That's a real phenomenon. Of course, it's a long-term one. The North American continent is still in the return swing of it's sea-saw motion, with the part of the continent above the 49th parallel (Canada) rising while the southern half sinks. The northern half was pressed down by the ice during the last ice age, and is still rising from when it all melted away 10,000 years ago.
But that won't affect the ice sheet in question in this article, since this ice sheet is floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and rests on no land at all.
if you aren't going to compile from source to get that extra level of customizability, what's the difference between Gentoo and say, Debian testing/unstable?
Last time I checked, Gentoo kept its packages more up to date. At one point I was using Gentoo because I needed a particular version or newer of a package and the version in Gentoo stable was newer than the version in Debian unstable (there'd been a bug filed against the Debian package a year ago noting that the package was no longer usable, but nothing had been done about the problem for a year, so I gave up and switched to Gentoo).
Had Gentoo had binary packages at the time, I'd probably have kept using it -- compiling from source is a big pain in the ass that, as far as I can tell, doesn't really buy you anything, but aside from the compile-from-source nastiness, Gentoo was a much better distribution.
Interestingly enough, I saw responses like this one or even worse on the Gentoo boards. It's like a lot of people were convinced Gentoo was a one-feature distro -- if you didn't want to compile from source, it had nothing to offer. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was better maintained and offered more options than Debian at the time. Don't know if that's still true today, or the current state of Gentoo's binary packages, but if they finally implemented some sort of decent binary package distribution system (for each package, not just a few large popular ones), I might take a look at them again.
Huh? Precursor? The Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The Apple IIgs was introduced in September 1986 (and did not include GS/OS right off the bat -- that came later).
I generally think of an object as a single item, not a collective.
By this definition, there are no objects larger than the largest subatomic particle. An atom isn't an object, it's a collection. If an atom IS an object, then so is a solar system, a galaxy, and this object, no? In all those cases, it's a collection of other objects held together by some physical force. Or are we playing favorites (electromagnetic force, yes, but gravity, no)?
There's a particular view where certain interests and behaviors are associated with childhood and certain interests and behaviours are associated with adulthood, and if you're a good child you follow those, and when you become an adult you continue to behave in the way society tells you to.
Then there are people who grow up, which among other things means leaning to think for yourself, decide for yourself, and be responsible for your own decisions and their consequences.
For people who've grown up, whether to be excited about this or not is a matter of personal preference, but for those who haven't really grown up yet, the fact that they're an adult and not a kid anymore is relevant to this. To the latter group, the comment "I'm not a kid anymore" is a valid explanation for why they would not be interested in this. If and when they ever do grow up, they'll refrain from making those kinds of comments about things that simply don't interest them for whatever reason.
explain to me again why this device is so special?
Because it's perceived as special by so many people. Successful marketting. Hype leading to popularity.
I'm not attempting to downplay this. I've owned four different MP3 players over the years. Only my latest is an iPod. Why, after three significantly cheaper and perfectly capable MP3 players that I was perfectly happy with until I outgrew them (each has been bigger than the last) did I finally decide upon an iPod?
It had nothing to do with the device itself. Look at it and you'll find no clear advantage to anything else you compare it to. The hard drives aren't bigger than you can get on other devices, it doesn't really play more stuff (less, in fact, than WMA-capable players), it isn't really any easier to use than a large number of cheaper competitors.
If you don't see it, you're focused in too close. Pull back the camera a bit, so that you can see more than just the device itself. The reason I bought the iPod wasn't that it was, by itself, any better than the Creative or other players available. No, see those three aisles of iPod accessories in the store next to the iPod?
You can do more with the iPod, not because it does more, but simply because it's the one that everyone is making things for. The Creative player had three accessories I could buy. The iPod had three aisles of accessories. No matter what I wanted, I have a multitude of choices -- which style of case I wanted, what kind of speakers, specially built to both play and charge while it was docked in it, which kind, shape, and color of dash-mounting kit, etc.
The iPod is better because everyone thinks it's better, and manufacturers and sells accessories accordingly. What makes the iPod so special is that everyone thinks it's so special. It's like the proverbial self-fulfilling prophesy -- because so many people perceive it to be special, it actually is.
As for TFA's 30GB average laptop, seems like they have not looked at the retail market recently - 80GB is mainstream right now.
