That has got to the worst advice you can give someone. I graduated, got my business computers degree with the intention of someday going back and getting that MBA. Dang, I wish I'd followed up. Now I'm stuck with a mortgage, 3 kids, and demanding wife, and NO TIME to get what would have been relatively easy to pick up back then. Do NOT lose the momentum you've got now. Go immediately after an MBA. I've told my kids a million times (although I think I may have to keep working on my five year old) that they can get a degree in whatever interests them, but they must also get a degree in business. Period, end of story. Want to maximize your potential in any field? Understand the way that field makes money. 99% of that is going to be standard business practice.
and so I can, perhaps, ask about capitalization conventions. Why is it that people write (and case-sensitivity therefore forces me to write)
thisLittleThing();
instead of
ThisLittleThing();
or even
this_little_thing();
I'll go a step further. I think that anyone who thinks that case insensitivity is juvenile was potty trained at gun-point. I've said it before and I'll say it again, allowing a programmer to write LastName and lastname and lastName and lAsTnAmE and mean something different each time is inviting trouble when the next guy comes along and tries to read the code. Rather than using lastname as a data member and lastName as a method name is just bad naming practice, period, end of story. While I agree with nearly everything Mr. Grimes had to say, throwing out a stab at the case-sensitivity argument was not only off-topic, it was......well......Juvenile.
All those foolish people who protested the collection and sale of personal data of private citizens should be ashamed since the prosperity of this country depends greatly on the efficiency of business.
I had already started to type a heated reply to this when I saw the next paragraph. You got me!
I'm in total agreement with your true view. Having my personal information does not make companies more efficient, and while I'm not against the collection of personal information, I'm against the distribution of personal information without my expressed written permission. Like it or not, your identity is digital now. Sale of that identity should not occur without proper safeguards, and companies that engage in the sale of such information should be legally obligated to provide financial protection and fraud detection services to those affected. Period, end of story.
...Japanese automobile manufacturers have launched a coordinated legal attack against car owners that modify their vehicles.
"Adding nitrous systems to the fuel injection and 'coffee can' mufflers to the exhaust systems are clearly actions that violate the DMCA," said Hiroshi Yagasaki, lead attorney for Toyota.
Taking a page from the RIAA, investigators have been hired to watch for teens entering automotive parts stores to purchase after market parts for compact vehicles. Fake auto parts websites have been set up to net offenders who would order parts online.
"These young hooligans are clearly stealing from the car companies by circumventing our state-of-the-art protection schemes, which we call 'The Hood'."
Ok, so running with the previous analogy, the DEA gives the drug dealer drugs, but when the drug dealer uses the drugs to throw a party and his neighbors are horrified and demand that he be arrested. The DEA does nothing, possibly because drawing too much attention to the situation might reveal where the drug dealer got the drugs?
I'm kind of enjoying this analogy. As a previous writer stated, it's stupid, but it's entertaining.
Y'know, that one sounded so stupid I just had to look. As it turns out, it describes an unusual type of swing in which a single chain positioned in front of the seated individual is manipulated. Rather than imagine it, check it out.
On the other hand, "Method of Exercising a Cat" was completely moronic.
As for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich patents, I thought it appropriate that the inventor, Jeffrey Bogdan, lives in Sandwich, IL, and that the assignee is PJ Squares.
Of course they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
My 9 year old domain was getting flooded with over 5000 emails a day. I finally screamed to my ISP and was given a way to stop some of the emails at the server. Now I'm down to about 300 a day, with filtering in my Mozilla mail client taking care of the rest. It's frikkin' ridiculous what the average email user has to put up with. I'm for any and all legislation that shuts these rat bastards down.
I disagree. Is it bad for the minor sent to jail? I'm sure an argument could be made that it is, that spending time with other criminals would certainly expose this kid to the wrong kind of mindset and would expose him even more to bodily harm of the type so often joked about on this site.
But would it serve as a deterrent to the other kids? At that age level, I would say absolutely. Most "white collar" crime isn't nearly as repellant as violent crime to most kids, and holding up an example like this will most definitely make the average think, "Wow, that's something I don't want to try."
The north pole is used extensively by the US Military. It's the fastest flight path from the US to Afganistan for example. Long range bombers use it.
MY GOD!!!
