The underlying network should be pretty agnostic. Devices connected to the networks probably need timing to a reasonable degree of precision for things to stay in sync, and when your GPS receiver decides to party like it's 1999, you lose that precision.
Having just reviewed several GPS receivers from different brands over the last month or so to ensure that my workplace wouldn't have such problems (most are fine and dandy, one particularly ancient one needs replacing in the coming months - interestingly, that one's from a brand that markets heavily to emergency services) I'm wondering just how decentralized the network is.
If they've got a limited number of timing hosts with GPS receivers and NTP out, and all the devices on the network are synced to that, they need to acquire and swap in a limited number of new ones.
On the other hand, if it's really decentralized, and almost every device on the network has its own GPS receiver... pass the popcorn, wouldja?
I mentioned this in a late comment on the other post, and the hardware has been mentioned on the Reddit thread - including by the person who built the modules! - but the Mark 6 drive packs used for recording this data at various large, high-bandwidth radio observatories can handle 16 Gbps sustained records. (By way of comparison, an all-SSD RAID might get you about one-quarter that speed.)
It was explained to me by a guy who runs a radio telescope as each pack more or less being a JBOD, but with controllers smart enough to write each packet of data to whatever drive was ready to handle it, while keeping a journal on some other drive of where things had been written, so that the data could be reassembled later. The word "shotgun" figured into the explanation.
One aspect of all this that we geeks might find interesting is the recording systems developed for handling the huge amounts of data a high-bandwidth radio telescope spits out. MIT Haystack Observatory, NRAO and a company called Conduant have created storage packs for those times when there just isn't a level of RAID that can handle your data needs. Here's the latest (Mark 6) from Haystack's site:
If I correctly understood and recall the way it was explained to me once, it's basically a box of cheap disks with a controller smart enough and fast enough to shove data to whatever drive can take it, and keep a journal of what was put where, so when all the drive packs from around the world are shipped back to Haystack for correlating, it can all be sorted out and put into the right order.
So... not only is there the whole "imagine what you could do with 5 petabytes of storage," there's the whole "imagine what you could do with storage that you can write to at a sustained rate of 16Gbps."
Even sunny Hawaii realizes that not every roof gets lots of sun all the time, so its law (in effect since 2010) requires new single-family construction have solar hot water OR photovoltaics OR other renewable power for water heating OR a high-efficiency gas-fired tankless on-demand water heater.
1.36kg seemed pretty light back then, and the 2010 version came in a hair lighter at 1.35kg. Of course, the 13-inch MacBook Pro was a whopping 2.04kg. But then the 13-inch MacBook Pro (Retina) came out at only 1.48kg, and now the second generation (sans Menu Bar) is down to 1.37kg - only 10 grams more than the original MacBook Air.
This is an improvement, since now when a robot becomes depressed, there is someone it can call, who will try to talk it out of plunging suicidally into the nearest mall fountain.
And even those who are still fine know it's going to happen sooner or later.
A sixty-something guy I used to work with got a Tesla in part because of all the assistive features (and opted for the features), because he figures in 10 years, he might appreciate things like self-park, stay-in-lane, adaptive cruise control and all that, even if he doesn't need them right this instant.
"All things factored in" includes what - airfare, five-star hotels and four-diamond restaurants, hookers and blow?
Even if I were tired of all the green spaces, parks, wildlife refuges, etc. etc. in my own area, $60 in gas will get me and my family a round-trip to somewhere 300 miles away, and I'm not sure how I'm going to spend $2,268 more.
Yes, "The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc" is a non-profit that spun out of a little school called MIT in the 1970s. (Not to be confused with "Lincoln Laboratory" which is still officially MIT-run, or "MITRE Corporation" which was created in the late 1950s with mostly former MIT/Lincoln folks.)
Yup, pretty much clicked just to see if someone else had already mentioned TDP. I remember a while ago a company at the Philly navy yard or some such place had a prototype - think they may have been the same ones who built Carthage.
There are a few obvious exceptions to what's included, such as and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls.
Such as what and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls? One or more words seem to be missing there. I understand, they can't tell us what it is that we can't see. Got it.:)
This is one of my concerns - the possibility that the scraping was done using actual LinkedIn accounts, with connections and thus to some extent contains information that wasn't in public profiles.
My other concern is that even if you're limited to public information, if you have enough of it, you can deduce non-public stuff.
Maybe it's one of the big "profiles based on public records" companies; maybe it's state-sponsored or some kind of non-state actor.
