More faulty assumptions. The idea is to create the competitive industry.
Oh wait, we already did.
SpaceX and OSC have signed contracts with NASA for ISS resupply, minimum 20 launches through 2015.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin can enter the arena on short notice -- the Delta IV has similar performance to the Space Shuttle and operates at a fraction of the cost.
Going outside the US, Arianespace and several Russian companies have similar capability.
Yeah, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "backers of using private space companies" are talking about. It's not *heavy* cargo transport, it's not even about fundamental advancement. It's about *routine* transport (of both cargo and humans). It's been there, done that, got the t-shirt stuff.
The point is that we know how to do it, and it's time for robust, competitive private industry to make it cheap. Then NASA can focus on the next step instead of worrying about how to maintain and resupply the ISS.
How the hell does one have "personal reasons" for suspecting how efficient photosynthesis is? There's extensive research on exactly that subject, surely you have actual data instead of "personal reasons"?
How is it possible you survived working in IT for over 20 years and not being able to adapt to radical changes? These sort of things happen all the time. One moment you're working from LSB upward, then you're suddenly working from MSB downward.
Most people working in IT in the last 20 years have dealt almost exclusively with x86 CPUs. More to the point, really, most IT people in the last 20 years didn't care about byte order in the first place -- by 1990, not everyone in computing was a programmer, and most of the ones who were didn't care about bitwise operations very often.
8 bit changed into 16, into 32 and now in 64.
So what? Lots of numbers increase, the units used with them rarely change, and all of those are bits.
Filenames can't be longer than 8 characters and now they can.
Just another size increase. Not to mention the fact that by 1990, such a limitation was effectively a DOSism. Anyone on a Unix box didn't give a shit.
A file can't be larger than 4 GB and now it can.
Another simple size increase that did not change the units in question. And look at that, you just referred to a base-2 gigabyte, since that was the limitation.
Not to mention that on many filesystems, it was actually a 2GB limit, not 4GB.
And now finally, operating systems are beginning to understand SI units (which we've been using for all sorts of applications for hundreds of years) and *THAT* is a problem?
How many knuckles am I holding up?
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.
Odd. The few times I've had to explain the concept to anyone, they understood it immediately. "Computers operate in base-2, and a funny result is that kilobytes, megabytes, etc. end up being 1024."
What sub-human protoplasmic entities do YOU deal with?
No, I think _you_ misunderstand the issue. Different words can and do take on different meanings in different contexts due to historical accidents, even where they really should mean the same thing.
Base-2 units have been in use for computers for decades, with HDD manufacturers the sole dissenters not for any technical reason, but because it makes for better marketing.
Taking this path isn't "fixing" a problem, it's caving to 20+ years of false advertising.
When you plug an already suitably-powered audio device (pretty much anything that has an independent power source) into an inevitably-amplified microphone jack, what you get is going to be badly clipped audio (assuming you don't just blow out the sound card). Even if you manage to get the power so low on the input device that you avoid clipping while still having a usable signal, running through the second amplifier is still going to add unnecessary noise/distortion.
This assumes that a 25-year-old 5.25" floppy drive still works, not to mention that the floppies are actually physically and/or track-compatible with anything he might have around. Both may be quite a leap.
Seriously, don't go there, not until you get the data off via the serial port (or flatly establish that you _can't_).
You are dealing with a system that is lucky to be functional _at all_ after 25+ years, and presumably got heavy use while it was active. Corrosion, brittle plastics, dust worked into dangerous areas, etc..
If it's working now, taking it apart stands a good chance of breaking something that is difficult or impossible to fully repair, and you don't want to go there until the information is preserved.
Your complete failure to comprehend that a human life is worth more than its economic value to society is why I called you a psychopath.
Whether or not I recognize any such thing is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. There are no moral imperatives involved in the question of whether self-described 'n00bs' should be running world-facing servers, it is purely an economic question, thus making any non-economic value of a human life entirely irrelevant.
Your complete inability to disconnect your base emotions from a purely economic discussion is why I called you psychologically immature.
Did you even read what I was responding to? Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right (and you're not, entirely), you're just making my point for me.
If the problem is that the Internet is vastly younger than humanity, then the fact that it's "vastly simpler" to become a competent sysadmin should compensate appropriately, and companies should thus be able to go find someone competent to run their servers, rather than relying on a self-described "n00b" owner.
No, a web server has been cracked and turned to spamming, DDoS, and cracking of other servers, causing immense financial damage to other companies.
