Supersonic biz-jets more realistic
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
By going with a smaller aircraft, Learjet sized, you can reduce design and manufacturing costs. That and you can target the filthy-rich-let's-buy-a-trip-on-a-Soyuz-for-fun market instead of the save-bucks-at-all-costs airline market.
Once a few supersonic bizjets are on the market, it would be easier to scale the designs up to airliner sizes.
Is Lionel Hutz representing SCO?
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
"Your Honor, I'd like to ask for a bad court thingy."
Actually, I'm thinking that BayStar isn't selling short immediately. They're going to wait until the share prices jump up some more.
Here's the real plan if we're talking death spirals.
They bought $50M at $16/share, which helps Darl & Co. throw around lots of frivilous litigation, which will pump up the stock prices to even more inflated levels.
At some higher stock price, say $32/share, they'll short 3 million shares of stock (equal number to what they bought at $50M), which will get them $100M of cash. If SCO loses the court case and goes into the death spiral, they dump their original investment, watch SCO burn, and $$$PROFIT$$$. If SCO wins, they cover the short with the original investment and still profit.
I suppose this depends on the subject material, but implemented correctly, this may actually make the students learn something. Give out homework assignments that require studying some obscure part of the course's subject matter. Soon after the assignments are turned in, throw a pop quiz at some unpredictable interval on the same obscure material. The students who did the work honestly will be more prepared for the quiz than the ones who just copied. This won't catch cheaters in the act, but it'll help ensure the people who cheat instead of actually learning and using the material won't get decent grades.
Much of the spam these days is being sent by trojans running on unsuspecting computers, and many of the web sites pointed to in spam are on systems whose owners have no idea their machines are being abused.
A better idea would be to work on speeding up the response time for mechanisms used to shut down spam, such as Spamcop and Vipul's Razor. The general idea is that we should automate and accelerate the chain of events starting with spam detection (manually or by spam filters,) followed by reporting of spam, then blockage of spam in as many places as possible as well as TOS termination of the spammer's accounts. The entire process from spam detection to widespread blockage and TOS termination should take no more than five minutes. Every time a spammer starts spewing crap to people's mailboxes, he should expect to have his connection cut immediately. If the spammer is a trojan running on an innocent's machine, it still gets cut, with the ISP telling the user they'll be reconnected after they fix their machine. Bayesian filtering is a good start for fast spam detection. We need more mechanisms in place to distribute that information and block spammers.
I'm sure the FBI's capable of tracking these guys in the same way they track drug rings, who use all sorts of techniques to obfuscate their origins.
Lots of people track down spammers and publicise their home mailing addresses for free. Surely the FBI's computer crimes unit can trace some of the trojans back to spammers, throw a few of them into Pound You In The Ass prison, and get the rest to sing like canaries. If the feds concentrated their efforts on busting spammers instead of people like Dimitri Sklyarov, life would be Better.
Hmmm... Busting spammers AND crackers. That makes me smile...
My personal vote for industry flavors of the week
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Flavors of the week, past & present:
DRM: Right now every big software company is considering it, and many of them will stop using it when they realize just how much it pisses off their customers, and how little it does to reduce piracy.
Push content: How many of you still have a push client on your systems?/me listens for responses, hears nothing but chirping crickets.
.NET is also a flavor of the week that will be yesterday's news once Microsoft force-upgrades their customers to the next flavor of the week.
Cameras in every gadget, starting with cell-phones. Most people don't care enough to use them, don't want to have to check themselves in the mirror every time their phone rings, and have little use for them outside the normal uses that a dedicated camera is usually used for. In the end, it's an expensive gimmick.
Virtual reality. Visions of William Gibson's matrix have danced in the heads of thousands of developers and marketers, but that's not going to happen in real life. The problem is that VR interfaces are far less intuitive than the good old fashioned screen full of windows with a keyboard & mouse. Can you imagine donning VR goggles & gloves to write a letter or buy airline tickets? It's just plain easier & faster to do it the way we do it today.
DVDs, DirectX and digital cable boxes all use MPEG-2 to compress the video (and yes, I've seen nasty compression artifacts in them). The real question is what tradeoff do you want to make between quality and storage/bandwidth requirements. Uncompressed video consumes obscene amounts of storage and bandwidth. MPEG-4 is better at retaining quality at a given compression rate than MPEG-2.
