Is it just me, or does the photo not actually match the description given?
the Sun illuminates the surface from the upper right
I know I'm nitpicking here, but as far as I can tell, it looks like the illumination is just from the right.
In the center is a large area that must be higher than the rest of the crater floor because it has not been covered by the dark lavas
If the illumination is from the right, then looking at the edge of the 'large area in the center', it seems that perhaps this is below the level of the surrounding darker zone. To my untrained eye, it seems to appear as if the center is a yellowish hued liquid (they did say the red had significant IR in it) with a darker yellow (and occasionally greenish) skin on it, and that liquid and skin is flowing to, and out a space in the middle of the straight side to the bottom left of the picture.
The red areas almost seem to be a reddish mist that rises somewhere near the top of the central area, and drifts toward the bottom right.
I know that the top of the cliffs at the bottom of the picture are a similar red, and that solid sulphur does not float on top of liquid sulphur, but no matter how I rotate the image, I simply cannot seem to get my eyes to convince my brain that the central area is higher. Does it seem that way to anyone else?
Quad issue (executing 4 instructions simultaneously) wouldn't be possible without the ability to fetch all those instructions in one go
True, but this does not require a the machine to be either a 64 bit processor or have a 64 bit address space. The size of the bus is independent of either the size of the address space or the length of the instruction word.
Despite being only a 32 bit architecture, the original Pentium chips implemented a 64 bit bus (requiring two 32 bit simms in parallel for memory), while the 8088 was a 16 bit machine with a 20 bit address space running on an 8 bit bus.
True, I was comparing apples to oranges here - but there are some similarities.
With adaptive optics, unless the atmosphere is completely predictable, there is going to be a lag between observing the distortion and correcting the distortion that limits the perfection of the result.
Similarly, with the HST mirror - the corrective lens corrects for the systematic error in the manufacture of the mirror, but does nothing for the residual (local) errors in the original mirror, and indeed, any residual errors in it's own manufacture will be added to them.
The diffraction limit can only be approached when the accuracy of the entire system is perfectly consistent to a fraction of a wavelength - that Paranal is even that close to the resolution of the smaller HST is a tribute to how well the adaptive optics are implemented.
On the other hand, the Hubble - assuming a correctly made mirror - does not have to deal with either atmospheric distortion or gravity/motion compensation, and theoretically would only be limited by the diffraction limit.
I suspect that, once the Paranal telescopes are indeed linked, or the adaptive optics are better tuned, that Paranal may eventually be better than the Hubble at times, especially when it comes to resolving faint objects. (It should gather about 80 times the light that the Hubble can.)
But the HST certainly sets a high standard to be reached.
It's interesting to note that the Paranal telescope modifies the mirror to correct for an imperfect lens (the atmosphere), while the Hubble has a corrective lens (installed in orbit) in it's system to correct for a manufacturing error in the mirror.
It makes me wonder if the Hubble would have been significantly better than Paranal if the mirror had been made correctly in the first place.
I've seen all sorts of comments about this 'Magic lantern' being a virus - but really, it's just a covert keylogger - once installed, it doesn't spread. The trick is, since Carnivore is capturing all your emails anyway, they know what 'user agent' and OS you're running, making it much trivial to select a wrapper e-mail to take advantage of a 'known vulnerability' for your system. The known vulnerability might even be using a Microsoft certificate (or the windows NSA key?:-/ ) to sign an attachement for an auto install?
Of course, a more likely use of the 'Magic Lantern' is to provide plausible deniability when they covertly break in to plant the keylogger software.
All we don't need is more distributions of the same thing. On the otherhand, expertise in making an already good distribution do exactly what a client wants should be a valuable commodity.
For that matter, having proprietary tools (NOT part of any distribution) to help you manage a customers system could be quite useful - the tools don't have to be applicable to any possible configuration the way most distribution supplied tools do.
Nowhere should open source insist that companies be non-profit.
