a slug isnt a unit of mass. Mind you, thats the problem with imperial - you confuse mass and force, and use pounds for both.
You were the one comparing it to stones, GOOGLE aparently thinks there are two distinct units of measure called slugs, one being a unit of mass, the other being a unit of force. Given that you want the unit of force, here is GOOGLE's formula for converting to foot-pounds: 1 slug = 9.67412023 x 10^17 foot-pounds , or for metric units 1 slug = 1.31163458 x 10^18 Newton meters
I submitted this to the Editor on duty, but aparently not in time. Fairbanks has over 80,000 people, not just 12,000 that the battery is capable of supporting for 7 minutes. Alaska is rural, but not so rural that its second largest city only has 12,000 people.
FYI - I had family living in Fairbanks for a while so here is some trivia regarding the weather there:
Everyone must have three plug-in heaters in their car, one for the oil pan, one for the radiator, and one for the battery. All major shopping centers have outdoor outlets to plug your car into while you shop.
In addition to being wicked cold, their is essentially 0% humidity, this results in extremely high risk of static shock. And on a cold day you can actually throw hot coffee in the air and it fall to the ground as instant coffee.
The whole city is built on permafrost, so for any major construction they have to sink pilings into the ground to support the buidling once its ambient heat melts the soil below it.
The city is south of the arctic circle by a couple hundred miles, but there is small mountain nearby that if you drive to the top you can see the sun for 24 hours straigh on the summer soltice. THe favorite solstice activity is a city wide charity run.
In the Winter, there is nearby town that holds an annual statewide contest to guess when the river will melt sufficiently to allow a bouy to float freely. This event is called "break-up".
I'd much rather these porting efforts concentrated on providing ports of the OS to inexpensive existing PDA's rather than trying to build their own hardware and then effectively charging a premium to run a "free" OS. I'll pay $20 - $30 to run Linux on my PDA - I won't pay $100.
During the peak of the blaster virus I firerd up IE (which of course was still set to the default homwpage) in order to go the MS update site. Well MSN which loaded into the browser as far as I could tell said nothing on the homepage on the blaster worm. You'd think that since this was a worm directed at MS itself that at a minimum there'd be a banner ad warning people to upgrade and if they were serious a forced push of the update to my machine as soon as I visited any MS controlled website (except maybe MSNBC or ESPN.com).
Instead of just pushing the upgrade on the people that visit their sites, they want to start by pushing to every user on the Net? Give it a go at MSN and Microsoft.com first and see what reaction you get before you make it mandatory - oh and another idea - make patches that don't require reboots.
Yeah, the article sites the cost of repaving at "$325,000 per lane mile." whic makes me wonder a couple of things, how long will that last until repaving, what is the per year cost of maintenance (pot-hole repair, re-striping, etc.), and WHY THE HELL DOES THE CONGRESS THINK AMTRAK SHOULDN'T BE SUBSIDIZED?
Sorry about yelling, but seriously, If AMTRAK needs a $3B/year subsidy that is 1500 miles of 6 lane highway - or about the cost to repave I-95 North to south.
Or You Could Run Yourself!
on
The "Techie" Vote?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the Dean campaign shows that it is media access that makes the biggest difference in getting an unknown launched, and techs are the media of the 21st century.
alternatively you could just take some screenshots of the page while the license agreement is showing.
And what OS will the screenshot software be running on? Obviously not Windows. While it seems theoretically possible that you could install an OS such as Knoppix, and then on top of that a VMware type ap from which you could launch the Windows install-on-initial-boot routine, it seems like it would take a lot of trial and error to get right, and any one error might cost you $199. Since you can get cameras for a lot less that $199, or may already have a camera, I think I would rather go with that.
The author spends a lot of time talking about his inability to document the license and the provisions he didn't want to agree to. Perhaps he could save a lot of trouble by just photographing or videotaping the license. I'd reccommend both because its easier to get a hard copy for court of the still photo, and you might want the video to provide evidence you selected NO and then reformatted the drive and then installed an alternate OS.
