Excuse me, but back when I was in programming school that was Confused Obsolete Badly Organized Language. I only wish that the obsolete bit had been true, because that was back in the early '80s and it's still around. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, I was always taught that it was so verbose so that the accountants could follow the code and make sure that the programmers weren't stealing anything.
What was revolutionary was that its very genericness allowed people to clone it
It also helped that IBM decided to publish the specs, making it an open architecture, so that anybody who wanted could design expansion cards for it, like sound cards, internal modems, better graphics cards and so on. This Open Source approach meant that there was a large supply of third-party after-market hardware for people to upgrade their computers. Apple, OTOH, kept to the closed architecture approach, so that the only source for upgrades was Apple. This meant that there was a smaller variety and everything cost more. As most people are looking to get the most bang for their buck, the PC soon cornered the lion's share of the home computer market and has never let go.
There's one key Adams forgot to throw away. I never mentioned it when he was alive, because he'd made it clear he didn't want to write any more HHGTTG stories and I didn't feel it was my place to give the unthinking fans ammunition. However, AFAIK, the Heart of Gold is still out there, somewhere, and as long as that's true, quite literally anything is possible.
There's one good thing about VIOP from the IT viewpoint: nobody can call you to tell you the network's down.
Seriously, though, I can't see it as the killer app; there's nothing in it that you can't do now, IPv6 just makes it easier. Of course, I'm not involved in that type of thing, and you may well be right. Only time will tell, and it hasn't as of yet.
The summary refers to a possible "killer app" for IPv6. Now, AIUI, a killer app is something that can be done on the new platform, or with the new OS that couldn't be done before, or not very well and everybody wants. An example might be a new game that allowed you to rotate your POV around your character would have been a killer app when 3D graphics cards first came out; Bit Torrent would fit for broadband. What, however, would be a killer app for IPv6? What is there that you can do with it, from the end-user's POV that Just Doesn't work now? I'm not saying that there can't be one, but as of right now, nothing comes to mind.
I have. On the first of four pages, it's pointed out that there's not enough evidence yet to concede that the chemical in question causes these diseases.
Current physics, to my understanding, postulate that the universe had to have consisted of 50/50 matter and antimatter at the beginning.
IANAP, but I've read that in extreme conditions, such as obtained just after the Big Bang, there's "a slight statistical bias" towards normal matter, so that there's more of it created than of anti-matter, and what we see now is the result. Alas, I have no cite, (It was in a book I don't have any more, and I'm not sure of the title anyway.) never saw the math and don't know if I'd understand it if I did, so you can take it with as big a grain of salt as you want.
Another thing to remember: comments are your friend! In setting up the server and getting it configured Just Right, you're going to have to edit config files. Every time you do, add a comment, giving the date, and the reason for the edit. If you have to change one of the default settings, don't just change it; comment it out and put a new line with your new value in beneath it, so that if things go wrong, you don't have to worry about remembering how it was before. We all know about documenting our work; having documentation right there in the files means that we have it right in front of us next time we have to tweak things.
Exactly. Back in the bad old dial-up days, I did tech support for an ISP. I remember one caller who'd spoken to several other techs before getting to me. He'd tried several times to email somebody a file, but every time, his connection would go dead at exactly the same spot, and the only way to get it back was to log off and dial in again. I suspected something funny was going on with the modem, and started looking at how he had it set up, finding that he'd added an extra setting, changing one of the S registers (don't remember which) to zero. He explained that he'd found that in an article about speeding up your connection, and all the other techs had just let it go. I got suspicious, and looked it up in a cheat-sheet I happened to have. Turns out, it had to do with timing on dropping into command mode. Setting it to zero meant that as soon as his modem saw +++ it dropped into command mode and never came back. I had him remove the setting and all was OK. The point here is, just because you see it in an article, on a webpage or in a blog doesn't mean it's right; there still could be a typo!
He's probably one step up from call desk and bullshitted his way into a small company as an "admin".
Maybe not. He might have been promoted from the hell desk to admin when his predecessor quit/got fired/died/whatever and he's trying to learn his new job by the old "throw him in the pond" technique.
I fail to see how you can make a local law against any usage of cloud computing.
