If the probe was only traveling at.6c top speed, it would take closer to 35 years to reach the planet, when you allow for some acceleration and deceleration time. That means that we could start getting close-ups about 55 years after launch.
Where did you get the idea that being tidal locked would subject it to frequent quakes? I don't see a connection there. Also, TFA says that there shouldn't be a huge temperature difference between the sides of the planet.
So, the temperature range indicates that it can probably be made hospitable for humans. Sure, we might have to bring a lot of our own oxygen and water to start with, but otherwise, we just need a colony ship. And, of course, the gravity is pretty strong (2.25 Gs) so we will have trouble with that. And, it being so close to the star, there might be a big radiation problem, forcing humans to go underground. But that wouldn't be too bad, because it would make gravity a bit less of a problem.
What I think is the coolest thing is that this is the smallest extrasolar planet found so far. We are getting close to being able to detect earth-sized planets. Once we do, I think the number of potentially colonizable planets will go up quite a bit.
Somewhere in their pdfs, it says that the EDGE architecture should be better at emulating x86 than a VLIW or Itanic processor. If they can get some dynamic recompilation going, they should be good. (Though they will still have to scale beyond 500Mhz.) It does seem pretty interesting having 16 ALUs per core, and not using registers for intermediate values.
If MS decided to skip town (continent, actually) just because the court room hearings were getting rough, it would be quite sensible for the EU to freeze all their assets and issue warrants for the arrest of the executives. Once you start thinking of Microsoft as organized crime, it gets a lot easier to decide what to do with them.
I don't think the date of that article matters much. Since that article was written, HT has been sped up, more companies have signed on, and some neat things like the HTX slot have been created. None of those make the article less relevant.
On a different note, the Inq article mentions that "it is one of the 'thou shalt nots' of the Intel competition manual, how it forced AMD to make their own bus." I think history has shown that AMD will always end up with a better bus. For the athlon, they used the aplha ev6 bus, and then they went and made HyperTransport. Perhaps Intel has realized that putting together a good bus architecture isn't hard.
Presumably, if microsoft ceases to exist as a company, somebody will still own the IP for windows XP (at least, until the copyright expires). If the owner of said IP is not microsoft, they are not likely to care about piracy of xp, so they would probably be willing to release a patch to disable activation, or something to that effect.
I'm pretty sure microsoft will have to keep their XP activation servers open for a long time. If they turn them off in even a decade, they will be wide open for some very nasty, very easy lawsuits. The windows licenses don't have an expiration date, so MS would have to demonstrate the the customer had violated the terms before they could stop activations without breaching contracts left and right.
Microsoft's alternatives would include giving all remaining XP users a refund (not feasible, even for them) and setting up an automatic approval server or other mechanism that would allow XP to be activated without troubling them. Unfortunately, that would make piracy even more trivial, and XP will continue to be usable (if a bit insecure) for years to come.
I was quite serious. A complete linux distro, with all available source code, easily fits on a recent hard drive. The only people who are actually using more than 100Gb are people who are baking up large collections of DVDs and music. Other than the multimedia, desktops don't really need more than 10Gb. (That's not to say they don't use more than 10Gb. They do. But that qualifies as bloat.)
Software really should be usable during beta. Nobody should have to wait for 2 service packs, and nobody should tolerate software that is released in such a bad condition as Vista. Asking people to wait a few years before criticizing Vista is like asking people to excuse $POLITICIAN because he's a moron.
Some people have complained that the "defectivebydesign" tag is being overused on Vista stories. I say that is an oxymoron.
Intel has been doing a lot of work to get around the relative limitation of not having an on-board memory controller. When they integrate the memory controller, quite a bit of that work will be irrelevant. Sure, being smart about how you cache things is good. But intel has done what they can to reduce their dependence on a bottleneck. When that bottleneck is removed, they won't necessarily be able to scale to full use of the new bandwidth.
I think it is AMD that has been increasing the performance by making drastic changes (64 bit, on-die memory controller, HT bus) whereas intel has been using their fab capacity to their advantage, by including big caches (for x86) and being the first to a die shrink.
These days, file compression is pretty much only used for large downloads. In those instances, you really have to use either gzip, pkzip, or bzip2 format, so that your users can extract the file.
Yes, having a good compression algorithm is nice, but unless you can get it to partially supplant zip, you'll never make much money off it. Also, most things these days don't need to be compressed. Video and audio are already encoded with lossy compression, web pages are so full of crap that compressing them is pointless, and hard drives are big enough. Although, I haven't seen any research lately about whether compression is useful for entire filesystems to reduce the bottleneck from hard drives. Still, I suspect that it is not worth the effort.
Where did you get the idea that you cannot disclaim liability from public domain software? That seems to go entirely against the idea of public domain. If public domain software causes problems, who do you sue when nobody owns it? Please do answer this. I have downloaded several pieces of public domain software with disclaimers of liability attached. I'm sure the authors would like to know if those disclaimers are illegal.
