Well, I was happy that the latest version of Quicken is coming with the Mac mini I ordered, but now I'm not so sure I want to support Quicken. While this Sunsetting pretty much sucks, they do have costs associated with the some of the services. Are those upset by this move willing to pay an annual fee to use their old software? Isn't this really a reason to rent software in some instances?
A few vocal folks talk about the virtues of free (as in speech) software, but most of only care about the free (as in beer) aspects of it. This is pervasive in the US. That is why we have outsourcing, Walmart, a huge trade deficit, and a crappy job market. Everyone expects a free lunch. I am no different and maybe one day I'll wake up and realize the the folly of my ways.
The Global Hawk has the ability to fly nearly half way around the world WITHOUT a pilot. So this guy's claim to fame will be that he did it solo? It seems to me that with the right equipment, he could spend to whole flight taking pictures out the window or sleeping. Won't this claim will be rather pointless given the current state of technology?
No they can't do that! This is their attempt to rebalance the karma loss from continued hunting (I mean research) of whales. It would be plain wrong to kill a defective animal for food when there are bigger healthier ones to eat (I mean research).
I hope people who bought lifetime membership are still happy with their decision to do so. You would think that buying a lifetime subscription would entitle you to lock in the feature set available at the time of subscription.
I tried Firefox today. Being an Opera7 user, I expected quite a bit and Firefox came up short. Specifically, I miss the scheduled autoupdate of the various tabs. I have several sites I frequent, like slashdot, that I update every 30 minutes. I do it for convienence sake and to throw off the web monitoring my employer does (they update all night long while I'm not at work). I also like to have several tabs visible at the same time (now maybe I just couldn't figure that one out for myself). I do not know what overhead they have in their java(script) use, but animated weather maps I often use were very jerky. It is a lot better than previous versions, but just not quite there yet.
Wait 'till you see the deluxe model. It runs on a hydrogen fuel cell and so creates its own water supply which has enabled Nokia to include a Kitchen Sink in the deluxe model (due out in time for the winter holiday season!).
What??? Water is its densest at a temperature of 4C. Cold water pumped out during the summer cooling months has a chance to be replenished during the next winter. As the winter ice melts and the melt water warms it begins to sink due to the relative increase in density as it approaches a temperature of 4C. So long as the winter cooling capacity of the lake exceeds the summer cooling needs of the city, this should be a sustainable practice. It is true that the thickness of the cold layer will thin during the summer pumping season, but it will thicken again during winter. Obviously, this pumping will cause the mean thickness to decrease - they just need to hope it doesn't thin too much. The problem with free lunches is that people eat too much, get fat, and die!
What you are looking to use is something called a "corner cube" or "retro reflector". It has the property of sending the incident light back in exactly the direction it came from. So your attacker would very effectively shoot himself. You might be able to use some of that retro-reflecting tape that some runners/cyclists use to be more easily seen during dawn/dusk. It is not as efficient as a good quality corner cube, but it doesn't cost several hundred dollars either.
To address the query posed by the lead author, a beam expander will reduce the divergence of the laser beam and "tighten up" the pattern. Again, they are not cheap, you might want to experiment using an old, cheap rifle scope on the end of your weapon as a beam expander.
The government must fund and support the weather service activities simply because it is an issue of the health and safety of the public. By your reasoning we should privatize the military too. Given the fact that we (those of us that pay taxes at least) are already paying for this work and the information it generates, we should not have to pay for it again nor be required to provide a subsidy to the "weather corporations" so they can profit from it directly. They need to enhance the products by some value-added activity of their own.
Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm an extra class ham, but I believe amateur radio is a dying art/hobby. The thanks go mostly to the internet and cell phones. While I'm a bit sad to see very few of the younger folk comming into the hobby, I'm not surprised.
Just because they patent it, does not mean that they will keep it for themselves. Let's see what they do with it before we burn them at the stake. Maybe they did that to protect us all from soemone else patenting it and trying to milk it. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt before I make statements like "that'll be the last Cisco device I buy...". What a bunch of manic depressives! WWLD (What would Linus Do?).
Yeah, we get 8 here in Hampton Roads, VA too. To see what is available in your area look Here or better yet, Here for what is available in your area. I'm waiting for the ATI HD-tuner card to add to my system plus an antenna from the site linked to above. Fortunately, where I am at all 8 stations are within 5 degrees of each other and one stationary antenna will pull them all in.
Perhaps they are looking at the universe the wrong way. What if the universe is accelerating *because* some aliens elsewhere in the universe are doing one heck of a lot of computation, could this be the source of dark energy? Remember, we are talking about accelerating and not merely expanding.
