I can strongly second this opinion. I have used various editors (vi/vim,emacs/xemacs,kdevelop,eclipse etc.) in linux over the past 12 years, and Visual Slickedit is just "done right". One gets the feeling that this is an editor/IDE coded by people who "eat their own dog food" and added the necessary features to make one more productive. I've tried several releases of Eclipse too the past two years, and it looks very good too, but it is in my experience very slow/sluggish compared to SlickEdit. Another draw for me was that SlickEdit has a Windows version too, which works identically. The $300 (which the company paid admittedly) was money well spent in my opinion, and its has easily paid for itself many,many times over in terms of time saved by using it compared to any other IDE. It is VERY configurable, and integrates quite nicely with CVS/SVN and gdb. I use it solely for C++ development, but apparently its even stronger for java development. The C++ support is the best I've seen in any IDE.
heck, I had a ZX spectrum back in about 1984 or so, and there were quite a few before then even! To show how small it really was, it had only 48kb of RAM!
I like Dragon Go Server, it has a clean simple interface, and allows you to play against others of the same skill. You can start out as a high ku (not haiku) player, and as you beat people your ku will improve, and eventually you'll probably stabilise at a ku value somewhere (or you could go on to being a 9 dan player!) You can also play handicap (i.e. you start out with a bunch of moves) games against much higher rated players, its VERY instructiveto play against really good players this way.
Hmm, maybe it will help prove/disprove this: "Faster than the speed of light: the story of a scientific speculation" by Joao Magueijo ( amazon ).
I read this book a few months ago, it is absolutely fascinating (if you're into the "popular science" genre). Basically, IIRC, the guy reckons that c (speed of light in a vacuum) is not really constant (along with a whole host of other "constants"), but depends on the size of the universe or something to that effect. From our current perspective it changes so little as to be undetectable, but perhaps with this new gadget that will change?
Well, incredible.co.za looks really bad in Opera 7.54 which I'm using now, I'll have a look with the preview version. The flysaa.com "looks" fine in Opera, until you try the interactive parts, I tried it through your proximitron and it still breaks, but works fine in Firefox. If I enable javascript error dialog in Opera, the site keeps giving errors about variables not existing, and looking at the html source shows that the javascript variables are being used outside of the correct scope, there are many, many sites for which this happens unfortunately, it is by and large the most common error I see. People code their javascript, and test with IE or Firefox, and it works fine because both browsers are tolerant of this error (they automatically try to resolve the variable in a different scope). The ideal would obviously be to fix the sites, but webmasters tend to ignore you when you tell them their page is broken but it works fine in IE and mozilla. I'd personally LOVE to see opera coming out on top, because it still has a number of userfriendly/power features that make it really really nice.
Well, like I said, changing the user agent ident string doesn't do anything for me most of the time when I find a site that doesn't work correctly with Opera, so I'm not talking about sites that target Opera (and yes, I've tried to do this through web proxies like the one you mention which completely strip off the fact that its Opera). Don't get me wrong, I remain a huge Opera fan, and it is still my primary browser (has been since 1997), its just that I'm finding it more and more necessary to whip out Firefox for broken sites (e.g. try www.flysaa.com, one site I can remember using recently that doesn't work, or www.incredible.co.za which renders completely incorrectly). The handling of quirks doesn't appear to work well enough, especially for sites with javascript variable scope bugs...
I'm a long time Opera fan and have paid for all the upgrades along the years. There are still many things I love about Opera that I've yet to see in any other browser, *but* lately I'm seeing more and more pages that just don't work properly in Opera, whereas they (usually) work great in Firefox and Konqueror. Changing the user agent ident doesn't usually help in these cases. Opera claims to have the best adherence to various web standards of any browser, but I really feel they need to add a "compatibility" mode or something to make it work with broken sites (i.e. sites that work fine in all other browsers, but not in Opera, allegedly due to the sites themselves not being standards compliant). The error I see most often relates to javascript variable scope (Opera is stricter about scope than the other browsers, and there seem to be many sites accessing javascript variables out of scope, causing them to break with Opera), and my pleas to Opera developers have fallen on deaf ears. I hope they read/. and wake up a bit. Its all fine and dandy to say "those sites don't work because the sites suck", but in the end if the sites do work with other browsers, I'm slowly going to migrate away from Opera and instead try to convince the Firefox developers to add [insert-favourite-opera-feature-here] to Firefox.
How about the Sony Ericsson P800 (or better still P900)? It is a PDA and camera too, that way you get some more meaningfull reasons for using bluetooth than only syncing phone numbers...
