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Domain: 2130706433
Stories and comments across the archive that link to 2130706433.
Comments · 46
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Re:TV
http://2130706433/ is mine.. it looks like yours too.
My companies is also very similar... http://7f000001/ -
Re:I don't know butVery credible! I have subscribed to the magazine for over 10 years now. Many of their stories are taken from peer reviewed journals such as Nature and Science. However, it is important to realise that they see advancing public interest in science and scientific issues as an important part of their mission. Consequently, they do include a number of speculative articles. The important point to consider however is that even their speculative articles are based around current scientific endeavours; they do not tend to print the UFO/warp drive/ray gun type articles that are often found in the likes of more populist magazines such as Popular Science. Try reading some of the articles and you will find that full references are included to the sources of the information and that the articles are based around real science.
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OT: possessionYou might want to try dictionary.com next time you haven't got a dictionary to hand, rather than using google to find the most frequent [mis|foreign]-spelling.
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Re:whats to stop me
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Re:Nit Wits
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Re:In other news...The internal release of GPLed code has nothing whatsoever to do with the respect that would be accorded to other nations' intellectual property. I still maintain that the US (and anyone else) does not pay attention to IP law when determining defence strategy.
Regarding the incomprehensible fragment of code that you are keen to show off, don't bother. Send us the machine code and it can be reverse-engineered well enough.
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Re:Greetings from KyotoAccording to Jane's the Osprey had a triplex fly-by-wire system. Although I don't have a detailed knowledge of the Osprey's architecture, I think that it is highly unlikely that all of the processors failed. It is more likely that the system was trying to re-initialise the flying controls without compensating for the hydraulic leak. If the computers knew the current rotor angle, for example, and tried to set an output to maintain that angle upon re-boot, it is quite likely that the generated signal would not be appropriate for the current (failed) hardware architecture - thus placing the flying controls in the wrong position.
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Re:Nit WitsFirstly, aircraft are not built solely by CS majors. It is generally considered desirable that different people can bring a range of experience to a discussion.
To the issue at hand, although voting is an integral part of safety/mission critical systems, this pales into insignificance compared to the need for well designed and thoroughly tested code. It is not enough to test components in isolation. In any real-world complex engineering system, it is the interactions between components that are of the greatest importance, not just the individual components themselves. The formal proof of the correctness of a few "key components" is not enough. Would you normally consider a hydraulic line to be a key component of a reset routine?
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Re:The reset button didn't work right?!?!
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Duplex is not enough!"One would think that software used in war machines would be doubled with two distinct processors"
In the aerospace industry, even duplex systems are considered too risky. Quadruplex is the norm; with four computers, if one fails the remaining three can still "vote". Safety critical software cannot be trusted to just one computer as there is always the possiblity of failure.
Many modern [unstable,agile] aircraft are not controllable by a human without assistance from the Flight Control Computer, so a total failure of the Flight Control System is unthinkable. As far as pilot intuition is concerned, this can be worse than useless for an unstable airframe. There is a condition, not limited to unstable aircraft, called Pilot Induced Oscillation, where a pilot's "corrective" actions cause unstable dynamics to occur, sending the plane out of control. Just because a human is involved doesn't necessarily mean that s/he has the best solution to some very complex equations of motion
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Re:Good Software Exists
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Re:In other news...Do you honestly believe that even the holier than holy US respects copyright law when it comes to military technology? I think it's a fairly safe assumption that the intellectual property of foreign nations is not a high priority for any country when the defence of the state is at stake.
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Oh, please tell us about your super-secret projectConsidering that the Flight Control System dictates the in-service performance limits of the aircraft, don't you think that the military might have at least a slight incentive to keep it quiet?
Next question, what would be the point of open-sourcing it? It's not as if you could just port the code from an old aircraft to a new one. It may surprise you, but the code running on a Tornado is not the same as that on a Harrier or Typhoon. Each aircraft has different requirements (those laws of aerodynamics again!) and the control code has to be tested against those requirements.
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Re:A little more to it than that ...The system is more than the processor. The computer was interacting with complex and failed hardware.
Besides, if you want complex interaction:
A hydraulic line failed.
The hydraulic flow to a heat exchanger ceased.
The engine bleed air passing through that hx was not cooled sufficiently.
The "cooling" air to the avionics was too hot.
