I had one like that; the caps lock key actually required you press shift AND lock, as the lock key did exactly what it says: it inserted a little shim under the shift lever to lock it in place. Pressing lock again released the shim and the platen came back down with a deafening thud.
Its the platen (the roller) that got lifted, as the hammers on the typewriter look like this:
[a][b] [A][B]
| |
| |
(except reversed!) so lifting the platen causes the upper-case letters to hit the ink ribbon instead of the lower-case letter.
When typing up reports I had to do it in a closed room upstairs while everyone else was watching telly, or I got complaints about the noise. You're dead right about the placement, anywhere else and the mechanics of what it was doing would have been difficult.
Specifically: - experts exchange. I never want to see you guys, I want links to the developer's website + mail archives (this one I block by having my own customized html form for google with the extra options) - searching for a 'review' of any electronic product pops up screeds of reseller online catalogues, best price guides etc and never one fucking review. You have to add words which are likely to appear in a review, like 'sucks' and 'shiny' to find the real reviews. - searching for bands gives the same shit - catalogue style interfaces purporting to tell me everything I wanted to know about the band, but in reality its one of a bazillion holding pages.
C. Your state and county stickers are not in the picture. If the camera does move it will be much more noticable if there is a static image on the video.
Not that I know much about this... but surely having something static in frame - point-like, not too close to the camera - could be a good thing, it would allow easier image registration in post production? But then, I guess that's a whole heap more work.
they also have sites for other languages, eg http://perl.apache.org/ - but the foundation felt they didn't have the legally-necessary oversight over the 'sub-projects' of jakarta.apache.org, much less the sub-sub projects in jakarta-commons.
So a while back (year and a half? something like that) the larger projects started to move up and out, and become separately managed (as opposed to completely unmanaged), so now we have ant.apache.org and the like. They also asked that the sites gain a stronger common identity with the main Apache website.
As for why there were so many java projects in jakarta to begin with - well, things just went that way. (shrugs)
I almost always wear a jewelled codpiece. Obviously the poster of this article is profoundly against the wearing of formal underclothing, and from the sound of it doesn't know how to strap one on without castrating himself. A codpeice should be exaggerating, not constricting.
Here are some reasons to wear a jewelled codpiece: -You'll appear more medieval than your workmates who don't wear one -You'll appeal more to codpiece-wearing types -You gain the appearance of having status and importance -It's the only safe place in formal underwear for a man to express himself. -Codpieces are a "success indicator", which essentially means that you will be viewed more favourably by persons of either persuasion (unless your codpiece is extremely small).
If any of those reasons has any bearing on the job you actually do, you're probably a codpiece salesman or Henry VIII. The people climbing upwards on the ladder of success will wonder why you pay more attention to what you wear than who you are, or how well you did your job.
After a similar question was posted on/. a couple of years ago, I tried the Hacker's Diet, written by the co-author of AutoCAD, which several people recommended.
The book and the tools are all downloadable for free. It aims for gradual and consistent weight change through slight adjustments to your diet (just "smaller portions" rather than "thou shalt not eat X"), with light excercise thrown, in mainly to make you feel better. Because its not prescribing a massive life change, its fairly easy to get started and keep it going.
While a lot of folk might suggest a database, structuring data is difficult, especially when you're spanning the gamut from "bits of green wire" to "Cray XMP, Serial no 700l33t4u", with and without photos, etc.
A simpler, scalable solution is to see all of this stuff as semistructured or even unstructured data - and point a search engine at it. (lots of people are heading this way - see eg ReiserFS, WinFS.
To create your data, just make web pages and get the search engine to index them. You can even make the whole process very simple by using a Wiki with built in full text search like MoinMoin, or just go for a proper search engine like lucene/
There are disadvantages. In the most basic setup you will not be able to search for "green things" because until you move from unstructured to semistructured data, there are no properties for the search engine to pick on. Even once you do add properties, you won't be able to ask "add up the cost of all my junk" which is easy in SQL. But the speed at which you can add stuff to your inventory is some compensation.
You say you've ruled out bikes, but have you looked into recumbent bikes as an alternative? They're a lot less effort than the normal kind, and you can get varying levels of weatherproofing too. I presume you don't need *that* much where you are because those mini vehicles don't look like they'd be cosy at 30 below.
There's also the electric bike option, and you can even get bikes that are both recumbent and electric, which would really take the strain away.
You should also look into working from home of course - the most economic journeys are the ones you don't make.
"The closest I found was the Clio Vadem PC-1000 but it has a color screen and is rather big..:("
You want a 10" screen but think the PC-1000 is big! I have to say that I've been looking for that kind of thing too. I guess marketing depts worldwide that B/W won't sell, even with higher res and better battery life than the colour alternatives.
