An apochromatic refractor is color corrected against at least 3 wavelengths of light. The cheaper acrochromatic type is corrected against 2 wavelengths. Most of the largest (and most famous) refractors ever built used just two pieces of glass, and so were acrochromatic types. However by using a focal length of F15 or greater, the residual color of these telescopes is not a problem. More modern lenses are made from 3 or more glass elements which reduce the color to a very small percentage, and allow shorter focal lengths.
Both types of lenses use combined elements made from glass with different refractive indexes, and though careful combination of these with the focal lengths (positive and negative) of the elements as many wavelengths of light as possible are brought into focus at the same point. With two glass elements two (or at most 3) wavelengths will focus at the same point. With more elements, most of the visible spectrum can be brought into focus at the same point. The design math involved in created both acrochromatic and apochromatic lenses is complex enough that it evaded the great Issac Newton in how to do it (so he invented the reflector instead).
I hope they release info on the video capture and TV out features of all of the ATI chipsets. It would be great to be able to support all of the features in the "all in one" chipsets. Especially the new HDTV tuner / capture cards.
Even if you distribute binaries in their pristine forms you STILL need to make the source code available, and (probably) include the license agreement with the code. Also (IANAL) I thought that under the GPL any code that was linked in with GPL'ed code also had to be GPL'ed. DLL's would qualify (unless the code was LGPL). Also if the DLL's were created by linking GPL'ed code with other code, then the resulting DLL 's are GPL'ed and the source of the added code MUST be made available. (Where is RMS on this?)
My response to the format wars was to buy an Oppo DV-981HD dvd player. This is the best upconverting dvd player you can buy, it's better than many selling for twice the price. This player will buy me time by making my current dvd collection viewable on my new HDTV. Eventually more companies will produce dual format machines and the format war will be over, as far as the consumer is concerned. Some patent holder will be left holding the bag, T.S.!
To answer a question, there is NOTHING obsolete about spinning disks. The process of mastering and pressing DVD/CD's is the most cost effective way to produce read only copies of media. On-line downloading of video content requires lots of bandwidth that is not available on the current inferstructure. Buying dvd's or renting them is a choice up to the individual. But with it being cheaper to buy a dvd then to take the family to the movies, dvd's will still sell. Even better, borrow a dvd from your public library!
RCA made a 45 rpm auto player for singles. It was slot loading just like a 5.25" floppy disk drive. You inserted the record and pushed down on a lever to lock it in place. When the record finished playing it was ejected by itself. They also made a version of the same machine that could be used in the home.
At the time of its' design, the Space Shuttle made a lot of sense. The original concept called for full horizontal takeoff and landing with ALL parts being reusable. Due to cost over runs we ended up with the system we currently have. The original idea was to have an air breathing booster taking off from a runway which would fly up to the top of the stratosphere at which point it would switch to rocket power and climb up to a sub-orbital arc and release the orbiter. The 'booster-naults' would then guide the winged booster back to a safe landing at the 'cape while the shuttle would climb on its' own rocket power into orbit like now. The shuttle would need less rocket power to do this and the fuel tanks would have been self contained instead of external. Engine development on the shuttle would have been cheaper and the entire system would have been a lot more reliable. The problem was the cost of developing TWO space craft at the same time. The current shuttle made use of existing solid rocket technology (up scaled versions of the boosters used by the Delta rocket), and upscaled Apollo engines.
Re:As much as I hate to suggest this...
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 1
Most people do NOT know how to protect computers from the internet, NOR SHOULD THEY! The computer makers and the OS writers should handle this, it's THEIR PRODUCT!!!
Hey DELL and M$! I bought this computer from you and it got itself infected with spambots because YOU didn't provide the security to prevent this. So (to quote Weird Al) I'LL SUE YA!
There are some things a person CAN do to improve their health. There are other things that they CANNOT do. Blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and body mass are NOT things we can change by will alone. People that have high blood pressure can sometimes get this under control with drugs and diet. Cholesterol is harder to control, but can respond to drugs and diet as well. Loosing weight requires a life style change, and if your genes are just 'wrong' NOTHING you do will change a thing. Insurance MUST cover treatments for cholesterol and blood pressure, not deny coverage based on it! (COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE MAN!). About the ONLY thing that would be fair would be charging smokers more for coverage, THAT is something that you can control. To be fair, the insurance should cover treatment for aid in quiting (at 100%) for a period long enough for the average person to quit.
