There's a jahookin' load more where that came from!
Although I don't think I invented confuddling (confuzzling is another good variation), and it was my sister who invented jahookin':P Everyone should embiggen their vocabulary from time to time, though unfortunately a lot of people will just question the cromulence of any new words:/
I understand the joke Uh earth to junglee, I'm not so sure you did cause you were all "I mailed "Big daddy" that the story is incomplete" like you didn't know it was a joke! [/Zoolander reference]
5) Do you always just crash firefox rather than quitting or something? I do like the 'do you want to restore your old session' if Windows happens to crash and I have more than one tab open.
I mostly use my Mac with the touchpad. I just Apple-Click to open a new tab.
Two fingers on the touchpad and a click simulates a right click, which was annoying at first, but now that I'm used to it I get pissed at having to find the right click button when I use another laptop, because I have to move my whole hand to place my thumb above the right button (which is sometimes smaller than the left so more awkward to reach), rather than just dropping down my middle finger then doing a normal click. For something designed for more than 2 buttons this system wouldn't work that well though, obviously. You'd have to move to using 3 finger clicks and maybe even 4 finger clicks, which could get confusing or simply inconvenient, especially if you don't have 5 fingers:P
If you put down 2 fingers on the pad and then move them around then it allows you to scroll - not just up and down either, it also does left and right:) Much better than a scroll wheel IMO, it's very natural feeling.
Obviously a mouse is still preferable for some tasks, but I just thought I'd point out how great Apple's trackpads are because of the multitouch thing. I hope more manufacturers copy (or license?:/ ) this.
I thought the entire purpose of Betas was for limited release testing, not so that people could still download them once the release candidates or final versions were out?
I did wonder how they weren't sure how certain they were. Perhaps they weren't certain how certain they were but were certain how right they were. These guys should be building quantum CPUs by now with such confuddling principles of certainty.
What did I say that disagreed with my tag? For one I said it was my opinion, and secondly this guy even said he'd probably switch back. Certainly some people think Vista is okay, but I think those people are most probably morons who have no idea what is going on in the background and only like saying "ooh, new, shiny!" at the interface.
Most people on slashdot are quite capable of adapting to a new interface. Vista is clearly much slower than XP, and the DRM and insanely stupid initial bugs like how it took so long to delete a file (if they're that incompetent on basic file access, that doesn't inspire much confidence for the rest of the OS, does it?). Personally I grew up disliking Windows and even just x86 in general. I've grown used to them and after my dad showing me Linux when I got my first PC, I don't have so much of a beef with x86 (even less so now that Apple have moved over to using it). As part of my job has involved IT support ranging from 98 and NT through 2000 and XP, I have to say I thought that Microsoft were starting to redeem themselves a bit. With Vista they've only shown that they still have no clue. I don't have a problem with them making things incompatible in the name of getting rid of the clutter that comes with backwards compatibility, but when they start to cater so much to other big business with their DRM and end up with an OS that is unreasonably slow even on good hardware, I take issue with that. I used to think that each version of Windows was getting slower, but XP does boot to login faster than my version of 98 did (though then takes a bit longer to actually get to the desktop, but that could be because I never actually ran real-time anti-virus or software firewall on my 98 box..). Vista is a step back in many regards. Changing the interface a little is pretty easy to deal with (I managed it fine from 98 to XP and even grew to appreciate the changes, apart from I always use the 'classic' control panel rather than trying to navigate that maze of 'user-friendly' bullshit they put in XP). I've used several versions of Amiga Workbench from 1.3 to 3.1, Windows 3.1, 98, NT, 2000 and XP, Mac OS from the 68k days to PPC to Intel, and dabble occasionally in Linux. While I like some of the interface improvements in Vista, it's just too slow and has too many well known issues (the DRM affecting sound and networking performance is a big no no for me because I listen to music a lot while I work) to let it slide and keep drinking the kool-aid. If it turns out to be the only option in the future for my workplace then I will basically have to drink the kool-aid, but I'm happy that there is all this negative press, and I hope that Microsoft either clean up their act or just hurry up and die already, rather than having us limping along with software that is catering more to corporations than the actual users. Wow that was a big rant:) While it is kinda trendy to bash MS here, I hated them before I came to/. rather than the other way round. Anyone who has ever used another OS should be aware of just how lifeless Windows is. At least it's more stable than it used to be, but I still would prefer to use another OS if there were any real choice - unfortunately with our company being so entrenched in our Windows only CAD software, I can't really put it forward as a realistic option at the moment (but I'm damn well going to try if MS keep trying to force Vista down everyone's throat without showing significant improvements over XP first - there was an article on/. recently about how easy it is to get around UAC so I don't consider security to have been improved much)
Apart from the fact that inevitably Windows users will have to spend money on upgrading their OS, while with Linux you only pay if you need support (unless RedHat have made their business model even more restrictive recently? I bought a RedHat 6 box set a few years ago when downloading was more of a PITA, but haven't used it since then..). And if you're already using Linux then it makes it easier to move to another brand of Linux without too much hassle. Moving from Windows to Linux is a much bigger step, at least for a 'power user' and not just someone who only wants to browse the interwebs.