Anyway, from an opsec angle, I felt justified blanking my profile - just days after someone told me it was far more interesting than those of Silicon Valley millionaires. Haven't dropped my connections yet, but continuing to back away from social / professional networking.
Next I need to remember my password for Academia, which regularly sends me email noting that someone I've never heard of is following me on there, and asking me to confirm that I know them.
Whew! For a minute there, I thought Slashdot, which was full of cutting-edge techies when I joined something-teen years ago, had become the domain of crotchety old curmudgeons. Glad to see someone still acknowledging that progress can exist.
Plenty of other technologies have given way to newer ones in the time this site has been around, and in most of those cases, there's been a period where technology B didn't work well with technology A and wasn't universal, and then after a bit manufacturers supported it and life went on.
If this sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth happened every time - and was actually successful - we'd still be using 5.25-inch floppies, MFM/RLL drives, keyboards with "AT" connectors, EGA graphics, token-ring networking over coax, long-distance communications through DB-9/DB-25 serial ports limited to 56K, and so on.
Even if a new standard is developed, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, in that somebody has to be the first to adopt it, and during the transitional period there's less motivation for industry to make things for it. Just look at USB in the '90s. That was a standard, developed by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq and others, which should have had enough weight in the PC world, but rather embarrassingly the first mainstream product to use it was the iMac - and Apple wasn't even involved in creating the standard.
Five, ten years from now, I anticipate we'll all have USB-C headphones (except Apple users, who might have something non-standard), and there will be USB-C ports everywhere, and we'll look back at this thread and laugh.
The accelerating expansion of the universe, aka "dark energy" is just about the last case in which you want to say this sort of thing, you know. Two independent groups of scientists both set out to measure how much the expansion was decelerating, since they, and basically everyone else who even believed the universe was expanding, expected gravity to slow it down over time. Through lots of observations (not pulled out of their collective asses) and calculations (ditto), they wound up disproving their own hypotheses.
I would say that's an example of science at its best - research leading to results that fly in the face of what had previously been believed, and belief being updated as a result. Apparently the Nobel committee felt the same way. Oh, and yes, there are people - not just Hubble folks - actively running experiments to get more data and see whether the numbers arrived at back in the late '90s by the guys who won the Nobel 5 years ago were actually right. In fact, those same guys are involved in follow-on projects to further refine or narrow down the ranges they came up with.
This. Given the size of the iTunes Store and Google Play, if you want a certain kind of app, there are probably 20 free ones you can download and try to see which one you like best. My phone says I downloaded 26 free Sudoku apps at some point in the distant past - but for some strange reason, I only kept one of those.
GMT's approach of using a small number of very large round mirrors, instead of a large number of small hexagonal ones, is very different from the path chosen by E-ELT and TMT (and GTC, and SALT, and HET, and Keck I and II)... in fact, other than possibly the original design of the MMT, I'm unsure whether anyone's done this before. (And of course the original design of the MMT was chosen because nobody knew how to make a 6.5-meter mirror at that point in time.) It will be very interesting to see how well it works, particular in comparison to the (by now well-established) practice of using lots of small hexagons.
...by writing a simple page and putting it under load on a Sun E4500... which was the front end of our dot-com's website. We were only invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, thankfully...
Well, you can't just go chasing after every so-called protocol some Finn throws out there, you know. Clearly Microsoft just felt it best to wait 20 years for the spec to settle down enough that it would attract a few users.
Congratulations, fellow Slashdotters, for (predictably?) hewing to the opposite end of the spectrum from the people in the articles.
If their side says, "Hawaiian culture and spirituality is of paramount importance, your science has no place on our sacred mountain," calling them extreme and then saying that science is of paramount importance and their culture and spirituality should be given no weight whatsoever... doesn't make you look like the good guys. In fact, it only gives them more evidence that supporters of science are every bit as extreme and closed-minded.
I work full-time at a big telescope on Maunakea, and have a further part-time job using one of the smaller telescopes on Maunakea, as well as other jobs outside astronomy. I go to Maunakea in person, and interact with TMT's opponents in person. The situation is a lot more nuanced to me than a bunch of Internet Tough Guys could hope to begin to understand, but I just wanted to let you know that no, you're actually not helping.
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying network should be pretty agnostic. Devices connected to the networks probably need timing to a reasonable degree of precision for things to stay in sync, and when your GPS receiver decides to party like it's 1999, you lose that precision.
