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U.S. Prepares to Get Nuked
There's an important story in the NYT about new efforts from the U.S. national laboratories to retain and improve their ability to identify nuclear fallout. In a nutshell, any fissionable materials turned into a nuclear weapon will be composed of a specific ratio of various radionuclides, which form a sort of signature, which can be used to identify the source of the fissionable material. The problem is, naturally, that you're probably doing this after the detonation.
Hey, Hey, we're all gonna die!!!
Go California!
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www.kio3.com
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
The article's not important enough - nothing is important enough - to get me to use my NYT subscription.
Will you drooling TWITS stop supporting things like this?
Stop going to these dumb sites! Wait until the news hits other open sources! (pun not intended) And do not, repeated do NOT, submit this intolerable SHIT to SLASHDOT!
Ahem. Thank you.
It used to be hard to make intellectual property that was compelling enough to justify the enormous cost of distribution. Since the distribution costs and production costs forced each other up, there was a lot of sunk-cost to deal with before any customers even had the option of paying for the product. Now, distribution costs are so low that you can do as little or as much production as you want, and you can distribute it nearly for free if you use peer-to-peer distribution networks. Software like Apple's iLife suite lowers the ante on production costs to within reach of nearly any high school or college student, let alone professionals moonlighting as film or recording artists.
Maybe most of the product will not be that good, but there is still no reason to involve the massive and massive expense of a full-blown 1980s style music or film production. For example, people routinely pay for concert tickets (guaranteed delivery) of a performance--sight unseen. If too few tickets are sold, the show is cancelled, and the ticket holders are refunded. Why not sell download tickets for yet unfinished films and albums? Then the fan base can directly fund proven popular artists' productions.
I recognise that some artists and a lot of middlemen enjoy lots of residual income from past production work. Why is it so hard to recognise that this is not the only way to pay artists for their work, and there may be better ways if we think about it? The way I see it, copyrights only protect residual income, which pays artists and middlemen to NOT produce new material. Why do people think this is good?
Is it legal to make and edit copies of commercial DVDs for personal use? What about loaning out the edited copies to friends?
...Needs more cowbell.
This will not improve people's skills. In fact, it willl make them more prone to mistakes, and more likely to get the result that they didn't expect. It's similat to computer spell checkers. Ever since people started relying on these, their spelling has gone way downhill simly because they don't bother thinking. Computer do all the spelling for them. They don;t need a spell checker. They need spelling lessons.
This si even worse. Computers will try to second guess what the user means, get get it wrong half tyhe time.
A qualified shell scripter will be not make these mistakes in the first place. Anyone who thinks they need this shell actually just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly.
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While its not exactly reviewing all the latest and greatest, www.dansdata.com is my favorite "independent" web review site. He usually sticks to cameras, small computer parts, and other neat electronics, but he's a no BS kinda guy who will say something sucks when it does.
Bill has been tinkering with computers since the age of two. He has been playing with DVD drives on his computer since 1999. Recently he has been unable to watch any movies on his computer running GNAA/Linux because of the codes that the MPAA has used to encrypt the disc.
"I think it's an illegal monopoly. If you don't have the codes you can't watch the disc."
Yet there's a law that protects the MPAA from having to give this code to the rest of the world. It's called the DMCA. It stops you from circumventing copy-protection.
Why aren't there any lawmakers backing the public on DVD encryption? See here.
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I'm feeling so wired today.
Once they got to that version of their SQL product, they got it pretty much right.
Its one of the few solid things that microsoft puts out. Previous verisons were pretty dismal.
I doubt that most pepole will ever need the 'new' features coming down the pike. They should leave it alone, instead of screwing it up or bloating it out....
"Boy, you've got some nerve!" "You like it? I just had it grafted in this morning"
Well, the fact that beer bubbles sink was actually already known thousand of years ago. But it has to be "re-discovered" in every two years or so, otherwise the world would come to an end. And reporting this "discovery" in media is just a part of the ritual.
I wanted to know more about the video camera after the throwaway line "750 frames per second" - wow!
"Password fairly correct. Root login granted."
Do you see the DMCA as a law that can truly benefit the world as a whole, or just a tool of the big corporations (MPAA, I'm looking at you) or whatever?
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Welcome our new, jazzier, robot overlords....
(sorry someone had to)
If David Foster Wallace can't explain infinity to us, nobody can. At least, that's what I told myself while anxiously waiting for his Everything and More: A Compact History of GNAA. The book promised to be an intellectual history of the mathematical concept of infinity, with heavy doses of history, math, and philosophy. And while it proves heavy going at times, I'm pleased to say that it delivers admirably on this promise.
