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Even after the experiment and the basic lesson in physics, they still won't say "Yeah, we are keeping our minds open to any new evidence, but right now it appears that this foam strike was the a major factor in the accident."

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SAYING "Yes, we think this is what caused the damage" If it was instead the basketball that indeed hit the shuttle, the debate about what caused the damage would be wrapping up.

There are several things wrong with saying "Yes, we think this is what caused the damage." So far, they've made a statement that is completely supported by experiment--it is probable that the foam is capable of doing damage.

Is it likely that the foam did in the Shuttle? Yes. Do we know it did? No. So they can't publicly say they think they know. What if it turns out to be a micrometeoroid, and they find evidence to support that conclusion? How about if they discover a flaw in the adhesives used to assemble the wing? What if it's a software thing--once per century, the computer will decide that the Shuttle is upside down and move to 'correct' it. They have to retract their statements, present new data, upset the powers-that-be. Administrators get raked over the coals in Senate hearings, because they 'changed their story'. Senators looking to score political points and move dollars from NASA to Disney demand to know, "why should we believe you now, since you lied to us before?"

If an airliner crashes in the United States, the NTSB will investigate, and usually keeps a very tight lid on all speculation until they can issue a final report. This is how it should be done. You don't whip off a press release as soon as you have a plausible scenario--you test everything. Investigators looking at other areas might be tempted to get sloppy if they perceive that their superiors have already 'decided' what the cause of the accident was.

Those on /. more than twenty-five years old or so will remember the incidents involving the Therac-25 radiotherapy accelerator. Early accidents were attributed to a faulty microswitch, and investigation ceased at that point. Consequently, several more people were injured or killed because nobody kept looking for the real problem--a software bug.

One more thought regarding the 500 mph basketball impact--your car is not designed for flight at many multiples of the speed of sound, or for atmospheric reentry. We're working in a realm where most laypeople should definitely not trust their intuition. (Foam sounds light...but 500 mph is pretty fast...what does it mean?) My training actually is in physics, but I'm still leery of making guesses.

Linux should try to keep its GUI the same, then it will offer something windows doesn't.

I disagree! The "start" button & icon dock desktop is a well-worn concept now - shouldn't new desktops be looking to innovate? Instead of emulating desktop formats from Apple and Microsoft (who've got massive resources to develop these things) new desktops should play on their strengths and try out something new (the previously mentioned big players are bound to a certain extent by their users resistance to change).

Something like trying to incorporate Fitt's Law which basically says the less effort (distance, size of target) required to get to something e.g. a menu button the better. With this in mind, I'm waiting for someone to develop a popup circular menu-thing. Anybody know if there are any projects working on something like this in a desktop?

it should be noted that the world bank, more specifically the international bank for reconstruction and development did not bank roll this project, because the human and environment costs were too great, even for them. this project was funded mainly by private contributions, lots of which are American, such as Morgan Stanley, just to name one.

This project will displace 1.9 Million people over the next year, including many unexplored aracaelogical sites in the canyon walls.

And lastly, it is believed that the amount of water being formed in the reservoir will be so great that it will put *a lot* of stress on the surrounding tectonic plates. So, casual earthquakes could become common.

But you know, anything in the name of progress...and socialism.

According to: The Gesargenplotzian Gospel

IV. 1. Lo, in 1962 the Great Gesargenplotz came back, and it saw what He had done. And the Great Gesargenplotz was wroth, and it spoke unto Him saying "Why have you done this? Why have you created these creatures just to torment them?" 2. And He answered, saying "I have done so because it amuses me, Great Gesargenplotz. Of what matter is their pain and disappointment? They are not gods as you and I, they exist only for my amusement." 3. The Great Gesargenplotz, hearing His answer, knew that His heart was hard. The Great Gesargenplotz repented it that it had made Him. 4. The Great Gesargenplotz ate Him and He was no more.

After being eaten by His creator, I think His patent lapsed.

From whom would you buy your critical applications software (and hardware)? What if the guy down the street starts building them in his garage? Would you trust him? Would you trust your life with him?

Let's say he's very responsive to customer issues. Whenever there's a serious incident, he tracks down the bug in the software, issues a patch, and moves on. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs, and a lot of deaths, because he couldn't do proper QA by himself in his garage...

Well, you say, let him hire some QA people. Maybe a few marketing guys--he has to make a living, after all. Perhaps an engineer or two. Pretty soon, it starts to sound like he's running a *gasp* corporation.

