While that will be entertaining to see, this beast, having lost its head, will stagger around and flail its limbs, catching others unawares, before it finally succumbs to death.
This reactor design in an improvement, but I would like to see a design which does not use a pressured coolant. I consider the usage of a pressurized coolant to be a possible point of failure.
By the by, didn't Westinghouse have an earlier standardized reactor design?
Hmm. Thorium is intriguing, and quite possibly profitable. Perhaps more so than Uranium-based power plants.
However, there are two problems: 1.) a proper Thorium power-plant needs to be designed (correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the Thorium reactor most often cited is a Research reactor -> promising, but not commercial), 2.) we need to begin mining for Thorium, which I imagine requires locating various deposits, and extracting the ore in quantity (Uranium mining is rather developed, and a Google search for Thorium mining is coming up with nothing).
Large glass windows, preferably on the second story on up.
Don't put any windows on the first floor, as someone will put a brick through them and make off with the machines in the middle of the night. Repeatedly, as experience recalls.
I'd refer to it as magic: http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/Android-App-Development-for/Triumph-as-a-dev-phone/td-p/16984/page/2
As for the cloak, very interesting. I wonder why it is that every cloak I come across is made out of the scratchiest wool I can imagine? Seriously, I'm getting an abrasion just looking at it. Think I'm going to want a liner for the inside (silk?). However, I agree that the metal clasps are the way to go (they'll hold up over time, string will fray). Colors should be deeper, like emerald green or sapphire blue or midnight black. I do not think embroidery would hold up well over time, so perhaps a print (around the edges, various designs)? And I could go either way on the hood. A little less Renaissance-fairish, a little more inspired by the Renaissance. I live in the northern latitudes, and if I'm going to be wearing one, it needs to keep me warm, be comfortable to wear for several hours, and have some sense of style. But yes, quality materials are important, as abuse is what most of my clothing gets put through (into the washer, with standard detergent, and cold water, muhahahaha). ^_^
Hmm. Perhaps I can get by without the alter; there is an abandoned rock quarry up the road, I think I can hew something out if I need it in a pinch. Not sure what kind of stone.
The goat might actually be the hardest thing to find. Horses for miles where I live, but no goats.
But all joking aside, the driver installation for Windows for this phone is considered non-trivial at best. Any-time the installer lists "a clean copy of Windows" as a prerequisite usually means you are in for a ride.
However, most of the smart-phones currently being offered are kind of frightful for programming purposes. See, it's the whole tethering aspect which appeals to me, and it's the one thing that I seem to have to most difficulty getting my smart-phone to actually do.
Which brings me to my current project -> getting my Motorola phone to talk to my PC. I'm working on getting the cloak, sacrificial alter, and goat necessary to make this work, only it's on back order because of the holidays.
These incredibly high speeds are wonderful, and have their place.
My interests, though, are for sustainable high speeds. I want the equipment to overclock my CPU / GPU / RAM, and be able to keep it running at a high speed indefinitely. And that's part of the problem: these high speed trials require liquid nitrogen or helium, which can be rather expensive.
Your enemies will always use the most outrageous of your previous actions as the standard / bar for what is and isn't acceptable. Hence, with every war, we seem to be creating more and more nightmarish precedents.
With regards to politicians, the same idea applies. You manage to one-up the opposition through some 'dirty' trick this election? Watch the opposition employ the same (or a more evolved) version next election.
And there is no way to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
I am loathe to get into this kind of discussion, because politics is like an unmarked minefield.
However, with regards to the US budget, we're quickly heading down the same road that Greece is on. Raising some taxes, and making a few spending cuts isn't going to work here; that's the standard political chicanery when you're dealing with a populace that wants both; in this case, it's not the populace that's demanding these changes, it's our globalized markets; and they are a lot less patient, a lot more demanding than the populace, and more than a little skeptical (good luck electing a 'leader' whose political charisma will work on them, it usually backfires).
And here's the best part: the naysayers will argue that we aren't; that the US is 'different', that we have some named special quality or advantage that prevents us from faltering; they do not account for the amount of time it will take to change things, in the US, when we are staring at the sacrificial alter; technology moves how fast? law moves how slow?