Oh, there'd no difficulty making a local law against cloud computing; all you need to do is get enough clueless legislators to agree on it. Enforcing it, now, that's a different, much more difficult proposition.
In short, this doesn't sound unscientific at all. It's more likely a poorly written article compounded with us the readers having trouble jiving it with all the things we learned about dinosaurs in grade school.
I think you may have misunderstood me a little. I didn't say it was unscientific, just that it shouldn't be considered science (in the sense of having been proven) when it's not. Too many people, here on Slashdot and other places, are prone to believe that if a Scientist says it, It Must Be True, and I wanted to remind them to take TFA (in the unlikely event they read it) with a grain of salt.
As far as relativity being considered an ad hoc hypothesis, I'd not heard that, although I do know it took a number of years before it was accepted by the physics community.
I would tend to suspect that the fault lies with the reporter in that case, not the speculator who, it must be admitted, did come up with an interesting hypothesis, if not a very solid one.
I did RTFA, and it's hard to say how much is the reporter and how much the person who came up with the idea. And, I'm not so much objecting to the idea as reminding people that it's just speculation. Already, even in the few early comments, I could see some people were accepting this guess as proven fact and I wanted to point out that it's anything but proven at this point.
This isn't science, it's speculation. There's not actual evidence what happened (and probably never will be) so somebody came up with a guess that there was some sort of disaster that caused the dinosaurs to win out. This is what's properly called an ad hoc hypothesis, where somebody comes up with the idea of something unprovable to explain something. Phlogiston, the Continuous Creation of Hydrogen and the Luminiferous Ether are well-known examples from history, and there was a time I suspected that Dark Matter was another one. (Don't flame me, there's enough evidence now that there's something out there, but there certainly wasn't when the idea was first proposed.)
Can these 2 users that know so little about laptops and OS's to get vista on a 512 box really manage a linux setup or is linux hiding the backend enough that they cant screw it up?
*Shrug!* I'm not the OP, but I know what I'd do: set them up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu (your choice) and let them go after setting up their connection and email. Odds are that after a week or two they won't have any more questions for you unless something goes wrong, and that will be rare. I know; my sister's a Windows refugee on Ubuntu, I'm her tech support, and she needs less help now than she did on Win2k because with Linux, It Just Works.
ANYBODY should be able to collect evidence of criminal activity from the public Internet and should be able to testify in a court of law.
IANAL, but AFAIK, anybody can collect that type of evidence already and testify in court, provided that they are doing it as private citizens doing it in the interest of Justice. What Media-Sentry is doing is different: they are acting as paid agents of the RIAA, investigating on their behalf and charging money for it, without the proper licenses. It's the same as with home renovation; you don't need any type of license to renovate your own home, but you do if you act as a contractor, doing it on other people's property and receiving payment for your work.
There are some people who thing that change is always good, and that the latest must be the greatest. They're the people who are always using the latest beta version of everything simply because it's new. Then, when the new version is out, they adopt it on the first day so that they can brag that they have the newest version. Yes, they suffer through the teething problems any new version has to go through, but they don't care, as long as it's new.
More to the point, it appears to average out, so we could be inserting them just to have to remove them a decade later.
No they don't. If you'll look at the chart in the Wikipedia article, you'll see that since they started using them in 1972, they've never had to subtract a second. Either no change, or +1 second.
I, for one, welcome our feline overlords. (I'd better, I have one watching me type this, ready to sink his claws into my leg if I type the wrong thing.)
"Sin" is a relative term, depending on the religion [or lack of] that you believe in.
If you read the Old Testament, you'll see that The Lord commanded that the tribe of the Amalekites be destroyed, root and branch. I can't cite a source, but I've seen it claimed that this was not because they did not believe in Him, but because they had no concept of sin and retribution. Or, as i would (possibly incorrectly) phrase it, they weren't so much immoral as amoral. Being immoral implies that you understand the difference between Good and Evil but chose Evil; being amoral means (I think) that you don't see the distinction, and that's what offended Him. Not particularly on-topic, but I thought readers might find it interesting.
Seriously. Who really wants to write for OS/2 that already isn't doing it? I remember, about ten years ago, a club I belong to was auctioning off a copy to raise money. A good friend of mine outbid everybody, even though he made it clear he was going to take it outside after the meeting and throw it in a random trash can on his way home. He'd just finished a project that required porting something to OS/2 and he hated the OS so much that he was willing to pay good money for the privilege of trashing a copy.
