Actually, metallic mercury is fairly innocuous.
It's the compounds that are nasty, especially
vapours formed when heating it. It's also not
a very good conductor of heat.
As an intermittent visitor to University Avenue, I notice that you can get a table now rather more easily than you could in 1998. And driving from the hotel by Palo Alto Caltrain Station to Sun up by the water takes about 20 minutes, as against nigh-on an hour in the nineties. Gosh, I wonder why that is? A few weeks ago I just turned up at the sushi place opposite Palo Alto Cycles and got a spot at the bar for two, just like that: it used to be queues out of the door. The economy really has tanked, I guess.
The great University Avenue shame is that you can't get breakfast at The Good Earth anymore.
What I can't figure out the economic significance of is that the Fresh Choice in the Stanford Shopping Centre has closed down. I had to nip down to Mountain View, opposite Tower Records, to get my unlimited salad and bready-things fix.
Violently off-topic, but plenty of reputable historians would argue that the Allies defeated the Nazis precisely because they _did_ have a better economy. The Ford company make more trucks in 1942 than Italy did in the entire war, and at one point a escort carrier was coming down a US slipway every fortnight. At Willow Run there was a B24 coming off the line every 62 minutes, and it was a long way from German airfields. This Briton is very grateful to America for all those dead boys up behind Omaha beach who would rather be alive in Omaha, and contrary to stereotype so are most people in France. However, it's not just the manpower that won the war: the US economy did a lot of the work.
That said, I agree with your broad point: RMS (who I have the privilege of organising a lecture tour for in the eighties) is not making an economic argument, and doesn't care about it.
NASA appear to believe that radio contact loss is
not an issue. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=10518.
I presume the guidance is autonomous, not done
from the ground. Aircraft routinely autoland
in low visibility: it's not done with a camera
and a remote control, after all.
Why would the damaged shuttle need to be dumped? It may well be that the damage is regarded as risky for human use, but not fatal (such as happened last time). What stops the shuttle autolanding empty? As far as I know, the only manual part of landing is putting the wheels down, and there's a ground override for that anyway. The myth of NASA folk as uber-pilots has to be maintained, of course, but the shuttle lands totally automatically once the deorbit burn has completed.
There was a huge fuss when the pound coin was introduced (and the pound note withdrawn: that was the US mistake, to introduce a coin and _not_ withdraw the iconic note) because people said it precisely _wasn't_ valuable looking. But since then all the rest of the coinage has been reduced in size (5p, 10p, 50p: sadly, all the old shillings and two shillings, which were worth 5p and 10p so the original 5p and 10p pieces were made that size) so the pound sticks out more. The two pound coin is lovely, though. But the 1 Euro piece is the nicest.
Automated theorem proving was the purpose of Russel and Whitehead's work in Principia Mathematica, amplified by the Hilbert Programme. Godel exploded that little lot by showing how any formal system powerful enough to represent anything worthwhile was powerful enough to contain contradictions.
Even simple `proof' like n-satisfiability or showing that a string is a member of a language defined by a context-free grammar is NP complete.
Interestingly, for all the fact that native speakers of British English like to believe that Americans are knuckle-dragging halfwits, the use of the subjective in casual writing screams ``educated American''. One might use ``If I were...'' whilst writing a leader for the Telegraph, or indeed whilst writing a final-year dissertation, but few British English speakers would use it in speech or on/.
> I can understand why they have it do this; since semicolons are meant
Hmm. Pretty marginal semi-colon for one who knows how to use it. It may be a US/UK thing, but the careful writer of British English would use a colon there. Or perhaps even a full stop.
Er, no. People in dirt poor environments will get bible-based education, and remain dirt poor. Meanwhile, Ivy-League parents will put their children through Ivy League universities, where religious nonsense doesn't get much of a look in. End result: the rich stay rich, the poor slit their own wrists.
But as a European, I'm quite keen on this. Fucking up the productivity in the 21st century of a good proportion of the US population can only be a good thing for my children.