The Vadem, its twin the "TriPad" and the Psion Series 7 were the closest I could find to what I wanted.
Taking the cue from the grandparent to look for word processors I also found someotheroptions - mainly aimed at the educational market.
Of the links above, the two cheaper quickpads seem the most viable - it works as a wireless or USB keyboard at your pc, then just walk away with some text files (and apparently spreadsheets too?). At 11" its a bit large but it makes sense if you see it as a keyboard replacement. Interesting note on how it works in a review I found:
"When a user returns to the office, the QuickPAD allows the files in the Text Editor to be uploaded into any favorite word-processing program. This trick is accomplished by having the keyboard "replay" all the keystrokes of the text editor's file."
Actually the NY law doesn't mention sidewalks. It bans motorised scooters per se. And the argument for the law, given in its text, seems dubious at best:
"The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 4,390 emergency room-treated injuries associated with motorized scooters in the year 2000. Thirty-nine percent of those injured were under 15 years of age."
"The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that over 600,000 persons suffered bicycle-related injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment in 1994."
600,000 vs. 4,390. Hmm, shouldn't they be banning bikes? (bikes also fit their other criteria - you can do 40mph on a bike and they aren't licensed)
I've no argument with you about the sidewalks, but thats not how this law is framed.
BTW the law would also make selling toy electric cars for kids punishable by a $1000 fine. Though I guess if you can afford a toy ferrari you can afford the fine....
"For purposes of this section the term "motorized scooter" shall mean any wheeled device that is designed to be stood or sat upon by the operator, is powered by an electric motor [...]"
We actually use the lbi/dwt format as the basis for our template engine. I wrote this because I was annoyed at seeing the assets the web designer works on thrown away, or at best cut & paste, into JSP solutions (the same goes for most other template solutions).
This solution works best on design-led, rather than code-led projects; ie websites not webapps, since you'll have to change and prototype the UI more, which is where DW is strong.
Unfortunately I can't at present open source my work, but here's some technical details:
our sites static skins are built to be navigable, so that replacing URLs is enough to get the site to use the correct servlets.
we ship a.war with the 'static site' skin held separately (typically under apache, see bit on URL rewriting below)
the.war is configured with the url to the root of the 'static site', and its location on disk.
whenever a.htm,.dwt,.lbi is requested in the dynamic site it reads it from its cache or disk, with some parts of the site replaced (see below).
jsps can use static assets as templates, via a template tag lib almost the same as the struts tiles tags. This is the typical means for replacing parts of pages in the static site.
the parser for the DW4 type stuff (no javascript expressions) was written by hand; for DWMX I wrote a small javacc parser for the javascript subset they support. The syntax is described pretty well in the DW help, for the JS bits you'd need to see the ECMAScript manual (or just get hold of Moz Rhino)
We parse the DW comments, the 9 URL attributes in html (8 standard html4 ones + 'background' I think), and URLs in @imported styles. We parse the URLs because we rewrite them to have the full path in the 'dynamic' site + session ids. Editable regions, URLs and LibraryItems are all replaceable by configuring the.war.
lbis are processed as includes; only the editable regions of files based on dwts come from that file - the rest comes from the dwt. This means you can edit the dwt files on the fly.
one reason for replacing URLs is that templated JSPs can be reusing a template at a different 'depth' than the original page; putting in absolute URLs avoids this problem. A second reason is that we point all URLs in templates that arent handled by the dynamic site back to the static site - so JPGs etc are served by Apache not the J2EE server (I know there are other solutions for this involving more Apache config...)
for those times you need popups - and would think you need URLs in your javascript - the no-JS-friendly [a href="x" target="y" onclick="window.open(this.href, this.target,..."] allows URLs used by JS to be replaced.
It works pretty well, and its acceptably fast (when I originally wrote it on an 800MHz laptop, pages with 5 lbi includes were served in about 0.2s if they needed to be reparsed, 0.025s from the cache; for JSPs with 'tiles' tags the figures were 12s and 0.02s. ie, you don't lose much speed if you use the cache, and the first view time - important in sales demos - was much quicker than JSP. NB other template engines that don't involve the compiler are similarly fast, eg Velocity. I didn't have to work particularly hard on optimizing it as it very quickly dropped below the level where DB access and network lag dominated again.
In terms of effort, it took one developer (me) about a week over it for the first delivery for DW4; the javascripty bits and changes to the parser after DWMX came out took about 2 more.
Again, its horses for courses. For web/applications/ (where its more important to have reusable UI components) stuff like Tapestry is a better fit. If you are uncomfortable writing parsers, this project is not for you. If you are comfortable with Velocity, then there are velocity extensions for DW that may suit. However, for all our website work this template engine fits our workflow like a glove.
