Be careful, it's sometimes difficult to figure out what is actually necessary to learn and what is "mindless busywork", especially if you're the pupil.
You don't want to be 5 years down the track thinking "fuck! I wish I had known about (x), it would have saved me 3 man-years implementing (y)", especially when that new guy who's after your job casually mentions (x) to your boss.
If a compound is safe enough to apply in relatively large quantities to human skin, then it is very likely that it is perfectly safe when bound up in paint. You can bet that before they'll be slapping that stuff on anywhere, it'll be going through the usual bank of tests by the EPA and other relevant bodies.
For your reference, a quick search on "Titanium Dioxide Toxicity" leads to a summary of studies, stating :
Titanium dioxide is a very insoluble compound. The studies in several species, including man, show neither significant absorption nor tissue storage following ingestion of titanium dioxide. Studies on soluble titanium compound have therefore not been reviewed. It is useful to note that following absorption of small amounts of Ti ions no toxic effects were observed. Establishment of an acceptable daily intake for man is considered unnecessary.
In any case, I doubt the effectiveness of this paint. Over it's rated 5 year life, how much NOx does this paint recover? Many tons of NOx are generated yearly (hell, daily!) in an average-sized city - I would presume then that many tons of this paint would be required yearly as well to neutralise it.
I'd think I'd prefer ABS to loss of directional control when your steer tyres lock;-)
On a slightly different subject, when ABS was introduced by the major manufacturers in Australia, they altered their ABS firmware so that the initial skid-after-lockup was a fraction longer, allowing the wheel to 'bite' down through loose gravel onto the road base. Otherwise the system would try and brake your vehicle using the loose gravel, with obvious poor effect. I've encountered this "rolling" effect of braking on loose gravel with early ABS systems and it's very disconcerting. Later systems are much better at it, that's for sure.
If you are a small-fry like my wife and myself, you too can be killed in a 10mph impact by a piece of safety equipment! Wear your damn seatbelt. Airbags in.au only deploy above 60km/h because they expect the seatbelt to be doing it's job keeping the occupant in the seat in minor impacts. Airbags in the US deploy a lot slower because they can't predict whether someone is using a belt or not. Anyway, airbags only deploy so far into the cabin - make sure you're not hurtling unrestrained towards the windshield and you'll be fine (if a bit shaken / bruised).
Anti-Lock brakes, they actually increase breaking distance and if you pump them (like anyone over the age of 26 was trained to do) you are screwed. Antilock brakes allow you to steer your way out of (and possibly avoid) an impending accident. Most people's reflexes are to keep pressing that brake pedal until you stop. Train yourself away from pumping the pedal - ABS can pump that pedal a lot faster than you can. They are also multi-channel, and can yield considerably more braking effort from each wheel than you, eg two wheels off the edge of the road on dirt. So unless you have four brake pedals in your car, you , by yourself, have very little chance of getting a shorter braking distance than your antilock brakes can. (Yes, special circumstances apply).
I would buy the car with ABS and airbags, because those two technologies would significantly improve my chances of survival in day-to-day driving. And here ends my little rant for the day;-)
Which HD manufacturer in their right mind would cut into their production of hard drives in order to make a non-standard part that MS will demand be priced less than their cheapest unit?
The HD makers with multi-platter drives that have dud platters perhaps? "Gee , we *could* send it back to QA for testing and repair... or we could just reflash it and sell it as a 5GB drive to microsoft and make a profit out of useless hardware. God knows we have plenty of crap drives here."
Few things can stand up to the umpteen-bumtillion degree heat and pressures of reentry. Even the RCC leading edges are only good for 2000 degrees C or so, its the fact that you have a cushion of relatively cool air separating them from the superheated plasma that makes it all work.
The NASA guys had a hard engineering problem to solve, with many physical and financial restraints. I'm suprised they managed to get the damn shuttles to do any serious work at all.
With LaTex... did you try Lyx? Moderately wysiwyg, to the limits of LaTex, anyway.
All your other points are true to some extent though. Things are still clunky in the desktop area. You can twiddle with device permissions etc to burn disks non-root... but for "normal/novice" users it all hinges on how well your distro set it all up. As for spreadsheets, ditch kspread / gnumeric. The closest I've found to office usefulness is the OpenOffice suite. At least it has good programability / macro support.
