It's a bit complicated to try to look at that way, since MeeGo is open source, anyone is free to fork it and make their own version, which is what kept happening all through. If you really try to look at it with the "Whose project" mindset, since MeeGo is Linux, at the root you'll find out it's a Linus Torvalds project:)
However, if you look at its more recent history, MeeGo was Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo (Except that the only released MeeGo phone was never true MeeGo, much of the Moblin code was still unusable so it's more Maemo than Moblin/MeeGo). Of course the irony is that Intel's Moblin was in reality little more than just an earlier version of Maemo. For a long time after Intel announced their Moblin project, their project-site just linked to Nokia's Maemo source-repositories. Of course in open source it's fairly common to see forks and merges of codebase, and this is usually hailed as a strength and a good thing. I myself view the whole Moblin/MeeGo merger more as a marketing gimmic ("Now running software from world's #1 chipmaker!") and an excuse to make incompatible changes to the system, though doubtless there were many useful parts Intel had added to their fork (Which Nokia could've just uplifted into their branch anyway without committing to Intel).
But then, Maemo itself was based on earlier work by others, including Intel, as well, but getting already too longwinded:)
An old topic, but I still gotta look through them sometimes:) Good point on actually doing out the math, though there's a lot on the problem setup we don't know. If the goal of the school is to do (well, almost!) nothing but teach the students to type on computer as fast as possible, then indeed that is insufficient. On the other hand if it's a school that's aiming to give the students pretty rounded education, which one should hope is the case, then the situation is little different.
From my upper secondary school aka. high-school days in first world country I recall, we graduated in three years and courses on computers/typing would not even be on the schedule much of that time. When they were, there were two hours a week (like most other subjects, really). If only third of the students are taking computer classes at the same time and then only take 2 hours a week, then the amount of computers is more than sufficient. They'd still have up to hundred hours of computer education. And I'm not entirely in the wrong in remembering our rate of computers to students was somewhat similar.
On the other hand reading in between lines, it might be a typing bootcamp like idea where all the students are simply crammed with tying lectures as fast as possible might be more the case. Putting aside moral questions and reservations, there's some practical issues, like finding suitable classrooms and teachers for all of them. I know big classes are all the rage, but I don't think it'd be possible efficiently teach classes more than around 25 students in something like that. Assuming sick leaves, vacations, preparation time etc. does the budget allow for 20 class-rooms and 40 teachers? All in all I think in that kind of mass-teaching just giving them printed or photocopied keyboard layouts and having them practice on that, maybe in pairs taking turns spotting errors, and then giving the best of them 2 hours a week on actual computer would be best solution.
But of course as noted, we don't even know if the existing computers can actually be made to work...
Or vent it out because the stockpiles are being sold off at price below the cost of collecting and stockpiling it? Which is what they're doing now. Of course it would change once the current stockpiles are sold and price starts going up, right up until those helium-rich oil-wells dry up. There used to be a saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket, but I'm sure that's not appropriate here.
Looking below this seems to have been hashed to death and back already of course, including Mythbusters this and that etc... But just for the "Hydrogen burns, lulz" people who seem to have taken over Slashdot, hydrogen is indeed flammable, but it does not burn without oxygen and a source of ignition present. Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well. Now when that balloon develops a leak it's a whole different story. Also hydrogen flames burn in the ultraviolet spectrum and are hardly visible to the human eye. Thus it's clear something else was burning alongside the hydrogen when Hindenburg burned. Unknown to most people the American helium-filled airships suffered very similar burning accidents. Safety regulations were far laxer then than they are today, the main problems with Hindenburg were its design allowed large static charge potential differences to develop between its parts and it was not covered in flame-retardant fabric. In addition being part of the Nazi propaganda machine it was being pushed far beyond the stresses and uses its original developers intended, and likely to be leaking all over the place. "Hindenburg burns and crashes, people die, American trade embargo on helium to blame" was merely the politically correct (at least to the Nazi-party, and they worked hard to hide any evidence to the contrary) summary. But where does this leave us with hydrogen balloons? Not sure, any current party balloon designs I can think of are highly flammable, and preventing a leak is not really an option. Luckily, there's one other option for flying your party balloons: Sky lanterns! There's no way anything could go wrong with those... (Apologies for being too lazy to make every word of last sentence a link to similar article... would be ugly, too:)
I love the solution to the power availability here: if the area has limited electricity, just chain up progressively more inefficient electricity connections out of the computer. Problem solved! This reminds me of the old solution to get rid of the evil nuclear power plants, just take the power from the wall-outlet instead.
I was going to say the whole issue of limited electricity is little beyond the scope of Slashdot, but I suppose in a way this would be a perfect question to ask from Slashdot crowd, but it'd have to be entirely its own topic. Also the original question doesn't really clarify if the currently existing computers can be powered and if so how - I would assume this is very much an on/off situation, with poor electricity quality, brownouts and frequent blackouts. It's entirely possible they've never been powered up because they can't be as well.
DC power from batteries rigged up to photovoltaics would seem like fairly idea solution to me, but this assumes there isn't a risk of stuff like that getting vandalized intentionally or out of ignorance and of course availability of the batteries and panels (and a couple of high power diodes, or preferably solar charger circuits), but sunlight should be plentiful. Since the computers themselves will use a maximum of 12v of voltage, a PV system should be ideal for powering the computers themselves while avoiding many of the potential pitfalls, displays might still need an inverter. Unfortunately the direct DC power-supplies needed are hard to come by, but then we seem to be dealing in wishful geek thinking anyway:)
Any microcontroller/custom solutions might be powered off car-batteries (charged with PV or maybe whatever is available) either with individual simple regulators, or preferably laptop car battery adapter powering a bunch of them. But I think the Raspberry PI/Arduino/etc. ideas are pipe-dreams in themselves, though it's certainly nice to think the students could be taught to build up their own microcontroller computers and there'd be no problem getting the neccessary components and materials, and there was ample time to pull it all off...
A bunch of USB keyboards on HUB's (provided the computers have USB or can be retro-fitted with it) and a program displaying what they type on a line per student would IMHO seem much more like the way to go. If having so many students per computer is indeed needed; at least in my days of basic education it felt like we had even less computers per student, yet somehow managed with a "complete" computer-science curriculum. Perhaps a class time-table design software is all that is needed:)
Considering the very submission reads " I considered using typewriters but they are in limited supply on the market." I bet that must be the case... and all the non-trollish replies to the article so far just point "use a typewriter". That said, this does seem bit of like a solution looking for a problem, or what have you - any other solution one could come by would be even more "limited supply on the market", given there's not general demand for that. Only thing that comes to mind to me is that USB-attached keyboards should be easy to come by, surplus, used, sponsored deal whatever. Get a few USB hubs and connect them together to a single computer with a handy software. Unfortunately that's far from ideal, as the screen will have to be shared, and electricity is still required. But as far as an easily available geeky solution goes, I think that's a start. Maybe blink the lights or something if they make a typo - actually learning/teaching on them would be harder, but then you can do that even on a blackboard or so.
