Well considering how much younger Red Hat is than Novell and the fact that Red Hat focuses soley on linux where as Novell has its hands in many markets and still Red Hat's market capitalization is around a billion more than Novell's says something. Novell has consistently been underperforming in the market for a few quarters now. There is serious mismanagement in that company. The distribution is great, but most of its greatness is still from the prior owners. There is lots of speculation about Novell being bought out or revamping management and direction. Last time they were doing poorly, they switched directions into Linux, if they change management again, they may move into a different direction. Novell is still feeling out the market and deciding how to best make money. They have a few customers in Europe, but other than that it seems most people are going with Red Hat or < insert alternative >. This isn't meant to start a distro war, but this is the way business is going. Its not a bad thing, Red Hat has done a ton for the community and pays some of the best hackers in OSS. This is just the way things go down. Regards, Steve
Given a 10x10x10 box you can calculate how long it will take you to "scan" the entire box for any contents within. You can calculate it without knowing anything other then the size of the box. Now we already know to within extremely small margins of error how much recorded data there is, in a worst case you can simply extrapolate the average amount of information generated per generation going back to the dawn of man writing and drawing. There is a pretty good curve that is followed. In newer generations you also have to account for non-written data, i.e. sounds and videos. This curve (unfortunately I can't find the resource right now) has been strictly followed and is growing exponentially, obviously. Estimate how much data there is now, figure out its growth rate, you know the rate you can index it and assume you'll only get faster indexing capabilities as time goes on, and then you can get a pretty good estimate as to how long it would take. If you can't index it faster than it is generated then you'll never completely index everything, at least they've shown that they believe it can be indexed fast enough. It would by no means be within a year of accuracy, but maybe within a few decades. You have to start somewhere so don't blast Google for trying, at least they are thinking ahead 300 years from now rather then just their next quarterly earnings report. Regards, Steve
I'm a huge python fan, but what you stated is blatantly false. Python is around 700 times slower than java, on a good day. Perl is around 95 times slower than java. For any gui related work though you'd never know it, the "responsivess" of an application depends on the gui toolkit. In java , just don't use swing if you want an app that feels fast. Use SWT or GTK, its quite simple. Gui applications do things in discrete steps, so a python app can feel as fast as a java app because nothing is usually happening for more than a few milliseconds. Implementing any heavy performance servers or just about anything else that requires heavy duty calculations (like 100 million calculations per second) you just can't do in python. I use python all the time, but don't be naive and look past its limitations. It may also be worth noting that the fastest database on the market right now is written in java (I'm sure others will argue, and there are many variables to take into account, but from a raw performance view in general use it almost always beats out the competition) Regards, Steve
Wow you are clueless. Just using cameras alone, computers can avoid obstacles fairly well. Throw in other sensors and range measurement equipment and they can do it extremely well, better than a 70 year old driver could aovid obstacles. That tells you something. Read Stanford's site, as of this time they've already completed the course. These cars have to avoid lots of things from bushes and cones to having to figure out how to avoid rivers and cliffs and mountains. Sure the general course is given to them, but when you drive to the local store, directions are also given to you, big deal. These cars are mapping the world in real time and using various analysis techniques, figuring out the best way to get from point a to point b at the safest maximum speed while maneuvering. These robots aren't just driving on flat roads like you imply, and they are also constantly surrounded by dirt clouds. Regards, Steve
Err... I don't know what industry you're in, but the standard in Pharmaceuticals, Energy & Utils, and Defense is Java. Those are just the 3 largest industries off the top of my head. Java is *fast*, extremely fast, I've written Java code that runs fast than C++. With JIT, speed is not a problem. The only reason Java has a somewhat bad name is because of Swing, but if you understand the extreme extensibility of Swing, it makes sense. If you want Java apps that feel fast, just use SWT or GTK's java bindings. Slashdot's groupthink often criticizes Java, but as of about a year ago there were 7 to 8 times as many jobs available for java developers. I feel bad for the students that might read slashdot and be turned off by Java, its only going to limit their options when they graduate. Java is a good thing, it is worth learning. Adding on to this... the GNU GCJ can compile around 90-95% of Java programs including Eclipse and OpenOffice.Org, it also handles JOGL and iirc Java3D. If you don't like the idea of a JVM, just compile it natively. I code in Java at work, at home I often prefer Python (but its always for smaller projects). Java is horrendous for throwing anything together that is less than 1000 lines or so of code. Java's syntax and naming conventions were designed with large teams on large projects in mind, and writing code where people would be coming back 7 years later never even knowning who wrote it or what it did. It does that very well. It may take a few extra keystrokes to type, and it may not be a one liner like in perl but it is designed so that just about anyone (Novice or Pro) can read through it and realize what is happening step by step. I could go on but I'm probably only going to get flamed. Regards, Steve
