Planes will have navigation strobes on (they blink), though if you're looking right at the landing lights they can be hard to see sometimes. Satellites will be steady, not blinking, and not changing course. You also won't ever see one flying east-to-west. West-to-east and north-south either way, but not east-west.
I'm an employer / capitalist oppressor now, and yes, I look up applicants on the web. Beats having them come in for job interviews if it's obvious they're not what I'm looking for. Frankly, I don't care what sort of stupid stuff someone does on their own time, I'm just interested in what kind of a person they are. And the last person I interviewed had this posted on MySpace:
That was enough to convince me that she would be a good fit here. I interviewed her and she was the first to be offered the job. Granted, her resume alone would probably have been enough to get her an interview (out of about 70 submitted, more than half were total garbage) but her online presence is what got her on the short list.
If I say "There's no danger here because higher energy interactions happen naturally all the time", there's maybe a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong. (Hey, I'm no physicist, right?) So that means my argument is invalidated and can't be considered more than a 1 in 3 chance that the world won't end?
I'm also no statistician, but I don't think that's right.
(But I there's probably at least a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong about that, too.)
Make sure you've got good watertight, light-proof packaging. Pack it with plenty of desiccant packs. Maybe some oxygen absorber packs too. A big heat-sealed moisture barrier bag would be a good start, if you can get one that big.
I'd be a little concerned about the electrolytic capacitors in the computer. There's probably not much you can do if they're going to leak - maybe you could fill the whole thing up with something absorbent that could be vacuumed up later, but I wouldn't count on it.
Also make sure you don't leave any CMOS backup battery installed. If it has to be included, bag it separately.
Keep the capsule temperature controlled. Assume it's going to flood at some point - there was a time capsuled opened here not long ago that was almost totally destroyed by water leakage.
Make sure the local library has paper records on where the capsule is, what's in it, and so forth.
The 'invisibility cloak' thing is right up there with 'teleportation'. Every time someone manages to 'teleport' the state of a single subatomic particle, we get a bunch of articles likening the process to Star Trek teleporters.
Do ANY of the researchers involved in these things really expect them to have invisibility or teleportation capabilities at macro scales someday? I was under the impression that neither of them had any relevance at larger scales, and while I could be wrong, it seems like the media just can't resist this kind of idiotic hyperbole.
A decade ago the Air Force was still using the MMPI. I remember taking it and talking with a pair of Air Force shrinks (one a Lt. Col. and the other a new-looking Captain) about the results. They skipped over the one scale that was clearly outside of the 'normal' range for me, so I asked about it.
"That indicates, uh, non-traditional masculinity. It's not uncommon in, uh, college guys..."
This was at the height of the "don't ask, don't tell" controversy and it was a little funny watching both of them squirm.
That's it... I'm going to go build a portable media player that plays only Amiga MODs and C-64 SID tunes. Should be great for jogging, so long as you don't make any turns - the gyroscopic force of the 30 MB RLL hard drive can cause some problems.
That's right. Less than 15 measly PSI. Fifteen PSI ain't even enough air in your car tire to make it roll very well. And that's all the difference there is between ground and space.
Here's another way to look at that measly 14.7 PSI pressure differential - on a 1-meter diameter circular hatch, that's about 17,890 pounds of force. Or roughly 3.5 Ford F-150's, since this is Slashdot and car analogies are mandatory.
Sighted people can learn this, too. I worked in an office where I had my back to a doorway, and through that door was a room full of servers. No one was ever able to sneak up on me because I could hear their sound shadow as they walked by the servers. It took me a while to figure out how I was aware of them, because it wasn't really a conscious thing at first.
I've thought about a device like this for years. My assumption was always that you'd need some sort of feedback - the image you're thinking about would be displayed in front of you with a controllable amount of persistence, and you'd be able to focus on the parts that aren't right and change them.
I've always wondered if we wouldn't find that talented artists can hold an image with much more detail and complexity than most of us. Certainly some seem to be able to visualize complete works in a fair amount of detail before starting. Not me, though.
What I haven't seen covered yet here is whether the visual cortex at this level even reflects the mind's eye, or if it's just literal 'pixel' data from the eyes. Do imagined images get mapped back down to this concrete a form, or are they more abstract?
Re:Crashing Web store applications?
on
USPS Server Meltdown
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
osC is insidious. You install it because it's open source and a zillion other sites are using it, so it can't be THAT bad, right? Then you have to install a few contributions to add the basic functions you need - and with each contribution, adding the next gets harder and harder.