Well, they said the average laptop, so I assume they mean the average laptop. Looking at the retail market only tells you what the average laptop purchased today has, but one assumes the average laptop is more than one day old. Mine is over a year old, for example. The average laptop is certainly less impressive than the average laptop available for retail purchase.
In this case, not only dies the drive cost more indeed (compared to the regular version), but the MTBF is halved or something...
I believe the MTBF time on all the hard drives I've owned has been significantly longer than the MTBU (mean time between upgrades -- I only use a HD for so long before it's just too dinky to hold my data).
Yes, but setting aside the evil OS/software monopoly, Microsoft has some pretty good hardware. I've loved several great Microsoft mice over the years. I think Microsoft should get out of the OS and software business and concentrate on what they do best.
What seriously scares me is the number of people who think driving while talking on the cell phone is a bad idea. Seriously, if you're that bad at paying attention to the road while carrying on a conversation, you can't be a very good driver even under the best of circumstances. It's too dangerous for you to be driving, even without a cellphone (much less anything even more distracting, like an actual passenger in the car with you). Turn in your license now so that you don't run into any of us drivers who are actually competent enough to talk and drive at the same time.
Two identically-clad notebooks, both with dual-core AMD
Bzzt. Yes, there is an AMD on the page you linked, but the review you're talking about was for an Intel P4 based laptop. The other differences are similarly "minor". I hate to be pedantic, but you're dead wrong.
Who are you and what are you doing on Slashdot?????
I think that from time to time, reading comments, but then I have to check myself on the whole generation gap thing. Some/. readers may not be old enough to remember older shows, just as not every geek spent their teen years writing machine code in BASIC. Remember when the source code for your programs always started with a whole lot of POKE statements, if they weren't POKEs entirely (except for the final CALL)? Ah, those were the days. Boy was I happy when Merlin came along...
I think you're the one trying too hard to marry these things up. Of all the groups in the Battlestar Galactica series universe that could be compared to terrorists, the Cylons wouldn't be terribly close to the top of the list. Although, particularly in several of the on-Caprica episodes, I thought they came off pretty close to Nazis, with their experimentation on people and all. Terrible beings, yes, but not really anything like terrorists.
Actually, the most telling statement about human nature here is how, when someone uses a new tool in a way someone else doesn't like, it's called "bastardization". That it happens isn't a statement against human nature, but that it's viewed that way by some certainly is...
Does anybody know theoretically how far away our solar system's gravity can stretch and hold something in orbit?
Theoretically, the answer is any distance. You must be an infinite distance away from any object for it's gravitational effect upon you to be zero.
Practically, the answer is much less than infinity, since although you can never escape the Sun's gravity, it eventually becomes much less than that of over objects in space.
But it could easily reach 6 or 7 billion miles. Indeed, objects in the Oort cloud (if it exists) will have orbits some order of magnitude greater than that...
Note: At 47 degrees to the ecliptic this body won't appear to pass through most of the Zodiac constellations anyhow.
Actually, what constellations any body passes through is irrelevant to standard western astrology, since astrological signs are 30 degree arc segments that happen to be named for nearby constellations, and not constellations themselves. How far a body is above or below it's arc segment is also as irrelevant as what actual constellation it's in.
It is. On the other hand, since crytography has nothing to do with the problem he's working on, this is an irrelevant observation.
He's totally ignoring authentication, non-repudiation, man-in-the-middle attacks, and half a dozen other very important problems.
Yup. He's also ignoring global warming, terrorism in Israel, and numerous other very real problems that are nevertheless irrelevant to the problem at hand. You appear to have misunderstood what problem he's attempting to solve, since none of this has anything to do with the specific problem he's attempting to solve.
(It's also not a cipher, but we'll ignore that slip.)
It's not meant to be. It's meant to secure communications by ensuring an attacker never hears more than one bit of it. It doesn't take a Ph.D. in cryptography to know that if an attacker can only retrieve one bit, they can't decrypt your message from it.
I'll ignore the rest of your comments, since I'm not an electrical engineer, but they don't sound particularly clueful either...
Eh? Much like quantum communication systems, this is aimed at providing secure point-to-point communications. Almost everything you said above is utterly irrelevant to the question at hand. It doesn't solve any of the problems you bring up because it isn't meant to.
