Although, I small space probe might be moved quite a bit. Not at first, but over time it could get going quite fast.
I once calculated that, under a constant 1G acceleration (and ignoring relativity effects), you should get to roughly light-speed in a year.
Similarly: 0.01G over a year would give you roughly 2000miles/second acceleration -- fast enough, I think to start getting obvious relativistic side-effects. (and, man, you do not want to hit a rock at those speeds!)
Programs fight each other for supremacy in terms of the number of processors they . . . . . . a craftsmanly Russian program defeated a sophisticated genetic algorithm from NASA."
hmmm
I'm guessing that this guy works for the Russian mobsters that put together the
porn/spam network reported earlier.
i read a blurb in the newspaper where this man slipped on his front poarch and fell into his rosebush and somehow a branch went into his throat and he choaked to death. a very unusual occurence to say the least. but i think this is more likely
You're more likely to get killed by an asteroid than hit by Lightning... That's because each year, N dozen people get hit by lightning that gives a probability in the range of 1/100million. An extinction-level meteor strike happens about every 60 million years -- thus a probability of 1/60million because it would be expected to kill everybody if it hit.
A metor impact program would be a good excuse for near-earth observations and might also allow us to prevent non-extinction large impacts but it's not that likely to make a big difference in my life either for god or bad.
Like failing to prevent an extinction-level event is gonna get someone tossed out of office? It may toss his office off the planet, but most reps are not going to be in a state to complain about it post-impact.
No one is forcing the artists to sign a contract with record label X-- if they dont like the terms, find another record label who has terms you agree with.
My understanding is that what the labels often tend to do is sign a 'quick' pre-contract agreement that pretty much locks up the musicians, then starve them into signing.
Quick, nasty and effective. The trick for the musician is to actually pay attention before signing such 'quick and harmless' agreement in principles -- but the young and eager are often blinded by apparent opportunity.
Don't scream too loud, until you read the fine print. TIA is deployable now, but (in theory) only against foreign nationals in the US or anybody who leaves US soil.... I.E.
if you go to the Bahamas or Mexico for a vacation, you're fair game until you get back home.
If you've got a green card, you're also fair game and
if you get mistaken for a foreigner, they'll just say "oops".
Funny I don't have any hardware problems with the other dozen identical machines in the department that run another OS.
If somebody is telling you it's a hardware problem, alocate yourself a 4Gb partition and load Linux -- then see if it crashes. If it keeps crashing under Linux then it probably is a hardware problem.
I actually ran into that once. Had a desktop that kept crashing and I blamed it on 'stupid windows'. Then I loaded Linux on the box, but Linux kept crashing too --- that told me that it was really a hardware problem. Turned out o be badly seated RAM.
Me and a friend did something similar, but with better reason. When he got his phone line, he got an unpublished number -- It's much harder to get hold of than an unlisted number... as he found out because they never told him what his number was when he got the line, and when he went back to get it they told him they couldn't release that data even to him with anything less than a court order.
He did know what exchange he was in, so that only left us 10000 numbers to go through (!).
Since he had a nice new sportster modem we decided to write a program that would go through every number in the exchange and dial it. If we got a 'RINGING' response, then we'd hang up immediately, and forget that number. If we got a 'BUSY' signal, then we'd save that number for the next
pass.
On each pass, we figured that we'd get at least 90% non-busy signals, so after 3 or 4 passes we should be down to a couple dozen numbers. At that point, I could just call each of those numbers from my home, until I got him, then we'd know what his phone number was.
to avoid seriously pissing off people with rotary banks, we decided to randomize the order in which we called the numbers.
Just before we'd finished the program, he got a wrong number dialing his phone. He had the presence of mind to ask the person what number they were trying to dial, and from that we got ourselves down to a handful of probable permutations and that was all we needed... so we never actually used the program.
