There are some rocks of significant size immediately behind the rover. Those are certainly large enough for the rover to get hung on or to flip it over on its side. I'm surprised the lander touched down within just a few feet of rocks like that. Either their hazard avoidance system looks only directly beneath the footprint of the lander, or it failed to properly detect those rocks. Had it landed just 50% closer to those rocks, the ramp the rover descended would have been right on them..
Are you saying that Luna-9 was controlled by a Turing-complete computer? From what I can discover it only had a programmable timing device, which would trigger a fixed list of tasks after variable delays. Stuff like shutting off the main engines was done by a physical switch that detected when the lander was just above the surface. I stand by my comment that it was not controlled by anything remotely resembling a modern computer.
In case anyone cares, the first soft moon landing was on January 31, 1966 by the Soviet lander Lana-9. It still boggles my mind how they were able to achieve that without anything remotely resembling a modern computing device.
Kind of embarrassing for Slashdot to post this now, considering the truck has already been found. Apparently the container was opened, but it appears (at least most of) the Cobalt-60 is still intact.
Considering the infrastructure and expense required to ship something like this (special shielded containers, etc), why don't they include a tracking device? Even a cheapo cell phone can be used as a tracking device, which is better than nothing.
This isn't a bank but an exchange, which I presume buys bitcoins with real currency. Thus they may build up large amounts of bitcoins that they sell for cash when they think the market timing is right. So they would own those bitcoins, since they bought them with money. In other words, that is their own giant private wallet and someone noticed the bitcoins (a lot of them) had been moved around or consolidated in some way.
There is no "default install". Raspberry Pis don't even come with SD cards. You download whatever OS image you want and extract it to your SD card, and there are many to choose from, both "official" and 3rd party.
I hate to state the obvious, but no one controller design will be comfortable to such a wide variety of people. Either you have to target the core demographic responsible for the bulk of game sales, or you offer more than one size controller. Anything else sounds like a waste of time.
Spamming them to death with garbage data would be the best way to take control of the issue. Since the information is unencrypted, posting gibberish data to their server will be a breeze. It would be even better to have a registry of device IDs that people can opt-in so that many people can be spamming them on behalf of other device IDs. Better yet is if the device IDs are serial, then the whole range can be randomly spammed. It doesn't have to go to the point of DDOSing them. Just throwing some bad data at them would be enough to totally screw up their ability to mine / sell that data.
Exactly. The very fact that he asked Slashdot this question instead of directly asking his supervisor what was meant by "communication skills" illustrates the bulk of his problem. His tone also indicates a general disdain for authority or those more experienced or potentially "better" than himself. All in all he is probably insecure both professionally and socially and needs to mature in general.
Sounds a lot better than the home-brew technique I've use a bunch of times in the past: print the pattern on glossy photo paper using a laser printer, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner off the paper to the copper breadboard, then etch in acid bath. The part that usually screws up is transferring the toner from the paper to the circuit board using an iron.
Great idea but the issue then is how exactly would you charge for this power when anyone with some know how could build a receiver to grab the "free" power?
I don't care WHAT lights my car on fire; I only care how likely it is that my car will light on fire.
Hang on a second. You make it sound like gasoline or batteries set your car on fire, and then your "car" is simply burning. You do realize the gasoline is 99% of what is burning, and not really the "car" itself, right? So there's more to it than the cause or frequency, but the nature of the fire itself. Gasoline is particularly bad because it is a liquid that typically flows all over and around the scene of an accident, then it is the evaporated vapor of the fuel that combusts openly in the air. Essentially, it will spread and consume the entire car and surrounding area because of its liquid nature. Lithium batteries burn in an entirely different manner. It seems likely to me that a Tesla battery fire would be much more contained and thus less dangerous than a gasoline fire.
Your logic is like saying that headaches and strokes are equivalent medical events involving the brain, and you'd rather have strokes since they occur less often. I don't think most people would share that kind of opinion.
News just in: IrDA wants its acronym back. On a more serious note, I really did like IrDA. It was slow as crap and the range sucked, but at one point in time, pretty much EVERYTHING had IrDA support. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, HPCs, etc. You could buy serial dongles to add to any PC for $5 or so. It was the go-to fallback to transfer a file or data between two devices that had disparate storage card types (PC-Card vs CF cards, etc), or you didn't have cables to connect them up directly. Bluetooth has sort of replaced it, but you can't just bit-bang communication with a bluetooth device using a microcontroller and two 25 cent components. Plus Bluetooth has been implemented by OEMs as more of a method to connect dumb peripherals than a method of communicating directly between devices.
It's kind of ironic Ebert was mentioned when it comes to software reviews. What Siskel and Ebert did for decades was give their opinion on works of art created in the film medium. Of course they would take into consideration the technical achievements of the film (cinematography, timing, etc), but even if a film was implemented perfectly, they would still give it a bad review if it wasn't entertaining or worthy artistically as a whole. Obviously the whole thing is quite subjective.
