Sit down for a few hours and figure out the odds against enough genetic material arising spontaneously...
A creationist ever being able to think objectively is even less probable.
I'm glad you had something objective to say, and didn't stoop to an ad hominem argument.
In point of fact, given the existence of creationists - and even asserting that they're all literally insane - the odds against one of them thinking objectively are many thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than even the simplest concievable life-form having formed entirely by accident out of 10^81 atoms (the vast majority of those being hydrogen) within 10^17 seconds even aided by the most eye-poppingly optimistic assumptions about the environment(s) that this may have occurred in.
Now take your religious zealotry elsewhere, materialist (-: or at least get some objectivity of your own installed:-)
DNA is one of the best demonstrations in existence that we cannot have arrived here as the culmination of a long series of accidents. If you've got a problem with that, explain your problem to us all instead of voting pointlessly. Even an AC comment is better than an "Offtopic" mod.
Adding ingredients is relative, even if it is only one new one.
You cannot add enough time to make spontaneous generation work. The closest anyone has come is (in their head only) adding an infinitude of extra universes to reality in the (forlorn) hope that if you toss a coin often enough, you'll come up with 10^umptysquillion heads in a row. Not only are those extra universes strictly an article of faith, but the way odds work the universe we would find ourselves in under those circumstances is extremely unlikely to be anything like as favourable to life as the one we're in. Arguments about "we're here because we're here" are just plain dumb - and the tautology they represent points once again to an article of faith.
go read this, take a look at the image it talks about, then have a little sit down and realize that this planet we're on (and all of your "intelligent designs") are more meaningless than one microscopic speck of silica in the entire ocean.
I realise that your nickname is "Cyclops", but aside from the fact that a perspective in which we are insignificant and intrinsically worthless is a useful one - it makes the value placed on each of us so much more meaningful - our planet is indeed special, since it's a cosmic hop, skip and jump from the centre of the universe (in a universe which you hold as an article of faith as having no centre).
Now I'm wondering why my comment above got modded offtopic and your's didn't. I guess it's a political thing: "I disagree (as an article of faith, not based on complete observations), so I'll blast him". Very SlashDot. (-:
Y'know, given how difficult it is for us and all of our technology to even consider forward-engineering from borrowed parts, one has to wonder how life as we know it came together in the first place. The complexity involved is well over the top of anything which can be produced by randomising and selecting - without a plan for making those selections - in any finite time.
The Christian Right are just one example among many of the dangers inherent in misreading or ignoring the manufacturer's instructions (you're another). Your brains work a lot better if you don't constantly abuse them in lifestyle and diet.
Sit down for a few hours and figure out the odds against enough genetic material arising spontaneously (together with a framework to support and replicate it all), no matter how many or how few steps it's done in, to produce the most basic lifeform. It lends new depth and richness of meaning to the term "impossible". The Medieval people called it "spontaneous generation" and we laugh at that concept - but the only new ingredient we add is time.
Even living critters like us, if we die, don't spontaneously burst back into life again or spawn simpler critters. All of the ingredients are there, in the right arrangements and ideal concentrations, an immensely better situation than any of the ephemeral "primordial soup" scenarios, yet we don't get new life from dead bodies, we just get food for worms and bacteria.
So if it didn't happen by accident, it happened by design. Is there a third alternative?
This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research.
Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.
Devastating argument against what?
One of the current crop justifications for murdering your unborn baby (and several organisations are agitating to take it beyond that) is "the stem cells will go toward research". Now that baby teeth can be used instead, the force goes out of that argument.
It will never quite rank up there with lies like "it's not fully developed, you're only killing a fish" or "it can't feel anything" (your baby is a fully human baby from conception, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is total bullshit (the foetuses used were doctored, and the drawings based on them doctored even further) and has been known to be bullshit for well over a hundred years, but for some reason the idea is supported and still used today; and nerves, heart, the whole nine yards are in place a few weeks after conception, generally well befor ethe mother knows she is a mother).
I disagree with senor falsification in that I don't believe that the tooth-fairy argument will be "devastating", but it will be useful and significant in the war against infanticide-for-convenience.
