Text file configuration for servers is orders of magnitude better than a GUI. A GUI is clumsy to automate. It can't be checked into the source code management of choice (making rolling back awkward). Servers shouldn't have GUIs, and if they do, all server processes should have a text configuration underneath it all that can be versioned and automated.
Yes it does. It's a bit like that question on the US visa waiver form that asks if you're coming to the US to commit crimes. This means if you do commit a crime, they can give you extra punishments by adding the crime of making a false declaration on the visa waiver form.
This is the same thing. It gives the authorities extra charges they can add to increase the severity of the punishment and make it more likely that they can secure a conviction. If the state starts sliding towards a real police state, it also allows them to arrest anyone for practically anything - for instance, for a government to have political opponents arrested, by using nebulous laws that can practically make any object "useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism". A police state would go through, say, the government opponent's garden shed and find some sodium chlorate weedkiller, and arrest the opponent on the grounds that this is an ingredient for explosives and useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.
It looks like aerodynamic stresses got it, rather than the stress from the rocket thrust. You can see as the angle of attack increases on the wings (as the... well I don't want to call it an 'aircraft') vehicle's nose starts to point significantly away from the direction of travel, one of the wings fail, leading to an increasing rate of pitch...which tears the other wings off.
This is part of the problem. If the rules are so byzantine that you find yourself going "you must be kidding", and they aren't prepared to change those rules - well, then there's really no point in installing a new system because all you're doing is computerizing a mess... and it will all end in tears.
Let's rewind the clock a bit. I have a book on my desk, which I recite a short passage out of every time management wants us to computerize a mess. The book is "Businessman's Guide To Microcomputers", by accounting firm Deloitte Haskins and Sells - published November 1982.
A short excerpt from chapter 14, "Common first time buyer pitfalls"
We've got a lot of problems, but we're getting a computer The buyer is asking for trouble...there is a new "old adage": "Don't computerise a mess...clean it up first". It is important to understand that a computer can't help you do things you don't understand, and it won't make decisions for you. All it does is process a lot of information very quickly...exactly as it is told to do it. To be of any real use, a computer requires a disciplined approach and an organised mind.
If you're going "You must be kidding" frequently, you're just computerising a mess. Management needs to be prepared to re-engineer the business, not just throw overpriced software and multiple cores at it and hope it sticks.
Is the "classic" 6502 still made in 40 pin DIP format? It'd be nice to know that there are spares for my BBC Micro. I've been looking for a local seller for the 6502 but have not found one yet.
(I use Z80s rather more heavily though - a nice feature of the Z80 for hacking is you can clock it arbitrarily slowly, since the registers are implemented in static memory, which is useful at times). The Z80 and many Z80-based computers has a development kit called the Z88DK - which provides the C language and the standard library, and other things like a sprite library for the ZX Spectrum).
The US side of the space race was exactly the same: they even called the Mercury project "MISS" - Man In Space Soonest - the purpose to rush someone into orbit in the soonest possible time and beat the Russians. The Soviets hardly had a monopoly on this kind of thinking.
...and also, the classic Z80 CPU (plus peripherals like the CTC and PIO) is *still* manufactured - you can still homebrew an old-skool 8 bit computer. It's still made in the classic 40 pin DIP package, good for breadboard experimentation. Flash chips like the Am29F010 can be used as ROM, and are much faster and easier than UV erase EPROMs (your homebrew computer can now reprogram its own ROM).
Incidentally, if you like Atmel's AVR lineup of microcontrollers, there's a port of GCC for the AVR. I use it, it works well.
Part of the embarrassment over poor code IS a competitive advantage. Imagine two functionally similar products - one with beautiful code that costs $1000, and one with awful code that costs $800. If the code to both is closed (or even just the code to the $800 product is closed), nobody can differentiate the products on code quality, giving the cheap nasty code a competitive advantage.
If you want to claim the credit for things your granfathers did, then perhaps you can also stop hating France too - after all, France was instrumental in helping the United States win the War of Independence. Without France, you'd still be a British overseas dependency.
