To get the full story, and to put your Linux distro of choice in context, it might be weel and good to list the full progession.
For me it was: Mainframe, PLC Trash 80 IBM PC running DOS 2 through 6 OS/2 V. 1.2 through Warp 4 Redhat 4.2 though 9 Fedora 1 through 14/Gnome Fedora 17/XFCE
Also run various flavors of Ubunto and Centos concurrent with the Fedora loop.
I have not been able to glean what open source licence this project used, but for sure it was not the GPL. But THIS TYPE of misappropriation of code is the reason the GPL ought to be used for any kind of community project like this.
If you use an open source licence that allows the code to be taken and closed then don't cry when others figure out how to profit from your work and deny you the fruits of your own frickin' labor.
I don't know where the submitter or editor got his/her eclipse frequency info, but the chances of an eclipse occuring are equal for both hemispheres. If you look at a specific short enough time span, it may appear to favor one hemisphere over another, but the eclipse geometry is symmetrical. There are times that a total eclipse vs. an annular eclipse will favor one hemisphere over another because the distance of the earth from the sun varies, but over any reasonable time scale this will all average out.
Sure are a lot of options out there if you don't want to be tied to a contract. I got a new LG Alley phone for about $100 bucks on ebay, and signed up with page plus celluar. Cheap pay as you service, uses all the Verizon toweras, and I can do anything and load any browser I want.
OT but pumping the brakes is not what people used to do before anti-lock brakes. Pumping the brakes is what you do when the brake system hydraulics are failing, and you need to build up fluid and pressure in the line so the pedal doesn't hit the floor when you want to stop. Pumping the brakes was made a thing of the past by dual brake system circuits. Not anti-lock brakes.
I can't even remember when I started reading Slashdot, but I associate it with my discovery of Linux in the mid/late 90's. I think I found it while surfing around after figuring out how to get my modem to connect using redhat 4.2 . Or maybe it was while I still ran an OS/2 box and found Slashdot while looking at the RC5 teams. Took a while before I finally signed up.
Anyway, I have really enjoyed the stories and discussions until recently. Been thinking about moving on. This latest expansion to whatever-bi just confirms my thinking. Must be a better News for Nerds out there. Guess I'll go take a look.
I guess you know that the present editors with respected credentials doing all the hard work at the prestigious print journals are -right now- working for free? So you are right. Shouldn't be too hard at all.
There is actually a fair bit of flexibility out there if you dig around.
When I went looking for a new phone for my daughter, I discovered that Verizon would NOT activate a smartphone unless you get the very expensive data plan, no matter if you own the phone or get it from them. I think around $80 per month.
I did a little research and found Page Plus Celluar. They use the Verizon system/cell towers so coverage is pretty good. No contract, and have a pretty good data/text/phone plan for about $30 per month.
I hopped over to Ebay and found a new-in-the-retail-box LG ALLY 3G Verizon Android phone for about $140. Has a slide out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles.
Works great. Page Plus Celluar will activate the phone with any of their plans. So for example, you could have a call only prepaid talk plan that will give you 2000 mins. of talk good for a year, for a one time payment of $80. And you could still use the data capability of the phone by connecting to a nearby WIFI.
In our office, we use the ability to run programs remotely on a regular basis. It is particularly useful for running programs that have dependencies that are no longer included in modern linux distributions.
As an example, I am a big fan of Word Perfect. I have used it to write specifications in our architectural office since maybe 1986. As some of you may recall, Word Perfect was available as a native Linux application -not a port or WINE abortion- I love this program, and would reinstall it at each upgrade, moving the required libraries from the old 2.0 kernel as needed.
Starting about Fedora Core 3, It just couldn't be installed in a way that was useful.
I solved this by installing RH9 on an old box, installed the libraries from Kernel 2.0 installed WP and have been happily running WP on this box with the display appearing on whatever computer I happen to be using ever since.
This is just one example, and maybe seems like a cranky one, but we have many other examples, such as pushing intensive computational tasks off to another computer while having the display on the desktop.
We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?
