Testing for caching is fairly straightforward. For example, I have login accounts on several remote machines where I can put up web pages. To learn whether my home ISP is caching, I login to one of my remote accounts and to a tail -f on the server's access_log file. Next, I fetch a page using the browser at home. I see the GET appear on the remote server's log. I hit the Reload button. I see a second GET appear on the remote server's log. I conclude that nobody along the route has cached the page.
Maybe I hit Reload a few more times, to cover the remote possibility that caching is done only on a string of requests for the same page.
There are lots of ISP behaviors that can be detected easily if you have access to logs on a few remote machines.
Impossible criteria? Hmmm... I don't seem to see any subset of the requirements that couldn't be in one language. Granted, I can't think of a language that does them all, but that's not what "impossible" means.
What specifically points in the stated requirements aren't possible in the same language?
Hey, wow! Someone actually replied to one of my comments in a friendly fashion. I thought there was a requirement that all replies insult the original writer. I guess I was wrong.
Also, it looks like at least one other person has seen the pattern of bosses asking people to find the best answer to a question whose answer has already been determined by management. I wonder if there are others who have noticed this?
Well, I'd try to get your boss into a discussion with the (unstated) goal of trying to learn what language the boss has already decided is the correct answer.
When people have a long shopping list of specific details, it almost always means that they have decided and have set up the requirements so that only the one answer is correct.
This is, of course, a conventional way of doing "open" hiring or purchasing. You just write up the specs so that only one person or product can fit. It works just as well with software.
Ugly piece of junk? I dunno; I've had the Kyocera smartphone for about a year now, and most people who see it think it looks kinda cool. They're really impressed when I demo downloading tunes off the net and playing them through the tinny little speaker.
The really important thing about this versus the older palm/visor PDAs with phone plugin is that the Kyocera fits in my pocket. If it didn't, it wouldn't be in my pocket, so I wouldn't be able to use it.
OTOH, I've seen some nice demos of the iPAQ and other PDAs running linux. Now if it were possible to get the phone companies to cooperate, we could have a real computer with a real phone in our pockets. But having a real computer like that in your pocket isn't as gratifying if you can't get the local monopoly to let you send and receive packets.
Nope; I was talking about the US Supreme Court. As I recall, what happened was that they (in effect) threw out the Florida Supreme Court's decisions and thus decided the election themselves.
Also, in a democracy like the US, it is not only the right, but the duty of all citizens to study such things and form their own opinions. A law degree is specifically not required of citizens who wish to participate in elections. Ad hominem attacks like "did you go to law school?" are appropriate for some other forms of government, but utterly irrelevant in a supposed democracy.
(And in the US, any "dumbass" is allowed to vote.;-)
Ah, it doesn't matter, anyway. The Supreme Court just set a precedent that says that courts can ignore ballots and state laws dealing with how they are to be counted, and "elect" someone by a vote of the court itself.
One of the more "interesting" provisions of this proposed follow-on to the DMCA is that companies will no longer have to include in their EULA a ban on publishing criticism. The SSSCA will make negative criticism illegal by default. Then we'll be allowed to publish all the praise we want, but if we publish any facts that show problems with a product, we will be classified as terrorists.
There's strong corporate support for this law. Sounds like we might be in for some fun legal stories over the next few years.
Huh? Go to handhelds.org and look at the specs for the various linux handhelds. Few if any of them have hard disks; everything is run out of memory. This doesn't seem to have been much of a problem with linux (or any of the unix clones). A "ramdisk" isn't exactly a new concept in the unix environment.
In fact, this sort of trick was exactly why the unix "block device" abstraction was invented more than a quarter century ago. It allows you to have a file system on anything that can store data in addressable chunks called "blocks". Memory works just fine for this.
An old trick for speeding up unix systems has been to use memory for the/tmp directory (and symlink/usr/tmp to/tmp, or vice-versa). This causes most apps' temp files to be in main memory, and eliminates rotational delays for these files.
There's no real problem with mapping the entire file system to memory.
So how is Everquest any less "real" than our monetary system? After all, most of the world's money now consists solely of magnetized spots on disks (and backup tapes). Even currency has value only because the players agree that it has value.
Yet a lot of people, including financial experts and economists who should know better, persist in treating money as if it were a real commodity.
The reason the broadband providers are finding the Internet expensive is that they're doing something that other comm providers don't: They are filtering and censoring the traffic. Just providing bandwidth (including a per-subscriber cap) isn't all that expensive. But if you also try to provide the software and management layers that examing the packets and filter, it rapidly becomes very costly.
