You could replace it with a bunch of NOP instructions, though {like you get out of/dev/zero}. That would be a lot like removing it.
The real problem is that Microsoft's implementation of fdisk is totally christian. It won't even let you delete, let alone create, non-native partitions {the 95/98/ME one won't even delete 2000/XP partitions}.
I would recommend you use DBAN {if it's not in your toolkit, why not?} in "quick" mode just to zero out the whole drive before installing a Microsoft OS. Or there is a way to zero out the MBR using dd..... probably # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 but as usual, check manpages and Google first before trusting anything I said.
I'm a diehard LILO user, it works for chuff's sake so don't muck with it, but the issue you are seeing is not the fault of the bootstrap loader.
Any bootstrap loader, be it GRUB, LILO or NTLDR.EXE, must necessarily use the BIOS to interact with the hardware, because no drivers are loaded yet.
Your BIOS setup should have an option something like "legacy USB keyboard" which takes the keystrokes from the USB keyboard and makes them appear to have come from the "old style" keyboard instead. Enable this and GRUB should work.
Well, end user support won't be too hard for Google to do. When tech-savvy users have a problem, Google is usually the first place they turn.....
We'll assume for starters that the appliance has known hardware and contains closed-source, modified versions of BSD, Firefox, OpenOffice and maybe some graphics editor {I can't right now think of one licenced BSD-wise that they could lock up}. The fewer parts there are in a system, the fewer parts there are to go wrong.
By fixing the hardware, you have instantly eliminated most of a major bugbear: driver incompatibility {the rest was already eliminated by the existence of open-source drivers on an open-source OS in the first place; the Windows fanboys don't seem to want to see that the closed nature of Windows is at the root of almost every one of its problems}.
And by restricting the software, you get to eliminate most of the rest. Most of the problems faced by Linux users occur when they go beyond their own distro {and it has to be said, missing -devel packages are probably the number one culprit; Gentoo and Slackware users are the ones at the back, smirking. Badly put together autoconf/automake scripts are the number two culprit}.
Finally, if this thing is plugged into the internet 24/7, it will be very easy to do a "restore factory defaults" anytime you like.
I'd say it's because a newspaper costs 25c, whereas a photocopied newspaper probably costs close to that in dollars. Even if we just photocopy the articles we want, at 10c each, assuming none are split over several pages and the guy at the newsagent has no problem with us doing this, we're probably looking at 50c-$1. And what you're left with isn't as managable as a newspaper either.
Exactly so. If the pirates can sell DVDs as cheaply as they do, then the studios can sell them just as cheaply -- and make just as much profit because they would sell more copies of each title.
Endorphins are generally released in response to pain BTW, and most releases are related in some way to pain (the only counter example I can think of right now is that there's some research out there that proposes video games can cause the release of endorphins, which is bizarre but possibly the result of the brain believing it should be in pain.) Hunter-Gathering is certainly an unlikely cause for release of the compound.
They are also the body's "feelgood" chemical when you are not in pain. That "just had sex" feeling is just a huge endorphin rush.
First point: there's plenty of life yet in the cathode ray tube. And LCD panels are harder to interface to, but not that much.
As for "unique per-disc watermarking", that too can be defeated. If it's out-of-band, it's trivially easy to do so, and most probably will already have been stripped away by the time the signal arrives at the display device; even if it's in-band, it is not hard to do. If you can get several source discs, you can average the signals from them.
I personally am not convinced that unique per-disc watermarking would even be economically viable. Though I wouldn't put it past them to lie about it either.
Copy prevention is mathematically impossible; this is not a limitation of present technology, but a limitation of the universe. I hope I do not need to explain why.
Of course you have the added problem that the motivation which encourages consumers to copy content, is exactly the same one that encourages content creators to seek ever more payment for it: the deep-seated Cave-man hunter-gatherer instinct. Twenty thousand years of evolution have not altered the instinct, just created new ways for it to manifest itself.
The best way I can think of to put it is like this: Whenever you get something without paying for it, your brain rewards you by ordering the release of a shot of endorphins {basically, your body's homebrew version of heroin; or more accurately, heroin and similar substances artificially stimulate the endorphin receptors}. This is exactly the same as what happened when Cave-man brought down an animal with a spear. We like the effects when our endorphin receptors get stimulated, so we tend to repeat behaviour which results in those effects. And whenever a fatcat executive thinks of a way to gouge more money out of already-overstretched consumers without any extra effort, their brain orders them a shot of endorphins too.
I have just one piece of advice for the record, TV and movie industries. Ask yourselves why, when there is a photocopier in many newsagents' shops, do people still buy newspapers, magazines and books, instead of copying them? Then try applying the same principle to other forms of content.
How about replacing the cathode ray tube in one of these TV sets with a dummy one?
From the current flowing in the scan coils, we can determine where the electron beam is on the screen {though to generate a standard timing signal, we really only care about when it jumps to the left hand side or the top}. From the three grid drives, we can get the levels of red, green and blue light emitted by the nearest pixel.
