I have a Samsung A400 (SprintPCS). The GPS can be turned off as a menu function. Right now, it's no good for anything, except emergency 911 locating services, and even that currently works only in Rhode Island.
Personally, I wish the WOULD get the rest of the darn GPS thing working, so that next time I'm lost I can get directions!
Now when "they" decide that GPS will not be turn off-able, oh well, I guess I'll just turn the whole darn phone off. If I'm feeling *super paranoid* that day, I suppose I'll have to go to the trouble of removing the battery too. It's too d*mn intrusive anyway, even when it *doesn't* know where I am.
Thanks for the reply. I understand your logic now, and I think your reasoning is reasonable. Perhaps we may just have to agree to disagree on the gun point as/. isn't really the place to discuss the issue. It's just that I've seen solid data contrary to your "false sense of security" argument and havn't seen any well reviewed data to back your point.
As to your comments regarding Israel, I think you are right on -- but I think that there is perhaps nothing at all that the government over there can do to solve what is ultimately a culture war. Either one culture or the other, or both must undergo some large revisions -- or destroy the other (or both) before that very very old conflict ends.
Next we have the woman jogging in the park who is suddenly being chased by a man.
[snip]
Laws don't make you more secure, nor do guns; freedom does.
Taking away that woman's best means of protecting herself against someone larger and stronger than her, rather than her being "free," makes her more secure? I don't get it. Can you explain your deductive process here?
Huh? Just buy twice the # of hard drives & use them for backup. Since they're only being used for backup and otherwise just sitting there (spin them down when idle), their lifetime is more or less infinite. Also, backup then happens in a fraction of the time of tape or DVD.
Backup with tape made sense when a tape cartridge was larger than a typical hard drive, and also cheaper than a typical hard drive, not to mention that hard drives used to be extremely expensive as compared to the present day.
If you want portability, there are quite a few ways to drag a hard drive around and hot swap it wherever you might need it.
And "real" offline storage? WTF do you mean by that? I've seen far more tapes die than HD's. I still have two hard drives over 15 years old and they still work. The typical life of magnetic tape is 10 years. I've had plenty of CDs die too.
Maybe you mean punchcards? Those suckers last forever so long as the overhead plumbing holds up! Maybe I should hook the old card reader back up? I'm sure I saw it around here somewhere just the other day...
Or regale the readers of Slashdot with a gripping explanation of how there's *one* tube in the car radio, but presumably it carries audio for left and right (two distinct) channels.
The tube is a twin triode.
Re:How the heck did he know this?
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
NeatoKeen! Maybe I will try it. I just wish a had a spare HD sitting around to slap in the machine until I get the hang of it!
Does anyone know if it's hard to set up a Dual XP/Gentoo machine? Right now I have dual XP/Mandrake & it's easy as pie to set up.
How the heck did he know this?
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
My jaw dropped as I read this. I've been running Mandrake for over a year now and have been getting SICK of trying to upgrade/install software. What has really intrigued me has been Gentoo. Just last night I was reading through the Gentoo install instructions again thinking: "Wow, do I really want to risk trying to do this on my main (currently dual boot) machine?" Was this just intuition on the part of the author? I find that hard to believe.
You have to ask yourself - where are these users coming from? Gentoo is not easy to install, even with the excellent instructions provided you still need to be pretty familiar with Kernel internals to get all your hardware work. You need to make decisions whether to enable Unix98 PTY support and magic SysRq key, get familiar with Grub and load the correct module for your network card. Surely, a daunting task if your entire previous computing experience was gained from using Windows! Mandrake makes all those tricky decisions for you, Gentoo does not. No, all these new Gentoo users are not users abandoning Windows. They are users who have been around Linux for some time, many of them still have visible bumps on their foreheads. They are ex-Mandrake users, trust me on this one.
For the first time in my life I think I believe that some censorship is OK, and that the government isn't intrusive enough. I wish slashdot would just erase this horror.
I used to run something like that on the dark side of OSes, but now my cell phone plan is so cheap with practically unlimited nationwide long distance and free roaming, I have *zero* need for such a thing. The only time I could see that it might be useful nowadays is if I were making a lot of overseas calls.
I think you may have something there. It seems that for quite a while now, most of the music released by the "Big 5" has been by "artists" that are neither songwriters, nor musicians, but do look GREAT on TV.
