A laser is a light source that creates coherent light by bouncing photons backwards and forwards through an active medium with mirrors. The light it discharges doesn't have to be in a perfectly straight beam, in fact no laser has ever been made that shoots out a perfectly straight beam. After passing through a lens the light would still be homogeneous even though it would flare out more.
In answer to the grandparents post: no, lasers only interfere cameras because of their intensity in a small area, spread that area out and you start requiring a laser diode the size of a car to do anything except provide extra illumination.
You know, he's a pretty ordinary dude. And he is a a lot like those dudes described in the article, in that he's stuck doing a job that doesn't give much satisfaction. He grinds away, flying around a boring part of space, keeping the peace, dreaming about the glory of the NEG Marine Corps who won't let him in because he has to do his current job 'cause noone else wants to do it. Then he gets a chance to prove himself, and to get satisfaction from his own existence by doing a task that actually stimulates him on an intellectual and emotional level.
When I'm out there, gutting Skaarj, dismembering mercenaries and doing nasty stuff to equally nasty creatures, I think about the hard choices he must face every day. His responsibilities to the community and his friends. About doing what's right, but still true to himself. I make him excel in his work, but make sure that he never looses sight of what he is really doing it for, and that his life has consequences.
Unreal II is deep, really deep.
Ok, maybe it is a little mean for me to be lampooning what seems to me to be the noblest idea for a game ever (I don't mean Unreal II), but to me the idea of a role model, especially a racially based role model in a game is something that can never work. If you have control of a character in a game, that makes you intrinsically better than them. How can you be positively influenced by someone who you totally and utterly dominate? This sounds to me as unlikely as an abusive husband having a healthy and fulfilling relationship with the wife that he beats. Positive role models in games has absolutly no precident, and I am guessing that there is a good reason why. After all, is it just black people who lack a suitable role model in games? White people have Duke Nukem and the dude from GTA3, I think games are just naturally devoid of good characters of any race.
But anyway, I really wish the dude well, and I hope I am wrong about game psychology because I would love to see a game make a positive difference in someone's life.
You'd be supprised how modular the linux kernel actually is. One time, a couple of years ago there was some bug with the VM that was crashing my computer for some reason, so what I did is I dragged and dropped the VM section from an old version into the new version, and it actually worked. All without having to even use a terminal (except for in the compilation of cause), let alone a text editor.
I think there are some assumptions going around that because linux is monolithic, it is also a mess of spaghetti code with no real structure. This is simply not true. My guess at why linux undergoes a complete branching process rather than a subsystem splitup is that it is simply easier and safer. Packaging everything in modules would require plenty of cross-version testing before anything is considered stable. Why bother? Who wants just a single chunk of new technology when you can have the whole thing.
Plus, a fully split up design would make it far harder to make fast structural changes without huge amounts of negociating between teams. As it stands Torvalds can just do what he wants and everything goes right.
I am not anwering the original poster. It is clear to me that this is just a deliberate troll, and a damn skillful one and I respect that. Kudos to whoever posted it. But this is a response to the four individual people who modded this up and obviously need a response.
This is not a gnome application. I don't really know what it was doing on gnomedesktop.org in the first place, it really has nothing to do with gnome (or at least no more than it has to do with XFCE). It's a GTK2 application which uses wxwindows to abstract most of the GTK2 stuff anyway so it wouldn't be hard to port to another toolkit. You don't have to be running gnome to use it, you don't even need to have gnome installed.
GTK2 which is what it actually uses is a fairly good library to base such an application on. It provides a very nice user interface with only a bit under 5 or so megs of dependancies above the stuff that comes with X. (when everthing is compiled and installed)
Pango is really part of GTK. Freetype is pretty much used by everyone (gnome, KDE, games, most other things), and the rest of the stuff you mention comes with X (the ones that actually exist that is). Personally, I have no idea whatsoever what you are complaing about. Do you expect everyone to use Xaw or make their interface from scratch with raw X calls? Maybe you beleive that all sound editing should be done on the console. You are really putting a stupid expectation on developers and suggesting a course of action that would hold back creating good gui programs for linux for ages.