Imagine if the phone company or the postal service were to try to do something similar. They'd have to hire people to monitor all your calls and letters, to make sure you weren't violating any local ordinances. This would cost hundreds or thousands of time what the basic service costs. The Internet isn't really any different.
"But we can't let things like CodeRed or Nimda bring down the traffic." Nonsense. You just do what the phone system does. You limit each subscriber to a certain bandwidth, and charge a lot more when they go over. Give people pointers to security-related web sites and let them fix the problems themselves. If they refuse, you don't need to block everyone's port 80; you just throttle the few machines that are flooding the wire with their traffic.
For that matter, why do ISPs provide email service? This has nothing to do with basic IP service. With an always-on connection, it's easy to do direct point-to point email. I can't get cable Internet service without email bundled, though I don't use it. This is yet one more reason that the cable companies are finding the Internet very expensive.
Why don't any of them offer just basic IP service, with none of the higher-level junk that my machine can very well do itself? If they did this, and billed separately for services like port blocking, they'd find that the Internet can be provided at a good profit. But it's those add-on "free" services that they provide whether you want them or not that are dragging them down.
As I understand it, the "cracking" in this case was a test to verify that people were following the password policy that the company's management had published. The only way you can possibly verify that such a policy is being followed is by running a password cracker against the password file(s).
What the company was saying, in effect, was "Yes, we have a policy, but if anyone attempts to verify that we are following it, we will have them arrested and tried for criminal activity."
The Oregon courts seem to agree with this.
Meanwhile, of course, the word has probably gotten out to the real criminal types that Intel is actively making sure that there are no internal audits of the safety of their passwords. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the likely consequences of this.
> It's nice to know MS can conceive of it. Too bad they can't *build* it.
And note that the link was to a patent. This means that you can't build it, either, without being hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit from the biggest bully on the block.
If the courts uphold this patent, we can expect that Microsoft will be getting royalties from anyone who incorporates any DRM into their products.
Excuse me, but if a company sells virus-detecting software, and it contains code that explicitly ignores certain viruses, wouldn't this be an open-and-shut case of consumer fraud?
If I were working at McAffee, I'd probably be trying to make sure that their legal staff is working on the problem of a disclaimer in the fine print that covers this. And it would have to be worded in such a way that most purchasers (including the legal staff of corporate purchasers) wouldn't realize that the disclaimer is talking about the fact that they are knowingly making their product fail at the sole job that it's purchased for.
Yeah; I just wrote this up as a fake news item. I was real disappointed that it didn't ger rated "funny". What do you have to do to get this rating?
Of course, one problem may have been that the person who rated it didn't think it qualified as humor, because this is probably what will happen.
It can be difficult to write satire. By the time you finish writing, the world has passed you by and done something even worse than your poor attempt at satire.
Also, note that satellite radios that function as modems are quite available, and are in use in many parts of the world without ground-line access. With such a radio modem, you can get Internet access from pretty much anywhere (though coverage at the poles is a bit spotty).
As part of the US Government's shutdown of the only Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Somalia, Microsoft has announced a new povision of their pending punishment from the US Justice Department. The Microsoft subsidiary msn.com will now provide Internet service to Somalia. It will be free for the first month, after which market rates will determine the cost of further service.
As part of the arrangement, all equipment and servers in Somalia will be converted to the latest Microsoft products. Previously, the service had been provided with old hardware running such unbranded systems as linux and FreeBsd. Microsoft and US government spokesmen claim that this will provide for improved service, at least during times when the new computers are up and running.
The CIA has expressed a desire to cooperate with the installation. A spokesman said that previous Internet gateways in Somalia had been "overly difficult for information gathering, due to their support for unbreakablel encrypion." The new systems will presumably cooperate fully with the recently-announced email virus that uses Microsoft Outlook to install keylogger software.
Of course, in many scientific circles, "fossil" is routinely used to refer to any distinct objects or materials found in rocks. The term doesn't just mean remains of once-living organisms. Thus one reads of bits of "fossil gases" entrapped in cracks or bubbles in rocks or ice; these are used to learn about ancient atmospheric conditions. Sedimentary strata contain "fossil rock" as tiny inclusions. And so on.
