As a 17 year old uni student in the US, I can tell you exactly why my general peer group doesn't accept the metric system: we have no real experience with it. I think that's why most people don't accept it, in fact. It's very easy to understand (powers of ten, consistent relation between units via multiplication and division), but it's very difficult to apply if you grow up with english units. For instance, I can judge people's height in feet/inches very easily. Doing the same with meters is nigh impossible. Or worse, hefting something and determining its weight in kilos.
That's why I think it'll take a lot more than a just a few generations going by. I think it'll take putting the metric units in big print and the english in small. I think it'll take students being taught metric before english. And, most importantly, it'll take time. The US has shown great reluctance to even try to use metric units (the token effort with food and car spedometers is about it), so it'll probably be 3 or 4 generations before the english system is phased out.
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world.:)
Ahh, 2628kWh (small k is a 1000, big K is 1024, Mr. Units;) in computer power-consumption a year! Oh my goodnessn, that's like, $80/year where I live! A travesty!:)
Furthermore, that's for a house with 4 computers running continuously, hardly the usual case.
Seriously, power (in the US) is insanely cheap (usually between 2 and 5 cents/kWh), and this is for mobile stuff anyway, which are designed to consume considerably less power than their wall-socket-bound equivalents.
As some have mentioned, it's already in a dome, so you can't stick your hand in if you wanted to. Furthermore, if the dome is a vacuum you get rid of both air resistance and a lot of the noise. A magnetic rotation system would further reduce the noise. I'm sure they've gone to great lengths to make it as safe (and also protected) as possible, as well as noise-free.
And as far as the vacuum being a problem to do, well, what do you think is inside your CRT?
You seem quite confident from having read the article. Thinking about what you read is, of course, the next step before posting.:)
Obviously you all gave not a thought to how great Emedicine is from a medical point of view. Here is the first major effort to produce a quality, peer-reviewed, low cost textbook and reference system entirely via the Internet by actual, board certified doctors and you tear it apart because they decided to patent something that took them a lot of time and effort to put together?
Ignoring the fact that cvs, zope, and wikiwikiweb do nothing like this, and ignoring the fact that the other prior art brought up by posters wasn't patented (if it was indeed the first such thing, shouldn't they have patented it themselves?). Indeed, the Interwoven website turns up 1 hit for the word 'patent,' and the link doesn't mention any patents of theirs.
Also, Emedicine is not meant to be a purely doctor-oriented site. Part of the big plan was to publish not only a quality medical textbook, but also a medical reference for ordinary folks in order to better equip them when they see a doctor.
So, did they patent something? Yes. Was it insubstantiated by prior art? Not that I've seen mentioned yet. Is there anything inherently wrong with what they patented? No. Recall that just because someone takes two known ideas and puts them together doesn't mean that the patent is any less valid.
If we can then disregard that the patent (however possibly silly) is invalid, I'd think that slashdot would certainly love the idea (and actuality) of Emedicine. Certainly everytime slashdot posts a story about e-medicine in general, the crowd goes wild over the prospect of being diagnosed from their home or being able to have multiple doctors teleconference about their condition. Yet, mention it as a big bad patent story with a bunch of distorted facts and suddenly we'd all like Emedicine's CEO's head on a stick.
"Open Source, Closed Minds. We are Slashdot," indeed.
Just to put my.0011 binary cents in (eh...so we're learning about binary floating point...sue me), I am a Christian. Yep, I believe that one omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, loving God created the entire universe yet exists outside of it. I believe that he sent his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for the sins of mankind and that he affects the world today through the presence of the Holy Spirit. I believe that those who do not accept salvation through Christ will spend an eternity in a real place called Hell where they will be subjected to immeasureable pain through seperation from God. That about sums it up, I suppose.
