opera looks somehow whacked up when installed on my ubuntu feisty.. must be the font or something???? Have you installed the msttcorefonts package (Automatix installs it, I think, and it's in ubuntu-restricted-extras)?
If so, that may be the problem. The MS fonts just don't render well in Opera on Ubuntu. Arial seems to render incredibly squashed and compressed; and Verdana, by contrast, seems abnormally horizontally stretched, compared to how they render in Windows. None of the fonts seem to be getting antialiased properly when subpixel rendering is turned on. (This is all with hinting set to 'full'; turning that down makes everything go to hell).
That isn't to say I like Bitstream. I don't, much (it's rather too squareish, reminds me of Webdings). But at least the Bitstream set, for all its faults, renders consistently cleanly and legibly under Ubuntu.
The situation hasn't improved with later fonts: I grabbed Segoe UI (a font I've grown extremely fond of on Windows) in the hope that it would have improved things, but no luck -- though fine at very large sizes; at normal sizes it renders very, very thickly, and rather blockily. Certainly nothing like it *should* be rendered.
The latter problem is actually perfectly understandable -- Segoe UI is apparently "specially hinted for Cleartype" which probably translates to a bit of Microsoft improprietry that Ubuntu's font renderer, quite understandably, doesn't understand. But with the msttcorefonts, this shouldn't apply, so I don't really know why they don't work very well under. Some sort of conflict between Opera and Ubuntu's font renderer? Oh well. Anyway, if it is installed, try uninstalling it from Synaptic, and let Opera revert to the Ubuntu default fonts.
Does Internet Explorer come this way by default? If not, then it's of no use to 99+% of Vista victims...err...users since they won't change the defaults. Yes, it is turned on by default. The worry is that people will turn it *off*: protected mode is part of UAC...
Turn UAC back on. Protected mode is part of UAC privilege level seperation, and won't work if you have UAC turned off.
Re:Laughing? A less happy feeling
on
Firefox Quickies
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or allow? It's rather ironic that you're positing that in this thread, since UAC actually prevents the exploit that TFA's talking about.
If you try it on Vista with UAC turned on, it'll fail -- or, at least, it'll give you a warning dialogue (one of these ) -- due to IE's protected mode, which is part of UAC (quick summary: IE runs as an even lower integrity token than normal users, and need privilege elevation to a normal user token to do things like write to anywhere other then temporary internet files and access other programs on the computer -- in this case, Firefox).
In XP (and 2000, and all previous Windows), there's "File Types" tab in `Folder Options' dialog. That's the thing you'd use if you wanted to manually create that "Command Prompt Here" (without using the power tool). No such thing in Vista (as far as I could tell). You haven't looked very hard, then. It's right there on the Start menu, just above 'Help and Support': "Default Programs". Even if you missed that, you just open control panel and start typing "file type" and it shows you the entry. (Although, as you've already said, Open Command Prompt Here is built into Vista anyway).
One of the biggest bugs in Winjdows has always been that it has allowed installers etc... to [...] overwrite files in the system folders. This was a HUGE mistake, that should have been correected long ago! That WAS corrected long ago. Specifically, Windows 2000 and newer. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_File_Protecti on.
Despite recent articals to the contrary, Vista is NOT secure at all for the average user, because the security "features"are so annoying that the average user turns them off after a very short time. Could you provide a source for that? Certainly, my experience has been the exact opposite ("the average user" doesn't do many administrative tasks and so practically never sees a UAC prompt, excapt when installing new programs, which isn't often). Of course, I'm willing to be proved wrong if you have any data which suggests that most average users do turn UAC off; but I rather suspect that you don't.
As to the common practice of an anti-virus program identifying the files of a competing product (that are not viruses nor infected with a virus) as viruses or infected is just plain wrong. This practice is in the Micro$haft tradition of anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior. Well, that would have been a relevent comment -- if the company in question who's antivirus product is under question was Microsoft. It isn't. Microsoft do make an antivirus product, but AFAIK it has never been accused of this kind of behaviour. Even with TFA, I'd bet on the problem being incompetence rather than malice any day.
"if you run a program and authorize it to run it will run and can affect the operation of the machine" -- I don't wish to sound sarcastic, but what would you suggest an OS should do if you run a program, and explicitely authorize it, apart from, well... run it?
