This picture specifies a 20m boom, which appears to be over half the length of the spacecraft. I didn't find any reference to 300ft (or metric equivalent) at the JPL website (but feel free to correct me if it is there.) Eyeballing the picture, 20m for the boom implies about 35m total length. By comparison, 300ft is about 90m.
The 300ft figure is in the newspaper article. Possibly it is an error, possibly the reporter knows more than I do.
I am curious as to how they will launch something so long. Presumably it will be collapsed in some way, and expand after launch. Allowing the (presumed) heat-pipe connections between the reactor and the radiators in a collapsable configuration sounds like a challenging engineering problem.There is no indication of how it would collapse - telescoping and folding seem the most obvious.
Bruce Simpson runs a daily on-line column called the "Daily Aardvark", which gave lots of details on the bankrupting in installments last week. (Normally it is commentry on New Zealand internet related stuff - see this week for a taste of what it is normally like.)
Three weekends ago, I went to my library looking for the 2nd book of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. (I have vols 1 and 3 from 2nd hand bookstores.) They didn't have it.
Two weekends ago, I went to the library and saw the book on the BookCrossing table, so I grabbed it. Later I noticed where it had been donated from - my local library.
ChordonBlue: With all of these companies having geared up for LCD production and building huge plants while downsizing CRTs, it's unlikely that the shift to LED tech is going to happen anytime soon - no matter how cheap it is.
soundsop: This comment doesn't make sense. What you're saying violates the most basic law of economics for businesses: do not take sunk costs into account.
Well, it makes a limited amount of sense. If I am considering making these hypothetical LED displays, I need to assure myself that I can sell them at a cost that will reimburse my startup costs. The LCD manufacturers have already sunk their costs, and are pricing their product to recover those costs. If I were to start undercutting their costs severely enough that they could no longer sell all their production at their current price, they will drop their price, and if necessary keep dropping it until they are selling at slightly over the marginal cost of producting each unit (i.e. leaving no return on investment in the plant.)
So my business plan has to anticipate that my entry into the market will lower prices, possibly to below an economic rate of return on investment for the LCD manufacturers, but I'm not going to enter the market unless I can still get an economic rate of return on my initial investment under these conditions. In this sense, the fact that my would-be competitors have sunk their costs already works against me.
Of course, the same applies to people considering building a new LCD plant also - they will only keep building plants so long as they believe the supply/demand will support a price that will pay back the investment in the plant. If my technology is superior (I can make a good rate of return at a lower price), and if the LCD manufacturers have correctly judged when to stop building plants (there is no oversupply) then I can still economically build plants once it has become economically marginal for the LCD manufacturers to build more. (And keep building plants until the supply/demand price comes down to what is economically marginal for my improved process.)
Caution: IANAE. But common sense is slightly more applicable to economics than it is to law.
Tolkien wrote his works for a narrow literate audience, wrote it alone based on his personal experiences
It was a first hand account? Wow, I'm even more impressed by Tolkien than I used to be.
O.K., so that was a cheap shot... He did also have some amazing real life experiences, such as being a junior officer in (IIRC) the Battle of the Somme, which (again IIRC) had the highest single-day casualties in English military history - something over 20,000 dead. Just a tiny change to history, and he'd have been one of them, and the world would never have known what we had missed. How many would-be Tolkiens/Einsteins did we lose to war without knowing?
What is the legal situation for suing for actions of a minor? The article says the family are being sued, not the 15 year old. At what age does a person become liable to be sued directly? If the child is not at home when the "offense" occurs, what then? (E.g. if they music-file-shared on a school computer, is the school liable?)
Another legal question: Say I am about to be sued for everything I own. I liquidate all my assets, go to a casino, and bet the whole lot on a spin of the roulette wheel. If I loose, I'm no worse off (I was going to be bankrupt anyhow), if I win, the winnings pay off the judgement and I still have my money. Effectively I am gambling someone else's money, but I get the winnings. What legal sanctions are there to prevent this?
Now as far as pointing fingers at the guilty parties, understand that the infrastructure is really at fault far more than any individual company. Look at this from a broader perspective: One company was able to take down how wide of an area? The whole system is too fragile, too interdependent, and maintained too close to full capacity. Worse, there's absolutely no incentive for a company to maintain a large reserve capacity, since it costs a lot, and brings in no extra income.
