channel attempts are very short compared to a transatlantic swim. it's over in a few hours, whereas you're looking at several weeks in this case.
things to keep in mind:
traditional wetsuits, and especially drysuits are made for diving, not swimming. they are too stiff to swim for more than a few minutes (read: extra effort going nowhere) and cause abrasions / chafing in lots of places (neck and shoulders especially). there are suits made especially for swimming (try Quintana Roo or Ironman Wetsuits), but von Tetzchner is wearing a diving suit.
you can't stock enough supplies for two people in a rubber inflatable.
sharks. you'd probably want to swim in a shark cage.
currents. unless you were totally insane, you'd rather swim with the currents than against them.
You're not exagerating at all. When the first 4WD vehicles came out, there was a sharp increase in accidents. Those idiots didn't realize that just because 4WD climbs better on snow doesn't mean they can go downhill faster. I guess they learned the difference between four-wheel drive and four-wheel brake the hard way.
Another misconception: ABS doesn't shorten the braking distance. In fact, you often need a longer time to stop (depending on the surface). The big difference is that the vehicle remains maneuverable while braking as hard as possible.
IMHO, either make the car run on full autopilot, or give the driver full control and full responsibility. Giving people an excuse for not paying attention is just asking for trouble. Any automatic system that keeps drivers from doing anything stupid will fail due to new levels of stupidity.
Well, I guess it's a good thing to lose customers like that. I mean, if they can't get over some random numbers in their PPP login, how often do they call to complain about that 'Peer' person and how he always resets their connection?
you might also want to check out Helwig Hauser's M.S. thesis from back in 1996. He did about the same thing, just a little prior. Too bad that Mr. Glassner was a bit sloppy with his research and didn't even mention the (published) results from that MS thesis in his own TR.
"photoshopped"? this looks like it was done in MS-Paint... or by people who don't know how to use their tools.
for a professional, it would have been very easy to do this correctly. maybe a ten minute job. but no, someone decided that anyone who knows how to install photoshop can remove the hat. probably either someone from management or the webmaster.
what few people realize is that this is just as bad as writing bad code, because it proves that a company isn't putting the right people on the right job.
Running Photoshop in an emulation layer is not the same as in 'native' Windows, because WINE can possibly alter the colorspace (eg. to fake a 24-bit visual on 16-bit displays). So you can't just calibrate your setup in Windows and hope to get accurate results with the same ICC profile in WINE.
Corel PhotoPaint for Linux can do ICC, and so does Scribus. Not sure on the GIMP side of things, but overall I think at least manual calibration (Adobe Gamma) should give good results.
weight difference aside (i doubt it would be noticeable), the problem is that all rubber tires do lose pressure over time.. not only due to leaking valves, but by diffusion through the rubber itself. for example, latex tubes are stronger and more puncture resistant than other materials, but they leak significantly.
in triathlon races (where you often have to check in the bike on the day before the race) you'll find a lot of people pumping up their bikes on race day morning. not because they've forgotten to do so, but because the overnight pressure loss really is noticeable.
so, the point i'm trying to make is that as far as i know those gases also diffuse through rubber tires very easily, so that you're bound to lose much more pressure over time than with plain air. which translates into higher rolling resistance as the pressure drops, and more stops to pump the tires back up.
i think that the chain is the major weakness. i've had the pleasure of riding with Dan Bull (organizer of the iditasport multisport races in alaska), and when temperatures reach -20F it doesn't take much to kill a chain link. you need to be very careful with changing gears.
by the way, i don't think he's using a belt drive as suggested by another posting; the front chainrings look pretty standard on the picture.
other parts, such as tubes and tires, actually hold up fairly well. i doubt he'll have to deal with a snakebite anyway...
what totally surprised me was that the bottom bracket shells broke on my bike. it's a carbon fiber frame, and the bottom bracket is mounted through steel shells that are glued to the frame.. either the glue went brittle, or there was too much stress due to different expansion coefficients. bottom line: if you're rinding in extreme temperatures, composite materials may not be the best idea.
when it comes to boots,
bunny boots are the way to go. you don't really need
any SPD or other pedaling system, and those boots are awesome in really cold conditions. in fact, the metal parts of the SPD pedals would make a perfect thermal conductor from the outside (pedal) all the way to the shoe's insole (where the adapter is mounted), no matter how much insulation you wrap around the shoes. cold feet are guaranteed!
very simple, actually. you need to populate the mirrors.
yes, "creative surfing" may get you to the most recent release notes on some of the mirrors, and the release files might be there as well. but as long as there are sites that haven't been updated yet people will pound on the other mirrors even more.
