And you have no convective airflow even in the space station, because of the microgravity environment. I do hope this guy understands that you shouldn't try to use a Mac Cube in space without considering cooling. Inside the space station, adding a fan is enough, but outside is going to be much trickier.
Another thing that has me concerned is that the guy is proposing just throwing it from the space station. In addition to resulting in a rather imprecise orbit, there's always the chance that it will hit the space station when it returns. While this isn't as bad as hitting an object orbiting in the oppsite direction (with impact speed = 2X orbital speed), an object that size could still do some damage to the space station.
I think this guy has an interesting idea, but as far as implementation goes, he's a kook.
Valid: If they hire replacements to work beneath you, with you taking the promotion, they can hire cheap labor. If they need to hire someone qualified to work above you, they need to pay your wage or better up front.
And instead, if he has any brains about this situation, he would have his resume out yesterday, and they'll end up having to hire two people instead. Ah, the short-sightedness of manglement.
I'm tempted to say that he should consult with a laywer immediately and see if there are any, ah, "legal remedies" should manglement be stupid enough to fire him after all. Then call their bluff and sit.
But it gets better. After they fire him, he should be ready to work as a consultant/independent contractor for them at three times your current pay. Because when you're fired, the company does not get the benefit of "two weeks notice" so you can leave things in order.
Oh, and unless there's just cause, in.us he gets to collect unemployment, and (IIRC) the company has to pay more into the state unemployment funds. I don't think anybody would consider this "just cause".
Any company clueless enough to pull that kind of crap is not the kind of company I would want to stay at.
Here's a little story I heard about a VHS backup system. Seems a pawn shop had acquired one of these beasties, and decided to use it to back up their computer data.
One night somebody broke into the pawn shop, saw the VCR, pulled the tape out of it, turned to the camera, smiled and waved. He thought he had pulled the security tape. The cops had a real good picture of him which was more than enough to put him in jail for quite some time.
I think you might want to add the Atari Jaguar to that comparison list. It certainly fits in with the first point: an unusual architecture that is difficult for developers to program for.
His father, by turning a blind eye while the S&Ls went nuts
And there you have the difference between conservative and liberal ideals. Personal responsibility. See, according to you, the S&L's were completely innocent and it was the government's fault for not shoring them up. With no consideration that the S&L's were perhaps doing stupid things that caused their own downfall?
The next time you guys say that the two candidates are "just alike", babbling about "Republicrats" and "Gush vs Bore", consider that this is more than just a popularity contest. You're not just voting for a person to sit in the oval office or Congress, you're also voting for what his (or her) party represents.
Even worse are the "single-issue whackos" (whether that single issue is abortion or gay rights) who would rather stay home than vote for a candidate that better represents his/her own other beliefs when a candidate doesn't swear complete allegiance to the voter's pet issue. Thus usually resulting in a half vote in favor of the exact opposite of what the single-issue voter believes in.
This is the exact reason that FoxNews is KILLING CNN and network news sources for fair and accurate reporting. It's about the NEWS to them, not their personal spin on the news to validate their own ideals and help them sleep at night.
Specific example: Saturday morning, Bob Dole and a lot of other military veterans had a press conference to complain about 77% of the overseas military vote being thrown out. Fox News showed it live, and even MSNBC was showing it. On a hunch, I switched to CNN. As I expected, they were not showing it. They were making it an "un-event", as it would be said in Orwellian NewSpeak.
Well, I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and while I can't tell you which page it's on, I did see a reference to Space Survivor as being on the ISS! Given the lead time for printed publications, this is a rather interesting omen.
But it's just not as intense when the winner goes to a brand new space station, rather than an oldy moldy decrepit space station with a decaying orbit. Oh well, so it goes.
Or the Democrats, who seem to be "recount shopping"? If you don't like the count, get another recount! And while you're at it, shake those cards around a bit so a few more pieces of chad fall on the floor! Pregnant chad? Dimpled chad? Tricorner chad? Hell, ask the people who make the voting and counting machines, and even they've never heard of this crap before!
I just heard that this Florida thing is now being referred to as "Hurricane Chad". Sheesh.