Nearly everything you mentioned was invented by IBM in OS/2. Microsoft pulled out of a contract with IBM (honestly, OS/2 was putting them to shame) and literally stole IBM's ideas. At the time, suing for gui copying was unheard of, but today IBM probably would have sued considering some people are suing Apple for the iTunes interface. IBM invented the whole concept of the desktop and all associated metaphors. The difference being that they called it "workplace" instead of "desktop". Here is a picture, notice the similarities? See that side bar... compare it to some of the previews of longhorn. See those files with.htm ? Yea... they open in a default program just like windows, only this version of OS/2 was released over 3 and a half years earlier than Windows 95, and earlier versions of OS/2 excelled in functionality as well. Stop eating what MS is feeding you, its not true. I was reading a blog earlier by an Excel developer... apparently he thought that this new gui in Office12 was the first to use tabs in a toolbar like manner, er... take a look at the bottom of that screenshot. OS/2 was fully aware of task oriented and mode sensitive guis. Hell... I've heard some MS Developers say that they created the whole "tabs" idea when Mac's alternative widget sucked... but once again it was already in OS/2. I could go on for quite some time but it honestly disgusts me. Regards, Steve
The U.N. is *not* a democracy by any means. It is also more polluted with corruption than any major government. In addition to that, there are 5 members with veto power... the other 186 nations can all agree on something, and one of the other 5 can just say "no". That is not a democracy. I personally think that is a good thing, however, because a quick glance at the list of nations shows that at a minimum 70% are not democratic nations, they are oppressive to the people, force a religion upon the populace, restrict the flow of information into the borders and are the last people in the world that deserve to be in control of the internet. Most of those nations would be putting forth a constant push to censor it. The U.S. may not be perfect, but its one of the few countries left that respect basic human freedoms (even England is pushing to make negative religious assertations illegal, i.e. a religious joke). Regards, Steve
I think you trust your media a bit too much... WMDs were found in Iraq, several times, just not in the quantities previously claimed. Any large quantities could have easily been hidden or smuggled out of the country while the U.N. held up everything for weeks. The U.N. told Saddam how it was going to be or else, Saddam ignored them, and the U.N. did nothing... it was a bad move on the U.N's part. All the countries were too scared of the financial impact of a war, so the U.S. steps up and does what everyone else is too scared to do. Iraq did have quite a military force, the U.S. just had a really good plan. The only reason there is any trouble right now is simply because the terrorists don't where uniforms, they blend in with the regular people. I can guarantee you that if terrorists walked around openly proclaiming their cause and wearing uniforms that this thing would be over in a month. Regardless, the U.N. never enforces its threats, it looks and acts weak, completely destroying its whole purpose. The U.N. was not designed to regulate what most would consider a utility. Regards, Steve
The U.N. is corrupt and moves slowly. There are many religious states and other non-free countries that want to manipulate and filter content. Depsite the many downfalls that the U.S. has, they are one of the last free countries around. Even goddamn England wants to ban religious jokes. You'll never see that happen in the U.S. In addition to that, the U.N. would tax everyone (they've already said they had an intention of doing so) and the last thing the world needs is a precedent for an international tax. The U.N. was not made for this, just like EU is starting to excercise control in areas it doesn't belong, the U.N. is already spreading itself too far If the U.N. takes control, you'll see the internet fall to pieces as it takes months to years for everyone to agree on every little thing. Mark my words, if the U.S. loses control you will start to see the freedoms provided by the internet eroded. Just a quick glance at the countries in the U.N. tells you that at least 60-70% of them would fully back censorship. This is nothing but a power trip. Regards, Steve
Honestly... they realized that they were giving all these cool features away when they could be getting money for it. Noone is going to buy an extension so they made a new browser(I bet its based heavily on gecko) and now they can plop google ads and amazon stuff in the window and they make money. Regards, Steve
Re:Waste of time and source of FUD for Microsoft
on
Dell Offering "Open" PC
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, actually the law firm I work at has. Excellent support from both Dell and Red Hat. Regards, Steve
Re:How do Maya and Max compare to Blender?
