One reason a Google search for 58.44 turns up so much crap is the non-adjustable punctuation filter Google uses. AFAIK, you can't search for the exact phrase '58.44' and have it exclude IP addresses that contain *.58.44.*
In games like Microprose's F-19, I'd try and shoot my allies, bomb the carrier I'd just taken off from, kill the operative I was supposed to pick up and rescue, drive my airplane on the ground instead of taking off, etc.
Google gives oodles of companies that will sell this stuff or install it for you. Maybe not under the 'one way mirror' moniker, though (the stuff we used is not 100% reflective, but it's still pretty hard to see into the office on a bright day). I bought a roll a couple of years ago at a car accessories shop, but you can get larger sizes for domestic/office windows.
That would leave you unable to read LCDs. A single polarized lens is bad enough in this regard: I use polarized sunglasses, and I have to align the LCD to be able to view it. Turn the LCD on its side (PDA or iPhone in landscape mode), and it goes black.
Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like. That's why it had as many pre-press features as it did, that's why it was as expensive as is was,
No. It was targeted at general office use, and got more and more features tacked on as Microsoft tried to increase the number of markets it could 'serve' with Word. Pre-press features? Microsoft shot themselves in the foot from the get-go on that one. Having your document auto-reformat itself when you select a different printer means that Word documents are invariably greeted with derision and groaning by printing houses. Technical manuals in Word? only if you want to kill the poor writer. There's no way to enforce consistent formatting, it's unstable when documents get large, there's no way to share information between documents, its graphics handling sucks, there's no way to publish variants (multiple similar books) from a single source, and I could go on. If Microsoft targeted Word at professional writers they did a job so spectacularly awful it makes Clippy seem brilliant by comparison.
Here we go with the rose-colored WP glasses again. The reason people liked WP is that WP and Word have failure modes that can be solved in WP using Reveal Codes and manually futzing with the code tags. Guess what? A real editor doesn't have these failure modes, which makes the Reveal Codes feature obsolete. In 12 years of using FrameMaker to within an inch of its life, I've never had a failure mode that could be solved by manual tag editing. It Just Works like it's supposed to.
The SR-71 blackbird was arguably the finest airplane ever built. Nothing before or since has ever matched it.
It was designed with nothing but a slide rule and paper.
Nonsense. It was the fastest non-rocket airplane ever, and that was a remarkable achievement, but it came at a price. It was a one-trick pony, built so close to the limits of the technology of that era that basically, every flight needed to be treated like e.g. a space flight or a speed record. It needed astronaut-level pilots. It had spectacular failure modes that needed constant attention if you wanted to avoid them (compressor stall) and was fantastically expensive to run and maintain.
These days, an F-22 could do the same job (undetectable and/or untouchable reconnaisance) better, plus unlike the SR-71 it can defend itself, attack ground targets etc. Unlike the SR-71, this aircraft is in series production and can be flown by any competent pilot.
That's what computers can do, in the hands of well trained engineers and mathemeticians.
The Soviet Union has had nuclear powered icebreakers for a long time, and if I was as rich as Warren Buffett that is one toy I would certainly buy myself.
For the slightly less rich, some of those icebreakers are being used for tourist trips to the Arctic (Google 'nuclear icebreaker cruise' to find out more).
and one that's far more interesting: The transport to the building site is the constraining factor in building larger wind turbines. Taller turbines require a mast with bigger diameter than the ~4.5 m that can be transported via most roads. More powerful turbines run into trouble with the diameter of the generator casing.
The mast problem is being worked on: there's a company that supplies prefab concrete elements that can be assembled into, say, the bottom 50 meters of mast. A normal steel mast can then be put on top.
As ever, the countries with access to water get the best opportunities. This was/is true for the trade of physical goods, a bit weird to see it holds for data as well.
Nitpick: that article was written by Neal Stephenson (yes, the same), and the title is 'Mother Earth motherboard'. The term hacker tourist is used in the article but is ultimately not its focus. It's brilliant, btw.