Unfortunately,( RSFQ (Rapid Single Flux Quantum) circuitry is beyond the scope of SPICE simulations, but this appears to me to be a natural fit to the trinary logic paradigm.
Some circuits have already been physically built and tested - and at least one person feels that they lend themselves to tristate logic gates .
The basic principles are already in the category of proven technology - ever heard of a SQUID sensor?
Josephson junctions work equally well for either positive or negative currents - and so do magnetic flux quanta. (But this circuitry has to be the ultimate in low-power computing - you can't get much lower discrete amounts of energy than a single quantum of magnetic flux.)
Sorry, I skipped some mental steps in my comment. I looked at their inverter circuit, came to the conclusion that as a 3 level voltage inverter it was seriously lacking (saturated emitter follower??) and looked at the output stages of their other gates to come up with that comment.
(Circuit tricks that depend on transistor gain, but NOT equal gains, to set the switching thresholds and approximate a connection to ground are not, IMO, useable as a real circuit, even though a 'simulator' will work fine.)
The best I could come up with out of their circuits was 'rotate down' - voltage switched positive and negative output, and although it's theoretically a complementary emitter follower, zero is open (to a resistor) zero output - add a saturating transistor between the output bases, and you've got a tristate. But you are correct, this is not the inverter that I was looking at.
Meanwhile, the link I suggested is still applicable for naturally tristate circuitry - josephson junctions and magnetic flux work equally well for switching between positive, negative, and zero with no additional components.
I dissected their inverter circuit in a different post -- in short, it won't work for the intermediate level, and in fact closely resembles a primitive ancestor of TTL binary.
Their inverter seems more related to current tristate outputs (i.e. zero, one, off) than trinary, but you might want to check the RSFQ tristate logic. Seems the links for more info are down at the moment, though.
The big disadvantage of using any logic system with more than two states, electrically, is that sometimes in switching from one state to another you must go through a third state which is electrically "valid" but not the correct output for the function you're implementing.
True, but that's what clocks or asynchronous handshakes are for - because even with only two levels, there's a lot of 'Wrong' state in between.
Admittedly, it might not be possible to define a 'gray code' signalling scheme using trinary digits, but a trinary clock signal ( -1, 0, +1, 0, -1) etc, could have definite benefits - quad speed data rate, data in trits would be effectively a 6X interface...
Electrically, implementation is inevitably binary, at its core... electrical comparisons of boundary conditions. "Trinary" is just a minimal case of "analog", with all of the same disadvantages.
Say what?? Where'd this come from? Binary itself is still a minimal case of analog - just with a single breakpoint instead of two with trinary.
You want the same noise margins? You'll have to double your voltage. That means you're cutting your speed in half. So overall you're taking a loss because at half speed you could have gotten two whole bits for your money instead of one lousey trit.
This depends very much on the implementation, but it is NOT necessarily cutting the speed in half. Assuming that the circuit has normal RC timeconstants, double the swing is NOT double the lag. (It's about 1.4 times the lag) This might not be significant in clocked ciruits, and at worst, the loss is about equal to the gain achieved by trits over bits.
Not to mention the fact that you're using more power, switching between these trinary states due to the longer transition and detection times.
Here you may be partly correct.
Assuming that there is a separate power supply connection for each signal state, the leakage in the drive transistors is probably going to be about double that of a normal binary output. The active power using a positive-zero-negative type signalling scheme should work out similar, since the voltage relative to ground won't be increased. The dynamic power would probably be comparable despite the larger swing since only 1/3 of the transitions involve the full possible swing while carrying 50% more information. And as I noted in the previous point, the transition (and detection) times are also comparable on a 'amount of data transferred' basis.
Oh boy! Hotter chips! Bleah!
All things considered, it looks like the heat to computing power ratio is going to similar for both. But if there truly are algorithms or applications that are more easily rendered using trits (and there may well be so) then the advantage for them may go to the trinary logic.
