Tell it to the florist i know who registered 18 different domain names and put up six different websites for his 1 business and stuffed them silly with keywords.
It's total and utter bullflop, and it works. And we hate him for it . . .
Does anybody know if current CVS of MythTV is usable, and if so, does it still thoroughly suck for ATSC?
I spent days getting 0.18.1 working with my PCHDTV card only to find that the mpeg demuxer is right next door to non-functional and it had a tendency to crash if it accidentally caught wind of an encrypted stream, which are ubiquitous on my local airwaves.
It was a total PITA to use and i was actually more comfortable tuning manually and using mplayer. At least mplayer's demuxer isn't all choppy on an Athlon64-3500.
So i asked around on the irc channel and found out, yeah that's basically the state of things.
Only a really topheavy organization can make this kind of mistake.
The compatibility ABI isn't going to pass muster when it hits the QA phase, they never do. You can't realistically develop an application for one OS and expect it to work perfectly on a "compatible" OS.
When developing vertical applications like this, it's most wise to develop for the actual physical installation that it's going to end up running on. Not just the *version, the actual functioning OS image that will ultimately be used.
There's a term for what this is gonna end up being. The first part is cluster and the last part rhymes with truck.
Professional archivists tend to recommend that data be turned over onto new media every 5 years regardless of how well it's weathering the years.
But the truth is that, paradoxically, the most critical data tends to be the least likely to be refreshed, because access to it is typically quite limited.
Our own department of defense doesn't know where it stashed all of it's nuclear materials over the years. Why? because they recorded it on a magnetic tape, put the tape in a vault, and had someone stand in front of the vault with a gun for 40 years, and now the tape has turned to goo, and in other cases the tape seems readable but there is no technology available to read it.
We should always strive for and recommend rigorous archival policies, but we should also strive for media that can possibly withstand the ages should some knucklehead put it in a concrete box or just forget about it completely for a few decades instead.
Funny thing is i was arguing with a photoshop wonk about this just last week. It seems that when it first surfaced, it was 'debunked' by end-users on worth1000.com.
Levin et al were published by ACM more than a year ago.
Some criticism: Their website only shows images that show the strength of their method. They don't show any examples of it's weaknesses, and it does have some.
A much more interesting website would be this one:
A similar technique, a comparison with the levin et al method, images that show how both techniques sometimes don't work so well, and a nifty java applet so you can try it yourself.
Both of these techniques, however, seem to depend on a good quality grayscale image. This is paradoxical because the emphasis in colorization has been old film. A lot of that stuff is coarser, and higher contrast, than any of these images. Silver oxide without any dyes added has a big spike in it's color sensitivity for blue light, as well, so what tone you do have to work with is maybe not going to be correct.
While out here in utah, they're tearing up the streets as fast as they can to lay fiber for the new Utopia Network!
(Except in provo, where they want to have their/own/ network, apart from the rest of the state. loosers.)
The Beach Boys didn't use a theremin. In fact, there's some hilarious footage of Brian Wilson exhibiting how entirely incompetent he is at playing one in that documentary. He makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't know how it works.
The Beach Boys used an instrument that's referred to variously as a Tannerin, Electro-Theremin, or Slide-Theremin. It's nothing like a Theremin because it requires actual electrical contact to function, where a Theremin doesn't work if you touch it.
Oliver Messiaen recorded 'Oraison" in 1937, 10 years before these guys. It's quite nice, actually.
They were important and all, but they were hardly the first.
Heck, Lev Termin patented the Theremin in 1927, when the Barrons were little kids.
You can find a lot of this stuff on a 3-disc set called "OHM" variously "Early Gurus of Electronic Music" or "History of Electronic Music" but always OHM, afaik.
Here's a shameless plug for EAR-Rational Music, the guys i bought my copy from. google for 'em.
Both the publisher and the authors are correct. PublishAmerica is just a vanity publisher, and nearly all scifi authors are lazy talentless hacks.
Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction author himself, said it much more eloquently years ago in an essay that got him kicked out of his honorary membership in SFWA in 1976.
I've got no management experience, but I've worked for enough people, good (rarely) and bad (mostly) that i've identified what i like.
The superhero of middle management is my former boss, Ron, at a now-utterly-defunct embedded linux vendor.
