The ashes from burning the harvested plants {which does put CO2 back into the atmosphere, but only as much as the plants took out while growing -- and you can do something useful with the heat you generate, thereby saving you from having to burn a quantity of fossil fuel which would have produced the same amount of CO2 without taking it out first} will contain the metallic elements absorbed by the plant, either in their pure states {if they are particularly unreactive, e.g. gold} or as oxides. A book of physical and chemical properties of substances, something like Kaye and Laby for instance, would give you all the information you needed to devise suitable processes for separating the remains.
I would fully support such a move as being cruel to be kind. You shouldn't be using a computer or even a calculator until you have a good enough idea of how to use your own brain.
I was one of the last people to do the non-calculator version of the O-level mathematics exam, and we learned little tricks involving finding common factors and cancelling out that calculator users never need to bother with. I even used to add up order forms in my head when we used paper forms {I have since written some software to computerise it} and would never have dreamed of using a calculator.
All the computer is really good for is the last step of solving a mathematical problem. It can't ever manage the first step, which is actually expressing the problem in mathematical terms in the first place.
The point is that it isn't the ringing that's annoying, it's the half a conversation that people have to endure. Use your voicemail. You have to spend your credit to listen to it, but it's really a small price to pay for people not thinking you're a prick.
You don't get warnings on the metro, or down caves, or in any of the other places where mobile phones don't work well. The whole point of using discreet Faraday shielding to stop phones from working is so there is no notice for people to get wound up by.
It is normal for a phone to have some sort of signal strength meter. Nokias have a bar up the left hand side of the screen; some other makes have an LED that flashes green when there is coverage, red where there is none.
The worst is when people express a date like 01/04/03. Great; how the hell am I supposed to know which is which? I have to figure out whether you were from the U.S. and meant January 4, 2003, or from somewhere else and meant April 1st, 2003.
Or from Japan or Sweden and meant the 3rd of April 2001..... or 1901.....
By the way, two figure years are quite legitimate, they could be years AQ {Age of AQuarius}, sometimes also written ACE {After Christian Era}. 1 January 2001 CE is 1 January 0001 AQ or ACE.
Comme ceci? Yes, just like this.
Moi jue parle Francais et tu parles Anglais? That's right, I'll speak English and you can speak French.
Et c'est pour voir si ceux quie ne comprennent pas les deux langues prennent plus d'ennui? Exactly so, my friend.
Plus d'ennui qu'un telephone mobile? Well, that is the question.
How can passive shielding be illegal if you have possession of the building? If you own the building / pay the rent / have squatter's rights, you make the rules. If your customers don't like it, tough..... you don't have any obligation to keep other people's services available in your own private property, you aren't forcing them to stay there, and they can easily go outside the Faraday cage and their phones will work just fine.
I don't even buy the argument that you're draining their batteries quicker by forcing their phone to look harder for a signal..... What about all-metal structures which predate mobile telephones? What about cellars? Caves? Metro systems? Other areas with naturally poor mobile coverage?
Makes me wonder why someone doesn't make a cheap Faraday shielding material which can be applied to walls in places where you don't want phones being used. {Some council houses I have stayed in seem already to have a layer of metal mesh behind the plaster, which is quite effective in blocking out anything except crappy MW radio signals; I guess they were built before Gyproc became commonplace}. The absence of a row of bars up the left hand side of the phone's display is less likely to be seen as an affront than a big sign saying NO MOBILE PHONES; and the kind of jerk that can ignore common good manners can easily ignore a sign, but they can't ignore the laws of physics.
What it really comes down to is a matter of how nosey you can be. We all are motivated to some degree by a sense of morbid curiosity -- a simple enough desire to know everything. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. If two people choose to have a conversation within earshot of me, I am not going to be made to feel the slightest bit guilty for listening in {however, I would draw the line at passing on information received without consent. Being privy to a secret doesn't give you the right to broadcast it}. If it's that important, they can always get up and go somewhere else.
If two people are having a face to face conversation in a language in which you are fluent, then you can hear both sides of the conversation. You can then make a fully-informed decision just how much attention to pay to it.
If one person is on a mobile phone, having one side of a conversation in a language in which you are fluent, it can drive you crazy trying to work out what is going on. You probably are devoting more attention to it than you can afford, and this also increases annoyance.
Two people talking face to face in a language in which you are not fluent, can also be extremely annoying.
employers/school insist on Windows but are willing to permit employee/student to choose applications
need software not readily available on OSS platforms, such as accounting software or graphics package (apparently GIMP isn't good enough for everyone)
already know how to use Windows, can't afford to spend the time it would take to get to grips with a "real OS"
Case 1 - stand up for what you believe in, rather than doing what other people want you to do. Risk the sack, even -- at the end of the day, your boss needs your labour more than you need your boss's wages.
