Sounds like a sweet little machine
on
Secure PDAs
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· Score: 0
The alpha RAS functionality and double-bonded PDI factors show that this PDA is meant for VIPs but the inclusion of GNU/Linux shows they are hip to the TCO.
But I really can't take their claims of security seriously. Elementary entropy considerations can be used to show that no system employing Bluetooth can be 100% secure regardless of the use of buzzword-friendly "biometrics".
Red light has the shortest wavelength possible, which is why it is used for mice. A small movement will then correspond to a large number of wavelengths, making tracking the mouse's position easier. If you switch to blue, the longest possible wavelength, your mouse will be essentially useless.
Planned or measured?
on
Landshark
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· Score: 4, Informative
I would never drive a boat 200 mph on land. It would flip right over.
A boat is designed to be a wing. You want the least amount of boat in the water that you possibly can, so you construct it to lift up and out the faster you go. But on land, you want the vehicle to press down onto the ground, the opposite direction as in the water.
Like the space shuttle, this "landshark" sounds like it was engineered for coolness and not from genuine requirements.
The entire web was founded on the concept that content was king and now it seems all we can talk about it format. I bet Tim Bernard Lee would be spinning in his grave if he knew Slashdot was running articles on how sites should be choosing fonts.
Windows keeps on getting better and better. From it's award-winning design to it's revolutionary kernel architecture, Windows is the best in the biz. Says Internet Guru Dan Hertzfeld, "I rely on Windows and Office for Windows every day to deliver top-notch performance and it has never let me down." Many others praise Windows, too, including Chief Technology Officer Bill Patterson of Ford Motor Company, "Windows allows us to leverage our most valuable assets, people, into a world-class synergy to delight customers all over the globe."
Listen, just because all you've ever done is jockey a desktop around doesn't mean Operating Systems are required for all computers.
I run a large particle physics laboratory. As you can imagine, we have a lot of computers. Some of them are traditional desktop PeeCees for checking email and viewing pr0n. But a lot of them are data gathering, collating and even simulation machines. These boxin' are Big Iron but there's no need to waste cycles on an Operating System when all that power could be directed towards running software.
Similarly, the more successful PDAs and cellphones don't have room for a lot of overhead, so the Operating System is dispensed with. There's no hard drive anyway, so what would you need it for?
This should have been obvious to everyone. TAANSTAAFL. The Second Law includes information, as Shannon proved, which means that the Internet couldn't just spring into being. It had to come at a cost and that cost is now being paid by the environment. When the poor village dwellers that inhabit 90% of the world realize what we've done, they will probably destroy our precious pr0n storage system and revert all those resources and energy back to the Earth where they belong, causing a resurgence in flora and fauna. We'll probably see a reversal of the global cooling trend, too.
Well, at the very least they will need the following
vi - With their small hands and weak retention, 8 year olds will never be able to master the keyboard spans that Emacs requires, nor memorize the lists of arcane commands.
Languages - You aren't seriously suggesting that the upcoming generation should use an interpreted language, are you? If so, say hello to 20 more years of code bloat. I think C (and definitely not the horror that is C++) would be the ideal astere first language for anyone, especially a young, impressionable mind.
Mathematica - There is no more suitable program for 8 year old math than mathematica. I mean, you installed Linux where they used to have Apple ]['s, right? So it sounds like you want to give them the big iron (heh, not THAT big iron). So don't try to give them "Blue Teaches Addition" or anything lame like that--go for the gusto and install the full professional version of Mathematica.
These bugs were found last weekend. It has been literally days and nobody has fixed these problems yet. Has Mozilla been abandoned by AOL? Are we are on our own here? I don't even have the source code, I just download binaries because I trusted them to have done it right, now I find that it's broken and they refuse to fix it.
I think we can lay the blame for Mozilla's many flaws at the feet of it's Cathedral-style development model. It was basically a big company project, only they didn't pay the programmers, figuring that was enough to make it Open Source. Well sorry, Sunny Jim, that's not how it works. You need to accept bugfixes from people once in a while too.
I tried countless times to send them patches for such egregious errors as allowing javascripted emails to both access files on the HD and automatically send out new messages but they said it was a feature people used. Yeah, used to crack machines. Idiots. I'll stick with IE if you don't mind.
