Posts by Chemist 2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
"Weigh is way better, but not whey. Too cheesy."
Weigh is certainly a verb but definitely NOT the correct word to use in this context. Mass is the correct noun and so the construct should be .... .it would have a mass about ten times more than Earth
"@Mage, your own link (correctly) says CO2 is not toxic."
You might like to read the rest of the paragraph !
"Concentrations of 7% to 10% (70,000 to 100,000 ppm) may cause suffocation, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, manifesting as dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.[98] The physiological effects of acute carbon dioxide exposure are grouped together under the term hypercapnia, a subset of asphyxiation."
"Before or after you die of a lack of oxygen?"
As has been mentioned carbon dioxide will kill you quite effectively at modest concentrations. Many years ago I wrote one of our laboratory safety regulations banning people from moving solid carbon dioxide ( a common coolant in labs) by lift.
"Of course the electron is critical for all sorts of technology today and more uses will come every decade"
The electron, involved in all chemistry and hence life and numerous other things like lightning from (almost) the dawn of time. I think J J Thompson was referring to new applications
"Really going back in time??? I have no idea,"
Must be that all the positrons are going back to the "Big Bang Burger Bar", whilst the electrons (heading forwards in time ) are saving their pennies for a night-out at the "Restaurant at the End of the Universe"
Thanks Douglas
"I think one good thing from Vista is that it changed desktop Linux from being mostly an unpolished hobbyist OS to a viable competitor to Windows"
Linux distros had been a perfectly usable, stable and fast desktop OS long before Vista. I'd been using it for years before that ( including professionally) About ~2005 I built a dual core AMD 64 bit system running OpenSUSE 11.? . and that's still going now running Leap 42.2
"Have you managed to get stable WiFi on your Pi? I have a couple old A-model ones here and I have yet to find a USB WiFi adapter that will stay up for more than a few days at a time."
Well most are Pi3s with built-in WiFi which have no problems but 1 Pi2 has a USB Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter which as been running continuously for ~ 150 days without a prob.
(Just had one of those phone calls, funny accent from "Windows Repair Centre". "Please press Windows key and .... well I wasn't listening really just grunting and saying 'Yeh' etc. Described the desktop - which was mostly blank - he eventually twigged it wasn't a Windows machine so accused me of lying about the Windows key 'because you have a Mac'. Needless to say it was the PI I'd setup for my wife. Well it amused my and wasted 10 minutes of his time...)
"I'm getting a Raspberry Pi soon so I can also test on that."
As a little footnote to all the people claiming as usual that LInux is flaky, difficult, cli driven - I've just set a Pi up as a temp. measure after my wife's laptop died after she spilt water all over it . She wanted access to the laserprinter which lives on my file-server. So I installed the GUI printer controller from the (GUI) synaptic software installer and when I clicked on it it had found the printer and was all set to go. That was even easier than on the laptop (OpenSUSE 13.2)
"Calm down Hans 1 - Just uninstall Flash."
I have a couple of sites I use that need Flash, but I do have it set up to ask for permission. On the BBC sites I generally find that ignoring the request to authorize Flash now automatically starts the html5 version.
After using get_iplayer for years I finally built a KDialog GUI box (started from an icon) that you can paste the pid number from the iplayer program page into, that then kicks off a bit of c that sends a request to a Pi that does the download. Works really well and the Pi downloads to a pendrive so I can easily pull it and take it away
The embedded KDialog line is : X=`kdialog --inputbox PID?` ; /home/bin/gip $X where gip is the c program that requests the pasted pid from the Pi daemon
You could, of course, just pass the pid from the dialogue to a script downloading the programme to the local machine
"FF regularly crashed for me, much like their Thunderbird mail program does. "
Thunderbird crashes every week or so for me but I repeat FF never does. I believe you that it does for you - what's needed is to understand why the difference as I've written previously in this thread.
Memory, OS etc
I don't get juddery scrolls either
"Oh, this happens to me all the bloody time"
Can we have a little more detail. Fast/slow hardware, memory in use at the time, OS
As I've mentioned further back I don't see this problem at all even using slow machines, a Pi via VNC, various VMs . Some are slow to open a new tab but the typing all goes to the correct spot without missing anything
"I'll try it later on a 2GB 2-core AMD from ~2004"
Still no problem and that's running the latest OpenSUSE Leap42.2. Not quickly but still no issue with Ctl-T......
I've read most of this topic and I have to say I don't recognise many/most problems at all. For example FF never crashes (and this i7 laptop is only rebooted every couple of months), it uses quite a lot of memory (~1.5GB) on occasion but regularly reclaims it.
