NINGRAT SITE

YAMAHA MOTORCYCLE YBR-125, GUYS

2008-07-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

YBR125-Custom

Get you motor running, head out on the highway

The YBR125 Custom goes the whole way with teardrop tank, high ‘bars, deep-valance fenders, slash-cut muffler (rated to EU3 emissions) and a low-slung seat for laid-back riding. Oh yeah, and the YBR125 Custom gets lots of chrome, from the plated dials all the way back to the neat rear carrier.

Take some chilled-out custom styling, mix it up with some rugged YBR125 engineering and you’ve got the genuine US cruiser look.

sumber:www.superstreetbike.com

BIKE SAFETY WITH READING

2008-07-07T22:47:00.000-07:00

In Wikipedia, the safety bicycle had definied a type of bicycle that became very popular beginning in the late 1880s. The first safety, using a diamond frame, was invented by John Kemp Starley in 1885. "Safeties" are characterized by having two wheels of identical - or nearly identical - size, and a chain-driven rear wheel.

The safety bicycle was a big improvement on the previous penny-farthing design which it replaced. The chain drive, coupling a large front cog (the chainring) to a small rear cog (the sprocket) to multiply the revolutions of the pedals, allowed for much smaller wheels, and replaced the need for the large, directly pedaled front wheel of the "penny-farthing" or "high ordinary". The smaller wheel gave a harder ride, thus hastening the replacement of solid tires with pneumatic ones.

With the center of gravity low and between the wheels, rather than high and near the front hub, the Safety greatly diminished the danger of "taking a header" or long fall over the handlebars. This made braking more effective and cycling, previously the reserve of spry, daring young men, safer, and therefore much more popular, especially for women. The same basic design of bicycle is still in common use today.

SMALL INFO MOTORCYCLE HISTORY

2008-07-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

Petroleum power

The inspiration for the earliest dirt bike, and arguably the first motorcycle, was designed and built by the German inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in Bad Cannstatt (since 1905 a city district of Stuttgart) in 1885. The first petroleum-powered vehicle, it was essentially a motorized bicycle, although the inventors called their invention the Reitwagen ("riding car"). They had not set out to create a vehicle form but to build a simple carriage for the engine, which was the focus of their endeavours.

Steam power

However, if one counts two wheels with steam propulsion as being a motorcycle, then the first one may have been American. One such machine was demonstrated at fairs and circuses in the eastern United States in 1867, built by Sylvester Howard Roper of Roxbury, Massachusetts.[1] There exists an example of a Roper machine dating from 1869, but there is no patent existing and nothing proves it was a working model. It was powered by a charcoal-fired two-cylinder engine, whose connecting rods directly drive a crank on the rear wheel. The Roper machine pre-dates the invention of the safety bicycle by many years, so its chassis is based on the "boneshaker" bike.

In 1868, the French engineer Louis-Guillaume Perreaux patented a similar steam-powered vehicle, which was probably invented independent of Roper's. In this case, although a patent exists that is dated 1868, nothing indicates the invention had been operable before 1871. Nevertheless, these steam-powered vehicles were invented prior to the first petroleum-powered motorcycle.
An 1894 Hildebrand & Wolfmüller

First commercial products

In the decade from the late 1880s, dozens of designs and machines emerged, particularly in France, Germany and England, and soon spread to America.[2] During this early period of motorcycle history, there were many manufacturers since bicycle makers were adapting their designs for the new internal combustion engine.

In 1894, the Hildebrand & Wolfmüller became the first motorcycle available to the public for purchase.[3] However, only a few hundred examples of this motorcycle were ever built. Soon, as the engines became more powerful and designs outgrew the bicycle origins, the number of motorcycle-oriented producers increased.

