Blandness incarnate. Sorry guys/gals, I'm sure everyone put a lot of effort into it, and you'll never please all the people all the time, but it looks like a political-party logo to me, or possibly a mega-conglomerate corporate logo.
I guess if, as a brand, you're all trying to move up-market - say, to distinguish yourselves from those upstart linux rabble [grin], then it'll work just fine. In my case, my eyes would automatically shift to [next topic], but then I'm not a corporate clone, so I guess it's doing its job.
Just to be non-PC for a second, some people have far too much time on their hands - the old image was cute, easily recognised, and daemons (note the 'a') have a long and distinguished history in Unix. My Oxford english dictionary defines 'daemon' as:
An inner or attendant spirit; a genius (the daemon of creativity)
A supernatural being in ancient greece
... which is a *little* different to how it defines 'demon' (lots of definitions - basically really nasty thing you don't want to meet in a dark alley. Or anywhere.) Interestingly, the online dictionaries tend to blur the meaning a bit more...
I take the point in the requirements about it being complex - hard to render at low resolutions etc, but to reject the whole idea of a cute daemon just because some people can't handle that there is no god (hey, I said I was going to be non-PC, you knew it was coming:-) seems to be cutting off your nose to spite your face...
Windows has been used on (at least) Natwest ATM's for a loooong time - several years at least. I've been in several situations where an ATM is displaying a Blue Screen Of Death. Interestingly enough, they show a trend for solidarity in these matters, when one of set is down, they're all down... Presumably the weakness is in the network layer, or some component that is attached to it.
Not that this means too much (apart from the annoyance factor) though, I've never lost any money due to an ATM crash - I'm pretty sure the system is designed so that the central machine does all the secure stuff, with the ATM being not much more than a calculator keypad.
Even if you're broadcasting, you only care if someone else is receiving.
If you have a reader, *it* is broadcasting, and therefore the RFID chip is also broadcasting, so any time there's a reader nearby, the RFID *is* in fact broadcasting. Always.
Whereas I think the addition of RFID chips to passports is simply another incremental step, and passports are in fact there to identify you anyway, if you take a step back and read your last paragraph
If you want privacy, pay cash only, stay home, don't use phones, and don't do anything that requires identifying yourself.
What part of that is 'freedom' ? When did the USA go from 'the land of the free' to the 'spy on me any which way you want' ?
Hell, it's your country, your politics, your ideals, and your decision; I don't really care - it's mainly a curiosity for me that sociological values can change so rapidly.
I've just obtained a visa for the US, and had to give my fingerprints - I was curiously antagonistic towards this, and again it's nothing more than another incremental step. After thinking about it for a while I realised it's nothing to do with privacy, it's that I mentally associate being fingerprinted with being a criminal.
I felt I'd been judged and summarily convicted of something (what, I don't know, being an alien perhaps). As a reasonably law-abiding citizen (ok, I admit I sometimes exceed the speed limit on a motorway:-) it offended me at some deep level mainly because of that association - you *never* have to give fingerprints in the UK unless you've been caught breaking the law... Of course if "Stalin" Blunkett gets his way, that will all change...
The [grin] at the end of 'Is this too much to ask' was supposed to be an indicator that I realise it's not the most common of requests...
OTOH, I don't think *my* data is any more or less valuable to me than X's data is to X. How many 'Joe Public's are going to "throw away" one of their two disks to run raid-1 ? Very few I suspect. Most people will go with the raid-0 approach, if they use raid at all, and one raid-0 disk dying is a bad thing, even if it's one of their two 80G drives.
If you don't think that many people will use raid at all, then you have to question why it's there at all, and then you would have a point. I think nvidea would have done some market research on that, though.
So, actually I think it's a valid point - the size of the array isn't important. The reliability is, and that's independent of size.
I *do* like the trend for passing computationally-expensive chores onto support chips rather than the CPU (ethernet checksums, firewalls, raid checksums etc.) but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.
