The Space Shuttle is only in that part of the atmosphere for a short time, and it is only at one point.
Yup, and for those reasons, such a collision is extremely unlikely to occur. Just as for the reasons I stated above, a collision with a space elevator is extremely unlikely to occur.
There are many unsolved problems to deal with before we can create a Space Elevator. Terrorism (or incompetent piloting) isn't really one of them -- except possibly as a political problem, caused by an American public which has been intimidated into losing confidence in its ability to create anything new.
If you want security, ask an authority on the matter rather than basing it on inderect things like price, openness, etc
Of course, the authority's opinion on the product might be mistaken also. What we really need is a way for laypeople to test a program's security themselves.... some sort of auto-hacker-in-a-box software, perhaps. I have no idea if that's even remotely feasible, but it would be really useful.
when a plane runs into the elevator? It only takes one crazy pilot
Most likely, the cable would break, the 99.999% of the cable above the impact point would start to drift upwards, and the 0.001% of the cable below the impact point would fall harmlessly to earth. It would then be a bit of a chore to repair the cable, but not impossible. Fortunately this wouldn't happen, because the cable's base station would be located somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean, in the middle of a no-fly zone several thousand miles in diameter. For a crazy pilot to get to the site of the cable, they'd have do evade detection by radar for several hours, and avoid getting shot down by the SAMs or military aircraft whose sole job is to guard the cable against this sort of attack.
Now a question for you: What happens when a plane runs into the Space Shuttle during launch? It only takes on crazy pilot.
Re:Perhaps you don't understand the game.
on
Google Image Labeler
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· Score: 3, Funny
Maybe some of those "retarded" people that you talk about have realized that "points" are meaningless, and are trying to send you a message
Of course! Because people who think Google's game is a complete waste of time would definitely want to spend several hours of their precious time playing that game as badly as possible, in order to send a "message" about time-wasting to some anonymous person who they know nothing about and will never meet or even talk to. It all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.:^P
Actually, I've got an alternate explanation: The server was malfunctioning under the load of too many people trying to play it at once.
Am I wrong? What kinds of things does your computer work on, which are a little parallelizable but not very much?
How about games and media playback? In those applications, you have X amount of work that needs to be done every (say) 33ms... there might be more work to do than one core can handle, but not so much that you need all 4 cores.
On Earth, that's very true. In space, people are a poor substitute for robots. People require pressurized cabins, oxygen, water, food, exercise, entertainment, and so on... and worst of all, they aren't considered expendable, so every mission has to be a round trip (you personally may disagree with that, but it's the political reality nevertheless). That means that including humans as part of the equipment drives up the cost by three or four orders of magnitude. Sure, it increases the benefits as well, but not by anywhere near amount needed to justify the expense.
Lofting one planetologist on a one way flight to Mars with some lab equipment and a small set of hand tools recognizable to a geologist or rock hound on Earth would probably yield more data than all of the robotic Mars probes we have, or could ever, get to Mars.
It doesn't really matter how cool or useful it might be to have a human on Mars... if it's not practical, it won't happen. And for the forseeable future, it's not practical. If you want it to become practical, then the problem you need to solve is how to economically launch tons of material into orbit. Once we can routinely lift hundreds of tons of supplies into orbit, then it will be possible to build spacecraft large enough to support manned trips to Mars. Until then, robots are the way to go, simply because only they and their support gear are light enough to lift to orbit.
But it takes like 10 m (33 feet) of water to provide a decent shield - way too much to carry into space.
I think step #1 ought to be to develop a way to carry huge quantities of mass into orbit. Once you're able to do that, everything else becomes easy. Without that, everything is difficult or impossible. Space Elevator, anyone?
swap makes perfect sense. Ideally, it wouldn't be used much - and if it is - it's a signal to the user that says YOU NEED MORE RAM DUMMY!!!
Well, you have to admit it's not a very obvious signal... most users aren't well-enough informed to necessarily know what is causing their computer to run slowly; they'll probably think they've caught a virus or something. A better notification would be an actually dialog box opening saying something like "Out of memory... YOU NEED MORE RAM DUMMY!!!", so the user knows exactly what is going wrong.