Continuous operation analogous to power & telephone services
Well, all modern operating systems can do this in theory at least;-)
If you're talking "analogous to power & telephone services", that means to be even resistant to hardware failures. Which means hot-swap disks and CPUs. Certainly Sun systems can do this, except maybe if you lose the drive with the root partition, but I'm not aware of Winderz machines which allow CPU swapping.
Right now, my main Linux server is whining and rumbling like a banshee on testosterone, and it's not the power supply fan, so it must be the old 17 gig hard drive. So it looks like I'll have a few hours of downtime to get a new one in there.
Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities.
Not entirely sure what they mean by this...
Sounds like NIS on steroids. Or maybe the Windoze Registry without the suckage, and distributed over multiple machines. Or better yet, NetInfo from NeXT/OS-X.
Though what you say is true, it would still be interesting to see how they deal with the fact that, say, Japanese character sets provide for full-width alphanumeric characters, which, although they look the same as A,B,C,etc... except for their width, have a different encoding.
True, they say that any name part consisting entirely of USASCII characters are not allowed to be encoded this way, but they would have to go out of their way if they wanted to ensure that double-wide SJIS romaji were not confusingly registered. Then again, we can already do "s1ashdot.org" with just plain ASCII.
In addition, there's the inherent difficulty in the fact that a Chinese website using a Simplified Chinese set of ideographs could hijack surfers wanting to go to a site with the same name, but with Traditional Chinese ideographs.
IIRC, in Unicode, Chinese and Japanese ideographs all map to the same code if they're basically the same character, with the differences considered font-specific. In the extreme case, one common radical is rendered with one less stroke in Japanese, which could have created hundreds of extra codes.
Most simplified kanji/hanzi should be unique, but a few, at least in Japanese, use an already existing, more common character. Generally, though, this won't be a problem if Unicode is used.
Okay, for the PDF challenged, it seems to not be an RFC, but to be compliant with the current RFC spec, in consideration of RFC2825, which points out that there is simply too much software out there which will break when given UTF-8 domain names.
How it works is there is a special prefix "<rp>" (or maybe this just represents the prefix, I can't really tell from the PDF, but I didn't think < and > were valid domain name characters) that indicates a part of the domain is encoded, followed by the encoded name which only uses ASCII characters, and includes information about which character set was used (Unicode, SJIS, etc.). The algorithm is called RACE, Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding.
A couple of examples were given for both a domain name and a server name:
How is it that thousands of senior citizens could have voted for Buchannan "by accident" in a poll which a 10-year old could figure out? We're not talking rocket science here, nor are we even talking setting the clock on the VCR.
What I think happened is the Democrats brought in busloads of senior citizens and told them "Now remember, punch the second hole or you lose your Social Security!" Since this was the only district in the state with this wierd ballot, anyone from out of the district busing in old folks wouldn't have known that it was really the third hole. Maybe one or two of them had enough clue to tell their shepherds when they got back on the bus something like "Duhh, I punched the second hole, but it sure looked like that was the vote for Buchannan."
Any way you look at it, it is clear where PHBs and other lusers go when they retire: Palm Beach.
I was stunned when after they had given Florida to Gore they took it back.
I wasn't stunned about that. I was stunned that they gave it to Gore in the first place. When about 10% of the precincts were in, and Bush was leading 50/48, I wondered where the hell they pulled a solid Gore win for the state from, and guessed it was based entirely on exit polls of 1770 some odd people, which in a close race is about as reliable as pulling it out of your ass.
Finally CNN pulled Florida, then Fox News, then the two networks I was also switching to.
Now the really tricky part about this was that the polls were apparently still open in the Florida panhandle (which I guess is in a different time zone) when the networks gave the state to Gore.
I know, I've been thinking the same thing. But now that it's an issue with enough people interested in it. I've been listening on TV and radio to arguments for it.
It seems that the one thing it does is keep the states with lower populations from becoming completely insignificant, amplifying their votes a bit. This was one of the concerns back in the 1770's when there were only 13 states, that the little states would be reduced to insignificance, and is also why we have a bicameral (house+senate) system that is set up the way it is. After all, who would campaign in Rhode Island otherwise?
Still, I'd kind of like to see the "winner takes all" thing done away with. In a state with a near 50/50 split, and there were quite a few of them, it seems kind of silly to count it the same as a 100/0 victory. Plus, this would give third party candidates a chance. Nader's 4% in California would have been enough to give him at least one electoral vote. Then we'd also have to start thinking about coalition voting, with third part Electoral College delegates voting for the best coalition, to avoid it going to Congress.
