This is really nothing new, nor is it exclusive to Linux. You find the problem on Unix and Solaris systems as well. Some packages come pretty well self-contained with their own libraries meanwhile many open source systems take advantage of open source libraries. One reason is plain old programmer laziness. Why reinvent the wheel when some guy a couple of years ago made a really great wheel and put it on CPAN? One one hand it's a royal pain to keep track of libraries, but on the other programmers are churning out a lot of great applications at a pretty good clip.
Before the dotcom bubble burst, I was looking to cash in with one of those high paying jobs. While evaluating offers, I used a bunch of apartment finders to look for a place to live in the areas with those jobs. I know I got no where near the whole rental picture for any given region using these services, but I got a basic idea what was out there and what the market was charging. One thing I learned was that there no way I could afford to live in Si Valley. Yeesh! In the other areas,I was able to zero in on about a dozen places that I could live in very quickly. This was very helpful since if I had taken any of the offers, I would have had to been out there yesterday, leaving very little time to find a place to live. Still, I dunno if I would use an online realtor to shop for house. It's a much bigger commitment in terms of cash and time. With the wrong apartment, you can put up with shit for a year a lot easier than you can break away owning the wrong house. And, since a large part of the reason for buying a particular house is the neighborhood, it's make much more sense to rent for a year and get to know the place before jumping in. Oh, and one other thing with the online apartment finders, their selections tend to be skewed towards luxury units. No suprise.
Another reason why Fortran is popular in scientific circles is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's a lot of code in physics departments that's been running for decades and the senior scientists are so afraid of mucking it up that they won't touch it and won't let anyone else either. And, for that matter if someone before you worked out the algorithm for a problem in Fortran, why waste time redoing it if the program runs? And, Fortran is fast for numerical work. It blows for doing system work, but the unforunate reality is that for many scientists who were given the hammer called Fortran in their schooling, every thing looks like a nail. One of the truly awful things I saw in Fortran was a database emulator that took flat text files and pretended it was a relational database.
In a cross platform world about the only thing you can do limit exposure is to provide students with a good non-Outlook mail client. That'll eliminate a lot of virus exposure. In terms of the software, the University of Michigan has a licenses for McAfee and on PC and Mac. The strategy they use with students and staff is education and encouragement. I dunno how well this works tho. Ironically, staff gets bitten by Outlook propagated virus more than the students do because the student accounts rely on pine over telnet for email access.
Given that Fortune 500 companies are successful because they make the best use of their resources, it's not unreasonable that they might be big into Open Source behind the scenes. I've worked at one very big company for a bit and everything was Unix, open source, and a lot of home grown stuff. Also, last I checked, Apache accounted for something like 60% of all web servers out there. I'm willing to bet a lot of Fortune 500 sites out there use it. And, the last stat there is something that ought to comfort the suits. The point is that it's hard to say just what these companies use because they have no requirement to disclose that, and a good incentive not to disclose.
Cool, now maybe AOL will stop sending me trial cds. They used to send nice, reusable floppies. Gee, if this trend continues, they might have to start sending trial zip disks.
The point is well made. I'm native to the LA area, and back before the new train systems came in you were royally screwed without a car. I don't know how well the new trains work since I no longer live in the area. One of the big reasons I moved out was the fact that to get anywhere, you had drive at least an hour. There was very little in way of community as well. And, this in an area that came of age with the automobile. If you go into the older parts of LA, like Silverlace, Hollywood, and Century City, the place has a fairly back east feel to it, and there is a sense of neighborhood. However, that's a very, very small part of the region. One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods. And, from a racial point of view the automobile based city can be very segregated. So, yeah, I'm the camp that agitates for a fundamental redesign of the US City around dense development and public transit. Mainly, I just feel that time spent driving is a little bit of my life wasted, and when the commute gets up in the hour + range, it's a lot of my life wasted.
Remember who's doing the teaching here. Like I mentioned earlier, given that teachers are notoriusly underpaid, not many are going to risk their physical tush to intervene in such an incident. Even in the most optimistic case, not every teacher can get over the fear of a physical confrontation. Granted most of this can be stopped by verbal commands in the case that the students respect the system. Even so, put yourself in the shoes of a female teacher trying to break up a situation involving several larger male teenagers. Or, put yourself in the shoes of the average out of shape middle aged male teacher. There's a significant intimidation factor here. Add to that the fact that teachers aren't roaming the halls in between classes. Now add to the fact that people tend look unfavorably to non conformists, and it's no suprise that teachers aren't intervening. Not to mention that teachers are trying to pay attention a dozen things all at once.
Even though I am sympathetic to teachers in this regard, I still have to think that there's more they can do. Even if they can't break up a fight, a teacher can call security, take names, and administer other discipline. I am more than a little critical of teachers who don't have the courage to stop such incidents. Especially in nice suburban schools. They're dealing with kids who may be more aggressive, but who as a whole don't really know how to fight. You might get clocked if you step in, but I guarantee these kids are gonna stop once they who they hit. Given the example some of my teachers set by intervening in full fledged gang fights, most teachers are just wimping out just because it's easier.
One reason why the school system is run by stupid reactionary morons is the pay scale. Take a look at what teachers and school administrators make. Now figure out who's going to take those jobs.
Are you sure this is the first observation of Aurora on Jupiter? I mean when I worked as a research assistant in the Space Physics lab, I spent a fair amount of time doing image analysis on things that looked like aurora on Jupiter, and that was about ten years ago now. Infact, what I was looking at were maps of spectral emmissons coming of the plant. I also worked with images of ultraviolet light being emitted from the planet. If this wasn't an aurora, I don't know what is.
