This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is
allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away
and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working
intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked
anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished
the blinkenlights.
Re:Long distance repairs
on
SOHO Is Back
·
· Score: 1
Voyager 2 had its entire OS replaced from half way across the solar system.
Too bad that was before/. existed. We have stories about someone's grandma switching to linux hitting the front page all the time, imagine the splash this would have caused... oh wait... voyager was before linux too, wasn't it? So it can't have been... damn nevermind what I was saying
Hmm... could you explain "source of life energy"? If you consider direct harnessing of sunlight, then solar power is a tiny fraction compared to the other sources. OTOH if you refer to both direct and indirect forms, then all sources of energy, including plant and animal food, coal, etc. are derived from solar energy. (except nuclear energy, but I can't see how you can call it "life energy":-)
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously. Then, you would just have to get a link to any one of the trackers and when you connect to that tracker it would forward you to a random tracker, or something like that.
There's another advantage to this too: You can no longer "shut down" sites like the *AA's doing, if you make every bit torrent node a tracker!. I don't see any theoretical obstacle to implementing this: all you need to do is to send the info about who has which pieces of a file to all the nodes, apart from sending the pieces of the file itself. Any thoughts on this?
Netscape, once the browser pioneer that has fallen second to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer in recent years
Read obliterated, wiped out of existence.
Best euphemism I've seen in a while:)
(Disclaimer: I use nothing but mozilla)
Re:Theoretical maximum for common stellar material
on
Non-Spherical Stars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The article has some info on grandparent's question:
The indicated ratio between the equatorial and polar radii of Achernar constitutes an unprecedented challenge for theoretical astrophysics, in particular concerning mass loss from the surface enhanced by the rapid rotation (the centrifugal effect) and also the distribution of internal angular momentum (the rotation velocity at different depths).
The astronomers conclude that Achernar must either rotate faster (and hence, closer to the "critical" (break-up) velocity of about 300 km/sec) than what the spectral observations show (about 225 km/sec from the widening of the spectral lines) or it must violate the rigid-body rotation.
From this I think we can conclude that the star is very close to the theoretical limit for polar/eq radius for stable stars, but that this theoretical model might be inaccurate.
Your question about how the star formed at all is interesting. IANAP, but it could be that when the star formed it wasn't spinning fast enough to break apart, but as it loses mass due to fusion, it becomes more elongated until the weakened gravity isn't able to hold it together any longer.
the plasma reaches a temperature of 15,000 degrees Kelvin
First, its degrees only when it is Fahrenheit or Centigrade, which are not absolute units. Second, its Kelvins, damn it! (at least when it is more than 1K). People have no problem with Joules, Newtons, Pascals etc which are all people's names, why is Kelvins so different??
[I haven't done any physics after high school, so if I'm wrong correct me.]
"When I was young and naive I believed that all human actions are directly or indirectly motivated by the twin goals of money and sex. Now I know better; there are three drivers - money, sex, and the fear of computers." -- me
I wanted to make it my sig. Too bad/. allows only 120 chars:(
Sure, but nor can dictatorship. How's anyone going to get a 1/2 km rock out of the moon's gravitational field? Maybe the book explains that, but for those who haven't read it, care to explain how? And even if that's possible, I don't see what's the big deal. For a long time the US has had enough nukes to destroy a whole country. I mean, if both sides are capable of wiping each other out, the details don't really matter, do they?
You brought up an interesting point, but I don't think the submitter is being jingoistic here. Even though I'm not from the US, I agree with that viewpoint. What's unfortunate is not that other countries are getting to the moon, but that NASA did nothing all this while. Until now, one could have believed that more moon missions would really have been of no use, at least until technology and economics got much better. But with this spurt of interest from other countries (EU, Japan, China, India etc) that argument no longer holds: surely, they lag the US tech-wise but still think it's worthwhile getting to the moon? That must mean that the only reason for the inaction after the Appolo missions must have been the shortsighedness of US congressmen. And of course, it's good that private ventures are getting into the act, because they are likely to be more efficient in the long run.
And many people have pointed out that while the majority of exploits have been directed at Windows machines, there are a lot more Windows users than anything else.
Oh c'mon. This is one horse that's been flogged on/. a million times already. Most attacks aren't directed at desktop users (though those are the ones that get the most publicity) but at servers. And that's one market which MS certainly doesn't dominate. Why are there still far more attacks directed at MS products? Do you really think the frequency and severity of exploits of (say) IIS and apache are comparable? (Note that apache has more than twice the market share as IIS.)