But you get up and running. Then you discover all of the little annoying usability quirks - US state names don't use proper abbreviations, customers in Ireland can't place an order without a post code even if you set the minimum length to zero, the payment option selection looks like it has a default selected when it doesn't, users don't know that 'authorize.net' is actually the credit card payment option, and so on.
So you spend hours fixing those. Meanwhile, you've got the database populated with all of your products, and you're using it to track sales figures. Maybe you add some back-end order processing stuff for your own convenience.
Eventually this mass of haphazardly patched spaghetti code becomes an absolute nightmare to do ANYTHING with, but by this point you've spent so many hours working on it that it's easier to just keep slogging away at it than to just abandon the whole thing, install something new, and try to move your catalog and your sales records over to the new system.
And THAT is why there are so many osCommerce sites.
As a former search and rescue team member, I just want to add that if you do call up the rescue team and give coordinates, STOP MOVING! Sit your ass down and wait, don't keep trying to find your car just over the next rise or over there behind those trees.
I came in yesterday morning to find the USPS module non-functional. Worse, the only working option was DHL overnight - and in case you've missed the news, DHL is now about an order of magnitude worse than the post office for domestic delivery. Even for places they say they can do next-day delivery to, actual delivery can take more than a week.
Why? Because they hand it off to the post office rather than deliver it themselves. Why it takes the post office a week to deliver it when I can get it there in two days by sending it by priority mail myself is a mystery. In any case, DHL's out of the (US) domestic game entirely next month.
My site was up last time I checked, but if the USPS option goes down again, I think it's time for a 'free economy shipping' promotion. No messy rate tables to deal with!
I'm sure the/. crowd is going to say that this is because my kids have been contaminated by exposure to Windows, but my 9-year old and 12-year old both gave up on the XO1 pretty fast. It frustrates me as well - not quite so much with the latest update, but it's still annoying as heck. The keyboard is worse than the old Mattel Aquarius (marginally better than the Timex Sinclair), the user interface is inconsistent (no standard 'close' button?) and tends to get in the way.
The hardware is impressive in many respects, especially considering the cost. I just think the user experience could be improved significantly. From all of the hype I was expecting something intuitive and simple to use, but it's got a long way to go. I don't think either of my kids have ever managed to shut it down properly.
Yep. I just had to rework by hand more boards than I'd like to think about. The increased temperature required to reflow the solder already had the contract manufacturer's over maxed out for the panel size I was using - with 63/37 Sn/Pb solder it would never have been a problem - and then a stencil problem caused a bunch of bridges. It would have been a simple matter to fix with lead-based solder, but no matter how much flux you slather on it, it still doesn't flow right.
So yes, there are RoHS-compliant solders out there, but people underestimate the impact of throwing away years of experience with established soldering processes. It takes a long time to get really good information on long-term reliability. The new processes are also using a lot more energy, with the increased carbon footprint and so forth that goes with it.
If someone could come up with a RoHS-compliant solder that flowed and wetted like 63/37, with roughly the same melting temperature, I'd be all over it, even if the cost was significantly higher.
I was in China last year and picked up a knock-off Lego set for my daughter. I wound up helping her put it together, and from what I remember the bricks were nearly indistinguishable from Lego. They seem to be ABS as far as I can tell, though I didn't do a flame test or anything. The big flat base pieces were too thin and a little unstable maybe, but the bricks themselves (while being restricted to the variety of styles Lego had maybe 30 years ago) were just fine.
So, Mega Bloks aside, expect to see more of these knock-offs in the very near future if this decision sticks.
This sort of thing has been floated around for a while under the banner of 'syndromic surveilance'. I spent most of the last three years working on a research project that involved gathering data on water quality and developing statistical software to find subtle indications of contamination. The intent was always to extend the approach to syndromic data, incorporating things like over-the-counter medicine sales, ER visits, and so forth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that none of us on the team knew enough about statistics to manage a fantasy football league. I'm now happily self-employed doing stuff absolutely unrelated to statistics. I think some of my hair has grown back, and I hardly even cringe when someone says 'generalized least squares'.
If you're interested, though, here is a paper from the CDC on the subject. I'm pretty sure they have a better idea what they're talking about. Or at any rate, they've got nicer graphics.
I'll second AS&S and Digi-Key both. Digi-Key was founded by a ham radio kit builder (Dr. Stordahl is still active in the hobby, in fact) and even though they're a huge company now, their customer service is still great, even for hobbyists.
The Levitron, by the way, was fun for about 10 minutes. That was 10 minutes after the hour of fiddling with it to make it work, and before I got tired of having to constantly readjust it to KEEP it working.
