If you are in the middle of redesigning your personal website, you might replace the front page with a 'splash page' which http-refreshes to the fresh content, nested deep within the site.
A stock-tracking site wants to have the freshest possible data on-screen, so refresh seems appropriate.
Refresh is also appropriate for site redesigns which change page addresses, redirect the browser to the correct page.
Not many legitimate uses of refresh, but a few exist.
at a first glance, this is what the tired UNIX geek sees
"... up to a red-hot +rwxrwxrwx degrees."
And at first glance this is what a tired airplane geek sees:
"... up to a red-hot +300-550_passenger_airplane degrees."
...
I work for Boeing, I worked on the newest 777 last year. Any time that I see a pattern of numbers 7_7, I think of a Boeing airplane. Heh, I saw a story today which had 747 total comments, and I did a double-take.
One possibility: put [PDF] in the title, which pops up next to your cursor (depending on which browser you use). That way, you can hover over the link, and not have to peer at the status line every time you click, but the subtle warning is still there: [PDF]. Too bad slashdot doesn't do titles much, if at all.
So does mine. Two buttons and a scroll wheel. And right-clicking brings up menus in everything I've used in the last couple'a weeks, since I got this great Powerbook. Or, with a one-button mouse (like my trackpad), hold CTRL while clicking.
The beauty of "man grep" while surfing the 'net, while fiddling with perl, while ripping songs to MP3. Just think of it as another windowing system over another unix. But with pricey hardware.:)
The parent is modded (Score 3: Offtopic). Huh? How is satirically mocking a naive poster considered offtopic? If I'd been modding this, I'd have given this comment a "+1, Funny", or maybe a "+1, Insightful", but to down-rate it as offtopic?
OFFTOPIC?!?
That's like saying that Ferris Bueller's comments to the camera distracted from the movie. They were part of the movie, and if you didn't understand the type of comedy being produced, that doesn't mean that the movie was unsucessful as a comedy.
BTW, it seems that my reaction to many things recently has been "good grief", maybe I should change user-names to "Charlie Brown". Maybe not. Oh, well, I'm going to try to fly my kite. I got it out of the tree yesterday, right before the baseball game.
It doesn't matter how much of the total market uses Linux, it matters how much of your target market uses linux. If half of their target market uses linux then developing a version for linux does make sense. How much of the market does Apple have? Maybe 10%? But Macromedia puts our a very good Dreamweaver for it. And Microsoft ported Office, not just to Mac, but to the bleeding edge Mac OS X. (And it looks pretty, BTW. Though I think this Powerbook keyboard could be a bit bigger, I've got big hands.)
You're right, it is a bit of a catch-22, but we must remember that the gross numbers are less important than the net numbers. Much like your gross income is less important than the net ammount you take home.
Not his head, his back.:) If he thinks that a car battery solution is an answer to powering a portable hum, then he's either the new Andre the Giant, or he's got serious back problems.
This is one project where hacking the code can kill people or land you in jail. Don't broadcast on the wrong frequency!
Keep this away from radio telescopes!
That brings up a good question. Are there going to be some software restrictions on which frequencies you can use? Would those restrictions be in the source or options you can change on the fly?
It seems like a good idea to put at least one barrier between users and transmitting on police frequencies. But what kind of barrier? Should any restrictions prevent listening as well? What about military transmissions? Or air traffic control frequencies? Or the band the Secret Service uses?
Where should the line be drawn? What does the law say?
I like that. So many times in these discussions, we forget about a possible progression of events which could lead to X. (Ahem, 'X' being a variable, not necessarily a Mac OS.) When you start to think in terms of paths toward an end, getting to that end becomes more managable. It's like a ship which is off course by half a degree, you don't really notice it, but if you don't check your course mid-route, you're off by 26 miles after crossing the Atlantic. (Assuming that crossing the Atlantic is a 3000 mile trip.) A little nudge at the beginning, and you can get a big result in the end.
Take my case. I'm getting a PowerBook this week because I want the power of unix and ease of use. I like my Red Hat 7, but it's on the same machine as WinXP, where I play lots of games. So I reboot a LOT. Got tired of booting, put Mozilla on Windows, surf from there. But I can't learn Perl or use EMACS to write web pages, etc. Solution: another computer, dedicate one PC to Linux, the other to games. BUT, MacOS X has ease of use, unix, all in one shiny package. I can type in emacs while surfing in Moz, while putting my resume in a Word format (yuck, but some businesses really want it that way), while... anything.:)
So for me the progression was Windows to Linux to Mac, because of my interests. If we could find more ways to identify specific interests and needs, we might be able to convert more people to something 'better', or set people on paths toward the better. I started using emacs on Win98. I think that started it for me. Maybe we can start others down the path of the light side in similar fashion.
