If people will believe that green M&Ms can turn people into homosexuals, they will certainly take this as gospel.
Clearly anyone who believes this is an idiot. It's the blue M&Ms that are gay. And the M&M people are still holding the tan M&M in solitary confinement without a lawyer or other advocate. As others have said, the newer blue M&Ms are much weaker and are genetically inferior to the other colors.
I certainly agree that overall there would be a savings in battery power with this technique, but issues still exists that would cause individual opposition. The most obvious is that while users would welcome and eventually expect the ability to make lower power calls (assuming they understood this at all), they would still resent others using their batteries. A more reasonable concern is that those who carry the phones only for "emergencies", and who really want the battery to be available if they do need to use the phone, would oppose subsidizing those who seem to live on their cell phone.
We need a statement from SELinux on this. Having a patent in itself isn't necessarily evil; enforcing it is. Having the patent itself can be good, it prevents some patent whore from seeing what was done and then patenting ti and claiming he owns the idea [Not that such a thing would ever be done;-) ]. What needs to happen now is for SELinux to make it clear that this patent will not be enforced against the Linux community. Or, if they want a fight,......
I suggested this last time the subject came up and was told they couldn't/wouldn't do it because of the support issue. Looks like it can be done after all. At least now it will be much more likely that the hardware in the box really does support Linux.
Lindows is an interesting twist I hadn't expected.
As others have said, there are lots of GSP units out there. The 12 channel Garmin units have particularly good reception for small units. The real issue is that you can't depend on getting the kind of accuracy that you want with just a civilian unit. The military ones work on a separate signal and will certainly do it, but the average Joe can't get his hands on one. If you can then that's certainly the way to go.
The other technique that could get you the accuracy you want is differential GPS (DGPS). It is based on the concept that all receivers in a local area experience about the same error. So a receiver is put at a known location and transmits a differential signal (how much error it's seeing right now). With the help of a special receiver, this signal is used by the GPS to calculate a more accurate position. Thing is, DGPS transmitters are not everywhere. The Coast Guard has put up some, but unless your in an area where the extra signal is available the only choices are to do without or to put up your own temporary DGPS transmitter while you need it.
One other option is to post process your data. You record the error at a known site while you are out taking your readings. You then apply the errors as seen to the known receiver to the field receiver readings to get a more accurate reading. Unfortunately, to do this ideally you should have a very accurate timestamp, and the data provided by the Garmin is only accurate to the second. Also, the calculations can be made more accurate if you have the individual satellite data, but units like the Garmin only give out the final computed location. It might be close enough for your use, but then again, it might not, you'll have to determine this.
Unfortunately hard to get excited about
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was there for the first time these S100 computers came out. Always wanted a NorthStar S100 machine, just couldn't scrape together the cash a the time.
A couple of years ago I saw a nice, wood case NorthStar S100 system sitting on a surplus table for a very modest amount. I was tempted, but had to admit that there was nothing I would do with it. Would have had to use a PC as a terminal into the NorthStar, and even an old 386 could emulate the S100 machine faster than the S100. So what's to be gained by running an S100 system?
Of course the IMSIA would at least have the nice Blinkin' Lights, the NorthStar was one of the S100 PC's that avoided them and went right to a ROM monitor, but beyond that I can't see anything I would enjoy about an old S100 system.
By the way, Bil Gates didn't have an S100 system when he wrote MS Basic. He used an Emulator. The way I heard it from another student there at the time, as a student he got caught at Harvard running the emulator for commercial gain (developing a commercial product, MS Basic).
He was instructed to cease immidately, or he would be thrown out of the university. He elected to leave. (Can anyone confirm that this is how it went down?) Lets just all be glad that he doesn't do such questionable things anymore.;-)
Millions? What do you think the population of Iowa is, what percentage of them have computers, what percentage of that have an MS OS, what percentage of that have Win98 rather than an older or newer flavor, and what percentage of that have a legal copy of the OS?
I don't think you really posted enough details for anyone to give you good advice either way. Read your list of ten reasons, but the one that seems missing there is why, if you were being treated fairly, were you being paid so much less yesterday? Maybe there is a reason for this that you can find acceptable, but it strikes me that if your employer already recognized how valuable you were then it shouldn't have taken this to get them to pay you fairly.
tiles? we don't need no tinkin' tiles!
on
P2P Roaming Chat
·
· Score: 1
Am I the only one who thinks that the concept of using a limited set of tiles to build your "land" is an incrediably lame idea? It looks like graphics out of an old Atari 2600 (even the tile based Sim City did much better than this). And the applications need to be version locked so they all have the same tiles?
