Yes, that's right, don't bother about adding a single ethernet port, merely invest in a VLAN-capable switch! You always need another piece of power-hungry overkill hardware when you're using your Pi in a remote location somewhere (or even behind your TV), and you've got money to burn now that you've saved so much money buying a Pi!
At least SBS tried to cling to the 'ads only between shows', but it's certainly pretty dismal. My old mythtv box used to do a pretty good job of marking ads and auto-skipping during playback, but I pity the poor sod that doesn't have a DVR these days.
(OT: GoodnaGuy, eh? My mother grew up in Goodna, haven't been there in years...)
watch a documentary and you'll spend an hour watching repeated film clips Congratulations! You are not the target audience for these alleged 'documentaries'. Go watch a documentary produced by somebody who doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator instead. (Hint: Their channel lineup will not contain words like "turbo" , or "extreme")
I run "Flashblock" on firefox, which replaces flash objects with a 'click to run' F symbol. I used someone else's PC a little while ago and I never realised how much of a blinking distraction the modern flash-enabled internet is.
Yeah - we've got a stack of mobotix cameras with PIR sensors. Really cuts down on the noise if you're also doing motion detection - you can AND them together and only get motion from people (or hot objects - we use it to look for haul trucks)
GPS signals give results that are three-dimensional.
You look at three sats - and you know the distance to each one and the position of each one. That gives three spheres around each satellite where you could be, and you are at or very near the point where they all intersect.
You know your altitude as a byproduct of knowing the distance to each satellite. It's not *perfect* altitude - unless you're doing some sort of mapping/reference, your atitude is with respect to a general oblate sphere called 'Earth' with an average sea level. But it works pretty well in practice.
Something to do with replacing the half-a-billion existing vehicles that can't run on bio-diesel perhaps?
If someone can figure out how to manufacture a 'drop-in' replacement for normal petrol / gasolene then you can jump start the entire process without waiting the 20-30 years for passenger diesel engines to become the bulk of the market.
Hmm. What about the Brits and the French? Both have a sub with a nuke or two on board lurking about. Probably not so much in the way of bombers though.
. But isn't it silly to drive these distances through the wilderness
You're not quite getting it. It's not 'wilderness' as such, it's 'ordinary' distances in 'ordinary' rural Australia. 500km gets me half the way across Queensland and I've done double that (driving 900km from Mt Isa to Townsville) on a regular basis without any concern.
Concerns are limited because: - You usually go about 100-150 kilometers before the next fuel stop. - Roads have a reasonable amount of traffic (30-100 vehicles an hour). - Towns are normally where the GPS tells you they are.
And that's the problem, because if the map you've got is a little vague and that town isn't there, then the rough "I can make it there with 1/4 tank to spare" calculation doesn't get you back that 100km to the previous town where you should have filled up and it doesn't get you to the next town either.
We transitioned to cars because there was a great many advantages to do so - speed, load carrying capacity, etc, etc.
What are the advantages of using a touchscreen over a keyboard/mouse in everyday situations?
Mobile? Well sure, if you're wandering around and you want to quickly tap something out or go through a few apps, there's a good advantage to a touch screen.
But at the office? I don't know. The time taken to take your hands off the keys, reach out and tap something... is that quicker than getting the mouse and clicking? I don't really know. I'd suspect that that with my setup (2 x 24" monitors) it's going to be slower. And I'd bet that if I was forced to use a touchscreen in an office situation where I still had a keyboard, I'd be learning a lot more keyboard shortcuts quick-smart.
Hmm. I think a better explanation is ripples on a pond from a rock.
You are stationary on a boat on a pond. You throw a rock into the pond some distance away, the ripples move towards you across the water at a set speed and slap against the hull of the boat at a certain frequency.
You repeat the process, this time moving your boat towards the origin of the ripples after you throw the rock. As your boat passes over the ripples as they travel towards you, they slap against the hull at a higher frequency = blue shifted.
Similarly, you move your boat away from the origin of the ripples - the ripples slap against the hull at a lower frequency = red shifted.
The polar orbiting satellites are the quiet achievers of weather forecasting. Everyone sees the geostationary sat images on TV and think that's it, but there's a lot more going on with the polar sats.
They orbit north/south over the poles at about 800km. They are sun-synchronous (so the sun is always behind them illuminating the earth on their daylight run) and they do an orbit about every 90 minutes or so. The earth turns underneath them as they orbit, so they cover the entire globe. The current POES status is here
They transmit a heap of data - the data I receive here in Australia is the APT transmissions, which is 4 x 4 km per pixel resolution images in the visible and IR wavelength, which run constantly. As the satellite clears the horizon, you pick up the signal at two lines per second and about 15 minutes later on a directly overhead pass it sets again and you've got a nice, 2000km x 4000km image of your immediate area, just like if it came off a fax machine. The two wavelengths offered in the analog mode give you a visible image and allow you to read temperatures, so you can find thunderheads and cold fronts, for example. The APT transmissions just require a 137Mhz FM receiver and a simple antenna to pick up, so it's easy to get images.
