'The "building" that blew off is just a light screen around the reactor building itself. It's very light weight panels hung on an equally light frame, designed to screen the reactor building from view. Nothing else. '
See, now, this is part of the problem. A lot of pro-nuclear people are saying this is no big deal. But to most people, when a building explodes, that's a major big deal even if there *isn't* a nuclear reactor inside it.
This minimizing attitude hurts nuclear power almost as much as the rapid anti-nuke people do.
"Did people even use Kermit after Zmodem was available?"
Kermit was designed and useful for incompatible systems and bad links. Think 7-bit links, mainframes, less-common minicomputers, non-ASCII systems, repurposed long-distance telecom data lines, odd filename restrictions or formats, OS-imposed file formats, brain damaged terminal systems, limited C compiler support, limited system libraries, etc. Kermit wasn't trying to be fast or sophisticated, it was trying to be portable and universal. Different goals.
ZModem was tuned for the 8-bit microcomputer world, where everything was 8N1 and relatively intelligent. There are gains to be had by limiting your scope.
Of course, YModem-G was preferred by those of us with ARQ modems, since omitting error correction from the file transfer protocol gave it a speed boost.
And IIRC, C-Kermit was also a terminal emulator, not just a file transfer protocol. I remember running it (or something like C-Kermit) on a DOS-ish voice mail system that had some dislike of most "fancier" software. It let me talk to the phone switch without having to lug a terminal into the phone closet.
"I didn't particularly want to understand it. I just wanted to use it to download."
"And free services have found new and interesting ways to slow down downloads by splitting them up, imposing time limits and restrictions and trying to get you to pay for the privilege of having those restrictions removed."
Based on your commentary above, you appear to be what we old-timey SysOps would call a "leech". You just want files for free. All this equipment and bandwidth costs money. That's where there are things like download limits, upload ratios, pay avenues, etc.
"Now consider the 'cloud' push, and concepts like Google's ChromeOS. The web browser is becoming the modern day equivalent of a X terminal in a sense."
The HTTP and HTML page request/response mechanism has been compared, with a fair degree of accuracy, to the IBM 3270 terminal system. The web server is the mainframe, the big unseen untouchable system where all the data lives. The terminal/browser stores no data.
"There is nothing new under the sun." (from Ecclesiastes 1:9-14, reportedly written about 2250 years ago)
The exact same thing happened to Slashdot some years back. Database stolen, and it turned out Slashcode was storing user passwords cleartext at the time.
Well, it's Verizon. They're a CDMA (IS-95/2000) carrier, so they prolly have a different acronym. MSC is a GSM term, and it seems like the competing standards have to come up with their own terminology for everything.
I do agree that this article and its author were lacking.
If it's anything like any of the other telco installations I've seen, the facility is *always* running on battery power. Telcos run just about everything off 48 volts DC. City power runs rectifiers to keep the batteries charged. If city power fails, the batteries just begin discharging. The generators come online if city power is out for more than a minute or so.
This is a much better system that most "data" centers, with multiple conversions from AC to DC and back, automatic transfer switches, etc.
Additionally, telco COs usually have two sets of batteries, two sets of wiring in the building, and all the equipment has two power inputs.
"However, a statement of the form "You're either A or not-A" is a true dichotomy, as the given options are complementary."
The English language is not precise enough for that to actually work in practice. (I suspect all human language suffers from this problem (more accurately, I suspect it's a human problem, not a language problem, per se), but that's another discussion.) In this particular case:
"You're either for software freedom or you're not."
There are multiple definitions/interpretations/POVs/etc. for "software freedom", and further implications and subtleties within those.
Does anyone have any actual information on why Apple is dumping Samba?
After approximately 37,249 posts for/against/discussing the GPL and the bad reporting in TFA, I think we've got that covered. But it still leaves the real question unanswered.
"You don't know what reasons someone may have to visit a torrent site. "
"Know"? You're right, I don't *know*. But in terms of probability -- especially given the mention of malware infested sites -- I can predict with a good degree of accuracy.
You'll note I did address the issue of legitimate torrents, and why malware infested sites should be much less of an issue for such.
"Regardless there is no reason that they need expose themselves to malware..."
block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with
Here's an idea. You could, you know, not frequent sites that routinely deal in illegal stuff to avoid other nasty stuff. Kind of like not going to the bad parts of town, ya know?
Yah, yah, I know, there's that one joint in Sin City that makes a great burrito, but guess what, it's mostly crack dealers and thugs. Strictly legit torrents tend to be published from original sites that don't attack you.
Worth noting: The fearmongering about the death of the 'net actually pre-dates the Internet. It originally referred to Usenet. The more things change...
"contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens."
"Or rather, shit happens and the designs work better than they were engineered for."
There's the disconnect between many engineers and many non-engineers right there.
Many engineers look at this and say, "See! This quake was way bigger than it was designed for, and it's holding up kinda-okay. Success!"
Many non-engineers look at this and say, "Oh, fuck! Buildings are exploding!"
