Not quite, there is a campaign at the moment against Raubkopieren (illegal copying) quoting the prison terms and fines. They are trying at least to go after file sharers but they cannot get those who copy for friends off their own media.
The music business here is carefully controlled and we have a major publisher (BMG) who seem to get the ear of the government.
This is an issue that I have also been thinking about, tracking the missing as well as identifying the dead. The BBC has been operating a tracking system. It does require web access though which wouldn't be an issue where the comms are intact, but would be a problem elsewhere.
I have looked at the problem of slow/limited comms before when I was out workinging in some wilder places. The solution that evolved was to use centralised servers and dialup connections from the outstations, which would synchronise at various points during the day. This technique was used by shops in the early days for stock control so it is well known but the issue of throughput is a problem.
Inmarsat terminals are extremely useful as they can give you 64Kb/s, but the bandwidth will be expensive.
As far as the DB is concerned, I agree, you need to have a 'confidence' indicator on all reports.
Note that IIRC, many of the countries have immigration registration systems to track foreigners coming in, but these systems are typically quite primitive, and tourists move around. Other sources of information such as the town for residents and police for foreigners may have been destroyed (i.e. Banda Aceh, completely) or in other places, it may be at least partially intact.
I am aware that some simple systems already exist for missing persons tracking, which have been used with refugees and others, but they just wouldn't work for something as big as this and they can't cope for where there is a large transient population (i.e., tourists) where reports are coming from other countries.
That was quite a rant, but you have forgotten to remind the USians that without French help, then the war of independence would have failed. I know, that it was done out of the French love of the English (neignbours and so on). Anyway, I find it particularly hypocritical when this is forgotten.
Actually a lot of the problems comes down to the trenches of WWI. The US entered particularly late into that one but it was a common and appalling experience for the rest of Europe.
The thing is that system calls can't move around usually. You don't really need libc if you can get to the kernel entry points. Remember it is the kernel that actually does the real work, i.e., libc only wraps system(), the real work is inside the kernel.
Overwriting a return address with a new one is difficult because you need to find the correct place to call. It is much easier to insert your own code with the modified stack frame. Therefore NX (present on many other architectures) is actually a fairly major step.
Samples can be taken and even photos are made. The problem is to make the information available widely.
The issue is to be able to do this across fairly poor links.
One of the big problems with such disasters is identifying the victims, particularly when there are so many tourists involved and complete communities destroyed.
One wonders what tech is available to help people be identified. Whilst I realise that priority must be given to the living, it is still important to be able to trace who has died, or who is stuck unable to communicate in a hospital somewhere.
In my understanding, this was no 9/11 so bodies were usually intact (death through drowning or collision with debris). Eventually the bodies may be identified, but by then the people may have been missing for months. Clearly there is use for some kind of system to allow the information to be spread around so that people may be identified.
Forget the USGS and NOAA. If you drop a large pile of something in the water it will go splash. Therefore, you can extrapolate from a major earthquake in a body of water that there will very probably be a tsunami.
The things is that although the affected countries may not have government organisations for this (although Indonesia definitely should as it sits on an active plate boundary), they have universities and some must have geology or geophysics departments with working seismologists.
Germany has no colonial connections there but this is considered a *major* event. The Germans like to travel and there were probably a lot of them caught up in the tragedy (perhaps even more than the UK). The journalists don't really care about which nationalities they are are talking to so I have seen English people interviewed on German TV and Germans interviewed on British TV (at least, BBC World). An interesting point is that the Beeb doesn't like to show dead bodies (a bit difficult at the moment), but the Germans don't seem to mind showing it.
I agree that the US is actually quite vulnerable. They catch other diasters such as hurricanes on a regular basis on the east coast, but "The big splash", either from an earthquake in the Pacific or that landslide in the Canaries would dwarf what has already been seen.
This is just a "me too", but I also found sourcenav great for getting into a big legacy C++ project. I did have stability problems but I had to run the Windows version because the AIX backend was so ancient that I couldn't build on that platform. It meant I needed frequent saves of the project but otherwise fine.
The real issue is with a warning net, those closest will be able to warn those further away. Even if an Indian based seismologist observes something, the difference between the earthquake and the tsunami wouldn't be so big. It would be better to have a waring net like the Pacific, but the Pacific rim is much more active.
A scientist will be able to recognise that a dangerous event has ocurred. I guess the real problem is who does the scientist call to ensure that word is spread. You are quite right about bureacracy, as there need to be a system that ensures reports are taken seriously and acted upon.
Unlike the Pacific, the Bay of Bengal/Anderman sea is much less active, and this was practically the only major fault. India is still prone to some earthquakes (major plate boundary in the North), but these are not undersea.