Case 2 - use some other method. Pencil and paper, even -- if doing it without a computer is the only way to do it without using Closed Source software, then so be it. Quote: "I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses" - Sterling Ball.
Case 3 - freaking well learn. Invest a little effort of your own now so others beside you can receive a dividend later.
Perhaps Trolltech shouldn't have released QT as GPL on any platform - after all, any Linux developer can go and write their own toolkit if they want a GPL one.
Which is exactly what they did -- and it's an almighty coincidence if that wasn't what prompted TrollTech to release Qt under the GPL.
And why is it okay to support or argue for the idea of open source (as Linux users often do), but it's "pathetic" to do so if you're a Windows user?
Because you are judged by your deeds, not your words. It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Anyway, if you're that concerned about Open Source software, why don't you ditch Windows altogether and move to a real Open Source operating system, such as Linux or one of the BSD variants?
But connecting to port 25 as a non-privileged user means the MTA will add headers to your message, and you need root privileges to get around that. Someone receives a message, lets the owner of the compromised box know, they check their logs, see what's happened and it gets fixed.
And that's even assuming that the owner of the box has their MTA misconfigured so as to relay mail from anywhere, which is no longer the default on popular distributions. With a really well-configured MTA, an outsider could only ever send to other users on that box.
NO NO NO NO NO. Telnet is very useful for some purposes (I use it regularly to check my e-mail). It's not the telnet client that's the problem, but the telnetd server listening on port 23.
So you can open a non-privileged port as a non-privileged user and listen on it -- but you can't use that to send spam, at least not anonymously, because the daemon listening on the high-numbered port is non-privileged -- which means it can't suppress certain headers generated by the MTA, nor prevent its activities being logged.
QT is available under the freaking GPL. That means anyone can use it, as long as they release their software under the GPL. I'm fine with that. IMHO, closed source software is just plain wrong -- there is simply no justification for it. Just because you wrote something, doesn't give you the right to stop me from seeing it. Them's the breaks. If you want to write closed source software, don't expect to get a free ride on the back of the Free Software community. We might sell you a limited right to use our work -- if and only if you're prepared to pay for it, and we reserve the right to invest that money in a GPL replacement for whatever you're writing.
The fact remains that there is a version of Qt available under the GPL -- and, therefore, in source code form. Anybody could quite legitimately port that to Windows, as long as it was released under the GPL {or not released at all, just used within an organisation}. Sure, it would take a bit of effort, but that's the only obstacle. Trolltech cannot do anything legally to prevent you from doing it.
I think it's absolutely pathetic the way all these Windows fanboys bitch about the way Trolltech hasn't released a GPL version of Qt for windows. Nothing is stopping them doing what we in the GNU/Linux community have already done for ourselves, and writing their own. But the truth is the only kind of software the Windows users really know or care about writing is worms and viruses -- and even then they only manage that with a lot of help from Microsoft. They're quite content to eat the shit they get fed, because they know it would be too much like hard graft to try changing it.
Er, yes; see self-reply, above. Looks as though Apple's original validation testing programme missed something crucial. This sort of thing sometimes happened at my old firm; we would test modules at various combinations of -40 degrees, +85 degrees, low voltage, high voltage, reverse polarity, humidity, water jet blast, dust blast, sensors open-circuit, sensors short-circuit, vibration non-operational and operational, and rough handling -- and these were units meant to be fixed in place, in vehicles or domestic appliances. But sometimes, there would be a logic trap that would go unnoticed -- operating two switches within too short a time of one another at low temperature could cause a non-volatile memory write error on one particular module. Things like that are almost impossible to track down in validation testing -- you just have to wait for the first field returns, and hope you can reproduce the fault.
Hand-held kit with detachable connectors would take a whole new round of testing; simulating repeated mating cycles, scratching, pocket fluff and so forth; and it's likely that even if you set up some sort of mechanical system for rapidly plugging and unplugging the connector -- say, with a pneumatic actuator -- you might line up the unit and the connector too well and never cause the problem.
Well, I've now seen the pictures of a stripped-down unit and it's not as simple as I first thought. Looks as though the jack is on a daughterboard, with a rigid connector between that and the motherboard, and it's this which is failing. An easy fix probably would be to use a small piece of flexible printed circuit as the electrical connection between the MB and DB, and back this up with some sort of semi-rigid mechanical coupling. This would not take much of a redesign. Another idea might be to make the connection using "zebra strips" {as used to connect LCDs to PCBs, basically stacks of alternate layers of conductive and non-conductive material; pull apart a cheap pocket calculator to see a real-life example}, but these might have too much resistance {LCDs have resistances in the megohm range, but headphone voice coils are typically only 32 ohms} and there is not much margin for voltage drop.