If you look at a 3ware 9500 card, it'll cost ~£500 for an 8-port setup! Given that the N-force can support 8 drives (4 sata, 4 ata) in a single RAID image, it would have been nice to get the raid-5 as well as the -1 or -0 levels. You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!
I know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions - I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow, and when you have that enormous amount of data, even restoring from originals is a pain:-(
All I want is a single server with enough space and reliability to store all my DVD's and MP3's of CD's, is this too much to ask ? [grin]
Nevertheless, I'm pretty impressed with a stateful firewall implemented in hardware:-)
Well, 'Bookmarks' is approx 18mm wide x 5mm high on Linux (Mozilla), and approx 19mm x 5mm on OSX (Safari).
Both screens are Iiyama Vision Master Pro 413's, horizontal 320mm, vertical 233mm (measurements made approximately, with a ruler to the edges of the displayed screen bitmap, so take with a pinch of salt:-)
One other thing, I had to move my screensaver-on 'hot corner' from top-left because I constantly used to get it triggered whenever I wanted the 1st menu:-(
Agreed, that putting the same menu bar on both screens would probably alleviate the problem as well, but I really have no problem finding (for example) the quick-link at the top of the Safari browser...
I've got 2 1600x1200 monitors set side by side, with a Belkin box to switch one of them, and 2 leads into the back of the other and a front panel switch. I can switch between linux/OSX by pressing two buttons, and they both run at the same resolution.
If I can't remember the menu shortcut, it takes me a *lot* longer to pull down the menu on the Mac than it does on a linux application...
I have no problem at all moving the mouse a small distance to a point on the screen that's already in my field of view (since I'm using the application).
I have a much larger problem turning my head to another screen, moving the mouse all the way over two screens and locating the pulldown, doing what I want, moving the mouse all the way back to the dialogue or 'drawer' that's just popped up, and clicking 'ok'. This is with the 'tracking speed' set to about 3/4 on the mouse - any more and I find close control harder to manage.
On a single screen, it's not really an issue. On two screens, it really is a problem. Since Apple have complete control over the UI and the layout, it might be a useful option to allow the menubar to be additionally embedded within the window titlebar as a cross-application standard...
It seems rather futile to try and restrict what people can do with images on the net. Given that fundamentally it's an open easily-parsed format, and wget is your friend, it ought to be relatively easy to write a harvester, if anyone could be bothered.
And there's the rub. Unless Google publishers are suffciently stupid (I've not seen much evidence of online stupidity in book publishers to date...) to put significant excepts from the book online, who'd care if you could download the images ?
At the end of the day, the best protection is to make sure that the good information is kept in the book, and the online imagery gives an indication of what you get when you pay for the book. This all presupposes the book is worth buying, of course, and perhaps that's the market they're trying to protect...
I guess this will protect against casual copying by the clueless, and that's probably all they're trying to do, but Google is every tech's favourite lovechild (brought about by those clever marketing peeps, which, er, aren''t most tech's favourite people. Well, moving swiftly on...). So Google are popular, and they do something that those tech peeps will react to (DRM), and quick as a flash there are workarounds. Hell, I expect a firefox plugin by tomorrow! A waste of time, perhaps ? Or just another example where the clueful (Mozilla users) have the advantage over the clueless (IE users:-)
Not to be pedantic about the poster's phrasing, but I would have though the proof went *against* the five-second rule (although this is the first I've heard of such a rule - up until now I've always thought of food on the floor as being garbage-fodder... Catching it in mid-fall is the thing to do, thus managing to foil the buttered-toast rule:-)
For me, the Coca Cola one is the most amazing one - there was a UK sitcom called 'Only Fools And Horses' about an East-London wide-boy ("Del-boy") and family, often hilarious, especially where 'Trigger' was concerned:-) One of Del's wheezes was to bottle the 'Peckham Spring' (IIRC) which of course was tapwater and sell to health-farm freaks - he couldn't believe people would pay *that* much for water:-)
The fact that Coca Cola thought they could get away with for real makes me wonder what *other* "Del-boy" schemes have been put into practice!