But of course when it happens the next time (and make no mistake--it will), we'll have another commission to once again figure out the single company that broke a rotten and unstable infrastructure, instead of fixing the root problem.
You are jumping the gun here - the commission isn't finished. This is only the phase I report - what happened. The phase II report will be about "how do we stop it from happening again." They may address incentives and the fragility of the system. (Who knows, the politicians *might* even implement some of the fixes.)
The point is well made however that if errors by a company are able to cause failures so remote from that company's control, then the system is also at fault. It is like an application that crashes the OS - it is a bug in the application, but also a bug in the OS that allows it to happen.
If the tradeoff for that is I have to wait a bit longer for XFree 4.3, so be it, the only interesting new feature for me is coloured/animated mouse pointers, which isn't even that exciting.
However, for me it is the difference between 640x480x8 bits and 1280x1024x24 bits. I have had much pain from Debian not having XFree4.3 (partly because I am new to Debian (although >10 years experience on Linux) so I didn't know about backports, where to get unofficial packages, etc.)
4. Artificially add to the cost of the greedy strategy, until it is no longer better than the cooperative strategy - e.g. by having enforcement agents who can fine greedy strategists.
Damn, that's a good idea. I think I'll patent it. I could apply it to other antisocial behaviour like theft and murder too.
I'm not so sure about non-dairy creamer. Does that mean it's really aliens that have been dehydrated and ground to dust?
When I was living in the US, I worried about non-dairy creamer too. Coming as I do from a dairying country (New Zealand), "non-dairy" is anathema.
Then I talked to my father, who is in the dairy industry. Non-dairy creamer is made from sodium cassienate. Which is made from cassien. Which is made from milk. And the cassien market is dominated by New Zealand.
Support the New Zealand dairy industry - buy non-dairy creamer.
There is story that circulates amongst astronomers that an irate astronomer once emptied their pistol into the main mirror of the telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. (Bear in mind that this mirror would have been polished to an accuracy of about 1/20,000 of a millimeter.) Supposedly the mirror did not crack, so they just painted the damaged areas black and still use it.
(I never observed there, so I can't personally verify this story. I only found one reference on the web.)
Choose the least likely two options out of the following: A) A person at the poster's company edits incoming web pages to sanitize them. B) A program is able to remove offensive language while leaving a result that makes sense. C) Two versions of the article were posted on the original website at various times, and due to caching the poster and his friend are seeing different versions. D) The poster is in error about or inventing what they saw on the page.
There are some good points in the article, but also some that really don't hold water.
* If it is too hard to run an executable sent as an e-mail attachment, this is a lack-of-feature in Linux e-mail software, not a feature. It should be capable of automatically correctly setting file modes when saving an executable attachment.
* The "strong community around Linux" argument would fall over if Linux became as widespread as Windows - so this is really just the "only because Windows is so popular" argument in disguise.
* Outlook uses IE to display HTML - who would write an entire new HTML engine when they already have one to hand? (This can become a problem if it is unnecessarily run with Admin priviliges. Unix has had problems with this, where a big program does one little thing that needs root, so it runs as root, then exploits in other parts of the program give root access. I think most of these are fixed now.)
* Many criticisms are about MS's applications, rather than the OS - e.g. Kmail's policy to HTML compared to Outbreak's. (This is still MS's fault, but it is Outlook vs KMail rather than Windows vs Linux. Unlike the OS level complaints, MS could fix these quickly if they cared.)
Some good points:
* Windows users running with Admin priviliges. In Linux, when I try to install a new package I get a box popping up asking for the root password. In Windows, I have to log out and then back in as Admin to install anything - this pain encourages users to grant Admin to their normal accounts.
* Window's intertwining of OS, application, data - in particular, non-Admin installed DLL's which then get run by Admin. (I'm taking his word for this - I don't know windows enough to know if this is so.)
Radius of Earth ~6000km. Distance of closest approach of asteroid 88000 km. (Is that from the surface or center? I'll assume center.) Ratio of distances is approx 1:15, so the ratio of areas is 1:225.