No. It's not a cron jub. it's just a different way of doing the same thing (ad/hock) except every 500 seconds instead of every 10 minutes).
roughly the same effect.
i can transfer 3 gigs from my work computer to my home machine faster than the time it would take me to write the 3 gigs to tape, drive it there, and read it back from tape
Well, I can presume that if you're regularly transferring a station wagon full of data, chances are that you've got more than one tape drive. Also: this article is going on the presumption that you're now using 200GB disk drives rather than tape cartridges -- mostly because disk drives are now about the same cost/gigabyte as tape cartridges -- and a lot more convenient, presuming that the recieving machine can read the filesystem that your data is written on.
$ units 200gigabytes/'(100megabits/second)' hours
* 4.4444444
if we consider a disk drive to be a new-fangled backup tape, then, even at 100megabits/second, it's still 4 hours to get a single 200GB tape transferred (and a couple hundred dollars in network charges).
As for filling the station wagon (presuming you insist on using tape drives), you can always go to a level 1 RAIT (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Tapes). With 40 tape drives, you'll have that 3GB dataset written in no time.
If you're talking a terabyte of data, then you can just put those 200GB drives into a RAID enclosure and just ship the enclosure.
Of course, most of us don't have a 100Mbit connection at home, so it's going to take a good bit longer than 4 hours to transfer a 200GB disk image.
BTW It's just as accurate then as it is now. A station wagon full of (pick your storage medium) may have decent bandwidth, but the packet size is ENORMOUS.
Just over a week to transfer 200gigabytes over a 2megabit line. (of course, I can only send at 500kilobits/second, so you can quadruple that to over a month for me)
I'm arranging with my G/F to have our phones call each other every 10 minutes when we're together. We never answer the phone, but it will keep the bugs away.
If that doesn't work (i.e. you don't have an SO), you can set up a cron job to have your computer do the same thing for you.
while sleep 500 ; do dial 604-555-1234,,,, ; done
( dial is my own shell script that I use to have my computer do the dialing for me. It integrates nicely with my qick and dirty phone-number finder. )
Yep. I agree on the paper trail thing. You need to send an email/text memo saying:
Correct and Proper = X time
Quick snd Dirty = Y time
Time to clean up the Q&D solution Z
If time constraints require me to do the Q&D route, then I need explicit authorization to go that route, (and authorization + time to clean it up afterwards.)
If you actually have the time budgeted to clean up the Q&D solution, then it's less likely that someone is going to come down on you for implementing it 'against the rules'. It also removes the barriers against getting the marketdroid types to accept that the v0.1 version.is really only the start of the process.
Hey: If the government wants to put the fear of.gov into foreign students, then what better way to do it than this? Laws that mandate that students have no freedoms if they're not in a database and a database that randomly scrambles their data.
The result is that every once in a while a random student is arrested, delayed and/or deported because of a glitch in the database. As was mentioned in the article, students weren't too worried before SEVIS came into service, but now, the government is acting like a rampaging despot -- but they get to blame it on an opaque, mallfunctioning computer system. What more could they ask for?
Now, if the government wants to deport a student for (say) calling Bush a moron, all they have to do is induce a glitch in SEVIS and then have the student stopped for (say) speeding. One quick look in sevis, and they're in jail or on their way out of the country.
This whole randomness aspect is what has the foreign student body nervous, and it's almost impossible to pin down. It seems like a pretty good opposition supression system.
. . .
But as a corrolary to Occam's razor says: "Never blame on belligerence what can be explained by simple stupidity."
-- and we're talking about the government, after all.
'Of course you are right,' said the manager. 'But the key to achieving profitability and return on investment is to improve the development process, and with it the cost and quality of the end product. Software developers like to think they're doing something very special, but in fact it's an industrial process just like any other. The essence of software development is a quantitative approach to measuring and improving the performance of the software development process. What you don't measure you can't control.'
I think that, for most managers, the analogy which would most make sense to them is that Programmers are pretty much the same as Lawyers:
The goal, in either case, is to take a set of rules -- often arcane and ancient (programming languages and operating systems Vs. rules and laws), and combine them in such a way as to allow the client to achieve their wanted ends.
The judge would be the rough equivalent of a wetware execution unit.
Once they accept the lawyer analogy, then you can ask just how reasonable it would be to expect a lawyer to accomplish a lawsuit according to a tight schedule. Although it is doable, the tighter the schedule, the higher the price (often exponentially so).
