I love science. I love big science. But science is more than pretty
pictures. It is a process of creating, testing and destroying
hypotheses to push our knowledge to the edge of the envelope.
The Hubble telescope does none of these things. Of course, neither
does an electron microscope or a hammer--because they are merely
tools. But when wielded by a trained, creative and insightful
scientist they can help produce startling new theories that make our
life better.
But the Hubble telescope isn't in the hands of trained, creative and
insightful scientists. It is in the hands of bureaucrats and
politicians who dole out a minute here and a minute there on whatever
pet projects they happen to favor. When Scientist A creates a theory
based on an observation made with Hubble, these chairwarmers refuse to
let Scientist B use the 'scope to attempt demolish that theory for
fear it will make Hubble look bad.
We obviously can't afford to make enough for everyone, so the only
solution is to let no one have it. Decommission the Hubble
There's also a very shallow learning curve! And I'd like to reiterate your point about the upgrade treadmill--I've had my kernel installed since...gosh, it must have been mid-June when I d/l'd and compiled this baby. And XP's latest patch came out what, last week? HAHA, M$ SUXORS!
It'll also be pretty sweet when all that GPL'd, SouthWest-oriented county management software can finally get used. It's been ramping up in usability on SourceForge for literally months and it's time to give that stuff a spin around the block!
I'm really really really excited to hear about that New Mexico county that has a rule against using Microsoft software. As soon as some Slashdotter points it out to them they'll have no choice but to spend next weekend upgrading to Linux! It'll cost thousands, if not millions, of dollars to convert and retrain everyone, not to mention re-write all their internal software, but it will have the desired effect of marginally reducing M$ income and that means we win!
Well, unless they decide to use MacOS. Or just change the rule. But honestly, with all the Linux users that probably live in that county, they'd be stupid not to take advantage of it.
I can see a few bad outcomes. First, it will splinter the development community. There will be numerous sourceforge projects started, only to be abandoned when no one is skilled enough with GIMP to create themselves an icon. This is development effort that could have been directed towards making KDE themes and Linux will only suffer as a result.
Second, assuming someone succeeds, a large cash infusion has proved to be the downfall of many Linux companies. Roger Stallman was right, money is the "root" (ha!) of all evil, just look at companies like RedHat and VA Linux Something.
Third, even if they succeed and no one is killed in the process, what possible use could Linux be on an XBox? I heard they use some kind of proprietary game format that Linux won't be able to read anyway. "DVD" or something.
I'm a geek. I like fast cars, fast women and fast computers.
However, I'm also concerned about the proliferation of pollution and
greenhouse gasses.
Let's take watercooling as an example. Heating water breaks the
molecules apart. This is OK (up to a point) for pure water, but
nobody actually uses pure water. Instead we use tap water,
full of lead, acidophilus and other harmful toxins. When the heat
from the overclocked PC causes those toxins to be released into the
air--whoa nellie, we have ourselves an EPA Superfund site in a
bottle.
Of course, anybody who's even slightly concerned about the environment
knows all the above already. The trouble is self-centered morons like
this guy who think the rules don't apply to him or that "just one more
overclocked PC won't hurt anything". So please, Slashdot, quit
glorifying this destructive pasttime and instead advocate the right
solution: a new PC every six months.
I always see a ton of trolls talking about how cell phones give us cancer and I'd like to post some real, science-based information to forestall the inevitable tide. We are right to be skeptical of outrageous claims like "my cell phone
gave me cancer" and I applaud the many geeks who, in this story and
others, have stood up to suspected pseudo-science and brought to bear
a modicum of scientific knowledge.
However, there are significant reasons to believe the claim is true in
this case. For instance, consider electric fields. You may not be
aware of this or have thought of it this way, but a microwave oven is
basically just a big, unmodulated radio station broadcasting in the
microwave band instead of the radio band. And what do we use
microwave ovens for? Cooking things.
And microwaves, like all electromagnetic radiation, are caused by
what? Electric fields. And a major source of electric fields and
broadcast power is what? Cell phones. And we put cell phones where?
Next to our genitals and next to our brains[1].
So, while I love my personal computer, SUV, air-conditioning and other
marvels of modern life I Just Say No to cancer-causing cell phones.
This story warms the cockles of my heart. I really love it when a little guy is gets back at big, faceless corporation by putting resources together in unexpected ways like this. I mean, here he is, buy two connections and getting 1.8 times the bandwidth! And for only a modest outlay of $400! Ingenious and I bet the DSL/cable providers are beating their heads trying to find a way to discourage this kind of activity which must really eat into their profits.
That's very interesting, considering the 1976 case, "Blount vs McIverson" wherein the Fed Gov't claimed that moon rocks were public property in the same way Earth rocks are. In that landmark case it was established that rocks can be bought and sold irrespective of the Apollo program having picked them up originally.