I'm guessing your 'needs' often involve whips and dominatrix types?:p Just because you can afford good resources doesn't mean you should fritter them away on something like Vista IMO - and worst of all is that even if Vista was as good as XP (but not better), it just encourages Microsoft to keep releasing sloppy software with little innovation or improvement.
Yeah I get what you're saying, but I think the extra gravitational pull has more of an affect than you think - see here and here.
While it is true that you need a larger force to accelerate a more massive object at the same rate as a smaller object, I think the extra gravitational pull has more effect than that. For example the first poster's example of two planets. Clearly even though a planet is more massive and requires more force to move it towards another planet than would be required to move a small rock towards that planet, since a planet exerts a larger gravitational pull than a small rock, then the total acceleration is larger. If what you were saying is true then you could keep increasing the mass of the objects that you are dropping towards the moon until you are 'dropping' an object that is more massive than the moon, in which case it would be more like dropping the moon onto another object. Yet the moon would drop at a different speed were it dropped near Jupiter than if it were dropped near earth. If gravitational force were a certain amount weaker then maybe you could get a situation where the acceleration would only depend on the larger mass though, as the extra gravitational pull of the object being 'dropped' exactly counteracts the force needed to overcome its inertia.
It may be silly, but it's still true;) Yep air resistance plays a large part in our atmosphere, so a glider would fall slowly to earth, while a much less massive pebble would 'sink like a stone' so to speak.. human intuition between dropping a canonball and a small rock would be pretty sensible, though there still wouldn't be a measurable difference in the acceleration over short distances this close to the eart, but when dropping a feather the fact that it is meant to aid flight totally throws things off.
Wow, someone who gets what I've been trying to be saying! I didn't know Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, but I remember having conversations with my high school physics teacher about this stuff, him talking about an elephant and the feather and how fast they'd fall to earth. I always used to ask him awkward questions (everyone else in the class loved that because it would put him off on a tangent talk meaning we didn't have to do any work:P ), and I'm pretty sure I came up with the idea that the elephant would be exerting its own gravitational pull.. so while the difference may not be noticeable, there is still a slight difference.
Isn't it great how all these/.ers have been told that a feather and a rock dropped in a vacuum would accelerated towards a source of gravitational pull at the same rate, and so they don't even bother to actually think about the physics involved anymore, just accepting that F=ma and forgetting that gravity isn't just a one way thing? Every mass in the universe exerts a gravitational pull on every other mass, but often effect is so small as to be completely negligible because of the inverse square (at least I'm assuming it follows that kind of relationship, same as radiation) nature of the effect:)
Well I was meaning more that apparently a lot of people drink and drive in Texas, but yeah I think they can be quite strict about speed limits in parts of the US, patrol cars hiding behind signs and things like that!
Paul says "I do not permit a woman to teach" or something along those lines. Admittedly that says "I do not" rather than "God does not", so it does seem more a cultural/bastard thing. Yep I don't believe in the Christian God any more, but have been brought up to believe that women preachers are wrong. My dad started supporting our closest local church with an old woman preacher - who seemed to just tell random holiday stories rather than actually giving any teaching, though it was the Church of Scotland so not the most evangelical ever - shortly before he died and I didn't find out what his reasoning was.. apart from that he disagreed with some political crap going on in the "Free Church of Scotland" at that time..