Write-permit rings or write rings are light and don't actually fly well, so I doubt they were playing with that as it is unlikely to mass enough to flip the switch. More likely frisbee with the 9-track canisters.
If you drop a stone in the water, it makes a splash, I think most people would understand that. Such a big earthquake would not only have been recorded but it would normally set off alarms to get the seismologists attention. If promptly recognised, then those in India/Sri Lanka should have had an hour or so's warning.
I would have thought that news of a massive earthquake at sea backed by warnings of a tsunami would have worried enough people to get them to move (possible panic being another issue.
Cyclone's don't tend to create tsunami's as such, more the low pressure builds up water levels which can then be pushed further inland by the winds. This is a gradual process (like an extremely high tide), rather than the sudden impact of a tsunami.
As mentioned, a lot of airlines have been able to cope with this kind of thing in the past. To shut down for the day seems to be rather an exceptional response, and I hope the market remembers them.
I understand that the main threat is in the Canary Islands, although the article linked says that perhaps the threat is overstated. OTOH, there are boulders that seem to have been displaced in the bahamas that tie to a previous subterranean landslide in the Canaries.
Between this and a possible impact that may cause major damage, it seems that there is a lot more to worry about than a war on terrorism.
Once the earthquake hit with a sea floor epicenter, everyone with a web browser knew a tsunami was going to hit somewhere.
Why didn't someone in India or Sri Lanka work this one out? It was early morning there and the country isn't predominantly Christian so there should have been people around and services available to warn people via radio/TV.
As you quote a UK help line, I guess you are UK based so you have GSM phones.If your brother has a mobile then he may be able to at least SMS even if he can't call. Phuket (and surrounding islands) is the main diving location but although it is badly damaged, there seem to be fewer deaths.
The old system used keyboard macros but many experienced users just typed the commands completely themselves. The backend ran on heavy metal (Unisys) and that did most of the work. It seems a waste of the PC but the system functioned well.
The problem is that the daily schedule of an airline is extremely complicated. One issue is that many airlines have downsized their older and more experienced staff so they lack the ability to run the airline without their extensive IT systems. Even with the knowledge, you still need to be able to reschedule slots with the airports as well as new flight plans (also usually filed by computer).
It is then an issue as to whether you really want to design IT systems for every scenario. It costs a *lot* of money to do this and is usually only warranted in a safety critical domain (i.e., ATC). Comair's solution was to scratch the flights and thus ensure that aircraft were at their start positions for the next day.
I do not know the nature of the Comair system, but software design is the major issue with systems that degrade catastrophically rather than gradually. Please remember that major airlines used to run with much slower hardware up to the eighties (indeed, much less processing power than my PDA), however they did have very high I/O throughput and intelligent frontends.
No, its more difficult in the airline industry. The system by default tries to keep as many planes in the air earning money as possible. If you have an outage which disrupts this choreography, there is a tremendous knock-on effect as passengers/urgent cargo must be rebooked.
I have seen the major hub for an airline closed because of snow for just a couple of hours in the early morning, but the resulting chaos of rescheduling/rebooking caused the reservations system to crash after just a few minutes of uptime. The same would keep happening after restarts.
It is normal to test system up to several times normal load, but they were seeing peaks at over 100x. The old, 3270 emulator based system would have slowly got through it but the newer system died.
I have a lot of friends working at a large airline.
Yes, but it is mostly recoverable. The heavy iron handles things like backend reservations, checkin and cargo. Smaller systems handle things like weight/balance and fuel and PCs are typically used for the front-ends.
Weight/balance calcs can be done more or less by hand if necessary, however a larger fuel margin is needed. Checkin can be done by hand (you have seen those sticky label systems). However to lose reservations is a major problem.
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We can easily stick music down 64 Kbps, so what are they doing with 128Kpbs?
The music business here is carefully controlled and we have a major publisher (BMG) who seem to get the ear of the government.
I have looked at the problem of slow/limited comms before when I was out workinging in some wilder places. The solution that evolved was to use centralised servers and dialup connections from the outstations, which would synchronise at various points during the day. This technique was used by shops in the early days for stock control so it is well known but the issue of throughput is a problem.
Inmarsat terminals are extremely useful as they can give you 64Kb/s, but the bandwidth will be expensive.
As far as the DB is concerned, I agree, you need to have a 'confidence' indicator on all reports.
Note that IIRC, many of the countries have immigration registration systems to track foreigners coming in, but these systems are typically quite primitive, and tourists move around. Other sources of information such as the town for residents and police for foreigners may have been destroyed (i.e. Banda Aceh, completely) or in other places, it may be at least partially intact.
