And you believed him? Hahahahaaaaa! Sorry... Seriously though, I haven't found a DVD yet (admittedly, I only have ~10) with a warning that I could fast forward through. Might be the software playing it, but what's the difference to the user?
I guess Theo really can piss further than anybody else in a pissing match.
I agree, and I think it's cool. Theo really puts his money where his mouth is. Say what you like about his social "skills," at least you know where he stands, and that he's certainly willing to follow through with what he believes in. Good guy to have on our side.:-)
I'm not sure why this is news though. It's a new OS. It'll take some time for support to get used to it, and figure out what problems people are having. It's not like they're denying its existence and will never support it.
Astronomers Celebrate Reliable Measure of Dark Matter
By Heather Sparks
Scientists are closer than ever to balancing the checkbook of cosmic matter. This is because two recent independent measurements of normal matter in the universe are in agreement. The results further strengthen the case for the Big Bang theory and for the nature of the universe as astronomers understand it today.
The universe contains normal atomic matter, what makes you, your dog, the stars, and everything in between. Normal matter is what Carl Sagan was talking about when he said we are all star-stuff.
But in addition to star-stuff, there is invisible dark matter that is known only because the universe is denser than normal matter alone, as evidenced by how structures, like clusters of galaxies, are bound together by gravity. Even individual galaxies don't have enough normal matter in them -- that which can be directly detected -- to keep them from simply flying apart.
Now, through different measurements of conditions existing at the very start of time, astronomers are beginning to see the light.
"There is more than one way of measuring the total amount of matter in the universe," said astronomer Brian Fields from the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "And if you have an idea of how much normal stuff there is to all the universe, then you know how much other stuff there is, too."
Creation of normal matter
All the "normal stuff" is thought to have been made in two steps, one occurring when the universe was roughly three minutes old, and the other some 300,000 years later.
According to the leading theory, an enormous nuclear explosion called the Big Bang happened 13 billion to 15 billion years ago. From it, the universe appeared in an instant, but as a billion-degree mess of neutrons, protons and electrons. The explosion was so energetic that nothing could come together close enough, for long enough, to form atoms. But the universe expanded and cooled so rapidly that within three minutes protons and neutrons bonded in twos and fours, and formed all the atomic nuclei in the universe. This Big Bang Nucleosynthesis determined how much normal matter would ever exist.
Just how much matter that was can be estimated from observing the most recently formed stars and galaxies, because they are fueled by the hydrogen atoms formed from those original nuclei of twos.
Fields explained that young stars, like our Sun, are just now fusing that original hydrogen into helium whereas older stars fuse helium into oxygen and iron. Because the hydrogen fuel has not been converted, scientists are able to measure the proportion of original normal matter to dark matter.
"Stars change the amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe," he said, "and we want to know what the Big Bang did. So we have to find places where pollution from stars is minimal" to estimate the original amounts of normal and dark matter.
But before any stars could form, hydrogen atoms had to exist. This took 300,000 years after the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis the universe had to cool down enough so that electrons could bind with the nuclei.
Once this happened, there was a curious side effect: the creation of light in the Universe. Unbound electrons scattered the UV radiation from the Big Bang, but once the electrons were bound, the radiation was allowed uniform movement, thus, light was finally released in the young cosmos.
This light has existed since then, travelling along the edge of the universe, stretching and weakening into a still measurable microwave radiation, called the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB as astronomers call it.
Weak attraction
At the time of the original release of light, dark matter had congregated in clumps, which created small fields of gravity that eventually pulled in normal matter as well. Images of the CMB are therefore mostly smooth, but have spots, or wiggles, of slight variation, a result of the dark and normal matter pooling together.
"The nature of these 'wiggles' is basically saying how the normal matter was responding to that crazy dark matter," explained Fields, "by amplifying the places where the extra density was."
The CMB, most recently measured by highly sensitive probes in Antarctica, therefore gives a detailed measure of the proportion of normal to dark matter.
Phenomenally, both the measurements of young galaxies and of the cosmic microwave background showed that normal matter makes up just one-tenth of the universe. The rest must be dark matter, researchers say. Fields, who wrote about this astronomical agreement in the Oct. 19 issue of the journal Science, explained why this is causing astronomers to "bring out the bubbly."
