Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.?
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
(and what am I missing?)
zero
22.26% (437 songs out of 1963)
way less than 1% (only a few dozen out of 1963)
76.5% (approx 1500 out of 1963)
zero
Almost all of my files are AAC, not MP3, and I have a Mac and an iPod, so Ballmer and Microsoft can go bark up another tree.
Just because the iPod can play non-DRM formats such as unprotected AAC, AIFF, MP3, and WAV doesn't mean that it supports piracy. No more so than my ownership of a gun means that I am a murderer or my ownership of a some zip-lock baggies means that I sell drugs. It's not the tool but the user that makes something criminal.
I wrote for a paper once, my columns were regularly 'edited'* to fit the available page space. Read some the pedant should read some newspaper articles some time and wonder why certain things are repeated and restated in different words, the answer is because the writer has no idea what will eventually end up in print, after so many inches it's usually drivel.
A good newspaper journalist writes in an "inverted pyramid", the most important facts first and then the trivial details later on. The idea is that if an editor wants to trim the story he can just start trimming at the end of the story and then he doesn't have to pick through the article to essentially re-write it. The best article will answer all of the 5 most important questions (who, what, where, why, and how) in the first paragraph. An article that has an introductory sentence which doesn't get a start on the 5 questions is probably written by a non-professional journalist.
There are a lot of newspaper writers who obviously never took a journalism course and so they don't write in an "inverted pyramid", it's those writers who repeat and restate things because they have no clue what will get cut out. An editor going through their articles would simply have to cut the stuff that seems least important, at times just randomly cutting stuff because he's in a hurry and doesn't have the time to carefully re-do the article.
It's in their TV ads for 'number portability', claiming that someone had a special number and didn't want to lose it.
Hmm, never saw those ads. Then again I don't watch much TV, just one or two shows a week.
Still, it is a clever thing to use in an ad, especially if you are targeting 30 - 40 year olds who grew up with that song.
Re:I'm a Reebok Sales Engineer!
on
Google's Math Puzzle
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The URL was really 1828675309.com and let you to an OGG of Blink182 singing the standard Reebok commercial.
On a side note, someone was very clever over at Cingular.com. The URL 8675309.com redirects you to Cingular's web site. I'm sure that only a small percentage of people have tried that URL but I'm sure that means that hundreds or thousands of people were redirected.
Someone was definitely thinking when they set that up.
Whups, the link got mangled when I did some editing. Here's the text with the link fixed:
like most border collie owners, would very likely end up with a dog with serious emotional problems due to lack of stimulation.
got a reference for that statistic? Every single border collie I know (and I know a lot) has emotionally stable, happy dogs. My experience has been that if you can't handle a border collie, you can't handle having a dog at all.
Border collies are great dogs, very smart and very loving. The big thing about them is that they need to be working to truly be happy. If you don't engage them daily in some sort of working activity they tend to develop psychological problems. The activity can be playing with the kids, fetching some balls, taking a long walk, whatever.
If you don't have kids I'd say that you are better off getting a border collie and another type of dog, preferably a non-herding dog that gets along well with other dogs and is somewhat active. Take them both out to play and the border collie will tend to naturally herd the other dog as part of their playing. Both dogs will come back inside your house exhausted, but happy, and its much less likely that they will develop any psychological problems due to inactivity.
like most border collie owners, would very likely end up with a dog with serious emotional problems due to lack of stimulation.
got a reference for that statistic? Every single border collie I know (and I know a lot) has emotionally stable, happy dogs. My experience has been that if you can't handle a border collie, you can't handle having a dog at all.
Border collies are great dogs, very smart and very loving. The big thing about them is that they need to be working to truly be happy. If you don't engage them daily in some sort of working activity they tend to develop psychological problems. The activity can be playing with the kids, fetching some balls, taking a long walk, whatever.
If you don't have kids I'd say that you are better off getting a border collie and another type of dog, preferably a non-herding dog that gets along well with other dogs and is somewhat active. Take them both out to play and the border collie will tend to naturally herd the other dog as part of their playing. Both dogs will come back inside your house exhausted, but happy, and its much less likely that they will develop any psychological problems due to inactivity.
