Sub pixel anti aliasing so 8pt font were crisp and clear on a 15 inch monitor
A file copy / move process that allowed you to pause, and more importantly when copying or moving 10,000 files, one which didn't just crash dead when file # 5,734 refused to copy.
incidentally copy / move was truly multitasking even back then, you could perform a dozen simultaneous operations if you wished to.
OS in EPROM, so the computer was up and running before the CRT had warmed up... (incidentally, the upgrade from RISCOS 3.0 to 3.5 was free when I wrote to them asking about some bugs in 3.0, they just sent me a jiffy bag with the 8 chips containing 3.5, totally gratis...)
all application software TOTALLY resided in it's own folder, no registry shit, which is probably why acorn died a death, nobody was willing to develop software that could only be protected by dongle.
system didn't slow to a slug pace when formatting a floppy, alos did 2.8 Mb floppies way back then, in addition to 1.44 Mb formats read / write ability
some killer applications, like artworks, which later was bought by corel and bastardised to become xara, and a full fledged semi professional DTP app that came on 13 floppies, 4 or 5 of which were dictionaries and fonts... plus some really clever shit like iterated systems fractal image compression way back in 92 or 93...
I could go on and on.....
Things Windows95a had at the same time.
Hugely slower systems, win95 on the early pentium 60 and 75 mhz cpu was orders of magnitude slower than an Acorn.
Swap file, this was the one serious advantage, on an acorn when you ran out of memory your app crashed.
16 bit (or greater) colour, the basic acorn a5000 was limited to 256 unique colours on screen, pron on an acorn looked like acid freak mosaics, but ok for dtp / games and everything else
the win95 boxes also lacked a reset key on the keyboard, a particularly dumb idea from acorn
far larger hard disks, 600 mb on a p75 as opposed to the 40 mb connors in an acorn, nearly enough to hold an entire CD!!!! mind you, wintel boxes needed the extra space because bloatware had already arrived
Later when I got into hosting and looked inside my first RAQ2 to see just what I had spend all that money on I was reminded of my earlier acorns... one main PCB, apparently pretty sparseley populated, and apparently running so little electrical power temperatures on the board were more closely tied to whether you had the window open than cpu loading.
and from my perspective java sucks just as badly as flash... it is a bloody resource hog, causes very noticeable slowdowns even on this box (P4 2.6 with a gig of dual channel ddr) and in exchange for this doesn't actually *do* anything that hasn't already been done better and faster using other methods.
Like I said, I'm not a coder, but I'm guessing java is propular because it is possible to create quick and dirty (spelt CHEAP) solutions to relatively minor coding challenges.
Certainly from the end user's point of view and resource hogginess it is crap.
"Ah yes, you need to enable activex, java, javascript and flash in order to use our online xxxxx service...."
err, no thanks, I'll take my custom elsewhere or simply go without.
the manuf blurb talks a lot about "optimal" resolution and makes ZERO mention of native (true) resolution, as such I'm guessing this is a 1920 x 1200 TFT with on board GFX card (same as proper industrial kit) that takes the input RGB and translates it into the TFT specific driver signal.. see ginsbury.co.uk etc) so in other words... marketing bullshit.
the actual story I was referring to http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/displayNod e.js p?nodeId=143632&command=displayContent&sourceNode= 142719&contentPK=10440956
and some related local atm cloning... http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/displayN ode.jsp?node Id=137199&command=displayContent&sourceNode=136986 &contentPK=10423338 and http://www.thisisexeter. co.uk/displayNode.jsp?node Id=137199&command=displayContent&sourceNode=136986 &contentPK=10439315
There is an old method that does work and is used for extortion and other purposes...
1/ create bank / building society account in ficticious name with false documents and genuine 500 cash deposit. Make sure account comes with an ATM card.
2/ wait one year while doing the minimum to keep the account active. Do not go near the maildrop you used, but do make sure it is paid up.
3/ Do extortion thing, instruct victim in the following manner... a/ pay 100,000 into account number xxxx at bank xxx b/ notify the police if you wish, but be advised that should the account be suspended or frozen in ANY way WHATSOEVER you will simply and without further warning do whatever it was you threatened (eg put HIV+ blood in baby food which was most recent case here that comes to mind) and walk away from the whole deal.
4/ withdraw the money from randomly selected ATM machines over the next year or three, just scout them out first to make sure they aren't covered by security cameras (if they are wear a full face crash helmet) and make sure you have a concealed carry for the card itself, don't wanna get caught with that six months later....
You guys ought to get out more, I'm really surprised that in a diverse forum like this nobody knows about this one...
I hear this same old tired "but the metric multiples of ten system is so much SIMPLER!!!!" argument every day.
And it is, ON PAPER.
Meanwhile, out in the real world using real materials things aren't quite so simple....
As I've have said elsewhere on slashdot, I'm in my 40's and living in the UK, as a child I grew up with a monetary system known as LSD, being the symbols for Pounds, Shillings, and Pence.
1 pound (Sterling) = 20 Shillings = 240 Pennies.
12 Pennies to the shilling, 20 Shillings to the pound, so book-keepers would work with a three column row of entries on every page, one in base 10 (Pounds) one in base 20 (Shillings) and one in base 12 (Pence) and could add them all up mentally at any speed you like, no big deal.
