I have always been of the opinion that, had the economies of the fuel supply permitted steam engine technology to survive into the Age of Microprocessors (late 70's), steam would be competitive on the rails today. But for a steam comeback, someone has to climb over the investment hump of developing a microprocessor-controlled, stainless-steel boilered, locomotive with electric generators in place of the low pressure cylinders, and infrastructure to supply purified coal and deionized water.
Trials in 1985 of 614T steam locomotive seemed to confirm that steam power can be competitive when oil prices are high, but it is still easier for the railroads to outsource locomotive production and leverage existing ICE technology
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Today, the locomotives of Europe do run on steam, but the steam engines are now stationary, generating electricity.
I'm with you on the poor implementation of Gnome on Slack. I'm mostly a KDE guy, but found that using XFCE permits me to run Matlab on my laptop (128 MB of RAM) without slowing the system to a crawl.
I still use KDE on my desktop because it seems to have more & clicky-easier components (mail, browser, KOrganizer, etc). Maybe the XFCE equivalents are just as good, but right now I am sorta invested in The KDE Way.
For a reverse example, compare Slackware's well-maintained KDE packages vs. the nearly-afterthought Gnome.
Commercial linux apps seem to be written for Gnome, probably because they are thinking the target market uses Red Hat. in those cases, and when running Slack on a hardware that is insufficiently spec'd for KDE, I drop down to xfce, which is sorta Gnomish in flavor and uses gtk.
...an accomplice holding a product with the anti-theft tag walk by a counter close to the scanners so when it went off, associates just looked up.
This technique is as old as anti-theft tags themselves, as depicted in the 1987 Madonna-movie Who's that girl?, though that was an unwitting accomplice with planted merchandise. It's only scene in the movie I even remember (I vaguely recall the rest of it sucking), but my then-11-year-old sister was entertained.
As further evidence, observe that even the cheapest phones now have battery- and space-wasting color displays. Even phones without cameras can't be permitted to have monochome displays. Picture-messaging is more marketable when all your acquaintences can receive photos.
Golly I should research this before I post, but I seem to remember that Q-Link got screwed by the money-grubbers at Commodore (a bit before all the rest of us) and this one reason AOL never offered an Amiga client.
So in essence, yes. Commodores were cut out of the network.
We did a section on tube design in a microwaves course. (Tubes still rule for high-power microwave.) We could cover the material fairly quickly by relying on the same principles used in semiconductor circuits, and merely pointing up where things are different. If circuits were taught in a recipe-book fashion, that woudn't work.
And that illustrates the point: If you have a good foundation skillset, new (or in this case, retro-but-new-to-you) situations can be handled with aplomb.
I believe it is possible to book a cabin on a cargo ship. It takes several days and the conditions are rather spartan; you basically live among the crew. Talk to a travel agent.
I calculated this a while ago, so I can't remember my sources, by the upshot I got was this: At $3.50 a gallon at the pump, it becomes profitable to make motor fuel from something other than oil. Whether that means methanol from methane, biodiesel, or coal-derived gasoline depends on how the economies of scale play out. I suspect biodiesel will come first, because it is fits right into the existing distribution structure, but then will be supplanted by either methanol or F-T gasoline as gi-normous production plants are built.
The Concorde didn't have the endurance for a trans-Pacific flight. It would have to stop in the Aleutians for fuel, so there goes your time advantage. The proposed trans-Pacific Concorde "B" was never developed. Boeing dropped its effort to develop an SST (contemporaneous with Concorde's development) once it became apparent that trans-Pacific endurance wasn't realistic. In hindsight Boeing made the right move.
I don't know if that was intended to be funny, but I have independently reached the similar conclusion that drunk driving in the US in considerably exacerbated by zoning, liquor license laws, restrictive taxi licensing, and incompetent public sector management of mass transit.
We don't see the anti-drunk-driving movement pushing to make drinking-without-driving any easier. Sure, they oppose drunk driving as long as the costs (fines, designated drivers, etc.) are foisted on someone else, but not so much as despoiling a residential neighborhood with a bar (by replacing a small number of high square footage liquor licenses with many smaller licenses for example) will be tolerated.
Eliminating closing hour by itself will help. Why do we need to send everyone home, all at once, whether they are ready or not?
