Blind Faith was one of the more depressing novels I've read recently. Although it wasn't 'science fiction' per se, it did predict a technological near-future that seems to be getting closer by the second.
This submission is terrible. Is there a parrot in the room? You don't say "Such and such said this" and then in the next sentence insert a quote from Such and such saying EXACTLY THAT.
At least try to summarise the facts in your own words.
I was going to read a few more articles on Slashdot today, but I think I might go check out a few subreddits instead. Or maybe swipe through a few pages of Google Currents. Seeya.
Fixed one for a work colleague - it was a 1TB drive in an external enclosure and had 'stopped working'. The IT guy had deduced it had gone short circuit after it blew two of the IT guy's power supplies when he removed it from the enclosure and tried to power it directly.
It (as usual) had very important documents and photos on it. So I said I'd take a look and IT guy with a laugh bet me $100 that I had no hope.....CHALLENGE ACCEPTED....
I poked about on the board with a multimeter for a bit and discovered there was a dead short on the 12V rail. A suspicious-and-large-looking (for a SMD component,anyway) was just inboard from the SATA power connector, so with nothing to lose, I desoldered it.
Ta-da! Short was gone. Drive powered up fine, so we immediately pulled all the data off it. Looked up the number on the device, turns out it was a 14.7V zener diode. I presume at some stage the drive had been subjected to overvoltage and shorted out the protective zener. Seeing that it was in an enclosure, it's possible someone put the wrong power adaptor on it I guess.
Anyway, happy ending and the drive still works... it's just used for non-critical stuff now.
Bravo. You've got me convinced. Everyone's an honourable person underneath.
Now convince the readership of Forbes. Try to do better than the guy with the scruffy hair and 'evil etc' T-shirt that's been hacking into door locks lately.
For example, at present I can only think of a couple of opponents that would rise to the level of 'enemy' for the US.
Hey there. Try and look at this from a non-US perspective.
This isn't about who the US thinks is an enemy and what your definition of an enemy to them is. It's quite possible for someone to consider the US as an 'enemy' and for the US to consider them as 'just a trifling inconvenience'.
I have never been requested to send a document in a pdf format.
I must admit that as the years go by, the ol' resume is worth less and less and word of mouth and connections get me jobs now. Personally, I think having your document scanned for keywords/ranking is lazy and it's a warning sign for me to avoid companies with those kinds of HR departments. But perhaps my kind of work doesn't have the volume of applicants that other fields might have.
If they specifically ask for a specific format, by all means, send it to them. If they don't, send them something that will at least render and print nicely, certainly not O97.
Because we don't have the technology to make large holes 10+ km deep
So dig many small holes near the limits of our current tech then.
Anyone coming along who can get at it should have the equivalent technological ability. If you can get down as deep as us, you'll have a good reason for having that drilling tech, such as looking for minerals. If you're looking for minerals you should be able to analyse them. If you're analysing them, and you've got tech that can go as deep as us, you should be aware of radioactive elements. If you spread it out to many small boreholes, there's not going to be a large concentration of 'interesting' stuff in one spot detectable from the surface without good tech.
This clause is useless from a consumer standpoint. Weasel words highlighted:
Our Programming Changes. Many factors affect the availability, cost and quality of programming and may influence the decision to raise prices and the amount of any increase. These include, among others, programming and other costs, consumer demand, market and shareholder expectations, and changing business conditions. Accordingly, we must reserve the unrestricted right to change, rearrange, add or delete our programming packages, the selections in those packages, our prices, and any other Service we offer, at any time. We will endeavor to notify you of any change that is within our reasonable control and its effective date. In most cases this notice will be about one month in advance. You always have the right to cancel your Service, in whole or in part, if you do not accept the change (see Section 5). If you cancel your Service, a deactivation fee (described in Sections 2 & 5(b)) or other charges may apply. Credits, if any, to your account will be posted as described in Section 5. If you do not cancel, your continued receipt of our Service will constitute acceptance.
when he is neither the sharer, the viewer, nor the author.
He's the "fixer". He gets you what you want, because he knows someone who has it and can arrange delivery without fuss and bother on your part.This is a perfectly legit role to have in the scheme of things.
well, yeah, but the implication was you keep everything spinning and "just plug 'er back in!"
Hardware isn't *that* expensive these days and it seems like a lot of effort/expense for fairly small return. I've priced containerised data centres and it ain't cheap. Especially compared to the rather low monthly cost of insurance premiums, which should replace your hardware should things take a turn for the worse.
Then you've got to ask whether your current insurance will insure all your equipment when it's out of the insured premises moving at 60mph..... sounds like something insurance companies would gladly wash their hands of.
Done properly your UPS and AC systems would keep them alive until you could get to an alternate location with power and network which you should already have contracted for in advance.
