I am a subscriber to many sites. I do this all the more as this generally suppresses at least part of the ads.
The only negative side of such a behavior, and it is serious, is I won't subscribe instantly, for one given issue. While this may in the future be partly solved via micropayments (still to be implemented in an economically efficient way), I feel it a real problem, and I don't trust a 'pay-per-view' model will allow today's fluidity.
All I hope is, the cost of hosting will decrease. When both you and me will be able to host large news sites for a few cents, with only authors to be paid ads will be less necessary...
in France, indeed we have one (paper) weekly magazine with just no ad --a newspaper that only lives from customers buying it.
But it is a very special one, the "Canard enchainé" (a pun on words as 'canard' is slang for 'newspaper', and 'enchainé' stands for 'enslaved/censored'). It has a quite extreme reputation (there are people that would never want to be seen with it in hand...) and most of its contents is about news that elsewhere would have been auto-censored.
Needless to say it is not really fun to read (you almost always learn atrocious things), but generally it indeed is accurate, because when it is not people sue it (it is sued every month, but almost *always* wins in court). So, bad news but no junk, which is quite unusual. If there was a newspaper for a french Watergate, it would be the Canard Enchainé (in fact they did oust a number of ministers, mayors and company execs, to an extend some consider a bit exagerated).
The fact that only this kind of newspaper manages to 'work without ads' is quite striking IMHO. It seems that, contrary to most of what I read here on/., 99% of people consider ads as inescapable. The trend in Europe is even to question end-user payment, as the only developing newstitles here seem to be "free newspapers": those that very exactly are *fully* paid by ads.There have been a number of such annoucements these years, and so many "ordinary" magazine managers declaring the "free papers" are killing them...
I don't know what will be the trend on internet. I have been using ad-blockers from day one, and to an extend few may reach (even my present RSS aggregator filters ads, in two different ways); I look for paying sites whenever this is associated with ad removal. While I agree that paying suppresses most of the information fluidity, I am still in search of other alternatives to advertisement. Maybe, in the future, the development of micropayments may ease this...
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Indeed there would be interactions, there have even been plans, and some developments, in deploying long conductive wires ('tethers') from the shuttle to study this (and possibly generate energy from the tether crossing mag field lines). Up to now actual tests were not very successful I think (the last tether I heard about, a Nasa/Esa/italian development, catched fire during deployment)
But even more than this, I think adding to the wire the need to feed electrical kilowatts upwards and downwards would mean yet another constraining specification to a system that is already quite intensely constrained by the pure weight issue, and just this may be a show stopper. I for one would confirm the 'laser feed' choice as the best one, even if this means a bit of pointing / tracking from ground.
Because the Huygens probe had many platinum-covered appendages, this (catalyst) triggered out the chemical reactions depicted in the OP, which heated the probe much more than expected (it is notorious that the probe's temperature was well above manufacturer's predictions during all descent). Then once on ground, this heating continued, and Huygens whose batteries had been designed to last "the 3-hours descent + some margins" in a -150 degree environment, lasted indeed six hours more for being much hotter...
Hervé, part of the Huygens technical team
OK, as we are not april 1st now I wonder wether I shoulnd't have posted anonymously:-)
In France, by law and like all other earphone music players, iPods have a maximum allowed output power that happens to be lower than on the original product. This is implemented in software by Apple: somewhere in the machine lies a small file that sets the max output level.
Guess what? Within weeks from the first iPod appearing there, the hack to remove this limitation went widely diffused over internet...
The Manhole was Cyan's authors very first
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Neat idea - Perhaps you could try it on an "ordinary" email archive (like the email databases used on unix, I think even Apple's Mail.app uses them, and most email clients can export to this format) Then basically you'd need to write a parser that would read your (admittedly long) text unix mail archive. I'd love to run such a thing on my own archive:-)
In a couple of places I heard about wiki engines that could run onto the palm, and then you get a Memo application with bold and italic fonts for instance, that you moreover can sync to external wikis... I personally am too weak at computing to advance here but if you start something do warn me:-)
How old are you? I am 45 -an age which allows me, paradoxically, to clearly remember times where text editors other than Word existed. Not only I accept Pages, but I welcome it.
