It's odd that you're worried about the cost of batteries but not of the panels. As a point of reference a recent issue of home power, HomePower.com shows 3 100W panels for $1680 while a 105AH battery is only $400.
The solar panels are going to be easily thousands of dollars. By spending some money on batteries you'll be able to do away with a bunch of extra panels which is going to save more in the long run and will allow you to cool in the evening or on a cloudy day to boot. Still the cheapest is going to be all the tricks you can use to reduce the need for AC like shade, swamp coolers and such.
A few years ago my hands also started to hurt. It was about that time that this article (I believe that's the one) came out here. After reading a bunch about all the keyboards and looking into them I also picked up a kinesis ergo. It was the best money I've ever spent on my computer and close to some of the best money I've ever spent. I would glady pay again in an instant.
I love it. I also started to use xwrits. I find that I don't need it anymore but if things start to hurt it comes back in a hurry. If you're hurting I'd recommend a kinesis without reservation.
I actually got a qwerty/dvorak but haven't switched to dvorak. Unix seems to be just too optimized for qwerty. If I really started to hurt again I'm sure that I might try though.
Re:Who wants to write CGI anyway ?
on
Programming Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I heard him talk once in St. Louis. He's around, at least once in a while. The US isn't that big, you could just drive over and take him to dinner. He talked about some environmental issues, quite a guy.
A moon base would just be an extra gravity well to go in and out of on a trip to Mars. It doesn't buy you anything in terms of making the trip any faster or cheaper. Conceivably you could use it if you never wanted your ship to come back to earth but just getting to Mars won't need it.
A space station is about the same though perhaps a bit more useful. The thing that you have to remember is that you have to get things to the station one way or another. Whether it comes up on your ship or another one it's not any cheaper to get it from the station. You might as well just loft it up there before and rendezvous with it a bit later.
What would really be helpful is a heavy lift rocket. We used to have them in the apollo era but NASA let their last two new ones (atlas class I believe) rust unused in front of some NASA buildings. That would let us get bigger payloads off to Mars.
I don't know about the portals per-se but I have one piece of experience with Be-Open. I wanted to try out the OO-browser, which seems to be part of their flagship app. It's pretty nice but there is absolutely NO community behind it. I signed up for a few mailing lists on it, that I found in the depths of google, but still no traffic after a month. I even sent in a patch to the author and president of Be-Open, Bob Weiner, and haven't heard anything after more than 2 weeks. I can see how he's be busy but if he wants any sense of community around his software he should try to get back to aspiring developers. They may have open source but I don't think that they are fostering any kind of bonds between people on the site. Does anyone know how to interact with the OO-Browser team, is there even such a thing?
You should take this with a grain of salt. A lot of wrist problems are RSI, the key to this comment is the R, repetative. In order to recover you don't need to do more of what's hurting you, using your wrists, you need to do less! If you're in pain go see a doctor. You may need to strengthen them but I'd be wary of doing it in the uncontrolled arena of aikido or anything else that's not physical therapy.
I will second that. Even at a grad student's salary I have no regrets about the cash I shelled out for my kinesis. It's some of the best money I have ever spent. It's like having a nice pair of shoes after wearing velcro ones from Walmart all your life. Definately the best money I've ever spent on computer equipment.
Re:Kinesis is the best keyboard I've ever used
on
Ergonomic Keyboards
·
· Score: 1
>Yes but can you play Quake with it?
Like a fiend! Check out Kinesis Game Central . The keys are all in rows and columns, this means that you don't have to worry about the diagonals messing you up, it's like having a really nice numberpad in a convenient place. It's a lot better for mapping keys than a regular keyboard. Bad for nethack though.
Re:Thanks for the Description
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps you could make a trip to the library? I'd bet they have at least some of them. If you read one and like them then you can buy yourself a copy if you think it's worth it.
Smalltalk has been using this for years, if not decades. If you look at the way java has been developing you'll see a lot of similarity to what smalltalk has had for a long time. Generational garbage just makes sense ( once you see how it works, the hallmark of a great idea).
I think that the hope is not that you won't have to think but what you will think about moves on to other things. You probably don't worry where you next meal will come from, you're pretty comfortable with going to the grocery store every week. You also probably don't think about how to divide 2 binary numbers, someone else has thought about it a lot and you can use the fruits of their labors. You still have to know what not to eat and what kinds of things go together but you have less to worry about.