Having just reviewed several GPS receivers from different brands over the last month or so to ensure that my workplace wouldn't have such problems (most are fine and dandy, one particularly ancient one needs replacing in the coming months - interestingly, that one's from a brand that markets heavily to emergency services) I'm wondering just how decentralized the network is.
If they've got a limited number of timing hosts with GPS receivers and NTP out, and all the devices on the network are synced to that, they need to acquire and swap in a limited number of new ones.
On the other hand, if it's really decentralized, and almost every device on the network has its own GPS receiver... pass the popcorn, wouldja?
Haystack's description has it as Gbps:
https://www.haystack.mit.edu/t...
I mentioned this in a late comment on the other post, and the hardware has been mentioned on the Reddit thread - including by the person who built the modules! - but the Mark 6 drive packs used for recording this data at various large, high-bandwidth radio observatories can handle 16 Gbps sustained records. (By way of comparison, an all-SSD RAID might get you about one-quarter that speed.)
It was explained to me by a guy who runs a radio telescope as each pack more or less being a JBOD, but with controllers smart enough to write each packet of data to whatever drive was ready to handle it, while keeping a journal on some other drive of where things had been written, so that the data could be reassembled later. The word "shotgun" figured into the explanation.
One aspect of all this that we geeks might find interesting is the recording systems developed for handling the huge amounts of data a high-bandwidth radio telescope spits out. MIT Haystack Observatory, NRAO and a company called Conduant have created storage packs for those times when there just isn't a level of RAID that can handle your data needs. Here's the latest (Mark 6) from Haystack's site:
https://www.haystack.mit.edu/t...
If I correctly understood and recall the way it was explained to me once, it's basically a box of cheap disks with a controller smart enough and fast enough to shove data to whatever drive can take it, and keep a journal of what was put where, so when all the drive packs from around the world are shipped back to Haystack for correlating, it can all be sorted out and put into the right order.
So... not only is there the whole "imagine what you could do with 5 petabytes of storage," there's the whole "imagine what you could do with storage that you can write to at a sustained rate of 16Gbps."
1. What could possibly go wrong?
2. And so it begins.
3. I, for one, welcome our self-learning robotic-arm overlords.
Even sunny Hawaii realizes that not every roof gets lots of sun all the time, so its law (in effect since 2010) requires new single-family construction have solar hot water OR photovoltaics OR other renewable power for water heating OR a high-efficiency gas-fired tankless on-demand water heater.
1.36kg seemed pretty light back then, and the 2010 version came in a hair lighter at 1.35kg. Of course, the 13-inch MacBook Pro was a whopping 2.04kg. But then the 13-inch MacBook Pro (Retina) came out at only 1.48kg, and now the second generation (sans Menu Bar) is down to 1.37kg - only 10 grams more than the original MacBook Air.
This is an improvement, since now when a robot becomes depressed, there is someone it can call, who will try to talk it out of plunging suicidally into the nearest mall fountain.
And even those who are still fine know it's going to happen sooner or later.
A sixty-something guy I used to work with got a Tesla in part because of all the assistive features (and opted for the features), because he figures in 10 years, he might appreciate things like self-park, stay-in-lane, adaptive cruise control and all that, even if he doesn't need them right this instant.
It's like scientists are now TRYING to win Ignobel Prizes.
"All things factored in" includes what - airfare, five-star hotels and four-diamond restaurants, hookers and blow?
Even if I were tired of all the green spaces, parks, wildlife refuges, etc. etc. in my own area, $60 in gas will get me and my family a round-trip to somewhere 300 miles away, and I'm not sure how I'm going to spend $2,268 more.
Yes, "The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc" is a non-profit that spun out of a little school called MIT in the 1970s. (Not to be confused with "Lincoln Laboratory" which is still officially MIT-run, or "MITRE Corporation" which was created in the late 1950s with mostly former MIT/Lincoln folks.)
Yup, pretty much clicked just to see if someone else had already mentioned TDP. I remember a while ago a company at the Philly navy yard or some such place had a prototype - think they may have been the same ones who built Carthage.
There are a few obvious exceptions to what's included, such as and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls.
Such as what and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls? One or more words seem to be missing there. :)
I understand, they can't tell us what it is that we can't see. Got it.
This is one of my concerns - the possibility that the scraping was done using actual LinkedIn accounts, with connections and thus to some extent contains information that wasn't in public profiles.
My other concern is that even if you're limited to public information, if you have enough of it, you can deduce non-public stuff.
Maybe it's one of the big "profiles based on public records" companies; maybe it's state-sponsored or some kind of non-state actor.
