Was it really necessary to put an attack on one specific Microsoft employee who supported Prop 8? Microsoft has excellent benefits that are extended to same sex domestic partners. It seems kind of churlish to smear Microsoft by juxtaposing Google's corporate stance on the issue against one Microsoft employee's.
Come on, there's plenty of other things to attack Microsoft over.
In electric guitars, the wood itself has a surprisingly small impact on the sound. I've built three electrics and been tweaking my guitar collection obsessively for more than 10 years. The pickups and bridge have far more to do with the tone produced by an electric guitar than the wood it's manufactured from. People never believe me when I make this claim, then I show them my Les Paul that sounds like a Strat and my Telecaster that sounds like a Jackson:) I get a lot of "WTF!?" looks and comments at open mic nights.
This obviously isn't the case with acoustic guitars.
My habit of heavily modifying guitars has proven very useful, as I used to sit in with a jazz ensemble that played a huge variety of types of music... If you're feeling adventerous, try reproducing my cheapo Epiphone Les Paul, which is now one of my most versatile guitars. Get a Duncan JB bridge position pickup, install it in the neck position, use your bridge pickup of choice. Rewire it so that there is a single master volume, independent tone knobs for the pickups, and use the remaining knob to dial the neck position pickup between fully-tapped and humbucking modes. That's the dirty trick -- tapped humbuckers usually sound too thin because they're wound less for the purpose of pairing up with another coil; with 0 on the knob being fully tapped and 10 being fully humbucked, I set it at about 3-4 and I get better strat sounds out of my Les Paul than I do out of my Strat (a 50th anniversary strat with Lace Sensors, soon to be upgraded to Lindy Fralins).
That said, violins are very different animals from guitars, and the varnish has a heck of a lot to do with the tone produced.
A common problem with acoustic instruments these days is methods of tree farming. Pick up a '65 strat, then pick up a 2008 strat. You'll feel about 4 pounds of weight difference, even though they're the same type of wood and same dimensions. Lots of wood used in musical instrument nowadays comes from tree farms, not from forests that have been growing for hundreds of years. As a result, a lot of emphasis is placed on fast tree growth, which produces less dense wood. There's a reason why old wood harvested from churches, houses, etc. is so in-demand for musical instruments.
Also, wood from old sunken ships is extremely popular (and expensive) due to its high density, and due to the tiny pockets of gas inside produced by bacteria consuming the wood. As the bacteria consumes the wood, it depletes the oxygen and dies off (wood does not rot in anaerobic environments). The little pockets of gas left behind change the frequency response of the wood and creates an incredible sounding instrument. Just tapping on such a piece of wood sounds like you're hitting a marimba.
...would we be seeing the same reaction on Slashdot?
Seriously, imagine if Apple were trying to acquire, for instance Transmeta, (purely hypothetical) and offering a 45%+ premium. And Transmeta in response turned it down and set up internal policies to make generous severence payments to employees who chose to leave after the acquisition.
What do you call that? I call it gross breach of fiduciary duty to your stockholders. I am fortunately not a Yahoo stockholder, but if I was, I'd be pretty pissed about this.
When I was a student, before getting assimilated by MS (I am now a MS employee), I ran Linux exclusively on my school laptop and used OpenOffice full time. There's no way around saying it, it was a terrible experience. When it wasn't crashing, losing my documents, or in some other way completely failing to function, it was painfully slow, bordering on unusable.
I stuck by it and fiddled with it until one day in a lab I had to do some extensive spreadsheet work. Specifically, getting data out of a tab-delimited file, approx 15,000 rows and ~5ish columns. Every way I could possibly attempt to open, paste, import this file would throw OpenOffice into a seemingly endless loop. I'd wait 20, 30, 40 minutes, but it couldn't handle this 100kB file no matter how I diced it. I made all sorts of excuses as other students were doing the same thing in mere seconds on their Windows PCs or Macs. It was the last straw for me and I gave up, and used the lab machine with MS Office to do the same thing in about 5 seconds. A similar lab experience only a few weeks later, and I ended up dual-booting my laptop "just for Excel", and before I realized it, I liked the whole Office suite better than OpenOffice. I still used Linux primarily at that time, but every time I needed anything remotely Office related, I simply found OpenOffice to be inadequate.
