I live in a city that can be defined as the opposite of sprawl: Venice (Venezia), Italy. Buildings here are closer one to another than any place I know of. Some "calli" (pedestrian passages) are as narrow as half meter. Cars just don't enter the city beyond the parkings at the end of the bridge that connects it to the mainland, and even bikes are not allowed. You just walk. Every time your way intersects a canal, you have to go up and down the steps of a bridge. Because of the high density, the time spent moving from place to place in everyday business is not different from that in car-only cities. Remove the time spent looking for a parking place (a big problem in most Italian cities) and you have a net time advantage. You don't see many obese people in Venice and even elders citizens tend to be healthier than in other places. People meet and talk in the streets. Goods travel almost exclusively on water, on a network that is completely separate from that of persons. One of the downsides is a very uncomfortable environment for disabled people: wheelchairs weren't an option when the city was built!
Are they doing THAT? Are they CRAZY?!? Shifting Jupiter from its orbit? We are here busy worrying about asteroid impacts, and when you least expect it a gas giant hurls unstoppably toward our small planet, only because years before NASA was too cheap to buy enough fuel for its probes! They must be stopped NOW! To every celestial body its own momentum, I say.
NFTA(*): Years ago, researchers performed some experiments where this gene was deactivated with the help of a targeted gene-suppressing retrovirus. The resulting fruits were so ugly colored they had to rebrand them as "iMac" and sell them to computer fashion victims.
(*): Not From The Article
Explain to their kids that there's no such thing as free software
Great! Not only you boost sales of Windows licenses by making them buy new PCs, you even corrupt their children by steering them away from Linux and OSS! You are Evil, Sir!
P.S.: Please don't take my words too seriously, as the OP apparently did.
Summary: Microsoft is not forcing people to upgrade. YOU are doing it, giving incomplete advice and asking for unrealistic fees in order to part your naive customers from their perfectly good hardware! I wonder how many millions tons of CO2 emissions are caused by your behaviour. Expect a visit from our Kyoto agents soon...
Is it just me, or is this way of presenting research even more superficial than usual? Nobody would present a (even minor) scientific breakthrough with the words "Some scientists somewhere in Northern or Southern America discovered...", even in a Slashdot blurb.
By the way, it's The Australian National University in Canberra, as clearly stated at the beginning of the article.
Why this fixation on electric motors for the climber? The travel takes way too long this way. Use rocket engines, I say. Fast, solid, space-proven technology. Plus, you might be able to avoid the tether construction entirely!
Spouting acronyms without any explanation. Anybody care to explain to me what "IE" stands for? "Intelligent Evolution" maybe? Can't be, I don't see any religion-vs-science flamewar...
P.S.: Yes, you CAN ignore it!
this type of radar may someday be used on Mars to locate water in a future mission
What the (thin) article doesn't say is how this technology is different from, for example, the Italian MARSIS ground penetrating radar, operating on board of the ESA Mars Express probe since 2004, probing for water down to 5 km under the surface. Or the new Shallow Subsurface Radar now being deployed by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe.
"...[fumble noise] Ok, it's plugged... Is it? Wait... shouldn't someting pop up? Hmmm... [more fumble noise] Look into WHAT? Ok, I'm typing, tell me... [click, click] D, M, E, S, G, correct?... It says USB Mass Storage device detected, ok? Now what? SCSI? What has this to do with SCSI? Ah, I'll trust you on this...
[click, click][more fumble noise] Hello, here is Mark for another issue of Mark My Words, news from the world and stuff that matters to me..."
Mona means "c**t" (female reproductive organ) in an italian dialect...
I know, I'm from Venice. We don't giggle when the word comes up in other languages or in a Renaissance context, because we know it's a medieval contraction of the word "madonna", itself coming from the Latin "mea domina".
What would make me laugh would be the face of Miguel De Icaza discovering that in some other language "Mono" means "male reproductive organ".
It is easy to form a layman idea about the geometry involved in this phenomenon. A wrong idea, that is. The article's drawing shows a galaxy cluster between us and a distant wall of light, casting a shadow cone. It is rather intuitive that the "wall of light" is actually part of a sphere surrounding us in every direction, with a radius of 13.7 billion light years. The sphere is actually a magnified image of the Universe as it was some time after the Big Bang, when it cooled down to the temperature required for the emission of the observed microwave radiation. And it is magnified not by some optical effect, but by the expansion of space itself. If you were in the cluster's position you would continue to see yourself at the center of such a sphere with radiation coming from all directions. Actually, this would be true for any place in the Universe. Add the fact that things move, light travels at a finite speed, and that the "wall of light" was essentially "here" 13.7 billion years ago, when the light was emitted. Throw in all the relativistic factors required on such scales, and what seemed like a simple geometry problem becomes a job for expert astronomers, not for me.
My favourite explanation is that light and dark travel at different speeds...
Actually, the joke works in Italian too. Except we don't have the Saxon Genitive, so articles and prepositions are required.
"the periodic table table" is translated as "la tavola della tavola periodica".
The fact is, no software company is more bound to backward compatibility than Microsoft. With the kind of installed base they have, who knows where in the world some critical production server would fail if they decide to remove Microsoft Pinball?
Imaging the whole partition (example: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=winc.img) is quick and easy.
I did this several times, but wouldn't describe it as "quick". Adding option "bs=8000000" helps by making a better use of the disk cache (assuming an 8MB cache, which you don't want to use up to the last byte), but the process still takes a long time.
Plus side: you can do this without special software from any Linux live CD or even a running system (better not have the partition mounted, anyway). You can mount the image as a loopback device for single file restore.
