This is the same stupidity that energy gurus did to ceiling fans. They decided that, in order to save energy, all ceiling fans would have to go to the candelabra-sized base, from a standard full-size base bulb. Their thinking (if you can call it that) was that those bulbs are not made in anything over 60 Watts, so that's bound to save power, right? Okay, so let's see what they did: They eliminated the possibility of using almost any compact fluorescent bulb in a ceiling fan, because the choices of CFL bulb offered in that size base are extremely limited. So get rid of those wasteful 100 Watt CFLs (which consume 25 Watts of power) and install the efficient 60 Watt candelabra base bulbs (which actually use 60 Watts). Way to go.
It's only better at file find than XP, because the search function in XP is so horribly evil (FRIENDLY!!) to use. Compare it to search in Win2K, and the advantage isn't there.
Nice one! Okay, two points for demonstrating that IS possible for human brains to become infected, to do the bidding of others, and reprogrammed to mindlessly spread that infection as far and wide as possible. It would have been fifty points but, y'know, spelling.
And what is this constant harping on cockroach "brains?" Their so-called "brain" is a cluster of nerve cells that runs along the ventral midline of their thoracic segment. There's three clusters of it in the "head" segment, but that doesn't control locomotion. A cockroach doesn't even need its head, except for that starving to death thing. It would have been nice if the article had been a bit more clear on where this precise injection occurs. In the head? That might blind them, but probably wouldn't rob them of "free will" (as much as a cockroach can be said to have free will). Even more impressive might be that the wasp knows in which segment of the neural ganglia to inject them in order to control their actions.
Why not use steel? I'm sure it's much cheaper, and can be purchased almost anywhere. And what does "strong as steel" even mean? After all, even steel ranges from 50,000 PSI tensile strength in mild steel to over 110,000 PSI in cobalt steels. Pound for pound, aluminum is stronger than steel. So are titanium and tungsten. In tensile strength, kevlar is FAR stronger per pound than steel.
"As strong as steel" is not only absurdly over-used as a metaphor, it's also practically meaningless.
Those people are standing well back from the crater. Read the article with a critical eye. It says the crater is forty-two feet wide, and ten feet deep, or about big enough to hold two Chevy Suburbans. There's no way those people in the picture are anywhere near it.
I sure wish that half as much energy were expended in the Linux world writing software that people actually need to use Linux for business as there is in writing software that makes Linux appear to be nothing more than a hacker/pirate platform. I remember in the early days of DOS, when there were probably a fraction as many programmers TOTAL than there are today messing with Linux. We had spreadsheets and word processors galore to choose from. What's wrong with Linux that this isn't happening here? Maybe because there's no vacuum to fill?
Yeah, sure, mod this a troll, but think about it a bit.
If they only block port 25 for dynamic IP users, they'll leave most of the small business/geekier sorts untouched (I've got 5 IPs at home, and 13 at work). I would definitely approve of this, especially if they provide an unblocking mechanism (but how do you do that reliably with a dynamic IP?)
Evolution doesn't make bad steps, at least none that last. If they are eating bamboo then there is either an excellent reason that improved their ability to survive or exploit a niche, or their impending extinction is inevitable.
MOST herbivores have to spend 80% of their time eating. That's just the nature of being an herbivore. Nor would I say that they have evolved very far from their parent line (raccoons, not bears), since their digestive tract is not ideally suited for their diet.
At the same time, a gnu antilope (not GNU/Antilope) needs only about 6 hours of sleep per night. And yes, this is because of their diet.
No, it's not. Strictly speaking it's because of the lion's diet, and the real figure is more like 4 hours a DAY, some of it while standing. If you had somebody who was intent on eating you, how much sleeping would you do? The wildebeest who slept the longest would be the one most likely to get surprised in his sleep. His surviving buddies would be the more alert ones.
Yeah, Microsoft might take some REALLY extreme tactic to protect their monopoly -- like giving their browser away for free, bundled with the operating system! Oh, wait....
