When I've accidentally typed in an address wrong, I've been brought to a page with "premium" domains that a squatter is sitting on listing the prices for them. They were all pretty bland and stupid sites like a000.org or MedicMan.net but they listed the prices anywhere from $100 to $5,000. Unfortunately what you have to realize if you're going to make this offer is that they're doing this for those few times a year they strike it rich so it's probably going to be closer to $5,000 or more. If the site is like two last names or something readable, it's probably going to be pretty high cost. Far less than a court case you probably wouldn't win though.
The last thing you need to realize is that whatever money you give this guy is just going to fund him to buy up more domains and keep his hands on others longer. If you wanted to do the most conscious thing for the community, you would just find another domain and not give this scum one red cent.
But, I am not interesting in blogging, I do not want too much personal information up there, and I do not want to spend a lot of money (none, if possible).
I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed. Ok, stay with me on this one, ok? Picture this: your head... superimposed on Chuck Norris' body... punching Clippy... into the fires of Mount Doom.
WHAT? How can you not like that?
What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?
Something really interesting and original... which kind of puts the ball back in your court. If you have any work you can showcase, do it... otherwise I would suggest you actually take sometime to make it personal. Otherwise just make a portal to sites you like or profiles on social networking sites with a theme that you enjoy (you could do this easily with nvu, blufish, etc or any WISYWIG open source editor out there).
According to scientists, city Great Tits prefer other city Great Tits over country Great Tits. (Lets act like adults)
Yeah, we could do that. Or we could plug what you just said into Google translator and translate it from English to Hindi to Estonian back to English again:
According to researchers, large cities and large country breast breast-feeding a baby, like other big cities do. As adults (Act I)
BTW, ts TFA just FUD or a guy promoting his own agenda??
He's probably disappointed that Microsoft won't license his codec from him and pay him lots of money for lots of installs that will rarely use it.
Wow, am I the only person that read the article? From Matroska's Wikipedia entry:
Matroska is an open standards project. This means it is free to use, and that the technical specifications describing the bit stream are open to anybody, including companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU LGPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for proprietary hardware and software adoption.
The only thing this guy's guilty of is trying to get everyone to use his LGPL developed stuff and lamenting on DRM and proprietary crap they have to deal with. Get off his back.
creating a modern, flexible, extensible, cross-platform multimedia container format;
developing robust streaming support;
developing a menu system similar to that of DVDs based on EBML;
developing a set of tools for the creation and editing of Matroska files;
developing libraries that can be used to allow developers to add Matroska support to their applications;
working with hardware manufacturers to include Matroska support in embedded multimedia devices;
working to provide native Matroska support in various operating systems.
I would have liked to hear more on how he plans to break into the streaming market when everyone is going proprietary on that for the sake of DRM. He mentions it briefly but does he have any definite plans?
Davis Freeberg, if you're reading this could you introduce Marlin to the editors for a Slashdot Interview? I can think of a lot things to ask him as I'm sure other users could...
Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It and Maniac Mansion are listed on page 160 of the book in the chapter on King's Quest. The author regards Monkey Island as one of the "greatest adventure games." I guess there's a difference between 'great' and 'vintage' although vintage usually means "having an enduring appeal; high-quality, classic."
I have a minor qualm with the title, I think it should be "Vintage Digital Games" as when I saw the title I thought "well, this should be difficult." But the cover sure illustrates they mean video games.
That's odd considering the story we discussed yesterday in which Qualcomm showed an eee PC (an Asus product) running Android with an ARM processor. And in the Bloomberg article (which also mentions that), "Asustek said in February its engineers were trying to develop an Android-based netbook this year."
The comments of Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asus, don't convince me. Actions speak louder than words. Hint: When you release an ARM Processor based chipset in a netbook, you're actually distancing yourself from Windows and x86 applications.
What he means to say is "everything's ready, just don't alarm our Redmond masters until we're sure the consumer likes Android."
When you say "realistic goals", all you really mean is "goals that are realistic while still holding XXX sacrosanct". What you mean is, "freedom within the narrow bounds of what the tyranny allows".
