> It might have decent preemptive multitasking, but the entire premise of the OS was to deny users as many privileges as possible, thus ensuring systems people full-time employment. I can still remember having to go and beg to have my disk allocation increased to 2 MB.
Same thing happens under UNIX if you have a disk quota. Don't blame the operating system for company policy.
> Your first iteration was amazing. Your second version was equally amazing. AMD's own successes with the K7 architecture are owed mostly to you. Your latest golden baby was thrown in the garbage because it scared the other babies. Even though no one wants to know, your EV7 is *STILL* the premiere big iron architecture in this day and age. What would have been your crowning jewel was aborted and your womb replaced by something Intel Inside. EV8, you would've been an engineering and design marvel, something that would've taken YEARS to beat. And now, poor DEC Alpha team, where are you? Fragments of your EV7/6 team are higher-ups at AMD, giving the desktop underdog a chance, and the rest of you is at work at Intel/HP, genetically engineering something something truly EPIC, that sadly, only even a mother could love...assuming the mother eventually gives birth to acceptably talented offspring. Oh, whither art thou, Alpha?
Link people to that whenever you hear them say "Let the market decide!".
> but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today?
The answer to your question is cultural rather than technical. VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles, so it only has a thin slice of mindshare. That's not really any more a reflection on it than the thin slice of mindshare given to some very excellent programming languages.
I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.
> 64 bit does not mean a thing. 99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it, and the performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible.
> As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.
Also good for scientists who want to do lots of 64-bit FP math. Possibly others; let's make a list.
Would it help with graphics applications? RGBA x 16 bits each would be 64 BPP.
> Then Shephard was lacking information! I missed the press conference, mostly as a result of it being several minutes late and having several things to do this afternoon. I suppose I could go back and read the text of it (I've linked to it from my web site, after all...)
Of course it's possible that the spokesman was right the first time and wrong during the correction, or that I misunderstood what he said. But the best picture I can put together right now is that all the abnormal sensor readings were drops to the "no reading" value, except for a general system of structural temperature sensors that showed some elevations of temperature on the left side of the ship. Unfortunately, I've heard several mentions of that system but no indication of exactly where those temperatures were measured. I would guess at various points on the left wing, but that is just a guess.
And of course, as soon as any sizable chunk of the left wing broke off the ship would have become aerodynamically unstable, with instantly catastrophic results at those speeds. We can assume with fair confidence that the wing broke off right when the crewman calmly said "but" during that final message.
> > In other news [reuters.com], Iraqis welcomed the news as God's vengeance
> That's not news, that's expected.
And of course, if a disaster struck Bhagdad right now there are lots of stupid Americans who would smugly attribute it to the Wrath of God. Hopefully you wouldn't take that as a reflection on Americans in general; let's not blame the Iraqis in general either.
> > There were no such signs of jubilation over the shuttle disaster in any of the Palestinian territories.
> I find this surprising considering their jubilation back in 2001.
And all the "jubilation" I ever saw was a single small group of schoolboys performing for the newscameras. Was there actually any widespread jubilation anywhere in the world?
> Their 3 leading suspicions are improper piloting leading to a roll which caused structural breakup, the heat tiles that fell of during launch, and the possibility that what little fuel is reserved for the maneuvering engines ignited somehow.
You can count the roll right out. The crew was completely unaware of any problem even after the sensors had started failing; it's difficult to imagine that neither crew nor ground control noticed a roll in progress. (Indeed, it's looking increasingly like the ship started shedding parts all the way back over California.)
It's almost certainly the result of shedding tiles. Launch damage to some tiles, maybe. Structural fatigue allowed excessive flexing of the wing, resulting in a tile shed, maybe. Exploding tire or fuel dislodged some files, possibly. From there the possibilities recede rapidly.
Do they even land with substantial fuel on board? I thought all they had at that point was the attitude jets, with purely local fuel supplies.
> Shawn Shephard discusses the potential "tire pressure problem".
The spokesman at the extended NASA press conference this afternoon indicated that the "pressure problem" was simply a loss of signal from those sensors... just like all the other sensor failures. (He originally said that they had detected some high temperatures at the wheels, but during the questioning he explicitely corrected himself and said that the sensors went to zero rather than showing high.)
All the symptoms indicate a progressive burn-through of the wing. I suppose it could have been caused by an exploding tire, but other sensors had already died by the time the tire sensors did. Look for explanations elsewhere.
The order of the sensor failures will ultimately tell where the burn-through occured.
> Sleep paralysis. From the time I was 18 till 22 or so, I would occasional wake from a dream but still have the paralysis from REM sleep. It is the opposite of fun waking up and being totally paralyzed. Couldn't even talk. It would happen within a dream first as well. One time in a dream I was being chased up a hill by *something* and I slowed down to a crawl. Before long I couldn't move. Woke up. Couldn't move.