"Broadcasters are claiming however that sharing media between devices over the air constitutes a grey area that needs to be more strictly controlled to fight piracy."
Well this sounds like it applies to WIRELESS networks but NOT to WIRED networks. So, I'm good.
But then again, maybe not. I know people who pay more for bottled water price-per-gallon than gasoline... and they complain about the price of gasoline. Yeah but you can't drink gasoline.
In most theaters they usually show a short bit about turning off cell phones and not talking during the movie so as not to disturb others who are actually WATCHING THE MOVIE. They should also put up a notice that cameras are NOT allowed in the theater and that if you get caught with one you will be ejected from the theater and possibly arrested. Actually, the notice should be a big sign pasted up by the box office and also printed on the tickets.
First of all you COULD record your own 8 tracks. Several companies (even Rat Shack) sold 8 track recorders and blank tapes. The only problem was 8 TRACKS SUCK. Tremendous flutter and wow, poor frequency response and short tape life (every have to remove a gordian knot of tape from a car player after pulling the cart out?)
Laser Disks were NOT killed off by VHS. The two formats lived side by side for the life of both. (OK VHS is still around, but not for pre-recorded). In comparing software costs people seem to forget the bad old days when VHS videos were $50-$100 each. It took the studios a while to realize that they could make more money at the $20 price point (and you can thank Kmart for that). While Laserdisk was selling along side RCA's CED disks laser disk prices dropped to about $25 a disk for most titles. I NEVER spend as much as $50 for a laser disk (well, except for a few collector's packages recorded in CAV format). Machines did drop in price to $250 or less. What kept laser disk in the background was that you could NOT record on them. So you had to buy two machines, one disk and one tape. Why bother if you could get pre-recorded tapes (even if they looked like crap compared to the laser disk)? It was DVD that signed laser disks death warrant. Smaller, cheaper (eventually), better picture, and backward compatible with CD's. What more could you want?
BTW strange as it may seem laser disks were NEVER copy protected. No macrovision crap. You can copy ANY laser disk to VHS or DVD without any hacking (just two machines and jumper cables).
Trakfone isn't that expensive when you buy a year long time card. For under $100 you get a full year of service and several hundred minutes of air time. You can extend the air time at any time buy buying additional air time cards. There are also 1 year service cards that give you DOUBLE the air time on each additional air time cards you add.
Finally Trakfone has cloned themselves with NET10, a sister service that is only 10 cents a minute (or LESS) depending on the air time cards you purchase. Net10 is a "buy in bulk" version of Trakfone, so it costs more for their air time cards because you are buying more minutes at each purchase, but paying less per minute. The only down side is that Trakfone seems to have a larger choice of phones than NET10.
My wife and I are very happy with our Trakfones, though service inside some shopping malls is spotty (maybe the malls are rf shielded against cell phones?).
Debian and Ubuntu have compatibility binaries available to support running x86 binaries, but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this. BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.
Ubuntu's strongest point is it's Debian roots. In some cases you can install packages from Debian's repository. You can also install the deb-package tools and build missing Debian packages from source that will then be compatible with Ubuntu (because they were linked against Ubuntu packages).
Finally, Debian is a possible upgrade path to Ubuntu. While there has been a bit of a split between Debian and Ubuntu, they still share a great deal of code AND a great package system.
Years age the state of N.H. had some state sponsored liquor stores on the interstate. Residents of Mass. would cross the border to buy liquor cheap in N.H. (bootlegging ?). Well Mass. get pissed off at loosing state sales taxes on booze so they had the Mass. state troopers stationed in unmarked cars in front of the N.H. liquor stores to radio license tag numbers back to troopers on the Mass. side of the border. The Mass. cops would then arrest those who crossed the border with the booze. The N.H. state police got even. They arrested the Mass. troopers for loitering.
The owners of the coffee houses shouldn't have to pay the fees, the musicians should. It is the musicians that are making money from playing the copyrighted material, and they should pay to make use of it. The person hiring the musicians is just buying a service. I guess the responsibility DOES end up on the person hiring the musicians to make sure THEY have paid the fees, but it shouldn't be that way. After all who is the music expert here?
Once upon a time all prototype electronics were wirewrapped. Today, it's a dying art. When dip IC's ruled the roost wirewrap was king. Today, surface mount ic's are king and pc boards rule.
