From what I understood, there were Neutrino experiments scheduled to run at Fermilab until 2012 at least. Sure, with the LHC operational, it doesn't make much sense to continue the search for the Higgs at Fermilab, but that doesn't mean that other meaningful research isn't going on there.
That also said, it's very important to have two large colliders operational at once, as an observation recorded at *both* would be considerably more significant. The US really needs to get its head back into the game when it comes to science -- the LHC and ITER taking place overseas doesn't exactly reflect positively upon our current state of affairs.
Clinton's cancellation of the SSC (when it was halfway completed, no less) set particle physics back 15-20 years worldwide. If completed, it would have had 3 times the circumference of the LHC.
But, hey. We've got Iraq. That's got to count for something, right?
Areas immediately surrounding nuclear power plants still have high-powered siren systems that are tested once or twice a year.
Not exactly the same thing, but similar.
Apparently, a few years ago, the test system system in Surry, VA malfunctioned, and sent out the 'real' signal instead of a test signal, and a few of the sirens got stuck in the 'on' position. Freaked out quite a few people.
I'd bet that ZFS is in there for some future version of their XServe NAS product, not as a boot partition.
Granted, I am somewhat disappointed by this announcement. HFS+ isn't terrible, but as far as modern file systems go, it's pretty unremarkable (and every bit as poorly supported as NTFS).
It's quicktime that's the absolute mess -- It's gotten better since iTunes came along, but compared to the lightweight framework that it is on the mac, the windows version absolutely sucks. It's just an incredibly sluggish, and somewhat useless media player.
On OS X, Quicktime is essentially a fairly versatile media framework that, given the proper codec, can play just about anything. Virtually all mac applications that require the manipulation of media files utilize it. The file format also allows for some pretty darn cool nondestructive editing -- Final Cut Pro is more or less just a fancy utility for manipulating QuickTime files.
QuickTime player is simply a front-end application that makes use of the framework. Its Windows counterpart is a mere shadow of its former self.
On the other hand, VLC natively plays every format under the sun on every platform under the sun. Come to think of it, it's the only app I know of that works extremely well on all 3 major platforms (Firefox isn't so hot on the mac)
Many people blame the presence of a Windows version for preventing Apple from transitioning iTunes over to a Cocoa app. I can hardly blame them either -- Cocoa apps tend to be a bit more stable and 'snappy' (it's a really nice framework)
I wouldn't completely knock Safari without giving it a chance. Safari itself was based off of KHTML (and the Apple devs still contribute back regularly to the KDE/Konqueror folks). If they ported it once, porting it twice shouldn't be a terribly huge issue once the initial kinks are worked out.
I hope that EA takes the same policy as Blizzard does, and bundles both PC and Mac versions of the game in the same box.
It makes it easy to upgrade/transition between platforms, not to mention, gives both versions equal retail penetration. It's good for them AND the consumer (although EA hasn't been one to traditionally think along logical lines)
What I don't get is how an athletic conference has any bearing whatsoever over academic matters (and I find that fact somewhat troubling). Ditto for the Ivy League.
Our current president is a pretty good indication that an Ivy League education has become absolutely meaningless. Save some cash, and go to a state school.
From what I understand, the API that Windows filesystem drivers interface with is an undocumented nightmare that's entirely different (but not necessarily 'worse') from the way the rest of the world does it.
So porting a filesystem as complicated as ZFS could take some time.
I'd say that the odds of this happening soon are fairly likely, but after the next version of OS X is released.
One of the biggest features of 10.5 that's sort of slipped under the radar is that it's supposed to be "resolution independent", which means that the size of text and window elements will scale with the size of the screen, and not the resolution.
If you haven't noticed, 1920x1200 in a 15" screen makes text WAY too small for most people to read. Resolution independence lets apple (finally) start bundling ultra-high resolution screens in very small packages.
Personally, I'm waiting for LCDs to catch up to paper. Go pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and compare its text to the smallest text your monitor can legibly display. It's pretty embarrassing how much better paper still is.