Another choice might be to boot into Demolinux or Knoppix, then open the license file and print it. This combined with videotaping the process from opening the box to installation of Linux on the then formatted drive would be pretty convincing.
Per his description of small claims court the judge isn't going to want to watch the video anyway, but having it might convince the company to refund or settle out of court.
Lindows, SO CLOSE. Please (or Knoppix) someone take the OS-on-CD to the next level. Yes having Knoppix and LindowsCD is great, but no one wants to have to setup their mail settings each and every time the system reboots.... As an alternative...flashram? A CF reader and a 32MB card cost what, $25 on the street? More than enough to keep mail settings, bookmarks, etc.
With these drives coming in sizes up to 1 gigabyte now - it makes a pretty good option for even more than saving your settings, you could even keep all your email on there, and maybe a few favorite apps so you don't have to pull them down over the network all the time.
The drawback I see is that being (mostly)USB 1.x based (and the two Webstation models seem to both only have USB 1.x ports) the throughput is much slower than an ethernet connection to a local server and is actually slower than some cable modem connections to the Internet.
As to these Webstations - I'd would want either a DVD or CD-RW drive (or combo-drive) instead of a plain CD if I were going to get it for home use. With a high-speed CD-RW drive you could use it much as you would any other low-end Linux PC - except you wouldn't use the CD-RW for caching.
While I think a watch is one of the ideal places to keep a data device - since you always have it with you (the other being a keychain), I don't see the point of paying a $100+ premium for a fashionable one over a functional one - no matter what you are going to be considered a geek for wearing one these, that you paid $295 for a Fossil branded PalmOS watch versus $179 for a Abacus branded one, only makes you look like a geek that is careless with his money.
The camera can take 640x480 shots even though they don't fit on the screen. And has "movie recorder" software, I'd like specs on its movie recording capability. If it can take 320x240 MPEGs at 30fps I'm buying one as soon as they are released. If its some weird file format, or less than 20 fps, or not at least 320x240 I'll wait and buy a real digital movie camera instead.
Since it was Carl Linnaeus that is considered the "Father of Taxonomy" it only seems appropriate that Linus & and Linux play a role on bringing it into the 21st century.
is that this doesn't require a separate piece of equipment.
The cue:cat provided the additional piece of equipment free of charge, I don't see how that is any less of a problem than requiring purchase of a specific brand of phone. You maight an argument that the cue:cat wasn't good for use outside the home, but the new cell phone system doesn't sound particularly handy inside the home (though I know use of the sell phone as your home phone is much more common in Europe than in the US.)
The main problem with both systems is the threat to your privacy, will activating the link be traceable to your cell phone number? The main complaint about Cue:cat wasn't availabity of the scanner (in fact most people considered that its best feature since once they disabled it they had a free scanning wand) the problem was that they wanted you to register it so every use could be tracked back to you (though they claimed it would only be tracked to your demographic data - not your actual personal name & address.)
Sniffer was a commercial product from then Network General and came out at least by 1987. But they called it "The Sniffer" , which seems to have more of a brandname like sound to it.
And another Usenet post shows that at least as early as 1994 they were quite conscious of its growing use as a generic term and tried to deter it.
Maybe they should have been more proactive in stopping it use as a generic term, but it is a fine line to walk for companies since getting to be the "Kleenex" of your market niche makes you the defacto standard.
This very brief cNet article implies it is a scanner as well, but their description seems off so they may just misunderstand the product.
But if you consider that scanning is an inherent property of the device to help determine is current movement and distance from the printing surface, then it seems adding a scanning function would not require a major change to the hardware if any.
Having both in the same handheld device would be useful as it would make it a true multifunction device able to scan, print, copy, and (wirelessly linked to your cell phone) even fax. Of course a decent quality digital camera incorporated into your bluetoothed enabled phone could be combined with a print only device to also cover all these functions.
