I agree, and it's worth adding that the "message back" the original poster's refering to is an immediate direct response from the network to the handset, at time of sending, not a second SMS message: If the message fails, you're told straight off by the handset.
Also reliability (here in the UK) partly depends on your network and which of their SMS service center numbers you're using.
A few months in with my first GSM handset way-back-when I started getting regular 'message failed' notices and called network customer services on what was then Cellnet (now O2) they recommended I change my service center number as the preset I was using had become oversubscribed, and the center unreliable.
I switched to another service number (they gave me six to try) the problem cleared up right away and since then (which is about four and a half years) I rarely if ever get a fail notice (at most about one every couple of months) and then only at peak times...
So far as I can tell from speaking with/emailing the people I text, the messages *always* get through.
Problems on US networks sound to me like teething troubles with immature GSM systems: give it a year or so to shake down, and for your service providers to get the distribution of service centers right etc. and SMS should be as reliable as anything else.
Paramount Comedy over here in the UK finally started showing Moonlighting in the mornings again a few months back, and now that I have satelite not cable I can actually TiVo it (for reasons best know to flextech, Paramount only airs from 7pm on Paramount which is annoying) *anyway* I'm not sure why but they started airing it from the middle of season 3 (the eps recorded after the big unexplained production delays back in the 80s) I hadn't seen the show since I was about 12 either and eagerly started watching again... it was hugely disapointing: the spark I remembered flickered for a few eps and then fizzled completely, then (just as I was about to delete the season pass) Paramount started back from the first episode - it's now unmissable, my housemate to whom I'd raved about this show now understands why and until we catch back up with the end of season three (in a couple of weeks' time: it's on every weekday) we have some first rate TV... then I'll delete the pass, put the show back into the box marked 'fond memories' and try to forget that there were another three season's worth of shows made that never should have been.
To drag this kicking and screaming back on-topic, This is the kind of thing Farscape fans should be saved from by letting the show bow out gracefully - ending while it's still worth caring about is sad, but much less sad than having it trundle on for years getting gradually worse and losing its fan base until it's remembered as just another worn out Sci Fi series.
The John and Erin(sp?) romance is kinda getting stale anyway. I just want to scream "Fuck already David and Mattie!"
interesting choice of analogy there: Moonlighting 'Jumped the Shark' when David and Maddie got it on, no matter how rosy your memories of the show are, the blunt fact is that after season 3 the show just wasn't itself anymore.
Personally I lost the plot with Farscape when my cable went out for two months and I came back to find half the caharcters gone and a bunch of new ones, but the consensus seems to be that (as yet) it's remained innovative, fresh, and insanely watchable.
For my money bowing the show out now is probably best. Sure it's sad when things end, but end they must eventually, and it's FAR better when they do it before they've started to rot.
PS the (sp?) - you got Erin right but Maddie wrong: it's two 'd's not two 't's... There should be a David Addison-esque line there but I can't think of one...
who's "bashing?" the article's about some idiot breaking an NDA and being sued (this is news why? btw) but nobody's bashing contractors here, relax pal.
Linking a 'limited edition' 1000 run stand as an example of the "comercial offerings" is intersting. afaik this is the ONLY commecrial stand out there and is aimed at the kind of poser who'd use it in the first-place.
um, I mightn't have mentioned it by name or linked it but I hadn't forgotten it - it's the emulator I was talking about "firing up" (together with the excellent 'Amiga Forever' which I bought at the same time as my Mac) though I wish someone would get on with getting the OS X version out of beta - it's on sourceforge and surely it can't be that hard since X is essentially UNIX after all? If any of you coder-types put the finishing touches to that project I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the only person whose eternal gratitude would be earned...
good point about the webgraphics - I still use PPaint under emulation for web work where I want to keep the memory/bandwidth overheads down, but since it runs just fine under emulation on the PowerBook I never boot up the old 1200 anymore (I still use the CD32 sometimes sometimes) for day-to-day computing however its time has passed.
fair comment on the missing features, the browsers are indeed dated (see my other post) but amiga software was never expensive, and isn't all unsupported or inadequate.
