Regarding the drift: The day length is getting gradually longer by about 1.7 milliseconds every century (+2.3ms due to tidal braking, -0.6ms due to glacial rebound). In about 1820 the day was 86400 seconds; now it is longer than that. In a thousand years, the day will be about 86400.017 seconds, and we will need a leap second every couple of months.
[Note: I am simplifying a little here for the sake of clarity by ignoring the difference between a solar day and the stellar and sidereal days, which are about 4 minutes shorter].
Regarding the fluctuations: There are fluctuations of the earth's angular velocity on many timescales. It fluctuates with weather, with the seasons, and with major events on the surface (e.g. a dam creating a new reservoir) and in the earth's crust (e.g. an earthquake or major volcanic eruption) and deeper interior (e.g. we don't really know). All these events are minor rearrangements of the mass of the earth, which change its moment of inertia. Conservation of angular momentum dictates that the angular velocity must change, and it does. Of course the earth isn't a rigid body and that complicates all this. Learn about Geodesy if you want to know more.
In the 1990s the day length was approximately 86400.003 seconds, so we needed a leap second every year. For poorly-understood reasons (possibly some sort of deep mantle activity), the earth's rotation speeded up around the year 2000, and for a while the day length was about 86400.0004 seconds. Now it is slower again, about 86400.001 seconds. These changes all come under the "fluctuations" heading.
There is an organisation called the IERS - International Earth Rotation and reference Systems Service - which collects measurements of all this stuff to very high accuracy and produces all sorts of reports, bulletins, data sets, etc etc.
I'm sorry? Fluctuations in the rotation of the earth? You mean the earth is accelerating and breaking?
Yes, that's exactly what we mean (well, "braking" rather than "breaking"). The earth does not have a constant angular velocity. To conserve angular momentum, as the mass distribution of the earth changes (e.g. due to glacial rebound), the spinning of the earth speeds up and slows down. It also slows down a little due to tidal braking. So a "day", as measured by the rotation of the earth relative to the fixed stars, is not exactly 86400 seconds. It's generally a little more, around 86400.001 seconds at present, and it varies from day to day and from year to year. Now that civil time (UTC) is kept with atomic clocks, this is a genuine problem. Leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC close to UT1 (astronomical time).
It has nothing to do with the fact that a rotation around the sun is not exactly 365.25 rotations around our own axis? hmm...
That's right. Leap seconds have nothing whatsoever to do with that. They don't affect the calendar. That's what leap days are for. Leap days keep the calendar in sync with the seasons (by setting the average calendar year length to 365.2425 days, very close to the vernal equinox year which is currently 365.242374 days).
Nintendo is brilliant for turning their backs on the gamers that supported them for decades and designing games for grandma
I'm one of the gamers that supported Nintendo for decades. Guess what? I don't have time to play hardcore games. I don't have an XBox or a 360, don't have a PS3 or a PS2. But I love an hour or two of Mario Kart or Wii Play or Boom Blox with my kids.
And in fact, the game that's had most play in my house this weekend has been Goldeneye, on our N64.
So have Nintendo turned their backs on me? Um, no. They've worked out a way to create and sell new games to me. Have they stolen back from a losing position in the last console generation, to eat Sony's and Microsoft's lunches, by redefining console gaming and finding a new and much larger group of gamers? Yes, in fact.
Are you a sad loser who can't deal with the fact that Nintendo have revolutionized gaming by opening it up to this new group, people who would never have bought a console before the Wii? Well, it kind of looks that way.
uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option
Good. Providing too many options, especially UI options, is a stupid mistake made by many open-source projects. You end up with software which is impossible to test and which often looks terrible. fork
Crazy. But, hey, it's their time. Let the users decide; I'm sticking with Pidgin.
This isn't money which "SCO owes Novell". This is Novell's money which SCO has retained (in breach of contract). The distinction seems trivial but should be important. In theory, it should give Novell priority over all other creditors (including the lawyers, accountants, and landlords with whom SCO has been merrily spending money since entering Chapter 11). The word "disgorgement" looms large in the future of this case.
A pair of loose analogies should make the distinction clear: if I rob a bank, and then use the stolen money to hire expensive lawyers in a futile attempt to escape justice, the bank is entitled to recover that money from the lawyers. But if instead I borrow money from a bank and then spend it all on expensive lawyers on my way out of business, the bank is out of luck. The current situation is more like the former analogy than the latter. In selling Sys V licenses to Microsoft and Sun, TSCOG was acting as Novell's agent: the money was Novell's all along.
Firstly, there are solar thermal plants using higher-temperature working fluid (molten salts) that can keep working through the night (the fluid heats up all day, cools down all night).
Secondly, the load is higher during the day.