Does Santa know about this???
All it takes is for one flying reindeer to get sucked into a jet engine, and I dare say I know one President that's going to get coal in his stocking, mark my words!
I'm really good at code breaking. So good, I didn't realize you needed a manual for it. Heck, I can break any code in the world. They haven't made code yet that I can't break.
My secret? I find that randomly inserting punctuation will break just about any code...
Calm down folks. I've seen plenty of cool looking computers built in to aircraft instrument panels. Yes, some of them run Windows.
Third, most pilots... don't have the time, nor do most of them care enough to learn any more than they need to get the airplane safely from point A to point B.
That's a relief. Because I could have sworn I saw the pilot practicing the landing by playing Flight Commander on the little screen running Windows and using the actual controls as a joystick. A Blue Screen Of Death at that exact moment would have been most unsettling...
A long time ago I realized the need for speedy updates to a web page without having to reload a page. Instead I created a very small Java class that could be loaded with the page and called via Javascript. All it does is call a web service and return the result. The javascript routine that made use of that class accepted two parameters: the URL to call and the DIV name to put the result in. It acted as a great hook for dynamically modifying any page without reloading the entire page. I was able to create some very sophisticated looking data pages that updated quickly.
The end result was fast, flexible, and did everything this stuff will do. So why would I switch?
To make use of a standard. There has been no good standard way to do what this does. I'm all for it, and I'll be diving in right away.
1: Stop payment on cheque. 2: Demand refund of deposit. 3: Get one return ticket to contractor's location via Expedia. 4: If 1 or 2 fail send return ticket to "IcePick" Vinnie. 5: Pick up Vinnie at airport in a couple of days. 6: Take money home and count it or enjoy photos of mangled corpse(s). 7: ??? 8: Profit!!!
??? = Sell photos to crew producing "Faces Of Death: When Ripped Off Outsourcers Attack."
So, for a $10,000 central server, a $1000 PC, and a $195 device, you can have the computing power of: a $1000 PC.
True story: While working at DHL Systems in Burlingame (is it still there? dunno) I walked into the office of my boss, John. He had a stack of high performance Sun modules on his desk all wired together running a Windows emulation.
I asked him how much the whole setup cost and he said, "Oh, about $50,000." (this was around 1994). I looked over his shoulder and saw he was playing Solitaire.
I said, "So let me get this straight: you've got a $50,000 computer pretending it's a $2000 PC pretending it's a 50 cent deck of cards."
He thought about that for a moment, laughed, and said, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history.
Lame. Better yet:
1. Identify edible as opposed to poisonous plants when hiking.
2. Identify a part you took off your car during a doomed DIY tune-up session.
3. Identify a part that was lying on the ground after you closed up the computer case that you just *swear* wasn't there when you started.
4. Identify the odd substance in the bowl from the back of the fridge...
5. ID your blind date, see if Joe Walsh is looking for him/her/it.
6. And for die-hard nerds, ID that big shiny ball in the sky on those rare occasions when you tear yourself from the computer and wander through the front door when it's still daytime.
Re:Statistical Lies...
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
With information like this available about the misuse of statistics, I find the crap that comes out of the current Presidential administration amusing. Things like jiggling the numbers when reporting the number of wounded and dead from Iraq, employment numbers, Social Security liquidity, that sort of thing. Understanding how statistics are used as propoganda tools makes it easier to recognize a liar when you hear him give the State of the Union address.
Re:Statistical Lies...
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Or if you want the Reader's Digest version, there's a quick and easy explanation of how to use critical thinking when you hear statistics here: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/evistats.html
He is not working in the US under an American company's "we are own all your base" contract.
Spoken like a man that's never owned a business: sincere, heartfelt, and inexperienced. Look, if he wants to develop blue LEDs in his garage, he's certainly free to do that. If I invest money in him to get the job done with the agreement that I own what he creates and he expressly agrees to that by accepting employment in my company, then the bargain has been struck and, as a matter of honor, which they do recognize in Japan last I checked, he should live by that.
