I'm a little confused, and was hoping that someone knew -- but my question was: let's say that a HUGE asteroid was passing near earth. Okay - chances are really slim, but lets say that we do find a way to deflect it - thus saving mankind as we know it and avoiding another ice age.
Assuming that this case does play out, is there a possibility of the gravitational field from the large body changing earth's orbit?
This is a great idea though -- hopefully it doesn't get as annoying as mock emergency fire drills did back in residence at college.
Re:Suing SCO in small claims court?
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 0, Troll
SCO is suing on the presumption that the GPL is invalid and does not apply. Assuming that this holds, what would you be suing them for?
I'd be more worried about getting trampled by big-time lawyers, and then being used as an ugly precedent where the GPL was shown to be inapplicable to IP rights in the Linux kernel.
Seems to me that the title of the post contradicts the end of the article itself!
Your next "IT job" may be in an industry you didn't even think about a few years ago. It may be in a place you never thought of as an "IT mecca." But if you have solid skills, whether as an entry level programmer or sysadmin or as a top-level IT manager or CIO, some company out there almost certainly needs someone just like you. The trick is finding that company -- but that's another article for another day.
Although in the end, I hate to say it, but this looks like its still based on speculation and hope rather than any empirical evidence.
Isn't an ISP a private company? I mean, don't they have the right to choose not to add all services?
E.g. in this case, its pretty specific, but as a private business, can't they choose to omit a certain part of the web -- leaving the users to choose to go elsewhere should they want that part?
Linux Set to Break Through in Consumer Electronics Thu August 28, 2003 12:21 PM ET By Lucas van Grinsven, European Technology Correspondent
BERLIN (Reuters) - Linux, the fast growing and freely available operating system, is set to be the software of choice for future televisions, set top boxes and DVD recorders, consumer electronics executives and specialists said Thursday.
Linux, currently a software system mostly used to power big servers and personal computers, is also now emerging as a small set of computing code to drive devices like mobile phones, remote controls and TVs.
"The consumer electronics industry has chosen the Linux platform in large numbers. For us, Linux has several advantages," said Gerard Kleisterlee, Chief Executive at Philips Electronics, Europe's biggest and the world's No. 3 consumer electronics maker.
Low cost and the freedom to tweak the software are reasons why eight of the world's largest consumer electronics makers, including the numbers one and two Sony Corp and Matsushita of Japan, have set up an alliance to develop and promote Linux for consumer electronics products, last month.
Linux should also create a common standard to connect products from different manufacturers which currently build various proprietary systems into their devices.
At the sector's largest trade fair IFA in Berlin, the first Linux products are already on show and more will come soon, companies said.
Linux's key advantage over other operating systems is that the core software is freely available and widely embraced. In the cut-throat electronics business where profit margins are one or two percent at the best of times, every saving is welcome.
"The consumer electronics makers sell millions of devices while their profit margins are extremely slim. If they have don't have to pay royalties it works directly through to their bottom line," Martin Fink, head of Linux activities at Hewlett-Packard, told Reuters in an interview.
TINY LINUX
Linux's core software, also known as kernel, which drives the chips and other basic functions of a device, can be as small as one Megabyte if embedded in a consumer electronics product, Fink added. A single high quality digital picture or one minute of MP3 music can be stored on one Megabyte of memory.
U.S. electronics maker Motorola has launched a Linux mobile phone for the Chinese market, while Philips has a remote control running on Linux for all the electronic devices in a home.
The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) is working to speed up the start-up time of devices and reduce power demands.
Next target is the 164 million units a year global television set market, as well as the millions of set top boxes and DVD recorders. These devices need more powerful chips and versatile software like Linux to connect easily to other devices in the home and the Web. U.S.-based Microsoft has a slimmed-down version of Windows for networked home electronics.
Consumers are embracing home networks to hook up their computers with always-on, fast Internet. Consumer electronics makers believe that next they will want to play and display music, pictures and films from the Internet and their PC on TVs and HiFi sets, which is why they make them more powerful.
Worldwide, over twenty million consumers have a home network this year, a number that will double within two years and treble within four, said Juergen Thiel, a Western European sales manager at U.S. chip maker Intel. Intel said it would partner with Sony to develop these home networks.
