I remembered seeing this a while back--some guy who claims to be able to take any kind of garbage and process it into various chemical components--heavy hydrocarbons (ie oil) and various elements, sounds like.
Link: (planetark.org). Story came off the Reuters wire originally. The venture's being bankrolled by some pretty heavy hitters.
If we can actually produce various oils, it'd certainly change the picture. This being/. and all, though, I have to ask the chemists among us--is this possible? Likely? Feasible?
The college is still largely a Mac campus in the academic departments. Dartmouth cut a sweet discount with Apple in the early 80s, ad was the first school to require students to bring a computer--an Apple computer. The legacy of this is a far-above-average number of Macs around.
If they aren't going to provide for non-Windows machines, they're going to have angry staff and administrators if they deploy this beyond the students...
Oh, if only we were this well prepared...nothing has been done to brace for it where I go, as far as I know...
I'm a student, and I work helpdesk at a smaller (~4500 student) college. Students move in the 20th, and life will probably becoming a living tech support hell soon after that.
It's been my experience in the past that laptops returning to school have everything on them from virii to rootkits. We're a liberal arts school; most kids have no idea they're even doing anything wrong or missing anything.
The worst oversight most schools make--mine included--is the AV protection they require is inadequate (not that it would completely save us here, but hey.) About 90% of students buy computers through the school, and they get Norton Corporate preinstalled. Problem is, we can't forcibly push updates to 'em (somehow violates the privacy code we have) and they can't connect to our server outside of the campus network.
Sci-Fi does advance science; where do you think scientists get ideas, most modern tech was first thought up in science fiction.
No.
In general, SF derives from existing scientfic concepts. It's not as if authors are sitting around and think "Hey, you know what'd be cool? Some kinda energy source from little tiny particles called atoms smashing into each other!"
Enrico Fermi didn't learn how fission works from reading SF.
Even pulling ideas from existing science, the genre has gotten it wrong plenty of times. It was Gibson (I think) that wrote a story where characters see all these bizarre rocketships and flying things in the sky, and strange vehicles on the ground...in the end, these crazy vehicles turn out to be all the pictures of silver ships and flying cars and nuclear thingamajigs from the 1950s pulp mags.
Kim Stanley Robinson has written about a lot of prospective, uninvented things in his Mars series, but he didn't start from nothing--a lot of the ideas in those books was first proposed by NASA researchers and guys like Robert Zubrin. Hell, he even takes stuff from the 100 Day Plan.
SF and science feed off each other, true...but SF != source of science.
Nice to see the literary Hugos are going to actual SF again...two years of solid selections. I think it was 2001 when Harry Potter won best novel, and I just shook my head...
I have nothing against HP, but it doesn't deserve a Hugo. It's not adult fiction, and it's not even science fiction (which is, of course, the focus of the Hugo...
I disagree with the folks who keep saying SF is "incredibly boring" these days, though--it's just on a different tack.
...I've been running it for 6 months under Mandrake 9.1. Smooth sailing...I've had RAID 0 and 1 arrays on it without any problems. Also supports 1+0 and JBOD. The RR454 is out now, too, which supports RAID 5 (ooh, if only I'd waited...)
Great value, though--can run 8 drives for ~90 bucks. Hit up pricewatch or something, they're easy to find.
The specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group.
The fact that Joe Average is confused by this doesn't surprise me one bit. Joe ain't no MCSE, nor does he care what one is. Joe doesn't know what that stands for.
Look at all the confusion even within the tech community about some of the terminology (GNU/Linux vs. Linux, anyone? Who can explain.NET satisfactorily?)
I have a hard time sometimes, and I'm a student who spends a lot of time working with coding/computing. Some professionals still are hazy. It's all part of learning the field, learning the specialty.
Hell, I've got friends that are chem majors, art history majors. I have only the haziest idea what they mean when they talk about copolymers or dadaism.
"USA TODAY: Is there a scenario by which you would at some point consider porting Microsoft applications into Linux?
BG: There's no consideration of that at this point." /quote
Well, that's a relief.
This isn't exactly groundbreaking...
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
John Varley wrote a short story ~30 years ago that I believe was called "The Phantom Of Kansas." People got personality "recordings" to live forever, and the protagonist got hers stolen...and then got killed about 4 times, trying to figure out who kept doing it. Twist was, she had no idea what the previous girl had known...
It's a twist on detective fiction. You're trying to solve a case--but you get extra chances. But every time around, the killer gets smarter, learns more about the victim...
Original or no, I might have to pick this one up. I need to read some new, good SF again. *sigh*
Am I the only one that remembers those guys from Purdue who would light their charcoal grills with LOX? Combustion gave off so much light you could barely see anything in the pictures...