Patterns always take some thought to apply, most of them will tell you situations when they will not be very good. You need to think if what you have learned is appropriate.
You'd also never say "in what pattern would (this problem) fit". You'd say, I have a problem, what patterns could help me solve it. It takes thought.
Both of your problems are relatively non-starters for stopping a trip to say Mars. You should take a look at Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars. Basically the amount of radiation that you take on a trip to Mars are larger than normal but can be well within what say a nuclear power worker is allowed to be exposed to in a year. By shielding yourself during the larger solar flares and such, say behind your the water you're carying for the worst few hours of the solar storm it can be done.
The microgravity issue can also be solver, inertia to the rescue. Say you have a staged rocket. You leave earth on your way to Mars and use up the fuel in your last stage. Instead of just letting it go you but a teather on it let it go. You can then spin, your habitat on one side of the teather and this stage on the other. Presto, gravity!
It is possible to go to Mars with current technology, we just need the desire, see the above book. Any president who took a Kennedy like approach to this would be immortalized forever as the persone who got us to the moon. Taxes will go up and down and those presidents will be forgotten but they'll never be able to take away a landing on Mars. If I was Bill Gates my money would be getting us to Mars for sure.
Re:Out of the Real World
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
You should take a look at Robert Zubrin's new book, Entering Space. He talks about He3 in it and while it certainly is a great source of power, no harmful ions come from the fusion, there just isn't enough on the moon for the lifetime of the human race. If you look at history you'll see that we continually use more and more energy. The energy we use today in one day would go for a year just a few hundred years ago. There's no reason to believe that this trend won't continue. Progress takes energy.
One of the issues with mining the moon is getting us up there to collect it too, not a trivial task. I'm all for it, I'm writing my memebers of congress about space funding, but we'll need more, like minining Saturn for example.
I too will sound off for the wonders of the Kinesis. It moves a lot of keys under your thumbs which is very nice, like space, delete, control, and a few others. My left "emacs pinkey" was getting really tired of all that control hitting before I changed it to be under my thumb. I'm suprised that there hasn't been a link yet to the Ask Slashdot about Ergo Keyboards It's what got me on the kinesis bandwagon.
Ever hear of cross compiling? You just need to know what the target instruction set is and have the backend of your compiler spit some of that out. It's definitely useful to have some familiarity with assembler but it is a lot less useful that it once was.
Whiny bitch, give me a break. You try to be unable to open a jar or use a door knob and tell me how you feel. There are so many factors that cause things like this to be really troubling. Anyone would try to get things fixed when they can't get up in the mornng and open the tooth paste. If a little cash output to make the workplace a better environment for workers I'm all for it. I think that in a lot of cases it's not even a money problem but just that people don't think that ergo factors are important and they just don't think factor that into their decision.
My office has 5 protec BYTELANs. We can't get out mice to work with these things to save our lives. The guy who acually has 4 systems hooked up to his system has the mouse pad from hell, 4 mice on it. I suppose that the mouse is the least important part of the KVM setup but from what people have to say I'd go with one that does all 3.
I haven't noticed any quality or resolution issues though. We have HP, Sun, NT and linux all using there switches and other than the mouse issue like them.
The problem with this, as I believe Bruce has said in a crypto-gram (which is available from the counterpane homepage), is that once a digital signature is forged it can be forged perfectly everytime by anyone who you share the secret with. Ink signatures on the other hand take some skill every time. The people with the skills to do such things are few. A broken digital signature can be used by any jamoke whose buddy gave him the info.
Have you looked at your slashdot cookies lately? Taco seems to have not only my visa number and my high school gpa but also my income bracket, ssn, religion, sexual preference, AND the last time I brushed my teeth. Take a look at your cookies, it gave me a chuckle yesterday.
Here's an interesting comment I found regarding the size and funding of the NSA:
* "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner * The New York Times, November 5 1994 * * By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually * detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United * States intelligence agencies. * * In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information * public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the * secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of * the United States. * * $3.1 billion for the CIA * $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force * and Marines special-operations units * $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA * * The only damage done so far is to the * credibility of those who opposed the measure.
Slashdot Mirror
It's odd that you're worried about the cost of batteries but not of the panels. As a point of reference a recent issue of home power, HomePower.com shows 3 100W panels for $1680 while a 105AH battery is only $400.