Well if Bush screws things up you can be sure Nader will be back in 4 years and take far more than that 5%.
Huh? So you're saying that Nader, with his way far leftist Green Party, at least as far left as Socalists, and maybe as far left as Communists, will be the third party of choice for disgruntled Republicans? If that's the case, we (as in the whole country) might as well give up.
You know what's been bugging me this election? It's how Nader gets all this press as though the Green party were the Official Third Party, just because of Mister Corvair, when the Libertarians have been sticking in there for years. And nobody, at least not the media, has bothered to look deeply at his party platform. A lot of people are just voting for him as a "None Of The Above" checkbox.
Those who say they would have voted for Bush if Nader hadn't been running are the worst of the lot. No matter what else you can say about Nader and the Green Party, they certainly are farther left than Gore.
You got that right. I currently own three players, two DVL-909 and one DV-505 Pioneer player. I have applied the jumper wire mod to the MPEG board on all three, and one of the DVL-909s had the DTS firmware and has received that mod also.
Sure, it's annoying to have to switch regions when I want to play my import anime DVDs, but I can.
I'll add another reason: 3) it probably has its own share of the annoying firmware bugs that plague cheaper players. Not only is this bad for the owner of the machine, but it causes companies mastering DVD discs to avoid features that screw up cheap-ass players, thus affecting every DVD owner.
I'm sure there are those who will say "but doesn't Sony make the most bug-free DVD players out there?" Sure they do for their regular players, but this is from a different division of the company, and likely isn't even running the same (debugged) code as their regular players.
Well, I hope it wasn't to get away from Taco Cabana, HEB, and BBQ.:)
Anyhow, I've been checking where the test neighborhoods in Austin are, and they're all down southwest around the Mopac/360/290 triangle.
One group is in an area bordered by Town Lake, Barton Creek, 360, and the south edge of West Lake Hills, in the Barton Creek Mall area.
The other area is bordered by Mopac, Slaughter lane, Brodie Lane, and William Cannon, with a small extra area northeast of Brodie and William Cannon.
All areas are apparently within the Austin city limits. This makes sense, as they only got approval with the city of Austin.
Anyone who is planning to move down there to get in on the trial run had better either have a southside/360 job or plan for a fun-filled Mopac commute twice a day!
This guy was the ultimate tinkerer. He actually built his own laser light show controller from scratch. The way he did the television image was to set up the mirror controllers to sweep the laser across in lines (that's two mirror controllers).
Yep, in the early 20th century before CRT displays and cameras had been developed, in the experimental dawn of television, people used mechanical scanners for cameras and displays.
The problem with vector video games is that you don't have a regular scan like you do with raster, so raster is actually easier to generate with a laser and mirrors because you just need constantly rotating mirrors.
FWIW, the first home TV recordings (time-shifting, even) were done by recording the analog signal using a wax phonograph recorder. On some examples of these discs, you can visibly see the sync regions, much like you can on a CAV laserdisc.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing that has me concerned is that the guy is proposing just throwing it from the space station. In addition to resulting in a rather imprecise orbit, there's always the chance that it will hit the space station when it returns. While this isn't as bad as hitting an object orbiting in the oppsite direction (with impact speed = 2X orbital speed), an object that size could still do some damage to the space station.
I think this guy has an interesting idea, but as far as implementation goes, he's a kook.
And instead, if he has any brains about this situation, he would have his resume out yesterday, and they'll end up having to hire two people instead. Ah, the short-sightedness of manglement.
I'm tempted to say that he should consult with a laywer immediately and see if there are any, ah, "legal remedies" should manglement be stupid enough to fire him after all. Then call their bluff and sit.
But it gets better. After they fire him, he should be ready to work as a consultant/independent contractor for them at three times your current pay. Because when you're fired, the company does not get the benefit of "two weeks notice" so you can leave things in order.
Oh, and unless there's just cause, in .us he gets to collect unemployment, and (IIRC) the company has to pay more into the state unemployment funds. I don't think anybody would consider this "just cause".
Any company clueless enough to pull that kind of crap is not the kind of company I would want to stay at.
