It's always been a thorn in my side, that (here in Canada, and no doubt elswhere) tax money pays for government agencies to collect map and aerial photography data (and land records), and do not make it properly accessible to the public.
Go to www.geobase.ca and fill your boots. They have high-resolution elevation maps, road maps, land-usage maps, location identifier databases (town names, river names, etc.), and low-resolution satellite imagery. You can pay $25 (I think) and have some of it shipped to you on CD-Rom.
About 20 years ago some of my friends put together a pseudo-code program that described how to enjoy beer. It included variables (who brought, who paid, who got to take the empties back), subroutines to fill the cooler when the queue hit the low-water mark, and even non-maskable interrupts (when nature calls).
Is Reiser V4 journaled? Is an 'atomic filesystem' the same, or is it better, or just different?
If different, what is the difference?
Journaled: The data is written to a temporary queue and then copied to the main storage. If the system dies while writing to the temporary queue then the main storage is unaffected; if the system dies while writing the queue to main storage then the system will notice when it reboots and will resume writing the queue to main storage.
PRO: Safer than non-journaled since you can never end up with half a buffer written to disk.
CON: Writes everything twice, causing delays. Very bad things could happen if data and associated metadata are in separate transactions and the system crashes between them.
Atomic: The file data is written to unallocated space on the disk. Once that has completed, the directory record is updated by writing a copy of that record to unallocated space. The directory's parent is then updated by writing *it* to a new region of the disk, and so on up the tree. Since each write doesn't take effect until the next has completed, any interruption results in complete reversion.
PRO: Safe. Faster than journaled since there is no double-posting.
CON: More complicated to impliment, I suppose. I would expect it to be slighly slower than journalled method when writing very small changes to existing files as journalled can optimise the writes in the queue whereas atomic has to finish what it started...
HP/UX has shipped with "sam" for a long time, too. That's an administration GUI application that allows a normal user to supply a password and then select tasks from a pre-approved list and execute them with root access.
Anyone care to fill us in on the rate at which the energy received by a surface decreases with distance?
I'm no scientist, but wouldn't the thrust follow the same inverse-square law as radiant light?
To make best use of a solar sail, it would probably make sense to use a conventional rocket to establish a highly eccentric (parabolic) orbit around the sun and then pop the sail open after perihelion where the sail would contribute the most energy to the orbit.
I think aiming the spacecraft (on the outbound journey) would be the hardest part.
What I dont understand is how they intend to protect these massive sails from being shot full of holes by meteorites and space dust as it propels its way through space.
They don't have to. The force imparted by the solar radiation is probably not strong enough to cause any holes to expand on their own. They could further prevent tearing using a cross-hatch "rip-stop" pattern of slightly greater thickness.
The sad thing is that anyone who watched that last 30 seconds of the miniseries already knows who it is.
That may not be fatal. Keeping the audience out of the loop is just one way to tell a story. That path often leads to disappointment as it's difficult to give clues without the risk that half the audience will figure it out too early, spoiling the suspense. Another story arc reveals the bad guy to the audience alone [Silence of the Lambs] so that we feel helpless watching the victim/sleuth wander into a trap we know about and can't mitigate. Those are the stories where people yell "the bad guy's waiting behind the door!" at the movie screen or TV. Another alternative is to expose the bad guy completely [StarWars] (usually with the victim informed of a pending and inescapable conclusion to the conflict), creating an epic story of triumph over evil.
I really don't want [...] some awfully long and complex string of hard-to-remember ASCII codes just because a computer can crack a 32 char password in 10 seconds.
In order to crack a password you need to know the hashing formula and the expected result. If either is unknown then the only way to perform an attack (dictionary or otherwise) is to ask the protected service to validate each attempt. In that case, a simple time delay in the authentication procedure would stop most brute-force attacks. In *nix the hash result was moved from/etc/passwd to/etc/shadow for this reason.
The pilot movie made it clear that the following series will revolve around the question which of the Galactica crew members is actually a cylon, possibly without even knowing about it.