That shell script can be improved a lot by using " set -e " to exit on failure, as follows:
#!/bin/sh
set -e # exit on failure
cd/work/foo
rm -rf bar
cp -r/fresh/data
This means that, if any command in the script fails, the script will exit immediately, instead of carrying on blindly.
The script's exit status will be non-zero, indicating failure. If it was called by another script, and that had "set -e", then that too will exit immediately. This is a little bit like exceptions in some other languages.
Will people now start referring to "digitician's butt"?
Yet we are expected to excuse your grammatical and typos. Doesn't that just promote bad practices? Shouldn't we whack you over the head with a baseball bat just to make sure you won't post when you're not prepared to write flawless posts?
The more work you have to do to check errors, the more likely it is that however vigilant you might be, errors slip past. If you have to check the return values of a 100 commands, that is a 100 chances for forgetting to do the check or for doing the check the wrong way, or for handling the error incorrectly.
In this case, the shell offers a function that provides a more sensible default handling of errors: If you don't handle them, the shell won't continue executing by "accident" because you didn't catch an error, but will terminate. It also provides an optional feature that let you easily retry commands that are likely to fail sometimes and where the likely error handling would be to stop processing and retry without having to write the logic yourself.
Each time you have to write logic to handle exponential backoff and to retry according to specific patterns is one more chance of introducing errors.
No offense, but I would rather trust a SINGLE implementation that I can hammer the hell out of until I trust it and reuse again and again than trust you (or anyone else) to check the return code of every command and every function they call.
This shell does not remove the responsibility to for handling errors. It a) chooses a default behaviour that reduces the chance of catastrophic errors when an unhandled error occurs, and b) provides a mechanism for automatic recovery from a class of errors that occur frequently in a particular type of systems (distributed systems where network problems DO happen on a regular basis), and by that leave developers free to spend their time on more sensible things (I'd rather have my team doing testing than writing more code than they need to)
This was an obscure typo bug I found this morning (after 3 months)
Argh.
Wish the shell would have added the (obvious) ' > ':P
"asteroids are rocks"
We should use this for the demarkation between "asteroid" and "planet." An asteroid is one big chunk of rock. A planet is a bunch of little rocks held together by their own gravity.
If Pluto primarily orbits the sun and it's dense enough to hold on to an atmosphere from time to time, why shouldn't it be considered a planet?
I for one can see several applications that might directly appeal to this crowd.
Answer: Never.
Here's a clue about how to avoid lawsuits: don't break the law.
<bart
Extracted from the US to:
Ireland
Hong Kong
Yugoslavia
I am by no means an expert on this, these are just some google results.
The cost of advertising of a newly approved drug is a VERY SMALL drop in the bucket compared to the cost to develop and push a drug through clinical trials and all the red tape the FDA has constructed.
Your typical drug, say Viagria, starts as a base compund. Normally there are over 100,000 or more base compounds that are tested and researched before even one compound is found that would be useful to market (and this is before the inital FDA filing, AKA Pre-EDC). Once the compound is registered with the FDA and goes under intensive developemnt there is much more money spent.
On average development costs for a single drug can esclate into billions of dollars. Of course, if successful, a single good drug can bring enough profit to keep a drug company operating for years before the patent protection goes away.
The reason drugs outside of the US are much cheaper is mainly thanks to the FDA. The FDA has massive amounts of regulations even after the drug is approved that regulate how a drug is manufactured and handled. These regulations even dictate how the drug company manages and runs its production computer networks and client systems. This of course adds A LOT of overhead when making a drug.
Drugs coming from non FDA regulated sites (this is the kinda stuff you buy super cheap on the net) are much cheaper however knowing what the FDA regulations are and why they are there I feel much safer paying more money for an FDA approved drug which I know will be safe as opposed to a drug made at a non-FDA regulated site which may not meet the standards of saftey we have here in the states.
1. Please tell us about the general status of DragonFly BSD.
Matthew Dillon: The project has been going very well. We've primarily been focused on the 'guts' of the system during this initial period, and you can get a fair idea of the work that has been accomplished so far by looking at the Diary page on our site.
Most of the work so far has been to operating systems internals. The work has been a combination of new work, like our light weight kernel threading core, plus selective backports from FreeBSD-5 to keep the system's device drivers up to date (e.g. such as the USB subsystem).
