Like, the first digit is ones, then twos, then threes, then fives, then sevens, then elevens and so on
Trouble is there are lots of redundant numbers. The decimal value '3' is 3, 11 and 100. This problem rapidly gets worse as you have larger values. Decimal 5 is 110, 1000, 21, 102 and 13. Also, how many symbols are you allowing? Without a constant radix who knows when to carry? It's crazy. You didn't really think it through, did you?
Ah, but a big difference between carrying another plane slung below or on the back (Example from the 30s), and having a separate aircraft push one into the air using a kind of towbar: Cover image
I picked up a bunch of PM's from a second-hand bookstore that run from about 1949 through 1960, about 8 or 10 in all. They have pride of place on the shelf in 'the smallest room' and make great bogtime reading. The optimism of that era! The small ads are my favourite, everyone seemingly on the make with this scheme or that, amazing what seemed a viable business at the time, like chrome-plating baby shoes or plans for converting a push-mower into a ride-on. But even the big articles are mind-boggling, like the bizarre concept, quite seriously researched apparently, of using a separate "pusher" plane to get heavy bombers into the air (instantly made pointless as soon as jets started to improve even slightly, and never mind how many accidents it would have caused in practice).
And the car reviews are great as well - one copy has the release of the Edsel, which is just a straightforward review saying it has this and that, and what should appeal to buyers, A later one has an article explaining why it was such an inevitable disaster! (Which strangely the first article hadn't predicted at all). Tail fins and white picket fences, and not a care in the world - great reading!
It isn't necessarily illegal for the President to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office. It might have been sexual harassment, and an investigation was tenuously warranted, but lying to the investigators is certainly illegal.
This is still something most outside the US can't understand - what was the big deal? For those who get into a righteous froth about ol' Bill, you only need to go and read up on the Nixon administration. The words "ethics" and "morality" simply were not in their dictionary. Nixon did permanent harm to the office of the President which is has never recovered from - pretty much all modern cynicism about 'The Man' can be traced to that administration. Bill and his cigar fetish pale into insignificance beside it.
Experience shows how much you need to comment and what the comments worth writing consist of, just as experience tells you how to structure the code in the first place. "Rules" about commenting are perhaps useful starting points for the inexperienced, but with experience you can write your own rules.
OK, I'll check it out - it does sound like an interesting read and gets away from what I see as the main flaw with the sci-fi I've read - too much focus on technology (possibly alien) and not enough on real humanity (for my taste, even though I'm keen on technology myself).
If the constant arguing and bickering about what to do about global warming is anything to go by, they never will be ready.
As a teen I read lots of sci-fi, but then I grew up. One of the recurrent themes was the Earth was doomed for some reason so we'd all have to build a fleet of ships and go off and colonise another world. Even as a 13-year-old I was highly skeptical of those stories, not because of the technology or the distances or any of the practical difficulties, but because I knew that politics would never function to the point where a decision could have been reached, let alone acted upon.
If global warming is truly in need of a rapid, urgent and above all united effort to combat (and whether it is or not is your first argument, right there), then quite honestly, we're doomed. Perhaps one reason we've never detected an advanced civilisation out there is because they all go through this stage, or fail to.
I'm fed up with hearing and reading how "digital TV delivers better quality images (and sound)". It does no such thing. It's obvious that the picture quality is poorer than a good analogue signal - some images break up altogether, like sunlight on rippling water. It may help cram more channels into less space, but that's not really an end-user benefit (it doesn't necessarily translate into more choice, here in Australia it just means more repeats).
I've just had a BRILLIANT idea! Since you have to move the mower across the lawn to get to the next patch of grass to be cut, you could link up its wheels to drive the blades. You'd probably want to gear it so that the blades spun faster relative to the wheels, and maybe a more efficient blade design would be needed, such as, say, forming the blades into a cylinder rather than a "fan" shape, a bit like a combine harvester. Small and light, it would need no power other than someone pushing it along. I think I'm onto a winner here! Remember folks, you heard about it here first.