Minus side: you can't do incremental backups. You are saving unallocated disk space together with actual data, wich slows down the process and may be a security concern if you are not very careful about wiping the unused sectors before the backup or after the restore.
You can compress the image simply by piping it through gzip. For both security and better compression, run "dd if=/dev/zero of=/[partition's mountpoint]/BigFileToBeDeleted" as root and delete BigFileToBeDeleted before you perform the compressed backup. This way, your image will compress unused space to almost nothing. As for security, the traces of deleted files will still be "under the zeros" on your disk, recoverable with specialized equipment, but they will not end up into your backup.
Anyway, this is far from the "average home user" solution asked for. Just a very useful (scriptable and schedulable) procedure if you know enough about Linux and don't want to use custom software.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in a city that can be defined as the opposite of sprawl: Venice (Venezia), Italy. Buildings here are closer one to another than any place I know of. Some "calli" (pedestrian passages) are as narrow as half meter. Cars just don't enter the city beyond the parkings at the end of the bridge that connects it to the mainland, and even bikes are not allowed. You just walk. Every time your way intersects a canal, you have to go up and down the steps of a bridge. Because of the high density, the time spent moving from place to place in everyday business is not different from that in car-only cities. Remove the time spent looking for a parking place (a big problem in most Italian cities) and you have a net time advantage. You don't see many obese people in Venice and even elders citizens tend to be healthier than in other places. People meet and talk in the streets. Goods travel almost exclusively on water, on a network that is completely separate from that of persons. One of the downsides is a very uncomfortable environment for disabled people: wheelchairs weren't an option when the city was built!
Are they doing THAT? Are they CRAZY?!? Shifting Jupiter from its orbit? We are here busy worrying about asteroid impacts, and when you least expect it a gas giant hurls unstoppably toward our small planet, only because years before NASA was too cheap to buy enough fuel for its probes! They must be stopped NOW! To every celestial body its own momentum, I say.
NFTA(*):
Years ago, researchers performed some experiments where this gene was deactivated with the help of a targeted gene-suppressing retrovirus. The resulting fruits were so ugly colored they had to rebrand them as "iMac" and sell them to computer fashion victims.
(*): Not From The Article
Maybe we are expected to buy in a single day everything we don't need, and leave the rest of the year for providing the boring necessary goods.
Dear Tim (686), you must be new here. Oh, wait...
P.S.: Please don't take my words too seriously, as the OP apparently did.
Summary: Microsoft is not forcing people to upgrade. YOU are doing it, giving incomplete advice and asking for unrealistic fees in order to part your naive customers from their perfectly good hardware! I wonder how many millions tons of CO2 emissions are caused by your behaviour. Expect a visit from our Kyoto agents soon...
Is it just me, or is this way of presenting research even more superficial than usual? Nobody would present a (even minor) scientific breakthrough with the words "Some scientists somewhere in Northern or Southern America discovered...", even in a Slashdot blurb. By the way, it's The Australian National University in Canberra, as clearly stated at the beginning of the article.
Why this fixation on electric motors for the climber? The travel takes way too long this way. Use rocket engines, I say. Fast, solid, space-proven technology. Plus, you might be able to avoid the tether construction entirely!
Spouting acronyms without any explanation. Anybody care to explain to me what "IE" stands for? "Intelligent Evolution" maybe? Can't be, I don't see any religion-vs-science flamewar... P.S.: Yes, you CAN ignore it!
"...[fumble noise] Ok, it's plugged... Is it? Wait... shouldn't someting pop up? Hmmm... [more fumble noise] Look into WHAT? Ok, I'm typing, tell me... [click, click] D, M, E, S, G, correct? ... It says USB Mass Storage device detected, ok? Now what? SCSI? What has this to do with SCSI? Ah, I'll trust you on this...
[click, click][more fumble noise] Hello, here is Mark for another issue of Mark My Words, news from the world and stuff that matters to me..."
I don't get it. Does the European Space Agency allow gamers to drive its huge Ariane rockets with joypads?
What would make me laugh would be the face of Miguel De Icaza discovering that in some other language "Mono" means "male reproductive organ".
My favourite explanation is that light and dark travel at different speeds...
Actually, the joke works in Italian too. Except we don't have the Saxon Genitive, so articles and prepositions are required. "the periodic table table" is translated as "la tavola della tavola periodica".
The fact is, no software company is more bound to backward compatibility than Microsoft. With the kind of installed base they have, who knows where in the world some critical production server would fail if they decide to remove Microsoft Pinball?
I did this several times, but wouldn't describe it as "quick". Adding option "bs=8000000" helps by making a better use of the disk cache (assuming an 8MB cache, which you don't want to use up to the last byte), but the process still takes a long time.
Plus side: you can do this without special software from any Linux live CD or even a running system (better not have the partition mounted, anyway). You can mount the image as a loopback device for single file restore.
Minus side: you can't do incremental backups. You are saving unallocated disk space together with actual data, wich slows down the process and may be a security concern if you are not very careful about wiping the unused sectors before the backup or after the restore.
You can compress the image simply by piping it through gzip. For both security and better compression, run "dd if=/dev/zero of=/[partition's mountpoint]/BigFileToBeDeleted" as root and delete BigFileToBeDeleted before you perform the compressed backup. This way, your image will compress unused space to almost nothing. As for security, the traces of deleted files will still be "under the zeros" on your disk, recoverable with specialized equipment, but they will not end up into your backup.
Anyway, this is far from the "average home user" solution asked for. Just a very useful (scriptable and schedulable) procedure if you know enough about Linux and don't want to use custom software.
As for "Duo", who would want to use that?