I would like to know what it takes for a product to get "independently certified for security", and how would/does this affect OSS?
If this has been posted and answered in the past, please mod me down.
It has been posted, but not sufficiently answered.:)
The tentative answers which I have seen seem to end up saying that any commercial certification would probably cost too much for OSS/FREE and that any government cert would be biased by established software companies "adding their expertise and experience to the process". (Unless those commercial certs were aimed specifically at OSS/FREE, in which case they would be the victims of discrediting campaigns by the other commercial certs. Which would leave the costly certs as the only "respectable" certs around.) Much weeping and nashing of teeth, but I still haven't seen any good solutions. Maybe I've missed something.
Side note, we do need companies giving input to government regarding what those corporations are knowledgable about and good at, but that needs to be tempered by honest gov't types who have a clue about the industry. Think USPTO with clueful people running it. EX: I'm not much of a programmer, but if I were reviewing a patent application for a new sort method, I would have a good idea about where to start looking for info.
I can't see much in Netscape 4.7 (I'm at work. Management takes a poor view of hacking the servers and PCs here, so I can't upgrade.) BUT, I can see something in IE 5.0.... Well, I could, before I refreshed the page. The page I saw also had database problems.
Warning: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/var/www/icrontic/last10.php on line 14
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/var/www/icrontic/last10.php on line 14
Can't open connection to MySQL
And now, IE is frozen trying to get a new copy of the homepage. Slashdot effect in the house.
Oh wait. This is the real world, and I'm talking about interminably idiotic human beings. Please ignore everything I've just said.
True, people often don't respond until you hit them with a Clue-by-Fore, but people are quite good at avoiding pain. I think that those who "get the new media" (Katz-isms are useful, wow.) will react more readily than those who don't get it, BUT we will still need to hit them with that Clue-by-Four. It's just that the "new media types" will respond to more varieties of Clue-by-Four's than the old media types do, so it will appear that the new media types are more responsive/ethical/in-touch.
I'm heading under the bridge, hold this rope and pull me out if the troll gets his hands on me.
:)
Part of the reason for using Mach as a reference is that it is so flexible. Many aspects of fluid mechanics depend on knowing if the fluid flow is supersonic or sub-sonic. The behavior of subsonic fluid is fairly familiar to most people, but that changes radically when the flow becomes supersonic. Knowing the flow speed in relation to the shock wave speed (the speed of sound in that fluid) tells you which equations to use, and what to expect. Handy.
The problem we have here is that we don't care about the fluid mechanics. All we care about is the speed in relation to the ground, and we can't get that easily because the reporter & the PR flack thought that spouting off Mach numbers sounded cooler or more scientific. (My idea of a scientific speed reference in this case would be two-fold: the raw speed number and the velocity vector broken down into components: vertical, North/South, & East/West. But I'm a mechanical engineer, and I want useful information.) We can get a good idea about the bounds of the acceleration involved by using speeds for Mach 1 at various altitudes (10 - 11 gravities as posted already), but a more accurate calc would account for the variation in Mach number with altitude.
Of course, for a trully rigourous theoretical treatment, what we really want is the mass of the craft, the mass loss rate (fuel burn rate), and whatever measure of the craft's rocket power we can get (it might be the force the rocket produces [which could be a function of time], it might be the power of the rocket [which I think I could translate to a force if I had a few books in front of me], it might be the mean velocity of the rocket's exhaust stream [which I know that I could translate into a force, if I had the proper information about that flow stream]).
With that {potential} boatload of information, we could apply the modern incarnation of Newton's Second Law, F=d(p)/dt ; force equals the derivative of momentum (p) with respect to time (t). That ends up being F=ma + v*d(m)/dt , the first part being very familiar to anyone who's ever taken physics, the second part much less so. F=ma : force (F) equals mass (m) times acceleration (a). The second term isn't very familiar, because most people don't think of mass changing over time. The classic example of this is a rocket - the topic of today's lecture. {I have no idea why I'm saying so much. Work must be more boring than normal.} F=v*d(m)/dt : force (F) equals velocity (v) times the change in mass (m) over time (t).