Sorry, I'm really not trying to be a troll about this, and I know many folks will scream bloody murder at me for even posting because of my bias. But before I had such a bias, I tried so very hard to love OpenOffice, and just couldn't. Like Wulfstan said, the quality of OpenOffice is just not very good.
If I were Google, I'd be working hard to carve out this niche market for online services and stay out of desktop apps beyond perhaps plugins for better online integration. OpenOffice doesn't fit with Google's business model, and frankly, I think Google could probably crank out something superior to OpenOffice from scratch anyways.
"Really, we just bid billions of dollars for something we didn't really want out of the goodness of our hearts. Honestly, we didn't even want it, that's the real reason why we didn't win. Really. Come on. I mean it."
I think Google generally has a lot of good intent, but this claim smells like BS to me.
My brother shares his name with a well known IRA terrorist. Every time he travels, he has to show up many hours early, and every single time they take him to the secondary inspection room to ask him if he's ever been to England, if he's planning to go to England, etc.
Does it also do your homework, peel potatoes, and satisfy all your deepest sexual desires?
Please tell me I missed the sarcasm. A full blown cross platform Java office package with high performance in under 10 megs? I have no doubts that OO could be a very potent solution, but you've specced out something which isn't feasible in the least.
Thank you! I feel exactly the same. I've been a Linux hippie for years, but I'm very rapidly converting to the dark side. Get prepared for a rant not specific to just C#...
I don't care what anyone says, C# is way better than Java. And I have ~5 years experience with Java, 6 months experience with C#. It converted me in no time. C# is very pleasant and the language just seems to get out of your way when you want to do something, largely because of the.Net framework.
I'm tired of the fact that it's "cool" to make fun of Microsoft on Slashdot. But you know what? They have a lot of very solid products. Visual Studio is a fantastic IDE. SQL Server is not always the server of choice, but it is very powerful nonetheless.
I'd say this is going to be a very big year for Microsoft. All of their major product groups have a major release due out, and they're all looking very good from what I've seen so far.
So we may not always like Microsoft's products in every way, and we may downright hate some of their business practices. Does that make Visual Studio and C# any worse of a product? Does that make Microsoft Word a worse word processor? NO.
"OMG WINDOWS 95 HAD BLUE SCREENS LOL C# MUST BE BAD" -- Grow up.
The entire open source community needs to grow up a little bit. There's a tremendous amount of talent in it, but it's so obscured by absurd social stigmas and internet-Green-Peace propaganda that a great deal of it loses credability. Visual Studio is a great IDE. C# is a great language. Office is a great productivity toolkit. People use them. Live with it, move on.
OS Integration is a great idea
on
Sun Eyes PostgreSQL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a developer who works on databases a lot, I still find it very arcane when I do have to get right down and dirty and work on files again. It seems very primitive in a world of SELECTs and INNER JOINs.
I personally think every OS should ship with some sort of a light db engine equipped to handle databases stored in files. Imagine if you could write a simple application that opened databases just like you would with a db server, only using a file instead. When it comes time to scale it to a larger application, switch one line and connect it to a server instead. Or have your application configurable so that the user can either store it in a file or on a remote server simply by changing the server info from "c:\database.db" to "server:1234".
Read my brother's webcomics at www.krakowstudios.com and www.marilith.com .
Colonization?
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 4, Interesting
How do you feel about the largely unrecognized awesomeness of Colonization? Have you thought about making a new revision of it? What about open sourcing it so guys like me can fix it up to work on modern OS's?
Like any programmer, I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing Civilization, but in all honesty I've spent more playing Colonization and I always felt it was a better (but less-well-received) game than Civilization. I still find myself trying to run the original DOS game on my Athlon64, and I find it sad that I can't get the original MIDI music to work either.
Not only was Colonization an incredible game, it was educational without cramming it down my throat. When I was a little kid studying history I knew all of the pioneers by name and accomplishments already.
I have a product called FogX that I've been putting on the inside of my car windshield for years. No fog, no hassle, low cost. I've also been applying it to bathroom mirrors and such. Am I completely missing something, or is this not exactly a breakthrough?
