>Star Wars again?! Man, I mean didn't they learn anything the first time around?
Uhh, that you can spend the other super power out of existence like that?
The USSR didn't just fall down; it was pushed. It would have happened
in another 30-50 years anyway, but responding to the Reagan buildup
finished them offf. Gorbachev wouldn't have had to gamble (and lose)
with glasnost and perestroika (sp?) without the pressure that trying
to keep up placed on their system.
>To me, a missile defense system like star wars suffers many of
>the same problems as pr0n filters. Sure, they can catch titties, but
>they also catch baby's butts, or a picture of somone's tattoo, or a
>tan sofa...
I'm not *to* worried about shooting down sofas lobbed into ballistic
trajectories . . .
>These missile detectors don't know the difference between
>a missile and a weather balloon.
The velocity is a *wee* bit different.
>Much less a missile and an identical
>decoy missile coming from the same vacinity.e
This misunderstands the nature of the defense. The system (and this
applies specifically to the old USSR, but also to others) doesn't
need to be 100%, but rather enough to interfere with the attack.
Aside from Russia, there's noone who could launch enough decoys
anyway.
When Challenger was launched, the temperature was not only well below the temperature range for which it had been designed. It had exceeded its design specs, true, and been tested at colder temperatures--bot not as cold as the launch day temperature.
Launching under those terms was criminally neglicent, and should have been prosecuted as either mansalughter or (insert local name for "criminally negligent homicide" here).
It wasn't a technical failure, any more than it's a design problem that kills you when you slam your car into a brick wall at 100mph.
there are, of course, the usual tales about pre-approval of pets, and at non-existent addresses entered by clerical error, etc.
But my favorite of all time is from the late 80's. I'd just set up my practice (which is why I can place it), and was talking to my grandmother. She was living in the house she was born in, and received a letter addressed to her father. Seems he was pre-approved for a gold card due to his excellent credit--never mind that he'd been dead for over half a century . . .
now how in the world did *that* one get into the system??? 19th century birth records? death certificates? 1920's electrical bills? oh, wait, the house would have still been gas at that point . . .:)
Has anyone managed to unsubscribe once they found your email?
I used to have a free subscription to macweek, which seems to be where they got the email address they use. They took it on themselves to take this as consent to receive eweek a couple of years later. I've emailed them demanding that they stop. I"ve sent abuse complaints upstream. Nothing seems to work.
For some reason, i doubt that frims that build their subscription numbers this way have enough of a clue to tell me anything interesting . . .
This has been one of my back-burner issues that I've just never gotten around to. (Among other things, it's easier to just install FreeBSD:). Are there instructions around for this somewhere?
hawk, who thinks the -- from the -- options should be violently thrust through those who inflict them upon us, and wants the man pages for mkdir and rmdir to reflect that the lenght of their names is a long-standing bug
There's nothing special about an 8 bit byte; that's a more recent concept than these dec mainfraims. Why 32? It leaves 4 bits left over after putting 4 characters in it? 64 only wastes 1 bit after holding 9, but it's a bigger word than you need for common integer or floating point data.
The 8 bits we use (why not 7???) seems to come from the 4 bit processors (4004, 4040) of the 70's. 4 bits was enough to hold a bcd digit. 8 let you hold two at once. After that, we've just doubled what we started with a couple of times.
Oh, and many of those older processors could use bytes of various sizes. I think the dec's were among the 36 bit machines that had a command to set the byte size from anywhere from 1 to 36 bits. It all depended upon what yoyu were doing with the data.
It hasn't always meant 8 bits. And there was nothing special about 8 bits--certainly not the size of a character.
With an ascii character set, the dec's put 7 characters/word, with one left over (which I think was used to indicate the last character in certain circumstances.
The data, though, was 36 bits, not 32+parity. Besides, if you want to do that, I think the correct number is 38, not 36, to allow 1 bit correction and 2 bit detection.
OK, OK. that's not the real reason for 36 bits. Remember how cars used to have real spare tires instead of the toy spare? Computers were like that, too. If you burned out bit 7 of the processor, you had some spares to use . . .
