Can you describe a few of these times? I'm being serious... as a novice work worker and DIY home improvement and maintenance guy, I find using mixed fractions very annoying.
You need to drill a hole to put a bolt through. You drill it 1/64th bigger than the bolt's outer diameter. Bolt slides in easy without wiggle. To get the same effect with (small) metric holes, you need to smash your drill press to make it spin non-true, as metric drills usually just come in 0.5mm gradations. Exactitude demands more!
After using them for a while, the fractions become second nature and you can usually guess which wrench etc you need by application and looking at it.. and that's a pleasant day. Also exact calculations in your head are easier (possible) in fractions than in floating point.
Most/many of the free US Gov't datasets that were online have been taken offline for more same-old reasons. Politics & corporate lobbying.
One part "if someone can sell you a CD with gov't data on it, and their big parent company can make campaign contributions, we won't give it away for free anymore"; one part bandwidth costs (tiny fraction of data collection costs WRT satellite data for instance); and one part ideology driven governance (see rant below).
All this great data (with zero terrorist potential) used to be online. Now it's gone. Chronically underfunded scientists and grad students can't get access, and the public loses.
I'm not sure if many people have noticed, but federal research budgets of gov't programs that publish scientific data which doesn't support the ideas of the current administration have been gutted. Global warming doesn't exist if you turn off all the thermometers! Bloody la-la land.
NASA's budget has been micromanaged by congress for ages, leaving it a floundering mess. Now the executive branch is dictating what the NSF and NOAA scientists can publish (no funding=no research=no publish). [/rant]
Golden opportunity to try and load some of this non-threatening geospatial data with our very own free software GIS. Model your neighborhood in 3D with high resolution Space Shuttle topography radar mission (STRM) elevation data!
Installing Debian via Knoppix should solve most of those problems.
Debian isn't really the most newbie-friendly distribution. It's really by, of, and for linux developers and professionals (which is why once you get your head around the way things are done, bolts of sunlight start to shine out of every ventilation hole of your Debian box, and life is good). You might have a much more satisfying experience at first by installing say Lycoris instead (Debian back-end with user-friendly front-end).
"For my own part, I consider it nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery...It is only this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country... Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt...An appeal to arms and the God of Hosts is all that is left us!... Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three million people, armed in the Holy cause of Liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.
Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Still in active use: IEC power cable off of something that cost $60,000 25 years ago. It & some components off the PCB were the only thing worth salvaging.
My boss makes me dispose of such things as he remembered blowing the year's budget to buy it way back when.
And we've got a couple (dual drive) osborne's kicking around that still work, but aren't used much. The 300 baud handset modem is just a curiosity on the shelf..
Why not just use Speak-freely? It's non-vapor, public domain code, works really well, and doesn't have for-profit sleaze-ware hooks. The UNIX client talks to the Windows client without fuss, and overseas sound quality is usually better than the real telephone. Even on 56k dial-up. It'll work just fine on a 486 too. NASA used it to communicate with the Space Shuttle on several missions.
Maintainership is in transition, but the package is already mature so that's not too big a worry.
old homepage: http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/ new homepage: http://speak-freely.sourceforge.net/
Long live speak-freely, thanks to free software! (it rocks; Linux users be sure to grab the tcl/tk frontend)
I guess the thing to remember is that even if it is slightly wasteful and self serving, people are boing helped. The wastefil & self serving bit is all too often used as an excuse to do nothing.
I guess the thing to remember is that even if it is slightly wasteful and self serving, people are boing helped. The wastefil & self serving bit is all too often used as an excuse to do nothing.
And one traditional silliness about solar power is that by the time you actual install it, the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells.
Now that's just not true. The breakpoint is somewhere year 3-4. Add to that the solar panels made from reject chip maker silicon, and the energy is already spent anyway.
It's a bit ancillary though, as PV is generally deployed in areas where line-volatage would take buldozers and trench diggers a few days of disturbance and many dollars to equip.
which is why it is generally used where the utility isn't, or is very expensive (eg getting new poles put in just for you is tens of grands).
