The source content for the first laboratory test of the radio was "Layla," by Derek and the Dominos, followed soon after by "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.
A few seconds after which, a SWAT team stormed the lab demanding royalty payments.....
Of course, go too far in the other way, drive enough people into proverty, and the government will discover that Janis Joplin was right...freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
I think you'll find it was actually Kris Kristofferson who wrote that.
From my own personal history, when I had a chemistry set as a child, it came with glass tubing and an alcohol burner. You used it to heat the tubing and bend it into shapes to connect beakers and what have you together... Well, not being old enough to know better, and not patient enough to wait for the tubing to cool down on its own after bending it, I decided it might be best to cool it off in some water.
There's another lesson most people learn quite quickly when mucking about with glass:
There was something like this for the BBC computer, about 20 years ago. You were given a "sample" of a randomly-chosen chemical (an acid, alkali or salt) and had to perform various "tests" on it (litmus paper, heat it, stick it in a flame, add acid and so forth) and were given the results of the tests ("You heat the sample. It smells of ammonia." -- meaning we must be dealing with an ammonium salt; now we have to find out what the negative ion is).
It was not a bad idea per se, but it was let down by a "scoring system" which was essentially random (rewarding lucky guesses). Also, it was nothing like the real thing.
Are there really people in the world THAT stupid? I've met smarter rocks than that.
Yes, there are. Think of someone with an IQ of 100 (which is by definition the median). Then remember that half the population are even stupider than that person.
I hear this argument all the time: that guns in private hands are necessary in case a Bad and Evil Government ever take power. And all the people who lost their lives needlessly are just collateral damage and the death toll would be so much worse if a Bad Government got in.
I'm sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic and I can only wonder, just how bad does your government have to get before you actually use those guns for what you say you wanted them for?
You do know what causes the "warm fuzzy feeling" you get from helping an old lady across the road, don't you?
Endorphins. The body's natural painkilling chemicals, and more. The brain can also trigger a release of endorphins when not in pain, as a reward for certain behaviours. Opiate drugs such as morphine and heroin also bind to the endorphin receptors.
A standard "warm fuzzy" is approximately equivalent to one small breath of brown.
I bet your average prohibitionist doesn't know this.
All you need is a local HTTP proxy server set to block known advertising servers, and a local DNS server set to point the target URLs of tracking scripts somewhere benign. If your proxy server strips out __utm* cookies, so much the better.
Actually, screw local -- if you were an ISP with your own servers and the wherewithal to (re)sell ADSL, you could offer something like this as a paid-for service; and even give out CDs with a customised Firefox, preconfigured to use your proxy and DNS. I know people would gladly pay a premium for advert-free surfing -- after all, Sky Plus users pay for (what is effectively) advert-free television.
Yes -- aluminium is made from bauxite by electrolysis of the molten ore. This consumes riduculous amounts of electricity. Extracting 50kg. of aluminium from ore -- that's enough for about 3000 * 330ml coke cans -- uses as much energy as melting down a whole tonne of used aluminium.
One of the cool ways of recycling steel is in an electric arc furnace. You jump an arc from a carbon electrode to the pile of scrap steel, and of course it becomes a puddle. But there's more! Shine the light through a prism, and you can see by its spectrum exactly what impurities are present in your feedstock.
It's not the naturalistic explanation per se that offends, but the fact that one could be marked down for offering an alternative, supernatural explanation.
Some chrimbo fundie nutters actually believe that the world really was created in six days -- that's 144 hours, as we know an hour today -- about 10000 years ago, as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible (though they never say whether they prefer the version in chapter 1, or the mutually-incompatible version chapter 2). I realise that's an absolutely mind-boggling thought, but some people really are that fucking stupid.
It depends entirely on whether or not you can program the graphics chip -- which I haven't seen -- to sync as low as 15kHz and display 625 lines interlaced. You also need to generate a composite sync signal, which may require some additional hardware. Some graphics cards already put out a composite sync on the line sync pin: look at it with an oscilloscope, or feed it into an audio amplifier and listen for a low pitched sound like power hum. Alternatively, if you can get both the line and field syncs negative-going, all you need do is join them together.
