[Why don't we just say 1 foot =] 10 inches. Back in the old days the carpenters didn't document that a foot=12 inches and obviously since we have 10 fingers a foot must be equal to 10 inches.
ITYM 10 toes;)
Imagine what that means for car manufactures when we measure mpg for fuel efficiency on cars a mile should actually be 880ft shorter then it really is. That's about 16% shorter. Imagine if car companies could claim by the same logic that cars are 16% more fuel efficient then they really are.
Just imagine if they used real gallons, with 8 real 20 fluid ounce pints in them? That would make the cars seem 25% more fuel-efficient than, um, some people, think they are...
And while we're at it, we could use real decimal numbers:
1 thousand = 1,000
1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000
1 billiard = 1,000,000,000,000,000
etc...
I used to think "Everything's Bigger in America", but I guess there are a couple of exceptions...;)
I often wonder why "Cheating on your wife" jokes are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I can't see the point in getting married if you don't intend to be faithful, and laughing about it doesn't make it any less tragic that so many people think otherwise... hmm.
I doubt it'd be that much power, I've made little radio transmitters (within legal limits) from home science kits before with a range of a hundred metres or so, powered off half a dozen AA batteries. Given that the scenario you describe is somebody intending to indulge in criminal activity anyway, I doubt he'd be too worried about upping the power a little over the legal limit...
how long do the power sources in these things last?
I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of RFID tags, but they certainly don't need power supplies at all. Compare with the tags they embed in books to stop you nicking them from the library, or the similar (but much larger) tags they attach to clothes in shops, or the ID tags they've started injecting into in pets, or whatever else.
Generally, the way these work is that the 'reader' emits a signal, essentially saying "Where are you little tags?" which is strong enough that the energy of the signal is enough to power a miniscule transmitter that simply says "I'm #2393278". If you've ever played with a crystal-set radio, you'll be familiar with the first half of this process. Or if you've ever had a stereo pick up the mains hum (shield those cables!) There's probably enough electromagnetic energy floating around in the average house to power a transmitter with a range of a few feet even without the 'reader' transmitting power (if the signal is easy to separate from background noise, that is, and your receiver is sensitive).
You can check fingerprints on paper too you know. And with paper, you have the ability to say "This ballot was held by X and he voted for Y"...
Sure, but once it's in the ballot box, only those officially sanctioned to deal with the votes have access to them, besides, who cares about finger prints when the ballot paper itself identifies you? The point I was making was that anyone who comes into the box after me (say I'm a celeb, or a politician and they care) can dust for my fingerprints on the screen and see which button I pressed.
... whereas with a screen with some 5000 people touching it in 1 day, good luck finding any useable prints.
Sure this would be pretty lousy for speculative dusting, but if you're looking for a single fingerprint and you look shortly after it was laid down, you'd have a far better chance, I reckon...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS surely concerns over the security of a voting system are not off topic? Yeah, I know "Grousing about moderation" is offtopic, so I'll shut up now:(
Another option that I'm aware of lies in an old linux kernel patch to the keyboard driver--I only know of it because a friend of mine wrote it. The patch makes it so that if you hold down the spacebar, the keyboard is mirrored, so that you can continue to type one-handed, and allegedly learning the reflected keys is very fast, since you already sort of know where they are. In case this wasn't clear, if you wanted to type "type", you would type T-(hold space)-T-Q-(release space)-E. I'm not sure where the link is, but if people want I'll try and find it
I'm interested, especially looking at the various links people have posted to people who do keyboards with this functionality ($295 is the cheapest, some go to nearly a grand! Bloody stupid!)
Looking this up wasn't exactly difficult (to pronate the forearm is to turn it such that your palm points downward, in case you haven't already looked it up) but the bit that confuses me is how you "extend the wrist" does that mean point with it, or something?
New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home.
But "Home is wherever I hang my hat" and I have a lot of hats for sale for very cheap...
Seriously, though, how can they possibly do this on a technological level? Unless (of course) when they say "Home" they mean "Computer, excluding any upgrade ever"
There are two buyers of licenses: Sun & Microsoft. The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the April 30, 2003 quarter and $7,280,000 during the July 31, 2003 quarter.
RTFA, as they say;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS: I know this is redundant, but if somebody can overlook it and post the above, maybe it needs repeating...
Re:Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
I am no reading expert but [...] If you don't know what the sound the letter "P" makes you can never ever read the letter. [...] I _have_ to sound it out, or attempt to, because that is the only way a human being can read.
