Great that they're switching to Ubuntu. I've got Ubuntu running on a little Asus EeeBox in the kitchen for the past two years. It came with some Asus-branded version of Linux that was terrible; but I dumped that right away for Ubuntu. It works great; never had any problems. It's a nice, small box, humming away under the cabinet, connected to a monitor mounted on the wall. My wife and kids use it primarily for email and web stuff, and play music on it. None of them have ever complained about Ubuntu or asked how to use it. I'm not sure my wife even knows it's not MacOS or Windows...
I'd add Kazuo Ishiguro to the list for "Never Let Me Go", which was very well accepted by the literary establishment, and was somewhat science fiction.
Most lists I've seen of the best books of the last 150 years or so include some science fiction such as Orwell's '1984', Huxley's 'Brave New World', Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', and Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange'.
I think literary establishment acceptance depends on several factors: -- Writing other 'literary' books that aren't science-fiction -- Using SF to set or enhance the situation, rather than having it be the focus of the book -- Serious topics -- Plain good writing -- A setting that is closer to present-day. Seems like the farther out in the future the book is set, the less 'literary' it will be considered.
Sure, a mindlessly entertaining SF book is not going to be accepted by the literary establishment, but then again, neither is a mindlessly entertaining present-day book. The bar is probably higher for SF though; it's going to take a more highbrow SF book to break into 'literary' circles than a present-day book.
I do find it interesting to note that about 10-20% of the books that my (non-geek) wife's bookclub reads could be considered SF.
Yeah, thanks for the summary with no explanatory information whatsoever for anyone not familiar with this case already. The Ars article didn't really explain much about it either. Not sure how I missed such a huge news story, maybe I was reading about minor stuff like tsunamis...
But hey, it's/., so the summary has at least met my expectations.;-)
"the movie version of "Starship Troopers" was much better than the book. There, I said it."
Of course it was; it had Denise Richards.
I fail to see what is funny about that. If I had mod points, I'd mod it 'insightful'. I thought the movie was barely OK, but I might have to watch it a few more times now that I remember she's in it...
Of course, pretty soon you've got millions of small pieces of web page debris orbiting your browser. Then your real, working web pages run a real risk of getting hit and destroyed by a piece of debris at over 20,000 mph, thus contributing even more to the debris belt. And when the Chinese start testing their anti-web-page rockets and making even more debris? Well, it's pretty much game over for the Intertubes at that point...
I haven't been to Weird Stuff, but I hit Halted / HSC every few months. From the pictures, it seems like Weird Stuff has more old junk. HSC has plenty of old stuff, but most of it is still usable, and someone probably will eventually buy it. Not sure why anyone wants a copy of early 90s era MS Word though; good luck getting rid of some of that stuff.
In addition to the defendant's delayed disclosures, Beckerman, defendant's counsel, adopted an unduly contentious approach throughout this litigation (albeit the same can be said of plaintiff's counsel). For that reason alone, his request for attorney's fees and costs is not only denied but is also inappropriate.
Sounds like the judge was pretty annoyed, and is taking his ball and going home.
Exactly. If we go to the moon now, it will be with very expensive, one-off vehicles, with no reusability, and we'll have no lasting presence there. It will just be going to the moon to go to the moon. Maybe there will be some learning that we can then apply to very expensive, one-off vehicles to go to other destinations, like Mars. Not very compelling, except for the wow factor.
What NASA really needs to do is concentrate on unmanned science, and infrastructure. What we should be doing is perfecting designs to deliver standard payloads to the moon, to Mars, to the outer system, etc, so we can achieve some real economies of scale on these unmanned missions. Seems like we're reinventing the wheel everytime we send a mission out there. If we could get the delivery vehicles standardized, we could be sending up missions every month.
To prepare for future manned missions, we should be developing the unmanned infrastructure to support them: sending up missions to the moon to pre-place supplies, buildings, vehicles, etc. And in the process, developing the capability to manufacture some of this stuff on site. Assuming the raw materials are there, could we develop technology that will manufacture photovoltaic cells on the moon, or metals? Or mine for water? Or mine for propellants for an eventual trip to Mars? Eventually, we'd get to the point where we had enough infrastructure up there and running, that all we'd have to do is send up a few people to crew the base that's already in place.
That's the kind of long-term thinking we need at NASA. Manned missions right now don't make a lot of sense, scientifically or economically. But we should be using the unmanned missions to prepare for a return to manned missions at some future date.
