Slashdot Mirror
Nanotechnology + Superconductivity = Spintronics
karvind writes "Spintronics is a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron's charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron's intrinsic spin and if a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips--including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations. PhysOrg is reporting that University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues have found a way to achieve this control using a magnetic semiconductor, insulator and superconducting material stack of thicknesses of order of few dozen nanometers. IBM and Stanford are also looking into spintronics."
I heard of spintronics before. I have some idea of what electron spin is from university, but not much more. So when I saw the article, I thought "wow, great, a nice-looking /. blurb choke full of links to the subject"... only to discover that 4 out of the 5 links link back to /. itself, and the last one links to a half-page semi-general article in physorg.com.
I don't know, I guess I may as well Google spintronics at random...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the Linux community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: Linux is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. This led to Mandrakesoft, makers of another troubled distro, to purchase Connectiva. However, industry anaylists say that this will not help since Mandrakesoft is already a shell of its former self.
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 120 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: Trivial issues such as names and a lack of professionalism continue to plague Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest all of them. Thirty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that Ubuntu sounds like an obscure term for a gay orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running FreeBSD."
Fact: The Slackware Distro is now dead. The Slackware team could never get their distro to function on hardware other than Intel and S/390. Had they not been slacking off, Slackware would still be around.
Fact: Servers running SELinux, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few SELinux servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "The SELinux team will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the Linux community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: Linux is already dead.
This is just the type of technology that we have secretly been investigating from crashed ufo's.
Of *BSD 4sswipes