30 succesful flights is not "a job well done" in this case. If the actuators had been installed on the other side a catastrophic failure would have been not only possible, but probable.
What that is called is "dumb luck".
It's sort of like winning at slots in a casino and being told that is "a job well done".
That specific idea is a little flawed, as about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness (or analogous trichromat vision)
So should the shuttle orbiter be engineered so all of the general population can work on it???
Before you bomb us Europeans, can we please have back >- All your BMW and Mercedes cars
O.K, first we are going to have take off the tires (Goodyear) and strip out all the hoses. We are going to have to yank out the radio (transistors) along with any computer your car has. Sorry, the electronic ignition will have to stay with us too.
There goes "fine european handling" as you move back to oxcart wheels.
Also, we will take back refridgeration and air conditioning. You won't be able to run them anyway without electricty (Westinghouse). Your going to have to go back to using ice from lakes frozen in winter. Sorry.
Also, we take back nylons, disposable razors (Gillette), and hair dryers. Your women will look like cave men again.
> we'd like to keep a copy of "The Simpsons" just to remember you guys by!
And what do you plan to watch it on??? Television is ours (Farnsworth), and even if you plan other activities at night it will have to be by flame as the light bulb (Edison) is ours too.
So when we finally settle up, you will want us to bomb you just to put you out of your misery.
Re:Standard response to the "why bother" crowd.
on
Ultimate Cooling System
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· Score: 4, Funny
1. Because it's possible 2. It's kinda cool (literally0 3. It keeps overclockers off the streets 4. It gives us something to do 5. It's just interesting 6. Performance!
7. Because liquid nitrogen is "so yesterday".
8. The angst of our inability to get a date is so great that we do not limit ourselves to one form of technology anymore.
9. We won't be happy until we force our CPUs into Bose-Einsten condensate so we can laugh in the face of the uncertainty principle and thereby squeeze another 3fps out of quake.
10. We want to have intelligent discussions with our computers like on the Starship Enterprise (see #8 above).
11. When our friends and family ask us to fix their computers, we'll be able to take care of their fridge and air conditioning too.
12. Human Cryogenics should not be limited to rich people and baseball players.
13. So we can have our own sperm bank, not so much for future generations but so future scientists can map our DNA to understand us.
14. Blue screen of death??? HAAAA!!! Blue screen of COLD!!!
Actually yahoo has their own instant payment system called yahoo paydirect.
Ebay needs competition, that's for sure. The problem is that because _everybody_ goes to ebay you get a wider variety of items to shop for and more chances to buy stuff.
Unless there is a better way of conducting online auctions with dispute resolution (I think there is) any online auction is going to have fraud.
From the article:However, while outsourcing to the US grew by under 7 per cent in 2003, outsourcing by the country grew 11.43 per cent.
That pretty much speaks for itself. It's an interesting way of spinning the numbers. Rather than saying "Outsourcing to other countries is oupacing incoming work" we get the lesser truth "More work is coming in than the US is outsourcing".
That's like looking at a painting through a two foot straw. It tries to give a rosy picture to a bad truth - that outsourcing is adding to a US trade deficit that is through the roof. By anybody's numbers it is severe, and its not good for our economy.
Well if windows had one that wasn't junk (as user drdink noted above) and somebody could code one for open source that really worked apple wouldn't have a monopoly.
In as much it might lock some people into apple's platform, I do not see how that would hinder competition in this market. If there is a better, lower cost solution people will migrate to it.
What is something to be more cynical about are all the webmasters who thoughtlessly don't code well enough so a blind person might navigate their site properly.
At least apple is doing something.
Do you think there will ever be a screen reader for flash??
i for one, think that nasa is scared more than anything.
I really think that is it. They must have known that not servicing the hubble would be an extremely unpopular decion.
But they started to look at all the nuts and bolts of things that could go wrong and they had to start being honest with themselves.
There has been a specific culture in Nasa to overlook bad engineering that could be a major problem later on.
They knew that foam was falling off the shuttle since day one, but they just ignored it not realizing that it could have the kinetic energy of a cannonball. Same with the O'Rings and temperature.
How many other systems remain that are "marginal" and could result in a catastrophic failure? I bet there is a few.
If the shuttle blows up again that would quickly put Nasa out of business.
The thing that people need to remember is that everytime an astronaut goes into space they are riding a bomb.
Spaceplanes instead would be nice, but they simply do not exist.