It's customary to explicitly define the acronym before its first use in the main body.
Come on, here on Slashdot, everyone knows that ETF stands for "Exchange Traded Fund". Google is giving out Nexus Ones to all investors in some fund, and charging them for it. Or is it "Electron-transferring flavoproteins"? Maybe "Emergency Task Force"?
I used to date a girl who called her pussy a "nook." I succesfully opened it many times:)
Sure, that's the very definition of truthfulness: An AC on/. posting about dating and pussy. Right... how's the wireless connection down in the basement btw?
Wait, so the majors have been selling CDs for over thirty years with songs they don't own the copyright on?? They've been charging consumers for something they didn't own?
And they wonder why consumers are downloading music...
In retrospect, I don't think we've been pirating music at all over the past decade or so. We're all just small record labels that have been creating (very limited run) compilation CDs and putting the songs on our own 'pending lists'. We fully intend to pay the rights holders, once we can locate them and negotiate rights. Brilliant idea, guys! Thanks!
I can just see it now -- anyone who can get a bit of video of you can create a 3-D models of your face and body, and then do anything with the likeness. When rendering gets really good, this could be a bit embarrassing. Instead of 2D retouched photos of celebrities and politicians, we'll be seeing hacked up 'animated' (but realistic) video of them doing all sorts of wild stuff. Well, it might be a boon to the porn industry, at least in the short-term before the rendering software becomes available to consumers.
Boss: OK, guys. Marketing and PR has decided to release the source code publicly. You guys said our software is really nice, clean, secure code. So you don't have any problems with that, right?
Developers: Umm, yeah, sure, no problem... You know, we might want to make one or two very minor fixes first... [runs frantically back to computer and pounds away]
It's the area around the LHC. When they turned it on, it really did create small black holes, which of course don't let any light or other EMR escape. So the satellites can't see in past their event horizon. Or something like that.
Or maybe they just got lazy, blew off work, went home, and cracked open a few beers. "Come on, Seiji, no one will notice that we didn't map the last 1%; it's just a measly 5mm km2. Let's hit the bar!"
I've been involved in a few of these types of projects (unfortunately), and believe it or not, the money goes quickly. So does the time. It's not just coding -- that's actually a very small part of the money. It would take some time to burn through $40mm, but you'd be amazed how quickly these project eat up cash. I certainly was when I first got involved.
Here are some things to consider:
They always consider the costs of the internal people's time on these projects, even if they're not dedicated to the project. So if you have a 4 hour requirements meeting with 6 business folks from Payroll, well, that gets figured into the overall budget at 4 * 6 * hourly loaded cost of employees, plus your time.
Software and database licenses add up quickly for this type of project. You know they're not running on MySQL, right? It's probably Oracle all the way, and that's $$$. Some vendors charge by the seat -- how many users do you think a payroll system for 60,000 employees has? That's right, a lot. Plus hardware costs -- they're not running this on their old hardware.
A project of this size probably has a project manager, several project administrators, an internal business lead, and an internal technical lead, at a minimum, running the show.
How much do you think gathering requirements, mapping out existing processes, mapping requirements to functionality, developing specs to cover the gaps, creating the new processes, testing the new processes, and getting buy-in and approval on all that from all the stakeholders costs? You know there will always be 3 to 5 revision and feedback cycles for everything. That's an easy 6 to 18 months of work for a team of six to eight people probably.
They're going to have run it in test mode for several pay periods, while the old system is still running, and check the results. That will result in duplicate work for all the people entering in the data.
Converting the existing data costs money.
Training costs for the users -- there are probably several hundred users, at different sites. (Plus there's always "Change Management" costs)
(Ugh, thank God I'm out of that ERP systems business these days!)
Yes, a fair amount of the money is probably wasted. But these projects do cost big bucks. This isn't hacking up a new blogging tool from open source toolkits. I'm not saying it's right, or well managed (it almost certainly isn't), but to say "dude, I could hack up a payroll system in a couple of months, pay me the money!" just shows that while you may know how to sling code, you don't have a clue about delivering solutions to business problems.
Maybe programmers in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe have more time on their hands, less money, and would derive more benefit from participating in the contest (prestige and recognition for instance). I'm sure there are a great many US coders who would do very well in this contest, but are too busy.
Repeat after me: there is no secret lab under Sutter Buttes. Certainly not one exactly 322' under Brockman Canyon off Pass Road with henchmen wearing shiny silver suits where several tanks of Sphyrna have recently been delivered. Umm, I mean, these are not the buttes you are looking for...
