Dear Slashdot,
didn't you say you knew Beta was broken, what was wrong etc? Didn't you say, you would only redirect not logged in users to Beta? Well, I have my doubts as I am force over with Beta again. And not even a click to Classic works. Great work again with your Beta. I am really proud of you. Well sort of. Well actually I am not. You guys really know how to annoy your user base.

I hate Beta.

Searching a large collection of non-indexed documents from disk is likely disk-bound, yes - except you somehow formulated a very complex search or stream from multiple disks at a time - but maybe you are searching data already in RAM. Traversing an index isn't necessarily a serial process, depending on your data structure. There are parallel implementations for binary and red-black trees, as far as I know. Or one could simply use a forest of as many trees as one has searching threads. (will get worse performance when using less threads than trees). If you only have a sorted list or array you could use a parallel search. If your data is not indexed you are likely to be faster with multiple threads (if there is no other bottle neck like, for example, disk throughput). Maybe you are searching multiple things at the same time (like a string in authors and contents of e-mails) or you are searching with multiple parameters (filetype [type], last access after [date], string in content [foo]) where not all parameters are indexed.

I never stated that my problems are 100% parallelizable. ;) Parsing: Why not? Reflow: And if I have multiple boxes at the same layer? At least as long the dimension are fixed or bounded some parallel processing could be possible, if it would benefit I can't tell.
Often enough there is more than one page opened at a time. With every open page the likelihood of executing multiple JavaScripts rises and with multiple pages getting rendered at the same time you can use parallelism, too.

Many steps can be parallelized, not all, as you pointed out. And even than I am not sure if there wouldn't be a solution for whole-program / link-time optimization, but I'm no professional concerning compiler building. And even then: I happen to compile multiple binary files with one run of make most of the time, so using multiple threads is for free (there is a reason make has the -j option).

I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: almost everything concerning audio and video (images or movies), searching, analyzing, rendering web pages, compiling, computing physics and AI for games.

I can't think of one computing intensive day to day action that is not parallelized or wouldn't be easy to do so.

Not only does this "news" in no way matter for people reading /. it is even wrong on so many levels, that it actually does more harm than good.

I have to correct myself. I can't prove something stating: "All swans are white", but I can prove "There is a black swan." if I happen to catch one. Going back to religion: imho one could only prove the existence but not the non-existence of something supernatural. Concluding: if at all religious people could prove non-believers wrong.

I would agree with many of your points, but: Do not mix up a mathematical proof with a "proof" in general science. ;)
A mathematical proof says something is or is not. There is no doubt (if we accept some axioms). In general "proofs" (better: validation) of theories describing nature can only say, something seems likely or unlikely (and to what extend). To be more specific: One formulates a hypothesis and a null hypothesis (often saying the effect described in the hypothesis is non-existent) and then look at the data and say whether one can show the null hypothesis to be highly unlikely. Your are not saying your hypothesis is right, your just saying the null hypothesis is likely wrong and your hypothesis _could_ explain why.

To support your claim: As we can we only say what likely is wrong, any theory has to be falsifiable. Everything else is not science. I can't say: "My god is out of reach of man and their tools, he can't be perceived or measured, neither it's actions. And science hasn't proven me wrong about it's existence, so it must exist." and expect science to take me serious, as it is impossible to (in)validate this claim with tools of science.

To the general topic: I have no problem of people being religious in general (as long those don't rub it under my nose all the time, play missionary or try to use it for their advantage), but there is a big misunderstanding about science, what it can achieve and how it works. On both ends. How often have I read post saying science is just another kind of religion. No it's not. Maybe some pseudo sciences make non-invalidatable claims, but definitely not natural sciences and mathematics. On the other hand people trying science to disprove religious believe will not succeed, for reasons mentioned above. The only thing you could do imho is to argue, why you consider it not reasonable to have religious believe.

To the OP: Please refer to the provided documentation or use a search engine to find tutorials, if you dare. There is an official API for this. We won't recite manuals here.

To ./ community: Why is a question that can be answered with a "rtfm" landing on the front page?

This whole GUI thing is totally bloated. We shouldn't have gone further after DOS 6.0.

The article is about _businesses_. Their IT staff _will_ care at least it should considering whats on the stakes.
It's not about what Joe Sixpack does on his private machine running a "spatial distributed backup" of windows xp without service packs.

Obvious troll is obvious...

Anyone who likes security holes fixed, when they come up, is concerned.