I suggest you get either an online or dead tree subscription to the NYT. Excellent general science coverage. The NYT does the heavy work of gathering together the stories and sources. If you want to know more in depth about the story, use the internet.
If I had mod points today I would mod you up. I have been a Redhat user since the old version 4.2 and Fedora since V. 1. When the Gnome developers made spacial view the default, I truly began to question their judgement and competence as interface designers. I mean WTF? What are these people actually doing with their computers? Not much apparently or they would "get" why these interface solutions are increadibly irritating to true desktop users. And no amount of comment from disgusted users seems to make a difference.
So I will hold out on Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 untill bitrot gets to me, and then switch to XFCE unless the Fedora, and Ubuntu folks get a clue.
This is not really true. Nuclear energy is not cheap once the plants are up and operating. If this were true the rates would go down when they switch them on. The converse is true, electric rates go up. The reason for this is that a utility can include the (very high) cost of the plant in the rate base.
One of the main reasons that power companies flocked to build nuke plants was fact that they cost so much. As public (monopoly) utilities, they were guaranteed a fixed rate of return on the cost of the plant and all the other infrastructure.
This was the reason that the $6,000,000,000 Shoreham Nuclear plant was allowed to initiate a chain reaction, even though it had been already been agreed to abandon the plant due to safety concerns - Once it was officially operating the cost of the plant could be included in the rate base. Take that, electrical consumer.
So no, nuclear power is not cheap. The fuel is relatively cheap.
I agree that coal plants should be required to pay into a fund to reverse environmental damage.
Also, I think it is obvious from the design of the Japanese reactors, That you could certainly fly a plane into the secondary containment building where the spent fuel pools are and cause a very major release, and probably disable the primary cooling pumps to boot. Wham Wham Wham
And even with the best design you still have: Possible design errors. Wham or Maintenance problem Wham
More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........
Put your viewmaster disk on a scanner that has a backlight for scanning transparencies or film negatives. scan at 1200 dpi. Your now done as far as the scanning. You could then use a tool such as the gimp to separate out the stereo pairs and reformat them so that they could be printed and viewed using an old stereo postcard viewer.
I have been into 3D photography since my Grandfather gave me his Realist Stereo camera sometime in the 1970's. I have added many other stereo/3D cameras to the mix since then. I also have a 3D slide projector that uses polarized light to separate the images, as well as an 1890s stereo card viewer.
3D has been really big since the 1890's. 3D was big in the 50's - both movies and photography You could get 3D comics in the 60's Disney has had 3D movies at least since the late 70's Viewmaster has been around since -forever- NASA has been taking 3D images also since -forever- And lets not forget the hologram.
Bottom line however is that 3D is a novelty and will forever remain a novelty, because viewing a stereo image is a perceptual trick that gives our brains all the clues that we are viewing an image in 3D EXCEPT that you cannot shift your point of view as you can with a real image.
This combined with the inappropriate manipulation of the apparent interocular distance by the photographer and parallax problems and other off-axis viewing problems make viewing 3D images problematic for a lot of people. And they always will. You can't fix these problems although they can be somewhat mitigated if you know what you are doing.
I enjoy 3D movies because I have been into for a long time, know where to sit in the theater, (dead center vertically and horizontally) and know how to hold my head. (level, on axis and still)
So is it a marketing scam? Sure, yes it is. Arguably 2D is much better for most content and situations. Is it fun or informative. Yes, it can be.
Granted that an engineering solution for passively cooling the spent fuel pools can be designed. But at what cost? What further vulnerabilities are introduced by the new design?
The trap of nuclear power plant design is that all contingencies and failure modes cannot be accommodated. What is the acceptable risk? One meltdown and release every fifty years? a hundred years? If we plan to be around as a species for the long term, I don't think anything but very close to 100% reliable is an acceptable risk.
Most folks are unable to grasps the time scale of how long we must deal with the waste products of our nuke plants. Certainly longer than present recorded history. It's a heavy burden to lay on the future for a few brief fleeting megawatts.