My conclusion is that anti-drunk-driving has become a neo-prohibitionist movement. I'm not the only one, either: a DWI conviction has lost its social stigma and drunk driving incidents have reversed the long downward trend and are rising again.
There is another possible outcome. With Linux competing from "above" (the servers and techie users), and convergence devices from below (cellphones and pda-like gizmos), and lateral competition from Apple and Mom & Pop shops who offer Linux turn-key systems, the Windows OS might end up trapped in a market that doesn't have any pricing power. Without the ability to charge a premium for new features, they hold on to market share by competing on price.
It already appears to have happened to WinCE and XBox. Few XBoxen sold until they matched PS2's price, and WinCE lost money hand over fist.
We don't have to eliminate Windows. If Windows drops to merely 75% of the userbase, that is enough that the aftermarket of services & software can't ignore the 25% that use Something Else. Then I won't be forced to use MS's sucky stuff anymore: That is my definition of victory.
Well sure, the clients may all support MP3, but the servers may represent a lawsuit-vulnerable target. And ogg does perform better at low bitrates, which may make the difference between a usable or non-usable system for dial-up users.
MP3 has already been supplanted for internet radio. Take a look at how many commercial radio stations stream MP3: almost none, despite the fact that well nigh every client supports it. It's all WMA or Realaudio to save on bandwidth. Ogg adoption here would increase if support for it were not conspicuously absent from WMP.
While I use ogg extensively and won't buy a portable player that won't support it (that means iPod), I don't expect it to really catch on until somebody hacks together some killer opensource application that won't support mp3 due to patent or encoding efficiency issues. Maybe a streaming variant of bittorrent for distributed hosting or podcasting of nearly-live audio. Or a clever way to audio conference over the public network, or whatever. But if this hypothetical app deoes something people really want, everyone will be using & insisting on ogg faster than you can say "Napster".
I can play mp3's just fine on my 50 MHz 68030 Amiga, though the GUI response is sluggish when doing so (which is jarring on the Amiga, but commonplace on the PC to this day). Maybe you didn't have enough RAM.
And yes, that is present tense. I don't have equivalents for everything on my Linux box so I still power her up occasionally.
A distinction needs to be made here between "non-discretionary" licensing (anyone who can meet some simple requirements qualifies) and fixed-allocation licensing. The number of NYC taxi medallions is a fixed number that hasn't increased since the 30's. Now everyone who has one has an equity interest in it, and therefore an interest in keeping the number of medallions down, perpetuating the cycle.
Walter Williams often mentions the topic. Taxi regulation was a chapter in one of his books. (He is an advocate of free-market capitalism as the best way to lift African-Americans up to economic equality.)
That's not an effective option when the server accounts are limited to 40 MB. Exchange doesn't appear to scale very well. It can't tolerate network latency either. My wife uses cached mode and it sux for email archives of non-trivial size. No one can use it over 802.11b, which doesn't seem to be much of a problem for their IT guy; he doesn't use wireless.
What annoys me is that both our employers offer Exchange exclusively. IMAP isn't even an option for the 90% of users who don't use server-side calandaring. One of these days I'm gonna write a VB script that pulls mail out of Outlook and presents it as local IMAP or some such, and reduce Outlook to a (superfluous) delivery step, and start using something else for an email client.
On that topic...does anyone know how to turn that feature off? I am in China right now. Your tomorrow is my today. My yesterday is your today. Ack, the clock on the wall doesn't always match the clock on the PC!
KOrganizer handles world timezones perfectly. My Palm IIIxe, however does not, so when I book a trans-Pacific flight and pull in the.vcs file, KOrganizer has no trouble, but syncing to my Palm splits it into two appointments. That confounding Int'l Date Line!
Fair enough, but y'know, Outlook doesn't make backup management easy. Everything...every email from the beginning of time to two minutes ago, every contact, every appt, all in one honkin' PST file. Not the sort of thing that lends itself to incremental backups. Get a single email today? That's the whole 2 GB PST file to backup tonight. PST file bigger than 700 MB? Gotta figure out how to span multiple CD-R's, or no soup for you!
Where I work, the users have pushed their PST files onto the local fileserver, and the nightly backup (out the building's T1) has become so large that it runs into the next work morning, clogging the link so people can't login.
I use have to use Outlook every day and my conclusion is that it is for people who don't care about reliability. The users have gotten a vague feel for this fact and have developed workarounds: People in our Chinese locations routinely request return receipts. Anything really important doesn't go over email anymore, making conference calls with Europe & the far East very common, and the workday stretches out to all manner of odd hours.