But still, 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth didn't have much in the way of solid crust, and most of that has long-since been subducted and melted. So we may never have many details from back then. This makes it a bit difficult to find data for or against the "colliding planets" hypothesis. The best argument so far isn't fossil at all. It comes from physicists' attempts to explain how a pair of planets so closely matched as the Earth and its moon can end up in the orbits that we see today. Orbital mechanics seem to preclude this, except as the outcome of a grazing collision between two planet-sized objects.
As a separate subject, though, geologists do say that even if this collision happened, it probably has little if anything to do with the formation of the Pacific Ocean. From what has been learned of plate tectonics in the past decades, it seems that oceans and continents have come and gone many times. The presence of such a large, circular ocean at this time is somewhat of an accident, and wasn't really true at several times in the past billion years.
Actually, dinosaurs didn't all disappear. At least six species survived, according to recent DNA studies. By whatever coincidence, they were all in the suborder that we call "birds".
The hypothesis that birds are dinosaurs was actually proposed early in the 1800's. The reaction of lots of scientists was the usual "That's an intriguing idea; where's your evidence?" It took more than a century for people to stumble onto convincing evidence. Most of the best evidence has been found in the last 30 years or so. Birds don't fossilize too well. Also, it seems that most of the few good bird fossils are in China, and political problems prevented much serious paleontological work there for a long time.
Also, it wasn't just frogs and salamanders that survived. Several species of mammals managed to hang on until things got better. This included a small tree-shrew-like proto-primate.
If this were the only evidence, you'd be right. When the impact hypothesis was first fielded, most scientists just said "Interesting; where's your evidence?" But over a couple of decades, geologists and paleontologists have done lots and lots of testing on strata around the world of that age. They keep turning up more and more data that is "consistent with" the impact hypothesis, and nothing that convincingly debunks it. By now, the evidence is overwhelming, so what was a weak hypothesis has elevated to a mostly-accepted theory.
Nowadays, if the face of so much consistent evidence, you'd have to have some really spectacular counter-evidence to be taken seriously. There are still scientists out there trying to debunk the idea, of course, but mostly they just keep turning up more evidence in favor of the impact. That's what this story was. One more of a chain of hundreds of findings that support the general idea of a major impact 65 million years ago.
Has anyone found strata anywhere that is well-dated and continuous across the 65-million-year age that doesn't show a thin anomalous layer and a radical change of fossils?
(Yes, there are continuous strata of around that age that can't be firmly dated. There are also strata that straddle the date but can't be shown to be continuous. None of these is evidence pro or con the impact.)
What does it have to do with nerd news? Well one thing that a few people have been pushing is funding for equipment and people to do a thorough study and census of small objects in the solar system. There could be such an object aimed to hit us Real Soon Now. We don't know. The sooner we can spot such things, the sooner we can do something to deflect them. If we don't, well, one of them will hit the Earth eventually. Maybe it'll hit next week; maybe it'll hit 30 million years from now.
There are roughly a thousand objects now known of km-size or greater that cross the Earth's orbit. None of the known objects will hit the Earth within a century or so. But we have no idea how many more may be out there.
We nerds are just the ones to find them. And knowledge of earlier disasters is one of the best ways to pry funding out of governments agencies.
Well, yeah; probably lots of people would guess at such a hypothesis. But it's not consistent with what is known about the 65-Million-year-old crater on the coast of Yucutan. You'd expect the crater to be near the middle of the Gulf, but it's not. And the crater itself is only maybe 1/10 the diameter f the Gulf.
Also, any geologist will probably tell you that the Gulf of Mexico is much older than that. It's really a very old feature of that part of the planet.
But this shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the idea. The scientific process isn't harmed by such wild guesses. They are often the start of interesting findings. The Gulf of Mexico does look like a "circular feature". It could be an impact crater. But apparently it isn't.
For that matter, the Pacific Ocian is also roughly circular. There has been lots of hypothesizing about this, including the idea that it's the scar left from when the moon was torn from the Earth by the impact of another planet. The scientific jury is still out on this one. After 4.5 billion years, there's not a whole lot of fossil evidence left...
This is six accesses. So I'd get $.06, right? But it's fairly obvious that the user actually made only one request, for the directory listing. The rest are the file-type icons. If I include files of even more types, I get even more money, right?
The really obvious thing here would be to have a flock of 1x1 gifs, and include references to all of them in all my "pages", with immediate expiration so your browser will download them every time.
"Padding the books" is really trivial here...