Yes, really. Accidents are not caused by driving fast (excepting "too fast for conditions", which is a different issue entirely), but by speed differences. If you are driving slower than the surrounding traffic then you are causing compression and the need for lane-changing behind you, both of which increase the risk of collision. As my driving instructor once said "the measure of a driver's skill is not how few accidents he's been in, but how few he's caused".
I think the parent's idea of a "niche" porn site would be a "Lolita" site. I can imagine the spam now: "Come to Katie.com to see 13-year-old Katie and her older boyfriend as they...."
A better example would be Air Canada's failed attempt to force the owners of zip.com to give up their domain name when Air Canada introduced the Zip brand of economy airfare as a spin-off of the main-line airline business. It was yet another case of a company choosing a name and advertising it without checking first to see if the web address was available. Air Canada eventually gave up and stopped advertising zip.com (good thing, as the web site was redirecting people to the competition at WestJet) and registered 4321zip.com instead.
So far Katie Jones has been playing fair, referring to the dispute but not disparaging the book. In fact, she actually praises Katie Tarbox for writing it. Given the escalating nature of the attacks by Penguin books, however, it may be time for more drastic action.
Would it be legal for Katie Jones to turn her site into a parody site? She could pretend to be the Katie from the book and "confess" that the whole story is just a hoax, or maybe place a false advertisement describing the book as a "How-To" story written by a 41-year-old man who lured a 13-year-old girl to his hotel room using an online chat site.... Given that Penguin has retained a top-rated constitutional lawyer to defend their misuse of the domain name and have millions of dollars to spend on questionable tactics to get Katie Jones to abandon the domain, I don't think there's any point in keeping the moral high ground in this case.
...if applications would stop forcing themselves on top when they've finally finished loading. Some of the applications I use at work display a splash screen (or an empty window frame) for 30 to 60 seconds while they load their libraries, contact servers, download session data, etc. I often background the splash screen and continue working on other applications that are already running. When the new application is finished initializing, it invariably forces itself to the front, takes the focus, and then complains because it caught me typing in mid-word. Windows should Z-order the application window at the same level as the splash screen it replaced and leave the focus alone until *I* change it.
Pages would take forever to load for me (certain pages, not all), if they used doubleclick ads, simply because the browser was waiting for the final item (the ad) to load.
That's only an effect if you are using a browser that does one-pass rendering (such as MS Internet Explorer) and therefore needs to know the sizes of all embedded content before it starts drawing on the display. If you were using a web browser with a dynamic layout engine (such as FireFox) then the rest of the page would display while you wait for the advertisement to download. The only real down-side of dynamic layout is that your page would redraw itself as each item is loaded -- not usually a problem when content loads from top to bottom as changes usually take place in the off-screen area below where you are reading, but it can really bite you when something near the top of the page is delayed.
I always find it interesting that people will justify space travel by suggesting that it will save our species by providing us with an opportunity to settle another planet/moon. If long-term survival is to be our ultimate goal, then is there really any point to picking a single destination? In particular, why stay within the solar system, where any one plane/moon is just as likely to be hit as the next? Given enough time, it's pretty much inevitable that all colonies would meet similar fates.
The solution to extinction on Earth is not to send out a single life-boat to a chosen destination, but to send out life-boats in every direction and recognize that some will last longer than others. The Soviets knew it ("quantity has a quality of its own") and the plant world exists by virtue of it (launch a million spores, produce a dozen offspring).
Bad Canadian S/F features notwithstanding, the future of the human species may depend more on the journey than in the destination.
Interestingly enough, the "49th Parallel" portion of the Canada/USA border is *NOT* exactly 49N (it's 49d00m07sN). Mind you, the USA 49N confluences are still close enough to the border that you're likely to end up playing 20 questions with the local DEA officer.
Two years ago on a trip to China I visited one of the internet kiosks in a mall in Dalian (near the N.Korea border). I actually wanted to ssh into my home machine and check my email, but discovered that the Great Firewall of China blocks all of the 24/8 network. Most official news sites were also obviously modified. On a whim I hit Slashdot and found it was completely uncensored. I even posted from there, but unfortunately that discussion is long gone from the archives so I can't prove it.
The rates over there are actually not too bad (for a foreigner). I think they wanted 2 Yuen (US $0.35) per 15-minute block. Yes, it was high-speed....