One night somebody broke into the pawn shop, saw the VCR, pulled the tape out of it, turned to the camera, smiled and waved. He thought he had pulled the security tape. The cops had a real good picture of him which was more than enough to put him in jail for quite some time.
I think you might want to add the Atari Jaguar to that comparison list. It certainly fits in with the first point: an unusual architecture that is difficult for developers to program for.
And there you have the difference between conservative and liberal ideals. Personal responsibility. See, according to you, the S&L's were completely innocent and it was the government's fault for not shoring them up. With no consideration that the S&L's were perhaps doing stupid things that caused their own downfall?
The next time you guys say that the two candidates are "just alike", babbling about "Republicrats" and "Gush vs Bore", consider that this is more than just a popularity contest. You're not just voting for a person to sit in the oval office or Congress, you're also voting for what his (or her) party represents.
Even worse are the "single-issue whackos" (whether that single issue is abortion or gay rights) who would rather stay home than vote for a candidate that better represents his/her own other beliefs when a candidate doesn't swear complete allegiance to the voter's pet issue. Thus usually resulting in a half vote in favor of the exact opposite of what the single-issue voter believes in.
Specific example: Saturday morning, Bob Dole and a lot of other military veterans had a press conference to complain about 77% of the overseas military vote being thrown out. Fox News showed it live, and even MSNBC was showing it. On a hunch, I switched to CNN. As I expected, they were not showing it. They were making it an "un-event", as it would be said in Orwellian NewSpeak.
But it's just not as intense when the winner goes to a brand new space station, rather than an oldy moldy decrepit space station with a decaying orbit. Oh well, so it goes.
I just heard that this Florida thing is now being referred to as "Hurricane Chad". Sheesh.
As for "old", well, that 17G drive cost me almost $300 when it was new! :)
Well, all modern operating systems can do this in theory at least
If you're talking "analogous to power & telephone services", that means to be even resistant to hardware failures. Which means hot-swap disks and CPUs. Certainly Sun systems can do this, except maybe if you lose the drive with the root partition, but I'm not aware of Winderz machines which allow CPU swapping.
Right now, my main Linux server is whining and rumbling like a banshee on testosterone, and it's not the power supply fan, so it must be the old 17 gig hard drive. So it looks like I'll have a few hours of downtime to get a new one in there.
Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities. Not entirely sure what they mean by this...
Sounds like NIS on steroids. Or maybe the Windoze Registry without the suckage, and distributed over multiple machines. Or better yet, NetInfo from NeXT/OS-X.
True, they say that any name part consisting entirely of USASCII characters are not allowed to be encoded this way, but they would have to go out of their way if they wanted to ensure that double-wide SJIS romaji were not confusingly registered. Then again, we can already do "s1ashdot.org" with just plain ASCII.
In addition, there's the inherent difficulty in the fact that a Chinese website using a Simplified Chinese set of ideographs could hijack surfers wanting to go to a site with the same name, but with Traditional Chinese ideographs.
IIRC, in Unicode, Chinese and Japanese ideographs all map to the same code if they're basically the same character, with the differences considered font-specific. In the extreme case, one common radical is rendered with one less stroke in Japanese, which could have created hundreds of extra codes.
Most simplified kanji/hanzi should be unique, but a few, at least in Japanese, use an already existing, more common character. Generally, though, this won't be a problem if Unicode is used.
How it works is there is a special prefix "<rp>" (or maybe this just represents the prefix, I can't really tell from the PDF, but I didn't think < and > were valid domain name characters) that indicates a part of the domain is encoded, followed by the encoded name which only uses ASCII characters, and includes information about which character set was used (Unicode, SJIS, etc.). The algorithm is called RACE, Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding.
A couple of examples were given for both a domain name and a server name:
<rp>45dfg62de34432.COM
<rp>3df45gd345.<rp>45dfg62de34432.COM
So I guess you can set your spam filters to block any domain starting with <rp>! :)
So is there an RFC on how this works?
What I think happened is the Democrats brought in busloads of senior citizens and told them "Now remember, punch the second hole or you lose your Social Security!" Since this was the only district in the state with this wierd ballot, anyone from out of the district busing in old folks wouldn't have known that it was really the third hole. Maybe one or two of them had enough clue to tell their shepherds when they got back on the bus something like "Duhh, I punched the second hole, but it sure looked like that was the vote for Buchannan."