I used to suffer that, though it was never associated with a dream (unless of course the state itself was a dream). I would fight seemingly forever to move a finger, and as soon as I could so much as bend my pinky I would immediately snap out of it.
Probably not related, but once every few years I wake up in the middle of the night with apparently total amnesia. I won't have the faintest idea where I am. I always go through the same bottom-up procedure of knowing that I'm in a bed, recalling (with difficulty) where the bed is in a room, where the doors and windows of the room are, where the room is with respect to the rest of the building, where the building is w.r.t. the street, what town the street is in, and at that point I remember where I am and why I'm there. Notice that this happens when I'm home in my own bed, not when I'm off travelling somewhere.
> I don't agree that the war is inevitable though. Blair just got an extension of six weeks to try to convince other allies. In particular they really need permission from Turkey to use bases there. Blix has stated that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented his report. The diplomatic initiative could well swing against Bush and his chickenhawks.
It's starting to look like the North Korea Crisis (yes, it is boiling up to "crisis" status) is going to upstage the Iraq pseudo-crisis. From what I heard on the news Friday evening, I think you'd be hearing lots of news about North Korea today if not for the loss of the Columbia.
Hopefully the NKC will give Bush & Co. a face-saving way to back off Iraq. Hopefully also it won't just move the deaths a quarter of the way around the world.
> If these streaks and point echoes are what I believe them to be, that is, parts of Columbia, she was in trouble before she made landfall in California or very shortly thereafter.
A California astronomer has also reported seeing it shedding parts. He says that some of his colleages were planning on photographing the shuttle as it went over California, but does not know whether they were going to do so telescopically or not. (If they did it telescopically, we may get some extraordinary evidence.)
> Maybe now, the Government will give NASA the money to build a new earth to orbit reusable spacecraft. Why do people have to die to convince the American Government to do something?!?!?!?!
We don't like to think of it this way, but much - perhaps most - of engineering is a matter of closing the barn door after the cows got out. You can read your civic building codes, auto safety regulations, etc., as a history of human tragedy.
There's no reason to expect spaceflight to be any different.
> Of the 270 men (some sites on the 'net say 237) who set out with Magellan, only 15 made it home. Magellan didn't.
In the old Icelandic records they sometimes report very matter-of-fact-ly that, say, "20 ships set out for Norway; 10 arrived." And that wasn't even exploration.
> Feynmann was very unhappy with the report on the Challenger disaster. [...] So, Feynmann's estimate was really that the chance of failure is CLOSER TO 1 IN 100 than to 1 in a thousand or 1 in 10.
This isn't such an "outlaw" perspective as you might think. A former astronaut was just on the telly, and he said there was not a head-in-sand attitude about this. He said he was aware of formal studies giving odds ranging from 1/78 to 1/500. Feynmann wasn't a voice crying in the wilderness, nor was his estimate an outlier w.r.t. official estimates.f
And of course, there's no shortage of astronaut wannabe's anyway.
> If the money spent on the ISS and the shuttle was diverted to projects like the Pathfinder, we'd have robots sampling Europa's oceans within the decade. Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?
If/when the manned space program is canceled, our unmanned program will be canceled a few years later. The public won't see any short-term payoff in it, and political support will falter.
I think there are better reasons for manned space exploration, but that seems to be the one that best answers your question.
Re: The Problem Here...
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 1
> Is that most geeks are male, most slashdotters are geeks, most males are left-brained, and communications is a predominantly right-brained activity. Is it any wonder that IT is consistently faulted for having poor communications skills?
Is it any wonder that WHAT is consistently faulted for having poor communication skills?
> I signed up for our state do not call list, and probably would for the national one too. But sometimes it is fun to hassle them.
I always say "Hang on a sec...", lay the receiver down as quitely as I can, and forget about it until I hear it beeping. They waste my time --> I waste theirs.
> > Rambus maintains the document destruction was part of the company's regular document retention policy...
> Which leads one to wonder... what is that policy? Destroy it before the prosecution gets ahold of it?
Most corporations (other than the ill-informed Pa & Ma shop) have "record retention policies" that are primarily designed to prevent documents from coming up in lawsuits. The should more properly be called "record destruction policies"; you catch holy hell if an audit shows that you've been keeping stuff you should have destroyed.
Your government probably has laws that specify the minimum amount of time certain types of records must be maintained.
> MPlayer will probably be a permanently grey-area application legally.
My concern is where all those.dll's came from. They say that they won't work under Windows, but that just leaves me wondering why they're.dll's to start with, instead of.so's or.a's.
The names of the.dll's suggest that that's where all the codec work is done. One suspects a bit of thievery going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
> It might have decent preemptive multitasking, but the entire premise of the OS was to deny users as many privileges as possible, thus ensuring systems people full-time employment. I can still remember having to go and beg to have my disk allocation increased to 2 MB.
