No, I don't think they had a section on hell freezing over. But there was a bit on how, after the thousand years of heaven on Earth, there'd be a thousand years of hell on Earth. That must be when Microsoft buys out the Linux cloud services.
Most of the time, yes, but then there's a question of trade-off. Small URLs are generally hashes and are hard to type accurately and hard to remember. On the other hand, if you took ALL of the sources of wastage in bandwidth, what percentage would you save by compressing pages vs. compressing pages + URLs or just compressing URLs?
It might well be the case that these big web services are so inefficient with bandwidth that there are many things they could do to improve matters. In fact, I consider that quite likely. Those times I've done web admin stuff, I've rarely come across servers that have compression enabled.
I imagine that depends on your interpretation of "intent".
For example, James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis can be understood from the "weak sense", ie: if positive feedback overwhelmed negative feedback, you must produce an extreme environment in which nothing could survive, so if things survive, negative feedback must drown out positive feedback. Evolution is random, so either way can happen, but survival of the fittest eliminates anything that pushes the local system out of bounds. A "weak Gaia" has "intent" only in the sense that any valid implementation can be said to be the intent of a specification, and that a faulty implementation will break the specification. (In this case, the "specification" is the criteria the sum total must have to produce a system that is capable of existing in dynamic equilibrium.)
"Gaia" can also be understood in the "strong" sense of all dynamic processes on a planet (biological, geological, everything) constituting a superorganism. (In biology, the notion of superorganisms - something that acts like an organism and can be treated as a single organism but isn't a single physical entity, a swarm of bees for example - is perfectly accepted. Superorganisms even on the scale of thousands of miles across have been observed and documented.) If you think of the entire planet and all life on it as a superorganism, then a literal understanding of "intent" (in the same way an ant can be said to have an intent) would work.
The Parrot Sketch backfired not that long ago when fossils of a parrot (that probably was blue) were found in Norway. Not too far from the Fjords, as I recall. It is, however, quite dead.
If developers were working from a clean-slate and didn't have the problems of excessive legacy code to work with, I suspect Digital Mars' D, Inmos' Occam and Erikkson's Erlang would be the three main languages in use today.
If hardware developers were working from a clean-slate, you'd probably also see a lot more use of Content Addressable Memory, Processor-In-Memory and Transputer/iWarp-style "as easy as LEGO" CPUs.
Sadly, what isn't patented was invented 30 years too late and 20 years before the technology existed to make these ideas really work, so we're stuck with neolithic monoliths in both the software and hardware departments.
(Remember, Y2K was worth tens of billions, but wasn't worth enough to get people to stop using COBOL, and that was practically dead. To get people to kick their current habits would need a kick in the mind a thousand times bigger.)
I have problems with 8.10 on my somewhat ancient Dell Dimension 2100 - lots of problems with latency and task switching - and I've yet to get the kernel to build from source for it. (Given I've built Linux kernels since the 0.9 days, it's not from lack of experience.)
(The latest Fedora won't install on it at all. Hard lock-up when booting the GUI installer.)
Sure, you expect support to decay for older machines, but this is hardly a Viglen 386SX we're talking about (Pentium IV is still in-vogue), I've upgraded the RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, ethernet and sound card, so it's all well above what these distros expect as minimum hardware.
I'm considering 9.04 not because I'm particularly in need of new features, but because I can't get the existing features to work with the way the distro is built. If 9.04 doesn't improve, I'm giving up on other people's distros and patches, and building the whole damn thing from the vanilla sources from scratch.
Correction notes. Diff applied. Will go into JD's Brain 2.6.30.1.:) (Seriously, one of the great things with Slashdot is that errors do get corrected quickly and learning is far more interesting.)
That's what THEY say. You'll notice that everything in your list requires a huge grant cheque and fantastically large and sophisticated observatories. (A dozen or so of the 1 Km Square Array - in space, since some frequencies you need don't travel through the atmosphere - should be sufficient.)