The first known motorcycle in the United States was said to be brought to New York by a French circus performer, in 1895. It weighed about 200 lb (91 kg) and was capable of 40 mph (64 km/h) on a level surface.[4] However, that same year, American inventor E.J. Pennington demonstrated a motorcycle of his own design in Milwaukee. Pennington claimed his machine was capable of a speed of 58 mph, and is credited with inventing the term "motor cycle" to describe his machine.[5]

PENCIL BAD AND STUPID

2008-07-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

STUPID OLD PENCIL

When Bertie Ahern casts his vote this morning in the Irish Republic’s closest-fought general election for decades, the cameras would do well to focus on his clenched teeth. The Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach is not happy about having to go into a polling booth with a “stupid old pencil”.
A half-hour drive from his North Dublin constituency the object of Mr Ahern’s ire is under lock and key, stored in a hangar on a coastal military base: thousands of electronic voting machines, purchased at a cost of more than €50 million three years ago.
And the expense is rising. Storage of the 7,500 Dutch-made machinery costs another €1 million (£685,000) a year.
The machines were used as pilots in a number of constituencies in the 2002 general election and in the second Nice referendum that same year.
They were mothballed after the independent Commission on Electronic Voting said, before the 2004 local and European elections, that it did not have confidence in them.
Last year, in another report, the commission raised further questions about the security of the machines.
“Our silly old system is outdated,” Mr Ahern told the Dail, the Irish parliament, recently.
“We have to correct the software, which will cost €500,000, and then try to move forward. Otherwise we will go into the 21st century being the laughing stock with our stupid old pencils.”
The issue reemerged just before Mr Ahern called elections when the Opposition raised the cost as an example of the profligacy of the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrat coalition Government.
With an economy that has recorded year-on-year growth for the past decade, the Opposition has tried to portray the Government as wasting what may have been the country’s boom years through incompetence.
As traffic jams worsen, hospital waiting lists lengthen and schools burst at the seams, it’s a strategy that seems to strike a chord with harassed voters. Opinion polls have seesawed throughout the campaign, making it too close to call.
The two main political groupings, Mr Ahern’s centre-right coalition and Enda Kenny’s centre-left alliance of Fine Gael and Labour, are running neck-and-neck.
If neither of the big two gets a majority under Ireland’s complex multi-seat constituency, proportional representation system based upon the single transferable vote, smaller parties, such as Sinn Fein, the Greens or independents, could hold the balance of power in the 166-seat lower chamber.
The likelihood is that tomorrow, when the count begins around the country, the outcome of the election may take days or even weeks to emerge.
With each of the Republic’s 43 constituencies electing four or five TDs (Members of Parliament), manually recounting votes to eliminate candidates took up to six days in some cases during the 2002 election. Today voters must choose by writing ‘1’ against their first choice then ‘2’, ‘3’ and so on against successive candidates with those “stupid” pencils.
“What kind of a country is this?” asked Pat Rabitte, leader of the Labour Party, last month as he rubbed salt into Mr Ahern’s wounds over the e-voting fiasco.
Mr Ahern agreed, saying that he was embarrassed by the speed of France’s presidential election result. He blamed the opposition for raising political objections to the “perfect” voting machines.
He said: “You’re dead right. I must have felt embarrassed when I watched over 80 million people have the result of their highest polls ever – over 85 per cent – in two hours.
“I had to go down to Meath and apologise to the people of Meath for being a technologically advanced country and one of the biggest exporters of software, that we’re going back to the pencils”.
“It’s a disgrace, and any waste of money on the voting system lies at your door,” he told his opposition tormentors.
“With a bit of luck, our election will be finished in about five days, as we go checking the bins to see if a vote blew off the pile. It is an embarrassment, and I hope in the next Dail, that we are able to rid ourselves of the horrendous difficulties we have trying to be a modern country.”

MOUSE CRAZY AND STUPID

2008-07-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Laptop - Crazy touchpad mouse?

I bought a compaq laptop a few months ago and ever since I've bought it I've had problems with the touchpad mouse. Every now and then the mouse will become uncontrollable and will not go where I want it to. Sometimes it skips back and forth across the screen. It does this for about a minute before I am able to gain control of it again. I have never used an external mouse on it since I normally do not have the room for one and would prefer not to use this as a solution. Does anyone know what might be causing this problem and if there are any ways of fixing it?