There's already about 250ms delay between two people on cell phones due to encoding and signal relay issues -- and it drives me nuts. It seems to me that adding even more hops between me and the person at the other end of the line (other end of the wave?) might increase the delay to the point where I would find the phone unusable.
I'm a violinist and I have been sitting here for the last 10 minutes trying to figure out if a violin performance could ever, regardless of the level of future technolgy, be reproduced.
First I was concentrating on the left hand (the one on the fingerboard that touches the strings). I decided that it might, at some point, be possible by scanning the hand and fingers with some sort of combination of MRI or lasers and then just adjusting string length on the repro instrument accordingly. Alternatively, a series of sensors might be run underneath the fretboard to detect precise string length.
But the bow? That will be impossible. As any violin teacher will tell you, teaching left hand is easy: find note, wiggle. Teaching (and learning) right hand/bow is a lifelong struggle as there aren't really any words to describe half of what is going on, and the other half isn't even something that the violinist is concious of. There are infinitely endless variations of pressure, angle, and attack, not to mention the subtleties of dealing with a spring constant that varies down the length of the stick and varies quickly with humidity changes over the course of a few minutes.
I saw a book once that illustrated over 100 ways of just gripping the bow in order to achieve various things.
Nevertheless, it hasn't stopped some from trying:
Isn't the possibility of seeing a planet as it eclipses the star pretty darn slim because for the vast majority of stars, the planetary orbital plane is going to *not* be across the star from our point of view?
LED's don't actually use (much) less energy as compared to an incandescent bulb. They light longer when powered by batteries though because their intensity doesn't drop off as much as incandescents do as the voltage drops.
The most efficient light source (except for exotics) is still the flourescent tube.
Let me see if I can dig up a reference...
Ah, this should do:
http://www.resurgentsoftware.com/gpetrie/The_Per fe ct_LED_Light.pdf
Scroll down to page five. Note that the above link is a.pdf file. Also, I don't seem to be able to get the "Perfe" and the "ct" to stick together so you may need to cut and paste. Sorry. I don't know if it is me, or Mozilla that is doing it.... No, IE is doing it too. I guess I'm just unclueful.
>>>When I'm trashed or otherwise feeling like the rest of the masses, I always end up booting back up into windows to surf because the interface is more mouse-only oriented.
What I meant to say was that I always end up booting back into Windows+IE....
Does anyone know if FullScreen (F11) has been returned to 1.1 in the Linux version?? I don't know why it was taken away in the first place and really miss the feature. I have a small (17") monitor and really miss the extra space savings. I think it was there until Version 0.98 and then poof!, she was gone.
On the Windows side of things, there are exactly two things keeping mozilla from being my Browser Of Choice:
1. No fullscreen button to switch back and forth between the modes.
2. No hotspot for the mouse to pop out the sidebar automatically.
This is why:
With those two buttons I can surf all day and *never* touch the keyboard. The way the browser is now I always need to be hitting F9 to get the sidebar to come out or go away, and F11 to switch between the fullscreen/screengarbage modes.
I realize I can try to aim for and click the center of the left side of the sidebar to get it to come in and out, but even with my optical mouse and superior fragging skills I still find getting exactly into that little space a bit of a challenge depending on my sleep+alcohol levels.
With IE, drunk/tired surfing is simple. I slam the mouse pointer to the left and bang!, there are all my lovely bookmarks. I don't have to aim; I don't have to make my eyes focus; and most of all I don't have to try to find function keys in the dark.
When I'm trashed or otherwise feeling like the rest of the masses, I always end up booting back up into windows to surf because the interface is more mouse-only oriented.
And by the way, the reason I havn't downloaded 1.1 and tried it myself is because just for once, for more than one day, I would like to have a browser running on my Linux box that isn't called a beta, let alone alpha.
The absolute resolution of any optical system, be it a common microscope, or a super yet to be invented CCD, is limited to half the wavelength of the visible light being used. Obviously deep violet light gives the maximum resolution. The electron microscope was a fantastic breakthrough because it could discern features much smaller than half the wavelength of violet light. That also explains why pictures taken with an electron microscope are always black and white (or colorized): there is no actual "light" there at all to give the object color. Below a certain size, color is impossible.
Here's a page giving the simple formulas, as well as an automatic calculator:
http://www.microscopyu.com/tutorials/flash/pixel ca lc/
Since recorded history began, it has been extremely unusual for a new organization, technology, or way of thinking that threatens the status quo to not be eventually co-opted and monitored in some way to support the status quo. (Examples: Democratic party (or any political party), the printing press, protestants, broadcast media, telephones, art, music, software -- there's probably thousands of examples).