Now we have a metric currency, nobody can do mental arithmetic, but I digress, just like the old Imperial currency mentioned above, Imperial weights and measures (don't forget there was Troy as well as Avoirdupois weights in everyday use) were NOT english, they were common european measures that had by and large evolved over CENTURIES and were developed to work with the actual materials people were handling.
I newton applied to 1 kilo will accelerate it by 1 etc etc etc is ALL VERY WELL ON PAPER, in the real world of physical materials things are different.
Some number bases are historic, ancient sumerians started out counting stuff in base 60, many other bases were very common, in england base 12 was both pennies in a shilling and inches in a foot, a lot of these weights came from ancient historic equivalents to do with coinage and metals and liquid, for more years than I can remember dope smokers used to use old pennies, halfpennies and farthings as weights on the scales, because their weights were in perfect fractions of an ounce, again for historical reasons....
Non-technical people often cite the wheel as the greatest first major invention, it wasn't, the screw thread was, and there are many different types with variations on the angles and profiles the threads are machined at....
Metric has metric fine and metric coarse, both are shit threads, henry ford went metric years ago, but for many mnay mnay years kept his wheels nuts in imperial threads, because metric ones kept working loose...
BSP is still used for hydraulics, because metric threads leak, NTP is used in the states for hydraulic, but it is still basically BSP with a different end.
I could go on and on, but people need to remember that just because something looks clever and easy on paper, that does not mean it is worth a damn in the real world of engineering as applied to real materials....
OK, I live in england, I'm celtic by ancestry, you might refer to me as "a Britisher"
My parents generation fought ww2, on my mums side 5 kids, all of them signed up, their father, my grandad was torpedoes three fucking times and lived to tell the tale... he was a bosun on the murmansk run on oil tankers, he used to chew tobacco (can't smoke on tankers) and that's what eventually killed him, colostomy and bowel cancer.
Of his five children the eldest was a telegrapher, RN, was ordered to stay behind at the fall of singapore and report on the nips, was mia for 9 months and eventually made his own way overland to india, next eldest was another RN telegrapher (the radio shack was a prime target btw) my mum was a wren who was a plotter in devonport, plotted the d-day practices in which thousands of americans died through the sheer incompetence of their commanders, going to cut a long shit load of history short here, not much point going on about a thousand years of clanging swords with someone or other which is basically what english history is, let me tell you how WE see american military in first hand observations from ww2 (my father etc) through korea (before you lot went into nam properly) to the present day.
in 1943 when the british army couldn't even get a pair of boots and 20 rounds of ammunition to every soldier, the american military machine could get chocolates to every soldier, and all the boots they could wear and ammo they could carry, "over sexed, over paid, and over here" was a 1943 sentiment about americans here in the southwest training for d day, but EVERYONE was in absolute awe of american logistics.
Similarly, from 1943 through korea etc to present day, nobody ever thought american soldiers lacked courage.
While american logistics were awesome, most people rated american military hardware as sub-standard, when germany had tiger tanks you were running around in shermans, worst thing about a sherman was the motor, 2 stroke detroit diesel was NOISY bastard, made it real easy to shoot at... similarly because supply of bullets was never a problem american weapons and soldiering were much more automatic fire than semi automatic, times where supply chain breaks everyone shit themselves if americans on the flank, waiting for them to expend all ammo and then fall back.....
no, BY FAR commonest sentiment about american military machine was the soldiers were not as highly trained or versatile as ours (this is still true, simply because US military budget is so fucking huge we HAVE to be better at everything, on a per platoon basis) and american brass were by and large grandstanding assholes, just like we used to shoot in the back when going over the top in WWI....
americans go on patrol in iraq in armoured vehicles all toting fully automatic weapons and more importantly crew-few medium calibre automatic weapons, anything tougher than a columbine schoolkid pops up and you hunker down and call in an airstrike.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a HUGE military machine with awesome logistics and vast numbers of under trained cannon fodder troops.
british go on patrol in iraq in open backed landrover (4wd, a british "technical" really, often minus the 50 cal) response is very short ammunition conserving short bursts of 3 or 4 rounds at most, of not single shot mode, if it turns bad retreat and regroup, or die there, we just don't have that kind of air support or even heavy armour.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a small military machine with shite logistics (remember, we had to canniballise our biggest liner just to get troops to falklands, and she was built that way just in case too...) so every soldier must be a minimum of proficient at many tasks and bloody good at one or two.
same thing is true of bar fights, in american bar fights there is much pre fight posturing and strutting, like bears in some mating ritual, much opportunity for both to mutually cool it off without losing face according to some strange set of rules...
Ok, I'm in my mid 40's, you need to know that as it gives some sort of perspective on my views on this.
I still own the old 7 inch reel to reel Sony Tapecorder 500 that my dad bought in the sixties, they still had many of the ten inch (?) 78 rpm records, as well as the newer 45 rpm singles and 33.3 rpm "long playing" records.
The reel to reel was the god of quality, especially on the faster speed settings eg 3.75 (?) inches per second, and even better it was of course stereo, long playing records were still mono.
