Why? I don't see the cable companies getting rid of their larger plans. I think this will just bring them more customers like myself who currently have only basic cable (provides the major networks and PBS).
except when your friend calls and says "check out the show on channel 'etc'!!" and you dont have it, you might wish you did.
Except that right now I have no chance at something like this unless they are calling about something on one of the major networks. I only have the basic cable package because $50/month for television is rediculous.
Sure it will. But I'd be willing to pay a couple of dollars/month per ala carte channel to get ESPN and a few others.
I only have basic cable right now (this includes the major networks and PBS). Cablevision's 'Family plan' is where all of the good cable channels are, but it costs an additional $40/month on top of the $11/month for the required basic plan. So to get access to the 2 or 3 'cable' channels that I'd actually use, right now I'd have to pay over $50/month. That's just nuts!
I think Stern has half the definition correct. The other half should be a restriction by orbital eccentricity, and possibly inclination (although I'm not so sure about that one).
I'm pretty sure that if you generate a histogram of the eccentricity of all known solar system objects that orbit the sun (so as to exclude moons) then you will see something quite similar to the brown dwarf desert. There will be a number of objects with very low eccentricity (ie. near circular orbits). Many of these are asteroids, and excluded by Stern's gravity qualification. I think there is a defecit of objects with slightly eccentric orbits, and then many objects with very eccentric orbits.
If you only include the gravitiationally collapsed objects with very low eccentricity, then you have a well defined sample of objects. You'll have to add in Ceres and a few others to the 'current' list of planets, but not many.
To answer to the people who asked why we need a definition of a planet... It is quite simple. Planets should be defined such that they better help us understand the formation of the solar system. All planets should be basically formed in similar ways, and those criteria should be used to drive solar system formation models. The definition definately does not depend on the symantics of the word. It should be a scientific definition which provides some useful constraints. As for the other solar system objects, we already have other astronomical classes that they fit into (asteroids, centaurs, long and short period comets, kuiper belt objects, oort cloud objects, etc). Heck, the asteroid classification alone is subdivided into a half dozen or so different types based on their orbits.
I'll end with the note that there should probably be some caviot in the planet definition that once a planet, always a planet. By this I mean that if a planet is whacked by another body and sent into a high eccentricity orbit, then it is still a planet (if you can show that this occurred). Afterall, if someday mars were to get knocked out of the inner solar system, we wouldn't want to depreciate its status as a planet.
As for Sedna, it is a oort cloud object (its orbit takes it 1000AU from the sun, and has an eccentricity of 0.9).
Transgaming (www.transgaming.com) has a customized version of Wine 3.3 that is designed to run games. They branched out from the main Wine code a while back, and are concentrating on getting things like DirectX working. I have a subscription ($5/month), and have gotten a few things to work. However, it's still never as easy as it should be. Just because something works in the end doesn't mean that getting it installed is trivial.
Part of the problem may be that I'm running SuSE. If they've geared things towards some other distro, then that might explain my difficulty.
Anyway, their site has a list of several hundred games that work to some degree (some work perfectly, others not so well).
That's an interesting comment about Yast. Most things on my SuSE installation that I've needed to customize I've been able to do through Yast. If Yast is incompatable with users modifying the config files directly, then that is a problem.
However, the idea of something like Yast is definately a plus for most of the people I work with. They are responsible for doing minor system admin things on their individual machines, bug fix installations and upgrades for example. If they had to do this from the command line, then they probably wouldn't. But if a easy to navigate GUI exists, then they are more likely to keep on top of things.
I'll look into Libranet. I've heard a lot of good things about Debian, but also that it is royally hard to install. So I didn't want to mess with it.
Certainly an important point! Many people in the US Astronomy community used RedHat in the past (those running linux that is... Solaris is still popular). However, people are being turned off by RedHat's policy change. We actually use Linux for productivity in a desktop environment, and need it to work without a lot of system admin. That essentially means:
1) A distribution that installs 'out of the box' (ftp,nfs,etc) without a lot of tinkering and screwing around getting hardware setup.
2) A distribution that provides bug patches and updates in a easy to use interface.
3) Something that can easily be figured out from a user perspective and is not overly complicated. Many faculty are not the most savey of computer users. I know one who got a new laptop with Windows and couldn't figure it out. He had though been (and still is) using VMS since its beginning and understands that fine.
I recently installed SuSE on my laptop and am quite pleased with it. I'll probably switch my other RedHat machines over to Suse in the near future.
Just my 2-cents from a community that uses linux daily.
A nice idea, but a little difficult to implement. The crew size is 1000 persons. And the idea of this thing just sailing around the world owned by some corp. sounds like the plot of a Bond movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless, they are providing the sources on the ftp site, and have been for several days now.
