A factual statement, but rather irrelevant, as we are discussing Brazil: a nation whose official language is Portugese.
(Portugese, Spanish, French, and Itailan are all decended from Latin, the language of the holy Roman empire. Hence their designation as the "Romance Languages.")
I always had a preference for the keyboard that came with my first computer, which had Control to the left of "A", and Caps-Lock as a single-width, mechanically-locking key at the bottem left corner of the keyboard
You could touch-verify the caps setting, and didn't have to have any of those annoying status lights.
As a bonus, the keyboard had a full number-pad, but was amazingly compact (no function keys.) If it had had Page-Up and Page-Down keys, I've used it even longer than I did.
What was it? The ADB-interface (Macintosh compatible!) keyboard that came with the last of the AppleII-series, the Apple IIgs.
You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered
This is an allusion to the final line of Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements" (written, I believe, for the educational TV program "The Electric Company" (targeted to the age group between "Sesame Street" and "3 2 1 Contact.") His tune "Ly" is pretty funny, as well, for something intended for educational TV.)
``These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.''
I was intoduced to Tom Lehrer's work by listening to the "Dr. Demento Show" on the radio (the man who gave Wierd Al Yankovick his first big media exposure.) Funny, twisted stuff.
I HAVE a bread machine: a Regal KitchenPro K6725, capable of making a 2+ pound loaf (5"x7"x5"+: it's dense.). The shortest cycle for making actual BREAD is 3 hours:
10 min knead+ 20 min rise+15 min knead+ 20 min rise+ 30 sec punchdown +55 min rise, and finally, an hour to actually bake.
If you make a white-bread with processed sugar, then you can use the "quick-bread" setting and cut it to 2:20 (no secondary knead/rise.)
The whole-wheat cycle takes 3:40 (longer rise times.)
The only way to get the cycle time under two hours is to forgo yeast entirely, and use baking soda or baking powder instead: 1 hour &50 minues for the quick bread setting.
In fact, even just baking the loaf takes a whole hour!
If it weren't for the timer letting me set a cycle to start while I'm asleep, I doubt that I'd use the thing at all. (It _IS_ great to wake up to the smell of fresh bread.)
My recipe for honey-grain bread(modified from the book that came with the machine.)
Add to the machine in order:
13 oz of carbon-filtered water (to remove the chlorine.)
-use more when it's cold and dry, less when it's warm and humid
1 teaspoon plain salt (I started using a free box of "canning salt" and just stuck with it.)
2 tablespoons 100% oil hard margerine (none of that half-water soft "spread" stuff.)
-I've got a slicing "butter dispenser" made by Kitchen Art that makes this easy. Plus, it's a gadget, so I love it.
1 tablespoon Honey (use pan-spray oil to get it to slide out of the spoon)
2 cups bread flour (I've been using all-purpose: it's cheap)
1 cup whole-wheat flour(why is this more expensive that white?)
1 half-cup of quick rolled oats
2 tablespoons dried milk (optional)
2 tablespoons oat-bran (optional)
1 rounded teaspoon active, dry yeast
Run on Basic or Whole Wheat cycle, let cool before slicing.
You've been told a million times not to exagerate!
Seriously, though: looking at a ramen packet, the first ingredient is enriched four, and the second is partially hydrogenated vegtable oil.
Hardly what you could call "mostly fat."
In fact, the nutritional information states that there are 8 grams of fat per 43 gram serving(one half packet.) That's 18.6% fat. Sure, it's high, but what did you expect from fried noodles?
And that is before it's prepared. Once you consider the two cups of water(227 grams per serving) that is added to prepare ramen-soup, you're down to a dish that is 3% fat.
Not quite as bad as you've been making it out to be.
I have a hard time thinking about food as other than "provisions."
In other words, I know that I have to eat properly in order to maintain the meat-sack that is my body in order to obtain optimum functionality from my mind, but why would I want to waste time or brainspace by learning special preparation methods for it?
"Cuisine" is simply a form of mental (or is it oral?) masturbation practiced by those who either have too much time on their hands, or for some reason need to distract themselves from the other aspects of their life while they eat.