With all your precious data sitting on ruined platters.
This is a legal requirement of operating as a bank in Australia.
You are not required to give a bank or any other entity your TFN. But the consequence of that is that they will tax any interest/earnings at the highest tax rate.
It pays 4 to 6 percent back if you can keep it on hand long enough and you're lucky enough to have a stable economy and sane CPI.. But I suppose you can do the old "keep it in a high interest account, pay off card in full monthly" routine too. Depending on your situation, you can get (or save) thousands if you do things like that, especially if you use your mortgage as the 'savings' account.
Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station).
I would suggest it is the density of the asteriod vs the empty shells of space stations that is the problem. A 100 ton asteroid (which might be equivalent to the ISS, and the shuttle was a lot lighter on re-entry) is approximately a 5 x 5 x 5 meter cube if you assume a 5,000kg / cubic meter density. It's not that big (er, spread out may be a better term) that aerodynamic forces can act on it in a way that can easily break it up and slow it down.
100,000kg moving at an impact speed of, say, 2km/sec is 0.5 * 50,000 * 4,000,000 or 100,000,000,000 Joules. Converting that TNT gives you about 23 tons of TNT. Not a world-ender, but not something you want to have land nearby. And that's just a 100 ton rock. Economies of scale would suggest you go get the biggest rock you can find, and a 5 x 5 x 5 meter rock is pretty piddly......
The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split,
Split where? The NBN fibres in my town here in Tassie end up in your house. There's a 4-port distributor on the power pole outside, and when a person connects a fibre goes from there to the NTD. The distributor isn't powered, it's just a weatherproof connector.
They do get aggregated further upstream somewhere, so I guess there could eventually be some congestion there.
We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.
Funny, everything after your first sentence describes early trans-oceanic seafaring exactly.
I'm not grumping about the system as such, just the vendor's claims.
"95% accuracy" sucks when you're scanning "thousands per hour" as you have to deal with at least one or two incorrect plates a minute. If "deal with" in this case means "officer isn't hassled by a beeping machine" it's ok.
I just hate the description of high throughput systems with a "xx%!" accuracy claim. Unless its up there in the 5 x 9's (like site availability), it's pitiful.
According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy.
Just a little grumble.... Two thousand an hour at 95-98 percent accuracy gives 40 to 100 wrongly-read plates.
Just like dictation software, where they say "99% accurate!" - a hundred words is pretty easy to clock up and then you seem to be forever correcting it.
And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.
Oh yeah, I suppose, there'll be some cash needed to pay for all that compute time to render it like the big boys. Great big stinking wads of cash. But yeah, it's totally levelled the playing field now.
DC for homes is not - it's quite difficult to arc-proof a switch for 110/220VDC. In the late 1930's, when DC was being phased out here in Australia a couple of relatives of mine experienced arcs in DC light switches that progressed out of the switch and up the cabling feeding them. Only way to stop them was to go and find the next breaker upstream.....
Slashdot Mirror
Because operating a webserver is basically opting-in to being part of the World Wide Web.
Blind Faith was one of the more depressing novels I've read recently. Although it wasn't 'science fiction' per se, it did predict a technological near-future that seems to be getting closer by the second.
This submission is terrible. Is there a parrot in the room? You don't say "Such and such said this" and then in the next sentence insert a quote from Such and such saying EXACTLY THAT.
At least try to summarise the facts in your own words.
I was going to read a few more articles on Slashdot today, but I think I might go check out a few subreddits instead. Or maybe swipe through a few pages of Google Currents. Seeya.
Fixed one for a work colleague - it was a 1TB drive in an external enclosure and had 'stopped working'. The IT guy had deduced it had gone short circuit after it blew two of the IT guy's power supplies when he removed it from the enclosure and tried to power it directly.
It (as usual) had very important documents and photos on it. So I said I'd take a look and IT guy with a laugh bet me $100 that I had no hope. ....CHALLENGE ACCEPTED....
I poked about on the board with a multimeter for a bit and discovered there was a dead short on the 12V rail. A suspicious-and-large-looking (for a SMD component,anyway) was just inboard from the SATA power connector, so with nothing to lose, I desoldered it.
Ta-da! Short was gone. Drive powered up fine, so we immediately pulled all the data off it. Looked up the number on the device, turns out it was a 14.7V zener diode. I presume at some stage the drive had been subjected to overvoltage and shorted out the protective zener. Seeing that it was in an enclosure, it's possible someone put the wrong power adaptor on it I guess.
Anyway, happy ending and the drive still works... it's just used for non-critical stuff now.
Bravo. You've got me convinced. Everyone's an honourable person underneath.
