The Saturn V was anything but cheap! Just to build one of those suckers costs $630,000,000. It was probably the most expensive single-use rocket ever built!
I use Royal Bank.. their site supports everything I've tried. I was so amazed I sent their tech support an email about how great it was to be able to use Konqueror to do my banking.
I'm a Royal Bank client too, and up until a few days ago what you have said was true. But now they've switched to something that's a bit fancier looking, a lot more broken, and crashes Netscape 4.x. I see no reason for the change, other then "we need more javascript... just 'cuz!".
PDF is fine if you just want to print stuff out, but it contains absolutely none of the information of the original document that allows you to edit it.
I would say that 95% of the documents floating around on the web, being e-mailed to people, etc., are meant to be "read only", i.e., with no intention to be editable. PDF is a much better format for this purpose.
The main advantage of using a multibeam receiver, as stated in the article, is to filter out noise from the Earth. If the same signal is received from different points in the sky (even if they're only slightly different), then it's almost definitely a signal that originated on Earth and is simply bouncing off the atmosphere. Being able to filter out false positives like this is extremely advantageous to the SETI program.
I don't like the keypad. It'd be awkward to everybody who's used to the standard 3x4 array of buttons, which is, well, everybody!
The least they could have done is arranged the circular buttons in clockwise order so that they'd be layed out in a way similar to the old rotary-dial phones.
What would be interesting is coming up with a proof of why 196 exhibits this peculiar property.
Until then, it's actually impossible to prove that a number is a Lychrel number. In fact, it's impossible to prove that there are any Lychrel numbers. Whose to say that the 20 billionth iteration of 196 isn't going to result in a palindrome?
Until and unless there's a proof of why Lychrel numbers exist, the whole concept is quite uninteresting beyond a passing "neat".
I think a 13 28-day month calendar, with 4 perfect 7-day weeks a month, is better.
An advantage to such a system that you never stated is that a particular day of the month will always be the exact same day of the week. E.g., June 13th will always be on a Wednesday, and Christmas will always be on a Saturday, etc. It makes planning events much easier. Also, simply looking at the moon will give you a rough indication as to how far through the month it is (actually, probably to within a day or two). As well, women's menstrual cycles are usually about 28 days, so things like that will be easier to keep track of without having to rely on a calendar.
Come to think of it, a system like that would obsolete the need for a year-specific calendar. You could use the same calendar every year!
Not quite true... according to the article, the CCD only captures at 640x480. The larger image size is achieved by interpolation. In fact, since "the 52-shot capacity is unaffected by your choice", it seems to me that the image is ALWAYS stored by the camera at 640x480, regardless of what mode you set it to, and only performs the interpolation to enlarge the image during upload to your computer.
I just wish that bug #58554 would be fixed so that I can have use xv as my helper aplication for images. Why this is listed as an RFE and not a bug is beyond me. If you configure Mozilla to use "xv" as the helper application for MIME type "image/gif" and it continues to render the GIF inside the browser window, it's clearly a bug, and an annoying one at that! It's the only thing keeping me from switching from Netscape 4.x to Mozilla.
If some bright fellow invented a general CO2 collector that could be planted on floating platforms in the middle of the oceans and suck up more than all the manmade CO2 that was being pumped out, the Kyoto treaty would *still* require a CO2 emission restriction regimin even though it would be totally useless.
I can't believe how many people have this attitude about environmental pollution! I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see that preventative maintenance (i.e., reducing emissions at the source) is a fundamentally safer way to insure that we don't continue down the spiralling path of the gradual destruction of our planet's ecosystem. In order for humankind to survive (comfortably) in the long run, we're going to have to treat our planet with respect.
Do you piss on your living room carpet every day and then get a carpet cleaner in each weekend to clean up the mess? No, you install a toilet and a plumbing system!
One of the things I found interesting about this music is how the computer voice actually tries to reproduce the actual "note" of each word. I'm not sure where it gets this information from; I'm guessing it's manually fed into the generator.
The male computer voice, however, isn't capabable of producing the range required for most of the songs, though, so it switches to a female voice occasionally to hit the higher notes (i.e., on a word-by-word basis). It's actually quite comical to hear.
The first question you'll want to ask yourself is whether you want the result in searchable text form or scanned image form. Searchable text is achievable with OCR (optical character recognition) software, but has at least two issues:
OCR software isn't perfect, and so errors will occur that'll you'll either have to live with or correct manually. Good OCR software does some validating against a dictionary, but this doesn't help when the source is highly mathematical, etc.
You'll lose figures, diagrams and pictures.
Scanned images solve these problems, but have two problems of their own:
They're not searchable.
