NeoOffice is an independently developed version of OpenOffice.org 2.1 which runs on Mac OS X natively and without the need for X11. I've been using it for years.
It was useable until it started opening Safari on launch and close- loading a page nagging me to give them money.
The unprofessionalism of that is absolutely staggering. The only other application I know of that does this is Acquisition- probably the most nag-laden software ever written.
I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AT GOOGLE FOR WHAT TO DO AND WHAT NOT TO DO AND I FOLLOWED THE RULES
If you simply follow the rules that google lays out, you won't get sucked into google hell. If you try and game the system by paying for consultants to "juice" your site, you gambled and lost.
While I see you mean with trying to "game" the system, these guys are a bit of a straw-man. Why? Sure, they tried to "game" the system. But there are many of us who don't, and have been arbitrarily hurt. Possibly because we did nothing, instead of following Google's "rules". Pardon my french, but when the fuck did Google get to set how sites are made? Answer: when they became the Microsoft of the internet.
I help run a site for car enthusiasts. We've been around since the mid 1990's. Remained fairly strictly non-commercial. We have mailing list archives stretching back that far, that are a treasure-trove of useful information. We use Google's branded search. And one day, we noticed that the branded search wasn't returning many results. We tried exactly the same search on the main google page using "site:____.com". We got ten times the results. Huh?
Then one day, people started to complain that they couldn't find recent posts. We looked in the logs; Google was crawling the site, but we did a dozen searches for specific posts and couldn't find any of them past a certain date. Google simply binned us.
I filled out the "contact us" form, and didn't get anything more than a form reply telling me to take a long walk off a short pier and stop complaining about how we didn't like our search positioning. We didn't give a shit about where we appeared in searches. We just wanted to get current content indexed, period.
Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks.
That should read "CAN have much lower latency." I've seen USB flash drives tested that had +100ms seek times, and it's not always the 5-6MB/sec class drives; some of the 10-20MB/sec flash drives were this bad. The fastest USB keys are around half a ms or so, which is perhaps a 8x improvement over the fastest magnetic drives.
Flash memory can be glacially slow, have limited number of write cycles and poor reliability, and controllers can be slow as well- and as this stuff gets more into the mainstream, I guarantee some companies will use cheap components to boost profit margins or undercut competitors. We're already seen it in the USB flash drive market; I've witnessed at least a couple of these things get corrupted or stop working after daily use in an office environment, and they were all pretty much no-name brands or freebies.
This competition isn't entirely a bad thing, as the cheap junk will put some pressure on the "good guys" pricing-wise, but the tradeoff is that we'll have to look before we leap with the credit card.
I suppose a university environment is a bit different from a creative environment (at least outside the art/music/etc departments).
Having worked for an advertising company, yes. Sometimes, if stuff doesn't go out the door on time - millions of dollars are at stake. Advertising industries are highly competitive, even against each other (the vast majority of advertising firms are owned by less than a half-dozen holding companies...and yes, the same 'children' compete against each other.) So whether it is a proposal, presentation to the client, or artwork- if it doesn't leave with the CCO (Chief Creative Officer) on time for his flight, or get downstairs to the courier to arrive at the client or their printing house...shit hits the fan.
The closest comparison is probably "grant time" in the academic world.
The art department where I worked were the neediest; they got the fastest computers (and got 'em more often) and they were the only department with gigabit ethernet. When shit broke you had to got to drop everything and get it fixed ASAP. They also tended to have more problems because of more complexity...tons of fonts(and a font manager like Suitcase), old versions of Quark that required Classic...inDesign, Adobe Distiller printer drivers, half a dozen different kinds of printers. Nowhere nearly as complex an software matrix as the copywriters and paper pushers who just need email, Word, Safari, and to be able to print to the laserprinter in the hallway.
I'm not sure when you last looked, but you are not always guaranteed your provider will not oversubscribe you for a T1. In fact, this is regular practice that your ISP does oversubscribe.
The difference is that your T1 has mandated provisions for downtime and speeds. If your T1 line goes down, the phone company has some serious obligations to get it going again.
If your cablemodem or DSL line has line quality problems, goes down for two days, or doesn't deliver stated capacity- the cable company shrugs and says "so?" None of that happens with a tarrifed line, because if it does, you have legal resource- both through government regulations and contractual obligations.
The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR.
That isn't even remotely what the article said. It said: "As you can see the top photo, taken in medium light conditions, is in focus and the colours are very vibrant, if not a little over saturated." and, "This difference in colour is likely due to the N95 processing the shot after it was taken."
Nowhere do they describe if the images actually represented a faithful reproduction of the colors of the objects, and they did not test under multiple lighting conditions, such as outdoors, under incandescent and fluorescent lights, etc. They also did not conduct any test which would demonstrate the camera's dynamic range, and they did not show us any 1:1 crop areas.
There's one simple site I point any of small but persistent who claim things like "film is superior to digital" (it hasn't been for at least a few years, in terms of resolution, signal to noise ratio, and dynamic range.) Clarkvision. The guy lays it all out in cold, hard science with good illustrative graphs and examples.
Does Pixel Size Matter? lays a real cold hard blow to all the idiots that claim dSLRs are overpriced or unjustified. They VASTLY outperform "point and shoot" cameras because the sensors are huge. Current dSLRs already approach the theoretical maximum sensitivity, SNR, etc. The bigger the sensor well, the more photons it collects- and the less electronic amplification is necessary. dSLRs have sensors the size of your phone's screen. Your phone's camera has a sensor around the size of an eraser. Not only does that cause a lot of noise problems, but it causes problems for aliasing filters (which spread light across the red, blue, and green sensor wells.) It's very easy to make a very good aliasing filter on a scale required for the very large pixels in a dSLR. Sensor wells in the point and shoots are so tiny that the filters really, really blur the image.
