Which is why hummers aren't used for anything useful by civilians. Any company that wants reliable low maintainance vehicles for off-road work will run a mile from these things.
5 year ago some guy had the idea of importing hummers to Australia to make ground herbicide spraying rigs out of hummers. Think 8 hours a day, pulling at least 2 tonnes of equipment and water over a rocky, furrrowed uneven paddock at probably 30 km/h or more. Well It didn't fly as the cost of maintaining the thing (especially the cost of parts) was horrendous, and they were not that reliable.
Another example how the needs of military needs are very different to civilian needs, the auto tyre inflation things the military hummers have, great if the vehicle is shot at deflates a tyre and for obvious reasons the occupants want to floor it out of there, to everyone else its just a piece of complicated, breakage prone and most of the time useless piece of junk. The odd time the vehicle gets a flat there is usually plenty of time to stop and change the tyre.
Which begs the question why would any sane person buy the fricking thing if it wasn't what they wanted and have to change the bloody engine, there are lots of perfectly good 4x4 that have at least the option to run on petrol.
I mean if the owners actually were planning to use these things for anything that a hummer may actually be useful they would definately keep the diesel engine. For instance longer range (fuel efficiency is higher, so X amount of fuel will get you further) very handy for long journeys through remote regions, and fording rivers as diesels don't mind getting wet.
This further solidifies in my mind that hummer owners are clueless wankers.
>Other than selling services to corporations and little text >ads, how does Google make money?
Ummm by selling services to corporations and little text ads. Googles advertising model is a very good way to make money on the internet by servicing both types of customers well, the normal google user and the advertisers.
Why, well the text ads are unobtrusive and obvious as advertisement links, and often welcome by the searcher. Why are they welcome, because they relate directly to the search term used. So you search for widgets, and widget inc. pays to put themselves on the first search page. The company gets trade, and the customer gets what they are looking for. In the real world this is the equivalent to the yellowpages directory where companies pay money to be listed with a small advert under a relevant indexed title like plumber or something.
So why does google have to be number one, because the more eyeballs they have the more money they can charge for an ad and the more companies that will be clamouring to get their little ad link under the "widgets" search term. Again for the yellowpages, in the US ever seen those ads from one or the other yellowpages directory saying that they are the preferred yellowpages by consumers, they are advertsising to potential advertisers in their directory implying that you will get the most value if you advertise in our directory and not the competitions. Same reasons google needs to be number one to maximise their profit.
A way of dealling with blindness from cataracts (the lens of the eye turning opaque), is to remove the lens of the eye and replace it with an artificial lens. An interesting side effect is that without the lens people can see further into the UV region of light.
Interestingly the work of Claude Monet demonstrates this. Starting with his early work which is clear and in the normal colour range, then he develops cataracts and his work is more undefined swirls of colour, often dark and dim. Then he has cataract surgery and the new work is bright and vibrant, but with a deep purple/blue hue to many things because of the now increased presence of UV light in his vision.
No theories are wrong all the time, a hypothesis is a subset of a theory. A hypothesis is an expected or testable phenomena or outcome derived from a theory thought to describe how something works.
A hypothesis that is wrong can bring down a perfectly good theory. Now we can still use the old busted theory as a model, as long as we know the limitations (ie. where it breaksdown), but it still doesn't mean that it is correct.
This is not a bad idea, make it a separate driving test with more rigourous standards for driving a vehicle over a certain weight. I mean these heavy, high centre of gravity SUV's do require a different set of driving skills to my little ford excort. Reverse parking is a lot more difficult, stopping in a short distance etc., how to prevent roll-over. This has the added advantage of not discriminating to much against the tradesmen and farmers etc. that require pick-up trucks (and the reason trucks and SUV originally were given tax-breaks) once you have the licence your free to drive your SUV, just that you have to get the licence first.
It would also be fair, as they have made the choice of (in the SUV drivers view) to increase their safety by buying a bigger car, but its at the expense of a smaller cars safety (should the SUV hit my escort for example). Therefore they have a responsibility to learn how to drive their car safely.
