Yeah, I've heard some real horror stories. (Then there's what it does to the equipment: the airflow is such that the avionics tend to protect the filters from dust...)
After Challenger they may have gone back to the zip-lock baggies they used in the Apollo days, I'm not certain.
Heck, sounds like my bedroom as a teenager, between my chemistry set and rock collection (as in minerals, not music). The former finally got exiled to the basement -- where I also set up a microbiology lab.
I once worked for a company that had a data center in the basement of a shopping mall, and we had several other basement offices. There was some remodelling going on, so I had to put up with the occasional pounding of a sledghammer on cinder block walls. So far, no big deal.
One day after most people had left, I was working at my terminal when the sledgehammer pounding was particularly loud. I mean REALLY loud, my desk was shaking. Suddenly, accompanied by flying chips of brick and concrete dust, the head of a sledgehammer came crashing through the wall in front of me. Seems they're supposed to take out that wall, too.
I still needed to finish up what I was working on, so I dragged my desk back a few yards, threw up some plastic sheeting to keep dust out of the monitor, and kept on programming while workmen destroyed the concrete block wall in front of me, putting up with the occasional shower of rock chips and dust.
At most, you get a punctuation flame. Inserting extra punctuation to make it clear:
Do you think the reason that cars are broken into more often than armored trucks is solely "because there are more cars around"?
Shortening: "do you think the reason is 'because foo'?". Replacing "because" with "that" makes the phrase less sensible. Reverse the phrases: does "that there are more cars around, cars are broken into more often" make as much sense as "because there are more cars around, cars are broken into more often"?
I suppose you could add "that" in front of "because" in the original, but that's needlessly verbose.
I trust most of your copyediting is of higher caliber.
As originally designed and flown (they may have changed it since), in the Shuttle toilet the, ah, excrement is supposed to hit the, um, rotary impeller blades.
(Yes, really. Actually called slinger blades -- slings the stuff against the walls of the waste compartment which is then (well, after the user is done) vented to vacuum to dry the stuff. Problem is/was, the dried stuff has zero structural integrity and a couple days into the mission you end up with a fine brown powder floating everywhere...)
Oh, sure, Devil's Tower is some kind of igneous intrusion. The top was levelled off as a landing zone for UFOs (see CE3K) (grin).
As for volcanic activity on Mars, as the other poster's link points out, Mars has some of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system -- Olympus Mons and the other volcanoes on the Tharsis Bulge. Pavonis Mons is almost exactly on the equator -- if you were going to build a beanstalk on Mars, that'd be the place to anchor it.
Probably not active, though. For that you'd have to go to Io.
Re:Geological Event
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not that the tops were sliced off. The whole area was probably a pretty flat plain before whatever (zillions of gallons of water, most likely) carved out the canyon. The flat areas are what's left of the original surface.
You'll see the same thing in canyon areas on Earth. As the valleys widen you get less and less of the original surface left, until the whole terrain is rugged.
Does anyone know when "The Moon Landing Special Edition" will be out on DVD?
Check out the boxed HBO series "From The Earth To The Moon". Some of the effects are better, and there are definitely some better "3rd person" shots of the lunar astronauts doing stuff.
On the other hand some of the effects are cheesier -- the view out the LM window of the lunar touchdown is clearer, but this time they let the kicked-up dust billow in an obvious reaction with surrounding atmosphere, rather than just radiating straight out the way it did in the original (as it would in vacuum). (Oh, and some of the moon walking has problems too -- they did a good job rigging the astronauts to simulate a 1/6 G bounce-walk, but the dirt they kick up still falls back at an obvious 1G rate. The original did it much better and simulated the dirt at 1/6 G too.)
(Seriously, if you haven't seen that HBO series recently, do yourself a favor and find it and watch it. Good stuff.)
The Poles smuggled out the 3-rotor version of Enigma used by the army and the Luftwaffe. The naval version use 4 rotors, and was much harder to decrypt. The recovery of materials from a U-boat (unkown to the German command) was invaluable in helping crack U-boat and other German naval communications.
(Not that they cracked everything, by a long shot.)
The movie Enigma has some good dramatization of this (the code cracking, not the U boat incident) and some interesting plot twists.
Pretty much, yeah, the "higher logic functions" of your brain are disconnected when asleep/dreaming -- which is why things that are totally illogical can happen in dreams without you being particularly bothered by the discrepancy.
