Chrysler released their electronically-controlled automatic transmission in '88 or '89. It was one of the first such transmissions, which is why for quite a while it was one of the most problematic ones. They fixed most of the mechanical defects within 2-3 years, but they were STILL fixing control issues in the firmware in '95. Doesn't help that electronically controlled transmissions are more sensitive to fluid type than hydraulic ones. Chrysler's 3-speed hydraulic automatics can pretty much run with any transmission fluid (Dexron/Mercon or Chrysler ATF+3 or +4), while their 4-speeds will die within a few thousand miles if you put anything but ATF+3 in them. Even today, LOTS of mechanics still try to get away with straight Dexron or Dexron with additives in Chrysler 4-speed automatics.
Nowadays almost all automatic transmissions except the most basic 3-speeds are electronically controlled.
While they may be a crappy brewery (although Blue Moon, a rather good wheat beer, is brewed by Coors), they are one of the top two ceramics companies in the world, with Kyocera being the other one.
Coors? Ceramics? Rather than heat pasteurization, Coors mastered the art of making ceramic microparticulate filters. Instead of killing the critters, Coors just filters them out. Coors is most likely the #1 company in the world as far as filtering technology.
Coors Ceramics and Coors Brewing Company are now seperate companies, but there's a reason they have the same name and are both headquartered in Golden, CO.
Rutan chose a hybrid engine (liquid/gaseous oxidizer, solid fuel) for just this reason.
Bad news: It can't be restarted.
Good news: It's nearly impossible for it to explode, can be shut down, and I believe is significantly more efficient than normal solid rockets.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of Scaled's next projects uses XCor engines - They're next-generation liquid-fueled engines that are designed to be inexpensive yet safe and powerful/efficient. XCor's current test aircraft (EZ-Rocket) is a modified Rutan design already, their chief test pilot is Burt's brother, and it seems like XCor would prefer to focus on engine development and leave airframe development to a partner - given their location and the Rutan-Rutan connection, Scaled is the logical choice. I would not be surprised if they're already working together on something that isn't publicized yet.
The wording of the article is rather vague, whether he was referring to the first flight or the second as far as it being his fault. Overall it was kind of confusing in that respect.
Later on it sounded almost like he was INTENTIONALLY rolling the craft.
RAF (Rutan Aircraft Factory) only exists now to support existing customers of their plans. I'm not sure if they ever provided actual kits. Currently you can't even buy new copies of their plans.
A few other companies are producing kits that are very closely related to some of the original Rutan designs, and may even be licensees of the designs.
If it's a movie I REALLY want to see, or one that the theater is especially suited to, I go out to see it.
Otherwise I just Netflix it.
Note: Matinee prices and student discounts are your friend. Parking $0, tickets $6 each, snacks hidden in large pockets, and I live in central New Jersey, where things in general are NOT cheap... Movie prices are far lower in less populated areas. Also, AAA used to (and I think still does) have discounted movie ticket vouchers for members. They often have some restrictions on use (such as needing to wait 2 weeks after release of a movie to use the cheap tickets). There are other sources of cheap tickets if you know where to look and don't mind a few restrictions.
Without any special utilities at all, I found the update rate and smoothness in Quake 3 to be FAR better than with my old USB mouse when I switched to an Intellimouse Explorer. My frag counts *instantly* went up after switching.
Nowadays there are far more accurate opticals with much higher update rates than even my IM Explorer.
In the period between 1959 and 1969 - money was no object. At that point, we were near the peak of the Cold War, and very few people in the American public minded spending exorbitant amounts of money on putting a person on the moon, because it meant beating the Russians.
These days, there is no Enemy that we must race to space to beat, thus there isn't an incentive to spend exorbitant amounts of money. The recent efforts (X-Prize, etc.) have mainly been in the arena of taking spaceflight and bringing the cost down.
IMO, we won't be seeing cheap Moon shots in only 10 years. But nonetheless, SpaceShipOne is an important first step to space.
Space tourism is likely not going to pay the bills, but SpaceShipOne + White Knight is not far in configuration from what would be needed as a first (actually in this case first (WK) AND second (SSO) ) stage booster for a small rocket designed to insert small payloads into low-earth orbit.
Then after we're slinging picosatellites into orbit dirt-cheap, the next step will be larger satellites. Then eventually, people. Then we'll leave low-earth.
