From my experience with Sattelite TV, signal quality depends a lot on where you are in relation to the sattelite. At my cabin in upstate New York, we get great reception, even in storms, because we are on the top of a hill, with a large valley around, and a great direct line to the sattelite. In Boston, however, there are several tall buildings between my dish and the sattelite. The signal is usually pretty good, low artifacting, but rain at all, even heavy cloud cover, knocks off my signal completely. Usually I'll get a few blocky images at best during a good storm.
So if you are moving out into the country, I'd recommend sattelite (probably easier and cheaper than running cable out to your house in some areas), but if you're moving into a city or anywhere there is not a good line of sight to the satellite, then go with cable.
not just a rumor. if you would RTFA, you would see that it says:
"A winning Pepsi cap isn't just a song, it's a chance to send Pepsi's 99 cents somewhere good. When a cap is redeemed, Pepsi pays Apple 99 cents for the song, and Apple passes along 65 cents to a record label. Unfortunately, most of the music on iTunes is put out by one of the 5 major record labels, and their business practices are highly suspect. When you buy an iTunes song from a major label, there's a good chance the artist won't see a penny, because they're still recouping. If the artist does get a cut, it's only about 10 cents from the 99 cents you paid. But we can do better!"
I think that they are able to afford to sell the XBoxes and other consoles at a loss by making up for it with the cost of games. Most games cost around $50 when they first come out. That's about half the price of a GameCube, and almost a third the price of an XBox now. People only buy one XBox usually, but lots of games. I spent $200 on my XBox, and probably close to $1000 on games for it. I know the money for the games don't all go to microsoft, but they get a pretty good chunk of money for the games that sell on their consols.
Actually, data storage isn't measured in base 2. A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix mega indicating 10^6. A gigabyte is 10^9 bytes. A Terabyte is 10^12 bytes. A petabyte is 10^15, or one million billion bytes.
Why is the plural of virus viruses? One octopus and many octopi. One cactus, many cacti. Why not one virus, many virii? Virii seems to have caught on with many people, and fits the ending that we use for most words ending in -us in the singular case.
The problem is that he is being payed by the tape. Thus if he playes the tape at a slower speed, it will take him more time to finish the tape. This will result in less dollars per hour. If he can get a computer to transcribe the tape in 4 hours, and correct the computer on the fly, then he'll make $10/hour. If he has to play the tape at 70% speed, it'll take him almost 6 hours, at only $7 an hour. Splitting the work up between two people would be the same as far as payment goes, because tapes are being finished at twice the rate, but there are twice as many people to pay.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. It was $10USD, not Canadian funny money. The Register article didn't specify which currency he was referring to, but on his webpage (google cache) he says it was US Dollars.
I had the same CPU in my first computer as well. I was kinda bummed when I found that it was only 150MHz, but I had a friend with a Pentium 166MHz, and there didn't seem to be much of a speed difference. I loved that old computer, it worked great for years, well after we got our first P2 and P3. I think it finally ended up getting sold in a garage sale when we moved into a smaller house without enough room for extra computers.
Wasn't even music. I was trying to find Abbot & Costello's Who's on First routine. I was into collecting MIDI and WAV files at the time, and saw something about a new WAV compression format called MP3. The article had a sample of a 300 second audio file which was only 600kb, drastically better than any wav file I had at the time. The quality was pretty good too, so from that moment on, I was hooked.
Sometime after that, I heard of a program called Napster that let you download mp3's of songs, and the rest is history.
I know the parent is a joke and all, but seriously, will it generate enough energy to power whatever is used to keep the helium at such a low temperature? I would rather doubt that you'd get much energy out of such a system, with the amount of energy proportional to the amount of Helium. However, the energy needed to keep the system cold is also proportional to the amount of Helium. Could such a device work if the ambiant temperature was sufficiently cold (Maybe in an orbit perpetually in the earth's shadow or something). We could use this in conjunction with a microwave beam to send cheap power wherever we want.
