Yes, UV lasers do exist, but they're not the nicest of things. Firstly, like IR lasers, they're invisible, but unlike IR lasers, they tend to scatter and diffract off surfaces very easily, due to the high wavelength. So you never really know where they are.
Secondly, UV lasers have a nasty habit of causing cancer on contact with the beam. Granted, only a very low power beam will be required to read the media, but I bet the average consumer will be thrilled with having invisible carcinogenic radiation inside their computer.
On a vaguely related note, due to the ionising nature of UV lasers, they're considering making tasers out of them. I spose the thinking is, if they don't incapacitate the criminals, they'll give them cancer. I see a great case for lawsuits here....
What many people don't realise, is that Chi Rho (XP) is also a common abbreviation for the Greek Christos (./ doesn't seem to like Greek), for Christ.
Windows Christ. The second coming is upon us:) Nothing like Microsoft being modest. Windows XP! The most stable OS yet, and also heals the sick and cures your sins!
Unix guys are like the people who spend two weeks at the beginning of summer painstakingly ridding their yards of every weed and vermin, and then spend the rest of the summer drinking beer in their hammock hurling abuse at their neighbors who have to spray their Dandilions every other week.
Hear Hear!
That's the best way I've heard it said in a long time... it's going in my sigquotes file:)
Consequently, I've just installed Debian unstable/testing on my SMP workstation, and spent 4 days trying to get all the hardware working. It's all done now, and it boots up in literally 1/3rd of the time of Win2k on the same box.
However, this has illustrated the point that the dpkg/apt/dselect method doesn't work very well if you've compiled some of the packages. For instance, I had to compile X from source to fiddle with some mouse support, which mucked up every deb package which depended on X.. which meant I had to compile KDE from source, which mucked up everything which depended on KDE...etc...etc...
I don't think space is really an issue these days. With today's 100Gb drives, you can fit literally thousands of MP3s on, and the exact bitrate doesn't really matter. I'm in half a mind to encode everything with lossless compressor like FLAC (which average about 15Mb per song) and be done with the quality debate for good.
First thing's first. I listen through a Yamaha SW1000XG sound card, a mid-range Phonic mixer, and a decent pair of Technics headphones (no, they're not stunning; I'm about to order a decent Sennheiser pair). I do a bit of sound engineering here and there, and have had much better things to listen to.
I can tell the difference between some MP3s encoded at 256kbps, and at 320kbps. Personally, my MP3s are LAME VBR encoded, with a maximum bandwidth of 320kbps, although it rarely reaches that.
I've tried ogg before, which is probably what's stopping me from trying it again. The version I tried quite substantially chewed up the treble. It's probably got better now, but I don't see a vast amount of advantage in it.
On many large yachts, they have small satellite dishes inside fibreglass domes which automatically rotate to track the satellite as the boat moves along, so you can watch satellite TV whilst moving, and also access satellites for comms and phone.
These only cost a few hundred dollars, so it can't be that hard to put one of these on a satellite videophone...
It's a problem which is going to come up fairly frequently in this conflict. Arabic is a notoriously difficult to transliterate from, so you end up with Taleban and Taliban, Moslem and Muslim, Al Qaida, Al Qaeda, and Al Quaida, Usama or Osama.
The problem arises because actual pronunciation of Taliban is half way between 'le' and 'li'. Spell it how you like, people will still get the idea.
On a related note, the pronunciation 'Moslem' ("m-oh-slim") is wrong - the correct one (at least with my English accent) is 'Muslim' ("m-ooh-slim"). I suppose the spelling Moslem came about to counter the people who pronounced Muslim "m-uh-slim", which is incorrect.
There was a television program on here in Britain a few months ago investigating why the Kursk sank. Essentially, several seconds before the Kursk actually exploded, seimologists picked up a first, much smaller blast which was similar in waveform, which indicates a similar source of the blast.
The program claimed that an experimental torpedo in the ship sprung a leak of Hydrogen Peroxide propellant, which reacted with metal fittings inside the body of the torpedo, producing Oxygen and slowly pressurisng the torpedo. About 30 seconds before the Kursk actually exploded, they claim the body of the torpedo exploded, filling the forward hull of the submarine with Oxygen, and inevitably causing fires. The crew of the ship couldn't keep these fires under control, and after time the torpedo warheads exploded, flooding the forward torpedo compartments and sinking the boat.