There may also be some uses for trinary base computing where the storage of additional logic states is NOT an overhead. Quantum flux gates - which unfortunately can't amplify or fan out yet - can store digits as fluz quanta - gates can be designed such that there is no overhead to such a device holding 2 quanta instead of one - and these chips will definitely NOT run hot. (Of course, cooling to superconducting temperatures may have its own problems.... for those interested, this is a link to the RSFQ lab pages, and a link to an item on superconducting trinary circuits. 100+GHz on 3.5um technology.)
What is the difference between a cancer cell and a "normal" cell? Why would radiation therapy tend to kill cancer cells faster than normal cells?
The quick answer - it doesn't. Enough of the radiation used will kill ANY cell, with no preferences.
Conventional radiation therapy involves sending radiation from multiple directions (not necessarilly at the same time), such that the cancerous tissue is at the focus and gets the most radiation, while normal tissue around the cancer isn't in every beam, and is more likely to survive.
This new method uses antibodies that will (hopefully) attach only to the cancerous cells as part of the carrier. Because 75% of the radiation only occurs _after_ the first decay of the actinium, and because the alpha radiation from the actinium does NOT propagate very far through tissue, then almost all of the radiation is concentrated on the cancerous tissue.
This means that there is not the annoying second or two type latencies involved in connections via satellite, but rather, is just as fast as a cable modem connection.
Unfortunately (similarly to shared cable and satellite connections) the available bandwidth is shared by all of the users connected through the access point - and when a single wireless access point serves an entire city and surrounding area......
And thanks for the note that they plan to make it available again - but they'll probably need more local station towers before I'll consider it again.
I rather thought that some technology might be able to. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to get here - 95% of the telco's potential profits live within 4KM of the Bell switches/COs anyway.
Bell Canada's DSL is $40 Canadian plus sales taxes is closer to $50 CDN, still a bargain compared to what many people are paying in the USA.
And yeah, I'm not in a city. No cable here, either.
Dunno what 'Look' service you are referring to, but around the Raglan area (North of Oshawa) they had high-speed terrestrial wireless internet, not satellite, that was comparable in speed to a cable connection. And they did file for bankruptcy protection - they just didn't discontinue the TV part of the business 'cos it was profitable. (For all I know, they may offer the internet service again, but I don't trust them at the moment.)
If somebody actually provided DSL in my area, then I would be interested in getting it. But I'm in the Canadian Bell monopoly area - and too far from the Bell switch to get DSL, at least according to their specs - 12 Km is a little to far for a unit specced as 4 Km - but I do wonder if the lines were open to competitors whether somebody elses equipment could work at that distance. Meanwhile, the only wireless network provider (for high-speed links) in my area filed for bankruptcy last year.
But the other side of the coin here is cost. Commercial DSL connections are several hundred $CDN a month - home DSL is about $CDN50, and may be why the wireless provider went under.
Just because one battle (access information) has been lost by The Phone Companys, this doesn't mean that the general DSL landscape is anywhere near changing yet.
For that matter, you also need to be able to prevent IT from automatically installing 'upgrades' to the software.
A few years ago, we had what we thought was a rigorously controlled machine that had the minimum revision levels of the O/S that our applications were supposed to work with. This machine was used for testing and for building the final distribution of the application.
A few days before building a production version of the app, IT used their domain adminstration ability to add a simple 'run once' item to the machine to do a simple service pack installation. Unfortunately, this was not noticed in time, and when we logged in to do the shipping build - Did you know that some Microsoft build environments automatically make the application require that the target machine have at least the same or later version of all DLLs and COM components as the build machine?
So we shipped the app suite to the beta customer sites, the installation runs fine, but the apps all complain about missing DLLs and components.
Of course, the IT domain adminstrators no longer have administration privileges on the development area boxes - and now we have our own development domain. Central administration (from outside the department) and a properly controled development environment both require absolute control over machine configurations - but the development department needs multiple configurations. The two versions of control are incompatible. And that's just for test and build machines.