Now, having said that, and if you're not already posting a heated reply, let me state that I still think he went way beyond the call of duty in a very literal sense. He earned something extra, something juicy and wonderful like a phat ("ph" intended) bonus and large recognition. What you're saying is that Japanese law states that such recognition and bonuses are required. I'm a bit more free-market thinking than that, so I have mixed feelings about the government forcing me to give someone more than was agreed upon -- I feel that I should be able to choose whether and how much to "appreciate" my employees -- but I'm glad to hear that a company that wasn't ready to appreciate him at all was forced to do the right thing.
I can't tell you how many times I've looked at my brand new mug with the company logo on it, compared it to the huge bonuses and recognition that the high-level managers got for my work, and thought that there was a huge injustice occurring. But your comment about "we are own all your base" is just plain naive. You agree to the terms of employment or you don't. You're free to negotiate at the time of employment, work for someone else, or even for yourself if you choose to do so, even in Japan.
o This guy has enough money that, if left in a simple account earning 5% (compounding left to the accountants), he could live off the interest of $400,000 a year.
o That's a crap-load more than I make in a year.
o He worked hard, but no harder than I work, and in some instances, no more hours than I work.
o He got paid to do what he was doing.
Should he have gotten paid more? Oh, hell yeah. Should the company have appreciated him more? Well, duh. Now the genius has left and they're stuck with whatever they've got to work with. They screwed themselves while screwing him. But to call $8 million a drop in the bucket is beyond cynical.
While I'm not sure I agree with the decision of the court in terms of prior agreement of compensation, it certainly is just. The good guy won in the end, and he got the bonuses et al that he richly deserved.
1. No spin. At least none mentioned in the article. Any offset in approach would have resulted in a spin of some kind at an angle to the seam.
2. You're talking to moons of exactly the same size.
3. You're talking about a very slow approach that would allow the moons to melt into each other rather than crushing each other.
4. They'd have had to be running exactly parallel to each other without strongly attracting each other, as opposed to shepherding each other in a braided orbit. The braided orbit would have degraded into the two moons tightly orbiting each other, and the final merge would have, again, resulted in a very tight spin.
I just don't see it.
Also, while the entire surface is scarred with a tremendous amount of old and multi-layered craters, the seam doesn't seem to be that damaged, suggesting that the ridge is younger than some of the craters. Two moons merging would have caused enough volcanic activity to repave nearly the entire surface.
On the other hand, I wouldn't buy that this was an expansion at the middle. Such expansion would have fractured the entire globe and certainly wouldn't have only appeared in a straight line at the equator.
What it looks like to me is that it got hit by something *seriously* large, something that knocked a bunch of material off or that burst on impact. Perhaps even a moon, but one much smaller and moving in the opposite direction, perhaps captured. That would explain the dark material -- a body of different material, splattered, then collected as the larger moon continued in its orbit.
The collision, as I picture it, cracked the crap out of the large body. I don't see pix of the other side. I'll bet there's one hell of a crater on the opposite side. Perhaps tidal stresses caused by Saturn made the equator weaker than other areas, and with just the right punch, it cracked right own the middle. But then that implies that the middle oozed out to create the ridge, otherwise it would be just a crack, right? So why not more volcanic activity? Why just a ridge?
Not to get too off topic, but off the page mentioned in this/. article, there're links to videos, mostly computer generated, and one is of Hyugens landing on Titan. According to the video, the parachute remains attached all the way down. In the video, the probe lands with a blackened impact dust-splot and the parachute very politely folds up on itself and lays neatly to one side. But what if the parachute lands on top of the probe? Would that suck or what?
And I can imagine that at least two NASA engineers have discussed the chances of this happening and disagreed on the outcome. Cocky engineer #1 insisting that even a slight breeze is all it would take to cause the chute to fall to the side, and irritated engineer #2 slapping engineer #1 on the back of the head, knocking the gum from his slack mouth, as the pictures come back from the surface of Titan all looking like billowing white fabric.
So anyone out there with some experience with parachutes have an idea if there's a way to build a parachute that always slides sideways on landing?
Actually, if you read the article and check out the neat and rather useless diagram included, they refer to the technology as both "effect" and "emission". The principles between the FEDs you reference and the FEDs in this article are similar, but since it's based on a new approach -- nanotubes -- perhaps this solution will be workable?
By old, I mean DOS old -- I don't even think Windows 95 uses the BIOS for disk access once booted up unless it has no other choice.