I think BBC got their terms confused. There's a fine book on the Jovian outer atmosphere and magentosphere called Time Variant Phenomenon in the Jovian System. While technical, this book is way cool and has some great images. Anyway, this is sort of a reference for researchers and grad students who study Jupiter. I believe it's out of print, but can be found at a decent University Library. It was self publisched by NASA and NSF. The point here is that aurora on Jupiter are familar phenomenon that have been studied for a quite a while. I'm not saying anyone understands it, but that's why they study it.
I wish my institution still had access to Nature so I could check the primary source. I think the news here is that a flare was observed. Maybe the big news is that the Hubble imaged it. I dunno. The project I worked on was based off a sounding rocket. It was a pretty cool setup. We'd put a telescope in the nose of small rocket. I think it was a Redstone, but I'm probably wrong. The thing would fly in a ballistic trajectory briefly leaving the atmosphere. During that brief time, our module would find the disk of Jupiter, focus on it, and record the spectra.
Waitaminute. Go to Nature and read the little write up they have. The BBC misreported it. This flare is wholly unlike anything yet seen. Different wavelength--visible! And, it's huge! Dang, that's impressive. The news here is that whatever is going on is not related to the well observed interation between Jupiter and IO. This event is due to an entirely different mechanism. It warms my heart to see an old prof of mine as a coauthor on the report.
One reason why you don't hear people agitating for the lynching of Oracle, Cisco and Sun is that their stuff mostly works. And, for most of us geeks here, someone else picks up the outragous bills for their products. I've used or administered the products of all these comapanies and have encountered fewer problems and annoyances in all of them combined than I've found in MS Word! As for the cost? Heck my employer picks that up. What do I care?
On the other hand, til I finally got around to putting linux on my home system I was stuck with MS and all its attendent crap. As buggy and and stupid as that system is, I'm the one who had to pay for it. And, I had to pay a lot. In consumer terms that is. That's why there's such a jihad. Not to mention, the poor fools who have to administer and or maintain MS products. I liken them to the suicide bombers that come to mind when Americans picture the Middle East. Oh, and let's not get into their business practics.
Of course, the other companies shouldn't be throwing stones either. Still, they seem to know when to back off. Either that or they're more adept at buying off the tech press. I dunno which.
They're talking about more than a laser here. One application is indeed about using the plasma as a power source. The other application is more interesting. That one uses magnetic fields to focus the plasma and direct it. I have the same degree of doubt about the application's feasiblity, but they're talking about directing the plasma itself. One point worth noting is that the article has a sentence about the an anti-ballistic misslile project working on a similar principle. It talking about dumping the energy into the missile's electronics. If this the second application is an anti-electronics weapons, I can see it working. The plasma bolts don't need to remain compact bullets. They just have to deliver enough energy to the electronics to fry them.
Then again... The mentioned a torus of plasma. I pulled down my trusty copy of Introduction to Electrodynamics and started doddling a bit using that as a reference. It's a toroid of plasma. Right? A doughut of charged particles, moving towards a target. What's the magnetic force on the torus? F=Q(vXB). If I remember right, shouldn't the magnetic force resulting from this situation confine the plasma to its original torus? What happens when it hits air, I dunno. However, consider the following arrangement. A duct to divert plasma. A magnetic field separates electrons from postive particles. Introduce them into a tube or gun barrel. Some +s pile up at the very end while others get magically formed into a plasma torus. Electrical replusion sends the plasma torus down the end of the tube, while a strong magnetic field running perpendicular to the tube serves to increase the focusing force, generating a very compact fast moving bolt of plasma. Now, things to remember: 1)I barely passed this class. 2)That was eight years ago. 3)It's late. I'll take another hit off my crack pipe and really go out on a limb here. What about using powerful radio waves to keep the plasma focused as it travels down range? Anyone with better major GPA than me care to comment?
Is it just me, or does this seem trivial to work around? Here's my idea. Go out and buy one of those nifty little Sony mini disc thingies. Connect to your pre-amp/amp/whatever, play your cd and record it to the mini disc. Now you're ready to record your music anywhere. I mean this seems just like making a tape recording except with digital media. Any comments? Am I just clueless here?
One thing's for sure, we have more ways than ever of tuning out of unpleasantness. However, I'm not so sure the real issue is about moderation or customizable portals. I think people have historically made active choices in the media they consume. Newspapers and magazines are good examples of this. Network TV, I think, has been anomaly in the forty or so years it's been around in any meaningful way. The Net puts us back to the day where we mostly got our information from a diverse set of print publications. As for moderation, this system is not so different from a panel discussion. The moderation system can be a way of achieving consensus in a particular community. In short these new information spaces are what we make of them.
I'd argue that the user interface is not what makes Unix, Unix. If I were a company looking for a good OS for my system, I'd be much more interested in multitasking, memory management, the file system and host of internals. One selling point for Unix/Linux is that its internals are solid enough and compact enough to be embedded in consumer devices like MP3 players. Not to mention, that either OS does not reboot on its own, degrade over time, or freeze. I think I've only ever seen a Unix system freeze once. These properties make the OS ideal for a user friendly machine. You have extreme reliablity, and with, Linux or FreeBSD, you can modify the OS to have any user interface you want. Yeah, if I was a big hardware company saddled with an aging OS that never quite worked right, I'd start with a Unix or Linux kernel and build several layers of interface over it to make it friendly to the average user. You'd have to do that any way, and with the kernel as a starting point, you've got a head start.