If you're claiming that most attackers are on windows machines, that's not true either. If you have the technical sophistication to author buffer overflow exploits, it's pretty likely that you've played with linux at some point. Go read phrack , for instance, and see for yourself.
The reason OSS is more secure is that (if it needs any repeating):
Since everyone can look at the source the good guys are far likelier to find any given bug before the bad guys and a patch is usually out before there's an exploit
The Unix design is simply a lot cleaner and security conscious, period.
Are you insane? I don't care for Windows, but it is the most advanced mouseless UI there is. You can do everything without even having a mouse plugged in at all. The same cannot be said for gnome/kde or X in general.
Yes it can. I do everything using the keyboard, including moving and resizing windows under X (with sawfish.) I kid you not! Care to show me how to do that in windows? Of course, gnome's philosophy from gnome2 onwards is "you can do only what we let you to, because we know better than you", and I don't think you can use KDE without a keyboard either, but there's really nothing you can't do under X. To put it simply, what you really need is a WM that is both programmable and allows keys to be bound to arbitrary actions. Windows doesn't have the concept of a user-visible WM independent from the application, so there's and inherent limitation to what you can do.
While OSS is strong in India's enterprise sector, that's not the case on the desktop. So "1 000 000 000 million [sic]* people worldwide using an Os that isn't Windows" is still a pipe dream.
* While it's a really populous country, I don't think there's space for 10^15 people:-)
Dr. Kalam is a vocal advocate of peace. He maintains, however, that the existence of nukes in the subcontinent is one of the things that contributes to that aim, due to its deterrent value. So there's no contradiction here.
While its true that a large number of IIT CS students end up at Microsoft, there is a very healthy fraction of them that are OSS zealots (that includes me:-). A while back someone made very much the same argument on K5 (Indian programmer ==> poverty ==> sell your soul to M$) and here's my rebuttal
To be noted is that he made the speech (look for the "Think Different" section) at the famous Indian Institute of Information Technology (india's foremost academic institution equivalent to MIT).
.
There are two things wrong with that: first, you got the name wrong: he made the speech at the "International Institute of Information Technology". Second, you're probably confusing it with IIT, Indian Institute of Technology, which is the one that fits the description of India's foremost academic institution. Two unrelated universities.
... is the knight's tour of the chessboard. The problem is to move a knight on an empty chessboard in such a way that it visits each square exactly once and returns to the starting square. Here's a little HowTo for solving it.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad that was before /. existed. We have stories about someone's grandma switching to linux hitting the front page all the time, imagine the splash this would have caused ... oh wait ... voyager was before linux too, wasn't it? So it can't have been ... damn nevermind what I was saying
Hmm... could you explain "source of life energy"? If you consider direct harnessing of sunlight, then solar power is a tiny fraction compared to the other sources. OTOH if you refer to both direct and indirect forms, then all sources of energy, including plant and animal food, coal, etc. are derived from solar energy. (except nuclear energy, but I can't see how you can call it "life energy" :-)
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously. Then, you would just have to get a link to any one of the trackers and when you connect to that tracker it would forward you to a random tracker, or something like that. There's another advantage to this too: You can no longer "shut down" sites like the *AA's doing, if you make every bit torrent node a tracker!. I don't see any theoretical obstacle to implementing this: all you need to do is to send the info about who has which pieces of a file to all the nodes, apart from sending the pieces of the file itself. Any thoughts on this?
slashdotted with less than 5 comments posted. google cache.
Just mentioning what I happened to notice. Conclusions, if any, are left to the reader.
The settlement was reached based on a fine of $10000 for every user of the netscape software.
Read obliterated, wiped out of existence.
Best euphemism I've seen in a while :)
(Disclaimer: I use nothing but mozilla)
The indicated ratio between the equatorial and polar radii of Achernar constitutes an unprecedented challenge for theoretical astrophysics, in particular concerning mass loss from the surface enhanced by the rapid rotation (the centrifugal effect) and also the distribution of internal angular momentum (the rotation velocity at different depths).
The astronomers conclude that Achernar must either rotate faster (and hence, closer to the "critical" (break-up) velocity of about 300 km/sec) than what the spectral observations show (about 225 km/sec from the widening of the spectral lines) or it must violate the rigid-body rotation.
