I am a long-time LINUXhead and now MacOS user. I recently had to purchase my first Microsoft Windows machine to run some optical design software (it is a Dell box running XP Pro). I was flabbergasted at how counterintuitive XP was, how difficult it was to set up networking properly, at how non-configurable it was, and and at how many annoying little gizmos popped up to distract me from doing real work. Jeez, I don't know or care whether my antivirus software is updated, or have to delete a zillion pre-installed AOL@HOME icons, or read and ignore a Symantec sales pitch disguised as a "security report". I just want to mount a remote SMB volume and run my optical design software and be left alone.
In short, Microsoft Windows really is that bad. The awful depth of its badness is virtually invisible, however, to most computer users -- because to them, that's just how computers are. They've never learned anything else and don't know any better. They're even proud to be able to get work done in the tricky, distracting, frustrating environment that is "a personal computer" (really just Microsoft Windows). That is the real shame. If those people had been weaned on Macintosh or even one of the more recent Linux distributions like Fedora or Mandrake, they'd never put up with such crap.
Hmmm... Maybe I wasn't clear to start with. If (using my handy atomic clock) I made an NTP timestamp at precisely 11:00 pm UTC yesterday, and another NTP timestamp at precisely 11:00 pm UTC today, those two timestamps would differ by exactly 24 hours, although the two UTC times are 24 hours and one second apart. That is an error. T
he error is carried by the fact that NTP stays synchronized to UTC in the present, but the past is "free floating". If, today, I convert my previous NTP timestamp back to UTC I will find that it occurred at 11:00:01pm yesterday rather than 11:00:00, the time that I actually made it. That's because NTP counts offsets from the present moment, assuming that UTC behaves like TAI.
The NTP protocol that all of us cool kids use to synchronize our computers' clocks has a fundamental flaw -- the NTP time is tied to UTC, but contains no leap seconds at all, more like TAI, the atomic time standard. When there's a leap second, the system's solution is to ignore it.
So, as of today, any time stamp you have made using NTP, ever, has been retroactively displaced by one second. Intervals that included midnight (UTC) last night are all too short by one second.
This may not be a problem for handling your calendar appointments, but it can muck up all kinds of scientific applications that require high precision.
That evolution happens is pretty indisputible, since anyone can reproduce it in populations of microbes, drosophila, or even canis familiaris. But the idea that evolution is the mechanism by which people came to exist is much less well tested. Although the evidence seems to be pretty overwhelming, it is not currently possible to repeat the whole experiment within our lifetimes, so Occam's Razor is the main justification for evolution-as-creation-story. Although the evidence is amazingly consistent and rich, Occam's Razor (the principle of parsimony) is a pretty weak philosophical tool compared to realism or positivism (the ideas that scientific theory is actually describing something real that can be reproduced), and it's not surprising that many folks find it hard to swallow.
That doesn't make the short-Earth creationists right -- it just makes them more understandable. They're at least attacking the edifice of scientific study at a weak point, rather than at a bastion.
Guidryp, you're right about random shuffle and large collections. I don't think it's I-pods specifically, however, it's just the "big random play collections" that are the real threat to the music industry.
While my wife owns an IPod, I do not. But I do maintain our music collection, which has become -- by my standards when I was a teenager -- immense. I've spent 2-3 years digitizing every piece of vinyl and cassette tape I can lay my hands on, including my old not inconsiderable record and CD collections and hundreds of used records, cassettes, and found/garage-sale CDs. It's all in a database of about 2300 hours of MP3 files on our home stereo server, and it's all legally acquired since (to my knowledge) we own the original copies and use the collection only for ourselves. I might occasionally order a CD from a particular artist I like -- but most of the time we just listen to our own customized "radio" station. We went walking through Best Buy the other night and I realized that we have more albums in our online collection than their entire store music section - about 2,000 albums.
