Macs ditched all need for floppies with their new systems. If you've got a bootable partion on just about any media Open Firmware can boot it. Floppies are so 1980s man, get with the go.
From the beginning I agreed with status quo planetary formation theories. I was pointing out missing pieces of information in your original post. You were originally trying to point out flaws in some other theory but you didn't answer your own questions. Posing questions to another poster without defining any answers yourself suggested you didn't know what the fuck you were saying and thus I answered your questions.
As for Jupiter's core I said the core was Earth massed and the heat was from condensation, not fission. You're so convinced of your own superiority you're automatically thinking I said something contrary to the accepted belief. I was pointing out that the non-rocky core of Jupiter, the hundred of Earth masses worth of metallic hydrogen was the culprit in the massive heat production.
Neither is Earth's core powered by nuclear fission, as I said. I don't know where you're finding suggestions that I thought nuclear fission was powering anything. I was pointing out that uranium does not differenciate in the Earth's core because the concentration would be such that the uranium WOULD become fissal and blow up the planet. Since we're able to discuss this point I think it is safe to assume the Earth has not exploded and there is no measurable amounts of nuclear fission in the core. The theory of nuclear fission in the Earth's core is a bit far fetched and uses absurb leaps in logic to conclude its findings.
What the fuck are you talking about? Jupiter is 310 Earth masses, about a third of that is the rocky core mass as well as the metallic hydrogen mass. Most of the condensation heat is generated not by the rocky inner core but the several thousand miles worth of metallic hydrogen moving about in its highly conductive way. Heat transfer through a metallic liquid is very efficient due to the sheer density of the material. Any compression on that material is going to generate a bit of heat that is efficiently transfered. The inner rocky mass according to all models is not a solid rocky core but a liquid one about the size of the Earth. Please recall that the liquid rock core is the size of the Earth, not the size of the Earth's core.
Uranium mixed with iron will not start a reactor but that is not what I suggested was happening. Uranium mixed with iron will will radiate and generate heat and decay byproducts like say...helium-4. Fission reactions in the Earth's core would produce far more genergy than the pressures of gravitation could contain and the planet would explode. I wasn't defending nor suggesting the idea that fission is taking place in the core.
No the Earth's core is not solid. It is very dense but seismic data does not suggest it is fully solid. It is more of a hyper plastic, there is elastic motion in the material of the core but the resistance is very high due to the density of the material which is believed to be mostly unoxidized iron. The differenciation begins at the upper surfaces of the core where the extremely hot yet lighter material separates from the dense iron in inner core.
I said the dynamo effect of the Sun's magnetic field followed the same princibles as the Earth's; did you miss that part? The dynamics are the same but the generation source is very different in terms of relative position in the sphere. The core of the Earth is responsible for generating our magnetic field making the magnetic twisting of the fast moving equitorial material a much slower process because the radial velocity differences are much lower than of the Sun's convective zone. The Sun's convective zone which is generating the magnetic field is much larger is preportion than the metallic core of the Earth causing a much faster magnetic field flipping effect. As seen in glacial core samples as well as some deep rock cores the Earth's magnetic field changes polarity MUCH slower than the Sun's and is much less active.
You don't seem to grasp the size of Jupiter by suggesting it doesn't have a core or that its core is mainly ices. Jupiter is a gigantic ball of Hydrogen surrounding a "rocky" core of heavy elements. Jupiter's surface a and below for a couple Earth diameters is liquid hydrogen, it is liquid not due low temperatures but to the high pressure of the planet's gravity. Then below that is a layer of hydrogen another couple Earth diameters thick composed of liquid metallic hydrogen. The hydrogen becomes so compressed that the electrons spring forth and it all becomes a super efficient conductor. That sort of compression causes immense heat from the condensation of hydrogen. The weight of the hydrogen just increases the deeper down you go. For the size of Jupiter's liquid metallic core it doesn't produce orders of magnitude more heat than the Earth's core, it is just a couple orders of magnitude larger.
There was nothing mentioned about uranium diffenciating in the parent post, uranium would most likely be held either in solutions or suspended in the material of the core. It might form some kind of uranium-iron alloy but it is still going to decay radioactively.
The Sun's magnetic field has nothing to do with the Earth's magnetic field. Well they follow the same princibles but they are generated a bit differently. The ionized gases that make up convective zone in the Sun move all around (because of the heat convection) generating a powerful magnetic field. The reason it shifts polarity regularly is the gases around the equator move a lot faster than the gases at the poles. The magnetic fields being produced by this gas end up twisting because of the difference in gases' velocity. After about 11 years the orientation has reached its maximum twistiness and has begun to procede in the opposite direction causing the magnetic fields to have an opposite polarization from when they started. Two cycles of this and you've got your 22 year solar magnetic polarization cycle.
The center of the Earth is by no means a solid, the temperature and pressure prohibit the formation of solids. I think what the parent post meant was that the center of the Earth would be fairly uniform, not a solid chunk of something. Fission byproducts would easily diffenciate out of the core of the Earth, sometimes rapidly due to the severe weight difference between the fission byproducts and the surrounding material.
A new P4 can run the 386 binaries, I don't know where the hell you're getting crap about compiling the system on a 386. Gentoo is not really designed to be run on a 386 but it has a base ISO compiled in 386 instructions so it can be run by any x86 compatible processor. Using the 386 binary base ISO is so you can load up that base on a K6-2 or some shit like that and then install an optimized version (K6-2 optimized) of the Gentoo distro. See the point of the 386 base distro now?
