Re:The external fuel tank does NOT get reused
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
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· Score: 1
I see. I seem to recall reading in the past that the tank does break up into smaller sections, but that the rings making up the main body were recovered and reused. Wikipedia seems to agree with your version, however.:)
Wasn't the reason that NASA went to a shuttle was for reuse? To me, this "new" design looks like the apollo capsules. What is there for reuse and how will they reuse it? And then there is landing....
NASA sold the shuttle program to congress on the concept of re-use. To safely fly the shuttle requires it to be nearly rebuilt after every flight at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars each time. I seem to recall an article saying that it ended up costing just as much as sending up a new rocket each time.
Also, the functional parts of this rocket are based on the current shuttle booster rockets. The ones that fall to earth halfway through the launch, as does large external the fuel tank that powers them. Note that these are picked up and reused. I'm sure NASA will continue this practice, if they go with this "new" design.
I imagine the landing will work just like it did with the Apollo capsules, which I imagine is similar to how the Russians are still doing it. And last I heard, they have not lost any craft on re-entry in recent years, unlike us.
Yeah, that's sensible, put the "open new" button right next to the "close" button, that'll make sense for 99% of the population who don't have perfectly precise mastery of the mouse pointer.
Yeah. Next thing you know, they'll put the button to close the window right next to the button to maximize the window. Oh, wait...
How secure is the PSTN?
on
VoIP Security
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Considering I can walk up to 90% of the houses on the street. open up the phone box, and plug a lineman's handset (or anything else) into the phone line...how secure is the PSTN?
If you think the PSTN is really secure, you might want to look through some old issues of 2600...
Re:Lunokhod Soviet moon robots?
on
Google Moon Debuts
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· Score: 2, Interesting
> I note that Google have conveniently forgotten to place the Soviet (Russian) Lunokhod moon robots on the map (at Sea of Rains and Le Monnier, Mare Serenitatis).
I wonder if the Google Maps API works on Google Moon. Maybe someone else can make a page which adds them.;)
I admit the "evidence" that I present in a moment is rather weak, but then I also think the claims made by this Sophia person are extremely, deeply stupid. IMHO, the idea that she originally created scripts with material used for both the Matrix and Terminator is a typically pathetic urban legend.
Her claim is that she sent the Wachowski's her manuscript years before they wrote the Matrix. If that's true, she may actually have a case against them. I don't see how the Terminator movies could really be the result of it, unless they had anything to do with the creation of Terminator, which is probably pretty unlikely.
I really don't think Matrix 2 and 3 are so different from the first one. What makes them seem so different is that the first film had a miraculous revelation--that the world we thought was real isn't.
There was that, but that happened less than halfway through the film. It may have added to the novelty for the rest of the film, but I don't think that was the reason. There were a few "revelations" in the second and third ones as well, though admittedly they weren't quite as interesting.
I think it's more that the first was very quickly paced, kept you on your toes, and well produced with great use of music and imagery. The sequels seemed to lose this pacing, and I don't recall the music being anything special either. Really, nothing all that major happened in the second movie...it felt pretty "slow", and there really wasn't much of a resolution. They really should have released 2 and 3 back to back, not having to wait 6 months to find out what happened might have helped somewhat.
Another thing I think may play a factor is Keanu as The One in the virtual matrix is a lot more believable than Keanu as The One in "the real wold". Especially with all of the special powers he seems to gain towards the end. Special powers in virtual reality: believable. Seeing things in fire after being blinded: not so believable.
> "IBM plans to be inside these new systems." > > Yeah, well, so do Intel and AMD. Why does IBM think they have the inside track all of a sudden?
Maybe because as of yet, consoles have not managed to be more than just game machines. The next generation consoles are all IBM powered, and (at least Sony and MS's) are pushing more in this direction that the previous generation. At least, according to the hype. We have heard this sort of thing before, so whether it will actually happen this time remains to be seen.
> What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
If you had read the article, you might have noticed that much of it was talking about HDTV over IP, and the bandwidth requirements per channel being on the order of 10Mbps (with overhead, etc). Want to watch HDTV on 3 TVs? You need 30Mbps. Hope you have some extra bandwidth for your internet browsing too...
> How do you determine which version of a given program is installed on a Slackware system?
ls -l/var/adm/packages/packagename*
(Assuming Slackware 8.1 or greater)
Or, as one of the other posters suggested, run "program --version". Pat and friends don't usually backport security fixes like Debian and Redhat, they just update the packages to the fixed version. This makes it much easier to tell if you are vulnerable to a specific vulnerability without having to wait for your vendor to tell you if that particular bug has already been fixed in your distro's package or not...
