What trick? Can you come up with any measure by which passenger auto, mass transit, or even bicycle riding is safer than commercial air travel? Do you consider air travel unsafe?
As someone pointed out, I screwed up on the decimal places. Thats what I get for using a slide rule.
Fatalities per 1 billion passenger miles
Auto: 11 Urban transit: 8 School bus: 1.4 Shuttle: 6
40% of first year drivers are in accidents. Does that mean we should give up driving? How many 25-year old cars have never been in an accident? If you want to look at it in hours of operation, the total on-orbit time for the fleet is 19,179 hours. Thats like a truck being on the road 8 hours a day, 200 days a year (typical for commercial vehicles) for 12 years. Two accidents? Its not a lot, considering.
My point is that no matter how you look at it, the shuttle is safe considering what they're doing. Compare their record to any dangerous endeavor like deep sea diving or climbing Everest and its far better.
NASA's problem is that they didn't set the expectations correctly up front. There will be losses. They do keep them to the minimum. They should never have had a "teacher in space" making it look like space travel is ready for passenger service.
Here's the relevant figures for various dangerous modes of transportation. Based on this I would say its not about how dangerous it is to life and limb, its about the money, period.
Fatalities per 1 million passenger miles
Auto: 110 Urban transit: 83 School bus: 14 Shuttle: 0.006
Shuttle data so you can check my math
Total fatalities: 7 on Challenger, 7 on Columbia Total passengers: over 600 Total time on orbit: 19179 hours Avg orbital period: 90 minutes Total miles: 329 million Avg crew: 7 Total passenger miles: 2304 million
Why would a code review catch this? The guy at the review may have said "I think that address is time.nist.gov" or something. There may be >100K lines of code in a product like this.
> Usually, someone should say "hey, are we following the RFC for the protocol here?"
According to the article the packets were well-formed.
> Usually, someone should say "isn't hardcoding one single IP address for a service a bad design idea?"
Isn't hardcoding a default address good design rather than leaving an uninitialized variable?
> None of these things apparently happened. It may not show up in "testing" (hey, everything worked fine) but in quality assurance, they should be checking their code for anomalies.
QA tests functionality, not code quality, in every software org that I've worked in. Code quality is almost always up to Design Engineering and QA gets black-box binaries.
They should have done case testing, like "What happens to the product when its not connected to the internet?" That seems like the most likely place to find this bug.
Who got fired? My guess is noone, and that is probably OK.
there was no "roll-over" ot "type-ahead". If you tried to press the "h" key before the "t" key was finished doing its thing, the "h" key just wouldn't push
Not only that, but when printing to a teletype, you had to add a few null characters at the end of every line (along with CR and LF, of course) to give the carriage time to return, and the line time to feed. Definitely realtime programming.
That's true. The hdd motor and head positioning is usually running on the 12V supply and its current profile is on/off at fairly high frequency.
We used to estimate power supply quality by weight. The heavier, the better, since it meant they had more iron. Bigger transformers = better magnetic storage = better voltage stability. Now the switching frequencies are high enough that you don't need big iron cores. But you do need a switching frequency that is a lot higher than the load current frequency. Otherwise the 12V won't be stable. Not that they will tell you the switching frequency in a spec.
I don't think it will be. Cuecat was only aimed at people reading magazines next to a computer and scanning in links (ie. nobody). This is aimed at people who want a digital print. A lot of the people using it aren't geeks, just people who own or have access to computers who want to email photos.
So, even if a few people tear apart the cameras, the majority of users will probably still turn them in. They'll still make money even if you criminals tear a few apart.
Get somebody to donate a server (read old PC) and make a project course to do a wireless local community network. Apache, Linux, sendmail (OK qmail) etc.
My son explained to me how they bypassed Deep Freeze at their high school computer lab to install the software that they wanted. I think they did it on the second day of class.
Anyway, I think you'll run into various levels of experience just because there's nothing else out there for the interested computer user, short of college courses. You need to get the novices up to speed on buzzwords, like what is an "Operating System" but also give the somewhat experienced people something interesting to learn, like "here's Perl".
An aluminum smelter is a good candidate for this technology. Instead of generating electricity, transferring it over the grid, and then converting it to heat to melt AL, just put the smelter on the tower and aim the mirrors at it. Heck of a lot more efficient.
Linux distributions are copyrighted. Most public domain software is copyrighted. Many use a variation of the GPL, which authorizes redistribution. So yes, you're OK, but its not because of copyright, its because of authorization.
Under current law I can make a copy of a letter written by John Ashcroft and put it up on my P2P network. If he gets upset he can claim copyright violation and force me to take it down. Under the proposed law, he can claim copyright violation and put me in jail. Did you notice the difference? Do you see why people might be upset?
Slashdot Mirror
Games are suppose to be fun? Since when?
Note who is saying this. "Laura Fryer, director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group". It means the XBox folks have just figured this out.
Tubes!!! You weenie.
We had to do all our programming on punch cards with an old Jacquard loom. And that was the new system.
Before that we were stuck with the old calculator that Pascal gave us.
What trick? Can you come up with any measure by which passenger auto, mass transit, or even bicycle riding is safer than commercial air travel? Do you consider air travel unsafe?
As someone pointed out, I screwed up on the decimal places. Thats what I get for using a slide rule.
Fatalities per 1 billion passenger miles
Auto: 11
Urban transit: 8
School bus: 1.4
Shuttle: 6
40% of first year drivers are in accidents. Does that mean we should give up driving? How many 25-year old cars have never been in an accident? If you want to look at it in hours of operation, the total on-orbit time for the fleet is 19,179 hours. Thats like a truck being on the road 8 hours a day, 200 days a year (typical for commercial vehicles) for 12 years. Two accidents? Its not a lot, considering.