2 years ago, at my old place, my dog had his own couch. He slept on this couch nightly. The couch was in the path between my bed and my computers (on another floor).
One morning, my pager went off, a network had stopped responding, and I have to investigate. It was about 3am, and my eyes hadn't adjusted to the light yet, so I didn't bother turning on any lights in my path between my room and the basement.
I got down there, where the dog was, and it was PITCH black. No matter how good your night vision, you weren't seeing ANYTHING. As I rounded the corner from the stairs into the basement, all I heard was a low-pitched growl and the quiet sound of a dog walking towards me very slowly (he desperately needed his nails cut)... it didn't even sound like my dog. I turned around, and said, "PUPPY ITS ME!" Upon hearing that, he came over, expected a quick petting, and then went back to sleep. I was so proud of him that day.
There was one time that I fell asleep on a bed with my black Lab at my feet. This dog is a sweet, loving, and friendly Labrador that has never attacked anyone.
The bedroom was pretty dark but the door was open a little, letting some light in. I was just nodding off when my Lab began to growl this erie, nasty, low growl. It made the hairs stand up on my head.
When I looked down at her I could see that she was crouching on the bed, getting ready to pounce. The hair along the center of her back and down her tail was all puffed up and looked like a mohawk. It must have stood an inch or two off of her back.
I looked up to see what she was concerned about and I realized that the light from the door was backlighting a coat rack with a coat and a hat on it. It looked almost exactly like a person was standing in the doorway.
As I turned on a lamp next to my bed I saw that it definitely was a coat rack and not a person. We both got up and checked the rest of the house and it was clear of intruders. My Lab looked sheepish as we headed back to bed, my guess is that a random sound set her off so that when she saw the coat and hat she mistook it for a person and thought we were in danger. I have no doubt that if it were a intruder she would have attacked with 90 pounds of fury and done everything she could to protect me.
I have 2 Labs, a black and a yellow and 2 Goldens. When I go into town (which has a high gang ratio) and bring my Black Lab *everyone* clears the way. He is big and has presence and doesn't do the "I love everyone to death!" attitude my Goldens do.
Labs have a great combination of intelligence, aggressiveness, protectiveness, size, and gentleness. They look tough and have a big bark but they generally don't fly off the handle. An intruder will quickly get barreled over by a Lab but if the master is around and he okays the person then the Lab will generally chill out.
Labs are awesome with kids and are amazing at social interaction with people. My black Lab pretty much knows EXACTLY what is going on. If I'm going for a swim in the pool she is at the door before I leave my room. If I'm going to take a walk she is already by my side WITH the leash in her mouth. If I want her out of my way I just ask her to back up and she backs up, if I say move she moves out of the way.
The worst thing is the first three years. Up until age 2 or 3 they can be unholy terrors. They are such mouthy, energetic dogs that they are constantly carrying your shoes, socks, paper, etc around the house and chewing on them. Be prepared to run them to death every day to try to tire them out. A swimming pool is perfect for this, get 2 toys, throw one in and send in the dog, when it gets back wave the second toy and throw it, then you can pick up the first one. Repeat until you have a very tired dog.
BTW, speaking as a dog trainer and having worked in kennels for many years the very BEST guard dog in the world is a Chesapeak Bay Retriever. They are gentle and loyal with the elderly and children but make the best, most intelligent guard dogs there is. A Chessie is NOT afraid to knock a perp over and stand on them snarling in there face and only bite if necessarly till help arrives without any training in protection work.
Chesapeake Bay Retrievers are a bit more wild and energetic than Labradors but they are also wonderful. Chessies are just as friendly as Labs but they are even WORSE when it comes to taking a break. From what I've experienced most Chessies will work or play until they literally pass out from exhaustion. They are a little dopey but not dumb, it's just that their energy is a bit too much for them to stop to think about what they are doing! They are EXTREMELY trainable and are very protective of children.
You can hardly go wrong with either a Labrador or a Chesapeake Bay Retriever but be prepared to take a lot of walks and swims if you get one!
There is a really wierd thing with real website. They have a different website depending og whenewer you are located in europa or usa.
