Well, you're right. In fact the force it feels is less, since it is the gravity from the mass below it minus that from the mass above it (if I'm not mistaken, if you had a perfect sphere, any object inside of the sphere feels zero gravitational force, since the pull from the larger amount of mass farther away on the one side (assuming its not perfectly centered) balances out the pull from the smaller amount on the closer side).
Regardless, I don't think the plan is to get that far in that this really becomes an issue, but I don't know enough about geology to know how far down they plan to go. But assuming that the earth is molten once they break through the chewy, chocolate-coated outer crust (sorry, I haven't yet had breakfast), I suppose the amount of force needed wouldn't be as great anyway.
If you can't tell, this was all speculation, i.e. I'm pulling it out of my ass. But that's my best guess.
Probably because it wouldn't work as well. The idea behind the iron thing is apparently that once you get the initial crack going and fill it with molten iron, gravity just takes care of the rest. With a laser, you'd have togo farther and farther down with the crack, which could present an issue to your equipment when the temperature rises to 4000C. And if you don't, you lose power the farther you get from the drilling point.
Plus, even if the laser heats the earth, it doesn't exert any force on it; the molten iron heats and then presses down on the crust to allow it to break through.
I'm also not sure what a laser would accomplish once you break through the crust. Since at that point the temperature is already really hot, and the earth is, if I remember right, molten, the issue is presumably the pressure to get your probes down farther (which the iron accomplishes), not the ability to break through the earth itself.
Despite how obviously this is a troll, I'm going to reply, since you're getting modded up.
First off, I have little Solaris admin knowledge. I run BSD and Linux myself, but I've got some experience with Solaris as a workstation and server. That said, none of your criticisms are really specific to Solaris, or even on-topic.
So first, out of date software: the current Xfree release is 4.3. If you got a complaint with 4.1, say what it is. Regardless, though, if you are running Solaris as a server, you don't give a shit what the X server is on it, and even as a workstation, it's usually used for high-end scientific applications; it doesn't need to be incredibly user friendly or run the latest games.
Second: Solaris (or at least the SunOS servers I just checked to be sure) doesn't have a/lib/modules. So as I'm pointing out right now, purely for the casual reader's benefit, you are full of shit.
Third: Back to X, eh? Nobody likes X. It sucks to configure on any system, pretty much (except maybe RedHat). If you can't handle it, you probably aren't a Solaris admin. And if looking up your monitor's horizontal sync is such a big deal, use Windows. I use the text xf86config utility whenever I install a new system, I look up my monitor's sync specs, and I'm good. Not really that hard.
Fourth: When have you ever put a USB mouse or scanner on a server? And honestly, x86 Solaris, as discussed above, is good for learning and for environments that need to be homogeneous. But most Solaris workstations run on Sparc.
Firth: You're an idiot. A few Linux distros use RPM. Solaris is not Linux. RPMs also are widely regarded as sucking.
Finally, you go way off topic and talk about Debian users switching (with a link to www.ibm.com as proof?). Right. Anyway, you're an idiot, I know I've been trolled, but I wanted to clarify some of your BS for the other readers.
Or am I just crazy and paranoid because of what's happening to my country right now (USA)?
Yes.
Is it too much to ask that the folks "in charge" let a true people's democracy develop without being waylaid and corrupted by corporate and special interests?
Well, got a history book? I'd say yes to this, as well.
So what's the point? I don't get it at all. You trust a loan officer with your financial information, but you don't expect him to be an expert in good eating.
What the ``activists'' did was present a fake ID. Whoop de freakin' do. Certainly something stupid on part of the summit organizers, but not exactly failing to ``keep a couple of geeks out of a conference room.''
The part I really don't get, though, is the fuss about the RFID tags. Guess what? I bet they were using them for the same thing that supermarkets and department stores use them for--electronic identification. If the ID cards had bar codes, would they complain that the bar codes are being used to electronically ID the holders? Sure, they can be read remotely, and that would bother me if they were given to ordinary consumers (say, like in Minority Report, when Cruise walks into a store and is greeted by name by a sales display). But at a conference you volunteer to attend to, run by a trusted organization (in theory, at least) with far less motive to engage in remote tracking and profiling than a major retailer, I'd say it's just not a huge concern.
But maybe that's just me. It's still an interesting article.