Ron was Not A Programmer. He wasn't even technically speaking a geek, except in the strict jargon file definition. He was an old HAM operator and a former QA manager for various semiconductor fabrication facilities. He was managing a bunch of software QA people, me among them.
So, this was the basis of his attitude:
"As your manager, I am a man who is not competent to do your job, someone who, in fact, has only a cursory understanding of how you do your job.
What i need from you is for you to get your work done. How i intend to make that happen is by making sure:
a: You know what your job is b: You know what your priorities are c: You have everything you need to get the job done d: Nobody will get in the way of your doing it, even if i have to jump in front of the bullet for you."
It was great. If people from other departments interfered with my work, Ron got on their case for it and hasseled their supervisor about it - so people from other departments rarely hassled me.
I knew exactly what my #1, #2, and #3 projects were, when they were due, and what was expected from them.
This rocked. If you've ever caught flack for not delivering something that you were never given any sense of urgency about, you can appreciate this.
If i needed anything - a particular cable, a memory module of a certain type, more clarification from marketing or engineering exactly what they wanted from me, an OK to take the rest of the day off if i was getting nowhere fast, heck, a sandwitch, Ron was on it.
I probably could have asked to take his daughter out to dinner and he wouldn't have said no right away.
Ron wouldn't make me work late unless he was working late too. Often this meant that he was in the office doing nothing important, so he'd fetch dinner and send flowers to the significant others. I'm serious.
If Ron was cutting out early before a holiday, he'd send me home first.
So, it was like this. I was certain - absolutely certain - that Ron would do whatever it took to make sure i could do a good job at what he'd asked me to do.
And, lets face it, that's what job satisfaction is all about.
I was entirely sure that Ron wouldn't ask me to do something unless it honestly needed to be done. That he would never bullshit me or sell me out.
I had no doubts about the fact that if upper management asked him to have us do something that he felt was unreasonable, he'd do whatever he could to talk them out of it.
So, whatever Ron wanted, Ron got. He treated us like princes and in return we exaulted him as our king. I'd work for him again in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure I'd even ask what the job was.
Good thing the CIA isn't about code breaking
on
Decrypting Kryptos
·
· Score: 1
The article says that the NSA failed as well, but, honestly, the NSA wouldn't say if they had.
They probably have, long ago, and just don't tell anybody. They're probably chuckling about it right now.
I know this is going to come as a shock to all of you, but dynamic ram doesn't get hot. It doesn't need a heat sink or heat spreader.
Technically, dynamic ram doesn't even consume electricity, let alone dissipate it as heat. The power consumption of the actual memory cells is essentially zero.
The row and collumn drivers do consume some small amount of power, and in theory, a 'heat spreader' would help even out the temperature across the chip.
Except, remember, this is dynamic ram, which means that every row and collumn is refreshed in unison whether or not it's in use, so every row and collumn is generating the same tiny amount of heat, so the distribution is entirely even.
Someone please point me at test results that show any thermal advantage to sticking some copper or aluminum to my 400mhz ram. Everything I've seen indicates that the temperature of the dimms is within 1 degree of the ambient temperature inside the case with or without 'cooling' devices.
Ricoh had this in 2001, on one of their high end cameras - it had two full-blown PCMCIA slots.
I was peripherally involved with a proposed project to port it's embedded software from vxworks to linux. It never got off the ground, because Ricoh US wanted it to happen but Ricoh Japan didn't. Ricoh US only had the documentation in japanese, but they wanted our US division and not our japan division to do it.
The deal was all messed up. But a very nice camera. We were sad to box it up and send it back after about, what, a year or more of back and forth.
I hear they're thinking about putting cell phones in cameras now . . . .
Face recognition software has never worked. And by that i mean that it has never caught a criminal. Ever. It's never happened.
Funny thing is, it's not a new concept. Before the advent of fingerprinting, law enforcement in a number of countries used a hand measured set of facial metrics to identify criminals.
One of the events that precipitated widespread fingerprinting was a day when a guy was picked up for being a shady character who looked just like a guy on a wanted poster. They get him in, start measuring features on his face. Everything is lining up, then one of the guards says, "Hey, I know this guy" - and realizes that they already have this guy in custody, has been in for years.
At that point, when they had evidence of the fallability of their facial recognition system right there in the same prison, there was a loss of confidence, and a need for a better system.
