of the water trapped in the marshmallow.
Yeah, though I don't think any of the wave-powered windtraps got built until relatively recently (two years ago or so). I remember discussions of wave and tide power generation from when I was a kid in the 70's.
See stuff at the BBC here and here from November 2000.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 2
Don't forget Laika, 1st dog in space. I guess that would be an orbital 'Rover':-)
Sadly, Laika, aka "Muttnik" either died when life support gave out, or as was reported later, burned up on reentry. Sputnik 2 was quick-and-dirty followup to Sputnik 1, and was designed as a one-way trip from the start.
If Sun, Apple, MS, and Red Hat will suddenly all agree on a common UI, I'll drop my need for customization.
Once upon a time, there was the CUA Interface. No, not Canadian Urological Association, Common User Access. Think early versions of OS/2 or Windows 3.0. It's basically what most UIs today are based on.
Some parts of it were good -- standard shortcuts for common actions (e.g., Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, before the Mac Ctrl-X/C/V fortunately took over), a standard way of defining mnemonics in menus, standard placement of OK and Cancel in dialog boxes.
But it wasn't perfect (see editing shortcuts above), nor was it pretty. In fact, it was kind of ugly (Windows 3.0 and before caused grand mal seizures in some cases, IIRC:-)
The problem was that different companies and different egos attacked different problems within the standard, and some changes were good (see editing shortcuts above), and some not so good. And except for some odd shortcuts still being supported for curmudgeons like me that still remember them, and some basic design ideas, that was the last that was seen of a 'common UI'.
I don't think skins affect this very much -- most skinned UIs still behave like other skins. The problem is that there is no longer a 'standard' that anyone follows, not even (as evidenced by the changes between Mac OS 8.5 or whatever and Mac OS X) the Macintosh, which once had a very rigid UI document. OK and Cancel are no longer always in the same place...
The original GEOS development team was probably a dozen people (I'd have to look at some old files to get the exact count). Geoworks Ensemble not only included the GEOS operating system (pre-emptive multi-tasking, object-oriented UI, single image model, etc.), but a word processor, vector drawing program, PIMs, file manager, and other goodies. At the time, it was well beyond the Microsoft offering of Windows 3.0 + MS Works.
GEOS didn't get a spreadsheet and flatfile database until V2.0, and Internet apps until later. I recall one of the 3.5 engineers on the spreadsheet project (1 = FP math, 1 = data storage and calculation, 1 = app framework and UI (me), 0.5 = charting) finding an article about the Lotus 1-2-3 development team, and their engineering team was larger than all of Geoworks at the time.
Sadly, the same miracle of small numbers wasn't pulled off by Geoworks' sales department. Not entirely their fault, as the 'chicken and egg' problem of lack of available apps, and a Unix-based SDK kept most developers (other than AOL née Quantum Computer Services) away, which didn't add many available apps.
The target that KOffice, et al, are facing now is a lot further along (especially Excel; Word still sucks), but the general idea is still true: adding bodies doesn't always make the results come any faster. In the words of Wernher von Braun:
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
Which isn't to say more programmers wouldn't help, just that they need to be the right programmers.
Good for them! It's a good case, since both Mofo and the spammers are in California, and there are state laws that apply. I wonder if anyone at Mofo got the spam from candidate for governor Rep. Bill Jones. Maybe they can sue him, too.
Lawyers bill at different rates, but I'd guess about $500/hour if they get a partner to bill the hours, less if it's an associate. But they're a big firm, so they could put a lot of lawyers on it.
I guess lawyers are finally getting through the backlog of.com bankruptcies, and are looking for other work to keep them busy:-)
"doesn't do it all that well" is being kind. My wife tried it on a 5 page letter she'd written, and the results were...bizarre. Yes, the text was from the document. Far from the most relevant parts, seemingly grabbed at random.
My best guess for what it could do is some sort of word frequency count, ignoring common words like 'the'. Then include the top N% of sentences and those adjacent to them that include the most common words. Also, give a higher weighting to things in the beginning and end, since papers following the classic form tend to say what they're going to say, say it, then say what they've just said.
Maybe 500 was an exaggeration (given that the printing press was about that old)...
Actually, there are books that pre-date the printing press. The oldest printed book still around is The Diamond Sutra, at The British Library. It dates from 868AD.
It may also be the oldest existing Open Source document:
The colophon, at the inner end, reads: `Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie...
...he has the chance to make a coherent hole of the trilogy
I think you meant coherent whole, but given many people's opinion of TPM, this is much funnier:-)
This whole discussion reminds me of stuff I did as a youngster. I had one of those old '101 Electronics Projects' kits that came in a wooden case with resistors, capacitors, a speaker, etc. (kind of like this). One of the experiments was an AM transmitter. I built it, played around with it, got bored, and so tried different parts in place of the original specs.