What ``bunch of scientific research''? Note Feynmann's bromide on that: everyone told him the shuttle was doing important research, but he never saw any papers. The main research done by manned flight is how to put men in space. Which is entirely circular.
Meanwhile, genuine science, in the shape of Hubble and the like, gets de-scoped to fund glory boys (just how much science was done by John Glenn's shuttle flight, again?)
With a monoculture, what happens if something we've not yet thought of turns out to be hard with x86? Ever wonder why in WW2 every air force kept production lines running for at least fighters and at least two bombers? Because if when they needed an increment of performance the tails started falling off, they had another gene pool to try the same trick with (why did the UK keep making Spitfires when the Tempest was clearly better in every way? B17 vs B24? P47 vs P51? 109 vs 190)?
Had the RAF decided that the Spitfire was where the action was in 1942 and shut Hawker down, they'd never have had the aircraft they needed to deal with the 262 and the V1. Had they decided that the Spitfire wasn't going to deliver the performance of what was coming through Hawker, they'd have been shafted when the tails started falling off Typhoons (elevator flutter: very hard to diagnose in 1943).
Rushdie is a British Citizen, and has
been since Birth. He needs a visa to
enter India.
You might also like to recall that
India has a rather larger population
than Holland, and India also has
English as one of its official working
languages
again unlike Holland.
It's been done many times before. A company called
CMC made a 3U VME board which provided full TCP
offload to System V machines --- I ported it into
an SVR3 system and ported Lachman's NFS product to
run over it. Sun shipped an Omniserve (or somesuch
name) product as the NC400 and NC600 for the 4/4X0
and 4/6X0 range which offloaded quite a lot of NFS
and XDR protocol overhead, as well as some of TCP.
Neither of these products was unique.
Less generically, the original Auspex NFS servers
had distinct boards for Ethernet, Network and
File processing, which managed to do TCP offload
_and_ zero copy.
With the exception of the Auspex example, most of
these cards were rapidly obsolete because the
overhead of copying the network traffic to and
from the offload card is greater than the work
involved in doing the processing. You can't do
a zero-copy without a huge amount of scaffolding
in the OS.
Anyway, 3Com had a card which did this a couple
of years ago. It sank without trace.
For those missing the joke, the hme ethernet interface gets its name from the `Happy Meal' ethernet/SCSI combo card, so named because you get both interfaces as a discount deal. The same chipset went onboard some machines, too. The PCI version (Happy Meal was SBus) I think was named Fresh Choice (two trips to the ASIC salad bar) after the valley eateries, but I might be misremembering.
Fiorina was recognized as a marketing genius at Lucent
Which is fine, except Lucent and HP play in wildly differing markets. Lucent's customer base are
almost entirely in business, almost entirely
technical or with access to technical resources and
almost entirely looking for quality. And although today perhaps there's some price-driven competition in supply to telcos, there wasn't
back then.
HP's
customer base covers all the bases from
residential through to enterprise, and in spaces
where there's a lot of lowcost competition and
not a lot of differentiation.
It's a completely different game. The ability
to sell kit to RBOCs is rather different to
the ability to sell laptops in competition with
Apple.
ian
None of my wife, my mother or my father use scroll wheels. When I use it, they complain that I'm making the window move too much. The point out a scrollbar is that it's a direct manipulation thing --- ``grab this, slide it to where you want to be''. In fact, I use a wheel-less most of the time and I only dimly miss the wheel on the machines that don't have one.
What I _really_ miss is the suntools thing of middle-click in a scrollbar positioning the visible window Just Here.
Anyone who's done user support will know that function keys are a morrass. And the business about delete and backspace is a nightmare even on Unix boxen (it's routine to log into something you don't use very often via a route you don't use very often and find them swapped around). And Unix && Function Keys && X is a real case for extra-points, as you try to run that legacy vt100 app in an xterm and something that wants X keysym events in another.
Letter One Time Pad. One Time Pads, used correctly, are unbreakable by any technology including `quantum computers', and using Letters rather than Numbers increases the physical density of the material by a factor of 2.6.