"Part of that job is trying to drill into programmer's heads the concept that performing to spec when used as directed is not sufficient." Can you give an example of what you mean by this? It sounds like you give them a spec and tell them not to follow it.
It is also required that a program not behave badly when abused. At worst an abused program should cry "No mas!" and fall over. Preferably it should elegantly decline to perform and return to a ready-to-work state.
When a program instead does something unexpected when operated outside of spec that's a bug, and it shouldn't do it.
The simplest example is corrupt data. I've seen network applications getting hung up on corrupt UDP packets, for example, and a video decoder that hung the system by taking a damaged stream and delivering invalid frames to the buffer instead of dropping them in/dev/null.
"Garbage in, garbage out" is an invalid assertion. Software should detect and reject (or ignore) garbage. More like "Garbage offered, garbage not accepted, and user appropriately scolded"
If you want to build that into the spec, I'm all for it, but the "It's not required by the spec" argument won't get the test goon off your back.
The article is a bunch of malarky. Well, I suspect it is, but i stopped after the first couple paragraphs, after I read this:
Last month, a system that controls communications between commercial jets and air traffic controllers in southern California shut off because some maintenance had not been performed.
Yeah. That maintenance they failed to perform? It was their mandated once-a-month reboot of their windows system, because it locks up after 43 days.
This was the result of bad programming.
Anyway, as a QA guy, I can assure you that bad programming abounds. It's my job to make sure you never see it. Part of that job is trying to drill into programmer's heads the concept that performing to spec when used as directed is not sufficient.
electric bikes don't make much, if any sense. You add a bunch of weight for a little added torque.
Take your money and buy a recumbent - get a more efficient drive train and a more comfortable seat and a better view. Plus people will shout out "Cool!" instead of muttering "Man, what a sissy, can't even pedal for himself!"
If you're cheap you can get a Cycle Genius CGX or a Sun EZ-1 or one of the China Mascot imports (google for 'actionbent' or 'tsunami t-2') for about $500-600.
On a wedgie the maximum force you can apply to the pedals is roughly what gravity can give you. On a 'bent you're pushing between the seat and the pedals. All the bicycle speed records were set with recumbents.
I started riding a short wheel base recumbent about a week ago, and I'm never going back to a wedgie. Haven't mounted my cyclocomputer yet, so I dunno what to say about my average speed.
If it's switched, and it's between the users, then they can each get 100Mbps to each other. To the "main server", whatever that may be, they do share 100Mbps, though.
Obviously you've never tried to manage a large scale switched network! And by large i mean several miles.
No matter how nice your switch is - even uber-expensive Alteon switches - the backplane is NEVER what they say it is. Ever. Ever ever.
I've worked at an experimental isp that delivered 100mbps to the home. I've worked at a testing lab that performend throughput analysis on high end switching gear. ten people on ten ports of a 100mbps switch will not get 100mbps to eachother. ever. Not ever. Hasn't happened yet. Won't.
Yeah, they *say they have various gigabits on the backplane. Whatever.
Worse yet, it's never just you and nine other people. And due to the effects of broadcast radiation, and the cold hard truths about ethernet, even on super special hardware you rarely see more than 70% efficiency on switched ethernet in real actual real-world implementations that allow people to get done what they need to get done.
As for the 54mbps wireless - Not a damn one of you will get 54mbps. Even one person on a 54mbps wireless network won't get 54mbps. The overhead in the physical layer and the signalling properties of rf end up meaning that the best case scenario is 27mbps.
The problem with wireless, above and beyond that, is that you're back to a totally broadcasted network, and there is nothing you can do about it short of giving every station it's own frequency.
so, ten people on a hub trying to talk to eachother at full speed. Yeah. Zippy.
I don't like heinlein, for example, because he writes like a well-spoken simpleton (despite the veracity of his scienfic references) and because I find his ideas trite and repetitive.
(perhaps i'm being harsh - I don't not enjoy heinlein, but he's not all that either)
Re-reading Solaris is probably unwarranted. I know i wouldn't. I'm glad i read it, but i don't feel like i should go back and see if i missed anything. But i also have so much more to read.