They also have a digital mode - HRPT - with the entire range of 6 imaging sensors onboard and 1x1km per pixel resolution and you can do a lot with that - highlight vegetation, measure and and sea surface temps, locate and track fires and such.
Onboard there are also charge sensors for measuring auroral densities, and you can visit a webpage that shows the current auroral activity. The satellites can also receive, process and retransmit data from Search and Rescue beacon transmitters, and automatic data collection platforms on land, ocean buoys, or aboard free-floating balloons, as well as detect and map the ozone holes that appear yearly over the poles.
Their capabilities completely outclass the geosynchronous satellites and I hope that NOAA gets their act together and back on track with the launches.
As another has posted, they are my friends and yes, they have views that differ from mine. They are still my friends, I just wish they didn't bulk-add all their friends to their groups!
, there was (is?) a trick: join meaningless groups to hit the group limit Should I have to know these tricks? Or should facebook just have a little notification that says, "join this group? Y/N"
And I did have a go at disabling platform apps. Unless I got the wrong setting, I still got the usual "OMG!Ican'tbelieveIcanseewholooksatmyprofile!" spam-o-rama. I regularly hit the ignore button on the most atrocious of app-spam.
I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent. It's a damn nuisance, and I unsubscribe from them as soon as I notice.
But generally I just seem to spend my hour or two a week on facebook turning off all the 'texas hold-em' and other crappy 'OMG!'-type apps so they don't clutter my news feed. I need a checkbox that I can tick that says, 'I only care about what my friends actually post, please discard all application-generated posts'.
Somehow I don't think that one will be turning up any time soon.....
Fer fuck's sake, you shouldn't have to notify your bank that you're going to be using your card! They're charging you interest on everything you buy, transaction fees on everything the merchant sells to cover 'fraud' and yet when you try and use it, it's a big red flag.
They just don't want to have to deal with proper fraud, so they set their auto-fraud-detection level to irritatingly-low levels. Fuck them. If they don't want to deal with the 'hassle' of offering a credit card - which was *supposed* to make things more convenient for the purchaser - they should fuck off out of the credit-card business.
There, over the course of Christmas, doctors batted around diagnoses: tumor, cancer. Finally, Alvarez received a brain scan
My dad had symptoms of a stroke - which are similar. First thing he got? A dose of blood thinners and a brain scan at a local hospital.
I can understand a little bit of incompetence, or delays due to Christmas but please don't tell me that it was cost that prevented this simple scan from happening immediately, or I will once again shake my head at the appalling state of affairs of the US health system.
Orbital mechanics is a difficult thing, which I shall freely admit to having only small amounts of clue about. However the following is as I understand it (and general consensus on the internet seems to agree)
Losing a screw at 90 degrees vertically to your orbital velocity ('dropping' it towards earth, for example) merely perturbs its orbit - if you were in a perfectly circular orbit to start out with, the screw would now be in an elliptical orbit with an apogee and perigee. Wait half an orbit and it'll be coming past again on its way to/from apogee/perigee.
Losing it to the left/right or your direction of travel however and you'd probably lose it for a long time.
Losing it forwards or backwards is the equivalent of entering a transfer orbit like sending satellites from LEO to GEO - however when you're doing that with satellites to stay in the final orbit requires another burn to match the speed for your new altitude, so I don't know where it'd end up. But I'll hazard a guess that it will oscillate back to your current altitude, I just don't know where it will be at that point.
I'd image it's quite difficult to 'feel a click' though chunky gloves. Especially in a fashion that ensures you continue to hold it securely between said chunky-gloved-fingers.
Although 'dropping' the screw in orbit would be a hassle, in most cases you could just wait half-an-orbit for it to come back to you.
Slashdot Mirror
to automatically compute the approximate weight of each container loaded as they load it.
They're called load cells, and they're in every modern crane.
Yes, that's right, don't bother about adding a single ethernet port, merely invest in a VLAN-capable switch! You always need another piece of power-hungry overkill hardware when you're using your Pi in a remote location somewhere (or even behind your TV), and you've got money to burn now that you've saved so much money buying a Pi!
Brilliant! /s
At least SBS tried to cling to the 'ads only between shows', but it's certainly pretty dismal. My old mythtv box used to do a pretty good job of marking ads and auto-skipping during playback, but I pity the poor sod that doesn't have a DVR these days.