Re:It shouldn't have happened yet
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
Now, according to the parent post (and here), this virus shouldn't start attacking for another hour. Yet SCO is down. Why?
Expand your worldview, man! Some of us live in the future;-)
Where I live (in.au) we're 10 hours ahead of UTC and 20 or so hours ahead of SCO. So theoretically they'd get each timezone coming online and increasing the load over a period of 24 hours.
A friend of mine runs a web site which offers a very large archive of files.....his bandwidth consumption has been through the roof because of people using wget...50% of that being clients who are downloading every document on the site
However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.
You're right, itanium is more suited for tabletops or large benches. I've even heard of it being used on pool tables, but I think it might be pushing the limits of its architecture a little bit there.
In order to make iron, iron ore and coal (well, coke actually) are dropped in layers in an operating blast furnace. The coke burns in the furnace and as a consequence reduces the iron ore to iron, as well as supplying enough heat to keep the contents of the bottom of the furnace molten.
So, you need coal to make coke to make iron... to make steel and such.
Bad Things happen if the blast furnace runs out of coke, Very Bad Things in fact, so these pretty much run 24x7, meaning you've normally got a giant stockpile of coal to cover any conceivable loss of supply (normally a few weeks supply). So... if you've got all these ludicrous amounts of coal around (stockpiles of 100,000t are not uncommon) and a giant energy requirement, you can easily and economically build an on-site power station to power the rest of the system.
And the fun part is you can sell your excess capacity to the grid at a profit for a good 10 or 15 years, because you built your plant larger than you needed to allow for growth in your steel mill.
(Aluminium plants use an entirely different process, of which the only part I know about is they use an obscene amount of electricity and no coal required as in a blast furnace.)
Windows does this by telling itself to re-enumerate it's devices in 5 seconds, then hibernating.
On wakeup it's down to 3...2...1...re-enumerate devices.As windows can re-enumerate it's device list any time it feels like it's not much of a hassle.
I used to lurk on the linux-usb dev list, getting device enum sorted was a bit of a pain in the bum, with much discussion.... I don't know how far the other linux subsystems have gotten yet. If they've gotten the re-enumerate problem licked , it's not too much hassle.
Unless you do something like remove some usb storage while the PC's sleeping, of course.
Oh and in additon, I use ntpd to keep the software clock synced and hwclock to hourly reset the hardware real time clock on my mythTV, otherwise it drifts rather alarmingly when I reboot.
There's an alpha feature in MythTv that does this now. Apparently it works, but I try to keep off the bleeding edge CVS, especially when my TV depends on it;-)
If there is any quantity of platinum in those fuel cells, then yes the parent poster is right. For example, the platinum (99.9% pure) for crucibles that we use normally costs about USD650-700/ounce. Because of this, we supply them our old crucibles and scrap platinum and they melt them down and re-refine them.
D'oh! You're right of course. Patents are not my strong point....
Well, so much for MS office compatibility then. I guess it'll come down to finding some country that *doesn't* have the crushing MS-Patent-Of-Death (tm) and moving all filter development there.
Maybe one day in the distant future, we'll kindly supply poor old microsoft a filter for their crufty old office suite so their last dozen customers can import all of our slick OSS-generated documents;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful, it's sometimes difficult to figure out what is actually necessary to learn and what is "mindless busywork", especially if you're the pupil.
You don't want to be 5 years down the track thinking "fuck! I wish I had known about (x), it would have saved me 3 man-years implementing (y)", especially when that new guy who's after your job casually mentions (x) to your boss.
I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
(This gratituous Aliens reference was brought to you today by boredom.)
If a compound is safe enough to apply in relatively large quantities to human skin, then it is very likely that it is perfectly safe when bound up in paint. You can bet that before they'll be slapping that stuff on anywhere, it'll be going through the usual bank of tests by the EPA and other relevant bodies.
For your reference, a quick search on "Titanium Dioxide Toxicity" leads to a summary of studies, stating :
(from http://www.inchem.org/documents/jecfa/jecmono/v46
In any case, I doubt the effectiveness of this paint. Over it's rated 5 year life, how much NOx does this paint recover? Many tons of NOx are generated yearly (hell, daily!) in an average-sized city - I would presume then that many tons of this paint would be required yearly as well to neutralise it.