I have a good friend who is profoundly deaf and (untill recently, when she had a cochlea implant) has never heard a sound in her life. She can read and write well enough that you wouldn't have the faintest idea she's deaf at all, so clearly your assertion holds no water.
In case you think I'm having a go at you, actually she also speaks very well (though with a minor artifact, akin to a speech impediment) having had hours of speech therapy per day for the first decade of her life. You could say that for her the sensation of articulating the sounds, even if she couldn't hear them, served the same purpose. I'll ask her if she learned to read before she learned to speak...
I've had to use the VS IDE most days since I started this current job around 10 months ago. I have to say I'm very impressed with it. Most of the time.
On the other hand, there are some screaming bugs. Just a couple that spring to mind:
popup windows that refuse to pop up is one of the minor ones
html / asp formatting is one of the major ones
I like HTML to be formatted so that you can see what's going on, unfortunately, VS likes it to be formatted so you can't see ANYTHING. And it doesn't even just wait for you to click the reformat button to 'help you out' by bastardising your formatting, it does it every time you switch from HTML view to designer view, even if you don't do anything. And then there are the tags, which it seems to be really keen on, and which don't serve any purpose I can see, they just appear at random. Then there's the fact that it can't be arsed to close its tags unless they're paired (<br> instead of <br/>)
It wouldn't be so infuriating, but it does XML really quite well. I write all my HTML so that it's XHTML, why doesn't it get formatted with the same scheme, then?
Switching to open source will only shrink the market even more, there is NO value at all, it certainly will not help.
You obviously haven't actually thought about this. RedHat, SuSE, IBM, Mandrake, and many others are actually making a reasonable living from OSS, particularly in the service area, providing & supporting the system, not selling the software
Some people say that IP rights is something unique to this industry, that utterly untrue. More or less all major businesses have substancial IP rights. Patents, copyright, trademarks.
I agree on this point but...
What would McDonalds or Coca-cola be without their IP rights? Nothing!
Gibberish. Coca-Cola may be one example of a "secret recipe", but all McDonalds have is trademarks, they hardly have any patents on the recipe for a burger! Besides, even Cola isn't excactly a closed market, there are dozens of colas on the market, and many of them are only significantly different from Coke because they're working to a cheaper market and they cut corners on quality of ingredients to meet that demand.
Car-manufacturers don't give out blueprints to their cars, medicine-manufacturers don't give out the ingridients.
Again, not true. I have two manuals for my motorbike, (I considered buying a third from the manufacturers themselves, but it was three times the price of the other two) which contain as much information about the bike as one would need to be able to completely dismantle it and re-assemble it. There may be techniques involved in the manufacture of parts, but you can ask any forger or material scientist for those. Pharamaseuticals are required by law to tell you exactly what they contain (*grabs a couple of boxes of pills*) "Citalopram Hydrobromide, 20mg", "ibuprofen 200mg" hmm, sounds pretty specific to me. If you're wondering what other ingredients there are, it's chalk, sugar, shellac & sometimes colouring, same as any pill you take.
It's time for this industry to grow up and protect their rights just like everyone else.
I think the problem with this suggestion is that the "industry" isn't a single entity, the protection you mentioned above is protection of one party in the industry from another party in the same industry, which is counterproductive in that it reduces the positive benefit available from competition. It means that competition is nothing to do with the quality of the product, rather how easily the customer is duped into *thinking* it's better (or more convenient, or whatever)
It doesn't have to be the huge disaster it is now in this industry, it's self-inflicted by the people working in it.
Maybe, but at the end of the day, I think the main reason technology jobs are moving out of the "developed" world and into the "developing" world is money. It's cheaper to employ people in india or wherever, so that's where the business goes. It's nothing to do with IP.
Maybe HP just wants to avoid Microsoft/BSA-style hassles: FatRatBastard writes "According to an article on Commentwire.com SCO has started sending invoices to Linux users. If a company signs up for SCO's 'Intellectual Property License for Linux,' they allow the possibility of being audited at SCO's expense to ensure that the user has been truthful about the number of Linux installations it has. Should the audit reveal that the user has underpaid SCO by 5% or $5,000, whichever is highest, the user also agrees to pay the price for the audit."
So, anyone here who happens to have no linux boxen, but a very large setup of other machines want to install one linux box, offer to pay for the license and then try to get SCO to spend a bunch of money auditing your entire network?
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Re:Because non CLI text interfaces are useful.