*cough*slashdot effect*cough*
so, please give the freebsd folks a fair chance of populating all the mirrors. if you really can't wait for the hottest release, you have have been tracking -stable via cvsup anyway.
Well, DDoS works because a large number of attacks can be concentrated on one host, causing a total shutdown of the target.
One simple way to prevent this: Have a large number of hosts in the DNS RR for said site, and either loosely synchronize them (P2P networks come to mind) or perhaps tunnel valid requests to a secure, central site unknown to the public. In this case, attacking one of the publically availanle sites via DDoS does not effect much. One of the hosts in the RR doesn't work, but if there are 10 hosts that would be a disruption for only 10% of all accesses.Attacks on the central site are very difficult, as its address is unknown and appropriate filters would be in place.
This idea certainly isn't perfect; it works for web sites, but hosts that are necessarily unique (such as corporate firewalls) could still be attacked. But it shows that there are indeed research opportunities and solutions that can be (at least theoretially) put in place with current technology.
those finishline cams have been available for
most (if not all) races of the Ironman series for quite some time now. the site that's covering them
(live.ironmanlive.com) also provides updates during the race, including up-to-date swim/bike/run split times. (for my performance at Ironman California this year, look for athlete #213:-)
I tried to find more technical info on the sportvision homepage, but a quick glance didn't reveal any specifics on their approach.
see, for example,
The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their
Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement,
though.
right. what those games needed was a way to issue
complex commands quickly, without taking your hands off the input device (or eyes away from the screen).
and for the very same reason, gestures have become an integral part of Alias|Wavefront's Maya (the successor of the infamous PowerAnimator). the gestures take a bit to learn, but once you've got them wired you'll never look back. i know a few artists who have completely removed all of Maya's menu bars and buttons - no need to clutter your screen real estate when everything is available by hitting blank and a few strokes with your pen/mouse. needless to say, their productivity has improved dramatically, and they keep complaining about having to use 'traditional' menus in all those other applications.
Due to a last-minute problem (a build error, not
a bug with KDE or FreeBSD itself) which was discovered with the KDE packages on the Intel architecture ISO image for 4.2-RELEASE, I've updated the image at:
I also took the opportunity to include the windowmaker package, which was mistakenly left
off (and referenced by one of FreeBSD's canned
Desktop profiles).
The new MD5 checksum for this image is:
MD5 (4.2-install.iso) = 7eec8a2e4bc2211fccf18b5a6fd5b55e
If you do not have any interest in installing the KDE desktop or windowmaker and you have already grabbed the previous installation ISO
then you can safely ignore this announcement; nothing else was changed.
Apologies to everyone who downloaded the first ISO image and had an unsatisfactory KDE experience. Excrement occurs.
personally, what i'd like to see is not one single distribution, but more control over what goes where when installing packages. i've been one of the minimal install, compile everything else from source guys in the past because that let me control where things went. which is especially nice if you have a heterogenous set of machines (say, irix+linux because that's where i'm coming from) and want to use the same file layout everywhere. of course this is overkill for the 'standard' user who doesn't bother as long as everything works, but it's sort of the same problem we are facing with all the different distributions.
i guess a possible solution would beself-installing packages that can figure out where to put things on their own (sort of like autoconf'ed sources).. or a common package format that all distributions can handle cleanly, together with a reasonably configurable installer for those who do bother.
could be. what i think that's happening though is that they've realized that most companies toss their DB and use one of the big players (oracle, informix, db2,...) instead. i suppose the development and support doesn't really pay off, but they also can't just go ahead and dump their DB and tell people that they'll have to shell out even more big $$$ for a DB backend.
solution: make it open source, let the general public fix the bugs and create new versions instead. their in-house developers can then go back to working on R3.