This is better than "This process has been killed unexpectedly" type messages you used to see - or the ever better complete system lock as the mouse subsystem tries to allocate a position structure to send as a message to the application - and fails.
Those things are just symptoms of an operating system that doesn't handle out-of-memory situations properly. A proper operating system would be designed to handle our-of-memory situations without locking up or causing "mysterious" failures. (it might well have to kill some processes, but if it did it would inform the user as to why it did so). Yeah, I know handling out-of-memory is a hard problem, and that the last OS that actually attempted it was probably AmigaDOS... but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be handled. That's the other problem with swap space, it gives developers an excuse to pretend that they don't have to worry about handling memory exhaustion:^)
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
The thing is, in that situation, swap just makes things worse. Now instead of having a computer with all its RAM used up, you have a computer with all its RAM and all its swap space being used up, and it's slow as molasses due to constantly waiting for the hard disk I/O.
At least without swap, the runaway process will be killed in a few seconds and then you can continue working.
That's probably many times more likely than the scenario you paint.
I don't know about that... it's probably happened a dozen times over the last few years that a bug in the program I was developing would cause the program to allocate memory in an infinite loop. When that happened, it was usually a big PITA to recover, because the GUI would become so unresponsive that it was very difficult or impossible to issue the command to kill the runaway process. On the other hand, I have yet to be bit by any rabid dogs...:^)
The only people who should care about how much VM to allocate already know how to allocate it. This is something that should be automated by your distro installer,
Sure, I'll agree with that... but out of curiosity, how do the distro developers decide what the "best" value should be? It seems to me that the best setting would always be to disable the swap file entirely, and just buy another $30 gigabyte of RAM if you find yourself running out...
Isn't having too much swap potentially harmful, though? If you have little or no swap configured, and a buggy process starts endlessly allocating/leaking more and more memory, then memory will fill up, the swap space (if any) will quickly become exhausted, the buggy process will be terminated, and the rest of the system will continue on its merry way. If you have large amounts of swap space, on the other hand, your system may spend hours or days in a sort of 'near-death experience', where all processes are technically still running, they are all constantly being paged on and off the disk, resulting in a computer that is running too slow to be usable. During that period, the computer is just as useless as if there had been a complete BSOD system crash.
But maybe I'm missing something... is there a technique that OS designers use to avoid this problem?
To this day, i never put more than 256m as swap even on servers with 4G of ram. that's where we had the least problems.
That raises the question: is swapping obsolete? Or to put it more explicitly, has the speed difference between modern CPUs and hard drives become so large, and RAM so cheap, that it's better to consider running out of RAM to be indicative of a software failure? That way you end up with a system where one or more processes may fail (or be terminated) but at least the machine remains usable and doesn't swap itself into non-responsiveness.
In my experience, the answer is yes: with 2GB of RAM in my machine, I never need to swap, and in the few instances where swapping did occur, it was because of buggy software (memory leaks) and manually terminating the offending processes is what I needed to do resolve the memory shortage. So why not just have the OS do that automatically?
Or to put it a third way, is there any situation where swapping is helpful, anymore?
Or he could have just sent an anonymous tip to the press who would have loved to pick up on something like this...
If it doesn't involve JonBenet Ramsey, the press isn't interested.
Re:This is what I want in a future OS
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
You realize how vastly inefficient it is to have all that power sitting there on the desktop?
You realize that perfectly good computers can be bought for around $300 new, and much less used? And that the electricity required to run them is a fairly negligible cost as well? Given that computing power is so outragously inexpensive these days, where is the incentive to use it more efficiently?
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The central problem I see with this adaptable OS concept is the fact that those who are programming the adaptability will not have any idea what the average person considers intuitive, or what the average user truly wants from their OS. One of my major gripes with Micro$oft is that their products always seem to think they know what you want better than you yourself do.
Indeed. In fact, Microsoft developed the very feature this article is describing, and they named it 'Clippy'. The rest, as they say, is history:^)
Not that I don't understand what you mean, but you're presenting a pretty moot point.
