Over the last couple of years I've been quietly replacing my incandescent light bulbs with
CFLs.
The only issue I've had is the ones with the warmest colour take the longest to come up to
full brightness. The one in my kitchen is full brightness pretty well immediately, but has a blue cast.
The ones in my bedroom and living room take about 30 seconds from turning on to full brightness, but have a much nicer
colour.
I grabbed a PC that wasn't doing anything, loaded my favourite distro (Slackware)
on it, plugged it in to the network, and showed that it could do useful things at an interesting price compared to the Sun
hardware we mainly used at the time.
Now we use Linux for all new development. The suits insist on RedHat for product stuff. So be it. We use CentOS
for development. My personal box remains Slackware.
I'd think a lot of people who fly recreationally and are not commercial pilots, have licenses that don't allow them to do any sort of for-hire work. They'd lose their licenses if it ever came out that they did. So that's not quite nice to those pilots, it's like waving a lollipop and enticing them to do stuff they shouldn't.
Sharing expenses is OK for a private pilot. Making money is not.
Be careful how you divvy up the bills and you'l be fine.
I have indeed downloaded a few things from YouTube. But only as a last resort, after exhausting all legitimate
ways of obtaining the content. Some stuff just doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, like this
energetic ditty
which
I downloaded, peeled the soundtrack off, and added it to my workout playlist. It just doesn't seem to exist anywhere else.
I like Kim Wilde, and I'd happily pay for a legit copy.
I used to use FileJuicer, but the live streaming YouTube now uses
makes it less useful. For audio I guess I'll hook up some cables. People will always circumvent stuff like this.
Me? Yes, I have some silly videos on YouTube. As always, if anybody can make money from what
I'm giving away for free, they are welcome to do so.
How many people on Slashdot were around during Minitel's heyday? Perhaps half of us? How many people on Slashdot are hearing about Minitel for the first time in this article?
I was very much around, and followed Minitel's development with interest. I've used Minitel on visits
to France. It filled a need. It worked.
Lots of people at the time thought teletext was the way to go. In a sense it was,
in the days when 1200 baud was considered a fast modem. Remember
Prestel (U.K.)? Remember all the hype about
Telidon (Canada)? And how little we have to show
for it?
At one time all the ads in French magazines and stuff quoted Minitel codes, almost invariably
3615. Now they all have URLs.
I've never been a fan of putting multi-threading/multi-tasking in a programming language. You get one abstraction of threads/tasks, and
that's it. If you want to do it differently, you have to do it yourself with library
calls. So why not leave it that way and keep the language simple?
Unless there is an awfully good reason not to (and I haven't encountered one yet), I use pthreads.
An outfit I used to work for had a go at doing peripherals for Palms, back in the Palm Pilot days. I found the
devices amusing, so I bought a newer Palm to play with, one of their ARM-based Tungsten units.
I found the general design of the unit to be good. Decent graphics, good selection of applications,
the handwriting recognition basically worked. I had a go at writing my own apps for it, using the free gcc-based toolchain.
Again, it basically worked. The programming environment was idiosyncratic, but mobile
devices always are.
What killed it for me was the shocking battery life. With the fun bonus that since
all your apps and data were in RAM, if the battery went dead, you lost everything.
Creative people are curious, and anybody who is any good has toys to play with and side projects on the go.
A good manager will encourage a bit of goofing off...sorry, personal research. Good people do so anyway, and if it's on company time,
the company may be able to make some money out of it.
Not every side project will be a winner, but if you don't try, you will never know. One of mine got a security guard fired. Another became a
key test tool. Another looked like a good way for the company to make lots of money until our marketing person screwed it up.:-(
Sorry, but I can't accept this being progress toward a proof.
Consider Fermat's Last Theorem. Proving it for any particular exponent is doable. Mathematicians had
proved it for various sets of exponents (Sophie Germain, Wieferich, etc.). But the proof for all exponents
was based on completely different mathematics
(Elliptic curves/modular forms, Taniyama-Shimura, Wiles) and didn't look like anything that had come before.
I don't get the point of a hybrid airplane in the first place.
Hybrid cars work well in stop-and-go city traffic (almost all the taxis here are hybrids, as are all the new
transit buses),
but drone along on their engines on the highway like any other car.
An airplane engine runs at constant speed, constant load, usually a fairly high percentage
of its maximum output (65 to 75%). I see no advantage here.
I live in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and not only will we have a good view (egress is just after sunset), the weather prospects are decent. My mylar filter is ready to go on my Takahashi, so is my Coronado PST, bought on the way to the airport to observe the 2006 eclipse in Turkey.
