You don't think it is possible that Microsoft could have lobbied the USN.
The government decided they wanted to use off the shelf computer equipment and software. They got sick of developing a computer system and maintaining it for 30 years.
As opposed to a system which will probably need a complete overhaul ever 5 years...
You realize that in the 80s there were software engineers that were maintaining code for submarines that had ferrous-core memory systems.
This being the same Navy which reactivated 4 Iowa class WWII designed battle cruisers around the same time. A lot of military hardware is fairly old. Military commanders tend to prefer it that way because it means that the behaviour of any machine is well understood. With as many of the bugs as possible shaken out.
So, its nice that you're mad about the navy's choice of computing infrastructure. The fact that it happened to fail has nothing whatsoever to do with microsoft, and you're being irrational about being upset with them over this.
Except that Microsoft's basic approach to making and selling software is completly inappropriate for the vast majority of military applications. Microsoft just don't provide reliablity or long term support. They don't need to buy warship XP they need the bugs in warship 85, 75 or 65 fixing. Warship XP shouldn't be considered safe to send anywhere near a shooting war until 2015...
Look, I don't care WHAT the problem was. A military vessel is explicitly designed to keep working even if parts of it get destroyed.
Or at least that should be a basic design criteria.
I would expect the vessel to continue functioning, albeit at a decreased efficiency, if I shot the computer with my sidearm.
Shooting it with a pistol should do nothing at all to the actual control system. Just possibly break the input devices. Warships tend to be targeted by ordinance a lot more destructive than anything remotly man portable. A control system should be capable of withstanding at least one direct hit from a, non nuclear, anti ship missile.
The previous article about their billions was specifically referring to cash reserves, which are not stock.
And you think they would never use those cash reserves to keep their stock price artificially high. At least until the top executives had converted all their assets into cash... If Microsoft's stock were to take a nosedive it would be very suprising if any of this cash was around afterwards.
Why is it that the audience here is unwilling to get behind an "All American" company and support it,
Presumably Microsoft intend selling their X-Box elsewhere than just the US. Indeed promoting somthing as "All American", especially right now, would probably dissuade many people from buying it.
Microsoft can afford to lose money on the XBOX. They've got enough extra cash lying around to buy a dozen space shuttles.
But if they were to fail that could affect how the stock market sees them... Most of Microsoft's assets are simply numbers in stock exchange computer systems.
Alan Cox clearly doesn't understand copyright -- what is that baloney about it being invented by oppressive regimes for censor?
Sounds like Alan knows perfectly well what he is talking about. History didn't start at the same time as the USA.
Copyright was something an author sold a publisher, and didn't exist in any form, really, until it got put in the American constitiution.
The US Consitution borrows ideas from all over the place. The IP section is taken from a 1710 piece of legislation, "The Queen Anne Copyright Statue".
The problem then was the publishers were ripping off the writers, and it was made to protect a writer's (and the publishers he contracted with) rights.
Until 1710 the concept of "authors rights" was not recognised. The situation of authors ending up having to assign copyright to publishers most certainly does cover the current situation, nearly 300 years later.
He's right about the political machinations though. When the only alternatives are some fruitcake space cadet with a bunch of platitudes or a racists with a promise to make the trains run, people are going to say, hell with it -- if we can't have a decent government, at least we can have reliable transportation.
One important think to consider is that there is a lot of diversity in European politics. I'd expect people in the US to have been suprised at the number of political parties competing in the recent French, Dutch and Irish elections. Assuming these were covered at all...
I saw a documentary recently which suggested that even though the towers were designed to withstand the impact of an aircraft
Which they actually did perfectly well.
no one gave much thought to what would happen AFTER the impact, and what effect the impact might have on specific components (like the building's core, and the fire-retardant coating on the steel beams that connected the outer walls to the inner core)
One important point about the WTC design is that both the core and outer wall were structural. Which is most likely why WTC2 collapsed first, an almost horizontal rip in one side of the wall is more damaging than a big hole in the middle.
The current model is based off of a certain number of episodes per year, shown a week apart. Half the year gets reruns so people can catch up.
It depends where you are in the world. The US model involves showing a series in one slot throughout the year. Contrived so that new episodes come at certain times and you get "rerun hell". In other parts of the world you'd tend to get either shown once then something else shown in the same slot or shown once in it's entirity then repeated in entirity. Repeating the programme isn't intended for the benefit of the viewers, it's so that the broadcaster can fill up their schedule at least cost to them.
