A use for heat pipes was presented; apparently a lot of structures were sinking on the Alaska pipeline. When the ground was frozen, everything was fine...but the permafrost was receding in the warm months. The solution was to keep the ground frozen all the time, by removing heat from about 20 feet down. Heat pipes were constructed with a vaporization point at the desired temperature, and sunk into the ground at the problem areas. The ground stayed frozen, and the problem was solved.
Not that I'm sceptical, but could somebody explain to me how this would work? I was under the impression that the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't let you (passively) pump heat from a cold source (the frozen ground) to a warmer one. Are you sure it wasn't moving heat *down*, using the underground permafrost to keep the surface from melting?
I'd be curious to know how specifically the US government benefits from the oil in Iraq after a war. Keep in mind that Saddam (is that his surname?) could very well destroy all of his oil facilities and set all his wells alight if he senses the end is nigh.
The middle east, and much of the Mediterranean, is like a giant oil sump, the lowest point (plug, if you like) of which is Iraq, which is why there has been so much (US) interest in the past 20+ years in the 'stability' of the region. After the last Gulf war, Cheney's Haliburton (which was already quite involved in Iraq) were awarded the contract to rebuild the oil fields after the allies bombed them to smithereens. Talk about a job-creation scheme! Now France and Russian companies have developed oilfields in Iraq, but they're afraid they're going to lose out to the US should Iraq have a US-mandated regime-change.
Basically, you have to be pretty naiive to discount the probability that US companies won't be quids in if the current Iraqi regime is destroyed - which I'd love to see happen, by the way, but not by the current "Sink and you're innocent, float and you drown"/"If we find weapons, we bomb you, if not, you must be hiding them and we bomb you anyway" witchunt.
Why not just use UDF packet-written CDs? What advantage does this new, properietary, probably DRMed format have over good ol' UDF with a load of.jpeg and.mpeg files?
You misunderstand. This is a format for the metadata and layout. Metadata such as structural metadata, linking one image to another (say, to describe formally that images 1-100.jpg are a sequence of stills from a video, and that 101-200.jpg are thumbnails of same) or technical metadata about the image creation/capture process (and a whoooole lot more which I won't even start on).
This stuff is important, complex and probably not for 99% of the Slashdot crowd. We (at a national copyright library) are using METS (Metdata Encoding and Transmission Standard) as metadata on our digital objects, and METS has an extension schema for AV stuff, which seems to be similar to this.
I'm critical of invoking the Nazis as a metaphor for every excess of government, but in truth the immediate choice of the words "homeland security" made me squirm. It's much like his dad's "New World Order." I don't know if there's any awareness of the echoes of the past. Those who did not study the past are doomed to quote it?
In 1933 shortly after Hitler took power, an agreement reached in Berlin designated Harriman International Co., headed by Averell Harriman's cousin Oliver, the sole agent for exports from Germany to the U.S. A key participant in the negotiations was John Foster Dulles, who with his brother was a lawyer for the Bush and Harriman families. John Foster Dulles later became Secretary of State, and a leader in the Republican Party. His brother Allan became head of the CIA, helped Prescott Bush in his campaign for Senate from Connecticut, and presumably assisted George H.W. Bush when he headed the CIA himself.
I read "The Register" like I read "The Weekly World News." It's a tabloid in every sense.
Taco, I can't believe you had the balls to post this nonsense (which, if they're any truth to it, was written by a UNIX admin. WTF?)
Hmm - now that we know this came from a leaky microsoft ftp server (or maybe you think wired is also a tabloid?) maybe we'll see you post a retraction? Or does your (indignant) integrity not stretch that far?
If you honestly think that The Reg is WWN, please post copious examples of their made-up stories. Just post them here:
They are different crooks than they were 32 years ago
Did you take obtuseness classes, or did it come naturally?
If Fischer is justified in U.S.-bashing as if he were mad from syphilis contracted from a chess groupie, he ought to at least bash the right crooks.
Note that I haven't mentioned Fisher once. He doesn't interest me in the least. So lay off the strawmen.
NB: your "Bush was head of the CIA" argument is really bogus: that was George Bush Sr., not George Bush Jr.
Sheesh. And your arguments wouldn't look so feeble if you actually read my posts. Here's a free sample of that first one I posted. See if you can spot your comprehension error: "Daddy Bush was head of the CIA".
Note that your argument, even if you'd noticed that I'd referred to Bush Sr, hinges on the rather untenable hypotheses that there is no association between Bush Jr & Sr.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, nor what point you imagine I'm trying to make, but I'm getting rather bored of it.
So your claim is that Al Quaeda waited for a Republican Administration, before they decided that they didn't like the U.S., right?