A few years go by and long players and singles went stereo, but rpm stayed the same, disc material changed and most notably turntables and pickups changed and quality improved.
Along the way there were a few wierdos, I still have a Philips quadrophonic system with active (mains powered with integrated amplifiers and feedback circuits) speakers (which are a lovely sound) but pretty much by the time _I_ started buying music the standards were set, noticeably enough that things like picture disks and coloured vinyl had sufficiently different physical characteristics that any reasonably good stereo could show an audibly loss of quality with such media.
Only trouble was, especially at parties, you ended up buying copies of records you already owned because the last copy got scratched yet again...
Then came compact cassette, (i'm going to gloss over 8 track, because it was the betamax of self contained audio tape formats, technically better but still sidelined) much lower audio quality than vinyl but a really user friendly physical package and very very tough, until the tape got chewed by worn pinch rollers...
Compact cassette evolved, notably the run times, especially for blanks which everyone bought to record their vinyl onto to save the vinyl from wear and tear, grew to 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 120 minutes etc, but most people thought the longer tapes were too prone to stretch, and a C90 TDK SA tape was just long enough to hold a complete long playing record on each side, which was nice and not just by chance.... autoreversing players saved even the hassle of flipping the tape.
Apart from this the real advantage was the ability, just like the old reel to reel jobs, or making your own compilation albums.....
Players with dual decks made especially with high speed dubbing ability were cool too....
Then CD's came out, CD's were totally indestructible, so despite the fact that I had probably already purchased, for example, Hurry On Sundown / Hawkwind 6 or seven times on vinyl and 2 or 3 on compact cassette, I bought it yet again on CD.
I was pretty disappointed that the quality, although much better than compact cassette, wasn't quite up to a new unscratched vinyl quality, but the indestructibility of this new medium won me over, this was the same as compact cassette, only with better quality......... then about 3 months later my first CD delaminated and started skipping..... then more did......
Now I have 100 gig of Mp3's, at 192 kbps and digital at that (as opposed to analogue) the quality is not as good as new vinyl, but it is reasonably close to new CD audio, and as good as compact cassette, more importantly, by the time the vinyl has become scratched, the compact cassette deoxidised and the compact disk delaminated the quality of the mp3 beats them all, quite apart from anything else because it STILL BLOODY PLAYS and notably compared to the CD being digital it isn't fucked up by the medium it is recorded on to (unless the HD crashes I suppose)... perhaps most significantly it is really compact in filesize so I can get around 170 tracks on a CDR of the same capacity as will hold 12 original cd audio format (red book) tracks, blank cdr cost me pennies, literally about 1% of the cost of a shop bought music CD.
Sony minidisk was cool too, but it seems to be another betamax / 8-track type casualty, technically superior, but never reaching critical (useful) mass and so forever destined to niche / speciality mark
You know what I find most interesting about Wilbur and Orville Wright?
Everyone has heard of them, everyone knows they invented and built the first aeroplane.
Except they didn't.
Do a google on the Wright brothers and try and find a reference to Charles Taylor.
At the VERY LEAST his input was equal to both the wright brothers combined, sure, they may have had a back of the envelope idea but only a true Genius like Charlie Taylor ( http://www2.hmc.edu/www_common/aviation/images/tay lor.jpg ) could have taken those ideas and literally gotten them off they ground.
Leonardo da Vinci's glider designs were recently built here in the UK and flew, he, unlike the wrights, didn't have a Charles Taylor to take his drawings and make them into a working 3 dimensional full scale object.
Give me a copy of autocad and 3dsmax and I will design your Mars rocket for you, in 100 years time should my name go down in history as the inventor of the Mars ship ir inventor of the warp drive? Or should the credit go to those clever bastards who actually build these things and make them reality?
The universe is at least some 14,500,000,000,000 years old, during that time it has undergone remarkable changes, stuff that happened soon after the big bang that can never be replicated in a lab, stuff that goes on within stars and black holes, which might someday be replicated in a lap, and from the very moment the clock came into existence and started ticking the less than 200 chemical elements possible (forget star trek bullshit elements that if created would have a half life of nanoseconds) rwacting with the half a dozen or so possible forces and the handful of basic laws of physics / thermodynamics (even if we cannot create gravity in a lab observation is sufficient to asseert that it is a "Force" and it exists) have been CONSTANTLY trying all possible combinations in all possible enviornments and all possible ambient energy levels....
no experiment is too expensive, too stupid, too slow or too exotic for the universe to undertake it as many times as it can, and then unlike the lab it build other experiments based upon the varying results of previous experiments, iterated untold times.....
the grey goo scenario IS NOT POSSIBLE because it has not happened, and it did not happen because it could only ever happen in a small closed enviornment where an outside force could input VAST (of the order of E=mc2) amounts of energy, whicg CANNOT happen in the free universe, it is called Entropy.
anyone who who seriously thought a-bomb tests would ignite the atmosphere was applying as much logial brain power as those people who thought humans would suffocate at the dizzying speeds of 30mph on the early steam trains.
the ONLY science experiment that could possibly destroy the planet earth is the creating of a stable (eg massing many megatons) singularity or black hole and then accidentally "dropping" it when the cleaners unplug the magnetic fields to plug the vacuum cleaner in.... and even that would take geological ages because the little bastard could only "eat" an atom or so at a time due to its miniscule "diameter"
The only thing that I guarantee WILL NOT happen is human beings actually growing up from the quaking n their knees in fear cave dwelling hairless monkeys that are afraid of anything and everything that they cannot understand.