It's going to take a LOT longer than ten years for the Moon to become cheap to fly to. (IMO it won't happen until a compact fusion reactor exists, but the way fusion is being funded, we won't be seeing one of those for many, many decades.) But suborbital flight is an important first step.
You're apparently using some form of display mirroring to display the exact same thing on two monitors. (I can't tell as the video is slashdotted...)
Are you using an actual splitter (i.e. the monitors are getting the EXACT same signal from the same video card output port), or are you using a dual-headed card with two video connectors, set up in software to do mirroring.
FYI, the latter tactic cannot in any way be used to judge the monitor, because it could easily be the video card itself that is lagging between outputs. In fact it most likely is considering that other owners of the same monitor have noticed no problems.
If you're feeding the monitors the EXACT same signal, then maybe your monitor is defective, or possibly if you're simply splitting the signals without any buffering or amplification, the LCD is reacting badly to insufficient drive signals. (Similar to how the one-machine-feeds-ten-monitors setups in your local Best Buy are a HORRENDOUS way to demo monitors, as the video quality is degraded so badly by the cabling.)
I have never seen lag attributable to a USB mouse.
In face, USB mice typically lag LESS than PS/2 mice because they update their position far more often.
The option in games isn't "REDUCE MOUSE LAG", it's "SMOOTH MOUSE", which is specifically designed around the problem of mice with low update rates (namely PS/2 mice, and in some cases REALLY crappy USB mice can have a slower update rate than a PS/2 mouse but it's RARE.)
I have NEVER had any sort of problem like this with any LCD monitor I've used, and two of them (My Inspiron 8200's UltraSharp UXGA screen, and my 1800FP DVI flat-panel) are both excellent.
IIRC, Dell purchases most of their LCDs from either Sharp or IBM. In fact, I believe over 60% of the world's LCD screens are made by Sharp.
You've got some sort of video driver or other computer problem, or your monitor is SEVERELY defective.
Older LCD monitors (and I mean REALLY old) did have problems with slow on-off pixel transition times, resulting in ghosting of fast motion. But I have not seen this effect in any modern LCD.
You'll go right back as soon as you see your cable company's prices.
DirecTV's basic Total Choice package? $40/mo, includes SciFi.
Want SciFi if you're a Cablevision subscriber? Please cough up $80-90/month, oh yeah and you still get fewer channels than DTV's Total Choice package.
Damn trees in the front lawn blocking my house's view of the DTV sat. Between CV's price insanity and those trees, my TV comes through a classic V/U antenna in the attic and I just get Stargate: Atlantis and SG-1 episodes via BitTorrent.
Yup. In general, manufacturing setups have a given probablity of a N defects within a certain area. That probability is basically fixed at any given point of time. (As time goes on and manufacturing techniques improve, that probability goes down.)
So if you have a 10"x7.5" display (75 square inches), the probability of the display being useless is far higher than, say, a 2"x3" (6 square inch display). In this case, the probability of a defective panel is over 10 times higher, PLUS the cost of a defective panel is significantly higher too.
There are a couple of companies (such as Rainbow Displays, http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/) that have been trying to make large panels by tiling smaller panels together, because the price per square inch of a smaller panel is much lower than a larger one, but so far such technologies are nowhere near mainstream. (So far Rainbow only seems to be able to do it for relatively low-res displays - Good when you need a large display but not high resolution, such as an airport departures display, which is what is shown in the picture on their homepage.)
Except that the scroll wheel is a variant of the touchpad, not the clit-stick as some of my friends call the little eraser-like pointer in the middle of the keyboard.:)
Uncompressed video means you have to waste CPU time compressing the video if you want to record.
The fact is, that OK video quality can be obtained by passing MPEG2 over a USB1.1 link. Just because your average USB1.1 TV tuner uses worse compression than MPEG2 doesn't mean that USB1.1 is bad for PVRs.
Although USB2 makes for some nice additional headroom if you want to crank up the MPEG2 bitrate really high. But anything above 8 megabits/sec can't be archived to DVD without recompression anyway. (At least not if you want it to play on any DVD player.)
55 pounds translates to at least 80-90 dollars US these days I believe, which is more than an Avermedia M179 goes for, which has built in MPEG2 compression, allowing you to record high-quality TV with minimal CPU usage. (When MythTV records from my Haup PVR-350 on my machine, there is zero noticeable CPU usage. I've stressed the hell out of my system by doing major recompiles during recordings and it didn't drop a single frame.)