Apparently in some of the larger cities there are uncensored internet cafes. I visited one in Shanghai and they had two rooms -- one for those with foreign passports and one for those who were Chinese or had no passport on hand. If you had a foreign passport they would log your time of entry and exit along with your passport number, presumably so the government could follow up on any leaks.
1355 Americans gave it a "1". 93 gave it a "2". I'm not sure what to think of those numbers. Of course, any accusation of "voting by principle" can also be applied to the other end of the scale.
Of course it can. I would expect biased voters to try and stuff the box on both ends of the scale.
The airspace above FL600 was changed to Class E in 1998. The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with it.
The upper limit of Class E is not "NaN". Class E ends at 100,000m (62 statute miles if you prefer). Above that is "space".
Class E is only controlled airspace where IFR flight is concerned. You don't need an ATC clearance to fly above FL600 if you are operating in accordance with VFR.
Most people assume you can't get to FL600 without passing through Class A. That's only true if you stay within 12 nautical miles of the U.S.A. coastline, as mentioned above. There is some uncontrolled international airspace, or at least there used to be. Of course, you can also get to FL600 via Class F airspace. This would require permission from the agency responsible for that airspace, but wouldn't technically require an IFR clearance.
The article says that he lost attitude control at the end of the burn as the ship was leaving the atmosphere. What else would you expect, considering the primary attitude controls are atmospheric flight surfaces? Once the ailerons, elevators and rudders have no air to push agains you're pretty much stuck with gyros, attitude thrusters or a controllable main engine thrust nozzle. This craft had NONE of those, so It would be completely reasonable to expect it to tumble until the air friction had built up enough for the fins to reorient the aircraft along the motion vector.
I saw a show recently that said they soon may allow cell phones on planes, and they didn't mention anything about interference. It was all about improvements to the system so they would work "properly" while going at high speeds.
It's really not about speed, but signal coverage. The cell system was designed to use the same set of frequencies over and over again by using low-power transmission that limits the signal coverage to a very small area. Cells on different frequencies have overlapping coverage, and when the phone is in a cell it communicates on one frequency while constanly polling the others. When a new frequency has better signal than the current frequency then you "change cells".
There are two reasons why you're not supposed to use a cell phone in flight:
1) At high elevations your phone may be within range of two or more cells operating on the same frequency. Your phone would consume bandwidth on both, or at least interfere with the scheduling of airtime.
2) Airlines charge US$7 per minute for "Airphone" service and like cell phones about as much as a movie theatre likes brought-from-home popcorn.
The new in-flight cell service works by carrying a very low power cell transmitter inside the plane. The passenger's cell phone would always consider it to be the best source, and would scale down the transmitter strength to the minimum required to stay connected. This prevents interference with ground-based cells. Most importantly, it allows the airline to patch the airborne cell through their Airphone system so they still get to charge obscene rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to www.geobase.ca and fill your boots. They have high-resolution elevation maps, road maps, land-usage maps, location identifier databases (town names, river names, etc.), and low-resolution satellite imagery. You can pay $25 (I think) and have some of it shipped to you on CD-Rom.
About 20 years ago some of my friends put together a pseudo-code program that described how to enjoy beer. It included variables (who brought, who paid, who got to take the empties back), subroutines to fill the cooler when the queue hit the low-water mark, and even non-maskable interrupts (when nature calls).
Journaled: The data is written to a temporary queue and then copied to the main storage. If the system dies while writing to the temporary queue then the main storage is unaffected; if the system dies while writing the queue to main storage then the system will notice when it reboots and will resume writing the queue to main storage.
PRO: Safer than non-journaled since you can never end up with half a buffer written to disk.
CON: Writes everything twice, causing delays. Very bad things could happen if data and associated metadata are in separate transactions and the system crashes between them.
Atomic: The file data is written to unallocated space on the disk. Once that has completed, the directory record is updated by writing a copy of that record to unallocated space. The directory's parent is then updated by writing *it* to a new region of the disk, and so on up the tree. Since each write doesn't take effect until the next has completed, any interruption results in complete reversion.
PRO: Safe. Faster than journaled since there is no double-posting.