Pointing this out to Christians puts them in a bit of a quandary because either they have to deny what the Bible says, or deny the belief in their own traditions.
Although not a Christian myself, I disagree with what you have written. Most Christians I know aren't that literal in their beliefs. If, however, you change "Christians" to "Christian fundamentalists," I'd agree with you 100%.
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Excuse me, but back when I was in programming school that was Confused Obsolete Badly Organized Language. I only wish that the obsolete bit had been true, because that was back in the early '80s and it's still around. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, I was always taught that it was so verbose so that the accountants could follow the code and make sure that the programmers weren't stealing anything.
It also helped that IBM decided to publish the specs, making it an open architecture, so that anybody who wanted could design expansion cards for it, like sound cards, internal modems, better graphics cards and so on. This Open Source approach meant that there was a large supply of third-party after-market hardware for people to upgrade their computers. Apple, OTOH, kept to the closed architecture approach, so that the only source for upgrades was Apple. This meant that there was a smaller variety and everything cost more. As most people are looking to get the most bang for their buck, the PC soon cornered the lion's share of the home computer market and has never let go.
There's one key Adams forgot to throw away. I never mentioned it when he was alive, because he'd made it clear he didn't want to write any more HHGTTG stories and I didn't feel it was my place to give the unthinking fans ammunition. However, AFAIK, the Heart of Gold is still out there, somewhere, and as long as that's true, quite literally anything is possible.
You are joking, aren't you? Centrifugal force makes it get larger around the equator, not smaller.
Seriously, though, I can't see it as the killer app; there's nothing in it that you can't do now, IPv6 just makes it easier. Of course, I'm not involved in that type of thing, and you may well be right. Only time will tell, and it hasn't as of yet.
The summary refers to a possible "killer app" for IPv6. Now, AIUI, a killer app is something that can be done on the new platform, or with the new OS that couldn't be done before, or not very well and everybody wants. An example might be a new game that allowed you to rotate your POV around your character would have been a killer app when 3D graphics cards first came out; Bit Torrent would fit for broadband. What, however, would be a killer app for IPv6? What is there that you can do with it, from the end-user's POV that Just Doesn't work now? I'm not saying that there can't be one, but as of right now, nothing comes to mind.
I have. On the first of four pages, it's pointed out that there's not enough evidence yet to concede that the chemical in question causes these diseases.
IANAP, but I've read that in extreme conditions, such as obtained just after the Big Bang, there's "a slight statistical bias" towards normal matter, so that there's more of it created than of anti-matter, and what we see now is the result. Alas, I have no cite, (It was in a book I don't have any more, and I'm not sure of the title anyway.) never saw the math and don't know if I'd understand it if I did, so you can take it with as big a grain of salt as you want.
Another thing to remember: comments are your friend! In setting up the server and getting it configured Just Right, you're going to have to edit config files. Every time you do, add a comment, giving the date, and the reason for the edit. If you have to change one of the default settings, don't just change it; comment it out and put a new line with your new value in beneath it, so that if things go wrong, you don't have to worry about remembering how it was before. We all know about documenting our work; having documentation right there in the files means that we have it right in front of us next time we have to tweak things.
Exactly. Back in the bad old dial-up days, I did tech support for an ISP. I remember one caller who'd spoken to several other techs before getting to me. He'd tried several times to email somebody a file, but every time, his connection would go dead at exactly the same spot, and the only way to get it back was to log off and dial in again. I suspected something funny was going on with the modem, and started looking at how he had it set up, finding that he'd added an extra setting, changing one of the S registers (don't remember which) to zero. He explained that he'd found that in an article about speeding up your connection, and all the other techs had just let it go. I got suspicious, and looked it up in a cheat-sheet I happened to have. Turns out, it had to do with timing on dropping into command mode. Setting it to zero meant that as soon as his modem saw +++ it dropped into command mode and never came back. I had him remove the setting and all was OK. The point here is, just because you see it in an article, on a webpage or in a blog doesn't mean it's right; there still could be a typo!