The processor over-heated.
The over-heated processor failed to respond correctly.
Perhaps.
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Re:NOT OPEN!!
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Re:From the install.sh
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Re:When I heard of this, I wanted to create E-ShelBut that scheme will only be profitable until the invention of "The Trigger" (Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell). A very good book in which the authors explore the impact of a device which can neutralise ammunition. Perhaps you could then sell your domain name for vast quantities of e-cash to an oil company.
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Re:This is the end for slashdot
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Re:The previous poster said "a better product"
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Re:this would be really cool for inventory control
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Re:Well, they can't really take it back, now...
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Re:Hmm, the Linux community has one last gasp...
My firewall is here. And I bet it's at lease as hard to hack as yours
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Re: No, that's NOT standard.
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Re:You're right
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Re:Add, don't subtractAsk 10,000 people if you like. If they are from the south of England - "if you think that, you've got another think coming". Views from the north of England (like Sheffield) don't count. They don't speak proper English up there anyway. Views from the US certainly don't count. If you want to speak English then do so. If you want to change it, then call it American.
-1 flamebait, -1 off-topic
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Re:The Arabs will fold soon enoughAnd exactly how long do you think it will take for Western countries to fold without oil? The Arab nations may as well try and sell us sand, because that'a all the failed economies will be able to afford. Witness the recent chaos in Europe resulting from restriction of the supply of oil for an incredibly short period of time. The assertion that a strong Christian belief system is fundamental to a sound economy is just plain nonsense. Whilst it may appear that way in the American bible belt, there are highly successful economies in which religion really isn't a factor. UK is a case in point - do you realise how many atheists, agnostics and apathetics there are in the UK? There is little doubt that they outnumber practicing Christians by a very large ratio.
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Re:Vote
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Re:Mozilla and Netscape 6 beaten?
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Re:Mozilla and Netscape 6 beaten?
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Re:Any questions about the ASP and linking issues?
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Re:Any questions about the ASP and linking issues?
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Re:Any questions about the ASP and linking issues?What if you're an administrator at a college campus? Do *you* have to distribute the source of EMACS, just because a programming class uses it as an editor? What happens if you modified it slightly to work on you network?
I don't really think that this would be as great a burden as you imply. Leaving the patch in a publicly accessible part of the network would probably satisfy any requirements of the GPL in this case (and a pointer to the Emacs dowload site maybe?). I'm also not entirely sure if the GPL would actually apply in this case; allowing users to run an application on your own network is arguably not distribution, so copyright law may well not apply.
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Not much of a sneak preview.
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Re:I smell money...
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So, it's the users fault?
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USPTO discusses this.
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Re:This is true
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Re:Lame patents
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Do I lose the bonus karma...
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Re:Even worse...
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Re:He called you slashdot.com (-1 uninformative)whois slashdot.com [whois.internic.net] Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: SLASHDOT.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS1.ANDOVER.NET
Name Server: NS2.ANDOVER.NET
Updated Date: 11-apr-2000
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Re:I don't trust floppies anymore
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Re:Reply to MarkThe key thing about safety critical software is that it is horrendously expensive to produce. The amount of testing that on-flight software has to undergo is far in excess of that which would be required for a desktop application. The kind of code being executed is also very different. The pilot of an aircraft is not going to ask the processor to instantiate a new window with an odd mix of properties half way through a flight! The developers of safety-critical software also have knowledge of/control over all of the software running on the hardware - no dodgy downloads from Warez'R'Us on an airliner.
Additionally, I don't think that many applications programmers would be over-joyed by the prospect of coding in Spark Ada, and an engine controller certainly won't be developed in Java anytime soon.
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Re:No TODO list?I wonder if part of the problem could be that anything on a TODO list is perceived as being fairly rigidly sketched out in the lead developer's mind, thus reducing the opportunities for contributors to influence the direction of the project as much as they would wish.
There is also the possibility that anything remaining on a TODO list cannot be deemed to be too important, or worth the effort to implement, by everyone else who hasn't volunteered to do it.
Maybe wishlist would be a better description.
Btw, excellent replies, Mark!
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Re:The US Navy will soon be running Windows :-(
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The US Navy will soon be running Windows :-(Lockheed Martin are intending to run MS Windows (or should that be portholes?) on aircraft carriers. Now if this isn't scary...