At least one "FBC" project exceeded it's design lifetime by (as I recall) a factor of 4.
Mars Pathfinder's wee little cutie Sojourner rover had a design lifetime of 1 week (or was it 14 days, I can't recall). It ran for the best part of 2 months, and indeed it's believed Soujourner outlived the Pathfinder (renamed Sagan Station) home base which suffered a transmitter failure... Apparently, the fallback method of regaining contact was for Soujourner to "orbit" Pathfinder at a fixed distance (10 metres?) constantly re-trying to connect; it's been speculated that when we finally get to Mars we might find a deep circular track worn in the dust by Sojourner's continuous circuits...
As I recall, the Pioneer series doesn't contain a "true" programmable computer; it's more like a fancy sequence controller (built around LSI logic, natch). The Voyager series were the first (deep space) probes containing a programmable computer; they do have continuous uptime of 25-odd years).
Normally, NASA immediately hands-over hardware to the Smithsonian at the end of it's life. This certainly applied throughout Apollo where (I believe) the material at the lunar landing sites for A11, 12, 14, 15, 16 & 17 are already the property of the Smithsonian... They just have to go pick 'em up:-)
Note that since the Smithsonian is a federal entity as is NASA, ownership of hardware remains with the Government at all times.
I'd imagine that deep-space probes would follow this precedent; I certainly can't see the US Government allowing private individuals/companies or foreign nation states to just wade on in and pick 'em up and sell to the highest bidder...
On the other hand, any state/company/individual with the ability to do so would possibly not give a fig what the US Government says anyway...
Oh, and about the astronomical distances... In space, distance is easy, it's a function of how long you can be bothered to wait. It's astronomical *velocities* we ought to be celebrating...
As a resident of the UK, I've been online shopping for 4 years or so - bought my first Slackware distribution from Walnut Creek in mid '96. I'd class myself as a moderate online shopper,averaging 1-2 transactions per month. I can only offer my own experience but anyway...
The hassles have been covered already, and fall into the areas of:
Availability
Shipping
Delay
Taxes & Customs
Availability. There's a very marked difference here between companies that "get it" and those that don't. There are a *lot* of online vendors (both within the US and outside) that aren't aware of, or can't be bothered with shipping internationally. Smart companies will take business from anywhere; hey - they've gone to the trouble of setting up a mail order distribution business so adding the minor hassle of international distribution is trivial.An excellent example is Thinkgeek. Counter-examples I can't provide - whilst shopping for cheap GPSes a while back I came across a few (mainly US) shops that just couldn't deal with the concept of places other than US states. My response is to instantly forget all about them. The lesson should be obvious.
Shipping, by which I mainly refer to hassle and cost. For many reasons it's a lot cheaper to go with "local" companies. In the UK we're a fairly enlightened bunch so by preference I'd usually by from a local distributor - Amazon UK rather than Amazon US for example. However there's always something you can't get locally (such as ThinkGeek's Map of the Internet, for example) so it's a simple trade-off: Do you want it bad enough to pay shipping?.
In fairness, intercontinental shipping is usually not too bad - you guys in the States have things *so* cheap that can still be cheaper for me to buy (shippable) electronic goods from US stores, pay shipping, customs AND Tax, and come out ahead of the local offerings... Certainly for more esoteric gear (like GPSes).
This feeds into Delay. Generally if I buy from a UK store it gets to me within a week. Your Mileage May Vary. Shipping from the States is highly variable - my Inet map arrived 10 days after ordering, my last Walnut Creek order took 6 weeks. The simple answer is: Do you want it bad enough, can you afford to wait, is it cheap enough to go for it? (It's that whole time value of money / money value of time thing).
Lastly the whole area of the legal & fiscal obligations. For consumer goods, it's (nearly!) always going to be legal, but you can get hassle from local Customs folks trying to prove it. Given the amount of this trade going back and forth 'cross the Big Pond, however, I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 5 packages is actually inspected at all. This is a good thing, from a delay perspective. However you can view it as a downside - it's your responsibility to report incoming good for import duty so if the Customs folks don't do it for you that's one more hassle (or you can just ignore it...).
I sorta went off on a fuzzy one here, but hopefully brain-dumped some of the thought processes I go through when online ordering. In practice, as time goes by I'm doing far far less international shopping because the whole internet revolution is (slowly!) driving down costs in the UK as well as increasing availability. Hell, we can even do our groceries online here now.
Conclusion: Online Shopping is NOT an Americans-only thing, it's widely available throughout the Western world at least. Whether it's right for you depends on a range of factors, not least of which is your own circumstances - For instance, my job keeps me away from home during the week and I value my weekend time. Online shopping lets me use little dead spaces during the week to "batch up" stuff I need (or more commonly want) ready for quick weekend processing of the incoming parcels.
Oh, and one last comment. Online shops are *exactly* the same as high street ones. There are those I keep coming back to (see above), those I've tried once or twice and will never use again (no names, no packdrill) and those I just plain don't like the look of. Generally the ones I've had most success with have been big, recognisable web-only firms (Amazon, Thinkgeek) that got in early and/or know the business. Johnny-come-lately.COMs and high-street shops trying to get their heads around this "internet" thingy are generally... less satisfying:-).