(really not as facetious as it sounds. Core memory used to come with spare rows & columns . ..)
It's not very useful, and it's not what anyone *means* when they say linux, but "GNU/Linux" is a technically correct label for the linux kernel and the GNU utilities.
On the other hand, when we say "Linux," we usually mean either
a) the kernel, or
b) the kernel, and the usual collection of things from a gaggle of different sources (X, bsd, sendmail, perl, and a gaggle of others including GNU).
Oh, and it's the bsd utilities, of which GNU has an implementation, that
we're in love with, not the GNU versions themselves. Many of us prefer the non-GNU versions (and particularly the real documentation instead of that wretched info system . ..)
For those using the One True Browser (Lynx), it is necessary to view
the source to even see the message. I expect this also applies to those using those silly graphical browsers who have enough sense to browse with javascript off . . .
Netscape wasn't really in the browser business--they needed to get browsers to do "more" [1] to build their server market.
Yes, they did charge for the browser, at least on paper. You could
also download it or find it nearly anywhere for "free evaluation," if
somehow you didn't manage to be in one of the categories that didn't
have to pay. And then they left it to you to pay them if
you felt like it and kept it, with a wink or two. "Really, pay us
[wionk]".
Eventually, prior to assorted illegal activities by ms, they did
have a noticable revenue stream from the browser. But at the time
they were adding that obnoxious stuff (whoever started flashing
gifs should be sent straight to Hell without dying first), it
was really about increassing the market for their server software.
hawk
[1] For a sufficiently clueless definition of "more" or "better"
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in Nevada, the point of those players isn't to take you, but rather to provide enough players to have a game.
It's been a while, but I believe that casinos are required to identify which players work for them on request.
This has possibiliities . . . I've never played one of these, but if you place it in a "New Country" radio station, and I get to blow up the records (err, CD's), shoot the crew for the "Morning Moron" show, and maybe a couple of those purported "artists" who wouldn't recognize Hank Williams if he haunted them, and I'd be all over it.
Hawk, who prefers western, but also listens to real country.
"And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my MLK%$)Y*(^)&*
Of course not. In that case, there's be about 7 billion english speakers.
For that matter, just being born and rasied in the U.S. doesn't mean that someone can speak english. One of my students actually used "gonna" on a test last semester . . .
This is straightforward, mainstream economics. I'm sorry if the laws of supply and demand offend you, but they cannot be suspended, notwistanding the semi-regular attempts of the california legislature.
Then again, maybe a CA legislature picked up some moderation points:)
Yes, you read that right. California did *not* deregulate, at least not in any sense that I recognize as an economist or lawyer.
California no more deregulated than NAFTA introduced free trade: it doesn't take 400 words, let alone 400 pages, to describe free trade, and it California's electrical marget is still bizarrely regulated.
Commodities are generall purchased under a wide varieties of contract types--including the ability to produce for oneself. In particular, there are contracts of varying length, the shortest of which is the "spot market" for immediate purchase. NOt surprisingly, the prices tend to be highest in the spot maret. Particularly, the wildest price swings happen in that market.
What California did was to mandate that the utilities sell their own power plants--the ones with the most predictable costs. They then further required that all the electricity be purchased on the spot market.
I'm sure that they *could* have come up with a more idiotic system, but it would take some serious work. This one is spectacular, even by California standards . . .
The obvious solution: deregulation. Let the utilities or middlemen enter long-term contracts for power when they make sense. It will take time to adjust (noone wants to sell power they can sell on the spot market at a lower rate), but it will.
Also note that some parts of california, particularly san diego, were paying heavily subsidized electrical rates in teh past. SDG&E had unusually low production costs, which under they old system, led to unusually low rates.
hawk, economics professor and lawyer
ok, I also fled california when Wilson and Feinstein were the choices for governor . . .
Uh, this is west-central Pennsylvania. It's not my tree:)
It's not even on my street--it's in the lot behind the house across
from me, and it's 75-100 feet tall . . . and the ground is 30-50 feet
higher than me:)
I sunk a 12' 4x4 at the edge of my lot, mounted the dish at the
top, and *still* couldn't clear it. I tried out my attic, but couldn't
get a clear site from there, either. Next summer, when the tree is full
again, I'll let their professional installation folks try . . .