Re:I'd have a hard time taking this book seriously
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This attitude is, of course, why a lot of writers have used pseudonyms. For example, if Charles Dodson had published Alice in Wonderland under his own name, it would have really discredited his mathematical publications in a lot of people's minds.
OTOH, I'd guess that Adams publishes such writings under his own name with the idea of publicly tweaking the dummies who pigeonhole writers. He would probably classify you as an "induhvidual",
and you'd deserve the name.
You should also read his "Dilbert Future" book. It's tremendously funny, and very serious at the same time. And he's starting to look like a real prophet already...
In my (several decades) of experience, the main thing that causes software to always be late is the fact that all software must use things from an underlying "system", and these things are generally not entirely knowable by a programmer.
This is especially true in the case of proprietary systems. In this case, many details of the underlying system are intentionally hidden from the programmer, and can only be discovered. Even then, knowledge can only be partial, and future surprises can't even be predicted in principle.
In the case of Open Source software, the underlying system's behavior is in principle knowable. This helps greatly in the debugging process, since you can examine the lower-level software and reach a detailed understanding of any specific portion. But even in a fully open system like linux you are facing the fact that there is too much information for a single human to master.
In manufacturing, you can get specs for the low-level nuts and bolts. You can ask about properties and failure rates and get correct answers. With software on a proprietary system, you can't get such information at all. And on any system, including Open Source systems, such information may silently change with even the smallest system upgrade.
In physics, there are fundamental units (photons, electrons, etc.) that are all identical and whose behavior never changes. In software, the detailed behavior of a machine's opcodes may change from one machine to the next, even when they are the same model. So software can never have general equations or universal principles in the sense that physics has such things.
Also, in physics, the concept of a "hidden variable" is still in dispute after a century. In software, it's a fact of life. The makers of the computers have carefully hidden a great many significant details from the programmers. And they change these variables without notice.
As long as the low-level details can be hidden from the programmers, software can never be made into a reliable manufacturing process, or into any sort of science.
Slashdot Mirror
Testing for caching is fairly straightforward. For example, I have login accounts on several remote machines where I can put up web pages. To learn whether my home ISP is caching, I login to one of my remote accounts and to a tail -f on the server's access_log file. Next, I fetch a page using the browser at home. I see the GET appear on the remote server's log. I hit the Reload button. I see a second GET appear on the remote server's log. I conclude that nobody along the route has cached the page.
Maybe I hit Reload a few more times, to cover the remote possibility that caching is done only on a string of requests for the same page.
There are lots of ISP behaviors that can be detected easily if you have access to logs on a few remote machines.
Impossible criteria? Hmmm ... I don't seem to see any subset of the requirements that couldn't be in one language. Granted, I can't think of a language that does them all, but that's not what "impossible" means.
What specifically points in the stated requirements aren't possible in the same language?
Hey, wow! Someone actually replied to one of my comments in a friendly fashion. I thought there was a requirement that all replies insult the original writer. I guess I was wrong.
Also, it looks like at least one other person has seen the pattern of bosses asking people to find the best answer to a question whose answer has already been determined by management. I wonder if there are others who have noticed this?
Well, I'd try to get your boss into a discussion with the (unstated) goal of trying to learn what language the boss has already decided is the correct answer.
When people have a long shopping list of specific details, it almost always means that they have decided and have set up the requirements so that only the one answer is correct.
This is, of course, a conventional way of doing "open" hiring or purchasing. You just write up the specs so that only one person or product can fit. It works just as well with software.
Ugly piece of junk? I dunno; I've had the Kyocera smartphone for about a year now, and most people who see it think it looks kinda cool. They're really impressed when I demo downloading tunes off the net and playing them through the tinny little speaker.
The really important thing about this versus the older palm/visor PDAs with phone plugin is that the Kyocera fits in my pocket. If it didn't, it wouldn't be in my pocket, so I wouldn't be able to use it.
OTOH, I've seen some nice demos of the iPAQ and other PDAs running linux. Now if it were possible to get the phone companies to cooperate, we could have a real computer with a real phone in our pockets. But having a real computer like that in your pocket isn't as gratifying if you can't get the local monopoly to let you send and receive packets.
Nope; I was talking about the US Supreme Court. As I recall, what happened was that they (in effect) threw out the Florida Supreme Court's decisions and thus decided the election themselves.
