Re: Science fail.

"So what the hell are all those supercomputers doing?"

Suggest you read about chaos theory

Re: @Chemist - Windows it's like the belly-button

Ah well, you reinforced the belief out there that it's not possible to live life without Windows.

I've heard & seen people saying such rot as "Oh, you need it for banking", "Can't edit HD video without", "3G dongles only work with Windows", "How do you manage RAW camera files ?" and countless others.

The one that amuses me most is "How do you manage as a scientist without Excel?) - well I managed for 20 years before Excel and most of the time Excel was available the data sets I handled were FAR bigger than Excel could handle. Even now I get people to send me data as CSV files and crunch the data with purpose-written C. That's the way to handle 7 million lines of data.

Re: either

"Godminster chedder at the mo"

Godminster cheddar is magnificent !

Re: Windows it's like the belly-button

"actually it's pretty hard to avoid having one"

Well somehow we manage to. I'm not sure why you think that you NEED a Windows machine - it's simply not true.

Re: Pressure Differential

"when the helium eventually leaks out."

It will not leak out to give less than atmospheric pressure though. At this point there may well be slow exchange of helium/air

Re: Perhaps a Full Vacuum is the best Hard Drive environment then? (Patent Pending)

I thought the heads were supported when running by the air or whatever gas inside, presumably by some sort of aerodynamic lift like ground effect - in that case a vacuum would be a non-starter.

Re: @Chemist

"And he quite clearly hasn't done that."

Agreed !

Re: either

"Elop worked for Microsoft, so it was obvious he would go down the Microsoft route."

The word is "worked". His duty now is to do his best for Nokia shareholders NOT Microsoft's. That's a CEO's job.

Re: Strewth,

"Just use a video projector. Plug it into your WMC box if you have too"

You have certainly never seen a quality slide at huge projection - it's never forgotten.

BTW -all Linux here, mate, what is this WMC you speak of ?

Re: Strewth,

Just to flesh-out the comment. The slide I'm thinking about was taken by a Hasselblad, from Pra Gra which is high above a glacial trench near Arolla in the Valais, Switzerland. I've since stood at the same spot and the slide captured it perfectly. Unfortunately I didn't !

A quick search found me a view but not the magnificent slide I remember projected in a large hall.

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/36319632

Re: Strewth,

"It's a scanner for photo slides - they're so last century"

Indeed they are and I wouldn't be parted from the freedom my Canon 550D gives me. However if you've never seen a quality slide esp. 2.25" square blown up to 4m * 4m they you haven't seen a photographic image.

Re: reason for Patch Tuesday

"@TiddlyPom "Security by obscurity does NOT work.

Of course it works"

It helps as part of a strategy - but on it's own it's very risky. The gold hoard is a bit of a red herring as without any clues it really is just a matter of luck whereas scanning (say) IP addresses and ports severely limits the search scope and can be automated.

My router has one open port forwarding to a server for SSH purposes - I've run it for years and the router logs have never shown a SSH access attempt on anything other than a standard port - -the security by obscurity bit is the actual port number is non-standard but I don't rely on that - the only valid username allowed ssh access on the server is very unusual and the password is 20 characters long and horrible. As a further precaution I've now blocked access to ports below 1024 at my ISP

Re: ...spend “is not proportional to its effectiveness”

"I remind you that the first and worst internet worm ever was on UNIX based systems.."

I remind you that that was 1988 ( that's NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT ) and probably the majority of connected computers were running UNIX

Re: Oh go on, I'll feed em...

@RICHTO

"Since when does linux not let externally sourced code execute"

Let's see - browse to a page with link to a Linux executable - click on link - need to download then make executable and then run

Let's try a shell script link -oh, it still doesn't let it run automatically.

Mind your browser may be set-up in a less-secure manner.

Re: The reality is all too real

@RICHTO

"Im not clear how that is FUD"

Gosh, I thought you'd know !

Just visiting the link doesn't root the phone - you have to get involved -there's even a link for donations for goodness sake.

This no more roots an OS than me deciding to put a different Linux distro on a computer as far as I'm concerned.

Re: The reality is all too real

@RICHTO

"Web site to root a UNIX based system just by visiting a URL - here you go:"

I see the usual abysmal quality of your 'information' hasn't improved with the new year - what a load of FUD

Re: @Fred (was: On the off-chance any of you missed it ...)