Pretty soon, a little handheld gadget will be all of these:
- PDA
- Cell Phone
- Digital Camera
- Video player
- portable mass storage
- MP3 Player
- advanced graphing calculator...there're so many, what have I missed?
ntrsngl ngh, vwls dnt dd mch nfrmtn, nd prsn cn sly stll rd sntncs wtht vwls n thm. nfrtntl, vwls r mch sr t rcgns b cmptr sftwr thn cnsnts, whch s prblmtc fr spch rcgntn. (cnstns tnd t b vr xplsv nd shrt)
Interestingly enough, vowels don't add much information, and a person can easily still read sentences without vowels in them. Unfortunately, vowels are much easier to recognise by computer software than consonants, which is a problem for speech recognition. (consonants tend to be very explosive and short)
P.S. I wonder how much worldwide bandwidth the original post sentence caused. I received emails with this in about 5 times the past week from various people who'd forwarded it to friends etc. I'm sure other/.ers have had the same experience...
Our one and only windows box (XP) was set up for auto updates, and one morning when we got in to work it just sat there with a blue screen hinting at some sort of problem with the graphics driver. We were able to revive the box after some effort, but had to get a vendor driver, since the one XP updated itself with killed the box... Thats just completely unacceptable if you'd ever want to consider using windows boxes for any kind of server software you're shipping, since its a QA nightmare (what does the customer know, except that the server you supplied him with is now broken).
After playing this for most of the day, I drove to the store to get some food. After about 200m I discovered I was driving on the wrong side of the road! (We drive on the left in my country...)
Here I think you have some confusion about power sent to the speakers and power as it comes out of the wall. If your speaker system has an AC to DC converter like mine, you can read the wattage rating off that. The "100 watts x 4 channels" is refering to audio power at peak. I think the draw from the wall socket would be much lower. Maybe an audiophile can back me up/discount me on this.
IANAA (i am not an audiophile), but... So you're saying that more power comes out of the speakers than is drawn from the wall? I don't think so!! It is true though that many speaker manufacturers specify peak ratings (e.g. PMPO - peak mean power output) to make the speakers sound more powerful, generally the better (whatever that means) systems will specify the speaker power in RMS (root mean square) wattage (at a specific speaker impedence, often 8ohm), therefore a 20W RMS speaker is much more powerfull than a 20W PMPO speaker. As a (probably grossly inaccurate) thumbsuck rule, you can divide the PMPO rating by about 8 to get the RMS rating. If the specs on the speakers say 100W, it is more likely that it is a PMPO spec than an RMS one, unless the speakers and AC/DC converter are pretty large.
That said, these simple AC/DC converters are usually very inefficient themselves, and usually employ a linear voltage regulator to give an accurate DC output. The linear voltage regulator (very basically) essentially "wastes" the difference between input and output voltage times current as heat power, and the transformer itself is also usually fairly inefficient, so if you are blasting your speakers constantly at full volume, I'd guess you can expect the power drawn at the wall plug to be at least 1.5 times the power that is dissipated in the speaker coils. If the PMPO rating is 100x4 channels, we could maybe expect an approximate RMS output power of about 50W, so the input power at the wall socket could be about 75W (at a very rough guess).
Obviously, the voltage at the wall plug is much higher (and is AC), and the current drawn is lower, but the product (taking into account RMS power calculations) giving the power drawn from the wall plug must be greater than (or, if you had a perfectly efficient power supply for the speakers, equal to) the power dissipated in the speaker coils... (check out this googled pdf: power calculations)
So, to answer the original request, yes, the power drawn at the wall is less than the 400W the original guy seemed to think it was...
The signs probably have to be replaced every so often anyway due to weathering, vandalism or whatever, so you could do a gradual changeover?
The few times I've been to the USA, I've noticed that the car speedometers are marked off in km/h and m/h, although this may only apply to rental cars as a courtesy to the civilised world;-)
Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?' 'For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat.
I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. I think the one major problem is that many (most?) web "programmers" don't really have much of a clue, and actually just use some off-the-shelf software to create the site with. The off-the-shelf software in turn generates code which only works with IE.
I worked at a major investment bank (backend C++ stuff) where this was the case. The management figured that it was much cheaper to hire developers who could use Dreamweaver (or whatever), and they could code the sites more quickly that way. They figured that is was good enough to add smallprint to the web page saying that it only works with IE.
