The article states in the title "Diamonds are not forever". This was true even before this new material was created. Real diamonds decade into graphite. It takes many years (millions), but diamond is not the most stable version of carbon atoms, even if it is the hardest.
I drink a lot of coffee, and my stomach doesn't like it. I always drink water a glass of water every time I drink a cup of coffee; otherwise I start to feel bad.
I lot of our daily consumptions have a good and a bad side. Just because coffee appears to have a good amount of antioxidants, it still has a lot of negative side effect. This invalidates the articles claim that coffee might be used as a health drink.
It is not logical to conclude, that just because an ingredient has some good effects its healthy to eat or drink. If you start to send the signal; drink coffee to be healthy, you miss the point. Vegetables are much healthier in regards to antioxidants. It is mentioned briefly in the article but focus is on coffee as a health drink.
This is a tricky question. Here we have two systems, with different targets and goals that collide. Much like when two cultural societys meets each other.
Google aims to provide the best possible search engine on the internet. This requires certain methods that are optimized in regard to provide the users with the content they need. This engine has not been designed to violate copyrights. Should it be held liable when it happens? It's the same as being able to make a law suit against a baseball bat manufacturer, as their bats might be used as weapons.
Perfect 10 deliver porn to its users. Most of this content is in images, and therefore the value (the product) is the images them self. This is the reason copyright laws were made. If their content is "stolen" and "sold" through other channels than their own site, they lose money.
The problem is that both arguments make reason.
It would be difficult if a company like Google should integrate a filter to lockout individual cases, like Perfect 10. In a sense such a filter would work against the Google product.
Technically the real case will probably end with discussions about caching of images on the Google servers and displaying content outside their context... time will show. The winner will probably be the company with most muscle, as it usually is, and this will unfortunately deprive us of knowing the best solution to the problem.
I'm a nerd, and I know it. For many years I have done a good carrier in the IT business, working as Senior IT Consultant to top management. My experience has told me that the skills and tasks are very different at various levels of management.
At low levels you have team management. Here you need to be technically skilled, as you manage your team directly. You have to be able to advice you team members and often coach them in various issues.
When you advance you get into middle management. Here your intersocial skills begins to out weight your technical skills. If the team size goes beyond 10 people you need to manage the team as a group, and not as individual persons. Now this requires much different abilities. It is much more important to motivate and delegate tasks in the project than being able to know technical details.
At top level management technical skills are almost irrelevant. Here the issues relate much more to strategies and directions. You don't need to understand how to do a specific task, you need to priorities business cases and calculate return of investments...
... isn't it allready infected with the virus Bill Gates?
This virus produces a very nasty havroc on you computer called Windows.
And its spreading...
This really happened... believe it or not!
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10 Computer Mishaps
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· Score: 1
I once had a friend who worked as a system administrator in a university. I think he would like to remain anonymous.
One day he checked into the one of the servers and was cleaning up a little. He logged in as root (you might already hear disaster coming). Then he made the well known "rm -r *" to delete some files. As nothing happened (this is Unix, no messages is not the same as nothing is happening) he moved on to do something else...... 15 min later, the back of his mind, told him that something was wrong. He logged into the server and checked the jobs that were running. And as you might guess, the deletion was well under progress from the root directory, smashing everything!
Several student accounts were deleted - including two that was doing some serious research.
It took him 3 months to completely restore the machine.... and he was lucky! The server was also running as a news server, so the deletion had used a lot of time chewing through tons of news. If not the disaster would have been even worse.
The article uses a lot of time to establish that this is a paradigm shift, when it's actually not. I do believe their idea is good, but basically it's just applying a lot of "possible" user identifiers and merge them together to form a unified result.
Some of the identifiers they haven't used are linkage on the site. If one page links to another, it might be the same user, if the pages are called in sequence.
On top of links "time" might be applied. Some links are expected to be clicked fast, others after some reading on the page.
Some may argue that linkage is what you want to determine in the following analysis, and can't therefore be used to determine the use in advance, but this is not true. The determination of the user uniqueness looks to see if its possible for the user to get from one page to an other, while the analysis want to determine if they did it.
The technical side of the article is too simple. It almost appear like you can just connect the power cable to the internet, and then you have everyone online. This is defiantly not the case.
When two computers connect to each other they attach themselves to a complex network of routers. It's not "One-big-line" out there. There needs to be fitted routers into the power cables in order to manage handshaking etc. by the devices connecting to the cable. If this is not done, the cable will only have a certain maximum of connections before it drowns in the noise of computers trying to call each other.
But the basic technology is not new. It has been possible for some years by now to build your own tiny network through power cables within you house. But of cause they have not been connected outside, and the signal wasn't strong enough to get far outside and into the street.
But to use power cables as backbones and "the last mile" is still very interesting for two reasons. Backbone cables are typically defined by having a good "line" from A to B. Power cables support this. The "last mile issue" might also be addressed, as the cables are there inside our houses. All you need is to add the routers, switches etc...
In regard to the backbones railways have also been mentioned. They are also (straight) lines from A to B, and often have cable wells where a high band light cable may easily be fitted.
