Re:Why not make ONE game...
on
Online Game Cluster
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>That uses all CPU resources of a cluster, and leap 10 years into the future?
Hmm, that is a good idea. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, 10 years would be seven cycles of Moore's law. Which means we are roughly dealing with a 128 times increase in CPU power. A cluster computer will waste much of its CPU time, so let's say we'd need 256 modern computers to do what you want.
Not something the average person could do, it is the sort of thing that a bored university student with access to a lab of computers could do...
>Fact is, all security is obscurity. Security rests on the notion of a shared secret. Some key that both you and the other guy know.
Wrong. The security guard at the bank who's holding a rather impressive weapon isn't the slightest bit obscure. The security he provides is based on not being obscure.
>I don't know who started it - but I find it very odd that browsers send referer info by default. Why? It does not provide anything extra for the user but problems.
It is extremely useful for security purposes.
No, not the security most people are thinking of. Checking to see if the user came from FeedBack.html before executing FormMail.pl is no security, since spammers can forge any referer they want.
I'm talking about security which stops a human user who is logged in to a particular website from being tricked into performing actions they didn't authorise. For instance: I log into my server's adminsitrative area. Then, in another window, I browse someone's blog. And I click on their "search" button. As it turns out, this search button is a trap, which sends me to my own admin area with a command to delete someone's account. I'm logged in, I have a valid network address, I'm active, there's no problem. Except that fortunately my browser sends "Referer: www.blog.org" instead of "Referer: www.admin.com".
That's why referer info is useful: to prevent a user from being hijacked.
Shame on any politician for putting a picture of himself/herself/itself on web pages his/her/its department creates. Oh gosh, would you look at that, the author's placed a picture of himself at the bottom of his article.
>Why didn't they just make a client program for distributed computing so the entire country/world could help out?
Because there will always be creeps who won't play fair. Much of the work that SETI@home does is security, combatting those who would submit false or abreviated results in order to get higher stats. UofA want to do real computing on a variety of applications. They've concluded that it is more efficent (for their purposes) to go for a small pool whose results they can trust, than to go for a large pool whose results they have to check and double-check.
Each approach has significant advantages and disadvantages. It depends on the type of work you are interested in performing.
> It wouldn't work like that. Imagine that the copy of your mind is uploaded into a new body before you die. Do you think your consciousness would suddenly transfer to the new body? All the copying could do is create a new consciousness in the new body, your old one (ie, you) would still grow old and die in the old body, never to return.
> This is also the argument against Star Trek transporters. You die each time you use one but a new person is created at the other end that thinks it's you. You don't know anything about this, of course, you've just been disintegrated!
I don't have a problem with this. When I go to sleep, my current consciousness is discarded, and when I wake up a new consciousness (with all my memories) is created. This fact doesn't keep me awake at night.
There is also a plan afoot to drop the.net.uk second level domain by Christmas. Strong objections have been raised, but Nominet may not listen. It is scary to think that one's online identity (be it.su or.net.uk or something else) could be pulled out from under you. IMHO, if upper-level domains are to be scrapped, the existing ones should be grandfathered.
> Today's browsers (even the first SSL enabled browser, Netscape 2.0) recognized _dozens_ of certificate authorities. Besides Verisign and Thawte, there are RSA, Entrust, and others.
Ok, lets take a look. I have a freshly installed Windows 98 system here. What does IE4 come with:
Verisign (expires 2010)
Thawte (expires 2020)
Microsoft (expires 2020)
ATT (already expired)
GTE (already expired)
MCI (already expired)
Keywitness (already expired)
So, those are your options. That's why I'm sticking with Thawte for now.
> What I don't understand is why NASA hasn't tried a quick flyby using a shuttle. I mean once you're outside the atmosphere moving from Earth orbit to the moon is easy. Why not just rig some extra fuel for a shuttle and in the bay it could hold a lander of some kind.
I can answer this, having done the calculations just last week. The shuttle, fully loaded, could drag into low Earth orbit the Apollo versions of the Command Module and a Lunar Module. You'd need a second shuttle flight to bring up an Apollo version of the service module (this thing is heavy when fully fueled). Ok, so two shuttle flights give you everything? Nope, you also need two thirds of the Saturn V's third stage to get the rest into an Lunar injection orbit. And that is the equivalent payload of six more suttle flights.
