like almost everyone else, I typed my "real name"...and found 293 articles dating back
to april 1992. Excepted for my most private
and personal life, you could guess almost
exactly who I am, what is my career, hobbies
and so on... On./, anonymity and disguise
seem to be more prevalent than on Usenet.
Amazing also to see that before 1994 or so,
there were only educated, polite, informative
people on the face of the earth (and I looked
like a bad-taught puppy in comparison to them).
At this point, with AOLers and non-academics
appearing, something definitely changed.
the equivalent in France, Minitel, still works,
although for the first time it is reported
that online purchases on the Web overtook
those on Minitel this Xmas. (talking 10^9 $ here).
Talk about a business model : reliable content
due to synchronous, non packet data transmission,
billed on the minute with a large number of
phony pRon sites. I think that in 20 years
more than 10 billion $ net profit were taken
by France Telecom and all the content providers.
about 10 million terminals were given for free
to telephone line suscribers ; I think
that it was the initial leverage that BTX
neglected to apply.
The system still rocks to find a phone #,
book train tickets or check a bank account balance : the system boots in less than 10 s and
connects to the site in about the same duration.
The bandwidth admittely sucks, as well as the
graphics (about the same half graphics characters as IBM 850), but to get something done quickly
and reliably, it still is unbeatable.
however, it was demonstrated in the sixties
by concurrent US and Soviet teams (Tatarskii) that
a laser link (although very secure and
promising in terms of bw ) between an earth station and a satellite was not feasible
due to atmospheric turbulence. Maybe
things have evolved now...
This approach is to my knowledge more
and more used in science nowadays :
for instance, use well established
linear algebra or computational chemistry
routines in FORTRAN (which I never
saw mentioned in the discussion,
although it is a typical example of
a powerful high and low level language that
many people - rightly- want to keep at large)
and fancy graphic stuff in C/C++, scripted
by Tcl/Tk, perl, whatever.
Forgetting to put pickles on a big mac is
not criminal negligence, doesn't cause $20
billion damages and 5000 dead, and is indeed
a reason to be fired. Besides, a pickle
dispenser earns minimum wage, not $150,000 a year
as the grossly incompetent managment at massport,
say, or the bosses of the various security agencies. How comes you were not moderated
as a troll ?
if you read my comment, you can see
that I never said "I have a right to privacy, they can't listen to my phone calls or read my emails"
Looking at Sept 11th, how can you say they
did a good job ?
A white guy cannot join the group, but he can
pay one with more tan to do it...but of course
this money doesn't go in the pocket of
spyware specialists.
I wonder if all the people who failed
in the chain of events of last week will
lose theirs. Will there by a trial for
something like criminal negligence against
the federal government, NSA, CIA, FBI, FAA,
USAAF, canadian border patrol and the Massport authority ?
I am not speaking of course of the 5$/hour
security staff at the airport, who did what
they could and where motivated to do.
too many failures !
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
let's sum it up :
the FBI arrested one month ago an Algerian,
and the french secret service warned them
that the suspect had a "pedigree long as an
arm" linking him to Bin Laden, he also
had Boeing manuals and related stuff
The hijackers at Boston airport matched several
of the criteria for suspicion, and were not
searched : Arabic names and passports,
4 one-way last minute tickets bought by the same
credit card. One guy looked for several minutes
at an X-Ray machines and avoided eye
contact with the staff.
The authorities had almost one hour to
react between the first and the last crash,
and did not scramble at least one jet
to just "follow" the hijacked planes,
as occurs in other countries.
I am on the verge of thinking that
someone wants a war with Irak in order
to secure approvision in oil, or at least
to make huge benefits of rising prices.
the FBI arrested one month ago an Algerian,
and the french secret service warned them
that the suspect had a "pedigree long as an
arm" linking him to Bin Laden, he also
had Boeing manuals and related stuff
The hijackers at Boston airport matched several
of the criteria for suspicion, and were not
searched : Arabic names and passports,
4 one-way last minute tickets bought by the same
credit card. One guy looked for several minutes
at an X-Ray machines and avoided eye
contact with the staff.