Oh who needs a graphing calculator? Does anyone use the graphing aspect once they get out of high school? Probably not. Its mostly a gimmick used to snare parents into buying something that will make their otherwise lame kid excel in school. Just give me a solar powered RPN scientific caalculator any day. I'm still banging away on my HP 11C and haven't replaced the batteries in years but... Did HP ever make a solar powered scientific RPN calculator? This new one looks interesting if it wasn't for the batteries.
"I don't get this part. A wheel is a small closed shape, you go once around it and you're back where you started from. On the other hand, a road has to GO somewhere along the ground - if it was a closed shape suspended in the air then you would fall off when you come around to the bottom side of it - so of COURSE they can't be the same shape - one has to have open topology and one has to have closed topology."
Well, no. The wheel is merely a periodic shape that repeats every 2*pi radians in polar coordinates. It can be just as "open" and the road.
If you assume that real wheels and vehicles have mass, then either the vehicle or wheels of a square-wheeled thing would have to be constantly (de)accelerating and require work to be done. Only when the interface between the wheel and the road is a constant distance from the axel (ie. a circular wheel) does this acceleration go away at constant velocity. So, I would argue that there is nothing more efficient than a circular wheel.
Well a circular wheel with infinite radius is equivalent to a straight line. So without further guidance on the challenge, this is an acceptable solution. However since the general problem is to have the shape of the roadbed, in rectangular coordinates, be equal to the the shape of the wheel in a translating polar coordinate system, there may be other solutions. I would like to see an equation expressing the time dependence of the angular rate of rotation of this square wheel for a constant rate of rectalinear translation (speed). My guess is that the rate of rotation of the pedal is far from uniform and it would not be plesant to ride.
... and that's why I use Eudora for email (where I can easily disable html email) and Opera as my default browser on my windows systems. Life can be so simple when you have a choice.
Yes but, Micro$oft will do this in such a way so as to A) embrace and extend in a patented way, and B) with the market dominance to make it the standard. While the other email clients do it various ways, they'll be incompatable with the M$ "standard". You'll probably find some hooks to the DMCA to protect their investment too. Remember they lost the JAVA wars and are now looking for other conquests.
It is not just job loss or colonizing of the internet at stake here. This is eventually a loss of expertise. Folks in Washington, DC are worried about international arms trade and WMD, but don't see the risk from our open educational system and now the corporate moves that take not only the jobs but the technological advances out of the US.Does anyone else, for example, worry when they see the new Sony robot that can run? I'm neither alarmist nor xenophobic, but I do think knowledge and expertise are as important to protect as are nukes. This is more than just the loss of a few good paying jobs.
Yes, I RTFA. My point was that this was supported under Win98 5 years ago and is just now getting support under linux. The only reason it isn't supported by XP is the new driver model and Gravis's lack of support in providing a new driver for obsolete hardware. Noone is really to blame here since the market has moved on to USB-based devices. For the record, I'm really trying to completely dump Micro$oft OSes, but invaraiably my state of the art hardware is poorly supported by linux. No doubt that is my fault for not researching the support in advance. By the time support arrives the hardware is one or two generations old. My hope is that the hardware vendors see the light and provide linux drivers and utilities when the product is introduced, otherwise we are all dependent upon the 3rd party developers and whatever development schedule they feel likw working to. Micro$oft gets things to work by being the defacto standard that vendors design to. Apple does it by tight-fistedly controlling both the software and the hardware. With linux we wait and pray. I for one am happy to see the SUNs and Novells buying linux distros and whole-heartedly supporting the OS. I hope it helps the situation. I am watching the development of software that enables the windows drivers to be utilized by linux. This may be our near-term salvation.
I normally just bite my tongue, but this is a big story because...
"This input system used to cost more than $100, but it has been abandoned by Gravis since Windows 98."
everyone gets excited that linux finally has support for some ancient piece of hardware? Wake me up when most vendors support their latest video,raid,direct-to-disk-DVD+-RW,... by providing linux drivers & utilities.
Well it depends upon where they take the script. If you look at the setting we are left with at the end of the pilot (mini-series), I worry about it begin another Star Trek Voyager. They jumped way out into the middle of nowhere (read lots and annoying aliens) and an arch-enemy (aka another Borg). They only real difference is that they know where they are and can presumably jump back rather easily. Would I be willing to watch more episodes? Yes, as long as they stay away from a Doctor Z character!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I was happy that the latest version of Quicken is coming with the Mac mini I ordered, but now I'm not so sure I want to support Quicken. While this Sunsetting pretty much sucks, they do have costs associated with the some of the services. Are those upset by this move willing to pay an annual fee to use their old software? Isn't this really a reason to rent software in some instances?