[BTW, all of the "d"s are NOT variables, they are part of the notation of derivatives in calculus. (I was falling asleep during a lecture once, and I wondered why the teacher didn't cancel the extra "d"s from the top and bottom of the equation; then I woke up and almost died laughing at myself.:) ]
Anyway, the upshot of the math is that if we knew how fast that fuel was being burned [ d(m)/dt ] how fast the craft was traveling at any time (v) and what the mass of the craft was at any time (m), we could back-calculate to get the acceleration. All that work to find out how heavy you'd feel.:)
Combine this with some well placed comments, and you achieve a very high degree of readability.
[sarcasm]
Good writers know how to spell, and will catch spelling errors while proofreading for content and style. Besides, all good writers have dictionaries sitting on the desk for clarification of subtle meaning of words, and thesauri to remind them of better ways to express the idea. Knowing this, spellcheckers are unnecessary, and often counterproductive. I can't tell you how many times I've been writing a technical paper and had some stupid spellchecker choke on acronyms or technical terms! A good writer's skill nullifies the primary benefit of a spellchecker.
[/sarcasm]
But seriously, the problem isn't that it is IMpossible to write good, well documented code with Your-IDE-Of-Choice, but that Literate-Programming + Leo might make it easier to write well documented code. Hmm, sounds like the language selection process for a project; text manipulation in Perl, sound driver in C. You could write your text mangler in C, but Perl makes text processing easier. That's the point of Leo, make documentation easier.
Consider any spelling errors intentional.:) BTW, I tried to post this two hours ago, but/. disappeared from the net. Since the discussion continued, I can only conclude that it's the computers at work which were being stupid.
Good theory, wrong application. Using a conical shape to control explosions is a well known and widely practiced technique, but it isn't used in rockets or thrusters.
The reason that a rocket engine has a conical 'bell' is to control the behavior of the exhaust gases. Specifically, the shape of the exhaust bell controls the efficiency of the gas flow, and prevents losses which could reduce thrust. All of the exploding happens inside the rocket, and it is the escaping gasses which the exhaust bell is designed to affect.
FYI, one of the main uses of explosion control is shaped charges, the kind that police special units use to get through walls/roofs/ceilings. A simple shaped charge can be made by placing two explosives in a 'V' shape, the resulting explosion will be pointed toward the opening in the 'V'. It's not magic, the explosion is very radial, but more heads toward the open end of the 'V' than any other direction. To get a charge which points most (nearly all?) of the explosion in one direction, put something strong and heavy around the explosive where you don't want damage. Example - a piece of angle iron (an 'L' shape of steel) with strips of C4 along the inside of the 'V' will shape the explosion and direct it toward the open end. Unfortunately, Newton's Third Law still applies (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), so the force of the explosion will want to move the angle iron. So you weight it down with sandbags. This is pretty much how LAPD started using shaped charges to enter buildings through the roof. A few pieces of angle iron with explosive in them, some sandbags, arrange on the roof, get behind something and BOOM. This was later refined - the shaped charges (iron pieces, wiring, & everything) were attached to a piece of particle board, placed on the roof, a few sandbags were dropped on top, and you could create yourself a nice entry hole for your SWAT team in a few seconds.
Caveat: I haven't experimented with shaped charges, I've just read about them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that there are a few uses.
- If you are in the middle of redesigning your personal website, you might replace the front page with a 'splash page' which http-refreshes to the fresh content, nested deep within the site.
- A stock-tracking site wants to have the freshest possible data on-screen, so refresh seems appropriate.
- Refresh is also appropriate for site redesigns which change page addresses, redirect the browser to the correct page.
Not many legitimate uses of refresh, but a few exist."... up to a red-hot +300-550_passenger_airplane degrees."
I work for Boeing, I worked on the newest 777 last year. Any time that I see a pattern of numbers 7_7, I think of a Boeing airplane. Heh, I saw a story today which had 747 total comments, and I did a double-take.
One possibility: put [PDF] in the title, which pops up next to your cursor (depending on which browser you use). That way, you can hover over the link, and not have to peer at the status line every time you click, but the subtle warning is still there: [PDF]. Too bad slashdot doesn't do titles much, if at all.
And you'll probably be modded down as a troll too. :)
The beauty of "man grep" while surfing the 'net, while fiddling with perl, while ripping songs to MP3. Just think of it as another windowing system over another unix. But with pricey hardware. :)
The parent is modded (Score 3: Offtopic). Huh? How is satirically mocking a naive poster considered offtopic? If I'd been modding this, I'd have given this comment a "+1, Funny", or maybe a "+1, Insightful", but to down-rate it as offtopic?