Ebert famously stated that "Video games can never be art", and although many disagree with him on that, he does make a point why a "Siskel and Ebert" kind of reviewing doesn't really work when it comes to software. By what criteria is software to be evaluated? Certainly the artistic side (and do utilities and the like even have an artistic side, especially if they're using the platform's standard widgets and GUI elements?) can't be a major factor, unless we're talking about games. Obviously then that depends on what you even mean by "software". Are you talking about applications? Apps designed to streamline access to a web-based service (Facebook, Twitter, etc)? Games?
For example, when evaluating the official Facebook app, do you simply compare how well it works and many features it contains compared to the web version, or do you also get into issues about Facebook more generically (like privacy, etc). Do you get into details like how many user interactions are required to accomplish certain tasks, start up times, and other technical aspects that can be objectively and directly measured?
Another problem is just pure volume. How many applications are produced in a year compared to films? So how do you decide what applications to go to the trouble of reviewing? Stick to the top 100 lists by popularity? Obviously that method would suck in a number of ways. It is easily in the realm of human possibility to watch all feature-length movies that will be shown at the average movie theater, but when it comes to apps, it's simply impossible to even try them all.
When it comes to software found in app stores, it seems to me that the simple 5 star reviews by users is working pretty well. Apps quickly accumulate 1 star reviews if they are greedy (very little free content, or it costs a fortune to unlock things individually when it they should just sell the app outright, etc), buggy (people will quickly butcher an app if it is unstable), are just simply crap. Of course the 5 star reviews can be manipulated by shills, but that can't erase the 1 star reviews. That's why it is very helpful when app stores show individual counts (how many 5 star reviews, 4 star, etc). If you see a lot of 1 star reviews and the app still has a 4+ on average, then that is a warning flag and a quick perusal of individual reviews will reveal what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm saying the margin for error seemed needlessly minuscule given the stakes involved.
There are some rocks of significant size immediately behind the rover. Those are certainly large enough for the rover to get hung on or to flip it over on its side. I'm surprised the lander touched down within just a few feet of rocks like that. Either their hazard avoidance system looks only directly beneath the footprint of the lander, or it failed to properly detect those rocks. Had it landed just 50% closer to those rocks, the ramp the rover descended would have been right on them..
Are you saying that Luna-9 was controlled by a Turing-complete computer? From what I can discover it only had a programmable timing device, which would trigger a fixed list of tasks after variable delays. Stuff like shutting off the main engines was done by a physical switch that detected when the lander was just above the surface. I stand by my comment that it was not controlled by anything remotely resembling a modern computer.
In case anyone cares, the first soft moon landing was on January 31, 1966 by the Soviet lander Lana-9. It still boggles my mind how they were able to achieve that without anything remotely resembling a modern computing device.
What is this, ActiveX reborn?
They heard about Amazon's autonomous drone delivery and thought they'd quit while they were ahead.
We can thank eBay for the existence of PayPal. Nuff said.
Kind of embarrassing for Slashdot to post this now, considering the truck has already been found. Apparently the container was opened, but it appears (at least most of) the Cobalt-60 is still intact.
Considering the infrastructure and expense required to ship something like this (special shielded containers, etc), why don't they include a tracking device? Even a cheapo cell phone can be used as a tracking device, which is better than nothing.
Which would then bring me to ask why not just use that medium?
So by your logic Facebook or Google+ don't need to exist because we have insecure email already?
This isn't a bank but an exchange, which I presume buys bitcoins with real currency. Thus they may build up large amounts of bitcoins that they sell for cash when they think the market timing is right. So they would own those bitcoins, since they bought them with money. In other words, that is their own giant private wallet and someone noticed the bitcoins (a lot of them) had been moved around or consolidated in some way.
I guess you missed the part where Facebook rewrote their Android app from HTML5 to a native implementation less than a year ago:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/
There is no "default install". Raspberry Pis don't even come with SD cards. You download whatever OS image you want and extract it to your SD card, and there are many to choose from, both "official" and 3rd party.
I hate to state the obvious, but no one controller design will be comfortable to such a wide variety of people. Either you have to target the core demographic responsible for the bulk of game sales, or you offer more than one size controller. Anything else sounds like a waste of time.
Spamming them to death with garbage data would be the best way to take control of the issue. Since the information is unencrypted, posting gibberish data to their server will be a breeze. It would be even better to have a registry of device IDs that people can opt-in so that many people can be spamming them on behalf of other device IDs. Better yet is if the device IDs are serial, then the whole range can be randomly spammed. It doesn't have to go to the point of DDOSing them. Just throwing some bad data at them would be enough to totally screw up their ability to mine / sell that data.
I'm pretty sure sunlight is responsible for 99.9% of the rest of the fresh water on the planet too.
