You misinterpreted the sentence about the counselors. It's not that the military would be counselors - it's that counselors might be people who serve as counselors INSTEAD of being drafted into the military.
Other things people might be doing instead of serving in the military is helping in old folk's homes, being junior ambulance attendants, or being forrest observers for the firefighters.
Well, I *am* a database admin, and not a MySQL fanatic. I had a particular job to do: A database with approximately 7 milion records, with most of the fields being varchars, indexed on most of the fields, a lot of inserts and mostly simple queries - which is why so many of the fields are indexed.
I realy wanted postgres to win, so I tested the latest version of postgres against mysql and a famous commercial database which shall not be named except to say that it's name starts with O.
Al three databases had about the same speed when doing queries on the indexed fields. On the inserts, the story was different: mysql with myISAM type database was the fastest. The commercial database and mySQL with BDB transaction database were an order of magnitude (10 times) slower than that.
And postgressql was an order of magnitude slower than the commercial database, or in other words, one insert into the postgressql database took about as much time as 100 inserts into the mySQL/myISAM database. This was with version 7.02 if memory serves (I may be wrong about the minor version, but the major version was definitely 7).
So to people who cry "benchmark this" and "benchmark that", I say: try the databases on your particular problem, and then decide what you will use.
They have telnet up and running on IPv6. That's nice. But what I would like to see is a list of applications that support IPv6.
If I set up an IPv6 network at home, can I set up apache to answer on an IPv6 address? What about mySQL? Postgres? Will Netscape access such addresses?
One nanosized wineglass: $120 000
Micromaniuplators for handling it: $50 000
A bottle of very fine Wine: $100
The look on the policeman's face when he reads your blood alcohol level after you tell him you had "10 glasses of wine": priceless
I've been looking for a nice webpad for a while now. I don't mind if the processor is not very
powerfull or if the memory is rather tight, since
I would expect the applications to run on my main
home machine, and only display on the webpad.
Does anybody know if micro-X can work as a remote
Xwindows server? I'm a bit concerned about the
statement that only certified software will be
allowed on the machine. Does that mean no xterm?
The other thing I'd like to know that wasn't mentioned in the article, is what will be the input device. Handwriting recognition? One of the
snapshots showed a keyboard drawn on the screen, which could mean the whole pad is touch sensitive, or it could mean you'd touch the screen with a pen.
Either way, it is something you can use to read
your morning e-mail while sitting in the garden
instead of sitting in your dark den in front of
your machine.
There are several problems with your calculations.
First of all, to NASA, $50M is paltry research money. A single launch of the shuttle costs several times more than that. And if you read the article and the archived space access updates, you would have seen that NASA has deliberately frittered away much larger sums. Instead of a stepping stone NASA has become one of the obstacles on the road to space.
I recently saw an item from sleepycat software (makers of Berkeley DB library) appearing on freshmeat where they mentioned "This version of DB is the first which can be used with MySQL to give MySql support for transactions". Something for the ACID crowd.
It will be interesting to see what is the interaction between the MySQL GPL and Berkeley DB licence (which is also an open source licence).
That is a true piece of wisdom, for more reasons than one. Not only does the advertising for cars hit people who are interested in cars, in hits them WHEN they are interested in cars.
Let's say that last week, I was YAHOO's dream "high payback surfer" - I surfed the stock quotes, and I surfed the cars pages. So when I check the weather this week, they show me banner ads for expensive cars. But, baby, I sold the stock last week, and the car in my garage still has the new car smell, and the last thing I'm going to click on is another car commercial.
I understand that the original BBC radioplay of HHGTTG was your big break. I have listened to several audio books, including your own excelent narration of Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency, but I never heard anything as lively and amazing as that soundtrack (the excelent music sets the mood, too).
How did that project come together in the first place?
I work for an academic ISP in Slovenia, Europe. Just two weeks ago our security contact got a call from one of the local cell phone companies. Their e-mail to SMS gateway was being overwhelmed by traffic from a machine on one of our customer's networks.
To make a long story short, someone broke into the machine and was autogenerating consecutive addresses to spam every cellphone on that provider's network with an SMS message inivitng them to visit some site. Since the e-mail address of the gateway is <phone number>@provider.si that was very easy to do.