Why should we pay full price for hit-and-miss on new albums when we have so much stuff we like already? It would take a full year, 40 hours a week, to listen to the whole collection. Unlike the source material, it will never wear out with additional play or abuse (and we keep an offsite backup).
The same thing is happening with children's records. Although we have a child on the way, we are not part of the market for children's recordings and music, because we have over 100 albums of children's instructional songs, stories, and folk tales left over from our own childhood. We digitize 'em, pull out the pops, and remove the background hum -- and the 30-year-old records sounds better than when they were new. Why fork out $15 for a copy of Peter, Paul, and Mommy when I've got one right here? Why buy some crappy abridged version of Grimm's Fairy Tales when we have records of unabridged readings - with music -- that were cut in the 1960s? Why buy the soundtrack of our Disney DVD when we can get the music directly off the disk at the same quality as the CD in the store?
Big, accessible collections are displacing event DJs too. For our wedding we didn't hire a DJ, we hooked up a subset of our music collection and (after the first few songs) let the guests themselves choose the songs from a small web client right there on the dance floor. It was a big hit. I've been to several events since then that used the same idea. It's a natural thing to do once big hard drives became available.
Here's another killer feature that I'll bet vi(m) doesn't have (you have to use XEmacs for this, I don't know if plain Emacs does it): you can remotely connect to a running copy of XEmacs. Let's say I go home for the day, leaving a session of XEmacs up and running with various shells, debug sessions, and edit buffers. When I get home, I can SSH into my work box, run gnuclient, and connect a new UI to the running copy of XEmacs - all the same buffers, shells, debug sessions, etc.
A simple way to do this with vi is to run vi from within screen. (Of course that doesn't work with X windows, but there are also screen-like programs that fork an X connection)
Hmmm... This is getting a little heated and also way off topic, so I'll give brief examples rather than a complete exposition. (1) Free assembly has been a problem, but I think that is more encouragement of selective enforcement than actual legislation. Free speech is a big problem in several ways, the most notable is the massive expansion of ITAR and EAR. I do not knowingly handle classified information, but it is now illegal for me to discuss certain aspects of my profession (solar physics) with many of my colleagues. If I do so, I can be sent to prison for more than twenty years. That is a result of actual recent legislation pushed by the current executive branch.
(2) Have you tried to buy chemicals recently? Small arms are not very regulated, but almost everything else is heavily regulated and reported. Small arms aren't very useful today anyway for the main point of the 2nd amendment -- which is to enable, as a last resort, armed revolution.
(4) Yes, the PATRIOT act is exactly what I am thinking about. Wiretaps, secret warrants, and tracking of motion and purchases. Seizure is not as obvious and this administration may not be as bad as the Reagan administration (which pushed using the RICO act to seize assets of accused drug dealers without benefit of trial)
(5) Here I am referring to people being accused of infamous crimes against the U.S.A. and being extradited elsewhere for detainment and torture by our government in locations that are not subject to our laws. Guantanamo Bay is one such location, and the popular press is rife with recent reportage of others that have been held in secret.
(6) Both gitmo and the acknowledged foreign torture camps feature here, but the real problem with this administration is how strongly they pushed (to the supreme court) to be able to try civilians by closed military tribunal rather than under a court of law. No star-chamber courts here in America, please.
(8) Torture. This is what inspired my "holy crap" in the grandparent -- our President has stated that he will veto any bill that contains a clause outlawing torture of prisoners held by the U.S.A.
(9) May not guarantee you "...the right to check out communist literature from public libraries..." but the point of this clause is to frame the intent of the constitution: it is not an exhaustive enumeration of all rights thought to be held by people, but rather an enumeration of the ones that were on the founders' minds. Secret searches of library history, bookstore records, and spending habits may not be specifically forbidden but they're against the spirit of the document.
My point here is not that the ruling party is stupid or corrupt or evil -- it is that they are not supporters of the freedoms and moral leadership that we love about our country. I was puzzled by your sig because the ACLU seems to me to be a very patriotic organization: our bill of rights is a huge part of what makes our country special and desirable. ACLU is devoted to defending those rights against elements in our government that would quash them.
