but if you stick with Prism based cards (Yes, more expensive, but they're much better performers) you've got no issues there either as Intersil gifted us with the same thing, fully open sourced drivers.
I'm sorry but this isn't entirely true - The Intersil PrismGT hardware is well supported, however it is an example of a chipset that nolonger exists. It was replaced with a SoftMac Intersil Prism chipset which is _not_ supported (yet - there is some effort going into drivers for it) and many of the old PrismGT cards were migrated to the new chipset without any model number change.
Card manufacturers merely rebrand physical hardware produced by a third party chipset manufacturer... They will often change chipset suppliers according to who is cheaper.
However, many of the chipsets seem to have quite a short life span.
the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.)
I've had similar problems with "new improved versions". The reason why this is worse for wireless hardware seems to be: 1. The hardware seems to be very short-lived, with each "version" only being around for a short time. By the time the driver has been written the hardware is off the shelves. 2. New "versions" of the hardware aren't progressive improvements, they are complete re-designs of the hardware using completely incompatable components and designs. 3. Different "versions" are marketted under the same name, model number and in some cases even the same FCC ID so there is literally no way to tell it's the right version without actually looking at the hardware itself (something you can't do when mail ordering and I'm guessing many shops would take issue with you opening up the boxes to look at the hardware).
Now, I'm not sure why (1) should be especially true for 802.11 kit, but it does seem to be the case - given the engineering effort involved in creating a brand new chipset it seems strange that they only keep them around for very short periods.
As for (3), I can understand them using the same _name_ but the only people who look at model numbers are the people who actually need to know what hardware it is so it seems crazy that they don't change the model number. I'm not sure how they get away with not changing the FCC ID - surely a completely re-engineered piece of hardware needs to be re-approved?
As I see it, this problem can only be solved once it becomes illegal everywhere to send spam from anywhere to anyone
This doesn't seem to help - every so often, someone in government passes a new anti-spam law claiming it will stop spam. But it doesn't. The reason: the laws are not enforced. We don't need new laws - the spammers are already break the law (or did you think that setting up botnets without the computer owner's permission was legal?)
Ignoring email spam for a moment, I think a great example here in the UK is SMS spam - it's been illegal to send unsolicited SMS messages in the EU for some time, but they still happen. Worse - premium rate operators send unsolicited _reverse billed_ SMS messages and the telcos will refuse to do anything about it. The premium rate services regulator, ICSTIS, appears to be completely snowed under with complaints but still nothing seems to be done about it.
I'll say again: passing new laws to make something illegal that's already illegal don't help if noone's going to bother enforcing them. I can remember the days when cracking computers was considered a serious crime and incurred serious jail time. These days noone seems to care.
All technology seems to be making people lazy and stupid
Well as far as "safety" technology in cars goes - it's probably fine so long as it's strictly a fail-safe (i.e. if you _are_ going to hit a stationary car infront then maybe it's ok for the computer to apply the brakes to reduce the collision). As soon as you start _relying_ on a safety feature then you have a problem since when that feature goes wrong you're buggered (along with other innocent people probably). That said, things like traction control _can_ go wrong and cause an accident even when they're not actually being used (what happens when your traction control decides your're in a skid when you are infact happilly going in a straight line at 70mph?)
What about fire? When was the last time you rubbed 2 sticks together to get flame?
Last summer actually:) (bow & drill)
The schmo's who rely on anti-lock breaks, auto-break, radar adaptive speed control, etc. will more likely kill themselves in a snowstorm over those of us who rely on good ol' common sense and explore the "geez, what if I didn't have this crap?" scenario.
The thing is that it's not just the eejit who relies on their auto-brakes who's affected - you can be the best driver in the world but that doesn't help when you're stationary in traffic and someone smacks you from behind at 90mph coz their auto-brakes didn't notice you were there.