They based this conclusion on the fate of a little-known (so little-known I can't remember it's name) British sub, which sank in harbour off the coast of Scotland. The Navy investigation concluded that this was due to a Hydrogen Peroxide leak inside an experimental torpedo the sub was carrying.
Here we go again, Americans assuming that everyone lives in their country.
Well some of us live in the poor, deprived, third-world old United Kingdom, where speed cameras and CCTV monitor our every move, and dialup access is (mostly) metered! Broadband only covers about 10% of the population (thankfully me:). The USA is AFAIK one of the only countries with unmetered local calls.
In many cases, broadband is the only unmeterted access.
Tele2 already provide a wireless broadband service to a fair chunk of England (but not London at the moment).
They charge £39.99 ($60) for 512k downstream/256k upstream, which compares pretty well with the fixed UK broadband (I have a 512/128k cable modem from NTL which is £19.99 ($30) a month).
It does list some of them, they're just not classified under "Cracking International Terrorists' PGP Keys". There are a few under "Classified", and "Energy Research" seems to need an awful lot of computers....
Everyone so far has assumed that the connection must be wireless.
I know it sounds old-fashioned, but what's the problem with putting network sockets in each seat?
It will certainly cost less than wireless access points and cards for everyone, and will remove the risk of radio interference.
Network in an airplane? It must be wireless! WHY? Nobody's walking around!
Re:Well, why a case at all?
on
Hardwoodware
·
· Score: 1
Been there... done that...
Dropped a small metal screwdriver into it... Ooops.
My computer is now in a a full tower case, with the side off.
Re:This is a complete hoax and here's why...
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 2
THANK YOU! Everybody - please don't make inane comments about nuclear physics when you haven't got a clue of what you're talking about.
To further clarify, the amount of Americium in a smoke detector is minute - thousandths of a gramme. If you swallowed the source of Americium found in smoke detectors, it probably wouldn't take a single year off your lifespan (don't do it though. Please).
I remember reading years ago that NASA's policy on such things was that any samples brought back from other planets were to be treated as Level 4 Biohazard anyway. i.e. glove boxes and biohazard suits.
This is the same standard as pathogens such as Ebola and other haemorragic fevers are kept at.
But what might seem like a grand experiment is also a shrewd marketing move by IBM. None of IBM's server competitors--such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard or Compaq Computer--has offered similar programs.
ZDnet seem to be avoiding the fact that Compaq have their huge TestDrive program. They let anybody (currently)access:
Beowulf Cluster on AlphaServers
Caldera OpenLinux on ProLiants
Tru64 on various AlphaServers
TruCluster server on several AlphaServers
OpenVMS on AlphaServer
Debian on AlphaServer
Debian on ProLiant
FreeBSD on AlphaServer
FreeBSD on ProLiant
Kondara Linux 2000 on AlphaServer
Kondara Linux 2000 on ProLiant
Linux64 on Blazer Itanium
Mandrake on Proliant
NetBSD on on AlphaServer
RedHat on many ProLiants
RedHat on even more AlphaServers
SuSe on ProLiants
SuSo on AlphaServers
TurboLinux on ProLiant
Plus numerous databases...
Lots of toys... all for free...
Word has always (for a long time) had a changes tracking system in it. It was Alcatel (the lot who make Excite's ADSL modems) who made that little mistake...
how about the fact this is a news for nerds not jokes for nerds?
How about.... some of us have just finished (yes, not everyone lives in the US) a long day, and want something to make us smile? Viz a joke. Something to make one laugh.
or how about the fact that it wasnt posted as Satire it was posted as joys of tech support eh?
Now, that little line in bold after the posting date underneath the "posted by" line is the subject. It is generally a witty one-line quip on the subject of the article (this is not often the case on Slashdot. But that's the theory). Now, move your mouse cursor to the right a few hundred pixels. You will find a picture of a foot (oh, very Monty Python). Hover your mouse over the foot, and, by God! a small rectangle appears with...what's this? Words on it! What does it say?