On my computers, OS X takes up a lot more space than XP, and I don't have any extra microsoft software (such as Office) installed that is affecting windows update. Even considering that OS X is composed of universal binaries and lots of eye candy, I don't think Windows XP has twice as much code to be reviewed and patched if necessary.
Too bad you are an AC. I would like to be able to read your other rants about the failings of capitalism.
If the wii is selling much better than any other new console, that defines it as not crap. The fact that you have a low opinion of it simply defines you as not being part of the target market.
Maybe the feds check out that kind of thing. I can testify that at least one county government (with several thousand employees and about a million citizens) has such a bad IT department that they would be hard pressed to figure out that RIM is canadian. All employees within about 5 hops of the county manager on the O-chart have blackberries for official use.
All of my systems check for updates every time I turn them on, ie daily. But that doesn't really matter, as long as the systems check significantly more often than updates are released.
When somebody says "... Apple updates and patches their system constantly compared to Microsoft" that seems to be a exaggerated way of saying that Apple releases patches far more often than Microsoft. In my experience, the opposite is the case. I asked if I was interpreting the comment the right way, and explained why I was questioning the parent's comment. That is in no way a straw man attack, and I can't take it down anyways.
I didn't say that most slashdot users don't use windows. What I said was that they prefer to not use windows. I sympathize with all those who can't use anything else, for whatever reason.
Also, any poll on the subject would be useless. All it would tell us is that CowboyNeal is more popular than Vista.
Well, practically nobody can get away with charging for security patches for a currently shipping product. But apple has been known to charge for each and every new feature, such as unlocking 802.11n, and their frequent OS releases.
As for why there are rarely links to the security bulletins released by MS, that should be obvious. Anybody who really wants to try to extract information from their generic notices, rather than check Secunia, can look it up themselves. Also, Windows is not the preferred OS for the slashdot crowd.
Lastly, this is an honest security update. It has nothing to do with DRM or screwing the customer, so the defectivebydesign tag is unwarranted. The summary also doesn't say anything nasty about Apple or anybody else, so it is not flamebait.
Did you really mean to say that Apple releases patches more often than Microsoft? Because that is just plain wrong. I get pestered by Windows update at least twice as often as by OS X Software Update, and I use both operating systems regularly.
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If the probe was only traveling at .6c top speed, it would take closer to 35 years to reach the planet, when you allow for some acceleration and deceleration time. That means that we could start getting close-ups about 55 years after launch.
Where did you get the idea that being tidal locked would subject it to frequent quakes? I don't see a connection there. Also, TFA says that there shouldn't be a huge temperature difference between the sides of the planet.
You forgot to account for the fact that the radius is 1.5 times that of Earth. The best estimate puts that planet at around 2.25 times earth gravity.
So, the temperature range indicates that it can probably be made hospitable for humans. Sure, we might have to bring a lot of our own oxygen and water to start with, but otherwise, we just need a colony ship. And, of course, the gravity is pretty strong (2.25 Gs) so we will have trouble with that. And, it being so close to the star, there might be a big radiation problem, forcing humans to go underground. But that wouldn't be too bad, because it would make gravity a bit less of a problem.
What I think is the coolest thing is that this is the smallest extrasolar planet found so far. We are getting close to being able to detect earth-sized planets. Once we do, I think the number of potentially colonizable planets will go up quite a bit.
Somewhere in their pdfs, it says that the EDGE architecture should be better at emulating x86 than a VLIW or Itanic processor. If they can get some dynamic recompilation going, they should be good. (Though they will still have to scale beyond 500Mhz.) It does seem pretty interesting having 16 ALUs per core, and not using registers for intermediate values.
If MS decided to skip town (continent, actually) just because the court room hearings were getting rough, it would be quite sensible for the EU to freeze all their assets and issue warrants for the arrest of the executives. Once you start thinking of Microsoft as organized crime, it gets a lot easier to decide what to do with them.
I don't think the date of that article matters much. Since that article was written, HT has been sped up, more companies have signed on, and some neat things like the HTX slot have been created. None of those make the article less relevant.
On a different note, the Inq article mentions that "it is one of the 'thou shalt nots' of the Intel competition manual, how it forced AMD to make their own bus." I think history has shown that AMD will always end up with a better bus. For the athlon, they used the aplha ev6 bus, and then they went and made HyperTransport. Perhaps Intel has realized that putting together a good bus architecture isn't hard.
When you care about the long range stability of a platform that much, you use an operating system that you control i.e. Linux or BSD.
Presumably, if microsoft ceases to exist as a company, somebody will still own the IP for windows XP (at least, until the copyright expires). If the owner of said IP is not microsoft, they are not likely to care about piracy of xp, so they would probably be willing to release a patch to disable activation, or something to that effect.
I'm pretty sure microsoft will have to keep their XP activation servers open for a long time. If they turn them off in even a decade, they will be wide open for some very nasty, very easy lawsuits. The windows licenses don't have an expiration date, so MS would have to demonstrate the the customer had violated the terms before they could stop activations without breaching contracts left and right.