If you're going to use tiles at least let the server send you it's own custom tiles. I would rather opt for movable objects however, that don't have to sit on tile boundries. And again, the systems should be able to share this data amoung themselves so the users can create some interesting worlds. How many worlds can you visit made of cookie cutter cacti before it gets lame? For me the answer is somewhere less than one.
Unless you're using tacions for signaling I think you'll find out pretty fast (or pretty slowly depending on how you look at it) that your processor in Korea and your RAM in orbit has a bit of a signal delay problem. Put your ram in geosync orbit (so you aways know where to find it and it doesn't wander to the other side of the earth) and you'll have a read/write cycle of several seconds. Just doesn't seem like the best use of the top end bandwidth you seek.
Doesn't matter that you're using many computers, as long as you're using switches rather than hubs. (Not trying to run that 10 Gig down a coax daisy chain are you?;-) ). Since it would make no sense to adopt 10 gig bleeding edge technology and then use hubs rather than switches, the fact remains that 1 gig ethernet is all that virtualy everyone currently can make use of, the bottle neck isn't in the ethernet. Still, nice to see the technology evolving. Maybe it will even be afordable by the time I can use it.
It strikes me that you might be a few decades late with this idea. Long ago I recall lining up to use a terminal (or a keypunch!), but I doubt that a co-op could have offered competing resources then. Nearly 20 years ago I did see an off-campus computer rental service start up, but there are (or were at the time) some real problems trying to coordinate such an operation when the instructors all only wanted to deal with one of the campus systems.
Now I would expect that there are enough privately owned systems that a co-op would not be very viable. And I have doubts that you would have enough users of expensive special software to amortize the cost among them. And I would suggest that you at the very least confirm your original premise: As is the case with (almost) all educational facilities there are never enough computers available for students. What I found when running such a facility was that there was plenty of available computers, right up until the night before the assignments were due. Then people were backed up into the halls waiting for terminals. Be sure that's not the case at your target school, else you might find that you only have users on the night before the assignment is due, and then have more paying co-op members expecting the resource they paid extra for to be available than you can support.
Actually, I was just trying to joke with the cashier, but seeing as mentally calculating 10% really was beyond her capabilities even after I pointed out the obvious, I don't think she understood what I was saying about the school system enough to take offense. I expect it's more of a generation thing than a matter of which schools. I guess I just enjoy taking sadistic little digs.
I was talking about grade school, so M.I.T. doesn't really seem to enter into it (although some secondary education does end up doing a fair amount of remedial repair work). At least in public schools you don't have to worry about private sex education classes in the rectory.
I'm assuming..... you are referring to DVDs, CDs and the like.
I was thinking of DVD's as I wrote it, although it applies to e-books and even to CD's when they muck them up so that you can't even transfer the song on a Sony CD to a Sony MP3 player, or compile your own CD onto an audio CD that the recording industry has already received a cut on because you might put one of their albums on the CD. Sure, you don't own the content in the sense of broadcast rights and the like, but you certainly should own the right to play it on the system of your choice, including a Linux based system.
is this good or bad? maybe they can enact positive change
Microsoft, Disney....... Judging from past experience it seems very clear this can't be a good thing. Get ready for the "alliance" to decide what you can and cannot have, and what you can and cannot do even with materials you have clearly paid for. And they will know what you have and what you do with it. Of course, some people call learning from the past "prejudice". But then what else should we learn from?
Re:Will it ever end? Just give Bill all the $
on
Microsoft Case Proceeds
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're right. Microsoft lost and was found guilty in federal court of monopolistic pratices, but they outlasted us and outlasted the administration that beat them and got the next one to give them exactly what they wanted, including a free pass to keep doing business as usual. Lets not let those few states still fighting them conflict with our short attention span. We might as well realize that no matter what the court says, Microsoft will do whatever Bill damn well pleases.
If a kid graduates from school and doesn't know how to work a PDA, he's going to quickly learn how to work a deep fryer.
Perhaps, but one has to sense a decay in society when, as really happened to me, a cashier reaches for a calculator to figure out my 10% discount (when I commented she must have gone to a public school she simply said she wasn't very good at percentages, I don't think she ever had a clue why I knew the discount before she did). Or when the register at the burger joint has to have pictures of the food on it so the monkey operating it can function, and how it terribly confuses them, when you see your total is $2.78, if you give them and extra 3 pennies rather than just $3.
One gets the sense that the school system is skimming over the basics a little too quickly, and I've heard too many kids state that they shouldn't have to learn basic math because the calculator will do it.
one person would pay to download, and everybody else would get it off him for free.