It sounds as though the jack socket is prone to dry joints where it solders to the board. Either that, or the contacts are losing their springiness after a few insertion cycles.
Dry joints can be repaired "while-U-wait" in any suitably-equipped workshop -- or at home, but it's fiddly and I'd be reluctant to open up such an expensive precision instrument {and anyway, 30-40 days is well within the 12 month statutory guarantee period}.
I'm guessing that the PCB would be double-side surface mounted, reflow soldering both sides. The long-term solution is going to require a PCB redesign and new solder paste masks -- either too much solder or too little solder can cause poor joints; and maybe they should spec a socket with a plastic lug on the underside passing through a hole in the board, which would give it a bit more stability. Using a traditional socket with through-hole pins would be even more secure, especially if dummy pins were added for mechanical support, but would require an additional operation to hand-solder it in place.
It's understandable that Apple is using delaying tactics, as it will probably require a long round of accelerated testing to determine exactly what the problem is and how best to fix it. {I used to work in the R&D department of a company which designed and made electronic control modules, by the way}.
It's a freaking instruction set, and it's published {otherwise nobody would be able to write any software for it}. Anyone should be allowed to implement it if they design their own hardware to do it {or can prove that there is only one way to do it}. Frankly, I fail to see what the big deal is in all this. These multinational corporations are just taking their paranoia too far, and it's time somebody put a stop to it.
Just navigate to a directory with some files in it, and wait awhile for the previews to render. Hover the pointer over one, and you will get a "tooltip" with a slightly larger image and some additional {context-dependent} information about the file. Movies are rendered as a single still frame {maybe the preview engine in KDE4 will actually play them!} Note that you can turn off this behaviour if you can think of better things to do with your CPU cycles, see your KDE settings and be prepared for a good hunt around as there are many things you can tweak.
Try adding a new user from the command line (# useradd -m -p! -gusers somebody then # passwd somebody and enter a password) to force KDE to start the new user configuration wizard.
I wrote a script to generate an index.html page with thumbnails from a directory full of jpeg files, and Konqueror even renders me a thumbnail of the thumbnails!
When did Microsoft include a full-featured browser by default? The only thing I remember them ever having included by default was Internet Explorer, which provides some limited web browsing functionality, but lacks several important features {tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, PNG/MNG support, user agent masquerading and site-by-site cookie/Java/JavaScript management spring to mind}. On the other hand, I.E. does include some useful remote administration tools, like default behaviour being to treat unrecognised file types as executable.
It's not illegal by the FCC because anything goes in 2.4 GHz so long as you don't go over the power limits... there's no bandwidth-footprint limit that keeps you from using everything between the lines.
But the FCC is not the only authority regulating the use of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
With a match.
The ashes from burning the harvested plants {which does put CO2 back into the atmosphere, but only as much as the plants took out while growing -- and you can do something useful with the heat you generate, thereby saving you from having to burn a quantity of fossil fuel which would have produced the same amount of CO2 without taking it out first} will contain the metallic elements absorbed by the plant, either in their pure states {if they are particularly unreactive, e.g. gold} or as oxides. A book of physical and chemical properties of substances, something like Kaye and Laby for instance, would give you all the information you needed to devise suitable processes for separating the remains.
I would fully support such a move as being cruel to be kind. You shouldn't be using a computer or even a calculator until you have a good enough idea of how to use your own brain.
I was one of the last people to do the non-calculator version of the O-level mathematics exam, and we learned little tricks involving finding common factors and cancelling out that calculator users never need to bother with. I even used to add up order forms in my head when we used paper forms {I have since written some software to computerise it} and would never have dreamed of using a calculator.
All the computer is really good for is the last step of solving a mathematical problem. It can't ever manage the first step, which is actually expressing the problem in mathematical terms in the first place.
You don't get warnings on the metro, or down caves, or in any of the other places where mobile phones don't work well. The whole point of using discreet Faraday shielding to stop phones from working is so there is no notice for people to get wound up by.
It is normal for a phone to have some sort of signal strength meter. Nokias have a bar up the left hand side of the screen; some other makes have an LED that flashes green when there is coverage, red where there is none.
By the way, two figure years are quite legitimate, they could be years AQ {Age of AQuarius}, sometimes also written ACE {After Christian Era}. 1 January 2001 CE is 1 January 0001 AQ or ACE.
