Wouldn't that scan complete one sky in 6 months? It's kind of strange to report that it will do 1.5 in 9.
It's because WISE has a limited life expentancy of 10 months. In that 10 months its expected to cover the whole sky 1.5 times.
The life expentancy is only 10 months because the instrument needs to be cooled, which is done with solid hydrogen. Once the hydrogen is gone, the primary mission is over. Not sure if they have a plan for afterwards and can get secondary uses out of it.
Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world
Where did the submitter get that impression? Certainly not from the article. It mentions that they scrobbled 275,000 years of audio. Scrobbling is what Last.fm's client does when it takes a song you are playing from another source and uploads the meta data to them. Clearly that uses much less bandwidth than streaming a song
So now even the submitters aren't reading TFA anymore? I know, I know... its slashdot./sigh
I disagree. I find the trend of many websites to split the articles into as many as 10 - 15 pages beyond annoying. My browser has a scrollbar for a reason, you don't have to paginate it for me. I know they are trying to increase ad revenue, but it makes me use those sites less. Or get an extension like auto pager.
Most people greatly overestimate how well they can hear these differences, but the never actually try it in ABX testing. I tried it years ago and I can't hear a difference between most codecs at reasonable bitrates and unencoded originals.
Here is an old classic from the Hydrogenaudio forums, from someone would bought expensive head phones and set up ABX testing. He was very shocked when he couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC and Vorbis at 64kb/s.
I strongly doubt that the welding is the culprit. "Faulty welding" doesn't happen on something of the scale of a bridge.
You're right on. If the author of the article would have watched any of the Caltrans news conferences, they would have answered some of his theories.
The weld that he claims failed was clearly described as only being tacked, not structurally welded. That weld wasn't supposed to hold the structure together, the tie rods were, which failed. One of the improvements they are making now is to replace the tacking with a structural weld, so that even if something broke, these pieces won't come apart. The other improvements center around reducing vibration, especially in the tie rods
Who wrote that article anyway? Some guy on the internet who looks at some pictures of the repair and thinks he knows what a bunch of engineers working on the problem didn't know?
Is there any morally correct application for 'writing' false memories into a brain?
How about treating PTSD?
Very good point. Also, addiction. Basically, you'd erase the 'memory' of the urge to consume the particular substance your addicted to.
There was a story in the news six months ago about some research that would make it possible to do this in humans. PTSD and addiction were two examples they explicitly mentioned.
All these advances in speed and yet consumer ISPs can't seem to offer more than 6Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up for less than $70 a month.
Thats because we don't have real competition in the US, so why should they give you more for less?
Compare this to Germany for example, were you can get 16 Mbps for as little as 15 euros/month, 50 Mbps is available and Kabel Deutschland just announced that they are going to start selling 100 Mbps starting next year . Amazing what competition will do.
Brilliant Idea. Cause if we want to levy more taxes on the people that drive more, we need to track every car and build an extensive system of RFID scanners that covers the nation.
Of course every car already has a mileage based tracker build in. Its called the gas tank. You simply raise the gas tax, and you're done. In the process you also reward people with fuel efficient cars, and you make it easier for alternative fuels and electric cars to be competitive.
I suppose higher gas taxes have no lobby, while the RFID industry obviously has one./sigh
The issue [...] involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk.
So chkdsk is an 'arcane' process now? I've gotten used to the mainstream press always trying to dumb down anything even remotely technical, but shouldn't cnet be a little bit better? Guess not.
I like this site: n2yo. You can see the current position of the ISS, or get the 5 day flyover predictions with details If you click on 'draw' it will show you a graph for each pass, with blue where the station is in the shadow and yellow where it is in the light.
I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.
According to the article its called Message Center Plus. Here's uninstall instructions from the linked thread:
Just go to control panel and uninstall [Message Center] in add/remove programs.
Next time you use System Update when it tries to reinstall Message Center Plus, click on the plus sign and instead of selecting it in the enlarged menu choose hide the update. Then you won't see it next time you run System Update.