My own son is almost 13, and he's gotten a lot of use out of his Lego Mindstorms kit. Lately he's been into pure software, though - he's gotten pretty good at Scratch, and I'm working on getting him to make the transition to Java. Not my favorite language, but it seems to be the best option for the sort of stuff he wants to do.
You beat me to it. This is one of my pet peeves, and it shows up a lot in the crap that tries to pass itself off as science fiction on TV and in the movies. Does the general public really have no idea what a galaxy IS, or how far away other galaxies are, or how MANY stars there are in our own galaxy?
Same thing with time scales. Seems like no one cares too much to keep their millions, billions, and trillions straight. Come on, folks, it'll only take you 30 seconds of research to avoid making your ancient galactic empire a thousand times older than the universe itself.
Maybe writers think that because they don't understand it, no one else does and it doesn't really matter. Maybe I'll start writing sports stories, and attribute everything I don't understand to the infield fly rule, since I don't really understand it. No matter if the story is about football.
This sort of thing actually seems to go back to the 19th century. After the Treaty of Bern in 1874, mail was exchanged with something like settlement free peering agreements. Apparently this worked for a long time, back when people actually wrote to each other and a letter sent in one direction was likely to result in one sent back the other way.
The system broke down when commercial mail and magazines and such started accounting for more of the volume, and some countries were having to receive (and deliver) much more mail than they sent. In 1969 the system was changed, and now there's a much more complicated inter-country billing system in place.
Back when I was a kid, it was those skills that we had to develop to GET the pr0n! When the biggest source was a local BBS with a reasonably vigilant sysop, we had to get creative. It taught me a little about social engineering... like if you registered with a totally unpronounceable foreign name, the sysop would just validate you without a phone call because he didn't want to mispronounce it.
I once saw some old video from one of the Apollo landings where the color wheel on one of the fixed cameras got stuck. Ground control asks one of the astronauts to take a look at it, and he slowly bounces over to it and THWACK - hits it with a gloved hand and gets the color wheel unstuck. If anyone knows where I can find that on the web, let me know... it's one of my favorite Apollo clips.
Not to mention that the ISS is huge and in a fairly low orbit - without periodic boosts, it's not going to be up there long. I think I've heard 18 months, but certainly not more than a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Planes will have navigation strobes on (they blink), though if you're looking right at the landing lights they can be hard to see sometimes. Satellites will be steady, not blinking, and not changing course. You also won't ever see one flying east-to-west. West-to-east and north-south either way, but not east-west.
Come on, do you really think the native Americans would have ever developed casinos on their own?
<ducks>
I'm an employer / capitalist oppressor now, and yes, I look up applicants on the web. Beats having them come in for job interviews if it's obvious they're not what I'm looking for. Frankly, I don't care what sort of stupid stuff someone does on their own time, I'm just interested in what kind of a person they are. And the last person I interviewed had this posted on MySpace:
http://xkcd.com/137/
That was enough to convince me that she would be a good fit here. I interviewed her and she was the first to be offered the job. Granted, her resume alone would probably have been enough to get her an interview (out of about 70 submitted, more than half were total garbage) but her online presence is what got her on the short list.
But fission bombs were just fine?
If I say "There's no danger here because higher energy interactions happen naturally all the time", there's maybe a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong. (Hey, I'm no physicist, right?) So that means my argument is invalidated and can't be considered more than a 1 in 3 chance that the world won't end?
I'm also no statistician, but I don't think that's right.
(But I there's probably at least a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong about that, too.)
Make sure you've got good watertight, light-proof packaging. Pack it with plenty of desiccant packs. Maybe some oxygen absorber packs too. A big heat-sealed moisture barrier bag would be a good start, if you can get one that big.
I'd be a little concerned about the electrolytic capacitors in the computer. There's probably not much you can do if they're going to leak - maybe you could fill the whole thing up with something absorbent that could be vacuumed up later, but I wouldn't count on it.
Also make sure you don't leave any CMOS backup battery installed. If it has to be included, bag it separately.
Keep the capsule temperature controlled. Assume it's going to flood at some point - there was a time capsuled opened here not long ago that was almost totally destroyed by water leakage.
Make sure the local library has paper records on where the capsule is, what's in it, and so forth.
The 'invisibility cloak' thing is right up there with 'teleportation'. Every time someone manages to 'teleport' the state of a single subatomic particle, we get a bunch of articles likening the process to Star Trek teleporters.
Do ANY of the researchers involved in these things really expect them to have invisibility or teleportation capabilities at macro scales someday? I was under the impression that neither of them had any relevance at larger scales, and while I could be wrong, it seems like the media just can't resist this kind of idiotic hyperbole.
