The login process, say KDM, has the KDM thread. It then calls PAM, which has to go through all the enabled login schemes (described in different configuration files) to find one that works for that username/password pairing. This may involve hashing the password multiple times (and hashing is expensive). The lookup involves checking at least one flatfile database with far more structure than you need for a desktop, with variable-length records where a record is completed with a terminator and is not known in advance. Most people use shadow passwords, so two flatfile databases and two distinct password libraries are used. If a system has accounts stored in LDAP or some other database, you've got to establish a sockets connection and a suitable query string, which is passed to the server thread for handling.
In terms of the "whole system", this overhead is essentially nothing. On the other hand, if you want rapid startups on an essentially single-user system, you are looking at a fair amount of unnecessary memory consumption and excessive logic. It's probably not a critical item, but it's not free either. If you altered the login screen to short-circuit the entire chain, the binary sizes should be significantly smaller and potentially eliminate the early startup of access control servers.
Again, this is probably a minor piece in the puzzle, but all the major pieces are dealt with by startup profiling software and skillful init games (like picking the fastest init - there are seven or eight that can be considered mainstream). All that is left, out of the 3-5 seconds, are the multitude of small units of time being nibbled by this or that. If you want to push startup times even lower, you've got to shed anything and everything not absolutely vital to producing a perfectly usable system, and should phase in everything necessary to produce a useful system with skillful use of Linux' different scheduling rings and heavy use of 'nice'.
I would suggest grabbing videos and still images from NASA's computational fluid dynamics software. Serious hardware, nice graphics, flashy site logo (assuming that's ok), and genuine, practical, serious use of IT in business. It may not be the IT they will get into on leaving college, but it'll give them a dream or vision of really being able to make a difference, being able to do something that has hypersonic thrills - stuff few games can match.
Throw in a few other things, if time allows. High-quality image rendering, crash simulations, things that are easy to throw in and will grab attention.
I've done similar things myself, in the form of teaching kids about the scientific method by letting them solve puzzles from such data and then asking them to write down the step-by-step process they followed, with no goal of having "wrong answers" but rather getting them to think about and weigh different types of data. I've also given a presentation on IT on one of the extremely local television stations, using aerodynamics data because it's so visual and so dramatic.
There was a series of lectures on explosions given by Doctor John Salthouse, of the University of Manchester Department of Chemistry. Some amateur videos of his talks are on Youtube and I definitely recommend them. (Sadly, he is not well these days and no longer tours from what I understand.)
There is, however, a possibility of shock results. Do you happen to know if Van de Graaf or Tesla will be charged with counting the votes? Or just charged with passing current in a public place?
But in order to end up with positive charge, you've got to have an equal amount of negative campaigning. Though vinyl floors and extremely dry air can work as well.
Yeah, but you don't need a full ESMTP server for that - a wrapper for the local delivery agent that speaks classic SMTP (but ignores most of it) should be sufficient. In fact, if you're only using it to deliver to root, you've a choice of a tiny bit of text formatting, putting into a huge block of text and whapping it onto the end of root's mailbox, or doing a tiny bit of other text formatting and use the local mail delivery agent to do all of the work.
If you've only one login account (the rest are for daemons or accessed via sudo), then the login code is excessively heavy. There's effectively only one user and effectively only one password. Those need to be in a password/shadow file for compatibility with other apps, but for machines that are essentially single-user, where the data is essentially fixed-length, you don't need search algorithms, routines to scan for the correct column, etc. You store two fixed-length blocks of data and then do a string compare and a byte compare. No files to open, no multi-layer authentication modules, etc. For a straight single-user desktop, you don't need such weight for a console login. You do for servers and other remote activity, but not for the console.
XDM/GDM/KDM could be rigged to work under GGI or XGGI. They don't need the full X system. You can complete booting that whilst the user logs in.
