// Convert length to metres, e.g. 200 inches to metres: // lengthToMetres(200, "inches");
function lengthToMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n * lenFactor[strUnit]) }
// Convert metres to length, e.g. 10 metres to inches: // lengthFromMetres(2, "inches");
function lengthFromMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n / lenFactor[strUnit]) }
And as far as I can tell, this works! (note, the code might have lost some line breaks due to slash-dot; I did my best!)
If memory serves me, it was largely based on information from A Dictionary of Measures, Units and Conversions.
Again (if memory serves), all the conversion factors are set such that they should not produce any rounding errors.
The only issue here is that they're set from a UK perspective so you *might* need to change them for US measurements!
There is lots of data that says that a majorit of all spam is sent by the top 200 spammers; kill them all in greusome ways, and they are unlikely to have followers:-)
Personally, I think that when these shit heads are sentanced, it should be based on how stupid their spamming is. For example, I'm getting a bunch of "Popular software - very low price" emails, to the same email address**, on the same day. How is that fucking useful? How is that going to increase their sales? Surely it is very fucking obvious that this is going to piss people off? (appologies for the rant!)
My own feelings about sentancing are that prison just costs society even more. Me, I'd nail their genitalia to a table and kick them in the back of the knee.... firm but fair!
Seriously though, I'd have slightly (not much mind) more simpathy (or is that empathy?) with them if they'd clean their database a little (removed "webmaster@" addresses maybe?) and not send the same email n times per day.
Okay... I think I'm done now.:-D
**And the email addresses they are using are "webmaster@" and "domreg@".. the former I've never used anywhere and the latter I've only used when registering domains.
Agree about the buggyness, but I do have high hopes for this product. It would be great because it is based on the iCalendar standard (or something... I forget), and plus being able to run the same software cross-platform is particularly useful with day-to-day software such as email/todo/calendar software.
The sad thing is that not only the dull Britney Spears CD's are copy-protected, but also stuff like Radiohead and Placebo.
It is very sad indeed. I think the only *right* thing to do is to ignore the albums concerns, don't buy them, do not attempt to copy them, just buy something else that isn't copy protected.
However much you like the artists concerned, you shouldn't support this kind of crap being forced upon us.
So this shift-key thing... if I bought this album (Zero-7, Amazon.co.uk), am I correct in saying I would be able to play it in my PC (running Windows 2000 mostly)?
The stupid thing is, I *didn't* buy this album specificially because of the copy-protection as I like to play my music on my PC!
The OK and Cancel buttons being the wrong way around under KDE bugged the hell out of me, but I recently discovered this adjustment that solves that particular problem. It is a pain having to do this, but on the otherhand, at least it is fairly easy to make these changes and normally if something is bugging you, its probably bugging someone else and they've already fixed it!
I'm still running 0.8, so I'm guessing here, but it might be because 0.9 stores its own files in a new location:
Windows:
Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
MacOS X:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Linux:
~/.mozilla/firefox/
If it is this, then although it might seem like a dumb bit of design, the reason is because its a pre 1.0 release so the devs have to reserve the right to change things!
Anyway, you should be able to dig out your old bookmarks file. If my memory serves, you should close all instances of Firefox before you copy in the bookmarks file otherwise it'll just overwrite it.
I would absolutely love more browser info from google since it must get the broadest user demographic of any web site.. I'd guess anyway.
It looks like they've been playing with the figures a bit though, going on the strange dips and peaks on the IE6 line and the opposite on the IE5 line. Strange. I'd also imagine that Opera is showing as IE in their data?
I've not used InkScape extensively (yet), so I might be wrong here, but I found myself wanting a "layer palette" type thing just so I could see all the objects, the grouping, perhaps give them meaningful names and to be able to raise/lower objects and/or groups of objects.
This *might* be related to the fact that I've been using vectors in PSP7 for a number of years which does support this.
Does anyone know how this kind of thing works in Illustrator? (albeit the Inkscape folks prolly shouldn't duplicate Illustrator in anyway!!).
Appologies to non-UK folks -- this is completely off-topic. But its also an absolutely red hot topic for UKer's, so please don't mod as OT!!