Our buddies, overseas, have been going down like chumps, one after another. Perhaps there's something to that? Might we learn from it?
Bah, real life may have compromises, but not on every issue. Some things you do not want compromises on, like, I don't know, your various Amendment rights?
And lately, I'm thinking it's a tool for laziness. Rather than convince your opposite numbers of why the nation needs {something}, you tack on a few party favors, and it passes.
I wonder why it is that the thought of running a light-water nuclear fission power plant with only the atmosphere for cooling doesn't bother me, but the thought of using a fjord to cool a data-center does.
It's an unsettling feeling...there must be a reason, I just can't think of it right now.
I've been working on a (God help me) PHP implementation of a CalDav client for Davical, and Safari is one of the five or so browsers I've been testing it on.
Of course it does. It's part of MS's plan to bring the "bang" back into C++. All this nonsense about buffer overflows and what not, that's just the managed code people trying to keep good programmers from realizing the speed and efficiency of a good, tightly written C++ program, which can compromise your machine in 10 seconds flat.
I have frequent, unkind thoughts for a company that scuttled a good migration to a nicer programming experience.
How about, instead of Windows 8, you finish the code migration? 7 will tide us over for another several years.
The printer thing sounds like a standard malfunctioning printer driver -> any decent IT person has run into this problem before. Printer spits out pages and pages of gibberish, and it's a sign that the printer driver needs to be reconfigured. Probably trying to print using a PostScript driver instead of a PCL driver, or something to that effect.
And this is from 2010. Slow news day? Or someone desperately trying to play up the "h@x0r$" card, to drum up a little money for a solution in need of a problem?
Lastly, McAfee has gone downhill from their glory days as an anti-virus provider. That was a long time ago, mind you. They've reached the point where they'd claim they'd discovered foreign government intrusions on a coffee cup. I'm not saying that their advice is untrustworthy; I'm just saying that I haven't heard anyone in IT mention, let alone recommend, one of their products in nearly a decade. I think the only reason I know they still exist is their persistence in trying to bundle their anti-viral products with Adobe Acrobat.
On a side-note, one of the major reasons (but not the only one) for servers getting cracked back in the day, was the warez crowd. Servers sat on fat pipes, with a huge amount of disk space. People would scan entire ip ranges for an unsecured server. You would crack a server (often times, not even that, as a fair number of them didn't even use passwords), upload a bunch of files, then announce the site to everyone on a board somewhere. This was before the advent of cable modems / ADSL / FIOS / etc. Now almost everyone has a fast connection, hideous amounts of disk space, and bit torrent which spreads information faster than the older method.
How do I know? I left a home computer, with an (IIS) FTP server on it and no password, for the purposes of some web work I was doing at the time, on an apparently internet-accessible link, and several days later my hard drive had a bunch of 0-day warez on it. *shrugs*
Random guess? There isn't a lot of extra room in military aircraft. Things need to be molded into the shape of the air-frame itself, which probably causes a few headaches. So, what may fit in the corner of an old air-frame, may be jutting out into the ribs of the pilot in a new one.
Additionally, they're probably trying to improve things, with more dials / electronics / what have you. And while things may work in the lab, reality is the true test.
It's kind of how everyone looks at an anatomy model of the human body, and thinks, damn, there's a lot of empty space in there. And then you're in med school, dissecting your first body, and coming to the stark realization that there is *NO* empty space in there. It's filled, completely, with muscle, fat, organs, and some things which defy description.
In a military aircraft, I imagine the place with the most amount of "free" space is inside the engines, which, when turned on, becomes filled with super-heated fluids and probably isn't the best place to store anything.
And don't the kind of data that could get you in trouble on a disk. When I say trouble, I don't mean the common pirated software / songs / movies, but the kind of stuff that disappears people.
Put in a USB key chain drive. They're arguably easier to destroy in a jiff, assuming you know what you're doing. One blowtorch, one USB key chain drive -> coming to a Youtube near you.