And it's worse for the environment too with the silicon production chemicals
I think you are thinking of the super-high efficiency gallium arsenide solar cells used on sattelites, etc. Nasty stuff, but they're very niche. Many Si PV cells are actually made from reject microchip batches, which otherwise would of been wasted.
No worse than the byproduts of creating the CPU in your computer, anyway.
No, the main problem is that unless you are generating your power using only renewable resources, you are likely causing a disproportionately high amount of pollution.
That means running a noisy diesel generator.. and it pretty much kills the serene nature bit if used for anything but emergency backup I can tell you.
A good balance of wind (for the low pressure weather systems) and solar (for the high pressure systems) pretty much keeps you covered regardless of natural variability. Most off the grid homes use laptops & super efficient Norwegian refrigerators, so you can survive off your deep-cycle batteries for quite a long time during lulls in generation.
Sure. And any 2nd year electrical engineering student should be able to set the thing up.
Trick is to know enough so the circuit is designed so you don't fry the delicate piece of equipment.
You can do all sorts of stuff with a PC serial/parallel/joystick port. Add the flexability of linux & X windows.. Actually X is a bit underated for this sort of stuff..
See the lirc.org page for some easy places to start.
$ apt-cache search accessibility at-spi - Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface at-spi-doc - Documentation files of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility ayttm - All in one Instant Messaging client, forked from Everybuddy falconseye - A port of NetHack using SDL falconseye-data - Data files for Falcon's Eye gnome-accessibility-themes - GNOME 2 accessibility themes lg-issue49 - Issue 49 of the Linux Gazette. libatk1.0-0 - The ATK accessibility toolkit libatk1.0-data - Common files for the ATK accessibility toolkit libatk1.0-dbg - The ATK libraries and debugging symbols libatk1.0-dev - Development files for the ATK accessibility toolkit libatk1.0-doc - Documentation files for the ATK toolkit libatspi-dev - Development files of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility libatspi1.0-0 - C binding libraries of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility libgail-common - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- common modules libgail-dbg - Gail libraries and debugging symbols libgail-dev - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- development files libgail-doc - Documentation files of Gail library libgail-gnome-dbg - libgail-gnome library and debugging symbols libgail-gnome-dev - Development files of libgail-gnome libgail-gnome-module - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Module for GnomeUI/BonoboUI libgail17 - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- the shared libraries stalin - An extremely aggressive Scheme compiler xkbset - Small utility to change the AccessX settings of XKEYBOARD. cl-faq - This package contains Common Lisp-related FAQs w3-recs - [EBOOK-DEV] Recommendations of the W3 w3-recs-2002 - [EBOOK-DEV] Recommendations of the W3 - Year 2002
What the hell is he trying to say with that sentence?
Charities and institutions like to quantify widgets delivered and present nice boxes with ribbons on them to sick kids in the hospital.
aka throw money at the problem.
While Linux may be brilliantly suited for folks in real need - due to the custom setups available for people who really need or want them - it doesn't really fit into the image of a valued product you can buy off the shelf and present with a smile in a PR photo. eg: Microsoft 'donating' "Billions $$" of MS software gets way better press & recognition than an open source developer writing a program that delivers most of the worlds email, for Free. Which leaves more for humanity as their legacy?
The word of mouth thing among the families should really help the cause.
A lot of the antarctic ice acts as both a buffer and a buttress keeping the highly thermally conductive ocean waters away from the continental ice shelves. You remove the buttresses, the 2+ mile thick ice on land starts to move seaward disturbingly quickly.
While any melting ice is "bad" as it means warmer, less dense oceans [less dense oceans mean they expand, and there's only one way to go, up], melting sea ice doesn't strictly add the the volume of the ocean (Archimedes Principal), but land-ice flowing into the sea in fast moving "glacial rivers" do add to the total volume.