Next thing I know, my parents are shouting upstairs to me asking what the $%@#! I'm doing, as the TV screen was filled with nothing but noise. We joked about sitting outside the neighbors with it to get them to throw out their TV which we could then liberate from the trash:-)
Of course, that was designed to transmit, and when everybody was watching TVs with rabbit ears. But I imagine with a little work you could pretty easily get it to zap portable phone conversations and the like instead.
Yes, but carried out at a much lower rate than in Texas or Oklahoma. He could be elected, serve, and retire before they got around to him. I'm against the death penalty, but I might be willing to make an exception in this case:-)
In any event, I'm pretty sure this counts as 'three strikes' so he can be locked up for good. Ironically, it's a bill he authored. Seems fitting to me...
I'd suggest reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on web design, not only the current columns but past ones, too. Some columns like The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design
are definitely worth reading. It's a couple years old, but people still make those same mistakes.
Besides not falling into the trap of flash without substance (pun intended; Flash is frequently useless for most web sites), keep in mind that people have come to expect certain things from how web pages work. It's nice to have an inovative design, but if it's so far outside the norm that no one can figure it out, people aren't going to use it.
For example, for web commerce, you may not like Amazon, but their site has become the standard for how people expect to shop on the web.
I don't know if spoiled is quite it. More to the point, I think some games spend too much attention on graphics, sounds, special effects, and not enough on making a good, playable game. That's true of all game genres, not just multi-player online games.
If you're looking for a MUD, even a text-based one, they're still out there:
NetHack - successor to Rogue, the granddaddy of them all
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I have had our Prius since last fall. The best car either of us have owned, bar none. Great mileage, plenty of pickup when needed, very low emissions (SULEV, ZEV being the only lower category). And the LCD touchscreen makes it fun to show off :-)
We recently took a youth group from our church to Tijuana from the SF Bay Area to build a house for a needy family, and I drove the Prius. We drove a bit more slowly than the speed limit (~65 MPH vs. 70 MPH) because our caravan of vehicles included a pickup with a large trailer. The Prius got 53 MPG on the drive down (about 500 miles), and did it on a single tank. For the 1000+ mile trip overall it got 48 MPG and did it on two tanks of gas. The lower mileage coming in part from the 2+ hour wait at the border to return to the U.S., during which we had the AC running to avoid the exhast fumes.
The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight (a 2-seater with higher MPG but smaller load) are now available. Besides Honda's recent announcement of the hybrid Civic, there's also been dicussion of a hybrid Ford Escape (their smallest SUV) and a hybrid Dodge Durango (one of their SUVs), though I heard the latter had been cancelled. (Around the time the govt. failed to pass the higher MPG requirements. Coincidence?)
Huang says that he started with absorptive dyes because the chemistry was easier, but that he also considered the possibility of needing fluorescents -- an idea documented in his notebooks -- because they were known to be more sensitive.
...
The disclosure, signed by Smith and the Hunkapiller brothers, says they conceived the sequencer idea on Oct. 1, 1982 -- just five weeks after Huang departed.
So, the idea of using dyes (instead of radioactivity) was his. He also came up with the idea of using fluorescent dyes because of their increased sensitivity. He also came up with the idea of running the fragments through a single 'lane' of tubing to isolate them. And using an optical scanner to identify them. And using a computer to decode the results.
Sounds to me like he had an awful lot to do with it. Whether or not that means the other part of the article (that the government should get them royalty-free) isn't as clear, but it sounds to me like Henry Huang was certainly an inventor of the process.
I am a news videographer (and granted, that is a different designation than commercial photographers) but there is no need to sign a release form for me to shoot a building.
This is precisely why it is different -- news vs. commerical. I could shoot all the pictures I want of private property (as long as I didn't trespass or otherwise break the law to do it), but as soon as I want to sell one of those pictures for anything besides news (e.g., to sell a product or as fine art to hang on a wall), a release is needed.
And as noted in my post, I agree that taking this to court is absurd.
IANAL either, but I am a still photographer. I don't know if the same laws apply to motion picture filming, but generally you need a property release when photographing private property. It's not black-and-white (no pun intended), because if you photograph something like the New York or San Francisco skyline which is full of private property, you don't need a release. See more information on releases. Note this is referring to commercial photography, not vacation shots.
I'm not sure what a judge would rule, but I would hazard a guess that if the buildings and signs in question are 'part of the scene', it would be OK, but if they took a Samsung building and morphed it into Sony HQ and made it a key part of the film, it wouldn't.