Apply some rudimentary signal conditioning which, if you could get the circuitry to fit on an A6 size piece of breadboard, you really would not be trying at all; and you have a set of signals suitable for feeding into any old-fashioned SCART socket on any old-fashioned TV set or DVD+RW recorder.
There is no way to protect any kind of content against the "dummy CRT" attack -- and once it has been successfully applied, the content is now unprotected for all time
I've noticed that a lot of new keyboards don't seem to have a dedicated INSERT key -- you have to turn off the NumLock and use 0. This is a royal pain in the arse when copying {ctrl+insert} or pasting {shift+insert} using the keyboard, or when scrolling back in Links. Yes, I know I can use the mouse to copy by left-dragging and paste by middle-clicking, and Links is mouse-aware so the scroll wheel works as one would expect; but sometimes my hands are already on the keyboard, and I lose a beat if I have to let go of the keyboard to find the mouse.
Ha. I taught myself to use my right foot to operate both the brake and gas pedals together for a smooth pullaway on any gradient, up or downhill. It didn't cut any ice with a driving examiner, though. Neither did my habit of putting it in gear while the engine was stopped, and turning the key with the clutch pedal depressed.
If there was a control I'd do away with, it would be the gear lever -- but I'd keep the clutch pedal. If you're pressing the gas hard, then you suddenly release it just before you press the clutch, you obviously want to change up. If you're braking just before you press the clutch, you obviously want to change down -- and by integrating the braking and extrapolating, you can know how far down {4-2 and 5-3 are commonly done when approaching roundabouts}. If you're starting from rest, the car can sense electronically whether it's facing uphill and select first, or downhill and select second. If you turn around in your seat, you obviously want to reverse.
QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down. It was designed to separate letters which commonly occur together so typists could work faster. Anyway, once a person has mastered the layout of a keyboard, the placement of the keys relative to one another has less effect on typing speed -- the time to remember where a key is, is only dominant during the learning phase; in the case of an experienced typist, it is the time to move the finger to the key and depress it fully which dominates.
There exists a natural human tendency to strike the second key before releasing the first. This phenomenon, known as rollover, can create a race condition.
With any mechanical typewriter, each letter has to enter the same physical space in order to make a mark on the paper -- which creates the potential for jams. If the two letters are coming from far apart, then there is a better chance that the descending one will get out of the way before the ascending one hits it. The nearer the two letters are, the more likely they are to collide.
Electronic keyboards suffer from a different manifestation of the same problem. When typing a word such as "the", the sequence of operations is actually press T - press H - release T - press E - release H - release E -- or sometimes press T, press H, press E, release T, release H, release E. Now a mechanical switch takes some time to operate; and after it has been released, the contacts can bounce for several milliseconds. Printed switches are actually worse, not better, than "proper" snap-action switches. The use of a suitable resistor and capacitor across each pair of switch contacts is one way to "de-bounce" a keyboard, but it's expensive. What is more commonly done nowadays is software debouncing: the keyboard microcontroller {which is needed anyway, to squeeze the signals down a serial line} examines the switch several times in succession and, if the state is the same each time, assumes that the contacts have ceased to bounce.
This technique tends to break down, however, as the keypress duration approaches the bounce period. Furthermore the micro will have hard-coded into it a set of rules for determining which of two truly ambiguous sequences to use. It is very easy for a fast typist using a cheap keyboard to run afoul of this, resulting in sentences such as "teh rollvoer on this ekyboard is hsite". Balme it on the frimawre!
The QWERTY keyboard layout was created by studying word lists; but unfortunately, someone forgot something important. All the verbs in the lists were given in the present tense, and nobody noticed a common letter pairing: "e" and "d" occur together in the past tenses of all regular English verbs. As a result, nobody noticed that E and D should not have been placed next to one another. So they were placed next to one another; and they still jam on every mechanical typewriter to this very day.
It's fairly standard practice in the electronics industry to test timing circuits which use the mains frequency as a reference, by injecting a higher frequency signal into the timing input so as to shorten timeouts.
What you really need, then, is a very small, very heavy object that you could place directly below the clock. This would increase the local value of g; thus, speeding up the pendulum and allowing you to measure several thousand periods of oscillation in a shorter time.
No, it's extremely easy to set the timekeeping on a longcase clock. The pendulum has a 2" period; the mechanism is basically a self-resetting counter which records the number of times the pendulum has reached one or the other end of its travel. The only thing which affects the timekeeping is the period of the pendulum; and the only thing which affects the period of the pendulum is the distance from the pivot to the centre of gravity. Since T = 2 * pi * sqrt (l / g), it follows that for a two-second period you need a length of g / (pi ** 2), which I get as being 0.994 metres using the constants in KCalc.
Adding or subtracting half a millimetre will give an error of about 20 seconds a day, so you will indeed need some time to verify its correct operation.