I really tried to read this with an open mind, to see what legitimate problems businesses are facing in using Linux. Amazing stories. Absolutely amazing. They did almost everything wrong, and it still kept them operational, for awhile, at least.
But... they only came up with two? Out of all the hundreds, nay thousands, of businesses that have experimented with and migrated to Linux, they were only able to find a ski resort and a soap-merchant as examples of the stampede away from Linux? And two who were particularly clueless and dependent on outside support, at that? Looking at the list of Microsoft stuff the ski resort had to buy, for example, I'd tally up at least fifteen to twenty grand in software. I can think of a dozen sysadmins who would have done the job for free pizza and lift tickets.
Sounds to me like neither of these business are actually looking for software -- they're looking for Magic Profit Pills, and they want to be able to pay zero bucks for them.
I tried to read this with an open mind, but I'm afraid there was nothing substantive to read. Stories about stupid people being unable to make something work don't tell you anything about what's not working, and they aren't news.
I don't know how anybody can see the "original" version. Lucas was editing and re-releasing them from the very start, shifting scenes, cutting scenes, changing dialogue. When I first went to see the film, it had been out about two days. There is a scene on the Death Star where a bunch of Storm Troopers are chasing Han and Luke, and they yell "Close the Blast Doors, Close the Blast Doors!" And as the pair escape through the closing doors, they yell "Open the Blast Doors!" which I found very funny, and still would, if it existed. When I went back to see it a couple of weeks later, that line was gone, and has never come back. I guess having a sense of humor was not something Mr. Lucas wished to be known for. There were probably other, less conspicuous changes that didn't really catch my attention because I'd only seen the film once.
Mr. Lucas is a fiddler, a perfectionist, and he can't leave anything alone, even if his changes are widely viewed by his fans as being for the worse. Some creative types are like that. Picasso, for example, never considered one of his most famous paintings "La Damselles d'Avignon" as finished, and kept mucking around with it, making small changes, for over forty years, which must have driven fans of the painting absolutely spare.
I asked my boss about it, since he's been working here in Silicon Valley for thirty years and knows many of the interesting people (not the ones with lots of money -- the ones that invent things, like FORTH). His reply "They're smoking crack. They've poured tons of money into that for YEARS and have yet to produce anything viable."
Even if they manage to get the coupling working, there's the problem of constrained path placement. It'll be like playing four (or six)-sided dominoes when there's four thousand combinations of dots.
The Andersen Company declined to comment on rumors that they were in negotiations with Microsoft to give up all right to the name of their product, formerly titled "Windows." They further refused to comment on speculation that their products would now be called "Wallholes." When asked how much cash they'd been offered by Redmond, the Andersen spokesman hung up on this reporter.
Imperial units would look just as clean, using ft, ft/s, ft/lb, etc.
You are seriously suggesting this? With a relatively straight face? Okay, how many horsepower does it take to accelerate one slug of mass to a velocity of one rod per second? How many BTUs would stopping it generate? You can't seriously expect me to believe that will be a round number. I'd half expect it to be an irrational number.
The Imperial system was never designed to come out even (arguably, it wasn't even designed -- it just "happened"). One prime example is that there are 640 acres per square mile. What's the square root of 640? Even though both are 2D measures, you can't arrange them in a nice even grid, can you? Compare with 100 hectares per square kilometer. Ten by ten. How hard is that? This is the kind of stuff I deal with every day. How many ten foot by twenty foot sheds will fit in that acre with ten feet of clearance between them? First you have to look up how many square feet in an acre. It's 43,560 -- Damn, ANOTHER measure that won't come out even. Imperial is full of this kind of stupidity.
As far as messing people up goes, most don't even know how to use Imperial units. I bet not one person in 100 on the street knows how many furlongs are in a mile, unless they spend a lot of money at the horse races (a furlong is 220 yards). How many teaspoons in a pint? Put away that calculator. I'll give you a hint: It's not a factor of two.
