There are many other ways of dating fossils. I don't major in paleontology, but I've taken some courses in it out of interest. The discussion on dating methodologies and how they are used and why they are accurate is far beyond the scope of a slashdot post, but suffice it to say that things are always dated using more than one, usually more than two, methods, and those methods are completely unrelated as to avoid any kind of "contamination".
Methods like carbon dating (using other elements of course) on dinosaur bones are often useless anyway because it is rare for you to find bones that are bone, what I mean is that they've usually been replaced with sediments, just like petrified wood.
One of the most trivial methods of dating a fossil is to look at the rock it was found in. Each rock forms a variety of ways, one of the easiest areas to see this is in prehistoric coastal areas (Egypt for example). Every phase of the moon moves the tide in opposing directions, and as such the sediment collects in different directions, forming a new layer each phase. You can tell just by looking at the stone, which phase the moon was in, whether the tide was coming in, going out, or standing still, and how fast this all was happening. (Most rock formations have some kind of similar "fingerprint" to them) You can literally count the layers and know that each one is a phase (they are very thin layers so you may notice a directional grain in a distant picture, but distinct layers must be examined a bit closer), from this you can gather how long a period of time that piece of rock was made. Its no different then counting rings on a tree stump and figuring out how many seasons it lived, and how much rain fell during those seasons.
Anyway... it is trivial to tell if the rock had been cracked or altered anyway that would let fossils magically fall into its depths. This method of dating isn't used often, but it can be helpful, if for nothing else then checking your other measurements, and it was the most trivial example that I could think of right now. Alot of people don't understand nuclear science, the techniques of carbon dating are above their level of intellect, but noone can really argue with something that is akin to counting rings on a tree stump.
As for another argument that God created the world so that it was old, well I hate to tell you but if you believe in God then you believe that he controls everything including time and if he designs it so that it is 13.5 billion years old, even if it was actually assembled 6,000 or however many years ago that they claim, its still 13.5 billion years old because thats how God designed it and he controls time. Not sure if I worded that right, but hopefully I got the point across.
All of the intelligent design nonsense that I've been hearing about is absolutely ridiculous and incase you were wondering, I'm not an atheist, I am a Roman Catholic. I'm sick of people throwing well founded science out the window because they don't understand it. Many species have literally thousands of transitional fossils, almost looking like a flip book of evolution, and to hear intelligent design people say that there are no transitional fossils found makes me cringe because it is just a blatant lie, or an uninformed statement. Study paleontology, learn for yourself, not what some moron wants to tell you, and make the decision yourself, but don't speak on matters that you don't fundamentally understand. Regards, Steve
Heh, they even want to charge for the things we did give them. The U.N. stated that they would want an international internet tax to pay for the cost of the new organization controlling the internet. That is crazy, and sets a horrible precedent for international taxes. Regards, Steve
I'm not sure where you learned your world history but the U.S. didn't cause either of the World Wars and when they did enter, they dedicated nearly their entire economy to helping the Allies. The United States tried to remain neutral but in the first World War, Germany decided to make an alliance against us with Mexico so we stepped in and cleaned up the whole mess. Then Europe got themselves into another mess and we stayed back thinking this time they could handle it, afterall they had 21 years to rebuild everything and get back on their feet. The problem was, and still is, Europe tends to be weak and not fight when it needs to. Unfortunately war is a necessary evil, both times there were signs as far as 2 years in advance and no European country did anything to step in and cut it short, hell in WWII, they let Germany get away with attacks in the beginning, saying "Don't do it again and we'll let you go." Europe got hammered, and Japan wound up attacking the U.S. so we stepped up and cleaned the whole mess again. Both times, millions of Americans died to help save Europe. Fast foward 60 years and the U.S. sees Iraq starting to act up and get greedy, rather than have another huge war, the decide to defuse the situation before it gets out of control, and now they get bitched at for it. Saddam told the U.N. to stay out and leave him alone, he already had the scientists, he may or may not of had the materials, but they are easy to acquire. The U.N. backed off and didn't back up its sanctions, they acted weak, and it was only going to lead to trouble. The nations in the U.N. didn't want the financial impact of a war. The U.S. did the world a favor, the U.S. has done the world many favors, and we just keep getting shit for it, but luckily for everyone else we won't ever stop when they need us. Regards, Steve
