If something doesn't match your experience, ask why. The answer will teach you something, teach others something, and often both.
Here's the most important thing: Once you get your feet on the ground, you will start to be asked to do things. If you're asked "can you do X?", and you don't, then say so. However, the most important and best answer to questions like that is "I don't know, but I will find out." And then find out, and report back about it at the next meeting WITHOUT BEING ASKED.
Re:Any mutual "I can't belive it's ...!" moments?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
It's always been said that the two of you sort of do look alike.
Really? I don't really think so. Wil posts photos of himself from time to time, and I've seen Rob Malda in person at Penguicon. I don't really they look much alike, except that they're both about the same height (I'm guessing) and both on the thin side.
what was the "oh my god" moment?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Your recent journal entry talks about Slashdot becoming very popular very quickly. But at some point later, you realize that transferring slashdot over to a commercial enterprise would make you actual money that you could live off of. We'd love to hear the story of that meeting/phone call/e-mail/whatever.
any annoyed or happy /. effect stories?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Do you have any stores of annoyed sysadmins writing/phoning you and complaining that a link on Slashdot crushed their machines?
Alternatively, anyone whose exposure on slashdot boosted their popularity/traffic enough that they could retire/change jobs/make a major job change?
Any mutual "I can't belive it's ...!" moments?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Wil Wheaton has written about meeting a famous author, I think it was Larry Niven, and being completely blown away that Niven was at least as jazzed about meeting Wil as vice versa.
I'm sure you've met lots of folks that us normal mortals only see on TV. Anyone in particular that you were really excited to meet who hyperventilated when they realized who you were?
All I can say is, obviously this guy has never had to debug hardware.
When I was in graduate school, we were always adamant about devices having blinky lights for things. When you're trying to determine whether something is working, it's very useful to have lights whose pattern will give you a general idea of functionality. On the LCD monitor, for instance, the light can tell the difference between, say, the cable being unplugged or the display itself having failed. One glance at a network device can tell you which cables are plugged in and active, and any dead spots in the network will be immediately obvious.
I've always assumed "et-cetera". Sort of like labelling a box "miscellaneous".
It'll be interesting to see what this turns up. I assume that the people that would actually know why it was named that way in Unix are still around and active in computing?
Hmmm...I seem to remember that Bill say that he was going to be stepping down as Microsoft CEO in a couple of years...right about when the 2008 Presidential campaign would be heating up.
Microsoft decided to get into the console gaming arena without any prior experience. Perhaps Bill is thinking this same thing with politics. After all, Arnold Schwatzenegger and Jesse Ventura both won state governorships primarily on name recognition. And as much as I despise is company's tactics, he is quite intelligent and has real management skills.
Yes, the movie marketplace is glutted with a lot of pseudo-scifi action films. The spectacular success of the first Star Wars trilogy was a large part of that happening.
It's interesting to hear him say this, and it will be interesting to see if he really means it. However, since I think George's point of view hasn't touched down on earth in a few decades, I dont think what he has to say really has much bearing on reality.
That could be. They were purchased in late 2002 or early 2003, for what that's worth. I do know that PS2s we had weren't the exact model that the Linux kit was developed for, because before we could use the ethernet properly, we had to install a patched kernel driver.
This news actually does put a damper on the PS3 cluster idea.
No, it probably doesn't make any difference. One big reason we made the cluster of PS2s was that that was the only way to get the Emotion Engine chip at all. Unfortunately, the PS2 itself wasn't a very good platform for scientific computing (restricted boots, no remote reboot, that sort of thing.).
And the Cell Processor is (sort of) available on a blade that goes into an IBM Blade Center. So I think it's likely that we'll be buying those instead.
Glitching because of overheating would be interesting, if true.
The PlayStation 2 cluster that we
built at NCSA had 65 machines in a rack, tightly packed, with the fans of the machines at the front and the back of the shelves pointing at each other. They ran like that for on the order of 15 months, and I'm not aware of any heat related issues.
A thought just struck me. For much more additional cost, you could make the robots bigger and heavier with much bigger solar panels. They could have batteries big enough to hold several days' charge.