I've used Skype ( http://www.skype.com/ ) quite extensively (windows only at the moment but they have a linux version in the works) over my LAN and via my cable connection to people ranging from 160 miles away to people in other countries.
Sure, there is a slight "houston, this is tranquility base) type of delay, but within a couple of hours use this becomes second nature.
Many of the calls I made exceeded one hour in duration, god alone knows what they would have cost via telephone.
Every call was end to end encrypted, yes, even the voice signal.
To call what is effectively a brand new technology which is basically still in public beta DOA is nothing other than complete and utter bollocks and a sure sign that whoever is applying such a label to VOIP is either...
a/ terminally fucking clueless b/ blunkett (UK) / cheney or rice (US) / a telco shitting themselves.
BT has just started rollout of 21CN which will involve the ENTIRE NETWORK moving over to IP based traffic routing, so some 30,000,000 telephones in the UK alone will be, guess what, VOIP within a few years... link here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/bt_ip_netw ork/
Slashdot is rapidly declining to the point where Pissy World (UK) / Fry's (US) sales staff will start calling what THEY percieve as stupid clueless customers as "slashdotters" as a term of generic abuse.
"News for Nerds" ??? Give me a fucking break, Twaddle for Teletubbies is more accurate a decription of the content lately.
Ducatis it may be the case, but not so's you'd notice, the rear cylinder weakness in harleys is down to the design of the con rods...
see http://www.chopperscycle.com/Merchant2/merc hant.mv c?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=vts&Product_Code=18051&Ca tegory_Code=41-321 the front rod ends in a fork and the rear rod sits inside it, this gives the front rod more rigidity with respect to the axis of the cylinder bores.
The old english ariel square 4 http://www.autogallery.org.ru/m/ari4f37.htm DI D have issues with the rear cylinders overheating.
In motorcycles (like computers) lots of marketing bullshit is spoken and technical facts are usually covered up. For example honda experimented with turbochargers on of all the models in their current range at the time, the one model that was most derided and ridicules, the cx500 transverse vee twin.
Honda marketingspeak at the time claimed this was because the vtwin was a difficult configuration to turbocharge so if they could sort it on that ike they could sort it on anything.
This was of course the purest marketing bullshit.
just like faster computer processors, turbochargers most significant characteristic is more heat (IC engines are after all just heat engines) and honda only had two liquid cooled motorcycles in their range as test beds, the relatively light and tough CX500 motor, and the unweildy flat 4 gold wing, which already suffered from self destructing crankshafts even without any additional torque from a turbo unit being pumped through it.
"IBM compatible" PC design is INCREDIBLY crude and awful from any mechanical or thermal engineer's perspective, the dual watercooled G5 simply takes a Trabant ( http://www.team.net/www/ktud/trabi.html) and sticks a nice coat of paint and some body filler on it, it is still incredibly crude from the thermal engineer's viewpoint.
Santa Claus cannot have a home country, though it could be argued that his home town is the global HQ of Coca Cola.
It constantly amazes me how few people are aware of the FACT that Santa Claus (just look at the dude's colour scheme) is invented by and copyright the Coca Cola company and is no more than a marketing tool, just like the Michelin Man.
SP2 is not a car wreck, and it installs fine on the wdr2y keyset....
what sp2 ___IS___ is effectively a set of patches and updates to cover existing vulns and perhaps more importantly the installation of a new system service that monitors 3 items
windows updates windows firewall anti-virus (3rd party)
left to defaults it will enable auto update and do all critical updates, enable the windows firewall, and check you have installed a current working AV application.
left to defaults SP2 is something that will increase security and workability for the vast majority of winows users.
left to defaults SP2 will be a complete pain in the ass for all clueful windows users who religiously replace IE and Outlook with better options, run behind a hardware firewall, do not just download and run software blindly, etc, and scan all new files with a decentish free AV package such as http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
Bear in mind that compromised windows boxes are extremely likely to be running warezed copies of windows and operated by people who habitually use sites like astalavista to download cracks for software, never suspecting, despite their leetness, that a significant proportion of cracks and exploits contain malware of their own.
... some one from the Uk spy services went to Exide batteries because their spy radios were hampered by the fact that the current charge density / weight / volume of batteries was too low and resulted in low battery life or a spy radio that was bigger and heavier than the spy who was supposed to carry it...
The Exide mas was asked if they could increase the charge density somehow, the response was immediate, "Yes."
The spook was somewhat nonplussed, as this was not the answer he was expecting, so he then asked if Exide could do it, why didn't they?
This response was also immediate. "We sell more batteries."
That was 60 years ago, why does anyone think anything has changed? (esp when detroit is now producing SUV's that get worse mileage than 50 year old 500 cubic inch big block engined cars)
Slashdot Mirror
Off the top of my head....