And we're not talking about the happy-go-lucky land of every-life-is-precious or the insufferable "if even one child is saved..." fantasies, we're in the real world, and in the real world, the economic damage to be wrought from a single company's negligence in security their servers can meet or exceed the economic damage of a surgeon's negligence.
Society places economic value on everything, and the amount of damage a cracked server farm can potentially do far outstrips the economic value of a human life.
The surgeon who kills someone might, if the victim's family is very lucky, be assessed damages of a couple million. An idiot with a cracked server farm can easily cause that much damage on the net.
The web is nearly twenty years old, the internet as we know it thirty, Unix forty. How long does it have to be, exactly, before you realize that there are plenty of people out there who are experts (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) in its practical operation?
If somebody tries to perform surgery without a proper medical education, do you offer pointers, or do you tell them to drop the knife and find a real surgeon?
Companies running public-facing servers without good technical expertise are a menace.
"Inexpensive" does not have an absolute definition, and if you think it does, I think you need to reexamine who the "idiot" is.
The idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the absolute price of any particular disk. The idea is that one can use comparatively inexpensive disks to create an array that would be prohibitively expensive were it to be replaced with a single drive of identical capacity and performance.
Also, that link to a 750GB drive is for a 640GB drive. I know kindergarten is hard, but one would think you would have at least come out of it able to distinguish different numbers.
Serenity is sitting stuck on Mars. This isn't hypothetical, it's happening _now_. If we had humans there, someone could literally walk over and pull it out of the sand so it could be on its way.
Absolute positioning and sizing. No, I'm not kidding. All it takes for the vast majority of site designs is to get rid of the absolute/pixel-based nonsense, and they'll work just fine on almost all displays.
*My* mobile device is a Nexus One with an 800x480 screen. Like *all* such devices, however, the physical dimensions preclude readability of websites designed by idiots.
Websites not designed by idiots can be reflowed appropriately by the device to look good on any screen, and images can, if necessary, be re-scaled as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop being helpless and go look it up for yourself. Jesus.
"What can human beings do in space that robots can't?"
Not get stuck in two inches of sand on Mars.
Don't forget take a squeegee to the damned solar panels.
More faulty assumptions. The idea is to create the competitive industry.
Oh wait, we already did.
SpaceX and OSC have signed contracts with NASA for ISS resupply, minimum 20 launches through 2015.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin can enter the arena on short notice -- the Delta IV has similar performance to the Space Shuttle and operates at a fraction of the cost.
Going outside the US, Arianespace and several Russian companies have similar capability.
Yeah, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "backers of using private space companies" are talking about. It's not *heavy* cargo transport, it's not even about fundamental advancement. It's about *routine* transport (of both cargo and humans). It's been there, done that, got the t-shirt stuff.
The point is that we know how to do it, and it's time for robust, competitive private industry to make it cheap. Then NASA can focus on the next step instead of worrying about how to maintain and resupply the ISS.
How the hell does one have "personal reasons" for suspecting how efficient photosynthesis is? There's extensive research on exactly that subject, surely you have actual data instead of "personal reasons"?
How is it possible you survived working in IT for over 20 years and not being able to adapt to radical changes? These sort of things happen all the time. One moment you're working from LSB upward, then you're suddenly working from MSB downward.
Most people working in IT in the last 20 years have dealt almost exclusively with x86 CPUs. More to the point, really, most IT people in the last 20 years didn't care about byte order in the first place -- by 1990, not everyone in computing was a programmer, and most of the ones who were didn't care about bitwise operations very often.
8 bit changed into 16, into 32 and now in 64.
So what? Lots of numbers increase, the units used with them rarely change, and all of those are bits.
Filenames can't be longer than 8 characters and now they can.
Just another size increase. Not to mention the fact that by 1990, such a limitation was effectively a DOSism. Anyone on a Unix box didn't give a shit.
A file can't be larger than 4 GB and now it can.
Another simple size increase that did not change the units in question. And look at that, you just referred to a base-2 gigabyte, since that was the limitation.
Not to mention that on many filesystems, it was actually a 2GB limit, not 4GB.
And now finally, operating systems are beginning to understand SI units (which we've been using for all sorts of applications for hundreds of years) and *THAT* is a problem?
How many knuckles am I holding up?
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.
Odd. The few times I've had to explain the concept to anyone, they understood it immediately. "Computers operate in base-2, and a funny result is that kilobytes, megabytes, etc. end up being 1024."
What sub-human protoplasmic entities do YOU deal with?
