But that unmeasurable 0.07C drop (incidentally, where did you get that number?) would mean that it hasn't raised the 3C we're expecting it to. It would mean we've managed to stop the upward climb and stabilise the global average temperature. With climate, if you're standing still, you're actually moving ahead (unlike the rest of life).
I know that climate change is a complex issue, and it may not be our fault, but do we really want to take the chance, and potentially find out it actually was our fault?
yeah, I always used Ilford Multigrade IV; I don't know if I ever tried Kodak paper... but if Kodak discontinues Tri-X pan (iso 400 movie film, it's grainy but sharp, which is a weird but attractive combination) I'll be very sad. hell, they probably already did discontinue it. Sad.
wow, I feel so sorry for you. Exact same thing happened to me. A capacitor in the PSU exploded and let out its magic smoke, along with some strange magic stringy things. It toasted an old video card, my new DVD burner, and, yep, a Western Digital hard drive. The controller board was charred and melted in places. (It was a WD300BB though, not a WD800BB.) I lost a project I was almost finished.
Sooooo I bought a new WD300BB off eBay, and by the time it came in, I'd finished rewriting the stupid project, so I didn't really need to recover any files on it. BUT! the controller board from the new hard drive did work famously, so if you do find a replacement controller board, you have a very good chance at success. One note: I did take care to buy a drive with the exact same model number -- there were a few different WD300BB drives, with different six-digit suffixes.
you're right; there is something wonderful about being able to say, "I have no idea." It's such a freeing thing, especially when one is expected to be an 'expert' (in other words, 'computer god'). And it is a testimony to the fact that Linux is becoming more and more useful, to the point that some computer users haven't even seen Windows for months ^_^
heh, you know, I've used Linux as my primary OS for so long (at first I spent about 95% of my time in Linux, but my Windows hard drive gave up its magic smoke, so now I use Linux 100% of the time) that I'm beginning to forget how to fix Windows systems... if I started saying, "sorry, I don't do Windows," it'd probably be mostly true... I just feel stupid at a Windows console. I mean, how do you track down a segfault with no strace, and how do you track down a server misconfiguration without comprehensive logfiles? Windows is so bloody hard to fix!:-D
I second this. BitTorrent is absolutely brill. I think it's so cool that, as more people start downloading the latest LiveCD for their fave distro, all of a sudden the network becomes more efficient, not less. That totally reverses the way things supposedly should be.
(Of course, I realise that the BitTorrent idea doesn't totally reverse the 'more clients, slower download' thing -- I've seen some pretty slow trackers, which are of course the point-of-failure for a torrent -- but I'm sure it's many times cheaper in bandwidth to run a tracker than an FTP site.)
that is a prodigious amount of corn. I wonder, I wonder... how about this? to reduce the amount of popcorn substantially, why not just cover the whole house with some sort of adhesive material and stick the popcorn on? Then when your friend comes home, he'll discover what looks like a popcorn sculpture that roughly resembles his house...
there are a few problems, though. The first is that you'd have to find a substance that is sticky but completely water-soluble (and of course biodegradable). Some possibilities are lecithin, dextrin, carragheenan, tapioca, ummm... watered-down corn syrup (think caramel corn)... you can make dextrin simply by boiling up a mess o' cornstarch and water, which converts the starch molecules to longer-chain cousins. Dextrin isn't quite as sticky as carragheenan or tapioca though.
Second problem is how to attach the corn to a vertical plane. You could blow it on... plastering it on with your hands might work (e.g., mix it up with more adhesive so it sticks to the already sticky house). It might be be rather time-consuming though (mind you, Mr Tin Foil wasn't too worried about time ^_^).
Third problem is that it might be a tad noisy... compressors spewing out sticky starch, fans blowing popcorn... you're looking for something secretive, aren't you.
Anyway, just some ideas. I just thought this would be the ideal solution to (1) the huge amount of popcorn you'd need (2) the problem of the corn blowing away from the exterior of the house. It'd be pretty visually striking, too.
oh yeah, I forgot to point that out... I noticed that the person whose post I'd copied said that MMX was i686, but forgot to address the issue. Thanks!
(wasn't aware that the original Pentium Pro didn't have MMX extensions tho; seems a little odd...