Sub pixel anti aliasing so 8pt font were crisp and clear on a 15 inch monitor
A file copy / move process that allowed you to pause, and more importantly when copying or moving 10,000 files, one which didn't just crash dead when file # 5,734 refused to copy.
incidentally copy / move was truly multitasking even back then, you could perform a dozen simultaneous operations if you wished to.
OS in EPROM, so the computer was up and running before the CRT had warmed up... (incidentally, the upgrade from RISCOS 3.0 to 3.5 was free when I wrote to them asking about some bugs in 3.0, they just sent me a jiffy bag with the 8 chips containing 3.5, totally gratis...)
all application software TOTALLY resided in it's own folder, no registry shit, which is probably why acorn died a death, nobody was willing to develop software that could only be protected by dongle.
system didn't slow to a slug pace when formatting a floppy, alos did 2.8 Mb floppies way back then, in addition to 1.44 Mb formats read / write ability
some killer applications, like artworks, which later was bought by corel and bastardised to become xara, and a full fledged semi professional DTP app that came on 13 floppies, 4 or 5 of which were dictionaries and fonts... plus some really clever shit like iterated systems fractal image compression way back in 92 or 93...
I could go on and on.....
Things Windows95a had at the same time.
Hugely slower systems, win95 on the early pentium 60 and 75 mhz cpu was orders of magnitude slower than an Acorn.
Swap file, this was the one serious advantage, on an acorn when you ran out of memory your app crashed.
16 bit (or greater) colour, the basic acorn a5000 was limited to 256 unique colours on screen, pron on an acorn looked like acid freak mosaics, but ok for dtp / games and everything else
the win95 boxes also lacked a reset key on the keyboard, a particularly dumb idea from acorn
far larger hard disks, 600 mb on a p75 as opposed to the 40 mb connors in an acorn, nearly enough to hold an entire CD!!!! mind you, wintel boxes needed the extra space because bloatware had already arrived
Later when I got into hosting and looked inside my first RAQ2 to see just what I had spend all that money on I was reminded of my earlier acorns... one main PCB, apparently pretty sparseley populated, and apparently running so little electrical power temperatures on the board were more closely tied to whether you had the window open than cpu loading.
it's an old time sailor's trick, allegedly....
100k per night for a hotel room you can afford to blow another 100k on a few hookers and a penguin and fuck your brains out.
and from my perspective java sucks just as badly as flash... it is a bloody resource hog, causes very noticeable slowdowns even on this box (P4 2.6 with a gig of dual channel ddr) and in exchange for this doesn't actually *do* anything that hasn't already been done better and faster using other methods.
Like I said, I'm not a coder, but I'm guessing java is propular because it is possible to create quick and dirty (spelt CHEAP) solutions to relatively minor coding challenges.
Certainly from the end user's point of view and resource hogginess it is crap.
"Ah yes, you need to enable activex, java, javascript and flash in order to use our online xxxxx service...."
err, no thanks, I'll take my custom elsewhere or simply go without.
Tell me about it, I had to take them to court...
http://web.archive.org/web/*/ups-are-crap.com
TROLL???!!!!
How the FUCK is raising a valid question about the native resolution of a TFT trolling?
Stupid cunts.
the manuf blurb talks a lot about "optimal" resolution and makes ZERO mention of native (true) resolution, as such I'm guessing this is a 1920 x 1200 TFT with on board GFX card (same as proper industrial kit) that takes the input RGB and translates it into the TFT specific driver signal.. see ginsbury.co.uk etc) so in other words... marketing bullshit.
You forgot the weight of the oxygen to burn the fuel, there is none in space.........
dunno about eyelook but encase is a steaming pile of shite....
it's called an air pistol, I had one when I was a kid....
the actual story I was referring to
http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/displayNo
and some related local atm cloning...
http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/display
and
http://www.thisisexeter
have phun
No, it was old to me by a fellow con while spending a short vacation at one of Her Majesty's Prisons....
There is an old method that does work and is used for extortion and other purposes...
1/ create bank / building society account in ficticious name with false documents and genuine 500 cash deposit. Make sure account comes with an ATM card.
2/ wait one year while doing the minimum to keep the account active. Do not go near the maildrop you used, but do make sure it is paid up.
3/ Do extortion thing, instruct victim in the following manner...
a/ pay 100,000 into account number xxxx at bank xxx
b/ notify the police if you wish, but be advised that should the account be suspended or frozen in ANY way WHATSOEVER you will simply and without further warning do whatever it was you threatened (eg put HIV+ blood in baby food which was most recent case here that comes to mind) and walk away from the whole deal.
4/ withdraw the money from randomly selected ATM machines over the next year or three, just scout them out first to make sure they aren't covered by security cameras (if they are wear a full face crash helmet) and make sure you have a concealed carry for the card itself, don't wanna get caught with that six months later....
You guys ought to get out more, I'm really surprised that in a diverse forum like this nobody knows about this one...
err, that pic looks like it is of a female......
I hear this same old tired "but the metric multiples of ten system is so much SIMPLER!!!!" argument every day.
And it is, ON PAPER.
Meanwhile, out in the real world using real materials things aren't quite so simple....
As I've have said elsewhere on slashdot, I'm in my 40's and living in the UK, as a child I grew up with a monetary system known as LSD, being the symbols for Pounds, Shillings, and Pence.