You're right--directors and executives of companies that suppress reports of safety concerns should be drawn and quartered. To suggest that all corporations are reckless, deceptive, and grossly irresponsible is unfair.

Then there are some damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't cases. I'm familiar with the Therac-25 accidents in the mid-1980s, but I'm not going to ask the pharmacy for cobalt-60 so I can do home radiotherapy. I have to accept that there is a probability that somewhere, someone screwed up--and my life might be at risk because of it, and there is little (if anything) I can do about it.

Anybody remember ther Therac 25? It was a medical radiation machine, and killed a handful of people, due to a firmware bug...

Therac 25 Investigation

ToaterBoy

Well, its a good job they put it through all of those Q & A procedures. After all, Q&A always catches every possible bug.

I'll stick to a carbon granite mark placed upon a wood pulp based medium.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates - for what it's worth. Bill Gates: Before Microsoft

And as the history of the Therac-25 points out, people do die and companies are sued for flaws in software design. In the case of the Therac, the company tried to keep the individual programmer from being tagged with the blame for the deaths his bugs caused.

We know that the software for the Therac-25 was developed by a single person, using PDP 11 assembly language, over a period of several years. The software "evolved" from the Therac-6 software, which was started in 1972....

The programmer left AECL in 1986. In a lawsuit connected with one of the accidents, the lawyers were unable to obtain information about the programmer from AECL. In the depositions connected with that case, none of the AECL employees questioned could provide any information about his educational background or experience. Although an attempt was made to obtain a deposition from the programmer, the lawsuit was settled before this was accomplished. We have been unable to learn anything about his background.

I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing if the lawsuit doesn't go their way. I find it difficult to imagine that MS would lose though.

Code reuse from Therac-25, I see.

There have been cases where software bugs in medical equipment killed people. In those cases, there would be strong precedent for product liability lawsuits.

Suppliers to the military are harder to sue, which is probably good news to the folks whose bugs killed soldiers when their mortar targeting software made incorrect assumptions about target altitude or when a Patriot missile targeting system's clock overflowed after 8 hours.

For further reading on software liability issues, see this Business Week article, which was discussed on /. and badsoftware.com, which surveys software liability issues from a consumer's perspective.

While I'm British, someone is going to post a link to a Konrad Zuse biography, so I may as well do it. Personally, I consider Zuse to be the first with his Z3, closely followed by Colossus, then the ABC. After that is open to debate. Oh and no, the UNIVAC was not the first commercial computer, either.

According to Zuse himself, he stayed in Germany throughout the war building larger and more complex machines through to the Z4 in 1944-5.

See this biography of him.

Now, Turing has some claim to being the very first computer scientist. His attempts to explain mathematical logic in terms of mechanistic abstractions predates the computer revolution by a couple of decades. And when actual computers did start to appear, he was one of the first to deal seriously with what we now call software.

For details of Turing's life, I heartily recommend Andrew Hodges's biography.

But here's another bummer. It seems pretty obvious that the security bozos murdered Turing because they couldn't stand the idea of faggot with all those state secrets in his head. I should emphasize that this is my paranoid theory, not Hodges's -- as a UK citizen, he could get in trouble just for suggesting the possibility.

Exactly - there's the laziness factor. I'd much rather just move my index finger than move my index finger and the mouse.

That's why god gave us trackballs.

Seriously, though, I never got these people who prefer mice to trackballs. I'm still holding on to my old, old, serial Logitech Trackman. It's the best thing I've ever used (granted I never tried any of the newer model trackmen, or in fact hardly any other trackballs for years). Most people I know who have one wouldn't sell it for any money. I'd love to get a few more as spares, but of course this is increasingly hard as time goes by. It's also ironic because at my first contact with it I simply hated it... But in no time I was in love with it.

(Funny when I was at a store that sells old equipment, and asked the guy if he had one of those; he asked me if it was "PS/2 or USB". Only then I realized :))

If you have any of these you want to sell or give away, please reply to this post...

tmegapscm

This should help

Two words:

Kitchen Fire

Virutally every cook book, and even packaging pre-prepared foods say not to leave the cooking food unattended. Now they're not only giving you a way to not attend it, but to not be there when it starts.

Here's a few references to read before we start:

A few fatally famous Software Bugs,

The Therac-25 Radiation Overdose accidents from 1975 to 1987.

and

Microsoft makes hackers obsolete

---> Worst case scenerio 1:

Hacker A finds this device. He manages to figure out how to get into it.