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 1
Don't know if this GTK supports mouse inputs. From the screenshots I'd guess not which somewhat limits its utility.
the webshite says:
Requirements/dependencies:
To install RPM/DEB packages: ncurses + gpm
I'd imagine that's because it uses gpm for mouse input
What if SCO's Microsoft-funded strategy is not to FUD Linux, but to revisit that decision and show that 32V did not fall into the public domain, but *became in fact a derivative work of BSD?*
I've found myself at the wrong end of 240v before (we have proper manly electricity in the UK;) it (*insert expletive here*) hurt, first off. The spark was audible.
Secondly, it temprarily paralysed my right hand, my thumb was totally numb and limp for around 12 hours.
I think I got off fairly lightly. Luckily I wasn't holding the conductor, I merely touched it. The reason this makes a lot of difference is that when the electricity, simulating nerve impulses but over 340 times as strong, tenses all the muscles in the area, your hand is instantly yanked away by your biceps (the hand, wrist and forearm muscles just contort, rather than moving the hand much). If I'd been holding the power cable, my hand would've gripped the wire with all my physically available strength (possibly ripping muscles in the process) meaning that I would have been connected to the mains until the current burnt out a fuse or, more likely, cooked the skin & muscle in my hand to a degree that the charcoal constituted a significant insulator. Or maybe the muscles would've torn right through, or I might've pulled the cable out of its place, though it was soldered fairly securely...
Slashdot Mirror
[Why don't we just say 1 foot =] 10 inches. Back in the old days the carpenters didn't document that a foot=12 inches and obviously since we have 10 fingers a foot must be equal to 10 inches.
ITYM 10 toes ;)
Imagine what that means for car manufactures when we measure mpg for fuel efficiency on cars a mile should actually be 880ft shorter then it really is. That's about 16% shorter. Imagine if car companies could claim by the same logic that cars are 16% more fuel efficient then they really are.
Just imagine if they used real gallons, with 8 real 20 fluid ounce pints in them? That would make the cars seem 25% more fuel-efficient than, um, some people, think they are...
And while we're at it, we could use real decimal numbers:
1 thousand = 1,000
1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000
1 billiard = 1,000,000,000,000,000
etc...
I used to think "Everything's Bigger in America", but I guess there are a couple of exceptions... ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
You can have my one-button mouse when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Surely "finger"? ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Boondoggle CCAGW Misspeaks English, Generally Can't Comprehend Communication
What "Boondoggle" means...
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Um, what happened to #1? Or don't I want to know ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
"Ha Ha"
I often wonder why "Cheating on your wife" jokes are so popular. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I can't see the point in getting married if you don't intend to be faithful, and laughing about it doesn't make it any less tragic that so many people think otherwise... hmm.
Oops, -1 Depressing ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I doubt it'd be that much power, I've made little radio transmitters (within legal limits) from home science kits before with a range of a hundred metres or so, powered off half a dozen AA batteries. Given that the scenario you describe is somebody intending to indulge in criminal activity anyway, I doubt he'd be too worried about upping the power a little over the legal limit...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Or perhaps because he has enough integrity that being caught out isn't a problem?
Cheers & God bless
-- This isn't aSam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
how long do the power sources in these things last?
I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of RFID tags, but they certainly don't need power supplies at all. Compare with the tags they embed in books to stop you nicking them from the library, or the similar (but much larger) tags they attach to clothes in shops, or the ID tags they've started injecting into in pets, or whatever else.
Generally, the way these work is that the 'reader' emits a signal, essentially saying "Where are you little tags?" which is strong enough that the energy of the signal is enough to power a miniscule transmitter that simply says "I'm #2393278". If you've ever played with a crystal-set radio, you'll be familiar with the first half of this process. Or if you've ever had a stereo pick up the mains hum (shield those cables!) There's probably enough electromagnetic energy floating around in the average house to power a transmitter with a range of a few feet even without the 'reader' transmitting power (if the signal is easy to separate from background noise, that is, and your receiver is sensitive).
I guess it's a little similar to the Tesla thing.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
You can check fingerprints on paper too you know. And with paper, you have the ability to say "This ballot was held by X and he voted for Y" ...
Sure, but once it's in the ballot box, only those officially sanctioned to deal with the votes have access to them, besides, who cares about finger prints when the ballot paper itself identifies you? The point I was making was that anyone who comes into the box after me (say I'm a celeb, or a politician and they care) can dust for my fingerprints on the screen and see which button I pressed.