According to informations from the german computer magazine c't, the SAP company will make an announcement tomorrow at the LinuxWorld conference in Frankfurt. They will publish their database ('SAP DB') under the GPL (or LGPL) license. Up to now, this database has been mainly used together with the company's flagship product, SAP R3. However, R3 also provides interfacing to other database systems like Informix, Oracle or DB2. SAP DB is the first large scale software product whose source code has been made public by SAP.
i suppose those spores aren't an alien life form like the article implies. it sounds far more plausible that the spores have been on the spacecraft before liftoff and mutated into their current form over time. that would explain why they can be related to other fungus found on earth.
besides, how high is the mir's orbit? i guess chances are that it's well within the (rapidly thinning, but still) earth's atmosphere.
CMG has replied to the article; here's a translation of the essentials:
Only a single company has been notified by CMG
of the trademark infringement; CMG has asked
this one company to cease and desist.
CMG has developed SAMBA (Standard Anwendung
Meldewesen Banken) over several years with
considerable investments, and successfully
positioned SAMBA as the leading software
product in this field in Germany. The name
"SAMBA" has been registered at the german
patent office under number 2070029 on 7-5-94,
reference ) 16491/9 Wz.
The intention of CMG is to avoid confusion
between their own SAMBA product and the open
source software Samba. Obviously both products
serve entirely different needs, but confusion
by non-experts is easy, leading to disadvantages
for both sides.
CMG's actions are only aimed at protecting
their name "SAMBA" and not against the open
source community in general. CMG does not intend
to harm the Unix- or Linux-world or the open
source community, but indeed welcomes those
movements. It is not CMG's goal to avoid the
development or distribution of the open source
product "Samba" in general; only the name is
an issue.
It has been found that an australian IT-company
is responsible for the name; CMG will contact
this company and try to find a mutually
acceptable solution that avoids future
confusion in germany.
At the same time, CMG will stop its actions
against the company that has been contacted;
said company had merely been offering support
for the open source software Samba. CMG also
currently does not plan to take actions against
other german companies. After all, CMG does
not intend to harm other (open source) companies
or limit the distribution or use of those
products.
CMG would like to emphasize again that trademark
protection is a legitimate action of all businesses, especially if the establishment of the
product has required considerable investments.. this is also proven by the fact that the developer Volker Lendecker has registered the Samba logo as a picture trademark last year (as has been pointed out in the Heise article).
i suppose that's because nowadays nobody writes very much any more. at least i've noticed that when i don't write the ancient, pen-and-paper way for a while, it definitely degrades, and sometimes i even start using Palm graffiti strokes instead.
ouch.
anyway, my prediction is that as tablet devices and handwriting recognition become more suitable in some areas (esp. with devices too small to have a Proper Keyboard), regular usage will lead to better performance. that's the human adapting to the computer. this may be ethically challenging - after all, it's still the computers that should adapt to human needs - but much easier to achieve than vice versa:o)
Slashdot Mirror
things to keep in mind:
- traditional wetsuits, and especially drysuits are made for diving, not swimming. they are too stiff to swim for more than a few minutes (read: extra effort going nowhere) and cause abrasions / chafing in lots of places (neck and shoulders especially). there are suits made especially for swimming (try Quintana Roo or Ironman Wetsuits), but von Tetzchner is wearing a diving suit.
- you can't stock enough supplies for two people in a rubber inflatable.
- sharks. you'd probably want to swim in a shark cage.
- currents. unless you were totally insane, you'd rather swim with the currents than against them.
by the way, here's a guy who actually did it.You're not exagerating at all. When the first 4WD vehicles came out, there was a sharp increase in accidents. Those idiots didn't realize that just because 4WD climbs better on snow doesn't mean they can go downhill faster. I guess they learned the difference between four-wheel drive and four-wheel brake the hard way. Another misconception: ABS doesn't shorten the braking distance. In fact, you often need a longer time to stop (depending on the surface). The big difference is that the vehicle remains maneuverable while braking as hard as possible. IMHO, either make the car run on full autopilot, or give the driver full control and full responsibility. Giving people an excuse for not paying attention is just asking for trouble. Any automatic system that keeps drivers from doing anything stupid will fail due to new levels of stupidity.