Personally, I suggest that you just go ahead and install GTK and QT as well as anything else apps you want ask for, as well as their respective dependancies. Then what I suggest you do after that is shut up. This process will only take you half an hour at the most and will allow you to run many more applications without having to complain about it.
I'm a gnome developer, and a proud gentoo user and I would guess that the majority of your bug reports, even if you are running ~arch would be fairly out of date. The gentoo gnome team do an exceptional job at what they do, but in reality, by the time a gnome package becomes stable on gentoo, or even a masked ebuild pops up in portage, the package's development would have moved on.
I'm not suggesting you stop making bug reports or anything, they are often useful and there is never any harm in them, especially if you make them clear enough to check quickly. But I kind of think suggesting gentoo is _that_ cutting edge is kind of stretching it a little far.
And I really hope nobody mods this up, because I really shouldn't be discoraging bug reports or bad mouthing gentoo like this.
It's incredible that a gadget that is designed to be cheap, utilitarian and mass produced still looks better than any custom riced up case mods I have ever seen before.
AMD could actually be superior, and the/. community understands this and sees no point tiptoing around it.
Slashdot has become populated by people who just personally like AMD.
If the first situation is the case then why should slashdot give the Celeron equal attention? If the second is the case then even if Celerons were superior why shouldn't a community be able to talk about things it likes.
Complaints about bias on a community newssite is stupid.
As an Australian computer geek, I don't want to sound like I'm getting all touchy and emotional here. But really, most of these worms are probably coming from some compromised win98 boxes used by some computer illiterate 14 year old to swap songs and look up game cheats out in suburbia.
I don't think anyone cares if these systems are further hacked by NK crackers, and I don't think the abundance of these systems really indicates anything whatsoever about the general state of security in an area.
And, to me, these suggestions that Australian security may be a little lacking don't really seem to be substantiated. I think the general thinking overseas may be that an Australian is great to have around when one is having trouble with crocodiles, snakes or other wild animals but when it comes to locking down a system, maybe you better go for someone a little more orthodox. One gets the feeling that the butch image is thought of as a great quality for toughguy roles in movies. But it seems that just because you can't picture someone declaring that "that's not a tightly secured firewall configuration, this is a tightly configured firewall configuration" without sounding like a cheesy computer science school review it is thought that an Australian can't configure iptables as well as his/her foreign counterpart.
And for what it's worth, even if no Australian could even use a computer to type a letter to their mother, American females would still find us just as irresistible simply because of of our accents and dry senses of humor.:P
As a rabid left wing christian fundimentalist I wholeheartadly agree.
Howard and Costello may go to church, but their oppression of the poor and their warmongering is against my personal morality. I am voting Labour this coming election because that is what God would want me to do
It could simply be that Microsoft does not trust the open source community not to flagrantly disregard all microsoft patents when modifying OO.o if they were given immunity from civil action.
That said, I this is Microsoft and their legal actions have rarely been that benign in the past.
P.S. Slave labour is mentioned in the last three paragraphs of page 2. The original post WAS a troll because the article does go into a little bit of deatail of Von Brahn's personal involvment in this.
Yeah, that's true and all, but what has that got to do with the technology behind the V2? (which if you had read the article you would know that it is based on)
u-238 is the most common and stable isotope of uranium... what the hell does that have to do with rockets, germany and slave labour?
Does He-4 denote a preference to pepsi over coke... if so maybe W-184 means someone may vote conservative and Au-197 could mean that someone is inclined to be biased in favour of wearing boxers rather than jocks.
I think the article is about the scientific development, not the actual construction. And I think the fact that they were constructed with slave labour is fairly irrelivant since they would have been evil weapons even if they were created by well-payed union workers with health benifits, dental care and 8 weeks holiday a year.