Nixie tubes are based on the same technology as the neon lamps you find on mains extension leads and some appliances {from the pre-LED era, or ones that don't have any low-voltage electronics inside them} and in power-finder screwdrivers. These simple lamps are just a glass tube with two electrodes, connected to the mains through a ballast resistor {or in the case of a power-finder, the capacitor formed between the whole surface of your body [not, as per common misconception, just the soles of your feet] and the earth; AC can flow through a capacitor because it is being continuously charged and discharged}. The tube is filled with a mixture of gases, mainly neon and argon, which become conductive and emit light when a sufficiently high voltage is applied. The glow occurs in the space between the cathode {negative terminal} and the anode {positive terminal}, but always nearest to the cathode. Note that the mains is AC, so each electrode glows on each alternate half-cycle; but since there are 50 cycles every second, your eyes cannot detect this.
In a Nixie tube, the cathode wires are shaped into numbers {or letters, or symbols} and each one is brought out to a separate terminal pin. The anode is a fine wire mesh grille in front of the cathodes. This is connected, through a ballast resistor {to limit the current} to a positive supply of several tens of volts DC {dependent upon the size of the tube}. When one of the cathodes is connected to ground, the gas ionises and a visible glow is given off around the cathode. The smaller the resistor, the bigger the current, and the further the glowing region extends {and the shorter the overall lifetime of the tube, since some material is transferred }; the general aim is to get a strong enough glow around the active wire so the whole digit is visible. Note that if a switched-mode power supply is being used to generate the high voltage, it will most probably already have a high enough output impedance so as not to need a ballast resistor.
The cathodes can be driven by ordinary, open-collector NPN transistors but they must be selected carefully: the collector-base junction must have a sufficiently high breakdown voltage to withstand the display drive voltage. Otherwise the C-B junction will behave like a Zener diode, essentially dropping a constant voltage irrespective of how much current is flowing through it; and once a digit has been lit, it won't extinguish until the anode supply is interrupted. It won't actually fail catastrophically due to the ballast resistance limiting the current; but it probably is not what you want anyway. If the anode supply is switched-mode, and the output capacitor is small enough that this afterglow can discharge it completely, you might just be able to get away with using under-rated transistors to switch the cathodes; but this is not ideal since the anode supply will always be dying {not just in the afterglow while the transistor is staying on} and the display will flicker.
The font in which a web page is displayed is dependent upon the client software, something the publisher does not control. Just because you designed a whole page in Comic Sans MS, does not necessarily mean that it will render in Comic Sans MS. The Web is WYSINNWEEG: What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets. What if the user's machine does not have this font installed? What if the user has specified font substitution, in one of several ways? What if the user is using a text-mode browser such as Links?
I would tend to think that if a particular rendering absolutely required something to be displayed in a particular font, it should be done as a graphical image rather than as a piece of text.
My personal preference {which, BTW, generally overrides whatever the web designer chose} is Bitstream Vera Sans. Though I don't mind the Serif equivalent, especially if I'm going to be printing it out -- I find serif text is just a bit easier on the eye in print.
"Evolutionary goal" is a bit of an oxymoron. Evolution doesn't have much in the way of goals. It's just a series of processes. A population reproduces with errors; some are beneficial to survival, some are deleterious and some are indifferent. Not all the offspring will reach maturity, so those errors which are severe enough to prevent reproduction are not reinforced.
In mathematics, there are equations which can be solved by starting with an approximation for the answer and applying a formula which gives a better approximation. The difference between successive results gets smaller and smaller, until the correct answer {within the limits imposed by the arithmetical precision used} is reached. Though it's tempting to assume that evolutionary processes tend to work this way, there is no reason to suppose that it should be a convergent process. Furthermore, it is not generally the case with iterative methods that where there are multiple solutions to an equation {e.g. x ** 2 = 4; x could be 2 or -2}, inserting one of the solutions as a starting value will yield another solution as the next approximation.
Even if we consider the evolution of living beings as nothing more than three-dimensional iterative steps towards the solution of a set of equations, we cannot suppose that there is a single solution set. And just because all means to the same end are equally valid, there is no reason why practising one means to an end should necessarily reveal alternative means to the same end.
"Knot lore" already implies something learned by rote. You could work out knots from first principles; the idea is basically to present as large a surface area of rope A as possible in as intimate a contact as possible with as large a surface area of rope B as possible, in order that the effects of friction are maximised. Oh, and maybe you can do some self-reversible process to the ropes which, as it reverses, will cause the knot to tighten.
But, you most probably wouldn't want to. It's much less effort to learn (the whole process of tying a knot) as something atomic, than to learn all the relevant underlying physics. You have all of later to pick up the abstract concepts like friction and expansion and contraction. And, to be honest, even someone with a thorough awareness of all the underlying science probably would have to tie at least a few knots for practice first.
If you want to make a closed source application, you are a c**t. Go and stick a tampon in your mouth.
If you want to make a closed source application using software that someone else decided -- which was their right because they wrote it -- should be open source, you are an even bigger c**t. Go and stick a whole cluster of high-absorbency tampons in your mouth.