Well, I guess it's a good thing to lose customers like that. I mean, if they can't get over some random numbers in their PPP login, how often do they call to complain about that 'Peer' person and how he always resets their connection?
you might also want to check out Helwig Hauser's M.S. thesis from back in 1996. He did about the same thing, just a little prior. Too bad that Mr. Glassner was a bit sloppy with his research and didn't even mention the (published) results from that MS thesis in his own TR.
"photoshopped"? this looks like it was done in MS-Paint... or by people who don't know how to use their tools. for a professional, it would have been very easy to do this correctly. maybe a ten minute job. but no, someone decided that anyone who knows how to install photoshop can remove the hat. probably either someone from management or the webmaster.
what few people realize is that this is just as bad as writing bad code, because it proves that a company isn't putting the right people on the right job.
Running Photoshop in an emulation layer is not the same as in 'native' Windows, because WINE can possibly alter the colorspace (eg. to fake a 24-bit visual on 16-bit displays). So you can't just calibrate your setup in Windows and hope to get accurate results with the same ICC profile in WINE.
Corel PhotoPaint for Linux can do ICC, and so does Scribus. Not sure on the GIMP side of things, but overall I think at least manual calibration (Adobe Gamma) should give good results.
This is an IBM Manual scroll.--More--
You are permanently confused.
preview.officedepot.com is quite prominently being announced as "the new officedepot.com", so maybe it's actually going to replace the old server.
in triathlon races (where you often have to check in the bike on the day before the race) you'll find a lot of people pumping up their bikes on race day morning. not because they've forgotten to do so, but because the overnight pressure loss really is noticeable.
so, the point i'm trying to make is that as far as i know those gases also diffuse through rubber tires very easily, so that you're bound to lose much more pressure over time than with plain air. which translates into higher rolling resistance as the pressure drops, and more stops to pump the tires back up.
other parts, such as tubes and tires, actually hold up fairly well. i doubt he'll have to deal with a snakebite anyway...
what totally surprised me was that the bottom bracket shells broke on my bike. it's a carbon fiber frame, and the bottom bracket is mounted through steel shells that are glued to the frame.. either the glue went brittle, or there was too much stress due to different expansion coefficients. bottom line: if you're rinding in extreme temperatures, composite materials may not be the best idea.
when it comes to boots, bunny boots are the way to go. you don't really need any SPD or other pedaling system, and those boots are awesome in really cold conditions. in fact, the metal parts of the SPD pedals would make a perfect thermal conductor from the outside (pedal) all the way to the shoe's insole (where the adapter is mounted), no matter how much insulation you wrap around the shoes. cold feet are guaranteed!
yes, "creative surfing" may get you to the most recent release notes on some of the mirrors, and the release files might be there as well. but as long as there are sites that haven't been updated yet people will pound on the other mirrors even more.
*cough*slashdot effect*cough*
so, please give the freebsd folks a fair chance of populating all the mirrors. if you really can't wait for the hottest release, you have have been tracking -stable via cvsup anyway.
Well, DDoS works because a large number of attacks can be concentrated on one host, causing a total shutdown of the target.
One simple way to prevent this: Have a large number of hosts in the DNS RR for said site, and either loosely synchronize them (P2P networks come to mind) or perhaps tunnel valid requests to a secure, central site unknown to the public.
In this case, attacking one of the publically availanle sites via DDoS does not effect much. One of the hosts in the RR doesn't work, but if there are 10 hosts that would be a disruption for only 10% of all accesses.Attacks on the central site are very difficult, as its address is unknown and appropriate filters would be in place.
This idea certainly isn't perfect; it works for web sites, but hosts that are necessarily unique (such as corporate firewalls) could still be attacked. But it shows that there are indeed research opportunities and solutions that can be (at least theoretially) put in place with current technology.
easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds
enjoy!
those finishline cams have been available for most (if not all) races of the Ironman series for quite some time now. the site that's covering them (live.ironmanlive.com) also provides updates during the race, including up-to-date swim/bike/run split times. (for my performance at Ironman California this year, look for athlete #213 :-)
I tried to find more technical info on the sportvision homepage, but a quick glance didn't reveal any specifics on their approach.
see, for example, The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement, though.
right. what those games needed was a way to issue complex commands quickly, without taking your hands off the input device (or eyes away from the screen).
