Comment Re:What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2? (Score 1) 260
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why they call it the theory of *relativity*
>>bill
Comment Re:What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2? (Score 5, Informative) 260
The relativity calculator at http://www.1728.com/reltivty.htm gives a relativity factor of 1.0000000016077795 for a speed of 17km/sec. If you multiply that all out for the approximate 33 years of travel (back of the envelope style, 33*525600*60), you get about a 1.67 second difference.
Of course, with the aliens towing in the spaceship, that might be off a bit
>>>bill
Amazon Reviewers Take on the Classics
272
Not everyone is a fan of great literature. In particular, reviewers on Amazon can be quite critical of some of the best loved classics. Jeanette DeMain takes a look at some of the most hated famous books according to some short tempered reviewers. One of my favorites is the review of Charlotte's Web which reads in part, "Absolutely pointless book to read. I felt no feelings towards any of the characters. I really didn't care that Wilbur won first prize. And how in the world does a pig and a spider become friends? It's beyond me. The back of a cereal box has more excitement than this book. I was forced to read it at least five times and have found it grueling. Even as a child I found the plot very far-fetched. It is because of this horrid book that I eat sausage every morning and tell my dad to kill every spider I see ..."
SolarPHP 1.0 Released 125
HvitRavn writes "SolarPHP 1.0 stable was released by Paul M. Jones today. SolarPHP is an application framework and library, and is a serious contender alongside Zend Framework, Symphony, and similar frameworks. SolarPHP has in the recent years been the cause of heated debate in the PHP community due to provocative benchmark results posted on Paul M. Jones' blog."
Comment Because its premise is flawed (Score 1) 490
TiVo, in my humble opinion, is based on a fairly flimsy premise: that television is so important to watch that you are willing to spend time and money to make sure you get to watch all of some part of it. Really? Seriously, what is on television that you couldn't miss? Frankly, very little. I'm not trying to be a hater, I watch TV all the time. I just don't care if I miss something. Because whatever I miss I can find later, and if I can't I didn't miss much. It's mind candy, mostly, and we could all do with losing a little "weight".
Comment Ashes used to make something (Score 1) 793
After donating what useful items might be left, I want my ashes to be mixed with something like concrete, to make something: a garden wall that hosts beautiful flowers, a bench for people to sit on and relax, a walkway that people use to stroll on. Having a useless headstone in some remote cemetery, or a stupid urn that collects dust somewhere is wasteful, worse hubristic.
Becoming something useful, whether someone else knows that I'm "in there" doesn't really matter. At least what's left is still part of the world.
Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390
An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"
Submission + - Best computer for med school
profBill writes: My son is applying for med school and his venerable Thinkpad T43 is getting a little flaky. He needs a new machine for his upcoming studies. The question is, what is the best, one computer to get someone for professional school where programming is not a big issue? His understanding is that what he needs is a machine that will allow him to watch lectures online (I guess med students can't get to all their classes regularly), write papers, do spreadsheets, read slides, do email. Pretty basic stuff. My inclination is to get the new Asus 1201n . Very portable, good battery life and enough power to do the basics. However, they are underpowered compared to a Macbook or the like. Assuming you aren't trying to do lots of games (and med students mostly aren't), what would you suggest? Real laptop, beefy netbook, even a desktop?
Submission + - SPAM: The Good, Bad, and Ugly OSes of the Decade
itwbennett writes: Hundreds of Operating Systems were released during the past decade, finding their way into microdevices, watches, refrigerators, mobile phones, cars, motorcycles, jets, even the International Space Station. Some worked; some even worked well. Others, sadly, didn't. And some were just ahead of their time. Blogger Tom Henderson takes a look back at the best and worst OSes of the decade. Among the worst? Vista, as you'd suspect, along with WinME. But what about GNU Hurd? And some of the best? Solaris/OpenSolaris 10, MacOS X, And newcomer Google Android.
Submission + - Yahoo Imposes Weeklong Shutdown (wsj.com)
Arvisp writes: Yahoo Inc. is shutting down its offices, except for "essential functions," from Dec. 25 through Jan. 1, as the Internet company searches for new ways to cut costs during the recession.
Comment Sprint Novatel727 + cradlepoint router (Score 0, Flamebait) 177
I live in the sticks where my options are few. Too far away from anything for cable or DSL and satellite is just a joke. I finally bit the bullet and bought a mobile card from sprint. I plug it into a cradlepoint (mbr1000 cellular, wireless N) router and the mobile card provides wireless service for the house. Yes, there is a 5Gb limit but the service is quite good. 200-300Kb down, 100Kb up on average. Sometimes quite a bit better, occasionally poorer but not often. Streaming video is not terrible and music seems good.
Anyway for rural use it is far and away the best solution
Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects 378
svonkie writes "C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent.
In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent.
PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many."
Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes 1079
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.
The Wackiest Technology Tales of 2008 97
coondoggie writes "Despite the daily drumbeat of new and improved hardware or software, the tech industry isn't all bits and bytes. Some interesting things happen along the way too. Like floating data centers, space geekonauts, shape shifting robots and weird bedfellows (like Microsoft and Jerry Seinfeld). What we include here is an example of what we thought were the best,
slightly off-center stories of 2008."
Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 901
The recurrent cry of "we need more technology in the classroom" is nothing more than a panacea for all things labeled education. Instead of focusing on educational issues, technology is a convenient place to thrown money and "address" the problem. A computer does not make you smarter, does not make you more job worthy, does not make you a better problem solver. It is just a big lump of junk unless someone can teach you how to use it as a tool. Few presently can. Instead, the fact that young people "use" their computers makes educators feel like they are making big progress.
What do young people do with their computers? Read Systems Software is Irrelevant by Rob Pike. Written in 2000 and somewhat dated, the "Grandma" effect is still clear. People, read young people, typically use computers for three things: networking (blogs, web pages, chat, twitter,
I teach introductory computer science and encourage students to bring their laptops. For the small percentage, it works great. Everyone else is off playing around. They may be "literate", but they are not better educated. They are, however, much more distracted. That is what computers have brought this generation