That's being more than a bit presuming and putting words into my mouth, wouldn't you say? All I mean by realistic goals is "realistic goals." That is, things that are achievable, measurable, actionable, time-bound and adhere to current laws. If they want to repeal current laws, they should include that in their rant--like the pro-marijuana posts.
When you say "holding XXX sacrosanct," the only thing I hold sacrosanct is every individual's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness without interfering with another individual's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That is the primary goal of our government, it should be in place to protect that for all of us.
You reveal yourself to be an enemy of freedom. Wave and say hi.
Ah, so you have designated yourself a judge of who is and who isn't an enemy of freedom?
I apologize for having an extreme urge to shape new ideas into something tangible and workable. Good luck with your witch hunt!
Here's what you're prompted with when you author a new idea: Title/Subject, Why Is This Idea Important?, Category & Tags.
That's not going to help people articulate ideas let alone produce anything usable. Half these things read sort of like a rant. IdeaScale should implement sections like the following:
Title/Subject
Problem You Are Addressing (Be Specific)
Solution (Include people involved, milestones, goals and how to measure success)
Foreseen Risks and Costs
Mitigation Plan to Risks & Failure
Category
Tags
Go to corporate America and ask any CEO what he expects to see in an idea presented to him from an underling. Then you'll get an idea of what kind of data we should be seeking from people with ideas.
I mean, this site should at least try to help people from making asses of themselves and instead 90% of these posts sound like people thinking they have the floor to say whatever they want about whatever they feel like. It's not coherent, it's not helping, it's nothing but internet drivel.
So on the frton page of the site, I counted more than ten "ideas" from one individual reading all the same (with a handful of votes to each!). They all read:
Hey folks, it seems that the administration is at it again. All of my posts have been removed regarding Obamas legitimacy of his birth certificate. It seems all of you that feel the same way will have yours removed sonner or later so that the ideas input portion of this website seems to consist mostly of garbage that doesnt really natter to true conservatives... How Sad Obama... You can change a leopards spots but you will never change the leopard.
Are there no abuse policy/software in place to catch this?
Even the other users like a person named 'obamawatch' is ranting about the president's birth certificate. I'm embarrassed enough for all parties involved--is this the "YouTube of the Government" to them? This is really what you say when you get the chance to make suggestions to your government?
Where's the "Ron Paul Should Be President" +75,496 idea?
I hate to say it but this might almost not work for a population the size of America. I know on a smaller scale (like in Hennepin County, Minnesota) they get useful ideas from the populace with very realistic goals. I dare say the only way this could work on a national level is to require the user to put in their SSN & birthdate for verification and banning for repeated abuse. But I don't like information going through IdeaScale one bit.
Wired reports that, based on her previous decisions...
Huh, that's odd, I only found the article to list one case -- the TopRank suing the host of a tavern in 1996. And the statement she added as:
"A willful infringement, which the magistrate judge found, combined with a willful
default, however, warrant an award greater and more significant than one which corresponds so closely to an estimated loss to the plaintiff,"
Are there more decisions I missed? Are we basing our image of this woman off of one action and one statement?
It's not a good indication but it's hardly conclusive. Things have changed with the advent of the internet since then. Here's to hoping, I guess, but I think we're being a bit unfair and too hasty.
Re: modern pseudo-analogues -- based upon the geese I raised as a kid, I never could quite grok the 'head-held-low' posture. Geese only hold their heads low to screw or to attack.
I think it's dangerous to try to compare a two legged winged creature to a four legged creature but from the article:
They found that reptiles and amphibians held their necks mostly horizontally, while mammals and birds (which are more closely related to dinosaurs and share their upright leg structures) all held their necks vertically.
Studying the neck movements of living creatures also suggested that sauropods had a greater range of movement than previously thought.
While scientists had assumed that the dinosaur neck vertebrae overlapped each other by around 50%, that's not true for living creatures like ostriches and giraffes, which can extend their necks till the vertebrae hardly overlap at all.
And in regards to efficiency of the way they hold their neck:
It seems very inefficient for a large creature to hold that much weight horizontally away from the body (remember those physics lessons re: levers and distance from the fulcrum?).
