it looked to me that, even when the capsule was just a bright dot with changing luminosity, it was spinning at much higher than 15 rpm. More like 60 - 80 rpm.
If it were spinning the way it was supposed to, you wouldn't have been able to see it: it was supposed to spin neatly around its axis, for stability. (Like a flying saucer spinning)
Instead, it lost aerodynamic stability altogether, and started tumbling randomly in all directions, which is what you saw. I think once it started tumbling, all hope was lost, since the G-forces of re-entry were jolting the insides in all different directions as it tumbled. Some of those forces might have been even higher than what it encountered on impact.
(i.e. you don't want to be spinning in different directions as you're doing a 30-G descent):(
The web was originally TEXT ONLY. How many roll & scroll applications used a mouse at all in 1997?
I share your righteous indignation at the stupid patent, but your facts are a bit off...
Read Tim Berners-Lee's FAQ about the web. The first web browser was designed on a NeXT system, and was graphical. Yes, a line-mode browser was written shortly thereafter, but a windowed point-and-click version came first. Graphics weren't inline, but they were definitely part of the initial idea. But the app itself was indeed GUI based.
And how many applications used a mouse in 1997!? Dude, all the apps I've been using have been with a mouse since Jan 24, 1984, where've you been?:)
But seriously, the patent is patently ridiculous, excuse the pun. The "invention" is a method for using the tab key to select a link on a web page. I feel as though millions of geeks all cried out "DUH!" and were silenced...
The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.
First, I've gotta say it: of course your vote counts! How do you think the state gets to be solid one color or another!? Votes.
But there are some other interesting issues to point out:
Instant run-off voting has some problems, including paradoxical cases where voting for someone can actually increase their chances of losing. Plus, it's relatively hard to implement, given the current state of our polling places.
One suggested alternative that makes a lot of sense to me is approval voting: voters select ALL the candidates they would like to see elected, leaving blank all the candidates they do NOT want elected. This can be done with no change to most of the existing polling systems, and counting is relatively straightforward.
Of course, all of these are arguments about how to implement a direct popular vote for president in the United States. That's not what the founders of the constitution wanted!
Right now we have tyranny of small states
Well, that is what the constitution intended. What you call tyranny is really just a slight advantage, of course... bigger states do get more electoral votes, after all.
We can't just reject the system out of hand because it's old; we'd have to have the debate about the states' role in the federal government etc. and whether/how that system should be changed.
You're lucky. With our lowly 120V supplies here, 2000 Watts is about as much as you can ever expect on a single circuit. (theoretically 2400W on a 20A circuit, but once you're pulling close to 20A, the wires and cords themselves start to draw enough in heating that it adds up)
On the other hand, I have accidentally touched live AC wires a few times (and even stuck my finger in a light socket as a kid) and had relatively minor effects from it. I'd imagine 220/240 has a bit more of a kick...:)
How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense?
Why do we insist on clinging to "naked" optical discs? They have always put magnetic media inside cartridges or flexible envelopes... Just because CDs and DVDs work well enough without caddies, must we reject that idea out of hand?
Design a really air-tight, substantial cartridge for these puppies, and don't let those fingernails near the media!
The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this.
True... but I think this technology changes the concept of "linear density" entirely: with holographic page recording, each area on the disc encodes a 2-dimensional holographic image.
If it were just the same type of 1-dimensional spiral of pits, packed closer, you're right... it would take many many more revolutions to read the whole disc. But I believe this technology doesn't use a spiral pattern at all, so the data read speed could scale right along with the overall density.
We don't know, but it's possible that each holographic page has a large amount of data, but there are a relatively small number of pages on the disc: maybe only 100 "tracks" with a variable number of pages per track. But if each page holds hundreds of megabytes of data, that would still give you a high overall capacity.
(Of course, the technical details are sparse from the company... it's obviously press-release stuff, since they're talking about playing "digital movies" -- the type of digital content obviously has nothing to do with the underlying technology. Or maybe their point was that the playback mechanism is capable of a stable enough data-rate to support movie playback?)
Wouldn't it be prudent to put in the story text that the object is estimated to be only 6 meters in diameter?
The article states that an object that size would burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. I'm not sure if that's correct or not... a 6 meter hunk of material would probably rain at least SOME material down on the ground, but I don't know if it would make a crater.
The point is that we didn't just narrowly escape certain doom... it was a small rock.
