Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion
Even lukewarm fusion would be satisfy me. driggers writes: "I wrote a review of the book "Excess Heat" for /. last year. I thought you might (or might not :) be interested to learn that the U.S. Navy in February 2002 issued Technical Report No. 1862 titled "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System," Vol. 1 of which summarizes A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories."
Dr. Frank Gordon, Head, Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, concludes his foreword with the remark, "It is time for the government funding organizations to invest in this research."
If you modify the source you must keep it accurate, like a Mad Lib. An Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed the biography of Richard M. Stallman, "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is online at oreilly, released under the GNU Free Documentation License."
What vapors rule the modern day Oracle? MarkedMan writes: "The following CNET article outlines Oracle's reply to the State of California's announcement it was canceling a nearly $100 million dollar contract. It should not come as a surprise, as few companies would give up that kind of money without a fight, not to mention the domino effect if they just rolled over. It would be a tacit admission that they ripped off naive customers."
I turn in trajllions of results per day to Brilliant Digital Entertainment. But where's my parade?!
yes, but the fact that they posted WHO the winner was had not been posted
Is very disappointing - it doesn't really explain him at all - other than to explain he is weird and has disgusting table manners (allegedly).
At least it doesn't suffer from the "we're all making millions cos we are brilliant" syndrome that infected even the latest edition of Rebel Code.
All these stories have been posted before!
Yeah, that's the point. Check the title. It's a Slashback, which is a play on the word "Flashback." In other words, this is where we get to hear about previously-posted stories and their outcomes.
qslack.com
GNU/Richard Stallman was born on the such and such of the year nineteen hundred and such and such. At school nobody liked him because he didn't shower and he smelled really bad so he decided to create Free Software. The End.
I read it (online), and bought a copy. It's a real biography of a real (if unusual) person.
For those who believe that everything must be perfectly bias-free, yes, it does display bias for free software ideals , but that is because it's telling RMS's (suprisingly successful) underdog story, and "triumph against massive odds" reads this way.
A genuinely informative, insightful book - and readable, too.
The article says Oracle is seeing a downturn in sales. Is any of this due to people switching to the open-source alternatives? I'm not a database geek, but from what I understand, the open-source stuff is getting more and more full-featured. Of course a fortune-500 company doesn't care about the extra $$ for Oracle, but I wonder if they're losing out on the lower end...
Find free books.
Notorious Superstars are usually referred to by one name, i.e., Cher, Madonna & Liberace.
Notorious Uber Geeks are usually referred to by their initials by other wannabe geeks, i.e., RMS, ESR & DNA.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I sometimes worry that computer geeks^H^H^H^H^Hprofessionals, like most of the general public, don't actually understand science.
So I'm relieved to see stories like this. The reviewer is fascinated by a book extolling sloppy science, and that's sad. Maybe such stories (like, say this) shouldn't get posted. But it's a relief to see so many thoughtful, highly moderated comments explain what science is, what it means, and why the original post doesn't know what it's talking about.
Oracle is not experiencing any kind of market erosion due to open-source software. Anything you run off PostgreSQL could be ported to Oracle, but you'd probably be a dummy to do so. The reverse is rarely true (except the dummy part).
Breakfast served all day!
Did I miss that link? I feel like Opus when he flipped on the news to hear "...and that is the single most poisonous to penguins item you can find in every household."
(no text)
...um..correction..19 yr old CHICK...
Just Limin' Mon
The winner of the 500 millionth result, Milada had the odds stacked against her. First, she is a she and we all know what the rates are there in the geek world. Next, she's not from the US (41.5% of SETI contributers are US residents), she's listed as Czech (only about 0.6% of the SETI contributers are Czech residents). And last she's only returned (as of this post) 92 results!
Such a combination is so astronomically unlikely, I think we've found our ET people!
But seriously I'm glad the prize went to someone who's got this unlikely profile, it just proves how truly global and widespread the SETI appeal is. Congratulations to SETI and Milada!
Anybody want a peanut?
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version.
Free as in Freedom: As told by Bill Gates
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
It's a Slashback, which is a play on the word "Flashback." In other words, this is where we get to hear about previously-posted stories
/. articles be in Slashback then?
Shouldn't something like 86% of the
</sarcasm>
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community. Yes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs'. But closed cell calorimetry is very hard to do right, and the electrodes are tricky to setup.
But bottom line, its an electrochemical cell that exposes dental x-ray film left next to the jar, and tritium is sometimes produced, all while little intermittent hot spots show up on IR.
So what if "its impossible!" Something interesting is happening, and it deserves to be studied properly, not dismissed...
"Weren't there shredding trucks involved with this somehow?"
I tried to shred trucks once; The tyres went ok, even if bits of rubber came flying out of the shredder like a wood chipper, but the chassis just jammed the whole thing up.
I suggest melting trucks instead of shredding them.
graspee
According to that Navy report, Fleischmann and Pons were right all along. Cold fusion really does exist and it is nuclear, not an artifact of some chemical processes.
So why isn't this being jumped on? It could actually be, as was announced back in 1989, a fruitful course of research and a possible solution to our power problems (as Dr. Frank Gordon writes in the foreward).
I think so, you can get an electronic copy free.
But I agree with you on RMS being an asshole, even if it costs me some of my karma points, currently capped at 50. I absolutely refuse to call my OS a GNU/Linux, just as I refuse to call my car a GOODYEAR/Chevrolet.
And boy that just sucks, I have about 2200 results sent in from Seti, about 29,000 hrs of computer time (at least with my machines). This guy only has 92, and he was the winner..
:-) (Sure, you could find similar examples in the form of lottery winners...)
I find this strangely appropriate. After all, what are the chances of SETI turning up clear signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Slim? Very slim? Miniscule? And here is some fellow that won, in spite of the odds
A dingo ate my sig...
I wish I could give this quote a correct attribution (I wish even more that I had said it originally): "It is morally wrong to allow ignorant end-users to keep their money."
Man you feminists are really a touchy sort.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.