I suspect the euro-wide dna scan is actually to find someone he can nominate as his successor, assuming he already has some of Vlad to compare everyone to... (can you tell I'm not a fan ? [grin])
My mistake - it was supposed to be 'RIP' (justice!) but my brain failed to communicate to my hands.... The 'justice' part was supposed to be an obvious addition - I accept that it's not.
[This is possibly more 'yro' than 'it' but the consequences are truly scary for the UK if this man gets his way]
Look at number 5 - David Blunkett. This man makes all other (previously thought to be totalitarian) Home Secretaries in the UK look positively liberal. To recount:
Wants to introduce compulsory biometric ID cards, despite massive opposition
Wants to DNA-sample all Europeans and be able to cross-reference them in a db.
Has enacted legislation forcing all telecoms companies (phone,'net,...) to monitor their users. The aptly named 'RIP justice' bill.
Wants to monitor ex-criminals with satellite technology. Note the important bit is these people are potential re-offenders!
Wants to greatly increase the number of cameras around the UK
God knows what else...
Sure he's an agenda-setter, but Vlad the impaler had an agenda. It didn't make it a good agenda, unless you happened to be Vlad himself...
Er, not sure if it was obvious or not, but when I said 'hopelessly optimistic', I was referring to the 'galactic' in the name rather than the idea itself. To call a service 'galactic' yet only get 100km away from terra firma seems... well, hopelessly optimistic:-)
Either that, or he's planning about 1000 years ahead...
I may never get onto the world's first commercial supersonic jet, now that it's been retired, but with an initial price of £115,000 I'll certainly hope that (after another 5 years or so, when the price has come down), I'll get into space. Cool. Really cool if it flies over my house:-))
I'd always regretted not doing the quick flight to NY from London (not that I could afford it!), even with tiny seats. I'm told it was just about possible to pop over the pond, do your xmas shopping in a different continent, and pop back the next day (same day was possible but left little time for shopping...) Let's just hope that the space-flights stimulate some competition, unlike Concorde, because then the next goal would quickly become 'lunar city'...
I think that 'Virgin Galactic' is hopelessly optimistic, though, given that it's sub-orbital. I'm guessing people won't really want the 'galactic' version, and a return ticket might be a bit superfluous...
It doesn't break any law, it follows every law. Physics around phase-changes (liquid-solid, gas-liquid, gas-solid) can be really weird. Iodine sublimes (goes from solid crystal form to gas with no intermediate liquid form) for example, at least at STP.
It's almost certainly those pesky hydrogen bonds - they're responsible for just about everything interesting in organic chemistry... Strange how things ultimately come down to geometry:-)
It is new and strange, but I'd be willing to bet just about anything that the physical laws of energy conservation, attraction and conversion are being rigorously adhered to:-))
Simon
Information non-overload
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
One of the reasons Ceefax/Oracle was so popular was that it gave "just the facts, ma'am". It had to display on a 40x23 (ish) screen to work on the TV's of the time, and most pages used ZX81-style graphics (huge "pixels":-) which reduced the content possibilities even more. Oh, it was free too:-)
Curiously, this reduced content actually worked in its' favour - about all that could be put on a single page was the raw information, without political or other bias; there just wasn't the space for opinion. Even when they used linked pages (page displays, waits 30 secs, new page displays, repeat and loop) the real-estate was severely limited since each page had to stand alone.
I clearly remember preferring the minimalist information from Ceefax over the long-form in a newspaper. If I wanted more about a story, I could listen to the news or buy a paper, but to get an overview it was ideal. A good example of 'less is more'. It helps that the Beeb has good journalists who can succinctly tell a story, of course...