I use it on all my webserver at home. But for work I'm forced to use IIS and stories like this are the reason why. Slashdot, you aren't doing Apache any favors by publishing this kind of thing--it only makes Open Source software look bad. Please, keep it under your hat.
but is this really a good idea? First of all, it is going to conflate Linux with communism which has been a long-standing problem, given the anti-commercial GPL. Second, "Made in China" is something red-blooded True Amercians bristle at. Couldn't a home-grown, do-it-yourself OS like Linux PDA be based right here in its home country of the good ol' USA?
There is plenty of HD space to go around, a few gigs of MP3's aren't such a big deal. And most of my coworkers love listening to ZZ Top, TMBG and Bach on heavy rotation. The only thing I can really see them objecting to is stealing IP on company time but come one, everybody does it!
There is no way to "fix the spam problem". Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications. Spam is noise on a data channel. Measurements suggest that the amount of spam we are seeing is slightly higher than the nlog(n) amount that Shannon predicted. This is probably due to people responding to their spam emails because, whether in jest or not, this relabels them as data instead of noise. The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.
This book is awesome. It shows in practical detail how one could go about ridding society of ills such as racism, sexism and terrorism simply by making visible all the details of what bills you pay and how you structure your XML. He has taken the "information wants to be free" paradigm to it's logical limit and found that, while the transition might be a little painful, a Big Brother society is totally workable, at least for the majority.
enterprise porn. Sure with Linux you can view jpgs and even the occasional animated gif. But Linux's support for high-end AVIs and and quicktime codecs is sadly lacking.
and might I say that this is great news for Linux. For too long users have been having to remember filenames during save operations and now that this barrier to entry has disappeared I think we will see a large influx of users coming over from Microsoft. I think the only remaining problems are font management, DVD watching and support for IE.
The IT professionals among us are rightly concerned about software
security implementations, especially from a well-known company in
Washington State. The even more knowledgeable are concerned about the
protocols themselves. This concern is 10 times greater when the
network data is whizzing through the air for anyone to intercept.
Luckily I've had an idea that may prove fruitful as a first line of
defense against tactics such as war hacking and driving.
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a
small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless
networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by
hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided
wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is
impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can
propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium
should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge
quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided
wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter.
Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of
electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making
the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this
issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems
like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
At the lab, we do simulations of nuclear bomb explosions, particle interactions, etc all the time. The "virtual events" are critical in making sure our equations are accurate and save a lot of resources and money vs actually exploding a bomb. However, keep in mind that the simulation is only as accurate as our knowledge of it. We don't actually gain new information from the simulation (new insight, yes, new information no).
The same is true of virtual machines. Simulating how a computer might react to certain error codes and so forth is all right in small doses, but the only way to get real data is go out there and buy some actual hardware.
When I got my iPod I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! With its innovative design and sleek styling, it brought me to the forefront of MP3 technology! Unfortunately, I don't own a Mac, due to budget constraints. Then I discovered XPlay and my life was changed forever! Just by following a few simple steps I was able to connect my iPod to Windows and download hundreds of my favorite hits from Celine Dion, N'Sync and many more!
Thanks XPlay!
Slashdot: Nobody has fewer commercial breaks and gets you back to the technical article faster!
First of all, I think you are dismissing trolls too soon. In nature, lions and jackals cull the slow and stupid animals from the herd, but there aren't very many ISP's in the middle of the African savannah so we have to rely on other means to get the slow and stupid off the 'net. Trolls are the answer--once someone bites on a troll they are forever known as a World Class Moron that can safely be ignored. (To a slashdot reader, being ignored--nobody listening to them spouting punditry from every smelly orifice, is the death penalty).
Second...well, I guess I said everything that needs saying above. In short, don't bite and you won't get bitten.
My organization uses embedded Linux[1] and have found RedHat's offering to be of the first water. High uptimes, awesome flexibility, great documentation and industry-standard support have made it Number One in our book. Of course, while it is certainly the best embedded OS out there, it still has a ways to go before it is ideal. For instance, I with embedded Linux a better interface than the CLI and there's always the specter of fragmentation to deal with. Still, on the whole I think Tiemann has played well with the mediocre hand that Linus dealth him and I salute him for it.
[1]We have it running on our particle accelerator and capturing data that can be pulled up, real time, on the member scientists browsers either in the office or in the field.
Slashdot has done it again, we got a CEO in the microscope and asked him the tough questions and he had to answer to us, the Linux community. I just wish he could have taken time to address concerns that many have that Linux is fracturing into a multitude of incompatible versions at the kernel level.
Take the memory management or disk allocation buffer patches. RedHat includes them, Debian rejects them as being too unstable (as if Debian users know more about software development than Linus).
Anyway, you'd think that Mr Love could have looked up from the bottom line long enough to look us in the eye before lying through his teeth.
Slashdot Mirror
The Hubble telescope does none of these things. Of course, neither does an electron microscope or a hammer--because they are merely tools. But when wielded by a trained, creative and insightful scientist they can help produce startling new theories that make our life better.
But the Hubble telescope isn't in the hands of trained, creative and insightful scientists. It is in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians who dole out a minute here and a minute there on whatever pet projects they happen to favor. When Scientist A creates a theory based on an observation made with Hubble, these chairwarmers refuse to let Scientist B use the 'scope to attempt demolish that theory for fear it will make Hubble look bad.