Hey, I went to MIT, I like technology and have no fundamental problem with nuclear power as a concept, but practically, as implemented, it is a disaster, and I don't see anything happening that will make it better any time soon.
The fundamental reason that utilities got into the nuke businesses was because they were/are fantastically expensive to build, and this cost went into the rate base by which profits as a regulated utility are figured. They also got a break on insurance for a risk they clearly do understand.
So problem one, the rational for building them was based on making money, lots of money, with the risk carried by the taxpayers.
Problem number two, we have never figured out what to do with the waste. Folks in the future are really really going to hate us as they pay for that one. And as a consequence, we have waste sitting all over the place that is not particularly well protected AND requires continuous cooling and attention.
Problem number three. Nuke power plants have a fundamental flaw or at least a design weakness. They REQUIRE an outside source of electricity and a connection to the grid in order to function. If you cut the connection to the grid, they will immediately shutdown. They have to, they can't function without a load and they need power to run the plant when they do shutdown. If you also disable the backup generators, you get what has happened in Japan. There are so many ways that this could happen besides an earthquake and tsunami.
Problem number four, Reactors tend to be grouped together along with spent fuel storage ponds, so it is easy to have a cascade failure when one goes seriously belly up. In other words, things are so hot you can't maintain the functioning plants either.
When all of the above are reasonably worked out, then lets look at building more nuclear power plants. These things should have been worked out 50 years ago.
As much as it has been belittled by some on here, the consequences of a meltdown and release of core material is a damn big deal. At the very least I expect it will put the power company out of business.
I'll leave it to you to decide if you would move your family into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
Slashdot Mirror
What he said.
Kurt
Nuff said!
To get the full story, and to put your Linux distro of choice in context, it might be weel and good to list the full progession.
For me it was:
Mainframe, PLC
Trash 80
IBM PC running DOS 2 through 6
OS/2 V. 1.2 through Warp 4
Redhat 4.2 though 9
Fedora 1 through 14/Gnome
Fedora 17/XFCE
Also run various flavors of Ubunto and Centos concurrent with the Fedora loop.
Kurt
I have not been able to glean what open source licence this project used, but for sure it was not the GPL. But THIS TYPE of misappropriation of code is the reason the GPL ought to be used for any kind of community project like this.
If you use an open source licence that allows the code to be taken and closed then don't cry when others figure out how to profit from your work and deny you the fruits of your own frickin' labor.
Kurt
OK, so why wouldn't any home user choose a free LibreOffice download over a $100/year msoffice subscription tax?
Kurt
I don't know where the submitter or editor got his/her eclipse frequency info, but the chances of an eclipse occuring are equal for both hemispheres. If you look at a specific short enough time span, it may appear to favor one hemisphere over another, but the eclipse geometry is symmetrical. There are times that a total eclipse vs. an annular eclipse will favor one hemisphere over another because the distance of the earth from the sun varies, but over any reasonable time scale this will all average out.
Kurt
Sure are a lot of options out there if you don't want to be tied to a contract. I got a new LG Alley phone for about $100 bucks on ebay, and signed up with page plus celluar. Cheap pay as you service, uses all the Verizon toweras, and I can do anything and load any browser I want.
Be flexible, but stand up to the man.
Kurt
OT but pumping the brakes is not what people used to do before anti-lock brakes. Pumping the brakes is what you do when the brake system hydraulics are failing, and you need to build up fluid and pressure in the line so the pedal doesn't hit the floor when you want to stop. Pumping the brakes was made a thing of the past by dual brake system circuits. Not anti-lock brakes.
Kurt
OK, not perfect.
Kurt
I can't even remember when I started reading Slashdot, but I associate it with my discovery of Linux in the mid/late 90's. I think I found it while surfing around after figuring out how to get my modem to connect using redhat 4.2 . Or maybe it was while I still ran an OS/2 box and found Slashdot while looking at the RC5 teams. Took a while before I finally signed up.
