Instead of a $50,000 antenna system, the group used a metal tape measure.
This statement is misleading. The metal tape measure is a toy compared to a well designed NASA antenna system. The transmitter on the Cassini space probe uses only 20 watts of power to transmit a signal from Saturn to Earth. This is most likely less than one third of the power used by a single light bulb illuminating the room you are currently in.
Don't get me wrong, the USNA team accomplished an amazing feat with their satellite, but we must keep things in perspective.
In fact I have seen reports that Google is the most succesful search engine in terms of money making
I believe that is from licensing deals, not from ad revenue.
Re:Subscriptions should add value
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 1
But how would we work it so that only registered users get to post?
Just set up a newsserver that requires a username/password combo. There are already a few subscription based newsservers in business. This is actually one of the better ideas I have heard so far.
Webservers that operate behind a load balancer, reverse proxy server or a firewall will often report the operating system of the load balancer, reverse proxy or firewall server. Hence reports of 'Microsoft/IIS on Linux' indicate that either the web server is behind a Linux server that is acting as a reverse proxy, has been configured to send a different signature or Microsoft have released a version of IIS for Linux.
And If you look at the history info for download.microsoft.com it shows that it is an akamai site. As well all know akamai runs linux.
It's not entirely the case that there will be nothing to rebuild.
I agree with you there, but the original poster was implying that by invading and helping them rebuild, we could effectively turn then into the next Germany or Japan. Rebuilding will definitely help the Afganistanies, but we would not be able to instantly turn Afganistan into a huge economic powerhouse. Unlike Japan and Germany, the infrastructure is just not there. I support aid to Afganistan, I just don't expect them to be able to support themselves for a very long time.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
The current situtation with Afganistan is not the same as WWII. Both Germany and Japan had major economic resources before we invaded. Enough resources so that they could effectively wage war. Afganistan is different, the closest thing to an industry there is the opium trade. Germany and Japan had the knowledge and manpower to rebuild after the war, but Afganistan does not. There will be nothing to rebuild after an invasion. That leaves us with building industries from the ground up. Most likely these new industries would be controlled by foreigners, since I doubt there are sufficent numbers of Afghanies that are qualified to run a business. This might put us in an even worse position than now. From what I understand a great deal of the anti-american sentiment stems from the fact that we have military bases in Islamic countries. Imagine how pissed they would be if all of their capital was controlled by foreigners.
Re:CIA tried to do this once. only quietly.
on
Raising the Kursk
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· Score: 1
There is a good discussion about the Glomar Explorer in the book Blind Man's Bluff (The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage) by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. It is an interesting read.
From what I know, I haven't heard of an IC that have variable R, C or L. Also, tha main problem with RF IC are the L and C (well mostly the L) because it is only possible to make plane components in an IC.
While I don't know of any sort of variable inductors in IC's, they do have variable capactitors. They are called varactors. Essentially, it is a diode capacitance that is controlled by the forward bias voltage. As far I am aware, this is the most common way of tuning RF IC circuits.
It was Nautilus' webcentricity that made it great, I hope somehow it can continue in some form or other. The project was brilliant.
I am hoping that they will release some version of the nautilus server software. I would love to be able to set it up and access it just like the eazel-services, the file storage portion at least.
Microwaves are one thing, but let's look at something that operates in the same band. On my wireless lan, if I get on my 2.4GHz cordless, I have no more network, WEP or not.
Microwaves do operate in the same band. They run at 2.4 GHz. This may have something to do with why the 2.4 GHz band is unlicensed.
How about a hair dryer, an espresso machine, an electric razor, a TV (phlat panel and CRT types), a nearby PC running a benchmark, a washing machine and/or dryer? Gotta give it that lived in environmental background noise.
All of those items operate at a different frequency than the wireless network. They should not have an effect, only devices that output noise in the 2.4 Ghz band should cause a problem.
2) What Napster is required to do is block all ifnringing materials from being searched for.
How does this differ from a search engine? Next are they going to go after them? A search engine listing a web site offering illegal mp3s seems to be the same sort of thing as Napster.
This is only true if they don't buy any games at all.
This is true, but if someone has a unit with a mod chip and access to a burner, how many games do you think they are going to buy? Most of the people that I know have not bought a single game after their mod chips were installed. They simple go rent or borrow a game, and then burn it. I'm not saying that all people are this way, but the majority of modded units are primarily used for playing pirated games.
No, Dreamcasts are NOW sold at a loss. When they were $200, or POSSIBLY $150, they were not selling them at a loss. No, it wasn't a great profit, but like I said, a little volume goes a long way.