The thing that worries me about things like ABS is that even if you know how to cadance-brake, how long does it take between your wheels locking up and you realising your ABS isn't working - if you didn't have ABS you'd already be doing your cadance-braking at that point rather than skidding along out of control.
Canon is better at long exposures than Nikon, but neither will go much beyond 30 seconds.
I've done hour long exposures with my EOS300D, no problem. The internal timer on the camera won't exceed 30 seconds but just set it to bulb mode and time it manually.
It's like programmers bitching about no one knowing assembler any more, when no one apart from serious system optimizers (or race car drivers....) need to know it.
Modern programmers don't strictly _need_ to know stuff like ASM, but I believe it is of great benefit for them to have a cursory knowledge of what's going on at the lower levels. IMHO university courses should teach programmers the basics about what's going on at the hardware level and at the ASM level - whilest most people won't be coding in ASM in real life, it is good to have an overview of what's going on at the levels below their C code, etc.
Far too many people seem to come out of uni thinking they're good programmers because they now know how to write stuff in Java - in my experience that is just not the case because everything they're taught is just too abstract. Getting back to the computing roots _does_ help work at the higher levels.
Modern Windows OSes support multiple filesystems natively: FAT, NTFS, ISO-9660, etc.
FAT and NTFS are both patented - I understand that NTFS has hefty licence fees associated with it. Can windows read ISO9660 filesystems on non-CD devices?
Userspace utilities are available that can read and write to other major filesystems like ext2, HFS+, etc.
You're completely missing the point - using a filesystem that isn't supported natively is not feasable since noone is going to want to install drivers to access a flash card on $random_computer.
FAT is not the ONLY choice for formatting removable media on Windows, it's simply the simplest and most obvious choice. I don't believe Microsoft is abusing a monopoly position here.
FAT or NTFS (both patented) are the _only_ choices unless you start making people install device drivers.
They don't have laws such as the DMCA making it a crime to sell region free players, you ca walk into Tescos (a supermarket chain) and buy a region free DVD player with your milk and other groceries.
Well, we have the UK implementation of the EUCD (the EU super-DMCA) - not sure where region coding stands with this but it does lots of DMCA like things such as making it illegal for you to play DVDs using open software (coz you have to crack the CSS).
OTOH, I'm not sure how the manufacturers of the players are getting away with producing players that are region-free off the shelf since AFAIK that's a violation of their licence agreement (the one licencing the CSS decryption technology).
Someone else posted a link to an ext2-for-Windows project on SourceForge. Why not have something like an MBR on the card, from which Windows can install the ext2 driver if it's not already installed?
Windows' insane autorun system involves there being a filesystem that windows understands on the card (i.e. FAT, NTFS, etc) - if you want it to work differently you'll need to write a windows driver to handle it, which defeats the point of shoving a driver on the card. I wonder if Windows is capable of reading an ISO9660 filesystem off a non-CD device though...
USB HID Mass Storage devices apparently usually use FAT.
USB mass storage devices are just block devices, it's up to the host to decide how to use what is essentially just a big array of blocks. Most come with a single partition pre-formated as FAT for ease of use but pop one in a linux box and you can happilly repartition it or put any FS you want on it. (Yes, USB mass storage devices have partitions, just like hard drives... and whilest using a WinXP system recently I discovered that Windows doesn't actually appear to have a method or repartitioning them...)
it's just the device manufacturers whose stuff actually uses FAT, like digital camera makers.
But when a user pops their CF/SD/XD/whatever card out of their camera, they're going to want to access it without installing drivers, etc.
Personally I don't mind cameras, etc using ext2, or even better - a proper flash filesystem designed to deal with the problems inherent in writing to flash. But then I don't use Windows...
I'd be interested to know what the monopoly-police think about this - it seems that requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS to allow interoperability with other devices might be considered an abuse of their market position.
It's also worth thinking about - the Linux kernel infringes this patent. Is Linux going to have FAT support ripped out of it now? That'd be really bad coz suddenly it can't interoperate with all those devices using FAT.
