This helps me sleep a little better at night, and I have nothing to do with the porn biz.
See, I do photography, sometimes of naked people for fun. And, while there's no actual sexual content in my pictures of naked people, I still end up having that niggling fear in the back of my head that they'll show up on my doorstep.
At least these folks are honest that it's only 90-95% reliant. Were Biosphere 2 to have gone for the 90% case, they would have been a resounding success..
'cept they wouldn't have sounded nearly so impressive.
We know that coming down to Earth after a year in freefall sucks a big one. But we know nothing about how coming back from the Moon after more than a few days will work.
Also, having a reasonable sized colony of a few hundred that doesn't need too much more care other than being swapped out every few months so that nobody wastes away too much but doesn't require too much other logistical support is a useful thing.
1) NASA "ought" to be researching stuff like this... because they are going to need it in 20 years or so. But projects like this have been getting de-funded to pay for the Orion capsule (which, I might add, is in trouble -- it's too heavy and they are trying to make it lighter by removing redundancy and capabilities instead of trying to do things like remove a crew member or switching the first stage away from a 5-segment SRB) 2) This is fairly easy to test on earth. Except for the whole question about how well algae will reproduce in lunar gravity. The ISS was supposed to research these kinds of problems but the module that would have done this research is not going up. 3) "90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task to try and do all at once. It's probably far simpler to just add extra sufficiency over time so that you don't get nasty biosphere-two-ish surprises.
The problem is that each time, the reason to upgrade, other than not being able to purchase a new version of the OS when your CD dies, gets smaller.
Win98 to Win2k was a great upgrade. Suddenly, I didn't need to reboot every few days. And it supported multiple processors once everybody got their act together on drivers. And stuff.
I just finally upgraded to WinXP at home, largely because WinXP handles hyperthreading properly and I have a hyperthreaded CPU and because I figure it'll last slightly longer in the market than 2k since I'm avoiding Vista.
But before that, I was running XP at work and 2k at home and noticed no real difference other than a few bits of eye candy.
Vista was doomed as soon as they realized that all of the really innovative features weren't going to work out and dropped them... so it ends up being a few fairly marginal improvements and a bunch of features that nobody wants.
If you read the article, you see that there's not an engine in the thing right now.
This is a short and unwieldy wing that straps on your back and lets you fly farther from where you got dropped out of an airplane. You still need a parachute to land. You still need a real aircraft to lift you up for you to start your flight.
Not nearly as impressive as the headline seems to indicate.
In order to not get in trouble with shareholders, the CEO is usually obligated to sell his own mother to slavery if it will make sufficient impact to the bottom line.
Re:The winds were NOT very high this morning....
on
Steve Fossett Missing
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· Score: 1
So? He's flying a Bellanca Citabria Super Decathalon, which is not available with a ballistic parachute.
It's actually fairly common for famous fliers to die in a milkrun, because they figure that it is a milkrun compared to one of their more famous flights.
I mean, Scott Crossfield anybody?
Re:The winds were NOT very high this morning....
on
Steve Fossett Missing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, things are the other way around.
Sufficient requirements for design and inspection make even single-engined aircraft astonishingly reliable.
Most accidents are caused by operator error -- either fuel starvation, controlled-flight-into-terrain, or unsafe flying.
Also, ballistic parachutes are not available for all aircraft. There needs to be an appropriate structural member for them to be attached to and the correct parachute characteristics need to be set. Only with ultralights can you buy one off the rack.
Likewise, an emergency locater beacon generally needs to survive the accident and be triggered, either automatically or manually. These aren't built like airliner black-boxes.
Oh, no, not running Windows 100% of the time. One can install Parallels or Bootcamp and run Windows when necessary, OS X the rest of the time. Between the "intranet" craze and all of the systems that got replaced with y2k, there's astonishingly few real windows applications that don't also run on the Mac that are crucial anymore.
The problem is that (not sure about Vista here... I know that XP has problems with this) Microsoft didn't solve everybody else's problems for them in the right way. If I want to be able to go from the Laptop LCD + desktop LCD configuration with the numeric keypad on my keyboard usable as a numeric keypad on the Mac, I just unplug a few cables and go. Meanwhile, Windows has no native way to make this work in a seamless fashion. So IBM would package a software package that tried to make it work, but the software was a piece of crap.
Even now, when somebody has to put something up on the projector, the MacBook users are ready to go instantly, whereas the HP laptop users spend at least 5 minutes tinkering with stuff.