You probably don't want a logarithmic delay, logarithmic curves pretty much flatten off as they go along. You would probably want an exponential delay with a very low base (like 1.01 or so) that way it will start off with a very very small delay, but when the errors get big, the delays will get real big, real fast.
I find most people who dislike Starship Troopers do so because they don't understand what it's about. That's not to say that it is impossible to hate starship troopers while still understanding it, it just doesn't happen quite as often.
The reason the characters have no depth, the reason everything they say is just a corny throwaway line delivered in a manner more suitable to a porn movie (which is not far off in some of the scenes in S.T.) is actually part of the portrayal of a fascist dystopia. The society in Starship Troopers is a shallow one, but still an interesting one. Its nationalist (although based on a race, not a nation) values and its martial focus is explored by the brainless way the characters go through their roles. The baseness of the action scenes are comparable to the movies described in 1984 (such as the one with the helicopter and the boat) and the pointless nudity is similar to the erosion of social values found in Brave New World, so the sheer gratuitous nature of the entire film is what makes it almost as deep as those two books.
If you don't believe me, watch it again and try to comprehend the subtleties of it, like who exactly caused the war to start with. If you watch closely, it also gives quite a bit of information about the new feudal system and the military based "citizen" overclass that they had created. Try to pick out the little lies in the propaganda film and notice the spin it gives for the leaders doing some very immoral things.
I think social forecasts such as the dystopia in Starship Troopers to be some of the best Sci-fi out there, because it gives a useful warning for the present. Especially after the world trade center attacks where violence to avenge violence is seen as a social priority, movies like that help show that having a martial society destroys the parts of ourselves that we hold dear more than the enemy (whether giant bugs or saudi-terrorists) could ever do.
I just wrote a letter to The Honorable Mr Philip Ruddock. I suggest everyone else do the same. Enough political pressure and hopefully he wont be extrodited.
In Australian fedral law, if someone shoots a man over a state border (as has happened in the past) they are subject to the laws of the state where they were when the act was committed. Crimes are actions committed by bad people, and as such they occur where the bad people are. If you screw Australian computers up from the US you will have broken a US law and are subject to their courts, just like if someone distroys a US computer in Australia they have done something bad in Australia and should be punished by the Australian government.
Ok, your fired up ranting is proof that Osama would not get a fair trial by anybody like you.
You've been wronged in a big way, there is no doubt about that. However the very fact that you were wronged means you would possibly be the worst judge over the issue because you are so emotionally tied to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it would be
A laser is a light source that creates coherent light by bouncing photons backwards and forwards through an active medium with mirrors. The light it discharges doesn't have to be in a perfectly straight beam, in fact no laser has ever been made that shoots out a perfectly straight beam. After passing through a lens the light would still be homogeneous even though it would flare out more.
In answer to the grandparents post: no, lasers only interfere cameras because of their intensity in a small area, spread that area out and you start requiring a laser diode the size of a car to do anything except provide extra illumination.
You know, he's a pretty ordinary dude. And he is a a lot like those dudes described in the article, in that he's stuck doing a job that doesn't give much satisfaction. He grinds away, flying around a boring part of space, keeping the peace, dreaming about the glory of the NEG Marine Corps who won't let him in because he has to do his current job 'cause noone else wants to do it. Then he gets a chance to prove himself, and to get satisfaction from his own existence by doing a task that actually stimulates him on an intellectual and emotional level.
When I'm out there, gutting Skaarj, dismembering mercenaries and doing nasty stuff to equally nasty creatures, I think about the hard choices he must face every day. His responsibilities to the community and his friends. About doing what's right, but still true to himself. I make him excel in his work, but make sure that he never looses sight of what he is really doing it for, and that his life has consequences.
Unreal II is deep, really deep.