Make a central location (i.e.- getSouthPark.com) that people can go to and d/l an episode for $5 or so. High-speed servers that make your P2P look like shit. Don't have to hunt, don't have to worry you're getting inferior VHS to DivX after-the-dog-chewed-the-tape copies, don't have to wait. Hell, $5 for ones with the commercials or $7.50 sans ads.
Also since it's comming off a server the ads can always be current ads. Also ads can be selected by the geography of the viewer. Which means potentially more advertisers.
Lots of people would jump on that. Add a subscription service for a show -- get all the episodes sent directly to your TiVo for $50 a season. Sort of like "League Pass" with the sports.
Thing is that the status quo interests would want this $50 to go to the existing broadcasters. Rather than new distribution companies or even direct to production companies.
In the "perfect" world, where movies are uncopiable and you have to see it at the theater and/or purchase a legitimate copy, the industry would see only a paltry rise in revenue compared to today -- not the $3 Billion touted by Mr. Valenti.
Any rise in revenue would need to be offset by any loss due there no longer being people who chose to buy after seeing the bootleg.
Next we will exhaust quite some amounts of helium into our atmosphere, okay helium is a inert gas, so doesn't react so quickly, but what effects of high additional amounts of helium can have, we don't know.
Helium does not tend to stick around much on a planet like Earth. Indeed the only reason there is as much as there is is due to helium generated by alpha decay of radioactive materials.
For example, there is a movie coming out called "Minority Report" based on a book by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The short summary is that the government can predict crimes before the occur and thus stop them from occuring at all.
It's actually a short story. In the story the predictions are made by psychica, rather than computers. Plenty of his other work covers out of control computers or supposedly impartial computers actually subject to human manipulation. Anyway the central theme behind "Minority Report" appears to be how such a system can give unexpected results when applied to a government official who knows exactly how things work.
Twenty-five years ago, the greatest disaster in airline history killed 538 people, in part because of a "heterodyne" radio glitch that still hasn't been fixed.
No, the accident happened because an impatient pilot attempted to take off in thick fog whilst another plane was taxiing along the runway. The radio issues in no way excuse Jacob Van Zanten from the utterly stupidity of accelerating a 747 down a fog obscured runway without being absolutly sure that no other aircraft was on that runway.
It should be noted that many newer nuclear powers have yet to detonate a device of that magnitude. Just imagine what a small cargo ship full of heavy water could do...
Nothing very much at all. Indeed it would be suprising if you don't have duterium in your body right now.
It seems to me that if you allow people to walk around on something, you should design it to hold at least the load that would be caused if it was totally full of people.
The designer may well have done that. Problem was that what was built wasn't what had been designed. Indeed what was built couldn't even support it's own weight.
I live in KC, and remember thinking that the guys who designed the skywalks got a bum rap.
They were designed for people to walk from one side to the other, perhaps to pause and
check out the view for a few moments before continuing on their way, but not for a huge
crowd to fill them, swaying in unison in rhythm to the music. I have a great deal of sympathy
for the people on the lower skywalk and those underneath them both, but the ones on the
upper skywalk contributed to their own injuries. I never saw any acknowledgment of this
distinction.
The reason is that what the people were doing was irrelevent. As built the structure couldn't even support it's own weight. More people on it may have made it collapse a bit sooner, but even if no one had ever walked on either walkway it would still have collapsed at some time.
However, the problem wasn't with the tyre's as such, but with the fuel tanks. Fuel tanks on the Concorde used to have very little protection meaning that anything hitting the wing at high velocity could rupture them. In fact, it's a wonder a similar accident hadn't happened before.
Similar accidents had happened before. Not to the same type of aircraft, not from the same cause. But there had been cases of aircraft wing tanks being punctured on take off, long before. A 737 about 15 years before didn't even manage to get into the air.
Another issue I have been thinking about is the relationship between code reuse and unexpected behaviours. Code reuse (and object class reuse) is fine as long as all of the functionality and limitations of the object/code are known.
Or even changing hardware without checking if parts of the software need changing. As ESA found out the hard, and expensive, way...
Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're [sjsu.edu] the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists.