So, I guess PWC are really happy bunnies right now... I'm a subscriber, and I couldn't download the PDF before the link became public (was going to post an alternative link, I've got lots of b/w to spare:-))
Perhaps/. (since it can obviously survive the/. effect) could offer a mirror service for files ? I can't see the content-owners being too upset if (a) the alternative is their site being left a smoking ruin, and (b) full attribution (similar to external links) is made...
I mean I can see that if it's just to make people pay when there's no need, it'd be a real pain where it hurts, but if it's to try and collect on that money (by setting up a high-cost line then using a virus/trojan to change the settings to dial it), there must be someone making money out of it. Surely it ought to be possible to track down by the payments ?
I suppose the line owner could claim innocence, but they'd have to be damn convincing about it if lots of people suddenly start dialling this high-cost line.
Is it just me, or is this scarily like the plot of the book (didn't see the film)... I don't mind science-fiction becoming reality (for the most part:-) but I have a real problem with nuclear bombs being unaccounted for. I had thought the whole premise for the book was ridiculous, but....
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Perhaps the scientists (you know, the people who know ALL ABOUT how to get the best use from a telescope, the same people who designed it!) might just have taken that into account ?
The main constituent of atmospheric aberration is turbulence within the atmosphere. The atmosphere over the Antarctic is the thinnest in the world, it has far less turbulence because it's damn cold (heat = energy = motion of the gas), not to mention any massive heat 'spires' from human pollution.
You can use adaptive optics to characterise and therefore minimise the effects of the atmosphere - you shine a laser upwards, scatter off sodium atoms ~90km up, and use the measurements as inputs to actuators on the mirror segments approx 1000x per second. This can significantly remove the aberration if done correctly (you can use 2 adaptive systems, one natural, one artificial with a laser)
In any event, this is all old news, and there are existing telescopes using the technology. There have been arguments made before for the use of ground-based devices rather than space-based ones...
And yes, I do have an interest in astronomy, but of the radio kind rather than the optical variety - I picked all the above up from news channels...
Hmm - just been glancing at my weblogs for hostip.info and there's a shit.slashdot.org link in there - I get the same 'Nothing to see..' message when I click on it though...
Always nice to know what others think of you and the work you've done, even when it's not particularly complimentary....
Ok, this is weird - I've just previewed it and checked the 'shit' link, and it works now... most odd. Still, at least it shows they consider their own work at the same level as mine:-)
So that's it then - the elves had nanotech. It all makes sense now. Looks like steel, feels like steel, but cuts like sinclair molecule chain:-)
I do remember the UK Science minister at the time (Lord Sainsbury, I think it was) who said "Nanotechnology is going to be really BIG". He didn't quite get it, did he... Oh well, science is anathema to most politicians in the UK:-(
Slashdot Mirror
I guess if, as a brand, you're all trying to move up-market - say, to distinguish yourselves from those upstart linux rabble [grin], then it'll work just fine. In my case, my eyes would automatically shift to [next topic], but then I'm not a corporate clone, so I guess it's doing its job.
Just to be non-PC for a second, some people have far too much time on their hands - the old image was cute, easily recognised, and daemons (note the 'a') have a long and distinguished history in Unix. My Oxford english dictionary defines 'daemon' as:
I take the point in the requirements about it being complex - hard to render at low resolutions etc, but to reject the whole idea of a cute daemon just because some people can't handle that there is no god (hey, I said I was going to be non-PC, you knew it was coming
Simon.
Windows has been used on (at least) Natwest ATM's for a loooong time - several years at least. I've been in several situations where an ATM is displaying a Blue Screen Of Death. Interestingly enough, they show a trend for solidarity in these matters, when one of set is down, they're all down... Presumably the weakness is in the network layer, or some component that is attached to it.
Not that this means too much (apart from the annoyance factor) though, I've never lost any money due to an ATM crash - I'm pretty sure the system is designed so that the central machine does all the secure stuff, with the ATM being not much more than a calculator keypad.
