Heh, I'd tried that. DXdiag->Sound says "solo.sys is uncertified and has not been tested by the windows quality labs." But there isn't an updated driver AFAICS. Hmmmm, product recovery CD, I guess.
Offtopic, but I'm looking for help and this story is somewhat relevant...
So I kept the windows partition on my spanking new Thinkpad just to play Myst. Myst installed DirectX 6, and since then the computer has been silent. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the sound driver, done this in safe mode, done this with virgin copies of the drivers downloaded from IBM, used the saved configuration from ConfigSafe - still no sound.
Not much experience with windows - is this one of those cases where I have to reinstall the system? Or can I actually figure out if any DLLs got "upgraded" and need to be reverted? I last used a PC back in the days of Windows 3.1 and MSDOS so this is all a mystery to me - they call *this* easy to use? Give me Solaris (or Linux or even AIX) any day...
There is no way this article was posted at 8:48pm on October 3rd! Wow, is this Hemos suffering from jetlag, or is he getting too much, or not getting enough?
Ah for those good old bachelor geek-compound days...
I have to add, like thiopene above, that its not "high quality TAs" so much as "high quality lab bitches" that grad schools want. Racial breakdown at a typical EE department? 50% US profs, remaining from China, Taiwan and India; grad students divided equally between India, China, all of Europe and maybe a couple of token Americans... All slaving away at their advisors whim.
Resurrected from the grave, only to be trampled by the monstrous hordes of/. and ground back into the dust. This proves it once and for all: Cmdr Rob Malda "Pants are optional" Taco was responsible for the original DDOS, and he's done it again...
... teach Indian grad students. Been there, done that - if it weren't for the brains draining into the US[*] from the Third World (I use the term with pride!), you guys would be flopping like fish on the beach, wondering where all that wonderful water (tech workers, stock market valuations, gee-whiz software) vanished.
[*] and Ross Perot wondered what that giant sucking sound was... let me tell you about that giant sucking sound - of my graduating class of 300 engineers, over 200 are in the US right now, either in grad school or employed and making thousands in worthless paper options. Life - don't talk to me about life.
Its always an information race, if you will, between buyers and sellers.
The internet makes it a lot easier for the buyer to browse different prices, without having to pull out of the parking lot, drive to the next store, and find another parking spot. OTOH, it also makes it easier for the store to know what items you looked at and what you lingered over and what you put in your shopping cart before changing your mind - and they'd be fools not to use the information!
Brings to mind the proverb, "Be careful what you wish for -- it might just be granted..."
If you'd read the bloody article before putting your foot in it:
Publishers are guaranteed 100% market penetration at partner schools who opt to implement the Vital Source system. Purchase of all included titles is mandated by the universities.
... The fee comes in from each student each of the four years of their studies, regardless of whether they are taking that course that year.
... universities contractually agree to require at least three titles per curriculum topic. Therefore, the number of titles used by students increases significantly.
After all, if these guys support OSS, they're supporting a bunch of long-haired hippies who "beleive in downloading software freely over the internet..." So the MPAA should put its foot down on this one -- if it can get it out of its mouth, that is.
- all the TLA organizations can go into that hierarchy, along with the FBI, NSA, NIH, NSF et al. And we can have a TLA.tla site to dole out these names to you if your organization is spelt as a three letter acronym.
Seriously, what's the f***ing point? Of course all the major companies will squat on all the new domains as well (think etoys.gnu, etoys.rob, etoys.sux and so on) because they don't have a choice if they want to preserve brand recognition. What we need instead is browser keyword recognition to replace the currently broken host.domain naming convention.
Some people are now talking about the GPL being modified to encompass web sites being made with Open Source tools. If the GPL is changed to encompass web sites as opposed to binary distributions, could mean some serious problems for me.
Huh? Your proposition is as ridiculous as saying that any email that I compose with an Open Source email program should be available for others to use, or that my GnuCash balance sheets should be open for RMS to go over, or that my thesis, written in TeX with emacs, should be freely available on my website for others to download...
Oh, wait, my thesis will be available on my website for others to download. Now if only I could finish it, instead of responding to trollbait like this...:)
Me, I keep my NYT cookie from last year, my ADS and simbad cookies (astronomy work), and my slashdot cookie. The rest can assign me a new, unique, "look, another user!" cookie every time I happen by, and I flush them to the bit bucket every time I exit netscape.
how the world-wide VLBA works, too. Take a dozen scopes around theworld, have them all observe things simultaneously, recording onto high-speed mag tapes, then Fedex all the tapes to a computer center and run them all through a correlator, and out pop your images.
Heh, I work on the VLBA, and I wish my images popped out that easily...:)
You'll notice my other comment in this thread for some other good reasons why optical interferometry is harder than radio...
Actually, Red Mars is rewarding if you stick it out. I'm told Green and especially Blue really dragged, but the technological innovation in Red is pretty good. And the character development actually sucked in some non-SF fans for long enough to give them a taste of good ideas.