(As the article notes) it's probably a lot harder to have the blood pressure to pump blood all the way up that column to the head. Blood pressure is one of the things they can't explain about their model. The article says, "Estimates of blood pressure also suggested that it would have been very difficult for sauropods to pump their blood up to such a height."
Dinosaurs are awesome, as most five-year-olds will tell you. Armchair paleontology is fun too. And since we slashdotters are so fond of pretending expertise on subjects we know little about, and TFA seems to be slashdotted, I'm looking forward to a very amusing (but maybe not quite so enlightening) discussion.
After reading it, the article's not as great as you think. There's plenty of pictures on Wikipedia of the animals depicted both ways.
Why are we arguing over which position was the default when it's entirely possible that they utilized both positions. Down low for traveling to avoid blood pressure problems and up high for brief states of alert or reaching high food sources? With the flexibility of the vertebrae, I would assume the animal would use it however it most suited them for the time being.
The other thing is how much do we know about the tissues and proteins that made up muscles and blood in Sauropods? Is it possible that they were much stronger or their blood had different properties making it capable of overcoming the blood pressure problem?
I've seen exhibits that portray them both ways. You just might have to accept that you're never going to know for sure...
... until you CLONE THEM!
*starts humming the Jurrasic Park theme song with a creepy grin on his face*
Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations.
Gorbachev: Ah, KGB Agent Pajitnov, how goes Projekt Tetris? Pajitnov: Uh, not so good. Gorbachev: Nyet? Why not? Pajitnov: Yeah you see the Tetris, it did preoccupy them but they have all developed very specialized hand-eye coordination... Gorbachev: Meaning? Pajitnov: Well, they will be better surgeons and... Gorbachev: And? Pajitnov: Well, our superior MIGs may have problems if they figure out how to hook them up to their F-16 fighter jets... and also... well... Gorbachev: Yes? Pajitnov: I've read this new American instruction manual called Ender's Game and our problems may be much larger than we initially thought...
The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.
There's no way you could (at that time) stop the same thing happening to an American. I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet. Also, note that he sold the rights to this game to Spectrum HoloByte in Russia so he got the initial money he was looking for at least for Russian distribution rights it seems. Did he really get played or just fail to realize how great his game was? Sad when someone sells oneself so short but it happens even today, doesn't it?
Here's a brief explanation on how to do it in Apache with Russian and Nigerian IP ranges also. You may be tempted to do what many other people are already doing but remember that language barrier aside, you're blocking your website from 1/6th of the Earth's population.
Sounds a lot like Facebook being blocked during the elections in Iran. I wonder if banning sites just long enough to restrict the flow of ideas for the season will become more popular/acceptable than perma-bans?
"Oops, I can't access social sites today... must be a "democratic" election coming up!"
I'm not a pro in this department although I've saved a lot of partial data from hard drives for some friends (I'll be very interested in these comments).
I use a live CD of Knoppix which has really good system repair and troubleshooting. I also have another important tool which is an old Dell Intel motherboard that allows me to set the rotational speed of the drive. Example: my friend's laptop is giving him the click of death so I pop out the IDE drive and hook it up to a 2.5" to 3.5" connector and plug it into the motherboard with a working 1TB 3.5" slaved. On boot up, I hit the BIOS and set the speed as low as it can go or low enough like 1,000 RPM. Then I boot into Knoppix live CD and check to see if I can mount the file system. Knoppix seems to be able to mount a lot of partitions that other more stringent flavors of Linux don't. Sometimes it clicks from the get go and there's nothing you can do. But if it doesn't, then I set a script up to copy their most valuable directories first onto the working 1TB drive. I let it run all night or weekend and check the drive periodically for heat problems. People are surprised what you can save for them doing this... the downside is sometimes I'm surprised in what I save for people--p0rn is not worth my time.
Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit -- especially if you develop for business sites.
Yeah, IE6 is the herpes of the internet. It appears to be gone after heavy medication but if you look under the first layer of skin, there it is.
Oh, and I should point out another untimely mark of IE6: we've all made this hilariously fugly hacks to make crap work in IE6 at some point and those relics of the last millennium are still out there. Which means that browsers still have to support the old rendering ways of IE6. Yes, the doctype will tell the browser what standards to use but I'm betting that the support for rendering HTML 4 is just as annoying as having to patch up old struts 1.x applications and read through nested tables galore in the HTML.