Practically, this means that if you and I stand next to each other and take a photo towards sunset, and then take both to a photo lab and get them printed, my (several year old dSLR) will blow your (current P&S) out of the water. My photo will have more detail because of better aliasing on the sensor and dramatically less noise (which doesn't have to be hidden with blurring). Nevermind that I can shoot a photo at 800 ISO and it'll have less noise than your camera at 100 ISO, which means I get several stops of sensitivity which I can use for, oh, a faster shutter speed so there's less motion blur, or a smaller aperture for greater depth of field.
otherwise it gets derailed when people get alarmed about the fact that somebody is sitting in jail right now for a mistake and then somebody (in this case me) has to come and point out that the whole thing has actually been resolved.
#1, I'm alarmed about the fact that he was arrested, period.
#2, I'm alarmed that these false positives have been happening for a while, and #3, that it is still presented as valid evidence in criminal cases despite knowledge that it has a high false positive rate. Follow-up tests should be automatic, not a matter of the defendant having money to pay for it.
How did the cop even get to the point of being able to search the car? Oh, cute. The old "broken taillight" routine:
Bolles, 51, was arrested on April 4 after being pulled over for having a broken brake light
The officer got permission to search the vehicle and a field test on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap showed positive for GHB, Sailor said.
Never, never, NEVER agree to a search of your vehicle. Say, "I'm sorry, officer, I do not consent to a search", and if he says he's going to get a search warrant, LET HIM TRY. It's a scare tactic; if they had a legitimate, constitutional right to search you and your car, they already would have done so- and they certainly wouldn't need your permission.
Similarly, if you ARE stupid enough to allow a search (or they have a valid reason to search) and find something, SHUT UP. Don't say anything except, "I wish to speak to, and be represented by, an attorney." I don't care HOW much the cop says he'll "go easy" or who he'll "talk to". IT IS A LIE.
The Boston police department are in the process of "training" for doing "patrols" with the Massachusetts state police in the MSP helicopter(s).
Something tells me that they're going to spend most of their time hovering around in Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, etc- not Newbury Street, MIT, and Harvard. And something tells me that as long as they don't, we won't hear a peep about citizen complaints even if they pile in from residents tired of listening to the roar of helicopter blades and searchlights waking them in the middle of the night.
It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.
Is Washington a big enough state to overcome the costs associated with a differentiated product line?
If you read the article- there are alternatives to the banned chemicals. In fact, the same companies that make the banned chemicals make the alternatives.
The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it is remarkably adaptive. Even if Washington State isn't very large, they still represent a lot of buying power. I once read that my local town's residents have the buying power in the hundreds of millions of dollars...
Let's also not forget that "making things easy for corporations" (which pay single-digit percentages of taxes, when in the 50's they paid about half) should be the absolute least of our priorities, especially when it comes to matters of public health.
Watch the Bill Moyer special sometime about pollution- give a sample of your blood to someone with an analytical lab, and they'll be able to find hundreds, if not thousands, of industrial chemicals. They've become completely pervasive.
In Russia they require permits and his permit was denied.Most don't know that here in the US you are required to have a permit also, just as they did in Russia they can refuse to grant your permit will try to silence your protest and just happened in Russia. If you March anyway you WILL be arrested for trying to exercise your free speech.
First off, if you read the news stories, they requested a permit for one area, were told no, and were given one for a different area. Moving along...
Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. You do not have an unlimited or unrestrained right to free speech; see "libel" in your dictionary for an excellent example. Permits are required here too in almost any city or town of reasonable size, for two reasons.
Number one, protests usually lead to trouble, if they are of any size. People doing the protesting cause trouble. Or people tag along and take advantage of the anonymity of a crowd, to cause trouble. Or people who don't like the protesters cause trouble. Or the crowd by simple virtue of its size or density causes trouble with no specific fault. Say, someone lights a flag on fire, someone says "fire!", panic ensues, and you get people killed by trampling. Large crowds are very dangerous, because they have no intelligence: they have "mob mentality."
Number two, the city/town government wants a heads up so they can prepare, and see if you have any idea what you're doing, and if you don't, try to steer you into doing the right thing. Are you expecting 10 people, or 1000 arriving via busses? "Do you have a place for those busses to go? Do they need to have extra cops on traffic detail? Do they need to have a couple of ambulances nearby? Has your group caused trouble in other towns/cities? Is your message liable to inspire counter-protest? What are the counter-protesters like? Will they get nasty, even if you don't? Where are your people staying for the night? How are they eating? Where will they go when nature calls? Are you going to pick up all the trash you leave behind, or will we have to get the park department to pull overtime? Are you going to destroy the park's grass because of all the foot traffic, ruining it for everyone else?
Number two is important because more often than not, protesters only see their vision, and don't think through details, logistics, or the implications and consequences their actions have on the rest of society.
For example, most cities have very little patience for protesters clogging up major centers, where the effect will cause traffic throughout the city. That has a real impact on commerce, but also police, fire, and medical services for people that have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you don't like G8, NAFTA, green beans, Jewish Nazis, Yogi Bear, or whatever. The guy having a heart attack 10 blocks away just wants to get to the hospital, and his rights are just as important as yours. If a traffic jam prevents groceries from getting to market, and the market can't sell to the lunchtime crowd picking up stuff for dinner- well, maybe things are tight and the lost income means johnny the stockboy needs to be let go. What about his rights?
