My power company solved this problem for me by shipping out (at no additional charge) a power strip with 1 master and several slave outlets. The TV is plugged into the master outlet, and everythign else into the slave outlets. When the TV is off, the slave outlets are automatically switched off. So regardless of whether the cable box / dvd player / name your random device would prefer to live in standby mode, it can't.
Sure, there is a 20 second delay when I turn the TV on while the box syncs itself back up with the network, but that's a small price to pay.
No, my original statement was unclear. I was not attempting to classifly economists with social scientists. I was stating that they are both a long way from physicists. Perhaps 'fundamental science' is a better term for what I'm willing to call science. FWIW, that excludes large chunks of stalwarts such as biology & geology.
That actually was part of my point. In my day job (and night job and weekend job, and, oh god I need a vacation) I'm an astrophysicist. I have more data sets that I can recall, and the number of problems for which I'm confident that the errors are Gaussian is at most 2 or 3. We're finally in an era where computational power facilitates forward modeling & Bayesian techniques that can provide good estimates of true uncertainties. But I (and many of my colleagues) barely understand how they work. Any expectation that most researchers are willing to invest the time to understand anything beyond Gaussian statistics is unrealistic.
+1 this.
The problem here is the author's impression that "social scientists" and economists are scientists. The groups that he excludes in the first paragraph (physicists) are scientists.
Anyone attempting to implement a statistical model designed for a large (and Gaussian) data set on a small number of data points (as the article's example does) should expect to get an answer that is at best marginal. Any scientists who ever received even the most basic of statistics and/or data analysis training knows this. Understand the problem first, then take enough data points, then carry out your statistical analysis & formulate conclusions.
Indeed. Please don't track my movements. Implement a "wheel tax" that is collected with the annual vehicle registration and tied to the odometer reading.
My run of the mill thinkpad has operated at the summit of Mauna Kea (~14,000 ft) many times. I've personally also used a Gateway laptop, and a couple of seagate 2.5" harddrives up there. I know of many people who have used other laptop models there as well, and have never heard of any problems. The pressure difference between 14000 ft and 150000 ft is only about 15%.
I strongly suspect Dell just pulled the 15,000 ft number out of their rear because some marketing person thought it sounded neato.
If this airport only serves a few dozen people each day, how can they possibly have passenger flow problems?
Until I read your post, I envisioned someone watching a computer screen with thousands of little dots overlaid on a floorplan of the airport, and saying something like: "Congestion at security line 6, open 2 more lines", or something like that.
If there are only a few dozen people using the airport, I don't see how anyone can interperet this as anything except 'big-(Hungarian)-brother'
I'm still waiting for airlines to install power sockets. I've flown hundreds of flights around the US on several airlines in the past several years and I have only found ONE plane that had power.
American Airlines has power adapters (9v cig type) on almost all of their aircraft. I've personally used them on 767, 757, 737, and MD80 aircraft. They tend to be in only every 3rd row in coach, so you need to be aware of your seat assignment ahead of time. Websites like seatguru.com can help with that. Business and First have them in every seat.
Kids can have cell phones when they are able to pay for the monthly bills, including any overages they might incur. Until then, they can carry quarters and use payphones, which still exist in schools and the like.
Kids should not be allowed to carry cell phones around during school hours. They can bring them in the building, but they must stay in lockers during school hours. If administrators or teachers see phones being used/carried in the halls or classrooms, they should be confiscated and the parents should have to come retrieve them.
Yeah, our guy says the same thing. What happens is that when the nozzle clogs, the oil is not aerated in the proper mist, which is required for ignition. Instead, it just kind of oozes out and forms a pool in the bottom of the burner (and apparently on the floor too if you have too much oil). Then when the burner guy replaces the nozzle and lights the burner, the pool of oil heats up and ignites. That is why you're "only supposed to hit the electronic start once, then call for help".
Without the high heat from the already lit burner, the pool of oil would just sit there indefinately. You could hold a candle next to it without any adverse consequences.
True, but the combustion temperature is pretty high (I don't recall off the top of my head what it is), and it has to be vaporized. I believe that tossing a match into a vat of heating oil at room temperature will do nothing except extinguish the match. Try that with natural gas.
The ignition on my boiler generates ~10,000V to start up the thing.
I neglected to 'spell-out' how my post ties in to the parent article. In short, ApJ and AJ are insulated even if paper subscriptions decrease because authors pick up the tab. Plus, if you want to view the material on-line, you still have to pay a token amount.