Except under normal circumstances the website wants to be indexed. This is an issue about what is the right policy for linking to a website from a mega traffic site, not if they should be indexed or not. If 100 people type that word combo in a day because they are actually interested in the subject and want to learn more, not a problem. But directing the huge userbase of google with one click on an alluring logo banner to the same search page, thats nothing that could be expected or designed for.
I think it is a severe problem which Slashdot and Google don't want to deal with. I have had atleast 2 website I wanted to submit as a slashdot story but didn't because they were private websites without any financial, and without the capacity to handle the load. One inparticular was already under financial strain because of bandwith bills, a slashdoting would have ended it there and then. In that case it is better to leave it for people actually interested in the topic and are willing to find it on their own than to sacrifice the poor website to slashdot.
Point taken on literally, its a bad writing/speaking habit I picked up in my youth, and its very hard to shake. I cranked out this short description at work and was trying to do it quick, hence not editing it properly for that kind of stuff.
Second they are not going to harvest fish for this kind of thing I don't think, but genetically engineer some organism and culture or farm them.
Anyway fishing for food is already a major issue at the poles. Big factory ships in international waters scarfing up huge quantites of deep sea cold water fish. A good example is the orange roughie, a bland inoffensively tasting fish that freezes well, big in fishstick and that kind of thing, but is a relatively new addition to Humans diets (like the last couple of decades) as it is a deep sea fish that requires big equipment to hual up and big factory ships to process. We actually know very little about the biology of these animals, population densities or anything, yet they now make up a signficant component of the worlds diet of fish. This has come about from a lack regulation for fishing in the remote parts of the worlds international waters, and it is very hard to figure out how to regulate it, or even how it would be policed in such remote localities as these ships operate.
Extremophiles are organisms that live at the edge of the range of environments life can exist in. Essentially very hot (at boiling water temperatures), to extreme cold temperature (cell contents should be freezing but they don't), to high acidity, alkalinity, or high salt. concentrations.
They are a literal gold mine for biotech companies. Heat extremophiles are a great source of heat stable enzymes that work in almost boiling water. This makes them good for many industrial processes and also makes them easy to make and purify in a none extremophile organism (you grow it up in the bacteria, smash open the cells and cook the contents till the only thing left active is the heat stable protein).
Cold tolerant organisms have great antifreeze techniques, as well as a source of enzymes that are able to work efficiently at cold temperatures. Handy for many industrial processes and even as additives in such mundane things as laundry detergent that is designed for use in cold water. The anitfreeze may have applications in crygenic applications (more pratically for freezing tissue samples and organs rather than a whole human).
The problem with cold extremophiles is the biggest source exist in Antartica, and people are sensitive about what happens in that region of the world. The point I should make is that this research will only require sampling and identification and growth in the lab of these organisms, and is really a pratical outgrowth of the scientific research already carried out in Antartica. These organisms are not going to be "harvested" in Antartica for any commercial purpose, and I can't see further research in this area creating anymore disturbance to the ecosystem than the research already carried out in Antartica since the first explorers. If anything this increases the need to preserve the ecosystem, along the same lines as the saving rainforest for the potential undiscovered medicinal plants.
There will be inertia unfortunately. The people who use there computers for gaming will stick with windows because it has the games and the games come out first on that platform even if they do come out later on mac or linux. Sure you can dual-boot, but that by its nature increases the complexity of installation of linux significantly.
There are two distinct home computer markets, gamers and people using computers to; surf the web, check email, do accounting of there personal finances, and write letters and documents. The second group of people can easily switch as all those functions are available in Linux, and if they use a particular commercial piece of software, as Linux becomes more popular no doubt it will be ported. But for gamers there are literally hundreds if not thousands of these killer apps (games) that will need porting.
My conclusion is that it may be easier to get business and the non-gamer PC user to switch before hardcore gamers. Kind of like the inertia of changing from DOS to windows for games, which was a combination of poor support for games in windows 3.1 and early 95, game companies not wanting to learn how to write games for windows, and gamers already quite happy using and tweaking DOS for their games as well as the ability to play their back catalog. Wanting to run windows on the same machine complicated things, with a need to setup different booting options for either gaming in DOS or working in windows, akin to dual booting Linux/Windows.