Yup, I agree -- the real problem is that the word "natural" has no real intrinsic meaning. Anything can be considered "natural" or "unnatural" depending on your point of view. When people use the word "natural", it's typically just another way of saying "the way I think things should be", without elaborating why. Similarly, "unnatural" is used to mean "bad", again without explaining why. Neither is a very useful term if you want to have an intelligent discussion.
It would simply be the end of the cow, pig, lamb, chicken, etc..
It's extremely unlikely that any of those species would go extinct... there would always be a market for people who prefer the "real item", and even ignoring that there would be wild pigs, sheep grown for wool, animals raised as pets or as a hobby, research animals, etc.
There would probably be 99% less of those species, but that's probably a good thing.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't eating meat entirely natural?
Only if you venture out into the wild armed with nothing but a spear and a loincloth, hunt down the animal, and stuff yourself with its still-warm raw flesh at the site of the kill.
If, on the other hand, you rely on an army of strangers to grow captive animals in large, overcrowded, stinking buildings, feed them massive doses of antibiotics to keep the inevitable disease outbreaks in check, fatten them up with genetically engineered hormones and "interesting" feed materials (including, up until recently, the nastier parts of their deceased compatriots), butcher them on an assembly line, then wrap the results in petroleum-based film to be delivered to local grocery store for you to buy.... then no, that's not very natural at all.
I'm a meat eater myself -- but I don't kid myself about my diet being "natural" in any sense of the word.
I've tasted steak, and I've tasted tofu, and they are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
honestly I don't see how you could "grow" meat.
I honestly don't see how they can pack a billion transistors onto a chip the size of my thumbnail, but somehow they do it anyway... fortunately human progress is not limited by the scope of any one individual's imagination.
If you grow meat in a vat, it's not going to work. You need to have muscle, and that muscle has to be worked
If someone manages to get beef to grow in a vat, then they by definition have found a way to make muscle grow under circumstances where it normally wouldn't. Compared to getting beef to grow outside of a cow, the challenge of getting it to grow without daily exercise is pretty trivial.
That said, the image of a guy with a whip forcing giant globs of meat to jog around the track once a day does have its appeal...:^)
Dr. Jackson slowly nodded. "The entire East Coast has been eating -- ME!"
Bravo! I'd definitely go see that movie! Make sure Samuel L. Jackson stars.
OTOH, if and when human muscle can be grown in a vat, will the taboo against eating human flesh fade away? After all, it's not hurting anyone... I can imagine it starting as an outre stunt, and then becoming an underground thing, before eventually moving on to become a minor fashion, and eventually becoming a fact of life. Imagine the marketing they could do at the grocery store: "Genuine Paris Hilton breasts and thighs, $3.99/lb"
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and for those reasons, such a collision is extremely unlikely to occur. Just as for the reasons I stated above, a collision with a space elevator is extremely unlikely to occur.
There are many unsolved problems to deal with before we can create a Space Elevator. Terrorism (or incompetent piloting) isn't really one of them -- except possibly as a political problem, caused by an American public which has been intimidated into losing confidence in its ability to create anything new.
Of course, the authority's opinion on the product might be mistaken also. What we really need is a way for laypeople to test a program's security themselves.... some sort of auto-hacker-in-a-box software, perhaps. I have no idea if that's even remotely feasible, but it would be really useful.
Most likely, the cable would break, the 99.999% of the cable above the impact point would start to drift upwards, and the 0.001% of the cable below the impact point would fall harmlessly to earth. It would then be a bit of a chore to repair the cable, but not impossible. Fortunately this wouldn't happen, because the cable's base station would be located somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean, in the middle of a no-fly zone several thousand miles in diameter. For a crazy pilot to get to the site of the cable, they'd have do evade detection by radar for several hours, and avoid getting shot down by the SAMs or military aircraft whose sole job is to guard the cable against this sort of attack.
Now a question for you: What happens when a plane runs into the Space Shuttle during launch? It only takes on crazy pilot.