The 386 designation isn't the processor, it is the instruction set revision. A 686 binary isn't necessarily 100% backwards compatible with older processors. Also any 686 family optimizations could totally hamburger the performance of an older processor due to scheduling and instruction arrangement problems. The reason the primary ISO image (the 16MB one) doesn't have any optimizations is you need to be able to run it on any system. The 686 ISO exists so you don't need to take the time to compile the entire distro from scratch if you've got a Pentium Pro or better processor.
Re:single point of failure
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Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
Compared to the.ini hell of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 the registry was a huge improvement in structure and style. Now it isn't the greatest of ideas in the world because the OS and software available for it is much more complex than for Windows 95. Having a bunch of text files in/etc is nice on the metadata front, any.conf file I've ever edited has huge chunks of commented lines I've added to remind me in a pinch what options to what.
A real badass scheme is OSX's XML based conf files for Cocoa applications. They're structured and easy to work with from a programming point of view, the programmer is sheltered from actually dealing with the files. They can also be tossed into a lightweight text editor and have hackish magic performed on them. Netscape/Mozilla's.js config files aren't to terrible to work with either. Too bad neither of these will ever become an accepted standard in any Linux software ever. Linux is carrying too much cruft from old paradigms for its own good for that to happen.
Re:single point of failure
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Is RPM Doomed?
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Registry values aren't unspecified some you just have to play with at first. It isn't any simpler or complex than/etc config files. The point of the post was to point out the irony and retardedness of praising/etc as the end all be all of program configuration. A single configuration point is at times much less confusing than people writing programs with no standard configuration method.
There are two major problems with RPM and neither have to do with the underlying packaging system itself. The first is a lack of a coherent standard between all of the distros that use RPM as a basis of application deployment. The second is people using an RPM based system installing from a tar.gz.
The reason FreeBSD and Debian's packaging systems run so well is package maintainers know where the hell shit is supposed to go. If I build a port or dpkg I know where my binary, its configuration files, and man page are going to go. I can also be reasonably sure that all the other software on the system has been using the same system as me so I can assume dependancies and whatnot will be taken care of. Some RPM based distros or just old ones people happen to be using may have subtle but important file system and packaging differences. I know I can build an RPM for a default RedHat build but do I know SuSE has everything in the same place? What about some RedHat derivitive or just newer or older version that switches shit around? Since I'm not going to install 20 different Linux distros I am going to build against what I'm using.
The second problem crops up in a couple different ways. When a program is released without an RPM requiring users to either install binaries or source from a dumb archiver it breaks the rest of the RPM system. People end up with shit they cannot manage on their systems because the dumb archivers don't have any centralized management system. Hopefully there's a Makefile included to handle installation and uninstallation. Then there is the problem of people getting source RPMs and not knowing to fix the.spec file to work on their oddly configured system.
The suggestion RPM based distros find a common ground is something that has been known for a long time but has yet to be effectively implemented. You can be different and unique by using Linux while still being practical and using a distro with a coherent design.
Re:single point of failure
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Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Well I'm sure glad Linux uses/etc to store confiruation data. Having 50 different styles of configuration files sure does make one's life easier.
Browser wars this browser wars that. The browser wars were not real, they existed in the minds of a handful of pundits trying to fill up a magazine column or Linux users harkening back to the good old days which they scarcely remember. OEMs went from bundling Netscape to not bundling Netscape at Microsoft's request. This was more of a "Microsoft shot a cruise missle up Netscape's ass" than a browser war. Microsoft improved IE and bundled it with Windows at the same time as Netscape bloated the hell out of "Communicator" and turned it into a piece of shit that took an hour to open. There will not ever be another so-called browser war because even with broadband internet connections (among only 5% of American internet users and even less elsewhere) why would they download a different browser if the one they have works? While you can praise Mozilla's features all you want (and I've tried to do before) most people don't care enough to go through the hassle. Better is entirely subjective.
However Mozilla doesn't face a bleak future by any means. Netscape is 0wned by AOL who is in constant need of a web client for their software. Netscape, through Mozilla can reliably and effectively provide that. AOL has dropped IE and turned to Netscape for their browsing needs. I wouldn't be at all suprised if AOL rewrote their client to use Mozilla's core libraries. The AOL client would run with little modification on set-top boxes, Macs, and PCs. Mozilla technologies I believe are going to end up a very important part of future AOL software. Who needs another "browser war". AOL can easily pull off a browser coup by switching umpteen million AOL users from Microsoft to Netscape in the course of a week. Not to mention the millions of Macs shipping with Netscape as of 10.2 with the other millions of 10.1 users upgrading. Users will switch not because Netscape/Mozilla is better but because they are fucking handed the software. That is why they started using IE anyways.
High speed hurts no one, quick acceleration kills people. If you accelerate at 1m/s^2 for quite a few seconds until you're hurdling through space just neigh the speed of light and cut the engines to coast. You will not be squashed flat or some such shit (well there is Lorenz contraction but that is different). If you accelerated from 0 to a million meters per second in a single second the atoms of your body would disassociate an instant before they fused together. Like the old saying goes, it isnt the fall that kills you it is the sudden stop at the end (rapid decceleration).
Maybe I am wrong about the colon/slash problem, when working on stuff that always seemed like the issue at hand. OSX is actually trying to get away from resource forks in the file system you'll notice too. Instead of the resource fork for a directory that information is being stored in a.PStores file in that directory. It stores pretty much the same information as a resource fork but can be used just fine on a non-HFS partition. The insitance that Finder write a.PStores file as well as a couple other files can be annoying when using NFS or SMB mounts on non-Unix systems.