I'd guess (based on comments by the head of the current rover project and stuff I've read) that the current rovers are at the large end of the design envelope for solar powered rovers. Larger vehicle, larger panels and batteries...but that means heavier chassis, more weight to move, heavier motors to move it. Eventually you get to the point all the weight is spent supporting other weight. (Besides, on a vehicle like that, the critical parameter is area of solar arrays which drives continuous power budget; batteries let you get through the night, but they don't help with overall power budget.)
The plutonium powered rover is probably taking the design in another direction. It gives a larger power budget with no solar panels, which means that useful percentage of the load is much higher. You can spend weight carrying instruments, instead of solar panels to power them.
Probably because of cost. Each consumes a cost in terms of:
cost to build robot
cost to build advanced instrumentation
cost to condition and launch
continued cost of personnel on the ground to monitor and control when they're on the surface of mars
They probably dont' want to get into the situation where their limiting factor is number of people to man shifts. Instead of several more solar-powered units, they're gearing up to send a bigger one with a nuclear power source, so that it never has to worry about power consumption or supply.
I don't think so. The article says It has driven more than 9.2 kilometers (5.7 miles).
They've been there (almost) 3 years, but that's all the farther Opportunity has gone, and it's the one with all wheels working. They are on the opposite sides of Mars, so they won't ever meet unless they're both functioning for hundreds or thousands of years, which is very unlikely.
That's an good question. When the PI for the project spoke at University of Illinois, someone asked that.
He said that basically having yet another moving part just wouldn't end up being worth the expense of engineering it and adding the weight to the rover and the launch vehicle.
The next rover that will be launched in a few years will have a plutonium oxide power source, so that the power won't be a factor.
Actually, dust on the panels isn't the only issue. Eventually the mechanical parts wear out, get dirt in them, so they don't work. Spirit is running on 5 of 6 wheels now. The PI said that if it loses another one, then it probably won't ever be able to move again. That is, the solar panels are fine, the computers and instruments are fine, but if one more motor goes out, then it's limited to what it can do in a stationary position.
Reading through the comments on this forum so far, looks like Rob got it right. About 1/3 like it a lot, about 1/3 think it's good but they're reflexively resistant, and about 1/3 sounding like country music singers and how they "long for the old one".:-)
Rob didn't want something radical, he wanted an updating of slashdot itself; similar, but better. For everyone here who thinks it sucks and how dare Rob do something this screwed up to "your" site, go make a site and for your own community there! That's what Rob did 10 years ago.
Yup. I miss the voiceover too. For one thing, Harrison Ford's voice is enough different from the "film noir" blokes that did them that it's not cheesey, it's different. And I like hearing what the character is thinking.
I know there are a lot of people who really hate it, and say that it ruins the movie. Well, Ok, that's a point of personal preference. My problem with that is that without the voicover, you have to see the film three times before you understand what's going on.
In my article submission, I also had a couple of sentences about that. I said something like "no word on whether the voice-over is a separate audio track", but the editor just kept the very basics.
Where do you GET the Hydrogen?
on
"H-Prize" Announced
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· Score: 4, Informative
As far as I can tell so far, the Hydrogen car thing is the political equivalent of "Look, it's the GoodYear Blimp!"
Do people not realize that Hydrogen is like electricity, it's only an energy delivery mechanism? There are NO free sources of hydrogen around to tap, to the best of my knowledge. You have to generate the hydrogen somehow...from oil, coal, or some other energy source In the amount of time that this idea has been bantered about, I have come to the conclusion that no one understands this point, including the President and the Secretary of Energy.
The reason that things like solar, wind power, or geothermal and the like have ben discussed as energy SOURCES is that they are just that; ways of extracting energy from processes on the earth. Hydrogen is an energy TRANSFER MECHANISM, not a source.
This will be really interesting when it's mature. I don't know that
the results will be quite the snake-oil-will-solve-all-your-problems
that the article claims, but this could well be a huge deal in five years.
While I am not particularly impressed by people mentioning their PhD either
Yeah; sorry about that. I just like to state up front where I'm coming from and my background. It's very easy for a discussion like this to get into a pissing war, and with everybody effectively anonymous, there's no way to tell the wack-jobs from the sensible people, particuarly since something like this is only going to last a few hours. I wasn't trying to wave my degree as a flag, just wanted to establish basic credibility, and which side of the fence I stood on.
Mach is not a speed, it's a ratio of your speed (measured in distance per time) to the speed of sound in whatever medium you happen to be travelling in (also measured in distance per time).
