Well then I would have expected that the improvements to the rovers ability to navigate to have happened at about the same time its responsibility for its own navigation was increased. Preferrably beforehand so someone would be looking over its shoulder.
The reduction in staffing came well into the extended mission, which means it wasn't part of the original planning. The enhanced software simply didn't exist at the time, because nobody (at least nobody who controlled a budget) though it likely the mission would work out as well it has.
And as a side note, they left the rover stuck in front of a rock for an hour and a half? Was everyone playing counterstrike or something?
Originally, they had teams working Martian days round-the-clock. But they they stopped doing that years ago now as they don't have the cash or the staff to do it any more. Months of working out-of-synch with Earth days kinda screwed with people's heads too. Even when they were doing it, they weren't in constant contact. Did you think Nasa's Deep Space Network has one of its precious, in-demand dishes pointing at Mars 24/7 in case one of the rovers wants to call home? Did you think the survey satellites round mars position themselves and their antennas to be ever-ready to relay messages when the rovers are on the far side of Mars as seen from Earth? Well, they don't. All that stuff has plenty of other work to be doing. Resources (people, money, comms, power, appropriate alignments...) are all much more scarce than you seem to think. They plan a day, upload the plan, then wait a day to see what happened. As Earth and Mars days aren't in synch, sometimes the plans are for a couple of Martian days.
I spent a lot more than a minute on Google looking for and evaluating PCB design packages. I know what's out there because I my Mac to design PCBs. I use Cadsoft Eagle. It's not even close to OrCAD and Altium Designer, but it's enough for the basic boards I make. The AVR simulators to a fair extent don't work - it's taken me many hours and hundreds of lines of code on the simulator just to get the one I chose to do what I need - you don't need to add your own processor models and fix the bugs you find in AVRStudio or most of the other PC simulators. If electronics was my work rather than my hobby, I'd buy a PC today. If electronics was my hobby and I wasn't a programmer, I'd buy a PC today. If I needed to built multi-layer boards or simulate complex mixed-signal circuits, I'd buy a PC today. Well, actually I'd buy an Intel Mac and run Windows in a VM, but I'd still be running Windows.
In summary: Your statistical analysis on a sample size of one showed a 100% failure rate, so Samsung are crap. You found some other people also had failed Samsung drives, so Samsung are crap.
Search the net and you will find people ranting about Seagate drives failures, Western Digital drive failures, IBM drive failures, Maxtor drives failures and failures of drives made by companies neither of us have even heard of. You won't find many, if any, reports of recent failures with 8" floppy drives though, so I suggest you use one of those. They must be more reliable, right?
What if someone else violated the license and made a stripped version of Epic Movie available, without any references to the original author? How in general can one tell whether one is getting the original movie with intact copyright notices?
I'm quite worried about that you know. To protect ourselves from this kind of inadvertant violat^Wthef^Wgang-rape-of-nuns, what we really need is some kind of mechanism which stops you removing copyright notices. Well, I suppose that probably ammounts to stopping you editing the thing at all. Some kind of system for managing rights in general, in fact. Digital rights. We could call it Digital Rights Management. It's for your own good you know.
The Anti-Defamation League are a bunch of anti-Nazi Nazis.
Damn that is a great line, is it your own?
Yes, but it's sufficiently direct that I doubt it's unique.
I note the ADL are happy to describe people who damage others property as vandals. When the Vandals laid waste to Gaul, sacked Rome and generally burnt and pillaged their way around Europe, East Asia and North Africa, they did a bit more than spray slogans on walls and break windows. Even been crucified at work for screwing up? I bet there weren't any big wooden crosses involved. Language marches on.
1 and 3 come down to having multiple nodes and copies of the data, which is trivial for a distributed network. The security thing can be dealth with using existing crypto stuff - hashes for integrity of it's no sensetive, encryption if it is sensetive. 40GB may be cheap, but 400TB (a mere 10 000 users) isn't so cheap.