Microsoft's alternatives would include giving all remaining XP users a refund (not feasible, even for them) and setting up an automatic approval server or other mechanism that would allow XP to be activated without troubling them. Unfortunately, that would make piracy even more trivial, and XP will continue to be usable (if a bit insecure) for years to come.
I was quite serious. A complete linux distro, with all available source code, easily fits on a recent hard drive. The only people who are actually using more than 100Gb are people who are baking up large collections of DVDs and music. Other than the multimedia, desktops don't really need more than 10Gb. (That's not to say they don't use more than 10Gb. They do. But that qualifies as bloat.)
Software really should be usable during beta. Nobody should have to wait for 2 service packs, and nobody should tolerate software that is released in such a bad condition as Vista. Asking people to wait a few years before criticizing Vista is like asking people to excuse $POLITICIAN because he's a moron.
Some people have complained that the "defectivebydesign" tag is being overused on Vista stories. I say that is an oxymoron.
Intel has been doing a lot of work to get around the relative limitation of not having an on-board memory controller. When they integrate the memory controller, quite a bit of that work will be irrelevant. Sure, being smart about how you cache things is good. But intel has done what they can to reduce their dependence on a bottleneck. When that bottleneck is removed, they won't necessarily be able to scale to full use of the new bandwidth.
I think it is AMD that has been increasing the performance by making drastic changes (64 bit, on-die memory controller, HT bus) whereas intel has been using their fab capacity to their advantage, by including big caches (for x86) and being the first to a die shrink.
TAR is not a compressor.
These days, file compression is pretty much only used for large downloads. In those instances, you really have to use either gzip, pkzip, or bzip2 format, so that your users can extract the file.
Yes, having a good compression algorithm is nice, but unless you can get it to partially supplant zip, you'll never make much money off it. Also, most things these days don't need to be compressed. Video and audio are already encoded with lossy compression, web pages are so full of crap that compressing them is pointless, and hard drives are big enough. Although, I haven't seen any research lately about whether compression is useful for entire filesystems to reduce the bottleneck from hard drives. Still, I suspect that it is not worth the effort.
Vista = BS
Fixed it for you.
Where did you get the idea that you cannot disclaim liability from public domain software? That seems to go entirely against the idea of public domain. If public domain software causes problems, who do you sue when nobody owns it? Please do answer this. I have downloaded several pieces of public domain software with disclaimers of liability attached. I'm sure the authors would like to know if those disclaimers are illegal.
The p4 hit 3.066 Ghz in November 2002. Those processors are now quite old, nearly 4.5 years.
On my computers, OS X takes up a lot more space than XP, and I don't have any extra microsoft software (such as Office) installed that is affecting windows update. Even considering that OS X is composed of universal binaries and lots of eye candy, I don't think Windows XP has twice as much code to be reviewed and patched if necessary.
Too bad you are an AC. I would like to be able to read your other rants about the failings of capitalism.
If the wii is selling much better than any other new console, that defines it as not crap. The fact that you have a low opinion of it simply defines you as not being part of the target market.
Maybe the feds check out that kind of thing. I can testify that at least one county government (with several thousand employees and about a million citizens) has such a bad IT department that they would be hard pressed to figure out that RIM is canadian. All employees within about 5 hops of the county manager on the O-chart have blackberries for official use.
All of my systems check for updates every time I turn them on, ie daily. But that doesn't really matter, as long as the systems check significantly more often than updates are released.
When somebody says "... Apple updates and patches their system constantly compared to Microsoft" that seems to be a exaggerated way of saying that Apple releases patches far more often than Microsoft. In my experience, the opposite is the case. I asked if I was interpreting the comment the right way, and explained why I was questioning the parent's comment. That is in no way a straw man attack, and I can't take it down anyways.
I didn't say that most slashdot users don't use windows. What I said was that they prefer to not use windows. I sympathize with all those who can't use anything else, for whatever reason.
Also, any poll on the subject would be useless. All it would tell us is that CowboyNeal is more popular than Vista.
Well, practically nobody can get away with charging for security patches for a currently shipping product. But apple has been known to charge for each and every new feature, such as unlocking 802.11n, and their frequent OS releases.
As for why there are rarely links to the security bulletins released by MS, that should be obvious. Anybody who really wants to try to extract information from their generic notices, rather than check Secunia, can look it up themselves. Also, Windows is not the preferred OS for the slashdot crowd.
Lastly, this is an honest security update. It has nothing to do with DRM or screwing the customer, so the defectivebydesign tag is unwarranted. The summary also doesn't say anything nasty about Apple or anybody else, so it is not flamebait.
Did you really mean to say that Apple releases patches more often than Microsoft? Because that is just plain wrong. I get pestered by Windows update at least twice as often as by OS X Software Update, and I use both operating systems regularly.