- Peter
Re:Chess, Islam, and Arab governments
on
Hydra vs. Shredder
·
· Score: 1
> imagine if the American government allowed a $2.6 billion mosque complex to be constructed in the "bible belt"
Um. How could the American government NOT allow it? Isn't there some cliché about it being a free country?;)
Now, if the US Government supported such a project, it might rightly anger some people, just as the National Endowment for the Arts is frequently criticized for its use of public funds. Governments have to be careful about what they build or support.
But why should a government stop private enterprise from a building project like this?
Ooops. I was wrong. The headquarters of one division of seagate is in Bloomington, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul): the The Recording Heads operation.
Didn't the article say something about the guy in question being in this division? Maybe because he worked for this division, that's why they're suing him from there.
"Seagate filed an injunction Friday with Minnesota State Court for Hennepin County, seeking to keep Goglia from working on Western Digital's read/write technology for two years..."
That's pretty easy to read.;)
Seagate's headquarters is here in the Twin Cities.
Minnesota has pretty weak laws protecting employees... The only relevant precedent I know of off hand is in our local TV market -- TV news personalities typically have non-compete agreements that state they cannot appear on-camera at another station for a certain number of years.
And this is usually possible. However, there are many many areas where a freeway is the only route from point A to point B. Here in the Minneapolis metro area, the only roads that cross the Minnesota River are three freeways.
If your load is too big to safely haul in your vehicle at the posted speed
And this was another of my points: The posted minimum on these freeways is 40mph, while the maximum limits are 60, 65, or 70 on the three different freeways. Typical traffic speeds are just over 70 on all three. (the speed limit doesn't seem to make much difference there)
So clearly, if you can't maintain 40mph, it's illegal to drive on these roads.
Don't be a cheap-assed fuckhead and strap a queen-size mattress to the roof of your little riceburner.
Nice language. Really improves your point.
So, our freeways are only for people with vehicles capable of going as fast as YOU want to, huh?
Why do I get the impression that you mercilessly tailgate anyone going too slowly for your taste...
And that's why there are posted minimum speed-limits in many states.
You're somehow implying there that someone going 60 in a 55 zone could be ticketed for obstructing the traffic that's going 80. That's ridiculous. The minimum on Minnesota freeways is usually 40mph. I can't imagine anyone getting a ticket for driving above that speed.
You always have to consider some of the "legitimate" cases for going more slowly: some rental moving trucks, for instance, have a speed limiter at 55. Or if you've got a sofa tied to a pickup truck, you don't want to go very fast. etc.
The bigger problem is that the government has allowed one of its laws to be unenforced or underenforced... For various reasons, state legislatures can't or won't raise the speed limits, but then in many cases the police departments can't or won't enforce the existing limits. This becomes unfair, because it becomes selectively enforced, which singles out a few "victims" for punishment without affecting the behavior of the vast majority of drivers.
because blending in with the flow of traffic is the safest thing to do unless the speed of that traffic is inherently unsafe
Well, that's the argument, isn't it? The legislature put a limit there, strongly implying that anything over that limit is inherently unsafe.
There's plenty of evidence out there that speeds above 60 or so are really unsafe, given the increased risk of fatal accidents.
So I wouldn't necessarily call someone an "idiot" if they were driving slower than the flow of traffic -- SO LONG AS they're in the slowest lane.
It's the IDIOTS who are in the fast lane going slower than the speed of traffic. Or who put them selves parallel with a car to their right thus preventing anyone from passing.
Because once the antiphotons hit our eyes we'd all annihilate
No such thing. Or, at least, the photon is its own anti-particle, as far as I can find. I am not a particle physicist, nor do I play one on TV, but my limited understanding is that matter is a type of "frozen" energy with certain charge and spin, and anti-matter is the same phenomenon but with opposite charge and spin.
Photons are just energy, with no properties you can put backwards as in anti-matter. I did find a number of pages out there that talk about anti-photons as somehow photons moving backwards in time, but I can't quite wrap my mind around that one.
Anti-matter would "look" the same as matter from a distance, I think. The glow of an anti-matter star would be pretty and warm, until you got close enough for the anti-matter solar wind to start annihilating you.
<futile-plea-to-editors>Could you PLEASE at least _read_ the article of submitted stories, so you could notice if they're about something that's already a week out of date? PLEASE?</futile-plea-to-editors>
why is it that network and modem speeds are measured in bits per second but hard disk space and ISP download limits are in BYTES?