Not for hard drive space. The standard is 10^x. In SI, the prefix Tera is 1000 Giga, which is 1000 Mega, which is 1000 Kilo, so a Tera is 1000*1000*1000 = 1000000000 = 10^9. There is another standard for the 2^x scale, but the prefix is not Tera. I think it's Teri or something rediculous like that. The 10^x standard has been used by disk manufacturers for years. The problem is that most people look at the disk size reported by Windoze. M$ decided to use the 2^x scale way back in the day, and never bothered to change it. People rarely actually look at their hard drives to see what capacity they actually claim, since the hard drive is inside the case, and most people rarely if ever open up their cases.
if you go through all of the trouble of getting radioactive by-products to space, why not just crash them into the sun? We may find some method of breaking down the greenhouse gasses in Venus' atmosphere and creating a more hospitable environment there. If we have all sorts of radioactive junk lying around, we're just going to have to move it again if we ever want to colonize Venus. Now I know that this won't be for probably several centuries, maybe even more, but we need to consider this things when making our plans now. Maybe if we had thought more about disposal of radioactive materials back in the 50's and 60's we wouldn't have the problems with storage that we have now.
the same reason as why people troll in slashdot. They like being annoying. They derive some sort of personal pleasure from annoying other people and/or wasting their time. Maybe they think they are some sort of "l33t __a.N.a.R.c.H.i.S.t__" or something.
Not even all that uncomfortable. IIRC, NASA originally planned on only pressurizing space capsules to around 5psi or pure oxygen. This is the same as the partial pressure of oxygen in our atmosphere, so the astronots didn't get high on O2 or anything. That's why the Apollo 1 fire was so bad.
Of course, I think the ISS uses normal 14.7psi of normal earth air, so they'd have to make the air a lot more Oxygen rich if there was a leak. Anyways, just my 2 cents.
Can't remember any sources exactly, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
*rant*
I'd rather die trying to get to mars than stay stuck here on earth and watch someone else do it, or some dumb robot. Humans should be starting to travel to other planets, because we are starting to realize that our civilization as a whole will have to undergo some rather drastic changes in the not so distant future. Our oil deposits will last maybe another 50 years or so, and with our current population growth, we'll have the planet pretty well overpopulated within a few centuries. The way we are destroying our environment is pretty bad (and i'm not even a tree hugging hippy or anything). We need to start looking to space for resources, real-estate, and energy. We can always talk about putting human spacetravel off until it's safer or we have better technology, but if we keep putting it off, it'll never happen. Mankind hasn't gotten out of low earth orbit in decades. It took less than 70 years for us to go from the first powered flight to the first moon landing. We need to continue this growth trend for the next 70 years, moving on to begin colonization of other planets.
*/rant*
How do they know that that specific computer is one of the "free" ones? Why not just wipe the hard drive and install Linux? Maybe figure out what the format is for however the computer tells IBM that you viewed your quota of advertisements, and have a script that sends in an appropriate message every month or whatever.
No, antimatter does not repel light, antimatter still has positive mass. Repelling light would require some sort of negative energy particle. Although such exocit particles abound in science fiction (read Steven Baxter & Arthur Clark's 'Light of other Days'), I don't think they've ever been found in our universe.
While I'm posting:
Several years after the Great Biblical Flood, Noah is walking around checking in on all the animals. Most animals are beginning to procreate, and have large families, except for two snakes. Noah asks God why these snakes haven't mated yet. God replies that Noah should take some planks from the Ark and put the planks near the snakes. He does so, and sometime afterwords notices that the snakes have indeed been busy, and have a large family. When Noah asks God what the planks from the Ark did, God replied "Don't you know that Adders use Logs to Multiply"
Then don't turn on your phone. It continually amazes me that people will get a cell phone and then insist on leaving the phone on 24/7. Unless you are a doctor on call or absolutely need to have people get in contact with you, turn off your phone. I've had a cell phone for a few years, and keep it powered off unless I'm using it or expecting a call. The cell phone is there for *my* convenience, and I'll use it when I want to make a call, not when others feel like randomly calling me. Plus it saves the battery. I've been using the same battery in my current phone for a year, and it still gets about 6-8 hrs of talk time per charge.