I agree. Having recently been employed to develop web applications, I think their use of DHTML is really cool! It's simple and intuitive. There's a lot more to it than first meets the eye, try dragging and dropping things around.
I really like how you can "pin" search results into a DHTML window.
It really seems like Google is rounding out the bases for all sorts of organization and general-handiness tools. But it seems awfully odd to me that they haven't branched more into desktop software just yet.
An online calendar system would be a great idea (I don't know about you folks, but it would be handy for me to have a unified calendar whether I'm checking it at home, work, school, etc.) and a possible gateway for Google to get more seriously into the desktop market. I definitely prefer to use localized applications wherever possible. I have a GMail account which I never use, because I far prefer being able to use Mozilla Thunderbird. But imagine just for a moment if Google made an online calendar/contacts list/organization application that interfaced well with a Thunderbird plugin or even a Google-branded e-mail client. You could get the full functionality you want out of such a package when at home or on a personal computer, but have everything accessible when out of the house, office, town, etc. via a web interface.
That's not even the beginning of it. What if they wrote their own sync software for PDAs and phones to synchronize with this system? Think about if you were at a public terminal, and rather than accessing your hotmail account to see what e-mail you have, you check your Google account, plug in your PDA to a front-accessible USB port, and synchronize with your online contact list. You could be writing e-mails on your PDA while on the bus, and fire them off at an internet kiosk at the mall.
I posted some time ago about the future of online/offline blended applications (using XUL plugins, though) and it seems to me that if anyone can create and take such a market by storm, it's Google.
Some strange claims...
on
SLI Primer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The article claims first that you need a $250 motherboard to run SLI (apparently a $75 premium for SLI), and second that you need to pay a large premium for SLI-compatible cards, which are next to impossible to find.
I'm running a $160 motherboard with two 6800GTs that I picked up for a good price at my local shop. They did not have a single PCIe 6600 or 6800 board there that wasn't SLI compatible.
Sure we've all seen the Segway, but have you seen.
on
Segway Polo
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· Score: 4, Informative
When you get right down to it, the Segway is quite simple. It is a closed loop feedback control system that corrects error in the device angle. Not too difficult for any electrical or computer engineering student. However, a one wheeled segway is a very different story. I'd like to see polo played on that thing.
Re:JUST Finished trying this
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 1
Genuine Brita filter, regular Brita 12 cup pitcher. My first filter took nearly 10 minutes, near the end, it was only 2-3 minutes per filter.
I don't know what to suggest, maybe trying another vodka? I will repeat this again another time with another putrid vodka. The filtered Medallion Quality is above average at this point.
I think it would be naive to assume that the filtration process is the only thing that separates cheap vodka from good vodka. No doubt the distilling process and ingredients play the largest role. I'd postulate that it's obvious the vodkas which respond best to this are made from decent ingredients but it's the process itself that lacks in its ability to filter out various chemicals added during the distilling process. Medallion is a local vodka made for Superstore, so I would think it's made from some sort of locally available commodities. Alberta is known for its grain farms, so it would be the obvious choice, and the grains wouldn't be of poor quality.
JUST Finished trying this
on
Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 4, Informative
What a wacky coincidence. I saw this experiment posted up on a message board and just tried it with some friends this evening. They left not 10 minutes ago.
Started off with a 750ml bottle of "Medallion Quality". You don't expect much from a bottle that large that costs in the range of $11 Canadian. Needless to say, it was putrid. Bordering undrinkable. You'd have to be drunk to start with to consume the stuff. Smells reminiscent of rubbing alcohol, tastes like turpentine with an aftertaste not unlike a bowling alley shoe. As my buddy described it, "It feels like a clown is raping my mouth."
We were sure to prime the filter first. It ships with some chemicals in the charcoal, so run a few pitchers of water through.
After 3 filters of the vodka, the odour was drastically reduced. Flavour was not hugely improved, but the aftertaste was lessened and it didn't burn as much going down.
6 filters, the odour is down even more. Taste is much improved. Now comparable to a decent cheap vodka, probably a little better than regular Smirnoff. Goes down not too bad, aftertaste still not great.
10 filters. Odour is near gone. Tastes smooth. Would be undetectable mixed with grapefruit juice.