I'm not sure how much I should really say, because I work on similar system too. It's not just vehicle tracking, of course, you could say it's "data processing services for mobile units", and the irony is that description covers a fair amount of everything done in IT these days. But I'll freely admit the example is partially fictitious, there's no point in getting to the nitty-gritty details of data representation and reduction here, nor can I reveal numbers that could be considered trade secrets. But suffice to say the example is realistic, and pretty close to what we do for some clients.
Fuel economy is presently one of the biggest needs driving this influx of data. While few of the companies care themselves, but many public sector service contract competitions now require or are going to require companies to implement economic driving systems. For this you may require down to the second data on what the driver did with the controls, how the vehicle responded, and what were the environmental conditions. Some public transit companies want to go even further, optimizing their performance and time-tables to the max. Equipment failures are also VERY costly, especially when you have an expensive time-dependent and possibly climate controlled cargo riding on it, so companies will do anything to prevent, predict and detect them. EU has recently mandated automated accident detection and emergency call system on future vehicles, while this can work in-vehicle, it's another thing driving adoption of remote data-loggers and detailed logging, the systems being needed in the vehicles anyway.
Mobile networks won't particularly mind large amount of data, as long as they get to set the price. 3G/4G and other mobile broadband solutions exist for just such cases. Sending real-time video isn't really sensible in general, of course. But just to be sure, it's easy and often necessary to store the data locally until it can be downloaded via WLAN to wired network at depot of the like. Unless you're Google, there's limited things you can do with it, it's not easily searchable and nobody's going to watch hundreds of simultaneous streams like that, most of it is noise and not data. But extracting data from it, like road signs, driving distances and other more complicated parameters, or snapshots of specific situations (why did the vehicle brake, what's the weather like etc.) are done.
The data needed increases a lot the moment you have time dimension to anything. But as nobody seems to want to come up with an example, from something I have experience with, lets say you're running a shipping & logistics company. All your vehicles, trailers etc. have sat-nav, wireless broadband, sensor arrays for temperatures, weather, heck maybe even a video feed or two. But I'll stick into a "small" example.
The vehicle control-buses alone can generate thousands of messages per second, but if you don't want to go overboard, you might be tracking maybe 64 values on per-second basis. Oh, and naturally you have hundreds of trucks in the fleet, say you're a relatively small operator with 250 trackable vehicles. At bare minimum you're looking at something like vehicle-id, timestamp, flags and data per each item. This would be roughly 2k per row on a naive database, or half a megabyte for whole feet. Times the seconds, coming to whopping 14 gigabytes per day even if they're only in use 8 hours a day on average. In a year, you'll amass 5 terabytes of data.
If you're said logistics company, you probably want to outsource it somewhere, the company may be handling data from dozen or so logistics companies and then it's 60 terabytes per year. It might be desirable to save that data for 5 years, at which point you'd looking at 300 terabytes in active storage, from whence you'll want answers like "Who was driving on 5th Street on the new year's eve" or "Was the temperature of the cargo over 10C at any point during shipment XYZ" to the utterly complex data-mining for fuel economy etc.
Of course, in reality the amount of data you'd want to store would vary widely, you would also store much other data from administrative to legal, have different storage approaches for different uses, and employ different compression schemes starting with storing only when values change, but that's primarily an example of how the amount of data easily balloons once you figure in matters of scale and time-dimension. Even in something as simple as getting fresh bread delivered to your local store. I can imagine quite a few businesses having similar situation, especially as society gets more and more data-driven, which I guess is what this article is supposed to be about.
Yeah, I definitely think it's time for Slashdot to get back to its roots - "News for nerds, stuff that matters, unless it's embarrassing to the Republicans". That said, the revelation in this Slashdot article is hardly news or previously unheard of, as usual. Nor should the number of Twitter followers or Likes matter, but quite obviously there are many who believe they do. Just to quote the above news article as a teaser, "We subjected Barack Obama's account, @BarackObama, to the same analysis."
Nokia is a 150 years old company that happened to rule the mobile phone space for 15 of those years - forever in technological scale. They've also been close to bankrupt several times during this time. This is undeniably a dark chapter for them, but as much as many people seem to so wish, it is not (as of yet) their darkest hour, and there is every reason to expect they will go on and survive in some way or form. (Then again, times have changed, and Nokia of today is certainly heavily entrenched and invested on being the leader in mobile phones, making it questionable if they can or if it indeed makes business sense to continue without that, so this is not financial advice. Just a viewpoint to all the "Finally it's over, good riddance" people.)
Actually, the sensor in the pen reacts to carbon, hence what you need is a black & white laser. A color-laser comes useful in that since color-printing doesn't disrupt the pattern recognition, you can print whatever else you want on the paper in color. This will mainly come useful for making forms etc. with boxes to fill, but for note taking, just laser-printer is enough. Photocopies did not work; the copy is not exact enough. Also one of the features of the system is that each page can be unique such that you can recognize which page it was written on. Thus generating and printing new ones may come handy.
Also strictly speaking no ink on the pen is required. It comes extremely extremely helpful, as it can be hard to write when you don't see what you've written. But with practice it's possible to re-use the papers, even without ink. Depending what your needs are.
Now my problem with this product is, first of all, for note-taking I don't understand what's the big difference between this and jotting down your notes on notepad and then taking the notepad to a flatbed scanner. I can see many other use-cases for it, but writing down pages and pages of notes isn't one of these. Either take the notes down with a keyboard or if that's not possible write and scan notes.
The other major issue is that there's no open spec on the protocol, and thus no Linux support. In fact the driver situation is tough overall. There's been a few of these pens, some of them only have drivers for Windows 95 etc. so that with any Windows release you may be left hanging. The companies in charge also seem to be tightening the noose all the time so that I fully expect in a year or two you will only be able to access your notes through a DRM:ed pay-per-view service.
The provision to REALLY spread the wealth around is the rule "Can be shared by any number of people;". Ie. a research team with 12 members could easily get it. And why limit yourself to research teams? Presumably only nominations are the limit, so why not nominate "Everybody graduated from Berkeley" or "Everybody with letter E in their full name". Granted, the award would then be quite little, and think of the bureaucracy... They're supposed to accept online nominations, however.
There were some posts about whether it were to be annual or what... just to clarify, according to their news release, the US$3 million Fundamental Physics Prize is going to be awarded (at least) every year. It's only the first year that they awarded that prize to nine people each. I can not determine from the web-site how often or how many New Horizons in Physics prizes they're planning to grant, and I also think the provision of awarding "special main prize" in addition to the annual waters down the significance of the prize... but we'll see, it's still hell of a lot of money.