Sure this would be pretty lousy for speculative dusting, but if you're looking for a single fingerprint and you look shortly after it was laid down, you'd have a far better chance, I reckon...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS surely concerns over the security of a voting system are not off topic? Yeah, I know "Grousing about moderation" is offtopic, so I'll shut up now :(
How can these elections remain anonymous when somebody can just come into the booth after me, check for fingerprints and say "Bob's my uncle"?
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS first post? ;)
Another option that I'm aware of lies in an old linux kernel patch to the keyboard driver--I only know of it because a friend of mine wrote it. The patch makes it so that if you hold down the spacebar, the keyboard is mirrored, so that you can continue to type one-handed, and allegedly learning the reflected keys is very fast, since you already sort of know where they are. In case this wasn't clear, if you wanted to type "type", you would type T-(hold space)-T-Q-(release space)-E. I'm not sure where the link is, but if people want I'll try and find it
I'm interested, especially looking at the various links people have posted to people who do keyboards with this functionality ($295 is the cheapest, some go to nearly a grand! Bloody stupid!)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Looking this up wasn't exactly difficult (to pronate the forearm is to turn it such that your palm points downward, in case you haven't already looked it up) but the bit that confuses me is how you "extend the wrist" does that mean point with it, or something?
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
(hey folks try to do a Ctrl-P with your left hand using the left Control key)
Works for me, I have just the standard keyboard that came with this Dell workstation...
Small hands -> Small feet -> ? ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
If you sell a hat, it's not yours anymore.
Rent, then :)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home.
But "Home is wherever I hang my hat" and I have a lot of hats for sale for very cheap...
Seriously, though, how can they possibly do this on a technological level? Unless (of course) when they say "Home" they mean "Computer, excluding any upgrade ever"
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Um, no.
There are two buyers of licenses: Sun & Microsoft. The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the April 30, 2003 quarter and $7,280,000 during the July 31, 2003 quarter.
RTFA, as they say ;)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS: I know this is redundant, but if somebody can overlook it and post the above, maybe it needs repeating...
I am no reading expert but [...] If you don't know what the sound the letter "P" makes you can never ever read the letter. [...] I _have_ to sound it out, or attempt to, because that is the only way a human being can read.
I have a good friend who is profoundly deaf and (untill recently, when she had a cochlea implant) has never heard a sound in her life. She can read and write well enough that you wouldn't have the faintest idea she's deaf at all, so clearly your assertion holds no water.
In case you think I'm having a go at you, actually she also speaks very well (though with a minor artifact, akin to a speech impediment) having had hours of speech therapy per day for the first decade of her life. You could say that for her the sensation of articulating the sounds, even if she couldn't hear them, served the same purpose. I'll ask her if she learned to read before she learned to speak...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Yay! I get to say RTFA!
The link (given in 'TFA') is http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/mcbride2.html (it wasn't exactly highlighted, though)
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I've had to use the VS IDE most days since I started this current job around 10 months ago. I have to say I'm very impressed with it. Most of the time.
On the other hand, there are some screaming bugs. Just a couple that spring to mind:
- popup windows that refuse to pop up is one of the minor ones
- html / asp formatting is one of the major ones
I like HTML to be formatted so that you can see what's going on, unfortunately, VS likes it to be formatted so you can't see ANYTHING. And it doesn't even just wait for you to click the reformat button to 'help you out' by bastardising your formatting, it does it every time you switch from HTML view to designer view, even if you don't do anything. And then there are the tags, which it seems to be really keen on, and which don't serve any purpose I can see, they just appear at random. Then there's the fact that it can't be arsed to close its tags unless they're paired (<br> instead of <br/>)It wouldn't be so infuriating, but it does XML really quite well. I write all my HTML so that it's XHTML, why doesn't it get formatted with the same scheme, then?
grr!
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
How, exactly, did you reach that conclusion?
well...
Switching to open source will only shrink the market even more, there is NO value at all, it certainly will not help.
You obviously haven't actually thought about this. RedHat, SuSE, IBM, Mandrake, and many others are actually making a reasonable living from OSS, particularly in the service area, providing & supporting the system, not selling the software
Some people say that IP rights is something unique to this industry, that utterly untrue. More or less all major businesses have substancial IP rights. Patents, copyright, trademarks.
I agree on this point but...
What would McDonalds or Coca-cola be without their IP rights? Nothing!