The authorities had almost one hour to
react between the first and the last crash,
and did not scramble at least one jet
to just "follow" the hijacked planes,
as occurs in other countries.
I am on the verge of thinking that
someone wants a war with Irak in order
to secure approvision in oil, or at least
to make huge benefits of rising prices.
Well, maybe due to the traumatisms of WWI and II,
proximity of the Eastern Block, and so on,
but this used (I do not know if it was
true until Tuesday) to be the case in Europe,
at least in France for what I know. Not the
stingers, of course, but the 10 minutes radius.
Maybe it's because the country is smaller,
or because the feeling of safety and the
self-confidence is not as high. Are there any
military airfields around NY, or was NORAD only
fearing Russian Bison bombers coming
across the North Pole with 6 hours notice,
ready to be intercepted above Canada ?
The article in the Boston Herald states
that a voice from the first plane said
"we have more planes". Why, in the 15 min
delay until the second plane approached,
(and the third, and the fourth...) weren't
any planes scrambled , at least to intercept
the liners, if not to shoot them down
above crowded areas ? I know from personal
sources that there used to be a permanent
guard by two Mirage fighter planes at a small
airfield two minutes from Paris...but this
dates back to cold war era, maybe such measures
were abandoned until yesterday.
I also remember from some Forsyth or Clancy book
that all flights in USSR had a steel door,
to the cockpit, permanently closed
during flight, and some armed KGB man
near to this door. Time to revive such measures ?
The Nostradamus verses are very disturbing.
At least, it seems from that source
that eventually the
West will triumph of the Muslims...
In "Vol 714 pour Sydney" (one of the
worst Tintin albums, by the way) the
most interesting part is about a
very accurately and realistically
described supersonic business jet,
designed by a parody of M.Dassault. The
jet is indeed quite long, 10-seater or
something, with straight and
acute wings with variable geometry (as opposed
to the delta shapes of Concorde, Tu144 and
various supersonic fighter jets,which, of
what I heard, seem to be the only other possibility to have maneuvrability at all
speeds and not too high takeoff/landing speeds).
Maybe it is the way to go if the acuteness of
the wings is necessary to prevent damage to the
buildings ?
By the way, when a squadron of four fighter
jets exercise 150 ft above my house,
making everything shake, frightening my pets,
(who damage the furniture when rushing for
shelter), with a large black trail of smoke,
this is not a problem, as when a Concorde
flies at 60 000 ft this is one ? Or is is just
protectionist excuses to damage
european airplane industry...
what these guys want to do is to build, say,
a cluster of
2 CPU system where one of the CPUs only
computes while the other manages I/O
and communications. Indeed, the I/O
part is really a problem on Beowulves,
and dedicating a CPU on it and communication
can be cheaper than dedicated network cards
like Myrinet (at 1000 $/port) or SCI, and
hi-perf I/O like HiPPi. I wonder though
if they can beat the price/performance ratio
of the latter the way Beowulves beat on raw Flops
the ones of traditional supercomputers.
we all know that Linux is more difficult
to crash than NT, but I wonder if the korean
planes will now resist better than back in
the 80's when attacked by MiGs....
I suppose you have a printer...just print
those files with a large Courier font,
in case everything goes wrong, you can always
OCR them with on my opinion the same
reliability as paper tape readers from the fifties. Darn cheap and durable backup for, say, less than 100 kb
The problem with the amendment on free speech
is that it was short of thinking of the
power the individuals were to get in two centuries
(the same for weapons). I think it is OK
to scream to the top of your voice that you are
a nazi, or to display hand-made shocking drawings,
but when using modern media that make you as
powerful as, say, CNN, there is some trouble to be
expected if one is not perfectly politically correct.
true ! A few years ago, in France
(ok, not the best example for clever militaries,
but where are they to be found ?), a
satirical journal, le Canard, managed to get
an almost complete list of the military secret service : they got hand of some class reunions invitation lists of military schools, and the secret service men were listed as belonging to units that did not actually exist.