Its not just Imperial, its the British Imperial System of measurement. Which makes for some irony, as the last major country to use the system officially is the USA, the first country to break away from the British Imperial System of Government.
This is dependent on the time of knighting. Australia and NZ still have the queen as the head of state. In Australia the top honour used to be a knighthood officially into at least the eighties. Then the order of Australia was introduced to take over from knighthoods as the official top honour.
Basically like the court system at the time (upto 1986 the highest court/ court of last appeal in Australia was the british privy court. Canada had the same arrangement until 1949, and New Zealand upto last year) the honours system for rewarding outstanding acheivement actually extended upto british knighthoods. The australian government and states could recommend directly to the queen, people who should receive knighthoods, and the titles were officially recognised (by political protocol) with the official title of Sir Blogs.
An interesting quirk of this is that now if the queen was to award a knighthood to an Australian, like she is doing to Bill Gates, it would be a large outcry from people saying that it was undermining the Order of Australia as the top honour in Australia, instead of an award from a foreign head of state which is how the US will view the award to Bill Gates.
Edmund Hillary was knighted in an age where the top honour in New Zealand was a knighthood, and the NZ government of the time would have recommended his knighthood. He would also have been addressed by his title at all official events.
This is short circuiting nature, basically as we get cold extremities like the hands and fingers have the blood circulation restricted to conserve heat so our core body temp stays high. Fingers are far more robust in surviving cold than say our brains, they are also more expendable, and they also have a larger surface area to mass ratio so are costly to keep at body temperature anyway.
What it really means is that the garment that this is in is less thermally efficient than the same garment without (you will lose heat faster). It maybe handy for delicate work were you need thin gloves and warm hands in a cold environment with the only other real option is an active heating system power by batteries.
It seems to me that this is primarily aimed at being a replacement for a midi keyboard and laptop combination simplified into one box and hardened for touring.
I would not be surprised if it really is just a midi keyboard with a computer, monitor, UPS and a profession sound card all in the same box. If it is just a standard type midi interface running things internally then I can't see why linux couldn't be a drop in replacement.
The merit of this over a laptop and midi keyboard separately, well the dual opteron option would really increase the computing grunt over a laptop, and it is one solid box that sounds fairly roadie proof. There maybe a niche, but how big of one will depend on price.
Industrial design is to mechanical and electrical engineering as architecture is to civil engineering.
Industrial design is actually making a good looking fully functional product from the barebones the engineers have put together. It is part of the design of most consumer products and many people have careers in industrial design.
Industrial design is a fundamental part of the product design phase of everything from an coffee makers to a car. In fact both these are good examples of where good industrial design works.
Take the coffee maker, its function is pretty simple, but people actually coordinate their appliances with their kitchens, therefore the kettle has to look good and often will follow a particular style or trend in interior design to suit a particular market. The style and how it is intergrated into the design and function of the kettle is purely the work of an industrial designer.
Take a car interior, if purely functional without thought to aesthetics or ergonimics it would no doubt look a lot like the cockpit of a racing car, bare surface with simply toggle switches. So how do you get all those colour matched interiors, with ergonomic well placed switches for the A/C and stereo and a comfortable seating position etc. Well good industrial designers (though they tend to have a different job titles in the car industry).
Its been with us for a long time, take for instance such things as the beutiful art deco objects from the twenties, the height of which I think is the design of the ill fated line of luxury cars by Cord (ill fated as 1929 was not a good time to start a luxury car company). Wonderful looking looking masterworks of art-deco design.
Apple does the same thing for computers, combines good engineering (both in the software and hardware) with top notch design that both looks good and increases ease of use. They are the best computer company at doing this at the moment, and one of the best companies generally.
Yep, it's a combination of a vitamin deficiency (B6 i think), dehydration, and the metabolism of left over residual methanol and other nasty impurities which are just by-products of fermentation.
Good ways to avoid hangovers, and help hangovers once you have them. Drink water, and take something to replace B vitamins, vegemite and cheese with sandwiches are the ducks nuts in this regard.