Assumes they have good, cheap communications link (HINT: this rules out just about everywhere except US/Canada)
Assumes they want to use *IX and not some of the more popular [ooh what an obvious troll] Windows software (or even X apps)
Assumes the donator has power, space, communications and the inclination to keep and sysadmin the non-donated box
Privacy, security, freedom implications
In short, this has been tried before (think BIX,CIX, PRESTEL et al) as public timesharing ans as soon as the technology allowed we dropped it all like a rock. What's different this time?
I've been hoarding old hardware (ask my wife) and/or donating it to friends and family (although it tends to come back that way). At last, a way of ethically disposing of old hardware that I probably would keep around and get shouted at about!
Do we have anyone here who's used the service and can pass comments on effectiveness? Giver or Receiver?
If people are too bloody stupid to work out how to delete things properly, or use strong encryption to prevent invasion of privacy, then they deserve everything they get.
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Discuss.
Actually, I believe you can make a case for this argument with some sensible provisos. Once such that immediately springs to mind is that the information so obtained (regardless of age) should have been obtained both Legally and Ethically (leaving open the argument that Carnivore, Echelon, UK's RIP etc fail at least 1 of those tests).
Personally, I'm in favour of providing technological solutions to technological problems, rather than wrapping-around a legal "hack". In An Ideal World, the technology would transparently handle secure deletion and/or copy-protection (for email) for you, thus negating the need to involve the blood-sucking fraternity in the first place.
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If this statute of limitations had been in force, the DoJ's case against Microsoft would have been severely weakened (didn't they refer to years-old email from billg spouting anti-competitive tactics? or was that a previous lawsuit?)
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Another point to make on this issue is that really high-end CPUs get used for one of 2 things in the real world:
Rendering
Games
(I'll ignore things like SETI@HOME / Distributed.net here 'cos noone buys a machine for that, right?....Right?)
SMP is a fine solution for rendering; I can't speak as to whether common packages out there can exploit SMP though.
However, very few if any games can exploit SMP. I'm ignoring the subclass of multiprocessing which is used in gaming: specialisation of processing to dedicated hardware (aka 3d acceleration). Partly this is because of the platform (most games are written for that non-SMP OS Windows 9x), and partly it's because SMP has such poor penetration to the consumer market (mostly because of the first reason!).
So, completely ignoring the very valid question of whether SMP is a suitable model for pushing forward the field of general purpose multiprocessing anyway, the answer to why SMP isn't really a good solution in this case (and hence why Intel/AMD et al can still make news, profits and push out megawatts of combined waste heat) is that the overwhelming majority of systems into which their high-end CPUs are placed couldn't make use of any other solution for their intended use.
Given the appalling state of DSL rollout here in the UK(*), does anyone have anything to say about their ADSL experience on the pilot and/or (pleasepleaseplease) the live rollout?
Latest reports are that ADSL will be available through our state monopoly...er....major Telco to 60% of the population by the end of 2001. So obviously this isn't an urgent request; take your time responding 'cos there's naff-all any of us can do with the information anyway.
(*): Summary: ADSL roll-out can only happen if a supplier can "get at" the copper wires running from your house to the exchange. This exchange, it's contents, and indeed the copper is owned lock, stock and two smoking conductors by BT . BT is being forced to "unbundle" these local loops, but is dragging it's heels to say the least, and the degree of watchfullness of the state regulator, OfTel, could most charitably be described as "collusionary". Consequence: no competition for ADSL provision, and no incentive for BT to agressively deploy and cut down on all those nice modem call charges it receives.
Actually, that's probably too harsh on the poor monopoly. Never ascribe to malice what can reasonably be explained by incompetence.
Manuals?
Well, the manuals are on the CD ROM, and for the CDE, it is the v1.0. The Open Group dropped the use of postscript
docs and went to SGML which we have not yet mastered. Since the changes to the CDE manual were very slight,
(and who reads the manual, anyway?) we hope this bit of slacking on our part will be forgiven.
...So, I pay you money for a version of a crappy(*) old *IX desktop that's been opened up anyway, and in return I'll get documentation that doesn't reflect what "value" you've "added"..
And not only that but you're admitting that you haven't updated that documentation through either incompetence or laziness or both. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I'm happy that I'm not going to have any support issues here then...
Really compelling sales-case they're making here, aren't they?
hope no-one minds a swift summary of the responses to the question: why not use ramdisk more?
Case FOR the motion:
Faster/tmp
Controllable program pre-load
wipeable cache
better network boot/operation utilisation
Case AGAINST the motion:
/tmp already IS ramdisk on some OSes; doesn't fix disk space util problems but can increase access patterns if whole OS's applications co-operate with good housekeeping practices. These benefits can be obtained with a good caching algorithm anyway.
Effective Disk caching algorithms implement all of the benefits of ramdisk program "caching" with fewer drawbacks AND make better use of memory space and time (i.e. only caching what's used rather than (statically?) pre-determining cacheable programs and then living with that)
Programs that need dynamic temporary / semi-persistant storage can do it a lot quicker in memory without filesystem overhead, and anyway gain their long-term benefits from a persistent sotre rather than semi-persistent RAM disk
The special case of network boot/operation is better handled with dedicated thin/optimised protocols (network block devices et al) rather than a general purpose solution with a lot of overhead (i.e. that filesystem rubbish)
My conclusions? Ramdisks are mainly an anachronism from an earlier time before better solutions to the problems became available, and are better left alone. Performance and/or resource utilisation efficiency is better served by more specialist tools such as caching, sensible application design, network block devices etc etc.