I'd think I'd prefer ABS to loss of directional control when your steer tyres lock ;-)
On a slightly different subject, when ABS was introduced by the major manufacturers in Australia, they altered their ABS firmware so that the initial skid-after-lockup was a fraction longer, allowing the wheel to 'bite' down through loose gravel onto the road base. Otherwise the system would try and brake your vehicle using the loose gravel, with obvious poor effect. I've encountered this "rolling" effect of braking on loose gravel with early ABS systems and it's very disconcerting. Later systems are much better at it, that's for sure.
Titanium Dioxide *is* used in sunscreen, so it has been reasonably well researched, and is moderately safe to the human body.
Please, do not spread this FUD.
.au only deploy above 60km/h because they expect the seatbelt to be doing it's job keeping the occupant in the seat in minor impacts. Airbags in the US deploy a lot slower because they can't predict whether someone is using a belt or not. Anyway, airbags only deploy so far into the cabin - make sure you're not hurtling unrestrained towards the windshield and you'll be fine (if a bit shaken / bruised).
;-)
If you are a small-fry like my wife and myself, you too can be killed in a 10mph impact by a piece of safety equipment!
Wear your damn seatbelt. Airbags in
Anti-Lock brakes, they actually increase breaking distance and if you pump them (like anyone over the age of 26 was trained to do) you are screwed.
Antilock brakes allow you to steer your way out of (and possibly avoid) an impending accident. Most people's reflexes are to keep pressing that brake pedal until you stop. Train yourself away from pumping the pedal - ABS can pump that pedal a lot faster than you can. They are also multi-channel, and can yield considerably more braking effort from each wheel than you, eg two wheels off the edge of the road on dirt. So unless you have four brake pedals in your car, you , by yourself, have very little chance of getting a shorter braking distance than your antilock brakes can. (Yes, special circumstances apply).
I would buy the car with ABS and airbags, because those two technologies would significantly improve my chances of survival in day-to-day driving.
And here ends my little rant for the day
Free as in "whateva-you-can-pull-outta-the-dumpsta-before-the -truck-comes" free.
so, that's "free, but it stinks?"
Which HD manufacturer in their right mind would cut into their production of hard drives in order to make a non-standard part that MS will demand be priced less than their cheapest unit?
The HD makers with multi-platter drives that have dud platters perhaps?
"Gee , we *could* send it back to QA for testing and repair... or we could just reflash it and sell it as a 5GB drive to microsoft and make a profit out of useless hardware. God knows we have plenty of crap drives here."
You do actually.
The hyshot test, while successful, produced no thrust. It just had hypersonic combustion going , for a few seconds.
Few things can stand up to the umpteen-bumtillion degree heat and pressures of reentry. Even the RCC leading edges are only good for 2000 degrees C or so, its the fact that you have a cushion of relatively cool air separating them from the superheated plasma that makes it all work.
The NASA guys had a hard engineering problem to solve, with many physical and financial restraints. I'm suprised they managed to get the damn shuttles to do any serious work at all.
With LaTex ... did you try Lyx? Moderately wysiwyg, to the limits of LaTex, anyway.
All your other points are true to some extent though. Things are still clunky in the desktop area.
You can twiddle with device permissions etc to burn disks non-root... but for "normal/novice" users it all hinges on how well your distro set it all up.
As for spreadsheets, ditch kspread / gnumeric. The closest I've found to office usefulness is the OpenOffice suite. At least it has good programability / macro support.
Now, according to the parent post (and here), this virus shouldn't start attacking for another hour. Yet SCO is down. Why?
;-)
.au) we're 10 hours ahead of UTC and 20 or so hours ahead of SCO. So theoretically they'd get each timezone coming online and increasing the load over a period of 24 hours.
Expand your worldview, man!
Some of us live in the future
Where I live (in
A friend of mine runs a web site which offers a very large archive of files.....his bandwidth consumption has been through the roof because of people using wget...50% of that being clients who are downloading every document on the site
That friend wouldn't be SCO , by any chance?
that's why the geek dropped it, fool ;-)
Thats PCMCIA / CARDBUS adaptors there,champ :-)
He's taling about COMPACTFlash cards, which are a whopping 36.4(L) x 42.8(W) x 3.30(T) mm for the type-I's
Any smaller physical size for your media and you tend to lose them. A lot.
