Personally, I hate text messaging because of the clunky input method. The idea that perhaps there is a better way to enter text into a phone is intrigueing.
indeed, i would use this. i would learn morse code just to use this. it might even get me to send SMS when nothing else has, or looks likely to. but even if it didn't, it would get my cell phone's contacts list into something resembling sensible shape.
are there morse codes for "shift-to-upper-case" and "shift-to-lower-case"? how about punctuation? but not to worry; if there aren't, as soon as a device like this becomes a common accessory for cell phones, there will be.
NY to Tokyo shouldn't have to cross all that much US land. curve out a little east of the Atlantic coast and you should be fairly good to go, i'd think. they do fly a polar route on that one, don't they?
When you ask Abiword to save a.doc file, it saves a file in RTF with a.doc extension.
it does? i had no idea. then again, i don't usually run less(1) on the.doc files i save, so i probably wouldn't know.:-P thanks for setting me straight, though!
If you have a Mac, OmniGraffle 3 Professional can import and export Visio files.
great for Mac users; now if only the source was GPL'ed...
on top of everybody saying OOo and AbiWord can save.doc (which is true), i have to mention that RTF is an MS Office format. perfectly decent one, too, at least unless you need to include graphics in your document, in which case the file sizes balloon horribly.
i use OOo and AbiWord to manipulate MSOffice documents on Linux, and the only format i have trouble with is Visio. i know of no Free Software equivalent for it; Visio's templating is miles ahead of all the others, and it seems nothing but Visio can read or write a Visio file. MS is even playing the "change the file format from one version to the next" game with Visio.
(i might have trouble with MS Access, too, but i'm not dumb enough to even try to move those between platforms. i know Access. it's excellent for making people use a relational database instead of Excel to store their data in, but that's about it. don't bring up PowerPointless, either, i don't have time for the rant that would set me off on...)
6) Any new computer purchased from GlobalComputer/TigerDirect under the "SysteMax" name
hey! i comment that resentment!
'course, mine was a "barebones kit" that came sans harddisk, so it doesn't really apply to me -- i moved over my Linux/legal-though-free win2k disks from my old homebuilt -- but still...
in fact, i've bought more software (bundled with hardware) that i've never used than i have used pirated software over the last decade or so. i can't even remember actually pirating any software the last five or six years, at all -- some questionable stretching of freeware trial-period terms, at most. OSS/Free Software has pretty well made me a fully legal software user; were i still stuck on M$, i'd never be able to afford to be that. IMHO, it's worth coping with Linux' little glitches of UI design and hardware support for that alone.
(they're not such big glitches, anyway. moving the installs from one mobo/video card/IDE interface/network chip setup to a whole other platform, i had much less headaches reconfiguring Linux than win2k server. Linux == rewrite a few config files; win2k == reinstall.)
that's pretty much where he lost me, too. it's a shame, because i agree with most (more than half) of what he says, but it seems he's got blinkers on when he looks at a number of important issues -- like this one.
i like his support for instant runoff voting, but i wish he'd be a bit more realistic about other alternatives to fall back on for when IRV inevitably gets shot down by the major parties. splitting the electoral vote blocs wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a lot better than nothing, and i wish some candidate would take it seriously.
If doctors could change my mind, I would no longer be the same person.
maybe not. but it seems to me you don't appear to WANT to be the person you are; you're going through serious surgery to become someone slightly different. changing who you are as a person isn't necessarily bad, after all.
Call it brainwashing if you like.
it might be. or it might be simply setting a mental defect right.
look, i'll be first in line to criticise psychiatry as a profession. it's rife with all sorts of problems - basically, it's a soft science trying to pretend to be a hard science so people will take it more seriously and pay its practitioners more money. behind the scenes, it's half-heartedly trying to remake itself into an actual hard science, and i'll give the shrinks full credit for that attempt - but if it ever succeeds, then "psychiatry" will have disappeared and we'll all be talking about "neurology" instead.
yet for all of that, it is still at least partly a science, it's not entirely witchcraft and religion any longer. mental diseases do exist, and insofar as curing them occasionally requires changes to the patient's personality -- well, it happens i've seen patients who needed their personalities changed, badly. yes, there have been abuses of this in psychiatry's history. that doesn't mean there isn't some good being done by it, too, or that the field can't improve itself and clean up its act over time. give the shrinks some credit, they're not all spawns of the devil.