BTW, if they aren't currently doing this, I claim prior art for any future attempts to do so and release the idea into the public domain.
Re:Broken Angels available in Canada & _US_
on
Altered Carbon
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· Score: 1
My mistake, you can get it in paperback as well. Though it appears both the hardback and paperback are through Amazon resellers not from Amazon itself.
Re:Broken Angels available in Canada & _US_
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
The article says the discoverers think the find in Ethiopia supports the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, and that the bones are similar enough to modern huimans to be classified as Homo sapiens but a different (ancestral) subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu - idaltu meaning "elder" in the local tribal language.
An curious thing about the find is that the sculls were found but without the bodies, or even the jawbones. Other evidence indicates they some of the sculls may have been used in a ritual, or possibly be the victims of cannibalism.
I still use Rabbit Ears, but here in DC even with about 10 on air channels we still have channels 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13 and a host of UHF channels that are vacant.
When these frequencies have all been taken up by alternative uses, which I expect would take well past the cutover to Digital broadcast, then you can start talking about ending analog broadcast.
It was my understanding that analog broadcast was going to be phased out in 2006 anyway once the broadcasters had been given time to switchover to digital and consumer prices for digital receivers had come down to the roughly the same as analog receivers.
I was under the impression that most college libraries carry Nature.
Yes, I'm sure many do have subscriptions to it. Which doesn't conflict with my statement. My point was that both tthe website, like the print version, requires a subscription to read - that might be your own subscription or someone elses.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some references (best that I could find on short notice):
a slug isnt a unit of mass. Mind you, thats the problem with imperial - you confuse mass and force, and use pounds for both.
You were the one comparing it to stones, GOOGLE aparently thinks there are two distinct units of measure called slugs, one being a unit of mass, the other being a unit of force. Given that you want the unit of force, here is GOOGLE's formula for converting to foot-pounds: 1 slug = 9.67412023 x 10^17 foot-pounds , or for metric units 1 slug = 1.31163458 x 10^18 Newton meters
Slugs are worse then stones.... Slugs are used somewhere in physics to make rocket science as hard as it is.
.
Well, thanks to Google calculator that should no longer be a problem: 1 stone = 0.435133302 slugs
1 slug = 32.1740486 pounds or 14.5939029 kilograms
I submitted this to the Editor on duty, but aparently not in time. Fairbanks has over 80,000 people, not just 12,000 that the battery is capable of supporting for 7 minutes. Alaska is rural, but not so rural that its second largest city only has 12,000 people.
FYI - I had family living in Fairbanks for a while so here is some trivia regarding the weather there:
Everyone must have three plug-in heaters in their car, one for the oil pan, one for the radiator, and one for the battery. All major shopping centers have outdoor outlets to plug your car into while you shop.
In addition to being wicked cold, their is essentially 0% humidity, this results in extremely high risk of static shock. And on a cold day you can actually throw hot coffee in the air and it fall to the ground as instant coffee.
The whole city is built on permafrost, so for any major construction they have to sink pilings into the ground to support the buidling once its ambient heat melts the soil below it.
The city is south of the arctic circle by a couple hundred miles, but there is small mountain nearby that if you drive to the top you can see the sun for 24 hours straigh on the summer soltice. THe favorite solstice activity is a city wide charity run.
In the Winter, there is nearby town that holds an annual statewide contest to guess when the river will melt sufficiently to allow a bouy to float freely. This event is called "break-up".
1. Find something non-Linux based
2. Make a linux version.
3. ??? ( = Charge a $100 Premium over the non-Linux version )
4. Profit
I'd much rather these porting efforts concentrated on providing ports of the OS to inexpensive existing PDA's rather than trying to build their own hardware and then effectively charging a premium to run a "free" OS. I'll pay $20 - $30 to run Linux on my PDA - I won't pay $100.