Gibberish. Coca-Cola may be one example of a "secret recipe", but all McDonalds have is trademarks, they hardly have any patents on the recipe for a burger! Besides, even Cola isn't excactly a closed market, there are dozens of colas on the market, and many of them are only significantly different from Coke because they're working to a cheaper market and they cut corners on quality of ingredients to meet that demand.
Car-manufacturers don't give out blueprints to their cars, medicine-manufacturers don't give out the ingridients.
Again, not true. I have two manuals for my motorbike, (I considered buying a third from the manufacturers themselves, but it was three times the price of the other two) which contain as much information about the bike as one would need to be able to completely dismantle it and re-assemble it. There may be techniques involved in the manufacture of parts, but you can ask any forger or material scientist for those. Pharamaseuticals are required by law to tell you exactly what they contain (*grabs a couple of boxes of pills*) "Citalopram Hydrobromide, 20mg", "ibuprofen 200mg" hmm, sounds pretty specific to me. If you're wondering what other ingredients there are, it's chalk, sugar, shellac & sometimes colouring, same as any pill you take.
It's time for this industry to grow up and protect their rights just like everyone else.
I think the problem with this suggestion is that the "industry" isn't a single entity, the protection you mentioned above is protection of one party in the industry from another party in the same industry, which is counterproductive in that it reduces the positive benefit available from competition. It means that competition is nothing to do with the quality of the product, rather how easily the customer is duped into *thinking* it's better (or more convenient, or whatever)
It doesn't have to be the huge disaster it is now in this industry, it's self-inflicted by the people working in it.
Maybe, but at the end of the day, I think the main reason technology jobs are moving out of the "developed" world and into the "developing" world is money. It's cheaper to employ people in india or wherever, so that's where the business goes. It's nothing to do with IP.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Maybe HP just wants to avoid Microsoft/BSA-style hassles: FatRatBastard writes "According to an article on Commentwire.com SCO has started sending invoices to Linux users. If a company signs up for SCO's 'Intellectual Property License for Linux,' they allow the possibility of being audited at SCO's expense to ensure that the user has been truthful about the number of Linux installations it has. Should the audit reveal that the user has underpaid SCO by 5% or $5,000, whichever is highest, the user also agrees to pay the price for the audit."
So, anyone here who happens to have no linux boxen, but a very large setup of other machines want to install one linux box, offer to pay for the license and then try to get SCO to spend a bunch of money auditing your entire network?
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
the webshite says:
Requirements/dependencies:
To install RPM/DEB packages: ncurses + gpm
I'd imagine that's because it uses gpm for mouse input
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
What if SCO's Microsoft-funded strategy is not to FUD Linux, but to revisit that decision and show that 32V did not fall into the public domain, but *became in fact a derivative work of BSD?*
*Sshhh!* Don't give them ideas!
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Pennyit'll just cost you the price of a small car to buy a CPU.
it already does:
c puintel
d ll?GetResult&SortProperty=MetaHighestPriceSort&que ry=car&maxPrice=350&from=R6&ebaytag1=ebayctry&ebay curr=999&ebaytag1code=3&siteid=3&ht=1&currdisp=1&c ategory0=9800&combine=y&st=2
http://cclcomputers.co.uk/plist/r1-proessors.htm#
lists a Xeon 3GHz as around 340,
http://search-completed.ebay.co.uk/search/search.
lists several cars costing aruond the same, or less...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
--
All too often passwords are the weakest link in security.
I've found myself at the wrong end of 240v before (we have proper manly electricity in the UK ;) it (*insert expletive here*) hurt, first off. The spark was audible.
Secondly, it temprarily paralysed my right hand, my thumb was totally numb and limp for around 12 hours.
I think I got off fairly lightly. Luckily I wasn't holding the conductor, I merely touched it. The reason this makes a lot of difference is that when the electricity, simulating nerve impulses but over 340 times as strong, tenses all the muscles in the area, your hand is instantly yanked away by your biceps (the hand, wrist and forearm muscles just contort, rather than moving the hand much). If I'd been holding the power cable, my hand would've gripped the wire with all my physically available strength (possibly ripping muscles in the process) meaning that I would have been connected to the mains until the current burnt out a fuse or, more likely, cooked the skin & muscle in my hand to a degree that the charcoal constituted a significant insulator. Or maybe the muscles would've torn right through, or I might've pulled the cable out of its place, though it was soldered fairly securely...
All in all, not a pretty situation! BE CAREFUL!
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny