Some of us prefer not to upgrade our computer every fucking month because all of a sudden the idiots at Microsoft/Apple/Netscape decide that our computing experience is incomplete without shiny new throbbing widgets. Even when I'm on a screaming fast computer, I throttle down every single bit of eye candy. Result: I can use my computer for actual work. Even so, I find that either Mozilla (on Linux) or IE (on XP) is entirely capable of reducing a Pentium 4 with plenty of memory into a quivering heap of dung.
Example: I'm often forced to use Microsoft Word. However, I have yet to utilize any feature that is not present in Word 5.1a, which runs quite happily on my stone-age PowerBook. Neither do any of my coworkers or collaborators, apparently; most of them would be served just as well by Emacs or Vi. That doesn't stop them from mailing me Word 2000 documents (nor does the fact that I run Unix pretty much everywhere). Result: I can't use my office computer or my Mac, and I have to walk down the hall to use one of the shared PCs. This is progress?
They should have gone for something like "Requiem for the Ring", which was used in the Two Towers trailer.
Oh god, that drove me up the wall. I'm sure it sounded great in the original context, but LotR is the type of epic that screams out for loud, heavy Wagnerian orchestral scores. The soundtrack to the trailer had a sort of throbbing feel to it, like it was just re-orchestrated pop music. Didn't fit in at all with the medieval fantasy world.
Actually, re-use of standard music in trailers has become more and more annoying and obvious. . . like using the "Gladiator" soundtrack to promote "K-19". There's a piece called "Tikun" (not even from a soundtrack) that's been used in trailers for Minority Report, Pirates of the Carribean, and about seven other movies. Sounds sort of like "Carmina Burana", which has been ripped off more times than I care to remember.
perhaps you are encountering some very uninformed creationists
I wasn't aware there was any other kind. (But seriously, most young-earth creationists that I've either read or spoken to were under the impression that speciation is impossible.)
In fact, our predictions based on our model fit the data much more accurately.
Too bad the model comes out of thin air. There are plenty of questions which classical evolutionary theory can't answer yet - which (yet) doesn't mean it's wrong, simply that our understanding of molecular biology isn't advanced enough. However, to counter this with claims of a Great Flood and an Ark is absurd. You're using Biblical myth to counter scientific theory. This is thoroughly pseudoscience.
you will find the major creationist organisations like AiG and ICR do not reject speciation or natural selection
I hadn't been aware of this, but it's interesting to know. At any rate, they embrace Biblical literalism, which negates the value of any valid scientific points they might raise.
What do we blather on about that is a load of bull? I'm curious to know. Spell it out carefully.
Most creationist arguments make some mention of the fact that speciation is impossible. No explanation is given for this, but they're relying on the assumption that an uneducated observer will be led to believe that speciation requires a sudden transition among all members of a population. *This* is bullshit, and creationists never explicitly say this, but it's implicit in their arguments and required for their claims against speciation to work.
A new species is declared usually when two groups of animals with a common ancestor diverge so they no longer are willing or able to breed with each other. It is all a bit arbitrary, but serves a purpose.
Um, yeah, exactly. The problem is that creationists claim this is impossible and unobserved. There's actually an entire field devoted to the process behind this - it's called population genetics.
Certainly various animal rights activists will use this as a rallying cry to stop experimentation on chimpanzees.
Actually, this is an interesting point. It's very difficult to decide where to draw the line on this sort of thing. I'm a biologist, and I have no problem with animal testing, but something about testing on chimps just seems wrong. In the abstract, it's easy to dismiss apes as just another dumb beast, but every time I actually see one in person I can't shake the feeling that there's something more than a little human in there. No social awareness, no verbal thought, but maybe self-awareness and curiosity? I'm not sure what the law should say, but I personally could never bring myself to subject a chimp to harmful experiments. It'd feel too much like hurting an infant human. (I feel somewhat the same about whales, but my sense is that we know less about their mental capabilities, if only because they're harder to study.)
Incidentally, this is one reason why creationist blather about speciation is a load of bull - there isn't really a strict definition for speciation on the molecular level. It's a series of events that are well documented, but there isn't one point where you suddenly get a new species. Creationists talk about speciation as if there's a sudden "promotion" or massive change that has to occur, but that really has no basis in reality. Speciation is simply the sum of reproductive isolation and mutation/genetic drift.
If SCO were really concerned about losing IP, they could have discreetly contacted the parties in question, demonstrated their case, and maybe worked out some kind of licensing agreement.
My recollection is that their original claim was that they did contact IBM first, and after looking at the claims IBM told them to go fuck themselves.
However, it's hard to tell what the SCO management is thinking, because they've changed their story so many times that it's really looking more and more like a shakedown - but at the same time, it'd be even worse for Linux if their bullshit turns out to be true. They started out by going after IBM, and making those stupid bicycle/car comparisons; next they threatened other Linux vendors, claiming that parts of SCO's IP were in other pieces of the OS besides the kernel; then they claimed that the Linux kernel itself has SCO's source code, and now they even claim that this was the case before IBM started doing Linux development. I don't think this has helped their case much.
SCO's original complaint was actually sort of vague; now that they've moved on to claiming that specific bits of code have been lifted by non-IBM developers, they just sound incompetent for letting this go on for so long while they continued to distribute Linux. In the worst case, if the claims hold up, they're a bunch of incompetent morons. Either way, they've now backed themselves up against a wall - this leaves them wide open to a countersuit if they can't back up their words.
Unfortunately the result is a language whose omitions actually make it more verbose and harder to maintain than C++.
I disagree with this a little; I find uncommented Java code easier to understand than commented C code. Regardless, I'm not a huge Java fan, partly because I've always found the class library to be a pain in the ass. The first Java project I worked on, I spent hours trying to figure out how to manipulate dates properly. Writing the code in Python or Perl instead would have been much shorter, easier to understand, and took me a few minutes to figure out. I've never figured out how Java's anal retentive typing is supposed to make this type of thing "better".
Anyone who's ever had to provide tech support for a large number of college students could have described most of this behavior. The only thing missing is beer spilled on the keyboard the night before a big essay is due.
For those of you who think that this bill has anything better than a snowball's chance in hell, I proudly present: the Texas Republican Party Platform.
These are not reasonable people. Don't get me wrong; I'm too conservative to be a good Democrat, and I dislike Nader just as much as the Texas GOP. I don't even hate Bush (though I have no respect for most of the rest of the administration, other than Powell). There are actually a couple of points in the platform that are reasonable enough. However, those fruitcakes embody just about every liberal nightmare, and they scare the living shit out of me. They're like John Ashcroft on methamphetamines. (Yo, Texans: no offence; we have theocratic lunatics in WA state as well.)
Assholes like this are why I didn't change my voter affiliation years ago. The chances of them even understanding any of the technical issues involved, let alone lending a sympathetic ear, are simply pathetic.
Among the multitude of advances seen on Intel (and cohorts) desktop hardware are fast networking, digital video and audio, heavily accelerated 3D graphics, faster ram and bus speeds, USB, FireWire, &c.
These are all essentially advances on the same tired old technology, and/or trickle-down from advanced workstations. Your standard PC is still based on a 10-year-old bus, and is probably uniprocessor. Even some simpler features like dual-monitor support, integrated sound (including recording) and ethernet were available on Macintosh years before they became standard on PCs.
Server side the ability to create big MP boxen has been largely superceded by the ability to hook together small cheap uniprocessor systems.
Only up to a point. The component systems of most Linux clusters are anything but cheap. You will not find many production systems that are using whiteboxes - they will usually buy expensive custom jobs. Efforts to approximate a real supercomputer usually involve purchasing Myrinet or Quadrics interconnects, which drive the price way up. You usually get a lot of downtime for individual boxes, and they require a lot of administrative overhead. I work with SGIs and Linux clusters, and the pure speed advantage of the individual PC CPU (which isn't even always true) is the only reason I don't use SGIs all the time.
An example of what SGI does best: the Origin 300 is normally a 2U, 2-or-4-CPU box. Take two, plug them together, it's instantly twice the computer, single system image. You can plug up to eight together. This is a designed limitation - the Origin 3000 goes much further. One SGI box fits 16 processors in 4U. Good luck finding a PC that'll do this any time in the next five years.
There are some older architectures that apparently had even more sophisticated features - VAX and the CM-5 come to mind, but these were way before my time.
I bet HP has the capability to make Sun's hardware more efficiently than Sun.
Past experience indicates that HP would keep the support contracts, and kill off the hardware as soon as possible. They're already trying to unload PA-RISC and Alpha in favor of Itanium. At the same time, I doubt they'd be big Java fans. They have too much at stake in their dealings with Microsoft. They're prepped to be the most enthusiastic vendor of Itanium2 products, and I doubt that many of the early adopters will be interested in running Linux on these. So the future of HP's big-iron hardware business is probably pretty closely tied to Microsoft's 64-bit server offerings. Hence, continued Java support would be a very, very bad thing for them.
Too bad SGI went from its 64 bits MIPS, and HP from its 64 bits PA-RISC and Alpha (the first one, from Digital), to Intel.
Correction - although SGI now sells Itanium2 systems, they haven't given up on MIPS by any means. There are still many things possible with their existing architecture that won't be possible with Intel hardware for years to come. Like cramming many CPUs into a box without creating a new solar body. It's a pity that they haven't been able to keep up with other manufacturers in terms of raw horsepower, but they're one of the few companies that still makes an innovative box. God knows PC hardware has been stagnant for the past decade.
At any rate, the SPARC has for a long time been the least impressive of the 64-bit architectures. Any of the others beats the shit out of it for speed. Sun was just very good at getting the right people to use and support its boxes, and Solaris was generally a very well-made OS. But, ignoring the Mhz issues entirely, they aren't very fast, and some of their machines are far too expensive for what they're actually capable of. (The same goes for Itanium2, from what I've seen.)
Re:SARS and distributed computing
on
SARS and the Internet
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are two separate responses to this:
1. The distributed computing project attacking SARS is a giant hand-waving exercise. The technique it uses is simply molecular docking, which has been studied for years but hasn't been truly proved as a successful method to drug design. The people I know who use this sort of tool admit that right now the methods aren't very sensitive - the hope is that they'll at least be able to reduce the (vast) number of false positives that make it into experimental screening.
At any rate, the force fields used are still pretty theoretical. The problem with this project is that they're using a homologous viral protein (the site says "50-60% identity") because we obviously don't know the structures of the SARS proteins. The idea is that the active site is still well conserved, and that inhibitors should be analogous. Unfortunately, it's well known that molecules which appear to have pefect fits may still have poor binding kinetics or efficacy - they may not even make it to the target protein in vivo. So they're adding an approximation of structure on top of an already approximate technique.
If people are serious about doing computational drug design targeting this virus, they'd be better off determining the crystal structure of the proteins first, and improving the virtual library screening.
2. Ignoring (1), who cares if it's some big biotech who gets the results? Who the fuck else has the time, resources, and money to screen target compounds, mass-produce the drug, and get it past FDA review? The last I heard, D2OL was working with millions of candidate compounds. Assuming it works at all, the best it can do is narrow the field down to many thousands. Experimentally validating these compounds is something that virtually no public/academic labs could handle. Academicians are great at doing basic research, not this type of investigation.
iirc, SGI's used to (still do?) have an optional file manager that was 3d based. looked kinda like that one in jurasic park (might have been that one for all i know).
Yes, they made it just for the movie. For a long time they proudly distributed the entire thing for free (though only for IRIX) on their website. I don't think it exists there any more, but those of you lucky enough to own an SGI box can get it here.
SBC recently swallowed SNET, the dominant phone company in Connecticut (and a pretty pathetic outfit itself). I haven't been living on my own for very long and always used a cellphone, but when I became ill for a prolonged period I decided I needed to be able to check email from home. So I had to activate my land line. I pay $16/month for ATT dial-up; DSL is only $26/month. I'd been feeling very stupid about this until I read this article. I don't usually make this kind of informed consumer decision (other than refusing to fill my tank at Unocal or Shell), but in this case I'm definitely not giving them any more of my money than necessary.
I think this is their yacht racing. look arond at the uber rich and what do you see?
Sure, but it has potentially much more economic and scientific value than yacht racing. The only way any of these guys is going to succeed is by coming up with a cheap way of manned space flight, which NASA sure as hell hasn't. If they make it, it ought to be a huge technological advance.
Besides, manned space travel is currently just a giant boondoggle anyway (while the unmanned probes are far more useful and cheaper). Better that it be funded by private investors - I don't want NASA spending my tax dollars on shuttle flights just for the hell of it. Maybe if Bezos or Carmack gets something working we'll be on Mars after all.
What CLI's are not good for is general file management
Ehhhh, I'm not so sure about that. The organization of files and directories is essentially the same either way, and I find it easier to navigate within a terminal window than with a graphical browser.
What might be better for file management is a new type of interface entirely. My sense is that this is part of the motivation behind attempts to develop a database-like filesystem. There's also this Yale prof David Gelernter that claims that "the desktop metaphor is dead" and that we should use his new timeline-based file manager. (I've always thought Gelernter was full of shit. I find that the classical directory structure is still perfectly adequate, but the interfaces to it need some work. Also, Gelernter says we should just give up and all use Windows because that's what his software runs on. Blow me, Dave.)
I wouldn't ever claim that they are. I would, however, claim that I can work far faster with a Unix CLI than my Windows coworkers can with their GUI. There will always be exceptions, but I've known many people who found Unix far easier to use once they overcame the initial barrier. I find this usability more important than being intuitive. (By the way, as someone who has always used Macs or Unix systems, I certianly don't find Windows at all intuitve, GUI or no.)
I once asked an older coworker and Solaris guru what happened with the Unix-haters list. He told me that it stopped being quite so funny once Windows NT came along.
I'm certainly not blind to the faults of Unix- there have been many, many failed technologies that were more advanced than the crap we have to work with now. I think the reason so many people profess their love for Unix now is that the remaining alternative is pretty godawful, and many of us have had limited opportunity to work with anything better. You can pine for VMS all you want, but whatever made it such a badass operating system seems to have been discarded in the making of NT.
Perhaps in twenty years we'll be mocking old MS-bashing Slashdot posts as we attempt to deal with crashing PalmOS Metaverse servers and brag about how our Windows 2020 boxes are *real* computers.
I was incorrect - sorry, misread the article. The "three years" was how long he'd been evading them, not how long he'll get in jail. However, it looks like the jail sentence could be considerable (if he's found guilty), but perhaps they'll let him off easy since he was 16 at the time.
As for the punishment, they're claiming he caused $150,000 worth of damage. I know these figures get wildly inflated, but considering the money that flies around here, I don't think that's total bullshit. He basically wiped a bunch of hard drives and ruined many peoples' research. There's no difference between what he did and walking into the labs and smashing equipment.
The problem is little fucknuts that think they have some god given right to violate my systems.
Amen. I'm in the middle of cleaning up a number of servers that got r00ted due to compromised user accounts. Could we have prevented this? Maybe. Does this excuse the hacker? No. I would castrate the little shit in a second if I had the opportunity. The fact that he's from some godforsaken third-world nation means we'll probably never find him, though.
I read an article the other day about some kid who'd cracked a bunch of boxes down the hall from me several years ago, and caused data loss. They'd finally caught up with him in Texas, and he got three years of jail (he's only 19). He's getting off light, but I do get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about the shithead being attacked in the showers.
It isn't just a Linux distro; it is specifically a free software distro. They don't want anything that isn't free-as-in-liberty.
I've never had any illusions about that. However, it's a bit bizarre to see Debian fanboys posting about how great their OS is, and complaining about how Debian doesn't get as much commercial attention as, say, RedHat. Among several reasons why I don't use Debian is exactly this licensing issue - I don't really care about it nearly as much as they do, and I just want my computer to work with a minimum of fuss, without having to discriminate between Free and non-Free packages.
I'm sure it's technically quite excellent, but all I need is to get my code written and my research done. From my perspective, as long as I can burn a RedHat CD and install it on as many computers as I want, it's no less "free" than Debian, regardless of whether or not it includes Netscape 4.
Looks like a shameless attempt to cash in on the success of both Blade and The Matrix at the same time. Pearl Harbor doesn't seem to have done much for Kate Beckinsale's acting career. . . gee, there's a shock. Might not be as bad if she looked a bit better wearing a tight leather suit - from the trailer, I don't think she'll be replacing Trinity in any geek fantasies.
This one has "no advance screenings" written all over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us prefer not to upgrade our computer every fucking month because all of a sudden the idiots at Microsoft/Apple/Netscape decide that our computing experience is incomplete without shiny new throbbing widgets. Even when I'm on a screaming fast computer, I throttle down every single bit of eye candy. Result: I can use my computer for actual work. Even so, I find that either Mozilla (on Linux) or IE (on XP) is entirely capable of reducing a Pentium 4 with plenty of memory into a quivering heap of dung.
Example: I'm often forced to use Microsoft Word. However, I have yet to utilize any feature that is not present in Word 5.1a, which runs quite happily on my stone-age PowerBook. Neither do any of my coworkers or collaborators, apparently; most of them would be served just as well by Emacs or Vi. That doesn't stop them from mailing me Word 2000 documents (nor does the fact that I run Unix pretty much everywhere). Result: I can't use my office computer or my Mac, and I have to walk down the hall to use one of the shared PCs. This is progress?
In short: fuck you. Fuuuuuuuuuuck you.
They should have gone for something like "Requiem for the Ring", which was used in the Two Towers trailer.
Oh god, that drove me up the wall. I'm sure it sounded great in the original context, but LotR is the type of epic that screams out for loud, heavy Wagnerian orchestral scores. The soundtrack to the trailer had a sort of throbbing feel to it, like it was just re-orchestrated pop music. Didn't fit in at all with the medieval fantasy world.
Actually, re-use of standard music in trailers has become more and more annoying and obvious. . . like using the "Gladiator" soundtrack to promote "K-19". There's a piece called "Tikun" (not even from a soundtrack) that's been used in trailers for Minority Report, Pirates of the Carribean, and about seven other movies. Sounds sort of like "Carmina Burana", which has been ripped off more times than I care to remember.
perhaps you are encountering some very uninformed creationists
I wasn't aware there was any other kind. (But seriously, most young-earth creationists that I've either read or spoken to were under the impression that speciation is impossible.)
In fact, our predictions based on our model fit the data much more accurately.
Too bad the model comes out of thin air. There are plenty of questions which classical evolutionary theory can't answer yet - which (yet) doesn't mean it's wrong, simply that our understanding of molecular biology isn't advanced enough. However, to counter this with claims of a Great Flood and an Ark is absurd. You're using Biblical myth to counter scientific theory. This is thoroughly pseudoscience.
you will find the major creationist organisations like AiG and ICR do not reject speciation or natural selection
I hadn't been aware of this, but it's interesting to know. At any rate, they embrace Biblical literalism, which negates the value of any valid scientific points they might raise.
What do we blather on about that is a load of bull? I'm curious to know. Spell it out carefully.
Most creationist arguments make some mention of the fact that speciation is impossible. No explanation is given for this, but they're relying on the assumption that an uneducated observer will be led to believe that speciation requires a sudden transition among all members of a population. *This* is bullshit, and creationists never explicitly say this, but it's implicit in their arguments and required for their claims against speciation to work.
A new species is declared usually when two groups of animals with a common ancestor diverge so they no longer are willing or able to breed with each other. It is all a bit arbitrary, but serves a purpose.
Um, yeah, exactly. The problem is that creationists claim this is impossible and unobserved. There's actually an entire field devoted to the process behind this - it's called population genetics.
Certainly various animal rights activists will use this as a rallying cry to stop experimentation on chimpanzees.
Actually, this is an interesting point. It's very difficult to decide where to draw the line on this sort of thing. I'm a biologist, and I have no problem with animal testing, but something about testing on chimps just seems wrong. In the abstract, it's easy to dismiss apes as just another dumb beast, but every time I actually see one in person I can't shake the feeling that there's something more than a little human in there. No social awareness, no verbal thought, but maybe self-awareness and curiosity? I'm not sure what the law should say, but I personally could never bring myself to subject a chimp to harmful experiments. It'd feel too much like hurting an infant human. (I feel somewhat the same about whales, but my sense is that we know less about their mental capabilities, if only because they're harder to study.)
They are merely labels of convenience
Incidentally, this is one reason why creationist blather about speciation is a load of bull - there isn't really a strict definition for speciation on the molecular level. It's a series of events that are well documented, but there isn't one point where you suddenly get a new species. Creationists talk about speciation as if there's a sudden "promotion" or massive change that has to occur, but that really has no basis in reality. Speciation is simply the sum of reproductive isolation and mutation/genetic drift.