Personally, I really liked Antarctica too - he flies off the handle at the very end, where he spouts off about "What works for Antarctica, works for the rest of the planet", but barring that, it was a good read. Not a raw SF read, but definitely a good read. I guess it helps that I would sympathize with eco-terrorists and don't own an SUV myself... it might be a bit too wide-eyed radical eco-hippie for some tastes.
Just the one way to find out - try it! Its not a big waste.
This is deep, so I won't do a good job of explaining this, but let me take a stab at it anyways... The fundamental difference is that quanta of light (photons) have more energy than quanta of radio waves (also photons, but ever hear them called that?): E = hf, as Planck tells us. So for a given signal strength, there are far more radio photons than there are optical photons - this implies that optical telescopes are in a quantum regime (shot noise limited), while radio telescopes work in a classical regime (thermal noise limited). So what? So: radio signals can be received and amplified and replicated "perfectly" - each telescope output can be split into N identical copies to be correlated against the other N telescopes in the array. But optical photons cannot be received and amplified without destroying coherence - so the light form one mirror has to be split N ways to be combind with the other N telescopes. That's why optical interferometry is only possible with huge mirrors like the VLT, where for 4 mirrors, 1/3 the light from each telescope is still enough photons to work with. For radio telescopes: add more scopes? Sure, just boost the amplifier some more. Optically, to add another scope, you need to increase collecting area by (N+1)/N. This is a fundamental limit, sadly - so it keeps us radio astronomers in business and makes optical interferometry very very hard... - pq: I can't login today, for some reason.
And what the other posters haven't added yet: the guy believed that the CIA had implanted a mind control device in his head and were commanding him to do strange things using radio waves. And he needed to know the frequency on which they were broadcasting, so that he could jam it, I suppose. Hence, "what's the frequency, Kenneth?"
Or maybe this is another UL, and I'm aiding its propagation...
BTW, why are you marked down as flamebait? Special crack being handed out today, or what...?
The trend lately has been towards smaller planes rather than monsters like the 747
Ummm - the Airbus consortium announced today that it was proceeding with the A3XX, a super jumbo. And a military variant that would dwarf Boeing's C51A (or whatever its called now since the last takeover).
Not that I totally disagree with you, or agree completely with the previous poster - but this argument of yours doesn't hold too much water...
Stars are a lot more symmetrical than you appear to think! The reason planetary nebulae and supernova remnants look asymmetrical has much more to do with the non-homogeneous medium into which the shell is expanding...
OTOH, we are talking about tiny, tiny asymmetries:
A supernova relases 10^51 ergs in mass motion and optical display, 10^53 ergs if you count neutrino emission.
A neutron star has a mass of ~1.4 times our Sun's mass: to make it travel at 700km/second takes only 10^49 ergs.
So you see, even the fastest neutron stars we know of (the Guitar nebula, for example, is created by a pulsar going ~1600km/sec) use only a tiny fraction of the energy of a supernova.
And still, even that tiny fraction takes explaining - but if we buy into hypernovae that create Gamma Ray bursts, then this is a trivial problem. Sigh - its annoying to reduce your thesis proposal to a trivial problem!
I believe that a very famous science fiction author (whose name escapes me) once said: "Never attribute anything to malice that can be accounted for by stupidity."
This is Hanlon's razor (not Heinlein): "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Having used Star Office to open PowerPoint files before (ah, the world would be a better place without powerpoint), I can say that StarOffice does a decent job. Not stellar: the fonts, line breaks and spacings look a little ugly (at least, to someone used to the perfection of TeX they look ugly) but good enough to get the job done.
That said, its only a matter of time before M$ changes file formats to force everyone onto the vicious upgrade cycle of death ("Uh oh, my client just sent me an attchment in MSOffice 2001 format - must pay M$ tax now!") and the current release of StarOffice becomes useless.
Though I heard some rumblings (here on/. - so it must be true) that the new format might be HTML (or XML) based? If so, expect strange new tags to appear in an undocumented way...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the idea, though.
So I kept the windows partition on my spanking new Thinkpad just to play Myst. Myst installed DirectX 6, and since then the computer has been silent. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the sound driver, done this in safe mode, done this with virgin copies of the drivers downloaded from IBM, used the saved configuration from ConfigSafe - still no sound.
Not much experience with windows - is this one of those cases where I have to reinstall the system? Or can I actually figure out if any DLLs got "upgraded" and need to be reverted? I last used a PC back in the days of Windows 3.1 and MSDOS so this is all a mystery to me - they call *this* easy to use? Give me Solaris (or Linux or even AIX) any day...
Anyway, any ideas appreciated.
Ah for those good old bachelor geek-compound days...
[*] and Ross Perot wondered what that giant sucking sound was... let me tell you about that giant sucking sound - of my graduating class of 300 engineers, over 200 are in the US right now, either in grad school or employed and making thousands in worthless paper options. Life - don't talk to me about life.