Sony, Philips and Samsung Electronics from South Korea all showed home network boxes that will transfer digital content from PCs and the Web to consumer electronics devices.
"Broadband Internet will create completely new opportunities. In Germany alone the number of broadband DSL subscribers will surpass four million this year," says Leopold Bonengl, head of Sony Germany. Some 12 percent of all European households currently h
I thought that the arguments of engineers vs. managers was ALWAYS there?
I had always thought that it was a case where an engineer wants to do and the managers decide whether or not it was feasible or not, or whether it makes any sense to do it at all!
URHAM, N.C. -- Scientists seek to understand what is, the aerospace pioneer Theodore von Karman is supposed to have said, while engineers seek to create what never was. The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists the vehicle was a tool; to engineers it was their creation.
With the release of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, there is a new focus on the "culture" of NASA. Engineers have played a prominent but not a controlling role in that culture, both in the design of the shuttle and in the planning of its missions. When the report speaks of NASA's "broken safety culture," the particular failure it cites is "a consistent lack of concern" that Columbia may have been damaged by debris at takeoff. But perhaps NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable -- and healthy -- tension among scientists, managers and engineers.
A common misconception about how things such as space shuttles come to be is that engineers simply apply the theories and equations of science. But this cannot be done until the new thing-to-be is conceived in the engineer's mind's eye. Rather than following from science, engineered things lead it. The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics, and flying machines before aerodynamics. The sciences were invented to explain the accomplishments -- and to analyze their shortcomings.
The design of any device, machine or system is fraught with failure. Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail. If gases escaping from a booster rocket can lower efficiency or cause damage, then O-ring seals are added. If the friction of re-entry can melt a spacecraft, then a heat shield is devised.
Much of design is thus defensive engineering: containing, shielding and fending off anticipated problems on the drawing board and computer screen so that they cannot bring down the design when it flies. Obviously, total success can only come if every possible mode of failure is identified and defended against.
Engineering is also very much about numbers. O-rings must be sized; the thickness of heat shields specified; the weight of insulation calculated. Often, the numbers work at cross purposes, as when increasing shield material decreases available payload. Engineering design is ultimately the art of compromise.
What results from the design process is a thing that has unique characteristics. It can withstand the conditions for which it was designed as long as it maintains its integrity. There is usually some leeway allowed, for engineers know that operating conditions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Until it fails, how far beyond design conditions a system can be pushed is never fully known.
But engineers do know that nothing is perfect, including themselves. As careful and extensive as their calculations might be, engineers know that they can err -- and that things can behave differently out of the laboratory. On the space shuttles, O-rings got scorched, heat tiles fell off, foam insulation broke free. To engineers, these unexpected events were incontrovertible evidence that they did not fully understand the machine.
Engineers do not feel comfortable with things they do not understand. It is at this point that they begin to act more like scientists. In the case of the scorched O-rings, the engineers studied burn patterns. They looked for a correlation between damage and temperature, and they warned about launching when the temperature was outside the bounds of their experience and scientific study.
If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology. Successful, albeit flawed missions indicated to them not a weak but a robust machine. When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank. In the case of Columbia, engineers who worried about damage that the
So, people that don't want to be called put themselves on a list. Alternatively, others can remain off the list and still receive calls.
The telemarketing companies end up calling only those that are willing to listen. Instead of wasting time, they call someone else that will listen to them and be a possible sale.
The week ending July 6 was including a three day weekend and also Independence Day. WHO stays in and actively uses the Internet when you could be up at the cottage or out celebrating the long weekend?
I used to work as a tech, and one day some people came in to showcase a security system that they were trying to sell! Unfortunately, to the horror of all/. folk, it was based on a windows system. Alas, the name of the company escapes me now, but they had the computer dial up and send a text message based on the camera detecting motion.... also, a live feed was possible by dialing up (which they thought was the most secure)...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little confused, and was hoping that someone knew -- but my question was: let's say that a HUGE asteroid was passing near earth. Okay - chances are really slim, but lets say that we do find a way to deflect it - thus saving mankind as we know it and avoiding another ice age.
Assuming that this case does play out, is there a possibility of the gravitational field from the large body changing earth's orbit?