The article provide a very good set of entries for those who wish to use (on not) open source.
I have quite a few times (I work as an IT Consultant) met clients who did use open source. I my opinion there was some base indicators when it was useful:
You'll need in-house support. For those who wish to use open source in the desktop environment, it usually requires some in-house supporters. Most employees are use to MS Windows from home and can therefore more easily engage with a windows environment. But after a learning period, it's possible to switch entirely to OS.
If anyone tries to switch their software to OS without the in-house support will often fail... but a lot of companies out there already has an in-house support team in place to help with daily routines (printers, new mousse etc...)
So a good rule is; if it's possible to "upgrade" your in-house support team to OS, you may "upgrade" the company desktop environment. (Do expect the cost of a learning period, compared to license savings).
Servers Servers are often very expensive, but the operational users are usually less than the full range of desktop users in the companies. Therefore it's often more easy to switch servers, and use OS.
It still requires some fairly good administrators, but that issue goes for commercial products as well.
As most commercial server software is fairly expensive, good savings can be made here.
But check out for various issues. The basic stuff like mySql is much easier to hack than MSSql. (I know as I have been working with security on several projects). This is often not due to the product limitations, but the lack of knowledge by the administrators and developers using these platforms.
Sadly I have often seen sites that allow for SQL-insertions. In an MSSql environment, you just dictate the use of stored procedures, and your safe...
Other stuff There are some other parameters any company needs to consider, but they are often not as general as the two above. Basically it all comes down to a simple return of investment calculation: Is the expenses in regards to OS, less than the licenses?
My own site uses OS (see link above). Why not? In my spare time I can be nerdish enough to play around, and here the OS world have it all... the only other option was to use pirate copies. So in a sense the really smart consultants and developers are forced to train and us OS. (Oh, yes I do have access to MSDN, but that's an other story).
My brother did successfully introduce computers to his kids at an early age.
When his kid was 5 he cracked his first computer... It was one day I came visiting, when my brother told me that he had just installed a new game, that I should have a look at. He was doing the dishes, so he said I could just go up to the computer and check it out, while he was finishing.
He warned me that he had made a tiny protection program, because his kid did spend too much time at the computer. The kid was about 5 at the time. But he told me that the program would be easy for me to use/get through in order to start the machine.
I went upstairs and sat down at the computer, while his kid jumped onto the bed behind me, eager to help me get started.
Kid: You need to press the round button to start the computer.
I smiled and gently pressed the power button. The computer started (old dos, before Win3.11)...
On the screen stood:
What is 9*7?
My brother had been smart enough to install a simple program that would require some mathematical skills before it would continue booting. My mind started to do the calculation, when the kid interrupted:
Press "h".
I stopped and looked at him sitting on the bed behind me. Just to see what would happen I tried to type an "h" and pressed return.
The computer wrote:
ONLY NUMERICAL INPUT ALLOWED! PROGRAM TERMINATED.
... and continued to boot. Opening up the main menu, where the games section required me to press an "h". But I didn't see that, as I was on the floor laughing.
5 years, and had already cracked the computer so he could play games...
Now my own kid is 3 years old. I think a laptop would be too heavy for him, and I fear he will hack my work computers if he starts now. I think I'll try to wait a couple of years before introducing him to the wonderful world of computing... but then again, I might not. I'm a nerd after all.
It has been known for some time that electrical currents send to the muscles may cause you to move them. In this way you may control the motion directly, not only by throwing someone off balance, but actually make each individual body part bend.
There's a (crazy?) artist who has a show, where he do this. Once he danced a synchronized dance, with an industrial robot. Other times he has benne "dancing" to the response times of the internet (lag).
Now this technology has been explored to see if people can be remotely operated. This could be used to allow people in the field to operate on a patient, remotely controlled by a doctor. Now the doctor is controlling the person in the other end in the same way. Here sensors read the electrical current in his muscles as he moves his hands.
So far the sensibility to do surgery is not possible, but major movement like moving an arm or closing a hand has been successful.
Others have already mentioned the possibility of remote sex. Here your partner can control your arms and hands in the same way as you may control his or hers...
In my beliefs I have a very short version of the relation between God and Science, especially in regards to the creation.
Let's put it like a question:
"If you should create mankind, and do it really smart. How would you do it?"
Answer:
"Snap you fingers! Make the big bang, set the fundamental laws in motion and wait a couple of billion years."
If you are God, time doesn't really matter, do it? Billions of years or some days would be the same.
In regards to the laws of energy, matter etc. everyone realize that the construction of the universe is brilliant. Today we even recognize physical laws by the way they look. If they are mathematically nice and simple, they are usually right.
But the one answer Science always fails is; What (or who) started it all? The creator is still a fully plausible explanation.
In my opinion, anyone who disregards the scientific laws, disregards the creation it self. If the laws that rules this world is brilliant, why settle for something less brilliant. Some ideas made by man. 7 days or whatever...
