Can I just point out that you require an Apple ID to use a Mac or iDevice,
I don't know about Android or the iDevices, but for Macs you do not need an Apple ID. Yes, it does prompt you during the OS install, but you can skip that screen. Now, if you want to use their App Store for anything other than OS updates, then you do need an ID.
I'm definetely not an expert on this, but I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Cities were using too much water for utilities and no returning it, then there are some climate concerns, but I think the biggie (both from an actual cause, and political view) is the St. Clair River.
Just look at the Great Lakes. They stand at record levels.
Do you mean record lows or highs? Because the way it's written seems to indicate you think they're at record highs, and that is not the case at all. I am originally from Wisconsin, and dropping lake levels has been a concern for a long time and this year saw a record low for Lake Michigan. The states surrounding the lakes have been actively trying to protect and increase the lake levels, since they had been dropping for so long. Many states (read: the southwest) wanted to run a pipeline from the Great Lakes in order that Arizona can have green grass in their front yards. All of the Great Lake states (and eventually the feds) signed the Great Lakes Compact in order to protect the lakes. In effect, it requires that all water removed from the lakes must be returned.
Dropping lake levels has a significant economic impact on shipping in the midwest - measured in the billions of dollars (too lazy to find a citation for this, but I've read more than a few reports on this over the years).
As for the rest of your post, yes sea level are rising, but I think a 3 foot rise in sea levels in the short term is not terribly likely. The seas are rising, this is a problem, but I don't think it serves anyone to overstate the problem. A cm or two is a big enough problem as it is. 3 ft in the short term would be nothing short of catastrophic. Calm down, focus on the problem, readjust to the new data, and contribute to the conversation productively with your newfound context.
I have been looking (albeit halfheartedly) for an alternative to Slashdot for quite some time. I know everyone likes to say that the "old days" were indeed the "good ol' days", and then someone counters that the "old days" weren't that good and everyone gives it their +1 Insightful while nodding sagely. But I have been coming to./ for over 8 years now, and I do feel that the tone is different now. I'm not saying that every article and comment was a platter full of Unicorn meat cooked to perfection on a jelly bean grill, but the overall experience and community was superior to what we have today.
Aside from the state of comments, the last part of this gentle rant is against the editors. The incredibly poor level of editing has gotten to a point where it is simply insulting. Millions of people visit this site daily. The editors post about 20 summaries that are 1 paragraph long each, and they can't be bothered to proofread it for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes? Moving past basic English skills, there are still the dupes, asinine headlines that end in a question mark, feature links that don't go to the source, and inflammatory headlines written for clicks alone. Headlines and summaries set the tone, and discussion (often) follows that tone. If the editors take their jobs seriously and start writing for an audience of adults rather than appealing to rabid adolescent partisans, then perhaps this site will turn around. Here's hoping. Until then, I will keep searching, and will give Hacker News (as suggested by trancemission) a fair shake.
This article is without merit and doesn't say much at all, though my favorite part is description of the "quote" he attributes to Jobs:
He [Jobs] told them something to the effect of
... and then just makes up the rest.
And not to rag on the author too much, but this "About Chris" profile simply makes me cringe.
Chris started at The Coffee Desk during its hey-day as an infrequent guest author who slowly grew to becoming a mainline contributor. He is a business grad student at USC who is very fluent with technology and the ever-evolving web, and has priceless contributions to Silicon News as a result. He is known for looking at the "big picture" of things, namely new technological trends, and analyzing them from a business perspective that so many IT professionals tend to glaze[sic] over in their focus on the technology's specifics.
From a guy with such tech "fluency," I expect a bit more.
UIUC runs their own power plant, and I used to live in an apartment on campus not too far from it. That thing put off so much steam that every morning fog was rolling across the street in front of where I lived. If I remember correctly, they also use the steam to heat a lot of the buildings on campus as well, via steam tunnels under the streets. They leak a lot, so there were always a few places you could stop on the sidewalk to warm yourself up before walking the rest of the way to class. Most of this was on the older side of campus. I'm sure most UIUC Slashdot readers spent more of their time north of Green street in the engineering quad where everything is a lot newer;-).