What happens is the coin ends up _thicker_ than before. Because it is thicker, the coin in turn becomes smaller. The mass is indeed the same before and after.
There is no exotic atomic manipulation going on. Not that people have tried (aka alchemy).
And eventually they will merge with Sony to produce the American-Japanese company Microsoft-Sony.
Wouldn't the name of that company be Microsony??
Re:Netcraft confirms: TiVo is Dying
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 1
Joke aside, as I was reading the article I did get the very distinct impression that this guy had used the "bsd is dying" troll as a model for his rant.
Maybe it wasn't intentional, but it does cast doubt on his conclusion.
But for the small home user, they are not practical. Also, something spinning that fast with that much mass makes me quite nervous.
Most people do not live near a creek and do not have space for a water reservoir storage system. This is probably the case here as he is wanting to use photovoltaics.
This is why everybody is clamoring to get a fuel cell to work.
He could use the excess energy to generate hydrogen and feed it to a fuel cell later to use as he needs.
Fuel cells are available, but they are beset with problems. They are expensive because many use rare metals as catalysts. They have limited lifetimes, needing repalcement every couple of years, making them very uneconomical at today's prices.
So while fuel cells may be the ideal, he may be stuck with batteries.
Not really. 16 bit windows was nothing more than DOS with lipstick, with a lot of programs using DOS interrupts.
Another real problem to a lot of this old software is that it was written with 386 clock speeds in mind. So that is around 25 MHz. Most new machines run at 2500MHz, a 100 fold increase that will break many programs.
You can use a DOS simulator and load Windows 3.1 onto it (maybe - there is a real issue of compatibility here, most of the free stuff isn't 100% and there is bound to be bugs). You can also use a slow-down program for the CPU.
If and when you get all this to work, you are sure to have a very clunky computing experience at hand.
P.S. Oh btw, the reason my friend declined their offers is that he lost the source code in a harddrive failure and he's too embarrass to admit it.:)
I know that it's too late now, but if the offer was decent enough (too justify the expense) there are a few companies that specialize in data recovery off crashed harddrives.
The problem I have with the EU decision as much as I know about it at this point is that is primarily a big fine.
It does nothing to open up the APIs, file formats, that are required by other companies to write compatible software.
I suspect that Microsoft plans on paying the fine and going about its business as usual. Maybe they also think that they can tie any decision up in the courts and delay the outcome, by which time the decision is irrelevant for all concerned.
Given this scenario, I don't see how the EU decision can help consumers in any way. A big fine means that Microsoft raises the prices for its OS to everyone. So the consumer could end up paying more.
Its like regulators "get it" when they say Microsoft is wrong for its business practices, but then they drop the ball to the other half the equation as to what the remedy should be. A big fine means nothing to anybody (except those collecting the fine). Judge Jackson in the US came close when he suggested a breakup, but then he had to blow it out of the water by shooting off his mouth.
What would be better is open APIs and file formats. But I'm not holding my breath anytime soon.
I especially like the tag line "Project Guttenberg: The Next Millenium" and the line below it says "providing library services to the world".
Essentially what they are saying is "you don't want the old project guttenberg, you want the new better one that you have to pay for".
It's pretty clear to me that their aim is to confuse computer users to start up the adobe ebook program rather than loading it into a plain text reader/editor.
I especially like the "public access section" as if that is the "official" source for project gutenberg texts that are "free", and "by the way, here are are added search results that are over here that you have to pay for".
I think the distinction needs to be made clear. There is nothing wrong with selling a public domain text. Anybody can and will do that.
The problem is that they are essentially plying off the good name of project gettenberg and adding subtle misdirection to get people to buy their services.
You see, the adobe ebook program can not offer enough advantages for it to stand on its own (and why there aren't adobe ebooks all over the place and why it has fallen on its face) so they have to try and prop it up with lies.
I would be outraged too. Somebody needs to yank their cord.
Slashdot Mirror
30 succesful flights is not "a job well done" in this case. If the actuators had been installed on the other side a catastrophic failure would have been not only possible, but probable.
What that is called is "dumb luck".
It's sort of like winning at slots in a casino and being told that is "a job well done".
That specific idea is a little flawed, as about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness (or analogous trichromat vision)
So should the shuttle orbiter be engineered so all of the general population can work on it???
Before you bomb us Europeans, can we please have back
>- All your BMW and Mercedes cars
O.K, first we are going to have take off the tires (Goodyear) and strip out all the hoses. We are going to have to yank out the radio (transistors) along with any computer your car has. Sorry, the electronic ignition will have to stay with us too.