Last week I saw In the shadow of the moon, a series of interviews with the Apollo astronauts. In this, Aldrin says the reason for the overload was that he kept the rendezvous radar running (against procedure) so they'd be able to find the CM quickly in case of an abort.
Same here. After several tries at more conventional vacations that turned out to be boring (Architecture? meh. Nature? If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. Mountains? pfft), I've given my geek impulses free rein the last few years, and it's wonderful. I just finished a two-week trip to the UK, where I visited several old mines, a few car and aircraft museums, the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum (thanks to Neal Stephenson) [1] and Bletchley Park.
1: an absolute treat, well worth travelling to the middle of nowhere for
You mean like this Toshiba unit? That's specced at 200 kW, way short of the power needs of a warship. The USN has been looking into nuclear power recently (the past few years) as part of their program to design a replacement for the Nimitz-class carrier (and a new cruiser class as well, iirc). I don't know the outcome of that process, though. this may be relevant
Navies like the huge power output from a small package. With gas turbines, 30+ knot top speeds are feasible while still having lots of internal volume left in the ship. Steam plants are much bigger, and so are diesels: 100,000 shp (the amount of power needed to propel a destroyer at 30+ knots) can be packed in 4 ISO shipping containers if you use gas turbines. The GE LM2500 (used in many ships, power output ca 25 MW) weighs ca. 5 tons. A 100,000 shp diesel is 30 m long and 15 m high, and weighs 2300 tons.
The USN has been using nuclear reactors for decades. They've pretty much concluded that nuclear power is too expensive for everything except aircraft carriers (submarines are another matter, nuclear affords them the ability to stay submerged for months, unlike all other forms of propulsion). Recent developments may change this: fossil fuels are getting more expensive, and current reactor designs don't require refueling (which is horrendously expensive, since you have to cut open the ship). Still, nuclear ships require expensive personnel (nuclear engineers).
Reactors with the kind of output power the Navy needs, are pretty big. Count on 1000+ tons. See FAS for more info.
What the Navy means by 'hybrid' is not exactly what you'd expect. TFA is light on details, but I suspect the idea is to use the electrical generators on the ship for low-speed propulsion, instead of having to run the main gas turbine engines at 10% load, at which they're very inefficient. There'll be no batteries involved, and no regenerative braking.
Many warships already have two plants capable of driving the propellers. Not so much the USN, but European navies often use gas turbines to provide high speeds (30+ knots), plus a set of diesels for lower speeds (up to 20 kt).
For new ships, electrical propulsion is being looked into for the same reason: you can switch generators on and off so you always have them running at their most efficient power setting.
Playing with this Java applet that shows Ulysses' position relative to Earth, Ulysses will be a lot closer to Earth in 2013. It'd be interesting to see if the shorter distance will make up for 3 more years of decay of the RTG.
Yes, you're much better off being distracted by mapreading, or juggling Google Maps printouts (and trying to read their directions in 6-point fonts) than having the damn satnav read out clear instructions so you can keep your eyes on the road. I prefer giving up a bit of sense of direction/location, even using a suboptimal route to the nightmare that is manual navigation without a second person in the car. Also, the routes Google Maps generates aren't any better than those generated by a satnav. Checking the route proposed by the satnav before you set off solves the sense of direction issue and allows you to correct the route if necessary (although in my experience the only time you're going to correct the route is if you know the area already). In a car, you're struggling with information overload as it is; a satnav reduces that load significantly.
Speaking of which: the results pages on the Google Image part of that site use a script to show full-size images when you click on a thumbnail. Unfortunately, the script also triggers when you Ctrl-click (in Firefox, to load the link into a new tab) and even when you right-click. Is there a way to defeat this script?
Slashdot Mirror
One reason a Google search for 58.44 turns up so much crap is the non-adjustable punctuation filter Google uses. AFAIK, you can't search for the exact phrase '58.44' and have it exclude IP addresses that contain *.58.44.*
In games like Microprose's F-19, I'd try and shoot my allies, bomb the carrier I'd just taken off from, kill the operative I was supposed to pick up and rescue, drive my airplane on the ground instead of taking off, etc.