Comme ceci?
Yes, just like this.
Moi jue parle Francais et tu parles Anglais?
That's right, I'll speak English and you can speak French.
Et c'est pour voir si ceux quie ne comprennent pas les deux langues prennent plus d'ennui?
Exactly so, my friend.
Plus d'ennui qu'un telephone mobile?
Well, that is the question.
How can passive shielding be illegal if you have possession of the building? If you own the building / pay the rent / have squatter's rights, you make the rules. If your customers don't like it, tough ..... you don't have any obligation to keep other people's services available in your own private property, you aren't forcing them to stay there, and they can easily go outside the Faraday cage and their phones will work just fine.
..... What about all-metal structures which predate mobile telephones? What about cellars? Caves? Metro systems? Other areas with naturally poor mobile coverage?
I don't even buy the argument that you're draining their batteries quicker by forcing their phone to look harder for a signal
Makes me wonder why someone doesn't make a cheap Faraday shielding material which can be applied to walls in places where you don't want phones being used. {Some council houses I have stayed in seem already to have a layer of metal mesh behind the plaster, which is quite effective in blocking out anything except crappy MW radio signals; I guess they were built before Gyproc became commonplace}. The absence of a row of bars up the left hand side of the phone's display is less likely to be seen as an affront than a big sign saying NO MOBILE PHONES; and the kind of jerk that can ignore common good manners can easily ignore a sign, but they can't ignore the laws of physics.
What it really comes down to is a matter of how nosey you can be. We all are motivated to some degree by a sense of morbid curiosity -- a simple enough desire to know everything. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. If two people choose to have a conversation within earshot of me, I am not going to be made to feel the slightest bit guilty for listening in {however, I would draw the line at passing on information received without consent. Being privy to a secret doesn't give you the right to broadcast it}. If it's that important, they can always get up and go somewhere else.
If two people are having a face to face conversation in a language in which you are fluent, then you can hear both sides of the conversation. You can then make a fully-informed decision just how much attention to pay to it.
If one person is on a mobile phone, having one side of a conversation in a language in which you are fluent, it can drive you crazy trying to work out what is going on. You probably are devoting more attention to it than you can afford, and this also increases annoyance.
Two people talking face to face in a language in which you are not fluent, can also be extremely annoying.
So how do you take your empties to the recycling centre?
Case 2 - use some other method. Pencil and paper, even -- if doing it without a computer is the only way to do it without using Closed Source software, then so be it. Quote: "I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses" - Sterling Ball.
Case 3 - freaking well learn. Invest a little effort of your own now so others beside you can receive a dividend later.
Anyway, if you're that concerned about Open Source software, why don't you ditch Windows altogether and move to a real Open Source operating system, such as Linux or one of the BSD variants?
Linux never had "security by obscurity". The source code has been equally available to good guys and bad guys since day one.
But connecting to port 25 as a non-privileged user means the MTA will add headers to your message, and you need root privileges to get around that. Someone receives a message, lets the owner of the compromised box know, they check their logs, see what's happened and it gets fixed.
And that's even assuming that the owner of the box has their MTA misconfigured so as to relay mail from anywhere, which is no longer the default on popular distributions. With a really well-configured MTA, an outsider could only ever send to other users on that box.
NO NO NO NO NO. Telnet is very useful for some purposes (I use it regularly to check my e-mail). It's not the telnet client that's the problem, but the telnetd server listening on port 23.
So you can open a non-privileged port as a non-privileged user and listen on it -- but you can't use that to send spam, at least not anonymously, because the daemon listening on the high-numbered port is non-privileged -- which means it can't suppress certain headers generated by the MTA, nor prevent its activities being logged.
QT is available under the freaking GPL. That means anyone can use it, as long as they release their software under the GPL. I'm fine with that. IMHO, closed source software is just plain wrong -- there is simply no justification for it. Just because you wrote something, doesn't give you the right to stop me from seeing it. Them's the breaks. If you want to write closed source software, don't expect to get a free ride on the back of the Free Software community. We might sell you a limited right to use our work -- if and only if you're prepared to pay for it, and we reserve the right to invest that money in a GPL replacement for whatever you're writing.
The fact remains that there is a version of Qt available under the GPL -- and, therefore, in source code form. Anybody could quite legitimately port that to Windows, as long as it was released under the GPL {or not released at all, just used within an organisation}. Sure, it would take a bit of effort, but that's the only obstacle. Trolltech cannot do anything legally to prevent you from doing it.