Maybe it wasn't mentioned because the cause is similar to the Swedish warship. People who knew what they were doing being overruled by government.
A more appropriate analogy would be listing the leaders of all the countries in world along with some accusation of war crimes and/or an explanation of why they're evil and need to be vanquished.
Would it not make rather a difference if "vanquished" ment brought before an international tribuneral, with execution being seriously considered or just killed?
Conversely: maybe the way to shut down Nuremberg files is with a law like the one that shut down JusticeFiles.org, which makes it illegal to post cops' home addresses and phone numbers and so on. (some legal analysis here [rcfp.org].)
What appears to have been missed is that there is a serious problem with laws granting special protection for doctors and special protection for police officers. Or indeed any law to grant special protection to an arbitary group of people...
Funny, you could say the same about Government, and maybe you do. In fact, you seem to have much more of a bone to pick with authority in general more than "Religion".
There is not always a clear dividing line between "religion" and "politics" with both religious organisations wielding political power and political organisations using either religion or some other kind of faith to support their position.
Anyway, it is the reason you can't just stick an air conditioner in the middle of the room or leave the fridge door open and expect your house to get cooler.
There are air air conditioning units which you can simply sit in the middle of a room to make it cooler. The downside is that they make the air more humid.
You have to have a heat exchanger outside to dump the heat removed from the cold side and the 20% waste heat that they are quoting.
Or something which can adsorb the heat. The air conditioning units on
a 747 are actually designed to dump heat into the fuel.
That's right. Fake name, fake birthday, ZIP code 90210. But I did an oopsie when I went in to change my profile. Just to be funny, I thought I give them an even faker birthday than the fake one I put in, but I locked myself out of my account because now it thinks I'm 3 years old and I need my parent's permission to confirm my account.
Maybe if people want to put in fake data they should give a date of birth before 1900 and fill in "vampire" under occupation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how thats microsofts problem.
You don't think it is possible that Microsoft could have lobbied the USN.
The government decided they wanted to use off the shelf computer equipment and software. They got sick of developing a computer system and maintaining it for 30 years.
As opposed to a system which will probably need a complete overhaul ever 5 years...
You realize that in the 80s there were software engineers that were maintaining code for submarines that had ferrous-core memory systems.
This being the same Navy which reactivated 4 Iowa class WWII designed battle cruisers around the same time.
A lot of military hardware is fairly old. Military commanders tend to prefer it that way because it means that the behaviour of any machine is well understood. With as many of the bugs as possible shaken out.
So, its nice that you're mad about the navy's choice of computing infrastructure. The fact that it happened to fail has nothing whatsoever to do with microsoft, and you're being irrational about being upset with them over this.
Except that Microsoft's basic approach to making and selling software is completly inappropriate for the vast majority of military applications. Microsoft just don't provide reliablity or long term support. They don't need to buy warship XP they need the bugs in warship 85, 75 or 65 fixing. Warship XP shouldn't be considered safe to send anywhere near a shooting war until 2015...
Look, I don't care WHAT the problem was. A military vessel is explicitly designed to keep working even if parts of it get destroyed.
Or at least that should be a basic design criteria.
I would expect the vessel to continue functioning, albeit at a decreased efficiency, if I shot the computer with my sidearm.
Shooting it with a pistol should do nothing at all to the actual control system. Just possibly break the input devices. Warships tend to be targeted by ordinance a lot more destructive than anything remotly man portable. A control system should be capable of withstanding at least one direct hit from a, non nuclear, anti ship missile.
The previous article about their billions was specifically referring to cash reserves, which are not stock.
And you think they would never use those cash reserves to keep their stock price artificially high. At least until the top executives had converted all their assets into cash...
If Microsoft's stock were to take a nosedive it would be very suprising if any of this cash was around afterwards.
Why is it that the audience here is unwilling to get behind an "All American" company and support it,
Presumably Microsoft intend selling their X-Box elsewhere than just the US. Indeed promoting somthing as "All American", especially right now, would probably dissuade many people from buying it.
Microsoft can afford to lose money on the XBOX. They've got enough extra cash lying around to buy a dozen space shuttles.
But if they were to fail that could affect how the stock market sees them... Most of Microsoft's assets are simply numbers in stock exchange computer systems.