The part that concerns me is that Hollywood will almost certainly insist on shoving DRM (that's Digital Restrictions Management) down our throats. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't like being told what I can and can't do with the equipment I own. DRM amounts to big businesses stealing the right of people to control the hardware they own.
In order to deal with spammers, we have to analyze their vulnerabilites. Understanding their weaknesses is easy once you answer this question: What do spammers fear the most?
That's easy. Look at spam messages. You'll see forged return addresses, redirections through open relays, spoofed Received lines, etc.
What does this mean? Spammers are most afraid of being tracked and identified.
And they have a good reason to be afraid. When spammers are identified, they get their ISP accounts terminated, and may get stuck paying hundreds of dollars of cleanup fees. They're harrassed, sued, threatened, they quickly earn a terrible reputation. They'll go to extremes to remain anonymous.
The key is to make it difficult or impossible for spammers to forge headers and obfuscate their emails' points of origin. How do we do this? Require cryptographic authentication of all mail going through any MTA. No exceptions, ever. Every time a mail goes through an MTA, it must be signed by that MTA. Any message without a signature or with an invalid signature gets dropped. By requiring crypto signatures, responsible MTAs can be easily tracked, and spamming MTAs can be blocked.
Key creation, distribution and endorsement can be through a central authority, though I prefer a PGP-style web of trust because central authorities can abuse their power. Naturally, any MTA caught distributing spam should immediately get their keys revoked, and the revocation should be distributed to MTAs as widely as possible, causing all emails from that MTA to be blocked in a matter of minutes. If an MTA wants its emails to reach its destinations, it will crack down hard on spammers.
The difficult part is convincing ISPs to require authentication and drop unsigned messages. However, if a large ISP such as AOL or Comcast can be convinced to do this, MTAs will have a strong incentive to start signing messages, and authentication will start to catch on.
This would cause too many problems for legitimate people.
My solution would be mandatory authentication. Require all mail relays & servers to create and use a cryptographic key and register it on a P2P authentication network. Plenty of signature algorithms are available for such purposes, read Applied Cryptography to learn more. That key is used to sign all emails coming from or being relayed through that system. All emails must be signed by the originating system, and any other systems it passes through, making a cryptographic trail of bread crumbs back to the sender. Any emails without a signature, or with an invalid signature are silently bit-bucketed, with NO EXCEPTIONS. If ISPs let unsigned or invalid messages through, spammers may be able to get spam through and disguise their origin. The crypto signatures prevent spammers from forging headers or otherwise obfuscating their origin, and any spammer trying to send email through this system will be immediately tracked down and blocked, and their admins contacted with requests for a TOS for the spammer, with threat of blacklisting if the spammer is allowed to continue. In short, it should prevent spammers from forging headers to make the spam appear to be from legitimate systems, thus eliminating stories like this one.
In order to prevent abuse of the P2P authentication network, any member of that network can sign other server's keys, encouraging members to get keys signed by trusted parties (which will naturally emerge). Spammers who constantly change their keys to avoid being blocked would be refused an endorsement by the trusted key signing parties. The trusted signers can be anyone from the US Government to a local ISP who took matters to their own hands and built their own network of trust. If a key signer endorses too many spammers or blacklists too many non-spammers, mail admins are free to stop using that signer and switch to one that's more trustworthy. If a key signer endorsed a key from someone that turns out later to be a spammer, he can issue a signature revocation.
Ideally, the system will ensure that spammers are immediately blacklisted minutes after the first spams are caught, and that that information is propogated quickly enough to enable thousands of mail systems to block emails from that spammer, and that attempts to evade the system are quickly caught. It would enable people to come forward as signing authorities so mailers have a better idea which systems they can trust to stay legit, and it would make sure that incompetent or malicious signers are easily ignored.
This feat's nifty because now, when the user thinks about closing his hand, the way a non-amputee would think about closing his natural hand, the bionic hand closes. You don't have to shrug your shoulders or anything like that, you use the artificial limb in the same way you use a natural limb.