Any way you look at it, it is clear where PHBs and other lusers go when they retire: Palm Beach.
I wasn't stunned about that. I was stunned that they gave it to Gore in the first place. When about 10% of the precincts were in, and Bush was leading 50/48, I wondered where the hell they pulled a solid Gore win for the state from, and guessed it was based entirely on exit polls of 1770 some odd people, which in a close race is about as reliable as pulling it out of your ass.
Finally CNN pulled Florida, then Fox News, then the two networks I was also switching to.
Now the really tricky part about this was that the polls were apparently still open in the Florida panhandle (which I guess is in a different time zone) when the networks gave the state to Gore.
It seems that the one thing it does is keep the states with lower populations from becoming completely insignificant, amplifying their votes a bit. This was one of the concerns back in the 1770's when there were only 13 states, that the little states would be reduced to insignificance, and is also why we have a bicameral (house+senate) system that is set up the way it is. After all, who would campaign in Rhode Island otherwise?
Still, I'd kind of like to see the "winner takes all" thing done away with. In a state with a near 50/50 split, and there were quite a few of them, it seems kind of silly to count it the same as a 100/0 victory. Plus, this would give third party candidates a chance. Nader's 4% in California would have been enough to give him at least one electoral vote. Then we'd also have to start thinking about coalition voting, with third part Electoral College delegates voting for the best coalition, to avoid it going to Congress.
Not that this is better as a router than as a good cheap xterm, but I am interested in whether it can be made into a router.
Huh? So you're saying that Nader, with his way far leftist Green Party, at least as far left as Socalists, and maybe as far left as Communists, will be the third party of choice for disgruntled Republicans? If that's the case, we (as in the whole country) might as well give up.
You know what's been bugging me this election? It's how Nader gets all this press as though the Green party were the Official Third Party, just because of Mister Corvair, when the Libertarians have been sticking in there for years. And nobody, at least not the media, has bothered to look deeply at his party platform. A lot of people are just voting for him as a "None Of The Above" checkbox.
Those who say they would have voted for Bush if Nader hadn't been running are the worst of the lot. No matter what else you can say about Nader and the Green Party, they certainly are farther left than Gore.
One president has had non-contiguous terms, Grover Cleveland.
So were the cigarettes made from the tobacco that Gore harvested himself?
Sure, it's annoying to have to switch regions when I want to play my import anime DVDs, but I can.
I'll add another reason: 3) it probably has its own share of the annoying firmware bugs that plague cheaper players. Not only is this bad for the owner of the machine, but it causes companies mastering DVD discs to avoid features that screw up cheap-ass players, thus affecting every DVD owner.
I'm sure there are those who will say "but doesn't Sony make the most bug-free DVD players out there?" Sure they do for their regular players, but this is from a different division of the company, and likely isn't even running the same (debugged) code as their regular players.
...is when he gets paid big bucks for the movie rights!
Well, I hope it wasn't to get away from Taco Cabana, HEB, and BBQ. :)
Anyhow, I've been checking where the test neighborhoods in Austin are, and they're all down southwest around the Mopac/360/290 triangle.
One group is in an area bordered by Town Lake, Barton Creek, 360, and the south edge of West Lake Hills, in the Barton Creek Mall area.
The other area is bordered by Mopac, Slaughter lane, Brodie Lane, and William Cannon, with a small extra area northeast of Brodie and William Cannon.
All areas are apparently within the Austin city limits. This makes sense, as they only got approval with the city of Austin.
Anyone who is planning to move down there to get in on the trial run had better either have a southside/360 job or plan for a fun-filled Mopac commute twice a day!
Hey, wait a minute. Who let Pat Buchannan in here? Next thing you know, Harry Browne, Ralph Nader, and Alan Keyes will want their share of time too.
Yep, in the early 20th century before CRT displays and cameras had been developed, in the experimental dawn of television, people used mechanical scanners for cameras and displays.
The problem with vector video games is that you don't have a regular scan like you do with raster, so raster is actually easier to generate with a laser and mirrors because you just need constantly rotating mirrors.
FWIW, the first home TV recordings (time-shifting, even) were done by recording the analog signal using a wax phonograph recorder. On some examples of these discs, you can visibly see the sync regions, much like you can on a CAV laserdisc.