Victim B is someone at home preparing to use the microwave. They open the door. Hacker A sees the indication that the door is open, and activates the oven at 100% power.

---> Worse Case Scenerio 2:

User A is driving home, expecting that the frozen dinner is still in the oven. He activates the oven 15 minutes prior to his arrival home.

Kid B is home early, sees the frozen dinner in the oven, pulls it out, and puts in popcorn instead. Due to a programming error, the oven activates while he's still rearranging foods, and the door is open.

---> Worse Case Scenerio 3:

User A put frozen dinner in oven before he left home. Being it was 5am, he wasn't thinking very well.

User A remembers on his way home, that he put food in the oven, and activates it while driving.

User A forgot to take the food out of the box, or that part of the packaging contained foil.

User A comes home to a house fire which has been going for approx 15 minutes.

I'm not sure I like this invention. I'm no technophobe, but this sounds kind of dangerous.

Legacy free PCs... ...Wow...

Does this really mean we can actually, finally rid ourselves from Von Neumann's bottle neck?

You mean people like those killed in the widely studied Therac-25 accidents in the late 1980's? Or the US soldiers killed because of a software failure in the Patriot Missle defense system in 1991?

Sorry, but you're off. In case you were wondering, the Carnot cycle describes a heat engine (specifically, the most efficient heat engine allowed by the Second Law). Click the link for a demo: Carnot Engine What you're thinking of is the Refrigeration Cycle Cheers!

Reed's analysis, badly presented in Salon, deals with networks of wireless nodes that not only use frequency diversity (e.g. spread spectrum), but also use multiple antennas for spatial diversity (e.g. phase arrayed antennas) and the nodes cooperate not only for relaying (e.g. mesh network) but also for detecting and eliminating interference.

All of these elements increase the efficiency of radio spectrum use.

Optimal Operation of Wireless Networks

Combined Space Time Diversity and Interference Cancellation for MIMO Networks

Information Theory at the Extremes

Linear Multiuser Receivers: Effective Interference, Effective Bandwidth and User Capacity

Abstract: Multiuser receivers improve the performance of spread-spectrum and antenna-array systems by exploiting the structure of the multiaccess interference when demodulating the signals of a user.

(Plus, I had the added benefit of taking her back to her B&B that night. Ok, I was dropping her off, but still!)

Give me a break. Your acting like windows users should be living with a constant fear that Microsoft "agents" will suddenly appear at their front door to give them a beating.

Incidentally, This is very, very old news- I remember reading about this years ago, a bunch of US researchers beat these guys to the punch by quite a bit.

Universities like Virginia Tech have been building these things for years.

Run a keylogger for a day and then put the text in this applet

..., then believe that just because it is written down that Jack P Lester has a PHD that it is actually true

There's an answer to this.

Hmm, maybe I should read my spam more closely ...

here, [pdf,yahoo.com] with more information here[vt.edu].

This team at Virginia Tech, (I used to be on it) are the three time world champs for a human powered submarine. Check them out, lots of cool videos, and documentation. www.hps.vt.edu

she was also a rear admiral in the navy, coined the term, "debug" and had trouble balancing her check book because she thought in octal rather than decimal. there's also the fact that she was the first woman to recieve a ph.d. in mathematics from yale. more info here. definately a cool chick ;-) byte magazine did a really nice bio on here in their 25th anniversary edition too.

a complete list of interesting candidates can be found here. alan definately has my vote, of course, i'm slightly biased in this, given that he's the father of my field (ai). unfortunately, 90+% of people don't know turing's full story --- a lot of people are surprised to find out that he started at bletchley park cracking enigma and ended up committing suicide thinking he was snow white (eating a poisoned apple). it was turing's stored program concept that was the foundation for the von neumann architecture, so in a sense turing is the father of computing in general. anyways, for more info, try here or here

a complete list of interesting candidates can be found here. alan definately has my vote, of course, i'm slightly biased in this, given that he's the father of my field (ai). unfortunately, 90+% of people don't know turing's full story --- a lot of people are surprised to find out that he started at bletchley park cracking enigma and ended up committing suicide thinking he was snow white (eating a poisoned apple). it was turing's stored program concept that was the foundation for the von neumann architecture, so in a sense turing is the father of computing in general. anyways, for more info, try here or here

HGH works by stimulating the growth of cartilage in the Epiphyseal Plate, which causes lengthening of the bone. Unfortunately, once you finish puberty, the epiphyseal plate hardens into the epiphyseal line, which is why you stop growing (if you get an X-ray done on your arm, have the doc point it out to you - it'll be right near the end of the bone, just before it widens at the end).