Which doesn't stop me from watching "Good Eats" or "A Cook's Tour" on Food-Network occasionally: the physical chemistry behind even a simple mayonaise can be fascinating, and the significance that people ascribe to eating raw shellfish is intriguing, psychologically. Emeril, on the other hand, grates on my psyche like fingernails on a chalkboard.
In my opinion, eating is overrated, and I have a hard time believing that I'm alone among the crowd that is/.
Something that's always bothered me about the old "classic" video-gaming platforms (with exceptions like the Magnavox Odyssey 2) was that the joystick controllers were all digital, with either 8 directions or, sometimes, 16 (IntelliVision), but no control over the INTENSITY of the movement: any game that had you controlling a moving object in two dimensions (e.g. the aim-point in "Missile Command") had only one speed at which that point moved, making it difficult ot be either precise or fast in your positioning.
Now, what is a joystick, really? It's two potentiometers: one for horizontal (x-axis), and one for vertical (y-axis.) Atari 2600 joysticks aren't built like this, instead having on/off contacts only. But joysticks aren't the only controllers available for the 2600: there are also the paddles (and the keypads and the driving controller, but I digress.) And what is a Paddle? It's a potentiometer. And the Atari paddles are only available in PAIRS, which share a common connector to the 2600. This makes it possible to have four-player games like "Warlords" or "Video Olympics" by using two sets of paddles. Why did no one ever build the two potentiometers from the paddles into a single joystick? All of the necessary functionality is present on the 2600 side for analog 2D controls, so why not? (I'll grant that writing analog-control software on such a limited platform would be taxing, to say the least, but surely it's POSSIBLE.)
Heck, I've even soldered together a pair of capacitors into an adaptor-plug that lets you use PC joysticks on an Atari 5200 (using plans from the online Atari 5200 FAQ and an old Texas-Instruments calculator with the clicky keys for my keypad), surely such a project for the 2600 wouldn't be any harder?
So THERE's a challenge for the modern 2600 hacker: build a game that uses an analog joystick! (for a REAL challenge, make it two-player!) Heck, I'd even be willing to build a joystick adapter for the programmer who did it! (and gave me a ROM cart of it.) (OK, that's setting myself up, I know.)
The interface was all key commands ( A L = Attack with whatever is in your Left hand) (P R WS = from your pack, Pull using your Right hand, the Wooden Sword.) However, the graphics were sufficiently detailed (using the faux-monochrome display method, and simple vector graphics.), and the game played a number of distinctive sounds at ascending volumes as enemies approached, so you could plan your defense (or retreat, as appropriate for the strength of the enemy and your own health) before you could even see your enemy. The variety of enemies (spider, ghost, knight, wizard, etc.) not only kept the gameplay interesting, but allowed strategies to deal with enemies stronger than yourself later in the game. Yes, I burned many hours playing "Dungeons of Dagorath." and it wasn't even my CoCo!
There was even a sequel for CoCo3: "Castle of Tharogad", which had solid-color graphics and used a point-and-click graphical interface using the joystick (or mouse, if you had one.) Unfortunately, the graphical interface was actually slower to use than the old key-based one and, worse yet, the CoCo platform used the same hardware to do the D/A conversions for the joystick/mouse ports as it did for the audio, so the audio was lost as well. Too bad, really.
The best part is, they WEREN'T using an Altair 8800 to write the code! (they were a terribly designed machine: a reliable Altair 8800 is practially an oxymoron.)
In fact, the Altair 8800 hadn't even been RELEASED yet, when they developed Basic for it: they wrote it to run on the emulator that they had written to run on the PDP-10.
The funny bit? Because it was all emulated, they never needed to actually LOAD Basic onto their test "machine", so they never wrote a loader. Paul Allen wound up coding one up ON THE PLANE TO ALBUQUERQUE to demo the finished product! (hey, it had to be keyed into the unit from the front panel switches, anyway.)
Maybe not, but the backside of the moon is the place to build a very large telescope array that doesn't have to cope with all of the noise that is coming from Earth.
Did you know that the Earth is "brighter" in the radio spectrum than most stars? What might we be able to detect if our radio telescopes didn't have to cope with all of that backgroud noise? Putting the moon between us and the telescope fixes that problem!