No. Chernobyl is a terrible example, and only brought up by those who don't have the slightest bit of knowledge of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was an insanely dangerous reactor design. Only the Soviets ever designed reactors like this - every other country in the world uses reactor designs several orders of magnitude safer than Chernobyl. Even military ship reactors are orders of magnitude safer. The RBMK design was made with one reason only: to quickly get a reactor going, regardless of safety, to be ahead of the West during the cold war and to be able to crow about technical prowess. The Soviets habitually designed machinery like this. Take a look at the old Soviet era airliners - no thought put into the 'user interface' leading to nasty traps for the pilot to fall into. Things like having to retard the throttles on landing, and then flick a switch and push them FORWARD again for reverse thrust: counter intuitive, but fast and easy to design.
The RBMK reactor as used in Chernobyl and other places had several serious safety flaws - not least, they were a "fail dangerous" design if mistakes were made (which made an accident like Chernobyl inevitable). The design of the control rods coupled with the high positive void coefficiency of the reactor meant that when the operators went to shut the reactor down, it had the opposite effect, causing the reaction to run away. The lack of a cointainment building - another breathtakingly awful Soviet "innovation", meant that when the runaway reactor blew its lid off, it spewed all that radioactivity into the atmosphere.
No one else, absolutely no one else, ever built civil reactors with such a dreadful "fail dangerous" design.
Plutonium can be burned in a nuclear reactor. Reprocess waste from one reactor, and it's fuel for another. That gives us tens of thousands of years worth of nuclear energy, leaving very small amounts of waste.
Nuclear waste is a lot easier to deal with than fossil fuel waste. Nuclear waste can all be kept in a very very small place, and only affect a very small place. Fossil fuel waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere where it continues to build and affects the whole planet.
The trouble with solar cells is the sun goes down at night. The trouble with wind is that the wind stops from time to time. All renewable energy of this form (intermittent) must be backed by the same amount of traditional generation - gas turbine, coal, nuclear etc. or the lights go out at night or when the wind stops.
No it wouldn't. Censorship suggests that something in the public interest is being suppressed. It is not in the public interest for people's personal details to be left lying around. However, it is in the public interest to know which companies are lax with personal data, or whether a billionaire's assets are mostly ill-gotten gains.
This is the trouble with many simplistic rants on Slashdot - because $FOO is considered a good thing, then $BAR must be "otherwise your opinion is inconsistent". Whereas anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that it's not quite as clear cut as that, and someone's personal bank details are not the same thing as whether someone's business dealings are legal or not.
It would be a retarded idea for Microsoft to stop selling software in Europe - a bigger software market than the United States. Their shareholders would probably sue them if they tried it.
Did you even read his question? He wants broadband so he can have more of a life - being able to fix problems at work remotely, rather than having to spend the time (and use fuel) to drive in, fix something, and drive home. This means he can have more time to actually have a life outside of work.
If you want remote access for administration, unless you can do it all over ssh (which if 28.8k is insufficient, I suspect not), sorry - you're gonna have to either spend buckets of money or move. Latency is important for GUI-based remote access, otherwise it's just awful - even if the throughput is higher, a high latency 2 meg link can be worse than a low latency 28.8k link for gui access.
High latency is pretty terrible for command-line access too, but not quite as bad. Your solutions:
GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access. 3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency. SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are pretend unlimited). Satellite (which you've already said you can't get) - latency is so bad that remote access either GUI or SSH based is impractical. Good job you can't get it or you may have spent a wodge of cash coming to this unhappy realisation.
You may be in with a chance if you can cobble together some "cantenna" style wireless access (or spend a lot of money on a microwave link).
Or you can spend lots of money on a T1. That will give you proper, solid broadband speeds not just downstream but upstream too, low latency, will work very well for remote access, and you'll have an SLA so if it breaks they should fix it quickly, instead of "when we get around to it" as for DSL. But I bet the setup fees are some thousands, and monthly charges are $hundreds. (Would your employer chip in?)
Perhaps ISDN? You can get 128kbps if your ISP supports bonding the two 64K channels. Not high speed, but low latency and it may be tolerable for GUI remote access.
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Text file configuration for servers is orders of magnitude better than a GUI. A GUI is clumsy to automate. It can't be checked into the source code management of choice (making rolling back awkward). Servers shouldn't have GUIs, and if they do, all server processes should have a text configuration underneath it all that can be versioned and automated.