A lot of people believe that the bible is to be taken literal. I my opinion they could not be more wrong, for several reasons. It all comes down to the fact that the book I written by man! Some may argue that it was inspired by God (and I might even agree) but it's still a manmade text. The written language (in any form) will in my opinion always fail to explain the divine. The God I believe in is too big for letters and text. The creation he (or she?) made and the method he used to make it, is too big for any of us to fully understand, much less write down in text.
An other fundamental reason where the bible fails (still because it was written by man) is the fact that God, even if he dictated the words could not describe the fabric of space 2000 years ago. Humans simply could not understand it. We might have a better chance today (even thou some parts still eludes even the best scientists). Therefore God would describe only the parts that could be understood by man back then, and simplify the rest. Creation was simplified into a story about the 7 days. What else could God say to the poor human that should write it down? Should he start explaining about energies and matter? Even the words we use today are manmade. I bet God didn't call it a "proton" back when he made it. (Wonder what the divine word really is?)
So if God is brilliant, he made a brilliant world. Science shows us a brilliant world, the bible doesn't. The bible shows us a dictated world. A world that just is! Period! No arguing, no fanciness! But that is not the world I see. I see a world of possibilities... of brilliance. My God is a brilliant God.
This is NOT a machine to generate AMPS!
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19 million Amps
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· Score: 1
The article is about a machine that can produce a very high pressure, generated in a short amount of time. This is actually much more interesting (of cause a matter of opinion) than the ability to generate a lot of amps.
Amps without voltage don't really say anything after all. Besides it's the high level of voltages that are exciting, just think of lightning. Having a lot of amps stored in some battery or something similar is just not that exciting....
But back to the article. This machine can generate a very high pressure in a very precise way. As the article states; ... the fabrication tools used to build the hardware, and the diagnostic tools used to measure the results, making this one of the best-predicted and best-understood high-precision implosion experiments ever.
Now, that's exciting. Who don't love a good implosion? And the machine is much more than that. It's also all the measure end diagnostic tools. I guess anyone on SlashDot would like to get their hands on this nerdish kind of equipment.
I use Firefox! Why? - is the question we should answer.
If a browser is going to embrace the market (open source or not) it needs to add value to the users of the browser. If it's named IE, Firefox or something else is a secondary effect. (I know a lot of us here on SlashDot might use it just because it's cool).
Firefox has in my opinion 3 major advances: Tabbed browsing (when you tried it, you will never live without it again), better security and customization/extras abilities. You may have additional advances, but these are the ones I favor.
When I say better security, its not only a question about how many security holes there are in the browser, its also a question in regards to how many browsers are out there. To target IE is much smarter than some "minor" browser. Of cause this benefit will slowly decrease as Firefox becomes more popular.
Customization is an other issue. You may adjust IE, but the extras for Firefox are really good. I'm not even sure they can be made to IE (at least they are not easy to make). My Firefox is loaded with extensions. And the ones I use are of my own choice (you'll probably have your own favorite list). This option is not available in IE in the same degree. Some likes themes as well. I use the browser daily, so for me it's important to have a very functionally theme rather than a fancy one. (I use a very tiny one to get better space).
When I first installed Firefox I went to my own website (www.rednebula.com), and was disappointed as the layout collapsed... but as I checked the html, I realized that it often was due to errors in my html code that IE simply ignored. Now my website has been tuned to both Firefox and IE, giving better and nicer html... a nice secondary effect.
I cant find the quote: 'I think there's a lot of hope for Linux, although I don't think that Linux is the answer. I think that UNIX is the answer, in some form or fashion. It might be BSD, it might be Linux, it might be some third thing. But UNIX is such a well understood and smart to handle the issues that an operating system has to handle that it ultimately will prevail.'... in the article?!?
It has spawned a discussion, but the linked article is much more about Open Source, than UNIX. Try search for 'hope for Linux'. Am I the only one who try to read the article before posting?
Quote: "It is important to note that the information Mr. Lynn presented was not a disclosure of a new vulnerability or a flaw with Cisco IOS software. Mr. Lynn's research explores possible ways to expand exploitations of existing security vulnerabilities impacting routers."
Quote: "... Mr. Lynn a platform to publicly disseminate the information he illegally obtained."
If his research regards known and exsisting vulnerabilities how could they be illegal obtained? This can only happen if Cisco sits on the vulnerabilities for some time. If this is the case its a poor excuse by Cisco to state that its not a new vulnerability.
In my humble opinion its new when first made public.... and I can never find out why pople can get sued for disclosure of something dangerous to a lot of costumers.
If I use their routers I would like to know if they can be hacked. If they can get hacked I would like the oppotunity to take them offline if I need to protect my business.
If I don't have that oppotunity - and I loose data/values/etc due to an attack, I'll have to keep Cisco responsible.
I think one of the most importent aspects of the table is to provide an overview of how the atoms align to eachother.
The table is not a lookup table for atom details of data. There are so many details (protons, weight, melting point, etc...) in regard to each atom, that no table can really display them proberly.
If you are a chemist you will know most of this by heart, so the table is best for teaching the concepts. To provide an overview.
