Try tossing some portable apps on it. Lots of great stuff available if you ever have to use someone else's computer and are missing some seemingly minor yet critical app and are short on time.
I found a 1gig flash drive for $20, snapped it up right away. It's saved my ass several times when I've got 30 minutes until class, left my laptop in my car clear across campus and I need to make a few quick changes & print a Word doc and the damn library PCs only have Word viewer installed (thank you portable AbiWord!) . . . and gee, that printer isn't working/out of paper & we're too lazy/stupid to refill it, you'll have to go to the other lab . . . etc.
I've got a bootable DSL partition on it too . . . it can be useful, but "No time! Need nearest PC!" doesn't always boot from USB.
Really, they're like sneaker-net swiss army knives.
The crawler shouldn't need to run up the cable at escape velocity since it's getting the necessary kinetic energy from the cable itself--it can crawl up at a leisurely pace from the perspective of anyone onboard. You also can recover a lot of the energy when the robot/elevator car/whatever makes its way make down. Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise is a great read. (Sci-fi novel about building a space elevator in an exaggerated Sri Lanka.) Fun!
Right now we don't really need them, but they'd be awfully handy in a real space battle. Lasers and other beam weapons really suck for space weapons, since ships would be engaging each other light-seconds apart--by the time the laser reaches where it's aimed at, the other ship will have moved somewhere else. Even if you *do* manage to hit them (say if they were standing still or not evading . . . ) the beam will have spread out like a flashlight and not do very much damage.
On the other hand, if you have.9c missiles that can track and manuever with an evading enemy ship, they can be tiny (1 kg or so) and still pack the wallop of a nuclear weapon when they hit. =)
Yes you would be incredibly blue-shifted, but you would in fact appear to be coming in faster than light:
Suppose I fire a missile at you from 10 light-seconds away. If the missile is travelling at 90% of the speed of light, it'll take just over 11 seconds to hit you. You'll see it 10 seconds after I fire it, and the missile itself reaches you 1 second later. From your perspective, it looks & feels as though that missile was travelling at nearly 10 times the speed of light.
The same effect has been observed in space telescopes. Some black holes and other celestial bodies can emit jets of matter at significant fractions of lightspeed. If those jets are pointed in our general direction, they appear to be moving faster than the speed of light.
"Elevation is 100% irrelevant. Not all cellphone towers are on mountains (though they certainly are here, where I live, in Lake County, California, USA, Terra) and the only important thing is the distance to the tower. Don't worry about the current, worry about the power of the transmission. All current portable cellular phones are under 1 watt. Most flip phones are under half a watt. The only reason anyone is worried about it at all is that it's very close to your head."
Actually, it's a mix of transmission power, "stuff in the way" *and* distance. i.e. communication satellites are basically just radio towers put *really* high up to cover even larger areas--anything with a clear view of the sky has a clear view of the sat, no pesky mountains or curvature of the Earth (well, half of it anyway) to fuss with.
^Actually, that's a common misconception about microwave ovens--they're *not* operating on water's resonance frequency (Microwaves are usually operating around 2.4 ghz, whereas the resonance frequency of water is in the tens of ghz.) The whole point of microwaves is that the energy *doesn't* get completely absorbed at the food's surface and can instead penetrate deeper to cook food throughout.
And even if the bugs aren't in the driver, but the OS vendor is on the support call, who still gets the blame?
My point is, the interfaces and ins and outs of the hardware are (in theory) based on long established standards.
My wireless chipsets shouldn't care whether they've been shoved into a PCI card, PCMCIA card or USB dangly bit running windows, *nix, etc. If the pins match up, how difficult can it be to build to a standard that works across all platforms?
You blame the rapid evolution of the Linux kernel on a lot, but it'll compile on vastly different platforms containing dramatically different CPU architectures. Why does this become such a big hang up for peripheral vendors?
Hate to burst your little bubble there, but Linus != God.
A vendor can get *nix support without spending a dime--just publish enough specs for other people to write the drivers. Individuals will happily write drivers around every little kernel-build quirk. Sure there's that whole FUD-nugget of "our competitors will steal our trade secrets if we talk about them openly!!" But we're talking about freaking wireless chipsets. Frankly, I could care less if my laptop's wireless card is a whitebox 802.11g or the top of the line SkinkFish 802.11g Super-Dooper-ExtreemoVision with Multiphasic Shields (tm). I'll still only get 5 mbits max most places.
I shouldn't need to spend $25.00 for a car charger every time I get a new cell phone, nor should I need to recompile the kernel everytime I switch brands of some random computer device. These interfaces have all been standard for quite a while now. We should hold our vendors' feet to the flames and simply not buy products that have this sort of lock-in built in, IMNSHO.