So, yes, Windows is able to work properly. But have you ever asked a cook about his knives? He's got a favorite knife that is worn down in just the right places, with just the right weight and balance and sharpness. He'll hate using a cheap ginsu knife because it won't cut quite as well and will need to be sharpened a little more often. When something becomes your primary tool, even little flaws get amplified.
The simple truth is that at least for IBM (now Levno) laptops and HP... and probably others... the build quality is just not there compared to Apple.
Plus, the risky gamble of allowing people to run Windows on their MacBooks really did work out. People can talk their employer into buying them a MacBook, instead of being issued a winblows machine.
I suspect the closest model with math behind it is a futures contract.
The things that a good sysadmin is supposed to do is make sure that all of the things that would threaten the relevant simple metrics -- capacity, uptime, etc -- are taken care of ahead of time.
Clearly, it is more desirable to add servers a month or two before they are needed instead of after the server farm becomes unusable.
So what you want, as your metric, is to track the future value of capacity and the future value of uptime.
Got a time machine? The best we've managed is Black-Scholes and that's not going to work for this situation.:P
Actually, it would be really nice to answer that question BEFORE we get to mars.
Once we're there, there is a distinct possibility that any extremophobes hanging on will contaminate the planet. And it'll be much harder to prove that they weren't just extremophobes, kind of like how NASA went through a bunch of trouble to bring back parts of Surveyor 3 only to discover that the Streptococcus mitis they found on one of the parts was likely not there the whole time.
Also, if there really is life on Mars, it would be nice to either not render it extinct or at least make sure that it isn't infectious while exploring it.
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic church, it states that "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."
A belief in a God does not require you to contradict the Big Bang or evolution or anything else. Unless, of course, you think that it is important for a god to lie.
What this leads to is that some fairly savvy folks in the religious community primarily don't want you to try and argue that because we descended from the same stock as the Bonobo it's OK to fuck like Bonobos... but it's OK to say that we descended from the same stock as Bonobos. This, of course, gets turned by the far-less-savvy religious right into an excuse to attack evolution.
I tend to think that the whackos on the religious right has pushed the thinking person towards aethism, when a thinking person might had been a member of a fairly liberal faith or agnostic before.
No, the *right* way to do things is to have the format at least able to describe the size of each chunk of data and be self-contained. That way, you could copy any unknown information blocks to a new saved file without breaking anything.
This kinda works, in that you at least know the size of the chunks that you do not understand. However, right now, unknown chunks can be destroyed because too many of them encode offsets based on the beginning of the file, not the beginning of the chunk. You are pretty much guaranteed that if your program does not understand the individual MakerNote format that a file uses, it will be corrupted if you re-arrange the file.... and Canon and Nikon have taken to removing information from the publicly viewable EXIF information and moving it to the MakerNote. Really stupidly important stuff, too, like what ISO the camera was set to.
Most of the pro photographers I know do editing between when the file leaves the camera and when the file is sent out to press/print. And they tend to take advantage of the RAW-friendly features to reduce noise, control sharpening precisely, adjust white balance, adjust contrast, etc. in ways that a JPEG or TIFF or JPEG2000 file wouldn't enable nearly as well.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it was an optimal sort of thing. The RAW file situation is a nasty ugly mess. But it works better than if cameras took JPEG2000 or TIFF files in many ways.
How is human readable going to help a piece of software?
It is currently impossible to reliably be able to read an arbitrary TIFF/JPEG image that contains various MakerNote and other undocumented flags, modify it slightly, and then be able to spit it out as a new file that preserves the various pieces of metadata. You'll likely corrupt any MakerNote fields your software doesn't understand.
So, really, the problem with the spec is that it doesn't at least require the metainformation to be understood in order to parse it properly...
I mean, read the exiv2 docs or dive into the TIFF specs if you don't believe me.
Only ensuring that the image is recoverable is pretty lame. The metainformation is just as important for archivists down the road.
Also, TIFF doesn't do files bigger than 2gb, Unicode, and other things.
JPEG2000 is covered by patents that haven't been properly licensed
JPEG2000 has very little software support, wheras good old JPEG will work eveyrwhere. Which helps your average user who doesn't want to need an image editor.
The digital camera market has standardized to RAW for cases where JPEG isn't good enough. Neither the existing JPEG2000 nor HD Photo are designed to store un-demosaiced data from the sensor. This allows a RAW converter to offer smarter noise reduction and sharpening modes... and it's not trivial enough of an operation that any arbitrary JPEG2000-ish tool should be forced to implement properly.