Also sea ice that is so thick it is resting on the ocean floor doesn't follow Archimedes Principal & adds to the volume somewhat.
Larsen B broke off Antarctica a year or so back, for what it's worth. The Ross Sea Ice shelf has been half broken and stuck for about the last two years. Chances are it'll go "poof" early next year.
Also consider Earth's reduced albedo due to having darkish water not reflective snow to bounce off. Lot more heat from the sun is absorbed into the system.
Hello, this is the first stab at a prototype, not the exact future economics of the energy industry.
Cut em some slack. The technology is in its infancy and still has lots of room to grow. Contrast that to the I.C.E., which matured ages ago & hasn't really done anything new in my lifetime anyway.
I think it is amazing that at this early stage they are nearing the point of breaking even on some of these points with the very mature automobile industry's best efforts.
All the "is isn't ready *now* so it must be useless and doomed to failure" talk around here really gets my gnu.
How much emission does manufacturing 6800 lithium-ion batteries produce?
Considerably less than you create if you try to produce the same amount of car kinetics with a gasoline powered engine. Not only is the electric version more efficient, you also are running the powerplant (& if it is a fossil fueled one) at a much higher efficency than what a car runs at. The power company loses money if their system isn't running at peak operating efficiency.. and power companies don't like that.
You also control emmissions at a point source, which makes it much easier to monitor & clean with large & expensive pollution scrubbing devices which would be impractable to attach to a car.
Even with power-line losses, the electric model is cleaner. Just not as practical, yet. As this article demonstrates though, the situation is improving all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep an eye on handhelds.org
This will open you up to 10,000 free software packages.
You need to drill a hole to put a bolt through. You drill it 1/64th bigger than the bolt's outer diameter. Bolt slides in easy without wiggle. To get the same effect with (small) metric holes, you need to smash your drill press to make it spin non-true, as metric drills usually just come in 0.5mm gradations. Exactitude demands more!
After using them for a while, the fractions become second nature and you can usually guess which wrench etc you need by application and looking at it.. and that's a pleasant day. Also exact calculations in your head are easier (possible) in fractions than in floating point.
That's not the half of it.
Most/many of the free US Gov't datasets that were online have been taken offline for more same-old reasons. Politics & corporate lobbying.
One part "if someone can sell you a CD with gov't data on it, and their big parent company can make campaign contributions, we won't give it away for free anymore"; one part bandwidth costs (tiny fraction of data collection costs WRT satellite data for instance); and one part ideology driven governance (see rant below).
All this great data (with zero terrorist potential) used to be online. Now it's gone.
Chronically underfunded scientists and grad students can't get access, and the public loses.
I'm not sure if many people have noticed, but federal research budgets of gov't programs that publish scientific data which doesn't support the ideas of the current administration have been gutted. Global warming doesn't exist if you turn off all the thermometers! Bloody la-la land.
NASA's budget has been micromanaged by congress for ages, leaving it a floundering mess. Now the executive branch is dictating what the NSF and NOAA scientists can publish (no funding=no research=no publish).
[/rant]
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
http://grass.ibiblio.org
STRM is new, so get the CVS version if you want access to the latest auto-load & clean scripts. View with NVIZ.
cool stuff.
Installing Debian via Knoppix should solve most of those problems.
Debian isn't really the most newbie-friendly distribution. It's really by, of, and for linux developers and professionals (which is why once you get your head around the way things are done, bolts of sunlight start to shine out of every ventilation hole of your Debian box, and life is good). You might have a much more satisfying experience at first by installing say Lycoris instead (Debian back-end with user-friendly front-end).
FY [slightly OT] I,
There's a mature VOIP multi-platform already out there. Now under new management, but still Free.
Speak-Freely
linux/unix \ MS windows
It rocks. Much lighter than GnomeMeeting, but full featured multi codec + strong encryption.
Linux people get be sure to get the Tcl/Tk GUI...
make that 592.
sigh...
Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775
damn fine..