In mature people, however, elevated levels of HGH cause the sides of bones to thicken, leading to very heavy features in the face, and wide hands and fingers. This can be seen in pictures of 'Giants' as well - not only are they quite tall, but their hands and faces are quite wide as well.

Basically, HGH in large amounts is bad for the mature human being. There have been a number of studies on its effects, and the major bad ones include increased incidence of cancer and diabetes. You have to remember that this is a hormone, and hormones basically control our bodies - messing with their balance can have very bad side effects. If you're serious about bulking up, an exercise routine is a much better way to go.

English will be the world's standard language for thousands of years.

I can't readily understand the English language spoken even 600 years ago, before the great vowel shift.

Read about the history of the English language

• XFoil - XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils. It consists of a collection of menu-driven routines which perform various useful functions
• NASG Airfoil Database - This database includes airfoil specification(contour,thickness ratio and etc.) and performance(lift,drag and moment) data widely.
• Aircraft Design Software Review - This page originated from a paper given at the ASEE Annual Conference, Sunday, June 25, 1995, Anaheim, CA (Gary Slater, session chairman: Software and Multimedia). It has been updated for design class use.
• CompuFoil - CompuFoil is the industry standard in airfoil modification and plotting software. Used by SIG, Estes Industries, Midwest Models, Hobbico, House of Balsa, HobbyHangar, Great Planes Models, R&R Products, CR Aircraft, DJAeroTech, The Electric Jet Factory, NASA, West Point, dozens of schools, colleges, universities and discriminating R/C modelers around the world. CompuFoil runs on Windows 95, 98, and ME. It will also run on WindowsXP/2000, and Macintosh computers (with a PC emulator), but these two require a custom setup program stub file..

There's a lot more, but this should give you an idea. Use google to find more (this may be a good place to start :-)

Aerodynamics is a huge field, and i doubt you'll ever get far enough to build your own plane, but if you're anything like me you'll have a lot of fun trying.

Good luck!

This is by no means a new or unique project. PDP-8s have been cloned using various chips for years. There is the SBC-6120, the PDP-8/X and many others.
Of course, none of these are as much fun as the real PDP-8/E and PDP-11 I have in my basement.

This is by no means a new or unique project. PDP-8s have been cloned using various chips for years. There is the SBC-6120, the PDP-8/X and many others.
Of course, none of these are as much fun as the real PDP-8/E and PDP-11 I have in my basement.

Computers were designed to play games? Maybe someone should have clued Babbage, Turing and the rest into this a while ago. We could have some kick ass gaming machines now, though they probably couldn't run notepad.


The irony is that computing the flight path of a rocket predates using computers for word processing. Computing ballistic trajectories was one of the calculations which ENIAC, was programmed to do, for example. So you could say that the technology behind Quake III dates back to 1945...

to implement the X protocol stream. And once you do that, ta-da you're an X server once again, just like XFree86.

How do the Object-Oriented guys say it? Containing or implementing X is not the same as being X. Microsoft's Windows GDI and Apple's Aqua are "backwards compatible" with X11 in the sense that you can install and run an XServer on top of them. But they're not "an X server again".

current UNIX ports of OpenOffice and Mozilla
Both OpenOffice and Mozilla run on non-X11 GUIs, I think. So some of the work of migrating them to another GUI has already been done. Likewise both the Gtk and Qt toolkits can run without X11. This point isn't insurmountable. (Although, to take proper advantage of newer GUI abstractions you'd have to re-write a lot of code anyway, because the way a user interacts with the application is going to be different).

one of the biggest benefits of X: the X protocol stream and the client/server model. D'oh!

Its a benefit, and also a hinderance. Many people are not served by this client server model. On one side are people who claim that "I'm sitting right at the computer, why should there be a network-protocol abstraction getting in the way of raw performance?". On the other side are those who want network transparency but find that X is too bandwidth intensive to be usable.