A few vocal folks talk about the virtues of free (as in speech) software, but most of only care about the free (as in beer) aspects of it. This is pervasive in the US. That is why we have outsourcing, Walmart, a huge trade deficit, and a crappy job market. Everyone expects a free lunch. I am no different and maybe one day I'll wake up and realize the the folly of my ways.
The Global Hawk has the ability to fly nearly half way around the world WITHOUT a pilot. So this guy's claim to fame will be that he did it solo? It seems to me that with the right equipment, he could spend to whole flight taking pictures out the window or sleeping. Won't this claim will be rather pointless given the current state of technology?
No they can't do that! This is their attempt to rebalance the karma loss from continued hunting (I mean research) of whales. It would be plain wrong to kill a defective animal for food when there are bigger healthier ones to eat (I mean research).
I hope people who bought lifetime membership are still happy with their decision to do so. You would think that buying a lifetime subscription would entitle you to lock in the feature set available at the time of subscription.
I tried Firefox today. Being an Opera7 user, I expected quite a bit and Firefox came up short. Specifically, I miss the scheduled autoupdate of the various tabs. I have several sites I frequent, like slashdot, that I update every 30 minutes. I do it for convienence sake and to throw off the web monitoring my employer does (they update all night long while I'm not at work). I also like to have several tabs visible at the same time (now maybe I just couldn't figure that one out for myself). I do not know what overhead they have in their java(script) use, but animated weather maps I often use were very jerky. It is a lot better than previous versions, but just not quite there yet.
Submitted using Opera7 (again).
Wait 'till you see the deluxe model. It runs on a hydrogen fuel cell and so creates its own water supply which has enabled Nokia to include a Kitchen Sink in the deluxe model (due out in time for the winter holiday season!).
Sheesh!
What??? Water is its densest at a temperature of 4C. Cold water pumped out during the summer cooling months has a chance to be replenished during the next winter. As the winter ice melts and the melt water warms it begins to sink due to the relative increase in density as it approaches a temperature of 4C. So long as the winter cooling capacity of the lake exceeds the summer cooling needs of the city, this should be a sustainable practice. It is true that the thickness of the cold layer will thin during the summer pumping season, but it will thicken again during winter. Obviously, this pumping will cause the mean thickness to decrease - they just need to hope it doesn't thin too much. The problem with free lunches is that people eat too much, get fat, and die!
What you are looking to use is something called a "corner cube" or "retro reflector". It has the property of sending the incident light back in exactly the direction it came from. So your attacker would very effectively shoot himself. You might be able to use some of that retro-reflecting tape that some runners/cyclists use to be more easily seen during dawn/dusk. It is not as efficient as a good quality corner cube, but it doesn't cost several hundred dollars either.
To address the query posed by the lead author, a beam expander will reduce the divergence of the laser beam and "tighten up" the pattern. Again, they are not cheap, you might want to experiment using an old, cheap rifle scope on the end of your weapon as a beam expander.
Enjoy,
The government must fund and support the weather service activities simply because it is an issue of the health and safety of the public. By your reasoning we should privatize the military too. Given the fact that we (those of us that pay taxes at least) are already paying for this work and the information it generates, we should not have to pay for it again nor be required to provide a subsidy to the "weather corporations" so they can profit from it directly. They need to enhance the products by some value-added activity of their own.
I'm an extra class ham, but I believe amateur radio is a dying art/hobby. The thanks go mostly to the internet and cell phones. While I'm a bit sad to see very few of the younger folk comming into the hobby, I'm not surprised.
Just because they patent it, does not mean that they will keep it for themselves. Let's see what they do with it before we burn them at the stake. Maybe they did that to protect us all from soemone else patenting it and trying to milk it. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt before I make statements like "that'll be the last Cisco device I buy ...". What a bunch of manic depressives! WWLD (What would Linus Do?).
Yeah, we get 8 here in Hampton Roads, VA too. To see what is available in your area look Here or better yet, Here for what is available in your area. I'm waiting for the ATI HD-tuner card to add to my system plus an antenna from the site linked to above. Fortunately, where I am at all 8 stations are within 5 degrees of each other and one stationary antenna will pull them all in.
Perhaps they are looking at the universe the wrong way. What if the universe is accelerating *because* some aliens elsewhere in the universe are doing one heck of a lot of computation, could this be the source of dark energy? Remember, we are talking about accelerating and not merely expanding.