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This helps me sleep a little better at night, and I have nothing to do with the porn biz.
See, I do photography, sometimes of naked people for fun. And, while there's no actual sexual content in my pictures of naked people, I still end up having that niggling fear in the back of my head that they'll show up on my doorstep.
Well, we know that it's safer in terms of getting killed largely because it's awful hard to cover up a plane crash. :P
Because you really want to know how algae and crops and stuff will do in lunar gravity for years and years.
Remember, cellular mitosis doesn't work well in freefall. It may or may not work better at lunar gravity.
At least these folks are honest that it's only 90-95% reliant. Were Biosphere 2 to have gone for the 90% case, they would have been a resounding success..
'cept they wouldn't have sounded nearly so impressive.
Ah, but we don't know that for certain.
We know that coming down to Earth after a year in freefall sucks a big one. But we know nothing about how coming back from the Moon after more than a few days will work.
Also, having a reasonable sized colony of a few hundred that doesn't need too much more care other than being swapped out every few months so that nobody wastes away too much but doesn't require too much other logistical support is a useful thing.
1) NASA "ought" to be researching stuff like this... because they are going to need it in 20 years or so. But projects like this have been getting de-funded to pay for the Orion capsule (which, I might add, is in trouble -- it's too heavy and they are trying to make it lighter by removing redundancy and capabilities instead of trying to do things like remove a crew member or switching the first stage away from a 5-segment SRB)
2) This is fairly easy to test on earth. Except for the whole question about how well algae will reproduce in lunar gravity. The ISS was supposed to research these kinds of problems but the module that would have done this research is not going up.
3) "90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task to try and do all at once. It's probably far simpler to just add extra sufficiency over time so that you don't get nasty biosphere-two-ish surprises.
The problem is that each time, the reason to upgrade, other than not being able to purchase a new version of the OS when your CD dies, gets smaller.
Win98 to Win2k was a great upgrade. Suddenly, I didn't need to reboot every few days. And it supported multiple processors once everybody got their act together on drivers. And stuff.
I just finally upgraded to WinXP at home, largely because WinXP handles hyperthreading properly and I have a hyperthreaded CPU and because I figure it'll last slightly longer in the market than 2k since I'm avoiding Vista.
But before that, I was running XP at work and 2k at home and noticed no real difference other than a few bits of eye candy.
Vista was doomed as soon as they realized that all of the really innovative features weren't going to work out and dropped them... so it ends up being a few fairly marginal improvements and a bunch of features that nobody wants.
If you read the article, you see that there's not an engine in the thing right now.
This is a short and unwieldy wing that straps on your back and lets you fly farther from where you got dropped out of an airplane. You still need a parachute to land. You still need a real aircraft to lift you up for you to start your flight.
Not nearly as impressive as the headline seems to indicate.
In order to not get in trouble with shareholders, the CEO is usually obligated to sell his own mother to slavery if it will make sufficient impact to the bottom line.
So? He's flying a Bellanca Citabria Super Decathalon, which is not available with a ballistic parachute.
So? If you RTFA, you see that they didn't spend a lot of engineering/test/validation time either.
It's actually fairly common for famous fliers to die in a milkrun, because they figure that it is a milkrun compared to one of their more famous flights.
I mean, Scott Crossfield anybody?
Actually, things are the other way around.
Sufficient requirements for design and inspection make even single-engined aircraft astonishingly reliable.
Most accidents are caused by operator error -- either fuel starvation, controlled-flight-into-terrain, or unsafe flying.
Also, ballistic parachutes are not available for all aircraft. There needs to be an appropriate structural member for them to be attached to and the correct parachute characteristics need to be set. Only with ultralights can you buy one off the rack.
Likewise, an emergency locater beacon generally needs to survive the accident and be triggered, either automatically or manually. These aren't built like airliner black-boxes.
Nope. Stinkpads, at least in my experience, are the crappiest laptops money can buy.
Oh, no, not running Windows 100% of the time. One can install Parallels or Bootcamp and run Windows when necessary, OS X the rest of the time. Between the "intranet" craze and all of the systems that got replaced with y2k, there's astonishingly few real windows applications that don't also run on the Mac that are crucial anymore.
The problem is that (not sure about Vista here... I know that XP has problems with this) Microsoft didn't solve everybody else's problems for them in the right way. If I want to be able to go from the Laptop LCD + desktop LCD configuration with the numeric keypad on my keyboard usable as a numeric keypad on the Mac, I just unplug a few cables and go. Meanwhile, Windows has no native way to make this work in a seamless fashion. So IBM would package a software package that tried to make it work, but the software was a piece of crap.