Fiasco is built on a similar premise, but is better written and easier to get through. And there is NO chance of Soderbergh writing in a chick who shouts "AND I'M NOT OK WITH THAT!" in a weak moment.
Some of the events in the book are a bit of a stretch, but i think Lem was basically saying, "ok, fine, lets say we overcome THAT impossibility . . . " -- it's also never understood just what the aliens *are, but the evidence of their existance and considerably advanced technology is unavoidable.
Solaris is about the futility of space travel, and about man facing the unknowable. In a lesser sense about K. facing his own concepts about his dead woman.
I agree that too much of it is spent with K. in the library reading other books. Found that weird. And a little boring.
The conciet of most space travel novels is that we meet another race and have something in common with them. Unless you buy into some sort of star-trek "we were all seeded by a single race" theory, the premise is fairly unlikely. Having evolved from a different start in a different place, and having advanced with different needs and goals in a different environment, it is fairly unlikely that humans have any concepts in common with extraterrestrial races. Best case scenario maybe the desire for self-preservation. Unless they've never had a problem preserving themselves.
But that's ok, because the underlying archetype of the journey novel is man-seeking-himself. And solaris follows this somewhat as well.
So in Solaris we have a future where, having searched far and wide, we haven't found anything vaguely like 'life'. As close as we ever got was a planet with orbital characteristics that can only mean that the planet changes it's own orbit, the complexity of which can only mean that it actually means to.
But it's just covered by a big, weird, plasmic ocean with bizarre characteristics. all efforts at 'interaction' have failed.
I like the old movie better than the new movie. Well, the new movie made me pretty angry, probably because the screenwriter only understood the book on the level you do.
Hard Sci-fi, to most people, means an emphasis on the science part (ok sometimes engineering). Asimov,Niven, Heinlein, Hal Clement, Allan Steele, Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars Trilogy).
Slashdot Mirror
Tell it to the florist i know who registered 18 different domain names and put up six different websites for his 1 business and stuffed them silly with keywords.
It's total and utter bullflop, and it works. And we hate him for it . . .
Does anybody know if current CVS of MythTV is usable, and if so, does it still thoroughly suck for ATSC?
I spent days getting 0.18.1 working with my PCHDTV card only to find that the mpeg demuxer is right next door to non-functional and it had a tendency to crash if it accidentally caught wind of an encrypted stream, which are ubiquitous on my local airwaves.
It was a total PITA to use and i was actually more comfortable tuning manually and using mplayer. At least mplayer's demuxer isn't all choppy on an Athlon64-3500.
So i asked around on the irc channel and found out, yeah that's basically the state of things.
The OpenSuSE server has been sucking wind for weeks, and i know for a fact that trouble tickets have been submitted about it within Novell.
Maybe they were just trying to lend a hand with the administration . . . .
This is guaranteed not to conserve energy.
There is mountains of data that shows that if it's light out, more people are driving.
Extending DST so that there are more daylight hours in the evening is guaranteed to increase the number of cars on the road during those hours.
What about Smoots?
Only a really topheavy organization can make this kind of mistake.
The compatibility ABI isn't going to pass muster when it hits the QA phase, they never do. You can't realistically develop an application for one OS and expect it to work perfectly on a "compatible" OS.
When developing vertical applications like this, it's most wise to develop for the actual physical installation that it's going to end up running on. Not just the *version, the actual functioning OS image that will ultimately be used.
There's a term for what this is gonna end up being. The first part is cluster and the last part rhymes with truck.
Professional archivists tend to recommend that data be turned over onto new media every 5 years regardless of how well it's weathering the years.
But the truth is that, paradoxically, the most critical data tends to be the least likely to be refreshed, because access to it is typically quite limited.
Our own department of defense doesn't know where it stashed all of it's nuclear materials over the years. Why? because they recorded it on a magnetic tape, put the tape in a vault, and had someone stand in front of the vault with a gun for 40 years, and now the tape has turned to goo, and in other cases the tape seems readable but there is no technology available to read it.
We should always strive for and recommend rigorous archival policies, but we should also strive for media that can possibly withstand the ages should some knucklehead put it in a concrete box or just forget about it completely for a few decades instead.
Funny thing is i was arguing with a photoshop wonk about this just last week. It seems that when it first surfaced, it was 'debunked' by end-users on worth1000.com.
Levin et al were published by ACM more than a year ago.