Alan Cox clearly doesn't understand copyright -- what is that baloney about it being invented by oppressive regimes for censor?
Sounds like Alan knows perfectly well what he is talking about. History didn't start at the same time as the USA.
Copyright was something an author sold a publisher, and didn't exist in any form, really, until it got put in the American constitiution.
The US Consitution borrows ideas from all over the place. The IP section is taken from a 1710 piece of legislation, "The Queen Anne Copyright Statue".
The problem then was the publishers were ripping off the writers, and it was made to protect a writer's (and the publishers he contracted with) rights.
Until 1710 the concept of "authors rights" was not recognised. The situation of authors ending up having to assign copyright to publishers most certainly does cover the current situation, nearly 300 years later.
He's right about the political machinations though. When the only alternatives are some fruitcake space cadet with a bunch of platitudes or a racists with a promise to make the trains run, people are going to say, hell with it -- if we can't have a decent government, at least we can have reliable transportation.
One important think to consider is that there is a lot of diversity in European politics. I'd expect people in the US to have been suprised at the number of political parties competing in the recent French, Dutch and Irish elections. Assuming these were covered at all...
I saw a documentary recently which suggested that even though the towers were designed to withstand the impact of an aircraft
Which they actually did perfectly well.
no one gave much thought to what would happen AFTER the impact, and what effect the impact might have on specific components (like the building's core, and the fire-retardant coating on the steel beams that connected the outer walls to the inner core)
One important point about the WTC design is that both the core and outer wall were structural. Which is most likely why WTC2 collapsed first, an almost horizontal rip in one side of the wall is more damaging than a big hole in the middle.
The current model is based off of a certain number of episodes per year, shown a week apart. Half the year gets reruns so people can catch up.
It depends where you are in the world. The US model involves showing a series in one slot throughout the year. Contrived so that new episodes come at certain times and you get "rerun hell". In other parts of the world you'd tend to get either shown once then something else shown in the same slot or shown once in it's entirity then repeated in entirity.
Repeating the programme isn't intended for the benefit of the viewers, it's so that the broadcaster can fill up their schedule at least cost to them.
Make a central location (i.e.- getSouthPark.com) that people can go to and d/l an episode for $5 or so. High-speed servers that make your P2P look like shit. Don't have to hunt, don't have to worry you're getting inferior VHS to DivX after-the-dog-chewed-the-tape copies, don't have to wait. Hell, $5 for ones with the commercials or $7.50 sans ads.
Also since it's comming off a server the ads can always be current ads. Also ads can be selected by the geography of the viewer. Which means potentially more advertisers.
Lots of people would jump on that. Add a subscription service for a show -- get all the episodes sent directly to your TiVo for $50 a season. Sort of like "League Pass" with the sports.
Thing is that the status quo interests would want this $50 to go to the existing broadcasters. Rather than new distribution companies or even direct to production companies.
In the "perfect" world, where movies are uncopiable and you have to see it at the theater and/or purchase a legitimate copy, the industry would see only a paltry rise in revenue compared to today -- not the $3 Billion touted by Mr. Valenti.
Any rise in revenue would need to be offset by any loss due there no longer being people who chose to buy after seeing the bootleg.
Next we will exhaust quite some amounts of helium into our atmosphere, okay helium is a inert gas, so doesn't react so quickly, but what effects of high additional amounts of helium can have, we don't know.
Helium does not tend to stick around much on a planet like Earth. Indeed the only reason there is as much as there is is due to helium generated by alpha decay of radioactive materials.
For example, there is a movie coming out called "Minority Report" based on a book by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The short summary is that the government can predict crimes before the occur and thus stop them from occuring at all.
It's actually a short story. In the story the predictions are made by psychica, rather than computers. Plenty of his other work covers out of control computers or supposedly impartial computers actually subject to human manipulation.
Anyway the central theme behind "Minority Report" appears to be how such a system can give unexpected results when applied to a government official who knows exactly how things work.
not the only swedish 17th century warship to have a catastrophic ending...
Better well known is the 16th century British warship, Mary Rose. Which sank following a refit.
Twenty-five years ago, the greatest disaster in airline history killed 538 people, in part because of a "heterodyne" radio glitch that still hasn't been fixed.
No, the accident happened because an impatient pilot attempted to take off in thick fog whilst another plane was taxiing along the runway.