As for "Misery loves company" - thanks for finally explaining to me why milions use windows;)
out of curiosity what keeps you using yours? as someone who only bailed out a little over a year ago (and thought I was among the last to give up by a long looong way!) I'm curious. I bought the OS updates, accelerated and expanded my little A1200 almost beyond recognition and still found it lagged too far behind the crowd - for example I wanted to be able to use a web browser that rendered most pages I viewed faithfully and quickly, and I just couldn't find one (AWeb, Voyager and iBrowse are all valiant efforts but the latest versions are also each a good five years behind the likes of Chimera and OmniWeb)
I bought a G4 PowerBook cheap through work (I'm in education/information management) moved to Mac OS X and never looked back, later the same week the only other remaining Amiga user I knew switched full time to Linux on a second hand x86 set up which is what worked for him (he's a programmer)... both of us were dyed in the wool Amigans who'd *really* invested in our machines and the platform, even contributed to the "community", so I'm not talking about a couple of guys who gave up at the first signs of trouble back in '92... we moved on becuase in the end there was nothing left keeping us there.
This isn't a dig, it's a real question - I'm genuinely very glad to hear that 'the old girl' is still working out for some people, I just can't for the life of me think what's keeping you there besided inertia? I'd be interested to hear what it is that makes up for all that you (indisputably) miss out on by sticking with it.
You're right that it's probably doomed to failure but your dismissal of its "partial Amiga binary compatibility" is *way* off base - this thing CAN'T run old Amiga games because it doesn't have the custom chipset, besides how many gamers are going to want to pay good money to run games that are at least ten years old?
What this machine and OS CAN run is the majority of serious Apps the Amiga has/had, and believe me there were/are tonnes, including stuff like Lightwave for example, as well as a host of other excellent creative/productivity software you'll almost certainly never have heard of, some of which still puts modern apps to shame: Wordworth 7 vs Word anyone? or Photogenics vs Photoshop? these applications were tightly programmed, smart, user friendly and incredibly feature rich, they're still more than capable of holding their own against much of the bloatware we're stuck with on other platforms...
Bearing in mind that there are corners of the video induistry where you'll still find dusty old A2000/4000 Toasters as the main creative workhorses, this could be interesting in a very limited niche way - I'd love to see how Lightwave performed on one of these in comparison to an x86 box for example.
All those arguments aside though, you missed the main reason why this venture is doomed which is (imho) that its declared target market has largely vanished. I'm an ex-Amigan myself and interesting though this is I wont be shelling out for one in a million years, it's VERY expensive for what it is, and only just keeps pace with the competition in terms of modern features. I held out with my modified A1200 until just over a year ago, so I reckon I qualify as being about as die-hard a user as they come (before insanity/fanaticism creeps in at least) if even people like me have moved on (and are now very happily using stuff like Mac OS X, and investing in a different hardware platform) then there can't be a viable market left for these boxes beyond the fanatics and (well off) nostalgics. The rest of us will either dismiss it because it's ancient history that we never bothered to learn (like you have) or shrug sadly and fire up our emulators (which incidentally can run most of the old games as well)
once again I can't speak for the US but on the RARE occasions that a movie screens here without ads (which are after all only at the start, I mean it's not like they're interrupting your viewing...) the sole reason is that nobody wants to pay to advertise before it, usually either because it's a low budget flick, or because it's no-longer considered "hot property"
strange but true: not everything is a government/big business conspiracy.
besides you're not exactly "forced" to watch the adverts anyway, close your eyes, stick your head in your popcorn, make out with your date... oh yeah, right, this is Slashdot, never mind...;)
I can't speak for the standard of ads where you are but here in the UK we often get ads which are specifically done for the cinema and *some* are really pretty good...
that said, if you don't like the ads, turn up 10 minutes late for the movie, problem solved.
suspense
n 1: apprehension about what is going to happen
2: an uncertain cognitive state; "the matter remained in
suspense for several years"
3: excited anticipation of an approaching climax; "the play
kept the audience in suspense"
look at that third def. for a minute, even when you know the plot of a play, you can still be said to be kept in suspense by a good performance: Similarly there's an element of suspense in sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see *how* the film will portray the sequence of events in a plot you already know inside out...
In this case, I think suspense is the right word to have used given the context of the 'to pirate or not to pirate?' question, since seeing a second rate ripped copy would entirely deflate that sense of anticipation, robbing you of a big part of that first viewing thirll.
me? I'll be watching on the biggest screen I can find:)
Pay per View is a limited type of Video on Demand but they're not one and the same - VoD services allow you to chose specific content, "on demand" i.e. what you want to watch when you want to watch it.