The problem with this approach is that on *every* boot you have to pre-stuff the ramdisk with files, regardless of whether you're about to use them or not.
And of course, the memory so allocated is tied up whether or not those programs are in use.
The tip-top way of achieving this effect is some uber-control over the disk caching mechanisms to allow pre-stuffing of the cache with known files at bootup / login.
Now's the time for someone to point me at a FAQ telling me how to do this....
You're making a statement of ethics here, and it's important to recognise this.
The legalities of the situation are totally different; the right to reverse-engineer and adapt technology is well-established (if under attack in the US via the DMCA...). Let's be clear: hacking TiVO or CueCat is totally legal.
Now, to address the ethical side of this question, yes every business's first goal is to make money. And if you feel sorry for these poor companies having their income stolen from underneath them, then that's fine.. I don't have a problem with that.
However, personally, my own feelings are of mild contempt for the businesses concerned.. It smacks of incompetence to build an entire business around people's goodwill in not using their legal rights to reverse engineer your profit-stream..er...technology, without understanding what the impacts are.
In the CueCat case, they've taken some ever-so-slightly warmed-over technology (barcodes + scanners; available since the early '80s), wrapped some "encryption" around it, and expect to charge a great deal of money for providing what is effectively a referral service. Personally I'd have thought that it would have been cheaper for these guys to do a mass-market cheap implementation of same on the existing universal bar-codes; substituting quantity for quality with no hardware overheads... That's a business model I can see working, and people getting behind - think "hotmail" here...
The point being, Windows 1.0 looked awful because pretty much all GUIs looked awful at the time, to our modern eyes. You've got 15 years worth of GUI development colouring your judgement there.
I mean, even those early PARC systems (dammit, the name escapes me) on which the Apple Lisa was based look pretty damn ugly now. However, in 1984 (or whenever) when all you were used to was a green-screen or CLI, any one of these things was a real glimpse into the future(*).
(*) = Except Windows 1.0 which looked like a command-line DOS shell with heavy makeup.
Not only that, they are now blaming BT (My employer, #include ) for not providing the lines. Nice one Altavista.
I certainly agree that AltaVista's finger-pointing at BT is a desperate attempt to avoid blame for this unmitigated disaster.
Unfortunately for your illustrious company, however, it's a far too tempting target to shoot at. Regardless of the reality, the widespread perception is that BT is still a monopolistic quasi-governmental organisation with an inherent belief that the population of this little island should be gratefull for any morsels it happens to throw their way. You only have to look at the ADSL roll-out for a prime example (and ISDN before it) - BT won't even quote which *year* my exchange is going to be enabled, because I have the gall to live outside a megalopolis. Not that the so-called competition is helping one iota; you only have to look at the availability vs. penetration of cable-modem for that!
So you can certainly see where the temptation to "spin" this story came from... It's not like this result doesn't favourably affect BT after all - all those disappointed AltaVista users turning to the only other supplier of unmetered access in the UK (no prizes for guessing the company... Starts with a "B")
Regardless, in this instance it was wrong to attack BT. Just this once, mind!
This topic is actually covered in the book "Stages to Saturn", by Roger E. Bilstein. As you might guess, it's biased heavily towards development of the Saturn hardware, but it does cover management structure in a great deal of structure.
Some of this element - with more of a leaning towards the "whys" rather than the "whats" - is covered in the excellent "Chariots for Apollo" by Charles R. Pellegrino, Joshua Stoff. This really is development of the Lunar Module (LM) rather than NASA-as-a-whole, but Grumman's story (the developer of the LM), together with the trials and tribulations of dealing with NASA and the other contractors, is told excellently.
Amazon have "Stages to Saturn" listed Here and "Chariots for Apollo" listed Here
By lucky coincidence I finished reading this book last week. I'm having my annual isn't-Apollo-fascinating binge[*].
I mostly agree with the review as-written, certainly with regards to the..um...slickness of the writing. Don't get me wrong - it's a perfectly readable book, however it's not what I'd call professional. Actually, that's a benefit - Gene's personality literally shines through his writing.
In fact, this book could not be written by any other person; no ghost-writer could be this convincing. Gene's attitude, beliefs, values and idiosyncracies are all there in their glory. Just finding out he pumped himself up for a mission by mentally playing back military marches on his way to work was worth the price of admission alone.
This book is almost like reading Gene's confession of his pride for his team and America's accomplishments in the '60s, in space. And that's really my only remark. As a non-USian, non-religious, not-particularly-patriotic soul, it's hard to empathise with some of Gene's values. Doesn't detract from the reading, mind you, but I just don't necessarily "get" Gene's motivations.
As a historical document, however, then when people ask you about the stuff that wasn't on TV during Apollo - i.e. things done by any of the 400,000 people who didn't end up in the pointy end of a 6-million pound Aluminum tube - then point 'em at this book. You might not learn much technically, but the reasons it happened, and how it made those people feel, is all there.
[*] = I've just read the Apollo 11 Mission Reports parts 1 & 2 from, Apogee Books - highly recommended if you like lots of technical detail since they're the pre/post mission reports and crew debriefs). Just have Apollo 13 mission report to read next, after I finish "Darwin's Radio"
3. Contextual menues were also the saviour to the crisis of badly designed hot keys. I want to close a window... is it ctrl-w, alt-w or alt-F4 (nobel prize for counter-intuitive design to whoever came up with that one).