Nice non-sequitur. I didn't mention Al Quaeda anywhere. I was merely responding to your naiive statement that 1970 was a long time ago, and that the US administration had "changed 8 times since". I was just suggesting you look at the CVs of the present bunch of crooks, and note how far back they stretch.
The leadership of the U.S. has changed 8 times since 1970, when Nixon was in office.
If, in fact, this is his motivation, he's fighting against an administration that's been out of power for a quarter of a century, and whose leadership, even if he could legitimately blame them, is already dead.
You honestly believe that the current administration is totally distinct to those of the past? Christ on a bike, Daddy Bush was head of the CIA, Cheney was Ford's assistant and Chief of Staff. Your current administration is chock-a-block with the same crooks and cronies as Bush Sr's 10 years ago, which was stuffed with Regan-era and earlier muppets. And now, to top it off, here comes Poindexter eager to set up his new Stasi. It's unbelievable.
I mean, the government gets whatever it wants, because it has all the power. It has all the power because it has all the guns, and that is especially true in the UK.
And in the US, those guns have stopped your government passing laws that threaten your freedoms, right?
that article, which alleges that many KDE project members are somehow antisemitic for not supporting Israel,
That editorial also says:
"a long column by the noted anti-semite Robert Fisk of the amusingly ill-named "Independent," a British newspaper."
...which (for me, at least) sinks it immediately. Having read Robert Fisk's humanitarian reporting from the middle east and beyond for many years, including his condemnation of all manner of arab/muslim/palestine acts, anyone refering to him as an anti-semite has a rather large agenda to push.
The first I remember was Urban 75's (Hi Mike!) slap-a-politician game in '97 (around the same time as their infamous slap-a-spice-girl). But in this google post, Mike says he nicked the idea from a US site - anybody know what it was?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XML.. as a data interchange format.. but when i want tight storage and quick retrieval, give me a normalized RDBMS any day of the week. Because that's what it's for.
But what if your data representation is already an XML schema? And a pretty complicated one at that? For example, look at METS : The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and
is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.
Have a look at that schema and tell me how you'd store that in a traditional RDBMS (I'd be interested if you could, because I know SQL, I don't know OODMBS or XML repositories - this is painful for me). Databases have been for storing data, but when your data is already a complex XML representation of an object,
there's little use in saying don't use OODBMS.
Terabyte tape libraries are fairly common. Check out any of the major datacenter manufacturers. Sun and HP both have a unit of about 7TB. But you're talking several 100k$ for a fully automated unit.
Not serveral 100k, really - I've got a HP 6TB unit here, and it cost us about 32k UKP, which is about
50k USD.
Now the problem you're going to have is that 90MB/s is going to tax your drives - LTO likes to claim that it does 15MB/s, but in practice you're going to get about 7MB/s (if you're lucky) since
you won't be using compression (15 MB/s is with
compression on). Now judging from my experience of LTO reliability, you're going to have to use about 20 drives to ensure that you're not going to drop anything. Now your 6TB (even 20TB) tape library won't hold 20 drives, so you're looking at some serious hardware, which *will* put you back some 400-500k USD, and will be a pig to maintain, and cost you about 14000 USD a day in tapes and you're going to have to find somewhere to store them.
In short, don't do it. Use multiplexing onto analogue or something.
If we really are seeing a marked increase in worm traffic (and it's not just everyone suddenly noticing, now that others have brought it up -- just being cautious, eh?)
No, we've got a number of web servers here which have been consistently hammered by the Code Red variants (5713 attempts and counting over the past two months) but this one appeared for the first time this morning, and we're currently at 4969 attempts already (not that many distinct hosts - my quick one-liner counts 110 distinct
hosts)
Btw, is there hardware available *now* for reasonable cost that would allow me to speed-up the ProjectMajo/DivX/MPEG-4 encoding process on my home PC?
Me too! Only not on my home PC - at work. We're a copyright library (like the Library of Congress) and digitization is the big thing. MPEG2 is just too big (we're reaching 31TB of storage this year, and expect to go to over 100TB within the next 2 years) - a Free (as in speech - we can't use MP3 for audio, for example - you *don't* archive stuff in encumbered standards) MPEG4 solution with hardware accelerated encoding is one of our Holy Grails. Given this, we could be streaming hundreds of hours of (Free) content to our reading rooms, and eventually to the world (once the bandwidth will allow). Working at a copyright library really shows the damage that closed systems and braindead copyright laws can do to free exchange of information.
And through the magic of UN, we can share our fascism all over the world!
Not the UN - the UN has little to do with the march of corporate globalisation. It's mainly the WTO and its myriad agreements, cooked up by (mostly) unelected representatives. Do you know who represents you on the WTO? Do you think these global organisations have any democratic accountability? No, me neither.