Some criticism: Their website only shows images that show the strength of their method. They don't show any examples of it's weaknesses, and it does have some.
A much more interesting website would be this one:
http://mountains.ece.umn.edu/~liron/colorization/
A similar technique, a comparison with the levin et al method, images that show how both techniques sometimes don't work so well, and a nifty java applet so you can try it yourself.
Both of these techniques, however, seem to depend on a good quality grayscale image. This is paradoxical because the emphasis in colorization has been old film. A lot of that stuff is coarser, and higher contrast, than any of these images. Silver oxide without any dyes added has a big spike in it's color sensitivity for blue light, as well, so what tone you do have to work with is maybe not going to be correct.
While out here in utah, they're tearing up the streets as fast as they can to lay fiber for the new Utopia Network! (Except in provo, where they want to have their /own/ network, apart from the rest of the state. loosers.)
The Beach Boys didn't use a theremin. In fact, there's some hilarious footage of Brian Wilson exhibiting how entirely incompetent he is at playing one in that documentary. He makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't know how it works.
The Beach Boys used an instrument that's referred to variously as a Tannerin, Electro-Theremin, or Slide-Theremin. It's nothing like a Theremin because it requires actual electrical contact to function, where a Theremin doesn't work if you touch it.
Read about it here:
http://www.tompolk.com/Tannerin/Tannerin.html
Oliver Messiaen recorded 'Oraison" in 1937, 10 years before these guys. It's quite nice, actually.
They were important and all, but they were hardly the first.
Heck, Lev Termin patented the Theremin in 1927, when the Barrons were little kids.
You can find a lot of this stuff on a 3-disc set called "OHM" variously "Early Gurus of Electronic Music" or "History of Electronic Music" but always OHM, afaik.
Here's a shameless plug for EAR-Rational Music, the guys i bought my copy from. google for 'em.
Both the publisher and the authors are correct. PublishAmerica is just a vanity publisher, and nearly all scifi authors are lazy talentless hacks.
Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction author himself, said it much more eloquently years ago in an essay that got him kicked out of his honorary membership in SFWA in 1976.
May as well.
I've got no management experience, but I've worked for enough people, good (rarely) and bad (mostly) that i've identified what i like.
The superhero of middle management is my former boss, Ron, at a now-utterly-defunct embedded linux vendor.
Ron was Not A Programmer. He wasn't even technically speaking a geek, except in the strict jargon file definition. He was an old HAM operator and a former QA manager for various semiconductor fabrication facilities. He was managing a bunch of software QA people, me among them.
So, this was the basis of his attitude:
"As your manager, I am a man who is not competent to do your job, someone who, in fact, has only a cursory understanding of how you do your job.
What i need from you is for you to get your work done. How i intend to make that happen is by making sure:
a: You know what your job is
b: You know what your priorities are
c: You have everything you need to get the job done
d: Nobody will get in the way of your doing it, even if i have to jump in front of the bullet for you."
It was great. If people from other departments interfered with my work, Ron got on their case for it and hasseled their supervisor about it - so people from other departments rarely hassled me.
I knew exactly what my #1, #2, and #3 projects were, when they were due, and what was expected from them.
This rocked. If you've ever caught flack for not delivering something that you were never given any sense of urgency about, you can appreciate this.
If i needed anything - a particular cable, a memory module of a certain type, more clarification from marketing or engineering exactly what they wanted from me, an OK to take the rest of the day off if i was getting nowhere fast, heck, a sandwitch, Ron was on it.
I probably could have asked to take his daughter out to dinner and he wouldn't have said no right away.
Ron wouldn't make me work late unless he was working late too. Often this meant that he was in the office doing nothing important, so he'd fetch dinner and send flowers to the significant others. I'm serious.
If Ron was cutting out early before a holiday, he'd send me home first.
So, it was like this. I was certain - absolutely certain - that Ron would do whatever it took to make sure i could do a good job at what he'd asked me to do.
And, lets face it, that's what job satisfaction is all about.
I was entirely sure that Ron wouldn't ask me to do something unless it honestly needed to be done. That he would never bullshit me or sell me out.
I had no doubts about the fact that if upper management asked him to have us do something that he felt was unreasonable, he'd do whatever he could to talk them out of it.
