I am no astronomer but... given a Jupiterlike planet in a Sunlike system, what are the odds about a telescope on a remote star sytem finding the planet in transit during a seven days session?
Like... the star diameter is 1.5 millon km., the planet is 150 000 km. diameter, it orbits at 800 millions km. from the sun in 600 weeks.
The planet can be anywhere on a 4 * PI * (800 000 000 * 800 000 000 ) square km. That's a surface about 8 * 10 exp 18 square km.
In it's orbit, the planet covers 2 * PI * 800 000 000 * 150 000. About 7 * 10 exp 14 square km. During one week it covers only 1/600th: 7/600 * 10 exp 14 square km.
Henceforth, for any observer who doesn't know about it's orbital plane, the odds for this planet to cover a given point ( the center of the star) is about 1 of (600 * 8/ 7 ) * 10 exp. ( 18 - 14 ). That's one in 6857143. Since Jupiter's diameter is about one tenth of the sun's diameter, we can assume our astronomer's odd to about 1 of 700000.
If my numbers are correct, for one detected jovian planet there is about 700000 others undetected! This is quite a lot! ( BTW, our sun is rather small... How many planets can orbit a giant star? A hundred? A thousand? ).
I'd like someone more knowledgable than me to check my numbers...
- No comments about my grammar, please, i'm a French-Canadian doing what he can...
Same old song again and again as soon as we write about Gentoo... You can install a binary distro ( If you dislike Gentoo, you can use another such as Debian or Knoppix and install Portage over it... Just follow instructions at:
And then you upgrade one package at a time in the background when you need to emerge a huge package, you can do it in background ( unless you have a P-1, a P-2 or an old Celeron ) or just do it overnight.
Compile time wasn't a big problem for me ( Athlon-XP 1800+ with KDE and OpenOffice each compiling in one night...)
Japanese were amongst the strongest allies of the americans led coalition during the last war to Iraq. They even lost at least two diplomats in the conflict.
But, hey! They won't lose such a valuable friendship such as America's no?
What a bunch of losers! Lost WW2 in 1945, lost their industrial and economic dominance in the nineties... Now they will probably pay Patriot Scientific whatever they asked without a word of protest, without asking about japaneses being the only ones to pay! Losers!
Imagine: a bunch of OSS developpers hiring a manager to improve their mail client. After a few weeks and a few thousands of $$$, the manager advises them to find a way to execute scripts upon reception on their mail client!
Heh! This would make a lot of sense from a manager's point of view, of course, but 99% of the slashdotters know it's a bad idea. Linux developers have better uses for their meagher resources.
What we need is a standard for things like cut-and-paste, configuration, etc. We can have 100 distributions, 10 toolkits, 5 packagings but we need one kernel to rule them all...
Well 'rule' may not be a happy choice of word for people attached to freedom and progress, but I'm convinced that improving coordination can help a lot.
Moore's law is a marketing thing: it allows corporations to sell you x times the same kind of unit. Remember the escalation of CD-ROM from 1X to around 52X ? I bought 2X, 8X, 16X and 48X. Now, if the 48X were available from the beginning, I could have kept the same unit. But I paid four times for the manufacturer, broker, distributor, etc.
Officially, this escalation from 1X to 52X is the result of technica progress... of course! Then comes the CD-burners. Once again we had 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X... as predicted by Moore's law. I told myself: Strange! apparently they forgot what they discovered when they accelerated CD-ROMs up to 52X! Guess I'll have to upgrade a few times again...
But things could be worse, few are using biodegradable plastic parts wich fails when warranty expires.
As for the new disks, this is catastrophic news! This is still an old, electromechanical technology from the sixties. They can be a lot smaller than a washing machine now, contain many thousand times the data but they will always get lousy access time. Magnetic heads have mass and inertia: they accelerate and decelerate each time they change tracks. When they seek the appropriate track, they need time to stabilize. As the capacity rises, the tracks gets thinner and thinner. Dampening will need more time. I expect that vibrations will be a huge problem very soon.
For about 20 years, I heard about solid state successors to the magnetic disks: Holographic memory, magnetic bubbles, magnetic chips, etc. Then , not a word about these anymore... I suppose they were patented and locked in a drawer. A shame!
I got it myself (first virus in nearly ten years). I dit what you said except that instead of removing Explorer.scr, I opened it with a text editor and removed a big chunk of it. I hope it will not be reinfected since the file is already there! Of course I will drop Kazaa anyway after this.... Thanks a lot, It stopped the nasty worm!
What we need to save ourselves from -You know who- to force his own private standards upon us is not another office suite but a real, open international standard for office files enforced by a renowned organisation such as the International Standards Organisation. When governements and organisms such as United Nations will start to request ISO compatible files, even Microsoft will comply!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft just patented a new file format...
