But an elevator on the Moon should be much simpler.
Actually due to the low rotation rate of the moon (tidally locked), a space elevator on the moon as some have proposed for earth and mars would be impossible. To have the center of mass at a geocentric point in space the elevator would hit the earth.
However with no atmosphere to contend with, you could consider a railgun type launching system for non fragile cargo.
Actually, Vice Admiral is an O-9. Based on his bio, he has over 34 years of service, so base pay alone is $16.4K/month. Probably lives in base housing, so with BAS and sub pay it totals close to $17K/month.
If found guilty in the investigation, he will probably be retired at a lower rank. In addition to whatever civilian penalties are incurred. Assuming that there are no instances of military misconduct found, otherwise all bets are off.
That's what I was thinking. They claim that a Google win would devastate the industry, I claim an Oracle win would do the same. Do they have any idea how much of the world's technology is built on common API's? Their own included?
Couldn't agree more. Wouldn't be ironic if MS' support for Oracle helps them win the appeal. Then Oracle turns around and sues MS by claiming the original.NET implementation violated the Java API copyright.
The only way Oracle should deserve to win this copyright case is if they had shown Google copied large parts of the actual Java implementation into their software. The API claim they are making is almost as bad as a musician claiming copyright over all songs written in the key of C.
That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left has been in a panic recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania and Ohio, I think).
Actually the reason it favors the GOP is that the proposal is just to do it in states that went Democratic that happen to have Republican governors. The Republicans certainly weren't proposing splitting up the electoral vote in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Just the states they lost.
Then you tie in the rampant gerrymandering that passes for redistricting these days, there would only be a few places worth campaigning.
As someone who has moved overseas and back four times; you are worried about the trivial details. Take a good hard look at the shipping contract concerning damage coverage. The contract may also prohibit certain hazardous materials like lead acid batteries and cleaning products.
Have your property packed out by a company experienced in shipping belongings overseas. No amount of silica packages will protect your stuff if the container is lost at sea or gets sea water inside.
Document the condition of your belongings before they are packed up. Also make backups of important data and papers and keep them separate from your shipment. So that in the event that the worst happens, it's just a matter of getting reimbursed for damages and buying replacements. While that can be time consuming and annoying, it is better than losing irreplaceable photos or legal records.
Why is it that it's always company intranets that break with new browsers?
Because company intranets/portals contain lots of links to third party apps and are limited by what those vendors support. When you have major software companies like SAP which have products that only added IE 9 support in major upgrades provided in the last two months, it is no surprise that lots of corporations aren't on the leading edge of supported browsers. Support for Chrome or recent Firefox (including extended support release 10) is virtually non-existent among lots of enterprise software, so those aren't options either.
Just a quick application of logic shows this to be a straw-man argument. The depth of some ice deposits has absolutely no relationship to the volume of ice overall, or when it was deposited.
Not sure why I'm debating with someone who just makes claims without any facts, but here is some more information for you to consider.
Average Ice Depth In Antarctica Basically, Antarctica is a snow and ice "factory" with ice depths on the Polar Plateau reaching 15,000 feet (the continent's average ice thickness is 7,000 feet). Thus, one of Antarctica's most important resources is its ice. It is said that Antarctica's ice accounts for 70% of the world's fresh water.
Now when you consider that Antarctica is essentially a desert that only averages two inches of snow a year, think about how long it takes to build up 7000 feet of ice.
Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old.
Where did you get that idea from?
Just a quick search finds obvious differences from that concept: Ice cores: The length of the record depends on the depth of the ice core and varies from a few years up to 800 kyr (800,000 years) for the EPICA core.
Lake Vostok: Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 sub-glacial lakes and was recently drilled into by Russian scientists. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15[3][4] to 25 million years.[5]
Now Arctic Ice (as in the Arctic Ocean), is sea ice, so yes it is relatively young. But please get a better set of sources before you try to pass stuff off as facts.
Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.
I would argue that you are falling into the same mistake the Supreme Court has made repeatedly, equating money with free speech. Money is not speech, money is power. Misuse of this monetary power is what has seriously corrupted the US political process.
While McCain-Feingold may not have been perfect, it was a step in the right direction to limit the influence of money on the US political system. It is one of the great ironies in that international election observers would consider the US campaign contribution system highly corrupt if it were replicated in any election they were monitoring.
The vendor refused to acknowledge it was a security issue.
Then it's either a feature or a regular old non-security-related bug, and I don't see the problem with announcing it to everybody. Right?