<snip>...only for it to be show (by the Military police...) that the photos are faked (apparently by matching scratches on vehicles no less.)..<snip>
Going on the "by Military police" bit I'm guessing you doubt this. From what I've heard, the evidence is also the kit the solidiers in the photo where using and the type of vehicle in which photos were take were both incorrect -- not they stuff that was shipped to Iraq. This where some of the initial, fairly obvious (to those in the know... which *doesn't* include me btw!), errors. From this they've found the actual vehicle used... which I must admit to being suprised they could do... but given that all this evidence has been independantly corroborated *AND* the Mirror has agreed with it, I think we can be sure that *the photos WERE fake*!
So instead of it being soldiers engaged in acts that have been reported to the government already, it is solders faking sick and degrading behaviour and passing these off as real to a newspaper. Either because they are mentally disturbed psychotics who get a kick out that sort of behaviour or in an attempt to set up the newspaper.
Or perhaps because the paper *paid* for the photos? Maybe? Or perhaps there was political motivation? (I haven't heard this mentioned... yet... but it is another possibility)
Now call me picky, but one is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers while the other is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers.
LOL.. point taken, although *aledgedly* it might've perhaps been TA's who staged the pictures. Aledgedely. You might argue that they're essentially the same... but I suspect that a full time Soldier might disagree!
The only difference is that the mirror has paid for its opposition to the war by being set up - in either event it shows that there is something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British soldiers.
In the case of the Mirror, thats the way these things go. It isn't the first time and it isn't the last, and although I detest Piers Morgan, he has simply screwed up. Largely, he's been unlucky, but it all goes with the territory; when this kind of stuff up happens, someone has to go. But on the plus side, *everyone* hates him, so no problems there!!:)
As for this bit about "something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British solidiers", I think you're way out of line there. In any organisation there *are* going to be bad apples and you know there's some horrible shit going on over there. But this "news" report blatantly smeared the good name of the British solidiers and it was compeltely wrong to do that and has put lives at risk. There fact that "this is the type of thing that might also be going on" is besides the point... it implied that this kind of behaviour was rife, when it clearly isn't (even the reports of abuses that do exist do make this point).
The Mirror "report" was fundamentally flawed news reporting, and had very serious repercusions. Reporting on actual events is fine, but the Mirror report didn't do that. It used made up, false information.
Completely agree! I guess the penalty for loosing its anti trust case wasn't right. If they were required to pass X% of their revenue to a fund for rival products then perhaps that might have helped address the "MS is a monopoly" issue and therefore actually affected the company since hiking their prices would *then* be detremental to their business because there would then be competition..... or something like that! (I haven't really thought this thru, but hopefully you can see what I'm getting at!).
I mean, how on earth could you miss the opportunity to take advantage of a proprietry, non-portable, technology that hasn't officially been released yet and probably won't be for another 2 years, and even then will be comparitively immature compared with anything, but in particular when compared with XUL that has now been in use for... how many years is it now?
Jeeezzz, these FOSS guys just keep shooting them selves in the foot!!
On a serious note, I was particularly amused by the idea of Opera (of all companies) being a possible user of MS technologies! Erm, is this Scobleizer guy the cleaner at Microsoft or something? I mean, he really doesn't seem to understand *The Way Things Are*(TM) vis-a-vis Opera being particularly relgious about standards and the way Opera and Mozilla don't consider themselves enemies -- at least I've not noticed them taking pot shots at each other!
Whilst I'm sure it was a disposable comment (as REM if you like!), and whilst I don't agree (largely due to my own BASIC background), and whilst there are plenty of other comments disagreeing and saying Dijkstra was arrogant... this is Slash dot, so:
Proving the statement:"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Wasn't Bill G/Microsoft's early background BASIC interpreters?
However, considering it cost virtually nothing to get the thing, I don't think this was particularly unfair.
If it actually cost nothing, then I guess that might be fair (sort of), but if there's any charge (beyond media costs) then.... well, it causes distress to my definition of "fair"!:)
Certainly RUNAS doesn't work with Windows Explorer. Don't know why, but I guess it has something to do with the way Explorer is _part of the operating system_. Which is unfortunate really, 'cos isn't that exactly where the security flaw is?
Just in case you haven't realised, IE5.5 is quite different to both IE5 and IE6. I myself tested a site once using IE5 and IE6 assuming that IE5.5 would be much the same as one of them... but oh no, its got its very own strangeness! And Mac IE is of course different again.