Hmmm...point taken. I think technically it's supposed to be "mach number", rather than what I said, which is that it's a speed.
I don't know. Mach number is clearly dimensionless...but it gets larger in magnitude when you go faster, so it is a speed in a way. It's a dimensionless speed? That seems contradictory.
I perhaps typed incorrectly, that mach number is not a speed. However, my basic original objection still stands; the web site is playing dumb games with numbers and dimensions and making conclusions without really understanding them.
Slashdot Mirror
"[Skynet] It becomes self-aware at two-fourteen AM, August 29.". From Terminator 2. The implied reference is cute.
If something doesn't match your experience, ask why. The answer will teach you something, teach others something, and often both.
Here's the most important thing: Once you get your feet on the ground, you will start to be asked to do things. If you're asked "can you do X?", and you don't, then say so. However, the most important and best answer to questions like that is "I don't know, but I will find out." And then find out, and report back about it at the next meeting WITHOUT BEING ASKED.
It's always been said that the two of you sort of do look alike.
Really? I don't really think so. Wil posts photos of himself from time to time, and I've seen Rob Malda in person at Penguicon. I don't really they look much alike, except that they're both about the same height (I'm guessing) and both on the thin side.
Your recent journal entry talks about Slashdot becoming very popular very quickly. But at some point later, you realize that transferring slashdot over to a commercial enterprise would make you actual money that you could live off of. We'd love to hear the story of that meeting/phone call/e-mail/whatever.
Do you have any stores of annoyed sysadmins writing/phoning you and complaining that a link on Slashdot crushed their machines?
Alternatively, anyone whose exposure on slashdot boosted their popularity/traffic enough that they could retire/change jobs/make a major job change?
Wil Wheaton has written about meeting a famous author, I think it was Larry Niven, and being completely blown away that Niven was at least as jazzed about meeting Wil as vice versa.
I'm sure you've met lots of folks that us normal mortals only see on TV. Anyone in particular that you were really excited to meet who hyperventilated when they realized who you were?
When I was in graduate school, we were always adamant about devices having blinky lights for things. When you're trying to determine whether something is working, it's very useful to have lights whose pattern will give you a general idea of functionality. On the LCD monitor, for instance, the light can tell the difference between, say, the cable being unplugged or the display itself having failed. One glance at a network device can tell you which cables are plugged in and active, and any dead spots in the network will be immediately obvious.
This will, of course, be available for open source software users in the quarter after hell freezes over.
I've always assumed "et-cetera". Sort of like labelling a box "miscellaneous".
It'll be interesting to see what this turns up. I assume that the people that would actually know why it was named that way in Unix are still around and active in computing?
Hmmm...I seem to remember that Bill say that he was going to be stepping down as Microsoft CEO in a couple of years...right about when the 2008 Presidential campaign would be heating up.
Microsoft decided to get into the console gaming arena without any prior experience. Perhaps Bill is thinking this same thing with politics. After all, Arnold Schwatzenegger and Jesse Ventura both won state governorships primarily on name recognition. And as much as I despise is company's tactics, he is quite intelligent and has real management skills.
Yes, the movie marketplace is glutted with a lot of pseudo-scifi action films. The spectacular success of the first Star Wars trilogy was a large part of that happening.
It's interesting to hear him say this, and it will be interesting to see if he really means it. However, since I think George's point of view hasn't touched down on earth in a few decades, I dont think what he has to say really has much bearing on reality.
You must have had later generation PS2s.
That could be. They were purchased in late 2002 or early 2003, for what that's worth. I do know that PS2s we had weren't the exact model that the Linux kit was developed for, because before we could use the ethernet properly, we had to install a patched kernel driver.
This news actually does put a damper on the PS3 cluster idea.
No, it probably doesn't make any difference. One big reason we made the cluster of PS2s was that that was the only way to get the Emotion Engine chip at all. Unfortunately, the PS2 itself wasn't a very good platform for scientific computing (restricted boots, no remote reboot, that sort of thing.).
And the Cell Processor is (sort of) available on a blade that goes into an IBM Blade Center. So I think it's likely that we'll be buying those instead.
Glitching because of overheating would be interesting, if true.