The most awful abuses of the current one are the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and ninth articles. If you get your news from anyone but Fox and Rush, you should be able to spot them. Holy crap, man, these people are coming out in support of torture.
Love my country, always. Love my government, when it deserves it.
MD5 may be useless for producing undeniable electronic signatures (proof that Alice generated and distributed a particular document, in the face of Alice's denials) but it is still quite useful for fraud prevention (proof that Eve generated and distributed a particular document, despite her claims that it came from Alice).
That is because the algorithm can produce pairs of documents that share a single hash, but that single hash is now known in advance.
Thus, Alice can use the algorithm to produce a pair of documents that have the same (unknown-in-advance) hash -- but, once Alice has signed a document with MD5, Eve still can't easily produce a document that has the same (known-in-advance) hash as Alice's original screed.
Ah, jeez, that old thing. Looking at an eclipse is quite a different affair than looking just at the Sun. Looking directly at the Sun with your naked eye is dazzling and maybe a little stupid, but it won't make you go blind: the human eye's minimum pupil size is coincidentally just small enough to handle the energy flux (which makes sense in the context of evolution). Eclipses trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system, so that your pupil can end up wide open as you look at the mostly-eclipsed Sun. That can 'burn' pinholes in your retina.
I know you're kidding -- but farside imaging exists now. Look here - it is a continuously updated false-color map of the Sun. Of course, the far side data are not a true photograph, but a reconstruction made from measurements of sound waves that propagate all the way through the star.
I use Audacity. I've found that ripping at 44kHz works fine for my ear.
The noise-gating feature is good although it requires some tweaking (it is too aggressive by default; slide the slider way over to almost the leftmost edge). For a long time I used DePopper, a windows shareware black box, but it just doesn't work very well on harmonically pure tracks like choral vocals or classical music. I finally bit the bullet and wrote a better depopper, which is in the current Audacity release candidate.
Audacity lets me go in and clean up the waveform anywhere that it gets too weird. It also lets me 'erase' skips seamlessly without having to start the record over.
I beg your pardon, but several of us are doing exactly that. So far I've ripped over 600 of my old vinyl records (with about 1500 to go). The resulting MP3s sound better than the vinyl itself, as I've been depopping and noise-gating them along the way.
As with other analog solutions, you tend to lose the metadata unless you type it in as you go...:-)
Who hired ScuttleMonkey? He's certainly no copyeditor, that's for sure. "Immanent" means "existing within". I think he meant to type "Imminent", meaning "soon to be realized".
Between the crackpot science and the bad copyediting, I hope Taco beats him upside the head with a raw ham...
These guys (energy crackpots) are always around on the sidelines; they pop up every once in a while when they need a new sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hventure capitalist to invest. The fractional-quantum-number chestnut has been around since at least the USENET days; I remember folks trying to use fractional quantum numbers to justify cold fusion among other things.
Hot fusion is always 50 years away; tabletop fusion is always 4 years away. Nothing to see here, move along.
Isn't this like the fourth time we've seen a Xeon-vs-AMD benchmark on the front page? It's old news.
The problem with the Xeons is they're totally throttled. The Xeon was like a V-6 engine under a VW carburetor; the dual-core Xeon is like a big-block V8 under the same carburetor.
The AMDs have better access to RAM and better (independent) cross-CPU communication. The dual-core Xeons were clearly rushed to market to answer AMD's offering, before Intel could get their own memory-access ducks in a row.
SQLite is lighting fast, tiny, and public domain. No external dependencies required. It also supports a pretty full-featured SQL (maybe not so "Lite" anymore, except for its small footprint in RAM)
The problem with falsification is that it wastes far more time and money than it saves. In addition to any actual damages (such as, in health science, killing patients), every falsified result that makes it into the scientific literature is a blind alley that someone else has to go down to get at the truth.