Actually, as is shown at the top of the article, the story was actually published on PC Magazine. Yahoo doesn't have it's own news gathering service, they simply aggregate content from others.
Yep. I expected to be modded funny, not insightful. I guess the moderators didn't actually read the article...
> Jon made a modification to an OPEN SOURCE media player, removing a trivial protection, and Yahoo news posts a story about him cracking yet another protection mechanism, implying parallels with his past work. This news then spreads to Slashdot.
Another potentially interesting way of putting this: Yahoo posts a news story about their biggest competitor's protection mechanism being broken less than 24 hours after release.
> Or just buy a card with multiple tuners. My pvr500 has two, but I've heard of cards with four!
But does your Myth box have enough CPU power to simultaneously record/encode 4 MPEG4/DivX streams? As far as I know, the Hauppage cards only do MPEG2 which is going to require much more disk space. The Plextor devices encode to MPEG4/DivX in hardware, so you should be able to handle a lot more tuners on one lower-spec box.
However, USB I/O is rather CPU intensive from what I've seen. I wonder how many you could actually hook up and use simultaneously.
And if you actually read the f'ing article, you'll see that he used a VIA Nano-ITX board. It's 12x12 cm. Not much of a "challenge", you pointlessly smug Apple crackmonkey, you.:)
If it's not much of a "challenge', could you please tell me where I can get a Nano-ITX board? I've been waiting for over a year to buy one.
Luckily for me, it appears that Apple has provided the solution to that problem of finding a motherboard smaller than the Mini-ITX.
I'm sure though this time next year Honda will be holding that title when the new hybrid Accord comes out, which by the way will be built with a higher output engine than what will be avialable to the conventional versions and gets 40% better gas millage.
Actually the engine is the same, the car just has more power because there is an electric engine assisting it. Check the specs on the last page of this review:
You might want to read the rest of the review too, there's some interesting tech at work. Personally I think this is more interesting than a hybrid purpose built to break a speed record... and I'm not sure if they really did, it looks like the Accord Hybrid can already do 131mph.
You can do most of this in one step with mplayer's encoder, mencoder. You can reencode any format mplayer can read. It will even encode directly from real rtsp and microsoft mms streams if compiled with the appropriate libraries. I sometimes find it useful to "play" real video streams and output them to divx for later viewing. All you have to do is something like this:
mencoder http://sourcestream/ -ovc none -oac mp3lame -lameopts (see man page for the settings you want) -o output.mp3
BTW, there is a much simpler way to save anything "streamed" over http in it's original format if it doesn't need to be reencoded:
So the SP uses the nanoBGA CPU and CN400 northbridge. Does this mean we will finally see the long awaited nano-ITX board VIA originally announced last year and still has yet to deliver, despite announcing availability
months ago? Or are they giving up on the Nano-ITX and just giving us Yet Another Mini-ITX?
The last version of Photoshop I used did, but that was back in 1998. No idea if it still does or not. But possibly it does, and you meant that people who like MDI dislike the GIMP?
Second, HD looks GREAT on a SD TV. I have been a satellite subscriber since day one because local cable was aweful. It used to have a great picture, but the channel squeeze forced bit rates down so low it was like watching a good streaming internet image (crappy).
I keep seeing people say this. I'm assuming you are all using DirecTV. Is it really that bad?
I had Dish Network before I moved, and I thought the picture quality was great...looked just as good as DVD on a high quailty SD display. Now I have Comcast digital cable and the quality really sucks compared to DN. I am thinking about switching to satellite again sooner rather than later. I was planning on waiting a bit, and switching to DirecTV rather than DN so I could get a HD DirecTiVo. Seeing all these comments like these, makes me wonder if I should go back to DN and stick with my standalone Tivo...
Re:Tivo does not require a phone line
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 1
Series 1 units do not require a phone line either. My Tivo has never been plugged into a phone line. I installed a network adapter from 9thtee before I even powered my Tivo on for the first time. This was back in the 1.3 days, so I did have to remove the drive and install the NIC drivers, etc.
Last time I did a full reset on the Tivo, it had the 2.5 or 3.0 software that is also used on the Series 2 which comes with network support out of the box. I didn't even have to open it up that time, just put in the dialing prefix for using the network instead of the phone line.