Properly distilled spirits (like good vodka, whiskey, gin etc.) purifies the ethanol and removes methanol and other nasty impurities, so the toxic breakdown products of these impurites aren't as bad, but if you drink spirits close to straight you get even more dehydrated
Improperly distilled spirits (worse case being moon-shine) can some times do the reverse and increase the amount of impurities, which is one of the dangers of illegal home distilled spirits.
Yes there is an openoffice port for OS X, well sort off. As other people has said there is only a X11 dependent version of version 1.03. There is no plan to port version 1.1, instead they are working to get the necessary hooks into version 2.0 port for a native port, maybe by 2005 -2006. Till then it's a long wait.
Now that porting KDE apps is seemingly straight forward it may be easier for the OS X porters to piggy back on the KDE intergration effort so things will shift along a bit faster.
What bollocks, if he had wmd's he would have used them. Do you think having to hide out in a hole was also part of the overal plan. Saddam must have known that once he lost power, even if he escaped capture, he would not gain power again.
There is really no reason for him to hold back. I think the real reason for the lack of WMD's is that the chemical and biological weapons were used within the country against the kurds and so forth. The economic sanctions made it very hard to replenish and rebuild (as they were designed to do), with the on again off again weapons inspections at least making it hard to establish good facilities, as they would have to be up-rooted periodically and moved else where to continue operating. It may have been a cat and mouse game, but while they are shifting everything every few weeks there was not a lot of development or production possible if at all.
It may come out now that Saddam is captured that he quite possibly gave up on WMD production for the most part. Saddam couldn't rebuild his conventional army, and he wasn't able to get the technology to develop decent missile technology or nuclear capability. His wmd capability was very much stopped at the pre gulf war 1 days by sanctions and intense scrutiny, and his conventional army crippled and becoming obsolete.
I think he really had no choice but to give up his military plans and instead built himself palaces, put up gaudy statues of himself and ran his country into the ground to show how "big" a man he is instead of invading other countries.
My point is that Saddam was less of a threat during Gulf War 2 than he was in Gulf War 1.
Buses as transportation suck and continue to do so as they have the same speed limitations as a car.
The problem with trains in america is that innovation in train transport died in about the 50's or 60's. I mean look at amtrak trains, they are not different in any fundamental respect to what you could get in the 50's or 60's, that included interior comfort and appointment (this has quite possibly declined over the years), and speed has stayed the same. What happened of course is that airlines had rapid growth in the 50's and even more in the 60's with the introduction of passenger jets and so trains lost out on speed. Also cars were finally consistantly fast enough, and actually comfortable enough for lengthy trips, as well as the introduction of the interstate highway system making car travel fast, (at a huge cost). Before that to travel long distances meant some drivinguncomfortable cars, on often pretty poor quality roads.
Americans just lost interest in trains about that time, the money disappeared and the american rail system got stuck in the sixties. Now you just have to look around the world to see that rail transport is alive and well and a very viable form of transport, just none of the technology was developed or is used in the US.
Morrow was a computer manufacturer from the CP/M era.. Morrow sent themselves almost broke developing the first true laptop, the morrow pivot (a msdos machine).The developed the msdos XT compatiple computer essential inhouse. The thing worked but they were in debt from the venture and licensed the design, concurrently with the manufacture of the real morrow pivot, to Zenith who named made it as the z-151 and z-171. Morrow was aiming for a contract with the US tax office but Zenith got the contract with the licensed design. Morrow went almost under and stripped to the core until Zeniths royalty check started to role in. So what was so good about the design. It was a fully functional portable computer that was smaller and lighter than a normal briefcase full of paper. They had a costume design state of the art LCD display to it. To put it another way it was not just luggable, but actually portable, you could carry it one your shoulder without putting your back out. It's the missing link between Luggable computers (those lead bricks with crt screens that claimed they were portable) and todays laptops.
Well you could actually setup a fake type ATM with just a pc in a well design fake case could you not. With a fake error message to spoof the fact the ATM doesn't have any cash to dispense whil harvesting cards and pin numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Very funny, though it made me think of an obvious choice, a play-man, very sony.
Which is why hummers aren't used for anything useful by civilians. Any company that wants reliable low maintainance vehicles for off-road work will run a mile from these things.