Well, it's not always easy to compute. Dividing by 8 is the first step, but you also have to count all of the overhead used by the various protocols at play.
PPPoA DSL in particular has a very high overhead due to the ATM layer. I calculated the theoretical overhead for a TCP data stream to be 13.9%, and in the real world I found closer to 18%.
Each technology is different, of course. A PtP T1 has 0.5% overhead of its own; so you get just the 4-5% of TCP/IP.
One more "gotcha": All telecommunications units are true metric units. A 10Gbps link is exactly 10,000,000,000 bits per second. To turn that into "binary" GBps, you'd have to divide by 8, and then by 1024*1024*1024.
(BTW, I reject this notion of gibibytes, abbreviated GiB, just because it sounds so stupid.)
Just how effective is this filter at cleaning water? If it is cheap enough to be mass produced for soldiers' food, then it would be incredible for humanitarian purposes if it cleans water well.
I think it works by osmosis, so it won't work just to clean the water: the water is drawn across the membrane into the food because the salt concentration is higher on the food-side.
If you were to remove the food, and try to use the pouch empty, nothing would happen: the water would not flow across the membrane.
This is why reverse-osmosis filters require some sort of pump to create pressure against the membrane, to force the water through.
How come these are never reported near coasts? At the frequency they were detected, you think there would be a tsunami event somewhere every week or so.
My understanding of them is that they aren't a single "wave" traveling along, carrying some large amount of energy. Instead, the appearance of a rogue wave is just a temporary concentration of the local wave energy into one spot.
It's a constructive interference effect, and doesn't last long or travel far. Longer waves move more quickly than shorter waves, so by chance you could get a few different waves that all catch up with each other and produce a temporary HUGE wave in one particular location. The individual waves then drift apart as they move at their different rates.
The whole controversy is the math that goes into predicting how common such a coincidence is. I do not actually understand the math involved, but my guess is there is some effect that makes it easier for the waves to line up with each other to cause the effect. (Sort of like a magnetic attraction -- as the waves pass each other, something helps the phases line up more than a simple linear combination would suggest)
There is an EXCELLENT animation(animated GIF, 1.7MB) on the Karsten Trulsen site linked to in the story here. It shows how intentionally lined-up waves of different frequencies will all catch up with each other to form a large local wave. It then also shows how that same sequence of waves can be placed in amidst "normal" ocean waves, and the same effect still appears. Very cool to watch.
A tsunami, on the other hand, IS a single, large-energy wave, and is a completely different phenomenon.
- Peter
Re:v6 could help solve some net problems
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
IPv6 is big enough to give a class C subnet to every living person on the planet
Um. IPv6 is big enough to give a Class A subnet to every living person on the planet.
It's big enough to route an entire IPv4 numberspace to every living person on the planet, and to each of their pets, favorite invisible friends, and pieces of furniture.
2^128 is a big, big number.
The point is, they'll be able to "waste" huge swaths of the that numberspace as they build the routing hierarchy, making the network more scalable.
I'm worried about remembering ssh 2031:0000:130F:0000:0000:09C0:876A:130B
Um, ever used satellite internet? How's 128K down and 64k up sound to you? After you purchase your $1000 bi-directional dish and have it installed, and pay $100/mo for service, it would be cheaper to have an ISDN or Frame relay ran to your home or business. I'll pass.
Couple points:
Advertised rates are 750k down, 128k up. Yes, slightly over $100/mo is what that costs. Are any frame-relay or ISDN services much less than that?
The worst part is there's no way around the time it takes the signal to travel the 88,000 miles to and from the satellite TWICE to get a packet to the internet and back. Right around 500ms latency, minimum.
So, if it's "cheaper to have ISDN or Frame relay" then by all means... but it is NOT cheaper in many, many areas of the US. In some more rural areas, you just can't get any high-speed services at all. The rural telco will just laugh at you, or offer you $1000/month prices. (To their defense, if you're many many miles from the nearest CO, building a T1 out to you costs BIG BUCKS for them)
What I'm looking forward to is more constellation-based low-orbit satellite systems with higher bandwidth. Latency is much less of a problem, with orbits of 300 miles instead of 22000. But the economics of such a system just doesn't quite work yet. (Think of the problems Iridium has had)
With most RS232 (and even RS422) serial ports, if you short the tx and rx pins, you wind up with a loop-back, where you receive a copy of every byte you transmit.