My own personal view is that if a mother has the right to have her child murdered in utero, she should also have the right to have her child murdered at any time up to majority. And of course, if she has the right to murder her children, then little matters like abusing them or selling them into slavery should hardly matter, should they?
Are there any sixteen-year-olds here that would care to comment on that?
paraconformity, polystratics, paleomagnetics etc
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way.
The reason this is important is so that correlation to events of a known age is possible. For example, say I have a lead-zinc mineralization event that I'm trying to find a cause for. Well ok...one of the most important things to do is get an estimate on the date of mineralization, and then see if there are any local or regional tectonic and/or magmatic events of known ages that may have had an effect.
I assert that the dates don't need to be correct to do this, just consistent. Unfortunately, IRL you get very little of either. (-:
For example, if two strata are correctly identified as "Carboniferous", it doesn't really matter for purposes of comparison whether they're umpty squillion years old or were laid down during Olmec times.
Paraconformities are just an unconformity of parallel strata
No, a paraconformity is where you would expect to see a conformity, but there isn't one. The word has also come to mean "a difficult-to-detect unconformity".
What polystratic fossils are you talking about?
Everything from little shells a few inches across striking through tens of millions of years' worth of strata to large trees striking through tens of meters of strata, neither with any evidence of having been intruded (e.g. incongruous turbulence in the strata above or below).
The earth's magnetic field does reverse from time to time. It is recorded in parallel bands to the mid oceanic ridges of known ages...
Unfortunately for that idea, there are several more plausible explanations for those magnetic bands. Again, the ages of the ridges are assumed, and then correlated. If you do your history, you'll notice that the claimed ages have been completely revised a number of times, and I expect they're a long way from finished doing that yet.
The field reversals I actually had in mind were paleomagnetic signatures in large areas of cooling lava that show either huge rock units or the poles rotating dramatically on a scale of minutes to hours.
What flood erosion do you speak of?
Bretz's "Spokane Floods" would be one example, but even today meltwater in far northern Canada can eat away ranges on riverbanks at a rate of meters an hour.
As for your "problems" with lab geology, 99% of the time when age dates do not match up so well, there is a very good reason why.
Yes, including many that you've not cited here. One has to wonder, if there are so many ways of explaining anomalies, how one decides whether a reading is anomalous or not. How would you decide?
AFAICT, they're actual platelets, with genuine organic material in them, not fossil (ie not mineral-replaced objects or outlines). The dude in charge of the lab that discovered them (a student saw them under a microscope) has bent over backwards to find a suitable reptilian source of contamination, without success. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. (-:
Remarkable preservation of fossils... even soft bodied organisms (Burgess Shale for one...and that is in *much* older rocks), does occur.
This unfortunate stream of reasoning goes as follows:
I believe that this piece of rock is X years old; and
This rock contains remarkably preserved fossils including organic matter; therefore
I believe that organic matter can survive intact for X years.
All that you really know is that a certain stratum contains well-preserved organic material. Nobody was there scratching off days on a calendar or even a cave wall (-: and to scratch 65Ma worth of days you'd need one motherous huge cavern, some serious scaffolding, and a good supply of nice hard scratchy rocks:-). A heck of a lot of initial assumptions are simply guesses, and dating contradictions are far more common than agreements. A manifestation of this can be found in the constantly spreading "ranges" of marker fossils like Ammonites.
Observations of decaying organic matter suggest that 100ka is really pushing your luck WRT finding the veriest scrap of intact flesh. This is but one measuring-rod which suggests that Velikovskian catastrophes are more a feature of our planet's past than many people have hoped (for another, look at the biggest feature on Mars).
All of geology does not hinge on one assumption!
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
You mean that the entirety of geology is completely wrong because we "assume" the Earth has been around for 4.6GA?
Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way.
For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology.
up 2 years [...] every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that
Only if their sysadmins are complete idiots. The truth is that exploits happen. Kernel updates happen. Recompiles happen. Reboots happen.
If not that, then intrusions happen. Get the point?
Well... no. At least, I understand what you're saying, but it's wrong.