on
Autodesk Acquires Alias
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Blender is much more than just 3d modeling. It is a full suite of 3d modeling, sound syncing, animation, physics, great scripting capabilities, game engine, and an extremely fast renderer. It was used in parts of the development for Spiderman 2, so its obviously starting to catch the big guys' attention. Quite a few professionals already use it. It really is quite a product, and although its gui paradigm is different than most are used to, it turns out to be extremely effective. Other than that, blender has all your standard features, it can render to a cluster, it can do just about anything you want it, its just a matter of getting schools to start teaching it. Regards, Steve
This was a problem with one very small portion (twiki) of spreadfirefox. The system was setup regardless so that no user infomration was exposed. Nothing bad happened, spreadfirefox sent out a nice email to all registered users just letting them know that a remote attack was attempted. Regards, Steve
Ray Kurzweil is a reknowned "futurist" who has accurately predicted the future literally hundreds of times. He sometimes is even responsible for it happenning, i.e. he created the first synthetic instruments, first electronic book reader for the blind, the first robot that creates truly original art, a robot that writes poems inspired by other poems ( from what I understand, he really just uses an elegant markov chain), and he is currently one of the industry leaders in Artificial Intelligence research. He owns like 12 corporations and is a millionaire not because he is a crazy lunatic, but because he is often accurate and good at what he does. In addition to the above, he is often paid hefty sums of money to do consulting at Lockheed Martin and some other major companies. This guy is no joke, take what he says seriosuly. Regards, Steve
It's a little worse than that. The IHS guys aren't just script kiddies, their lead guy's blog is here. He is apparently very active in writing exploits and gives code to all of them. He was just accepted into a university, but worse, one of his blog entries is about how he likes slackware and is trying to write some code to help the project out. Now I don't know about you, but I find that suspicious as hell. Unless someone goes over every line of code submitted with a magnifying glass than it can be fairly easy to sneak in a little area for a buffer overflow or something. (Preventive measures like SELinux and exec-shield are necessary and even they don't fully solve the problem). I can only hope that the slackware community does decent background checks on submitters, and also good code checking. The last thing we need is for Open Source to start being purposely made vulnerable and attacked from within. Regards, Steve
To me, the fact that it looks like nothing has happened is a very immature handling of the problem. They should have a notice on the front page about what happened, how they are researching how it happened, and the possible effects that it may have on you as a user. It seems like they are trying to cover this up with absolutely no recognition of what happened. If they do have a forum or something about this and I didn't see it, then thats a good thing but it should be made more visible. If I ran Suse, the first thing through my mind would be, "Shit, what servers are their repositories ran on. Could my update last night have rooted my system? Is this flaw something to do with the configuration that this specific site was using, or is it a flaw in all servers running Suse. What do I need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen to my Suse server." I think they are handling this all wrong and covering it up like Cisco or Microsoft would do, but I don't run Suse and am not sure how they typically handle things like this. Maybe they use a different channel like e-mail, if so please correct me. Regards, Steve
The science is not something to be explained in a post on slashdot. It can be a pretty complex science, but the basis relies on the half-life of nuclear materials. The half-life can easily be measured and from that, you can come to many other conclusions. But let me repeat, there are plenty of other dating methods that have nothing to do with carbon dating or even nuclear phsyics at all. A simple example would be akin to counting the layers of certain tidal areas (or areas that were once tidal). Each cycle you can tell just from the way the rock formed, what the cycle of the moon was and other facts about the tide... the moon circles the earth on a pretty constant cycle and you can tell how long ago a certain layer of that tidal area is from. It is easy to determine if that layer has been tampered with or not, but if a fossile is in that layer and the surrounding sediments are consistent with typical tidal patterns than that fossil died during that period (Of course you would confirm your finding with a few other completely unrelated dating methods). Its just like counting rings on a tree, not only can you tell what rings are from which seasons but you get other information like how much rain was during that season. Regards, Steve
Well please let me know what science you've discovered that conflicts with all known, tested, and proven nuclear theory. Regardless, carbon dating is only good for up until about 60,000 years old. After that many other methods can be used, most of those methods are proven and extremely accurate. Please also keep in mind that scientists rarely, if ever, only use one method of dating something. By using two or more completely unrelated methods to date a specimen you can get its age to within extremely small margins of error.
