...at 45 degrees. Sure, you'd lose efficiency but this could be made up for by having a few more panels. The payoff would be the self-cleaning action when rain falls, plus birds would be less likely to roost on them.
I still have that issue, the one with the dragon on the cover art? It's the one issue I kept when I gave away all my CC magazines.
It didn't have the FORTRAN code to Adventure but did have articles such as 'How to fit a bit program into a small machine' describing Zork and ZIL (Zork Interpretive Language), a BASIC text adventure or two, and a few others.
This DARPA thing appears to be nothing more than a copy of the famous Aqueon invented back in the 1960's. You can find videos of it on YouTube, and even the original patent drawings are online which you could use to build your own: http://forums.deeperblue.net/freediving-equipment/ 53592-weird-fin-long-ago.html
Just google 'Aqueon swimming device'.
If there were a number of small air nozzles directing dust off the panels, a small compressor and air tank could be charged up over several days or even weeks. Time is not a factor so a tiny compressor would suffice. Then wooosh! open the valves and it's done.
Or, this device could have been on the landing platform. After the rover rolls off, a boom extends outwards, a metre or two off the ground. Every couple of months the rover returns to the platform, drives underneath and gets a blast. This would of course mean the rover could never travel too far so perhaps the on-board one would be better.
so I've just sat down and made myself a nice cup of instant tea. The list of ingredients on the teabag's packet say it contains 'Thiotimoline, resublimated, product of China.'
There are RTG's in the MERs: "To survive the frigid Martian night, MER computers are housed in warm electronics boxed heated by a combination of electric heaters, eight radioisotope heater units as well as the natural warmth from the electronics themselves."
(http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technolog y/mer_computer_040128.html)
Coders afraid of the right half of their screens?
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
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· Score: 1
Oh, how I agree with this so much!
Lately I've been porting lot of C++ code to Win32 that is wrapped at around 40 to 60 columns. Other C# code formatted similarly I've had the mispleasure to maintain was the same, and because I worked with the code's author before he left, I figured out why - he had a tiny code window on his Visual Studio. He was happy scrolling and wrapping for this tiny bit of screen real estate! For $(DEITY)'s sake, can't people learn Ctrl-Alt-Enter and code using the whole screen's width?
Forty to sixty columns? And double-spaced? I have never seen a valid argument for double-spacing and spreading out code vertically. Do we read double-spaced books or newspapers? No! Perhaps the only benefit is for mouse manufacturers because the scroll wheel gets overworked.
Forty to eighty columns is ridiculous. It's not the nineteen eighties anymore, folks. It's not even the nineteen nineties. We are not using Apple ][s or Commodore 64s, we are using sophisticated visual displays with powerful IDE's to do serious work.
My question is: Why are people so afraid of using the rightmost half or third of their IDE's code window?
A few years ago an Australian company Molectra Technologies (http://www.molectra.com.au) used microwaving shredded car tires, and extracted enough oil and other compounds to power the process. It won the Australian Invention of the Year award.
Ever notice the number of times that ultra-expensive carbon fiber racing yachts tend to break in conditions far less stressful than what they are apparently rated for? The super-dooper CF mast snaps, or the hull cracks or something. Examples that come to mind are the maxi-yachts taking part in the Sydney-to-Hobart, or the sinking of the australian CF entry 'AUS35' in the America's cup about ten years ago. And yet aluminum-masted yachts in the same weather conditions make it through.
...be able to drag any about:config entry to the toolbar, whereapon boolean antries become toggle buttons, numerics become spin buttons, and editable values become, well, editable values:)
This way you can set any tweak anything quickly, and see the result. Now whatever happened to 'disable image load'?
...and the most interesting thing about it is that they show all manner of munitions made by Russia, South Africa and China, but not a mention about having to clean up any from another large and powerful western democracy who no doubt has dropped quite a lot of ordnance on that country in the name of WMD...or was it er... nasty dictators?... ummm.... yeah. Nasty dictators, that's got to be it.