Pay per View on the other hand, is a label applied to limited VoD-like services such as sportiung events and films where you pay for a one off showing of the content, either whenever it happens to be broadcast (with sports) or at one of the limited number of allocated slots in which it's re-broadcast (with Pay per View films)
With a true VoD service the user isn't limited in this way, programming is stored and retrieved as and when required... if you've ever used anything liek a TiVo you'll appreciate the difference.
well said, although off the top of my head, I can't think of many breakthroughs which came from theories that *didn't* sound really bizarre at the time...
incidentally your argument works equally well the other way up: just because most crackpots are crackpots, doesn't negate the fact that breakthroughs are often made with really bizarre sounding theories.;)
seriously, while I see your point about it being a shame to squash 'the little guy' - the big-bad corporate behemoths are the only ones with the muscle to pull off a network on the scale the article talks about.
Besides which I don't quite see how this network would "spoil" those small co-operative nets you're talking about, they're free right? this isn't, so people who want free access and are prepared to live with the limitations of a local scale use the litlle guys' free nets, people who want national (or better yet, international!) roaming, cough up the subscription and use the big-bad corporations' commercial net.
see, no need to incinerate yourself modifying your combination grill, so put the spanner down before you take someone's eye out;)
"CONCLUSIVE" proof of anything is impossible. One day I expect we'll have gathered enough information to be able to settle comfortably on one martian theory over the others, but the whole point about science is that you don't get to *know* the answers, you just have to keep asking the questions.
In that light this is an interesting article: personally I still think the atmospheric therories carry more wieght, but this is an interesting new way of asking the Mars question all the same.
Real advances are often the product of what someone in an earlier post refered to as "National Enquirer Science", which might more neutrally be called "thinking outside the box"
my flatmate and I both use OmniWeb 4.1 (on different machines) both bank online (through a total of four different banks) and have no difficulties what so ever in doing so.
In my experience OmniWeb only fails to render a page correctly very *very* rarely, certainly no more frequently (in its current incarnation) than IE5 did last time I used it for any length of time, and far less frequently than the only other candidate I've any experience with: Netscape 7 (which I'm stuck using on the Mac at work - blech!)
This of course just demonstrates the core of the "Problems with [the] article" which is that we all browse different combinations of a bewildering number of sites, most of which are undergoing almost constant editing and reconstruction, so we all have different experiences... *shrugs* happily I've found the browser that works for me.
Can anyone explain the fascination with running OS X on non-Apple hardware? the beauty of OS X (imho) is that it finally offers elegantly designed and powerful software for elegantly designed and powerful hardware, why the urge to stick it in some nasty biege box?
I too played with one of these first hand - my folks were both senior teachers at the time and one of them brought the whole rig home for the summer, We were lucky enough to have two BBC B Micros in the house at the time (for the uninitiated there were four BBC branded Micros, the 'A', the 'B' (by far the most common and also the unit pictured in the BBC News article) 'Master', and 'Master-Compact') so I was already pretty familiar with 'em
Doomesday was run from a BBC Master with a gigantic Video-Disc player. The content was all accessed through a custom interface since the file system the Beebs used was text-only and would have been nightmarish to navigate... as far as I know all the maps, video data etc. could have been coded into two files, one on each disc, so I can understand that you'd need a Beeb to be able to get at the content, what I don't understand is what the fuss is about here? I've had BBC emulators pretty much ever since I stopped using 'real live' BBCs - Acorns RISC based machines (the Archimedes series) all came with BBC Micro emulation as standard, later I ran emulators on my Amiga, and and I currently have a shareware BBC emulator kicking about on the hard drive of my PowerBook, unless I'm mistaken the only real innovation here is perhaps in tweaking the software or drivers into life on the emulator - the em.s themselves are very VERY old news
nice that it's being done though
Re:You Americans are funny sometimes...