In 2004 I looked at creative places I might go to see the transit, and one candidate was Inuvik, thanks to the midnight sun. Until I looked at the weather prospects there, and concluded it wasn't going to happen. I got skunked by the 2010 eclipse from Mangaia in the Cook Islands, nice sunny weather the entire time, except at the time of the eclipse. Nice place, otherwise.
The same thing has occurred to me a number of times. "If they're that freaked about
what I may or may not be carrying, I might as well take my clothes off and show them."
The nonsense about electric cars is no different. It's just attempts by the lobbying department of interested automobile makers (the ones who aren't adapting to the 21st century) using bribed republicans and regulatory capture to try to create artificial barriers to adoption against their competition.
A very long time ago steam was the proven technology, electric cars were considered quiet and civilized, and gas engine cars
were the noisy, dangerous, smelly upstarts. The gas engine car manufacturers engaged in a major FUD campaign
against electric cars. They were dangerous! They were so quiet you couldn't hear them coming...
We have an active electric vehicle club here in Vancouver. The loudest noise their best conversions make is the whirr
of the tires, sometimes with a slight groan from their power controllers. They have a
1912 Detroit electric car,
and it's almost completely silent.
Our bus system has one of the larger fleets of electric trolley buses in the western world. They too are very quiet, but people get used to looking for them
before crossing the street.
If the merchants were on the ball they would have real people wandering around their stores helping customers. Then they wouldn't need
technology to bombard us with ads. If a sales person points out a special to me, or brings another product to my attention, I won't mind.
I did a lot of work a few years ago with assisted GPS, that used both GPS and the cellphone network to determine location. I did one
test where I was driving around a parkade in downtown Seattle. The assisted cellphone fixes were spot on. The GPS fixes were - literally - all over the map.
The I drove along the nastiest urban canyon I could find (under the monorail), and out the I-90 bridge/tunnel, with all the big underpasses and
things that confused every other GPS.
Our stuff basically worked, but our marketing person still managed to bankrupt the company. That was another matter. It was fun while it lasted.
Back in the days of magnetic drums it was common for instructions to specify the address of the next instruction,
to handle drum rotation latency. Were their assemblers that smart, or did programmers do instruction scheduling by hand?
I always wonder what people talk about incessantly on their cellphones.
Around here it's either people talking rapidly in some asian language (Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese), or a
zero content conversation along the lines of "uh huh...yeah...no...on the bus...later...no...uh huh...yeah...OK..."
I have better things to do with my life.
I was amused at the mention in the article about landing being the phase of flight where
the plane impacts the ground. I found this one of the hardest things about learning to fly, getting
over the phobia of the plane hitting the ground. In the case of landing, that's exactly what it's supposed
to do.
They should be teaching students to be skeptical.
To examine the evidence, to test its validity, to see how the conclusions were arrrived at. This is A Good Thing.
What they really want to do, of course, is place evolution on the same footing as "In the beginning..." If students were genuinely skeptical they would quickly
see what makes sense and what is religious nonsense.
I keep a few dollars in my purse for incidentals, but pay for almost everything else with my debit
card.
I pay all my bills on line. When I travel outside of Canada I use credit cards. The last time I used traveller's cheques was in 1986.
I write one cheque a month, for my rent. The building managers would like to go electronic (they don't accept cash),
but haven't come up with a good way to do so.
Cybercrime? My debit card has never been compromised, but I've had a couple of credit card incidents. One time I was
wondering when my new Amex was going to arrive, and I got a phone call from their security department. Somebody
had intercepted my new card and gone on a shopping spree. My bill came in a box that month. My liability was zero,
since (unlike most other cards), American Express cards say "Not Transferable" on them, and if a merchant
doesn't verify the identity of a man presenting a card that says "Laura" on it, that's their problem.
The excessively loud tracks remind of the old Wall of Sound production. LPs and AM radio had lousy dynamic range, so they blasted you. CDs have excellent dynamic range, WoS sounded awful, and the most effective CD recordings were the raw, almost live-sounding recordings.
Now with MP3 and loudness wars, we're back to WoS. I didn't like it then. I don't like it now....laura
Slashdot Mirror
Over the last couple of years I've been quietly replacing my incandescent light bulbs with CFLs.
The only issue I've had is the ones with the warmest colour take the longest to come up to full brightness. The one in my kitchen is full brightness pretty well immediately, but has a blue cast. The ones in my bedroom and living room take about 30 seconds from turning on to full brightness, but have a much nicer colour.
...laura
Good point. Hungarian sounds much like the invaders' language in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks to me.
In one of Tom Clancy's books Jack Ryan makes a similar observation about Hungarian, that it sounds like Martian.