The parent poster wrote: Crossing wires in a PS2 cable will no more fool this than shorting wires on your serial port will make the computer see a modem reply to an AT command
This is true for two reasons:
1. Simply providing a loopback will not convince the computer that a modem is there, because a modem should reply with "OK" in response to "AT", whereas a loopback makes it look like the modem replied "AT". I'm sure something similar happens with a computer sending a status request to the keyboard, and expecting a proper response.
2. But regardless, the PS2 interface doesn't have separate tx and rx pins, so there's nothing to short... it's a bi-directional bus, with the host and device signaling each other with a pattern of pulses on the clock and data lines. No passive loopback is possible with that arrangement.
Man, if you were working on something and your wood got a little too wet or something, and this thing went off incorrectly, it would be both problematic and expensive. A false negative would be pretty bad too.
The features page (which has javascript rollover junk that Safari won't Grok) lists a "Metal Bypass" for cutting metalic or metal-clad stuff, that WOULD conduct enough to trigger the device.
As far as false-positive expense: I'm guessing if the total system cost is only $50-$150, then the replacement breaking cartridge couldn't be THAT expensive.
False negative would be unfortunate... I wonder how they protect themselves legally? Freak accidents could still happen, and if their magic "safety system" didn't prevent it, would people want to sue them?
Yea, it almost makes you wonder if the "on duty editor" is even checking their mail...
Or if the editors ever, oh, I dunno... READ SLASHDOT!?
Dupes are such a simple problem... as any of us lowly readers know: we recognize them immediately, because we read/. every day. Should that be an obvious requirement for being an editor?
Slashdot Mirror
it looked to me that, even when the capsule was just a bright dot with changing luminosity, it was spinning at much higher than 15 rpm. More like 60 - 80 rpm.
:(
If it were spinning the way it was supposed to, you wouldn't have been able to see it: it was supposed to spin neatly around its axis, for stability. (Like a flying saucer spinning)
Instead, it lost aerodynamic stability altogether, and started tumbling randomly in all directions, which is what you saw. I think once it started tumbling, all hope was lost, since the G-forces of re-entry were jolting the insides in all different directions as it tumbled. Some of those forces might have been even higher than what it encountered on impact.
(i.e. you don't want to be spinning in different directions as you're doing a 30-G descent)
- Peter
The web was originally TEXT ONLY. How many roll & scroll applications used a mouse at all in 1997?
:)
I share your righteous indignation at the stupid patent, but your facts are a bit off...
Read Tim Berners-Lee's FAQ about the web. The first web browser was designed on a NeXT system, and was graphical. Yes, a line-mode browser was written shortly thereafter, but a windowed point-and-click version came first. Graphics weren't inline, but they were definitely part of the initial idea. But the app itself was indeed GUI based.
And how many applications used a mouse in 1997!? Dude, all the apps I've been using have been with a mouse since Jan 24, 1984, where've you been?
But seriously, the patent is patently ridiculous, excuse the pun. The "invention" is a method for using the tab key to select a link on a web page. I feel as though millions of geeks all cried out "DUH!" and were silenced...
- Peter
The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.
First, I've gotta say it: of course your vote counts! How do you think the state gets to be solid one color or another!? Votes.
But there are some other interesting issues to point out:
Instant run-off voting has some problems, including paradoxical cases where voting for someone can actually increase their chances of losing. Plus, it's relatively hard to implement, given the current state of our polling places.
One suggested alternative that makes a lot of sense to me is approval voting: voters select ALL the candidates they would like to see elected, leaving blank all the candidates they do NOT want elected. This can be done with no change to most of the existing polling systems, and counting is relatively straightforward.
Of course, all of these are arguments about how to implement a direct popular vote for president in the United States. That's not what the founders of the constitution wanted!
Right now we have tyranny of small states
Well, that is what the constitution intended. What you call tyranny is really just a slight advantage, of course... bigger states do get more electoral votes, after all.
We can't just reject the system out of hand because it's old; we'd have to have the debate about the states' role in the federal government etc. and whether/how that system should be changed.
