Your points seem more or less valid, but somewhat irrelevant to the situation: CS is not IT, and university is not vocational training. Even putting that aside, it strikes me as an odd choice of department to cut - I can't imagine running a CS department costs much, in comparison to engineering or physical sciences.
Cutting CS makes sense from a political point of view. Its equivalent to a city threatening to cut police, fire or K-12 teachers. The goal of the politicians, government or university, is to maximize outcry to get a budget restored. If a city announced cuts to administration, or a university announced dropping its Canadian Studies program, no one would care rather they would approve. This is all about restoring a budget or "punishing" those who called for budget cuts to prevent a second round.
OK, by "remote" I was referring to something that left the internal networks and has touched public networks. At a previous employer we didn't refer to on-site consoles as "remote". "Remote" was only used when the vendor or one of our tech support people were trying to connect from off-site.
Hell, I used to embed Active-X controls in Excel docs, mixed up with a good bit of VB. My way of paying back that employer for sub-par wages;)
If you were to take a survey of folks around here the recommended reaction to someone using a lot of VB and ActiveX would probably not be "give that person a raise". What is the "cause" and what is the "effect" is not clear.;-)
This is not a suprise to anyone who works in the SCADA industry. For example one leading firm the catch phrase used by the CEO used to be "from Factory Floor to the Boardroom". That phrase pretty much drove the thrust of all development. Nay-sayers were replaced by yes-men where necessary.
Perhaps I am being overly generous but in some contexts connecting the factory floor to the boardroom is not inherently wrong. Letting the CEO and other execs have a little dashboard type app displaying real time info of what is happening might be OK, note that this is strictly a *read only* application. Its only when the ability to write goes remote that things may have taken a terrible turn.
For example lets say a company has 5 big expensive machines that should be running all the time. It might be OK for the CEO to have a dashboard type app that has 5 colored disks that display green for a running machine and red for a machine that is down. If the CEO sees too much red for too long he may want to make a call to see what is going on.
I'm not sure that is a fair assessment. OLE is not really a web based technology, its a windows API based technology. It allowed applications to share data and capabilities, apps running on the same machine or apps running on the same private network. It seems the sort of thing a Windows developer would use for the computer sitting next to the industrial machinery, say an operator's console for a computer controlled milling machine. Even extending this idea to web based solutions is not inherently wrong, for example it could simply be *reading* the data from a remote sensor, say the seismometers geologists spread around southern california.
From your link:
"OLE for Process Control (OPC), which stands for Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for Process Control, is the original name for a standards specification developed in 1996 by an industrial automation industry task force. The standard specifies the communication of real-time plant data between control devices from different manufacturers."
Perhaps I am mistaken but I think the newsworthiness of this story is not that ActiveX has issues, rather it is that there are a bunch of people out there who decided to use ActiveX to provide remote graphical interfaces to industrial controls.;-)
My understanding is that we are pretty much there today. I believe for certain modern commercial aircraft the autopilot can land the aircraft. I think occasional auto-landings are even required. So a modern commercial jetliner can navigate from waypoint to waypoint, approach and land on autopilot. Can they take off too? I believe some carrier based military aircraft, F18 for example, launch on autopilot.
When the Muslims danced in the streets after 9/11, we frowned on them, and named them animals, or worse. Then we take out one of theirs, and we behave in the same manner.
"They" cheered over the death of thousands of innocents working in offices; women, elderly, fellow muslims - all unarmed targets prohibited by their religion. We cheered over the death of a mass murderer of innocents (Africa, NY, Europe, etc) who was actively planning more attacks on innocents.
I remember when I was a kid I used to watch some sci-fi series that had a dolphin with a translator device on it, all the people talked to it like another human. Can't remember what it was now.
Trolling? I'd say it was a failed attempt at humor. Now whether the writer or the audience failed I can't say... on second thought, it is the author's failure if the audience does not get it. "Thank you for your radiation, Madam Curry!" was perhaps too subtle.:-)
Note that warrants do not require the same burden of proof as conviction at trial, warrants only need "reasonable" cause.
But any judge with half a brain should require more than just "reasonable cause" to approve a no-knock warrant. OK, so I see the fallacy in my own statement...sorry to take up your time.
Humor aside you make a good point. I doubt these warrants based solely on IR output or electricity consumption are no-knocks executed by a swat team. I'd expect that judges generally require that the renter/owner have an appropriate criminal record.
So when my beowulf cluster of C64s comes to the attention of the police I expect a detective to knock on my door and ask whats up with all the electricity. After I show him the beowulf cluster I expect he will say little more than "so what WoW realm do you play on?".