I guess I'll just have to stop buying CDs and start downloading more MP3s then. From people who've made slightly noisy, but free copies from their stereos.
I predict that this booklet will be just like those that we all received in health class that told us "drugs are bad, mmmkay?" Now, 20 years later, important new studies are establishing that marijuana and even heroin are nothing like as harmful as were thought and may even have major benefits.
Similarly, there is a growing contingent in the physics community that is questioning the feasibility of 1960's technology being able to land a man on the moon. Keep in mind the primitive computation available then and you will realize what I mean. Then there's the many scientific, errr, irregularities that have been noted in the films, transcripts and other records of the "landing". For instance, it supposedly took 3 days to travel to the moon, 250,000 miles away. That's a mere 3500 mi/hr and yet the propellent they (claim to have) used should have been pushing them in the 10's of thousands of mi/hr.
Until these issues are cleared up (and NASA has only ever concerned itself with the easily-confused issues such as camera angles) I feel the only logical conclusion is that the moon landings haven't happened yet.
This decision was bad news for MS in the long run
on
Microsoft's New Hurdles
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· Score: -1, Interesting
All the Linux zealots who know nothing about economics are dismayed that MS is getting off with a slap on the wrist, totally unaware that this decision actually spell the end of MS as we know it.
Microsoft has always been one to cost-optimize their revenue side financials. Under the new agreement, however, they will need to inflate their income-stream differentials which is a well-known death rattle for a large corporation.
The first book was pretty good, though it went on for a long time and pretened to have a lot more significance to just end with "it turns out the big worms are part of a sprinkler system". Plus it seems like a lot of the ambience was stolen from Star Wars (Tatooine anyone?).
But that's neither here nor there. My main point is that I had no idea there were more Dune books still being made. I managed to slog through the second one and the third one I used as a paperweight for a while. Are there really people out there who read this same pseudo-intellectual tripe 9 times and then demanded an additional book?
Ummmm...OK. Well, let's think about this for a second.
Light travels as waves, right? When two waves cross or meet at the same place, interference occurs. The interference can create light or dark spots if the light is monochromatic. If there are different wavelengths (==colors) involved the light and dark spots may be different colors depending one which waves interfered in what way at a particular point. This must be the idea they are basing their display on.
Unfortunately, I think/. has been trolled. The amount of interference that occurs depends on the distance the waves travel. So if you move your head a little bit, the entire screen changes. "A little bit" is going to be a significant fraction of a wavelenght, call it a few femtometers. I don't know about you, but I don't think I can hold that still.
Why should we limit the benefits of unions to just programmers and IT drones? What about engineers and scientists as well?
Many's the time the other PhD's and I down at the lab have grumbled about how we get low wages despite the fact we are building the future. If only there was some way we could organize and demand some respect and acknowledgement. Forming a union sounds like a great idea. If we got enough backing we could even demand that the fat-cat politicians be kicked out of Washington and that the intelligentsia (by which I mean me and the people I work with) be put in charge.
His examples are clear and useful and I look forward to the day when most Linux programmers will have been taught using this book. I wish there was a way to get current Linux programmers to read it, because his advice is very sound and would make for much higher quality software than you see in the Linux world today.
The current Linux programming wisdom comes from Richard Stevens, a know-nothing hack who spends more time talking about the out-dated concept of filesystem permissions and socket programming than he spends on GUI design! I mean, for crying out loud, Dick, this is the Aughts! We "aught" to be optimizing for the user experience, not ivory tower "engineering principles"!
Anyway, throw away your copy of Linux Kernel Internals because this book replaces it...and then some!
Lasers work by creating an inversion of atoms into an excited state and then releasing that exciting energy in a burst. But exciting the atoms obviously takes energy and, by E=mc^2, it takes a LOT. Industrial and scientific lasers can manage this by being plugged in to a dedicated power supply capable of delivering the gigawattage required for even small lasers, but a soldier in the field clearly doesn't have the luxury of an outlet needed to power his weapon.
I would like to know what happened to one of the most insightful and prolific (not to mention good at spelling) writers Slashdot has ever had.
I would also like to know why Slashdot is suddenly pandering to the Silicon Valley crowd by moving the servers to the West Coast, leaving us Right Coasters with high latency and slow connections (than usual, I mean).
How many queries/second will you have? How many concurrent users? Etc.