Charity Watch (aka American Institute of Philanthropy) has been doing this for years and does a damn good job of it. You can subscribe to their ratings guide and always have it on hand if you're interested.
How long until the corporations get their own private armies of mercenaries and start waging wars of attrition over market share?
There's an interesting fiction book called Jennifer Government by Max Berry that explores just that: a distopian, completely capitalist world. Overall it's a book that had the potential to be truly amazing, and ended up somewhere in the vicinity of good instead. Still, a worthwhile read.
If I may make a suggestion: why block perfectly valid words like clitoris, cunnilingus, vagina, penis, anus, anal, fellatio, ejaculate, etc? I assume you do teach sex-ed at your school. Will kids taking these classes not be allowed to discuss these topics via email? Not to mention the sheer amount of well respected literature which includes these terms (and many other listed above)
In my opinion, filtering using a word list is a bad way to go to begin with. Instead, teach the kids to use proper judgment and good taste; that will be far more effective than any word list. However, if using a word list is a foregone conclusion, then I think blocking the proper and technical terms of genitalia is a huge mistake. It sends a message that our sexuality and our genitalia are something to be ashamed of and basically says that the school district's view on sexuality is negative. This is hardly the lesson kids should be learning. People need to be comfortable with their bodies and in control, not told it is a taboo and any discussion of it will be censored.
I wish your district the best of luck with this roll out. I used to work in K-12 IT, so I know just how insane and irrational "protective" parents can be.
Robert McNamara was in a documentary a few years a back, expressing his regret over the Vietnam strategy he implemented...
In case anyone is curious, the title of the documentary is "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." I'm too young to have lived during the Vietnam war, but I found the documentary to be fascinating not only from a historical standpoint but also from watching McNamara himself. He's obviously struggling with what he's done during his life and this documentary is part historical, part confession, and part attempted justification for what he did. The film has a very personal feel to it since they shot the movie with the interviewer's face on a screen and camera right behind it. It does feel like he is talking to you personally in the camera.
Also, even though the movie was released in 2003, it was shot just before September 11th, 2001. McNamara makes some interesting comments about US and warfare. Basically he stated that if we act unilaterally and cannot convince our closest allies to join us, then we need to consider very carefully just what we have become.
It's an interesting film that is worth watching. You don't have to agree with him for it to still be enlightening.
From what I understand, one of the first things LibreOffice did after forking was import the GO-oo patch-set. I believe GO-oo and BrOffice intend to merge into LibreOffice and combine their efforts. I am not affiliated with any of the projects though, so some of my information could be incorrect or out of date.
There is a project called SparkleShare that is in the works. There is no release yet, but I hope it gains momentum soon. It has the killer feature that DropBox doesn't have: you to host your own repository.
I work in a research lab at a university and we use DropBox all the time to collaborate with researches at other institutions. The 2 GB limit is a problem though, and we don't like relying on an external service run by a company. If DropBox's free 2 GB ever goes away, then we're in a bit of a bind.
Once SparkleShare is ready to go, I'm going to switch all of the labs I cover over to it.
The newly released (in the US) HTC Hero has a 5 megapixel camera (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/specification.html). I just got the Hero and it takes surprisingly good pictures in low light too. The screen lags quite a bit behind what the camera is seeing, but I'm told that Android 1.6 is supposed to fix that (whenever HTC gets around to releasing the update).
---Alex
I was rather hoping for an article where the author would actually parse the output of dmesg and explain, line for line, what everything meant. There's a lot of comments here which discuss how much this article sucks - and I tend to agree. However, I really am interested in learning more about the boot process and really what all that dmesg output means. Does anyone have a link to an article that Slashdot can deem "worthy?" I'd be quite interested in reading it.
---Alex
Don't quote me on this, but if I had to guess I would think this has something to do with the prefetching that XP does. It prefetches both Boot and Applications by default. For a guide on how to change these settings then go here http://www.theeldergeek.com/prefetch_parameters_-_ altering.htm I have noticed a huge difference on machines which have a 2-3 year old install of XP on them. Even though programs may not even be installed anymore (Acrobat Reader 5, and now they're running 7), it'll still be prefetched, thus slowing things down. Maybe in your case, though I'm not sure, XP is still prefetching the SP0 Boot code in addition to the SP2 Boot code. Try turning the prefetching on boot off and then back on and see what it does for you.