My point is that no matter how you look at it, the shuttle is safe considering what they're doing. Compare their record to any dangerous endeavor like deep sea diving or climbing Everest and its far better.
NASA's problem is that they didn't set the expectations correctly up front. There will be losses. They do keep them to the minimum. They should never have had a "teacher in space" making it look like space travel is ready for passenger service.
Here's the relevant figures for various dangerous modes of transportation. Based on this I would say its not about how dangerous it is to life and limb, its about the money, period.
Fatalities per 1 million passenger miles
Auto: 110
Urban transit: 83
School bus: 14
Shuttle: 0.006
Shuttle data so you can check my math
Total fatalities: 7 on Challenger, 7 on Columbia
Total passengers: over 600
Total time on orbit: 19179 hours
Avg orbital period: 90 minutes
Total miles: 329 million
Avg crew: 7
Total passenger miles: 2304 million
We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
- Jason Kidd
Game journalism is people who cant write, interviewing people who cant talk, for an audience that cant read.
So go to people who can draw, instead.
I don't play video games much (well, ok, less than 4 hours a day), but these two have a wicked sense of humor.
> Usually, there should be a code review.
Why would a code review catch this? The guy at the review may have said "I think that address is time.nist.gov" or something. There may be >100K lines of code in a product like this.
> Usually, someone should say "hey, are we following the RFC for the protocol here?"
According to the article the packets were well-formed.
> Usually, someone should say "isn't hardcoding one single IP address for a service a bad design idea?"
Isn't hardcoding a default address good design rather than leaving an uninitialized variable?
> None of these things apparently happened. It may not show up in "testing" (hey, everything worked fine) but in quality assurance, they should be checking their code for anomalies.
QA tests functionality, not code quality, in every software org that I've worked in. Code quality is almost always up to Design Engineering and QA gets black-box binaries.
They should have done case testing, like "What happens to the product when its not connected to the internet?" That seems like the most likely place to find this bug.
Who got fired? My guess is noone, and that is probably OK.
Most earlier reconstructions are done by artists with clay. On Nova about 6 years ago they showed how to build up from a skull.
1. Glue on pencil erasers to set the skin thickness
2. Cover with modeling clay to make the features using the erasers as a guide.
3. ???
You know the rest.
Also add doc and xls. I'm sick of getting 12K word docs that turn out to be two lines of text.
there was no "roll-over" ot "type-ahead". If you tried to press the "h" key before the "t" key was finished doing its thing, the "h" key just wouldn't push
Not only that, but when printing to a teletype, you had to add a few null characters at the end of every line (along with CR and LF, of course) to give the carriage time to return, and the line time to feed. Definitely realtime programming.
That's true. The hdd motor and head positioning is usually running on the 12V supply and its current profile is on/off at fairly high frequency.
We used to estimate power supply quality by weight. The heavier, the better, since it meant they had more iron. Bigger transformers = better magnetic storage = better voltage stability. Now the switching frequencies are high enough that you don't need big iron cores. But you do need a switching frequency that is a lot higher than the load current frequency. Otherwise the 12V won't be stable. Not that they will tell you the switching frequency in a spec.
That's because my home computer is a Cray X-MP.
Oh yeah, real concerned. The top US supercomputer can only do 20 TFLOPS or so. That will never do.
Imagine a beo...
I don't think it will be. Cuecat was only aimed at people reading magazines next to a computer and scanning in links (ie. nobody). This is aimed at people who want a digital print. A lot of the people using it aren't geeks, just people who own or have access to computers who want to email photos.
So, even if a few people tear apart the cameras, the majority of users will probably still turn them in. They'll still make money even if you criminals tear a few apart.
Oooh. Oooh. Call on me.
Get somebody to donate a server (read old PC) and make a project course to do a wireless local community network. Apache, Linux, sendmail (OK qmail) etc.
Its PC Card to most industry people. Which I personally find confusing as hell. I call them, "those little tiny PC Cards" (TM).
My son explained to me how they bypassed Deep Freeze at their high school computer lab to install the software that they wanted. I think they did it on the second day of class.
Anyway, I think you'll run into various levels of experience just because there's nothing else out there for the interested computer user, short of college courses. You need to get the novices up to speed on buzzwords, like what is an "Operating System" but also give the somewhat experienced people something interesting to learn, like "here's Perl".
An aluminum smelter is a good candidate for this technology. Instead of generating electricity, transferring it over the grid, and then converting it to heat to melt AL, just put the smelter on the tower and aim the mirrors at it. Heck of a lot more efficient.
Let's see. The article talks about 200 MW plant. At 1kW/m^2 and 17% efficiency this means we need about 300 acres of mirrors. Seems real practical.
Verio
"Science behind it"
Look at the page!! Its a dartboard, people!! Your money is paying for this!!
Don't forget that every non-millenium century is not a leap year. I'd figure it out but my calculator has that pesky Y3K bug.
Linux distributions are copyrighted. Most public domain software is copyrighted. Many use a variation of the GPL, which authorizes redistribution. So yes, you're OK, but its not because of copyright, its because of authorization.
Under current law I can make a copy of a letter written by John Ashcroft and put it up on my P2P network. If he gets upset he can claim copyright violation and force me to take it down. Under the proposed law, he can claim copyright violation and put me in jail. Did you notice the difference? Do you see why people might be upset?