Debian Sid introduced Gnome 3 a couple of weeks ago and I had a bit of a tough time to come to terms with it, but now I have reached a good compromise by installing tint2 and the alternate menu extension (which basically brings back the switch off menu item). I'm rather pleased with this setup and the only thing I am really missing are a couple of applets, but nothing major.
Or, as other have said, XFCE is a great alternative, especially if you NEED external outputs (which gnome-shell still miserably fails to manage properly).
I might be taking this a little to personally, but anyway, ha-ha funny but now stop.
J.B. Goodenough has been one of the most prolific scientists in the last 50 years, especially in chemistry (and to think he's a physicist!). Thanks to him we have rechargeable lithium batteries (for which he never made a penny, yay patent wars) and his work spans from magnetism to fuel cells. At 89 he is still incredibly bright and a delight to talk to.
I really hope he will get a Nobel prize before he leaves us.
I have always been a Nokia person, and after the announcement of WP7 I was looking at RIM to get out a phone with QNX soon enough. Alas, no sign of such thing, so I guess I'll bite the bullet and get an N9, and keep it as long as possible.
Silicon anodes have been under study for many years now, and most researchers gave up when they figured out that the usual binder used in Li-ion batteries (poly vinilene difluoride, PVDF) did not work well with silicon. A couple of years ago people found out that using carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) actually allowed to cycle silicon for hundreds of charges/discharges without significant capacity fading, so the research in the field boomed again and now Sony is commercializing the first examples of batteries with Si as negative electrode. It's all about the engineering, and since silicon has proved that the binder is a more important piece of the Li-ion technology than previously expected, these news are actually very welcome.
Unfortunately, this invention does not replace the liquid electrolyte. The "jelly" is a polymer soaked in the liquid electrolyte, which definitely is immobilized (thus protecting against leaks) but it's probably not fireproof (I could not find a reference to a research article). Despite this, it is a step in the right direction: dry polymer electrolytes are a good solution, but nowadays they have a low conductivity (about 100 times lower than the liquid). The solution to this is to run the batteries at higher temperatures (about 80C), but this promotes the fading of the capacity. The real solution to the flammability of batteries will come with ceramic solid electrolytes, which are now in their early stages but should become practical in a few years.
The way I understand the problem is that some articles show explicit pictures, which may offend some people. Honestly it has happened to me sometimes to see pictures of illnesses or war crimes which did upset me (granted, I have a very low threshold for these things). I don't see how it would be bad to hide these pictures by default, with a little button "view" next to the caption. Of course, if the goal is to delete these pictures altogether, then I'm all against it.
According to Wikipedia, Methane has a solubility of 35mg/L in water at 17C. Back of the envelope calculation tells me that's about 5% in volume. That is a whole lot of methane that you would be ingesting day after day of drinking contaminated water. And probably wouldn't simply make for more spectacular farts.
While generally I don't share the same extreme views of RMS I must say that I am finding very hard to warm up to ebooks. I've been considering a Kindle for a while now, but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back. Additionally, I suppose one could accept the restrictive terms of ebooks if the price was substantially lower than their dead tree counterparts, but this does not seem to be the case. If I'm going to spend my hard earned cash, I prefer to have the physical book mine to read, re-read, share and lend.