and for the very same reason, gestures have become an integral part of Alias|Wavefront's Maya (the successor of the infamous PowerAnimator). the gestures take a bit to learn, but once you've got them wired you'll never look back. i know a few artists who have completely removed all of Maya's menu bars and buttons - no need to clutter your screen real estate when everything is available by hitting blank and a few strokes with your pen/mouse. needless to say, their productivity has improved dramatically, and they keep complaining about having to use 'traditional' menus in all those other applications.
personally, what i'd like to see is not one single distribution, but more control over what goes where when installing packages. i've been one of the minimal install, compile everything else from source guys in the past because that let me control where things went. which is especially nice if you have a heterogenous set of machines (say, irix+linux because that's where i'm coming from) and want to use the same file layout everywhere. of course this is overkill for the 'standard' user who doesn't bother as long as everything works, but it's sort of the same problem we are facing with all the different distributions.
i guess a possible solution would beself-installing packages that can figure out where to put things on their own (sort of like autoconf'ed sources).. or a common package format that all distributions can handle cleanly, together with a reasonably configurable installer for those who do bother.
beziehungsweise conj 1. (oder aber) or. 2. (im anderen Fall) and ... respectively. 3. (genauer gesagt) or rather, or that is to say.
could be. what i think that's happening though is that they've realized that most companies toss their DB and use one of the big players (oracle, informix, db2, ...) instead. i suppose the development and support doesn't really pay off, but they also can't just go ahead and dump their DB and tell people that they'll have to shell out even more big $$$ for a DB backend.
solution: make it open source, let the general public fix the bugs and create new versions instead. their in-house developers can then go back to working on R3.
if this announcement is correct, this is the real deal. the complete, full-featured and unencumbered product.
According to informations from the german computer magazine c't, the SAP company will make an announcement tomorrow at the LinuxWorld conference in Frankfurt. They will publish their database ('SAP DB') under the GPL (or LGPL) license. Up to now, this database has been mainly used together with the company's flagship product, SAP R3. However, R3 also provides interfacing to other database systems like Informix, Oracle or DB2. SAP DB is the first large scale software product whose source code has been made public by SAP.
i suppose those spores aren't an alien life form like the article implies. it sounds far more plausible that the spores have been on the spacecraft before liftoff and mutated into their current form over time. that would explain why they can be related to other fungus found on earth.
besides, how high is the mir's orbit? i guess chances are that it's well within the (rapidly thinning, but still) earth's atmosphere.
- Only a single company has been notified by CMG
of the trademark infringement; CMG has asked
this one company to cease and desist.
- CMG has developed SAMBA (Standard Anwendung
Meldewesen Banken) over several years with
considerable investments, and successfully
positioned SAMBA as the leading software
product in this field in Germany. The name
"SAMBA" has been registered at the german
patent office under number 2070029 on 7-5-94,
reference ) 16491/9 Wz.
- The intention of CMG is to avoid confusion
between their own SAMBA product and the open
source software Samba. Obviously both products
serve entirely different needs, but confusion
by non-experts is easy, leading to disadvantages
for both sides.
- CMG's actions are only aimed at protecting
their name "SAMBA" and not against the open
source community in general. CMG does not intend
to harm the Unix- or Linux-world or the open
source community, but indeed welcomes those
movements. It is not CMG's goal to avoid the
development or distribution of the open source
product "Samba" in general; only the name is
an issue.
- It has been found that an australian IT-company
is responsible for the name; CMG will contact
this company and try to find a mutually
acceptable solution that avoids future
confusion in germany.
- At the same time, CMG will stop its actions
against the company that has been contacted;
said company had merely been offering support
for the open source software Samba. CMG also
currently does not plan to take actions against
other german companies. After all, CMG does
not intend to harm other (open source) companies
or limit the distribution or use of those
products.
CMG would like to emphasize again that trademark protection is a legitimate action of all businesses, especially if the establishment of the product has required considerable investments.. this is also proven by the fact that the developer Volker Lendecker has registered the Samba logo as a picture trademark last year (as has been pointed out in the Heise article).ouch.
anyway, my prediction is that as tablet devices and handwriting recognition become more suitable in some areas (esp. with devices too small to have a Proper Keyboard), regular usage will lead to better performance. that's the human adapting to the computer. this may be ethically challenging - after all, it's still the computers that should adapt to human needs - but much easier to achieve than vice versa :o)