I came up with this analogy because I ended up, a few years ago, self-representing myself in a reasonably complex lawsuit (It was about 4 years old by the time I got pulled in). With a couple of months heavy research I was able to do well enough in the courtroom (before the chief justice, and later at the Court of Appeals level) to reasonably impress just about every lawyer I dealt with in court.
I achieved this by pretty much applying my programming experience almost one-to-one. I simply treated the legalese and rules of court as a programming language. Old precedents were treated much like code snippits.
If you look at old slashdot postings, I think you can see that good programmers don't have that tough a time with laws and even court decisions. I submit that it's because the paradigms aren't really that different.
This pretty much literally blows a big hole in any argument that the nasa probe people were over=estimating the kind of damage that a 'little' chunk of foam could do to the shuttle's wing.
I think that this final test is a smoking bun because it shows that pieces of foam can do much more than just cause minor holes in the wing. that might allow a fatal stream of air into the shuttle wing. If Columbia had had a hole in it's wing like this test created, it probably wouldn't have made it anywhere near as close to the landing point as it did.
I'm guessing that this was something of a worst-case scenario, and it pretty much blew the socks off the testers.
(having gotten in my weekly quota of pun, I'm now gonna go do some real work).
is that he has it in one convenient package... Kindof a Terrorist to-do list. When you think about it, this is really just turning the tables on the privacy debate.
Conpanies (i.e. financial institutions) don't mind compiling scads of public information on us until they can tell what brand of hemorrhoid cream you use, but when we do the same thing to them, they scream bloody murder.
Hmmm.....
If you locked up all of the infomation he's compiled, you'd shut down the Economy just as effectively as using that same infomation to blow up critical infrastructure points. The real point of his data is that he also allows the good guys to see just whwre the choke points are so that they can design backup plans and structures.
As Ghandi said (and I'd bet he'd be on the terrorist watch list if he was doing his work today).
I'd rather let my enemies know exactly what I'm doing and hope that they overreact
Now, at least, these companies are clear that they need to get their ISPs to use different fiber lines to deliver their data. It's not like they couldn't have known this before. It's just that now they have it at their fingertips.
A few years ago I was in a Job interview, and the company president was in on the hiring (a reatively small company).
He was asking me about various technologies, and it went like:
SNMP?
I know what it is, but I haven't really used it.
SMTP?
Oh yeah!
NFS?
yep
RFS
dabbled with it
DHCP?
yep
. . . .
Finally, he threw one at me that I didn't even recognize. I asked him what it was, and he said
"Dunno. I made it up. I just wanted to make sure you weren't snowing us."
I'm presuming that the declaration that the Internet is a human right would mean that someone coud be forced to provide "reasonable access", but I don't think that they'd be forced to give it to me for free.
On the other hand, an attempt by some entity (either commercial or governmental) to arbitrarily limit the access that certain people have to the 'net would be illegal.
Things like the US cable companies outlawing the use of broadband to make websites available might be illegal under such a declaration (but that's getting into serious lawyer space).
Re:
Sour Grapes Just because we don't enjoy the right here doesn't mean that it's inapproprate for somebody else to declare the right. In the early days of the US, the right to free speech was also considered a strange thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I just prefer the address for webcast rules to be a hot-link:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#114
Similarly: 0.01G over a year would give you roughly 2000miles/second acceleration -- fast enough, I think to start getting obvious relativistic side-effects. (and, man, you do not want to hit a rock at those speeds!)
Personally, I found it kinda funny, myself (being the one who originally got modded down).
According to the article: "The whole exercise will take 12 hours or more."
Perhaps the exact timing is still a bit up in the air.
(sorry -- just had to say that)
hmmm
I'm guessing that this guy works for the Russian mobsters that put together the porn/spam network reported earlier.
I thought that 'a beowulf cluster of these' would do much better than that.
You're more likely to get killed by an asteroid than hit by Lightning... That's because each year, N dozen people get hit by lightning that gives a probability in the range of 1/100million. An extinction-level meteor strike happens about every 60 million years -- thus a probability of 1/60million because it would be expected to kill everybody if it hit.