Thirdly, any replacement of fossil fuel by renewables saves on carbon emissions, whether or not it's a complete replacement allowing us to decommission the fossil plants. Substituting renewables for a GW of coal power for 8 hours saves the emission of something like 7000 tonnes of CO2.
How can you "safely assume... that someone took some pictures of bathroom tiles... in the hopes of scamming Best Buy" ?
Either the tiles were in the box or they weren't. You don't know and I don't know. You absolutely can't "safely assume" what you say.
Re:Summary is Flamebait
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This was SCO v Novell, not SCO v IBM. The IBM case is going to be a doozy now, with SCO's side in tatters.
My wife's office is 200 miles away from home, 4 hours by train, and with other business travel it works out at 2-4 nights each week away from home (she does a lot of work from home on the other days). We've been doing this for nearly 3 years now, since our children were 8 and 4. I'm in the happy position of being the director of a small consultancy firm, which means I can set my own hours. Also my office is about 10 minutes bike ride from home, and school is even closer. So I get the children up and out in the mornings, pick them up from school, feed them, play with them, get them to bed, keep up with the house-work, all that. In the first year our daughter (then 4) had huge difficulty settling in at school (reception year in the UK school system) so her school hours were cut right down, and I was only working about 15 hours per week, most of them in the late evenings. Now I'm up to about 30 hours in the office, which is nearly full-time in this enlightened country.
Whether or not it works is up to you. It's really hard work for both of you, and needs excellent communication. And it's not your decision. It has to be a joint decision. If you somehow think that this is up to you, then your marriage is already broken. So stop asking slashdot and talk to your husband.
Widespread use of DDT for crop-spraying has lead to DDT-resistant mosquitos in many parts of the world. Despite this, and despite some other adverse effects, DDT is not banned. DDT is recommended by the WHO for residual indoor spraying as part of an anti-malaria campaign. Governments and NGOs fund residual indoor DDT spraying programs in many countries. However, for saving lives, DDT is far less effective than treated bed-nets, and each is less effective than an integrated anti-malaria campaign.
For reasons best known to themselves, some parts of the blogosphere have taken up the meme "By banning DDT, environmentalists have caused the deaths of millions of people from malaria." Almost every aspect of this meme is false, as anyone can discover with a small amount of Googling. I can even save you the small amount of Googling by pointing you to Deltoid, the blog of someone who has done it for you. The "Rachel Carson was worse than Stalin" notion seems to have been started as an astroturf lobbying operation by DDT manfacturers, and spread by dittoheads. Some wingnut sites have counters suggesting that the death-toll is even billions, which just goes to show how innumerate some people are.
I've been running FreeBSD on my desktop for 7 or 8 years now. It's just fine. The main problem has been the usual thing on hacker desktops: managing the dependencies between the 100-200 miscellaneous third-party packages that you end up with (all the GUI stuff, docproj with LaTeX, Apache with some modules, perl plus a couple of dozen perl modules, ditto python, ditto ruby, ditto PHP, ditto SQL, etc). The ports collection (together with the port management tools such as portupgrade) has been very good at this, and it would probably have been fine if I'd been in the habit of keeping it all up-to-date (barring some rough edges such as the docproj meta-package). It's certainly been easier to manage than Windows. I haven't tried keeping a desktop Linux box current (why would I?), so I can't compare with that.
It's been 18 months or so since I cvsupped the core OS. I'll be looking at DesktopBSD as an option the next time I do that.
Yet I can't do
anything when a company produces software that exposes my online
banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare, because I've
agreed a license that removes such liability.
That's exactly what you've done when you agree to a license from Microsoft.
Erm, yes. Your point? The author knows this, and in fact emphasizes it.
NASA doesn't just quickly throw together stuff and upload it onto the space shuttle, they test the hell out of it.
Testing is only a small part of a high-quality software development process, just as it is a small part of the automobile design and manufacturing process. The products of a high-quality process will rarely fail testing.
Replying to self: I was a few years out of date, and have now RTF preprint and have a better understanding. Current theory is that GRBs might be very powerful supernovae with some poorly-understood mechanism for turning a few FOEs of the energy (gravitational potential energy liberated by the collapse of the star) into a tightly-focussed short-lived beam of gamma rays (e.g. along the spin axis of the collapsing star) instead of into neutrinos. It's still the case that the gamma ray intensity of such a beam is very very much higher than that of the other gamma rays emitted by the supernova. So a GRB hitting us from anywhere within a few thousand parsecs would really spoil our day (destroy a lot of ozone, generate a burst of sea-level UVB, in addition to the longer-term UV increase due to ozone depletion, and make a real boatload of NO2, which is a brown gas and will therefore reduce surface insolation by a significant amount for several years).
Current numbers say that we can expect one of those every few hundred million years or so, and the Ordovician event has some properties which, at least roughly, fit a GRB.
