Mission scientists hope they will not only have proof about Einstein's theory, but a precise number for calibrating the effect
It's not just another one of those "let's prove he was right" thing, we're gonna measure a lot of very precise stuff up there, like some data we need to calibrate our tools to make better measurments in the future.
Americans have the will to risk money and lives on visionary stuff, on going somewhere first.
The NASA is american, granted. However, just because the NASA succeeded in something, it doesn't mean that it's an all american success. NASA is just a name, the name of a group of people. It's the people inside NASA that count. And somewhat (not based on any real numbers, they didn't allow me to walk in there to count heads), I doubt that every single engineer or other innovative guy in NASA is american.
Just because something happens in the US, the Americans take it for their own and tell the whole world they were the first one to do it. What happens really is someone thinks of something (either an american or someone from anywhere else in the world), then the United States have the money to do what the guy was thinking about, and all of a sudden, it's American Genius at work.
The USA were the first country in the whole world to have the technology to build and use an atomic bomb. But did the americans have any idea on how to build one and how to use the energy that was concealed in atoms and such? It was all Albert Einstein, a German. A guy from Germany had the brains to innovate, and the US had the money to make it happen, without caring about the consequences (that we all know today).
There are other nations with the drive to go to Space, though. They have some catching up to do in terms of technology, and they are certainly not as rich as the US, but they'll get there.
Fighting or running a race to figure out who can reach Mars first is ridiculous. When a scientist from another country (with some exceptions) figures out he could help mankind set foot on Mars (or anywhere else in the universe), he doesn't try to start his own space program in his country. He goes to NASA, which can provide the funds, and then works there with a whole bunch of other geniuses. He does that because he doesn't care that the piece of metal he'll be shooting up comes from the USA, from Canada, from Spain, from China or whatever. He just wants to help mankind achieve something.
When Christopher Columbus came to America, he was from Spain. When Jacques-Cartier came to America, he was from France. From one continent to another, it's on the same scale. But when someone goes to Mars, whoever that is will be coming from Earth, not from the USA, or from Russia, or anywhere else. When we meet a martian, we won't tell him "Hi, I come from Canada", he won't care what a country is. We'll tell him "Hi, I come from Earth, that big rock over there".
For years and years, we've been saying that in the end, we're all the same no matter where we come from, we're all human beings. When it comes to space exploration, it can only be more true. We are not americans or canadians or french or japanese, we are earthlings.
It's not really news about Firefox... the news is more about Mozilla, they just talked about the eventual Firefox 1.0, just like they talked about Firebird 1.0 and Phoenix 1.0
I say wait a couple of weeks before popping the champagne;-)
Any company that can afford the legal game and then postpone the trial and then appealing the decision will make more money by doing that than by complying. Considering they (Microsoft or any other company) can still use their current strategy during the time of the appeal, or before the final judgment is made (it took what? 5 years for the WMP case in Europe?), a couple of million of Euros is nothing compared to what they did in those 5 years.
Judges should act quicker and allow for much less delay is anti-trust cases, because time plays against the ones they're trying to defend.
I can hear it from here... Microsoft saying "See, Open Source isn't more secure than our stuff... there is a public database that all hackers and crackers can use to exploit known vulnerabilities..."
IBM does not infringe, induce the infringement of or contribute to the infringement of any SCO copyright through its Linux activities, including its use, reproduction and improvement of Linux, and that some or all of SCO's purported copyrights in Unix are invalid and unenforceable
Nor does anyone. If there is a single judge that finds a single Linux user guilty of that bullcrap promoted by SCO, I vote that all the/. community go castrate him!!! (or simply force him to read out loud the whole source code... that could be a good punishment too...)
I mean... are there any "law officials" that actually know some stuff about programming and computers? IBM is just stating the obvious here, they shouldn't even have to do so.
The problem is that if it isn't patented already, then they can patent it. Screw any "prior art" that isn't in the patent database
It's not only about "not being patented already", the article says that to patent something:
The invention must be new or novel. It must be non-obvious. The persons claiming the patent must be the inventors. And the patent application must be filed within one year of a public disclosure or sale.
