Far. To. Many.
where i live, there is a POS (point of sale) software that some local maniac wrote back in the days of plain ole' DOS. dozens of local businesses use it, and the guy that wrote it refuses to support it on any platform besides DOS. when i last encountered it, it was on a XP machine. I have no doubt that it is now installed on a windows 7 machine somewhere in town, and giving them trouble, just because these 'old timers' refuse to learn a new POS program.
here's the thing, I scanned a QR from the back of a package of starbucks coffee beans today. the link? something like http://vjghhtv.com/qwertvmlghjg. took me to a special mobile version of starbucks site. If Legit QR codes are using garglemesh URL's, people are just going to click through, even with preview, because they always do.
So you buy one of those baseball caps with the LED lights in the brim, swap out the white LED's for IR LED's, and wear it at partys. Your face will be obscured by the bright light in photos, and you will not be popping and flashing like a thunderstorm all night.
At what point will we finally reach the realization that certain design features are NOT original to anyone, and simply required to obtain basic useable function from a smartphone? At some point, this stupidity has to stop, right?
you know, the slow page flips and whatnot are usually toggle-able in the settings somewhere. (sure, that means you have to know what a 'settings' is, but it is sort of assumed at this stage that you are not just drinking the apple juice)
This reminds me of a thing I noticed in college. At least in my experience, most text books, when presenting you with a problem to solve for practice, will chose a selection of numbers that, when solved for the answer, will produce a number that does not seem abjectly strange (nothing like 6.531943 ohms per square library of congress). That way, when you do the problem, if the answer you get is truly bizarre, you know you've made a mistake.
However, in a course I took on electricity, part of the coursework involved a workbook that was created by some students at Texas Tech if I recall, and the math problems they created for the workbook (mainly things about resistance and whatnot) always had answers that where so strange, that it made it almost impossible to tell if you had it right or not. We where allowed to use a calculator, but several times, after running the problem through the calculator, I would look at the answer produced and go 'Huh.' and then work it out the long way on paper, just to be sure the machine was not bullshitting me.
thank god, i thought i was the only one that did math that way. (it feels sort of wrong, after learning to do it the 'traditional' way) disassembling the problem, rounding, cranking the generator, then fixing for the round. It works, its just makes your math teacher pull her hair out.
seems like that'd be fine also. At that rate, it'll be into the mantle in about 420 years, (the crust is around 10km thick there as far as i can tell, so at 24cm per year thats a little over 416 years, and we buffer for a bad landing spot by few years because hey, we're imagining things) and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
I was thinking along the same lines, only using it to make the monitor appear to be showing 'work' on one polarization, and 'play' on the other, so that a passer by sees microsoft word, and you with your glasses see the movie you are actually watching on the other polarization. Not really as easy as all that, but it could be done i suppose.
i don't get why he used 3d glasses. he could have gotten demo glasses (with the non refracting lenses) and added the film to them instead. then they would have just looked like sunglasses, instead of bluetard 3D glasses.
I dunno, they *are* talking about digging a 65 story deep hole in a swamp. They might actually want a Fresnel lens. (to vaporize the water that's going to leak in)
so basically... we've got a couple kilos of a radioactive product that produces heat, alpha particles (that are not particularly dangerous?) and its sitting in one of the deeper trenches in the ocean, and according to the summary, it is assumed that its containment vessel is intact, because thorough monitoring of the area has detected no signs that it has been breached?
and the problem is what exactly?
ok, so you are in the 5%. what about those of us who are doing the 15k a year back breaking, long hours to get that 15k? College education don't seem to be helping us much. (i got through without any student loans thank God) but the point is, there is a lot of people who are being ejected from the graduating end of a degree and looking around going 'wtf, i was told there would be a good paying job at this end'
you win. the water runs off the runways to the edges or it, or into the cracks, making those areas get a higher net amount of water than the surrounding terrain, so more grows there. You see it along the highways here also, the bar pit is all green, and a few meters past it is all brown.
the trouble with these places, is because its in the desert, and has so little around it, getting a sense of scale is rather tricky. Sure, there is the little bar that says '50m is this much' in the corner, but it is not the same as having something of a known size (like a car, or a municipal street) in the image to compare to.
you never repurposed anything? Perhaps the area once was a bomb range (cold war era perhaps) and they have repurposed these vast tracts of government owned land into satellite calibration areas. Hell, look at this: http://g.co/maps/39mhb
That is near where i live. On google earth it looks like an air base mockup. from the ground, you can't even see the thing. That *was* an air base about 50 years ago. Now its a few foundations and a crumbling runway. Things look a lot different from above.