In my opinion the new table do solve some of the issues the old table had. Especially now that it is round, that allows the end collums to meet.
You could almost say; look at the table and tell me how the atom "behvior groups" are like. Now look at the new table, and answer the same question.
In both cases you still need to learn about the "behvior groups"...
In a sense you are right, but there is a more obvious case. When the lander seperated from the command module during landing, they both filmed the other ship. Here it is not even on the ground but in mid space fligt.
You might have a point, but in regards to work youre not right.
We have a lot of work going on in space. Just think about fixing satelites. There are also some experiments that need to be done i space, and require "workers" up there. In time we will start to have real factories up there. Some materials require zero-g to be produced (crystals etc.).
All these tasks will require us to be up there for "work" and are not secondary effects.
But otherwise you might be right to say item no. 3 overall is more importaint than the rest.
I use to play a game with some friend a long time ago. Basically it was about the concept of communicating with aliens. You create two teams. (And keep one or two persons as referee). Now one team had to come up with the concept of an alien race. They would line up their basic way of living and their primary way of communication. The other team should compose a message and a way of sending it to the other team. The referees would then listen to the two parties and deciding how the communication would work (or not).
This little game is a good way to explore the issues faced by communicating into space. Sometimes the races would be underwater sea squid-type of monsters the communicated with sound waves. Other times they used tactile or chemical communication. The last is an obvious way of communicating, as most parts of our body uses this way of communication internally.
Sometimes we would put some special requirements, like the race should have long range communication abilities or should be able to do space travel. The last requirement forced the race team to explain why and how the race would pursue the space quest.
We always faced the core issue of how to transmit the message. It is obvious to uses certain radio frequencies. (There are some wavelengths that are fairly silent in our universe, that would be obvious to use. But check out some of our attempt to locate alien, like SETI for further references of these).
To get their attention it would be obvious to send something out of the ordinary. We have looked fore some time into space now, and have a fairly good idea of how things should look. Now anyone interested would pickup anything that would not be familiar. They would then try to determine if it was intelligent (us?) or some new phenomenon. Sending primes would be good. But anything will really work.
Then the issue as stated in this Slashdot bullet comes next. How to encode the message. Out group quickly found some common issues. If the race communicated with light (sight) they should fairly easy be able to decode an image. Send some basic images, square, circle etc. to define how you have encoded you image. Any intelligent species (and anyone listing to space would probably be), would fairly quickly be able to decode the image. Any race not using sight would probably never decode an image! The same goes for basically all the other weird kinds of communication we came up with. Sound (ears) indicated waves...ect. Basically the message should hold several (identical) encodings of the same message.
But other issues arose in our discussions. Would it be communication? The answer is no. It would be a one-way message. To do communication would be stupid. Wait 50, 100 or more years to answer? So any kind of "How is the weather over there?". "Do you have a cure for cancer?" (Laugh) - would be really foolish. The message should be a one-way (but might be a long one).
But what should we send. The most obvious (if images would be used) would be sending an image of a man and woman. (Where did I hear that before). But to any alien this would be completely without any kind of content. What would these two shapes be? The outline of a gas could in space to guide the way. (No they would not like to travel so far). They might be able to guess... this is how the aliens (us) looks like. Many images with this familiar shape. A good guess. But they would never know. Let's say there was images of cars. (I think we have a lot of that kind of images if we send thousands of images to the in order to tell about us. This familiar shape from before? Is it born from this other shape that we sometimes see it inside. Or do the biggie eat the four-pointy thing with the knob? See?
Try to pick 10-15 images and try to guess what it is if you were an alien? No this was the second part of our two team's effort. How did they interpret the message from the human team? It's a quite funny game, but also quite serious for those who wish to communicate with aliens.
I have worked on several projects. The task you perform is really relevant in regards to the hours you can spend.
If I'm tired I can't do complex coding. This includes trying to grasp or plan some of the system design. This also includes seting up database layout etc...
The same effect comes from beer. On some of my workplaces we typically drink a beer before the week-end. One beer - and its the end of programming! I'm not even drunk, but complex coding is goodbye.
When I'm even more tired, I should stop programming, while debugging may still be possible. Debugging is often posible to do without to much thinking, as its mostly tracking down the errors.
My personal limit is around the 45+ hours, then I'll start to do buggy stuff after 3-4 weeks. So it really don't pay off spending more time than that.
When you know you limits you can benefit from planning you time. Morning is good for programming and system design (of cause after the first cup of coffee - before that is night...). Aftenoon can be used for raw programming, and evenings for debugging.
An other importaint thing is motivation. On my own personal projects (I'm working on a 3D FlightSim - see www.dragonslayer.dk) I can perform much more. Typically taking out several days in a row... with just the nessecary sleep. But even there I'll need sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
The article states in the title "Diamonds are not forever". This was true even before this new material was created. Real diamonds decade into graphite. It takes many years (millions), but diamond is not the most stable version of carbon atoms, even if it is the hardest.
I drink a lot of coffee, and my stomach doesn't like it. I always drink water a glass of water every time I drink a cup of coffee; otherwise I start to feel bad.
