You don't know if your pilot today is battle proven, don't you? Having the option to take control from the computer, however, should be possible. I can't believe airbus isn't doing this. The news claims, the autopilot was turned off - so this means human control, no? I'm rather more concerned about having no backup radar on board. It seems strange, that only one radar is there, while a second radar could be in a less exposed position (being less useful for that reason, but for backup purposes).
It seems somebody is spreading FUD against airbus, and that's something which doesn't surprise me at all.
What if it writes itself in the firmware when you shutdown the computer just before rebooting, and loads itself back into the SMM during boot? Maybe even restoring the original firmware? To work around space limitations, the SMM code could hide another rootkit hiding on the disk and download a new copy if the system has been wiped.
Not seeing all 4 arms in infrared light is not new. In fact this has been known for a long time and it just means that those stellar arms are not density waves in the stellar disk. However, they are seen in the distribution of molecular clouds. Basically this means that the Milky Way has two overlapping spiral pattern: a stronger 2-armed mode which is in stars and gas, and another 4-armed mode which is only seen in gas. The 4-arm mode is weaker (as expected from theory) and extends over a smaller radius range. So not all studies will find 4 arms. In the optical, that is seen by eye from the distance, our Galaxy would look 4-armed, because those weaker arms are still hosts of star formation. But in infrared, many galaxies look different, because in this waveband we see mostly the older stellar population.
is there any reason this can't be the unaccounted "dark matter" astronomers are always talking about? Yes and no. Yes, because now that this is 'known' we have to remove some mass from the 'dark matter' budget and add it to dust and stars. However, 'normal' matter is only 4% and 92% of that is gas, not stars or dust. So increasing the contribution of 'stars' or 'dust' will not change the amount of missing (dark) matter significantly. So, no, in the the sense that it won't explain any significant part of the 'dark matter'.
That is the problem with the modern society. Nobody understands sciences let along technology (but a few), but everyone can talk. Media allows everyone to speak, look at the afternoon / evening TV program. But, rarely there is anything worth the transmission energy or the paper. In my opinion, we should turn of the TV station air broadcasting and outlow rainbow press. This would have a bigger 'health effect' than not turning on wifi everywhere.
Radiation from TV stations >> Radiation from mobile phones/masts >> Radiation from wifi
The link you quote only explains that you won't loose data if something breaks because it is distributing the data in a redundant way. This is what I expect from every RAID and it clearly is an intriguing idea to take this one step further and distribute over multiple machines, sites, etc. especially if you can scale performance as well. However, with HSM I meant 'hierarchical storage management', you may also know it by a different name. With HSM, data is kept on cheaper offline media like tapes and on disk. The disk only serves as a cache for the data on tape, less frequently (forgotten?) data is only on tape, but takes a while to be accessed, while more frequently used data is on disk as well. You do not need a backup, because every modification you do to the disk version is copied to tape after a preset delay. This way you have all former versions of a file if you need to recover. When you run out of tape space, you recycle space occupied by older versions, but theoretically you can consider the total space to be infinite (buy tapes as needed), while the 'online space' is limited and needs only big enough to hold your active data. With a HSM-kind of setup, you combine the advantages of tapes (cheap, save, low energy, easy to extend) with the advantages of disks (fast, random access). This is what is missing in solutions like starfish. If somebody deletes a file within starfish, it's probably gone forever, while if you have HSM, there is a tape copy for every change you did. It keeps as many as possible, getting rid of old ones as tape space needs to get recycled.
Every scientific theory must be tested. Apparently, this theory was not, as it would be quite simple to do: just correlate bee death statistics with mobile network coverage. I read an article which claimed the same, among 5 other as far fetched possibilities. They even quote Einstein saying mankind will start dying 5 days after the bees. Apparently, somebody was just guessing and the media picked it up, because this kind of 'news' makes it easy to sell the paper And it is always cool to quote Einstein, makes you look more educated. They should also remember this other famous word of Einstein: "Simplify as much as you can, but not more!" Bees are not more fragile than other insects, why do we then get lots of wasps (only one of the many kinds) and only few honeybees this year? Why should only the bees react to mobile phone radiation? There is clearly a problem, but switching off mobile phones doesn't solve it.