Perhaps you only have 32MB of RAM, but it takes a little while to dump a gig or two to disk and copy it back. Or were you forgetting about shutting down and restarting, or hibernating and restoring?
Again, name one app that runs on Windows that you can't find an equivalant app for Macs.
A competent PCB design package. A competent Atmel AVR simulator. Games. A half-decent usenet client. At least, that's the stuff that I miss having now that I don't use Windows any more. Oh, to have Agent and AVRStudio and on-line FPS again *sob*.
On the iBook, the external display could only mirror the internal display, and could only run the same resolution as the internal.
iBooks can do it just fine, it's just that Apple didn't enable it (presumably to make the 12" PowerBook more desirable). I use a 1280x1024 external monitor with my iBook, while also using the inernal 1024x768 display and it works perfectly. "Screen Spanning Doctor" is your friend.
Re:Misses the point
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I LIKE ternary expressions and will use them whether or not beginners find them "confusing."
So using a style which leads to the minimum of errors is less important than your personal preference? It's not surprising that most software is bug-laden shit when so many programmers have attitudes like yours.
I meant the bit about the oceans being too big to damage easily. We don't even know the full effects of overfishing on the oceans yet. Who'd have though that refrigerators and spray cans could punch a hole in the ozone layer? We weren't even trying to manipulate the atmosphere, but still managed to create a hole in the ozone layer 'by accident'. I don't think there's much debate that we did that any more. And anthropmorphic climate change seems pretty clear to the overwhelming majority of experts in the field.
Scientists? Like the ones that have done so well on all those extremely long Bio-Sphere missions and such? Oh - wait - they haven't.
Haven't they? What did they do wrong? Biosphere 2 failed because of design flaws, not because of anything those inside did or did not do. In fact, those inside did everything expected of them in substantially worse conditions (dangerously low oxygen levels, thanks to soil with too much organic matter feeding bacteria which consumed the oxygen) than expected. They didn't freak out, start screaming to get out or start killing each other. They didn't even stop doing science.
That said I still miss Windows for a few applications and MOSTLY for the keyboard commands (in the OS GUI). Window Key + R + cmd = CLI. On the Mac it's click or Apple + Space + Term + Click.
I gave up closing all but the fattest applications a few weeks after getting a Mac. Apple-tab to Terminal, Apple-N to open a new one. There's no point rebooting, rarely any point shutting down and no point closing Terminal if you use it enough to care. I'm sure if something else needs the massive 8.7MB the seven Terminal windows I have open, the system will swap it out. Close all the windows or Apple-H if seeing the extra windows in Exposaaay annoys you.
Not as much as with code, no. But where I have (specs, reports, budgets, copy, correspondance...), Microsoft Word's locking and (in more recent versions) merging features have provided sufficient "version control". I've never worked somewhere where documents were the end result or on projects with 1000 people though. Much as I hate MS, they do have technologies to deal with this kind of thing without elaborate version control and publishing mechanisms. Now, sometimes you do need to edit documents in private and publish; some organisations and projects are sufficiently large or heirachical that it's necesarry. But it's not always so and having the option not to is, in smaller, organisationally-flatter environments, preferable.
No worries. I'm sorry I was so arsey and self-righteous in my response, rather than considering the possibility that you might have had a point (however aggressively put it was). These kind of misunderstandings seem quite common on Slashdot. Who says geeks are all pedants with no social skills, eh? And I'm referring to myself there:)
Do you care that you are wrong and have misread the EULA? It states that you cannot use the same license to run in a VM on the Licensed device. eg, you are not supposed to install home or basic on a physical machine and then use the same license/product key for the VM.
The question is what is considered to be the "licensed device". If a VM can be considered the "licensed device", you can run Vista Home/Basic in an VM. If the physical hardware is considered the "licensed device", you can't run Vista Home/Basic in a VM. Given Microsoft make specific mention of things you won't be able to do in a VM for Ultimate (which is supposed to have every feature), but don't mention that loss of functionality for Basic or Home, I suspect that you won't be able to run Basic or Home in a VM at all. But whatever the license says, the decision in practice has been made and will be enforced by the Vista installer. Anybody actually tried it?