Of course it doesn't have *all* the possibilities of Word -no single alternative ever will. But, for people like me that need read access to a variety of word-saved documents, and after tests, clearly Pages opens complicated word docs *much better* than the free alternatives.
I know, it's sad for the open source world. I'll say more: I agree with the general feeling that, once an application's functions are well understood -and 'text processing' is clearly a well understood paradigm now- sooner or later it is to be replaced by open source developments, which is welcome. Even, very welcome in the case of Microsoft.
But for now, I definitely prefer buying Pages than getting for free applications that at best are (more or less uglily) mimicking Word.
(...) However, I took the comment about smaller ships to imply frigates, destroyers, crusiers, and the like.
Here in Europe I heard landing is harder because our ships are smaller, which means whatever the active stabilization you have, they move much more in bad weather...
Maybe that's why it's a brit company (Qinetiq) that did it first: out of necessity;-)
I can't tell you how it works, but I can filter google's ads (e. g. those in the Engadget feed) with CSS. And this work both in Safari and my RSS aggregator (NetNewsWire)
"Ya, I'd think there should be a blur in there somewhere, but aparently there isn't."
There is no blur, but there is deformation. The second picture, at left, taken from farther and "with a slower relative motion", is very visibly less large than the first one. This deformation is due to the motion of the spacecraft while you slowly acquire its image line-after-line. Incidentally, of this I deduce the line acquired here are vertical (ie, one vertical line is taken, then the following one)
A couple of years ago the french (earth) imaging satellite SPOT similarly managed to take a picture of another satellite (ERS-1): the details of why you get a deformation, and images (before/after correction) are given at http://spot4.cnes.fr/spot4_gb/im-ers-0.htm
I find nothing shocking here.
I'd say, the innermost ring is *closer* to Saturn, so it turns *faster* (thus the moon's gravity waves on it are going *ahead* of the moon's movement), while the outer ring is farther, so it turns slower, so the moon's waves on it are going rearwards compared to the moon's movement.
Just consider the rings themselves are turning, like the moon, even if you can't detect it (indeed the waves are a means of visualizing the ring's movement, maybe the only one at that scale)
There is an interesting analysis of databases in filesystems (and metadata...) in the Ars Technica review of OSX: extended attributes managed at system level, an application like Spotlight making (some) use of this, etc.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
(this link was already given in the recent OSX Tiger discussion here)
There was indeed a multiple-curve grapher before Grapher: its name was Curvus Pro (last version 1.3.2); its developper sold it to Apple by end 2004,...to become Grapher.
I think I mentioned this here at the time, but presumably as a rank-epsilon anonymous coward;-)
Curvus was already excellent at the time (I am a registered user), and it seems Apple has added some honest improvements, at least a couple of extra buttons that are really useful in the GUI and other features that I didn't try in detail yet (for instance, Curvus handled copying -to export- in a variety of formats, of which vectorial pdf, but this had the effect of turning it uncompatible with old apple SW like Appleworks, maybe Grapher solves this)
This is done from time to time.
For instance, I know half a dozen years ago in one of the European Meteosat satellites, there was a spare card slot inside a computer box that went filled with a special, test-only card. The purpose was to real-life-test an image-dedicated processor. ESA placed a specific contract to a component manufacturer (Sagem), they devised the card, added a test software that was based on the image-filtering functions that one expected in meteorology at the time (the prime contractor of Meteosat satellites was hired to design the algorithms), and the card did fly.
Now, it has to be said nowadays there is pretty much knowledge about the actual strength of components. Some manufacturers even propose rad-hardened chips, either offspring from military-related developments or even because they themselves develop spacecrafts (eg Motorola with their Iridium constellation have developped, and now market, a special space-hard version of the PowerPC)
Slashdot Mirror
T5 can store/play mp3 etc from its own memory (in addition to the optional sd card)
I am a subscriber to many sites. I do this all the more as this generally suppresses at least part of the ads.