OS X Odyssey 439 - Teal Public Preview 2 OS X Painting Application

There are not a whole lot of image editing applications available for OS X. There is of course Photoshop and its lighter featured stablemate, Photoshop Elements; the freeware (but humongous) GIMP, the venerable but very popular shareware GraphicConverter, and a few others like the amazingly polished freeware ToyViewer. However, there's plenty of room for more entries in this category.
Teal is a little OS X painting application released last week as a preview. The developer expalins that: "following the demise of PhotoNick, there is a need for a free entry level image retouching package for Mac OS X."

The current roadmap for Teal is to make a program with a feature set roughly analogous to Paint Shop Pro 4. Once this has been reached, further features will be added on a priority basis (eg, layers, etc.) "Teal won't be DPaint, and will most likely never be Photoshop. Most importantly, Teal is not intended as a replacement for GraphicConverter. It is my intention that Teal complement rather than compete with GraphicConverter, and, beyond the basic essential features, priority will be given to features currently missing from GraphicConverter over features that it already implements well."
New ion this version: Colour grabber Convolution matrix effects Effect Brush Threshold added to fill Magic selection Realtime visual feedback added for selection brushes JPEG options dialogue

Brush tools in Teal include:
Point Brush A single pixel wide brush that draws a continuous line between mouse samples.
Circle Brush Draws an optionally feathered circle of the selected radius at mouse sample points.
Fill A flood fill that is stopped by pixels of a different colour to the colour of the pixel first clicked on. The tolerance can be adjusted using the threshold slider.
Clone Brush Reads a circular area located at an offset from mouse sample points, and prints it at the mouse sample points. The source is set by the first click, then the offset is determined by the second click. Cloning begins immediately on the second click. The source and offset can be cleared by pressing the reset button.
Smudge Brush Records a circular area around the first mouse down, then prints this record at subsequent mouse sample points until the mouse button is released. Produces an effect like smearing wet paint with your finger.
Effect Brush Applies an effect to a feathered circular area at sample points. The effect is cumulative between brush strokes.
Undo Brush Undoes the last action that modified the image. Circular areas of the image before the last action are revealed at mouse sample points.
Paste Brush Used when pasting an image from the pasteboard. When pasting, this brush will be selected automatically. Click to begin pasting. A translucent image of the pasted picture will indicate where the pasting will occur. Release the mouse button when you are satisfied with the location.
Rectangular Selection Adds a rectangle to, or subtracts from the currently selected area. When an area is selected, brushes that modify the image will only be of effect within the selected area. In the absence of a selection, copying will copy the whole image to the pasteboard. When an area is selected, only that area will be copied.
Selection brushes can be switched from additive to subtractive mode by pressing the selection button, and the selection can be reset to none by pressing the reset button, choosing Selection -> Reset from the menu, or pressing Shift-Cmd-R.
Circular Selection As with before, except with a circular area. The centre is defined by where the mouse button is depressed, then the radius is defined by where it is released.
Lasso Selection As with before, except with an arbitrary closed area. The area is defined by drawing it in a single mouse stroke. When the mouse is released, the area is closed, and added to or subtracted from the current selection.
Magic Selection Selects the area adjacent to the selected point where the colour of that area differs from the colour of the selected point by less than the specified threshold.

