On the other hand, stuff like DeCSS which enables a person to make backups of their DVDs has a less direct effect upon other users. It can still cause problems with piracy and such but it's not going to suddenly make everyone's DVDs unusable.
True. In fact, deCSS made a lot of people's DVDs usable.
Remember those times where it was terribly annoying or even impossible to
play DVDs on non-Windows computers?
Blu-Ray is still in this state. Not being able to play BRs on my computers is
actually the reason why I still haven't bought a BR drive and not a single BR disc.
Congratulations to the MAFIAA for successfully preventing me from giving them my money.
Actually, when Apollo 11 landed and announced, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed", mission managers were initially confused because they'd never heard the phrase "Tranquility Base" in training. Neal threw that in as a surprise. That teaser, Neal.
Who? I thought there were only two of them, Neil and Edwin.
Ideally, a device would get a static IPv6 address assigned to it and keep it forever, no matter where it roamed and went. It'd be akin to a routable MAC address. However, if we do that, we'll run out of IPv6 addresses more quickly (though still not fast), since things like phones get recycled fairly frequently.
Ummm... you don't really grasp the vastness of the IPv6 address space, do you?
It doesn't seem to work that well. I know for sure that my browser's UA string is globally unique - and am still
told that one in 4316 browsers will have that UA string.
We can simply return a product and demand money back, without reason.
No we can't.
That's an EU law.
No it isn't.
There are some cases with some classes of products or some
form of trade where rights similar to this exist, but there is no universal bring-back-within-14-days-and-you-get-your-money-back law.
I read a very intersting article about IT at the south pole a while ago. One of the most surprising facts:
They need extra large fans to cool their servers. The Amundsen-Scott station is alomst 3000m above sea level,
which means rather thin air - so they need a higher throughput to achieve the same cooling capacity than a
data center at more usal elevations.
The cold outside temperature means no real need for AC, but doesn't help too much in terms of cooling power:
The difference between 295K and 250K isn't that big and outweighed by the lower air density.
Take flight. There are two ways to do it - be lighter than air,
Airship.
or equal your weight with thrust.
Rocket.
Unless we find some way to modify gravity, that's it.
Right. Wouldn't it be awesome if it were somehow possible to use the dynamic properties of the medium
you move through to generate some sort of supporting force? That might even make it possible to create flying
machines with less thrust than their mass. Woohoo, let me patent that immediately!
Huh? What do you mean, airplanes?
Ah, well, thanks for confirming that it doesn't. Did you even read what you linked to?
"[...]Formerly, the specification recommended ('should') support for Theora video and Vorbis audio encapsulated in Ogg containers.[...]"
The final version of the spec doesn't any more, see "HTML5 turns neutral" in your wikipedia article.
Yes, using theora/vorbis in an ogg container is allowed in HTML5. However, it is not mandatory,
and clients don't have to implement it to conform to the spec. It is possible to completely adhere to
the current HTML5 specs with H.264 video.
Yes, in the past, NASA was crazy-careful, but that was more around the Apollo era of things.
I'm sorry, but you should really read up on your NASA history again. "crazy" does indeed apply
to a lot of things they did back then. "careful" - not so much.
The first manned Apollo mission for example, Apollo 8, was done after a pretty much failed unmanned
test flight of a Saturn V (Apollo 6) - and was only the third Saturn V launch ever.
Now imagine a situation like that for the Shuttle successor, a launcher that relies heavily on previous
experience - something the Apollo guys didn't have: First launch with dummy payload goes OK, second launch
with the real thing fails miserably. Would you expect the third launch to be manned?
Apollo-NASA was thorough, very professional, highly innovative, and concentrated on getting things done.
The risks were known, and everyone involved accepted them as part of doing what they were doing. This included accepting
"we might go boom", knowing that the engineers involved did the best they could to prevent known sources of boom, while
still being unable to prevent unknown ones.
Note that both Shuttle losses fall under the "known sources" category, something I believe would not have happened with
Apollo-NASA - not because of them being more careful, but because of them being more competent:
They actually listened to the engineers, and trusted their judgements, all the way down to the subcontractors.
Today, even a remote possibility of boom is considered unacceptable.
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.
Doing fsck runs is just not worth it for them. One of the first contributions from google to the ext4
driver was the possibility to run ext4 volumes without journaling: All the performance benefits of ext4,
none of the performance penalties of journaling.
If there is (possible) FS corruption, they just rebuild it from scratch from another copy of the data.
