I'm way off the original topic here, but your Dilbert reminded me of one of my favorites.
Dilbert, examining two network cables as the pointy haired boss looks on: Here's you problem. The connection to the network is broken.
Dilbert: Uh oh. It's a "token ring" LAN. That means the token fell out and it's in this room someplace.
In the background, the PHB can be seen on the floor, peering beneath his desk, trying to find the token. In the foreground, Wally says to Dilbert: You are the wind beneath my wings.
Dilbert: I'll wait a week, then tell him the token must be in the "ethernet".
The sad truth is that I just don't do a lot of woodworking... not as much as I'd like. I guess if I retire one day, then I'll have the time and the money. Until then, I just fool around a bit, and when I need it, I buy pre-planed stock.
I know that Norm's table saw is "enhanced" as you say, and it's not "really" that big. I just guess I had a workshop as big as his. Something else to build when I get the time.
Oh yeah, that BIG belt sander, geeze! That thing must be new, because I've only seen it on one recent episode.
Yep! I love that show, but it comes on at a time I'm rarely watching PBS.
Porter Cable sponsors a bunch of PBS stuff - around here they sponsor "This Old House" and "New Yankee Workshop". I own a Porter Cable framing nailer, but I have yet to try it... my back-yard deck project has yet to reach the framing stage. (If it would EVER stop raining in Houston so I could pour my footings...)
Well, I was just quoting DeWalt's rating, I've never actually done the math, but let's see... (runs units, runs bc...)
3HP is 2237W. Standard US voltage is 117V... at 20A and a 1.0 power factor, that's 2340W - in the ballpark.
DeWalt says the motor is 15A, which would only make about 2.1HP at a 0.9 power factor. DeWalt's 3HP must be peak HP or "developed" HP, and not rated HP.
Re:Confused...
on
Router Wars
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Now, before we get started with any power tools, a brief word on shop safety...
Good edit point! That's exactly where I turn off the TV, wait about fifteen seconds, then turn it back on. When my timing is good, I rejoin the program just in time to hear the hiss of the trailing 's' in "saftey glasses".
The problem with Norm is he owns too many expensive, exotic tools. A band saw. A planer. A table saw the size of the Astrodome. Hell, he's even got a jig he can put on his electric screwdriver that will automatically build and finish an heirloom-quality china cabinet from scrap lumber. These tools are probably part of any "master carpenter's" workshop, but are definitely not part of mine.
I'd like to see Norm do a show called "The New Working Stiff's Workshop" in which he makes quality projects using tools that cost a total of no more than (pick a number) $1000, with no one tool costing more than (pick a number) $300. You can't easily build many of Norm's current NYW projects without first winning the Lotto Jackpot to pay for the tools. True, you can probably make most or all of those projects by substituting other tools and lots of extra work for some of the exotic, expensive tools, but I'd like to see more projects designed to be made in the average Joe's workshop.
Never known anybody who's even tried a Cisco router. I've been pretty happy with my DeWalt DW625 plunge router - 3 horsepower, electronic variable speed, soft start, and a nice rack-and-pinion depth adjuster. And what is this tera bit everybody is talking about? I've heard of straight bits, v-groove bits, mortising bits, rabbeting bits, cove bits, roundover bits, and tongue-and-groove sets of bits, but never a tera bit. Anybody care to give me the lowdown on this new woodworking equipment?
No, you miss the point. It depends on the data type. A gigabyte of WAV files weighs about the same as two CDs, but a gigabyte of mp3 files weights about the same as 20.
However, this whole discussion is extremely silly. Garbage in, garbage out.
Re:The ABCs of Google Complete
on
Google Suggest
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That is based on alphabetics ordering, I think it would make more sense to sort based on rating.
Google is ranking these suggestions so that the ones you're most likely to search for are higher. So even though 's' has more hits than 'spybot', Google thinks you're more likely to search for 'spybot'. That makes sense - the terms people search for most often are not necessarily the pages with the most search results (or the highest Pagerank).