There are people surfing the web from Europa???!!!
Wow, and here I was thinking that a latency of a 500 milliseconds was bad, a latency of 1.8 million milliseconds must make surfing the web just unbearable. You'd better not even attempt a game of Unreal Tournament with that net connection...
I meant reliable and sustainable fusion power, which releases a LOT more energy than a fuel cell reaction like that.
Ahh, my bad. You didn't mention fusion and I have seen a ton of people who think that burning hydrogen produced from water means free energy.
Still, that sort of power is a ways off. People are just beginning to plan pilot fusion power plants that may produce enough energy to completely offset the generation and transmission losses and be cost-effective. It will happen eventually but it will take some time.
Solar powered microwave transmission satellites are technology that we could build today if we were pushed to do so. Most of the pieces are already there, it would just take someone with vision and guts to assemble them, launch them and start harnessing. Unfortunately the only thing that is going to get that moving is a substantial increase in energy costs. Right now energy is still cheap enough that profits from such a venture would be borderline.
The question I pose is that why werent the buildings designed to withstand a SUBSTANTIAL Huricane. It is not hurricanes are a new danger, designeing buildings not to be able to stand up to direct hit isnt a smart gamble in my books.
In the article they say that at least some of the buildings are rated for 110 mph winds. That's a pretty substantial hurricane. The problem is that the force on a building goes up with the square of the velocity of the wind. So if you wanted to design a building that could withstand 150 mph winds you would need a lot more structural strength.
Let's say that a wall can withstand 110 mph winds so we set it at a strength of 1. A wall that can withstand 150 mph winds would need a strength of at least:
(150^2)/(110^2) = 1.86
By the time you add in the increased turbulence and other damaging effects of the higher-speed winds you would need a wall at least twice as strong.
It becomes a matter of trade-off. Spend a certain amount on a building that can withstand 110 mph winds or spend double that on a building that can withstand 150 mph winds. Considering that the 110 mph building probably cost a mint in the first place (compared to a lower wind-velocity building) you might just say, "We'll build the 110 mph building and if we get lucky we save some money. If it gets knocked down then we re-build it with the money we saved."
Since the chances of a storm greater than 110 mph directly hitting you are pretty slim this is probably a safe bet. By the time your building is knocked down you would probably have made enough money on your savings to build a better building, not to mention that by that time your old building probably would have had to be refurbished anyways. Also, you will probably receive a substantial amount of insurance money when the building is destroyed.
If we can get to the point that we rely on hydrogen instead of oil, or even uranium, then we'll have a virtually limitless fuel supply covering 70% of the planet up to several miles deep.
H2O (water for the few who may not know that...) is a very low energy state for hydrogen. In order to get usable energy from the hydrogen in H2O you first have to split off the hydrogen. This takes energy. Now when you burn the hydrogen you are probably going to burn it with oxygen, producing H2O and energy.
So the cycle would go:
2H2O -> add energy -> 2H2 + O2 -> release energy by burning -> 2H20
The energy you get back will be no more than the energy you put in. Actually, it will most likely be a lot less because of thermodynamics and inefficiencies. If you get back 50% of the energy you used to produce, store, and transport the hydrogen I would be amazed.
At best hydrogen is a fairly clean way of storing energy. You still need to get that energy from somewhere. Today that energy most likely comes from burning fossil fuels. Hopefully in the future we can use beamed microwaves from space stations or other clean methods of producing the energy, which we then store as hydrogen and burn cleanly.
I believe the iTMS AAC is CBR, so the MSN service has definitely better quality.
iTMS AAC is a type of VBR known as ABR (Average Bit Rate). Instead of the frames being a variable number of bytes they are instead grouped into blocks of a constant size. This means that you can have variable-sized frames that have a constant, dependable size over the long-run. ABR is pretty much as good as regular VBR but it is a better format for streaming because of the regularity of the average bit rate.
OS X runs perfect here on two different machines, one with 256 and the other with 384 megs of ram. Things may run a little bit slow if you try to run a zillion programs all at once, but for the average user, 256 is fine.