Regardless, I can understand Samsung, et al, being a little miffed, but I also find the idea of taking this to court absurd. I guess I wouldn't make a very good lawyer...
Bad Timothy! No dead mouse for you! :-)
- Telephones - main lines in use: 473,031 (2000)
- Telephones - mobile cellular: 2,994 (1997)
- domestic: principal trunk system, end to end of country, is coaxial cable; fiber-optic distribution in Havana and on Isla de la Juventud; 2 microwave radio relay installations (one is old, US-built; the other newer, built during the period of Soviet support); both analog and digital mobile cellular service established
- Internet country code:
.cu
- Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 4 (2001)
- Internet users: 60,000 (2000)
So they've got phones, ISPs, even celluar. In addition, it indicates a high literacy rate (95.7%) and long life expectancy (76.41 years, compared with 77.26 for the U.S.). The economy took a big hit when the Soviet Union broke up and stopped sending them $4-6 billion US a year, but has been slowly recovering, due to tourism and foreign investment.But obviously it's not a perfect place to live, otherwise so many people wouldn't risk their lives on makeshift rafts and boats trying to cross to the U.S.
And while PCs may be expensive compared to the per capita income, obviously some people have them and can connect the to Internet, and it would seem that is what the Cuban government is trying to limit.
The main reason individual offices are avoided? Expense. You'll likely get that as an argument for a cube farm, regardless of what studies you can quote about productivity. I encourage you to stick to your guns, though -- point out short term cost gains vs. long term productivity of other arrangements. Office walls and cube farms both cost money up front.
If you do end up with a cube farm anyways, make the most of it. Give neighbors the right to have music turned down, and encourage or even require use of headphones. Some nice noise-cancelling headphones are even better.
When I worked in a cube farm, several of us made signs:
Do Not Disturb
if you really need to reach me:
- try back later
- send me email
- leave a message
The signs were on strings and hung across the cubical entrance to physically block the way.It took a while (it would have gone quicker if I could have given a shock to people who ignored it :-), but eventually people learned to respect the signs. Even the execs.
Looking at the letter it is very unclear... :-)
No, looking at the letter, what I would say is unclear is the scan. I can't make out half the text on there. Unless that's a clean scan, in which case I think they're return rate is going to be pretty low
Let's hope they get Deutsche Bahn to keep it on schedule, rather than Amtrak. Any anybody besides British Railways to keep it on track...
Even if true (it smacks of urban legend to me), incandescent bulbs are very inefficient compared with fluorescent lights, either the traditional tubes or the newer compact fluorescents. Fluorescents last longer, too.
The idea behind the lights based on organic LEDs is that they will (a) be more natural colored than traditional LEDs, which are used in stoplights and brakelights (b) use even less energy than fluorescents (c) last even longer than fluorescents, too.
Not only energy-efficient, but tasty and better for you, too! :-)
Also of interest was the article linked to from the posted one, about using organic LEDs for thin, bright computer displays.
Yeah, though I don't think any of the wave-powered windtraps got built until relatively recently (two years ago or so). I remember discussions of wave and tide power generation from when I was a kid in the 70's.
See stuff at the BBC here and here from November 2000.
Don't forget Laika, 1st dog in space. I guess that would be an orbital 'Rover' :-)
Sadly, Laika, aka "Muttnik" either died when life support gave out, or as was reported later, burned up on reentry. Sputnik 2 was quick-and-dirty followup to Sputnik 1, and was designed as a one-way trip from the start.
If Sun, Apple, MS, and Red Hat will suddenly all agree on a common UI, I'll drop my need for customization.
Once upon a time, there was the CUA Interface. No, not Canadian Urological Association, Common User Access. Think early versions of OS/2 or Windows 3.0. It's basically what most UIs today are based on.
Some parts of it were good -- standard shortcuts for common actions (e.g., Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, before the Mac Ctrl-X/C/V fortunately took over), a standard way of defining mnemonics in menus, standard placement of OK and Cancel in dialog boxes.
But it wasn't perfect (see editing shortcuts above), nor was it pretty. In fact, it was kind of ugly (Windows 3.0 and before caused grand mal seizures in some cases, IIRC :-)
The problem was that different companies and different egos attacked different problems within the standard, and some changes were good (see editing shortcuts above), and some not so good. And except for some odd shortcuts still being supported for curmudgeons like me that still remember them, and some basic design ideas, that was the last that was seen of a 'common UI'.
I don't think skins affect this very much -- most skinned UIs still behave like other skins. The problem is that there is no longer a 'standard' that anyone follows, not even (as evidenced by the changes between Mac OS 8.5 or whatever and Mac OS X) the Macintosh, which once had a very rigid UI document. OK and Cancel are no longer always in the same place...
