Any cheesey rumors of what happened to the X33 after it was killed? I saw one report that the project was killed in the public sense, and being 'taken black.' After reading the report on the tank failure, it looked to me as if the technology wasn't disproven, it just needed more work. Had the X33 been treated more as a technology development vehicle than an end in itself, good things might have come.
The most important aspect of space travel...
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
is that it captivates the minds of our youth, and inspires them to enter careers in science and engineering. Robot probes do this, but IMHO manned space does it even better. The urge to 'go someplace new' is built into all of us, and though the Earth is big, and arguably parts (like the ocean depths) are poorly explored, space most truly qualifies as 'infinite' in its possiblities.
I've got this multi-million pound bomb. Half a century ago, we couldn't get ANY of these off the ground without them exploding. But now we're 'pretty good' at it.
Get real. At ANY point in technology, reaching orbit is a heck of a lot harder than getting from point A to point B over paved roads in a car. One gallon of gas, properly vaporized, is roughly equivalent to a stick of dynamite. So most of us strap ourselves in with 10-20 sticks of dynamite, daily. The Shuttle has millions of poinds of fuel and oxidizer. (LOX - forget about 'properly vaporizing' the gasoline.) What they do is HARD.
Perhaps the WORST thing about Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like is that they make us thing space travel is safe and simple, and really convey NOTHING of the distances involved.
I think they're trying to make us laugh to death.
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 1
Kind of an adaptation of the MS ploy of insulting the judge until he reacts, then win on appeal based on the judges 'unproffessional conduct.'
If your enemy is all dead from laughing at you, you still win.
I suspect the can(n)on has to boom in a different direction for the movies, though I did like the touch of including Sylvester McCoy in the McGann movie, even if the movie itself wasn't generally well received. For all of the running through the Tardis in "Invasion of Time", we never saw such an essential and powerful piece of the Tardis as the Eye until 1996?
I just get this ugly feeling that we in the US (and perhaps the West in general) are getting ready to diminish ourselves the way the Islamic empire diminished itself around the time of the Rennaissance. I know there's much more to it than IP laws, and that the Islamic empire was busy coping with barbarians, etc.
But there are some parallels: A civilization that grew to prosperity based on free thought, progress, and advancement of knowledge. Conservative elements that grew to dominance and stifled the very free thought that made them great. As for coping with barbarians, perhaps there is a modern parallel for that too, in terrorism.
Nothing is completely free from needing patches, not the least my little blue Netear on my Home LAN. (I've flashed it for updates)
But appliances have one big advantage in this respect - less. No hard drive, little RAM, well minimized software set. Much of this can be done with Linux as well, but a generic PC makes it all harder to do. (Even if an appliance could be r00ted, it probably doesn't have enough 'spare' resource to do anything useful with, especially without compromising its base function in a user-obvious (reboot) way.)
I like auto-patching, but retaining an admin. For one thing, it's pretty tough to replace a kernel automatically.
Especially with a PC-based router the customer needs to understand that he is now buying a *service* instead of a machine. It's not too smart to leave *any* box live on the Internet, or even in a customer's office without some sort of maintenance, but for a Linux (or Windows, any flavor) box it's potentially dangerous.
The number of exposures for Linux doesn't particularly bother me, for a box that's being actively maintained. For a generally non-service box you don't even need to be paranoically prompt about getting fixes applied. But I'd get worried about an *appliance* PC.
Over the past several years we've learned that bacteria (and even plants?) can be 'promiscuous' about sharing useful genes, such as antibiotic resistance. Software is just catching up.
To continue to stretch the metaphor, apparently the immune system is keyed to stereochemistry of surface molecules. Change surface molecules, fool the immune system until it adapts. Spam has been taking this approach, injecting random text in an attempt to fool Baysean filtering. No doubt virii will learn the same trick. (Break code into mini-object modules, and use a randomizing link-edit step, for instance.)
That's why I wouldna thunk to look in the SCUMMVM FAQ about development resources. I did check their web site, google, etc. I dug out PyGame last night, and may try running some of those (+source) past my son.
I was thinking more of a vehicle for my son to try some games programming. He's more into the art side than the software side. I was hoping to find something more tailored to right-brainers.
Though, I suppose the right libraries or construction kit might make the job reasonable. In the old days, rapid gratification was possible with entry-level effort. These days our expectations have risen so high that meaningful entry-level exercises can be downright difficult to define.
As I said, (or meant to say) it would need to be a 'big enough' response in order to count. Though I do suspect that just the Slashdot readership would be sufficient to bury their 'legitimate' (read: suckers) business.
IMHO the key is to go after the people who hire spammers as an advertising means.