From my own experience, I can tell you that number of processors is vital. We use SQL Server in the lab to keep track of timesheets and vacation days. We have about 20 employees, so that machine is always thrashing hard, especially right now during the holiday season. But we've only got 3/4 of a processor in there now. I'm hoping to convince the big boss to let us add another 2/3 processor (which would bring us up to almost e-1 processors) and maybe even add about gigabytes of harddrive space.
The people who are ordering stuff over the Internet and from J Crew/LL Bean are the richest 10% of the country[1]. It is only fair that we contribute our share towards running it and take some of the crushing burden off of the WalMart-shopping, non-SUV-driving, non-alternative-remedy-using hoi polloi.
[1]Wearings jeans and a free tshirt, avoiding showers and eating macaroni and cheese all the time doesn't make you poor. It makes you trendy.
That was my attraction to the show as well. So why the typical heroes on FMC (and the typical anti-heroes on JW)? Why not get some smart, non-clownish hosts for both these shows?
Slashdot Mirror
But I really can't take their claims of security seriously. Elementary entropy considerations can be used to show that no system employing Bluetooth can be 100% secure regardless of the use of buzzword-friendly "biometrics".
Red light has the shortest wavelength possible, which is why it is used for mice. A small movement will then correspond to a large number of wavelengths, making tracking the mouse's position easier. If you switch to blue, the longest possible wavelength, your mouse will be essentially useless.
A boat is designed to be a wing. You want the least amount of boat in the water that you possibly can, so you construct it to lift up and out the faster you go. But on land, you want the vehicle to press down onto the ground, the opposite direction as in the water.
Like the space shuttle, this "landshark" sounds like it was engineered for coolness and not from genuine requirements.
1) It's pronounced "gooey-duck" which not only is reminiscent of "GUI" but is also non-intuitive, perfect for a Linux app.
2) The "duck" part is another bird.
3) The geoduck is a very large, slow creature. Much like Phoenix, despite their claims.
The entire web was founded on the concept that content was king and now it seems all we can talk about it format. I bet Tim Bernard Lee would be spinning in his grave if he knew Slashdot was running articles on how sites should be choosing fonts.
Windows keeps on getting better and better. From it's award-winning design to it's revolutionary kernel architecture, Windows is the best in the biz. Says Internet Guru Dan Hertzfeld, "I rely on Windows and Office for Windows every day to deliver top-notch performance and it has never let me down." Many others praise Windows, too, including Chief Technology Officer Bill Patterson of Ford Motor Company, "Windows allows us to leverage our most valuable assets, people, into a world-class synergy to delight customers all over the globe."
I don't want my kids watching that violent and sexually-explicit stuff.
And damn, I'm pretty sharp to have caught this, since I'm pushing 90 now...
I run a large particle physics laboratory. As you can imagine, we have a lot of computers. Some of them are traditional desktop PeeCees for checking email and viewing pr0n. But a lot of them are data gathering, collating and even simulation machines. These boxin' are Big Iron but there's no need to waste cycles on an Operating System when all that power could be directed towards running software.
Similarly, the more successful PDAs and cellphones don't have room for a lot of overhead, so the Operating System is dispensed with. There's no hard drive anyway, so what would you need it for?
This should have been obvious to everyone. TAANSTAAFL. The Second Law includes information, as Shannon proved, which means that the Internet couldn't just spring into being. It had to come at a cost and that cost is now being paid by the environment. When the poor village dwellers that inhabit 90% of the world realize what we've done, they will probably destroy our precious pr0n storage system and revert all those resources and energy back to the Earth where they belong, causing a resurgence in flora and fauna. We'll probably see a reversal of the global cooling trend, too.
vi - With their small hands and weak retention, 8 year olds will never be able to master the keyboard spans that Emacs requires, nor memorize the lists of arcane commands.
Languages - You aren't seriously suggesting that the upcoming generation should use an interpreted language, are you? If so, say hello to 20 more years of code bloat. I think C (and definitely not the horror that is C++) would be the ideal astere first language for anyone, especially a young, impressionable mind.
Mathematica - There is no more suitable program for 8 year old math than mathematica. I mean, you installed Linux where they used to have Apple ]['s, right? So it sounds like you want to give them the big iron (heh, not THAT big iron). So don't try to give them "Blue Teaches Addition" or anything lame like that--go for the gusto and install the full professional version of Mathematica.