The only negative side of such a behavior, and it is serious, is I won't subscribe instantly, for one given issue. While this may in the future be partly solved via micropayments (still to be implemented in an economically efficient way), I feel it a real problem, and I don't trust a 'pay-per-view' model will allow today's fluidity.
All I hope is, the cost of hosting will decrease. When both you and me will be able to host large news sites for a few cents, with only authors to be paid ads will be less necessary...
Hervé
in France, indeed we have one (paper) weekly magazine with just no ad --a newspaper that only lives from customers buying it.
/., 99% of people consider ads as inescapable.
But it is a very special one, the "Canard enchainé" (a pun on words as 'canard' is slang for 'newspaper', and 'enchainé' stands for 'enslaved/censored'). It has a quite extreme reputation (there are people that would never want to be seen with it in hand...) and most of its contents is about news that elsewhere would have been auto-censored.
Needless to say it is not really fun to read (you almost always learn atrocious things), but generally it indeed is accurate, because when it is not people sue it (it is sued every month, but almost *always* wins in court). So, bad news but no junk, which is quite unusual.
If there was a newspaper for a french Watergate, it would be the Canard Enchainé (in fact they did oust a number of ministers, mayors and company execs, to an extend some consider a bit exagerated).
The fact that only this kind of newspaper manages to 'work without ads' is quite striking IMHO. It seems that, contrary to most of what I read here on
The trend in Europe is even to question end-user payment, as the only developing newstitles here seem to be "free newspapers": those that very exactly are *fully* paid by ads.There have been a number of such annoucements these years, and so many "ordinary" magazine managers declaring the "free papers" are killing them...
I don't know what will be the trend on internet. I have been using ad-blockers from day one, and to an extend few may reach (even my present RSS aggregator filters ads, in two different ways); I look for paying sites whenever this is associated with ad removal. While I agree that paying suppresses most of the information fluidity, I am still in search of other alternatives to advertisement. Maybe, in the future, the development of micropayments may ease this...
Hervé
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Indeed there would be interactions, there have even been plans, and some developments, in deploying long conductive wires ('tethers') from the shuttle to study this (and possibly generate energy from the tether crossing mag field lines). Up to now actual tests were not very successful I think (the last tether I heard about, a Nasa/Esa/italian development, catched fire during deployment)
But even more than this, I think adding to the wire the need to feed electrical kilowatts upwards and downwards would mean yet another constraining specification to a system that is already quite intensely constrained by the pure weight issue, and just this may be a show stopper.
I for one would confirm the 'laser feed' choice as the best one, even if this means a bit of pointing / tracking from ground.
Because the Huygens probe had many platinum-covered appendages, this (catalyst) triggered out the chemical reactions depicted in the OP, which heated the probe much more than expected (it is notorious that the probe's temperature was well above manufacturer's predictions during all descent).
:-)
Then once on ground, this heating continued, and Huygens whose batteries had been designed to last "the 3-hours descent + some margins" in a -150 degree environment, lasted indeed six hours more for being much hotter...
Hervé, part of the Huygens technical team
OK, as we are not april 1st now I wonder wether I shoulnd't have posted anonymously
In France, by law and like all other earphone music players, iPods have a maximum allowed output power that happens to be lower than on the original product.
This is implemented in software by Apple: somewhere in the machine lies a small file that sets the max output level.
Guess what? Within weeks from the first iPod appearing there, the hack to remove this limitation went widely diffused over internet...
"Oh, bother... company again..."
"Bonjour, mon ami -- He said, welcome!"
Neat idea - Perhaps you could try it on an "ordinary" email archive (like the email databases used on unix, I think even Apple's Mail.app uses them, and most email clients can export to this format) :-)
Then basically you'd need to write a parser that would read your (admittedly long) text unix mail archive. I'd love to run such a thing on my own archive
Hervé
In a couple of places I heard about wiki engines that could run onto the palm, and then you get a Memo application with bold and italic fonts for instance, that you moreover can sync to external wikis... :-)
I personally am too weak at computing to advance here but if you start something do warn me
Hervé
How old are you?