Carbon dating, and similar methods, tend to often be most useful for mummies and humans or recent dead animals. Methods like those can't be used on dinosaur bones because most of the time the bone has been replaced with a different material (one example would be in southern south america, some major finds have been found but the bones were hard to move because they were nearly pure iron and bigger than a man.) You should read up on the science, its a very mature and well understood thing. The media does shitty research and doesn't check any facts that various religious groups tell them. Learn for yourself, you can probably take a class in it at your local college.
The intelligent design folk tend to be ignorant and ignoring facts. They can't accept the truth because they want more to their life, they want to believe that God designed people after himself (which in my eyes is a pretty conceited view, and also an insult to God considering how crappy and fragile we are designed, not to mention the numerous unused organs... I guess God just wanted to weigh us down.) I am a religious man, but some people associate evolution with meaning there is no heaven (not necessarily a true relation) and can't go through life not thinking that there is some higher meaning for them living. Its really all a case about people not being as important as they want to be. Its always been that way (hell, for centuries we claimed we were the center of the friggin Universe) and some people just need to wake up and accept the truth. Regards, Steve
A) 20 millions years isn't that old, its 100 times older than humans, big deal. Thats why the form hasn't changed that much, but it may also be because the design really is that well. Most spiders have few predators but quite a selection of prey.
B) Some animals did evolve to what is considered pretty optimal, some examples being sharks, crocidiles and squid. If you follow the genetic chains of living things you'll see that some tend to have fewer changes. Often times the case is that the animal has few or none predators.
Steve Jobs could potentially become the poster boy for our generation from this. If the record labels do pull out, all Steve Jobs has to do is stand up on a soap box and say
"Look everyone, I tried my hardest to make it easy and affordable for you to get music over the internet. We had succeeded at this and we revolutionized the industry. You and me showed the world that if you were given the choice to affordably download music that you'll choose that over pirating. Alas, the music industry has become extremely greedy. Their profit margins are already extremely inflated and they just want more money. The only option they left open for variable pricing was price increases, but where are the price decreases? It costs them nothing to distribute music this way, its cuts out the cost of the CD, the CD case, the label in the case, the cost of shipping, the cost of manufacturing. It is saving them extreme amounts of money, but they are just becoming greedier. As a result I hope we can all band together and boycott the RIAA, Sony, Warner, etc... Obtain your music through alternate channels, rip it off your old CDs, do what you must but please don't support these labels."