1) I didn't explore much the site and
related links, but I wonder if there is MPI
available on this cluster. Without it, they
cut themselves of a large community, and cannot
even give the crudest evaluation of supercomputing
performance, this is, Scalapack Gflops.
2) concerning human costs, I think that in a research institution with a lot of permanent staff, human costs are indeed zero. It is a better
option to spend the tiny budgets available for research in Europe on cheap hardware, and spend some of the almost free and unlimited time of
the permanent staff on hacking some Linux/Beowulf stuff. And don't tell me this time would be better used doing fundamental research ! The benefits of understanding the inner working of a system are huge, as well for education as for research.
of what I heard ( I used to live in Toulouse...)
the problem was that the code had range-checking imbedded, and the Ariane 5 generating values far exceeding the specs of ariane 4, the software detected a major malfunction. Had they coded in FORTRAN, reusability would have been greater...
Of course, that's how I can locate New Jersey.
Somehow I felt compelled to alalways
copy the lines
"Creative Computing, Morristown, New Jersey"
at the beginning of my adaptations of their
BASIC programs for my CASIO pocket computer
(PB100, like in "Ghostbusters"), then on my C64.
Their version of Eliza, Lunar Lander or
Wumpus was especially great.
In a car racing program I had found, I still
do not understand how it is physically possible
to change the compression ratio of an engine
(that's how one was supposed to accelerate).
Slashdot Mirror
like almost everyone else, I typed my "real name"...and found 293 articles dating back ./, anonymity and disguise
to april 1992. Excepted for my most private
and personal life, you could guess almost
exactly who I am, what is my career, hobbies
and so on... On
seem to be more prevalent than on Usenet.
Amazing also to see that before 1994 or so,
there were only educated, polite, informative
people on the face of the earth (and I looked
like a bad-taught puppy in comparison to them).
At this point, with AOLers and non-academics
appearing, something definitely changed.
why was she fired on the spot when
failing to reconnect slashdot to the
world some time ago ?
Besides, it seems to me that @ was slow to catch
up : I remember addresses with ! ! ! !
and BITNET addresses with %.
you mean "Rocket Propelled Grenade", or
is it another TLA ? (three letter acronym).
Could be convenient to control one by
Minitel...
I guess it was leased line ("transpac", or
RNIS, some kind of ISDN). For your phone #
you should give a look to
http://www.pagesblanches.fr
or http://www.annu.com
the equivalent in France, Minitel, still works,
although for the first time it is reported
that online purchases on the Web overtook
those on Minitel this Xmas. (talking 10^9 $ here).
Talk about a business model : reliable content
due to synchronous, non packet data transmission,
billed on the minute with a large number of
phony pRon sites. I think that in 20 years
more than 10 billion $ net profit were taken
by France Telecom and all the content providers.
about 10 million terminals were given for free
to telephone line suscribers ; I think
that it was the initial leverage that BTX
neglected to apply.
The system still rocks to find a phone #,
book train tickets or check a bank account balance : the system boots in less than 10 s and
connects to the site in about the same duration.
The bandwidth admittely sucks, as well as the
graphics (about the same half graphics characters as IBM 850), but to get something done quickly
and reliably, it still is unbeatable.
or some offensive action by an alien civilisation,
like the asteroids with an altered trajectory
in "starship troopers" ?
This could cause the same phenomena...
however, it was demonstrated in the sixties
by concurrent US and Soviet teams (Tatarskii) that
a laser link (although very secure and
promising in terms of bw ) between an earth station and a satellite was not feasible
due to atmospheric turbulence. Maybe
things have evolved now...
