When I ordered this book from Amazon, I found out it was an Amazon exclusive, so that's the only place to get it right now. On the other hand, I was able to get my copy in a very short time, so I'm fine with that... but I hope that you can get it in other places in the future.
Well, I saw it at a Borders last Friday (10-October), so perhaps other Borders have it, too?
Few publications ran stories about the troubles surrounding the Ohio plant around 2002. Here's the story from Miami Herald dated March 26, 2002 predicting such failures.
"The" Ohio plant? Which one? The article is talking about the Davis-Besse plant which was out of service before the blackout.
"Accurate" predictions? Davis-Besse was not involved in last week's blackout in any way, since it was off-line!
I live in Columbus as well, and can tell you that some people in the city and it's outlying areas *were* affected.
No, they were not affected by this. The only area affected by this in AEP (which serves Columbus) territory was Mt. Vernon in Knox county, about 40 miles NE of Columbus. There may have been outages at the time, but they were not a result of the blackout.
Now, if your service was from First Energy (whose territory begins just a bit north of Columbus, then your lights were probably out.
Actually, we already had our major black-out last month due to storms. Maybe we were better prepared.
Widespread outages (such as caused by last month's storms) are not usually considered "blackouts", although I'm sure the difference is lost on those affected. The storms certainly are not a help in preparing for this kind of thing.
On a side note...
I am a Electrical Engineer/Programmer-Analyst with over twenty years experience and I am very surprised and puzzled by this blackout.
When the 1965 blackout occured, the utilities got together and formed regional reliability councils to prevent a recurrance. Simply stated, the idea was separate the network (the electric power network) from the area having problems, once the problems got bad enough. It worked in 1977 when NYC went black, but the rest of the northeast did not.
However, this blackout was worse than the 1965 one! There are "rules of the road" on how to operate the electric power system and I'm going to be extremely interested in what caused this to happen.
The SecureID number is in plain text so that someone with a sniffer-type device could sniff a SecureID number and use it for access.
SecurID numbers can only be used once for access. Replay attacks will not work because of this. From RSA's web site:
A distributed lock manager tracks user authentication between replicated servers and blocks redundant requests in order to prevent replay attacks against servers or agents.
Regrettably, Forbes dosn't think this is a big deal. It shows Motorola's hedging its bets, as they are also a Symbian licensee and have developed their own OS internally.
Anyway, if you tried to do certain things, like delete a floppy disk, or format a directory, it would pop up a message "User Stupidity Error." Finally, some code that tells it like it is. I wish I could put "User Stupidity Errors" in my programs at work . ..
Does anybody remember what the name of the program was?
I was going to mention this one, but you beat me to it. I always thought that error message was a riot. I got it when trying to rename a file to the same name as a directory (in the same directory).
And it was "Disk Man", or at least that's the name on the icon of my 2500. (Powered up for the first time on about 2 years!)
The problem I have with these reviews and those that are found on Amazon, is that there is no context for the review. Specifically, what's great to you might suck to me. We have no knowledge of the reviewers skill level or experience.
Even worse, you don't know if the have some relationship to the author! A contractor working for me was sharing a cubicle with a "business analyst". This guy boasted about how he had published several books and got great ratings on Amazon because he (through secondary accounts) and his buddies would write reviews about how great the book was and then would use other accounts to recommend the reviews. Sad. Let the buyer beware.
The problem is that myself and the component built up a few thousand volts when I walked across the floor, and the person I touched instantly discharged me, and a large current came out of the component too...
It's actually not a large current, just a large voltage. Static electricity discharge currents are on the order of microAmps. That's why it's called "static" electricity, almost no current. The voltages can be in the kiloVolts, though.
If they broke into the base, photocopied some records, and bragged about it noone would have even thought twice about their arrest. But now that it is electronic it is of some sort of interest to Slashdot? Very sad.
I think this is news because of ForensicTec's attitude. As the poster said: "What did they expect?" The problem is that there are quite of few people out there that see this activity as somehow different than breaking into the base and photocopying records, even though it's not.
And sure I am concerned about military security. And it is disturbing someone could hack into it.
Yes. However, not to lessen the severity of the issue, but I think you would find that the stuff that really needs to be protected, is really protected. From my reading of the article, they mostly got personnel records.
Security is a process, and it looks like the Army has quite a bit of "processing" to do.
impossible in Fortran since there are no pointers at all
Wow, we'd better stop using them in our F90 code, eh?