Another reservation I have on how it is arranged is the "previous winners choose new ones" system. At least all the recipients ought to be exceptional individuals, but I'm still quite worried it will either turn into a clique rewarding like-thinking conformists, or get boggled down in internal disagreements and inability to choose new recipients depending on how the voting progress is arranged. Of course I have no doubt the backing millionaire has specific provisions for over-riding in the fine print, but it still seems tricky.
I particularly loved the quote from TFA from BCC saying 'the chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India said the exact cause of the power cut was unclear, he said, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".' That sounds a lot like the "series of tubes" speech...
But at least they've got this things under control and are honing on the root cause, they've already managed reproducibility of the bug! 'After Monday's cut, engineers managed to restore electricity to the northern grid by the evening, but at 13:05 (07:35 GMT) on Tuesday, it collapsed again.'
Wait, no, according to a NY times article, another electric company chief executive clarifies: '“We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.'
Okay, that's settled then. Just keep replugging it, one of these times it's bound to work.
For those seriously suggesting dd, and assuming leaving the computer inoperable and none of the data is critical, how about instead doing: sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass xxxxxxxx/dev/sdx sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase xxxxxxxx/dev/sdx
This is rated as the highest security erase short of physically destroying the hard-drive. It will wipe all areas of the hard-drive, including relocated and spare blocks and such, unlike dd. And most importantly, it'll do it FAST. It will do only single pass erase however; Bradley Manning's chatlogs linking him to Wikileaks were reputedly recovered from a single overwrite wipe. If you require this level of security, then you shouldn't even need to ask, nuking it from the orbit is the only way to be sure.
However, I'm personally going to go with the people who note that as it's a work computer that's property of the workplace, rendering it inoperable and/or deleting work-related data on it are probably not approved use. And if the workplace/employee had any sense, all of the data on the computer are already backed up or even initially located on company fileservers, after which it is really anyone's guess who all have access to the super-seekrit stuff on it. In the best case all the work related data is backed up or on company servers and the private data exists only on the workstation, in which case the Security Erase methods is valid, but the odds of this distinction having held are slim at best.
Ooh, a snarky comment! Your car-analogy is bit lacking though, software user-interface is more akin to the "body" or case than the innards, indeed this is what we mean by the logic or computing engine of a program. So this means you'll actually be replacing all the rest while leaving engine, transmission and wheels into your car. Duh. On a more serious note, I realize this is not always trivial, but as Qt and GTK are the only two Linux UI-frameworks usually considered, much Linux software already has a Qt UI of some sort. The rest, if they are of any value, tend to be programmed so the UI is clearly separated from the engine or backend for maintenance and portability reasons. Even when this is not the case, the UI porting is generally not a hopeless endeavour, though there are considerable advantages from re-designing such an application. In either case we're not talking about something a casual end-user would do over the weekend, of course, but a Linux developer might. This is also why I'm saying high-end games are an exception, the UI in those tends to be so complex, specialized and tied-in with program logic (not to mention expecting desktop performance) that the effort would most likely be wasted. Of course, the first thing I did when I got hand of the original development hardware and tried to decide where to start was naturally to get Linux-DOOM running on it, using SVGAlib (and no graphics acceleration). It was... almost playable. Didn't play nicely with the windowing system, of course. But with little work they could be swapped between.
Apps are, of course, preferable way unless you're an unix admin. But on Maemo and MeeGo both, the underlying system is fairly complete "desktop" Linux. My N9's/usr,/usr/bin,/sbin and/usr/sbin directories have 1015 commands total, so I won't list everything that is included. Fully featured busybox build with ifconfig is included though. For N9, "developer mode" comes as standard option you can turn on from configuration menu, which will among other things add a console app to the device, as well as opening VNC or ssh connection to the device over USB or WLAN. What is annoying, and a slight warning for the home-hacker, is that N9 comes with kernel-backed Aegis security system, which means that unless you change the kernel or take other measures, changing ANY system files will brick the device so that a full re-flash over USB is needed. It's possible to disable, and allows installing uncertified apps, but a pain in the ass.
As one of the people who developed the MeeGo predecessor Maemo, I feel I have to point out that there are currently 1723 applications on my-meego.com MeeGo Harmattan software catalog. I consider this fairly well for OS where only single phone has been publically released, and has been orphaned since the get-go. Most of them are not fart-generators either, although there's a fairly high number of what are essentially custom RSS feed-readers for private feeds (there's an RSS reader built-in which feeds straight to one of the home screens).
Of course the beautiful thing as far as software ecosystem is concerned is MeeGo is pretty much full featured Linux desktop, so that almost any Linux desktop software (minus high-end games of course) can be ported to MeeGo, usually at most requiring porting the UI to Qt and touch-friendly. (Of course it's nice to see lot more thought put to integrating most apps into the MeeGo system).
It is possible. If you read the article in question, you would've seen that National Science Foundation (running the Antarctic Research Program) received bids in the range of $100 million to $500 million for satellite broadband. So not only is it possible, NFS has sought bids on it, and we know the projected price. No word on whether this is within the NFS budget for this task, however.
Personally I would assume it is not worth it. And hence enters this plan, as Polar Broadband Ltd. believes they can salvage the satellite into Antarctic service for as little as $20 million. It may still be more than NSF is willing to spend, especially considered the risks and reduced lifetime on the satellite and the fact the satellite was never planned for this use so is not going to be optimal solution.
Actually, while its possible to design a system to be "virtually" fault-tolerant, in engineering that always comes down the a cost-benefit analysis. Also this naturally does not entirely eliminate so-called "human error" and other freak incidences, but with enough resources tossed into it, you can get very close. It's obvious the safety-requirement and thus allowed cost for manned mission is set much higher; for an unmanned probe it will be accepted some of them will inevitably be lost and accepted, and design target set to for example 1 unrecoverable failure out of 100 missions (pulled that example out of my ass, and in practice Russia of course has 100% failure rate on Mars-probes, which I'm sure is nowhere near design target). Also we do not know the number of redundant processors of the kind that were in Phobos-Grunt. If there are three and a monitoring unit, going into "safe-mode" in case two of the processors failed at the same time would be entirely reasonable response - there would be no redundant processor left to compare the results to. But only Roscosmos knows the design for sure, I'm even guessing the redundancy just from the reported facts that there were (at least) two identifcal and both booting at the same time was somehow a problem. It is of course kind of confirmation bias as that's generally the main way a redundant system can fail, but the way there stories generally seem to go there is some unthought issue causing all redundant units to fail at the same time, and the control logic responds in some unexpected way that makes matters worse because nobody ever thought the redundant systems could fail at the same time let alone bothered to test it. I work in automotive industry, and we have unwritten in-house rule that whenever an engineer says "But just what are the odds that..." we HAVE to make the design hardened against just that possibility. RAID is actually a good example of the redundancy failure. You may be led to assume that with 100,000 hours MTBF per drive the odds of losing two drives at the same time are practically non-existent. In practice, as the hard-drives are from the same manufacturing batch and subject to identical operating-conditions and usage patterns (including external dangers like somebody dropping it etc.), it will actually be unlikely for the hard-drives to fail at significantly different times. If it were up to me, I'd randomly swap around drives between RAID arrays, preferably acquired at different times, for just that reason.