In Astronomy (at least in the US), major journals are supported by subscriptions AND by page charges. If an author wants to publish in a journal (eg. ApJ, AJ, etc.), they have to pay by the page. Subscription rates (for paper copies) are quite low, and generally reflect the cost of printing, binding, and postage. On-line subscriptions are also available to individuals (if you're institution doesn't already have an on-line subscription to the journal you're interested in), and are quite reasonable.
The exact charges are (for members of the AAS): ApJ/ApJS/AJ Electronic Only $50 ApJ Printed $290 (add electronic for additional $25) AJ Printed $110 (add electronic for additional $40) Keep in mind that these are not some newstand magazine, but thick journals with many tens to hundreds of articles/month (some have multiple issues per month).
Page charges are $110/page for manuscripts submitted electronically.
Journals that don't use page charges have higher subscription rates (ie. Icarus - $3377)
From personal experience, articles in Icarus tend to be much longer than articles in ApJ or AJ - I wonder what would happen if the authors were paying by the page...
or natural gas heaters that heat up water on-demand. The first is very costly and wasteful, and the second is not available to everyone, especially those in rural areas.
We don't have natural gas available where I live, but we still have hot water on demand. It's called 'oil heat', and as far as I know is available most anywhere in the US. Granted, oil has its downsides, but so does natural gas. At least your house won't blow up if you have an oil leak
Can you expand on why you find this so? I've installed suse 9.1, and 9.2 on numerous machines, always using the FTP install. I've never had a problem (running off of the argon nat. lab mirror) and always found the installation to go smoothly. It typically took me ~2 hours over my cable modem connection, although for most of that it runs by itself while I am elsewhere.
wouldn't it be nice to see a distribution get the minimal or basic installation only requires one (possibly two) CDs?
I bet that installing via FTP is faster than downloading the entire ISO distribution, because I too don't come anywhere close to needing all of the packages.
Actually, I think it is quite common for other institutions to 'intercept' the signal just for kicks. I think Stanford did this during the landing of the Mars rovers last year. Picking up the signal is not so hard - you just need a big dish and to know at what frequency to look.
Cassini is probably harder than Mars because the signal will be weaker. But I can't imagine why it couldn't be done.
The 'pigment' based printers have always had longer archival times due to the nature of the ink. It doesn't 'dye' the paper, it embeds little bits of colored junk. Unfortunately, the color gamut of pigment inks is not as good as dye-based inks, so people often complain that prints with pigment based inks look flat and don't have the 'pop' that dye-based ones do.
Epson produced a professional pigment based photo printer a few years ago (Model 2000P, if I recall correctly). The prints from it supposedly always looked muddied, and it didn't sell well.
Yes the DVD is much sharper. I was watching ESB last night, and during the Hoth battle scene I could easily see snow and glaciers in the mountains behind the walkers. In the original (at least the VHS) I was hard pressed to discern the mountains at all.
That's an interesting analysis. I have Suse 9.1 running on 2 machines, a notebook with an Intel i810 graphics card, and a desktop with an Nvidia Ti4200 graphics card. I have never used any tv app, and I generally haven't watched much video at all. I was quite impressed though at how easy (compared to old RH) getting the Nvidia driver installed and working for my Ti4200 was.
I don't use nautilus, and in fact have never really figured out what it's purpose is. I do all my file management from the command line in an xterm (not the linux terminal). I'm probably missing out on some 'great' functionality, but am not missing what I don't know about. You mention burning CD's - I use XCDRoast because I learned the interface long ago and it still seems to work just fine (for DVD-R and DVD+R's too).
I recently installed the latest version of MPlayer on the notebook (the mplayer website has a link to Suse 9.1 binary rpms), and it seems to work just fine for qt, windows media, and dvds, although I haven't tested it extensively. I did have to switch on DMA support to get DVD's to run without chunking.
I've also not tried to play games on linux, except for Railroad Tycoon 2 (the linux version by loki), which ran just fine but doesn't really require any high power graphics processing. I dinked around with wine a few years back, but couldn't get anything to work so abandoned it.
Your description of KDE reminds me of why I abandoned it years ago - all of those ugly little icons made for a claustrophobic desktop. Actually, my favorite window manager was FVWM2, configured to look like 'openwindows', with nothing on it except for a clock and a workspace switcher. All menus were accessible via a right mouse click, and the config file was an easily customizable (and locateable) text file. Unfortunately, I think those days are gone.
I've never tried anything with Mandrake. I was a loyal RH user until they switched business models. I was concerned that upgrading packages would be a royal pain, so I switched to Suse and have been very happy. I need my machine(s) to do work on, and don't want to spend a lot of time configuring the OS.