The only comfort is that the messages can only be 160 characters long, and there's no HTML. I hate HTML spams.
There are several factual errors in their article. For instance, they state that tesla discovered the AC distribution system and that it used "Tesla's newly developed transformers".
In fact, AC was well known when Tesla studied in Prague, as was it's advantage over DC - that it could be transformed to a higher voltage. Higher voltages can be more efficiently transported over long distance, but are too dangereous and inconvenient for most everyday use.
Converting DC to higher voltages would incurr such inefficiencies that the whole system would be untenable.
What the AC camp lacked, however, was a workable motor. The only motors that worked ran on DC. Again, converting AC to DC was not cost-efficient.
Tesla designed an AC motor, something considered theoretically impossible up until that time.
Also, Tesla did not "design the world's first hydroelectric plant" - Edison ran several small plants years before. What he did design, was the worlds first big AC hydroelectric plant.
None of that, of course, detracts from Tesla's real genius, just setting the record straight.
If you ever get the chance to visit the technical museum in Zagreb, Croatia, ask them to show you the Tesla exhibit.
Most of the famous Tesla experiments have been recreated for a movie made about Tesla's life about 20 years ago, and while the exhibit has been somewhat neglected in the last few years, the machines still work, and they are awesome.
I visited it about a year ago, and as I was the only visitor, the guy in charge demonstrated all the devices to me (and on me).
The argument that life is improbable is an old one. In fact, no lesser physicist than Lord Kelvin himself has argued that the eye is so improbable that God must have had a hand in creating life.
Anybody with computer inclinations and an interest in the question of evolution should read Richard Dawkins' "Climbing mount improbable".
In a very readable book, Dawkins examines the development of the same organs in various creatures, and points out how (and why) their evolutions took different paths, sometimes arriving at widely different organs that have the same effect. He also uses computer simulations to SHOW how evolution works. It's a realy amazing book, and once you work through it, you won't have trouble beleiving in evolution again. (Though you may never again look at a fig in quite the same way - if you read the book, you know what I mean:-)
Back in the days of the framers fo the constitution, most Americans lived in what would today be considered small towns. Practicaly everybody knew everybody else, and certainly the people who mattered could do little without their doings being known all over town.
The only difference between then and today is that today's know-it-alls haven't (yet) become gossips.
When I can go to amazon.com and buy a list of roblimo's book purchases, then it's time to worry. Of course, by then it may be too late to worry...
The main problem is getting to orbit
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
It takes as much energy to fly a man to orbit as it takes to fly one from US to Australia. The reason space flight is so expensive is that NASA insists, in the best case, on taking the airplane apart and rebuilding it after each flight.
This is because the space shuttle does not have a "safe abort" in the early part of it's envelope: there is a significantly large part in the early flight where, if the engines fail, you die.
The vertical takeoff, vertical landing SSTO (single stage to orbit) craft that have been proposed by many people do have this option. (Go read G. Harry Stine's "Halfway to anywhere" for the history of this).
NASA prefers to "inspect in" the quality, which is expensive and supports a vast number of technical people. This is called "the missile mentality", and it stems from the early days of "get to the moon at any cost" and other political reasons.
So, it's important to support people like Rotary rocket, because, basicaly, NASA is the Microsoft of space travel.
The Lith visual engine truly looks impressive to me, but then I'm only play games, and I'm not likely to spot if anything is missing.
Except for one thing. There is no mention of an environmental sound model (EAX or simmilar). Their features list does mention DirectX compatibility, and I think the later versions of DirectX include environmental sound, so it may be included.
But somehow, I have a feeling that it is not. And Linux AFAIK doesn't have an environmental sound API. I think it would be great if the LithTech people hooked up with the opensource SB Live driver developers and created an API that would work for game developers and be open source...
Yes, that's right - you have the right not to listen to people who want to publish porn. They have no right to force it upon you - or on your kids.
Which is what makes the internet such a great medium. If someone wants to put porn on their site, they can. And if you want to avoid it, you simply don't surf there. That way, you are both free: he is free to publish, you are free not to see it.
I don't see anybody forcing porn on anybody on the internet. Even the spam I keep getting only invites me with a URL, not a picture.