Organizers sought permission to gather on Pushkin Square, a traditional site for protests, but city officials rejected the request. Instead, they approved Turgenev Square, about a mile east and away from the city's commercial and cultural hub. Organizers refused to cancel plans for the Pushkin Square rally and protesters started to arrive before 11 a.m. Police began seizing them a few at a time.
Some trouble broke out when protesters charged a line of riot police. Riot police responded, and the crowd broke up. A journalist was injured, riot police treated him.
Eventually the crowd of protesters melted into side streets, a
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage [spj.org], though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Whooooops. The first sentence was supposed to replace the last 3-4...
'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage, though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Here's a bigger, related question: a robot is a)not a person and b)maybe more durable. A human soldier is allowed to fire in defense. Picture a homeowner in wartime, guarding his house. Robot trundles by, x-rays the house, sees the weapon, charges in. He sees it heading for him, freaks out, fires at it. How can the robot possibly be justified in killing him? Even if it represents a threat, you're only threatening a machine!
Second point: this is really just "killing by proxy." Regardless of whether you pull a trigger on a machine gun, or flip a switch on the General Dynamics Deathmachine 2000: if you knew your actions would cause injury or death, you're culpable. It's not the robot that is responsible when a civilian or hors de combat soldier is killed: it's the operators. Robots don't kill people: people build, program, and operate robots that kill people.
The power convesion ratio is not really that important in itself. The only really important measure is $/watt.
Right, and the only thing that matters with hard drives is $/GB ratio? People don't size systems based purely on $ figures; required output weighs into the equation heavily, since systems usually pay themselves back pretty fast. It doesn't matter when you have a whole hillside or roof, but otherwise, size is important, and the more efficient a panel, (duh), the smaller. That matters for space availability and wind loads.
For example, it's not practical to put solar panels on the roof of a UPS truck; you could cover the entire roof, and even on a sunny day, you probably still wouldn't be able to supply enough energy to keep it going on a day's worth of deliveries. Increasing the efficiency matters here. Likewise for say, putting a solar panel on the back of a cell phone.
The other arena this helps in? Wind loads. If you have a residential system with several panels on a tracking frame, if the panels can be half the size, that means a cheaper frame and tracking system, and less of an eyesore in your back yard. Or, alternatively, twice as much power from the same frame.
What really matters is retail availability. I've been reading about advances in solar panel technology for years, and it's dripping into the consumer market like molasses. Why? Well, for one thing, oil companies are snapping up solar intellectual property and companies like crazy...
Cops and ambulances are subject to the law except when their sirens are on. Since these are traffic light cameras, we could be able to tell that pretty easily.
I've watched Boston PD officers routinely approach a red light, flip on their lightbar, blip the siren a few times, go through, and then switch off their lights again.
Judging from the speed they approached and exited the intersection (ie, at or below legal speeds, leisurely departure from the intersection etc), it was pretty much just because they didn't want to sit at the intersection.
If you ask around in the GIS/mapping community, it's known that the [street] map data providers (Delorme, Garmin, etc) will insert garbage data here and there. A street name is slightly wrong, or they have a mystery street that doesn't exist in the real world. They use it to try and tell if/when someone steals their data. If Zyugyz Road in Somecity, CA exists- the legal team fires at will.
It's kind of weird, considering that most mapping companies do little more than get their hands on town/county/state GIS data for cheap, massage it a bit, then charge assloads of money for it.
What's bad is that it displaces all the oxygen in the area. This was a common cause of occupational deaths in MRI rooms- not flying metal objects attracted to the magnet (though a very small number of people have been killed by oxygen tanks and such.) An MRI repair tech was killed because of a slow helium leak that lowered the oxygen percentage enough that he passed out. That's why most if not all MRI facilities have gas monitors that monitor oxygen, nitrogen, and helium levels (liquid nitrogen is also used.)
MRI machines have vents for this sort of thing. Also because if the magnet quenches, a LARGE amount of liquid helium will boil off; all the electrical energy used to generate the field, which is constantly running in the magnet, turns very quickly into thermal energy. If the vent wasn't there, the room would pressurize, preventing one from opening doors (even an outward opening door- enough force would make it impossible to overcome friction on the bolt.) Magnet quenches are done only in situations where someone's life is in immediate danger (say, they're trapped by a ferrous object and about to bleed out) because of the danger (and the fact that there's a 1:4 chance of destroying the multi-million-dollar magnet and boiling off thousands of gallons of very expensive liquid hydrogen.)
It's been reported in vent failures when a magnet quenched that it rained oxygen; liquid helium is substantially colder than liquid oxygen. Shit happens: vent valves fail, birds nest in stuff, someone says "hey, what's that big empty pipe for" 6 rooms over and cuts it/blocks it off, etc. I think the MRI tech was killed because of a leaking o-ring.
Are they just afraid no one will take them seriously if they sound like the chipmunks when they report their findings?
Picture one guy yelling "Run, run! We'll all suffocate!" in a chipmunk voice, and everyone else laughing at how funny he sounds, and passing out. And dying.
I mean, it's not like it's spraying O2 in the direction of the pilot light of their oven.
Oxygen spraying in the direction of a pilot light in an oven will do nothing except make the pilot light burn at a higher temperature. It will not cause an explosion, because there's nothing else combustible in the oven, unless it's REALLY greasy.
What is not a joking matter is smoking in high-oxygen environments or fires in spacecraft, because they do have lots of flammable stuff, like wire insulation (which is fire-resistant, not necessarily fire-proof.)
The TV show MythBusters "busted" as a myth the conventional wisdom that phones interfere with avionics.