Remember that airlines are responsible these days for returning people who are denied entry, so they have some incentive to make sure that people won't be barred at the entry to the US. However, that doesn't give them carte blanche to trample over data protection rights, for example. Especially if they're demanding third party information.
A few
years ago I was stopped at SFO and had the whole
wipe-your-bag, stick-it-in-machine thing going.
``Explosives residues, sir''. It came up clear.
Sadly for the credibility of the machine, I had
stopped off en route to the airport to engage in
a little light shooting. I'd got through 200 of.38SPL and 100 9mm. The latter from a Glock that
had rained spent cases down onto my bag, which had
been shoved under the counter at the range. I
stank of propellant, and although I'd washed my
hands after shooting (dunno why, as I was using
FMJ ammunition, probably steel cored, not lead)
I doubt that cleans out all the residue.
No, it isn't. I visit the US on an I94W basis about every six months, and have done for a decade. The question that's asked is where you're staying on the first night (it explicitly states that for people travelling it's just the first night on either the form or in the notes). And besides, what the INS ask at the US border (or its logical equivalent in an airport) is wildly different to what a random airline asks on a blank piece of paper in London.
The SMF code you refer to as replacing init and inetd doesn't use a binary config file. It uses XML, which you can quite easily edit by hand if svccfg isn't doing what you want. Use svccfg export to see what's going on. For example, see below.
Note the upside of all this is that the dependencies between services are precisely defined, so on MP machines they boot _much_ faster because init scripts that don't depend on each other can be run in parallel. And of course you can get a manifest of what's running on a machine, checkpoint it, consisently restart things (svcadm restart network/ssh), consistently turn things off (svcadm disable network/ssh) and so on. chkconfig on Linux sort of does the same job, but surely to God no-one is defending the SVR4 init.d format? The howls of protest when that arrived in Solaris 2, replacing/etc/rc.local in SunOS4, could be heard from coast to coast.
I'm Mr Honest and don't have any dealings with MP3s of CDs I don't own. However, I had to copy two CDs recently, using cdparanoia, because the bloody things wouldn't play in my car thanks to some half-assed non-red-book copy protection not working in VW OEM CD players. There's an irony: copy protection forcing someone who is law-abiding to a fault to circumvent copy-protection...
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)
ian
As an intermittent visitor to University Avenue, I
notice that you can get a table now rather more
easily than you could in 1998. And driving from
the hotel by Palo Alto Caltrain Station to Sun up
by the water takes about 20 minutes, as against
nigh-on an hour in the nineties. Gosh, I wonder
why that is? A few weeks ago I just turned up at
the sushi place opposite Palo Alto Cycles and got a
spot at the bar for two, just like that: it used to
be queues out of the door. The economy really
has tanked, I guess.
The great University Avenue shame is that you
can't get breakfast at The Good Earth anymore.
What I can't figure out the economic significance
of is that the Fresh Choice in the Stanford Shopping Centre
has closed down. I had to nip down to Mountain
View, opposite Tower Records, to get my unlimited
salad and bready-things fix.
ian
Violently off-topic, but plenty of reputable
historians would argue that the Allies defeated
the Nazis precisely because they _did_ have a better
economy. The Ford company make more trucks in 1942
than Italy did in the entire war, and at one point
a escort carrier was coming down a US slipway every
fortnight. At Willow Run there was a B24 coming
off the line every 62 minutes, and it was a long way
from German airfields. This Briton is very
grateful to America for all those dead boys up
behind Omaha beach who would rather be alive in
Omaha, and contrary to stereotype so are most
people in France. However, it's not just the
manpower that won the war: the US economy did a
lot of the work.
