The show will be effectively over by moonrise here on the Wet Coast. The
weather forecast is totally dismal anyway.
Of the last three lunar eclipses visible in these parts, we were clouded out on 16 May 2003,
but had fine shows on 28 October 2003 and 9 November 2004. I also saw the eclipse
on 21 January 2000 from Toronto, while I was at school. Next for us: 28 August 2007.
I saw my first total
solar eclipse
last year from Turkey.
Even though I knew exactly what was going on, it still gave me the creeps, some sort
of "if nothing else makes sense then panic" reaction. It must have scared the crap
out of our ancestors.
I just got back from a week in Costa Rica, and the pickings on shortwave
were awfully thin. All I wanted was news from the outside world. My Spanish
is up to the task of ordering in a restaurant or asking directions.
The local radio was far beyond my linguistic
capabilities, though they played great music...
All
I could get was
Radio Netherlands and (for an hour each afternoon) the
BBC World Service. I'm used to
non-commercial radio, since the only radio I ever
listen to at home is the
CBC.
Streaming media is fine if you're at home. It's not fine if you're out in the bush.
Yes, I know it's suppose to be a deterrent, but I think a better deterrent would be a much larger fine, probation, and maybe your email address along with your crime made publicly known.
Why, oh why, do drug makers not realize that if you don't TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOUR DRUG IS FOR that they may not know if they really should "Ask you doctor about X"?
In Canada ambiguous ads are the law. An ad for
a prescription drug may say what the drug is called, or what
it does. But not both.
I'm still trying to figure out how Cialis might help me get to the opera
late, figure out what to wear, or even fix my leg after I slip on ice. Must be some drug.
What the author fails to take into account is that multi-core allows each program to effectively use a separate core to do its work, regardless of how it is programmed. All it takes is the OS to be smart enough to task each program to a free core, if available. The programs don't have to be specifically written to be multi-core aware as long as the OS is smart enough to send process to the idle cores.
I did this to solve a major performance problem on a flagship Tomcat application for my employers.
Since each request stood alone, I figured that if I ran more than one copy of Tomcat, each running
the app, it should do The Right Thing on a dual processor box. And so it did. There was enough
I/O and CPU overlap that I could run 4 copies to good effect. I ended up putting Apache in front
of the mess
to load-balance requests.
The bosses didn't mind the 6x speed improvement one bit. Maybe some day I'll get a raise
out of it.
Another thing I'd like to do is get a good telescope with a camera mount so I can photo the stars.
One word of advice on this.
Don't.
While astrophotography can be enormously rewarding, it can also be very expensive, and you really do have
to know what you're doing to get anything other than blank film with vague blurs on it. Learn the sky.
Learn
the stars and planets and stuff. If you can't point your finger at, say, M31, how can you point a telescope
at it, let alone photograph it?
Too many people attempt astrophotography, find it's far harder than it looks, and give
up in frustration. Please don't be one of those people.
UK residents have been paying television fees since TV started.
Yes, but this is Slashdot, and acknowledging the existence of the U.K. would require the
Slashdot bunch to deal with difficult concepts like the U.S. not being the centre of the universe.
I would happily pay a subscription to get rid of the ads.
The old press cameras, the 1950s newspaper photographer cameras,
are the ancestors of the modern field/technical
cameras. They fold up in to a portable little box and take sheet film.
They can do lots of view camera things, but they're not really view cameras.
They were made in different models to take different size film.
Mine, in particular, takes 4 by 5 inch film. Since an 8 by 10 print is
only a 2x enlargement, you can just about get away with murder.:-)
Press cameras were intended to be used handheld, and I try to use mine
handheld as much as possible. You can sit one on
a tripod, open the back to access the focusing screen, and move the lens
around like a view camera. The rear is fixed, so you lose a little
flexibility. If you want a real view camera, this isn't it. If you want a seriously cool camera that
takes great pictures, this is an attractive choice. It's helpful
if you can do your own darkroom work.
I have a view camera, BTW, focusing hood and all. The camera design hasn't changed much
since about 1885, though the film and optics have been developed and improved
tremendously.