One of the biggest problems Fortran has is a PR one. Everyone "knows" things like "Fortran has no pointers". A simple example from the Compaq Visual Fortran help:
INTEGER, POINTER:: P, N INTEGER, TARGET:: M INTEGER S M = 14 N => M ! N is associated with M P => N ! P is associated with M through N S = P + 5
Fortran 90 has plenty of structured programming features to make maintainable code. Equally, if not more important, is that Fortran code can be much better optimized than C/C++ code for numerics.
Agreed on both points.
We have "ported" a number of programs from F77 to F90 and they are much more maintainable as F90 programs.
There still are enormous Fortran code bases in the engineering and scientific fields. A vendor of a major (in my field anyway) application program started moving their code base from F77 to F90 a few years ago. That program suit is about 1.2M lines of code.
Since one of the major features of a PVR is to be able to rewind and fast-forward at will, an obvious side-effect is you can simply skip commercials. This is bad for advertisers for obvious reasons.
You're right, I never did that with my VCR.
I say it every time someone mentions this... How is Tivo's fast forwarding different than my VCRs? It's not as far as I can tell. My 1998 vintage VCR even does the "jump back a few seconds to make up for human reflexes" thing quite well. And other VCRs I have seen have the skip 30 seconds at a time feature as well. Hell, a friend of mine bought a VCR for his parents that would go back over the recorded material, figure out where the commercials were, and mark them so that you never had to see them again!
I think the skip commercials arguement is a red herring on the part of the entertainment/marketing industry. What they're really worried about is the ability, on a wide scale, to share content (even if it came from broadcast TV!)
How about killing those pop (under/over) Advertisments? That alone is worth the price of admission!
Yes it certainly was. But the advertisers seem to be coming up with ways to get around Mozilla's anti-popup feature. The problem appears to be listed in Bugzilla, but not at a high priority.
"Exponential" means something - it does not just mean "high acceleration" as the author of that quote seems to think.
True. But "Quantum" doesn't mean "large" or "giant" either, but that's what it means in popular usage these days. Look at the way writers use the term " a quantum leap".
Yoooo, win 2000 = D when XP = C+ ???? 2000 is the best OS MS did. XP is crappy.
Well, IMHO I guess it depends on your criteria. From a stability standpoint WinNT 3.51 was their most stable offering. When they moved the graphics subsystem into ring zero the result was many more crashes.
A Long time ago I was working on a project which was being built on a pair of single-board Motorola 6800-based computers. (Yes, 6800.)
I was in charge of some of the display code. The unit would display results on a thermal printer and an LED display. The problem was... the results were displaying as random junk.
A fellow undergraduate working on the project and I looked long and hard at the code, but everything seemed ok. Then, after about an hour or staring at the code, one of the grad students on the project came up behind us. This fellow pointed at something on the screen and said "You can't do that" and walked away. We stared at the screen and it hit me...
The 6800 had two accumulators, A and B. They were identical except... you couldn't do decimal conversions in the B accumulator! I had forgotten that DAA was Decimal Adjust AccumulatorA, not Decimal Adjust Accumulator. Duh.
A quick breese through the editor, a run of the cross-assembler, and a long time manually punching hex codes into the EPROM burner (no sense buying an interface to the burner when you have free undergrad workers!) and the display unit worked!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I saw it at a Borders last Friday (10-October), so perhaps other Borders have it, too?
Milalwi
Oh, no! Now you've violated the DMCA!
Just kidding... Sorta.
Milalwi
True.
Also, the Transmission Reservation (E-Tag) system is not directly involved with the actual control of the power system anyway.
Milalwi
"The" Ohio plant? Which one?
The article is talking about the Davis-Besse plant which was out of service before the blackout.
"Accurate" predictions? Davis-Besse was not involved in last week's blackout in any way, since it was off-line!
Milalwi
No, they were not affected by this. The only area affected by this in AEP (which serves Columbus) territory was Mt. Vernon in Knox county, about 40 miles NE of Columbus. There may have been outages at the time, but they were not a result of the blackout.
Now, if your service was from First Energy (whose territory begins just a bit north of Columbus, then your lights were probably out.
Widespread outages (such as caused by last month's storms) are not usually considered "blackouts", although I'm sure the difference is lost on those affected. The storms certainly are not a help in preparing for this kind of thing.
On a side note...
I am a Electrical Engineer/Programmer-Analyst with over twenty years experience and I am very surprised and puzzled by this blackout.
When the 1965 blackout occured, the utilities got together and formed regional reliability councils to prevent a recurrance. Simply stated, the idea was separate the network (the electric power network) from the area having problems, once the problems got bad enough. It worked in 1977 when NYC went black, but the rest of the northeast did not.
