Considering how unstable 3X was, I'm shocked that anyone is using it for anything.
Unstable? Maybe to your average Joe Luser who, ignorant of computers, let programs install all kinds of crap in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and WIN.INI... Or didn't know how to properly set paths, or any one of dozens of other ways to tune his machine. But to those who did know how to tune, and how to clean up after crappy installs, Win 3.X was very stable.
I think Windows 3.X got a bad rep because, unlike vanilla DOS systems, you actually had to know what you were doing to set everything up properly. Few people bothered.
If what you encrypt with can be broken by others, then it is not doing the intended job.
WRONG.
Cryptography only needs to be strong enough to protect the encoded contents for as long as said contents retain value. It does not need to remain unbroken forever.
In south or terse, I touch in kelp. You are wrought on girls, but it's young urine poor obese ladle mate.
Encrypting is not hard, but if what you decrypt looks like this above, it may be hard to decipher and not worth the effort. BTW, that is decipherable.
Wrong again - if it is worth the time of those attempting to decrypt your initial message, then it is worth their time to break the second layer.
We've all seen the Schneier-Norris jokes, and it is true that he is something of a celebrity in cryptography and computer science circles. But does becoming a celebrity through making the effort to educate the public about your field automatically cheapen your worth as a scientist or researcher? Does it reduce the worth of the message?
When one has used ones celebrity status primarily to advance ones political beliefs and to lend unwarranted weight to claims in fields where one has no expertise - yes, it reduces the worth of the message because it calls into question the motives behind the message.
I've never understood why people leave their keys laying about anyhow. My keys are in pocket, or at night they are in the top drawer of my wife's jewelry armoire...
Probably my Navy training showing through - a key in its designated stowage, on a lanyard around your neck, in your pocket, or in your hand in use. No exceptions. A key is treated as if it were the thing the key controls access to. (I once narrowly missed Captain's Mast once because I laid a very important set of keys on the console so I could pick up a pen to sign a log...)
I rather suspect it's the opposite - 99.9% of consumers aren't in the Slashdot demographic that goes out of it's way to find reasons to hate and denigrate. I'm surprised the every buy and/or play any games at all frankly.
In addition to the factors mentioned by others, at the extremely low [freezing] temps involved - differential contraction of various parts is a big issue. It can crack camera lenses as the metal body shrinks, crack circuit traces inside of PCBs as the metal shrinks more than the plastic, tear pins from ICs as the IC and PCB shrink at different rates...
In addition to the factors mentioned by others, at the extreme [freezing] temps involved - differential contraction is a big issue. It can crack camera lenses as the metal body shrinks, crack circuit traces inside of PCBs as the metal shrinks more than the plastic, tear pins from ICs as the IC and PCB shrink at different rates...
Government agencies and archivists are starting to wake up to the fact that this is an issue -- I think the Office 2007 file format change was a big factor that is getting it on the radar.
Government agencies and archivists have been aware of the problem since the late 1970's when NASA started having problems with decaying [magnetic] tapes containing data from various probes that required obsolescent or obsolete computers to read.
If you looked at the archives of a government or corporate office 30 years ago, only official memorandums, some meeting minutes and policies were retained.
Along with tons of official correspondence, internal publications, invoices, drawings, plans, etc... etc...
Typically these rockets are more efficient than their chemical cousins.
They are more efficient on paper, but in real world engineering, not so much.
For a given reactant mass, rockets will give you more thrust (can't get into orbit with anything but rockets at this point) but the plasma and ion engines are more efficient, low-thrust but higher change in velocity (delta-v.)
But much of the theoretical performance gain is eaten up by the need to provide a source of power - and for any significant payload, that power source dominates the mass budget and eats up almost all of the theoretical advantage. You do end up going faster, but you do so with much smaller payload.
Why does it take so long for we Americans to get anything accomplished nowadays? Didn't the Apollo missions take only seven years to get from conception to landing, including development of command modules, lunar rovers, lunar modules, and a fairly reliable multi-stage rocket engine system?
The answer to the latter question is actually "no"... (To the surprise of many.)
Some key, early, dates in the Apollo program:
1955 - Work starts on what will eventually become the F-1 engine.