I really hate this argument, but that seems to be what is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
I can strongly second this opinion. I have used various editors (vi/vim,emacs/xemacs,kdevelop,eclipse etc.) in linux over the past 12 years, and Visual Slickedit is just "done right". One gets the feeling that this is an editor/IDE coded by people who "eat their own dog food" and added the necessary features to make one more productive. I've tried several releases of Eclipse too the past two years, and it looks very good too, but it is in my experience very slow/sluggish compared to SlickEdit. Another draw for me was that SlickEdit has a Windows version too, which works identically. The $300 (which the company paid admittedly) was money well spent in my opinion, and its has easily paid for itself many,many times over in terms of time saved by using it compared to any other IDE. It is VERY configurable, and integrates quite nicely with CVS/SVN and gdb. I use it solely for C++ development, but apparently its even stronger for java development. The C++ support is the best I've seen in any IDE.
heck, I had a ZX spectrum back in about 1984 or so, and there were quite a few before then even! To show how small it really was, it had only 48kb of RAM!
I like Dragon Go Server, it has a clean simple interface, and allows you to play against others of the same skill. You can start out as a high ku (not haiku) player, and as you beat people your ku will improve, and eventually you'll probably stabilise at a ku value somewhere (or you could go on to being a 9 dan player!) You can also play handicap (i.e. you start out with a bunch of moves) games against much higher rated players, its VERY instructiveto play against really good players this way.
Hmm, maybe it will help prove/disprove this:
"Faster than the speed of light: the story of a scientific speculation" by Joao Magueijo ( amazon ).
I read this book a few months ago, it is absolutely fascinating (if you're into the "popular science" genre). Basically, IIRC, the guy reckons that c (speed of light in a vacuum) is not really constant (along with a whole host of other "constants"), but depends on the size of the universe or something to that effect. From our current perspective it changes so little as to be undetectable, but perhaps with this new gadget that will change?
Well, getting offtopic now, but I downloaded 7.60 TP2 (linux), and the page still doesn't look any better.
Well, incredible.co.za looks really bad in Opera 7.54 which I'm using now, I'll have a look with the preview version. The flysaa.com "looks" fine in Opera, until you try the interactive parts, I tried it through your proximitron and it still breaks, but works fine in Firefox. If I enable javascript error dialog in Opera, the site keeps giving errors about variables not existing, and looking at the html source shows that the javascript variables are being used outside of the correct scope, there are many, many sites for which this happens unfortunately, it is by and large the most common error I see. People code their javascript, and test with IE or Firefox, and it works fine because both browsers are tolerant of this error (they automatically try to resolve the variable in a different scope). The ideal would obviously be to fix the sites, but webmasters tend to ignore you when you tell them their page is broken but it works fine in IE and mozilla.
I'd personally LOVE to see opera coming out on top, because it still has a number of userfriendly/power features that make it really really nice.
Well, like I said, changing the user agent ident string doesn't do anything for me most of the time when I find a site that doesn't work correctly with Opera, so I'm not talking about sites that target Opera (and yes, I've tried to do this through web proxies like the one you mention which completely strip off the fact that its Opera). Don't get me wrong, I remain a huge Opera fan, and it is still my primary browser (has been since 1997), its just that I'm finding it more and more necessary to whip out Firefox for broken sites (e.g. try www.flysaa.com, one site I can remember using recently that doesn't work, or www.incredible.co.za which renders completely incorrectly). The handling of quirks doesn't appear to work well enough, especially for sites with javascript variable scope bugs...
I'm a long time Opera fan and have paid for all the upgrades along the years. There are still many things I love about Opera that I've yet to see in any other browser, *but* lately I'm seeing more and more pages that just don't work properly in Opera, whereas they (usually) work great in Firefox and Konqueror. Changing the user agent ident doesn't usually help in these cases. Opera claims to have the best adherence to various web standards of any browser, but I really feel they need to add a "compatibility" mode or something to make it work with broken sites (i.e. sites that work fine in all other browsers, but not in Opera, allegedly due to the sites themselves not being standards compliant). The error I see most often relates to javascript variable scope (Opera is stricter about scope than the other browsers, and there seem to be many sites accessing javascript variables out of scope, causing them to break with Opera), and my pleas to Opera developers have fallen on deaf ears. I hope they read /. and wake up a bit. Its all fine and dandy to say "those sites don't work because the sites suck", but in the end if the sites do work with other browsers, I'm slowly going to migrate away from Opera and instead try to convince the Firefox developers to add [insert-favourite-opera-feature-here] to Firefox.
All of you should feel special: In South Africa it costs around $140/month for 512/256, with a 3 gigabyte monthly download cap!
I'm no fan of motorbikes, but this looks like it bypasses some of the problems wrt weather/safety etc.
BMW C1
Are there some games which break all rules of logic and still remain addictive?
Grand Theft Auto III
How about the Sony Ericsson P800 (or better still P900)? It is a PDA and camera too, that way you get some more meaningfull reasons for using bluetooth than only syncing phone numbers...