I am 45 -an age which allows me, paradoxically, to clearly remember times where text editors other than Word existed.
Not only I accept Pages, but I welcome it.
Of course it doesn't have *all* the possibilities of Word -no single alternative ever will.
But, for people like me that need read access to a variety of word-saved documents, and after tests, clearly Pages opens complicated word docs *much better* than the free alternatives.
I know, it's sad for the open source world. I'll say more: I agree with the general feeling that, once an application's functions are well understood -and 'text processing' is clearly a well understood paradigm now- sooner or later it is to be replaced by open source developments, which is welcome. Even, very welcome in the case of Microsoft.
But for now, I definitely prefer buying Pages than getting for free applications that at best are (more or less uglily) mimicking Word.
(...) However, I took the comment about smaller ships to imply frigates, destroyers, crusiers, and the like.
;-)
Here in Europe I heard landing is harder because our ships are smaller, which means whatever the active stabilization you have, they move much more in bad weather...
Maybe that's why it's a brit company (Qinetiq) that did it first: out of necessity
I can't tell you how it works, but I can filter google's ads (e. g. those in the Engadget feed) with CSS. And this work both in Safari and my RSS aggregator (NetNewsWire)
"Ya, I'd think there should be a blur in there somewhere, but aparently there isn't."
There is no blur, but there is deformation. The second picture, at left, taken from farther and "with a slower relative motion", is very visibly less large than the first one.
This deformation is due to the motion of the spacecraft while you slowly acquire its image line-after-line.
Incidentally, of this I deduce the line acquired here are vertical (ie, one vertical line is taken, then the following one)
A couple of years ago the french (earth) imaging satellite SPOT similarly managed to take a picture of another satellite (ERS-1): the details of why you get a deformation, and images (before/after correction) are given at http://spot4.cnes.fr/spot4_gb/im-ers-0.htm
I find nothing shocking here. I'd say, the innermost ring is *closer* to Saturn, so it turns *faster* (thus the moon's gravity waves on it are going *ahead* of the moon's movement), while the outer ring is farther, so it turns slower, so the moon's waves on it are going rearwards compared to the moon's movement.
Just consider the rings themselves are turning, like the moon, even if you can't detect it (indeed the waves are a means of visualizing the ring's movement, maybe the only one at that scale)
Hervé
There is an interesting analysis of databases in filesystems (and metadata...) in the Ars Technica review of OSX: extended attributes managed at system level, an application like Spotlight making (some) use of this, etc. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
(this link was already given in the recent OSX Tiger discussion here)
Hervé
There was indeed a multiple-curve grapher before Grapher: its name was Curvus Pro (last version 1.3.2); its developper sold it to Apple by end 2004, ...to become Grapher.
;-)
I think I mentioned this here at the time, but presumably as a rank-epsilon anonymous coward
Curvus was already excellent at the time (I am a registered user), and it seems Apple has added some honest improvements, at least a couple of extra buttons that are really useful in the GUI and other features that I didn't try in detail yet (for instance, Curvus handled copying -to export- in a variety of formats, of which vectorial pdf, but this had the effect of turning it uncompatible with old apple SW like Appleworks, maybe Grapher solves this)
This is done from time to time. For instance, I know half a dozen years ago in one of the European Meteosat satellites, there was a spare card slot inside a computer box that went filled with a special, test-only card.
The purpose was to real-life-test an image-dedicated processor. ESA placed a specific contract to a component manufacturer (Sagem), they devised the card, added a test software that was based on the image-filtering functions that one expected in meteorology at the time (the prime contractor of Meteosat satellites was hired to design the algorithms), and the card did fly.
Now, it has to be said nowadays there is pretty much knowledge about the actual strength of components. Some manufacturers even propose rad-hardened chips, either offspring from military-related developments or even because they themselves develop spacecrafts (eg Motorola with their Iridium constellation have developped, and now market, a special space-hard version of the PowerPC)