We hear, every so often, that "nuclear fusion has occurred", and nothing ever comes of it. It either can't be replicated or is impractical for power generation.
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
The trouble with fusion reactor experiments (of the tokamak kind) is that they are tremendously expensive and lengthy to build. After the previous generation of European experiments (JET) there supposed to be something like a seven-year gap before ITER would become available. IIRC the US pulled funding on their independent fusion programme, but eventually decided to join ITER too; its pretty much the only tokamak game in town.
However, due to its cost, ITER has always been mired in politics (even the site hasn't been chosen yet - 5 years after the project was supposed to have started) and this leads to more delays and increased costs.
Plasma theorists also have to find something else to do (and alternate funding) between each round of testing; seven years is a long time and people leave the subject, retire, etc, never too return. You'd be a very brave man to pin your career hopes on ITER being built on time. This then causes manpower difficulties for the project when it finally gets into gear, which then suffers more delays and overruns, etc, as postdoc researchers are trained up.
In short; expect progress when ITER is build, but don't hold your breath.
"the diffrences in the lens curveture ought to give results that don't reflect the true geometry of a building. So it'd be interesting to find out how, if they solved this problem."
This is one of those enigma style puzzles: you can solve because you know there is a solution. You know that the image is of a building and that the image contains long straight edges. Edge detection would pull out several long curves instead. The problem is reduced to finding the lens function to apply that produces the most long straight lines.
The work Steve Mann did on photogrammetry (search for "video orbits", I think the project is on sourceforge now) included lens characterization functions for exactly the reasons you describe (he was stitching images together). Only a couple of parameters were required; in the video orbits case you just guessed them, but then Mann didn't have the advantage of knowing there were long straight edges in the image. You just need to fit these parameters to maximize the straight edges in the image.
Mann's work also covered 'dechirping' transforms that remove perspective effects.
That was my immediate reaction too. A bit of digging and I found out that the next firmware rev of the SqueezeBox will incorporate Wireless Wake-on-lan, so your mp3 server can be running on very low power when not in use, and your slimserver (or other wireless client) can kick it into life. Nifty.
The paper doesn't actually claim a causal relationship:
"Early television exposure is associated with attentional problems at age 7. Efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood may be warranted, and additional research is needed." (my italics, from the abstract)
Without any evidence of a causal pathway it could be that, eg the constantly changing images are appealing to children who eventually develop ADHD. There have also been studies showing that children watching television in preschool has a beneficial effect on their teenage school performance.
Given conflicting advice, surely parents should follow the advice of their doctors or health board and not jump on the first research bandwagon that rolls through town.
As its only 2500 years this thing has been sealed up, I'd guess they are doing something a tad more obvious like looking at isotope levels in trapped air bubbles to determine the age of the ice cores they've extracted.
Tectonic plate movement seems to be unconnected to the rest of what you're talking about, but it seems irrelevant anyway, as the lake looks to be well inside the antarctic plate which would have moved only couple of miles in that timeframe (I would have thought the fact that there has been so little earthquake activity that the ice is still intact was a big clue).
As for DNA... this wasn't a cryogenic tube for bacterial pizza delivery boys, both the lakes microbes and those outside have diverged from their ancestors, and even at the time they would have been divergent because they are unlikely to have been in physical proximity (or they'd all be covered in ice right now).
What you're suggesting is somewhat equivalent to comparing the code of the Linux 2.6 kernel and SCO Unixware 7.1.3, without using any previous versions, and trying to guess who copied what from whom. And just as ridiculous.
Dammit, I've just been trolled...by the bastard lovechild of Michael Crichton and Darl McBride.
Moderators, how is the parent insightful? He's just misread the post he replied to!
Please don't use straight SHA1 - it requires downloading the entire file to verify.
Bittorrent and some other file sharing networks split the file into chunks and keep metadata with the hashes of chunks.
Re read the grandparent: with clients uploading pieces to each other and verifying their integrity with MD5 or SHA1 checksums (emphasis mine, especialy on the pronoun)
ie the SHA1s are of the pieces (ie chunks) not the whole file.
Anyone in the UK see the program where someone (Derren Brown?) asked a load of advertising people to design a logo and a catchphrase? They made pretty much the exact one that he had put in an envelope before they started. And how? He got the taxi that they came to the office in to drive a certain route, and he planted certain things, logos, words, and images along the way.
Next time you see this (and since it was in one of those talking head "Best N" shows it will be along again soon) look _carefully_ at the things he planted along the route.
