It did seem as though the engines themselves weren't the problem -- as the poster above noted, they had a series of successful test firings. I just wonder if the current Administration killed the X-33 purely because it was prominently backed by their predecessors.
I would hope that some point, the whole issue could be revisited: as long as the engine design has been proven, the tank design/manufacture could always be improved.
Slightly offtopic, but interesting. I had always wondered why drinking lots of D2O might be bad for you, but it's wasn't immediately obvious to me. As it turns out, one difference between D2O and H2O is in hydrogen bonding; an amino acid chain in a deuterated environment tends to fold into a different shape. You can imagine how that would start to raise havoc, depending on the concentrations involved.
Re:Time for a new icon
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 1
You could always modify it to look like Pac-Man, only more sinister.
(As an aside, the Pac-Man art exhibit from which the above image was taken is extremely cool.)
Actually, I'm assuming the link is correct. The Hubble Deep Field is one of the most amazing and humbling astronomical images I've ever seen. (Runner up: the Eagle Nebula, aka The Pillars of Creation.)
-a
The form factor is approximately the same as the SPH-A460 that I currently use, which is wehat I was waiting for, as the large form-factor smartphones seemed too awkward for daily use. I just wonder what the battery life will be like....
I just logged into my iTools account, and it has indeed morphed into.mac, with a big red "join now" button, and a helpful reminder that I "...only have 75 days left to take advantage of this special price..."
Who in the world is "A"? The Apache group? Slashdot editors, please do not forget to actually PROOFREAD your own story text, links, and titles before making fools of yourselves yet again. I guess I keep forgetting that this is not ACTUAL journalism, where professionalism,
acurate sources, and correct grammar matter.
Quod erat demonstrandum, baby. (Oooh! You speak French!)
Perhaps you're thinking of "The Feeling of Power", by Isaac Asimov. It's been mentioned on/. before, by TwistedGreen in a discussion about sliderules. At the risk of slashdotting it, the story can be found here.
It's still one of my favorite short stories, and still sends a chill down my spine.
According to my unscientific poll (sample size = 1), Gulf War Navy vets thought the comment was fuckin' hilarious. Military and ex-military personnel are not of one mind on things like this, so don't presume to speak for all.
I suspect we're all going to get to watch "Sim Invading Iraq to Keep Approval Ratings High", whether we want to or not.
Our "notebook" pages could be torn out, rearranged, placed on the desktop, replaced in another project notebook, etc. It was a fun system, although right at the edge of being too faithful to the notebook metaphor. My favorite frivolous hack? The XNeWS server supported the X SHAPE extension as well as its own PostScript-based rendering, so I included three notebook-paper holes on the left-hand margin of each page.
There is actually a real person behind the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely -- he left InfoWorld around 1993, and after a bunch of lawsuits, won the right to continue writing using the name. Oddly enough, InfoWorld, also won the right to keep using it -- their Cringely column is a staff-written collaboration.
My thoughts go out to the "real" Bob Cringely on the death of his son.
This is ridiculous -- there's loads of prior art on this one. Specifically, I designed a tabbed pane/notebook metaphor for a development environment project when I was at Sun in 1991. It was demo'ed to a bunch of customers and potential customers, including the NSA. I'm not sure where I saw the idea in the first place, it might have been something from Lotus 1-2-3.
Hmmm....I wonder if I still have the source code stashed somewhere....
Having done a very large, multiplatform (NT and Solaris) project with the STL, the biggest issues we faced were problems with thread safety. Even some of the things that were purported to be threadsafe...weren't. (We found a bunch of bugs in the Microsoft and Sun compilers, and also g++.)
I will say that it enabled us to get a system up and running quickly, but the debugging process (long error messages, obscure thread bugs under heavy load in a distributed system) was absolutely horrible.
The tricky thing is writing a server that integrates well with existing back-end security and authentication infrastructure: having a bunch of standalone systems really sucks from a management point of view. Depending on how the client/agent/firewall (in software or firmware, as on a NIC) is structured, it may be possible to mix and match vendors in the future. (For example, another vendor's server monitoring these 3com NICs.)
