If I recall my particle physics correctly, the way ATLAS at the LHC will be detecting gravitons is via their leptopic decay products, and regard that as the optimal way.
You're thinking of the Higgs boson. We are nowhere near approaching the level of technology required to detect gravitons, and the mathematics they give rise to doesn't even work. The only real reason we have to believe they exist is because the other forces also have quantized mediators.
it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.
Voyager 1 will take on the order of several hundred thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri.
The traditional explanation for this is that the graviton can only travel at the speed of light and as such will take 10 minutes to travel from one particle to the other, so far so good.
The 'traditional' explanation? Gravitons are hypothetical at best, and currently mathematically useless. Quantized force mediators do not need to "intercept" a moving particle at a distance; they are virtual, and there are infinitely many of them in all directions.
By changing the mass of the ball (simple enough to do with a powerful laser)
This is all nonsense. Even if this were true, your probe is also receiving gravitons from every other atom in the universe. The effect of varying a "ball of mass" would not even be measurable.
Just because a sizable block of text with "sciency words" is posted doesn't mean it's meaningful, and certainly doesn't deserve mod points. Please mod parent down, and please read things before giving points!
The cheapest system sold at Best Buy can run Vista with Aero Glass.
Just because a system is no longer being sold doesn't mean it's not modern. Yes, any new hardware you buy will run Vista. Do offices care? Office buildings have THOUSANDS of computers with decent hardware just under the limit of Vista's requirements. Whether or not it's reasonable to ask them to upgrade the hardware is irrelevant; businesses simply don't want to.
This is why Vista's hardware requirements are considered hefty. It's just stupid on their part to insist on that amount of resources.
99% of consumers bought their computer from an OEM supplier; most people think Windows is free. Just look at comments like this; people think they just buy a computer and magically get Windows. I can't see any significant fraction of consumers actually wanting to legally download it online.
The CVS version of Gnash has started getting video playback support; it's only a matter of time before it has full support for YouTube, Google Video, etc. Once this happens, we can happily accept Flash video in the open-source desktop.
On a somewhat related note, hopefully by August the nouveau project will deliver an open source 3D driver for NVidia cards; between nouveau and Gnash, I'll soon be able to completely eliminate binary blobs on this machine. Here's hoping it happens sooner rather than later:D
Not only that, but Flash 9 has hit the Ubuntu backports already, probably along with many other distributions. The video played perfectly for me, and I didn't even know I had Flash 9 until I saw the above comment and checked my Flash version.
Keep in mind that this exact same functionality is _free_ under Windows.
No it's not you fool. You pay $200 for a copy of Windows; a significant portion of that goes to licensing codecs. You just don't notice it when you buy a computer with Windows bundled in, so you think it's free.
Sure, if you pirate Windows, it's free, and if you use ffmpeg on Linux it's free. This solution is illegal in the US, and entirely useless to OEM vendors.
While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer.
Exactly. I think one of the biggest problems with w32codecs, libdvdcss, etc. is that they are too easy to install. People don't realize that in many countries (most notably the United States), installing these codecs is NOT LEGAL; they just install the packages on their Linux box and complain about distros not including them by default. The critical application of Fluendo is for OEM installs of Linux; instead of charging the utterly ridiculous $60 or whatever price for Windows XP, they can now markup $4 for a codec license and finally offer the layman a completely functional operating system.
I think it is very unfortunate that nobody stepped up and made people aware of the dangers of this event.
That's the thing, someone DID step up. A nurse called in and explained to them that it was dangerous, and the DJs basically just told her she was crazy and hung up on her.
The only reason the *AA are pushing this bill is to harm independent artists. There's nothing preventing them from using DRM on their own published media, or from requiring licensees (such as online radio stations) to use DRM. They want this bill to pass to require independent artists to do the same; they hope many of them will not want to foot the bill themselves, opting instead to sign on with a *AA label or give up entirely.
It's a sad state of government where corporations dictate freedom.
Honestly, how long would it have taken you to Google "yum search" or "apt package list" before posting this drivel? In both cases you could have hit I'm Feeling Lucky and gotten what you were looking for. Please do a little research before posting next time.
Don't bash Sugar from the meager videos you've seen; you need to actually try it to see what it's like. I watched the Google video and immediately hated the interface as well, but it's a very different experience when you actually sit down in front of it and use it.
A ship using an Alcubierre warp drive is causally disconnected from the bubble itself. In other words, once you start going, you can't stop. You need some external device to stop you. So you'd need to move said external device to your destination beforehand using subluminal travel, and then you'd need to aim your ship towards it and hope you don't go off course while in warp drive; the stopping device can't be adjusted to catch you because they can't even see you coming.