No one is claiming that an armed anarchy is peaceful.
Except NRA members. They don't make any distinctions other than guns/no-guns.
Given that the NRA is all about electoral participation I'd say they are very much on the pro civil society side and not really on the anarchy side.
Also, IIRC, one of the conditions of NRA membership is that you do *not* advocate the violent overthrow of the government. Seriously, this was actually in the membership applications that the hunter safety instructor was passing out.
How did they get that evidence without a court order? Getting the court order for the data from the electric company should require some other evidence right?
Some police agencies have tried overflying neighborhoods and noting infrared hot spots. A home that is pumping out "too much" heat may be the tip off. Note that warrants do not require the same burden of proof as conviction at trial, warrants only need "reasonable" cause.
Like odors, IR leaking into the public domain needs no warrant.
"An armed society is a polite society," as the saying goes.
An assault rifle and 300 rounds of ammo in most Swiss households does indeed support that notion.
Note the word "society" in the quote. Somalia's civil society has regrettably collapsed into anarchy. No one is claiming that an armed anarchy is peaceful.
... in Moby Dick, despite having small arms on board, Ahab decides to outrun the pirates. Think for a while about why. But then Melville had actually crewed on a whaler...
I think one of the things I enjoyed most about the novel was the window into history that it provided.
The problem of the US Navy is that it is not set up to combat piracy economically. Its ships and munitions are too expensive to operate, and its systems are intended to detect tactical level threats, not identify which of a hundred similar fishing boats is in fact a pirate boat. It would probably be cheaper and more effective just to give the pirates reasonably well paid jobs, lack of which explains why they are involved in piracy in the first place...
I think naval history shows that appeasing or buying off the pirates does not work. What did work was threatening the financial well being of the pirate leadership. If the warlords that send out today's pirate, and who keep the bulk of the ransoms, had their luxury homes, cars, etc threatened then piracy would lose its attraction. I think the real solution is to make piracy personally uneconomical for the warlords that send out the kids with rusty AKs. Note that history also shows that these warlords resist bringing assistance to the hungry unemployed masses. I don't think the strategy you suggest could be employed.
Its a geometric, not a linear, problem ...
on
Ugly Truth of Space Junk
·
· Score: 3, Informative
... we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Wrong analogy. To continue with the Columbus theme a better analogy would be dropping off a bunch of pigs at each island you visit. When you return later you find far more than the few pigs you dropped off. Like pigs, satellite debris "breeds". 1 item of debris + 1 item of debris = *many* items of debris, where many can be many orders of magnitude larger than two.
Consider the example from the article. The number of debris items increased by 25% from a *single* event, China testing an anti-satellite weapon. While this may be a worse case event, an accidental collision between two satellites could similarly generate a cloud of thousands of debris items.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues more pressing that this (oh sorry - forgot this was slashdot....thought I was in a US Government thinktank...).
A think tank would hopefully possess enough potential to realize that when TVs go blank, phones no longer make connections, ships/planes/cars can no longer navigate, etc then the average person might care.
IIRC there are treaties that prevent the weaponization of space. A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology. If dual use technology is allowed then I expect many nations will be researching "navigational" lasers.
They will get higher sales numbers if they are late, IMHO - since Elder Scrolls V comes out in November, and it will probably be another 500+ hour game.
The launch date of Diablo 3 will not affect the sales. Other games will not affect Diablo 3's sales. Consider that Diablo 1, an unproven title at the time, ***missed Christmas***. The Christmas season is normally the most important sales period, missing Christmas has killed other games. However Diablo 1 was instantly a #1 best seller and set records for game sales.
People generally don't cruise down the game isle searching for something to buy and pick a Blizzard game. They generally make a special trip to the store specifically to get the latest Blizzard game. Hell, across the country select retailers will open at midnight just to sell the latest Blizzard game. My locale Frys electronics has a football field sized building, the lines to get in at midnight are often reported to wrap the building more than once for these Blizzard launch events.
Nothing short of the mayan 2012 apocalypse is going interfere with Diablo 3 sales.;-)
Considering PSN is apparently 75 million users, if the numbers for Ubuntu keep growing then we will hopefully see more developers who consider it worthwhile to port their games over. The first to get there stands to do well out of a niche market like us.