Moving to hydrogen powered cars doesn't solve problems of secure Internet communcations, either. That doesn't make them a step backwards...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a real phenomenon. Of course, it's a long-term one. The North American continent is still in the return swing of it's sea-saw motion, with the part of the continent above the 49th parallel (Canada) rising while the southern half sinks. The northern half was pressed down by the ice during the last ice age, and is still rising from when it all melted away 10,000 years ago.
But that won't affect the ice sheet in question in this article, since this ice sheet is floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and rests on no land at all.
Last time I checked, Gentoo kept its packages more up to date. At one point I was using Gentoo because I needed a particular version or newer of a package and the version in Gentoo stable was newer than the version in Debian unstable (there'd been a bug filed against the Debian package a year ago noting that the package was no longer usable, but nothing had been done about the problem for a year, so I gave up and switched to Gentoo).
Had Gentoo had binary packages at the time, I'd probably have kept using it -- compiling from source is a big pain in the ass that, as far as I can tell, doesn't really buy you anything, but aside from the compile-from-source nastiness, Gentoo was a much better distribution.
Interestingly enough, I saw responses like this one or even worse on the Gentoo boards. It's like a lot of people were convinced Gentoo was a one-feature distro -- if you didn't want to compile from source, it had nothing to offer. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was better maintained and offered more options than Debian at the time. Don't know if that's still true today, or the current state of Gentoo's binary packages, but if they finally implemented some sort of decent binary package distribution system (for each package, not just a few large popular ones), I might take a look at them again.
Huh? Precursor? The Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The Apple IIgs was introduced in September 1986 (and did not include GS/OS right off the bat -- that came later).
By this definition, there are no objects larger than the largest subatomic particle. An atom isn't an object, it's a collection. If an atom IS an object, then so is a solar system, a galaxy, and this object, no? In all those cases, it's a collection of other objects held together by some physical force. Or are we playing favorites (electromagnetic force, yes, but gravity, no)?
There's a particular view where certain interests and behaviors are associated with childhood and certain interests and behaviours are associated with adulthood, and if you're a good child you follow those, and when you become an adult you continue to behave in the way society tells you to.
Then there are people who grow up, which among other things means leaning to think for yourself, decide for yourself, and be responsible for your own decisions and their consequences.
For people who've grown up, whether to be excited about this or not is a matter of personal preference, but for those who haven't really grown up yet, the fact that they're an adult and not a kid anymore is relevant to this. To the latter group, the comment "I'm not a kid anymore" is a valid explanation for why they would not be interested in this. If and when they ever do grow up, they'll refrain from making those kinds of comments about things that simply don't interest them for whatever reason.
Yeah, Second Life isn't really a game. It's more of a graphical chat client... with shopping malls...
Yeah, if you want any kind of non-standard relationship, you need to get a life... available here. ;)
Because it's perceived as special by so many people. Successful marketting. Hype leading to popularity.
I'm not attempting to downplay this. I've owned four different MP3 players over the years. Only my latest is an iPod. Why, after three significantly cheaper and perfectly capable MP3 players that I was perfectly happy with until I outgrew them (each has been bigger than the last) did I finally decide upon an iPod?
It had nothing to do with the device itself. Look at it and you'll find no clear advantage to anything else you compare it to. The hard drives aren't bigger than you can get on other devices, it doesn't really play more stuff (less, in fact, than WMA-capable players), it isn't really any easier to use than a large number of cheaper competitors.
If you don't see it, you're focused in too close. Pull back the camera a bit, so that you can see more than just the device itself. The reason I bought the iPod wasn't that it was, by itself, any better than the Creative or other players available. No, see those three aisles of iPod accessories in the store next to the iPod?
You can do more with the iPod, not because it does more, but simply because it's the one that everyone is making things for. The Creative player had three accessories I could buy. The iPod had three aisles of accessories. No matter what I wanted, I have a multitude of choices -- which style of case I wanted, what kind of speakers, specially built to both play and charge while it was docked in it, which kind, shape, and color of dash-mounting kit, etc.
The iPod is better because everyone thinks it's better, and manufacturers and sells accessories accordingly. What makes the iPod so special is that everyone thinks it's so special. It's like the proverbial self-fulfilling prophesy -- because so many people perceive it to be special, it actually is.