It's funny. Laugh
Yes. I ordered a RaQ3, and it was connected while I was away on holiday. The first day back from holiday, I hooked up to it, and the first thing I did was go to the Web Admin interface to look around.
It was all chugging along nicely, so I went to get a drink. I came back and went back in (to install security patches, ironically), and I'd been H4X0R3D. 6 days after the server came up.
I caught it in time, though, and managed to salvage it. Only a web defacement, thank God. Good job, as the support at my ISP (www.tele7.net) is crap.
Nobody ever said they were (insert rant about New Labour here). However, here in England we have what is commonly called a democracy. This means that, once a week, elected people from all over the country come to shout at the current government about what they're doing wrong.
Let me just elaborate on this: The government are ordinary citizens. They are kept in check by Members of Parliament, who are also ordinary citizens. Your severe checks are there. They have been for several hundred years in this country.
I see citizens of supposedly democratic nations sitting idly by and letting their governments usurp powers they should not have
The government represents the people. The government has power to do all that they want, but that is kept in check by the people, through their elected representatives. I trust the goverment, because I know I can make it known to them that what they're doing isn't correct.
This may sound a little alien to those in America, where, as far as I can tell, the president is decided by the alignment of the planet Jupiter with the full moon on the 23rd day of the month (no, seriously, the Electoral College system is hardly what you might call fair. One person's vote in one state counts twice as much as one person's vote in another state).
The point I'm trying to make is: In England, democracy works. We trust our government. If the people collectively don't like the government, we can change it for a new one at a fair, free, and, above all democratic election. We don't fear invasion of our privacy, because we know that, if our privacy is invaded too far, the government will rectify it, or they will lose their power.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, UV lasers do exist, but they're not the nicest of things. Firstly, like IR lasers, they're invisible, but unlike IR lasers, they tend to scatter and diffract off surfaces very easily, due to the high wavelength. So you never really know where they are.
Secondly, UV lasers have a nasty habit of causing cancer on contact with the beam. Granted, only a very low power beam will be required to read the media, but I bet the average consumer will be thrilled with having invisible carcinogenic radiation inside their computer.
On a vaguely related note, due to the ionising nature of UV lasers, they're considering making tasers out of them. I spose the thinking is, if they don't incapacitate the criminals, they'll give them cancer. I see a great case for lawsuits here....
--Russ
What many people don't realise, is that Chi Rho (XP) is also a common abbreviation for the Greek Christos (./ doesn't seem to like Greek), for Christ.
:) Nothing like Microsoft being modest. Windows XP! The most stable OS yet, and also heals the sick and cures your sins!
Windows Christ. The second coming is upon us
--Russ (rg@tcslon.com)
Unix guys are like the people who spend two weeks at the beginning of summer painstakingly ridding their yards of every weed and vermin, and then spend the rest of the summer drinking beer in their hammock hurling abuse at their neighbors who have to spray their Dandilions every other week.
:)
:)
Hear Hear!
That's the best way I've heard it said in a long time... it's going in my sigquotes file
Consequently, I've just installed Debian unstable/testing on my SMP workstation, and spent 4 days trying to get all the hardware working. It's all done now, and it boots up in literally 1/3rd of the time of Win2k on the same box. However, this has illustrated the point that the dpkg/apt/dselect method doesn't work very well if you've compiled some of the packages. For instance, I had to compile X from source to fiddle with some mouse support, which mucked up every deb package which depended on X.. which meant I had to compile KDE from source, which mucked up everything which depended on KDE...etc...etc...
(I like compiling from source anyway
--Russ
I don't think space is really an issue these days. With today's 100Gb drives, you can fit literally thousands of MP3s on, and the exact bitrate doesn't really matter. I'm in half a mind to encode everything with lossless compressor like FLAC (which average about 15Mb per song) and be done with the quality debate for good.
First thing's first. I listen through a Yamaha SW1000XG sound card, a mid-range Phonic mixer, and a decent pair of Technics headphones (no, they're not stunning; I'm about to order a decent Sennheiser pair). I do a bit of sound engineering here and there, and have had much better things to listen to.