If you are really certain it is a valid issue, take a look at their marketing page and find out who their reference customers are. If you can get some of their important customers to raise this issue as well, you may have better luck getting some action on it without disclosing the vulnerability to the world at large.
I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.
Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.
C# has yield iterators, i.e. real iterators like in Python. Try writing an iterator in Java for a tree structure. You pretty much have to think about breaking it into a state machine. In a language that has real support for iterators it's as simple as writing your standard-issue traversal function. Unless you are picking a bad example, I still don't see any purpose to this.
Of course in Java you can do that contrived example as TreeSet.iterator( ), so it really doesn't take any significant code using the basic libraries in the language.
Your type inference is really just shorthand, I don't really see that as an advantage in any significant way either.
C# and Java are now both heavily plagiarized from each other. If you are explicitly coding for Windows, C# has the advantage that it mimics the underlying Windows API. If your code ever has to run anywhere else, Java is probably the better choice. Unfortunately I think Java picked up a few of the bad ideas from C# in the last couple of revisions, but that's just my opinion.
Yes the article talks about Vista, but Vista the application as in "Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture". An application and acronym that predates the Microsoft OS of the same name. I know we like to blame MS for everything, but they have no involvement in this problem.
Two, their failover plan had three levels of planning. That is far better than most of the failure planning I have seen. As a result of this failure, there were degradations in service because the users weren't able to use the computer systems the way they were used to. Patients records weren't lost or destroyed.
Three, the vendor tests had nothing to do with the problem, it just meant that there were more people around to throw out opinions. In fact, we don't know what the vendor was testing (perhaps passive monitoring), nor if it was even the same hardware involved in the outage, the article just throws it in there. The actual problem was a failure to follow their procedures and documentation when changing a network port.
Pay a bit more attention to the article if you are going to make a detailed critique of what these people did.
As far as I can tell, I think in the long run when games start making use of DX10 and such, we'll see some nice results, but in the short run games will be better run in XP.
Since MS has made the decision not to support DX10 in XP, I doubt that any games will require DX10 for about 2 years or so. Until then, the games developers would probably be limiting their target audience too much until the majority of their target audience has gone through a computer upgrade cycle.
GDP to Debt ratio in the US going down? I think you need to actually take a look at some statistics before making a claim like that.
A quick search finds data here or here readily contridicting your statement. We have gone from about 58% when Bush to office to about 64% now. Another thing to realize is that the projected government expenditures on medicare and social security are about to explode. Demographics are going to make the simple outgrow the deficit thesis very hard to support.
Voter votes and gets a printout of his votes from machine A. He verifies that the votes are correct (if not, the printout gets shredded) and puts the printout into machine B (which signals to machine A that it got the printout). Note that machine A and machine B could be made by seperate vendors, and B also contains a paper trail in case a recount is needed.
If machine A and B don't agree, you recount the paper ballots. Gee, sounds quite a bit harder to subvert eh? With added paper ballot goodness no less.
Why go to all that trouble?
Why not just file the printed ballot in a box. Use the tabulated results from the machine which generated the ballot as the "preliminary" results. Simply mandate that some fraction (5% comes to mind) of randomly selected precincts must be manually counted, or all ballots manually counted if the "preliminary" results are within some small fraction of votes cast (e.g. 1%).
If there is any difference between the preliminary results and the manual counts, then all preliminary (machine) counts are rejected and all ballots must be manually counted.
Just keep it simple and don't mandate another machine, much less one that needs to be continuously communicating back to the original ballot generator.
The issue isn't allowing columns to be nulls and the like. It is to correct concatenation results using nulls, null comparisons, exceptions on arithmetic underflow/overflow, and similiar issues.
I can't check right now to see if the Enterprise Manager allows changing these settings via the GUI, but the only way I have found to do it is by directly issuing alter database commands.
The fact that these settings aren't the default is another issue.
I agree, though - I'd recommend SQL Server as a teaching tool over MySQL, Postgres, or Oracle any day, assuming price/licensing wasn't an issue.
I'll disagree with that statement as far as Postgres or Oracle are concerned. While I can't speak for SQL Server 2005 (haven't used it yet), but previous versions of SQL Server required special settings for correct handling of null values and arithmetic exceptions. Because most tutorials don't mention these settings when creating a database (nor are they accessible as part of the wizards), most people don't realize they haven't set up a standards conformant database.
I feel it is more important for a teaching database to conform to the standards than just have easy to use GUI tools.