It may have been intentional. Sure, linking to the 1400 pictures would make sense since thats what the article seems to be about; however, I think it was wise to not link to 500 MB of photos on Slashdot's front page. Though NASA has some really nice servers that hold up well to the Slashdot effect, I think the editors want to give NASA a fighting chance.
No, we have. Not. Released. Firefox. 2. Yet.
When people link to bits directly on a random FTP mirror, they're doing a number of people harm including, quite possibly, themselves:...posts linking to direct FTP mirrors could be costing the operators of those mirrors hundreds to thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills, or may cause them to crash by linking directly to them. This could cause them to "un-volunteer" their services as a mirror, making it even harder to obtain Firefox on release days.
The article says that it is every super massive black hole within 400 million light years. Also, as for being "lucky" to be in the Milky Way, our Galaxy has a super massive black hole at the center of it. Actually, we are a very typical galaxy. We are slightly larger than the average and we are a spiral galaxy (there are more elliptical galaxies and irregular galaxies than spiral). We are very typical. Also, as for being lucky about not being closer to the center of the galaxy (someone above mentioned that as well) if we were closer to the black hole at the center, it would not mean much. We are in an orbit around it and thus we won't be falling into it any time soon, even if we were closer to it. We do, though, have a great location in the galaxy. We are far enough out that we can look across the plane of our galaxy (only at some wavelengths because dust obscures a lot) and get a good view of it. We also can look out pretty well too. And to make things even cooler, our solar system actually bobs up and down through the main plane of the galaxy. It take about 30 million years to complete a complete cycle, but in 5 or so million years we will have a pretty cool view from above of the Milky Way. I don't remember exactly what the angle is that we would be viewing the galaxy from, not huge, but enough to be useful. The point of all this is that the advantage of this survey is to have a complete list of super massive black holes so as we are testing out theories we can apply these theories (and how they measure up) across not only a wide data set, but also a very complete set. There is so much left to be learned about black holes and this catalogue will certainly help.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I do. I'm not sure what I wrote that led you to think that I thought otherwise...
---Alex
Can I just point out that you require an Apple ID to use a Mac or iDevice,
I don't know about Android or the iDevices, but for Macs you do not need an Apple ID. Yes, it does prompt you during the OS install, but you can skip that screen. Now, if you want to use their App Store for anything other than OS updates, then you do need an ID.
---Alex
I'm definetely not an expert on this, but I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Cities were using too much water for utilities and no returning it, then there are some climate concerns, but I think the biggie (both from an actual cause, and political view) is the St. Clair River.
---Alex
Just look at the Great Lakes. They stand at record levels.
Do you mean record lows or highs? Because the way it's written seems to indicate you think they're at record highs, and that is not the case at all. I am originally from Wisconsin, and dropping lake levels has been a concern for a long time and this year saw a record low for Lake Michigan. The states surrounding the lakes have been actively trying to protect and increase the lake levels, since they had been dropping for so long. Many states (read: the southwest) wanted to run a pipeline from the Great Lakes in order that Arizona can have green grass in their front yards. All of the Great Lake states (and eventually the feds) signed the Great Lakes Compact in order to protect the lakes. In effect, it requires that all water removed from the lakes must be returned.
Dropping lake levels has a significant economic impact on shipping in the midwest - measured in the billions of dollars (too lazy to find a citation for this, but I've read more than a few reports on this over the years).
As for the rest of your post, yes sea level are rising, but I think a 3 foot rise in sea levels in the short term is not terribly likely. The seas are rising, this is a problem, but I don't think it serves anyone to overstate the problem. A cm or two is a big enough problem as it is. 3 ft in the short term would be nothing short of catastrophic. Calm down, focus on the problem, readjust to the new data, and contribute to the conversation productively with your newfound context.
---Alex
I have been looking (albeit halfheartedly) for an alternative to Slashdot for quite some time. I know everyone likes to say that the "old days" were indeed the "good ol' days", and then someone counters that the "old days" weren't that good and everyone gives it their +1 Insightful while nodding sagely. But I have been coming to ./ for over 8 years now, and I do feel that the tone is different now. I'm not saying that every article and comment was a platter full of Unicorn meat cooked to perfection on a jelly bean grill, but the overall experience and community was superior to what we have today.