Oh who needs a graphing calculator? Does anyone use the graphing aspect once they get out of high school? Probably not. Its mostly a gimmick used to snare parents into buying something that will make their otherwise lame kid excel in school. Just give me a solar powered RPN scientific caalculator any day. I'm still banging away on my HP 11C and haven't replaced the batteries in years but... Did HP ever make a solar powered scientific RPN calculator? This new one looks interesting if it wasn't for the batteries.
"I don't get this part. A wheel is a small closed shape, you go once around it and you're back where you started from. On the other hand, a road has to GO somewhere along the ground - if it was a closed shape suspended in the air then you would fall off when you come around to the bottom side of it - so of COURSE they can't be the same shape - one has to have open topology and one has to have closed topology."
Well, no. The wheel is merely a periodic shape that repeats every 2*pi radians in polar coordinates. It can be just as "open" and the road.
If you assume that real wheels and vehicles have mass, then either the vehicle or wheels of a square-wheeled thing would have to be constantly (de)accelerating and require work to be done. Only when the interface between the wheel and the road is a constant distance from the axel (ie. a circular wheel) does this acceleration go away at constant velocity. So, I would argue that there is
nothing more efficient than a circular wheel.
Well a circular wheel with infinite radius is equivalent to a straight line. So without further guidance on the challenge, this is an acceptable solution. However since the general problem is to have the shape of the roadbed, in rectangular coordinates, be equal to the the shape of the wheel in a translating polar coordinate system, there may be other solutions. I would like to see an equation expressing the time dependence of the angular rate of rotation of this square wheel for a constant rate of rectalinear translation (speed). My guess is that the rate of rotation of the pedal is far from uniform and it would not be plesant to ride.
... and that's why I use Eudora for email (where I can easily disable html email) and Opera as my default browser on my windows systems. Life can be so simple when you have a choice.
I would agree if they were actually taking legal action, but this is just more threats and nasty letters.
Vaporware producers unite!
Yes but, Micro$oft will do this in such a way so as to A) embrace and extend in a patented way, and B) with the market dominance to make it the standard. While the other email clients do it various ways, they'll be incompatable with the M$ "standard". You'll probably find some hooks to the DMCA to protect their investment too. Remember they lost the JAVA wars and are now looking for other conquests.
It is not just job loss or colonizing of the internet at stake here. This is eventually a loss of expertise. Folks in Washington, DC are worried about international arms trade and WMD, but don't see the risk from our open educational system and now the corporate moves that take not only the jobs but the technological advances out of the US.Does anyone else, for example, worry when they see the new Sony robot that can run? I'm neither alarmist nor xenophobic, but I do think knowledge and expertise are as important to protect as are nukes. This is more than just the loss of a few good paying jobs.
Yes, I RTFA. My point was that this was supported under Win98 5 years ago and is just now getting support under linux. The only reason it isn't supported by XP is the new driver model and Gravis's lack of support in providing a new driver for obsolete hardware. Noone is really to blame here since the market has moved on to USB-based devices. For the record, I'm really trying to completely dump Micro$oft OSes, but invaraiably my state of the art hardware is poorly supported by linux. No doubt that is my fault for not researching the support in advance. By the time support arrives the hardware is one or two generations old. My hope is that the hardware vendors see the light and provide linux drivers and utilities when the product is introduced, otherwise we are all dependent upon the 3rd party developers and whatever development schedule they feel likw working to. Micro$oft gets things to work by being the defacto standard that vendors design to. Apple does it by tight-fistedly controlling both the software and the hardware. With linux we wait and pray. I for one am happy to see the SUNs and Novells buying linux distros and whole-heartedly supporting the OS. I hope it helps the situation. I am watching the development of software that enables the windows drivers to be utilized by linux. This may be our near-term salvation.
Flamebait indeed. Off-topic probably.
I normally just bite my tongue, but this is a big story because ...
"This input system used to cost more than $100, but it has been abandoned by Gravis since Windows 98."
everyone gets excited that linux finally has support for some ancient piece of hardware? Wake me up when most vendors support their latest video,raid,direct-to-disk-DVD+-RW,... by providing linux drivers & utilities.
Well it depends upon where they take the script. If you look at the setting we are left with at the end of the pilot (mini-series), I worry about it begin another Star Trek Voyager. They jumped way out into the middle of nowhere (read lots and annoying aliens) and an arch-enemy (aka another Borg). They only real difference is that they know where they are and can presumably jump back rather easily. Would I be willing to watch more episodes? Yes, as long as they stay away from a Doctor Z character!
There is some info and a less than glowing review Here.
Enjoy