My mind is anything but ill, and the discomfort caused by my GID offers me the choice of transition or death.
i understand you don't perceive yourself as mentally ill, but please understand that when you claim you have to get elective surgery or commit suicide, you'll have a very hard time convincing anyone who isn't in your shoes that you're entirely healthy. and since your illness appears to concern mainly your mind -- your body seems healthy by anybody else's standards, after all, correct? -- what you've got is by definition a mental illness. the appropriate treatment might very well be SRS; many mental illnesses can be treated (and some cured) by physical means.
my bipolar friend doesn't perceive herself as mentally ill most of the time, either. her condition is treated by very physical medication. should she fail to take it, she often won't perceive any mental illness in herself until a few days before she's ready to be discharged from the psych ward again - take my word for it, mental illness is very real.
IAANP, and I've handled mCi sources, and treated them with considerable respect. Even pure beta-emiters like 63Ni (60-odd keV endpoint) generate significant flux of x-rays due to shake-off electrons and bremmstralung (fairly negligable).
how much plutonium/uranium etc is there on earth? Is it sustainable to become dependent on this type of fuel?
depends on how we choose to use it. the current method is basically to refine uranium ore, put it through a reactor, then bury what comes out as dangerous waste; this isn't very efficient, on the whole. if we went to an all-nuclear energy economy using this strategy, we'd be running out fairly soonish.
(how soon? depends on who you ask, since it's so tricky to estimate. i've heard figures from several decades to a few centuries for this.)
if we switched to breeder reactors and a plutonium economy (google the term), we could make much more efficient use of the fuel. in that scenario, we'd effectively be recycling and reusing the stuff many times over before burying any waste; the time to run out, then, becomes so large that it's entirely impossible to estimate, since nobody can know how our energy demand will change over such time spans.
the problem with breeder reactors is that they'd create a lot of Pu, and the whole scheme would rest on us reprocessing, shipping, and reusing the stuff all the time, all over the place. there's a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation in that, and environmentalists tend to go bananas at the mention of it all. (except for me - i'm a technophile environmentalist, i think it's a much better idea than burning coal. i think pretty much any damn thing is better than that, actually.)
especially british environmentalists tend to go apeshit at the mention of reprocessing anything nuclear. i'm not sure why; i suspect it's because the brits have already proven themselves rather dramatically incompetent at doing it, so now they don't want anybody else showing it can be done safely, or something. whatever the reason, whenever you say "reprocessing nuclear waste", next thing you know some brit will start screaming, "Sellafield! Sellafield! Sellafield!" at you, like it's some sort of cussword they expect you to be scared of. just watch, at least one's pretty much bound to reply to me that way...
Re:I know nothing about computers. Take care of me
on
Security Alert
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
this will only work if the same user is willing to accept "i can't let you download that junk / play that game / view that malware-laden web page" when the machine tells them so.
making a machine that won't get infected by all kinds of crap isn't all that hard; making a machine that won't get infected no matter what the user demands it do for them is impossible. and no user too stupid to take care of themselves is smart enough to accept being baby-sat by any mere machine.
what counts as a "high" concentration of O3 is very debatable. one rule of thumb would be that if you can smell it, the concentration is high; whether that'll be high enough to destroy your stuff... well, wait a couple months and see if any of your stuff dies, i guess.
sharper image's online claims about the safety of the stuff they're trying to SELL you are worth about the paper you're reading them off of. (in case of printed catalogs, i'd say they're worth the electrons to download the same.) safety regulations concerning ozone vary wildly depending on what you're trying to keep safe; for people suffering from respiratory illnesses, for example, there is NO safe lower limit for ozone, it is ALWAYS hazardous to their lungs.
it's hazardous to YOUR lungs, too, of course. it's just that yours might possibly heal fast enough to keep up with the ongoing damage. the good news here is that you can safely stop using your ionizer at any time; it's not really doing you any actual good, unless you simply happen to like the smell a lot.