The internet makes it a lot easier for the buyer to browse different prices, without having to pull out of the parking lot, drive to the next store, and find another parking spot. OTOH, it also makes it easier for the store to know what items you looked at and what you lingered over and what you put in your shopping cart before changing your mind - and they'd be fools not to use the information!
Brings to mind the proverb, "Be careful what you wish for -- it might just be granted..."
Publishers are guaranteed 100% market penetration at partner schools who opt to implement the Vital Source system. Purchase of all included titles is mandated by the universities.
Now see what the problem is?
Seriously, what's the f***ing point? Of course all the major companies will squat on all the new domains as well (think etoys.gnu, etoys.rob, etoys.sux and so on) because they don't have a choice if they want to preserve brand recognition. What we need instead is browser keyword recognition to replace the currently broken host.domain naming convention.
Huh? Your proposition is as ridiculous as saying that any email that I compose with an Open Source email program should be available for others to use, or that my GnuCash balance sheets should be open for RMS to go over, or that my thesis, written in TeX with emacs, should be freely available on my website for others to download...
Oh, wait, my thesis will be available on my website for others to download. Now if only I could finish it, instead of responding to trollbait like this... :)
Me, I keep my NYT cookie from last year, my ADS and simbad cookies (astronomy work), and my slashdot cookie. The rest can assign me a new, unique, "look, another user!" cookie every time I happen by, and I flush them to the bit bucket every time I exit netscape.
Heh, I work on the VLBA, and I wish my images popped out that easily... :)
You'll notice my other comment in this thread for some other good reasons why optical interferometry is harder than radio...
Personally, I really liked Antarctica too - he flies off the handle at the very end, where he spouts off about "What works for Antarctica, works for the rest of the planet", but barring that, it was a good read. Not a raw SF read, but definitely a good read. I guess it helps that I would sympathize with eco-terrorists and don't own an SUV myself... it might be a bit too wide-eyed radical eco-hippie for some tastes.
Just the one way to find out - try it! Its not a big waste.
Anyone?
Anyone?
Ferris?
This is deep, so I won't do a good job of explaining this, but let me take a stab at it anyways... The fundamental difference is that quanta of light (photons) have more energy than quanta of radio waves (also photons, but ever hear them called that?): E = hf, as Planck tells us. So for a given signal strength, there are far more radio photons than there are optical photons - this implies that optical telescopes are in a quantum regime (shot noise limited), while radio telescopes work in a classical regime (thermal noise limited). So what? So: radio signals can be received and amplified and replicated "perfectly" - each telescope output can be split into N identical copies to be correlated against the other N telescopes in the array. But optical photons cannot be received and amplified without destroying coherence - so the light form one mirror has to be split N ways to be combind with the other N telescopes. That's why optical interferometry is only possible with huge mirrors like the VLT, where for 4 mirrors, 1/3 the light from each telescope is still enough photons to work with. For radio telescopes: add more scopes? Sure, just boost the amplifier some more. Optically, to add another scope, you need to increase collecting area by (N+1)/N. This is a fundamental limit, sadly - so it keeps us radio astronomers in business and makes optical interferometry very very hard... - pq: I can't login today, for some reason.
Or maybe this is another UL, and I'm aiding its propagation...
BTW, why are you marked down as flamebait? Special crack being handed out today, or what...?
Ummm - the Airbus consortium announced today that it was proceeding with the A3XX, a super jumbo. And a military variant that would dwarf Boeing's C51A (or whatever its called now since the last takeover).
Not that I totally disagree with you, or agree completely with the previous poster - but this argument of yours doesn't hold too much water...
OTOH, we are talking about tiny, tiny asymmetries:
- A supernova relases 10^51 ergs in mass motion and optical display, 10^53 ergs if you count neutrino emission.
- A neutron star has a mass of ~1.4 times our Sun's mass: to make it travel at 700km/second takes only 10^49 ergs.
So you see, even the fastest neutron stars we know of (the Guitar nebula, for example, is created by a pulsar going ~1600km/sec) use only a tiny fraction of the energy of a supernova.And still, even that tiny fraction takes explaining - but if we buy into hypernovae that create Gamma Ray bursts, then this is a trivial problem.
Sigh - its annoying to reduce your thesis proposal to a trivial problem!
Learn more here...
Who the hell are you, and why are you called "piku"???
This is Hanlon's razor (not Heinlein): "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
That said, its only a matter of time before M$ changes file formats to force everyone onto the vicious upgrade cycle of death ("Uh oh, my client just sent me an attchment in MSOffice 2001 format - must pay M$ tax now!") and the current release of StarOffice becomes useless.
Though I heard some rumblings (here on /. - so it must be true) that the new format might be HTML (or XML) based? If so, expect strange new tags to appear in an undocumented way...