That's feasible for the code example, where you actually do move files around as part of the normal process. But what if it's a bunch of images or documents? It's no longer part of the process, it's a workaround. Documents which should be read together should be kept together - whether or not everybody gets to read everything or edit everything. With vanilla *nix permissions, you need version control and publishing mechanisms to do that. They're naturally part of the software development process (because your errors might stop someone else doing their thing), but not naturally part of every other process where multiple files are used my multiple people.
My deepest and most sincere apologies for thinking the point was to discuss the story being summarised, not the slashdot summary itself. Actually reading the wording of the summary again (rather than remembering the gist and actually reading TFA), I see what the OP was getting at now.
You could have justly called me out for not realising the OP was talking about the summary rather than the story, but you didn't. You decided to call me an idiot and try to explain the meaning of hearsay, when it was obvious what I was discussing (the quote from TFA in my post made it obvious it was TFA, not the summary, that I was talking about) and obvious that what I was discussing was not, in fact, hearsay. Ah well, if you want to pretend that I wasn't obviously discussing TFA, feel free to do so.
Errr... how long ago were you here?! The sort of Soviet-styled three-rectangular-pin has been mandated by law for a *long* time now, and has been dominant on everything for atleast 20 years. I've never seen a wall socket with round pins (though have occasionally seen the odd round 2-pin plugs and adaptors for very old tech). The electric razor 115v socket is only really seen in hotels.
I'm in the UK. We had our house rewired about 18 months ago and had many of the small, 3-round-pin, unfused sockets fitted. They're only legal for lighting I believe, but they are legal and you can still get them (or we wouldn't have been able to have spanking new ones fitted by a qualified electrician). We use them for lamps, so you can switch on all the lamps in a room from a wall switch. You see them used in hotels for the same purpose. According to our electrician, people just don't ask for them. Perhaps they don't know it's possible, but I certainly like being able to turn all the lamps in a room on and off from one wall switch.
We've got 2-pin shaver sockets (our are 240V, not 115V) in the bathrooms too [for US readers: the room with the bath in it, not a ridiculous synonym for toilet], which is much handier than charging the electric toothbrush or shaver elsewhere (3-pin sockets aren't allowed in bathrooms). There are adapters which fit in 3-square-pin sockets which provide that socket ("shaver plug adapters"). The ones with D-shaped holes will accept US-style 2-pin plugs, as the spacing is similar enough that they can be designed to take the round-pin shaver plugs and flat-pin US-style plugs. The voltage is too high for most US applicances though. I run a small battery charger and a small 5V PSU with US-style plugs which accept "universal" voltages (90-250V) from "shaver plug adapters".
Slashdot Mirror
The reduction in staffing came well into the extended mission, which means it wasn't part of the original planning. The enhanced software simply didn't exist at the time, because nobody (at least nobody who controlled a budget) though it likely the mission would work out as well it has.
Originally, they had teams working Martian days round-the-clock. But they they stopped doing that years ago now as they don't have the cash or the staff to do it any more. Months of working out-of-synch with Earth days kinda screwed with people's heads too. Even when they were doing it, they weren't in constant contact. Did you think Nasa's Deep Space Network has one of its precious, in-demand dishes pointing at Mars 24/7 in case one of the rovers wants to call home? Did you think the survey satellites round mars position themselves and their antennas to be ever-ready to relay messages when the rovers are on the far side of Mars as seen from Earth? Well, they don't. All that stuff has plenty of other work to be doing. Resources (people, money, comms, power, appropriate alignments...) are all much more scarce than you seem to think. They plan a day, upload the plan, then wait a day to see what happened. As Earth and Mars days aren't in synch, sometimes the plans are for a couple of Martian days.