That is the force exerted by gravity by the earth/moon/whatever on the object on its surface, but you have to take into account the (almost completely insignificant in this case, but still present) gravitational force being exerted by the object that is moving towards the earth too surely? If you think of it another way - what if you substitute the feather for the earth here, and then drop the earth and a rock near the feather - which will hit it first, the rock or the earth?
Like I said (or at least implied), when one of the objects is significantly more massive, you're not going to notice much difference in that kind of test. You'd also have to do them one at a time or at least in different locations otherwise they would both be pulling the moon in the same direction;) I'm not saying that larger masses would be accelerated faster if they themselves did not exert a gravitational pull, and I know that a feather and a rock will fall at a very very similar rate in a strong gravitational field.
Yes I would be arguing that the earth would also be accelerating however infinitescimally quicker towards the other object. I know that the differences are purely academical and have pretty much no bearing in real terms, but consider you had 3 different orbs of the same volume but different masses, say A=1 large mass unit, B=2 large mass units and C=1 large mass unit.
If you left any of these orbs near each other in space then they would exert a significant gravitational pull on each other and would both be accelerated towards each other. A and B would accelerate towards each other at the same rate as B and C. A and C would accelerate towards each other slightly slower. I don't see how relativity makes much of a difference in that case, it's basic newtonian stuff. For relatively small masses next to a large mass then the gravitational pull that they exert is negligible compared to the pull of the large mass, but technically it is still happening. You can argue about relativity if you want, but observing from a place standing on earth watching 2 very large moons accelerating towards the earth, I'm pretty sure the more massive moon would appear to impact first to the observer.
However, the firmware in my printer may very well disagree, and mock me in ways far too subtle for my feeble, meat-based mind to comprehend "PC LOAD LETTER"??? What the fuck does that mean?
Probably just that among actual racing fans, racing around in a big figure 0 where you only turn left is quite dull. Sure they're going pretty fast, and there are some interesting tactical concepts, but NASCAR fans are probably just in it for the crashes anyway:p
Slashdot Mirror
There's a jahookin' load more where that came from!
:P Everyone should embiggen their vocabulary from time to time, though unfortunately a lot of people will just question the cromulence of any new words :/
Although I don't think I invented confuddling (confuzzling is another good variation), and it was my sister who invented jahookin'
Oh for fu
[/Zoolander reference]
5) Do you always just crash firefox rather than quitting or something? I do like the 'do you want to restore your old session' if Windows happens to crash and I have more than one tab open.
I mostly use my Mac with the touchpad. I just Apple-Click to open a new tab.
:P
:) Much better than a scroll wheel IMO, it's very natural feeling.
:/ ) this.
Two fingers on the touchpad and a click simulates a right click, which was annoying at first, but now that I'm used to it I get pissed at having to find the right click button when I use another laptop, because I have to move my whole hand to place my thumb above the right button (which is sometimes smaller than the left so more awkward to reach), rather than just dropping down my middle finger then doing a normal click. For something designed for more than 2 buttons this system wouldn't work that well though, obviously. You'd have to move to using 3 finger clicks and maybe even 4 finger clicks, which could get confusing or simply inconvenient, especially if you don't have 5 fingers
If you put down 2 fingers on the pad and then move them around then it allows you to scroll - not just up and down either, it also does left and right
Obviously a mouse is still preferable for some tasks, but I just thought I'd point out how great Apple's trackpads are because of the multitouch thing. I hope more manufacturers copy (or license?
I thought the entire purpose of Betas was for limited release testing, not so that people could still download them once the release candidates or final versions were out?
I did wonder how they weren't sure how certain they were. Perhaps they weren't certain how certain they were but were certain how right they were. These guys should be building quantum CPUs by now with such confuddling principles of certainty.
What did I say that disagreed with my tag? For one I said it was my opinion, and secondly this guy even said he'd probably switch back. Certainly some people think Vista is okay, but I think those people are most probably morons who have no idea what is going on in the background and only like saying "ooh, new, shiny!" at the interface.