Another poster back up correctly pointed out that open source did not begin with the Internet. Yep, he's most definitely right. However, the openess of the Internet and the freedom of open systems fed off one and other. Infact, I would argue that the neither would have been possible today without the other. Opensource and the Internet have a very symbiotics relationship.
Katz keeps talking about how the Net made open source inevitable. I don't agree with that view and would argue that Katz doesn't know his Internet history very well. The Inernet in its earliest history was a research network setup to facilitate communication between national laboratories and universities. The culture of the participating institutions has colored the Internet to this day. The world of academia and espeically science relies on open communication to function. Consequently, one would expect this to become cultural value in the world of the Internet. Then there are the indiviuals who built the system. A lot of these guys came of age as technically educated adults during the sixties. They transmitted their values into the new world they were creating. Already we can see that Net was a reflection of its builders. Then there are very real technological decisions that shaped the Ineternet. Back when this whole enterprise was called the Arpanet, it was controled from the top on down. There was a small body of people making design decisions. They could have done the logical thing and gone with the vendor that had the best stuff for the cheapest, but they didn't. Instead, they decided on a software solution that would work with what was already installed in all the various institutions. They went one step further with the solution. Driven by hardware and OS incoimpatiblities, they developed a set of standards that defined how data would be communicated between machines. The implmentation was left up to individual members. This set of standards is what we call TCP/IP.
The standards were developed democratically through a series of commitees populated by engineers. There's a good treatment of this in David Comer's TCP/IP series of books, and another one in The Simple Book. Their outlook was epitomized by the statement "We reject kings and presidents! We run on rough consensus and working code!". I forget who uttered that, but it tells a lot about the people working on what we would come to call the Ineternet.
The point of this whole diatribe is to point out that the Internet didn't have to be that way. The Internet was designed to be open by people who held those values close to their hearts. The existence of an open set of communication protocols was an invitation to students and professional developers alike to develop implementations that suited their particular needs. As long as it adhered to the protocol, any implementation would work. And, remember until fairly recently, the only people on the net were employed in academia. The culture of academia is one of openess and co-operation--or at least it used to be--and software was freely distributed to colleagues and collaborators. This is where the open source movement came from.
Thinngs didn't have to be that way. If, say, DEC, got the contract to develop the Arpanet, they wouldn't have given a darn about openess and interoperablity: They had their own functioning protocol, DECNet, and they could have locked everyone into using their implementation if not their hardware. Instead,the Arpanet was developed by university academics. While the Internet has gone through many different incanarions, DARPANet, ARPANet, NSFNet, and so on, throughout most its history the Internet has been academia's private reserve. Things have opened up now, and while one might expect to lead to still more openess, the Net has been subjected to the values a larger world, and those values do not necessarily include open and free communication.
I'm thinking about running a webzine. I've got the technical details down, and there's some writers I want to recruit, but the one thing that hangs me up is how to generate enough money to give the writers a decent royalty. Does anyone out there have any experience in this type of thing? I know the banner ad market is in the process of imploding, but I'm looking for info on recruiting advertisers, prices and all that. Also does anyone have any experience starting up a magazine that they would like to share? Let's face it, Salon didn't get where they are overnight, they had to start somewhere--even if they did have a lot of venture capital.
Dunno why this was marked troll. Swordgeek here brings up a very good point. Just because the honorable(?) Garcia is too lazy to figure out how to use his computer doesn't mean anyone else is that lazy. However, the problem is that most folks out there are that lazy. I get the picture that a lot of parents hide behind the fact that computers are so new and so complicated that they can't cope. I think such people should wake up. I mean c'mon here, you're telling me that an adult in their mid thirties who's been filing taxes and maybe running a small business is less sophisticated and literate than a child, even a teenager? I don't buy it. Granted, I'm coming from the perspective of someone who learned to program on an Apple II, but let's face it any adult that's not mentally impaired should be able to sit down with a manual and a tech support phone call and install filtering software. That is if they want it. What this takes is time and effort. So does sitting down with your kid and having a talk about what's out there both in the online world and the real world. That's what's really lacking in this disconnected suburban society.
My roomate is very conservative and I'm very liberal as some of my posts might indicate, but we both agree on one thing. And, that's the danger of this trend towards legislating risk and responsiblity away. He cites the increasing trend towards gun control, and I point to things like this. It all boils down to the same thing: Suburbanites want protected spaces cut off from reality and the possiblity that life has risk. No amount of legislation can ever keep the darker side of life from intruding. If you want to protect kids from from this darker side, you have to prepare them to confront it. You're going to have to take the time and make the effort to transmit the values you believe in to your kid. You're going to have to train your kid to think for themselves. But, of course, that's the problem. It's an effort and requires you take responsiblity. Of course a politican can't say that and expect to get relected in this risk averse society. A politican has to say don't worry, we'll make a law to cover that. Don't worry all it costs is a little bit of freedom. You won't miss it. And, for most people these days that's true. Most folks like their gilded cages.
Garcia also said that downloading and installing the software over the net is too difficult for anyone over 30 years old to install.
Sorry if there's a blank post with the same title. I hit enter my mistake. Anyway, I guess I'm in a lot of trouble. Geeze, I mean I'm like 33 now and I'm still writing software. Time to retire and let the kids take care of the computer at home. Oh, waitaminute... That's right I don't have any kids. Dang, now I'm screwed.