Well, it depends a little on exactly what they're doing. There was an argument that you couldn't use air cooling to go below ambient temperature. Let us say you've N chips, with some method of transferring the heat from all of them to a common point. The common point can now be air cooled to ambient temperature, which means that the N chips must be cooled below that. You generate heat by doing so (2nd Law) but so long as that generated heat is outside the airstream you're using, it won't affect the ambient temperature, except in a closed system, where this must necessarily break down almost immediately.
It would follow that if you could transfer heat from surrounding areas to a more concentrated region, you can get enough heat to do interesting things with. But it has to be concentrated, or you won't have enough to be able to do anything. You won't be able to do anything useful with a thermocouple, as you don't have any inherent cold regions and making one will cost more energy than the thermocouple could provide. So what else can you do with heat? Heat causes expansion - a really bad idea for any material using variable materials in layers to produce tracks - but there are possibilities for nanoscale mechanical systems. Not many, though, and nothing I can think of that would be useful.
Let us say you have N compute devices, but for some reason (due to prior threading, perhaps) the ones in use are highly concentrated together. The heat could be used to trigger a re-distribution of workload. Seems unlikely to be fast enough, but it's one possibility.
Option 2 would seem to be based on electron tunneling. This phenomena is deliberately used to create jumps between lines that you can't build physically on a 2D circuit except by using lots of very slow logic. Electron tunneling is partially a function of the medium. If you could therefore alter the medium sufficiently, you basically have a very slow but serviceable switch. This is only useful if there's anything so long-term that an extremely high latency switching mechanism would be useful.
Option 3 is where data is retained in the absence of power (for some time - doesn't matter how long) but you need it to act like volatile memory. Maybe you could use heat to zero the state of such memory. Again, it's very slow, so you'd need something that needed so much zeroing that doing the same operation electronically would be slower. This is possible because although heat has a very high latency, it diffuses well and therefore provides a massively parallel method.
Option 4 is to find the researchers and tie them by their feet to the top of the mast of a Tall Ship and leave them there until they do something worthwhile. I favour option 4.
Just in: Wreckage has been reported near to where the items were found, but the exact location is being kept a closely-guarded secret. They're due to swarm into the area of the reported wreckage pretty much first thing tomorrow.
"Few days" seems to be excessive. Perhaps. News just in: Wreckage has been reported near where the material was found, but the exact location is still being kept secret.
As I see it, there are essentially three possibilities. First, Steve's instrumentation failed and he flew not only in the wrong direction but also ended up flying into the lake. Unlikely, given his experience, but even the best sometimes over-rely on instrumentation, and I've spoken to some damn good WW2 pilots who have assured me that prior to reliable instrumentation, people often took a fatal wrong turning in a cloud, or mistook a really smooth river for a runway. All in all, I consider this unlikely but within the realms of possibility.
The second option is that he crashed somewhere relatively near to where the belongings were found, where "relatively near" would be the distance you could expect a hardened survivor with plenty of experience of extreme conditions to be able to travel given his supplies and the availability of natural resources. In this case, it is possible he deliberately left a marker to (a) avoid walking in circles, and (b) inform searchers he'd survived that long and was in that general proximity. It's not unknown for people to leave such markers, and if there was a reason to believe the crash site would never be found (such as being in a lake), this could well be the only sort of marker he could realistically leave.
The third option - the most likely but also the most depressing - is that he got clear of the wreckage but was killed by a bear or other large predator, and that what we are seeing is a location where such a predator decided to take a snack. If this is the case, we might still locate the wreck, but this may well be all we'll ever see of Steve Fossett.
Because programmers don't use engineering techniques - if they've twice the RAM, they're half as likely to use memory-conserving techniques. (Compare TORCS to REVS and remember that REVS took 7K to store a 3D track representation, aerodynamics models, AIs, user-adjustable aerodynamic profiles and the 3D velocities and locations of 20 cars. And it ran perfectly well on a 4MHz 8-bit machine. Hey, I love TORCS, but don't tell me modern coders can write to nearly the same degree of compactness.)
Because Linux uses unused RAM for caching and buffering, so all sleeping processes SHOULD be kept on disk whenever humanly possible.
Because it's normal to want some horribly large number of desktops under X, but it is abnormal to want them in physical RAM except when they are being displayed.