Governments may be voted out, revolutionaries may take over, wars may have victors and losers; the true historians reading this know that regardless of political outcomes, the extremely wealthy have generally managed, behind the scenes, to preserve the majority of their assets and power network (i.e., political) connections.
Even the super-rich industrialists and bankers that had their (worldwide and national) assets seized by the NAZIs, quietly had those assets returned to them after the war.
Really the only thing that ever threatened the long term status quo (until now) with immediate breakdown was the threat of worldwide communism, i.e., nationalization of all property -- and of course we all know about the sillinessess the fear of that threat felt by the super-wealthy resulted in during the 20th century.
But now a new, and very serious threat has emerged: forums. They can be web based -- they can be usenet, they can be IRC, and other formats I can't recall right now or that havn't been invented yet. The older crowd here may remember that the speaker of the house sent home in disgrace because of a usenet campaign (defoleate congress). In forums, unlike the traditional letter to the editor, an argument that starts out with lots of holes and easily refuted, is refined, very quickly via criticism, to perfection. By itself it means a single perfectly refined idea means nothing, but if there is a strong possibility that "bad" ideas might start circulating widely (to the unwashed) and catching on (with the unwashed), it is quite worrisom to the powers that be if they cannot see some way of eventually co-opting the medium that those ideas are propegated upon.
Even free software plays into part of this threat: if everybody starts running open-source, people's activities become much more difficult to monitor.
But then, perhaps the ICANN types are right?
Most people PREFER that status quo. The everyday Joe just wants to wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, have a beer and pass out in front of the TV and look forward to the weekend when he can hang with his buds and drink beer and go nuts in front of the TV. I kind of agree. I *like* things to stay the same. It's better than war/revolution. War SUCKS. Really. The only people that want war or revolution are always idiots who havn't actually seen it. There is nothing worse than war.
If the ultimate result of some modicum of control over the net is more peace and less war, then fine: Do it, control it.
All it takes to have a war is to piss enough people off. There may be a nuclear war soon between India and Pakistan. As far as I can tell, they are all going to kill each other because of IDEAS. If keeping some "bad" ideas away from people is enough to keep them from being pissy enough to be violent, then why not?
Would it really be so awful if the great unwashed continue to be fed pablum as usual? Folks at the fringe (i.e.,/.ers) are still gonna find ways to come up with enough weird info to stay there.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean like my cell phone?
Samsung A400
That's pretty cool. Hmmm... wallet escaping pocket... must resist!!!!
I have a Samsung A400 (SprintPCS). The GPS can be turned off as a menu function. Right now, it's no good for anything, except emergency 911 locating services, and even that currently works only in Rhode Island.
Personally, I wish the WOULD get the rest of the darn GPS thing working, so that next time I'm lost I can get directions!
Now when "they" decide that GPS will not be turn off-able, oh well, I guess I'll just turn the whole darn phone off. If I'm feeling *super paranoid* that day, I suppose I'll have to go to the trouble of removing the battery too. It's too d*mn intrusive anyway, even when it *doesn't* know where I am.
If ever there were a book that would be completely lost in the translation (to screen), this is the one.
Thanks for the reply. I understand your logic now, and I think your reasoning is reasonable. Perhaps we may just have to agree to disagree on the gun point as /. isn't really the place to discuss the issue. It's just that I've seen solid data contrary to your "false sense of security" argument and havn't seen any well reviewed data to back your point.
As to your comments regarding Israel, I think you are right on -- but I think that there is perhaps nothing at all that the government over there can do to solve what is ultimately a culture war. Either one culture or the other, or both must undergo some large revisions -- or destroy the other (or both) before that very very old conflict ends.
[snip]
Next we have the woman jogging in the park who is suddenly being chased by a man.
[snip]
Laws don't make you more secure, nor do guns; freedom does.
Taking away that woman's best means of protecting herself against someone larger and stronger than her, rather than her being "free," makes her more secure? I don't get it. Can you explain your deductive process here?
real mastered CDs). They last a good 100 years or so
Uh... I don't think so:
ahhhhh!!!!
Huh? Just buy twice the # of hard drives & use them for backup. Since they're only being used for backup and otherwise just sitting there (spin them down when idle), their lifetime is more or less infinite. Also, backup then happens in a fraction of the time of tape or DVD.