Pretty soon, a little handheld gadget will be all of these: - PDA - Cell Phone - Digital Camera - Video player - portable mass storage - MP3 Player - advanced graphing calculator ...there're so many, what have I missed?
How about using scp with the blowfish cipher?
...
scp -c blowfish
It has very low overhead, so shouldn't be too much slower than using ftp...
Also recently got a digital camera with manual controls (Olympus C-740), I found this site to have some useful "basic" info: www.shortcourses.com
P.S. I wonder how much worldwide bandwidth the original post sentence caused. I received emails with this in about 5 times the past week from various people who'd forwarded it to friends etc. I'm sure other /.ers have had the same experience...
Cool, that means the amount of brain cells I lose every time I quaff a beer won't affect my navigation skills!
Our one and only windows box (XP) was set up for auto updates, and one morning when we got in to work it just sat there with a blue screen hinting at some sort of problem with the graphics driver. We were able to revive the box after some effort, but had to get a vendor driver, since the one XP updated itself with killed the box... Thats just completely unacceptable if you'd ever want to consider using windows boxes for any kind of server software you're shipping, since its a QA nightmare (what does the customer know, except that the server you supplied him with is now broken).
After playing this for most of the day, I drove to the store to get some food. After about 200m I discovered I was driving on the wrong side of the road! (We drive on the left in my country...)
;-)
Amused me, if nobody else
Here I think you have some confusion about power sent to the speakers and power as it comes out of the wall. If your speaker system has an AC to DC converter like mine, you can read the wattage rating off that. The "100 watts x 4 channels" is refering to audio power at peak. I think the draw from the wall socket would be much lower. Maybe an audiophile can back me up/discount me on this.
IANAA (i am not an audiophile), but...
So you're saying that more power comes out of the speakers than is drawn from the wall? I don't think so!! It is true though that many speaker manufacturers specify peak ratings (e.g. PMPO - peak mean power output) to make the speakers sound more powerful, generally the better (whatever that means) systems will specify the speaker power in RMS (root mean square) wattage (at a specific speaker impedence, often 8ohm), therefore a 20W RMS speaker is much more powerfull than a 20W PMPO speaker. As a (probably grossly inaccurate) thumbsuck rule, you can divide the PMPO rating by about 8 to get the RMS rating. If the specs on the speakers say 100W, it is more likely that it is a PMPO spec than an RMS one, unless the speakers and AC/DC converter are pretty large.
That said, these simple AC/DC converters are usually very inefficient themselves, and usually employ a linear voltage regulator to give an accurate DC output. The linear voltage regulator (very basically) essentially "wastes" the difference between input and output voltage times current as heat power, and the transformer itself is also usually fairly inefficient, so if you are blasting your speakers constantly at full volume, I'd guess you can expect the power drawn at the wall plug to be at least 1.5 times the power that is dissipated in the speaker coils. If the PMPO rating is 100x4 channels, we could maybe expect an approximate RMS output power of about 50W, so the input power at the wall socket could be about 75W (at a very rough guess).
Obviously, the voltage at the wall plug is much higher (and is AC), and the current drawn is lower, but the product (taking into account RMS power calculations) giving the power drawn from the wall plug must be greater than (or, if you had a perfectly efficient power supply for the speakers, equal to) the power dissipated in the speaker coils... (check out this googled pdf: power calculations)
So, to answer the original request, yes, the power drawn at the wall is less than the 400W the original guy seemed to think it was...
I can already see them shooting the space debris into tinier and tinier smithereens ;-)
Maybe every now and then a UFO will arrive to take pot shots at the Space Debris Cleaning System (tm)
The signs probably have to be replaced every so often anyway due to weathering, vandalism or whatever, so you could do a gradual changeover?
;-)
The few times I've been to the USA, I've noticed that the car speedometers are marked off in km/h and m/h, although this may only apply to rental cars as a courtesy to the civilised world
Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?' 'For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat.
...
Someone has played too much Black&White
Hmmm, this explains why my house keeps moving around then...
Write standards compliant stuff, it works with IE
I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. I think the one major problem is that many (most?) web "programmers" don't really have much of a clue, and actually just use some off-the-shelf software to create the site with. The off-the-shelf software in turn generates code which only works with IE.
I worked at a major investment bank (backend C++ stuff) where this was the case. The management figured that it was much cheaper to hire developers who could use Dreamweaver (or whatever), and they could code the sites more quickly that way. They figured that is was good enough to add smallprint to the web page saying that it only works with IE.
I really hate this argument, but that seems to be what is happening.