Simon
Er, so what ?
Even if you're broadcasting, you only care if someone else is receiving.
If you have a reader, *it* is broadcasting, and therefore the RFID chip is also broadcasting, so any time there's a reader nearby, the RFID *is* in fact broadcasting. Always.
Simon.
Hell, it's your country, your politics, your ideals, and your decision; I don't really care - it's mainly a curiosity for me that sociological values can change so rapidly.
I've just obtained a visa for the US, and had to give my fingerprints - I was curiously antagonistic towards this, and again it's nothing more than another incremental step. After thinking about it for a while I realised it's nothing to do with privacy, it's that I mentally associate being fingerprinted with being a criminal.
I felt I'd been judged and summarily convicted of something (what, I don't know, being an alien perhaps). As a reasonably law-abiding citizen (ok, I admit I sometimes exceed the speed limit on a motorway
Simon.
The [grin] at the end of 'Is this too much to ask' was supposed to be an indicator that I realise it's not the most common of requests...
OTOH, I don't think *my* data is any more or less valuable to me than X's data is to X. How many 'Joe Public's are going to "throw away" one of their two disks to run raid-1 ? Very few I suspect. Most people will go with the raid-0 approach, if they use raid at all, and one raid-0 disk dying is a bad thing, even if it's one of their two 80G drives.
If you don't think that many people will use raid at all, then you have to question why it's there at all, and then you would have a point. I think nvidea would have done some market research on that, though.
So, actually I think it's a valid point - the size of the array isn't important. The reliability is, and that's independent of size.
Simon.
I *do* like the trend for passing computationally-expensive chores onto support chips rather than the CPU (ethernet checksums, firewalls, raid checksums etc.) but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.
If you look at a 3ware 9500 card, it'll cost ~£500 for an 8-port setup! Given that the N-force can support 8 drives (4 sata, 4 ata) in a single RAID image, it would have been nice to get the raid-5 as well as the -1 or -0 levels. You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!
I know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions - I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow, and when you have that enormous amount of data, even restoring from originals is a pain
All I want is a single server with enough space and reliability to store all my DVD's and MP3's of CD's, is this too much to ask ? [grin]
Nevertheless, I'm pretty impressed with a stateful firewall implemented in hardware
Simon.
... and another one comes, ... and another one comes,
/. :-()
(repeat ad nauseum)
Unfortunately, the subject refers to the spam-fighting groups, and the body refers to spam itself. Sad.
Simon
(Assuming the site was to do with fighting spam, since I can't get to it after it's gone public on
Well, 'Bookmarks' is approx 18mm wide x 5mm high on Linux (Mozilla), and approx 19mm x 5mm on OSX (Safari).
:-)
:-(
Both screens are Iiyama Vision Master Pro 413's, horizontal 320mm, vertical 233mm (measurements made approximately, with a ruler to the edges of the displayed screen bitmap, so take with a pinch of salt
One other thing, I had to move my screensaver-on 'hot corner' from top-left because I constantly used to get it triggered whenever I wanted the 1st menu
Agreed, that putting the same menu bar on both screens would probably alleviate the problem as well, but I really have no problem finding (for example) the quick-link at the top of the Safari browser...
Simon.
I've got 2 1600x1200 monitors set side by side, with a Belkin box to switch one of them, and 2 leads into the back of the other and a front panel switch. I can switch between linux/OSX by pressing two buttons, and they both run at the same resolution.
If I can't remember the menu shortcut, it takes me a *lot* longer to pull down the menu on the Mac than it does on a linux application...
On a single screen, it's not really an issue. On two screens, it really is a problem. Since Apple have complete control over the UI and the layout, it might be a useful option to allow the menubar to be additionally embedded within the window titlebar as a cross-application standard...
Just my 2 pennyworth...
Simon
... another can undo.
