Listening to O'keefe on a press conference about a month ago, when he addressed the Hubble issue in detail, it all became clear to me: It's pure politics.
After the CAIB, he was blasted, questioned and doubted to no end, so what does a skilled polititian do? cut your losses and move on. Well, he did just that. So now he's gonna follow the CAIB like it's the road to salvation. To the letter.
The CAIB puts forward a number of requirements for shuttle flights, including the ability to service the Shuttle via ISS if something goes wrong...among a host of other "inconvenient" requirements.
O'keefe decided to follow the CAIB to the letter so that means that going to the hubble will "break the laws" of the CAIB (Hubble is in an entirely different, incompatible orbit...still you'd think that being the thing called SHUTTLE it shouldn't be an issue, but it is)
So servicing the Hubble will violate his mandate to play it safest and thus it won't happen because it's "too risky" according to the CAIB mantra.
but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
I disagree with the reporter. Because of the added scrutinity a widespread access to the sourcecoude will generate, it's more likely that we'll finally see a tight, secure Windows 2000 and NT. That is, if Microsoft accepts fixes, tips and advices from the hacker community as they should. If they don't, I can already see the unofficial Service Packs doing a much better job than Microsoft's.
RAT stans for Rock Abrasion Tool which is the grinding tool. The fact that they're going to use it to clear away the dust doesn't mean it's a brush type tool.
And in relation to the parent post, you don't want to use a grinding tool to clean the rover itself. That's the same type of speculaiton and extrapolation that you see in the media: using very little information to reach "common sense" conclusions on zero research.
I don't wanna get TOO off topic here, but that's exactly the sort of "thinking" that causes unreasonable fear of nuclear power or hydrogen based engines when compared to, say, internal combustion.
well, the way I understand it is this: remember how in old DOS (and other OS's) you had to set the number of files open?
files=30
well, that basically told the OS how many files it was going to have to handle at any given time.
Well, in the case of Spirit, it's not that they were short on flash or RAM, it's that the portion of RAM used to handle the files in flash when the flash filesystem is mounted grew unexpectedly for some reason (kinda like the frames in conventional memory you used to access extended memory in DOS). They think the problem was that this portion of RAM used to handle Flash files was not big enough for the amount of files they had in the flash (including files from 6-7 months in transit and a couple of days on the ground in mars).
Soooo, a quick (ok, maybe not so quick) rewrite of the routines in the OS for this flash-files-handling-RAM-portion should do the trick.
Bottom line, it WAS a bug that could only surface with thousands of files in flash, which is something they didn't try on the ground.
how about real time placement of military resources, GIS info by clicking on a building, status and other info by clicking on troop, tanks, etc. (asuming they can pair this up with touch screen functionality which I'm guessing they can).
Well, tell you what. The impact that this acomplishment is having ripples well beyond the US. I'm a Panamanian (from Panama in Central America, not the FL one) and I've been looking at the webcast all night (when NASA TV decides to broadcast since they cut off shortly after the thing landed instead of just letting the feed on)
I've been following the whole thing very closely to a point where I've neglected some other duties. I'm just fascinated by it and would expect a hell of a lot of people all around the world feeling the same way.
I use Vonage, pay $40.00 a month and have unlimited US-wide service. My phone number is of the Miami area (area code 786, but I could have chosen any area code) and I use a regular telephone.....And I do all this from my home in Central America.
They give you a little cisco thingy that you hook up to your hub and configures itself using DHCP. I have a 192Kbps connection and NO-ONE has been able to figure out I'm using voip. In fact, voice quality is much better than the regular Cable & Wireless telephony service (wich is pretty good I might add).
Try it, it even has voicemail, caller ID, and all the other regular goodies.
The reason I use google news very frequently is simple: they dig out news that I wouldn't find through casual news surfing on the traditional sites. Mostly international news which I DO care about, local news of a lot of cities and stuff that's just interesting and not tired and exploited (I wouldn't sit through a news story of the Peterson case even if they paid me!)
I don't see Microsoft matching that for the simple reason that MS is in it for the ads, the traffic and the money, while Google (when it comes to news at least) is doing it because they can and makes them look good (it's more a technological showroom than a add based news service. In fact, they don't sell advertising in that page)
If you ask me, I'm glad that people opine and wage war when it comes to PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MySQL has done for PostgreSQL what windows has done for Linux: make it want to thrive, compete and prosper.
This is also why Microsoft WANTS there to be an enemy: they need someone to compete against to continue improving their product (which they do, even if we hate to admit it).
