Do you have a superior term? 'ADSL box' is ambiguous, 'ADSL transcoder' is just terrible. 'Modem' has come to be a generic term for 'device that links your ethernet port to the rest of the world'. Yes, it's technically incorrect, but there isn't a suitable replacement.
I'll regularly have around 30-40 tabs open, sometimes over 300 if I'm gathering images or references. And I have no trouble navigating them the way they are. Then again, I have my mouse set up with ctrl-tab, crtl-shift-tab, etc buttons, so I'm used to flicking through tabs quickly and easily. Abolishing the stupid default fwd/back buttons on mice (What's wrong with shift-scroll? Who even uses fwd/back that often when you can simply open a link in a new tab?) would be more useful than shifting the tab bar to take up more room.
Re:I'm sorry comet sightings in 1908?!?!?
on
When Comets Attack
·
· Score: 1
Really tiny, high velocity, and pretty much tailless (as is likely if it was a shard of icy crust rather than accreted from stellar dust).
You heard that it may have been a comet. What is new here is the theory of it's origin (cast off from a gas giant moon's crust) and composition (containing bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen).
Could be worse. Could be a pile of little icons with huge spacing between them, and a default scrolling direction of 'sideways' (i.e. the way every mouse in existence DOESN'T scroll). Thanks for that, Apple.
Virgin? 250GB? With their current package, more than 5gb a day will cap you at ISDN speeds for a few hours. Blanket caps are generally listed at 30GB a month, if listed at all.
An ebook reader with a reasonable resolution, at an almost affordable price? Sold! Or it would be, if Amazon would deign to offer it to the world that exists outside of the US.
Lack of data support outside the US isn't a problem. The Kindle only supports EVDO, which nobody outside the US uses anyway. And whilst there is not hardware keyboard, I'd imagine the touchscreen supports a software keyboard (otherwise the 'memo' menu button displayed rather prominently would be pretty useless).
The real make-or-break factor is it's resolution. The Kindle, along with all the other e-ink readers I've seen, have had no higher a resolution than 1280x1024 (for the iRex Digital Reader costing an exorbitant £600), with 800x600 being the norm. This is unacceptably low for comfortable reading without huge fonts (and thus low word counts per page), and entirely prevents the use of grayscale images at any readable quality. Until e-ink displays can hit 1280x1024 at a reasonable price point, they're just not worth it.
IIRC, there were at least two demonstrations of it prior to it actually being sold. Both used the EXACT SAME scripted series of actions,and both were claimed to be unscripted reactions to the environment.
What, you've never listened to the RF from the surface of the Sun, or a distant pulsar, or Jupiter's electromagnetic field? Or if you want to listen to space Right This Instant, turn your radio (or a TV without channel blanking) to a channel with no broadcast. Behold the CMB.
They've called Silver Screens, and they're in common use in cinemas everywhere. And yes, they preserve both linear and circular polarisation. Shutter glasses have framerate and synchronisation problems (ESPECIALLY keeping a large room full of glasses synced at the correct rate for their position relative to the screen), and rarely get the same wrong-eye isolation that circular polarisation can. Plus they're bulky, expensive and need batteries.
Forget air cooling entirely. Look up oil-immersed PCs. Immersing all but the HDDs in oil entirely removes the problems of dust and humidity. All you then need is to cool the oil, which can be done with either a pump and a passive radiator, or an immersed cooler which can be easily replaced when/if it breaks down. It would also provide a small amount of protection of shocks and vibration if the components were isolation mounted.
It also has the benefit of being surprisingly when custom made (compared to commercial ultra-rugged servers). Unfortunately, it will still need some creative thinking to handle poorly regulated power supplies, and can be unpleasent to work on if a component fails. And it's nowhere near an elegant, low power solution, but as the article specifically mentions a quad-core with a terabyte drive array, I doubt power efficiency is high on the list of priorities.
Much as I love my giant robots, powered armours, landmates, VTs, and so on, it's really not that practical for a front-line war machine. Sure, increased mobility sounds good, but it's not that great a leap over tracks. Warfare at the moment is a game of range and sensors, with the actual weapons almost guaranteeing a kill (with the exception of OLD RPGs vs new MBTs). A modern tank can hit a helicopter with it's main gun, assuming said helicopter hasn't blown the tank to bits from a few miles away over a hill. Having legs will not help you dodge shells or missiles, nor will it allow you to magically hide behind obstacles (I'd hate to think of the amount of heat such a power intensive locomotion system would produce, let alone any notion of adding radar stealth to something with so many huge moving parts).
If anything, walking vehicles will see the same utilisation that helicopters do: allow you to get places and do a logistic (and a handful of combat) tasks that jets can't but generally staying the hell out of the way, and having huge maintenance requirements and massive technical and mechanical complexity.
Ballute assisted re-entry has been a staple of the Gundam franchise for quite a while, along with wave-rider airfoils and O'Neill cylinder colonies. Some of the science behind it is rather good, though somewhat offset by the idea that giant robots make everything work better.
Any micrometeor with sufficient energy to give a massive solar power array enough rotational velocity to point it in a wildly different direction before the change is noticed and corrected will likely smash it to bits anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a superior term? 'ADSL box' is ambiguous, 'ADSL transcoder' is just terrible. 'Modem' has come to be a generic term for 'device that links your ethernet port to the rest of the world'. Yes, it's technically incorrect, but there isn't a suitable replacement.