Closed source software is really no more morally justifiable than slavery, weasel words about how nobody is forced to use a computer nitwithstanding. One day, trust me, one day it will be illegal. But before that, decompilers will progress to the point where it will be impossible in practice.
And as far as the other hand, men and women are a lot more the same than 1 difference in 45, its more like 99.99 percent identical in fact. The number of genes that the Y chromosome encodes can be counted on your fingers, and they all deal with the male reproductive system.
I'm not disputing that -- I'm agreeing with it. Men have nipples {that can actually produce milk} because it would just be too much bother not to. Today we seem to ascribe far more to this one little difference than it explains {there is barely room for enough bits of information in the whole human genetic code to store all the supposed gender differences, let alone in the sex chromosome alone}.
Of course not everything that makes up the human being is in DNA. To use a computer metaphor, babies are born with a mostly-blank flash PROM containing a simple firmware BIOS and a bootstrap loader which is used to download a more sophisticated firmware version piecemeal.
The fact is, we play up the differences from birth by giving boys and girls different clothes, different toys, different foods, different treatment and different expectations -- and mostly so that companies who exploit workers in the third world can sell overpriced and unnecessary crap in pink and blue packs so people buy twice as much. Before disposable nappies, everyone was brought up in washable terry towelling ones {so was my ex's little one, who will be ten next year} and they didn't last for two or three hours a time -- they lasted for two or three children a time. Up till the 20th century, baby boys wore dresses. Kids' duffel coats invariably used to have universal fastenings which could be done up boys-side or girls-side {but why is there a difference anyway?}. Primitive cultures probably would have been a lot less sexist than today -- if there was a job to be done on pain of death, then anyone who could do it would have been needed. So there would naturally have been some women hunting with the men and some men doing the sedentary jobs around the camp. Shame they were too primitive to leave any notes.....
Smart arse response: That's because the GNU userland sits closer to the metal than the KDE desktop environment, so it would be KDE/GNU.
Seriously, KDE does not depend on a particular set of userland utilities; it will work just as happily with a BSD or Solaris userland, just as long as they do whatever the hypothetical Normal Healthy Adult would expect.
Some genetic similarity is overstated. If you took two samples of DNA that were different in every way they possibly could be different, they would still have 50% in common.
OTOH, some genetic similarity is understated. The human genetic code consists of 23 chromosome pairs, in which a single chromosome differs between the sexes. Therefore, at the lowest biological level, men and women have 45 similarities for every one difference.
The best way I have found to get a good deal on a digital camera is to go out to a camera shop with a bundle of crisp pound notes. Speak to a sales assistant. Handle a few cameras. Ask if the assistant has tried them {why are they working in a camera shop if they don't love taking photographs?} What do they feel like in your hand? Note the layout of the controls, and check that your fingers are not going to get in the way of the lens -- or any of the other sensors like the auto-focus or the light meter. Does your shutter finger keep finding the on-off switch by mistake? *cough*FujiFilm*cough* How long does it take to store the picture and recharge the flash? Look at some test shots, or even better take some yourself. See if you can get a discount for cash, or something chucked in {another memory card, a multi-slot reader, free prints.....} And if the store staff don't treat you like you pay their wages, then don't pay their wages.
There's still no substitute for real, live shops with real, live people in them. If you don't believe me, I have some very inexpensive 8 megapixel cameras you may want to buy..... NB no penguin-shaggers please, these ones only do 2MPx without the special closed-source Windows driver.
Applying 12V DC to a door control solenoid will indeed release it. However, in any sensible system, the wires to the solenoid will be concealed inside the building, so in order to get access to them you would have to already have access to the building. And if I was building security systems, I would design them to pass a milliamp or so through the solenoid coil all the time, for tamper detection: if someone cuts the wires, the current stops and a silent alarm goes off -- the first you get to know about it is when the Old Bill arrive and your collar is felt. If someone tries to apply a battery without cutting the wires, that's easy to sense:)
It ought to be possible to lift someone's fingerprint from something they touched and make a mould from it, using copper clad PCB board. And a PIN provides little to no security, as thousands of British debit card users are about to discover. Come to think of it, you ought to be enable to replicate someone's DNA if you could persuade them to..... but talking about that might prejudice a patent I'm applying for.
As another poster has already hinted, it's all to do with the way that MS-DOS was never designed to work in anything but an isolated environment. It had no real need to be network-aware -- networking was a vendor-specific thing in those days. And users tended to know what they were doing. Software written for DOS and early Windows took advantage of this. The need for security became apparent later. Now it's got to the point where securing Windows properly is going to break enough applications that upgrading to a more secure Windows will be as traumatic as upgrading to a non-Windows OS.
Not that it's in Microsoft's interest to release an even half-secure OS anyway, what with the entire secondary industry that has developed around tidying up Microsoft's shite. In no other industry would anyone ever get away with it..... you get someone in to install central heating, they don't leave till the boiler is running fine, the radiators are fixed sound and level and the pipes are leak-free. You buy a car, it already has seat belts and stop lights fitted {and you can buy the Haynes manual.....}. Why the fuck does anybody think it's even remotely acceptable that when you buy a brand new computer, some little runt on the other side of the world can take over it within a quarter of an hour from when you plug it in, unless you spend even more money on protection software?