Anyway, I have really enjoyed the stories and discussions until recently. Been thinking about moving on. This latest expansion to whatever-bi just confirms my thinking. Must be a better News for Nerds out there. Guess I'll go take a look.
bye
Kurt
I guess you know that the present editors with respected credentials doing all the hard work at the prestigious print journals are -right now- working for free? So you are right. Shouldn't be too hard at all.
Kurt
There is actually a fair bit of flexibility out there if you dig around.
When I went looking for a new phone for my daughter, I discovered that Verizon would NOT activate a smartphone unless you get the very expensive data plan, no matter if you own the phone or get it from them. I think around $80 per month.
I did a little research and found Page Plus Celluar. They use the Verizon system/cell towers so coverage is pretty good. No contract, and have a pretty good data/text/phone plan for about $30 per month.
I hopped over to Ebay and found a new-in-the-retail-box LG ALLY 3G Verizon Android phone for about $140. Has a slide out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles.
Works great. Page Plus Celluar will activate the phone with any of their plans. So for example, you could have a call only prepaid talk plan that will give you 2000 mins. of talk good for a year, for a one time payment of $80. And you could still use the data capability of the phone by connecting to a nearby WIFI.
I liked it so much I bought two..
Kurt
Yes to this. +5
Yes to this.
Kurt
In our office, we use the ability to run programs remotely on a regular basis. It is particularly useful for running programs that have dependencies that are no longer included in modern linux distributions.
As an example, I am a big fan of Word Perfect. I have used it to write specifications in our architectural office since maybe 1986. As some of you may recall, Word Perfect was available as a native Linux application -not a port or WINE abortion- I love this program, and would reinstall it at each upgrade, moving the required libraries from the old 2.0 kernel as needed.
Starting about Fedora Core 3, It just couldn't be installed in a way that was useful.
I solved this by installing RH9 on an old box, installed the libraries from Kernel 2.0 installed WP and have been happily running WP on this box with the display appearing on whatever computer I happen to be using ever since.
This is just one example, and maybe seems like a cranky one, but we have many other examples, such as pushing intensive computational tasks off to another computer while having the display on the desktop.
We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?
Kurt
I suggest you get either an online or dead tree subscription to the NYT. Excellent general science coverage. The NYT does the heavy work of gathering together the stories and sources. If you want to know more in depth about the story, use the internet.
Kurt
If I had mod points today I would mod you up. I have been a Redhat user since the old version 4.2 and Fedora since V. 1. When the Gnome developers made spacial view the default, I truly began to question their judgement and competence as interface designers. I mean WTF? What are these people actually doing with their computers? Not much apparently or they would "get" why these interface solutions are increadibly irritating to true desktop users. And no amount of comment from disgusted users seems to make a difference.
So I will hold out on Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.04 untill bitrot gets to me, and then switch to XFCE unless the Fedora, and Ubuntu folks get a clue.
Kurt
This is not really true. Nuclear energy is not cheap once the plants are up and operating. If this were true the rates would go down when they switch them on. The converse is true, electric rates go up. The reason for this is that a utility can include the (very high) cost of the plant in the rate base.
One of the main reasons that power companies flocked to build nuke plants was fact that they cost so much. As public (monopoly) utilities, they were guaranteed a fixed rate of return on the cost of the plant and all the other infrastructure.
This was the reason that the $6,000,000,000 Shoreham Nuclear plant was allowed to initiate a chain reaction, even though it had been already been agreed to abandon the plant due to safety concerns - Once it was officially operating the cost of the plant could be included in the rate base. Take that, electrical consumer.
So no, nuclear power is not cheap.
The fuel is relatively cheap.
I agree that coal plants should be required to pay into a fund to reverse environmental damage.
Kurt
Sorry,
You did not address waste issue. Wham. Wham
Also, I think it is obvious from the design of the Japanese reactors, That you could certainly fly a plane into the secondary containment building where the spent fuel pools are and cause a very major release, and probably disable the primary cooling pumps to boot. Wham Wham Wham
And even with the best design you still have:
Possible design errors. Wham
or
Maintenance problem Wham
What else will pop up?
Kurt
More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........