I am aware that some simple systems already exist for missing persons tracking, which have been used with refugees and others, but they just wouldn't work for something as big as this and they can't cope for where there is a large transient population (i.e., tourists) where reports are coming from other countries.
Actually a lot of the problems comes down to the trenches of WWI. The US entered particularly late into that one but it was a common and appalling experience for the rest of Europe.
The thing is that system calls can't move around usually. You don't really need libc if you can get to the kernel entry points. Remember it is the kernel that actually does the real work, i.e., libc only wraps system(), the real work is inside the kernel.
Overwriting a return address with a new one is difficult because you need to find the correct place to call. It is much easier to insert your own code with the modified stack frame. Therefore NX (present on many other architectures) is actually a fairly major step.
Samples can be taken and even photos are made. The problem is to make the information available widely. The issue is to be able to do this across fairly poor links.
One wonders what tech is available to help people be identified. Whilst I realise that priority must be given to the living, it is still important to be able to trace who has died, or who is stuck unable to communicate in a hospital somewhere.
In my understanding, this was no 9/11 so bodies were usually intact (death through drowning or collision with debris). Eventually the bodies may be identified, but by then the people may have been missing for months. Clearly there is use for some kind of system to allow the information to be spread around so that people may be identified.
The things is that although the affected countries may not have government organisations for this (although Indonesia definitely should as it sits on an active plate boundary), they have universities and some must have geology or geophysics departments with working seismologists.
I agree that the US is actually quite vulnerable. They catch other diasters such as hurricanes on a regular basis on the east coast, but "The big splash", either from an earthquake in the Pacific or that landslide in the Canaries would dwarf what has already been seen.
...will it go away?
This is just a "me too", but I also found sourcenav great for getting into a big legacy C++ project. I did have stability problems but I had to run the Windows version because the AIX backend was so ancient that I couldn't build on that platform. It meant I needed frequent saves of the project but otherwise fine.
A scientist will be able to recognise that a dangerous event has ocurred. I guess the real problem is who does the scientist call to ensure that word is spread. You are quite right about bureacracy, as there need to be a system that ensures reports are taken seriously and acted upon.
Unlike the Pacific, the Bay of Bengal/Anderman sea is much less active, and this was practically the only major fault. India is still prone to some earthquakes (major plate boundary in the North), but these are not undersea.
Write-permit rings or write rings are light and don't actually fly well, so I doubt they were playing with that as it is unlikely to mass enough to flip the switch. More likely frisbee with the 9-track canisters.
I would have thought that news of a massive earthquake at sea backed by warnings of a tsunami would have worried enough people to get them to move (possible panic being another issue.
Cyclone's don't tend to create tsunami's as such, more the low pressure builds up water levels which can then be pushed further inland by the winds. This is a gradual process (like an extremely high tide), rather than the sudden impact of a tsunami.
As mentioned, a lot of airlines have been able to cope with this kind of thing in the past. To shut down for the day seems to be rather an exceptional response, and I hope the market remembers them.
But he listens to someone who thinks he is god! (Himself!)
Between this and a possible impact that may cause major damage, it seems that there is a lot more to worry about than a war on terrorism.
Good luck!
The old system used keyboard macros but many experienced users just typed the commands completely themselves. The backend ran on heavy metal (Unisys) and that did most of the work. It seems a waste of the PC but the system functioned well.
It is then an issue as to whether you really want to design IT systems for every scenario. It costs a *lot* of money to do this and is usually only warranted in a safety critical domain (i.e., ATC). Comair's solution was to scratch the flights and thus ensure that aircraft were at their start positions for the next day.
I do not know the nature of the Comair system, but software design is the major issue with systems that degrade catastrophically rather than gradually. Please remember that major airlines used to run with much slower hardware up to the eighties (indeed, much less processing power than my PDA), however they did have very high I/O throughput and intelligent frontends.
I have seen the major hub for an airline closed because of snow for just a couple of hours in the early morning, but the resulting chaos of rescheduling/rebooking caused the reservations system to crash after just a few minutes of uptime. The same would keep happening after restarts.
It is normal to test system up to several times normal load, but they were seeing peaks at over 100x. The old, 3270 emulator based system would have slowly got through it but the newer system died.
Yes, but it is mostly recoverable. The heavy iron handles things like backend reservations, checkin and cargo. Smaller systems handle things like weight/balance and fuel and PCs are typically used for the front-ends.
Weight/balance calcs can be done more or less by hand if necessary, however a larger fuel margin is needed. Checkin can be done by hand (you have seen those sticky label systems). However to lose reservations is a major problem.