Ubuntu has mp3, flash and java out of the box, like most linux distros I believe. Its video player is a bit lacking out-o-the box, aparantly something to do with proprietary codecs or css or something. Fortunately, enabling the "universe" repository allows for easy installing with a graphical installer. Download is pretty quick and the applications just work right away.
I think the thing ubuntu lacks is a decent set of graphical config tools like mandrake and redhat have. If you don't need to tweak something, it's great and most things don't need tweaking on ubuntu, but if you do, you need to pour through man pages as the grahical configurators are quite limited. (I'm still trying to find the menu editor if there is one.. LyX didn't get placed in a menu when I installed it:( fortunately alt-f2 works like in any other distro.)
why bother with the search box at all? you can just type google "search terms" in the address bar. you can even change it to be g "search terms" if you want. check out the quick searches menu.
WRT netflix, I don't think that's it at all. Certainly that's one of the reasons, but I'd venture a guess that the predominant reason is convenience. Netflix takes at least three days turnaround, more if it's over a weekend. That means no impulse movies and no big super-trilogy marathons or whole series marathons or what have you. People building up netflix libraries are planning a bit further ahead so later on they can say, "hey i'm in the mood for x" and watch it right away rather put it in the queue and wait a week. In fact, that's the same reason people buy movies at all!
I would like a can opener that opens cans. Most of the offerings I have seen of late have been very attractive looking with molded plastic and nice color choice. But they've been suprisingly unsharp (one even had a squared off metal disk instead of the traditional sharpened metal disk) and difficult to properly open and close around the can. One just munged the top of the can a bit until i pulled out a penknife with "can opener" attachment and opened it manually.
In contrast, my old 10 cent "army issue" piece of stamped aluminum with a razor sharp blade works better than any of the current offerings despite being "disposeable"
Rubberized handles are good, but don't forget to put a can opener in there at some point.
Anything that can be imaged can be reproduced to the accuracy of the imager. Hence, biometric security is like a social security number: it might be unique to you, but you can't change it ever* and if someone gets a hold of it, you're screwed.
*I am aware that in extreme situations you can change your SSN. afaik, This capability was designed to address that point, however the address space of SSNs is not that sparse and the cost of changing the number is too high. (in both time and money)
The only way to change your biometric data would involve some pretty severe scarring.
You know, I always here about how well/poorly the labour party is doing in UK, but I never hear about any other parties. Since you seem to be from UK (or at least very knowledgable of it) perhaps you could shed some light on the matter. What ARE the major parties in UK and what do they stand for? In the US we have two major parties, Democrat and Republican which stand for, respectively: Big Government paying for social programs and Big Government paying for the same social programs and tax cuts (as long as they increase the total size and complexity of the tax code).
They did. There was a design problem with the fuel tanks so they scrapped it: They couldn't spread the manufacturing around to enough states to get congress to vote for it.
Ok, actually it was a weight issue: the plans called for as yet unmanufacturable materials for the fuel tanks to be light enough and apparantly there was no interest in continuing to refine the design until it WAS possible (either through better design or through the materials finally being available.) leading some to speculate the above as the real reason.
Of course, if you'd bothered to pay attention to the timeline, you'd know that his addiction happened a number of years after that statement, during which time he was conspicuously silent on the issue. (with one or two much milder quotes.. which may be on the podcast...)
By some stretch, he is a hypocrite (apparantly a bigger sin these days than even murder), but he did not every "say one thing while doing another" only the lesser "say one thing then later do the opposite and also change what you're saying a bit"
As a conservativish libertarian, I don't think ANY drugs should be illegal, on the "you're only hurting yoruself" argument. If i were left leaning, I'm sure i would feel the same way and not be interested in having the laws all of a sudden just because they could hurt someone I hate.