Actually, someone HAS hacked Snow Leopard to do exactly that:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=8484389&postcount=54
No, I think _you_ misunderstand the issue. Different words can and do take on different meanings in different contexts due to historical accidents, even where they really should mean the same thing.
Base-2 units have been in use for computers for decades, with HDD manufacturers the sole dissenters not for any technical reason, but because it makes for better marketing.
Taking this path isn't "fixing" a problem, it's caving to 20+ years of false advertising.
It's not sensitivity, it's power.
When you plug an already suitably-powered audio device (pretty much anything that has an independent power source) into an inevitably-amplified microphone jack, what you get is going to be badly clipped audio (assuming you don't just blow out the sound card). Even if you manage to get the power so low on the input device that you avoid clipping while still having a usable signal, running through the second amplifier is still going to add unnecessary noise/distortion.
This assumes that a 25-year-old 5.25" floppy drive still works, not to mention that the floppies are actually physically and/or track-compatible with anything he might have around. Both may be quite a leap.
Seriously, don't go there, not until you get the data off via the serial port (or flatly establish that you _can't_).
You are dealing with a system that is lucky to be functional _at all_ after 25+ years, and presumably got heavy use while it was active. Corrosion, brittle plastics, dust worked into dangerous areas, etc..
If it's working now, taking it apart stands a good chance of breaking something that is difficult or impossible to fully repair, and you don't want to go there until the information is preserved.
Your complete failure to comprehend that a human life is worth more than its economic value to society is why I called you a psychopath.
Whether or not I recognize any such thing is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. There are no moral imperatives involved in the question of whether self-described 'n00bs' should be running world-facing servers, it is purely an economic question, thus making any non-economic value of a human life entirely irrelevant.
Your complete inability to disconnect your base emotions from a purely economic discussion is why I called you psychologically immature.
I'm sorry you're too psychologically immature to recognize economic reality, but that's really not my problem, and hardly makes me a psychopath.
Did you even read what I was responding to? Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right (and you're not, entirely), you're just making my point for me.
If the problem is that the Internet is vastly younger than humanity, then the fact that it's "vastly simpler" to become a competent sysadmin should compensate appropriately, and companies should thus be able to go find someone competent to run their servers, rather than relying on a self-described "n00b" owner.
No, a web server has been cracked and turned to spamming, DDoS, and cracking of other servers, causing immense financial damage to other companies.
And we're not talking about the happy-go-lucky land of every-life-is-precious or the insufferable "if even one child is saved..." fantasies, we're in the real world, and in the real world, the economic damage to be wrought from a single company's negligence in security their servers can meet or exceed the economic damage of a surgeon's negligence.
To whom, exactly, is it more important?
Society places economic value on everything, and the amount of damage a cracked server farm can potentially do far outstrips the economic value of a human life.
Practically speaking, it really isn't different.
The surgeon who kills someone might, if the victim's family is very lucky, be assessed damages of a couple million. An idiot with a cracked server farm can easily cause that much damage on the net.
The web is nearly twenty years old, the internet as we know it thirty, Unix forty. How long does it have to be, exactly, before you realize that there are plenty of people out there who are experts (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) in its practical operation?
If somebody tries to perform surgery without a proper medical education, do you offer pointers, or do you tell them to drop the knife and find a real surgeon?
Companies running public-facing servers without good technical expertise are a menace.
"Inexpensive" does not have an absolute definition, and if you think it does, I think you need to reexamine who the "idiot" is.
The idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the absolute price of any particular disk. The idea is that one can use comparatively inexpensive disks to create an array that would be prohibitively expensive were it to be replaced with a single drive of identical capacity and performance.
Also, that link to a 750GB drive is for a 640GB drive. I know kindergarten is hard, but one would think you would have at least come out of it able to distinguish different numbers.
Fully acceptable to illiterates, you mean.
RTFA jackass, it's proxies that are getting listed.
Serenity is sitting stuck on Mars. This isn't hypothetical, it's happening _now_. If we had humans there, someone could literally walk over and pull it out of the sand so it could be on its way.
Tell me again what the insult to science is?
Absolute positioning and sizing. No, I'm not kidding. All it takes for the vast majority of site designs is to get rid of the absolute/pixel-based nonsense, and they'll work just fine on almost all displays.
*My* mobile device is a Nexus One with an 800x480 screen. Like *all* such devices, however, the physical dimensions preclude readability of websites designed by idiots.
Websites not designed by idiots can be reflowed appropriately by the device to look good on any screen, and images can, if necessary, be re-scaled as well.