A decade ago the Air Force was still using the MMPI. I remember taking it and talking with a pair of Air Force shrinks (one a Lt. Col. and the other a new-looking Captain) about the results. They skipped over the one scale that was clearly outside of the 'normal' range for me, so I asked about it.
"That indicates, uh, non-traditional masculinity. It's not uncommon in, uh, college guys..."
This was at the height of the "don't ask, don't tell" controversy and it was a little funny watching both of them squirm.
That's it... I'm going to go build a portable media player that plays only Amiga MODs and C-64 SID tunes. Should be great for jogging, so long as you don't make any turns - the gyroscopic force of the 30 MB RLL hard drive can cause some problems.
That's right. Less than 15 measly PSI. Fifteen PSI ain't even enough air in your car tire to make it roll very well. And that's all the difference there is between ground and space.
Here's another way to look at that measly 14.7 PSI pressure differential - on a 1-meter diameter circular hatch, that's about 17,890 pounds of force. Or roughly 3.5 Ford F-150's, since this is Slashdot and car analogies are mandatory.
Sighted people can learn this, too. I worked in an office where I had my back to a doorway, and through that door was a room full of servers. No one was ever able to sneak up on me because I could hear their sound shadow as they walked by the servers. It took me a while to figure out how I was aware of them, because it wasn't really a conscious thing at first.
I've thought about a device like this for years. My assumption was always that you'd need some sort of feedback - the image you're thinking about would be displayed in front of you with a controllable amount of persistence, and you'd be able to focus on the parts that aren't right and change them.
I've always wondered if we wouldn't find that talented artists can hold an image with much more detail and complexity than most of us. Certainly some seem to be able to visualize complete works in a fair amount of detail before starting. Not me, though.
What I haven't seen covered yet here is whether the visual cortex at this level even reflects the mind's eye, or if it's just literal 'pixel' data from the eyes. Do imagined images get mapped back down to this concrete a form, or are they more abstract?
osC is insidious. You install it because it's open source and a zillion other sites are using it, so it can't be THAT bad, right? Then you have to install a few contributions to add the basic functions you need - and with each contribution, adding the next gets harder and harder.
But you get up and running. Then you discover all of the little annoying usability quirks - US state names don't use proper abbreviations, customers in Ireland can't place an order without a post code even if you set the minimum length to zero, the payment option selection looks like it has a default selected when it doesn't, users don't know that 'authorize.net' is actually the credit card payment option, and so on.
So you spend hours fixing those. Meanwhile, you've got the database populated with all of your products, and you're using it to track sales figures. Maybe you add some back-end order processing stuff for your own convenience.
Eventually this mass of haphazardly patched spaghetti code becomes an absolute nightmare to do ANYTHING with, but by this point you've spent so many hours working on it that it's easier to just keep slogging away at it than to just abandon the whole thing, install something new, and try to move your catalog and your sales records over to the new system.
And THAT is why there are so many osCommerce sites.
As a former search and rescue team member, I just want to add that if you do call up the rescue team and give coordinates, STOP MOVING! Sit your ass down and wait, don't keep trying to find your car just over the next rise or over there behind those trees.
I'm looking at you, idiot Santa Barbara hikers.
I came in yesterday morning to find the USPS module non-functional. Worse, the only working option was DHL overnight - and in case you've missed the news, DHL is now about an order of magnitude worse than the post office for domestic delivery. Even for places they say they can do next-day delivery to, actual delivery can take more than a week.
Why? Because they hand it off to the post office rather than deliver it themselves. Why it takes the post office a week to deliver it when I can get it there in two days by sending it by priority mail myself is a mystery. In any case, DHL's out of the (US) domestic game entirely next month.
My site was up last time I checked, but if the USPS option goes down again, I think it's time for a 'free economy shipping' promotion. No messy rate tables to deal with!
I'm sure the /. crowd is going to say that this is because my kids have been contaminated by exposure to Windows, but my 9-year old and 12-year old both gave up on the XO1 pretty fast. It frustrates me as well - not quite so much with the latest update, but it's still annoying as heck. The keyboard is worse than the old Mattel Aquarius (marginally better than the Timex Sinclair), the user interface is inconsistent (no standard 'close' button?) and tends to get in the way.
The hardware is impressive in many respects, especially considering the cost. I just think the user experience could be improved significantly. From all of the hype I was expecting something intuitive and simple to use, but it's got a long way to go. I don't think either of my kids have ever managed to shut it down properly.