Heh, maybe you're right. I don't claim to be an expert from just a basic certification. That said, I doubt that he hit a headwind that was so many times greater than forecasted that he has a great excuse for being unprepared, though we don't really know. They probably oughta be nice and help him out, but I totally understand their position.
Unprepared ``adventurers'' cost thousands or millions of dollars to governments each year by doing things like getting stranded on mountains (Mt. Hood is famous for this, I've heard), going places they shouldn't go, and so forth. Not that they should let him rot, but they're under no obligation to encourage his behavior.
The maximum maneuvering airspeed of a Cessna 172 (largest plane I've flown, I confess) is something like 110KTS (I don't have a manual handy). The maximum maneuvering speed is not the same as the maximum airspeed (140KTS for a 172, IIRC), by the way.
Anyway, a 100 knot headwind means, 1) you'd have to have a really high airspeed to get anywhere at all--but I don't know what the specs on this guy's home-built plane are and 2) you run a risk, just as with a higher maneuvering airspeed, of hitting, say, a turning speed that's greater than your plane can take. Or say he has to make an emergency landing (hey, who woulda thought?) and he can't find a good spot that's into the wind. I'd really, really love to see him land in a 100 knot crosswind.
Anyway, I was pointing it out not because it can't be done by, say, hurricane pilots, but because the joker who I was replying to was pulling ridiculously large figures out of his ass. I'm disinclined to believe anyone on Slashdot who claims any expertise in pretty much anything (so don't bother to believe me that I'm a pilot, it really doesn't matter), and I was moreso disinclined when this guy comments that a 100 knot headwind is no big deal. Yeah. Right.
You know what? I did read the article (when it was posted on Fark, prior to it being on Slashdot, actually) and, shockingly enough, I am a pilot as well. Now I'll admit, I only have my VFR certification, and it's not even current right now (my medical certification ran out a few months ago) but yeah...I think I made my point.
I've never flown over the south pole, however, and I doubt you have. But I'm sure the bases there report on the weather just fine. I didn't see anything in the article indicating he hit a 100 knot headwind (which would likely pose some serious threats to his plane, not just his fuel reserves). The point remains. You choose to do something risky on the assumption that someone else will save your ass, you don't deserve a lot of sympathy.
He did not have a plane accident. He encountered stronger headwinds than expected and used more fuel than expected. Now I'm willing to accept that the conditions over the South Pole might be a tad unusual or unpredictable, but, without knowing the details, I'd say that still sounds like a bit of poor planning on his part. If he had a totally unforseeable mechanical failure, say, or hit a bird (a pengiun?), then you may have a case. But through his desire to push the limits of what he, and his plane, could do, he ran out of gas.
And you gotta wonder, when planning that trip, assuming he deserves his pilot's certification, he knew how far he could make it given strong headwinds. Ya think it's possible, however unlikely, that he thought, ``Ah, well, it's a risk I'm willing to take, 'cause the American's will bail me out if I fuck up''? I agree that we should, ordinarily, try to help people simply out of kindness. But that's just stupid.
The Americans offered to house him and feed him, and the New Zealanders offered to ship his plane out at his expense. So its not as if he doesn't have options.
And their justification is not to be mean. It's that he should have made plans to begin with. It's not their job to be someone's backup plan, as they themselves pointed out.
But there are a few comments about treating auto-immune diseases and anthrax. So maybe it's useful as an intermediary treatment for some easily-targeted particles, but doesn't completely remove an infection?
It seems like if the effectiveness weren't 100%, it may not matter for detox, since it may get the toxin levels below tolerance, but for a virus, it may simply meet as soon as you stop, the virus spreads again.
It may be far harder to make things to bond to the virus. The particles being bonded to may have well known chemical properties, but it seems like if it were that simple to make things bond to viruses, we'd have little problem treating them, magnet or no.
Just a guess, though. Anyone here actually know about this stuff?:P
Possibly, but it sounds like the free support for OO is limited, and the pay support wouldn't be popular among individuals. The pay support implies Sun expects OO to be used in offices--individuals rarely sign up for software support contracts that don't come from the OEM--which makes little sense compared to their StarOffice offering. And if they really want to push StarOffice, they may as well give free non-commercial, individual licenses (sorta like Solaris's ``free'' $20 license).