Hell, my parents have a 400 mHz iMac G3 that was running Mac OS 10.3.5 with 192 MB of RAM and it ran just fine for their purposes. They could surf the web, use e-mail, use Word to read and write documents, play some simple games. The computer was a bit slow in launching apps and if you ran more than a couple of big apps at once things could get slow switching between them but they never needed more than a few apps open at once anyways.
I recently bumped the machine up to 640 MB of RAM because I got a good deal on a 512 MB stick of RAM. It helped but it didn't change the operation of the machine a whole hell of a lot. 256 MB of RAM is just fine for Mac OS X but certainly more RAM is better.
If you are going to make it like a TV... they should have gone all the way and put a TV tuner in there - this is the killer app to beat microsoft on and to complete the iLife suite. An Apple (with all the associated easiness) TV center with maybe a grey one for corporate use with no TV.
It looks to me like things are already pretty tight in there. Putting a TV tuner and connecters in there might not have been realistically possible due to space considerations. Not only that but it would also add to the already borderline-high cost. Plus that's one more component in an already-crowded set of connectors, the iMac is supposed to a simple consumer-level machine - not a pro level do-everything machine.
However, it is very simple to add this functionality to an iMac. Elgato Systems makes USB and Firewire devices that act as TV tuners, PVRs and analog-to-digital converters. They are very sharp, have great support, and the software works well. So anyone who wants to use their iMac as a TV only have to find the appropriate product model, buy it, and plug it in.
Yeah, more features are great to have in a computer but in this case Apple goes for the most flexibility by not bundling a TV tuner into the iMac.
macosxlabs.org has articles and whatnot about this, i believe
macosxlabs.org is definitely a great site to use as a resource. The specific area of the website to take a look at is the"Documentation - System Deployment & Maintenance" section. Here is a link to a PDF that explains how to use MacOS X Server, NetInstall, and Apple Software Restore to accomplish this task.
If the copy operation is as slow as you are mentioning then the disk image that is being restored from probably was not properly prepared and so the image is probably being copied at the file level rather than the block level. This would cause the operation to take a great deal more time. As someone else mentioned, a man page listing of the asr shell tool under Mac OS X will show you a good discussion on optimizing restore speed. Here is a web site with that man page.
This good-looking woman looked at profiles of singles in her immediate area, found one she wanted to meet, and IMed him to meet her at some street-side cafe or something like that.
Hmm, sounds like high-tech prostitution. I can see it now:
Incoming text message:
female, brunette, 5'11", corner of 5th and Main, $100/hour, $50 extra for bondage
The difficulty with discussing things like this is that ideas (such as volume) are mostly innapplicable when discussing elementary particles, especially when discussing scattering.
Of course. I was simply "dumbing it down" for any layman who might be reading this. Yes, volume is not quite the proper term for the various interactions that occur when an alpha particle hits other matter but it gets the general idea across. Alpha particles tend to slow down more than beta particles when traveling through dense matter because they interact with the matter more strongly than a beta particle would.
As for the discussion on the radius of curvature, that is a fact that I make use of almost every day. I routinely use a gas chromatograph - mass spectrophotometer which takes ions and categorizes them by how they interact with a magnetic field. If they hit one target they have a certain mass-to-charge ratio, if they hit a different target then they have another ratio. These targets are at different radii along a curve and how strongly the particle curves determines where it ends up. It's quite a neat trick.
Whups, yes you are right. I mistakenly wrote down +1 when I meant +2. Alpha particles have two protons, two neutrons and should have no electrons (assuming they haven't picked up one or two somewhere).
Dunno how I missed that in preview but it happens...
The greater mass of Alpha particles causes them to be more easily deflected than beta particles. Gamma radiation has a near-zero mass, so it can penetrate most forms of matter. (Penetration being the act of "missing" most of the matter.)
No, beta particles are deflected more in a magnetic field than alpha particles are, all things being equal.
Alpha particles are essentially helium nuclei, they have a charge of +1 and a mass of 4. Beta particles are electrons, they have a charge of -1 and a negligible mass when compared to an alpha particle (each proton is about the mass of 1800 electrons). Gamma particles are high-energy photons with no charge and essentially no mass at all.