I was looking at both sites recently, and I do appreciate the efforts put forward in both projects. However, the post was about an open source high availability solution which also scales well and deals with users which do not plan well how they distribute their data.
Starfish has a limit of 1TB for the 'free' solution and is not GPL. Lustre is GPL (the limited free edition only), but cannot reexport over NFS, only SAMBA (not everyones choice). What about backup? Both solutions are not providing any means of backing up the presumably huge amount of data. As you get into the 50 TB+ regime, how you would ever be able to make a backup? Here is where a HSM kicks in: backups are not necessary anymore.
What is missing is a HSM kind of system natively integrated within NFS. Then you could take whatever cluster-filesystem you like to provide r/w access to the same aggregated storage pool (iSCSI, or FC attached RAIDs), reexport it with NFS from all cluster nodes (scaleable performance & failover!), and HSM to manage the data growths.
Software like Lustre and Starfish only wants you to help testing the software. Both are not OSS in my opinion and not ready for the production. So if you have to pay, why not go with a commercial software? Have a look at polymatrix, although they do not have an integrated HSM. Or, get SAMFS in a HA-NFS Server configuration (could be linux). Yes, you pay for the license by the GB, but you do same is true for the hardware cost. Having a single (large enough and scaleable) filesystem will stop your customer to duplicate and move things around, causing increased maintenance cost.
Both articles talk about different time scales. The sun spot rate is going from minimum to maximum in only 11 years (not sure about the correct time scale but should be approximately right). Just last year, the Sun hit the minimum and for the first time a gigantic explosion with a shockwave running all around the Sun was observed. While the Sun Spot number goes through this cycle, the solar magnetic field is reversed. This is critical for the solar wind which helps to protect earth from the cosmic radiation. Same is true for the magnetic field of the earth. And Earth's magnetic field is also reversing now! Why? The interplay between the solar magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field is not known.
The NASA article talks about this minimum, and the science article talks about the average Sun spot number increasing over the last 1000 years. This is surely interesting, as it explains quite a lot of the global warming. The astronomical influence on the weather system should be studied in more detail. For example, it is believed by some scientists, that the Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is causing Ice Ages as well. At the moment, this is all far fetched, but if we do not understand it better, we will never know for sure what is causing how much of the observed global warming.
At home, I have a 4 year old AMD system running FC6, running so fast, I wouldn't want to upgrade the hardware anytime soon. In fact, it still has an Athlon XP in there (32-bit), which are no longer available, so I can't upgrade without replacing almost everything (board, memory, graphics card). Strangely enough, some things even got faster (starting openoffice), and it runs fine with compz/beryl although I disabled it as it keeps distracting me to much. As long as I can keep up with Fedora Development, I'm happy. Strangely enough, my G4 Laptop, less then 2 years old, is quite slow by comparison.
This will only counter the goal of the whole project. Some people will want to pay money just to have a few of these in their toy collection. As a result, some criminals will rob laptops from the children and sell them on ebay. Selling them cheap would instead make the value of a used laptop even less and also help lower cost.
I'm having almost everywhere CFL's, already, but it is very difficult to find nice lamps which allow you to use CFL's. Most of them simply do not have the space, and many are halogen based. My living room usually has only two 11 W CFL's, but on the ceiling there is a nice looking but energy eating 150 W halogen lamp.
I'm looking forward to buy an LED based lamp to replace it. Unless somebody comes up with a nicely designed lamp for CFL's.
Just yesterday, I upgraded my home PC from FC4 to FC6. This went smoothly as always (I did upgrades since RH5.0). It took me half day, however, because I first copied the system to a new hard drive in case something goes horribly wrong. I wish anaconda had a way to first clone installations before upgrading. Using fdisk and cpio works, but is not the simplest way for everybody. As usual, many 'rpmnew' files are installed and need to be sorted out manually. For a mission critical system, I would always migrate like this. Making the system dual boot in two identical copies of the system, then upgrading one of them.