So if you were to try this for real, you'd have to launch seven Titan rockets (equivalent payload of the Shuttle, but a bit cheaper and un-manned) with the high-risk fueled components, dock them all in LEO, then launch a Shuttle with the two crewed modules, dock, transfer the crew, and start your mission. A masive undertaking.
Most people don't realise just how astonishingly powerful the Saturn V rocket was. We don't have anything like that anymore.
Re:"Gaining speeds of up to 140mph"?
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 2
140mph? Is that right? It seems awfully slow to me. I would have thought that the terminal velocity of a car would have been much higher than that.
Keep in mind that the article said they remove the engine block. That would considerably reduce the mass, without affecting the surface area. Density goes down, and thus so does terminal velocity.
Huh? Why does that belong there? Not a single person died. Nobody was injured. Granted, it was a PR disaster.
I'd add the Nedelin Catastrophe to your list. October 24 1960. Over a hundred Soviet rocket scientists burned alive. Destroying the USSR's ability to compete in the Moon race. Imagine what space would be like today if the space race continued beyond the Moon...
Five years ago I was browsing my grandmother's telephone bill, and discovered that Bell Canada was charging her rent on her telephones. Over the past 25 years she had paid $1000 each on three telphones. They were returned that afternoon.
Next time you see an older telephone in Canada, flip it over and see if it has a "Property of Bell Canada" sticker on the bottom. If it does, warn its owner.
> I wonder what has become of Lockheed Martin's "Linear Aerospike" engine technology. When X-33 went down the tubes, LA engine tests continued. The results looked somewhat promising.
> Don't forget this older slashdot article that deals with the dangers of tidal power, namely that since it's the moon's gravitational pull that powers the tides, by harnessing them for power, we'll slow the moon down in its orbit, causing it to fall and crash into the earth.
And if you actually *read* any of the top-moderated posts on the article you linked to, you'll see that the Moon would do the exact opposite. As you tap tidal energy (which the Scottish power plant doesn't, it taps wave energy) the Moon is pushed further away. Concervation of angular momentum is Highschool physics folks...
>Anybody remember the lens repair mission? I had almost as much fun watching that as I did watching Alan Shepard's and John Glenn's first rides into space.
Unfortunately I'm of the post-Apollo generation. I would give a great deal to have been a part of those days. The consolation is that with luck I'll live to see a cheap air-breathing space launch system which will kick off a second golden age of space exploration.
As for that first repair mission you mentioned (STS-61), I'll never forget it. The live video of them throwing the defective solar array overboard, then watching it undulate and spin as it was hit by the shuttle's exhaust was unforgettable. Even the busy astronauts were awestruck. They just stood there and watched as it disappeared astern, then in an amazing demonstration of orbital mechanics, turned around and swept ahead of the shuttle.
The next day none of the news channels bothered showing more than a few seconds of that episode. And I've been unable to find it on the net. I wish we had greater access to NASA's archives, I'd love to see that again.
> What do you, as coders and programmers,
> want from your immediate manager?
The best manager I've ever had put in roughly the same hours I did. If he tasked me with a job that forced me to stay late, he'd stay late too and help out as best he could. He wasn't a programmer, but he'd find ways to be useful with QA, documentation, gopher, etc.
By contrast the worst managers I've had invariably kept regular office hours regardless of what the programmer(s) were up to. As a result they'd have no clue what was going on, they'd become adversarial, and they'd eventually loose our respect.
Don't sechedule meetings with your staff, spend real time with them.
> Absolutely not. Avoid that book like the plague.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be quite so energetic with my comments about Frank's "shoebox holography". He was (acording to him) the first person to use laser diodes. However the fact remains that his book hasn't aged well. As I said before, the main suplier for the plates has gone out of business. And in the mean time other people (such as Integraf) have come up with far simpler, easier and better methods. Whereas Frank uses a creaky assembly of threaded pipes, pipe ends, several spring clips, a lens, and a laser, Integraph gets much better results with just one laser, a clothes pin and a container of salt. Integraf's technique is so good that you don't even need a vibration isolation table!
Frank's "Shoebox Holography" may have been the bible of laser diode holography several years ago. But Integraf has rendered him obsolete.
> Laser pointer holography was originaly developed by Frank DeFreitas.
