Dude, you just made my head hurt early in the morning. Don't you know, it's either liters/100km, or mi/gallon? Either way, 29mpg that your vespa does is quite bad. There are small cars cars with better gas mileage.
Riding a silent bike in town is a form of suicide. More than half of the time, the only way the drivers know you are there is by ear. It's the noise that makes you look for a motorcycle near you on the road. Bicycles are only safe because they don't mingle with large vehicles in traffic,
Also this thing is only comparable to a rather small motorbike, what with 8hp. It's equivalent to, say, 12hp gas engine, something like 1/4 liter engine. Which is probably a good thing, considering how unsafe it might on the highway without the noise.
OK, let's assume perfectly collimated diode laser, with divergence determined by coherence length. The latter for a typical diode laser would be about 1mm. For a very crude estimate, with a 600nm red beam, this means 300nm divergence over 1mm distance, or 300mm over 1km. Suppose you point the thing at a landing plane 200m from the ground, and the spot is 60mm in diameter. Suppose you have one of them those bigger 100mW lasers, not just a stupid pointer. Then the light intensity would be comparable to the 6mm spot from a 1mW pointer, which is rather bright. If you really do hit the pilot in the eye with this thing (which would be next to impossible to achieve other than by freak accident), you could really blind the guy. So, while a laser pointer would not be nearly strong enough to be dangerous, a bigger laser module could be, and modules like that are readily available.
Note that while the green lasers are not direct diode kind, they probably have about the same coherence length. Gas lasers achieve much better coherence length, but the power out of a cheap unit would be much lower.
Never understood why all these rival players seem to include FM radios...
This is for people who run out of music in their player, and want to tune in a local station. Starts to make sense to you once you neglect to reload your music, and now you are away from your computer, and still have juice in the batteries.
Most rival players also include an LCD, which makes a lot of sense, unless you're buying the player as a present to someone else:-).
Some rival players also include voice and line-in recording, and FM recording. Those are really rarely-needed features, but the manufacturers have to compete on something, don't they?
Serial port? Man, you need to upgrade your computer before starting to worry about mp3 players. Do me a favor, get out your trusty calculator and calculate how long it would take you to load that 1GB flash over a serial link:-).
BTW, there are some players that do what you want, i.e. FM and even line-in recording to mp3. Look up iAudio and iRiver players, and also muvo nx200. The later is even sold in retail stores. The cost is not $39.95, though, it's more like $139.95. But then, you being the guy who thinks serial port is still a fresh idea, you might just be a bit out of touch there too. The thing has an LCD on it, after all, and a big chunk of flash memory - I doubt you could have one made in quantities for 12 bucks each, and then you can't sell them for $40.
Ever try to swap a quartz in a notebook? You'd have to take the whole damn thing apart, take out the motherboard, find the RTC crystal on it, obtain a replacement crystal (same model/frequency), and solder it in. If you have enough skills to do that, you probably don't need to bother stealing laptops in the first place.
Most people who steal laptops don't even reinstall the OS, and I know people who recovered their laptops using the noip client that they had on the machine (http://www.noip.com).
The thing is, to measure clock skew on a suspect machine you need to be able to connect to it, and if you can connect to it, there is no need to additionally confirm that it's your machine.
This would've made great news around 1930, I suppose, but why is it a big deal in the 21st century? Just because noone has done it before doesn't make it difficult. There are many things that noone has done before because they weren't interesting enough for te trouble. These things usually make it into the Guinnes book once someone does them. They don't have to make big news, really.
...everyone I know, personally, is already either using Firefox or just the kind of person that'll probably always use internet explorer forever..
Don't forget that many of the latter kind of people are gradually switched over to firefox by the former kind of people, as in:
X: Dear, my computer is kinda slow, could you take a look?
Y(an hour and a few beers later): Here, click this orange round icon instead of the blue "e" when you go on the internet, and your computer won't slow down again, OK?
This way firefox gains installed base essentially at the speed of spyware, and we that's not slowing down, is it?
BTW, all the problems with IE were caused by the simple fact that it had no viable competition on the market for a long time, and the IE team had no reason to fix it and add features. I figure, in another year you won't be able to tell the difference between FF and IE in terms of features and stability, except that IE will, of cousre, retain its horrific ActiveX crud. All the better for the users.
The last laptop with similar specs that I got was a T series ThinkPad, ordered directly from IBM. But it was <$1800, not <$1200.