They're bulky (perhaps 100x).
Perhaps a hybrid solution exists, but I suspect such a solution will require a lot of manual intervention and tweaking, something you'll want to avoid if your goal is to digitize several books.
Slashdot does this fairly often, in fact. For example, the "James Doohan Not In A Coma and Likely To Survive" story was originally titled "James Doohan In A Coma And Not Likely To Survive", and was modified on-the-fly as more facts became available. Very confusing.
MPEG and DVD players are all fine and dandy, but I'm curious as to the best way, under Linux, to record from a video source and encode it into MPEG2. I've been looking around lately, and there seem to be a few what-appear-to-be-options, but it all seems rather unclear to me if and how this stuff can be put together for a complete solution.
The requirements I'm looking for are:
The ability to grab a raw 640x480 NTSC signal (including audio!) at 30fps from a video card (it doesn't matter what kind of video card - I'll buy whatever I need!) and dump it to a (large) hard drive in an uncompressed format.
The ability to crop and join these recordings.
The ability to do a high-quality MPEG2 encoding from these captured recordings. This doesn't have to be a real-time encoding, since the source is now just a series of hard drive files, so all of the quality parameters can be pumped way up.
Does anybody have any experience with this type of procedure? Do you have any advice to share? I have a pile of old VHS tapes that are decaying, and I'd like to get a high-quality digital capture of them before they get too bad.
The one bit cut on the CD release is "Did you know that robot can hum like Pink Floyd?", cut because Roger Waters wouldn't let them include a small sample of Pink Floyd on the CD release.
That's not entirely accurate. It was cut because Douglas Adams' lawyer thought that Pink Floyd's lawyer would disallow it. They never even considering asking the artists themselves. Douglas Adams and David Gilmour were good friends, and David told Douglas directly that it was okay to use that bit.
Which would be a worthy note if that was a real bug. Looks to me like an enhancement. Just because a piece of software can't do something another similar piece can doesn't make it a bug. An enhancement is something that adds useful functionality.
I consider this a bug. If I tell Mozilla to pass documents of type "image/gif" to the application "xv" and it doesn't, that's a bug. It's unfortunate that this was marked as an "enhancement request", because it means that it's less likely that anybody is going to look into it anytime soon.
I know they've switched over to Mozilla (a move I wholeheartedly agree with), but I was wondering if they still ship with Netscape as well (at least for this release).
they told him they were going to see Pluto the disney character. His eyes lit up and he jumped up and down saying "oh boy oh boy"
However, when he found out in February that what they were talking about was actually a cold rock in space, he "removed the $122 million needed for the mission from NASA's budget for the 2003 fiscal year". Sigh.
Okay, this is getting silly. Earlier today I made a posting that claimed that "The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2)". Shortly after that, I was corrected. The force of gravity is proportional to the product of the masses. The full formula is F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2. However, I have since seen this formula mis-quoted a number of times in this thread. It seems as if other people made the same mistake as I did, recalling the equation from memory and assuming that the operation is an addition because it sounds like it would work that way. The logic used to rationalize this is as follows: It couldn't be a multiplication, because if it were, doubling the mass of one of the objects (e.g., by replacing a foam ball with a bowling ball) would double the value of (m1 * m2), causing the bowling ball to fall to earth twice as fast, which it clearly doesn't. Well, this logic is incorrect, and I'm gonna tell you why. Ready?
Yes, the value of (m1 * m2) doubles. And yes, that means that the overall force that the object experiences doubles. But since the object is twice as massive, it needs twice the force to accelerate it to the same extent (because F = m * a). So the bowling ball falls at the exact same speed as the foam ball because a given force would affect it half as much as it would affect the foam ball (because it weighs twice as much), but the force of gravity is pulling on it twice as hard. The actual mass of the object is cancelled out of the equation.
This, to me, is simply astounding, as in 1) simple, 2) astounding, and 3) astounding in its simplicity. The universe is truly an amazing place.
dropping a bowling ball and a light foam ball to demonstrate how mass is independant of gravity.
But this experiment is a bit misleading. Mass isn't actually independent of gravity. It is just extremely negligable when the second object is billions of times more massive than the object in question (like a bowling ball as compared to the Earth).
The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2), and the Earth (m2) has a mass of 5.9736 × 10^24 kg. Try the same experiment by comparing how fast a bowling ball falls in comparison to a bowling-ball sized neutron star. (Of course, you wouldn't want to drop them at the same time, because you'd then be dealing with a three-body problem.)