There was once a time that Russia would have just kept schtum. How many UFO reports are due to similar failed firings prior to the end of the Cold War?
And lame as our cars may be, they are far more efficient than they were in 1980
How do you quantify "far more efficient"? The fact is, they're not. A difference of perhaps 25% to 27% is not far more efficient. I'm basing that on a typical small European car - maybe the situation with large US built cars looks better than that, but it's still absolutely atrocious. Cars may pollute less, in terms of actual noxious gasses released to the atmosphere, but that doesn't equate to better efficiency.
Or you could, you know, just ask a taxi driver. A black cab driver that is (unless it's south of the river after 10pm), not a minicab driver - they don't know where anything is.
when CDs and DVDs came out, they claimed they would last 50 years. I have yet to find one that lasts longer than 5
What on earth are you doing to them? The first CD I ever bought (Dark Side of the Moon I'm afraid) in 1986 still plays just fine. CDRs, perhaps another matter - I have some now that are not always readable - seems to depend on the drive - but are over 12 years old. Luckily there's nothing of value on them - funny how I burned so much stuff I thought I'd need, but never did.
Ok, repeat after me: there is no production car on the planet with an engine capable of suddenly overpowering simple hydraulic brakes.
That's incorrect, as anyone who has done any motorsport or even driven hard will testify. Brakes work by converting kinetic energy into heat. They have a finite capacity (rate) at which they can do this. If the car has more energy than the brakes can dissipate, it will continue to move. In addition, the brakes also have a maximum working temperature at which point they cannot convert any more energy into heat - effectively they are saturated - this point is easily felt as a sudden loss of deceleration (aka "fade"). Different materials can help, which is why competition vehicles are invariably fitted with a different pad material, ventilate the discs (to increase the heat dissipation) and maybe use ceramic discs and so on.
Ordinary cars compromise on having brakes which work and feel better from cold but often perform badly when used hot. They are usually rated for only two consecutive emergency stops from 60km/hr or so before they will become effectively non-functional. Frequent applications of the brakes on a twisty road will reach the same temperature quickly, so let's hope there isn't a child about to step out just around the next bend, eh?
And on the same topic, next time you drag your car down a long hill on the brakes (instead of changing to a lower gear), you're also in great danger of having no brakes available if you need to actually stop at the bottom. Every time I follow someone whose brake lights are permanently on all the way down a long hill, I want to scream.
Screen zooming is not that useful compared to an application-specific zoom (which you have to code yourself - we use option-scrollwheel). Screen zoom may be more useful to sight-impaired people though, so I'm not saying it has no use.
A least they've removed the stupid, stupid scrollball for scrolling. That thing simply never worked properly after a few weeks of gathering dirt and dust. And opening the mouse to clean it generally broke it, as it was glued together.
I wonder how its battery life will compare? The wireless Mighty Mouse needed a recharge of its two AA Li-Mn cells once a week, which was very inconvenient. Might Mouse must be the worst Apple mouse ever, and that's saying something. I gave up on mine and went back to a simple multi-button USB mouse that I bought in 2000 and is still going strong.
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Like, the first digit is ones, then twos, then threes, then fives, then sevens, then elevens and so on
Trouble is there are lots of redundant numbers. The decimal value '3' is 3, 11 and 100. This problem rapidly gets worse as you have larger values. Decimal 5 is 110, 1000, 21, 102 and 13. Also, how many symbols are you allowing? Without a constant radix who knows when to carry? It's crazy. You didn't really think it through, did you?