And why, after you wake up in the middle of the night with that brilliant idea that you jot down on the notepad by your bed, when you wake up in the morning feeling all smug that you had that brilliant idea and managed to write it down, and you pick up your notepad to read it... it makes no sense at all.
(Now think about how many people who seem to have their higher logic functions (if any) disconnected all the time can end up believing some pretty bizarre stuff -- like SCO being able to sucessfully sue IBM or collect Unix royalties from Linux end users.)
but unless security practices dictate customizing every box, networks running Linux will become more vulnerable in general.
The "customization" tends to happen anyway. Unless all your boxes are doing exactly the same thing, and their all exactly identical hardware, there are going to be configuration differences. A real-world datacenter is likely to comprise a mix of different boxes, even if all from the same vendor (and more likely, different vendors), running different mixes of apps. (Web severs vs application servers vs DB servers vs mail servers etc, etc,)
Of course in a Windows environment, even different boxes and different vendors tend to be all running pretty much the same thing. Not so on the Unix side. (I know whereof I speak: in the computer room about 100 yards from where I sit there are some 400-plus Unix boxes and about 700 Windows boxes. There's far more diversity in the former, even though most of them are Sun hardware.)
Exactly, for many server functions even a single distro gives multiple options. (Sendmail vs Postfix, several different FTP servers, etc.)
Also factor in different CPU architectures. While less likely in the desktop space (because of the commodity pricing on 32-bit x86 hardware), in server space -- even amongst servers running Linux -- you're likely to find almost any architecture: x86, x86-64, PPC, Sparc, z90, Itanic, etc.
Broaden that to include the other 'nix flavors -- the *BSD's and proprietary 'nixs, even if they're all running the "same" server tools (Apache, etc) a virus/worm is going to have a rough time propagating.
If OSX, Linux, or whatever else were on top, do you honestly think there would be less vulnerabilities?
Grammar flame: That's fewer vulnerabilities. Hint, "vulnerabilities" is plural, implying some enumeration. Use "fewer". "Less" is unenumerated quantities, eg. "less weight", or even "less vulnerability".
And to answer the question: yes. Some designs are just inherently more vulnerable than others, as are some development methods. Do you think the reason that cars are broken into more often than armored trucks is solely because there are more cars around?
Okay, agreed. Static arrays shouldn't be used if you can't guarantee (through data flow analysis or some such) that you'll never need more than whatever the array is sized at.
(You just touched a nerve because I've had somebody go through perfectly working code and arbitrarily replace all "strcpy" with "strncpy" and the like -- when the only places strcpy was being used the source was guaranteed to be smaller than the target because of checks upstream in the data flow. They clearly didn't understand the program and that was just busywork.)
Novell has absolutely ZERO need for an insurance company to handle the claims.
SCO sues some Linux user over alleged SCO Unix IP? Novell exercises its right to waive SCO's action, as per the purchase agreement that bought whatever feeble Unix rights SCO has from Novell in the first place.
Novell also has the right to license Unix to its own customers, again voiding any attempted SCO suit.
Not this old argument again (referring to several of the above posts, but/. won't let me simultaneously reply to several).
The permanent Martian ice caps are just that, water ice. They expand and shrink seasonally, with much of the winter increase being CO2 ("dry") ice. In the Martian summers the poles are too warm for CO2 ice, in the Martian winters, too cold for some of the atmospheric CO2 not to freeze out. (So yes, at any given time, one pole is mostly water ice, the other mostly (covered with) dry ice -- except in spring and fall when the CO2 is changing poles -- which is also when you tend to get planetary dust storms. Imagine that.)
This has been more or less known since some astronomer first pointed a spectrometer at Mars, and largely confirmed by subsequent observation and exploration.
The only real discussion is the percentages of same, and how much (if any) water or water ice is in the soil further from the poles.
Sorry, nope. While Gilbert chemistry sets were cool, the Erector stuff was a patent-avoiding rip-off of the original Meccano.
I find it nicely ironic that what is now sold in the US as Erector sets is exactly the same stuff that's sold everywhere else in the world as Meccano. Even if it does come in some bizarre colors other than the traditional red, green and silver, and they use plastic gears and pulleys now instead of the original brass.
Back on topic: I'm glad Lego is going in this direction. All my kids play with the stuff, and they all got some for xmas -- although it was a challenge finding the generic stuff. Toys'R'Us had four goddamn shelves of (expletive deleted) sports themed Lego. WTF is the point of Lego basketball hoops and a sheet painted to look like a basketball court? As if the movie tie-in licensing fees weren't bad enough (my daughter's a huge Harry Potter fan, but the Harry Potter Lego was just lame), NBA and NFL etc licensing fees are probably pretty bad too. But the generic stuff, or kits with only a few specialized pieces (make 47 different aircraft) can still be had.
one day we brought in Amdahl's version of unix that ran on VM.