Also, the moon is stable. Don't you remember that Hubble has/had a problem with vibration while passing into and out of earth's shadow due to thermal expansion and contraction in the arms holding the solar panels? That made the images from those times blurry. Getting the moon to vibrate would be much more difficult! Less vibration means sharper pictures.
As for the mission to Mars: you do know that the moon's gravity is 1/6th that of Earth, don't you? Well, what if most of the vehicle for the Mars mission is already on the moon? If we built the vehicle on the moon, we might actually SAVE on fuel getting it out of the gravity well and on its way.
Mining, refining, and manufacturing raw material into a Mars lander, vehicle, and fuel on the moon sounds like a very tricky problem, and one that I don't consider feasible on G.W. Bush's timeline for the mission, but I am not a rocket (or materials)scientist, so I'm not going to rule it out just out of hand.
Speaking of materials: I found the article in Discover magazine (last month?) on glassy metals to be fascinating: they have a much higher strength than the same amount of conventional, crystaline-structured metals. While the article made more mention of more pedestrian uses like scapel blades that are sharp, straight from the mold, and PDA frames that don't flex when you sit on them (thus keeping the screen from cracking), my first thought was "when can we start making spacecraft from this? We might finally be able to get a decent distance off of this rock, if we don't have to throw so much fuel back down onto the earth just getting into orbit."
"Due South" was a sort of Sit-com Cop show with a Mounty (RCMP) in Chicago, I believe. (Yes, a Canadian cop in the US: go figure.)
In this episode: http://www.realduesouth.com/Transcripts/112HAAH.ht m Frasier breaks into the computer by typing a password that he HEARD, but not saw. Based largely on the rhythm of the typing.
DVDs tend to have a layer of plastic between the foil and the outside. (Probably just for this problem.)
No, sorry: DVDs have a plastic layer between the foil and the outside because the DVD standard allows for double-sided disks: the foil (reflective) layer has to be in the same place on ALL disks, though, so your single-sided DVDs will have that extra layer of plastic to "fill out" the disk to the proper thickness.
Re:Google can't do it: phrase searches
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I performed the Google search for the phrase
"To be or not to be"
and I honestly can't see what you are going on about: of the first ten results, eight highlighted the phrase in the page synopsis, one used the phrase as a domain name, and one included the parital phrase "...Or Not To Be."
Note the elipsis on that last one: it alludes to a larger portion of text preceding the printed portion. And the domain-name was found even though the spaces were omitted.
Those aren't irregular results: those are highly intelligent results.
Just because they aren't deterministic enough for you to plug them into a piece of code of your own construction (without compensating Google) doesn't mean that they don't fulfill the purpose of the web search.
The problem with buried pipes as a cooling mechanism is that it is possible to cool the ambient air to BELOW the dew-point (in many climates)
The result is condensation, and that fosters the growth of molds, which can produce lung-irritating spores. Or worse, become a source of Legionaire's disease! (which thrives in similar environments to many molds: it was first discovered (IIRC) by the Centers for Disease Control in the swamp cooler of a high-rise hotel in a major mid-American (Chicago?) city, which was hosting a convention of the American Legion at the time of the outbreak. hence the name.)
In the real-world, programs need-to be idiot-proof, because the number of idiots that purchase the software will FAR outnumber the uber-geniouses that will. Guess which demographic will cost the developer more in time spent doing technical support? (hint: not the geniuses.)
Geniuses can get by with an application that requires the user to do things like translate coordinates from an n-dimensional array into a linear string (1-dim array), because they can do those things in their head. The rest of us want computer programs in order to AVOID doing tasks like that.
MAYBE the perfect programmer is one who is suffering from multiplepersonality disorder: an idiot and a genius with access to the same knowledge, of course!
Taxing blank paper? Insane, right? No government could HOPE to make that stick, right?
It was called the "Stamp Tax", and it was one of the reasons that the American colonies declared their independance from Great Britain. (Though I don't believe that it's specifically cited.)
A little revolution from time to time does wonders for clearing out layers of accreted bureaucratic crud. Now if only we could some how limit the accumulation....
Those "potato clocks" and such weren't really powered by the vegetable/fruit that they were plugged into: they were actually powered by the oxidation/reduction reaction differential between the two electrodes, just like a conventional chemical battery. (what, you didn't notice that the positive and negative elctrodes were made out of different metals? Shame on you!)