The Mythbusters also constructed a fake airplane cabin and dropped themselves 10-20 feet onto solid ground to see which crash positions were safest. In the episodes I watched, they routinely ignore or arbitrarily (and grossly) weight evidence. It is psuedo-science at its finest: a moderate amount of science, and then simplified experiments without enough controls, that throw the whole "experiment" out the window. They're a bunch of special effects guys, with a couple of actors for assistance, on a TV show, for chrissakes.
It's not as simple as "flip on a laptop in the cabin, see if anything wonky happens." Mythbuster's idea of a "scientific" investigation would be to buy 10 laptops and try it in 2 planes, a jet, and a helicopter. It's "shotgun" science.
When I was young, my father was a commercial-license pilot (not "commercial" in money-making sense or letting you fly jumbos- it's the class of license) and we'd fly places on a semi-regular basis. We'd occasionally take along a laptop for looking at weather charts, planning the IFR flight, etc.
This was in the day of VHF/UHF beacons, used for direction-finding. They're still used, but back then, even LORAN units were kind of an unusual luxury, and most often used as a backup or confirmation of your primary instrumentation. You'd plan the flight following beacons, with cross-checks every so often to make sure you're where you think you are AND that everything is working properly. If it's a nice day out, you look for a tower or some other landmark and do a visual.
The issue, as he explained it, was this: what if the laptop makes the direction-finder off by a bit? Suddenly you're not where you thought you would be, and the laptop didn't give you any extra fuel, and the laptop didn't tell ATC that you were going off on a field trip from your flight plan, and the laptop didn't move that mountain or radio tower out of the way.
A lot of these are solveable problems, but pilots and scuba divers (particularly technical/cave/wreck divers) will tell you that big problems start from little ones. It's a snowball effect, and often just being distracted by a minor problem is enough to cause another minor problem to go unnoticed, until it becomes a BIG problem.
"The O'Reilly School of Technology and the University of Illinois have partnered to offer Certificates of Professional Development in information technology and related skills."
students will earn 4 CEUs (Continuing Education Units) and a CEU letter from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education.
$1600 (let's see- that's 2-3 weeks pay) for a new school, completely unproven? I'm eligible for tuition reimbursement and such, but my HR department would laugh me right out the door.
This CEU/"certificate of professional development" and a ham sandwich at an interview would get me something to eat.
Reputation and respect are insanely important to most developers and being accused in public of stealing someone's stuff is damaging. Theo is responding with an appropriate amount of emotion if you ask me.
The proper response is to defend yourself against the claim, not attack the person; logical fallacies may be motivated by emotion, but that does not make use of a logical fallacy legitimate or justified. That's the entire point behind ad hominem attacks and other logical fallacies. They're poisoned arguments. Even if you have a legitimate claim, using logical fallacies in front of people who realize what's going, gives them the distinct impression that you don't have any legitimate arguments in your defense at all.
If you read through the email conversation, you'll see a VERY diplomatic initial message from Michael, a straw-man attack from Theo ("Do you feel that Marcus should give up his efforts?"), a VERY reasonable response ("No, he should _not_ give up. The opposite is true. He should start to contact us to get relicensing permission from us to speed up bcw development and stay legal") and then profanity and rage from Theo.
The slashdot post, the weblog entry, and Theo's comments are all ad hominem, and baseless ad hominem at that- the core issue here is that GPL code was taken in violation of its license. The owner of the code contacted and admittedly large number of people, publicly, about it. It is hardly out of line given Theo's well-known grandstanding full of rhetoric (hardware drivers for OpenBSD come to mind.)
Michael pointed out the violation and asked the developer/OpenBSD people to contact him to work out relicensing the code. Instead, Theo attacked him relentlessly and repeatedly. After the first 6 posts between Theo and Michael, I felt sick and stopped reading.
aerodynamics and rolling friction, not engine tech
on
Japanese Mileage Maniacs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If a regular engine can get 50+ MPG it shouldn't be hard for a Hybrid to get 70 or 80+, if not 100+.
Highway mileage has nothing to do with hybrid vs. non-hybrid. You're still getting energy from the same fuel, in the same way. Even with a hybrid's electric motor helping with acceleration for passing, guess where energy to charge the battery back up again comes from? Ding, the gasoline motor (some regenerative braking, but most of the hybrids don't wait that long before they start charging the pack.)
Take a look at the Insight. It gets noticeably more mileage than any of its hybrid siblings- I think it's in the high 60's or low 70's. Why? It's super-streamlined, complete with wheel skirts over the rear wheels. Now, notice that the shape is quite reminiscent of the Honda CRX, a car that got 50MPG, in the early 80's?
If you completely switched off the hybrid system in a Prius or Honda Civic or (snicker) that hybrid Lexus SUV, guess what- highway gas mileage wouldn't change. The overwhelming factors for highway mileage are aerodynamics and rolling friction (tires, bearings, drivetrain components.) Lowering weight helps too; less energy required to accelerate and go up hills- and hybrids have that working against them because the battery packs, extra electronics+wiring, and traction motor all add weight.
Diesels like the VW TDIs get 45-50MPG on the highway, and they do it with the same aerodynamics as standard VW's AND the extra weight of the heavier diesel engine, because diesels are more efficient. Put a diesel engine in a Insight, and you'd probably get a similar boost in mileage as between an gasoline Jetta and a TDI Jetta. Heck, you might crack 100mpg without breaking a sweat.
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I'm sure he has a staff of secretaries that screen everything and is well versed by now how to take care of these relatively unimportant problems
He does, in fact. Dozens. This is old news to those of us who have been using macs since before OS X days.