> You should buy his book
Absolutely not. Avoid that book like the plague. The supplier for his plates has gone out of business. The new supplier that took over manufacture of these plates describes Frank's technique as "crap". And it is.
I made the mistake of purchasing his book and trying to get results. He makes things far far more complicated than they need to be. By contrast, the integraf techiques (as linked to from the main/. article) are much simpler much cheaper and produce perfect holograms. I just finished making some stunning integraf holograms a couple of days ago.
A couple of days ago I just finished creating my first set of holograms based on their techniques. And I have to say that it was a lot of fun and turned out quite well. If you've never tried creating holograms, give it a shot. It takes a bit of time, but it is well worth it.
The only catch is that these holograms are only visible at a very narrow range of angles. Not just the two angles of rotation to your eye, but also the two angles of rotation to the point light source. So it can take a bit of fiddling before you suddenly see something. But when you do, it's very sharp and detailed.
Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have. This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk. Check your facts.
> or a higher circular orbit.
As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it. Check your facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that is a good idea. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, 10 years would be seven cycles of Moore's law. Which means we are roughly dealing with a 128 times increase in CPU power. A cluster computer will waste much of its CPU time, so let's say we'd need 256 modern computers to do what you want.
Not something the average person could do, it is the sort of thing that a bored university student with access to a lab of computers could do...
Wrong. The security guard at the bank who's holding a rather impressive weapon isn't the slightest bit obscure. The security he provides is based on not being obscure.
It is extremely useful for security purposes.
No, not the security most people are thinking of. Checking to see if the user came from FeedBack.html before executing FormMail.pl is no security, since spammers can forge any referer they want.
I'm talking about security which stops a human user who is logged in to a particular website from being tricked into performing actions they didn't authorise. For instance: I log into my server's adminsitrative area. Then, in another window, I browse someone's blog. And I click on their "search" button. As it turns out, this search button is a trap, which sends me to my own admin area with a command to delete someone's account. I'm logged in, I have a valid network address, I'm active, there's no problem. Except that fortunately my browser sends "Referer: www.blog.org" instead of "Referer: www.admin.com".
That's why referer info is useful: to prevent a user from being hijacked.
Shame on any politician for putting a picture of himself/herself/itself on web pages his/her/its department creates. Oh gosh, would you look at that, the author's placed a picture of himself at the bottom of his article.
Because there will always be creeps who won't play fair. Much of the work that SETI@home does is security, combatting those who would submit false or abreviated results in order to get higher stats. UofA want to do real computing on a variety of applications. They've concluded that it is more efficent (for their purposes) to go for a small pool whose results they can trust, than to go for a large pool whose results they have to check and double-check.
Each approach has significant advantages and disadvantages. It depends on the type of work you are interested in performing.
> This is also the argument against Star Trek transporters. You die each time you use one but a new person is created at the other end that thinks it's you. You don't know anything about this, of course, you've just been disintegrated!
I don't have a problem with this. When I go to sleep, my current consciousness is discarded, and when I wake up a new consciousness (with all my memories) is created. This fact doesn't keep me awake at night.
Good night. Sleep well...
There is also a plan afoot to drop the .net.uk second level domain by Christmas. Strong objections have been raised, but Nominet may not listen. It is scary to think that one's online identity (be it .su or .net.uk or something else) could be pulled out from under you. IMHO, if upper-level domains are to be scrapped, the existing ones should be grandfathered.
And for those who don't know what ELF is, and are too afraid to ask...
The Linux ELF HOWTO
Ok, lets take a look. I have a freshly installed Windows 98 system here. What does IE4 come with:
- Verisign (expires 2010)
- Thawte (expires 2020)
- Microsoft (expires 2020)
- ATT (already expired)
- GTE (already expired)
- MCI (already expired)
- Keywitness (already expired)
So, those are your options. That's why I'm sticking with Thawte for now.Read the article. It is only talking about keyword meta tags. There are lots of other types of meta tags. The Slashdot title is misleading.
I can answer this, having done the calculations just last week. The shuttle, fully loaded, could drag into low Earth orbit the Apollo versions of the Command Module and a Lunar Module. You'd need a second shuttle flight to bring up an Apollo version of the service module (this thing is heavy when fully fueled). Ok, so two shuttle flights give you everything? Nope, you also need two thirds of the Saturn V's third stage to get the rest into an Lunar injection orbit. And that is the equivalent payload of six more suttle flights.