Colour Grabber Sets the current colour to the colour of the pixel at the mouse sample.
Effects:
Emboss Produces a textured effect dependant on the image intensity using a convolution matrix.
Gaussian Blur A 9 x 9 Gaussian blur (looks prettier than median) implemented using a convolution matrix. Blur size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.
Median A 3 x 3 median (average) implemented using a convolution matrix. This effect was implemented primarily to test convolution. Median size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.
Pixelate Gives the effect of viewing the image on a low resolution display. Pixel size will be variable, pending the addition of effect options dialogues.
Scan Lines Gives the effect of viewing the image on a television, by alternatively darkening and lightening scan lines. This effect was implemented primarily for testing purposes. Options are planned, though not presently implemented.
File Formats supported: • Currently, only 24-bit RGB PNG and JPEG files are supported.
Future Plans
It is hoped that eventually, a plug-in API will be available so people can write their own Teal plug-ins.
Other features planned for future versions: Enlarge canvas Flip and mirror Rotate Resample New image from pasteboard Rectangular and circular shape brushes. Alpha channel support Feathered selection Mask effects (shadow, glow, etc) Averaging colour dropper Options dialogues for effects More image wide effects (suggestions welcome)
One that I would suggest is that the "Cut" command in the File menu be activated, especially pertaining to selected portions of an image. When you paint and draw as badly as I do, this is very important. ;-)
In general, Teal is a cool little program that has lots of potential.
System requirements: Mac OS X version 10.2
Teal will continue to be freeware, and most likely open source.

Color It! For OS X Now In Beta Testing
And speaking of OS X image editing applications, MicroFrontier has announced that:
"We are in the beta testing process for a 'Carbonized' version of Color It! to run native under Mac OS X, an enormous effort that has taken over a year. At this time, a date has not been set as to when the OS X version will be available."
In the meantime, all MicroFrontier products work in Mac OS X (including 10.2.8), although they run in the Classic mode.
Color It! 4.1 is my favorite Mac image editor by a wide margin, and it's the one I use 95% of the time. It's lightining fast in Classic Mode (as you might expect for an application that supports Macs as old as the 68020 machines of the early '90s), supports Photoshop plugins, and offers virtually all of Photoshop's functionality *that I would ever use* without Photoshop and Photoshop Elements' bulk and ponderous slowness.
News that the long-awaited OS X port of Color It! is exciting, at least to me.

Panther Quick Takes
From David Chilstrom
I've been happily running Panther since its release without incident. Here are a few off the cuff observations, particularly relative to speed.
On a 600 Mhz Non-Quartz Extreme iBook, everything is noticeably faster. Specific things like starting Help; System Preferences, Preview and doing quick searches in the Finder are much faster. One of my particular peeves in Jaguar (besides the glacial performance of Help) was the turgid response of popup menus from folders or drives placed in the Dock. This feature was barely usable for me in Jaguar. It's quite adequate in Panther, easily on par with OS 9's Apple menu and navigating hierarchical directories there. Also, the 5 levels deep limitation that existed in the old Apple menu and in Jaguar is gone. You can now go as deep as you want.
Further on speed, is the utility of fast user switching (even without the cool rotating cube effect.) I was just running Adobe GoLive in my "Web Geek" account and I noticed from the one I'm in now, "Surfer Dude" that GoLive had run amok and was gobbling up memory like there's no tomorrow. I was able to logout that account while remaining undisturbed in finishing this e-mail in this account.
There's a definite value in being able to isolate problem applications like GoLive as well as having a customized workspace for a particular task, like web editing. Another benefit is that your primary account doesn't get trashed with the detritus that inevitably builds up over time. For instance, I've set up a purgatory account for putting any software under review through its trials before purchasing and installing in my applications folder. And I have a "Fort Knox" account with FileVault enabled for those few items on my Mac that I'd rather have under lock and key. Fast user switching makes utilizing multiple accounts for a single user a workable proposition. A facility for managing multiple workspaces (each with its own Desktop, Dock and running applications) within a single user account would probably be more efficient, but there is something about working in a hermetically sealed space that is comforting. If I trash my "Xperimental" account by doing something stupid, I can be fairly certain that accounts I need for real work have been unharmed.
File dialogs are well served by the immediacy of the places sidebar and it's really great to have list view as an option there. The sidebar has replaced Jaguar's favorites, but one feature missing is a way to add items to the sidebar while in a file dialog. In Jag there is an "Add to Favorites" button available when in a file dialog.
I read Chris Long's bad experience with Font Book. I installed 1500 fonts with it the other night without incident, but I did that from a non-admin account.