People who lose sight of that, and who make stuff up to submit, are not only disrespecting their peers, they are stealing time and effort from them. For example, I lost about six months of my life because a senior colleague falsified data that I needed in graduate school. We were in the business of flying a rocket payload to look at the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light. We calibrated the photographic film at a synchrotron facility at Stanford. Our senior colleague (who later went on to become a bigwig at SPIE and in NASA's Astrobiology program) was in charge of developing the film that we exposed, at great effort, to calibrated amounts of ultraviolet light emitted by the synchrotoron. He forgot (or something) to write down which process he used on which piece of film. As a result, a year later when we were analysing our images of the Sun we couldn't make any sense of them. It took a good six months of concentrated effort to eliminate all reasonable hypotheses about what had happened, and to conclude that the film processing notes from that calibration run were simply made up. Once we knew that, we could get reasonable (if not-as-good-as-we-hoped) results from the rocket flight, using earlier calibrations. If my colleague had fessed up immediately we would have lost a few days' work rather than six months.
In the short term, the scientific refereeing process keeps out many honest mistakes or omissions, but anyone determined to deliberately slip fake results into a paper can probably get away with it. In the long term, though, there's no escape: anything made up will either be buried (because it turns out to be uninteresting or because no-one trusts it), or found out (because, if it is interesting, others will try to use or reproduce the result, and will niggle at it until the truth comes out).
No troll -- maybe there's something wrong with my startup. I've got 1.1 going. I used the default install from the download (can't remember if it was an install wizard or a drag-and-drop) but somehow now it always auto-starts in my dock when I log in. The process is nefarious because it's not one of my usual startup items.
If I quit NeoOfficeJ and restart it, it takes about 20-30 seconds to start up on my PowerBook G4. If I work fast, I can click all four of the other applications in my dock and all four finish bouncing before my first NeoOfficeJ window shows up.
The Mac port of OpenOffice (NeoOfficeJ) is so bloated that by default it starts up in the background when you log in! That's a crappy solution because it sits there hogging swap space until you want it.
I can start Mac Pages, Inkscape, Keynote and even the Gimp before NeoOfficeJ is finished loading. Now that's slow.
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I am a long-time LINUXhead and now MacOS user. I recently had to purchase my first Microsoft Windows machine to run some optical design software (it is a Dell box running XP Pro). I was flabbergasted at how counterintuitive XP was, how difficult it was to set up networking properly, at how non-configurable it was, and and at how many annoying little gizmos popped up to distract me from doing real work. Jeez, I don't know or care whether my antivirus software is updated, or have to delete a zillion pre-installed AOL@HOME icons, or read and ignore a Symantec sales pitch disguised as a "security report". I just want to mount a remote SMB volume and run my optical design software and be left alone. In short, Microsoft Windows really is that bad. The awful depth of its badness is virtually invisible, however, to most computer users -- because to them, that's just how computers are. They've never learned anything else and don't know any better. They're even proud to be able to get work done in the tricky, distracting, frustrating environment that is "a personal computer" (really just Microsoft Windows). That is the real shame. If those people had been weaned on Macintosh or even one of the more recent Linux distributions like Fedora or Mandrake, they'd never put up with such crap.
Hmmm... Maybe I wasn't clear to start with. If (using my handy atomic clock) I made an NTP timestamp at precisely 11:00 pm UTC yesterday, and another NTP timestamp at precisely 11:00 pm UTC today, those two timestamps would differ by exactly 24 hours, although the two UTC times are 24 hours and one second apart. That is an error. T
he error is carried by the fact that NTP stays synchronized to UTC in the present, but the past is "free floating". If, today, I convert my previous NTP timestamp back to UTC I will find that it occurred at 11:00:01pm yesterday rather than 11:00:00, the time that I actually made it. That's because NTP counts offsets from the present moment, assuming that UTC behaves like TAI.