The Tivo may require a phone line as it comes out of the box, but that does not mean it absolutely requires one.
Mercedes is coming out with a mini-SUV model SMART car, and are supposed to start selling it here in a few years. Maybe it will lead to the rest of the line being sold here as well. A quick google turned up these articles:
Slashdot Mirror
I see. I seem to recall reading in the past that the tank does break up into smaller sections, but that the rings making up the main body were recovered and reused. Wikipedia seems to agree with your version, however. :)
The "tiles" on the shuttle are made of insulating foam. This is why they are so easily damaged by debris from the booster rockets.
NASA sold the shuttle program to congress on the concept of re-use. To safely fly the shuttle requires it to be nearly rebuilt after every flight at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars each time. I seem to recall an article saying that it ended up costing just as much as sending up a new rocket each time.
Also, the functional parts of this rocket are based on the current shuttle booster rockets. The ones that fall to earth halfway through the launch, as does large external the fuel tank that powers them. Note that these are picked up and reused. I'm sure NASA will continue this practice, if they go with this "new" design.
I imagine the landing will work just like it did with the Apollo capsules, which I imagine is similar to how the Russians are still doing it. And last I heard, they have not lost any craft on re-entry in recent years, unlike us.
According to the link:
"capable of transmitting up to 0.9 miles (1.4 km) in line-of-sight conditions."
According to the wikipedia article:
"Transmission range is between 10 and 75 metres (33~246 feet)."
There is quite a bit of a difference between those two. Is wikipedia out of date, or rfdesign overly optimistic?
Yeah. Next thing you know, they'll put the button to close the window right next to the button to maximize the window. Oh, wait...
Considering I can walk up to 90% of the houses on the street. open up the phone box, and plug a lineman's handset (or anything else) into the phone line...how secure is the PSTN?
If you think the PSTN is really secure, you might want to look through some old issues of 2600...
> I note that Google have conveniently forgotten to place the Soviet (Russian) Lunokhod moon robots on the map (at Sea of Rains and Le Monnier, Mare Serenitatis).
;)
I wonder if the Google Maps API works on Google Moon. Maybe someone else can make a page which adds them.
> Oh, and I can read at 9600 baud, so reading the subtitles isn't a big deal to me.
;)
While I agree with most of what you said, I think there is little chance you can actually read 9600 characters per second.
Her claim is that she sent the Wachowski's her manuscript years before they wrote the Matrix. If that's true, she may actually have a case against them. I don't see how the Terminator movies could really be the result of it, unless they had anything to do with the creation of Terminator, which is probably pretty unlikely.
There was that, but that happened less than halfway through the film. It may have added to the novelty for the rest of the film, but I don't think that was the reason. There were a few "revelations" in the second and third ones as well, though admittedly they weren't quite as interesting.
I think it's more that the first was very quickly paced, kept you on your toes, and well produced with great use of music and imagery. The sequels seemed to lose this pacing, and I don't recall the music being anything special either. Really, nothing all that major happened in the second movie...it felt pretty "slow", and there really wasn't much of a resolution. They really should have released 2 and 3 back to back, not having to wait 6 months to find out what happened might have helped somewhat.
Another thing I think may play a factor is Keanu as The One in the virtual matrix is a lot more believable than Keanu as The One in "the real wold". Especially with all of the special powers he seems to gain towards the end. Special powers in virtual reality: believable. Seeing things in fire after being blinded: not so believable.
> "IBM plans to be inside these new systems."
>
> Yeah, well, so do Intel and AMD. Why does IBM think they have the inside track all of a sudden?
Maybe because as of yet, consoles have not managed to be more than just game machines. The next generation consoles are all IBM powered, and (at least Sony and MS's) are pushing more in this direction that the previous generation. At least, according to the hype. We have heard this sort of thing before, so whether it will actually happen this time remains to be seen.
How much good is that going to do them when I'm SSH'ing to my server at home to check my mail with pine?
And if I was really paranoid, I'd tunnel all of my web browsing through a remote server over SSH as well...
> What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
If you had read the article, you might have noticed that much of it was talking about HDTV over IP, and the bandwidth requirements per channel being on the order of 10Mbps (with overhead, etc). Want to watch HDTV on 3 TVs? You need 30Mbps. Hope you have some extra bandwidth for your internet browsing too...
> How do you determine which version of a given program is installed on a Slackware system?