1 pound (Sterling) = 20 Shillings = 240 Pennies.
12 Pennies to the shilling, 20 Shillings to the pound, so book-keepers would work with a three column row of entries on every page, one in base 10 (Pounds) one in base 20 (Shillings) and one in base 12 (Pence) and could add them all up mentally at any speed you like, no big deal.
Now we have a metric currency, nobody can do mental arithmetic, but I digress, just like the old Imperial currency mentioned above, Imperial weights and measures (don't forget there was Troy as well as Avoirdupois weights in everyday use) were NOT english, they were common european measures that had by and large evolved over CENTURIES and were developed to work with the actual materials people were handling.
I newton applied to 1 kilo will accelerate it by 1 etc etc etc is ALL VERY WELL ON PAPER, in the real world of physical materials things are different.
Some number bases are historic, ancient sumerians started out counting stuff in base 60, many other bases were very common, in england base 12 was both pennies in a shilling and inches in a foot, a lot of these weights came from ancient historic equivalents to do with coinage and metals and liquid, for more years than I can remember dope smokers used to use old pennies, halfpennies and farthings as weights on the scales, because their weights were in perfect fractions of an ounce, again for historical reasons....
Non-technical people often cite the wheel as the greatest first major invention, it wasn't, the screw thread was, and there are many different types with variations on the angles and profiles the threads are machined at....
Metric has metric fine and metric coarse, both are shit threads, henry ford went metric years ago, but for many mnay mnay years kept his wheels nuts in imperial threads, because metric ones kept working loose...
BSP is still used for hydraulics, because metric threads leak, NTP is used in the states for hydraulic, but it is still basically BSP with a different end.
I could go on and on, but people need to remember that just because something looks clever and easy on paper, that does not mean it is worth a damn in the real world of engineering as applied to real materials....
cheers
OK, I live in england, I'm celtic by ancestry, you might refer to me as "a Britisher"
My parents generation fought ww2, on my mums side 5 kids, all of them signed up, their father, my grandad was torpedoes three fucking times and lived to tell the tale... he was a bosun on the murmansk run on oil tankers, he used to chew tobacco (can't smoke on tankers) and that's what eventually killed him, colostomy and bowel cancer.
Of his five children the eldest was a telegrapher, RN, was ordered to stay behind at the fall of singapore and report on the nips, was mia for 9 months and eventually made his own way overland to india, next eldest was another RN telegrapher (the radio shack was a prime target btw) my mum was a wren who was a plotter in devonport, plotted the d-day practices in which thousands of americans died through the sheer incompetence of their commanders, going to cut a long shit load of history short here, not much point going on about a thousand years of clanging swords with someone or other which is basically what english history is, let me tell you how WE see american military in first hand observations from ww2 (my father etc) through korea (before you lot went into nam properly) to the present day.
in 1943 when the british army couldn't even get a pair of boots and 20 rounds of ammunition to every soldier, the american military machine could get chocolates to every soldier, and all the boots they could wear and ammo they could carry, "over sexed, over paid, and over here" was a 1943 sentiment about americans here in the southwest training for d day, but EVERYONE was in absolute awe of american logistics.
Similarly, from 1943 through korea etc to present day, nobody ever thought american soldiers lacked courage.
While american logistics were awesome, most people rated american military hardware as sub-standard, when germany had tiger tanks you were running around in shermans, worst thing about a sherman was the motor, 2 stroke detroit diesel was NOISY bastard, made it real easy to shoot at... similarly because supply of bullets was never a problem american weapons and soldiering were much more automatic fire than semi automatic, times where supply chain breaks everyone shit themselves if americans on the flank, waiting for them to expend all ammo and then fall back.....
no, BY FAR commonest sentiment about american military machine was the soldiers were not as highly trained or versatile as ours (this is still true, simply because US military budget is so fucking huge we HAVE to be better at everything, on a per platoon basis) and american brass were by and large grandstanding assholes, just like we used to shoot in the back when going over the top in WWI....
americans go on patrol in iraq in armoured vehicles all toting fully automatic weapons and more importantly crew-few medium calibre automatic weapons, anything tougher than a columbine schoolkid pops up and you hunker down and call in an airstrike.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a HUGE military machine with awesome logistics and vast numbers of under trained cannon fodder troops.
british go on patrol in iraq in open backed landrover (4wd, a british "technical" really, often minus the 50 cal) response is very short ammunition conserving short bursts of 3 or 4 rounds at most, of not single shot mode, if it turns bad retreat and regroup, or die there, we just don't have that kind of air support or even heavy armour.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a small military machine with shite logistics (remember, we had to canniballise our biggest liner just to get troops to falklands, and she was built that way just in case too...) so every soldier must be a minimum of proficient at many tasks and bloody good at one or two.
same thing is true of bar fights, in american bar fights there is much pre fight posturing and strutting, like bears in some mating ritual, much opportunity for both to mutually cool it off without losing face according to some strange set of rules...
Ok, I'm in my mid 40's, you need to know that as it gives some sort of perspective on my views on this.
I still own the old 7 inch reel to reel Sony Tapecorder 500 that my dad bought in the sixties, they still had many of the ten inch (?) 78 rpm records, as well as the newer 45 rpm singles and 33.3 rpm "long playing" records.