They already offered similar support for StarOffice, as I understand it. StarOffice has a decent penetration, but not compared to MS's. I don't see a huge difference here, since the cost of StarOffice was already pretty miniscule by site-licensing standards. And as stated in the article, most of the people using OO at the outset were individuals.
So I don't see any reason to believe that many companies that weren't interested in StarOffice will be interested in OO; the price difference between StarOffice and MS Office is so great compared to that between StarOffice and OO that if the first didn't sway them, the second probably won't, either (many simply want to use ``the standard'', often so they can implement VB plugins or macros or somesuch).
To some degree, you may be right about slowing down the development cycle for certain applications, but I think its a silly distinction to say developers don't know how the OS or underlying software work. Sounds like something that would be true if you're talking about user applications or web development (VB, anyone?), but not really fair for certain kinds of development at all (say, OS development). In many of these applications, developers must know a great amount of detail about how the underlying OS works, sometimes far more than even the sysadmins who run the systems.
You're right that there are plenty of coders out there who can use thirty different languages but are afraid to install their own OS. But I think thats a subset who aren't really representative of the whole.
I do systems programming right now (I think that's the title--not really sure as long as I get paid) and the distinction between sysadmin and developer is very blurred. Then again, it's a smaller organization as well. Perhaps the experience in a larger company is far different.
Can the UC demand BSD licensed code be removed? If I'm not mistaken, the point of the BSD license is that you can change the license of code you take away from it and commercialize it. So if that's all SCO has done, they have not violated the license in any way.
She says she didn't, but bleh-of-the-huns may be right about the original contract. I'm not sure if you can write a contract that extends its own duration in that matter, though. I believe you can, but I don't remember much from legal studies...
What's your point? The point of number portability is to be able to keep the same number. If you want to keep the same number but have it be a local area code, you would need to redistrict the area you move to and change all the other resident's area codes to keep your number the same but make it familiar to the locals where you move to. Yeah. Hello, Napolean.
Or you could just hire a sky writer.
I think that scenario would, in theory, be totally doable. But you can't keep the same number and have it be a familiar area code to the people where you move to. It's just not possible.
A family member of mine who was trying to get a new ATT phone (after three years of service on the original phone--the contract has long since expired) was just given a terrible runaround. They offered a nice Siemens GSM phone with a retail price of $250 for $90, but didn't have it in stock and said to come back Thursday. The exchange, as far as I can tell, was a complete deal; offer and acceptance makes it legally binding. Anywho, on Thursday, they ring it up (`How much did the saleswoman offer it for? $90? OK.') and it comes out to something like $250. And they'd already cut the old phone. And when she threatens to leave and rejoin to get the new-member rate of $90, they say, 'Ah, no. We upgraded your plan to a newer one a few months ago and locked you into a one year contract,' (despite never having informed her of that). So she gets no new phone, loses service for two hours, all for nothing.
I have Cingular, and they aren't bad, but I'm thinking of switching to Verizon for spite. When I called Cingular to ask about upgrading my plan (it's now out of contract), and casually asked the rep about number portability, he gave me a runaround. When I asked how hard it would be for me to switch from Cingular to someone else, he hung up on me.
That's silly. They can hardly classify an application process--then you would have to apply to be trusted enough to be shown the confidential application process.
Right, but you're assuming people want to know how the total system performs versus another total system. That's not necessarily the case.
For example, I recently built myself a new PC. I wanted to go budget, but of course get the most bang for my buck. I debated for a while between the 2400+ Athlon XP Thunderbird (2.0GHz) and the 2500+ Barton (1.8GHz). Now, I knew the Thunderbird was faster than a comparable Barton (and they were the same price), but the Barton had a 333MHz FSB, while the Thunderbird didn't. So I had the total stats available comparing a Thunderbird and a Barton with the same FSB (because the test was of a higher end machine), but I didn't have a breakdown to tell me what difference the FSB meant. I ultimately went with the Barton, because even if its marginally slower, the faster bus speed would increase my memory access speeds as well, which would presumably be worth it (I hope I chose right:P).
Point being that plenty of reviews of video cards are available, but someone building a custom PC wants to see the individual specs, not the totals for a prebuilt model.
Re:If this shipped with Lindows instead...