On the TV end, your composite sync (however you managed to generate it) goes into pin 20; pin 17 is sync return. Pin 15 is red signal, 13 is red return, 11 is green signal, 9 is green return, 7 is blue signal and 5 is blue return. Pin 6 is LH audio, 2 is RH audio and 4 is audio return. You will also need to pull pins 8 and 16 "high" in order to make the TV display from the RGB input. If the picture looks oversaturated, then you will need to add a resistance in series with each of the colour signals: a TV is expecting a peak of 1V into 75 ohms, a monitor is expecting 5V peak into an open circuit. 300 ohms would do the business, which you can make with 150 + 150 in series.
Once you have the hardware sorted, you then need to run xvidtune. Remember that LCD monitors are not as likely as cheap chinese CRT monitors to be damaged by dodgy settings, and TVs are next to bombproof (the sync inputs are tightly filtred; a TV set has to be able to handle static when not tuned to any station). If you can get one of those spiffy LCD digital TV sets with a VGA input, even just for trying it out, so much the better.
The chrimbo-fundie bashing was tongue-in-cheek (for now; if things carry on the way they are going, I can see a day dawning when marking a candidate down for writing "God did it" will be treated as religious discrimination.)
The remark about privatised matriculation boards, on the other hand, was deadly serious. GCSEs and A-levels have been stripped of any meaning in the race to earn money for shareholders.
If the US educational system works anything like the UK one (where examinations are now set by private companies answerable to shareholders, not by matriculation boards answerable to universities as in my day) then examinations will have been getting easier over the years anyway to keep the pass rates high (since if any examining authority is perceived to have a low pass rate, then they will lose customers as schools switch to a different examining authority in order to keep their pass rates high).
Plus, there are a lot of christians in the USA, and a question like "Why is water denser than steam?" can legitimately be answered with "Because God says so" (insisting for the candidate to mention something like how the molecules in a liquid attract one another and so tend to be packed closely together whereas the molecules in a gas behave independently of one another and so tend to move apart might offend religious people).
These factors combined mean that while you might have plenty of science graduates, their qualifications are actually less valuable. This is an unsustainable situation, and something will break sometime soon.
Is this going to make the OLPC unsuitable for vegans?
Come to think of it, seeing as plastic is made from oil, which was made from animals that died a long time ago, it's already not suitable for vegetarians.
Something people constantly misunderstand..... is that they assume that all problems can be broken apart into manageable portions that can be split
Exactly! Having sex 39 times does not mean you will be able to get a baby in one week. Some operations are by nature sequential -- and while there is scope for some parallelisation, doing so in a highly-distributed fashion can end up increasing latency, because you end up spending more time splitting the data up and putting the results back together than actually doing any maths.
A vector processor basically has several separate logic matrices that work in parallel, performing the same operation on different (sets of) operands simultaneously. When you want to solve simultaneous equations in many variables, some of which are themselves multi-dimensional vectors, that can be extremely useful.
[T]here's always a chorus of people who don't think that multiple virtual desktops are normal (or hell, use windows/mac where it's not possible AFAIK) and wish that there was a way to do what I mentioned earlier. Instead of the developers trying to force the users into new paradigms, they could add a configuration option and knock off one of the largest (or at least most vocal) complaints about the program.
Because that way lies bloat. Once you start mucking about with things outside your bailiwick, who knows where it will end? GIMP is a graphics editor, not a window manager; and it sticks to what it knows, which is editing graphics. If you want your windows managed differently, use a different window manager.
Just imagine what it would be like if a text editor re-implemented whole chunks of the OS and GUI layers for itself -- for instance, sanity-checking its own filenames instead of using a system call (thus running afoul of future changes in allowable filename syntax), or implementing its own version of the file requester with the icons just ever-so-slightly different!
Well, you see, actually, it's not that weird. It's quite sensible -- if you're coming from the idea that multiple virtual desktops are normal and the way everybody does things.
I think the real problem is Microsoft Windows and early Macs only having one virtual desktop, and therefore convincing people that one desktop is all there is. X has supported multiple virtual desktops since..... well, I can't remember when it didn't, only that they used to be called "workspaces". Even the Amiga had multiple screens (after a fashion).
As a long-term X user, and someone already used to multiple workspaces, this just seemed the normal way of doing it. Both the desktop environments I use -- KDE and WindowMaker -- let you switch virtual desktops with a mouse click (I just learned never to let anything get in the way of the clip).
What you could do, if you need speedy switching, is get a keyboard with extra "multimedia" keys -- they generate xkb events -- and assign something like "rewind" and "fast forward" to switch desktops. But you've already got used to things the way they are now.