Wonderous. Then I shall tip my hat into the ring, as these kinds of postings seem to require (post an article about the top 5 predictions by someone, and any number of people feel the urge to weigh in / post theirs).
We'll go with the 5 Virtues and the 5 Vices.
Let's start with the Vices, as they are almost guaranteed to be accurate.
1.) Government intrusion into your personal life / civil liberties through technology will continue to increase in frequency / magnitude. Various mentions in the press of 31337 h@x0r$ / foreign governments will fuel a demand for security. The average person will not understand nor care about the 'wars' springing up between those who built the internet, and those who wish to own / destroy / (laughably) safeguard it. 2.) The courts / policy makers will continue to be behind on both their understanding of technology, as well as their understanding of the effects of their rulings in this area. One or two judges may attempt to learn technology, but the rest will remain afraid / underestimate the importance of its effects on the populace. Several bills, and several precedents may make the government machinery appear even more out of touch with the populace than it already is. 3.) Advertisers will continue to promote more intrusive and convoluted schemes. Older forms of advertisement will appear to be less effective than these newer forms. (Just for fun) -> A careful examination of data will show an actual increase in the number of people buying things through the older text-based ads, as the hipsters, always wanting to be seen as non-conformists, will eschew the newer flash / HTML5 / video ads in favor of the older ones, stating that they sound better on vinyl. 4.) "Social" networking / Web 2.0 will continue to be promoted as the future by every person without an adequate business plan, as these people will believe that schmoozing (and charisma) is more important to success than the underlying technology and a solid understanding of the market they wish to operate in. "It's not what you know, but who you know" will hold sway here, as the product may or may not materialize, but the focus will be on making "friends." 5.) Older / mature technology companies will continue to stagger. This problem will mostly manifest itself in upper management / the boardroom, where, if many a corporation could speak, the question of "Where is my head?" would continuously be asked. Several attempts will be made to fix this problem, including company literature speaking of 'vision' and the appointment of a token tech, chosen by way of popularity, to provide a counter-weight to the several members from marketing.
Now for the Virtues, which are almost guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate.
1.) Those skilled in the art of Learning / Technology will finally find a common language / understanding, with the result of educational software that actually speeds up human learning at a rate of over 1000%. It will be possible for any human to assume any job, with less than two months of training. The result will be the appearance of second-graders with PhDs, which will temporarily increase unemployment. 2.) Physicists will improve their understanding of gravity, such that the movement of subatomic particles (gravity tweezers), or trips to faraway planets will become possible. They will find out that in the aftermath of their discoveries, they have more questions than answers, thus fueling the demand for another several generations of humanity to figure it all out. 3.) Artificial Intelligence will become a reality. A certain amount of unsteadiness will be felt for some time, as AI / human relationships take a meandering path towards an equilibrium. Old wounds, in the form of the institution of slavery, will reappear and questions of sentience will dog AI and human philosophers for generations. A common ground may be found when they both find problems that neither is particularly fond of. 4.) Fusion will finally become economically viable. A careful understanding of humanity's in
Agreed. I've had Maxtor hard drives die so often that I could have sworn it was a government operation to have a looksie at the data on the RMAed disks.
And everywhere Maxtor goes, I cringe. See, I started buying Seagate, to get away from Maxtor; Maxtor responded by getting acquired by Seagate, and destroying their product line.
When my IBM Deskstar went bad (the larger one; the smaller one refuses to die), it started showing bad sectors. When my Maxtor drives die, the entire partition disappears.
I'm currently hoping that Corsair does not somehow merge with / acquire Seagate. I've enjoyed my SSDs thus far, and would like to continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
Yes. And favors can be expensive. Which is kind of the point.
Owe too many people one too many favors, and suddenly you're adopting positions completely contrary to your election platform. You can see the effect it has on the current Congress, where members of the populace have argued that Congressmen should sport jackets (ala Nascar) with patches indicating their various 'sponsors'.
Slashdot Mirror
While that will be entertaining to see, this beast, having lost its head, will stagger around and flail its limbs, catching others unawares, before it finally succumbs to death.