When they are ejected in the same direction with the same velocity through a uniform magnetic field it is the beta particle which will be deflected more. This is due to the fact that both particles will have the same force acting upon them, but they have a different mass. Since the alpha particle has much more mass it will be deflected a lot less by the force and so it will curve less than the beta particle. The gamma radiation will not curve at all because photons have no charge and will hardly be affected by a magnetic field.
As for deflection, the alpha particles take up a lot of room. When they encounter other material they are much more likely to have a collision than beta particles which have a very small volume. This means that the alpha particles usually only travel a small distance through a material before slowing down enough to be stopped. Beta particles get slowed down less because they tend to be able to slip right past the atoms (actually past the nuclei) in the material. Gamma particles penetrate the furthest because they really are only captured occasionally by atoms and quite a large percentage will manage to get through even a couple of feet of low-density material.
Take it from someone who has dealt with Wacom and their pricing for Overlays used in Tablets - It Ain't Cheap! Sure, you can go Non-Wacom...but why?
Well, first of all Wacom is not necessarily the best company to go to for touch screens. Yes they are a decent company but there are many, many more suppliers of this technology. A quick Google search reveals many. I'm not in the field of computer system component integration but I'm certain that a company like Apple could easily find a decent partner at a decent price.
Now, just a quick look around reveals LCD screen overlays costing from around $90 to $110 for a 12.1" screen. I didn't find out what quantity you would need to purchase to get those prices but I'm pretty sure that a major PC manufacturer like Apple could easily get those prices and probably much better because they are dealing in quantity.
So I feel that I can stand on my estimate of a $100 increase, more or less, in price for an Apple laptop with a touch screen over an Apple laptop without a touch screen. All things being equal it is at least a decent ballpark estimate of the costs.
Well the big question would obviously be price. Any Mac fan probably knows it would be a very nice piece of hardware... but really, tablets are expensive enough. How much would something like this be from Apple?
I honestly don't understand why it would be that much more expensive than a regular laptop. The only things different are a hinge that flips around and an overlay which goes on the screen. The flip-around hinge is really just a redesign, that should be a trivial cost, and the overlay is proven technology that has been in use for years. I can't see the overlay costing much more than an extra hundred bucks. That doesn't add too much to the cost when you are talking about a $1000+ machine.
I could easily see Apple taking a 12" iBook, changing the hinge and putting on a touch-sensitive overlay. They already have most of the software to use the tablet in place with Inkwell.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all of my files are AAC, not MP3, and I have a Mac and an iPod, so Ballmer and Microsoft can go bark up another tree.
Just because the iPod can play non-DRM formats such as unprotected AAC, AIFF, MP3, and WAV doesn't mean that it supports piracy. No more so than my ownership of a gun means that I am a murderer or my ownership of a some zip-lock baggies means that I sell drugs. It's not the tool but the user that makes something criminal.
A good newspaper journalist writes in an "inverted pyramid", the most important facts first and then the trivial details later on. The idea is that if an editor wants to trim the story he can just start trimming at the end of the story and then he doesn't have to pick through the article to essentially re-write it. The best article will answer all of the 5 most important questions (who, what, where, why, and how) in the first paragraph. An article that has an introductory sentence which doesn't get a start on the 5 questions is probably written by a non-professional journalist.
There are a lot of newspaper writers who obviously never took a journalism course and so they don't write in an "inverted pyramid", it's those writers who repeat and restate things because they have no clue what will get cut out. An editor going through their articles would simply have to cut the stuff that seems least important, at times just randomly cutting stuff because he's in a hurry and doesn't have the time to carefully re-do the article.
Hmm, never saw those ads. Then again I don't watch much TV, just one or two shows a week.
Still, it is a clever thing to use in an ad, especially if you are targeting 30 - 40 year olds who grew up with that song.
On a side note, someone was very clever over at Cingular.com. The URL 8675309.com redirects you to Cingular's web site. I'm sure that only a small percentage of people have tried that URL but I'm sure that means that hundreds or thousands of people were redirected.
Someone was definitely thinking when they set that up.