So if you were to try this for real, you'd have to launch seven Titan rockets (equivalent payload of the Shuttle, but a bit cheaper and un-manned) with the high-risk fueled components, dock them all in LEO, then launch a Shuttle with the two crewed modules, dock, transfer the crew, and start your mission. A masive undertaking.
Most people don't realise just how astonishingly powerful the Saturn V rocket was. We don't have anything like that anymore.
Sanity from a coward? Mod the parent up!
Keep in mind that the article said they remove the engine block. That would considerably reduce the mass, without affecting the surface area. Density goes down, and thus so does terminal velocity.
Huh? Why does that belong there? Not a single person died. Nobody was injured. Granted, it was a PR disaster.
I'd add the Nedelin Catastrophe to your list. October 24 1960. Over a hundred Soviet rocket scientists burned alive. Destroying the USSR's ability to compete in the Moon race. Imagine what space would be like today if the space race continued beyond the Moon...
Next time you see an older telephone in Canada, flip it over and see if it has a "Property of Bell Canada" sticker on the bottom. If it does, warn its owner.
RMS: We need breathing room!
BillG: 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
Excellent question. Take a close look at Lockheed Martin's proposal. See anything you recognise? :-)
I take it you aren't married. :-)
And if you actually *read* any of the top-moderated posts on the article you linked to, you'll see that the Moon would do the exact opposite. As you tap tidal energy (which the Scottish power plant doesn't, it taps wave energy) the Moon is pushed further away. Concervation of angular momentum is Highschool physics folks...
Unfortunately I'm of the post-Apollo generation. I would give a great deal to have been a part of those days. The consolation is that with luck I'll live to see a cheap air-breathing space launch system which will kick off a second golden age of space exploration.
As for that first repair mission you mentioned (STS-61), I'll never forget it. The live video of them throwing the defective solar array overboard, then watching it undulate and spin as it was hit by the shuttle's exhaust was unforgettable. Even the busy astronauts were awestruck. They just stood there and watched as it disappeared astern, then in an amazing demonstration of orbital mechanics, turned around and swept ahead of the shuttle.
The next day none of the news channels bothered showing more than a few seconds of that episode. And I've been unable to find it on the net. I wish we had greater access to NASA's archives, I'd love to see that again.
> want from your immediate manager?
The best manager I've ever had put in roughly the same hours I did. If he tasked me with a job that forced me to stay late, he'd stay late too and help out as best he could. He wasn't a programmer, but he'd find ways to be useful with QA, documentation, gopher, etc.
By contrast the worst managers I've had invariably kept regular office hours regardless of what the programmer(s) were up to. As a result they'd have no clue what was going on, they'd become adversarial, and they'd eventually loose our respect.
Don't sechedule meetings with your staff, spend real time with them.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be quite so energetic with my comments about Frank's "shoebox holography". He was (acording to him) the first person to use laser diodes. However the fact remains that his book hasn't aged well. As I said before, the main suplier for the plates has gone out of business. And in the mean time other people (such as Integraf) have come up with far simpler, easier and better methods. Whereas Frank uses a creaky assembly of threaded pipes, pipe ends, several spring clips, a lens, and a laser, Integraph gets much better results with just one laser, a clothes pin and a container of salt. Integraf's technique is so good that you don't even need a vibration isolation table!
Frank's "Shoebox Holography" may have been the bible of laser diode holography several years ago. But Integraf has rendered him obsolete.
> You should buy his book
Absolutely not. Avoid that book like the plague. The supplier for his plates has gone out of business. The new supplier that took over manufacture of these plates describes Frank's technique as "crap". And it is.
I made the mistake of purchasing his book and trying to get results. He makes things far far more complicated than they need to be. By contrast, the integraf techiques (as linked to from the main /. article) are much simpler much cheaper and produce perfect holograms. I just finished making some stunning integraf holograms a couple of days ago.
The only catch is that these holograms are only visible at a very narrow range of angles. Not just the two angles of rotation to your eye, but also the two angles of rotation to the point light source. So it can take a bit of fiddling before you suddenly see something. But when you do, it's very sharp and detailed.
It most certainly does. Check your facts.
> and why it wasn't placed in a geosync
Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have. This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk. Check your facts.
> or a higher circular orbit.
As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it. Check your facts.