Internet is uniquely suited to preserving both your freedom and the freedom of porn lovers. Often it is the unconventional, unpopular ideas that open new vistas in human development, and internet lets all views, popular and unpopular, thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
The englishman who landed on an asteroid and took off a planet.
Who posted a link to UT's webserver on slashdot?
Until the couple making love in a dark corner ruin it for everyone :-)
You misinterpreted the sentence about the counselors. It's not that the military would be counselors - it's that counselors might be people who serve as counselors INSTEAD of being drafted into the military.
Other things people might be doing instead of serving in the military is helping in old folk's homes, being junior ambulance attendants, or being forrest observers for the firefighters.
Well, I *am* a database admin, and not a MySQL fanatic. I had a particular job to do: A database with approximately 7 milion records, with most of the fields being varchars, indexed on most of the fields, a lot of inserts and mostly simple queries - which is why so many of the fields are indexed.
I realy wanted postgres to win, so I tested the latest version of postgres against mysql and a famous commercial database which shall not be named except to say that it's name starts with O.
Al three databases had about the same speed when doing queries on the indexed fields. On the inserts, the story was different: mysql with myISAM type database was the fastest. The commercial database and mySQL with BDB transaction database were an order of magnitude (10 times) slower than that.
And postgressql was an order of magnitude slower than the commercial database, or in other words, one insert into the postgressql database took about as much time as 100 inserts into the mySQL/myISAM database. This was with version 7.02 if memory serves (I may be wrong about the minor version, but the major version was definitely 7).
So to people who cry "benchmark this" and "benchmark that", I say: try the databases on your particular problem, and then decide what you will use.
They have telnet up and running on IPv6. That's nice. But what I would like to see is a list of applications that support IPv6.
If I set up an IPv6 network at home, can I set up apache to answer on an IPv6 address? What about mySQL? Postgres? Will Netscape access such addresses?
One nanosized wineglass: $120 000
Micromaniuplators for handling it: $50 000
A bottle of very fine Wine: $100
The look on the policeman's face when he reads your blood alcohol level after you tell him you had "10 glasses of wine": priceless
It can play an hour's worth of MP3s in 78 seconds.
(and execute an infinite loop in less than 3.5 minutes)
It will take, and it will take experience (just like any other sophisticated job).
The best book I can recommend is "Peopleware - productive projects and teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It will help you to avoid teamicide.
Does anybody know if micro-X can work as a remote Xwindows server? I'm a bit concerned about the statement that only certified software will be allowed on the machine. Does that mean no xterm?
The other thing I'd like to know that wasn't mentioned in the article, is what will be the input device. Handwriting recognition? One of the snapshots showed a keyboard drawn on the screen, which could mean the whole pad is touch sensitive, or it could mean you'd touch the screen with a pen.
Either way, it is something you can use to read your morning e-mail while sitting in the garden instead of sitting in your dark den in front of your machine.
I guess that just means I'll have to run Netscape in a chroot environment, like I do apache.
Try doing that on windows...
First of all, to NASA, $50M is paltry research money. A single launch of the shuttle costs several times more than that. And if you read the article and the archived space access updates, you would have seen that NASA has deliberately frittered away much larger sums. Instead of a stepping stone NASA has become one of the obstacles on the road to space.
I recently saw an item from sleepycat software (makers of Berkeley DB library) appearing on freshmeat where they mentioned "This version of DB is the first which can be used with MySQL to give MySql support for transactions". Something for the ACID crowd.
It will be interesting to see what is the interaction between the MySQL GPL and Berkeley DB
licence (which is also an open source licence).
However, I found this book clear, informative and very much worth the price.
I learned a lot from it.
That is a true piece of wisdom, for more reasons than one. Not only does the advertising for cars
hit people who are interested in cars, in hits them WHEN they are interested in cars.
Let's say that last week, I was YAHOO's dream "high payback surfer" - I surfed the stock quotes, and I surfed the cars pages. So when I check the weather this week, they show me banner ads for expensive cars. But, baby, I sold the stock last week, and the car in my garage still has the new car smell, and the last thing I'm going to click on is another car commercial.
I understand that the original BBC radioplay of HHGTTG was your big break. I have listened to several audio books, including your own excelent narration of Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency, but I never heard anything as lively and amazing as that soundtrack (the excelent music sets the mood, too).
How did that project come together in the first place?