Still in active use:
IEC power cable off of something that cost $60,000 25 years ago. It & some components off the PCB were the only thing worth salvaging.
My boss makes me dispose of such things as he remembered blowing the year's budget to buy it way back when.
And we've got a couple (dual drive) osborne's kicking around that still work, but aren't used much. The 300 baud handset modem is just a curiosity on the shelf..
Why not just use Speak-freely? It's non-vapor, public domain code, works really well, and doesn't have for-profit sleaze-ware hooks. The UNIX client talks to the Windows client without fuss, and overseas sound quality is usually better than the real telephone. Even on 56k dial-up. It'll work just fine on a 486 too. NASA used it to communicate with the Space Shuttle on several missions.
Maintainership is in transition, but the package is already mature so that's not too big a worry.
old homepage:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
new homepage:
http://speak-freely.sourceforge.net/
Long live speak-freely, thanks to free software!
(it rocks; Linux users be sure to grab the tcl/tk frontend)
I guess the thing to remember is that even if it is slightly wasteful and self serving, people are boing helped. The wastefil & self serving bit is all too often used as an excuse to do nothing.
good on 'ya.
I guess the thing to remember is that even if it is slightly wasteful and self serving, people are boing helped. The wastefil & self serving bit is all too often used as an excuse to do nothing.
good on 'ya.
Replace spam with greenhouse gasses and you've got something.
One kWh currently runs at around 8 cents, plus around roughly another 30% for taxes and equipment charges
... plus $76 billion up front.
And one traditional silliness about solar power is that by the time you actual install it, the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells.
Now that's just not true.
The breakpoint is somewhere year 3-4. Add to that the solar panels made from reject chip maker silicon, and the energy is already spent anyway.
It's a bit ancillary though, as PV is generally deployed in areas where line-volatage would take buldozers and trench diggers a few days of disturbance and many dollars to equip.
typically MORE expensive than the utility!
which is why it is generally used where the utility isn't, or is very expensive (eg getting new poles put in just for you is tens of grands).
And it's worse for the environment too with the silicon production chemicals
I think you are thinking of the super-high efficiency gallium arsenide solar cells used on sattelites, etc. Nasty stuff, but they're very niche. Many Si PV cells are actually made from reject microchip batches, which otherwise would of been wasted.
No worse than the byproduts of creating the CPU in your computer, anyway.
No, the main problem is that unless you are generating your power using only renewable resources, you are likely causing a disproportionately high amount of pollution.
That means running a noisy diesel generator.. and it pretty much kills the serene nature bit if used for anything but emergency backup I can tell you.
A good balance of wind (for the low pressure weather systems) and solar (for the high pressure systems) pretty much keeps you covered regardless of natural variability. Most off the grid homes use laptops & super efficient Norwegian refrigerators, so you can survive off your deep-cycle batteries for quite a long time during lulls in generation.
Sure. And any 2nd year electrical engineering student should be able to set the thing up.
.. Actually X is a bit underated for this sort of stuff..
Trick is to know enough so the circuit is designed so you don't fry the delicate piece of equipment.
You can do all sorts of stuff with a PC serial/parallel/joystick port. Add the flexability of linux & X windows
See the lirc.org page for some easy places to start.
$ apt-cache search accessibility
at-spi - Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface
at-spi-doc - Documentation files of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility
ayttm - All in one Instant Messaging client, forked from Everybuddy
falconseye - A port of NetHack using SDL
falconseye-data - Data files for Falcon's Eye
gnome-accessibility-themes - GNOME 2 accessibility themes
lg-issue49 - Issue 49 of the Linux Gazette.