Re:Is it any coincidence
on
Google Suggest
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There are some other interesting first-suggestions in the alphabet: h suggests "hotmail", and x suggests "x-box" (not, as I was expecting, a porn term). d suggests "dictionary", and o suggests "online dictionary". Most surprising: f suggests "firefox", where the top hit is mozilla.org.
Re:Try this:
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So why is it that goooooooooooooooogle, with 16 o's, has over 23000 hits, while strings with one more or one fewer o have only hundreds of hits?
"Hack" is a verb with many nuances of meaning, including both "to write programs for" and "to make modifications to". I happen to think that changing the user-visible graphics is a way cool hack, even if used for something so unthinkably perverse as to create a "Hello Kitty" theme. As a programmer, it would be cool to be able to write modules to plug into the firmware - or even to patch the firmware for new and different capabilities. But as someone who carries an iPod, I like this hack even better, because it gives users the power to customize the most visible aspect of the iPod's firmware. Now I just gotta get me one of those new color models...
He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.
That conversion only makes sense for data that is "naturally" convertible to paper for printing: reports, manuals, e-books, etc., but this conversion makes NO sense for digital music files.
A typical mp3 is what - about 5 megabytes? And let's say a typical CD has 10 songs. That's 50 MB. So, for mp3s, a gigabyte "weighs" about the same as 20 compact discs. Even if you count the weight of the jewel box and liner notes in that weight, an mp3 gigabyte is a hell of a lot less than a truck full of paper.
Given the bogosity of this, hell, you might as well "weigh" data in solar masses. Or Gummi Bears. Or Mount McKinleys. Or...
HD-DVD will win out over Blu-Ray because people are not going to buy something with a stupid sounding name when a comparable technology with a better/cooler name exists.
HD-DVD is a cool name? It's just a bunch of letters that are hard to say in sequence and have no possible pseudo-pronunciation. Reminds me of some GI talking about his freeze-dried food.
Now Blu-Ray sounds cool, reminiscent of Death-Ray or Cosmic Ray. And it reminds me of the Blues, the coolest kind of music there is.
Are you sure you didn't mean that Blu-Ray will win because IT has the cooler name?
Sacrifice a few days of legitimate e-mail for a drastic reduction in spam, but I'm wondering if it's possible to let some e-mail through while bouncing all the rest - a whitelist approach. This would entail not turning off the server entirely, but responding "no such address" to all but those few names on the whitelist. So you could still hear from Grandpa or Aunt Jo, but all other mail would bounce. Would that be as effective as a complete shutdown? I'm guessing it would, because either way the recipient is unreachable, and thus gets culled from the spammer's lists.
One problem I see with either approach is that the effect may be temporary. You'll get removed from the lists of people sending out mail during those few days you're shut down, but because your address is still in all those "millions of e-mail addresses on CD" lists that the spammers sell to each other, your spam load is eventually going to ramp back up to its previous levels.
Some of us aren't going to be able to use your method, because our mail goes through a forwarder. I buy an e-mail address from pobox.com that forwards to my real address. The SMTP server at pobox.com is always going to look valid to the spammers - unless I temporarily change my alias... and then I risk losing it.
I have an alias that I've been using for nearly 10 years. The beauty of a forwarding service like pobox is that you can keep the same e-mail address no matter what your "real" e-mail address is. The curse of a forwarding service like pobox is that the spam finds you no matter what your "real" e-mail address is. I keep using my e-mail address, clinging to the faint hope that, some day, a solution to the spam problem will arise - one that doesn't include having to change my alias and give the new one to the hundreds of people and web sites that I want to receive legitimate e-mail from.
In the mean time, I use the CRM-114 discriminator. Not ideal, because it gets too many false positives, but until I make the sacrifice of changing to a "clean" alias, it's the best I'm able to do.
I'm laughing at you, Gizmodo, because just a couple of months ago you told us that Blu-ray has already won. Disney must agree with you, but four other big studios don't. Care to hedge your bet?
I love you! You just gave me a great gift idea for my wife... she enjoys the Mahjong computer game, and I bet she would like getting a real set of Mahjong tiles. She'll probably still play the computer version most of the time, but there are times when you just want the tactile experience of using the real thing. Now I've just got to figure out where to get a good set.
