I prefer the original Simcity, when in 1900 I could build a fully modern city with mass transit, airports, and nuclear power. And atleast in the Super Nintendo version, I never had a nuclear meltdown despite many countless hours of playing. That is, except in the scenario where the nuclear meltdown was supposed to happen (and if you were quick and crafty, you could even prevent that from happening!)
This is something that I have studied in my classic mechanics course. The Earth is in a roughtly circular orbit around, and once you get your waste away from the Earth, it too will be in an (almost) circular orbit around the sun. Interestingly enough, in order to get the waste in a circular orbit out of the solar system costs exactly the same amount of energy as it would to send the waste to the center of sun. Without going through all the physics, the basic reason why the energy needed is the same is that in both cases you are giving the waste enough energy to bring it to a stop relative to the sun (in space, with no drag or friction, it costs energy to both speed up and slow something down). To send it to the sun, you need the waste to be stationary when it is at the center of the sun (think of it as stopping the nuclear waste, then letting the sun's gravity pulling it in). To send it out of the solar system, you are just giving it just enough energy to escape, so that when it's infinently far away where the sun's gravity will have no effect, it'll no longer have to be moving away from the sun.
In reality though, you don't need to send the waste to the center of the sun, the surface of the sun will do. However, this will only save you about 2% of the energy needed. Another thing to consider is if I was going to take the send-it-away route, I would give the waste a bit of extra energy, just in case it was to lose some energy (say it come close to an asteriod's gravity field) - it wouldn't get thrown into some crazy elliptical orbit and come back.
You might of been thinking of so called "decaying" orbits which is used with satellites around Earth. The principle is the same - you need to lose energy to bring the satellite back to Earth. The decaying orbit uses drag from the Earth's atmosphere to do this. In order to put something in a decaying orbit around the sun, you'd have to be pretty close to the surface in the first place.
I hope this makes sense, I've had enough physics for one night.
Exactly - people can pick up perfectly usable high end PIII systems that do everything they want to do for $100-$200. A system that would have no problem with the latest Linux distro, or Windows XP SP2. A $100-$200 used Mac is a lower end G3 that would barely run OSX. What do you think people are going to choose?
As someone who owns an iRiver IFP-795T (the 512MB version), I must add that the OGG support is only for bitrates of 96kbps or higher - which sucks on a portable player with limited space. So for low bitrates, you're back to MP3 or WMA.
A thief might be curious and boot up the laptop before reformatting it to see what is on there before blowing it away (mp3's? credit card numbers? porn?) - that might be all that is needed to track him down. Especially if the laptop has wireless and finds a hotspot on its own.
I'd recommend that you don't simply let people use your computer to check their email, or what have you. If you do, you might want to get fast user switching set up and create as lackluster an account as possible (just a browser, ma'am), regardless of what OS you run. Having people constantly use your machine ("Yeah, ask Jim in room 301 if you can use his laptop to check your mail, John, he's a nice guy.") is a good way to draw potentially unwanted attention. The people I know that have had computers stolen from their rooms usually had a lot of people in their rooms using their machines.
Another thing to do is convert to Dvorak. I had my computer with a Dvorak keyboard at college, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Which was perfectly fine by me.
Thieves will break into cars to steal the most crappy, worthless audio equipment. I've seen them pry out the cheap $20 tape decks they sell over at Wal-wart, and steal old, crappy Radio Shack speakers. The key in this case, is to leave the car unlocked so they don't break a $100+ window to get at it.
Well, there is a trade-off between batteries and responsiveness. Every wireless mouse I have used, after sitting still for several seconds, goes into a "doze" mode where it only checks to see if it has been moved a couple of times a second - hence the lag between moving the mouse and the mouse realizing its been moved. Once the mouse is "awake", there is no lag time on any decent mouse, until you stop moving the mouse and it dozes off again. This is done to save battery power, because if the wireless mouse checked to see if it has been moved ~60 times a second like a corded mouse, it would eat batteries like a 1st generation digital camera.
