the reason Microsoft will never opensource XP is that the kernel code contains trade secrets. What those trade secrets are exactly, we'll never know - because they're secret. On top of which, because the platform is used by the DoD in live fire environments, custom code tied into the kernel is doubly protected as a National Security matter, which rolls back into the kernel itself. We don't know what that code is or what it involves or how it interacts with the standard 5.1.2600 NT kernel, because it is all SECRET.
I'm sure the Nazis under Hitler would be happy to hear that.
If such were true then the Nuremberg War Crimes trials would never have happened; after all, the supreme executive authority in Germany during WWII ended it all by eating a bullet.
Flip that card over: millions of people still died. "I was just following orders" became the most used phrase in that chamber. It also didn't hold any water.
it's not the Government's job to mediate; that is a matter for the Courts. The Judiciary is necessarily separate from Government as it is they who hold the Government in check by ensuring that they do not operate outside the Law. In England we have the House of Commons (representing the People) and the House of Lords (representing the Judiciary) which together make up the legislative branch of Government. The judicial branch is a separate entity notwithstanding the fact that a significant membership of the House of Lords is also a sizeable chunk of the Upper Judiciary. The executive branch is made up of the Privy Council with HM Queen Elizabeth II at the head of the table, although all decisions are made, at her implied approval*, by the head of the Privy Council (currently David Cameron).
*the Monarch did, until 1911 (with the passing of the Parliament Act which placed supreme executive power in the hands of Parliament), have a right of veto on any Bill put before Parliament. The last time this veto was exercised was 1707 when Queen Anne vetoed the Scottish Militia Bill.
Caveat: in an ideal world, this would be a stable situation and one which is obeyed, but sadly this isn't an ideal world, and the last seven lines should be ignored with the exception that as head of the Privy Council, David Cameron is the de facto supreme executive authority in England.
Over the last several years, I have seen old DoD propaganda and training movies (The Art Of Escape, anyone?) crop up on the aforementioned site. Does this mean that such content will be taken down?
(I''m just glad I managed to mirror most of the DoD content on the site... mostly for geek value, but I'm also a packrat).
hmmm... nope again. Assuming all things equal (ie common cause probability), the odds of losing one wheel=1/6 The odds of losing another wheel are still 1/6 (because you still have six wheels) the odds of the second wheel being on the same side as the first wheel: 3/6 (6 possible positions, 3 condition-meeting outcomes)
If you're going to bias the odds in some way, ie by excluding one axle just because a wheel has already failed, then you have to exclude that axle at the start knowing for certain that it is going to fail. Or, you don't *ever* exclude it just because it has met a failure condition. This would be like excluding a coin toss outcome just because it has been met x number of times in y tosses.
...is a monetary system under private control. Take the commercial banking sector. The banks are on a roll here, they're "losing" money hand over fist, and world Governments are rolling over to ensure they don't fail. Who are the winners here? With the exception of Iceland, it ain't the Governments. In fact, the banks tried to fool the Icelandic Government into the belief that if a bank failed then so does the economy, the bankers were jailed and the banks sacked. The Icelandic Government is now in charge of the money supply, and as it stands now Iceland has the LOWEST deficit in all of Europe.
there'd be an issue with MPF (moving parts failure) as well, how many moving parts per inch of track? Half a dozen? On a wheelbase of three feet? Couple hundred? The failure of any ONE of which would end the mission.
Probably why they opted for six independent wheels - so the failure of any two on opposite sides would not be a mission ender. On a four wheeled vehicle, the failure of just one wheel would end the mission.
how much science has gone in to building the Rover wheels? Mountain bike wheels have been using the same technology for decades - a steel hub, steel spokes, steel rim, and air-filled rubber tyres. With the Mars Rover, they had to think about:
Tyres: no good in such a rarefied atmosphere - they'd explode, that's if they didn't explode on the way. Plus there's no way to stop and repair a puncture. Solids are making a comeback (again), but you run in to weight issues (I know, I've had newtech solids and they are *heavy*). Tyres are a necessity in any vehicle expected to roll across the surface of any body, but do they have to be solid? They're only there for grip and suspension, you can get the same effect using sprung metal cantilevers. Rims: here we have steel and several alloys, and recently carbon composites have made an appearance. Weight is again an issue with all of these, and consider the fact that carbon composites don't react well to UV, that's those out. You've got to develop light and strong alloys. Hub: With the number of moving parts in a hub (the average bike wheel has over fifty!) any one of those failing can end a mission. Here they had to think about a fail-proof redesign of bearings that not only had to be maintenance-free, they also had to have as close to zero failure probability as possible. Something which can only be achieved by reducing the number of parts to the point where you can not only predict when a part is going to fail and under what conditions, but also what can be done to mitigate that probability.