Even if you are developing in Java, you might not get the same results from two different JVM versions (if it's Microsoft JVMs you will, anyway).
Final answer? Let IT control machines that are used for IT functions, and let developers control machines used for development functions.
Yes, it is. But at least this is in the 'add-on' category, rather than being an 'integrated' feature.
Just so long as it isn't so integrated that an 'invitation to a meeting' that gets automatically added to your calendar will run an accompanying script in the process.
I'd really hate it if this 'Look-Out' work-alike managed to provide work-alike functionality for malware.
I agree that the basic Altavista page has an incurable case of portalitus (or even portal-heavy-us). But they did maintain a good interface - it's just much harder to find. You used to be able to just append '?text=yes' to an Altavista URL to get a text only page, but now the advanced text search is hidden at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/sites/search/textadv.
But even this doesn't address the problem of their index being out of date (and recently, extremely incomplete).
But it was rejected back when the cost of the mechanism was far higher that of the media alone. This suggestion is that the 'Media' IS the mechanism.
When the cost of a TB of storage on IDE hard drives is lower than the cost of a TB of tape media (at least when you include the amortized cost of the tape drive - though it's becoming true without that nowadays) then "if your drive stops spinning, but your data is fine" winds up in the same category as any other tape failure.
And I've yet to see a tape drive mechanism failure that didn't manage to corrupt (or even destroy) a tape.
And in my experience, bad tapes are even more likely than failed hard drives.
"You have no privacy. Get over it." -- Scott McNealy
I already presume that everything I send over the internet is monitored somewhere - as should we all. The difference here is really that anyone monitoring the internet now has to pay for and provide their own equipment.
The nasty part of this non-legislation (it's not passed by the German Federal Assembly) is that it puts the cost of the monitoring equipment onto the ISPs and providers - can you imagine trying to modify your backbone equipment so that all packets to or from a single IP address are copied to a log?
And they have the stated intention of "the surveillance of the complete Internet" - I simply cannot imagine the cost to an ISP of even starting to attempt to record the contents of every single packet that passes through their routers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet that the patch will be available by the spring.
(Note - I'm specifying neither the hemisphere nor the year.)
The red areas almost seem to be a reddish mist that rises somewhere near the top of the central area, and drifts toward the bottom right.
I know that the top of the cliffs at the bottom of the picture are a similar red, and that solid sulphur does not float on top of liquid sulphur, but no matter how I rotate the image, I simply cannot seem to get my eyes to convince my brain that the central area is higher. Does it seem that way to anyone else?
Didn't the Patriot act take care of that? As I understood it, they defined hacking as terrorism, so this was part of their war on terrorism.
Quad issue (executing 4 instructions simultaneously) wouldn't be possible without the ability to fetch all those instructions in one go
True, but this does not require a the machine to be either a 64 bit processor or have a 64 bit address space. The size of the bus is independent of either the size of the address space or the length of the instruction word.
Despite being only a 32 bit architecture, the original Pentium chips implemented a 64 bit bus (requiring two 32 bit simms in parallel for memory), while the 8088 was a 16 bit machine with a 20 bit address space running on an 8 bit bus.
True, I was comparing apples to oranges here - but there are some similarities.
With adaptive optics, unless the atmosphere is completely predictable, there is going to be a lag between observing the distortion and correcting the distortion that limits the perfection of the result.
Similarly, with the HST mirror - the corrective lens corrects for the systematic error in the manufacture of the mirror, but does nothing for the residual (local) errors in the original mirror, and indeed, any residual errors in it's own manufacture will be added to them.
The diffraction limit can only be approached when the accuracy of the entire system is perfectly consistent to a fraction of a wavelength - that Paranal is even that close to the resolution of the smaller HST is a tribute to how well the adaptive optics are implemented.
