So glad it's wireless. A few years ago they tried this with USB and Firewire -- neither of those projects got funded past the first 10,000 trial runs! (In a manner of speaking...)
Eco's point about books (hypertexts, rather) which present a multitude of branches at many points in a "story" reminds me a lot of Stephenson's _The_Diamond_Age_, in which Nell is taught by a book being 'ractored' by people.
Admittedly, at the beginning of the story, the book is more of a video monitor, with moving pictures and sounds and such, but by the end, when she's matured, it's mainly text.
What sort of future can _that_ have?
(P.S. --- a holdover from the "old days"; how many times do you see post-scripta in emails and other hypertexts, when it's so damned easy to just go back and fit those thoughts in where they should go -- like this one! Anyway, I was too lazy to put in hypertextural links to Stephenson, the book, etc.)
Perhaps very little with the _design_ of a programming language (I don't know about this in particular, I'll admit), but the _concepts_ involved in the calculus are used _ALL_ the time in numerics, especially differentiation, limit-taking, and Riemann and Lebesgue integrals. Vector calculus (and matrix manipulation, which one can either view as a parent or child of vector calculus) is irreplaceable as a tool used in CS, especially, e.g., for graphics manipulations.
And,if one argues that the computer programmers of the future really need to understand algorithmics, what better way to introduce them to the power of computers than have them write a numeric integration program, where the abilities of various programming paradigms shine.
y'all might want to point your browsers at:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030622& mode=classic
Erm... a lot of people
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Anyone who doesn't have fast internet access or a television (or who doesn't want to pay for cable television).
Anyone who likes to camp and take a $5 transistor radio along, rather than lug a satellite uplink system for online-access.
Anyone who drives, and likes to have music or blather going while doing it (driving, that is).
I agree with the poster -- Kansas isn't necessarily boring. Heck, my ex girlfriend lives there, which should count for a lot of excitement, at least in the Wichita area (and she'd skew ANY measure of flatness, except maybe surface roughness, at least at a mesoscopic scale, WAYYY up).
However, I'll disagree about the REASON for Kansas' flatness (any other-than-armchair-geologists out there?). By far most of the continental US has been under the ocean for some part of its life, receiving a uniform deposition of deposits. Right next door, Colorado (from which we used to venture into Kansas) has lots 'n' lots of nice sedimentary rocks, many of which are still even horizontally-layered. But lots of orogeny has uplifted Colorado's sediments, exposing them to water and wind, and producing a lot of thrust- and fold-mountains. Kansas has had very little of that, at least in recent geological time.
One of the main factors to Kansas' flatness is sediment blowing from the more elevated states (like CO, UT, WY, NM) into Kansas, and being deposited evenly. It's more a sea of air effect than a sea of water one. In fact, in David Brin's (admittedly science fiction, but check out John McPhee's stuff) book Earth, the geologist challenges his daughter to find a single, naturally deposited pebble in western Kansas. She can't do it, until she brings him a meteorite.
1. Brown-nose boss; 2. Get boss to pay for your trip to a coding convention; 3. Acquire "Microsoft is leet!" shirt; 4. Walk by any linux area -- the more gamers around the better; 5. Yell, loudly and repeatedly, "I hear even *nix dweebies can get laid these days!"
No matter what happens, after the body pieces are sorted out (or you finish running like hell), I guarantee you'll have lost weight SOMEHOW.
Heck, I figure I can forget celery. Beer has GOT to take more calories to down really, REALLY fast than it's got in it, right?
The best solution, though, is to have officemates hide the goods. Not only do they get kudos for showing creativity, but one can't help but get into shape by gnawing through, say, a titanium-reinforced vault wall to get at the stuff. Everyone enjoys the game. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!?
Basically, these guys store a whole lot of electricity in monstrous capacitors, and then shove all of it through a contraption of parallel wires (imagine about a hundred wires lining the inside of a Pringles can -- parallel to the can's long axis -- the "z" axis in cylindrical coordinates, and then take away the can).
From the Lorentz force law (easiest way to see this; alternate explanations work, too, but everything boils down to the same thing), one can see that parallel wires, when they have current going through them in the same direction, attract each other. So these wires, each of which has gazillions (technical term) of Coulombs per second coursing through them -- Amperes), get attracted to eachother VERY much. These attracting wires basically "pinch" whatever is put between them, possibly leading to fusion (in deuterium, the article states).