The short of it is, this all comes down to mass. The Mars Rover was lucky to have been equipped with SIX wheels. If the launch systems engineers had gotten their way, the mission would have been equipped with four wheels and been over long ago (probably not even having fulfilled the mission parameters - MR is on its own clock now, everything it sends back is just icing) and the LSEs would be up a few hundred kg of fuel for the next launch. How inconvenient, they have to fabricate some more!
The thinness of the rovers wheels isnt so much about saving money as it is about saving weight.
Every ounce the wheels dont weigh is another ounce for science equipment or batteries.
So im sure they made them absolutely as thin & lightweight as they thought they could get away with.
...and every ounce the probe doesn't weigh is another few hundred pounds saved in fuel for the launch vehicle.
This is reflected in the amount of power the Voyager probes put out - not even enough to power a digital watch, yet we're still getting science from them. The legwork is done on Earth, with vast arrays of massive radio telescopes gathering and filtering the signals. To put out enough power for an amateur radio astronomer to be able to pick out of the cosmic background... we'd probably have had to launch each probe with a Sizewell-B sized reactor. That's 1.1GW for those not versed in "How many football fields is that?" units of measurement. Obviously not practical in terms of escaping the gravity well.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it until two wheels on the same side develop mission-fail flat spots. This is probably why it's got six wheels - a four wheeled vehicle would be at mission end with the failure of any one wheel. This puppy can withstand two failures and keep on truckin'.
(...Could other governments or amateurs with telescopes see for themselves?)
No, because the probe is just too damn small.
None of them can see it. The probe (or to borrow another local example, the Apollo 11 flag) is far too small to be seen with any telescope on Earth, or even the Hubble space telescope (which is in low Earth orbit).
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (orbiting the Moon) took pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site, however. It showed a long shadow cast by the lower lander stage, but not the stage itself - again, it's just too small.
You can approximate the angular size of an object by dividing its width by its distance from the telescope:
A galaxy might be around 100,000 light years in diameter. At a distance of ten billion light years, it would have an angular size of: (100,000 light years) / (10,000,000,000 light years) = 0.00001 radians. HST can (and has) taken images containing *millions* of these galaxies.
Now we do the same for a flag on the Moon, generously estimated as 1 metre in width: (1 metre) / (384,400,000 meters) = 0.0000000026 radians
Well, look at that. Seeing the flag requires about 3800 times the resolving power needed to see the galaxy. Who would have guessed?
This is something that *cannot* be done optically. The wavelength of visible light is just too long. By about 3800 times the wavelength needed. Now we're in high-energy cosmic ray (X-Ray in the Gigawatts) range.
Apart from injection burns and terminal braking manoeuvres, the spacecraft is a passenger of Newton. Launch windows come into play here, taking into account: local weather conditions, atmospheric height, local gravitational anomalies, and the final say comes down to where you are and where you expect the destination mass to be in x number of days.
All this can be done on paper. Apollo was all done on paper and slide rules before the first rocket was lit. Before even Mercury, Apollo was timetabled down to the second. They knew just how much thrust was needed, how much fuel they needed to carry, and where they wanted to land, and how long they wanted to stay on the surface.
Hell, even Verne and Wells had a handle on this. Both wrote stories describing in incredible detail how one would get to the Moon, a feat equally, if not more, daring than the Saturn V shots in that those two stories involved the firing of capsules out of a gun - 22,000G would be a bit much for even the hardiest of humans.