I am no astronomer but... given a Jupiterlike planet in a Sunlike system, what are the odds about a telescope on a remote star sytem finding the planet in transit during a seven days session?
Like... the star diameter is 1.5 millon km., the planet is 150 000 km. diameter, it orbits at 800 millions km. from the sun in 600 weeks.
The planet can be anywhere on a 4 * PI * (800 000 000 * 800 000 000 ) square km. That's a surface about 8 * 10 exp 18 square km.
In it's orbit, the planet covers 2 * PI * 800 000 000 * 150 000. About 7 * 10 exp 14 square km. During one week it covers only 1/600th: 7/600 * 10 exp 14 square km.
Henceforth, for any observer who doesn't know about it's orbital plane, the odds for this planet to cover a given point ( the center of the star) is about 1 of (600 * 8/ 7 ) * 10 exp. ( 18 - 14 ). That's one in 6857143. Since Jupiter's diameter is about one tenth of the sun's diameter, we can assume our astronomer's odd to about 1 of 700000.
If my numbers are correct, for one detected jovian planet there is about 700000 others undetected! This is quite a lot! ( BTW, our sun is rather small... How many planets can orbit a giant star? A hundred? A thousand? ).
I'd like someone more knowledgable than me to check my numbers...
- No comments about my grammar, please, i'm a French-Canadian doing what he can...
And then you upgrade one package at a time in the background when you need to emerge a huge package, you can do it in background ( unless you have a P-1, a P-2 or an old Celeron ) or just do it overnight.
Compile time wasn't a big problem for me ( Athlon-XP 1800+ with KDE and OpenOffice each compiling in one night...)
Japanese were amongst the strongest allies of the americans led coalition during the last war to Iraq. They even lost at least two diplomats in the conflict.
But, hey! They won't lose such a valuable friendship such as America's no?
What a bunch of losers! Lost WW2 in 1945, lost their industrial and economic dominance in the nineties... Now they will probably pay Patriot Scientific whatever they asked without a word of protest, without asking about japaneses being the only ones to pay! Losers!
Imagine: a bunch of OSS developpers hiring a manager to improve their mail client. After a few weeks and a few thousands of $$$, the manager advises them to find a way to execute scripts upon reception on their mail client!
Heh! This would make a lot of sense from a manager's point of view, of course, but 99% of the slashdotters know it's a bad idea. Linux developers have better uses for their meagher resources.
What we need is a standard for things like cut-and-paste, configuration, etc. We can have 100 distributions, 10 toolkits, 5 packagings but we need one kernel to rule them all...
Well 'rule' may not be a happy choice of word for people attached to freedom and progress, but I'm convinced that improving coordination can help a lot.
Moore's law is a marketing thing: it allows corporations to sell you x times the same kind of unit. Remember the escalation of CD-ROM from 1X to around 52X ? I bought 2X, 8X, 16X and 48X. Now, if the 48X were available from the beginning, I could have kept the same unit. But I paid four times for the manufacturer, broker, distributor, etc.
Officially, this escalation from 1X to 52X is the result of technica progress... of course! Then comes the CD-burners. Once again we had 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X... as predicted by Moore's law. I told myself: Strange! apparently they forgot what they discovered when they accelerated CD-ROMs up to 52X! Guess I'll have to upgrade a few times again...
But things could be worse, few are using biodegradable plastic parts wich fails when warranty expires.
As for the new disks, this is catastrophic news! This is still an old, electromechanical technology from the sixties. They can be a lot smaller than a washing machine now, contain many thousand times the data but they will always get lousy access time. Magnetic heads have mass and inertia: they accelerate and decelerate each time they change tracks. When they seek the appropriate track, they need time to stabilize. As the capacity rises, the tracks gets thinner and thinner. Dampening will need more time. I expect that vibrations will be a huge problem very soon.
For about 20 years, I heard about solid state successors to the magnetic disks: Holographic memory, magnetic bubbles, magnetic chips, etc. Then , not a word about these anymore... I suppose they were patented and locked in a drawer. A shame!
I got it myself (first virus in nearly ten years). I dit what you said except that instead of removing Explorer.scr, I opened it with a text editor and removed a big chunk of it. I hope it will not be reinfected since the file is already there! Of course I will drop Kazaa anyway after this.... Thanks a lot, It stopped the nasty worm!
What we need to save ourselves from -You know who- to force his own private standards upon us is not another office suite but a real, open international standard for office files enforced by a renowned organisation such as the International Standards Organisation. When governements and organisms such as United Nations will start to request ISO compatible files, even Microsoft will comply!