I just read the Advanced Energy Materials article (which you can easily find by googling the title and filtering for pdf). The idea itself is interesting, and could potentially remove some manufacturing problems (i.e. no need to dry, calender, cut electrodes and then assemble single cells and wire them in a pack) but I see a couple of big flaws in it: 1) Let's get off the table the idea of "refueling". Li-ion batteries are assembled in their discharged state. The slurries containing LiCoO2 and Li4Ti5O12 (as per the article), when put in contact, produce exactly 0 energy. You have to either charge them using electricity, or prepare slurries of Li0.5CoO2 and Li7Ti5O12. Neither of the two materials is stable in air, thus I don't think it's possible to prepare a "refueling" system with current Li-ion battery materials. 2) The beauty of Li-ion batteries is that they have 99.995% efficiency round-trip. This system seems to be based on very thick slurries which probably require strong pumps to circulate in a system, thus killing such efficiency. 3) What's more, the slurries are prepared with highly flammable solvents (dioxolane). Not sure I'd like to carry around two tanks of the stuff, considering that a breach in the separator or in the "fuel" lines could ignite the whole thing. It is true that changing materials is a simpler problem than designing a completely new system, but as the authors themselves admit this is just a readaptation of an old system. I think it would be much more practical to redesign redox flow batteries to use non-aqueous electrolytes, thus allowing to work in a larger potential window (water only allows about 1.5V). I'm not sure things are looking up for A123, and I hope Prof. Chiang won't sink with this idea either. Good luck to all the researchers involved.
Oh look, evolution changed it's mail folder structure and decided to delete all my existing email
I had a moment of terror as well when I upgraded to Evolution 3.0 in my Debian Sid system last week. Your mail has not been deleted, but it has been moved in another folder (can't remember exactly where, I'm at work stuck with WinXP) in Evolution. What I did, I simply re-imported all of my email from the "old" location (~/.local/share/evolution/mail IIRC), scanned everything for Junk, used the "remove duplicate messages" function and I was good to go. But yeah, weird.
I believe that the current inflation of PhD degrees is a direct consequence of the "everyone in university" attitude. I think that there is absolutely no point in giving a BA degree to pretty much anyone who enters university, because this produces an enormous mass of mediocre MS students, which then turn into way too many PhD candidates of dubious value. I include myself in this group, as I know full well that 20 years ago I would have not been admitted in a PhD program, let alone receive a degree. A PhD nowadays is an award to persistence, not excellence. The inflation in titles is then carried on to the job market: more and more jobs are offered to candidates who hold a PhD, where a good MS would be more than enough. However, as a poster above noted, a PhD is basically taken as a certificate of being able to work independently (which, in may cases, is hardly true). Treating PhD students as cheap labor is not doing a favor to anyone. I would find it much more honest intellectually to offer long-term internships for BA and MS students, instead of enrolling them to receive a higher degree which on the long run is devoided of all meaning.
I feel very strongly about this.
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
Fact is, the way I understand it, biology (and medicine, for that matter), is not an exact science and individuating a direct cause effect is close to impossible.
It all relies on statistics, and showing that a certain treatment has a higher probability of causing a certain beneficial effect (or reducing a side effect).
Then why in the world don't medical doctors and biology majors receive a STRONG education in math and statistics? Is it because the large majority of them are women, thus the whole "ooohh math is hard, there Barbie, go back to the kitchen" comes into play?
I find this a shame, it makes me dispute every finding in medical and biology science.
Of course I did not RTFA, however is there any way this technology could be used to convert flash-heavy websites to HTML5, thus benefiting those platforms which don't have a flash plugin available?
Linux/PPC comes to mind, but I am sure there are others.
And no, Gnash and company do not even come close.
What, do you want to sell my light usage statistics to drug companies so they can target sleep medication to me?
Dear Sir,
please refrain from discussing this technology in public until our patent application has been officially accepted by the USPTO.
GoogleSleep (TM) will be available to you as beta (C) on an invitation basis only.
Yours truly, Google.
I upgraded to 2.6.33-rc4 from 2.6.32 because of strong flickering and tearing on my Intel chipset. If you're affected by the problem you might want to give it a shot even in -rc state.
Slashdot Mirror
Debian Sid introduced Gnome 3 a couple of weeks ago and I had a bit of a tough time to come to terms with it, but now I have reached a good compromise by installing tint2 and the alternate menu extension (which basically brings back the switch off menu item).
I'm rather pleased with this setup and the only thing I am really missing are a couple of applets, but nothing major.