So why not CentOS or RHEL (the later we use at work)? I like to tinker with things, really. This way I keep up with the changes in Linux and the knowledge is important for my work. I used debian before, and was quite disappointed by it's old software (woody). Probably a good choice for a cheap server running on old hardware. Used SuSe for a while and didn't like some aspects (i.e. yast2). What I like about Fedora is, that they try out new innovative ideas (i.e. stateless linux). Yes, occasional you get bitten and you have to upgrade often. I wished they would give up the point release idea, and instead make incremental updates.
Having only 13 month of security updates is not great. It's a pity that legacy is shutting down. This also kind of shifts the balance between stability (patches) and quirks (new features) in the wrong direction. We will see how it goes, or if Fedora starts to decline. At the moment the quality is quite high in my opinion. It also reminds us that nothing is guaranteed: Fedora Legacy originally promised to extend support to older versions but they could not keep up with the large number of releases. Maybe they should focus on one or two old releases.
If I would run a server at work with FC4-, I would now upgrade to RHEL or CentOS (but I would rather prefer to pay for the redhat network service). Running a server with FC makes only sense if you have the time to upgrade it every year -and- you need some cutting edge software / hardware support on it.
Running FC on older hardware? Not really a good idea. I have an older laptop running RH9, because it cannot upgrade (not enough memory to run anaconda). Sometimes the best solution is to uninstall the software packages which creates security problems.
SIP, in my opinion, is already better than Skype. First it is free in the sense that any company can start offering SIP. Large companies can even offer it two its own empolyees. Second, because of Skype, prices dropped a lot during the last year. Now I can have a free landline number and free registration. The phone calls are either free for a monthly flat rate fee, or as cheap as skype. Since I moved to SIP from (www.sipate.de), I saved a lot of money. Enough to pay for the new equipment and more. I now think about buying a wifi phone, because we get free wifi in town.
This is great, because there will be no difference between mobile and landline phones anymore. And calls are basically free already today. So why should I use Skype? With Skype I pay for the number and calls are only free for US citizens (or skype to skype). With SIP I have free calls in 15 european countries and of course sip to sip. And I can use multiple SIP providers on a single phone, so I'm not locked in by one particular SIP company, although I like sipgate so far (they still seem like a startup company to me, not like the big telecoms).
So, if you have internet over cable or can have nacked DSL, go for SIP!
But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests
Tell me what you search for and I tell you who you are. Kind of obvious what they need this for.
I wonder why they do not even come up with a fake reason to hide their true intentions. Are
people already considered THAT dumb?
And since he will then be no longer in a position to make an objective observation, the monkeys will start making experiments with him.
But seriously, experiments like this will ultimately lead to a more inhuman society. Think of cops with satellite aided vision or marines with remote controlled wapons. There should be an international law/treaty against it, like we have for certain biological wapons or nukes.
"Helvetica reads well on screen due to its large x-height."
Really? Did you compare fonts with same size but different x-height? No, surprise, because this
basically just compares small caps of different size and larger fonts are always easier to read.
What you really should compare are fonts with same x-height but different font size. You will
probably find the opposite result.
I use KDE at work and GNOME at home. At times it was the other way around. I do not see any real difference. Some details are better in GNOME: * Customization * clicking on links in the terminal window others in KDE: * korganizer * kdevelop I regularily use tools from KDE in GNOME and vice versa.
Some new tools in KDE or GNOME are even worse than older software, i.e. ggv can handle less complex documents then gv which can handle less complex documents than ghostview. In fact all use the same backend (ghostscript). Nevertheless, ggv _is_ useful and if my document doesn't load, I can still use old ghostview.
So, I see little reason for throwing away neither KDE nor GNOME. It's the applications what counts.
Yeah, if you release some software
to be run within some 'platform' and this software opens some security
hole in the platform though your application, then it is you problem too.
It's not fair to assume the platform to be bug free. As somebody else pointed
out, the same problem can arise in firefox too. Likewise, if you write a php
application which allows the remote user to enter any shell command, it would
open a security hole and in this case nobody would claim it is the fault of
php interpreter or the web server itself. It would be called a backdoor instead. Yes, the
web server could be setup in a chroot environment and php can be configured to
disallow this, but it would still be a huge problem. When you provide some
web server plugin, you must care even more about security issues.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know if your pilot today is battle proven, don't you? Having the option to take control from the computer, however, should be possible. I can't believe airbus isn't doing this. The news claims, the autopilot was turned off - so this means human control, no? I'm rather more concerned about having no backup radar on board. It seems strange, that only one radar is there, while a second radar could be in a less exposed position (being less useful for that reason, but for backup purposes).