I'd feel silly carrying around a couple 10kB tiff's on whatever the smallest USB drive is these days.
not for very long. before you knew it, you'd be carrying around a few hundred 10KB-range tiffs on the thing, plus some text documents describing those tiffs, and this and that and...
USB drives are just large (and fast!) enough that you start subconsciously treating them like tiny slivers of mobile hard disks. there's no incentive to keep them clean and empty, like floppies; you end up using them to store files and not just transport them. a 64MB one is full before you know it.
I am sure that sales drones have more than 16 meg of files.
what are you to do then? trust the computer's hard drive? How many people have lost lots to a hard drive failure.
most people I know use floppies for their backups cince the computer fails or IT comes in with updates and magically loses everything.
That is exactly what I am sure Lumpy's Sales people are thinking.
(BTW, AC, you are Lumpy. you're the only person i've ever seen misspelling "since" with two c's.)
i pity your salesdroids if they have to back up >16megs each, to floppies. i know exactly how slow that must be. normally i'd recommend they buy their own, reasonably large, USB drives for this need - believe me, their time savings alone would more than make up for the out-of-pocket cost - but given the sort of morons you say you're working for, i bet they've banned that too, right?
There does not exist another vehicle that can COMFORTABLY take 10 people into space and back, AND cargo too. The largest capsules only seat 3 people, and have no room for anything else.
there's no law of nature saying a capsule can't be built bigger. in fact, some of the ideas floated for an updated-Apollo capsule for crew changes on the ISS had six seats in two "layers". (the
X-38 CRV
was meant to seat seven, and for all its actual flight capabilities, we might about as well call it a capsule.) there's also no law saying a small capsule with a small crew can't be sent up on the same heavy lifter as a large, unpressurized, non-returning payload shroud holding cargo. c.f. Apollo.
as for cargo, there's not a whole lot of good reason it has to go up along with human crew. if something needs to be assembled or maintained in orbit, why can't it be sent up into a parking orbit by itself for a week or two and the personnel to do the work on it be sent up separately? this not only lets you choose launch windows a bit more freely (since the two launches might be different in those regards - only one of them needs to be able to return, for a start), it also lets you use cheaper, non-manrated lifters for dead cargo and save the expensive, reliable ones for humans.
one of the main reasons the shuttle is what it is was that the Air Force wanted the capacity to bring large loads back down from orbit. that's why the thing has that huge, ever-present cargo bay instead of a disposable payload shroud, basically. 'course, this ability has actually been used about three or four times, but who cares, right...?
when I enter public libraries or school computer labs these are not allowed due to security restrictions.
i realize you probably can't do anything about it, but doesn't it just give you the willies having to rely on computers maintained by complete morons? it'd freak me out.
here at corperate they are BANNING cd and DVD burners. hell they just rolled out USB thumb drives to everyone but made sure they are too small to be useable (16 meg)
just on the off chance that this is actually news to anyone - you work for a bunch of stupid jerks. HTH.
"nobody will buy us MORE thumb drives, and I'm not going to spend $12.00 each for these things!"
how often does even a salesdrone manage to break a USB drive? (or was the intention that s/he wanted something they could give away to clients...?) because, short of leaving my flash disk behind somewhere, or running it over with my car, it's pretty much immortal. no moving parts and all that.
only time i've ever lost data off of mine was when i gave rsync the --delete switch when i shouldn't've... free hint: undeleting stuff off a FAT-formatted flash disk is NOT a reliable process.:-/
i've got that on my shitty noname Duron mobo. haven't tried it yet, though, but if i run into a 16meg USB drive i won't care about potentially trashing, i will.
it's the most affordable reusable VTHL SSTO vehicle in the world.
as you say, it's the ONLY reusable VTHL SSTO vehicle in the world. (for some values of "reusable" and "SSTO", anyway.) the mere fact that it kinda-sorta works is not sufficient evidence that it's a good idea, or a cheap way to get to orbit.