And we all know that 90% of the work out there for developers is maintenance. What a painful irrepressible memory...
Why port Android to x86 when you can just run Android apps in Ubuntu?
Like I said in my post:
but it looks like I'm left to emulating it (pretty much not an option considering the overhead).
I tried doing this on a P4 with 2 gigs of DDR RAM a while ago in Ubuntu 8.04 if I recall correctly. It was slow as hell.
I don't know if the SDK has since matured since then but I was trying to do their tutorial examples and I would experience really bad startup times... like waiting minutes for everything to initialize. Sometimes it would bomb out before making it to the applications screen in the emulator. Maybe it was memory pagination? Anyway, I also assume the emulation stops you from efficiently using the hardware like the camera? Does the emulator have access to those? I could be wrong and I'll certainly give it a shot if I find reports of people online having no problem firing up Ubuntu on their eee PC and emulating Android and running an application on it no problem. As it stands, I'd probably just look for an alternative in Ubuntu to that application!
Who knows? Maybe I'll sell this one and trade up when the new Snapdragons come out and I'll wean myself from the Microsoft teat entirely with only ARM Linux and applications?:-) I must guiltily admit that I kind of enjoy the dual boot though and am really just curious what Android would have to offer on a netbook.
The new laptop -- which Qualcomm calls a smartbook -- is thinner and lighter than current members of Asustek's Eee PC netbook lineup because the 1GHz Snapdragon processor that it uses does not require a heat sink or a cooling fan.
Yes, of course, because of an important point in the article:
Qualcomm's Snapdragon includes a 1GHz Arm processor core, a 600MHz digital-signal processor and hardware video codecs. Currently, Asustek's Eee PC line of netbooks relies on Intel processors, in particular the low-cost, low-power Atom chip, which has an x86 processor core.
Which makes complete sense, because of its low power consumption you're going to see less heat and longer battery life (why do you think OLPC moved to it). And for those of you skeptical of the speed:
When the first Snapdragon-based devices hit the market later this year, they will have a 1GHz Arm processor core but that will increase to 1.3GHz next year, with the release of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8650A, Pineda said.
Every single eee PC available (with Atom processors) on the market is x86, to my knowledge.
This headline really got my hopes up as I just bout an eee PC 1000HE last weekend and have it dual booting to Windows XP & Easy Peasy Ubuntu. I love it. It's totally replaced my 5 year old laptop. I was hoping this meant I could partition out some space for Android but it looks like I'm left to emulating it (pretty much not an option considering the overhead). Maybe Google just doesn't see a point of porting Android to x86 since it's probably pretty dependent on the power efficiency of ARM?
Pare away the heat sink and all that junk, add super small RAM and flash storage and... hand held computers (like the article notes from Toshiba). Microsoft better not be resting on its laurels and should either be beefing up Windows Mobile or porting Windows 7 to ARM... or they're going to miss out big time again.
Has anyone found anything on how Android applications dependent on cell phone-ish hardware (like GPS location and the like) will be handled inside a device like the eee PC?
It's lovely to see that illegally obtained evidence is still illegitimate in the courts. Kinda gives you a warm feeling inside.
Agreed. Well from the letter of the law, it does sound like MediaSentry operated as an unlicensed Private Detective and regardless of whether she's guilty or not, I hope they uphold the law. It kind of saddens me that this may vary state to state, do other states have these sort of protections in place to stop a completely biased party (oh, like your ISP or MediaSentry) from gathering evidence against you for a trial?
I'm not a lawyer but it sounds like this lawyer finally did his homework and will probably stop the trial altogether due to lack of any evidence at all. I hope the RIAA learns its lesson and stops these frivolous lawsuits.
Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient
So that whole time in Star Wars, they were just trying to make each other Super-Efficient? That's a whole lot nicer than what I was led to believe was initially going on.