"drugs are bad because...You could go to jail" is not a good reason to make drugs illegal. (I have actually heard someone say that in support of drug laws)
Actually i do find their jokes to be in very bad taste, but surely you aren't equating recreational drug use with addiction caused by overuse* of painkillers for a legitimate pain? Where's all this compassion that the non-republicans are supposed to have?
*overuse in the sense of above the threshold of addiction, not necessarily more than enough to relieve the pain.
There are only two cases where communism can work. One is coerced managed economy. A despot is probably a requirement. example: USSR
The other is a purely voluntary communism. A despot may also be necessary, but it's ok because there's no coersion. example: linux*
Only one of those has succeeded in any way.
*part of the success of linux (and other GPL communist projects) is surely due to the fact that freeloaders cannot diminish the project. Everyone is free to contribute or not, but there will always be a net improvement. Real communism cannot claim that advantage: freeloaders consume real resources which diminishes the community wealth.
100% of the energy is either reflected or radiated into space. The temperature at which this occurs is the only thing under contention. Things that cause the equilibrium temperature to rise include: Increased energy flux and IR opaque gasses in the atmosphere.
Tomsrtbt, http://www.toms.net/rb, fits on a floppy disk. (one of the ways he saves space is by taking out the extraneous Os and spaces in 'Tom's Root Boot'
What are you talking about? tons IS a force unit. 2,000 pound force = 8,896.44323 newtons (from google)
[siderant] You might think we imperal units people are crazy because we have pounds force and pounds mass, but we think you metric people are crazy because although you have kgs mass and newtons force, you seem to prefer to use kgs force and ignore the concept of mass altogether.[siderant off]
I'd like to point out that these haven't been tested in any long term basis yet. By long term, I mean longer than a few miliseconds. The 30 MW tests are conducted using a huge bank of capacitors which take hours to charge. the problem is in maintaining hard vacuum at the thrust levels these things are supposed to put out. They're suppposed to bridge the gap a bit between the high Isp/nearly insignificant thrust of ion propulsion and the abyssmal Isp/really high thrust of traditional chemical rockets.
The problem mentioned on the Wiki page is inaccurate... some background: MHD's basically work the same way as a rail gun, but instead of slugs, quasineutral conducting plasma* is used. and instead of rails, concentric annode and cathode are used. The magnetic field is generated by the current through the cathode AND the annode and is necessary for operation of the thruster. The other element is the current through the plasma, set in motion by the electric field generated between the cathode and annode.
The problem is twofold. For efficiency, you must generate a uniform current sheet. This involves some complicated finite elements modeling and is not afaik perfected as of yet. In addition to being inefficient, concentrations in current will wreak havoc on the surface of the cathode, further compounding the problem. In addition to this, even ideal cathodes will ablate due to the high temperatures and currents. This ablation will not be uniform, which brings us back to the first problem. Wear of the cathode is the most significant engineering problem before these things can be used in space, but they hold the most promise so far for an interplanetary drive.
In the meantime, look up Hall thruster, (which trap a "sea of electrons" instead of a physical cathode-i think) and Pulse plasma thrusters (a pico-thruster for really fine adjustment - and some so simple you could build one at home) both of which have actually flown.
Unfortunately, this is not a earth-to-orbit technology. Like ion drive, this tech requires high voltages (which simply will not be achieved in an atmosphere) and still does not have the raw thrust available in a chemical or nuclear rocket.
*Yes i know that was redundant, but it's so fun to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu has mp3, flash and java out of the box, like most linux distros I believe. Its video player is a bit lacking out-o-the box, aparantly something to do with proprietary codecs or css or something. Fortunately, enabling the "universe" repository allows for easy installing with a graphical installer. Download is pretty quick and the applications just work right away.
I think the thing ubuntu lacks is a decent set of graphical config tools like mandrake and redhat have. If you don't need to tweak something, it's great and most things don't need tweaking on ubuntu, but if you do, you need to pour through man pages as the grahical configurators are quite limited. (I'm still trying to find the menu editor if there is one.. LyX didn't get placed in a menu when I installed it:( fortunately alt-f2 works like in any other distro.)
why bother with the search box at all? you can just type google "search terms" in the address bar. you can even change it to be g "search terms" if you want. check out the quick searches menu.