The problems of UFS and HFS+ and different types of software stem from the way they deliniate directories. HFS has always deliniated directories with a colon. Your Applications folder is SystemDisk:Applications and home is SystemDisk:Documents or whatever arrangement you have. UFS deliniates directories with a slash. Apple is working towards ditching HFS entirely so they can switch to a more Unix friendly file system when they finally drop support for Classic applications in OSX.
In many cases Darwin project Ports and Fink packages work much better with a UFS partition than they do with an HFS+ partition because they contain absolute paths using slashes for directories rather than colons. Classic and some Carbon applications do the opposite, they use absolute paths with colons. Your best bet is to make an HFS+ partition for your Mac software and then a smaller separate UFS partition to mount as/opt or something. The default BSD tools work fine with HFS+ but third party stuff might not work as well so putting them on a separate partition you know they will work on might be your best bet.
Buying a license guarantees you get that bandwidth for several years and lets you sublease that bandwidth to others. There's a huge difference between only being able to output a couple of watts in an ISM band and being able to output a ton of watts in a licensed band. Say what they want to do is set up an LMDS network using their licensed band. They can have a fewer number of transceivers and have a longer range on those transceivers than they could with 2.4GHz ISM because they can broadcast with much more power. The individual receivers are also not going to be getting interference from anything else on the 2.4GHz ISM band either which is going to make a much clearer network.
Now they may have paid way too much for their band license, time will tell. Then again the subleasing of the band might end up making them some beacoup bucks, while every 200th Australian might buy a connection from them, if another 200th bought a connection from a company subleasing bandwidth from them that is twice the customers with the same investment. Owning a band can be profitable because anyone who wants to use that band has to go through you. Am I making more sense now?
ISM bands have very very very limited power output. When you actually pay money to license a raio band you can have a much much higher output transmitter. Higher output means a better signal at longer range. Not everything is fucking free and ISM bands aren't an answer to the communication quandaries of the known fucking world.
It is too bad the boycott zealots can't get their reasoning straightened the fuck out. If you browse over the reactions to people supporting Blizzard suing the bnetd guys (or just not caring) you find varying reasons for the Blizzard bashing despite the authoritive use of the word "we". The first is an objection to Blizzard suing a group that is attempting to write software that is compatible with Blizzard's own software. A second group opposes the use of the DMCA to persecute somebody writing an implimentation of the BNet protocol. The third group is bitching about a lack of a Linux port which makes them just steaming mad. While I don't give a fuck about these people nor their respective causes I think more restraint ought to be used on the authoritive use of the word "we" when describing the problem with Blizzard. Your retarded qualm is not necessarily the same as other people's. Seek organization in your irrational bitching to make it more effective.
Blizzard has been making good games for a long time and the Vivendi/bnetd crap the great and wise M decided to point out has little to do with them making games. The Bnetd guys were making a program that people were going to use to play pirated copies of Warcraft 3. No one gives a shit if it was not designed for that purpose (which isn't a very strong argument), the fact it WOULD be used to play pirated games and it was open source which means a CD check could be removed is the reason it was attacked. Had bnetd been free but not open source I don't think such a hubbub would have been raised. It sucks Vivendi went after bnetd in some regards but not in others. It depends entirely on your point of view. Obviously I'm not up in arms about bnetd, I don't really care and I don't give a damn when people tell me I ought to for whatever their righteous and holy reason is. Go eat your organically grown food and wear your handwoven hemp clothing and don't bug me about buying a fucking video game because you think it anally rapes baby grey whales.
While I'm not necessarily the biggest proponent of the GPL or even much of a believer in many open source principals, there are times when the dumbfuckery surrounding the GPL is just ludicrous.
First, if you don't distribute your code you're not required to release the source code to it but you can use all the GPLed code you want in it. I can hire someone on a contractural basis to write a program using GPLed components and neither of us is required to release the source code for anything if I'm not releasing my program to a third party. Section 2 of the GPL only applies to work you distribute or publish. If I write Jackassnix using GPL code and I never release it I don't have to provide anything to anybody. Thus, if the government contracted a group to modify and write software based on GPL software or including GPL software, the GPL would not supercede any other licensing or distribution rules covering the developed software. The author of the article seems to think your code is relicensed if you use GPL code which is simply retarded.
It is also pretty ridiculous to talk about insecurity when it comes to open source software. It is no better or worse than any other bit of software. Per so many lines of code there will be so many bugs. It doesn't matter how many eyes are looking over the code either. Many levels of government use different contractors and agencies for different tasks. There's no single standard between two government office buildings let alone the entire government body. Using software with a Free license (whatever it may be) would be a good idea in my opinion. Any government body or agency can hire their own contractors and give them the source code from the last contractor. This is arguably more secure than closed source review because the agency in question can has the code they paid for for later. The agency in question can hire other contractors to review and validate or secure the code they've got as well. A city wanting to use Windows XP Server can't exactly hire a security consulting company to review IIS for security holes. If they were using Free code they could. A dollar spent on security can save fifty in damages.
The FAA flight control system example is complete shit. Whatever code was used for the system would be reviewed by both FAA contractors as well as the NTSB. Given the current call for "security" it wouldn't be assanine to think said code might also end up reviewed by the FBI or NSA before it was pushed into mainstream use. Using the FAA as an example is just retarded scaremongering. Why would the FAA use some bit of GPL code written by some 15 year old Danish high school student anyways? Is there some bit of coding magic she did that revolutionized flight control software? As much as I hate the FUD acronym because of its flagrant and retarded use on slashdot, that example is pure FUD tactics.