I find that I usually slip into "The Zone" after an hour or two of straight coding. While in the zone, my mind is capable of wonderful things. The thing that amazes me the most is that I've got a stack of a staggering size. In other words, I can say "Hmmm, I'll have to get back to finishing that complicated bit of code later, after I do this..." a number of times, and I always seem to remember every level of things I have to get back to, and all the complexity involved at each level. It's like I can almost see the algorithm at all of its different levels of abstraction all at once. I know how Neo felt at the end of The Matrix. The ironic thing about this is outside of the zone, and in most everyday situations, my memory, especially my short term, is really awful.
I can stay in the zone for many hours at a time. Of course, the passage of time is something hardly noticed. It's becomes just part of my surroundings, to be ignored by my conscious like the walls and light fixtures. Music is the same way - it can be on, but it neither helps nor hinders me, because my mind pretty much blocks it out completely.
I find that if anybody tries talking to me while I'm in the zone, it's like I'm being pulled out of a dream into a reality I'm not yet ready to re-enter. First of all, I sound like a babbling idiot, because 98% of my mind has been taken over by my algorithm and coding skills, leaving very little left over for communication skills. If I'm lucky, the person who interrupted me will see that I'm preoccupied with what I'm doing and leave me alone. I can then usually recover, and stay in the zone (usually forgetting the interruption immediately). If I'm unlucky, the person will continue to talk to me. This is a very frustrating experience. I can literally feel my abovementioned stack slipping away, one layer at a time. I feel the algorithm in my mind's eye falling apart. If it goes too far (which doesn't take long - even a couple of minutes of dealing with "the real world" will do it), I fall out of the zone. Then I'm left with a huge mess of half-written code that I have to figure out. Sure, I'm the one who wrote the code in the first place, but it was written while I was in a state of heightened awareness.
I used to fall into the zone a lot while in university. I'd start working on a project at say, 14:30 one afternoon, write incredible amounts of quality code throughout the night, and come out of the zone at 05:30 the next morning with a finished product. Of course, at that point the hunger and sleep deprevation hits me all at once.
I don't fall into the zone much any more. There are too many interruptions in a typical work environment. It's a shame, too, because I'm easily five times as productive when I'm in the zone than when I'm not.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're referring to the Domesday book, covered by Slashdot here and here.
The Saturn V was anything but cheap! Just to build one of those suckers costs $630,000,000. It was probably the most expensive single-use rocket ever built!
They also mis-spelt McDonald's as Mac Donald's in a fight against Burger King, causing Burger King to unfairly win by a landslide.
I'm a Royal Bank client too, and up until a few days ago what you have said was true. But now they've switched to something that's a bit fancier looking, a lot more broken, and crashes Netscape 4.x. I see no reason for the change, other then "we need more javascript... just 'cuz!".
I would say that 95% of the documents floating around on the web, being e-mailed to people, etc., are meant to be "read only", i.e., with no intention to be editable. PDF is a much better format for this purpose.
The main advantage of using a multibeam receiver, as stated in the article, is to filter out noise from the Earth. If the same signal is received from different points in the sky (even if they're only slightly different), then it's almost definitely a signal that originated on Earth and is simply bouncing off the atmosphere. Being able to filter out false positives like this is extremely advantageous to the SETI program.
The least they could have done is arranged the circular buttons in clockwise order so that they'd be layed out in a way similar to the old rotary-dial phones.
Until and unless there's a proof of why Lychrel numbers exist, the whole concept is quite uninteresting beyond a passing "neat".
An advantage to such a system that you never stated is that a particular day of the month will always be the exact same day of the week. E.g., June 13th will always be on a Wednesday, and Christmas will always be on a Saturday, etc. It makes planning events much easier. Also, simply looking at the moon will give you a rough indication as to how far through the month it is (actually, probably to within a day or two). As well, women's menstrual cycles are usually about 28 days, so things like that will be easier to keep track of without having to rely on a calendar.
Come to think of it, a system like that would obsolete the need for a year-specific calendar. You could use the same calendar every year!
Not quite true... according to the article, the CCD only captures at 640x480. The larger image size is achieved by interpolation. In fact, since "the 52-shot capacity is unaffected by your choice", it seems to me that the image is ALWAYS stored by the camera at 640x480, regardless of what mode you set it to, and only performs the interpolation to enlarge the image during upload to your computer.
I just wish that bug #58554 would be fixed so that I can have use xv as my helper aplication for images. Why this is listed as an RFE and not a bug is beyond me. If you configure Mozilla to use "xv" as the helper application for MIME type "image/gif" and it continues to render the GIF inside the browser window, it's clearly a bug, and an annoying one at that! It's the only thing keeping me from switching from Netscape 4.x to Mozilla.
