The SPARC port of SuSE generally skips one
version number every time, so the next edition
will probably be 8.1. At least that is what Thorsten Kukuk, the SPARC port maintainer wrote:
The bad news: For 8.0, as in the past, I will skip one version.
The good news: We will continue with 8.1, if I'm able to get more and
faster UltraSPARCs (Hey, where are the people from Sun on this list?
Since Sun mentioned SuSE Linux for SPARC in their Linux announcement,
maybe they can start loaning me newer and faster hardware?)
My few current ones are far to slow to compile current glibc/gcc and
qt.
But I don't think that 32bit SPARCs will be supported any longer:
it is impossible to use our current installer with kernel 2.2
and kernel 2.4 is still far away from running stable. It is possible
to configure a minimal kernel which runs on most of the 32bit SPARCs,
but this kernel misses to much important features. And I don't see
a kernel developer looking at this:-(
3. Honeypot's. Servers being used to find security risks wouldnt work very well if there were no security holes.
Well, a "benevolent virus" could only patch security holes that are already known. So you could still use test systems and honeypots to look
for new security holes or new attack strategies.
4. Turf. You're a highly trained sysadmin who has spent most of a year setting up a system that runs so flawlessly that you can play Quake all day and NOT be
missing any work. Do you really want someone else messing with it.
This I agree with. Computer systems are very diverse in configuration, and it is very difficult to design a completely automatic system to tune/update/improve a complicated set of subtly interacting programs (which is often only marginally stable). A "Mr. Fix-It" virus might fix a large percentage of systems, but might als screw up other, less standard systems.
Stupid question, what are the differences between the ps and pdf file formats? PDF is basically an extension of PostScript. It has some additional features, such as the ability to include internal and external hyperlinks in a document and support for compression of the document file. Apparently, the program control constructs in PDF are more limited than those in PS.
The fact that gv can read both makes me think that they are infact very similar. Indeed.
Also,
if they are similar, why doesn't adobe add ps support to it's acrobat reader? Beats me.
... and I couldn't figure out how such strict rules about dominant and recessive
genes could produce the variety of species we have.
If dominant and recessive genes really were so binary in nature (D | R = D, R | R = R, D | D = D, etc) then unless there was more imbreeding going on, all recessive
genes would've eventually gone away and we would all be the same.
The dominant/recessive model is only the simplest
example of interactions between genes. Mendel was actually rather lucky/selective in finding a number of properties of peas that follow this model. In general, properties of organisms are determined by interactions between many different genes, each possessing any number of variants.
The second Lord of the Rings trailer has been available in a number of different video formats (QuickTime, MPEG, Windows Media,...) for a few days now on this Tolkien Movies site. The site also hosts a number of other interesting images and videos.
Then there were the Kazon. They were able to manufacture tony starships; artificial gravity and all. We were expected to believe they couldn't synthesize water.
HELLO???
Well, in fairness, it was later explained that the Kazon stole their ships and technology from the Trabe who had been oppressing them for ages. They did not themselves know how to make starships. Still, I admit it is hard to believe they could not get their hands on adequate water supplies.
One possible problem with a widespread application of this material could be that some people might develop an allergic reaction to it. Of course, the substance probably (will go|is going) through trials to examine this possibility.
And you can say whatever you want, but is isn't easy to get a boeing 747 flying upside down. Just try it sometime in some flight simulator.
This would only tell you what happens when you follow the rules that were programmed into the flight simulator. You can't draw conclusions about the validity or the physical relevance of those rules. This being said, I admit I also think it would be very difficult to fly a 747 upside down.
Scientists are actively seeking an organism that can feed on radiation.
I am afraid they'll be looking for a very long time. A radioactive isotope is radioactive because the nuclei of its atoms are intrinsically unstable and will sooner or latter desintegrate, releasing harmful energy and particles. The stability of the nucleus is not affected by any physical (pressure, temperature) or chemical parameters. Only nuclear reactions resulting from collisions between particles can change the nature of atomic nuclei, and it is very hard to imagine a biological organism to perform such nuclear reactions. At most they can resist the damage and sequester the radiocative nuclei, but we can already minimize the volume of radioactive waste using glass and ceramics. The waste still remains.
The Earth's magnetic field acts sort of like a funnel diverting charged particles from the solar winds to the magnetic poles. So it probably concentrates particles there which would otherwise have been distributed more uniformly, making the aurorae at the poles more intense.