I don't know why Novell bought all of those companies, but so far I've been quite pleased with the latest Suse releases. My wireless centrino card started working in 9.1, and my wireless mouse now works simultaneously with my touchpad (before it was one or the other, but not both). As long as things like this keep improving, and I can continue to download free patches, I'll stick with Suse.
Ok, that makes sense. It hadn't occurred to me because I'm pretty much always connected to a fast network (either ethernet or wireless), so it probably takes me longer to find the CD than it would to just download the package.
Does the ISO actually include most of what you need? Last time I did an FTP install, I think I downloaded between 1.5 and 2GB to get all of the packages I wanted. When I was using RH, I remember they released 2 or 3 disks containing binary packages (and another 2 with source rpms). It looks like the SUSE iso distribution is only a single disk!
I regularly use the gnome with suse 9.1, and haven't had any problems. I hear (and read on/.) that people have issues with gnome, but don't know what it is that they are doing. Please tell me what you are trying to do that gnome doesn't work for!
I use gnome daily for work, and haven't found anything that I'd like it to do that it doesn't (not quite true, I wish I could switch workspaces with the mouse by bumping against the edge, but can't figure out how to activate this feature in 2.4 - it works fine on my rh7.3 system).
Good question! Hopefully they will still offer the FTP install.
I never understood why some people prefer downloading the personal edition ISO over the FTP install. You've still got to download a whole bunch of stuff, which means that you need a broadband connection. With the ISO version, I assume there are things included that you don't want, and things not included that you do want. So the download is not optimized to the installation you will end up with (after installing extra packages via FTP). Can someone explain why they prefer to use the ISO over the FTP install?
I'm running SuSE 9.1 and only use Gnome (2.4). I find that it works just fine for everything I need. I don't know if there are nice features in KDE that don't exist in GNOME because I've never really used a modern version of KDE. I did use a very old version years ago on a RH 6.x machine and didn't like it very much, so I switched to GNOME and have stayed there. As I see it, it's only a window manager. As long as it opens windows, and allows me to easily navigate between them, then what other features might I need that I don't have?
Hell, TWM and FVWM(2) served many people, myself included, just fine for many many years.
From an end user perspective, if everything you've tried to do works, then you have no reason to go looking for new features. In fact, I probably won't upgrade to Suse 9.2 because I'm pretty much happy with everything in 9.1 (unless powersaved has learned to work happily alongside agp modules).
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My power company solved this problem for me by shipping out (at no additional charge) a power strip with 1 master and several slave outlets. The TV is plugged into the master outlet, and everythign else into the slave outlets. When the TV is off, the slave outlets are automatically switched off. So regardless of whether the cable box / dvd player / name your random device would prefer to live in standby mode, it can't. Sure, there is a 20 second delay when I turn the TV on while the box syncs itself back up with the network, but that's a small price to pay.
No, my original statement was unclear. I was not attempting to classifly economists with social scientists. I was stating that they are both a long way from physicists. Perhaps 'fundamental science' is a better term for what I'm willing to call science. FWIW, that excludes large chunks of stalwarts such as biology & geology.
That actually was part of my point. In my day job (and night job and weekend job, and, oh god I need a vacation) I'm an astrophysicist. I have more data sets that I can recall, and the number of problems for which I'm confident that the errors are Gaussian is at most 2 or 3. We're finally in an era where computational power facilitates forward modeling & Bayesian techniques that can provide good estimates of true uncertainties. But I (and many of my colleagues) barely understand how they work. Any expectation that most researchers are willing to invest the time to understand anything beyond Gaussian statistics is unrealistic.
Not in actual physics labs, it wasn't. The change to MRI is only in public facing applications.
+1 this. The problem here is the author's impression that "social scientists" and economists are scientists. The groups that he excludes in the first paragraph (physicists) are scientists. Anyone attempting to implement a statistical model designed for a large (and Gaussian) data set on a small number of data points (as the article's example does) should expect to get an answer that is at best marginal. Any scientists who ever received even the most basic of statistics and/or data analysis training knows this. Understand the problem first, then take enough data points, then carry out your statistical analysis & formulate conclusions.
Indeed. Please don't track my movements. Implement a "wheel tax" that is collected with the annual vehicle registration and tied to the odometer reading.
My run of the mill thinkpad has operated at the summit of Mauna Kea (~14,000 ft) many times. I've personally also used a Gateway laptop, and a couple of seagate 2.5" harddrives up there. I know of many people who have used other laptop models there as well, and have never heard of any problems. The pressure difference between 14000 ft and 150000 ft is only about 15%.
I strongly suspect Dell just pulled the 15,000 ft number out of their rear because some marketing person thought it sounded neato.