There is actually a bonus to having a DJ on a station, it gives it a more "human" feel to it, whereas no DJ starts seeming like Muzak.
XM typically handles the balance well though, their DJs usually talk far less than FM DJs. Bodhi and Grant Random, the two DJs that appear on Squizz (XM's hard rock channel) are really good, and a good example of "not too much, not too little".
So reasons to get XM over FM: a) Variety, there's so much more you will hear on XM you'll never hear on XM b) No commercials c) Quality, and never needing to change channels because you're out of range. Of course you may want to change channels because you want to hear something different. I have 4 of my 6 car's FM presets set, and most of the time I only use one of them. On my Roady, I've filled all ten of my presets and use them all.
The variety and choice on XM is far greater than XM.
I've heard a lot of stuff on XM that I would never hear on your average Clear Channel station.
I love my XM receiver.
As far as the Sirius fanboys saying Sirius includes it for free:
a) Sirius programming is more "mainstream" (i.e. Clear Channel-style) than XM from what I've heard b) Above posters said the Sirius streams are crap quality c) XM is $3-4/mo less than Sirius for the base sub.
Slashdot Mirror
Polaroid really blew it there.
With a big name like Kodak marketing their technology, Polaroid would've made massive amounts of money by licensing the patents for royalty fees.
Instead, Polaroid just sued Kodak and prevented them from selling any instant cameras, relegating Polaroid to a small-time niche-market player.
Chrysler released their electronically-controlled automatic transmission in '88 or '89. It was one of the first such transmissions, which is why for quite a while it was one of the most problematic ones. They fixed most of the mechanical defects within 2-3 years, but they were STILL fixing control issues in the firmware in '95. Doesn't help that electronically controlled transmissions are more sensitive to fluid type than hydraulic ones. Chrysler's 3-speed hydraulic automatics can pretty much run with any transmission fluid (Dexron/Mercon or Chrysler ATF+3 or +4), while their 4-speeds will die within a few thousand miles if you put anything but ATF+3 in them. Even today, LOTS of mechanics still try to get away with straight Dexron or Dexron with additives in Chrysler 4-speed automatics.
Nowadays almost all automatic transmissions except the most basic 3-speeds are electronically controlled.
WRONG. Coors is indeed NOT heat-pasteurized.
While they may be a crappy brewery (although Blue Moon, a rather good wheat beer, is brewed by Coors), they are one of the top two ceramics companies in the world, with Kyocera being the other one.
Coors? Ceramics? Rather than heat pasteurization, Coors mastered the art of making ceramic microparticulate filters. Instead of killing the critters, Coors just filters them out. Coors is most likely the #1 company in the world as far as filtering technology.
Coors Ceramics and Coors Brewing Company are now seperate companies, but there's a reason they have the same name and are both headquartered in Golden, CO.
Rutan chose a hybrid engine (liquid/gaseous oxidizer, solid fuel) for just this reason.
Bad news: It can't be restarted.
Good news: It's nearly impossible for it to explode, can be shut down, and I believe is significantly more efficient than normal solid rockets.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of Scaled's next projects uses XCor engines - They're next-generation liquid-fueled engines that are designed to be inexpensive yet safe and powerful/efficient. XCor's current test aircraft (EZ-Rocket) is a modified Rutan design already, their chief test pilot is Burt's brother, and it seems like XCor would prefer to focus on engine development and leave airframe development to a partner - given their location and the Rutan-Rutan connection, Scaled is the logical choice. I would not be surprised if they're already working together on something that isn't publicized yet.
The wording of the article is rather vague, whether he was referring to the first flight or the second as far as it being his fault. Overall it was kind of confusing in that respect.
Later on it sounded almost like he was INTENTIONALLY rolling the craft.
He still is an *amazing* pilot.
RAF (Rutan Aircraft Factory) only exists now to support existing customers of their plans. I'm not sure if they ever provided actual kits. Currently you can't even buy new copies of their plans.
A few other companies are producing kits that are very closely related to some of the original Rutan designs, and may even be licensees of the designs.
Would somewhat make sense, as it only has to be put down and never retracted.
Was an interesting sight. I was looking away for a second, looked back, and just barely caught the gear popping down.
Watch the original Spaceballs movie...
Did you see how fast SS1 can put down its gear?
That roll on ascent was scary...
Probably 25%/75% movies/DVD for me.