So, whatever Ron wanted, Ron got. He treated us like princes and in return we exaulted him as our king. I'd work for him again in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure I'd even ask what the job was.
The article says that the NSA failed as well, but, honestly, the NSA wouldn't say if they had.
They probably have, long ago, and just don't tell anybody. They're probably chuckling about it right now.
I know this is going to come as a shock to all of you, but dynamic ram doesn't get hot. It doesn't need a heat sink or heat spreader.
Technically, dynamic ram doesn't even consume electricity, let alone dissipate it as heat. The power consumption of the actual memory cells is essentially zero.
The row and collumn drivers do consume some small amount of power, and in theory, a 'heat spreader' would help even out the temperature across the chip.
Except, remember, this is dynamic ram, which means that every row and collumn is refreshed in unison whether or not it's in use, so every row and collumn is generating the same tiny amount of heat, so the distribution is entirely even.
Someone please point me at test results that show any thermal advantage to sticking some copper or aluminum to my 400mhz ram. Everything I've seen indicates that the temperature of the dimms is within 1 degree of the ambient temperature inside the case with or without 'cooling' devices.
Ricoh had this in 2001, on one of their high end cameras - it had two full-blown PCMCIA slots.
I was peripherally involved with a proposed project to port it's embedded software from vxworks to linux. It never got off the ground, because Ricoh US wanted it to happen but Ricoh Japan didn't. Ricoh US only had the documentation in japanese, but they wanted our US division and not our japan division to do it.
The deal was all messed up. But a very nice camera. We were sad to box it up and send it back after about, what, a year or more of back and forth.
I hear they're thinking about putting cell phones in cameras now . . . .
Why do i get the impression that it's bad at showing shades of blue?
Face recognition software has never worked. And by that i mean that it has never caught a criminal. Ever. It's never happened.
Funny thing is, it's not a new concept. Before the advent of fingerprinting, law enforcement in a number of countries used a hand measured set of facial metrics to identify criminals.
One of the events that precipitated widespread fingerprinting was a day when a guy was picked up for being a shady character who looked just like a guy on a wanted poster. They get him in, start measuring features on his face. Everything is lining up, then one of the guards says, "Hey, I know this guy" - and realizes that they already have this guy in custody, has been in for years.
At that point, when they had evidence of the fallability of their facial recognition system right there in the same prison, there was a loss of confidence, and a need for a better system.
"Part of that job is trying to drill into programmer's heads the concept that performing to spec when used as directed is not sufficient."
/dev/null.
Can you give an example of what you mean by this? It sounds like you give them a spec and tell them not to follow it.
It is also required that a program not behave badly when abused. At worst an abused program should cry "No mas!" and fall over. Preferably it should elegantly decline to perform and return to a ready-to-work state.
When a program instead does something unexpected when operated outside of spec that's a bug, and it shouldn't do it.
The simplest example is corrupt data. I've seen network applications getting hung up on corrupt UDP packets, for example, and a video decoder that hung the system by taking a damaged stream and delivering invalid frames to the buffer instead of dropping them in
"Garbage in, garbage out" is an invalid assertion. Software should detect and reject (or ignore) garbage. More like "Garbage offered, garbage not accepted, and user appropriately scolded"
If you want to build that into the spec, I'm all for it, but the "It's not required by the spec" argument won't get the test goon off your back.
The article is a bunch of malarky. Well, I suspect it is, but i stopped after the first couple paragraphs, after I read this:
Last month, a system that controls communications between commercial jets and air traffic controllers in southern California shut off because some maintenance had not been performed.
Yeah. That maintenance they failed to perform? It was their mandated once-a-month reboot of their windows system, because it locks up after 43 days.
This was the result of bad programming.
Anyway, as a QA guy, I can assure you that bad programming abounds. It's my job to make sure you never see it. Part of that job is trying to drill into programmer's heads the concept that performing to spec when used as directed is not sufficient.
electric bikes don't make much, if any sense. You add a bunch of weight for a little added torque.
Take your money and buy a recumbent - get a more efficient drive train and a more comfortable seat and a better view. Plus people will shout out "Cool!" instead of muttering "Man, what a sissy, can't even pedal for himself!"
If you're cheap you can get a Cycle Genius CGX or a Sun EZ-1 or one of the China Mascot imports (google for 'actionbent' or 'tsunami t-2') for about $500-600.