Slashdot Mirror
When I've accidentally typed in an address wrong, I've been brought to a page with "premium" domains that a squatter is sitting on listing the prices for them. They were all pretty bland and stupid sites like a000.org or MedicMan.net but they listed the prices anywhere from $100 to $5,000. Unfortunately what you have to realize if you're going to make this offer is that they're doing this for those few times a year they strike it rich so it's probably going to be closer to $5,000 or more. If the site is like two last names or something readable, it's probably going to be pretty high cost. Far less than a court case you probably wouldn't win though.
The last thing you need to realize is that whatever money you give this guy is just going to fund him to buy up more domains and keep his hands on others longer. If you wanted to do the most conscious thing for the community, you would just find another domain and not give this scum one red cent.
But, I am not interesting in blogging, I do not want too much personal information up there, and I do not want to spend a lot of money (none, if possible).
I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed. Ok, stay with me on this one, ok? Picture this: your head ... superimposed on Chuck Norris' body ... punching Clippy ... into the fires of Mount Doom.
WHAT? How can you not like that?
What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?
Something really interesting and original ... which kind of puts the ball back in your court. If you have any work you can showcase, do it ... otherwise I would suggest you actually take sometime to make it personal. Otherwise just make a portal to sites you like or profiles on social networking sites with a theme that you enjoy (you could do this easily with nvu, blufish, etc or any WISYWIG open source editor out there).
According to scientists, city Great Tits prefer other city Great Tits over country Great Tits. (Lets act like adults)
Yeah, we could do that. Or we could plug what you just said into Google translator and translate it from English to Hindi to Estonian back to English again:
According to researchers, large cities and large country breast breast-feeding a baby, like other big cities do. As adults (Act I)
BTW, ts TFA just FUD or a guy promoting his own agenda??
He's probably disappointed that Microsoft won't license his codec from him and pay him lots of money for lots of installs that will rarely use it.
Wow, am I the only person that read the article? From Matroska's Wikipedia entry:
Matroska is an open standards project. This means it is free to use, and that the technical specifications describing the bit stream are open to anybody, including companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU LGPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for proprietary hardware and software adoption.
The only thing this guy's guilty of is trying to get everyone to use his LGPL developed stuff and lamenting on DRM and proprietary crap they have to deal with. Get off his back.
I would have liked to hear more on how he plans to break into the streaming market when everyone is going proprietary on that for the sake of DRM. He mentions it briefly but does he have any definite plans?
...
Davis Freeberg, if you're reading this could you introduce Marlin to the editors for a Slashdot Interview? I can think of a lot things to ask him as I'm sure other users could
It and Maniac Mansion are listed on page 160 of the book in the chapter on King's Quest. The author regards Monkey Island as one of the "greatest adventure games." I guess there's a difference between 'great' and 'vintage' although vintage usually means "having an enduring appeal; high-quality, classic."
I have a minor qualm with the title, I think it should be "Vintage Digital Games" as when I saw the title I thought "well, this should be difficult." But the cover sure illustrates they mean video games.
Meanwhile, notes reader Barence, Asus is continuing to distance itself from Android, saying it "isn't a priority."
I think the article you wanted to link there was Asus distances itself from Android netbook.
That's odd considering the story we discussed yesterday in which Qualcomm showed an eee PC (an Asus product) running Android with an ARM processor. And in the Bloomberg article (which also mentions that), "Asustek said in February its engineers were trying to develop an Android-based netbook this year."
The comments of Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asus, don't convince me. Actions speak louder than words. Hint: When you release an ARM Processor based chipset in a netbook, you're actually distancing yourself from Windows and x86 applications.
What he means to say is "everything's ready, just don't alarm our Redmond masters until we're sure the consumer likes Android."
Opera 10 continues to follow the web standards by getting 100/100 and pixel-perfect scores on the Acid3 test.
Yeah, I think anything running the latest versions of Presto (Opera) & Webkit (Safari, Chrome) are getting 100s. Two nights ago I put the latest and greatest Chrome in WinXP SP3 on my eeePC and got a 100/100 even though it said Linktest failed.
Odd thing is that the more popular a browser or layout engine is, the worse it seems to do on the Acid tests!
When you say "realistic goals", all you really mean is "goals that are realistic while still holding XXX sacrosanct". What you mean is, "freedom within the narrow bounds of what the tyranny allows".