So, as of today, any time stamp you have made using NTP, ever, has been retroactively displaced by one second. Intervals that included midnight (UTC) last night are all too short by one second.
This may not be a problem for handling your calendar appointments, but it can muck up all kinds of scientific applications that require high precision.
That evolution happens is pretty indisputible, since anyone can reproduce it in populations of microbes, drosophila, or even canis familiaris. But the idea that evolution is the mechanism by which people came to exist is much less well tested. Although the evidence seems to be pretty overwhelming, it is not currently possible to repeat the whole experiment within our lifetimes, so Occam's Razor is the main justification for evolution-as-creation-story. Although the evidence is amazingly consistent and rich, Occam's Razor (the principle of parsimony) is a pretty weak philosophical tool compared to realism or positivism (the ideas that scientific theory is actually describing something real that can be reproduced), and it's not surprising that many folks find it hard to swallow.
That doesn't make the short-Earth creationists right -- it just makes them more understandable. They're at least attacking the edifice of scientific study at a weak point, rather than at a bastion.
Anything that transmits in the same general band as the bitstream on the powerlines is in serious trouble.
Guidryp, you're right about random shuffle and large collections. I don't think it's I-pods specifically, however, it's just the "big random play collections" that are the real threat to the music industry.
While my wife owns an IPod, I do not. But I do maintain our music collection, which has become -- by my standards when I was a teenager -- immense. I've spent 2-3 years digitizing every piece of vinyl and cassette tape I can lay my hands on, including my old not inconsiderable record and CD collections and hundreds of used records, cassettes, and found/garage-sale CDs. It's all in a database of about 2300 hours of MP3 files on our home stereo server, and it's all legally acquired since (to my knowledge) we own the original copies and use the collection only for ourselves. I might occasionally order a CD from a particular artist I like -- but most of the time we just listen to our own customized "radio" station. We went walking through Best Buy the other night and I realized that we have more albums in our online collection than their entire store music section - about 2,000 albums.
Why should we pay full price for hit-and-miss on new albums when we have so much stuff we like already? It would take a full year, 40 hours a week, to listen to the whole collection. Unlike the source material, it will never wear out with additional play or abuse (and we keep an offsite backup).
The same thing is happening with children's records. Although we have a child on the way, we are not part of the market for children's recordings and music, because we have over 100 albums of children's instructional songs, stories, and folk tales left over from our own childhood. We digitize 'em, pull out the pops, and remove the background hum -- and the 30-year-old records sounds better than when they were new. Why fork out $15 for a copy of Peter, Paul, and Mommy when I've got one right here? Why buy some crappy abridged version of Grimm's Fairy Tales when we have records of unabridged readings - with music -- that were cut in the 1960s? Why buy the soundtrack of our Disney DVD when we can get the music directly off the disk at the same quality as the CD in the store?
Big, accessible collections are displacing event DJs too. For our wedding we didn't hire a DJ, we hooked up a subset of our music collection and (after the first few songs) let the guests themselves choose the songs from a small web client right there on the dance floor. It was a big hit. I've been to several events since then that used the same idea. It's a natural thing to do once big hard drives became available.
A simple way to do this with vi is to run vi from within screen. (Of course that doesn't work with X windows, but there are also screen-like programs that fork an X connection)
Hmmm... This is getting a little heated and also way off topic, so I'll give brief examples rather than a complete exposition.
(1) Free assembly has been a problem, but I think that is more encouragement of selective enforcement than actual legislation. Free speech is a big problem in several ways, the most notable is the massive expansion of ITAR and EAR. I do not knowingly handle classified information, but it is now illegal for me to discuss certain aspects of my profession (solar physics) with many of my colleagues. If I do so, I can be sent to prison for more than twenty years. That is a result of actual recent legislation pushed by the current executive branch.
