when i read about X11 and their licensing issues i was scared: i had noticed that redhat dropped several (for me important) packages due to the fact that they are not GPL (such as pine... no flames, please, i like it more than any other mail client cause all you need is an xterm). i was wondering what would happen with x11. now i know. and (i think) i am releived...
... there *must* be something in for Microsoft for them to release the source of something. Maybe it is just a sad attempt to show that their code is not as nasty as what other programmers saw a few months back when the Windows code was leaked. Or maybe there is some ploy in here in order to make $$$ but it is so sneaky that we have not figured it out yet. As far as I am concerned, this seems to be some strategic move...
i guess that is why you must be an "Anonymous Coward", huh? the kid which shoots with daddy's gun his brother also kills, as well as the father. let's face it, whoever makes a mistake, be it the programmers or the management for lacking QA kill... as for your last statement: whatever...
software does not kill...
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
because they are *morons*... my wife is an astronomer and i have a lot of friends in the field. everyone seems outraged by this... it seems as if there are simple "marketing" reasons for scrapping the hubble telescope:
1. talking about a deep field image is not as entertaining for the common american as talking about a man on mars.
2. the shuttle is the weak link here. two have exploded so far. you need to service the telescope once in a while. currently nobody wants to hear the word shuttle, so why should we then service it?
not to mention that the telescope is modular and you can always install new instruments, i.e. it can live long and prosper...
what pisses me off most is that ther are several types of observation which you can *only* do from space. if hubble is scrapped, then several astronomers will be rather unhappy and unable to do their job. not to mention that hubble has provided amazing insights into space. the argument from NASA that it is too expensive to service it is BS. it's just that they are having a hard time to sell their budget in general and so they need to focus on more popular topics. now you might say: well, who cares about hubble. the new generation space telescope, james webb, is around the corner! well, it is not. first, it will sit in a lagrange point in space (cool idea!!!) which is rather far away and so impossible to service if something breaks. and at this point i would like to remind you the faith of beagle 2 as well as the problems hubble had at the beginning (mistake in mirror). how shall we fix such problems on JW? in addition, JW telescope will be launched in 2011... and we all know that realistically it wont happen till 2015. so if hubble gets trashed in 2007, what will we do? why put all cards on JW if hubble is still perfectly functioning and generating the most amazing data? makes you wonder...
as for the ultra deep image: amazing! i wonder how much it costs to use the hubble for ~ 11 days...
yeah, sure, but you did not get the point: you need a source of energy and then also something which transports it to the place you want to warm up. after all open fires in rooms are more a luxury than an effective heating tool. how you generate the heat, i do not care. but how you transport it is different. you can heat up water with coal, gas, electricity,... and then pump it via tubes into the rooms. or you can heat up air and pump it via ducts. the latter being less effective.
having said that: here in switzerland some farmers collect gases emitted from the rotting cow poo. these are then used to heat/cook. have you seen that one yet?
NASA's statement is a mere "catch phrase". They probably just studied the thermal conductivity of aerogels and figured out how much energy it conducts. Then they looked at how much energy a candle produces. Then they came up with a selling phrase...
I should have been more precise: when I wrote you cannot heat a house with a candle, I meant: once you turn the candle off, the room should be cold again (in analogy to the crappy heaters in the US). After all you do not have an equilibrium state and air flows out of the house. Radiation will not do much either, because the walls cannot store the heat as they are not conducting. While the canlde is on, the room would be "warm", just like a fire in the woods keeps yu warm.
Too bad you are a physicist. You make us look bad.
dude. the volume of the house remains constant. after all the walls are not moving, right? what changest is the number of particles inside the FIXED volume. therefore V = const. and so from pV = NRT
N1T1 = N2T2
if there is higher pressure (which is right), then particles will escape. only if the pressure increases upon heat-up, you will experience a temperaure increase. think of the pressure cooker. no particles escape, volume constant, p goes up (as well as T -- which you put in).
Most houses are heated by blowing warm air into them. As far as i can tell you are claiming that this doesn't work.
That is true -- in the US. This is not the case in Europe. Here heating is transfellered with water. I recall when I used to live in the Bay Area and we had one of those air blowing heaters. Completely inefficient!