Maybe not. He might have been promoted from the hell desk to admin when his predecessor quit/got fired/died/whatever and he's trying to learn his new job by the old "throw him in the pond" technique.
Oh, there'd no difficulty making a local law against cloud computing; all you need to do is get enough clueless legislators to agree on it. Enforcing it, now, that's a different, much more difficult proposition.
I think you may have misunderstood me a little. I didn't say it was unscientific, just that it shouldn't be considered science (in the sense of having been proven) when it's not. Too many people, here on Slashdot and other places, are prone to believe that if a Scientist says it, It Must Be True, and I wanted to remind them to take TFA (in the unlikely event they read it) with a grain of salt.
As far as relativity being considered an ad hoc hypothesis, I'd not heard that, although I do know it took a number of years before it was accepted by the physics community.
I did RTFA, and it's hard to say how much is the reporter and how much the person who came up with the idea. And, I'm not so much objecting to the idea as reminding people that it's just speculation. Already, even in the few early comments, I could see some people were accepting this guess as proven fact and I wanted to point out that it's anything but proven at this point.
This isn't science, it's speculation. There's not actual evidence what happened (and probably never will be) so somebody came up with a guess that there was some sort of disaster that caused the dinosaurs to win out. This is what's properly called an ad hoc hypothesis, where somebody comes up with the idea of something unprovable to explain something. Phlogiston, the Continuous Creation of Hydrogen and the Luminiferous Ether are well-known examples from history, and there was a time I suspected that Dark Matter was another one. (Don't flame me, there's enough evidence now that there's something out there, but there certainly wasn't when the idea was first proposed.)
*Shrug!* I'm not the OP, but I know what I'd do: set them up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu (your choice) and let them go after setting up their connection and email. Odds are that after a week or two they won't have any more questions for you unless something goes wrong, and that will be rare. I know; my sister's a Windows refugee on Ubuntu, I'm her tech support, and she needs less help now than she did on Win2k because with Linux, It Just Works.
IANAL, but AFAIK, anybody can collect that type of evidence already and testify in court, provided that they are doing it as private citizens doing it in the interest of Justice. What Media-Sentry is doing is different: they are acting as paid agents of the RIAA, investigating on their behalf and charging money for it, without the proper licenses. It's the same as with home renovation; you don't need any type of license to renovate your own home, but you do if you act as a contractor, doing it on other people's property and receiving payment for your work.
There are some people who thing that change is always good, and that the latest must be the greatest. They're the people who are always using the latest beta version of everything simply because it's new. Then, when the new version is out, they adopt it on the first day so that they can brag that they have the newest version. Yes, they suffer through the teething problems any new version has to go through, but they don't care, as long as it's new.
No they don't. If you'll look at the chart in the Wikipedia article, you'll see that since they started using them in 1972, they've never had to subtract a second. Either no change, or +1 second.
I, for one, welcome our feline overlords. (I'd better, I have one watching me type this, ready to sink his claws into my leg if I type the wrong thing.)
Only those of you still using Windows. Those of us using Linux have moved on; why don't you?
If you read the Old Testament, you'll see that The Lord commanded that the tribe of the Amalekites be destroyed, root and branch. I can't cite a source, but I've seen it claimed that this was not because they did not believe in Him, but because they had no concept of sin and retribution. Or, as i would (possibly incorrectly) phrase it, they weren't so much immoral as amoral. Being immoral implies that you understand the difference between Good and Evil but chose Evil; being amoral means (I think) that you don't see the distinction, and that's what offended Him. Not particularly on-topic, but I thought readers might find it interesting.
Seriously. Who really wants to write for OS/2 that already isn't doing it? I remember, about ten years ago, a club I belong to was auctioning off a copy to raise money. A good friend of mine outbid everybody, even though he made it clear he was going to take it outside after the meeting and throw it in a random trash can on his way home. He'd just finished a project that required porting something to OS/2 and he hated the OS so much that he was willing to pay good money for the privilege of trashing a copy.
Either that, or use ssh to log into your home box and read your email that way.
Although not a Christian myself, I disagree with what you have written. Most Christians I know aren't that literal in their beliefs. If, however, you change "Christians" to "Christian fundamentalists," I'd agree with you 100%.