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1
um, you mean your pants are on fire?;p
Diesel and Gasolene/Petrol 101 ;)
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1
Not sure I can give you a complete answer here but here goes: in reverse order
2) the difference between Diesel and UL Petrol/Gasolene - as I understand it, diesel is a completely different petroleum derivative, a different fraction of crude oil, which comes from a different refining process (perhaps there's someone out there whose knowledge here goes further than mine) a quick scan of everything2 suggests that the difference lies in gasolene (Petrol in the UK) being primarily composed of Octane which has eight carbon atoms per molecule while Diesel is primarily composed of Cetane, which has sixteen carbons to the molecule, my cehemistry is far too rusty to explain this any further but it does explain why UK registration docs refer to diesel burners as fueled on 'heavy oil' - since the extra carbon makes diesel heavier
1) why the EPA emission ratings for diesels are consistently poor - I'm guessing here but the *potential* for higher particulate carbon emissions would seem the likely culprit - I don't know what the EPA's standards are so I'm a little in the dark but Diesel's naturally tend toward a higher soot content in the exhaust - probably what you're smelling, though it's equally possible that you're reacting to the sulphur dioxide (? - rotten egg) that gasolene fueled cars with catalytic converters produce when it's cold and damp (as it so often is here!) in which case the different exhaust smell has nothing to do with the diesels... stab in the dark here: EPA guidelines are wieghted against vehicles with higher particulate carbon output (soot) and not other, arguably more dangerous compound pollutants such as Sulphur Monoxide, Carbon Monoxide etc.
it's worth noting that modern diesels use higher pressure compression than their forebears (through direct injection and/or common rail techniques) and that this renders the carbon particles emitted much smaller than would normally be considered 'soot' by you or I...
hope this helps:)
Patrick
Re:You Americans are funny sometimes...
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1
um, wrong actually, I'm guessing you're doing the usual trick of equating 'UK' with 'England'? I'm talking about Scotland where traffic density isn't quite as insane, and you do indeed get clear stretches, especially on small roads through the hills.
incidentally there are a total of two speed cameras on my entire route and niether are out on the 'unrestricted' "A" road, they're both in the city (where the traffic gets much denser but still flows, at least at the times I'm driving) that said getting caught on a camera doing 80 in an unrestricted zone, while quite illegal, is also common practice and would be unlikely to result in a fine, let alone a ban. For better or worse very few people rigidly adhere to the speed limit in any country when they know they can safely get away eith it...
however you're missing the point - it wasn't about speeding, it was about the fact that modern diesel engined cars are (or at least can be) a helluva lot of fun to drive
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and it's worth adding that the "message back" the original poster's refering to is an immediate direct response from the network to the handset, at time of sending, not a second SMS message: If the message fails, you're told straight off by the handset.
Also reliability (here in the UK) partly depends on your network and which of their SMS service center numbers you're using.
A few months in with my first GSM handset way-back-when I started getting regular 'message failed' notices and called network customer services on what was then Cellnet (now O2) they recommended I change my service center number as the preset I was using had become oversubscribed, and the center unreliable.
I switched to another service number (they gave me six to try) the problem cleared up right away and since then (which is about four and a half years) I rarely if ever get a fail notice (at most about one every couple of months) and then only at peak times...
So far as I can tell from speaking with/emailing the people I text, the messages *always* get through.
Problems on US networks sound to me like teething troubles with immature GSM systems: give it a year or so to shake down, and for your service providers to get the distribution of service centers right etc. and SMS should be as reliable as anything else.
Paramount Comedy over here in the UK finally started showing Moonlighting in the mornings again a few months back, and now that I have satelite not cable I can actually TiVo it (for reasons best know to flextech, Paramount only airs from 7pm on Paramount which is annoying) *anyway* I'm not sure why but they started airing it from the middle of season 3 (the eps recorded after the big unexplained production delays back in the 80s) I hadn't seen the show since I was about 12 either and eagerly started watching again... it was hugely disapointing: the spark I remembered flickered for a few eps and then fizzled completely, then (just as I was about to delete the season pass) Paramount started back from the first episode - it's now unmissable, my housemate to whom I'd raved about this show now understands why and until we catch back up with the end of season three (in a couple of weeks' time: it's on every weekday) we have some first rate TV... then I'll delete the pass, put the show back into the box marked 'fond memories' and try to forget that there were another three season's worth of shows made that never should have been.
To drag this kicking and screaming back on-topic, This is the kind of thing Farscape fans should be saved from by letting the show bow out gracefully - ending while it's still worth caring about is sad, but much less sad than having it trundle on for years getting gradually worse and losing its fan base until it's remembered as just another worn out Sci Fi series.
ta. I'll sleep better for that ;)
The John and Erin(sp?) romance is kinda getting stale anyway. I just want to scream "Fuck already David and Mattie!"