The reel to reel was the god of quality, especially on the faster speed settings eg 3.75 (?) inches per second, and even better it was of course stereo, long playing records were still mono.
A few years go by and long players and singles went stereo, but rpm stayed the same, disc material changed and most notably turntables and pickups changed and quality improved.
Along the way there were a few wierdos, I still have a Philips quadrophonic system with active (mains powered with integrated amplifiers and feedback circuits) speakers (which are a lovely sound) but pretty much by the time _I_ started buying music the standards were set, noticeably enough that things like picture disks and coloured vinyl had sufficiently different physical characteristics that any reasonably good stereo could show an audibly loss of quality with such media.
Only trouble was, especially at parties, you ended up buying copies of records you already owned because the last copy got scratched yet again...
Then came compact cassette, (i'm going to gloss over 8 track, because it was the betamax of self contained audio tape formats, technically better but still sidelined) much lower audio quality than vinyl but a really user friendly physical package and very very tough, until the tape got chewed by worn pinch rollers...
Compact cassette evolved, notably the run times, especially for blanks which everyone bought to record their vinyl onto to save the vinyl from wear and tear, grew to 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 120 minutes etc, but most people thought the longer tapes were too prone to stretch, and a C90 TDK SA tape was just long enough to hold a complete long playing record on each side, which was nice and not just by chance.... autoreversing players saved even the hassle of flipping the tape.
Apart from this the real advantage was the ability, just like the old reel to reel jobs, or making your own compilation albums.....
Players with dual decks made especially with high speed dubbing ability were cool too....
Then CD's came out, CD's were totally indestructible, so despite the fact that I had probably already purchased, for example, Hurry On Sundown / Hawkwind 6 or seven times on vinyl and 2 or 3 on compact cassette, I bought it yet again on CD.
I was pretty disappointed that the quality, although much better than compact cassette, wasn't quite up to a new unscratched vinyl quality, but the indestructibility of this new medium won me over, this was the same as compact cassette, only with better quality......... then about 3 months later my first CD delaminated and started skipping..... then more did......
Now I have 100 gig of Mp3's, at 192 kbps and digital at that (as opposed to analogue) the quality is not as good as new vinyl, but it is reasonably close to new CD audio, and as good as compact cassette, more importantly, by the time the vinyl has become scratched, the compact cassette deoxidised and the compact disk delaminated the quality of the mp3 beats them all, quite apart from anything else because it STILL BLOODY PLAYS and notably compared to the CD being digital it isn't fucked up by the medium it is recorded on to (unless the HD crashes I suppose)... perhaps most significantly it is really compact in filesize so I can get around 170 tracks on a CDR of the same capacity as will hold 12 original cd audio format (red book) tracks, blank cdr cost me pennies, literally about 1% of the cost of a shop bought music CD.
Sony minidisk was cool too, but it seems to be another betamax / 8-track type casualty, technically superior, but never reaching critical (useful) mass and so forever destined to niche / speciality mark
You know what I find most interesting about Wilbur and Orville Wright?
Everyone has heard of them, everyone knows they invented and built the first aeroplane.
Except they didn't.
Do a google on the Wright brothers and try and find a reference to Charles Taylor.
At the VERY LEAST his input was equal to both the wright brothers combined, sure, they may have had a back of the envelope idea but only a true Genius like Charlie Taylor ( http://www2.hmc.edu/www_common/aviation/images/ta
Leonardo da Vinci's glider designs were recently built here in the UK and flew, he, unlike the wrights, didn't have a Charles Taylor to take his drawings and make them into a working 3 dimensional full scale object.
Give me a copy of autocad and 3dsmax and I will design your Mars rocket for you, in 100 years time should my name go down in history as the inventor of the Mars ship ir inventor of the warp drive? Or should the credit go to those clever bastards who actually build these things and make them reality?
Simple, open your eyes and look....
The universe is at least some 14,500,000,000,000 years old, during that time it has undergone remarkable changes, stuff that happened soon after the big bang that can never be replicated in a lab, stuff that goes on within stars and black holes, which might someday be replicated in a lap, and from the very moment the clock came into existence and started ticking the less than 200 chemical elements possible (forget star trek bullshit elements that if created would have a half life of nanoseconds) rwacting with the half a dozen or so possible forces and the handful of basic laws of physics / thermodynamics (even if we cannot create gravity in a lab observation is sufficient to asseert that it is a "Force" and it exists) have been CONSTANTLY trying all possible combinations in all possible enviornments and all possible ambient energy levels....
no experiment is too expensive, too stupid, too slow or too exotic for the universe to undertake it as many times as it can, and then unlike the lab it build other experiments based upon the varying results of previous experiments, iterated untold times.....
the grey goo scenario IS NOT POSSIBLE because it has not happened, and it did not happen because it could only ever happen in a small closed enviornment where an outside force could input VAST (of the order of E=mc2) amounts of energy, whicg CANNOT happen in the free universe, it is called Entropy.
anyone who who seriously thought a-bomb tests would ignite the atmosphere was applying as much logial brain power as those people who thought humans would suffocate at the dizzying speeds of 30mph on the early steam trains.
the ONLY science experiment that could possibly destroy the planet earth is the creating of a stable (eg massing many megatons) singularity or black hole and then accidentally "dropping" it when the cleaners unplug the magnetic fields to plug the vacuum cleaner in.... and even that would take geological ages because the little bastard could only "eat" an atom or so at a time due to its miniscule "diameter"
The only thing that I guarantee WILL NOT happen is human beings actually growing up from the quaking n their knees in fear cave dwelling hairless monkeys that are afraid of anything and everything that they cannot understand.
get a life, FFS.