This approach is to my knowledge more
and more used in science nowadays :
for instance, use well established
linear algebra or computational chemistry
routines in FORTRAN (which I never
saw mentioned in the discussion,
although it is a typical example of
a powerful high and low level language that
many people - rightly- want to keep at large)
and fancy graphic stuff in C/C++, scripted
by Tcl/Tk, perl, whatever.
Forgetting to put pickles on a big mac is
not criminal negligence, doesn't cause $20
billion damages and 5000 dead, and is indeed
a reason to be fired. Besides, a pickle
dispenser earns minimum wage, not $150,000 a year
as the grossly incompetent managment at massport,
say, or the bosses of the various security agencies. How comes you were not moderated
as a troll ?
if you read my comment, you can see
that I never said "I have a right to privacy, they can't listen to my phone calls or read my emails"
Looking at Sept 11th, how can you say they
did a good job ?
A white guy cannot join the group, but he can
pay one with more tan to do it...but of course
this money doesn't go in the pocket of
spyware specialists.
sorry, I was speaking of the US patrol
at the Canadian border. Some of the suspects
were on a wanted list.
I wonder if all the people who failed
in the chain of events of last week will
lose theirs. Will there by a trial for
something like criminal negligence against
the federal government, NSA, CIA, FBI, FAA,
USAAF, canadian border patrol and the Massport authority ?
I am not speaking of course of the 5$/hour
security staff at the airport, who did what
they could and where motivated to do.
let's sum it up :
the FBI arrested one month ago an Algerian,
and the french secret service warned them
that the suspect had a "pedigree long as an
arm" linking him to Bin Laden, he also
had Boeing manuals and related stuff
The hijackers at Boston airport matched several
of the criteria for suspicion, and were not
searched : Arabic names and passports,
4 one-way last minute tickets bought by the same
credit card. One guy looked for several minutes
at an X-Ray machines and avoided eye
contact with the staff.
The authorities had almost one hour to
react between the first and the last crash,
and did not scramble at least one jet
to just "follow" the hijacked planes,
as occurs in other countries.
I am on the verge of thinking that
someone wants a war with Irak in order
to secure approvision in oil, or at least
to make huge benefits of rising prices.
let's sum it up :
the FBI arrested one month ago an Algerian,
and the french secret service warned them
that the suspect had a "pedigree long as an
arm" linking him to Bin Laden, he also
had Boeing manuals and related stuff
The hijackers at Boston airport matched several
of the criteria for suspicion, and were not
searched : Arabic names and passports,
4 one-way last minute tickets bought by the same
credit card. One guy looked for several minutes
at an X-Ray machines and avoided eye
contact with the staff.
The authorities had almost one hour to
react between the first and the last crash,
and did not scramble at least one jet
to just "follow" the hijacked planes,
as occurs in other countries.
I am on the verge of thinking that
someone wants a war with Irak in order
to secure approvision in oil, or at least
to make huge benefits of rising prices.
Well, maybe due to the traumatisms of WWI and II,
proximity of the Eastern Block, and so on,
but this used (I do not know if it was
true until Tuesday) to be the case in Europe,
at least in France for what I know. Not the
stingers, of course, but the 10 minutes radius.
Maybe it's because the country is smaller,
or because the feeling of safety and the
self-confidence is not as high. Are there any
military airfields around NY, or was NORAD only
fearing Russian Bison bombers coming
across the North Pole with 6 hours notice,
ready to be intercepted above Canada ?
The article in the Boston Herald states
that a voice from the first plane said
"we have more planes". Why, in the 15 min
delay until the second plane approached,
(and the third, and the fourth...) weren't
any planes scrambled , at least to intercept
the liners, if not to shoot them down
above crowded areas ? I know from personal
sources that there used to be a permanent
guard by two Mirage fighter planes at a small
airfield two minutes from Paris...but this
dates back to cold war era, maybe such measures
were abandoned until yesterday.
I also remember from some Forsyth or Clancy book
that all flights in USSR had a steel door,
to the cockpit, permanently closed
during flight, and some armed KGB man
near to this door. Time to revive such measures ?