It seems somebody is spreading FUD against airbus, and that's something which doesn't surprise me at all.
What if it writes itself in the firmware when you shutdown the computer just before rebooting, and loads itself back into the SMM during boot?
Maybe even restoring the original firmware? To work around space limitations, the SMM code could hide another rootkit hiding on the disk and download a new copy if the system has been wiped.
Not seeing all 4 arms in infrared light is not new. In fact this has been known for a long time and it just means that those stellar arms are not density waves in the stellar disk. However, they are seen in the distribution of molecular clouds. Basically this means that the Milky Way has two overlapping spiral pattern: a stronger 2-armed mode which is in stars and gas, and another 4-armed mode which is only seen in gas. The 4-arm mode is weaker (as expected from theory) and extends over a smaller radius range. So not all studies will find 4 arms. In the optical, that is seen by eye from the distance, our Galaxy would look 4-armed, because those weaker arms are still hosts of star formation. But in infrared, many galaxies look different, because in this waveband we see mostly the older stellar population.
HBR Online Terms and Conditions
In order to access articles on HBR Online, you must agree to the terms and conditions that apply.
The 'I Decline' button doesn't work. Accepting the terms is contradicting the message of the article (how to save the internet openness).
That is the problem with the modern society. Nobody understands sciences let along technology (but a few), but everyone can talk. Media allows everyone to speak, look at the afternoon / evening TV program. But, rarely there is anything worth the transmission energy or the paper. In my opinion, we should turn of the TV station air broadcasting and outlow rainbow press. This would have a bigger 'health effect' than not turning on wifi everywhere.
Radiation from TV stations >> Radiation from mobile phones/masts >> Radiation from wifi
Smaller cells -> less power
Get a cheap small USB key and boot from that into grub. Using grub you can then daisy-chain boot into your IDE drive.
The link you quote only explains that you won't loose data if something breaks because it is distributing the data in a redundant way. This is what I expect from every RAID and it clearly is an intriguing idea to take this one step further and distribute over multiple machines, sites, etc. especially if you can scale performance as well. However, with HSM I meant 'hierarchical storage management', you may also know it by a different name. With HSM, data is kept on cheaper offline media like tapes and on disk. The disk only serves as a cache for the data on tape, less frequently (forgotten?) data is only on tape, but takes a while to be accessed, while more frequently used data is on disk as well. You do not need a backup, because every modification you do to the disk version is copied to tape after a preset delay. This way you have all former versions of a file if you need to recover. When you run out of tape space, you recycle space occupied by older versions, but theoretically you can consider the total space to be infinite (buy tapes as needed), while the 'online space' is limited and needs only big enough to hold your active data. With a HSM-kind of setup, you combine the advantages of tapes (cheap, save, low energy, easy to extend) with the advantages of disks (fast, random access). This is what is missing in solutions like starfish. If somebody deletes a file within starfish, it's probably gone forever, while if you have HSM, there is a tape copy for every change you did. It keeps as many as possible, getting rid of old ones as tape space needs to get recycled.
Every scientific theory must be tested. Apparently, this theory was not, as it would be quite simple to do: just correlate bee death statistics with mobile network coverage. I read an article which claimed the same, among 5 other as far fetched possibilities. They even quote Einstein saying mankind will start dying 5 days after the bees. Apparently, somebody was just guessing and the media picked it up, because this kind of 'news' makes it easy to sell the paper And it is always cool to quote Einstein, makes you look more educated. They should also remember this other famous word of Einstein: "Simplify as much as you can, but not more!" Bees are not more fragile than other insects, why do we then get lots of wasps (only one of the many kinds) and only few honeybees this year? Why should only the bees react to mobile phone radiation? There is clearly a problem, but switching off mobile phones doesn't solve it.
I was looking at both sites recently, and I do appreciate the efforts put forward in both projects. However, the post was about an open source high availability solution which also scales well and deals with users which do not plan well how they distribute their data.