There goes "fine european handling" as you move back to oxcart wheels.
Also, we will take back refridgeration and air conditioning. You won't be able to run them anyway without electricty (Westinghouse). Your going to have to go back to using ice from lakes frozen in winter. Sorry.
Also, we take back nylons, disposable razors (Gillette), and hair dryers. Your women will look like cave men again.
> we'd like to keep a copy of "The Simpsons" just to remember you guys by!
And what do you plan to watch it on??? Television is ours (Farnsworth), and even if you plan other activities at night it will have to be by flame as the light bulb (Edison) is ours too.
So when we finally settle up, you will want us to bomb you just to put you out of your misery.
1. Because it's possible
2. It's kinda cool (literally0
3. It keeps overclockers off the streets
4. It gives us something to do
5. It's just interesting
6. Performance!
7. Because liquid nitrogen is "so yesterday".
8. The angst of our inability to get a date is so great that we do not limit ourselves to one form of technology anymore.
9. We won't be happy until we force our CPUs into Bose-Einsten condensate so we can laugh in the face of the uncertainty principle and thereby squeeze another 3fps out of quake.
10. We want to have intelligent discussions with our computers like on the Starship Enterprise (see #8 above).
11. When our friends and family ask us to fix their computers, we'll be able to take care of their fridge and air conditioning too.
12. Human Cryogenics should not be limited to rich people and baseball players.
13. So we can have our own sperm bank, not so much for future generations but so future scientists can map our DNA to understand us.
14. Blue screen of death??? HAAAA!!! Blue screen of COLD!!!
Yeah, I got scarred just by reading it.
Ebay is still in the "Adult" business. I think it would do a lot of good for their image if they dumped all the adult items.
But that would require them to have a spine.
Actually yahoo has their own instant payment system called yahoo paydirect.
Ebay needs competition, that's for sure. The problem is that because _everybody_ goes to ebay you get a wider variety of items to shop for and more chances to buy stuff.
Unless there is a better way of conducting online auctions with dispute resolution (I think there is) any online auction is going to have fraud.
It's ok. As I read it I kept my eyes closed.
The silver bullet of programming already exists. Link.
For a minute there I thought you meant this silver bullet
I know that I am a much better programmer after a couple of "silver bullets".
Yes, but some of us are counting the days that we will be able to get our hands on one.
Any little scrap of news is welcome.
From the article:However, while outsourcing to the US grew by under 7 per cent in 2003, outsourcing by the country grew 11.43 per cent.
That pretty much speaks for itself. It's an interesting way of spinning the numbers. Rather than saying "Outsourcing to other countries is oupacing incoming work" we get the lesser truth "More work is coming in than the US is outsourcing".
That's like looking at a painting through a two foot straw. It tries to give a rosy picture to a bad truth - that outsourcing is adding to a US trade deficit that is through the roof. By anybody's numbers it is severe, and its not good for our economy.
So yeah, its a clever lie.
Well if windows had one that wasn't junk (as user drdink noted above) and somebody could code one for open source that really worked apple wouldn't have a monopoly.
In as much it might lock some people into apple's platform, I do not see how that would hinder competition in this market. If there is a better, lower cost solution people will migrate to it.
What is something to be more cynical about are all the webmasters who thoughtlessly don't code well enough so a blind person might navigate their site properly.
At least apple is doing something.
Do you think there will ever be a screen reader for flash??
You goddamn heartless bastard.....Mad doesn't even describe my feelings right now
So Shadowbearer, how do you really feel about Sean O'Keefe and the job he is doing at Nasa???
i for one, think that nasa is scared more than anything.
I really think that is it. They must have known that not servicing the hubble would be an extremely unpopular decion.
But they started to look at all the nuts and bolts of things that could go wrong and they had to start being honest with themselves.
There has been a specific culture in Nasa to overlook bad engineering that could be a major problem later on.
They knew that foam was falling off the shuttle since day one, but they just ignored it not realizing that it could have the kinetic energy of a cannonball. Same with the O'Rings and temperature.
How many other systems remain that are "marginal" and could result in a catastrophic failure? I bet there is a few.
If the shuttle blows up again that would quickly put Nasa out of business.
The thing that people need to remember is that everytime an astronaut goes into space they are riding a bomb.
Spaceplanes instead would be nice, but they simply do not exist.