To be fair: of course the blowing air can heat a room, but it will not stay warm long. In the aerogel article they probably tested the heat conductivity of the aerogel, looked at the amount of energy a candle produces and then thought of a catchy phrase to sell it. This is an idealized scenario. An airtight house is also an idealized scenario... And as someone else pointed out: you'd probably run out of Oxygen over night.
Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.'
if you have the smallest crack in your house, then air will be allowed to escape. this means that you do not have a closed system. assuming that air is an ideal (or even a van der Waals) gas, if it heats up, it expands. this means that air escapes and the temperature sinks. hence you would NOT heat up your house with a candle. just think of the equation pV = NRT, i.e. T ~ 1/N (temperature proportional to 1/number of particles).
as a matter of fact, when you heat up a house, the air is not what keeps it hot. it is the items, such as walls, and stuff, which irradiate the heat off and so warm the room. if you now make walls out of a completeley nonheatconducting stuff, would it still work? i am not sure...
: ) by the way: the same guys who got lego from the NSF also got money to make a ropewing from a bridge. it's just a matter of how you sell it to the government.
not only do geeks in my former physics department write grant proposals to get lego mindstorms and then race them, they are actually an EXCELLENT toy for teens to learn to program, robotics,... what the standard lego building blocks do for kids in the age range 3 - 8, mindostorms do in the dange 8 - 15 (clearly these numbers are not bounded on top): foster creativity! so... why drop an educational tool which has proven to be excellent. i guess lego knows what is good and what is not. what i hated with lego (as a big fan since i can remeber), is that in recent year there have been more and more specialized blocks which are useless and completely kill the main goal of lego: use your imagination to make a plane out of bricks. giving the kid a wing was a bad idea, IMHO, because kids then would be bored. after all, you got the wing out of the box, so why spend time trying to figure it out!
it's not just the swipe card, you also want to make sure that whoever swiped the card is the person on it. i think the idea is to check when people come and go and make sure cousin jake is not filling in for you while you have a cold...
I do not understand why the MD format is still around and Sony releases a new player if there are mp3 players for the same price which can carry much more music for less weight...
i cannot imagine such a taping has any good quality. what would anyone do with such a "copy" of a movie? of course there are, for example, the star wars lovers in kathmandu who would like to see the movie before it is officially released in their country. but then again, the big blockbusters seem to be released everywhere at the same time...
i used to have (at work) two emachines. while the machines were stable, the stuff was really poor quality. the big hit comes when you want to do an upgrade: the prices are really hard....
why just not admit that one is stupid and leave it there. at least DMcB would then save face. but at this rate, all he will have in his face is a creampie on the next public speech...
linus: thanks for the link. actions speak louder than words... and DMcB has spoken too many...
i think this is somehow part of human nature: in science (where i work) people tend to have collaborations until some a**hole comes along who does not believe in collaborating. the project splits and suddenly you have two papers about the same. if there was one paper in the first place, it would probably been a really good one, but now you have two mediocre works. if you now are a scientist in industry (which would correspond to something like microsoft) you better know how to work in a team or you are out.
having said that i conclude with the statement that collaborations are extremely important in order to push towards a novel idea or result. on the other hand having some kind of kindergarten mama (a company) watching over us kids sometimes makes us produce more and better.
but then again, if there are many groups working on the same they will compete. and that ensures a better product/result in the end. ah, what the heck, i don't know...
back in the days when ext3 was still in our dreams i downloaded the SGI XFS kernel from their site and installed it on my wife's laptop. it was extremely stable and had the advantage, that her "oops, i have to run off and just close the lid"-atacks would not corrupt the filesystem (which i would have to clean up...).
nowadays i use ext3 on my machines because it comes default with RH (by the way EL is now available for academia, woohoo!). hence my question:
can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?
a) as mentioned before, it is easy to probe the hole to make sure it really works.
b) i seriuosly doubt that the security team of any university and / or company would enable such a hole because then they might get blacklisted and no more email for them...
Slashdot Mirror
when i read about X11 and their licensing issues i was scared: i had noticed that redhat dropped several (for me important) packages due to the fact that they are not GPL (such as pine... no flames, please, i like it more than any other mail client cause all you need is an xterm). i was wondering what would happen with x11. now i know. and (i think) i am releived...