Most Ubuntu packages are brought in from the Sid repository, then brought up to the point where they could be considered 'stable' by most people's assessments (which isn't too hard with Debian, seeing as Debian unstable is like Gentoo stable ^_^). I haven't personally brought the Sid repository into my repository list, but from what I've heard, it plays well with Ubuntu. You could always stick with the Ubuntu universe and multiverse repositories, though, which contain a snapshot of the Sid repository (if I'm not mistaken).
I think the biggest headache you'll experience when using foreign repositories is that Ubuntu is moving over from fam to gamin for file monitoring, and this causes things to break ever so slight. Not a big issue; my computer is still working fine, but it can get confusing.
that's great for people like us who are comfortable doing that, but I think that the point your parent (my grandparent) was trying to make is that Ubuntu's requirement to install your own non-free packages makes it not quite ready for widespread use yet. I agree... but after using it as my primary (well, actually, only) desktop environment for a couple months now, I'm thinking that everything in the distro *besides* non-free packages is pretty much ready... I find it easier than Windows. (then again, maybe it's because I've been away from Windows for too long.)
My three fave parts of the distro are (1) the layout of the Applications and Computer menu (2) its reliance on apt and therefore Synaptic (through its Debian heritage) (3) the Project Utopia automounting/autoconfiguring wunder-stack 'Just Works'. These three things alone are enough to make it competitive with Windows (and having a package management system makes it better than Windows, in my opinion -- I think package management is a 'killer app' for people coming from the world of Windows).
yeah, I thought they shoulda been at Hexium too... considering their Pentium Pro (and later Celeron) chips were called 80686... They should be at Septium right now, because I b'lieve the P4 core is called 80786... wait, that's not true! look what I found:
There is no such thing like 80786! The last was 80486, and becouse of legal issues Intel changed its "labels" to PENTIUM class (I remember NEXTGEN was involved). My ways of thinking (CAN BE NOT TRUE): 80586 class = Intel Pentium, or 100% compatibile 80686 class = Intel Pentium MMX, or 100% compatibile 80786 class = AA-64 (or AMD64) and EM64T CPU's, or 100% compatibile (hope to be, for now ONLY MY ASSUMPTION) this way Intel Pentium II,Intel Pentium III,Intel Pentium 4, AMD K6-2,AMD K6-3,AMD Athlons (in all mutations), some other, not mentioned CPU's, are just 80686 CPUs, with some additional instrucions.
Might as well start arguing that a blastocyst is fully human. OK, if THAT is fully human, then why is an adult-derived stem cell not?
Actually, I was having a big debate with my geneticist friend about this very issue once, and we brought up the issue of blastocysts versus adult (or, for that matter, foetal or placental) stem cells, and he said there is a significant difference: only a blastocyst really has the capacity to create a full human. Other stem cells are versatile, but not versatile enough (unless you monkey around with the cells' structure, ultimately turning it into a blastocyst). To me, that says that a blastocyst is fully human, because it innately has the capacity to create a human being, whereas any other type of stem cell does not.
I don't think a mouse would have a human experience, because much of what we consider 'experience' -- our thoughts and feelings, our dreams, etc -- rely on the size of our gray matter. Also, I think that injecting human neural stem-cells into a mouse's skull is hideously bizarre, but it doesn't carry half the ethical problems as experimentation with blastocysts.
actually, zinc is quite a tame substance, unlike the other three. I've also read that zinc could be hazardous in the water, soil, etc, but those same papers I read recommend tossing zinc batteries in the garbage. As a matter of fact, many medical scientists suspect that zinc can actually boost your immune system when you're fighting a cold.
so yeah, I don't know why the authors of this article are up-in-arms about zinc; it's immensely preferable to lead.
heh, on the subject of plants that move when you touch them, how about a mimosa pudica? It is a tree, but you can keep it in your cube when it's still a sapling... apparently when you touch the leaves, or give the plant's pot a good sharp tap, the leaves fold up and droop towards the ground. (according to the link, it's a protection against locusts.)
Being a scanline RenderMan renderer, it's comparable to BMRT. Because Blender doesn't do RenderMan without a plugin, you couldn't really compare it directly to Blender's built-in scanline renderer. However, they're both basically similar ideas... shadow maps, shaders, ambient-occlusion shadows, etc. BlenderRender already has raytracing built in, though, I believe.
oh, I agree that DBDesigner4 beats the stuffing out of Access and then mops the floor with its remains, but as far as I can see, it's focused on making entity-relationship modelling as powerful and easy as possible, but you can't build those funky form templates that you can in Access... you know, the thingy where you drop all these widgets on a form, choose font styles, backgrounds, etc. All the stuff I've never had any use for.