What happens is the coin ends up _thicker_ than before. Because it is thicker, the coin in turn becomes smaller. The mass is indeed the same before and after.
There is no exotic atomic manipulation going on. Not that people have tried (aka alchemy).
Here are his ebay auctions
With some slight modifications, this technique could be used to shrink the national debt.
Only if you electrocute the politicians currently in office.
And eventually they will merge with Sony to produce the American-Japanese company Microsoft-Sony.
Wouldn't the name of that company be Microsony??
Joke aside, as I was reading the article I did get the very distinct impression that this guy had used the "bsd is dying" troll as a model for his rant.
Maybe it wasn't intentional, but it does cast doubt on his conclusion.
Actually there are fywheel energy systems around.
But for the small home user, they are not practical. Also, something spinning that fast with that much mass makes me quite nervous.
Most people do not live near a creek and do not have space for a water reservoir storage system. This is probably the case here as he is wanting to use photovoltaics.
This is why everybody is clamoring to get a fuel cell to work.
He could use the excess energy to generate hydrogen and feed it to a fuel cell later to use as he needs.
Fuel cells are available, but they are beset with problems. They are expensive because many use rare metals as catalysts. They have limited lifetimes, needing repalcement every couple of years, making them very uneconomical at today's prices.
So while fuel cells may be the ideal, he may be stuck with batteries.
Not really. 16 bit windows was nothing more than DOS with lipstick, with a lot of programs using DOS interrupts.
Another real problem to a lot of this old software is that it was written with 386 clock speeds in mind. So that is around 25 MHz. Most new machines run at 2500MHz, a 100 fold increase that will break many programs.
You can use a DOS simulator and load Windows 3.1 onto it (maybe - there is a real issue of compatibility here, most of the free stuff isn't 100% and there is bound to be bugs). You can also use a slow-down program for the CPU.
If and when you get all this to work, you are sure to have a very clunky computing experience at hand.
So become part of the growing Linux community, install linux today, because this is where the cool windows programmers have gone!
This commercial in a thread is brought to you by Anonymous Coward productions, located in Sausalito California copyright 2004 All rights reserved.
We now return you to your regular slashdot reading.
shareware that relied on your good will to send money to the creators.
The problem is there wasn't enough good will to buy groceries with. That's why I have seen most shareware titles either become demos or crippleware.
It's funny also how all the "free downloads" really aren't.
P.S. Oh btw, the reason my friend declined their offers is that he lost the source code in a harddrive failure and he's too embarrass to admit it. :)
I know that it's too late now, but if the offer was decent enough (too justify the expense) there are a few companies that specialize in data recovery off crashed harddrives.
The problem I have with the EU decision as much as I know about it at this point is that is primarily a big fine.
It does nothing to open up the APIs, file formats, that are required by other companies to write compatible software.
I suspect that Microsoft plans on paying the fine and going about its business as usual. Maybe they also think that they can tie any decision up in the courts and delay the outcome, by which time the decision is irrelevant for all concerned.
Given this scenario, I don't see how the EU decision can help consumers in any way. A big fine means that Microsoft raises the prices for its OS to everyone. So the consumer could end up paying more.
Its like regulators "get it" when they say Microsoft is wrong for its business practices, but then they drop the ball to the other half the equation as to what the remedy should be. A big fine means nothing to anybody (except those collecting the fine). Judge Jackson in the US came close when he suggested a breakup, but then he had to blow it out of the water by shooting off his mouth.
What would be better is open APIs and file formats. But I'm not holding my breath anytime soon.
I especially like the tag line "Project Guttenberg: The Next Millenium" and the line below it says "providing library services to the world".
Essentially what they are saying is "you don't want the old project guttenberg, you want the new better one that you have to pay for".
It's pretty clear to me that their aim is to confuse computer users to start up the adobe ebook program rather than loading it into a plain text reader/editor.
I especially like the "public access section" as if that is the "official" source for project gutenberg texts that are "free", and "by the way, here are are added search results that are over here that you have to pay for".
I think the distinction needs to be made clear. There is nothing wrong with selling a public domain text. Anybody can and will do that.
The problem is that they are essentially plying off the good name of project gettenberg and adding subtle misdirection to get people to buy their services.
You see, the adobe ebook program can not offer enough advantages for it to stand on its own (and why there aren't adobe ebooks all over the place and why it has fallen on its face) so they have to try and prop it up with lies.
I would be outraged too. Somebody needs to yank their cord.
Where's the link to your store?