Go back and count the number of Linux kernel security issues over the last 5 years. Now divide by ten because your original kernel featured OpenWall so 90% of the vulnerabilities weren't exploitable anyway. The end result, for Linux (a rapidly-developing, large-ish and immature Unix - now consider OpenBSD) is far less than one potentially useable kernel exploit in five years. Now consider additional elementary precautions against exploitation, such as readonly and nosuid/nodev partitions, chroot'ing and chattr+i'ing everything in sight (very effective on nosuid loopbacks) (and then hiding chattr), and your need to reboot drops even further. If you can be bothered running your services in UML, you can put those few security patches through the stripped-down UML kernel(s) - which may not even have a chattr call - and never need touch your "real" one. And so on.
In short, power and hardware failures are much more common than software failures. Unlike Windows.
It's true that the latest OOo, 1.1beta, is looking pretty good.
And getting better faster than MS-Office (which seems to have pretty much peaked, time for a new round of Microsoft's "stone soup" game). Speaking of whizbang features, OOo's export-to-Flash is pretty slick.
Flawless word im/export is what I need.
You're pretty much going to lose that with Blackdown versions of MSO anyway.
I know someone who ran a 3-line dialup BBS under Windows 95 and used it as a workstation as well.
He only had to reboot it about every mealtime. Eventually switched to OS/2 when it became clear that this was going to be a non-flyer. But it did work. Kinda. Mostly. Reminds me in so many ways of many mission-critical Excel spreadsheets which is an oxymoron in principle but actually happens IRL. Some complete bananas-for-brains do that kind of thing and don't even keep backups. Aiyaiyai...!
As I understand it, they're having a hard time selling the SF code, and to add insult to injury at least one of the original developers also have a Free competitor up.
You're not gonna tell me about how the Wordfilters in Open/StarOffice work just fine, are you?
As well as one MS-Word version to another, yes, and sometimes better.
And OOo does a lot of things well that MS-Word can't do, or does very badly.
PS, Office runs fine on Mac OS X, so its absence on Linux is a political decision (porting would be a doddle). Expect that decision to be reversed before Linux officially hits 10% of the desktop market share.
Try 65,000,000 years - in real life!
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
The fossil from Hell... er, Creek, Montana. Big silence on this one ever since, which is possibly significant in itself because definite indications of contamination would have to have been published somewhere.
Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible, so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions.
Yes, it's all good fun until someone loses an eye!
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
As long as the CPU isn't producing insane amounts of heat, just turn the fan in the PSU around so it sucks air instead of blowing it, and whack a plastic scouring pad (available in the dishwashing things at your nearest supermarket for a small fraction of a dollar each in bulk packs) across your new air intake. You might have to use scissors to shape the scourer aound mains plugs, switches et al, but that's easy. Feed it through the washing machine every so often - with a low-lint load - or just hand-wash it with dishwashing detergent.
If you have a motherous great room-heater for a CPU, you can add a case fan with a similar filter, or bolt another "pusher" fan over the PSU fan intake on standoffs (to allow room for dropping the scourer in between the fans).
For a multi-stage filter, get some pantyhose and flywire (aka "flyscreen", "termi-mesh" would also do, and at a pinch some coarse shadecloth) and one of those little wire baskets people use for holding garlic, potpourri, nuts and such. If you position it right, you can use a loop of wire attached to a case bolt as a hinge on one side of the basket and as a catch on the other. Stretch the pantyhose over the outside of the basket, and the flywire outside that. You will need two fans to push enough air through this arrangement.
If you have multiple computers to filter, I suggest making a single large filter assembly with a brace of fans feeding a distribution pipe, and holes on the side of that with spongy sealing tape around them to butt the PSU intakes of your boxes against (fans reversed in those, of course). An unemployed evapourative aircon picked up off the kerb during a council cleanup day and used absolutely dry can be a great start to a large filter assembly.
It helps to be able to monitor the health of all of your fans, and have a computer squeak at you if it all goes horribly wrong, which monitoring can be done optically or with a magnet on the hub not on a blade tip (think balance).