Of course if Lenovo brings out new releases of Message Center Plus you will have to hide them too.
And here, also from the thread, instructions to disable it without uninstalling:
start-->runs-->type msconfig--->go to menue tab --> startup ---> in the list of startup items--->
unhook
[ ] MCPLaunch
&
[ ] Scheduler_proxy
-->apply--> ok then a restart is required--> system
after restart
-->set in the upcoming message a hook , so that it next time didnt comes up..
The real problem is that it is surprisingly hard to embrace a new system of measurement when you've spent your entire life thinking in different terms.
Yes. Thats why the Canadians haven't been able to do it either. Or the Irish. Not Australia and New Zealand either. Or India.
Oh wait, they *have* all done it. So how come they can, but for the US it's just too hard?
You're not new here, I can tell by the fact that you didn't read the article. Or the summary;)
This feature actually works like you want it to: It *does* load on demand. And that's the problem here. If it always loaded it this exploit wouldn't work. Its based on only being loaded on demand.
As long as there is one free quality source for news, most people won't sign up.
Or, to turn that statement around, the quality of the reporting would have to be a class or two above the free source for me to be willing to pay for it. Which may be why it worked for the Wall Street Journal.
But then again, quality reporting is what News Corp is all about.
I can't remember the name of it, but I read about an island somewhere off the coast of Africa. It's a giant chunk of rock that's split in such a way that its eventual collapse into the ocean is near certain.
Well, there's one scientist who thinks its near certain, and a BBC documentary that focused on his points of view and made them sound like fact. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but it's not the certainty that the documentary made it sound.
If I recall correctly, other scientist are far from convinced that his assumptions are right. I believe some theories predict slow land slides instead, which wouldn't cause tsunamis.
Agree totally about the 555 but what? No 741 (Op Amp) or 7400 (or any other TTL?) ?
Those were the staples of most electronic projects as kits or in magazines etc.
I know reading the FA is frowned upon on slashdot, but if you did, you could find the 741 as number 6.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource.
Really? The internet was limitless in 1989 and now its slowing down? Which internet were they using?
That's pretty much a complete rewrite of history if I've ever seen one. The internet was really slow in those days. My whole university of 40,000 students had a 64kbit connection to the internet as late as 1993 or so. Anybody remember the www being called the world-wide-wait? I think the first couple of years I was more limited by the backbones the by the last mile. And that was on dialup!
Then at some point in the late 90s, probably during the dot com boom, they finally got the backbones to where they could keep up. And by and large, I think they do that pretty well even with the much increased traffic today. Did these guys just make up some facts to support their fearmongering theory? Like 'home computers' slowing down when kids start playing games?
It's funny how it breaks down the Bay Area into San Francisco and Silicon Valley while on the other hand it puts entire Japan (population 130 mil) as one entry.
Yeah, weird how they didn't even explain that in the article. Oh wait... they did!
The whole San Francisco entry basically talks about why they made it a separate entry from Silicon Valley, and how its different.
From the article:
When we were coming up with this list I joked that San Francisco should be considered a separate region from Silicon Valley if only because companies from the valley actually turn a profit at some point. The differences between the two areas, however, are distinct and have become more apparent in recent years.
On the surface, it seems like San Francisco is sort of the mouthpiece for Silicon Valley; a place where the reporters and PR staff are kept so that they don't bother the engineers down in Palo Alto and Cupertino.
In reality, San Francisco has a technology sector all its own, one which blossomed with the rise of the "Web 2.0" era. Because an internet-based service doesn't require a large lab or factory space, startups were able to move from garages to small offices and apartments.
Today, companies such as Salesforce.com and Craigslist maintain their headquarters in San Francisco, while web sites such as Twitter have taken up residence in the trendy South of Market neighbourhood and made the former warehouse district the new hot place to find a start-up.
[...]
Silicon Valley is where you go to start up a business that needs lots of space to grow. San Francisco is where you come if you're a small services startup with low headcount that wants somewhere with good coffee and the best sushi this side of the Pacific.
