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New Motorcycle World Speed Record, 367.382 mph
An anonymous reader, apparently a member of the BUB racing team, wrote to let us know that on Thursday, their crew set the new ultimate motorcycle world speed record at 367.382 mph with the BUB Seven Streamliner at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Seven is powered by a 3 Liter, turbocharged, 16-valve V4 engine that produces a claimed 500 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque at 8500 rpm. The pilot, Chris Carr, hit 380 mph during the run.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What the article doesn't tell you is that the motorbike was running Linux and the driver was thinking about the best car analogy while he was driving.
signature is pants
As a biker with a long graying beard, lemme point out that whatever that thing on the picture is, it damn sure ain't a motorcycle.
This all boils down to how you define geek.
I'm an automotive mechanic. My friends and family would also consider me to be a big geek. I fix their computers (yes yes, cars too), I build my own (computers, I haven't built a car from scratch... yet!). I love gadgets and hacking stuff together, and I have an abnormal interest in technology related politics (my girlfriend calls me paranoid). So to the general public, i'm a geek.
Among the Slashdot crowd, I don't have quite the same geek credentials. I don't use any flavour of Linux (besides the occasional liveCD like Backtrack) because my PC is a gaming rig first and foremost. I'm not a sys admin or a programmer. The last thing I "programmed" was fifteen years ago and written in BASIC. I don't run a website, and the extent of my HTML knowledge is frames and tables. I hate math and I don't get off on exciting new prime numbers or subatomic particles. Oh, and i've only played D&D like, twice. It was fun but time consuming. Am I still a geek?
My personal opinion is that geek has moved far beyond the 1980's definition of pocket protectors, glasses, and a calculator. Geeks come in all flavours now, from classical computing and math geeks all the way into sports and automotive geeks. The microprocessor really has changed the way we see the modern world, in virtually every way. A geek is now anyone who shares both a passion for a subject and the thirst for related knowledge, no matter what that subject may be.
The geek shall inherit the Earth. :)
Alternatively, 532.25 attoparsecs per picocentury.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
To give you a more concrete feel of just how fast that is, it's about 3.25922905 * 10^-67 Universe diameters per Planck time.