NeoOffice is an independently developed version of OpenOffice.org 2.1 which runs on Mac OS X natively and without the need for X11. I've been using it for years.
It was useable until it started opening Safari on launch and close- loading a page nagging me to give them money.
The unprofessionalism of that is absolutely staggering. The only other application I know of that does this is Acquisition- probably the most nag-laden software ever written.
My favorite part of their site is the quote from the FAQ:
"Q:Is FreeMat 100% compatible with MATLAB? What about IDL?"
"A:No. FreeMat supports roughly 95% (a made up statistic) of the features in MATLAB."
Mathematicians making jokes about made up statistics, hee hee :-)
I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AT GOOGLE FOR WHAT TO DO AND WHAT NOT TO DO AND I FOLLOWED THE RULES If you simply follow the rules that google lays out, you won't get sucked into google hell. If you try and game the system by paying for consultants to "juice" your site, you gambled and lost.
While I see you mean with trying to "game" the system, these guys are a bit of a straw-man. Why? Sure, they tried to "game" the system. But there are many of us who don't, and have been arbitrarily hurt. Possibly because we did nothing, instead of following Google's "rules". Pardon my french, but when the fuck did Google get to set how sites are made? Answer: when they became the Microsoft of the internet.
I help run a site for car enthusiasts. We've been around since the mid 1990's. Remained fairly strictly non-commercial. We have mailing list archives stretching back that far, that are a treasure-trove of useful information. We use Google's branded search. And one day, we noticed that the branded search wasn't returning many results. We tried exactly the same search on the main google page using "site:____.com". We got ten times the results. Huh?
Then one day, people started to complain that they couldn't find recent posts. We looked in the logs; Google was crawling the site, but we did a dozen searches for specific posts and couldn't find any of them past a certain date. Google simply binned us.
I filled out the "contact us" form, and didn't get anything more than a form reply telling me to take a long walk off a short pier and stop complaining about how we didn't like our search positioning. We didn't give a shit about where we appeared in searches. We just wanted to get current content indexed, period.
Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks.
That should read "CAN have much lower latency." I've seen USB flash drives tested that had +100ms seek times, and it's not always the 5-6MB/sec class drives; some of the 10-20MB/sec flash drives were this bad. The fastest USB keys are around half a ms or so, which is perhaps a 8x improvement over the fastest magnetic drives.
Flash memory can be glacially slow, have limited number of write cycles and poor reliability, and controllers can be slow as well- and as this stuff gets more into the mainstream, I guarantee some companies will use cheap components to boost profit margins or undercut competitors. We're already seen it in the USB flash drive market; I've witnessed at least a couple of these things get corrupted or stop working after daily use in an office environment, and they were all pretty much no-name brands or freebies.
This competition isn't entirely a bad thing, as the cheap junk will put some pressure on the "good guys" pricing-wise, but the tradeoff is that we'll have to look before we leap with the credit card.
I suppose a university environment is a bit different from a creative environment (at least outside the art/music/etc departments).
Having worked for an advertising company, yes. Sometimes, if stuff doesn't go out the door on time - millions of dollars are at stake. Advertising industries are highly competitive, even against each other (the vast majority of advertising firms are owned by less than a half-dozen holding companies...and yes, the same 'children' compete against each other.) So whether it is a proposal, presentation to the client, or artwork- if it doesn't leave with the CCO (Chief Creative Officer) on time for his flight, or get downstairs to the courier to arrive at the client or their printing house...shit hits the fan.
The closest comparison is probably "grant time" in the academic world.
The art department where I worked were the neediest; they got the fastest computers (and got 'em more often) and they were the only department with gigabit ethernet. When shit broke you had to got to drop everything and get it fixed ASAP. They also tended to have more problems because of more complexity...tons of fonts(and a font manager like Suitcase), old versions of Quark that required Classic...inDesign, Adobe Distiller printer drivers, half a dozen different kinds of printers. Nowhere nearly as complex an software matrix as the copywriters and paper pushers who just need email, Word, Safari, and to be able to print to the laserprinter in the hallway.
I'm not sure when you last looked, but you are not always guaranteed your provider will not oversubscribe you for a T1. In fact, this is regular practice that your ISP does oversubscribe.
The difference is that your T1 has mandated provisions for downtime and speeds. If your T1 line goes down, the phone company has some serious obligations to get it going again.
If your cablemodem or DSL line has line quality problems, goes down for two days, or doesn't deliver stated capacity- the cable company shrugs and says "so?" None of that happens with a tarrifed line, because if it does, you have legal resource- both through government regulations and contractual obligations.
The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR.
That isn't even remotely what the article said. It said: "As you can see the top photo, taken in medium light conditions, is in focus and the colours are very vibrant, if not a little over saturated." and, "This difference in colour is likely due to the N95 processing the shot after it was taken."
Nowhere do they describe if the images actually represented a faithful reproduction of the colors of the objects, and they did not test under multiple lighting conditions, such as outdoors, under incandescent and fluorescent lights, etc. They also did not conduct any test which would demonstrate the camera's dynamic range, and they did not show us any 1:1 crop areas.
There's one simple site I point any of small but persistent who claim things like "film is superior to digital" (it hasn't been for at least a few years, in terms of resolution, signal to noise ratio, and dynamic range.) Clarkvision. The guy lays it all out in cold, hard science with good illustrative graphs and examples.