He would instantly be praised and supported by millions of teens and twentysomethings, cutting nearly completely into the record label's profits. On the other hand, Apple could also simply start their own music label and really rock the industry. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Well considering how much younger Red Hat is than Novell and the fact that Red Hat focuses soley on linux where as Novell has its hands in many markets and still Red Hat's market capitalization is around a billion more than Novell's says something. Novell has consistently been underperforming in the market for a few quarters now. There is serious mismanagement in that company. The distribution is great, but most of its greatness is still from the prior owners. There is lots of speculation about Novell being bought out or revamping management and direction. Last time they were doing poorly, they switched directions into Linux, if they change management again, they may move into a different direction. Novell is still feeling out the market and deciding how to best make money. They have a few customers in Europe, but other than that it seems most people are going with Red Hat or < insert alternative >. This isn't meant to start a distro war, but this is the way business is going. Its not a bad thing, Red Hat has done a ton for the community and pays some of the best hackers in OSS. This is just the way things go down.
Regards,
Steve
Given a 10x10x10 box you can calculate how long it will take you to "scan" the entire box for any contents within. You can calculate it without knowing anything other then the size of the box. Now we already know to within extremely small margins of error how much recorded data there is, in a worst case you can simply extrapolate the average amount of information generated per generation going back to the dawn of man writing and drawing. There is a pretty good curve that is followed. In newer generations you also have to account for non-written data, i.e. sounds and videos. This curve (unfortunately I can't find the resource right now) has been strictly followed and is growing exponentially, obviously. Estimate how much data there is now, figure out its growth rate, you know the rate you can index it and assume you'll only get faster indexing capabilities as time goes on, and then you can get a pretty good estimate as to how long it would take. If you can't index it faster than it is generated then you'll never completely index everything, at least they've shown that they believe it can be indexed fast enough. It would by no means be within a year of accuracy, but maybe within a few decades. You have to start somewhere so don't blast Google for trying, at least they are thinking ahead 300 years from now rather then just their next quarterly earnings report.
Regards,
Steve
I'm a huge python fan, but what you stated is blatantly false. Python is around 700 times slower than java, on a good day. Perl is around 95 times slower than java. For any gui related work though you'd never know it, the "responsivess" of an application depends on the gui toolkit. In java , just don't use swing if you want an app that feels fast. Use SWT or GTK, its quite simple. Gui applications do things in discrete steps, so a python app can feel as fast as a java app because nothing is usually happening for more than a few milliseconds. Implementing any heavy performance servers or just about anything else that requires heavy duty calculations (like 100 million calculations per second) you just can't do in python. I use python all the time, but don't be naive and look past its limitations. It may also be worth noting that the fastest database on the market right now is written in java (I'm sure others will argue, and there are many variables to take into account, but from a raw performance view in general use it almost always beats out the competition)
Regards,
Steve
Wow you are clueless. Just using cameras alone, computers can avoid obstacles fairly well. Throw in other sensors and range measurement equipment and they can do it extremely well, better than a 70 year old driver could aovid obstacles. That tells you something. Read Stanford's site, as of this time they've already completed the course. These cars have to avoid lots of things from bushes and cones to having to figure out how to avoid rivers and cliffs and mountains. Sure the general course is given to them, but when you drive to the local store, directions are also given to you, big deal. These cars are mapping the world in real time and using various analysis techniques, figuring out the best way to get from point a to point b at the safest maximum speed while maneuvering. These robots aren't just driving on flat roads like you imply, and they are also constantly surrounded by dirt clouds.
Regards,
Steve
Err... I don't know what industry you're in, but the standard in Pharmaceuticals, Energy & Utils, and Defense is Java. Those are just the 3 largest industries off the top of my head. Java is *fast*, extremely fast, I've written Java code that runs fast than C++. With JIT, speed is not a problem. The only reason Java has a somewhat bad name is because of Swing, but if you understand the extreme extensibility of Swing, it makes sense. If you want Java apps that feel fast, just use SWT or GTK's java bindings. Slashdot's groupthink often criticizes Java, but as of about a year ago there were 7 to 8 times as many jobs available for java developers. I feel bad for the students that might read slashdot and be turned off by Java, its only going to limit their options when they graduate. Java is a good thing, it is worth learning. Adding on to this... the GNU GCJ can compile around 90-95% of Java programs including Eclipse and OpenOffice.Org, it also handles JOGL and iirc Java3D. If you don't like the idea of a JVM, just compile it natively. I code in Java at work, at home I often prefer Python (but its always for smaller projects). Java is horrendous for throwing anything together that is less than 1000 lines or so of code. Java's syntax and naming conventions were designed with large teams on large projects in mind, and writing code where people would be coming back 7 years later never even knowning who wrote it or what it did. It does that very well. It may take a few extra keystrokes to type, and it may not be a one liner like in perl but it is designed so that just about anyone (Novice or Pro) can read through it and realize what is happening step by step. I could go on but I'm probably only going to get flamed.