"honey, have you seen my postage-stamp sized SD card?"
"I think one of the kids snapped it in half when they tried to feed it to the cat."
"Oh that's ok, it was only 75 bucks (sob)"
However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.
You're right, itanium is more suited for tabletops or large benches. I've even heard of it being used on pool tables, but I think it might be pushing the limits of its architecture a little bit there.
There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.
,"IBMAMDVIATRANSMETA".
:look floor
:get CD
:look CD
:go north
:quit
You have:
- A wallet
: look
There is a PowerPC processor in the corner.
: Get processor
Taken.
The man in the spacesuit fidgets uncomfortably.
: Use processor
You have no software that can run on this processor.
The man in the spacesuit laughs at your predicament.
A geek has also fallen into the intel trap.
: Look geek
He is pasty-skinned and bearded. He seems to shun the light.
: Talk geek
The geek says loudly
The man in the spacesuit screams and departs the room!
The geek leaves the room, giggling.
There is something on the floor near where the geek was standing.
There is a a rewriteable CD on the floor.
Taken.
On closer inspection you notice the CD has been labelled "YellowDog" with a marker pen.
You are in a maze of twisty processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.
are you sure? (y/n) y
no, voyager's code has been rewritten and updated several times in the last twenty years
Ok, a few basic principles of steel manufacture.
In order to make iron, iron ore and coal (well, coke actually) are dropped in layers in an operating blast furnace. The coke burns in the furnace and as a consequence reduces the iron ore to iron, as well as supplying enough heat to keep the contents of the bottom of the furnace molten.
So, you need coal to make coke to make iron... to make steel and such.
Bad Things happen if the blast furnace runs out of coke, Very Bad Things in fact, so these pretty much run 24x7, meaning you've normally got a giant stockpile of coal to cover any conceivable loss of supply (normally a few weeks supply).
So... if you've got all these ludicrous amounts of coal around (stockpiles of 100,000t are not uncommon) and a giant energy requirement, you can easily and economically build an on-site power station to power the rest of the system.
And the fun part is you can sell your excess capacity to the grid at a profit for a good 10 or 15 years, because you built your plant larger than you needed to allow for growth in your steel mill.
(Aluminium plants use an entirely different process, of which the only part I know about is they use an obscene amount of electricity and no coal required as in a blast furnace.)
Windows does this by telling itself to re-enumerate it's devices in 5 seconds, then hibernating.
On wakeup it's down to 3...2...1...re-enumerate devices.As windows can re-enumerate it's device list any time it feels like it's not much of a hassle.
I used to lurk on the linux-usb dev list, getting device enum sorted was a bit of a pain in the bum, with much discussion.... I don't know how far the other linux subsystems have gotten yet. If they've gotten the re-enumerate problem licked , it's not too much hassle.
Unless you do something like remove some usb storage while the PC's sleeping, of course.
Oh and in additon, I use ntpd to keep the software clock synced and hwclock to hourly reset the hardware real time clock on my mythTV, otherwise it drifts rather alarmingly when I reboot.
There's an alpha feature in MythTv that does this now. Apparently it works, but I try to keep off the bleeding edge CVS, especially when my TV depends on it;-)
I'll weigh in on this.
Bootvis does exactly that, it gives you a timing of how long it takes for a particular process to initialise and hand off to the next one.
you can get an idea of why your boot takes so long to start. for instance, on my pc , video init takes 12 seconds, easily the longest bit.
It's not much use for end users , but for developers it helps to be able to say "goddamn crappy video driver takes 12 seconds to init! fix that!"
If there is any quantity of platinum in those fuel cells, then yes the parent poster is right.
For example, the platinum (99.9% pure) for crucibles that we use normally costs about USD650-700/ounce. Because of this, we supply them our old crucibles and scrap platinum and they melt them down and re-refine them.
D'oh! You're right of course. Patents are not my strong point....
;-)
Well, so much for MS office compatibility then.
I guess it'll come down to finding some country that *doesn't* have the crushing MS-Patent-Of-Death (tm) and moving all filter development there.
Maybe one day in the distant future, we'll kindly supply poor old microsoft a filter for their crufty old office suite so their last dozen customers can import all of our slick OSS-generated documents