OFFTOPIC?!?
That's like saying that Ferris Bueller's comments to the camera distracted from the movie. They were part of the movie, and if you didn't understand the type of comedy being produced, that doesn't mean that the movie was unsucessful as a comedy.
BTW, it seems that my reaction to many things recently has been "good grief", maybe I should change user-names to "Charlie Brown". Maybe not. Oh, well, I'm going to try to fly my kite. I got it out of the tree yesterday, right before the baseball game.
Sometimes I want to moderate "+1 Funny -1 Troll = 0 Ironic", but I don't think that'll be added to Slash anytime soon.
My girlfriend ... whoops.
The "whoops" is my overly-subtle way of saying that I don't have a girlfriend. Or an ocean view, or a crime-free neighborhood.
My ocean view ... whoops.
My crime-free neighborhood ... whoops.
Well, I might give up TV for broadband. But not coffee.
You're right, it is a bit of a catch-22, but we must remember that the gross numbers are less important than the net numbers. Much like your gross income is less important than the net ammount you take home.
Or maybe, "Wil wonders never cease."
It seems like a good idea to put at least one barrier between users and transmitting on police frequencies. But what kind of barrier? Should any restrictions prevent listening as well? What about military transmissions? Or air traffic control frequencies? Or the band the Secret Service uses?
Where should the line be drawn? What does the law say?
Take my case. I'm getting a PowerBook this week because I want the power of unix and ease of use. I like my Red Hat 7, but it's on the same machine as WinXP, where I play lots of games. So I reboot a LOT. Got tired of booting, put Mozilla on Windows, surf from there. But I can't learn Perl or use EMACS to write web pages, etc. Solution: another computer, dedicate one PC to Linux, the other to games. BUT, MacOS X has ease of use, unix, all in one shiny package. I can type in emacs while surfing in Moz, while putting my resume in a Word format (yuck, but some businesses really want it that way), while ... anything. :)
So for me the progression was Windows to Linux to Mac, because of my interests. If we could find more ways to identify specific interests and needs, we might be able to convert more people to something 'better', or set people on paths toward the better. I started using emacs on Win98. I think that started it for me. Maybe we can start others down the path of the light side in similar fashion.
The tentative answers which I have seen seem to end up saying that any commercial certification would probably cost too much for OSS/FREE and that any government cert would be biased by established software companies "adding their expertise and experience to the process". (Unless those commercial certs were aimed specifically at OSS/FREE, in which case they would be the victims of discrediting campaigns by the other commercial certs. Which would leave the costly certs as the only "respectable" certs around.) Much weeping and nashing of teeth, but I still haven't seen any good solutions. Maybe I've missed something.
Side note, we do need companies giving input to government regarding what those corporations are knowledgable about and good at, but that needs to be tempered by honest gov't types who have a clue about the industry. Think USPTO with clueful people running it. EX: I'm not much of a programmer, but if I were reviewing a patent application for a new sort method, I would have a good idea about where to start looking for info.
We should keep the PC on the QT, 'cause if the VC find out about the VP, he'll be MIA, and we'll all be on KP.
At least, that's how I recall the line.
No, to The Pain.
I'm not quite familiar with that one.
I'll explain. And I'll use small words
...
Enough quoting The Princess Bride, I'll just go watch it again
Part of the reason for using Mach as a reference is that it is so flexible. Many aspects of fluid mechanics depend on knowing if the fluid flow is supersonic or sub-sonic. The behavior of subsonic fluid is fairly familiar to most people, but that changes radically when the flow becomes supersonic. Knowing the flow speed in relation to the shock wave speed (the speed of sound in that fluid) tells you which equations to use, and what to expect. Handy.
The problem we have here is that we don't care about the fluid mechanics. All we care about is the speed in relation to the ground, and we can't get that easily because the reporter & the PR flack thought that spouting off Mach numbers sounded cooler or more scientific. (My idea of a scientific speed reference in this case would be two-fold: the raw speed number and the velocity vector broken down into components: vertical, North/South, & East/West. But I'm a mechanical engineer, and I want useful information.) We can get a good idea about the bounds of the acceleration involved by using speeds for Mach 1 at various altitudes (10 - 11 gravities as posted already), but a more accurate calc would account for the variation in Mach number with altitude.
