"...it replaced noisy, expensive vacuum cleaners"
Yes, with a noisy, fairly expensive little vaccuum cleaner. My dad got one of these for my mom, and let me tell you it's still fairly loud, and at $100+ its just as expensive as the low end vaccuums you'll find at target or wal-mart. I love the little bugger, though:)
THis is not true at least from my point of view. I'm currently a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (11th grade) and I've grown up with computers. I currently have seven, just to throw this off a bit more, and some of my earliest memories are with our 286, 386, 486, and all the way up the line. I've had computers around me all my life, and all it seems to have done was help. I'm in the top 2% of students in the state, and have always loved my comps. They just gave me an outlet to use whenever I needed, and still do. I'd suggest the scientists who conducted this study maybe find a few test subjects whose computers weren't just used for pr0n or only for gaming.
Before you know it Windoze will be releasing things like 'windows classic' to make up for the time delays.
Windoze Classic- Remember dot matrix printers and phosphore monitors? We do! Now you can relive the 'good old days' with Windows Classic! For only $500 you can run the original Windoze 3.1 with three, that's right, three shiney new graphics! Act now and we'll throw in a free 3 month subscription to AOL 4.0!
This is cool, but if there ever is a robot revolution this gives them the technology to develop giant human digesting robots. It'd be like the matrix but not. I'd personally rather be in a tube and think I'm alive than be digeted for power. That's just me though.
I myself am a space enthusiast. Personally, I have no problem with the private sector wanting in on space flight, and in fact, I think it would be good for the troubled American economy. The only thing is these companies have no practical experience with putting humans into space, and they seem to be jumping in head first rather than 'testing the waters' so to speak. Remember, NASA has had more than 40 years experience putting humans into space, and they by no means just dove right in. I don't know fully about the tests being conducted with these spacecraft, but from what I can gather these companies are in over their heads. They are attempting to start their 'space business' by putting 20 or 30 people in space at a time, when they should really start out slow for safety's sake. What's going to happen if these companies rush to put massive numbers of people in space, forgetting about safety and we have another Challenger or Columbia, but this time with civilians, and more of them? The industry really needs to slow down, or else we are in for a terrible tragedy.
Ever since Red Hat died (sob) i've been kind of up in the air on distro's. I'm currently running Debian, but I decided that I'm going to at least try Fedora. I've tried Test 2, and overall, I was impressed. Other than the fact that they still have mp3 support disabled, it's a great distro. Still it lacks the amazing 'apt-get' feature that makes me love debian. I do like that it comes with Gnome pre-installed, since gnome can be a real pain to install otherwise, and the 2.6 kernel is nice. Wish somebody would just combine debian and Fedora and make the uber distro with a beatiful graphical installer like Fedora, and all the power of apt-get like Debian. For now, though, I'll just have to wait.
There was a smaller article like this in Popular Science a while back, and since I am very interested in planes and aerospace, it now is on my wall. I'll type it down for you guys, I'ts actually very interesting...
All Zoom, No Boom Teaching an F-5E Tiger how to tiptoes.
There's nothing more dramatic than a supersonic jet streaking overhead; and nothing more annoying than the bone-rattling sonic boom it leaves behind. The boom really consists of two bangs caused by the N-wave in the planes wake, with rapid pressure rises corresponding to the nose and tail. Northrop-Grumman hopes that by tailoring a F-5E Tiger with a longer nose an modified tail, and tinkering wiht its body and wngs, the boom can be transformed into a smooth, inaudible hump. Engineers got the idea from research that goes back to the 1970's. Today's computers, which make it possible to model airflows up to 200 yards from a plane, were required to put the theories into practice. Tests being next august. --Written by Bill Sweetman.
I don't know exactly when it was published, but it shows that this is really no new idea. On an interesting side-note, my uncle worked for McDonald Douglas before they were bought out by Boeing, and actually was a systems engineer for the Coherent Readar systems for the F-5F. When I told him about this he thought it was one of the coolest things he'd ever heard.