This professor was my computer graphics and computer vision teacher. He was given offers to work for the DOD and for military contractors, but turned them down, not because he didn't agree with them, but because if he took the job, his work would be classifed and he wouldn't be able to publish.
Looking at the example of J. K. Rowling in the article, I've had a brainfart.
Farming has been mechanized. So has manufacturing, and as the article predicts, service sector work will be done by machines as well. There will always be some demand for IT, though that's being filled more frequently by workers in countries like India with cheap labor. Same goes for accounting, call center and other formerly safe white collar jobs.
Essentially, almost the entire workforce will be replaced by machines.
So what's left that can't be done by machines?
Art. All art - writing, painting, music, computer games, etc.
That's how J. K. Rowling adapted, by writing books. So far, we don't know how to make machines that make art, thus we have to make art ourselves. Granted, there's a lot of competition out there for artists, but there are still many people out there who can make money through selling artwork and performances.
Wow, I just check my mailbox (as well as the abyss into which my ISP casts the most blatent spam.) It's nearly disappeared. My ISP's spam hell contains mostly SoBig viruses, and my current biggest email nuisance is bounce mails from ISPs getting SoBig viruses that forged my email address into the From header.
Sysadmins, PLEASE turn off the virus bounce emails. I do not have SoBig on my computer, since I run Linux & SoBig won't run on my box.
I'm another person with ADHD (yes, professionally diagnosed & taking prescription stimulants).
The thing to remember about ADHD isn't that it creates a lack of attention, it's more of a lack of ability to control your concentration, meaning that you can have too little or too much concentration. That explains how a person with ADHD can have such a hard time staying on task when trying to get work done, but then hyperfocus in a 20 hour Quake marathon, missing classes, work, nookie, etc. Hyperfocusing is very common among people with ADHD.
I've gotten myself in trouble with both lack of concentration and hyperfocusing.
The fact is that ninety-nine plus percent of those companies who are employing people for options are not going to end up with stock that's worth anything.
So if you have to work for free, do it for yourself and start a project. At least you won't be deluding yourself into thinking your getting money when you're not.
You'll be able to work on exactly what you want to work on, and all the fruits of your labor will be yours in the end, even if it has no dollar value. You can sell your project if anyone will buy it, or you can give it away under the GPL and get karma++.
Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
Let me give you a bit of perspective on what a "300G shock rating" really means. If you drop a can of pop on your counter from three inches, that will induce a shock on the can greater than 1000Gs. When I worked in the HD industry, I learned that simply tapping a drive with a pencil induced a momentary shock of 40-50Gs. I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.
Moral of the story, hard drives are fragile The only reason why they seem so tough is because the firmware detects and fixes thousands of errors that you don't even see.
It's definitely related to cost cutting. The manufacturers are perfectly capable of keeping the drives reliable at higher densities - that's just a matter of using the amount of error correction, sector sparing, interleaving, scratch detection & such to bring the error rate down to a statistically insignificant number.
The hard drive manufacturers are under intense pressure to cut costs. If they can reduce the price per unit by five cents, when that is spread out over hundreds of millions of drives, that adds up to a lot of money. Especially in this economy, this means you'll see drives made with cheaper components, with less testing done, in clean rooms that may not be as clean as they used to be, by workers that don't have the training their predecessors had, using firmware that has been hacked and rehacked until "spaghetti" doesn't even begin to describe it. (Don't ask me how I know this...)
But this is no excuse for a 90% failure rate. Making drives cheaply is one thing, but we as customers still expect them to work for at least two or three years without problems. I still expect vendors to own up to their screwups and make them right.
Through all the flames and accusations, the only thing I've definitively concluded Red Hat is doing is changing the default themes & colors & such so that KDE apps and GNOME apps behave as identically as possible, in order to minimize interface confusion for users. Maybe they're doing other stuff, but I haven't got a straight answer.
WHAT IS RED HAT DOING TO KDE? While we're at it, are they doing similar stuff to GNOME?
The sort of volumetric projection in Star Wars is not possible without some super fancy technology to bend light rays once they hit a certain point in space. You need something for the photons to hit and change direction in, like glass.