OTOH, the shuttle alone can't be taken as sufficient evidence that SSTO is a bad idea, or that VTHL is a half-assed way to put a winged airframe someplace without air, or that reusability either is or isn't worth its extra effort. nonetheless, i believe we should note that the shuttle is not and never was cheap to fly, that it has a sucky safety record, and takes a continuing enormous investment of time, money and manpower to operate.
it's been, what, thirty years since it was proposed and twenty since it first flew? maybe - just maybe - we could do better these days, with the lessons we've learned from it?
in a text file, they make natural "region markers"; because of the way people write text files, changes are naturally constrained to being inside a line, or to be additions/deletions of lines, or some combination. that means you can break your text files up into one-line units, scan for differences/similarities between (extents of) those units, and likely have fairly good luck - even if your diff file format considers a line the smallest possible unit of change, that's not going to be outrageously wasteful even to change just one byte in a line.
whereas with a binary file, if the changes touch bytes 3164, 3166 and 3190-3403 inclusive, without any line breaks anywhere in those ranges, you'll have to do a lot of byte-by-byte searching to figure it out. you'll have to look for insertions and deletions byte by byte, too, you can't assume that entire lines (with convenient newline end markers) will have been pushed in or cut out from between existing ones.
a "diff" is a file listing just the differences between two other files. (those two are assumed to be fairly similar. that's what makes diffs be small and efficient.)
binary diffs are diffs on non-text, binary, files. turns out it's a little bit trickier to create these (and make them optimally small) than it is on text files, since you can't rely on there being newlines in a non-text file.
delta compression is about sending a gzipped diff between file1 and file2, uncompressing it, and applying it to your already-extant copy of file1 to get file2, as opposed to just sending a gzipped file2. so long as file1 and file2 are similar, this can produce gi-normous "compression ratios".
actually, i used to use bzip (version 1, even) on a 16MB 486 back in the day. slow as fuck, but it did successfully (de)compress kernel tarballs and patches. bzip2 uses no more memory than v1 did, in my experience.
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indeed, i would use this. i would learn morse code just to use this. it might even get me to send SMS when nothing else has, or looks likely to. but even if it didn't, it would get my cell phone's contacts list into something resembling sensible shape.
are there morse codes for "shift-to-upper-case" and "shift-to-lower-case"? how about punctuation? but not to worry; if there aren't, as soon as a device like this becomes a common accessory for cell phones, there will be.
does that theoretical energy of yours include what it takes to remain at 100KM altitude for a few hours...?
NY to Tokyo shouldn't have to cross all that much US land. curve out a little east of the Atlantic coast and you should be fairly good to go, i'd think. they do fly a polar route on that one, don't they?
it does? i had no idea. then again, i don't usually run less(1) on the .doc files i save, so i probably wouldn't know. :-P thanks for setting me straight, though!
great for Mac users; now if only the source was GPL'ed ...
i use OOo and AbiWord to manipulate MSOffice documents on Linux, and the only format i have trouble with is Visio. i know of no Free Software equivalent for it; Visio's templating is miles ahead of all the others, and it seems nothing but Visio can read or write a Visio file. MS is even playing the "change the file format from one version to the next" game with Visio.
(i might have trouble with MS Access, too, but i'm not dumb enough to even try to move those between platforms. i know Access. it's excellent for making people use a relational database instead of Excel to store their data in, but that's about it. don't bring up PowerPointless, either, i don't have time for the rant that would set me off on...)
hey! i comment that resentment!
'course, mine was a "barebones kit" that came sans harddisk, so it doesn't really apply to me -- i moved over my Linux/legal-though-free win2k disks from my old homebuilt -- but still...
in fact, i've bought more software (bundled with hardware) that i've never used than i have used pirated software over the last decade or so. i can't even remember actually pirating any software the last five or six years, at all -- some questionable stretching of freeware trial-period terms, at most. OSS/Free Software has pretty well made me a fully legal software user; were i still stuck on M$, i'd never be able to afford to be that. IMHO, it's worth coping with Linux' little glitches of UI design and hardware support for that alone.