It would be interesting to see what the history of some of these projects were. My (admittedly uninformed) guess is that these were custom software projects developed by the Universities in question, which they have released under some open source license.
The problem is that people want software that meets their requirements. If open source software exists to meet that need, great. If not, someone will probably have to pay (time/money/resources) to get it developed. The real problem is that after going through the expense of developing software, few organizations adopt open source licenses enabling their work to be shared with organizations with similar requirements.
The article summary (can't read the entire article without subscribing) is addressing concerns that open source can not fill the business specific software requirements for higher education institutions (curriculum management, etc). This is not talking about web servers, word processors or other generic software systems. This open source limitation is true in many industries.
Most open source developers do not have the business expertise to attack vertical software markets, nor do many of the people who know the business requirements have the software development expertise (or time) to actually code a working project that could compete with commercial offerings.
This is where software businesses will always be required. Someone needs to pay the people with the business expertise to work with people having the development expertise to actually produce products that meet the needs of specific customers.
If an existing product were open sourced, modifying and maintaining would be possible. But getting to that initial state for vertical market software is very difficult.
Sun and other VM providers (e.g. Blackdown:-) already provide 64-bit VMs!
Yes they run in 64 bit mode on a 64 bit OS, but from the Java 5.0 docs:
-Xmxn
Specify the maximum size, in bytes, of the memory allocation pool. This value must a multiple of 1024 greater than 2MB. Append the letter k or K to indicate kilobytes, or m or M to indicate megabytes. The default value is 64MB. Examples:
-Xmx83886080
-Xmx81920k
-Xmx80m
On Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 SPARC platforms, the upper limit for this value is approximately 4000m minus overhead amounts. On Solaris 2.6 and x86 platforms, the upper limit is approximately 2000m minus overhead amounts. On Linux platforms, the upper limit is approximately 2000m minus overhead amounts.
So either there still is a problem with the JVM limiting memory usage to 4GB or the documentation is wrong. Don't have a Sun box with more than 4GB RAM handy to test this out on. But I think it is a JVM issue.
Slashdot Mirror
second largest polluter in the world, and the largest per capita
source?
Not that hard to find.
You must be mistaken. That would be against the rules.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. While there have been several accusations, so far only one confirmed case.
But an elevator on the Moon should be much simpler.
Actually due to the low rotation rate of the moon (tidally locked), a space elevator on the moon as some have proposed for earth and mars would be impossible. To have the center of mass at a geocentric point in space the elevator would hit the earth.
However with no atmosphere to contend with, you could consider a railgun type launching system for non fragile cargo.
Actually, Vice Admiral is an O-9. Based on his bio, he has over 34 years of service, so base pay alone is $16.4K/month. Probably lives in base housing, so with BAS and sub pay it totals close to $17K/month.
If found guilty in the investigation, he will probably be retired at a lower rank. In addition to whatever civilian penalties are incurred. Assuming that there are no instances of military misconduct found, otherwise all bets are off.
That's what I was thinking. They claim that a Google win would devastate the industry, I claim an Oracle win would do the same. Do they have any idea how much of the world's technology is built on common API's? Their own included?
Couldn't agree more. Wouldn't be ironic if MS' support for Oracle helps them win the appeal. Then Oracle turns around and sues MS by claiming the original .NET implementation violated the Java API copyright.
The only way Oracle should deserve to win this copyright case is if they had shown Google copied large parts of the actual Java implementation into their software. The API claim they are making is almost as bad as a musician claiming copyright over all songs written in the key of C.
That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left has been in a panic recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania and Ohio, I think).
Actually the reason it favors the GOP is that the proposal is just to do it in states that went Democratic that happen to have Republican governors. The Republicans certainly weren't proposing splitting up the electoral vote in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Just the states they lost.
Then you tie in the rampant gerrymandering that passes for redistricting these days, there would only be a few places worth campaigning.
As someone who has moved overseas and back four times; you are worried about the trivial details. Take a good hard look at the shipping contract concerning damage coverage. The contract may also prohibit certain hazardous materials like lead acid batteries and cleaning products.
Have your property packed out by a company experienced in shipping belongings overseas. No amount of silica packages will protect your stuff if the container is lost at sea or gets sea water inside.
Document the condition of your belongings before they are packed up. Also make backups of important data and papers and keep them separate from your shipment. So that in the event that the worst happens, it's just a matter of getting reimbursed for damages and buying replacements. While that can be time consuming and annoying, it is better than losing irreplaceable photos or legal records.