~I was playing poker with tarot cards the other night. I got a full house and that same night five people died. True story.
I think that Einstein would turn over in his grave if he knew that we were spending 700 million dollars to test one of his theories. Remember, this was the man that came up with some of the most complicated theories in modern physics, and he did it in his head. He used 'geddonken' experiments, and however useful it may be to 'prove' his theories, one has to wonder what he would think...
There should be laws governing who is allowed to wear spandex. Someone please get on that!
---I was playing poker with tarot cards the other night. I got a full house and that same night 5 people died. True Story.---
I'm glad to see the military taking some initiative in this 'cease and desist' kind of way. I myself hope to someday go into the Air Force, and hope that they will follow suit. In fact, many people that I know in the military, especially engineers, have switched to linux or unix long ago. My uncle worked for McDonnel Douglas before they were bought out by Boeing as a radar engineer, and he hasn't used windoze in 10 years. He now runs a successful web business without any microsoft software whatsoever. What amazed me was what he told me about others in the military. He told me that many of the contractors and engineers had switched to linux long ago, saying it was much more reliable and efficient (duh!). I was quite happy to hear this, and hope it is still the case. It just goes to show you that the military really is ahead of (most) of the rest of us even in things like OS and software. I'm hoping this could mean a possible switch towards open source software in the government, as Brazil has done. Wouldn't that be great!!!
The most likely candidate as an explaination of failure is simply human error. There are rarely errors in electronics that are not caused by humans that could cause such a massive loss. Usually, errors in hardware do not exist, as the hardware is top of the line and checked and re-checked for defects. (Granted, however, that sometimes faulty hardware may slip through the cracks) It is most likely something simpler than "it landed in a crater full of quicksand and sank." However entertaining it may be to picture a multi-million dollar rover sinking into the martian soil, it simply is impossible. To create quicksand one needs water. Even though the Spirit and Opportunity rovers found evidence of water on Mars, it was a long time ago, not today, that Mars was wet. So that simply is not feasible. Space debris, while a popular theory, is so unlikely (the chances of a meteor hitting something in the middle of space are *chuckle* ASTRONOMICAL) So this leaves us with simple human error. Something as simple as a single line of code can destroy an entire project (programmers know what I'm talking about). If you will remember, a few years back NASA lost a multi-million dollar spacecraft because of an error converting from the English system to the Metric system, so it is usually something tiny like that. If you asked me, it's most likely that someone typed an extra "0" somewhere in the code for orbital data and/or surface descent for the capsule. Even though it is just one "0", over that long of a distance it would make a huge difference. Remember that each decimal place is a factor of 10! Telling a spacecraft to orbit at "100,000" miles above the surface is a whole lot different than telling the spacecraft to orbit at "1,000,000" miles above the surface. Such an error would just send the poor Beagle 2 hurtling into the vast reaches of space or crashing to the surface. So it is most likely something like this that has caused all the trouble with the Beagle 2 and given those poor Brits such a hard time.
At least some people in the educational system have finally realized that open source is the future. If all educators were like this the classes would be much better. I would love to have a class based on a virtual textbook. Even more, I would love to see some school computers running Linux instead of Windoze. Not only would it save the school system money, but in all reality, it would make the teaching better. There would be no more "lost" papers because windows decided it didn't like you 20 page midterm and decided you needed to fail economics. Not only that, but it could finally introduce the masses to Linux, which everyone can agree would be a good thing.
Even if kazaa goes down, there is no way in the world that they are going to eliminate p2p. They live in a world of red tape and formalities. We just find ways to go around the system, and therefore, we're always a step ahead of them. Networks start blocking ports in schools and offices, we simply change the port we get it through (at least that's what we do at our school in our dorms) The RIAA starts tracking p2p transactions, we set up massive networks based on ant behavior (e.g. MUTE p2p). They take down one major p2p client, we'll set up 10 more. I think Pepsi and iTunes got it right in their commericial... "We're going to keep downloading music for free whether you like it or not..."