The advertisers were in a car. Several of the items were shown to you in shop windows along their route, and were quite small. In fact the only person involved in the trick who could have seen these is YOU (via the camera).
Derren's explanation might have been true, but there's good reason to doubt it.
This paper reviews history mechanisms in web browsers back in '97. One of the mechanisms mentioned, MosaicG is stunningly similar to the work in this article.
MosaicG was released in 1995.
It's interesting though that Tauscher's paper (the first link) conlcuded back then that the 'stack based' histories we used were not optimal, mainly because sibling history branches disappear. She found that the best method tested was to have a 'context sensitive web subset', ie a graph showing the relationships between visited nodes in relation to the current node, rather than a strict history.
I've just discovered that/. is brilliant for rants (when one is pissed off) especially in threads like this were no one seems to be commenting (or reading);-).
No worries, I do the same. I'm not trying to flame you, just comment from the point of view of someone who works on gov't contracts (as I do).
ATM many parts of the government only produce documents in proprietary Microsoft formats (and even worse expect others to be able to read and send documents to them in the same formats)
Govtalk has a list of 'blessed' formats. Documents filed in "public records office"-compliant systems have to be available in their original (possibly proprietary) format, and a 'rendered' format which hopefully will make the documents visible to future generations/platforms.
Unfortunately the office formats are allowed; pdf, ps, tiff too (adobe-proprietary) but at least with them the specs are readily available. My beef with this isn't quite the F/OSS one: render formats should have an open spec and no plugin architecture - so the spec/fully/ specs the doc - which is clearly not the case for the OLE containers used in office.
Now you have given me the link the previous one, I've looked at it and it doesnt seem to be about software (or for that matter freedom) -- in fact there is no mention of the word software
Indeed, software per se isn't the EC's priority, its the needs of the populace. However, universal online access to services/is/ a priority for them (no inequality of opportunity). This meant, in the first round, targets for ADSL deployment and unbundling the local loop, the setting up of the pathfinder projects, UKOnline, NHS direct, and the original office of the e-envoy.
As time has gone on they felt it necessary to say something about the software that was being developed to meet these needs, so they could avoid being used as a cash cow by the software companies. There's also a pressing need to share software developed in-house; at the moment there's a crazy situtation where some depts will have their budgets/cut/ if they sell software they've developed to other depts, so wheels are continually being reinvented. OSI-compliant licensing is seen as a way out.
I'm sure that *some* departments are aware of this -- many (probably most) really don't seem to be (even) aware of these issues, which is actually why we need a document like the one produced by e-Envoy
Well yes, but my point was really that these things have been in the tenders for the last 3 years. That's where it really bites: you have to be able to answer the questions on support costs and source availability before selling software.
e-Envoy (that name really annoys me;-) )
Yeah. Well it could have been 'geek czar', count yourself lucky. I have to say it does represent a major step forward in 'joined up government' as regards IT. However, IIRC a year ago their budget was cut and they were pulled in underneath another dept (Cabinet Office? ODPM? Can't remember)
Only recently have they given permission to reproduce them/print them out/&c . I emailed them congratulating them on this decision. However, the sort-of license they give is too vague to being meaningful and I would not consider it to be free.
"It may be reproduced free of charge provided that it is reproduced accurately and that the source and copyright status of the material is made evident to users." - seems pretty unambiguous to me. This goes back to a 1999 instruction from the cabinet office to waive copyright on the text and typography of Acts (among other things).
I suspect they're not doing older acts purely because they have no financial incentive to do so; thats piss-poor. We're only talking about OCRing something like 2500 documents (to get the acts back to 1940 or so), which is a drop in the ocean when you consider that most forms submitted to councils are OCRd these days.
Disclaimer: maybe I'm very cynical and I am in a pissed off mood No kidding...
also, I believe, at least three-quaters of software is licesed under the FSF's GNU GPL. Figures?
If the are talking about the GNU GPL, the GPL does not "[prevent] it from being redistributed under a more restrictive licence" -- the author can distribute it under any license
Legally, thats distribution not redistribution as the author originates the material, and they are in fact correct as regards the GPL. But point taken, their executive-level introduction of what open source is is a bit inaccurate. But its just an introduction and not the policy.
So it seems that they are making another action plan as part of their previous action plan on which they haven't done anything yet but produce another action plan.
Bollocks. In fact, the 2005 plan was produced because it was felt many of the goals of the 2002 plan had been achieved.
Oh, and they are only doing it because the EU (who I think are more free-software friendly thanks to FSF Europe bringing them over) forced them.