Translation: To a first approximation, we can have about 200 asteroids come this close or closer before one hits us - so it wasn't a particularly close call.
To a second approximation, it gets a bit more complicated. The Earth's gravity deflects asteroids towards the center of the Earth, and so an asteroid that would have missed us if gravity were ignored could hit us. Another way of looking at this is that the 'target' area for hitting the Earth is bigger than the simple geometrical cross-section of the Earth.
How much bigger will depend on the ratio between the Earth's escape velocity (about 11 km/s) and the asteroid's approach speed (highly variable but likely on the order of 30 km/s*.) I'm too lazy to figure out the actual formula, but I'd guess it comes out to a factor of a few. (I.e. we could take perhaps 50 this close or closer before one impacts.)
* Something to think about when watching them fly the spaceship down a crack in the asteroid at the end of "Deep Impact".
A scenario: Someone damages you, but it is hard to figure out who it was. You spend money and/or time and track them down. You succeed, and sue them.
Can you include the cost of tracking them down in the damages you are suing for?
Can you sue for more than your actual costs, to account for the risk you took that you'd be unsuccessful in tracking them down (hence your time/money would be gone with no possibility of being repaid)?
IIRC the 10C/11C/12C/15C/16C were the 'Pioneer' series, and as an HP calculator collector they are still my favourite. Great compactness, usability, ruggedness. (These would date from about mid 80's.) If you don't need units, graphing etc. getting one of these would be well worth while.
My second favourite series was "Woodstock" - 21/25/25C/29C (plus some rare ones I don't remember off the top of my head.) This was their second generation, much more compact than their predecessors. (Late 70's.) I wouldn't recommend them for other than collectable use - the batteries only last a few hours (power hungry LEDs.)
(Oh, and I own 11C, 15C, 16C, 19C, 19B, 21, 25, 28S, 32E, 34C, 35, 41CV, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 70, 97 - I think - there might be memory lapses. Not all work.)
MuPAD is a free-(beer)-to-academics-and-home-use Mathematica-like program.
I tried it for a while, but I have access to Mathematica so I'm using that (extensively.)
(Woohoo! I have a job where I get to play with Mathematica all day! Boy am I glad I changed - I wasn't doing anything with that extra $20K/year anyhow.)
(Mathematica pricing: ~US$1800 commercial, ~$900 academic, not sure about student - ~$150??)
There would be other methods if X were not running. That is why I said "On desktop Linux..." which I assumed to be graphical and aimed at a non-geek user.
On the command line, it might just be a matter of getting lots of programs to standardize on one format of error message, e.g. "Required server food (Foo Daemon) is not running or is not responding"
Possibly you could have a "Missing Daemons Bureax" daemon to which you would send such complaints. It would look at some configuration info and figure out whether to pop up a window, send error to stderr, send e-mail to root, ignore the complaint or whatever.
(And if the mdbd is missing, the program ignores this fact and just reports the original error through stderr.)
Re:Just turn off services you don't need
on
Booting Linux Faster
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Something for the usability folks to think about:
Ordinary users, and even many geeks, don't have time to figure out what every service does and whether they use it. A policy of aggresively turning off services (mostly for security, partly for boot time) carries a risk of turning of a service that is needed.
I suggest that there should be a standard framework for dealing with "a needed service is not running" problems. On a desktop Linux, this should pop up a window explaining what service wasn't running, and giving options to do nothing, start the service on a one-time basis, or add the service to boot time start-up (and prompting for root password as required.)
(There can be extra options - don't start the service, and never ask me again. Don't start the service, and never ask me again if this particular program complains about it.)
Slashdot Mirror
This picture specifies a 20m boom, which appears to be over half the length of the spacecraft. I didn't find any reference to 300ft (or metric equivalent) at the JPL website (but feel free to correct me if it is there.) Eyeballing the picture, 20m for the boom implies about 35m total length. By comparison, 300ft is about 90m.
The 300ft figure is in the newspaper article. Possibly it is an error, possibly the reporter knows more than I do.