Shaun and I may have had a giggle about the loss-making side of the business but the fact remains that online is king here.
[...]
The city is the heart of IT innovation, even if Silicon Valley is the soul.
It may have been an axiom, but really, what did BeOS do (or want to do) that Linux doesn't do now?
The Linux OS has been scaled to thousands of CPUs. Sure, most applications don't benefit from multi-processors, but that'd be true in BeOS, too.
I'd honestly like to know if there is some design paradigm that was lost with BeOS that isn't around today.
I think their application framework was highly threaded. Or, structured to encourage you to use a lot of threads.
Just creating a window and some task that did something automatically gave you two threads, without you thinking about it much. One would take care of the UI, the other would run your app. That way if even the app was busy the UI stayed responsive.
Of course I don't know how far it would really have scaled, but I think the application framework that came with it probably did as much to enhance that as did the actual OS
open this page in multiple tabs, and then try to scroll the foreground page. If Firefox used a thread or process per page like Google Chrome does, the operating system would take care of this.
I think you are gravely oversimplifying things. Firefox certainly uses multiple threads. My Firefox thread is using 16 threads at the moment. The reason Chrome is using processes is so that when one of them crashes the other ones stay up.
Also, if you look closely, it doesn't completely look up while the other tabs are loading. It *does* however, lock up at some point during the rendering. Which would indicate that some points of the code are synchronizing between threads, or bottlenecking on some resource, and that locks it up.
Which is part of the problem. Its easy to say people need to use more threads. But the trouble comes when you need to synchronize, when they need to communicate with each other. Thats when you introduce performance bottlenecks. It's also one of the reasons why threading is harder than it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't that scan complete one sky in 6 months? It's kind of strange to report that it will do 1.5 in 9.
It's because WISE has a limited life expentancy of 10 months. In that 10 months its expected to cover the whole sky 1.5 times.
The life expentancy is only 10 months because the instrument needs to be cooled, which is done with solid hydrogen. Once the hydrogen is gone, the primary mission is over. Not sure if they have a plan for afterwards and can get secondary uses out of it.
There are several websites that show at least coastal traffic of all AIS equipped vessels. I like http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
Reader CNETNate notes that Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world
Where did the submitter get that impression? Certainly not from the article. It mentions that they scrobbled 275,000 years of audio. Scrobbling is what Last.fm's client does when it takes a song you are playing from another source and uploads the meta data to them. Clearly that uses much less bandwidth than streaming a song
So now even the submitters aren't reading TFA anymore? I know, I know... its slashdot. /sigh
I disagree. I find the trend of many websites to split the articles into as many as 10 - 15 pages beyond annoying. My browser has a scrollbar for a reason, you don't have to paginate it for me. I know they are trying to increase ad revenue, but it makes me use those sites less. Or get an extension like auto pager.
Most people greatly overestimate how well they can hear these differences, but the never actually try it in ABX testing. I tried it years ago and I can't hear a difference between most codecs at reasonable bitrates and unencoded originals.
Here is an old classic from the Hydrogenaudio forums, from someone would bought expensive head phones and set up ABX testing. He was very shocked when he couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC and Vorbis at 64kb/s.
ABX Just Destroyed My Ego, My perception of my bitrate needs was greatly inflated.
I strongly doubt that the welding is the culprit. "Faulty welding" doesn't happen on something of the scale of a bridge.
You're right on. If the author of the article would have watched any of the Caltrans news conferences, they would have answered some of his theories.
The weld that he claims failed was clearly described as only being tacked, not structurally welded. That weld wasn't supposed to hold the structure together, the tie rods were, which failed. One of the improvements they are making now is to replace the tacking with a structural weld, so that even if something broke, these pieces won't come apart. The other improvements center around reducing vibration, especially in the tie rods
Who wrote that article anyway? Some guy on the internet who looks at some pictures of the repair and thinks he knows what a bunch of engineers working on the problem didn't know?
How about treating PTSD?