5 year ago some guy had the idea of importing hummers to Australia to make ground herbicide spraying rigs out of hummers. Think 8 hours a day, pulling at least 2 tonnes of equipment and water over a rocky, furrrowed uneven paddock at probably 30 km/h or more. Well It didn't fly as the cost of maintaining the thing (especially the cost of parts) was horrendous, and they were not that reliable.
Another example how the needs of military needs are very different to civilian needs, the auto tyre inflation things the military hummers have, great if the vehicle is shot at deflates a tyre and for obvious reasons the occupants want to floor it out of there, to everyone else its just a piece of complicated, breakage prone and most of the time useless piece of junk. The odd time the vehicle gets a flat there is usually plenty of time to stop and change the tyre.
Which begs the question why would any sane person buy the fricking thing if it wasn't what they wanted and have to change the bloody engine, there are lots of perfectly good 4x4 that have at least the option to run on petrol.
I mean if the owners actually were planning to use these things for anything that a hummer may actually be useful they would definately keep the diesel engine. For instance longer range (fuel efficiency is higher, so X amount of fuel will get you further) very handy for long journeys through remote regions, and fording rivers as diesels don't mind getting wet.
This further solidifies in my mind that hummer owners are clueless wankers.
>Other than selling services to corporations and little text >ads, how does Google make money?
Ummm by selling services to corporations and little text ads. Googles advertising model is a very good way to make money on the internet by servicing both types of customers well, the normal google user and the advertisers.
Why, well the text ads are unobtrusive and obvious as advertisement links, and often welcome by the searcher. Why are they welcome, because they relate directly to the search term used. So you search for widgets, and widget inc. pays to put themselves on the first search page. The company gets trade, and the customer gets what they are looking for. In the real world this is the equivalent to the yellowpages directory where companies pay money to be listed with a small advert under a relevant indexed title like plumber or something.
So why does google have to be number one, because the more eyeballs they have the more money they can charge for an ad and the more companies that will be clamouring to get their little ad link under the "widgets" search term. Again for the yellowpages, in the US ever seen those ads from one or the other yellowpages directory saying that they are the preferred yellowpages by consumers, they are advertsising to potential advertisers in their directory implying that you will get the most value if you advertise in our directory and not the competitions. Same reasons google needs to be number one to maximise their profit.
That ???? = sell to an approriate tabloid (assuming the person is both rich and famous). This one actually works!
A way of dealling with blindness from cataracts (the lens of the eye turning opaque), is to remove the lens of the eye and replace it with an artificial lens. An interesting side effect is that without the lens people can see further into the UV region of light.
Interestingly the work of Claude Monet demonstrates this. Starting with his early work which is clear and in the normal colour range, then he develops cataracts and his work is more undefined swirls of colour, often dark and dim. Then he has cataract surgery and the new work is bright and vibrant, but with a deep purple/blue hue to many things because of the now increased presence of UV light in his vision.
No theories are wrong all the time, a hypothesis is a subset of a theory. A hypothesis is an expected or testable phenomena or outcome derived from a theory thought to describe how something works.
A hypothesis that is wrong can bring down a perfectly good theory. Now we can still use the old busted theory as a model, as long as we know the limitations (ie. where it breaksdown), but it still doesn't mean that it is correct.
This is not a bad idea, make it a separate driving test with more rigourous standards for driving a vehicle over a certain weight. I mean these heavy, high centre of gravity SUV's do require a different set of driving skills to my little ford excort. Reverse parking is a lot more difficult, stopping in a short distance etc., how to prevent roll-over. This has the added advantage of not discriminating to much against the tradesmen and farmers etc. that require pick-up trucks (and the reason trucks and SUV originally were given tax-breaks) once you have the licence your free to drive your SUV, just that you have to get the licence first.
It would also be fair, as they have made the choice of (in the SUV drivers view) to increase their safety by buying a bigger car, but its at the expense of a smaller cars safety (should the SUV hit my escort for example). Therefore they have a responsibility to learn how to drive their car safely.
