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Domain: pcwatch.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pcwatch.com.
Comments · 9
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Old HatThis article doesn't present anything more than the now cliched "well if just one percent of stars have planets and one percent of those are in a habitable zone and . .
The only original take is that those 'one percents' are getting replaced with percentages actually based in reality.
Speculations like this used to be popular because astronomy was nowhere near the technology needed to actually see planets out there. If I remember correctly, the first true proof of planets around other stars occurred around 1995 when these first gas giants started to be detected.
With the detection methods getting better every year though, it's only a matter of time before we can directly detect terrestrial sized planets around other stars. That's the point where these statistical guesses get kind of silly.
"I bet there's a thousand planets out there!"
"Actually, there are 1422. We can just count them now."
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Re:mandrake woesI had a win98/mdk8.1 dual boot that died similarly. I didn't tweak the mandrake settings at all. All I used it for was tinkering around with perl and c++. One day it refused to boot into mandrake anymore, claiming that the partitions were damaged. I tried using the mandrake install (Disk Drake I think) to reinstall mandrake just in the partition it was already in, but the utility claimed the partitions were completely fscked and wanted to format the entire hard drive.
Thankfully, I was still able to boot into windows and was able to get all my files off before wiping the drive.
Now it dual boots Windows and RH7.2. Two months and no problems at all.
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
vaporware
Vaporware . . . chips so small they can be inhaled.
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Re:21 days, 24 hours...As I get older, I start to judge books by how thin they are. Who has the time to page through a thousand pages of verbose crap. I gained this bias after building an Access 97 application based on the "Access 97 Bible". 1500 pages!!! Who has the time?
It really depends on the book. I got the Linux Programming Bible a couple weeks ago and it is great, though weighing in at well over a thousand pages. But to relate it to your point, it's good because it acts like the small books. There's a 150 pages on Shell Programming, then 150 on C, then 150 on Perl, then 150 on C++, etc.
On the other hand, like you I learned Access 97 from one of those behemoths - I think it was one of the QUE series. That was a highly unproductive nightmare.
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Robert E. LeeA quote with some relevance to this discussion:
well that war is so terrible - lest we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Leestipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Give em LoopholesI agree that a lot of corporate culture likes the '$600 of software' on each computer, but they don't like actually paying for it. In fact, most of the time they never really paid $600 for the $600 of software. It came preloaded or in a bulk licensing scheme that knocked half the price off.
Free software can beat down this door by price tagging itself at a price equivalent to the commerical software, but only charging nominal fees in reality.
Those same corporate drones that like saying 'there's $600 of software on this computer' would absolutely love to be saying 'there's $600 of software on this computer, but I cut a deal to get it for $50.'
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Re:Plot.Without wombats can great cinema even exist?
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Re:BiologyWow. I have been with her four years, so this blunt jab actually shifted my perception a bit. The weird thing about losing someone after that long is that you still think of yourself as part of a 'we' even though you are now entirely an 'I'. I feel strangely free yet the freedom is strangely painful.
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com -
Re:In relation to Ximian Gnome
I've got a counter question then. I read quite a lot about Linux before I actually took the step of installing it and trying to use it instead of Windows. Before the install, I had assumed that Gnome apps and KDE apps only ran on Gnome and KDE respectively. Obviously this is not the case. What then is the difference between KDE apps and Gnome apps? Just an idle question. stipe42 www.pcwatch.com