- Peter
You're lucky. With our lowly 120V supplies here, 2000 Watts is about as much as you can ever expect on a single circuit. (theoretically 2400W on a 20A circuit, but once you're pulling close to 20A, the wires and cords themselves start to draw enough in heating that it adds up)
:)
On the other hand, I have accidentally touched live AC wires a few times (and even stuck my finger in a light socket as a kid) and had relatively minor effects from it. I'd imagine 220/240 has a bit more of a kick...
- Peter
Should funny be measured in some sort of clown-units?
- Peter
How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense?
Why do we insist on clinging to "naked" optical discs? They have always put magnetic media inside cartridges or flexible envelopes... Just because CDs and DVDs work well enough without caddies, must we reject that idea out of hand?
Design a really air-tight, substantial cartridge for these puppies, and don't let those fingernails near the media!
- Peter
The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this.
True... but I think this technology changes the concept of "linear density" entirely: with holographic page recording, each area on the disc encodes a 2-dimensional holographic image.
If it were just the same type of 1-dimensional spiral of pits, packed closer, you're right... it would take many many more revolutions to read the whole disc. But I believe this technology doesn't use a spiral pattern at all, so the data read speed could scale right along with the overall density.
We don't know, but it's possible that each holographic page has a large amount of data, but there are a relatively small number of pages on the disc: maybe only 100 "tracks" with a variable number of pages per track. But if each page holds hundreds of megabytes of data, that would still give you a high overall capacity.
(Of course, the technical details are sparse from the company... it's obviously press-release stuff, since they're talking about playing "digital movies" -- the type of digital content obviously has nothing to do with the underlying technology. Or maybe their point was that the playback mechanism is capable of a stable enough data-rate to support movie playback?)
- Peter
Wouldn't it be prudent to put in the story text that the object is estimated to be only 6 meters in diameter?
The article states that an object that size would burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. I'm not sure if that's correct or not... a 6 meter hunk of material would probably rain at least SOME material down on the ground, but I don't know if it would make a crater.
The point is that we didn't just narrowly escape certain doom... it was a small rock.
- Peter
> imagine if the American government allowed a $2.6 billion mosque complex to be constructed in the "bible belt"
;)
Um. How could the American government NOT allow it? Isn't there some cliché about it being a free country?
Now, if the US Government supported such a project, it might rightly anger some people, just as the National Endowment for the Arts is frequently criticized for its use of public funds. Governments have to be careful about what they build or support.
But why should a government stop private enterprise from a building project like this?
- Peter
Ooops. I was wrong. The headquarters of one division of seagate is in Bloomington, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul): the The Recording Heads operation.
Didn't the article say something about the guy in question being in this division? Maybe because he worked for this division, that's why they're suing him from there.
- Peter
I was not able to figure out from the article alone what state this is taking place in.
;)
Um. From the article:
"Seagate filed an injunction Friday with Minnesota State Court for Hennepin County, seeking to keep Goglia from working on Western Digital's read/write technology for two years..."
That's pretty easy to read.
Seagate's headquarters is here in the Twin Cities.
Minnesota has pretty weak laws protecting employees... The only relevant precedent I know of off hand is in our local TV market -- TV news personalities typically have non-compete agreements that state they cannot appear on-camera at another station for a certain number of years.
- Peter
Take back roads.
And this is usually possible. However, there are many many areas where a freeway is the only route from point A to point B. Here in the Minneapolis metro area, the only roads that cross the Minnesota River are three freeways.
If your load is too big to safely haul in your vehicle at the posted speed
And this was another of my points: The posted minimum on these freeways is 40mph, while the maximum limits are 60, 65, or 70 on the three different freeways. Typical traffic speeds are just over 70 on all three. (the speed limit doesn't seem to make much difference there)
So clearly, if you can't maintain 40mph, it's illegal to drive on these roads.
Don't be a cheap-assed fuckhead and strap a queen-size mattress to the roof of your little riceburner.
Nice language. Really improves your point.
So, our freeways are only for people with vehicles capable of going as fast as YOU want to, huh?
Why do I get the impression that you mercilessly tailgate anyone going too slowly for your taste...
- Peter
And obstructing traffic IS a ticketable offense.
And that's why there are posted minimum speed-limits in many states.
You're somehow implying there that someone going 60 in a 55 zone could be ticketed for obstructing the traffic that's going 80. That's ridiculous. The minimum on Minnesota freeways is usually 40mph. I can't imagine anyone getting a ticket for driving above that speed.