One way this could be made possible, using technology that isn't here yet, is what I'd call a "nanocloud display". When you turn the thing on, a vent opens and out comes zillons of tiny nanites, which look sort of like flying disco balls under the microscope. The nanites would each be able to fly, using tiny thrusters, propellers, fly wings, whatever. They would also be covered with lots of red, green and blue colored mirrors (or you could have separate red, green and blue colored nanites) which each have little servos on them that can adjust the mirrors' angles, or even hide the mirrors completely.
When the unit is programed to display something, the nanites fly themselves into a 3-d grid formation, and adjust their mirrors so that a light that is shone on them reflects at a programmed angle. Voila, instant volumetric display, with views that change arbitrarity as the viewing angle changes (assuming enough nanites to cover all voxels from all potential angles.) Help me Obiwan Kenobi, you're my only hope! The problem is that a gust of wind may screw up your display, and scatter your precious nanites to the 4 winds.
Of course, this requires technology that we don't have yet.
That's one of my gripes with modern airliners - they have such teeny, hard-to-see-through windows. My guess is that they make them that small so the airframe can withstand the streeses of pressurization.
The DeHavilland Comet, one of the first jet airliners, was originally built with large square windows. About a year after they went into service, Comets started falling out of the sky because of metal fatigue from pressurization. Since then, airliners have been designed with those tiny round windows we've all come to hate.
It would be really nice if the BWB was built with big panoramic front windows, so anyone could stick their heads into the aisle and get a decent view. But I don't know if they can do that without comprimising the structure.
After destroying several cheap plastic keyboards in succession, I got myself an IBM Model M, the original "clicky" keyboard. It uses buckling springs and capacitance switches, it's built like a tank, lasts forever, and its diswasher safe.
There is no other keyboard out there with the sweet tactile response of a Model M. They can be had for 15-20 bucks + shipping on E-Bay. One of the sellers offers them used, but protected with the old "keyboard condom" dust covers - get one of those, clean it up with some isopropyl and WD-40, and you'll have a keyboard that is in mint condition.
Slashdot Mirror
By going with a smaller aircraft, Learjet sized, you can reduce design and manufacturing costs. That and you can target the filthy-rich-let's-buy-a-trip-on-a-Soyuz-for-fun market instead of the save-bucks-at-all-costs airline market.
Once a few supersonic bizjets are on the market, it would be easier to scale the designs up to airliner sizes.
"Your Honor, I'd like to ask for a bad court thingy."
"You mean a mistrial?"
"Yeah."
Actually, I'm thinking that BayStar isn't selling short immediately. They're going to wait until the share prices jump up some more.
Here's the real plan if we're talking death spirals.
They bought $50M at $16/share, which helps Darl & Co. throw around lots of frivilous litigation, which will pump up the stock prices to even more inflated levels.
At some higher stock price, say $32/share, they'll short 3 million shares of stock (equal number to what they bought at $50M), which will get them $100M of cash. If SCO loses the court case and goes into the death spiral, they dump their original investment, watch SCO burn, and $$$PROFIT$$$. If SCO wins, they cover the short with the original investment and still profit.
Does this make sense?
I suppose this depends on the subject material, but implemented correctly, this may actually make the students learn something. Give out homework assignments that require studying some obscure part of the course's subject matter. Soon after the assignments are turned in, throw a pop quiz at some unpredictable interval on the same obscure material. The students who did the work honestly will be more prepared for the quiz than the ones who just copied. This won't catch cheaters in the act, but it'll help ensure the people who cheat instead of actually learning and using the material won't get decent grades.
Much of the spam these days is being sent by trojans running on unsuspecting computers, and many of the web sites pointed to in spam are on systems whose owners have no idea their machines are being abused.
A better idea would be to work on speeding up the response time for mechanisms used to shut down spam, such as Spamcop and Vipul's Razor. The general idea is that we should automate and accelerate the chain of events starting with spam detection (manually or by spam filters,) followed by reporting of spam, then blockage of spam in as many places as possible as well as TOS termination of the spammer's accounts. The entire process from spam detection to widespread blockage and TOS termination should take no more than five minutes. Every time a spammer starts spewing crap to people's mailboxes, he should expect to have his connection cut immediately. If the spammer is a trojan running on an innocent's machine, it still gets cut, with the ISP telling the user they'll be reconnected after they fix their machine. Bayesian filtering is a good start for fast spam detection. We need more mechanisms in place to distribute that information and block spammers.