That lag is what really drives me nuts, which is why I don't use a wireless mouse (besides the fact that I don't see the point of having a wireless mouse when the damn thing never leaves the 9" x 9" mousepad anyway)
Comparing the costs of your monthly payment to how much more you would spend on repairs to keep an older car going, the monthly payments are going to bleed you dry a lot faster. Unless you decide to buy an old Ford Probe or something equally shoddy. I always thought leasing was dumb myself - make all these payments for 3-4 years, and at the end of it you own nothing. Best bet is to buy a lease return, something that is 2-3 years old with low miles (since you are limited with how many miles you can put on a leased car) - you get a newer, reliable car that oftentimes still has some warrenty left that some other sucker has already paid most of the depreciation on.
What do you suppose is cleaner for the environment? Lots and lots of small internal combustion engines running around, which may or may not be in good running condition - or a few large coal-fired power plants that are undoubtably well maintained?
What do you suppose is better, being dependent on oil that mostly comes from the middle east for gasoline, or coal that can be mined in the US?
Just because a piece of software has is old does not mean it's unsafe and unsecure to run, especially since many firewalls, spyware killers, and virus scanners have no problem running on 98SE. But that's beside the point, 98SE has yet to be EOL'd by Microsoft anyway.
When it comes to key size and feel, the Apple keyboards aren't really any different than a standard x86 laptop keyboard to me. But unlike some x86 laptops, atleast the Apple keyboards hold up pretty well to heavy use.
It's not like Diablo II isn't full of ads anyway when you play on battle.net - with tons of bots spamming "Buy your overpriced hacked items from our site!!!!!" Blizzard does not seem the least bit interested in kicking them off battle.net or shutting them down either.
I really don't understand why people those stand-alone units that are half the price of a notebook.
I've seen those portable DVD players going for $200-$300 now - the prices have come down a lot from a few years ago. However, for $400-$600 you can buy a used PIII notebook with a DVD drive, so I suppose your point still stands.
In the case of theft, negligence, or damage to the iPod, students are financially responsible for replacing the iPod.
This seems to imply that the student is expected to have the iPod for the 2004-2005 school year. What if some kid breaks/loses/whatever his iPod, and decides it wasn't very useful to him anyway and doesn't want to buy a replacement? Will the school force him to purchase another one regardless?
Except that most students don't complete a "4 year" degree now in 4 years. Most freshmen entering college right now who actually complete their degrees will graduate sometime in 2009.
And then they connect these specialized ASIC chips to the internet? What do you suppose they run on them, Windows? The simpliest and easiest solution would be to simply not connect the data acquistion computers to the net at all.
Comparing digital cameras by megapixel ratings is like comparing computers by looking at how many Mhz the processor is. It may give you a vague idea how they compare, but that's about it. I'm sure your old Kodak will blow this crappy disposable away in terms of quality.
A lot depends on the compression used. I have a 2MP Sony Cybershot where the pictures are about 400-500k in size at the "highest" quality. So about 25 pictures would be about right if I had a 16MB card.
However, I would guess since the photos are likely already low quality due to a really crappy lens, they probably just compress the hell out of the photos so you'll get 60 out of the 16MB.
someone gets +3 informative for telling us what day it is.
Wouldn't of surprised me at all if it had gotten rated "+3 Insightful"...
Re:An additional word about 'blocky trans..'
on
Star Wars on DVD
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· Score: 1
I have a version of ET that has two disks - the original movie, and the new version that replaces the guns with flashlights. I don't remember right now, there may of been a third with special features too. So it's not like Star Wars at all, I can watch whatever version I want on an official DVD.
Presumably, the XP installer does not have all these services like RPC, Windows Messenger, Netbios, etc. running, so there would be no way for the computer to be infected. Even if those services were running, the XP installer could throw up an extremely limiting firewall that would just allow the traffic needed for downloading the updates.
Just like how Mandrake checks for updates during the install, allowing you to get critical updates to things like SSH, Samba, etc. without your freshly installed Linux box getting r00t3d.
However, in reality, I would still expect there to be some hole in the XP installer that could be exploited, and once it is exploited - then we are right back where we started.