It's not enough to meet design criteria. People want it to be safe at all times, in all possible situations. Unfortunately, that's impossible. But then some engineers sell a design as full-proof, knowing that's impossible. At least the unwashed masses have the excuse that they don't know any better.
"A proper reactor like the ones typically employed in the US, will shut down automatically when power is lost to the core."
As someone else said, nuclear reactors don't have an "off switch". The control rods dampen the reaction. On a shutdown, reactivity drops by over an order of magnitude, but it takes minutes or hours to then ramp down to idle levels, and idle still does not mean none.
More significantly, even if you could wave a magic wand and kill all atomic reaction instantly, the core remains at operating temperature until coolant can remove all that thermal energy. And at the risk of stating the obvious, there is a *lot* of thermal energy in the core of a operating nuclear reactor. Most reports are saying their cooling system went offline in under an hour. Even with the magic wand, it would still be hot enough to melt.
All reports say the reactor scramed as soon as the quake hit, *before* the tsunami even arrived. The problem then became residual heat and lack of power for cooling. Coolant boiled off, pressure rose, the rods became uncovered, water starts turning into hydrogen...
"The reactors won't impact the global economy appreciably - it's *highly* unlikely that anything is going to blow up, anyhow. It's sounding like they had a partial scram, with primary coolant system failure afterwards."
Now that the containment building has exploded, I was wondering if you'd like to revise your statement?
"There's a reason that newspapers have several columns of text, and this reason is that text becomes harder to read once lines become longer than 80 characters (roughly 40em in CSS)"
It's actually not the number of characters, but how far the eye has to track. If you get out of central vision (towards peripheral vision) comprehension drops measurably; the brain wants to move the eye and that's bad. So it's a combination of physical column width and how far you are from the text. (i.e., with bigger print you can sit further away.)
The reason terminal windows are 80 columns wide is because IBM punched cards had 80 columns.
Slashdot Mirror
"... unlikely to generate anything larger than an 8.3 or so ..."
And Fukushima I was unlikely to be subject to a 9.0 quake and 50 meter tsunami.
'The "building" that blew off is just a light screen around the reactor building itself. It's very light weight panels hung on an equally light frame, designed to screen the reactor building from view. Nothing else. '
See, now, this is part of the problem. A lot of pro-nuclear people are saying this is no big deal. But to most people, when a building explodes, that's a major big deal even if there *isn't* a nuclear reactor inside it.
This minimizing attitude hurts nuclear power almost as much as the rapid anti-nuke people do.
"Jobs most likely sees himself as a visionary or an artist, perhaps even a philosopher..."
From what I've seen of how he talks, how he treats customers, and how fans follow him, I would say "prophet" would be more apt.
(And like most prophets, he's invented his own religion.)
"Did people even use Kermit after Zmodem was available?"
Kermit was designed and useful for incompatible systems and bad links. Think 7-bit links, mainframes, less-common minicomputers, non-ASCII systems, repurposed long-distance telecom data lines, odd filename restrictions or formats, OS-imposed file formats, brain damaged terminal systems, limited C compiler support, limited system libraries, etc. Kermit wasn't trying to be fast or sophisticated, it was trying to be portable and universal. Different goals.
ZModem was tuned for the 8-bit microcomputer world, where everything was 8N1 and relatively intelligent. There are gains to be had by limiting your scope.
Of course, YModem-G was preferred by those of us with ARQ modems, since omitting error correction from the file transfer protocol gave it a speed boost.
And IIRC, C-Kermit was also a terminal emulator, not just a file transfer protocol. I remember running it (or something like C-Kermit) on a DOS-ish voice mail system that had some dislike of most "fancier" software. It let me talk to the phone switch without having to lug a terminal into the phone closet.
"I didn't particularly want to understand it. I just wanted to use it to download."
"And free services have found new and interesting ways to slow down downloads by splitting them up, imposing time limits and restrictions and trying to get you to pay for the privilege of having those restrictions removed."
Based on your commentary above, you appear to be what we old-timey SysOps would call a "leech". You just want files for free. All this equipment and bandwidth costs money. That's where there are things like download limits, upload ratios, pay avenues, etc.
"Now consider the 'cloud' push, and concepts like Google's ChromeOS. The web browser is becoming the modern day equivalent of a X terminal in a sense."
The HTTP and HTML page request/response mechanism has been compared, with a fair degree of accuracy, to the IBM 3270 terminal system. The web server is the mainframe, the big unseen untouchable system where all the data lives. The terminal/browser stores no data.
"There is nothing new under the sun." (from Ecclesiastes 1:9-14, reportedly written about 2250 years ago)
"Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers."
Where'd you get the coconuts? The coconut's tropical! This is a temperate zone.
Gawker media should be summarily banned.
For those who don't know why http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/12/2234252/Gawker-Source-Code-and-Databases-Compromised
The exact same thing happened to Slashdot some years back. Database stolen, and it turned out Slashcode was storing user passwords cleartext at the time.
And you owe me a new irony meter.
once you've come to an agreement on the meaning of "software freedom"
Aye, and there's the rub. Most complicated issues quickly get into an infinite regression trying to define terms.