I've read all this article with a feeling of disbelief - my and mine have been using Linux happily for years without any of the problems and traumas depicted.

Only today I've edited a video, installed some bluetooth tools, converted the last of my vinyl disks to digital and done the usual e-mails etc. without any drama or bother - what is it with you people ?

Otherwise Happy New Year !

Re: Considering the distances from Earth for the *other* candidates this is pretty close.

I calculate the energy required to accelerate 1 tonne to 10%c as ~5E20 J. According to Wikipedia the sum of energy release from ALL the nuclear weapons test/uses is ~the same. Now I've not read the details of ORION but something seems amiss.

The joke icon...

....is, er, for a joke not a statement of fact.

Re: Linux users.....

"It's almost like he's intelligent."

What an extraordinary assertion - where's the evidence ?

Re: mmmm

I'm glad you posted this because it does help to illuminate the general ignorance around about Linux photo tools - even though I'm just a keen amateur I find it satisfying to convert a good raw photo from my 550D through 16bit programs like darktable or showFoto or do most of the tweeks in ufraw (again 16bit) and final (un)sharpening in GIMP. Even the command-line program dcraw and it's library which are at the back of many of these programs will output 16bit.

Apart from dcraw all these are GUI programs but for efficiency a little bit of scripting around dcraw will convert, resize, enhance an entire directory of raw images into a decent set of jpg proofs ( I use 1080 v) without the large sizes associated with the original .JPGs

e.g.

#!/bin/bash

#

dcraw -w *.CR2

#

mogrify -resize 1624x1080 -quality 100 *.ppm

#

mogrify -unsharp 0x1+.5+0.02 *.ppm

#

mogrify -format jpg *.ppm

Re: Microsoft USP

I take your point but

"Why buy something else when you will still need a WinTel PC in some capacity?"

I don't and haven't needed to for 5 years

Re: chemist

I'm sorry but you were the one who said "And yet you guys want to say that you can manage to get your work done on Tablets and Non MS systems. What kind of work do you do ?"

So I told you. This was about MS losing it's stranglehold -well it lost it a long time ago for some people.

"I am sitting at work with three screens (1280 * 3 Wide ) * 1024 High of applications, some of which, the following , of which have no viable Unix/Apple equivalants (Avaya ASA, Business Objects, Visio). I have several VMs open which are usually interfaces to the servers."

I don't suppose you are representative of the majority either.

Re: chemist

A perfectly valid use for a computer - probably the original.

In any case It wasn't all exotic calculations, there was the real-time use of 3D graphics to study protein structures, analysis with spreadsheets ( no not Excel - that could only handle 16K rows at the time - we had to handle millions) and even writing reports & papers.

In any case dismissing thousands of people using non-MS solutions just because it doesn't fit your world view or experience only shows how little experience of the world you have. There are lots of other uses out there - CGI, stock trading, machine control ( all the NMR and MS spectroscopy machines where I worked DIDN'T use MS software.

The majority, by the way, probably only want a browser. If you mean people who work in offices that might be a different matter.

Re: Arrgggh a mass rebooting session as well!

"seldom" it said !

Re: @Trevor

"And yet you guys want to say that you can manage to get your work done on Tablets and Non MS systems."

What's so suprising about that. Scientist, academics, engineers, designers - lots of them work on non-MS systems. You might not recognize the names of the programs but plenty of them are rather pricy. Before I retired I'd been using Linux plus a host of commercial scientific software for ~6 years, much of that had been ported from SGs and there were several hundred of us in the company so equipped.

A few comments recently have been along the lines "who needs more computing power - machines are fast enough" - well they may be to edit a document or fill-in a form but there are PLENTY of people who have requirements for as much as they can get. My twin Xeon workstation used to run all the time - many of the day-day requirements needed a run of several days and nights and I had a stack of jobs waiting to run whenever the machine was idle. For the really serious stuff there were several 1-2 K node Linux farms.

What wimpy kind of work do you do ?

"Doesn't track mouse movements on the extended screen!"

It's a bug- you need to report that

Re: Hydro Electric Power Stations

No, it isn't !