Government depts are well aware that having access to the source prevents them being held to ransom by companies who need a big license payoff to stay afloat. At least 2 of the Pathfinder projects (50 x 1m local govt projects funded by central govt to kickstart development of online services) were fully open source. I say 'were' because AFAIK all the Pathfinders are now completed, they started back in 2000/2001.
Something I have been campagning for the UK government to do is to release all their laws[..]on request to citizens gratis. They do, at least, have some online now under a restrictive license that requires paying so much per click-through for some uses of the laws."
Eh??? Have you looked at HMSO recently? All the acts since 1991 are there, online, for free, and can be reproduced for free. The only clickthroughs the HMSO uses are for supplementary material, not the laws themselves.
My own complaint about those is that they only go back 'selectively' beyond 1991. That's a problem, because eg the laws relating to pollution since then (which it sounds like you're interested in) have been supplementary to the previous Acts. HMSO say the selection of pre-91 laws is just those that they had available already in some electronic form, but we live in a world of OCR, what's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Its the platen (the roller) that got lifted, as the hammers on the typewriter look like this:
[a][b]
[A][B]
| |
| |
(except reversed!) so lifting the platen causes the upper-case letters to hit the ink ribbon instead of the lower-case letter.
When typing up reports I had to do it in a closed room upstairs while everyone else was watching telly, or I got complaints about the noise. You're dead right about the placement, anywhere else and the mechanics of what it was doing would have been difficult.
Specifically:
- experts exchange. I never want to see you guys, I want links to the developer's website + mail archives (this one I block by having my own customized html form for google with the extra options)
- searching for a 'review' of any electronic product pops up screeds of reseller online catalogues, best price guides etc and never one fucking review. You have to add words which are likely to appear in a review, like 'sucks' and 'shiny' to find the real reviews.
- searching for bands gives the same shit - catalogue style interfaces purporting to tell me everything I wanted to know about the band, but in reality its one of a bazillion holding pages.
Can we install ad blockers on Google??!!
Not to mention that Ken Thompson was just 26 when he started on 'Unics'. (ken born 1943, unix born 1969)
Integrated Fusion Device? Well, I guess they'll need it to power all that crap.
C. Your state and county stickers are not in the picture. If the camera does move it will be much more noticable if there is a static image on the video.
Not that I know much about this... but surely having something static in frame - point-like, not too close to the camera - could be a good thing, it would allow easier image registration in post production? But then, I guess that's a whole heap more work.
Gabe's your neighbour? Just be glad it's not Tycho the Psycho.
they also have sites for other languages, eg http://perl.apache.org/ - but the foundation felt they didn't have the legally-necessary oversight over the 'sub-projects' of jakarta.apache.org, much less the sub-sub projects in jakarta-commons.
So a while back (year and a half? something like that) the larger projects started to move up and out, and become separately managed (as opposed to completely unmanaged), so now we have ant.apache.org and the like. They also asked that the sites gain a stronger common identity with the main Apache website.
As for why there were so many java projects in jakarta to begin with - well, things just went that way. (shrugs)
I almost always wear a jewelled codpiece. Obviously the poster of this article is profoundly against the wearing of formal underclothing, and from the sound of it doesn't know how to strap one on without castrating himself. A codpeice should be exaggerating, not constricting.
Here are some reasons to wear a jewelled codpiece:
-You'll appear more medieval than your workmates who don't wear one
-You'll appeal more to codpiece-wearing types
-You gain the appearance of having status and importance
-It's the only safe place in formal underwear for a man to express himself.
-Codpieces are a "success indicator", which essentially means that you will be viewed more favourably by persons of either persuasion (unless your codpiece is extremely small).
If any of those reasons has any bearing on the job you actually do, you're probably a codpiece salesman or Henry VIII. The people climbing upwards on the ladder of success will wonder why you pay more attention to what you wear than who you are, or how well you did your job.
After a similar question was posted on /. a couple of years ago, I tried the Hacker's Diet, written by the co-author of AutoCAD, which several people recommended.
The book and the tools are all downloadable for free. It aims for gradual and consistent weight change through slight adjustments to your diet (just "smaller portions" rather than "thou shalt not eat X"), with light excercise thrown, in mainly to make you feel better. Because its not prescribing a massive life change, its fairly easy to get started and keep it going.
I lost 2 1/2 stone, and havent put it back on.
While a lot of folk might suggest a database, structuring data is difficult, especially when you're spanning the gamut from "bits of green wire" to "Cray XMP, Serial no 700l33t4u", with and without photos, etc.
A simpler, scalable solution is to see all of this stuff as semistructured or even unstructured data - and point a search engine at it. (lots of people are heading this way - see eg ReiserFS, WinFS.