*I'm* not going to try to mount it on the chimney with a sloped roof . . .
>Getting back on topic, the problems you were having wern't your
>satellite system's fault. At the microwave frequancies used, the
>leaves on your tree where acting like miniture reflectors, scattering
>and disrupting the signal. Mircowave systems need a clear
>line-of-sight between the transmitting and recieving stations.
Oh, I don't blame them. But barring that tree being struck
by lightning, I'm not going to get a clear line of site at
30 degrees off the horizon . . .
>The joke, of course, is on you. If greedheads like you get your way
>you will screw the pootch.
Ahh, I see. You've directed all of your retirement funds to
invest *your* money in companies that spend on infrastructure and
give it away free, rather than those that seek a return on
investment?
>My mod points gave me a really hard choice here. Mark you as a troll
>or answer your BS.
I doubt that would have given him a problem. There are enough
people around here that understand basic economics that your
abuse of moderation would have been quickly undone.
for about two weeks. It finally turned out that we could only get the second satellite with the "local" channels (which don't come in at all over broadcast) when the wind blew *hard* to the east, pushing a tree out of the way.
Nonetheless, the picture was *much* better than anything I'd seen before--but then again, I have a funky 700 line, almost 40" television . . .
Slashdot Mirror
>Star Wars again?! Man, I mean didn't they learn anything the first time around?
Uhh, that you can spend the other super power out of existence like that?
The USSR didn't just fall down; it was pushed. It would have happened
in another 30-50 years anyway, but responding to the Reagan buildup
finished them offf. Gorbachev wouldn't have had to gamble (and lose)
with glasnost and perestroika (sp?) without the pressure that trying
to keep up placed on their system.
>To me, a missile defense system like star wars suffers many of
>the same problems as pr0n filters. Sure, they can catch titties, but
>they also catch baby's butts, or a picture of somone's tattoo, or a
>tan sofa...
I'm not *to* worried about shooting down sofas lobbed into ballistic
trajectories . . .
>These missile detectors don't know the difference between
>a missile and a weather balloon.
The velocity is a *wee* bit different.
>Much less a missile and an identical
>decoy missile coming from the same vacinity.e
This misunderstands the nature of the defense. The system (and this
applies specifically to the old USSR, but also to others) doesn't
need to be 100%, but rather enough to interfere with the attack.
Aside from Russia, there's noone who could launch enough decoys
anyway.
hawk
Yes, what *is* that comment doing up there??? Has he *ever* suggested cutting NASA? It strikes me as the type of thing he's likely to support . . .
When Challenger was launched, the temperature was not only well below the temperature range for which it had been designed. It had exceeded its design specs, true, and been tested at colder temperatures--bot not as cold as the launch day temperature.
Launching under those terms was criminally neglicent, and should have been prosecuted as either mansalughter or (insert local name for "criminally negligent homicide" here).
It wasn't a technical failure, any more than it's a design problem that kills you when you slam your car into a brick wall at 100mph.
It's Pournelle & Niven, not just Niven
is that it applies equally well to prostitution, selling crack, contract hits, etc.
This "desparate person" is yharming other people to collect his minimum wage. That *does* make him a lousy person and a zit upon society's posterior.
there are, of course, the usual tales about pre-approval of pets, and at non-existent addresses entered by clerical error, etc.
:)
But my favorite of all time is from the late 80's. I'd just set up my practice (which is why I can place it), and was talking to my grandmother. She was living in the house she was born in, and received a letter addressed to her father. Seems he was pre-approved for a gold card due to his excellent credit--never mind that he'd been dead for over half a century . . .
now how in the world did *that* one get into the system??? 19th century birth records? death certificates? 1920's electrical bills? oh, wait, the house would have still been gas at that point . . .
Has anyone managed to unsubscribe once they found your email?
I used to have a free subscription to macweek, which seems to be where they got the email address they use. They took it on themselves to take this as consent to receive eweek a couple of years later. I've emailed them demanding that they stop. I"ve sent abuse complaints upstream. Nothing seems to work.