Oh man...
They didn't have a barbeque so much as a hunk of melted metal with some carbon molecules left over.
...but "they" (whoever they are) pulled the site...*teardrop*
Anybody know of a mirror?
Seriously, it's a matter of stocks getting back to realistic values. Investors are taking a look, and seeing a realistic chance for profit--so they're returning, albeit cautiously. Where there's money, the market will follow, eventually.
The college has a policy that every square foot of campus should, in theory, be covered by fuzzy blanket of wireless signal. And I mean fuzzy in every sense--feel good, and the fact that sitting here in my dorm room I get no signal.
The trick with this is that to cover all college land, we bleed over into the town a *lot*. And since it's an unsecured network (anybody who knows the SSID can join), a not-completely-insignificant portion of the town that surrounds the school gets free internet access.
As for "a few access points", the number's well over a thousand just for the school, if memory serves right. The town (small as it is) is still way bigger than the school. Wireless APs are *not* cheap, especially ones that will mesh well into a large network.
Something tells me this network is going to end up tied to the college, using BlitzMail (Dartmouth's own proprietary email system, which eats it.) Of course, speaking as a student, that wouldn't be all bad...there are things at every school that can't be accessed outside their LAN, and that'd make it easier to live off campus.
On the upside, maybe that means they'd finally upgrade our non-I2 backbone. Heh.
Closing thought: Strange that the first I hear of a local issue is via Slashdot...
I go to a school in the northeast that relies heavily on Blackboard. (I also work computing support here, so I know what a pain it is on the backend, but I digress.)
Oddly enough...I had a discussion about this with a CS prof a while back. Turns out he and another tenured prof figured out how to make all the vending machines (which are on the card) spit out free stuff by using a card with purposely malformed data.
This worked so well that the machines would dispense free stuff until somebody came along and unplugged/restarted them...
But anyway, if Blackboard wants to, two highly respected, published CS profs could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Another problem popped up a couple years ago that never became common knowledge: if your account balance was between 0 and $0.05, you could buy as much as you wanted, and your balance would never change. I'm not sure if that was a Blackboard bug or something else we did here.
Another one of those through-the-grapevine stories that I suspect is true--the host "machines", whatever they are, for the locks operated by these cards communicate via TCP/IP with a central server. Last year a CS student figured this out and started sending a variety of packets at one of the hosts, crashed it, and summarily locked 200 students out of their dorm.
Ah, Blackboard, how I love thee.
And I've just committed multiple crimes under the DMCA, I believe...
Slashdot Mirror
Link: (planetark.org). Story came off the Reuters wire originally. The venture's being bankrolled by some pretty heavy hitters.
If we can actually produce various oils, it'd certainly change the picture. This being /. and all, though, I have to ask the chemists among us--is this possible? Likely? Feasible?
If they aren't going to provide for non-Windows machines, they're going to have angry staff and administrators if they deploy this beyond the students...
You insensitive clod! My ears, they bleed!
I'm a student, and I work helpdesk at a smaller (~4500 student) college. Students move in the 20th, and life will probably becoming a living tech support hell soon after that.
It's been my experience in the past that laptops returning to school have everything on them from virii to rootkits. We're a liberal arts school; most kids have no idea they're even doing anything wrong or missing anything.
The worst oversight most schools make--mine included--is the AV protection they require is inadequate (not that it would completely save us here, but hey.) About 90% of students buy computers through the school, and they get Norton Corporate preinstalled. Problem is, we can't forcibly push updates to 'em (somehow violates the privacy code we have) and they can't connect to our server outside of the campus network.
Oh yes, it's going to be fun.
"I hate Spam Nazis."
Sci-Fi does advance science; where do you think scientists get ideas, most modern tech was first thought up in science fiction. No. In general, SF derives from existing scientfic concepts. It's not as if authors are sitting around and think "Hey, you know what'd be cool? Some kinda energy source from little tiny particles called atoms smashing into each other!" Enrico Fermi didn't learn how fission works from reading SF. Even pulling ideas from existing science, the genre has gotten it wrong plenty of times. It was Gibson (I think) that wrote a story where characters see all these bizarre rocketships and flying things in the sky, and strange vehicles on the ground...in the end, these crazy vehicles turn out to be all the pictures of silver ships and flying cars and nuclear thingamajigs from the 1950s pulp mags. Kim Stanley Robinson has written about a lot of prospective, uninvented things in his Mars series, but he didn't start from nothing--a lot of the ideas in those books was first proposed by NASA researchers and guys like Robert Zubrin. Hell, he even takes stuff from the 100 Day Plan. SF and science feed off each other, true...but SF != source of science.