1958 - work starts on the Juno V, which will eventually become the Saturn family of boosters. Also in 1958 (or thereabouts) the Polaris guidance computer which will form the basis of the Apollo CSM and LM guidance packages is designed, and the H-1 engine which will eventually power the first stage of the Saturn I and Ib starts development.
1960 - the J-2 engine (used in both the Saturn I family and the Saturn V starts development, the Saturn S-IV stage contractor is selected, initial feasibility studies of a three man capsule, formal commencement of the Apollo project, detailed design studies of the Apollo spacecraft.
1961 - Final specifications for the Apollo CSM completed, CSM contract competition commences, MIT selected as prime contractor for the Apollo Guidance and Navigation systems, Kennedy proposes the US go to the moon "in this decade"... (Balance of 1961 omitted.)
Alert readers will do the math and note that Apollo was being designed as Mercury was flying. One outcome of this is that lesson learned in Mercury aren't applied to Apollo, with tragic consequences. As the Mercury program progressed, they had great difficulty in modifying and maintaining the capsules - as a result, Gemini was designed for much easier access to its internal systems. Apollo wasn't, and the resulting cramped conditions inside the capsule during assembly, modification, and checkout were implicated as being among the causes of the Apollo 1 fire.
Another result is that the Apollo CSM struggled with its two gimbal guidance system which greatly limited maneuvers due to the need to avoid gimbal lock. Gemini shows that a three gimbal system is more flexible and less dangerous - but the design for Apollo's guidance system was already frozen.
The settlers were people who were so fed up with the way their government was run that they would risk everything they had to escape it. Although I'm sure getting the ship and supplies was expensive for the day, it's no where near as expensive as it will be to get to Mars.
The surviving settlers, on the other hand, were mostly people backed up by Big Money back home. Big Money that provided tools, supplies, and materials that couldn't be manufactured in the Colonies. Big Money made it's investment back when the Colonies began shipping tobacco and other agricultural products back the homeland.
The romantic notion of the colonists being rugged and completely self reliant individualists who carved a nation from wilderness with nothing but their bare hands and a Bible, so widely accepted as fact today, is nothing but pure propaganda from the era of the Revolutionary War.
Which, if it keeps going that way, will turn itself right around when the salaries (company expense) gets high enough to justify rewrites.
Assuming it's possible for salaries to get that high. It's also possible it will correct because more people learn COBOL to chase after the high salaries.
Because there still exists in the world companies and people that have priorities other than "the latest l33t technology".
Why can't we just port everything over to a newer language and be done with it?
Assuming the hardware can run the newer language of course... But you still have to face the same basic problem, in a few years your l33t "newer language" will no longer be l33t or newer - it's be the stodgy old stuff that only crusty old farts program on. What then? Go through the same exercise every five to ten years?
That sounds more like a recipe for keeping programmers employed, regardless of value, than it does for keeping a system stable and operational. (Which a large part of why IT is often viewed with such suspicion in many quarters - because the constant rewrite/upgrade cycle that keeps the IT departments e-penis turgid rarely seems to provide much of a ROI.)
Doesn't it cost more to keep paying these rare programmers than to just update/convert/replace the systems?
A handful of (COBOL) programmers costs the company just a couple of million dollars a year for a stable functional system. A stable of ($l33t_language) programmers costs about the same, plus the potential costs of hardware changes, plus the potential for months of disruption or loss of data...
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
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· Score: 1
Walk onto a waiting 18-wheeler parked in a nearby parking lot. Drive to a new location and park near where you want the house to be located. Walk off the truck and to the new location.
That's already possible, and widely done, without the need for legs. Houses and cabins are moved routinely. (I mean units designed to be moved, not Mega-Mover style.) The smallest such cabin I've seen is about three times the size of this thing and much more comfortable.
Not to mention under the current system you don't need to maintain the legs.
I could see this being useful as a command post for emergency services (say in a place with bad roads, or one where wheeled vehicles can't access for some reason.)
It's entirely too small to serve as any kind of a real command post, not to mention that by the time it reaches any significant distance off-road, the emergency will be long over. We already have tents and cell phones, this thing gives you nothing beyond the cool factor and has significant drawbacks.