If SCO were really concerned about losing IP, they could have discreetly contacted the parties in question, demonstrated their case, and maybe worked out some kind of licensing agreement.
My recollection is that their original claim was that they did contact IBM first, and after looking at the claims IBM told them to go fuck themselves.
However, it's hard to tell what the SCO management is thinking, because they've changed their story so many times that it's really looking more and more like a shakedown - but at the same time, it'd be even worse for Linux if their bullshit turns out to be true. They started out by going after IBM, and making those stupid bicycle/car comparisons; next they threatened other Linux vendors, claiming that parts of SCO's IP were in other pieces of the OS besides the kernel; then they claimed that the Linux kernel itself has SCO's source code, and now they even claim that this was the case before IBM started doing Linux development. I don't think this has helped their case much.
SCO's original complaint was actually sort of vague; now that they've moved on to claiming that specific bits of code have been lifted by non-IBM developers, they just sound incompetent for letting this go on for so long while they continued to distribute Linux. In the worst case, if the claims hold up, they're a bunch of incompetent morons. Either way, they've now backed themselves up against a wall - this leaves them wide open to a countersuit if they can't back up their words.
Unfortunately the result is a language whose omitions actually make it more verbose and harder to maintain than C++.
I disagree with this a little; I find uncommented Java code easier to understand than commented C code. Regardless, I'm not a huge Java fan, partly because I've always found the class library to be a pain in the ass. The first Java project I worked on, I spent hours trying to figure out how to manipulate dates properly. Writing the code in Python or Perl instead would have been much shorter, easier to understand, and took me a few minutes to figure out. I've never figured out how Java's anal retentive typing is supposed to make this type of thing "better".
Remember that policy was from 2000, things have changed.
Ummm. . . their biggest star got elected? If anything I'd expect them to be less moderate.
What I don't understand is how any self respecting male Texan could vote for a male cheerleader for a public office.
Or Mississippian - that was Trent Lott's main activity at Ole Miss.
Anyone who's ever had to provide tech support for a large number of college students could have described most of this behavior. The only thing missing is beer spilled on the keyboard the night before a big essay is due.
For those of you who think that this bill has anything better than a snowball's chance in hell, I proudly present: the Texas Republican Party Platform.
These are not reasonable people. Don't get me wrong; I'm too conservative to be a good Democrat, and I dislike Nader just as much as the Texas GOP. I don't even hate Bush (though I have no respect for most of the rest of the administration, other than Powell). There are actually a couple of points in the platform that are reasonable enough. However, those fruitcakes embody just about every liberal nightmare, and they scare the living shit out of me. They're like John Ashcroft on methamphetamines. (Yo, Texans: no offence; we have theocratic lunatics in WA state as well.)
Assholes like this are why I didn't change my voter affiliation years ago. The chances of them even understanding any of the technical issues involved, let alone lending a sympathetic ear, are simply pathetic.
Among the multitude of advances seen on Intel (and cohorts) desktop hardware are fast networking, digital video and audio, heavily accelerated 3D graphics, faster ram and bus speeds, USB, FireWire, &c.
These are all essentially advances on the same tired old technology, and/or trickle-down from advanced workstations. Your standard PC is still based on a 10-year-old bus, and is probably uniprocessor. Even some simpler features like dual-monitor support, integrated sound (including recording) and ethernet were available on Macintosh years before they became standard on PCs.
Server side the ability to create big MP boxen has been largely superceded by the ability to hook together small cheap uniprocessor systems.
Only up to a point. The component systems of most Linux clusters are anything but cheap. You will not find many production systems that are using whiteboxes - they will usually buy expensive custom jobs. Efforts to approximate a real supercomputer usually involve purchasing Myrinet or Quadrics interconnects, which drive the price way up. You usually get a lot of downtime for individual boxes, and they require a lot of administrative overhead. I work with SGIs and Linux clusters, and the pure speed advantage of the individual PC CPU (which isn't even always true) is the only reason I don't use SGIs all the time.
An example of what SGI does best: the Origin 300 is normally a 2U, 2-or-4-CPU box. Take two, plug them together, it's instantly twice the computer, single system image. You can plug up to eight together. This is a designed limitation - the Origin 3000 goes much further. One SGI box fits 16 processors in 4U. Good luck finding a PC that'll do this any time in the next five years.