Exactly. The very fact that he asked Slashdot this question instead of directly asking his supervisor what was meant by "communication skills" illustrates the bulk of his problem. His tone also indicates a general disdain for authority or those more experienced or potentially "better" than himself. All in all he is probably insecure both professionally and socially and needs to mature in general.
Sounds a lot better than the home-brew technique I've use a bunch of times in the past: print the pattern on glossy photo paper using a laser printer, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner off the paper to the copper breadboard, then etch in acid bath. The part that usually screws up is transferring the toner from the paper to the circuit board using an iron.
Great idea but the issue then is how exactly would you charge for this power when anyone with some know how could build a receiver to grab the "free" power?
Doesn't seem to stop them from collecting money in the UK for essentially the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
I don't care WHAT lights my car on fire; I only care how likely it is that my car will light on fire.
Hang on a second. You make it sound like gasoline or batteries set your car on fire, and then your "car" is simply burning. You do realize the gasoline is 99% of what is burning, and not really the "car" itself, right? So there's more to it than the cause or frequency, but the nature of the fire itself. Gasoline is particularly bad because it is a liquid that typically flows all over and around the scene of an accident, then it is the evaporated vapor of the fuel that combusts openly in the air. Essentially, it will spread and consume the entire car and surrounding area because of its liquid nature. Lithium batteries burn in an entirely different manner. It seems likely to me that a Tesla battery fire would be much more contained and thus less dangerous than a gasoline fire.
Your logic is like saying that headaches and strokes are equivalent medical events involving the brain, and you'd rather have strokes since they occur less often. I don't think most people would share that kind of opinion.
I think it is a misuse of the word "bank" using it to describe these websites.
If they manage to pull that off they should name it something like "OnLive". Name just seems catchy and fitting to me.
News just in: IrDA wants its acronym back. On a more serious note, I really did like IrDA. It was slow as crap and the range sucked, but at one point in time, pretty much EVERYTHING had IrDA support. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, HPCs, etc. You could buy serial dongles to add to any PC for $5 or so. It was the go-to fallback to transfer a file or data between two devices that had disparate storage card types (PC-Card vs CF cards, etc), or you didn't have cables to connect them up directly. Bluetooth has sort of replaced it, but you can't just bit-bang communication with a bluetooth device using a microcontroller and two 25 cent components. Plus Bluetooth has been implemented by OEMs as more of a method to connect dumb peripherals than a method of communicating directly between devices.
This is what we can look forward to with autonomous vehicles. In fact they should be able to average even faster speeds than that, en masse.
It's kind of ironic Ebert was mentioned when it comes to software reviews. What Siskel and Ebert did for decades was give their opinion on works of art created in the film medium. Of course they would take into consideration the technical achievements of the film (cinematography, timing, etc), but even if a film was implemented perfectly, they would still give it a bad review if it wasn't entertaining or worthy artistically as a whole. Obviously the whole thing is quite subjective.
Ebert famously stated that "Video games can never be art", and although many disagree with him on that, he does make a point why a "Siskel and Ebert" kind of reviewing doesn't really work when it comes to software. By what criteria is software to be evaluated? Certainly the artistic side (and do utilities and the like even have an artistic side, especially if they're using the platform's standard widgets and GUI elements?) can't be a major factor, unless we're talking about games. Obviously then that depends on what you even mean by "software". Are you talking about applications? Apps designed to streamline access to a web-based service (Facebook, Twitter, etc)? Games?
For example, when evaluating the official Facebook app, do you simply compare how well it works and many features it contains compared to the web version, or do you also get into issues about Facebook more generically (like privacy, etc). Do you get into details like how many user interactions are required to accomplish certain tasks, start up times, and other technical aspects that can be objectively and directly measured?
Another problem is just pure volume. How many applications are produced in a year compared to films? So how do you decide what applications to go to the trouble of reviewing? Stick to the top 100 lists by popularity? Obviously that method would suck in a number of ways. It is easily in the realm of human possibility to watch all feature-length movies that will be shown at the average movie theater, but when it comes to apps, it's simply impossible to even try them all.
When it comes to software found in app stores, it seems to me that the simple 5 star reviews by users is working pretty well. Apps quickly accumulate 1 star reviews if they are greedy (very little free content, or it costs a fortune to unlock things individually when it they should just sell the app outright, etc), buggy (people will quickly butcher an app if it is unstable), are just simply crap. Of course the 5 star reviews can be manipulated by shills, but that can't erase the 1 star reviews. That's why it is very helpful when app stores show individual counts (how many 5 star reviews, 4 star, etc). If you see a lot of 1 star reviews and the app still has a 4+ on average, then that is a warning flag and a quick perusal of individual reviews will reveal what's going on.
Um, that links right back here, and now I'm caught in an infinite loop until a family member comes along and breaks me. Thanks.