Good luck and enjoy your new country.
Why is it that it's always company intranets that break with new browsers?
Because company intranets/portals contain lots of links to third party apps and are limited by what those vendors support. When you have major software companies like SAP which have products that only added IE 9 support in major upgrades provided in the last two months, it is no surprise that lots of corporations aren't on the leading edge of supported browsers. Support for Chrome or recent Firefox (including extended support release 10) is virtually non-existent among lots of enterprise software, so those aren't options either.
Just a quick application of logic shows this to be a straw-man argument. The depth of some ice deposits has absolutely no relationship to the volume of ice overall, or when it was deposited.
Not sure why I'm debating with someone who just makes claims without any facts, but here is some more information for you to consider.
Average Ice Depth In Antarctica
Basically, Antarctica is a snow and ice "factory" with ice depths on the Polar Plateau reaching 15,000 feet (the continent's average ice thickness is 7,000 feet). Thus, one of Antarctica's most important resources is its ice. It is said that Antarctica's ice accounts for 70% of the world's fresh water.
Now when you consider that Antarctica is essentially a desert that only averages two inches of snow a year, think about how long it takes to build up 7000 feet of ice.
Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old.
Where did you get that idea from?
Just a quick search finds obvious differences from that concept:
Ice cores:
The length of the record depends on the depth of the ice core and varies from a few years up to 800 kyr (800,000 years) for the EPICA core.
Lake Vostok:
Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 sub-glacial lakes and was recently drilled into by Russian scientists. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15[3][4] to 25 million years.[5]
Now Arctic Ice (as in the Arctic Ocean), is sea ice, so yes it is relatively young. But please get a better set of sources before you try to pass stuff off as facts.
They don't point to research of climatologists to show the earth has always experienced climate change, they point to the research of geologists.
Apparently you have never heard of paleoclimatology.
Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.
I would argue that you are falling into the same mistake the Supreme Court has made repeatedly, equating money with free speech. Money is not speech, money is power. Misuse of this monetary power is what has seriously corrupted the US political process.
While McCain-Feingold may not have been perfect, it was a step in the right direction to limit the influence of money on the US political system. It is one of the great ironies in that international election observers would consider the US campaign contribution system highly corrupt if it were replicated in any election they were monitoring.
The vendor refused to acknowledge it was a security issue.
Then it's either a feature or a regular old non-security-related bug, and I don't see the problem with announcing it to everybody. Right?
If you are really certain it is a valid issue, take a look at their marketing page and find out who their reference customers are. If you can get some of their important customers to raise this issue as well, you may have better luck getting some action on it without disclosing the vulnerability to the world at large.
I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.
Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.
Of course in Java you can do that contrived example as TreeSet.iterator( ), so it really doesn't take any significant code using the basic libraries in the language.
Your type inference is really just shorthand, I don't really see that as an advantage in any significant way either.
C# and Java are now both heavily plagiarized from each other. If you are explicitly coding for Windows, C# has the advantage that it mimics the underlying Windows API. If your code ever has to run anywhere else, Java is probably the better choice. Unfortunately I think Java picked up a few of the bad ideas from C# in the last couple of revisions, but that's just my opinion.
Who modded this up?
Yes the article talks about Vista, but Vista the application as in "Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture". An application and acronym that predates the Microsoft OS of the same name. I know we like to blame MS for everything, but they have no involvement in this problem.
Two, their failover plan had three levels of planning. That is far better than most of the failure planning I have seen. As a result of this failure, there were degradations in service because the users weren't able to use the computer systems the way they were used to. Patients records weren't lost or destroyed.
Three, the vendor tests had nothing to do with the problem, it just meant that there were more people around to throw out opinions. In fact, we don't know what the vendor was testing (perhaps passive monitoring), nor if it was even the same hardware involved in the outage, the article just throws it in there. The actual problem was a failure to follow their procedures and documentation when changing a network port.
Pay a bit more attention to the article if you are going to make a detailed critique of what these people did.
Take a hard look at your laptop case before you think this is any real security.
Many laptop shells are just simple plastic and the cable locks can snap out with only barely noticeable damage to the laptop shell.
Discovered this when a coworker caught their chair in the laptop cable lock one day and "disconnected" it from his Dell laptop.
As far as I can tell, I think in the long run when games start making use of DX10 and such, we'll see some nice results, but in the short run games will be better run in XP.