If *all* of us answered our spam, it would be like a mailbomb or DDOS attack, except they *asked* us to respond. Can they blame us, if we do?
If there's a secondary incovenience, like the fact that they can't find their one sucker in 10,000, well too bad for them. Maybe they should have worked harder targeting their spam to suckers instead of getting past all of our spam filters.
Actually, we don't *all* have to respond to spam. I'll bet if even 1% of us did, they'd be buried past their ability to handle.
but the evidence is still relatively weak.
on
Higgs Boson Detected?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Never read about the Shiga wire, did read "Fountains of Paradise." Wasn't actively thinking of that story while cutting vegetables, though I won't deny a subconscious link.
But instead I'll mention Robert Cringeley's article from last few weeks. (not today's) His take was that in most rounds of offshoring, it wasn't bad because something new came right in behind. He further asserts that biotech and nanotech fields are both ready to take off, and reuse (and expand) on the skill base that is now being offshored. The current job gap is because the venture capitalists haven't been investing in these companies, thus helping the next big wave take off. (They're waiting for The Sure Thing.)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/archive/ Look at the Mar4 and Feb26 articles.
I think a better (?) model than Ron Popeil would be Dan Ackroyd's impression of Julia Childs on SNL. (For those who a-are too young, b-don't remember, c-never watched SNL in its prime, the skit involved knife accidents while cooking, and copious use of stage blood.)
After reading some other nanotube story, I was cooking that night and musing about nanotubes in food preparation...
Imagine a rectangular frame with nanotubes forming a grid or just parallel lines. Drop an egg through the frame, and it falls through the bottom sliced. Drop a potato through the frame, and (uncooked) french fries fall out the bottom.
Forget what you're doing when you handle it, and take pieces of your fingers to the hospital for reattachment.
I remember that broadcast. There was something visceral as they read Genesis with the picture on TV, as fuzzy as it was. Publication of the true photo only amplified it, and I still get the feeling thinking about it, decades later.
IMHO what we need MOST at the ISS is a conference room. From what I've heard, EVERY astronaut or cosmonaut has come back to Earth with his/her world view adjusted by the experience. World leaders need to understand, that viscerally, that we all share this little island in space. (Unfortunately I suspect that some world leaders are so jaded and full of themselves that they'd see the vision and instead think "I want it ALL!")
I was similarly struck by a sequence during the movie, "Master and Commander." The scene began of people on the ship, then pulled back an up, until you began to realize that this was a tiny little ship on a huge ocean. I wished we could get a similarly powerful sequence of a spacecraft. Part of the effectiveness of the movie sequence was that the ocean was active, and that can't be captured in space.
Which I'm sure most outfits pushing "utility computing" really don't want you to do. It can be construed in the way that most responders did, as 'something that's there, that you just use,' and I suspect that that's what companies are pushing.
It can also be construed in the same cast as "public utility," like water and electricity. Public utilities are either publicly owned by governments, or privately owned and heavily regulated by Public Service Boards. I'm sure the companies aren't pushing for this.
In general use, a utility is something so heavily used that its existence becomes 'assumed.' IMHO, the WORST thing that Microsoft has taught us is that you can have it both ways. For approaching two decades, Windows on PCs has become pretty much a 'utility', nearly always assumed to be there, with no oversight or regulation that a real 'utility' has. In essence, Microsoft has positioned themselves as a Gatekeeper to personal computing, and collects 'tax' on it.
(Should utilities be regulated? Shouldn't the market set prices? Perhaps, but perhaps not when it's truly a 'utility'. Science fiction is full of stories of selling air on the moon at exhorbitant markups.)
This lesson has not been lost on other companies, so now we have a general rush to become gatekeepers, to emulate the 'most successful American company.' This is BAD, for two reasons. In the first place, gatekeeping has worked for Microsoft in the short and middle terms, but is now showing cracks in its foundation.
In the second place, gatekeeping is bad for society. In the gatekeeping model, companies try to own standards instead of cooperate on them. They don't seem to have learned the lesson of how CompuServe, AOL, Genie, The Source, and Prodigy weren't really making it until they surrendered to the open, non-owned Internet standards. As a result, everyone is squabbling over owning small pies rather than a piece of a gigantic pie, even when only a piece of a gigantic pie is far bigger than the small pie.