Now, is it new? We'd need to check the exact date and time of the patent to determine when subdomains were new and when they became old.
Is it non-obvious? Again, it probably was non-obvious in the early 80's, but it's definitely very obvious since 95.
Are they the inventor of sub-domain... I don't know them, but I would bet that they aren't.
Did they file the patent less than a year after public disclosure? If they had, we would have heard of it much earlier.
If it were to be obliged to offer versions both with and without Media Player, then that would mean we would probably have double the number of consumer PC configuration in our shops
Why don't they just offer Windows WITHOUT Media Player to everybody, and let anyone who wants it simply download it from their website?!? That's what people do when they want Real Player or any other player. Is that too hard for MS to do?
What I meant is, in mathematics as well as in physics, because we believe something is true today does not mean it really is. I gave the phisical example of the finitude of the universe, but there are also examples of when mankind believed something to be true mathematically but then was proved otherwise.
At one time, there were only integer numbers from 1 to infinity. Then came zero. Back then, people thought that nothing could be smaller than 1, but then zero arrived. So we had a lot of integer numbers, usually refered to as "natural numbers", or N. Then we found out that there were also negative numbers, and we had Z.
At that time, we thought that right after 1 came 2, but then we found that 1.5 was also there... we got the ratios... Granted that A and B are integers, then A/B is also a number, a "rational" number, Q. We then thought that every number could be represented as either an integer, or a ratio of integers A/B, but then came the square root of 2. So we have irrationnal numbers, which, with the rational numbers, make up the real numbers.
We then thought that with the real numbers, we had all we needed to make maths work. Then came along the square root of minus one. That then gave the imaginary numbers, which, with the real numbers, make up the complex numbers.
So, all those time, we believed something to be true, but then another mathematician proved us wrong.
Most interresting things in math are related to something in either physics or chemistry. Pi is the ratio of the circumpherence of a circle to its diameter, the exponential function describes the nuclear desintegration of unstable elements and so on.
When Fibonacci "discovered" his series, it was merely a slight mathematical amusement, but when we discovered that nature actually used the mathematical function of the Fibonacci series, then it became interresting.
At the current time, infinity is merely a mathematical amusement, and if we can never find a way to concretly apply the notion of infinity in science, then mathematical infinity might be a concept that doesn't really exist.
Makes you wonder if there really is an infinity... Mankind used to believe that the universe was infinite (physical infinity), but we're getting more and more proof that it might actually be finite.
Today we believe that there is a mathematical infinity. Maybe in a few generations, a genius will discover that there is no such thing either...
You are unfortunately right on that. However, sometimes, when developping a commercial application, one needs to shorten development time as much as possible. Using a cross-platform toolkit does that by not requiring to do the same things many times for many platforms.
The company I work for at the moment develops its apps for both Windows and Mac, using MFC on Windows and Cocoa on Mac. The main development tree is on Mac, and when the next version is ready, we have to port it to Windows, working with MFC this time, and then fixing stuff that goes wrong because MFC doesn't do things as Cocoa does them and stuff.
We're currently studying the possibility to start supporting Linux... If we go for yet another native toolkit, we would have to port the GUI twice for every version we develop. That not only increases development time, but it also screws the budget. I am currently trying to convince my boss that Qt is the way to go, because having to do stuff only once instead of thrice will let us work much more on the core functionality of our app instead of spending so much time working on the native GUI on each platform every time.
So yeah, native toolkits will always look better, but they are not always the right solution. If you consider building a commercial app that you will distribute on a single platform (be it Windows or Mac or whatever), then go ahead and use the native toolkit, but when you have to port the same app to different platform, a cross-platform toolkit might just be the happy-middle you need.
It all depends on speed and angle of the entry. A meteor that is one meter in diameter can make it to the ground if it's going straight for the ground, at a right angle, while a larger meteor of 30 meters in diamater could have the time to burn up entirely if it entered the atmosphere nearly parallel to the ground.