Since MS has made the decision not to support DX10 in XP, I doubt that any games will require DX10 for about 2 years or so. Until then, the games developers would probably be limiting their target audience too much until the majority of their target audience has gone through a computer upgrade cycle.
GDP to Debt ratio in the US going down? I think you need to actually take a look at some statistics before making a claim like that.
A quick search finds data
here or
here readily contridicting your statement. We have gone from about 58% when Bush to office to about 64% now. Another thing to realize is that the projected government expenditures on medicare and social security are about to explode. Demographics are going to make the simple outgrow the deficit thesis very hard to support.
Here is what I would do to fix the problem:
Voter votes and gets a printout of his votes from machine A. He verifies that the votes are correct (if not, the printout gets shredded) and puts the printout into machine B (which signals to machine A that it got the printout). Note that machine A and machine B could be made by seperate vendors, and B also contains a paper trail in case a recount is needed.
If machine A and B don't agree, you recount the paper ballots. Gee, sounds quite a bit harder to subvert eh? With added paper ballot goodness no less.
Why go to all that trouble?
Why not just file the printed ballot in a box. Use the tabulated results from the machine which generated the ballot as the "preliminary" results. Simply mandate that some fraction (5% comes to mind) of randomly selected precincts must be manually counted, or all ballots manually counted if the "preliminary" results are within some small fraction of votes cast (e.g. 1%).
If there is any difference between the preliminary results and the manual counts, then all preliminary (machine) counts are rejected and all ballots must be manually counted.
Just keep it simple and don't mandate another machine, much less one that needs to be continuously communicating back to the original ballot generator.
The issue isn't allowing columns to be nulls and the like. It is to correct concatenation results using nulls, null comparisons, exceptions on arithmetic underflow/overflow, and similiar issues.
I can't check right now to see if the Enterprise Manager allows changing these settings via the GUI, but the only way I have found to do it is by directly issuing alter database commands.
The fact that these settings aren't the default is another issue.
I agree, though - I'd recommend SQL Server as a teaching tool over MySQL, Postgres, or Oracle any day, assuming price/licensing wasn't an issue.
I'll disagree with that statement as far as Postgres or Oracle are concerned. While I can't speak for SQL Server 2005 (haven't used it yet), but previous versions of SQL Server required special settings for correct handling of null values and arithmetic exceptions. Because most tutorials don't mention these settings when creating a database (nor are they accessible as part of the wizards), most people don't realize they haven't set up a standards conformant database.
I feel it is more important for a teaching database to conform to the standards than just have easy to use GUI tools.
It would be interesting to see what the history of some of these projects were. My (admittedly uninformed) guess is that these were custom software projects developed by the Universities in question, which they have released under some open source license.
The problem is that people want software that meets their requirements. If open source software exists to meet that need, great. If not, someone will probably have to pay (time/money/resources) to get it developed. The real problem is that after going through the expense of developing software, few organizations adopt open source licenses enabling their work to be shared with organizations with similar requirements.
The article summary (can't read the entire article without subscribing) is addressing concerns that open source can not fill the business specific software requirements for higher education institutions (curriculum management, etc). This is not talking about web servers, word processors or other generic software systems. This open source limitation is true in many industries.
Most open source developers do not have the business expertise to attack vertical software markets, nor do many of the people who know the business requirements have the software development expertise (or time) to actually code a working project that could compete with commercial offerings.
This is where software businesses will always be required. Someone needs to pay the people with the business expertise to work with people having the development expertise to actually produce products that meet the needs of specific customers.
If an existing product were open sourced, modifying and maintaining would be possible. But getting to that initial state for vertical market software is very difficult.
Sun and other VM providers (e.g. Blackdown :-) already provide 64-bit VMs!
Yes they run in 64 bit mode on a 64 bit OS, but from the Java 5.0 docs:
-Xmxn
Specify the maximum size, in bytes, of the memory allocation pool. This value must a multiple of 1024 greater than 2MB. Append the letter k or K to indicate kilobytes, or m or M to indicate megabytes. The default value is 64MB. Examples:
-Xmx83886080
-Xmx81920k
-Xmx80m
On Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 SPARC platforms, the upper limit for this value is approximately 4000m minus overhead amounts. On Solaris 2.6 and x86 platforms, the upper limit is approximately 2000m minus overhead amounts. On Linux platforms, the upper limit is approximately 2000m minus overhead amounts.
So either there still is a problem with the JVM limiting memory usage to 4GB or the documentation is wrong. Don't have a Sun box with more than 4GB RAM handy to test this out on. But I think it is a JVM issue.