The distinction only matters to trademark lawyers, because to "protect" their trademark they would argue that there's no such thing as a "Lego" noun, only an adjective.
The rest of us non-pedants don't give a shit and call them Legos, because in everyday English each individual brick is an individual Lego. Saying "I built this house out of Lego!" sounds prissy and affected. If you disagree, you ought to look deep inside your personality and consider whether *you* are prissy and affected.
Capsules don't just plummet vertically through the atmosphere. They spend most of the reentry going almost horizontally bleeding off speed. Most of them also angle the heat shield so that they get a good deal of lift, and they "fly" for a more gentle reentry.
In any case, a capsule must slow down to less than hypersonic speeds before deploying a parachute. Otherwise the parachute would burn up and/or be ripped to shreds.
Once a capsule is going slowly enough to put out a chute, it doesn't have all that much kinetic energy. Small retrorockets would be sufficient to stop it instead.
$40,000 and the size of a washing machine isn't exactly what you'd call small and inexpensive, certainly not compared to what most people would think of when you mention a resistor.
Well, the transformers to which they'd be attached are also a wee bit bigger than your average wall wart.
A shame that Ubuntu or any other Linux distro doesn't include mscorefonts installed by default, or make similar efforts to give the user better looking fonts from the start.
They did give the user better looking fonts: They automatically substitute Bitstream Vera Sans for most of them.
If you'd still like to see mscorefonts distributed with Linux distros, maybe you could convince Microsoft to change the peculiar restrictive license that's attached to them.
It'll work all year round! You'll never feel cold in July ever again, and you may not even need to use your oven to make a roast.
Well, this is from the country that invented the "AGA", which is some kind of hybrid kitchen range/oven/furnace that burns fuel 24x7x365, and which has no temperature adjustment. I guess their theory is that they live in a chilly climate.
The period between eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot/caldera are on the order of hundreds of millions of years.
Actually, it's more like hundreds of thousands of years, and it's been a good long while since the last one. However, IIRC studies show that the magma chamber beneath the park isn't currently anywhere near full, so betting that there'd be a full scale eruption in the next 10K years seems iffy to me.
It's about how flexible the system will be when you have to change it. And you will -- that's the whole point of software, that it is soft, and changeable."
Not entirely. Software allowed one to perform functions that were not practical to do in hardware.
And what is the one thing that makes something impractical to do in hardware? It's almost always the fact that hardware isn't easily changeable.
FYI, modern x86 processors have lots of registers. They just get dynamically aliased and renamed to *look* like 8 or 16. A good compiler writer isn't going to be constrained by such a literal linear view of the execution stream.
Seriously, if this were the big issue you make it out to be, then some other alternative CPU would have consistently outperformed X86 and trounced it in the marketplace years ago. Well, it isn't and they didn't. (ARM has the market advantage in it's low-powered niche, but that's not because of its register count. Rather, it's because they omit the power-sucking things like big caches and out-of-order execution that make high-end X86s so fast.)
For cryinh out load, with 1 mainfram you can't have a mainframe with 30,000 or more intances of your operating enviroment on it. Possible up to 100K.
Mainframes aren't made out of magic pixie dust. They still need to *compute* those 100,000 queries. I'm used to Google results being returned within about 100 milliseconds.
How do you propose that a mainframe CPU cluster, which is known for not having very much computational horsepower relative to how much it costs, will handle the 1 million distinct queries per second that your 100K instances will require? I'll bet that for any standard off-the-shelf business mainframe, it just can't.
To have any effect, the vinyl plastic must degrade somehow
PVC *does* degrade, all by itself. Pure PVC is very brittle (like your PVC drain pipes), so any flexible PVC product has lots of plasticizers mixed in. Some of these are volatile and gradually evaporate out of the plastic at room temperature. It's the plasticizers that are under suspicion here.
However, I would imagine that most babies and toddlers are exposed to more PVC emmisions from the vynyl mattress covers in their cribs and beds. After all, they spend half of each day with their heads a couple inches away from the mattresses. These things are extremely stinky when new, and over the course of a year or so they seem to lose much of their plasticizers into the air and become brittle (and no longer stinky). Unfortunately, at that point they often shred into ribbons and must be replaced.
IMO, given the safety questions that have recently come up regarding the phthalate plasticizers used in PVC products, it's probably worth the extra cost of buying polyethelene mattress covers for kids.
Agreed. I had the joy of debugging perl code written in Russian a few years back. Not fun.
I can imagine that it was especially hard for Perl since the ruble doesn't seem to have a standard dedicated symbol. Finding a suitable substitute for all of the "$" characters must have been a real pain.
Slashdot Mirror
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
The distinction only matters to trademark lawyers, because to "protect" their trademark they would argue that there's no such thing as a "Lego" noun, only an adjective.
The rest of us non-pedants don't give a shit and call them Legos, because in everyday English each individual brick is an individual Lego. Saying "I built this house out of Lego!" sounds prissy and affected. If you disagree, you ought to look deep inside your personality and consider whether *you* are prissy and affected.
just because you or i dont have the vision or ability to make it work dosent mean it cant be done!
That's not the reason it can't be done.
The reason it can't be done is found in Maxwell's equations.
That's right.
iPhone : computer :: Disney World Main Street USA : real town
Capsules don't just plummet vertically through the atmosphere. They spend most of the reentry going almost horizontally bleeding off speed. Most of them also angle the heat shield so that they get a good deal of lift, and they "fly" for a more gentle reentry.
In any case, a capsule must slow down to less than hypersonic speeds before deploying a parachute. Otherwise the parachute would burn up and/or be ripped to shreds.
Once a capsule is going slowly enough to put out a chute, it doesn't have all that much kinetic energy. Small retrorockets would be sufficient to stop it instead.