I've had weirdness with different IE versions too, like where I have some content with images floated right; words okay in IE5 and IE6, but in IE5.5, the images cover the content. And don't forget that Mac IE is different again!
But I have found myself that using standards compliant code, and then JavaScript to fix "anomalies" is pretty good. Using CSS hacks always seems to be asking for problems to me, whereas with JS you can target specific browser versions.
I'm thinking of installing Kerio on my parents PC but what I need to avoid is it asking any questions (hence Kerio and not Zone Alarm). Did you find it easy setting the right ports to leave open?
Also, are you running the latest (version 4 I think) Kerio?
That's four simple goddamn things you need to do, and your Windows is bulletproof enough for any standard needs.
I think I agree with that... although in my case I made the mistake of trying to be very "hands off" with their computing needs so they bought their own PC and its running the OEM OS install (Windows ME.... I'm sorry... I'm sorry!).
The thing is, they're still n00bs to "IT" and find clicking on things not very easy, so sometimes end up dragging tools bars to places tool bars shouldn't go. Anyhoo, WinME does have a few more options as regards locking the location of the Windows task bar and start menu, so I enabled that. But *somehow* my dad still managed to drag the task bar. The "lock taskbar" (or whatever its called) option is still checked, but somehow he moved it!!
Slashdot Mirror
I use this (JavaScript) code:
// Metric length measurements // kilometre // metre (si base unit) // centimetre // millimetre
// UK (Imperial) length measurements
// Convert length to metres, e.g. 200 inches to metres:
// lengthToMetres(200, "inches");
// Convert metres to length, e.g. 10 metres to inches:
// lengthFromMetres(2, "inches");
lenFactor["km"] = 1000;
lenFactor["m"] = 1;
lenFactor["cm"] = 0.01;
lenFactor["mm"] = 0.001;
lenFactor["inches"] = 0.0254;
lenFactor["feet"] = 0.3048;
lenFactor["yards"] = 0.9144;
lenFactor["chains"] = 20.1168;
lenFactor["furlongs"] = 201.168;
lenFactor["miles"] = 1609.344;
function lengthToMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n * lenFactor[strUnit]) }
function lengthFromMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n / lenFactor[strUnit]) }
And as far as I can tell, this works! (note, the code might have lost some line breaks due to slash-dot; I did my best!)
If memory serves me, it was largely based on information from A Dictionary of Measures, Units and Conversions. Again (if memory serves), all the conversion factors are set such that they should not produce any rounding errors.
The only issue here is that they're set from a UK perspective so you *might* need to change them for US measurements!
There is lots of data that says that a majorit of all spam is sent by the top 200 spammers; kill them all in greusome ways, and they are unlikely to have followers :-)
:-D
Personally, I think that when these shit heads are sentanced, it should be based on how stupid their spamming is. For example, I'm getting a bunch of "Popular software - very low price" emails, to the same email address**, on the same day. How is that fucking useful? How is that going to increase their sales? Surely it is very fucking obvious that this is going to piss people off? (appologies for the rant!)
My own feelings about sentancing are that prison just costs society even more. Me, I'd nail their genitalia to a table and kick them in the back of the knee.... firm but fair!
Seriously though, I'd have slightly (not much mind) more simpathy (or is that empathy?) with them if they'd clean their database a little (removed "webmaster@" addresses maybe?) and not send the same email n times per day.
Okay... I think I'm done now.
**And the email addresses they are using are "webmaster@" and "domreg@".. the former I've never used anywhere and the latter I've only used when registering domains.
Agree about the buggyness, but I do have high hopes for this product. It would be great because it is based on the iCalendar standard (or something... I forget), and plus being able to run the same software cross-platform is particularly useful with day-to-day software such as email/todo/calendar software.
The sad thing is that not only the dull Britney Spears CD's are copy-protected, but also stuff like Radiohead and Placebo.
It is very sad indeed. I think the only *right* thing to do is to ignore the albums concerns, don't buy them, do not attempt to copy them, just buy something else that isn't copy protected.
However much you like the artists concerned, you shouldn't support this kind of crap being forced upon us.