Math is based on computer science. Not computer science in math. Math is a subset of computer science. [The scene: around 500 BC. A boat in the Ionian sea, just off the shore of Greece.]
Pythagoras: Welcome, my fellow Pythagoreans! Since we last met, what news? Hippasus: Pythagoras, I have made a new discovery in the field of mathematika: you know that we thought that all lengths are expressable as the ratio of two integers? We were wrong: I have constructed a proof that the length of a line connecting two opposite corners of a unit square cannot be so represented! Pythagoras: What? Impossible! It is heresy to say so! Hippasus: b--but I have the proof! Look at it! Pythagoras: Don't be foolish! [turns to his Macbook pro and starts typing furiously] Hah! Look, I've just calculated it, and the decimal expansion clearly terminates! Hippasus: But -- But of course it terminates, you're using floats! They can never be accurate enough to represent the an irrational number. Pythagoras: Ah, but I'm using double-precision. Hippasus: Yes, but-- Pythagoras: Double. Precision. [stares at Hippasus] Hippasus:... Pythagoras:[To the rest of his followers] Throw him overboard! [They do so]
Oops. Sorry, yes, you're right. In my defense, I've never used Imperial weights or volumes -- I was bought up on a metric diet (with a couple of irritating exceptions, e.g. road speed limits here in the UK are still in miles per hour for some reason; but mostly it's metric all the way).
mg/oz! Why not list it in Sun-Masses/Proton-Radius^3 once for all? An ounce is a unit of weight, so mg/oz is unitless. Sun-masses/proton_radius^3, on the other hand, is not unitless: it has units of density.
Both are valid ways of measuring concentration, but you couldn't convert one measure directly into the other without knowing the different densities of all the liquids in the test.
A row is an altercation; it involves bickering, it can be a brawl, it is undoubtedly a dispute; it can be described as a fracas, a quarrel, a scrap, or a squabble; it is a wrangle.
The MEG (Motionless Electromagnetic Generator) has a patent filed which you can read all about yourself [...] his multiple attempts to patent the device were refused by the US patent office [...] The fact that the US patented office has refused patents because they do not understand them is enough for me to realize that revealing an invention is not enough to have it reproduced and used I am amused but somewhat puzzled by your seeming faith in the importance of patents. Whether a patent is awarded, in the USA at least, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the device works or is even possible. The criteria for patents to be accepted are novelty, originality , and usefullness. Whether it works or not is utterly irrelevent. Take the following patent as a stark example: "A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another". Scientists in particular pay not the slightest attention to patents in the context you're talking about: if an experiment is described that purports to demonstrate an exception to the first law of thermodynamics, whether the device in question has been patented in the United States is a question of absolutely no importance whatsoever.
much of our current technology was the result of "lone inventors" like Tesla, Edison, and Jefferson who among them there is one university degree and it's not in science or engineering. I'm not sure if you're being deliberately misleading or whether you've been mislead, but Tesla -- who is in reality the only one out of the three you mention who actually significantly changed our understanding of Physics -- studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. He was apparently discharged without a degree for non-payment of tuition fees, though some sources disagree on the reason.
But if you look at lone inventors you can look at Newman, who did supply his machine for testing and it was determined to be a highly efficient AC converter Don't know what source you have on that, but the NBS test gave the Newman machine as 27 to 67 percent efficient; commercial devices at the time already operated in excess of 90%.
but when asked to rerun the test with the machine "correctly" set up, the testing agency refused. I'm not saying that Newman's machine works, but that he did at least attempt to have it scrutinized. It would be very simple for him to demonstrate over-unity: connect the output to the input and have it run by itself with no external input. He has consistently refused to do this. The one time he permitted an outside agency to test the device, it performed exactly as you would expect it to (i.e. not over-unity); so of course he's going to claim it "wasn't set up correctly".
No I am not trying to support Free Energy Suppression conspiracies, just saying it takes a lot more than revealing an invention to have it seem production and use, and that rejecting the possibility that a device is usefully simply because the inventory claims Over Unity is doing a great injustice to the world If any of the free energy crowd did uncover a previously unknown scientific principle in their free time between coming up with ever more imaginitive twists on Stevin's ball-ramp; it would be absurdly simple to reveal details of an experiment that demonstrated the principle. Patents are supremely irrelevent if you have a repeatable experiment. None have done so.