Hopefully if you're reading this you've read the paper, it is one steaming pile of shit after another. One of the most interesting parts is when the author goes into open source software not having a warranty. Now some contracted code (for medical equipment or flight control systems) is going to be well tested and warrantied, most of the software using by everybody is provided as is. Microsoft and Sun's licenses tell you flat out they aren't responsible if their software pours sugar in your car's gas tank while giving your mother a deep colonic. Even if you used GPL software in a flight control system, it would still have to pass the same scrutiny as privately developed close source software. No one is going to load JumboJet OS onto a 767 they downloaded off fucking SourceForge.
It really and truly sucks AT&T has decided to impose a rate hike on people choosing not to get screwed up the ass by them. Logically it makes sense, for every user not using an AT&T modem they're missing out on the rental fee of that modem. You can be sure the cost of the modem itself has amortized so only a fraction of the rental fee is actually used to cover the cost of it which they got at wholesale prices. Say they make five bucks a month off each rented modem, that is nice chunk of change when all of your subscribers are renting modems. Taking away a couple million free dollars from someone is going to make them pretty angry. However, thats the ropes of an industry with published standards. A DOCSIS capable modem is going to work on their network, paying customers ought not be prevented from buying their own modems.
There is some crappy legistlation around for cable television boxes that I hope doesn't end up repeated with cable modems. Under FCC rules a cable operator can't prevent you from buying your own cable equipment and using it as long as it conforms to all regulations and specifications. The crappy part is those rules don't prohibit a cable operator from requiring you rent some ludicrous piece of equipment like a remote control or converter. What I hope doesn't happen is the cable operators being required to let people buy their DOCSIS compliant modems buy they have to lease something as trivial as a T-splitter. This is bad legistlation and it would be shitty if it was applied to cable modems. However, there are also rules stating that a cable subscriber can set up all of their own equipment which makes me wonder how the circular logic if allowing an operator to require the lease of some piece of equipment while also maintaining that subscribers can maintain their own equipment.
Until last year I didn't have the Sci-Fi channel so I'd never been able to watch Farscape. Even after I got the SFC I'd usually find something else on TV or just not watch it at all. Then it hit me, the Farscape marathon from last week. It is very rare that I end up so interested in a TV show. Now I can see why there is all the hubbub about the series, it is pretty damn awesome. I've found it to be the perfect mix of space opera and true sci-fi. There are sci-fi elements that make it intriguing and pique geek interest and then there are dramatic elements that easily transcend genres but make the show much better by fleshing it out and humanizing the story. Some parts of the story arc still confuse me but I've just started to watch the show. I wish Enterprise's writers would write some better drama which would really intrigue the audience. Another reason for not watching Farscape is I had it confused for a while with Lexx which actually hurt me on the inside.
I've been watching SG-1 since it first aired on Showtime (at which point it actually had some nudity). The first two seasons went by pretty slow and it took a while for the series to really hit its stride. I think since season three started it really has. Like others have said, there's no captain's chair or any of the other sci-fi staples we've come to expect. There's aliens but they aren't masterful overloads of MIB, they're real badasses with laser guns trying to kill the characters. I liked the movie so I figured I would give the series a shot and found that I did indeed enjoy it. The things over the years I haven't liked is the increasing amount of Carter-delivered technobabble and the decline of witty banter. O'Neil and Jackson had some of the best banter that was well performed and didn't seem entirely out of place. Both actors delivered it well and the scene didn't pause for the punchline which I absolutely despise. It is a sitcom tactic to pause for a punchline. Now the banter seems entirely one sided with O'Neil delivering lines to no one in particular or saying some sarcastic remark at entirely the wrong time. The technojargonbabble is just crap. Carter is a decent character but I really dislike when she get used to deliver some technospeak that has no real point other than to give O'Neil an oppertunity to come back with a faux witty remark. I'm glad it was picked up by SFC though, it makes a good addition to their lineup. It will be nice to be able to watch the latest season rather than Fox's saturday behind the times filler syndication.
The Sony camera Lucas used for AoTC was a badass Sony HDTV camera filming at about 1920x1080p. The best HDTV displays you can find anywhere are 1080i so you get the finaly vertical resolution from two interlaced fields. The 1080p he filmed in is much more expensive to use, hence the 13,000$ or some such price tag on that camera. For the DLP projection he had to downsample the resolution to 1280x1024. IIRC the film was made from the HD master rather than the downsampled DLP version.
Despite what slashdotters think about Microsoft, whatever they charge for Office, they're giving you a support contract. If I offered OpenOffice to the government for 1$ a pop with no support contract they would pretty quickly choose Microsoft's 100$ bid over mine. Most organizations will do this, you COULD download Linux freely and install it on a bunch of systems. Companies buy it from RedHat for a pretty penny specifically because that 70$ or whatever gets them some real support other than pointing out some newsgroups or IRC channels.
Don't bring up that stupid hippie John Lindh. He is a US citizen and like all US citizens everywhere he can be punished by the laws of this country. If you're Chinese and join a battle against China they're going to shitcan you under their laws. If you want to get out of a country you renounce your citizenship, you don't go on vacation. Your comments about governments are equally ridiculous. A government is a social contract, hopefully one that is agreed to by the people, in which people trade personal freedoms for legal protections. If you think legal protection isn't so special, it is usually the only thing keeping people from curbing your dumb ass when you open your mouth spouting off your uneducated rhetoric.
The educational model still has a combo drive option available which suggests Apple doesn't want to cut into their combo drive supply by offering it to Joe Sixpack.
That is a retarded argument. Loki didn't die because of lack of public exposure. Who gives a fuck about what the general public knows, the Linux customers that existed didn't buy their software. The general public wasn't going to help matters much. If you installed a Linux distro it had the obligitory link to all of the places you could get software for Linux, including Loki's website.