A metor impact program would be a good excuse for near-earth observations and might also allow us to prevent non-extinction large impacts but it's not that likely to make a big difference in my life either for god or bad.
Like failing to prevent an extinction-level event is gonna get someone tossed out of office? It may toss his office off the planet, but most reps are not going to be in a state to complain about it post-impact.
My understanding is that what the labels often tend to do is sign a 'quick' pre-contract agreement that pretty much locks up the musicians, then starve them into signing.
Quick, nasty and effective. The trick for the musician is to actually pay attention before signing such 'quick and harmless' agreement in principles -- but the young and eager are often blinded by apparent opportunity.
If somebody is telling you it's a hardware problem, alocate yourself a 4Gb partition and load Linux -- then see if it crashes. If it keeps crashing under Linux then it probably is a hardware problem.
I actually ran into that once. Had a desktop that kept crashing and I blamed it on 'stupid windows'. Then I loaded Linux on the box, but Linux kept crashing too --- that told me that it was really a hardware problem. Turned out o be badly seated RAM.
Bridges between domains are not an absolutel necessity. sometimes you can achieve encapsulated transport using the appropriate carrier (another RFC?)
BTW: I say that the ATVs should generally be referred to as transports (or transmort mechanisms), not carriers.
He did know what exchange he was in, so that only left us 10000 numbers to go through (!). Since he had a nice new sportster modem we decided to write a program that would go through every number in the exchange and dial it. If we got a 'RINGING' response, then we'd hang up immediately, and forget that number. If we got a 'BUSY' signal, then we'd save that number for the next pass.
On each pass, we figured that we'd get at least 90% non-busy signals, so after 3 or 4 passes we should be down to a couple dozen numbers. At that point, I could just call each of those numbers from my home, until I got him, then we'd know what his phone number was.
to avoid seriously pissing off people with rotary banks, we decided to randomize the order in which we called the numbers.
Just before we'd finished the program, he got a wrong number dialing his phone. He had the presence of mind to ask the person what number they were trying to dial, and from that we got ourselves down to a handful of probable permutations and that was all we needed ... so we never actually used the program.
No. It's not a cron jub. it's just a different way of doing the same thing (ad/hock) except every 500 seconds instead of every 10 minutes). roughly the same effect.
Well, I can presume that if you're regularly transferring a station wagon full of data, chances are that you've got more than one tape drive. Also: this article is going on the presumption that you're now using 200GB disk drives rather than tape cartridges -- mostly because disk drives are now about the same cost/gigabyte as tape cartridges -- and a lot more convenient, presuming that the recieving machine can read the filesystem that your data is written on.
$ units 200gigabytes/'(100megabits/second)' hours
* 4.4444444
if we consider a disk drive to be a new-fangled backup tape, then, even at 100megabits/second, it's still 4 hours to get a single 200GB tape transferred (and a couple hundred dollars in network charges).
As for filling the station wagon (presuming you insist on using tape drives), you can always go to a level 1 RAIT (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Tapes). With 40 tape drives, you'll have that 3GB dataset written in no time.
If you're talking a terabyte of data, then you can just put those 200GB drives into a RAID enclosure and just ship the enclosure.
Of course, most of us don't have a 100Mbit connection at home, so it's going to take a good bit longer than 4 hours to transfer a 200GB disk image.
BTW It's just as accurate then as it is now. A station wagon full of (pick your storage medium) may have decent bandwidth, but the packet size is ENORMOUS .
% units '200gigabytes/(2megabits/second)' days
- * 9.2592593
Just over a week to transfer 200gigabytes over a 2megabit line. (of course, I can only send at 500kilobits/second, so you can quadruple that to over a month for me)/ 0.108
If that doesn't work (i.e. you don't have an SO), you can set up a cron job to have your computer do the same thing for you.
( dial is my own shell script that I use to have my computer do the dialing for me. It integrates nicely with my qick and dirty phone-number finder. )- Correct and Proper = X time
- Quick snd Dirty = Y time
- Time to clean up the Q&D solution Z
- If time constraints require me to do the Q&D route, then I need explicit authorization to go that route, (and authorization + time to clean it up afterwards.)