A sattelite orbiting the earth at a constant altitude is travelling at a constant speed, yet is constantly attracted by gravity. I am currently travelling at a constant speed (zero, wrt the Earth) yet am attracted by gravity. Similarly, light being bent around a massive object is attracted by gravity, yet travels at a constant speed.
These are fairly specific instances though - an orbitting body only orbits at a constant speed if it's orbit is perfectly circular. Take a look at comets as an example, which have very eliptical orbits around the sun. Comets travel at relatively slow speeds for most of their orbit but are going very fast as they pass close by the sun. In your other example, you are travelling at a constant speed (zero) because the ground is producing a force opposing gravity - take away the ground and you'll accellerate.
Light is a rather strange beast - normal matter changes speed when energy is applied to it whereas light changes wave length (shorter wavelengths are higher energies).
Some clarification for the grandparent: light travels at 186[000] miles per second IN A VACUUM.
My understanding is then when you're not in a vacuum, light still travels at 3x10^8m/s in the spaces between the matter but whenever it hits some matter it gets absorbed and then re-emitted which takes some time. This means that during the times when the light isn't travelling at c it isn't light.
The Hubble constant is not well understood and is very hard to measure, hence the error margin.
Didn't someone determine that the Hubble constant is infact not a constant? Can't really remember but I have a vague idea that I'd read something about it.
Make it 1/10th of Nevada, and you've overshot current production by a factor of 2.8 (or so).
I'd like to ask what the environmental impact is of covering 1/10th of Nevada. Bearing in mind that desert is usully pretty good at reflecting and reradiating the sun's energy I'd be willing to bet that the effect of absorbing that energy rather than radiating it back into space is quite significant.
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using.
You are suggesting covering a significant chunk of the Earth's surface with solar arrays - and what happens to all the stuff that was there absorbing the sun's energy? (plants, etc). That for one thing makes it reasonably infeasable to extract all our energy from ground based solar arrays. Another reason why we can't do this is that the sun only provides significant energy to a given area for a relatively short period of the day and we just don't have the technology to store that kind of energy for consumption when the sun isn't shining.
IMHO the future is orbital solar arrays and fusion. But we need a stop gap and as nice as it'd be to use entirely renewable power it's not going to happen and fission is the next best thing.
Burning or fissioning anything that we have down here on earth is, by comparison, very short-sighted.
Well, burning stuff isn't necessarilly short sighted - for example, burning biodiesel or ethanol seems like a good plan for portable engines (i.e. cars, etc). And I sincerely hope we have better solutions to producing power when we run out of fissile material in over 10,000 years time.
When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
What you're describing can be built as a closed system - crack pure water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and then when you oxidise it to get your energy back you get pure water back which you can store. Admittedly you need to deal with losses from the system, but desalinating small quanitites of sea water to replace lost hydrogen shouldn't be too hard.
Getting flattened by the cars and trucks you have to share the road with since noone bothered to build decent cycle paths can be a bit of a turn off...
Also, widescreen really is the future: if you have a 50" widescreen monitor, and you sit a foot or two away from it, you don't need two of them.
If you've got a 50" widescreen monitor you've got way too much money.:)
The thing that gets me is that 16:9 or 16:10 TFT screens are way more pricey than 4:3 screens of similar resolution. My crumby second monitor is now starting to make really nasty noises and I'm hoping that when it eventually dies I'll be able to get a 21" wide screen TFT at a sane price.
Do know however that as much of an annoyance light pollution may be, in some areas it's for your own saftey
I'm failing to see how directing light straight up into the sky increases my safety... Also, IMHO the roads are more than brightly enough lit at night and there would be no safety problem with decreasing the brightness of the lighting.
And I'm sure lighting up the walls of buildings with floodlights also increase my safety... on the odd occasions I walk up vertical walls.
This is what amateur astronomy people call it when a "regular" person looks through a five-thousand-dollar backyard telescope and is dissappointed that they can't see the US flag left on the moon.
