> if it was all about generating amps I don't see the point.
It wasn't, as you'd know if you'd RTFA. Passing a high current through a cylinder makes it implode (in our undergrad labs in Oxford there was a length of squished copper pipe that had provided a short circuit between (IIRC) an old linac and ground. They want to cause a powerful implosion to study nukes without having to detonate them for real.
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Isn't that a good thing, though? If we can still use all the applications and data we need to without constantly upgrading, it seems like an excellent thing all round. Fewer perfectly good machines scrapped just because M$'s latest bloatware can't run on them, less of a drain on mineral resources (eg tantalum) for the production of new computers, reduced cost for companies who find they don't actually have to upgrade all their machines every few years.
The only people I see who don't benefit are the PC makers, and frankly with all the DRM crap and beta-quality chips[0] they keep trying to foist on us who can feel sorry for them?
[0] F00F, recent Athlon memory bug thing as a couple of examples...
As people have said, quiet fans are available. But put a silent fan somewhere where it creates turbulent airflow and the effect will be noise. I recently took out one of the fans from my rather noisy power supply - outside the PSU, quiet fan. Inside, where it causes turbulent airflow over all the components, noisy. You can even get a considerable noise reduction just by removing the grille that goes over the fan to stop idiots poking their fingers into the PSU.
Uhh... what's wrong with ntp for network time-syncing? Even Windows supports it. It can do everything you seem to want - sync your BIOS clock, sync the clock on your desktop so it's nice and accurate.
I would say that walking around in a heavy fallout zone is an extremely unhealthy activity
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both classical airburst detonations. These typically produce low local fallout as the radioactive material is mostly swept up into the stratosphere as the fireball rises. Although there were certainly many cancer cases, most of these were caused by prompt radiation (ie gamma and neutrons directly from the nuclear reactions in the fireball), and that prompt radiation dies away very quickly (hours rather than days).
I wouldn't like to walk around in a heavy fallout zone either, but those are generally associated with groundbursts or radiological devices rather than airbursts. So I think this reporter was probably okay. See the FAQ at nuclearweaponarchive.org for more info.
Bins with Genuine People Personalities... I wonder if there isn't now at least one terminally depressed bench wandering around Cambridge. Life? Don't talk to me about life!
Perhaps as an intermediate language they'd be better off using lojban. It's aimed at removing ambiguity so it sounds ideal for the job, particularly for translating diplomatic stuff where ambiguity is a really bad thing....
That isn't DRM. And, curiously, it doesn't happen on any of the UK (region 2) DVDs I own. Maybe I just got lucky with the titles I've bought, or maybe they figured Europe was less tolerant of such crap than the US. I don't know.
"the best interests of shareholders" doesn't include getting sued into oblivion by IBM a short while after filing specious lawsuits. If I were a shareholder I'd be fuming - while the management could have been building a successful and profitable company based on linux, they got stupid or greedy and flushed it down the drain. The way to fix a failing company is to identify how to make it profitable, not spin out its death agonies.
I can't see the public buying it. Do you remember DIVX? DVDs that automatically degrade after 48 hours? Me neither; they all crashed in flames, because the DRM was too intrusive. The public will put up with a certain amount of unintrusive DRM, like that in current DVDs, but when it gets in-your-face they reject it. And this is about as in-your-face as it gets: what happens when the kids are being baby-sat but Dad buys the DVDs? Every family would have to make a list of who bought which DVDs so as to know which finger to give the machine.
There is no way the public would touch this with a barge pole - I can see it being useful for oscar pre-releases etc. but if the firm that came up with the idea thought it had any mass-market potential they need their heads examining.
Mod parent up, I think this is a really key point. I began to use google when it came out because the search engine I used before, AltaVista, sucked. Since then there have been occasional pretenders to the throne; I used to try one out every now and again, but for the most part they were gimmicky and just not as efficient as google (all the way through, in terms of the interface, the relevance of results and their presentation). So now, so long as google doesn't do something totally stupid, I don't even bother to check out different search engines. Perhaps I've locked myself in, but it saves me time investigating sites I'll never use anyway. I bet a lot of other people are in the same position now, and it'll take not just a better product from someone else, but also a huge cock-up by google, to make us change search engine.
This is about supply to the Chinese government, not all the people of China. Whether or not you think it's unfair (I do, but have no problem with that - life isn't fair...) it's a pretty small thing. Especially when you consider they were probably pirating all their software anyway...
Things aren't necessarily represented by a physical manifestation. Does that reduce their value?
Not their value, but it should vastly reduce the material costs. Just like internet banks, airlines and so on reduced the cost to end users, so should internet music stores.
It doesn't make the "the universe started out as a point" assumption at all. All it relies on is that the speed of light is a constant, and no experiment has ever shown that it isn't. Regardless of how big the universe started out, if it only started 4000 years ago and there are objects more than 4000 light years away then we shouldn't see them: the light would not have had time to reach us. That's about as simple an explanation as they come - you don't have to be much of a scientist to understand concepts like "fixed speed".
Slashdot Mirror
> if it was all about generating amps I don't see the point.
It wasn't, as you'd know if you'd RTFA. Passing a high current through a cylinder makes it implode (in our undergrad labs in Oxford there was a length of squished copper pipe that had provided a short circuit between (IIRC) an old linac and ground. They want to cause a powerful implosion to study nukes without having to detonate them for real.
Nah, they just made 10 louder ;-)
You have been killed by a Firefox on Level 8 with 5439 Gold. RIP.