Kewl, I now have a reason to order an IPaq for work.
Now if only IBM can port linux to Canford Audio's rackmounted fridge and develop an essential-sounding app for it ("network coolant level monitor"?) then this BOFH is made.
Aberystwyth Uni doing same
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 3
Aberystwyth (Wales, UK) have a research project
into 'aerobots' designed for planetary exploration. See introduction:
" It is a perfect device for the road warrior sales professional,
for doing presentations, for doing conferencing and for a large number of
professional applications"
I've seen deparments and universities move to Chilisoft (and eat the cost). Why? Can somebody explain to me why you'd choose it over PHP/mod_perl or whatever? Does it have a kick-ass IDE? Just curious.
Slashdot Mirror
A use for heat pipes was presented; apparently a lot of structures were sinking on the Alaska pipeline. When the ground was frozen, everything was fine...but the permafrost was receding in the warm months. The solution was to keep the ground frozen all the time, by removing heat from about 20 feet down. Heat pipes were constructed with a vaporization point at the desired temperature, and sunk into the ground at the problem areas. The ground stayed frozen, and the problem was solved.
Not that I'm sceptical, but could somebody explain to me how this would work? I was under the impression that the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't let you (passively) pump heat from a cold source (the frozen ground) to a warmer one. Are you sure it wasn't moving heat *down*, using the underground permafrost to keep the surface from melting?
Oooh! oooh! I get it! I get it! That's the Gettysburg Address, right?
The middle east, and much of the Mediterranean, is like a giant oil sump, the lowest point (plug, if you like) of which is Iraq, which is why there has been so much (US) interest in the past 20+ years in the 'stability' of the region. After the last Gulf war, Cheney's Haliburton (which was already quite involved in Iraq) were awarded the contract to rebuild the oil fields after the allies bombed them to smithereens. Talk about a job-creation scheme! Now France and Russian companies have developed oilfields in Iraq, but they're afraid they're going to lose out to the US should Iraq have a US-mandated regime-change.
Basically, you have to be pretty naiive to discount the probability that US companies won't be quids in if the current Iraqi regime is destroyed - which I'd love to see happen, by the way, but not by the current "Sink and you're innocent, float and you drown"/"If we find weapons, we bomb you, if not, you must be hiding them and we bomb you anyway" witchunt.
You misunderstand. This is a format for the metadata and layout. Metadata such as structural metadata, linking one image to another (say, to describe formally that images 1-100.jpg are a sequence of stills from a video, and that 101-200.jpg are thumbnails of same) or technical metadata about the image creation/capture process (and a whoooole lot more which I won't even start on).
This stuff is important, complex and probably not for 99% of the Slashdot crowd. We (at a national copyright library) are using METS (Metdata Encoding and Transmission Standard) as metadata on our digital objects, and METS has an extension schema for AV stuff, which seems to be similar to this.
I'm critical of invoking the Nazis as a metaphor for every excess of government, but in truth the immediate choice of the words "homeland security" made me squirm. It's much like his dad's "New World Order." I don't know if there's any awareness of the echoes of the past. Those who did not study the past are doomed to quote it?
Hmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with Grandfather Bush's financing the nazis before WW2?
This bit is good:
In 1933 shortly after Hitler took power, an agreement reached in Berlin designated Harriman International Co., headed by Averell Harriman's cousin Oliver, the sole agent for exports from Germany to the U.S. A key participant in the negotiations was John Foster Dulles, who with his brother was a lawyer for the Bush and Harriman families. John Foster Dulles later became Secretary of State, and a leader in the Republican Party. His brother Allan became head of the CIA, helped Prescott Bush in his campaign for Senate from Connecticut, and presumably assisted George H.W. Bush when he headed the CIA himself.
Taco, I can't believe you had the balls to post this nonsense (which, if they're any truth to it, was written by a UNIX admin. WTF?)
Hmm - now that we know this came from a leaky microsoft ftp server (or maybe you think wired is also a tabloid?) maybe we'll see you post a retraction? Or does your (indignant) integrity not stretch that far?
If you honestly think that The Reg is WWN, please post copious examples of their made-up stories. Just post them here:
Did you take obtuseness classes, or did it come naturally?
If Fischer is justified in U.S.-bashing as if he were mad from syphilis contracted from a chess groupie, he ought to at least bash the right crooks.
Note that I haven't mentioned Fisher once. He doesn't interest me in the least. So lay off the strawmen.
NB: your "Bush was head of the CIA" argument is really bogus: that was George Bush Sr., not George Bush Jr.
Sheesh. And your arguments wouldn't look so feeble if you actually read my posts. Here's a free sample of that first one I posted. See if you can spot your comprehension error: "Daddy Bush was head of the CIA".