CON: More complicated to impliment, I suppose. I would expect it to be slighly slower than journalled method when writing very small changes to existing files as journalled can optimise the writes in the queue whereas atomic has to finish what it started...
HP/UX has shipped with "sam" for a long time, too. That's an administration GUI application that allows a normal user to supply a password and then select tasks from a pre-approved list and execute them with root access.
I'm no scientist, but wouldn't the thrust follow the same inverse-square law as radiant light?
To make best use of a solar sail, it would probably make sense to use a conventional rocket to establish a highly eccentric (parabolic) orbit around the sun and then pop the sail open after perihelion where the sail would contribute the most energy to the orbit.
I think aiming the spacecraft (on the outbound journey) would be the hardest part.
They don't have to. The force imparted by the solar radiation is probably not strong enough to cause any holes to expand on their own. They could further prevent tearing using a cross-hatch "rip-stop" pattern of slightly greater thickness.
That may not be fatal. Keeping the audience out of the loop is just one way to tell a story. That path often leads to disappointment as it's difficult to give clues without the risk that half the audience will figure it out too early, spoiling the suspense. Another story arc reveals the bad guy to the audience alone [Silence of the Lambs] so that we feel helpless watching the victim/sleuth wander into a trap we know about and can't mitigate. Those are the stories where people yell "the bad guy's waiting behind the door!" at the movie screen or TV. Another alternative is to expose the bad guy completely [StarWars] (usually with the victim informed of a pending and inescapable conclusion to the conflict), creating an epic story of triumph over evil.
In order to crack a password you need to know the hashing formula and the expected result. If either is unknown then the only way to perform an attack (dictionary or otherwise) is to ask the protected service to validate each attempt. In that case, a simple time delay in the authentication procedure would stop most brute-force attacks. In *nix the hash result was moved from /etc/passwd to /etc/shadow for this reason.
That would be Rick Deckard, right?
Yes, really. Accidents are not caused by driving fast (excepting "too fast for conditions", which is a different issue entirely), but by speed differences. If you are driving slower than the surrounding traffic then you are causing compression and the need for lane-changing behind you, both of which increase the risk of collision. As my driving instructor once said "the measure of a driver's skill is not how few accidents he's been in, but how few he's caused".
I think the parent's idea of a "niche" porn site would be a "Lolita" site. I can imagine the spam now: "Come to Katie.com to see 13-year-old Katie and her older boyfriend as they...."
A better example would be Air Canada's failed attempt to force the owners of zip.com to give up their domain name when Air Canada introduced the Zip brand of economy airfare as a spin-off of the main-line airline business. It was yet another case of a company choosing a name and advertising it without checking first to see if the web address was available. Air Canada eventually gave up and stopped advertising zip.com (good thing, as the web site was redirecting people to the competition at WestJet) and registered 4321zip.com instead.
Would it be legal for Katie Jones to turn her site into a parody site? She could pretend to be the Katie from the book and "confess" that the whole story is just a hoax, or maybe place a false advertisement describing the book as a "How-To" story written by a 41-year-old man who lured a 13-year-old girl to his hotel room using an online chat site.... Given that Penguin has retained a top-rated constitutional lawyer to defend their misuse of the domain name and have millions of dollars to spend on questionable tactics to get Katie Jones to abandon the domain, I don't think there's any point in keeping the moral high ground in this case.
...if applications would stop forcing themselves on top when they've finally finished loading. Some of the applications I use at work display a splash screen (or an empty window frame) for 30 to 60 seconds while they load their libraries, contact servers, download session data, etc. I often background the splash screen and continue working on other applications that are already running. When the new application is finished initializing, it invariably forces itself to the front, takes the focus, and then complains because it caught me typing in mid-word. Windows should Z-order the application window at the same level as the splash screen it replaced and leave the focus alone until *I* change it.
That's only an effect if you are using a browser that does one-pass rendering (such as MS Internet Explorer) and therefore needs to know the sizes of all embedded content before it starts drawing on the display. If you were using a web browser with a dynamic layout engine (such as FireFox) then the rest of the page would display while you wait for the advertisement to download. The only real down-side of dynamic layout is that your page would redraw itself as each item is loaded -- not usually a problem when content loads from top to bottom as changes usually take place in the off-screen area below where you are reading, but it can really bite you when something near the top of the page is delayed.