Same thing happens under UNIX if you have a disk quota. Don't blame the operating system for company policy.
> Your first iteration was amazing. Your second version was equally amazing. AMD's own successes with the K7 architecture are owed mostly to you. Your latest golden baby was thrown in the garbage because it scared the other babies. Even though no one wants to know, your EV7 is *STILL* the premiere big iron architecture in this day and age. What would have been your crowning jewel was aborted and your womb replaced by something Intel Inside. EV8, you would've been an engineering and design marvel, something that would've taken YEARS to beat. And now, poor DEC Alpha team, where are you? Fragments of your EV7/6 team are higher-ups at AMD, giving the desktop underdog a chance, and the rest of you is at work at Intel/HP, genetically engineering something something truly EPIC, that sadly, only even a mother could love...assuming the mother eventually gives birth to acceptably talented offspring. Oh, whither art thou, Alpha?
Link people to that whenever you hear them say "Let the market decide!".
> I am curious as to what sense that OpenVMS is open?
In the marketing sense.
> but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today?
The answer to your question is cultural rather than technical. VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles, so it only has a thin slice of mindshare. That's not really any more a reflection on it than the thin slice of mindshare given to some very excellent programming languages.
I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.
> 64 bit does not mean a thing. 99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it, and the performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible.
> As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.
Also good for scientists who want to do lots of 64-bit FP math. Possibly others; let's make a list.
Would it help with graphics applications? RGBA x 16 bits each would be 64 BPP.
> Then Shephard was lacking information! I missed the press conference, mostly as a result of it being several minutes late and having several things to do this afternoon. I suppose I could go back and read the text of it (I've linked to it from my web site, after all...)
Of course it's possible that the spokesman was right the first time and wrong during the correction, or that I misunderstood what he said. But the best picture I can put together right now is that all the abnormal sensor readings were drops to the "no reading" value, except for a general system of structural temperature sensors that showed some elevations of temperature on the left side of the ship. Unfortunately, I've heard several mentions of that system but no indication of exactly where those temperatures were measured. I would guess at various points on the left wing, but that is just a guess.
And of course, as soon as any sizable chunk of the left wing broke off the ship would have become aerodynamically unstable, with instantly catastrophic results at those speeds. We can assume with fair confidence that the wing broke off right when the crewman calmly said "but" during that final message.
> > In other news [reuters.com], Iraqis welcomed the news as God's vengeance
> That's not news, that's expected.
And of course, if a disaster struck Bhagdad right now there are lots of stupid Americans who would smugly attribute it to the Wrath of God. Hopefully you wouldn't take that as a reflection on Americans in general; let's not blame the Iraqis in general either.
> > There were no such signs of jubilation over the shuttle disaster in any of the Palestinian territories.
> I find this surprising considering their jubilation back in 2001.
And all the "jubilation" I ever saw was a single small group of schoolboys performing for the newscameras. Was there actually any widespread jubilation anywhere in the world?
> Their 3 leading suspicions are improper piloting leading to a roll which caused structural breakup, the heat tiles that fell of during launch, and the possibility that what little fuel is reserved for the maneuvering engines ignited somehow.
You can count the roll right out. The crew was completely unaware of any problem even after the sensors had started failing; it's difficult to imagine that neither crew nor ground control noticed a roll in progress. (Indeed, it's looking increasingly like the ship started shedding parts all the way back over California.)
It's almost certainly the result of shedding tiles. Launch damage to some tiles, maybe. Structural fatigue allowed excessive flexing of the wing, resulting in a tile shed, maybe. Exploding tire or fuel dislodged some files, possibly. From there the possibilities recede rapidly.
Do they even land with substantial fuel on board? I thought all they had at that point was the attitude jets, with purely local fuel supplies.
> Shawn Shephard discusses the potential "tire pressure problem".
The spokesman at the extended NASA press conference this afternoon indicated that the "pressure problem" was simply a loss of signal from those sensors... just like all the other sensor failures. (He originally said that they had detected some high temperatures at the wheels, but during the questioning he explicitely corrected himself and said that the sensors went to zero rather than showing high.)
All the symptoms indicate a progressive burn-through of the wing. I suppose it could have been caused by an exploding tire, but other sensors had already died by the time the tire sensors did. Look for explanations elsewhere.
The order of the sensor failures will ultimately tell where the burn-through occured.
> Sleep paralysis. From the time I was 18 till 22 or so, I would occasional wake from a dream but still have the paralysis from REM sleep. It is the opposite of fun waking up and being totally paralyzed. Couldn't even talk. It would happen within a dream first as well. One time in a dream I was being chased up a hill by *something* and I slowed down to a crawl. Before long I couldn't move. Woke up. Couldn't move.