Slashdot Mirror
Macs ditched all need for floppies with their new systems. If you've got a bootable partion on just about any media Open Firmware can boot it. Floppies are so 1980s man, get with the go.
From the beginning I agreed with status quo planetary formation theories. I was pointing out missing pieces of information in your original post. You were originally trying to point out flaws in some other theory but you didn't answer your own questions. Posing questions to another poster without defining any answers yourself suggested you didn't know what the fuck you were saying and thus I answered your questions.
As for Jupiter's core I said the core was Earth massed and the heat was from condensation, not fission. You're so convinced of your own superiority you're automatically thinking I said something contrary to the accepted belief. I was pointing out that the non-rocky core of Jupiter, the hundred of Earth masses worth of metallic hydrogen was the culprit in the massive heat production.
Neither is Earth's core powered by nuclear fission, as I said. I don't know where you're finding suggestions that I thought nuclear fission was powering anything. I was pointing out that uranium does not differenciate in the Earth's core because the concentration would be such that the uranium WOULD become fissal and blow up the planet. Since we're able to discuss this point I think it is safe to assume the Earth has not exploded and there is no measurable amounts of nuclear fission in the core. The theory of nuclear fission in the Earth's core is a bit far fetched and uses absurb leaps in logic to conclude its findings.
What the fuck are you talking about? Jupiter is 310 Earth masses, about a third of that is the rocky core mass as well as the metallic hydrogen mass. Most of the condensation heat is generated not by the rocky inner core but the several thousand miles worth of metallic hydrogen moving about in its highly conductive way. Heat transfer through a metallic liquid is very efficient due to the sheer density of the material. Any compression on that material is going to generate a bit of heat that is efficiently transfered. The inner rocky mass according to all models is not a solid rocky core but a liquid one about the size of the Earth. Please recall that the liquid rock core is the size of the Earth, not the size of the Earth's core.
Uranium mixed with iron will not start a reactor but that is not what I suggested was happening. Uranium mixed with iron will will radiate and generate heat and decay byproducts like say...helium-4. Fission reactions in the Earth's core would produce far more genergy than the pressures of gravitation could contain and the planet would explode. I wasn't defending nor suggesting the idea that fission is taking place in the core.
No the Earth's core is not solid. It is very dense but seismic data does not suggest it is fully solid. It is more of a hyper plastic, there is elastic motion in the material of the core but the resistance is very high due to the density of the material which is believed to be mostly unoxidized iron. The differenciation begins at the upper surfaces of the core where the extremely hot yet lighter material separates from the dense iron in inner core.
I said the dynamo effect of the Sun's magnetic field followed the same princibles as the Earth's; did you miss that part? The dynamics are the same but the generation source is very different in terms of relative position in the sphere. The core of the Earth is responsible for generating our magnetic field making the magnetic twisting of the fast moving equitorial material a much slower process because the radial velocity differences are much lower than of the Sun's convective zone. The Sun's convective zone which is generating the magnetic field is much larger is preportion than the metallic core of the Earth causing a much faster magnetic field flipping effect. As seen in glacial core samples as well as some deep rock cores the Earth's magnetic field changes polarity MUCH slower than the Sun's and is much less active.
You don't seem to grasp the size of Jupiter by suggesting it doesn't have a core or that its core is mainly ices. Jupiter is a gigantic ball of Hydrogen surrounding a "rocky" core of heavy elements. Jupiter's surface a and below for a couple Earth diameters is liquid hydrogen, it is liquid not due low temperatures but to the high pressure of the planet's gravity. Then below that is a layer of hydrogen another couple Earth diameters thick composed of liquid metallic hydrogen. The hydrogen becomes so compressed that the electrons spring forth and it all becomes a super efficient conductor. That sort of compression causes immense heat from the condensation of hydrogen. The weight of the hydrogen just increases the deeper down you go. For the size of Jupiter's liquid metallic core it doesn't produce orders of magnitude more heat than the Earth's core, it is just a couple orders of magnitude larger.
There was nothing mentioned about uranium diffenciating in the parent post, uranium would most likely be held either in solutions or suspended in the material of the core. It might form some kind of uranium-iron alloy but it is still going to decay radioactively.
The Sun's magnetic field has nothing to do with the Earth's magnetic field. Well they follow the same princibles but they are generated a bit differently. The ionized gases that make up convective zone in the Sun move all around (because of the heat convection) generating a powerful magnetic field. The reason it shifts polarity regularly is the gases around the equator move a lot faster than the gases at the poles. The magnetic fields being produced by this gas end up twisting because of the difference in gases' velocity. After about 11 years the orientation has reached its maximum twistiness and has begun to procede in the opposite direction causing the magnetic fields to have an opposite polarization from when they started. Two cycles of this and you've got your 22 year solar magnetic polarization cycle.
The center of the Earth is by no means a solid, the temperature and pressure prohibit the formation of solids. I think what the parent post meant was that the center of the Earth would be fairly uniform, not a solid chunk of something. Fission byproducts would easily diffenciate out of the core of the Earth, sometimes rapidly due to the severe weight difference between the fission byproducts and the surrounding material.
A new P4 can run the 386 binaries, I don't know where the hell you're getting crap about compiling the system on a 386. Gentoo is not really designed to be run on a 386 but it has a base ISO compiled in 386 instructions so it can be run by any x86 compatible processor. Using the 386 binary base ISO is so you can load up that base on a K6-2 or some shit like that and then install an optimized version (K6-2 optimized) of the Gentoo distro. See the point of the 386 base distro now?