I've used Skype ( http://www.skype.com/ ) quite extensively (windows only at the moment but they have a linux version in the works) over my LAN and via my cable connection to people ranging from 160 miles away to people in other countries.
Sure, there is a slight "houston, this is tranquility base) type of delay, but within a couple of hours use this becomes second nature.
Many of the calls I made exceeded one hour in duration, god alone knows what they would have cost via telephone.
Every call was end to end encrypted, yes, even the voice signal.
To call what is effectively a brand new technology which is basically still in public beta DOA is nothing other than complete and utter bollocks and a sure sign that whoever is applying such a label to VOIP is either...
a/ terminally fucking clueless
b/ blunkett (UK) / cheney or rice (US) / a telco shitting themselves.
BT has just started rollout of 21CN which will involve the ENTIRE NETWORK moving over to IP based traffic routing, so some 30,000,000 telephones in the UK alone will be, guess what, VOIP within a few years... link here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/bt_ip_net
Slashdot is rapidly declining to the point where Pissy World (UK) / Fry's (US) sales staff will start calling what THEY percieve as stupid clueless customers as "slashdotters" as a term of generic abuse.
"News for Nerds" ??? Give me a fucking break, Twaddle for Teletubbies is more accurate a decription of the content lately.
Ducatis it may be the case, but not so's you'd notice, the rear cylinder weakness in harleys is down to the design of the con rods...
see
http://www.chopperscycle.com/Merchant2/mer
the front rod ends in a fork and the rear rod sits inside it, this gives the front rod more rigidity with respect to the axis of the cylinder bores.
The old english ariel square 4
http://www.autogallery.org.ru/m/ari4f37.htm
D
In motorcycles (like computers) lots of marketing bullshit is spoken and technical facts are usually covered up. For example honda experimented with turbochargers on of all the models in their current range at the time, the one model that was most derided and ridicules, the cx500 transverse vee twin.
Honda marketingspeak at the time claimed this was because the vtwin was a difficult configuration to turbocharge so if they could sort it on that ike they could sort it on anything.
This was of course the purest marketing bullshit.
just like faster computer processors, turbochargers most significant characteristic is more heat (IC engines are after all just heat engines) and honda only had two liquid cooled motorcycles in their range as test beds, the relatively light and tough CX500 motor, and the unweildy flat 4 gold wing, which already suffered from self destructing crankshafts even without any additional torque from a turbo unit being pumped through it.
"IBM compatible" PC design is INCREDIBLY crude and awful from any mechanical or thermal engineer's perspective, the dual watercooled G5 simply takes a Trabant ( http://www.team.net/www/ktud/trabi.html) and sticks a nice coat of paint and some body filler on it, it is still incredibly crude from the thermal engineer's viewpoint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claust p://www.icubed.com/~colagrrl/xmas.htm
and
ht
Santa Claus cannot have a home country, though it could be argued that his home town is the global HQ of Coca Cola.
It constantly amazes me how few people are aware of the FACT that Santa Claus (just look at the dude's colour scheme) is invented by and copyright the Coca Cola company and is no more than a marketing tool, just like the Michelin Man.
Don't believe me? do a google.
SP2 is not a car wreck, and it installs fine on the wdr2y keyset....
what sp2 ___IS___ is effectively a set of patches and updates to cover existing vulns and perhaps more importantly the installation of a new system service that monitors 3 items
windows updates
windows firewall
anti-virus (3rd party)
left to defaults it will enable auto update and do all critical updates, enable the windows firewall, and check you have installed a current working AV application.
left to defaults SP2 is something that will increase security and workability for the vast majority of winows users.
left to defaults SP2 will be a complete pain in the ass for all clueful windows users who religiously replace IE and Outlook with better options, run behind a hardware firewall, do not just download and run software blindly, etc, and scan all new files with a decentish free AV package such as http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
Bear in mind that compromised windows boxes are extremely likely to be running warezed copies of windows and operated by people who habitually use sites like astalavista to download cracks for software, never suspecting, despite their leetness, that a significant proportion of cracks and exploits contain malware of their own.
HTH etc
... some one from the Uk spy services went to Exide batteries because their spy radios were hampered by the fact that the current charge density / weight / volume of batteries was too low and resulted in low battery life or a spy radio that was bigger and heavier than the spy who was supposed to carry it...
The Exide mas was asked if they could increase the charge density somehow, the response was immediate, "Yes."
The spook was somewhat nonplussed, as this was not the answer he was expecting, so he then asked if Exide could do it, why didn't they?
This response was also immediate.
"We sell more batteries."
That was 60 years ago, why does anyone think anything has changed?
(esp when detroit is now producing SUV's that get worse mileage than 50 year old 500 cubic inch big block engined cars)