Most astronomy photos the public sees are taken by massive professional telescopes (either Hubble or large ground based scopes) and so they have no idea what kind of results they would get out of the many many different types of amateur scope available. And of the amateur photos that are published, in my experience almost none of them are captioned with information about the equipment used, exposure times, post processing, etc.
What would be really good is a collaborative astronomy database where you could look up an astronomical object and see the results of different equipment - i.e. I could look up the Horsehead Nebula and get to see lots of photos of it all stating what equipment and settings were used. That kind of thing would certainly be really useful when deciding what equipment to buy.
you don't live in an area of high light pollution
This is a serious problem and aparantly one that the UK government/councils at least don't appear to care about. More and more street lights go up every year, few of them seem to have full cutoff shades and worryingly most of the new ones now seem to be high presure sodium lights (much less filterable than the old low pressure sodium lights). Do we really _need_ our streets to be lit so brightly at night? Some legislation designed to reduce light pollution would be a good step - i.e. requiring all lights to have full cutoff shades and putting limits on the amount of lighting used.
Not at the current access rates they won't. I've used WAP once, and after getting my bill, I was through. Many people I know had the same experience with it.
Exactly - using GPRS means constantly watching the amount of bandwidth I use. Orange charge me something like 3ukp per month for a whole 4MB of bandwidth, and anything over 4MB gets charged at 10ukp per megabyte, it's crazy. I want pay as you go bandwidth charged at sane rates - the whole point of GPRS is that it's an "always on" thing but I can't even leave an XMPP client running on my phone because the keepalives alone eat up several hundred kilobytes per day.
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but if you stick with Prism based cards (Yes, more expensive, but they're much better performers) you've got no issues there either as Intersil gifted us with the same thing, fully open sourced drivers.
I'm sorry but this isn't entirely true - The Intersil PrismGT hardware is well supported, however it is an example of a chipset that nolonger exists. It was replaced with a SoftMac Intersil Prism chipset which is _not_ supported (yet - there is some effort going into drivers for it) and many of the old PrismGT cards were migrated to the new chipset without any model number change.
Card manufacturers merely rebrand physical hardware produced by a third party chipset manufacturer... They will often change chipset suppliers according to who is cheaper.
However, many of the chipsets seem to have quite a short life span.
the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.)
I've had similar problems with "new improved versions". The reason why this is worse for wireless hardware seems to be:
1. The hardware seems to be very short-lived, with each "version" only being around for a short time. By the time the driver has been written the hardware is off the shelves.
2. New "versions" of the hardware aren't progressive improvements, they are complete re-designs of the hardware using completely incompatable components and designs.
3. Different "versions" are marketted under the same name, model number and in some cases even the same FCC ID so there is literally no way to tell it's the right version without actually looking at the hardware itself (something you can't do when mail ordering and I'm guessing many shops would take issue with you opening up the boxes to look at the hardware).
Now, I'm not sure why (1) should be especially true for 802.11 kit, but it does seem to be the case - given the engineering effort involved in creating a brand new chipset it seems strange that they only keep them around for very short periods.
As for (3), I can understand them using the same _name_ but the only people who look at model numbers are the people who actually need to know what hardware it is so it seems crazy that they don't change the model number. I'm not sure how they get away with not changing the FCC ID - surely a completely re-engineered piece of hardware needs to be re-approved?
As I see it, this problem can only be solved once it becomes illegal everywhere to send spam from anywhere to anyone
This doesn't seem to help - every so often, someone in government passes a new anti-spam law claiming it will stop spam. But it doesn't. The reason: the laws are not enforced. We don't need new laws - the spammers are already break the law (or did you think that setting up botnets without the computer owner's permission was legal?)