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I prefer the original Simcity, when in 1900 I could build a fully modern city with mass transit, airports, and nuclear power. And atleast in the Super Nintendo version, I never had a nuclear meltdown despite many countless hours of playing. That is, except in the scenario where the nuclear meltdown was supposed to happen (and if you were quick and crafty, you could even prevent that from happening!)
This is something that I have studied in my classic mechanics course. The Earth is in a roughtly circular orbit around, and once you get your waste away from the Earth, it too will be in an (almost) circular orbit around the sun. Interestingly enough, in order to get the waste in a circular orbit out of the solar system costs exactly the same amount of energy as it would to send the waste to the center of sun. Without going through all the physics, the basic reason why the energy needed is the same is that in both cases you are giving the waste enough energy to bring it to a stop relative to the sun (in space, with no drag or friction, it costs energy to both speed up and slow something down). To send it to the sun, you need the waste to be stationary when it is at the center of the sun (think of it as stopping the nuclear waste, then letting the sun's gravity pulling it in). To send it out of the solar system, you are just giving it just enough energy to escape, so that when it's infinently far away where the sun's gravity will have no effect, it'll no longer have to be moving away from the sun.
In reality though, you don't need to send the waste to the center of the sun, the surface of the sun will do. However, this will only save you about 2% of the energy needed. Another thing to consider is if I was going to take the send-it-away route, I would give the waste a bit of extra energy, just in case it was to lose some energy (say it come close to an asteriod's gravity field) - it wouldn't get thrown into some crazy elliptical orbit and come back.
You might of been thinking of so called "decaying" orbits which is used with satellites around Earth. The principle is the same - you need to lose energy to bring the satellite back to Earth. The decaying orbit uses drag from the Earth's atmosphere to do this. In order to put something in a decaying orbit around the sun, you'd have to be pretty close to the surface in the first place.
I hope this makes sense, I've had enough physics for one night.
Exactly - people can pick up perfectly usable high end PIII systems that do everything they want to do for $100-$200. A system that would have no problem with the latest Linux distro, or Windows XP SP2. A $100-$200 used Mac is a lower end G3 that would barely run OSX. What do you think people are going to choose?
As someone who owns an iRiver IFP-795T (the 512MB version), I must add that the OGG support is only for bitrates of 96kbps or higher - which sucks on a portable player with limited space. So for low bitrates, you're back to MP3 or WMA.
A thief might be curious and boot up the laptop before reformatting it to see what is on there before blowing it away (mp3's? credit card numbers? porn?) - that might be all that is needed to track him down. Especially if the laptop has wireless and finds a hotspot on its own.
I'd recommend that you don't simply let people use your computer to check their email, or what have you. If you do, you might want to get fast user switching set up and create as lackluster an account as possible (just a browser, ma'am), regardless of what OS you run. Having people constantly use your machine ("Yeah, ask Jim in room 301 if you can use his laptop to check your mail, John, he's a nice guy.") is a good way to draw potentially unwanted attention. The people I know that have had computers stolen from their rooms usually had a lot of people in their rooms using their machines.
Another thing to do is convert to Dvorak. I had my computer with a Dvorak keyboard at college, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Which was perfectly fine by me.
Thieves will break into cars to steal the most crappy, worthless audio equipment. I've seen them pry out the cheap $20 tape decks they sell over at Wal-wart, and steal old, crappy Radio Shack speakers. The key in this case, is to leave the car unlocked so they don't break a $100+ window to get at it.
Outlook. All military computers have it, just use the voting feature built in. Spam a message out to the troops, and watch the votes roll back in.
That must be the worst idea I have ever heard of.
Well, there is a trade-off between batteries and responsiveness. Every wireless mouse I have used, after sitting still for several seconds, goes into a "doze" mode where it only checks to see if it has been moved a couple of times a second - hence the lag between moving the mouse and the mouse realizing its been moved. Once the mouse is "awake", there is no lag time on any decent mouse, until you stop moving the mouse and it dozes off again. This is done to save battery power, because if the wireless mouse checked to see if it has been moved ~60 times a second like a corded mouse, it would eat batteries like a 1st generation digital camera.