The solar panels are going to be easily thousands of dollars. By spending some money on batteries you'll be able to do away with a bunch of extra panels which is going to save more in the long run and will allow you to cool in the evening or on a cloudy day to boot. Still the cheapest is going to be all the tricks you can use to reduce the need for AC like shade, swamp coolers and such.
Do you see how dorky your parents are?
Even they found each other, fell in love, and got married somehow. There are better things to stress out about than your lack of a {girl,boy}friend.
A few years ago my hands also started to hurt. It was about that time that this article (I believe that's the one) came out here. After reading a bunch about all the keyboards and looking into them I also picked up a kinesis ergo. It was the best money I've ever spent on my computer and close to some of the best money I've ever spent. I would glady pay again in an instant.
I love it. I also started to use xwrits. I find that I don't need it anymore but if things start to hurt it comes back in a hurry. If you're hurting I'd recommend a kinesis without reservation.
I actually got a qwerty/dvorak but haven't switched to dvorak. Unix seems to be just too optimized for qwerty. If I really started to hurt again I'm sure that I might try though.
You can find out about mod_ruby here:
mod_ruby.
Yes, this is topmind's stuff. Semi-kook is a good way to put it.
If you take a look at the comp.object archives in the past few weeks there have been a few whacks taken at exactly this article. Try this deja.com link: My thoughts on `topmind@technologist.com` AND his site
You might want to check out "Distributed Operating Systems: Concepts and Design" by Pradeep Sinha.
It talks about Amoeba, the V-System (I couldn't find a good web page), and Chorus.
It's a textbook so it also has a lot of theory about general distributed OS's.
I heard him talk once in St. Louis. He's around, at least once in a while. The US isn't that big, you could just drive over and take him to dinner. He talked about some environmental issues, quite a guy.
A moon base and a space station aren't needed.
A moon base would just be an extra gravity well to go in and out of on a trip to Mars. It doesn't buy you anything in terms of making the trip any faster or cheaper. Conceivably you could use it if you never wanted your ship to come back to earth but just getting to Mars won't need it.
A space station is about the same though perhaps a bit more useful. The thing that you have to remember is that you have to get things to the station one way or another. Whether it comes up on your ship or another one it's not any cheaper to get it from the station. You might as well just loft it up there before and rendezvous with it a bit later.
What would really be helpful is a heavy lift rocket. We used to have them in the apollo era but NASA let their last two new ones (atlas class I believe) rust unused in front of some NASA buildings. That would let us get bigger payloads off to Mars.
I don't know about the portals per-se but I have one piece of experience with Be-Open. I wanted to try out the OO-browser, which seems to be part of their flagship app. It's pretty nice but there is absolutely NO community behind it. I signed up for a few mailing lists on it, that I found in the depths of google, but still no traffic after a month.
I even sent in a patch to the author and president of Be-Open, Bob Weiner, and haven't heard anything after more than 2 weeks. I can see how he's be busy but if he wants any sense of community around his software he should try to get back to aspiring developers.
They may have open source but I don't think that they are fostering any kind of bonds between people on the site.
Does anyone know how to interact with the OO-Browser team, is there even such a thing?
That's a steGANographics file system. A steno filesystem would be more like a secrary with shorthand writing down all of your files.
You should take this with a grain of salt. A lot of wrist problems are RSI, the key to this comment is the R, repetative. In order to recover you don't need to do more of what's hurting you, using your wrists, you need to do less! If you're in pain go see a doctor. You may need to strengthen them but I'd be wary of doing it in the uncontrolled arena of aikido or anything else that's not physical therapy.
I will second that. Even at a grad student's salary I have no regrets about the cash I shelled out for my kinesis. It's some of the best money I have ever spent. It's like having a nice pair of shoes after wearing velcro ones from Walmart all your life. Definately the best money I've ever spent on computer equipment.
>Yes but can you play Quake with it?
Like a fiend! Check out Kinesis Game Central . The keys are all in rows and columns, this means that you don't have to worry about the diagonals messing you up, it's like having a really nice numberpad in a convenient place. It's a lot better for mapping keys than a regular keyboard. Bad for nethack though.
Perhaps you could make a trip to the library? I'd bet they have at least some of them. If you read one and like them then you can buy yourself a copy if you think it's worth it.
Smalltalk has been using this for years, if not decades. If you look at the way java has been developing you'll see a lot of similarity to what smalltalk has had for a long time. Generational garbage just makes sense ( once you see how it works, the hallmark of a great idea).