20 filters. SMOOTH. Goes down like water. Zero odour. Perfect. Easily as good as an upper end vodka like Canadian Iceberg, but not as delicate as the really pricy brands. Definitely a good taste. Pleasant enough to drink straight without shooting it.
Of course we kept a control sample. I did not fully appreciate how good the 20-filtered drink was until I tasted the control sample again. It was truly terrible. While I suggest doing this just to try it, I will not again put that stuff in my mouth unfiltered.
I have heard mixed reports about how well different vodkas turn out. Some are better than others, Medallion had tremendous benefit from the filtering. The taste of the original and final product are not even remotely close.
Also heard complaints about murky vodka. Our first filter result was slightly murky and blue/greyish from chemicals left in the filter. Repeated filtering made it disappear again. I can't help but wonder if those chemicals were doing me any physical harm, but they could not possibly be doing any worse than the original vodka anyways. It's all in the name of SCIENCE!
All in all, this experiment was fun and definitely worth trying. It takes long enough that I wouldn't expect it to be a decent timesaving measure. However, it was fun to do and we will probably repeat the experiment again next Friday with that godawful Russian Prince vodka.
While I am a tube nut, I also own several Line6 and Boss digital modeling products. While good bang for the buck and fun to play with, they simply don't model well enough to replace tubes yet. There's a good reason why very few professional guitarists have gone the modeling route thus far.
Saying that the majority of the sound is produced by the cabinet, speaker, and transformer is a ridiculous statement. Most power amplifiers that accept 6L6 tubes can also accept EL34s. Swap them out and it is a dramatically different sound. Not to mention the fact that there are many amplifiers on the market which share the same cabinet, speaker, and transformer and have remarkably different tones (Fender Twin vs. Mesa Boogie Mark I anybody? The two couldn't sound further apart and share 99% of the components)
As a guitarist who is a tube nut (currently own a Mesa Mark IV and a Rivera TBR-1SL), I'm a bit disappointed to see that nobody has improved the vacuum tube at all since it was abandoned in the mainstream for the solid state transistor. It's a well known fact that guitar amplifiers produce more pleasing sounds when the tubes run hot, but amps which are known for running the tubes hot (such as the Vox AC30) are also known for blowing tubes. Why haven't we made tempered glass (Pyrex?) tubes built to run at higher temperaturesr. Why haven't we applied newer technologies to produce better tubes? It also seems odd to me that tubes made today don't seem to last any longer than tubes made 50 years ago.
As a home based computer consultant, the freezer trick has been one of my favourite techniques for fixing up computers for years.
Hard drives that are on their way out due to mechanical failure often start struggling due to failed bearings, seized bearings, seized bushings, etc. Symptoms may be complete crash (hard drive appears to be dead), clicking noises, grinding noises, etc. The parts in question are all metal. I put one of those "do not eat" packets from computer parts on the bottom of the drive (these things are made to suck up moisture) to keep moisture off the circuit board, carefully wrap it in a dry towel, place in a ziploc baggie, and leave it in the freezer overnight. The temperature shifts the metal parts around a bit as they contract, usually allowing the drive to spin up and operate once again. It is only a temporary fix to get the data off the drive, and it's usually toast once again (and usually forever) once it spins down again. Thankfully I live in a very dry climate, but if I were in a humid area, I would think that condensation on a cold drive could cause other problems as well.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that animal rights activists and creationists are up in arms about how this is "playing God." Personally I think this is a pretty cool idea. Will they next make pets that smell better? Basset hounds that don't STINK? Will those funny purebred ones that need their anal glands drained on a regular basis no longer need it? Can they make different animals shed less, or have longer or shorter fur?
Maybe down the road we'll get to mix and match dog personalities with different dog bodies too. I love Siberian Huskies, but the damn things are way too hyper for my lifestyle. Or maybe I want a great dane miniaturized to live in an apartment?
Come to think of it, some breeds of pets are naturally cleaner than others in terms of behaviour. Cats are very clean (other than the fur they leave everywhere), some dogs are pretty clean, some are filthy.. I wonder if a genetic tweak could make my girlfriend's ferret have a higher litter pan hit/miss ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it really necessary to put an attack on one specific Microsoft employee who supported Prop 8? Microsoft has excellent benefits that are extended to same sex domestic partners. It seems kind of churlish to smear Microsoft by juxtaposing Google's corporate stance on the issue against one Microsoft employee's.