:-)
It seems rather futile to try and restrict what people can do with images on the net. Given that fundamentally it's an open easily-parsed format, and wget is your friend, it ought to be relatively easy to write a harvester, if anyone could be bothered.
And there's the rub. Unless Google publishers are suffciently stupid (I've not seen much evidence of online stupidity in book publishers to date...) to put significant excepts from the book online, who'd care if you could download the images ?
At the end of the day, the best protection is to make sure that the good information is kept in the book, and the online imagery gives an indication of what you get when you pay for the book. This all presupposes the book is worth buying, of course, and perhaps that's the market they're trying to protect...
I guess this will protect against casual copying by the clueless, and that's probably all they're trying to do, but Google is every tech's favourite lovechild (brought about by those clever marketing peeps, which, er, aren''t most tech's favourite people. Well, moving swiftly on...). So Google are popular, and they do something that those tech peeps will react to (DRM), and quick as a flash there are workarounds. Hell, I expect a firefox plugin by tomorrow! A waste of time, perhaps ? Or just another example where the clueful (Mozilla users) have the advantage over the clueless (IE users
Simon.
Not to be pedantic about the poster's phrasing, but I would have though the proof went *against* the five-second rule (although this is the first I've heard of such a rule - up until now I've always thought of food on the floor as being garbage-fodder... Catching it in mid-fall is the thing to do, thus managing to foil the buttered-toast rule :-)
:-) One of Del's wheezes was to bottle the 'Peckham Spring' (IIRC) which of course was tapwater and sell to health-farm freaks - he couldn't believe people would pay *that* much for water :-)
For me, the Coca Cola one is the most amazing one - there was a UK sitcom called 'Only Fools And Horses' about an East-London wide-boy ("Del-boy") and family, often hilarious, especially where 'Trigger' was concerned
The fact that Coca Cola thought they could get away with for real makes me wonder what *other* "Del-boy" schemes have been put into practice!
Simon
I suspect the euro-wide dna scan is actually to find someone he can nominate as his successor, assuming he already has some of Vlad to compare everyone to... (can you tell I'm not a fan ? [grin])
Simon
My mistake - it was supposed to be 'RIP' (justice!) but my brain failed to communicate to my hands.... The 'justice' part was supposed to be an obvious addition - I accept that it's not.
Simon
[This is possibly more 'yro' than 'it' but the consequences are truly scary for the UK if this man gets his way]
Look at number 5 - David Blunkett. This man makes all other (previously thought to be totalitarian) Home Secretaries in the UK look positively liberal. To recount:
Sure he's an agenda-setter, but Vlad the impaler had an agenda. It didn't make it a good agenda, unless you happened to be Vlad himself...
Simon.
Er, not sure if it was obvious or not, but when I said 'hopelessly optimistic', I was referring to the 'galactic' in the name rather than the idea itself. To call a service 'galactic' yet only get 100km away from terra firma seems ... well, hopelessly optimistic :-)
Either that, or he's planning about 1000 years ahead...
Simon
I may never get onto the world's first commercial supersonic jet, now that it's been retired, but with an initial price of £115,000 I'll certainly hope that (after another 5 years or so, when the price has come down), I'll get into space. Cool. Really cool if it flies over my house :-))
I'd always regretted not doing the quick flight to NY from London (not that I could afford it!), even with tiny seats. I'm told it was just about possible to pop over the pond, do your xmas shopping in a different continent, and pop back the next day (same day was possible but left little time for shopping...) Let's just hope that the space-flights stimulate some competition, unlike Concorde, because then the next goal would quickly become 'lunar city'...
I think that 'Virgin Galactic' is hopelessly optimistic, though, given that it's sub-orbital. I'm guessing people won't really want the 'galactic' version, and a return ticket might be a bit superfluous...