On the other hand, the Hubble - assuming a correctly made mirror - does not have to deal with either atmospheric distortion or gravity/motion compensation, and theoretically would only be limited by the diffraction limit.
I suspect that, once the Paranal telescopes are indeed linked, or the adaptive optics are better tuned, that Paranal may eventually be better than the Hubble at times, especially when it comes to resolving faint objects. (It should gather about 80 times the light that the Hubble can.)
But the HST certainly sets a high standard to be reached.
It's interesting to note that the Paranal telescope modifies the mirror to correct for an imperfect lens (the atmosphere), while the Hubble has a corrective lens (installed in orbit) in it's system to correct for a manufacturing error in the mirror.
It makes me wonder if the Hubble would have been significantly better than Paranal if the mirror had been made correctly in the first place.
I've seen all sorts of comments about this 'Magic lantern' being a virus - but really, it's just a covert keylogger - once installed, it doesn't spread. The trick is, since Carnivore is capturing all your emails anyway, they know what 'user agent' and OS you're running, making it much trivial to select a wrapper e-mail to take advantage of a 'known vulnerability' for your system. The known vulnerability might even be using a Microsoft certificate (or the windows NSA key? :-/ ) to sign an attachement for an auto install?
Of course, a more likely use of the 'Magic Lantern' is to provide plausible deniability when they covertly break in to plant the keylogger software.
If you think that a computer problem can give you a headache now, just wait until your new Thinktronic crashes...
All we don't need is more distributions of the same thing. On the otherhand, expertise in making an already good distribution do exactly what a client wants should be a valuable commodity.
For that matter, having proprietary tools (NOT part of any distribution) to help you manage a customers system could be quite useful - the tools don't have to be applicable to any possible configuration the way most distribution supplied tools do.
Nowhere should open source insist that companies be non-profit.
Unfortunately,( RSFQ (Rapid Single Flux Quantum) circuitry is beyond the scope of SPICE simulations, but this appears to me to be a natural fit to the trinary logic paradigm.
Some circuits have already been physically built and tested - and at least one person feels that they lend themselves to tristate logic gates .
The basic principles are already in the category of proven technology - ever heard of a SQUID sensor?
Josephson junctions work equally well for either positive or negative currents - and so do magnetic flux quanta. (But this circuitry has to be the ultimate in low-power computing - you can't get much lower discrete amounts of energy than a single quantum of magnetic flux.)
Sorry, I skipped some mental steps in my comment. I looked at their inverter circuit, came to the conclusion that as a 3 level voltage inverter it was seriously lacking (saturated emitter follower??) and looked at the output stages of their other gates to come up with that comment.
(Circuit tricks that depend on transistor gain, but NOT equal gains, to set the switching thresholds and approximate a connection to ground are not, IMO, useable as a real circuit, even though a 'simulator' will work fine.)
The best I could come up with out of their circuits was 'rotate down' - voltage switched positive and negative output, and although it's theoretically a complementary emitter follower, zero is open (to a resistor) zero output - add a saturating transistor between the output bases, and you've got a tristate. But you are correct, this is not the inverter that I was looking at.
Meanwhile, the link I suggested is still applicable for naturally tristate circuitry - josephson junctions and magnetic flux work equally well for switching between positive, negative, and zero with no additional components.
I dissected their inverter circuit in a different post -- in short, it won't work for the intermediate level, and in fact closely resembles a primitive ancestor of TTL binary.
Their inverter seems more related to current tristate outputs (i.e. zero, one, off) than trinary, but you might want to check the RSFQ tristate logic. Seems the links for more info are down at the moment, though.
The big disadvantage of using any logic system with more than two states, electrically, is that sometimes in switching from one state to another you must go through a third state which is electrically "valid" but not the correct output for the function you're implementing.
True, but that's what clocks or asynchronous handshakes are for - because even with only two levels, there's a lot of 'Wrong' state in between.