The radio issues in no way excuse Jacob Van Zanten from the utterly stupidity of accelerating a 747 down a fog obscured runway without being absolutly sure that no other aircraft was on that runway.
It should be noted that many newer nuclear powers have yet to detonate a device of that magnitude. Just imagine what a small cargo ship full of heavy water could do...
Nothing very much at all. Indeed it would be suprising if you don't have duterium in your body right now.
It seems to me that if you allow people to walk around on something, you should design it to hold at least the load that would be caused if it was totally full of people.
The designer may well have done that.
Problem was that what was built wasn't what had been designed.
Indeed what was built couldn't even support it's own weight.
I live in KC, and remember thinking that the guys who designed the skywalks got a bum rap. They were designed for people to walk from one side to the other, perhaps to pause and check out the view for a few moments before continuing on their way, but not for a huge crowd to fill them, swaying in unison in rhythm to the music. I have a great deal of sympathy for the people on the lower skywalk and those underneath them both, but the ones on the upper skywalk contributed to their own injuries. I never saw any acknowledgment of this distinction.
The reason is that what the people were doing was irrelevent. As built the structure couldn't even support it's own weight. More people on it may have made it collapse a bit sooner, but even if no one had ever walked on either walkway it would still have collapsed at some time.
However, the problem wasn't with the tyre's as such, but with the fuel tanks. Fuel tanks on the Concorde used to have very little protection meaning that anything hitting the wing at high velocity could rupture them. In fact, it's a wonder a similar accident hadn't happened before.
Similar accidents had happened before. Not to the same type of aircraft, not from the same cause. But there had been cases of aircraft wing tanks being punctured on take off, long before. A 737 about 15 years before didn't even manage to get into the air.
Another issue I have been thinking about is the relationship between code reuse and unexpected behaviours. Code reuse (and object class reuse) is fine as long as all of the functionality and limitations of the object/code are known.
Or even changing hardware without checking if parts of the software need changing. As ESA found out the hard, and expensive, way...
Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're [sjsu.edu] the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists.
Maybe it wasn't mentioned because the cause is similar to the Swedish warship. People who knew what they were doing being overruled by government.
A more appropriate analogy would be listing the leaders of all the countries in world along with some accusation of war crimes and/or an explanation of why they're evil and need to be vanquished.
Would it not make rather a difference if "vanquished" ment brought before an international tribuneral, with execution being seriously considered or just killed?
Conversely: maybe the way to shut down Nuremberg files is with a law like the one that shut down JusticeFiles.org, which makes it illegal to post cops' home addresses and phone numbers and so on. (some legal analysis here [rcfp.org].)
What appears to have been missed is that there is a serious problem with laws granting special protection for doctors and special protection for police officers. Or indeed any law to grant special protection to an arbitary group of people...
Funny, you could say the same about Government, and maybe you do. In fact, you seem to have much more of a bone to pick with authority in general more than "Religion".
There is not always a clear dividing line between "religion" and "politics" with both religious organisations wielding political power and political organisations using either religion or some other kind of faith to support their position.
Anyway, it is the reason you can't just stick an air conditioner in the middle of the room or leave the fridge door open and expect your house to get cooler.
There are air air conditioning units which you can simply sit in the middle of a room to make it cooler. The downside is that they make the air more humid.
You have to have a heat exchanger outside to dump the heat removed from the cold side and the 20% waste heat that they are quoting.
Or something which can adsorb the heat. The air conditioning units on a 747 are actually designed to dump heat into the fuel.
Boeing cannot quantify those figures for a 747. When a 747 rolls off the production line, they do not know how much that plane has cost them to build.
:)
You'd think they'd have some idea by now. It's not as if a 747 is a new aircraft design.
I don't care how you slice it, when a company cannot define the cost of their product, that's a problem.
So long as they avoid selling it at below cost it probably isn't a serious problem though
That's right. Fake name, fake birthday, ZIP code 90210. But I did an oopsie when I went in to change my profile. Just to be funny, I thought I give them an even faker birthday than the fake one I put in, but I locked myself out of my account because now it thinks I'm 3 years old and I need my parent's permission to confirm my account.
Maybe if people want to put in fake data they should give a date of birth before 1900 and fill in "vampire" under occupation.