However, this blackout was worse than the 1965 one! There are "rules of the road" on how to operate the electric power system and I'm going to be extremely interested in what caused this to happen.
Milalwi
SecurID numbers can only be used once for access. Replay attacks will not work because of this. From RSA's web site:
Milalwi
Regrettably, Forbes dosn't think this is a big deal. It shows Motorola's hedging its bets, as they are also a Symbian licensee and have developed their own OS internally.
Milalwi
Yep. Why else would a motorcycle manufacturer have a logo which is three overlapping tuning forks?
Milalwi
Indeed, I would think that they'll want folks to stop using "Google" as a verb..
After all, when was the last time you rode on a Escalator Brand moving staircase?
Milalwi
I was going to mention this one, but you beat me to it. I always thought that error message was a riot. I got it when trying to rename a file to the same name as a directory (in the same directory).
And it was "Disk Man", or at least that's the name on the icon of my 2500. (Powered up for the first time on about 2 years!)
Milalwi
No... that's innovation!
Milalwi
Even worse, you don't know if the have some relationship to the author! A contractor working for me was sharing a cubicle with a "business analyst". This guy boasted about how he had published several books and got great ratings on Amazon because he (through secondary accounts) and his buddies would write reviews about how great the book was and then would use other accounts to recommend the reviews. Sad. Let the buyer beware.
Milalwi
Don't make eye contact!
Milalwi
Man, you got a lot of stuff on your front page... or you've got a lot hidden.
It was in a Slashback
Milalwi
It's actually not a large current, just a large voltage. Static electricity discharge currents are on the order of microAmps. That's why it's called "static" electricity, almost no current. The voltages can be in the kiloVolts, though.
Milalwi
So the "foot"ball where you bang the ball around with your head is ok?
Milalwi
I think this is news because of ForensicTec's attitude. As the poster said: "What did they expect?" The problem is that there are quite of few people out there that see this activity as somehow different than breaking into the base and photocopying records, even though it's not.
Yes. However, not to lessen the severity of the issue, but I think you would find that the stuff that really needs to be protected, is really protected. From my reading of the article, they mostly got personnel records.
Security is a process, and it looks like the Army has quite a bit of "processing" to do.
Milalwi
One of the biggest problems Fortran has is a PR one. Everyone "knows" things like "Fortran has no pointers". A simple example from the Compaq Visual Fortran help:
INTEGER, POINTER
INTEGER, TARGET
INTEGER S
M = 14
N => M ! N is associated with M
P => N ! P is associated with M through N
S = P + 5
The value assigned to S is 19 (14 + 5).
Milalwi
We have "ported" a number of programs from F77 to F90 and they are much more maintainable as F90 programs.
There still are enormous Fortran code bases in the engineering and scientific fields. A vendor of a major (in my field anyway) application program started moving their code base from F77 to F90 a few years ago. That program suit is about 1.2M lines of code.
Milalwi
I say it every time someone mentions this... How is Tivo's fast forwarding different than my VCRs? It's not as far as I can tell. My 1998 vintage VCR even does the "jump back a few seconds to make up for human reflexes" thing quite well. And other VCRs I have seen have the skip 30 seconds at a time feature as well. Hell, a friend of mine bought a VCR for his parents that would go back over the recorded material, figure out where the commercials were, and mark them so that you never had to see them again!
I think the skip commercials arguement is a red herring on the part of the entertainment/marketing industry. What they're really worried about is the ability, on a wide scale, to share content (even if it came from broadcast TV!)
Milalwi
Milalwi
Milalwi
Milalwi
Milalwi
A Long time ago I was working on a project which was being built on a pair of single-board Motorola 6800-based computers. (Yes, 6800.)
I was in charge of some of the display code. The unit would display results on a thermal printer and an LED display. The problem was... the results were displaying as random junk.
A fellow undergraduate working on the project and I looked long and hard at the code, but everything seemed ok. Then, after about an hour or staring at the code, one of the grad students on the project came up behind us. This fellow pointed at something on the screen and said "You can't do that" and walked away. We stared at the screen and it hit me...
The 6800 had two accumulators, A and B. They were identical except... you couldn't do decimal conversions in the B accumulator! I had forgotten that DAA was Decimal Adjust AccumulatorA, not Decimal Adjust Accumulator. Duh.
A quick breese through the editor, a run of the cross-assembler, and a long time manually punching hex codes into the EPROM burner (no sense buying an interface to the burner when you have free undergrad workers!) and the display unit worked!
I don't think I'll ever forget that one.
Milalwi