Now, to add to the complexity, take away the wires. They get vaporized by the huge currents going through them, and basically you've got lines of plasma (positive and negative ions -- which allow current flow) which accelerate together, making for the pinch effect.
This all happens very, very quickly, and at nice high temperatures (thus thermal energy also helps contribute to fusion effects), so that fusion is kept on the edge of possibility.
The pretty sparks in the pictures are produced when those capacitors discharge -- there's a "skin" effect on the oil, where its surface is next to the air. Those big sparkies, are, in effect, just the spark from a very large, very expensive finger approaching a very large, very expensive doorknob on a nice dry day, after the very large, very expensive feet have been scuffed over a shag carpet.
Check out PCTorque.com or Powernotebooks (as has already been mentioned). I got my Sager at PCTorque, and couldn't be happier with the service and the product. The laptop I got was a beast, but came with all the latest and greatest (including your firewire, et. al., and 802.11b). And it runs linux like a dream, with practically everything supported and loaded from the get-go (Mandrake, of course). The only problem I can see is the weight -- http://pctorque.com/comparenotebooks.html has a page listing some dimensions, and so forth, and the lightest 'book from Sager is 7lbs. However, that page also says that 802.11b isn't available on that model, and it IS.
The forums on these sites have specific linux posts (and posting areas FOR linux posts, which is nice).
You CAN choose to have Windows shipped with the thing, in various incarnations, but the default is NO os.
Slashdot Mirror
That's NORTH American, thank you very much.
Is that like sharks with frikkin' laser beams?
Dude, you could send an entire camera crew + generator onna cart in there. Wide format film cameras and everything.
So glad it's wireless. A few years ago they tried this with USB and Firewire -- neither of those projects got funded past the first 10,000 trial runs! (In a manner of speaking...)
... THOSE webcams.
... insensitive clod! I am a Vegan Vegan! comment?
Well, there you go.
The guy in the background is obviously trying to hang himself because the hot chick in the foreground has a glowing booger.
Eco's point about books (hypertexts, rather) which present a multitude of branches at many points in a "story" reminds me a lot of Stephenson's _The_Diamond_Age_, in which Nell is taught by a book being 'ractored' by people.
Admittedly, at the beginning of the story, the book is more of a video monitor, with moving pictures and sounds and such, but by the end, when she's matured, it's mainly text.
What sort of future can _that_ have?
(P.S. --- a holdover from the "old days"; how many times do you see post-scripta in emails and other hypertexts, when it's so damned easy to just go back and fit those thoughts in where they should go -- like this one! Anyway, I was too lazy to put in hypertextural links to Stephenson, the book, etc.)
I am, of course, printing this sucker out before I read it.
Perhaps very little with the _design_ of a programming language (I don't know about this in particular, I'll admit), but the _concepts_ involved in the calculus are used _ALL_ the time in numerics, especially differentiation, limit-taking, and Riemann and Lebesgue integrals. Vector calculus (and matrix manipulation, which one can either view as a parent or child of vector calculus) is irreplaceable as a tool used in CS, especially, e.g., for graphics manipulations.
And,if one argues that the computer programmers of the future really need to understand algorithmics, what better way to introduce them to the power of computers than have them write a numeric integration program, where the abilities of various programming paradigms shine.
That's because we can't convert from kg to lb!
y'all might want to point your browsers at: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030622& mode=classic
Anyone who doesn't have fast internet access or a television (or who doesn't want to pay for cable television).
Anyone who likes to camp and take a $5 transistor radio along, rather than lug a satellite uplink system for online-access.
Anyone who drives, and likes to have music or blather going while doing it (driving, that is).