Font Book is clearly unrefined, but once you accept its quirks and annoyances (like wholly unnecessary dialogs reminding you for the umpteenth time that disabling a font collection will disable all the fonts therein) it does seem to work OK. I may change my mind after more experience with it, but for now its adequate for the modest font management demands I presently have. Other improvements in type handling in Panther are very impressive, overshadowing the clunkiness of Font Book.
The good thing about Font Book is that professional font utility vendors have nothing to worry about. The bad thing is that Font Book's simple approach to font management could be less obtuse and do a better job of protecting the user without driving him crazy with stupid nagging dialog boxes. I look forward to Font Book 2.0.
I mentioned Help before as being faster. It's not instantaneous, but it is much improved in performance over Jaguar. One great improvement is that doing a search in a particular application's Help doesn't return results for other applications as well. Perhaps somebody at Apple thought that was a cool feature, returning all instances of a query in the help files of all applications, but nine times out of ten it just slowed down the search and aggravated the user by giving a long list of useless hits.

COMPUTER CRAZY AND BAD

2008-06-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

"On two occasions, I have been ask [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The folowing is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users. It's a baffling phenomenon that in today's society an individual, who might in other circumstances be considered smart and wise, can sit down in front of a computer screen and instantly lose every last shred of common sense he ever possessed. Complicate this phenomenon with a case of "computerphobia," and you end up with tech support personnel having phone conversations that are funny in retrospect but seem like perfectly valid motive for wil machine gun shooting sprees at the time. You will read stories in this file that will convince you that among the human race are human-shaped artichokes futilely attempting to break the highly regarded social convention that vegetables should not operate electronic equipment. And yet, amidst the vast, surging quantities of stupidity are perfectly excusable technological mishaps -- but that are amusing nonetheless. After all, even the best of us engages in a little brainless folly every once in a while.
Most of these stories are true. Some hapened to me personally. Some happened to friends of mine. Some are considered urban legends, but even most of these are more likely to have happened in some form or another than not. Skeptics look at such stories and doubt their truth. But reason, comon sense, and experience tell me that if you sit someone who isn't computer literate (even a smart someone) down in front of a computer, you're bound to accrue anecdotes no less outrageous than these. You'd be surprised.

WOW MACHINE MANIPULATE DATA

2008-06-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

The first devices that resemble modern computer date to the mid-20th centuri (around 1940 - 1945), although the computer concep and various machines similar to computers existed earlier. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers.

Modern computers are based on tiny integrated circuits and are millions to billions of times more capable.
Today, simple computers may be made small enough to fit into a wristwatch and be powered from a watch battery. Personal computers, in various forms, are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "a computer"; however, the most common form of computer in use today is the embedded computer.

The ability to store and execute list of instructions call programs mekes computers extremely versatile and distinguishes them from calculators. The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a certain minimum capability is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. Therefore, computers with capability and complexity ranging from that of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer are all able to perporm the same computational tasks given enough time and storage capacity.

UPS...TIMELINE OF COMPUTER HISTORY

2008-06-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

WHAT THE TIMELINE IS

This timeline explores the history of computing from 1939 to 1994. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in harware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial application and artificial intelligence.

HOW THE TIMELINE WORKS

Across the top of this and every timeline is a graphic with the years from 1939 to 1994 displayed as well as seven topic areas.
The timeline can either be brows using the links above (and appropriate Previous/Next and More links on each page) or searched for specific events.

AHAA...INTERNET HISTORY?

2008-06-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitiv. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.

Domestically, data communicatione over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The ‘Picturephone’ of 1939, shown again at the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defensee, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ reserch, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.

By 1992, when this timeline ends,

the Internet has one million hosts
the ARPANET has ceased to exist
computers are nine orders of magnitude faster
network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.