... There should be a David Addison-esque line there but I can't think of one...
interesting choice of analogy there: Moonlighting 'Jumped the Shark' when David and Maddie got it on, no matter how rosy your memories of the show are, the blunt fact is that after season 3 the show just wasn't itself anymore.
Personally I lost the plot with Farscape when my cable went out for two months and I came back to find half the caharcters gone and a bunch of new ones, but the consensus seems to be that (as yet) it's remained innovative, fresh, and insanely watchable.
For my money bowing the show out now is probably best. Sure it's sad when things end, but end they must eventually, and it's FAR better when they do it before they've started to rot.
PS the (sp?) - you got Erin right but Maddie wrong: it's two 'd's not two 't's
who's "bashing?" the article's about some idiot breaking an NDA and being sued (this is news why? btw) but nobody's bashing contractors here, relax pal.
Quicktime 6 is the player
:)
MPEG-4 is the format
Linking a 'limited edition' 1000 run stand as an example of the "comercial offerings" is intersting. afaik this is the ONLY commecrial stand out there and is aimed at the kind of poser who'd use it in the first-place.
me? I keep mine in my pocket where it belongs.
um, I mightn't have mentioned it by name or linked it but I hadn't forgotten it - it's the emulator I was talking about "firing up" (together with the excellent 'Amiga Forever' which I bought at the same time as my Mac) though I wish someone would get on with getting the OS X version out of beta - it's on sourceforge and surely it can't be that hard since X is essentially UNIX after all? If any of you coder-types put the finishing touches to that project I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the only person whose eternal gratitude would be earned...
good point about the webgraphics - I still use PPaint under emulation for web work where I want to keep the memory/bandwidth overheads down, but since it runs just fine under emulation on the PowerBook I never boot up the old 1200 anymore (I still use the CD32 sometimes sometimes) for day-to-day computing however its time has passed.
fair comment on the missing features, the browsers are indeed dated (see my other post) but amiga software was never expensive, and isn't all unsupported or inadequate.
;)
As for "Misery loves company" - thanks for finally explaining to me why milions use windows
out of curiosity what keeps you using yours? as someone who only bailed out a little over a year ago (and thought I was among the last to give up by a long looong way!) I'm curious. I bought the OS updates, accelerated and expanded my little A1200 almost beyond recognition and still found it lagged too far behind the crowd - for example I wanted to be able to use a web browser that rendered most pages I viewed faithfully and quickly, and I just couldn't find one (AWeb, Voyager and iBrowse are all valiant efforts but the latest versions are also each a good five years behind the likes of Chimera and OmniWeb)
I bought a G4 PowerBook cheap through work (I'm in education/information management) moved to Mac OS X and never looked back, later the same week the only other remaining Amiga user I knew switched full time to Linux on a second hand x86 set up which is what worked for him (he's a programmer)... both of us were dyed in the wool Amigans who'd *really* invested in our machines and the platform, even contributed to the "community", so I'm not talking about a couple of guys who gave up at the first signs of trouble back in '92... we moved on becuase in the end there was nothing left keeping us there.
This isn't a dig, it's a real question - I'm genuinely very glad to hear that 'the old girl' is still working out for some people, I just can't for the life of me think what's keeping you there besided inertia? I'd be interested to hear what it is that makes up for all that you (indisputably) miss out on by sticking with it.
You're right that it's probably doomed to failure but your dismissal of its "partial Amiga binary compatibility" is *way* off base - this thing CAN'T run old Amiga games because it doesn't have the custom chipset, besides how many gamers are going to want to pay good money to run games that are at least ten years old?
What this machine and OS CAN run is the majority of serious Apps the Amiga has/had, and believe me there were/are tonnes, including stuff like Lightwave for example, as well as a host of other excellent creative/productivity software you'll almost certainly never have heard of, some of which still puts modern apps to shame: Wordworth 7 vs Word anyone? or Photogenics vs Photoshop? these applications were tightly programmed, smart, user friendly and incredibly feature rich, they're still more than capable of holding their own against much of the bloatware we're stuck with on other platforms...
Bearing in mind that there are corners of the video induistry where you'll still find dusty old A2000/4000 Toasters as the main creative workhorses, this could be interesting in a very limited niche way - I'd love to see how Lightwave performed on one of these in comparison to an x86 box for example.
