You thought correctly! http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae53. cfm A common misconception is that the sonic boom is only produced at the moment when the plane actually 'breaks the sound barrier' (i.e. moves from subsonic to supersonic speed). Actually the sonic boom delineates the edge of the mach cone which is behind any object that travels at supersonic speed. So a plane actually produces a continuous sonic boom that travels behind it in a cone-shaped form.
That is correct, the article is wrong. As the Japanese page states:
... with a flight speed 2 times faster than that of current large subsonic transport aircrafts
and:
- flight time less than half on the same route.
So this factor two is compared to current non-supersonic airliners, not the Concorde. Actually the article is even more wrong, since "the current time of a Concorde" is positive infinity, and so is half of that time:)
Apparently, many people want to reach or approach a state of immortality. I can understand why, but if it's in the sense of extending human life as it is now to an unlimited life span, I'll pass on it. I bet that this desire of becoming some immortal human being is mostly rooted in egoism, which causes most people to assume that the rest of the world will stay mortal when they become immortal. Which will, of course, be true to some extent since none of the less developed countries will be able to profit from whatever technology makes immortality possible.
But eventually, the world (be it earth or all planets we might make habitable) will be filled with immortal people, unable to procreate because there is no more room nor resources for more people. They will be doomed to either continue living with the same people eternally, kill each other, or commit suicide. No thanks.
Hmm, isn't that a generalization on its own? Then it must also be false... But then not all generalizations are false, therefore this generalization might be true... but then... *brain explodes*
After reassembling my brain, I can only agree with you. I'm working on a PhD and even I make 'specs' for myself before starting to code. I know from the past that, if I just start to code away without thinking first and writing down what I'm going to do, I either end up with ugly unflexible software, or I just get completely stuck.
"Have we made absolutely certain books and movies are not degrading the minds of our children and video games and all computerized representation of violent and sexual acts are the cause of an increase of depraved sociopaths??" Very nicely written piece.
That phrase could've used some more punctuation, though...:P
I've played with Linux on a 266MHz Pentium II, and that worked pretty well. It's only a matter of tuning the system and throwing out unnecessary stuff and eyecandy.
First of all, those cameras are most often placed in areas where you are supposed to drive quite slow. So, a tiny distraction is not likely to cause a huge accident unless you're speeding like a maniac, i.e. beg to have an accident.
Second, they are also never placed with the flash directly pointed into the face of the drivers. Most cameras face the back of the cars, and those that flash cars in both driving directions are at a too large angle to the approaching drivers to cause any problems.
And third, the flash is very short and not very intense, because its primary purpose is to highlight the license plate, which is quite reflective on its own.
In other words, you won't see many lawsuits against traffic cameras soon
Even though the cells run on methanol instead of ethanol (although they probably will run just fine on ethanol too), I can't believe nobody has made a reference to Bender yet...
It is just another person claiming that everybody hates Microsoft, when Microsoft somehow still pulls a vast majority of market share.
Why would there be a strong relation between market share and people liking a product? If you buy a PC, Windows is installed on it. Most people don't even realize that they could replace it with something else (heck, many people don't even know what an OS is). Others know it, but are too lazy, or afraid that they will be considered weirdo's because they're "acting different from the group".
Hence, it requires much more hate to exceed the threshold of using something else than Windows, than one would expect from a simplistic 'hate or like' point of view.
Nope, it's not exactly the same, unless you use a camera which allows raw storage of images without lossy compression. But cameras which allow that, will either have no digital zoom, or are not targeted towards the average consumer who thinks digital zoom must be better than optical zoom because it sounds cooler.