Border collies are great dogs, very smart and very loving. The big thing about them is that they need to be working to truly be happy. If you don't engage them daily in some sort of working activity they tend to develop psychological problems. The activity can be playing with the kids, fetching some balls, taking a long walk, whatever.
If you don't have kids I'd say that you are better off getting a border collie and another type of dog, preferably a non-herding dog that gets along well with other dogs and is somewhat active. Take them both out to play and the border collie will tend to naturally herd the other dog as part of their playing. Both dogs will come back inside your house exhausted, but happy, and its much less likely that they will develop any psychological problems due to inactivity.
Border collies are great dogs, very smart and very loving. The big thing about them is that they need to be working to truly be happy. If you don't engage them daily in some sort of working activity they tend to develop psychological problems. The activity can be playing with the kids, fetching some balls, taking a long walk, whatever.
If you don't have kids I'd say that you are better off getting a border collie and another type of dog, preferably a non-herding dog that gets along well with other dogs and is somewhat active. Take them both out to play and the border collie will tend to naturally herd the other dog as part of their playing. Both dogs will come back inside your house exhausted, but happy, and its much less likely that they will develop any psychological problems due to inactivity.
There was one time that I fell asleep on a bed with my black Lab at my feet. This dog is a sweet, loving, and friendly Labrador that has never attacked anyone.
The bedroom was pretty dark but the door was open a little, letting some light in. I was just nodding off when my Lab began to growl this erie, nasty, low growl. It made the hairs stand up on my head.
When I looked down at her I could see that she was crouching on the bed, getting ready to pounce. The hair along the center of her back and down her tail was all puffed up and looked like a mohawk. It must have stood an inch or two off of her back.
I looked up to see what she was concerned about and I realized that the light from the door was backlighting a coat rack with a coat and a hat on it. It looked almost exactly like a person was standing in the doorway.
As I turned on a lamp next to my bed I saw that it definitely was a coat rack and not a person. We both got up and checked the rest of the house and it was clear of intruders. My Lab looked sheepish as we headed back to bed, my guess is that a random sound set her off so that when she saw the coat and hat she mistook it for a person and thought we were in danger. I have no doubt that if it were a intruder she would have attacked with 90 pounds of fury and done everything she could to protect me.
Labs have a great combination of intelligence, aggressiveness, protectiveness, size, and gentleness. They look tough and have a big bark but they generally don't fly off the handle. An intruder will quickly get barreled over by a Lab but if the master is around and he okays the person then the Lab will generally chill out.
Labs are awesome with kids and are amazing at social interaction with people. My black Lab pretty much knows EXACTLY what is going on. If I'm going for a swim in the pool she is at the door before I leave my room. If I'm going to take a walk she is already by my side WITH the leash in her mouth. If I want her out of my way I just ask her to back up and she backs up, if I say move she moves out of the way.
The worst thing is the first three years. Up until age 2 or 3 they can be unholy terrors. They are such mouthy, energetic dogs that they are constantly carrying your shoes, socks, paper, etc around the house and chewing on them. Be prepared to run them to death every day to try to tire them out. A swimming pool is perfect for this, get 2 toys, throw one in and send in the dog, when it gets back wave the second toy and throw it, then you can pick up the first one. Repeat until you have a very tired dog.
Chesapeake Bay Retrievers are a bit more wild and energetic than Labradors but they are also wonderful. Chessies are just as friendly as Labs but they are even WORSE when it comes to taking a break. From what I've experienced most Chessies will work or play until they literally pass out from exhaustion. They are a little dopey but not dumb, it's just that their energy is a bit too much for them to stop to think about what they are doing! They are EXTREMELY trainable and are very protective of children.
You can hardly go wrong with either a Labrador or a Chesapeake Bay Retriever but be prepared to take a lot of walks and swims if you get one!
Free as in you are free to spend your money in hopes of getting a return on your investment.
There are people surfing the web from Europa ???!!!
Wow, and here I was thinking that a latency of a 500 milliseconds was bad, a latency of 1.8 million milliseconds must make surfing the web just unbearable. You'd better not even attempt a game of Unreal Tournament with that net connection...