So you're turning on a computer system thats intended to be intelligent enough to seek out and erradicate computer worms?
Did you NOT see Terminator 3?
- Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Or, in this case, those that don't learn from crappy movies. =P
Time to karma whore cuz the server's getting slow ;)
Google Cache
This is a great idea though -- hopefully it doesn't get as annoying as mock emergency fire drills did back in residence at college.
SCO is suing on the presumption that the GPL is invalid and does not apply. Assuming that this holds, what would you be suing them for?
I'd be more worried about getting trampled by big-time lawyers, and then being used as an ugly precedent where the GPL was shown to be inapplicable to IP rights in the Linux kernel.
Hah!
;)
You can enjoy your faux-reality.... I'm off for a second helping of motivation to get off my arse and get something done!
Seems to me that the title of the post contradicts the end of the article itself!
Your next "IT job" may be in an industry you didn't even think about a few years ago. It may be in a place you never thought of as an "IT mecca." But if you have solid skills, whether as an entry level programmer or sysadmin or as a top-level IT manager or CIO, some company out there almost certainly needs someone just like you. The trick is finding that company -- but that's another article for another day.
Although in the end, I hate to say it, but this looks like its still based on speculation and hope rather than any empirical evidence.
Isn't an ISP a private company? I mean, don't they have the right to choose not to add all services?
E.g. in this case, its pretty specific, but as a private business, can't they choose to omit a certain part of the web -- leaving the users to choose to go elsewhere should they want that part?
Linux Set to Break Through in Consumer Electronics
Thu August 28, 2003 12:21 PM ET
By Lucas van Grinsven, European Technology Correspondent
BERLIN (Reuters) - Linux, the fast growing and freely available operating system, is set to be the software of choice for future televisions, set top boxes and DVD recorders, consumer electronics executives and specialists said Thursday.
Linux, currently a software system mostly used to power big servers and personal computers, is also now emerging as a small set of computing code to drive devices like mobile phones, remote controls and TVs.
"The consumer electronics industry has chosen the Linux platform in large numbers. For us, Linux has several advantages," said Gerard Kleisterlee, Chief Executive at Philips Electronics, Europe's biggest and the world's No. 3 consumer electronics maker.
Low cost and the freedom to tweak the software are reasons why eight of the world's largest consumer electronics makers, including the numbers one and two Sony Corp and Matsushita of Japan, have set up an alliance to develop and promote Linux for consumer electronics products, last month.
Linux should also create a common standard to connect products from different manufacturers which currently build various proprietary systems into their devices.
At the sector's largest trade fair IFA in Berlin, the first Linux products are already on show and more will come soon, companies said.
Linux's key advantage over other operating systems is that the core software is freely available and widely embraced. In the cut-throat electronics business where profit margins are one or two percent at the best of times, every saving is welcome.
"The consumer electronics makers sell millions of devices while their profit margins are extremely slim. If they have don't have to pay royalties it works directly through to their bottom line," Martin Fink, head of Linux activities at Hewlett-Packard, told Reuters in an interview.
TINY LINUX
Linux's core software, also known as kernel, which drives the chips and other basic functions of a device, can be as small as one Megabyte if embedded in a consumer electronics product, Fink added. A single high quality digital picture or one minute of MP3 music can be stored on one Megabyte of memory.
U.S. electronics maker Motorola has launched a Linux mobile phone for the Chinese market, while Philips has a remote control running on Linux for all the electronic devices in a home.
The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) is working to speed up the start-up time of devices and reduce power demands.
Next target is the 164 million units a year global television set market, as well as the millions of set top boxes and DVD recorders. These devices need more powerful chips and versatile software like Linux to connect easily to other devices in the home and the Web. U.S.-based Microsoft has a slimmed-down version of Windows for networked home electronics.
Consumers are embracing home networks to hook up their computers with always-on, fast Internet. Consumer electronics makers believe that next they will want to play and display music, pictures and films from the Internet and their PC on TVs and HiFi sets, which is why they make them more powerful.
Worldwide, over twenty million consumers have a home network this year, a number that will double within two years and treble within four, said Juergen Thiel, a Western European sales manager at U.S. chip maker Intel. Intel said it would partner with Sony to develop these home networks.