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Isn't that a good thing, though? If we can still use all the applications and data we need to without constantly upgrading, it seems like an excellent thing all round. Fewer perfectly good machines scrapped just because M$'s latest bloatware can't run on them, less of a drain on mineral resources (eg tantalum) for the production of new computers, reduced cost for companies who find they don't actually have to upgrade all their machines every few years.
The only people I see who don't benefit are the PC makers, and frankly with all the DRM crap and beta-quality chips[0] they keep trying to foist on us who can feel sorry for them?
[0] F00F, recent Athlon memory bug thing as a couple of examples...
As people have said, quiet fans are available. But put a silent fan somewhere where it creates turbulent airflow and the effect will be noise. I recently took out one of the fans from my rather noisy power supply - outside the PSU, quiet fan. Inside, where it causes turbulent airflow over all the components, noisy. You can even get a considerable noise reduction just by removing the grille that goes over the fan to stop idiots poking their fingers into the PSU.
Uhh... what's wrong with ntp for network time-syncing? Even Windows supports it. It can do everything you seem to want - sync your BIOS clock, sync the clock on your desktop so it's nice and accurate.
Hopefully Slashdot can follow this case in as much enthralling detail as it does the IBM/SCO proceedings. Oh boy, I can't wait....
Arms aren't rigid. Helo blades (hopefully) are!
Come on now, I think you're being unfair.
I think this story will be of great interest to both SCO's remaining users.
I would say that walking around in a heavy fallout zone is an extremely unhealthy activity
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both classical airburst detonations. These typically produce low local fallout as the radioactive material is mostly swept up into the stratosphere as the fireball rises. Although there were certainly many cancer cases, most of these were caused by prompt radiation (ie gamma and neutrons directly from the nuclear reactions in the fireball), and that prompt radiation dies away very quickly (hours rather than days).
I wouldn't like to walk around in a heavy fallout zone either, but those are generally associated with groundbursts or radiological devices rather than airbursts. So I think this reporter was probably okay. See the FAQ at nuclearweaponarchive.org for more info.
Bins with Genuine People Personalities... I wonder if there isn't now at least one terminally depressed bench wandering around Cambridge. Life? Don't talk to me about life!
Does this mean I get to wear a cool fedora and carry my distro CDs in a violin case?"
Alas, it probably means you get to wear an overcoat made from discarded AOL CDs and carry Fedora Core 4-beta in a violin case.
Perhaps as an intermediate language they'd be better off using lojban. It's aimed at removing ambiguity so it sounds ideal for the job, particularly for translating diplomatic stuff where ambiguity is a really bad thing....
>Besides, you've manually intervened to start Evolution up in the first place, so why not take the extra step of clicking "Send/Receive"?
Perhaps he has it start automatically on login?
>>"You HAVE to specify a mail server in the Evo startup wizard."
>Duh! Where else is your email going to come from?
A local mailbox?
My bad phrasing. s/DIVX\?\ DVDs/DIVX\?\ Or\ those\ DVDs//
I think you misread my post. I was blaming both pigs :-)
That isn't DRM. And, curiously, it doesn't happen on any of the UK (region 2) DVDs I own. Maybe I just got lucky with the titles I've bought, or maybe they figured Europe was less tolerant of such crap than the US. I don't know.
"the best interests of shareholders" doesn't include getting sued into oblivion by IBM a short while after filing specious lawsuits. If I were a shareholder I'd be fuming - while the management could have been building a successful and profitable company based on linux, they got stupid or greedy and flushed it down the drain. The way to fix a failing company is to identify how to make it profitable, not spin out its death agonies.
I can't see the public buying it. Do you remember DIVX? DVDs that automatically degrade after 48 hours? Me neither; they all crashed in flames, because the DRM was too intrusive. The public will put up with a certain amount of unintrusive DRM, like that in current DVDs, but when it gets in-your-face they reject it. And this is about as in-your-face as it gets: what happens when the kids are being baby-sat but Dad buys the DVDs? Every family would have to make a list of who bought which DVDs so as to know which finger to give the machine.
There is no way the public would touch this with a barge pole - I can see it being useful for oscar pre-releases etc. but if the firm that came up with the idea thought it had any mass-market potential they need their heads examining.
Mod parent up, I think this is a really key point. I began to use google when it came out because the search engine I used before, AltaVista, sucked. Since then there have been occasional pretenders to the throne; I used to try one out every now and again, but for the most part they were gimmicky and just not as efficient as google (all the way through, in terms of the interface, the relevance of results and their presentation). So now, so long as google doesn't do something totally stupid, I don't even bother to check out different search engines. Perhaps I've locked myself in, but it saves me time investigating sites I'll never use anyway. I bet a lot of other people are in the same position now, and it'll take not just a better product from someone else, but also a huge cock-up by google, to make us change search engine.
This is about supply to the Chinese government, not all the people of China. Whether or not you think it's unfair (I do, but have no problem with that - life isn't fair...) it's a pretty small thing. Especially when you consider they were probably pirating all their software anyway...
Especially when you take coal mining into account.
Things aren't necessarily represented by a physical manifestation. Does that reduce their value?
Not their value, but it should vastly reduce the material costs. Just like internet banks, airlines and so on reduced the cost to end users, so should internet music stores.
Fpenooyr!
It doesn't make the "the universe started out as a point" assumption at all. All it relies on is that the speed of light is a constant, and no experiment has ever shown that it isn't. Regardless of how big the universe started out, if it only started 4000 years ago and there are objects more than 4000 light years away then we shouldn't see them: the light would not have had time to reach us. That's about as simple an explanation as they come - you don't have to be much of a scientist to understand concepts like "fixed speed".