Starfish has a limit of 1TB for the 'free' solution and is not GPL. Lustre is GPL (the limited free edition only), but cannot reexport over NFS, only SAMBA (not everyones choice). What about backup? Both solutions are not providing any means of backing up the presumably huge amount of data. As you get into the 50 TB+ regime, how you would ever be able to make a backup? Here is where a HSM kicks in: backups are not necessary anymore.
What is missing is a HSM kind of system natively integrated within NFS. Then you could take whatever cluster-filesystem you like to provide r/w access to the same aggregated storage pool (iSCSI, or FC attached RAIDs), reexport it with NFS from all cluster nodes (scaleable performance & failover!), and HSM to manage the data growths.
Software like Lustre and Starfish only wants you to help testing the software. Both are not OSS in my opinion and not ready for the production. So if you have to pay, why not go with a commercial software? Have a look at polymatrix, although they do not have an integrated HSM. Or, get SAMFS in a HA-NFS Server configuration (could be linux). Yes, you pay for the license by the GB, but you do same is true for the hardware cost. Having a single (large enough and scaleable) filesystem will stop your customer to duplicate and move things around, causing increased maintenance cost.
Both articles talk about different time scales. The sun spot rate is going from minimum to maximum in only 11 years (not sure about the correct time scale but should be approximately right). Just last year, the Sun hit the minimum and for the first time a gigantic explosion with a shockwave running all around the Sun was observed. While the Sun Spot number goes through this cycle, the solar magnetic field is reversed. This is critical for the solar wind which helps to protect earth from the cosmic radiation. Same is true for the magnetic field of the earth. And Earth's magnetic field is also reversing now! Why? The interplay between the solar magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field is not known.
The NASA article talks about this minimum, and the science article talks about the average Sun spot number increasing over the last 1000 years. This is surely interesting, as it explains quite a lot of the global warming. The astronomical influence on the weather system should be studied in more detail. For example, it is believed by some scientists, that the Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is causing Ice Ages as well. At the moment, this is all far fetched, but if we do not understand it better, we will never know for sure what is causing how much of the observed global warming.
At home, I have a 4 year old AMD system running FC6, running so fast, I wouldn't want to upgrade the hardware anytime soon. In fact, it still has an Athlon XP in there (32-bit), which are no longer available, so I can't upgrade without replacing almost everything (board, memory, graphics card). Strangely enough, some things even got faster (starting openoffice), and it runs fine with compz/beryl although I disabled it as it keeps distracting me to much. As long as I can keep up with Fedora Development, I'm happy. Strangely enough, my G4 Laptop, less then 2 years old, is quite slow by comparison.
Here is a simple solution from metamathematics for that problem: Sell the $138,000 prize for $1 to your mom and make the tax calculation:
$138,000 income
- $137,999 loss from selling
--------
$1 net income
Why not www.hasta-la-vista-microsoft.com ? ;-)
Like in the Arni movie
This will only counter the goal of the whole project. Some people will want to pay money just to have a few of these in their toy collection. As a result, some criminals will rob laptops from the children and sell them on ebay. Selling them cheap would instead make the value of a used laptop even less and also help lower cost.
I'm having almost everywhere CFL's, already, but it is very difficult to find nice lamps which allow you to use CFL's. Most of them simply do not have the space, and many are halogen based. My living room usually has only two 11 W CFL's, but on the ceiling there is a nice looking but energy eating 150 W halogen lamp.
I'm looking forward to buy an LED based lamp to replace it. Unless somebody comes up with a nicely designed lamp for CFL's.
Just yesterday, I upgraded my home PC from FC4 to FC6. This went smoothly as always (I did upgrades since RH5.0).
It took me half day, however, because I first copied the system to a new hard drive in case something goes horribly wrong. I wish anaconda had a way to first clone installations before upgrading. Using fdisk and cpio works, but is not the simplest way for everybody. As usual, many 'rpmnew' files are installed and need to be sorted out manually. For a mission critical system, I would always migrate like this. Making the system dual boot in two identical copies of the system, then upgrading one of them.