The 386 designation isn't the processor, it is the instruction set revision. A 686 binary isn't necessarily 100% backwards compatible with older processors. Also any 686 family optimizations could totally hamburger the performance of an older processor due to scheduling and instruction arrangement problems. The reason the primary ISO image (the 16MB one) doesn't have any optimizations is you need to be able to run it on any system. The 686 ISO exists so you don't need to take the time to compile the entire distro from scratch if you've got a Pentium Pro or better processor.
Compared to the .ini hell of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 the registry was a huge improvement in structure and style. Now it isn't the greatest of ideas in the world because the OS and software available for it is much more complex than for Windows 95. Having a bunch of text files in /etc is nice on the metadata front, any .conf file I've ever edited has huge chunks of commented lines I've added to remind me in a pinch what options to what.
.js config files aren't to terrible to work with either. Too bad neither of these will ever become an accepted standard in any Linux software ever. Linux is carrying too much cruft from old paradigms for its own good for that to happen.
A real badass scheme is OSX's XML based conf files for Cocoa applications. They're structured and easy to work with from a programming point of view, the programmer is sheltered from actually dealing with the files. They can also be tossed into a lightweight text editor and have hackish magic performed on them. Netscape/Mozilla's
Registry values aren't unspecified some you just have to play with at first. It isn't any simpler or complex than /etc config files. The point of the post was to point out the irony and retardedness of praising /etc as the end all be all of program configuration. A single configuration point is at times much less confusing than people writing programs with no standard configuration method.
There are two major problems with RPM and neither have to do with the underlying packaging system itself. The first is a lack of a coherent standard between all of the distros that use RPM as a basis of application deployment. The second is people using an RPM based system installing from a tar.gz.
.spec file to work on their oddly configured system.
The reason FreeBSD and Debian's packaging systems run so well is package maintainers know where the hell shit is supposed to go. If I build a port or dpkg I know where my binary, its configuration files, and man page are going to go. I can also be reasonably sure that all the other software on the system has been using the same system as me so I can assume dependancies and whatnot will be taken care of. Some RPM based distros or just old ones people happen to be using may have subtle but important file system and packaging differences. I know I can build an RPM for a default RedHat build but do I know SuSE has everything in the same place? What about some RedHat derivitive or just newer or older version that switches shit around? Since I'm not going to install 20 different Linux distros I am going to build against what I'm using.
The second problem crops up in a couple different ways. When a program is released without an RPM requiring users to either install binaries or source from a dumb archiver it breaks the rest of the RPM system. People end up with shit they cannot manage on their systems because the dumb archivers don't have any centralized management system. Hopefully there's a Makefile included to handle installation and uninstallation. Then there is the problem of people getting source RPMs and not knowing to fix the
The suggestion RPM based distros find a common ground is something that has been known for a long time but has yet to be effectively implemented. You can be different and unique by using Linux while still being practical and using a distro with a coherent design.
Well I'm sure glad Linux uses /etc to store confiruation data. Having 50 different styles of configuration files sure does make one's life easier.
Browser wars this browser wars that. The browser wars were not real, they existed in the minds of a handful of pundits trying to fill up a magazine column or Linux users harkening back to the good old days which they scarcely remember. OEMs went from bundling Netscape to not bundling Netscape at Microsoft's request. This was more of a "Microsoft shot a cruise missle up Netscape's ass" than a browser war. Microsoft improved IE and bundled it with Windows at the same time as Netscape bloated the hell out of "Communicator" and turned it into a piece of shit that took an hour to open. There will not ever be another so-called browser war because even with broadband internet connections (among only 5% of American internet users and even less elsewhere) why would they download a different browser if the one they have works? While you can praise Mozilla's features all you want (and I've tried to do before) most people don't care enough to go through the hassle. Better is entirely subjective.
However Mozilla doesn't face a bleak future by any means. Netscape is 0wned by AOL who is in constant need of a web client for their software. Netscape, through Mozilla can reliably and effectively provide that. AOL has dropped IE and turned to Netscape for their browsing needs. I wouldn't be at all suprised if AOL rewrote their client to use Mozilla's core libraries. The AOL client would run with little modification on set-top boxes, Macs, and PCs. Mozilla technologies I believe are going to end up a very important part of future AOL software. Who needs another "browser war". AOL can easily pull off a browser coup by switching umpteen million AOL users from Microsoft to Netscape in the course of a week. Not to mention the millions of Macs shipping with Netscape as of 10.2 with the other millions of 10.1 users upgrading. Users will switch not because Netscape/Mozilla is better but because they are fucking handed the software. That is why they started using IE anyways.
High speed hurts no one, quick acceleration kills people. If you accelerate at 1m/s^2 for quite a few seconds until you're hurdling through space just neigh the speed of light and cut the engines to coast. You will not be squashed flat or some such shit (well there is Lorenz contraction but that is different). If you accelerated from 0 to a million meters per second in a single second the atoms of your body would disassociate an instant before they fused together. Like the old saying goes, it isnt the fall that kills you it is the sudden stop at the end (rapid decceleration).
Maybe I am wrong about the colon/slash problem, when working on stuff that always seemed like the issue at hand. OSX is actually trying to get away from resource forks in the file system you'll notice too. Instead of the resource fork for a directory that information is being stored in a .PStores file in that directory. It stores pretty much the same information as a resource fork but can be used just fine on a non-HFS partition. The insitance that Finder write a .PStores file as well as a couple other files can be annoying when using NFS or SMB mounts on non-Unix systems.