Our national progress and innovation are being held back by an obsession with the gatekeeper model of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Any cheesey rumors of what happened to the X33 after it was killed? I saw one report that the project was killed in the public sense, and being 'taken black.' After reading the report on the tank failure, it looked to me as if the technology wasn't disproven, it just needed more work. Had the X33 been treated more as a technology development vehicle than an end in itself, good things might have come.
is that it captivates the minds of our youth, and inspires them to enter careers in science and engineering. Robot probes do this, but IMHO manned space does it even better. The urge to 'go someplace new' is built into all of us, and though the Earth is big, and arguably parts (like the ocean depths) are poorly explored, space most truly qualifies as 'infinite' in its possiblities.
Don't you fear a patent bomb sitting under mono?
I sure do.
Let's all use .net, instead!
That'll show them.
Note for the sarcasm-impaired: Move along, now.
I've got this multi-million pound bomb. Half a century ago, we couldn't get ANY of these off the ground without them exploding. But now we're 'pretty good' at it.
Get real. At ANY point in technology, reaching orbit is a heck of a lot harder than getting from point A to point B over paved roads in a car. One gallon of gas, properly vaporized, is roughly equivalent to a stick of dynamite. So most of us strap ourselves in with 10-20 sticks of dynamite, daily. The Shuttle has millions of poinds of fuel and oxidizer. (LOX - forget about 'properly vaporizing' the gasoline.) What they do is HARD.
Perhaps the WORST thing about Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like is that they make us thing space travel is safe and simple, and really convey NOTHING of the distances involved.
Kind of an adaptation of the MS ploy of insulting the judge until he reacts, then win on appeal based on the judges 'unproffessional conduct.'
If your enemy is all dead from laughing at you, you still win.
What about Peter Cushing in "Day of the Daleks"?
I suspect the can(n)on has to boom in a different direction for the movies, though I did like the touch of including Sylvester McCoy in the McGann movie, even if the movie itself wasn't generally well received. For all of the running through the Tardis in "Invasion of Time", we never saw such an essential and powerful piece of the Tardis as the Eye until 1996?
I just get this ugly feeling that we in the US (and perhaps the West in general) are getting ready to diminish ourselves the way the Islamic empire diminished itself around the time of the Rennaissance. I know there's much more to it than IP laws, and that the Islamic empire was busy coping with barbarians, etc.
But there are some parallels: A civilization that grew to prosperity based on free thought, progress, and advancement of knowledge. Conservative elements that grew to dominance and stifled the very free thought that made them great. As for coping with barbarians, perhaps there is a modern parallel for that too, in terrorism.
Nothing is completely free from needing patches, not the least my little blue Netear on my Home LAN. (I've flashed it for updates)
But appliances have one big advantage in this respect - less. No hard drive, little RAM, well minimized software set. Much of this can be done with Linux as well, but a generic PC makes it all harder to do. (Even if an appliance could be r00ted, it probably doesn't have enough 'spare' resource to do anything useful with, especially without compromising its base function in a user-obvious (reboot) way.)
I like auto-patching, but retaining an admin. For one thing, it's pretty tough to replace a kernel automatically.
Especially with a PC-based router the customer needs to understand that he is now buying a *service* instead of a machine. It's not too smart to leave *any* box live on the Internet, or even in a customer's office without some sort of maintenance, but for a Linux (or Windows, any flavor) box it's potentially dangerous.
The number of exposures for Linux doesn't particularly bother me, for a box that's being actively maintained. For a generally non-service box you don't even need to be paranoically prompt about getting fixes applied. But I'd get worried about an *appliance* PC.
Over the past several years we've learned that bacteria (and even plants?) can be 'promiscuous' about sharing useful genes, such as antibiotic resistance. Software is just catching up.
To continue to stretch the metaphor, apparently the immune system is keyed to stereochemistry of surface molecules. Change surface molecules, fool the immune system until it adapts. Spam has been taking this approach, injecting random text in an attempt to fool Baysean filtering. No doubt virii will learn the same trick. (Break code into mini-object modules, and use a randomizing link-edit step, for instance.)
That's why I wouldna thunk to look in the SCUMMVM FAQ about development resources. I did check their web site, google, etc. I dug out PyGame last night, and may try running some of those (+source) past my son.
How outrageous, reading the FAQ.
I was thinking more of a vehicle for my son to try some games programming. He's more into the art side than the software side. I was hoping to find something more tailored to right-brainers.
Though, I suppose the right libraries or construction kit might make the job reasonable. In the old days, rapid gratification was possible with entry-level effort. These days our expectations have risen so high that meaningful entry-level exercises can be downright difficult to define.
A few quick searches, now and in the past, have only ever shown one SCUMM authoring system, called SCRAMM. But the link to SCRAMM is dead and gone.
Anyone know of a (preferably OSS) authoring system for SCUMM? As SCUMMVM gets more mature, this gets more interesting.
You forgot about being drowned in hot molten butter, too.