I spent a lot more than a minute on Google looking for and evaluating PCB design packages. I know what's out there because I my Mac to design PCBs. I use Cadsoft Eagle. It's not even close to OrCAD and Altium Designer, but it's enough for the basic boards I make. The AVR simulators to a fair extent don't work - it's taken me many hours and hundreds of lines of code on the simulator just to get the one I chose to do what I need - you don't need to add your own processor models and fix the bugs you find in AVRStudio or most of the other PC simulators. If electronics was my work rather than my hobby, I'd buy a PC today. If electronics was my hobby and I wasn't a programmer, I'd buy a PC today. If I needed to built multi-layer boards or simulate complex mixed-signal circuits, I'd buy a PC today. Well, actually I'd buy an Intel Mac and run Windows in a VM, but I'd still be running Windows.
Are you from Kansas?
In summary: Your statistical analysis on a sample size of one showed a 100% failure rate, so Samsung are crap. You found some other people also had failed Samsung drives, so Samsung are crap.
Search the net and you will find people ranting about Seagate drives failures, Western Digital drive failures, IBM drive failures, Maxtor drives failures and failures of drives made by companies neither of us have even heard of. You won't find many, if any, reports of recent failures with 8" floppy drives though, so I suggest you use one of those. They must be more reliable, right?
I'm quite worried about that you know. To protect ourselves from this kind of inadvertant violat^Wthef^Wgang-rape-of-nuns, what we really need is some kind of mechanism which stops you removing copyright notices. Well, I suppose that probably ammounts to stopping you editing the thing at all. Some kind of system for managing rights in general, in fact. Digital rights. We could call it Digital Rights Management. It's for your own good you know.
- MAFIAA shill #71426
Yes, but it's sufficiently direct that I doubt it's unique.
I note the ADL are happy to describe people who damage others property as vandals. When the Vandals laid waste to Gaul, sacked Rome and generally burnt and pillaged their way around Europe, East Asia and North Africa, they did a bit more than spray slogans on walls and break windows. Even been crucified at work for screwing up? I bet there weren't any big wooden crosses involved. Language marches on.
1 and 3 come down to having multiple nodes and copies of the data, which is trivial for a distributed network. The security thing can be dealth with using existing crypto stuff - hashes for integrity of it's no sensetive, encryption if it is sensetive. 40GB may be cheap, but 400TB (a mere 10 000 users) isn't so cheap.
The Anti-Defamation League are a bunch of anti-Nazi Nazis.
Perhaps you only have 32MB of RAM, but it takes a little while to dump a gig or two to disk and copy it back. Or were you forgetting about shutting down and restarting, or hibernating and restoring?
iBooks can do it just fine, it's just that Apple didn't enable it (presumably to make the 12" PowerBook more desirable). I use a 1280x1024 external monitor with my iBook, while also using the inernal 1024x768 display and it works perfectly. "Screen Spanning Doctor" is your friend.
Actually, you got a 17" 1120x832 monitor with NeXT machines.
It'll be called the MacPamphlet.
So using a style which leads to the minimum of errors is less important than your personal preference? It's not surprising that most software is bug-laden shit when so many programmers have attitudes like yours.
I meant the bit about the oceans being too big to damage easily. We don't even know the full effects of overfishing on the oceans yet. Who'd have though that refrigerators and spray cans could punch a hole in the ozone layer? We weren't even trying to manipulate the atmosphere, but still managed to create a hole in the ozone layer 'by accident'. I don't think there's much debate that we did that any more. And anthropmorphic climate change seems pretty clear to the overwhelming majority of experts in the field.
That's what they used to say about the atmosphere.
Haven't they? What did they do wrong? Biosphere 2 failed because of design flaws, not because of anything those inside did or did not do. In fact, those inside did everything expected of them in substantially worse conditions (dangerously low oxygen levels, thanks to soil with too much organic matter feeding bacteria which consumed the oxygen) than expected. They didn't freak out, start screaming to get out or start killing each other. They didn't even stop doing science.