Hey, I seem to remember noting that they were almost certainly off-base.:) Besides, this is Slashdot, so being off-base is normal. With grits.
Oh, you're probably right about it being some oddity in this stage in the lifecycle. And, yes, the solar winds are not completely understood (although, if I'm right, our sun's heliopause was about where it was expected and the Pioneer/Voyager data doesn't show up any amazing oddities that I've heard of).
Oh, and if I recall correctly, the largest known exoplanet is 16 solar masses, so although it's fantastically unlikely (and as I recall only gets used as a plot device in a Fred Hoyle novel) and utterly absurd even to picture it, I'm going to have to nyah! your "wouldn't work". Besides, how's it any worse than "Pulsars are Little Green Men", which was indeed a very reputable theory at one point.:)
That's a part I'm not completely sure about. (See hundred-mile pipe organ story, holes in the sun's corona story, and in fact any other story on recent observations of the sun.) The sun is absolutely tame, as uncontrolled fusion reactors go, but the outer layers have generally been totally bizarre.
Is it the distance that obscures such bizareness in these sorts of stars (as we can assume that anything the sun can do, other stars can do better) or is it that when you get supermassive stars, these sorts of things don't happen anyway (far too conservative, only yuppie stars go in for that sort of ruckus)?
If Hollywood would take scripts from Slashdotters, (a) movies would be a whole lot more entertaining, and (b) Hollywood would go broke. Of these, I can see definite advantages to (b).
Well, why not? The Irish came over to dig ditches for the Americans, so it's only fair if the Americans have to dig holes now. One large hole, or fourty thousand very small holes (but it has to be managed from Blackburn) should be fine.
One is that this was a binary system, that a second star was behind the first at the time of the "pre-supernova" photo, and that they collided. Remember, they have very few photographs, are not using any data from space telescopes like SWIFT, and are therefore filling in the blanks.
We can assume that star evolution is moderately well-understood (though not completely), so if what they think is the input is inconsistent with what they know is the output, the chances are really good that the input is wrong, especially with such little data.
Another possibility. In order to get a supernova, as TFA notes, you need iron at the core of the star. There is no requirement that the iron be formed by the star, so there is no requirement that the star be at a stage in its evolution to have formed said iron. I don't know how large a rocky planet can get, but it's entirely possible to theorize of a bloody massive exoplanet made largely of iron dive-bombing a star. Depending on how close to critical the star is, it's possible to imagine such a strike giving a supermassive star severe indigestion.
There again, they may have miscalculated the distance. I believe they rely on spectral analysis to determine the relative velocity of a star and use that to infer distance, as you can't use parallax at those kinds of distances. However, if the star was getting close to critical, the spectral patterns can't necessarily be assumed to follow those of stars in better health. Further, if the star's movement was not primarily due to the expansion of space, the measured Doppler shift won't be directionally proportional to distance.
These reasons have probably been gone through and either discarded, laughed at, or even maybe put in the "improbable but should be looked at" pile, but it's very reasonable to assume the astronomers themselves have come up with many, many more possibilities, all of which could be valid based on what little is known.
And that's just it. Very little is known, unless one of the rapid-reaction space telescopes detected the explosion and took a look. TFA makes no mention of such data, but given the volume they process maybe that information hasn't been looked at yet. But I suspect the mystery won't be solvable unless such extra data does exist.
Since when does being broke make a difference? It never affected AIG, until someone noticed. Besides, you can get an awful lot of work out of the unemployed when you've an armed National Guard standing over them.
Slashdot Mirror
Celebrities are popular but exceedingly boring, so popularity may not be a good measure.
Do not feed the trolls, it makes them soggy and hard to light.
As others have noted, there are many different definitions and comparisons. These are the ones I tend to use, though:
No, I don't think they had a section on hell freezing over. But there was a bit on how, after the thousand years of heaven on Earth, there'd be a thousand years of hell on Earth. That must be when Microsoft buys out the Linux cloud services.
