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Hypernova Erupts as Global Telescopes Scramble
An anonymous reader writes "The remarkable Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment [ROTSE] telescopes have tracked a 2 billion year old hypernova, from which an intense gamma ray burst reached earth on March 29. From Carl Akerlof, the ROTSE investigator: "The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before." To underscore how the sun never rises on this automated telescope network, the observations switched rapidly from New South Wales in Australia back to Fort Davis, Texas, over a 12 hour burnout of the collapsing black hole."
You know I needs that sweet FP, B!
I really sorry, but I've never had the opportunity to do a first post before. I;m sure by the time I get this up here, it shall be too late, but what the hell. Thank you all for your understanding.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
The domain name www.jessicalynch.org was registered on March 17th, 2003 - six days before the US Private was allegedly captured!
Announcement: OperaSoftware has released Opera 7.1 betas. Please test and submit any bugs. Thank you for making Opera a better product.
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I just heard some sad news on talk radio -- Iraqi general "Chemical" Ali Hassan Al Majid was found dead in the rubble of his Basra home this morning. No further details were available. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him. Even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his ground-breaking efforts in the fields of chemical warfare and genocide. Beloved by the anti-war activists and homicidal megalomaniacs everywhere, he will be missed. Truly an Iraqi icon.
Reality: Windows NT 4.0 Outperforms Linux On Common Customer Workloads The Linux community claims to have improved performance and scalability in the latest versions of the Linux Kernel (2.2), however it's clear that Linux remains inferior to the Windows NT® 4.0 operating system.
For File and Print services, according to independent tests conducted by PC Week Labs, the Windows NT 4.0 operating system delivers 52 percent better performance on a single processor system and 110 percent better performance on a 4-way system than similarly configured single processor and 4-way Linux/SAMBA systems. ( For print services, the bottleneck is not with the spooling speed to the server but in the output speed on the printer )
For Web servers, the same PC Week tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers 41 percent better performance on a single processor system and 125 percent better performance on a 4-way system than Linux and Apache. ( There were two problems with these results. Firstly, they only took into account static HTML page content. Most web sites use CGI to generate dynamic content - Linux beats NT at doing this. Secondly, almost no internet sites use 100Mb Ethernet for their connection. Linux Apache can saturate a 10Mb line even with low end hardware so the "performance" figures are only of interest to high end server farms etc where the competition is Solaris, not Linux See http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.html )
For e-commerce workloads using secure sockets (SSL), recent PC Magazine tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers approximately five times the performance provided by Linux and Stronghold. (SSL is about security not speed.)
For transaction-orientated Line of Business applications, Windows NT 4.0 has achieved a result of 40,368 tpmC at a cost of $18.46 per transaction on a Compaq 8-Way Pentium III XEON processor-based system. This industry leading price/performance result from the transaction processing council clearly shows how Windows NT can deliver world-class performance for heavy duty transaction processing. It's interesting to note that there is not a single TPC result on any database running on Linux, and therefore Linux has yet to demonstrate their capabilities as a database server. (See note on POSIX compliancy below.)
Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0. (Please read the footnote carefully.) The largest file size Linux supports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB RAM. In addition, Linux does not support many of the modern operating system features that Windows NT 4.0 has pioneered such as asynchronous I/O, completion ports, and fine-grained kernel locks. These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors. (Linux generally uses swap partitions, not swap files. In 2.2 kernels, their maximum size is not limited to 128MB per partition, so this is just plain wrong. However, even in 2.0 kernels one could create as many 128MB partitions as limited by the partition table on the disk. In either case, its still possible to use a swap file in which case the limit is simply the maximum file size supported by the OS. The 2gb limit is for x86 architecture only. Linux running on the Alpha platform supports much much more. As for OS features, Linux has always used cutting edge technology but not at the cost of increased size. The "core" NT system is several Megabytes but Linux, due to it's modular nature, is never over 1 meg in size. A Linux kernel over 500k is considered big. NT's lumbering size means that it will never be reliable: bigger program, more bugs.)
The Linux community continues to promise major SMP and performance improvements. They have been promising these since the development of the 2.0 Kernel in 1996. Delivering a scalable system is a complex task and it's not clear
I think that black holes should be explored by brilliant popstars. (Lance Bass from NSYNC) Anyone have any other suggestions for tourists to this final destination?
http://www.basstronaut.com/news.html
cMDR tACO is teh GHEY!
hmm im scared to click on their home page :-)
How much longer do we have to reach the Ringworld?! We need the new hyperdrive NOW!
Sig master! Sig master! Sig... faster?!
Well, sure, for you or I.
But for tan-master Hamilton, tis but a healthy glow.
This story reminds me of the other day at the arcade... A little kid challenged me to a game of Mortal Wombat and for a while I was like getting thrashed so I said like "Hey, all three super bars ar filled!" and bam! Rotated into a crouch and slapped left+right+punch+punch+kick and laid him out with my character's Hypernova finishing move...
What..? Astronomy???
You need a FREE iPod Nano
cancer of the colon?
IF we put Bill Gates in the middle of the explosion, will he get rip to shreds? Nah, he'll probably monopolize and patents the explosions.
I'd suggest they register a .cx domain name instead of .net ...