To create your data, just make web pages and get the search engine to index them. You can even make the whole process very simple by using a Wiki with built in full text search like MoinMoin, or just go for a proper search engine like lucene/
There are disadvantages. In the most basic setup you will not be able to search for "green things" because until you move from unstructured to semistructured data, there are no properties for the search engine to pick on. Even once you do add properties, you won't be able to ask "add up the cost of all my junk" which is easy in SQL. But the speed at which you can add stuff to your inventory is some compensation.
You say you've ruled out bikes, but have you looked into recumbent bikes as an alternative? They're a lot less effort than the normal kind, and you can get varying levels of weatherproofing too. I presume you don't need *that* much where you are because those mini vehicles don't look like they'd be cosy at 30 below.
There's also the electric bike option, and you can even get bikes that are both recumbent and electric, which would really take the strain away.
You should also look into working from home of course - the most economic journeys are the ones you don't make.
"The closest I found was the Clio Vadem PC-1000 but it has a color screen and is rather big.. :("
You want a 10" screen but think the PC-1000 is big! I have to say that I've been looking for that kind of thing too. I guess marketing depts worldwide that B/W won't sell, even with higher res and better battery life than the colour alternatives.
The Vadem, its twin the "TriPad" and the Psion Series 7 were the closest I could find to what I wanted.
Taking the cue from the grandparent to look for word processors I also found some other options - mainly aimed at the educational market.
Of the links above, the two cheaper quickpads seem the most viable - it works as a wireless or USB keyboard at your pc, then just walk away with some text files (and apparently spreadsheets too?). At 11" its a bit large but it makes sense if you see it as a keyboard replacement. Interesting note on how it works in a review I found:
"When a user returns to the office, the QuickPAD allows the files in the Text Editor to be uploaded into any favorite word-processing program. This trick is accomplished by having the keyboard "replay" all the keystrokes of the text editor's file."
Interesting. So if you combine a Happy Hacking keyboad, a keylogger and a display, you'd have the same thing?
Actually the NY law doesn't mention sidewalks. It bans motorised scooters per se. And the argument for the law, given in its text, seems dubious at best:
"The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 4,390 emergency room-treated injuries associated with motorized scooters in the year 2000. Thirty-nine percent of those injured were under 15 years of age."
Compare this with figures for bicycles:
"The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that over 600,000 persons suffered bicycle-related injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment in 1994."
600,000 vs. 4,390. Hmm, shouldn't they be banning bikes? (bikes also fit their other criteria - you can do 40mph on a bike and they aren't licensed)
I've no argument with you about the sidewalks, but thats not how this law is framed.
BTW the law would also make selling toy electric cars for kids punishable by a $1000 fine. Though I guess if you can afford a toy ferrari you can afford the fine....
"For purposes of this section the term "motorized scooter" shall mean any wheeled device that is designed to be stood or sat upon by the operator, is powered by an electric motor [...]"
This solution works best on design-led, rather than code-led projects; ie websites not webapps, since you'll have to change and prototype the UI more, which is where DW is strong.
Unfortunately I can't at present open source my work, but here's some technical details:
It works pretty well, and its acceptably fast (when I originally wrote it on an 800MHz laptop, pages with 5 lbi includes were served in about 0.2s if they needed to be reparsed, 0.025s from the cache; for JSPs with 'tiles' tags the figures were 12s and 0.02s. ie, you don't lose much speed if you use the cache, and the first view time - important in sales demos - was much quicker than JSP. NB other template engines that don't involve the compiler are similarly fast, eg Velocity. I didn't have to work particularly hard on optimizing it as it very quickly dropped below the level where DB access and network lag dominated again.
In terms of effort, it took one developer (me) about a week over it for the first delivery for DW4; the javascripty bits and changes to the parser after DWMX came out took about 2 more.
Again, its horses for courses. For web
We hear, every so often, that "nuclear fusion has occurred", and nothing ever comes of it. It either can't be replicated or is impractical for power generation.
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
The trouble with fusion reactor experiments (of the tokamak kind) is that they are tremendously expensive and lengthy to build. After the previous generation of European experiments (JET) there supposed to be something like a seven-year gap before ITER would become available. IIRC the US pulled funding on their independent fusion programme, but eventually decided to join ITER too; its pretty much the only tokamak game in town.
However, due to its cost, ITER has always been mired in politics (even the site hasn't been chosen yet - 5 years after the project was supposed to have started) and this leads to more delays and increased costs.
Plasma theorists also have to find something else to do (and alternate funding) between each round of testing; seven years is a long time and people leave the subject, retire, etc, never too return. You'd be a very brave man to pin your career hopes on ITER being built on time. This then causes manpower difficulties for the project when it finally gets into gear, which then suffers more delays and overruns, etc, as postdoc researchers are trained up.