Does Pixel Size Matter? lays a real cold hard blow to all the idiots that claim dSLRs are overpriced or unjustified. They VASTLY outperform "point and shoot" cameras because the sensors are huge. Current dSLRs already approach the theoretical maximum sensitivity, SNR, etc. The bigger the sensor well, the more photons it collects- and the less electronic amplification is necessary. dSLRs have sensors the size of your phone's screen. Your phone's camera has a sensor around the size of an eraser. Not only does that cause a lot of noise problems, but it causes problems for aliasing filters (which spread light across the red, blue, and green sensor wells.) It's very easy to make a very good aliasing filter on a scale required for the very large pixels in a dSLR. Sensor wells in the point and shoots are so tiny that the filters really, really blur the image.
Practically, this means that if you and I stand next to each other and take a photo towards sunset, and then take both to a photo lab and get them printed, my (several year old dSLR) will blow your (current P&S) out of the water. My photo will have more detail because of better aliasing on the sensor and dramatically less noise (which doesn't have to be hidden with blurring). Nevermind that I can shoot a photo at 800 ISO and it'll have less noise than your camera at 100 ISO, which means I get several stops of sensitivity which I can use for, oh, a faster shutter speed so there's less motion blur, or a smaller aperture for greater depth of field.
otherwise it gets derailed when people get alarmed about the fact that somebody is sitting in jail right now for a mistake and then somebody (in this case me) has to come and point out that the whole thing has actually been resolved.
#1, I'm alarmed about the fact that he was arrested, period.
#2, I'm alarmed that these false positives have been happening for a while, and #3, that it is still presented as valid evidence in criminal cases despite knowledge that it has a high false positive rate. Follow-up tests should be automatic, not a matter of the defendant having money to pay for it.
How did the cop even get to the point of being able to search the car? Oh, cute. The old "broken taillight" routine:
Bolles, 51, was arrested on April 4 after being pulled over for having a broken brake light
The officer got permission to search the vehicle and a field test on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap showed positive for GHB, Sailor said.
Never, never, NEVER agree to a search of your vehicle. Say, "I'm sorry, officer, I do not consent to a search", and if he says he's going to get a search warrant, LET HIM TRY. It's a scare tactic; if they had a legitimate, constitutional right to search you and your car, they already would have done so- and they certainly wouldn't need your permission.
Similarly, if you ARE stupid enough to allow a search (or they have a valid reason to search) and find something, SHUT UP. Don't say anything except, "I wish to speak to, and be represented by, an attorney." I don't care HOW much the cop says he'll "go easy" or who he'll "talk to". IT IS A LIE.
How long 'til we see them in the U.S.?
The Boston police department are in the process of "training" for doing "patrols" with the Massachusetts state police in the MSP helicopter(s).
Something tells me that they're going to spend most of their time hovering around in Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, etc- not Newbury Street, MIT, and Harvard. And something tells me that as long as they don't, we won't hear a peep about citizen complaints even if they pile in from residents tired of listening to the roar of helicopter blades and searchlights waking them in the middle of the night.
It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.
Is Washington a big enough state to overcome the costs associated with a differentiated product line?
If you read the article- there are alternatives to the banned chemicals. In fact, the same companies that make the banned chemicals make the alternatives.
The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it is remarkably adaptive. Even if Washington State isn't very large, they still represent a lot of buying power. I once read that my local town's residents have the buying power in the hundreds of millions of dollars...
Let's also not forget that "making things easy for corporations" (which pay single-digit percentages of taxes, when in the 50's they paid about half) should be the absolute least of our priorities, especially when it comes to matters of public health.
Watch the Bill Moyer special sometime about pollution- give a sample of your blood to someone with an analytical lab, and they'll be able to find hundreds, if not thousands, of industrial chemicals. They've become completely pervasive.
In Russia they require permits and his permit was denied.Most don't know that here in the US you are required to have a permit also, just as they did in Russia they can refuse to grant your permit will try to silence your protest and just happened in Russia. If you March anyway you WILL be arrested for trying to exercise your free speech.
First off, if you read the news stories, they requested a permit for one area, were told no, and were given one for a different area. Moving along...
Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. You do not have an unlimited or unrestrained right to free speech; see "libel" in your dictionary for an excellent example. Permits are required here too in almost any city or town of reasonable size, for two reasons.
Number one, protests usually lead to trouble, if they are of any size. People doing the protesting cause trouble. Or people tag along and take advantage of the anonymity of a crowd, to cause trouble. Or people who don't like the protesters cause trouble. Or the crowd by simple virtue of its size or density causes trouble with no specific fault. Say, someone lights a flag on fire, someone says "fire!", panic ensues, and you get people killed by trampling. Large crowds are very dangerous, because they have no intelligence: they have "mob mentality."
Number two, the city/town government wants a heads up so they can prepare, and see if you have any idea what you're doing, and if you don't, try to steer you into doing the right thing. Are you expecting 10 people, or 1000 arriving via busses? "Do you have a place for those busses to go? Do they need to have extra cops on traffic detail? Do they need to have a couple of ambulances nearby? Has your group caused trouble in other towns/cities? Is your message liable to inspire counter-protest? What are the counter-protesters like? Will they get nasty, even if you don't? Where are your people staying for the night? How are they eating? Where will they go when nature calls? Are you going to pick up all the trash you leave behind, or will we have to get the park department to pull overtime? Are you going to destroy the park's grass because of all the foot traffic, ruining it for everyone else?
Number two is important because more often than not, protesters only see their vision, and don't think through details, logistics, or the implications and consequences their actions have on the rest of society.
For example, most cities have very little patience for protesters clogging up major centers, where the effect will cause traffic throughout the city. That has a real impact on commerce, but also police, fire, and medical services for people that have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you don't like G8, NAFTA, green beans, Jewish Nazis, Yogi Bear, or whatever. The guy having a heart attack 10 blocks away just wants to get to the hospital, and his rights are just as important as yours. If a traffic jam prevents groceries from getting to market, and the market can't sell to the lunchtime crowd picking up stuff for dinner- well, maybe things are tight and the lost income means johnny the stockboy needs to be let go. What about his rights?