Slashdot Mirror
Great that they're switching to Ubuntu. I've got Ubuntu running on a little Asus EeeBox in the kitchen for the past two years. It came with some Asus-branded version of Linux that was terrible; but I dumped that right away for Ubuntu. It works great; never had any problems. It's a nice, small box, humming away under the cabinet, connected to a monitor mounted on the wall. My wife and kids use it primarily for email and web stuff, and play music on it. None of them have ever complained about Ubuntu or asked how to use it. I'm not sure my wife even knows it's not MacOS or Windows...
I'd add Kazuo Ishiguro to the list for "Never Let Me Go", which was very well accepted by the literary establishment, and was somewhat science fiction.
Most lists I've seen of the best books of the last 150 years or so include some science fiction such as Orwell's '1984', Huxley's 'Brave New World', Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', and Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange'.
I think literary establishment acceptance depends on several factors:
-- Writing other 'literary' books that aren't science-fiction
-- Using SF to set or enhance the situation, rather than having it be the focus of the book
-- Serious topics
-- Plain good writing
-- A setting that is closer to present-day. Seems like the farther out in the future the book is set, the less 'literary' it will be considered.
Sure, a mindlessly entertaining SF book is not going to be accepted by the literary establishment, but then again, neither is a mindlessly entertaining present-day book. The bar is probably higher for SF though; it's going to take a more highbrow SF book to break into 'literary' circles than a present-day book.
I do find it interesting to note that about 10-20% of the books that my (non-geek) wife's bookclub reads could be considered SF.
Yeah, thanks for the summary with no explanatory information whatsoever for anyone not familiar with this case already. The Ars article didn't really explain much about it either. Not sure how I missed such a huge news story, maybe I was reading about minor stuff like tsunamis...
But hey, it's /., so the summary has at least met my expectations. ;-)
"the movie version of "Starship Troopers" was much better than the book. There, I said it."
Of course it was; it had Denise Richards.
I fail to see what is funny about that. If I had mod points, I'd mod it 'insightful'. I thought the movie was barely OK, but I might have to watch it a few more times now that I remember she's in it...
that's what I get for blowing though the preview page -- I meant much higher levels of pain
Clearly it's the penguins that are helping!
In another study, patients who played a game that featured windows and paper-clips reported much levels of pain...
Of course, pretty soon you've got millions of small pieces of web page debris orbiting your browser. Then your real, working web pages run a real risk of getting hit and destroyed by a piece of debris at over 20,000 mph, thus contributing even more to the debris belt. And when the Chinese start testing their anti-web-page rockets and making even more debris? Well, it's pretty much game over for the Intertubes at that point...
Find/steal gasoline along the way, and, well, I ate the dog...
PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath
a sawed off shotgun, lots of ammo, and a Ford Falcon XB Interceptor
I haven't been to Weird Stuff, but I hit Halted / HSC every few months. From the pictures, it seems like Weird Stuff has more old junk. HSC has plenty of old stuff, but most of it is still usable, and someone probably will eventually buy it. Not sure why anyone wants a copy of early 90s era MS Word though; good luck getting rid of some of that stuff.
Regarding attorney's fees, from the decision:
In addition to the defendant's delayed disclosures, Beckerman, defendant's counsel, adopted an unduly contentious approach throughout this litigation (albeit the same can be said of plaintiff's counsel). For that reason alone, his request for attorney's fees and costs is not only denied but is also inappropriate.
Sounds like the judge was pretty annoyed, and is taking his ball and going home.
Exactly. If we go to the moon now, it will be with very expensive, one-off vehicles, with no reusability, and we'll have no lasting presence there. It will just be going to the moon to go to the moon. Maybe there will be some learning that we can then apply to very expensive, one-off vehicles to go to other destinations, like Mars. Not very compelling, except for the wow factor.
What NASA really needs to do is concentrate on unmanned science, and infrastructure. What we should be doing is perfecting designs to deliver standard payloads to the moon, to Mars, to the outer system, etc, so we can achieve some real economies of scale on these unmanned missions. Seems like we're reinventing the wheel everytime we send a mission out there. If we could get the delivery vehicles standardized, we could be sending up missions every month.