;-)
Also, in a democracy like the US, it is not only the right, but the duty of all citizens to study such things and form their own opinions. A law degree is specifically not required of citizens who wish to participate in elections. Ad hominem attacks like "did you go to law school?" are appropriate for some other forms of government, but utterly irrelevant in a supposed democracy.
(And in the US, any "dumbass" is allowed to vote.
Probably George W, by the same 5-4 majority.
Ah, it doesn't matter, anyway. The Supreme Court just set a precedent that says that courts can ignore ballots and state laws dealing with how they are to be counted, and "elect" someone by a vote of the court itself.
One of the more "interesting" provisions of this proposed follow-on to the DMCA is that companies will no longer have to include in their EULA a ban on publishing criticism. The SSSCA will make negative criticism illegal by default. Then we'll be allowed to publish all the praise we want, but if we publish any facts that show problems with a product, we will be classified as terrorists.
There's strong corporate support for this law. Sounds like we might be in for some fun legal stories over the next few years.
Huh? Go to handhelds.org and look at the specs for the various linux handhelds. Few if any of them have hard disks; everything is run out of memory. This doesn't seem to have been much of a problem with linux (or any of the unix clones). A "ramdisk" isn't exactly a new concept in the unix environment.
/tmp directory (and symlink /usr/tmp to /tmp, or vice-versa). This causes most apps' temp files to be in main memory, and eliminates rotational delays for these files.
In fact, this sort of trick was exactly why the unix "block device" abstraction was invented more than a quarter century ago. It allows you to have a file system on anything that can store data in addressable chunks called "blocks". Memory works just fine for this.
An old trick for speeding up unix systems has been to use memory for the
There's no real problem with mapping the entire file system to memory.
So how is Everquest any less "real" than our monetary system? After all, most of the world's money now consists solely of magnetized spots on disks (and backup tapes). Even currency has value only because the players agree that it has value.
Yet a lot of people, including financial experts and economists who should know better, persist in treating money as if it were a real commodity.
The reason the broadband providers are finding the Internet expensive is that they're doing something that other comm providers don't: They are filtering and censoring the traffic. Just providing bandwidth (including a per-subscriber cap) isn't all that expensive. But if you also try to provide the software and management layers that examing the packets and filter, it rapidly becomes very costly.
Imagine if the phone company or the postal service were to try to do something similar. They'd have to hire people to monitor all your calls and letters, to make sure you weren't violating any local ordinances. This would cost hundreds or thousands of time what the basic service costs. The Internet isn't really any different.
"But we can't let things like CodeRed or Nimda bring down the traffic." Nonsense. You just do what the phone system does. You limit each subscriber to a certain bandwidth, and charge a lot more when they go over. Give people pointers to security-related web sites and let them fix the problems themselves. If they refuse, you don't need to block everyone's port 80; you just throttle the few machines that are flooding the wire with their traffic.
For that matter, why do ISPs provide email service? This has nothing to do with basic IP service. With an always-on connection, it's easy to do direct point-to point email. I can't get cable Internet service without email bundled, though I don't use it. This is yet one more reason that the cable companies are finding the Internet very expensive.
Why don't any of them offer just basic IP service, with none of the higher-level junk that my machine can very well do itself? If they did this, and billed separately for services like port blocking, they'd find that the Internet can be provided at a good profit. But it's those add-on "free" services that they provide whether you want them or not that are dragging them down.
As I understand it, the "cracking" in this case was a test to verify that people were following the password policy that the company's management had published. The only way you can possibly verify that such a policy is being followed is by running a password cracker against the password file(s).
What the company was saying, in effect, was "Yes, we have a policy, but if anyone attempts to verify that we are following it, we will have them arrested and tried for criminal activity."
The Oregon courts seem to agree with this.
Meanwhile, of course, the word has probably gotten out to the real criminal types that Intel is actively making sure that there are no internal audits of the safety of their passwords. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the likely consequences of this.
> It's nice to know MS can conceive of it. Too bad they can't *build* it.
And note that the link was to a patent. This means that you can't build it, either, without being hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit from the biggest bully on the block.
If the courts uphold this patent, we can expect that Microsoft will be getting royalties from anyone who incorporates any DRM into their products.
Excuse me, but if a company sells virus-detecting software, and it contains code that explicitly ignores certain viruses, wouldn't this be an open-and-shut case of consumer fraud?
If I were working at McAffee, I'd probably be trying to make sure that their legal staff is working on the problem of a disclaimer in the fine print that covers this. And it would have to be worded in such a way that most purchasers (including the legal staff of corporate purchasers) wouldn't realize that the disclaimer is talking about the fact that they are knowingly making their product fail at the sole job that it's purchased for.