It also requires astronomical amounts of energy, like the energy a star burns in its entire lifetime just to form the bubble. The Alcubierre drive is pretty much just a mathematical curiosity at this point.
I am so fucking sick of people complaining about how difficult things are to install in Linux. It always starts with something like:
"Well my friend said Slackware was good, but when I tried to install Apache..." "Have you even TRIED to install something on Red Hat 6?" "I downloaded this thing called a 'source tarball' and it couldn't even install it!" "'Console'? Why do I have to speak computer-language? I thought you said Gentoo was new!"
For Christ's sake people, choose the distribution that is appropriate for your uses, and start sentences with "How do I" instead of "Linux needs to learn". If you're an idiot migrating from Windows, you should use Kubuntu, and not jump the bridge like Parent here when something isn't exactly the same.
The choice of in-order versus out-of-order has very little to do with anything from the consumer's perspective. Keep in mind that the Xbox 360's processor is in-order as well... So I guess neither console can support decent AI algorithms? What a crock of shit.
Yes. In case you haven't noticed, the Xbox 360 is also designed for graphics rather than gameplay.
You can achieve the same level of AI (for example) on these chips as on a computer; the problem is that it's much harder. The average console game will have much shittier AI because they just can't handle unoptimized code as well as a computer. It's unrealistic to think that every game developer will spend hundreds of man-hours optimizing their code to make up for the failings of an in-order processor; it's just more efficient to spend the time on prettier graphics.
Imagine running a differential equation solver in real time for sound synthesis on one of those, say. Also, I think it is a tool to market Blu-ray, which is a rather interesting strategy.
This is exactly how Sony is shitting on their gamers. I don't want to solve differential equations. I don't want to sponsor a Blu-ray marketing campaign. I want to play games.
The cell processor is optimized for in-order processing. As far as games are concerned, this makes it ideal for pretty reflection and water effects, and practically crippled for gameplay elements like AI (you know, things that make games fun). If they were marketing it as a general purpose processor, it might be innovative. For the PS3, it's anything but.
Hybrid hard drives: These drives, coming from companies such as Samsung and Seagate, will combine a flash-memory component with traditional platters to boost performance while keeping costs lower than those of purely flash-based drives. The drives should especially improve startup and resume times. They should also save you some time when it comes to data access, since they can cache more of the data in the flash portion, cutting down on lags due to accessing the disk platters. You'll need Windows Vista to make this work, however.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Linux and BSD will be completely incapable of handling hybrid hard drives.
1) Good lord, use k3b. It's the greatest burning software known to humankind, much better than Nero or anything else you might pay money for. And I've never had to sudo anything to burn a CD, I had no idea this was even an issue.
2) I don't know anything about.NET software, but you can find a FOSS alternative for pretty much anything, and odds are it's already installed on your Ubuntu desktop. Hop into #ubuntu on freenode and ask them for FOSS alternatives; hopefully they'll be able to help.
3) Perhaps on a well configured and well cared for XP machine. I'm home for the holidays and I can tell you, all my family's XP computers are downright painful to use with all the spyware, viruses, anti-viruses, anti-spyware, and various firewalls they're all filled with. This is pretty much nonexistant in Linux. I'm willing to concede that KDE's slower than a vanilla XP machine if you're willing to concede that XP is much uglier:-)
4) Depends on your wireless card. I have an Atheros card which comes preloaded in Ubuntu, so it's a simple matter of opening the wireless config and typing in the key. This is much smoother and much simpler in Ubuntu, and it won't forget your key even if you pull your wireless card right out of the machine and put it back in later (I've done this). I've found wireless configuration to already be very friendly in Ubuntu, and one of the main blueprints for Ubuntu Feisty is easier configuration of wireless roaming.
5) See (2). In other words, it definitely doesn't for ordinary desktop users, and even if it does, I wouldn't want to use (much less pay for!) proprietary Windows software anyway. As far as niche users go, it depends on the industry you need it for; the same argument could be made for publishing for OSX for example.
Slashdot Mirror
My breakfast is an extra fifteen minutes of sleep.
If I recall my particle physics correctly, the way ATLAS at the LHC will be detecting gravitons is via their leptopic decay products, and regard that as the optimal way.
You're thinking of the Higgs boson. We are nowhere near approaching the level of technology required to detect gravitons, and the mathematics they give rise to doesn't even work. The only real reason we have to believe they exist is because the other forces also have quantized mediators.
it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.
Voyager 1 will take on the order of several hundred thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri.
The traditional explanation for this is that the graviton can only travel at the speed of light and as such will take 10 minutes to travel from one particle to the other, so far so good.
The 'traditional' explanation? Gravitons are hypothetical at best, and currently mathematically useless. Quantized force mediators do not need to "intercept" a moving particle at a distance; they are virtual, and there are infinitely many of them in all directions.