Blame IBM. Alt+F4 is part of an earlier Common User Access (CUA) standard (circa 1987). OS/2's Presentation Manager was based on CUA and since Windows kinda-sorta evolved from PM (by the time Win3.0 came along anyway), it brought with it a bunch of CUA as well.
Actually, CUA was kinda cool if misguided. It defined on-screen metaphors and a range of standard user interface elements that were designed to work across platforms. Which meant that all the keystrokes defined for e.g. pull-down menus, window manipulation, moving around the screen etc, had to work regardless of whether the application was hosted on a green-screen terminal attached to a mainframe, or a pixel-addressed graphical device like PM. The idea being that Mr Big IBM Customer didn't have to retrain his/her IT staff to use a new application when it got moved onto a newer, flashier (more expensive?) platform - everything would work juuust the same way.
CUA was last seen in OS/2 v2.x's object-oriented desktop (which ran on top of PM anyway), and had a bunch of new interface elements like pop-up menus, right-clicking action and things added to the existing definitions. If you ignored the fact that it only really applied to OS/2 by then, it was still kinda cool because it applied consistently across the entire platform, regardless of application. Right-click would always ALWAYS bring up a context-menu for whatever object you were working with, ALT-F4 would always close a window, and CTRL-ESC would always bring up a window list (which you could right-click within to manipulate windows), etc etc. It took me an *age* to adjust to that keystroke being mapped to "Start" on Win9x...
I'd agree that AIX adds a separate, proprietory binary configuration database (the ODM) to the UNIX flat-file configuration model, and I'd agree that the way in which the ODM is bolted-on to the UNIX model leaves some ugliness at the boundaries.
However, to say "SMIT is the only choice" for configuration is somewhat misleading. One of SMIT's strengths is that *everything* is implemented via commands and scripts, under the covers. Indeed, it's fairly easy to extend SMIT itself to perform custom per-system administration tasks by adding menu / form definitions and the actions needed to implement to the ODM database (which is what SMIT reads to produce the menus, as well as being AIX's authoratitive source of config. data).
Result? Everything that can be done via SMIT can also be done direct from the command line. In AIX, most (but lamentably not all) commands that change flat-file configuration also "behind the scenes update the ODM also. For instance, the user configuration commands (mkuser, rmuser, lsuser etc) not only affect the filesystem directly (modifying/etc/passwd,/etc/group,/etc/security/passwd, home/ etc), but also update the ODM. Likewise for most of the the device configuration commands (certainly the common TCP/IP commands have this dual-mode operation).
'sfunny, what with the well-published delays in releasing NT5.0....er...Win2K, I'd always assumed they'd only ever heard 50% of that particular mantra...
Still, I know plenty of young kiddies that follow this philosophy, and I'm not sure I like their results, either... Not that I'd wish to draw comparisons of course.
The other interesting tidbit from Desert Storm was that because the GPS satellite constellation wasn't complete at the time, there were 2 approximately 20-minute periods per day where not enough sats. were above the horizon to allow navigation in the Gulf region.
Guess which 2 x 20 minute periods per day a given Coalition Army unit could be relied upon to be stationary?
What I find most telling about this state of affairs, though, is that even the "supplier" of navigation, who should be most intimately aware of it's limitations etc, is taken in by the technology to the exclusion of a more common sense approach. I think there's a lesson there for all potential users.
Just like it says in the manual, folks: Never rely on your GPS alone for navigation.
--
henley, who will be very nervous about flying when they finally turn off ILS in favour of (D)GPS for landing aircraft....
OK, I don't have details so you can file this response in the "rumour has it" category. However, the Metric/Imperial error seems to have been a *very* limited mistake caused by a misunderstanding between a supplier (I'm tempted to say Lockeed Martin but I may be well out on that one), and the customer (JPL, if I'm not mistaken).
I do not believe that this error - embarrassing and fundamentally unforgivable as it is - is a general indication of deterioration within NASA and related organisations. NASA, and JPL in particular, has a 30-year history of outstanding celestial navigation - work out the error-bars on getting Gallieo into Jovian orbit for instance.
So, to come back to the points above I personally would not be more wary today than during Cassini. You're extrapolating a single error into a systemic failure based on an extremely limited sample set.
Having said all that, I'd agree that the EI statement basically represents a pro-Cassini standpoint (after all, NASA's hardly likely to say "we'd like to launch this probe that will kill all life on earth if it blows up and oh by the way our launchers have a 20% failure rate"), although there's also something called Common Sense to be used.
RTGs (not russian honest-to-god Almaz reactors, but RTGs) have been flown, AND brought back to earth the "easy way" and the "hard way" (commonly known as "lithobraking":-), with no measurable environmental damage. Apollo 13's RTG lies in 5 miles of water in the pacific after a 7KM/Sec re-entry, with no leakage. Yes, in theory there's enough Pu per RTG to eliminate humanity (for it's poisionous effects, not it's radioactivity). However that assumes you can magically transform that Pu from a solid lump contained in a foot-cubed package into sub-micron particles evenly distributed throughout the entire biosphere. Finding mechanisms to achieve this are somewhat problematic:-)
Cassini did not "orbit Earth for a few days". Cassini flew-by Earth, at an insignificant distance (astronomically speaking), and thus gained a significant velocity boost in exchange for stripping the Earth of a infinitesimal amount of it's orbital velocity about the sun.