Aside from the state of comments, the last part of this gentle rant is against the editors. The incredibly poor level of editing has gotten to a point where it is simply insulting. Millions of people visit this site daily. The editors post about 20 summaries that are 1 paragraph long each, and they can't be bothered to proofread it for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes? Moving past basic English skills, there are still the dupes, asinine headlines that end in a question mark, feature links that don't go to the source, and inflammatory headlines written for clicks alone. Headlines and summaries set the tone, and discussion (often) follows that tone. If the editors take their jobs seriously and start writing for an audience of adults rather than appealing to rabid adolescent partisans, then perhaps this site will turn around. Here's hoping. Until then, I will keep searching, and will give Hacker News (as suggested by trancemission) a fair shake.
---Alex
This article is without merit and doesn't say much at all, though my favorite part is description of the "quote" he attributes to Jobs:
He [Jobs] told them something to the effect of
... and then just makes up the rest.
And not to rag on the author too much, but this "About Chris" profile simply makes me cringe.
Chris started at The Coffee Desk during its hey-day as an infrequent guest author who slowly grew to becoming a mainline contributor. He is a business grad student at USC who is very fluent with technology and the ever-evolving web, and has priceless contributions to Silicon News as a result. He is known for looking at the "big picture" of things, namely new technological trends, and analyzing them from a business perspective that so many IT professionals tend to glaze[sic] over in their focus on the technology's specifics.
From a guy with such tech "fluency," I expect a bit more.
---Alex
UIUC runs their own power plant, and I used to live in an apartment on campus not too far from it. That thing put off so much steam that every morning fog was rolling across the street in front of where I lived. If I remember correctly, they also use the steam to heat a lot of the buildings on campus as well, via steam tunnels under the streets. They leak a lot, so there were always a few places you could stop on the sidewalk to warm yourself up before walking the rest of the way to class. Most of this was on the older side of campus. I'm sure most UIUC Slashdot readers spent more of their time north of Green street in the engineering quad where everything is a lot newer ;-).
---Alex
Charity Watch (aka American Institute of Philanthropy) has been doing this for years and does a damn good job of it. You can subscribe to their ratings guide and always have it on hand if you're interested.
---Alex
Plus, it doesn't run on Linux without hacks which are more hassle than its worth.
Well, in theory, Netflix is eventually coming to Linux courtesy of their efforts to get it working in Chrome.
That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.
---Alex
How long until the corporations get their own private armies of mercenaries and start waging wars of attrition over market share?
There's an interesting fiction book called Jennifer Government by Max Berry that explores just that: a distopian, completely capitalist world. Overall it's a book that had the potential to be truly amazing, and ended up somewhere in the vicinity of good instead. Still, a worthwhile read.
---Alex
I have no idea what she is researching, but there may be problems with patient data, etc.
---Alex
If I may make a suggestion: why block perfectly valid words like clitoris, cunnilingus, vagina, penis, anus, anal, fellatio, ejaculate, etc? I assume you do teach sex-ed at your school. Will kids taking these classes not be allowed to discuss these topics via email? Not to mention the sheer amount of well respected literature which includes these terms (and many other listed above)
In my opinion, filtering using a word list is a bad way to go to begin with. Instead, teach the kids to use proper judgment and good taste; that will be far more effective than any word list. However, if using a word list is a foregone conclusion, then I think blocking the proper and technical terms of genitalia is a huge mistake. It sends a message that our sexuality and our genitalia are something to be ashamed of and basically says that the school district's view on sexuality is negative. This is hardly the lesson kids should be learning. People need to be comfortable with their bodies and in control, not told it is a taboo and any discussion of it will be censored.
I wish your district the best of luck with this roll out. I used to work in K-12 IT, so I know just how insane and irrational "protective" parents can be.
---Alex
SparkleShare may be what you're looking for. I've had my eye on it for awhile, but I havn't used it yet.
---Alex
Robert McNamara was in a documentary a few years a back, expressing his regret over the Vietnam strategy he implemented...