Very good point. Also, addiction. Basically, you'd erase the 'memory' of the urge to consume the particular substance your addicted to.
There was a story in the news six months ago about some research that would make it possible to do this in humans. PTSD and addiction were two examples they explicitly mentioned.
NPR's Science Friday had an interview with the one of the scientists this morning. You can listen to the segment here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200910161
All these advances in speed and yet consumer ISPs can't seem to offer more than 6Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up for less than $70 a month.
Thats because we don't have real competition in the US, so why should they give you more for less?
Compare this to Germany for example, were you can get 16 Mbps for as little as 15 euros/month, 50 Mbps is available and Kabel Deutschland just announced that they are going to start selling 100 Mbps starting next year . Amazing what competition will do.
Brilliant Idea. Cause if we want to levy more taxes on the people that drive more, we need to track every car and build an extensive system of RFID scanners that covers the nation.
Of course every car already has a mileage based tracker build in. Its called the gas tank. You simply raise the gas tax, and you're done. In the process you also reward people with fuel efficient cars, and you make it easier for alternative fuels and electric cars to be competitive.
I suppose higher gas taxes have no lobby, while the RFID industry obviously has one. /sigh
The issue [...] involves a fairly arcane process used to check for problems in a particular disk.
So chkdsk is an 'arcane' process now? I've gotten used to the mainstream press always trying to dumb down anything even remotely technical, but shouldn't cnet be a little bit better? Guess not.
I like this site: n2yo. You can see the current position of the ISS, or get the 5 day flyover predictions with details If you click on 'draw' it will show you a graph for each pass, with blue where the station is in the shadow and yellow where it is in the light.
I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.
According to the article its called Message Center Plus. Here's uninstall instructions from the linked thread:
Just go to control panel and uninstall [Message Center] in add/remove programs.
Next time you use System Update when it tries to reinstall Message Center Plus, click on the plus sign and instead of selecting it in the enlarged menu choose hide the update. Then you won't see it next time you run System Update. Of course if Lenovo brings out new releases of Message Center Plus you will have to hide them too.
And here, also from the thread, instructions to disable it without uninstalling:
start-->runs-->type msconfig--->go to menue tab --> startup ---> in the list of startup items--->
unhook
[ ] MCPLaunch
&
[ ] Scheduler_proxy
-->apply--> ok then a restart is required--> system
after restart
-->set in the upcoming message a hook , so that it next time didnt comes up..
The real problem is that it is surprisingly hard to embrace a new system of measurement when you've spent your entire life thinking in different terms.
Yes. Thats why the Canadians haven't been able to do it either. Or the Irish. Not Australia and New Zealand either. Or India.
Oh wait, they *have* all done it. So how come they can, but for the US it's just too hard?
You should only load remote images on demand.
[...]
Yeah , I know must be new here..
You're not new here, I can tell by the fact that you didn't read the article. Or the summary ;)
This feature actually works like you want it to: It *does* load on demand. And that's the problem here. If it always loaded it this exploit wouldn't work. Its based on only being loaded on demand.
I knew light was quantized, but I had seriously never heard of Phonons, or that sound can be quantized as well.
Well, apparently it can: Phonon
As long as there is one free quality source for news, most people won't sign up.
Or, to turn that statement around, the quality of the reporting would have to be a class or two above the free source for me to be willing to pay for it. Which may be why it worked for the Wall Street Journal.
But then again, quality reporting is what News Corp is all about.
I can't remember the name of it, but I read about an island somewhere off the coast of Africa. It's a giant chunk of rock that's split in such a way that its eventual collapse into the ocean is near certain.
Well, there's one scientist who thinks its near certain, and a BBC documentary that focused on his points of view and made them sound like fact. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but it's not the certainty that the documentary made it sound.
If I recall correctly, other scientist are far from convinced that his assumptions are right. I believe some theories predict slow land slides instead, which wouldn't cause tsunamis.
Agree totally about the 555 but what? No 741 (Op Amp) or 7400 (or any other TTL?) ? Those were the staples of most electronic projects as kits or in magazines etc.