If it's a movie I REALLY want to see, or one that the theater is especially suited to, I go out to see it.
Otherwise I just Netflix it.
Note: Matinee prices and student discounts are your friend. Parking $0, tickets $6 each, snacks hidden in large pockets, and I live in central New Jersey, where things in general are NOT cheap... Movie prices are far lower in less populated areas. Also, AAA used to (and I think still does) have discounted movie ticket vouchers for members. They often have some restrictions on use (such as needing to wait 2 weeks after release of a movie to use the cheap tickets). There are other sources of cheap tickets if you know where to look and don't mind a few restrictions.
Without any special utilities at all, I found the update rate and smoothness in Quake 3 to be FAR better than with my old USB mouse when I switched to an Intellimouse Explorer. My frag counts *instantly* went up after switching.
Nowadays there are far more accurate opticals with much higher update rates than even my IM Explorer.
In the period between 1959 and 1969 - money was no object. At that point, we were near the peak of the Cold War, and very few people in the American public minded spending exorbitant amounts of money on putting a person on the moon, because it meant beating the Russians.
These days, there is no Enemy that we must race to space to beat, thus there isn't an incentive to spend exorbitant amounts of money. The recent efforts (X-Prize, etc.) have mainly been in the arena of taking spaceflight and bringing the cost down.
IMO, we won't be seeing cheap Moon shots in only 10 years. But nonetheless, SpaceShipOne is an important first step to space.
Space tourism is likely not going to pay the bills, but SpaceShipOne + White Knight is not far in configuration from what would be needed as a first (actually in this case first (WK) AND second (SSO) ) stage booster for a small rocket designed to insert small payloads into low-earth orbit.
Then after we're slinging picosatellites into orbit dirt-cheap, the next step will be larger satellites. Then eventually, people. Then we'll leave low-earth.
It's going to take a LOT longer than ten years for the Moon to become cheap to fly to. (IMO it won't happen until a compact fusion reactor exists, but the way fusion is being funded, we won't be seeing one of those for many, many decades.) But suborbital flight is an important first step.
You're apparently using some form of display mirroring to display the exact same thing on two monitors. (I can't tell as the video is slashdotted...)
Are you using an actual splitter (i.e. the monitors are getting the EXACT same signal from the same video card output port), or are you using a dual-headed card with two video connectors, set up in software to do mirroring.
FYI, the latter tactic cannot in any way be used to judge the monitor, because it could easily be the video card itself that is lagging between outputs. In fact it most likely is considering that other owners of the same monitor have noticed no problems.
If you're feeding the monitors the EXACT same signal, then maybe your monitor is defective, or possibly if you're simply splitting the signals without any buffering or amplification, the LCD is reacting badly to insufficient drive signals. (Similar to how the one-machine-feeds-ten-monitors setups in your local Best Buy are a HORRENDOUS way to demo monitors, as the video quality is degraded so badly by the cabling.)
I have never seen lag attributable to a USB mouse.
In face, USB mice typically lag LESS than PS/2 mice because they update their position far more often.
The option in games isn't "REDUCE MOUSE LAG", it's "SMOOTH MOUSE", which is specifically designed around the problem of mice with low update rates (namely PS/2 mice, and in some cases REALLY crappy USB mice can have a slower update rate than a PS/2 mouse but it's RARE.)
I have NEVER had any sort of problem like this with any LCD monitor I've used, and two of them (My Inspiron 8200's UltraSharp UXGA screen, and my 1800FP DVI flat-panel) are both excellent.
IIRC, Dell purchases most of their LCDs from either Sharp or IBM. In fact, I believe over 60% of the world's LCD screens are made by Sharp.
You've got some sort of video driver or other computer problem, or your monitor is SEVERELY defective.
Older LCD monitors (and I mean REALLY old) did have problems with slow on-off pixel transition times, resulting in ghosting of fast motion. But I have not seen this effect in any modern LCD.
Slashdot renders like crap in Mozilla 1.7.x
/. has been HORRIBLY broken in Mozilla.
Specifically, the "left side" menus and the main page overlap most of the time. (That's what the original poster meant by "Slashdot left side".)
Half the time ONLY the left side menu and nothing else renders.
For the past month or two,
www.geocaching.com's front page is also broken in Mozilla.
When you agreed to the EULA, you agreed not to sue M$.