"I found the Stock Drive Products site and it looks like an extensive catalog, but one really needs to know what one is looking for and I don't think we're there yet."
They are selling a fun experience for kids that is short on science, short on education and high on "fun". It's something a Great America or Disneyland designer would come up with.
You see the fruit not of amusement park designers but of decades of educators trying to make education 'fun' rather than educational.
I am sorry for stating that Mid-West and Easter U.S. are primary candidates for a rail road. The reality is that the whole freaking United States is a good candidate.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Among other things, we were talking about passenger trains - and you suddenly switch the topic to freight, being ignorant of how large a percentage of freight goes on trains already.
And once again you're right about me being ignorant. It is extremely hard to be objective when your government spends billions of dollars on a useless war in somewhere far away while cutting local programs.
Your objectivity isn't in question, your level of knowledge is. Once again, you try and change the topic.
I'm basing the $100 ticket price on Acela pricing. You can get the tickets for sub $100 at times.
However, Acela is subsidized, doesn't run on dedicated rails, and doesn't run fast enough to be really competitive with the airlines. You are basing your ticket price for your proposed train by comparing apples to oranges. Creating an 'Acela done right' is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars just to connect Boston to Washington - tickets won't be $100.
I DO realize that the cross country trip in a place like the US would be an issue. Thats the perfect time to use an airline. The bread and butter routes for trains should be regional intercity routes.
Like I said in one of the other responses, its not like all of this stuff hasn't been dealt with in other places. In Europe if I want to travel locally I take a train, if I want to travel across the continent I'd fly.
But you fail to realize that outside of Southern California and the Bos-Wash corridor - the United States isn't anything like Europe. There simply aren't any regional intercity routes that will come anywhere even close to paying their own way outside of those small areas. I really wish people would learn that the US isn't simply a large Europe.
The spoke/hub system I mentioned was more of a way to connect point to point, not so much taking into account hub to hub to hub to local.
Well, you have to take into account hub to hub to hub to local because it's an inescapable consequence of spoke/hub. There's a lot more to the US than the few large hubs that are (more or less) connected point-to-point under your scheme.
It would be better for the environment, better for wallets, and help ease congestion as a few dangerously busy airports.
Railroad tracks are hardly environmentally friendly, it's only better for wallets when subsidized, and any significant train system will suffer the same congestion on the tracks and at the stations.
Don't forget to account for the share of costs of the ATC system of radars, centers and towers to track and route the jet. This would significantly outweigh the cost of similar systems for a maglev train.
Actually, trains have a fairly sophisticated traffic control system of their very own to prevent a fast train from getting behind a slow one, to prevent two trains from towards each on the same track, etc... etc... it's a big job because there will always be a lot less 2D train track than there is 3D airspace.
I won't go into airport congestion, weather delays and other cost additions for aircraft in flight.
Nor do you go into congestion at the train terminal (cars, pedestrians, and trains), or weather delays on the track, and other cost additions for a train in service. (Not to mention that airspace is free, while tracks require considerable maintenance.)
A maglev train parked on a siding should absorb only sufficient power for safety, communications and environmental (comfort) systems.
An aircraft parked on the apron only draws sufficient power for safety, communications and environmental (comfort) systems.
There is a belief that children need a backyard (I honestly never understood this one at all, what good is a backyard when your friends live 10 miles away?)
In a reality where houses with kids are ten miles apart, this is a valid point. Here in the US where you have kids next door, and down the block, etc... etc... it's nonsense.
Americans in general are very resistant to rail travel for some reason, mostly because the only experience they have with it is a friend of a friend who rode Amtrak once.
No, it goes back into history - Americans avoid rails because except for fairly short distances, airplanes are far faster and cheaper even when compared to dedicated trains on dedicated tracks.
Alternatively, put maglev lines between airports that are close together but still see lots of traffic. I'm thinking something like Mineapolis to Chicago since that is what I am familiar with. Generally, if you want to fly into or out of Minneapolis, it is cheaper to go through Chicago. It would save a lot of time, money, and polution if you could ride the maglev between them.
How, precisely, does building tens of billions of dollars worth of tracks save you money? In the end, that's the real problem with rail travel - it never has been profitable in the US, ever. Amtrak was formed because the US railroads were ready to simply abandon passenger service entirely because dropping freight revenue (from competition with trucks) made it an expensive luxury and no longer viable in it's old role (as a loss leader to advertise the railroads freight services).