I'm sure the FBI's capable of tracking these guys in the same way they track drug rings, who use all sorts of techniques to obfuscate their origins.
Lots of people track down spammers and publicise their home mailing addresses for free. Surely the FBI's computer crimes unit can trace some of the trojans back to spammers, throw a few of them into Pound You In The Ass prison, and get the rest to sing like canaries. If the feds concentrated their efforts on busting spammers instead of people like Dimitri Sklyarov, life would be Better.
Hmmm... Busting spammers AND crackers. That makes me smile...
Flavors of the week, past & present:
DRM: Right now every big software company is considering it, and many of them will stop using it when they realize just how much it pisses off their customers, and how little it does to reduce piracy.
Push content: How many of you still have a push client on your systems? /me listens for responses, hears nothing but chirping crickets.
.NET is also a flavor of the week that will be yesterday's news once Microsoft force-upgrades their customers to the next flavor of the week.
Cameras in every gadget, starting with cell-phones. Most people don't care enough to use them, don't want to have to check themselves in the mirror every time their phone rings, and have little use for them outside the normal uses that a dedicated camera is usually used for. In the end, it's an expensive gimmick.
Virtual reality. Visions of William Gibson's matrix have danced in the heads of thousands of developers and marketers, but that's not going to happen in real life. The problem is that VR interfaces are far less intuitive than the good old fashioned screen full of windows with a keyboard & mouse. Can you imagine donning VR goggles & gloves to write a letter or buy airline tickets? It's just plain easier & faster to do it the way we do it today.
Oops, that's DirectTV. Sorry, my brain's got crosslinked files... Where's fsck.brain when I need it?
DVDs, DirectX and digital cable boxes all use MPEG-2 to compress the video (and yes, I've seen nasty compression artifacts in them). The real question is what tradeoff do you want to make between quality and storage/bandwidth requirements. Uncompressed video consumes obscene amounts of storage and bandwidth. MPEG-4 is better at retaining quality at a given compression rate than MPEG-2.
The part that concerns me is that Hollywood will almost certainly insist on shoving DRM (that's Digital Restrictions Management) down our throats. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't like being told what I can and can't do with the equipment I own. DRM amounts to big businesses stealing the right of people to control the hardware they own.
In order to deal with spammers, we have to analyze their vulnerabilites. Understanding their weaknesses is easy once you answer this question: What do spammers fear the most?
That's easy. Look at spam messages. You'll see forged return addresses, redirections through open relays, spoofed Received lines, etc.
What does this mean? Spammers are most afraid of being tracked and identified.
And they have a good reason to be afraid. When spammers are identified, they get their ISP accounts terminated, and may get stuck paying hundreds of dollars of cleanup fees. They're harrassed, sued, threatened, they quickly earn a terrible reputation. They'll go to extremes to remain anonymous.
The key is to make it difficult or impossible for spammers to forge headers and obfuscate their emails' points of origin. How do we do this? Require cryptographic authentication of all mail going through any MTA. No exceptions, ever. Every time a mail goes through an MTA, it must be signed by that MTA. Any message without a signature or with an invalid signature gets dropped. By requiring crypto signatures, responsible MTAs can be easily tracked, and spamming MTAs can be blocked.
Key creation, distribution and endorsement can be through a central authority, though I prefer a PGP-style web of trust because central authorities can abuse their power. Naturally, any MTA caught distributing spam should immediately get their keys revoked, and the revocation should be distributed to MTAs as widely as possible, causing all emails from that MTA to be blocked in a matter of minutes. If an MTA wants its emails to reach its destinations, it will crack down hard on spammers.
The difficult part is convincing ISPs to require authentication and drop unsigned messages. However, if a large ISP such as AOL or Comcast can be convinced to do this, MTAs will have a strong incentive to start signing messages, and authentication will start to catch on.
This would cause too many problems for legitimate people.