(OT: GoodnaGuy, eh? My mother grew up in Goodna, haven't been there in years...)
watch a documentary and you'll spend an hour watching repeated film clips
Congratulations! You are not the target audience for these alleged 'documentaries'.
Go watch a documentary produced by somebody who doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator instead.
(Hint: Their channel lineup will not contain words like "turbo" , or "extreme")
Do you realise how many ads are flash-based?
I run "Flashblock" on firefox, which replaces flash objects with a 'click to run' F symbol. I used someone else's PC a little while ago and I never realised how much of a blinking distraction the modern flash-enabled internet is.
Yeah - we've got a stack of mobotix cameras with PIR sensors.
Really cuts down on the noise if you're also doing motion detection - you can AND them together and only get motion from people (or hot objects - we use it to look for haul trucks)
GPS signals give results that are three-dimensional.
You look at three sats - and you know the distance to each one and the position of each one.
That gives three spheres around each satellite where you could be, and you are at or very near the point where they all intersect.
You know your altitude as a byproduct of knowing the distance to each satellite. It's not *perfect* altitude - unless you're doing some sort of mapping/reference, your atitude is with respect to a general oblate sphere called 'Earth' with an average sea level. But it works pretty well in practice.
1b -
"This is a fine example of a typical 18th century porcelain jug."
"It's the 21st century, where is my flying car and moonbase?"
Which was influenced by wolfenstein...... not too sure if there was a decent first-person pseudo-3D shooter before that.
Something to do with replacing the half-a-billion existing vehicles that can't run on bio-diesel perhaps?
If someone can figure out how to manufacture a 'drop-in' replacement for normal petrol / gasolene then you can jump start the entire process without waiting the 20-30 years for passenger diesel engines to become the bulk of the market.
Hmm. What about the Brits and the French? Both have a sub with a nuke or two on board lurking about. Probably not so much in the way of bombers though.
. But isn't it silly to drive these distances through the wilderness
You're not quite getting it. It's not 'wilderness' as such, it's 'ordinary' distances in 'ordinary' rural Australia. 500km gets me half the way across Queensland and I've done double that (driving 900km from Mt Isa to Townsville) on a regular basis without any concern.
Concerns are limited because:
- You usually go about 100-150 kilometers before the next fuel stop.
- Roads have a reasonable amount of traffic (30-100 vehicles an hour).
- Towns are normally where the GPS tells you they are.
And that's the problem, because if the map you've got is a little vague and that town isn't there, then the rough "I can make it there with 1/4 tank to spare" calculation doesn't get you back that 100km to the previous town where you should have filled up and it doesn't get you to the next town either.
We transitioned to cars because there was a great many advantages to do so - speed, load carrying capacity, etc, etc.
What are the advantages of using a touchscreen over a keyboard/mouse in everyday situations?
Mobile? Well sure, if you're wandering around and you want to quickly tap something out or go through a few apps, there's a good advantage to a touch screen.
But at the office? I don't know. The time taken to take your hands off the keys, reach out and tap something... is that quicker than getting the mouse and clicking? I don't really know. I'd suspect that that with my setup (2 x 24" monitors) it's going to be slower. And I'd bet that if I was forced to use a touchscreen in an office situation where I still had a keyboard, I'd be learning a lot more keyboard shortcuts quick-smart.
Thats why you also add flashblock to your browser.
Turns every embedded flash player into a little F symbol that you have to click to play/enable.
Adblock and Flashblock make things so much more pleasant on the internet.
Hmm. I think a better explanation is ripples on a pond from a rock.
You are stationary on a boat on a pond. You throw a rock into the pond some distance away, the ripples move towards you across the water at a set speed and slap against the hull of the boat at a certain frequency.
You repeat the process, this time moving your boat towards the origin of the ripples after you throw the rock. As your boat passes over the ripples as they travel towards you, they slap against the hull at a higher frequency = blue shifted.
Similarly, you move your boat away from the origin of the ripples - the ripples slap against the hull at a lower frequency = red shifted.
The polar orbiting satellites are the quiet achievers of weather forecasting. Everyone sees the geostationary sat images on TV and think that's it, but there's a lot more going on with the polar sats.