The protocols themselves don't really need to be proprietary to the point of precluding interoperability: most are based on good solid Internet/IETF standards like IPSec, SSL, TCP, XML, etc. (Full disclosure: I was the system architect for Zone Labs Integrity.) If the protocols could be standardized, I could easily see ZLI serving policy to the various firewall-enabled gadgets out there, as the server is easily extensible.
I guess I just want to see things interoperate, but that's probably just because I'm an old Unix hacker....
...flawed system as many things still go wrong. In fact the systems that have been designed as modularized have only failed once (space shuttle O ring, 1986. Where as the moon lander never once malfunctioned). Most problems in...
Um, didn't you ever hear of Apollo 13? While I will grant you that the lander itself didn't malfunction, the explosion in the Service Module wasn't part of the original design...just ask Tom Hanks.
Here is the text of a submission I just made to Barbara Boxer's website.
(If you're going to write, PLEASE be a grownup: typical Slashdot flaming gets us nowhere.)
----
Dear Senator Boxer,
I was a bit surprised to hear that you are favoring Senator Hollings' SSSCA bill. While there are real concerns about illegal file-sharing, an overly-broad and intrusive bill like the SSSCA is absolutely not the way to go about it.
As a technical professional (software architect, security and database systems), I strongly believe that putting hardware copy-control devices into general consumer PCs is a terrible idea, one that will help stifle creativity in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Code is speech, and there are many people who are quite passionate about this issue, and others having to do with free and open access to technology. I, for one, am made very uncomfortable about mysterious black boxes, legislated into hardware, over which I have no control.
The problem is that the PC is a very general device, and requiring "certification" for every operating system/hardware combination will merely enrich the mainstream at the expense of the cutting edge. This sort of legislation is very dangerous to the continued health of Silicon Valley innovation. Our neighbors to the south in Hollywood have legitimate concerns, but harming one signature California industry to help another strikes me as the wrong approach.
...actually, I just wasn't being clear. To quote the original article:
All of these traditional methods are being enhanced by ZeoSync through collaboration with top experts from Harvard University, MIT, University of California at
Berkley, Stanford University,...
Hmmph. Since they didn't bother to run the press release through a spell checker ("Berkeley"), I suspect they have bugs that could randomly change your compressed data into listings from the 1937 Manhattan phone book. (Or perhaps old episodes of "Who's The Boss?").
Slashdot Mirror
I would hope that some point, the whole issue could be revisited: as long as the engine design has been proven, the tank design/manufacture could always be improved.
Slightly offtopic, but interesting. I had always wondered why drinking lots of D2O might be bad for you, but it's wasn't immediately obvious to me. As it turns out, one difference between D2O and H2O is in hydrogen bonding; an amino acid chain in a deuterated environment tends to fold into a different shape. You can imagine how that would start to raise havoc, depending on the concentrations involved.
(As an aside, the Pac-Man art exhibit from which the above image was taken is extremely cool.)
-a
Actually, I'm assuming the link is correct. The Hubble Deep Field is one of the most amazing and humbling astronomical images I've ever seen. (Runner up: the Eagle Nebula, aka The Pillars of Creation.)
-a
The form factor is approximately the same as the SPH-A460 that I currently use, which is wehat I was waiting for, as the large form-factor smartphones seemed too awkward for daily use. I just wonder what the battery life will be like....
Alas.
My first trip was when I was 8, and as a little science geek, it was absolutely pure heaven.
I just logged into my iTools account, and it .mac, with a big red
has indeed morphed into
"join now" button, and a helpful reminder that
I "...only have 75 days left to take advantage of this special price..."
Feh.
(Oooh! You speak French!)
It's still one of my favorite short stories, and still sends a chill down my spine.
It was first published in 1957(!).
-a
I suspect we're all going to get to watch "Sim Invading Iraq to Keep Approval Ratings High", whether we want to or not.