That's being more than a bit presuming and putting words into my mouth, wouldn't you say? All I mean by realistic goals is "realistic goals." That is, things that are achievable, measurable, actionable, time-bound and adhere to current laws. If they want to repeal current laws, they should include that in their rant--like the pro-marijuana posts.
When you say "holding XXX sacrosanct," the only thing I hold sacrosanct is every individual's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness without interfering with another individual's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That is the primary goal of our government, it should be in place to protect that for all of us.
You reveal yourself to be an enemy of freedom. Wave and say hi.
Ah, so you have designated yourself a judge of who is and who isn't an enemy of freedom?
I apologize for having an extreme urge to shape new ideas into something tangible and workable. Good luck with your witch hunt!
That's not going to help people articulate ideas let alone produce anything usable. Half these things read sort of like a rant. IdeaScale should implement sections like the following:
Go to corporate America and ask any CEO what he expects to see in an idea presented to him from an underling. Then you'll get an idea of what kind of data we should be seeking from people with ideas.
I mean, this site should at least try to help people from making asses of themselves and instead 90% of these posts sound like people thinking they have the floor to say whatever they want about whatever they feel like. It's not coherent, it's not helping, it's nothing but internet drivel.
Hey folks, it seems that the administration is at it again. All of my posts have been removed regarding Obamas legitimacy of his birth certificate. It seems all of you that feel the same way will have yours removed sonner or later so that the ideas input portion of this website seems to consist mostly of garbage that doesnt really natter to true conservatives... How Sad Obama... You can change a leopards spots but you will never change the leopard.
Are there no abuse policy/software in place to catch this?
Even the other users like a person named 'obamawatch' is ranting about the president's birth certificate. I'm embarrassed enough for all parties involved--is this the "YouTube of the Government" to them? This is really what you say when you get the chance to make suggestions to your government?
Where's the "Ron Paul Should Be President" +75,496 idea?
I hate to say it but this might almost not work for a population the size of America. I know on a smaller scale (like in Hennepin County, Minnesota) they get useful ideas from the populace with very realistic goals. I dare say the only way this could work on a national level is to require the user to put in their SSN & birthdate for verification and banning for repeated abuse. But I don't like information going through IdeaScale one bit.
Wired reports that, based on her previous decisions ...
Huh, that's odd, I only found the article to list one case -- the TopRank suing the host of a tavern in 1996. And the statement she added as:
"A willful infringement, which the magistrate judge found, combined with a willful default, however, warrant an award greater and more significant than one which corresponds so closely to an estimated loss to the plaintiff,"
Are there more decisions I missed? Are we basing our image of this woman off of one action and one statement?
It's not a good indication but it's hardly conclusive. Things have changed with the advent of the internet since then. Here's to hoping, I guess, but I think we're being a bit unfair and too hasty.
...as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus
My problem is the number of **attractive** girls taking my class. There are girls, and then there are girls.
Agreed, I would also like to point out that there's a big difference between a "whole lot of girls" and a "whole lot of girl."
Re: modern pseudo-analogues -- based upon the geese I raised as a kid, I never could quite grok the 'head-held-low' posture. Geese only hold their heads low to screw or to attack.
I think it's dangerous to try to compare a two legged winged creature to a four legged creature but from the article:
They found that reptiles and amphibians held their necks mostly horizontally, while mammals and birds (which are more closely related to dinosaurs and share their upright leg structures) all held their necks vertically.
Studying the neck movements of living creatures also suggested that sauropods had a greater range of movement than previously thought.
While scientists had assumed that the dinosaur neck vertebrae overlapped each other by around 50%, that's not true for living creatures like ostriches and giraffes, which can extend their necks till the vertebrae hardly overlap at all.
And in regards to efficiency of the way they hold their neck:
It seems very inefficient for a large creature to hold that much weight horizontally away from the body (remember those physics lessons re: levers and distance from the fulcrum?).
(As the article notes) it's probably a lot harder to have the blood pressure to pump blood all the way up that column to the head. Blood pressure is one of the things they can't explain about their model. The article says, "Estimates of blood pressure also suggested that it would have been very difficult for sauropods to pump their blood up to such a height."