You're certainly right about the next version after Vista being a server OS, because it will be: Windows Server 2008. But on your main point, I'm afraid I have partly to disagree with you. What will happen is an acceleration of a change that's already started: modulerization. In Windows 9x, everything was one big lump of crap sitting on top of a very shaky base, and that certainly hit a physical limit, as Windows ME demonstrated. With Vista, though, MS has actually started to move towards modulerization of code; one consequence of which is the large number of versions -- they can just include whatever modules are appropriate for the different versions without affecting other parts of the OS, which they couldn't do with Windows 9x.
Of course, this is one area where Microsoft is far, far behind open-source -- IMHO, the main strength and advantage of Linux over Microsoft in the coming years will be the extent to which Linux is so incredibly neatly compartmentalised, which will make it much easier to expand upon and make more complex where a monolithic OS would hit a limit. Microsoft will try and catch up, but they've got a long way to go.
If the new machines do break new scientific ground, and find a new and efficient source of energy -- whilst it is very unlikely that a lone inventor could stumble across a new scientific principle that has evaded actual scientists, it is certainly possible -- it will not matter in the slightest whether people have taken the inventors word at face value, been sceptical, or anything else. All that needs to happen is for the inventor to give us an experiment that uses the new principle that can be independently replicated, and Science will be turned upside-down. Even if the inventors refuse to publish their results in a scientific journal, it only takes a single person to independently replicate the results and do so.
The sad fact is, however, that the free energy 'inventors' usually refuse to either publish or even release the details of their devices, because they know that if people did do the relevent experements they would come up negative.
For some reason, humanity has decided that we've mastered knowledge, or at least crossed the tipping point. Science is now so mainstream that the 'unlikely' now equates to 'impossible'. I'm sorry, but to be quite frank, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Indeed, I would say that the exact opposite is true. Quantum mechanics, to take the obvious example, strikes most people as incredibly 'unlikely' (and certainly counterintuitive), but was accepted as mainstream incredibly quickly precisely because it makes testable predictions that match experiment very, very closely.
Physics is now at an incredibly exciting point, because we now have two theories of mechanics (Quantum mechanics and Relativity) that, in their own fields, have incredible predictive powers that match every experiment we can throw at them; but are incompatible; thus paving the way for several candidates for a new unified field theory that can unite them. We are approaching a turning point sometime this century, just like the turning point last century when Newtonian mechanics was overthrown to make way for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
By reading mainstream newspapers, I can see how you would get the impression that Science research is no longer 'all there', considering that all they seem to report is crap like some PR company announcing that they've found "the scientific formula for the best day of the year". Don't be mislead. Pick up a copy of New Scientist or Scientific American. Discover for yourself how wrong you really are.
Actually, it turns out that the net magnetic field due to all the outer magnets is 0 pretty much everywhere in the circle. The inside magnet pretty much doesn't interact with the outer ones in any way. Try tracing some field lines, and you'll see that there can't be any flux linkage between the inside magnet and the outside.
Doesn't the magnitude of the field multiply those small changes But the magnitude of the Earth's magnetic field at the Earth's surface is very, very small: 30-60 microTesla, according to Wikipedia. And it is alternating very, very slowly.
Recall -- I think it's Faraday's law: E.M.F induced in a coil of wire due to a changin magentic field = - N d(phi)/dt.
N = no. of turns per meter; phi = magnetic flux through the coil.
So for a coil with a cross sectional area of a square metre, flux through it will be call it 50 microWeber. If it takes, say, 500,000 years for the Earth's magnetic field to reverse, d(phi)/dt = 50 microWeber / 250,000 years
So d(phi)/dt = 50e-6 / 8e12 = 6e-18.
So E.M.F. produced = N * 6e-18 Volts. Assuming a good few thousand turns per meter, that's of the order of 10 femtovolts of EMF for a coil a square meter big. That's not very useful.
Good point -- I think I was (incorrectly) mentally equating 'coefficient of performance' with 'energy conversion efficiency', which is obviously only defined for a closed system and so is never >1.
You can't get energy from a static magnetic field. (You can get it from a *changing* magnetic field, and the Earth's magnetic field is changing; but it's doing so over a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, so the energy you'd get would be very, very small).