Regards,
Steve
Nearly everything you mentioned was invented by IBM in OS/2. Microsoft pulled out of a contract with IBM (honestly, OS/2 was putting them to shame) and literally stole IBM's ideas. At the time, suing for gui copying was unheard of, but today IBM probably would have sued considering some people are suing Apple for the iTunes interface. IBM invented the whole concept of the desktop and all associated metaphors. The difference being that they called it "workplace" instead of "desktop". Here is a picture, notice the similarities? See that side bar... compare it to some of the previews of longhorn. See those files with .htm ? Yea... they open in a default program just like windows, only this version of OS/2 was released over 3 and a half years earlier than Windows 95, and earlier versions of OS/2 excelled in functionality as well. Stop eating what MS is feeding you, its not true. I was reading a blog earlier by an Excel developer... apparently he thought that this new gui in Office12 was the first to use tabs in a toolbar like manner, er... take a look at the bottom of that screenshot. OS/2 was fully aware of task oriented and mode sensitive guis. Hell... I've heard some MS Developers say that they created the whole "tabs" idea when Mac's alternative widget sucked... but once again it was already in OS/2. I could go on for quite some time but it honestly disgusts me.
Regards,
Steve
The U.N. is *not* a democracy by any means. It is also more polluted with corruption than any major government. In addition to that, there are 5 members with veto power... the other 186 nations can all agree on something, and one of the other 5 can just say "no". That is not a democracy. I personally think that is a good thing, however, because a quick glance at the list of nations shows that at a minimum 70% are not democratic nations, they are oppressive to the people, force a religion upon the populace, restrict the flow of information into the borders and are the last people in the world that deserve to be in control of the internet. Most of those nations would be putting forth a constant push to censor it. The U.S. may not be perfect, but its one of the few countries left that respect basic human freedoms (even England is pushing to make negative religious assertations illegal, i.e. a religious joke).
Regards,
Steve
I think you trust your media a bit too much... WMDs were found in Iraq, several times, just not in the quantities previously claimed. Any large quantities could have easily been hidden or smuggled out of the country while the U.N. held up everything for weeks. The U.N. told Saddam how it was going to be or else, Saddam ignored them, and the U.N. did nothing... it was a bad move on the U.N's part. All the countries were too scared of the financial impact of a war, so the U.S. steps up and does what everyone else is too scared to do. Iraq did have quite a military force, the U.S. just had a really good plan. The only reason there is any trouble right now is simply because the terrorists don't where uniforms, they blend in with the regular people. I can guarantee you that if terrorists walked around openly proclaiming their cause and wearing uniforms that this thing would be over in a month. Regardless, the U.N. never enforces its threats, it looks and acts weak, completely destroying its whole purpose. The U.N. was not designed to regulate what most would consider a utility.
Regards,
Steve
The U.N. is corrupt and moves slowly. There are many religious states and other non-free countries that want to manipulate and filter content. Depsite the many downfalls that the U.S. has, they are one of the last free countries around. Even goddamn England wants to ban religious jokes. You'll never see that happen in the U.S. In addition to that, the U.N. would tax everyone (they've already said they had an intention of doing so) and the last thing the world needs is a precedent for an international tax. The U.N. was not made for this, just like EU is starting to excercise control in areas it doesn't belong, the U.N. is already spreading itself too far If the U.N. takes control, you'll see the internet fall to pieces as it takes months to years for everyone to agree on every little thing. Mark my words, if the U.S. loses control you will start to see the freedoms provided by the internet eroded. Just a quick glance at the countries in the U.N. tells you that at least 60-70% of them would fully back censorship. This is nothing but a power trip.