I lot of our daily consumptions have a good and a bad side. Just because coffee appears to have a good amount of antioxidants, it still has a lot of negative side effect. This invalidates the articles claim that coffee might be used as a health drink.
It is not logical to conclude, that just because an ingredient has some good effects its healthy to eat or drink. If you start to send the signal; drink coffee to be healthy, you miss the point. Vegetables are much healthier in regards to antioxidants. It is mentioned briefly in the article but focus is on coffee as a health drink.
This is a tricky question. Here we have two systems, with different targets and goals that collide. Much like when two cultural societys meets each other.
Google aims to provide the best possible search engine on the internet. This requires certain methods that are optimized in regard to provide the users with the content they need. This engine has not been designed to violate copyrights. Should it be held liable when it happens? It's the same as being able to make a law suit against a baseball bat manufacturer, as their bats might be used as weapons.
Perfect 10 deliver porn to its users. Most of this content is in images, and therefore the value (the product) is the images them self. This is the reason copyright laws were made. If their content is "stolen" and "sold" through other channels than their own site, they lose money.
The problem is that both arguments make reason.
It would be difficult if a company like Google should integrate a filter to lockout individual cases, like Perfect 10. In a sense such a filter would work against the Google product.
Technically the real case will probably end with discussions about caching of images on the Google servers and displaying content outside their context... time will show. The winner will probably be the company with most muscle, as it usually is, and this will unfortunately deprive us of knowing the best solution to the problem.
I'm a nerd, and I know it. For many years I have done a good carrier in the IT business, working as Senior IT Consultant to top management. My experience has told me that the skills and tasks are very different at various levels of management.
At low levels you have team management. Here you need to be technically skilled, as you manage your team directly. You have to be able to advice you team members and often coach them in various issues.
When you advance you get into middle management. Here your intersocial skills begins to out weight your technical skills. If the team size goes beyond 10 people you need to manage the team as a group, and not as individual persons. Now this requires much different abilities. It is much more important to motivate and delegate tasks in the project than being able to know technical details.
At top level management technical skills are almost irrelevant. Here the issues relate much more to strategies and directions. You don't need to understand how to do a specific task, you need to priorities business cases and calculate return of investments...
... isn't it allready infected with the virus Bill Gates?
This virus produces a very nasty havroc on you computer called Windows.
And its spreading...
I once had a friend who worked as a system administrator in a university. I think he would like to remain anonymous.
... 15 min later, the back of his mind, told him that something was wrong. He logged into the server and checked the jobs that were running. And as you might guess, the deletion was well under progress from the root directory, smashing everything!
... and he was lucky! The server was also running as a news server, so the deletion had used a lot of time chewing through tons of news. If not the disaster would have been even worse.
One day he checked into the one of the servers and was cleaning up a little. He logged in as root (you might already hear disaster coming). Then he made the well known "rm -r *" to delete some files. As nothing happened (this is Unix, no messages is not the same as nothing is happening) he moved on to do something else...
Several student accounts were deleted - including two that was doing some serious research.
It took him 3 months to completely restore the machine.
Oh, and backup? Just guess...
The article uses a lot of time to establish that this is a paradigm shift, when it's actually not. I do believe their idea is good, but basically it's just applying a lot of "possible" user identifiers and merge them together to form a unified result.
Some of the identifiers they haven't used are linkage on the site. If one page links to another, it might be the same user, if the pages are called in sequence.
On top of links "time" might be applied. Some links are expected to be clicked fast, others after some reading on the page.
Some may argue that linkage is what you want to determine in the following analysis, and can't therefore be used to determine the use in advance, but this is not true. The determination of the user uniqueness looks to see if its possible for the user to get from one page to an other, while the analysis want to determine if they did it.
The technical side of the article is too simple. It almost appear like you can just connect the power cable to the internet, and then you have everyone online. This is defiantly not the case.
When two computers connect to each other they attach themselves to a complex network of routers. It's not "One-big-line" out there. There needs to be fitted routers into the power cables in order to manage handshaking etc. by the devices connecting to the cable. If this is not done, the cable will only have a certain maximum of connections before it drowns in the noise of computers trying to call each other.
But the basic technology is not new. It has been possible for some years by now to build your own tiny network through power cables within you house. But of cause they have not been connected outside, and the signal wasn't strong enough to get far outside and into the street.
But to use power cables as backbones and "the last mile" is still very interesting for two reasons. Backbone cables are typically defined by having a good "line" from A to B. Power cables support this. The "last mile issue" might also be addressed, as the cables are there inside our houses. All you need is to add the routers, switches etc...
In regard to the backbones railways have also been mentioned. They are also (straight) lines from A to B, and often have cable wells where a high band light cable may easily be fitted.
They expect to launch Thursday morning.
But its better to wait one dya, than loosing a big rocket, just to stay on shedule. Better be safe, than sorry.
The article provide a very good set of entries for those who wish to use (on not) open source.