As for the number of neopagans or 'alternative' religion-type people among geeks, well, intellectualism is a great barrier to Christianity (intellectualism, btw, does not mean that being smart or using ones God-given intellect is bad, rather intellectualism is the sin of having self-love and/or pride because of ones intellect, rather than using it to further the kingdom of God on earth). Essentially, there are two kinds of faith: Christianity and everything else. Since everything else is equal in the eyes of God (i.e. equally sinful), then it should come as no surprise that most geeks are either agnostics, atheists, or a part of some 'alternative' religion or other. In any case, geeks would tend to be drawn to alternative religions (as opposed to hindism, buddhism, etc) because they are just that, alternative (e.g., non-mainstream).
Ah well, that's enough spouting for one day.
Ha! I'm sure I'll get flamed beyond imagination and modded down, but y'all can consider it a divine mandate to share my beliefs.:)
btw, for the record, all of the geeks that I know are stricly agnostic/atheistic. None of them are neopagans, but, then, I live in Arkansas.:)
also, btw, I was not raised a Christian; rather, I became one at the age of 16 after having been a confirmed agnostic for quite some time, so don't knock me as a Southern Baptist Fundie Wacko[tm]
This is something that I've wondered about for a long time. Apparently one of the Amiga's greatest strengths was its use of several bits of dedicated hardware that allowed it to be much faster and featureful than the other machines of the day. It occurred to me that a modern PC has a -lot- of dedicated hardware. Think: SB Live! has a powerful DSP capable of doing mind-numbingly fast mp3 encoding, hardware 3d sound processing, and mixing 512 voices. A GeForce2 GTS does a great deal of the OpenGL 1.2 spec in hardware. SCSI controllers take a ton of I/O load off of the CPU. Decent ethernet cards take care of their own stuff. It seems to me that if Amiga could write an OS that could make full, seamless use of all of this power (even if they had to only really support a small subset of the available hardware with the rest getting comparatively minimal support) that it would really be quite impressive. I mean, theoretically, the SB Live should be capable of doing mp3 decoding all on its own, given that it's somewhat reprogrammable. Likewise, the GeForce should be able to handle a lot of display-related things that are currently relegated to the CPU. I don't see why the Amiga -can't- be a revolutionary system/OS, but I wouldn't hold my breath, either.
Horribly offtopic, but I figure it's worth what little Karma I have.
With regard to the recent Supreme Court decision... What was banned was not school-sanctioned prayer. What was banned is allowing students to elect someone to speak for them because they might say something religious. Now that is outright censorship. The Supreme Court has essentially said that, unless the message is sanctioned by the school system, nothing can be said by students in an official capacity, even if the students organize and elect the representative. The decision is not about separation of church and state, it's about muzzling students for fear that they might say something disagreeable. Yet where is the furor over this? I find it amazing (or maybe not so amazing, given the general air of the place) that/. defends porn (even in libraries and schools) but not outright censorship of students.
Also note that it was a 6-3 decision and that the Chief Justice wrote a scathing dissenting opinion that truly exposes the decision for what it really is: the pigeon-holing of religion as a purely private matter rather than the basis for American society as it was in the beginning.
As far as separation of church and state goes, well, what little seperation is implied is there to protect religion from the government, which includes censorship. Furthermore, be suspicious of Thomas Jefferson as a Constitutional scholar--he wasn't even in America while it was being written and ratified!
This is undoubtedly much too far down the discussion to get noticed, and I'm sure anyone who did get down here would be tired of all the nitpicking, but I have to throw one last bit in. When the meteorites struck the exposed fuel line (ridiculous in and of itself), the fuel exploded when the rocket was fired. That situation is incredibly implausible. I've never seen a liquid fuel engine model that mixed the fuel and oxidizer -before- very point of ignition. The chain of floating fuel wouldn't have even burned up, in all likelihood. Oh, and it seems to me that intuition would show that it is incredibly unlikely that the entire ship's atmosphere could be sucked out of two marble-sized holes in minutes when the Dr.Pepper brand carbonated soda barely trickled through. And speaking of the Dr. Pepper, would it not have sealed the hole as it froze? After all, Robbins's character had to break it off in order to properly seal it. Oh well. Maybe the next Mars movie will actually get stuff right. That, or be much more like 'real' sci-fi and not even try but rather concentrate on the storyline.