In short; expect progress when ITER is build, but don't hold your breath.
"the diffrences in the lens curveture ought to give results that don't reflect the true geometry of a building. So it'd be interesting to find out how, if they solved this problem."
This is one of those enigma style puzzles: you can solve because you know there is a solution. You know that the image is of a building and that the image contains long straight edges. Edge detection would pull out several long curves instead. The problem is reduced to finding the lens function to apply that produces the most long straight lines.
The work Steve Mann did on photogrammetry (search for "video orbits", I think the project is on sourceforge now) included lens characterization functions for exactly the reasons you describe (he was stitching images together). Only a couple of parameters were required; in the video orbits case you just guessed them, but then Mann didn't have the advantage of knowing there were long straight edges in the image. You just need to fit these parameters to maximize the straight edges in the image.
Mann's work also covered 'dechirping' transforms that remove perspective effects.
That was my immediate reaction too. A bit of digging and I found out that the next firmware rev of the SqueezeBox will incorporate Wireless Wake-on-lan, so your mp3 server can be running on very low power when not in use, and your slimserver (or other wireless client) can kick it into life. Nifty.
If MS does morph into a benevolent monopoly like AT&T of old, should we break it up just for market's sake?
Nah, just for the sake of nostalgia.
The paper doesn't actually claim a causal relationship:
"Early television exposure is associated with attentional problems at age 7. Efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood may be warranted, and additional research is needed." (my italics, from the abstract)
Without any evidence of a causal pathway it could be that, eg the constantly changing images are appealing to children who eventually develop ADHD. There have also been studies showing that children watching television in preschool has a beneficial effect on their teenage school performance.
Given conflicting advice, surely parents should follow the advice of their doctors or health board and not jump on the first research bandwagon that rolls through town.
As its only 2500 years this thing has been sealed up, I'd guess they are doing something a tad more obvious like looking at isotope levels in trapped air bubbles to determine the age of the ice cores they've extracted.
Tectonic plate movement seems to be unconnected to the rest of what you're talking about, but it seems irrelevant anyway, as the lake looks to be well inside the antarctic plate which would have moved only couple of miles in that timeframe (I would have thought the fact that there has been so little earthquake activity that the ice is still intact was a big clue).
As for DNA... this wasn't a cryogenic tube for bacterial pizza delivery boys, both the lakes microbes and those outside have diverged from their ancestors, and even at the time they would have been divergent because they are unlikely to have been in physical proximity (or they'd all be covered in ice right now).
What you're suggesting is somewhat equivalent to comparing the code of the Linux 2.6 kernel and SCO Unixware 7.1.3, without using any previous versions, and trying to guess who copied what from whom. And just as ridiculous.
Dammit, I've just been trolled...by the bastard lovechild of Michael Crichton and Darl McBride.
Moderators, how is the parent insightful? He's just misread the post he replied to!
Please don't use straight SHA1 - it requires downloading the entire file to verify.
Bittorrent and some other file sharing networks split the file into chunks and keep metadata with the hashes of chunks.
Re read the grandparent:
with clients uploading pieces to each other and verifying their integrity with MD5 or SHA1 checksums (emphasis mine, especialy on the pronoun)
ie the SHA1s are of the pieces (ie chunks) not the whole file.
Anyone in the UK see the program where someone (Derren Brown?) asked a load of advertising people to design a logo and a catchphrase? They made pretty much the exact one that he had put in an envelope before they started. And how? He got the taxi that they came to the office in to drive a certain route, and he planted certain things, logos, words, and images along the way.
Next time you see this (and since it was in one of those talking head "Best N" shows it will be along again soon) look _carefully_ at the things he planted along the route.
The advertisers were in a car. Several of the items were shown to you in shop windows along their route, and were quite small. In fact the only person involved in the trick who could have seen these is YOU (via the camera).
Derren's explanation might have been true, but there's good reason to doubt it.
This paper reviews history mechanisms in web browsers back in '97. One of the mechanisms mentioned, MosaicG is stunningly similar to the work in this article.
MosaicG was released in 1995.
It's interesting though that Tauscher's paper (the first link) conlcuded back then that the 'stack based' histories we used were not optimal, mainly because sibling history branches disappear. She found that the best method tested was to have a 'context sensitive web subset', ie a graph showing the relationships between visited nodes in relation to the current node, rather than a strict history.
There was a disclaimer, OK?
/. is brilliant for rants (when one is pissed off) especially in threads like this were no one seems to be commenting (or reading) ;-) .
/fully/ specs the doc - which is clearly not the case for the OLE containers used in office.