For the record, I use Kmail & Kalandar at home. Not quite as automatic as Outlook (when it works, that is, and when you can trust it, which is never), and a little more work to set up, but not lacking any feature I really need.
What is worse for Exchange is that the web interface is not all that useful either, since many operations will only work with Internet Explorer. Many features do not work with Firefox or Konq
Make sure you have javascript pop-ups enabled. The Exchange web interface relies on them.
Not formaldehyde, acetylaldehyde. Two carbon atoms. The metabolic pathway is
ethanol -> acetylaldehyde -> acetic acid -> food energy.
Going from memory here but I believe that enzyme for the first step also catalyzes methanol to formaldehyde, but the homologous second step (fomaldehyde to formic acid) doesn't work. So methanol is more toxic when combined with ethanol, because ethanol stimulates the production of the aldehyde-producing enzyme.
I'm with you on the alleged toxicity of aspartame, which is, after all, a dipeptide (two amino acids hooked together to form a very short protien). If protien is toxic, then we are all in trouble.
That is a consequence of the distinction of inter- vs. intra- state commerce. Rather than adapt their organization to comply with 50 different states' shipping regulations (which largely didn't undergo deregulatory reform like federal trucking laws in the 80's), Fedex just makes sure every shipment crosses state lines.
Federal Express picks up a package in Terre Haute, Indiana, bound for nearby Gary. Although FedEx has a state-of-the-art national hub in Indianapolis, it is cheaper to fly the package to the company's hub in Memphis, Tennessee, sort it there, and fly it back to Indiana, even at twice the cost of transporting it directly, than to comply with state regulations governing intrastate carriers.
Slashdot Mirror
Trials in 1985 of 614T steam locomotive seemed to confirm that steam power can be competitive when oil prices are high, but it is still easier for the railroads to outsource locomotive production and leverage existing ICE technology
. Today, the locomotives of Europe do run on steam, but the steam engines are now stationary, generating electricity.
I still use KDE on my desktop because it seems to have more & clicky-easier components (mail, browser, KOrganizer, etc). Maybe the XFCE equivalents are just as good, but right now I am sorta invested in The KDE Way.
Commercial linux apps seem to be written for Gnome, probably because they are thinking the target market uses Red Hat. in those cases, and when running Slack on a hardware that is insufficiently spec'd for KDE, I drop down to xfce, which is sorta Gnomish in flavor and uses gtk.
This technique is as old as anti-theft tags themselves, as depicted in the 1987 Madonna-movie Who's that girl?, though that was an unwitting accomplice with planted merchandise. It's only scene in the movie I even remember (I vaguely recall the rest of it sucking), but my then-11-year-old sister was entertained.
As further evidence, observe that even the cheapest phones now have battery- and space-wasting color displays. Even phones without cameras can't be permitted to have monochome displays. Picture-messaging is more marketable when all your acquaintences can receive photos.
So in essence, yes. Commodores were cut out of the network.
And that illustrates the point: If you have a good foundation skillset, new (or in this case, retro-but-new-to-you) situations can be handled with aplomb.
I believe it is possible to book a cabin on a cargo ship. It takes several days and the conditions are rather spartan; you basically live among the crew. Talk to a travel agent.
I calculated this a while ago, so I can't remember my sources, by the upshot I got was this: At $3.50 a gallon at the pump, it becomes profitable to make motor fuel from something other than oil. Whether that means methanol from methane, biodiesel, or coal-derived gasoline depends on how the economies of scale play out. I suspect biodiesel will come first, because it is fits right into the existing distribution structure, but then will be supplanted by either methanol or F-T gasoline as gi-normous production plants are built.
The Concorde didn't have the endurance for a trans-Pacific flight. It would have to stop in the Aleutians for fuel, so there goes your time advantage. The proposed trans-Pacific Concorde "B" was never developed. Boeing dropped its effort to develop an SST (contemporaneous with Concorde's development) once it became apparent that trans-Pacific endurance wasn't realistic. In hindsight Boeing made the right move.
We don't see the anti-drunk-driving movement pushing to make drinking-without-driving any easier. Sure, they oppose drunk driving as long as the costs (fines, designated drivers, etc.) are foisted on someone else, but not so much as despoiling a residential neighborhood with a bar (by replacing a small number of high square footage liquor licenses with many smaller licenses for example) will be tolerated.