If you do a whois on a domain name, then somebody, somewhere gets to see that you might be interested in buying it. It was really only a matter of time before someone started doing this.
Move all the GIMP windows to one virtual desktop. Right-click on the taskbar; choose configure panel, taskbar, and set "group similar tasks" to "always". This will group all GIMP windows together under a single taskbar entry which, when clicked, allows you to focus any one of them. If you need to, right-click on the group of mini-desktop icons; select "configure desktops" and increase the number of desktops.
No. If you install from source, the mail executable will go into/usr/local/bin; whereas if you install from a precompiled package it will go into/usr/bin. So there is no conflict.
All you have to do is sudo aptitude build-essential to make sure you have a complete build environment, then do the usual tar xvzf..../configure... make... sudo make install business. If it complains that you need some package foo that you know for sure you do have, what it probably really means is you need foo-dev. When you get it to make properly, then do sudo make install. Now just go into your desktop menu editor, and create an application link to/usr/local/bin/gimp. And there you have it..... gimp 2.2 and 2.4 coexisting in harmony.
Just increase your number of virtual desktops, and keep one just for GIMP. Works for me.
BTW, GIMP 2.4 is in Debian Sid already. I "apt-got" it this morning. However, the documentation is still only 2.2 -- expect some package maintainer is still building that.
You can install 32-bit libraries on a 64-bit Linux -- that's how Red Hat and SUSE do it. Debian (and, I believe but this is unconfirmed, Gentoo) install only 64-bit libraries by default.
BUT, with a 64-bit processor, once you have enabled 64-bit mode, there are a few 32-bit machine instructions that don't work anymore. GCC -- at least, versions since the launch of 64-bit processors -- is aware of this and avoids these instructions altogether, so 32-bit libraries built with a modern version of GCC are "safe" on a 64-bit processor.
However, not everything was built with GCC..... Some Windows applications and libraries do use these "dead" instructions and will fail on a 64-bit processor in 64-bit mode. Real Windows (at least, up to XP) only ever runs in 32-bit mode even on a 64-bit processor, so the problem won't arise. Now there's 64-bit Vista, these programs will have to be rewritten; but Wine isn't yet TTBOMK emulating 64-bit Vista API calls.
You'd think they'd at least put a prefs switch in to let you choose.
Allowing the user to choose between two different paradigms would be distinctly un-Mac-like behaviour, and potentially would confuse the hell out of users who might be expecting someone else's Mac that they may be using for whatever reason to behave the way they were used to. None of the many preferences settings on a Mac actually alter anything of any real consequence, and this is for a reason. If you can alter a heap of ultimately-really-pointless shit such as the DVD drive's eject speed or the colour of the power-on LED, you might not notice how constrained you really are.
If you hadn't posted that, I would have had to post about my idea for representing each pixel as a 256-bit floating point number representing the wavelength of light it emitted, and watching the CMYK proponents squirm and splutter when told their preferred colour space was unable to handle infra-red and ultra-violet. Hell, if you kept enough bits for the exponent, there's no reason why it couldn't reach comfortably into MW radio!
Beside which, at the end of the day it's just an AND-OR transform. RGB is about ORing colours, CMYK is about ANDing colours (cyan reflects blue OR green, magenta reflects red OR blue, yellow reflects red OR green and black doesn't reflect anything; cyan and yellow mixed together reflect [blue OR green] AND [red OR green] = green.) CMYK support isn't the real issue, any more than religion is the real issue in Northern Ireland -- if the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England re-merged, the Paddies would still be fighting over something.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from that, you're spot on.
Hot glass and cold glass look exactly the same.
There was something like this for the BBC computer, about 20 years ago. You were given a "sample" of a randomly-chosen chemical (an acid, alkali or salt) and had to perform various "tests" on it (litmus paper, heat it, stick it in a flame, add acid and so forth) and were given the results of the tests ("You heat the sample. It smells of ammonia." -- meaning we must be dealing with an ammonium salt; now we have to find out what the negative ion is).
It was not a bad idea per se, but it was let down by a "scoring system" which was essentially random (rewarding lucky guesses). Also, it was nothing like the real thing.
I hear this argument all the time: that guns in private hands are necessary in case a Bad and Evil Government ever take power. And all the people who lost their lives needlessly are just collateral damage and the death toll would be so much worse if a Bad Government got in.
I'm sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic and I can only wonder, just how bad does your government have to get before you actually use those guns for what you say you wanted them for?