So why not CentOS or RHEL (the later we use at work)? I like to tinker with things, really. This way I keep up with the changes in Linux and the knowledge is important for my work. I used debian before, and was quite disappointed by it's old software (woody). Probably a good choice for a cheap server running on old hardware. Used SuSe for a while and didn't like some aspects (i.e. yast2).
What I like about Fedora is, that they try out new innovative ideas (i.e. stateless linux). Yes, occasional you get bitten and you have to upgrade often. I wished they would give up the point release idea, and instead make incremental updates.
Having only 13 month of security updates is not great. It's a pity that legacy is shutting down. This also kind of shifts the balance between stability (patches) and quirks (new features) in the wrong direction. We will see how it goes, or if Fedora starts to decline. At the moment the quality is quite high in my opinion. It also reminds us that nothing is guaranteed: Fedora Legacy originally promised to extend support to older versions but they could not keep up with the large number of releases. Maybe they should focus on one or two old releases.
If I would run a server at work with FC4-, I would now upgrade to RHEL or CentOS (but I would rather prefer to pay for the redhat network service). Running a server with FC makes only sense if you have the time to upgrade it every year -and- you need some cutting edge software / hardware support on it.
Running FC on older hardware? Not really a good idea. I have an older laptop running RH9, because it cannot upgrade (not enough memory to run anaconda). Sometimes the best solution is to uninstall the software packages which creates security problems.
SIP, in my opinion, is already better than Skype. First it is free in the sense that any company can start offering SIP. Large companies can even
offer it two its own empolyees. Second, because of Skype, prices dropped a lot during the last year. Now I can have a free landline number and free registration. The phone calls are either free for a monthly flat rate fee, or as cheap as skype. Since I moved to SIP from (www.sipate.de), I saved a lot of money. Enough to pay for the new equipment and more. I now think about buying a wifi phone, because we get free wifi in town.
This is great, because there will be no difference between mobile and landline phones anymore. And calls are basically free already today.
So why should I use Skype? With Skype I pay for the number and calls are only free for US citizens (or skype to skype). With SIP I have free calls
in 15 european countries and of course sip to sip. And I can use multiple SIP providers on a single phone, so I'm not locked in by one particular
SIP company, although I like sipgate so far (they still seem like a startup company to me, not like the big telecoms).
So, if you have internet over cable or can have nacked DSL, go for SIP!
But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests
Tell me what you search for and I tell you who you are. Kind of obvious what they need this for. I wonder why they do not even come up with a fake reason to hide their true intentions. Are people already considered THAT dumb?
And since he will then be no longer in a position to make an objective observation, the monkeys will start making experiments with him.
But seriously, experiments like this will ultimately lead to a more inhuman society. Think of cops with satellite aided
vision or marines with remote controlled wapons. There should be an international law/treaty against it, like we have for certain biological wapons or nukes.
Really? Did you compare fonts with same size but different x-height? No, surprise, because this basically just compares small caps of different size and larger fonts are always easier to read. What you really should compare are fonts with same x-height but different font size. You will probably find the opposite result.
I use KDE at work and GNOME at home. At times it was the other way around.
I do not see any real difference. Some details are better in GNOME:
* Customization
* clicking on links in the terminal window
others in KDE:
* korganizer
* kdevelop
I regularily use tools from KDE in GNOME and vice versa.
Some new tools in KDE or GNOME are even worse than older software, i.e.
ggv can handle less complex documents then gv which can handle less
complex documents than ghostview. In fact all use the same backend (ghostscript).
Nevertheless, ggv _is_ useful and if my document doesn't load, I can still
use old ghostview.
So, I see little reason for throwing away neither KDE nor GNOME. It's the applications
what counts.
Yeah, if you release some software to be run within some 'platform' and this software opens some security hole in the platform though your application, then it is you problem too. It's not fair to assume the platform to be bug free. As somebody else pointed out, the same problem can arise in firefox too. Likewise, if you write a php application which allows the remote user to enter any shell command, it would open a security hole and in this case nobody would claim it is the fault of php interpreter or the web server itself. It would be called a backdoor instead. Yes, the web server could be setup in a chroot environment and php can be configured to disallow this, but it would still be a huge problem. When you provide some web server plugin, you must care even more about security issues.