Ok, maybe it is a little mean for me to be lampooning what seems to me to be the noblest idea for a game ever (I don't mean Unreal II), but to me the idea of a role model, especially a racially based role model in a game is something that can never work. If you have control of a character in a game, that makes you intrinsically better than them. How can you be positively influenced by someone who you totally and utterly dominate? This sounds to me as unlikely as an abusive husband having a healthy and fulfilling relationship with the wife that he beats. Positive role models in games has absolutly no precident, and I am guessing that there is a good reason why. After all, is it just black people who lack a suitable role model in games? White people have Duke Nukem and the dude from GTA3, I think games are just naturally devoid of good characters of any race.
But anyway, I really wish the dude well, and I hope I am wrong about game psychology because I would love to see a game make a positive difference in someone's life.
I think there are some assumptions going around that because linux is monolithic, it is also a mess of spaghetti code with no real structure. This is simply not true. My guess at why linux undergoes a complete branching process rather than a subsystem splitup is that it is simply easier and safer. Packaging everything in modules would require plenty of cross-version testing before anything is considered stable. Why bother? Who wants just a single chunk of new technology when you can have the whole thing.
Plus, a fully split up design would make it far harder to make fast structural changes without huge amounts of negociating between teams. As it stands Torvalds can just do what he wants and everything goes right.
This is not a gnome application. I don't really know what it was doing on gnomedesktop.org in the first place, it really has nothing to do with gnome (or at least no more than it has to do with XFCE). It's a GTK2 application which uses wxwindows to abstract most of the GTK2 stuff anyway so it wouldn't be hard to port to another toolkit. You don't have to be running gnome to use it, you don't even need to have gnome installed.
GTK2 which is what it actually uses is a fairly good library to base such an application on. It provides a very nice user interface with only a bit under 5 or so megs of dependancies above the stuff that comes with X. (when everthing is compiled and installed)
Pango is really part of GTK. Freetype is pretty much used by everyone (gnome, KDE, games, most other things), and the rest of the stuff you mention comes with X (the ones that actually exist that is). Personally, I have no idea whatsoever what you are complaing about. Do you expect everyone to use Xaw or make their interface from scratch with raw X calls? Maybe you beleive that all sound editing should be done on the console. You are really putting a stupid expectation on developers and suggesting a course of action that would hold back creating good gui programs for linux for ages.
Personally, I suggest that you just go ahead and install GTK and QT as well as anything else apps you want ask for, as well as their respective dependancies. Then what I suggest you do after that is shut up. This process will only take you half an hour at the most and will allow you to run many more applications without having to complain about it.
It doesn't matter anyway, KDE isn't going to die any time soon if novell has it or not.
I'm not suggesting you stop making bug reports or anything, they are often useful and there is never any harm in them, especially if you make them clear enough to check quickly. But I kind of think suggesting gentoo is _that_ cutting edge is kind of stretching it a little far.
And I really hope nobody mods this up, because I really shouldn't be discoraging bug reports or bad mouthing gentoo like this.
Kinda sad really.
This could be a product of one of two situations:
AMD could actually be superior, and the /. community understands this and sees no point tiptoing around it.
Slashdot has become populated by people who just personally like AMD.
If the first situation is the case then why should slashdot give the Celeron equal attention? If the second is the case then even if Celerons were superior why shouldn't a community be able to talk about things it likes.
Complaints about bias on a community newssite is stupid.
I don't think anyone cares if these systems are further hacked by NK crackers, and I don't think the abundance of these systems really indicates anything whatsoever about the general state of security in an area.
And, to me, these suggestions that Australian security may be a little lacking don't really seem to be substantiated. I think the general thinking overseas may be that an Australian is great to have around when one is having trouble with crocodiles, snakes or other wild animals but when it comes to locking down a system, maybe you better go for someone a little more orthodox. One gets the feeling that the butch image is thought of as a great quality for toughguy roles in movies. But it seems that just because you can't picture someone declaring that "that's not a tightly secured firewall configuration, this is a tightly configured firewall configuration" without sounding like a cheesy computer science school review it is thought that an Australian can't configure iptables as well as his/her foreign counterpart.