On a wedgie the maximum force you can apply to the pedals is roughly what gravity can give you. On a 'bent you're pushing between the seat and the pedals. All the bicycle speed records were set with recumbents.
I started riding a short wheel base recumbent about a week ago, and I'm never going back to a wedgie. Haven't mounted my cyclocomputer yet, so I dunno what to say about my average speed.
If it's switched, and it's between the users, then they can each get 100Mbps to each other. To the "main server", whatever that may be, they do share 100Mbps, though.
Obviously you've never tried to manage a large scale switched network! And by large i mean several miles.
No matter how nice your switch is - even uber-expensive Alteon switches - the backplane is NEVER what they say it is. Ever. Ever ever.
I've worked at an experimental isp that delivered 100mbps to the home. I've worked at a testing lab that performend throughput analysis on high end switching gear. ten people on ten ports of a 100mbps switch will not get 100mbps to eachother. ever. Not ever. Hasn't happened yet. Won't.
Yeah, they *say they have various gigabits on the backplane. Whatever.
Worse yet, it's never just you and nine other people. And due to the effects of broadcast radiation, and the cold hard truths about ethernet, even on super special hardware you rarely see more than 70% efficiency on switched ethernet in real actual real-world implementations that allow people to get done what they need to get done.
As for the 54mbps wireless - Not a damn one of you will get 54mbps. Even one person on a 54mbps wireless network won't get 54mbps. The overhead in the physical layer and the signalling properties of rf end up meaning that the best case scenario is 27mbps.
The problem with wireless, above and beyond that, is that you're back to a totally broadcasted network, and there is nothing you can do about it short of giving every station it's own frequency.
so, ten people on a hub trying to talk to eachother at full speed. Yeah. Zippy.
Ah. Perhaps i am just misusing the term "hard".
I don't like heinlein, for example, because he writes like a well-spoken simpleton (despite the veracity of his scienfic references) and because I find his ideas trite and repetitive.
(perhaps i'm being harsh - I don't not enjoy heinlein, but he's not all that either)
Re-reading Solaris is probably unwarranted. I know i wouldn't. I'm glad i read it, but i don't feel like i should go back and see if i missed anything. But i also have so much more to read.
Fiasco is built on a similar premise, but is better written and easier to get through. And there is NO chance of Soderbergh writing in a chick who shouts "AND I'M NOT OK WITH THAT!" in a weak moment.
Some of the events in the book are a bit of a stretch, but i think Lem was basically saying, "ok, fine, lets say we overcome THAT impossibility . . . " -- it's also never understood just what the aliens *are, but the evidence of their existance and considerably advanced technology is unavoidable.
Then you're not paying attention.
Solaris is about the futility of space travel, and about man facing the unknowable. In a lesser sense about K. facing his own concepts about his dead woman.
I agree that too much of it is spent with K. in the library reading other books. Found that weird. And a little boring.
The conciet of most space travel novels is that we meet another race and have something in common with them. Unless you buy into some sort of star-trek "we were all seeded by a single race" theory, the premise is fairly unlikely. Having evolved from a different start in a different place, and having advanced with different needs and goals in a different environment, it is fairly unlikely that humans have any concepts in common with extraterrestrial races. Best case scenario maybe the desire for self-preservation. Unless they've never had a problem preserving themselves.
But that's ok, because the underlying archetype of the journey novel is man-seeking-himself. And solaris follows this somewhat as well.
So in Solaris we have a future where, having searched far and wide, we haven't found anything vaguely like 'life'. As close as we ever got was a planet with orbital characteristics that can only mean that the planet changes it's own orbit, the complexity of which can only mean that it actually means to.
But it's just covered by a big, weird, plasmic ocean with bizarre characteristics. all efforts at 'interaction' have failed.
I like the old movie better than the new movie. Well, the new movie made me pretty angry, probably because the screenwriter only understood the book on the level you do.
Go read Fiasco, or His Master's Voice.
Aw, forget it. go read your precious asimov.
Hard Sci-fi, to most people, means an emphasis on the science part (ok sometimes engineering). Asimov,Niven, Heinlein, Hal Clement, Allan Steele, Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars Trilogy).
Heinlein. Bah.