IIRC, Win9x, since it ran on top of DOS, did in fact use DOS and BIOS services to access the disk. Windows NT was the first Windows variant to replace all machine access with an hardware abstraction layer. I can still remember when I first heard this. I worked at DHL and I was going to lunch with one of my managers, John, and he gave me the Reader's Digest version of what was cool and new about NT. I remember thinking that someone was finally making an OS that would grab total control of the machine, and at the same time wondering how difficult that would be to manage given all the BIOS makers at the time. It didn't occur to me at the time that being a Windows-compliant BIOS would not only be a selling point but a leverage point for Microsoft to use in applying unfair business practices.
The only valid responses above (Webex and Flash Comm Sevrer) were modded to 1
I don't know about Flash Comm Server, but Webex has serious issues. I'm just speaking from recent experience (as late as yesterday), but I have yet to have a Webex conference go smoothly.
Webex uses a browser plug-in. It claims to work with Netscape and IE, but I've only managed to get it to work with IE. There doesn't seem to be support for Firefox, Mozilla, etc.
Conferences are assigned a number. This meeting number, in theory, provides access to a groupware-style sharing of a single computer screen and access to a teleconference phone session. Participants are sent an invitation email. Unfortunately, the only way to join the meeting is via the link in the emails you receive "inviting" you to the conference. If you go to the Webex site and plug in the number, you get "Meeting number is invalid" or some such. The same with calling the teleconference phone number provided. If you click on the email link, you can access the meeting with the same number that was reported as "invalid" elsewhere in their system.
Last gripe: the teleconference phone number used to be an 800 number. Now it's a toll call. Not sure if that has to do with the agreement we have with them or not.
The parts that work look great, but they've got some work to do if it's going to all work seamlessly.
I always thought that the heat shield should be a little higher on the list of priorities. Examination of how the heat shield weathered the fall would yield invaluable information that could be used to better safeguard future missions.
Slashdot Mirror
That has got to the worst advice you can give someone. I graduated, got my business computers degree with the intention of someday going back and getting that MBA. Dang, I wish I'd followed up. Now I'm stuck with a mortgage, 3 kids, and demanding wife, and NO TIME to get what would have been relatively easy to pick up back then. Do NOT lose the momentum you've got now. Go immediately after an MBA. I've told my kids a million times (although I think I may have to keep working on my five year old) that they can get a degree in whatever interests them, but they must also get a degree in business. Period, end of story. Want to maximize your potential in any field? Understand the way that field makes money. 99% of that is going to be standard business practice.
"I think that case insensitivity is juvenile"
...well.... ..Juvenile.
and so I can, perhaps, ask about capitalization conventions. Why is it that people write (and case-sensitivity therefore forces me to write)
thisLittleThing();
instead of
ThisLittleThing();
or even
this_little_thing();
I'll go a step further. I think that anyone who thinks that case insensitivity is juvenile was potty trained at gun-point. I've said it before and I'll say it again, allowing a programmer to write LastName and lastname and lastName and lAsTnAmE and mean something different each time is inviting trouble when the next guy comes along and tries to read the code. Rather than using lastname as a data member and lastName as a method name is just bad naming practice, period, end of story. While I agree with nearly everything Mr. Grimes had to say, throwing out a stab at the case-sensitivity argument was not only off-topic, it was...
All those foolish people who protested the collection and sale of personal data of private citizens should be ashamed since the prosperity of this country depends greatly on the efficiency of business.
I had already started to type a heated reply to this when I saw the next paragraph. You got me!
I'm in total agreement with your true view. Having my personal information does not make companies more efficient, and while I'm not against the collection of personal information, I'm against the distribution of personal information without my expressed written permission. Like it or not, your identity is digital now. Sale of that identity should not occur without proper safeguards, and companies that engage in the sale of such information should be legally obligated to provide financial protection and fraud detection services to those affected. Period, end of story.
Well done.
...Japanese automobile manufacturers have launched a coordinated legal attack against car owners that modify their vehicles.
"Adding nitrous systems to the fuel injection and 'coffee can' mufflers to the exhaust systems are clearly actions that violate the DMCA," said Hiroshi Yagasaki, lead attorney for Toyota.
Taking a page from the RIAA, investigators have been hired to watch for teens entering automotive parts stores to purchase after market parts for compact vehicles. Fake auto parts websites have been set up to net offenders who would order parts online.