The PlayStation 2 cluster that we built at NCSA had 65 machines in a rack, tightly packed, with the fans of the machines at the front and the back of the shelves pointing at each other. They ran like that for on the order of 15 months, and I'm not aware of any heat related issues.
A thought just struck me. For much more additional cost, you could make the robots bigger and heavier with much bigger solar panels. They could have batteries big enough to hold several days' charge.
I'd guess (based on comments by the head of the current rover project and stuff I've read) that the current rovers are at the large end of the design envelope for solar powered rovers. Larger vehicle, larger panels and batteries...but that means heavier chassis, more weight to move, heavier motors to move it. Eventually you get to the point all the weight is spent supporting other weight. (Besides, on a vehicle like that, the critical parameter is area of solar arrays which drives continuous power budget; batteries let you get through the night, but they don't help with overall power budget.)
The plutonium powered rover is probably taking the design in another direction. It gives a larger power budget with no solar panels, which means that useful percentage of the load is much higher. You can spend weight carrying instruments, instead of solar panels to power them.
cost to build robot
cost to build advanced instrumentation
cost to condition and launch
continued cost of personnel on the ground to monitor and control when they're on the surface of mars
They probably dont' want to get into the situation where their limiting factor is number of people to man shifts. Instead of several more solar-powered units, they're gearing up to send a bigger one with a nuclear power source, so that it never has to worry about power consumption or supply.
They've been there (almost) 3 years, but that's all the farther Opportunity has gone, and it's the one with all wheels working. They are on the opposite sides of Mars, so they won't ever meet unless they're both functioning for hundreds or thousands of years, which is very unlikely.
He said that basically having yet another moving part just wouldn't end up being worth the expense of engineering it and adding the weight to the rover and the launch vehicle.
The next rover that will be launched in a few years will have a plutonium oxide power source, so that the power won't be a factor.
Actually, dust on the panels isn't the only issue. Eventually the mechanical parts wear out, get dirt in them, so they don't work. Spirit is running on 5 of 6 wheels now. The PI said that if it loses another one, then it probably won't ever be able to move again. That is, the solar panels are fine, the computers and instruments are fine, but if one more motor goes out, then it's limited to what it can do in a stationary position.
Rob didn't want something radical, he wanted an updating of slashdot itself; similar, but better. For everyone here who thinks it sucks and how dare Rob do something this screwed up to "your" site, go make a site and for your own community there! That's what Rob did 10 years ago.
I know there are a lot of people who really hate it, and say that it ruins the movie. Well, Ok, that's a point of personal preference. My problem with that is that without the voicover, you have to see the film three times before you understand what's going on.
In my article submission, I also had a couple of sentences about that. I said something like "no word on whether the voice-over is a separate audio track", but the editor just kept the very basics.
Do people not realize that Hydrogen is like electricity, it's only an energy delivery mechanism? There are NO free sources of hydrogen around to tap, to the best of my knowledge. You have to generate the hydrogen somehow...from oil, coal, or some other energy source In the amount of time that this idea has been bantered about, I have come to the conclusion that no one understands this point, including the President and the Secretary of Energy.
The reason that things like solar, wind power, or geothermal and the like have ben discussed as energy SOURCES is that they are just that; ways of extracting energy from processes on the earth. Hydrogen is an energy TRANSFER MECHANISM, not a source.
I hope they've patented it!
Er...yeah, sorry about that. I was typing fast.
Ahem...should be "for the author's parents and any physics teachers they've ever had."
Yeah; sorry about that. I just like to state up front where I'm coming from and my background. It's very easy for a discussion like this to get into a pissing war, and with everybody effectively anonymous, there's no way to tell the wack-jobs from the sensible people, particuarly since something like this is only going to last a few hours. I wasn't trying to wave my degree as a flag, just wanted to establish basic credibility, and which side of the fence I stood on.
Thanks for the back-up.
Hmmm...point taken. I think technically it's supposed to be "mach number", rather than what I said, which is that it's a speed.
I don't know. Mach number is clearly dimensionless...but it gets larger in magnitude when you go faster, so it is a speed in a way. It's a dimensionless speed? That seems contradictory.
I perhaps typed incorrectly, that mach number is not a speed. However, my basic original objection still stands; the web site is playing dumb games with numbers and dimensions and making conclusions without really understanding them.