The difference is: with digital zoom, the image is enlarged before compressing. If you just take the image, and enlarge it in Photoshop afterwards, you're also enlarging the compression artefacts. Here's a test with a simple Canon Ixus-i camera:
Digital zoom: http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~athomas/images/Zoo mDigital.jpg
Photoshop: http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~athomas/images/Zoo mPhotoshop.jpg
The 'stains' you see on the car's hood in the digital zoom image are not artefacts, but raindrops. As you can see, modern cameras do have quite good interpolation algorithms, maybe even better than Photoshop's bicubic interpolation. The contrast in the digital zoom image is also better because the camera can adapt to the zoomed part only, instead of having to make sure all the irrelevant parts of the image look good as well. In the photoshop image, you would need to increase the contrast to have the same effect, further amplifying the artefacts.
Nevertheless, the use of digital zoom is never justified unless optical zoom is not available, like with my Ixus-i camera. Or, when you really want to photograph something tiny in the distance and you're already at the maximum of your optical zoom.
I think the translation is: What happen?
Somebody set up us the bomb.
We get signal.
What!!
Main screen turn on.
It's you!!
How are you gentlemen!!
All your base are belong to us.
What you say!!
You have no chance to survive make your time.
I don't know what PMPO means, Peak Momentary Power Output I've heard
Sorry, you heard that wrong. It's Putrid Marketing Power Optimism. While some other posters still try to give a definition of it, I think your SWPOOA comes closest. There might be an official definition of it, as far as I remember it involves measuring the power of a ridiculously short pulse. Even your standard PC case speaker could probably endure 1000W, if it was only applied during 1 microsecond (1000W*1e-6 = 0.001 joules, that surely won't burn the coil). The peak amplitude is only limited by the breakthrough voltage of the coil, once this is reached it's only a matter of applying a pulse short enough to stay below a lethal power dissipation for the speaker. Otherwise all speakers would have an infinite PMPO rating.
In other words, this rating is so bogus that if you go into a store and a clerk tries to sell you speakers toting their PMPO rating, you should seriously consider shoving the things up his ass.
I also once saw a speaker in a leaflet with an RMS rating, where RMS was explained as "Real Music Source". I wouldn't buy speakers there either:)
Oh please, not again. I suggest you don't post any more questions like this until you have skimmed through all Slashdot comments from the past year, reading the comments that are replies to this same question (where 'OS X' may also be replaced by 'Linux'). Because this silly discussion has been done before countless times.
I suggest that everyone who can, mods down this entire subthread into oblivion.
Again I wonder where you found that image, because it's not used anywhere on the site... as it is now. Which makes me suspect that they cleaned up their hoax to make it less suspicious.
By the way, I bought exactly the same 3.5mm jack about 7 years ago at an electronics store. Of course it didn't have that little red doohickey.
Look at the pisspoor job he did on the Memory counter.
I really wonder what the heck is everyone talking about here. I can't find any screenshots of CPU/memory specs. A few posts above, someone links to this image which is not to be found anywhere on the site. My guess is that they read forums too and removed the most suspicious stuff that people laugh with?
so I doubt this information will have any pratical application other than sensationalisim.
... like 99% of all articles of which the title/abstract boils down to: "{men/women} outperform {women/men} in some way". Although these 'studies' often reach the front page of magazines and newspapers, in practice they are totally useless for anything, except for giving pseudo-scientific justifications for sexism.
Moreover, this is a rare case where I see actual numbers. Most of these articles say nothing about the margin at which men/women 'outperform' their counterparts (actually, neither does this article, but at least it contains some numbers). I bet it's because "are better than" sounds more impressive than "in a 1/1 mixed population of men and women, there is 23% chance that, considering skill X, the women beat the men by 4% above chance level".
Aside from the problems with playing back WMV files in OS X (which I mosty managed to solve now), I still hate them by default because 95% of the WMV files are ugly tiny moving puddles of blocky puke with a soundtrack of people dancing in glass shards. I suspect this is due to the fact that WMV files are mostly made by users who have no idea that there are other formats, because WMV was neatly packed with their OS. They just punch some buttons in their 'wizards' which tell them that a file for the internet should have a bit rate of 56kbit/s.