Because of Mr. Newton (and to a limited degree Mr. Einstein), the chances of a collision with the Earth during this fly by were approximately 0% (to any degree of precision you choose). The environmentalist's assessment of the danger to the biosphere caused by this manoever was therefore even harder to justify than the fears of contamination during launch.
However I would have been very interested to have seen a competent arguement made over the increase in global warming that will *inevitably* result from the momentum-loss caused by Cassini - after all, our orbit is now *that much* closer to the sun:-).....
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At least one "FBC" project exceeded it's design lifetime by (as I recall) a factor of 4.
Mars Pathfinder's wee little cutie Sojourner rover had a design lifetime of 1 week (or was it 14 days, I can't recall). It ran for the best part of 2 months, and indeed it's believed Soujourner outlived the Pathfinder (renamed Sagan Station) home base which suffered a transmitter failure... Apparently, the fallback method of regaining contact was for Soujourner to "orbit" Pathfinder at a fixed distance (10 metres?) constantly re-trying to connect; it's been speculated that when we finally get to Mars we might find a deep circular track worn in the dust by Sojourner's continuous circuits...
A nice idea, but highly improbable.
Does uptime apply to a device containing no CPU?
As I recall, the Pioneer series doesn't contain a "true" programmable computer; it's more like a fancy sequence controller (built around LSI logic, natch). The Voyager series were the first (deep space) probes containing a programmable computer; they do have continuous uptime of 25-odd years).
Normally, NASA immediately hands-over hardware to the Smithsonian at the end of it's life. This certainly applied throughout Apollo where (I believe) the material at the lunar landing sites for A11, 12, 14, 15, 16 & 17 are already the property of the Smithsonian... They just have to go pick 'em up :-)
Note that since the Smithsonian is a federal entity as is NASA, ownership of hardware remains with the Government at all times.
I'd imagine that deep-space probes would follow this precedent; I certainly can't see the US Government allowing private individuals/companies or foreign nation states to just wade on in and pick 'em up and sell to the highest bidder...
On the other hand, any state/company/individual with the ability to do so would possibly not give a fig what the US Government says anyway...
Oh, and about the astronomical distances... In space, distance is easy, it's a function of how long you can be bothered to wait. It's astronomical *velocities* we ought to be celebrating...
As a resident of the UK, I've been online shopping for 4 years or so - bought my first Slackware distribution from Walnut Creek in mid '96. I'd class myself as a moderate online shopper ,averaging 1-2 transactions per month. I can only offer my own experience but anyway...
The hassles have been covered already, and fall into the areas of:
Availability. There's a very marked difference here between companies that "get it" and those that don't. There are a *lot* of online vendors (both within the US and outside) that aren't aware of, or can't be bothered with shipping internationally. Smart companies will take business from anywhere; hey - they've gone to the trouble of setting up a mail order distribution business so adding the minor hassle of international distribution is trivial.An excellent example is Thinkgeek. Counter-examples I can't provide - whilst shopping for cheap GPSes a while back I came across a few (mainly US) shops that just couldn't deal with the concept of places other than US states. My response is to instantly forget all about them. The lesson should be obvious.
Shipping, by which I mainly refer to hassle and cost. For many reasons it's a lot cheaper to go with "local" companies. In the UK we're a fairly enlightened bunch so by preference I'd usually by from a local distributor - Amazon UK rather than Amazon US for example. However there's always something you can't get locally (such as ThinkGeek's Map of the Internet, for example) so it's a simple trade-off: Do you want it bad enough to pay shipping?.
In fairness, intercontinental shipping is usually not too bad - you guys in the States have things *so* cheap that can still be cheaper for me to buy (shippable) electronic goods from US stores, pay shipping, customs AND Tax, and come out ahead of the local offerings... Certainly for more esoteric gear (like GPSes).
This feeds into Delay. Generally if I buy from a UK store it gets to me within a week. Your Mileage May Vary. Shipping from the States is highly variable - my Inet map arrived 10 days after ordering, my last Walnut Creek order took 6 weeks. The simple answer is: Do you want it bad enough, can you afford to wait, is it cheap enough to go for it? (It's that whole time value of money / money value of time thing).
Lastly the whole area of the legal & fiscal obligations. For consumer goods, it's (nearly!) always going to be legal, but you can get hassle from local Customs folks trying to prove it. Given the amount of this trade going back and forth 'cross the Big Pond, however, I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 5 packages is actually inspected at all. This is a good thing, from a delay perspective. However you can view it as a downside - it's your responsibility to report incoming good for import duty so if the Customs folks don't do it for you that's one more hassle (or you can just ignore it...).
I sorta went off on a fuzzy one here, but hopefully brain-dumped some of the thought processes I go through when online ordering. In practice, as time goes by I'm doing far far less international shopping because the whole internet revolution is (slowly!) driving down costs in the UK as well as increasing availability. Hell, we can even do our groceries online here now.
Conclusion: Online Shopping is NOT an Americans-only thing, it's widely available throughout the Western world at least. Whether it's right for you depends on a range of factors, not least of which is your own circumstances - For instance, my job keeps me away from home during the week and I value my weekend time. Online shopping lets me use little dead spaces during the week to "batch up" stuff I need (or more commonly want) ready for quick weekend processing of the incoming parcels.