Something about your name and post made me think about a large planet firing gun called the "Shat-o-caster"
Most people on slashdot are quite capable of adapting to a new interface. Vista is clearly much slower than XP, and the DRM and insanely stupid initial bugs like how it took so long to delete a file (if they're that incompetent on basic file access, that doesn't inspire much confidence for the rest of the OS, does it?). Personally I grew up disliking Windows and even just x86 in general. I've grown used to them and after my dad showing me Linux when I got my first PC, I don't have so much of a beef with x86 (even less so now that Apple have moved over to using it). As part of my job has involved IT support ranging from 98 and NT through 2000 and XP, I have to say I thought that Microsoft were starting to redeem themselves a bit. With Vista they've only shown that they still have no clue. I don't have a problem with them making things incompatible in the name of getting rid of the clutter that comes with backwards compatibility, but when they start to cater so much to other big business with their DRM and end up with an OS that is unreasonably slow even on good hardware, I take issue with that. I used to think that each version of Windows was getting slower, but XP does boot to login faster than my version of 98 did (though then takes a bit longer to actually get to the desktop, but that could be because I never actually ran real-time anti-virus or software firewall on my 98 box..). Vista is a step back in many regards. Changing the interface a little is pretty easy to deal with (I managed it fine from 98 to XP and even grew to appreciate the changes, apart from I always use the 'classic' control panel rather than trying to navigate that maze of 'user-friendly' bullshit they put in XP). I've used several versions of Amiga Workbench from 1.3 to 3.1, Windows 3.1, 98, NT, 2000 and XP, Mac OS from the 68k days to PPC to Intel, and dabble occasionally in Linux. While I like some of the interface improvements in Vista, it's just too slow and has too many well known issues (the DRM affecting sound and networking performance is a big no no for me because I listen to music a lot while I work) to let it slide and keep drinking the kool-aid. If it turns out to be the only option in the future for my workplace then I will basically have to drink the kool-aid, but I'm happy that there is all this negative press, and I hope that Microsoft either clean up their act or just hurry up and die already, rather than having us limping along with software that is catering more to corporations than the actual users. Wow that was a big rant :) While it is kinda trendy to bash MS here, I hated them before I came to /. rather than the other way round. Anyone who has ever used another OS should be aware of just how lifeless Windows is. At least it's more stable than it used to be, but I still would prefer to use another OS if there were any real choice - unfortunately with our company being so entrenched in our Windows only CAD software, I can't really put it forward as a realistic option at the moment (but I'm damn well going to try if MS keep trying to force Vista down everyone's throat without showing significant improvements over XP first - there was an article on /. recently about how easy it is to get around UAC so I don't consider security to have been improved much)
Apart from the fact that inevitably Windows users will have to spend money on upgrading their OS, while with Linux you only pay if you need support (unless RedHat have made their business model even more restrictive recently? I bought a RedHat 6 box set a few years ago when downloading was more of a PITA, but haven't used it since then..). And if you're already using Linux then it makes it easier to move to another brand of Linux without too much hassle. Moving from Windows to Linux is a much bigger step, at least for a 'power user' and not just someone who only wants to browse the interwebs.
I'm guessing your 'needs' often involve whips and dominatrix types? :p Just because you can afford good resources doesn't mean you should fritter them away on something like Vista IMO - and worst of all is that even if Vista was as good as XP (but not better), it just encourages Microsoft to keep releasing sloppy software with little innovation or improvement.
Yeah I get what you're saying, but I think the extra gravitational pull has more of an affect than you think - see here and here.
While it is true that you need a larger force to accelerate a more massive object at the same rate as a smaller object, I think the extra gravitational pull has more effect than that. For example the first poster's example of two planets. Clearly even though a planet is more massive and requires more force to move it towards another planet than would be required to move a small rock towards that planet, since a planet exerts a larger gravitational pull than a small rock, then the total acceleration is larger. If what you were saying is true then you could keep increasing the mass of the objects that you are dropping towards the moon until you are 'dropping' an object that is more massive than the moon, in which case it would be more like dropping the moon onto another object. Yet the moon would drop at a different speed were it dropped near Jupiter than if it were dropped near earth. If gravitational force were a certain amount weaker then maybe you could get a situation where the acceleration would only depend on the larger mass though, as the extra gravitational pull of the object being 'dropped' exactly counteracts the force needed to overcome its inertia.