For some reason, i doubt that frims that build their subscription numbers this way have enough of a clue to tell me anything interesting . . .
This has been one of my back-burner issues that I've just never gotten around to. (Among other things, it's easier to just install FreeBSD :). Are there instructions around for this somewhere?
hawk, who thinks the -- from the -- options should be violently thrust through those who inflict them upon us, and wants the man pages for mkdir and rmdir to reflect that the lenght of their names is a long-standing bug
There's nothing special about an 8 bit byte; that's a more recent concept than these dec mainfraims. Why 32? It leaves 4 bits left over after putting 4 characters in it? 64 only wastes 1 bit after holding 9, but it's a bigger word than you need for common integer or floating point data.
The 8 bits we use (why not 7???) seems to come from the 4 bit processors (4004, 4040) of the 70's. 4 bits was enough to hold a bcd digit. 8 let you hold two at once. After that, we've just doubled what we started with a couple of times.
Oh, and many of those older processors could use bytes of various sizes. I think the dec's were among the 36 bit machines that had a command to set the byte size from anywhere from 1 to 36 bits. It all depended upon what yoyu were doing with the data.
You're using a very recent notion of "byte" . . .
.)
It hasn't always meant 8 bits. And there was nothing special about 8 bits--certainly not the size of a character.
With an ascii character set, the dec's put 7 characters/word, with one left over (which I think was used to indicate the last character in certain circumstances.
The data, though, was 36 bits, not 32+parity. Besides, if you want to do that, I think the correct number is 38, not 36, to allow 1 bit correction and 2 bit detection.
OK, OK. that's not the real reason for 36 bits. Remember how cars used to have real spare tires instead of the toy spare? Computers were like that, too. If you burned out bit 7 of the processor, you had some spares to use . . .
(really not as facetious as it sounds. Core memory used to come with spare rows & columns . .
It's not very useful, and it's not what anyone *means* when they say linux, but "GNU/Linux" is a technically correct label for the linux kernel and the GNU utilities.
On the other hand, when we say "Linux," we usually mean either
a) the kernel, or
b) the kernel, and the usual collection of things from a gaggle of different sources (X, bsd, sendmail, perl, and a gaggle of others including GNU).
Oh, and it's the bsd utilities, of which GNU has an implementation, that
we're in love with, not the GNU versions themselves. Many of us prefer the non-GNU versions (and particularly the real documentation instead of that wretched info system . .
hawk
Even more likely: the person writing the exclusion code didn't understand the problem.
For those using the One True Browser (Lynx), it is necessary to view
the source to even see the message. I expect this also applies to those using those silly graphical browsers who have enough sense to browse with javascript off . . .
Netscape wasn't really in the browser business--they needed to get browsers to do "more" [1] to build their server market.
Yes, they did charge for the browser, at least on paper. You could
also download it or find it nearly anywhere for "free evaluation," if
somehow you didn't manage to be in one of the categories that didn't
have to pay. And then they left it to you to pay them if
you felt like it and kept it, with a wink or two. "Really, pay us
[wionk]".
Eventually, prior to assorted illegal activities by ms, they did
have a noticable revenue stream from the browser. But at the time
they were adding that obnoxious stuff (whoever started flashing
gifs should be sent straight to Hell without dying first), it
was really about increassing the market for their server software.
hawk
[1] For a sufficiently clueless definition of "more" or "better"
err, not quite. Casino's take a cut of every pot.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in Nevada, the point of those players isn't to take you, but rather to provide enough players to have a game.
It's been a while, but I believe that casinos are required to identify which players work for them on request.
hawk, a displaced Nevadan
This has possibiliities . . . I've never played one of these, but if you place it in a "New Country" radio station, and I get to blow up the records (err, CD's), shoot the crew for the "Morning Moron" show, and maybe a couple of those purported "artists" who wouldn't recognize Hank Williams if he haunted them, and I'd be all over it.
Hawk, who prefers western, but also listens to real country.
"And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my MLK%$)Y*(^)&*
Of course not. In that case, there's be about 7 billion english speakers.