"It didn't have to be true," Fields explained, "because they're completely independent things. It's just gorgeous that they agree with each other."
Earlier studies had showed that dark matter made up anywhere from 85 to 95 percent of the universe. Only now do the two different measures of dark matter agree. Now, 90 percent of everything is known to be virtually nothing.
Same thing happened to me on an Athlon 550. I was working on something, and the screen went black. The system rebooted, but didn't come up. I pulled the plug when I smelled burning.:) Melted the power supply and motherboard (Biostar M7Ksomething). Processor's fine, but it's a Slot-A, which is lame to buy a new mobo for. Ah well. Picked up a K7V which runs about 4 degrees cooler anyway.
Well hopefully you wouldn't scratch the whole disc at once. Instant grey hair. But hey, that's what backups are for, right? Assuming it's legal to make a backup copy of your own pictures by the time this technology's out, anyway...
Do you NEED access to the registry? Do you install that much different stuff on a daily basis? I see limiting install access as a good thing for most employees, but not necessarily developers.
I worked at a place that replaced 400 systems with WinNT from Win95, and you wouldn't believe the crap people had installed, which they expected us to put back on and support when it didn't work.
Keep in mind why a company would want to restrict write access though-
1) they don't want to get sued (pr0n, warez, etc.), and they ARE liable for what people have on their drives, and
2) users have a nasty habit of installing crap that "oh, my friend sent me this email and..." and then they boot into a BSOD every time.
That's a pain in the ass to support. If you can alleviate those fears (and as a developer, you probably know what you're doing), you'd have a better shot at not getting restricted.
[T]he Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said negotiators have placed safeguards on the legislation, like a four-year expiration date on the wiretapping and electronic surveillance portion, court permission before snooping into suspects' formerly private educational records and court oversight over the FBI's use of a powerful e-mail wiretap system.
So it comes down to a matter of priorities: do you want users who are satisfied with their experience but difficult to support or users who feel that their environment is unusable and who hate your guts.
No real answers, but what about the users who are NOT satisfied with their experience and are difficult to support? It's nice to get 4 coffee breaks a day when the server's down, but I tend to think people would actually rather WORK. Unix is scary though, there's no getting around it. People are willing to put up with constant crashes just because it's the only thing they know, and "it's too late to change now."
According to Microsoft's numbers our manufacturing company can expect 13 desktop failures each day and one significant server failure every 15 days. The more realistic Bugtoaster number equals about 161 desktop application crashes per day.
I don't know how you could even pause before making that decision, given numbers like that.
Microsoft and other companies of the world will continue to spend millions of man-hours and billions of dollars to produce products that will make the world a more prosperous place.
Dear Microsoft: while we're all very impressed with how much money and time you spend working on improving a flawed product, and making our lives better AT THE SAME TIME, you're doing a piss-poor job of it. The more you claim to spend on fixing stuff, the stupider you look. Where are the results?
As long as the spirit of innovation is preserved and destructive viruses are recognized as industrial terrorism, Microsoft will continue to provide revolutionary ideas.
So if they're NOT recognized as industrial terrorism, will Microsoft promise to stop "revolutionizing" the computer industry? Please?
Re:emacs history, direction ?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 1
That'll teach you to ask questions around here, ya damn troll!:-)
What is next using apache to brew my morning coffee (well there is the coffee pot cam - anyone know what webserver it ran on) write my website for me, solve world hunger ???
Home phone service worth ~$20 a month.
Long distance worth ~$20 a month. (Currently free with many cell-phone plans)
Broadband access worth ~$40 a month.
Talking to your girlfriend in Albuquerque AT THE SAME TIME as downloading hardcore pr0n at 8Mbps: Priceless.
Slashdot Mirror
And you believed him? Hahahahaaaaa! Sorry... Seriously though, I haven't found a DVD yet (admittedly, I only have ~10) with a warning that I could fast forward through. Might be the software playing it, but what's the difference to the user?
I guess Theo really can piss further than anybody else in a pissing match.
:-)
I agree, and I think it's cool. Theo really puts his money where his mouth is. Say what you like about his social "skills," at least you know where he stands, and that he's certainly willing to follow through with what he believes in. Good guy to have on our side.