Yep. I just had to rework by hand more boards than I'd like to think about. The increased temperature required to reflow the solder already had the contract manufacturer's over maxed out for the panel size I was using - with 63/37 Sn/Pb solder it would never have been a problem - and then a stencil problem caused a bunch of bridges. It would have been a simple matter to fix with lead-based solder, but no matter how much flux you slather on it, it still doesn't flow right.
So yes, there are RoHS-compliant solders out there, but people underestimate the impact of throwing away years of experience with established soldering processes. It takes a long time to get really good information on long-term reliability. The new processes are also using a lot more energy, with the increased carbon footprint and so forth that goes with it.
If someone could come up with a RoHS-compliant solder that flowed and wetted like 63/37, with roughly the same melting temperature, I'd be all over it, even if the cost was significantly higher.
I was in China last year and picked up a knock-off Lego set for my daughter. I wound up helping her put it together, and from what I remember the bricks were nearly indistinguishable from Lego. They seem to be ABS as far as I can tell, though I didn't do a flame test or anything. The big flat base pieces were too thin and a little unstable maybe, but the bricks themselves (while being restricted to the variety of styles Lego had maybe 30 years ago) were just fine.
So, Mega Bloks aside, expect to see more of these knock-offs in the very near future if this decision sticks.
This sort of thing has been floated around for a while under the banner of 'syndromic surveilance'. I spent most of the last three years working on a research project that involved gathering data on water quality and developing statistical software to find subtle indications of contamination. The intent was always to extend the approach to syndromic data, incorporating things like over-the-counter medicine sales, ER visits, and so forth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that none of us on the team knew enough about statistics to manage a fantasy football league. I'm now happily self-employed doing stuff absolutely unrelated to statistics. I think some of my hair has grown back, and I hardly even cringe when someone says 'generalized least squares'.
If you're interested, though, here is a paper from the CDC on the subject. I'm pretty sure they have a better idea what they're talking about. Or at any rate, they've got nicer graphics.
I'll second AS&S and Digi-Key both. Digi-Key was founded by a ham radio kit builder (Dr. Stordahl is still active in the hobby, in fact) and even though they're a huge company now, their customer service is still great, even for hobbyists.
The Levitron, by the way, was fun for about 10 minutes. That was 10 minutes after the hour of fiddling with it to make it work, and before I got tired of having to constantly readjust it to KEEP it working.
My own son is almost 13, and he's gotten a lot of use out of his Lego Mindstorms kit. Lately he's been into pure software, though - he's gotten pretty good at Scratch, and I'm working on getting him to make the transition to Java. Not my favorite language, but it seems to be the best option for the sort of stuff he wants to do.
You beat me to it. This is one of my pet peeves, and it shows up a lot in the crap that tries to pass itself off as science fiction on TV and in the movies. Does the general public really have no idea what a galaxy IS, or how far away other galaxies are, or how MANY stars there are in our own galaxy?
Same thing with time scales. Seems like no one cares too much to keep their millions, billions, and trillions straight. Come on, folks, it'll only take you 30 seconds of research to avoid making your ancient galactic empire a thousand times older than the universe itself.
Maybe writers think that because they don't understand it, no one else does and it doesn't really matter. Maybe I'll start writing sports stories, and attribute everything I don't understand to the infield fly rule, since I don't really understand it. No matter if the story is about football.
This sort of thing actually seems to go back to the 19th century. After the Treaty of Bern in 1874, mail was exchanged with something like settlement free peering agreements. Apparently this worked for a long time, back when people actually wrote to each other and a letter sent in one direction was likely to result in one sent back the other way.
The system broke down when commercial mail and magazines and such started accounting for more of the volume, and some countries were having to receive (and deliver) much more mail than they sent. In 1969 the system was changed, and now there's a much more complicated inter-country billing system in place.
Back when I was a kid, it was those skills that we had to develop to GET the pr0n! When the biggest source was a local BBS with a reasonably vigilant sysop, we had to get creative. It taught me a little about social engineering... like if you registered with a totally unpronounceable foreign name, the sysop would just validate you without a phone call because he didn't want to mispronounce it.
I once saw some old video from one of the Apollo landings where the color wheel on one of the fixed cameras got stuck. Ground control asks one of the astronauts to take a look at it, and he slowly bounces over to it and THWACK - hits it with a gloved hand and gets the color wheel unstuck. If anyone knows where I can find that on the web, let me know... it's one of my favorite Apollo clips.
Not to mention that the ISS is huge and in a fairly low orbit - without periodic boosts, it's not going to be up there long. I think I've heard 18 months, but certainly not more than a few years.