DBDesigner4 is an open-source database designer for MySQL. It's not really a replacement for Access, as it doesn't have a form designer for non-techies to enter records. But for all the fancy stuff like designing databases and forming queries, it's beautiful. My one beef is that it depends on Kylix, and as such I still can't compile it in Ubuntu. Worked great in Gentoo though.
I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200, depending on its condition, the number of accessories, etc. The h3600 and h3700 series had problems with battery life, but the h3800 series solved that (mainly by putting a bigger battery in, but also by adjusting the requirements of the backlight). The h3800 also had an SD/MMC slot and Bluetooth.
HP is a huge sponsor of the handhelds.org project, which aims to get a good Linux distro on the iPaq, Zaurus, and (I think) Jornada handhelds. They run you through the installation process (and how to back up your original flash ROM in case you want to go back to Windows PocketPC) and provide a package management system and a host of other fun things. There are even a number of desktop environments:
Opie which is based off TrollTech's Qtopia (which I think is the enviro used in the Zaurus handheld). I can't comment on it much because I haven't been paying attention to its development.
GPE, which I'm more interested in, because it uses lots of freedesktop.org standards like HAL, DBUS, gstreamer, etc, and I'm a GNOME fan myself. The website is pretty spare, but if you search the mailing lists, you realise there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.
Both of those desktop environments are available in the Familiar distro, which is the standard iPaq Linux distro. Familiar provides an X server, Python, Perl, ssh, vnc, etc, etc, etc, so if you don't mind programming, you'll probably feel quite okay.
There's another distro based on Familiar called Intimate. It's closer to a desktop distro, so you can install KDE, GNOME, the Mozilla Suite, Fluxbox, etc.
One caveat: The iPaq installation HOWTO says that you need either a serial cradle or a CompactFlash sleeve for your handheld, so before you bid on an auction, make sure it has one of those two features! Not all iPaqs sold have CF sleeves!
(Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem! remember Zmodem?)
I'd just like to add my own stats to the discussion: my 'signal-to-noise' ratio is pretty low too, about 1:20. what does that work out to? uhhhhhh... I can't do math right now. 95% -- that sounds about right. Ninety-five percent spam.
I notice that the vast majority of it appears during the night time, so I receive it when I turn my computer on in the morning. Maybe it's because I'm on the west coast, and all the security-unconscious computer users on the eastern seaboard (and the rest of the continent) turn on their computers before I do?
Slashdot Mirror
But that unmeasurable 0.07C drop (incidentally, where did you get that number?) would mean that it hasn't raised the 3C we're expecting it to. It would mean we've managed to stop the upward climb and stabilise the global average temperature. With climate, if you're standing still, you're actually moving ahead (unlike the rest of life).
I know that climate change is a complex issue, and it may not be our fault, but do we really want to take the chance, and potentially find out it actually was our fault?
yeah, I always used Ilford Multigrade IV; I don't know if I ever tried Kodak paper... but if Kodak discontinues Tri-X pan (iso 400 movie film, it's grainy but sharp, which is a weird but attractive combination) I'll be very sad. hell, they probably already did discontinue it. Sad.
wow, I feel so sorry for you. Exact same thing happened to me. A capacitor in the PSU exploded and let out its magic smoke, along with some strange magic stringy things. It toasted an old video card, my new DVD burner, and, yep, a Western Digital hard drive. The controller board was charred and melted in places. (It was a WD300BB though, not a WD800BB.) I lost a project I was almost finished.
Sooooo I bought a new WD300BB off eBay, and by the time it came in, I'd finished rewriting the stupid project, so I didn't really need to recover any files on it. BUT! the controller board from the new hard drive did work famously, so if you do find a replacement controller board, you have a very good chance at success. One note: I did take care to buy a drive with the exact same model number -- there were a few different WD300BB drives, with different six-digit suffixes.
you're right; there is something wonderful about being able to say, "I have no idea." It's such a freeing thing, especially when one is expected to be an 'expert' (in other words, 'computer god'). And it is a testimony to the fact that Linux is becoming more and more useful, to the point that some computer users haven't even seen Windows for months ^_^
heh, you know, I've used Linux as my primary OS for so long (at first I spent about 95% of my time in Linux, but my Windows hard drive gave up its magic smoke, so now I use Linux 100% of the time) that I'm beginning to forget how to fix Windows systems... if I started saying, "sorry, I don't do Windows," it'd probably be mostly true... I just feel stupid at a Windows console. I mean, how do you track down a segfault with no strace, and how do you track down a server misconfiguration without comprehensive logfiles? Windows is so bloody hard to fix! :-D
I second this. BitTorrent is absolutely brill. I think it's so cool that, as more people start downloading the latest LiveCD for their fave distro, all of a sudden the network becomes more efficient, not less. That totally reverses the way things supposedly should be.