Backup with tape made sense when a tape cartridge was larger than a typical hard drive, and also cheaper than a typical hard drive, not to mention that hard drives used to be extremely expensive as compared to the present day.
If you want portability, there are quite a few ways to drag a hard drive around and hot swap it wherever you might need it.
And "real" offline storage? WTF do you mean by that? I've seen far more tapes die than HD's. I still have two hard drives over 15 years old and they still work. The typical life of magnetic tape is 10 years. I've had plenty of CDs die too.
Maybe you mean punchcards? Those suckers last forever so long as the overhead plumbing holds up! Maybe I should hook the old card reader back up? I'm sure I saw it around here somewhere just the other day...
Or regale the readers of Slashdot with a gripping explanation of how there's *one* tube in the car radio, but presumably it carries audio for left and right (two distinct) channels.
The tube is a twin triode.
NeatoKeen! Maybe I will try it. I just wish a had a spare HD sitting around to slap in the machine until I get the hang of it!
Does anyone know if it's hard to set up a Dual XP/Gentoo machine? Right now I have dual XP/Mandrake & it's easy as pie to set up.
My jaw dropped as I read this. I've been running Mandrake for over a year now and have been getting SICK of trying to upgrade/install software. What has really intrigued me has been Gentoo. Just last night I was reading through the Gentoo install instructions again thinking: "Wow, do I really want to risk trying to do this on my main (currently dual boot) machine?" Was this just intuition on the part of the author? I find that hard to believe.
You have to ask yourself - where are these users coming from? Gentoo is not easy to install, even with the excellent instructions provided you still need to be pretty familiar with Kernel internals to get all your hardware work. You need to make decisions whether to enable Unix98 PTY support and magic SysRq key, get familiar with Grub and load the correct module for your network card. Surely, a daunting task if your entire previous computing experience was gained from using Windows! Mandrake makes all those tricky decisions for you, Gentoo does not. No, all these new Gentoo users are not users abandoning Windows. They are users who have been around Linux for some time, many of them still have visible bumps on their foreheads. They are ex-Mandrake users, trust me on this one.
For the first time in my life I think I believe that some censorship is OK, and that the government isn't intrusive enough. I wish slashdot would just erase this horror.
I used to run something like that on the dark side of OSes, but now my cell phone plan is so cheap with practically unlimited nationwide long distance and free roaming, I have *zero* need for such a thing. The only time I could see that it might be useful nowadays is if I were making a lot of overseas calls.
I think you may have something there. It seems that for quite a while now, most of the music released by the "Big 5" has been by "artists" that are neither songwriters, nor musicians, but do look GREAT on TV.
There's already about 250ms delay between two people on cell phones due to encoding and signal relay issues -- and it drives me nuts. It seems to me that adding even more hops between me and the person at the other end of the line (other end of the wave?) might increase the delay to the point where I would find the phone unusable.
The Mubot
Isn't the possibility of seeing a planet as it eclipses the star pretty darn slim because for the vast majority of stars, the planetary orbital plane is going to *not* be across the star from our point of view?
LED's don't actually use (much) less energy as compared to an incandescent bulb. They light longer when powered by batteries though because their intensity doesn't drop off as much as incandescents do as the voltage drops.
r fe ct_LED_Light.pdf
.pdf file. Also, I don't seem to be able to get the "Perfe" and the "ct" to stick together so you may need to cut and paste. Sorry. I don't know if it is me, or Mozilla that is doing it.... No, IE is doing it too. I guess I'm just unclueful.
The most efficient light source (except for exotics) is still the flourescent tube.
Let me see if I can dig up a reference...
Ah, this should do:
http://www.resurgentsoftware.com/gpetrie/The_Pe
Scroll down to page five. Note that the above link is a
Galeon wants a lower version of the mozilla installed & is super BuggyCrashy when a newer version is tacked underneath.
I will whenever it gets un /.ed.
>>>When I'm trashed or otherwise feeling like the rest of the masses, I always end up booting back up into windows to surf because the interface is more mouse-only oriented.
What I meant to say was that I always end up booting back into Windows+IE....
Does anyone know if FullScreen (F11) has been returned to 1.1 in the Linux version?? I don't know why it was taken away in the first place and really miss the feature. I have a small (17") monitor and really miss the extra space savings. I think it was there until Version 0.98 and then poof!, she was gone.