D'OH! You must have posted this while I was writing my explanation of Set. My family loves this game. I think it's harder than it sounds because it overflows the average person's "Seven, Plus or Minus Two" buffer.
One of our favorites is the card game called Set. Each card has symbols on it with four attributes: shape (oval, squiggle, or diamond), color (red, green, or purple), fill pattern (solid, empty, or striped), and number of symbols (one, two or three). You shuffle the cards, lay out a grid of twelve (or is it sixteen?) and try to find "sets". A set is three cards in which each attribute is the same on each card, or is different on every card. Sounds simple, but it's harder than it sounds, and amazingly addictive. The web site has the rules and a Java tutorial applet that you can use to practice set-finding.
By the way, does anybody know if they still make the logic game Wiff-n-Proof?
Bowler: Your fingers are so slender, so feminine. They're far too tapered for the ball you are using. You need something lighter, more delicate. Here, use my ball. Marge: No, no thank you Mister... [looking at his bowling ball] Brunswick.
(For those who don't bowl, "Brunswick" is the manufacturer of the bowling ball.)
I gave the new Google groups a visit for the first time this morning. Under "recently visited groups" it listed gnu.emacs.bug, which is strange because I haven't used the new Google groups before, or the old Google groups in months, and because I have never used Google to visit gnu.emacs.bug. The posts were mostly garbage: a Rolex ad, a Nigerian 401 phish, a via/g/ra ad, one in an Asian font, and the rest in Cyrillic. Only one of the posts listed in the first set was about emacs. This only confirms my belief that Usenet is now mostly worthless spam, rendering the Google Groups debate moot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm way off the original topic here, but your Dilbert reminded me of one of my favorites.
Dilbert, examining two network cables as the pointy haired boss looks on: Here's you problem. The connection to the network is broken.
Dilbert: Uh oh. It's a "token ring" LAN. That means the token fell out and it's in this room someplace.
In the background, the PHB can be seen on the floor, peering beneath his desk, trying to find the token. In the foreground, Wally says to Dilbert: You are the wind beneath my wings.
Dilbert: I'll wait a week, then tell him the token must be in the "ethernet".
120V at 20 amps is 2400 watts
Only if the power factor is 1.0!
The sad truth is that I just don't do a lot of woodworking... not as much as I'd like. I guess if I retire one day, then I'll have the time and the money. Until then, I just fool around a bit, and when I need it, I buy pre-planed stock.
I know that Norm's table saw is "enhanced" as you say, and it's not "really" that big. I just guess I had a workshop as big as his. Something else to build when I get the time.
Oh yeah, that BIG belt sander, geeze! That thing must be new, because I've only seen it on one recent episode.
Yep! I love that show, but it comes on at a time I'm rarely watching PBS.
Porter Cable sponsors a bunch of PBS stuff - around here they sponsor "This Old House" and "New Yankee Workshop". I own a Porter Cable framing nailer, but I have yet to try it... my back-yard deck project has yet to reach the framing stage. (If it would EVER stop raining in Houston so I could pour my footings...)
Well, I was just quoting DeWalt's rating, I've never actually done the math, but let's see... (runs units, runs bc...)
3HP is 2237W. Standard US voltage is 117V... at 20A and a 1.0 power factor, that's 2340W - in the ballpark.
DeWalt says the motor is 15A, which would only make about 2.1HP at a 0.9 power factor. DeWalt's 3HP must be peak HP or "developed" HP, and not rated HP.
Now, before we get started with any power tools, a brief word on shop safety...
Good edit point! That's exactly where I turn off the TV, wait about fifteen seconds, then turn it back on. When my timing is good, I rejoin the program just in time to hear the hiss of the trailing 's' in "saftey glasses".
The problem with Norm is he owns too many expensive, exotic tools. A band saw. A planer. A table saw the size of the Astrodome. Hell, he's even got a jig he can put on his electric screwdriver that will automatically build and finish an heirloom-quality china cabinet from scrap lumber. These tools are probably part of any "master carpenter's" workshop, but are definitely not part of mine.