This will be my first motion for all forms of government and associated militaries to be permanently banned from the internet.
Do I hear a second?
Nerf 'em.
This reactor design in an improvement, but I would like to see a design which does not use a pressured coolant. I consider the usage of a pressurized coolant to be a possible point of failure.
By the by, didn't Westinghouse have an earlier standardized reactor design?
Hmm. Thorium is intriguing, and quite possibly profitable. Perhaps more so than Uranium-based power plants.
However, there are two problems: 1.) a proper Thorium power-plant needs to be designed (correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the Thorium reactor most often cited is a Research reactor -> promising, but not commercial), 2.) we need to begin mining for Thorium, which I imagine requires locating various deposits, and extracting the ore in quantity (Uranium mining is rather developed, and a Google search for Thorium mining is coming up with nothing).
Large glass windows, preferably on the second story on up.
Don't put any windows on the first floor, as someone will put a brick through them and make off with the machines in the middle of the night. Repeatedly, as experience recalls.
Looks interesting.
I'd refer to it as magic: http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/Android-App-Development-for/Triumph-as-a-dev-phone/td-p/16984/page/2
As for the cloak, very interesting. I wonder why it is that every cloak I come across is made out of the scratchiest wool I can imagine? Seriously, I'm getting an abrasion just looking at it. Think I'm going to want a liner for the inside (silk?). However, I agree that the metal clasps are the way to go (they'll hold up over time, string will fray). Colors should be deeper, like emerald green or sapphire blue or midnight black. I do not think embroidery would hold up well over time, so perhaps a print (around the edges, various designs)? And I could go either way on the hood. A little less Renaissance-fairish, a little more inspired by the Renaissance. I live in the northern latitudes, and if I'm going to be wearing one, it needs to keep me warm, be comfortable to wear for several hours, and have some sense of style. But yes, quality materials are important, as abuse is what most of my clothing gets put through (into the washer, with standard detergent, and cold water, muhahahaha). ^_^
Hmm. Perhaps I can get by without the alter; there is an abandoned rock quarry up the road, I think I can hew something out if I need it in a pinch. Not sure what kind of stone.
The goat might actually be the hardest thing to find. Horses for miles where I live, but no goats.
But all joking aside, the driver installation for Windows for this phone is considered non-trivial at best. Any-time the installer lists "a clean copy of Windows" as a prerequisite usually means you are in for a ride.
The Kraken. That must be it.
I want to say as a programmer, yes.
However, most of the smart-phones currently being offered are kind of frightful for programming purposes. See, it's the whole tethering aspect which appeals to me, and it's the one thing that I seem to have to most difficulty getting my smart-phone to actually do.
Which brings me to my current project -> getting my Motorola phone to talk to my PC. I'm working on getting the cloak, sacrificial alter, and goat necessary to make this work, only it's on back order because of the holidays.
These incredibly high speeds are wonderful, and have their place.
My interests, though, are for sustainable high speeds. I want the equipment to overclock my CPU / GPU / RAM, and be able to keep it running at a high speed indefinitely. And that's part of the problem: these high speed trials require liquid nitrogen or helium, which can be rather expensive.
Your enemies will always use the most outrageous of your previous actions as the standard / bar for what is and isn't acceptable. Hence, with every war, we seem to be creating more and more nightmarish precedents.
With regards to politicians, the same idea applies. You manage to one-up the opposition through some 'dirty' trick this election? Watch the opposition employ the same (or a more evolved) version next election.
And there is no way to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
I am loathe to get into this kind of discussion, because politics is like an unmarked minefield.
However, with regards to the US budget, we're quickly heading down the same road that Greece is on. Raising some taxes, and making a few spending cuts isn't going to work here; that's the standard political chicanery when you're dealing with a populace that wants both; in this case, it's not the populace that's demanding these changes, it's our globalized markets; and they are a lot less patient, a lot more demanding than the populace, and more than a little skeptical (good luck electing a 'leader' whose political charisma will work on them, it usually backfires).