In brief (busy, busy, too much Linux work to do)...
I have a Linux user with a workstation uptime in excess of two years.
Slammer may not be an IIS worm (but it's one of the few that aren't... sorry, couldn't resist:-) but it did kill that IIS server by raping MS SQL Server on the same machine,
Betcha Longhorn has more bugs than your front lawn when it comes out, and Oracle has maybe a few hundred.
I use Linux to write code and play games, too. What a coincidence! (-:
I also use it to write articles, do graphics work (crappy craphics work, I'm no artist), fix broken Word documents, build (and sometimes show) presentations, remote administer a few score servers around town when they need it (rare), and only ever have problems with dodgy hardware. The only things standing between it and infinite uptime are that I power it down to plug people's hard disks into it from time to time, and every month or two I lug it off to a bandwidth party. Oh, and I just blessed it and my wife's machine with a kernel update (actually, total upgrade from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1), killing about 3.5 months of uptime on hers (last power failure). My wife's machine and the gateway in the shed (Debian 3.0) stop only for power failures. No exceptional hardware, no special care. My LAN-attached neighbour (community networking at its best) kills his shiny new XP machine about once a day.
Oh, and the ext3fs journalling actually works. I routinely pull the plug on working machines to add hardware or move them, and haven't had a blip yet. My experience with NT and 2000 has been... less sanguine.
More power to anyone who uses it. (-: That's the whole point:-)
But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.
Don't look now, but they're doing it already.
Bill's desktop may be pretty, and officially possessed of useability, but if that were what really counted then Apple would long ago have won the desktop wars, wouldn't they?
A lot of things go into making a desktop corporately acceptable, and many businesses are waking up to the fact that if they run Windows, Microsoft to some extent runs their business - and Microsoft is working very hard to drive their claws deeper into every business they can reach. Anyone who thinks that's a safe move from the individual business's perspective is invited to continue headbutting the walls of their cell.
Meanwhile, businesses are also discovering that if they want their desktops to be within cooee of stable, they have to spend time and/or effort locking them down. Locking down KDE or GNOME (or for that matter Ice, FluxBox etc) is relatively trivial, especially en masse, and can be done without the one-idle-change-in-Tahoe-wrecks-systems-in-Boston- and-Vancouver risks of Active Directory.
This here KDE 3.1 desktop seems mighty stable, and it's easy to configure, too. You can have an "eye-candy orgasm" (excellent buzzphrase!) and still keep your I-am-an-accountant-I-am-so-boring-people-forget-to -breathe-in-my-presence shirt on.
I've not had any noticeable issues with GNOME recently, either, and I can't see that there's enough of an issue for Hewlett-Pacquard to throw a hissy fit over it, especially given that most of the desktops hp ships are laden with oops-another-special-case Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you had something objective to say, and didn't stoop to an ad hominem argument.
In point of fact, given the existence of creationists - and even asserting that they're all literally insane - the odds against one of them thinking objectively are many thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than even the simplest concievable life-form having formed entirely by accident out of 10^81 atoms (the vast majority of those being hydrogen) within 10^17 seconds even aided by the most eye-poppingly optimistic assumptions about the environment(s) that this may have occurred in.
Now take your religious zealotry elsewhere, materialist (-: or at least get some objectivity of your own installed :-)
DNA is one of the best demonstrations in existence that we cannot have arrived here as the culmination of a long series of accidents. If you've got a problem with that, explain your problem to us all instead of voting pointlessly. Even an AC comment is better than an "Offtopic" mod.
You cannot add enough time to make spontaneous generation work. The closest anyone has come is (in their head only) adding an infinitude of extra universes to reality in the (forlorn) hope that if you toss a coin often enough, you'll come up with 10^umptysquillion heads in a row. Not only are those extra universes strictly an article of faith, but the way odds work the universe we would find ourselves in under those circumstances is extremely unlikely to be anything like as favourable to life as the one we're in. Arguments about "we're here because we're here" are just plain dumb - and the tautology they represent points once again to an article of faith.