Because if you compile software, you can get better compile-times and better optimization if you use lots of memory-hungry techniques which stuff lots of things in memory at the same time. See first point on why crappy compiling techniques force you to use more memory in the long-run anyway.
Because if you're smart and running a lot of commonly-used stuff in a RAMDisk, you want the unused portions of that disk pushed onto physical disk.
Because if you're running a database - even for family history - most serious database engines dwarf most home computers, and you really don't want everything to grind to a halt. Why database engines are so large requires going back to the first point.
As they being very particle-ular, that should be zealons, a theoretical particle of zero mass and infinite energy which produces a field (known as an egoic field) of sufficient strength to hold the zealon above all other matters and energy.
This is difficult, as you do not specify if this is a Daily Mail reader who also wants to be a Paperback Writer, where you have to add the equations for John, Paul, George and Ringo muse-ons. A member of the BNP will increase spin to twice the speed of light, causing space/time distortions. For DIGG readers, add together the DIGG value of all articles and posts submitted and multiply by the speed of light in a beer glass cubed. In terms of Macintosh usage, it is important to determine if these are old or new Macintoshes. Old Macintoshes would stop on removing the floppy disk, which means you have a probability (based on the Poisson distribution) of having instantaneous zero forward velocity and infinite resultant force.
Well, arguably you are correct, assuming they can fix the problem on a single repair mission. There is now so much that needs fixing that they may need to make two missions to Hubble. (The fact that NASA claims this is the "final repair mission" and yet is going to insist on installing a docking port... That's a strong hint to me that they see nothing final about this at all. Why add a docking port if there's nothing in future that is going to dock with it?)
The current updates from NASA suggest that module A is unrecoverable from the ground and that they are having serious problems accessing module B. The only spare module they have, apparently, is in storage and hasn't been tested or maintained. (This repair mission should therefore be called Murphy's Wakeup Call And Coffee Service.)
My concern is that if module B can't be used, or has deteriorated severely under radiation, they will be utterly dependent on a single backup system which might not even work. Hubble's instruments can only be accessed if at least one module is up and running. Really, under such conditions, both modules should be replaced with fully tested and burned-in modules from Earth, but NASA doesn't appear to have that many spares.
My other concern is that the delay in the repair mission (which is unnecessary since the failure doesn't impact any of their other operations, there's a good chance they couldn't add the replacement operation to their current list of activities) is for political reasons. If enough bits stop working or fall off, they don't need to repair it at all. The upper echelons never wanted the repair mission, they were forced into it, so permanently delaying the mission is the best way to look like they're complying without having to do so. (Oh, they SAY they want to repair it, now, but they're now in the position where they must either do two repair missions or abandon Hubble completely, and they're showing no signs of opting for the former.)
Besides, if ground control can't switch to module B then getting an astronaut up there to see why would be obviously better than sitting around philosophizing over whether to dust off the spare. No point in taking the spare up if it isn't the module itself that has failed but the junction to it, and you need an on-site tech to find things like that out. The problems with switching over would actually hint at a problem in the system prior to the modules themselves. Once you know what needs replacing, THEN send out a mission to do that. Duh.
If you then add the MICE MBone tools, you get the remainder of what's wanted - video, audio, whiteboard and primitive shared text editor. It's a damn shame MICE stopped development of the tools because they are good, easy-to-use and modular. Modular is very important. Most modern videoconferencing tools are monolithic, all but impossible to extend and are just not designed for anything I'd consider "real work". They're toys. Powerful toys, but this is something software developers really need to grasp. If you can't make a program do more than what it was designed for, it really is just a toy. If you can't maintain it (won't isn't important) or extend it (and that includes meaningful 3rd party plugins as well as your own code) then it has no sustainable value.
Windows XP has a lot of immediate value, but it's not sustainable so is just an executive toy no different from a top-end Ferrari. Hey, you can get places in a top-end Ferrari, so there's clear immediate value there too, but closed-source cars and closed-source OS' cannot be maintained and must eventually fail beyond any hope of recovery. The only benefit they have given, beyond the merely functional which could have been obtained other ways, was momentary pleasure. That is the function of a toy. Airfix and Matchbox produced equally good toys for younger children.