I am curious as to how they will launch something so long. Presumably it will be collapsed in some way, and expand after launch. Allowing the (presumed) heat-pipe connections between the reactor and the radiators in a collapsable configuration sounds like a challenging engineering problem.There is no indication of how it would collapse - telescoping and folding seem the most obvious.
Bruce Simpson runs a daily on-line column called the "Daily Aardvark", which gave lots of details on the bankrupting in installments last week. (Normally it is commentry on New Zealand internet related stuff - see this week for a taste of what it is normally like.)
Dec 1
Dec 2
Dec 3
Dec 4
Dec 5
I believe that Bruce appears on Slashdot as "NewtonsLaw" - I expect he'll put in an appearance.
From my understanding, it is an IRD vendetta that has bankrupted him, unrelated to the "cruise missile" project.
I once found something in a computer room that I applied a label to: "Emergency manual hard reset device."
It was a metre long monkey-wrench.
Three weekends ago, I went to my library looking for the 2nd book of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. (I have vols 1 and 3 from 2nd hand bookstores.) They didn't have it.
Two weekends ago, I went to the library and saw the book on the BookCrossing table, so I grabbed it. Later I noticed where it had been donated from - my local library.
ChordonBlue:
With all of these companies having geared up for LCD production and building huge plants while downsizing CRTs, it's unlikely that the shift to LED tech is going to happen anytime soon - no matter how cheap it is.
soundsop:
This comment doesn't make sense. What you're saying violates the most basic law of economics for businesses: do not take sunk costs into account.
Well, it makes a limited amount of sense. If I am considering making these hypothetical LED displays, I need to assure myself that I can
sell them at a cost that will reimburse my startup costs. The LCD manufacturers have already sunk their costs, and are pricing their product to recover those costs. If I were to start undercutting their costs severely enough that they could no longer sell all their production at their current price, they will drop their price, and if necessary keep dropping it until they are selling at slightly over the marginal cost of producting each unit (i.e. leaving no return on investment in the plant.)
So my business plan has to anticipate that my entry into the market will lower prices, possibly to below an economic rate of return on investment for the LCD manufacturers, but I'm not going to enter the market unless I can still get an economic rate of return on my initial investment under these conditions. In this sense, the fact that my would-be competitors have sunk their costs already works against me.
Of course, the same applies to people considering building a new LCD plant also - they will only keep building plants so long as they believe the supply/demand will support a price that will pay back the investment in the plant. If my technology is superior (I can make a good rate of return at a lower price), and if the LCD manufacturers have correctly judged when to stop building plants (there is no oversupply) then I can still economically build plants once it has become economically marginal for the LCD manufacturers to build more. (And keep building plants until the supply/demand price comes down to what is economically marginal for my improved process.)
Caution: IANAE. But common sense is slightly more applicable to economics than it is to law.
While we're speculating, would the world have been better or worse if Hitler had been killed in WW I?
The first thought is that it would be better, but imagine a Nazi party that manages to get to power with a different, sane and competant, leader...
Tolkien wrote his works for a narrow literate audience, wrote it alone based on his personal experiences
It was a first hand account? Wow, I'm even more impressed by Tolkien than I used to be.
O.K., so that was a cheap shot... He did also have some amazing real life experiences, such as being a junior officer in (IIRC) the Battle of the Somme, which (again IIRC) had the highest single-day casualties in English military history - something over 20,000 dead. Just a tiny change to history, and he'd have been one of them, and the world would never have known what we had missed. How many would-be Tolkiens/Einsteins did we lose to war without knowing?
What is the legal situation for suing for actions of a minor? The article says the family are being sued, not the 15 year old. At what age does a person become liable to be sued directly? If the child is not at home when the "offense" occurs, what then? (E.g. if they music-file-shared on a school computer, is the school liable?)
Another legal question: Say I am about to be sued for everything I own. I liquidate all my assets, go to a casino, and bet the whole lot on a spin of the roulette wheel. If I loose, I'm no worse off (I was going to be bankrupt anyhow), if I win, the winnings pay off the judgement and I still have my money. Effectively I am gambling someone else's money, but I get the winnings. What legal sanctions are there to prevent this?