Come on, there's plenty of other things to attack Microsoft over.
In electric guitars, the wood itself has a surprisingly small impact on the sound. I've built three electrics and been tweaking my guitar collection obsessively for more than 10 years. The pickups and bridge have far more to do with the tone produced by an electric guitar than the wood it's manufactured from. People never believe me when I make this claim, then I show them my Les Paul that sounds like a Strat and my Telecaster that sounds like a Jackson :) I get a lot of "WTF!?" looks and comments at open mic nights.
This obviously isn't the case with acoustic guitars.
My habit of heavily modifying guitars has proven very useful, as I used to sit in with a jazz ensemble that played a huge variety of types of music... If you're feeling adventerous, try reproducing my cheapo Epiphone Les Paul, which is now one of my most versatile guitars. Get a Duncan JB bridge position pickup, install it in the neck position, use your bridge pickup of choice. Rewire it so that there is a single master volume, independent tone knobs for the pickups, and use the remaining knob to dial the neck position pickup between fully-tapped and humbucking modes. That's the dirty trick -- tapped humbuckers usually sound too thin because they're wound less for the purpose of pairing up with another coil; with 0 on the knob being fully tapped and 10 being fully humbucked, I set it at about 3-4 and I get better strat sounds out of my Les Paul than I do out of my Strat (a 50th anniversary strat with Lace Sensors, soon to be upgraded to Lindy Fralins).
That said, violins are very different animals from guitars, and the varnish has a heck of a lot to do with the tone produced.
A common problem with acoustic instruments these days is methods of tree farming. Pick up a '65 strat, then pick up a 2008 strat. You'll feel about 4 pounds of weight difference, even though they're the same type of wood and same dimensions. Lots of wood used in musical instrument nowadays comes from tree farms, not from forests that have been growing for hundreds of years. As a result, a lot of emphasis is placed on fast tree growth, which produces less dense wood. There's a reason why old wood harvested from churches, houses, etc. is so in-demand for musical instruments.
Also, wood from old sunken ships is extremely popular (and expensive) due to its high density, and due to the tiny pockets of gas inside produced by bacteria consuming the wood. As the bacteria consumes the wood, it depletes the oxygen and dies off (wood does not rot in anaerobic environments). The little pockets of gas left behind change the frequency response of the wood and creates an incredible sounding instrument. Just tapping on such a piece of wood sounds like you're hitting a marimba.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/patterson/6765
Except Yahoo's stock was at $19 before the Microsoft bid and now it's $23.50. How does causing its stock to rise by 24% qualify as 'tanking'?
...would we be seeing the same reaction on Slashdot?
Seriously, imagine if Apple were trying to acquire, for instance Transmeta, (purely hypothetical) and offering a 45%+ premium. And Transmeta in response turned it down and set up internal policies to make generous severence payments to employees who chose to leave after the acquisition.
What do you call that? I call it gross breach of fiduciary duty to your stockholders. I am fortunately not a Yahoo stockholder, but if I was, I'd be pretty pissed about this.
I'm glad I'm not the only one.
When I was a student, before getting assimilated by MS (I am now a MS employee), I ran Linux exclusively on my school laptop and used OpenOffice full time. There's no way around saying it, it was a terrible experience. When it wasn't crashing, losing my documents, or in some other way completely failing to function, it was painfully slow, bordering on unusable.
I stuck by it and fiddled with it until one day in a lab I had to do some extensive spreadsheet work. Specifically, getting data out of a tab-delimited file, approx 15,000 rows and ~5ish columns. Every way I could possibly attempt to open, paste, import this file would throw OpenOffice into a seemingly endless loop. I'd wait 20, 30, 40 minutes, but it couldn't handle this 100kB file no matter how I diced it. I made all sorts of excuses as other students were doing the same thing in mere seconds on their Windows PCs or Macs. It was the last straw for me and I gave up, and used the lab machine with MS Office to do the same thing in about 5 seconds. A similar lab experience only a few weeks later, and I ended up dual-booting my laptop "just for Excel", and before I realized it, I liked the whole Office suite better than OpenOffice. I still used Linux primarily at that time, but every time I needed anything remotely Office related, I simply found OpenOffice to be inadequate.