Obviously all media outlets have their agendas, but quoting 4 news sources all with conflicting agendas (i.e. non are all right or all left, they vary and by quite a bit) cannot just be disregarded. They aren't just blatantly making up stories, the facts are there, sure they may sensationalize them a bit, but any source that you would think is "reputable" wouldn't report such occurences because it'd be against their own agenda. The military link was to a declassified document, that is plenty legitimate. Regardless, here are two more links to other sources here(past evidence) and here(present evidence). Here is a disclaimer, and this is going to make you hate me and possibly disregard everything I say but in the interest of full disclosure its best I say this, I used to work for the Department of Defense (I recently left), I have government clearance, I've worked with some of the guys that found one of those bunkers, I also had access to other information. Those stories in the links I sent before are factual, I wish I could give you links to a slew of non-american sources but the fact is that outside of America, pro-american stories don't sell, news sources will rarely run them. Non-american news agencies know that news bad mouthing America sells, and your not likely to hear anything opposing that. CNN though is a pretty good and reliable news source, just as good, if not better, than the BBC. If nothing else, hearing all these sources reporting information contrary to popular belief has to make you at least think twice about the situation... anything else would just be naive. Regards, Steve
It doesn't matter in this case... this is one of the few periods in the history of the earth where the poles have ice. Sea level has been 300 meters higher a couple hundred million years ago. The earth is still coming out of its last ice age which means no matter what we do its just going to keep getting warmer, oh well, we'll adapt or move off the planet by the time it gets majorly bad. This is a non-issue and we need to stop wasting everyone's time with global warming nonsense. Its going to happen with or without us, its going to continue to accelerate in rate of change, and even if humans are impacting it, it is minimal at best. Regards, Steve
Stop attatching political affiliations with every idea, and stop treating people with disdain simply because they have opposing views to yours, it simply implies ignorance on your part.
As far as huge underground bunkers go, read this(present evidence) and this(past evidence).
As far as chemical warfare goes, read this(present evidence), this(more present evidence over a year later), and this(past evidence).
If you're still too stubborn to admit that my original response might have an ounce of validity, go read about Iraq's previous tactics in recent wars... the U.N. told them to be good and Iraq ignored them, what made you think that Iraq all of the sudden became this nice little peaceful nation over a decade of time? Saddam had it coming. Regards, Steve
Wow... an argument based on nothing but political affiliation. Iraq has been caught burying stockpiles many times before, why do you think this time they wouldn't? Perhaps you've forgotten about the multi-acre underground bunkers designed to be filled with nothing but weapons, most inside of Iraq, but some in neighboring countries. Regards, Steve
What claims were false exactly? Saddam had weeks to move and/or bury stockpiles of any weapons he did have while the UN delayed everything. Regardless, WMDs were found, just not to the extent previously thought, and Saddam already had the scientists, if anything he just needed the materials which are easy enough to come by. Don't assume everything the media is telling you is true. Europe looked the other way when Hitler was ramping up his forces, and Europe looked the other way again while Saddam was ramping up his. The nations were too scared of the financial impact of a war with Iraq, so the U.S. stepped up and did what the rest of the world was too scared to do. The U.S. may have very well prevented WW III and they'll never get the recognition they deserve for it. Regardless, Saddam was no good for the world and needed to be overthrown, America had balls big enough to do it. The UN is weak, it is a corrupt organization, they rarely enforce their sanctions, its ridiculous that people like you still spread FUD about the Iraq War when the real enemy here is the U.N. constantly making empty threats and the dictators of the world knowing that. Regards, Steve
AOL is actually the kid everyone wants to be friends with again. They've revamped alot of their business and are expected to have a strong come back. I know it sounds impossible, but thats what Wall Street is saying, and Wall Street doesn't just put its money anywhere. Regards, Steve
Parabolas are the only geometric shape that perfectly focus rays of light at a defined point. Perfect parabolic mirrors are well beyond the budget of most organizations, yet alone individuals, so they are often approximated through a piece of a sphere which are much easier to make, but less effective. I recommend reading up on optical phsyics if you want to know more, its probably beyond the subject of this post. Regards, Steve
Not to argue that the mythbusters are always wrong, but they were wrong this time. Not only does the number of mirrors count, but they must be lined along a parabolic path, must be "perfectly" flat (in this case) and as the article stated, the point of focus changes at 36 feet per hour so you have to keep the mirrors "up to date". There are a lot of factors to take into account, and optical physics to solve. You can clearly see MIT's results, setting the ship on fire, and it was made out of wood stronger than what would have been used by the Romans. The ship hit over 1100 degrees and burnt pretty well. Moral of the story: Myth Buster's results no longer matter because a contradiction to them was proven to exist. Regards, Steve
Then WebCT will fit right in with Blackboard because it is a piece of shit as well. WebCT actually went above and beyond its own horrible self a few months ago releasing WebCT Vista and my University upgraded (no relation to Windows Vista). Regards, Steve
Heh, who was talking about productivity?:) Your post seemed to imply that running something like quake on your phone isn't yet feasible with J3d, I was simply pointing out some demos that I've used that imply differently. Regards, Steve