Something is wrong, something that is ideosycratic. No idea what but the fact that we can have a large range of behaviors suggests a rather complex problem.
I believe most people when they say they have a problem - I just don't have anything much myself.
"It may have to do with what's in those tabs. "
It may indeed but it's not an easy call. I'm not running a script blocker at the moment because I've been using some booking sites that behave very badly from past experience.
To add a little more I've just run FF ESR via VNC on a Pi and that still opens a new tab etc. without issues and I'd be the first to admit it's not snappy in general. The BBC News website takes quite a while to load and this particular Pi is on an ethernet connection.
All very odd
"Try it with a reasonanle number of tabs open."
Well I've got ~20 open at the moment. Firefox is using ~1.4GB at the mo'. This i7 laptop has 8GB and no SSD . Apart from a few filemanagers/editors and some ssh sessions/remote X progs. I'm not running anything too heavy at the moment.
I've just loaded up Google Earth, a RAW photoeditor, and 2 VMs. There is now ~900MB free, 1.4 GB swap and FF is now more sluggish but Ctl-T is still opening a new tab with the cursor in the address box and all I've typed appearing OK.
I'll try it later on a 2GB 2-core AMD from ~2004
"With Firefox, you type <ctrl>-T rm_or_address.... oh .... it's bloody Fiorefox again."
Genuine inquiry as this doesn't happen to me.
Ctl-T opens a new tab with the cursor in the address box. It happens so quickly that I can't type anything after the Ctl-T that doesn't appear in the box. Mind I'm using a pretty quick laptop (i7)
Firefox 50.1.0, OpenSUSE 13.2
Also I don't lose UI settings during updates.
"An MRI scanner may have used Windows because developing an UI in Linux back then could have been a real pain in the ass"
Well it's years since I did any lab work (~2000) but at the time our robotic mass-spectrometer and superconducting NMR machines all ran on Solaris complete with pretty GUI.
A couple of years later we were taking delivery of Dell workstations (replacing SG) to do computational chemistry, protein modelling and 3D graphics( liquid xtal spectacles) and yes they all ran Red Hat/Gnome and even our in-house programmer was producing high quality GUI software. We tried porting some stuff to W2000 but it generally broke, usually in the night or over the weekend - some of the protein modelling software ran at ~100% CPU on the dual Xeons for days/weeks even.
"Every fecking time someone comes up with these fictional anecdotes."
Why do you imagine that they're fictional ??
I don't expect you to believe it but I've certainly set my (80 year old) mother-in-law with an OpenSUSE setup after WindowsXP committed suicide during an update. She had no problem at all. Firefox for the web, Thunderbird for e-mail, LibreOffice for wp. All she needed really, scanning & printing no problem. Automatic updates. I did install well-protected SSH access for remote sorting of problems but never needed to use it.
As I say : why do you imagine that they're fictional ??
"Lets ask a Gentoo user!"
Yes, let's ask him/her !
To whom it may concern. I've used Linux since ~ the beginning. I use it all the time & nothing else since ~2006. I compile lots of stuff but the last time I compiled a kernel was ~~1997 and even that was a matter of ticking boxes and pressing the 'go' button.
"You need entire galaxies to warp spacetime. Light just goes straight"
You do know that one of the first tests of GR was the 'bending' of a star's position by the sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Deflection_of_light_by_the_Sun
"Therefore triggering A50 overrides an Act of Parliament, so can only happen by an Act by our constitution."
I'm happy to have Parliament oversee any invocation of Art 50 but I don't see how Parliament can agree/disagree to the final terms of exit if it can't be reversed.
"From the first ref. you gave."
From the second they suggest that it's probably down to the lawyers/courts. However the fact that the author himself suggests that it's reversible weights quite a lot with me.
Other people have suggested since the ref. that Art.50 should be reversible but they've been hard to find in the mass of noise on the subject.
On the other hand if it isn't reversible that would suggest that we should be extremely cautious with invoking this article as we are undertaking a huge gamble on the basis of the 'advice' from some very dubious characters and against the advice of almost everyone else.
"If A50 can be backed out of, as some have just started saying,"
Even the author of Article 50 is suggesting it can be canceled !
And as I've noted before -
“there is nothing in Article 50 itself one way or another; it does not say
that you can retract or, once invoked, that you cannot retract. So it is left
to the lawyers to have those enjoyable disputes to sort it out.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldconst/44/44.pdf
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ldeucom/138/13804.htm#_idTextAnchor008
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