Unfortunately, no. Tens of millions of Linux users does not necessarily justify porting games to Linux. Unlike the tens of millions of PSN users, the Linux users are not necessarily gamers. Also nearly all the Linux gamers have dual boot configurations or use wine. Basically most Linux gamers are already buying the Windows version. The "market" that justifies whether or not to do a port is only those Linux gamers who refuse to buy Windows games. To a developer switching a Linux gamer from a Windows version to a Linux version is a loss, same revenue, more expenses (the Linux port and its support).
>>...As it is now, freebsd and OS X become fragmented, and some fixes in one aren't present in the other.
> That is untrue. Apple has contributed to FreeBSD. Apple has even contributed code that was formerly proprietary, HFS+ (file system) code for example.
By saying that the original statement is untrue, you are effectively claiming that *all* fixes Apple made have been pushed back to BSD. I'd like to see some evidence of that, please.
The layer of Mac OS X that uses BSD, Darwin, is itself open sourced by Apple. Not only are there fixes in there, but FreeBSD can take any code at all that they think may be useful. My understanding is that the FreeBSD folks do mine Darwin. Also, some Apple employees have been granted "committer" status for the FreeBSD source.
What FreeBSD says:
''Mac OS X is the latest version of the operating system for Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh® line. The BSD core of this operating system, Darwin, is available as a fully functional open source operating system for x86 and PPC computers. The Aqua/Quartz graphics system and many other proprietary aspects of Mac OS X remain closed-source, however. Several Darwin developers are also FreeBSD committers, and vice-versa.." http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/article.html
Darwin stuff:
"Mac OS X includes a wide variety of open source software from FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the GNU Project, and many more projects each its own vibrant developer community." http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1067/
Slashdot Mirror
Your points seem more or less valid, but somewhat irrelevant to the situation: CS is not IT, and university is not vocational training. Even putting that aside, it strikes me as an odd choice of department to cut - I can't imagine running a CS department costs much, in comparison to engineering or physical sciences.
Cutting CS makes sense from a political point of view. Its equivalent to a city threatening to cut police, fire or K-12 teachers. The goal of the politicians, government or university, is to maximize outcry to get a budget restored. If a city announced cuts to administration, or a university announced dropping its Canadian Studies program, no one would care rather they would approve. This is all about restoring a budget or "punishing" those who called for budget cuts to prevent a second round.
Is it just me or is the text on most comments cut off to the top half? I tried with Firefox, Chrome, and IE and it's the same with all of them...
Oh no, its not just you. And Safari on Macs are doing it too.
.css file will be reverted shortly.
I expect a
By "remote" I basically mean LAN based.
OK, by "remote" I was referring to something that left the internal networks and has touched public networks. At a previous employer we didn't refer to on-site consoles as "remote". "Remote" was only used when the vendor or one of our tech support people were trying to connect from off-site.
Hell, I used to embed Active-X controls in Excel docs, mixed up with a good bit of VB. My way of paying back that employer for sub-par wages ;)
If you were to take a survey of folks around here the recommended reaction to someone using a lot of VB and ActiveX would probably not be "give that person a raise". What is the "cause" and what is the "effect" is not clear. ;-)
This is not a suprise to anyone who works in the SCADA industry. For example one leading firm the catch phrase used by the CEO used to be "from Factory Floor to the Boardroom". That phrase pretty much drove the thrust of all development. Nay-sayers were replaced by yes-men where necessary.
Perhaps I am being overly generous but in some contexts connecting the factory floor to the boardroom is not inherently wrong. Letting the CEO and other execs have a little dashboard type app displaying real time info of what is happening might be OK, note that this is strictly a *read only* application. Its only when the ability to write goes remote that things may have taken a terrible turn.
For example lets say a company has 5 big expensive machines that should be running all the time. It might be OK for the CEO to have a dashboard type app that has 5 colored disks that display green for a running machine and red for a machine that is down. If the CEO sees too much red for too long he may want to make a call to see what is going on.
There's a whole 15 year-old standards effort dedicated to this purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLE_for_process_control
I'm not sure that is a fair assessment. OLE is not really a web based technology, its a windows API based technology. It allowed applications to share data and capabilities, apps running on the same machine or apps running on the same private network. It seems the sort of thing a Windows developer would use for the computer sitting next to the industrial machinery, say an operator's console for a computer controlled milling machine. Even extending this idea to web based solutions is not inherently wrong, for example it could simply be *reading* the data from a remote sensor, say the seismometers geologists spread around southern california.
From your link:
"OLE for Process Control (OPC), which stands for Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for Process Control, is the original name for a standards specification developed in 1996 by an industrial automation industry task force. The standard specifies the communication of real-time plant data between control devices from different manufacturers."