The same is true in the videoconferencing world. You absolutely do not want a toy for serious work, because toys break and you can't afford things that break. Jabber is good in that respect. It is not a toy. Netmeeting is. The MICE tools are not toys, though they lack a maintainer. Internet Phone and White Pine's version of CU-SeeMe, from the same era, are toys because you can't use them at all now.
Has anyone checked to see if all the good pubs are blurry? Maybe with a touch of double-vision and a few pink elephants? Also, if blurry images are proof of national security concerns, the sheep in New Zealand must be Above Top Secret to produce some of the limitations there.
Given everything the W3C has done over recent years, nobody is entirely sure if blocking the W3C is censorship or saving the planet from standards bloat.
If the boss says "don't design", buy paper napkins and design during lunch. If the boss says "don't version control", take the work laptop home and version control to your own damn server. These things are not optional. If the boss says something stupid and things go wrong, guess what? The boss won't be the one taking the fall. Bosses know this, which is why they continue to say stupid things rather than learn better. The better software developers also know this, which is why they rapidly discover ways to bypass the pettiness of stupid bosses who don't see any reason to not be stupid.
The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution. Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint. However, I don't see how this relates to my post. Those enlisted have most certainly lost. Mental health care within the military is pathetic at best, non-existent at worst, which is why you're seeing a huge spike in suicides and other preventable psychiatric-related conditions. The injury levels from Iraq and Afghanistan are unimaginably high, with many of those injured lacking any serious possibility of future employment, and with the press reporting many cases of troops having their pay docked or withdrawn entirely because they were hospitalized. If you only get paid when you don't do your job, you do indeed lose if the only way to survive IS to do your job.
So, yes, the military have lost. Massively. Not just the individuals, either. The US Navy had its funding slashed dramatically, leading to the cancellation of many key projects, from the start of the war in Iraq onwards. The airforce has lost a B2 stealth bomber and it wasn't from hostile fire. The accidental transport of nukes was also due to failures indicative of infrastructure decay and lack of resources. And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower, not Pakistan's soldiers being able to hit a black target on a black night at extreme range. The generals won't get the lucrative book deals, not without violating laws governing classified information. That means the market is open only to Defense secretaries and the Commander in Chief. The former won't get nearly as good employment opportunities, which means Bush is the true winner.
There are now textbooks which solely and specifically go through all the errors and flaws in other textbooks. It makes for a superb recursive market, but not for a very coherent picture.
Personally, I would like to see a law in the US requiring that textbooks permissable as school texts (including private schools, but excluding specifically and explicitly religious texts) be peer-reviewed to the same standard as scientific papers, and that such reviews shall expire either after a fixed period of time (with the option of being re-validated) OR expired when there is general consensus within the field that a major theory has failed a critical test and been falsified within the range of conditions that would be addressed by the target school audience.
(I would not consider falsifying Hooke's Law outside the limits of elasticity or at levels of precision beyond the means of Junior High to measure to be significant. We know it's an approximation, we know why, and we know the scope over which the approximation is good enough to be useful. Put the caveats in as a footnote if you like, but you don't need to reject a useful approximation to such students simply because it isn't a useful approximation to others.)
Either that, OR require that all examinations in all schools (public and private) be peer-reviewed at that level of accuracy with zero allowance made for what the school chooses to teach. It comes to the same thing - the only way to pass is to exclude all teaching material that isn't as valid or better than the examination material.
(If examinations were changed, I'd also add in that the syllabus be made intentionally less specific. Tests should not be about how well children do at tests. They should be measures of how well the children understand the subject. Teaching to the test is the worst possible form of education. Well, second-worst. Teaching to the religion is the worst.)