(Of course, I realise that the BitTorrent idea doesn't totally reverse the 'more clients, slower download' thing -- I've seen some pretty slow trackers, which are of course the point-of-failure for a torrent -- but I'm sure it's many times cheaper in bandwidth to run a tracker than an FTP site.)
that is a prodigious amount of corn. I wonder, I wonder... how about this? to reduce the amount of popcorn substantially, why not just cover the whole house with some sort of adhesive material and stick the popcorn on? Then when your friend comes home, he'll discover what looks like a popcorn sculpture that roughly resembles his house...
there are a few problems, though. The first is that you'd have to find a substance that is sticky but completely water-soluble (and of course biodegradable). Some possibilities are lecithin, dextrin, carragheenan, tapioca, ummm... watered-down corn syrup (think caramel corn)... you can make dextrin simply by boiling up a mess o' cornstarch and water, which converts the starch molecules to longer-chain cousins. Dextrin isn't quite as sticky as carragheenan or tapioca though.
Second problem is how to attach the corn to a vertical plane. You could blow it on... plastering it on with your hands might work (e.g., mix it up with more adhesive so it sticks to the already sticky house). It might be be rather time-consuming though (mind you, Mr Tin Foil wasn't too worried about time ^_^).
Third problem is that it might be a tad noisy... compressors spewing out sticky starch, fans blowing popcorn... you're looking for something secretive, aren't you.
Anyway, just some ideas. I just thought this would be the ideal solution to (1) the huge amount of popcorn you'd need (2) the problem of the corn blowing away from the exterior of the house. It'd be pretty visually striking, too.
marketing never did make sense, brutha. Marketers never bothered having that goal ^_^
oh yeah, I forgot to point that out... I noticed that the person whose post I'd copied said that MMX was i686, but forgot to address the issue. Thanks!
(wasn't aware that the original Pentium Pro didn't have MMX extensions tho; seems a little odd...
Most Ubuntu packages are brought in from the Sid repository, then brought up to the point where they could be considered 'stable' by most people's assessments (which isn't too hard with Debian, seeing as Debian unstable is like Gentoo stable ^_^). I haven't personally brought the Sid repository into my repository list, but from what I've heard, it plays well with Ubuntu. You could always stick with the Ubuntu universe and multiverse repositories, though, which contain a snapshot of the Sid repository (if I'm not mistaken).
I think the biggest headache you'll experience when using foreign repositories is that Ubuntu is moving over from fam to gamin for file monitoring, and this causes things to break ever so slight. Not a big issue; my computer is still working fine, but it can get confusing.
that's great for people like us who are comfortable doing that, but I think that the point your parent (my grandparent) was trying to make is that Ubuntu's requirement to install your own non-free packages makes it not quite ready for widespread use yet. I agree... but after using it as my primary (well, actually, only) desktop environment for a couple months now, I'm thinking that everything in the distro *besides* non-free packages is pretty much ready... I find it easier than Windows. (then again, maybe it's because I've been away from Windows for too long.)
My three fave parts of the distro are (1) the layout of the Applications and Computer menu (2) its reliance on apt and therefore Synaptic (through its Debian heritage) (3) the Project Utopia automounting/autoconfiguring wunder-stack 'Just Works'. These three things alone are enough to make it competitive with Windows (and having a package management system makes it better than Windows, in my opinion -- I think package management is a 'killer app' for people coming from the world of Windows).
naw, he's an Ubuntu user, so of course he has to 'sudo make install'! sudo can do evvvvvvverything in Ubuntu!
yeah, I thought they shoulda been at Hexium too... considering their Pentium Pro (and later Celeron) chips were called 80686... They should be at Septium right now, because I b'lieve the P4 core is called 80786... wait, that's not true! look what I found:
Actually, I was having a big debate with my geneticist friend about this very issue once, and we brought up the issue of blastocysts versus adult (or, for that matter, foetal or placental) stem cells, and he said there is a significant difference: only a blastocyst really has the capacity to create a full human. Other stem cells are versatile, but not versatile enough (unless you monkey around with the cells' structure, ultimately turning it into a blastocyst). To me, that says that a blastocyst is fully human, because it innately has the capacity to create a human being, whereas any other type of stem cell does not.
