Posts by Chemist 2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
I agree, we live about 1/2 mile up an unmade road just wide enough for a van in places with steep gradients, bends and a drop of ~20-100ft into a stream for the whole distance. Yet a HGV ! drove all the way up one day due to following his satnav and had to reverse the whole way down - horrendous - blocked the road for almost an hour, knocked down fences, pushed over small trees. `
Same kind of thing happened to me when I was taking my first steps in protein modeling. Some joker swapped the wiring to the X,Y,Z knobs on the Evans and Sutherland vector graphics terminal I was using and in the dark, wearing stereo glasses, I damn nearly fell off my chair when my ' world' sheared away in quite a different direction
"But cats are pretty cool already, no?"
Er, yes and no.
"The experiment will be easiest to run if the probabilities are equal -- so the bags are equally warm, comfortable, easy to get into, hard to be pulled from, inconvenient for whichever human is nearby, on top of something someone is wanting to read, etc."
I also think that it's going to be impossible to get two exact bags and even if there is only an infinitesimal difference between them the cat will choose the best one
"if we cool the cat down as far as possible."
I think you are probably breaking the 5th Law of Thermodynamics
" Any small increase in the cat's de Broglie wavelength will be extremely helpful."
Cats can adjust their de Broglie wavelength, their zero point energy and almost every other parameter. They are also quite capable of emerging from a blackhole ( or any other sort of interesting subterranean space)
All this off-topic for sure but discussing GR at this time of the morning (UK) is a bit heavy.
Seem to remember this planet had lots going for it. Interesting variations of day, month, year length that led to an extra hour in bed every day etc. Good food although slightly repetitive and a great white knuckle ride that went to a great bar that had the best singer in the known universe.
Thanks Douglas,
For Linux :-
PS Elements runs under WIne perfectly - at least the copy I had a few years ago. Otherwise dcraw, ShowPhoto, ufraw and a number of others import Canon RAW files. and allow levels, curves and size/unsharp etc. I've taken to using a script to convert entire collections at one go to have browse-able .jpgs. in the same directories as RAW files. (I've just converted 33GB) In particular dcraw will output 48-bit and showphoto will handle 48 bit
It just requires dcraw and ImageMagick. Just run the script in the directory. dcraw outputs .ppm files
raw1080.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
dcraw -w -H 2 *.CR*
#
mogrify -resize 1624x1080 -quality 100 *.ppm
#
mogrify -unsharp 0x1+0.5+0.02 *.ppm
#
mogrify -format jpg *.ppm
Patents are about implementation but are also about novelty. Wireless charging is not novel unless the would-be inventor can show a significant improvement in some aspect of the process ( efficiency or safety ....). If they can they can patent THAT but it wouldn't cover wireless charging in toto
"Just because you have been using "compute" incorrectly for several years doesn't make it right!!"
17million hits on Google for compute server
Compute Server - Encyclopedia - The Free Dictionary
encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/compute+server
(computer, parallel), compute server - A kind of parallel processor where the parallel processors have no I/O except via a bus or other connection to a front-end ...
Linux Compute Servers | School of Natural Sciences
www.sns.ias.edu/computing/servers
Linux Compute Servers. The following linux servers are available for general and/or computational use. These servers are available for public use via ssh, and ...
Compute server | Define Compute server at Dictionary.com
dictionary.reference.com/browse/compute+server
compute server definition. computer, parallel. A kind of parallel processor where the parallel processors have no I/O except via a bus or other connection to a ...
If it's being used frequently by a range of people then it's right - even the OED accepts that
If a GPU is available it should be used to decode video. Running 1080p/50 video on a rather elderly Linux dual-core AMD takes all the processor - with a GPU and vdpau it takes ~10% and it becomes possible to watch edits whilst transcoding several other videos AND still have a responsive system.
"I wrote a 6802* cross-assembler "
Actually I used it for a 6802 - it was the first cpu project I did and the end-result was a burglar alarm. Luckily I only needed to run the assembler twice as it was so slow. I had to shoehorn a PIA into the Dragon I was using to run a home-made EPROM programmer. I rapidly shifted to 6809s and Forth assembler after that !
"Driver support for Linux is still hit or miss. In order to make a particular distro work on a particular piece of hardware, you have to do some tuning."
Mostly you are wrong. I've not had to do that for ~6-7 years and I install 3-5 a year on quite a range of hardware even 3G dongles and printer/scanners have worked out of the box.
I don't know where you get your 'information' from as you seem so dismissive of Linux but I can't believe that it from personal experience. If indeed Dell have some custom components, which I find hard to believe, then some configuration/coding might be necessary.
I've no experience of recent Photoshops as I stopped using WIndows a few years back but I did have a legit copy of Photoshop Expressions which worked perfectly under Wine - I seem to recall it had just one massive .dll Certainly if you must have something it's a powerful argument.