I have quite a few times (I work as an IT Consultant) met clients who did use open source. I my opinion there was some base indicators when it was useful:
You'll need in-house support.
For those who wish to use open source in the desktop environment, it usually requires some in-house supporters. Most employees are use to MS Windows from home and can therefore more easily engage with a windows environment. But after a learning period, it's possible to switch entirely to OS.
If anyone tries to switch their software to OS without the in-house support will often fail... but a lot of companies out there already has an in-house support team in place to help with daily routines (printers, new mousse etc...)
So a good rule is; if it's possible to "upgrade" your in-house support team to OS, you may "upgrade" the company desktop environment. (Do expect the cost of a learning period, compared to license savings).
Servers
Servers are often very expensive, but the operational users are usually less than the full range of desktop users in the companies. Therefore it's often more easy to switch servers, and use OS.
It still requires some fairly good administrators, but that issue goes for commercial products as well.
As most commercial server software is fairly expensive, good savings can be made here.
But check out for various issues. The basic stuff like mySql is much easier to hack than MSSql. (I know as I have been working with security on several projects). This is often not due to the product limitations, but the lack of knowledge by the administrators and developers using these platforms.
Sadly I have often seen sites that allow for SQL-insertions. In an MSSql environment, you just dictate the use of stored procedures, and your safe...
Other stuff
There are some other parameters any company needs to consider, but they are often not as general as the two above. Basically it all comes down to a simple return of investment calculation: Is the expenses in regards to OS, less than the licenses?
My own site uses OS (see link above). Why not? In my spare time I can be nerdish enough to play around, and here the OS world have it all... the only other option was to use pirate copies. So in a sense the really smart consultants and developers are forced to train and us OS. (Oh, yes I do have access to MSDN, but that's an other story).
My brother did successfully introduce computers to his kids at an early age.
... and continued to boot. Opening up the main menu, where the games section required me to press an "h". But I didn't see that, as I was on the floor laughing.
When his kid was 5 he cracked his first computer... It was one day I came visiting, when my brother told me that he had just installed a new game, that I should have a look at. He was doing the dishes, so he said I could just go up to the computer and check it out, while he was finishing.
He warned me that he had made a tiny protection program, because his kid did spend too much time at the computer. The kid was about 5 at the time. But he told me that the program would be easy for me to use/get through in order to start the machine.
I went upstairs and sat down at the computer, while his kid jumped onto the bed behind me, eager to help me get started.
Kid: You need to press the round button to start the computer.
I smiled and gently pressed the power button. The computer started (old dos, before Win3.11)...
On the screen stood:
What is 9*7?
My brother had been smart enough to install a simple program that would require some mathematical skills before it would continue booting. My mind started to do the calculation, when the kid interrupted:
Press "h".
I stopped and looked at him sitting on the bed behind me. Just to see what would happen I tried to type an "h" and pressed return.
The computer wrote:
ONLY NUMERICAL INPUT ALLOWED!
PROGRAM TERMINATED.
5 years, and had already cracked the computer so he could play games...
Now my own kid is 3 years old. I think a laptop would be too heavy for him, and I fear he will hack my work computers if he starts now. I think I'll try to wait a couple of years before introducing him to the wonderful world of computing... but then again, I might not. I'm a nerd after all.
It has been known for some time that electrical currents send to the muscles may cause you to move them. In this way you may control the motion directly, not only by throwing someone off balance, but actually make each individual body part bend.
There's a (crazy?) artist who has a show, where he do this. Once he danced a synchronized dance, with an industrial robot. Other times he has benne "dancing" to the response times of the internet (lag).
Now this technology has been explored to see if people can be remotely operated. This could be used to allow people in the field to operate on a patient, remotely controlled by a doctor. Now the doctor is controlling the person in the other end in the same way. Here sensors read the electrical current in his muscles as he moves his hands.
So far the sensibility to do surgery is not possible, but major movement like moving an arm or closing a hand has been successful.
Others have already mentioned the possibility of remote sex. Here your partner can control your arms and hands in the same way as you may control his or hers...
In my beliefs I have a very short version of the relation between God and Science, especially in regards to the creation.
Let's put it like a question:
"If you should create mankind, and do it really smart. How would you do it?"
Answer:
"Snap you fingers! Make the big bang, set the fundamental laws in motion and wait a couple of billion years."
If you are God, time doesn't really matter, do it? Billions of years or some days would be the same.
In regards to the laws of energy, matter etc. everyone realize that the construction of the universe is brilliant. Today we even recognize physical laws by the way they look. If they are mathematically nice and simple, they are usually right.
But the one answer Science always fails is; What (or who) started it all? The creator is still a fully plausible explanation.
In my opinion, anyone who disregards the scientific laws, disregards the creation it self. If the laws that rules this world is brilliant, why settle for something less brilliant. Some ideas made by man. 7 days or whatever...
A lot of people believe that the bible is to be taken literal. I my opinion they could not be more wrong, for several reasons. It all comes down to the fact that the book I written by man! Some may argue that it was inspired by God (and I might even agree) but it's still a manmade text. The written language (in any form) will in my opinion always fail to explain the divine. The God I believe in is too big for letters and text. The creation he (or she?) made and the method he used to make it, is too big for any of us to fully understand, much less write down in text.