/is/ a priority for them (no inequality of opportunity). This meant, in the first round, targets for ADSL deployment and unbundling the local loop, the setting up of the pathfinder projects, UKOnline, NHS direct, and the original office of the e-envoy.
/cut/ if they sell software they've developed to other depts, so wheels are continually being reinvented. OSI-compliant licensing is seen as a way out.
;-) )
I've just discovered that
No worries, I do the same. I'm not trying to flame you, just comment from the point of view of someone who works on gov't contracts (as I do).
ATM many parts of the government only produce documents in proprietary Microsoft formats (and even worse expect others to be able to read and send documents to them in the same formats)
Govtalk has a list of 'blessed' formats. Documents filed in "public records office"-compliant systems have to be available in their original (possibly proprietary) format, and a 'rendered' format which hopefully will make the documents visible to future generations/platforms.
Unfortunately the office formats are allowed; pdf, ps, tiff too (adobe-proprietary) but at least with them the specs are readily available. My beef with this isn't quite the F/OSS one: render formats should have an open spec and no plugin architecture - so the spec
Now you have given me the link the previous one, I've looked at it and it doesnt seem to be about software (or for that matter freedom) -- in fact there is no mention of the word software
Indeed, software per se isn't the EC's priority, its the needs of the populace. However, universal online access to services
As time has gone on they felt it necessary to say something about the software that was being developed to meet these needs, so they could avoid being used as a cash cow by the software companies. There's also a pressing need to share software developed in-house; at the moment there's a crazy situtation where some depts will have their budgets
I'm sure that *some* departments are aware of this -- many (probably most) really don't seem to be (even) aware of these issues, which is actually why we need a document like the one produced by e-Envoy
Well yes, but my point was really that these things have been in the tenders for the last 3 years. That's where it really bites: you have to be able to answer the questions on support costs and source availability before selling software.
e-Envoy (that name really annoys me
Yeah. Well it could have been 'geek czar', count yourself lucky. I have to say it does represent a major step forward in 'joined up government' as regards IT. However, IIRC a year ago their budget was cut and they were pulled in underneath another dept (Cabinet Office? ODPM? Can't remember)
Only recently have they given permission to reproduce them/print them out/&c . I emailed them congratulating them on this decision. However, the sort-of license they give is too vague to being meaningful and I would not consider it to be free.
"It may be reproduced free of charge provided that it is reproduced accurately and that the source and copyright status of the material is made evident to users." - seems pretty unambiguous to me. This goes back to a 1999 instruction from the cabinet office to waive copyright on the text and typography of Acts (among other things).
I suspect they're not doing older acts purely because they have no financial incentive to do so; thats piss-poor. We're only talking about OCRing something like 2500 documents (to get the acts back to 1940 or so), which is a drop in the ocean when you consider that most forms submitted to councils are OCRd these days.
Disclaimer: maybe I'm very cynical and I am in a pissed off mood
No kidding...
also, I believe, at least three-quaters of software is licesed under the FSF's GNU GPL.
Figures?
If the are talking about the GNU GPL, the GPL does not "[prevent] it from being redistributed under a more restrictive licence" -- the author can distribute it under any license
Legally, thats distribution not redistribution as the author originates the material, and they are in fact correct as regards the GPL. But point taken, their executive-level introduction of what open source is is a bit inaccurate. But its just an introduction and not the policy.
So it seems that they are making another action plan as part of their previous action plan on which they haven't done anything yet but produce another action plan.
Bollocks. In fact, the 2005 plan was produced because it was felt many of the goals of the 2002 plan had been achieved.
Oh, and they are only doing it because the EU (who I think are more free-software friendly thanks to FSF Europe bringing them over) forced them.
Government depts are well aware that having access to the source prevents them being held to ransom by companies who need a big license payoff to stay afloat. At least 2 of the Pathfinder projects (50 x 1m local govt projects funded by central govt to kickstart development of online services) were fully open source. I say 'were' because AFAIK all the Pathfinders are now completed, they started back in 2000/2001.
Something I have been campagning for the UK government to do is to release all their laws[..]on request to citizens gratis. They do, at least, have some online now under a restrictive license that requires paying so much per click-through for some uses of the laws."
Eh??? Have you looked at HMSO recently? All the acts since 1991 are there, online, for free, and can be reproduced for free. The only clickthroughs the HMSO uses are for supplementary material, not the laws themselves.
My own complaint about those is that they only go back 'selectively' beyond 1991. That's a problem, because eg the laws relating to pollution since then (which it sounds like you're interested in) have been supplementary to the previous Acts. HMSO say the selection of pre-91 laws is just those that they had available already in some electronic form, but we live in a world of OCR, what's the problem?