Lots of things are "pocket change" to these players. They donate to a lot of causes. What makes Wikipedia so special that they deserve a cut of the pie versus, say, donating to a battered women's shelter, cancer research, or children's home.
There are lots of deserving organizations out there, but what sets Wikimedia apart is that its directly generating income for these players--they're making money off of Wikipedia's efforts.
FOSS shares much of this paradigm. Big companies like IBM, Sun, RedHat, etc. ought to (and do) support FOSS development because they generate revenue from its fruits.
And credit card companies/paypal receive interest on the monies collected before they're spent as well as on the balances of whatever credit card donors are carrying. Because Wikimedia is a not-for-profit philanthropic endeavor, they should be waving those transaction fees at the very least. It doesn't *really* cost them anything out of pocket, significantly helps Wikimedia, and makes them look good . . . well, as good as a credit card company is likely to look, anyway.;)
It's not even about what's a "worthier" cause; it's about supporting something that can add to your bottom line.
I wonder why Wikimedia isn't getting larger donations from big organizations. I know Google has offered support, but I feel they should be donating cash--Wikipedia has high-quality organic search results in tons of queries on Google, I'm sure that's generating quite a bit of ad revenue. Other players making money off Wikipedia's efforts:
-The other search engines
-PayPal - This one irritates me--why are they charging transaction fees for Wikimedia donations!? They should waive them or at the VERY least, donate a portion back.
-Visa/MC/Amex/etc. - Related to PayPal, I'm sure some of those transaction fees are mandated by the credit companies . . . who should also donate back or at least waive those fees!
Wikimedia's yearly expenses are mere pocket change for any of the players I mentioned. I really think they ought to donate.
There are a couple of GUI frontends for configuration available, but I don't believe this release includes one "out of the box." If you're running Apache on Windows there are a number of commercial products available for GUI configuration. There's a whole bunch of free ones for Linux/Unix, webmin being one of my favorites since it has modules for just about everything under the sun (unix users & groups, samba shares, mysql, etc.)
Although I've never had much trouble editing the text conf files by hand. We have a lot of sites and virtual hosts--it was much quicker and easier to set it all up in Apache via typing and cutting and pasting the relevant bits than when we used to run IIS.
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Try tossing some portable apps on it. Lots of great stuff available if you ever have to use someone else's computer and are missing some seemingly minor yet critical app and are short on time.
I found a 1gig flash drive for $20, snapped it up right away. It's saved my ass several times when I've got 30 minutes until class, left my laptop in my car clear across campus and I need to make a few quick changes & print a Word doc and the damn library PCs only have Word viewer installed (thank you portable AbiWord!) . . . and gee, that printer isn't working/out of paper & we're too lazy/stupid to refill it, you'll have to go to the other lab . . . etc.
I've got a bootable DSL partition on it too . . . it can be useful, but "No time! Need nearest PC!" doesn't always boot from USB.
Really, they're like sneaker-net swiss army knives.
^What GeoffP said. Some of the larger (>1GB) flash drives ship with NTFS which is both unnecessary and read-only on most non-Windows machines.
The crawler shouldn't need to run up the cable at escape velocity since it's getting the necessary kinetic energy from the cable itself--it can crawl up at a leisurely pace from the perspective of anyone onboard. You also can recover a lot of the energy when the robot/elevator car/whatever makes its way make down. Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise is a great read. (Sci-fi novel about building a space elevator in an exaggerated Sri Lanka.) Fun!
Right now we don't really need them, but they'd be awfully handy in a real space battle. Lasers and other beam weapons really suck for space weapons, since ships would be engaging each other light-seconds apart--by the time the laser reaches where it's aimed at, the other ship will have moved somewhere else. Even if you *do* manage to hit them (say if they were standing still or not evading . . . ) the beam will have spread out like a flashlight and not do very much damage.
On the other hand, if you have .9c missiles that can track and manuever with an evading enemy ship, they can be tiny (1 kg or so) and still pack the wallop of a nuclear weapon when they hit. =)
Ooo! Ooo! *raises hand*
99.99999999975 % Light Speed
Yes you would be incredibly blue-shifted, but you would in fact appear to be coming in faster than light:
Suppose I fire a missile at you from 10 light-seconds away. If the missile is travelling at 90% of the speed of light, it'll take just over 11 seconds to hit you. You'll see it 10 seconds after I fire it, and the missile itself reaches you 1 second later. From your perspective, it looks & feels as though that missile was travelling at nearly 10 times the speed of light.
The same effect has been observed in space telescopes. Some black holes and other celestial bodies can emit jets of matter at significant fractions of lightspeed. If those jets are pointed in our general direction, they appear to be moving faster than the speed of light.