I'm not sure the Net was ever really revolutionary. In the early days, the Connected Internet(AKA Darpanet or NSF Net depending on year)was the private domain of academic institutions and the only people online were scientists, engineers and other educated weirdos. These people used Net to the greatest advantage due to their technical and intellectual sophistication. The majority of discussions at least seemed to be weighty and erudite, but that might just be nostalgia. Let's be honest here. alt.lemurs and alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics were two of my favorite usenet groups in those bygone days, but I can't say the discussions there were revolutionary or even relevant. Silly, yes, relevant no. And how many bull sessions on the early muds and mucks were about nothing more than the relative merits of Vaxes vs Unix. The important stuff in the early days was all work related, like exhcanging data, or sending commands to a polar radar station. Yeah, there was a lot of interesting social stuff going on the murkier corners of gopher space and in the Mud/Muck world, but that was all very experimental. It also a very elite crowd of people, who despite their individual personalities, tended to be cut from the same socio-economic cloth.
Nowadays, everyone's getting online, so there's a lot of noise out there, but there's also a lot more signal than there used to be. Yeah we've got more stock tickers and cat pictures out there than we'll ever know what to do with, but there's also a lot more people setting down their thoughts than there ever has been. The web in a way is the greatest collections of 'zines ever put together. For those who have grown up late in the technological boom a 'zine is little self published paper magazine often given away for free at friendly newsstands and bookstores. Even before the web, people were finding ways to promulgate and exchange ideas. However putting together something as simple as a 'zine is not a trivial task and getting it distributed widely is even harder. The web has changed that to some extent. You can not put up something similar for very little money and effort. Getting exposure is more diffiucult, but if you network well, you can get other people of like mind to link to your effort. For those who say that there's nothing worthwhile or challenging on the net, I'll link to two sites I found recently. Agree with them or not, they are windows into a culture that the mainstream does not want to acknowledge. Gangland Express and Sleepy Lagoon. Both of these sites helped illuminate a world that had always been dark to me growing up. And, that's the potential power of the information overload. Anyone can get on and say something. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but you can use tools to filter the noise and tune in what you want. Tools like search engines. The main difference between the Net and other modern media is that the consumer has to be an active particpant to utilize the Net.
In a way, I'd argue that the revolution has not yet begun. We as a society are still learning to deal with the Net and the sheer volume of information it brings us. Sure the deliurm of the 'new thing' has faded from the Internet, but that does not mean it's going to go away. The Net is undergoing a correction that puts the supply in line with the actual demand. Not biggie there. Contrary to the pundits, the revolution of the Net has not happened, nor will it happen. The Net will be used by people to exchange ideas and to organize. Those people may well engender a revlotion, but that revolution will happen outside of the Net. That revolution will happen in the real world, in the courts, the polls, and even in the streets.
Strap several live cats to your body then jump off a building. You should recover from any incidental broken bones in a day or so. Well, provided you don't die of blood loss.
I think this decision will actually help the programming community in Mexico. My experience thus far with Open Source systems is that they don't do exactly what you want them to do so you have to tweak them a bit. Mind you commerical software has the same problem, the only difference is that you can't customize it. So anyway, they're going run into the same thing and have the same need. That means they hire on programmers to develop the features they need. This is very much preferable to the MS model of retooling your business process around software that doesn't quite fufill your needs.
Given the sheer amount of electronic information resources out there, portals make it possible to navigate the web. However, the question is becoming who provides the service and what are their motivations to do so. Yahoo made a ton of money by creating valuable real estate, but there's a recession that's driving the value down--not to mention a shift in marketing philosophy. Meanwhile, ogranizations are making their own portals custom suited for their purposes. Infact, that's what I'm working on. My employer, a large university has a library that subscribes to an awesome array of electronic publications and services. Prior to installing and customizing, MyLibrary, no one on the user end had any idea what we had. With the portal, any student can get online and have access to primary resources, and invaluable tool for students at all levels. However, the university library regards this as valuable service for students, staff, and faculty. The revenue we generate from running a portal is, in essence, the increased productivity resulting from the portal.
Let's take this a little further: Let's say that the banner ad market completely collapses and no new market for advertising revenue takes it place. Yahoo goes bye-bye. Suddenly, large organizations are going to need for their members, be they employees or whatever, to be able to find things on the Internet. That means each one will want to run their own search engine and indexing service. Or, given the current trend away from 'vertical integration' in buisiness, most organizations are going to want to outsource their portal work to avoid having to support an a web services infrastructure. That means, by default we will have a subscription base model for portals. Maybe Yahoo can survive this paradigm shift, but someone will almost certainly move into this service vacuum. To be sure, the bigger corps will want to create portals that only allow their members to see what the leadership wants them to see, but there is a need for totally open portals, especially in adcademia. I could even see a consortium of universities and colleges coming together to provide comprehensive and uncensored portal services for academics.
Given the cost in fuel and engery needed to haul an invasion force, I wonder if planetary invasion would ever be feasible. And, if not, what options would military leaders have for pacifying a planet? Would it be enough to simply assume control of local space and threaten to drop rocks on them if they got out of line? Would they have to use a combination of 'rocks' and spaceborne infantry raids? Or, would the only reasonable deterent be total destruction? I think there's a sci-fi story in this here.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really nothing new, nor is it exclusive to Linux. You find the problem on Unix and Solaris systems as well. Some packages come pretty well self-contained with their own libraries meanwhile many open source systems take advantage of open source libraries. One reason is plain old programmer laziness. Why reinvent the wheel when some guy a couple of years ago made a really great wheel and put it on CPAN? One one hand it's a royal pain to keep track of libraries, but on the other programmers are churning out a lot of great applications at a pretty good clip.