I'd like to see Norm do a show called "The New Working Stiff's Workshop" in which he makes quality projects using tools that cost a total of no more than (pick a number) $1000, with no one tool costing more than (pick a number) $300. You can't easily build many of Norm's current NYW projects without first winning the Lotto Jackpot to pay for the tools. True, you can probably make most or all of those projects by substituting other tools and lots of extra work for some of the exotic, expensive tools, but I'd like to see more projects designed to be made in the average Joe's workshop.
Moderation: -1, Woodworking
Never known anybody who's even tried a Cisco router. I've been pretty happy with my DeWalt DW625 plunge router - 3 horsepower, electronic variable speed, soft start, and a nice rack-and-pinion depth adjuster. And what is this tera bit everybody is talking about? I've heard of straight bits, v-groove bits, mortising bits, rabbeting bits, cove bits, roundover bits, and tongue-and-groove sets of bits, but never a tera bit. Anybody care to give me the lowdown on this new woodworking equipment?
I RTFA and didn't pick up on that
It's right there in the first line: "Yahoo! has licensed the X1 search software for Windows from tech incubator Idealab..."
No, you miss the point. It depends on the data type. A gigabyte of WAV files weighs about the same as two CDs, but a gigabyte of mp3 files weights about the same as 20.
However, this whole discussion is extremely silly. Garbage in, garbage out.
That is based on alphabetics ordering, I think it would make more sense to sort based on rating.
Google is ranking these suggestions so that the ones you're most likely to search for are higher. So even though 's' has more hits than 'spybot', Google thinks you're more likely to search for 'spybot'. That makes sense - the terms people search for most often are not necessarily the pages with the most search results (or the highest Pagerank).
There are some other interesting first-suggestions in the alphabet: h suggests "hotmail", and x suggests "x-box" (not, as I was expecting, a porn term). d suggests "dictionary", and o suggests "online dictionary". Most surprising: f suggests "firefox", where the top hit is mozilla.org.
So why is it that goooooooooooooooogle, with 16 o's, has over 23000 hits, while strings with one more or one fewer o have only hundreds of hits?
gooooooooooooooogle 618
goooooooooooooooogle 23,300
gooooooooooooooooogle 198
I thought maybe it was a power-of-two thing, but other such disparities happen at non 2^n transitions. Interesting.
"Hack" is a verb with many nuances of meaning, including both "to write programs for" and "to make modifications to". I happen to think that changing the user-visible graphics is a way cool hack, even if used for something so unthinkably perverse as to create a "Hello Kitty" theme. As a programmer, it would be cool to be able to write modules to plug into the firmware - or even to patch the firmware for new and different capabilities. But as someone who carries an iPod, I like this hack even better, because it gives users the power to customize the most visible aspect of the iPod's firmware. Now I just gotta get me one of those new color models...
He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.
That conversion only makes sense for data that is "naturally" convertible to paper for printing: reports, manuals, e-books, etc., but this conversion makes NO sense for digital music files.
A typical mp3 is what - about 5 megabytes? And let's say a typical CD has 10 songs. That's 50 MB. So, for mp3s, a gigabyte "weighs" about the same as 20 compact discs. Even if you count the weight of the jewel box and liner notes in that weight, an mp3 gigabyte is a hell of a lot less than a truck full of paper.
Given the bogosity of this, hell, you might as well "weigh" data in solar masses. Or Gummi Bears. Or Mount McKinleys. Or...
HD-DVD will win out over Blu-Ray because people are not going to buy something with a stupid sounding name when a comparable technology with a better/cooler name exists.
HD-DVD is a cool name? It's just a bunch of letters that are hard to say in sequence and have no possible pseudo-pronunciation. Reminds me of some GI talking about his freeze-dried food.
Now Blu-Ray sounds cool, reminiscent of Death-Ray or Cosmic Ray. And it reminds me of the Blues, the coolest kind of music there is.
Are you sure you didn't mean that Blu-Ray will win because IT has the cooler name?