Weight on ground, energy used to lift weight to height above ground,physics well understood, energy released again as weight falls to ground - really it's not complicated - where on Earth do you think it comes from ?

Just potential energy - it's no hard. If you tensioned a spring the energy wouldn't come from the ground state of the spring -it would come from the muscle energy required to stretch it.

Re: Hydro Electric Power Stations

No, they are sun-powered. Heat from sun, water evaporates, falls as rain, fills reservoirs = stored potential energy. You need gravity to make it work but that's not where the energy comes from.

Re: Z-80

"The 6809 seemed to be one of the best of the 8bit breed"

I think the problem was it WAS rather slow and the complex, elegant addressing modes and position independent code which made it such a great cpu to program in assembler were dying the death as compilers generally only used simpler modes. It was caught at the wrong moment in time really with the 68000 being developed on one hand and the shift over to RISC on the other.

I've often thought that an updated 32 bit with high clock speeds would have been interesting but past is past and I'd much rather have a multi-core modern cpu running at 3GHz even if much of the power seems to disappear somewhere these days.

(I do have a 6809 still running in a home-made Forth system but I guess I've not switched it on in years)

Re: Z-80

"6809 had multiply! Multiply! That made it practically a supercomputer!"

Integer multiply of course, but far, far better it has wonderful addressing modes.

"There's an amazing joke here somewhere, but I just can't find it..."

They're putting copies of W8 back !

"Sand is not silicon"

Indeed it is not. Further the silicon is highly purified which I think probably dwarfs the raw material cost.

Re: Android is malware

"it is the third worst phone ever behind iPhones and Blackberries."

Your conclusion ?

Re: Who would leave a perfectly serviceable highway?

"3 different McDonald's."

There are DIFFERENT McDonalds ?????

Re: Stupid people always want something to blame

I agree, we live about 1/2 mile up an unmade road just wide enough for a van in places with steep gradients, bends and a drop of ~20-100ft into a stream for the whole distance. Yet a HGV ! drove all the way up one day due to following his satnav and had to reverse the whole way down - horrendous - blocked the road for almost an hour, knocked down fences, pushed over small trees. `

Re: Security FAIL

"Conversely, the reason NT is not a microkernel system is because most of the system components run in the same address space as the kernel,"

In any case "modern" != "better"

Re: Security FAIL

@AC 10:54

Hello RICHTO

" whole universe swapped left"

Same kind of thing happened to me when I was taking my first steps in protein modeling. Some joker swapped the wiring to the X,Y,Z knobs on the Evans and Sutherland vector graphics terminal I was using and in the dark, wearing stereo glasses, I damn nearly fell off my chair when my ' world' sheared away in quite a different direction

Re: Licencing hell

"As that's the LHC, I expect it is because it is full of beardy wierdies!"

They're smart though.

Re: But what about the cat?

"That, you have ask Herr Heisenberg."

I'm not certain where he is !

Re: Access control

"The Swiss taxpayer does not like to allocate huge resources to the government"

Indeed they don't -as far as I'm aware the bulk of taxes go to the local community & the local canton and then a small amount to the Federal government.

Re: But what about the cat?

"But cats are pretty cool already, no?"

Er, yes and no.

"The experiment will be easiest to run if the probabilities are equal -- so the bags are equally warm, comfortable, easy to get into, hard to be pulled from, inconvenient for whichever human is nearby, on top of something someone is wanting to read, etc."

I also think that it's going to be impossible to get two exact bags and even if there is only an infinitesimal difference between them the cat will choose the best one

"if we cool the cat down as far as possible."

I think you are probably breaking the 5th Law of Thermodynamics

" Any small increase in the cat's de Broglie wavelength will be extremely helpful."

Cats can adjust their de Broglie wavelength, their zero point energy and almost every other parameter. They are also quite capable of emerging from a blackhole ( or any other sort of interesting subterranean space)

All this off-topic for sure but discussing GR at this time of the morning (UK) is a bit heavy.

Re: But what about the cat?

"and not observing into which bag the cat climbed,"

That's easy, in order

1) the warmest

2) the most comfortable

3) the easiest to get into

4 the hardest to be removed from

Re: Huh?

"that the cosmological constant was a fixed number, or variable."

"A variable constant? That's revolutionary maths right there!!"

or !