To prepare for future manned missions, we should be developing the unmanned infrastructure to support them: sending up missions to the moon to pre-place supplies, buildings, vehicles, etc. And in the process, developing the capability to manufacture some of this stuff on site. Assuming the raw materials are there, could we develop technology that will manufacture photovoltaic cells on the moon, or metals? Or mine for water? Or mine for propellants for an eventual trip to Mars? Eventually, we'd get to the point where we had enough infrastructure up there and running, that all we'd have to do is send up a few people to crew the base that's already in place.
That's the kind of long-term thinking we need at NASA. Manned missions right now don't make a lot of sense, scientifically or economically. But we should be using the unmanned missions to prepare for a return to manned missions at some future date.
It's customary to explicitly define the acronym before its first use in the main body.
Come on, here on Slashdot, everyone knows that ETF stands for "Exchange Traded Fund". Google is giving out Nexus Ones to all investors in some fund, and charging them for it. Or is it "Electron-transferring flavoproteins"? Maybe "Emergency Task Force"?
No, no. They were uploaded to AT&T's 3G network (sort of an online backup, y'know), and it took all year to download them again via an iPhone!
Let's celebrate with a song we all know: "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam..."
Now repeat 1 billion times...
(Sad to think that way more spam has been sent than the number of times that Monty Python sketch has been played; should be the other way around)
I used to date a girl who called her pussy a "nook." I succesfully opened it many times :)
Sure, that's the very definition of truthfulness: An AC on /. posting about dating and pussy. Right... how's the wireless connection down in the basement btw?
Wait, so the majors have been selling CDs for over thirty years with songs they don't own the copyright on?? They've been charging consumers for something they didn't own?
And they wonder why consumers are downloading music...
In retrospect, I don't think we've been pirating music at all over the past decade or so. We're all just small record labels that have been creating (very limited run) compilation CDs and putting the songs on our own 'pending lists'. We fully intend to pay the rights holders, once we can locate them and negotiate rights. Brilliant idea, guys! Thanks!
I can just see it now -- anyone who can get a bit of video of you can create a 3-D models of your face and body, and then do anything with the likeness. When rendering gets really good, this could be a bit embarrassing. Instead of 2D retouched photos of celebrities and politicians, we'll be seeing hacked up 'animated' (but realistic) video of them doing all sorts of wild stuff. Well, it might be a boon to the porn industry, at least in the short-term before the rendering software becomes available to consumers.
PS Slashdot has the slowest comment preview of any website I know.
That's because it's disconnected from space and time
Boss: OK, guys. Marketing and PR has decided to release the source code publicly. You guys said our software is really nice, clean, secure code. So you don't have any problems with that, right?
Developers: Umm, yeah, sure, no problem... You know, we might want to make one or two very minor fixes first... [runs frantically back to computer and pounds away]
It's the area around the LHC. When they turned it on, it really did create small black holes, which of course don't let any light or other EMR escape. So the satellites can't see in past their event horizon. Or something like that.
Or maybe they just got lazy, blew off work, went home, and cracked open a few beers. "Come on, Seiji, no one will notice that we didn't map the last 1%; it's just a measly 5mm km2. Let's hit the bar!"
I've been involved in a few of these types of projects (unfortunately), and believe it or not, the money goes quickly. So does the time. It's not just coding -- that's actually a very small part of the money. It would take some time to burn through $40mm, but you'd be amazed how quickly these project eat up cash. I certainly was when I first got involved.
Here are some things to consider:
testing the new processes, and getting buy-in and approval on all that from all the stakeholders costs? You know there will always be 3 to 5 revision and feedback cycles for everything. That's an easy 6 to 18 months of work for a team of six to eight people probably.
(Ugh, thank God I'm out of that ERP systems business these days!)
Yes, a fair amount of the money is probably wasted. But these projects do cost big bucks. This isn't hacking up a new blogging tool from open source toolkits. I'm not saying it's right, or well managed (it almost certainly isn't), but to say "dude, I could hack up a payroll system in a couple of months, pay me the money!" just shows that while you may know how to sling code, you don't have a clue about delivering solutions to business problems.
Maybe programmers in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe have more time on their hands, less money, and would derive more benefit from participating in the contest (prestige and recognition for instance). I'm sure there are a great many US coders who would do very well in this contest, but are too busy.
I'm continually amazed at all the stuff people get the 555 to do. Just google '555 circuit', and be prepared for some major geek accomplishments.
Repeat after me: there is no secret lab under Sutter Buttes. Certainly not one exactly 322' under Brockman Canyon off Pass Road with henchmen wearing shiny silver suits where several tanks of Sphyrna have recently been delivered. Umm, I mean, these are not the buttes you are looking for...