You always have to consider some of the "legitimate" cases for going more slowly: some rental moving trucks, for instance, have a speed limiter at 55. Or if you've got a sofa tied to a pickup truck, you don't want to go very fast. etc.
The bigger problem is that the government has allowed one of its laws to be unenforced or underenforced... For various reasons, state legislatures can't or won't raise the speed limits, but then in many cases the police departments can't or won't enforce the existing limits. This becomes unfair, because it becomes selectively enforced, which singles out a few "victims" for punishment without affecting the behavior of the vast majority of drivers.
because blending in with the flow of traffic is the safest thing to do unless the speed of that traffic is inherently unsafe
Well, that's the argument, isn't it? The legislature put a limit there, strongly implying that anything over that limit is inherently unsafe.
There's plenty of evidence out there that speeds above 60 or so are really unsafe, given the increased risk of fatal accidents.
So I wouldn't necessarily call someone an "idiot" if they were driving slower than the flow of traffic -- SO LONG AS they're in the slowest lane.
It's the IDIOTS who are in the fast lane going slower than the speed of traffic. Or who put them selves parallel with a car to their right thus preventing anyone from passing.
- Peter
Because once the antiphotons hit our eyes we'd all annihilate
No such thing. Or, at least, the photon is its own anti-particle, as far as I can find. I am not a particle physicist, nor do I play one on TV, but my limited understanding is that matter is a type of "frozen" energy with certain charge and spin, and anti-matter is the same phenomenon but with opposite charge and spin.
Photons are just energy, with no properties you can put backwards as in anti-matter. I did find a number of pages out there that talk about anti-photons as somehow photons moving backwards in time, but I can't quite wrap my mind around that one.
Anti-matter would "look" the same as matter from a distance, I think. The glow of an anti-matter star would be pretty and warm, until you got close enough for the anti-matter solar wind to start annihilating you.
- Peter
- Peter
why is it that network and modem speeds are measured in bits per second but hard disk space and ISP download limits are in BYTES?
Well, it's not always easy to compute. Dividing by 8 is the first step, but you also have to count all of the overhead used by the various protocols at play.
PPPoA DSL in particular has a very high overhead due to the ATM layer. I calculated the theoretical overhead for a TCP data stream to be 13.9%, and in the real world I found closer to 18%.
Each technology is different, of course. A PtP T1 has 0.5% overhead of its own; so you get just the 4-5% of TCP/IP.
One more "gotcha": All telecommunications units are true metric units. A 10Gbps link is exactly 10,000,000,000 bits per second. To turn that into "binary" GBps, you'd have to divide by 8, and then by 1024*1024*1024.
(BTW, I reject this notion of gibibytes, abbreviated GiB, just because it sounds so stupid.)
- Peter
Just how effective is this filter at cleaning water? If it is cheap enough to be mass produced for soldiers' food, then it would be incredible for humanitarian purposes if it cleans water well.
I think it works by osmosis, so it won't work just to clean the water: the water is drawn across the membrane into the food because the salt concentration is higher on the food-side.
If you were to remove the food, and try to use the pouch empty, nothing would happen: the water would not flow across the membrane.
This is why reverse-osmosis filters require some sort of pump to create pressure against the membrane, to force the water through.
- Peter
My dad, my brother and I all had lasik two years ago. I even have the video of my procedure (MPEG-4 video, 35MB) online.
No complaints, corrected to 20/20, no night-vision problems. I'm a happy camper!
(I'm 27 -- 25 when it was done, my prescription was -1.75 and -2.25, only slight astigmatism)
- Peter
How come these are never reported near coasts? At the frequency they were detected, you think there would be a tsunami event somewhere every week or so.
My understanding of them is that they aren't a single "wave" traveling along, carrying some large amount of energy. Instead, the appearance of a rogue wave is just a temporary concentration of the local wave energy into one spot.
It's a constructive interference effect, and doesn't last long or travel far. Longer waves move more quickly than shorter waves, so by chance you could get a few different waves that all catch up with each other and produce a temporary HUGE wave in one particular location. The individual waves then drift apart as they move at their different rates.