Caveat: it is possible to perform a direct flight to the Moon without using gravitational slingshots. Problem is this would require a LOT of propellant. Probably too much for a single lifter, the spacecraft would have to be assembled and fuelled in orbit, and flight time to a Lunar landing could be measured in hours - halfway out to accelerate to maximum velocity, then spin the whole thing around and decelerate through the other half of the trip to a soft tail landing. Very inefficient and totally dangerous.
...breaking, it's fucking BROKEN already! IDS has ADMITTED in the Select Committee inquiry that the system IS NOT READY for rollout and that it is so full of flaws that the planned completion of rollout in 2017 WILL NOT HAPPEN.
yep, Dyson actually referred to a shell of discrete segments rather than a solid sphere, Armstrong laid a (very feasible, as it goes) construction timetable. A swarm could be built using the mass of Mercury in about forty years according to that, and Venus follows (OK it's bigger and the numbers might get confusing) over the next ten.
GNU has been around since *1983*! Linux was released in *1991*!
By 2010 the city of Munich public services had deployed SuSE Linux in 20% of its front end systems following prior announcement of the plan in 2003, with the stated intention to complete the transition to FOSS by 2015. citation
Personally, I've been using Linux in various flavours and for various projects since 1996.
not so long ago (1990, in fact), Carl Sagan persuaded the Voyager team to look back and take a photo montage of the solar system. Earth appeared as a pale blue dot, yet smaller than a single pixel. While still within the terrestrial sphere of influence in the 1970's, Voyager's instruments were turned back toward Earth, and while "some" chemical signatures were recognised (water and oxygen), the consensus was that it could not be confirmed whether there was in fact life on the planet. If we couldn't confirm life on a planet where we knew for a fact there *was* life, from a distance of less than five million miles, then what hope do you think we have of detecting anything smaller than a Jupiter-mass blob orbiting a star fifty light years away or determining what a rock orbiting Epsilon Eridani (there are two known; one at least is a gas giant about five to eight times the mass of Jupiter) is made of?
BTW, the 1936 Olympics has now been shooting in every direction through space for 77 years and change. Counting M-type cool dwarf stars, that signal has probably crossed over eight thousand star systems, and it will continue outward forever.
Dyson's original idea was to build a cloud of satellites. Stuart Armstrong expanded on this and conceived a construction timescale on the order of *less than a Century* from striking ground on Mercury to lifting the last segment from Venus to orbit.
Dyson structures have been shown elsewhere to be mechanically impractical purely due to the amount of material they'd need. A single fully enclosed, solid Dyson sphere surrounding a G2V star such as our Sun, at the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone (around 94 million miles from the centre of the star) and just nine feet thick would require the complete disassembly of all four inner planets (Mercury, Venus and Earth and Mars and all associated satellites, shepherd asteroids and Lagrangian objects), the entire asteroid belt, and all the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The amount of energy that would be required to counter any drift during and post construction would be immense (say bye bye to Jupiter, being the second largest and ready source of hydrogen available locally), and what are you going to use for atmosphere? Our envelope wouldn't be near enough, unless you can learn to cope with 1/640millionth of a bar pressure. That's right, you'd have to completely convert the entire gas content of TWO G2V white dwarf stars (two of our SUNS!) to oxygen and nitrogen and pump it in. Which brings another couple problems: how are you going to contain a gas envelope that just wants to fall into the Sun? And having solved that problem (you have, right?), how are you going to cope with 80 miles of gas pressing out against nine feet of iron and nickel? You'll need another couple planets' worth of iron just to reinforce the sphere!
Oh yeah, and water might become a bit on the scarce side as well; the entire content of our oceans and polar caps, rivers and lakes would form a solid ice ball only 360 miles wide. That wouldn't be enough to form a ground frost on the inside of the sphere.
Slashdot Mirror
27 July 2012, to be precise: linky [redacted PDF].
I'll post a link to the unredacted version if I can find a non-walled URL.
the reason Microsoft will never opensource XP is that the kernel code contains trade secrets. What those trade secrets are exactly, we'll never know - because they're secret. On top of which, because the platform is used by the DoD in live fire environments, custom code tied into the kernel is doubly protected as a National Security matter, which rolls back into the kernel itself. We don't know what that code is or what it involves or how it interacts with the standard 5.1.2600 NT kernel, because it is all SECRET.