Except under normal circumstances the website wants to be indexed. This is an issue about what is the right policy for linking to a website from a mega traffic site, not if they should be indexed or not. If 100 people type that word combo in a day because they are actually interested in the subject and want to learn more, not a problem. But directing the huge userbase of google with one click on an alluring logo banner to the same search page, thats nothing that could be expected or designed for.
I think it is a severe problem which Slashdot and Google don't want to deal with. I have had atleast 2 website I wanted to submit as a slashdot story but didn't because they were private websites without any financial, and without the capacity to handle the load. One inparticular was already under financial strain because of bandwith bills, a slashdoting would have ended it there and then. In that case it is better to leave it for people actually interested in the topic and are willing to find it on their own than to sacrifice the poor website to slashdot.
Yeh, exactly what is the problem the US seems to have in building good solid brick aparments and houses?
Point taken on literally, its a bad writing/speaking habit I picked up in my youth, and its very hard to shake. I cranked out this short description at work and was trying to do it quick, hence not editing it properly for that kind of stuff.
Second they are not going to harvest fish for this kind of thing I don't think, but genetically engineer some organism and culture or farm them.
Anyway fishing for food is already a major issue at the poles. Big factory ships in international waters scarfing up huge quantites of deep sea cold water fish. A good example is the orange roughie, a bland inoffensively tasting fish that freezes well, big in fishstick and that kind of thing, but is a relatively new addition to Humans diets (like the last couple of decades) as it is a deep sea fish that requires big equipment to hual up and big factory ships to process. We actually know very little about the biology of these animals, population densities or anything, yet they now make up a signficant component of the worlds diet of fish. This has come about from a lack regulation for fishing in the remote parts of the worlds international waters, and it is very hard to figure out how to regulate it, or even how it would be policed in such remote localities as these ships operate.
Extremophiles are organisms that live at the edge of the range of environments life can exist in. Essentially very hot (at boiling water temperatures), to extreme cold temperature (cell contents should be freezing but they don't), to high acidity, alkalinity, or high salt. concentrations.
They are a literal gold mine for biotech companies. Heat extremophiles are a great source of heat stable enzymes that work in almost boiling water. This makes them good for many industrial processes and also makes them easy to make and purify in a none extremophile organism (you grow it up in the bacteria, smash open the cells and cook the contents till the only thing left active is the heat stable protein).
Cold tolerant organisms have great antifreeze techniques, as well as a source of enzymes that are able to work efficiently at cold temperatures. Handy for many industrial processes and even as additives in such mundane things as laundry detergent that is designed for use in cold water. The anitfreeze may have applications in crygenic applications (more pratically for freezing tissue samples and organs rather than a whole human).
The problem with cold extremophiles is the biggest source exist in Antartica, and people are sensitive about what happens in that region of the world. The point I should make is that this research will only require sampling and identification and growth in the lab of these organisms, and is really a pratical outgrowth of the scientific research already carried out in Antartica. These organisms are not going to be "harvested" in Antartica for any commercial purpose, and I can't see further research in this area creating anymore disturbance to the ecosystem than the research already carried out in Antartica since the first explorers. If anything this increases the need to preserve the ecosystem, along the same lines as the saving rainforest for the potential undiscovered medicinal plants.
There will be inertia unfortunately. The people who use there computers for gaming will stick with windows because it has the games and the games come out first on that platform even if they do come out later on mac or linux. Sure you can dual-boot, but that by its nature increases the complexity of installation of linux significantly.
There are two distinct home computer markets, gamers and people using computers to; surf the web, check email, do accounting of there personal finances, and write letters and documents. The second group of people can easily switch as all those functions are available in Linux, and if they use a particular commercial piece of software, as Linux becomes more popular no doubt it will be ported. But for gamers there are literally hundreds if not thousands of these killer apps (games) that will need porting.
My conclusion is that it may be easier to get business and the non-gamer PC user to switch before hardcore gamers. Kind of like the inertia of changing from DOS to windows for games, which was a combination of poor support for games in windows 3.1 and early 95, game companies not wanting to learn how to write games for windows, and gamers already quite happy using and tweaking DOS for their games as well as the ability to play their back catalog. Wanting to run windows on the same machine complicated things, with a need to setup different booting options for either gaming in DOS or working in windows, akin to dual booting Linux/Windows.