Dinosaurs are awesome, as most five-year-olds will tell you. Armchair paleontology is fun too. And since we slashdotters are so fond of pretending expertise on subjects we know little about, and TFA seems to be slashdotted, I'm looking forward to a very amusing (but maybe not quite so enlightening) discussion.
After reading it, the article's not as great as you think. There's plenty of pictures on Wikipedia of the animals depicted both ways.
Why are we arguing over which position was the default when it's entirely possible that they utilized both positions. Down low for traveling to avoid blood pressure problems and up high for brief states of alert or reaching high food sources? With the flexibility of the vertebrae, I would assume the animal would use it however it most suited them for the time being.
...
The other thing is how much do we know about the tissues and proteins that made up muscles and blood in Sauropods? Is it possible that they were much stronger or their blood had different properties making it capable of overcoming the blood pressure problem?
I've seen exhibits that portray them both ways. You just might have to accept that you're never going to know for sure
... until you CLONE THEM!
*starts humming the Jurrasic Park theme song with a creepy grin on his face*
Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations.
Gorbachev: Ah, KGB Agent Pajitnov, how goes Projekt Tetris? ... ... ... and also ... well ... ...
Pajitnov: Uh, not so good.
Gorbachev: Nyet? Why not?
Pajitnov: Yeah you see the Tetris, it did preoccupy them but they have all developed very specialized hand-eye coordination
Gorbachev: Meaning?
Pajitnov: Well, they will be better surgeons and
Gorbachev: And?
Pajitnov: Well, our superior MIGs may have problems if they figure out how to hook them up to their F-16 fighter jets
Gorbachev: Yes?
Pajitnov: I've read this new American instruction manual called Ender's Game and our problems may be much larger than we initially thought
One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.
In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!
Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights. From Wikipedia:
The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.
There's no way you could (at that time) stop the same thing happening to an American. I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet. Also, note that he sold the rights to this game to Spectrum HoloByte in Russia so he got the initial money he was looking for at least for Russian distribution rights it seems. Did he really get played or just fail to realize how great his game was? Sad when someone sells oneself so short but it happens even today, doesn't it?
That's it, I'm going to block China
I don't know if you're joking or not but if you're not here you go (and other formats)!
Here's a brief explanation on how to do it in Apache with Russian and Nigerian IP ranges also. You may be tempted to do what many other people are already doing but remember that language barrier aside, you're blocking your website from 1/6th of the Earth's population.
Sounds a lot like Facebook being blocked during the elections in Iran. I wonder if banning sites just long enough to restrict the flow of ideas for the season will become more popular/acceptable than perma-bans?
... must be a "democratic" election coming up!"
"Oops, I can't access social sites today
I'm not a pro in this department although I've saved a lot of partial data from hard drives for some friends (I'll be very interested in these comments).
... the downside is sometimes I'm surprised in what I save for people--p0rn is not worth my time.
I use a live CD of Knoppix which has really good system repair and troubleshooting. I also have another important tool which is an old Dell Intel motherboard that allows me to set the rotational speed of the drive. Example: my friend's laptop is giving him the click of death so I pop out the IDE drive and hook it up to a 2.5" to 3.5" connector and plug it into the motherboard with a working 1TB 3.5" slaved. On boot up, I hit the BIOS and set the speed as low as it can go or low enough like 1,000 RPM. Then I boot into Knoppix live CD and check to see if I can mount the file system. Knoppix seems to be able to mount a lot of partitions that other more stringent flavors of Linux don't. Sometimes it clicks from the get go and there's nothing you can do. But if it doesn't, then I set a script up to copy their most valuable directories first onto the working 1TB drive. I let it run all night or weekend and check the drive periodically for heat problems. People are surprised what you can save for them doing this
Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit -- especially if you develop for business sites.
Yeah, IE6 is the herpes of the internet. It appears to be gone after heavy medication but if you look under the first layer of skin, there it is.
...