These bugs were found last weekend. It has been literally days and nobody has fixed these problems yet. Has Mozilla been abandoned by AOL? Are we are on our own here? I don't even have the source code, I just download binaries because I trusted them to have done it right, now I find that it's broken and they refuse to fix it.
I tried countless times to send them patches for such egregious errors as allowing javascripted emails to both access files on the HD and automatically send out new messages but they said it was a feature people used. Yeah, used to crack machines. Idiots. I'll stick with IE if you don't mind.
I guess I'll just have to stop buying CDs and start downloading more MP3s then. From people who've made slightly noisy, but free copies from their stereos.
Similarly, there is a growing contingent in the physics community that is questioning the feasibility of 1960's technology being able to land a man on the moon. Keep in mind the primitive computation available then and you will realize what I mean. Then there's the many scientific, errr, irregularities that have been noted in the films, transcripts and other records of the "landing". For instance, it supposedly took 3 days to travel to the moon, 250,000 miles away. That's a mere 3500 mi/hr and yet the propellent they (claim to have) used should have been pushing them in the 10's of thousands of mi/hr.
Until these issues are cleared up (and NASA has only ever concerned itself with the easily-confused issues such as camera angles) I feel the only logical conclusion is that the moon landings haven't happened yet.
Microsoft has always been one to cost-optimize their revenue side financials. Under the new agreement, however, they will need to inflate their income-stream differentials which is a well-known death rattle for a large corporation.
But that's neither here nor there. My main point is that I had no idea there were more Dune books still being made. I managed to slog through the second one and the third one I used as a paperweight for a while. Are there really people out there who read this same pseudo-intellectual tripe 9 times and then demanded an additional book?
Light travels as waves, right? When two waves cross or meet at the same place, interference occurs. The interference can create light or dark spots if the light is monochromatic. If there are different wavelengths (==colors) involved the light and dark spots may be different colors depending one which waves interfered in what way at a particular point. This must be the idea they are basing their display on.
Unfortunately, I think /. has been trolled. The amount of interference that occurs depends on the distance the waves travel. So if you move your head a little bit, the entire screen changes. "A little bit" is going to be a significant fraction of a wavelenght, call it a few femtometers. I don't know about you, but I don't think I can hold that still.
Many's the time the other PhD's and I down at the lab have grumbled about how we get low wages despite the fact we are building the future. If only there was some way we could organize and demand some respect and acknowledgement. Forming a union sounds like a great idea. If we got enough backing we could even demand that the fat-cat politicians be kicked out of Washington and that the intelligentsia (by which I mean me and the people I work with) be put in charge.
The current Linux programming wisdom comes from Richard Stevens, a know-nothing hack who spends more time talking about the out-dated concept of filesystem permissions and socket programming than he spends on GUI design! I mean, for crying out loud, Dick, this is the Aughts! We "aught" to be optimizing for the user experience, not ivory tower "engineering principles"!
Anyway, throw away your copy of Linux Kernel Internals because this book replaces it...and then some!
Lasers work by creating an inversion of atoms into an excited state and then releasing that exciting energy in a burst. But exciting the atoms obviously takes energy and, by E=mc^2, it takes a LOT. Industrial and scientific lasers can manage this by being plugged in to a dedicated power supply capable of delivering the gigawattage required for even small lasers, but a soldier in the field clearly doesn't have the luxury of an outlet needed to power his weapon.
I would also like to know why Slashdot is suddenly pandering to the Silicon Valley crowd by moving the servers to the West Coast, leaving us Right Coasters with high latency and slow connections (than usual, I mean).
From my own experience, I can tell you that number of processors is vital. We use SQL Server in the lab to keep track of timesheets and vacation days. We have about 20 employees, so that machine is always thrashing hard, especially right now during the holiday season. But we've only got 3/4 of a processor in there now. I'm hoping to convince the big boss to let us add another 2/3 processor (which would bring us up to almost e-1 processors) and maybe even add about gigabytes of harddrive space.
[1]Wearings jeans and a free tshirt, avoiding showers and eating macaroni and cheese all the time doesn't make you poor. It makes you trendy.
That was my attraction to the show as well. So why the typical heroes on FMC (and the typical anti-heroes on JW)? Why not get some smart, non-clownish hosts for both these shows?