I realise that your nickname is "Cyclops", but aside from the fact that a perspective in which we are insignificant and intrinsically worthless is a useful one - it makes the value placed on each of us so much more meaningful - our planet is indeed special, since it's a cosmic hop, skip and jump from the centre of the universe (in a universe which you hold as an article of faith as having no centre).
Now I'm wondering why my comment above got modded offtopic and your's didn't. I guess it's a political thing: "I disagree (as an article of faith, not based on complete observations), so I'll blast him". Very SlashDot. (-:
Y'know, given how difficult it is for us and all of our technology to even consider forward-engineering from borrowed parts, one has to wonder how life as we know it came together in the first place. The complexity involved is well over the top of anything which can be produced by randomising and selecting - without a plan for making those selections - in any finite time.
The Christian Right are just one example among many of the dangers inherent in misreading or ignoring the manufacturer's instructions (you're another). Your brains work a lot better if you don't constantly abuse them in lifestyle and diet.
Sit down for a few hours and figure out the odds against enough genetic material arising spontaneously (together with a framework to support and replicate it all), no matter how many or how few steps it's done in, to produce the most basic lifeform. It lends new depth and richness of meaning to the term "impossible". The Medieval people called it "spontaneous generation" and we laugh at that concept - but the only new ingredient we add is time.
Even living critters like us, if we die, don't spontaneously burst back into life again or spawn simpler critters. All of the ingredients are there, in the right arrangements and ideal concentrations, an immensely better situation than any of the ephemeral "primordial soup" scenarios, yet we don't get new life from dead bodies, we just get food for worms and bacteria.
So if it didn't happen by accident, it happened by design. Is there a third alternative?
Isn't it? You're not very observant! (-:
s/bateing/baiting/
IOW, your spelling is even further off topic. (-:
The central theme is stem cells, one of the justifications for infanticide is the potential to use their stem cells to save others.
Hands up all those who were deeply shocked by this news.
Devastating argument against what?
One of the current crop justifications for murdering your unborn baby (and several organisations are agitating to take it beyond that) is "the stem cells will go toward research". Now that baby teeth can be used instead, the force goes out of that argument.
It will never quite rank up there with lies like "it's not fully developed, you're only killing a fish" or "it can't feel anything" (your baby is a fully human baby from conception, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is total bullshit (the foetuses used were doctored, and the drawings based on them doctored even further) and has been known to be bullshit for well over a hundred years, but for some reason the idea is supported and still used today; and nerves, heart, the whole nine yards are in place a few weeks after conception, generally well befor ethe mother knows she is a mother).
I disagree with senor falsification in that I don't believe that the tooth-fairy argument will be "devastating", but it will be useful and significant in the war against infanticide-for-convenience.
My own personal view is that if a mother has the right to have her child murdered in utero, she should also have the right to have her child murdered at any time up to majority. And of course, if she has the right to murder her children, then little matters like abusing them or selling them into slavery should hardly matter, should they?
Are there any sixteen-year-olds here that would care to comment on that?
I assert that the dates don't need to be correct to do this, just consistent. Unfortunately, IRL you get very little of either. (-:
For example, if two strata are correctly identified as "Carboniferous", it doesn't really matter for purposes of comparison whether they're umpty squillion years old or were laid down during Olmec times.
No, a paraconformity is where you would expect to see a conformity, but there isn't one. The word has also come to mean "a difficult-to-detect unconformity".
Everything from little shells a few inches across striking through tens of millions of years' worth of strata to large trees striking through tens of meters of strata, neither with any evidence of having been intruded (e.g. incongruous turbulence in the strata above or below).
Unfortunately for that idea, there are several more plausible explanations for those magnetic bands. Again, the ages of the ridges are assumed, and then correlated. If you do your history, you'll notice that the claimed ages have been completely revised a number of times, and I expect they're a long way from finished doing that yet.
The field reversals I actually had in mind were paleomagnetic signatures in large areas of cooling lava that show either huge rock units or the poles rotating dramatically on a scale of minutes to hours.
Bretz's "Spokane Floods" would be one example, but even today meltwater in far northern Canada can eat away ranges on riverbanks at a rate of meters an hour.