Oh, and I should point out another untimely mark of IE6: we've all made this hilariously fugly hacks to make crap work in IE6 at some point and those relics of the last millennium are still out there. Which means that browsers still have to support the old rendering ways of IE6. Yes, the doctype will tell the browser what standards to use but I'm betting that the support for rendering HTML 4 is just as annoying as having to patch up old struts 1.x applications and read through nested tables galore in the HTML.
And we all know that 90% of the work out there for developers is maintenance. What a painful irrepressible memory
Why port Android to x86 when you can just run Android apps in Ubuntu?
Like I said in my post:
but it looks like I'm left to emulating it (pretty much not an option considering the overhead).
I tried doing this on a P4 with 2 gigs of DDR RAM a while ago in Ubuntu 8.04 if I recall correctly. It was slow as hell.
... like waiting minutes for everything to initialize. Sometimes it would bomb out before making it to the applications screen in the emulator. Maybe it was memory pagination? Anyway, I also assume the emulation stops you from efficiently using the hardware like the camera? Does the emulator have access to those? I could be wrong and I'll certainly give it a shot if I find reports of people online having no problem firing up Ubuntu on their eee PC and emulating Android and running an application on it no problem. As it stands, I'd probably just look for an alternative in Ubuntu to that application!
:-) I must guiltily admit that I kind of enjoy the dual boot though and am really just curious what Android would have to offer on a netbook.
I don't know if the SDK has since matured since then but I was trying to do their tutorial examples and I would experience really bad startup times
Who knows? Maybe I'll sell this one and trade up when the new Snapdragons come out and I'll wean myself from the Microsoft teat entirely with only ARM Linux and applications?
The new laptop -- which Qualcomm calls a smartbook -- is thinner and lighter than current members of Asustek's Eee PC netbook lineup because the 1GHz Snapdragon processor that it uses does not require a heat sink or a cooling fan.
Yes, of course, because of an important point in the article:
Qualcomm's Snapdragon includes a 1GHz Arm processor core, a 600MHz digital-signal processor and hardware video codecs. Currently, Asustek's Eee PC line of netbooks relies on Intel processors, in particular the low-cost, low-power Atom chip, which has an x86 processor core.
Which makes complete sense, because of its low power consumption you're going to see less heat and longer battery life (why do you think OLPC moved to it). And for those of you skeptical of the speed:
When the first Snapdragon-based devices hit the market later this year, they will have a 1GHz Arm processor core but that will increase to 1.3GHz next year, with the release of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8650A, Pineda said.
Every single eee PC available (with Atom processors) on the market is x86, to my knowledge.
... hand held computers (like the article notes from Toshiba). Microsoft better not be resting on its laurels and should either be beefing up Windows Mobile or porting Windows 7 to ARM ... or they're going to miss out big time again.
This headline really got my hopes up as I just bout an eee PC 1000HE last weekend and have it dual booting to Windows XP & Easy Peasy Ubuntu. I love it. It's totally replaced my 5 year old laptop. I was hoping this meant I could partition out some space for Android but it looks like I'm left to emulating it (pretty much not an option considering the overhead). Maybe Google just doesn't see a point of porting Android to x86 since it's probably pretty dependent on the power efficiency of ARM?
Pare away the heat sink and all that junk, add super small RAM and flash storage and
Has anyone found anything on how Android applications dependent on cell phone-ish hardware (like GPS location and the like) will be handled inside a device like the eee PC?
It's lovely to see that illegally obtained evidence is still illegitimate in the courts. Kinda gives you a warm feeling inside.
Agreed. Well from the letter of the law, it does sound like MediaSentry operated as an unlicensed Private Detective and regardless of whether she's guilty or not, I hope they uphold the law. It kind of saddens me that this may vary state to state, do other states have these sort of protections in place to stop a completely biased party (oh, like your ISP or MediaSentry) from gathering evidence against you for a trial?
I'm not a lawyer but it sounds like this lawyer finally did his homework and will probably stop the trial altogether due to lack of any evidence at all. I hope the RIAA learns its lesson and stops these frivolous lawsuits.
Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient
So that whole time in Star Wars, they were just trying to make each other Super-Efficient? That's a whole lot nicer than what I was led to believe was initially going on.
LASIK makes a lot more sense now too.
I'm learning!