Ahh, my bad. You didn't mention fusion and I have seen a ton of people who think that burning hydrogen produced from water means free energy.
Still, that sort of power is a ways off. People are just beginning to plan pilot fusion power plants that may produce enough energy to completely offset the generation and transmission losses and be cost-effective. It will happen eventually but it will take some time.
Solar powered microwave transmission satellites are technology that we could build today if we were pushed to do so. Most of the pieces are already there, it would just take someone with vision and guts to assemble them, launch them and start harnessing. Unfortunately the only thing that is going to get that moving is a substantial increase in energy costs. Right now energy is still cheap enough that profits from such a venture would be borderline.
In the article they say that at least some of the buildings are rated for 110 mph winds. That's a pretty substantial hurricane. The problem is that the force on a building goes up with the square of the velocity of the wind. So if you wanted to design a building that could withstand 150 mph winds you would need a lot more structural strength.
Let's say that a wall can withstand 110 mph winds so we set it at a strength of 1. A wall that can withstand 150 mph winds would need a strength of at least:By the time you add in the increased turbulence and other damaging effects of the higher-speed winds you would need a wall at least twice as strong.
It becomes a matter of trade-off. Spend a certain amount on a building that can withstand 110 mph winds or spend double that on a building that can withstand 150 mph winds. Considering that the 110 mph building probably cost a mint in the first place (compared to a lower wind-velocity building) you might just say, "We'll build the 110 mph building and if we get lucky we save some money. If it gets knocked down then we re-build it with the money we saved."
Since the chances of a storm greater than 110 mph directly hitting you are pretty slim this is probably a safe bet. By the time your building is knocked down you would probably have made enough money on your savings to build a better building, not to mention that by that time your old building probably would have had to be refurbished anyways. Also, you will probably receive a substantial amount of insurance money when the building is destroyed.
H2O (water for the few who may not know that...) is a very low energy state for hydrogen. In order to get usable energy from the hydrogen in H2O you first have to split off the hydrogen. This takes energy. Now when you burn the hydrogen you are probably going to burn it with oxygen, producing H2O and energy.
So the cycle would go:The energy you get back will be no more than the energy you put in. Actually, it will most likely be a lot less because of thermodynamics and inefficiencies. If you get back 50% of the energy you used to produce, store, and transport the hydrogen I would be amazed.
At best hydrogen is a fairly clean way of storing energy. You still need to get that energy from somewhere. Today that energy most likely comes from burning fossil fuels. Hopefully in the future we can use beamed microwaves from space stations or other clean methods of producing the energy, which we then store as hydrogen and burn cleanly.
iTMS AAC is a type of VBR known as ABR (Average Bit Rate). Instead of the frames being a variable number of bytes they are instead grouped into blocks of a constant size. This means that you can have variable-sized frames that have a constant, dependable size over the long-run. ABR is pretty much as good as regular VBR but it is a better format for streaming because of the regularity of the average bit rate.
There is an explanation of the formats here.
Hell, my parents have a 400 mHz iMac G3 that was running Mac OS 10.3.5 with 192 MB of RAM and it ran just fine for their purposes. They could surf the web, use e-mail, use Word to read and write documents, play some simple games. The computer was a bit slow in launching apps and if you ran more than a couple of big apps at once things could get slow switching between them but they never needed more than a few apps open at once anyways.
I recently bumped the machine up to 640 MB of RAM because I got a good deal on a 512 MB stick of RAM. It helped but it didn't change the operation of the machine a whole hell of a lot. 256 MB of RAM is just fine for Mac OS X but certainly more RAM is better.
It looks to me like things are already pretty tight in there. Putting a TV tuner and connecters in there might not have been realistically possible due to space considerations. Not only that but it would also add to the already borderline-high cost. Plus that's one more component in an already-crowded set of connectors, the iMac is supposed to a simple consumer-level machine - not a pro level do-everything machine.
However, it is very simple to add this functionality to an iMac. Elgato Systems makes USB and Firewire devices that act as TV tuners, PVRs and analog-to-digital converters. They are very sharp, have great support, and the software works well. So anyone who wants to use their iMac as a TV only have to find the appropriate product model, buy it, and plug it in.