It depends on your definition of "won" and "we". If you mean "we, the people", as in the populace of the United States, then we have most definitely lost by every imaginable definition of the term. If you mean "the glorious leader", well, he's pretty much guaranteed a fortune in war memoirs (worth much much more than regular autobiographies) and a highly-paid job in one of the major companies that has made a fortune out of the war as spokesman, plus a gigantic price-tag as a guest speaker for events. And, of course, said companies have done extremely well. Along with whoever has been half-inching billions of US dollars being sent as aid. (Including cargo planes stuffed with cash, for reasons that escape me but probably do involve escaping.)
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The login process, say KDM, has the KDM thread. It then calls PAM, which has to go through all the enabled login schemes (described in different configuration files) to find one that works for that username/password pairing. This may involve hashing the password multiple times (and hashing is expensive). The lookup involves checking at least one flatfile database with far more structure than you need for a desktop, with variable-length records where a record is completed with a terminator and is not known in advance. Most people use shadow passwords, so two flatfile databases and two distinct password libraries are used. If a system has accounts stored in LDAP or some other database, you've got to establish a sockets connection and a suitable query string, which is passed to the server thread for handling.
In terms of the "whole system", this overhead is essentially nothing. On the other hand, if you want rapid startups on an essentially single-user system, you are looking at a fair amount of unnecessary memory consumption and excessive logic. It's probably not a critical item, but it's not free either. If you altered the login screen to short-circuit the entire chain, the binary sizes should be significantly smaller and potentially eliminate the early startup of access control servers.
Again, this is probably a minor piece in the puzzle, but all the major pieces are dealt with by startup profiling software and skillful init games (like picking the fastest init - there are seven or eight that can be considered mainstream). All that is left, out of the 3-5 seconds, are the multitude of small units of time being nibbled by this or that. If you want to push startup times even lower, you've got to shed anything and everything not absolutely vital to producing a perfectly usable system, and should phase in everything necessary to produce a useful system with skillful use of Linux' different scheduling rings and heavy use of 'nice'.
I would suggest grabbing videos and still images from NASA's computational fluid dynamics software. Serious hardware, nice graphics, flashy site logo (assuming that's ok), and genuine, practical, serious use of IT in business. It may not be the IT they will get into on leaving college, but it'll give them a dream or vision of really being able to make a difference, being able to do something that has hypersonic thrills - stuff few games can match.
Throw in a few other things, if time allows. High-quality image rendering, crash simulations, things that are easy to throw in and will grab attention.
I've done similar things myself, in the form of teaching kids about the scientific method by letting them solve puzzles from such data and then asking them to write down the step-by-step process they followed, with no goal of having "wrong answers" but rather getting them to think about and weigh different types of data. I've also given a presentation on IT on one of the extremely local television stations, using aerodynamics data because it's so visual and so dramatic.
There was a series of lectures on explosions given by Doctor John Salthouse, of the University of Manchester Department of Chemistry. Some amateur videos of his talks are on Youtube and I definitely recommend them. (Sadly, he is not well these days and no longer tours from what I understand.)
There is, however, a possibility of shock results. Do you happen to know if Van de Graaf or Tesla will be charged with counting the votes? Or just charged with passing current in a public place?
But in order to end up with positive charge, you've got to have an equal amount of negative campaigning. Though vinyl floors and extremely dry air can work as well.
Yeah, but you don't need a full ESMTP server for that - a wrapper for the local delivery agent that speaks classic SMTP (but ignores most of it) should be sufficient. In fact, if you're only using it to deliver to root, you've a choice of a tiny bit of text formatting, putting into a huge block of text and whapping it onto the end of root's mailbox, or doing a tiny bit of other text formatting and use the local mail delivery agent to do all of the work.
If you've only one login account (the rest are for daemons or accessed via sudo), then the login code is excessively heavy. There's effectively only one user and effectively only one password. Those need to be in a password/shadow file for compatibility with other apps, but for machines that are essentially single-user, where the data is essentially fixed-length, you don't need search algorithms, routines to scan for the correct column, etc. You store two fixed-length blocks of data and then do a string compare and a byte compare. No files to open, no multi-layer authentication modules, etc. For a straight single-user desktop, you don't need such weight for a console login. You do for servers and other remote activity, but not for the console.