Its not just Imperial, its the British Imperial System of measurement. Which makes for some irony, as the last major country to use the system officially is the USA, the first country to break away from the British Imperial System of Government.
This is dependent on the time of knighting. Australia and NZ still have the queen as the head of state. In Australia the top honour used to be a knighthood officially into at least the eighties. Then the order of Australia was introduced to take over from knighthoods as the official top honour.
Basically like the court system at the time (upto 1986 the highest court/ court of last appeal in Australia was the british privy court. Canada had the same arrangement until 1949, and New Zealand upto last year) the honours system for rewarding outstanding acheivement actually extended upto british knighthoods. The australian government and states could recommend directly to the queen, people who should receive knighthoods, and the titles were officially recognised (by political protocol) with the official title of Sir Blogs.
An interesting quirk of this is that now if the queen was to award a knighthood to an Australian, like she is doing to Bill Gates, it would be a large outcry from people saying that it was undermining the Order of Australia as the top honour in Australia, instead of an award from a foreign head of state which is how the US will view the award to Bill Gates.
Edmund Hillary was knighted in an age where the top honour in New Zealand was a knighthood, and the NZ government of the time would have recommended his knighthood. He would also have been addressed by his title at all official events.
This is short circuiting nature, basically as we get cold extremities like the hands and fingers have the blood circulation restricted to conserve heat so our core body temp stays high. Fingers are far more robust in surviving cold than say our brains, they are also more expendable, and they also have a larger surface area to mass ratio so are costly to keep at body temperature anyway.
What it really means is that the garment that this is in is less thermally efficient than the same garment without (you will lose heat faster). It maybe handy for delicate work were you need thin gloves and warm hands in a cold environment with the only other real option is an active heating system power by batteries.
It seems to me that this is primarily aimed at being a replacement for a midi keyboard and laptop combination simplified into one box and hardened for touring.
I would not be surprised if it really is just a midi keyboard with a computer, monitor, UPS and a profession sound card all in the same box. If it is just a standard type midi interface running things internally then I can't see why linux couldn't be a drop in replacement.
The merit of this over a laptop and midi keyboard separately, well the dual opteron option would really increase the computing grunt over a laptop, and it is one solid box that sounds fairly roadie proof. There maybe a niche, but how big of one will depend on price.
Industrial design is to mechanical and electrical engineering as architecture is to civil engineering.
Industrial design is actually making a good looking fully functional product from the barebones the engineers have put together. It is part of the design of most consumer products and many people have careers in industrial design.
Industrial design is a fundamental part of the product design phase of everything from an coffee makers to a car. In fact both these are good examples of where good industrial design works.
Take the coffee maker, its function is pretty simple, but people actually coordinate their appliances with their kitchens, therefore the kettle has to look good and often will follow a particular style or trend in interior design to suit a particular market. The style and how it is intergrated into the design and function of the kettle is purely the work of an industrial designer.
Take a car interior, if purely functional without thought to aesthetics or ergonimics it would no doubt look a lot like the cockpit of a racing car, bare surface with simply toggle switches. So how do you get all those colour matched interiors, with ergonomic well placed switches for the A/C and stereo and a comfortable seating position etc. Well good industrial designers (though they tend to have a different job titles in the car industry).
Its been with us for a long time, take for instance such things as the beutiful art deco objects from the twenties, the height of which I think is the design of the ill fated line of luxury cars by Cord (ill fated as 1929 was not a good time to start a luxury car company). Wonderful looking looking masterworks of art-deco design.
Apple does the same thing for computers, combines good engineering (both in the software and hardware) with top notch design that both looks good and increases ease of use. They are the best computer company at doing this at the moment, and one of the best companies generally.
Yep, it's a combination of a vitamin deficiency (B6 i think), dehydration, and the metabolism of left over residual methanol and other nasty impurities which are just by-products of fermentation.
Good ways to avoid hangovers, and help hangovers once you have them. Drink water, and take something to replace B vitamins, vegemite and cheese with sandwiches are the ducks nuts in this regard.