I can tell the difference between some MP3s encoded at 256kbps, and at 320kbps. Personally, my MP3s are LAME VBR encoded, with a maximum bandwidth of 320kbps, although it rarely reaches that.
I've tried ogg before, which is probably what's stopping me from trying it again. The version I tried quite substantially chewed up the treble. It's probably got better now, but I don't see a vast amount of advantage in it.
On many large yachts, they have small satellite dishes inside fibreglass domes which automatically rotate to track the satellite as the boat moves along, so you can watch satellite TV whilst moving, and also access satellites for comms and phone. These only cost a few hundred dollars, so it can't be that hard to put one of these on a satellite videophone...
It's a problem which is going to come up fairly frequently in this conflict. Arabic is a notoriously difficult to transliterate from, so you end up with Taleban and Taliban, Moslem and Muslim, Al Qaida, Al Qaeda, and Al Quaida, Usama or Osama.
:)
The problem arises because actual pronunciation of Taliban is half way between 'le' and 'li'. Spell it how you like, people will still get the idea.
On a related note, the pronunciation 'Moslem' ("m-oh-slim") is wrong - the correct one (at least with my English accent) is 'Muslim' ("m-ooh-slim"). I suppose the spelling Moslem came about to counter the people who pronounced Muslim "m-uh-slim", which is incorrect.
All very confusing
There was a television program on here in Britain a few months ago investigating why the Kursk sank. Essentially, several seconds before the Kursk actually exploded, seimologists picked up a first, much smaller blast which was similar in waveform, which indicates a similar source of the blast.
The program claimed that an experimental torpedo in the ship sprung a leak of Hydrogen Peroxide propellant, which reacted with metal fittings inside the body of the torpedo, producing Oxygen and slowly pressurisng the torpedo. About 30 seconds before the Kursk actually exploded, they claim the body of the torpedo exploded, filling the forward hull of the submarine with Oxygen, and inevitably causing fires. The crew of the ship couldn't keep these fires under control, and after time the torpedo warheads exploded, flooding the forward torpedo compartments and sinking the boat.
They based this conclusion on the fate of a little-known (so little-known I can't remember it's name) British sub, which sank in harbour off the coast of Scotland. The Navy investigation concluded that this was due to a Hydrogen Peroxide leak inside an experimental torpedo the sub was carrying.
But Dell are the #1 manufacturer of small servers at the moment, which they seemed pretty proud of... This will most likely make them #2...
Here we go again, Americans assuming that everyone lives in their country.
:). The USA is AFAIK one of the only countries with unmetered local calls.
Well some of us live in the poor, deprived, third-world old United Kingdom, where speed cameras and CCTV monitor our every move, and dialup access is (mostly) metered! Broadband only covers about 10% of the population (thankfully me
In many cases, broadband is the only unmeterted access.
--Russ
Not only that, but the previous story links to the same article on CNET!
Come on, Slashdot, this is a new low.... two duplicate stories in a row!
Tele2 already provide a wireless broadband service to a fair chunk of England (but not London at the moment).
They charge £39.99 ($60) for 512k downstream/256k upstream, which compares pretty well with the fixed UK broadband (I have a 512/128k cable modem from NTL which is £19.99 ($30) a month).
It does list some of them, they're just not classified under "Cracking International Terrorists' PGP Keys". There are a few under "Classified", and "Energy Research" seems to need an awful lot of computers....
Everyone so far has assumed that the connection must be wireless.
I know it sounds old-fashioned, but what's the problem with putting network sockets in each seat?
It will certainly cost less than wireless access points and cards for everyone, and will remove the risk of radio interference.
Network in an airplane? It must be wireless! WHY? Nobody's walking around!
Been there... done that...
Dropped a small metal screwdriver into it... Ooops.
My computer is now in a a full tower case, with the side off.
THANK YOU! Everybody - please don't make inane comments about nuclear physics when you haven't got a clue of what you're talking about.