... there *must* be something in for Microsoft for them to release the source of something. Maybe it is just a sad attempt to show that their code is not as nasty as what other programmers saw a few months back when the Windows code was leaked. Or maybe there is some ploy in here in order to make $$$ but it is so sneaky that we have not figured it out yet. As far as I am concerned, this seems to be some strategic move...
at the beginning humans would fight for food. anything was game. i guess the same was with the movie industry at that time... ah... what the heck...
i guess that is why you must be an "Anonymous Coward", huh? the kid which shoots with daddy's gun his brother also kills, as well as the father. let's face it, whoever makes a mistake, be it the programmers or the management for lacking QA kill... as for your last statement: whatever...
... dumb programmers kill!
because they are *morons*... my wife is an astronomer and i have a lot of friends in the field. everyone seems outraged by this... it seems as if there are simple "marketing" reasons for scrapping the hubble telescope:
1. talking about a deep field image is not as entertaining for the common american as talking about a man on mars.
2. the shuttle is the weak link here. two have exploded so far. you need to service the telescope once in a while. currently nobody wants to hear the word shuttle, so why should we then service it?
not to mention that the telescope is modular and you can always install new instruments, i.e. it can live long and prosper...
what pisses me off most is that ther are several types of observation which you can *only* do from space. if hubble is scrapped, then several astronomers will be rather unhappy and unable to do their job. not to mention that hubble has provided amazing insights into space. the argument from NASA that it is too expensive to service it is BS. it's just that they are having a hard time to sell their budget in general and so they need to focus on more popular topics. now you might say: well, who cares about hubble. the new generation space telescope, james webb, is around the corner! well, it is not. first, it will sit in a lagrange point in space (cool idea!!!) which is rather far away and so impossible to service if something breaks. and at this point i would like to remind you the faith of beagle 2 as well as the problems hubble had at the beginning (mistake in mirror). how shall we fix such problems on JW? in addition, JW telescope will be launched in 2011... and we all know that realistically it wont happen till 2015. so if hubble gets trashed in 2007, what will we do? why put all cards on JW if hubble is still perfectly functioning and generating the most amazing data? makes you wonder...
as for the ultra deep image: amazing! i wonder how much it costs to use the hubble for ~ 11 days...
it is just the right size for a pocket, a hand, a shirt pocket, ...
other than that my sony remote feels well, too.
i had a hard time finding something. look at http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/farmmgt/05002.ht ml
yeah, sure, but you did not get the point: you need a source of energy and then also something which transports it to the place you want to warm up. after all open fires in rooms are more a luxury than an effective heating tool. how you generate the heat, i do not care. but how you transport it is different. you can heat up water with coal, gas, electricity, ... and then pump it via tubes into the rooms. or you can heat up air and pump it via ducts. the latter being less effective.
having said that: here in switzerland some farmers collect gases emitted from the rotting cow poo. these are then used to heat/cook. have you seen that one yet?
NASA's statement is a mere "catch phrase". They probably just studied the thermal conductivity of aerogels and figured out how much energy it conducts. Then they looked at how much energy a candle produces. Then they came up with a selling phrase...
I should have been more precise: when I wrote you cannot heat a house with a candle, I meant: once you turn the candle off, the room should be cold again (in analogy to the crappy heaters in the US). After all you do not have an equilibrium state and air flows out of the house. Radiation will not do much either, because the walls cannot store the heat as they are not conducting. While the canlde is on, the room would be "warm", just like a fire in the woods keeps yu warm.
Too bad you are a physicist. You make us look bad.
dude. the volume of the house remains constant. after all the walls are not moving, right? what changest is the number of particles inside the FIXED volume. therefore V = const. and so from pV = NRT
N1T1 = N2T2
if there is higher pressure (which is right), then particles will escape. only if the pressure increases upon heat-up, you will experience a temperaure increase. think of the pressure cooker. no particles escape, volume constant, p goes up (as well as T -- which you put in).
Most houses are heated by blowing warm air into them. As far as i can tell you are claiming that this doesn't work.
That is true -- in the US. This is not the case in Europe. Here heating is transfellered with water. I recall when I used to live in the Bay Area and we had one of those air blowing heaters. Completely inefficient!