Before the dotcom bubble burst, I was looking to cash in with one of those high paying jobs. While evaluating offers, I used a bunch of apartment finders to look for a place to live in the areas with those jobs. I know I got no where near the whole rental picture for any given region using these services, but I got a basic idea what was out there and what the market was charging. One thing I learned was that there no way I could afford to live in Si Valley. Yeesh! In the other areas,I was able to zero in on about a dozen places that I could live in very quickly. This was very helpful since if I had taken any of the offers, I would have had to been out there yesterday, leaving very little time to find a place to live. Still, I dunno if I would use an online realtor to shop for house. It's a much bigger commitment in terms of cash and time. With the wrong apartment, you can put up with shit for a year a lot easier than you can break away owning the wrong house. And, since a large part of the reason for buying a particular house is the neighborhood, it's make much more sense to rent for a year and get to know the place before jumping in. Oh, and one other thing with the online apartment finders, their selections tend to be skewed towards luxury units. No suprise.
Another reason why Fortran is popular in scientific circles is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's a lot of code in physics departments that's been running for decades and the senior scientists are so afraid of mucking it up that they won't touch it and won't let anyone else either. And, for that matter if someone before you worked out the algorithm for a problem in Fortran, why waste time redoing it if the program runs? And, Fortran is fast for numerical work. It blows for doing system work, but the unforunate reality is that for many scientists who were given the hammer called Fortran in their schooling, every thing looks like a nail. One of the truly awful things I saw in Fortran was a database emulator that took flat text files and pretended it was a relational database.
In a cross platform world about the only thing you can do limit exposure is to provide students with a good non-Outlook mail client. That'll eliminate a lot of virus exposure. In terms of the software, the University of Michigan has a licenses for McAfee and on PC and Mac. The strategy they use with students and staff is education and encouragement. I dunno how well this works tho. Ironically, staff gets bitten by Outlook propagated virus more than the students do because the student accounts rely on pine over telnet for email access.
Given that Fortune 500 companies are successful because they make the best use of their resources, it's not unreasonable that they might be big into Open Source behind the scenes. I've worked at one very big company for a bit and everything was Unix, open source, and a lot of home grown stuff. Also, last I checked, Apache accounted for something like 60% of all web servers out there. I'm willing to bet a lot of Fortune 500 sites out there use it. And, the last stat there is something that ought to comfort the suits. The point is that it's hard to say just what these companies use because they have no requirement to disclose that, and a good incentive not to disclose.
Cool, now maybe AOL will stop sending me trial cds. They used to send nice, reusable floppies. Gee, if this trend continues, they might have to start sending trial zip disks.
The point is well made. I'm native to the LA area, and back before the new train systems came in you were royally screwed without a car. I don't know how well the new trains work since I no longer live in the area. One of the big reasons I moved out was the fact that to get anywhere, you had drive at least an hour. There was very little in way of community as well. And, this in an area that came of age with the automobile. If you go into the older parts of LA, like Silverlace, Hollywood, and Century City, the place has a fairly back east feel to it, and there is a sense of neighborhood. However, that's a very, very small part of the region. One of the bigger problems for young people is that in many neighborhoods there's literally nothing to do, and nowhere to go until they get old enough to drive. The other big problem is that the sprawl tends to isolate poorer people, denying them access to good jobs outside of their neighborhoods. And, from a racial point of view the automobile based city can be very segregated. So, yeah, I'm the camp that agitates for a fundamental redesign of the US City around dense development and public transit. Mainly, I just feel that time spent driving is a little bit of my life wasted, and when the commute gets up in the hour + range, it's a lot of my life wasted.
Remember who's doing the teaching here. Like I mentioned earlier, given that teachers are notoriusly underpaid, not many are going to risk their physical tush to intervene in such an incident. Even in the most optimistic case, not every teacher can get over the fear of a physical confrontation. Granted most of this can be stopped by verbal commands in the case that the students respect the system. Even so, put yourself in the shoes of a female teacher trying to break up a situation involving several larger male teenagers. Or, put yourself in the shoes of the average out of shape middle aged male teacher. There's a significant intimidation factor here. Add to that the fact that teachers aren't roaming the halls in between classes. Now add to the fact that people tend look unfavorably to non conformists, and it's no suprise that teachers aren't intervening. Not to mention that teachers are trying to pay attention a dozen things all at once.
Even though I am sympathetic to teachers in this regard, I still have to think that there's more they can do. Even if they can't break up a fight, a teacher can call security, take names, and administer other discipline. I am more than a little critical of teachers who don't have the courage to stop such incidents. Especially in nice suburban schools. They're dealing with kids who may be more aggressive, but who as a whole don't really know how to fight. You might get clocked if you step in, but I guarantee these kids are gonna stop once they who they hit. Given the example some of my teachers set by intervening in full fledged gang fights, most teachers are just wimping out just because it's easier.
One reason why the school system is run by stupid reactionary morons is the pay scale. Take a look at what teachers and school administrators make. Now figure out who's going to take those jobs.