You mentioned medium format, and used medium format gear is cheap nowadays. While
there are no digital backs
for systems like Pentax 67 (yes, I have one of those, too), they also take breathtaking
pictures. The larger negatives produce prints with a reach-in-and-touch-it quality
that smaller negatives just don't have. I liken the Pentax 67 to photography's answer
to a Humvee - it's big, heavy, black, ugly and noisy, but it gets the job done,
every time.
The best way to improve your pictures is to
learn something about composition and lighting. If the subject matter is good,
you have a good picture.
You want better data? Get a better camera. Ditch that point-and-shoot for a DSLR, or
even (gasp!) a film camera.
My 50 year old
Crown Graphic takes
pictures that the very best DSLRs can
only dream about.
I think they only do it when in dire need of your coordinates (like when you call 911).
Among other things, there are privacy issues involved. Every cellphone call
generates signal strength data from cell towers, but that doesn't determine
a location to better than a few blocks. GPS, on the other hand, can locate you
to within a few meters. The fine print on your cellphone contract
probably says something about this. This is also an issue with
CDMA and GSM location
devices (a couple of vendors that come to mind - there are lots more).
By using one, you are, in effect, consenting to be
located.
The elaborate assisted GPS setup is so that they can get
reliable fixes in hostile environments, like urban canyons.
The cellphone GPS has to do little more than record some raw data off
the air, as directed by the base system, then the base system does the number crunching.
Why does it matter? What is the business reason for developing more female engineers?
Easy.
To develop great products, to find the innovations that make things better, we
need all the help we can get. Writing off 51% of humanity means that 51% of
those possible innovations may never happen.
There are versions of Scrabble
in other languages,
with letter frequencies and such suitably adjusted,
but I can't imagine the sales of an Inuktitut version to be worth the
effort of producing one.
You'd probably want to use something like the
Nunavut Hansard
to get an idea of letter frequencies. You would also have to adjust the rules
to allow for the radically different way Inuktitut forms words.
I'm on the tall side, so people often ask me how tall I am.
My reply: "185!". A few people still look at me like I'm an alien,
but people look at me like I'm an alien anyway.:-)
I remember when we changed our weather forecasts in the 1970s,
and now find U.S. weather forecasts meaningless unless I convert
them to Celsius. Ditto driving stuff - I don't know about you, but my
car cruises nicely at 115 klicks on the freeway, and does 10 litres
per 100 km city, 5.8 highway. When you buy gas
by the litre and your car only has kilometers on its speedometer
(a rarity, even in Canada, BTW), it all falls in to place.
If we didn't have such a ridiculously reactionary neighbour,
we'd be a lot more metric today. See Australia and New Zealand
as examples of how to do it right.
If you're going to play with RF there are lots of excelent books
out there. One of the standard ham references is Experimental Methods
in RF Design by Rick Campbell, Wes Hayward and Bob Larkin. This
is a real get-your-hands-dirty-and-experiment kind of book.
If you look EMRFD up on
Amazon (or just about anywhere else, for that matter)
you'll find lots of other references worth tracking down.
Why can't they point hubble at Mars and other nearby planets and get some decent images. If they are so good at preparing the images mathematically. Makes you wonder doesn't it? The images we have received so far from Mars are a joke compared to the teraserver or maps.google.com images of earth. Makes you think NASA is more focused on research that discovery.
There is nothing to wonder about at all. Hubble's resolution is fixed by the
the size of its mirror and the wave nature of light. The seeing is perfect in space, but
you can only see so much with an objective of a particular size. With adaptive optics
and various sorts of image processing, ground-based telescopes now equal, or even
exceed, Hubble's resolution. In space they would do better, but on the ground
they are very good.
The Hubble pictures of the planets are more than "decent", and they're
far from a joke - they're
excellent. What more do you want?
3)More seriouly "It's too early to say what those differences are, Richer said, but he expects there will be several -- colour among them. That's because the older a star gets, the redder it gets, he says. Younger stars are bluer." This is obviouly the colors shift of the duppler effect, and have nothing to do with the age of the star but the speed relativly with us !