That said, I agree with your broad point: RMS
(who I have the privilege of organising a lecture
tour for in the eighties) is not making an economic
argument, and doesn't care about it.
ian
ian
Why would the damaged shuttle need to be
dumped? It may well be that the damage
is regarded as risky for human use, but not
fatal (such as happened last time). What stops
the shuttle autolanding empty? As far as I know,
the only manual part of landing is putting the
wheels down, and there's a ground override for
that anyway. The myth of NASA folk as uber-pilots
has to be maintained, of course, but the shuttle
lands totally automatically once the deorbit
burn has completed.
ian
There was a huge fuss when the pound coin was
introduced (and the pound note withdrawn: that
was the US mistake, to introduce a coin and
_not_ withdraw the iconic note) because people said
it precisely _wasn't_ valuable looking. But since
then all the rest of the coinage has been reduced
in size (5p, 10p, 50p: sadly, all the old shillings
and two shillings, which were worth 5p and 10p so
the original 5p and 10p pieces were made that size)
so the pound sticks out more. The two pound coin
is lovely, though. But the 1 Euro piece is the
nicest.
ian
Russel and Whitehead's work in Principia Mathematica, amplified by the Hilbert Programme.
Godel exploded that little lot by showing how
any formal system powerful enough to represent
anything worthwhile was powerful enough to
contain contradictions.
Even simple `proof' like n-satisfiability or
showing that a string is a member of a language
defined by a context-free grammar is NP complete.
ian
Interestingly, for all the fact that native /.
speakers of British English like to believe
that Americans are knuckle-dragging halfwits,
the use of the subjective in casual writing
screams ``educated American''. One might use
``If I were...'' whilst writing a leader for the
Telegraph, or indeed whilst writing a final-year
dissertation, but few British English speakers
would use it in speech or on
ian
> I KNOW how to use a semicolon, dammit
> I can understand why they have it do this; since semicolons are meant
Hmm. Pretty marginal semi-colon for one who knows
how to use it. It may be a US/UK thing, but the
careful writer of British English would use a colon
there. Or perhaps even a full stop.
ian
Er, no. People in dirt poor environments will
get bible-based education, and remain dirt poor.
Meanwhile, Ivy-League parents will put their
children through Ivy League universities, where
religious nonsense doesn't get much of a look
in. End result: the rich stay rich, the poor
slit their own wrists.
But as a European, I'm quite keen on this.
Fucking up the productivity in the 21st century
of a good proportion of the US population can
only be a good thing for my children.
ian
What ``bunch of scientific research''? Note
Feynmann's bromide on that: everyone told him
the shuttle was doing important research, but
he never saw any papers. The main research
done by manned flight is how to put men in
space. Which is entirely circular.
Meanwhile, genuine science, in the shape of
Hubble and the like, gets de-scoped to fund
glory boys (just how much science was done by
John Glenn's shuttle flight, again?)
ian
With a monoculture, what happens if something
we've not yet thought of turns out to be hard
with x86? Ever wonder why in WW2 every air force
kept production lines running for at least fighters
and at least two bombers? Because if when they needed
an increment of performance the tails started
falling off, they had another gene pool to try
the same trick with (why did the UK keep making
Spitfires when the Tempest was clearly better
in every way? B17 vs B24? P47 vs P51? 109 vs
190)?
Had the RAF decided that the Spitfire was where the
action was in 1942 and shut Hawker down, they'd
never have had the aircraft they needed to deal
with the 262 and the V1. Had they decided that
the Spitfire wasn't going to deliver the performance
of what was coming through Hawker, they'd have
been shafted when the tails started falling off
Typhoons (elevator flutter: very hard to diagnose
in 1943).
Same's true of processors. Sadly.
ian
You might also like to recall that India has a rather larger population than Holland, and India also has English as one of its official working languages again unlike Holland.
ian
Less generically, the original Auspex NFS servers had distinct boards for Ethernet, Network and File processing, which managed to do TCP offload _and_ zero copy.
With the exception of the Auspex example, most of these cards were rapidly obsolete because the overhead of copying the network traffic to and from the offload card is greater than the work involved in doing the processing. You can't do a zero-copy without a huge amount of scaffolding in the OS.
Anyway, 3Com had a card which did this a couple of years ago. It sank without trace.
ian
For those missing the joke, the hme ethernet
interface gets its name from the `Happy Meal'
ethernet/SCSI combo card, so named because
you get both interfaces as a discount deal.
The same chipset went onboard some machines, too.