There are some older architectures that apparently had even more sophisticated features - VAX and the CM-5 come to mind, but these were way before my time.
I bet HP has the capability to make Sun's hardware more efficiently than Sun.
Past experience indicates that HP would keep the support contracts, and kill off the hardware as soon as possible. They're already trying to unload PA-RISC and Alpha in favor of Itanium. At the same time, I doubt they'd be big Java fans. They have too much at stake in their dealings with Microsoft. They're prepped to be the most enthusiastic vendor of Itanium2 products, and I doubt that many of the early adopters will be interested in running Linux on these. So the future of HP's big-iron hardware business is probably pretty closely tied to Microsoft's 64-bit server offerings. Hence, continued Java support would be a very, very bad thing for them.
Too bad SGI went from its 64 bits MIPS, and HP from its 64 bits PA-RISC and Alpha (the first one, from Digital), to Intel.
Correction - although SGI now sells Itanium2 systems, they haven't given up on MIPS by any means. There are still many things possible with their existing architecture that won't be possible with Intel hardware for years to come. Like cramming many CPUs into a box without creating a new solar body. It's a pity that they haven't been able to keep up with other manufacturers in terms of raw horsepower, but they're one of the few companies that still makes an innovative box. God knows PC hardware has been stagnant for the past decade.
At any rate, the SPARC has for a long time been the least impressive of the 64-bit architectures. Any of the others beats the shit out of it for speed. Sun was just very good at getting the right people to use and support its boxes, and Solaris was generally a very well-made OS. But, ignoring the Mhz issues entirely, they aren't very fast, and some of their machines are far too expensive for what they're actually capable of. (The same goes for Itanium2, from what I've seen.)
There are two separate responses to this:
1. The distributed computing project attacking SARS is a giant hand-waving exercise. The technique it uses is simply molecular docking, which has been studied for years but hasn't been truly proved as a successful method to drug design. The people I know who use this sort of tool admit that right now the methods aren't very sensitive - the hope is that they'll at least be able to reduce the (vast) number of false positives that make it into experimental screening.
At any rate, the force fields used are still pretty theoretical. The problem with this project is that they're using a homologous viral protein (the site says "50-60% identity") because we obviously don't know the structures of the SARS proteins. The idea is that the active site is still well conserved, and that inhibitors should be analogous. Unfortunately, it's well known that molecules which appear to have pefect fits may still have poor binding kinetics or efficacy - they may not even make it to the target protein in vivo. So they're adding an approximation of structure on top of an already approximate technique.
If people are serious about doing computational drug design targeting this virus, they'd be better off determining the crystal structure of the proteins first, and improving the virtual library screening.
2. Ignoring (1), who cares if it's some big biotech who gets the results? Who the fuck else has the time, resources, and money to screen target compounds, mass-produce the drug, and get it past FDA review? The last I heard, D2OL was working with millions of candidate compounds. Assuming it works at all, the best it can do is narrow the field down to many thousands. Experimentally validating these compounds is something that virtually no public/academic labs could handle. Academicians are great at doing basic research, not this type of investigation.
iirc, SGI's used to (still do?) have an optional file manager that was 3d based. looked kinda like that one in jurasic park (might have been that one for all i know).
Yes, they made it just for the movie. For a long time they proudly distributed the entire thing for free (though only for IRIX) on their website. I don't think it exists there any more, but those of you lucky enough to own an SGI box can get it here.
Do not use SBC long distance. Do not use SBC DSL.
SBC recently swallowed SNET, the dominant phone company in Connecticut (and a pretty pathetic outfit itself). I haven't been living on my own for very long and always used a cellphone, but when I became ill for a prolonged period I decided I needed to be able to check email from home. So I had to activate my land line. I pay $16/month for ATT dial-up; DSL is only $26/month. I'd been feeling very stupid about this until I read this article. I don't usually make this kind of informed consumer decision (other than refusing to fill my tank at Unocal or Shell), but in this case I'm definitely not giving them any more of my money than necessary.
I think this is their yacht racing. look arond at the uber rich and what do you see?
Sure, but it has potentially much more economic and scientific value than yacht racing. The only way any of these guys is going to succeed is by coming up with a cheap way of manned space flight, which NASA sure as hell hasn't. If they make it, it ought to be a huge technological advance.