Software is a bit different than anything else you can compare it to. It is essentially "living" math equations. To prove a program to be perfectly functioning is the equivalent of proving a huge mathematical statement... except because of that good ol' Turing completeness you can't ever prove that an arbitrary program will halt given any type of input (that's not to say that you can't severly limit the cases, and it is possible to design a program that you can prove will halt, just very hard for any complex piece). I could go into this further but suffice it to say that proving quicksort sorts on average of nlg(n) is one thing, proving that your program will perform every function as desired is quite another and would take decades to produce any piece of software of any notable complexity. Adding to this... your software is running in an environment on an OS that it doesn't control which can have any of a variety of patch sets and have any versions of various drivers while also running along side other software that may affect your program by hooking into it, corrupting files, eating all the memory on the machine, thus screwing your program and causing it to possibly crash in the middle of an important cycle. Its not like the Universe where you can be pretty sure what physical laws you're dealing with. In software there are no set of standard "laws", every computer is a different "universe" with different hardware, different programs, different speeds, different amounts of memory, things like antivirus and anti-spyware wil interfere with how your program functions, viruses, and random operating system quirks. Your software relies on the operating system to be perfect, and to prove the operating system to be perfect I would imagine would take on the order of 5 decades, while at the same time forcing the software to not be advanced or changed at all because the proof would have to start from the beginning again. Then for every bug found while proving the operating system functions as desired, when that bug is fixed the proof would have to be done all over again from scratch. The world of software is different then any other industry in the history of man, and as such can not be compared with industries that make physical products. If you don't want technology advancement to crawl to a stop, then don't support this. Regards, Steve
Fractals as they are understood and used today were researched and invented by an IBM employee. Mandelbrot discovered them while in the hospital and had nothing else to do (or so the story goes). There were earlier mentions of similar functions, but thats like saying Newton is directly responsible for getting man on the moon. In a sense its true, but I don't think itd be an accurate statement. People were investigating similar things to fractals before Mandelbrot, but its safe to say that he is the one that really took the idea and ran with it, making it into a usable mathematical theory. Regards, Steve
The Netbeans IDE has a very nice J2ME feature set, including a gui for designing cell phone interfaces using drag & drop, and it comes with a variety of phone emulators so you can see how it functions on many different systems. Anyway... they have a few J3D samples for phones and they are pretty impressive, the one is a skateboarder going back and forth on a half pipe, the other is a kangaroo bouncing around on a pogo stick in a field. They both run really well on every cell I've tried (all of them have been sony ericsson or motorola phones), which I wasn't expecting (I thought maybe the emulators that Netbeans came with were being a little too generous to the cell phone). So as far as the capabilities of J3D on a J2ME go, I'm more than convinced that there are plenty of oppurtunities for really cool stuff. Regards, Steve
I'd like a phone that resemembles something like an ipod shuffle. Small, slim, no screen, just enough buttons to dial a number and answer the phone. I think something like that could be extremely cheap and pretty cool looking at the same time, maybe program it so it speaks the number that called you or something if caller ID is a big issue. I'd bet it would catch on more than most people think. Regards, Steve
ThinkFree is *not* a decent product. If you took the union of the set of features in MS Office and the set of features in OpenOffice.Org, ThinkFree has about 60% of them, and that is being generous. In addition, several glaring bugs stand out within seconds of using it. It is inconsistent in many areas and just feels like an alpha product that was pushed to market. I know this because my company *did* evaluate it looking to see if any good web based office suites existed, they want one for a mutlitude of reasons, and I was a part of analysing this. It turns out that as you could of guessed, no good web based office suite quite exist. One other thing, ThinkFree isn't a web based office suite in the sense that most want... it is a java application that can be started through a browser. I work at a fairly large defense contractor and if they are looking for a good web based office suite (by web based I mean AJAX like functionality with Google like quality, not to be cliche), I can only assume that many other corporations are looking too. The sooner businesses start adopting web based office technology, the sooner schools will start teaching it, at which point home users start using it. Regards, Steve
Making the data fit the equation isn't necessarily always as bad as it sounds, assuming the equation tends to accurately predict the results. Many times in physics, the equations will predict the existence of particles that aren't yet known about and only through asusming they exist, they are later found. It goes further than particles as well, Einstein assumed his equations were wrong because two particles couldn't possibly be connected and have instantaneous "influence" on each other at any distance... sure enough though quantum entanglement was discovered and proven to exist, and is now performed all the time now in universities and corporate labs working on next generation research. If it wasn't for the scientists assuming that the equations were right, they would have never discovered quantum entanglement. Regards, Steve
A) Red Hat had an oppurtunity to buy Suse first (and they had plenty of money to do so), but they declined because they honest to god believe that competition is good.