Properly distilled spirits (like good vodka, whiskey, gin etc.) purifies the ethanol and removes methanol and other nasty impurities, so the toxic breakdown products of these impurites aren't as bad, but if you drink spirits close to straight you get even more dehydrated
Improperly distilled spirits (worse case being moon-shine) can some times do the reverse and increase the amount of impurities, which is one of the dangers of illegal home distilled spirits.
Yes there is an openoffice port for OS X, well sort off. As other people has said there is only a X11 dependent version of version 1.03. There is no plan to port version 1.1, instead they are working to get the necessary hooks into version 2.0 port for a native port, maybe by 2005 -2006. Till then it's a long wait.
Now that porting KDE apps is seemingly straight forward it may be easier for the OS X porters to piggy back on the KDE intergration effort so things will shift along a bit faster.
What bollocks, if he had wmd's he would have used them. Do you think having to hide out in a hole was also part of the overal plan. Saddam must have known that once he lost power, even if he escaped capture, he would not gain power again.
There is really no reason for him to hold back. I think the real reason for the lack of WMD's is that the chemical and biological weapons were used within the country against the kurds and so forth. The economic sanctions made it very hard to replenish and rebuild (as they were designed to do), with the on again off again weapons inspections at least making it hard to establish good facilities, as they would have to be up-rooted periodically and moved else where to continue operating. It may have been a cat and mouse game, but while they are shifting everything every few weeks there was not a lot of development or production possible if at all.
It may come out now that Saddam is captured that he quite possibly gave up on WMD production for the most part. Saddam couldn't rebuild his conventional army, and he wasn't able to get the technology to develop decent missile technology or nuclear capability. His wmd capability was very much stopped at the pre gulf war 1 days by sanctions and intense scrutiny, and his conventional army crippled and becoming obsolete.
I think he really had no choice but to give up his military plans and instead built himself palaces, put up gaudy statues of himself and ran his country into the ground to show how "big" a man he is instead of invading other countries.
My point is that Saddam was less of a threat during Gulf War 2 than he was in Gulf War 1.
Buses as transportation suck and continue to do so as they have the same speed limitations as a car.
The problem with trains in america is that innovation in train transport died in about the 50's or 60's. I mean look at amtrak trains, they are not different in any fundamental respect to what you could get in the 50's or 60's, that included interior comfort and appointment (this has quite possibly declined over the years), and speed has stayed the same. What happened of course is that airlines had rapid growth in the 50's and even more in the 60's with the introduction of passenger jets and so trains lost out on speed. Also cars were finally consistantly fast enough, and actually comfortable enough for lengthy trips, as well as the introduction of the interstate highway system making car travel fast, (at a huge cost). Before that to travel long distances meant some drivinguncomfortable cars, on often pretty poor quality roads.
Americans just lost interest in trains about that time, the money disappeared and the american rail system got stuck in the sixties. Now you just have to look around the world to see that rail transport is alive and well and a very viable form of transport, just none of the technology was developed or is used in the US.
Morrow was a computer manufacturer from the CP/M era.. Morrow sent themselves almost broke developing the first true laptop, the morrow pivot (a msdos machine).The developed the msdos XT compatiple computer essential inhouse. The thing worked but they were in debt from the venture and licensed the design, concurrently with the manufacture of the real morrow pivot, to Zenith who named made it as the z-151 and z-171. Morrow was aiming for a contract with the US tax office but Zenith got the contract with the licensed design.
Morrow went almost under and stripped to the core until Zeniths royalty check started to role in.
So what was so good about the design. It was a fully functional portable computer that was smaller and lighter than a normal briefcase full of paper. They had a costume design state of the art LCD display to it.
To put it another way it was not just luggable, but actually portable, you could carry it one your shoulder without putting your back out.
It's the missing link between Luggable computers (those lead bricks with crt screens that claimed they were portable) and todays laptops.
Well you could actually setup a fake type ATM with just a pc in a well design fake case could you not. With a fake error message to spoof the fact the ATM doesn't have any cash to dispense whil harvesting cards and pin numbers.
I am sure criminals have tried this.
>"I'll give you this cow for that rack mounted server."
Throw in a pig and your daughter and you have a deal!