I can't believe how many people have this attitude about environmental pollution! I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see that preventative maintenance (i.e., reducing emissions at the source) is a fundamentally safer way to insure that we don't continue down the spiralling path of the gradual destruction of our planet's ecosystem. In order for humankind to survive (comfortably) in the long run, we're going to have to treat our planet with respect.
Do you piss on your living room carpet every day and then get a carpet cleaner in each weekend to clean up the mess? No, you install a toilet and a plumbing system!
The male computer voice, however, isn't capabable of producing the range required for most of the songs, though, so it switches to a female voice occasionally to hit the higher notes (i.e., on a word-by-word basis). It's actually quite comical to hear.
Scanned images solve these problems, but have two problems of their own:
Perhaps a hybrid solution exists, but I suspect such a solution will require a lot of manual intervention and tweaking, something you'll want to avoid if your goal is to digitize several books.
The requirements I'm looking for are:
Does anybody have any experience with this type of procedure? Do you have any advice to share? I have a pile of old VHS tapes that are decaying, and I'd like to get a high-quality digital capture of them before they get too bad.
That's not entirely accurate. It was cut because Douglas Adams' lawyer thought that Pink Floyd's lawyer would disallow it. They never even considering asking the artists themselves. Douglas Adams and David Gilmour were good friends, and David told Douglas directly that it was okay to use that bit.
I consider this a bug. If I tell Mozilla to pass documents of type "image/gif" to the application "xv" and it doesn't, that's a bug. It's unfortunate that this was marked as an "enhancement request", because it means that it's less likely that anybody is going to look into it anytime soon.
I know they've switched over to Mozilla (a move I wholeheartedly agree with), but I was wondering if they still ship with Netscape as well (at least for this release).
However, when he found out in February that what they were talking about was actually a cold rock in space, he "removed the $122 million needed for the mission from NASA's budget for the 2003 fiscal year". Sigh.
Yes, the value of (m1 * m2) doubles. And yes, that means that the overall force that the object experiences doubles. But since the object is twice as massive, it needs twice the force to accelerate it to the same extent (because F = m * a). So the bowling ball falls at the exact same speed as the foam ball because a given force would affect it half as much as it would affect the foam ball (because it weighs twice as much), but the force of gravity is pulling on it twice as hard. The actual mass of the object is cancelled out of the equation.
This, to me, is simply astounding, as in 1) simple, 2) astounding, and 3) astounding in its simplicity. The universe is truly an amazing place.
But this experiment is a bit misleading. Mass isn't actually independent of gravity. It is just extremely negligable when the second object is billions of times more massive than the object in question (like a bowling ball as compared to the Earth).
The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2), and the Earth (m2) has a mass of 5.9736 × 10^24 kg. Try the same experiment by comparing how fast a bowling ball falls in comparison to a bowling-ball sized neutron star. (Of course, you wouldn't want to drop them at the same time, because you'd then be dealing with a three-body problem.)
I can stay in the zone for many hours at a time. Of course, the passage of time is something hardly noticed. It's becomes just part of my surroundings, to be ignored by my conscious like the walls and light fixtures. Music is the same way - it can be on, but it neither helps nor hinders me, because my mind pretty much blocks it out completely.
I find that if anybody tries talking to me while I'm in the zone, it's like I'm being pulled out of a dream into a reality I'm not yet ready to re-enter. First of all, I sound like a babbling idiot, because 98% of my mind has been taken over by my algorithm and coding skills, leaving very little left over for communication skills. If I'm lucky, the person who interrupted me will see that I'm preoccupied with what I'm doing and leave me alone. I can then usually recover, and stay in the zone (usually forgetting the interruption immediately). If I'm unlucky, the person will continue to talk to me. This is a very frustrating experience. I can literally feel my abovementioned stack slipping away, one layer at a time. I feel the algorithm in my mind's eye falling apart. If it goes too far (which doesn't take long - even a couple of minutes of dealing with "the real world" will do it), I fall out of the zone. Then I'm left with a huge mess of half-written code that I have to figure out. Sure, I'm the one who wrote the code in the first place, but it was written while I was in a state of heightened awareness.
I used to fall into the zone a lot while in university. I'd start working on a project at say, 14:30 one afternoon, write incredible amounts of quality code throughout the night, and come out of the zone at 05:30 the next morning with a finished product. Of course, at that point the hunger and sleep deprevation hits me all at once.
I don't fall into the zone much any more. There are too many interruptions in a typical work environment. It's a shame, too, because I'm easily five times as productive when I'm in the zone than when I'm not.