This is important stuff, and there's no reason it should be such a mess. It's no wonder Imperial cooks think that scaling recipes up or down is such a mind bender.
For those too young to remember, Carter had us on track to convert to the Metric system by 1982, which today would be saving us trillions in trade inequities (not to mention the odd crater on Mars). One of Reagan's first acts was to kill that, because he believed metric was foreign, and he didn't understand it. He also scaled back fusion research, but that's a whole other issue. The legacy of this is that my F-250 is half metric and half SAE, so I have to be very careful what I screw in where!
6. If Windows NT was really based on the source of VMS, M$ would have definitely been sued. And they haven't AFAIK. Instead, M$ had just been done with the OS/2 cooperation debacle, and it's pretty probable that they took quite a bit of code from that to get them started on NT.
AFAIK, they were sued, and they lost, which is why DEC was allowed to modify NT to run on Alpha systems, and to distribute it themselves. It wasn't an outright theft, but code that migrated into NT with several coders that had come from VMS development.
I still have WP 5.1 installed under Windows 2000 and use it in preference to any of the GUI WPs (and a quick look around Google proves that quite a few other people do too). WP5.1 actually has 3 bug fixes in it that I found in 5.0, back in the days when any software company actually encouraged customers to find and report bugs, and subsequently not only FIXED the bugs, but sent said customer a free copy of the fixed version.
Between WP5.1 and VIM, my text needs are covered. Gotta love a word processor with that much power that fits on three floppies. My only wish would be that it understood newer graphics formats -- like JPEG.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same stupidity that energy gurus did to ceiling fans. They decided that, in order to save energy, all ceiling fans would have to go to the candelabra-sized base, from a standard full-size base bulb. Their thinking (if you can call it that) was that those bulbs are not made in anything over 60 Watts, so that's bound to save power, right? Okay, so let's see what they did: They eliminated the possibility of using almost any compact fluorescent bulb in a ceiling fan, because the choices of CFL bulb offered in that size base are extremely limited. So get rid of those wasteful 100 Watt CFLs (which consume 25 Watts of power) and install the efficient 60 Watt candelabra base bulbs (which actually use 60 Watts). Way to go.
It's only better at file find than XP, because the search function in XP is so horribly evil (FRIENDLY!!) to use. Compare it to search in Win2K, and the advantage isn't there.
Nice one! Okay, two points for demonstrating that IS possible for human brains to become infected, to do the bidding of others, and reprogrammed to mindlessly spread that infection as far and wide as possible. It would have been fifty points but, y'know, spelling.
And what is this constant harping on cockroach "brains?" Their so-called "brain" is a cluster of nerve cells that runs along the ventral midline of their thoracic segment. There's three clusters of it in the "head" segment, but that doesn't control locomotion. A cockroach doesn't even need its head, except for that starving to death thing. It would have been nice if the article had been a bit more clear on where this precise injection occurs. In the head? That might blind them, but probably wouldn't rob them of "free will" (as much as a cockroach can be said to have free will). Even more impressive might be that the wasp knows in which segment of the neural ganglia to inject them in order to control their actions.
That's okay. It's Schroedinger's Joke. Until someone laughs at it, it both is and is not funny.
Why not use steel? I'm sure it's much cheaper, and can be purchased almost anywhere. And what does "strong as steel" even mean? After all, even steel ranges from 50,000 PSI tensile strength in mild steel to over 110,000 PSI in cobalt steels. Pound for pound, aluminum is stronger than steel. So are titanium and tungsten. In tensile strength, kevlar is FAR stronger per pound than steel.
"As strong as steel" is not only absurdly over-used as a metaphor, it's also practically meaningless.
Those people are standing well back from the crater. Read the article with a critical eye. It says the crater is forty-two feet wide, and ten feet deep, or about big enough to hold two Chevy Suburbans. There's no way those people in the picture are anywhere near it.