Cars have to pass a roadworthiness test before they are allowed to be driven on the public highway. Maybe there should be some kind of "networthiness" test for computers -- but it's absolutely imperative that this is handled properly, otherwise it could turn out to be the equivalent of allowing Ford to administer roadworthiness tests. I also think some basic education for computer users would not go amiss. You don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but you should know how to check the FLOWER {fuel, lenses, oil, water, electrics and rubber=tyres} before you set out.
Slashdot Mirror
You could replace it with a bunch of NOP instructions, though {like you get out of /dev/zero}. That would be a lot like removing it.
..... probably
The real problem is that Microsoft's implementation of fdisk is totally christian. It won't even let you delete, let alone create, non-native partitions {the 95/98/ME one won't even delete 2000/XP partitions}.
I would recommend you use DBAN {if it's not in your toolkit, why not?} in "quick" mode just to zero out the whole drive before installing a Microsoft OS. Or there is a way to zero out the MBR using dd
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
but as usual, check manpages and Google first before trusting anything I said.
I'm a diehard LILO user, it works for chuff's sake so don't muck with it, but the issue you are seeing is not the fault of the bootstrap loader.
Any bootstrap loader, be it GRUB, LILO or NTLDR.EXE, must necessarily use the BIOS to interact with the hardware, because no drivers are loaded yet.
Your BIOS setup should have an option something like "legacy USB keyboard" which takes the keystrokes from the USB keyboard and makes them appear to have come from the "old style" keyboard instead. Enable this and GRUB should work.
Well, end user support won't be too hard for Google to do. When tech-savvy users have a problem, Google is usually the first place they turn .....
We'll assume for starters that the appliance has known hardware and contains closed-source, modified versions of BSD, Firefox, OpenOffice and maybe some graphics editor {I can't right now think of one licenced BSD-wise that they could lock up}. The fewer parts there are in a system, the fewer parts there are to go wrong.
By fixing the hardware, you have instantly eliminated most of a major bugbear: driver incompatibility {the rest was already eliminated by the existence of open-source drivers on an open-source OS in the first place; the Windows fanboys don't seem to want to see that the closed nature of Windows is at the root of almost every one of its problems}.
And by restricting the software, you get to eliminate most of the rest. Most of the problems faced by Linux users occur when they go beyond their own distro {and it has to be said, missing -devel packages are probably the number one culprit; Gentoo and Slackware users are the ones at the back, smirking. Badly put together autoconf/automake scripts are the number two culprit}.
Finally, if this thing is plugged into the internet 24/7, it will be very easy to do a "restore factory defaults" anytime you like.
First point: there's plenty of life yet in the cathode ray tube. And LCD panels are harder to interface to, but not that much.
As for "unique per-disc watermarking", that too can be defeated. If it's out-of-band, it's trivially easy to do so, and most probably will already have been stripped away by the time the signal arrives at the display device; even if it's in-band, it is not hard to do. If you can get several source discs, you can average the signals from them.
I personally am not convinced that unique per-disc watermarking would even be economically viable. Though I wouldn't put it past them to lie about it either.
Copy prevention is mathematically impossible; this is not a limitation of present technology, but a limitation of the universe. I hope I do not need to explain why.
Of course you have the added problem that the motivation which encourages consumers to copy content, is exactly the same one that encourages content creators to seek ever more payment for it: the deep-seated Cave-man hunter-gatherer instinct. Twenty thousand years of evolution have not altered the instinct, just created new ways for it to manifest itself.
The best way I can think of to put it is like this: Whenever you get something without paying for it, your brain rewards you by ordering the release of a shot of endorphins {basically, your body's homebrew version of heroin; or more accurately, heroin and similar substances artificially stimulate the endorphin receptors}. This is exactly the same as what happened when Cave-man brought down an animal with a spear. We like the effects when our endorphin receptors get stimulated, so we tend to repeat behaviour which results in those effects. And whenever a fatcat executive thinks of a way to gouge more money out of already-overstretched consumers without any extra effort, their brain orders them a shot of endorphins too.
I have just one piece of advice for the record, TV and movie industries. Ask yourselves why, when there is a photocopier in many newsagents' shops, do people still buy newspapers, magazines and books, instead of copying them? Then try applying the same principle to other forms of content.
How about replacing the cathode ray tube in one of these TV sets with a dummy one?
From the current flowing in the scan coils, we can determine where the electron beam is on the screen {though to generate a standard timing signal, we really only care about when it jumps to the left hand side or the top}. From the three grid drives, we can get the levels of red, green and blue light emitted by the nearest pixel.
Apply some rudimentary signal conditioning which, if you could get the circuitry to fit on an A6 size piece of breadboard, you really would not be trying at all; and you have a set of signals suitable for feeding into any old-fashioned SCART socket on any old-fashioned TV set or DVD+RW recorder.