The company knows this perfectly well. They're not claiming that they've found a way to get energy out of a static magnetic field in a way that's in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. From http://www.steorn.com/orbo/claim/:
"The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy"
"The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%"
So saying that they claim that their machine breaks the laws of thermodyanmics is really not actually a "bad logical deduction", since they're perfectly happy to admit that that is exactly what they are claiming...
Slashdot Mirror
If IE tabs are too slow (which they are) and Firefox crashes too often (which it does); have you tried Opera? Best of both worlds.
If so, that may be the problem. The MS fonts just don't render well in Opera on Ubuntu. Arial seems to render incredibly squashed and compressed; and Verdana, by contrast, seems abnormally horizontally stretched, compared to how they render in Windows. None of the fonts seem to be getting antialiased properly when subpixel rendering is turned on. (This is all with hinting set to 'full'; turning that down makes everything go to hell).
That isn't to say I like Bitstream. I don't, much (it's rather too squareish, reminds me of Webdings). But at least the Bitstream set, for all its faults, renders consistently cleanly and legibly under Ubuntu.
The situation hasn't improved with later fonts: I grabbed Segoe UI (a font I've grown extremely fond of on Windows) in the hope that it would have improved things, but no luck -- though fine at very large sizes; at normal sizes it renders very, very thickly, and rather blockily. Certainly nothing like it *should* be rendered.
The latter problem is actually perfectly understandable -- Segoe UI is apparently "specially hinted for Cleartype" which probably translates to a bit of Microsoft improprietry that Ubuntu's font renderer, quite understandably, doesn't understand. But with the msttcorefonts, this shouldn't apply, so I don't really know why they don't work very well under. Some sort of conflict between Opera and Ubuntu's font renderer? Oh well. Anyway, if it is installed, try uninstalling it from Synaptic, and let Opera revert to the Ubuntu default fonts.
Turn UAC back on. Protected mode is part of UAC privilege level seperation, and won't work if you have UAC turned off.
If you try it on Vista with UAC turned on, it'll fail -- or, at least, it'll give you a warning dialogue (one of these ) -- due to IE's protected mode, which is part of UAC (quick summary: IE runs as an even lower integrity token than normal users, and need privilege elevation to a normal user token to do things like write to anywhere other then temporary internet files and access other programs on the computer -- in this case, Firefox).
I'm not putting my trust in any site that recommends I turn off the prefetching service for 'performance reasons'...
"if you run a program and authorize it to run it will run and can affect the operation of the machine" -- I don't wish to sound sarcastic, but what would you suggest an OS should do if you run a program, and explicitely authorize it, apart from, well... run it?
[The scene: around 500 BC. A boat in the Ionian sea, just off the shore of Greece.]
Pythagoras: Welcome, my fellow Pythagoreans! Since we last met, what news?
Hippasus: Pythagoras, I have made a new discovery in the field of mathematika: you know that we thought that all lengths are expressable as the ratio of two integers? We were wrong: I have constructed a proof that the length of a line connecting two opposite corners of a unit square cannot be so represented!
Pythagoras: What? Impossible! It is heresy to say so!
Hippasus: b--but I have the proof! Look at it!
Pythagoras: Don't be foolish! [turns to his Macbook pro and starts typing furiously] Hah! Look, I've just calculated it, and the decimal expansion clearly terminates!
Hippasus: But -- But of course it terminates, you're using floats! They can never be accurate enough to represent the an irrational number.
Pythagoras: Ah, but I'm using double-precision.
Hippasus: Yes, but--
Pythagoras: Double. Precision. [stares at Hippasus]
Hippasus:
Pythagoras: [To the rest of his followers] Throw him overboard!
[They do so]
finis
Oops. Sorry, yes, you're right. In my defense, I've never used Imperial weights or volumes -- I was bought up on a metric diet (with a couple of irritating exceptions, e.g. road speed limits here in the UK are still in miles per hour for some reason; but mostly it's metric all the way).
Why not list it in Sun-Masses/Proton-Radius^3 once for all? An ounce is a unit of weight, so mg/oz is unitless. Sun-masses/proton_radius^3, on the other hand, is not unitless: it has units of density.
Both are valid ways of measuring concentration, but you couldn't convert one measure directly into the other without knowing the different densities of all the liquids in the test.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ works for Office 2007.