Yeah, more features are great to have in a computer but in this case Apple goes for the most flexibility by not bundling a TV tuner into the iMac.
If the copy operation is as slow as you are mentioning then the disk image that is being restored from probably was not properly prepared and so the image is probably being copied at the file level rather than the block level. This would cause the operation to take a great deal more time. As someone else mentioned, a man page listing of the asr shell tool under Mac OS X will show you a good discussion on optimizing restore speed. Here is a web site with that man page.
Was that "paying" or "laying"? Hmm, I seem to remember quite a few girls giving it out left and right for free at college...
I think maybe it's one of the twelve steps...
Hmm, sounds like high-tech prostitution. I can see it now:
Of course. I was simply "dumbing it down" for any layman who might be reading this. Yes, volume is not quite the proper term for the various interactions that occur when an alpha particle hits other matter but it gets the general idea across. Alpha particles tend to slow down more than beta particles when traveling through dense matter because they interact with the matter more strongly than a beta particle would.
As for the discussion on the radius of curvature, that is a fact that I make use of almost every day. I routinely use a gas chromatograph - mass spectrophotometer which takes ions and categorizes them by how they interact with a magnetic field. If they hit one target they have a certain mass-to-charge ratio, if they hit a different target then they have another ratio. These targets are at different radii along a curve and how strongly the particle curves determines where it ends up. It's quite a neat trick.
Whups, yes you are right. I mistakenly wrote down +1 when I meant +2. Alpha particles have two protons, two neutrons and should have no electrons (assuming they haven't picked up one or two somewhere).
Dunno how I missed that in preview but it happens...
No, beta particles are deflected more in a magnetic field than alpha particles are, all things being equal.
Alpha particles are essentially helium nuclei, they have a charge of +1 and a mass of 4. Beta particles are electrons, they have a charge of -1 and a negligible mass when compared to an alpha particle (each proton is about the mass of 1800 electrons). Gamma particles are high-energy photons with no charge and essentially no mass at all.
When they are ejected in the same direction with the same velocity through a uniform magnetic field it is the beta particle which will be deflected more. This is due to the fact that both particles will have the same force acting upon them, but they have a different mass. Since the alpha particle has much more mass it will be deflected a lot less by the force and so it will curve less than the beta particle. The gamma radiation will not curve at all because photons have no charge and will hardly be affected by a magnetic field.
As for deflection, the alpha particles take up a lot of room. When they encounter other material they are much more likely to have a collision than beta particles which have a very small volume. This means that the alpha particles usually only travel a small distance through a material before slowing down enough to be stopped. Beta particles get slowed down less because they tend to be able to slip right past the atoms (actually past the nuclei) in the material. Gamma particles penetrate the furthest because they really are only captured occasionally by atoms and quite a large percentage will manage to get through even a couple of feet of low-density material.
Well, first of all Wacom is not necessarily the best company to go to for touch screens. Yes they are a decent company but there are many, many more suppliers of this technology. A quick Google search reveals many. I'm not in the field of computer system component integration but I'm certain that a company like Apple could easily find a decent partner at a decent price.
Now, just a quick look around reveals LCD screen overlays costing from around $90 to $110 for a 12.1" screen. I didn't find out what quantity you would need to purchase to get those prices but I'm pretty sure that a major PC manufacturer like Apple could easily get those prices and probably much better because they are dealing in quantity.
So I feel that I can stand on my estimate of a $100 increase, more or less, in price for an Apple laptop with a touch screen over an Apple laptop without a touch screen. All things being equal it is at least a decent ballpark estimate of the costs.
I honestly don't understand why it would be that much more expensive than a regular laptop. The only things different are a hinge that flips around and an overlay which goes on the screen. The flip-around hinge is really just a redesign, that should be a trivial cost, and the overlay is proven technology that has been in use for years. I can't see the overlay costing much more than an extra hundred bucks. That doesn't add too much to the cost when you are talking about a $1000+ machine.
I could easily see Apple taking a 12" iBook, changing the hinge and putting on a touch-sensitive overlay. They already have most of the software to use the tablet in place with Inkwell.