Yes it does. It's a bit like that question on the US visa waiver form that asks if you're coming to the US to commit crimes. This means if you do commit a crime, they can give you extra punishments by adding the crime of making a false declaration on the visa waiver form.
This is the same thing. It gives the authorities extra charges they can add to increase the severity of the punishment and make it more likely that they can secure a conviction. If the state starts sliding towards a real police state, it also allows them to arrest anyone for practically anything - for instance, for a government to have political opponents arrested, by using nebulous laws that can practically make any object "useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism". A police state would go through, say, the government opponent's garden shed and find some sodium chlorate weedkiller, and arrest the opponent on the grounds that this is an ingredient for explosives and useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.
It looks like aerodynamic stresses got it, rather than the stress from the rocket thrust. You can see as the angle of attack increases on the wings (as the ... well I don't want to call it an 'aircraft') vehicle's nose starts to point significantly away from the direction of travel, one of the wings fail, leading to an increasing rate of pitch...which tears the other wings off.
Let's rewind the clock a bit. I have a book on my desk, which I recite a short passage out of every time management wants us to computerize a mess. The book is "Businessman's Guide To Microcomputers", by accounting firm Deloitte Haskins and Sells - published November 1982.
A short excerpt from chapter 14, "Common first time buyer pitfalls"
If you're going "You must be kidding" frequently, you're just computerising a mess. Management needs to be prepared to re-engineer the business, not just throw overpriced software and multiple cores at it and hope it sticks.
Hi. I'm Officer Murgatroyd of Lave High. Your ship is carrying contraband. Pay a CR600 fine by midnight or your ship will be confiscated.
[ ] Pay fine
[ ] CR25 bribe
[ ] CR50 bribe
[ ] CR100 bribe
[x] CR250 bribe
Ah, $100000. In Zimbabwe dollars. (You might have enough there to buy half a loaf of bread)
Is the "classic" 6502 still made in 40 pin DIP format? It'd be nice to know that there are spares for my BBC Micro. I've been looking for a local seller for the 6502 but have not found one yet.
(I use Z80s rather more heavily though - a nice feature of the Z80 for hacking is you can clock it arbitrarily slowly, since the registers are implemented in static memory, which is useful at times). The Z80 and many Z80-based computers has a development kit called the Z88DK - which provides the C language and the standard library, and other things like a sprite library for the ZX Spectrum).
Ah you reminded me of that self-important wossname, Signal11, the original karma whore.
The US side of the space race was exactly the same: they even called the Mercury project "MISS" - Man In Space Soonest - the purpose to rush someone into orbit in the soonest possible time and beat the Russians. The Soviets hardly had a monopoly on this kind of thinking.
...and also, the classic Z80 CPU (plus peripherals like the CTC and PIO) is *still* manufactured - you can still homebrew an old-skool 8 bit computer. It's still made in the classic 40 pin DIP package, good for breadboard experimentation. Flash chips like the Am29F010 can be used as ROM, and are much faster and easier than UV erase EPROMs (your homebrew computer can now reprogram its own ROM).
Incidentally, if you like Atmel's AVR lineup of microcontrollers, there's a port of GCC for the AVR. I use it, it works well.
Part of the embarrassment over poor code IS a competitive advantage. Imagine two functionally similar products - one with beautiful code that costs $1000, and one with awful code that costs $800. If the code to both is closed (or even just the code to the $800 product is closed), nobody can differentiate the products on code quality, giving the cheap nasty code a competitive advantage.
I use an E6B circular slide rule for flight calculations. They are quicker to use than the electronic version, and have more than enough precision.
If you want to claim the credit for things your granfathers did, then perhaps you can also stop hating France too - after all, France was instrumental in helping the United States win the War of Independence. Without France, you'd still be a British overseas dependency.
No. Chernobyl is a terrible example, and only brought up by those who don't have the slightest bit of knowledge of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was an insanely dangerous reactor design. Only the Soviets ever designed reactors like this - every other country in the world uses reactor designs several orders of magnitude safer than Chernobyl. Even military ship reactors are orders of magnitude safer. The RBMK design was made with one reason only: to quickly get a reactor going, regardless of safety, to be ahead of the West during the cold war and to be able to crow about technical prowess. The Soviets habitually designed machinery like this. Take a look at the old Soviet era airliners - no thought put into the 'user interface' leading to nasty traps for the pilot to fall into. Things like having to retard the throttles on landing, and then flick a switch and push them FORWARD again for reverse thrust: counter intuitive, but fast and easy to design.