All those arguments aside though, you missed the main reason why this venture is doomed which is (imho) that its declared target market has largely vanished. I'm an ex-Amigan myself and interesting though this is I wont be shelling out for one in a million years, it's VERY expensive for what it is, and only just keeps pace with the competition in terms of modern features. I held out with my modified A1200 until just over a year ago, so I reckon I qualify as being about as die-hard a user as they come (before insanity/fanaticism creeps in at least) if even people like me have moved on (and are now very happily using stuff like Mac OS X, and investing in a different hardware platform) then there can't be a viable market left for these boxes beyond the fanatics and (well off) nostalgics. The rest of us will either dismiss it because it's ancient history that we never bothered to learn (like you have) or shrug sadly and fire up our emulators (which incidentally can run most of the old games as well)
once again I can't speak for the US but on the RARE occasions that a movie screens here without ads (which are after all only at the start, I mean it's not like they're interrupting your viewing...) the sole reason is that nobody wants to pay to advertise before it, usually either because it's a low budget flick, or because it's no-longer considered "hot property"
;)
strange but true: not everything is a government/big business conspiracy.
besides you're not exactly "forced" to watch the adverts anyway, close your eyes, stick your head in your popcorn, make out with your date... oh yeah, right, this is Slashdot, never mind...
I can't speak for the standard of ads where you are but here in the UK we often get ads which are specifically done for the cinema and *some* are really pretty good...
that said, if you don't like the ads, turn up 10 minutes late for the movie, problem solved.
from WordNET
:)
suspense
n 1: apprehension about what is going to happen
2: an uncertain cognitive state; "the matter remained in
suspense for several years"
3: excited anticipation of an approaching climax; "the play
kept the audience in suspense"
look at that third def. for a minute, even when you know the plot of a play, you can still be said to be kept in suspense by a good performance: Similarly there's an element of suspense in sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see *how* the film will portray the sequence of events in a plot you already know inside out...
In this case, I think suspense is the right word to have used given the context of the 'to pirate or not to pirate?' question, since seeing a second rate ripped copy would entirely deflate that sense of anticipation, robbing you of a big part of that first viewing thirll.
me? I'll be watching on the biggest screen I can find
Pay per View is a limited type of Video on Demand but they're not one and the same - VoD services allow you to chose specific content, "on demand" i.e. what you want to watch when you want to watch it.
Pay per View on the other hand, is a label applied to limited VoD-like services such as sportiung events and films where you pay for a one off showing of the content, either whenever it happens to be broadcast (with sports) or at one of the limited number of allocated slots in which it's re-broadcast (with Pay per View films)
With a true VoD service the user isn't limited in this way, programming is stored and retrieved as and when required... if you've ever used anything liek a TiVo you'll appreciate the difference.
well said, although off the top of my head, I can't think of many breakthroughs which came from theories that *didn't* sound really bizarre at the time...
;)
incidentally your argument works equally well the other way up: just because most crackpots are crackpots, doesn't negate the fact that breakthroughs are often made with really bizarre sounding theories.
Constructive. no really.
;)
seriously, while I see your point about it being a shame to squash 'the little guy' - the big-bad corporate behemoths are the only ones with the muscle to pull off a network on the scale the article talks about.
Besides which I don't quite see how this network would "spoil" those small co-operative nets you're talking about, they're free right? this isn't, so people who want free access and are prepared to live with the limitations of a local scale use the litlle guys' free nets, people who want national (or better yet, international!) roaming, cough up the subscription and use the big-bad corporations' commercial net.
see, no need to incinerate yourself modifying your combination grill, so put the spanner down before you take someone's eye out
"CONCLUSIVE" proof of anything is impossible. One day I expect we'll have gathered enough information to be able to settle comfortably on one martian theory over the others, but the whole point about science is that you don't get to *know* the answers, you just have to keep asking the questions.
In that light this is an interesting article: personally I still think the atmospheric therories carry more wieght, but this is an interesting new way of asking the Mars question all the same.
Real advances are often the product of what someone in an earlier post refered to as "National Enquirer Science", which might more neutrally be called "thinking outside the box"
Interesting.
my flatmate and I both use OmniWeb 4.1 (on different machines) both bank online (through a total of four different banks) and have no difficulties what so ever in doing so.