(they're not such big glitches, anyway. moving the installs from one mobo/video card/IDE interface/network chip setup to a whole other platform, i had much less headaches reconfiguring Linux than win2k server. Linux == rewrite a few config files; win2k == reinstall.)
that's pretty much where he lost me, too. it's a shame, because i agree with most (more than half) of what he says, but it seems he's got blinkers on when he looks at a number of important issues -- like this one.
i like his support for instant runoff voting, but i wish he'd be a bit more realistic about other alternatives to fall back on for when IRV inevitably gets shot down by the major parties. splitting the electoral vote blocs wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a lot better than nothing, and i wish some candidate would take it seriously.
maybe not. but it seems to me you don't appear to WANT to be the person you are; you're going through serious surgery to become someone slightly different. changing who you are as a person isn't necessarily bad, after all.
it might be. or it might be simply setting a mental defect right.
look, i'll be first in line to criticise psychiatry as a profession. it's rife with all sorts of problems - basically, it's a soft science trying to pretend to be a hard science so people will take it more seriously and pay its practitioners more money. behind the scenes, it's half-heartedly trying to remake itself into an actual hard science, and i'll give the shrinks full credit for that attempt - but if it ever succeeds, then "psychiatry" will have disappeared and we'll all be talking about "neurology" instead.
yet for all of that, it is still at least partly a science, it's not entirely witchcraft and religion any longer. mental diseases do exist, and insofar as curing them occasionally requires changes to the patient's personality -- well, it happens i've seen patients who needed their personalities changed, badly. yes, there have been abuses of this in psychiatry's history. that doesn't mean there isn't some good being done by it, too, or that the field can't improve itself and clean up its act over time. give the shrinks some credit, they're not all spawns of the devil.
i understand you don't perceive yourself as mentally ill, but please understand that when you claim you have to get elective surgery or commit suicide, you'll have a very hard time convincing anyone who isn't in your shoes that you're entirely healthy. and since your illness appears to concern mainly your mind -- your body seems healthy by anybody else's standards, after all, correct? -- what you've got is by definition a mental illness. the appropriate treatment might very well be SRS; many mental illnesses can be treated (and some cured) by physical means.
my bipolar friend doesn't perceive herself as mentally ill most of the time, either. her condition is treated by very physical medication. should she fail to take it, she often won't perceive any mental illness in herself until a few days before she's ready to be discharged from the psych ward again - take my word for it, mental illness is very real.
IYAANP, how come you'd misspell "bremsstrahlung"?
depends on how we choose to use it. the current method is basically to refine uranium ore, put it through a reactor, then bury what comes out as dangerous waste; this isn't very efficient, on the whole. if we went to an all-nuclear energy economy using this strategy, we'd be running out fairly soonish.
(how soon? depends on who you ask, since it's so tricky to estimate. i've heard figures from several decades to a few centuries for this.)
if we switched to breeder reactors and a plutonium economy (google the term), we could make much more efficient use of the fuel. in that scenario, we'd effectively be recycling and reusing the stuff many times over before burying any waste; the time to run out, then, becomes so large that it's entirely impossible to estimate, since nobody can know how our energy demand will change over such time spans.
the problem with breeder reactors is that they'd create a lot of Pu, and the whole scheme would rest on us reprocessing, shipping, and reusing the stuff all the time, all over the place. there's a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation in that, and environmentalists tend to go bananas at the mention of it all. (except for me - i'm a technophile environmentalist, i think it's a much better idea than burning coal. i think pretty much any damn thing is better than that, actually.)
especially british environmentalists tend to go apeshit at the mention of reprocessing anything nuclear. i'm not sure why; i suspect it's because the brits have already proven themselves rather dramatically incompetent at doing it, so now they don't want anybody else showing it can be done safely, or something. whatever the reason, whenever you say "reprocessing nuclear waste", next thing you know some brit will start screaming, "Sellafield! Sellafield! Sellafield!" at you, like it's some sort of cussword they expect you to be scared of. just watch, at least one's pretty much bound to reply to me that way...
making a machine that won't get infected by all kinds of crap isn't all that hard; making a machine that won't get infected no matter what the user demands it do for them is impossible. and no user too stupid to take care of themselves is smart enough to accept being baby-sat by any mere machine.
that's pretty much the case no matter what's in the subject, i've found.