The raw imagery will indeed be red-shifted. That is, after all, how they know how far away the stars are.
Hubble Constant and all that.
Since they know the red shift, they can easily prepare a true representation of the colours.
Obviously.
I've played with a number of research/hobby OSs, and, for the most part,
they work as advertised. They often have interesting ideas. Sometimes
it's just plain fun to mess around.
The catch always seems to be applications. If the OS doesn't actually do anything,
there is little point in using it. And while many apps can be ported,
if you're not using, for example, the native GUI and API of Syllable, what's the point of
running Syllable at all?
I suspect this is a critical-mass-meets-chicken-and-the-egg problem. Nobody will write
apps if people aren't using the system. Nobody will use the system
if there aren't apps.
I remember when Minitel was first introduced, and, in 1982, it
was pretty hot stuff. Lots of people were playing with videotex
in the 1980s
(remember
Telidon?),
but only France seemed to find a use for it. I knew people
who used
Prestel, but all they ever
seemed to do with it was send pr0n.
I have used Minitel when visiting
France for its original purpose, putting the phone book online. It worked.
In ten years someone who has been recording them for thirty years will have quantum breakers to decode them with.
No.
Decrypting one-time pads isn't hard because there isn't enough compute power to throw at it. It's hard because
it can't be broken, no matter what you do to it. Given a message to decrypt, the best an enemy
cryptanalyst can do is random chance. There are better ways of compromising secrets.
This is a well-established result in encryption and there is no point in arguing about it. The only time one-time pad encryption
has ever been broken was when the agents misused their one-time pads. The
Venona decrypts
are a good example of this.
It's not that people buy Macs because they think the graphics cards are great or the processors are the best. Though for a time some did.
Apple products are extremely stylish and trendy. The brushed metal look is in along with everything turning white, something I have heard described as the iPod effect.
People also buy apple because of the simplicity of their hardware. I'm very fond of the little things they do like the magnetic power cable and a power supply with a place to wind up the cord...
I didn't buy my Mac Mini because of the hardware. I bought it because it's
a neat little box that can do cool shit.
Of course it looks cool. It's designed
as a unit, a coherent whole (hardware and software), something the Windoze folks have never
gotten quite right. It's one damned cool package, everything from the box it came in to the documentation. How could I lose?
Nowadays it's pretty much taken for granted that any box you
buy will have enough CPU and memory to do what it's supposed
to do. The whole package is what matters more. We don't ask "How fast is it?"
much anymore. We ask "What does it do?"
I've been looking forward to 2007 for a while, since it's 50
years since Sputnik 1, and lots of stuff gets declassified after
50 years. Witness the enormous amount of new WW2 material
in the 1990s. Let's see some real dirt!
The U.S. government isn't the only one with secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
The show will be effectively over by moonrise here on the Wet Coast. The weather forecast is totally dismal anyway.
Of the last three lunar eclipses visible in these parts, we were clouded out on 16 May 2003, but had fine shows on 28 October 2003 and 9 November 2004. I also saw the eclipse on 21 January 2000 from Toronto, while I was at school. Next for us: 28 August 2007.
I saw my first total solar eclipse last year from Turkey. Even though I knew exactly what was going on, it still gave me the creeps, some sort of "if nothing else makes sense then panic" reaction. It must have scared the crap out of our ancestors.
...laura
In Soviet Russia hard disk caches YOU!
...laura, who wonders what old people in Korea do about such things
I just got back from a week in Costa Rica, and the pickings on shortwave were awfully thin. All I wanted was news from the outside world. My Spanish is up to the task of ordering in a restaurant or asking directions. The local radio was far beyond my linguistic capabilities, though they played great music...
All I could get was Radio Netherlands and (for an hour each afternoon) the BBC World Service. I'm used to non-commercial radio, since the only radio I ever listen to at home is the CBC.
Streaming media is fine if you're at home. It's not fine if you're out in the bush.
...laura
You're right. Why not just shoot them, instead?
...laura
In Canada ambiguous ads are the law. An ad for a prescription drug may say what the drug is called, or what it does. But not both.