During the peak of the blaster virus I firerd up IE (which of course was still set to the default homwpage) in order to go the MS update site. Well MSN which loaded into the browser as far as I could tell said nothing on the homepage on the blaster worm. You'd think that since this was a worm directed at MS itself that at a minimum there'd be a banner ad warning people to upgrade and if they were serious a forced push of the update to my machine as soon as I visited any MS controlled website (except maybe MSNBC or ESPN.com).
Instead of just pushing the upgrade on the people that visit their sites, they want to start by pushing to every user on the Net? Give it a go at MSN and Microsoft.com first and see what reaction you get before you make it mandatory - oh and another idea - make patches that don't require reboots.
Yeah, the article sites the cost of repaving at "$325,000 per lane mile." whic makes me wonder a couple of things, how long will that last until repaving, what is the per year cost of maintenance (pot-hole repair, re-striping, etc.), and WHY THE HELL DOES THE CONGRESS THINK AMTRAK SHOULDN'T BE SUBSIDIZED?
Sorry about yelling, but seriously, If AMTRAK needs a $3B/year subsidy that is 1500 miles of 6 lane highway - or about the cost to repave I-95 North to south.
Like this techie is doing. "a 26-year-old high-tech programmer from Mountain View", who has already won the unofficial endorsement of Washington Post Writer Howard Kurtz, though this seems to be mostly based on her using cafepress to sell endorsed thong underwear as a fundraising tool. Regardless, she is using the net to propel her campaign to an extent that she is garnering press attention even among the strippers and pornographers and actors.
I think the Dean campaign shows that it is media access that makes the biggest difference in getting an unknown launched, and techs are the media of the 21st century.
alternatively you could just take some screenshots of the page while the license agreement is showing.
And what OS will the screenshot software be running on? Obviously not Windows. While it seems theoretically possible that you could install an OS such as Knoppix, and then on top of that a VMware type ap from which you could launch the Windows install-on-initial-boot routine, it seems like it would take a lot of trial and error to get right, and any one error might cost you $199. Since you can get cameras for a lot less that $199, or may already have a camera, I think I would rather go with that.
The author spends a lot of time talking about his inability to document the license and the provisions he didn't want to agree to. Perhaps he could save a lot of trouble by just photographing or videotaping the license. I'd reccommend both because its easier to get a hard copy for court of the still photo, and you might want the video to provide evidence you selected NO and then reformatted the drive and then installed an alternate OS.
Another choice might be to boot into Demolinux or Knoppix, then open the license file and print it. This combined with videotaping the process from opening the box to installation of Linux on the then formatted drive would be pretty convincing.
Per his description of small claims court the judge isn't going to want to watch the video anyway, but having it might convince the company to refund or settle out of court.
Lindows, SO CLOSE. Please (or Knoppix) someone take the OS-on-CD to the next level. Yes having Knoppix and LindowsCD is great, but no one wants to have to setup their mail settings each and every time the system reboots. ... As an alternative...flashram? A CF reader and a 32MB card cost what, $25 on the street? More than enough to keep mail settings, bookmarks, etc.
Knoppix 3.x has built-in support to autodetect USB drives such as pen-drives or CF (etc.) readers and pull your workstation settings from there.
With these drives coming in sizes up to 1 gigabyte now - it makes a pretty good option for even more than saving your settings, you could even keep all your email on there, and maybe a few favorite apps so you don't have to pull them down over the network all the time.
The drawback I see is that being (mostly)USB 1.x based (and the two Webstation models seem to both only have USB 1.x ports) the throughput is much slower than an ethernet connection to a local server and is actually slower than some cable modem connections to the Internet.
As to these Webstations - I'd would want either a DVD or CD-RW drive (or combo-drive) instead of a plain CD if I were going to get it for home use. With a high-speed CD-RW drive you could use it much as you would any other low-end Linux PC - except you wouldn't use the CD-RW for caching.
CDBaby works with all the major online music services (or claims to) not just iTunes, so shouldn't this run either on the main page or not at all?