Actually they were selling them at a loss then as well. A news item from January 24 (which was before they dropped the price to $100) says:
Eiji Maeda, senior analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research, estimated Sega was losing 5,000 to 10,000 yen ($42 to $84) per console since it set the product price at a minimum profit margin.
So if Sega was loosing $42 dollars per unit at a price of $150, that would put the cost of a dreamcast at $192. Selling them at $200 would only bring in $8 profit. Selling 1 million units would only bring in $8 million. I don't know if that price included development and promotional costs, but if it didn't I am sure that Sega would still be taking a loss. Console makers expect to lose money on the hardware, they make it up in the software.
Look at the time when Kalisto and UTOPiA started releasing their boot discs and Dreamcast ISO's. Suddenly, within a few weeks, the Dreamcast consoles are starting to finally SELL, instead of collecting dust on the shelf. I PERSONALLY know of six people who bought a DC at that time, and for that reason. One simple demonstration on how my purchased copy of Virtua Tennis was identical to the burned cdr version was all they needed. But look what happened when Sega started going after these people, and the people with just the INFORMATION on it online. Sega's console sales suddenly drop (and that's WITH some big-name titles being released)!
This is actually even worse for the manufacturer. Basically all of the hardware is sold at a loss, and if people are buying units just to play pirated games, they loose even more money.
I wonder when these companies finally learn that, as much as it goes against traditional business practices, GIVING more things away will most likely increase your profit. And with the millions (rough worldwide estimate) of "pirated" Playstation games alone, Sony and all of the 3rd party developers (ESPECIALLY Squaresoft) managed to do pretty damn well from '95-'00 with their PSX sales. Hm...coincidence? I think not.
In essence most console manufactures are giving things away when they sell the consoles at a loss. They make the money back by selling the software. Now I for one like the ability to play backups, I even burn backups of new music cd's when I buy them. But buying a console just to play pirated games doesn't help the manufacturer's situation, it worsens it.
I think of the involuntary EE's as CS's without all the math. Granted some people are in EE cause they want to be, and not cause they couldn't handle CS.
That is funny, because at my school we view it exactly the opposite. Most of the involuntary CS's were EE's who couldn't handle all of the math. I don't know of a single person who has switched from CS to EE. All I ever see are the EE's going to CompE or to CS.
Now I'm not saying that CS is easy, but it is definitely less math oriented than EE or even CompE. I've taken CS classes and about the only math that was used was inductive proofs and simple efficiency of algorithms. While in EE we routinely use higher math such as Laplace and Fourier Transforms for frequency analysis.
At my school it only takes two extra math clasees beyond what the EE dept requires in order to complete a math minor. I would hardly consider that to be a CS without all the math.
But as advise to the student, I would say what most other people have said. If you want to be a programmer or are-not-very-good-at/don't-like math go for the CS degree. If you like math and would like to learn more about the hardware side as well as learning to program go for the CompE.
For a losslessly compressed file, this would work great. The only inconvience would be that you would have to wait each track to be played to decrypt it.
But this won't work as well with mp3's. The quality of the mp3 will go down each time you reencode it. I'm sure that artifacts would be apparent after a few encodings.
While $3k does seem expensive, it really isn't for the convenience. Think of a setup such as this at an airport. 100 meters would cover a lot of people, and the cost of wiring would most likely be greater than the $3k. I think that the amount of simultaneous users would be a bigger limiting factor than converage area.
Now for a office or home environment where people are mostly stationary, it is most likely more economical to stick with wired networks. But the $3k price is only the starting point, and the prices will only go down from here.
That sounds like a flaw in your network design, not in Campus Pipeline itself. The removal of the old mail accounts just seems silly. It will break all existing mail clients. I can see why you are frustrated.
We have Campus Pipeline here at my school. Basically it just ties existing services together in one place. From the portal you can check email (using your old email account, which is still pop3 and unix shell accesible), connect to the registration system to add/drop classes, look at you schedule, read campus news and whatnot. I don't quite see what the big fuss is about. It is just a fancy portal system. It is not required use here, you can still use all of the systems the old way. Now everything is accessable from one url.
I personally don't use it, but it is not an inherently bad thing. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like Campus Pipeline helped pay for some of the hardware setup along with software costs for the system. So overall everyone is a winner. Soon with browsers such as mozilla that allow easily blocking images from specific hosts, you won't even have to view the ads.
Yes, the url of the page comes from babelfish, which should get past the proxy. But the images themselves come directly from the blockedpornsite.com and won't make it past the filter.