B) Red Hat's management is open source to the core, if you've ever followed their blogs, or speeches then its pretty evident this isn't just a sham.
C) Red Hat manages GCC, glibc, commits more kernel code than any other entity, is now the core entity behind Gnome, has committed large portions of code to Apache. They've given us Cygwin, GFS, worked with the NSA to integrate SELinux into the kernel, gave us a Directory Server and many many more things. OSS in its current state would be screwed without a big presence like Red Hat. The only reason half of the enterprise features exist in the kernel is from Red Hat. Red Hat does full testing on the kernel. Many OSS projects have such a great reputation for fast patches, a large portion of those patches come from Red Hat.
D) In 16-24 months, Fedora gained more servers according to Netcraft than Novell's Suse. It is a very good product.
E) Novell just got on the Linux train. Despite that they have their hands in many markets, as opposed to Red Hat who depends on Linux to succeed, Red Hat's market capitalization is still over 1 billion dollars higher. Novell is highly mismanaged, and many are speculating that they either are going to get bought, or go through a major management revampment. That revampment could very well include selling off Suse and moving to a different market like they've done many times before. If its not making them enough money, Novell moves on. Red Hat has motivation to keep Linux strong. Novell has been underperforming for a few quarters now and if they keep at this pace they are going to be bankrupt.
You don't give Red Hat enough credit and assume that simply because they are a corporation that they are automatically doing everything with evil intentions. They have very intelligent and deicated folks working there. Literally some of the biggest names in OSS are on their payroll. Regards, Steve
How is this FUD? Have you ever seen Red Hat managemnet speak, or read their blogs? These people are open source to the core. They were offered to purchase Suse first before Novell, but declined because they honest to god believe that competition in the market place is healthy for everyone. Not to mention in their industry, Novell gets to borrow their code, and vice versa, so why buy a company when you get access to most of the code anyway?
When it comes to Linux, Red Hat is *the* distro to a PHB. Anyone who dealt with Novell in the 90's is probably scared to ever go back. Even in Europe, Red hat has the majority of the market. Red Hat's market capitalization is over a billion dollars more than Novell's (about 25% more money), yet Red Hat is younger and focuses on one market rather than many markets like Novell does. Novell is highly mismanaged, has underperformed for quite a few quarters now, and is speculated to either be bought up by another company or go through a major management revampment. The only success they've had with Suse is because Suse's prior owners did a pretty good job with it. If Novell keeps at its current pace, they'll be bankrupt in a couple years. If they go through another revampment, nothing says that they'll stick with Suse, they might sell it off and move into a different market like they've done plenty of times before. Red Hat's sole business is Linux, it depends on its success, Novell just jumped on the Linux train and if it doesn't provide the income they are hoping then they'll just move on to the next thing, why on earth would you go with Novell when you've seen their past? Regards, Steve
About two or three years ago Red Hat was first offered the chance to buy Suse. They declined, not because the didn't want the company, but because the top guys there really do believe that a competitive market leads to better results for both the industry and the consumer. Red Hat is ran with a very Open Source friendly attitude and mindset, you should listen to some of their conferences, blogs, and talks. Not to mention that in the industry that they are in, most of the things that get developed for Suse can be included in Red Hat, and vice versa. This is a very common occurence where even though neither company pays each other or owns each other they still benefit from each others work. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
There are many other ways of dating fossils. I don't major in paleontology, but I've taken some courses in it out of interest. The discussion on dating methodologies and how they are used and why they are accurate is far beyond the scope of a slashdot post, but suffice it to say that things are always dated using more than one, usually more than two, methods, and those methods are completely unrelated as to avoid any kind of "contamination".