Of course! Because people who think Google's game is a complete waste of time would definitely want to spend several hours of their precious time playing that game as badly as possible, in order to send a "message" about time-wasting to some anonymous person who they know nothing about and will never meet or even talk to. It all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.
Actually, I've got an alternate explanation: The server was malfunctioning under the load of too many people trying to play it at once.
How about games and media playback? In those applications, you have X amount of work that needs to be done every (say) 33ms... there might be more work to do than one core can handle, but not so much that you need all 4 cores.
They'll get you modded up to +5, Insightful... congratulations on your increased karma score!
On Earth, that's very true. In space, people are a poor substitute for robots. People require pressurized cabins, oxygen, water, food, exercise, entertainment, and so on... and worst of all, they aren't considered expendable, so every mission has to be a round trip (you personally may disagree with that, but it's the political reality nevertheless). That means that including humans as part of the equipment drives up the cost by three or four orders of magnitude. Sure, it increases the benefits as well, but not by anywhere near amount needed to justify the expense.
Lofting one planetologist on a one way flight to Mars with some lab equipment and a small set of hand tools recognizable to a geologist or rock hound on Earth would probably yield more data than all of the robotic Mars probes we have, or could ever, get to Mars.
It doesn't really matter how cool or useful it might be to have a human on Mars... if it's not practical, it won't happen. And for the forseeable future, it's not practical. If you want it to become practical, then the problem you need to solve is how to economically launch tons of material into orbit. Once we can routinely lift hundreds of tons of supplies into orbit, then it will be possible to build spacecraft large enough to support manned trips to Mars. Until then, robots are the way to go, simply because only they and their support gear are light enough to lift to orbit.
I think step #1 ought to be to develop a way to carry huge quantities of mass into orbit. Once you're able to do that, everything else becomes easy. Without that, everything is difficult or impossible. Space Elevator, anyone?
Well, you have to admit it's not a very obvious signal... most users aren't well-enough informed to necessarily know what is causing their computer to run slowly; they'll probably think they've caught a virus or something. A better notification would be an actually dialog box opening saying something like "Out of memory... YOU NEED MORE RAM DUMMY!!!", so the user knows exactly what is going wrong.
This is better than "This process has been killed unexpectedly" type messages you used to see - or the ever better complete system lock as the mouse subsystem tries to allocate a position structure to send as a message to the application - and fails.
Those things are just symptoms of an operating system that doesn't handle out-of-memory situations properly. A proper operating system would be designed to handle our-of-memory situations without locking up or causing "mysterious" failures. (it might well have to kill some processes, but if it did it would inform the user as to why it did so). Yeah, I know handling out-of-memory is a hard problem, and that the last OS that actually attempted it was probably AmigaDOS... but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be handled. That's the other problem with swap space, it gives developers an excuse to pretend that they don't have to worry about handling memory exhaustion
The thing is, in that situation, swap just makes things worse. Now instead of having a computer with all its RAM used up, you have a computer with all its RAM and all its swap space being used up, and it's slow as molasses due to constantly waiting for the hard disk I/O.
At least without swap, the runaway process will be killed in a few seconds and then you can continue working.
I don't know about that... it's probably happened a dozen times over the last few years that a bug in the program I was developing would cause the program to allocate memory in an infinite loop. When that happened, it was usually a big PITA to recover, because the GUI would become so unresponsive that it was very difficult or impossible to issue the command to kill the runaway process. On the other hand, I have yet to be bit by any rabid dogs...
The only people who should care about how much VM to allocate already know how to allocate it. This is something that should be automated by your distro installer,
Sure, I'll agree with that... but out of curiosity, how do the distro developers decide what the "best" value should be? It seems to me that the best setting would always be to disable the swap file entirely, and just buy another $30 gigabyte of RAM if you find yourself running out...
Isn't having too much swap potentially harmful, though? If you have little or no swap configured, and a buggy process starts endlessly allocating/leaking more and more memory, then memory will fill up, the swap space (if any) will quickly become exhausted, the buggy process will be terminated, and the rest of the system will continue on its merry way. If you have large amounts of swap space, on the other hand, your system may spend hours or days in a sort of 'near-death experience', where all processes are technically still running, they are all constantly being paged on and off the disk, resulting in a computer that is running too slow to be usable. During that period, the computer is just as useless as if there had been a complete BSOD system crash.