Note that your argument, even if you'd noticed that I'd referred to Bush Sr, hinges on the rather untenable hypotheses that there is no association between Bush Jr & Sr.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, nor what point you imagine I'm trying to make, but I'm getting rather bored of it.
Nice non-sequitur. I didn't mention Al Quaeda anywhere. I was merely responding to your naiive statement that 1970 was a long time ago, and that the US administration had "changed 8 times since". I was just suggesting you look at the CVs of the present bunch of crooks, and note how far back they stretch.
The leadership of the U.S. has changed 8 times since 1970, when Nixon was in office.
If, in fact, this is his motivation, he's fighting against an administration that's been out of power for a quarter of a century, and whose leadership, even if he could legitimately blame them, is already dead.
You honestly believe that the current administration is totally distinct to those of the past? Christ on a bike, Daddy Bush was head of the CIA, Cheney was Ford's assistant and Chief of Staff. Your current administration is chock-a-block with the same crooks and cronies as Bush Sr's 10 years ago, which was stuffed with Regan-era and earlier muppets. And now, to top it off, here comes Poindexter eager to set up his new Stasi. It's unbelievable.
And in the US, those guns have stopped your government passing laws that threaten your freedoms, right?
Oh... wait
That editorial also says:
"a long column by the noted anti-semite Robert Fisk of the amusingly ill-named "Independent," a British newspaper."
The first I remember was Urban 75's (Hi Mike!) slap-a-politician game in '97 (around the same time as their infamous slap-a-spice-girl). But in this google post, Mike says he nicked the idea from a US site - anybody know what it was?
Hmph. Slow News Day^UBuy VA!
But what if your data representation is already an XML schema? And a pretty complicated one at that? For example, look at METS : The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.
Have a look at that schema and tell me how you'd store that in a traditional RDBMS (I'd be interested if you could, because I know SQL, I don't know OODMBS or XML repositories - this is painful for me). Databases have been for storing data, but when your data is already a complex XML representation of an object, there's little use in saying don't use OODBMS.
Not serveral 100k, really - I've got a HP 6TB unit here, and it cost us about 32k UKP, which is about 50k USD.
Now the problem you're going to have is that 90MB/s is going to tax your drives - LTO likes to claim that it does 15MB/s, but in practice you're going to get about 7MB/s (if you're lucky) since you won't be using compression (15 MB/s is with compression on). Now judging from my experience of LTO reliability, you're going to have to use about 20 drives to ensure that you're not going to drop anything. Now your 6TB (even 20TB) tape library won't hold 20 drives, so you're looking at some serious hardware, which *will* put you back some 400-500k USD, and will be a pig to maintain, and cost you about 14000 USD a day in tapes and you're going to have to find somewhere to store them.
In short, don't do it. Use multiplexing onto analogue or something.
No, we've got a number of web servers here which have been consistently hammered by the Code Red variants (5713 attempts and counting over the past two months) but this one appeared for the first time this morning, and we're currently at 4969 attempts already (not that many distinct hosts - my quick one-liner counts 110 distinct
hosts)
Me too! Only not on my home PC - at work. We're a copyright library (like the Library of Congress) and digitization is the big thing. MPEG2 is just too big (we're reaching 31TB of storage this year, and expect to go to over 100TB within the next 2 years) - a Free (as in speech - we can't use MP3 for audio, for example - you *don't* archive stuff in encumbered standards) MPEG4 solution with hardware accelerated encoding is one of our Holy Grails. Given this, we could be streaming hundreds of hours of (Free) content to our reading rooms, and eventually to the world (once the bandwidth will allow). Working at a copyright library really shows the damage that closed systems and braindead copyright laws can do to free exchange of information.
Not the UN - the UN has little to do with the march of corporate globalisation. It's mainly the WTO and its myriad agreements, cooked up by (mostly) unelected representatives. Do you know who represents you on the WTO? Do you think these global organisations have any democratic accountability? No, me neither.
Kids these days... grumble, grumble. Read the original post again and use your brain.
Doesn't anybody read for comprehension round here?
Now if only IBM can port linux to Canford Audio's rackmounted fridge and develop an essential-sounding app for it ("network coolant level monitor"?) then this BOFH is made.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/Altair.sh tml
and photos:
http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/presspics .shtml
I'm not connected with them, I just work down the road.
Oh yes, go on, correct your typos without telling anybody so that my oh-so-witty post now reads like a submission from a brainfarted thicko.
If Bob is England, can I be Japan?
Excuse me whilst I barf.
I've seen deparments and universities move to Chilisoft (and eat the cost). Why? Can somebody explain to me why you'd choose it over PHP/mod_perl or whatever? Does it have a kick-ass IDE? Just curious.