Anyway, from an opsec angle, I felt justified blanking my profile - just days after someone told me it was far more interesting than those of Silicon Valley millionaires. Haven't dropped my connections yet, but continuing to back away from social / professional networking.
Next I need to remember my password for Academia, which regularly sends me email noting that someone I've never heard of is following me on there, and asking me to confirm that I know them.
Whew! For a minute there, I thought Slashdot, which was full of cutting-edge techies when I joined something-teen years ago, had become the domain of crotchety old curmudgeons. Glad to see someone still acknowledging that progress can exist.
Plenty of other technologies have given way to newer ones in the time this site has been around, and in most of those cases, there's been a period where technology B didn't work well with technology A and wasn't universal, and then after a bit manufacturers supported it and life went on.
If this sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth happened every time - and was actually successful - we'd still be using 5.25-inch floppies, MFM/RLL drives, keyboards with "AT" connectors, EGA graphics, token-ring networking over coax, long-distance communications through DB-9/DB-25 serial ports limited to 56K, and so on.
Even if a new standard is developed, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, in that somebody has to be the first to adopt it, and during the transitional period there's less motivation for industry to make things for it. Just look at USB in the '90s. That was a standard, developed by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq and others, which should have had enough weight in the PC world, but rather embarrassingly the first mainstream product to use it was the iMac - and Apple wasn't even involved in creating the standard.
Five, ten years from now, I anticipate we'll all have USB-C headphones (except Apple users, who might have something non-standard), and there will be USB-C ports everywhere, and we'll look back at this thread and laugh.
The accelerating expansion of the universe, aka "dark energy" is just about the last case in which you want to say this sort of thing, you know. Two independent groups of scientists both set out to measure how much the expansion was decelerating, since they, and basically everyone else who even believed the universe was expanding, expected gravity to slow it down over time. Through lots of observations (not pulled out of their collective asses) and calculations (ditto), they wound up disproving their own hypotheses.
I would say that's an example of science at its best - research leading to results that fly in the face of what had previously been believed, and belief being updated as a result. Apparently the Nobel committee felt the same way. Oh, and yes, there are people - not just Hubble folks - actively running experiments to get more data and see whether the numbers arrived at back in the late '90s by the guys who won the Nobel 5 years ago were actually right. In fact, those same guys are involved in follow-on projects to further refine or narrow down the ranges they came up with.
This. Given the size of the iTunes Store and Google Play, if you want a certain kind of app, there are probably 20 free ones you can download and try to see which one you like best. My phone says I downloaded 26 free Sudoku apps at some point in the distant past - but for some strange reason, I only kept one of those.
GMT's approach of using a small number of very large round mirrors, instead of a large number of small hexagonal ones, is very different from the path chosen by E-ELT and TMT (and GTC, and SALT, and HET, and Keck I and II)... in fact, other than possibly the original design of the MMT, I'm unsure whether anyone's done this before. (And of course the original design of the MMT was chosen because nobody knew how to make a 6.5-meter mirror at that point in time.) It will be very interesting to see how well it works, particular in comparison to the (by now well-established) practice of using lots of small hexagons.
Talking to Mike Brown the morning after they submitted this paper, he acknowledged the inevitability of kooks, but didn't seem too concerned.
Controlling a facility that cost roughly $400,000,000 in the 1990s. But they're due to be replaced with Linux boxen next year.
...by writing a simple page and putting it under load on a Sun E4500... which was the front end of our dot-com's website. We were only invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, thankfully...
Next week, OneWeb's lisping president, Richmond Valentine, will announce free SIM cards for EVERYONE.
Well, you can't just go chasing after every so-called protocol some Finn throws out there, you know.
Clearly Microsoft just felt it best to wait 20 years for the spec to settle down enough that it would attract a few users.
Congratulations, fellow Slashdotters, for (predictably?) hewing to the opposite end of the spectrum from the people in the articles.
If their side says, "Hawaiian culture and spirituality is of paramount importance, your science has no place on our sacred mountain," calling them extreme and then saying that science is of paramount importance and their culture and spirituality should be given no weight whatsoever... doesn't make you look like the good guys. In fact, it only gives them more evidence that supporters of science are every bit as extreme and closed-minded.
I work full-time at a big telescope on Maunakea, and have a further part-time job using one of the smaller telescopes on Maunakea, as well as other jobs outside astronomy. I go to Maunakea in person, and interact with TMT's opponents in person. The situation is a lot more nuanced to me than a bunch of Internet Tough Guys could hope to begin to understand, but I just wanted to let you know that no, you're actually not helping.