If this airport only serves a few dozen people each day, how can they possibly have passenger flow problems?
Until I read your post, I envisioned someone watching a computer screen with thousands of little dots overlaid on a floorplan of the airport, and saying something like: "Congestion at security line 6, open 2 more lines", or something like that.
If there are only a few dozen people using the airport, I don't see how anyone can interperet this as anything except 'big-(Hungarian)-brother'
American Airlines has power adapters (9v cig type) on almost all of their aircraft. I've personally used them on 767, 757, 737, and MD80 aircraft. They tend to be in only every 3rd row in coach, so you need to be aware of your seat assignment ahead of time. Websites like seatguru.com can help with that. Business and First have them in every seat.
Kids can have cell phones when they are able to pay for the monthly bills, including any overages they might incur. Until then, they can carry quarters and use payphones, which still exist in schools and the like.
Kids should not be allowed to carry cell phones around during school hours. They can bring them in the building, but they must stay in lockers during school hours. If administrators or teachers see phones being used/carried in the halls or classrooms, they should be confiscated and the parents should have to come retrieve them.
Yeah, our guy says the same thing. What happens is that when the nozzle clogs, the oil is not aerated in the proper mist, which is required for ignition. Instead, it just kind of oozes out and forms a pool in the bottom of the burner (and apparently on the floor too if you have too much oil). Then when the burner guy replaces the nozzle and lights the burner, the pool of oil heats up and ignites. That is why you're "only supposed to hit the electronic start once, then call for help".
Without the high heat from the already lit burner, the pool of oil would just sit there indefinately. You could hold a candle next to it without any adverse consequences.
True, but the combustion temperature is pretty high (I don't recall off the top of my head what it is), and it has to be vaporized. I believe that tossing a match into a vat of heating oil at room temperature will do nothing except extinguish the match. Try that with natural gas.
The ignition on my boiler generates ~10,000V to start up the thing.
I neglected to 'spell-out' how my post ties in to the parent article. In short, ApJ and AJ are insulated even if paper subscriptions decrease because authors pick up the tab. Plus, if you want to view the material on-line, you still have to pay a token amount.
In Astronomy (at least in the US), major journals are supported by subscriptions AND by page charges. If an author wants to publish in a journal (eg. ApJ, AJ, etc.), they have to pay by the page. Subscription rates (for paper copies) are quite low, and generally reflect the cost of printing, binding, and postage. On-line subscriptions are also available to individuals (if you're institution doesn't already have an on-line subscription to the journal you're interested in), and are quite reasonable.
The exact charges are (for members of the AAS):
ApJ/ApJS/AJ Electronic Only $50
ApJ Printed $290 (add electronic for additional $25)
AJ Printed $110 (add electronic for additional $40)
Keep in mind that these are not some newstand magazine, but thick journals with many tens to hundreds of articles/month (some have multiple issues per month).
Page charges are $110/page for manuscripts submitted electronically.
Journals that don't use page charges have higher subscription rates (ie. Icarus - $3377)
From personal experience, articles in Icarus tend to be much longer than articles in ApJ or AJ - I wonder what would happen if the authors were paying by the page...
We don't have natural gas available where I live, but we still have hot water on demand. It's called 'oil heat', and as far as I know is available most anywhere in the US. Granted, oil has its downsides, but so does natural gas. At least your house won't blow up if you have an oil leak
Can you expand on why you find this so? I've installed suse 9.1, and 9.2 on numerous machines, always using the FTP install. I've never had a problem (running off of the argon nat. lab mirror) and always found the installation to go smoothly. It typically took me ~2 hours over my cable modem connection, although for most of that it runs by itself while I am elsewhere.
wouldn't it be nice to see a distribution get the minimal or basic installation only requires one (possibly two) CDs?
I bet that installing via FTP is faster than downloading the entire ISO distribution, because I too don't come anywhere close to needing all of the packages.
Actually, I think it is quite common for other institutions to 'intercept' the signal just for kicks. I think Stanford did this during the landing of the Mars rovers last year. Picking up the signal is not so hard - you just need a big dish and to know at what frequency to look.
Cassini is probably harder than Mars because the signal will be weaker. But I can't imagine why it couldn't be done.
The 'pigment' based printers have always had longer archival times due to the nature of the ink. It doesn't 'dye' the paper, it embeds little bits of colored junk. Unfortunately, the color gamut of pigment inks is not as good as dye-based inks, so people often complain that prints with pigment based inks look flat and don't have the 'pop' that dye-based ones do.
Epson produced a professional pigment based photo printer a few years ago (Model 2000P, if I recall correctly). The prints from it supposedly always looked muddied, and it didn't sell well.