Oh, and one last comment. Online shops are *exactly* the same as high street ones. There are those I keep coming back to (see above), those I've tried once or twice and will never use again (no names, no packdrill) and those I just plain don't like the look of. Generally the ones I've had most success with have been big, recognisable web-only firms (Amazon, Thinkgeek) that got in early and/or know the business. Johnny-come-lately .COMs and high-street shops trying to get their heads around this "internet" thingy are generally... less satisfying :-).
Some reasons this isn't optimal:
In short, this has been tried before (think BIX,CIX, PRESTEL et al) as public timesharing ans as soon as the technology allowed we dropped it all like a rock. What's different this time?
I've been hoarding old hardware (ask my wife) and/or donating it to friends and family (although it tends to come back that way). At last, a way of ethically disposing of old hardware that I probably would keep around and get shouted at about!
Do we have anyone here who's used the service and can pass comments on effectiveness? Giver or Receiver?
If people are too bloody stupid to work out how to delete things properly, or use strong encryption to prevent invasion of privacy, then they deserve everything they get.
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Discuss.
Actually, I believe you can make a case for this argument with some sensible provisos. Once such that immediately springs to mind is that the information so obtained (regardless of age) should have been obtained both Legally and Ethically (leaving open the argument that Carnivore, Echelon, UK's RIP etc fail at least 1 of those tests).
Personally, I'm in favour of providing technological solutions to technological problems, rather than wrapping-around a legal "hack". In An Ideal World, the technology would transparently handle secure deletion and/or copy-protection (for email) for you, thus negating the need to involve the blood-sucking fraternity in the first place.
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If this statute of limitations had been in force, the DoJ's case against Microsoft would have been severely weakened (didn't they refer to years-old email from billg spouting anti-competitive tactics? or was that a previous lawsuit?)
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Another point to make on this issue is that really high-end CPUs get used for one of 2 things in the real world:
(I'll ignore things like SETI@HOME / Distributed.net here 'cos noone buys a machine for that, right?....Right?)
SMP is a fine solution for rendering; I can't speak as to whether common packages out there can exploit SMP though.
However, very few if any games can exploit SMP. I'm ignoring the subclass of multiprocessing which is used in gaming: specialisation of processing to dedicated hardware (aka 3d acceleration). Partly this is because of the platform (most games are written for that non-SMP OS Windows 9x), and partly it's because SMP has such poor penetration to the consumer market (mostly because of the first reason!).
So, completely ignoring the very valid question of whether SMP is a suitable model for pushing forward the field of general purpose multiprocessing anyway, the answer to why SMP isn't really a good solution in this case (and hence why Intel/AMD et al can still make news, profits and push out megawatts of combined waste heat) is that the overwhelming majority of systems into which their high-end CPUs are placed couldn't make use of any other solution for their intended use.
Given the appalling state of DSL rollout here in the UK(*), does anyone have anything to say about their ADSL experience on the pilot and/or (pleasepleaseplease) the live rollout?
Latest reports are that ADSL will be available through our state monopoly...er....major Telco to 60% of the population by the end of 2001. So obviously this isn't an urgent request; take your time responding 'cos there's naff-all any of us can do with the information anyway.
(*): Summary: ADSL roll-out can only happen if a supplier can "get at" the copper wires running from your house to the exchange. This exchange, it's contents, and indeed the copper is owned lock, stock and two smoking conductors by BT . BT is being forced to "unbundle" these local loops, but is dragging it's heels to say the least, and the degree of watchfullness of the state regulator, OfTel, could most charitably be described as "collusionary". Consequence: no competition for ADSL provision, and no incentive for BT to agressively deploy and cut down on all those nice modem call charges it receives.
Actually, that's probably too harsh on the poor monopoly. Never ascribe to malice what can reasonably be explained by incompetence.
References:
From the headline page for Dextop (click here):
...So, I pay you money for a version of a crappy(*) old *IX desktop that's been opened up anyway, and in return I'll get documentation that doesn't reflect what "value" you've "added"..
And not only that but you're admitting that you haven't updated that documentation through either incompetence or laziness or both. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I'm happy that I'm not going to have any support issues here then...
Really compelling sales-case they're making here, aren't they?
hope no-one minds a swift summary of the responses to the question: why not use ramdisk more?
Case FOR the motion:
Case AGAINST the motion:
My conclusions? Ramdisks are mainly an anachronism from an earlier time before better solutions to the problems became available, and are better left alone. Performance and/or resource utilisation efficiency is better served by more specialist tools such as caching, sensible application design, network block devices etc etc.
The problem with this approach is that on *every* boot you have to pre-stuff the ramdisk with files, regardless of whether you're about to use them or not.
And of course, the memory so allocated is tied up whether or not those programs are in use.
The tip-top way of achieving this effect is some uber-control over the disk caching mechanisms to allow pre-stuffing of the cache with known files at bootup / login.
Now's the time for someone to point me at a FAQ telling me how to do this....
You're making a statement of ethics here, and it's important to recognise this.
The legalities of the situation are totally different; the right to reverse-engineer and adapt technology is well-established (if under attack in the US via the DMCA...). Let's be clear: hacking TiVO or CueCat is totally legal.
Now, to address the ethical side of this question, yes every business's first goal is to make money. And if you feel sorry for these poor companies having their income stolen from underneath them, then that's fine.. I don't have a problem with that.