Sorry, I'm really not trying to be a troll about this, and I know many folks will scream bloody murder at me for even posting because of my bias. But before I had such a bias, I tried so very hard to love OpenOffice, and just couldn't. Like Wulfstan said, the quality of OpenOffice is just not very good.
If I were Google, I'd be working hard to carve out this niche market for online services and stay out of desktop apps beyond perhaps plugins for better online integration. OpenOffice doesn't fit with Google's business model, and frankly, I think Google could probably crank out something superior to OpenOffice from scratch anyways.
Uhhhhhhh yeah right.
"Really, we just bid billions of dollars for something we didn't really want out of the goodness of our hearts. Honestly, we didn't even want it, that's the real reason why we didn't win. Really. Come on. I mean it."
I think Google generally has a lot of good intent, but this claim smells like BS to me.
Zune is not PocketPC based.
Windows CE 5 also had the source code available, I wonder why in the world this made headline news..
My brother shares his name with a well known IRA terrorist. Every time he travels, he has to show up many hours early, and every single time they take him to the secondary inspection room to ask him if he's ever been to England, if he's planning to go to England, etc.
Does it also do your homework, peel potatoes, and satisfy all your deepest sexual desires?
Please tell me I missed the sarcasm. A full blown cross platform Java office package with high performance in under 10 megs? I have no doubts that OO could be a very potent solution, but you've specced out something which isn't feasible in the least.
Thank you! I feel exactly the same. I've been a Linux hippie for years, but I'm very rapidly converting to the dark side. Get prepared for a rant not specific to just C#...
.Net framework.
I don't care what anyone says, C# is way better than Java. And I have ~5 years experience with Java, 6 months experience with C#. It converted me in no time. C# is very pleasant and the language just seems to get out of your way when you want to do something, largely because of the
I'm tired of the fact that it's "cool" to make fun of Microsoft on Slashdot. But you know what? They have a lot of very solid products. Visual Studio is a fantastic IDE. SQL Server is not always the server of choice, but it is very powerful nonetheless.
I'd say this is going to be a very big year for Microsoft. All of their major product groups have a major release due out, and they're all looking very good from what I've seen so far.
So we may not always like Microsoft's products in every way, and we may downright hate some of their business practices. Does that make Visual Studio and C# any worse of a product? Does that make Microsoft Word a worse word processor? NO.
"OMG WINDOWS 95 HAD BLUE SCREENS LOL C# MUST BE BAD" -- Grow up.
The entire open source community needs to grow up a little bit. There's a tremendous amount of talent in it, but it's so obscured by absurd social stigmas and internet-Green-Peace propaganda that a great deal of it loses credability. Visual Studio is a great IDE. C# is a great language. Office is a great productivity toolkit. People use them. Live with it, move on.
As a developer who works on databases a lot, I still find it very arcane when I do have to get right down and dirty and work on files again. It seems very primitive in a world of SELECTs and INNER JOINs.
I personally think every OS should ship with some sort of a light db engine equipped to handle databases stored in files. Imagine if you could write a simple application that opened databases just like you would with a db server, only using a file instead. When it comes time to scale it to a larger application, switch one line and connect it to a server instead. Or have your application configurable so that the user can either store it in a file or on a remote server simply by changing the server info from "c:\database.db" to "server:1234".
Read my brother's webcomics at www.krakowstudios.com and www.marilith.com .
How do you feel about the largely unrecognized awesomeness of Colonization? Have you thought about making a new revision of it? What about open sourcing it so guys like me can fix it up to work on modern OS's?
Like any programmer, I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing Civilization, but in all honesty I've spent more playing Colonization and I always felt it was a better (but less-well-received) game than Civilization. I still find myself trying to run the original DOS game on my Athlon64, and I find it sad that I can't get the original MIDI music to work either.
Not only was Colonization an incredible game, it was educational without cramming it down my throat. When I was a little kid studying history I knew all of the pioneers by name and accomplishments already.