MPlayer nor VLC on Mac OS can benefit from the hack which is used in Linux, i.e. sending everything through the windows DLL. Therefore it can only play old WMV files for which the codec has been reverse engineered. When the switch to x86 is there, this problem will probably go away, though.
For now the only programs I know that can play most WMV junk in OS X, are the crappy WMP from MS itself, and Flip4Mac. The latter is pretty good since it allows to play WMV in QuickTime, enabling most of the features that I expect from a decent media player like easy seeking, frame per frame,...
OK, but how many people will actually try to do this? How many people try to tap VGA/DVI output nowadays in order to dump the video output back to disk? If someone wants to rip a DVD, there are software tools. There will be software tools too for upcoming media formats, once they are hacked. Nobody will want to be tampering with hardware if it can be done with a few mouse clicks too.
This idea just seems to me something which will thwart the 'crimes' of x% of the people, and frustrate y% of the people, with y much larger than x. Actually this idea seems so stupid to me that, if it had been April 1st, I would have said: "haha, April fool's!"
however, if I were to tell you that the bank across the street has a bunch of money in it, and I provided floor plans, and is unguarded from 2:30-3:00AM, and theres a set of keys under the doormat, etc
... then you would simply be pointing out that this bank is not serious about its security and only deserves to be robbed.
Slashdot Mirror
You thought correctly!. cfm
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae53
A common misconception is that the sonic boom is only produced at the moment when the plane actually 'breaks the sound barrier' (i.e. moves from subsonic to supersonic speed). Actually the sonic boom delineates the edge of the mach cone which is behind any object that travels at supersonic speed. So a plane actually produces a continuous sonic boom that travels behind it in a cone-shaped form.
Apparently, many people want to reach or approach a state of immortality. I can understand why, but if it's in the sense of extending human life as it is now to an unlimited life span, I'll pass on it. I bet that this desire of becoming some immortal human being is mostly rooted in egoism, which causes most people to assume that the rest of the world will stay mortal when they become immortal. Which will, of course, be true to some extent since none of the less developed countries will be able to profit from whatever technology makes immortality possible.
But eventually, the world (be it earth or all planets we might make habitable) will be filled with immortal people, unable to procreate because there is no more room nor resources for more people. They will be doomed to either continue living with the same people eternally, kill each other, or commit suicide. No thanks.
After reassembling my brain, I can only agree with you. I'm working on a PhD and even I make 'specs' for myself before starting to code. I know from the past that, if I just start to code away without thinking first and writing down what I'm going to do, I either end up with ugly unflexible software, or I just get completely stuck.
If you overclock it hard enough, I bet those heatsinks will start to glow. For a few milliseconds.
I've played with Linux on a 266MHz Pentium II, and that worked pretty well. It's only a matter of tuning the system and throwing out unnecessary stuff and eyecandy.
So, last time when I made cats run around by shining a laser pointer on the floor, I actally ought to have credited the inventor of this 'patent'?
So this thing would also work as a cat repellant? :)
First of all, those cameras are most often placed in areas where you are supposed to drive quite slow. So, a tiny distraction is not likely to cause a huge accident unless you're speeding like a maniac, i.e. beg to have an accident.
Second, they are also never placed with the flash directly pointed into the face of the drivers. Most cameras face the back of the cars, and those that flash cars in both driving directions are at a too large angle to the approaching drivers to cause any problems.
And third, the flash is very short and not very intense, because its primary purpose is to highlight the license plate, which is quite reflective on its own.
In other words, you won't see many lawsuits against traffic cameras soon
Even though the cells run on methanol instead of ethanol (although they probably will run just fine on ethanol too), I can't believe nobody has made a reference to Bender yet...
Hence, it requires much more hate to exceed the threshold of using something else than Windows, than one would expect from a simplistic 'hate or like' point of view.