I know reading the FA is frowned upon on slashdot, but if you did, you could find the 741 as number 6.
From TFA:
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource.
Really? The internet was limitless in 1989 and now its slowing down? Which internet were they using?
That's pretty much a complete rewrite of history if I've ever seen one. The internet was really slow in those days. My whole university of 40,000 students had a 64kbit connection to the internet as late as 1993 or so. Anybody remember the www being called the world-wide-wait? I think the first couple of years I was more limited by the backbones the by the last mile. And that was on dialup!
Then at some point in the late 90s, probably during the dot com boom, they finally got the backbones to where they could keep up. And by and large, I think they do that pretty well even with the much increased traffic today. Did these guys just make up some facts to support their fearmongering theory? Like 'home computers' slowing down when kids start playing games?
That page gets really messed up under non IE browsers. Both Firefox and Chrome show a pretty broken page. IE7 seems to display it OK.
There is a free service that does the same thing: browsershots.org
It's funny how it breaks down the Bay Area into San Francisco and Silicon Valley while on the other hand it puts entire Japan (population 130 mil) as one entry.
Yeah, weird how they didn't even explain that in the article. Oh wait... they did!
The whole San Francisco entry basically talks about why they made it a separate entry from Silicon Valley, and how its different.
From the article:
When we were coming up with this list I joked that San Francisco should be considered a separate region from Silicon Valley if only because companies from the valley actually turn a profit at some point. The differences between the two areas, however, are distinct and have become more apparent in recent years.
On the surface, it seems like San Francisco is sort of the mouthpiece for Silicon Valley; a place where the reporters and PR staff are kept so that they don't bother the engineers down in Palo Alto and Cupertino.
In reality, San Francisco has a technology sector all its own, one which blossomed with the rise of the "Web 2.0" era. Because an internet-based service doesn't require a large lab or factory space, startups were able to move from garages to small offices and apartments.
Today, companies such as Salesforce.com and Craigslist maintain their headquarters in San Francisco, while web sites such as Twitter have taken up residence in the trendy South of Market neighbourhood and made the former warehouse district the new hot place to find a start-up.
[...]
Silicon Valley is where you go to start up a business that needs lots of space to grow. San Francisco is where you come if you're a small services startup with low headcount that wants somewhere with good coffee and the best sushi this side of the Pacific.
Shaun and I may have had a giggle about the loss-making side of the business but the fact remains that online is king here.
[...]
The city is the heart of IT innovation, even if Silicon Valley is the soul.
It may have been an axiom, but really, what did BeOS do (or want to do) that Linux doesn't do now?
The Linux OS has been scaled to thousands of CPUs. Sure, most applications don't benefit from multi-processors, but that'd be true in BeOS, too.
I'd honestly like to know if there is some design paradigm that was lost with BeOS that isn't around today.
I think their application framework was highly threaded. Or, structured to encourage you to use a lot of threads.
Just creating a window and some task that did something automatically gave you two threads, without you thinking about it much. One would take care of the UI, the other would run your app. That way if even the app was busy the UI stayed responsive.
Of course I don't know how far it would really have scaled, but I think the application framework that came with it probably did as much to enhance that as did the actual OS
open this page in multiple tabs, and then try to scroll the foreground page. If Firefox used a thread or process per page like Google Chrome does, the operating system would take care of this.
I think you are gravely oversimplifying things. Firefox certainly uses multiple threads. My Firefox thread is using 16 threads at the moment. The reason Chrome is using processes is so that when one of them crashes the other ones stay up.
Also, if you look closely, it doesn't completely look up while the other tabs are loading. It *does* however, lock up at some point during the rendering. Which would indicate that some points of the code are synchronizing between threads, or bottlenecking on some resource, and that locks it up.
Which is part of the problem. Its easy to say people need to use more threads. But the trouble comes when you need to synchronize, when they need to communicate with each other. Thats when you introduce performance bottlenecks. It's also one of the reasons why threading is harder than it seems.