Your argument is logically flawed. Just because 'damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes' disapproved of coed dorms does not mean that they are automatically wrong about anything else. I would go further, but I think that what I have written is sufficient explanation for thinking persons.
As far as accelerating your number nine, the simplest way is to drop it...unfortunately, you'll only get about 9.8m/s^2 out of it. Catapults, slingshots, and rockets are a little harder to set up, but well worth the effort.:)
Disclaimer: I know nothing about number nine cards under linux, and this probably isn't funny to anyone but me and only then because it's 1am and I'm tired.:)
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but my father is, so I asked him.
His opinion on the new anti-viral drug (this isn't the only one, there is one other (Relenza) that has been on the market this year as an anti-flu/anti-cold drug) is that it is costly and relatively ineffective. The reason that it has been prescribed much at all this year is that the most common flu vaccine is proving to be ineffective itself. Combined with a lot of people deciding not to get said vaccine, Relenza has seen a fair bit of use, especially since many people can ask for it by name because of television and print advertising.
In any case, he wonders if the study presented in the article was manufacturer-sponsored. If it was, it is highly suspect. We suggest waiting until it is fully approved by the FDA before deciding if it's the miracle drug that the company claims it is, and even then he would wait until independent researchers publish their findings before prescribing it himself.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a CNN article is not extraordinary evidence, even one that has a chart. *g*
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone?:) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone?:) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I haven't done extensive stress testing of the two, but in my experience, Opera for Windows is much more stable than this release...to the point that I must wonder which will be 'finished' first, Opera for Linux or Wine? Wine is alpha, but, in a way, it runs a better Opera than Opera for Linux. Ah well.
The emu10k1 driver went from buggy and binary-only for all of 2 kernel versions to supporting the full range of SBLive cards in just a few weeks. It definitely gets my nomination.
I haven't bothered checking out the spec in its entirety, but I've got to wonder about a few things:
1. Is the 2:1 5/3 'mother wavelet' truly lossless for any and all inputs? 2. What kind of 'average' compression can we expect? One poster already mentioned that the example had a simple gradient as a background which would certainly compress well. 3. How CPU intensive is it to decode these things? Will MJPEG2000 (or whatever) practically require a hardware decoder for DVD-quality playback?
Anyone care to comment,refute, or otherwise flame? *g*
Ehh, this may have already been mentioned, but you don't have to reinstall or repartition or anything. VMWare has 'raw ide disk' access so that you can use a preexisting installation. It works fine for me.
I like the funny bits. I'm ambivalent on guest speakers. I like the post-production bits...they add a lot to it. I don't like it when you all speak at once, but that happens rarely enough not to be a problem. I want more, hmm....more....more. Yeah, that's it...more of all of it! All in all, y'all do good work.
I think that it's interesting that X has been around for 15 years (although what's more is the W bit, I'll have to look into what that was). Obviously, a tremendous amount of development and tweaking has gone into it, and yet I have seen many people complain that it's slow, bloated, etc...I'm not a coder (but I hope to be...college freshman this fall, in fact), so I have no idea as to the validity of those statements. Another thing, to my knowledge, there isn't another mainstream OS/GUI that uses the X client/server model (or is there?) so I guess that there isn't much to compare it to, unless you consider Berlin, but it's not quite so complete as to be a valid comparison.
Bleh, or I could just be blithering about nothing...but the moderators will deal with that, eh? *g*
What's more, by my watch, it was up from 11% to 60% within 6 minutes of being posted. Of course, this makes you wonder just how useful such a poll would be--stuffing the ballot and all. In fact, if Sierra puts two and two together (i.e., poll posted on slashdot, sudden increase in votes for linux games) they might forget about the poll altogether. Oh well, it's worth a shot, no?
About the alignment of planets....
on
Killer Asteroid
·
· Score: 1
Well, I am doubtful regarding the necessity of this post, but, with regard to whomever seems to think that the alignment of the planets is an important event, I am wont to state that even if the 6 planets outside of Earth's orbit aligned with the Earth (i.e., such that the pull of Mercury and Venus would not counteract them), then their combined gravitational pull could be negated by sitting down (well, lowering yourself about a foot closer to the Earth, anyway). And as to another planet 'bumping' into us because of an asteroid impact, it would indeed need to be a massive asteroid, given that with the exception of Pluto, the orbits of the planets in our solar system do not appear to be particularly elliptical or perturbed, even given something like 10 billion years of bombardment by asteroids and comets.