As such if you do not supply them with the password for the hard drive encryption you will be in contempt of court
You can just say "I Can't Remember." Hey, it worked for Ronald Reagan.
I really want to get into him. Anyone, anything to be an (in)adequate replacement for Douglas Adams' sensibilities. God I miss that guy.
I've read Kingdom For Sale
IF you want to get into Terry Pratchett, why are you reading books by Terry BROOKS?
Baltimore is testing the use of cell phones to monitor traffic flow!
This is the first article I've seen that has slashdotted Slashdot!
I sure wish that half as much energy were expended in the Linux world writing software that people actually need to use Linux for business as there is in writing software that makes Linux appear to be nothing more than a hacker/pirate platform. I remember in the early days of DOS, when there were probably a fraction as many programmers TOTAL than there are today messing with Linux. We had spreadsheets and word processors galore to choose from. What's wrong with Linux that this isn't happening here? Maybe because there's no vacuum to fill?
Yeah, sure, mod this a troll, but think about it a bit.
If they only block port 25 for dynamic IP users, they'll leave most of the small business/geekier sorts untouched (I've got 5 IPs at home, and 13 at work). I would definitely approve of this, especially if they provide an unblocking mechanism (but how do you do that reliably with a dynamic IP?)
Evolution doesn't make bad steps, at least none that last. If they are eating bamboo then there is either an excellent reason that improved their ability to survive or exploit a niche, or their impending extinction is inevitable.
MOST herbivores have to spend 80% of their time eating. That's just the nature of being an herbivore. Nor would I say that they have evolved very far from their parent line (raccoons, not bears), since their digestive tract is not ideally suited for their diet.
At the same time, a gnu antilope (not GNU/Antilope) needs only about 6 hours of sleep per night. And yes, this is because of their diet.
No, it's not. Strictly speaking it's because of the lion's diet, and the real figure is more like 4 hours a DAY, some of it while standing. If you had somebody who was intent on eating you, how much sleeping would you do? The wildebeest who slept the longest would be the one most likely to get surprised in his sleep. His surviving buddies would be the more alert ones.
Yeah, Microsoft might take some REALLY extreme tactic to protect their monopoly -- like giving their browser away for free, bundled with the operating system! Oh, wait....
Airbus? Isn't that the french plane that flies itself into trees?
I really tried to read this with an open mind, to see what legitimate problems businesses are facing in using Linux. Amazing stories. Absolutely amazing. They did almost everything wrong, and it still kept them operational, for awhile, at least.
... they only came up with two? Out of all the hundreds, nay thousands, of businesses that have experimented with and migrated to Linux, they were only able to find a ski resort and a soap-merchant as examples of the stampede away from Linux? And two who were particularly clueless and dependent on outside support, at that? Looking at the list of Microsoft stuff the ski resort had to buy, for example, I'd tally up at least fifteen to twenty grand in software. I can think of a dozen sysadmins who would have done the job for free pizza and lift tickets.
But
Sounds to me like neither of these business are actually looking for software -- they're looking for Magic Profit Pills, and they want to be able to pay zero bucks for them.
I tried to read this with an open mind, but I'm afraid there was nothing substantive to read. Stories about stupid people being unable to make something work don't tell you anything about what's not working, and they aren't news.
I don't know how anybody can see the "original" version. Lucas was editing and re-releasing them from the very start, shifting scenes, cutting scenes, changing dialogue. When I first went to see the film, it had been out about two days. There is a scene on the Death Star where a bunch of Storm Troopers are chasing Han and Luke, and they yell "Close the Blast Doors, Close the Blast Doors!" And as the pair escape through the closing doors, they yell "Open the Blast Doors!" which I found very funny, and still would, if it existed. When I went back to see it a couple of weeks later, that line was gone, and has never come back. I guess having a sense of humor was not something Mr. Lucas wished to be known for. There were probably other, less conspicuous changes that didn't really catch my attention because I'd only seen the film once.