No, I simply don't want to be tracked in the event that I was ever caught in some mind boggling consipiracy. I mainly just don't like being tracked by our incompetent campus security. And by the way, you only have to put tin foil on your windows to keep the mind rays out...
Our cards are used mainly for opening the doors to our wings for our dorms. The mechanism for unlocking the door is a quarter circle, the flat half facing inward so that when it is locked it blocks the door from opening. When you put the cards next to the reader it unlocks the hinge on which this quarter circle turns. Turns out though that the part that gets caught on the door is visible from the outside. It is a series of three pins, each with a rounded side and a flat side. The middle one's flat side, however, is poisitioned inward, so that the rounded side is visible. So if you stick you key to your room in the small gap between the door and the frame and push on the middle (rounded side out) pin, the pins are all pushed in and the door opens. Its pretty neat. Just my little way of sticking it to the man. As for main building doors, I ususally just have someone else use their card, and most of the hall doors are broken anyways, so I get around the system pretty well.
This is the reason I don't carry a cell phone. (other than the fact that I am a student and couldn't really afford it) This is also why I refuse to use the key cards that the school provides for us to open the doors. Call me paranoid, but I don't want anyone knowing where I am. Its just a personal thing.
Its sad but true. I hate the fact that more and more companies have to resort to lawsuits to "protect" their ideas. Ideas aren't property people. Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone, Edison took the idea of the lightbulb. It's just how the world works. Either keep it secret (which is, I admit, very hard these days) or make yours good enough that no one could beat it.
You have an excellent point. SCO is just digging in their heels even though they know that they have no claim to the code. I wouldn't be surprised to see these fools keep on fighting until they make some huge legal mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
"...it replaced noisy, expensive vacuum cleaners" Yes, with a noisy, fairly expensive little vaccuum cleaner. My dad got one of these for my mom, and let me tell you it's still fairly loud, and at $100+ its just as expensive as the low end vaccuums you'll find at target or wal-mart. I love the little bugger, though :)
Now if only I could find the Warp Zone...
THis is not true at least from my point of view. I'm currently a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (11th grade) and I've grown up with computers. I currently have seven, just to throw this off a bit more, and some of my earliest memories are with our 286, 386, 486, and all the way up the line. I've had computers around me all my life, and all it seems to have done was help. I'm in the top 2% of students in the state, and have always loved my comps. They just gave me an outlet to use whenever I needed, and still do. I'd suggest the scientists who conducted this study maybe find a few test subjects whose computers weren't just used for pr0n or only for gaming.
Before you know it Windoze will be releasing things like 'windows classic' to make up for the time delays.
Windoze Classic- Remember dot matrix printers and phosphore monitors? We do! Now you can relive the 'good old days' with Windows Classic! For only $500 you can run the original Windoze 3.1 with three, that's right, three shiney new graphics! Act now and we'll throw in a free 3 month subscription to AOL 4.0!
This is cool, but if there ever is a robot revolution this gives them the technology to develop giant human digesting robots. It'd be like the matrix but not. I'd personally rather be in a tube and think I'm alive than be digeted for power. That's just me though.
*cue matrix argument
I myself am a space enthusiast. Personally, I have no problem with the private sector wanting in on space flight, and in fact, I think it would be good for the troubled American economy. The only thing is these companies have no practical experience with putting humans into space, and they seem to be jumping in head first rather than 'testing the waters' so to speak. Remember, NASA has had more than 40 years experience putting humans into space, and they by no means just dove right in. I don't know fully about the tests being conducted with these spacecraft, but from what I can gather these companies are in over their heads. They are attempting to start their 'space business' by putting 20 or 30 people in space at a time, when they should really start out slow for safety's sake. What's going to happen if these companies rush to put massive numbers of people in space, forgetting about safety and we have another Challenger or Columbia, but this time with civilians, and more of them? The industry really needs to slow down, or else we are in for a terrible tragedy.