WRT netflix, I don't think that's it at all. Certainly that's one of the reasons, but I'd venture a guess that the predominant reason is convenience. Netflix takes at least three days turnaround, more if it's over a weekend. That means no impulse movies and no big super-trilogy marathons or whole series marathons or what have you. People building up netflix libraries are planning a bit further ahead so later on they can say, "hey i'm in the mood for x" and watch it right away rather put it in the queue and wait a week. In fact, that's the same reason people buy movies at all!
Beer object aparantly poorly designed. It should be beer.get("guinness","pint").
but there was no +1 flamebait.. only the -1 variety :(
Is bittorrent supposed to be derivative of "bit torrent" or "bit to rent"? The latter seems more likely based on how it works.
I would like a can opener that opens cans. Most of the offerings I have seen of late have been very attractive looking with molded plastic and nice color choice. But they've been suprisingly unsharp (one even had a squared off metal disk instead of the traditional sharpened metal disk) and difficult to properly open and close around the can. One just munged the top of the can a bit until i pulled out a penknife with "can opener" attachment and opened it manually.
In contrast, my old 10 cent "army issue" piece of stamped aluminum with a razor sharp blade works better than any of the current offerings despite being "disposeable"
Rubberized handles are good, but don't forget to put a can opener in there at some point.
But looks really cool in movies.
Anything that can be imaged can be reproduced to the accuracy of the imager. Hence, biometric security is like a social security number: it might be unique to you, but you can't change it ever* and if someone gets a hold of it, you're screwed.
*I am aware that in extreme situations you can change your SSN. afaik, This capability was designed to address that point, however the address space of SSNs is not that sparse and the cost of changing the number is too high. (in both time and money)
The only way to change your biometric data would involve some pretty severe scarring.
That's an awful lot of words for,
"No*"
*unless there is one
You know, I always here about how well/poorly the labour party is doing in UK, but I never hear about any other parties. Since you seem to be from UK (or at least very knowledgable of it) perhaps you could shed some light on the matter. What ARE the major parties in UK and what do they stand for? In the US we have two major parties, Democrat and Republican which stand for, respectively: Big Government paying for social programs and Big Government paying for the same social programs and tax cuts (as long as they increase the total size and complexity of the tax code).
They did. There was a design problem with the fuel tanks so they scrapped it: They couldn't spread the manufacturing around to enough states to get congress to vote for it.
Ok, actually it was a weight issue: the plans called for as yet unmanufacturable materials for the fuel tanks to be light enough and apparantly there was no interest in continuing to refine the design until it WAS possible (either through better design or through the materials finally being available.) leading some to speculate the above as the real reason.
And they made the GP hulls.
The safest way is to make a pocket sun and move the whole mini solar system to where you want to go. A 'fleet o' worlds' as it were.
Of course, if you'd bothered to pay attention to the timeline, you'd know that his addiction happened a number of years after that statement, during which time he was conspicuously silent on the issue. (with one or two much milder quotes.. which may be on the podcast...)
By some stretch, he is a hypocrite (apparantly a bigger sin these days than even murder), but he did not every "say one thing while doing another" only the lesser "say one thing then later do the opposite and also change what you're saying a bit"
As a conservativish libertarian, I don't think ANY drugs should be illegal, on the "you're only hurting yoruself" argument. If i were left leaning, I'm sure i would feel the same way and not be interested in having the laws all of a sudden just because they could hurt someone I hate.
"drugs are bad because...You could go to jail" is not a good reason to make drugs illegal. (I have actually heard someone say that in support of drug laws)
Actually i do find their jokes to be in very bad taste, but surely you aren't equating recreational drug use with addiction caused by overuse* of painkillers for a legitimate pain? Where's all this compassion that the non-republicans are supposed to have?