In my experience OmniWeb only fails to render a page correctly very *very* rarely, certainly no more frequently (in its current incarnation) than IE5 did last time I used it for any length of time, and far less frequently than the only other candidate I've any experience with: Netscape 7 (which I'm stuck using on the Mac at work - blech!)
This of course just demonstrates the core of the "Problems with [the] article" which is that we all browse different combinations of a bewildering number of sites, most of which are undergoing almost constant editing and reconstruction, so we all have different experiences... *shrugs* happily I've found the browser that works for me.
Can anyone explain the fascination with running OS X on non-Apple hardware? the beauty of OS X (imho) is that it finally offers elegantly designed and powerful software for elegantly designed and powerful hardware, why the urge to stick it in some nasty biege box?
I too played with one of these first hand - my folks were both senior teachers at the time and one of them brought the whole rig home for the summer, We were lucky enough to have two BBC B Micros in the house at the time (for the uninitiated there were four BBC branded Micros, the 'A', the 'B' (by far the most common and also the unit pictured in the BBC News article) 'Master', and 'Master-Compact') so I was already pretty familiar with 'em
Doomesday was run from a BBC Master with a gigantic Video-Disc player. The content was all accessed through a custom interface since the file system the Beebs used was text-only and would have been nightmarish to navigate... as far as I know all the maps, video data etc. could have been coded into two files, one on each disc, so I can understand that you'd need a Beeb to be able to get at the content, what I don't understand is what the fuss is about here? I've had BBC emulators pretty much ever since I stopped using 'real live' BBCs - Acorns RISC based machines (the Archimedes series) all came with BBC Micro emulation as standard, later I ran emulators on my Amiga, and and I currently have a shareware BBC emulator kicking about on the hard drive of my PowerBook, unless I'm mistaken the only real innovation here is perhaps in tweaking the software or drivers into life on the emulator - the em.s themselves are very VERY old news
nice that it's being done though
um, you mean your pants are on fire? ;p
Not sure I can give you a complete answer here but here goes: in reverse order
:)
2) the difference between Diesel and UL Petrol/Gasolene - as I understand it, diesel is a completely different petroleum derivative, a different fraction of crude oil, which comes from a different refining process (perhaps there's someone out there whose knowledge here goes further than mine) a quick scan of everything2 suggests that the difference lies in gasolene (Petrol in the UK) being primarily composed of Octane which has eight carbon atoms per molecule while Diesel is primarily composed of Cetane, which has sixteen carbons to the molecule, my cehemistry is far too rusty to explain this any further but it does explain why UK registration docs refer to diesel burners as fueled on 'heavy oil' - since the extra carbon makes diesel heavier
1) why the EPA emission ratings for diesels are consistently poor - I'm guessing here but the *potential* for higher particulate carbon emissions would seem the likely culprit - I don't know what the EPA's standards are so I'm a little in the dark but Diesel's naturally tend toward a higher soot content in the exhaust - probably what you're smelling, though it's equally possible that you're reacting to the sulphur dioxide (? - rotten egg) that gasolene fueled cars with catalytic converters produce when it's cold and damp (as it so often is here!) in which case the different exhaust smell has nothing to do with the diesels... stab in the dark here: EPA guidelines are wieghted against vehicles with higher particulate carbon output (soot) and not other, arguably more dangerous compound pollutants such as Sulphur Monoxide, Carbon Monoxide etc.
it's worth noting that modern diesels use higher pressure compression than their forebears (through direct injection and/or common rail techniques) and that this renders the carbon particles emitted much smaller than would normally be considered 'soot' by you or I...
hope this helps
Patrick
um, wrong actually, I'm guessing you're doing the usual trick of equating 'UK' with 'England'? I'm talking about Scotland where traffic density isn't quite as insane, and you do indeed get clear stretches, especially on small roads through the hills.
incidentally there are a total of two speed cameras on my entire route and niether are out on the 'unrestricted' "A" road, they're both in the city (where the traffic gets much denser but still flows, at least at the times I'm driving) that said getting caught on a camera doing 80 in an unrestricted zone, while quite illegal, is also common practice and would be unlikely to result in a fine, let alone a ban. For better or worse very few people rigidly adhere to the speed limit in any country when they know they can safely get away eith it...
however you're missing the point - it wasn't about speeding, it was about the fact that modern diesel engined cars are (or at least can be) a helluva lot of fun to drive