The Nostradamus verses are very disturbing.
At least, it seems from that source
that eventually the
West will triumph of the Muslims...
In "Vol 714 pour Sydney" (one of the
worst Tintin albums, by the way) the
most interesting part is about a
very accurately and realistically
described supersonic business jet,
designed by a parody of M.Dassault. The
jet is indeed quite long, 10-seater or
something, with straight and
acute wings with variable geometry (as opposed
to the delta shapes of Concorde, Tu144 and
various supersonic fighter jets,which, of
what I heard, seem to be the only other possibility to have maneuvrability at all
speeds and not too high takeoff/landing speeds).
Maybe it is the way to go if the acuteness of
the wings is necessary to prevent damage to the
buildings ?
By the way, when a squadron of four fighter
jets exercise 150 ft above my house,
making everything shake, frightening my pets,
(who damage the furniture when rushing for
shelter), with a large black trail of smoke,
this is not a problem, as when a Concorde
flies at 60 000 ft this is one ? Or is is just
protectionist excuses to damage
european airplane industry...
what these guys want to do is to build, say, a cluster of 2 CPU system where one of the CPUs only computes while the other manages I/O and communications. Indeed, the I/O part is really a problem on Beowulves, and dedicating a CPU on it and communication can be cheaper than dedicated network cards like Myrinet (at 1000 $/port) or SCI, and hi-perf I/O like HiPPi. I wonder though if they can beat the price/performance ratio of the latter the way Beowulves beat on raw Flops the ones of traditional supercomputers.
we all know that Linux is more difficult to crash than NT, but I wonder if the korean planes will now resist better than back in the 80's when attacked by MiGs....
I suppose you have a printer...just print those files with a large Courier font, in case everything goes wrong, you can always OCR them with on my opinion the same reliability as paper tape readers from the fifties. Darn cheap and durable backup for, say, less than 100 kb
hopefully this will enable flight simulators to render any spot on the planet, by online access to the database for instance.
The problem with the amendment on free speech is that it was short of thinking of the power the individuals were to get in two centuries (the same for weapons). I think it is OK to scream to the top of your voice that you are a nazi, or to display hand-made shocking drawings, but when using modern media that make you as powerful as, say, CNN, there is some trouble to be expected if one is not perfectly politically correct.
true ! A few years ago, in France (ok, not the best example for clever militaries, but where are they to be found ?), a satirical journal, le Canard, managed to get an almost complete list of the military secret service : they got hand of some class reunions invitation lists of military schools, and the secret service men were listed as belonging to units that did not actually exist.
1) I didn't explore much the site and related links, but I wonder if there is MPI available on this cluster. Without it, they cut themselves of a large community, and cannot even give the crudest evaluation of supercomputing performance, this is, Scalapack Gflops. 2) concerning human costs, I think that in a research institution with a lot of permanent staff, human costs are indeed zero. It is a better option to spend the tiny budgets available for research in Europe on cheap hardware, and spend some of the almost free and unlimited time of the permanent staff on hacking some Linux/Beowulf stuff. And don't tell me this time would be better used doing fundamental research ! The benefits of understanding the inner working of a system are huge, as well for education as for research.
of what I heard ( I used to live in Toulouse...) the problem was that the code had range-checking imbedded, and the Ariane 5 generating values far exceeding the specs of ariane 4, the software detected a major malfunction. Had they coded in FORTRAN, reusability would have been greater...
Of course, that's how I can locate New Jersey. Somehow I felt compelled to alalways copy the lines "Creative Computing, Morristown, New Jersey" at the beginning of my adaptations of their BASIC programs for my CASIO pocket computer (PB100, like in "Ghostbusters"), then on my C64. Their version of Eliza, Lunar Lander or Wumpus was especially great. In a car racing program I had found, I still do not understand how it is physically possible to change the compression ratio of an engine (that's how one was supposed to accelerate).