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, at least read the summary if you can't be bothered to read TFA
Unstable? Maybe to your average Joe Luser who, ignorant of computers, let programs install all kinds of crap in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and WIN.INI... Or didn't know how to properly set paths, or any one of dozens of other ways to tune his machine. But to those who did know how to tune, and how to clean up after crappy installs, Win 3.X was very stable.
I think Windows 3.X got a bad rep because, unlike vanilla DOS systems, you actually had to know what you were doing to set everything up properly. Few people bothered.
It should steep much as it does on Earth, as it steeps via diffusion.
WRONG.
Cryptography only needs to be strong enough to protect the encoded contents for as long as said contents retain value. It does not need to remain unbroken forever.
Wrong again - if it is worth the time of those attempting to decrypt your initial message, then it is worth their time to break the second layer.
When one has used ones celebrity status primarily to advance ones political beliefs and to lend unwarranted weight to claims in fields where one has no expertise - yes, it reduces the worth of the message because it calls into question the motives behind the message.
I've never understood why people leave their keys laying about anyhow. My keys are in pocket, or at night they are in the top drawer of my wife's jewelry armoire...
Probably my Navy training showing through - a key in its designated stowage, on a lanyard around your neck, in your pocket, or in your hand in use. No exceptions. A key is treated as if it were the thing the key controls access to. (I once narrowly missed Captain's Mast once because I laid a very important set of keys on the console so I could pick up a pen to sign a log...)
Which is why my neighbors know the people authorized to be in my house in my absence - *and* have my contact info.
I rather suspect it's the opposite - 99.9% of consumers aren't in the Slashdot demographic that goes out of it's way to find reasons to hate and denigrate. I'm surprised the every buy and/or play any games at all frankly.
In addition to the factors mentioned by others, at the extremely low [freezing] temps involved - differential contraction of various parts is a big issue. It can crack camera lenses as the metal body shrinks, crack circuit traces inside of PCBs as the metal shrinks more than the plastic, tear pins from ICs as the IC and PCB shrink at different rates...
In addition to the factors mentioned by others, at the extreme [freezing] temps involved - differential contraction is a big issue. It can crack camera lenses as the metal body shrinks, crack circuit traces inside of PCBs as the metal shrinks more than the plastic, tear pins from ICs as the IC and PCB shrink at different rates...
Government agencies and archivists have been aware of the problem since the late 1970's when NASA started having problems with decaying [magnetic] tapes containing data from various probes that required obsolescent or obsolete computers to read.
Along with tons of official correspondence, internal publications, invoices, drawings, plans, etc... etc...
They are more efficient on paper, but in real world engineering, not so much.
But much of the theoretical performance gain is eaten up by the need to provide a source of power - and for any significant payload, that power source dominates the mass budget and eats up almost all of the theoretical advantage. You do end up going faster, but you do so with much smaller payload.
The answer to the latter question is actually "no"... (To the surprise of many.)
Some key, early, dates in the Apollo program:
Alert readers will do the math and note that Apollo was being designed as Mercury was flying. One outcome of this is that lesson learned in Mercury aren't applied to Apollo, with tragic consequences. As the Mercury program progressed, they had great difficulty in modifying and maintaining the capsules - as a result, Gemini was designed for much easier access to its internal systems. Apollo wasn't, and the resulting cramped conditions inside the capsule during assembly, modification, and checkout were implicated as being among the causes of the Apollo 1 fire.
Another result is that the Apollo CSM struggled with its two gimbal guidance system which greatly limited maneuvers due to the need to avoid gimbal lock. Gemini shows that a three gimbal system is more flexible and less dangerous - but the design for Apollo's guidance system was already frozen.
And the Google Worship by Slashdot editors reaches, and I hardly thought it possible, a new low.
The surviving settlers, on the other hand, were mostly people backed up by Big Money back home. Big Money that provided tools, supplies, and materials that couldn't be manufactured in the Colonies. Big Money made it's investment back when the Colonies began shipping tobacco and other agricultural products back the homeland.