What we gleam from this, rather old article, together with other common knowledge... apparently the flight-control computer had two identical processors, presumably for redundancy, that according to Roskmos both rebooted at the same time, possibly due to "heavy particles" in space. This is not unthinkable, especially as the rebooting of such robust processors could take significant time, during which another one could encounter failure.
There is also reference to a watchdog procedure, which muddles waters somewhat - I'm wondering if the watchdog procedures could have triggered on some other condition than total unresponsiveness of the unit in question, and if it could have led to rebooting them both at the same time, for example due to checking them at the same time on an interval. Regardless, after both redundant processors booted at the same time, the probe interrupted flight program, and - quite correctly - entered into "safe mode" awaiting further instructions and diagnostics.
Then comes up the further engineering SNAFU, and where a software-specification error most likely comes into play: In safe-mode, the probe switched to its X-band radio, which was never intended to be operated on orbit, but only in deep space on way to Mars. The problem with this was two-fold. First of all, the bulky Russian deep space antennas could not track the probe at orbital speeds long enough to receive let alone transmit data. And secondly, as the probe was orbiting Earth it was spending long times with its solar panels in Earth's shadow, while the high power interplanetary radio was draining its batteries. And so the probe was doomed.
Skimming the actual report, the number in there is predictably "500Mbits", it seems to be Wired who got that mixed with megabytes. Still as some earlier posters point out one needs to go no further than Wikipedia to find out that number is still likely off by a magnitude as the real figure seems to be 50Mbps. I assume the 500Mbits figure came from people trying to get funding for more bandwidth, and may be based on theoretical maximum, such as the capability of the link installed on them. The report in question does, however, warn that "The finite bandwidth that currently exists for all military aircraft, and the resulting competition for existing bandwidth, may render the expansion of UAS applications infeasible and leave many platforms grounded". This sounds slightly dubious, as the report itself notes that moern UAV's are autonomous-capable, and all the bandwidth is basically for sensors, which can be switched on and off on the basis of need. Unless there is need for 24h uninterrupted surveillance, the bandwidth isn't such a limiting factor. From a satellite bandwidth link we learn the supposed total bandwidth available is somewhere in the ballbark of 12Gbps. This would mean a single Global Hawk uses 1/240th of the total available bandwidth when ran over satellite. Granted, that may seem bit of a andwidth hog, but it's important to notice there's no difference between that and a manned airplane running with equivalent sensors forwarding data. As such it's hard to see this as a "drawback". If one looks for a drawback from the report in question, it's their reliability, as according to the report in 2005 Global Hawk for example had 13 times as high "Class A Mishap" rate as U-2 spy-planes. On the other hand, the report claims that in 2009 Predator-drones reached a lower mishap rate than small single-engine private airplanes in the USA.
Besides 500MB/s being slightly dubious... so what? They're reconnaissance planes, their primary purpose is gathering intelligence. So they're gathering it, at 500MB/s. So their downside is that they're good at what they're doing? This would be an issue if we were told "They use 20% of the total available bandwidth for military applications per plane just to stay in air", but I do not believe this to be the case or we would be told that. So what exactly is the downside?
“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
The matter of "quality of prose" is, I believe, very much a question if preference. It is also important to understand and reflect on the context of said Nobel judgement. A kind of realistic modernism was about only form of literature the then influential literary critics considered "true art". Fantasy, in particular, had no place in the hallowed halls of great literature. It's thus somewhat likely that when members of the Nobel committee wrote "second rate prose", they were not as much making a judgement on the quality of the writing and storytelling, as simply affirming their regard of the genre as "juvenile trash".
Another important point for many vocal net-critics to realize is that as the parent poster implies, Tolkien was intentionally choosing an archaic and at places longwinded style; indeed the astute and careful reader will notice him switching from one prosaic style to another as the situation and intent of his storytelling calls for. He was, also, not intentionally setting out to create a fast and light action-paced thriller in a franchise, as is the formula for so much modern fantasy series, but imitating many classics and epics. Indeed the fantasy genre as we know it was created by Tolkien, but his was more an artistic exploration.
One thing that's never ceased to amaze me is the eagerness at which people will, at any online discussion of Tolkien's works, declare that they were not able to even read them - sounding quite proud of it, as if it makes them eligible for some grand elite club or something. How many here would declare "I tried to read Donald Knuth, but I fell asleep before the end of the first chapter", or perhaps "I picked up the Bible, but had to put it down after the first page" right after a dozen other rewordings of the statement? Well, what were you expecting! It might also be revealing and likely more useful if people who make such blanket declarations provided a list of books they have actually enjoyed.
Timed release or whatever it's called. And the motorcycle part is just it: Motorcycles were forbidden there, but in none of her pictures was the motorcycle actually shown within the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, which was probably one of the first clues people had that the story of her taking a motorcycle through there alone was bogus. Second clue was when a Chernobyl travel-guide told she'd been on their tour group. Now you might suggest its a conspiracy of them trying to cover up letting her in against rules, but Elena wrote on the site in response "I am being accused that it was more poetry in this story then reality. I partly accept this accusation, it still was more reality then poetry and it is why this site has millions of people visiting each month from the day when I put it online and I think I have right to say that people love it". If you go to the KiddOfSpeed website, you'll find a disclaimer from the person providing the hosting, "Regardless of what is true, this site has certainly made people think more about Chernobyl and this tragic disaster." So it would seem the people with "vested interests" to accuse her of making up things include both herself and the person currently hosting the site. Tours of the are have been available since 2002, and her website appeared in 2004. Wikipedia cites mainly Slashdot has having made the site famous. The site has ofcourse been changed numerous times since then with new pictures etc. Also Mary Mycio (who MAY have a vested interest in it) alleges many of the pictures are from books and different timeperiods. So in short, yes Elena's KiddOfSpeed story was fantasy. The images were of Chernobyl, but staged and not what they purpoted to be. As it relates to THIS story, the "solitary woman on unauthorized exploration of forbidden area" has a chance of being a fantasy. Looking cursorily over the site it's hard to imagine those pics being from a public tour, though the lack of actual rocket engines on site makes it a remote possibility.
Elena aka KiddOfSpeed. They were bogus in that she took a guided tour and was not on a solitary motorcycle ride through the area as she had claimed on her site. In other words the photos weren't photoshopped, but everything else about it was fake. I was considering this possibility myself reading the headline; there must be guided tours into the Russian space-technology facilities as well. On the other hand it would not be hard to believe the facilities are not very secure or well guarded, and probably quite empty over the holidays.