...being thrown out on a council rubbish collection. It was the original version, with cassette interface and heavy keyboard. I later acquired a CGA colour display at a fleamarket, and collected a bunch of old PC-bus cards. By the way this was in 1996 or 1997, so even back then I realised it would be worth something someday. I've never even attempted to plug it in. What I did was wrap it carefully in plastic and seal it up so it was airtight, then packed it away. It's still waiting for me to take a look at it, however that may be in many years from now as I have too many other projects.
Agree with the parent, buttons and moveable bits add to the cost. Whilst I lament (and curse) the cheap video cassette recorder I have because a lot of things have to be set from the remote (and settings can only be viewed on the TV screen), the cost of that unit was a darn sight cheaper than my nice 20-year-old TEAC Stereo VCR that had buttons, knobs and switches (yes, slide switches) for operation. And the fluorescent clock display had the indicators to tell me what I had set. And not just stupid odd-shaped rubber buttons but big rectangular ones. Ahhh I wish it still worked.
When I think of loss of 'ease-of-functionality' (not 'loss of functionality') I think VCR's.
Science fiction story.... can slashdotters help?
on
Caves on Mars?
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· Score: 1
Many years ago as a kid I read a science fiction novel about a mission to Mars. What was interesting was that the explorers wore compressors on their backs instead of air tanks. The plot revolved around one explorer getting lost and discovering an ancient martian city. He's captured and taken underground by the remaining martians, who incarcerate him by taking away his compressor. I do recall the chief martian's name as Spitz-Rlll or something like that. I'd love to find the name and author of this book, probably written in the 1950's. Does this ring a bell with any slashdotters?
Slashdot Mirror
...at 45 degrees. Sure, you'd lose efficiency but this could be made up for by having a few more panels. The payoff would be the self-cleaning action when rain falls, plus birds would be less likely to roost on them.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you give up your monopoly and IP rights on fishing.
..over the ocean, do the flight attendants change from calling them 'mobile phones' to 'cell phones'?
...there can be only one.
McFry! YOU'RE FIRED!
They're always 'just five years away'. ...oh wait
Hmmm.... yes. You're quite right, of course, thinking about it. Thank you and others for the correction :)
I still have that issue, the one with the dragon on the cover art? It's the one issue I kept when I gave away all my CC magazines.
It didn't have the FORTRAN code to Adventure but did have articles such as 'How to fit a bit program into a small machine' describing Zork and ZIL (Zork Interpretive Language), a BASIC text adventure or two, and a few others.
And you beat me to it in posting. A true relic of the evolutionary dead ends in the history of computer science :)
This DARPA thing appears to be nothing more than a copy of the famous Aqueon invented back in the 1960's. You can find videos of it on YouTube, and even the original patent drawings are online which you could use to build your own: http://forums.deeperblue.net/freediving-equipment/ 53592-weird-fin-long-ago.html
Just google 'Aqueon swimming device'.
Admittedly he's motionless, but fifteen minutes two seconds is pretty amazing: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/08/10/11865305 69468.html
If there were a number of small air nozzles directing dust off the panels, a small compressor and air tank could be charged up over several days or even weeks. Time is not a factor so a tiny compressor would suffice. Then wooosh! open the valves and it's done.
Or, this device could have been on the landing platform. After the rover rolls off, a boom extends outwards, a metre or two off the ground. Every couple of months the rover returns to the platform, drives underneath and gets a blast. This would of course mean the rover could never travel too far so perhaps the on-board one would be better.
so I've just sat down and made myself a nice cup of instant tea. The list of ingredients on the teabag's packet say it contains 'Thiotimoline, resublimated, product of China.'
Or end-to-end volkswagens, or Libraries of Congress(es)?