The money spent on the New Deal was spent on domestic public infrastructure, much of which is still in use today.
On the other hand, it's dubious at best to see how the money we're spending in Iraq is going to benefit us 7 or 70 years down the road. Ron Paul makes a pretty convincing argument that it's going to hurt us badly in the long-run.
Which brings up another thing -- one of the greatest things of the Clinton era was that EVERYONE had to compromise. No one got what they wanted. And because of it, there was discussion and debate and things had to happen because everyone found a common platform that they could agree on and the country had some of the largest gains because of it.
That's actually a very concise definition of classical conservatism. The power of the government is limited to the point where only laws that benefit the vast majority are passed.
Most of the time (specifically peacetime), this works fantasticly. However, in wartime, it's generally agreed upon that a firm leader needs to be able to take swift actions to defend the country. Bush created a false "war", and has been using this as his excuse to get a frightening amount of irrelevant legislation passed in an extremely short time. The Bush government is anything but conservative.
Indeed, CF has, and always will have its own niche.
Plus, if you have the need to swap cards between devices, I think that CF's large size actually makes it *more* convenient. miniSD, and now this new miCard business are great for cell phones and all, but for all practical concerns, they're far too small to be practical in general use (ie. you'll lose them).
Also, CF has pin-for-pin compatibility with normal 40-pin IDE/PATA devices, which is just plain cool. It's not unheard of to use a CF card as a solid-state disk in a router or other linux-embedded device.
The easiest solution, a tall building, was out because of pre-war restrictions on steel usage and the desire not to ruin Washington's skyline.
Hold up... skyline!! What skyline? DC has laws stating that no buildings may be over 20 feet taller than the width of the street they face. What DC has is a profound lack/i> of skyline!
Poor urban planning and laws like this have, of course, caused many of the city's problems. The sprawl around DC is absolutely unbelievable.
Most tollbooths have a large (ie. huge) reinforced concrete barrier directly in front of the booth where the attendant sits (assuming that it's not an automated booth, which many Turnpike of the booths on the turnpike are)
What I don't understand is why he was going 65 anywhere remotely near a tollbooth. The NJ Turnpike only has booths on the on/offramps to improve traffic flow. Get on the highway, take a ticket from the booth. Get off, return the ticket, and pay the toll for the distance travelled.
Seizure or not, driving 65mph on a ramp is not a very smart thing to do.
I'm intrigued. Do you have more information (or a source for your numbers?)
Specifically, what are the infrastructure costs, and how deep do we need to make our algae ponds? Likewise, how 'carbon-neutral' is algae growth, given that it takes place underwater?
That said, the large hype the Bush administration has begun to endorse regarding corn-based ethanol production might very well be one of the most evil things they've done. It could very well easily sabotage the adoption of alternative energy sources in the short-term, and it's perhaps the only thing holding their approval ratings up. Is there hope for the US, or is our government corrupt enough that the farmers and oil companies will be the ones shaping our futures?
The thing is that NYC's power infrastructure is already severely strained, much like the rest of the city's infrastructure which was severely neglected for the latter half of the last century.
Last summer, there was a pretty severe blackout in Queens that lasted for over a week, and affected over 100,000 people, and disrupted subway service.
The overload of the grid caused several of the feeder lines to Queens not only to shut down, but to fail catestrophically. So --- irregardless of security issues, NYC does need to have its electrical capacity increased.
Well, for one, users do react better to a UI that's visually appealing (but non-invasive). Although I personally think that Apple's Mail.app shown in the grandparent post violates this principle, OS X on a whole conforms to it pretty well.
As far as "amateurish UI element spacing and layouts", I refer you to this KDE Print Settins dialogue. Although the screenshot's somewhat dated (2004), I came across a similar dialogue this past week when using my University's linux cluster. Although the font configuration doesn't appear to have been borked like in the screenshot I linked to, the element spacing was the same, despite the smaller fonts (ie. huge window, small fonts).
There are a few examples of good UIs on KDE/GTK apps, but for the most part, they tend to look very sloppy. Win32 apps tend to look neutral and professional. OS X apps are a bit more flashy, but are on a similar level of "neatness".