Slashdot Mirror
As a 17 year old uni student in the US, I can tell you exactly why my general peer group doesn't accept the metric system: we have no real experience with it. I think that's why most people don't accept it, in fact. It's very easy to understand (powers of ten, consistent relation between units via multiplication and division), but it's very difficult to apply if you grow up with english units. For instance, I can judge people's height in feet/inches very easily. Doing the same with meters is nigh impossible. Or worse, hefting something and determining its weight in kilos.
That's why I think it'll take a lot more than a just a few generations going by. I think it'll take putting the metric units in big print and the english in small. I think it'll take students being taught metric before english. And, most importantly, it'll take time. The US has shown great reluctance to even try to use metric units (the token effort with food and car spedometers is about it), so it'll probably be 3 or 4 generations before the english system is phased out.
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world. :)
Ahh, 2628kWh (small k is a 1000, big K is 1024, Mr. Units ;) in computer power-consumption a year! Oh my goodnessn, that's like, $80/year where I live! A travesty! :)
Furthermore, that's for a house with 4 computers running continuously, hardly the usual case.
Seriously, power (in the US) is insanely cheap (usually between 2 and 5 cents/kWh), and this is for mobile stuff anyway, which are designed to consume considerably less power than their wall-socket-bound equivalents.
And as far as the vacuum being a problem to do, well, what do you think is inside your CRT?
You seem quite confident from having read the article. Thinking about what you read is, of course, the next step before posting.
Ignoring the fact that cvs, zope, and wikiwikiweb do nothing like this, and ignoring the fact that the other prior art brought up by posters wasn't patented (if it was indeed the first such thing, shouldn't they have patented it themselves?). Indeed, the Interwoven website turns up 1 hit for the word 'patent,' and the link doesn't mention any patents of theirs.
Also, Emedicine is not meant to be a purely doctor-oriented site. Part of the big plan was to publish not only a quality medical textbook, but also a medical reference for ordinary folks in order to better equip them when they see a doctor.
So, did they patent something? Yes. Was it insubstantiated by prior art? Not that I've seen mentioned yet. Is there anything inherently wrong with what they patented? No. Recall that just because someone takes two known ideas and puts them together doesn't mean that the patent is any less valid.
If we can then disregard that the patent (however possibly silly) is invalid, I'd think that slashdot would certainly love the idea (and actuality) of Emedicine. Certainly everytime slashdot posts a story about e-medicine in general, the crowd goes wild over the prospect of being diagnosed from their home or being able to have multiple doctors teleconference about their condition. Yet, mention it as a big bad patent story with a bunch of distorted facts and suddenly we'd all like Emedicine's CEO's head on a stick.
"Open Source, Closed Minds. We are Slashdot," indeed.
Just to put my .0011 binary cents in (eh...so we're learning about binary floating point...sue me), I am a Christian. Yep, I believe that one omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, loving God created the entire universe yet exists outside of it. I believe that he sent his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for the sins of mankind and that he affects the world today through the presence of the Holy Spirit. I believe that those who do not accept salvation through Christ will spend an eternity in a real place called Hell where they will be subjected to immeasureable pain through seperation from God. That about sums it up, I suppose.
:)
:)
As for the number of neopagans or 'alternative' religion-type people among geeks, well, intellectualism is a great barrier to Christianity (intellectualism, btw, does not mean that being smart or using ones God-given intellect is bad, rather intellectualism is the sin of having self-love and/or pride because of ones intellect, rather than using it to further the kingdom of God on earth). Essentially, there are two kinds of faith: Christianity and everything else. Since everything else is equal in the eyes of God (i.e. equally sinful), then it should come as no surprise that most geeks are either agnostics, atheists, or a part of some 'alternative' religion or other. In any case, geeks would tend to be drawn to alternative religions (as opposed to hindism, buddhism, etc) because they are just that, alternative (e.g., non-mainstream).