I think that the hope is not that you won't have to think but what you will think about moves on to other things. You probably don't worry where you next meal will come from, you're pretty comfortable with going to the grocery store every week. You also probably don't think about how to divide 2 binary numbers, someone else has thought about it a lot and you can use the fruits of their labors. You still have to know what not to eat and what kinds of things go together but you have less to worry about.
Patterns always take some thought to apply, most of them will tell you situations when they will not be very good. You need to think if what you have learned is appropriate.
You'd also never say "in what pattern would (this problem) fit". You'd say, I have a problem, what patterns could help me solve it. It takes thought.
Both of your problems are relatively non-starters for stopping a trip to say Mars. You should take a look at Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars. Basically the amount of radiation that you take on a trip to Mars are larger than normal but can be well within what say a nuclear power worker is allowed to be exposed to in a year. By shielding yourself during the larger solar flares and such, say behind your the water you're carying for the worst few hours of the solar storm it can be done.
The microgravity issue can also be solver, inertia to the rescue. Say you have a staged rocket. You leave earth on your way to Mars and use up the fuel in your last stage. Instead of just letting it go you but a teather on it let it go. You can then spin, your habitat on one side of the teather and this stage on the other. Presto, gravity!
It is possible to go to Mars with current technology, we just need the desire, see the above book. Any president who took a Kennedy like approach to this would be immortalized forever as the persone who got us to the moon. Taxes will go up and down and those presidents will be forgotten but they'll never be able to take away a landing on Mars. If I was Bill Gates my money would be getting us to Mars for sure.
You should take a look at Robert Zubrin's new book, Entering Space. He talks about He3 in it and while it certainly is a great source of power, no harmful ions come from the fusion, there just isn't enough on the moon for the lifetime of the human race. If you look at history you'll see that we continually use more and more energy. The energy we use today in one day would go for a year just a few hundred years ago. There's no reason to believe that this trend won't continue. Progress takes energy.
One of the issues with mining the moon is getting us up there to collect it too, not a trivial task. I'm all for it, I'm writing my memebers of congress about space funding, but we'll need more, like minining Saturn for example.
I too will sound off for the wonders of the Kinesis. It moves a lot of keys under your thumbs which is very nice, like space, delete, control, and a few others. My left "emacs pinkey" was getting really tired of all that control hitting before I changed it to be under my thumb. I'm suprised that there hasn't been a link yet to the Ask Slashdot about Ergo Keyboards
It's what got me on the kinesis bandwagon.
Ever hear of cross compiling? You just need to know what the target instruction set is and have the backend of your compiler spit some of that out. It's definitely useful to have some familiarity with assembler but it is a lot less useful that it once was.
Whiny bitch, give me a break. You try to be unable to open a jar or use a door knob and tell me how you feel. There are so many factors that cause things like this to be really troubling. Anyone would try to get things fixed when they can't get up in the mornng and open the tooth paste.
If a little cash output to make the workplace a better environment for workers I'm all for it. I think that in a lot of cases it's not even a money problem but just that people don't think that ergo factors are important and they just don't think factor that into their decision.
My office has 5 protec BYTELANs. We can't get out mice to work with these things to save our lives. The guy who acually has 4 systems hooked up to his system has the mouse pad from hell, 4 mice on it. I suppose that the mouse is the least important part of the KVM setup but from what people have to say I'd go with one that does all 3.
I haven't noticed any quality or resolution issues though. We have HP, Sun, NT and linux all using there switches and other than the mouse issue like them.
The problem with this, as I believe Bruce has said in a crypto-gram (which is available from the counterpane homepage), is that once a digital signature is forged it can be forged perfectly everytime by anyone who you share the secret with. Ink signatures on the other hand take some skill every time. The people with the skills to do such things are few. A broken digital signature can be used by any jamoke whose buddy gave him the info.
Have you looked at your slashdot cookies lately? Taco seems to have not only my visa number and my high school gpa but also my income bracket, ssn, religion, sexual preference, AND the last time I brushed my teeth. Take a look at your cookies, it gave me a chuckle yesterday.
Here's an interesting comment I found regarding the size and funding of the NSA:
* "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner
* The New York Times, November 5 1994
*
* By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually
* detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United
* States intelligence agencies.
*
* In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information
* public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the
* secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of
* the United States.
*
* $3.1 billion for the CIA
* $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force
* and Marines special-operations units
* $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA
*
* The only damage done so far is to the
* credibility of those who opposed the measure.