And here's the best part: the naysayers will argue that we aren't; that the US is 'different', that we have some named special quality or advantage that prevents us from faltering; they do not account for the amount of time it will take to change things, in the US, when we are staring at the sacrificial alter; technology moves how fast? law moves how slow?
Our buddies, overseas, have been going down like chumps, one after another. Perhaps there's something to that? Might we learn from it?
Bah, real life may have compromises, but not on every issue. Some things you do not want compromises on, like, I don't know, your various Amendment rights?
And lately, I'm thinking it's a tool for laziness. Rather than convince your opposite numbers of why the nation needs {something}, you tack on a few party favors, and it passes.
I wonder why it is that the thought of running a light-water nuclear fission power plant with only the atmosphere for cooling doesn't bother me, but the thought of using a fjord to cool a data-center does.
It's an unsettling feeling...there must be a reason, I just can't think of it right now.
7 people.
I've been working on a (God help me) PHP implementation of a CalDav client for Davical, and Safari is one of the five or so browsers I've been testing it on.
*grumble grumble*
Of course it does. It's part of MS's plan to bring the "bang" back into C++. All this nonsense about buffer overflows and what not, that's just the managed code people trying to keep good programmers from realizing the speed and efficiency of a good, tightly written C++ program, which can compromise your machine in 10 seconds flat.
I have frequent, unkind thoughts for a company that scuttled a good migration to a nicer programming experience.
How about, instead of Windows 8, you finish the code migration? 7 will tide us over for another several years.
The printer thing sounds like a standard malfunctioning printer driver -> any decent IT person has run into this problem before. Printer spits out pages and pages of gibberish, and it's a sign that the printer driver needs to be reconfigured. Probably trying to print using a PostScript driver instead of a PCL driver, or something to that effect.
And this is from 2010. Slow news day? Or someone desperately trying to play up the "h@x0r$" card, to drum up a little money for a solution in need of a problem?
Lastly, McAfee has gone downhill from their glory days as an anti-virus provider. That was a long time ago, mind you. They've reached the point where they'd claim they'd discovered foreign government intrusions on a coffee cup. I'm not saying that their advice is untrustworthy; I'm just saying that I haven't heard anyone in IT mention, let alone recommend, one of their products in nearly a decade. I think the only reason I know they still exist is their persistence in trying to bundle their anti-viral products with Adobe Acrobat.
On a side-note, one of the major reasons (but not the only one) for servers getting cracked back in the day, was the warez crowd. Servers sat on fat pipes, with a huge amount of disk space. People would scan entire ip ranges for an unsecured server. You would crack a server (often times, not even that, as a fair number of them didn't even use passwords), upload a bunch of files, then announce the site to everyone on a board somewhere. This was before the advent of cable modems / ADSL / FIOS / etc. Now almost everyone has a fast connection, hideous amounts of disk space, and bit torrent which spreads information faster than the older method.
How do I know? I left a home computer, with an (IIS) FTP server on it and no password, for the purposes of some web work I was doing at the time, on an apparently internet-accessible link, and several days later my hard drive had a bunch of 0-day warez on it. *shrugs*
Random guess? There isn't a lot of extra room in military aircraft. Things need to be molded into the shape of the air-frame itself, which probably causes a few headaches. So, what may fit in the corner of an old air-frame, may be jutting out into the ribs of the pilot in a new one.
Additionally, they're probably trying to improve things, with more dials / electronics / what have you. And while things may work in the lab, reality is the true test.
It's kind of how everyone looks at an anatomy model of the human body, and thinks, damn, there's a lot of empty space in there. And then you're in med school, dissecting your first body, and coming to the stark realization that there is *NO* empty space in there. It's filled, completely, with muscle, fat, organs, and some things which defy description.
In a military aircraft, I imagine the place with the most amount of "free" space is inside the engines, which, when turned on, becomes filled with super-heated fluids and probably isn't the best place to store anything.
Thank You.
And don't the kind of data that could get you in trouble on a disk. When I say trouble, I don't mean the common pirated software / songs / movies, but the kind of stuff that disappears people.
Put in a USB key chain drive. They're arguably easier to destroy in a jiff, assuming you know what you're doing. One blowtorch, one USB key chain drive -> coming to a Youtube near you.