The romantic notion of the colonists being rugged and completely self reliant individualists who carved a nation from wilderness with nothing but their bare hands and a Bible, so widely accepted as fact today, is nothing but pure propaganda from the era of the Revolutionary War.
Assuming it's possible for salaries to get that high. It's also possible it will correct because more people learn COBOL to chase after the high salaries.
Because there still exists in the world companies and people that have priorities other than "the latest l33t technology".
Assuming the hardware can run the newer language of course... But you still have to face the same basic problem, in a few years your l33t "newer language" will no longer be l33t or newer - it's be the stodgy old stuff that only crusty old farts program on. What then? Go through the same exercise every five to ten years?
That sounds more like a recipe for keeping programmers employed, regardless of value, than it does for keeping a system stable and operational. (Which a large part of why IT is often viewed with such suspicion in many quarters - because the constant rewrite/upgrade cycle that keeps the IT departments e-penis turgid rarely seems to provide much of a ROI.)
A handful of (COBOL) programmers costs the company just a couple of million dollars a year for a stable functional system. A stable of ($l33t_language) programmers costs about the same, plus the potential costs of hardware changes, plus the potential for months of disruption or loss of data...
That's already possible, and widely done, without the need for legs. Houses and cabins are moved routinely. (I mean units designed to be moved, not Mega-Mover style.) The smallest such cabin I've seen is about three times the size of this thing and much more comfortable.
Not to mention under the current system you don't need to maintain the legs.
It's entirely too small to serve as any kind of a real command post, not to mention that by the time it reaches any significant distance off-road, the emergency will be long over. We already have tents and cell phones, this thing gives you nothing beyond the cool factor and has significant drawbacks.
"I found the Stock Drive Products site and it looks like an extensive catalog, but one really needs to know what one is looking for and I don't think we're there yet."
There's your problem right there.
You see the fruit not of amusement park designers but of decades of educators trying to make education 'fun' rather than educational.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Among other things, we were talking about passenger trains - and you suddenly switch the topic to freight, being ignorant of how large a percentage of freight goes on trains already.
Your objectivity isn't in question, your level of knowledge is. Once again, you try and change the topic.
However, Acela is subsidized, doesn't run on dedicated rails, and doesn't run fast enough to be really competitive with the airlines. You are basing your ticket price for your proposed train by comparing apples to oranges. Creating an 'Acela done right' is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars just to connect Boston to Washington - tickets won't be $100.
But you fail to realize that outside of Southern California and the Bos-Wash corridor - the United States isn't anything like Europe. There simply aren't any regional intercity routes that will come anywhere even close to paying their own way outside of those small areas. I really wish people would learn that the US isn't simply a large Europe.
Well, you have to take into account hub to hub to hub to local because it's an inescapable consequence of spoke/hub. There's a lot more to the US than the few large hubs that are (more or less) connected point-to-point under your scheme.
Railroad tracks are hardly environmentally friendly, it's only better for wallets when subsidized, and any significant train system will suffer the same congestion on the tracks and at the stations.
Actually, trains have a fairly sophisticated traffic control system of their very own to prevent a fast train from getting behind a slow one, to prevent two trains from towards each on the same track, etc... etc... it's a big job because there will always be a lot less 2D train track than there is 3D airspace.
Nor do you go into congestion at the train terminal (cars, pedestrians, and trains), or weather delays on the track, and other cost additions for a train in service. (Not to mention that airspace is free, while tracks require considerable maintenance.)
An aircraft parked on the apron only draws sufficient power for safety, communications and environmental (comfort) systems.
In a reality where houses with kids are ten miles apart, this is a valid point. Here in the US where you have kids next door, and down the block, etc... etc... it's nonsense.
No, it goes back into history - Americans avoid rails because except for fairly short distances, airplanes are far faster and cheaper even when compared to dedicated trains on dedicated tracks.
How, precisely, does building tens of billions of dollars worth of tracks save you money? In the end, that's the real problem with rail travel - it never has been profitable in the US, ever. Amtrak was formed because the US railroads were ready to simply abandon passenger service entirely because dropping freight revenue (from competition with trucks) made it an expensive luxury and no longer viable in it's old role (as a loss leader to advertise the railroads freight services).