Regards,
Steve
Honestly... they realized that they were giving all these cool features away when they could be getting money for it. Noone is going to buy an extension so they made a new browser(I bet its based heavily on gecko) and now they can plop google ads and amazon stuff in the window and they make money.
Regards,
Steve
Yes, actually the law firm I work at has. Excellent support from both Dell and Red Hat.
Regards,
Steve
Blender is much more than just 3d modeling. It is a full suite of 3d modeling, sound syncing, animation, physics, great scripting capabilities, game engine, and an extremely fast renderer. It was used in parts of the development for Spiderman 2, so its obviously starting to catch the big guys' attention. Quite a few professionals already use it. It really is quite a product, and although its gui paradigm is different than most are used to, it turns out to be extremely effective. Other than that, blender has all your standard features, it can render to a cluster, it can do just about anything you want it, its just a matter of getting schools to start teaching it.
Regards,
Steve
This was a problem with one very small portion (twiki) of spreadfirefox. The system was setup regardless so that no user infomration was exposed. Nothing bad happened, spreadfirefox sent out a nice email to all registered users just letting them know that a remote attack was attempted.
Regards,
Steve
Ray Kurzweil is a reknowned "futurist" who has accurately predicted the future literally hundreds of times. He sometimes is even responsible for it happenning, i.e. he created the first synthetic instruments, first electronic book reader for the blind, the first robot that creates truly original art, a robot that writes poems inspired by other poems ( from what I understand, he really just uses an elegant markov chain), and he is currently one of the industry leaders in Artificial Intelligence research. He owns like 12 corporations and is a millionaire not because he is a crazy lunatic, but because he is often accurate and good at what he does. In addition to the above, he is often paid hefty sums of money to do consulting at Lockheed Martin and some other major companies. This guy is no joke, take what he says seriosuly.
Regards,
Steve
It's a little worse than that. The IHS guys aren't just script kiddies, their lead guy's blog is here. He is apparently very active in writing exploits and gives code to all of them. He was just accepted into a university, but worse, one of his blog entries is about how he likes slackware and is trying to write some code to help the project out. Now I don't know about you, but I find that suspicious as hell. Unless someone goes over every line of code submitted with a magnifying glass than it can be fairly easy to sneak in a little area for a buffer overflow or something. (Preventive measures like SELinux and exec-shield are necessary and even they don't fully solve the problem). I can only hope that the slackware community does decent background checks on submitters, and also good code checking. The last thing we need is for Open Source to start being purposely made vulnerable and attacked from within.
Regards,
Steve
To me, the fact that it looks like nothing has happened is a very immature handling of the problem. They should have a notice on the front page about what happened, how they are researching how it happened, and the possible effects that it may have on you as a user. It seems like they are trying to cover this up with absolutely no recognition of what happened. If they do have a forum or something about this and I didn't see it, then thats a good thing but it should be made more visible. If I ran Suse, the first thing through my mind would be, "Shit, what servers are their repositories ran on. Could my update last night have rooted my system? Is this flaw something to do with the configuration that this specific site was using, or is it a flaw in all servers running Suse. What do I need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen to my Suse server." I think they are handling this all wrong and covering it up like Cisco or Microsoft would do, but I don't run Suse and am not sure how they typically handle things like this. Maybe they use a different channel like e-mail, if so please correct me.
Regards,
Steve
The science is not something to be explained in a post on slashdot. It can be a pretty complex science, but the basis relies on the half-life of nuclear materials. The half-life can easily be measured and from that, you can come to many other conclusions. But let me repeat, there are plenty of other dating methods that have nothing to do with carbon dating or even nuclear phsyics at all. A simple example would be akin to counting the layers of certain tidal areas (or areas that were once tidal). Each cycle you can tell just from the way the rock formed, what the cycle of the moon was and other facts about the tide... the moon circles the earth on a pretty constant cycle and you can tell how long ago a certain layer of that tidal area is from. It is easy to determine if that layer has been tampered with or not, but if a fossile is in that layer and the surrounding sediments are consistent with typical tidal patterns than that fossil died during that period (Of course you would confirm your finding with a few other completely unrelated dating methods). Its just like counting rings on a tree, not only can you tell what rings are from which seasons but you get other information like how much rain was during that season.