The Wikipedia article that you link to discusses the possibility of the PT mass extinction being caused by a supernova within ten light years of earth. The present article, on the other hand, is about gamma-ray bursts. Not the same thing. A gamma ray burst produces something like 1e47 Joules of gamma rays (actually 1e46 Joules per steradian; we don't yet know whether bursts are focussed or otherwise directional); a supernova only produces something like 1e41 Joules per steradian of gammas (a lot more than that of neutrinos, but who cares about neutrinos).
I also save all my emails. Over the last two months I have seen a daily average of 708 spams, 75 messages on public mailing lists that I read for work (such as mozilla-webtools), 26 internal work emails, and some dribs and drabs. I filter most of it by hand (an RBL filter refiles about a third of the spam). The spam takes me about one second per message (I press 's' to refile in the spam folder). I think I will deploy an automatic spam filter in 2005, but I'll still keep all the messages.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a drift, and there are fluctuations.
Regarding the drift: The day length is getting gradually longer by about 1.7 milliseconds every century (+2.3ms due to tidal braking, -0.6ms due to glacial rebound). In about 1820 the day was 86400 seconds; now it is longer than that. In a thousand years, the day will be about 86400.017 seconds, and we will need a leap second every couple of months.
[Note: I am simplifying a little here for the sake of clarity by ignoring the difference between a solar day and the stellar and sidereal days, which are about 4 minutes shorter].
Regarding the fluctuations: There are fluctuations of the earth's angular velocity on many timescales. It fluctuates with weather, with the seasons, and with major events on the surface (e.g. a dam creating a new reservoir) and in the earth's crust (e.g. an earthquake or major volcanic eruption) and deeper interior (e.g. we don't really know). All these events are minor rearrangements of the mass of the earth, which change its moment of inertia. Conservation of angular momentum dictates that the angular velocity must change, and it does. Of course the earth isn't a rigid body and that complicates all this. Learn about Geodesy if you want to know more.
In the 1990s the day length was approximately 86400.003 seconds, so we needed a leap second every year. For poorly-understood reasons (possibly some sort of deep mantle activity), the earth's rotation speeded up around the year 2000, and for a while the day length was about 86400.0004 seconds. Now it is slower again, about 86400.001 seconds. These changes all come under the "fluctuations" heading.
There is an organisation called the IERS - International Earth Rotation and reference Systems Service - which collects measurements of all this stuff to very high accuracy and produces all sorts of reports, bulletins, data sets, etc etc.
I'm sorry? Fluctuations in the rotation of the earth? You mean the earth is accelerating and breaking?
Yes, that's exactly what we mean (well, "braking" rather than "breaking"). The earth does not have a constant angular velocity. To conserve angular momentum, as the mass distribution of the earth changes (e.g. due to glacial rebound), the spinning of the earth speeds up and slows down. It also slows down a little due to tidal braking. So a "day", as measured by the rotation of the earth relative to the fixed stars, is not exactly 86400 seconds. It's generally a little more, around 86400.001 seconds at present, and it varies from day to day and from year to year. Now that civil time (UTC) is kept with atomic clocks, this is a genuine problem. Leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC close to UT1 (astronomical time).
It has nothing to do with the fact that a rotation around the sun is not exactly 365.25 rotations around our own axis? hmm...
That's right. Leap seconds have nothing whatsoever to do with that. They don't affect the calendar. That's what leap days are for. Leap days keep the calendar in sync with the seasons (by setting the average calendar year length to 365.2425 days, very close to the vernal equinox year which is currently 365.242374 days).
Nintendo is brilliant for turning their backs on the gamers that supported them for decades and designing games for grandma
I'm one of the gamers that supported Nintendo for decades. Guess what? I don't have time to play hardcore games. I don't have an XBox or a 360, don't have a PS3 or a PS2. But I love an hour or two of Mario Kart or Wii Play or Boom Blox with my kids.
And in fact, the game that's had most play in my house this weekend has been Goldeneye, on our N64.
So have Nintendo turned their backs on me? Um, no. They've worked out a way to create and sell new games to me. Have they stolen back from a losing position in the last console generation, to eat Sony's and Microsoft's lunches, by redefining console gaming and finding a new and much larger group of gamers? Yes, in fact. Are you a sad loser who can't deal with the fact that Nintendo have revolutionized gaming by opening it up to this new group, people who would never have bought a console before the Wii? Well, it kind of looks that way.
uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option
Good. Providing too many options, especially UI options, is a stupid mistake made by many open-source projects. You end up with software which is impossible to test and which often looks terrible.
fork
Crazy. But, hey, it's their time. Let the users decide; I'm sticking with Pidgin.
Is anyone live-blogging the trial?
All of my Knuth checks are framed. I can't imagine anyone ever cashing one.