Ah yes, UTS. I supported a system on that on a partition of the campus 3090 for a year or so when I worked at U Guelph. (Originally developed the software on BSD on a PDP-11). A few minor quirks but overall solid -- although it felt strange to be running ASCII-based software on EBCDIC-loving hardware;-)
You're right about IBM's attitude -- at the moment I'm working (contractor) for IBM as a Solaris sysadmin with a roomful of mostly Sun boxes. (It's an IBM services customer site -- there's also some big IBM iron in another room.)
Yes to both, and I've also used PL/I. (As a matter of fact, I've done so on my Linux box right here, using the Hercules IBM/370 emulator -- but I've also done the real iron.)
And APL which originated at IBM.
That said, they've also come up with some pretty good stuff, just give me a minute to think of it... oh yeah, the Guidance and Control system for the Saturn V, for one;-)
Seriously, that was the old IBM. Lately they've been much better at delivering what the customer wants rather than what IBM thinks the customer needs. IBM isn't going to create their own desktop -- especially not at this stage of the process, where this is deployment for internal use. And I imagine most of the custom client apps will be web and/or Java based.
Not that IBM doesn't know a thing or two about desktop design -- their CUA (Common User Access) object-oriented desktop architecture is/was great, one of the things that OS/2 fans still rave about (although IIRC the OS/2 desktop wasn't quite CUA).
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Yeah, I've heard some real horror stories. (Then there's what it does to the equipment: the airflow is such that the avionics tend to protect the filters from dust...)
After Challenger they may have gone back to the zip-lock baggies they used in the Apollo days, I'm not certain.
Mercury, asbestos and chlorine.
Heck, sounds like my bedroom as a teenager, between my chemistry set and rock collection (as in minerals, not music). The former finally got exiled to the basement -- where I also set up a microbiology lab.
You had zeros? In my day we had to make do wi' letter 'O', and were t'ankful for it.
I once worked for a company that had a data center in the basement of a shopping mall, and we had several other basement offices. There was some remodelling going on, so I had to put up with the occasional pounding of a sledghammer on cinder block walls. So far, no big deal.
One day after most people had left, I was working at my terminal when the sledgehammer pounding was particularly loud. I mean REALLY loud, my desk was shaking. Suddenly, accompanied by flying chips of brick and concrete dust, the head of a sledgehammer came crashing through the wall in front of me. Seems they're supposed to take out that wall, too.
I still needed to finish up what I was working on, so I dragged my desk back a few yards, threw up some plastic sheeting to keep dust out of the monitor, and kept on programming while workmen destroyed the concrete block wall in front of me, putting up with the occasional shower of rock chips and dust.
Sorry, back to grammar school for you.
At most, you get a punctuation flame. Inserting extra punctuation to make it clear:
Do you think the reason that cars are broken into more often than armored trucks is solely "because there are more cars around"?
Shortening: "do you think the reason is 'because foo'?". Replacing "because" with "that" makes the phrase less sensible. Reverse the phrases: does "that there are more cars around, cars are broken into more often" make as much sense as "because there are more cars around, cars are broken into more often"?
I suppose you could add "that" in front of "because" in the original, but that's needlessly verbose.
I trust most of your copyediting is of higher caliber.
Ask a Shuttle astronaut.
As originally designed and flown (they may have changed it since), in the Shuttle toilet the, ah, excrement is supposed to hit the, um, rotary impeller blades.
(Yes, really. Actually called slinger blades -- slings the stuff against the walls of the waste compartment which is then (well, after the user is done) vented to vacuum to dry the stuff. Problem is/was, the dried stuff has zero structural integrity and a couple days into the mission you end up with a fine brown powder floating everywhere...)
Oh, sure, Devil's Tower is some kind of igneous intrusion. The top was levelled off as a landing zone for UFOs (see CE3K) (grin).
As for volcanic activity on Mars, as the other poster's link points out, Mars has some of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system -- Olympus Mons and the other volcanoes on the Tharsis Bulge. Pavonis Mons is almost exactly on the equator -- if you were going to build a beanstalk on Mars, that'd be the place to anchor it.
Probably not active, though. For that you'd have to go to Io.