Admittedly, it might not be possible to define a 'gray code' signalling scheme using trinary digits, but a trinary clock signal ( -1, 0, +1, 0, -1) etc, could have definite benefits - quad speed data rate, data in trits would be effectively a 6X interface...
Electrically, implementation is inevitably binary, at its core... electrical comparisons of boundary conditions. "Trinary" is just a minimal case of "analog", with all of the same disadvantages.
Say what?? Where'd this come from? Binary itself is still a minimal case of analog - just with a single breakpoint instead of two with trinary.
You want the same noise margins? You'll have to double your voltage. That means you're cutting your speed in half. So overall you're taking a loss because at half speed you could have gotten two whole bits for your money instead of one lousey trit.
This depends very much on the implementation, but it is NOT necessarily cutting the speed in half. Assuming that the circuit has normal RC timeconstants, double the swing is NOT double the lag. (It's about 1.4 times the lag) This might not be significant in clocked ciruits, and at worst, the loss is about equal to the gain achieved by trits over bits.
Not to mention the fact that you're using more power, switching between these trinary states due to the longer transition and detection times.
Here you may be partly correct.
Assuming that there is a separate power supply connection for each signal state, the leakage in the drive transistors is probably going to be about double that of a normal binary output. The active power using a positive-zero-negative type signalling scheme should work out similar, since the voltage relative to ground won't be increased. The dynamic power would probably be comparable despite the larger swing since only 1/3 of the transitions involve the full possible swing while carrying 50% more information. And as I noted in the previous point, the transition (and detection) times are also comparable on a 'amount of data transferred' basis.
Oh boy! Hotter chips! Bleah!
All things considered, it looks like the heat to computing power ratio is going to similar for both. But if there truly are algorithms or applications that are more easily rendered using trits (and there may well be so) then the advantage for them may go to the trinary logic.
There may also be some uses for trinary base computing where the storage of additional logic states is NOT an overhead. Quantum flux gates - which unfortunately can't amplify or fan out yet - can store digits as fluz quanta - gates can be designed such that there is no overhead to such a device holding 2 quanta instead of one - and these chips will definitely NOT run hot. (Of course, cooling to superconducting temperatures may have its own problems.... for those interested, this is a link to the RSFQ lab pages, and a link to an item on superconducting trinary circuits. 100+GHz on 3.5um technology.)
well-formed link to gatt.org [\\gatt.org]
:)
Proof that slashcode was not written by Windows users
Conventional radiation therapy involves sending radiation from multiple directions (not necessarilly at the same time), such that the cancerous tissue is at the focus and gets the most radiation, while normal tissue around the cancer isn't in every beam, and is more likely to survive.
This new method uses antibodies that will (hopefully) attach only to the cancerous cells as part of the carrier. Because 75% of the radiation only occurs _after_ the first decay of the actinium, and because the alpha radiation from the actinium does NOT propagate very far through tissue, then almost all of the radiation is concentrated on the cancerous tissue.
As an aside, a similar article is at NewScientist.com
like most people I talk faster then I type
:)
The usual problem isn't talking faster than you type, it's talking faster than you think
Hmmm, maybe I can type faster than I think, too....
Yep, Look is the bunch - but their an experimental satellite broadband service that you refer to is actually a purely terrestrial radio link.
This means that there is not the annoying second or two type latencies involved in connections via satellite, but rather, is just as fast as a cable modem connection.
Unfortunately (similarly to shared cable and satellite connections) the available bandwidth is shared by all of the users connected through the access point - and when a single wireless access point serves an entire city and surrounding area......
And thanks for the note that they plan to make it available again - but they'll probably need more local station towers before I'll consider it again.
SHDSL would be able to reach your house.
I rather thought that some technology might be able to. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to get here - 95% of the telco's potential profits live within 4KM of the Bell switches/COs anyway.