Now as far as pointing fingers at the guilty parties, understand that the infrastructure is really at fault far more than any individual company. Look at this from a broader perspective: One company was able to take down how wide of an area? The whole system is too fragile, too interdependent, and maintained too close to full capacity. Worse, there's absolutely no incentive for a company to maintain a large reserve capacity, since it costs a lot, and brings in no extra income.
But of course when it happens the next time (and make no mistake--it will), we'll have another commission to once again figure out the single company that broke a rotten and unstable infrastructure, instead of fixing the root problem.
You are jumping the gun here - the commission isn't finished. This is only the phase I report - what happened. The phase II report will be about "how do we stop it from happening again." They may address incentives and the fragility of the system. (Who knows, the politicians *might* even implement some of the fixes.)
The point is well made however that if errors by a company are able to cause failures so remote from that company's control, then the system is also at fault. It is like an application that crashes the OS - it is a bug in the application, but also a bug in the OS that allows it to happen.
If the tradeoff for that is I have to wait a bit longer for XFree 4.3, so be it, the only interesting new feature for me is coloured/animated mouse pointers, which isn't even that exciting.
However, for me it is the difference between 640x480x8 bits and 1280x1024x24 bits. I have had much pain from Debian not having XFree4.3 (partly because I am new to Debian (although >10 years experience on Linux) so I didn't know about backports, where to get unofficial packages, etc.)
4. Artificially add to the cost of the greedy strategy, until it is no longer better than the cooperative strategy - e.g. by having enforcement agents who can fine greedy strategists.
Damn, that's a good idea. I think I'll patent it. I could apply it to other antisocial behaviour like theft and murder too.
Non enim id agimus ut exerceatur vox, sed ut exerceat.
The best I can figure is something like:
Indeed we do not urge it to practice voice, but to practice.
I'm not so sure about non-dairy creamer. Does that mean it's really aliens that have been dehydrated and ground to dust?
When I was living in the US, I worried about non-dairy creamer too. Coming as I do from a dairying country (New Zealand), "non-dairy" is anathema.
Then I talked to my father, who is in the dairy industry. Non-dairy creamer is made from sodium cassienate. Which is made from cassien. Which is made from milk. And the cassien market is dominated by New Zealand.
Support the New Zealand dairy industry - buy non-dairy creamer.
There is story that circulates amongst astronomers that an irate astronomer once emptied their pistol into the main mirror of the telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. (Bear in mind that this mirror would have been polished to an accuracy of about 1/20,000 of a millimeter.) Supposedly the mirror did not crack, so they just painted the damaged areas black and still use it.
(I never observed there, so I can't personally verify this story. I only found one reference on the web.)
Choose the least likely two options out of the following:
A) A person at the poster's company edits incoming web pages to sanitize them.
B) A program is able to remove offensive language while leaving a result that makes sense.
C) Two versions of the article were posted on the original website at various times, and due to caching the poster and his friend are seeing different versions.
D) The poster is in error about or inventing what they saw on the page.
There are some good points in the article, but also some that really don't hold water.
* If it is too hard to run an executable sent as an e-mail attachment, this is a lack-of-feature in Linux e-mail software, not a feature. It should be capable of automatically correctly setting file modes when saving an executable attachment.
* The "strong community around Linux" argument would fall over if Linux became as widespread as Windows - so this is really just the "only because Windows is so popular" argument in disguise.
* Outlook uses IE to display HTML - who would write an entire new HTML engine when they already have one to hand? (This can become a problem if it is unnecessarily run with Admin priviliges. Unix has had problems with this, where a big program does one little thing that needs root, so it runs as root, then exploits in other parts of the program give root access. I think most of these are fixed now.)
* Many criticisms are about MS's applications, rather than the OS - e.g. Kmail's policy to HTML compared to Outbreak's. (This is still MS's fault, but it is Outlook vs KMail rather than Windows vs Linux. Unlike the OS level complaints, MS could fix these quickly if they cared.)
Some good points:
* Windows users running with Admin priviliges. In Linux, when I try to install a new package I get a box popping up asking for the root password. In Windows, I have to log out and then back in as Admin to install anything - this pain encourages users to grant Admin to their normal accounts.
* Window's intertwining of OS, application, data - in particular, non-Admin installed DLL's which then get run by Admin. (I'm taking his word for this - I don't know windows enough to know if this is so.)