"Elevation is 100% irrelevant. Not all cellphone towers are on mountains (though they certainly are here, where I live, in Lake County, California, USA, Terra) and the only important thing is the distance to the tower. Don't worry about the current, worry about the power of the transmission. All current portable cellular phones are under 1 watt. Most flip phones are under half a watt. The only reason anyone is worried about it at all is that it's very close to your head."
Actually, it's a mix of transmission power, "stuff in the way" *and* distance. i.e. communication satellites are basically just radio towers put *really* high up to cover even larger areas--anything with a clear view of the sky has a clear view of the sat, no pesky mountains or curvature of the Earth (well, half of it anyway) to fuss with.
^Actually, that's a common misconception about microwave ovens--they're *not* operating on water's resonance frequency (Microwaves are usually operating around 2.4 ghz, whereas the resonance frequency of water is in the tens of ghz.) The whole point of microwaves is that the energy *doesn't* get completely absorbed at the food's surface and can instead penetrate deeper to cook food throughout.
And even if the bugs aren't in the driver, but the OS vendor is on the support call, who still gets the blame?
My point is, the interfaces and ins and outs of the hardware are (in theory) based on long established standards.
My wireless chipsets shouldn't care whether they've been shoved into a PCI card, PCMCIA card or USB dangly bit running windows, *nix, etc. If the pins match up, how difficult can it be to build to a standard that works across all platforms?
You blame the rapid evolution of the Linux kernel on a lot, but it'll compile on vastly different platforms containing dramatically different CPU architectures. Why does this become such a big hang up for peripheral vendors?
Hate to burst your little bubble there, but Linus != God.
A vendor can get *nix support without spending a dime--just publish enough specs for other people to write the drivers. Individuals will happily write drivers around every little kernel-build quirk. Sure there's that whole FUD-nugget of "our competitors will steal our trade secrets if we talk about them openly!!" But we're talking about freaking wireless chipsets. Frankly, I could care less if my laptop's wireless card is a whitebox 802.11g or the top of the line SkinkFish 802.11g Super-Dooper-ExtreemoVision with Multiphasic Shields (tm). I'll still only get 5 mbits max most places.
I shouldn't need to spend $25.00 for a car charger every time I get a new cell phone, nor should I need to recompile the kernel everytime I switch brands of some random computer device. These interfaces have all been standard for quite a while now. We should hold our vendors' feet to the flames and simply not buy products that have this sort of lock-in built in, IMNSHO.
Lots of things are "pocket change" to these players. They donate to a lot of causes. What makes Wikipedia so special that they deserve a cut of the pie versus, say, donating to a battered women's shelter, cancer research, or children's home.
There are lots of deserving organizations out there, but what sets Wikimedia apart is that its directly generating income for these players--they're making money off of Wikipedia's efforts.
FOSS shares much of this paradigm. Big companies like IBM, Sun, RedHat, etc. ought to (and do) support FOSS development because they generate revenue from its fruits.
And credit card companies/paypal receive interest on the monies collected before they're spent as well as on the balances of whatever credit card donors are carrying. Because Wikimedia is a not-for-profit philanthropic endeavor, they should be waving those transaction fees at the very least. It doesn't *really* cost them anything out of pocket, significantly helps Wikimedia, and makes them look good . . . well, as good as a credit card company is likely to look, anyway. ;)
It's not even about what's a "worthier" cause; it's about supporting something that can add to your bottom line.
I wonder why Wikimedia isn't getting larger donations from big organizations. I know Google has offered support, but I feel they should be donating cash--Wikipedia has high-quality organic search results in tons of queries on Google, I'm sure that's generating quite a bit of ad revenue. Other players making money off Wikipedia's efforts:
-The other search engines
-PayPal - This one irritates me--why are they charging transaction fees for Wikimedia donations!? They should waive them or at the VERY least, donate a portion back.
-Visa/MC/Amex/etc. - Related to PayPal, I'm sure some of those transaction fees are mandated by the credit companies . . . who should also donate back or at least waive those fees!
Wikimedia's yearly expenses are mere pocket change for any of the players I mentioned. I really think they ought to donate.
-Nick
There are a couple of GUI frontends for configuration available, but I don't believe this release includes one "out of the box." If you're running Apache on Windows there are a number of commercial products available for GUI configuration. There's a whole bunch of free ones for Linux/Unix, webmin being one of my favorites since it has modules for just about everything under the sun (unix users & groups, samba shares, mysql, etc.) Although I've never had much trouble editing the text conf files by hand. We have a lot of sites and virtual hosts--it was much quicker and easier to set it all up in Apache via typing and cutting and pasting the relevant bits than when we used to run IIS.