Like millions and millions of people, the foundation series has had a huge impact on me. Besides from the fact that I first read it when I didn't speak english, using a spanish-english dictionary to translate many many words, that it was the first sci-fi novel I ever read, and other such "specials" that make it such an influential story in my life, there's also the fact that a huge part of my life's philosophy is derived from this work:
One of the central themes of psychohistory is that sociological and even personal momentum can only be counteracted by an equal and different "force". In other words, if you've followed a path in your life, wether it is your career, romantic life, studies, etc., and have spent months or years in one direction, only a huge event in the opposite direction, or a path equally long also in the opposite (or just different) direction can change the course of that aspect of your life.
I've made many decisions to shape my life the way I wanted based on this principle. My marriage, my carrier changes (from technology to finance), weight loss, my relationship with my partnts. And they've all been conscious decisions, which makes it a lot easier when you need to find the willpower or patience to really commit to something.
In fact, it's work so well that you can almost believe there's a mathematical model behind it all.
Basically the bad news is that it's never easy and rarely quick. The good news is, it's ALWAYS possible.
I can't make up my mind. On one hand, it's just stupid for humanity as a race to have two competing satellite based positioning systems, when one can be shared and the resources used for the other could be used for, say, more research or a new launch system.
Oh the other hand, it's this competition that usually drives progress. So far, the one for all and all for one model (soviets) seems to have failed while the super-capitalistic model (america) seems to be winning, but looking back 1000 years from now, is this the model that will perpetuate our presence in the universe?
God Damnit... because of people like you Clarke once said "the elevator will be built 50 years after people stop laughing".
Would you please document yourself, make the appropriate research, concentrate for 2 seconds on the topic at hand before you open your hole and spill out the first fearful thought that comes to your mind?
- It would be built in the middle of the ocean on a floating platform - If it broke, most of the 100,000Km would NOT fall to earth (junior high physics can tell you that), and most of the piece that would, would burn in reentry - What remains would be much more harmless than your poisonous, unscientific whining.
You're like those people that hear the word "nuclear" and immediately thing BAD BAD BAD
Dali and Disney??? this means we finally get to see Snow white's breasts! although they'll probably be a part of her left ear which actually comes out of her nose and enters the top of her head.
Why is her dress melting into a river??? I gotta go to sleep.
You know what happens when one country conquers space? and I mean, truly conquer?
Well, deterrance is over.
Let me illustrate: What happens if the crazy (bold? daring?) chinese start creating space colonies? What happens when they get, say, 500 million people in space and move their center of power there?
In that scenario, what's it to them if they nuke Taiwan? or the US for that matter?
What would have happend if Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Castro, Napoleon or even Mr. Churchill had gotten the bomb first?
It will probably take another Einstein signed letter to FDR to get the US to "do what it takes" again. And a completely different political reality.
I'd rather have a bill that reads: "NASA, you have to make sure we setup a base on the moon, go to mars and setup a refueling station at the Larange point between the Moon and the Earth", instead of one that mandates NASA to do those things by themselves.
This would be similar to the farmaceutical industry, where the government gives huge grants for pure research to private companies that eventually develop good products for illnesses that wouldn't make economical sense to do it on a for-profit basis from the start (i.e. a rare desease that wouldn't provide enought clients, etc.).
Now, what would the private sector ever get from space? well, what do you think would happen with the first company that sets up a space tourism business where anywone with, say, 10,000 to spare can go up? and after that, what happens with the first company that can provide a refueling station for that first business? and maintenance? there are entire countries whose whole economies are based on this principle.
Now, with NASA's current budget, or what they've spent in the last 10 years, do you think we would be there already? I think so. Look at XCOR and hwo they're doing off their own pockets, or how Bezos had to become a gazillionaire so that he could setup his own space business (or whatever it is blue origins is doing). They both have plans for ORBITAL travel. And don't get me started on what Carmack will be doing in the next 10 years if he doesn't die on his own rocket (no quake references please).
Now, I don't pretend to know what the economics of all this are, but I'm sure they could be figured out and the answer wouldn't be that far off.
actually, this is easily the only type of dupe I can understand and accept. If they're close together, it means that two editors were working on the same story almost at the same time, which is understandable, but when they're hours or days appart it can only mean that slashdot editors don't read slashdot...
That's exactly the oposite from what Stephen Wolfram is saying: that everything in nature has an underlying ALGORITHM, not a mathematical formula. Check out this light news.com article, or just read his wonderful book: A new kind of science.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have it both ways.
Listening to O'keefe on a press conference about a month ago, when he addressed the Hubble issue in detail, it all became clear to me: It's pure politics.
After the CAIB, he was blasted, questioned and doubted to no end, so what does a skilled polititian do? cut your losses and move on. Well, he did just that. So now he's gonna follow the CAIB like it's the road to salvation. To the letter.
The CAIB puts forward a number of requirements for shuttle flights, including the ability to service the Shuttle via ISS if something goes wrong...among a host of other "inconvenient" requirements.