They orbit north/south over the poles at about 800km. They are sun-synchronous (so the sun is always behind them illuminating the earth on their daylight run) and they do an orbit about every 90 minutes or so. The earth turns underneath them as they orbit, so they cover the entire globe. The current POES status is here
They transmit a heap of data - the data I receive here in Australia is the APT transmissions, which is 4 x 4 km per pixel resolution images in the visible and IR wavelength, which run constantly. As the satellite clears the horizon, you pick up the signal at two lines per second and about 15 minutes later on a directly overhead pass it sets again and you've got a nice, 2000km x 4000km image of your immediate area, just like if it came off a fax machine. The two wavelengths offered in the analog mode give you a visible image and allow you to read temperatures, so you can find thunderheads and cold fronts, for example. The APT transmissions just require a 137Mhz FM receiver and a simple antenna to pick up, so it's easy to get images.
They also have a digital mode - HRPT - with the entire range of 6 imaging sensors onboard and 1x1km per pixel resolution and you can do a lot with that - highlight vegetation, measure and and sea surface temps, locate and track fires and such.
Onboard there are also charge sensors for measuring auroral densities, and you can visit a webpage that shows the current auroral activity. The satellites can also receive, process and retransmit data from Search and Rescue beacon transmitters, and automatic data collection platforms on land, ocean buoys, or aboard free-floating balloons, as well as detect and map the ozone holes that appear yearly over the poles.
Their capabilities completely outclass the geosynchronous satellites and I hope that NOAA gets their act together and back on track with the launches.
As another has posted, they are my friends and yes, they have views that differ from mine. They are still my friends, I just wish they didn't bulk-add all their friends to their groups!
, there was (is?) a trick: join meaningless groups to hit the group limit
Should I have to know these tricks? Or should facebook just have a little notification that says, "join this group? Y/N"
And I did have a go at disabling platform apps. Unless I got the wrong setting, I still got the usual "OMG!Ican'tbelieveIcanseewholooksatmyprofile!" spam-o-rama.
I regularly hit the ignore button on the most atrocious of app-spam.
Robust privacy controls', my arse.
I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent. It's a damn nuisance, and I unsubscribe from them as soon as I notice.
But generally I just seem to spend my hour or two a week on facebook turning off all the 'texas hold-em' and other crappy 'OMG!'-type apps so they don't clutter my news feed. I need a checkbox that I can tick that says, 'I only care about what my friends actually post, please discard all application-generated posts'.
Somehow I don't think that one will be turning up any time soon.....
Fer fuck's sake, you shouldn't have to notify your bank that you're going to be using your card! They're charging you interest on everything you buy, transaction fees on everything the merchant sells to cover 'fraud' and yet when you try and use it, it's a big red flag.
They just don't want to have to deal with proper fraud, so they set their auto-fraud-detection level to irritatingly-low levels. Fuck them. If they don't want to deal with the 'hassle' of offering a credit card - which was *supposed* to make things more convenient for the purchaser - they should fuck off out of the credit-card business.
And so ends my rant for the day.
Pretty sure they were thinners.... it was some time ago. Maybe they were clotters :-P
There, over the course of Christmas, doctors batted around diagnoses: tumor, cancer. Finally, Alvarez received a brain scan
My dad had symptoms of a stroke - which are similar. First thing he got? A dose of blood thinners and a brain scan at a local hospital.
I can understand a little bit of incompetence, or delays due to Christmas but please don't tell me that it was cost that prevented this simple scan from happening immediately, or I will once again shake my head at the appalling state of affairs of the US health system.
Orbital mechanics is a difficult thing, which I shall freely admit to having only small amounts of clue about. However the following is as I understand it (and general consensus on the internet seems to agree)
Losing a screw at 90 degrees vertically to your orbital velocity ('dropping' it towards earth, for example) merely perturbs its orbit - if you were in a perfectly circular orbit to start out with, the screw would now be in an elliptical orbit with an apogee and perigee. Wait half an orbit and it'll be coming past again on its way to/from apogee/perigee.
Losing it to the left/right or your direction of travel however and you'd probably lose it for a long time.
Losing it forwards or backwards is the equivalent of entering a transfer orbit like sending satellites from LEO to GEO - however when you're doing that with satellites to stay in the final orbit requires another burn to match the speed for your new altitude, so I don't know where it'd end up. But I'll hazard a guess that it will oscillate back to your current altitude, I just don't know where it will be at that point.
I'd image it's quite difficult to 'feel a click' though chunky gloves. Especially in a fashion that ensures you continue to hold it securely between said chunky-gloved-fingers.
Although 'dropping' the screw in orbit would be a hassle, in most cases you could just wait half-an-orbit for it to come back to you.
The limits on GPS are a fair way beyond what you get with commercial passenger aircraft.
According to wikipedia the CoCom limits are "moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 60,000 feet (18,000 m)"
So what's your opinion on forcing everyone to pay for a military to protect your free society?
For things that have to service an entire populace, 'Free Society' sucks. Everyone's out to look after #1 and everyone else suffers as a result.