My solution would be mandatory authentication. Require all mail relays & servers to create and use a cryptographic key and register it on a P2P authentication network. Plenty of signature algorithms are available for such purposes, read Applied Cryptography to learn more. That key is used to sign all emails coming from or being relayed through that system. All emails must be signed by the originating system, and any other systems it passes through, making a cryptographic trail of bread crumbs back to the sender. Any emails without a signature, or with an invalid signature are silently bit-bucketed, with NO EXCEPTIONS. If ISPs let unsigned or invalid messages through, spammers may be able to get spam through and disguise their origin. The crypto signatures prevent spammers from forging headers or otherwise obfuscating their origin, and any spammer trying to send email through this system will be immediately tracked down and blocked, and their admins contacted with requests for a TOS for the spammer, with threat of blacklisting if the spammer is allowed to continue. In short, it should prevent spammers from forging headers to make the spam appear to be from legitimate systems, thus eliminating stories like this one.
In order to prevent abuse of the P2P authentication network, any member of that network can sign other server's keys, encouraging members to get keys signed by trusted parties (which will naturally emerge). Spammers who constantly change their keys to avoid being blocked would be refused an endorsement by the trusted key signing parties. The trusted signers can be anyone from the US Government to a local ISP who took matters to their own hands and built their own network of trust. If a key signer endorses too many spammers or blacklists too many non-spammers, mail admins are free to stop using that signer and switch to one that's more trustworthy. If a key signer endorsed a key from someone that turns out later to be a spammer, he can issue a signature revocation.
Ideally, the system will ensure that spammers are immediately blacklisted minutes after the first spams are caught, and that that information is propogated quickly enough to enable thousands of mail systems to block emails from that spammer, and that attempts to evade the system are quickly caught. It would enable people to come forward as signing authorities so mailers have a better idea which systems they can trust to stay legit, and it would make sure that incompetent or malicious signers are easily ignored.
This feat's nifty because now, when the user thinks about closing his hand, the way a non-amputee would think about closing his natural hand, the bionic hand closes. You don't have to shrug your shoulders or anything like that, you use the artificial limb in the same way you use a natural limb.
This professor was my computer graphics and computer vision teacher. He was given offers to work for the DOD and for military contractors, but turned them down, not because he didn't agree with them, but because if he took the job, his work would be classifed and he wouldn't be able to publish.
Looking at the example of J. K. Rowling in the article, I've had a brainfart.
Farming has been mechanized. So has manufacturing, and as the article predicts, service sector work will be done by machines as well. There will always be some demand for IT, though that's being filled more frequently by workers in countries like India with cheap labor. Same goes for accounting, call center and other formerly safe white collar jobs.
Essentially, almost the entire workforce will be replaced by machines.
So what's left that can't be done by machines?
Art. All art - writing, painting, music, computer games, etc.
That's how J. K. Rowling adapted, by writing books. So far, we don't know how to make machines that make art, thus we have to make art ourselves. Granted, there's a lot of competition out there for artists, but there are still many people out there who can make money through selling artwork and performances.
So are we entering the Artistic Economy? Maybe...
Wow, I just check my mailbox (as well as the abyss into which my ISP casts the most blatent spam.) It's nearly disappeared. My ISP's spam hell contains mostly SoBig viruses, and my current biggest email nuisance is bounce mails from ISPs getting SoBig viruses that forged my email address into the From header. Sysadmins, PLEASE turn off the virus bounce emails. I do not have SoBig on my computer, since I run Linux & SoBig won't run on my box.
I'm another person with ADHD (yes, professionally diagnosed & taking prescription stimulants).
The thing to remember about ADHD isn't that it creates a lack of attention, it's more of a lack of ability to control your concentration, meaning that you can have too little or too much concentration. That explains how a person with ADHD can have such a hard time staying on task when trying to get work done, but then hyperfocus in a 20 hour Quake marathon, missing classes, work, nookie, etc. Hyperfocusing is very common among people with ADHD.
I've gotten myself in trouble with both lack of concentration and hyperfocusing.
The fact is that ninety-nine plus percent of those companies who are employing people for options are not going to end up with stock that's worth anything.
So if you have to work for free, do it for yourself and start a project. At least you won't be deluding yourself into thinking your getting money when you're not.