O'keefe decided to follow the CAIB to the letter so that means that going to the hubble will "break the laws" of the CAIB (Hubble is in an entirely different, incompatible orbit...still you'd think that being the thing called SHUTTLE it shouldn't be an issue, but it is)
So servicing the Hubble will violate his mandate to play it safest and thus it won't happen because it's "too risky" according to the CAIB mantra.
but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
I disagree with the reporter. Because of the added scrutinity a widespread access to the sourcecoude will generate, it's more likely that we'll finally see a tight, secure Windows 2000 and NT. That is, if Microsoft accepts fixes, tips and advices from the hacker community as they should. If they don't, I can already see the unofficial Service Packs doing a much better job than Microsoft's.
RAT stans for Rock Abrasion Tool which is the grinding tool. The fact that they're going to use it to clear away the dust doesn't mean it's a brush type tool.
And in relation to the parent post, you don't want to use a grinding tool to clean the rover itself. That's the same type of speculaiton and extrapolation that you see in the media: using very little information to reach "common sense" conclusions on zero research.
I don't wanna get TOO off topic here, but that's exactly the sort of "thinking" that causes unreasonable fear of nuclear power or hydrogen based engines when compared to, say, internal combustion.
well, the way I understand it is this: remember how in old DOS (and other OS's) you had to set the number of files open?
files=30
well, that basically told the OS how many files it was going to have to handle at any given time.
Well, in the case of Spirit, it's not that they were short on flash or RAM, it's that the portion of RAM used to handle the files in flash when the flash filesystem is mounted grew unexpectedly for some reason (kinda like the frames in conventional memory you used to access extended memory in DOS). They think the problem was that this portion of RAM used to handle Flash files was not big enough for the amount of files they had in the flash (including files from 6-7 months in transit and a couple of days on the ground in mars).
Soooo, a quick (ok, maybe not so quick) rewrite of the routines in the OS for this flash-files-handling-RAM-portion should do the trick.
Bottom line, it WAS a bug that could only surface with thousands of files in flash, which is something they didn't try on the ground.
how about real time placement of military resources, GIS info by clicking on a building, status and other info by clicking on troop, tanks, etc. (asuming they can pair this up with touch screen functionality which I'm guessing they can).
Well, tell you what. The impact that this acomplishment is having ripples well beyond the US. I'm a Panamanian (from Panama in Central America, not the FL one) and I've been looking at the webcast all night (when NASA TV decides to broadcast since they cut off shortly after the thing landed instead of just letting the feed on)
I've been following the whole thing very closely to a point where I've neglected some other duties. I'm just fascinated by it and would expect a hell of a lot of people all around the world feeling the same way.
Congratulations and thanks on behalf of humanity.
Peter Parker has fallen for Michael Jordan?!?
Not Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson!.
And since Tobey McGuire looks like a young boy, they say it's mutual.
I use Vonage, pay $40.00 a month and have unlimited US-wide service. My phone number is of the Miami area (area code 786, but I could have chosen any area code) and I use a regular telephone.....And I do all this from my home in Central America.
They give you a little cisco thingy that you hook up to your hub and configures itself using DHCP. I have a 192Kbps connection and NO-ONE has been able to figure out I'm using voip. In fact, voice quality is much better than the regular Cable & Wireless telephony service (wich is pretty good I might add).
Try it, it even has voicemail, caller ID, and all the other regular goodies.
For a good read on an advocate of HIV != AIDS, go here.
She has HIV, does not take any of the AZT drugs and is and has been healthy as a horse for a looong time.
Not He.... She!. RTFA.
The reason I use google news very frequently is simple: they dig out news that I wouldn't find through casual news surfing on the traditional sites. Mostly international news which I DO care about, local news of a lot of cities and stuff that's just interesting and not tired and exploited (I wouldn't sit through a news story of the Peterson case even if they paid me!)
I don't see Microsoft matching that for the simple reason that MS is in it for the ads, the traffic and the money, while Google (when it comes to news at least) is doing it because they can and makes them look good (it's more a technological showroom than a add based news service. In fact, they don't sell advertising in that page)
If you ask me, I'm glad that people opine and wage war when it comes to PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MySQL has done for PostgreSQL what windows has done for Linux: make it want to thrive, compete and prosper.
This is also why Microsoft WANTS there to be an enemy: they need someone to compete against to continue improving their product (which they do, even if we hate to admit it).
If you don't believe me, ask Dubya.
Ok this is gonna be my all time geekiest post.