Google gives oodles of companies that will sell this stuff or install it for you. Maybe not under the 'one way mirror' moniker, though (the stuff we used is not 100% reflective, but it's still pretty hard to see into the office on a bright day).
I bought a roll a couple of years ago at a car accessories shop, but you can get larger sizes for domestic/office windows.
It's a function of the LCD itself.
For windows, one-way mirror foil is a cheaper option, btw. We use that in our office, and it's brilliant.
That would leave you unable to read LCDs. A single polarized lens is bad enough in this regard: I use polarized sunglasses, and I have to align the LCD to be able to view it. Turn the LCD on its side (PDA or iPhone in landscape mode), and it goes black.
Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like. That's why it had as many pre-press features as it did, that's why it was as expensive as is was,
No. It was targeted at general office use, and got more and more features tacked on as Microsoft tried to increase the number of markets it could 'serve' with Word.
Pre-press features? Microsoft shot themselves in the foot from the get-go on that one. Having your document auto-reformat itself when you select a different printer means that Word documents are invariably greeted with derision and groaning by printing houses.
Technical manuals in Word? only if you want to kill the poor writer. There's no way to enforce consistent formatting, it's unstable when documents get large, there's no way to share information between documents, its graphics handling sucks, there's no way to publish variants (multiple similar books) from a single source, and I could go on. If Microsoft targeted Word at professional writers they did a job so spectacularly awful it makes Clippy seem brilliant by comparison.
hdj (technical writer)
Here we go with the rose-colored WP glasses again. The reason people liked WP is that WP and Word have failure modes that can be solved in WP using Reveal Codes and manually futzing with the code tags.
Guess what? A real editor doesn't have these failure modes, which makes the Reveal Codes feature obsolete. In 12 years of using FrameMaker to within an inch of its life, I've never had a failure mode that could be solved by manual tag editing. It Just Works like it's supposed to.
That depends on your location. In the southern US you may be right. At higher latitudes, peak demand's could be in the winter.
The SR-71 blackbird was arguably the finest airplane ever built. Nothing before or since has ever matched it.
It was designed with nothing but a slide rule and paper.
Nonsense. It was the fastest non-rocket airplane ever, and that was a remarkable achievement, but it came at a price. It was a one-trick pony, built so close to the limits of the technology of that era that basically, every flight needed to be treated like e.g. a space flight or a speed record. It needed astronaut-level pilots. It had spectacular failure modes that needed constant attention if you wanted to avoid them (compressor stall) and was fantastically expensive to run and maintain.
These days, an F-22 could do the same job (undetectable and/or untouchable reconnaisance) better, plus unlike the SR-71 it can defend itself, attack ground targets etc. Unlike the SR-71, this aircraft is in series production and can be flown by any competent pilot.
That's what computers can do, in the hands of well trained engineers and mathemeticians.
The Soviet Union has had nuclear powered icebreakers for a long time, and if I was as rich as Warren Buffett that is one toy I would certainly buy myself.
For the slightly less rich, some of those icebreakers are being used for tourist trips to the Arctic (Google 'nuclear icebreaker cruise' to find out more).
and one that's far more interesting: The transport to the building site is the constraining factor in building larger wind turbines. Taller turbines require a mast with bigger diameter than the ~4.5 m that can be transported via most roads. More powerful turbines run into trouble with the diameter of the generator casing.
The mast problem is being worked on: there's a company that supplies prefab concrete elements that can be assembled into, say, the bottom 50 meters of mast. A normal steel mast can then be put on top.
As ever, the countries with access to water get the best opportunities. This was/is true for the trade of physical goods, a bit weird to see it holds for data as well.
Nitpick: that article was written by Neal Stephenson (yes, the same), and the title is 'Mother Earth motherboard'. The term hacker tourist is used in the article but is ultimately not its focus. It's brilliant, btw.