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It's a bit complicated to try to look at that way, since MeeGo is open source, anyone is free to fork it and make their own version, which is what kept happening all through. If you really try to look at it with the "Whose project" mindset, since MeeGo is Linux, at the root you'll find out it's a Linus Torvalds project :)
However, if you look at its more recent history, MeeGo was Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo (Except that the only released MeeGo phone was never true MeeGo, much of the Moblin code was still unusable so it's more Maemo than Moblin/MeeGo). Of course the irony is that Intel's Moblin was in reality little more than just an earlier version of Maemo. For a long time after Intel announced their Moblin project, their project-site just linked to Nokia's Maemo source-repositories. Of course in open source it's fairly common to see forks and merges of codebase, and this is usually hailed as a strength and a good thing. I myself view the whole Moblin/MeeGo merger more as a marketing gimmic ("Now running software from world's #1 chipmaker!") and an excuse to make incompatible changes to the system, though doubtless there were many useful parts Intel had added to their fork (Which Nokia could've just uplifted into their branch anyway without committing to Intel).
But then, Maemo itself was based on earlier work by others, including Intel, as well, but getting already too longwinded :)
An old topic, but I still gotta look through them sometimes :) Good point on actually doing out the math, though there's a lot on the problem setup we don't know. If the goal of the school is to do (well, almost!) nothing but teach the students to type on computer as fast as possible, then indeed that is insufficient. On the other hand if it's a school that's aiming to give the students pretty rounded education, which one should hope is the case, then the situation is little different.
From my upper secondary school aka. high-school days in first world country I recall, we graduated in three years and courses on computers/typing would not even be on the schedule much of that time. When they were, there were two hours a week (like most other subjects, really). If only third of the students are taking computer classes at the same time and then only take 2 hours a week, then the amount of computers is more than sufficient. They'd still have up to hundred hours of computer education. And I'm not entirely in the wrong in remembering our rate of computers to students was somewhat similar.
On the other hand reading in between lines, it might be a typing bootcamp like idea where all the students are simply crammed with tying lectures as fast as possible might be more the case. Putting aside moral questions and reservations, there's some practical issues, like finding suitable classrooms and teachers for all of them. I know big classes are all the rage, but I don't think it'd be possible efficiently teach classes more than around 25 students in something like that. Assuming sick leaves, vacations, preparation time etc. does the budget allow for 20 class-rooms and 40 teachers? All in all I think in that kind of mass-teaching just giving them printed or photocopied keyboard layouts and having them practice on that, maybe in pairs taking turns spotting errors, and then giving the best of them 2 hours a week on actual computer would be best solution.
But of course as noted, we don't even know if the existing computers can actually be made to work...
Or vent it out because the stockpiles are being sold off at price below the cost of collecting and stockpiling it? Which is what they're doing now. Of course it would change once the current stockpiles are sold and price starts going up, right up until those helium-rich oil-wells dry up. There used to be a saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket, but I'm sure that's not appropriate here.
Looking below this seems to have been hashed to death and back already of course, including Mythbusters this and that etc...
But just for the "Hydrogen burns, lulz" people who seem to have taken over Slashdot, hydrogen is indeed flammable, but it does not burn without oxygen and a source of ignition present. Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well. Now when that balloon develops a leak it's a whole different story.
Also hydrogen flames burn in the ultraviolet spectrum and are hardly visible to the human eye. Thus it's clear something else was burning alongside the hydrogen when Hindenburg burned. Unknown to most people the American helium-filled airships suffered very similar burning accidents. Safety regulations were far laxer then than they are today, the main problems with Hindenburg were its design allowed large static charge potential differences to develop between its parts and it was not covered in flame-retardant fabric. In addition being part of the Nazi propaganda machine it was being pushed far beyond the stresses and uses its original developers intended, and likely to be leaking all over the place. "Hindenburg burns and crashes, people die, American trade embargo on helium to blame" was merely the politically correct (at least to the Nazi-party, and they worked hard to hide any evidence to the contrary) summary.
But where does this leave us with hydrogen balloons? Not sure, any current party balloon designs I can think of are highly flammable, and preventing a leak is not really an option. Luckily, there's one other option for flying your party balloons: Sky lanterns! There's no way anything could go wrong with those... (Apologies for being too lazy to make every word of last sentence a link to similar article... would be ugly, too:)
I love the solution to the power availability here: if the area has limited electricity, just chain up progressively more inefficient electricity connections out of the computer. Problem solved! This reminds me of the old solution to get rid of the evil nuclear power plants, just take the power from the wall-outlet instead.
I was going to say the whole issue of limited electricity is little beyond the scope of Slashdot, but I suppose in a way this would be a perfect question to ask from Slashdot crowd, but it'd have to be entirely its own topic. Also the original question doesn't really clarify if the currently existing computers can be powered and if so how - I would assume this is very much an on/off situation, with poor electricity quality, brownouts and frequent blackouts. It's entirely possible they've never been powered up because they can't be as well.
DC power from batteries rigged up to photovoltaics would seem like fairly idea solution to me, but this assumes there isn't a risk of stuff like that getting vandalized intentionally or out of ignorance and of course availability of the batteries and panels (and a couple of high power diodes, or preferably solar charger circuits), but sunlight should be plentiful. Since the computers themselves will use a maximum of 12v of voltage, a PV system should be ideal for powering the computers themselves while avoiding many of the potential pitfalls, displays might still need an inverter. Unfortunately the direct DC power-supplies needed are hard to come by, but then we seem to be dealing in wishful geek thinking anyway :)
Any microcontroller/custom solutions might be powered off car-batteries (charged with PV or maybe whatever is available) either with individual simple regulators, or preferably laptop car battery adapter powering a bunch of them. But I think the Raspberry PI/Arduino/etc. ideas are pipe-dreams in themselves, though it's certainly nice to think the students could be taught to build up their own microcontroller computers and there'd be no problem getting the neccessary components and materials, and there was ample time to pull it all off...
A bunch of USB keyboards on HUB's (provided the computers have USB or can be retro-fitted with it) and a program displaying what they type on a line per student would IMHO seem much more like the way to go. If having so many students per computer is indeed needed; at least in my days of basic education it felt like we had even less computers per student, yet somehow managed with a "complete" computer-science curriculum. Perhaps a class time-table design software is all that is needed :)
Considering the very submission reads " I considered using typewriters but they are in limited supply on the market." I bet that must be the case... and all the non-trollish replies to the article so far just point "use a typewriter". That said, this does seem bit of like a solution looking for a problem, or what have you - any other solution one could come by would be even more "limited supply on the market", given there's not general demand for that.
Only thing that comes to mind to me is that USB-attached keyboards should be easy to come by, surplus, used, sponsored deal whatever. Get a few USB hubs and connect them together to a single computer with a handy software. Unfortunately that's far from ideal, as the screen will have to be shared, and electricity is still required. But as far as an easily available geeky solution goes, I think that's a start. Maybe blink the lights or something if they make a typo - actually learning/teaching on them would be harder, but then you can do that even on a blackboard or so.