The first one (coming straight for us) would only have to pass through about 10,000 meters of atmosphere, while the second one could travel several hundreds of thousands of meters before reaching the ground (or disintegrating completely)
A quick search on McAfee and Symantec websites yielded no result for "phatbot" on Symantec, and a 18 months old virus on McAfee...
If the US government is announcing this publically, and the virus has already infected "hundreds of thousands of computers already", wouldn't the anti-virus companies *know* that?!?
I'm for calling everything that orbits the sun a "planetary object"
Then you'd have one heck of a lot of "planetary objects", considering the huge amounts of asteroids that orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Should we give a name to all of them?;-)
I, for one, don't thing Pluto is a planet. It's much too small (at least compared to its moon Charon). They both have a similar mass, which means that Charon does not orbit around Pluto, nor Pluto orbit around Charon. They instead both orbit around a point somewhere between them. Which one is the planet and which one is the moon? They are probably both asteroids (or rocks, why don't we just call them big rocks) orbiting around each other.
And that new Sedna "planet"... it's not even as big as our own moon. Our big white rock has to be called a "moon", but if it had been lucky enough to be further from the sun, it would have been upgraded to "planet"? Size does matter up to a certain point, and Sedna (and probably Pluto too) is too small to be a planet.
This world's worst defect is its inability to think. Soooo many urban legends, and so many folks warning you of stupid stuff.
When was the last time a cousin or an in-law sent you an email warning you of that "super-strong" computer virus that McAfee doesn't yet know about, or about Microsoft deleting every user account that does not forward this email.
If somebody wrote it, then it must be true!!!
BTW, I wrote this comment, so you better believe it to be true.
There ya go. There is indeed a whole lot of tools in C/C++. Some are more risky than others.
Programming is no different than any other building job. A good C++ programmer knows what tools to use and what tools not to use. Just like a good carpenter knows which hammer to use in each situation.
Therefore, I believe that one can blame the programmer that his tools failed if he didn't use the right tools for the job.
For the rest of you, is it fair to blame the programmer when his tools (which are supposed to make his life easier) fail him? Use better tools!
Still, a good programmer should know his tools, and know the limits of his tools.
Re:The famous Linus - Tanenbaum debate
on
Linus on Linux in 1994
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
lol... I love your signature... but how can one post any earlier while actually having read the article? I mean... every slashdotter is loading the page during the first 5 minutes... I think I never saw those "loading arrows" in FireFox spin for so long...
I'm not sure if I totally understood, but the way I see it, IE will download a webpage that is W3C standards compliant, apply a stylesheet so that it locally becomes non-compliant so that IE can display it fine? Talk about Microsoft's way of doing things...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just another one of those "let's prove he was right" thing, we're gonna measure a lot of very precise stuff up there, like some data we need to calibrate our tools to make better measurments in the future.
The NASA is american, granted. However, just because the NASA succeeded in something, it doesn't mean that it's an all american success. NASA is just a name, the name of a group of people. It's the people inside NASA that count. And somewhat (not based on any real numbers, they didn't allow me to walk in there to count heads), I doubt that every single engineer or other innovative guy in NASA is american.
Just because something happens in the US, the Americans take it for their own and tell the whole world they were the first one to do it. What happens really is someone thinks of something (either an american or someone from anywhere else in the world), then the United States have the money to do what the guy was thinking about, and all of a sudden, it's American Genius at work.
The USA were the first country in the whole world to have the technology to build and use an atomic bomb. But did the americans have any idea on how to build one and how to use the energy that was concealed in atoms and such? It was all Albert Einstein, a German. A guy from Germany had the brains to innovate, and the US had the money to make it happen, without caring about the consequences (that we all know today).
There are other nations with the drive to go to Space, though. They have some catching up to do in terms of technology, and they are certainly not as rich as the US, but they'll get there.