According to the Associated Press story:
Organizers sought permission to gather on Pushkin Square, a traditional site for protests, but city officials rejected the request. Instead, they approved Turgenev Square, about a mile east and away from the city's commercial and cultural hub. Organizers refused to cancel plans for the Pushkin Square rally and protesters started to arrive before 11 a.m. Police began seizing them a few at a time.
Some trouble broke out when protesters charged a line of riot police. Riot police responded, and the crowd broke up. A journalist was injured, riot police treated him.
Eventually the crowd of protesters melted into side streets, a
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage [spj.org], though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Whooooops. The first sentence was supposed to replace the last 3-4...
'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage, though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Here's a bigger, related question: a robot is a)not a person and b)maybe more durable. A human soldier is allowed to fire in defense. Picture a homeowner in wartime, guarding his house. Robot trundles by, x-rays the house, sees the weapon, charges in. He sees it heading for him, freaks out, fires at it. How can the robot possibly be justified in killing him? Even if it represents a threat, you're only threatening a machine!
Second point: this is really just "killing by proxy." Regardless of whether you pull a trigger on a machine gun, or flip a switch on the General Dynamics Deathmachine 2000: if you knew your actions would cause injury or death, you're culpable. It's not the robot that is responsible when a civilian or hors de combat soldier is killed: it's the operators. Robots don't kill people: people build, program, and operate robots that kill people.
Tada.
The power convesion ratio is not really that important in itself. The only really important measure is $/watt.
Right, and the only thing that matters with hard drives is $/GB ratio? People don't size systems based purely on $ figures; required output weighs into the equation heavily, since systems usually pay themselves back pretty fast. It doesn't matter when you have a whole hillside or roof, but otherwise, size is important, and the more efficient a panel, (duh), the smaller. That matters for space availability and wind loads.
For example, it's not practical to put solar panels on the roof of a UPS truck; you could cover the entire roof, and even on a sunny day, you probably still wouldn't be able to supply enough energy to keep it going on a day's worth of deliveries. Increasing the efficiency matters here. Likewise for say, putting a solar panel on the back of a cell phone.
The other arena this helps in? Wind loads. If you have a residential system with several panels on a tracking frame, if the panels can be half the size, that means a cheaper frame and tracking system, and less of an eyesore in your back yard. Or, alternatively, twice as much power from the same frame.
What really matters is retail availability. I've been reading about advances in solar panel technology for years, and it's dripping into the consumer market like molasses. Why? Well, for one thing, oil companies are snapping up solar intellectual property and companies like crazy...
Cops and ambulances are subject to the law except when their sirens are on. Since these are traffic light cameras, we could be able to tell that pretty easily.
I've watched Boston PD officers routinely approach a red light, flip on their lightbar, blip the siren a few times, go through, and then switch off their lights again.
Judging from the speed they approached and exited the intersection (ie, at or below legal speeds, leisurely departure from the intersection etc), it was pretty much just because they didn't want to sit at the intersection.
If you ask around in the GIS/mapping community, it's known that the [street] map data providers (Delorme, Garmin, etc) will insert garbage data here and there. A street name is slightly wrong, or they have a mystery street that doesn't exist in the real world. They use it to try and tell if/when someone steals their data. If Zyugyz Road in Somecity, CA exists- the legal team fires at will.
It's kind of weird, considering that most mapping companies do little more than get their hands on town/county/state GIS data for cheap, massage it a bit, then charge assloads of money for it.
What's so bad about that?
What's bad is that it displaces all the oxygen in the area. This was a common cause of occupational deaths in MRI rooms- not flying metal objects attracted to the magnet (though a very small number of people have been killed by oxygen tanks and such.) An MRI repair tech was killed because of a slow helium leak that lowered the oxygen percentage enough that he passed out. That's why most if not all MRI facilities have gas monitors that monitor oxygen, nitrogen, and helium levels (liquid nitrogen is also used.)
MRI machines have vents for this sort of thing. Also because if the magnet quenches, a LARGE amount of liquid helium will boil off; all the electrical energy used to generate the field, which is constantly running in the magnet, turns very quickly into thermal energy. If the vent wasn't there, the room would pressurize, preventing one from opening doors (even an outward opening door- enough force would make it impossible to overcome friction on the bolt.) Magnet quenches are done only in situations where someone's life is in immediate danger (say, they're trapped by a ferrous object and about to bleed out) because of the danger (and the fact that there's a 1:4 chance of destroying the multi-million-dollar magnet and boiling off thousands of gallons of very expensive liquid hydrogen.)
It's been reported in vent failures when a magnet quenched that it rained oxygen; liquid helium is substantially colder than liquid oxygen. Shit happens: vent valves fail, birds nest in stuff, someone says "hey, what's that big empty pipe for" 6 rooms over and cuts it/blocks it off, etc. I think the MRI tech was killed because of a leaking o-ring.
Are they just afraid no one will take them seriously if they sound like the chipmunks when they report their findings?
Picture one guy yelling "Run, run! We'll all suffocate!" in a chipmunk voice, and everyone else laughing at how funny he sounds, and passing out. And dying.
I mean, it's not like it's spraying O2 in the direction of the pilot light of their oven.
Oxygen spraying in the direction of a pilot light in an oven will do nothing except make the pilot light burn at a higher temperature. It will not cause an explosion, because there's nothing else combustible in the oven, unless it's REALLY greasy.