You'll be able to work on exactly what you want to work on, and all the fruits of your labor will be yours in the end, even if it has no dollar value. You can sell your project if anyone will buy it, or you can give it away under the GPL and get karma++.
Let me give you a bit of perspective on what a "300G shock rating" really means. If you drop a can of pop on your counter from three inches, that will induce a shock on the can greater than 1000Gs. When I worked in the HD industry, I learned that simply tapping a drive with a pencil induced a momentary shock of 40-50Gs. I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.
Moral of the story, hard drives are fragile The only reason why they seem so tough is because the firmware detects and fixes thousands of errors that you don't even see.
It's definitely related to cost cutting. The manufacturers are perfectly capable of keeping the drives reliable at higher densities - that's just a matter of using the amount of error correction, sector sparing, interleaving, scratch detection & such to bring the error rate down to a statistically insignificant number.
The hard drive manufacturers are under intense pressure to cut costs. If they can reduce the price per unit by five cents, when that is spread out over hundreds of millions of drives, that adds up to a lot of money. Especially in this economy, this means you'll see drives made with cheaper components, with less testing done, in clean rooms that may not be as clean as they used to be, by workers that don't have the training their predecessors had, using firmware that has been hacked and rehacked until "spaghetti" doesn't even begin to describe it. (Don't ask me how I know this...)
But this is no excuse for a 90% failure rate. Making drives cheaply is one thing, but we as customers still expect them to work for at least two or three years without problems. I still expect vendors to own up to their screwups and make them right.
People like Lieberman still haven't grasped this simple concept.
If you don't like a game, DON'T PLAY IT!!!!
Through all the flames and accusations, the only thing I've definitively concluded Red Hat is doing is changing the default themes & colors & such so that KDE apps and GNOME apps behave as identically as possible, in order to minimize interface confusion for users. Maybe they're doing other stuff, but I haven't got a straight answer.
WHAT IS RED HAT DOING TO KDE? While we're at it, are they doing similar stuff to GNOME?
One way this could be made possible, using technology that isn't here yet, is what I'd call a "nanocloud display". When you turn the thing on, a vent opens and out comes zillons of tiny nanites, which look sort of like flying disco balls under the microscope. The nanites would each be able to fly, using tiny thrusters, propellers, fly wings, whatever. They would also be covered with lots of red, green and blue colored mirrors (or you could have separate red, green and blue colored nanites) which each have little servos on them that can adjust the mirrors' angles, or even hide the mirrors completely.
When the unit is programed to display something, the nanites fly themselves into a 3-d grid formation, and adjust their mirrors so that a light that is shone on them reflects at a programmed angle. Voila, instant volumetric display, with views that change arbitrarity as the viewing angle changes (assuming enough nanites to cover all voxels from all potential angles.) Help me Obiwan Kenobi, you're my only hope! The problem is that a gust of wind may screw up your display, and scatter your precious nanites to the 4 winds.
Of course, this requires technology that we don't have yet.
That's one of my gripes with modern airliners - they have such teeny, hard-to-see-through windows. My guess is that they make them that small so the airframe can withstand the streeses of pressurization.
The DeHavilland Comet, one of the first jet airliners, was originally built with large square windows. About a year after they went into service, Comets started falling out of the sky because of metal fatigue from pressurization. Since then, airliners have been designed with those tiny round windows we've all come to hate.
It would be really nice if the BWB was built with big panoramic front windows, so anyone could stick their heads into the aisle and get a decent view. But I don't know if they can do that without comprimising the structure.
The BWB aircraft could hypothetically be built with folding wingtips, like naval fighters. That would solve the excessive wingspan problem.
After destroying several cheap plastic keyboards in succession, I got myself an IBM Model M, the original "clicky" keyboard. It uses buckling springs and capacitance switches, it's built like a tank, lasts forever, and its diswasher safe.
There is no other keyboard out there with the sweet tactile response of a Model M. They can be had for 15-20 bucks + shipping on E-Bay. One of the sellers offers them used, but protected with the old "keyboard condom" dust covers - get one of those, clean it up with some isopropyl and WD-40, and you'll have a keyboard that is in mint condition.