So this shift-key thing... if I bought this album (Zero-7, Amazon.co.uk), am I correct in saying I would be able to play it in my PC (running Windows 2000 mostly)?
The stupid thing is, I *didn't* buy this album specificially because of the copy-protection as I like to play my music on my PC!
The OK and Cancel buttons being the wrong way around under KDE bugged the hell out of me, but I recently discovered this adjustment that solves that particular problem. It is a pain having to do this, but on the otherhand, at least it is fairly easy to make these changes and normally if something is bugging you, its probably bugging someone else and they've already fixed it!
HTH.
I'm still running 0.8, so I'm guessing here, but it might be because 0.9 stores its own files in a new location:
Windows:
Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
MacOS X:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Linux:
~/.mozilla/firefox/
If it is this, then although it might seem like a dumb bit of design, the reason is because its a pre 1.0 release so the devs have to reserve the right to change things!
Anyway, you should be able to dig out your old bookmarks file. If my memory serves, you should close all instances of Firefox before you copy in the bookmarks file otherwise it'll just overwrite it.
HTH!
I would absolutely love more browser info from google since it must get the broadest user demographic of any web site.. I'd guess anyway.
It looks like they've been playing with the figures a bit though, going on the strange dips and peaks on the IE6 line and the opposite on the IE5 line. Strange. I'd also imagine that Opera is showing as IE in their data?
I've not used InkScape extensively (yet), so I might be wrong here, but I found myself wanting a "layer palette" type thing just so I could see all the objects, the grouping, perhaps give them meaningful names and to be able to raise/lower objects and/or groups of objects.
This *might* be related to the fact that I've been using vectors in PSP7 for a number of years which does support this.
Does anyone know how this kind of thing works in Illustrator? (albeit the Inkscape folks prolly shouldn't duplicate Illustrator in anyway!!).
If I remember correctly, didn't Tesco start doing this in 1997! So thats 7 years of maturity... which is impressive in this day and age.
So with a minor modification to my CRT, I could have a velco face? Cool! Who'd say no to that!! :)
Appologies to non-UK folks -- this is completely off-topic. But its also an absolutely red hot topic for UKer's, so please don't mod as OT!!
:)
<snip>...only for it to be show (by the Military police...) that the photos are faked (apparently by matching scratches on vehicles no less.)..<snip>
Going on the "by Military police" bit I'm guessing you doubt this. From what I've heard, the evidence is also the kit the solidiers in the photo where using and the type of vehicle in which photos were take were both incorrect -- not they stuff that was shipped to Iraq. This where some of the initial, fairly obvious (to those in the know... which *doesn't* include me btw!), errors. From this they've found the actual vehicle used... which I must admit to being suprised they could do... but given that all this evidence has been independantly corroborated *AND* the Mirror has agreed with it, I think we can be sure that *the photos WERE fake*!
So instead of it being soldiers engaged in acts that have been reported to the government already, it is solders faking sick and degrading behaviour and passing these off as real to a newspaper. Either because they are mentally disturbed psychotics who get a kick out that sort of behaviour or in an attempt to set up the newspaper.
Or perhaps because the paper *paid* for the photos? Maybe? Or perhaps there was political motivation? (I haven't heard this mentioned... yet... but it is another possibility)
Now call me picky, but one is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers while the other is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers.
LOL.. point taken, although *aledgedly* it might've perhaps been TA's who staged the pictures. Aledgedely. You might argue that they're essentially the same... but I suspect that a full time Soldier might disagree!
The only difference is that the mirror has paid for its opposition to the war by being set up - in either event it shows that there is something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British soldiers.
In the case of the Mirror, thats the way these things go. It isn't the first time and it isn't the last, and although I detest Piers Morgan, he has simply screwed up. Largely, he's been unlucky, but it all goes with the territory; when this kind of stuff up happens, someone has to go. But on the plus side, *everyone* hates him, so no problems there!!
As for this bit about "something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British solidiers", I think you're way out of line there. In any organisation there *are* going to be bad apples and you know there's some horrible shit going on over there. But this "news" report blatantly smeared the good name of the British solidiers and it was compeltely wrong to do that and has put lives at risk. There fact that "this is the type of thing that might also be going on" is besides the point... it implied that this kind of behaviour was rife, when it clearly isn't (even the reports of abuses that do exist do make this point).