Odd that this is one of their biggest FUD weapons against OSS, "There's no one to sue.". Well, there's no one to sue with M$ software either.
Bitch about DirecTV all you want.
You'll go right back as soon as you see your cable company's prices.
DirecTV's basic Total Choice package? $40/mo, includes SciFi.
Want SciFi if you're a Cablevision subscriber? Please cough up $80-90/month, oh yeah and you still get fewer channels than DTV's Total Choice package.
Damn trees in the front lawn blocking my house's view of the DTV sat. Between CV's price insanity and those trees, my TV comes through a classic V/U antenna in the attic and I just get Stargate: Atlantis and SG-1 episodes via BitTorrent.
Yup. In general, manufacturing setups have a given probablity of a N defects within a certain area. That probability is basically fixed at any given point of time. (As time goes on and manufacturing techniques improve, that probability goes down.)
So if you have a 10"x7.5" display (75 square inches), the probability of the display being useless is far higher than, say, a 2"x3" (6 square inch display). In this case, the probability of a defective panel is over 10 times higher, PLUS the cost of a defective panel is significantly higher too.
There are a couple of companies (such as Rainbow Displays, http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/) that have been trying to make large panels by tiling smaller panels together, because the price per square inch of a smaller panel is much lower than a larger one, but so far such technologies are nowhere near mainstream. (So far Rainbow only seems to be able to do it for relatively low-res displays - Good when you need a large display but not high resolution, such as an airport departures display, which is what is shown in the picture on their homepage.)
Except that the scroll wheel is a variant of the touchpad, not the clit-stick as some of my friends call the little eraser-like pointer in the middle of the keyboard. :)
SPF is not meant to combat spam directly.
It is meant to make it easier to track down spammers if they happen to break an anti-spam law, as SPF prevents forgeries.
Yes, all a spammer has to do to spam you is to get a domain and set up an SPF record.
But at this point, you can track his ass down, complain to his upstream provider, and get him shut down.
It's a LOT harder to do that when the email is blatantly forged.
Uncompressed=bad in this case.
Uncompressed video means you have to waste CPU time compressing the video if you want to record.
The fact is, that OK video quality can be obtained by passing MPEG2 over a USB1.1 link. Just because your average USB1.1 TV tuner uses worse compression than MPEG2 doesn't mean that USB1.1 is bad for PVRs.
Although USB2 makes for some nice additional headroom if you want to crank up the MPEG2 bitrate really high. But anything above 8 megabits/sec can't be archived to DVD without recompression anyway. (At least not if you want it to play on any DVD player.)
55 pounds translates to at least 80-90 dollars US these days I believe, which is more than an Avermedia M179 goes for, which has built in MPEG2 compression, allowing you to record high-quality TV with minimal CPU usage. (When MythTV records from my Haup PVR-350 on my machine, there is zero noticeable CPU usage. I've stressed the hell out of my system by doing major recompiles during recordings and it didn't drop a single frame.)
There is actually a bonus to having a DJ on a station, it gives it a more "human" feel to it, whereas no DJ starts seeming like Muzak.
XM typically handles the balance well though, their DJs usually talk far less than FM DJs. Bodhi and Grant Random, the two DJs that appear on Squizz (XM's hard rock channel) are really good, and a good example of "not too much, not too little".
So reasons to get XM over FM:
a) Variety, there's so much more you will hear on XM you'll never hear on XM
b) No commercials
c) Quality, and never needing to change channels because you're out of range. Of course you may want to change channels because you want to hear something different. I have 4 of my 6 car's FM presets set, and most of the time I only use one of them. On my Roady, I've filled all ten of my presets and use them all.
The variety and choice on XM is far greater than XM.
I've heard a lot of stuff on XM that I would never hear on your average Clear Channel station.
I love my XM receiver.
As far as the Sirius fanboys saying Sirius includes it for free:
a) Sirius programming is more "mainstream" (i.e. Clear Channel-style) than XM from what I've heard
b) Above posters said the Sirius streams are crap quality
c) XM is $3-4/mo less than Sirius for the base sub.
And stick your antenna out the window. (Or you may be able to leave the window closed if there is no screen.)
My Roady (original, not 2) home kit is taking forever, I just switch the antenna between listening locations.
I'd pay the extra $4/mo if:
a) it works under Linux
b) It isn't restricted to a single computer
Would reduce stress on my Roady's connectors bringing it inside from the car every night.