This isn't money which "SCO owes Novell". This is Novell's money which SCO has retained (in breach of contract). The distinction seems trivial but should be important. In theory, it should give Novell priority over all other creditors (including the lawyers, accountants, and landlords with whom SCO has been merrily spending money since entering Chapter 11). The word "disgorgement" looms large in the future of this case. A pair of loose analogies should make the distinction clear: if I rob a bank, and then use the stolen money to hire expensive lawyers in a futile attempt to escape justice, the bank is entitled to recover that money from the lawyers. But if instead I borrow money from a bank and then spend it all on expensive lawyers on my way out of business, the bank is out of luck. The current situation is more like the former analogy than the latter. In selling Sys V licenses to Microsoft and Sun, TSCOG was acting as Novell's agent: the money was Novell's all along.
One site recently included my password in a routine email to me.
TFA explains how they're gonna do it. And it doesn't mention Nanosolar. eSolar and Makani.
Firstly, there are solar thermal plants using higher-temperature working fluid (molten salts) that can keep working through the night (the fluid heats up all day, cools down all night). Secondly, the load is higher during the day. Thirdly, any replacement of fossil fuel by renewables saves on carbon emissions, whether or not it's a complete replacement allowing us to decommission the fossil plants. Substituting renewables for a GW of coal power for 8 hours saves the emission of something like 7000 tonnes of CO2.
How can you "safely assume ... that someone took some pictures of bathroom tiles ... in the hopes of scamming Best Buy" ?
Either the tiles were in the box or they weren't. You don't know and I don't know. You absolutely can't "safely assume" what you say.
This was SCO v Novell, not SCO v IBM. The IBM case is going to be a doozy now, with SCO's side in tatters.
"Denies", or "rejects", not "refutes". Slashdot: even the headlines suck.
Whether or not it works is up to you. It's really hard work for both of you, and needs excellent communication. And it's not your decision. It has to be a joint decision. If you somehow think that this is up to you, then your marriage is already broken. So stop asking slashdot and talk to your husband.
Kann wi optomize artical speeling to?
For reasons best known to themselves, some parts of the blogosphere have taken up the meme "By banning DDT, environmentalists have caused the deaths of millions of people from malaria." Almost every aspect of this meme is false, as anyone can discover with a small amount of Googling. I can even save you the small amount of Googling by pointing you to Deltoid, the blog of someone who has done it for you. The "Rachel Carson was worse than Stalin" notion seems to have been started as an astroturf lobbying operation by DDT manfacturers, and spread by dittoheads. Some wingnut sites have counters suggesting that the death-toll is even billions, which just goes to show how innumerate some people are.
It's been 18 months or so since I cvsupped the core OS. I'll be looking at DesktopBSD as an option the next time I do that.
Erm, yes. Your point? The author knows this, and in fact emphasizes it.
Testing is only a small part of a high-quality software development process, just as it is a small part of the automobile design and manufacturing process. The products of a high-quality process will rarely fail testing.
Oh. I see that even the BBC now uses "regularly" to mean "frequently". Morons.
Replying to self: I was a few years out of date, and have now RTF preprint and have a better understanding. Current theory is that GRBs might be very powerful supernovae with some poorly-understood mechanism for turning a few FOEs of the energy (gravitational potential energy liberated by the collapse of the star) into a tightly-focussed short-lived beam of gamma rays (e.g. along the spin axis of the collapsing star) instead of into neutrinos. It's still the case that the gamma ray intensity of such a beam is very very much higher than that of the other gamma rays emitted by the supernova. So a GRB hitting us from anywhere within a few thousand parsecs would really spoil our day (destroy a lot of ozone, generate a burst of sea-level UVB, in addition to the longer-term UV increase due to ozone depletion, and make a real boatload of NO2, which is a brown gas and will therefore reduce surface insolation by a significant amount for several years). Current numbers say that we can expect one of those every few hundred million years or so, and the Ordovician event has some properties which, at least roughly, fit a GRB.
The Wikipedia article that you link to discusses the possibility of the PT mass extinction being caused by a supernova within ten light years of earth. The present article, on the other hand, is about gamma-ray bursts. Not the same thing. A gamma ray burst produces something like 1e47 Joules of gamma rays (actually 1e46 Joules per steradian; we don't yet know whether bursts are focussed or otherwise directional); a supernova only produces something like 1e41 Joules per steradian of gammas (a lot more than that of neutrinos, but who cares about neutrinos).
I also save all my emails. Over the last two months I have seen a daily average of 708 spams, 75 messages on public mailing lists that I read for work (such as mozilla-webtools), 26 internal work emails, and some dribs and drabs.
I filter most of it by hand (an RBL filter refiles about a third of the spam). The spam takes me about one second per message (I press 's' to refile in the spam folder). I think I will deploy an automatic spam filter in 2005, but I'll still keep all the messages.