Ah well, that's enough spouting for one day.
Ha! I'm sure I'll get flamed beyond imagination and modded down, but y'all can consider it a divine mandate to share my beliefs.
btw, for the record, all of the geeks that I know are stricly agnostic/atheistic. None of them are neopagans, but, then, I live in Arkansas.
also, btw, I was not raised a Christian; rather, I became one at the age of 16 after having been a confirmed agnostic for quite some time, so don't knock me as a Southern Baptist Fundie Wacko[tm]
This is something that I've wondered about for a long time. Apparently one of the Amiga's greatest strengths was its use of several bits of dedicated hardware that allowed it to be much faster and featureful than the other machines of the day. It occurred to me that a modern PC has a -lot- of dedicated hardware. Think: SB Live! has a powerful DSP capable of doing mind-numbingly fast mp3 encoding, hardware 3d sound processing, and mixing 512 voices. A GeForce2 GTS does a great deal of the OpenGL 1.2 spec in hardware. SCSI controllers take a ton of I/O load off of the CPU. Decent ethernet cards take care of their own stuff. It seems to me that if Amiga could write an OS that could make full, seamless use of all of this power (even if they had to only really support a small subset of the available hardware with the rest getting comparatively minimal support) that it would really be quite impressive. I mean, theoretically, the SB Live should be capable of doing mp3 decoding all on its own, given that it's somewhat reprogrammable. Likewise, the GeForce should be able to handle a lot of display-related things that are currently relegated to the CPU. I don't see why the Amiga -can't- be a revolutionary system/OS, but I wouldn't hold my breath, either.
Horribly offtopic, but I figure it's worth what little Karma I have.
With regard to the recent Supreme Court decision... What was banned was not school-sanctioned prayer. What was banned is allowing students to elect someone to speak for them because they might say something religious. Now that is outright censorship. The Supreme Court has essentially said that, unless the message is sanctioned by the school system, nothing can be said by students in an official capacity, even if the students organize and elect the representative. The decision is not about separation of church and state, it's about muzzling students for fear that they might say something disagreeable. Yet where is the furor over this? I find it amazing (or maybe not so amazing, given the general air of the place) that /. defends porn (even in libraries and schools) but not outright censorship of students.
Also note that it was a 6-3 decision and that the Chief Justice wrote a scathing dissenting opinion that truly exposes the decision for what it really is: the pigeon-holing of religion as a purely private matter rather than the basis for American society as it was in the beginning.
As far as separation of church and state goes, well, what little seperation is implied is there to protect religion from the government, which includes censorship. Furthermore, be suspicious of Thomas Jefferson as a Constitutional scholar--he wasn't even in America while it was being written and ratified!
This is undoubtedly much too far down the discussion to get noticed, and I'm sure anyone who did get down here would be tired of all the nitpicking, but I have to throw one last bit in.
When the meteorites struck the exposed fuel line (ridiculous in and of itself), the fuel exploded when the rocket was fired. That situation is incredibly implausible. I've never seen a liquid fuel engine model that mixed the fuel and oxidizer -before- very point of ignition. The chain of floating fuel wouldn't have even burned up, in all likelihood.
Oh, and it seems to me that intuition would show that it is incredibly unlikely that the entire ship's atmosphere could be sucked out of two marble-sized holes in minutes when the Dr.Pepper brand carbonated soda barely trickled through. And speaking of the Dr. Pepper, would it not have sealed the hole as it froze? After all, Robbins's character had to break it off in order to properly seal it.
Oh well. Maybe the next Mars movie will actually get stuff right. That, or be much more like 'real' sci-fi and not even try but rather concentrate on the storyline.
Your argument is logically flawed. Just because 'damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes' disapproved of coed dorms does not mean that they are automatically wrong about anything else. I would go further, but I think that what I have written is sufficient explanation for thinking persons.
