Nah, it's simple. There's so little mass in a ring you could concevably accelerate it pretty goddamn quickly. Strap a few rockets on, aim it well, and fire, and you can lie back for a littel nap.
Then again, you might have to wait awhile to see some results.
How does this work? I've read a few books covering relativity (as well as the linked articles), but I still don't understand how one can travel 25 light years in three minutes at near light speed.
The way I understand it, time dilates in a sense for everyone not traveling near light speed. When you approach the speed of light, from your vantage point, you are leaving your point of origin and approaching your destination at the speed of light. The origin and destination, however, will have time pass extraordinarily quickly from your perspective. A net result is that you make the trip in what feels like 25 years, and millions or billions of years have passed for your origin and destination.
I can see how these effects might be reversed if you perceive yourself as being still with the origin and destination accelerating away from and towards you, respectively, since, while moving at near light speed, time would move extraordinarily slowly on the origin and destination. However, wouldn't it still feel to you like twenty-five years have passed? And doesn't your acceleration destroy this potential perspective?
Christ, I hope it's different where you are than where I am. Here near Atlanta, Georgia Micro Center is nothing more than a Best Buy wannabe. Employees wander around desperately trying to get you to buy anything (since they're on commission) and generally give people lots of misinformation because none of them are techncial. The prices for hardware are absurd (I told you they were trying to become Best Buy, didn't I) and every time I have to go into the store I feel like I've sacrificed a small but vital part of my soul.
In this case, a third party has the ability to reduce the "free-ness" of the material, which is unacceptable.
Imagine writing a howto. Now somebody else comes along and adds lots of useful, relevant content to the howto. However, they mark all of the document as invariant and begin redistributing. They've just reduced the "free-ness" of that document, which is a big no-no.
Having anyone at some point be able to take the truly free and modifiable work of someone else, then hijack it and make it non-free (as this would surely be) is a big no-no.
No. No no no no no. I'm going to borrow from Joel Spolsky for a minute, but it shouldn't matter one iota what your competitors are doing. Listen to your customers, not your competitors. Your customers will let you know what they really want that your competitors have, and anything else isn't worth looking at.
You actually expect torrents to get faster as more people start downloading? If everyone downloading a torrent from a tracker has more download speed than upload, you're going to have to deal with starvation: more download than available upload.
You should have updated the kernel long ago. The boot-floppies kernel has several major security vulnerabilities (discovered post-release). The kernel-image packages for various kernel releases are there for you to upgrade to.
The upgrade path to the new release is fully supported. Unlike Windows 2000 -> XP (or even unlike other distributions, such as Fedora or RedHat), a distribution upgrade is guaranteed to be smooth and flawless, and has been tested hundreds of thousands of times.
Somehow, people start using this service voluntarily. As it becomes more popular, people start blacklisting email that doesn't come through this "stamping" service. As more people blacklist it, more people use it and it eventually becomes ubiquitous.
The real problems inherent are: how do you get it off the ground to where it becomes popular, since the utility is actually negative when it's unpopular (you have to front money, and you receive no gain), and how can you decentralize a service such as this?
Actually, light travels towards and away from you at light speed, no matter your speed. So the number of photons entering your pupils would be exactly the same.
If I ever see a developer do something as stupid as this on a job application, there's no way they will ever get a job working for me.
Having clean, readable code is far, far more important than saving a few minutes in total in a project. Using compiler-specific features is generally frowned upon, but acceptable in cases where there are significant performance or time gains. Using a compiler-specific alias to save yourself a few extra keystrokes at the extreme cost of readability is just being lazy, and not thinking about how that code will be maintained in a year.
I feel the same way about the ternary operator, actually. There are a few cases where it's clear enough to be used, and where it saves several lines of typing. However, 95% of the time that people use it, it only makes the code impossible to understand.
Okay, so compile the kernel. And compile everything as modules. If you ever need it later, it's there. And anyone who tells you "what do you expect if you don't compile your own kernel" is probably clueless. There's virtually no reason to do it unless you're patching the kernel yourself, or using embedded hardware that needs every spare CPU cycle it can get (yes, there are a few other exceptions). Hell, even if you need to compile an out-of-kernel module, you can do this without compiling the kernel proper.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
What the fuck?
Sorry, bucko, but this is your own damn fault. Nobody said you had to compile a kernel. Every packaged distro I know of provides their own packaged kernel which has *every single module compiled*. I've been using Debian for years, and I haven't *ever* needed to do a make, except for my own software.
Slashdot Mirror
However, as I understand it, our Sun's name is "Sol".
Jesus, guys, thanks for ruining it for the rest of us =P
Nah, it's simple. There's so little mass in a ring you could concevably accelerate it pretty goddamn quickly. Strap a few rockets on, aim it well, and fire, and you can lie back for a littel nap.
Then again, you might have to wait awhile to see some results.