Dell makes cheap students laptops, clunky, large and heavy. Don't tell me $600 extra is not too much for what you get. BTW, if you really want a "student"-type machine (which I define as a cheap general-purpose 7lb 15" laptop with an optical drive), why not get a Toshiba? Build quality is definately better than Dell, and the price is similar.
BTW, when you say...Pentium M (or roughly similar AMD)..., do you realize that there is really no AMD processor similar to the Pentium M in performance/power consumption? AMD just doesn't make any CPUs comparable to PM. Their desktop 939pin 90nm cores kick P4 ass where performance/power ratio is concerned, but on the mobile end of the CPU lineup they are playing catch-up for now.
The last laptop with similar specs that I got was a T series ThinkPad, ordered directly from IBM. But it was...Pentium M (or roughly similar AMD)..., do you realize that there is really no AMD processor similar to the Pentium M in performance/power consumption? AMD just doesn't make any CPUs comparable to PM. Their desktop 939pin 90nm cores kick P4 ass where performance/power ratio is concerned, but on the mobile end of the CPU lineup they are playing catch-up for now.
In other words, Dell is a large company, and they can have a million corporate reasons not to use AMD chips - reasons that don't apply to me and you. Like, they can't source them fast enough, or they sell to stupid asshats who don't know about AMD, or AMD's president's third nephew screwed Dell's cousin's cousin's daughter. Why the heck do I care, unless they state their reasons? Also, I don't buy Dell computers because they are too expensive for what they are. I can get equivalent machines for less - quality, speed, support and all - from other vendors. If Dell is not competitive (for me as a customer, anyways) why should I care that they don't buy AMD CPUs?
There are these things called "supercaps" - some my old palm m105 used one for backup battery - and I know about it because the sucker was defective and I had to replace it.
There are also nickel-based batteries (NiCd especially, NiMH to some extent) that can be discharged and recharged safely in minutes, with a smart enough charger.
Current lithium batteries are slow to recharge because they have a high internal resistance, and low tolerance for overvoltage. A typical battery cell with 3.6V idle voltage takes no more than 4.3V when charging, and the.7V drop over the internal resistance allows very little current through the battery, which is why it takes 3hr to recharge fully.
The article gives no details, but they talk about nanomaterials in the elctrodes. My best guess would be, they came up with a way to increase the surface area of the electrode, lowering the internal resistance a 100 fold or so. Expect this battery to explode in your face if shorted.
The question is - will Joe Average find it so easy?
Joe Average signed up for one webmail service - he can sign up for another. The less obnoxious the mail service, the easier the signup procedure - the forms are shorter.
1. It would only make a difference if you could convey your above statement to the site designers of all the sites you browse enough time in advance of your browsing of the said sites that they would actually understand that their site is broken and fix it.
2. Javascript allows some sites to work faster. My bank is an example: filters and other commands that change the view of the data don't require any interaction with the server at all, so they are instantaneous. Without javascript every command means loading a page, which makes a noticable difference even for small pages.
Are you really going to complain loudly to the webmaster of every little javascript-based site you want to use and wait for them to redo the site?
Do you realize that many sites are actually faster with javascript on, because there is a non-trivial application running on the client site, and it needs to download no (or very little) data for many of the requests, as opposed to loading the whole damn page every time you want to change the width of a column in a table?
The problem is, there is no such thing as a bootable Windows CD, so you can't just run your AV software off a clean boot, like they used to do back in DOS days.
Then, again, any of you AV vendors out there care to release a Windows AV system that runs off a bootable CD? I mean, all it has to do is go through the files in the C: filesystem. HINT: recompile (the scanner part of) your product under linux, and package the sucker on a bootable linux CD. Shouldn't take more than 3 days of work, really. The AV software itself can be much simpler than your current full-blown Windows-hosted package, since it doesn't have to run off an infected boot!
You'd have to write the piece of code to mount the goddamn registry though.
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Ever seen a foot traveler overtaking a semi on the highway?
Dude, you just made my head hurt early in the morning. Don't you know, it's either liters/100km, or mi/gallon? Either way, 29mpg that your vespa does is quite bad. There are small cars cars with better gas mileage.