As I said, (or meant to say) it would need to be a 'big enough' response in order to count. Though I do suspect that just the Slashdot readership would be sufficient to bury their 'legitimate' (read: suckers) business.
IMHO the key is to go after the people who hire spammers as an advertising means.
I think we *should* answer spam.
If *all* of us answered our spam, it would be like a mailbomb or DDOS attack, except they *asked* us to respond. Can they blame us, if we do?
If there's a secondary incovenience, like the fact that they can't find their one sucker in 10,000, well too bad for them. Maybe they should have worked harder targeting their spam to suckers instead of getting past all of our spam filters.
Actually, we don't *all* have to respond to spam. I'll bet if even 1% of us did, they'd be buried past their ability to handle.
Groan!
Was the pun intentional?
Never read about the Shiga wire, did read "Fountains of Paradise." Wasn't actively thinking of that story while cutting vegetables, though I won't deny a subconscious link.
But why bother?
Wish I had mod points.
But instead I'll mention Robert Cringeley's article from last few weeks. (not today's) His take was that in most rounds of offshoring, it wasn't bad because something new came right in behind. He further asserts that biotech and nanotech fields are both ready to take off, and reuse (and expand) on the skill base that is now being offshored. The current job gap is because the venture capitalists haven't been investing in these companies, thus helping the next big wave take off. (They're waiting for The Sure Thing.)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/archive/
Look at the Mar4 and Feb26 articles.
I think a better (?) model than Ron Popeil would be Dan Ackroyd's impression of Julia Childs on SNL. (For those who a-are too young, b-don't remember, c-never watched SNL in its prime, the skit involved knife accidents while cooking, and copious use of stage blood.)
After reading some other nanotube story, I was cooking that night and musing about nanotubes in food preparation...
Imagine a rectangular frame with nanotubes forming a grid or just parallel lines. Drop an egg through the frame, and it falls through the bottom sliced. Drop a potato through the frame, and (uncooked) french fries fall out the bottom.
Forget what you're doing when you handle it, and take pieces of your fingers to the hospital for reattachment.
I remember that broadcast. There was something visceral as they read Genesis with the picture on TV, as fuzzy as it was. Publication of the true photo only amplified it, and I still get the feeling thinking about it, decades later.
IMHO what we need MOST at the ISS is a conference room. From what I've heard, EVERY astronaut or cosmonaut has come back to Earth with his/her world view adjusted by the experience. World leaders need to understand, that viscerally, that we all share this little island in space. (Unfortunately I suspect that some world leaders are so jaded and full of themselves that they'd see the vision and instead think "I want it ALL!")
I was similarly struck by a sequence during the movie, "Master and Commander." The scene began of people on the ship, then pulled back an up, until you began to realize that this was a tiny little ship on a huge ocean. I wished we could get a similarly powerful sequence of a spacecraft. Part of the effectiveness of the movie sequence was that the ocean was active, and that can't be captured in space.
Which I'm sure most outfits pushing "utility computing" really don't want you to do. It can be construed in the way that most responders did, as 'something that's there, that you just use,' and I suspect that that's what companies are pushing.
It can also be construed in the same cast as "public utility," like water and electricity. Public utilities are either publicly owned by governments, or privately owned and heavily regulated by Public Service Boards. I'm sure the companies aren't pushing for this.
In general use, a utility is something so heavily used that its existence becomes 'assumed.' IMHO, the WORST thing that Microsoft has taught us is that you can have it both ways. For approaching two decades, Windows on PCs has become pretty much a 'utility', nearly always assumed to be there, with no oversight or regulation that a real 'utility' has. In essence, Microsoft has positioned themselves as a Gatekeeper to personal computing, and collects 'tax' on it.
(Should utilities be regulated? Shouldn't the market set prices? Perhaps, but perhaps not when it's truly a 'utility'. Science fiction is full of stories of selling air on the moon at exhorbitant markups.)
This lesson has not been lost on other companies, so now we have a general rush to become gatekeepers, to emulate the 'most successful American company.' This is BAD, for two reasons. In the first place, gatekeeping has worked for Microsoft in the short and middle terms, but is now showing cracks in its foundation.
In the second place, gatekeeping is bad for society. In the gatekeeping model, companies try to own standards instead of cooperate on them. They don't seem to have learned the lesson of how CompuServe, AOL, Genie, The Source, and Prodigy weren't really making it until they surrendered to the open, non-owned Internet standards. As a result, everyone is squabbling over owning small pies rather than a piece of a gigantic pie, even when only a piece of a gigantic pie is far bigger than the small pie.
Our national progress and innovation are being held back by an obsession with the gatekeeper model of business.