Also as circuit speeds went up, wirewrap stopped working. With clock speeds under 5 mhz, the long leads of wire wrapped construction with signals running parallel worked well enough. With today's 100mhz+ clocks wirewrap would have fatal crosstalk. Back in the 80's a company I worked for tried to wirewrap a cpu prototype using 10mhz processors. We NEVER got it to work, too many problems with crosstalk. A 4 layer circuit board was MUCH quieter, and worked fine.
Then there is the issue of labor. With computer layout software and automated fabs it's much cheaper and faster to have a pc prototype made than to pay some tech's to wirewrap a proto. In fact you can go through two or three pc prototypes in the time/money required to do just ONE wirewrap one.
After Hurricane Wilma in South Florida we were without power for almost two weeks. I don't know how long the phones stayed up after the power went down because the storm ripped our phone lines out of the ground when a stand of trees uprooted (the phone lines were buried so long ago that the tree roots grew around them).
Ma bell did start to deploy generators to replace dead batteries so the phones came back on line as soon as they spliced a new section of cable in. BTW have you EVER seen the batteries Ma Bell uses? They are lead / acid storage batteries, each 2v cell is as big as a refigerator!
I mean it's damn rude of the guy. If I paid good money for tickets to see a movie I don't want some bozo in the row ahead of me to stick his stupid movie camera in my view of the screen. Why that's only slightly less rude than leaving your damn cell phone on and I have to hear your stupid ring tones though out the picture.
I may be wrong, but I'm sure that the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2 ONLY. Linus did NOT state GPLv2 OR LATER, and that has not (yet) changed. Of course the GNU portions of any 'distro ARE licensed under GPLv2 OR LATER, this may also change to GPLv3 ONLY knowing RMS. (is GPLv2 compatible with GPLv3 and visa versa?)
So as far as the kernel is concerned, M$ has no problems being bound by GPLv3, it does not apply. As far as the GNU software, we shall see.
Slashdot Mirror
An apochromatic refractor is color corrected against at least 3 wavelengths of light.
The cheaper acrochromatic type is corrected against 2 wavelengths. Most of the largest (and most famous) refractors ever built used just two pieces of glass, and so were acrochromatic types. However by using a focal length of F15 or greater, the residual color of these telescopes is not a problem. More modern lenses are made from 3 or more glass elements which reduce the color to a very small percentage, and allow shorter focal lengths.
Both types of lenses use combined elements made from glass with different refractive indexes, and though careful combination of these with the focal lengths (positive and negative) of the elements as many wavelengths of light as possible are brought into focus at the same point. With two glass elements two (or at most 3) wavelengths will focus at the same point. With more elements, most of the visible spectrum can be brought into focus at the same point. The design math involved in created both acrochromatic and apochromatic lenses is complex enough that it evaded the great Issac Newton in how to do it (so he invented the reflector instead).
Just a big pile of legal mumbo jumbo.
I hope they release info on the video capture and TV out features of all of the ATI chipsets. It would be great to be able to support all of the features in the "all in one" chipsets. Especially the new HDTV tuner / capture cards.
Microsoftsucks
billblows
windowsisshit
Even if you distribute binaries in their pristine forms you STILL need to make the source code available, and (probably) include the license agreement with the code. Also (IANAL) I thought that under the GPL any code that was linked in with GPL'ed code also had to be GPL'ed. DLL's would qualify (unless the code was LGPL). Also if the DLL's were created by linking GPL'ed code with other code, then the resulting DLL
's are GPL'ed and the source of the added code MUST be made available. (Where is RMS on this?)
My response to the format wars was to buy an Oppo DV-981HD dvd player. This is the best upconverting dvd player you can buy, it's better than many selling for twice the price. This player will buy me time by making my current dvd collection viewable on my new HDTV. Eventually more companies will produce dual format machines and the format war will be over, as far as the consumer is concerned. Some patent holder will be left holding the bag, T.S.!
To answer a question, there is NOTHING obsolete about spinning disks. The process of mastering and pressing DVD/CD's is the most cost effective way to produce read only copies of media. On-line downloading of video content requires lots of bandwidth that is not available on the current inferstructure. Buying dvd's or renting them is a choice up to the individual. But with it being cheaper to buy a dvd then to take the family to the movies, dvd's will still sell. Even better, borrow a dvd from your public library!