To further clarify, the amount of Americium in a smoke detector is minute - thousandths of a gramme. If you swallowed the source of Americium found in smoke detectors, it probably wouldn't take a single year off your lifespan (don't do it though. Please).
I remember reading years ago that NASA's policy on such things was that any samples brought back from other planets were to be treated as Level 4 Biohazard anyway. i.e. glove boxes and biohazard suits.
This is the same standard as pathogens such as Ebola and other haemorragic fevers are kept at.
What about that marvellous (Windows) media player Winamp? Nullsoft are owned by AOL!
Ah. :-)
I missed that bit
But what might seem like a grand experiment is also a shrewd marketing move by IBM. None of IBM's server competitors--such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard or Compaq Computer--has offered similar programs.
ZDnet seem to be avoiding the fact that Compaq have their huge TestDrive program. They let anybody (currently)access:
Beowulf Cluster on AlphaServers
Caldera OpenLinux on ProLiants
Tru64 on various AlphaServers
TruCluster server on several AlphaServers
OpenVMS on AlphaServer
Debian on AlphaServer
Debian on ProLiant
FreeBSD on AlphaServer
FreeBSD on ProLiant
Kondara Linux 2000 on AlphaServer
Kondara Linux 2000 on ProLiant
Linux64 on Blazer Itanium
Mandrake on Proliant
NetBSD on on AlphaServer
RedHat on many ProLiants
RedHat on even more AlphaServers
SuSe on ProLiants
SuSo on AlphaServers
TurboLinux on ProLiant
Plus numerous databases...
Lots of toys... all for free...
touché
Word has always (for a long time) had a changes tracking system in it. It was Alcatel (the lot who make Excite's ADSL modems) who made that little mistake...
Seems NT can be UNIX: http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix/flavors_o f_unix.html#windowsnt
how about the fact this is a news for nerds not jokes for nerds?
How about.... some of us have just finished (yes, not everyone lives in the US) a long day, and want something to make us smile? Viz a joke. Something to make one laugh.
or how about the fact that it wasnt posted as Satire it was posted as joys of tech support eh?
Now, that little line in bold after the posting date underneath the "posted by" line is the subject. It is generally a witty one-line quip on the subject of the article (this is not often the case on Slashdot. But that's the theory). Now, move your mouse cursor to the right a few hundred pixels. You will find a picture of a foot (oh, very Monty Python). Hover your mouse over the foot, and, by God! a small rectangle appears with...what's this? Words on it! What does it say?
It's funny. Laugh
-Russ
Yes. I ordered a RaQ3, and it was connected while I was away on holiday. The first day back from holiday, I hooked up to it, and the first thing I did was go to the Web Admin interface to look around.
It was all chugging along nicely, so I went to get a drink. I came back and went back in (to install security patches, ironically), and I'd been H4X0R3D. 6 days after the server came up.
I caught it in time, though, and managed to salvage it. Only a web defacement, thank God. Good job, as the support at my ISP (www.tele7.net) is crap.
No government is all-wise and simon pure.
Nobody ever said they were (insert rant about New Labour here). However, here in England we have what is commonly called a democracy. This means that, once a week, elected people from all over the country come to shout at the current government about what they're doing wrong.
Let me just elaborate on this: The government are ordinary citizens. They are kept in check by Members of Parliament, who are also ordinary citizens. Your severe checks are there. They have been for several hundred years in this country.
I see citizens of supposedly democratic nations sitting idly by and letting their governments usurp powers they should not have
The government represents the people. The government has power to do all that they want, but that is kept in check by the people, through their elected representatives. I trust the goverment, because I know I can make it known to them that what they're doing isn't correct.
This may sound a little alien to those in America, where, as far as I can tell, the president is decided by the alignment of the planet Jupiter with the full moon on the 23rd day of the month (no, seriously, the Electoral College system is hardly what you might call fair. One person's vote in one state counts twice as much as one person's vote in another state).
The point I'm trying to make is: In England, democracy works. We trust our government. If the people collectively don't like the government, we can change it for a new one at a fair, free, and, above all democratic election. We don't fear invasion of our privacy, because we know that, if our privacy is invaded too far, the government will rectify it, or they will lose their power.