Ignoring email spam for a moment, I think a great example here in the UK is SMS spam - it's been illegal to send unsolicited SMS messages in the EU for some time, but they still happen. Worse - premium rate operators send unsolicited _reverse billed_ SMS messages and the telcos will refuse to do anything about it. The premium rate services regulator, ICSTIS, appears to be completely snowed under with complaints but still nothing seems to be done about it.
I'll say again: passing new laws to make something illegal that's already illegal don't help if noone's going to bother enforcing them. I can remember the days when cracking computers was considered a serious crime and incurred serious jail time. These days noone seems to care.
All technology seems to be making people lazy and stupid
:) (bow & drill)
Well as far as "safety" technology in cars goes - it's probably fine so long as it's strictly a fail-safe (i.e. if you _are_ going to hit a stationary car infront then maybe it's ok for the computer to apply the brakes to reduce the collision). As soon as you start _relying_ on a safety feature then you have a problem since when that feature goes wrong you're buggered (along with other innocent people probably). That said, things like traction control _can_ go wrong and cause an accident even when they're not actually being used (what happens when your traction control decides your're in a skid when you are infact happilly going in a straight line at 70mph?)
What about fire? When was the last time you rubbed 2 sticks together to get flame?
Last summer actually
The schmo's who rely on anti-lock breaks, auto-break, radar adaptive speed control, etc. will more likely kill themselves in a snowstorm over those of us who rely on good ol' common sense and explore the "geez, what if I didn't have this crap?" scenario.
The thing is that it's not just the eejit who relies on their auto-brakes who's affected - you can be the best driver in the world but that doesn't help when you're stationary in traffic and someone smacks you from behind at 90mph coz their auto-brakes didn't notice you were there.
The thing that worries me about things like ABS is that even if you know how to cadance-brake, how long does it take between your wheels locking up and you realising your ABS isn't working - if you didn't have ABS you'd already be doing your cadance-braking at that point rather than skidding along out of control.
Canon is better at long exposures than Nikon, but neither will go much beyond 30 seconds.
I've done hour long exposures with my EOS300D, no problem. The internal timer on the camera won't exceed 30 seconds but just set it to bulb mode and time it manually.
If you're doing real scientific work, you should be getting grants to pay for this kind of equipment.
News flash: amateur astronomers don't get grants.
It's like programmers bitching about no one knowing assembler any more, when no one apart from serious system optimizers (or race car drivers....) need to know it.
Modern programmers don't strictly _need_ to know stuff like ASM, but I believe it is of great benefit for them to have a cursory knowledge of what's going on at the lower levels. IMHO university courses should teach programmers the basics about what's going on at the hardware level and at the ASM level - whilest most people won't be coding in ASM in real life, it is good to have an overview of what's going on at the levels below their C code, etc.
Far too many people seem to come out of uni thinking they're good programmers because they now know how to write stuff in Java - in my experience that is just not the case because everything they're taught is just too abstract. Getting back to the computing roots _does_ help work at the higher levels.
On the plus side, I've been told I drive better than most people who've passed their test....
:)
A monkey could drive better than most people who have passed their test IMHO
Modern Windows OSes support multiple filesystems natively: FAT, NTFS, ISO-9660, etc.
FAT and NTFS are both patented - I understand that NTFS has hefty licence fees associated with it. Can windows read ISO9660 filesystems on non-CD devices?
Userspace utilities are available that can read and write to other major filesystems like ext2, HFS+, etc.
You're completely missing the point - using a filesystem that isn't supported natively is not feasable since noone is going to want to install drivers to access a flash card on $random_computer.
FAT is not the ONLY choice for formatting removable media on Windows, it's simply the simplest and most obvious choice. I don't believe Microsoft is abusing a monopoly position here.
FAT or NTFS (both patented) are the _only_ choices unless you start making people install device drivers.
They don't have laws such as the DMCA making it a crime to sell region free players, you ca walk into Tescos (a supermarket chain) and buy a region free DVD player with your milk and other groceries.