Endorphins. The body's natural painkilling chemicals, and more. The brain can also trigger a release of endorphins when not in pain, as a reward for certain behaviours. Opiate drugs such as morphine and heroin also bind to the endorphin receptors.
A standard "warm fuzzy" is approximately equivalent to one small breath of brown.
I bet your average prohibitionist doesn't know this.
All you need is a local HTTP proxy server set to block known advertising servers, and a local DNS server set to point the target URLs of tracking scripts somewhere benign. If your proxy server strips out __utm* cookies, so much the better.
Actually, screw local -- if you were an ISP with your own servers and the wherewithal to (re)sell ADSL, you could offer something like this as a paid-for service; and even give out CDs with a customised Firefox, preconfigured to use your proxy and DNS. I know people would gladly pay a premium for advert-free surfing -- after all, Sky Plus users pay for (what is effectively) advert-free television.
Yes -- aluminium is made from bauxite by electrolysis of the molten ore. This consumes riduculous amounts of electricity. Extracting 50kg. of aluminium from ore -- that's enough for about 3000 * 330ml coke cans -- uses as much energy as melting down a whole tonne of used aluminium.
One of the cool ways of recycling steel is in an electric arc furnace. You jump an arc from a carbon electrode to the pile of scrap steel, and of course it becomes a puddle. But there's more! Shine the light through a prism, and you can see by its spectrum exactly what impurities are present in your feedstock.
It's not the naturalistic explanation per se that offends, but the fact that one could be marked down for offering an alternative, supernatural explanation.
Some chrimbo fundie nutters actually believe that the world really was created in six days -- that's 144 hours, as we know an hour today -- about 10000 years ago, as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible (though they never say whether they prefer the version in chapter 1, or the mutually-incompatible version chapter 2). I realise that's an absolutely mind-boggling thought, but some people really are that fucking stupid.
It depends entirely on whether or not you can program the graphics chip -- which I haven't seen -- to sync as low as 15kHz and display 625 lines interlaced. You also need to generate a composite sync signal, which may require some additional hardware. Some graphics cards already put out a composite sync on the line sync pin: look at it with an oscilloscope, or feed it into an audio amplifier and listen for a low pitched sound like power hum. Alternatively, if you can get both the line and field syncs negative-going, all you need do is join them together.
On the TV end, your composite sync (however you managed to generate it) goes into pin 20; pin 17 is sync return. Pin 15 is red signal, 13 is red return, 11 is green signal, 9 is green return, 7 is blue signal and 5 is blue return. Pin 6 is LH audio, 2 is RH audio and 4 is audio return. You will also need to pull pins 8 and 16 "high" in order to make the TV display from the RGB input. If the picture looks oversaturated, then you will need to add a resistance in series with each of the colour signals: a TV is expecting a peak of 1V into 75 ohms, a monitor is expecting 5V peak into an open circuit. 300 ohms would do the business, which you can make with 150 + 150 in series.
Once you have the hardware sorted, you then need to run xvidtune. Remember that LCD monitors are not as likely as cheap chinese CRT monitors to be damaged by dodgy settings, and TVs are next to bombproof (the sync inputs are tightly filtred; a TV set has to be able to handle static when not tuned to any station). If you can get one of those spiffy LCD digital TV sets with a VGA input, even just for trying it out, so much the better.
Doesn't the value of the freebies awarded to the reviewer depend directly upon the number of stars awarded by the reviewer?
The chrimbo-fundie bashing was tongue-in-cheek (for now; if things carry on the way they are going, I can see a day dawning when marking a candidate down for writing "God did it" will be treated as religious discrimination.)
The remark about privatised matriculation boards, on the other hand, was deadly serious. GCSEs and A-levels have been stripped of any meaning in the race to earn money for shareholders.
If the US educational system works anything like the UK one (where examinations are now set by private companies answerable to shareholders, not by matriculation boards answerable to universities as in my day) then examinations will have been getting easier over the years anyway to keep the pass rates high (since if any examining authority is perceived to have a low pass rate, then they will lose customers as schools switch to a different examining authority in order to keep their pass rates high).
Plus, there are a lot of christians in the USA, and a question like "Why is water denser than steam?" can legitimately be answered with "Because God says so" (insisting for the candidate to mention something like how the molecules in a liquid attract one another and so tend to be packed closely together whereas the molecules in a gas behave independently of one another and so tend to move apart might offend religious people).