Radius of Earth ~6000km. Distance of closest approach of asteroid 88000 km. (Is that from the surface or center? I'll assume center.) Ratio of distances is approx 1:15, so the ratio of areas is 1:225.
Translation: To a first approximation, we can have about 200 asteroids come this close or closer before one hits us - so it wasn't a particularly close call.
To a second approximation, it gets a bit more complicated. The Earth's gravity deflects asteroids towards the center of the Earth, and so an asteroid that would have missed us if gravity were ignored could hit us. Another way of looking at this is that the 'target' area for hitting the Earth is bigger than the simple geometrical cross-section of the Earth.
How much bigger will depend on the ratio between the Earth's escape velocity (about 11 km/s) and the asteroid's approach speed (highly variable but likely on the order of 30 km/s*.) I'm too lazy to figure out the actual formula, but I'd guess it comes out to a factor of a few. (I.e. we could take perhaps 50 this close or closer before one impacts.)
* Something to think about when watching them fly the spaceship down a crack in the asteroid at the end of "Deep Impact".
And I thought my punched-card backup system was slow. What is the recording medium? 78s? How does he sing the binary files?
(Sorry, but a straight-line like that can't be ignored, and nobody else seems to have picked it up. I guess they all had good taste or something.)
A scenario: Someone damages you, but it is hard to figure out who it was. You spend money and/or time and track them down. You succeed, and sue them.
Can you include the cost of tracking them down in the damages you are suing for?
Can you sue for more than your actual costs, to account for the risk you took that you'd be unsuccessful in tracking them down (hence your time/money would be gone with no possibility of being repaid)?
IIRC the 10C/11C/12C/15C/16C were the 'Pioneer' series, and as an HP calculator collector they are still my favourite. Great compactness, usability, ruggedness. (These would date from about mid 80's.) If you don't need units, graphing etc. getting one of these would be well worth while.
My second favourite series was "Woodstock" - 21/25/25C/29C (plus some rare ones I don't remember off the top of my head.) This was their second generation, much more compact than their predecessors. (Late 70's.) I wouldn't recommend them for other than collectable use - the batteries only last a few hours (power hungry LEDs.)
(Oh, and I own 11C, 15C, 16C, 19C, 19B, 21, 25, 28S, 32E, 34C, 35, 41CV, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 70, 97 - I think - there might be memory lapses. Not all work.)
MuPAD is a free-(beer)-to-academics-and-home-use Mathematica-like program.
I tried it for a while, but I have access to Mathematica so I'm using that (extensively.)
(Woohoo! I have a job where I get to play with Mathematica all day! Boy am I glad I changed - I wasn't doing anything with that extra $20K/year anyhow.)
(Mathematica pricing: ~US$1800 commercial, ~$900 academic, not sure about student - ~$150??)
You Forth (heart) if honk then.
(A note for the ignorant - Forth also uses RPN.)
There would be other methods if X were not running. That is why I said "On desktop Linux..." which I assumed to be graphical and aimed at a non-geek user.
On the command line, it might just be a matter of getting lots of programs to standardize on one format of error message, e.g. "Required server food (Foo Daemon) is not running or is not responding"
Possibly you could have a "Missing Daemons Bureax" daemon to which you would send such complaints. It would look at some configuration info and figure out whether to pop up a window, send error to stderr, send e-mail to root, ignore the complaint or whatever.
(And if the mdbd is missing, the program ignores this fact and just reports the original error through stderr.)
Something for the usability folks to think about:
Ordinary users, and even many geeks, don't have time to figure out what every service does and whether they use it. A policy of aggresively turning off services (mostly for security, partly for boot time) carries a risk of turning of a service that is needed.
I suggest that there should be a standard framework for dealing with "a needed service is not running" problems. On a desktop Linux, this should pop up a window explaining what service wasn't running, and giving options to do nothing, start the service on a one-time basis, or add the service to boot time start-up (and prompting for root password as required.)
(There can be extra options - don't start the service, and never ask me again. Don't start the service, and never ask me again if this particular program complains about it.)
My puny 20 antique RPN calculator collection and I worship at your feet.