What makes you think that hijacking a passenger jet is the only way to get control of a large aircraft?
I seem to remember it flew over parts of Manhattan several times before landing (crashing) in the Hudson.
Nope, there was no time for that. If there were enough time to fly around, they could have landed at any of several nearby airports.
It was pretty much up, point at the river, then plop.
$40,000 and the size of a washing machine isn't exactly what you'd call small and inexpensive, certainly not compared to what most people would think of when you mention a resistor.
Well, the transformers to which they'd be attached are also a wee bit bigger than your average wall wart.
As a citizen of Colorado I have the right to travel freely in all of the United States with no permission, whatever.
Unless the authorities institute a general quarantine. In which case your libertarian ass will be staying put.
This happened billions of years ago, and Slashdot is just reporting it now?
Slashdot is just reporting from the frame of reference of the gamma photons, who experienced this explosion two days ago.
Geez. Are you starter edition design leader, or did you just forget your meds? Chill out.
I didn't mean to insult your favorite hobbled OS.
There is no such thing as defective by design. If it functions as designed, then it works, and hence isn't defective.
The design itself is defective. Therefore if it functions as designed, the result is defective.
That's what defective by design means.
A shame that Ubuntu or any other Linux distro doesn't include mscorefonts installed by default, or make similar efforts to give the user better looking fonts from the start.
They did give the user better looking fonts: They automatically substitute Bitstream Vera Sans for most of them.
If you'd still like to see mscorefonts distributed with Linux distros, maybe you could convince Microsoft to change the peculiar restrictive license that's attached to them.
Comic Sans itself isn't a bad font. It is easily readable, and more than anything else, that is the best measure of a font.
Just because it is so popular people hate it. It's like people hating on pop stars, Windows, and Kraft Parmesan cheese.
I AGREE. PRO TIP: THE MOST EASILY READABLE SUBSET OF ANY FONT IS THE CAPITAL LETTERS. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS USE CAPS TO MAKE YOUR MESSAGES EASIER TO READ.
There never was any such thing as "tax-free internet shopping". The only thing this would be an end to is scofflaws.
It'll work all year round! You'll never feel cold in July ever again, and you may not even need to use your oven to make a roast.
Well, this is from the country that invented the "AGA", which is some kind of hybrid kitchen range/oven/furnace that burns fuel 24x7x365, and which has no temperature adjustment. I guess their theory is that they live in a chilly climate.
The period between eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot/caldera are on the order of hundreds of millions of years.
Actually, it's more like hundreds of thousands of years, and it's been a good long while since the last one. However, IIRC studies show that the magma chamber beneath the park isn't currently anywhere near full, so betting that there'd be a full scale eruption in the next 10K years seems iffy to me.
It's about how flexible the system will be when you have to change it. And you will -- that's the whole point of software, that it is soft, and changeable."
Not entirely. Software allowed one to perform functions that were not practical to do in hardware.
And what is the one thing that makes something impractical to do in hardware? It's almost always the fact that hardware isn't easily changeable.
In that case, what's truly "failing" is you.
Unfortunately, most humans just don't have the consistent recall of a mindless automaton.
(But what do I know? My brain is comprised of nothing more than a single bimetallic strip.)
If you just want a quick copy on a hard drive and don't care about shrinking, you don't even need to bother with mencoder:
N.Y.T.: Most. Stodgy. Grammatical. Style.
FYI, modern x86 processors have lots of registers. They just get dynamically aliased and renamed to *look* like 8 or 16. A good compiler writer isn't going to be constrained by such a literal linear view of the execution stream.
Seriously, if this were the big issue you make it out to be, then some other alternative CPU would have consistently outperformed X86 and trounced it in the marketplace years ago. Well, it isn't and they didn't. (ARM has the market advantage in it's low-powered niche, but that's not because of its register count. Rather, it's because they omit the power-sucking things like big caches and out-of-order execution that make high-end X86s so fast.)
There are government agency that can do just that with mainframes.
Yeah, special government mainframes.
Compare those milspec prices with that of Google's hardware, then get back to me.
For cryinh out load, with 1 mainfram you can't have a mainframe with 30,000 or more intances of your operating enviroment on it. Possible up to 100K.
Mainframes aren't made out of magic pixie dust. They still need to *compute* those 100,000 queries. I'm used to Google results being returned within about 100 milliseconds.
How do you propose that a mainframe CPU cluster, which is known for not having very much computational horsepower relative to how much it costs, will handle the 1 million distinct queries per second that your 100K instances will require? I'll bet that for any standard off-the-shelf business mainframe, it just can't.
To have any effect, the vinyl plastic must degrade somehow
PVC *does* degrade, all by itself. Pure PVC is very brittle (like your PVC drain pipes), so any flexible PVC product has lots of plasticizers mixed in. Some of these are volatile and gradually evaporate out of the plastic at room temperature. It's the plasticizers that are under suspicion here.
However, I would imagine that most babies and toddlers are exposed to more PVC emmisions from the vynyl mattress covers in their cribs and beds. After all, they spend half of each day with their heads a couple inches away from the mattresses. These things are extremely stinky when new, and over the course of a year or so they seem to lose much of their plasticizers into the air and become brittle (and no longer stinky). Unfortunately, at that point they often shred into ribbons and must be replaced.
IMO, given the safety questions that have recently come up regarding the phthalate plasticizers used in PVC products, it's probably worth the extra cost of buying polyethelene mattress covers for kids.
Agreed. I had the joy of debugging perl code written in Russian a few years back. Not fun.
I can imagine that it was especially hard for Perl since the ruble doesn't seem to have a standard dedicated symbol. Finding a suitable substitute for all of the "$" characters must have been a real pain.