Yes, including many that you've not cited here. One has to wonder, if there are so many ways of explaining anomalies, how one decides whether a reading is anomalous or not. How would you decide?
AFAICT, they're actual platelets, with genuine organic material in them, not fossil (ie not mineral-replaced objects or outlines). The dude in charge of the lab that discovered them (a student saw them under a microscope) has bent over backwards to find a suitable reptilian source of contamination, without success. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. (-:
This unfortunate stream of reasoning goes as follows:
All that you really know is that a certain stratum contains well-preserved organic material. Nobody was there scratching off days on a calendar or even a cave wall (-: and to scratch 65Ma worth of days you'd need one motherous huge cavern, some serious scaffolding, and a good supply of nice hard scratchy rocks :-). A heck of a lot of initial assumptions are simply guesses, and dating contradictions are far more common than agreements. A manifestation of this can be found in the constantly spreading "ranges" of marker fossils like Ammonites.
Observations of decaying organic matter suggest that 100ka is really pushing your luck WRT finding the veriest scrap of intact flesh. This is but one measuring-rod which suggests that Velikovskian catastrophes are more a feature of our planet's past than many people have hoped (for another, look at the biggest feature on Mars).
Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way.
For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology.
Well... no. At least, I understand what you're saying, but it's wrong.
Go back and count the number of Linux kernel security issues over the last 5 years. Now divide by ten because your original kernel featured OpenWall so 90% of the vulnerabilities weren't exploitable anyway. The end result, for Linux (a rapidly-developing, large-ish and immature Unix - now consider OpenBSD) is far less than one potentially useable kernel exploit in five years. Now consider additional elementary precautions against exploitation, such as readonly and nosuid/nodev partitions, chroot'ing and chattr+i'ing everything in sight (very effective on nosuid loopbacks) (and then hiding chattr), and your need to reboot drops even further. If you can be bothered running your services in UML, you can put those few security patches through the stripped-down UML kernel(s) - which may not even have a chattr call - and never need touch your "real" one. And so on.
In short, power and hardware failures are much more common than software failures. Unlike Windows.
And getting better faster than MS-Office (which seems to have pretty much peaked, time for a new round of Microsoft's "stone soup" game). Speaking of whizbang features, OOo's export-to-Flash is pretty slick.
You're pretty much going to lose that with Blackdown versions of MSO anyway.
I know someone who ran a 3-line dialup BBS under Windows 95 and used it as a workstation as well.
He only had to reboot it about every mealtime. Eventually switched to OS/2 when it became clear that this was going to be a non-flyer. But it did work. Kinda. Mostly. Reminds me in so many ways of many mission-critical Excel spreadsheets which is an oxymoron in principle but actually happens IRL. Some complete bananas-for-brains do that kind of thing and don't even keep backups. Aiyaiyai...!
As I understand it, they're having a hard time selling the SF code, and to add insult to injury at least one of the original developers also have a Free competitor up.
As well as one MS-Word version to another, yes, and sometimes better.
And OOo does a lot of things well that MS-Word can't do, or does very badly.
PS, Office runs fine on Mac OS X, so its absence on Linux is a political decision (porting would be a doddle). Expect that decision to be reversed before Linux officially hits 10% of the desktop market share.
The fossil from Hell... er, Creek, Montana. Big silence on this one ever since, which is possibly significant in itself because definite indications of contamination would have to have been published somewhere.
Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible, so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions.
...then, of course, it's a professional sport.
As long as the CPU isn't producing insane amounts of heat, just turn the fan in the PSU around so it sucks air instead of blowing it, and whack a plastic scouring pad (available in the dishwashing things at your nearest supermarket for a small fraction of a dollar each in bulk packs) across your new air intake. You might have to use scissors to shape the scourer aound mains plugs, switches et al, but that's easy. Feed it through the washing machine every so often - with a low-lint load - or just hand-wash it with dishwashing detergent.
If you have a motherous great room-heater for a CPU, you can add a case fan with a similar filter, or bolt another "pusher" fan over the PSU fan intake on standoffs (to allow room for dropping the scourer in between the fans).