Our main weapons are fear, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to our language and a limitless supply of apostrophes!
Last week I saw In the shadow of the moon, a series of interviews with the Apollo astronauts. In this, Aldrin says the reason for the overload was that he kept the rendezvous radar running (against procedure) so they'd be able to find the CM quickly in case of an abort.
Same here. After several tries at more conventional vacations that turned out to be boring (Architecture? meh. Nature? If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. Mountains? pfft), I've given my geek impulses free rein the last few years, and it's wonderful.
I just finished a two-week trip to the UK, where I visited several old mines, a few car and aircraft museums, the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum (thanks to Neal Stephenson) [1] and Bletchley Park.
1: an absolute treat, well worth travelling to the middle of nowhere for
You mean like this Toshiba unit? That's specced at 200 kW, way short of the power needs of a warship.
The USN has been looking into nuclear power recently (the past few years) as part of their program to design a replacement for the Nimitz-class carrier (and a new cruiser class as well, iirc). I don't know the outcome of that process, though.
this may be relevant
Navies like the huge power output from a small package. With gas turbines, 30+ knot top speeds are feasible while still having lots of internal volume left in the ship. Steam plants are much bigger, and so are diesels:
100,000 shp (the amount of power needed to propel a destroyer at 30+ knots) can be packed in 4 ISO shipping containers if you use gas turbines. The GE LM2500 (used in many ships, power output ca 25 MW) weighs ca. 5 tons.
A 100,000 shp diesel is 30 m long and 15 m high, and weighs 2300 tons.
The USN has been using nuclear reactors for decades. They've pretty much concluded that nuclear power is too expensive for everything except aircraft carriers (submarines are another matter, nuclear affords them the ability to stay submerged for months, unlike all other forms of propulsion). Recent developments may change this: fossil fuels are getting more expensive, and current reactor designs don't require refueling (which is horrendously expensive, since you have to cut open the ship). Still, nuclear ships require expensive personnel (nuclear engineers).
Reactors with the kind of output power the Navy needs, are pretty big. Count on 1000+ tons. See FAS for more info.
What the Navy means by 'hybrid' is not exactly what you'd expect. TFA is light on details, but I suspect the idea is to use the electrical generators on the ship for low-speed propulsion, instead of having to run the main gas turbine engines at 10% load, at which they're very inefficient. There'll be no batteries involved, and no regenerative braking.
Many warships already have two plants capable of driving the propellers. Not so much the USN, but European navies often use gas turbines to provide high speeds (30+ knots), plus a set of diesels for lower speeds (up to 20 kt).
For new ships, electrical propulsion is being looked into for the same reason: you can switch generators on and off so you always have them running at their most efficient power setting.
Playing with this Java applet that shows Ulysses' position relative to Earth, Ulysses will be a lot closer to Earth in 2013. It'd be interesting to see if the shorter distance will make up for 3 more years of decay of the RTG.
Are you saying you'll flunk us if we don't change the world?
(from 'Pay it forward')
...is about as stupid as using a Lamborghini to move cattle
Ahem
Yes, you're much better off being distracted by mapreading, or juggling Google Maps printouts (and trying to read their directions in 6-point fonts) than having the damn satnav read out clear instructions so you can keep your eyes on the road.
I prefer giving up a bit of sense of direction/location, even using a suboptimal route to the nightmare that is manual navigation without a second person in the car.
Also, the routes Google Maps generates aren't any better than those generated by a satnav.
Checking the route proposed by the satnav before you set off solves the sense of direction issue and allows you to correct the route if necessary (although in my experience the only time you're going to correct the route is if you know the area already).
In a car, you're struggling with information overload as it is; a satnav reduces that load significantly.
Speaking of which: the results pages on the Google Image part of that site use a script to show full-size images when you click on a thumbnail. Unfortunately, the script also triggers when you Ctrl-click (in Firefox, to load the link into a new tab) and even when you right-click.
Is there a way to defeat this script?