The Mirror "report" was fundamentally flawed news reporting, and had very serious repercusions. Reporting on actual events is fine, but the Mirror report didn't do that. It used made up, false information.
Completely agree! I guess the penalty for loosing its anti trust case wasn't right. If they were required to pass X% of their revenue to a fund for rival products then perhaps that might have helped address the "MS is a monopoly" issue and therefore actually affected the company since hiking their prices would *then* be detremental to their business because there would then be competition..... or something like that! (I haven't really thought this thru, but hopefully you can see what I'm getting at!).
Damn, I'm too late... its fallen over already!!
Nothing can survive the power of slashdot it seems!
I mean, how on earth could you miss the opportunity to take advantage of a proprietry, non-portable, technology that hasn't officially been released yet and probably won't be for another 2 years, and even then will be comparitively immature compared with anything, but in particular when compared with XUL that has now been in use for... how many years is it now?
Jeeezzz, these FOSS guys just keep shooting them selves in the foot!!
On a serious note, I was particularly amused by the idea of Opera (of all companies) being a possible user of MS technologies! Erm, is this Scobleizer guy the cleaner at Microsoft or something? I mean, he really doesn't seem to understand *The Way Things Are*(TM) vis-a-vis Opera being particularly relgious about standards and the way Opera and Mozilla don't consider themselves enemies -- at least I've not noticed them taking pot shots at each other!
Whilst I'm sure it was a disposable comment (as REM if you like!), and whilst I don't agree (largely due to my own BASIC background), and whilst there are plenty of other comments disagreeing and saying Dijkstra was arrogant... this is Slash dot, so:
:)
Proving the statement:"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Wasn't Bill G/Microsoft's early background BASIC interpreters?
Hmmm, funny that!!
However, considering it cost virtually nothing to get the thing, I don't think this was particularly unfair.
:)
If it actually cost nothing, then I guess that might be fair (sort of), but if there's any charge (beyond media costs) then.... well, it causes distress to my definition of "fair"!
Certainly RUNAS doesn't work with Windows Explorer. Don't know why, but I guess it has something to do with the way Explorer is _part of the operating system_. Which is unfortunate really, 'cos isn't that exactly where the security flaw is?
a linux version of DOS? Lin-DOS?
Don't think I like that!
Slight off-topic, but why do I have to go to Jet Propulsion Laboratory to find out about the Mars rovers, and then I have to go to National Aeronautics and Space Administration to find out about fancy new jet engines?!
Is it a cunning plan to out-fox those secret stealing ruskies?
Just in case you haven't realised, IE5.5 is quite different to both IE5 and IE6. I myself tested a site once using IE5 and IE6 assuming that IE5.5 would be much the same as one of them... but oh no, its got its very own strangeness! And Mac IE is of course different again.
I feel your pain!
I've had weirdness with different IE versions too, like where I have some content with images floated right; words okay in IE5 and IE6, but in IE5.5, the images cover the content. And don't forget that Mac IE is different again!
But I have found myself that using standards compliant code, and then JavaScript to fix "anomalies" is pretty good. Using CSS hacks always seems to be asking for problems to me, whereas with JS you can target specific browser versions.
I'm thinking of installing Kerio on my parents PC but what I need to avoid is it asking any questions (hence Kerio and not Zone Alarm). Did you find it easy setting the right ports to leave open?
Also, are you running the latest (version 4 I think) Kerio?
Cheers!
That's four simple goddamn things you need to do, and your Windows is bulletproof enough for any standard needs.
I think I agree with that... although in my case I made the mistake of trying to be very "hands off" with their computing needs so they bought their own PC and its running the OEM OS install (Windows ME.... I'm sorry... I'm sorry!).
The thing is, they're still n00bs to "IT" and find clicking on things not very easy, so sometimes end up dragging tools bars to places tool bars shouldn't go. Anyhoo, WinME does have a few more options as regards locking the location of the Windows task bar and start menu, so I enabled that. But *somehow* my dad still managed to drag the task bar. The "lock taskbar" (or whatever its called) option is still checked, but somehow he moved it!!
So I think the moral is, you can only do so much!
The above post was not in any way intended as "flamebait" -- it was a plain question!