That lag is what really drives me nuts, which is why I don't use a wireless mouse (besides the fact that I don't see the point of having a wireless mouse when the damn thing never leaves the 9" x 9" mousepad anyway)
Comparing the costs of your monthly payment to how much more you would spend on repairs to keep an older car going, the monthly payments are going to bleed you dry a lot faster. Unless you decide to buy an old Ford Probe or something equally shoddy. I always thought leasing was dumb myself - make all these payments for 3-4 years, and at the end of it you own nothing. Best bet is to buy a lease return, something that is 2-3 years old with low miles (since you are limited with how many miles you can put on a leased car) - you get a newer, reliable car that oftentimes still has some warrenty left that some other sucker has already paid most of the depreciation on.
What do you suppose is cleaner for the environment? Lots and lots of small internal combustion engines running around, which may or may not be in good running condition - or a few large coal-fired power plants that are undoubtably well maintained?
What do you suppose is better, being dependent on oil that mostly comes from the middle east for gasoline, or coal that can be mined in the US?
Just because a piece of software has is old does not mean it's unsafe and unsecure to run, especially since many firewalls, spyware killers, and virus scanners have no problem running on 98SE. But that's beside the point, 98SE has yet to be EOL'd by Microsoft anyway.
When it comes to key size and feel, the Apple keyboards aren't really any different than a standard x86 laptop keyboard to me. But unlike some x86 laptops, atleast the Apple keyboards hold up pretty well to heavy use.
It's not like Diablo II isn't full of ads anyway when you play on battle.net - with tons of bots spamming "Buy your overpriced hacked items from our site!!!!!" Blizzard does not seem the least bit interested in kicking them off battle.net or shutting them down either.
I really don't understand why people those stand-alone units that are half the price of a notebook.
I've seen those portable DVD players going for $200-$300 now - the prices have come down a lot from a few years ago. However, for $400-$600 you can buy a used PIII notebook with a DVD drive, so I suppose your point still stands.
Last year the minimum specs were 1000 Mhz CPU and 20GB hard drive.
Dang, that's pretty steep if you ask me, especially for Mac users out there.
In the case of theft, negligence, or damage to the iPod, students are financially responsible for replacing the iPod.
This seems to imply that the student is expected to have the iPod for the 2004-2005 school year. What if some kid breaks/loses/whatever his iPod, and decides it wasn't very useful to him anyway and doesn't want to buy a replacement? Will the school force him to purchase another one regardless?
Except that most students don't complete a "4 year" degree now in 4 years. Most freshmen entering college right now who actually complete their degrees will graduate sometime in 2009.
And then they connect these specialized ASIC chips to the internet? What do you suppose they run on them, Windows? The simpliest and easiest solution would be to simply not connect the data acquistion computers to the net at all.
Comparing digital cameras by megapixel ratings is like comparing computers by looking at how many Mhz the processor is. It may give you a vague idea how they compare, but that's about it. I'm sure your old Kodak will blow this crappy disposable away in terms of quality.
Why on earth is any digital camera disposable? What part NEEDS to be replaced in order for the machine to be used again?
Batteries?
A lot depends on the compression used. I have a 2MP Sony Cybershot where the pictures are about 400-500k in size at the "highest" quality. So about 25 pictures would be about right if I had a 16MB card.
However, I would guess since the photos are likely already low quality due to a really crappy lens, they probably just compress the hell out of the photos so you'll get 60 out of the 16MB.
someone gets +3 informative for telling us what day it is.
Wouldn't of surprised me at all if it had gotten rated "+3 Insightful"...
I have a version of ET that has two disks - the original movie, and the new version that replaces the guns with flashlights. I don't remember right now, there may of been a third with special features too. So it's not like Star Wars at all, I can watch whatever version I want on an official DVD.
Presumably, the XP installer does not have all these services like RPC, Windows Messenger, Netbios, etc. running, so there would be no way for the computer to be infected. Even if those services were running, the XP installer could throw up an extremely limiting firewall that would just allow the traffic needed for downloading the updates.
Just like how Mandrake checks for updates during the install, allowing you to get critical updates to things like SSH, Samba, etc. without your freshly installed Linux box getting r00t3d.
However, in reality, I would still expect there to be some hole in the XP installer that could be exploited, and once it is exploited - then we are right back where we started.