The difference is: with digital zoom, the image is enlarged before compressing. If you just take the image, and enlarge it in Photoshop afterwards, you're also enlarging the compression artefacts. Here's a test with a simple Canon Ixus-i camera:o mDigital.jpg o mPhotoshop.jpg
Digital zoom: http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~athomas/images/Zo
Photoshop: http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~athomas/images/Zo
The 'stains' you see on the car's hood in the digital zoom image are not artefacts, but raindrops. As you can see, modern cameras do have quite good interpolation algorithms, maybe even better than Photoshop's bicubic interpolation. The contrast in the digital zoom image is also better because the camera can adapt to the zoomed part only, instead of having to make sure all the irrelevant parts of the image look good as well. In the photoshop image, you would need to increase the contrast to have the same effect, further amplifying the artefacts.
Nevertheless, the use of digital zoom is never justified unless optical zoom is not available, like with my Ixus-i camera. Or, when you really want to photograph something tiny in the distance and you're already at the maximum of your optical zoom.
I think the translation is:
What happen?
Somebody set up us the bomb.
We get signal.
What!!
Main screen turn on.
It's you!!
How are you gentlemen!!
All your base are belong to us.
What you say!!
You have no chance to survive make your time.
In other words, this rating is so bogus that if you go into a store and a clerk tries to sell you speakers toting their PMPO rating, you should seriously consider shoving the things up his ass.
I also once saw a speaker in a leaflet with an RMS rating, where RMS was explained as "Real Music Source". I wouldn't buy speakers there either
Oh please, not again. I suggest you don't post any more questions like this until you have skimmed through all Slashdot comments from the past year, reading the comments that are replies to this same question (where 'OS X' may also be replaced by 'Linux'). Because this silly discussion has been done before countless times.
I suggest that everyone who can, mods down this entire subthread into oblivion.
Again I wonder where you found that image, because it's not used anywhere on the site... as it is now. Which makes me suspect that they cleaned up their hoax to make it less suspicious.
By the way, I bought exactly the same 3.5mm jack about 7 years ago at an electronics store. Of course it didn't have that little red doohickey.
Moreover, this is a rare case where I see actual numbers. Most of these articles say nothing about the margin at which men/women 'outperform' their counterparts (actually, neither does this article, but at least it contains some numbers). I bet it's because "are better than" sounds more impressive than "in a 1/1 mixed population of men and women, there is 23% chance that, considering skill X, the women beat the men by 4% above chance level".
Aside from the problems with playing back WMV files in OS X (which I mosty managed to solve now), I still hate them by default because 95% of the WMV files are ugly tiny moving puddles of blocky puke with a soundtrack of people dancing in glass shards. I suspect this is due to the fact that WMV files are mostly made by users who have no idea that there are other formats, because WMV was neatly packed with their OS. They just punch some buttons in their 'wizards' which tell them that a file for the internet should have a bit rate of 56kbit/s.
MPlayer nor VLC on Mac OS can benefit from the hack which is used in Linux, i.e. sending everything through the windows DLL. Therefore it can only play old WMV files for which the codec has been reverse engineered. When the switch to x86 is there, this problem will probably go away, though. ...
For now the only programs I know that can play most WMV junk in OS X, are the crappy WMP from MS itself, and Flip4Mac. The latter is pretty good since it allows to play WMV in QuickTime, enabling most of the features that I expect from a decent media player like easy seeking, frame per frame,
OK, but how many people will actually try to do this? How many people try to tap VGA/DVI output nowadays in order to dump the video output back to disk? If someone wants to rip a DVD, there are software tools. There will be software tools too for upcoming media formats, once they are hacked. Nobody will want to be tampering with hardware if it can be done with a few mouse clicks too.
This idea just seems to me something which will thwart the 'crimes' of x% of the people, and frustrate y% of the people, with y much larger than x. Actually this idea seems so stupid to me that, if it had been April 1st, I would have said: "haha, April fool's!"
Why would that be relevant? A hyperlink is just a pointer, not an instruction manual for the site it points to.