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/src/
Why? I don't see the cable companies getting rid of their larger plans. I think this will just bring them more customers like myself who currently have only basic cable (provides the major networks and PBS).
Except that right now I have no chance at something like this unless they are calling about something on one of the major networks. I only have the basic cable package because $50/month for television is rediculous.
Sure it will. But I'd be willing to pay a couple of dollars/month per ala carte channel to get ESPN and a few others.
I only have basic cable right now (this includes the major networks and PBS). Cablevision's 'Family plan' is where all of the good cable channels are, but it costs an additional $40/month on top of the $11/month for the required basic plan. So to get access to the 2 or 3 'cable' channels that I'd actually use, right now I'd have to pay over $50/month. That's just nuts!
I think Stern has half the definition correct. The other half should be a restriction by orbital eccentricity, and possibly inclination (although I'm not so sure about that one).
I'm pretty sure that if you generate a histogram of the eccentricity of all known solar system objects that orbit the sun (so as to exclude moons) then you will see something quite similar to the brown dwarf desert. There will be a number of objects with very low eccentricity (ie. near circular orbits). Many of these are asteroids, and excluded by Stern's gravity qualification. I think there is a defecit of objects with slightly eccentric orbits, and then many objects with very eccentric orbits.
If you only include the gravitiationally collapsed objects with very low eccentricity, then you have a well defined sample of objects. You'll have to add in Ceres and a few others to the 'current' list of planets, but not many.
To answer to the people who asked why we need a definition of a planet... It is quite simple. Planets should be defined such that they better help us understand the formation of the solar system. All planets should be basically formed in similar ways, and those criteria should be used to drive solar system formation models. The definition definately does not depend on the symantics of the word. It should be a scientific definition which provides some useful constraints. As for the other solar system objects, we already have other astronomical classes that they fit into (asteroids, centaurs, long and short period comets, kuiper belt objects, oort cloud objects, etc). Heck, the asteroid classification alone is subdivided into a half dozen or so different types based on their orbits.
I'll end with the note that there should probably be some caviot in the planet definition that once a planet, always a planet. By this I mean that if a planet is whacked by another body and sent into a high eccentricity orbit, then it is still a planet (if you can show that this occurred). Afterall, if someday mars were to get knocked out of the inner solar system, we wouldn't want to depreciate its status as a planet.
As for Sedna, it is a oort cloud object (its orbit takes it 1000AU from the sun, and has an eccentricity of 0.9).
Transgaming (www.transgaming.com) has a customized version of Wine 3.3 that is designed to run games. They branched out from the main Wine code a while back, and are concentrating on getting things like DirectX working. I have a subscription ($5/month), and have gotten a few things to work. However, it's still never as easy as it should be. Just because something works in the end doesn't mean that getting it installed is trivial.
Part of the problem may be that I'm running SuSE. If they've geared things towards some other distro, then that might explain my difficulty.
Anyway, their site has a list of several hundred games that work to some degree (some work perfectly, others not so well).
That's an interesting comment about Yast. Most things on my SuSE installation that I've needed to customize I've been able to do through Yast. If Yast is incompatable with users modifying the config files directly, then that is a problem.
However, the idea of something like Yast is definately a plus for most of the people I work with. They are responsible for doing minor system admin things on their individual machines, bug fix installations and upgrades for example. If they had to do this from the command line, then they probably wouldn't. But if a easy to navigate GUI exists, then they are more likely to keep on top of things.
I'll look into Libranet. I've heard a lot of good things about Debian, but also that it is royally hard to install. So I didn't want to mess with it.
Certainly an important point! Many people in the US Astronomy community used RedHat in the past (those running linux that is... Solaris is still popular). However, people are being turned off by RedHat's policy change. We actually use Linux for productivity in a desktop environment, and need it to work without a lot of system admin. That essentially means:
1) A distribution that installs 'out of the box' (ftp,nfs,etc) without a lot of tinkering and screwing around getting hardware setup.
2) A distribution that provides bug patches and updates in a easy to use interface.
3) Something that can easily be figured out from a user perspective and is not overly complicated. Many faculty are not the most savey of computer users. I know one who got a new laptop with Windows and couldn't figure it out. He had though been (and still is) using VMS since its beginning and understands that fine.
I recently installed SuSE on my laptop and am quite pleased with it. I'll probably switch my other RedHat machines over to Suse in the near future.
Just my 2-cents from a community that uses linux daily.
A nice idea, but a little difficult to implement. The crew size is 1000 persons. And the idea of this thing just sailing around the world owned by some corp. sounds like the plot of a Bond movie.