We obviously can't afford to make enough for everyone, so the only solution is to let no one have it. Decommission the Hubble
It'll also be pretty sweet when all that GPL'd, SouthWest-oriented county management software can finally get used. It's been ramping up in usability on SourceForge for literally months and it's time to give that stuff a spin around the block!
It's a great time to be a Linux fanatic!
Well, unless they decide to use MacOS. Or just change the rule. But honestly, with all the Linux users that probably live in that county, they'd be stupid not to take advantage of it.
Second, assuming someone succeeds, a large cash infusion has proved to be the downfall of many Linux companies. Roger Stallman was right, money is the "root" (ha!) of all evil, just look at companies like RedHat and VA Linux Something.
Third, even if they succeed and no one is killed in the process, what possible use could Linux be on an XBox? I heard they use some kind of proprietary game format that Linux won't be able to read anyway. "DVD" or something.
Let's take watercooling as an example. Heating water breaks the molecules apart. This is OK (up to a point) for pure water, but nobody actually uses pure water. Instead we use tap water, full of lead, acidophilus and other harmful toxins. When the heat from the overclocked PC causes those toxins to be released into the air--whoa nellie, we have ourselves an EPA Superfund site in a bottle.
Of course, anybody who's even slightly concerned about the environment knows all the above already. The trouble is self-centered morons like this guy who think the rules don't apply to him or that "just one more overclocked PC won't hurt anything". So please, Slashdot, quit glorifying this destructive pasttime and instead advocate the right solution: a new PC every six months.
However, there are significant reasons to believe the claim is true in this case. For instance, consider electric fields. You may not be aware of this or have thought of it this way, but a microwave oven is basically just a big, unmodulated radio station broadcasting in the microwave band instead of the radio band. And what do we use microwave ovens for? Cooking things.
And microwaves, like all electromagnetic radiation, are caused by what? Electric fields. And a major source of electric fields and broadcast power is what? Cell phones. And we put cell phones where? Next to our genitals and next to our brains[1].
So, while I love my personal computer, SUV, air-conditioning and other marvels of modern life I Just Say No to cancer-causing cell phones.
[1] For me this is two separate locations, YMMV
I just can't stop laughing.
I'd like to see them weasel out of that one.
This is great news for Linux!
I use it on all my webserver at home. But for work I'm forced to use IIS and stories like this are the reason why. Slashdot, you aren't doing Apache any favors by publishing this kind of thing--it only makes Open Source software look bad. Please, keep it under your hat.
but is this really a good idea? First of all, it is going to conflate Linux with communism which has been a long-standing problem, given the anti-commercial GPL. Second, "Made in China" is something red-blooded True Amercians bristle at. Couldn't a home-grown, do-it-yourself OS like Linux PDA be based right here in its home country of the good ol' USA?
The headline has "boxen" instead of "boxes". Please fix, thanks!
There is plenty of HD space to go around, a few gigs of MP3's aren't such a big deal. And most of my coworkers love listening to ZZ Top, TMBG and Bach on heavy rotation. The only thing I can really see them objecting to is stealing IP on company time but come one, everybody does it!
There is no way to "fix the spam problem". Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications. Spam is noise on a data channel. Measurements suggest that the amount of spam we are seeing is slightly higher than the nlog(n) amount that Shannon predicted. This is probably due to people responding to their spam emails because, whether in jest or not, this relabels them as data instead of noise. The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.
This book is awesome. It shows in practical detail how one could go about ridding society of ills such as racism, sexism and terrorism simply by making visible all the details of what bills you pay and how you structure your XML. He has taken the "information wants to be free" paradigm to it's logical limit and found that, while the transition might be a little painful, a Big Brother society is totally workable, at least for the majority.
Great work!
enterprise porn. Sure with Linux you can view jpgs and even the occasional animated gif. But Linux's support for high-end AVIs and and quicktime codecs is sadly lacking.
and might I say that this is great news for Linux. For too long users have been having to remember filenames during save operations and now that this barrier to entry has disappeared I think we will see a large influx of users coming over from Microsoft. I think the only remaining problems are font management, DVD watching and support for IE.
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
The same is true of virtual machines. Simulating how a computer might react to certain error codes and so forth is all right in small doses, but the only way to get real data is go out there and buy some actual hardware.
Just my $.02.
Thanks XPlay!
Slashdot: Nobody has fewer commercial breaks and gets you back to the technical article faster!
When it begins to interfere with TV we start complaining. But where was the uproar when wireless networking started interfering with radio astronomy?
Check it out:
Second...well, I guess I said everything that needs saying above. In short, don't bite and you won't get bitten.
[1]We have it running on our particle accelerator and capturing data that can be pulled up, real time, on the member scientists browsers either in the office or in the field.
Take the memory management or disk allocation buffer patches. RedHat includes them, Debian rejects them as being too unstable (as if Debian users know more about software development than Linus).
Anyway, you'd think that Mr Love could have looked up from the bottom line long enough to look us in the eye before lying through his teeth.