The problems of UFS and HFS+ and different types of software stem from the way they deliniate directories. HFS has always deliniated directories with a colon. Your Applications folder is SystemDisk:Applications and home is SystemDisk:Documents or whatever arrangement you have. UFS deliniates directories with a slash. Apple is working towards ditching HFS entirely so they can switch to a more Unix friendly file system when they finally drop support for Classic applications in OSX.
/opt or something. The default BSD tools work fine with HFS+ but third party stuff might not work as well so putting them on a separate partition you know they will work on might be your best bet.
In many cases Darwin project Ports and Fink packages work much better with a UFS partition than they do with an HFS+ partition because they contain absolute paths using slashes for directories rather than colons. Classic and some Carbon applications do the opposite, they use absolute paths with colons. Your best bet is to make an HFS+ partition for your Mac software and then a smaller separate UFS partition to mount as
Buying a license guarantees you get that bandwidth for several years and lets you sublease that bandwidth to others. There's a huge difference between only being able to output a couple of watts in an ISM band and being able to output a ton of watts in a licensed band. Say what they want to do is set up an LMDS network using their licensed band. They can have a fewer number of transceivers and have a longer range on those transceivers than they could with 2.4GHz ISM because they can broadcast with much more power. The individual receivers are also not going to be getting interference from anything else on the 2.4GHz ISM band either which is going to make a much clearer network.
Now they may have paid way too much for their band license, time will tell. Then again the subleasing of the band might end up making them some beacoup bucks, while every 200th Australian might buy a connection from them, if another 200th bought a connection from a company subleasing bandwidth from them that is twice the customers with the same investment. Owning a band can be profitable because anyone who wants to use that band has to go through you. Am I making more sense now?
ISM bands have very very very limited power output. When you actually pay money to license a raio band you can have a much much higher output transmitter. Higher output means a better signal at longer range. Not everything is fucking free and ISM bands aren't an answer to the communication quandaries of the known fucking world.
It is too bad the boycott zealots can't get their reasoning straightened the fuck out. If you browse over the reactions to people supporting Blizzard suing the bnetd guys (or just not caring) you find varying reasons for the Blizzard bashing despite the authoritive use of the word "we". The first is an objection to Blizzard suing a group that is attempting to write software that is compatible with Blizzard's own software. A second group opposes the use of the DMCA to persecute somebody writing an implimentation of the BNet protocol. The third group is bitching about a lack of a Linux port which makes them just steaming mad. While I don't give a fuck about these people nor their respective causes I think more restraint ought to be used on the authoritive use of the word "we" when describing the problem with Blizzard. Your retarded qualm is not necessarily the same as other people's. Seek organization in your irrational bitching to make it more effective.
Blizzard has been making good games for a long time and the Vivendi/bnetd crap the great and wise M decided to point out has little to do with them making games. The Bnetd guys were making a program that people were going to use to play pirated copies of Warcraft 3. No one gives a shit if it was not designed for that purpose (which isn't a very strong argument), the fact it WOULD be used to play pirated games and it was open source which means a CD check could be removed is the reason it was attacked. Had bnetd been free but not open source I don't think such a hubbub would have been raised. It sucks Vivendi went after bnetd in some regards but not in others. It depends entirely on your point of view. Obviously I'm not up in arms about bnetd, I don't really care and I don't give a damn when people tell me I ought to for whatever their righteous and holy reason is. Go eat your organically grown food and wear your handwoven hemp clothing and don't bug me about buying a fucking video game because you think it anally rapes baby grey whales.
While I'm not necessarily the biggest proponent of the GPL or even much of a believer in many open source principals, there are times when the dumbfuckery surrounding the GPL is just ludicrous.
First, if you don't distribute your code you're not required to release the source code to it but you can use all the GPLed code you want in it. I can hire someone on a contractural basis to write a program using GPLed components and neither of us is required to release the source code for anything if I'm not releasing my program to a third party. Section 2 of the GPL only applies to work you distribute or publish. If I write Jackassnix using GPL code and I never release it I don't have to provide anything to anybody. Thus, if the government contracted a group to modify and write software based on GPL software or including GPL software, the GPL would not supercede any other licensing or distribution rules covering the developed software. The author of the article seems to think your code is relicensed if you use GPL code which is simply retarded.
It is also pretty ridiculous to talk about insecurity when it comes to open source software. It is no better or worse than any other bit of software. Per so many lines of code there will be so many bugs. It doesn't matter how many eyes are looking over the code either. Many levels of government use different contractors and agencies for different tasks. There's no single standard between two government office buildings let alone the entire government body. Using software with a Free license (whatever it may be) would be a good idea in my opinion. Any government body or agency can hire their own contractors and give them the source code from the last contractor. This is arguably more secure than closed source review because the agency in question can has the code they paid for for later. The agency in question can hire other contractors to review and validate or secure the code they've got as well. A city wanting to use Windows XP Server can't exactly hire a security consulting company to review IIS for security holes. If they were using Free code they could. A dollar spent on security can save fifty in damages.
The FAA flight control system example is complete shit. Whatever code was used for the system would be reviewed by both FAA contractors as well as the NTSB. Given the current call for "security" it wouldn't be assanine to think said code might also end up reviewed by the FBI or NSA before it was pushed into mainstream use. Using the FAA as an example is just retarded scaremongering. Why would the FAA use some bit of GPL code written by some 15 year old Danish high school student anyways? Is there some bit of coding magic she did that revolutionized flight control software? As much as I hate the FUD acronym because of its flagrant and retarded use on slashdot, that example is pure FUD tactics.