It may be silly, but it's still true ;) Yep air resistance plays a large part in our atmosphere, so a glider would fall slowly to earth, while a much less massive pebble would 'sink like a stone' so to speak.. human intuition between dropping a canonball and a small rock would be pretty sensible, though there still wouldn't be a measurable difference in the acceleration over short distances this close to the eart, but when dropping a feather the fact that it is meant to aid flight totally throws things off.
Wow, someone who gets what I've been trying to be saying! I didn't know Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, but I remember having conversations with my high school physics teacher about this stuff, him talking about an elephant and the feather and how fast they'd fall to earth. I always used to ask him awkward questions (everyone else in the class loved that because it would put him off on a tangent talk meaning we didn't have to do any work :P ), and I'm pretty sure I came up with the idea that the elephant would be exerting its own gravitational pull.. so while the difference may not be noticeable, there is still a slight difference.
/.ers have been told that a feather and a rock dropped in a vacuum would accelerated towards a source of gravitational pull at the same rate, and so they don't even bother to actually think about the physics involved anymore, just accepting that F=ma and forgetting that gravity isn't just a one way thing? Every mass in the universe exerts a gravitational pull on every other mass, but often effect is so small as to be completely negligible because of the inverse square (at least I'm assuming it follows that kind of relationship, same as radiation) nature of the effect :)
Isn't it great how all these
Well I was meaning more that apparently a lot of people drink and drive in Texas, but yeah I think they can be quite strict about speed limits in parts of the US, patrol cars hiding behind signs and things like that!
Paul says "I do not permit a woman to teach" or something along those lines. Admittedly that says "I do not" rather than "God does not", so it does seem more a cultural/bastard thing. Yep I don't believe in the Christian God any more, but have been brought up to believe that women preachers are wrong. My dad started supporting our closest local church with an old woman preacher - who seemed to just tell random holiday stories rather than actually giving any teaching, though it was the Church of Scotland so not the most evangelical ever - shortly before he died and I didn't find out what his reasoning was.. apart from that he disagreed with some political crap going on in the "Free Church of Scotland" at that time..
If a joke is flying, but no-one is in to hear it, what sound does it make?
:)
*whoooooooooosh!
That is the force exerted by gravity by the earth/moon/whatever on the object on its surface, but you have to take into account the (almost completely insignificant in this case, but still present) gravitational force being exerted by the object that is moving towards the earth too surely? If you think of it another way - what if you substitute the feather for the earth here, and then drop the earth and a rock near the feather - which will hit it first, the rock or the earth?
Oh and when I said "one of the objects" I was implying the moon, not the rock ;)
Like I said (or at least implied), when one of the objects is significantly more massive, you're not going to notice much difference in that kind of test. You'd also have to do them one at a time or at least in different locations otherwise they would both be pulling the moon in the same direction ;) I'm not saying that larger masses would be accelerated faster if they themselves did not exert a gravitational pull, and I know that a feather and a rock will fall at a very very similar rate in a strong gravitational field.
Yes I would be arguing that the earth would also be accelerating however infinitescimally quicker towards the other object. I know that the differences are purely academical and have pretty much no bearing in real terms, but consider you had 3 different orbs of the same volume but different masses, say A=1 large mass unit, B=2 large mass units and C=1 large mass unit.
If you left any of these orbs near each other in space then they would exert a significant gravitational pull on each other and would both be accelerated towards each other. A and B would accelerate towards each other at the same rate as B and C. A and C would accelerate towards each other slightly slower. I don't see how relativity makes much of a difference in that case, it's basic newtonian stuff. For relatively small masses next to a large mass then the gravitational pull that they exert is negligible compared to the pull of the large mass, but technically it is still happening. You can argue about relativity if you want, but observing from a place standing on earth watching 2 very large moons accelerating towards the earth, I'm pretty sure the more massive moon would appear to impact first to the observer.
Probably just that among actual racing fans, racing around in a big figure 0 where you only turn left is quite dull. Sure they're going pretty fast, and there are some interesting tactical concepts, but NASCAR fans are probably just in it for the crashes anyway :p