Anyway, it is known that Jupiter has a very powerful and huge magnetosphere, which indeed tells us something about its interior.
I find that spinning down hard drives, zip/jaz drives,
and the like at the same interval as the monitor can reduce power consumption by a further 10-15 percent.
I think Zip drives are configured by default to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. This time can be changed through the software, at least using the Properties dialog in Windows. Is there a way to change this setting from Linux?
It seems that for the last eight years Wolfram has essentially been running his company by remote control, working all night, every night, on a new kind of science, which is the name of the book he will soon publish to describe it.
Wolfram's new science propounds an extraordinary idea: With a few basic objects and a few rules of behavior--run a few hundred million times--he believes it is not only possible to create structures of great complexity, but the
universe itself, including its vast regions of apparent chaos.
While Stephen Wolfram is undoubtedly a very clever man, I seriously doubt whether he is the first or only person to investigate these kinds of concepts.
I am not an astronomer either, but I did watch a BBC Horizon documentary on the construction, failure and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope yesterday evening (sadly, the transcript is not available anymore, it appears). The Hubble has two advantages: no image distortion due to turbulence in the atmosphere, and the ability to detect light frequencies that are completely filtered out by the atmosphere (ultraviolet and infrared, amongst others). Ground-based telescopes are indeed catching up in the first area, but they still can't detect light that never reaches them. Of course, plans are already being made for the Next Generation Space Telescope, which will have an eight-meter mirror.
"Misanthropic" is derived from the Greek word
"anthropos" meaning "man". Notice the very subtle games those greasy Greeks played with the position of the letter "h" in their words.
Turns out that these robots are both phototrophic, or photovores as the website calls them, and phototropic, just like plants. Given the potential for confusion between phototrophic and phototropic, using photovore is probably a very good idea.
The title should probably use "Phototrophic" (literally "light-eating", deriving its energy from light; from the Greek "photos" for light and "trophein" for "to eat") instead of "phototropic" (meaning "seeking the light"). Plants are phototrophic when they use photosynthesis to make food, and they are phototropic when they grow to turn their leaves in the direction of the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
The expression is " post hoc ergo propter hoc " (link to the entry in the excellent Skeptic's Dictionary.
The SPARC port of SuSE generally skips one version number every time, so the next edition will probably be 8.1. At least that is what Thorsten Kukuk, the SPARC port maintainer wrote:
3. Honeypot's. Servers being used to find security risks wouldnt work very well if there were no security holes.
Well, a "benevolent virus" could only patch security holes that are already known. So you could still use test systems and honeypots to look for new security holes or new attack strategies.
4. Turf. You're a highly trained sysadmin who has spent most of a year setting up a system that runs so flawlessly that you can play Quake all day and NOT be missing any work. Do you really want someone else messing with it.
This I agree with. Computer systems are very diverse in configuration, and it is very difficult to design a completely automatic system to tune/update/improve a complicated set of subtly interacting programs (which is often only marginally stable). A "Mr. Fix-It" virus might fix a large percentage of systems, but might als screw up other, less standard systems.
Stupid question, what are the differences between the ps and pdf file formats?
PDF is basically an extension of PostScript. It has some additional features, such as the ability to include internal and external hyperlinks in a document and support for compression of the document file. Apparently, the program control constructs in PDF are more limited than those in PS.
The fact that gv can read both makes me think that they are infact very similar.
Indeed.
Also, if they are similar, why doesn't adobe add ps support to it's acrobat reader?
Beats me.
... and I couldn't figure out how such strict rules about dominant and recessive genes could produce the variety of species we have. If dominant and recessive genes really were so binary in nature (D | R = D, R | R = R, D | D = D, etc) then unless there was more imbreeding going on, all recessive genes would've eventually gone away and we would all be the same.
The dominant/recessive model is only the simplest example of interactions between genes. Mendel was actually rather lucky/selective in finding a number of properties of peas that follow this model. In general, properties of organisms are determined by interactions between many different genes, each possessing any number of variants.
Gaudeamus igatur, iuvenes dum sumus...
Unless there is a pun that eludes me, I think the correct text is "Gaudeamus igitur...".
The second Lord of the Rings trailer has been available in a number of different video formats (QuickTime, MPEG, Windows Media,...) for a few days now on this Tolkien Movies site. The site also hosts a number of other interesting images and videos.