Simon
It doesn't break any law, it follows every law. Physics around phase-changes (liquid-solid, gas-liquid, gas-solid) can be really weird. Iodine sublimes (goes from solid crystal form to gas with no intermediate liquid form) for example, at least at STP.
:-)
:-))
It's almost certainly those pesky hydrogen bonds - they're responsible for just about everything interesting in organic chemistry... Strange how things ultimately come down to geometry
It is new and strange, but I'd be willing to bet just about anything that the physical laws of energy conservation, attraction and conversion are being rigorously adhered to
Simon
One of the reasons Ceefax/Oracle was so popular was that it gave "just the facts, ma'am". It had to display on a 40x23 (ish) screen to work on the TV's of the time, and most pages used ZX81-style graphics (huge "pixels"
Curiously, this reduced content actually worked in its' favour - about all that could be put on a single page was the raw information, without political or other bias; there just wasn't the space for opinion. Even when they used linked pages (page displays, waits 30 secs, new page displays, repeat and loop) the real-estate was severely limited since each page had to stand alone.
I clearly remember preferring the minimalist information from Ceefax over the long-form in a newspaper. If I wanted more about a story, I could listen to the news or buy a paper, but to get an overview it was ideal. A good example of 'less is more'. It helps that the Beeb has good journalists who can succinctly tell a story, of course...
Simon (on-topic, for once
So, I guess PWC are really happy bunnies right now... I'm a subscriber, and I couldn't download the PDF before the link became public (was going to post an alternative link, I've got lots of b/w to spare :-))
/. (since it can obviously survive the /. effect) could offer a mirror service for files ? I can't see the content-owners being too upset if (a) the alternative is their site being left a smoking ruin, and (b) full attribution (similar to external links) is made...
Perhaps
Simon
I mean I can see that if it's just to make people pay when there's no need, it'd be a real pain where it hurts, but if it's to try and collect on that money (by setting up a high-cost line then using a virus/trojan to change the settings to dial it), there must be someone making money out of it. Surely it ought to be possible to track down by the payments ?
I suppose the line owner could claim innocence, but they'd have to be damn convincing about it if lots of people suddenly start dialling this high-cost line.
Simon
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Perhaps the scientists (you know, the people who know ALL ABOUT how to get the best use from a telescope, the same people who designed it!) might just have taken that into account ?
The main constituent of atmospheric aberration is turbulence within the atmosphere. The atmosphere over the Antarctic is the thinnest in the world, it has far less turbulence because it's damn cold (heat = energy = motion of the gas), not to mention any massive heat 'spires' from human pollution.
You can use adaptive optics to characterise and therefore minimise the effects of the atmosphere - you shine a laser upwards, scatter off sodium atoms ~90km up, and use the measurements as inputs to actuators on the mirror segments approx 1000x per second. This can significantly remove the aberration if done correctly (you can use 2 adaptive systems, one natural, one artificial with a laser)
In any event, this is all old news, and there are existing telescopes using the technology. There have been arguments made before for the use of ground-based devices rather than space-based ones...
And yes, I do have an interest in astronomy, but of the radio kind rather than the optical variety - I picked all the above up from news channels...
Simon
Hmm - just been glancing at my weblogs for hostip.info and there's a shit.slashdot.org link in there - I get the same 'Nothing to see..' message when I click on it though...
:-)
Always nice to know what others think of you and the work you've done, even when it's not particularly complimentary....
Ok, this is weird - I've just previewed it and checked the 'shit' link, and it works now... most odd. Still, at least it shows they consider their own work at the same level as mine
Simon
Quoth the anonymous coward:
At least I'm not an ANONYMOUS dork...
Simon.
So that's it then - the elves had nanotech. It all makes sense now. Looks like steel, feels like steel, but cuts like sinclair molecule chain
I do remember the UK Science minister at the time (Lord Sainsbury, I think it was) who said "Nanotechnology is going to be really BIG". He didn't quite get it, did he... Oh well, science is anathema to most politicians in the UK
Simon