I'm not sure why this is news though. It's a new OS. It'll take some time for support to get used to it, and figure out what problems people are having. It's not like they're denying its existence and will never support it.
Astronomers Celebrate Reliable Measure of Dark Matter
By Heather Sparks
Scientists are closer than ever to balancing the checkbook of cosmic matter. This is because two recent independent measurements of normal matter in the universe are in agreement. The results further strengthen the case for the Big Bang theory and for the nature of the universe as astronomers understand it today.
The universe contains normal atomic matter, what makes you, your dog, the stars, and everything in between. Normal matter is what Carl Sagan was talking about when he said we are all star-stuff.
But in addition to star-stuff, there is invisible dark matter that is known only because the universe is denser than normal matter alone, as evidenced by how structures, like clusters of galaxies, are bound together by gravity. Even individual galaxies don't have enough normal matter in them -- that which can be directly detected -- to keep them from simply flying apart.
Now, through different measurements of conditions existing at the very start of time, astronomers are beginning to see the light.
"There is more than one way of measuring the total amount of matter in the universe," said astronomer Brian Fields from the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "And if you have an idea of how much normal stuff there is to all the universe, then you know how much other stuff there is, too."
Creation of normal matter
All the "normal stuff" is thought to have been made in two steps, one occurring when the universe was roughly three minutes old, and the other some 300,000 years later.
According to the leading theory, an enormous nuclear explosion called the Big Bang happened 13 billion to 15 billion years ago. From it, the universe appeared in an instant, but as a billion-degree mess of neutrons, protons and electrons. The explosion was so energetic that nothing could come together close enough, for long enough, to form atoms. But the universe expanded and cooled so rapidly that within three minutes protons and neutrons bonded in twos and fours, and formed all the atomic nuclei in the universe. This Big Bang Nucleosynthesis determined how much normal matter would ever exist.
Just how much matter that was can be estimated from observing the most recently formed stars and galaxies, because they are fueled by the hydrogen atoms formed from those original nuclei of twos.
Fields explained that young stars, like our Sun, are just now fusing that original hydrogen into helium whereas older stars fuse helium into oxygen and iron. Because the hydrogen fuel has not been converted, scientists are able to measure the proportion of original normal matter to dark matter.
"Stars change the amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe," he said, "and we want to know what the Big Bang did. So we have to find places where pollution from stars is minimal" to estimate the original amounts of normal and dark matter.
But before any stars could form, hydrogen atoms had to exist. This took 300,000 years after the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis the universe had to cool down enough so that electrons could bind with the nuclei.
Once this happened, there was a curious side effect: the creation of light in the Universe. Unbound electrons scattered the UV radiation from the Big Bang, but once the electrons were bound, the radiation was allowed uniform movement, thus, light was finally released in the young cosmos.
This light has existed since then, travelling along the edge of the universe, stretching and weakening into a still measurable microwave radiation, called the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB as astronomers call it.
Weak attraction
At the time of the original release of light, dark matter had congregated in clumps, which created small fields of gravity that eventually pulled in normal matter as well. Images of the CMB are therefore mostly smooth, but have spots, or wiggles, of slight variation, a result of the dark and normal matter pooling together.
"The nature of these 'wiggles' is basically saying how the normal matter was responding to that crazy dark matter," explained Fields, "by amplifying the places where the extra density was."
The CMB, most recently measured by highly sensitive probes in Antarctica, therefore gives a detailed measure of the proportion of normal to dark matter.
Phenomenally, both the measurements of young galaxies and of the cosmic microwave background showed that normal matter makes up just one-tenth of the universe. The rest must be dark matter, researchers say. Fields, who wrote about this astronomical agreement in the Oct. 19 issue of the journal Science, explained why this is causing astronomers to "bring out the bubbly."
"It didn't have to be true," Fields explained, "because they're completely independent things. It's just gorgeous that they agree with each other."
Earlier studies had showed that dark matter made up anywhere from 85 to 95 percent of the universe. Only now do the two different measures of dark matter agree. Now, 90 percent of everything is known to be virtually nothing.
This?
