Comment Re:100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??? (Score 1) 272
if you don't limit yourself to the requirement that the text be optically readable
Also totally useless for the requirement of restarting an industrial civilization.
Comment 100 year old survival knowledge in PDF files??? (Score 4, Insightful) 272
That makes zero sense.
Publish the books hard-bound on acid-free paper and then you've got something useful!!
Comment Re:Performance issues? (Score 1) 170
Too bad my mod points expired, because that's exactly what I was thinking. Although, 20% was my rule of thumb.
It probably has a lot to do with usage patterns: is your multi-TB volume used as an IMAP server, and thus chock full of 5-250KB files -- so that the FS can easily find contiguous holes --, or is it a video server fully of 1-5GB files so that contiguous holes are much harder to find when the disk is "only" around 70%? Or a DB server who's files are even huger, and so contiguous holes impossible to find one?
Even then, circumstances can alter the situation, since if you create a bunch of *huge* tablespaces on a virgin FS and they never extend, then you can get up to a high usage percentage without fragmentation.
Comment How is it creepy? (Score 1) 130
ISTM that panicky mothers would *love* this...
Comment Re:Thousands of dollars? Big spender (Score 1) 59
More importantly, nowadays for your typical upper-middle class Washingtonian, $10,000 is bordering on chump change.
I'm surprised the IG would even notice it!
Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal 315
vinces99 writes Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Comment Why Chemistry? (Score 1) 29
This seems more "Physics", even though the techniques will be used by chemists.
Comment Re:Can we even detect ourselves from beyond LEO? (Score 1) 534
they did that with Voyager: turned it back on Earth and the answer came back "Inconclusive". I don't think they were that far away, either.
Interesting. Of course, they were launched 37 years ago, and antennae+sensor capabilities have greatly increased since then.
Comment Can we even detect ourselves from beyond LEO? (Score 1) 534
Before getting all confident that we can detect ET civilization, how about sending a satellite or three to 10-20 Lunar orbits (what's the Lunar equivalent of the AU?) to determine if we can detect ourselves -- especially when Earth is between it and the Sun.
If not, then no sense bloviating on religion and ET.
Comment Re:min install (Score 3, Insightful) 221
10 years ago, and I was a late-comer to the idea.
Comment Re:Null Terminated Strings (Score 1) 729
If you are seeking a language to write administrative applications then you should look further. COBOL back in the days or Java nowadays would suit you better.
Too bad that Computer Scientists are a bunch of elitist Haters who only know COBOL from legend. Even back in the day, CompSci professors loathed/disdained it, and the most popular textbook series was from the grossly incompetent Shelly & Cashman.
Once I re-learned it from people who grokked the language, I discovered how powerful it is at it's intended task.
Finding people willing to write in it is hard, though, so -- before Java -- many managers decided that business apps would be written in C rather than the appropriate language.
Comment Some COBOL features I like (Score 1) 729
- Variables can start with a numeric, since whitespace is the token separator. This has some distinct uses in a globally scoped language, when combined with PERFORM THRU.
- "Concatenated OR". It lets you write code like IF 8 = A OR B OR C OR D OR E THEN
- 88 Level variables
Comment Re:Everything old is new again. (Score 1) 193
Tape has always had a limited life-span and is too easily damaged to completely trust with high-value archival data. Instead, archival on tape usually means "we're not quite confident enough to just delete this crap".
Maybe the cheap crap. I've pulled 7 year old data off of SuperDLT tapes.
Comment Everything old is new again. (Score 4, Informative) 193
Enterprises have been doing this with tape for 30 years.
In fact, modern tape technology probably has a higher "volumetric" density than BD.
South Carolina Student Arrested For "Killing Pet Dinosaur" 421
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes In South Carolina a 16-year old boy, Alex Stone, was arrested and charged with creating a disturbance at his school, as well as suspended, for choosing to write: "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business," in response to a class writing assignment. The story has attracted international attention.