Well, they said the average laptop, so I assume they mean the average laptop. Looking at the retail market only tells you what the average laptop purchased today has, but one assumes the average laptop is more than one day old. Mine is over a year old, for example. The average laptop is certainly less impressive than the average laptop available for retail purchase.
I believe the MTBF time on all the hard drives I've owned has been significantly longer than the MTBU (mean time between upgrades -- I only use a HD for so long before it's just too dinky to hold my data).
Yes, but setting aside the evil OS/software monopoly, Microsoft has some pretty good hardware. I've loved several great Microsoft mice over the years. I think Microsoft should get out of the OS and software business and concentrate on what they do best.
New around here, are we?
It's one of the most front-page worthy stories currently on the front page.
Been there, done that. ;)
What seriously scares me is the number of people who think driving while talking on the cell phone is a bad idea. Seriously, if you're that bad at paying attention to the road while carrying on a conversation, you can't be a very good driver even under the best of circumstances. It's too dangerous for you to be driving, even without a cellphone (much less anything even more distracting, like an actual passenger in the car with you). Turn in your license now so that you don't run into any of us drivers who are actually competent enough to talk and drive at the same time.
Humans are relatively recent immigrants.
Bzzt. Yes, there is an AMD on the page you linked, but the review you're talking about was for an Intel P4 based laptop. The other differences are similarly "minor". I hate to be pedantic, but you're dead wrong.
No, actually, it's not.
I think that from time to time, reading comments, but then I have to check myself on the whole generation gap thing. Some /. readers may not be old enough to remember older shows, just as not every geek spent their teen years writing machine code in BASIC. Remember when the source code for your programs always started with a whole lot of POKE statements, if they weren't POKEs entirely (except for the final CALL)? Ah, those were the days. Boy was I happy when Merlin came along...
I think you're the one trying too hard to marry these things up. Of all the groups in the Battlestar Galactica series universe that could be compared to terrorists, the Cylons wouldn't be terribly close to the top of the list. Although, particularly in several of the on-Caprica episodes, I thought they came off pretty close to Nazis, with their experimentation on people and all. Terrible beings, yes, but not really anything like terrorists.
Actually, the most telling statement about human nature here is how, when someone uses a new tool in a way someone else doesn't like, it's called "bastardization". That it happens isn't a statement against human nature, but that it's viewed that way by some certainly is...
Actually, it's "Dakara"...
Theoretically, the answer is any distance. You must be an infinite distance away from any object for it's gravitational effect upon you to be zero.
Practically, the answer is much less than infinity, since although you can never escape the Sun's gravity, it eventually becomes much less than that of over objects in space.
But it could easily reach 6 or 7 billion miles. Indeed, objects in the Oort cloud (if it exists) will have orbits some order of magnitude greater than that...
Actually, what constellations any body passes through is irrelevant to standard western astrology, since astrological signs are 30 degree arc segments that happen to be named for nearby constellations, and not constellations themselves. How far a body is above or below it's arc segment is also as irrelevant as what actual constellation it's in.
It is. On the other hand, since crytography has nothing to do with the problem he's working on, this is an irrelevant observation.
He's totally ignoring authentication, non-repudiation, man-in-the-middle attacks, and half a dozen other very important problems.
Yup. He's also ignoring global warming, terrorism in Israel, and numerous other very real problems that are nevertheless irrelevant to the problem at hand. You appear to have misunderstood what problem he's attempting to solve, since none of this has anything to do with the specific problem he's attempting to solve.
(It's also not a cipher, but we'll ignore that slip.)
It's not meant to be. It's meant to secure communications by ensuring an attacker never hears more than one bit of it. It doesn't take a Ph.D. in cryptography to know that if an attacker can only retrieve one bit, they can't decrypt your message from it.
I'll ignore the rest of your comments, since I'm not an electrical engineer, but they don't sound particularly clueful either...
Eh? Much like quantum communication systems, this is aimed at providing secure point-to-point communications. Almost everything you said above is utterly irrelevant to the question at hand. It doesn't solve any of the problems you bring up because it isn't meant to. Moving to hydrogen powered cars doesn't solve problems of secure Internet communcations, either. That doesn't make them a step backwards...
No.