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience with Sattelite TV, signal quality depends a lot on where you are in relation to the sattelite. At my cabin in upstate New York, we get great reception, even in storms, because we are on the top of a hill, with a large valley around, and a great direct line to the sattelite. In Boston, however, there are several tall buildings between my dish and the sattelite. The signal is usually pretty good, low artifacting, but rain at all, even heavy cloud cover, knocks off my signal completely. Usually I'll get a few blocky images at best during a good storm.
So if you are moving out into the country, I'd recommend sattelite (probably easier and cheaper than running cable out to your house in some areas), but if you're moving into a city or anywhere there is not a good line of sight to the satellite, then go with cable.
not just a rumor. if you would RTFA, you would see that it says:
"A winning Pepsi cap isn't just a song, it's a chance to send Pepsi's 99 cents somewhere good. When a cap is redeemed, Pepsi pays Apple 99 cents for the song, and Apple passes along 65 cents to a record label. Unfortunately, most of the music on iTunes is put out by one of the 5 major record labels, and their business practices are highly suspect. When you buy an iTunes song from a major label, there's a good chance the artist won't see a penny, because they're still recouping. If the artist does get a cut, it's only about 10 cents from the 99 cents you paid. But we can do better!"
I think that they are able to afford to sell the XBoxes and other consoles at a loss by making up for it with the cost of games. Most games cost around $50 when they first come out. That's about half the price of a GameCube, and almost a third the price of an XBox now. People only buy one XBox usually, but lots of games. I spent $200 on my XBox, and probably close to $1000 on games for it. I know the money for the games don't all go to microsoft, but they get a pretty good chunk of money for the games that sell on their consols.
Actually, data storage isn't measured in base 2. A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix mega indicating 10^6. A gigabyte is 10^9 bytes. A Terabyte is 10^12 bytes. A petabyte is 10^15, or one million billion bytes.
Why is the plural of virus viruses? One octopus and many octopi. One cactus, many cacti. Why not one virus, many virii? Virii seems to have caught on with many people, and fits the ending that we use for most words ending in -us in the singular case.
The problem is that he is being payed by the tape. Thus if he playes the tape at a slower speed, it will take him more time to finish the tape. This will result in less dollars per hour. If he can get a computer to transcribe the tape in 4 hours, and correct the computer on the fly, then he'll make $10/hour. If he has to play the tape at 70% speed, it'll take him almost 6 hours, at only $7 an hour. Splitting the work up between two people would be the same as far as payment goes, because tapes are being finished at twice the rate, but there are twice as many people to pay.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. It was $10USD, not Canadian funny money. The Register article didn't specify which currency he was referring to, but on his webpage (google cache) he says it was US Dollars.
I had the same CPU in my first computer as well. I was kinda bummed when I found that it was only 150MHz, but I had a friend with a Pentium 166MHz, and there didn't seem to be much of a speed difference. I loved that old computer, it worked great for years, well after we got our first P2 and P3. I think it finally ended up getting sold in a garage sale when we moved into a smaller house without enough room for extra computers.
Wasn't even music. I was trying to find Abbot & Costello's Who's on First routine. I was into collecting MIDI and WAV files at the time, and saw something about a new WAV compression format called MP3. The article had a sample of a 300 second audio file which was only 600kb, drastically better than any wav file I had at the time. The quality was pretty good too, so from that moment on, I was hooked.
Sometime after that, I heard of a program called Napster that let you download mp3's of songs, and the rest is history.
In Soviet Russia, Robotic Scientists program YOU!
Especially the way they use time travel. Don't even get me started on those.
I know the parent is a joke and all, but seriously, will it generate enough energy to power whatever is used to keep the helium at such a low temperature? I would rather doubt that you'd get much energy out of such a system, with the amount of energy proportional to the amount of Helium. However, the energy needed to keep the system cold is also proportional to the amount of Helium. Could such a device work if the ambiant temperature was sufficiently cold (Maybe in an orbit perpetually in the earth's shadow or something). We could use this in conjunction with a microwave beam to send cheap power wherever we want.
Tibi is the prefix used for 1024*1024*1024, not Teri. The abbreviation for Tibibyte is TiB.
.931 TiB
So...