Eliminating closing hour by itself will help. Why do we need to send everyone home, all at once, whether they are ready or not?
My conclusion is that anti-drunk-driving has become a neo-prohibitionist movement. I'm not the only one, either: a DWI conviction has lost its social stigma and drunk driving incidents have reversed the long downward trend and are rising again.
That, BTW, is my solution for the Caps Lock. If I ever need to lock the caps, I use the end of a pen to reach the collapsing rubber dome.
Drifting OT but I have to ask, how is Linux compatibility with that brand of laptop? Linux wireless drivers?
It already appears to have happened to WinCE and XBox. Few XBoxen sold until they matched PS2's price, and WinCE lost money hand over fist.
We don't have to eliminate Windows. If Windows drops to merely 75% of the userbase, that is enough that the aftermarket of services & software can't ignore the 25% that use Something Else. Then I won't be forced to use MS's sucky stuff anymore: That is my definition of victory.
MP3 has already been supplanted for internet radio. Take a look at how many commercial radio stations stream MP3: almost none, despite the fact that well nigh every client supports it. It's all WMA or Realaudio to save on bandwidth. Ogg adoption here would increase if support for it were not conspicuously absent from WMP.
While I use ogg extensively and won't buy a portable player that won't support it (that means iPod), I don't expect it to really catch on until somebody hacks together some killer opensource application that won't support mp3 due to patent or encoding efficiency issues. Maybe a streaming variant of bittorrent for distributed hosting or podcasting of nearly-live audio. Or a clever way to audio conference over the public network, or whatever. But if this hypothetical app deoes something people really want, everyone will be using & insisting on ogg faster than you can say "Napster".
And yes, that is present tense. I don't have equivalents for everything on my Linux box so I still power her up occasionally.
Walter Williams often mentions the topic. Taxi regulation was a chapter in one of his books. (He is an advocate of free-market capitalism as the best way to lift African-Americans up to economic equality.)
What annoys me is that both our employers offer Exchange exclusively. IMAP isn't even an option for the 90% of users who don't use server-side calandaring. One of these days I'm gonna write a VB script that pulls mail out of Outlook and presents it as local IMAP or some such, and reduce Outlook to a (superfluous) delivery step, and start using something else for an email client.
On that topic...does anyone know how to turn that feature off? I am in China right now. Your tomorrow is my today. My yesterday is your today. Ack, the clock on the wall doesn't always match the clock on the PC!
KOrganizer handles world timezones perfectly. My Palm IIIxe, however does not, so when I book a trans-Pacific flight and pull in the .vcs file, KOrganizer has no trouble, but syncing to my Palm splits it into two appointments. That confounding Int'l Date Line!
Where I work, the users have pushed their PST files onto the local fileserver, and the nightly backup (out the building's T1) has become so large that it runs into the next work morning, clogging the link so people can't login.
I use have to use Outlook every day and my conclusion is that it is for people who don't care about reliability. The users have gotten a vague feel for this fact and have developed workarounds: People in our Chinese locations routinely request return receipts. Anything really important doesn't go over email anymore, making conference calls with Europe & the far East very common, and the workday stretches out to all manner of odd hours.
For the record, I use Kmail & Kalandar at home. Not quite as automatic as Outlook (when it works, that is, and when you can trust it, which is never), and a little more work to set up, but not lacking any feature I really need.
Make sure you have javascript pop-ups enabled. The Exchange web interface relies on them.
ethanol -> acetylaldehyde -> acetic acid -> food energy.
Going from memory here but I believe that enzyme for the first step also catalyzes methanol to formaldehyde, but the homologous second step (fomaldehyde to formic acid) doesn't work. So methanol is more toxic when combined with ethanol, because ethanol stimulates the production of the aldehyde-producing enzyme.
I'm with you on the alleged toxicity of aspartame, which is, after all, a dipeptide (two amino acids hooked together to form a very short protien). If protien is toxic, then we are all in trouble.
That is a consequence of the distinction of inter- vs. intra- state commerce. Rather than adapt their organization to comply with 50 different states' shipping regulations (which largely didn't undergo deregulatory reform like federal trucking laws in the 80's), Fedex just makes sure every shipment crosses state lines.
The Cato Institute made hay of this a while ago