XDM/GDM/KDM could be rigged to work under GGI or XGGI. They don't need the full X system. You can complete booting that whilst the user logs in.
Well, it depends a little on exactly what they're doing. There was an argument that you couldn't use air cooling to go below ambient temperature. Let us say you've N chips, with some method of transferring the heat from all of them to a common point. The common point can now be air cooled to ambient temperature, which means that the N chips must be cooled below that. You generate heat by doing so (2nd Law) but so long as that generated heat is outside the airstream you're using, it won't affect the ambient temperature, except in a closed system, where this must necessarily break down almost immediately.
It would follow that if you could transfer heat from surrounding areas to a more concentrated region, you can get enough heat to do interesting things with. But it has to be concentrated, or you won't have enough to be able to do anything. You won't be able to do anything useful with a thermocouple, as you don't have any inherent cold regions and making one will cost more energy than the thermocouple could provide. So what else can you do with heat? Heat causes expansion - a really bad idea for any material using variable materials in layers to produce tracks - but there are possibilities for nanoscale mechanical systems. Not many, though, and nothing I can think of that would be useful.
Let us say you have N compute devices, but for some reason (due to prior threading, perhaps) the ones in use are highly concentrated together. The heat could be used to trigger a re-distribution of workload. Seems unlikely to be fast enough, but it's one possibility.
Option 2 would seem to be based on electron tunneling. This phenomena is deliberately used to create jumps between lines that you can't build physically on a 2D circuit except by using lots of very slow logic. Electron tunneling is partially a function of the medium. If you could therefore alter the medium sufficiently, you basically have a very slow but serviceable switch. This is only useful if there's anything so long-term that an extremely high latency switching mechanism would be useful.
Option 3 is where data is retained in the absence of power (for some time - doesn't matter how long) but you need it to act like volatile memory. Maybe you could use heat to zero the state of such memory. Again, it's very slow, so you'd need something that needed so much zeroing that doing the same operation electronically would be slower. This is possible because although heat has a very high latency, it diffuses well and therefore provides a massively parallel method.
Option 4 is to find the researchers and tie them by their feet to the top of the mast of a Tall Ship and leave them there until they do something worthwhile. I favour option 4.
Just in: Wreckage has been reported near to where the items were found, but the exact location is being kept a closely-guarded secret. They're due to swarm into the area of the reported wreckage pretty much first thing tomorrow.
"Few days" seems to be excessive. Perhaps. News just in: Wreckage has been reported near where the material was found, but the exact location is still being kept secret.
As I see it, there are essentially three possibilities. First, Steve's instrumentation failed and he flew not only in the wrong direction but also ended up flying into the lake. Unlikely, given his experience, but even the best sometimes over-rely on instrumentation, and I've spoken to some damn good WW2 pilots who have assured me that prior to reliable instrumentation, people often took a fatal wrong turning in a cloud, or mistook a really smooth river for a runway. All in all, I consider this unlikely but within the realms of possibility.
The second option is that he crashed somewhere relatively near to where the belongings were found, where "relatively near" would be the distance you could expect a hardened survivor with plenty of experience of extreme conditions to be able to travel given his supplies and the availability of natural resources. In this case, it is possible he deliberately left a marker to (a) avoid walking in circles, and (b) inform searchers he'd survived that long and was in that general proximity. It's not unknown for people to leave such markers, and if there was a reason to believe the crash site would never be found (such as being in a lake), this could well be the only sort of marker he could realistically leave.
The third option - the most likely but also the most depressing - is that he got clear of the wreckage but was killed by a bear or other large predator, and that what we are seeing is a location where such a predator decided to take a snack. If this is the case, we might still locate the wreck, but this may well be all we'll ever see of Steve Fossett.
As they being very particle-ular, that should be zealons, a theoretical particle of zero mass and infinite energy which produces a field (known as an egoic field) of sufficient strength to hold the zealon above all other matters and energy.