The veggies served only as easily pierced containers of weak electrolyte for the electrodes to be submerged in.
Slashdot Mirror
Now who's confusing the issue?
"-4K"?
Since when is it POSSIBLE to register a negative temperature value in degrees Kelvin?
"SHIPPING??!!??"
"...from Hong Kong?"
Whatever your point was, you managed to fail to make it to me.
Examples, please!
A factual statement, but rather irrelevant, as we are discussing Brazil: a nation whose official language is Portugese.
(Portugese, Spanish, French, and Itailan are all decended from Latin, the language of the holy Roman empire. Hence their designation as the "Romance Languages.")
You could touch-verify the caps setting, and didn't have to have any of those annoying status lights.
As a bonus, the keyboard had a full number-pad, but was amazingly compact (no function keys.) If it had had Page-Up and Page-Down keys, I've used it even longer than I did.
What was it? The ADB-interface (Macintosh compatible!) keyboard that came with the last of the AppleII-series, the Apple IIgs.
Is it named "Colin?"
This is an allusion to the final line of Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements" (written, I believe, for the educational TV program "The Electric Company" (targeted to the age group between "Sesame Street" and "3 2 1 Contact.") His tune "Ly" is pretty funny, as well, for something intended for educational TV.)
I was intoduced to Tom Lehrer's work by listening to the "Dr. Demento Show" on the radio (the man who gave Wierd Al Yankovick his first big media exposure.) Funny, twisted stuff.10 min knead+ 20 min rise+15 min knead+ 20 min rise+ 30 sec punchdown +55 min rise, and finally, an hour to actually bake.
If you make a white-bread with processed sugar, then you can use the "quick-bread" setting and cut it to 2:20 (no secondary knead/rise.)
The whole-wheat cycle takes 3:40 (longer rise times.)
The only way to get the cycle time under two hours is to forgo yeast entirely, and use baking soda or baking powder instead: 1 hour &50 minues for the quick bread setting.
In fact, even just baking the loaf takes a whole hour!
If it weren't for the timer letting me set a cycle to start while I'm asleep, I doubt that I'd use the thing at all. (It _IS_ great to wake up to the smell of fresh bread.)
My recipe for honey-grain bread(modified from the book that came with the machine.)
- Add to the machine in order:
Tasty, and filling.13 oz of carbon-filtered water (to remove the chlorine.)
-use more when it's cold and dry, less when it's warm and humid
1 teaspoon plain salt (I started using a free box of "canning salt" and just stuck with it.)
2 tablespoons 100% oil hard margerine (none of that half-water soft "spread" stuff.)
-I've got a slicing "butter dispenser" made by Kitchen Art that makes this easy. Plus, it's a gadget, so I love it.
1 tablespoon Honey (use pan-spray oil to get it to slide out of the spoon)
2 cups bread flour (I've been using all-purpose: it's cheap)
1 cup whole-wheat flour(why is this more expensive that white?)
1 half-cup of quick rolled oats
2 tablespoons dried milk (optional)
2 tablespoons oat-bran (optional)
1 rounded teaspoon active, dry yeast
Run on Basic or Whole Wheat cycle, let cool before slicing.
Seriously, though: looking at a ramen packet, the first ingredient is enriched four, and the second is partially hydrogenated vegtable oil.
Hardly what you could call "mostly fat."
In fact, the nutritional information states that there are 8 grams of fat per 43 gram serving(one half packet.) That's 18.6% fat. Sure, it's high, but what did you expect from fried noodles?
And that is before it's prepared. Once you consider the two cups of water(227 grams per serving) that is added to prepare ramen-soup, you're down to a dish that is 3% fat.
Not quite as bad as you've been making it out to be.
I have a hard time thinking about food as other than "provisions."
In other words, I know that I have to eat properly in order to maintain the meat-sack that is my body in order to obtain optimum functionality from my mind, but why would I want to waste time or brainspace by learning special preparation methods for it?
"Cuisine" is simply a form of mental (or is it oral?) masturbation practiced by those who either have too much time on their hands, or for some reason need to distract themselves from the other aspects of their life while they eat.