But maybe I'm missing something... is there a technique that OS designers use to avoid this problem?
That raises the question: is swapping obsolete? Or to put it more explicitly, has the speed difference between modern CPUs and hard drives become so large, and RAM so cheap, that it's better to consider running out of RAM to be indicative of a software failure? That way you end up with a system where one or more processes may fail (or be terminated) but at least the machine remains usable and doesn't swap itself into non-responsiveness.
In my experience, the answer is yes: with 2GB of RAM in my machine, I never need to swap, and in the few instances where swapping did occur, it was because of buggy software (memory leaks) and manually terminating the offending processes is what I needed to do resolve the memory shortage. So why not just have the OS do that automatically?
Or to put it a third way, is there any situation where swapping is helpful, anymore?
If it doesn't involve JonBenet Ramsey, the press isn't interested.
You realize that perfectly good computers can be bought for around $300 new, and much less used? And that the electricity required to run them is a fairly negligible cost as well? Given that computing power is so outragously inexpensive these days, where is the incentive to use it more efficiently?
Indeed. In fact, Microsoft developed the very feature this article is describing, and they named it 'Clippy'. The rest, as they say, is history
I like to think that the Jessica Simpson Screensaver provides a valuable service: culling the herd...
Yup, I agree -- the real problem is that the word "natural" has no real intrinsic meaning. Anything can be considered "natural" or "unnatural" depending on your point of view. When people use the word "natural", it's typically just another way of saying "the way I think things should be", without elaborating why. Similarly, "unnatural" is used to mean "bad", again without explaining why. Neither is a very useful term if you want to have an intelligent discussion.
Linky
Somehow I doubt that very much. There definitely are health issues, (but in Western societies at least) they are dwarfed by the moral objections.
It's extremely unlikely that any of those species would go extinct... there would always be a market for people who prefer the "real item", and even ignoring that there would be wild pigs, sheep grown for wool, animals raised as pets or as a hobby, research animals, etc.
There would probably be 99% less of those species, but that's probably a good thing.
Only if you venture out into the wild armed with nothing but a spear and a loincloth, hunt down the animal, and stuff yourself with its still-warm raw flesh at the site of the kill.
If, on the other hand, you rely on an army of strangers to grow captive animals in large, overcrowded, stinking buildings, feed them massive doses of antibiotics to keep the inevitable disease outbreaks in check, fatten them up with genetically engineered hormones and "interesting" feed materials (including, up until recently, the nastier parts of their deceased compatriots), butcher them on an assembly line, then wrap the results in petroleum-based film to be delivered to local grocery store for you to buy.... then no, that's not very natural at all.
I'm a meat eater myself -- but I don't kid myself about my diet being "natural" in any sense of the word.
I've tasted steak, and I've tasted tofu, and they are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
honestly I don't see how you could "grow" meat.
I honestly don't see how they can pack a billion transistors onto a chip the size of my thumbnail, but somehow they do it anyway... fortunately human progress is not limited by the scope of any one individual's imagination.
If someone manages to get beef to grow in a vat, then they by definition have found a way to make muscle grow under circumstances where it normally wouldn't. Compared to getting beef to grow outside of a cow, the challenge of getting it to grow without daily exercise is pretty trivial.
That said, the image of a guy with a whip forcing giant globs of meat to jog around the track once a day does have its appeal...
Bravo! I'd definitely go see that movie! Make sure Samuel L. Jackson stars.
OTOH, if and when human muscle can be grown in a vat, will the taboo against eating human flesh fade away? After all, it's not hurting anyone... I can imagine it starting as an outre stunt, and then becoming an underground thing, before eventually moving on to become a minor fashion, and eventually becoming a fact of life. Imagine the marketing they could do at the grocery store: "Genuine Paris Hilton breasts and thighs, $3.99/lb"