Hopefully if you're reading this you've read the paper, it is one steaming pile of shit after another. One of the most interesting parts is when the author goes into open source software not having a warranty. Now some contracted code (for medical equipment or flight control systems) is going to be well tested and warrantied, most of the software using by everybody is provided as is. Microsoft and Sun's licenses tell you flat out they aren't responsible if their software pours sugar in your car's gas tank while giving your mother a deep colonic. Even if you used GPL software in a flight control system, it would still have to pass the same scrutiny as privately developed close source software. No one is going to load JumboJet OS onto a 767 they downloaded off fucking SourceForge.
It really and truly sucks AT&T has decided to impose a rate hike on people choosing not to get screwed up the ass by them. Logically it makes sense, for every user not using an AT&T modem they're missing out on the rental fee of that modem. You can be sure the cost of the modem itself has amortized so only a fraction of the rental fee is actually used to cover the cost of it which they got at wholesale prices. Say they make five bucks a month off each rented modem, that is nice chunk of change when all of your subscribers are renting modems. Taking away a couple million free dollars from someone is going to make them pretty angry. However, thats the ropes of an industry with published standards. A DOCSIS capable modem is going to work on their network, paying customers ought not be prevented from buying their own modems.
There is some crappy legistlation around for cable television boxes that I hope doesn't end up repeated with cable modems. Under FCC rules a cable operator can't prevent you from buying your own cable equipment and using it as long as it conforms to all regulations and specifications. The crappy part is those rules don't prohibit a cable operator from requiring you rent some ludicrous piece of equipment like a remote control or converter. What I hope doesn't happen is the cable operators being required to let people buy their DOCSIS compliant modems buy they have to lease something as trivial as a T-splitter. This is bad legistlation and it would be shitty if it was applied to cable modems. However, there are also rules stating that a cable subscriber can set up all of their own equipment which makes me wonder how the circular logic if allowing an operator to require the lease of some piece of equipment while also maintaining that subscribers can maintain their own equipment.
Until last year I didn't have the Sci-Fi channel so I'd never been able to watch Farscape. Even after I got the SFC I'd usually find something else on TV or just not watch it at all. Then it hit me, the Farscape marathon from last week. It is very rare that I end up so interested in a TV show. Now I can see why there is all the hubbub about the series, it is pretty damn awesome. I've found it to be the perfect mix of space opera and true sci-fi. There are sci-fi elements that make it intriguing and pique geek interest and then there are dramatic elements that easily transcend genres but make the show much better by fleshing it out and humanizing the story. Some parts of the story arc still confuse me but I've just started to watch the show. I wish Enterprise's writers would write some better drama which would really intrigue the audience. Another reason for not watching Farscape is I had it confused for a while with Lexx which actually hurt me on the inside.
I've been watching SG-1 since it first aired on Showtime (at which point it actually had some nudity). The first two seasons went by pretty slow and it took a while for the series to really hit its stride. I think since season three started it really has. Like others have said, there's no captain's chair or any of the other sci-fi staples we've come to expect. There's aliens but they aren't masterful overloads of MIB, they're real badasses with laser guns trying to kill the characters. I liked the movie so I figured I would give the series a shot and found that I did indeed enjoy it. The things over the years I haven't liked is the increasing amount of Carter-delivered technobabble and the decline of witty banter. O'Neil and Jackson had some of the best banter that was well performed and didn't seem entirely out of place. Both actors delivered it well and the scene didn't pause for the punchline which I absolutely despise. It is a sitcom tactic to pause for a punchline. Now the banter seems entirely one sided with O'Neil delivering lines to no one in particular or saying some sarcastic remark at entirely the wrong time. The technojargonbabble is just crap. Carter is a decent character but I really dislike when she get used to deliver some technospeak that has no real point other than to give O'Neil an oppertunity to come back with a faux witty remark. I'm glad it was picked up by SFC though, it makes a good addition to their lineup. It will be nice to be able to watch the latest season rather than Fox's saturday behind the times filler syndication.
The Sony camera Lucas used for AoTC was a badass Sony HDTV camera filming at about 1920x1080p. The best HDTV displays you can find anywhere are 1080i so you get the finaly vertical resolution from two interlaced fields. The 1080p he filmed in is much more expensive to use, hence the 13,000$ or some such price tag on that camera. For the DLP projection he had to downsample the resolution to 1280x1024. IIRC the film was made from the HD master rather than the downsampled DLP version.
Despite what slashdotters think about Microsoft, whatever they charge for Office, they're giving you a support contract. If I offered OpenOffice to the government for 1$ a pop with no support contract they would pretty quickly choose Microsoft's 100$ bid over mine. Most organizations will do this, you COULD download Linux freely and install it on a bunch of systems. Companies buy it from RedHat for a pretty penny specifically because that 70$ or whatever gets them some real support other than pointing out some newsgroups or IRC channels.
Don't bring up that stupid hippie John Lindh. He is a US citizen and like all US citizens everywhere he can be punished by the laws of this country. If you're Chinese and join a battle against China they're going to shitcan you under their laws. If you want to get out of a country you renounce your citizenship, you don't go on vacation. Your comments about governments are equally ridiculous. A government is a social contract, hopefully one that is agreed to by the people, in which people trade personal freedoms for legal protections. If you think legal protection isn't so special, it is usually the only thing keeping people from curbing your dumb ass when you open your mouth spouting off your uneducated rhetoric.
The educational model still has a combo drive option available which suggests Apple doesn't want to cut into their combo drive supply by offering it to Joe Sixpack.
That is a retarded argument. Loki didn't die because of lack of public exposure. Who gives a fuck about what the general public knows, the Linux customers that existed didn't buy their software. The general public wasn't going to help matters much. If you installed a Linux distro it had the obligitory link to all of the places you could get software for Linux, including Loki's website.