I'm not sure how much I should really say, because I work on similar system too. It's not just vehicle tracking, of course, you could say it's "data processing services for mobile units", and the irony is that description covers a fair amount of everything done in IT these days. But I'll freely admit the example is partially fictitious, there's no point in getting to the nitty-gritty details of data representation and reduction here, nor can I reveal numbers that could be considered trade secrets. But suffice to say the example is realistic, and pretty close to what we do for some clients.
Fuel economy is presently one of the biggest needs driving this influx of data. While few of the companies care themselves, but many public sector service contract competitions now require or are going to require companies to implement economic driving systems. For this you may require down to the second data on what the driver did with the controls, how the vehicle responded, and what were the environmental conditions. Some public transit companies want to go even further, optimizing their performance and time-tables to the max. Equipment failures are also VERY costly, especially when you have an expensive time-dependent and possibly climate controlled cargo riding on it, so companies will do anything to prevent, predict and detect them. EU has recently mandated automated accident detection and emergency call system on future vehicles, while this can work in-vehicle, it's another thing driving adoption of remote data-loggers and detailed logging, the systems being needed in the vehicles anyway.
Mobile networks won't particularly mind large amount of data, as long as they get to set the price. 3G/4G and other mobile broadband solutions exist for just such cases. Sending real-time video isn't really sensible in general, of course. But just to be sure, it's easy and often necessary to store the data locally until it can be downloaded via WLAN to wired network at depot of the like. Unless you're Google, there's limited things you can do with it, it's not easily searchable and nobody's going to watch hundreds of simultaneous streams like that, most of it is noise and not data. But extracting data from it, like road signs, driving distances and other more complicated parameters, or snapshots of specific situations (why did the vehicle brake, what's the weather like etc.) are done.
The data needed increases a lot the moment you have time dimension to anything. But as nobody seems to want to come up with an example, from something I have experience with, lets say you're running a shipping & logistics company. All your vehicles, trailers etc. have sat-nav, wireless broadband, sensor arrays for temperatures, weather, heck maybe even a video feed or two. But I'll stick into a "small" example.
The vehicle control-buses alone can generate thousands of messages per second, but if you don't want to go overboard, you might be tracking maybe 64 values on per-second basis. Oh, and naturally you have hundreds of trucks in the fleet, say you're a relatively small operator with 250 trackable vehicles. At bare minimum you're looking at something like vehicle-id, timestamp, flags and data per each item. This would be roughly 2k per row on a naive database, or half a megabyte for whole feet. Times the seconds, coming to whopping 14 gigabytes per day even if they're only in use 8 hours a day on average. In a year, you'll amass 5 terabytes of data.
If you're said logistics company, you probably want to outsource it somewhere, the company may be handling data from dozen or so logistics companies and then it's 60 terabytes per year. It might be desirable to save that data for 5 years, at which point you'd looking at 300 terabytes in active storage, from whence you'll want answers like "Who was driving on 5th Street on the new year's eve" or "Was the temperature of the cargo over 10C at any point during shipment XYZ" to the utterly complex data-mining for fuel economy etc.
Of course, in reality the amount of data you'd want to store would vary widely, you would also store much other data from administrative to legal, have different storage approaches for different uses, and employ different compression schemes starting with storing only when values change, but that's primarily an example of how the amount of data easily balloons once you figure in matters of scale and time-dimension. Even in something as simple as getting fresh bread delivered to your local store. I can imagine quite a few businesses having similar situation, especially as society gets more and more data-driven, which I guess is what this article is supposed to be about.
Yeah, I definitely think it's time for Slashdot to get back to its roots - "News for nerds, stuff that matters, unless it's embarrassing to the Republicans".
That said, the revelation in this Slashdot article is hardly news or previously unheard of, as usual. Nor should the number of Twitter followers or Likes matter, but quite obviously there are many who believe they do.
Just to quote the above news article as a teaser, "We subjected Barack Obama's account, @BarackObama, to the same analysis."
Nokia is a 150 years old company that happened to rule the mobile phone space for 15 of those years - forever in technological scale. They've also been close to bankrupt several times during this time. This is undeniably a dark chapter for them, but as much as many people seem to so wish, it is not (as of yet) their darkest hour, and there is every reason to expect they will go on and survive in some way or form.
(Then again, times have changed, and Nokia of today is certainly heavily entrenched and invested on being the leader in mobile phones, making it questionable if they can or if it indeed makes business sense to continue without that, so this is not financial advice. Just a viewpoint to all the "Finally it's over, good riddance" people.)
Actually, the sensor in the pen reacts to carbon, hence what you need is a black & white laser. A color-laser comes useful in that since color-printing doesn't disrupt the pattern recognition, you can print whatever else you want on the paper in color. This will mainly come useful for making forms etc. with boxes to fill, but for note taking, just laser-printer is enough. Photocopies did not work; the copy is not exact enough. Also one of the features of the system is that each page can be unique such that you can recognize which page it was written on. Thus generating and printing new ones may come handy.
Also strictly speaking no ink on the pen is required. It comes extremely extremely helpful, as it can be hard to write when you don't see what you've written. But with practice it's possible to re-use the papers, even without ink. Depending what your needs are.
Now my problem with this product is, first of all, for note-taking I don't understand what's the big difference between this and jotting down your notes on notepad and then taking the notepad to a flatbed scanner. I can see many other use-cases for it, but writing down pages and pages of notes isn't one of these. Either take the notes down with a keyboard or if that's not possible write and scan notes.
The other major issue is that there's no open spec on the protocol, and thus no Linux support. In fact the driver situation is tough overall. There's been a few of these pens, some of them only have drivers for Windows 95 etc. so that with any Windows release you may be left hanging. The companies in charge also seem to be tightening the noose all the time so that I fully expect in a year or two you will only be able to access your notes through a DRM:ed pay-per-view service.
The provision to REALLY spread the wealth around is the rule "Can be shared by any number of people;". Ie. a research team with 12 members could easily get it. And why limit yourself to research teams? Presumably only nominations are the limit, so why not nominate "Everybody graduated from Berkeley" or "Everybody with letter E in their full name". Granted, the award would then be quite little, and think of the bureaucracy... They're supposed to accept online nominations, however.
There were some posts about whether it were to be annual or what... just to clarify, according to their news release, the US$3 million Fundamental Physics Prize is going to be awarded (at least) every year. It's only the first year that they awarded that prize to nine people each. I can not determine from the web-site how often or how many New Horizons in Physics prizes they're planning to grant, and I also think the provision of awarding "special main prize" in addition to the annual waters down the significance of the prize... but we'll see, it's still hell of a lot of money.