Sacrifice a few days of legitimate e-mail for a drastic reduction in spam, but I'm wondering if it's possible to let some e-mail through while bouncing all the rest - a whitelist approach. This would entail not turning off the server entirely, but responding "no such address" to all but those few names on the whitelist. So you could still hear from Grandpa or Aunt Jo, but all other mail would bounce. Would that be as effective as a complete shutdown? I'm guessing it would, because either way the recipient is unreachable, and thus gets culled from the spammer's lists.
One problem I see with either approach is that the effect may be temporary. You'll get removed from the lists of people sending out mail during those few days you're shut down, but because your address is still in all those "millions of e-mail addresses on CD" lists that the spammers sell to each other, your spam load is eventually going to ramp back up to its previous levels.
Some of us aren't going to be able to use your method, because our mail goes through a forwarder. I buy an e-mail address from pobox.com that forwards to my real address. The SMTP server at pobox.com is always going to look valid to the spammers - unless I temporarily change my alias... and then I risk losing it.
I have an alias that I've been using for nearly 10 years. The beauty of a forwarding service like pobox is that you can keep the same e-mail address no matter what your "real" e-mail address is. The curse of a forwarding service like pobox is that the spam finds you no matter what your "real" e-mail address is. I keep using my e-mail address, clinging to the faint hope that, some day, a solution to the spam problem will arise - one that doesn't include having to change my alias and give the new one to the hundreds of people and web sites that I want to receive legitimate e-mail from.
In the mean time, I use the CRM-114 discriminator. Not ideal, because it gets too many false positives, but until I make the sacrifice of changing to a "clean" alias, it's the best I'm able to do.
Care to hedge your bet?
No, because I'm not betting on one or the other.
I'm laughing at you, Gizmodo, because just a couple of months ago you told us that Blu-ray has already won. Disney must agree with you, but four other big studios don't. Care to hedge your bet?
Any mirrors anyone?
Well, mirrordot will get you a look at the thumbnails, but it's not a deep mirror, so you can't see more than that.
Twister
Yeah, but you have to supplement it with a bottle of orange juice, a bottle of vodka, and a bottle of baby oil. (Um... you don't drink the baby oil.)
I love you! You just gave me a great gift idea for my wife... she enjoys the Mahjong computer game, and I bet she would like getting a real set of Mahjong tiles. She'll probably still play the computer version most of the time, but there are times when you just want the tactile experience of using the real thing. Now I've just got to figure out where to get a good set.
D'OH! You must have posted this while I was writing my explanation of Set. My family loves this game. I think it's harder than it sounds because it overflows the average person's "Seven, Plus or Minus Two" buffer.
One of our favorites is the card game called Set. Each card has symbols on it with four attributes: shape (oval, squiggle, or diamond), color (red, green, or purple), fill pattern (solid, empty, or striped), and number of symbols (one, two or three). You shuffle the cards, lay out a grid of twelve (or is it sixteen?) and try to find "sets". A set is three cards in which each attribute is the same on each card, or is different on every card. Sounds simple, but it's harder than it sounds, and amazingly addictive. The web site has the rules and a Java tutorial applet that you can use to practice set-finding.
By the way, does anybody know if they still make the logic game Wiff-n-Proof?
I was reminded of the classic Simpsons episode referred to by the original poster:
Bowler: Your fingers are so slender, so feminine. They're far too tapered for the ball you are using. You need something lighter, more delicate. Here, use my ball.
Marge: No, no thank you Mister... [looking at his bowling ball] Brunswick.
(For those who don't bowl, "Brunswick" is the manufacturer of the bowling ball.)
I gave the new Google groups a visit for the first time this morning. Under "recently visited groups" it listed gnu.emacs.bug, which is strange because I haven't used the new Google groups before, or the old Google groups in months, and because I have never used Google to visit gnu.emacs.bug. The posts were mostly garbage: a Rolex ad, a Nigerian 401 phish, a via/g/ra ad, one in an Asian font, and the rest in Cyrillic. Only one of the posts listed in the first set was about emacs. This only confirms my belief that Usenet is now mostly worthless spam, rendering the Google Groups debate moot.