*overuse in the sense of above the threshold of addiction, not necessarily more than enough to relieve the pain.
fundamentally, those are the same thing.
There are only two cases where communism can work. One is coerced managed economy. A despot is probably a requirement. example: USSR
The other is a purely voluntary communism. A despot may also be necessary, but it's ok because there's no coersion. example: linux*
Only one of those has succeeded in any way.
*part of the success of linux (and other GPL communist projects) is surely due to the fact that freeloaders cannot diminish the project. Everyone is free to contribute or not, but there will always be a net improvement. Real communism cannot claim that advantage: freeloaders consume real resources which diminishes the community wealth.
X and firefox under 50 mb. Damn that is small.
Your floppy disk is less likely to fail than a cd though. One of the advantages of ferrous media i suppose.
Ha Ha! We sure are clever. It feels good to be better than someone who became addicted to painkillers as a result of extreme back pain.
100% of the energy is either reflected or radiated into space. The temperature at which this occurs is the only thing under contention. Things that cause the equilibrium temperature to rise include: Increased energy flux and IR opaque gasses in the atmosphere.
Tomsrtbt, http://www.toms.net/rb, fits on a floppy disk. (one of the ways he saves space is by taking out the extraneous Os and spaces in 'Tom's Root Boot'
Then we'd still be getting the heat. The whole point is to reduce the flux absorbed and trapped by the earth.
Tastes just like people! Your dog won't know the difference!
"So, why do we need Amazon Prime again?"
Love interest for Optimus?
Are you sure you don't mean this:5 &spn=0.007950,0.011437&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=55.751388,37.61774
I'm pretty sure all saddam got from your location is "intelligence"
What are you talking about? tons IS a force unit.
2,000 pound force = 8,896.44323 newtons (from google)
[siderant]
You might think we imperal units people are crazy because we have pounds force and pounds mass, but we think you metric people are crazy because although you have kgs mass and newtons force, you seem to prefer to use kgs force and ignore the concept of mass altogether.[siderant off]
I'd like to point out that these haven't been tested in any long term basis yet. By long term, I mean longer than a few miliseconds. The 30 MW tests are conducted using a huge bank of capacitors which take hours to charge. the problem is in maintaining hard vacuum at the thrust levels these things are supposed to put out. They're suppposed to bridge the gap a bit between the high Isp/nearly insignificant thrust of ion propulsion and the abyssmal Isp/really high thrust of traditional chemical rockets.
The problem mentioned on the Wiki page is inaccurate... some background: MHD's basically work the same way as a rail gun, but instead of slugs, quasineutral conducting plasma* is used. and instead of rails, concentric annode and cathode are used. The magnetic field is generated by the current through the cathode AND the annode and is necessary for operation of the thruster. The other element is the current through the plasma, set in motion by the electric field generated between the cathode and annode.
The problem is twofold. For efficiency, you must generate a uniform current sheet. This involves some complicated finite elements modeling and is not afaik perfected as of yet. In addition to being inefficient, concentrations in current will wreak havoc on the surface of the cathode, further compounding the problem. In addition to this, even ideal cathodes will ablate due to the high temperatures and currents. This ablation will not be uniform, which brings us back to the first problem. Wear of the cathode is the most significant engineering problem before these things can be used in space, but they hold the most promise so far for an interplanetary drive.
In the meantime, look up Hall thruster, (which trap a "sea of electrons" instead of a physical cathode-i think) and Pulse plasma thrusters (a pico-thruster for really fine adjustment - and some so simple you could build one at home) both of which have actually flown.
Unfortunately, this is not a earth-to-orbit technology. Like ion drive, this tech requires high voltages (which simply will not be achieved in an atmosphere) and still does not have the raw thrust available in a chemical or nuclear rocket.
*Yes i know that was redundant, but it's so fun to say.