Even now, when somebody has to put something up on the projector, the MacBook users are ready to go instantly, whereas the HP laptop users spend at least 5 minutes tinkering with stuff.
So, yes, Windows is able to work properly. But have you ever asked a cook about his knives? He's got a favorite knife that is worn down in just the right places, with just the right weight and balance and sharpness. He'll hate using a cheap ginsu knife because it won't cut quite as well and will need to be sharpened a little more often. When something becomes your primary tool, even little flaws get amplified.
No, it's the Windows Black Hole of Suck effect.
Vista just made things worse.
The simple truth is that at least for IBM (now Levno) laptops and HP... and probably others... the build quality is just not there compared to Apple.
Plus, the risky gamble of allowing people to run Windows on their MacBooks really did work out. People can talk their employer into buying them a MacBook, instead of being issued a winblows machine.
I suspect the closest model with math behind it is a futures contract.
:P
The things that a good sysadmin is supposed to do is make sure that all of the things that would threaten the relevant simple metrics -- capacity, uptime, etc -- are taken care of ahead of time.
Clearly, it is more desirable to add servers a month or two before they are needed instead of after the server farm becomes unusable.
So what you want, as your metric, is to track the future value of capacity and the future value of uptime.
Got a time machine? The best we've managed is Black-Scholes and that's not going to work for this situation.
Actually, it would be really nice to answer that question BEFORE we get to mars.
Once we're there, there is a distinct possibility that any extremophobes hanging on will contaminate the planet. And it'll be much harder to prove that they weren't just extremophobes, kind of like how NASA went through a bunch of trouble to bring back parts of Surveyor 3 only to discover that the Streptococcus mitis they found on one of the parts was likely not there the whole time.
Also, if there really is life on Mars, it would be nice to either not render it extinct or at least make sure that it isn't infectious while exploring it.
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic church, it states that "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."
A belief in a God does not require you to contradict the Big Bang or evolution or anything else. Unless, of course, you think that it is important for a god to lie.
What this leads to is that some fairly savvy folks in the religious community primarily don't want you to try and argue that because we descended from the same stock as the Bonobo it's OK to fuck like Bonobos... but it's OK to say that we descended from the same stock as Bonobos. This, of course, gets turned by the far-less-savvy religious right into an excuse to attack evolution.
I tend to think that the whackos on the religious right has pushed the thinking person towards aethism, when a thinking person might had been a member of a fairly liberal faith or agnostic before.
No, the *right* way to do things is to have the format at least able to describe the size of each chunk of data and be self-contained. That way, you could copy any unknown information blocks to a new saved file without breaking anything.
This kinda works, in that you at least know the size of the chunks that you do not understand. However, right now, unknown chunks can be destroyed because too many of them encode offsets based on the beginning of the file, not the beginning of the chunk. You are pretty much guaranteed that if your program does not understand the individual MakerNote format that a file uses, it will be corrupted if you re-arrange the file.... and Canon and Nikon have taken to removing information from the publicly viewable EXIF information and moving it to the MakerNote. Really stupidly important stuff, too, like what ISO the camera was set to.
Of course, were they to have not canceled the Centerfuge Accomidation Module for the ISS, they could test it there....
Most of the pro photographers I know do editing between when the file leaves the camera and when the file is sent out to press/print. And they tend to take advantage of the RAW-friendly features to reduce noise, control sharpening precisely, adjust white balance, adjust contrast, etc. in ways that a JPEG or TIFF or JPEG2000 file wouldn't enable nearly as well.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it was an optimal sort of thing. The RAW file situation is a nasty ugly mess. But it works better than if cameras took JPEG2000 or TIFF files in many ways.
How is human readable going to help a piece of software?
It is currently impossible to reliably be able to read an arbitrary TIFF/JPEG image that contains various MakerNote and other undocumented flags, modify it slightly, and then be able to spit it out as a new file that preserves the various pieces of metadata. You'll likely corrupt any MakerNote fields your software doesn't understand.
So, really, the problem with the spec is that it doesn't at least require the metainformation to be understood in order to parse it properly...
I mean, read the exiv2 docs or dive into the TIFF specs if you don't believe me.
Only ensuring that the image is recoverable is pretty lame. The metainformation is just as important for archivists down the road.
Also, TIFF doesn't do files bigger than 2gb, Unicode, and other things.
Heh heh, yah.
:D
Standardized like Microsoft has standardized on monopolistic practices.