1,000,000,000 Bytes is 1 TB or
1,073,741,824 Bytes is 1 Tib or 1.07 TB
hope that clears up some confusion
Not for hard drive space. The standard is 10^x. In SI, the prefix Tera is 1000 Giga, which is 1000 Mega, which is 1000 Kilo, so a Tera is 1000*1000*1000 = 1000000000 = 10^9. There is another standard for the 2^x scale, but the prefix is not Tera. I think it's Teri or something rediculous like that. The 10^x standard has been used by disk manufacturers for years. The problem is that most people look at the disk size reported by Windoze. M$ decided to use the 2^x scale way back in the day, and never bothered to change it. People rarely actually look at their hard drives to see what capacity they actually claim, since the hard drive is inside the case, and most people rarely if ever open up their cases.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
if you go through all of the trouble of getting radioactive by-products to space, why not just crash them into the sun? We may find some method of breaking down the greenhouse gasses in Venus' atmosphere and creating a more hospitable environment there. If we have all sorts of radioactive junk lying around, we're just going to have to move it again if we ever want to colonize Venus. Now I know that this won't be for probably several centuries, maybe even more, but we need to consider this things when making our plans now. Maybe if we had thought more about disposal of radioactive materials back in the 50's and 60's we wouldn't have the problems with storage that we have now.
just my $0.02
the same reason as why people troll in slashdot. They like being annoying. They derive some sort of personal pleasure from annoying other people and/or wasting their time. Maybe they think they are some sort of "l33t __a.N.a.R.c.H.i.S.t__" or something.
Not even all that uncomfortable. IIRC, NASA originally planned on only pressurizing space capsules to around 5psi or pure oxygen. This is the same as the partial pressure of oxygen in our atmosphere, so the astronots didn't get high on O2 or anything. That's why the Apollo 1 fire was so bad.
Of course, I think the ISS uses normal 14.7psi of normal earth air, so they'd have to make the air a lot more Oxygen rich if there was a leak. Anyways, just my 2 cents.
Can't remember any sources exactly, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
*rant*
I'd rather die trying to get to mars than stay stuck here on earth and watch someone else do it, or some dumb robot. Humans should be starting to travel to other planets, because we are starting to realize that our civilization as a whole will have to undergo some rather drastic changes in the not so distant future. Our oil deposits will last maybe another 50 years or so, and with our current population growth, we'll have the planet pretty well overpopulated within a few centuries. The way we are destroying our environment is pretty bad (and i'm not even a tree hugging hippy or anything). We need to start looking to space for resources, real-estate, and energy. We can always talk about putting human spacetravel off until it's safer or we have better technology, but if we keep putting it off, it'll never happen. Mankind hasn't gotten out of low earth orbit in decades. It took less than 70 years for us to go from the first powered flight to the first moon landing. We need to continue this growth trend for the next 70 years, moving on to begin colonization of other planets.
*/rant*
Gore? He'd be an even worse president than Bush. I say Dole should run again ;) Sponsored, of course, by Viagra.
How do they know that that specific computer is one of the "free" ones? Why not just wipe the hard drive and install Linux? Maybe figure out what the format is for however the computer tells IBM that you viewed your quota of advertisements, and have a script that sends in an appropriate message every month or whatever.
While I'm posting:
Several years after the Great Biblical Flood, Noah is walking around checking in on all the animals. Most animals are beginning to procreate, and have large families, except for two snakes. Noah asks God why these snakes haven't mated yet. God replies that Noah should take some planks from the Ark and put the planks near the snakes. He does so, and sometime afterwords notices that the snakes have indeed been busy, and have a large family. When Noah asks God what the planks from the Ark did, God replied "Don't you know that Adders use Logs to Multiply"
Then don't turn on your phone. It continually amazes me that people will get a cell phone and then insist on leaving the phone on 24/7. Unless you are a doctor on call or absolutely need to have people get in contact with you, turn off your phone. I've had a cell phone for a few years, and keep it powered off unless I'm using it or expecting a call. The cell phone is there for *my* convenience, and I'll use it when I want to make a call, not when others feel like randomly calling me. Plus it saves the battery. I've been using the same battery in my current phone for a year, and it still gets about 6-8 hrs of talk time per charge.