From a userland perspective we have maintained a FreeBSD style environment, so DragonFly basically runs everything that FreeBSD-4.x can run. The packaging system probably won't be done until the second release so we are at the moment leveraging off of FreeBSD's ports system for user apps. Everything you'd expect of a BSD system (X, mozilla, etc) is available to DragonFly users.
The first release is slated for some time in mid-June, hopefully before the USENIX Technical Conference. That will be the 1.0 release. We've been fairly careful to maintain as high a level of reliability as possible during development and I think we've done a pretty good job meeting that goal. The first release is intended to be more of a technology showpiece then an integrated end-user platform.
2. Are you using any bits and pieces from FreeBSD-5, or you only strictly importing/exporting to FreeBSD-4 codebase?
Matthew Dillon: DragonFly began as a fork off of FreeBSD-4, because that was the most reliable starting point and because we wanted to do major core pieces of the system quite differently from the direction FreeBSD-5 took. For example, we are focused on more of a compartmentalized threading model to scale to SMP rather then the mutex model that FreeBSD-5 has chosen to use. But the FreeBSD-4 codebase is of strictly limited utility as a source of new code and maintainance updates. FreeBSD developers are doing nearly all new coding in the FreeBSD-5 branch.
So, basically, we are doing the major core pieces of the OS differently, such as our significantly evolved threading and messaging subsystems, but we are also maintaining a FreeBSD-5 compatible (or mostly compatible) device driver API in order to be able to bring in all the excellent device driver work that has gone into FreeBSD-5. It's simple logic, really... we don't have the manpower to be able to accomplish both our infrastructure goals *AND* be able to maintain pace with new PC hardware at the same time. This methodology allows us to proceed on both fronts by focusing our own new work on the infrastructure and bringing in FreeBSD-5's device driver work. This isn't to say that we don't do some of our own DD work, but the vast majority of it is take from FreeBSD-5 by design.
3. What is the primary goal of dragonfly, servers or desktops?
Matthew Dillon: Both. When it comes right down to it the idea of targeting a system to the 'server' is simply another word for 'reliability and scaleability', and the idea of targeting a system to the 'desktop' is simply another word for 'out of the box GUI'. It's not really an either-or deal. All UNIX systems, including GNAA/Linux, the BSD's, DragonFly... basically use the same desktop components so supporting a desktop environment comes down to being able to provide integrated solutions that work out of the box.
It is extraordinarily difficult to make GUIs work out of the box on PCs due to the wide variability in hardware and peripherals, but at the same time technology has continued to progress over the years towards standards that actually make this easier to accomplish. At some point the standards going in one direction will meet the software going in the other and systems such as GNAA/Linux and the BSDs (including DragonFly) will be able to approach the out-of-the-box compatibility that took Microsoft billions of dollars of development to ac
You know I was just checking the headlines and I see: this piece. Dumbfounded and perplexed, I research this bill. I find that the title of the bill is "To allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court."
WTF?! LINK
Sorry to be offtopic or to spam this but it is just plum crazy.
I'm a little late to the party, but I just felt compared to clear up some points about ASP.NET. I still where my PHP t-shirt with pride, but I simply love ASP.NET now.
.NET validators are known for not being friendly with non-IE browsers (go figure). I'd recommend checking out the DOM compliant .NET validation controls.
.NET is still kinda an adventure. Getting some things like post backs to be XHTML compliant output just is too much trouble right now when using things like the post back mechinisms, so you'll find lots of web developers excited about ASP.NET 2.0 which hopefully will make XHTML output much easier.
What you bring up about the validation code is pretty true. In fact, the built in
Also, nothing is really stopping someone from using the custom validator. All you do is specify the javascript validation logic, and a server-side function to be called to do the validation on the server too. Not too bad if the built in (compare, regular expession, etc) controls don't accomplish the task.
That being said
I can't think of a more unfortunate name than the "phantom console" other than the "vaporware console"... seriously who comes up with this stuff.
If they tried to sue me I'd call their bluff (the "phantom lawsuit") and just put quotation marks around all my stuff to humiliate them:
The ceo of the company making the *yet to be released* "phantom" console has asked us to take down our review of their business. We suggest the best thing they could do would be to give us a "phantom" console to review, but something is really haunting their company - because the "phantom console" has yet to be released to the public. Finding their "phantom offices" is also a difficult task. But perhaps we shouldn't be so hard on the CEO, he could be a visionary - this "phantom of his imagination" could bring the gaming world to it's knees. All they need to do is set a new "phantom release date" and stick to it like the slime the ghosts leave when the pass through walls in Ghost Busters. Then we will all be able to enjoy the phantoms
humiliation complete, lawsuit aborted, insert credit for more life.