Ever since Red Hat died (sob) i've been kind of up in the air on distro's. I'm currently running Debian, but I decided that I'm going to at least try Fedora. I've tried Test 2, and overall, I was impressed. Other than the fact that they still have mp3 support disabled, it's a great distro. Still it lacks the amazing 'apt-get' feature that makes me love debian. I do like that it comes with Gnome pre-installed, since gnome can be a real pain to install otherwise, and the 2.6 kernel is nice. Wish somebody would just combine debian and Fedora and make the uber distro with a beatiful graphical installer like Fedora, and all the power of apt-get like Debian. For now, though, I'll just have to wait.
There was a smaller article like this in Popular Science a while back, and since I am very interested in planes and aerospace, it now is on my wall. I'll type it down for you guys, I'ts actually very interesting...
All Zoom, No Boom
Teaching an F-5E Tiger how to tiptoes.
There's nothing more dramatic than a supersonic jet streaking overhead; and nothing more annoying than the bone-rattling sonic boom it leaves behind. The boom really consists of two bangs caused by the N-wave in the planes wake, with rapid pressure rises corresponding to the nose and tail. Northrop-Grumman hopes that by tailoring a F-5E Tiger with a longer nose an modified tail, and tinkering wiht its body and wngs, the boom can be transformed into a smooth, inaudible hump. Engineers got the idea from research that goes back to the 1970's. Today's computers, which make it possible to model airflows up to 200 yards from a plane, were required to put the theories into practice. Tests being next august. --Written by Bill Sweetman.
I don't know exactly when it was published, but it shows that this is really no new idea. On an interesting side-note, my uncle worked for McDonald Douglas before they were bought out by Boeing, and actually was a systems engineer for the Coherent Readar systems for the F-5F. When I told him about this he thought it was one of the coolest things he'd ever heard.
~I was playing poker with tarot cards the other night. I got a full house and that same night five people died. True story.
I think that Einstein would turn over in his grave if he knew that we were spending 700 million dollars to test one of his theories. Remember, this was the man that came up with some of the most complicated theories in modern physics, and he did it in his head. He used 'geddonken' experiments, and however useful it may be to 'prove' his theories, one has to wonder what he would think...
There should be laws governing who is allowed to wear spandex. Someone please get on that! ---I was playing poker with tarot cards the other night. I got a full house and that same night 5 people died. True Story.---
But does it get rid of the chick you ended up with after the one night stand the morning after?
What will all the poor old people do?
man, those people should be shot
I'm glad to see the military taking some initiative in this 'cease and desist' kind of way. I myself hope to someday go into the Air Force, and hope that they will follow suit. In fact, many people that I know in the military, especially engineers, have switched to linux or unix long ago. My uncle worked for McDonnel Douglas before they were bought out by Boeing as a radar engineer, and he hasn't used windoze in 10 years. He now runs a successful web business without any microsoft software whatsoever. What amazed me was what he told me about others in the military. He told me that many of the contractors and engineers had switched to linux long ago, saying it was much more reliable and efficient (duh!). I was quite happy to hear this, and hope it is still the case. It just goes to show you that the military really is ahead of (most) of the rest of us even in things like OS and software. I'm hoping this could mean a possible switch towards open source software in the government, as Brazil has done. Wouldn't that be great!!!