Another reservation I have on how it is arranged is the "previous winners choose new ones" system. At least all the recipients ought to be exceptional individuals, but I'm still quite worried it will either turn into a clique rewarding like-thinking conformists, or get boggled down in internal disagreements and inability to choose new recipients depending on how the voting progress is arranged. Of course I have no doubt the backing millionaire has specific provisions for over-riding in the fine print, but it still seems tricky.
I particularly loved the quote from TFA from BCC saying 'the chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India said the exact cause of the power cut was unclear, he said, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".' That sounds a lot like the "series of tubes" speech...
But at least they've got this things under control and are honing on the root cause, they've already managed reproducibility of the bug!
'After Monday's cut, engineers managed to restore electricity to the northern grid by the evening, but at 13:05 (07:35 GMT) on Tuesday, it collapsed again.'
Wait, no, according to a NY times article, another electric company chief executive clarifies: '“We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.'
Okay, that's settled then. Just keep replugging it, one of these times it's bound to work.
For those seriously suggesting dd, and assuming leaving the computer inoperable and none of the data is critical, how about instead doing: /dev/sdx /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass xxxxxxxx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase xxxxxxxx
This is rated as the highest security erase short of physically destroying the hard-drive. It will wipe all areas of the hard-drive, including relocated and spare blocks and such, unlike dd. And most importantly, it'll do it FAST. It will do only single pass erase however; Bradley Manning's chatlogs linking him to Wikileaks were reputedly recovered from a single overwrite wipe. If you require this level of security, then you shouldn't even need to ask, nuking it from the orbit is the only way to be sure.
However, I'm personally going to go with the people who note that as it's a work computer that's property of the workplace, rendering it inoperable and/or deleting work-related data on it are probably not approved use. And if the workplace/employee had any sense, all of the data on the computer are already backed up or even initially located on company fileservers, after which it is really anyone's guess who all have access to the super-seekrit stuff on it. In the best case all the work related data is backed up or on company servers and the private data exists only on the workstation, in which case the Security Erase methods is valid, but the odds of this distinction having held are slim at best.
Ooh, a snarky comment! Your car-analogy is bit lacking though, software user-interface is more akin to the "body" or case than the innards, indeed this is what we mean by the logic or computing engine of a program. So this means you'll actually be replacing all the rest while leaving engine, transmission and wheels into your car. Duh.
On a more serious note, I realize this is not always trivial, but as Qt and GTK are the only two Linux UI-frameworks usually considered, much Linux software already has a Qt UI of some sort. The rest, if they are of any value, tend to be programmed so the UI is clearly separated from the engine or backend for maintenance and portability reasons. Even when this is not the case, the UI porting is generally not a hopeless endeavour, though there are considerable advantages from re-designing such an application. In either case we're not talking about something a casual end-user would do over the weekend, of course, but a Linux developer might.
This is also why I'm saying high-end games are an exception, the UI in those tends to be so complex, specialized and tied-in with program logic (not to mention expecting desktop performance) that the effort would most likely be wasted. Of course, the first thing I did when I got hand of the original development hardware and tried to decide where to start was naturally to get Linux-DOOM running on it, using SVGAlib (and no graphics acceleration). It was... almost playable. Didn't play nicely with the windowing system, of course. But with little work they could be swapped between.
Apps are, of course, preferable way unless you're an unix admin. But on Maemo and MeeGo both, the underlying system is fairly complete "desktop" Linux. My N9's /usr, /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin directories have 1015 commands total, so I won't list everything that is included. Fully featured busybox build with ifconfig is included though. For N9, "developer mode" comes as standard option you can turn on from configuration menu, which will among other things add a console app to the device, as well as opening VNC or ssh connection to the device over USB or WLAN. What is annoying, and a slight warning for the home-hacker, is that N9 comes with kernel-backed Aegis security system, which means that unless you change the kernel or take other measures, changing ANY system files will brick the device so that a full re-flash over USB is needed. It's possible to disable, and allows installing uncertified apps, but a pain in the ass.
As one of the people who developed the MeeGo predecessor Maemo, I feel I have to point out that there are currently 1723 applications on my-meego.com MeeGo Harmattan software catalog. I consider this fairly well for OS where only single phone has been publically released, and has been orphaned since the get-go. Most of them are not fart-generators either, although there's a fairly high number of what are essentially custom RSS feed-readers for private feeds (there's an RSS reader built-in which feeds straight to one of the home screens).
Of course the beautiful thing as far as software ecosystem is concerned is MeeGo is pretty much full featured Linux desktop, so that almost any Linux desktop software (minus high-end games of course) can be ported to MeeGo, usually at most requiring porting the UI to Qt and touch-friendly. (Of course it's nice to see lot more thought put to integrating most apps into the MeeGo system).
It is possible. If you read the article in question, you would've seen that National Science Foundation (running the Antarctic Research Program) received bids in the range of $100 million to $500 million for satellite broadband. So not only is it possible, NFS has sought bids on it, and we know the projected price. No word on whether this is within the NFS budget for this task, however.
Personally I would assume it is not worth it. And hence enters this plan, as Polar Broadband Ltd. believes they can salvage the satellite into Antarctic service for as little as $20 million. It may still be more than NSF is willing to spend, especially considered the risks and reduced lifetime on the satellite and the fact the satellite was never planned for this use so is not going to be optimal solution.
Actually, while its possible to design a system to be "virtually" fault-tolerant, in engineering that always comes down the a cost-benefit analysis. Also this naturally does not entirely eliminate so-called "human error" and other freak incidences, but with enough resources tossed into it, you can get very close. It's obvious the safety-requirement and thus allowed cost for manned mission is set much higher; for an unmanned probe it will be accepted some of them will inevitably be lost and accepted, and design target set to for example 1 unrecoverable failure out of 100 missions (pulled that example out of my ass, and in practice Russia of course has 100% failure rate on Mars-probes, which I'm sure is nowhere near design target).
Also we do not know the number of redundant processors of the kind that were in Phobos-Grunt. If there are three and a monitoring unit, going into "safe-mode" in case two of the processors failed at the same time would be entirely reasonable response - there would be no redundant processor left to compare the results to. But only Roscosmos knows the design for sure, I'm even guessing the redundancy just from the reported facts that there were (at least) two identifcal and both booting at the same time was somehow a problem.
It is of course kind of confirmation bias as that's generally the main way a redundant system can fail, but the way there stories generally seem to go there is some unthought issue causing all redundant units to fail at the same time, and the control logic responds in some unexpected way that makes matters worse because nobody ever thought the redundant systems could fail at the same time let alone bothered to test it. I work in automotive industry, and we have unwritten in-house rule that whenever an engineer says "But just what are the odds that..." we HAVE to make the design hardened against just that possibility.