Well, we have the UK implementation of the EUCD (the EU super-DMCA) - not sure where region coding stands with this but it does lots of DMCA like things such as making it illegal for you to play DVDs using open software (coz you have to crack the CSS).
OTOH, I'm not sure how the manufacturers of the players are getting away with producing players that are region-free off the shelf since AFAIK that's a violation of their licence agreement (the one licencing the CSS decryption technology).
Someone else posted a link to an ext2-for-Windows project on SourceForge. Why not have something like an MBR on the card, from which Windows can install the ext2 driver if it's not already installed?
Windows' insane autorun system involves there being a filesystem that windows understands on the card (i.e. FAT, NTFS, etc) - if you want it to work differently you'll need to write a windows driver to handle it, which defeats the point of shoving a driver on the card. I wonder if Windows is capable of reading an ISO9660 filesystem off a non-CD device though...
USB HID Mass Storage devices apparently usually use FAT.
USB mass storage devices are just block devices, it's up to the host to decide how to use what is essentially just a big array of blocks. Most come with a single partition pre-formated as FAT for ease of use but pop one in a linux box and you can happilly repartition it or put any FS you want on it. (Yes, USB mass storage devices have partitions, just like hard drives... and whilest using a WinXP system recently I discovered that Windows doesn't actually appear to have a method or repartitioning them...)
it's just the device manufacturers whose stuff actually uses FAT, like digital camera makers.
But when a user pops their CF/SD/XD/whatever card out of their camera, they're going to want to access it without installing drivers, etc.
Personally I don't mind cameras, etc using ext2, or even better - a proper flash filesystem designed to deal with the problems inherent in writing to flash. But then I don't use Windows...
I'd be interested to know what the monopoly-police think about this - it seems that requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS to allow interoperability with other devices might be considered an abuse of their market position.
It's also worth thinking about - the Linux kernel infringes this patent. Is Linux going to have FAT support ripped out of it now? That'd be really bad coz suddenly it can't interoperate with all those devices using FAT.
I think all the patents should be put in a queue that is visible to the public and that we can moderate.
:)
Can't wait to mod some patents as +5 Funny
A sattelite orbiting the earth at a constant altitude is travelling at a constant speed, yet is constantly attracted by gravity. I am currently travelling at a constant speed (zero, wrt the Earth) yet am attracted by gravity. Similarly, light being bent around a massive object is attracted by gravity, yet travels at a constant speed.
These are fairly specific instances though - an orbitting body only orbits at a constant speed if it's orbit is perfectly circular. Take a look at comets as an example, which have very eliptical orbits around the sun. Comets travel at relatively slow speeds for most of their orbit but are going very fast as they pass close by the sun. In your other example, you are travelling at a constant speed (zero) because the ground is producing a force opposing gravity - take away the ground and you'll accellerate.
Light is a rather strange beast - normal matter changes speed when energy is applied to it whereas light changes wave length (shorter wavelengths are higher energies).
Some clarification for the grandparent: light travels at 186[000] miles per second IN A VACUUM.
My understanding is then when you're not in a vacuum, light still travels at 3x10^8m/s in the spaces between the matter but whenever it hits some matter it gets absorbed and then re-emitted which takes some time. This means that during the times when the light isn't travelling at c it isn't light.
The Hubble constant is not well understood and is very hard to measure, hence the error margin.
Didn't someone determine that the Hubble constant is infact not a constant? Can't really remember but I have a vague idea that I'd read something about it.
Make it 1/10th of Nevada, and you've overshot current production by a factor of 2.8 (or so).
I'd like to ask what the environmental impact is of covering 1/10th of Nevada. Bearing in mind that desert is usully pretty good at reflecting and reradiating the sun's energy I'd be willing to bet that the effect of absorbing that energy rather than radiating it back into space is quite significant.
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using.