I don't think a mouse would have a human experience, because much of what we consider 'experience' -- our thoughts and feelings, our dreams, etc -- rely on the size of our gray matter. Also, I think that injecting human neural stem-cells into a mouse's skull is hideously bizarre, but it doesn't carry half the ethical problems as experimentation with blastocysts.
actually, zinc is quite a tame substance, unlike the other three. I've also read that zinc could be hazardous in the water, soil, etc, but those same papers I read recommend tossing zinc batteries in the garbage. As a matter of fact, many medical scientists suspect that zinc can actually boost your immune system when you're fighting a cold.
so yeah, I don't know why the authors of this article are up-in-arms about zinc; it's immensely preferable to lead.
heh, on the subject of plants that move when you touch them, how about a mimosa pudica? It is a tree, but you can keep it in your cube when it's still a sapling... apparently when you touch the leaves, or give the plant's pot a good sharp tap, the leaves fold up and droop towards the ground. (according to the link, it's a protection against locusts.)
well I'll be jiggered, you're right; BMRT isn't a scanline renderer -- it's a raytracer. I stand corrected.
Being a scanline RenderMan renderer, it's comparable to BMRT. Because Blender doesn't do RenderMan without a plugin, you couldn't really compare it directly to Blender's built-in scanline renderer. However, they're both basically similar ideas... shadow maps, shaders, ambient-occlusion shadows, etc. BlenderRender already has raytracing built in, though, I believe.
oh, I agree that DBDesigner4 beats the stuffing out of Access and then mops the floor with its remains, but as far as I can see, it's focused on making entity-relationship modelling as powerful and easy as possible, but you can't build those funky form templates that you can in Access... you know, the thingy where you drop all these widgets on a form, choose font styles, backgrounds, etc. All the stuff I've never had any use for.
If I'm not mistaken, its only conduit is through MultiSync, just like Opie or QPE.
DBDesigner4 is an open-source database designer for MySQL. It's not really a replacement for Access, as it doesn't have a form designer for non-techies to enter records. But for all the fancy stuff like designing databases and forming queries, it's beautiful. My one beef is that it depends on Kylix, and as such I still can't compile it in Ubuntu. Worked great in Gentoo though.
I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200, depending on its condition, the number of accessories, etc. The h3600 and h3700 series had problems with battery life, but the h3800 series solved that (mainly by putting a bigger battery in, but also by adjusting the requirements of the backlight). The h3800 also had an SD/MMC slot and Bluetooth.
HP is a huge sponsor of the handhelds.org project, which aims to get a good Linux distro on the iPaq, Zaurus, and (I think) Jornada handhelds. They run you through the installation process (and how to back up your original flash ROM in case you want to go back to Windows PocketPC) and provide a package management system and a host of other fun things. There are even a number of desktop environments:
Both of those desktop environments are available in the Familiar distro, which is the standard iPaq Linux distro. Familiar provides an X server, Python, Perl, ssh, vnc, etc, etc, etc, so if you don't mind programming, you'll probably feel quite okay.
There's another distro based on Familiar called Intimate. It's closer to a desktop distro, so you can install KDE, GNOME, the Mozilla Suite, Fluxbox, etc.
One caveat: The iPaq installation HOWTO says that you need either a serial cradle or a CompactFlash sleeve for your handheld, so before you bid on an auction, make sure it has one of those two features! Not all iPaqs sold have CF sleeves!
(Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem! remember Zmodem?)
just an addendum: I should mention that these figures are based on the average day, in which I see about 120 spam messages and six real messages.
I'd just like to add my own stats to the discussion: my 'signal-to-noise' ratio is pretty low too, about 1:20. what does that work out to? uhhhhhh... I can't do math right now. 95% -- that sounds about right. Ninety-five percent spam.
I notice that the vast majority of it appears during the night time, so I receive it when I turn my computer on in the morning. Maybe it's because I'm on the west coast, and all the security-unconscious computer users on the eastern seaboard (and the rest of the continent) turn on their computers before I do?
hey, I didn't really mean it when I said you could mod me down!!! :D