Methods like carbon dating (using other elements of course) on dinosaur bones are often useless anyway because it is rare for you to find bones that are bone, what I mean is that they've usually been replaced with sediments, just like petrified wood.
One of the most trivial methods of dating a fossil is to look at the rock it was found in. Each rock forms a variety of ways, one of the easiest areas to see this is in prehistoric coastal areas (Egypt for example). Every phase of the moon moves the tide in opposing directions, and as such the sediment collects in different directions, forming a new layer each phase. You can tell just by looking at the stone, which phase the moon was in, whether the tide was coming in, going out, or standing still, and how fast this all was happening. (Most rock formations have some kind of similar "fingerprint" to them) You can literally count the layers and know that each one is a phase (they are very thin layers so you may notice a directional grain in a distant picture, but distinct layers must be examined a bit closer), from this you can gather how long a period of time that piece of rock was made. Its no different then counting rings on a tree stump and figuring out how many seasons it lived, and how much rain fell during those seasons.
Anyway... it is trivial to tell if the rock had been cracked or altered anyway that would let fossils magically fall into its depths. This method of dating isn't used often, but it can be helpful, if for nothing else then checking your other measurements, and it was the most trivial example that I could think of right now. Alot of people don't understand nuclear science, the techniques of carbon dating are above their level of intellect, but noone can really argue with something that is akin to counting rings on a tree stump.
As for another argument that God created the world so that it was old, well I hate to tell you but if you believe in God then you believe that he controls everything including time and if he designs it so that it is 13.5 billion years old, even if it was actually assembled 6,000 or however many years ago that they claim, its still 13.5 billion years old because thats how God designed it and he controls time. Not sure if I worded that right, but hopefully I got the point across.
All of the intelligent design nonsense that I've been hearing about is absolutely ridiculous and incase you were wondering, I'm not an atheist, I am a Roman Catholic. I'm sick of people throwing well founded science out the window because they don't understand it. Many species have literally thousands of transitional fossils, almost looking like a flip book of evolution, and to hear intelligent design people say that there are no transitional fossils found makes me cringe because it is just a blatant lie, or an uninformed statement. Study paleontology, learn for yourself, not what some moron wants to tell you, and make the decision yourself, but don't speak on matters that you don't fundamentally understand.
Regards,
Steve
The article is pretty much an advertisement for the European Galileo system.
Regards,
Steve
Heh, they even want to charge for the things we did give them. The U.N. stated that they would want an international internet tax to pay for the cost of the new organization controlling the internet. That is crazy, and sets a horrible precedent for international taxes.
Regards,
Steve
Flying squirrels and flying snakes (technically both glide, but hey close enough).
I'm not sure where you learned your world history but the U.S. didn't cause either of the World Wars and when they did enter, they dedicated nearly their entire economy to helping the Allies. The United States tried to remain neutral but in the first World War, Germany decided to make an alliance against us with Mexico so we stepped in and cleaned up the whole mess. Then Europe got themselves into another mess and we stayed back thinking this time they could handle it, afterall they had 21 years to rebuild everything and get back on their feet. The problem was, and still is, Europe tends to be weak and not fight when it needs to. Unfortunately war is a necessary evil, both times there were signs as far as 2 years in advance and no European country did anything to step in and cut it short, hell in WWII, they let Germany get away with attacks in the beginning, saying "Don't do it again and we'll let you go." Europe got hammered, and Japan wound up attacking the U.S. so we stepped up and cleaned the whole mess again. Both times, millions of Americans died to help save Europe. Fast foward 60 years and the U.S. sees Iraq starting to act up and get greedy, rather than have another huge war, the decide to defuse the situation before it gets out of control, and now they get bitched at for it. Saddam told the U.N. to stay out and leave him alone, he already had the scientists, he may or may not of had the materials, but they are easy to acquire. The U.N. backed off and didn't back up its sanctions, they acted weak, and it was only going to lead to trouble. The nations in the U.N. didn't want the financial impact of a war. The U.S. did the world a favor, the U.S. has done the world many favors, and we just keep getting shit for it, but luckily for everyone else we won't ever stop when they need us.
