cron. And it turns out, it has an ACM link in the external links, but it does NOT cite an ACM article, properly or otherwise

Yes, it does cite an ACM article from the late 70s, as the inspiration for improved versions of crond, which performed better, and were extended to all system users, not just root as early crond did.

And is the link related to cron? I'm going with no, because it doesn't sound related

That's just your own bias and/or unwillingness to read TFA.

"Robert Brown, reviewing this [ACM] article, [...] created an implementation [...] and this multi-user cron went into use at Purdue in late 1979."

It seems that rather than all those wiki pages citing ACM publications, somebody from ACM has spammed all those articles with unrelated links.

You checked on ONE out of hundreds, completely misunderstood everything about it, and are jumping to a conclusion that requires paranoid conspiracy fantasies.

How many Slashdot stories are untrue? Does anyone have any idea?

Here's a quick list of Wikipedia articles which probably cite ACM publications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...

It depends on what you mean by work station usage and what is important to you.

I now always build my machines to be as silent as possible, even if it means a significant sacrifice to horsepower as I have a machine filled with fans for heavy lifting in my garage.

I also need limited storage in my workstation so it always gets an SSD. At the moment I am using the amd FM2 integrated GPU systems for my work stations. Never going to set the gaming world on fire and will lose in performance to an Intel I7. But you can build a ready to go machine for peanuts.

They have been the same physical layout but their aerodynamic profile isn't what this competition is designed to challenge. What they want to challenge is the electrical system. How much power can your cells generate, how efficiently can you transfer that power to your motor, how versatile is the motor and how well can you store that power for when the sun isn't as bright.

These aspects have continued to develop every year.

MotoGP and World SuperBike. The rules aren't really designed to slow the bikes down. It was supposedly to keep the costs down but that hasn't happened. It has had the effect of pushing a lot of the development into materials.

Recent motogp changes that I don't like include:
Control tyres - you used to have michelin, dunlop and bridgestone developing tyres to suit the characterestics of a particular bike. Because the tyres had different wear characteristics you saw different tyres perform better on different tracks. They went all Bridgestone first and are going all Michelin in 2016.
Engine design - the requirement that the engines not be over square (ie the cylinder bore must not exceed the piston stroke). This basically acts as a rev limiter without going to crazy expensive materials. It also means that in some aspects the engines are behind modern road bikes as several road bikes have over square engines as they produce higher top power
Fuel limits - the fuel limits have been going down over time. This has the effect of capping power output across a race. It means you have to design a bike to carry more speed all the time. It actually makes the motogp act more like the smaller classes where corner speed is king. Go back to the 500cc 2 stroke era and you had bikes that sacrificed handling for crazy power. What they lost in the corners they made up in the straights (see screamer vs big bang engine design in the Honda NSR 500 for an example internal to one manufacturer)

To be fair though there have been some huge jumps in electronics. Things like the way the Honda cuts the ignition on upshifts so that the power of the engine doesn't cause micro spins of the back wheel giving them a couple of 10ths a lap was very cool. The launch control technology is also amazing (if you want to see what happens when you think your traction control is on when it is not search for Lorenzo practice highside)

The big problem going forward is that the owners of MotoGP have managed to acquire the rights to WSBK and the first thing they have done is dumb down the bikes so there is a bigger gap between the motogp and the WSBK.

This is not a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of wikipedia. This is a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of human knowledge. That Taiwanese English professor, those "innumerable blog posts and book reports", that book on Jews and Jesus - all of them accepted the account as given. That makes them *also* unreliable, together with the plethora of tertiary sources that might cite them. The fact that the untruth was initially added to wikipedia and not some other location is irrelevant. The real problem is the tendency of mankind to accept things as given without checking up on it.

Actually I prefer the larger rips by far. Story is hugely important and I am willing to watch something of low quality if it is good enough. But I will always go a high rate 1080 if given the choice.

I also bought a bluray drive for my pc and rip away with that.

I have 2 dedicated servers, 1 is a micro atom box which runs mysql, squid, dans guardian, torrents, dhcp, mail etc. And another which is a freenas box holding all my storage. I share the data off the freenas box both via samba and nfs. Samba for the windows and handheld devices and nfs for the shuttle atom xbmcbuntu boxes I have behind the tvs. I have 3 of those and so that I can share what has been watched and the like they all push data to the mysql server.

The freenas box runs a script which pings each one of the front ends on a 5 minute cycle. If they are all offline then it waits 3 mins, pings again and then shuts itself down if it doesn't get a response. All the front ends when turned on send a WOL packet to the freenas box. Total time to boot is 3.5 minutes from pressing the power button on the front ends.

About 5 years ago I paid the money and had a professional run cat 5 through the walls so I have 20 ports all coming back to a rack.

I have also now stuck my main gaming PC in the rack and I use the steam streaming to my laptop when I want to play games (Dell Latitude with full docking station)

Then they would all look alike but with 50 cubic feet of storage.

That is the problem with any engineering challenge where the conditions of a test are repeated over and over. Everyone will naturally move towards the same design as, without a major technological break through, that design is the most efficient concept.

It is the major reason I hate the direction motorcycle racing is going. By bringing in more rules about what is and isn't allowed they are reducing the possible solutions.

That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse

No, it's based on the premise of the Model-T being the cheapest possible automobile.

It's not obvious that the automobile would take off, though the piles of horse feces in city streets should have been a hint. But it is obvious that the best chance anybody has, starting a new market, is to go for the least-expensive possible vehicle.

otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.

Ford found a way to do it very cheaply, that had escaped all others. There were plenty of other car makers out there, and once they adopted the assembly-line model, they started competing with Ford, too.

These are things that 3D printing doesn't do maybe. But most certaintly it is feasible. And once that's achieved, you will be able to create metals with a la carte properties.

The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.

No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.

To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.

Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.

Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.

I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.

I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.

The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.