I wasn't really responding to you so much as the quote from TFA.
I certainly wasn't defending TFA.
"You mean like a MSC?"
Well, it's Verizon. They're a CDMA (IS-95/2000) carrier, so they prolly have a different acronym. MSC is a GSM term, and it seems like the competing standards have to come up with their own terminology for everything.
I do agree that this article and its author were lacking.
If it's anything like any of the other telco installations I've seen, the facility is *always* running on battery power. Telcos run just about everything off 48 volts DC. City power runs rectifiers to keep the batteries charged. If city power fails, the batteries just begin discharging. The generators come online if city power is out for more than a minute or so.
This is a much better system that most "data" centers, with multiple conversions from AC to DC and back, automatic transfer switches, etc.
Additionally, telco COs usually have two sets of batteries, two sets of wiring in the building, and all the equipment has two power inputs.
"However, a statement of the form "You're either A or not-A" is a true dichotomy, as the given options are complementary."
The English language is not precise enough for that to actually work in practice. (I suspect all human language suffers from this problem (more accurately, I suspect it's a human problem, not a language problem, per se), but that's another discussion.) In this particular case:
"You're either for software freedom or you're not."
There are multiple definitions/interpretations/POVs/etc. for "software freedom", and further implications and subtleties within those.
Does anyone have any actual information on why Apple is dumping Samba?
After approximately 37,249 posts for/against/discussing the GPL and the bad reporting in TFA, I think we've got that covered. But it still leaves the real question unanswered.
"You're either for software freedom or your not."
You either like imposing false dichotomies, or you don't.
"You don't know what reasons someone may have to visit a torrent site. "
"Know"? You're right, I don't *know*. But in terms of probability -- especially given the mention of malware infested sites -- I can predict with a good degree of accuracy.
You'll note I did address the issue of legitimate torrents, and why malware infested sites should be much less of an issue for such.
"Regardless there is no reason that they need expose themselves to malware..."
Some might say it's karma.
block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with
Here's an idea. You could, you know, not frequent sites that routinely deal in illegal stuff to avoid other nasty stuff. Kind of like not going to the bad parts of town, ya know?
Yah, yah, I know, there's that one joint in Sin City that makes a great burrito, but guess what, it's mostly crack dealers and thugs. Strictly legit torrents tend to be published from original sites that don't attack you.
This guy is using precious oxygen that clearly could be going to a more deserving cause. Like helping rust bridges, or something.
Usenet was originally implemented in terms of UUCP and dial-up modems. No IP involved.
Imminent death of the net predicted!
Worth noting: The fearmongering about the death of the 'net actually pre-dates the Internet. It originally referred to Usenet. The more things change...
"contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens."
"Or rather, shit happens and the designs work better than they were engineered for."
There's the disconnect between many engineers and many non-engineers right there.
Many engineers look at this and say, "See! This quake was way bigger than it was designed for, and it's holding up kinda-okay. Success!"
Many non-engineers look at this and say, "Oh, fuck! Buildings are exploding!"
It's not enough to meet design criteria. People want it to be safe at all times, in all possible situations. Unfortunately, that's impossible. But then some engineers sell a design as full-proof, knowing that's impossible. At least the unwashed masses have the excuse that they don't know any better.
"A proper reactor like the ones typically employed in the US, will shut down automatically when power is lost to the core."
As someone else said, nuclear reactors don't have an "off switch". The control rods dampen the reaction. On a shutdown, reactivity drops by over an order of magnitude, but it takes minutes or hours to then ramp down to idle levels, and idle still does not mean none.
More significantly, even if you could wave a magic wand and kill all atomic reaction instantly, the core remains at operating temperature until coolant can remove all that thermal energy. And at the risk of stating the obvious, there is a *lot* of thermal energy in the core of a operating nuclear reactor. Most reports are saying their cooling system went offline in under an hour. Even with the magic wand, it would still be hot enough to melt.
All reports say the reactor scramed as soon as the quake hit, *before* the tsunami even arrived. The problem then became residual heat and lack of power for cooling. Coolant boiled off, pressure rose, the rods became uncovered, water starts turning into hydrogen...
"The reactors won't impact the global economy appreciably - it's *highly* unlikely that anything is going to blow up, anyhow. It's sounding like they had a partial scram, with primary coolant system failure afterwards."
Now that the containment building has exploded, I was wondering if you'd like to revise your statement?
"Software still hasn't recovered its usability from the intentional/unnecessary complexity caused by shareware authors."
I can assure you, unnecessary complexity was not invented by shareware. :-)
They may have been innovative in turning that into a revenue source, though.
"There's a reason that newspapers have several columns of text, and this reason is that text becomes harder to read once lines become longer than 80 characters (roughly 40em in CSS)"
It's actually not the number of characters, but how far the eye has to track. If you get out of central vision (towards peripheral vision) comprehension drops measurably; the brain wants to move the eye and that's bad. So it's a combination of physical column width and how far you are from the text. (i.e., with bigger print you can sit further away.)
The reason terminal windows are 80 columns wide is because IBM punched cards had 80 columns.