Fighting or running a race to figure out who can reach Mars first is ridiculous. When a scientist from another country (with some exceptions) figures out he could help mankind set foot on Mars (or anywhere else in the universe), he doesn't try to start his own space program in his country. He goes to NASA, which can provide the funds, and then works there with a whole bunch of other geniuses. He does that because he doesn't care that the piece of metal he'll be shooting up comes from the USA, from Canada, from Spain, from China or whatever. He just wants to help mankind achieve something.
When Christopher Columbus came to America, he was from Spain. When Jacques-Cartier came to America, he was from France. From one continent to another, it's on the same scale. But when someone goes to Mars, whoever that is will be coming from Earth, not from the USA, or from Russia, or anywhere else. When we meet a martian, we won't tell him "Hi, I come from Canada", he won't care what a country is. We'll tell him "Hi, I come from Earth, that big rock over there".
For years and years, we've been saying that in the end, we're all the same no matter where we come from, we're all human beings. When it comes to space exploration, it can only be more true. We are not americans or canadians or french or japanese, we are earthlings.
I say wait a couple of weeks before popping the champagne ;-)
Right on time for my birthday :-). That is gonna be a sweet gift :-)
Judges should act quicker and allow for much less delay is anti-trust cases, because time plays against the ones they're trying to defend.
How long will it take till they say that?
Nor does anyone. If there is a single judge that finds a single Linux user guilty of that bullcrap promoted by SCO, I vote that all the /. community go castrate him!!! (or simply force him to read out loud the whole source code... that could be a good punishment too...)
I mean... are there any "law officials" that actually know some stuff about programming and computers? IBM is just stating the obvious here, they shouldn't even have to do so.
True enough, but I was lazy this morning ;-)
It's not only about "not being patented already", the article says that to patent something :
The invention must be new or novel. It must be non-obvious. The persons claiming the patent must be the inventors. And the patent application must be filed within one year of a public disclosure or sale.
Now, is it new? We'd need to check the exact date and time of the patent to determine when subdomains were new and when they became old.
Is it non-obvious? Again, it probably was non-obvious in the early 80's, but it's definitely very obvious since 95.
Are they the inventor of sub-domain... I don't know them, but I would bet that they aren't.
Did they file the patent less than a year after public disclosure? If they had, we would have heard of it much earlier.
They just don't have a case here.
Why don't they just offer Windows WITHOUT Media Player to everybody, and let anyone who wants it simply download it from their website?!? That's what people do when they want Real Player or any other player. Is that too hard for MS to do?
At one time, there were only integer numbers from 1 to infinity. Then came zero. Back then, people thought that nothing could be smaller than 1, but then zero arrived. So we had a lot of integer numbers, usually refered to as "natural numbers", or N. Then we found out that there were also negative numbers, and we had Z.
At that time, we thought that right after 1 came 2, but then we found that 1.5 was also there... we got the ratios... Granted that A and B are integers, then A/B is also a number, a "rational" number, Q. We then thought that every number could be represented as either an integer, or a ratio of integers A/B, but then came the square root of 2. So we have irrationnal numbers, which, with the rational numbers, make up the real numbers.
We then thought that with the real numbers, we had all we needed to make maths work. Then came along the square root of minus one. That then gave the imaginary numbers, which, with the real numbers, make up the complex numbers.
So, all those time, we believed something to be true, but then another mathematician proved us wrong.
Most interresting things in math are related to something in either physics or chemistry. Pi is the ratio of the circumpherence of a circle to its diameter, the exponential function describes the nuclear desintegration of unstable elements and so on.
When Fibonacci "discovered" his series, it was merely a slight mathematical amusement, but when we discovered that nature actually used the mathematical function of the Fibonacci series, then it became interresting.
At the current time, infinity is merely a mathematical amusement, and if we can never find a way to concretly apply the notion of infinity in science, then mathematical infinity might be a concept that doesn't really exist.
Makes you wonder if there really is an infinity... Mankind used to believe that the universe was infinite (physical infinity), but we're getting more and more proof that it might actually be finite.
Today we believe that there is a mathematical infinity. Maybe in a few generations, a genius will discover that there is no such thing either...