I'm still trying to figure out how Cialis might help me get to the opera late, figure out what to wear, or even fix my leg after I slip on ice. Must be some drug.
...laura
I did this to solve a major performance problem on a flagship Tomcat application for my employers.
Since each request stood alone, I figured that if I ran more than one copy of Tomcat, each running the app, it should do The Right Thing on a dual processor box. And so it did. There was enough I/O and CPU overlap that I could run 4 copies to good effect. I ended up putting Apache in front of the mess to load-balance requests.
The bosses didn't mind the 6x speed improvement one bit. Maybe some day I'll get a raise out of it.
...laura
One word of advice on this.
Don't.
While astrophotography can be enormously rewarding, it can also be very expensive, and you really do have to know what you're doing to get anything other than blank film with vague blurs on it. Learn the sky. Learn the stars and planets and stuff. If you can't point your finger at, say, M31, how can you point a telescope at it, let alone photograph it?
Too many people attempt astrophotography, find it's far harder than it looks, and give up in frustration. Please don't be one of those people.
...laura
Yes, but this is Slashdot, and acknowledging the existence of the U.K. would require the Slashdot bunch to deal with difficult concepts like the U.S. not being the centre of the universe.
I would happily pay a subscription to get rid of the ads.
...laura
The old press cameras, the 1950s newspaper photographer cameras, are the ancestors of the modern field/technical cameras. They fold up in to a portable little box and take sheet film. They can do lots of view camera things, but they're not really view cameras. They were made in different models to take different size film. Mine, in particular, takes 4 by 5 inch film. Since an 8 by 10 print is only a 2x enlargement, you can just about get away with murder. :-)
Press cameras were intended to be used handheld, and I try to use mine handheld as much as possible. You can sit one on a tripod, open the back to access the focusing screen, and move the lens around like a view camera. The rear is fixed, so you lose a little flexibility. If you want a real view camera, this isn't it. If you want a seriously cool camera that takes great pictures, this is an attractive choice. It's helpful if you can do your own darkroom work.
I have a view camera, BTW, focusing hood and all. The camera design hasn't changed much since about 1885, though the film and optics have been developed and improved tremendously.
You mentioned medium format, and used medium format gear is cheap nowadays. While there are no digital backs for systems like Pentax 67 (yes, I have one of those, too), they also take breathtaking pictures. The larger negatives produce prints with a reach-in-and-touch-it quality that smaller negatives just don't have. I liken the Pentax 67 to photography's answer to a Humvee - it's big, heavy, black, ugly and noisy, but it gets the job done, every time.
...laura
The best way to improve your pictures is to learn something about composition and lighting. If the subject matter is good, you have a good picture.
You want better data? Get a better camera. Ditch that point-and-shoot for a DSLR, or even (gasp!) a film camera. My 50 year old Crown Graphic takes pictures that the very best DSLRs can only dream about.
...laura
In Korea only old people use ActiveX.
Among other things, there are privacy issues involved. Every cellphone call generates signal strength data from cell towers, but that doesn't determine a location to better than a few blocks. GPS, on the other hand, can locate you to within a few meters. The fine print on your cellphone contract probably says something about this. This is also an issue with CDMA and GSM location devices (a couple of vendors that come to mind - there are lots more). By using one, you are, in effect, consenting to be located.
The elaborate assisted GPS setup is so that they can get reliable fixes in hostile environments, like urban canyons. The cellphone GPS has to do little more than record some raw data off the air, as directed by the base system, then the base system does the number crunching.
...laura
Easy.
To develop great products, to find the innovations that make things better, we need all the help we can get. Writing off 51% of humanity means that 51% of those possible innovations may never happen.
...laura
There are versions of Scrabble in other languages, with letter frequencies and such suitably adjusted, but I can't imagine the sales of an Inuktitut version to be worth the effort of producing one.
You'd probably want to use something like the Nunavut Hansard to get an idea of letter frequencies. You would also have to adjust the rules to allow for the radically different way Inuktitut forms words.