I'm sure the Nazis under Hitler would be happy to hear that.
If such were true then the Nuremberg War Crimes trials would never have happened; after all, the supreme executive authority in Germany during WWII ended it all by eating a bullet.
Flip that card over: millions of people still died. "I was just following orders" became the most used phrase in that chamber. It also didn't hold any water.
it's not the Government's job to mediate; that is a matter for the Courts. The Judiciary is necessarily separate from Government as it is they who hold the Government in check by ensuring that they do not operate outside the Law. In England we have the House of Commons (representing the People) and the House of Lords (representing the Judiciary) which together make up the legislative branch of Government. The judicial branch is a separate entity notwithstanding the fact that a significant membership of the House of Lords is also a sizeable chunk of the Upper Judiciary. The executive branch is made up of the Privy Council with HM Queen Elizabeth II at the head of the table, although all decisions are made, at her implied approval*, by the head of the Privy Council (currently David Cameron).
*the Monarch did, until 1911 (with the passing of the Parliament Act which placed supreme executive power in the hands of Parliament), have a right of veto on any Bill put before Parliament. The last time this veto was exercised was 1707 when Queen Anne vetoed the Scottish Militia Bill.
Caveat: in an ideal world, this would be a stable situation and one which is obeyed, but sadly this isn't an ideal world, and the last seven lines should be ignored with the exception that as head of the Privy Council, David Cameron is the de facto supreme executive authority in England.
Over the last several years, I have seen old DoD propaganda and training movies (The Art Of Escape, anyone?) crop up on the aforementioned site. Does this mean that such content will be taken down?
(I''m just glad I managed to mirror most of the DoD content on the site... mostly for geek value, but I'm also a packrat).
If you have classified data that a national security apparatus wants
...and they know about it, they will not stop at pulling fingernails to get it.
Shortened it for you.
yeah I stopped reading at "sheeple". Fail.
end-to-end encryption with a key pair. Doesn't matter what the carrier looks like at this point. It could be a fucking pigeon.
That is all.
hmmm... nope again. Assuming all things equal (ie common cause probability), the odds of losing one wheel=1/6
The odds of losing another wheel are still 1/6 (because you still have six wheels)
the odds of the second wheel being on the same side as the first wheel: 3/6 (6 possible positions, 3 condition-meeting outcomes)
If you're going to bias the odds in some way, ie by excluding one axle just because a wheel has already failed, then you have to exclude that axle at the start knowing for certain that it is going to fail. Or, you don't *ever* exclude it just because it has met a failure condition. This would be like excluding a coin toss outcome just because it has been met x number of times in y tosses.
the Government doesn't control the currency or the money supply, THE BANKS DO!
...is a monetary system under private control. Take the commercial banking sector. The banks are on a roll here, they're "losing" money hand over fist, and world Governments are rolling over to ensure they don't fail. Who are the winners here? With the exception of Iceland, it ain't the Governments. In fact, the banks tried to fool the Icelandic Government into the belief that if a bank failed then so does the economy, the bankers were jailed and the banks sacked. The Icelandic Government is now in charge of the money supply, and as it stands now Iceland has the LOWEST deficit in all of Europe.
there'd be an issue with MPF (moving parts failure) as well, how many moving parts per inch of track? Half a dozen? On a wheelbase of three feet? Couple hundred? The failure of any ONE of which would end the mission.
Probably why they opted for six independent wheels - so the failure of any two on opposite sides would not be a mission ender. On a four wheeled vehicle, the failure of just one wheel would end the mission.
snap!
how much science has gone in to building the Rover wheels? Mountain bike wheels have been using the same technology for decades - a steel hub, steel spokes, steel rim, and air-filled rubber tyres. With the Mars Rover, they had to think about:
Tyres: no good in such a rarefied atmosphere - they'd explode, that's if they didn't explode on the way. Plus there's no way to stop and repair a puncture. Solids are making a comeback (again), but you run in to weight issues (I know, I've had newtech solids and they are *heavy*). Tyres are a necessity in any vehicle expected to roll across the surface of any body, but do they have to be solid? They're only there for grip and suspension, you can get the same effect using sprung metal cantilevers.