Miss one time, game over.
Kurt
Put your viewmaster disk on a scanner that has a backlight for scanning transparencies or film negatives. scan at 1200 dpi. Your now done as far as the scanning. You could then use a tool such as the gimp to separate out the stereo pairs and reformat them so that they could be printed and viewed using an old stereo postcard viewer.
Kurt
I have been into 3D photography since my Grandfather gave me his Realist Stereo camera sometime in the 1970's. I have added many other stereo/3D cameras to the mix since then. I also have a 3D slide projector that uses polarized light to separate the images, as well as an 1890s stereo card viewer.
3D has been really big since the 1890's.
3D was big in the 50's - both movies and photography
You could get 3D comics in the 60's
Disney has had 3D movies at least since the late 70's
Viewmaster has been around since -forever-
NASA has been taking 3D images also since -forever-
And lets not forget the hologram.
Bottom line however is that 3D is a novelty and will forever remain a novelty, because viewing a stereo image is a perceptual trick that gives our brains all the clues that we are viewing an image in 3D EXCEPT that you cannot shift your point of view as you can with a real image.
This combined with the inappropriate manipulation of the apparent interocular distance by the photographer and parallax problems and other off-axis viewing problems make viewing 3D images problematic for a lot of people. And they always will. You can't fix these problems although they can be somewhat mitigated if you know what you are doing.
I enjoy 3D movies because I have been into for a long time, know where to sit in the theater, (dead center vertically and horizontally) and know how to hold my head. (level, on axis and still)
So is it a marketing scam? Sure, yes it is. Arguably 2D is much better for most content and situations. Is it fun or informative. Yes, it can be.
Will I buy a 3D TV? No.
Kurt
Granted that an engineering solution for passively cooling the spent fuel pools can be designed. But at what cost? What further vulnerabilities are introduced by the new design?
The trap of nuclear power plant design is that all contingencies and failure modes cannot be accommodated. What is the acceptable risk? One meltdown and release every fifty years? a hundred years? If we plan to be around as a species for the long term, I don't think anything but very close to 100% reliable is an acceptable risk.
Most folks are unable to grasps the time scale of how long we must deal with the waste products of our nuke plants. Certainly longer than present recorded history. It's a heavy burden to lay on the future for a few brief fleeting megawatts.
Kurt
No, sorry. I bet you forgot about the electrical power required to run the pumps required by the spent fuel pools.
Do you feel lucky?
Kurt
Hey, I went to MIT, I like technology and have no fundamental problem with nuclear power as a concept, but practically, as implemented, it is a disaster, and I don't see anything happening that will make it better any time soon.
The fundamental reason that utilities got into the nuke businesses was because they were/are fantastically expensive to build, and this cost went into the rate base by which profits as a regulated utility are figured. They also got a break on insurance for a risk they clearly do understand.
So problem one, the rational for building them was based on making money, lots of money, with the risk carried by the taxpayers.
Problem number two, we have never figured out what to do with the waste. Folks in the future are really really going to hate us as they pay for that one. And as a consequence, we have waste sitting all over the place that is not particularly well protected AND requires continuous cooling and attention.
Problem number three. Nuke power plants have a fundamental flaw or at least a design weakness. They REQUIRE an outside source of electricity and a connection to the grid in order to function. If you cut the connection to the grid, they will immediately shutdown. They have to, they can't function without a load and they need power to run the plant when they do shutdown. If you also disable the backup generators, you get what has happened in Japan. There are so many ways that this could happen besides an earthquake and tsunami.
Problem number four, Reactors tend to be grouped together along with spent fuel storage ponds, so it is easy to have a cascade failure when one goes seriously belly up. In other words, things are so hot you can't maintain the functioning plants either.
When all of the above are reasonably worked out, then lets look at building more nuclear power plants. These things should have been worked out 50 years ago.
As much as it has been belittled by some on here, the consequences of a meltdown and release of core material is a damn big deal. At the very least I expect it will put the power company out of business.
I'll leave it to you to decide if you would move your family into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
Kurt