Wonderous. Then I shall tip my hat into the ring, as these kinds of postings seem to require (post an article about the top 5 predictions by someone, and any number of people feel the urge to weigh in / post theirs).
We'll go with the 5 Virtues and the 5 Vices.
Let's start with the Vices, as they are almost guaranteed to be accurate.
1.) Government intrusion into your personal life / civil liberties through technology will continue to increase in frequency / magnitude. Various mentions in the press of 31337 h@x0r$ / foreign governments will fuel a demand for security. The average person will not understand nor care about the 'wars' springing up between those who built the internet, and those who wish to own / destroy / (laughably) safeguard it.
2.) The courts / policy makers will continue to be behind on both their understanding of technology, as well as their understanding of the effects of their rulings in this area. One or two judges may attempt to learn technology, but the rest will remain afraid / underestimate the importance of its effects on the populace. Several bills, and several precedents may make the government machinery appear even more out of touch with the populace than it already is.
3.) Advertisers will continue to promote more intrusive and convoluted schemes. Older forms of advertisement will appear to be less effective than these newer forms. (Just for fun) -> A careful examination of data will show an actual increase in the number of people buying things through the older text-based ads, as the hipsters, always wanting to be seen as non-conformists, will eschew the newer flash / HTML5 / video ads in favor of the older ones, stating that they sound better on vinyl.
4.) "Social" networking / Web 2.0 will continue to be promoted as the future by every person without an adequate business plan, as these people will believe that schmoozing (and charisma) is more important to success than the underlying technology and a solid understanding of the market they wish to operate in. "It's not what you know, but who you know" will hold sway here, as the product may or may not materialize, but the focus will be on making "friends."
5.) Older / mature technology companies will continue to stagger. This problem will mostly manifest itself in upper management / the boardroom, where, if many a corporation could speak, the question of "Where is my head?" would continuously be asked. Several attempts will be made to fix this problem, including company literature speaking of 'vision' and the appointment of a token tech, chosen by way of popularity, to provide a counter-weight to the several members from marketing.
Now for the Virtues, which are almost guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate.
1.) Those skilled in the art of Learning / Technology will finally find a common language / understanding, with the result of educational software that actually speeds up human learning at a rate of over 1000%. It will be possible for any human to assume any job, with less than two months of training. The result will be the appearance of second-graders with PhDs, which will temporarily increase unemployment.
2.) Physicists will improve their understanding of gravity, such that the movement of subatomic particles (gravity tweezers), or trips to faraway planets will become possible. They will find out that in the aftermath of their discoveries, they have more questions than answers, thus fueling the demand for another several generations of humanity to figure it all out.
3.) Artificial Intelligence will become a reality. A certain amount of unsteadiness will be felt for some time, as AI / human relationships take a meandering path towards an equilibrium. Old wounds, in the form of the institution of slavery, will reappear and questions of sentience will dog AI and human philosophers for generations. A common ground may be found when they both find problems that neither is particularly fond of.
4.) Fusion will finally become economically viable. A careful understanding of humanity's in
It's be easier to predict the future, if you're the one making it happen.
Agreed. I've had Maxtor hard drives die so often that I could have sworn it was a government operation to have a looksie at the data on the RMAed disks.
And everywhere Maxtor goes, I cringe. See, I started buying Seagate, to get away from Maxtor; Maxtor responded by getting acquired by Seagate, and destroying their product line.
When my IBM Deskstar went bad (the larger one; the smaller one refuses to die), it started showing bad sectors. When my Maxtor drives die, the entire partition disappears.
I'm currently hoping that Corsair does not somehow merge with / acquire Seagate. I've enjoyed my SSDs thus far, and would like to continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
By only employing people who are willing to work for money, and paying them well?
Yes. And favors can be expensive. Which is kind of the point.
Owe too many people one too many favors, and suddenly you're adopting positions completely contrary to your election platform. You can see the effect it has on the current Congress, where members of the populace have argued that Congressmen should sport jackets (ala Nascar) with patches indicating their various 'sponsors'.