(2) Have you tried to buy chemicals recently? Small arms are not very regulated, but almost everything else is heavily regulated and reported. Small arms aren't very useful today anyway for the main point of the 2nd amendment -- which is to enable, as a last resort, armed revolution.
(4) Yes, the PATRIOT act is exactly what I am thinking about. Wiretaps, secret warrants, and tracking of motion and purchases. Seizure is not as obvious and this administration may not be as bad as the Reagan administration (which pushed using the RICO act to seize assets of accused drug dealers without benefit of trial)
(5) Here I am referring to people being accused of infamous crimes against the U.S.A. and being extradited elsewhere for detainment and torture by our government in locations that are not subject to our laws. Guantanamo Bay is one such location, and the popular press is rife with recent reportage of others that have been held in secret.
(6) Both gitmo and the acknowledged foreign torture camps feature here, but the real problem with this administration is how strongly they pushed (to the supreme court) to be able to try civilians by closed military tribunal rather than under a court of law. No star-chamber courts here in America, please.
(8) Torture. This is what inspired my "holy crap" in the grandparent -- our President has stated that he will veto any bill that contains a clause outlawing torture of prisoners held by the U.S.A.
(9) May not guarantee you "...the right to check out communist literature from public libraries..." but the point of this clause is to frame the intent of the constitution: it is not an exhaustive enumeration of all rights thought to be held by people, but rather an enumeration of the ones that were on the founders' minds. Secret searches of library history, bookstore records, and spending habits may not be specifically forbidden but they're against the spirit of the document.
My point here is not that the ruling party is stupid or corrupt or evil -- it is that they are not supporters of the freedoms and moral leadership that we love about our country. I was puzzled by your sig because the ACLU seems to me to be a very patriotic organization: our bill of rights is a huge part of what makes our country special and desirable. ACLU is devoted to defending those rights against elements in our government that would quash them.
The most awful abuses of the current one are the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and ninth articles. If you get your news from anyone but Fox and Rush, you should be able to spot them. Holy crap, man, these people are coming out in support of torture.
Love my country, always. Love my government, when it deserves it.
My karma burns faster than the American flag at an ACLU meeting
That's funny -- mine burns faster than the Bill of Rights in a Republican Oval Office...
Shit. I meant to type "...is not known in advance..." but instead typed "...is now known in advance...", completely reversing the meaning!
MD5 may be useless for producing undeniable electronic signatures (proof that Alice generated and distributed a particular document, in the face of Alice's denials) but it is still quite useful for fraud prevention (proof that Eve generated and distributed a particular document, despite her claims that it came from Alice).
That is because the algorithm can produce pairs of documents that share a single hash, but that single hash is now known in advance.
Thus, Alice can use the algorithm to produce a pair of documents that have the same (unknown-in-advance) hash -- but, once Alice has signed a document with MD5, Eve still can't easily produce a document that has the same (known-in-advance) hash as Alice's original screed.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/latestimages.h tml
Ah, jeez, that old thing. Looking at an eclipse is quite a different affair than looking just at the Sun. Looking directly at the Sun with your naked eye is dazzling and maybe a little stupid, but it won't make you go blind: the human eye's minimum pupil size is coincidentally just small enough to handle the energy flux (which makes sense in the context of evolution). Eclipses trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system, so that your pupil can end up wide open as you look at the mostly-eclipsed Sun. That can 'burn' pinholes in your retina.
I know you're kidding -- but farside imaging exists now. Look here - it is a continuously updated false-color map of the Sun. Of course, the far side data are not a true photograph, but a reconstruction made from measurements of sound waves that propagate all the way through the star.
I use Audacity. I've found that ripping at 44kHz works fine for my ear.
The noise-gating feature is good although it requires some tweaking (it is too aggressive by default; slide the slider way over to almost the leftmost edge). For a long time I used DePopper, a windows shareware black box, but it just doesn't work very well on harmonically pure tracks like choral vocals or classical music. I finally bit the bullet and wrote a better depopper, which is in the current Audacity release candidate.