Mr. Lucas is a fiddler, a perfectionist, and he can't leave anything alone, even if his changes are widely viewed by his fans as being for the worse. Some creative types are like that. Picasso, for example, never considered one of his most famous paintings "La Damselles d'Avignon" as finished, and kept mucking around with it, making small changes, for over forty years, which must have driven fans of the painting absolutely spare.
I asked my boss about it, since he's been working here in Silicon Valley for thirty years and knows many of the interesting people (not the ones with lots of money -- the ones that invent things, like FORTH). His reply "They're smoking crack. They've poured tons of money into that for YEARS and have yet to produce anything viable."
Even if they manage to get the coupling working, there's the problem of constrained path placement. It'll be like playing four (or six)-sided dominoes when there's four thousand combinations of dots.
The Andersen Company declined to comment on rumors that they were in negotiations with Microsoft to give up all right to the name of their product, formerly titled "Windows." They further refused to comment on speculation that their products would now be called "Wallholes." When asked how much cash they'd been offered by Redmond, the Andersen spokesman hung up on this reporter.
Imperial units would look just as clean, using ft, ft/s, ft/lb, etc.
You are seriously suggesting this? With a relatively straight face? Okay, how many horsepower does it take to accelerate one slug of mass to a velocity of one rod per second? How many BTUs would stopping it generate? You can't seriously expect me to believe that will be a round number. I'd half expect it to be an irrational number.
The Imperial system was never designed to come out even (arguably, it wasn't even designed -- it just "happened"). One prime example is that there are 640 acres per square mile. What's the square root of 640? Even though both are 2D measures, you can't arrange them in a nice even grid, can you? Compare with 100 hectares per square kilometer. Ten by ten. How hard is that? This is the kind of stuff I deal with every day. How many ten foot by twenty foot sheds will fit in that acre with ten feet of clearance between them? First you have to look up how many square feet in an acre. It's 43,560 -- Damn, ANOTHER measure that won't come out even. Imperial is full of this kind of stupidity.
As far as messing people up goes, most don't even know how to use Imperial units. I bet not one person in 100 on the street knows how many furlongs are in a mile, unless they spend a lot of money at the horse races (a furlong is 220 yards). How many teaspoons in a pint? Put away that calculator. I'll give you a hint: It's not a factor of two.
This is important stuff, and there's no reason it should be such a mess. It's no wonder Imperial cooks think that scaling recipes up or down is such a mind bender.
For those too young to remember, Carter had us on track to convert to the Metric system by 1982, which today would be saving us trillions in trade inequities (not to mention the odd crater on Mars). One of Reagan's first acts was to kill that, because he believed metric was foreign, and he didn't understand it. He also scaled back fusion research, but that's a whole other issue. The legacy of this is that my F-250 is half metric and half SAE, so I have to be very careful what I screw in where!
6. If Windows NT was really based on the source of VMS, M$ would have definitely been sued. And they haven't AFAIK. Instead, M$ had just been done with the OS/2 cooperation debacle, and it's pretty probable that they took quite a bit of code from that to get them started on NT.
AFAIK, they were sued, and they lost, which is why DEC was allowed to modify NT to run on Alpha systems, and to distribute it themselves. It wasn't an outright theft, but code that migrated into NT with several coders that had come from VMS development.
I still have WP 5.1 installed under Windows 2000 and use it in preference to any of the GUI WPs (and a quick look around Google proves that quite a few other people do too). WP5.1 actually has 3 bug fixes in it that I found in 5.0, back in the days when any software company actually encouraged customers to find and report bugs, and subsequently not only FIXED the bugs, but sent said customer a free copy of the fixed version.
:-)
Between WP5.1 and VIM, my text needs are covered. Gotta love a word processor with that much power that fits on three floppies. My only wish would be that it understood newer graphics formats -- like JPEG.
Everyone knows computer geeks don't approve of silliness.
Now, where's my rubber chicken?