The PCI version (Happy Meal was SBus) I think
was named Fresh Choice (two trips to the ASIC
salad bar) after the valley eateries, but I
might be misremembering.
ian
Which is fine, except Lucent and HP play in wildly differing markets. Lucent's customer base are almost entirely in business, almost entirely technical or with access to technical resources and almost entirely looking for quality. And although today perhaps there's some price-driven competition in supply to telcos, there wasn't back then.
HP's customer base covers all the bases from residential through to enterprise, and in spaces where there's a lot of lowcost competition and not a lot of differentiation.
It's a completely different game. The ability to sell kit to RBOCs is rather different to the ability to sell laptops in competition with Apple. ian
The claim that electronic music is all post-war seems a little hard to sustain. Theremin?
Ondes Martineau?
ian
None of my wife, my mother or my father use
scroll wheels. When I use it, they complain
that I'm making the window move too much. The
point out a scrollbar is that it's a direct
manipulation thing --- ``grab this, slide it
to where you want to be''. In fact, I use a
wheel-less most of the time and I only dimly
miss the wheel on the machines that don't have
one.
What I _really_ miss is the suntools thing of
middle-click in a scrollbar positioning the visible
window Just Here.
ian
Anyone who's done user support will know that
function keys are a morrass. And the business
about delete and backspace is a nightmare even
on Unix boxen (it's routine to log into something
you don't use very often via a route you don't
use very often and find them swapped around).
And Unix && Function Keys && X is a real case for
extra-points, as you try to run that legacy vt100
app in an xterm and something that wants X keysym
events in another.
ian
Letter One Time Pad. One Time Pads, used
correctly, are unbreakable by any technology
including `quantum computers', and using Letters
rather than Numbers increases the physical density
of the material by a factor of 2.6.
ian
Remember that airlines are responsible
these days for returning people who are denied
entry, so they have some incentive to make sure
that people won't be barred at the entry to the
US. However, that doesn't give them carte blanche
to trample over data protection rights, for example.
Especially if they're demanding third party
information.
ian
Sadly for the credibility of the machine, I had stopped off en route to the airport to engage in a little light shooting. I'd got through 200 of .38SPL and 100 9mm. The latter from a Glock that
had rained spent cases down onto my bag, which had
been shoved under the counter at the range. I
stank of propellant, and although I'd washed my
hands after shooting (dunno why, as I was using
FMJ ammunition, probably steel cored, not lead)
I doubt that cleans out all the residue.
ian
No, it isn't. I visit the US on an I94W basis
about every six months, and have done for a decade.
The question that's asked is where you're staying
on the first night (it explicitly states that for
people travelling it's just the first night on
either the form or in the notes). And besides,
what the INS ask at the US border (or its logical
equivalent in an airport) is wildly different to
what a random airline asks on a blank piece of
paper in London.
ian
The SMF code you refer to as replacing init and
/etc/rc.local
inetd doesn't use a binary config file. It
uses XML, which you can quite easily edit by
hand if svccfg isn't doing what you want.
Use svccfg export to see what's going on.
For example, see below.
Note the upside of all this is that the dependencies
between services are precisely defined, so on
MP machines they boot _much_ faster because
init scripts that don't depend on each other
can be run in parallel. And of course you can
get a manifest of what's running on a machine,
checkpoint it, consisently restart things
(svcadm restart network/ssh), consistently
turn things off (svcadm disable network/ssh) and
so on. chkconfig on Linux sort of does the same
job, but surely to God no-one is defending the
SVR4 init.d format? The howls of protest when
that arrived in Solaris 2, replacing
in SunOS4, could be heard from coast to coast.
ian
# svccfg export network/ssh
[ and so on ]
I'm Mr Honest and don't have any dealings with
MP3s of CDs I don't own. However, I had to copy
two CDs recently, using cdparanoia, because the
bloody things wouldn't play in my car thanks to
some half-assed non-red-book copy protection not
working in VW OEM CD players. There's an irony:
copy protection forcing someone who is law-abiding
to a fault to circumvent copy-protection...
ian