Yeah; I just wrote this up as a fake news item. I was real disappointed that it didn't ger rated "funny". What do you have to do to get this rating?
Of course, one problem may have been that the person who rated it didn't think it qualified as humor, because this is probably what will happen.
It can be difficult to write satire. By the time you finish writing, the world has passed you by and done something even worse than your poor attempt at satire.
Also, note that satellite radios that function as modems are quite available, and are in use in many parts of the world without ground-line access. With such a radio modem, you can get Internet access from pretty much anywhere (though coverage at the poles is a bit spotty).
Redmond 11/13/1999
As part of the US Government's shutdown of the only Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Somalia, Microsoft has announced a new povision of their pending punishment from the US Justice Department. The Microsoft subsidiary msn.com will now provide Internet service to Somalia. It will be free for the first month, after which market rates will determine the cost of further service.
As part of the arrangement, all equipment and servers in Somalia will be converted to the latest Microsoft products. Previously, the service had been provided with old hardware running such unbranded systems as linux and FreeBsd. Microsoft and US government spokesmen claim that this will provide for improved service, at least during times when the new computers are up and running.
The CIA has expressed a desire to cooperate with the installation. A spokesman said that previous Internet gateways in Somalia had been "overly difficult for information gathering, due to their support for unbreakablel encrypion." The new systems will presumably cooperate fully with the recently-announced email virus that uses Microsoft Outlook to install keylogger software.
That's part of the problem.
...
Of course, in many scientific circles, "fossil" is routinely used to refer to any distinct objects or materials found in rocks. The term doesn't just mean remains of once-living organisms. Thus one reads of bits of "fossil gases" entrapped in cracks or bubbles in rocks or ice; these are used to learn about ancient atmospheric conditions. Sedimentary strata contain "fossil rock" as tiny inclusions. And so on.
But still, 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth didn't have much in the way of solid crust, and most of that has long-since been subducted and melted. So we may never have many details from back then. This makes it a bit difficult to find data for or against the "colliding planets" hypothesis. The best argument so far isn't fossil at all. It comes from physicists' attempts to explain how a pair of planets so closely matched as the Earth and its moon can end up in the orbits that we see today. Orbital mechanics seem to preclude this, except as the outcome of a grazing collision between two planet-sized objects.
As a separate subject, though, geologists do say that even if this collision happened, it probably has little if anything to do with the formation of the Pacific Ocean. From what has been learned of plate tectonics in the past decades, it seems that oceans and continents have come and gone many times. The presence of such a large, circular ocean at this time is somewhat of an accident, and wasn't really true at several times in the past billion years.
Gotta go
Actually, dinosaurs didn't all disappear. At least six species survived, according to recent DNA studies. By whatever coincidence, they were all in the suborder that we call "birds".
The hypothesis that birds are dinosaurs was actually proposed early in the 1800's. The reaction of lots of scientists was the usual "That's an intriguing idea; where's your evidence?" It took more than a century for people to stumble onto convincing evidence. Most of the best evidence has been found in the last 30 years or so. Birds don't fossilize too well. Also, it seems that most of the few good bird fossils are in China, and political problems prevented much serious paleontological work there for a long time.
Also, it wasn't just frogs and salamanders that survived. Several species of mammals managed to hang on until things got better. This included a small tree-shrew-like proto-primate.
If this were the only evidence, you'd be right. When the impact hypothesis was first fielded, most scientists just said "Interesting; where's your evidence?" But over a couple of decades, geologists and paleontologists have done lots and lots of testing on strata around the world of that age. They keep turning up more and more data that is "consistent with" the impact hypothesis, and nothing that convincingly debunks it. By now, the evidence is overwhelming, so what was a weak hypothesis has elevated to a mostly-accepted theory.
Nowadays, if the face of so much consistent evidence, you'd have to have some really spectacular counter-evidence to be taken seriously. There are still scientists out there trying to debunk the idea, of course, but mostly they just keep turning up more evidence in favor of the impact. That's what this story was. One more of a chain of hundreds of findings that support the general idea of a major impact 65 million years ago.
Has anyone found strata anywhere that is well-dated and continuous across the 65-million-year age that doesn't show a thin anomalous layer and a radical change of fossils?