Are you sure this is the first observation of Aurora on Jupiter? I mean when I worked as a research assistant in the Space Physics lab, I spent a fair amount of time doing image analysis on things that looked like aurora on Jupiter, and that was about ten years ago now. Infact, what I was looking at were maps of spectral emmissons coming of the plant. I also worked with images of ultraviolet light being emitted from the planet. If this wasn't an aurora, I don't know what is.
I think BBC got their terms confused. There's a fine book on the Jovian outer atmosphere and magentosphere called Time Variant Phenomenon in the Jovian System. While technical, this book is way cool and has some great images. Anyway, this is sort of a reference for researchers and grad students who study Jupiter. I believe it's out of print, but can be found at a decent University Library. It was self publisched by NASA and NSF. The point here is that aurora on Jupiter are familar phenomenon that have been studied for a quite a while. I'm not saying anyone understands it, but that's why they study it.
I wish my institution still had access to Nature so I could check the primary source. I think the news here is that a flare was observed. Maybe the big news is that the Hubble imaged it. I dunno. The project I worked on was based off a sounding rocket. It was a pretty cool setup. We'd put a telescope in the nose of small rocket. I think it was a Redstone, but I'm probably wrong. The thing would fly in a ballistic trajectory briefly leaving the atmosphere. During that brief time, our module would find the disk of Jupiter, focus on it, and record the spectra.
Waitaminute. Go to Nature and read the little write up they have. The BBC misreported it. This flare is wholly unlike anything yet seen. Different wavelength--visible! And, it's huge! Dang, that's impressive. The news here is that whatever is going on is not related to the well observed interation between Jupiter and IO. This event is due to an entirely different mechanism. It warms my heart to see an old prof of mine as a coauthor on the report.
One reason why you don't hear people agitating for the lynching of Oracle, Cisco and Sun is that their stuff mostly works. And, for most of us geeks here, someone else picks up the outragous bills for their products. I've used or administered the products of all these comapanies and have encountered fewer problems and annoyances in all of them combined than I've found in MS Word! As for the cost? Heck my employer picks that up. What do I care?
On the other hand, til I finally got around to putting linux on my home system I was stuck with MS and all its attendent crap. As buggy and and stupid as that system is, I'm the one who had to pay for it. And, I had to pay a lot. In consumer terms that is. That's why there's such a jihad. Not to mention, the poor fools who have to administer and or maintain MS products. I liken them to the suicide bombers that come to mind when Americans picture the Middle East. Oh, and let's not get into their business practics.
Of course, the other companies shouldn't be throwing stones either. Still, they seem to know when to back off. Either that or they're more adept at buying off the tech press. I dunno which.
They're talking about more than a laser here. One application is indeed about using the plasma as a power source. The other application is more interesting. That one uses magnetic fields to focus the plasma and direct it. I have the same degree of doubt about the application's feasiblity, but they're talking about directing the plasma itself. One point worth noting is that the article has a sentence about the an anti-ballistic misslile project working on a similar principle. It talking about dumping the energy into the missile's electronics. If this the second application is an anti-electronics weapons, I can see it working. The plasma bolts don't need to remain compact bullets. They just have to deliver enough energy to the electronics to fry them.
Then again... The mentioned a torus of plasma. I pulled down my trusty copy of Introduction to Electrodynamics and started doddling a bit using that as a reference. It's a toroid of plasma. Right? A doughut of charged particles, moving towards a target. What's the magnetic force on the torus? F=Q(vXB). If I remember right, shouldn't the magnetic force resulting from this situation confine the plasma to its original torus? What happens when it hits air, I dunno. However, consider the following arrangement. A duct to divert plasma. A magnetic field separates electrons from postive particles. Introduce them into a tube or gun barrel. Some +s pile up at the very end while others get magically formed into a plasma torus. Electrical replusion sends the plasma torus down the end of the tube, while a strong magnetic field running perpendicular to the tube serves to increase the focusing force, generating a very compact fast moving bolt of plasma. Now, things to remember: 1)I barely passed this class. 2)That was eight years ago. 3)It's late. I'll take another hit off my crack pipe and really go out on a limb here. What about using powerful radio waves to keep the plasma focused as it travels down range? Anyone with better major GPA than me care to comment?
Is it just me, or does this seem trivial to work around? Here's my idea. Go out and buy one of those nifty little Sony mini disc thingies. Connect to your pre-amp/amp/whatever, play your cd and record it to the mini disc. Now you're ready to record your music anywhere. I mean this seems just like making a tape recording except with digital media. Any comments? Am I just clueless here?
One thing's for sure, we have more ways than ever of tuning out of unpleasantness. However, I'm not so sure the real issue is about moderation or customizable portals. I think people have historically made active choices in the media they consume. Newspapers and magazines are good examples of this. Network TV, I think, has been anomaly in the forty or so years it's been around in any meaningful way. The Net puts us back to the day where we mostly got our information from a diverse set of print publications. As for moderation, this system is not so different from a panel discussion. The moderation system can be a way of achieving consensus in a particular community. In short these new information spaces are what we make of them.
I'd argue that the user interface is not what makes Unix, Unix. If I were a company looking for a good OS for my system, I'd be much more interested in multitasking, memory management, the file system and host of internals. One selling point for Unix/Linux is that its internals are solid enough and compact enough to be embedded in consumer devices like MP3 players. Not to mention, that either OS does not reboot on its own, degrade over time, or freeze. I think I've only ever seen a Unix system freeze once. These properties make the OS ideal for a user friendly machine. You have extreme reliablity, and with, Linux or FreeBSD, you can modify the OS to have any user interface you want. Yeah, if I was a big hardware company saddled with an aging OS that never quite worked right, I'd start with a Unix or Linux kernel and build several layers of interface over it to make it friendly to the average user. You'd have to do that any way, and with the kernel as a starting point, you've got a head start.