From this I think we can conclude that the star is very close to the theoretical limit for polar/eq radius for stable stars, but that this theoretical model might be inaccurate.
Your question about how the star formed at all is interesting. IANAP, but it could be that when the star formed it wasn't spinning fast enough to break apart, but as it loses mass due to fusion, it becomes more elongated until the weakened gravity isn't able to hold it together any longer.
First, its degrees only when it is Fahrenheit or Centigrade, which are not absolute units. Second, its Kelvins, damn it! (at least when it is more than 1K). People have no problem with Joules, Newtons, Pascals etc which are all people's names, why is Kelvins so different??
[I haven't done any physics after high school, so if I'm wrong correct me.]
I wanted to make it my sig. Too bad /. allows only 120 chars :(
<div style="background-attachment: fixed; background-image: url(http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/images/cover.png); width: 520px; height: 370px; background-repeat: no-repeat;"></div>
So it is supposed to be stationary. Also notice that you don't see the whole image in IE.
Whoever designed the page must be really geeky if they don't care about it working correctly in MSIE :-)
Couldn't resist :-) I don't remember where I read it though.
Sure, but nor can dictatorship. How's anyone going to get a 1/2 km rock out of the moon's gravitational field? Maybe the book explains that, but for those who haven't read it, care to explain how? And even if that's possible, I don't see what's the big deal. For a long time the US has had enough nukes to destroy a whole country. I mean, if both sides are capable of wiping each other out, the details don't really matter, do they?
You brought up an interesting point, but I don't think the submitter is being jingoistic here. Even though I'm not from the US, I agree with that viewpoint. What's unfortunate is not that other countries are getting to the moon, but that NASA did nothing all this while. Until now, one could have believed that more moon missions would really have been of no use, at least until technology and economics got much better. But with this spurt of interest from other countries (EU, Japan, China, India etc) that argument no longer holds: surely, they lag the US tech-wise but still think it's worthwhile getting to the moon? That must mean that the only reason for the inaction after the Appolo missions must have been the shortsighedness of US congressmen. And of course, it's good that private ventures are getting into the act, because they are likely to be more efficient in the long run.
The reds are going for a permanent settlement on the moon? No problem. Reagan had it all worked out years ago. ;^)
Oh c'mon. This is one horse that's been flogged on /. a million times already. Most attacks aren't directed at desktop users (though those are the ones that get the most publicity) but at servers. And that's one market which MS certainly doesn't dominate. Why are there still far more attacks directed at MS products? Do you really think the frequency and severity of exploits of (say) IIS and apache are comparable? (Note that apache has more than twice the market share as IIS.)
If you're claiming that most attackers are on windows machines, that's not true either. If you have the technical sophistication to author buffer overflow exploits, it's pretty likely that you've played with linux at some point. Go read phrack , for instance, and see for yourself.
The reason OSS is more secure is that (if it needs any repeating):
Yes it can. I do everything using the keyboard, including moving and resizing windows under X (with sawfish.) I kid you not! Care to show me how to do that in windows? Of course, gnome's philosophy from gnome2 onwards is "you can do only what we let you to, because we know better than you", and I don't think you can use KDE without a keyboard either, but there's really nothing you can't do under X. To put it simply, what you really need is a WM that is both programmable and allows keys to be bound to arbitrary actions. Windows doesn't have the concept of a user-visible WM independent from the application, so there's and inherent limitation to what you can do.
The author's got some really funny images on his site.
* While it's a really populous country, I don't think there's space for 10^15 people :-)
Dr. Kalam is a vocal advocate of peace. He maintains, however, that the existence of nukes in the subcontinent is one of the things that contributes to that aim, due to its deterrent value. So there's no contradiction here.
While its true that a large number of IIT CS students end up at Microsoft, there is a very healthy fraction of them that are OSS zealots (that includes me :-). A while back someone made very much the same argument on K5 (Indian programmer ==> poverty ==> sell your soul to M$) and here's my rebuttal
There are two things wrong with that: first, you got the name wrong: he made the speech at the "International Institute of Information Technology". Second, you're probably confusing it with IIT, Indian Institute of Technology, which is the one that fits the description of India's foremost academic institution. Two unrelated universities.
... is the knight's tour of the chessboard. The problem is to move a knight on an empty chessboard in such a way that it visits each square exactly once and returns to the starting square. Here's a little HowTo for solving it.