I think it's absolutely pathetic the way all these Windows fanboys bitch about the way Trolltech hasn't released a GPL version of Qt for windows. Nothing is stopping them doing what we in the GNU/Linux community have already done for ourselves, and writing their own. But the truth is the only kind of software the Windows users really know or care about writing is worms and viruses -- and even then they only manage that with a lot of help from Microsoft. They're quite content to eat the shit they get fed, because they know it would be too much like hard graft to try changing it.
And would that distribution be Debbian or Deebian?
Er, yes; see self-reply, above. Looks as though Apple's original validation testing programme missed something crucial. This sort of thing sometimes happened at my old firm; we would test modules at various combinations of -40 degrees, +85 degrees, low voltage, high voltage, reverse polarity, humidity, water jet blast, dust blast, sensors open-circuit, sensors short-circuit, vibration non-operational and operational, and rough handling -- and these were units meant to be fixed in place, in vehicles or domestic appliances. But sometimes, there would be a logic trap that would go unnoticed -- operating two switches within too short a time of one another at low temperature could cause a non-volatile memory write error on one particular module. Things like that are almost impossible to track down in validation testing -- you just have to wait for the first field returns, and hope you can reproduce the fault.
Hand-held kit with detachable connectors would take a whole new round of testing; simulating repeated mating cycles, scratching, pocket fluff and so forth; and it's likely that even if you set up some sort of mechanical system for rapidly plugging and unplugging the connector -- say, with a pneumatic actuator -- you might line up the unit and the connector too well and never cause the problem.
Well, I've now seen the pictures of a stripped-down unit and it's not as simple as I first thought. Looks as though the jack is on a daughterboard, with a rigid connector between that and the motherboard, and it's this which is failing. An easy fix probably would be to use a small piece of flexible printed circuit as the electrical connection between the MB and DB, and back this up with some sort of semi-rigid mechanical coupling. This would not take much of a redesign. Another idea might be to make the connection using "zebra strips" {as used to connect LCDs to PCBs, basically stacks of alternate layers of conductive and non-conductive material; pull apart a cheap pocket calculator to see a real-life example}, but these might have too much resistance {LCDs have resistances in the megohm range, but headphone voice coils are typically only 32 ohms} and there is not much margin for voltage drop.
It sounds as though the jack socket is prone to dry joints where it solders to the board. Either that, or the contacts are losing their springiness after a few insertion cycles.
Dry joints can be repaired "while-U-wait" in any suitably-equipped workshop -- or at home, but it's fiddly and I'd be reluctant to open up such an expensive precision instrument {and anyway, 30-40 days is well within the 12 month statutory guarantee period}.
I'm guessing that the PCB would be double-side surface mounted, reflow soldering both sides. The long-term solution is going to require a PCB redesign and new solder paste masks -- either too much solder or too little solder can cause poor joints; and maybe they should spec a socket with a plastic lug on the underside passing through a hole in the board, which would give it a bit more stability. Using a traditional socket with through-hole pins would be even more secure, especially if dummy pins were added for mechanical support, but would require an additional operation to hand-solder it in place.
It's understandable that Apple is using delaying tactics, as it will probably require a long round of accelerated testing to determine exactly what the problem is and how best to fix it. {I used to work in the R&D department of a company which designed and made electronic control modules, by the way}.
It's a freaking instruction set, and it's published {otherwise nobody would be able to write any software for it}. Anyone should be allowed to implement it if they design their own hardware to do it {or can prove that there is only one way to do it}. Frankly, I fail to see what the big deal is in all this. These multinational corporations are just taking their paranoia too far, and it's time somebody put a stop to it.
Just navigate to a directory with some files in it, and wait awhile for the previews to render. Hover the pointer over one, and you will get a "tooltip" with a slightly larger image and some additional {context-dependent} information about the file. Movies are rendered as a single still frame {maybe the preview engine in KDE4 will actually play them!} Note that you can turn off this behaviour if you can think of better things to do with your CPU cycles, see your KDE settings and be prepared for a good hunt around as there are many things you can tweak.
Try adding a new user from the command line (# useradd -m -p! -gusers somebody then # passwd somebody and enter a password) to force KDE to start the new user configuration wizard.
I wrote a script to generate an index.html page with thumbnails from a directory full of jpeg files, and Konqueror even renders me a thumbnail of the thumbnails!
When did Microsoft include a full-featured browser by default? The only thing I remember them ever having included by default was Internet Explorer, which provides some limited web browsing functionality, but lacks several important features {tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, PNG/MNG support, user agent masquerading and site-by-site cookie/Java/JavaScript management spring to mind}. On the other hand, I.E. does include some useful remote administration tools, like default behaviour being to treat unrecognised file types as executable.