Regards,
Steve
Woah... thats pretty interesting. 99% of all cancer patients also ate pickles at some point in their life.
Regards,
Steve (it's a joke, laugh)
Good to see everyone on /. hasn't lost their mind :) Thanks.
Regards,
Steve
Well please let me know what science you've discovered that conflicts with all known, tested, and proven nuclear theory. Regardless, carbon dating is only good for up until about 60,000 years old. After that many other methods can be used, most of those methods are proven and extremely accurate. Please also keep in mind that scientists rarely, if ever, only use one method of dating something. By using two or more completely unrelated methods to date a specimen you can get its age to within extremely small margins of error.
Carbon dating, and similar methods, tend to often be most useful for mummies and humans or recent dead animals. Methods like those can't be used on dinosaur bones because most of the time the bone has been replaced with a different material (one example would be in southern south america, some major finds have been found but the bones were hard to move because they were nearly pure iron and bigger than a man.) You should read up on the science, its a very mature and well understood thing. The media does shitty research and doesn't check any facts that various religious groups tell them. Learn for yourself, you can probably take a class in it at your local college.
The intelligent design folk tend to be ignorant and ignoring facts. They can't accept the truth because they want more to their life, they want to believe that God designed people after himself (which in my eyes is a pretty conceited view, and also an insult to God considering how crappy and fragile we are designed, not to mention the numerous unused organs... I guess God just wanted to weigh us down.) I am a religious man, but some people associate evolution with meaning there is no heaven (not necessarily a true relation) and can't go through life not thinking that there is some higher meaning for them living. Its really all a case about people not being as important as they want to be. Its always been that way (hell, for centuries we claimed we were the center of the friggin Universe) and some people just need to wake up and accept the truth.
Regards,
Steve
A) 20 millions years isn't that old, its 100 times older than humans, big deal. Thats why the form hasn't changed that much, but it may also be because the design really is that well. Most spiders have few predators but quite a selection of prey.
B) Some animals did evolve to what is considered pretty optimal, some examples being sharks, crocidiles and squid. If you follow the genetic chains of living things you'll see that some tend to have fewer changes. Often times the case is that the animal has few or none predators.
Regards,
Steve
There will most likely be no client to client traffic, which is enforced at the router and even more so by the VPN.
Regards,
Steve
Steve Jobs could potentially become the poster boy for our generation from this. If the record labels do pull out, all Steve Jobs has to do is stand up on a soap box and say
"Look everyone, I tried my hardest to make it easy and affordable for you to get music over the internet. We had succeeded at this and we revolutionized the industry. You and me showed the world that if you were given the choice to affordably download music that you'll choose that over pirating. Alas, the music industry has become extremely greedy. Their profit margins are already extremely inflated and they just want more money. The only option they left open for variable pricing was price increases, but where are the price decreases? It costs them nothing to distribute music this way, its cuts out the cost of the CD, the CD case, the label in the case, the cost of shipping, the cost of manufacturing. It is saving them extreme amounts of money, but they are just becoming greedier. As a result I hope we can all band together and boycott the RIAA, Sony, Warner, etc... Obtain your music through alternate channels, rip it off your old CDs, do what you must but please don't support these labels."
He would instantly be praised and supported by millions of teens and twentysomethings, cutting nearly completely into the record label's profits. On the other hand, Apple could also simply start their own music label and really rock the industry.
Regards,
Steve
99% of cancer victims have eaten a pickle.
Regards,
Steve - Leader of the War on Pickles
No one used the web before html. They used the internet, quite a different beast.
Regards,
Steve