"These young hooligans are clearly stealing from the car companies by circumventing our state-of-the-art protection schemes, which we call 'The Hood'."
Commander Taco was not available for comment.
Ok, so running with the previous analogy, the DEA gives the drug dealer drugs, but when the drug dealer uses the drugs to throw a party and his neighbors are horrified and demand that he be arrested. The DEA does nothing, possibly because drawing too much attention to the situation might reveal where the drug dealer got the drugs?
I'm kind of enjoying this analogy. As a previous writer stated, it's stupid, but it's entertaining.
Method of Swinging on a Swing.
Y'know, that one sounded so stupid I just had to look. As it turns out, it describes an unusual type of swing in which a single chain positioned in front of the seated individual is manipulated. Rather than imagine it, check it out.
On the other hand, "Method of Exercising a Cat" was completely moronic.
As for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich patents, I thought it appropriate that the inventor, Jeffrey Bogdan, lives in Sandwich, IL, and that the assignee is PJ Squares.
Of course they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
My 9 year old domain was getting flooded with over 5000 emails a day. I finally screamed to my ISP and was given a way to stop some of the emails at the server. Now I'm down to about 300 a day, with filtering in my Mozilla mail client taking care of the rest. It's frikkin' ridiculous what the average email user has to put up with. I'm for any and all legislation that shuts these rat bastards down.
I disagree. Is it bad for the minor sent to jail? I'm sure an argument could be made that it is, that spending time with other criminals would certainly expose this kid to the wrong kind of mindset and would expose him even more to bodily harm of the type so often joked about on this site.
But would it serve as a deterrent to the other kids? At that age level, I would say absolutely. Most "white collar" crime isn't nearly as repellant as violent crime to most kids, and holding up an example like this will most definitely make the average think, "Wow, that's something I don't want to try."
The north pole is used extensively by the US Military. It's the fastest flight path from the US to Afganistan for example. Long range bombers use it.
MY GOD!!!
Does Santa know about this???
All it takes is for one flying reindeer to get sucked into a jet engine, and I dare say I know one President that's going to get coal in his stocking, mark my words!
I'm really good at code breaking. So good, I didn't realize you needed a manual for it. Heck, I can break any code in the world. They haven't made code yet that I can't break.
My secret? I find that randomly inserting punctuation will break just about any code...
Calm down folks. I've seen plenty of cool looking computers built in to aircraft instrument panels. Yes, some of them run Windows.
Third, most pilots... don't have the time, nor do most of them care enough to learn any more than they need to get the airplane safely from point A to point B.
That's a relief. Because I could have sworn I saw the pilot practicing the landing by playing Flight Commander on the little screen running Windows and using the actual controls as a joystick. A Blue Screen Of Death at that exact moment would have been most unsettling...
A long time ago I realized the need for speedy updates to a web page without having to reload a page. Instead I created a very small Java class that could be loaded with the page and called via Javascript. All it does is call a web service and return the result. The javascript routine that made use of that class accepted two parameters: the URL to call and the DIV name to put the result in. It acted as a great hook for dynamically modifying any page without reloading the entire page. I was able to create some very sophisticated looking data pages that updated quickly.
The end result was fast, flexible, and did everything this stuff will do. So why would I switch?
To make use of a standard. There has been no good standard way to do what this does. I'm all for it, and I'll be diving in right away.
1: Stop payment on cheque.
2: Demand refund of deposit.
3: Get one return ticket to contractor's location via Expedia.
4: If 1 or 2 fail send return ticket to "IcePick" Vinnie.
5: Pick up Vinnie at airport in a couple of days.
6: Take money home and count it or enjoy photos of mangled corpse(s).
7: ???
8: Profit!!!
??? = Sell photos to crew producing "Faces Of Death: When Ripped Off Outsourcers Attack."
So, for a $10,000 central server, a $1000 PC, and a $195 device, you can have the computing power of: a $1000 PC.
True story: While working at DHL Systems in Burlingame (is it still there? dunno) I walked into the office of my boss, John. He had a stack of high performance Sun modules on his desk all wired together running a Windows emulation.