There is no way to protect any kind of content against the "dummy CRT" attack -- and once it has been successfully applied, the content is now unprotected for all time
I've noticed that a lot of new keyboards don't seem to have a dedicated INSERT key -- you have to turn off the NumLock and use 0. This is a royal pain in the arse when copying {ctrl+insert} or pasting {shift+insert} using the keyboard, or when scrolling back in Links. Yes, I know I can use the mouse to copy by left-dragging and paste by middle-clicking, and Links is mouse-aware so the scroll wheel works as one would expect; but sometimes my hands are already on the keyboard, and I lose a beat if I have to let go of the keyboard to find the mouse.
Ha. I taught myself to use my right foot to operate both the brake and gas pedals together for a smooth pullaway on any gradient, up or downhill. It didn't cut any ice with a driving examiner, though. Neither did my habit of putting it in gear while the engine was stopped, and turning the key with the clutch pedal depressed.
If there was a control I'd do away with, it would be the gear lever -- but I'd keep the clutch pedal. If you're pressing the gas hard, then you suddenly release it just before you press the clutch, you obviously want to change up. If you're braking just before you press the clutch, you obviously want to change down -- and by integrating the braking and extrapolating, you can know how far down {4-2 and 5-3 are commonly done when approaching roundabouts}. If you're starting from rest, the car can sense electronically whether it's facing uphill and select first, or downhill and select second. If you turn around in your seat, you obviously want to reverse.
Manslaughter.
QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down. It was designed to separate letters which commonly occur together so typists could work faster. Anyway, once a person has mastered the layout of a keyboard, the placement of the keys relative to one another has less effect on typing speed -- the time to remember where a key is, is only dominant during the learning phase; in the case of an experienced typist, it is the time to move the finger to the key and depress it fully which dominates.
There exists a natural human tendency to strike the second key before releasing the first. This phenomenon, known as rollover, can create a race condition.
With any mechanical typewriter, each letter has to enter the same physical space in order to make a mark on the paper -- which creates the potential for jams. If the two letters are coming from far apart, then there is a better chance that the descending one will get out of the way before the ascending one hits it. The nearer the two letters are, the more likely they are to collide.
Electronic keyboards suffer from a different manifestation of the same problem. When typing a word such as "the", the sequence of operations is actually press T - press H - release T - press E - release H - release E -- or sometimes press T, press H, press E, release T, release H, release E. Now a mechanical switch takes some time to operate; and after it has been released, the contacts can bounce for several milliseconds. Printed switches are actually worse, not better, than "proper" snap-action switches. The use of a suitable resistor and capacitor across each pair of switch contacts is one way to "de-bounce" a keyboard, but it's expensive. What is more commonly done nowadays is software debouncing: the keyboard microcontroller {which is needed anyway, to squeeze the signals down a serial line} examines the switch several times in succession and, if the state is the same each time, assumes that the contacts have ceased to bounce.
This technique tends to break down, however, as the keypress duration approaches the bounce period. Furthermore the micro will have hard-coded into it a set of rules for determining which of two truly ambiguous sequences to use. It is very easy for a fast typist using a cheap keyboard to run afoul of this, resulting in sentences such as "teh rollvoer on this ekyboard is hsite". Balme it on the frimawre!
The QWERTY keyboard layout was created by studying word lists; but unfortunately, someone forgot something important. All the verbs in the lists were given in the present tense, and nobody noticed a common letter pairing: "e" and "d" occur together in the past tenses of all regular English verbs. As a result, nobody noticed that E and D should not have been placed next to one another. So they were placed next to one another; and they still jam on every mechanical typewriter to this very day.
It's fairly standard practice in the electronics industry to test timing circuits which use the mains frequency as a reference, by injecting a higher frequency signal into the timing input so as to shorten timeouts.
What you really need, then, is a very small, very heavy object that you could place directly below the clock. This would increase the local value of g; thus, speeding up the pendulum and allowing you to measure several thousand periods of oscillation in a shorter time.
No, it's extremely easy to set the timekeeping on a longcase clock. The pendulum has a 2" period; the mechanism is basically a self-resetting counter which records the number of times the pendulum has reached one or the other end of its travel. The only thing which affects the timekeeping is the period of the pendulum; and the only thing which affects the period of the pendulum is the distance from the pivot to the centre of gravity. Since T = 2 * pi * sqrt (l / g), it follows that for a two-second period you need a length of g / (pi ** 2), which I get as being 0.994 metres using the constants in KCalc.
Adding or subtracting half a millimetre will give an error of about 20 seconds a day, so you will indeed need some time to verify its correct operation.