/var/adm/packages/packagename*
ls -l
(Assuming Slackware 8.1 or greater)
Or, as one of the other posters suggested, run "program --version". Pat and friends don't usually backport security fixes like Debian and Redhat, they just update the packages to the fixed version. This makes it much easier to tell if you are vulnerable to a specific vulnerability without having to wait for your vendor to tell you if that particular bug has already been fixed in your distro's package or not...
> One person briefed on the deal said there was opposition within Microsoft to the acquisition.
;)
Would that be from the AntiSpyware group?
> Jon made a modification to an OPEN SOURCE media player, removing a trivial protection, and Yahoo news posts a story about him cracking yet another protection mechanism, implying parallels with his past work. This news then spreads to Slashdot.
Another potentially interesting way of putting this: Yahoo posts a news story about their biggest competitor's protection mechanism being broken less than 24 hours after release.
Hmm...
> Or just buy a card with multiple tuners. My pvr500 has two, but I've heard of cards with four!
But does your Myth box have enough CPU power to simultaneously record/encode 4 MPEG4/DivX streams? As far as I know, the Hauppage cards only do MPEG2 which is going to require much more disk space. The Plextor devices encode to MPEG4/DivX in hardware, so you should be able to handle a lot more tuners on one lower-spec box.
However, USB I/O is rather CPU intensive from what I've seen. I wonder how many you could actually hook up and use simultaneously.
If it's not much of a "challenge', could you please tell me where I can get a Nano-ITX board? I've been waiting for over a year to buy one.
Luckily for me, it appears that Apple has provided the solution to that problem of finding a motherboard smaller than the Mini-ITX.
Actually the engine is the same, the car just has more power because there is an electric engine assisting it. Check the specs on the last page of this review:
http://www.caranddriver.com/article.asp?section_iYou might want to read the rest of the review too, there's some interesting tech at work. Personally I think this is more interesting than a hybrid purpose built to break a speed record... and I'm not sure if they really did, it looks like the Accord Hybrid can already do 131mph.
You can do most of this in one step with mplayer's encoder, mencoder. You can reencode any format mplayer can read. It will even encode directly from real rtsp and microsoft mms streams if compiled with the appropriate libraries. I sometimes find it useful to "play" real video streams and output them to divx for later viewing. All you have to do is something like this:
mencoder http://sourcestream/ -ovc none -oac mp3lame -lameopts (see man page for the settings you want) -o output.mp3
BTW, there is a much simpler way to save anything "streamed" over http in it's original format if it doesn't need to be reencoded:
curl http://streamurl/ > output.mp3
(stream.ogg, whatever)
So the SP uses the nanoBGA CPU and CN400 northbridge. Does this mean we will finally see the long awaited nano-ITX board VIA originally announced last year and still has yet to deliver, despite announcing availability months ago? Or are they giving up on the Nano-ITX and just giving us Yet Another Mini-ITX?
The GIMP does not use a MDI.
The last version of Photoshop I used did, but that was back in 1998. No idea if it still does or not. But possibly it does, and you meant that people who like MDI dislike the GIMP?
I keep seeing people say this. I'm assuming you are all using DirecTV. Is it really that bad?
I had Dish Network before I moved, and I thought the picture quality was great...looked just as good as DVD on a high quailty SD display. Now I have Comcast digital cable and the quality really sucks compared to DN. I am thinking about switching to satellite again sooner rather than later. I was planning on waiting a bit, and switching to DirecTV rather than DN so I could get a HD DirecTiVo. Seeing all these comments like these, makes me wonder if I should go back to DN and stick with my standalone Tivo...
Series 1 units do not require a phone line either. My Tivo has never been plugged into a phone line. I installed a network adapter from 9thtee before I even powered my Tivo on for the first time. This was back in the 1.3 days, so I did have to remove the drive and install the NIC drivers, etc.
Last time I did a full reset on the Tivo, it had the 2.5 or 3.0 software that is also used on the Series 2 which comes with network support out of the box. I didn't even have to open it up that time, just put in the dialing prefix for using the network instead of the phone line.
The Tivo may require a phone line as it comes out of the box, but that does not mean it absolutely requires one.
Mercedes is coming out with a mini-SUV model SMART car, and are supposed to start selling it here in a few years. Maybe it will lead to the rest of the line being sold here as well. A quick google turned up these articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/36606http://www.freep.com/money/autonews/smart10e_2004
Nice photo on that second one.