However, personally, my own feelings are of mild contempt for the businesses concerned.. It smacks of incompetence to build an entire business around people's goodwill in not using their legal rights to reverse engineer your profit-stream..er...technology, without understanding what the impacts are.
In the CueCat case, they've taken some ever-so-slightly warmed-over technology (barcodes + scanners; available since the early '80s), wrapped some "encryption" around it, and expect to charge a great deal of money for providing what is effectively a referral service. Personally I'd have thought that it would have been cheaper for these guys to do a mass-market cheap implementation of same on the existing universal bar-codes; substituting quantity for quality with no hardware overheads... That's a business model I can see working, and people getting behind - think "hotmail" here...
Now go look at early Mac screenshots and compare.
The point being, Windows 1.0 looked awful because pretty much all GUIs looked awful at the time, to our modern eyes. You've got 15 years worth of GUI development colouring your judgement there.
I mean, even those early PARC systems (dammit, the name escapes me) on which the Apple Lisa was based look pretty damn ugly now. However, in 1984 (or whenever) when all you were used to was a green-screen or CLI, any one of these things was a real glimpse into the future(*).
(*) = Except Windows 1.0 which looked like a command-line DOS shell with heavy makeup.
I certainly agree that AltaVista's finger-pointing at BT is a desperate attempt to avoid blame for this unmitigated disaster.
Unfortunately for your illustrious company, however, it's a far too tempting target to shoot at. Regardless of the reality, the widespread perception is that BT is still a monopolistic quasi-governmental organisation with an inherent belief that the population of this little island should be gratefull for any morsels it happens to throw their way. You only have to look at the ADSL roll-out for a prime example (and ISDN before it) - BT won't even quote which *year* my exchange is going to be enabled, because I have the gall to live outside a megalopolis. Not that the so-called competition is helping one iota; you only have to look at the availability vs. penetration of cable-modem for that!
So you can certainly see where the temptation to "spin" this story came from... It's not like this result doesn't favourably affect BT after all - all those disappointed AltaVista users turning to the only other supplier of unmetered access in the UK (no prizes for guessing the company... Starts with a "B")
Regardless, in this instance it was wrong to attack BT. Just this once, mind!
Ahhh... RIP. Conclusive proof that Her Magestie's Government couldn't tell a router from a hole in the head.
Guess I'll be implementing my RIP-avoiding policy now... There, done.
Steganography? Nope. PGP? Nope. ROT-13? Nope.
Just disable smart-host in sendmail.cf, kill -hup sendmail and bob's yer uncle.
See Here, amongst numerous other spots on yer friendly wibbly wobbly web, for more details...
Surely you mean I should mean a 2.72*10^6 KG Aluminium tube ?
:-)
This topic is actually covered in the book "Stages to Saturn", by Roger E. Bilstein. As you might guess, it's biased heavily towards development of the Saturn hardware, but it does cover management structure in a great deal of structure.
Some of this element - with more of a leaning towards the "whys" rather than the "whats" - is covered in the excellent "Chariots for Apollo" by Charles R. Pellegrino, Joshua Stoff. This really is development of the Lunar Module (LM) rather than NASA-as-a-whole, but Grumman's story (the developer of the LM), together with the trials and tribulations of dealing with NASA and the other contractors, is told excellently.
Amazon have "Stages to Saturn" listed Here and "Chariots for Apollo" listed Here
By lucky coincidence I finished reading this book last week. I'm having my annual isn't-Apollo-fascinating binge[*].
I mostly agree with the review as-written, certainly with regards to the..um...slickness of the writing. Don't get me wrong - it's a perfectly readable book, however it's not what I'd call professional. Actually, that's a benefit - Gene's personality literally shines through his writing.
In fact, this book could not be written by any other person; no ghost-writer could be this convincing. Gene's attitude, beliefs, values and idiosyncracies are all there in their glory. Just finding out he pumped himself up for a mission by mentally playing back military marches on his way to work was worth the price of admission alone.
This book is almost like reading Gene's confession of his pride for his team and America's accomplishments in the '60s, in space. And that's really my only remark. As a non-USian, non-religious, not-particularly-patriotic soul, it's hard to empathise with some of Gene's values. Doesn't detract from the reading, mind you, but I just don't necessarily "get" Gene's motivations.
As a historical document, however, then when people ask you about the stuff that wasn't on TV during Apollo - i.e. things done by any of the 400,000 people who didn't end up in the pointy end of a 6-million pound Aluminum tube - then point 'em at this book. You might not learn much technically, but the reasons it happened, and how it made those people feel, is all there.
[*] = I've just read the Apollo 11 Mission Reports parts 1 & 2 from, Apogee Books - highly recommended if you like lots of technical detail since they're the pre/post mission reports and crew debriefs). Just have Apollo 13 mission report to read next, after I finish "Darwin's Radio"
Blame IBM. Alt+F4 is part of an earlier Common User Access (CUA) standard (circa 1987). OS/2's Presentation Manager was based on CUA and since Windows kinda-sorta evolved from PM (by the time Win3.0 came along anyway), it brought with it a bunch of CUA as well.