Regards,
Steve
Obviously all media outlets have their agendas, but quoting 4 news sources all with conflicting agendas (i.e. non are all right or all left, they vary and by quite a bit) cannot just be disregarded. They aren't just blatantly making up stories, the facts are there, sure they may sensationalize them a bit, but any source that you would think is "reputable" wouldn't report such occurences because it'd be against their own agenda. The military link was to a declassified document, that is plenty legitimate. Regardless, here are two more links to other sources here(past evidence) and here(present evidence). Here is a disclaimer, and this is going to make you hate me and possibly disregard everything I say but in the interest of full disclosure its best I say this, I used to work for the Department of Defense (I recently left), I have government clearance, I've worked with some of the guys that found one of those bunkers, I also had access to other information. Those stories in the links I sent before are factual, I wish I could give you links to a slew of non-american sources but the fact is that outside of America, pro-american stories don't sell, news sources will rarely run them. Non-american news agencies know that news bad mouthing America sells, and your not likely to hear anything opposing that. CNN though is a pretty good and reliable news source, just as good, if not better, than the BBC. If nothing else, hearing all these sources reporting information contrary to popular belief has to make you at least think twice about the situation... anything else would just be naive.
Regards,
Steve
It doesn't matter in this case... this is one of the few periods in the history of the earth where the poles have ice. Sea level has been 300 meters higher a couple hundred million years ago. The earth is still coming out of its last ice age which means no matter what we do its just going to keep getting warmer, oh well, we'll adapt or move off the planet by the time it gets majorly bad. This is a non-issue and we need to stop wasting everyone's time with global warming nonsense. Its going to happen with or without us, its going to continue to accelerate in rate of change, and even if humans are impacting it, it is minimal at best.
Regards,
Steve
Read this.
Regards,
Steve
Stop attatching political affiliations with every idea, and stop treating people with disdain simply because they have opposing views to yours, it simply implies ignorance on your part.
As far as huge underground bunkers go, read this(present evidence) and this(past evidence).
As far as chemical warfare goes, read this(present evidence), this(more present evidence over a year later), and this(past evidence).
If you're still too stubborn to admit that my original response might have an ounce of validity, go read about Iraq's previous tactics in recent wars... the U.N. told them to be good and Iraq ignored them, what made you think that Iraq all of the sudden became this nice little peaceful nation over a decade of time? Saddam had it coming.
Regards,
Steve
Wow... an argument based on nothing but political affiliation. Iraq has been caught burying stockpiles many times before, why do you think this time they wouldn't? Perhaps you've forgotten about the multi-acre underground bunkers designed to be filled with nothing but weapons, most inside of Iraq, but some in neighboring countries.
Regards,
Steve
What claims were false exactly? Saddam had weeks to move and/or bury stockpiles of any weapons he did have while the UN delayed everything. Regardless, WMDs were found, just not to the extent previously thought, and Saddam already had the scientists, if anything he just needed the materials which are easy enough to come by. Don't assume everything the media is telling you is true. Europe looked the other way when Hitler was ramping up his forces, and Europe looked the other way again while Saddam was ramping up his. The nations were too scared of the financial impact of a war with Iraq, so the U.S. stepped up and did what the rest of the world was too scared to do. The U.S. may have very well prevented WW III and they'll never get the recognition they deserve for it. Regardless, Saddam was no good for the world and needed to be overthrown, America had balls big enough to do it. The UN is weak, it is a corrupt organization, they rarely enforce their sanctions, its ridiculous that people like you still spread FUD about the Iraq War when the real enemy here is the U.N. constantly making empty threats and the dictators of the world knowing that.
Regards,
Steve
AOL is actually the kid everyone wants to be friends with again. They've revamped alot of their business and are expected to have a strong come back. I know it sounds impossible, but thats what Wall Street is saying, and Wall Street doesn't just put its money anywhere.
Regards,
Steve
Parabolas are the only geometric shape that perfectly focus rays of light at a defined point. Perfect parabolic mirrors are well beyond the budget of most organizations, yet alone individuals, so they are often approximated through a piece of a sphere which are much easier to make, but less effective. I recommend reading up on optical phsyics if you want to know more, its probably beyond the subject of this post.
Regards,
Steve
Not to argue that the mythbusters are always wrong, but they were wrong this time. Not only does the number of mirrors count, but they must be lined along a parabolic path, must be "perfectly" flat (in this case) and as the article stated, the point of focus changes at 36 feet per hour so you have to keep the mirrors "up to date". There are a lot of factors to take into account, and optical physics to solve. You can clearly see MIT's results, setting the ship on fire, and it was made out of wood stronger than what would have been used by the Romans. The ship hit over 1100 degrees and burnt pretty well. Moral of the story: Myth Buster's results no longer matter because a contradiction to them was proven to exist.