Bell Canada's DSL is $40 Canadian plus sales taxes is closer to $50 CDN, still a bargain compared to what many people are paying in the USA.
And yeah, I'm not in a city. No cable here, either.
Dunno what 'Look' service you are referring to, but around the Raglan area (North of Oshawa) they had high-speed terrestrial wireless internet, not satellite, that was comparable in speed to a cable connection. And they did file for bankruptcy protection - they just didn't discontinue the TV part of the business 'cos it was profitable. (For all I know, they may offer the internet service again, but I don't trust them at the moment.)
If somebody actually provided DSL in my area, then I would be interested in getting it. But I'm in the Canadian Bell monopoly area - and too far from the Bell switch to get DSL, at least according to their specs - 12 Km is a little to far for a unit specced as 4 Km - but I do wonder if the lines were open to competitors whether somebody elses equipment could work at that distance. Meanwhile, the only wireless network provider (for high-speed links) in my area filed for bankruptcy last year.
But the other side of the coin here is cost. Commercial DSL connections are several hundred $CDN a month - home DSL is about $CDN50, and may be why the wireless provider went under.
Just because one battle (access information) has been lost by The Phone Companys, this doesn't mean that the general DSL landscape is anywhere near changing yet.
For that matter, you also need to be able to prevent IT from automatically installing 'upgrades' to the software.
A few years ago, we had what we thought was a rigorously controlled machine that had the minimum revision levels of the O/S that our applications were supposed to work with. This machine was used for testing and for building the final distribution of the application.
A few days before building a production version of the app, IT used their domain adminstration ability to add a simple 'run once' item to the machine to do a simple service pack installation. Unfortunately, this was not noticed in time, and when we logged in to do the shipping build - Did you know that some Microsoft build environments automatically make the application require that the target machine have at least the same or later version of all DLLs and COM components as the build machine?
So we shipped the app suite to the beta customer sites, the installation runs fine, but the apps all complain about missing DLLs and components.
Of course, the IT domain adminstrators no longer have administration privileges on the development area boxes - and now we have our own development domain. Central administration (from outside the department) and a properly controled development environment both require absolute control over machine configurations - but the development department needs multiple configurations. The two versions of control are incompatible. And that's just for test and build machines.
Even if you are developing in Java, you might not get the same results from two different JVM versions (if it's Microsoft JVMs you will, anyway).
Final answer? Let IT control machines that are used for IT functions, and let developers control machines used for development functions.
Yes, it is. But at least this is in the 'add-on' category, rather than being an 'integrated' feature.
Just so long as it isn't so integrated that an 'invitation to a meeting' that gets automatically added to your calendar will run an accompanying script in the process.
I'd really hate it if this 'Look-Out' work-alike managed to provide work-alike functionality for malware.
I agree that the basic Altavista page has an incurable case of portalitus (or even portal-heavy-us). But they did maintain a good interface - it's just much harder to find. You used to be able to just append '?text=yes' to an Altavista URL to get a text only page, but now the advanced text search is hidden at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/sites/search /textadv.
But even this doesn't address the problem of their index being out of date (and recently, extremely incomplete).
When the cost of a TB of storage on IDE hard drives is lower than the cost of a TB of tape media (at least when you include the amortized cost of the tape drive - though it's becoming true without that nowadays) then "if your drive stops spinning, but your data is fine" winds up in the same category as any other tape failure.
And I've yet to see a tape drive mechanism failure that didn't manage to corrupt (or even destroy) a tape.
And in my experience, bad tapes are even more likely than failed hard drives.
The nasty part of this non-legislation (it's not passed by the German Federal Assembly) is that it puts the cost of the monitoring equipment onto the ISPs and providers - can you imagine trying to modify your backbone equipment so that all packets to or from a single IP address are copied to a log?
And they have the stated intention of "the surveillance of the complete Internet" - I simply cannot imagine the cost to an ISP of even starting to attempt to record the contents of every single packet that passes through their routers.