Or, as other have said, XFCE is a great alternative, especially if you NEED external outputs (which gnome-shell still miserably fails to manage properly).
I might be taking this a little to personally, but anyway, ha-ha funny but now stop.
J.B. Goodenough has been one of the most prolific scientists in the last 50 years, especially in chemistry (and to think he's a physicist!).
Thanks to him we have rechargeable lithium batteries (for which he never made a penny, yay patent wars) and his work spans from magnetism to fuel cells. At 89 he is still incredibly bright and a delight to talk to.
I really hope he will get a Nobel prize before he leaves us.
I have always been a Nokia person, and after the announcement of WP7 I was looking at RIM to get out a phone with QNX soon enough.
Alas, no sign of such thing, so I guess I'll bite the bullet and get an N9, and keep it as long as possible.
Silicon anodes have been under study for many years now, and most researchers gave up when they figured out that the usual binder used in Li-ion batteries (poly vinilene difluoride, PVDF) did not work well with silicon. A couple of years ago people found out that using carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) actually allowed to cycle silicon for hundreds of charges/discharges without significant capacity fading, so the research in the field boomed again and now Sony is commercializing the first examples of batteries with Si as negative electrode.
It's all about the engineering, and since silicon has proved that the binder is a more important piece of the Li-ion technology than previously expected, these news are actually very welcome.
Unfortunately, this invention does not replace the liquid electrolyte. The "jelly" is a polymer soaked in the liquid electrolyte, which definitely is immobilized (thus protecting against leaks) but it's probably not fireproof (I could not find a reference to a research article).
Despite this, it is a step in the right direction: dry polymer electrolytes are a good solution, but nowadays they have a low conductivity (about 100 times lower than the liquid). The solution to this is to run the batteries at higher temperatures (about 80C), but this promotes the fading of the capacity.
The real solution to the flammability of batteries will come with ceramic solid electrolytes, which are now in their early stages but should become practical in a few years.
The way I understand the problem is that some articles show explicit pictures, which may offend some people. Honestly it has happened to me sometimes to see pictures of illnesses or war crimes which did upset me (granted, I have a very low threshold for these things).
I don't see how it would be bad to hide these pictures by default, with a little button "view" next to the caption.
Of course, if the goal is to delete these pictures altogether, then I'm all against it.
Considering how shite this summer's weather has been in central Europe, we would have had time to install gentoo from Stage 1 on a 386.
According to Wikipedia, Methane has a solubility of 35mg/L in water at 17C. Back of the envelope calculation tells me that's about 5% in volume.
That is a whole lot of methane that you would be ingesting day after day of drinking contaminated water.
And probably wouldn't simply make for more spectacular farts.
While generally I don't share the same extreme views of RMS I must say that I am finding very hard to warm up to ebooks.
I've been considering a Kindle for a while now, but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back.
Additionally, I suppose one could accept the restrictive terms of ebooks if the price was substantially lower than their dead tree counterparts, but this does not seem to be the case.
If I'm going to spend my hard earned cash, I prefer to have the physical book mine to read, re-read, share and lend.
I just read the Advanced Energy Materials article (which you can easily find by googling the title and filtering for pdf).
The idea itself is interesting, and could potentially remove some manufacturing problems (i.e. no need to dry, calender, cut electrodes and then assemble single cells and wire them in a pack) but I see a couple of big flaws in it:
1) Let's get off the table the idea of "refueling". Li-ion batteries are assembled in their discharged state. The slurries containing LiCoO2 and Li4Ti5O12 (as per the article), when put in contact, produce exactly 0 energy. You have to either charge them using electricity, or prepare slurries of Li0.5CoO2 and Li7Ti5O12. Neither of the two materials is stable in air, thus I don't think it's possible to prepare a "refueling" system with current Li-ion battery materials.
2) The beauty of Li-ion batteries is that they have 99.995% efficiency round-trip. This system seems to be based on very thick slurries which probably require strong pumps to circulate in a system, thus killing such efficiency.