I gave up closing all but the fattest applications a few weeks after getting a Mac. Apple-tab to Terminal, Apple-N to open a new one. There's no point rebooting, rarely any point shutting down and no point closing Terminal if you use it enough to care. I'm sure if something else needs the massive 8.7MB the seven Terminal windows I have open, the system will swap it out. Close all the windows or Apple-H if seeing the extra windows in Exposaaay annoys you.
Not as much as with code, no. But where I have (specs, reports, budgets, copy, correspondance...), Microsoft Word's locking and (in more recent versions) merging features have provided sufficient "version control". I've never worked somewhere where documents were the end result or on projects with 1000 people though. Much as I hate MS, they do have technologies to deal with this kind of thing without elaborate version control and publishing mechanisms. Now, sometimes you do need to edit documents in private and publish; some organisations and projects are sufficiently large or heirachical that it's necesarry. But it's not always so and having the option not to is, in smaller, organisationally-flatter environments, preferable.
No worries. I'm sorry I was so arsey and self-righteous in my response, rather than considering the possibility that you might have had a point (however aggressively put it was). These kind of misunderstandings seem quite common on Slashdot. Who says geeks are all pedants with no social skills, eh? And I'm referring to myself there :)
The question is what is considered to be the "licensed device". If a VM can be considered the "licensed device", you can run Vista Home/Basic in an VM. If the physical hardware is considered the "licensed device", you can't run Vista Home/Basic in a VM. Given Microsoft make specific mention of things you won't be able to do in a VM for Ultimate (which is supposed to have every feature), but don't mention that loss of functionality for Basic or Home, I suspect that you won't be able to run Basic or Home in a VM at all. But whatever the license says, the decision in practice has been made and will be enforced by the Vista installer. Anybody actually tried it?
That's feasible for the code example, where you actually do move files around as part of the normal process. But what if it's a bunch of images or documents? It's no longer part of the process, it's a workaround. Documents which should be read together should be kept together - whether or not everybody gets to read everything or edit everything. With vanilla *nix permissions, you need version control and publishing mechanisms to do that. They're naturally part of the software development process (because your errors might stop someone else doing their thing), but not naturally part of every other process where multiple files are used my multiple people.
My deepest and most sincere apologies for thinking the point was to discuss the story being summarised, not the slashdot summary itself. Actually reading the wording of the summary again (rather than remembering the gist and actually reading TFA), I see what the OP was getting at now.
You could have justly called me out for not realising the OP was talking about the summary rather than the story, but you didn't. You decided to call me an idiot and try to explain the meaning of hearsay, when it was obvious what I was discussing (the quote from TFA in my post made it obvious it was TFA, not the summary, that I was talking about) and obvious that what I was discussing was not, in fact, hearsay. Ah well, if you want to pretend that I wasn't obviously discussing TFA, feel free to do so.
I'm in the UK. We had our house rewired about 18 months ago and had many of the small, 3-round-pin, unfused sockets fitted. They're only legal for lighting I believe, but they are legal and you can still get them (or we wouldn't have been able to have spanking new ones fitted by a qualified electrician). We use them for lamps, so you can switch on all the lamps in a room from a wall switch. You see them used in hotels for the same purpose. According to our electrician, people just don't ask for them. Perhaps they don't know it's possible, but I certainly like being able to turn all the lamps in a room on and off from one wall switch.
We've got 2-pin shaver sockets (our are 240V, not 115V) in the bathrooms too [for US readers: the room with the bath in it, not a ridiculous synonym for toilet], which is much handier than charging the electric toothbrush or shaver elsewhere (3-pin sockets aren't allowed in bathrooms). There are adapters which fit in 3-square-pin sockets which provide that socket ("shaver plug adapters"). The ones with D-shaped holes will accept US-style 2-pin plugs, as the spacing is similar enough that they can be designed to take the round-pin shaver plugs and flat-pin US-style plugs. The voltage is too high for most US applicances though. I run a small battery charger and a small 5V PSU with US-style plugs which accept "universal" voltages (90-250V) from "shaver plug adapters".