To be fair: of course the blowing air can heat a room, but it will not stay warm long. In the aerogel article they probably tested the heat conductivity of the aerogel, looked at the amount of energy a candle produces and then thought of a catchy phrase to sell it. This is an idealized scenario. An airtight house is also an idealized scenario... And as someone else pointed out: you'd probably run out of Oxygen over night.
Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.'
if you have the smallest crack in your house, then air will be allowed to escape. this means that you do not have a closed system. assuming that air is an ideal (or even a van der Waals) gas, if it heats up, it expands. this means that air escapes and the temperature sinks. hence you would NOT heat up your house with a candle. just think of the equation pV = NRT, i.e. T ~ 1/N (temperature proportional to 1/number of particles).
as a matter of fact, when you heat up a house, the air is not what keeps it hot. it is the items, such as walls, and stuff, which irradiate the heat off and so warm the room. if you now make walls out of a completeley nonheatconducting stuff, would it still work? i am not sure...
: ) by the way: the same guys who got lego from the NSF also got money to make a ropewing from a bridge. it's just a matter of how you sell it to the government.
not only do geeks in my former physics department write grant proposals to get lego mindstorms and then race them, they are actually an EXCELLENT toy for teens to learn to program, robotics, ... what the standard lego building blocks do for kids in the age range 3 - 8, mindostorms do in the dange 8 - 15 (clearly these numbers are not bounded on top): foster creativity! so... why drop an educational tool which has proven to be excellent. i guess lego knows what is good and what is not. what i hated with lego (as a big fan since i can remeber), is that in recent year there have been more and more specialized blocks which are useless and completely kill the main goal of lego: use your imagination to make a plane out of bricks. giving the kid a wing was a bad idea, IMHO, because kids then would be bored. after all, you got the wing out of the box, so why spend time trying to figure it out!
it's not just the swipe card, you also want to make sure that whoever swiped the card is the person on it. i think the idea is to check when people come and go and make sure cousin jake is not filling in for you while you have a cold...
i want to see that scanner in mcdonalds after about a month of employees slapping their greasy palm on the scanner. will it still work then?
I do not understand why the MD format is still around and Sony releases a new player if there are mp3 players for the same price which can carry much more music for less weight...
i cannot imagine such a taping has any good quality. what would anyone do with such a "copy" of a movie? of course there are, for example, the star wars lovers in kathmandu who would like to see the movie before it is officially released in their country. but then again, the big blockbusters seem to be released everywhere at the same time...
i used to have (at work) two emachines. while the machines were stable, the stuff was really poor quality. the big hit comes when you want to do an upgrade: the prices are really hard....
why just not admit that one is stupid and leave it there. at least DMcB would then save face. but at this rate, all he will have in his face is a creampie on the next public speech...
linus: thanks for the link. actions speak louder than words... and DMcB has spoken too many...
i think this is somehow part of human nature: in science (where i work) people tend to have collaborations until some a**hole comes along who does not believe in collaborating. the project splits and suddenly you have two papers about the same. if there was one paper in the first place, it would probably been a really good one, but now you have two mediocre works. if you now are a scientist in industry (which would correspond to something like microsoft) you better know how to work in a team or you are out.
having said that i conclude with the statement that collaborations are extremely important in order to push towards a novel idea or result. on the other hand having some kind of kindergarten mama (a company) watching over us kids sometimes makes us produce more and better.
but then again, if there are many groups working on the same they will compete. and that ensures a better product/result in the end. ah, what the heck, i don't know...
and this is relevant to the original post because....?
back in the days when ext3 was still in our dreams i downloaded the SGI XFS kernel from their site and installed it on my wife's laptop. it was extremely stable and had the advantage, that her "oops, i have to run off and just close the lid"-atacks would not corrupt the filesystem (which i would have to clean up...).
nowadays i use ext3 on my machines because it comes default with RH (by the way EL is now available for academia, woohoo!). hence my question:
can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?
i think it will not work for two reasons:
a) as mentioned before, it is easy to probe the hole to make sure it really works.
b) i seriuosly doubt that the security team of any university and / or company would enable such a hole because then they might get blacklisted and no more email for them...