The most likely candidate as an explaination of failure is simply human error. There are rarely errors in electronics that are not caused by humans that could cause such a massive loss. Usually, errors in hardware do not exist, as the hardware is top of the line and checked and re-checked for defects. (Granted, however, that sometimes faulty hardware may slip through the cracks) It is most likely something simpler than "it landed in a crater full of quicksand and sank." However entertaining it may be to picture a multi-million dollar rover sinking into the martian soil, it simply is impossible. To create quicksand one needs water. Even though the Spirit and Opportunity rovers found evidence of water on Mars, it was a long time ago, not today, that Mars was wet. So that simply is not feasible. Space debris, while a popular theory, is so unlikely (the chances of a meteor hitting something in the middle of space are *chuckle* ASTRONOMICAL) So this leaves us with simple human error. Something as simple as a single line of code can destroy an entire project (programmers know what I'm talking about). If you will remember, a few years back NASA lost a multi-million dollar spacecraft because of an error converting from the English system to the Metric system, so it is usually something tiny like that. If you asked me, it's most likely that someone typed an extra "0" somewhere in the code for orbital data and/or surface descent for the capsule. Even though it is just one "0", over that long of a distance it would make a huge difference. Remember that each decimal place is a factor of 10! Telling a spacecraft to orbit at "100,000" miles above the surface is a whole lot different than telling the spacecraft to orbit at "1,000,000" miles above the surface. Such an error would just send the poor Beagle 2 hurtling into the vast reaches of space or crashing to the surface. So it is most likely something like this that has caused all the trouble with the Beagle 2 and given those poor Brits such a hard time.
At least some people in the educational system have finally realized that open source is the future. If all educators were like this the classes would be much better. I would love to have a class based on a virtual textbook. Even more, I would love to see some school computers running Linux instead of Windoze. Not only would it save the school system money, but in all reality, it would make the teaching better. There would be no more "lost" papers because windows decided it didn't like you 20 page midterm and decided you needed to fail economics. Not only that, but it could finally introduce the masses to Linux, which everyone can agree would be a good thing.
Even if kazaa goes down, there is no way in the world that they are going to eliminate p2p. They live in a world of red tape and formalities. We just find ways to go around the system, and therefore, we're always a step ahead of them. Networks start blocking ports in schools and offices, we simply change the port we get it through (at least that's what we do at our school in our dorms) The RIAA starts tracking p2p transactions, we set up massive networks based on ant behavior (e.g. MUTE p2p). They take down one major p2p client, we'll set up 10 more. I think Pepsi and iTunes got it right in their commericial... "We're going to keep downloading music for free whether you like it or not..."
They only have your fingerprints if your been arrested before...
No, I simply don't want to be tracked in the event that I was ever caught in some mind boggling consipiracy. I mainly just don't like being tracked by our incompetent campus security. And by the way, you only have to put tin foil on your windows to keep the mind rays out...
Our cards are used mainly for opening the doors to our wings for our dorms. The mechanism for unlocking the door is a quarter circle, the flat half facing inward so that when it is locked it blocks the door from opening. When you put the cards next to the reader it unlocks the hinge on which this quarter circle turns. Turns out though that the part that gets caught on the door is visible from the outside. It is a series of three pins, each with a rounded side and a flat side. The middle one's flat side, however, is poisitioned inward, so that the rounded side is visible. So if you stick you key to your room in the small gap between the door and the frame and push on the middle (rounded side out) pin, the pins are all pushed in and the door opens. Its pretty neat. Just my little way of sticking it to the man. As for main building doors, I ususally just have someone else use their card, and most of the hall doors are broken anyways, so I get around the system pretty well.
This is the reason I don't carry a cell phone. (other than the fact that I am a student and couldn't really afford it) This is also why I refuse to use the key cards that the school provides for us to open the doors. Call me paranoid, but I don't want anyone knowing where I am. Its just a personal thing.
Its sad but true. I hate the fact that more and more companies have to resort to lawsuits to "protect" their ideas. Ideas aren't property people. Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone, Edison took the idea of the lightbulb. It's just how the world works. Either keep it secret (which is, I admit, very hard these days) or make yours good enough that no one could beat it.
How wonderfully ironic. We should have this as a seperate story. Perhaps it should even be brought up during the court proceedings...
You have an excellent point. SCO is just digging in their heels even though they know that they have no claim to the code. I wouldn't be surprised to see these fools keep on fighting until they make some huge legal mistake.
You shouldn't have bought one in the first place. That's exactly what they wanted you to do. Get scared and contribute to their orginizatoin.