That would be wrong. I for one don't want to take money from the recording executives, who spend most of their days stealing money from the artists who actually make the music.
Gee, we can download an album in a "liquid audio" format (which, while they claim be better than MP3 I still have to assume is a lossy format) and burn it to our own media for $9.99, this while Sony gets less than $9.99 for albums they sell through retail outlets, and I can often find sales when any single album is $9.99. I'll opt for buying during these sales, where I get the full jewel case and printed materials and a CD that's isn't prone to self-destruct in a hot car, or stick with more "traditional" approaches.
By the way, about 2 years ago there were stories all over the news that the major labels had settled with the FTC over a suite it files against them of unfair marketing practices that were driving up the price of CD's. The claim was that as a result of the settlement we would see CD prices come down. Just the opposite has occurred, CD prices are higher now than they were at the time of the announced settlement. What isn't this getting any attention?
Slashdot Mirror
Which would acomplish exactly what the recording industry wants.
Clearly anyone who believes this is an idiot. It's the blue M&Ms that are gay. And the M&M people are still holding the tan M&M in solitary confinement without a lawyer or other advocate. As others have said, the newer blue M&Ms are much weaker and are genetically inferior to the other colors.
I certainly agree that overall there would be a savings in battery power with this technique, but issues still exists that would cause individual opposition. The most obvious is that while users would welcome and eventually expect the ability to make lower power calls (assuming they understood this at all), they would still resent others using their batteries. A more reasonable concern is that those who carry the phones only for "emergencies", and who really want the battery to be available if they do need to use the phone, would oppose subsidizing those who seem to live on their cell phone.
The guy who wrote that virus should sue Microsoft for distributing it without his permission. We're talking about theft of intellectual property here!
We need a statement from SELinux on this. Having a patent in itself isn't necessarily evil; enforcing it is. Having the patent itself can be good, it prevents some patent whore from seeing what was done and then patenting ti and claiming he owns the idea [Not that such a thing would ever be done ;-) ]. What needs to happen now is for SELinux to make it clear that this patent will not be enforced against the Linux community. Or, if they want a fight, ......
I suggested this last time the subject came up and was told they couldn't/wouldn't do it because of the support issue. Looks like it can be done after all. At least now it will be much more likely that the hardware in the box really does support Linux. Lindows is an interesting twist I hadn't expected.
Yes, you should.
I particularly enjoy the insanity of this when the soundtrack of a movie costs more than the movie.
Good to see the bureaucrats find out that they don't own the Internet. This is going to be interesting to watch as it continues to develop.
The other technique that could get you the accuracy you want is differential GPS (DGPS). It is based on the concept that all receivers in a local area experience about the same error. So a receiver is put at a known location and transmits a differential signal (how much error it's seeing right now). With the help of a special receiver, this signal is used by the GPS to calculate a more accurate position. Thing is, DGPS transmitters are not everywhere. The Coast Guard has put up some, but unless your in an area where the extra signal is available the only choices are to do without or to put up your own temporary DGPS transmitter while you need it.
One other option is to post process your data. You record the error at a known site while you are out taking your readings. You then apply the errors as seen to the known receiver to the field receiver readings to get a more accurate reading. Unfortunately, to do this ideally you should have a very accurate timestamp, and the data provided by the Garmin is only accurate to the second. Also, the calculations can be made more accurate if you have the individual satellite data, but units like the Garmin only give out the final computed location. It might be close enough for your use, but then again, it might not, you'll have to determine this.
A couple of years ago I saw a nice, wood case NorthStar S100 system sitting on a surplus table for a very modest amount. I was tempted, but had to admit that there was nothing I would do with it. Would have had to use a PC as a terminal into the NorthStar, and even an old 386 could emulate the S100 machine faster than the S100. So what's to be gained by running an S100 system?
Of course the IMSIA would at least have the nice Blinkin' Lights, the NorthStar was one of the S100 PC's that avoided them and went right to a ROM monitor, but beyond that I can't see anything I would enjoy about an old S100 system.
By the way, Bil Gates didn't have an S100 system when he wrote MS Basic. He used an Emulator. The way I heard it from another student there at the time, as a student he got caught at Harvard running the emulator for commercial gain (developing a commercial product, MS Basic). He was instructed to cease immidately, or he would be thrown out of the university. He elected to leave. (Can anyone confirm that this is how it went down?) Lets just all be glad that he doesn't do such questionable things anymore. ;-)
Millions? What do you think the population of Iowa is, what percentage of them have computers, what percentage of that have an MS OS, what percentage of that have Win98 rather than an older or newer flavor, and what percentage of that have a legal copy of the OS?