Ah, but a big difference between carrying another plane slung below or on the back (Example from the 30s), and having a separate aircraft push one into the air using a kind of towbar: Cover image
I picked up a bunch of PM's from a second-hand bookstore that run from about 1949 through 1960, about 8 or 10 in all. They have pride of place on the shelf in 'the smallest room' and make great bogtime reading. The optimism of that era! The small ads are my favourite, everyone seemingly on the make with this scheme or that, amazing what seemed a viable business at the time, like chrome-plating baby shoes or plans for converting a push-mower into a ride-on. But even the big articles are mind-boggling, like the bizarre concept, quite seriously researched apparently, of using a separate "pusher" plane to get heavy bombers into the air (instantly made pointless as soon as jets started to improve even slightly, and never mind how many accidents it would have caused in practice).
And the car reviews are great as well - one copy has the release of the Edsel, which is just a straightforward review saying it has this and that, and what should appeal to buyers, A later one has an article explaining why it was such an inevitable disaster! (Which strangely the first article hadn't predicted at all). Tail fins and white picket fences, and not a care in the world - great reading!
It isn't necessarily illegal for the President to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office. It might have been sexual harassment, and an investigation was tenuously warranted, but lying to the investigators is certainly illegal.
This is still something most outside the US can't understand - what was the big deal? For those who get into a righteous froth about ol' Bill, you only need to go and read up on the Nixon administration. The words "ethics" and "morality" simply were not in their dictionary. Nixon did permanent harm to the office of the President which is has never recovered from - pretty much all modern cynicism about 'The Man' can be traced to that administration. Bill and his cigar fetish pale into insignificance beside it.
Experience shows how much you need to comment and what the comments worth writing consist of, just as experience tells you how to structure the code in the first place. "Rules" about commenting are perhaps useful starting points for the inexperienced, but with experience you can write your own rules.
Ballmer is the software industry's Richard Nixon - paranoid, incompetent and untrustworthy. The difference is, he can't be unelected.
Synthehol is so next century. Wake me up when someone can import real Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters to Earth.
since when did they let just anybody post something on the interwebs?
Since it was invented, really. Isn't that the point?
Yeah, how /do/ people pronounce this decade?
The noughties (or naughties). What I want to know is, what the hell are we going to call the next one?
OK, I'll check it out - it does sound like an interesting read and gets away from what I see as the main flaw with the sci-fi I've read - too much focus on technology (possibly alien) and not enough on real humanity (for my taste, even though I'm keen on technology myself).
If the constant arguing and bickering about what to do about global warming is anything to go by, they never will be ready.
As a teen I read lots of sci-fi, but then I grew up. One of the recurrent themes was the Earth was doomed for some reason so we'd all have to build a fleet of ships and go off and colonise another world. Even as a 13-year-old I was highly skeptical of those stories, not because of the technology or the distances or any of the practical difficulties, but because I knew that politics would never function to the point where a decision could have been reached, let alone acted upon.
If global warming is truly in need of a rapid, urgent and above all united effort to combat (and whether it is or not is your first argument, right there), then quite honestly, we're doomed. Perhaps one reason we've never detected an advanced civilisation out there is because they all go through this stage, or fail to.
I'm fed up with hearing and reading how "digital TV delivers better quality images (and sound)". It does no such thing. It's obvious that the picture quality is poorer than a good analogue signal - some images break up altogether, like sunlight on rippling water. It may help cram more channels into less space, but that's not really an end-user benefit (it doesn't necessarily translate into more choice, here in Australia it just means more repeats).
I've just had a BRILLIANT idea! Since you have to move the mower across the lawn to get to the next patch of grass to be cut, you could link up its wheels to drive the blades. You'd probably want to gear it so that the blades spun faster relative to the wheels, and maybe a more efficient blade design would be needed, such as, say, forming the blades into a cylinder rather than a "fan" shape, a bit like a combine harvester. Small and light, it would need no power other than someone pushing it along. I think I'm onto a winner here! Remember folks, you heard about it here first.
The plural of Lego is Lego, just as the plural of sheep is sheep. Fuckwits.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of pond scum.
There was once a time that Russia would have just kept schtum. How many UFO reports are due to similar failed firings prior to the end of the Cold War?