I asked him how much the whole setup cost and he said, "Oh, about $50,000." (this was around 1994). I looked over his shoulder and saw he was playing Solitaire.
I said, "So let me get this straight: you've got a $50,000 computer pretending it's a $2000 PC pretending it's a 50 cent deck of cards."
He thought about that for a moment, laughed, and said, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
"Well done!"
Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history.
Lame. Better yet:
1. Identify edible as opposed to poisonous plants when hiking.
2. Identify a part you took off your car during a doomed DIY tune-up session.
3. Identify a part that was lying on the ground after you closed up the computer case that you just *swear* wasn't there when you started.
4. Identify the odd substance in the bowl from the back of the fridge...
5. ID your blind date, see if Joe Walsh is looking for him/her/it.
6. And for die-hard nerds, ID that big shiny ball in the sky on those rare occasions when you tear yourself from the computer and wander through the front door when it's still daytime.
Oh, and here're some more:
/ Text/ch16.htm
http://my.execpc.com/4A/B7/helberg/pitfalls/
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/stark/SticiGui
With information like this available about the misuse of statistics, I find the crap that comes out of the current Presidential administration amusing. Things like jiggling the numbers when reporting the number of wounded and dead from Iraq, employment numbers, Social Security liquidity, that sort of thing. Understanding how statistics are used as propoganda tools makes it easier to recognize a liar when you hear him give the State of the Union address.
Or if you want the Reader's Digest version, there's a quick and easy explanation of how to use critical thinking when you hear statistics here: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/evistats.html
He is not working in the US under an American company's "we are own all your base" contract.
Spoken like a man that's never owned a business: sincere, heartfelt, and inexperienced. Look, if he wants to develop blue LEDs in his garage, he's certainly free to do that. If I invest money in him to get the job done with the agreement that I own what he creates and he expressly agrees to that by accepting employment in my company, then the bargain has been struck and, as a matter of honor, which they do recognize in Japan last I checked, he should live by that.
Now, having said that, and if you're not already posting a heated reply, let me state that I still think he went way beyond the call of duty in a very literal sense. He earned something extra, something juicy and wonderful like a phat ("ph" intended) bonus and large recognition. What you're saying is that Japanese law states that such recognition and bonuses are required. I'm a bit more free-market thinking than that, so I have mixed feelings about the government forcing me to give someone more than was agreed upon -- I feel that I should be able to choose whether and how much to "appreciate" my employees -- but I'm glad to hear that a company that wasn't ready to appreciate him at all was forced to do the right thing.
I can't tell you how many times I've looked at my brand new mug with the company logo on it, compared it to the huge bonuses and recognition that the high-level managers got for my work, and thought that there was a huge injustice occurring. But your comment about "we are own all your base" is just plain naive. You agree to the terms of employment or you don't. You're free to negotiate at the time of employment, work for someone else, or even for yourself if you choose to do so, even in Japan.
Ok, let's review:
o Most of us can't earn 1 million in a decade.
o This guy has enough money that, if left in a simple account earning 5% (compounding left to the accountants), he could live off the interest of $400,000 a year.
o That's a crap-load more than I make in a year.
o He worked hard, but no harder than I work, and in some instances, no more hours than I work.
o He got paid to do what he was doing.
Should he have gotten paid more? Oh, hell yeah. Should the company have appreciated him more? Well, duh. Now the genius has left and they're stuck with whatever they've got to work with. They screwed themselves while screwing him. But to call $8 million a drop in the bucket is beyond cynical.
While I'm not sure I agree with the decision of the court in terms of prior agreement of compensation, it certainly is just. The good guy won in the end, and he got the bonuses et al that he richly deserved.
No way, and here's why:
1. No spin. At least none mentioned in the article. Any offset in approach would have resulted in a spin of some kind at an angle to the seam.
2. You're talking to moons of exactly the same size.
3. You're talking about a very slow approach that would allow the moons to melt into each other rather than crushing each other.
4. They'd have had to be running exactly parallel to each other without strongly attracting each other, as opposed to shepherding each other in a braided orbit. The braided orbit would have degraded into the two moons tightly orbiting each other, and the final merge would have, again, resulted in a very tight spin.
I just don't see it.