Riding a silent bike in town is a form of suicide. More than half of the time, the only way the drivers know you are there is by ear. It's the noise that makes you look for a motorcycle near you on the road. Bicycles are only safe because they don't mingle with large vehicles in traffic,
Also this thing is only comparable to a rather small motorbike, what with 8hp. It's equivalent to, say, 12hp gas engine, something like 1/4 liter engine. Which is probably a good thing, considering how unsafe it might on the highway without the noise.
OK, let's assume perfectly collimated diode laser, with divergence determined by coherence length. The latter for a typical diode laser would be about 1mm. For a very crude estimate, with a 600nm red beam, this means 300nm divergence over 1mm distance, or 300mm over 1km. Suppose you point the thing at a landing plane 200m from the ground, and the spot is 60mm in diameter. Suppose you have one of them those bigger 100mW lasers, not just a stupid pointer. Then the light intensity would be comparable to the 6mm spot from a 1mW pointer, which is rather bright. If you really do hit the pilot in the eye with this thing (which would be next to impossible to achieve other than by freak accident), you could really blind the guy. So, while a laser pointer would not be nearly strong enough to be dangerous, a bigger laser module could be, and modules like that are readily available.
Note that while the green lasers are not direct diode kind, they probably have about the same coherence length. Gas lasers achieve much better coherence length, but the power out of a cheap unit would be much lower.
everyone involved in not-for-profit copyright infringement.
In other words, everyone and their mother. And 12-year-old granddaughter.
Would you pay 5 cents for a song?
Hmm..no! Why? I can gett it for free off the internet...
Never understood why all these rival players seem to include FM radios...
This is for people who run out of music in their player, and want to tune in a local station. Starts to make sense to you once you neglect to reload your music, and now you are away from your computer, and still have juice in the batteries.
Most rival players also include an LCD, which makes a lot of sense, unless you're buying the player as a present to someone else:-).
Some rival players also include voice and line-in recording, and FM recording. Those are really rarely-needed features, but the manufacturers have to compete on something, don't they?
Serial port? Man, you need to upgrade your computer before starting to worry about mp3 players. Do me a favor, get out your trusty calculator and calculate how long it would take you to load that 1GB flash over a serial link:-).
BTW, there are some players that do what you want, i.e. FM and even line-in recording to mp3. Look up iAudio and iRiver players, and also muvo nx200. The later is even sold in retail stores. The cost is not $39.95, though, it's more like $139.95. But then, you being the guy who thinks serial port is still a fresh idea, you might just be a bit out of touch there too. The thing has an LCD on it, after all, and a big chunk of flash memory - I doubt you could have one made in quantities for 12 bucks each, and then you can't sell them for $40.
Ever try to swap a quartz in a notebook? You'd have to take the whole damn thing apart, take out the motherboard, find the RTC crystal on it, obtain a replacement crystal (same model/frequency), and solder it in. If you have enough skills to do that, you probably don't need to bother stealing laptops in the first place.
Most people who steal laptops don't even reinstall the OS, and I know people who recovered their laptops using the noip client that they had on the machine (http://www.noip.com).
The thing is, to measure clock skew on a suspect machine you need to be able to connect to it, and if you can connect to it, there is no need to additionally confirm that it's your machine.
..slight variations in the timing of the clock at various points throughout the CPU..
You are fucking kidding, right? He's referring to the real-time clock in your computer, not the delays inside the CPU.
This would've made great news around 1930, I suppose, but why is it a big deal in the 21st century? Just because noone has done it before doesn't make it difficult. There are many things that noone has done before because they weren't interesting enough for te trouble. These things usually make it into the Guinnes book once someone does them. They don't have to make big news, really.
The gate agent should've just told him it was an airline policy (which it probably is). Nothing wrong with that.
Though I should tell you, I really don't give a fuck if the guy trying to hijack the plane I'm flying on has an ID or not.
...everyone I know, personally, is already either using Firefox or just the kind of person that'll probably always use internet explorer forever..
Don't forget that many of the latter kind of people are gradually switched over to firefox by the former kind of people, as in:
X: Dear, my computer is kinda slow, could you take a look?
Y(an hour and a few beers later): Here, click this orange round icon instead of the blue "e" when you go on the internet, and your computer won't slow down again, OK?
This way firefox gains installed base essentially at the speed of spyware, and we that's not slowing down, is it?
BTW, all the problems with IE were caused by the simple fact that it had no viable competition on the market for a long time, and the IE team had no reason to fix it and add features. I figure, in another year you won't be able to tell the difference between FF and IE in terms of features and stability, except that IE will, of cousre, retain its horrific ActiveX crud. All the better for the users.