WTF are your walls made of, dude? discarded battle tank glacis plates?
sharper image's online claims about the safety of the stuff they're trying to SELL you are worth about the paper you're reading them off of. (in case of printed catalogs, i'd say they're worth the electrons to download the same.) safety regulations concerning ozone vary wildly depending on what you're trying to keep safe; for people suffering from respiratory illnesses, for example, there is NO safe lower limit for ozone, it is ALWAYS hazardous to their lungs.
it's hazardous to YOUR lungs, too, of course. it's just that yours might possibly heal fast enough to keep up with the ongoing damage. the good news here is that you can safely stop using your ionizer at any time; it's not really doing you any actual good, unless you simply happen to like the smell a lot.
USB drives are just large (and fast!) enough that you start subconsciously treating them like tiny slivers of mobile hard disks. there's no incentive to keep them clean and empty, like floppies; you end up using them to store files and not just transport them. a 64MB one is full before you know it.
i pity your salesdroids if they have to back up >16megs each, to floppies. i know exactly how slow that must be. normally i'd recommend they buy their own, reasonably large, USB drives for this need - believe me, their time savings alone would more than make up for the out-of-pocket cost - but given the sort of morons you say you're working for, i bet they've banned that too, right?
as for cargo, there's not a whole lot of good reason it has to go up along with human crew. if something needs to be assembled or maintained in orbit, why can't it be sent up into a parking orbit by itself for a week or two and the personnel to do the work on it be sent up separately? this not only lets you choose launch windows a bit more freely (since the two launches might be different in those regards - only one of them needs to be able to return, for a start), it also lets you use cheaper, non-manrated lifters for dead cargo and save the expensive, reliable ones for humans.
one of the main reasons the shuttle is what it is was that the Air Force wanted the capacity to bring large loads back down from orbit. that's why the thing has that huge, ever-present cargo bay instead of a disposable payload shroud, basically. 'course, this ability has actually been used about three or four times, but who cares, right...?
only time i've ever lost data off of mine was when i gave rsync the --delete switch when i shouldn't've... free hint: undeleting stuff off a FAT-formatted flash disk is NOT a reliable process. :-/
i've got that on my shitty noname Duron mobo. haven't tried it yet, though, but if i run into a 16meg USB drive i won't care about potentially trashing, i will.
OTOH, the shuttle alone can't be taken as sufficient evidence that SSTO is a bad idea, or that VTHL is a half-assed way to put a winged airframe someplace without air, or that reusability either is or isn't worth its extra effort. nonetheless, i believe we should note that the shuttle is not and never was cheap to fly, that it has a sucky safety record, and takes a continuing enormous investment of time, money and manpower to operate.
it's been, what, thirty years since it was proposed and twenty since it first flew? maybe - just maybe - we could do better these days, with the lessons we've learned from it?
i know i'd use it. just wish i had the skills (or the time to learn the skills) to write the damn thing myself.
whereas with a binary file, if the changes touch bytes 3164, 3166 and 3190-3403 inclusive, without any line breaks anywhere in those ranges, you'll have to do a lot of byte-by-byte searching to figure it out. you'll have to look for insertions and deletions byte by byte, too, you can't assume that entire lines (with convenient newline end markers) will have been pushed in or cut out from between existing ones.
binary diffs are diffs on non-text, binary, files. turns out it's a little bit trickier to create these (and make them optimally small) than it is on text files, since you can't rely on there being newlines in a non-text file.
delta compression is about sending a gzipped diff between file1 and file2, uncompressing it, and applying it to your already-extant copy of file1 to get file2, as opposed to just sending a gzipped file2. so long as file1 and file2 are similar, this can produce gi-normous "compression ratios".
actually, i used to use bzip (version 1, even) on a 16MB 486 back in the day. slow as fuck, but it did successfully (de)compress kernel tarballs and patches. bzip2 uses no more memory than v1 did, in my experience.