Ever try running X11 programs across the modern internet? It's very painful (unless you have some amazingly fat fast pipe). A simple "ls" in a remotely displayed xterm seems to take forever. But yet, gorgeous online games like Counterstrike and Warcraft are fast and snappy. Of course this is because the games are communicating at a much higher level than the X drawing primitives do. With newer, higher-level GUI APIs, more applications might be able to get this kind of benefit. It all depends on where in the application you define the partition between stuff running on the client and the server. PicoGui tries to run more of the GUI parts on the client-side, reducing the bandwidth needed to keep the program going.

(Related historical half-truth: the Java language was originally meant to be platform independent so that the partition between the client/server parts of a program could be determined at runtime, to best match the computing and network hardware on both sides of the link.)

X is not going away.

Not for a long time. It is absolutely true that the biggest advantage to staying with X11 is inertial- the big mass of existing applications. But at some point one will always need to break with the past. Today we can plan where to go, even if the trip isn't practical yet.

> FOR 1975!!!

Jump back in time... even further

Mhz = mega herz
mhz = milli herz

Imagine a computer that's triggered every 11 minutes... with hyperthreading!

Wow. It might have stunned Charles Babbage...

Tufte's argument presumes the burden of proof should be on those arguing for caution, instead of those proposing the increased risk. This is the exact opposite of the correct engineering position on mission-critical applications. It's not the engineer's job to prove that a company's products are unsafe, since this amounts to "proving a negative," and is impossible to do, regardless of the manner in which the information is presented.

Instead it's burden of a company, and the job of the engineers, to prove that their product is safe. This is possible, though difficult (and expensive), to do.

I found an excellent article that responds in detail to Tufte's allegations and concludes the following:

"The managers ... changed the burden of proof by asking for evidence that Challenger was not flight-ready. By shifting the burden of proof, NASA shifted from a risk-averse decision procedure to a decision procedure congenial to high fliers, willing to risk catastrophe unless it could be shown it would in fact occur."

FINRobison.pdf
Google's HTML cache of the .pdf paper:
FINRobison.pdf (HTML conversion)

Here is a picture of Will Crowther's Adventure running under RT-11 on my PDP-11/24.

This is obviously a richly researched topic with lots of published papers. Some of them talk about new algorithms for tackling the complex dynamics you're talking about. And of course there's always Moore's Law; the computers used for Apollo missions were about as powerful as (or maybe much less than?) Palm Pilots.

It's probably quite feasible to give the L1 station a radio link to an orbital mechanics cluster on the ground, which can be as big as is needed, and could run equations of motion for a couple dozen nearby orbits in faster-than-real-time.

The obligatory Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quote:

"The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep."

Anyone running with xhost access control is asking for trouble. If you're security conscious, tunnel your X session over ssh.

Call me a bumbling idiot, but I like using "they" as a non-gendered singular pronoun, as well as using "their" when referring to a non-gendered singular "them". It's intuitively clear, and more concise than "he or she". If such a construct isn't an accepted part of the English language, it should be. In fact, at one time it was...


http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.htm l


http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/s-pinker.htm l


http://www.english.vt.edu/~grammar/GrammarForWri te rs/forum/ForumTheir.html

Of classic "probabilistic searching" from the field of information retrieval. Here's a typical tutorial You can feed key words from this to google to find more if you want to.

The application to spam filtering is trivial. Simply take a document set (your inbox for a month), identify the spam set (manually) and the algorithm will generate term weightings for you.

Then apply these term weightings to previous unclassified records (emails) and BINGO!

BugBear

Just because it's a slow day at work... I mirrored it too

I know this is a bit off topic, but for the folks who are interested in trying another live linux cd, I suggest taking a look at knoppix.

It's a really neat distribution, something you could give to your friend if he's interested in what linux is all about.

ps) If you have trouble downloading iso from their mirrors, I have a small mirror here

Yeah, they've been tightening budgets up, but they sure haven't been laying people of in droves.

Depends on where you are. I bailed from Virginia Tech when my 3-year contract got reduced to a 1-year on renewal. Being the newest non-tenure track person in the department I had a bad feeling about that. Talking to my old boss recently, he commented that I'd made the right call: Tech is $25M in the hole and is laying off people.. He's already attritted 3 positions (including my old one) and will probably have to do more soon. Overall, the university is shedding about 300 people- not horrible in terms of percentages, but very rare in academia.

My current job at a small private school seems to be safe since they're doing everything possible to avoid layoffs, but we're losing people by attrition. My boss (head of IT) is moving on and they are replacing him with the assistant director, but not filling her space. Raises were close to nonexistant this year and my budget got cut by 5%- again, not much, but the days of getting everything we asked for are over.