What has Earth's gravity got to do with it other than giving a name to a unit of acceleration that's biologically relevant ?
A rocket far from any gravity source will still generate a force on it's occupants when the engine is running that can be measured in Gs indeed that's an Einstein thought experiment that's used in GR discussions
"when renewing their £15-20/month contract buut often it has no data so basically they are just getting the handset to use as a full screen phone (plus texts)."
It's quite possible (my wife has just done it) to get a mid-range Android phone, 1GB data, 250 mins, 5000 texts for £15/month in the UK.
"requires every person to understand the world to some degree"
Not just democracy. In part lots of aspects of education are of themselves no direct path to a career. For example most people are not going to use calculus or chemistry or lots of other parts of the syllabus. It doesn't mean that exposure to some aspects isn't worthwhile. Many people don't know what they want to do - exposure to a bit of coding or hardware hacking may well be the start of someones career - I'm sure it was for some people here.
Although I'm not an IT professional an interest in electronics from 13 and coding all my adult life meant that when I NEEDED to write my own software for scientific purposes I could.
"'were designed only to be able to be read by the senders and the recipients''"
Yes, I heard that too, as well as the journo wailing something like "with all this technology and supercomputers you'd think ....."
If it's a one-time pad AND no context it's all but impossible
(Might be - remember wartime -rationing- "Put this bird in an oven gas mark 5")
"I'm wondering how they make antihydrogen from antiprotons. Does the proton 'pick up' an ordinary electron, which stays in orbit due to normal processes, or do they give it an antielectron?!"
Well the antiproton would have a negative charge so they'd need a positron rather than an electron. I think antiprotons are relatively 'easy' to make but generating antihydrogen and bringing to reasonable temperatures seems a lot more difficult
"why MS should even bother to spend money developing free software"
One reason is that they charge for skype <=> conventional phone calls. Very reasonable price. I use it regularly to call my mother in UK from Switzerland - costs <2p /min. I see now it can be just £4/month for unlimited calls on a subscription basis (but a fair usage policy !)
Works fine on Linux - we've got a USB headset that improves the quality a lot
Thanks for that.
In reality I'm not too worried - I run a webserver on the internal network but the only external open port is a non-standard one for SSHD which as I mentioned has a password from hell *and a very non-standard username as the only valid account. The server running SSHD is firewalled, the NAT router is firewalled and all ports below 1024 are filtered at my ISP. I'm assuming that the major risk is e-mail attachments and given that I'm VERY suspicious and have trained my wife to be the same I'm fairly sanguine.
I agree I could try tripwire or some such or apparmor.
I really wanted to open up any discussion around Linux security and see if there was anything I'd missed.
*The password from hell is NOT written down, is 20 digits long something not like "bcGbf54TTt32dfcm2n1f" and generated on the fly by a little c program from a passphrase that I can remember. I use the same method, with different passphrases for all my serious passwords
Genuine non-trolling query
I've used Linux for years without any anti-virus, as far as I know there are so few threats and the existing AV programs mostly seem to look for Windows malware that might be passing through. It's summed up in these quotes from the Wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware
"There are a number of anti-virus applications available which will run under the Linux operating system. Most of these applications are looking for exploits which could affect users of Microsoft Windows."
"The following is a partial list of known Linux malware. However, few if any are in the wild, and most have been rendered obsolete by Linux updates or were never a threat. Known malware is not the only or even the most important threat: new malware or attacks directed to specific sites can use vulnerabilities previously unknown to the community or unused by malware."
So far I've relied on regular updates, good firewalls, careful browsing on a limited account, separate account for banking, VERY hard passwords for secure stuff like banking and SSH, and rigid adherence to good practice. (yes I often get e-mailed Windows malware or phishing tricks)
The questions - is this enough - anyone know how effective the current AV products are ? - is this a non-issue ?
I've found it VERY slow when the computer has certain internet connections bizarrely enough
With my home wifi or ethernet it's very fast but at our holiday home (shared wifi) or other wifi or using a 3G dongle it hangs for quit a time before behaving normally - turn off the connection and it's fine.
I think it's a known issue but I can't find it at the mo'
"Linux is too broken to use"
That's rather a broad comment given that lots of people use it all the time. I do every day - I don't use anything else. I obviously can't help with your problem esp. as as it's so vague. I do know that before I retired 200+ people used it in the company I worked for all the time and that was 8-9 years ago.
My wife, who had little in the way of computer education, used Windows at her school until she retired but then had no problem shifting to Linux.
"Why would an average computer user need emacs or vi ?"
They wouldn't need emacs or vi but then again a lot of Linux users are more technically inclined.
I listed my 'user' stuff earlier but in addition :
gcc - I write quite a lot of stuff in 'c'
tcl/tk - for quick GUI front-ends
VirtualBox
Now I'm not a IT professional, although I've been using and building computers since the Science of Cambridge Mk14 and written quite a lot of scientific programs and others for my own use.
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