Think of it this way. Say someone writes a message on a piece of paper and seals it in a box. Assume that no one has has seen the message, or was told by the writer what it said. If the writer dies and the box is tossed into a black hole, then the infomation in the message is effectively erased. There would not be any record of the message ever existing. There would not be anyway to recreate the message from the matter in the black hole. The black hole destroys the information content of the matter leaving only the mass behind.
I bet they worked hard on their alpah and sparc ports... Lets see, go out get a copy of alpha redhat linux, change the name to Mandrake Alpha linux and done with that, and then take a copy of Sparc redhat linux and change the name to Mandrake sparc linux and done with that. Must be nice to leech off other companies. This strategey worked for their Mandrake intel port. Wait, they added kde instead of gnome, I forgot how hard that is.
Maybe I am bit naive here, but how hard is it to port your distro to another architecture? I thought that one of the great things about linux was that once the kernel, compiler, and libs were ported to a new architecture, all that was required was a recompile for all of the apps. I do suppose that going to a 64-bit system would require some changes in the apps, but what would that take other than just changing some definitions?
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of a $50,000 antenna system, the group used a metal tape measure.
This statement is misleading. The metal tape measure is a toy compared to a well designed NASA antenna system. The transmitter on the Cassini space probe uses only 20 watts of power to transmit a signal from Saturn to Earth. This is most likely less than one third of the power used by a single light bulb illuminating the room you are currently in.
Don't get me wrong, the USNA team accomplished an amazing feat with their satellite, but we must keep things in perspective.
In fact I have seen reports that Google is the most succesful search engine in terms of money making
I believe that is from licensing deals, not from ad revenue.
But how would we work it so that only registered users get to post?
Just set up a newsserver that requires a username/password combo. There are already a few subscription based newsservers in business. This is actually one of the better ideas I have heard so far.
Webservers that operate behind a load balancer, reverse proxy server or a firewall will often report the operating system of the load balancer, reverse proxy or firewall server. Hence reports of 'Microsoft/IIS on Linux' indicate that either the web server is behind a Linux server that is acting as a reverse proxy, has been configured to send a different signature or Microsoft have released a version of IIS for Linux.
And If you look at the history info for download.microsoft.com it shows that it is an akamai site. As well all know akamai runs linux.
It's not entirely the case that there will be nothing to rebuild.
I agree with you there, but the original poster was implying that by invading and helping them rebuild, we could effectively turn then into the next Germany or Japan. Rebuilding will definitely help the Afganistanies, but we would not be able to instantly turn Afganistan into a huge economic powerhouse. Unlike Japan and Germany, the infrastructure is just not there. I support aid to Afganistan, I just don't expect them to be able to support themselves for a very long time.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
The current situtation with Afganistan is not the same as WWII. Both Germany and Japan had major economic resources before we invaded. Enough resources so that they could effectively wage war. Afganistan is different, the closest thing to an industry there is the opium trade. Germany and Japan had the knowledge and manpower to rebuild after the war, but Afganistan does not. There will be nothing to rebuild after an invasion. That leaves us with building industries from the ground up. Most likely these new industries would be controlled by foreigners, since I doubt there are sufficent numbers of Afghanies that are qualified to run a business. This might put us in an even worse position than now. From what I understand a great deal of the anti-american sentiment stems from the fact that we have military bases in Islamic countries. Imagine how pissed they would be if all of their capital was controlled by foreigners.
There is a good discussion about the Glomar Explorer in the book Blind Man's Bluff (The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage) by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. It is an interesting read.
While I don't know of any sort of variable inductors in IC's, they do have variable capactitors. They are called varactors. Essentially, it is a diode capacitance that is controlled by the forward bias voltage. As far I am aware, this is the most common way of tuning RF IC circuits.
I am hoping that they will release some version of the nautilus server software. I would love to be able to set it up and access it just like the eazel-services, the file storage portion at least.
there as and will never be a successful engineer in politics.
Depends, I guess, on what you consider as successful.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer.
He didn't use any cipher with ssh. So everything was unencrypted.
Microwaves are one thing, but let's look at something that operates in the same band. On my wireless lan, if I get on my 2.4GHz cordless, I have no more network, WEP or not.
Microwaves do operate in the same band. They run at 2.4 GHz. This may have something to do with why the 2.4 GHz band is unlicensed.
How about a hair dryer, an espresso machine, an electric razor, a TV (phlat panel and CRT types), a nearby PC running a benchmark, a washing machine and/or dryer? Gotta give it that lived in environmental background noise.
All of those items operate at a different frequency than the wireless network. They should not have an effect, only devices that output noise in the 2.4 Ghz band should cause a problem.