Sony, Philips and Samsung Electronics from South Korea all showed home network boxes that will transfer digital content from PCs and the Web to consumer electronics devices.
"Broadband Internet will create completely new opportunities. In Germany alone the number of broadband DSL subscribers will surpass four million this year," says Leopold Bonengl, head of Sony Germany. Some 12 percent of all European households currently h
I thought that the arguments of engineers vs. managers was ALWAYS there?
I had always thought that it was a case where an engineer wants to do and the managers decide whether or not it was feasible or not, or whether it makes any sense to do it at all!
Failure Is Always an Option
By HENRY PETROSKI
URHAM, N.C. -- Scientists seek to understand what is, the aerospace pioneer Theodore von Karman is supposed to have said, while engineers seek to create what never was. The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists the vehicle was a tool; to engineers it was their creation.
With the release of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, there is a new focus on the "culture" of NASA. Engineers have played a prominent but not a controlling role in that culture, both in the design of the shuttle and in the planning of its missions. When the report speaks of NASA's "broken safety culture," the particular failure it cites is "a consistent lack of concern" that Columbia may have been damaged by debris at takeoff. But perhaps NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable -- and healthy -- tension among scientists, managers and engineers.
A common misconception about how things such as space shuttles come to be is that engineers simply apply the theories and equations of science. But this cannot be done until the new thing-to-be is conceived in the engineer's mind's eye. Rather than following from science, engineered things lead it. The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics, and flying machines before aerodynamics. The sciences were invented to explain the accomplishments -- and to analyze their shortcomings.
The design of any device, machine or system is fraught with failure. Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail. If gases escaping from a booster rocket can lower efficiency or cause damage, then O-ring seals are added. If the friction of re-entry can melt a spacecraft, then a heat shield is devised.
Much of design is thus defensive engineering: containing, shielding and fending off anticipated problems on the drawing board and computer screen so that they cannot bring down the design when it flies. Obviously, total success can only come if every possible mode of failure is identified and defended against.
Engineering is also very much about numbers. O-rings must be sized; the thickness of heat shields specified; the weight of insulation calculated. Often, the numbers work at cross purposes, as when increasing shield material decreases available payload. Engineering design is ultimately the art of compromise.
What results from the design process is a thing that has unique characteristics. It can withstand the conditions for which it was designed as long as it maintains its integrity. There is usually some leeway allowed, for engineers know that operating conditions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Until it fails, how far beyond design conditions a system can be pushed is never fully known.
But engineers do know that nothing is perfect, including themselves. As careful and extensive as their calculations might be, engineers know that they can err -- and that things can behave differently out of the laboratory. On the space shuttles, O-rings got scorched, heat tiles fell off, foam insulation broke free. To engineers, these unexpected events were incontrovertible evidence that they did not fully understand the machine.
Engineers do not feel comfortable with things they do not understand. It is at this point that they begin to act more like scientists. In the case of the scorched O-rings, the engineers studied burn patterns. They looked for a correlation between damage and temperature, and they warned about launching when the temperature was outside the bounds of their experience and scientific study.
If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology. Successful, albeit flawed missions indicated to them not a weak but a robust machine. When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank. In the case of Columbia, engineers who worried about damage that the
Sure!
wanna post your email on slashdot in user@hot.com format? we'll start up a list this way!
Uhm.... you might really not want to do that.
So, people that don't want to be called put themselves on a list. Alternatively, others can remain off the list and still receive calls.
The telemarketing companies end up calling only those that are willing to listen. Instead of wasting time, they call someone else that will listen to them and be a possible sale.
And.... they are complaining?
Oh COME ON!
The week ending July 6 was including a three day weekend and also Independence Day. WHO stays in and actively uses the Internet when you could be up at the cottage or out celebrating the long weekend?
But can you port PocketPC 2003 to it? =P
I used to work as a tech, and one day some people came in to showcase a security system that they were trying to sell! Unfortunately, to the horror of all /. folk, it was based on a windows system. Alas, the name of the company escapes me now, but they had the computer dial up and send a text message based on the camera detecting motion.... also, a live feed was possible by dialing up (which they thought was the most secure)...