How does this work? I've read a few books covering relativity (as well as the linked articles), but I still don't understand how one can travel 25 light years in three minutes at near light speed.
The way I understand it, time dilates in a sense for everyone not traveling near light speed. When you approach the speed of light, from your vantage point, you are leaving your point of origin and approaching your destination at the speed of light. The origin and destination, however, will have time pass extraordinarily quickly from your perspective. A net result is that you make the trip in what feels like 25 years, and millions or billions of years have passed for your origin and destination.
I can see how these effects might be reversed if you perceive yourself as being still with the origin and destination accelerating away from and towards you, respectively, since, while moving at near light speed, time would move extraordinarily slowly on the origin and destination. However, wouldn't it still feel to you like twenty-five years have passed? And doesn't your acceleration destroy this potential perspective?
You know, like the Cable News Network?
Christ, I hope it's different where you are than where I am. Here near Atlanta, Georgia Micro Center is nothing more than a Best Buy wannabe. Employees wander around desperately trying to get you to buy anything (since they're on commission) and generally give people lots of misinformation because none of them are techncial. The prices for hardware are absurd (I told you they were trying to become Best Buy, didn't I) and every time I have to go into the store I feel like I've sacrificed a small but vital part of my soul.
In this case, a third party has the ability to reduce the "free-ness" of the material, which is unacceptable.
Imagine writing a howto. Now somebody else comes along and adds lots of useful, relevant content to the howto. However, they mark all of the document as invariant and begin redistributing. They've just reduced the "free-ness" of that document, which is a big no-no.
Having anyone at some point be able to take the truly free and modifiable work of someone else, then hijack it and make it non-free (as this would surely be) is a big no-no.
No. No no no no no. I'm going to borrow from Joel Spolsky for a minute, but it shouldn't matter one iota what your competitors are doing. Listen to your customers, not your competitors. Your customers will let you know what they really want that your competitors have, and anything else isn't worth looking at.
You actually expect torrents to get faster as more people start downloading? If everyone downloading a torrent from a tracker has more download speed than upload, you're going to have to deal with starvation: more download than available upload.
"Again"? Durable cat.
You should have updated the kernel long ago. The boot-floppies kernel has several major security vulnerabilities (discovered post-release). The kernel-image packages for various kernel releases are there for you to upgrade to.
The upgrade path to the new release is fully supported. Unlike Windows 2000 -> XP (or even unlike other distributions, such as Fedora or RedHat), a distribution upgrade is guaranteed to be smooth and flawless, and has been tested hundreds of thousands of times.
This would not require legislation to enact.
Somehow, people start using this service voluntarily. As it becomes more popular, people start blacklisting email that doesn't come through this "stamping" service. As more people blacklist it, more people use it and it eventually becomes ubiquitous.
The real problems inherent are: how do you get it off the ground to where it becomes popular, since the utility is actually negative when it's unpopular (you have to front money, and you receive no gain), and how can you decentralize a service such as this?
Actually, light travels towards and away from you at light speed, no matter your speed. So the number of photons entering your pupils would be exactly the same.
Breaking news: capacitors found to exist!
Think about this one- clones of yourself running around, posting on Slashdot... The Horror, the Horror.
*cringe*
Let me know once the Linux kernel can be built with something other than GCC.
Um, Miguel de Icaza? Nat Friedman? I know I'm being cheap, but hey :)
Anyone posting before noon didn't RTFA =P
If I ever see a developer do something as stupid as this on a job application, there's no way they will ever get a job working for me.
Having clean, readable code is far, far more important than saving a few minutes in total in a project. Using compiler-specific features is generally frowned upon, but acceptable in cases where there are significant performance or time gains. Using a compiler-specific alias to save yourself a few extra keystrokes at the extreme cost of readability is just being lazy, and not thinking about how that code will be maintained in a year.
I feel the same way about the ternary operator, actually. There are a few cases where it's clear enough to be used, and where it saves several lines of typing. However, 95% of the time that people use it, it only makes the code impossible to understand.
And Russians are...black?
Okay, so compile the kernel. And compile everything as modules. If you ever need it later, it's there. And anyone who tells you "what do you expect if you don't compile your own kernel" is probably clueless. There's virtually no reason to do it unless you're patching the kernel yourself, or using embedded hardware that needs every spare CPU cycle it can get (yes, there are a few other exceptions). Hell, even if you need to compile an out-of-kernel module, you can do this without compiling the kernel proper.
I'm getting goddamn sick of this, and I'm a developer. I'm also damn tired of defending it. I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
What the fuck?
Sorry, bucko, but this is your own damn fault. Nobody said you had to compile a kernel. Every packaged distro I know of provides their own packaged kernel which has *every single module compiled*. I've been using Debian for years, and I haven't *ever* needed to do a make, except for my own software.
Gee. For me, I don't even have to go find setup.exe. Apt knows where it all is already. It also does all the dependency checking for me.