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
AOL doesn't work on Linux (not officially; there are a few projects I've seen to try to circumvent this--no idea if they work well or not). And as others pointed out, they are trying to appeal to the non-savvy. Just because the default user is root doesn't make Lindows easy to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless, I don't think the plan is to get that far in that this really becomes an issue, but I don't know enough about geology to know how far down they plan to go. But assuming that the earth is molten once they break through the chewy, chocolate-coated outer crust (sorry, I haven't yet had breakfast), I suppose the amount of force needed wouldn't be as great anyway.
If you can't tell, this was all speculation, i.e. I'm pulling it out of my ass. But that's my best guess.
Plus, even if the laser heats the earth, it doesn't exert any force on it; the molten iron heats and then presses down on the crust to allow it to break through.
I'm also not sure what a laser would accomplish once you break through the crust. Since at that point the temperature is already really hot, and the earth is, if I remember right, molten, the issue is presumably the pressure to get your probes down farther (which the iron accomplishes), not the ability to break through the earth itself.
First off, I have little Solaris admin knowledge. I run BSD and Linux myself, but I've got some experience with Solaris as a workstation and server. That said, none of your criticisms are really specific to Solaris, or even on-topic.
So first, out of date software: the current Xfree release is 4.3. If you got a complaint with 4.1, say what it is. Regardless, though, if you are running Solaris as a server, you don't give a shit what the X server is on it, and even as a workstation, it's usually used for high-end scientific applications; it doesn't need to be incredibly user friendly or run the latest games.
Second: Solaris (or at least the SunOS servers I just checked to be sure) doesn't have a /lib/modules. So as I'm pointing out right now, purely for the casual reader's benefit, you are full of shit.
Third: Back to X, eh? Nobody likes X. It sucks to configure on any system, pretty much (except maybe RedHat). If you can't handle it, you probably aren't a Solaris admin. And if looking up your monitor's horizontal sync is such a big deal, use Windows. I use the text xf86config utility whenever I install a new system, I look up my monitor's sync specs, and I'm good. Not really that hard.
Fourth: When have you ever put a USB mouse or scanner on a server? And honestly, x86 Solaris, as discussed above, is good for learning and for environments that need to be homogeneous. But most Solaris workstations run on Sparc.
Firth: You're an idiot. A few Linux distros use RPM. Solaris is not Linux. RPMs also are widely regarded as sucking.
Finally, you go way off topic and talk about Debian users switching (with a link to www.ibm.com as proof?). Right. Anyway, you're an idiot, I know I've been trolled, but I wanted to clarify some of your BS for the other readers.
So I did. My bad.
Yes.
Is it too much to ask that the folks "in charge" let a true people's democracy develop without being waylaid and corrupted by corporate and special interests?
Well, got a history book? I'd say yes to this, as well.
What the ``activists'' did was present a fake ID. Whoop de freakin' do. Certainly something stupid on part of the summit organizers, but not exactly failing to ``keep a couple of geeks out of a conference room.''
The part I really don't get, though, is the fuss about the RFID tags. Guess what? I bet they were using them for the same thing that supermarkets and department stores use them for--electronic identification. If the ID cards had bar codes, would they complain that the bar codes are being used to electronically ID the holders? Sure, they can be read remotely, and that would bother me if they were given to ordinary consumers (say, like in Minority Report, when Cruise walks into a store and is greeted by name by a sales display). But at a conference you volunteer to attend to, run by a trusted organization (in theory, at least) with far less motive to engage in remote tracking and profiling than a major retailer, I'd say it's just not a huge concern.
But maybe that's just me. It's still an interesting article.
Unprepared ``adventurers'' cost thousands or millions of dollars to governments each year by doing things like getting stranded on mountains (Mt. Hood is famous for this, I've heard), going places they shouldn't go, and so forth. Not that they should let him rot, but they're under no obligation to encourage his behavior.
Anyway, I was pointing it out not because it can't be done by, say, hurricane pilots, but because the joker who I was replying to was pulling ridiculously large figures out of his ass. I'm disinclined to believe anyone on Slashdot who claims any expertise in pretty much anything (so don't bother to believe me that I'm a pilot, it really doesn't matter), and I was moreso disinclined when this guy comments that a 100 knot headwind is no big deal. Yeah. Right.
I've never flown over the south pole, however, and I doubt you have. But I'm sure the bases there report on the weather just fine. I didn't see anything in the article indicating he hit a 100 knot headwind (which would likely pose some serious threats to his plane, not just his fuel reserves). The point remains. You choose to do something risky on the assumption that someone else will save your ass, you don't deserve a lot of sympathy.