Our "notebook" pages could be torn out, rearranged, placed on the desktop, replaced in another project notebook, etc. It was a fun system, although right at the edge of being too faithful to the notebook metaphor. My favorite frivolous hack? The XNeWS server supported the X SHAPE extension as well as its own PostScript-based rendering, so I included three notebook-paper holes on the left-hand margin of each page.
-a
There is actually a real person behind the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely -- he left InfoWorld around 1993, and after a bunch of lawsuits, won the right to continue writing using the name. Oddly enough, InfoWorld, also won the right to keep using it -- their Cringely column is a staff-written collaboration.
My thoughts go out to the "real" Bob Cringely on the death of his son.
This is ridiculous -- there's loads of prior art on this one. Specifically, I designed a tabbed pane/notebook metaphor for a development environment project when I was at Sun in 1991. It was demo'ed to a bunch of customers and potential customers, including the NSA. I'm not sure where I saw the idea in the first place, it might have been something from Lotus 1-2-3.
Hmmm....I wonder if I still have the source code stashed somewhere....
-a
Having done a very large, multiplatform (NT and Solaris) project with the STL, the biggest issues we faced were problems with thread safety. Even some of the things that were purported to be threadsafe...weren't. (We found a bunch of bugs in the Microsoft and Sun compilers, and also g++.)
I will say that it enabled us to get a system up and running quickly, but the debugging process (long error messages, obscure thread bugs under heavy load in a distributed system) was absolutely horrible.
Hopefully, things are better now.
Interesting -- I wonder if they wrote their own policy server, or are OEM'ing someone else's stuff? There are several vendors who have products in this space: Zone Labs Integrity, Sygate Secure Enterprise, Symantec Enterprise Security Manager, F-Secure Policy Manager, and probably some others I've forgotten.
The tricky thing is writing a server that integrates well with existing back-end security and authentication infrastructure: having a bunch of standalone systems really sucks from a management point of view. Depending on how the client/agent/firewall (in software or firmware, as on a NIC) is structured, it may be possible to mix and match vendors in the future. (For example, another vendor's server monitoring these 3com NICs.)
The protocols themselves don't really need to be proprietary to the point of precluding interoperability: most are based on good solid Internet/IETF standards like IPSec, SSL, TCP, XML, etc. (Full disclosure: I was the system architect for Zone Labs Integrity.) If the protocols could be standardized, I could easily see ZLI serving policy to the various firewall-enabled gadgets out there, as the server is easily extensible.
I guess I just want to see things interoperate, but that's probably just because I'm an old Unix hacker....
Here is the text of a submission I just made to Barbara Boxer's website.
(If you're going to write, PLEASE be a grownup: typical Slashdot flaming gets us nowhere.)
----
Dear Senator Boxer,
I was a bit surprised to hear that you are favoring Senator Hollings' SSSCA bill. While there are real concerns about illegal file-sharing, an overly-broad and intrusive bill like the SSSCA is absolutely not the way to go about it.
As a technical professional (software architect, security and database systems), I strongly believe that putting hardware copy-control devices into general consumer PCs is a terrible idea, one that will help stifle creativity in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Code is speech, and there are many people who are quite passionate about this issue, and others having to do with free and open access to technology. I, for one, am made very uncomfortable about mysterious black boxes, legislated into hardware, over which I have no control.
The problem is that the PC is a very general device, and requiring "certification" for every operating system/hardware combination will merely enrich the mainstream at the expense of the cutting edge. This sort of legislation is very dangerous to the continued health of Silicon Valley innovation. Our neighbors to the south in Hollywood have legitimate concerns, but harming one signature California industry to help another strikes me as the wrong approach.
Thank you for your attention,
Andrew MacBride
(I'm an alum, so I noticed.)
Hmmph. Since they didn't bother to run the press release through a spell checker ("Berkeley"), I suspect they have bugs that could randomly change your compressed data into listings from the 1937 Manhattan phone book. (Or perhaps old episodes of "Who's The Boss?").