I would doubt that it's even an issue with "open-sourceness". Adium, a (free) GAIM-based multi-platform IM client for OS X has what is easily one of the best UIs I've seen on an application regardless of license or platform.
Another complaint I have is that FOSS GUIs tend to rely a lot on toolbars and icons. Although this isn't necessarily a terrible thing in and of itself, It is more often than not the case that WAY too many icons are presented, and that the design of said icons gives very few visual cues as to the function of the button. Konqueror is a terrible offender of this crime. Although virtually every other browser on the planet gets by just fine with 4 or 5 buttons in the toolbar, Konqueror somehow feels that it's perfectly acceptable to put 17 buttons in the default toolbar.
(It's not that I'm bitter. It's just that pranking lectures isn't even remotely unique to MIT. I just don't get why the editors deem it even remotely newsworthy when such a prank is pulled off at MIT. That said, they HAVE performed some fantastic pranks in the past. I got a big kick out of reading about the lengths they went through to steal the Caltech cannon, not to mention the various crap they've put on top of the great dome. This prank, on the other hand, was pretty darn lame.)
Why is it that whenever anything even remotely of interest happens at MIT, it immediately shows up on the front page of Slashdot, Digg, and Boingboing?
I'll gladly admit that xkcd is a great comic, and that there are plenty of smart students and professors at MIT. However, the disproportinate amount of press coverage that MIT (and the Ivies) receive is downright insulting to the rest of us.
Prediction: "*BSD Is Dead" turns into "Linux Is Dead"
That said, I think that *BSD might be the better operating system at the moment. I'm still not convinced of the merits of a monolithic kernel. Microkernels have worked very well for OS X, and even NT on the desktop and server levels. Even slashdot hosts itself on BSD.
Of course, what we (still) need is a good desktop UI environment. We've made so much progess in all the other areas, and absolutely none in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understood, there were Neutrino experiments scheduled to run at Fermilab until 2012 at least. Sure, with the LHC operational, it doesn't make much sense to continue the search for the Higgs at Fermilab, but that doesn't mean that other meaningful research isn't going on there.
That also said, it's very important to have two large colliders operational at once, as an observation recorded at *both* would be considerably more significant. The US really needs to get its head back into the game when it comes to science -- the LHC and ITER taking place overseas doesn't exactly reflect positively upon our current state of affairs.
Clinton's cancellation of the SSC (when it was halfway completed, no less) set particle physics back 15-20 years worldwide. If completed, it would have had 3 times the circumference of the LHC.
But, hey. We've got Iraq. That's got to count for something, right?
Areas immediately surrounding nuclear power plants still have high-powered siren systems that are tested once or twice a year.
Not exactly the same thing, but similar.
Apparently, a few years ago, the test system system in Surry, VA malfunctioned, and sent out the 'real' signal instead of a test signal, and a few of the sirens got stuck in the 'on' position. Freaked out quite a few people.
Personally, I'd like to see him grill the republicans.
All the better if he brings up gay marriage.
I'd bet that ZFS is in there for some future version of their XServe NAS product, not as a boot partition.
Granted, I am somewhat disappointed by this announcement. HFS+ isn't terrible, but as far as modern file systems go, it's pretty unremarkable (and every bit as poorly supported as NTFS).
Maybe they just got lucky, and found a hole in the first place they looked? It might sound stupid to suggest, but I wouldn't rule it out.
Eh. iTunes on Windows is alright in my opinion.
It's quicktime that's the absolute mess -- It's gotten better since iTunes came along, but compared to the lightweight framework that it is on the mac, the windows version absolutely sucks. It's just an incredibly sluggish, and somewhat useless media player.
On OS X, Quicktime is essentially a fairly versatile media framework that, given the proper codec, can play just about anything. Virtually all mac applications that require the manipulation of media files utilize it. The file format also allows for some pretty darn cool nondestructive editing -- Final Cut Pro is more or less just a fancy utility for manipulating QuickTime files.