2) What Napster is required to do is block all ifnringing materials from being searched for.
How does this differ from a search engine? Next are they going to go after them? A search engine listing a web site offering illegal mp3s seems to be the same sort of thing as Napster.
This is only true if they don't buy any games at all.
This is true, but if someone has a unit with a mod chip and access to a burner, how many games do you think they are going to buy? Most of the people that I know have not bought a single game after their mod chips were installed. They simple go rent or borrow a game, and then burn it. I'm not saying that all people are this way, but the majority of modded units are primarily used for playing pirated games.
Actually they were selling them at a loss then as well. A news item from January 24 (which was before they dropped the price to $100) says:
Eiji Maeda, senior analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research, estimated Sega was losing 5,000 to 10,000 yen ($42 to $84) per console since it set the product price at a minimum profit margin.
So if Sega was loosing $42 dollars per unit at a price of $150, that would put the cost of a dreamcast at $192. Selling them at $200 would only bring in $8 profit. Selling 1 million units would only bring in $8 million. I don't know if that price included development and promotional costs, but if it didn't I am sure that Sega would still be taking a loss. Console makers expect to lose money on the hardware, they make it up in the software.
This is actually even worse for the manufacturer. Basically all of the hardware is sold at a loss, and if people are buying units just to play pirated games, they loose even more money.
I wonder when these companies finally learn that, as much as it goes against traditional business practices, GIVING more things away will most likely increase your profit. And with the millions (rough worldwide estimate) of "pirated" Playstation games alone, Sony and all of the 3rd party developers (ESPECIALLY Squaresoft) managed to do pretty damn well from '95-'00 with their PSX sales. Hm...coincidence? I think not.
In essence most console manufactures are giving things away when they sell the consoles at a loss. They make the money back by selling the software. Now I for one like the ability to play backups, I even burn backups of new music cd's when I buy them. But buying a console just to play pirated games doesn't help the manufacturer's situation, it worsens it.
That is funny, because at my school we view it exactly the opposite. Most of the involuntary CS's were EE's who couldn't handle all of the math. I don't know of a single person who has switched from CS to EE. All I ever see are the EE's going to CompE or to CS.
Now I'm not saying that CS is easy, but it is definitely less math oriented than EE or even CompE. I've taken CS classes and about the only math that was used was inductive proofs and simple efficiency of algorithms. While in EE we routinely use higher math such as Laplace and Fourier Transforms for frequency analysis.
At my school it only takes two extra math clasees beyond what the EE dept requires in order to complete a math minor. I would hardly consider that to be a CS without all the math.
But as advise to the student, I would say what most other people have said. If you want to be a programmer or are-not-very-good-at/don't-like math go for the CS degree. If you like math and would like to learn more about the hardware side as well as learning to program go for the CompE.
For a losslessly compressed file, this would work great. The only inconvience would be that you would have to wait each track to be played to decrypt it.
But this won't work as well with mp3's. The quality of the mp3 will go down each time you reencode it. I'm sure that artifacts would be apparent after a few encodings.
While $3k does seem expensive, it really isn't for the convenience. Think of a setup such as this at an airport. 100 meters would cover a lot of people, and the cost of wiring would most likely be greater than the $3k. I think that the amount of simultaneous users would be a bigger limiting factor than converage area.
Now for a office or home environment where people are mostly stationary, it is most likely more economical to stick with wired networks. But the $3k price is only the starting point, and the prices will only go down from here.
I personally don't use it, but it is not an inherently bad thing. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like Campus Pipeline helped pay for some of the hardware setup along with software costs for the system. So overall everyone is a winner. Soon with browsers such as mozilla that allow easily blocking images from specific hosts, you won't even have to view the ads.
Yes, the url of the page comes from babelfish, which should get past the proxy. But the images themselves come directly from the blockedpornsite.com and won't make it past the filter.
Think of it this way. Say someone writes a message on a piece of paper and seals it in a box. Assume that no one has has seen the message, or was told by the writer what it said. If the writer dies and the box is tossed into a black hole, then the infomation in the message is effectively erased. There would not be any record of the message ever existing. There would not be anyway to recreate the message from the matter in the black hole. The black hole destroys the information content of the matter leaving only the mass behind.
Maybe I am bit naive here, but how hard is it to port your distro to another architecture? I thought that one of the great things about linux was that once the kernel, compiler, and libs were ported to a new architecture, all that was required was a recompile for all of the apps. I do suppose that going to a 64-bit system would require some changes in the apps, but what would that take other than just changing some definitions?