Nixie tubes are based on the same technology as the neon lamps you find on mains extension leads and some appliances {from the pre-LED era, or ones that don't have any low-voltage electronics inside them} and in power-finder screwdrivers. These simple lamps are just a glass tube with two electrodes, connected to the mains through a ballast resistor {or in the case of a power-finder, the capacitor formed between the whole surface of your body [not, as per common misconception, just the soles of your feet] and the earth; AC can flow through a capacitor because it is being continuously charged and discharged}. The tube is filled with a mixture of gases, mainly neon and argon, which become conductive and emit light when a sufficiently high voltage is applied. The glow occurs in the space between the cathode {negative terminal} and the anode {positive terminal}, but always nearest to the cathode. Note that the mains is AC, so each electrode glows on each alternate half-cycle; but since there are 50 cycles every second, your eyes cannot detect this.
In a Nixie tube, the cathode wires are shaped into numbers {or letters, or symbols} and each one is brought out to a separate terminal pin. The anode is a fine wire mesh grille in front of the cathodes. This is connected, through a ballast resistor {to limit the current} to a positive supply of several tens of volts DC {dependent upon the size of the tube}. When one of the cathodes is connected to ground, the gas ionises and a visible glow is given off around the cathode. The smaller the resistor, the bigger the current, and the further the glowing region extends {and the shorter the overall lifetime of the tube, since some material is transferred }; the general aim is to get a strong enough glow around the active wire so the whole digit is visible. Note that if a switched-mode power supply is being used to generate the high voltage, it will most probably already have a high enough output impedance so as not to need a ballast resistor.
The cathodes can be driven by ordinary, open-collector NPN transistors but they must be selected carefully: the collector-base junction must have a sufficiently high breakdown voltage to withstand the display drive voltage. Otherwise the C-B junction will behave like a Zener diode, essentially dropping a constant voltage irrespective of how much current is flowing through it; and once a digit has been lit, it won't extinguish until the anode supply is interrupted. It won't actually fail catastrophically due to the ballast resistance limiting the current; but it probably is not what you want anyway. If the anode supply is switched-mode, and the output capacitor is small enough that this afterglow can discharge it completely, you might just be able to get away with using under-rated transistors to switch the cathodes; but this is not ideal since the anode supply will always be dying {not just in the afterglow while the transistor is staying on} and the display will flicker.
The font in which a web page is displayed is dependent upon the client software, something the publisher does not control. Just because you designed a whole page in Comic Sans MS, does not necessarily mean that it will render in Comic Sans MS. The Web is WYSINNWEEG: What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets. What if the user's machine does not have this font installed? What if the user has specified font substitution, in one of several ways? What if the user is using a text-mode browser such as Links?
I would tend to think that if a particular rendering absolutely required something to be displayed in a particular font, it should be done as a graphical image rather than as a piece of text.
My personal preference {which, BTW, generally overrides whatever the web designer chose} is Bitstream Vera Sans. Though I don't mind the Serif equivalent, especially if I'm going to be printing it out -- I find serif text is just a bit easier on the eye in print.
"Evolutionary goal" is a bit of an oxymoron. Evolution doesn't have much in the way of goals. It's just a series of processes. A population reproduces with errors; some are beneficial to survival, some are deleterious and some are indifferent. Not all the offspring will reach maturity, so those errors which are severe enough to prevent reproduction are not reinforced.
In mathematics, there are equations which can be solved by starting with an approximation for the answer and applying a formula which gives a better approximation. The difference between successive results gets smaller and smaller, until the correct answer {within the limits imposed by the arithmetical precision used} is reached. Though it's tempting to assume that evolutionary processes tend to work this way, there is no reason to suppose that it should be a convergent process. Furthermore, it is not generally the case with iterative methods that where there are multiple solutions to an equation {e.g. x ** 2 = 4; x could be 2 or -2}, inserting one of the solutions as a starting value will yield another solution as the next approximation.
Even if we consider the evolution of living beings as nothing more than three-dimensional iterative steps towards the solution of a set of equations, we cannot suppose that there is a single solution set. And just because all means to the same end are equally valid, there is no reason why practising one means to an end should necessarily reveal alternative means to the same end.
"Knot lore" already implies something learned by rote. You could work out knots from first principles; the idea is basically to present as large a surface area of rope A as possible in as intimate a contact as possible with as large a surface area of rope B as possible, in order that the effects of friction are maximised. Oh, and maybe you can do some self-reversible process to the ropes which, as it reverses, will cause the knot to tighten.
But, you most probably wouldn't want to. It's much less effort to learn (the whole process of tying a knot) as something atomic, than to learn all the relevant underlying physics. You have all of later to pick up the abstract concepts like friction and expansion and contraction. And, to be honest, even someone with a thorough awareness of all the underlying science probably would have to tie at least a few knots for practice first.
If you want to make a closed source application, you are a c**t. Go and stick a tampon in your mouth.
If you want to make a closed source application using software that someone else decided -- which was their right because they wrote it -- should be open source, you are an even bigger c**t. Go and stick a whole cluster of high-absorbency tampons in your mouth.
Closed source software is really no more morally justifiable than slavery, weasel words about how nobody is forced to use a computer nitwithstanding. One day, trust me, one day it will be illegal. But before that, decompilers will progress to the point where it will be impossible in practice.