And lame as our cars may be, they are far more efficient than they were in 1980
How do you quantify "far more efficient"? The fact is, they're not. A difference of perhaps 25% to 27% is not far more efficient. I'm basing that on a typical small European car - maybe the situation with large US built cars looks better than that, but it's still absolutely atrocious. Cars may pollute less, in terms of actual noxious gasses released to the atmosphere, but that doesn't equate to better efficiency.
Is it just me or does their language look just like AppleScript?
Applescript and the Rev's incarnation of Hypertalk have the same roots - Hypercard. So They probably do look and work similarly.
Or you could, you know, just ask a taxi driver. A black cab driver that is (unless it's south of the river after 10pm), not a minicab driver - they don't know where anything is.
I don't see the idea fading any time soon
What makes you think that? I think solid state will be the norm within a decade. Moving parts? Who needs 'em.
when CDs and DVDs came out, they claimed they would last 50 years. I have yet to find one that lasts longer than 5
What on earth are you doing to them? The first CD I ever bought (Dark Side of the Moon I'm afraid) in 1986 still plays just fine. CDRs, perhaps another matter - I have some now that are not always readable - seems to depend on the drive - but are over 12 years old. Luckily there's nothing of value on them - funny how I burned so much stuff I thought I'd need, but never did.
iTunes LP format is closed and you have to pay $10,000 to Apple to have them make you one! Apple are EVIL!!
Oh wait, they released the format specs and anyone can make one.
OK, they took from open source and added Grand Central Dispatch without giving back to the community! Apple are EVIL!!
Oh wait, they released the GCD sources to Darwin.
OK, they nobbled the Atom processor in the latest OS build so people can't run Mac OS on some no-name brand PC! Apple are EVIL!!
Oh wait, it was probably just a bug.
And so on, and so on...
Ok, repeat after me: there is no production car on the planet with an engine capable of suddenly overpowering simple hydraulic brakes.
That's incorrect, as anyone who has done any motorsport or even driven hard will testify. Brakes work by converting kinetic energy into heat. They have a finite capacity (rate) at which they can do this. If the car has more energy than the brakes can dissipate, it will continue to move. In addition, the brakes also have a maximum working temperature at which point they cannot convert any more energy into heat - effectively they are saturated - this point is easily felt as a sudden loss of deceleration (aka "fade"). Different materials can help, which is why competition vehicles are invariably fitted with a different pad material, ventilate the discs (to increase the heat dissipation) and maybe use ceramic discs and so on.
Ordinary cars compromise on having brakes which work and feel better from cold but often perform badly when used hot. They are usually rated for only two consecutive emergency stops from 60km/hr or so before they will become effectively non-functional. Frequent applications of the brakes on a twisty road will reach the same temperature quickly, so let's hope there isn't a child about to step out just around the next bend, eh? And on the same topic, next time you drag your car down a long hill on the brakes (instead of changing to a lower gear), you're also in great danger of having no brakes available if you need to actually stop at the bottom. Every time I follow someone whose brake lights are permanently on all the way down a long hill, I want to scream.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Most of those countries don't speak Americanese, dammit! At least the Aussies have something vaguely close...
Screen zooming is not that useful compared to an application-specific zoom (which you have to code yourself - we use option-scrollwheel). Screen zoom may be more useful to sight-impaired people though, so I'm not saying it has no use.
A least they've removed the stupid, stupid scrollball for scrolling. That thing simply never worked properly after a few weeks of gathering dirt and dust. And opening the mouse to clean it generally broke it, as it was glued together.
I wonder how its battery life will compare? The wireless Mighty Mouse needed a recharge of its two AA Li-Mn cells once a week, which was very inconvenient. Might Mouse must be the worst Apple mouse ever, and that's saying something. I gave up on mine and went back to a simple multi-button USB mouse that I bought in 2000 and is still going strong.