Security wholes in active-x, whodathunkit.
Perhaps I am mistaken but I think the newsworthiness of this story is not that ActiveX has issues, rather it is that there are a bunch of people out there who decided to use ActiveX to provide remote graphical interfaces to industrial controls. ;-)
... Why not make all aircraft 'pilot optional' ...
My understanding is that we are pretty much there today. I believe for certain modern commercial aircraft the autopilot can land the aircraft. I think occasional auto-landings are even required. So a modern commercial jetliner can navigate from waypoint to waypoint, approach and land on autopilot. Can they take off too? I believe some carrier based military aircraft, F18 for example, launch on autopilot.
When the Muslims danced in the streets after 9/11, we frowned on them, and named them animals, or worse. Then we take out one of theirs, and we behave in the same manner.
"They" cheered over the death of thousands of innocents working in offices; women, elderly, fellow muslims - all unarmed targets prohibited by their religion. We cheered over the death of a mass murderer of innocents (Africa, NY, Europe, etc) who was actively planning more attacks on innocents.
"Like odors, IR leaking into the public domain needs no warrant."
Nope. An infrared scan constitutes a search. They would have to get a warrant, first, in order to do the thermal imaging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Wow, that was a surprising read in more than one way. Thanks AC.
I remember when I was a kid I used to watch some sci-fi series that had a dolphin with a translator device on it, all the people talked to it like another human. Can't remember what it was now.
I'm sure it was not the first to do so but SeaQuest seems likely.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106126/
Now a closer theatrical match to this research may be Day of the Dolphin.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069946/
My inner historian is sad that no one mentioned the Rosetta Stone as inspiraton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
So the laser simply asks the cesium what time it is.
No, I'd say that when someone is pointing a laser at you then you are being interrogated. :-)
Trolling? I'd say it was a failed attempt at humor. Now whether the writer or the audience failed I can't say ... on second thought, it is the author's failure if the audience does not get it. "Thank you for your radiation, Madam Curry!" was perhaps too subtle. :-)
Note that warrants do not require the same burden of proof as conviction at trial, warrants only need "reasonable" cause.
But any judge with half a brain should require more than just "reasonable cause" to approve a no-knock warrant. OK, so I see the fallacy in my own statement...sorry to take up your time.
Humor aside you make a good point. I doubt these warrants based solely on IR output or electricity consumption are no-knocks executed by a swat team. I'd expect that judges generally require that the renter/owner have an appropriate criminal record.
So when my beowulf cluster of C64s comes to the attention of the police I expect a detective to knock on my door and ask whats up with all the electricity. After I show him the beowulf cluster I expect he will say little more than "so what WoW realm do you play on?".
No one is claiming that an armed anarchy is peaceful.
Except NRA members. They don't make any distinctions other than guns/no-guns.
Given that the NRA is all about electoral participation I'd say they are very much on the pro civil society side and not really on the anarchy side.
Also, IIRC, one of the conditions of NRA membership is that you do *not* advocate the violent overthrow of the government. Seriously, this was actually in the membership applications that the hunter safety instructor was passing out.
How did they get that evidence without a court order? Getting the court order for the data from the electric company should require some other evidence right?
Some police agencies have tried overflying neighborhoods and noting infrared hot spots. A home that is pumping out "too much" heat may be the tip off. Note that warrants do not require the same burden of proof as conviction at trial, warrants only need "reasonable" cause.
Like odors, IR leaking into the public domain needs no warrant.
"An armed society is a polite society," as the saying goes.
An assault rifle and 300 rounds of ammo in most Swiss households does indeed support that notion.
Note the word "society" in the quote. Somalia's civil society has regrettably collapsed into anarchy. No one is claiming that an armed anarchy is peaceful.
... in Moby Dick, despite having small arms on board, Ahab decides to outrun the pirates. Think for a while about why. But then Melville had actually crewed on a whaler ...
I think one of the things I enjoyed most about the novel was the window into history that it provided.
The problem of the US Navy is that it is not set up to combat piracy economically. Its ships and munitions are too expensive to operate, and its systems are intended to detect tactical level threats, not identify which of a hundred similar fishing boats is in fact a pirate boat. It would probably be cheaper and more effective just to give the pirates reasonably well paid jobs, lack of which explains why they are involved in piracy in the first place ...