The last laptop with similar specs that I got was a T series ThinkPad, ordered directly from IBM. But it was <$1800, not <$1200.
...Pentium M (or roughly similar AMD)..., do you realize that there is really no AMD processor similar to the Pentium M in performance/power consumption? AMD just doesn't make any CPUs comparable to PM. Their desktop 939pin 90nm cores kick P4 ass where performance/power ratio is concerned, but on the mobile end of the CPU lineup they are playing catch-up for now.
Dell makes cheap students laptops, clunky, large and heavy. Don't tell me $600 extra is not too much for what you get. BTW, if you really want a "student"-type machine (which I define as a cheap general-purpose 7lb 15" laptop with an optical drive), why not get a Toshiba? Build quality is definately better than Dell, and the price is similar.
BTW, when you say
The last laptop with similar specs that I got was a T series ThinkPad, ordered directly from IBM. But it was ...Pentium M (or roughly similar AMD)..., do you realize that there is really no AMD processor similar to the Pentium M in performance/power consumption? AMD just doesn't make any CPUs comparable to PM. Their desktop 939pin 90nm cores kick P4 ass where performance/power ratio is concerned, but on the mobile end of the CPU lineup they are playing catch-up for now.
I reject Dell...again!
In other words, Dell is a large company, and they can have a million corporate reasons not to use AMD chips - reasons that don't apply to me and you. Like, they can't source them fast enough, or they sell to stupid asshats who don't know about AMD, or AMD's president's third nephew screwed Dell's cousin's cousin's daughter. Why the heck do I care, unless they state their reasons? Also, I don't buy Dell computers because they are too expensive for what they are. I can get equivalent machines for less - quality, speed, support and all - from other vendors. If Dell is not competitive (for me as a customer, anyways) why should I care that they don't buy AMD CPUs?
I reject Dell...again!
There are these things called "supercaps" - some my old palm m105 used one for backup battery - and I know about it because the sucker was defective and I had to replace it.
There are also nickel-based batteries (NiCd especially, NiMH to some extent) that can be discharged and recharged safely in minutes, with a smart enough charger.
Err...tubgirl>?
Current lithium batteries are slow to recharge because they have a high internal resistance, and low tolerance for overvoltage. A typical battery cell with 3.6V idle voltage takes no more than 4.3V when charging, and the .7V drop over the internal resistance allows very little current through the battery, which is why it takes 3hr to recharge fully.
The article gives no details, but they talk about nanomaterials in the elctrodes. My best guess would be, they came up with a way to increase the surface area of the electrode, lowering the internal resistance a 100 fold or so. Expect this battery to explode in your face if shorted.
The question is - will Joe Average find it so easy?
Joe Average signed up for one webmail service - he can sign up for another. The less obnoxious the mail service, the easier the signup procedure - the forms are shorter.
No site should *require* Javascript.
True. But:
1. It would only make a difference if you could convey your above statement to the site designers of all the sites you browse enough time in advance of your browsing of the said sites that they would actually understand that their site is broken and fix it.
2. Javascript allows some sites to work faster. My bank is an example: filters and other commands that change the view of the data don't require any interaction with the server at all, so they are instantaneous. Without javascript every command means loading a page, which makes a noticable difference even for small pages.
You block our ads? Fine, we'll just make it so you can't check your webmail so easily
You make me see a popup? Fine, I'll just switch to another webmail service.
Haven't you heard of gmail?
Are you really going to complain loudly to the webmaster of every little javascript-based site you want to use and wait for them to redo the site?
Do you realize that many sites are actually faster with javascript on, because there is a non-trivial application running on the client site, and it needs to download no (or very little) data for many of the requests, as opposed to loading the whole damn page every time you want to change the width of a column in a table?
The problem is, there is no such thing as a bootable Windows CD, so you can't just run your AV software off a clean boot, like they used to do back in DOS days.
Then, again, any of you AV vendors out there care to release a Windows AV system that runs off a bootable CD? I mean, all it has to do is go through the files in the C: filesystem. HINT: recompile (the scanner part of) your product under linux, and package the sucker on a bootable linux CD. Shouldn't take more than 3 days of work, really. The AV software itself can be much simpler than your current full-blown Windows-hosted package, since it doesn't have to run off an infected boot!
You'd have to write the piece of code to mount the goddamn registry though.