I was thinking the same thing. AIM was the first feeling of being online? Hell no! It was 9600 baud modems, BBSes and the first live chat for a lot of us was IRC.

I know I know unix has a chat thingy too, but it was IRC that connected the world, in strange little dungeon chatrooms, where you had to smell the bots before trying to download mp3s from them :)

When the first-ever reactor was being setup by Fermi, he know exactly how to build it and what the results will be. No human had ever built one before. And yet it was 'science' before the first reactor.

More than being 'testable', science gives you results rather than emotional satisfaction. There is much of science not testable (immediately) such as time travel and the likelihood of intelligent aliens in nearby galaxies.

A different definition might be:

- Science is the most likely truth given the observable

- Religion is usually the least likely truth, but one that emotionally appeals to us.

It was religion that claimed the world is flat, and sits on the back of a giant tortoise and a few other animals piled up. Science claimed the world was round before it was directly testable. It because testable when people sailed around the world. Yet there are still people in the 21st century who believe the world is flat, and they're being lied to.

Holy assumptions in the original article. It links the core's relative rotation to the magnetic field. The magnetic field exists because a huge mass of ferroelectric material rotates.

Now which do you think affects the magnetic field more, the cores RELATIVE rotation speed (a few degrees in a million years?) or the overall Earth rotation (roughly 365 degrees in a day)? This is like putting a magnet in a plastic cup, rotating the magnet, and rotating the cup SLIGHTLY slower, and saying the resulting magnetic field is due to the cup rotating SLOWER.

People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".

Can you install Windows/Solaris/Linux/AIX on file-level storage, install Oracle/DB2/Exchange/Domino?

Block-level storage can and does completely replace local harddrives. Thats the reason for bladeservers, where blades have everything but harddisks. They're given volumes of fiber channel, iscsi or fcoe to become their local virtual disks. NFS or CIFS would be completely useless to them without first having block level volumes (except for the rare case of Linux/FreeBSD installed on NFS).

I do not believe you've actually used iSCSI, at all.

The performance numbers are very different and so are the technologies, Microsoft filesharing is file-level and iSCSI is block level. It means with an iSCSI card, the machine can treat volumes as local disks and install any OS.

Secondly, you're confusing iSCSI with NFS. NFS has been freely available even back on Windows NT4. However it was not created to counter Microsoft, it was ALREADY there.

iSCSI until recently has been the only technology that provides block-level storage access and as efficiently as possible on a routable ethernet network. The recent FCoE is even more efficient but its not so easily routable.

It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.

Either way 1Gbit Ethernet is beginning to feel a bit like a bottleneck with storage and other bottlenecks being removed.

It'll take some time between ratification and cheap D-Link switches...

She should get....

(you know what) ...fired.

I was so happy about a detailed book (700+ pages) on a 'flash on devices' book. I've been wanting to know more about the intricacies of flash chips before I put them on my dev boards. Embedded development gets far less attention regarding literature than web programming. ... and then I was let down. :) A book on flash chips (NAND, NOR, XIP, various voltages and tricks) will have to wait for a better day.

I hate flash.

Yeah but does it have an aviation sixpack?
The aviation screen is just software, but Garmin charges an arm and a leg for it. It would be great to have a rough altimeter, airspeed indicator along with the map as a backup while up there.