If you actually have the time budgeted to clean up the Q&D solution, then it's less likely that someone is going to come down on you for implementing it 'against the rules'. It also removes the barriers against getting the marketdroid types to accept that the v0.1 version.is really only the start of the process.The result is that every once in a while a random student is arrested, delayed and/or deported because of a glitch in the database. As was mentioned in the article, students weren't too worried before SEVIS came into service, but now, the government is acting like a rampaging despot -- but they get to blame it on an opaque, mallfunctioning computer system. What more could they ask for?
Now, if the government wants to deport a student for (say) calling Bush a moron, all they have to do is induce a glitch in SEVIS and then have the student stopped for (say) speeding. One quick look in sevis, and they're in jail or on their way out of the country.
This whole randomness aspect is what has the foreign student body nervous, and it's almost impossible to pin down. It seems like a pretty good opposition supression system.
. . . But as a corrolary to Occam's razor says: "Never blame on belligerence what can be explained by simple stupidity." -- and we're talking about the government, after all.
I think that, for most managers, the analogy which would most make sense to them is that Programmers are pretty much the same as Lawyers:
The goal, in either case, is to take a set of rules -- often arcane and ancient (programming languages and operating systems Vs. rules and laws), and combine them in such a way as to allow the client to achieve their wanted ends.
The judge would be the rough equivalent of a wetware execution unit.
Once they accept the lawyer analogy, then you can ask just how reasonable it would be to expect a lawyer to accomplish a lawsuit according to a tight schedule. Although it is doable, the tighter the schedule, the higher the price (often exponentially so).
I came up with this analogy because I ended up, a few years ago, self-representing myself in a reasonably complex lawsuit (It was about 4 years old by the time I got pulled in). With a couple of months heavy research I was able to do well enough in the courtroom (before the chief justice, and later at the Court of Appeals level) to reasonably impress just about every lawyer I dealt with in court.
I achieved this by pretty much applying my programming experience almost one-to-one. I simply treated the legalese and rules of court as a programming language. Old precedents were treated much like code snippits.
If you look at old slashdot postings, I think you can see that good programmers don't have that tough a time with laws and even court decisions. I submit that it's because the paradigms aren't really that different.
I think that this final test is a smoking bun because it shows that pieces of foam can do much more than just cause minor holes in the wing. that might allow a fatal stream of air into the shuttle wing. If Columbia had had a hole in it's wing like this test created, it probably wouldn't have made it anywhere near as close to the landing point as it did.
I'm guessing that this was something of a worst-case scenario, and it pretty much blew the socks off the testers.
(having gotten in my weekly quota of pun, I'm now gonna go do some real work).
Conpanies (i.e. financial institutions) don't mind compiling scads of public information on us until they can tell what brand of hemorrhoid cream you use, but when we do the same thing to them, they scream bloody murder.
Hmmm.....
If you locked up all of the infomation he's compiled, you'd shut down the Economy just as effectively as using that same infomation to blow up critical infrastructure points. The real point of his data is that he also allows the good guys to see just whwre the choke points are so that they can design backup plans and structures.
As Ghandi said (and I'd bet he'd be on the terrorist watch list if he was doing his work today).
Now, at least, these companies are clear that they need to get their ISPs to use different fiber lines to deliver their data. It's not like they couldn't have known this before. It's just that now they have it at their fingertips.
+1 funny.
He was asking me about various technologies, and it went like:
Finally, he threw one at me that I didn't even recognize. I asked him what it was, and he said"Dunno. I made it up. I just wanted to make sure you weren't snowing us."
At that point, I knew I was doing pretty well.
On the other hand, an attempt by some entity (either commercial or governmental) to arbitrarily limit the access that certain people have to the 'net would be illegal.
Things like the US cable companies outlawing the use of broadband to make websites available might be illegal under such a declaration (but that's getting into serious lawyer space).
Re: Sour Grapes Just because we don't enjoy the right here doesn't mean that it's inapproprate for somebody else to declare the right. In the early days of the US, the right to free speech was also considered a strange thing.