Kudos to you, and thanks for the memories.
I have a product called FogX that I've been putting on the inside of my car windshield for years. No fog, no hassle, low cost. I've also been applying it to bathroom mirrors and such. Am I completely missing something, or is this not exactly a breakthrough?
I agree. Having recently been employed to develop web applications, I think their use of DHTML is really cool! It's simple and intuitive. There's a lot more to it than first meets the eye, try dragging and dropping things around.
I really like how you can "pin" search results into a DHTML window.
It really seems like Google is rounding out the bases for all sorts of organization and general-handiness tools. But it seems awfully odd to me that they haven't branched more into desktop software just yet.
An online calendar system would be a great idea (I don't know about you folks, but it would be handy for me to have a unified calendar whether I'm checking it at home, work, school, etc.) and a possible gateway for Google to get more seriously into the desktop market. I definitely prefer to use localized applications wherever possible. I have a GMail account which I never use, because I far prefer being able to use Mozilla Thunderbird. But imagine just for a moment if Google made an online calendar/contacts list/organization application that interfaced well with a Thunderbird plugin or even a Google-branded e-mail client. You could get the full functionality you want out of such a package when at home or on a personal computer, but have everything accessible when out of the house, office, town, etc. via a web interface.
That's not even the beginning of it. What if they wrote their own sync software for PDAs and phones to synchronize with this system? Think about if you were at a public terminal, and rather than accessing your hotmail account to see what e-mail you have, you check your Google account, plug in your PDA to a front-accessible USB port, and synchronize with your online contact list. You could be writing e-mails on your PDA while on the bus, and fire them off at an internet kiosk at the mall.
I posted some time ago about the future of online/offline blended applications (using XUL plugins, though) and it seems to me that if anyone can create and take such a market by storm, it's Google.
The article claims first that you need a $250 motherboard to run SLI (apparently a $75 premium for SLI), and second that you need to pay a large premium for SLI-compatible cards, which are next to impossible to find.
I'm running a $160 motherboard with two 6800GTs that I picked up for a good price at my local shop. They did not have a single PCIe 6600 or 6800 board there that wasn't SLI compatible.
When you get right down to it, the Segway is quite simple. It is a closed loop feedback control system that corrects error in the device angle. Not too difficult for any electrical or computer engineering student. However, a one wheeled segway is a very different story. I'd like to see polo played on that thing.
Genuine Brita filter, regular Brita 12 cup pitcher. My first filter took nearly 10 minutes, near the end, it was only 2-3 minutes per filter.
I don't know what to suggest, maybe trying another vodka? I will repeat this again another time with another putrid vodka. The filtered Medallion Quality is above average at this point.
I think it would be naive to assume that the filtration process is the only thing that separates cheap vodka from good vodka. No doubt the distilling process and ingredients play the largest role. I'd postulate that it's obvious the vodkas which respond best to this are made from decent ingredients but it's the process itself that lacks in its ability to filter out various chemicals added during the distilling process. Medallion is a local vodka made for Superstore, so I would think it's made from some sort of locally available commodities. Alberta is known for its grain farms, so it would be the obvious choice, and the grains wouldn't be of poor quality.
What a wacky coincidence. I saw this experiment posted up on a message board and just tried it with some friends this evening. They left not 10 minutes ago.
Started off with a 750ml bottle of "Medallion Quality". You don't expect much from a bottle that large that costs in the range of $11 Canadian. Needless to say, it was putrid. Bordering undrinkable. You'd have to be drunk to start with to consume the stuff. Smells reminiscent of rubbing alcohol, tastes like turpentine with an aftertaste not unlike a bowling alley shoe. As my buddy described it, "It feels like a clown is raping my mouth."
We were sure to prime the filter first. It ships with some chemicals in the charcoal, so run a few pitchers of water through.
After 3 filters of the vodka, the odour was drastically reduced. Flavour was not hugely improved, but the aftertaste was lessened and it didn't burn as much going down.
6 filters, the odour is down even more. Taste is much improved. Now comparable to a decent cheap vodka, probably a little better than regular Smirnoff. Goes down not too bad, aftertaste still not great.
10 filters. Odour is near gone. Tastes smooth. Would be undetectable mixed with grapefruit juice.