This comes from Ted T'so's FOSDEM09 keynote BTW. Very interesting talk.
I see quite many people here recommending ext3. Oh my. ext3 sucks for large files,
which is exactly what the submitter wants to use his setup for. Look into the crazy structures
("double indirect blocks") it uses. He should go with an FS that has sane data structures with
files >>4GB.
That kills most of the choices and leaves XFS, ext4, ZFS (only worth it if not used via FUSE,
i.e. in Solaris), and a couple more obscure ones.
I second the "forget OS portability, use a server" suggestion. There's great low-power, low-cost
hardware for this nowadays.
I could make the outrageous claim that I am currently consuming 12 gigabytes of data per second, based on my monitor's resolution and refresh rate.
I highly doubt that.
12GB/s = 103 079 215 104 (assuming binary GB).
Also assuming an outrageously advanced display using 16bit per color channel and a refresh rate of 120Hz,
(which I'm not sure even exists) this gives us 17 895 697 (.1) pixel, or the equivalent of more than four
30" displays with 2560x1600 pixel. What kind of display are you using exactly?
Also, dual link DVI carries a maximum of 1.2GB/s.
So maybe all my math was useless and you just forgot a decimal point...
First of all I wonder why you always use the term "censorship" if it is clearly not appropriated?
The law is about blocking a web site, that was found distributing child porn.
Not quite. The law is about establishing a nationwide site-blocking infrastructure at ISPs. Which sites are to be
blocked is supposed be decided by the BKA (federal police - roughly comparable to the FBI) without involvement
of a judge or any further oversight, and of course the blocking list is to be kept secret, because it could be misused
as a "shopping list" by evildoers.
Additionally, the first version of the law had a logging provision, where the detection of somebody trying to access
one of those blocked sites would be probable cause for investigating the person for certain crimes. I believe this was dropped,
but you get the idea...
This law is about much, much more than just child porn.
The Federal Cross of Merit is both the most prestigious as well as the only general decoration awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Wouldn't that also make it the least prestigious general decoration?
Yeah, that's worded weirdly.
It is the only federal award, making it the most prestigious amongst all (federal + non-federal - there's lots of those) official German state awards.
It has multiple classes however, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Cross_of_Merit I can't find any reference to which
one was awarded to Mr. Ettrich - I'd suspect it to be one of the not-so-high ones however.
This has been done 13(!) years ago by Mercedes Benz already, in their F 200 concept car.
It was entirely drive-by-wire using a sidestick for acceleration and braking too.
Interesting detail: Accelerating and braking was done by measuring the force applied
forwards and backwards on the stick without moving the stick, so the only dimension
in wich the stick actually moved was laterally for steering.
I've talked to people who have driven the thing, and apparently this worked very well.
The decoupling of the steering controls from external influences was actually seen as a
feature: The stick defined a steering angle, and the actual steering was handled by
the electronics, correcting for bumps or rough underground as needed. This made for
smooth driving and steering even on wet cobblestone pavement.
Yeah. For about half a week. Helium has the smallest "gas particles" there are - Hydrogen atoms would
be smaller, but those really like to bond, and an H_2 molecule is quite a bit larger than a Helium atom
That's why He leaks out of everything. No exception. It diffuses through "leakproof" welds for vacuum tanks.
It diffuses through the steel walls of tanks (albeit more slowly). That's also why He is used in leakage detection:
If you see less than $not_so_few He atoms on the outside of the container you test within a couple of seconds after
you injected a little bit of He, the container is considered airtight.
The only way to keep a HE atmosphere in your drive would be to constantly refill it. I don't think that there'll be any
scenario where this would seem like an even remotely good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, stuff like DeCSS which enables a person to make backups of their DVDs has a less direct effect upon other users. It can still cause problems with piracy and such but it's not going to suddenly make everyone's DVDs unusable.
True. In fact, deCSS made a lot of people's DVDs usable.
Remember those times where it was terribly annoying or even impossible to
play DVDs on non-Windows computers?
Blu-Ray is still in this state. Not being able to play BRs on my computers is
actually the reason why I still haven't bought a BR drive and not a single BR disc.
Congratulations to the MAFIAA for successfully preventing me from giving them my money.
Actually, when Apollo 11 landed and announced, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed", mission managers were initially confused because they'd never heard the phrase "Tranquility Base" in training. Neal threw that in as a surprise. That teaser, Neal.
Who? I thought there were only two of them, Neil and Edwin.
NASA is the only organization in the world that can do what it did, manned exploration of the universe.