Same thing happened to me on an Athlon 550. I was working on something, and the screen went black. The system rebooted, but didn't come up. I pulled the plug when I smelled burning. :) Melted the power supply and motherboard (Biostar M7Ksomething). Processor's fine, but it's a Slot-A, which is lame to buy a new mobo for. Ah well. Picked up a K7V which runs about 4 degrees cooler anyway.
Of course it can! A second is a second, no matter how many petaflops you have.
The question I'm asking is "how is it there's no comments and the site's slashdotted already?" Bastards...
Well hopefully you wouldn't scratch the whole disc at once. Instant grey hair. But hey, that's what backups are for, right? Assuming it's legal to make a backup copy of your own pictures by the time this technology's out, anyway...
Yeah, just don't scratch it. Hate to lose 40,000 pics in a second's time.
Do you NEED access to the registry? Do you install that much different stuff on a daily basis? I see limiting install access as a good thing for most employees, but not necessarily developers.
I worked at a place that replaced 400 systems with WinNT from Win95, and you wouldn't believe the crap people had installed, which they expected us to put back on and support when it didn't work.
Keep in mind why a company would want to restrict write access though-
1) they don't want to get sued (pr0n, warez, etc.), and they ARE liable for what people have on their drives, and
2) users have a nasty habit of installing crap that "oh, my friend sent me this email and..." and then they boot into a BSOD every time.
That's a pain in the ass to support. If you can alleviate those fears (and as a developer, you probably know what you're doing), you'd have a better shot at not getting restricted.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/25/rec.attacks.terro r.laws.ap/
[T]he Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said negotiators have placed safeguards on the legislation, like a four-year expiration date on the wiretapping and electronic surveillance portion, court permission before snooping into suspects' formerly private educational records and court oversight over the FBI's use of a powerful e-mail wiretap system.
I'll open it in NS, Opera, AND IE just in case nobody's awake. That way, we only need 1/3 the folks to bring it down.
So it comes down to a matter of priorities: do you want users who are satisfied with their experience but difficult to support or users who feel that their environment is unusable and who hate your guts.
No real answers, but what about the users who are NOT satisfied with their experience and are difficult to support? It's nice to get 4 coffee breaks a day when the server's down, but I tend to think people would actually rather WORK. Unix is scary though, there's no getting around it. People are willing to put up with constant crashes just because it's the only thing they know, and "it's too late to change now."
According to Microsoft's numbers our manufacturing company can expect 13 desktop failures each day and one significant server failure every 15 days. The more realistic Bugtoaster number equals about 161 desktop application crashes per day.
I don't know how you could even pause before making that decision, given numbers like that.
You're new here, aren't you? ;-)
Microsoft and other companies of the world will continue to spend millions of man-hours and billions of dollars to produce products that will make the world a more prosperous place.
Dear Microsoft: while we're all very impressed with how much money and time you spend working on improving a flawed product, and making our lives better AT THE SAME TIME, you're doing a piss-poor job of it. The more you claim to spend on fixing stuff, the stupider you look. Where are the results?As long as the spirit of innovation is preserved and destructive viruses are recognized as industrial terrorism, Microsoft will continue to provide revolutionary ideas.
So if they're NOT recognized as industrial terrorism, will Microsoft promise to stop "revolutionizing" the computer industry? Please?
That'll teach you to ask questions around here, ya damn troll! :-)
You mean, "voilà!" ?
:-P
Companies rarely trademark numbers - it may not even be possible (any IP lawyers out there?)
IANAL, but didn't Intel go with "Pentium" partly because they couldn't trademark "586?"What is next using apache to brew my morning coffee (well there is the coffee pot cam - anyone know what webserver it ran on) write my website for me, solve world hunger ???
Hey, Emacs has to be good for something, right?
Home phone service worth ~$20 a month.
Long distance worth ~$20 a month. (Currently free with many cell-phone plans)
Broadband access worth ~$40 a month.
Talking to your girlfriend in Albuquerque AT THE SAME TIME as downloading hardcore pr0n at 8Mbps: Priceless.
This software patent madness has to stop before it spreads to Europe.
Hey, it's only fair. If Europe gives us mad cow disease, we'll strike back with moronic patent law!
At the risk of getting snail-mail slashdotted (400,000 cuecats in my mailbox?), I'd like to try one out. Never saw them here in Canada.