Rims: here we have steel and several alloys, and recently carbon composites have made an appearance. Weight is again an issue with all of these, and consider the fact that carbon composites don't react well to UV, that's those out. You've got to develop light and strong alloys.
Hub: With the number of moving parts in a hub (the average bike wheel has over fifty!) any one of those failing can end a mission. Here they had to think about a fail-proof redesign of bearings that not only had to be maintenance-free, they also had to have as close to zero failure probability as possible. Something which can only be achieved by reducing the number of parts to the point where you can not only predict when a part is going to fail and under what conditions, but also what can be done to mitigate that probability.
The short of it is, this all comes down to mass. The Mars Rover was lucky to have been equipped with SIX wheels. If the launch systems engineers had gotten their way, the mission would have been equipped with four wheels and been over long ago (probably not even having fulfilled the mission parameters - MR is on its own clock now, everything it sends back is just icing) and the LSEs would be up a few hundred kg of fuel for the next launch. How inconvenient, they have to fabricate some more!
The thinness of the rovers wheels isnt so much about saving money as it is about saving weight.
Every ounce the wheels dont weigh is another ounce for science equipment or batteries.
So im sure they made them absolutely as thin & lightweight as they thought they could get away with.
...and every ounce the probe doesn't weigh is another few hundred pounds saved in fuel for the launch vehicle.
This is reflected in the amount of power the Voyager probes put out - not even enough to power a digital watch, yet we're still getting science from them. The legwork is done on Earth, with vast arrays of massive radio telescopes gathering and filtering the signals. To put out enough power for an amateur radio astronomer to be able to pick out of the cosmic background... we'd probably have had to launch each probe with a Sizewell-B sized reactor. That's 1.1GW for those not versed in "How many football fields is that?" units of measurement. Obviously not practical in terms of escaping the gravity well.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it until two wheels on the same side develop mission-fail flat spots. This is probably why it's got six wheels - a four wheeled vehicle would be at mission end with the failure of any one wheel. This puppy can withstand two failures and keep on truckin'.
strange, because the preliminary calibrations were done by pointing the mirror at Earth - orders of magnitude (pardon the pun) brighter than the Moon.
1. collect museum-piece Pentium systems ...
2. exploit FDIV bug
3. submit blurb to Slashdot
4.
5. Profit!
(...Could other governments or amateurs with telescopes see for themselves?)
No, because the probe is just too damn small.
None of them can see it. The probe (or to borrow another local example, the Apollo 11 flag) is far too small to be seen with any telescope on Earth, or even the Hubble space telescope (which is in low Earth orbit).
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (orbiting the Moon) took pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site, however. It showed a long shadow cast by the lower lander stage, but not the stage itself - again, it's just too small.
You can approximate the angular size of an object by dividing its width by its distance from the telescope:
A galaxy might be around 100,000 light years in diameter. At a distance of ten billion light years, it would have an angular size of:
(100,000 light years) / (10,000,000,000 light years) = 0.00001 radians. HST can (and has) taken images containing *millions* of these galaxies.
Now we do the same for a flag on the Moon, generously estimated as 1 metre in width:
(1 metre) / (384,400,000 meters) = 0.0000000026 radians
Well, look at that. Seeing the flag requires about 3800 times the resolving power needed to see the galaxy. Who would have guessed?
This is something that *cannot* be done optically. The wavelength of visible light is just too long. By about 3800 times the wavelength needed. Now we're in high-energy cosmic ray (X-Ray in the Gigawatts) range.
three words: paper orbital mechanics.
Apart from injection burns and terminal braking manoeuvres, the spacecraft is a passenger of Newton. Launch windows come into play here, taking into account: local weather conditions, atmospheric height, local gravitational anomalies, and the final say comes down to where you are and where you expect the destination mass to be in x number of days.
All this can be done on paper. Apollo was all done on paper and slide rules before the first rocket was lit. Before even Mercury, Apollo was timetabled down to the second. They knew just how much thrust was needed, how much fuel they needed to carry, and where they wanted to land, and how long they wanted to stay on the surface.