Replacing all the images with random links to adult sites would save considerable bandwidth and I doubt the users would notice the difference.
Just how interesting are the compounds in coffee, anyway?
For most users, anything they can access on Facebook is already present on 127.0.0.1.
I discussed it with myselves, but there was no agreement. Well, other than the world should use IPv6 or TUBA and enable multicasting by default.
Then dump CGI-like syntax completely and use applets that send back data via sockets.
Most of the time, yes, but then there's a question of trade-off. Small URLs are generally hashes and are hard to type accurately and hard to remember. On the other hand, if you took ALL of the sources of wastage in bandwidth, what percentage would you save by compressing pages vs. compressing pages + URLs or just compressing URLs?
It might well be the case that these big web services are so inefficient with bandwidth that there are many things they could do to improve matters. In fact, I consider that quite likely. Those times I've done web admin stuff, I've rarely come across servers that have compression enabled.
I imagine that depends on your interpretation of "intent".
For example, James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis can be understood from the "weak sense", ie: if positive feedback overwhelmed negative feedback, you must produce an extreme environment in which nothing could survive, so if things survive, negative feedback must drown out positive feedback. Evolution is random, so either way can happen, but survival of the fittest eliminates anything that pushes the local system out of bounds. A "weak Gaia" has "intent" only in the sense that any valid implementation can be said to be the intent of a specification, and that a faulty implementation will break the specification. (In this case, the "specification" is the criteria the sum total must have to produce a system that is capable of existing in dynamic equilibrium.)
"Gaia" can also be understood in the "strong" sense of all dynamic processes on a planet (biological, geological, everything) constituting a superorganism. (In biology, the notion of superorganisms - something that acts like an organism and can be treated as a single organism but isn't a single physical entity, a swarm of bees for example - is perfectly accepted. Superorganisms even on the scale of thousands of miles across have been observed and documented.) If you think of the entire planet and all life on it as a superorganism, then a literal understanding of "intent" (in the same way an ant can be said to have an intent) would work.
Language is dangerous and should be banned.
The Parrot Sketch backfired not that long ago when fossils of a parrot (that probably was blue) were found in Norway. Not too far from the Fjords, as I recall. It is, however, quite dead.
If developers were working from a clean-slate and didn't have the problems of excessive legacy code to work with, I suspect Digital Mars' D, Inmos' Occam and Erikkson's Erlang would be the three main languages in use today.
If hardware developers were working from a clean-slate, you'd probably also see a lot more use of Content Addressable Memory, Processor-In-Memory and Transputer/iWarp-style "as easy as LEGO" CPUs.
Sadly, what isn't patented was invented 30 years too late and 20 years before the technology existed to make these ideas really work, so we're stuck with neolithic monoliths in both the software and hardware departments.
(Remember, Y2K was worth tens of billions, but wasn't worth enough to get people to stop using COBOL, and that was practically dead. To get people to kick their current habits would need a kick in the mind a thousand times bigger.)
Or it could mean they used half-and-half in the developer's tea, causing them to slow down.
I have problems with 8.10 on my somewhat ancient Dell Dimension 2100 - lots of problems with latency and task switching - and I've yet to get the kernel to build from source for it. (Given I've built Linux kernels since the 0.9 days, it's not from lack of experience.)
(The latest Fedora won't install on it at all. Hard lock-up when booting the GUI installer.)
Sure, you expect support to decay for older machines, but this is hardly a Viglen 386SX we're talking about (Pentium IV is still in-vogue), I've upgraded the RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, ethernet and sound card, so it's all well above what these distros expect as minimum hardware.
I'm considering 9.04 not because I'm particularly in need of new features, but because I can't get the existing features to work with the way the distro is built. If 9.04 doesn't improve, I'm giving up on other people's distros and patches, and building the whole damn thing from the vanilla sources from scratch.
Isn't it something Michael Jackson bio-engineered in Neverland?
Correction notes. Diff applied. Will go into JD's Brain 2.6.30.1. :) (Seriously, one of the great things with Slashdot is that errors do get corrected quickly and learning is far more interesting.)