For that matter, just being born and rasied in the U.S. doesn't mean that someone can speak english. One of my students actually used "gonna" on a test last semester . . .
While more people speak Mandarain as a first language, more people speak English (including second & third languages) than any other language.
(OK, so those who speak it as a first language rarely speak a second, but that's another issue.)
hawk
Flamebait???
:)
This is straightforward, mainstream economics. I'm sorry if the laws of supply and demand offend you, but they cannot be suspended, notwistanding the semi-regular attempts of the california legislature.
Then again, maybe a CA legislature picked up some moderation points
Yes, you read that right. California did *not* deregulate, at least not in any sense that I recognize as an economist or lawyer.
California no more deregulated than NAFTA introduced free trade: it doesn't take 400 words, let alone 400 pages, to describe free trade, and it California's electrical marget is still bizarrely regulated.
Commodities are generall purchased under a wide varieties of contract types--including the ability to produce for oneself. In particular, there are contracts of varying length, the shortest of which is the "spot market" for immediate purchase. NOt surprisingly, the prices tend to be highest in the spot maret. Particularly, the wildest price swings happen in that market.
What California did was to mandate that the utilities sell their own power plants--the ones with the most predictable costs. They then further required that all the electricity be purchased on the spot market.
I'm sure that they *could* have come up with a more idiotic system, but it would take some serious work. This one is spectacular, even by California standards . . .
The obvious solution: deregulation. Let the utilities or middlemen enter long-term contracts for power when they make sense. It will take time to adjust (noone wants to sell power they can sell on the spot market at a lower rate), but it will.
Also note that some parts of california, particularly san diego, were paying heavily subsidized electrical rates in teh past. SDG&E had unusually low production costs, which under they old system, led to unusually low rates.
hawk, economics professor and lawyer
ok, I also fled california when Wilson and Feinstein were the choices for governor . . .
Ahh, but did you catch the part where her foot freezes in midair, and the techs had to come out and re-boot her?
/me ducks, but doesn't apoligize for the pun
> OT, but why didn't you prune the tree?
:)
:)
Uh, this is west-central Pennsylvania. It's not my tree
It's not even on my street--it's in the lot behind the house across
from me, and it's 75-100 feet tall . . . and the ground is 30-50 feet
higher than me
I sunk a 12' 4x4 at the edge of my lot, mounted the dish at the
top, and *still* couldn't clear it. I tried out my attic, but couldn't
get a clear site from there, either. Next summer, when the tree is full
again, I'll let their professional installation folks try . . .
*I'm* not going to try to mount it on the chimney with a sloped roof . . .
>Getting back on topic, the problems you were having wern't your
>satellite system's fault. At the microwave frequancies used, the
>leaves on your tree where acting like miniture reflectors, scattering
>and disrupting the signal. Mircowave systems need a clear
>line-of-sight between the transmitting and recieving stations.
Oh, I don't blame them. But barring that tree being struck
by lightning, I'm not going to get a clear line of site at
30 degrees off the horizon . . .
>The joke, of course, is on you. If greedheads like you get your way
>you will screw the pootch.
Ahh, I see. You've directed all of your retirement funds to
invest *your* money in companies that spend on infrastructure and
give it away free, rather than those that seek a return on
investment?
>My mod points gave me a really hard choice here. Mark you as a troll
>or answer your BS.
I doubt that would have given him a problem. There are enough
people around here that understand basic economics that your
abuse of moderation would have been quickly undone.
hawk
for about two weeks. It finally turned out that we could only get the second satellite with the "local" channels (which don't come in at all over broadcast) when the wind blew *hard* to the east, pushing a tree out of the way.
Nonetheless, the picture was *much* better than anything I'd seen before--but then again, I have a funky 700 line, almost 40" television . . .
>Hey, MDs are shiny and they come in pretty colors too!
Well, not at first. When they leave med school, most still have
hair. But as it recedes, the shininess starts to show through.
Still, there are only a few colors to choose from: white, pink,
brown, black, red, and yellow . . .
Besides, my quack is a DO . . .