To make a long story short, someone broke into the machine and was autogenerating consecutive addresses to spam every cellphone on that provider's network with an SMS message inivitng them to visit some site. Since the e-mail address of the gateway is <phone number>@provider.si that was very easy to do.
The only comfort is that the messages can only be 160 characters long, and there's no HTML. I hate HTML spams.
Buy an ATI-512 video Card, and get ATI-Windows!
:-)
Comes bundled with ATI/Microsoft Office.
Trintron Macintosh, Anyone?
The bet description of UCITA that I've heard (I wish it was mine, but it isn't) is "Grand theft shrinkwrap".
In fact, AC was well known when Tesla studied in Prague, as was it's advantage over DC - that it could be transformed to a higher voltage. Higher voltages can be more efficiently transported over long distance, but are too dangereous and inconvenient for most everyday use.
Converting DC to higher voltages would incurr such inefficiencies that the whole system would be untenable.
What the AC camp lacked, however, was a workable motor. The only motors that worked ran on DC. Again, converting AC to DC was not cost-efficient.
Tesla designed an AC motor, something considered theoretically impossible up until that time.
Also, Tesla did not "design the world's first hydroelectric plant" - Edison ran several small plants years before. What he did design, was the worlds first big AC hydroelectric plant.
None of that, of course, detracts from Tesla's real genius, just setting the record straight.
If you ever get the chance to visit the technical museum in Zagreb, Croatia, ask them to show you the Tesla exhibit.
Most of the famous Tesla experiments have been recreated for a movie made about Tesla's life about 20 years ago, and while the exhibit has been somewhat neglected in the last few years, the machines still work, and they are awesome.
I visited it about a year ago, and as I was the only visitor, the guy in charge demonstrated all the devices to me (and on me).
Very, very impressive.
The argument that life is improbable is an old one. In fact, no lesser physicist than Lord Kelvin himself has argued that the eye is so improbable that God must have had a hand in creating life.
:-)
Anybody with computer inclinations and an interest in the question of evolution should read Richard Dawkins' "Climbing mount improbable".
In a very readable book, Dawkins examines the development of the same organs in various creatures, and points out how (and why) their evolutions took different paths, sometimes arriving at widely different organs that have the same effect. He also uses computer simulations to SHOW how evolution works. It's a realy amazing book, and once you work through it, you won't have trouble beleiving in evolution again. (Though you may never again look at a fig in quite the same way - if you read the book, you know what I mean
The only difference between then and today is that today's know-it-alls haven't (yet) become gossips.
When I can go to amazon.com and buy a list of roblimo's book purchases, then it's time to worry. Of course, by then it may be too late to worry...
This is because the space shuttle does not have a "safe abort" in the early part of it's envelope: there is a significantly large part in the early flight where, if the engines fail, you die.
The vertical takeoff, vertical landing SSTO (single stage to orbit) craft that have been proposed by many people do have this option. (Go read G. Harry Stine's "Halfway to anywhere" for the history of this).
NASA prefers to "inspect in" the quality, which is expensive and supports a vast number of technical people. This is called "the missile mentality", and it stems from the early days of "get to the moon at any cost" and other political reasons.
So, it's important to support people like Rotary rocket, because, basicaly, NASA is the Microsoft of space travel.
Except for one thing. There is no mention of an environmental sound model (EAX or simmilar). Their features list does mention DirectX compatibility, and I think the later versions of DirectX include environmental sound, so it may be included.
But somehow, I have a feeling that it is not. And Linux AFAIK doesn't have an environmental sound API. I think it would be great if the LithTech people hooked up with the opensource SB Live driver developers and created an API that would work for game developers and be open source...
Yes, that's right - you have the right not to listen to people who want to publish porn. They have no right to force it upon you - or on your kids.
Which is what makes the internet such a great medium. If someone wants to put porn on their site, they can. And if you want to avoid it, you simply don't surf there. That way, you are both free: he is free to publish, you are free not to see it.
I don't see anybody forcing porn on anybody on the internet. Even the spam I keep getting only invites me with a URL, not a picture.
Internet is uniquely suited to preserving both your freedom and the freedom of porn lovers.
Often it is the unconventional, unpopular ideas that open new vistas in human development, and internet lets all views, popular and unpopular, thrive.
Let's keep it that way.