Hell, even Verne and Wells had a handle on this. Both wrote stories describing in incredible detail how one would get to the Moon, a feat equally, if not more, daring than the Saturn V shots in that those two stories involved the firing of capsules out of a gun - 22,000G would be a bit much for even the hardiest of humans.
Caveat: it is possible to perform a direct flight to the Moon without using gravitational slingshots. Problem is this would require a LOT of propellant. Probably too much for a single lifter, the spacecraft would have to be assembled and fuelled in orbit, and flight time to a Lunar landing could be measured in hours - halfway out to accelerate to maximum velocity, then spin the whole thing around and decelerate through the other half of the trip to a soft tail landing. Very inefficient and totally dangerous.
...breaking, it's fucking BROKEN already! IDS has ADMITTED in the Select Committee inquiry that the system IS NOT READY for rollout and that it is so full of flaws that the planned completion of rollout in 2017 WILL NOT HAPPEN.
yep, Dyson actually referred to a shell of discrete segments rather than a solid sphere, Armstrong laid a (very feasible, as it goes) construction timetable. A swarm could be built using the mass of Mercury in about forty years according to that, and Venus follows (OK it's bigger and the numbers might get confusing) over the next ten.
GNU has been around since *1983*!
Linux was released in *1991*!
By 2010 the city of Munich public services had deployed SuSE Linux in 20% of its front end systems following prior announcement of the plan in 2003, with the stated intention to complete the transition to FOSS by 2015. citation
Personally, I've been using Linux in various flavours and for various projects since 1996.
So clearly, the Head of Delivery is full of shit.
not so long ago (1990, in fact), Carl Sagan persuaded the Voyager team to look back and take a photo montage of the solar system. Earth appeared as a pale blue dot, yet smaller than a single pixel. While still within the terrestrial sphere of influence in the 1970's, Voyager's instruments were turned back toward Earth, and while "some" chemical signatures were recognised (water and oxygen), the consensus was that it could not be confirmed whether there was in fact life on the planet. If we couldn't confirm life on a planet where we knew for a fact there *was* life, from a distance of less than five million miles, then what hope do you think we have of detecting anything smaller than a Jupiter-mass blob orbiting a star fifty light years away or determining what a rock orbiting Epsilon Eridani (there are two known; one at least is a gas giant about five to eight times the mass of Jupiter) is made of?
BTW, the 1936 Olympics has now been shooting in every direction through space for 77 years and change. Counting M-type cool dwarf stars, that signal has probably crossed over eight thousand star systems, and it will continue outward forever.
Dyson's original idea was to build a cloud of satellites. Stuart Armstrong expanded on this and conceived a construction timescale on the order of *less than a Century* from striking ground on Mercury to lifting the last segment from Venus to orbit.
Dyson structures have been shown elsewhere to be mechanically impractical purely due to the amount of material they'd need. A single fully enclosed, solid Dyson sphere surrounding a G2V star such as our Sun, at the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone (around 94 million miles from the centre of the star) and just nine feet thick would require the complete disassembly of all four inner planets (Mercury, Venus and Earth and Mars and all associated satellites, shepherd asteroids and Lagrangian objects), the entire asteroid belt, and all the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The amount of energy that would be required to counter any drift during and post construction would be immense (say bye bye to Jupiter, being the second largest and ready source of hydrogen available locally), and what are you going to use for atmosphere? Our envelope wouldn't be near enough, unless you can learn to cope with 1/640millionth of a bar pressure. That's right, you'd have to completely convert the entire gas content of TWO G2V white dwarf stars (two of our SUNS!) to oxygen and nitrogen and pump it in. Which brings another couple problems: how are you going to contain a gas envelope that just wants to fall into the Sun? And having solved that problem (you have, right?), how are you going to cope with 80 miles of gas pressing out against nine feet of iron and nickel? You'll need another couple planets' worth of iron just to reinforce the sphere!
Oh yeah, and water might become a bit on the scarce side as well; the entire content of our oceans and polar caps, rivers and lakes would form a solid ice ball only 360 miles wide. That wouldn't be enough to form a ground frost on the inside of the sphere.