Which doesn't stop me from watching "Good Eats" or "A Cook's Tour" on Food-Network occasionally: the physical chemistry behind even a simple mayonaise can be fascinating, and the significance that people ascribe to eating raw shellfish is intriguing, psychologically. Emeril, on the other hand, grates on my psyche like fingernails on a chalkboard.
In my opinion, eating is overrated, and I have a hard time believing that I'm alone among the crowd that is /.
(My Google-fu is low, and all I can think of is a 4-bit encoder: 16 possible positions, which would be lousy.)
Now, what is a joystick, really? It's two potentiometers: one for horizontal (x-axis), and one for vertical (y-axis.) Atari 2600 joysticks aren't built like this, instead having on/off contacts only. But joysticks aren't the only controllers available for the 2600: there are also the paddles (and the keypads and the driving controller, but I digress.) And what is a Paddle? It's a potentiometer. And the Atari paddles are only available in PAIRS, which share a common connector to the 2600. This makes it possible to have four-player games like "Warlords" or "Video Olympics" by using two sets of paddles. Why did no one ever build the two potentiometers from the paddles into a single joystick? All of the necessary functionality is present on the 2600 side for analog 2D controls, so why not? (I'll grant that writing analog-control software on such a limited platform would be taxing, to say the least, but surely it's POSSIBLE.)
Heck, I've even soldered together a pair of capacitors into an adaptor-plug that lets you use PC joysticks on an Atari 5200 (using plans from the online Atari 5200 FAQ and an old Texas-Instruments calculator with the clicky keys for my keypad), surely such a project for the 2600 wouldn't be any harder?
So THERE's a challenge for the modern 2600 hacker: build a game that uses an analog joystick! (for a REAL challenge, make it two-player!) Heck, I'd even be willing to build a joystick adapter for the programmer who did it! (and gave me a ROM cart of it.) (OK, that's setting myself up, I know.)
Any takers?
Screenshot of "Dungeons of Dagorath" for TRS-80 CoCo2.
The interface was all key commands ( A L = Attack with whatever is in your Left hand) (P R WS = from your pack, Pull using your Right hand, the Wooden Sword.) However, the graphics were sufficiently detailed (using the faux-monochrome display method, and simple vector graphics.), and the game played a number of distinctive sounds at ascending volumes as enemies approached, so you could plan your defense (or retreat, as appropriate for the strength of the enemy and your own health) before you could even see your enemy. The variety of enemies (spider, ghost, knight, wizard, etc.) not only kept the gameplay interesting, but allowed strategies to deal with enemies stronger than yourself later in the game. Yes, I burned many hours playing "Dungeons of Dagorath." and it wasn't even my CoCo!
There was even a sequel for CoCo3: "Castle of Tharogad", which had solid-color graphics and used a point-and-click graphical interface using the joystick (or mouse, if you had one.) Unfortunately, the graphical interface was actually slower to use than the old key-based one and, worse yet, the CoCo platform used the same hardware to do the D/A conversions for the joystick/mouse ports as it did for the audio, so the audio was lost as well. Too bad, really.
In fact, the Altair 8800 hadn't even been RELEASED yet, when they developed Basic for it: they wrote it to run on the emulator that they had written to run on the PDP-10.
The funny bit? Because it was all emulated, they never needed to actually LOAD Basic onto their test "machine", so they never wrote a loader. Paul Allen wound up coding one up ON THE PLANE TO ALBUQUERQUE to demo the finished product! (hey, it had to be keyed into the unit from the front panel switches, anyway.)
Did you know that the Earth is "brighter" in the radio spectrum than most stars? What might we be able to detect if our radio telescopes didn't have to cope with all of that backgroud noise? Putting the moon between us and the telescope fixes that problem!
Also, the moon is stable. Don't you remember that Hubble has/had a problem with vibration while passing into and out of earth's shadow due to thermal expansion and contraction in the arms holding the solar panels? That made the images from those times blurry. Getting the moon to vibrate would be much more difficult! Less vibration means sharper pictures.
As for the mission to Mars: you do know that the moon's gravity is 1/6th that of Earth, don't you? Well, what if most of the vehicle for the Mars mission is already on the moon? If we built the vehicle on the moon, we might actually SAVE on fuel getting it out of the gravity well and on its way.