The forth item in the list of contributors is thought-provoking.
A row is an altercation; it involves bickering, it can be a brawl, it is undoubtedly a dispute; it can be described as a fracas, a quarrel, a scrap, or a squabble; it is a wrangle.
You're certainly right about the next version after Vista being a server OS, because it will be: Windows Server 2008. But on your main point, I'm afraid I have partly to disagree with you. What will happen is an acceleration of a change that's already started: modulerization. In Windows 9x, everything was one big lump of crap sitting on top of a very shaky base, and that certainly hit a physical limit, as Windows ME demonstrated. With Vista, though, MS has actually started to move towards modulerization of code; one consequence of which is the large number of versions -- they can just include whatever modules are appropriate for the different versions without affecting other parts of the OS, which they couldn't do with Windows 9x.
Of course, this is one area where Microsoft is far, far behind open-source -- IMHO, the main strength and advantage of Linux over Microsoft in the coming years will be the extent to which Linux is so incredibly neatly compartmentalised, which will make it much easier to expand upon and make more complex where a monolithic OS would hit a limit. Microsoft will try and catch up, but they've got a long way to go.
If the new machines do break new scientific ground, and find a new and efficient source of energy -- whilst it is very unlikely that a lone inventor could stumble across a new scientific principle that has evaded actual scientists, it is certainly possible -- it will not matter in the slightest whether people have taken the inventors word at face value, been sceptical, or anything else. All that needs to happen is for the inventor to give us an experiment that uses the new principle that can be independently replicated, and Science will be turned upside-down. Even if the inventors refuse to publish their results in a scientific journal, it only takes a single person to independently replicate the results and do so.
The sad fact is, however, that the free energy 'inventors' usually refuse to either publish or even release the details of their devices, because they know that if people did do the relevent experements they would come up negative.
Physics is now at an incredibly exciting point, because we now have two theories of mechanics (Quantum mechanics and Relativity) that, in their own fields, have incredible predictive powers that match every experiment we can throw at them; but are incompatible; thus paving the way for several candidates for a new unified field theory that can unite them. We are approaching a turning point sometime this century, just like the turning point last century when Newtonian mechanics was overthrown to make way for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
By reading mainstream newspapers, I can see how you would get the impression that Science research is no longer 'all there', considering that all they seem to report is crap like some PR company announcing that they've found "the scientific formula for the best day of the year". Don't be mislead. Pick up a copy of New Scientist or Scientific American. Discover for yourself how wrong you really are.
Actually, it turns out that the net magnetic field due to all the outer magnets is 0 pretty much everywhere in the circle. The inside magnet pretty much doesn't interact with the outer ones in any way. Try tracing some field lines, and you'll see that there can't be any flux linkage between the inside magnet and the outside.
Recall -- I think it's Faraday's law: E.M.F induced in a coil of wire due to a changin magentic field = - N d(phi)/dt.
N = no. of turns per meter; phi = magnetic flux through the coil.
So for a coil with a cross sectional area of a square metre, flux through it will be call it 50 microWeber. If it takes, say, 500,000 years for the Earth's magnetic field to reverse, d(phi)/dt = 50 microWeber / 250,000 years
So d(phi)/dt = 50e-6 / 8e12 = 6e-18.
So E.M.F. produced = N * 6e-18 Volts. Assuming a good few thousand turns per meter, that's of the order of 10 femtovolts of EMF for a coil a square meter big. That's not very useful.
Good point -- I think I was (incorrectly) mentally equating 'coefficient of performance' with 'energy conversion efficiency', which is obviously only defined for a closed system and so is never >1.
You can't get energy from a static magnetic field. (You can get it from a *changing* magnetic field, and the Earth's magnetic field is changing; but it's doing so over a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, so the energy you'd get would be very, very small).
The company knows this perfectly well. They're not claiming that they've found a way to get energy out of a static magnetic field in a way that's in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. From http://www.steorn.com/orbo/claim/:
"The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy"
"The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%"
So saying that they claim that their machine breaks the laws of thermodyanmics is really not actually a "bad logical deduction", since they're perfectly happy to admit that that is exactly what they are claiming...
There are innumerable "free energy machines" in the public domain for you to have a gander at; won't do you much good...