It's not that the tops were sliced off. The whole area was probably a pretty flat plain before whatever (zillions of gallons of water, most likely) carved out the canyon. The flat areas are what's left of the original surface.
You'll see the same thing in canyon areas on Earth. As the valleys widen you get less and less of the original surface left, until the whole terrain is rugged.
Does anyone know when "The Moon Landing Special Edition" will be out on DVD?
Check out the boxed HBO series "From The Earth To The Moon". Some of the effects are better, and there are definitely some better "3rd person" shots of the lunar astronauts doing stuff.
On the other hand some of the effects are cheesier -- the view out the LM window of the lunar touchdown is clearer, but this time they let the kicked-up dust billow in an obvious reaction with surrounding atmosphere, rather than just radiating straight out the way it did in the original (as it would in vacuum). (Oh, and some of the moon walking has problems too -- they did a good job rigging the astronauts to simulate a 1/6 G bounce-walk, but the dirt they kick up still falls back at an obvious 1G rate. The original did it much better and simulated the dirt at 1/6 G too.)
(Seriously, if you haven't seen that HBO series recently, do yourself a favor and find it and watch it. Good stuff.)
The Poles smuggled out the 3-rotor version of Enigma used by the army and the Luftwaffe. The naval version use 4 rotors, and was much harder to decrypt. The recovery of materials from a U-boat (unkown to the German command) was invaluable in helping crack U-boat and other German naval communications.
(Not that they cracked everything, by a long shot.)
The movie Enigma has some good dramatization of this (the code cracking, not the U boat incident) and some interesting plot twists.
Pretty much, yeah, the "higher logic functions" of your brain are disconnected when asleep/dreaming -- which is why things that are totally illogical can happen in dreams without you being particularly bothered by the discrepancy.
... it makes no sense at all.
And why, after you wake up in the middle of the night with that brilliant idea that you jot down on the notepad by your bed, when you wake up in the morning feeling all smug that you had that brilliant idea and managed to write it down, and you pick up your notepad to read it
(Now think about how many people who seem to have their higher logic functions (if any) disconnected all the time can end up believing some pretty bizarre stuff -- like SCO being able to sucessfully sue IBM or collect Unix royalties from Linux end users.)
Define "dramatic rise". Going from one to two is a 100 percent increase, after all.
I suspect overall the numbers would drop.
but unless security practices dictate customizing every box, networks running Linux will become more vulnerable in general.
The "customization" tends to happen anyway. Unless all your boxes are doing exactly the same thing, and their all exactly identical hardware, there are going to be configuration differences. A real-world datacenter is likely to comprise a mix of different boxes, even if all from the same vendor (and more likely, different vendors), running different mixes of apps. (Web severs vs application servers vs DB servers vs mail servers etc, etc,)
Of course in a Windows environment, even different boxes and different vendors tend to be all running pretty much the same thing. Not so on the Unix side. (I know whereof I speak: in the computer room about 100 yards from where I sit there are some 400-plus Unix boxes and about 700 Windows boxes. There's far more diversity in the former, even though most of them are Sun hardware.)
Exactly, for many server functions even a single distro gives multiple options. (Sendmail vs Postfix, several different FTP servers, etc.)
Also factor in different CPU architectures. While less likely in the desktop space (because of the commodity pricing on 32-bit x86 hardware), in server space -- even amongst servers running Linux -- you're likely to find almost any architecture: x86, x86-64, PPC, Sparc, z90, Itanic, etc.
Broaden that to include the other 'nix flavors -- the *BSD's and proprietary 'nixs, even if they're all running the "same" server tools (Apache, etc) a virus/worm is going to have a rough time propagating.
If OSX, Linux, or whatever else were on top, do you honestly think there would be less vulnerabilities?
Grammar flame: That's fewer vulnerabilities. Hint, "vulnerabilities" is plural, implying some enumeration. Use "fewer". "Less" is unenumerated quantities, eg. "less weight", or even "less vulnerability".
And to answer the question: yes. Some designs are just inherently more vulnerable than others, as are some development methods. Do you think the reason that cars are broken into more often than armored trucks is solely because there are more cars around?
Okay, agreed. Static arrays shouldn't be used if you can't guarantee (through data flow analysis or some such) that you'll never need more than whatever the array is sized at.
(You just touched a nerve because I've had somebody go through perfectly working code and arbitrarily replace all "strcpy" with "strncpy" and the like -- when the only places strcpy was being used the source was guaranteed to be smaller than the target because of checks upstream in the data flow. They clearly didn't understand the program and that was just busywork.)