RAID is actually a good example of the redundancy failure. You may be led to assume that with 100,000 hours MTBF per drive the odds of losing two drives at the same time are practically non-existent. In practice, as the hard-drives are from the same manufacturing batch and subject to identical operating-conditions and usage patterns (including external dangers like somebody dropping it etc.), it will actually be unlikely for the hard-drives to fail at significantly different times. If it were up to me, I'd randomly swap around drives between RAID arrays, preferably acquired at different times, for just that reason.
What we gleam from this, rather old article, together with other common knowledge... apparently the flight-control computer had two identical processors, presumably for redundancy, that according to Roskmos both rebooted at the same time, possibly due to "heavy particles" in space. This is not unthinkable, especially as the rebooting of such robust processors could take significant time, during which another one could encounter failure.
There is also reference to a watchdog procedure, which muddles waters somewhat - I'm wondering if the watchdog procedures could have triggered on some other condition than total unresponsiveness of the unit in question, and if it could have led to rebooting them both at the same time, for example due to checking them at the same time on an interval. Regardless, after both redundant processors booted at the same time, the probe interrupted flight program, and - quite correctly - entered into "safe mode" awaiting further instructions and diagnostics.
Then comes up the further engineering SNAFU, and where a software-specification error most likely comes into play: In safe-mode, the probe switched to its X-band radio, which was never intended to be operated on orbit, but only in deep space on way to Mars. The problem with this was two-fold. First of all, the bulky Russian deep space antennas could not track the probe at orbital speeds long enough to receive let alone transmit data. And secondly, as the probe was orbiting Earth it was spending long times with its solar panels in Earth's shadow, while the high power interplanetary radio was draining its batteries. And so the probe was doomed.
Skimming the actual report, the number in there is predictably "500Mbits", it seems to be Wired who got that mixed with megabytes. Still as some earlier posters point out one needs to go no further than Wikipedia to find out that number is still likely off by a magnitude as the real figure seems to be 50Mbps. I assume the 500Mbits figure came from people trying to get funding for more bandwidth, and may be based on theoretical maximum, such as the capability of the link installed on them.
The report in question does, however, warn that "The finite bandwidth that currently exists for all military aircraft, and the resulting competition for existing bandwidth, may render the expansion of UAS applications infeasible and leave many platforms grounded". This sounds slightly dubious, as the report itself notes that moern UAV's are autonomous-capable, and all the bandwidth is basically for sensors, which can be switched on and off on the basis of need. Unless there is need for 24h uninterrupted surveillance, the bandwidth isn't such a limiting factor.
From a satellite bandwidth link we learn the supposed total bandwidth available is somewhere in the ballbark of 12Gbps. This would mean a single Global Hawk uses 1/240th of the total available bandwidth when ran over satellite. Granted, that may seem bit of a andwidth hog, but it's important to notice there's no difference between that and a manned airplane running with equivalent sensors forwarding data. As such it's hard to see this as a "drawback".
If one looks for a drawback from the report in question, it's their reliability, as according to the report in 2005 Global Hawk for example had 13 times as high "Class A Mishap" rate as U-2 spy-planes. On the other hand, the report claims that in 2009 Predator-drones reached a lower mishap rate than small single-engine private airplanes in the USA.
Besides 500MB/s being slightly dubious... so what? They're reconnaissance planes, their primary purpose is gathering intelligence. So they're gathering it, at 500MB/s. So their downside is that they're good at what they're doing?
This would be an issue if we were told "They use 20% of the total available bandwidth for military applications per plane just to stay in air", but I do not believe this to be the case or we would be told that. So what exactly is the downside?
“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
The matter of "quality of prose" is, I believe, very much a question if preference. It is also important to understand and reflect on the context of said Nobel judgement. A kind of realistic modernism was about only form of literature the then influential literary critics considered "true art". Fantasy, in particular, had no place in the hallowed halls of great literature. It's thus somewhat likely that when members of the Nobel committee wrote "second rate prose", they were not as much making a judgement on the quality of the writing and storytelling, as simply affirming their regard of the genre as "juvenile trash".
Another important point for many vocal net-critics to realize is that as the parent poster implies, Tolkien was intentionally choosing an archaic and at places longwinded style; indeed the astute and careful reader will notice him switching from one prosaic style to another as the situation and intent of his storytelling calls for. He was, also, not intentionally setting out to create a fast and light action-paced thriller in a franchise, as is the formula for so much modern fantasy series, but imitating many classics and epics. Indeed the fantasy genre as we know it was created by Tolkien, but his was more an artistic exploration.
One thing that's never ceased to amaze me is the eagerness at which people will, at any online discussion of Tolkien's works, declare that they were not able to even read them - sounding quite proud of it, as if it makes them eligible for some grand elite club or something. How many here would declare "I tried to read Donald Knuth, but I fell asleep before the end of the first chapter", or perhaps "I picked up the Bible, but had to put it down after the first page" right after a dozen other rewordings of the statement? Well, what were you expecting! It might also be revealing and likely more useful if people who make such blanket declarations provided a list of books they have actually enjoyed.
Timed release or whatever it's called. And the motorcycle part is just it: Motorcycles were forbidden there, but in none of her pictures was the motorcycle actually shown within the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, which was probably one of the first clues people had that the story of her taking a motorcycle through there alone was bogus. Second clue was when a Chernobyl travel-guide told she'd been on their tour group.
Now you might suggest its a conspiracy of them trying to cover up letting her in against rules, but Elena wrote on the site in response "I am being accused that it was more poetry in this story then reality. I partly accept this accusation, it still was more reality then poetry and it is why this site has millions of people visiting each month from the day when I put it online and I think I have right to say that people love it". If you go to the KiddOfSpeed website, you'll find a disclaimer from the person providing the hosting, "Regardless of what is true, this site has certainly made people think more about Chernobyl and this tragic disaster."
So it would seem the people with "vested interests" to accuse her of making up things include both herself and the person currently hosting the site.
Tours of the are have been available since 2002, and her website appeared in 2004. Wikipedia cites mainly Slashdot has having made the site famous. The site has ofcourse been changed numerous times since then with new pictures etc. Also Mary Mycio (who MAY have a vested interest in it) alleges many of the pictures are from books and different timeperiods.
So in short, yes Elena's KiddOfSpeed story was fantasy. The images were of Chernobyl, but staged and not what they purpoted to be. As it relates to THIS story, the "solitary woman on unauthorized exploration of forbidden area" has a chance of being a fantasy. Looking cursorily over the site it's hard to imagine those pics being from a public tour, though the lack of actual rocket engines on site makes it a remote possibility.
Elena aka KiddOfSpeed. They were bogus in that she took a guided tour and was not on a solitary motorcycle ride through the area as she had claimed on her site. In other words the photos weren't photoshopped, but everything else about it was fake. I was considering this possibility myself reading the headline; there must be guided tours into the Russian space-technology facilities as well. On the other hand it would not be hard to believe the facilities are not very secure or well guarded, and probably quite empty over the holidays.