Another poster back up correctly pointed out that open source did not begin with the Internet. Yep, he's most definitely right. However, the openess of the Internet and the freedom of open systems fed off one and other. Infact, I would argue that the neither would have been possible today without the other. Opensource and the Internet have a very symbiotics relationship.
Katz keeps talking about how the Net made open source inevitable. I don't agree with that view and would argue that Katz doesn't know his Internet history very well. The Inernet in its earliest history was a research network setup to facilitate communication between national laboratories and universities. The culture of the participating institutions has colored the Internet to this day. The world of academia and espeically science relies on open communication to function. Consequently, one would expect this to become cultural value in the world of the Internet. Then there are the indiviuals who built the system. A lot of these guys came of age as technically educated adults during the sixties. They transmitted their values into the new world they were creating. Already we can see that Net was a reflection of its builders. Then there are very real technological decisions that shaped the Ineternet. Back when this whole enterprise was called the Arpanet, it was controled from the top on down. There was a small body of people making design decisions. They could have done the logical thing and gone with the vendor that had the best stuff for the cheapest, but they didn't. Instead, they decided on a software solution that would work with what was already installed in all the various institutions. They went one step further with the solution. Driven by hardware and OS incoimpatiblities, they developed a set of standards that defined how data would be communicated between machines. The implmentation was left up to individual members. This set of standards is what we call TCP/IP.
The standards were developed democratically through a series of commitees populated by engineers. There's a good treatment of this in David Comer's TCP/IP series of books, and another one in The Simple Book. Their outlook was epitomized by the statement "We reject kings and presidents! We run on rough consensus and working code!". I forget who uttered that, but it tells a lot about the people working on what we would come to call the Ineternet.
The point of this whole diatribe is to point out that the Internet didn't have to be that way. The Internet was designed to be open by people who held those values close to their hearts. The existence of an open set of communication protocols was an invitation to students and professional developers alike to develop implementations that suited their particular needs. As long as it adhered to the protocol, any implementation would work. And, remember until fairly recently, the only people on the net were employed in academia. The culture of academia is one of openess and co-operation--or at least it used to be--and software was freely distributed to colleagues and collaborators. This is where the open source movement came from.
Thinngs didn't have to be that way. If, say, DEC, got the contract to develop the Arpanet, they wouldn't have given a darn about openess and interoperablity: They had their own functioning protocol, DECNet, and they could have locked everyone into using their implementation if not their hardware. Instead,the Arpanet was developed by university academics. While the Internet has gone through many different incanarions, DARPANet, ARPANet, NSFNet, and so on, throughout most its history the Internet has been academia's private reserve. Things have opened up now, and while one might expect to lead to still more openess, the Net has been subjected to the values a larger world, and those values do not necessarily include open and free communication.
I'm thinking about running a webzine. I've got the technical details down, and there's some writers I want to recruit, but the one thing that hangs me up is how to generate enough money to give the writers a decent royalty. Does anyone out there have any experience in this type of thing? I know the banner ad market is in the process of imploding, but I'm looking for info on recruiting advertisers, prices and all that. Also does anyone have any experience starting up a magazine that they would like to share? Let's face it, Salon didn't get where they are overnight, they had to start somewhere--even if they did have a lot of venture capital.
Dunno why this was marked troll. Swordgeek here brings up a very good point. Just because the honorable(?) Garcia is too lazy to figure out how to use his computer doesn't mean anyone else is that lazy. However, the problem is that most folks out there are that lazy. I get the picture that a lot of parents hide behind the fact that computers are so new and so complicated that they can't cope. I think such people should wake up. I mean c'mon here, you're telling me that an adult in their mid thirties who's been filing taxes and maybe running a small business is less sophisticated and literate than a child, even a teenager? I don't buy it. Granted, I'm coming from the perspective of someone who learned to program on an Apple II, but let's face it any adult that's not mentally impaired should be able to sit down with a manual and a tech support phone call and install filtering software. That is if they want it. What this takes is time and effort. So does sitting down with your kid and having a talk about what's out there both in the online world and the real world. That's what's really lacking in this disconnected suburban society.
My roomate is very conservative and I'm very liberal as some of my posts might indicate, but we both agree on one thing. And, that's the danger of this trend towards legislating risk and responsiblity away. He cites the increasing trend towards gun control, and I point to things like this. It all boils down to the same thing: Suburbanites want protected spaces cut off from reality and the possiblity that life has risk. No amount of legislation can ever keep the darker side of life from intruding. If you want to protect kids from from this darker side, you have to prepare them to confront it. You're going to have to take the time and make the effort to transmit the values you believe in to your kid. You're going to have to train your kid to think for themselves. But, of course, that's the problem. It's an effort and requires you take responsiblity. Of course a politican can't say that and expect to get relected in this risk averse society. A politican has to say don't worry, we'll make a law to cover that. Don't worry all it costs is a little bit of freedom. You won't miss it. And, for most people these days that's true. Most folks like their gilded cages.
Garcia also said that downloading and installing the software over the net is too difficult for anyone over 30 years old to install.