Using dynamic memory, always, in place of static arrays is for people incapable of doing data flow analysis.
And if they can't figure out where their data is coming from and going to, the code probably has other problems too.
(Not to say that static arrays aren't often used inappropriately, but the opposite extreme is just as bad.)
... for my card reader.
Novell has absolutely ZERO need for an insurance company to handle the claims.
SCO sues some Linux user over alleged SCO Unix IP? Novell exercises its right to waive SCO's action, as per the purchase agreement that bought whatever feeble Unix rights SCO has from Novell in the first place.
Novell also has the right to license Unix to its own customers, again voiding any attempted SCO suit.
Not this old argument again (referring to several of the above posts, but /. won't let me simultaneously reply to several).
The permanent Martian ice caps are just that, water ice. They expand and shrink seasonally, with much of the winter increase being CO2 ("dry") ice. In the Martian summers the poles are too warm for CO2 ice, in the Martian winters, too cold for some of the atmospheric CO2 not to freeze out. (So yes, at any given time, one pole is mostly water ice, the other mostly (covered with) dry ice -- except in spring and fall when the CO2 is changing poles -- which is also when you tend to get planetary dust storms. Imagine that.)
This has been more or less known since some astronomer first pointed a spectrometer at Mars, and largely confirmed by subsequent observation and exploration.
The only real discussion is the percentages of same, and how much (if any) water or water ice is in the soil further from the poles.
Old School Erector Sets
Sorry, nope. While Gilbert chemistry sets were cool, the Erector stuff was a patent-avoiding rip-off of the original Meccano.
I find it nicely ironic that what is now sold in the US as Erector sets is exactly the same stuff that's sold everywhere else in the world as Meccano. Even if it does come in some bizarre colors other than the traditional red, green and silver, and they use plastic gears and pulleys now instead of the original brass.
Back on topic: I'm glad Lego is going in this direction. All my kids play with the stuff, and they all got some for xmas -- although it was a challenge finding the generic stuff. Toys'R'Us had four goddamn shelves of (expletive deleted) sports themed Lego. WTF is the point of Lego basketball hoops and a sheet painted to look like a basketball court? As if the movie tie-in licensing fees weren't bad enough (my daughter's a huge Harry Potter fan, but the Harry Potter Lego was just lame), NBA and NFL etc licensing fees are probably pretty bad too. But the generic stuff, or kits with only a few specialized pieces (make 47 different aircraft) can still be had.
Hey, for my sins I not only wrote APL, I actually taught APL. Thankfully those days are long gone.
(Oh, and I think the second line of that poem should read "Before his life is done;" so that you're not forcing "run" to rhyme with itself.)
I'd love to get my hands on a good APL for Linux (with font support).
Download Sharp APL for Linux. It's available from the Soliton (formerly I.P. Sharp) web site, here. No charge for the personal edition.
)CLEAR
WS CLEARED
one day we brought in Amdahl's version of unix that ran on VM.
;-)
Ah yes, UTS. I supported a system on that on a partition of the campus 3090 for a year or so when I worked at U Guelph. (Originally developed the software on BSD on a PDP-11). A few minor quirks but overall solid -- although it felt strange to be running ASCII-based software on EBCDIC-loving hardware
You're right about IBM's attitude -- at the moment I'm working (contractor) for IBM as a Solaris sysadmin with a roomful of mostly Sun boxes. (It's an IBM services customer site -- there's also some big IBM iron in another room.)
Has anyone here seen PL/I? Or used JCL?
;-)
Yes to both, and I've also used PL/I. (As a matter of fact, I've done so on my Linux box right here, using the Hercules IBM/370 emulator -- but I've also done the real iron.)
And APL which originated at IBM.
That said, they've also come up with some pretty good stuff, just give me a minute to think of it... oh yeah, the Guidance and Control system for the Saturn V, for one
Seriously, that was the old IBM. Lately they've been much better at delivering what the customer wants rather than what IBM thinks the customer needs. IBM isn't going to create their own desktop -- especially not at this stage of the process, where this is deployment for internal use. And I imagine most of the custom client apps will be web and/or Java based.
Not that IBM doesn't know a thing or two about desktop design -- their CUA (Common User Access) object-oriented desktop architecture is/was great, one of the things that OS/2 fans still rave about (although IIRC the OS/2 desktop wasn't quite CUA).