In case anyone is curious, the title of the documentary is "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." I'm too young to have lived during the Vietnam war, but I found the documentary to be fascinating not only from a historical standpoint but also from watching McNamara himself. He's obviously struggling with what he's done during his life and this documentary is part historical, part confession, and part attempted justification for what he did. The film has a very personal feel to it since they shot the movie with the interviewer's face on a screen and camera right behind it. It does feel like he is talking to you personally in the camera.
Also, even though the movie was released in 2003, it was shot just before September 11th, 2001. McNamara makes some interesting comments about US and warfare. Basically he stated that if we act unilaterally and cannot convince our closest allies to join us, then we need to consider very carefully just what we have become.
It's an interesting film that is worth watching. You don't have to agree with him for it to still be enlightening.
---Alex
I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?
From what I understand, one of the first things LibreOffice did after forking was import the GO-oo patch-set. I believe GO-oo and BrOffice intend to merge into LibreOffice and combine their efforts. I am not affiliated with any of the projects though, so some of my information could be incorrect or out of date.
---Alex
There is a project called SparkleShare that is in the works. There is no release yet, but I hope it gains momentum soon. It has the killer feature that DropBox doesn't have: you to host your own repository.
I work in a research lab at a university and we use DropBox all the time to collaborate with researches at other institutions. The 2 GB limit is a problem though, and we don't like relying on an external service run by a company. If DropBox's free 2 GB ever goes away, then we're in a bit of a bind.
Once SparkleShare is ready to go, I'm going to switch all of the labs I cover over to it.
---Alex
The newly released (in the US) HTC Hero has a 5 megapixel camera (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/specification.html). I just got the Hero and it takes surprisingly good pictures in low light too. The screen lags quite a bit behind what the camera is seeing, but I'm told that Android 1.6 is supposed to fix that (whenever HTC gets around to releasing the update). ---Alex
For those who would like to take the survey, here's a link. https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/2007ClientSurvey ---Alex
Don't quote me on this, but if I had to guess I would think this has something to do with the prefetching that XP does. It prefetches both Boot and Applications by default._ altering.htm
For a guide on how to change these settings then go here http://www.theeldergeek.com/prefetch_parameters_-
I have noticed a huge difference on machines which have a 2-3 year old install of XP on them. Even though programs may not even be installed anymore (Acrobat Reader 5, and now they're running 7), it'll still be prefetched, thus slowing things down. Maybe in your case, though I'm not sure, XP is still prefetching the SP0 Boot code in addition to the SP2 Boot code. Try turning the prefetching on boot off and then back on and see what it does for you.
---Alex
For the curious, the links to Spirit's and Opportunity's "raw pictures" are here http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ ---Alex
It may have been intentional. Sure, linking to the 1400 pictures would make sense since thats what the article seems to be about; however, I think it was wise to not link to 500 MB of photos on Slashdot's front page. Though NASA has some really nice servers that hold up well to the Slashdot effect, I think the editors want to give NASA a fighting chance.
The article says that it is every super massive black hole within 400 million light years. Also, as for being "lucky" to be in the Milky Way, our Galaxy has a super massive black hole at the center of it. Actually, we are a very typical galaxy. We are slightly larger than the average and we are a spiral galaxy (there are more elliptical galaxies and irregular galaxies than spiral). We are very typical. Also, as for being lucky about not being closer to the center of the galaxy (someone above mentioned that as well) if we were closer to the black hole at the center, it would not mean much. We are in an orbit around it and thus we won't be falling into it any time soon, even if we were closer to it. We do, though, have a great location in the galaxy. We are far enough out that we can look across the plane of our galaxy (only at some wavelengths because dust obscures a lot) and get a good view of it. We also can look out pretty well too. And to make things even cooler, our solar system actually bobs up and down through the main plane of the galaxy. It take about 30 million years to complete a complete cycle, but in 5 or so million years we will have a pretty cool view from above of the Milky Way. I don't remember exactly what the angle is that we would be viewing the galaxy from, not huge, but enough to be useful. The point of all this is that the advantage of this survey is to have a complete list of super massive black holes so as we are testing out theories we can apply these theories (and how they measure up) across not only a wide data set, but also a very complete set. There is so much left to be learned about black holes and this catalogue will certainly help.
I completely agree with the protected WMA only. Right on. ---Alex