I'll regularly have around 30-40 tabs open, sometimes over 300 if I'm gathering images or references. And I have no trouble navigating them the way they are. Then again, I have my mouse set up with ctrl-tab, crtl-shift-tab, etc buttons, so I'm used to flicking through tabs quickly and easily. Abolishing the stupid default fwd/back buttons on mice (What's wrong with shift-scroll? Who even uses fwd/back that often when you can simply open a link in a new tab?) would be more useful than shifting the tab bar to take up more room.
Really tiny, high velocity, and pretty much tailless (as is likely if it was a shard of icy crust rather than accreted from stellar dust).
You heard that it may have been a comet. What is new here is the theory of it's origin (cast off from a gas giant moon's crust) and composition (containing bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen).
Could be worse. Could be a pile of little icons with huge spacing between them, and a default scrolling direction of 'sideways' (i.e. the way every mouse in existence DOESN'T scroll). Thanks for that, Apple.
Virgin? 250GB? With their current package, more than 5gb a day will cap you at ISDN speeds for a few hours. Blanket caps are generally listed at 30GB a month, if listed at all.
An ebook reader with a reasonable resolution, at an almost affordable price? Sold! Or it would be, if Amazon would deign to offer it to the world that exists outside of the US.
A8: Cowboyneal
Lack of data support outside the US isn't a problem. The Kindle only supports EVDO, which nobody outside the US uses anyway. And whilst there is not hardware keyboard, I'd imagine the touchscreen supports a software keyboard (otherwise the 'memo' menu button displayed rather prominently would be pretty useless). The real make-or-break factor is it's resolution. The Kindle, along with all the other e-ink readers I've seen, have had no higher a resolution than 1280x1024 (for the iRex Digital Reader costing an exorbitant £600), with 800x600 being the norm. This is unacceptably low for comfortable reading without huge fonts (and thus low word counts per page), and entirely prevents the use of grayscale images at any readable quality. Until e-ink displays can hit 1280x1024 at a reasonable price point, they're just not worth it.
It means "post your work on the internet and get lots of other people do do it".
Or one source and a mask. Or one source and a scanning mirror.
And you need to keep refreshing RAM too. With a refresh every 30ms, this could be used for medium-term storage in an optical computer.
IIRC, there were at least two demonstrations of it prior to it actually being sold. Both used the EXACT SAME scripted series of actions,and both were claimed to be unscripted reactions to the environment.
"Play killer riffs to destroy a giant robot"
As long as there's a Basara lookalike, I'll be happy. A Coop is fine too.
What, you've never listened to the RF from the surface of the Sun, or a distant pulsar, or Jupiter's electromagnetic field? Or if you want to listen to space Right This Instant, turn your radio (or a TV without channel blanking) to a channel with no broadcast. Behold the CMB.
Communications sat bandwidth could be said to be 'scarce', especially with the older sats that are being hijacked.
The constant switching between past and future tense in the summary is most disorienting.
They've called Silver Screens, and they're in common use in cinemas everywhere. And yes, they preserve both linear and circular polarisation. Shutter glasses have framerate and synchronisation problems (ESPECIALLY keeping a large room full of glasses synced at the correct rate for their position relative to the screen), and rarely get the same wrong-eye isolation that circular polarisation can. Plus they're bulky, expensive and need batteries.
being that high up in a balloon has to be the experience of a life time.
A pity the balloon is unmanned then.
Forget air cooling entirely. Look up oil-immersed PCs. Immersing all but the HDDs in oil entirely removes the problems of dust and humidity. All you then need is to cool the oil, which can be done with either a pump and a passive radiator, or an immersed cooler which can be easily replaced when/if it breaks down. It would also provide a small amount of protection of shocks and vibration if the components were isolation mounted. It also has the benefit of being surprisingly when custom made (compared to commercial ultra-rugged servers). Unfortunately, it will still need some creative thinking to handle poorly regulated power supplies, and can be unpleasent to work on if a component fails. And it's nowhere near an elegant, low power solution, but as the article specifically mentions a quad-core with a terabyte drive array, I doubt power efficiency is high on the list of priorities.
It is easily readable
Yes. Compared to, say, Wingdings.
You don't know the BBC. They've reported on their OWN internal scandals in the past, and tried pretty well to remain unbiased over them.
Much as I love my giant robots, powered armours, landmates, VTs, and so on, it's really not that practical for a front-line war machine. Sure, increased mobility sounds good, but it's not that great a leap over tracks. Warfare at the moment is a game of range and sensors, with the actual weapons almost guaranteeing a kill (with the exception of OLD RPGs vs new MBTs). A modern tank can hit a helicopter with it's main gun, assuming said helicopter hasn't blown the tank to bits from a few miles away over a hill. Having legs will not help you dodge shells or missiles, nor will it allow you to magically hide behind obstacles (I'd hate to think of the amount of heat such a power intensive locomotion system would produce, let alone any notion of adding radar stealth to something with so many huge moving parts). If anything, walking vehicles will see the same utilisation that helicopters do: allow you to get places and do a logistic (and a handful of combat) tasks that jets can't but generally staying the hell out of the way, and having huge maintenance requirements and massive technical and mechanical complexity.
Ballute assisted re-entry has been a staple of the Gundam franchise for quite a while, along with wave-rider airfoils and O'Neill cylinder colonies. Some of the science behind it is rather good, though somewhat offset by the idea that giant robots make everything work better.
Any micrometeor with sufficient energy to give a massive solar power array enough rotational velocity to point it in a wildly different direction before the change is noticed and corrected will likely smash it to bits anyway.