Actually, CUA was kinda cool if misguided. It defined on-screen metaphors and a range of standard user interface elements that were designed to work across platforms. Which meant that all the keystrokes defined for e.g. pull-down menus, window manipulation, moving around the screen etc, had to work regardless of whether the application was hosted on a green-screen terminal attached to a mainframe, or a pixel-addressed graphical device like PM. The idea being that Mr Big IBM Customer didn't have to retrain his/her IT staff to use a new application when it got moved onto a newer, flashier (more expensive?) platform - everything would work juuust the same way.
CUA was last seen in OS/2 v2.x's object-oriented desktop (which ran on top of PM anyway), and had a bunch of new interface elements like pop-up menus, right-clicking action and things added to the existing definitions. If you ignored the fact that it only really applied to OS/2 by then, it was still kinda cool because it applied consistently across the entire platform, regardless of application. Right-click would always ALWAYS bring up a context-menu for whatever object you were working with, ALT-F4 would always close a window, and CTRL-ESC would always bring up a window list (which you could right-click within to manipulate windows), etc etc. It took me an *age* to adjust to that keystroke being mapped to "Start" on Win9x...
I'd agree that AIX adds a separate, proprietory binary configuration database (the ODM) to the UNIX flat-file configuration model, and I'd agree that the way in which the ODM is bolted-on to the UNIX model leaves some ugliness at the boundaries.
However, to say "SMIT is the only choice" for configuration is somewhat misleading. One of SMIT's strengths is that *everything* is implemented via commands and scripts, under the covers. Indeed, it's fairly easy to extend SMIT itself to perform custom per-system administration tasks by adding menu / form definitions and the actions needed to implement to the ODM database (which is what SMIT reads to produce the menus, as well as being AIX's authoratitive source of config. data).
Result? Everything that can be done via SMIT can also be done direct from the command line. In AIX, most (but lamentably not all) commands that change flat-file configuration also "behind the scenes update the ODM also. For instance, the user configuration commands (mkuser, rmuser, lsuser etc) not only affect the filesystem directly (modifying /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/security/passwd, home/ etc), but also update the ODM. Likewise for most of the the device configuration commands (certainly the common TCP/IP commands have this dual-mode operation).
'sfunny, what with the well-published delays in releasing NT5.0....er...Win2K, I'd always assumed they'd only ever heard 50% of that particular mantra...
Still, I know plenty of young kiddies that follow this philosophy, and I'm not sure I like their results, either... Not that I'd wish to draw comparisons of course.
The other interesting tidbit from Desert Storm was that because the GPS satellite constellation wasn't complete at the time, there were 2 approximately 20-minute periods per day where not enough sats. were above the horizon to allow navigation in the Gulf region.
Guess which 2 x 20 minute periods per day a given Coalition Army unit could be relied upon to be stationary?
What I find most telling about this state of affairs, though, is that even the "supplier" of navigation, who should be most intimately aware of it's limitations etc, is taken in by the technology to the exclusion of a more common sense approach. I think there's a lesson there for all potential users.
Just like it says in the manual, folks: Never rely on your GPS alone for navigation.
--
henley, who will be very nervous about flying when they finally turn off ILS in favour of (D)GPS for landing aircraft....
OK, I don't have details so you can file this response in the "rumour has it" category. However, the Metric/Imperial error seems to have been a *very* limited mistake caused by a misunderstanding between a supplier (I'm tempted to say Lockeed Martin but I may be well out on that one), and the customer (JPL, if I'm not mistaken).
I do not believe that this error - embarrassing and fundamentally unforgivable as it is - is a general indication of deterioration within NASA and related organisations. NASA, and JPL in particular, has a 30-year history of outstanding celestial navigation - work out the error-bars on getting Gallieo into Jovian orbit for instance.
So, to come back to the points above I personally would not be more wary today than during Cassini. You're extrapolating a single error into a systemic failure based on an extremely limited sample set.
Having said all that, I'd agree that the EI statement basically represents a pro-Cassini standpoint (after all, NASA's hardly likely to say "we'd like to launch this probe that will kill all life on earth if it blows up and oh by the way our launchers have a 20% failure rate"), although there's also something called Common Sense to be used.
RTGs (not russian honest-to-god Almaz reactors, but RTGs) have been flown, AND brought back to earth the "easy way" and the "hard way" (commonly known as "lithobraking" :-), with no measurable environmental damage. Apollo 13's RTG lies in 5 miles of water in the pacific after a 7KM/Sec re-entry, with no leakage. Yes, in theory there's enough Pu per RTG to eliminate humanity (for it's poisionous effects, not it's radioactivity). However that assumes you can magically transform that Pu from a solid lump contained in a foot-cubed package into sub-micron particles evenly distributed throughout the entire biosphere. Finding mechanisms to achieve this are somewhat problematic :-)
Cassini did not "orbit Earth for a few days". Cassini flew-by Earth, at an insignificant distance (astronomically speaking), and thus gained a significant velocity boost in exchange for stripping the Earth of a infinitesimal amount of it's orbital velocity about the sun.
Because of Mr. Newton (and to a limited degree Mr. Einstein), the chances of a collision with the Earth during this fly by were approximately 0% (to any degree of precision you choose). The environmentalist's assessment of the danger to the biosphere caused by this manoever was therefore even harder to justify than the fears of contamination during launch.
However I would have been very interested to have seen a competent arguement made over the increase in global warming that will *inevitably* result from the momentum-loss caused by Cassini - after all, our orbit is now *that much* closer to the sun :-).....