An other fundamental reason where the bible fails (still because it was written by man) is the fact that God, even if he dictated the words could not describe the fabric of space 2000 years ago. Humans simply could not understand it. We might have a better chance today (even thou some parts still eludes even the best scientists). Therefore God would describe only the parts that could be understood by man back then, and simplify the rest. Creation was simplified into a story about the 7 days. What else could God say to the poor human that should write it down? Should he start explaining about energies and matter? Even the words we use today are manmade. I bet God didn't call it a "proton" back when he made it. (Wonder what the divine word really is?)
So if God is brilliant, he made a brilliant world. Science shows us a brilliant world, the bible doesn't. The bible shows us a dictated world. A world that just is! Period! No arguing, no fanciness! But that is not the world I see. I see a world of possibilities... of brilliance. My God is a brilliant God.
The article is about a machine that can produce a very high pressure, generated in a short amount of time. This is actually much more interesting (of cause a matter of opinion) than the ability to generate a lot of amps.
... the fabrication tools used to build the hardware, and the diagnostic tools used to measure the results, making this one of the best-predicted and best-understood high-precision implosion experiments ever.
Amps without voltage don't really say anything after all. Besides it's the high level of voltages that are exciting, just think of lightning. Having a lot of amps stored in some battery or something similar is just not that exciting....
But back to the article. This machine can generate a very high pressure in a very precise way. As the article states;
Now, that's exciting. Who don't love a good implosion? And the machine is much more than that. It's also all the measure end diagnostic tools. I guess anyone on SlashDot would like to get their hands on this nerdish kind of equipment.
The article is vague, but it don't state the same as the editor on SlashDot...
During the few millionths of a second that it operates. Atlas generates electrical energy roughtly four times the Earth's entire energy production.
It doesn't say if it the Earth (magnetic field etc.) or the human energy production....
The statement is just after describing the Earth atmosphere pressure etc. so it could be related to earth it self.
And as the quote above states, it doesn't indicate that the energy production is measured in amps.
I use Firefox! Why? - is the question we should answer.
If a browser is going to embrace the market (open source or not) it needs to add value to the users of the browser. If it's named IE, Firefox or something else is a secondary effect. (I know a lot of us here on SlashDot might use it just because it's cool).
Firefox has in my opinion 3 major advances: Tabbed browsing (when you tried it, you will never live without it again), better security and customization/extras abilities. You may have additional advances, but these are the ones I favor.
When I say better security, its not only a question about how many security holes there are in the browser, its also a question in regards to how many browsers are out there. To target IE is much smarter than some "minor" browser. Of cause this benefit will slowly decrease as Firefox becomes more popular.
Customization is an other issue. You may adjust IE, but the extras for Firefox are really good. I'm not even sure they can be made to IE (at least they are not easy to make). My Firefox is loaded with extensions. And the ones I use are of my own choice (you'll probably have your own favorite list). This option is not available in IE in the same degree. Some likes themes as well. I use the browser daily, so for me it's important to have a very functionally theme rather than a fancy one. (I use a very tiny one to get better space).
When I first installed Firefox I went to my own website (www.rednebula.com), and was disappointed as the layout collapsed... but as I checked the html, I realized that it often was due to errors in my html code that IE simply ignored. Now my website has been tuned to both Firefox and IE, giving better and nicer html... a nice secondary effect.
Thanks.
It was not easy to see the layout...
Is it just me?
... in the article?!?
I cant find the quote: 'I think there's a lot of hope for Linux, although I don't think that Linux is the answer. I think that UNIX is the answer, in some form or fashion. It might be BSD, it might be Linux, it might be some third thing. But UNIX is such a well understood and smart to handle the issues that an operating system has to handle that it ultimately will prevail.'
It has spawned a discussion, but the linked article is much more about Open Source, than UNIX. Try search for 'hope for Linux'. Am I the only one who try to read the article before posting?
Contradiction?
... and I can never find out why pople can get sued for disclosure of something dangerous to a lot of costumers.
Quote: "It is important to note that the information Mr. Lynn presented was not a disclosure of a new vulnerability or a flaw with Cisco IOS software. Mr. Lynn's research explores possible ways to expand exploitations of existing security vulnerabilities impacting routers."
Quote: "... Mr. Lynn a platform to publicly disseminate the information he illegally obtained."
If his research regards known and exsisting vulnerabilities how could they be illegal obtained? This can only happen if Cisco sits on the vulnerabilities for some time. If this is the case its a poor excuse by Cisco to state that its not a new vulnerability.
In my humble opinion its new when first made public.
If I use their routers I would like to know if they can be hacked. If they can get hacked I would like the oppotunity to take them offline if I need to protect my business.
If I don't have that oppotunity - and I loose data/values/etc due to an attack, I'll have to keep Cisco responsible.
I think one of the most importent aspects of the table is to provide an overview of how the atoms align to eachother.