I think naval history shows that appeasing or buying off the pirates does not work. What did work was threatening the financial well being of the pirate leadership. If the warlords that send out today's pirate, and who keep the bulk of the ransoms, had their luxury homes, cars, etc threatened then piracy would lose its attraction. I think the real solution is to make piracy personally uneconomical for the warlords that send out the kids with rusty AKs. Note that history also shows that these warlords resist bringing assistance to the hungry unemployed masses. I don't think the strategy you suggest could be employed.
... we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Wrong analogy. To continue with the Columbus theme a better analogy would be dropping off a bunch of pigs at each island you visit. When you return later you find far more than the few pigs you dropped off. Like pigs, satellite debris "breeds". 1 item of debris + 1 item of debris = *many* items of debris, where many can be many orders of magnitude larger than two.
Consider the example from the article. The number of debris items increased by 25% from a *single* event, China testing an anti-satellite weapon. While this may be a worse case event, an accidental collision between two satellites could similarly generate a cloud of thousands of debris items.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues more pressing that this (oh sorry - forgot this was slashdot....thought I was in a US Government thinktank...).
A think tank would hopefully possess enough potential to realize that when TVs go blank, phones no longer make connections, ships/planes/cars can no longer navigate, etc then the average person might care.
IIRC there are treaties that prevent the weaponization of space. A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology. If dual use technology is allowed then I expect many nations will be researching "navigational" lasers.
They will get higher sales numbers if they are late, IMHO - since Elder Scrolls V comes out in November, and it will probably be another 500+ hour game.
The launch date of Diablo 3 will not affect the sales. Other games will not affect Diablo 3's sales. Consider that Diablo 1, an unproven title at the time, ***missed Christmas***. The Christmas season is normally the most important sales period, missing Christmas has killed other games. However Diablo 1 was instantly a #1 best seller and set records for game sales.
;-)
People generally don't cruise down the game isle searching for something to buy and pick a Blizzard game. They generally make a special trip to the store specifically to get the latest Blizzard game. Hell, across the country select retailers will open at midnight just to sell the latest Blizzard game. My locale Frys electronics has a football field sized building, the lines to get in at midnight are often reported to wrap the building more than once for these Blizzard launch events.
Nothing short of the mayan 2012 apocalypse is going interfere with Diablo 3 sales.
Even if we do spread to other worlds, systems, and galaxies we're doomed as a species. Who cares if it happens in 4 billion or 100 billion years?
Those born between the year 4 billion and the year 100 billion?
Their ancestors?
Considering PSN is apparently 75 million users, if the numbers for Ubuntu keep growing then we will hopefully see more developers who consider it worthwhile to port their games over. The first to get there stands to do well out of a niche market like us.
Unfortunately, no. Tens of millions of Linux users does not necessarily justify porting games to Linux. Unlike the tens of millions of PSN users, the Linux users are not necessarily gamers. Also nearly all the Linux gamers have dual boot configurations or use wine. Basically most Linux gamers are already buying the Windows version. The "market" that justifies whether or not to do a port is only those Linux gamers who refuse to buy Windows games. To a developer switching a Linux gamer from a Windows version to a Linux version is a loss, same revenue, more expenses (the Linux port and its support).
>> ...As it is now, freebsd and OS X become fragmented, and some fixes in one aren't present in the other.
> That is untrue. Apple has contributed to FreeBSD. Apple has even contributed code that was formerly proprietary, HFS+ (file system) code for example.
By saying that the original statement is untrue, you are effectively claiming that *all* fixes Apple made have been pushed back to BSD. I'd like to see some evidence of that, please.
The layer of Mac OS X that uses BSD, Darwin, is itself open sourced by Apple. Not only are there fixes in there, but FreeBSD can take any code at all that they think may be useful. My understanding is that the FreeBSD folks do mine Darwin. Also, some Apple employees have been granted "committer" status for the FreeBSD source.
What Apple says:
"The Darwin layer of Mac OS X comprises the kernel, drivers, and BSD portions of the system and is based primarily on open source technologies."
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_Overview/SystemTechnology/SystemTechnology.html
What FreeBSD says:
''Mac OS X is the latest version of the operating system for Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh® line. The BSD core of this operating system, Darwin, is available as a fully functional open source operating system for x86 and PPC computers. The Aqua/Quartz graphics system and many other proprietary aspects of Mac OS X remain closed-source, however. Several Darwin developers are also FreeBSD committers, and vice-versa.."
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/article.html
Darwin stuff:
"Mac OS X includes a wide variety of open source software from FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the GNU Project, and many more projects each its own vibrant developer community."
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1067/
Other stuff:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1067/