Sorry if there's a blank post with the same title. I hit enter my mistake. Anyway, I guess I'm in a lot of trouble. Geeze, I mean I'm like 33 now and I'm still writing software. Time to retire and let the kids take care of the computer at home. Oh, waitaminute... That's right I don't have any kids. Dang, now I'm screwed.
I'm not sure the Net was ever really revolutionary. In the early days, the Connected Internet(AKA Darpanet or NSF Net depending on year)was the private domain of academic institutions and the only people online were scientists, engineers and other educated weirdos. These people used Net to the greatest advantage due to their technical and intellectual sophistication. The majority of discussions at least seemed to be weighty and erudite, but that might just be nostalgia. Let's be honest here. alt.lemurs and alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics were two of my favorite usenet groups in those bygone days, but I can't say the discussions there were revolutionary or even relevant. Silly, yes, relevant no. And how many bull sessions on the early muds and mucks were about nothing more than the relative merits of Vaxes vs Unix. The important stuff in the early days was all work related, like exhcanging data, or sending commands to a polar radar station. Yeah, there was a lot of interesting social stuff going on the murkier corners of gopher space and in the Mud/Muck world, but that was all very experimental. It also a very elite crowd of people, who despite their individual personalities, tended to be cut from the same socio-economic cloth.
Nowadays, everyone's getting online, so there's a lot of noise out there, but there's also a lot more signal than there used to be. Yeah we've got more stock tickers and cat pictures out there than we'll ever know what to do with, but there's also a lot more people setting down their thoughts than there ever has been. The web in a way is the greatest collections of 'zines ever put together. For those who have grown up late in the technological boom a 'zine is little self published paper magazine often given away for free at friendly newsstands and bookstores. Even before the web, people were finding ways to promulgate and exchange ideas. However putting together something as simple as a 'zine is not a trivial task and getting it distributed widely is even harder. The web has changed that to some extent. You can not put up something similar for very little money and effort. Getting exposure is more diffiucult, but if you network well, you can get other people of like mind to link to your effort. For those who say that there's nothing worthwhile or challenging on the net, I'll link to two sites I found recently. Agree with them or not, they are windows into a culture that the mainstream does not want to acknowledge. Gangland Express and Sleepy Lagoon. Both of these sites helped illuminate a world that had always been dark to me growing up. And, that's the potential power of the information overload. Anyone can get on and say something. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but you can use tools to filter the noise and tune in what you want. Tools like search engines. The main difference between the Net and other modern media is that the consumer has to be an active particpant to utilize the Net.
In a way, I'd argue that the revolution has not yet begun. We as a society are still learning to deal with the Net and the sheer volume of information it brings us. Sure the deliurm of the 'new thing' has faded from the Internet, but that does not mean it's going to go away. The Net is undergoing a correction that puts the supply in line with the actual demand. Not biggie there. Contrary to the pundits, the revolution of the Net has not happened, nor will it happen. The Net will be used by people to exchange ideas and to organize. Those people may well engender a revlotion, but that revolution will happen outside of the Net. That revolution will happen in the real world, in the courts, the polls, and even in the streets.
Strap several live cats to your body then jump off a building. You should recover from any incidental broken bones in a day or so. Well, provided you don't die of blood loss.
I think this decision will actually help the programming community in Mexico. My experience thus far with Open Source systems is that they don't do exactly what you want them to do so you have to tweak them a bit. Mind you commerical software has the same problem, the only difference is that you can't customize it. So anyway, they're going run into the same thing and have the same need. That means they hire on programmers to develop the features they need. This is very much preferable to the MS model of retooling your business process around software that doesn't quite fufill your needs.
Given the sheer amount of electronic information resources out there, portals make it possible to navigate the web. However, the question is becoming who provides the service and what are their motivations to do so. Yahoo made a ton of money by creating valuable real estate, but there's a recession that's driving the value down--not to mention a shift in marketing philosophy. Meanwhile, ogranizations are making their own portals custom suited for their purposes. Infact, that's what I'm working on. My employer, a large university has a library that subscribes to an awesome array of electronic publications and services. Prior to installing and customizing, MyLibrary, no one on the user end had any idea what we had. With the portal, any student can get online and have access to primary resources, and invaluable tool for students at all levels. However, the university library regards this as valuable service for students, staff, and faculty. The revenue we generate from running a portal is, in essence, the increased productivity resulting from the portal.
Let's take this a little further: Let's say that the banner ad market completely collapses and no new market for advertising revenue takes it place. Yahoo goes bye-bye. Suddenly, large organizations are going to need for their members, be they employees or whatever, to be able to find things on the Internet. That means each one will want to run their own search engine and indexing service. Or, given the current trend away from 'vertical integration' in buisiness, most organizations are going to want to outsource their portal work to avoid having to support an a web services infrastructure. That means, by default we will have a subscription base model for portals. Maybe Yahoo can survive this paradigm shift, but someone will almost certainly move into this service vacuum. To be sure, the bigger corps will want to create portals that only allow their members to see what the leadership wants them to see, but there is a need for totally open portals, especially in adcademia. I could even see a consortium of universities and colleges coming together to provide comprehensive and uncensored portal services for academics.
Given the cost in fuel and engery needed to haul an invasion force, I wonder if planetary invasion would ever be feasible. And, if not, what options would military leaders have for pacifying a planet? Would it be enough to simply assume control of local space and threaten to drop rocks on them if they got out of line? Would they have to use a combination of 'rocks' and spaceborne infantry raids? Or, would the only reasonable deterent be total destruction? I think there's a sci-fi story in this here.