Besides, manned space travel is currently just a giant boondoggle anyway (while the unmanned probes are far more useful and cheaper). Better that it be funded by private investors - I don't want NASA spending my tax dollars on shuttle flights just for the hell of it. Maybe if Bezos or Carmack gets something working we'll be on Mars after all.
What CLI's are not good for is general file management
Ehhhh, I'm not so sure about that. The organization of files and directories is essentially the same either way, and I find it easier to navigate within a terminal window than with a graphical browser.
What might be better for file management is a new type of interface entirely. My sense is that this is part of the motivation behind attempts to develop a database-like filesystem. There's also this Yale prof David Gelernter that claims that "the desktop metaphor is dead" and that we should use his new timeline-based file manager. (I've always thought Gelernter was full of shit. I find that the classical directory structure is still perfectly adequate, but the interfaces to it need some work. Also, Gelernter says we should just give up and all use Windows because that's what his software runs on. Blow me, Dave.)
CLIs in general are *not* intuitive.
I wouldn't ever claim that they are. I would, however, claim that I can work far faster with a Unix CLI than my Windows coworkers can with their GUI. There will always be exceptions, but I've known many people who found Unix far easier to use once they overcame the initial barrier. I find this usability more important than being intuitive. (By the way, as someone who has always used Macs or Unix systems, I certianly don't find Windows at all intuitve, GUI or no.)
I once asked an older coworker and Solaris guru what happened with the Unix-haters list. He told me that it stopped being quite so funny once Windows NT came along.
I'm certainly not blind to the faults of Unix- there have been many, many failed technologies that were more advanced than the crap we have to work with now. I think the reason so many people profess their love for Unix now is that the remaining alternative is pretty godawful, and many of us have had limited opportunity to work with anything better. You can pine for VMS all you want, but whatever made it such a badass operating system seems to have been discarded in the making of NT.
Perhaps in twenty years we'll be mocking old MS-bashing Slashdot posts as we attempt to deal with crashing PalmOS Metaverse servers and brag about how our Windows 2020 boxes are *real* computers.
I was incorrect - sorry, misread the article. The "three years" was how long he'd been evading them, not how long he'll get in jail. However, it looks like the jail sentence could be considerable (if he's found guilty), but perhaps they'll let him off easy since he was 16 at the time.
As for the punishment, they're claiming he caused $150,000 worth of damage. I know these figures get wildly inflated, but considering the money that flies around here, I don't think that's total bullshit. He basically wiped a bunch of hard drives and ruined many peoples' research. There's no difference between what he did and walking into the labs and smashing equipment.
The problem is little fucknuts that think they have some god given right to violate my systems.
Amen. I'm in the middle of cleaning up a number of servers that got r00ted due to compromised user accounts. Could we have prevented this? Maybe. Does this excuse the hacker? No. I would castrate the little shit in a second if I had the opportunity. The fact that he's from some godforsaken third-world nation means we'll probably never find him, though.
I read an article the other day about some kid who'd cracked a bunch of boxes down the hall from me several years ago, and caused data loss. They'd finally caught up with him in Texas, and he got three years of jail (he's only 19). He's getting off light, but I do get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about the shithead being attacked in the showers.
It isn't just a Linux distro; it is specifically a free software distro. They don't want anything that isn't free-as-in-liberty.
I've never had any illusions about that. However, it's a bit bizarre to see Debian fanboys posting about how great their OS is, and complaining about how Debian doesn't get as much commercial attention as, say, RedHat. Among several reasons why I don't use Debian is exactly this licensing issue - I don't really care about it nearly as much as they do, and I just want my computer to work with a minimum of fuss, without having to discriminate between Free and non-Free packages.
I'm sure it's technically quite excellent, but all I need is to get my code written and my research done. From my perspective, as long as I can burn a RedHat CD and install it on as many computers as I want, it's no less "free" than Debian, regardless of whether or not it includes Netscape 4.
Looks like a shameless attempt to cash in on the success of both Blade and The Matrix at the same time. Pearl Harbor doesn't seem to have done much for Kate Beckinsale's acting career. . . gee, there's a shock. Might not be as bad if she looked a bit better wearing a tight leather suit - from the trailer, I don't think she'll be replacing Trinity in any geek fantasies.
This one has "no advance screenings" written all over it.