And for what it's worth, even if no Australian could even use a computer to type a letter to their mother, American females would still find us just as irresistible simply because of of our accents and dry senses of humor. :P
As a rabid left wing christian fundimentalist I wholeheartadly agree.
Howard and Costello may go to church, but their oppression of the poor and their warmongering is against my personal morality. I am voting Labour this coming election because that is what God would want me to do
Hmm... I don't know how useful that will be for finding the photographed people, but thanks for linking there, those KD chicks are HOT!
That said, I this is Microsoft and their legal actions have rarely been that benign in the past.
P.S. Slave labour is mentioned in the last three paragraphs of page 2. The original post WAS a troll because the article does go into a little bit of deatail of Von Brahn's personal involvment in this.
Yeah, that's true and all, but what has that got to do with the technology behind the V2? (which if you had read the article you would know that it is based on)
Does He-4 denote a preference to pepsi over coke... if so maybe W-184 means someone may vote conservative and Au-197 could mean that someone is inclined to be biased in favour of wearing boxers rather than jocks.
I think the article is about the scientific development, not the actual construction. And I think the fact that they were constructed with slave labour is fairly irrelivant since they would have been evil weapons even if they were created by well-payed union workers with health benifits, dental care and 8 weeks holiday a year.
Um, is this a troll or are you absolutely ignorent of the second world war?
You probably don't want a logarithmic delay, logarithmic curves pretty much flatten off as they go along. You would probably want an exponential delay with a very low base (like 1.01 or so) that way it will start off with a very very small delay, but when the errors get big, the delays will get real big, real fast.
The reason the characters have no depth, the reason everything they say is just a corny throwaway line delivered in a manner more suitable to a porn movie (which is not far off in some of the scenes in S.T.) is actually part of the portrayal of a fascist dystopia. The society in Starship Troopers is a shallow one, but still an interesting one. Its nationalist (although based on a race, not a nation) values and its martial focus is explored by the brainless way the characters go through their roles. The baseness of the action scenes are comparable to the movies described in 1984 (such as the one with the helicopter and the boat) and the pointless nudity is similar to the erosion of social values found in Brave New World, so the sheer gratuitous nature of the entire film is what makes it almost as deep as those two books.
If you don't believe me, watch it again and try to comprehend the subtleties of it, like who exactly caused the war to start with. If you watch closely, it also gives quite a bit of information about the new feudal system and the military based "citizen" overclass that they had created. Try to pick out the little lies in the propaganda film and notice the spin it gives for the leaders doing some very immoral things.
I think social forecasts such as the dystopia in Starship Troopers to be some of the best Sci-fi out there, because it gives a useful warning for the present. Especially after the world trade center attacks where violence to avenge violence is seen as a social priority, movies like that help show that having a martial society destroys the parts of ourselves that we hold dear more than the enemy (whether giant bugs or saudi-terrorists) could ever do.
Check this out (stolen from another post)
I don't have against Americans in general, but I am sure I will enjoy having a PM that does.
I just wrote a letter to The Honorable Mr Philip Ruddock. I suggest everyone else do the same. Enough political pressure and hopefully he wont be extrodited.
For an Australian patriotism is like falling in love with a callgirl: pointless and humiliating.
Damn I hate my country.
In Australian fedral law, if someone shoots a man over a state border (as has happened in the past) they are subject to the laws of the state where they were when the act was committed. Crimes are actions committed by bad people, and as such they occur where the bad people are. If you screw Australian computers up from the US you will have broken a US law and are subject to their courts, just like if someone distroys a US computer in Australia they have done something bad in Australia and should be punished by the Australian government.
You've been wronged in a big way, there is no doubt about that. However the very fact that you were wronged means you would possibly be the worst judge over the issue because you are so emotionally tied to it.