The whole controversy is the math that goes into predicting how common such a coincidence is. I do not actually understand the math involved, but my guess is there is some effect that makes it easier for the waves to line up with each other to cause the effect. (Sort of like a magnetic attraction -- as the waves pass each other, something helps the phases line up more than a simple linear combination would suggest)
There is an EXCELLENT animation(animated GIF, 1.7MB) on the Karsten Trulsen site linked to in the story here. It shows how intentionally lined-up waves of different frequencies will all catch up with each other to form a large local wave. It then also shows how that same sequence of waves can be placed in amidst "normal" ocean waves, and the same effect still appears. Very cool to watch.
A tsunami, on the other hand, IS a single, large-energy wave, and is a completely different phenomenon.
- Peter
Um. IPv6 is big enough to give a Class A subnet to every living person on the planet.
It's big enough to route an entire IPv4 numberspace to every living person on the planet, and to each of their pets, favorite invisible friends, and pieces of furniture.
2^128 is a big, big number.
The point is, they'll be able to "waste" huge swaths of the that numberspace as they build the routing hierarchy, making the network more scalable.
I'm worried about remembering ssh 2031:0000:130F:0000:0000:09C0:876A:130B
- Peter
Using standard TCP/IP is a non starter
All the existing satellite folks are using methods to overcome TCP/IP's limitations in the high latency satellite environment.
(That's not a particularly good article in terms of getting details right, but it's an okay overview)
- Peter
Um, ever used satellite internet? How's 128K down and 64k up sound to you? After you purchase your $1000 bi-directional dish and have it installed, and pay $100/mo for service, it would be cheaper to have an ISDN or Frame relay ran to your home or business. I'll pass.
:)
Couple points:
Advertised rates are 750k down, 128k up. Yes, slightly over $100/mo is what that costs. Are any frame-relay or ISDN services much less than that?
The worst part is there's no way around the time it takes the signal to travel the 88,000 miles to and from the satellite TWICE to get a packet to the internet and back. Right around 500ms latency, minimum.
So, if it's "cheaper to have ISDN or Frame relay" then by all means... but it is NOT cheaper in many, many areas of the US. In some more rural areas, you just can't get any high-speed services at all. The rural telco will just laugh at you, or offer you $1000/month prices. (To their defense, if you're many many miles from the nearest CO, building a T1 out to you costs BIG BUCKS for them)
It all depends where you live.
Cool thing: Starband is offering a self-pointing dish system for mobile homes etc. Try getting frame-relay to a moving target!
What I'm looking forward to is more constellation-based low-orbit satellite systems with higher bandwidth. Latency is much less of a problem, with orbits of 300 miles instead of 22000. But the economics of such a system just doesn't quite work yet. (Think of the problems Iridium has had)
- Peter
Then why does it work?
With most RS232 (and even RS422) serial ports, if you short the tx and rx pins, you wind up with a loop-back, where you receive a copy of every byte you transmit.
The parent poster wrote: Crossing wires in a PS2 cable will no more fool this than shorting wires on your serial port will make the computer see a modem reply to an AT command
This is true for two reasons:
1. Simply providing a loopback will not convince the computer that a modem is there, because a modem should reply with "OK" in response to "AT", whereas a loopback makes it look like the modem replied "AT". I'm sure something similar happens with a computer sending a status request to the keyboard, and expecting a proper response.
2. But regardless, the PS2 interface doesn't have separate tx and rx pins, so there's nothing to short... it's a bi-directional bus, with the host and device signaling each other with a pattern of pulses on the clock and data lines. No passive loopback is possible with that arrangement.
- Peter
Man, if you were working on something and your wood got a little too wet or something, and this thing went off incorrectly, it would be both problematic and expensive. A false negative would be pretty bad too.
The features page (which has javascript rollover junk that Safari won't Grok) lists a "Metal Bypass" for cutting metalic or metal-clad stuff, that WOULD conduct enough to trigger the device.
As far as false-positive expense: I'm guessing if the total system cost is only $50-$150, then the replacement breaking cartridge couldn't be THAT expensive.
False negative would be unfortunate... I wonder how they protect themselves legally? Freak accidents could still happen, and if their magic "safety system" didn't prevent it, would people want to sue them?
- Peter
Yea, it almost makes you wonder if the "on duty editor" is even checking their mail...
/. every day. Should that be an obvious requirement for being an editor?
Or if the editors ever, oh, I dunno... READ SLASHDOT!?
Dupes are such a simple problem... as any of us lowly readers know: we recognize them immediately, because we read
Sigh.
- Peter