Maths can be scary sometimes
You are unfortunately right on that. However, sometimes, when developping a commercial application, one needs to shorten development time as much as possible. Using a cross-platform toolkit does that by not requiring to do the same things many times for many platforms.
The company I work for at the moment develops its apps for both Windows and Mac, using MFC on Windows and Cocoa on Mac. The main development tree is on Mac, and when the next version is ready, we have to port it to Windows, working with MFC this time, and then fixing stuff that goes wrong because MFC doesn't do things as Cocoa does them and stuff.
We're currently studying the possibility to start supporting Linux... If we go for yet another native toolkit, we would have to port the GUI twice for every version we develop. That not only increases development time, but it also screws the budget. I am currently trying to convince my boss that Qt is the way to go, because having to do stuff only once instead of thrice will let us work much more on the core functionality of our app instead of spending so much time working on the native GUI on each platform every time.
So yeah, native toolkits will always look better, but they are not always the right solution. If you consider building a commercial app that you will distribute on a single platform (be it Windows or Mac or whatever), then go ahead and use the native toolkit, but when you have to port the same app to different platform, a cross-platform toolkit might just be the happy-middle you need.
How many cracker can a cracker who cracks crackers crack?
It all depends on speed and angle of the entry. A meteor that is one meter in diameter can make it to the ground if it's going straight for the ground, at a right angle, while a larger meteor of 30 meters in diamater could have the time to burn up entirely if it entered the atmosphere nearly parallel to the ground.
The first one (coming straight for us) would only have to pass through about 10,000 meters of atmosphere, while the second one could travel several hundreds of thousands of meters before reaching the ground (or disintegrating completely)
A quick search on McAfee and Symantec websites yielded no result for "phatbot" on Symantec, and a 18 months old virus on McAfee...
If the US government is announcing this publically, and the virus has already infected "hundreds of thousands of computers already", wouldn't the anti-virus companies *know* that?!?
Ya still gotta admit that fitting 4GB of data on such a small device is one heck of an accomplishment...
Anyone knows what the price tag for that baby will be?
Then you'd have one heck of a lot of "planetary objects", considering the huge amounts of asteroids that orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Should we give a name to all of them? ;-)
I, for one, don't thing Pluto is a planet. It's much too small (at least compared to its moon Charon). They both have a similar mass, which means that Charon does not orbit around Pluto, nor Pluto orbit around Charon. They instead both orbit around a point somewhere between them. Which one is the planet and which one is the moon? They are probably both asteroids (or rocks, why don't we just call them big rocks) orbiting around each other.
And that new Sedna "planet"... it's not even as big as our own moon. Our big white rock has to be called a "moon", but if it had been lucky enough to be further from the sun, it would have been upgraded to "planet"? Size does matter up to a certain point, and Sedna (and probably Pluto too) is too small to be a planet.
I have a classy inox cup that does the same thing, and that is reusable. We do depend on styrofoam too much.
This world's worst defect is its inability to think. Soooo many urban legends, and so many folks warning you of stupid stuff.
When was the last time a cousin or an in-law sent you an email warning you of that "super-strong" computer virus that McAfee doesn't yet know about, or about Microsoft deleting every user account that does not forward this email.
If somebody wrote it, then it must be true!!!
BTW, I wrote this comment, so you better believe it to be true.
Programming is no different than any other building job. A good C++ programmer knows what tools to use and what tools not to use. Just like a good carpenter knows which hammer to use in each situation.
Therefore, I believe that one can blame the programmer that his tools failed if he didn't use the right tools for the job.
Still, a good programmer should know his tools, and know the limits of his tools.
lol... I love your signature... but how can one post any earlier while actually having read the article? I mean... every slashdotter is loading the page during the first 5 minutes... I think I never saw those "loading arrows" in FireFox spin for so long...
You just need to be very... very... very... patient...
I'm not sure if I totally understood, but the way I see it, IE will download a webpage that is W3C standards compliant, apply a stylesheet so that it locally becomes non-compliant so that IE can display it fine? Talk about Microsoft's way of doing things...