Of course not everything that makes up the human being is in DNA. To use a computer metaphor, babies are born with a mostly-blank flash PROM containing a simple firmware BIOS and a bootstrap loader which is used to download a more sophisticated firmware version piecemeal.
The fact is, we play up the differences from birth by giving boys and girls different clothes, different toys, different foods, different treatment and different expectations -- and mostly so that companies who exploit workers in the third world can sell overpriced and unnecessary crap in pink and blue packs so people buy twice as much. Before disposable nappies, everyone was brought up in washable terry towelling ones {so was my ex's little one, who will be ten next year} and they didn't last for two or three hours a time -- they lasted for two or three children a time. Up till the 20th century, baby boys wore dresses. Kids' duffel coats invariably used to have universal fastenings which could be done up boys-side or girls-side {but why is there a difference anyway?}. Primitive cultures probably would have been a lot less sexist than today -- if there was a job to be done on pain of death, then anyone who could do it would have been needed. So there would naturally have been some women hunting with the men and some men doing the sedentary jobs around the camp. Shame they were too primitive to leave any notes
Smart arse response: That's because the GNU userland sits closer to the metal than the KDE desktop environment, so it would be KDE/GNU.
Seriously, KDE does not depend on a particular set of userland utilities; it will work just as happily with a BSD or Solaris userland, just as long as they do whatever the hypothetical Normal Healthy Adult would expect.
Some genetic similarity is overstated. If you took two samples of DNA that were different in every way they possibly could be different, they would still have 50% in common.
OTOH, some genetic similarity is understated. The human genetic code consists of 23 chromosome pairs, in which a single chromosome differs between the sexes. Therefore, at the lowest biological level, men and women have 45 similarities for every one difference.
A romantic.
The best way I have found to get a good deal on a digital camera is to go out to a camera shop with a bundle of crisp pound notes. Speak to a sales assistant. Handle a few cameras. Ask if the assistant has tried them {why are they working in a camera shop if they don't love taking photographs?} What do they feel like in your hand? Note the layout of the controls, and check that your fingers are not going to get in the way of the lens -- or any of the other sensors like the auto-focus or the light meter. Does your shutter finger keep finding the on-off switch by mistake? *cough*FujiFilm*cough* How long does it take to store the picture and recharge the flash? Look at some test shots, or even better take some yourself. See if you can get a discount for cash, or something chucked in {another memory card, a multi-slot reader, free prints .....} And if the store staff don't treat you like you pay their wages, then don't pay their wages.
..... NB no penguin-shaggers please, these ones only do 2MPx without the special closed-source Windows driver.
There's still no substitute for real, live shops with real, live people in them. If you don't believe me, I have some very inexpensive 8 megapixel cameras you may want to buy
Applying 12V DC to a door control solenoid will indeed release it. However, in any sensible system, the wires to the solenoid will be concealed inside the building, so in order to get access to them you would have to already have access to the building. And if I was building security systems, I would design them to pass a milliamp or so through the solenoid coil all the time, for tamper detection: if someone cuts the wires, the current stops and a silent alarm goes off -- the first you get to know about it is when the Old Bill arrive and your collar is felt. If someone tries to apply a battery without cutting the wires, that's easy to sense :)
..... but talking about that might prejudice a patent I'm applying for.
It ought to be possible to lift someone's fingerprint from something they touched and make a mould from it, using copper clad PCB board. And a PIN provides little to no security, as thousands of British debit card users are about to discover. Come to think of it, you ought to be enable to replicate someone's DNA if you could persuade them to
As another poster has already hinted, it's all to do with the way that MS-DOS was never designed to work in anything but an isolated environment. It had no real need to be network-aware -- networking was a vendor-specific thing in those days. And users tended to know what they were doing. Software written for DOS and early Windows took advantage of this. The need for security became apparent later. Now it's got to the point where securing Windows properly is going to break enough applications that upgrading to a more secure Windows will be as traumatic as upgrading to a non-Windows OS.
..... you get someone in to install central heating, they don't leave till the boiler is running fine, the radiators are fixed sound and level and the pipes are leak-free. You buy a car, it already has seat belts and stop lights fitted {and you can buy the Haynes manual .....}. Why the fuck does anybody think it's even remotely acceptable that when you buy a brand new computer, some little runt on the other side of the world can take over it within a quarter of an hour from when you plug it in, unless you spend even more money on protection software?
Not that it's in Microsoft's interest to release an even half-secure OS anyway, what with the entire secondary industry that has developed around tidying up Microsoft's shite. In no other industry would anyone ever get away with it
Cars have to pass a roadworthiness test before they are allowed to be driven on the public highway. Maybe there should be some kind of "networthiness" test for computers -- but it's absolutely imperative that this is handled properly, otherwise it could turn out to be the equivalent of allowing Ford to administer roadworthiness tests. I also think some basic education for computer users would not go amiss. You don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but you should know how to check the FLOWER {fuel, lenses, oil, water, electrics and rubber=tyres} before you set out.