You are suggesting covering a significant chunk of the Earth's surface with solar arrays - and what happens to all the stuff that was there absorbing the sun's energy? (plants, etc). That for one thing makes it reasonably infeasable to extract all our energy from ground based solar arrays. Another reason why we can't do this is that the sun only provides significant energy to a given area for a relatively short period of the day and we just don't have the technology to store that kind of energy for consumption when the sun isn't shining.
IMHO the future is orbital solar arrays and fusion. But we need a stop gap and as nice as it'd be to use entirely renewable power it's not going to happen and fission is the next best thing.
Burning or fissioning anything that we have down here on earth is, by comparison, very short-sighted.
Well, burning stuff isn't necessarilly short sighted - for example, burning biodiesel or ethanol seems like a good plan for portable engines (i.e. cars, etc). And I sincerely hope we have better solutions to producing power when we run out of fissile material in over 10,000 years time.
When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
What you're describing can be built as a closed system - crack pure water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and then when you oxidise it to get your energy back you get pure water back which you can store. Admittedly you need to deal with losses from the system, but desalinating small quanitites of sea water to replace lost hydrogen shouldn't be too hard.
What happened to riding your bike in the city?
Getting flattened by the cars and trucks you have to share the road with since noone bothered to build decent cycle paths can be a bit of a turn off...
Also, widescreen really is the future: if you have a 50" widescreen monitor, and you sit a foot or two away from it, you don't need two of them.
:)
If you've got a 50" widescreen monitor you've got way too much money.
The thing that gets me is that 16:9 or 16:10 TFT screens are way more pricey than 4:3 screens of similar resolution. My crumby second monitor is now starting to make really nasty noises and I'm hoping that when it eventually dies I'll be able to get a 21" wide screen TFT at a sane price.
Please see the Skywater Gallery for examples of what you can see with their excellent and affordable telescopes.
Unfortunately they only seem to do planetary photos - I'm much more interested in deep sky objects (and yes, I do realise you need a bigger scope).
Do know however that as much of an annoyance light pollution may be, in some areas it's for your own saftey
I'm failing to see how directing light straight up into the sky increases my safety... Also, IMHO the roads are more than brightly enough lit at night and there would be no safety problem with decreasing the brightness of the lighting.
And I'm sure lighting up the walls of buildings with floodlights also increase my safety... on the odd occasions I walk up vertical walls.
This is what amateur astronomy people call it when a "regular" person looks through a five-thousand-dollar backyard telescope and is dissappointed that they can't see the US flag left on the moon.
Most astronomy photos the public sees are taken by massive professional telescopes (either Hubble or large ground based scopes) and so they have no idea what kind of results they would get out of the many many different types of amateur scope available. And of the amateur photos that are published, in my experience almost none of them are captioned with information about the equipment used, exposure times, post processing, etc.
What would be really good is a collaborative astronomy database where you could look up an astronomical object and see the results of different equipment - i.e. I could look up the Horsehead Nebula and get to see lots of photos of it all stating what equipment and settings were used. That kind of thing would certainly be really useful when deciding what equipment to buy.
you don't live in an area of high light pollution
This is a serious problem and aparantly one that the UK government/councils at least don't appear to care about. More and more street lights go up every year, few of them seem to have full cutoff shades and worryingly most of the new ones now seem to be high presure sodium lights (much less filterable than the old low pressure sodium lights). Do we really _need_ our streets to be lit so brightly at night? Some legislation designed to reduce light pollution would be a good step - i.e. requiring all lights to have full cutoff shades and putting limits on the amount of lighting used.
Not at the current access rates they won't. I've used WAP once, and after getting my bill, I was through. Many people I know had the same experience with it.
Exactly - using GPRS means constantly watching the amount of bandwidth I use. Orange charge me something like 3ukp per month for a whole 4MB of bandwidth, and anything over 4MB gets charged at 10ukp per megabyte, it's crazy. I want pay as you go bandwidth charged at sane rates - the whole point of GPRS is that it's an "always on" thing but I can't even leave an XMPP client running on my phone because the keepalives alone eat up several hundred kilobytes per day.