Regards,
Steve
Then WebCT will fit right in with Blackboard because it is a piece of shit as well. WebCT actually went above and beyond its own horrible self a few months ago releasing WebCT Vista and my University upgraded (no relation to Windows Vista).
Regards,
Steve
Heh, who was talking about productivity? :) Your post seemed to imply that running something like quake on your phone isn't yet feasible with J3d, I was simply pointing out some demos that I've used that imply differently.
Regards,
Steve
Software is a bit different than anything else you can compare it to. It is essentially "living" math equations. To prove a program to be perfectly functioning is the equivalent of proving a huge mathematical statement... except because of that good ol' Turing completeness you can't ever prove that an arbitrary program will halt given any type of input (that's not to say that you can't severly limit the cases, and it is possible to design a program that you can prove will halt, just very hard for any complex piece). I could go into this further but suffice it to say that proving quicksort sorts on average of nlg(n) is one thing, proving that your program will perform every function as desired is quite another and would take decades to produce any piece of software of any notable complexity. Adding to this... your software is running in an environment on an OS that it doesn't control which can have any of a variety of patch sets and have any versions of various drivers while also running along side other software that may affect your program by hooking into it, corrupting files, eating all the memory on the machine, thus screwing your program and causing it to possibly crash in the middle of an important cycle. Its not like the Universe where you can be pretty sure what physical laws you're dealing with. In software there are no set of standard "laws", every computer is a different "universe" with different hardware, different programs, different speeds, different amounts of memory, things like antivirus and anti-spyware wil interfere with how your program functions, viruses, and random operating system quirks. Your software relies on the operating system to be perfect, and to prove the operating system to be perfect I would imagine would take on the order of 5 decades, while at the same time forcing the software to not be advanced or changed at all because the proof would have to start from the beginning again. Then for every bug found while proving the operating system functions as desired, when that bug is fixed the proof would have to be done all over again from scratch. The world of software is different then any other industry in the history of man, and as such can not be compared with industries that make physical products. If you don't want technology advancement to crawl to a stop, then don't support this.
Regards,
Steve
Fractals as they are understood and used today were researched and invented by an IBM employee. Mandelbrot discovered them while in the hospital and had nothing else to do (or so the story goes). There were earlier mentions of similar functions, but thats like saying Newton is directly responsible for getting man on the moon. In a sense its true, but I don't think itd be an accurate statement. People were investigating similar things to fractals before Mandelbrot, but its safe to say that he is the one that really took the idea and ran with it, making it into a usable mathematical theory.
Regards,
Steve
The Netbeans IDE has a very nice J2ME feature set, including a gui for designing cell phone interfaces using drag & drop, and it comes with a variety of phone emulators so you can see how it functions on many different systems. Anyway... they have a few J3D samples for phones and they are pretty impressive, the one is a skateboarder going back and forth on a half pipe, the other is a kangaroo bouncing around on a pogo stick in a field. They both run really well on every cell I've tried (all of them have been sony ericsson or motorola phones), which I wasn't expecting (I thought maybe the emulators that Netbeans came with were being a little too generous to the cell phone). So as far as the capabilities of J3D on a J2ME go, I'm more than convinced that there are plenty of oppurtunities for really cool stuff.
Regards,
Steve
I'd like a phone that resemembles something like an ipod shuffle. Small, slim, no screen, just enough buttons to dial a number and answer the phone. I think something like that could be extremely cheap and pretty cool looking at the same time, maybe program it so it speaks the number that called you or something if caller ID is a big issue. I'd bet it would catch on more than most people think.
Regards,
Steve
ThinkFree is *not* a decent product. If you took the union of the set of features in MS Office and the set of features in OpenOffice.Org, ThinkFree has about 60% of them, and that is being generous. In addition, several glaring bugs stand out within seconds of using it. It is inconsistent in many areas and just feels like an alpha product that was pushed to market. I know this because my company *did* evaluate it looking to see if any good web based office suites existed, they want one for a mutlitude of reasons, and I was a part of analysing this. It turns out that as you could of guessed, no good web based office suite quite exist. One other thing, ThinkFree isn't a web based office suite in the sense that most want... it is a java application that can be started through a browser. I work at a fairly large defense contractor and if they are looking for a good web based office suite (by web based I mean AJAX like functionality with Google like quality, not to be cliche), I can only assume that many other corporations are looking too. The sooner businesses start adopting web based office technology, the sooner schools will start teaching it, at which point home users start using it.