The RBMK reactor as used in Chernobyl and other places had several serious safety flaws - not least, they were a "fail dangerous" design if mistakes were made (which made an accident like Chernobyl inevitable). The design of the control rods coupled with the high positive void coefficiency of the reactor meant that when the operators went to shut the reactor down, it had the opposite effect, causing the reaction to run away. The lack of a cointainment building - another breathtakingly awful Soviet "innovation", meant that when the runaway reactor blew its lid off, it spewed all that radioactivity into the atmosphere.
No one else, absolutely no one else, ever built civil reactors with such a dreadful "fail dangerous" design.
Plutonium can be burned in a nuclear reactor. Reprocess waste from one reactor, and it's fuel for another. That gives us tens of thousands of years worth of nuclear energy, leaving very small amounts of waste.
Nuclear waste is a lot easier to deal with than fossil fuel waste. Nuclear waste can all be kept in a very very small place, and only affect a very small place. Fossil fuel waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere where it continues to build and affects the whole planet.
The trouble with solar cells is the sun goes down at night. The trouble with wind is that the wind stops from time to time. All renewable energy of this form (intermittent) must be backed by the same amount of traditional generation - gas turbine, coal, nuclear etc. or the lights go out at night or when the wind stops.
No it wouldn't. Censorship suggests that something in the public interest is being suppressed. It is not in the public interest for people's personal details to be left lying around. However, it is in the public interest to know which companies are lax with personal data, or whether a billionaire's assets are mostly ill-gotten gains.
This is the trouble with many simplistic rants on Slashdot - because $FOO is considered a good thing, then $BAR must be "otherwise your opinion is inconsistent". Whereas anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that it's not quite as clear cut as that, and someone's personal bank details are not the same thing as whether someone's business dealings are legal or not.
Second Life is really 3D IRC, with a much poorer frame rate than the old-skool IRC.
It would be a retarded idea for Microsoft to stop selling software in Europe - a bigger software market than the United States. Their shareholders would probably sue them if they tried it.
Cadmium... so not RoHS compliant, so not saleable at all in Europe and many other parts of the world. Oh dear.
I wonder if RoHS will be relaxed for solar energy?
The land required is probably taken up by your roof already, so there's no cost to the land (because it's already occupied by something else).
I think the point is that the French will reprocess the "waste", which to them is not waste at all, but fuel.
Did you even read his question? He wants broadband so he can have more of a life - being able to fix problems at work remotely, rather than having to spend the time (and use fuel) to drive in, fix something, and drive home. This means he can have more time to actually have a life outside of work.
If you want remote access for administration, unless you can do it all over ssh (which if 28.8k is insufficient, I suspect not), sorry - you're gonna have to either spend buckets of money or move. Latency is important for GUI-based remote access, otherwise it's just awful - even if the throughput is higher, a high latency 2 meg link can be worse than a low latency 28.8k link for gui access.
High latency is pretty terrible for command-line access too, but not quite as bad. Your solutions:
GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access.
3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency. SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are pretend unlimited).
Satellite (which you've already said you can't get) - latency is so bad that remote access either GUI or SSH based is impractical. Good job you can't get it or you may have spent a wodge of cash coming to this unhappy realisation.
You may be in with a chance if you can cobble together some "cantenna" style wireless access (or spend a lot of money on a microwave link).
Or you can spend lots of money on a T1. That will give you proper, solid broadband speeds not just downstream but upstream too, low latency, will work very well for remote access, and you'll have an SLA so if it breaks they should fix it quickly, instead of "when we get around to it" as for DSL. But I bet the setup fees are some thousands, and monthly charges are $hundreds. (Would your employer chip in?)
Perhaps ISDN? You can get 128kbps if your ISP supports bonding the two 64K channels. Not high speed, but low latency and it may be tolerable for GUI remote access.
He probably does have a 56k modem, but just like DSL - the further you're from the telephone exchange, the slower they work.