DID? The universe?
What NASA has been doing so far was manned exploration of the front porch. And not even all of it.
Cardboard with OLED.
Nope. Very misleading headline and cardboard under a projector.
Ideally, a device would get a static IPv6 address assigned to it and keep it forever, no matter where it roamed and went. It'd be akin to a routable MAC address. However, if we do that, we'll run out of IPv6 addresses more quickly (though still not fast), since things like phones get recycled fairly frequently.
Ummm... you don't really grasp the vastness of the IPv6 address space, do you?
I always loved the pause in JFK's original speech:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.. <pause while JFK thinks> and do the other things.. (?)
Except that he didn't pause there. Listen to the original recording, 8:40.
It doesn't seem to work that well. I know for sure that my browser's UA string is globally unique - and am still
told that one in 4316 browsers will have that UA string.
We can simply return a product and demand money back, without reason.
No we can't.
That's an EU law.
No it isn't.
There are some cases with some classes of products or some
form of trade where rights similar to this exist, but
there is no universal bring-back-within-14-days-and-you-get-your-money-back law.
I read a very intersting article about IT at the south pole a while ago. One of the most surprising facts:
They need extra large fans to cool their servers. The Amundsen-Scott station is alomst 3000m above sea level,
which means rather thin air - so they need a higher throughput to achieve the same cooling capacity than a
data center at more usal elevations.
The cold outside temperature means no real need for AC, but doesn't help too much in terms of cooling power:
The difference between 295K and 250K isn't that big and outweighed by the lower air density.
Take flight. There are two ways to do it - be lighter than air,
Airship.
or equal your weight with thrust.
Rocket.
Unless we find some way to modify gravity, that's it.
Right. Wouldn't it be awesome if it were somehow possible to use the dynamic properties of the medium
you move through to generate some sort of supporting force? That might even make it possible to create flying
machines with less thrust than their mass. Woohoo, let me patent that immediately!
Huh? What do you mean, airplanes?
Too bad HTML5 specifies Ogg Theora [...]
No it doesn't.
Yes, yes it does.
Ah, well, thanks for confirming that it doesn't. Did you even read what you linked to?
"[...]Formerly, the specification recommended ('should') support for Theora video and Vorbis audio encapsulated in Ogg containers.[...]"
The final version of the spec doesn't any more, see "HTML5 turns neutral" in your wikipedia article.
Yes, using theora/vorbis in an ogg container is allowed in HTML5. However, it is not mandatory,
and clients don't have to implement it to conform to the spec. It is possible to completely adhere to
the current HTML5 specs with H.264 video.
... a quick google shows present tapes take between 25-50 passes to fill a tape at ~7 minutes per pass, god that's slow.
Slow? 35TB, 50 passes, 7 minutes per pass: 1.6GB/s (using decimal prefixes of course...)
I doubt it'll be that fast in practice, but slow it isn't.
Yes, in the past, NASA was crazy-careful, but that was more around the Apollo era of things.
I'm sorry, but you should really read up on your NASA history again. "crazy" does indeed apply
to a lot of things they did back then. "careful" - not so much.
The first manned Apollo mission for example, Apollo 8, was done after a pretty much failed unmanned
test flight of a Saturn V (Apollo 6) - and was only the third Saturn V launch ever.
Now imagine a situation like that for the Shuttle successor, a launcher that relies heavily on previous
experience - something the Apollo guys didn't have: First launch with dummy payload goes OK, second launch
with the real thing fails miserably. Would you expect the third launch to be manned?
Apollo-NASA was thorough, very professional, highly innovative, and concentrated on getting things done.
The risks were known, and everyone involved accepted them as part of doing what they were doing. This included accepting
"we might go boom", knowing that the engineers involved did the best they could to prevent known sources of boom, while
still being unable to prevent unknown ones.
Note that both Shuttle losses fall under the "known sources" category, something I believe would not have happened with
Apollo-NASA - not because of them being more careful, but because of them being more competent:
They actually listened to the engineers, and trusted their judgements, all the way down to the subcontractors.
Today, even a remote possibility of boom is considered unacceptable.
Too bad HTML5 specifies Ogg Theora [...]
No it doesn't.
9150m are 30 019.685ft - so I presume the original source said
"up to about 30k feet", which obviously is an approximate number.
Although I salute the conversion to sensible units, the precision implied
is absolutely arbitrary.
"Up to about 9000m" is the number to give.
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.