QuickTime player is simply a front-end application that makes use of the framework. Its Windows counterpart is a mere shadow of its former self.
On the other hand, VLC natively plays every format under the sun on every platform under the sun. Come to think of it, it's the only app I know of that works extremely well on all 3 major platforms (Firefox isn't so hot on the mac)
Many people blame the presence of a Windows version for preventing Apple from transitioning iTunes over to a Cocoa app. I can hardly blame them either -- Cocoa apps tend to be a bit more stable and 'snappy' (it's a really nice framework)
I wouldn't completely knock Safari without giving it a chance. Safari itself was based off of KHTML (and the Apple devs still contribute back regularly to the KDE/Konqueror folks). If they ported it once, porting it twice shouldn't be a terribly huge issue once the initial kinks are worked out.
I hope that EA takes the same policy as Blizzard does, and bundles both PC and Mac versions of the game in the same box.
It makes it easy to upgrade/transition between platforms, not to mention, gives both versions equal retail penetration. It's good for them AND the consumer (although EA hasn't been one to traditionally think along logical lines)
What I don't get is how an athletic conference has any bearing whatsoever over academic matters (and I find that fact somewhat troubling). Ditto for the Ivy League.
Don't worry. They wouldn't want you anyway.
Our current president is a pretty good indication that an Ivy League education has become absolutely meaningless. Save some cash, and go to a state school.
From what I understand, the API that Windows filesystem drivers interface with is an undocumented nightmare that's entirely different (but not necessarily 'worse') from the way the rest of the world does it.
So porting a filesystem as complicated as ZFS could take some time.
I'd say that the odds of this happening soon are fairly likely, but after the next version of OS X is released.
One of the biggest features of 10.5 that's sort of slipped under the radar is that it's supposed to be "resolution independent", which means that the size of text and window elements will scale with the size of the screen, and not the resolution.
If you haven't noticed, 1920x1200 in a 15" screen makes text WAY too small for most people to read. Resolution independence lets apple (finally) start bundling ultra-high resolution screens in very small packages.
Personally, I'm waiting for LCDs to catch up to paper. Go pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and compare its text to the smallest text your monitor can legibly display. It's pretty embarrassing how much better paper still is.
No no no no.
The money spent on the New Deal was spent on domestic public infrastructure, much of which is still in use today.
On the other hand, it's dubious at best to see how the money we're spending in Iraq is going to benefit us 7 or 70 years down the road. Ron Paul makes a pretty convincing argument that it's going to hurt us badly in the long-run.
That's actually a very concise definition of classical conservatism. The power of the government is limited to the point where only laws that benefit the vast majority are passed.
Most of the time (specifically peacetime), this works fantasticly. However, in wartime, it's generally agreed upon that a firm leader needs to be able to take swift actions to defend the country. Bush created a false "war", and has been using this as his excuse to get a frightening amount of irrelevant legislation passed in an extremely short time. The Bush government is anything but conservative.
Even better if there's a dump truck parked across the street so that you can make even better analogies.
Indeed, CF has, and always will have its own niche.
Plus, if you have the need to swap cards between devices, I think that CF's large size actually makes it *more* convenient. miniSD, and now this new miCard business are great for cell phones and all, but for all practical concerns, they're far too small to be practical in general use (ie. you'll lose them).
Also, CF has pin-for-pin compatibility with normal 40-pin IDE/PATA devices, which is just plain cool. It's not unheard of to use a CF card as a solid-state disk in a router or other linux-embedded device.
Hold up... skyline!! What skyline? DC has laws stating that no buildings may be over 20 feet taller than the width of the street they face. What DC has is a profound lack/i> of skyline!
Poor urban planning and laws like this have, of course, caused many of the city's problems. The sprawl around DC is absolutely unbelievable.
Most tollbooths have a large (ie. huge) reinforced concrete barrier directly in front of the booth where the attendant sits (assuming that it's not an automated booth, which many Turnpike of the booths on the turnpike are)
What I don't understand is why he was going 65 anywhere remotely near a tollbooth. The NJ Turnpike only has booths on the on/offramps to improve traffic flow. Get on the highway, take a ticket from the booth. Get off, return the ticket, and pay the toll for the distance travelled.