These factors combined mean that while you might have plenty of science graduates, their qualifications are actually less valuable. This is an unsustainable situation, and something will break sometime soon.
Is this going to make the OLPC unsuitable for vegans?
Come to think of it, seeing as plastic is made from oil, which was made from animals that died a long time ago, it's already not suitable for vegetarians.
A vector processor basically has several separate logic matrices that work in parallel, performing the same operation on different (sets of) operands simultaneously. When you want to solve simultaneous equations in many variables, some of which are themselves multi-dimensional vectors, that can be extremely useful.
Just imagine what it would be like if a text editor re-implemented whole chunks of the OS and GUI layers for itself -- for instance, sanity-checking its own filenames instead of using a system call (thus running afoul of future changes in allowable filename syntax), or implementing its own version of the file requester with the icons just ever-so-slightly different!
I think the real problem is Microsoft Windows and early Macs only having one virtual desktop, and therefore convincing people that one desktop is all there is. X has supported multiple virtual desktops since
As a long-term X user, and someone already used to multiple workspaces, this just seemed the normal way of doing it. Both the desktop environments I use -- KDE and WindowMaker -- let you switch virtual desktops with a mouse click (I just learned never to let anything get in the way of the clip).
What you could do, if you need speedy switching, is get a keyboard with extra "multimedia" keys -- they generate xkb events -- and assign something like "rewind" and "fast forward" to switch desktops. But you've already got used to things the way they are now.
If you do a whois on a domain name, then somebody, somewhere gets to see that you might be interested in buying it. It was really only a matter of time before someone started doing this.
Move all the GIMP windows to one virtual desktop. Right-click on the taskbar; choose configure panel, taskbar, and set "group similar tasks" to "always". This will group all GIMP windows together under a single taskbar entry which, when clicked, allows you to focus any one of them. If you need to, right-click on the group of mini-desktop icons; select "configure desktops" and increase the number of desktops.
No. If you install from source, the mail executable will go into /usr/local/bin; whereas if you install from a precompiled package it will go into /usr/bin. So there is no conflict.
... ./configure ... make ... sudo make install business. If it complains that you need some package foo that you know for sure you do have, what it probably really means is you need foo-dev. When you get it to make properly, then do sudo make install. Now just go into your desktop menu editor, and create an application link to /usr/local/bin/gimp. And there you have it ..... gimp 2.2 and 2.4 coexisting in harmony.
All you have to do is sudo aptitude build-essential to make sure you have a complete build environment, then do the usual tar xvzf
Just increase your number of virtual desktops, and keep one just for GIMP. Works for me.
BTW, GIMP 2.4 is in Debian Sid already. I "apt-got" it this morning. However, the documentation is still only 2.2 -- expect some package maintainer is still building that.
You can install 32-bit libraries on a 64-bit Linux -- that's how Red Hat and SUSE do it. Debian (and, I believe but this is unconfirmed, Gentoo) install only 64-bit libraries by default.
..... Some Windows applications and libraries do use these "dead" instructions and will fail on a 64-bit processor in 64-bit mode. Real Windows (at least, up to XP) only ever runs in 32-bit mode even on a 64-bit processor, so the problem won't arise. Now there's 64-bit Vista, these programs will have to be rewritten; but Wine isn't yet TTBOMK emulating 64-bit Vista API calls.
BUT, with a 64-bit processor, once you have enabled 64-bit mode, there are a few 32-bit machine instructions that don't work anymore. GCC -- at least, versions since the launch of 64-bit processors -- is aware of this and avoids these instructions altogether, so 32-bit libraries built with a modern version of GCC are "safe" on a 64-bit processor.
However, not everything was built with GCC
You just made my day.
If you hadn't posted that, I would have had to post about my idea for representing each pixel as a 256-bit floating point number representing the wavelength of light it emitted, and watching the CMYK proponents squirm and splutter when told their preferred colour space was unable to handle infra-red and ultra-violet. Hell, if you kept enough bits for the exponent, there's no reason why it couldn't reach comfortably into MW radio!
Beside which, at the end of the day it's just an AND-OR transform. RGB is about ORing colours, CMYK is about ANDing colours (cyan reflects blue OR green, magenta reflects red OR blue, yellow reflects red OR green and black doesn't reflect anything; cyan and yellow mixed together reflect [blue OR green] AND [red OR green] = green.) CMYK support isn't the real issue, any more than religion is the real issue in Northern Ireland -- if the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England re-merged, the Paddies would still be fighting over something.