Nice to see the literary Hugos are going to actual SF again...two years of solid selections. I think it was 2001 when Harry Potter won best novel, and I just shook my head... I have nothing against HP, but it doesn't deserve a Hugo. It's not adult fiction, and it's not even science fiction (which is, of course, the focus of the Hugo... I disagree with the folks who keep saying SF is "incredibly boring" these days, though--it's just on a different tack.
...I've been running it for 6 months under Mandrake 9.1. Smooth sailing...I've had RAID 0 and 1 arrays on it without any problems. Also supports 1+0 and JBOD. The RR454 is out now, too, which supports RAID 5 (ooh, if only I'd waited...) Great value, though--can run 8 drives for ~90 bucks. Hit up pricewatch or something, they're easy to find.
A tax on local local area networks...hm. Thank god they aren't passing a stuttering tax.
(quoting)
jargon (n):
The specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group.
The fact that Joe Average is confused by this doesn't surprise me one bit. Joe ain't no MCSE, nor does he care what one is. Joe doesn't know what that stands for.
Look at all the confusion even within the tech community about some of the terminology (GNU/Linux vs. Linux, anyone? Who can explain .NET satisfactorily?)
I have a hard time sometimes, and I'm a student who spends a lot of time working with coding/computing. Some professionals still are hazy. It's all part of learning the field, learning the specialty.
Hell, I've got friends that are chem majors, art history majors. I have only the haziest idea what they mean when they talk about copolymers or dadaism.
And I don't feel particularly bad about that.
"USA TODAY: Is there a scenario by which you would at some point consider porting Microsoft applications into Linux?
/quote
BG: There's no consideration of that at this point."
Well, that's a relief.
It's a twist on detective fiction. You're trying to solve a case--but you get extra chances. But every time around, the killer gets smarter, learns more about the victim...
Original or no, I might have to pick this one up. I need to read some new, good SF again. *sigh*
Well, now I'll have to start making bootlegs of the music I download and selling 'em...otherwise I'll never be able to cover my legal bills.
Oh man...
They didn't have a barbeque so much as a hunk of melted metal with some carbon molecules left over.
Anybody know of a mirror?
Seriously, it's a matter of stocks getting back to realistic values. Investors are taking a look, and seeing a realistic chance for profit--so they're returning, albeit cautiously. Where there's money, the market will follow, eventually.
...they got off cheap.
but geez, poor scapegoats, I could be next...and school leaves me broke enough already.
...ten zillion "free" AOLSummons CDs clogging up spammers' mailboxes and stuffed in their magazines. All AOL has to do is what they know best...
The college has a policy that every square foot of campus should, in theory, be covered by fuzzy blanket of wireless signal. And I mean fuzzy in every sense--feel good, and the fact that sitting here in my dorm room I get no signal.
The trick with this is that to cover all college land, we bleed over into the town a *lot*. And since it's an unsecured network (anybody who knows the SSID can join), a not-completely-insignificant portion of the town that surrounds the school gets free internet access.
As for "a few access points", the number's well over a thousand just for the school, if memory serves right. The town (small as it is) is still way bigger than the school. Wireless APs are *not* cheap, especially ones that will mesh well into a large network.
Something tells me this network is going to end up tied to the college, using BlitzMail (Dartmouth's own proprietary email system, which eats it.) Of course, speaking as a student, that wouldn't be all bad...there are things at every school that can't be accessed outside their LAN, and that'd make it easier to live off campus.
On the upside, maybe that means they'd finally upgrade our non-I2 backbone. Heh.
Closing thought: Strange that the first I hear of a local issue is via Slashdot...
I go to a school in the northeast that relies heavily on Blackboard. (I also work computing support here, so I know what a pain it is on the backend, but I digress.)
Oddly enough...I had a discussion about this with a CS prof a while back. Turns out he and another tenured prof figured out how to make all the vending machines (which are on the card) spit out free stuff by using a card with purposely malformed data.
This worked so well that the machines would dispense free stuff until somebody came along and unplugged/restarted them...
But anyway, if Blackboard wants to, two highly respected, published CS profs could be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Another problem popped up a couple years ago that never became common knowledge: if your account balance was between 0 and $0.05, you could buy as much as you wanted, and your balance would never change. I'm not sure if that was a Blackboard bug or something else we did here.
Another one of those through-the-grapevine stories that I suspect is true--the host "machines", whatever they are, for the locks operated by these cards communicate via TCP/IP with a central server. Last year a CS student figured this out and started sending a variety of packets at one of the hosts, crashed it, and summarily locked 200 students out of their dorm.
Ah, Blackboard, how I love thee.
And I've just committed multiple crimes under the DMCA, I believe...