For a multi-stage filter, get some pantyhose and flywire (aka "flyscreen", "termi-mesh" would also do, and at a pinch some coarse shadecloth) and one of those little wire baskets people use for holding garlic, potpourri, nuts and such. If you position it right, you can use a loop of wire attached to a case bolt as a hinge on one side of the basket and as a catch on the other. Stretch the pantyhose over the outside of the basket, and the flywire outside that. You will need two fans to push enough air through this arrangement.
If you have multiple computers to filter, I suggest making a single large filter assembly with a brace of fans feeding a distribution pipe, and holes on the side of that with spongy sealing tape around them to butt the PSU intakes of your boxes against (fans reversed in those, of course). An unemployed evapourative aircon picked up off the kerb during a council cleanup day and used absolutely dry can be a great start to a large filter assembly.
It helps to be able to monitor the health of all of your fans, and have a computer squeak at you if it all goes horribly wrong, which monitoring can be done optically or with a magnet on the hub not on a blade tip (think balance).
...after Quetlzcoatl, the (South American) Toltec firebird/thunderbird. Cool name, no conflicts.
The wars were not "won" as such.
Also worth noting that the "war" is not over, but that Microsoft's contributions to it may well be over with shocking suddenness.
In brief (busy, busy, too much Linux work to do)...
:-) but it did kill that IIS server by raping MS SQL Server on the same machine,
:-)
I have a Linux user with a workstation uptime in excess of two years.
Slammer may not be an IIS worm (but it's one of the few that aren't... sorry, couldn't resist
Betcha Longhorn has more bugs than your front lawn when it comes out, and Oracle has maybe a few hundred.
I use Linux to write code and play games, too. What a coincidence! (-:
I also use it to write articles, do graphics work (crappy craphics work, I'm no artist), fix broken Word documents, build (and sometimes show) presentations, remote administer a few score servers around town when they need it (rare), and only ever have problems with dodgy hardware. The only things standing between it and infinite uptime are that I power it down to plug people's hard disks into it from time to time, and every month or two I lug it off to a bandwidth party. Oh, and I just blessed it and my wife's machine with a kernel update (actually, total upgrade from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1), killing about 3.5 months of uptime on hers (last power failure). My wife's machine and the gateway in the shed (Debian 3.0) stop only for power failures. No exceptional hardware, no special care. My LAN-attached neighbour (community networking at its best) kills his shiny new XP machine about once a day.
Oh, and the ext3fs journalling actually works. I routinely pull the plug on working machines to add hardware or move them, and haven't had a blip yet. My experience with NT and 2000 has been... less sanguine.
More power to anyone who uses it. (-: That's the whole point
Don't look now, but they're doing it already.
Bill's desktop may be pretty, and officially possessed of useability, but if that were what really counted then Apple would long ago have won the desktop wars, wouldn't they?
A lot of things go into making a desktop corporately acceptable, and many businesses are waking up to the fact that if they run Windows, Microsoft to some extent runs their business - and Microsoft is working very hard to drive their claws deeper into every business they can reach. Anyone who thinks that's a safe move from the individual business's perspective is invited to continue headbutting the walls of their cell.
Meanwhile, businesses are also discovering that if they want their desktops to be within cooee of stable, they have to spend time and/or effort locking them down. Locking down KDE or GNOME (or for that matter Ice, FluxBox etc) is relatively trivial, especially en masse, and can be done without the one-idle-change-in-Tahoe-wrecks-systems-in-Boston- and-Vancouver risks of Active Directory.
This here KDE 3.1 desktop seems mighty stable, and it's easy to configure, too. You can have an "eye-candy orgasm" (excellent buzzphrase!) and still keep your I-am-an-accountant-I-am-so-boring-people-forget-to -breathe-in-my-presence shirt on.
I've not had any noticeable issues with GNOME recently, either, and I can't see that there's enough of an issue for Hewlett-Pacquard to throw a hissy fit over it, especially given that most of the desktops hp ships are laden with oops-another-special-case Windows.