There are RTG's in the MERs: "To survive the frigid Martian night, MER computers are housed in warm electronics boxed heated by a combination of electric heaters, eight radioisotope heater units as well as the natural warmth from the electronics themselves." (http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technolog y/mer_computer_040128.html)
Lately I've been porting lot of C++ code to Win32 that is wrapped at around 40 to 60 columns. Other C# code formatted similarly I've had the mispleasure to maintain was the same, and because I worked with the code's author before he left, I figured out why - he had a tiny code window on his Visual Studio. He was happy scrolling and wrapping for this tiny bit of screen real estate! For $(DEITY)'s sake, can't people learn Ctrl-Alt-Enter and code using the whole screen's width?
Forty to sixty columns? And double-spaced? I have never seen a valid argument for double-spacing and spreading out code vertically. Do we read double-spaced books or newspapers? No! Perhaps the only benefit is for mouse manufacturers because the scroll wheel gets overworked.
Forty to eighty columns is ridiculous. It's not the nineteen eighties anymore, folks. It's not even the nineteen nineties. We are not using Apple ][s or Commodore 64s, we are using sophisticated visual displays with powerful IDE's to do serious work.
My question is: Why are people so afraid of using the rightmost half or third of their IDE's code window?
A few years ago an Australian company Molectra Technologies (http://www.molectra.com.au) used microwaving shredded car tires, and extracted enough oil and other compounds to power the process. It won the Australian Invention of the Year award.
Ever notice the number of times that ultra-expensive carbon fiber racing yachts tend to break in conditions far less stressful than what they are apparently rated for? The super-dooper CF mast snaps, or the hull cracks or something. Examples that come to mind are the maxi-yachts taking part in the Sydney-to-Hobart, or the sinking of the australian CF entry 'AUS35' in the America's cup about ten years ago. And yet aluminum-masted yachts in the same weather conditions make it through.
...be able to drag any about:config entry to the toolbar, whereapon boolean antries become toggle buttons, numerics become spin buttons, and editable values become, well, editable values :)
This way you can set any tweak anything quickly, and see the result. Now whatever happened to 'disable image load'?
...and the most interesting thing about it is that they show all manner of munitions made by Russia, South Africa and China, but not a mention about having to clean up any from another large and powerful western democracy who no doubt has dropped quite a lot of ordnance on that country in the name of WMD ...or was it er... nasty dictators?... ummm.... yeah. Nasty dictators, that's got to be it.
...being thrown out on a council rubbish collection. It was the original version, with cassette interface and heavy keyboard. I later acquired a CGA colour display at a fleamarket, and collected a bunch of old PC-bus cards. By the way this was in 1996 or 1997, so even back then I realised it would be worth something someday. I've never even attempted to plug it in. What I did was wrap it carefully in plastic and seal it up so it was airtight, then packed it away. It's still waiting for me to take a look at it, however that may be in many years from now as I have too many other projects.
Agree with the parent, buttons and moveable bits add to the cost. Whilst I lament (and curse) the cheap video cassette recorder I have because a lot of things have to be set from the remote (and settings can only be viewed on the TV screen), the cost of that unit was a darn sight cheaper than my nice 20-year-old TEAC Stereo VCR that had buttons, knobs and switches (yes, slide switches) for operation. And the fluorescent clock display had the indicators to tell me what I had set. And not just stupid odd-shaped rubber buttons but big rectangular ones. Ahhh I wish it still worked.
When I think of loss of 'ease-of-functionality' (not 'loss of functionality') I think VCR's.
Many years ago as a kid I read a science fiction novel about a mission to Mars. What was interesting was that the explorers wore compressors on their backs instead of air tanks. The plot revolved around one explorer getting lost and discovering an ancient martian city. He's captured and taken underground by the remaining martians, who incarcerate him by taking away his compressor. I do recall the chief martian's name as Spitz-Rlll or something like that. I'd love to find the name and author of this book, probably written in the 1950's. Does this ring a bell with any slashdotters?
"If the Bible proves the existence of God then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman".
...good old-fashioned silicon, not a briefcase substrate like this guy does. And like silicon, you can dope a briefcase too!