Seizure or not, driving 65mph on a ramp is not a very smart thing to do.
I'm intrigued. Do you have more information (or a source for your numbers?)
Specifically, what are the infrastructure costs, and how deep do we need to make our algae ponds? Likewise, how 'carbon-neutral' is algae growth, given that it takes place underwater?
That said, the large hype the Bush administration has begun to endorse regarding corn-based ethanol production might very well be one of the most evil things they've done. It could very well easily sabotage the adoption of alternative energy sources in the short-term, and it's perhaps the only thing holding their approval ratings up. Is there hope for the US, or is our government corrupt enough that the farmers and oil companies will be the ones shaping our futures?
Quantum computers have that one nagging flaw: they don't actually exist.
Quantum computers have that one nagging flaw: they actually exist.
vi.
The thing is that NYC's power infrastructure is already severely strained, much like the rest of the city's infrastructure which was severely neglected for the latter half of the last century.
Last summer, there was a pretty severe blackout in Queens that lasted for over a week, and affected over 100,000 people, and disrupted subway service.
The overload of the grid caused several of the feeder lines to Queens not only to shut down, but to fail catestrophically. So --- irregardless of security issues, NYC does need to have its electrical capacity increased.
Well, for one, users do react better to a UI that's visually appealing (but non-invasive). Although I personally think that Apple's Mail.app shown in the grandparent post violates this principle, OS X on a whole conforms to it pretty well.
As far as "amateurish UI element spacing and layouts", I refer you to this KDE Print Settins dialogue. Although the screenshot's somewhat dated (2004), I came across a similar dialogue this past week when using my University's linux cluster. Although the font configuration doesn't appear to have been borked like in the screenshot I linked to, the element spacing was the same, despite the smaller fonts (ie. huge window, small fonts).
There are a few examples of good UIs on KDE/GTK apps, but for the most part, they tend to look very sloppy. Win32 apps tend to look neutral and professional. OS X apps are a bit more flashy, but are on a similar level of "neatness".
I would doubt that it's even an issue with "open-sourceness". Adium, a (free) GAIM-based multi-platform IM client for OS X has what is easily one of the best UIs I've seen on an application regardless of license or platform.
Another complaint I have is that FOSS GUIs tend to rely a lot on toolbars and icons. Although this isn't necessarily a terrible thing in and of itself, It is more often than not the case that WAY too many icons are presented, and that the design of said icons gives very few visual cues as to the function of the button. Konqueror is a terrible offender of this crime. Although virtually every other browser on the planet gets by just fine with 4 or 5 buttons in the toolbar, Konqueror somehow feels that it's perfectly acceptable to put 17 buttons in the default toolbar.
*ducks as joke whizzes over head*
Care to explain the significance of Clarkson?
(It's not that I'm bitter. It's just that pranking lectures isn't even remotely unique to MIT. I just don't get why the editors deem it even remotely newsworthy when such a prank is pulled off at MIT. That said, they HAVE performed some fantastic pranks in the past. I got a big kick out of reading about the lengths they went through to steal the Caltech cannon, not to mention the various crap they've put on top of the great dome. This prank, on the other hand, was pretty darn lame.)
Why is it that whenever anything even remotely of interest happens at MIT, it immediately shows up on the front page of Slashdot, Digg, and Boingboing?
I'll gladly admit that xkcd is a great comic, and that there are plenty of smart students and professors at MIT. However, the disproportinate amount of press coverage that MIT (and the Ivies) receive is downright insulting to the rest of us.
Prediction: "*BSD Is Dead" turns into "Linux Is Dead"
That said, I think that *BSD might be the better operating system at the moment. I'm still not convinced of the merits of a monolithic kernel. Microkernels have worked very well for OS X, and even NT on the desktop and server levels. Even slashdot hosts itself on BSD.
Of course, what we (still) need is a good desktop UI environment. We've made so much progess in all the other areas, and absolutely none in this regard.