Yes the DVD is much sharper. I was watching ESB last night, and during the Hoth battle scene I could easily see snow and glaciers in the mountains behind the walkers. In the original (at least the VHS) I was hard pressed to discern the mountains at all.
Oh come on. They could do this on CSI a couple of years ago. What's taken 'real' law enforcement so long????
That's an interesting analysis. I have Suse 9.1 running on 2 machines, a notebook with an Intel i810 graphics card, and a desktop with an Nvidia Ti4200 graphics card. I have never used any tv app, and I generally haven't watched much video at all. I was quite impressed though at how easy (compared to old RH) getting the Nvidia driver installed and working for my Ti4200 was.
I don't use nautilus, and in fact have never really figured out what it's purpose is. I do all my file management from the command line in an xterm (not the linux terminal). I'm probably missing out on some 'great' functionality, but am not missing what I don't know about. You mention burning CD's - I use XCDRoast because I learned the interface long ago and it still seems to work just fine (for DVD-R and DVD+R's too).
I recently installed the latest version of MPlayer on the notebook (the mplayer website has a link to Suse 9.1 binary rpms), and it seems to work just fine for qt, windows media, and dvds, although I haven't tested it extensively. I did have to switch on DMA support to get DVD's to run without chunking.
I've also not tried to play games on linux, except for Railroad Tycoon 2 (the linux version by loki), which ran just fine but doesn't really require any high power graphics processing. I dinked around with wine a few years back, but couldn't get anything to work so abandoned it.
Your description of KDE reminds me of why I abandoned it years ago - all of those ugly little icons made for a claustrophobic desktop. Actually, my favorite window manager was FVWM2, configured to look like 'openwindows', with nothing on it except for a clock and a workspace switcher. All menus were accessible via a right mouse click, and the config file was an easily customizable (and locateable) text file. Unfortunately, I think those days are gone.
I've never tried anything with Mandrake. I was a loyal RH user until they switched business models. I was concerned that upgrading packages would be a royal pain, so I switched to Suse and have been very happy. I need my machine(s) to do work on, and don't want to spend a lot of time configuring the OS.
I don't know why Novell bought all of those companies, but so far I've been quite pleased with the latest Suse releases. My wireless centrino card started working in 9.1, and my wireless mouse now works simultaneously with my touchpad (before it was one or the other, but not both). As long as things like this keep improving, and I can continue to download free patches, I'll stick with Suse.
Ok, that makes sense. It hadn't occurred to me because I'm pretty much always connected to a fast network (either ethernet or wireless), so it probably takes me longer to find the CD than it would to just download the package.
Does the ISO actually include most of what you need? Last time I did an FTP install, I think I downloaded between 1.5 and 2GB to get all of the packages I wanted. When I was using RH, I remember they released 2 or 3 disks containing binary packages (and another 2 with source rpms). It looks like the SUSE iso distribution is only a single disk!
I find this to be a very intersting claim:
The Gnome desktop in 9.1 was pretty much unusable
I regularly use the gnome with suse 9.1, and haven't had any problems. I hear (and read on /.) that people have issues with gnome, but don't know what it is that they are doing. Please tell me what you are trying to do that gnome doesn't work for!
I use gnome daily for work, and haven't found anything that I'd like it to do that it doesn't (not quite true, I wish I could switch workspaces with the mouse by bumping against the edge, but can't figure out how to activate this feature in 2.4 - it works fine on my rh7.3 system).
Good question! Hopefully they will still offer the FTP install.
I never understood why some people prefer downloading the personal edition ISO over the FTP install. You've still got to download a whole bunch of stuff, which means that you need a broadband connection. With the ISO version, I assume there are things included that you don't want, and things not included that you do want. So the download is not optimized to the installation you will end up with (after installing extra packages via FTP). Can someone explain why they prefer to use the ISO over the FTP install?
I'm running SuSE 9.1 and only use Gnome (2.4). I find that it works just fine for everything I need. I don't know if there are nice features in KDE that don't exist in GNOME because I've never really used a modern version of KDE. I did use a very old version years ago on a RH 6.x machine and didn't like it very much, so I switched to GNOME and have stayed there. As I see it, it's only a window manager. As long as it opens windows, and allows me to easily navigate between them, then what other features might I need that I don't have?
Hell, TWM and FVWM(2) served many people, myself included, just fine for many many years.
From an end user perspective, if everything you've tried to do works, then you have no reason to go looking for new features. In fact, I probably won't upgrade to Suse 9.2 because I'm pretty much happy with everything in 9.1 (unless powersaved has learned to work happily alongside agp modules).