Regards,
Steve
Making the data fit the equation isn't necessarily always as bad as it sounds, assuming the equation tends to accurately predict the results. Many times in physics, the equations will predict the existence of particles that aren't yet known about and only through asusming they exist, they are later found. It goes further than particles as well, Einstein assumed his equations were wrong because two particles couldn't possibly be connected and have instantaneous "influence" on each other at any distance... sure enough though quantum entanglement was discovered and proven to exist, and is now performed all the time now in universities and corporate labs working on next generation research. If it wasn't for the scientists assuming that the equations were right, they would have never discovered quantum entanglement.
Regards,
Steve
A) Red Hat had an oppurtunity to buy Suse first (and they had plenty of money to do so), but they declined because they honest to god believe that competition is good.
B) Red Hat's management is open source to the core, if you've ever followed their blogs, or speeches then its pretty evident this isn't just a sham.
C) Red Hat manages GCC, glibc, commits more kernel code than any other entity, is now the core entity behind Gnome, has committed large portions of code to Apache. They've given us Cygwin, GFS, worked with the NSA to integrate SELinux into the kernel, gave us a Directory Server and many many more things. OSS in its current state would be screwed without a big presence like Red Hat. The only reason half of the enterprise features exist in the kernel is from Red Hat. Red Hat does full testing on the kernel. Many OSS projects have such a great reputation for fast patches, a large portion of those patches come from Red Hat.
D) In 16-24 months, Fedora gained more servers according to Netcraft than Novell's Suse. It is a very good product.
E) Novell just got on the Linux train. Despite that they have their hands in many markets, as opposed to Red Hat who depends on Linux to succeed, Red Hat's market capitalization is still over 1 billion dollars higher. Novell is highly mismanaged, and many are speculating that they either are going to get bought, or go through a major management revampment. That revampment could very well include selling off Suse and moving to a different market like they've done many times before. If its not making them enough money, Novell moves on. Red Hat has motivation to keep Linux strong. Novell has been underperforming for a few quarters now and if they keep at this pace they are going to be bankrupt.
You don't give Red Hat enough credit and assume that simply because they are a corporation that they are automatically doing everything with evil intentions. They have very intelligent and deicated folks working there. Literally some of the biggest names in OSS are on their payroll.
Regards,
Steve
How is this FUD? Have you ever seen Red Hat managemnet speak, or read their blogs? These people are open source to the core. They were offered to purchase Suse first before Novell, but declined because they honest to god believe that competition in the market place is healthy for everyone. Not to mention in their industry, Novell gets to borrow their code, and vice versa, so why buy a company when you get access to most of the code anyway?
When it comes to Linux, Red Hat is *the* distro to a PHB. Anyone who dealt with Novell in the 90's is probably scared to ever go back. Even in Europe, Red hat has the majority of the market. Red Hat's market capitalization is over a billion dollars more than Novell's (about 25% more money), yet Red Hat is younger and focuses on one market rather than many markets like Novell does. Novell is highly mismanaged, has underperformed for quite a few quarters now, and is speculated to either be bought up by another company or go through a major management revampment. The only success they've had with Suse is because Suse's prior owners did a pretty good job with it. If Novell keeps at its current pace, they'll be bankrupt in a couple years. If they go through another revampment, nothing says that they'll stick with Suse, they might sell it off and move into a different market like they've done plenty of times before. Red Hat's sole business is Linux, it depends on its success, Novell just jumped on the Linux train and if it doesn't provide the income they are hoping then they'll just move on to the next thing, why on earth would you go with Novell when you've seen their past?
Regards,
Steve
About two or three years ago Red Hat was first offered the chance to buy Suse. They declined, not because the didn't want the company, but because the top guys there really do believe that a competitive market leads to better results for both the industry and the consumer. Red Hat is ran with a very Open Source friendly attitude and mindset, you should listen to some of their conferences, blogs, and talks. Not to mention that in the industry that they are in, most of the things that get developed for Suse can be included in Red Hat, and vice versa. This is a very common occurence where even though neither company pays each other or owns each other they still benefit from each others work.
Regards,
Steve