The solution to extinction on Earth is not to send out a single life-boat to a chosen destination, but to send out life-boats in every direction and recognize that some will last longer than others. The Soviets knew it ("quantity has a quality of its own") and the plant world exists by virtue of it (launch a million spores, produce a dozen offspring).
Bad Canadian S/F features notwithstanding, the future of the human species may depend more on the journey than in the destination.
Interestingly enough, the "49th Parallel" portion of the Canada/USA border is *NOT* exactly 49N (it's 49d00m07sN). Mind you, the USA 49N confluences are still close enough to the border that you're likely to end up playing 20 questions with the local DEA officer.
Two years ago on a trip to China I visited one of the internet kiosks in a mall in Dalian (near the N.Korea border). I actually wanted to ssh into my home machine and check my email, but discovered that the Great Firewall of China blocks all of the 24/8 network. Most official news sites were also obviously modified. On a whim I hit Slashdot and found it was completely uncensored. I even posted from there, but unfortunately that discussion is long gone from the archives so I can't prove it.
The rates over there are actually not too bad (for a foreigner). I think they wanted 2 Yuen (US $0.35) per 15-minute block. Yes, it was high-speed....
Apparently in some of the larger cities there are uncensored internet cafes. I visited one in Shanghai and they had two rooms -- one for those with foreign passports and one for those who were Chinese or had no passport on hand. If you had a foreign passport they would log your time of entry and exit along with your passport number, presumably so the government could follow up on any leaks.
Of course it can. I would expect biased voters to try and stuff the box on both ends of the scale.
That's why IMDB's final score is a "weighted average".
... that it would be posted by someone named Timothy.
A few nits:
The airspace above FL600 was changed to Class E in 1998. The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with it.
The upper limit of Class E is not "NaN". Class E ends at 100,000m (62 statute miles if you prefer). Above that is "space".
Class E is only controlled airspace where IFR flight is concerned. You don't need an ATC clearance to fly above FL600 if you are operating in accordance with VFR.
Most people assume you can't get to FL600 without passing through Class A. That's only true if you stay within 12 nautical miles of the U.S.A. coastline, as mentioned above. There is some uncontrolled international airspace, or at least there used to be. Of course, you can also get to FL600 via Class F airspace. This would require permission from the agency responsible for that airspace, but wouldn't technically require an IFR clearance.
The article says that he lost attitude control at the end of the burn as the ship was leaving the atmosphere. What else would you expect, considering the primary attitude controls are atmospheric flight surfaces? Once the ailerons, elevators and rudders have no air to push agains you're pretty much stuck with gyros, attitude thrusters or a controllable main engine thrust nozzle. This craft had NONE of those, so It would be completely reasonable to expect it to tumble until the air friction had built up enough for the fins to reorient the aircraft along the motion vector.
Mike Melville is the ONLY member of the team who doesn't have to prepare two speeches....
It's really not about speed, but signal coverage. The cell system was designed to use the same set of frequencies over and over again by using low-power transmission that limits the signal coverage to a very small area. Cells on different frequencies have overlapping coverage, and when the phone is in a cell it communicates on one frequency while constanly polling the others. When a new frequency has better signal than the current frequency then you "change cells".
There are two reasons why you're not supposed to use a cell phone in flight:
1) At high elevations your phone may be within range of two or more cells operating on the same frequency. Your phone would consume bandwidth on both, or at least interfere with the scheduling of airtime.
2) Airlines charge US$7 per minute for "Airphone" service and like cell phones about as much as a movie theatre likes brought-from-home popcorn.
The new in-flight cell service works by carrying a very low power cell transmitter inside the plane. The passenger's cell phone would always consider it to be the best source, and would scale down the transmitter strength to the minimum required to stay connected. This prevents interference with ground-based cells. Most importantly, it allows the airline to patch the airborne cell through their Airphone system so they still get to charge obscene rates.
Why would I want to tip my server when I have a broadband connection?