I used to suffer that, though it was never associated with a dream (unless of course the state itself was a dream). I would fight seemingly forever to move a finger, and as soon as I could so much as bend my pinky I would immediately snap out of it.
Probably not related, but once every few years I wake up in the middle of the night with apparently total amnesia. I won't have the faintest idea where I am. I always go through the same bottom-up procedure of knowing that I'm in a bed, recalling (with difficulty) where the bed is in a room, where the doors and windows of the room are, where the room is with respect to the rest of the building, where the building is w.r.t. the street, what town the street is in, and at that point I remember where I am and why I'm there. Notice that this happens when I'm home in my own bed, not when I'm off travelling somewhere.
> I don't agree that the war is inevitable though. Blair just got an extension of six weeks to try to convince other allies. In particular they really need permission from Turkey to use bases there. Blix has stated that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented his report. The diplomatic initiative could well swing against Bush and his chickenhawks.
It's starting to look like the North Korea Crisis (yes, it is boiling up to "crisis" status) is going to upstage the Iraq pseudo-crisis. From what I heard on the news Friday evening, I think you'd be hearing lots of news about North Korea today if not for the loss of the Columbia.
Hopefully the NKC will give Bush & Co. a face-saving way to back off Iraq. Hopefully also it won't just move the deaths a quarter of the way around the world.
> If these streaks and point echoes are what I believe them to be, that is, parts of Columbia, she was in trouble before she made landfall in California or very shortly thereafter.
A California astronomer has also reported seeing it shedding parts. He says that some of his colleages were planning on photographing the shuttle as it went over California, but does not know whether they were going to do so telescopically or not. (If they did it telescopically, we may get some extraordinary evidence.)
> Maybe now, the Government will give NASA the money to build a new earth to orbit reusable spacecraft. Why do people have to die to convince the American Government to do something?!?!?!?!
We don't like to think of it this way, but much - perhaps most - of engineering is a matter of closing the barn door after the cows got out. You can read your civic building codes, auto safety regulations, etc., as a history of human tragedy.
There's no reason to expect spaceflight to be any different.
> Of the 270 men (some sites on the 'net say 237) who set out with Magellan, only 15 made it home. Magellan didn't.
In the old Icelandic records they sometimes report very matter-of-fact-ly that, say, "20 ships set out for Norway; 10 arrived." And that wasn't even exploration.
> Feynmann was very unhappy with the report on the Challenger disaster. [...] So, Feynmann's estimate was really that the chance of failure is CLOSER TO 1 IN 100 than to 1 in a thousand or 1 in 10.
This isn't such an "outlaw" perspective as you might think. A former astronaut was just on the telly, and he said there was not a head-in-sand attitude about this. He said he was aware of formal studies giving odds ranging from 1/78 to 1/500. Feynmann wasn't a voice crying in the wilderness, nor was his estimate an outlier w.r.t. official estimates.f
And of course, there's no shortage of astronaut wannabe's anyway.
> If the money spent on the ISS and the shuttle was diverted to projects like the Pathfinder, we'd have robots sampling Europa's oceans within the decade. Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?
If/when the manned space program is canceled, our unmanned program will be canceled a few years later. The public won't see any short-term payoff in it, and political support will falter.
I think there are better reasons for manned space exploration, but that seems to be the one that best answers your question.
It means "the quality goes in before the name goes on".
> Is that most geeks are male, most slashdotters are geeks, most males are left-brained, and communications is a predominantly right-brained activity. Is it any wonder that IT is consistently faulted for having poor communications skills?
Is it any wonder that WHAT is consistently faulted for having poor communication skills?
> WTF is up with all the companies thinking they have more rights than the citizens of this country?
You know the old saying: "Possession of Congress is nine tenths of the law."
> I signed up for our state do not call list, and probably would for the national one too. But sometimes it is fun to hassle them.
I always say "Hang on a sec...", lay the receiver down as quitely as I can, and forget about it until I hear it beeping. They waste my time --> I waste theirs.
I don't like Opt Out either. How about a law limiting them to Opt In?
Your subject line should have been Jesusgottinhimmelskind!
I guess we're about to find out whether crap has a critical mass.
> > Rambus maintains the document destruction was part of the company's regular document retention policy...
> Which leads one to wonder... what is that policy? Destroy it before the prosecution gets ahold of it?
Most corporations (other than the ill-informed Pa & Ma shop) have "record retention policies" that are primarily designed to prevent documents from coming up in lawsuits. The should more properly be called "record destruction policies"; you catch holy hell if an audit shows that you've been keeping stuff you should have destroyed.
Your government probably has laws that specify the minimum amount of time certain types of records must be maintained.
> MPlayer will probably be a permanently grey-area application legally.
My concern is where all those
The names of the