Like millions and millions of people, the foundation series has had a huge impact on me. Besides from the fact that I first read it when I didn't speak english, using a spanish-english dictionary to translate many many words, that it was the first sci-fi novel I ever read, and other such "specials" that make it such an influential story in my life, there's also the fact that a huge part of my life's philosophy is derived from this work:
One of the central themes of psychohistory is that sociological and even personal momentum can only be counteracted by an equal and different "force". In other words, if you've followed a path in your life, wether it is your career, romantic life, studies, etc., and have spent months or years in one direction, only a huge event in the opposite direction, or a path equally long also in the opposite (or just different) direction can change the course of that aspect of your life.
I've made many decisions to shape my life the way I wanted based on this principle. My marriage, my carrier changes (from technology to finance), weight loss, my relationship with my partnts. And they've all been conscious decisions, which makes it a lot easier when you need to find the willpower or patience to really commit to something.
In fact, it's work so well that you can almost believe there's a mathematical model behind it all.
Basically the bad news is that it's never easy and rarely quick. The good news is, it's ALWAYS possible.
So the unstoppable force won against the unmovable object... This google feature has been slashdotted.
I can't make up my mind. On one hand, it's just stupid for humanity as a race to have two competing satellite based positioning systems, when one can be shared and the resources used for the other could be used for, say, more research or a new launch system.
Oh the other hand, it's this competition that usually drives progress. So far, the one for all and all for one model (soviets) seems to have failed while the super-capitalistic model (america) seems to be winning, but looking back 1000 years from now, is this the model that will perpetuate our presence in the universe?
So, in a Nut shell, there's a lot of energy.
God Damnit... because of people like you Clarke once said "the elevator will be built 50 years after people stop laughing".
Would you please document yourself, make the appropriate research, concentrate for 2 seconds on the topic at hand before you open your hole and spill out the first fearful thought that comes to your mind?
- It would be built in the middle of the ocean on a floating platform
- If it broke, most of the 100,000Km would NOT fall to earth (junior high physics can tell you that), and most of the piece that would, would burn in reentry
- What remains would be much more harmless than your poisonous, unscientific whining.
You're like those people that hear the word "nuclear" and immediately thing BAD BAD BAD
Dali and Disney??? this means we finally get to see Snow white's breasts! although they'll probably be a part of her left ear which actually comes out of her nose and enters the top of her head.
Why is her dress melting into a river??? I gotta go to sleep.
You know what happens when one country conquers space? and I mean, truly conquer?
Well, deterrance is over.
Let me illustrate: What happens if the crazy (bold? daring?) chinese start creating space colonies? What happens when they get, say, 500 million people in space and move their center of power there?
In that scenario, what's it to them if they nuke Taiwan? or the US for that matter?
What would have happend if Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Castro, Napoleon or even Mr. Churchill had gotten the bomb first?
It will probably take another Einstein signed letter to FDR to get the US to "do what it takes" again. And a completely different political reality.
Economics have nothing to do with it.
See I don't know about that...
I'd rather have a bill that reads: "NASA, you have to make sure we setup a base on the moon, go to mars and setup a refueling station at the Larange point between the Moon and the Earth", instead of one that mandates NASA to do those things by themselves.
This would be similar to the farmaceutical industry, where the government gives huge grants for pure research to private companies that eventually develop good products for illnesses that wouldn't make economical sense to do it on a for-profit basis from the start (i.e. a rare desease that wouldn't provide enought clients, etc.).
Now, what would the private sector ever get from space? well, what do you think would happen with the first company that sets up a space tourism business where anywone with, say, 10,000 to spare can go up? and after that, what happens with the first company that can provide a refueling station for that first business? and maintenance? there are entire countries whose whole economies are based on this principle.
Now, with NASA's current budget, or what they've spent in the last 10 years, do you think we would be there already? I think so. Look at XCOR and hwo they're doing off their own pockets, or how Bezos had to become a gazillionaire so that he could setup his own space business (or whatever it is blue origins is doing). They both have plans for ORBITAL travel. And don't get me started on what Carmack will be doing in the next 10 years if he doesn't die on his own rocket (no quake references please).
Now, I don't pretend to know what the economics of all this are, but I'm sure they could be figured out and the answer wouldn't be that far off.
He IS the one...
Why hasn't anyone made a reference to the Ansible network yet?????? damn it, where did all the geeks go?
actually, this is easily the only type of dupe I can understand and accept. If they're close together, it means that two editors were working on the same story almost at the same time, which is understandable, but when they're hours or days appart it can only mean that slashdot editors don't read slashdot...
There was no mention of Jedi Outcast (Jedi Knight II), which has been a blast to play
That's because Jedi Outcast was in last year's game of the year competition.
That's exactly the oposite from what Stephen Wolfram is saying: that everything in nature has an underlying ALGORITHM, not a mathematical formula. Check out this light news.com article, or just read his wonderful book: A new kind of science.