20 filters. SMOOTH. Goes down like water. Zero odour. Perfect. Easily as good as an upper end vodka like Canadian Iceberg, but not as delicate as the really pricy brands. Definitely a good taste. Pleasant enough to drink straight without shooting it.
Of course we kept a control sample. I did not fully appreciate how good the 20-filtered drink was until I tasted the control sample again. It was truly terrible. While I suggest doing this just to try it, I will not again put that stuff in my mouth unfiltered.
I have heard mixed reports about how well different vodkas turn out. Some are better than others, Medallion had tremendous benefit from the filtering. The taste of the original and final product are not even remotely close.
Also heard complaints about murky vodka. Our first filter result was slightly murky and blue/greyish from chemicals left in the filter. Repeated filtering made it disappear again. I can't help but wonder if those chemicals were doing me any physical harm, but they could not possibly be doing any worse than the original vodka anyways. It's all in the name of SCIENCE!
All in all, this experiment was fun and definitely worth trying. It takes long enough that I wouldn't expect it to be a decent timesaving measure. However, it was fun to do and we will probably repeat the experiment again next Friday with that godawful Russian Prince vodka.
While I am a tube nut, I also own several Line6 and Boss digital modeling products. While good bang for the buck and fun to play with, they simply don't model well enough to replace tubes yet. There's a good reason why very few professional guitarists have gone the modeling route thus far.
Saying that the majority of the sound is produced by the cabinet, speaker, and transformer is a ridiculous statement. Most power amplifiers that accept 6L6 tubes can also accept EL34s. Swap them out and it is a dramatically different sound. Not to mention the fact that there are many amplifiers on the market which share the same cabinet, speaker, and transformer and have remarkably different tones (Fender Twin vs. Mesa Boogie Mark I anybody? The two couldn't sound further apart and share 99% of the components)
As a guitarist who is a tube nut (currently own a Mesa Mark IV and a Rivera TBR-1SL), I'm a bit disappointed to see that nobody has improved the vacuum tube at all since it was abandoned in the mainstream for the solid state transistor. It's a well known fact that guitar amplifiers produce more pleasing sounds when the tubes run hot, but amps which are known for running the tubes hot (such as the Vox AC30) are also known for blowing tubes. Why haven't we made tempered glass (Pyrex?) tubes built to run at higher temperaturesr. Why haven't we applied newer technologies to produce better tubes? It also seems odd to me that tubes made today don't seem to last any longer than tubes made 50 years ago.
As a home based computer consultant, the freezer trick has been one of my favourite techniques for fixing up computers for years.
Hard drives that are on their way out due to mechanical failure often start struggling due to failed bearings, seized bearings, seized bushings, etc. Symptoms may be complete crash (hard drive appears to be dead), clicking noises, grinding noises, etc. The parts in question are all metal. I put one of those "do not eat" packets from computer parts on the bottom of the drive (these things are made to suck up moisture) to keep moisture off the circuit board, carefully wrap it in a dry towel, place in a ziploc baggie, and leave it in the freezer overnight. The temperature shifts the metal parts around a bit as they contract, usually allowing the drive to spin up and operate once again. It is only a temporary fix to get the data off the drive, and it's usually toast once again (and usually forever) once it spins down again. Thankfully I live in a very dry climate, but if I were in a humid area, I would think that condensation on a cold drive could cause other problems as well.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that animal rights activists and creationists are up in arms about how this is "playing God." Personally I think this is a pretty cool idea. Will they next make pets that smell better? Basset hounds that don't STINK? Will those funny purebred ones that need their anal glands drained on a regular basis no longer need it? Can they make different animals shed less, or have longer or shorter fur?
Maybe down the road we'll get to mix and match dog personalities with different dog bodies too. I love Siberian Huskies, but the damn things are way too hyper for my lifestyle. Or maybe I want a great dane miniaturized to live in an apartment?
Come to think of it, some breeds of pets are naturally cleaner than others in terms of behaviour. Cats are very clean (other than the fur they leave everywhere), some dogs are pretty clean, some are filthy.. I wonder if a genetic tweak could make my girlfriend's ferret have a higher litter pan hit/miss ratio.