On the Windows side of things, there are exactly two things keeping mozilla from being my Browser Of Choice:
1. No fullscreen button to switch back and forth between the modes.
2. No hotspot for the mouse to pop out the sidebar automatically.
This is why:
With those two buttons I can surf all day and *never* touch the keyboard. The way the browser is now I always need to be hitting F9 to get the sidebar to come out or go away, and F11 to switch between the fullscreen/screengarbage modes.
I realize I can try to aim for and click the center of the left side of the sidebar to get it to come in and out, but even with my optical mouse and superior fragging skills I still find getting exactly into that little space a bit of a challenge depending on my sleep+alcohol levels.
With IE, drunk/tired surfing is simple. I slam the mouse pointer to the left and bang!, there are all my lovely bookmarks. I don't have to aim; I don't have to make my eyes focus; and most of all I don't have to try to find function keys in the dark.
When I'm trashed or otherwise feeling like the rest of the masses, I always end up booting back up into windows to surf because the interface is more mouse-only oriented.
And by the way, the reason I havn't downloaded 1.1 and tried it myself is because just for once, for more than one day, I would like to have a browser running on my Linux box that isn't called a beta, let alone alpha.
The absolute resolution of any optical system, be it a common microscope, or a super yet to be invented CCD, is limited to half the wavelength of the visible light being used. Obviously deep violet light gives the maximum resolution. The electron microscope was a fantastic breakthrough because it could discern features much smaller than half the wavelength of violet light. That also explains why pictures taken with an electron microscope are always black and white (or colorized): there is no actual "light" there at all to give the object color. Below a certain size, color is impossible.
l ca lc/
Here's a page giving the simple formulas, as well as an automatic calculator:
http://www.microscopyu.com/tutorials/flash/pixe
Since recorded history began, it has been extremely unusual for a new organization, technology, or way of thinking that threatens the status quo to not be eventually co-opted and monitored in some way to support the status quo. (Examples: Democratic party (or any political party), the printing press, protestants, broadcast media, telephones, art, music, software -- there's probably thousands of examples).
/.ers) are still gonna find ways to come up with enough weird info to stay there.
Governments may be voted out, revolutionaries may take over, wars may have victors and losers; the true historians reading this know that regardless of political outcomes, the extremely wealthy have generally managed, behind the scenes, to preserve the majority of their assets and power network (i.e., political) connections.
Even the super-rich industrialists and bankers that had their (worldwide and national) assets seized by the NAZIs, quietly had those assets returned to them after the war.
Really the only thing that ever threatened the long term status quo (until now) with immediate breakdown was the threat of worldwide communism, i.e., nationalization of all property -- and of course we all know about the sillinessess the fear of that threat felt by the super-wealthy resulted in during the 20th century.
But now a new, and very serious threat has emerged: forums. They can be web based -- they can be usenet, they can be IRC, and other formats I can't recall right now or that havn't been invented yet. The older crowd here may remember that the speaker of the house sent home in disgrace because of a usenet campaign (defoleate congress). In forums, unlike the traditional letter to the editor, an argument that starts out with lots of holes and easily refuted, is refined, very quickly via criticism, to perfection. By itself it means a single perfectly refined idea means nothing, but if there is a strong possibility that "bad" ideas might start circulating widely (to the unwashed) and catching on (with the unwashed), it is quite worrisom to the powers that be if they cannot see some way of eventually co-opting the medium that those ideas are propegated upon.
Even free software plays into part of this threat: if everybody starts running open-source, people's activities become much more difficult to monitor.
But then, perhaps the ICANN types are right?
Most people PREFER that status quo. The everyday Joe just wants to wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, have a beer and pass out in front of the TV and look forward to the weekend when he can hang with his buds and drink beer and go nuts in front of the TV. I kind of agree. I *like* things to stay the same. It's better than war/revolution. War SUCKS. Really. The only people that want war or revolution are always idiots who havn't actually seen it. There is nothing worse than war.
If the ultimate result of some modicum of control over the net is more peace and less war, then fine: Do it, control it.
All it takes to have a war is to piss enough people off. There may be a nuclear war soon between India and Pakistan. As far as I can tell, they are all going to kill each other because of IDEAS. If keeping some "bad" ideas away from people is enough to keep them from being pissy enough to be violent, then why not?
Would it really be so awful if the great unwashed continue to be fed pablum as usual? Folks at the fringe (i.e.,
I can imagine lots of new linux variant viruses when the above mentioned are focused on linux.