RCA made a 45 rpm auto player for singles. It was slot loading just
like a 5.25" floppy disk drive. You inserted the record and pushed down on
a lever to lock it in place. When the record finished playing it
was ejected by itself. They also made a version of the same machine that
could be used in the home.
At the time of its' design, the Space Shuttle made a lot of sense. The original concept called for full horizontal takeoff and landing with ALL parts being reusable. Due to cost over runs we ended up with the system we currently have. The original idea was to have an air breathing booster taking off from a runway which would fly up to the top of the stratosphere at which point it would switch to rocket power and climb up to a sub-orbital arc and release the orbiter. The 'booster-naults' would then guide the winged booster back to a safe landing at the 'cape while the shuttle would climb on its' own rocket power into orbit like now. The shuttle would need less rocket power to do this and the fuel tanks would have been self contained instead of external. Engine development on the shuttle would have been cheaper and the entire system would have been a lot more reliable. The problem was the cost of developing TWO space craft at the same time. The current shuttle made use of existing solid rocket technology (up scaled versions of the boosters used by the Delta rocket), and upscaled Apollo engines.
Most people do NOT know how to protect computers from the internet, NOR SHOULD THEY!
The computer makers and the OS writers should handle this, it's THEIR PRODUCT!!!
Hey DELL and M$! I bought this computer from you and it got itself infected with
spambots because YOU didn't provide the security to prevent this. So (to quote
Weird Al) I'LL SUE YA!
There are some things a person CAN do to improve their health. There are other things that they CANNOT do. Blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and body mass are NOT things we can change by will alone. People that have high blood pressure can sometimes get this under control with drugs and diet. Cholesterol is harder to control, but can respond to drugs and diet as well. Loosing weight requires a life style change, and if your genes are just 'wrong' NOTHING you do will change a thing. Insurance MUST cover treatments for cholesterol and blood pressure, not deny coverage based on it!
(COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE MAN!). About the ONLY thing that would be fair would be charging smokers more for coverage, THAT is something that you can control. To be fair, the insurance should cover treatment for aid in quiting (at 100%) for a period long enough for the average person to quit.
"Broadcasters are claiming however that sharing media between devices over the air constitutes a grey area that needs to be more strictly controlled to fight piracy."
Well this sounds like it applies to WIRELESS networks but NOT to WIRED networks.
So, I'm good.
But then again, maybe not. I know people who pay more for bottled water price-per-gallon than gasoline... and they complain about the price of gasoline.
Yeah but you can't drink gasoline.
I guess these guys forgot about 'fair use'.
In most theaters they usually show a short bit about turning off cell phones
and not talking during the movie so as not to disturb others who are actually
WATCHING THE MOVIE. They should also put up a notice that cameras are NOT allowed
in the theater and that if you get caught with one you will be ejected from the
theater and possibly arrested. Actually, the notice should be a big sign
pasted up by the box office and also printed on the tickets.
Sounds like something out of Hollywood. Ever see the movie
"Looker" ?
Well in my place of work we don't use Exchange. We use a different
piece of crap, Lotus Notes!
First of all you COULD record your own 8 tracks. Several companies (even Rat Shack) sold 8 track recorders and blank tapes. The only problem was 8 TRACKS SUCK. Tremendous flutter and wow, poor frequency response and short tape life (every have to remove a gordian knot of tape from a car player after pulling the cart out?)
Laser Disks were NOT killed off by VHS. The two formats lived side by side for the life of both. (OK VHS is still around, but not for pre-recorded). In comparing software costs people seem to forget the bad old days when VHS videos were $50-$100 each. It took the studios a while to realize that they could make more money at the $20 price point (and you can thank Kmart for that). While Laserdisk was selling along side RCA's CED disks laser disk prices dropped to about $25 a disk for most titles. I NEVER spend as much as $50 for a laser disk (well, except for a few collector's packages recorded in CAV format). Machines did drop in price to $250 or less. What kept laser disk in the background was that you could NOT record on them. So you had to buy two machines, one disk and one tape. Why bother if you could get pre-recorded tapes (even if they looked like crap compared to the laser disk)? It was DVD that signed laser disks death warrant. Smaller, cheaper (eventually), better picture, and backward compatible with CD's. What more could you want?
BTW strange as it may seem laser disks were NEVER copy protected. No macrovision crap. You can copy ANY laser disk to VHS or DVD without any hacking (just two machines and jumper cables).