...laura
I grabbed a PC that wasn't doing anything, loaded my favourite distro (Slackware) on it, plugged it in to the network, and showed that it could do useful things at an interesting price compared to the Sun hardware we mainly used at the time.
Now we use Linux for all new development. The suits insist on RedHat for product stuff. So be it. We use CentOS for development. My personal box remains Slackware.
...laura
I'd think a lot of people who fly recreationally and are not commercial pilots, have licenses that don't allow them to do any sort of for-hire work. They'd lose their licenses if it ever came out that they did. So that's not quite nice to those pilots, it's like waving a lollipop and enticing them to do stuff they shouldn't.
Sharing expenses is OK for a private pilot. Making money is not. Be careful how you divvy up the bills and you'l be fine.
...laura
There. I said it.
I have indeed downloaded a few things from YouTube. But only as a last resort, after exhausting all legitimate ways of obtaining the content. Some stuff just doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, like this energetic ditty which I downloaded, peeled the soundtrack off, and added it to my workout playlist. It just doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. I like Kim Wilde, and I'd happily pay for a legit copy.
I used to use FileJuicer, but the live streaming YouTube now uses makes it less useful. For audio I guess I'll hook up some cables. People will always circumvent stuff like this.
Me? Yes, I have some silly videos on YouTube. As always, if anybody can make money from what I'm giving away for free, they are welcome to do so.
...laura
I listened to the leap second on WWV. It sounded like this:
tick (23:59:55)
tick (23:59:56)
tick (23:59:57)
tick (23:59:58)
(nothing) (23:59:59)
(nothing) (23:59:60)
BEEP (00:00:00)
It always sounds to me like WWV has gotten stuck or something.
...laura
How many people on Slashdot were around during Minitel's heyday? Perhaps half of us? How many people on Slashdot are hearing about Minitel for the first time in this article?
I was very much around, and followed Minitel's development with interest. I've used Minitel on visits to France. It filled a need. It worked.
Lots of people at the time thought teletext was the way to go. In a sense it was, in the days when 1200 baud was considered a fast modem. Remember Prestel (U.K.)? Remember all the hype about Telidon (Canada)? And how little we have to show for it?
At one time all the ads in French magazines and stuff quoted Minitel codes, almost invariably 3615. Now they all have URLs.
...laura
I've never been a fan of putting multi-threading/multi-tasking in a programming language. You get one abstraction of threads/tasks, and that's it. If you want to do it differently, you have to do it yourself with library calls. So why not leave it that way and keep the language simple?
Unless there is an awfully good reason not to (and I haven't encountered one yet), I use pthreads.
...laura
An outfit I used to work for had a go at doing peripherals for Palms, back in the Palm Pilot days. I found the devices amusing, so I bought a newer Palm to play with, one of their ARM-based Tungsten units.
I found the general design of the unit to be good. Decent graphics, good selection of applications, the handwriting recognition basically worked. I had a go at writing my own apps for it, using the free gcc-based toolchain. Again, it basically worked. The programming environment was idiosyncratic, but mobile devices always are.
What killed it for me was the shocking battery life. With the fun bonus that since all your apps and data were in RAM, if the battery went dead, you lost everything.
Sigh...
...laura
The /. article before this was about a new overclocking record. Will 7 GHz be fast enough to run
this puppy?
...laura
Creative people are curious, and anybody who is any good has toys to play with and side projects on the go. A good manager will encourage a bit of goofing off...sorry, personal research. Good people do so anyway, and if it's on company time, the company may be able to make some money out of it.
Not every side project will be a winner, but if you don't try, you will never know. One of mine got a security guard fired. Another became a key test tool. Another looked like a good way for the company to make lots of money until our marketing person screwed it up. :-(
...laura
Sorry, but I can't accept this being progress toward a proof.
Consider Fermat's Last Theorem. Proving it for any particular exponent is doable. Mathematicians had proved it for various sets of exponents (Sophie Germain, Wieferich, etc.). But the proof for all exponents was based on completely different mathematics (Elliptic curves/modular forms, Taniyama-Shimura, Wiles) and didn't look like anything that had come before.
...laura
I don't get the point of a hybrid airplane in the first place.
Hybrid cars work well in stop-and-go city traffic (almost all the taxis here are hybrids, as are all the new transit buses), but drone along on their engines on the highway like any other car.
An airplane engine runs at constant speed, constant load, usually a fairly high percentage of its maximum output (65 to 75%). I see no advantage here.
Am I missing something?
...laura, PA28 and C152 pilot
I live in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and not only will we have a good view (egress is just after sunset), the weather prospects are decent. My mylar filter is ready to go on my Takahashi, so is my Coronado PST, bought on the way to the airport to observe the 2006 eclipse in Turkey.