What is not a joking matter is smoking in high-oxygen environments or fires in spacecraft, because they do have lots of flammable stuff, like wire insulation (which is fire-resistant, not necessarily fire-proof.)
The TV show MythBusters "busted" as a myth the conventional wisdom that phones interfere with avionics.
The Mythbusters also constructed a fake airplane cabin and dropped themselves 10-20 feet onto solid ground to see which crash positions were safest. In the episodes I watched, they routinely ignore or arbitrarily (and grossly) weight evidence. It is psuedo-science at its finest: a moderate amount of science, and then simplified experiments without enough controls, that throw the whole "experiment" out the window. They're a bunch of special effects guys, with a couple of actors for assistance, on a TV show, for chrissakes.
It's not as simple as "flip on a laptop in the cabin, see if anything wonky happens." Mythbuster's idea of a "scientific" investigation would be to buy 10 laptops and try it in 2 planes, a jet, and a helicopter. It's "shotgun" science.
When I was young, my father was a commercial-license pilot (not "commercial" in money-making sense or letting you fly jumbos- it's the class of license) and we'd fly places on a semi-regular basis. We'd occasionally take along a laptop for looking at weather charts, planning the IFR flight, etc.
This was in the day of VHF/UHF beacons, used for direction-finding. They're still used, but back then, even LORAN units were kind of an unusual luxury, and most often used as a backup or confirmation of your primary instrumentation. You'd plan the flight following beacons, with cross-checks every so often to make sure you're where you think you are AND that everything is working properly. If it's a nice day out, you look for a tower or some other landmark and do a visual.
The issue, as he explained it, was this: what if the laptop makes the direction-finder off by a bit? Suddenly you're not where you thought you would be, and the laptop didn't give you any extra fuel, and the laptop didn't tell ATC that you were going off on a field trip from your flight plan, and the laptop didn't move that mountain or radio tower out of the way.
A lot of these are solveable problems, but pilots and scuba divers (particularly technical/cave/wreck divers) will tell you that big problems start from little ones. It's a snowball effect, and often just being distracted by a minor problem is enough to cause another minor problem to go unnoticed, until it becomes a BIG problem.
"The O'Reilly School of Technology and the University of Illinois have partnered to offer Certificates of Professional Development in information technology and related skills."
students will earn 4 CEUs (Continuing Education Units) and a CEU letter from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education.
$1600 (let's see- that's 2-3 weeks pay) for a new school, completely unproven? I'm eligible for tuition reimbursement and such, but my HR department would laugh me right out the door.
This CEU/"certificate of professional development" and a ham sandwich at an interview would get me something to eat.
Reputation and respect are insanely important to most developers and being accused in public of stealing someone's stuff is damaging. Theo is responding with an appropriate amount of emotion if you ask me.
The proper response is to defend yourself against the claim, not attack the person; logical fallacies may be motivated by emotion, but that does not make use of a logical fallacy legitimate or justified. That's the entire point behind ad hominem attacks and other logical fallacies. They're poisoned arguments. Even if you have a legitimate claim, using logical fallacies in front of people who realize what's going, gives them the distinct impression that you don't have any legitimate arguments in your defense at all.
If you read through the email conversation, you'll see a VERY diplomatic initial message from Michael, a straw-man attack from Theo ("Do you feel that Marcus should give up his efforts?"), a VERY reasonable response ("No, he should _not_ give up. The opposite is true. He should start to contact us to get relicensing permission from us to speed up bcw development and stay legal") and then profanity and rage from Theo.
The slashdot post, the weblog entry, and Theo's comments are all ad hominem, and baseless ad hominem at that- the core issue here is that GPL code was taken in violation of its license. The owner of the code contacted and admittedly large number of people, publicly, about it. It is hardly out of line given Theo's well-known grandstanding full of rhetoric (hardware drivers for OpenBSD come to mind.)
Michael pointed out the violation and asked the developer/OpenBSD people to contact him to work out relicensing the code. Instead, Theo attacked him relentlessly and repeatedly. After the first 6 posts between Theo and Michael, I felt sick and stopped reading.
If a regular engine can get 50+ MPG it shouldn't be hard for a Hybrid to get 70 or 80+, if not 100+.
Highway mileage has nothing to do with hybrid vs. non-hybrid. You're still getting energy from the same fuel, in the same way. Even with a hybrid's electric motor helping with acceleration for passing, guess where energy to charge the battery back up again comes from? Ding, the gasoline motor (some regenerative braking, but most of the hybrids don't wait that long before they start charging the pack.)
Take a look at the Insight. It gets noticeably more mileage than any of its hybrid siblings- I think it's in the high 60's or low 70's. Why? It's super-streamlined, complete with wheel skirts over the rear wheels. Now, notice that the shape is quite reminiscent of the Honda CRX, a car that got 50MPG, in the early 80's?
If you completely switched off the hybrid system in a Prius or Honda Civic or (snicker) that hybrid Lexus SUV, guess what- highway gas mileage wouldn't change. The overwhelming factors for highway mileage are aerodynamics and rolling friction (tires, bearings, drivetrain components.) Lowering weight helps too; less energy required to accelerate and go up hills- and hybrids have that working against them because the battery packs, extra electronics+wiring, and traction motor all add weight.
Diesels like the VW TDIs get 45-50MPG on the highway, and they do it with the same aerodynamics as standard VW's AND the extra weight of the heavier diesel engine, because diesels are more efficient. Put a diesel engine in a Insight, and you'd probably get a similar boost in mileage as between an gasoline Jetta and a TDI Jetta. Heck, you might crack 100mpg without breaking a sweat.