libatk1.0-0 - The ATK accessibility toolkit
libatk1.0-data - Common files for the ATK accessibility toolkit
libatk1.0-dbg - The ATK libraries and debugging symbols
libatk1.0-dev - Development files for the ATK accessibility toolkit
libatk1.0-doc - Documentation files for the ATK toolkit
libatspi-dev - Development files of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility
libatspi1.0-0 - C binding libraries of at-spi for GNOME Accessibility
libgail-common - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- common modules
libgail-dbg - Gail libraries and debugging symbols
libgail-dev - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- development files
libgail-doc - Documentation files of Gail library
libgail-gnome-dbg - libgail-gnome library and debugging symbols
libgail-gnome-dev - Development files of libgail-gnome
libgail-gnome-module - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Module for GnomeUI/BonoboUI
libgail17 - GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- the shared libraries
stalin - An extremely aggressive Scheme compiler
xkbset - Small utility to change the AccessX settings of XKEYBOARD.
cl-faq - This package contains Common Lisp-related FAQs
w3-recs - [EBOOK-DEV] Recommendations of the W3
w3-recs-2002 - [EBOOK-DEV] Recommendations of the W3 - Year 2002
What the hell is he trying to say with that sentence?
Charities and institutions like to quantify widgets delivered and present nice boxes with ribbons on them to sick kids in the hospital.
aka throw money at the problem.
While Linux may be brilliantly suited for folks in real need - due to the custom setups available for people who really need or want them - it doesn't really fit into the image of a valued product you can buy off the shelf and present with a smile in a PR photo. eg: Microsoft 'donating' "Billions $$" of MS software gets way better press & recognition than an open source developer writing a program that delivers most of the worlds email, for Free.
Which leaves more for humanity as their legacy?
The word of mouth thing among the families should really help the cause.
namely the preservation of life, liberty, and property?
The Declaration of Independance speaks of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Constitution changes that to property.
Apparently Jefferson wasn't too happy to find out about the change, which happened after his edit.
I leave the meaning of the change to the imagination of the reader.
Ref: the 5th, and two other places in the Const.
fluxbox is pretty good. use rxvt as a xterm too.
Since Sudbury, Ontario.
A lot of the antarctic ice acts as both a buffer and a buttress keeping the highly thermally conductive ocean waters away from the continental ice shelves. You remove the buttresses, the 2+ mile thick ice on land starts to move seaward disturbingly quickly.
While any melting ice is "bad" as it means warmer, less dense oceans [less dense oceans mean they expand, and there's only one way to go, up], melting sea ice doesn't strictly add the the volume of the ocean (Archimedes Principal), but land-ice flowing into the sea in fast moving "glacial rivers" do add to the total volume.
Also sea ice that is so thick it is resting on the ocean floor doesn't follow Archimedes Principal & adds to the volume somewhat.
Larsen B broke off Antarctica a year or so back, for what it's worth. The Ross Sea Ice shelf has been half broken and stuck for about the last two years. Chances are it'll go "poof" early next year.
Also consider Earth's reduced albedo due to having darkish water not reflective snow to bounce off. Lot more heat from the sun is absorbed into the system.
Hello, this is the first stab at a prototype, not the exact future economics of the energy industry.
Cut em some slack. The technology is in its infancy and still has lots of room to grow. Contrast that to the I.C.E., which matured ages ago & hasn't really done anything new in my lifetime anyway.
I think it is amazing that at this early stage they are nearing the point of breaking even on some of these points with the very mature automobile industry's best efforts.
All the "is isn't ready *now* so it must be useless and doomed to failure" talk around here really gets my gnu.
How much emission does manufacturing 6800 lithium-ion batteries produce?
Considerably less than you create if you try to produce the same amount of car kinetics with a gasoline powered engine. Not only is the electric version more efficient, you also are running the powerplant (& if it is a fossil fueled one) at a much higher efficency than what a car runs at. The power company loses money if their system isn't running at peak operating efficiency.. and power companies don't like that.
You also control emmissions at a point source, which makes it much easier to monitor & clean with large & expensive pollution scrubbing devices which would be impractable to attach to a car.
Even with power-line losses, the electric model is cleaner. Just not as practical, yet. As this article demonstrates though, the situation is improving all the time.