Audacity lets me go in and clean up the waveform anywhere that it gets too weird. It also lets me 'erase' skips seamlessly without having to start the record over.
I beg your pardon, but several of us are doing exactly that. So far I've ripped over 600 of my old vinyl records (with about 1500 to go). The resulting MP3s sound better than the vinyl itself, as I've been depopping and noise-gating them along the way.
:-)
As with other analog solutions, you tend to lose the metadata unless you type it in as you go...
Who hired ScuttleMonkey? He's certainly no copyeditor, that's for sure. "Immanent" means "existing within". I think he meant to type "Imminent", meaning "soon to be realized".
Between the crackpot science and the bad copyediting, I hope Taco beats him upside the head with a raw ham...
The Sun is actually doing fusion at very low rates indeed...
You bet it is. Cows generate more heat per unit mass than does the Sun.
These guys (energy crackpots) are always around on the sidelines; they pop up every once in a while when they need a new sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hventure capitalist to invest. The fractional-quantum-number chestnut has been around since at least the USENET days; I remember folks trying to use fractional quantum numbers to justify cold fusion among other things.
Hot fusion is always 50 years away; tabletop fusion is always 4 years away. Nothing to see here, move along.
Isn't this like the fourth time we've seen a Xeon-vs-AMD benchmark on the front page? It's old news.
The problem with the Xeons is they're totally throttled. The Xeon was like a V-6 engine under a VW carburetor; the dual-core Xeon is like a big-block V8 under the same carburetor.
The AMDs have better access to RAM and better (independent) cross-CPU communication. The dual-core Xeons were clearly rushed to market to answer AMD's offering, before Intel could get their own memory-access ducks in a row.
SQLite is lighting fast, tiny, and public domain. No external dependencies required. It also supports a pretty full-featured SQL (maybe not so "Lite" anymore, except for its small footprint in RAM)
People who lose sight of that, and who make stuff up to submit, are not only disrespecting their peers, they are stealing time and effort from them. For example, I lost about six months of my life because a senior colleague falsified data that I needed in graduate school. We were in the business of flying a rocket payload to look at the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light. We calibrated the photographic film at a synchrotron facility at Stanford. Our senior colleague (who later went on to become a bigwig at SPIE and in NASA's Astrobiology program) was in charge of developing the film that we exposed, at great effort, to calibrated amounts of ultraviolet light emitted by the synchrotoron. He forgot (or something) to write down which process he used on which piece of film. As a result, a year later when we were analysing our images of the Sun we couldn't make any sense of them. It took a good six months of concentrated effort to eliminate all reasonable hypotheses about what had happened, and to conclude that the film processing notes from that calibration run were simply made up. Once we knew that, we could get reasonable (if not-as-good-as-we-hoped) results from the rocket flight, using earlier calibrations. If my colleague had fessed up immediately we would have lost a few days' work rather than six months.
In the short term, the scientific refereeing process keeps out many honest mistakes or omissions, but anyone determined to deliberately slip fake results into a paper can probably get away with it. In the long term, though, there's no escape: anything made up will either be buried (because it turns out to be uninteresting or because no-one trusts it), or found out (because, if it is interesting, others will try to use or reproduce the result, and will niggle at it until the truth comes out).
If I quit NeoOfficeJ and restart it, it takes about 20-30 seconds to start up on my PowerBook G4. If I work fast, I can click all four of the other applications in my dock and all four finish bouncing before my first NeoOfficeJ window shows up.
I'm running Tiger on the 1.67 GHz aluminum mac.
By contrast, Lyx takes 1-2 seconds to boot up :-)
The Mac port of OpenOffice (NeoOfficeJ) is so bloated that by default it starts up in the background when you log in! That's a crappy solution because it sits there hogging swap space until you want it.
I can start Mac Pages, Inkscape, Keynote and even the Gimp before NeoOfficeJ is finished loading. Now that's slow.