This is difficult, as you do not specify if this is a Daily Mail reader who also wants to be a Paperback Writer, where you have to add the equations for John, Paul, George and Ringo muse-ons. A member of the BNP will increase spin to twice the speed of light, causing space/time distortions. For DIGG readers, add together the DIGG value of all articles and posts submitted and multiply by the speed of light in a beer glass cubed. In terms of Macintosh usage, it is important to determine if these are old or new Macintoshes. Old Macintoshes would stop on removing the floppy disk, which means you have a probability (based on the Poisson distribution) of having instantaneous zero forward velocity and infinite resultant force.
It's the system used to produce LOLcat caipotns.
Then save humanity at cut-price - ship Wall Street to the moon at a fraction of the cost of repairing it.
In England, it's called Gaffer Tape. It is also inappropriate to use on Gaffers. Well, except by dubiously-employed women on request.
Well, arguably you are correct, assuming they can fix the problem on a single repair mission. There is now so much that needs fixing that they may need to make two missions to Hubble. (The fact that NASA claims this is the "final repair mission" and yet is going to insist on installing a docking port... That's a strong hint to me that they see nothing final about this at all. Why add a docking port if there's nothing in future that is going to dock with it?)
The current updates from NASA suggest that module A is unrecoverable from the ground and that they are having serious problems accessing module B. The only spare module they have, apparently, is in storage and hasn't been tested or maintained. (This repair mission should therefore be called Murphy's Wakeup Call And Coffee Service.)
My concern is that if module B can't be used, or has deteriorated severely under radiation, they will be utterly dependent on a single backup system which might not even work. Hubble's instruments can only be accessed if at least one module is up and running. Really, under such conditions, both modules should be replaced with fully tested and burned-in modules from Earth, but NASA doesn't appear to have that many spares.
My other concern is that the delay in the repair mission (which is unnecessary since the failure doesn't impact any of their other operations, there's a good chance they couldn't add the replacement operation to their current list of activities) is for political reasons. If enough bits stop working or fall off, they don't need to repair it at all. The upper echelons never wanted the repair mission, they were forced into it, so permanently delaying the mission is the best way to look like they're complying without having to do so. (Oh, they SAY they want to repair it, now, but they're now in the position where they must either do two repair missions or abandon Hubble completely, and they're showing no signs of opting for the former.)
Besides, if ground control can't switch to module B then getting an astronaut up there to see why would be obviously better than sitting around philosophizing over whether to dust off the spare. No point in taking the spare up if it isn't the module itself that has failed but the junction to it, and you need an on-site tech to find things like that out. The problems with switching over would actually hint at a problem in the system prior to the modules themselves. Once you know what needs replacing, THEN send out a mission to do that. Duh.
If you then add the MICE MBone tools, you get the remainder of what's wanted - video, audio, whiteboard and primitive shared text editor. It's a damn shame MICE stopped development of the tools because they are good, easy-to-use and modular. Modular is very important. Most modern videoconferencing tools are monolithic, all but impossible to extend and are just not designed for anything I'd consider "real work". They're toys. Powerful toys, but this is something software developers really need to grasp. If you can't make a program do more than what it was designed for, it really is just a toy. If you can't maintain it (won't isn't important) or extend it (and that includes meaningful 3rd party plugins as well as your own code) then it has no sustainable value.
Windows XP has a lot of immediate value, but it's not sustainable so is just an executive toy no different from a top-end Ferrari. Hey, you can get places in a top-end Ferrari, so there's clear immediate value there too, but closed-source cars and closed-source OS' cannot be maintained and must eventually fail beyond any hope of recovery. The only benefit they have given, beyond the merely functional which could have been obtained other ways, was momentary pleasure. That is the function of a toy. Airfix and Matchbox produced equally good toys for younger children.
The same is true in the videoconferencing world. You absolutely do not want a toy for serious work, because toys break and you can't afford things that break. Jabber is good in that respect. It is not a toy. Netmeeting is. The MICE tools are not toys, though they lack a maintainer. Internet Phone and White Pine's version of CU-SeeMe, from the same era, are toys because you can't use them at all now.
