I read recently that most music has a frequency spectrum that is roughly 1/f: that's characteristic of what sounds "musical" to humans. Quite a lot of signals are 1/f-like naturally (IIRC), so it's not suprising that we find "music" in space.
Real trebuchet
on
Fling-A-Keg
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A programme on UK televison earlier this year documented the making of replicas of "real", full-size-and-dangerous trebuchets.
These beasts are spec'd to hurl rocks ~600kg about 300m (i.e. further than long-bow range, so the crew don't get picked off by the defenders). The replicas did just that, and were suprisingly accurate. The target was a replica segment of castle wall - actual masonry of the style appropriate for maybe 12th century - and the machines knocked holes in it with a few shots.
The historical idea was to build a machine matching the one that Edward nth of England used on a military expedition into Scotland (sorry, can't remember dates and details, but I think we're talking 1300s here). IIRC, he reduced one castle, then the word spread and the rest surrendered without a fight as soon as the trebuchet showed up on site.
The Eurostar trains that go between London and Paris and Brussels are loaded with embedded processors controlling the on-board equipment. Notably, the traction control-gear (which is distributed between the vehicles) the equipment that guards against interference with signalling and the systems for controlling the ride of the cars are all tweakable in software.
There are (or there were on the Eurostar prototypes, at least) ports in the vestibules of the cars where engineers (in the sense of equipment designers, not train drivers) could connect laptops to monitor and adjust things. On many early Eurostar runs, you could see the manufacturer's people perched in the vestibules just keeping tabs on the train.
I hope that the trademark business only affects the name under which OpenSSH is publicized, not the command-names for the actual programmes. Given that OpenSSH is a clone, it ought to be invokable with the same commands as the "real" SSH product.
If this is so, then I don't think it really matters much for the OpenSSH side; AFAIK OpenSSH isn't really marketed, so the cost of changing its name is negligible. But if the trademark covers the actual ssh command, then the trademark is doing real damage to the community.
Interesting. A while back (maybe two years now) I got a lot of spam apparently from ibm domains and reported it to postmaster there. They said they'd look in to it. I wonder if this is connected. If this is the same hijack, did it really take all this time to catch the culprit, or is it just that the case took ages to come to court? And if it's not the same hijack, how many times a year does IBM get subverted?
There are a few reasons for hosting data at astronomical sites instead of on commercial servers.
Often, the data are most-often accessed at the site where they are stored. There is a growing tendency to provide the data-mining tools at the archive site. It is vastly easier to provide, test and maintain these tools at a scientific site. Check out the "grid" concept in meta-computing.
Many nations that do astronomy in a big way have dedicated networks for moving academic and scientific data (consider the.ac.uk domain in the UK). Storing the data somewhere off the academic network might reduce the delivery rates to scientifc sites.
Commercial storage costs extra money. The storage provider has to make some profit otherwise they'd go bust, whereas a scientific site can run happily at cost. Once you scale up to petabyte databases, commercial providers no longer have any
scale advantage to make them cheaper.
I get the same problem with Netscrap for Solaris, first seen at ~v4.75 and still an occasional problem at v4.76. Sometimes the back and forward buttons stop working at the same time.
One sure-fire way to make it go wrong is to run out of disc quota while still having free space on the disc where the Netscrap cache is kept. Netscrap then corrupts the cache directory and can't go on from there. If you save a bookmark while you're out of quota it will trash your bookmark file too. I've no idea if the gecko-based browsers have this same bug.
Most management methods that call themselves "methodologies" are exclusive: the method authors ask you to give up existing practices and switch to their practices across the board. If you do this, but find you can't implement one of the new practices (because it's too expensive, too complex, too boring and the staff won't do it, or maybe just too broken), then you can easily come out with less than you went in with.
A better management method would let you add some of its practices to your current work-style, perhaps adding more over time, and perhaps gradually swapping your old practices for the new ones as the organization evolved. That is, the method should have fine-grained, pluggable, loosely-coupled practices.
The practices of Extreme Programming (which are partly to do with software design and partly to do with project management) are like this. For example, one could introduce story-based specification without initially using using the stories as the unit for estimating time and cost; story based estimation could come later. (A story in XP is like a use-case, but very informal.) And all the story-related practices are totally separate from the technical practices concerning testing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I read recently that most music has a frequency spectrum that is roughly 1/f: that's characteristic of what sounds "musical" to humans. Quite a lot of signals are 1/f-like naturally (IIRC), so it's not suprising that we find "music" in space.
A programme on UK televison earlier this year documented the making of replicas of "real", full-size-and-dangerous trebuchets.
These beasts are spec'd to hurl rocks ~600kg about 300m (i.e. further than long-bow range, so the crew don't get picked off by the defenders). The replicas did just that, and were suprisingly accurate. The target was a replica segment of castle wall - actual masonry of the style appropriate for maybe 12th century - and the machines knocked holes in it with a few shots.
The historical idea was to build a machine matching the one that Edward nth of England used on a military expedition into Scotland (sorry, can't remember dates and details, but I think we're talking 1300s here). IIRC, he reduced one castle, then the word spread and the rest surrendered without a fight as soon as the trebuchet showed up on site.
The Eurostar trains that go between London and Paris and Brussels are loaded with embedded processors controlling the on-board equipment. Notably, the traction control-gear (which is distributed between the vehicles) the equipment that guards against interference with signalling and the systems for controlling the ride of the cars are all tweakable in software.
There are (or there were on the Eurostar prototypes, at least) ports in the vestibules of the cars where engineers (in the sense of equipment designers, not train drivers) could connect laptops to monitor and adjust things. On many early Eurostar runs, you could see the manufacturer's people perched in the vestibules just keeping tabs on the train.
If this is so, then I don't think it really matters much for the OpenSSH side; AFAIK OpenSSH isn't really marketed, so the cost of changing its name is negligible. But if the trademark covers the actual ssh command, then the trademark is doing real damage to the community.
Interesting. A while back (maybe two years now) I got a lot of spam apparently from ibm domains and reported it to postmaster there. They said they'd look in to it. I wonder if this is connected. If this is the same hijack, did it really take all this time to catch the culprit, or is it just that the case took ages to come to court? And if it's not the same hijack, how many times a year does IBM get subverted?
One sure-fire way to make it go wrong is to run out of disc quota while still having free space on the disc where the Netscrap cache is kept. Netscrap then corrupts the cache directory and can't go on from there. If you save a bookmark while you're out of quota it will trash your bookmark file too. I've no idea if the gecko-based browsers have this same bug.
MTTF for Netscrap 4.x < 0.5 hour for me.
A better management method would let you add some of its practices to your current work-style, perhaps adding more over time, and perhaps gradually swapping your old practices for the new ones as the organization evolved. That is, the method should have fine-grained, pluggable, loosely-coupled practices.
The practices of Extreme Programming (which are partly to do with software design and partly to do with project management) are like this. For example, one could introduce story-based specification without initially using using the stories as the unit for estimating time and cost; story based estimation could come later. (A story in XP is like a use-case, but very informal.) And all the story-related practices are totally separate from the technical practices concerning testing, etc.