And you gotta wonder, when planning that trip, assuming he deserves his pilot's certification, he knew how far he could make it given strong headwinds. Ya think it's possible, however unlikely, that he thought, ``Ah, well, it's a risk I'm willing to take, 'cause the American's will bail me out if I fuck up''? I agree that we should, ordinarily, try to help people simply out of kindness. But that's just stupid.
And their justification is not to be mean. It's that he should have made plans to begin with. It's not their job to be someone's backup plan, as they themselves pointed out.
But there are a few comments about treating auto-immune diseases and anthrax. So maybe it's useful as an intermediary treatment for some easily-targeted particles, but doesn't completely remove an infection?
It seems like if the effectiveness weren't 100%, it may not matter for detox, since it may get the toxin levels below tolerance, but for a virus, it may simply meet as soon as you stop, the virus spreads again.
It may be far harder to make things to bond to the virus. The particles being bonded to may have well known chemical properties, but it seems like if it were that simple to make things bond to viruses, we'd have little problem treating them, magnet or no.
Just a guess, though. Anyone here actually know about this stuff? :P
Possibly, but it sounds like the free support for OO is limited, and the pay support wouldn't be popular among individuals. The pay support implies Sun expects OO to be used in offices--individuals rarely sign up for software support contracts that don't come from the OEM--which makes little sense compared to their StarOffice offering. And if they really want to push StarOffice, they may as well give free non-commercial, individual licenses (sorta like Solaris's ``free'' $20 license).
Well, of course the free, trial-preview is so you can compare it and try it out. That's why its called a ``trial-preview.''
So I don't see any reason to believe that many companies that weren't interested in StarOffice will be interested in OO; the price difference between StarOffice and MS Office is so great compared to that between StarOffice and OO that if the first didn't sway them, the second probably won't, either (many simply want to use ``the standard'', often so they can implement VB plugins or macros or somesuch).
You're right that there are plenty of coders out there who can use thirty different languages but are afraid to install their own OS. But I think thats a subset who aren't really representative of the whole.
I do systems programming right now (I think that's the title--not really sure as long as I get paid) and the distinction between sysadmin and developer is very blurred. Then again, it's a smaller organization as well. Perhaps the experience in a larger company is far different.
Can the UC demand BSD licensed code be removed? If I'm not mistaken, the point of the BSD license is that you can change the license of code you take away from it and commercialize it. So if that's all SCO has done, they have not violated the license in any way.
She says she didn't, but bleh-of-the-huns may be right about the original contract. I'm not sure if you can write a contract that extends its own duration in that matter, though. I believe you can, but I don't remember much from legal studies...
No, they don't. Like I said, they're idiots.
Or you could just hire a sky writer.
I think that scenario would, in theory, be totally doable. But you can't keep the same number and have it be a familiar area code to the people where you move to. It's just not possible.
I have Cingular, and they aren't bad, but I'm thinking of switching to Verizon for spite. When I called Cingular to ask about upgrading my plan (it's now out of contract), and casually asked the rep about number portability, he gave me a runaround. When I asked how hard it would be for me to switch from Cingular to someone else, he hung up on me.
That's silly. They can hardly classify an application process--then you would have to apply to be trusted enough to be shown the confidential application process.
For example, I recently built myself a new PC. I wanted to go budget, but of course get the most bang for my buck. I debated for a while between the 2400+ Athlon XP Thunderbird (2.0GHz) and the 2500+ Barton (1.8GHz). Now, I knew the Thunderbird was faster than a comparable Barton (and they were the same price), but the Barton had a 333MHz FSB, while the Thunderbird didn't. So I had the total stats available comparing a Thunderbird and a Barton with the same FSB (because the test was of a higher end machine), but I didn't have a breakdown to tell me what difference the FSB meant. I ultimately went with the Barton, because even if its marginally slower, the faster bus speed would increase my memory access speeds as well, which would presumably be worth it (I hope I chose right :P).
Point being that plenty of reviews of video cards are available, but someone building a custom PC wants to see the individual specs, not the totals for a prebuilt model.
AOL doesn't work on Linux (not officially; there are a few projects I've seen to try to circumvent this--no idea if they work well or not). And as others pointed out, they are trying to appeal to the non-savvy. Just because the default user is root doesn't make Lindows easy to use.