Has anyone checked to see if all the good pubs are blurry? Maybe with a touch of double-vision and a few pink elephants? Also, if blurry images are proof of national security concerns, the sheep in New Zealand must be Above Top Secret to produce some of the limitations there.
Given everything the W3C has done over recent years, nobody is entirely sure if blocking the W3C is censorship or saving the planet from standards bloat.
If the boss says "don't design", buy paper napkins and design during lunch. If the boss says "don't version control", take the work laptop home and version control to your own damn server. These things are not optional. If the boss says something stupid and things go wrong, guess what? The boss won't be the one taking the fall. Bosses know this, which is why they continue to say stupid things rather than learn better. The better software developers also know this, which is why they rapidly discover ways to bypass the pettiness of stupid bosses who don't see any reason to not be stupid.
The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution. Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint. However, I don't see how this relates to my post. Those enlisted have most certainly lost. Mental health care within the military is pathetic at best, non-existent at worst, which is why you're seeing a huge spike in suicides and other preventable psychiatric-related conditions. The injury levels from Iraq and Afghanistan are unimaginably high, with many of those injured lacking any serious possibility of future employment, and with the press reporting many cases of troops having their pay docked or withdrawn entirely because they were hospitalized. If you only get paid when you don't do your job, you do indeed lose if the only way to survive IS to do your job.
So, yes, the military have lost. Massively. Not just the individuals, either. The US Navy had its funding slashed dramatically, leading to the cancellation of many key projects, from the start of the war in Iraq onwards. The airforce has lost a B2 stealth bomber and it wasn't from hostile fire. The accidental transport of nukes was also due to failures indicative of infrastructure decay and lack of resources. And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower, not Pakistan's soldiers being able to hit a black target on a black night at extreme range. The generals won't get the lucrative book deals, not without violating laws governing classified information. That means the market is open only to Defense secretaries and the Commander in Chief. The former won't get nearly as good employment opportunities, which means Bush is the true winner.
There are now textbooks which solely and specifically go through all the errors and flaws in other textbooks. It makes for a superb recursive market, but not for a very coherent picture.
Personally, I would like to see a law in the US requiring that textbooks permissable as school texts (including private schools, but excluding specifically and explicitly religious texts) be peer-reviewed to the same standard as scientific papers, and that such reviews shall expire either after a fixed period of time (with the option of being re-validated) OR expired when there is general consensus within the field that a major theory has failed a critical test and been falsified within the range of conditions that would be addressed by the target school audience.
(I would not consider falsifying Hooke's Law outside the limits of elasticity or at levels of precision beyond the means of Junior High to measure to be significant. We know it's an approximation, we know why, and we know the scope over which the approximation is good enough to be useful. Put the caveats in as a footnote if you like, but you don't need to reject a useful approximation to such students simply because it isn't a useful approximation to others.)
Either that, OR require that all examinations in all schools (public and private) be peer-reviewed at that level of accuracy with zero allowance made for what the school chooses to teach. It comes to the same thing - the only way to pass is to exclude all teaching material that isn't as valid or better than the examination material.
(If examinations were changed, I'd also add in that the syllabus be made intentionally less specific. Tests should not be about how well children do at tests. They should be measures of how well the children understand the subject. Teaching to the test is the worst possible form of education. Well, second-worst. Teaching to the religion is the worst.)
It depends on your definition of "won" and "we". If you mean "we, the people", as in the populace of the United States, then we have most definitely lost by every imaginable definition of the term. If you mean "the glorious leader", well, he's pretty much guaranteed a fortune in war memoirs (worth much much more than regular autobiographies) and a highly-paid job in one of the major companies that has made a fortune out of the war as spokesman, plus a gigantic price-tag as a guest speaker for events. And, of course, said companies have done extremely well. Along with whoever has been half-inching billions of US dollars being sent as aid. (Including cargo planes stuffed with cash, for reasons that escape me but probably do involve escaping.)
Well, not many movies came out in 1920. Even fewer in 1080 - the Norman cameramen could never grasp the fact they needed to hold the camera straight.