(Yes, there are continuous strata of around that age that can't be firmly dated. There are also strata that straddle the date but can't be shown to be continuous. None of these is evidence pro or con the impact.)
What does it have to do with nerd news? Well one thing that a few people have been pushing is funding for equipment and people to do a thorough study and census of small objects in the solar system. There could be such an object aimed to hit us Real Soon Now. We don't know. The sooner we can spot such things, the sooner we can do something to deflect them. If we don't, well, one of them will hit the Earth eventually. Maybe it'll hit next week; maybe it'll hit 30 million years from now.
There are roughly a thousand objects now known of km-size or greater that cross the Earth's orbit. None of the known objects will hit the Earth within a century or so. But we have no idea how many more may be out there.
We nerds are just the ones to find them. And knowledge of earlier disasters is one of the best ways to pry funding out of governments agencies.
Well, yeah; probably lots of people would guess at such a hypothesis. But it's not consistent with what is known about the 65-Million-year-old crater on the coast of Yucutan. You'd expect the crater to be near the middle of the Gulf, but it's not. And the crater itself is only maybe 1/10 the diameter f the Gulf.
...
Also, any geologist will probably tell you that the Gulf of Mexico is much older than that. It's really a very old feature of that part of the planet.
But this shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the idea. The scientific process isn't harmed by such wild guesses. They are often the start of interesting findings. The Gulf of Mexico does look like a "circular feature". It could be an impact crater. But apparently it isn't.
For that matter, the Pacific Ocian is also roughly circular. There has been lots of hypothesizing about this, including the idea that it's the scar left from when the moon was torn from the Earth by the impact of another planet. The scientific jury is still out on this one. After 4.5 billion years, there's not a whole lot of fossil evidence left
Consider these entries in our access_log:
/~jc/sh/ HTTP/1.1" 200 54120
/icons/blank.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 148
/icons/back.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 216
/icons/unknown.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 245
/icons/script.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 242
/icons/p.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 237
...
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:02 -0500] "GET
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:03 -0500] "GET
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:04 -0500] "GET
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:04 -0500] "GET
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:06 -0500] "GET
195.146.165.98 - - [14/Nov/2001:10:01:10 -0500] "GET
This is six accesses. So I'd get $.06, right? But it's fairly obvious that the user actually made only one request, for the directory listing. The rest are the file-type icons. If I include files of even more types, I get even more money, right?
The really obvious thing here would be to have a flock of 1x1 gifs, and include references to all of them in all my "pages", with immediate expiration so your browser will download them every time.
"Padding the books" is really trivial here
This attitude is, of course, why a lot of writers have used pseudonyms. For example, if Charles Dodson had published Alice in Wonderland under his own name, it would have really discredited his mathematical publications in a lot of people's minds.
...
OTOH, I'd guess that Adams publishes such writings under his own name with the idea of publicly tweaking the dummies who pigeonhole writers. He would probably classify you as an "induhvidual",
and you'd deserve the name.
You should also read his "Dilbert Future" book. It's tremendously funny, and very serious at the same time. And he's starting to look like a real prophet already
In my (several decades) of experience, the main thing that causes software to always be late is the fact that all software must use things from an underlying "system", and these things are generally not entirely knowable by a programmer.
This is especially true in the case of proprietary systems. In this case, many details of the underlying system are intentionally hidden from the programmer, and can only be discovered. Even then, knowledge can only be partial, and future surprises can't even be predicted in principle.
In the case of Open Source software, the underlying system's behavior is in principle knowable. This helps greatly in the debugging process, since you can examine the lower-level software and reach a detailed understanding of any specific portion. But even in a fully open system like linux you are facing the fact that there is too much information for a single human to master.
In manufacturing, you can get specs for the low-level nuts and bolts. You can ask about properties and failure rates and get correct answers. With software on a proprietary system, you can't get such information at all. And on any system, including Open Source systems, such information may silently change with even the smallest system upgrade.
In physics, there are fundamental units (photons, electrons, etc.) that are all identical and whose behavior never changes. In software, the detailed behavior of a machine's opcodes may change from one machine to the next, even when they are the same model. So software can never have general equations or universal principles in the sense that physics has such things.
Also, in physics, the concept of a "hidden variable" is still in dispute after a century. In software, it's a fact of life. The makers of the computers have carefully hidden a great many significant details from the programmers. And they change these variables without notice.
As long as the low-level details can be hidden from the programmers, software can never be made into a reliable manufacturing process, or into any sort of science.