I had always understood that lightning exists in two stages. an initial pop that causes an ionized channel in the atmosphere, and the second, 'real' lightning strike, that follows the ionized path to the ground. I would assume that the ionization is responsible in some way for the reduced voltage requirement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukkO7c2eUE&feature=related
this video was shown in the article, but sort of shows what i'm talking about. when one of those initial charges finally grounds, the major bolt follows the path it took.
I remember reading a few years back about a crew out in the desert in New Mexico that was able to induce lightning strikes using (if i recall correctly) a UV laser, which they would aim at the clouds and pulse, creating that ionized channel for a strike to follow. Trouble was, its that strike tended to hit the equipment they made it with, making it expensive to study the phenomenon.
do a degree it has been done. If you search around a bit, you can find articles detailing a few bands/musicians who produced a few pieces that if you look at the sound wave pattern, or feed the output of an amp through an oscilloscope, you get pictures or words. The most detailed i recall is a song that the sound wave visualization looks like the face of the artist if i recall. (all this of course is done by fooling with the piece in post production for the most part) Searching for articles about things hidden in music/ on albums is the trick.
Slashdot Mirror
Far. To. Many. where i live, there is a POS (point of sale) software that some local maniac wrote back in the days of plain ole' DOS. dozens of local businesses use it, and the guy that wrote it refuses to support it on any platform besides DOS. when i last encountered it, it was on a XP machine. I have no doubt that it is now installed on a windows 7 machine somewhere in town, and giving them trouble, just because these 'old timers' refuse to learn a new POS program.
one called 'scan' can be set to ask first as well.
here's the thing, I scanned a QR from the back of a package of starbucks coffee beans today. the link? something like http://vjghhtv.com/qwertvmlghjg. took me to a special mobile version of starbucks site. If Legit QR codes are using garglemesh URL's, people are just going to click through, even with preview, because they always do.
So you buy one of those baseball caps with the LED lights in the brim, swap out the white LED's for IR LED's, and wear it at partys. Your face will be obscured by the bright light in photos, and you will not be popping and flashing like a thunderstorm all night.
At what point will we finally reach the realization that certain design features are NOT original to anyone, and simply required to obtain basic useable function from a smartphone? At some point, this stupidity has to stop, right?
you know, the slow page flips and whatnot are usually toggle-able in the settings somewhere. (sure, that means you have to know what a 'settings' is, but it is sort of assumed at this stage that you are not just drinking the apple juice)
This reminds me of a thing I noticed in college. At least in my experience, most text books, when presenting you with a problem to solve for practice, will chose a selection of numbers that, when solved for the answer, will produce a number that does not seem abjectly strange (nothing like 6.531943 ohms per square library of congress). That way, when you do the problem, if the answer you get is truly bizarre, you know you've made a mistake.
However, in a course I took on electricity, part of the coursework involved a workbook that was created by some students at Texas Tech if I recall, and the math problems they created for the workbook (mainly things about resistance and whatnot) always had answers that where so strange, that it made it almost impossible to tell if you had it right or not. We where allowed to use a calculator, but several times, after running the problem through the calculator, I would look at the answer produced and go 'Huh.' and then work it out the long way on paper, just to be sure the machine was not bullshitting me.
thank god, i thought i was the only one that did math that way. (it feels sort of wrong, after learning to do it the 'traditional' way) disassembling the problem, rounding, cranking the generator, then fixing for the round. It works, its just makes your math teacher pull her hair out.