As far as accelerating your number nine, the simplest way is to drop it...unfortunately, you'll only get about 9.8m/s^2 out of it. Catapults, slingshots, and rockets are a little harder to set up, but well worth the effort. :)
:)
Disclaimer: I know nothing about number nine cards under linux, and this probably isn't funny to anyone but me and only then because it's 1am and I'm tired.
His opinion on the new anti-viral drug (this isn't the only one, there is one other (Relenza) that has been on the market this year as an anti-flu/anti-cold drug) is that it is costly and relatively ineffective. The reason that it has been prescribed much at all this year is that the most common flu vaccine is proving to be ineffective itself. Combined with a lot of people deciding not to get said vaccine, Relenza has seen a fair bit of use, especially since many people can ask for it by name because of television and print advertising.
In any case, he wonders if the study presented in the article was manufacturer-sponsored. If it was, it is highly suspect. We suggest waiting until it is fully approved by the FDA before deciding if it's the miracle drug that the company claims it is, and even then he would wait until independent researchers publish their findings before prescribing it himself.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a CNN article is not extraordinary evidence, even one that has a chart. *g*
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone? :) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone? :) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I haven't done extensive stress testing of the two, but in my experience, Opera for Windows is much more stable than this release...to the point that I must wonder which will be 'finished' first, Opera for Linux or Wine? Wine is alpha, but, in a way, it runs a better Opera than Opera for Linux.
Ah well.
The emu10k1 driver went from buggy and binary-only for all of 2 kernel versions to supporting the full range of SBLive cards in just a few weeks. It definitely gets my nomination.
I haven't bothered checking out the spec in its entirety, but I've got to wonder about a few things:
1. Is the 2:1 5/3 'mother wavelet' truly lossless for any and all inputs?
2. What kind of 'average' compression can we expect? One poster already mentioned that the example had a simple gradient as a background which would certainly compress well.
3. How CPU intensive is it to decode these things? Will MJPEG2000 (or whatever) practically require a hardware decoder for DVD-quality playback?
Anyone care to comment,refute, or otherwise flame? *g*
Ehh, this may have already been mentioned, but you don't have to reinstall or repartition or anything. VMWare has 'raw ide disk' access so that you can use a preexisting installation. It works fine for me.
I like the funny bits. I'm ambivalent on guest speakers. I like the post-production bits...they add a lot to it. I don't like it when you all speak at once, but that happens rarely enough not to be a problem. I want more, hmm....more....more. Yeah, that's it...more of all of it! All in all, y'all do good work.
I think that it's interesting that X has been around for 15 years (although what's more is the W bit, I'll have to look into what that was). Obviously, a tremendous amount of development and tweaking has gone into it, and yet I have seen many people complain that it's slow, bloated, etc...I'm not a coder (but I hope to be...college freshman this fall, in fact), so I have no idea as to the validity of those statements.
Another thing, to my knowledge, there isn't another mainstream OS/GUI that uses the X client/server model (or is there?) so I guess that there isn't much to compare it to, unless you consider Berlin, but it's not quite so complete as to be a valid comparison.
Bleh, or I could just be blithering about nothing...but the moderators will deal with that, eh? *g*
What's more, by my watch, it was up from 11% to 60% within 6 minutes of being posted.
Of course, this makes you wonder just how useful such a poll would be--stuffing the ballot and all. In fact, if Sierra puts two and two together (i.e., poll posted on slashdot, sudden increase in votes for linux games) they might forget about the poll altogether. Oh well, it's worth a shot, no?
Well, I am doubtful regarding the necessity of this post, but, with regard to whomever seems to think that the alignment of the planets is an important event, I am wont to state that even if the 6 planets outside of Earth's orbit aligned with the Earth (i.e., such that the pull of Mercury and Venus would not counteract them), then their combined gravitational pull could be negated by sitting down (well, lowering yourself about a foot closer to the Earth, anyway).
And as to another planet 'bumping' into us because of an asteroid impact, it would indeed need to be a massive asteroid, given that with the exception of Pluto, the orbits of the planets in our solar system do not appear to be particularly elliptical or perturbed, even given something like 10 billion years of bombardment by asteroids and comets.