Doing fsck runs is just not worth it for them. One of the first contributions from google to the ext4
driver was the possibility to run ext4 volumes without journaling: All the performance benefits of ext4,
none of the performance penalties of journaling.
If there is (possible) FS corruption, they just rebuild it from scratch from another copy of the data.
This comes from Ted T'so's FOSDEM09 keynote BTW. Very interesting talk.
[...]Find a port when you're somewhere random in an ocean?
LORAN is pretty much useless for this. What almost everyone here seems to be missing is:
LORAN coverage is very limited.
There's e.g. none at all on the southern hemisphere, and in the northern it isn't much more than
a coastal navigation help either.
Have a look at the map.
LORAN is in no way a useful backup for GPS except in a very small part of the oceans.
I see quite many people here recommending ext3. Oh my. ext3 sucks for large files,
which is exactly what the submitter wants to use his setup for. Look into the crazy structures
("double indirect blocks") it uses. He should go with an FS that has sane data structures with
files >>4GB.
That kills most of the choices and leaves XFS, ext4, ZFS (only worth it if not used via FUSE,
i.e. in Solaris), and a couple more obscure ones.
I second the "forget OS portability, use a server" suggestion. There's great low-power, low-cost
hardware for this nowadays.
I could make the outrageous claim that I am currently consuming 12 gigabytes of data per second, based on my monitor's resolution and refresh rate.
I highly doubt that.
12GB/s = 103 079 215 104 (assuming binary GB).
Also assuming an outrageously advanced display using 16bit per color channel and a refresh rate of 120Hz,
(which I'm not sure even exists) this gives us 17 895 697 (.1) pixel, or the equivalent of more than four
30" displays with 2560x1600 pixel. What kind of display are you using exactly?
Also, dual link DVI carries a maximum of 1.2GB/s.
So maybe all my math was useless and you just forgot a decimal point...
First of all I wonder why you always use the term "censorship" if it is clearly not appropriated?
The law is about blocking a web site, that was found distributing child porn.
Not quite. The law is about establishing a nationwide site-blocking infrastructure at ISPs. Which sites are to be
blocked is supposed be decided by the BKA (federal police - roughly comparable to the FBI) without involvement
of a judge or any further oversight, and of course the blocking list is to be kept secret, because it could be misused
as a "shopping list" by evildoers.
Additionally, the first version of the law had a logging provision, where the detection of somebody trying to access
one of those blocked sites would be probable cause for investigating the person for certain crimes. I believe this was dropped,
but you get the idea...
This law is about much, much more than just child porn.
The Federal Cross of Merit is both the most prestigious as well as the only general decoration awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Wouldn't that also make it the least prestigious general decoration?
Yeah, that's worded weirdly.
It is the only federal award, making it the most prestigious amongst all (federal + non-federal - there's lots of those) official German state awards.
It has multiple classes however, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Cross_of_Merit I can't find any reference to which
one was awarded to Mr. Ettrich - I'd suspect it to be one of the not-so-high ones however.
There is no "Neil" in Bohr. He's Danish: His Name is Niels Bohr, Niels Henrik David Bohr. Seriously, people...
No, General Failure screwed up once too often...
This has been done 13(!) years ago by Mercedes Benz already, in their F 200 concept car.
It was entirely drive-by-wire using a sidestick for acceleration and braking too.
Interesting detail: Accelerating and braking was done by measuring the force applied
forwards and backwards on the stick without moving the stick, so the only dimension
in wich the stick actually moved was laterally for steering.
I've talked to people who have driven the thing, and apparently this worked very well.
The decoupling of the steering controls from external influences was actually seen as a
feature: The stick defined a steering angle, and the actual steering was handled by
the electronics, correcting for bumps or rough underground as needed. This made for
smooth driving and steering even on wet cobblestone pavement.
Filling the drive with helium should help;
Yeah. For about half a week. Helium has the smallest "gas particles" there are - Hydrogen atoms would
be smaller, but those really like to bond, and an H_2 molecule is quite a bit larger than a Helium atom
That's why He leaks out of everything. No exception. It diffuses through "leakproof" welds for vacuum tanks.
It diffuses through the steel walls of tanks (albeit more slowly). That's also why He is used in leakage detection:
If you see less than $not_so_few He atoms on the outside of the container you test within a couple of seconds after you injected a little bit of He, the container is considered airtight.
The only way to keep a HE atmosphere in your drive would be to constantly refill it. I don't think that there'll be any scenario where this would seem like an even remotely good idea.