*hur hur hur applefanboi* Unless its a macbook, then the whole thing is aluminum. /fanboi
seems like that'd be fine also. At that rate, it'll be into the mantle in about 420 years, (the crust is around 10km thick there as far as i can tell, so at 24cm per year thats a little over 416 years, and we buffer for a bad landing spot by few years because hey, we're imagining things) and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
I was thinking along the same lines, only using it to make the monitor appear to be showing 'work' on one polarization, and 'play' on the other, so that a passer by sees microsoft word, and you with your glasses see the movie you are actually watching on the other polarization. Not really as easy as all that, but it could be done i suppose.
i don't get why he used 3d glasses. he could have gotten demo glasses (with the non refracting lenses) and added the film to them instead. then they would have just looked like sunglasses, instead of bluetard 3D glasses.
I dunno, they *are* talking about digging a 65 story deep hole in a swamp. They might actually want a Fresnel lens. (to vaporize the water that's going to leak in)
to be fair, at those depths, it'll be the only thing that is that warm, holding that still. Hard to miss really.
you need to read this: http://geology.about.com/od/geophysics/a/aaoklo.htm turns out, we've only harnessed nature.
so basically... we've got a couple kilos of a radioactive product that produces heat, alpha particles (that are not particularly dangerous?) and its sitting in one of the deeper trenches in the ocean, and according to the summary, it is assumed that its containment vessel is intact, because thorough monitoring of the area has detected no signs that it has been breached?
and the problem is what exactly?
ok, so you are in the 5%. what about those of us who are doing the 15k a year back breaking, long hours to get that 15k? College education don't seem to be helping us much. (i got through without any student loans thank God) but the point is, there is a lot of people who are being ejected from the graduating end of a degree and looking around going 'wtf, i was told there would be a good paying job at this end'
you win. the water runs off the runways to the edges or it, or into the cracks, making those areas get a higher net amount of water than the surrounding terrain, so more grows there. You see it along the highways here also, the bar pit is all green, and a few meters past it is all brown.
the trouble with these places, is because its in the desert, and has so little around it, getting a sense of scale is rather tricky. Sure, there is the little bar that says '50m is this much' in the corner, but it is not the same as having something of a known size (like a car, or a municipal street) in the image to compare to.
you never repurposed anything? Perhaps the area once was a bomb range (cold war era perhaps) and they have repurposed these vast tracts of government owned land into satellite calibration areas. Hell, look at this:
http://g.co/maps/39mhb
That is near where i live. On google earth it looks like an air base mockup. from the ground, you can't even see the thing. That *was* an air base about 50 years ago. Now its a few foundations and a crumbling runway. Things look a lot different from above.
I had always understood that lightning exists in two stages. an initial pop that causes an ionized channel in the atmosphere, and the second, 'real' lightning strike, that follows the ionized path to the ground. I would assume that the ionization is responsible in some way for the reduced voltage requirement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukkO7c2eUE&feature=related
this video was shown in the article, but sort of shows what i'm talking about. when one of those initial charges finally grounds, the major bolt follows the path it took.
I remember reading a few years back about a crew out in the desert in New Mexico that was able to induce lightning strikes using (if i recall correctly) a UV laser, which they would aim at the clouds and pulse, creating that ionized channel for a strike to follow. Trouble was, its that strike tended to hit the equipment they made it with, making it expensive to study the phenomenon.
You obviously have not heard the phrase 'the free market sees taxation as damages, and tries to route around it.'
it is zero progress if you never find a need for all the 'features' that it is wasting that processor power on.
do a degree it has been done. If you search around a bit, you can find articles detailing a few bands/musicians who produced a few pieces that if you look at the sound wave pattern, or feed the output of an amp through an oscilloscope, you get pictures or words. The most detailed i recall is a song that the sound wave visualization looks like the face of the artist if i recall. (all this of course is done by fooling with the piece in post production for the most part) Searching for articles about things hidden in music/ on albums is the trick.
the trick there is to not be totally incompetent at observing your surroundings i suppose.