Then there were the Kazon. They were able to manufacture tony starships; artificial gravity and all. We were expected to believe they couldn't synthesize water. HELLO???
Well, in fairness, it was later explained that the Kazon stole their ships and technology from the Trabe who had been oppressing them for ages. They did not themselves know how to make starships. Still, I admit it is hard to believe they could not get their hands on adequate water supplies.
One possible problem with a widespread application of this material could be that some people might develop an allergic reaction to it. Of course, the substance probably (will go|is going) through trials to examine this possibility.
And you can say whatever you want, but is isn't easy to get a boeing 747 flying upside down. Just try it sometime in some flight simulator.
This would only tell you what happens when you follow the rules that were programmed into the flight simulator. You can't draw conclusions about the validity or the physical relevance of those rules. This being said, I admit I also think it would be very difficult to fly a 747 upside down.
On one of the pages of William Beaty's Science Misconceptions site, there is a discussion of this issue with diagrams and further links.
Scientists are actively seeking an organism that can feed on radiation.
I am afraid they'll be looking for a very long time. A radioactive isotope is radioactive because the nuclei of its atoms are intrinsically unstable and will sooner or latter desintegrate, releasing harmful energy and particles. The stability of the nucleus is not affected by any physical (pressure, temperature) or chemical parameters. Only nuclear reactions resulting from collisions between particles can change the nature of atomic nuclei, and it is very hard to imagine a biological organism to perform such nuclear reactions. At most they can resist the damage and sequester the radiocative nuclei, but we can already minimize the volume of radioactive waste using glass and ceramics. The waste still remains.
I typed "hydrogen," but I was really thinking "helium." H... He... what's the difference? A proton? :)
A proton, two neutrons and an electron (when comparing hydrogen-1 and helium-4).
The Earth's magnetic field acts sort of like a funnel diverting charged particles from the solar winds to the magnetic poles. So it probably concentrates particles there which would otherwise have been distributed more uniformly, making the aurorae at the poles more intense.
Anyway, it is known that Jupiter has a very powerful and huge magnetosphere, which indeed tells us something about its interior.
According to the people they don't let out too often, a water hit is worse than a land hit as well.
There is a Scientific American article about the relative damage wrought by land and sea asteroid impacts.
Mirrors sites are available as of April 5th from the original link.
This is what Massachusetts has to say on the matter.
I find that spinning down hard drives, zip/jaz drives, and the like at the same interval as the monitor can reduce power consumption by a further 10-15 percent.
I think Zip drives are configured by default to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. This time can be changed through the software, at least using the Properties dialog in Windows. Is there a way to change this setting from Linux?
The manufacturer's website does not appear to be available at this time.
It seems that for the last eight years Wolfram has essentially been running his company by remote control, working all night, every night, on a new kind of science, which is the name of the book he will soon publish to describe it.
Wolfram's new science propounds an extraordinary idea: With a few basic objects and a few rules of behavior--run a few hundred million times--he believes it is not only possible to create structures of great complexity, but the universe itself, including its vast regions of apparent chaos.
While Stephen Wolfram is undoubtedly a very clever man, I seriously doubt whether he is the first or only person to investigate these kinds of concepts.
I am not an astronomer either, but I did watch a BBC Horizon documentary on the construction, failure and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope yesterday evening (sadly, the transcript is not available anymore, it appears). The Hubble has two advantages: no image distortion due to turbulence in the atmosphere, and the ability to detect light frequencies that are completely filtered out by the atmosphere (ultraviolet and infrared, amongst others). Ground-based telescopes are indeed catching up in the first area, but they still can't detect light that never reaches them. Of course, plans are already being made for the Next Generation Space Telescope, which will have an eight-meter mirror.
"Misanthropic" is derived from the Greek word "anthropos" meaning "man". Notice the very subtle games those greasy Greeks played with the position of the letter "h" in their words.
Turns out that these robots are both phototrophic, or photovores as the website calls them, and phototropic, just like plants. Given the potential for confusion between phototrophic and phototropic, using photovore is probably a very good idea.
The title should probably use "Phototrophic" (literally "light-eating", deriving its energy from light; from the Greek "photos" for light and "trophein" for "to eat") instead of "phototropic" (meaning "seeking the light"). Plants are phototrophic when they use photosynthesis to make food, and they are phototropic when they grow to turn their leaves in the direction of the sun.