3) What's more, the slurries are prepared with highly flammable solvents (dioxolane). Not sure I'd like to carry around two tanks of the stuff, considering that a breach in the separator or in the "fuel" lines could ignite the whole thing.
It is true that changing materials is a simpler problem than designing a completely new system, but as the authors themselves admit this is just a readaptation of an old system.
I think it would be much more practical to redesign redox flow batteries to use non-aqueous electrolytes, thus allowing to work in a larger potential window (water only allows about 1.5V).
I'm not sure things are looking up for A123, and I hope Prof. Chiang won't sink with this idea either. Good luck to all the researchers involved.
Idiocracy? No, Italy.
I had a moment of terror as well when I upgraded to Evolution 3.0 in my Debian Sid system last week.
Your mail has not been deleted, but it has been moved in another folder (can't remember exactly where, I'm at work stuck with WinXP) in Evolution.
What I did, I simply re-imported all of my email from the "old" location (~/.local/share/evolution/mail IIRC), scanned everything for Junk, used the "remove duplicate messages" function and I was good to go.
But yeah, weird.
P.S.: Make a backup before you start.
From the summary:
Which one is it? "It's" or "its"? I'm not saying you're supposed to know which one is correct, but at least be consistent.
I pity their souls.
I believe that the current inflation of PhD degrees is a direct consequence of the "everyone in university" attitude. I think that there is absolutely no point in giving a BA degree to pretty much anyone who enters university, because this produces an enormous mass of mediocre MS students, which then turn into way too many PhD candidates of dubious value. I include myself in this group, as I know full well that 20 years ago I would have not been admitted in a PhD program, let alone receive a degree. A PhD nowadays is an award to persistence, not excellence.
The inflation in titles is then carried on to the job market: more and more jobs are offered to candidates who hold a PhD, where a good MS would be more than enough. However, as a poster above noted, a PhD is basically taken as a certificate of being able to work independently (which, in may cases, is hardly true).
Treating PhD students as cheap labor is not doing a favor to anyone. I would find it much more honest intellectually to offer long-term internships for BA and MS students, instead of enrolling them to receive a higher degree which on the long run is devoided of all meaning.
I feel very strongly about this.
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
Fact is, the way I understand it, biology (and medicine, for that matter), is not an exact science and individuating a direct cause effect is close to impossible.
It all relies on statistics, and showing that a certain treatment has a higher probability of causing a certain beneficial effect (or reducing a side effect).
Then why in the world don't medical doctors and biology majors receive a STRONG education in math and statistics? Is it because the large majority of them are women, thus the whole "ooohh math is hard, there Barbie, go back to the kitchen" comes into play?
I find this a shame, it makes me dispute every finding in medical and biology science.
For further information, see Ben Goldacre's work.
Of course I did not RTFA, however is there any way this technology could be used to convert flash-heavy websites to HTML5, thus benefiting those platforms which don't have a flash plugin available? Linux/PPC comes to mind, but I am sure there are others. And no, Gnash and company do not even come close.
I had my PS3 stolen a few months ago. Now I have a new one, and I'd have loved to have all my savegames back, instead of re-playing them.
Ceci n'est pas une kg.
However, that would be Belgian.
I see what you did there. *squints*
My vote goes to Road Rash on the 3DO. Fantastic game, awesome soundtrack, great console.
Maybe something for surveillance? It's basically what you want to do, just "in a good way".
Dear Sir,
please refrain from discussing this technology in public until our patent application has been officially accepted by the USPTO.
GoogleSleep (TM) will be available to you as beta (C) on an invitation basis only.
Yours truly, Google.
I upgraded to 2.6.33-rc4 from 2.6.32 because of strong flickering and tearing on my Intel chipset.
If you're affected by the problem you might want to give it a shot even in -rc state.
Right. How am I going to mark messages as read in Lotus Notes without it?
*ducks*