Of course, for a trully rigourous theoretical treatment, what we really want is the mass of the craft, the mass loss rate (fuel burn rate), and whatever measure of the craft's rocket power we can get (it might be the force the rocket produces [which could be a function of time], it might be the power of the rocket [which I think I could translate to a force if I had a few books in front of me], it might be the mean velocity of the rocket's exhaust stream [which I know that I could translate into a force, if I had the proper information about that flow stream]).
With that {potential} boatload of information, we could apply the modern incarnation of Newton's Second Law, F=d(p)/dt ; force equals the derivative of momentum (p) with respect to time (t). That ends up being F=ma + v*d(m)/dt , the first part being very familiar to anyone who's ever taken physics, the second part much less so. F=ma : force (F) equals mass (m) times acceleration (a). The second term isn't very familiar, because most people don't think of mass changing over time. The classic example of this is a rocket - the topic of today's lecture. {I have no idea why I'm saying so much. Work must be more boring than normal.} F=v*d(m)/dt : force (F) equals velocity (v) times the change in mass (m) over time (t).
[BTW, all of the "d"s are NOT variables, they are part of the notation of derivatives in calculus. (I was falling asleep during a lecture once, and I wondered why the teacher didn't cancel the extra "d"s from the top and bottom of the equation; then I woke up and almost died laughing at myself.:) ]
Anyway, the upshot of the math is that if we knew how fast that fuel was being burned [ d(m)/dt ] how fast the craft was traveling at any time (v) and what the mass of the craft was at any time (m), we could back-calculate to get the acceleration. All that work to find out how heavy you'd feel. :)
Be careful about how your refer to slide rules, lots of Slashdoters don't think "slide rule" when they hear "slipstick". :)
Hmm, just saw the PS, I thought it was your sig. Gotta get my glasses checked.
Good writers know how to spell, and will catch spelling errors while proofreading for content and style. Besides, all good writers have dictionaries sitting on the desk for clarification of subtle meaning of words, and thesauri to remind them of better ways to express the idea. Knowing this, spellcheckers are unnecessary, and often counterproductive. I can't tell you how many times I've been writing a technical paper and had some stupid spellchecker choke on acronyms or technical terms! A good writer's skill nullifies the primary benefit of a spellchecker.
[/sarcasm]
But seriously, the problem isn't that it is IMpossible to write good, well documented code with Your-IDE-Of-Choice, but that Literate-Programming + Leo might make it easier to write well documented code. Hmm, sounds like the language selection process for a project; text manipulation in Perl, sound driver in C. You could write your text mangler in C, but Perl makes text processing easier. That's the point of Leo, make documentation easier.
Consider any spelling errors intentional. :) BTW, I tried to post this two hours ago, but /. disappeared from the net. Since the discussion continued, I can only conclude that it's the computers at work which were being stupid.
The reason that a rocket engine has a conical 'bell' is to control the behavior of the exhaust gases. Specifically, the shape of the exhaust bell controls the efficiency of the gas flow, and prevents losses which could reduce thrust. All of the exploding happens inside the rocket, and it is the escaping gasses which the exhaust bell is designed to affect.
FYI, one of the main uses of explosion control is shaped charges, the kind that police special units use to get through walls/roofs/ceilings. A simple shaped charge can be made by placing two explosives in a 'V' shape, the resulting explosion will be pointed toward the opening in the 'V'. It's not magic, the explosion is very radial, but more heads toward the open end of the 'V' than any other direction. To get a charge which points most (nearly all?) of the explosion in one direction, put something strong and heavy around the explosive where you don't want damage. Example - a piece of angle iron (an 'L' shape of steel) with strips of C4 along the inside of the 'V' will shape the explosion and direct it toward the open end. Unfortunately, Newton's Third Law still applies (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), so the force of the explosion will want to move the angle iron. So you weight it down with sandbags. This is pretty much how LAPD started using shaped charges to enter buildings through the roof. A few pieces of angle iron with explosive in them, some sandbags, arrange on the roof, get behind something and BOOM. This was later refined - the shaped charges (iron pieces, wiring, & everything) were attached to a piece of particle board, placed on the roof, a few sandbags were dropped on top, and you could create yourself a nice entry hole for your SWAT team in a few seconds.
Caveat: I haven't experimented with shaped charges, I've just read about them.
:)
Maybe (Score:2, Funny), or even (Score:0, Silly). But (Score:0, Redundant)???