That's what THEY say. You'll notice that everything in your list requires a huge grant cheque and fantastically large and sophisticated observatories. (A dozen or so of the 1 Km Square Array - in space, since some frequencies you need don't travel through the atmosphere - should be sufficient.)
Follow the money and the Tin Hats!
Hey, I seem to remember noting that they were almost certainly off-base. :) Besides, this is Slashdot, so being off-base is normal. With grits.
Oh, you're probably right about it being some oddity in this stage in the lifecycle. And, yes, the solar winds are not completely understood (although, if I'm right, our sun's heliopause was about where it was expected and the Pioneer/Voyager data doesn't show up any amazing oddities that I've heard of).
Oh, and if I recall correctly, the largest known exoplanet is 16 solar masses, so although it's fantastically unlikely (and as I recall only gets used as a plot device in a Fred Hoyle novel) and utterly absurd even to picture it, I'm going to have to nyah! your "wouldn't work". Besides, how's it any worse than "Pulsars are Little Green Men", which was indeed a very reputable theory at one point. :)
That's a part I'm not completely sure about. (See hundred-mile pipe organ story, holes in the sun's corona story, and in fact any other story on recent observations of the sun.) The sun is absolutely tame, as uncontrolled fusion reactors go, but the outer layers have generally been totally bizarre.
Is it the distance that obscures such bizareness in these sorts of stars (as we can assume that anything the sun can do, other stars can do better) or is it that when you get supermassive stars, these sorts of things don't happen anyway (far too conservative, only yuppie stars go in for that sort of ruckus)?
If Hollywood would take scripts from Slashdotters, (a) movies would be a whole lot more entertaining, and (b) Hollywood would go broke. Of these, I can see definite advantages to (b).
Well, why not? The Irish came over to dig ditches for the Americans, so it's only fair if the Americans have to dig holes now. One large hole, or fourty thousand very small holes (but it has to be managed from Blackburn) should be fine.
One is that this was a binary system, that a second star was behind the first at the time of the "pre-supernova" photo, and that they collided. Remember, they have very few photographs, are not using any data from space telescopes like SWIFT, and are therefore filling in the blanks.
We can assume that star evolution is moderately well-understood (though not completely), so if what they think is the input is inconsistent with what they know is the output, the chances are really good that the input is wrong, especially with such little data.
Another possibility. In order to get a supernova, as TFA notes, you need iron at the core of the star. There is no requirement that the iron be formed by the star, so there is no requirement that the star be at a stage in its evolution to have formed said iron. I don't know how large a rocky planet can get, but it's entirely possible to theorize of a bloody massive exoplanet made largely of iron dive-bombing a star. Depending on how close to critical the star is, it's possible to imagine such a strike giving a supermassive star severe indigestion.
There again, they may have miscalculated the distance. I believe they rely on spectral analysis to determine the relative velocity of a star and use that to infer distance, as you can't use parallax at those kinds of distances. However, if the star was getting close to critical, the spectral patterns can't necessarily be assumed to follow those of stars in better health. Further, if the star's movement was not primarily due to the expansion of space, the measured Doppler shift won't be directionally proportional to distance.
These reasons have probably been gone through and either discarded, laughed at, or even maybe put in the "improbable but should be looked at" pile, but it's very reasonable to assume the astronomers themselves have come up with many, many more possibilities, all of which could be valid based on what little is known.
And that's just it. Very little is known, unless one of the rapid-reaction space telescopes detected the explosion and took a look. TFA makes no mention of such data, but given the volume they process maybe that information hasn't been looked at yet. But I suspect the mystery won't be solvable unless such extra data does exist.
Since when does being broke make a difference? It never affected AIG, until someone noticed. Besides, you can get an awful lot of work out of the unemployed when you've an armed National Guard standing over them.
It's ok. When they exhale, it's mixed with water. The CO2 will dissolve. So long as there's enough iron in it.