Mining, refining, and manufacturing raw material into a Mars lander, vehicle, and fuel on the moon sounds like a very tricky problem, and one that I don't consider feasible on G.W. Bush's timeline for the mission, but I am not a rocket (or materials)scientist, so I'm not going to rule it out just out of hand.
Speaking of materials: I found the article in Discover magazine (last month?) on glassy metals to be fascinating: they have a much higher strength than the same amount of conventional, crystaline-structured metals. While the article made more mention of more pedestrian uses like scapel blades that are sharp, straight from the mold, and PDA frames that don't flex when you sit on them (thus keeping the screen from cracking), my first thought was "when can we start making spacecraft from this? We might finally be able to get a decent distance off of this rock, if we don't have to throw so much fuel back down onto the earth just getting into orbit."
Cool! Autobot or Decepticon?
Origami, the geometry of paper folding, looks simple when you're a kid. But it's actually quite challenging to design a robot to do it.
Phooey.
Seriously, though: wouldn't an origami Megatron or StarScream just ROCK?
"Due South" was a sort of Sit-com Cop show with a Mounty (RCMP) in Chicago, I believe. (Yes, a Canadian cop in the US: go figure.)
In this episode: http://www.realduesouth.com/Transcripts/112HAAH.ht m
Frasier breaks into the computer by typing a password that he HEARD, but not saw. Based largely on the rhythm of the typing.
You decide!
No, sorry: DVDs have a plastic layer between the foil and the outside because the DVD standard allows for double-sided disks: the foil (reflective) layer has to be in the same place on ALL disks, though, so your single-sided DVDs will have that extra layer of plastic to "fill out" the disk to the proper thickness.
"To be or not to be"
and I honestly can't see what you are going on about: of the first ten results, eight highlighted the phrase in the page synopsis, one used the phrase as a domain name, and one included the parital phrase "...Or Not To Be."
Note the elipsis on that last one: it alludes to a larger portion of text preceding the printed portion. And the domain-name was found even though the spaces were omitted.
Those aren't irregular results: those are highly intelligent results.
Just because they aren't deterministic enough for you to plug them into a piece of code of your own construction (without compensating Google) doesn't mean that they don't fulfill the purpose of the web search.
The problem with buried pipes as a cooling mechanism is that it is possible to cool the ambient air to BELOW the dew-point (in many climates)
The result is condensation, and that fosters the growth of molds, which can produce lung-irritating spores. Or worse, become a source of Legionaire's disease! (which thrives in similar environments to many molds: it was first discovered (IIRC) by the Centers for Disease Control in the swamp cooler of a high-rise hotel in a major mid-American (Chicago?) city, which was hosting a convention of the American Legion at the time of the outbreak. hence the name.)
That would be EXACTLY, DIAMETRICALLY wrong.
In the real-world, programs need-to be idiot-proof, because the number of idiots that purchase the software will FAR outnumber the uber-geniouses that will. Guess which demographic will cost the developer more in time spent doing technical support? (hint: not the geniuses.)
Geniuses can get by with an application that requires the user to do things like translate coordinates from an n-dimensional array into a linear string (1-dim array), because they can do those things in their head. The rest of us want computer programs in order to AVOID doing tasks like that.
MAYBE the perfect programmer is one who is suffering from multiplepersonality disorder: an idiot and a genius with access to the same knowledge, of course!
Or maybe it's not that simple.
Taxing blank paper? Insane, right? No government could HOPE to make that stick, right?
It was called the "Stamp Tax", and it was one of the reasons that the American colonies declared their independance from Great Britain. (Though I don't believe that it's specifically cited.)
A little revolution from time to time does wonders for clearing out layers of accreted bureaucratic crud. Now if only we could some how limit the accumulation....
that would be an "engorgement-activated sundial"
Those "potato clocks" and such weren't really powered by the vegetable/fruit that they were plugged into: they were actually powered by the oxidation/reduction reaction differential between the two electrodes, just like a conventional chemical battery. (what, you didn't notice that the positive and negative elctrodes were made out of different metals? Shame on you!)
The veggies served only as easily pierced containers of weak electrolyte for the electrodes to be submerged in.