Not so crabbit now! [2]

looks more believable now.  Believe me, it's tempting!  Back when I was teaching high school I had my kids calculate how much acceleration there'd be when first cutting loose: that's the weakness of the approach - if you have enough lift to get you to 21,000 feet there will be quite a jerk on lift-off.  Better to have a helium canister along to slowly fill a main balloon.

Above 18,000 is illegal for non-commercial or non-military flight.  Assuming of course that this type of thing is legal to begin with.  Murky: do balloonist operate under a special FAA exemption the same way hang gliders do?  We are allowed to operate so long as we can demonstrate a self regulating community, which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist for lawn chair ballooning the way it might for hot air ballooning.

The other thing I was wondering about is the expansion of the balloons as the altitude increases and the pressure decreases.  "POP" could be a really unsettling noise at 21,000 ft. Not  a problem in a hot air balloon.

this enormous amount of love that i have for everything is weighing me down but i like it

an insane man on the road asked me if i was a model and ofc i played it cool on the outside but on the inside I was BEAMING

I'm glad you're feeling a bit more positive CC.

whats Linux is it something to do with Snoopy?

Back when computers shrunk from the size of a room to the size of a dresser, two operating systems were developed.  One developed by DEC computers called VMS used plain english for all its commands, was highly stable and should have taken over the world.  But it was sold for a price.  Another developed by Bell Labs was called UNIX, and to save processing time was written so tersely and elliptically it looked like Martian.  But it was distributed for free to universities and ended up being the backbone of the internet.

But it wasn't distributed for free to just anyone.  There were several attempts to create clones that had the same user commands but the guts (called the 'kernel') were written differently to avoid trademark disputes so it could be distributed freely (like two robots that look and act the same on the inside but have different widgets running them on the inside).

The one that became successful was written almost as a hobby by Linus Torvalds in Stockholm.  Though he toyed with the idea of naming it Linux, he considered the name too egotistical.  But when other people started calling it that he accepted it.

So Linux allows you to do what all the major computer systems in the world do, with a development community dedicated to cloning stuff for free.  So you can get a free version of photoshop (gimp), a free version of windows (open windows) and lots of other things created largely out of the tinkering drive and idealism.  The downside is that if something goes wrong you don't have a dedicated support team you can call up to walk you through fixing the problem.  Instead you go on community forums until you find someone who has had the same problem and somebody else posts the solution, and you go back and fix it yourself.  Or you post the problem and wait for somebody to be interested enough to post a solution, which they often do because its a nice little ego boost to fix someone else's problem rather than dealing with your own.

nice, so gimp is really Photoshop?

It's basically the same, yeah.  Near-identical functionality for the most part (similar to the late Open Office and Microsoft Office).

and after all that fuss Petty made about gimp, its just the bloody same thing. I'll be having words with him when he gets back.

The buttons probably aren't exactly the same (I dunno, I don't have Photoshop) so it probably would have been hard to give hamster directions if you guys were using different software.

Now Mrs Figg- I recommend GIMP for solid crabbit thinking reasons.
Its got a much better interface for actually getting stuff done, arranging stuff on your screen as you want it ect- photoshop however is so restrictive and unnecesarliy cumbersome in comparison it greatly increases my crabbit levels- and you dont want me crabbit now do you?

probly not, no.

Sorry, I meant open office, not open windows.  THAT would have brought down a shit-storm. Hehehe....I think they should do it.  Though I'm surprised they got away with open office and gimp.

there was loads of rly good British music in the noughties and I was just listening to Green Day & Blink182 and being a general teenage gimp

I seem to remember spending this period of time lamenting the state of british popular music- your examples have done nothing to improve that crabbit opinion.

and Coldplay lol

imagine if you were American and you could watch Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead on your telly at a normal time like a normal person

Yes but think of the downside- youd be American!

i am

Nah, your way to wonderfully eccentric.

i am a normal teenager

You should get that put on a t-shirt.

halfwise wrote:Sorry, I meant open office, not open windows.  THAT would have brought down a shit-storm. Hehehe....I think they should do it.  Though I'm surprised they got away with open office and gimp.

I was wondering if you knew about some alternate operating system I wasn't aware of. Actually, I think Windows 7 borrowed rather liberally from the KDE desktop environment for Linux.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (2008)


KDE 4 (2008)


Windows 7 (2009)


That said, it's clear that the open software community has done quite a bit of "borrowing" themselves, as you point out with Open Office and GIMP.

CC12 35 wrote:imagine if you were American and you could watch Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead on your telly at a normal time like a normal person

You wouldn't be able to call it a telly without feeling ridiculous, though.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:You should get that put on a t-shirt.

I'd wear it!