I don't think you really posted enough details for anyone to give you good advice either way. Read your list of ten reasons, but the one that seems missing there is why, if you were being treated fairly, were you being paid so much less yesterday? Maybe there is a reason for this that you can find acceptable, but it strikes me that if your employer already recognized how valuable you were then it shouldn't have taken this to get them to pay you fairly.
If you're going to use tiles at least let the server send you it's own custom tiles. I would rather opt for movable objects however, that don't have to sit on tile boundries. And again, the systems should be able to share this data amoung themselves so the users can create some interesting worlds. How many worlds can you visit made of cookie cutter cacti before it gets lame? For me the answer is somewhere less than one.
And it is Soilent.
Unless you're using tacions for signaling I think you'll find out pretty fast (or pretty slowly depending on how you look at it) that your processor in Korea and your RAM in orbit has a bit of a signal delay problem. Put your ram in geosync orbit (so you aways know where to find it and it doesn't wander to the other side of the earth) and you'll have a read/write cycle of several seconds. Just doesn't seem like the best use of the top end bandwidth you seek.
Doesn't matter that you're using many computers, as long as you're using switches rather than hubs. (Not trying to run that 10 Gig down a coax daisy chain are you? ;-) ). Since it would make no sense to adopt 10 gig bleeding edge technology and then use hubs rather than switches, the fact remains that 1 gig ethernet is all that virtualy everyone currently can make use of, the bottle neck isn't in the ethernet. Still, nice to see the technology evolving. Maybe it will even be afordable by the time I can use it.
Now I would expect that there are enough privately owned systems that a co-op would not be very viable. And I have doubts that you would have enough users of expensive special software to amortize the cost among them. And I would suggest that you at the very least confirm your original premise: As is the case with (almost) all educational facilities there are never enough computers available for students. What I found when running such a facility was that there was plenty of available computers, right up until the night before the assignments were due. Then people were backed up into the halls waiting for terminals. Be sure that's not the case at your target school, else you might find that you only have users on the night before the assignment is due, and then have more paying co-op members expecting the resource they paid extra for to be available than you can support.
I was talking about grade school, so M.I.T. doesn't really seem to enter into it (although some secondary education does end up doing a fair amount of remedial repair work). At least in public schools you don't have to worry about private sex education classes in the rectory.
I was thinking of DVD's as I wrote it, although it applies to e-books and even to CD's when they muck them up so that you can't even transfer the song on a Sony CD to a Sony MP3 player, or compile your own CD onto an audio CD that the recording industry has already received a cut on because you might put one of their albums on the CD. Sure, you don't own the content in the sense of broadcast rights and the like, but you certainly should own the right to play it on the system of your choice, including a Linux based system.
Microsoft, Disney ....... Judging from past experience it seems very clear this can't be a good thing. Get ready for the "alliance" to decide what you can and cannot have, and what you can and cannot do even with materials you have clearly paid for. And they will know what you have and what you do with it. Of course, some people call learning from the past "prejudice". But then what else should we learn from?
You're right. Microsoft lost and was found guilty in federal court of monopolistic pratices, but they outlasted us and outlasted the administration that beat them and got the next one to give them exactly what they wanted, including a free pass to keep doing business as usual. Lets not let those few states still fighting them conflict with our short attention span. We might as well realize that no matter what the court says, Microsoft will do whatever Bill damn well pleases.
Perhaps, but one has to sense a decay in society when, as really happened to me, a cashier reaches for a calculator to figure out my 10% discount (when I commented she must have gone to a public school she simply said she wasn't very good at percentages, I don't think she ever had a clue why I knew the discount before she did). Or when the register at the burger joint has to have pictures of the food on it so the monkey operating it can function, and how it terribly confuses them, when you see your total is $2.78, if you give them and extra 3 pennies rather than just $3.
One gets the sense that the school system is skimming over the basics a little too quickly, and I've heard too many kids state that they shouldn't have to learn basic math because the calculator will do it.
That would be wrong. I for one don't want to take money from the recording executives, who spend most of their days stealing money from the artists who actually make the music.
By the way, about 2 years ago there were stories all over the news that the major labels had settled with the FTC over a suite it files against them of unfair marketing practices that were driving up the price of CD's. The claim was that as a result of the settlement we would see CD prices come down. Just the opposite has occurred, CD prices are higher now than they were at the time of the announced settlement. What isn't this getting any attention?