...I'm afraid I can't do that.
I don't think the original "And yet..." post was trying to belittle people who don't understand the Internet. I believe his point was to say that many people may have responded to the survey saying that they have Internet when in fact they don't because they really don't understand what the Internet *is* Maybe someone thinks that if they get CNN on TV then that is considered the Internet or the mere fact that they have a telephone means that they are on the Internet ... who knows ... never underestimate the ignorance of the masses.
Of course they are very biased. Since it rather hard to find any real-life application of RDBMS serving "sigle client".
And we all know how good MySQL at serving multiple clients with complex queries at once.
Neat quote tho, at least when you understand who is really biased:)
/usd
I understand that the "pluto - new horizons" mission, due hopefully for launch in 2006 (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission.htm) is looking for possible KB targets after getting to Pluto in 2015. I wonder if the planetary line-up would allow one of those targets to be Sedna? (prob not, but you could be lucky..)
Is there a chart anywhere that gives the location of all these various objects in relation to the solar system, at any given time?
There is another deep-space mission in the pipeline (ion-drive) to the heliopause and beyond - is Sedna positioned toward the heliopause?
By the way, Sedna is another good reason to upgrade and keep Hubble going..
Govt. is typically illogical.... IMHO, let them pass this one as law, and THEN hit them with the questioning about their logic on cars vs. DVD's.
It's more leverage for us if it's already written into law.
The movie really doesn't have anything to do with "I, Robot," as far as I know -- the original script for it was called, IIRC, "Hardwired." To be fair, it was supposed to be a pretty damn good script, but when it was bought by the studio that also had done some development work with "I, Robot" and owned the film rights to the name, they decided to merge the two concepts, because to someone with a Hollywood marketing executive's deep insight they're close enough (detective trying to solve murders committed by a robot). Really, though, it's still "Hardwired," with some of the names from the Asimov stories.
I'll be curious to see if it's still a good movie, but I don't expect it to be a good adaptation of anything related to Asimov's works. The fact that it's pretending to be is unfortunate marketing spin.
Bill: apperantly we violated some rules regarding 'ethics'. You ever here of it?
Ballmer: I think there was something in a college course, but I'm not sure.
Bill: hmm, See if you can buy this ethics things, so we can get back to telling the government what to do.
"Dave, get the barbarian in the corner another drink, quick!"
I've found that provided the system have a good amount of memory, a pentium 2 is good enough to run most applications.
I've been tweaking an older PII laptop (400MhZ, 192M) over the past few months. The idea was not to lose any functionality or "new" features (i.e., dropping a 2.2 based distro, the PII's contemporary OS, would be cheating). So far I'm extremely pleased. The machine is very functional, even faster in some respects than a newer Thinkpad T22 (800MhZ, 256M) because the video support is better.
The main changes:
* 2.6 kernel -- huge difference
* Fluxbox instead of KDE/Gnome
* NPTL
* Rebuilt some apps with i686 optimizations
* Config tweaks (default services, buffer sizes, etc)
* Application substitutions (Firefox vs Mozilla, etc)
I've been testing other things including:
* Default fs (reiserfs vs ext3)
* sshd default configs (blowfish vs des, etc)
* MP3 vs OGG (about the same CPU, but I hear MP3 is nicer)
* Adjusting timer resolution in kernel
* Replacement syslog that batches writes
I beta tested Windows 98 (dangerous to admit that here) and would just like to point out that the beta version ran better and used less memory than the final did because the Final had more features than the beta did, and I'm sure for other reasons as well.
So the submitter's comment that "Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources" isn't necessarily true.
?
Please mod parent up: +5, Funny!
I don't buy that. FDR wanted a war with Germany, not with Japan. It was likely his hope all along to bully them into submission. He couldn't allow them to conquer Southeast Asia (witness the security assurances we gave the Europeans -- we would defend thier colional holdings in Asia) but he didn't want to fight a war with them either.
That it went to a war was a lot of cultural misunderstandings on both sides. FDR's administration couldn't understand the Japanese concept of honor and saving face and the Japanese didn't understand how we would react to a sneak attack.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Interesting... I would have thought the US would pressure France not to engage in joint exercises with China. (Not trying to blame the US here; France is clearly at fault for cooperating with the Chinese in intimidating Taiwan.)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
another fooking parrot.