By changing the mass of the ball (simple enough to do with a powerful laser)
This is all nonsense. Even if this were true, your probe is also receiving gravitons from every other atom in the universe. The effect of varying a "ball of mass" would not even be measurable. Just because a sizable block of text with "sciency words" is posted doesn't mean it's meaningful, and certainly doesn't deserve mod points. Please mod parent down, and please read things before giving points!
The cheapest system sold at Best Buy can run Vista with Aero Glass.
Just because a system is no longer being sold doesn't mean it's not modern. Yes, any new hardware you buy will run Vista. Do offices care? Office buildings have THOUSANDS of computers with decent hardware just under the limit of Vista's requirements. Whether or not it's reasonable to ask them to upgrade the hardware is irrelevant; businesses simply don't want to.
This is why Vista's hardware requirements are considered hefty. It's just stupid on their part to insist on that amount of resources.
I fucking LOL'd. I was rolling on the floor during "printing... Printing! PRINTING!"
It would make the OS feel more affordable.
99% of consumers bought their computer from an OEM supplier; most people think Windows is free. Just look at comments like this; people think they just buy a computer and magically get Windows. I can't see any significant fraction of consumers actually wanting to legally download it online.
I agree. Now ask yourself, why do you need this software?
Go to your child and say "Show me your MySpace." If they refuse, unplug the computer and keep the cord indefinitely. It's that simple.
I can't imagine what kind of parent would want to secretly spy on their child; I can't think of a better way to lose your child's trust and respect.
The CVS version of Gnash has started getting video playback support; it's only a matter of time before it has full support for YouTube, Google Video, etc. Once this happens, we can happily accept Flash video in the open-source desktop.
:D
On a somewhat related note, hopefully by August the nouveau project will deliver an open source 3D driver for NVidia cards; between nouveau and Gnash, I'll soon be able to completely eliminate binary blobs on this machine. Here's hoping it happens sooner rather than later
Not only that, but Flash 9 has hit the Ubuntu backports already, probably along with many other distributions. The video played perfectly for me, and I didn't even know I had Flash 9 until I saw the above comment and checked my Flash version.
Keep in mind that this exact same functionality is _free_ under Windows. No it's not you fool. You pay $200 for a copy of Windows; a significant portion of that goes to licensing codecs. You just don't notice it when you buy a computer with Windows bundled in, so you think it's free. Sure, if you pirate Windows, it's free, and if you use ffmpeg on Linux it's free. This solution is illegal in the US, and entirely useless to OEM vendors.
While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer.
Exactly. I think one of the biggest problems with w32codecs, libdvdcss, etc. is that they are too easy to install. People don't realize that in many countries (most notably the United States), installing these codecs is NOT LEGAL; they just install the packages on their Linux box and complain about distros not including them by default. The critical application of Fluendo is for OEM installs of Linux; instead of charging the utterly ridiculous $60 or whatever price for Windows XP, they can now markup $4 for a codec license and finally offer the layman a completely functional operating system.
(Slashdot won't show me the reply links on replies now... So I'm starting a new post. Firefox2/Linux, btw.)
You're doing it wrong. Firefox2/Kubuntu here, and Slashdot works great. Slashdot is owned by the OSTG; you're basically running their target platform.
Back up your bookmarks and try nuking ~/.mozilla, or if that doesn't work try aptitude purge firefox (or whatever the equivalent is on your distro).
I think it is very unfortunate that nobody stepped up and made people aware of the dangers of this event.
That's the thing, someone DID step up. A nurse called in and explained to them that it was dangerous, and the DJs basically just told her she was crazy and hung up on her.
The only reason the *AA are pushing this bill is to harm independent artists. There's nothing preventing them from using DRM on their own published media, or from requiring licensees (such as online radio stations) to use DRM. They want this bill to pass to require independent artists to do the same; they hope many of them will not want to foot the bill themselves, opting instead to sign on with a *AA label or give up entirely.
It's a sad state of government where corporations dictate freedom.
Honestly, how long would it have taken you to Google "yum search" or "apt package list" before posting this drivel? In both cases you could have hit I'm Feeling Lucky and gotten what you were looking for. Please do a little research before posting next time.
Don't bash Sugar from the meager videos you've seen; you need to actually try it to see what it's like. I watched the Google video and immediately hated the interface as well, but it's a very different experience when you actually sit down in front of it and use it.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Instructions
Before commenting on what you think it will be like, please try it first.
Here's a size comparison to an ordinary laptop:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:AP1_39.jpg
The thing is tiny. It is not meant for adults, especially not ones with aging eyes and arthritic fingers.