In 2004 I looked at creative places I might go to see the transit, and one candidate was Inuvik, thanks to the midnight sun. Until I looked at the weather prospects there, and concluded it wasn't going to happen. I got skunked by the 2010 eclipse from Mangaia in the Cook Islands, nice sunny weather the entire time, except at the time of the eclipse. Nice place, otherwise.
...laura
The same thing has occurred to me a number of times. "If they're that freaked about what I may or may not be carrying, I might as well take my clothes off and show them."
No, I haven't done it.
...laura
The nonsense about electric cars is no different. It's just attempts by the lobbying department of interested automobile makers (the ones who aren't adapting to the 21st century) using bribed republicans and regulatory capture to try to create artificial barriers to adoption against their competition.
A very long time ago steam was the proven technology, electric cars were considered quiet and civilized, and gas engine cars were the noisy, dangerous, smelly upstarts. The gas engine car manufacturers engaged in a major FUD campaign against electric cars. They were dangerous! They were so quiet you couldn't hear them coming...
We have an active electric vehicle club here in Vancouver. The loudest noise their best conversions make is the whirr of the tires, sometimes with a slight groan from their power controllers. They have a 1912 Detroit electric car, and it's almost completely silent.
Our bus system has one of the larger fleets of electric trolley buses in the western world. They too are very quiet, but people get used to looking for them before crossing the street.
...laura
Indeed.
If the merchants were on the ball they would have real people wandering around their stores helping customers. Then they wouldn't need technology to bombard us with ads. If a sales person points out a special to me, or brings another product to my attention, I won't mind.
I did a lot of work a few years ago with assisted GPS, that used both GPS and the cellphone network to determine location. I did one test where I was driving around a parkade in downtown Seattle. The assisted cellphone fixes were spot on. The GPS fixes were - literally - all over the map. The I drove along the nastiest urban canyon I could find (under the monorail), and out the I-90 bridge/tunnel, with all the big underpasses and things that confused every other GPS.
Our stuff basically worked, but our marketing person still managed to bankrupt the company. That was another matter. It was fun while it lasted.
...laura
Back in the days of magnetic drums it was common for instructions to specify the address of the next instruction, to handle drum rotation latency. Were their assemblers that smart, or did programmers do instruction scheduling by hand?
...laura
If you want me as a customer, you will implement à la carte service.
If you don't, I will continue to use streaming video and iTunes.
This is non-negotiable.
...laura
Pen and paper. Nothing else even comes close.
What problem are you attempting to solve?
...laura
Shrug. We've already ditched $1 and $2 bills in favour of coins, and ditched 25 cent bills entirely. We've survived.
...laura
I always wonder what people talk about incessantly on their cellphones.
Around here it's either people talking rapidly in some asian language (Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese), or a zero content conversation along the lines of "uh huh...yeah...no...on the bus...later...no...uh huh...yeah...OK..." I have better things to do with my life.
I was amused at the mention in the article about landing being the phase of flight where the plane impacts the ground. I found this one of the hardest things about learning to fly, getting over the phobia of the plane hitting the ground. In the case of landing, that's exactly what it's supposed to do.
...laura
They should be teaching students to be skeptical. To examine the evidence, to test its validity, to see how the conclusions were arrrived at. This is A Good Thing.
What they really want to do, of course, is place evolution on the same footing as "In the beginning..." If students were genuinely skeptical they would quickly see what makes sense and what is religious nonsense.
...laura
I've been largely cashless since the late 1980s.
I keep a few dollars in my purse for incidentals, but pay for almost everything else with my debit card. I pay all my bills on line. When I travel outside of Canada I use credit cards. The last time I used traveller's cheques was in 1986. I write one cheque a month, for my rent. The building managers would like to go electronic (they don't accept cash), but haven't come up with a good way to do so.
Cybercrime? My debit card has never been compromised, but I've had a couple of credit card incidents. One time I was wondering when my new Amex was going to arrive, and I got a phone call from their security department. Somebody had intercepted my new card and gone on a shopping spree. My bill came in a box that month. My liability was zero, since (unlike most other cards), American Express cards say "Not Transferable" on them, and if a merchant doesn't verify the identity of a man presenting a card that says "Laura" on it, that's their problem.
...laura
The excessively loud tracks remind of the old Wall of Sound production. LPs and AM radio had lousy dynamic range, so they blasted you. CDs have excellent dynamic range, WoS sounded awful, and the most effective CD recordings were the raw, almost live-sounding recordings.
Now with MP3 and loudness wars, we're back to WoS. I didn't like it then. I don't like it now. ...laura