While I think a watch is one of the ideal places to keep a data device - since you always have it with you (the other being a keychain), I don't see the point of paying a $100+ premium for a fashionable one over a functional one - no matter what you are going to be considered a geek for wearing one these, that you paid $295 for a Fossil branded PalmOS watch versus $179 for a Abacus branded one, only makes you look like a geek that is careless with his money.
in PCWorld.
The camera can take 640x480 shots even though they don't fit on the screen. And has "movie recorder" software, I'd like specs on its movie recording capability. If it can take 320x240 MPEGs at 30fps I'm buying one as soon as they are released. If its some weird file format, or less than 20 fps, or not at least 320x240 I'll wait and buy a real digital movie camera instead.
Also it has USB and infrared ports of course.
Since it was Carl Linnaeus that is considered the "Father of Taxonomy" it only seems appropriate that Linus & and Linux play a role on bringing it into the 21st century.
is that this doesn't require a separate piece of equipment.
The cue:cat provided the additional piece of equipment free of charge, I don't see how that is any less of a problem than requiring purchase of a specific brand of phone. You maight an argument that the cue:cat wasn't good for use outside the home, but the new cell phone system doesn't sound particularly handy inside the home (though I know use of the sell phone as your home phone is much more common in Europe than in the US.)
The main problem with both systems is the threat to your privacy, will activating the link be traceable to your cell phone number? The main complaint about Cue:cat wasn't availabity of the scanner (in fact most people considered that its best feature since once they disabled it they had a free scanning wand) the problem was that they wanted you to register it so every use could be tracked back to you (though they claimed it would only be tracked to your demographic data - not your actual personal name & address.)
Sniffer was a commercial product from then Network General and came out at least by 1987. But they called it "The Sniffer" , which seems to have more of a brandname like sound to it.
And another Usenet post shows that at least as early as 1994 they were quite conscious of its growing use as a generic term and tried to deter it.
Maybe they should have been more proactive in stopping it use as a generic term, but it is a fine line to walk for companies since getting to be the "Kleenex" of your market niche makes you the defacto standard.
But if you consider that scanning is an inherent property of the device to help determine is current movement and distance from the printing surface, then it seems adding a scanning function would not require a major change to the hardware if any.
Having both in the same handheld device would be useful as it would make it a true multifunction device able to scan, print, copy, and (wirelessly linked to your cell phone) even fax. Of course a decent quality digital camera incorporated into your bluetoothed enabled phone could be combined with a print only device to also cover all these functions.
BTW, if they aren't currently doing this, I claim prior art for any future attempts to do so and release the idea into the public domain.
My mistake, you can get it in paperback as well. Though it appears both the hardback and paperback are through Amazon resellers not from Amazon itself.
It's also available in the US from Amazon, but still only in hardback of course.
Oh, a slashdot book review. Would that be why amazon.com is giving a time out?
Amazon seems to work fine for me, plus it's another 10% cheaper there than from BN.com
An curious thing about the find is that the sculls were found but without the bodies, or even the jawbones. Other evidence indicates they some of the sculls may have been used in a ritual, or possibly be the victims of cannibalism.
Take a look at what they are a calling a three dimensional model of the sun. To me it looks very much like a two dimensional model of a section of the the Golden Arches.
If this were to really be a 3d model, shouldn't the sun be sphere instead of an arch?
I still use Rabbit Ears, but here in DC even with about 10 on air channels we still have channels 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13 and a host of UHF channels that are vacant.
When these frequencies have all been taken up by alternative uses, which I expect would take well past the cutover to Digital broadcast, then you can start talking about ending analog broadcast.
It was my understanding that analog broadcast was going to be phased out in 2006 anyway once the broadcasters had been given time to switchover to digital and consumer prices for digital receivers had come down to the roughly the same as analog receivers.
I was under the impression that most college libraries carry Nature.
Yes, I'm sure many do have subscriptions to it. Which doesn't conflict with my statement. My point was that both tthe website, like the print version, requires a subscription to read - that might be your own subscription or someone elses.