Also, while the entire surface is scarred with a tremendous amount of old and multi-layered craters, the seam doesn't seem to be that damaged, suggesting that the ridge is younger than some of the craters. Two moons merging would have caused enough volcanic activity to repave nearly the entire surface.
On the other hand, I wouldn't buy that this was an expansion at the middle. Such expansion would have fractured the entire globe and certainly wouldn't have only appeared in a straight line at the equator.
What it looks like to me is that it got hit by something *seriously* large, something that knocked a bunch of material off or that burst on impact. Perhaps even a moon, but one much smaller and moving in the opposite direction, perhaps captured. That would explain the dark material -- a body of different material, splattered, then collected as the larger moon continued in its orbit.
The collision, as I picture it, cracked the crap out of the large body. I don't see pix of the other side. I'll bet there's one hell of a crater on the opposite side. Perhaps tidal stresses caused by Saturn made the equator weaker than other areas, and with just the right punch, it cracked right own the middle. But then that implies that the middle oozed out to create the ridge, otherwise it would be just a crack, right? So why not more volcanic activity? Why just a ridge?
Neato.
Not to get too off topic, but off the page mentioned in this /. article, there're links to videos, mostly computer generated, and one is of Hyugens landing on Titan. According to the video, the parachute remains attached all the way down. In the video, the probe lands with a blackened impact dust-splot and the parachute very politely folds up on itself and lays neatly to one side. But what if the parachute lands on top of the probe? Would that suck or what?
And I can imagine that at least two NASA engineers have discussed the chances of this happening and disagreed on the outcome. Cocky engineer #1 insisting that even a slight breeze is all it would take to cause the chute to fall to the side, and irritated engineer #2 slapping engineer #1 on the back of the head, knocking the gum from his slack mouth, as the pictures come back from the surface of Titan all looking like billowing white fabric.
So anyone out there with some experience with parachutes have an idea if there's a way to build a parachute that always slides sideways on landing?
Actually, if you read the article and check out the neat and rather useless diagram included, they refer to the technology as both "effect" and "emission". The principles between the FEDs you reference and the FEDs in this article are similar, but since it's based on a new approach -- nanotubes -- perhaps this solution will be workable?
By old, I mean DOS old -- I don't even think Windows 95 uses the BIOS for disk access once booted up unless it has no other choice.
IIRC, Win9x, since it ran on top of DOS, did in fact use DOS and BIOS services to access the disk. Windows NT was the first Windows variant to replace all machine access with an hardware abstraction layer. I can still remember when I first heard this. I worked at DHL and I was going to lunch with one of my managers, John, and he gave me the Reader's Digest version of what was cool and new about NT. I remember thinking that someone was finally making an OS that would grab total control of the machine, and at the same time wondering how difficult that would be to manage given all the BIOS makers at the time. It didn't occur to me at the time that being a Windows-compliant BIOS would not only be a selling point but a leverage point for Microsoft to use in applying unfair business practices.
The only valid responses above (Webex and Flash Comm Sevrer) were modded to 1
I don't know about Flash Comm Server, but Webex has serious issues. I'm just speaking from recent experience (as late as yesterday), but I have yet to have a Webex conference go smoothly.
Webex uses a browser plug-in. It claims to work with Netscape and IE, but I've only managed to get it to work with IE. There doesn't seem to be support for Firefox, Mozilla, etc.
Conferences are assigned a number. This meeting number, in theory, provides access to a groupware-style sharing of a single computer screen and access to a teleconference phone session. Participants are sent an invitation email. Unfortunately, the only way to join the meeting is via the link in the emails you receive "inviting" you to the conference. If you go to the Webex site and plug in the number, you get "Meeting number is invalid" or some such. The same with calling the teleconference phone number provided. If you click on the email link, you can access the meeting with the same number that was reported as "invalid" elsewhere in their system.
Last gripe: the teleconference phone number used to be an 800 number. Now it's a toll call. Not sure if that has to do with the agreement we have with them or not.
The parts that work look great, but they've got some work to do if it's going to all work seamlessly.
Here are links to pictures taken when Opportunity was standing a bit closer:
u nity_n331.html http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity_n332.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opport
I always thought that the heat shield should be a little higher on the list of priorities. Examination of how the heat shield weathered the fall would yield invaluable information that could be used to better safeguard future missions.
But that's just one layman's opinion....