...laura
I'm on the tall side, so people often ask me how tall I am. My reply: "185!". A few people still look at me like I'm an alien, but people look at me like I'm an alien anyway. :-)
I remember when we changed our weather forecasts in the 1970s, and now find U.S. weather forecasts meaningless unless I convert them to Celsius. Ditto driving stuff - I don't know about you, but my car cruises nicely at 115 klicks on the freeway, and does 10 litres per 100 km city, 5.8 highway. When you buy gas by the litre and your car only has kilometers on its speedometer (a rarity, even in Canada, BTW), it all falls in to place.
If we didn't have such a ridiculously reactionary neighbour, we'd be a lot more metric today. See Australia and New Zealand as examples of how to do it right.
...laura
In Korea only old people use ATX motherboards.
If you're going to play with RF there are lots of excelent books out there. One of the standard ham references is Experimental Methods in RF Design by Rick Campbell, Wes Hayward and Bob Larkin. This is a real get-your-hands-dirty-and-experiment kind of book.
If you look EMRFD up on Amazon (or just about anywhere else, for that matter) you'll find lots of other references worth tracking down.
...laura
There is nothing to wonder about at all. Hubble's resolution is fixed by the the size of its mirror and the wave nature of light. The seeing is perfect in space, but you can only see so much with an objective of a particular size. With adaptive optics and various sorts of image processing, ground-based telescopes now equal, or even exceed, Hubble's resolution. In space they would do better, but on the ground they are very good.
The Hubble pictures of the planets are more than "decent", and they're far from a joke - they're excellent. What more do you want?
...laura
The raw imagery will indeed be red-shifted. That is, after all, how they know how far away the stars are. Hubble Constant and all that.
Since they know the red shift, they can easily prepare a true representation of the colours. Obviously.
...laura
I've played with a number of research/hobby OSs, and, for the most part, they work as advertised. They often have interesting ideas. Sometimes it's just plain fun to mess around.
The catch always seems to be applications. If the OS doesn't actually do anything, there is little point in using it. And while many apps can be ported, if you're not using, for example, the native GUI and API of Syllable, what's the point of running Syllable at all?
I suspect this is a critical-mass-meets-chicken-and-the-egg problem. Nobody will write apps if people aren't using the system. Nobody will use the system if there aren't apps.
...laura
In Soviet Russia sites test YOU!
Seriously, though, if I want IE7 or anything else to do with Windows, I use VMware on my Linux box. Works like a charm.
...laura
I remember when Minitel was first introduced, and, in 1982, it was pretty hot stuff. Lots of people were playing with videotex in the 1980s (remember Telidon?), but only France seemed to find a use for it. I knew people who used Prestel, but all they ever seemed to do with it was send pr0n.
I have used Minitel when visiting France for its original purpose, putting the phone book online. It worked.
...laura
No.
Decrypting one-time pads isn't hard because there isn't enough compute power to throw at it. It's hard because it can't be broken, no matter what you do to it. Given a message to decrypt, the best an enemy cryptanalyst can do is random chance. There are better ways of compromising secrets.
This is a well-established result in encryption and there is no point in arguing about it. The only time one-time pad encryption has ever been broken was when the agents misused their one-time pads. The Venona decrypts are a good example of this.
(Wow! First time I've ever linked to the NSA!)
...laura
I didn't buy my Mac Mini because of the hardware. I bought it because it's a neat little box that can do cool shit.
Of course it looks cool. It's designed as a unit, a coherent whole (hardware and software), something the Windoze folks have never gotten quite right. It's one damned cool package, everything from the box it came in to the documentation. How could I lose?
Nowadays it's pretty much taken for granted that any box you buy will have enough CPU and memory to do what it's supposed to do. The whole package is what matters more. We don't ask "How fast is it?" much anymore. We ask "What does it do?"
...laura
I've been looking forward to 2007 for a while, since it's 50 years since Sputnik 1, and lots of stuff gets declassified after 50 years. Witness the enormous amount of new WW2 material in the 1990s. Let's see some real dirt!
The U.S. government isn't the only one with secrets.
...laura