The original GEOS development team was probably a dozen people (I'd have to look at some old files to get the exact count). Geoworks Ensemble not only included the GEOS operating system (pre-emptive multi-tasking, object-oriented UI, single image model, etc.), but a word processor, vector drawing program, PIMs, file manager, and other goodies. At the time, it was well beyond the Microsoft offering of Windows 3.0 + MS Works.
GEOS didn't get a spreadsheet and flatfile database until V2.0, and Internet apps until later. I recall one of the 3.5 engineers on the spreadsheet project (1 = FP math, 1 = data storage and calculation, 1 = app framework and UI (me), 0.5 = charting) finding an article about the Lotus 1-2-3 development team, and their engineering team was larger than all of Geoworks at the time.
Sadly, the same miracle of small numbers wasn't pulled off by Geoworks' sales department. Not entirely their fault, as the 'chicken and egg' problem of lack of available apps, and a Unix-based SDK kept most developers (other than AOL née Quantum Computer Services) away, which didn't add many available apps.
The target that KOffice, et al, are facing now is a lot further along (especially Excel; Word still sucks), but the general idea is still true: adding bodies doesn't always make the results come any faster. In the words of Wernher von Braun:
Which isn't to say more programmers wouldn't help, just that they need to be the right programmers.Good for them! It's a good case, since both Mofo and the spammers are in California, and there are state laws that apply. I wonder if anyone at Mofo got the spam from candidate for governor Rep. Bill Jones. Maybe they can sue him, too.
Lawyers bill at different rates, but I'd guess about $500/hour if they get a partner to bill the hours, less if it's an associate. But they're a big firm, so they could put a lot of lawyers on it.
I guess lawyers are finally getting through the backlog of .com bankruptcies, and are looking for other work to keep them busy :-)
"doesn't do it all that well" is being kind. My wife tried it on a 5 page letter she'd written, and the results were...bizarre. Yes, the text was from the document. Far from the most relevant parts, seemingly grabbed at random.
My best guess for what it could do is some sort of word frequency count, ignoring common words like 'the'. Then include the top N% of sentences and those adjacent to them that include the most common words. Also, give a higher weighting to things in the beginning and end, since papers following the classic form tend to say what they're going to say, say it, then say what they've just said.
Maybe 500 was an exaggeration (given that the printing press was about that old)...
Actually, there are books that pre-date the printing press. The oldest printed book still around is The Diamond Sutra, at The British Library. It dates from 868AD.
It may also be the oldest existing Open Source document:
...he has the chance to make a coherent hole of the trilogy :-)
I think you meant coherent whole, but given many people's opinion of TPM, this is much funnier
This whole discussion reminds me of stuff I did as a youngster. I had one of those old '101 Electronics Projects' kits that came in a wooden case with resistors, capacitors, a speaker, etc. (kind of like this). One of the experiments was an AM transmitter. I built it, played around with it, got bored, and so tried different parts in place of the original specs.
Next thing I know, my parents are shouting upstairs to me asking what the $%@#! I'm doing, as the TV screen was filled with nothing but noise. We joked about sitting outside the neighbors with it to get them to throw out their TV which we could then liberate from the trash :-)
Of course, that was designed to transmit, and when everybody was watching TVs with rabbit ears. But I imagine with a little work you could pretty easily get it to zap portable phone conversations and the like instead.
Does California still have the death penalty?
Yes, but carried out at a much lower rate than in Texas or Oklahoma. He could be elected, serve, and retire before they got around to him. I'm against the death penalty, but I might be willing to make an exception in this case :-)
In any event, I'm pretty sure this counts as 'three strikes' so he can be locked up for good. Ironically, it's a bill he authored. Seems fitting to me...
I'd suggest reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on web design, not only the current columns but past ones, too. Some columns like The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design are definitely worth reading. It's a couple years old, but people still make those same mistakes.
Besides not falling into the trap of flash without substance (pun intended; Flash is frequently useless for most web sites), keep in mind that people have come to expect certain things from how web pages work. It's nice to have an inovative design, but if it's so far outside the norm that no one can figure it out, people aren't going to use it.
For example, for web commerce, you may not like Amazon, but their site has become the standard for how people expect to shop on the web.
I don't know if spoiled is quite it. More to the point, I think some games spend too much attention on graphics, sounds, special effects, and not enough on making a good, playable game. That's true of all game genres, not just multi-player online games.
If you're looking for a MUD, even a text-based one, they're still out there:
- NetHack - successor to Rogue, the granddaddy of them all
- Falcon's Eye - a graphical version of NetHack
- Wyvern - a Java/Jython MUD with graphics
If what you're looking for isn't listed, check out the The MUD Connector