The table is not a lookup table for atom details of data. There are so many details (protons, weight, melting point, etc...) in regard to each atom, that no table can really display them proberly.
If you are a chemist you will know most of this by heart, so the table is best for teaching the concepts. To provide an overview.
In my opinion the new table do solve some of the issues the old table had. Especially now that it is round, that allows the end collums to meet.
You could almost say; look at the table and tell me how the atom "behvior groups" are like. Now look at the new table, and answer the same question.
In both cases you still need to learn about the "behvior groups"...
Well... it just blew away, I guess...
In a sense you are right, but there is a more obvious case. When the lander seperated from the command module during landing, they both filmed the other ship. Here it is not even on the ground but in mid space fligt.
You might have a point, but in regards to work youre not right.
We have a lot of work going on in space. Just think about fixing satelites. There are also some experiments that need to be done i space, and require "workers" up there. In time we will start to have real factories up there. Some materials require zero-g to be produced (crystals etc.).
All these tasks will require us to be up there for "work" and are not secondary effects.
But otherwise you might be right to say item no. 3 overall is more importaint than the rest.
Communicating with aliens.
I use to play a game with some friend a long time ago. Basically it was about the concept of communicating with aliens. You create two teams. (And keep one or two persons as referee). Now one team had to come up with the concept of an alien race. They would line up their basic way of living and their primary way of communication. The other team should compose a message and a way of sending it to the other team. The referees would then listen to the two parties and deciding how the communication would work (or not).
This little game is a good way to explore the issues faced by communicating into space. Sometimes the races would be underwater sea squid-type of monsters the communicated with sound waves. Other times they used tactile or chemical communication. The last is an obvious way of communicating, as most parts of our body uses this way of communication internally.
Sometimes we would put some special requirements, like the race should have long range communication abilities or should be able to do space travel. The last requirement forced the race team to explain why and how the race would pursue the space quest.
We always faced the core issue of how to transmit the message. It is obvious to uses certain radio frequencies. (There are some wavelengths that are fairly silent in our universe, that would be obvious to use. But check out some of our attempt to locate alien, like SETI for further references of these).
To get their attention it would be obvious to send something out of the ordinary. We have looked fore some time into space now, and have a fairly good idea of how things should look. Now anyone interested would pickup anything that would not be familiar. They would then try to determine if it was intelligent (us?) or some new phenomenon. Sending primes would be good. But anything will really work.
Then the issue as stated in this Slashdot bullet comes next. How to encode the message. Out group quickly found some common issues. If the race communicated with light (sight) they should fairly easy be able to decode an image. Send some basic images, square, circle etc. to define how you have encoded you image. Any intelligent species (and anyone listing to space would probably be), would fairly quickly be able to decode the image. Any race not using sight would probably never decode an image! The same goes for basically all the other weird kinds of communication we came up with. Sound (ears) indicated waves...ect. Basically the message should hold several (identical) encodings of the same message.
But other issues arose in our discussions. Would it be communication? The answer is no. It would be a one-way message. To do communication would be stupid. Wait 50, 100 or more years to answer? So any kind of "How is the weather over there?". "Do you have a cure for cancer?" (Laugh) - would be really foolish. The message should be a one-way (but might be a long one).
But what should we send. The most obvious (if images would be used) would be sending an image of a man and woman. (Where did I hear that before). But to any alien this would be completely without any kind of content. What would these two shapes be? The outline of a gas could in space to guide the way. (No they would not like to travel so far). They might be able to guess... this is how the aliens (us) looks like. Many images with this familiar shape. A good guess. But they would never know. Let's say there was images of cars. (I think we have a lot of that kind of images if we send thousands of images to the in order to tell about us. This familiar shape from before? Is it born from this other shape that we sometimes see it inside. Or do the biggie eat the four-pointy thing with the knob? See?
Try to pick 10-15 images and try to guess what it is if you were an alien? No this was the second part of our two team's effort. How did they interpret the message from the human team? It's a quite funny game, but also quite serious for those who wish to communicate with aliens.
I have worked on several projects. The task you perform is really relevant in regards to the hours you can spend.
If I'm tired I can't do complex coding. This includes trying to grasp or plan some of the system design. This also includes seting up database layout etc...
The same effect comes from beer. On some of my workplaces we typically drink a beer before the week-end. One beer - and its the end of programming! I'm not even drunk, but complex coding is goodbye.
When I'm even more tired, I should stop programming, while debugging may still be possible. Debugging is often posible to do without to much thinking, as its mostly tracking down the errors.
My personal limit is around the 45+ hours, then I'll start to do buggy stuff after 3-4 weeks. So it really don't pay off spending more time than that.
When you know you limits you can benefit from planning you time. Morning is good for programming and system design (of cause after the first cup of coffee - before that is night...). Aftenoon can be used for raw programming, and evenings for debugging.
An other importaint thing is motivation. On my own personal projects (I'm working on a 3D FlightSim - see www.dragonslayer.dk) I can perform much more. Typically taking out several days in a row... with just the nessecary sleep. But even there I'll need sleep.