In short, a LOT of people.
rocks
I agree with the poster -- Kansas isn't necessarily boring. Heck, my ex girlfriend lives there, which should count for a lot of excitement, at least in the Wichita area (and she'd skew ANY measure of flatness, except maybe surface roughness, at least at a mesoscopic scale, WAYYY up). However, I'll disagree about the REASON for Kansas' flatness (any other-than-armchair-geologists out there?). By far most of the continental US has been under the ocean for some part of its life, receiving a uniform deposition of deposits. Right next door, Colorado (from which we used to venture into Kansas) has lots 'n' lots of nice sedimentary rocks, many of which are still even horizontally-layered. But lots of orogeny has uplifted Colorado's sediments, exposing them to water and wind, and producing a lot of thrust- and fold-mountains. Kansas has had very little of that, at least in recent geological time. One of the main factors to Kansas' flatness is sediment blowing from the more elevated states (like CO, UT, WY, NM) into Kansas, and being deposited evenly. It's more a sea of air effect than a sea of water one. In fact, in David Brin's (admittedly science fiction, but check out John McPhee's stuff) book Earth, the geologist challenges his daughter to find a single, naturally deposited pebble in western Kansas. She can't do it, until she brings him a meteorite.
1. Brown-nose boss;
2. Get boss to pay for your trip to a coding convention;
3. Acquire "Microsoft is leet!" shirt;
4. Walk by any linux area -- the more gamers around the better;
5. Yell, loudly and repeatedly, "I hear even *nix dweebies can get laid these days!"
No matter what happens, after the body pieces are sorted out (or you finish running like hell), I guarantee you'll have lost weight SOMEHOW.
Heck, I figure I can forget celery. Beer has GOT to take more calories to down really, REALLY fast than it's got in it, right?
The best solution, though, is to have officemates hide the goods. Not only do they get kudos for showing creativity, but one can't help but get into shape by gnawing through, say, a titanium-reinforced vault wall to get at the stuff. Everyone enjoys the game. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!?
Hehehe. Mod this up!
'pitifull'?!?
Maybe people don't understand the lingo because they don't know how it's spelled.
I know, I know, we understand what you mean, of course, and there're no other words (that I'm aware of) that'll be confused with it, but... c'mon.
http://www.sandia.gov/pulspowr/facilities/zacceler ator.html
Basically, these guys store a whole lot of electricity in monstrous capacitors, and then shove all of it through a contraption of parallel wires (imagine about a hundred wires lining the inside of a Pringles can -- parallel to the can's long axis -- the "z" axis in cylindrical coordinates, and then take away the can).
From the Lorentz force law (easiest way to see this; alternate explanations work, too, but everything boils down to the same thing), one can see that parallel wires, when they have current going through them in the same direction, attract each other. So these wires, each of which has gazillions (technical term) of Coulombs per second coursing through them -- Amperes), get attracted to eachother VERY much. These attracting wires basically "pinch" whatever is put between them, possibly leading to fusion (in deuterium, the article states).
Now, to add to the complexity, take away the wires. They get vaporized by the huge currents going through them, and basically you've got lines of plasma (positive and negative ions -- which allow current flow) which accelerate together, making for the pinch effect.
This all happens very, very quickly, and at nice high temperatures (thus thermal energy also helps contribute to fusion effects), so that fusion is kept on the edge of possibility.
The pretty sparks in the pictures are produced when those capacitors discharge -- there's a "skin" effect on the oil, where its surface is next to the air. Those big sparkies, are, in effect, just the spark from a very large, very expensive finger approaching a very large, very expensive doorknob on a nice dry day, after the very large, very expensive feet have been scuffed over a shag carpet.
Oh, gods, I can't resist:
l ?m enu=news.celebrities . Seems he could save an awful lot of money....
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_559816.htm
Does this mean that "livin' it up while I'm going down" might be an week-long job?
Check out PCTorque.com or Powernotebooks (as has already been mentioned). I got my Sager at PCTorque, and couldn't be happier with the service and the product. The laptop I got was a beast, but came with all the latest and greatest (including your firewire, et. al., and 802.11b). And it runs linux like a dream, with practically everything supported and loaded from the get-go (Mandrake, of course). The only problem I can see is the weight -- http://pctorque.com/comparenotebooks.html has a page listing some dimensions, and so forth, and the lightest 'book from Sager is 7lbs. However, that page also says that 802.11b isn't available on that model, and it IS.
The forums on these sites have specific linux posts (and posting areas FOR linux posts, which is nice).
You CAN choose to have Windows shipped with the thing, in various incarnations, but the default is NO os.
They're a good, good place to do business with.