A ship using an Alcubierre warp drive is causally disconnected from the bubble itself. In other words, once you start going, you can't stop. You need some external device to stop you. So you'd need to move said external device to your destination beforehand using subluminal travel, and then you'd need to aim your ship towards it and hope you don't go off course while in warp drive; the stopping device can't be adjusted to catch you because they can't even see you coming.
It also requires astronomical amounts of energy, like the energy a star burns in its entire lifetime just to form the bubble. The Alcubierre drive is pretty much just a mathematical curiosity at this point.
Here's what happens when I right-click on a .deb in Kubuntu Edgy:
e bxj7.png
http://img503.imageshack.us/my.php?image=installd
I am so fucking sick of people complaining about how difficult things are to install in Linux. It always starts with something like:
"Well my friend said Slackware was good, but when I tried to install Apache..."
"Have you even TRIED to install something on Red Hat 6?"
"I downloaded this thing called a 'source tarball' and it couldn't even install it!"
"'Console'? Why do I have to speak computer-language? I thought you said Gentoo was new!"
For Christ's sake people, choose the distribution that is appropriate for your uses, and start sentences with "How do I" instead of "Linux needs to learn". If you're an idiot migrating from Windows, you should use Kubuntu, and not jump the bridge like Parent here when something isn't exactly the same.
The choice of in-order versus out-of-order has very little to do with anything from the consumer's perspective. Keep in mind that the Xbox 360's processor is in-order as well... So I guess neither console can support decent AI algorithms? What a crock of shit.
Yes. In case you haven't noticed, the Xbox 360 is also designed for graphics rather than gameplay.
You can achieve the same level of AI (for example) on these chips as on a computer; the problem is that it's much harder. The average console game will have much shittier AI because they just can't handle unoptimized code as well as a computer. It's unrealistic to think that every game developer will spend hundreds of man-hours optimizing their code to make up for the failings of an in-order processor; it's just more efficient to spend the time on prettier graphics.
Imagine running a differential equation solver in real time for sound synthesis on one of those, say. Also, I think it is a tool to market Blu-ray, which is a rather interesting strategy.
This is exactly how Sony is shitting on their gamers. I don't want to solve differential equations. I don't want to sponsor a Blu-ray marketing campaign. I want to play games.
The cell processor is optimized for in-order processing. As far as games are concerned, this makes it ideal for pretty reflection and water effects, and practically crippled for gameplay elements like AI (you know, things that make games fun). If they were marketing it as a general purpose processor, it might be innovative. For the PS3, it's anything but.
Hybrid hard drives: These drives, coming from companies such as Samsung and Seagate, will combine a flash-memory component with traditional platters to boost performance while keeping costs lower than those of purely flash-based drives. The drives should especially improve startup and resume times. They should also save you some time when it comes to data access, since they can cache more of the data in the flash portion, cutting down on lags due to accessing the disk platters. You'll need Windows Vista to make this work, however.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Linux and BSD will be completely incapable of handling hybrid hard drives.
Ooh, this also gets rid of the insane amounts of advertisement on either side of the article. Thanks!
Figured I'd throw in my two cents...
.NET software, but you can find a FOSS alternative for pretty much anything, and odds are it's already installed on your Ubuntu desktop. Hop into #ubuntu on freenode and ask them for FOSS alternatives; hopefully they'll be able to help.
:-)
1) Good lord, use k3b. It's the greatest burning software known to humankind, much better than Nero or anything else you might pay money for. And I've never had to sudo anything to burn a CD, I had no idea this was even an issue.
2) I don't know anything about
3) Perhaps on a well configured and well cared for XP machine. I'm home for the holidays and I can tell you, all my family's XP computers are downright painful to use with all the spyware, viruses, anti-viruses, anti-spyware, and various firewalls they're all filled with. This is pretty much nonexistant in Linux. I'm willing to concede that KDE's slower than a vanilla XP machine if you're willing to concede that XP is much uglier
4) Depends on your wireless card. I have an Atheros card which comes preloaded in Ubuntu, so it's a simple matter of opening the wireless config and typing in the key. This is much smoother and much simpler in Ubuntu, and it won't forget your key even if you pull your wireless card right out of the machine and put it back in later (I've done this). I've found wireless configuration to already be very friendly in Ubuntu, and one of the main blueprints for Ubuntu Feisty is easier configuration of wireless roaming.
5) See (2). In other words, it definitely doesn't for ordinary desktop users, and even if it does, I wouldn't want to use (much less pay for!) proprietary Windows software anyway. As far as niche users go, it depends on the industry you need it for; the same argument could be made for publishing for OSX for example.
Just watch, we'll soon learn that this is yet another viral marketing plan paid for by Sony. But first we'll have to endure the Wrist Strap Rap...