Trakfone isn't that expensive when you buy a year long time card. For under $100
you get a full year of service and several hundred minutes of air time. You can
extend the air time at any time buy buying additional air time cards. There are
also 1 year service cards that give you DOUBLE the air time on each additional air
time cards you add.
Finally Trakfone has cloned themselves with NET10, a sister service that is only
10 cents a minute (or LESS) depending on the air time cards you purchase. Net10 is
a "buy in bulk" version of Trakfone, so it costs more for their air time cards because
you are buying more minutes at each purchase, but paying less per minute. The only
down side is that Trakfone seems to have a larger choice of phones than NET10.
My wife and I are very happy with our Trakfones, though service inside some shopping malls
is spotty (maybe the malls are rf shielded against cell phones?).
Debian and Ubuntu have compatibility binaries available to support running x86 binaries,
but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on
both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this.
BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility
libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's
a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.
Ubuntu's strongest point is it's Debian roots. In some cases you can
install packages from Debian's repository. You can also install the deb-package
tools and build missing Debian packages from source that will then be compatible
with Ubuntu (because they were linked against Ubuntu packages).
Finally, Debian is a possible upgrade path to Ubuntu. While there has been a bit
of a split between Debian and Ubuntu, they still share a great deal of code
AND a great package system.
Years age the state of N.H. had some state sponsored liquor stores on
the interstate. Residents of Mass. would cross the border to buy liquor
cheap in N.H. (bootlegging ?). Well Mass. get pissed off at loosing
state sales taxes on booze so they had the Mass. state troopers stationed
in unmarked cars in front of the N.H. liquor stores to radio license tag
numbers back to troopers on the Mass. side of the border. The Mass. cops
would then arrest those who crossed the border with the booze.
The N.H. state police got even. They arrested the Mass. troopers for loitering.
The owners of the coffee houses shouldn't have to pay the fees,
the musicians should. It is the musicians that are making money
from playing the copyrighted material, and they should pay to make
use of it. The person hiring the musicians is just buying a service.
I guess the responsibility DOES end up on the person hiring the musicians
to make sure THEY have paid the fees, but it shouldn't be that way.
After all who is the music expert here?
Once upon a time all prototype electronics were wirewrapped. Today, it's a dying art.
When dip IC's ruled the roost wirewrap was king. Today, surface mount ic's are king
and pc boards rule.
Also as circuit speeds went up, wirewrap stopped working. With clock speeds under 5 mhz, the long leads of wire wrapped construction with signals running parallel worked well enough. With today's 100mhz+ clocks wirewrap would have fatal crosstalk. Back in the 80's a company I worked for tried to wirewrap a cpu prototype using 10mhz processors. We NEVER got it to work, too many problems with crosstalk. A 4 layer circuit board was MUCH quieter, and worked fine.
Then there is the issue of labor. With computer layout software and automated fabs it's much cheaper and faster to have a pc prototype made than to pay some tech's to wirewrap a proto. In fact you can go through two or three pc prototypes in the time/money required to do just
ONE wirewrap one.
Wirewrap is DEAD. Bury it!
After Hurricane Wilma in South Florida we were without power for almost two weeks.
I don't know how long the phones stayed up after the power went down because the
storm ripped our phone lines out of the ground when a stand of trees uprooted
(the phone lines were buried so long ago that the tree roots grew around them).
Ma bell did start to deploy generators to replace dead batteries so the phones came
back on line as soon as they spliced a new section of cable in. BTW have you EVER seen
the batteries Ma Bell uses? They are lead / acid storage batteries, each 2v cell is
as big as a refigerator!
I mean it's damn rude of the guy. If I paid good money
for tickets to see a movie I don't want some bozo in the
row ahead of me to stick his stupid movie camera in my view
of the screen. Why that's only slightly less rude than leaving
your damn cell phone on and I have to hear your stupid ring
tones though out the picture.
I may be wrong, but I'm sure that the Linux kernel is licensed under
the GPLv2 ONLY. Linus did NOT state GPLv2 OR LATER, and that has not
(yet) changed. Of course the GNU portions of any 'distro ARE licensed
under GPLv2 OR LATER, this may also change to GPLv3 ONLY knowing RMS.
(is GPLv2 compatible with GPLv3 and visa versa?)
So as far as the kernel is concerned, M$ has no problems being bound
by GPLv3, it does not apply. As far as the GNU software, we shall see.