Now convince the readership of Forbes. Try to do better than the guy with the scruffy hair and 'evil etc' T-shirt that's been hacking into door locks lately.
For example, at present I can only think of a couple of opponents that would rise to the level of 'enemy' for the US.
Hey there. Try and look at this from a non-US perspective.
This isn't about who the US thinks is an enemy and what your definition of an enemy to them is. It's quite possible for someone to consider the US as an 'enemy' and for the US to consider them as 'just a trifling inconvenience'.
I have never been requested to send a document in a pdf format.
I must admit that as the years go by, the ol' resume is worth less and less and word of mouth and connections get me jobs now. Personally, I think having your document scanned for keywords/ranking is lazy and it's a warning sign for me to avoid companies with those kinds of HR departments. But perhaps my kind of work doesn't have the volume of applicants that other fields might have.
If they specifically ask for a specific format, by all means, send it to them. If they don't, send them something that will at least render and print nicely, certainly not O97.
I wonder what employers think when I send-out my resume and the little popup says, "Converting from Word97"?
This guy can't even be bothered to convert his resume to PDF so it prints nicely on my printer?
Because we don't have the technology to make large holes 10+ km deep
So dig many small holes near the limits of our current tech then.
Anyone coming along who can get at it should have the equivalent technological ability. If you can get down as deep as us, you'll have a good reason for having that drilling tech, such as looking for minerals. If you're looking for minerals you should be able to analyse them. If you're analysing them, and you've got tech that can go as deep as us, you should be aware of radioactive elements. If you spread it out to many small boreholes, there's not going to be a large concentration of 'interesting' stuff in one spot detectable from the surface without good tech.
So dig a deep hole and be done with it.
This clause is useless from a consumer standpoint. Weasel words highlighted:
Our Programming Changes. Many factors affect the availability, cost and quality of programming and may influence the decision to raise prices and the amount of any increase. These include, among others, programming and other costs, consumer demand, market and shareholder expectations, and changing business conditions. Accordingly, we must reserve the unrestricted right to change, rearrange, add or delete our programming packages, the selections in those packages, our prices, and any other Service we offer, at any time. We will endeavor to notify you of any change that is within our reasonable control and its effective date. In most cases this notice will be about one month in advance. You always have the right to cancel your Service, in whole or in part, if you do not accept the change (see Section 5). If you cancel your Service, a deactivation fee (described in Sections 2 & 5(b)) or other charges may apply. Credits, if any, to your account will be posted as described in Section 5. If you do not cancel, your continued receipt of our Service will constitute acceptance.
One - this "fixer" role is not "perfectly legit" when his fixing breaks the law.
The law, according to a foreign country. Haven't seen the NZ government pressing charges......
Two - that also describes a pimp.
And it describes personal assistants, contractors, and a heap of other people in the service industry as well.
when he is neither the sharer, the viewer, nor the author.
He's the "fixer". He gets you what you want, because he knows someone who has it and can arrange delivery without fuss and bother on your part.This is a perfectly legit role to have in the scheme of things.
well, yeah, but the implication was you keep everything spinning and "just plug 'er back in!"
Hardware isn't *that* expensive these days and it seems like a lot of effort/expense for fairly small return. I've priced containerised data centres and it ain't cheap. Especially compared to the rather low monthly cost of insurance premiums, which should replace your hardware should things take a turn for the worse.
Then you've got to ask whether your current insurance will insure all your equipment when it's out of the insured premises moving at 60mph ..... sounds like something insurance companies would gladly wash their hands of.
Done properly your UPS and AC systems would keep them alive until you could get to an alternate location with power and network which you should already have contracted for in advance.
With all your precious data sitting on ruined platters.
This is a legal requirement of operating as a bank in Australia.
You are not required to give a bank or any other entity your TFN. But the consequence of that is that they will tax any interest/earnings at the highest tax rate.
So either way, taxman wins.
It pays 4 to 6 percent back if you can keep it on hand long enough and you're lucky enough to have a stable economy and sane CPI..
But I suppose you can do the old "keep it in a high interest account, pay off card in full monthly" routine too.
Depending on your situation, you can get (or save) thousands if you do things like that, especially if you use your mortgage as the 'savings' account.
Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station).
I would suggest it is the density of the asteriod vs the empty shells of space stations that is the problem.
A 100 ton asteroid (which might be equivalent to the ISS, and the shuttle was a lot lighter on re-entry) is approximately a 5 x 5 x 5 meter cube if you assume a 5,000kg / cubic meter density. It's not that big (er, spread out may be a better term) that aerodynamic forces can act on it in a way that can easily break it up and slow it down.
100,000kg moving at an impact speed of, say, 2km/sec is 0.5 * 50,000 * 4,000,000 or 100,000,000,000 Joules. Converting that TNT gives you about 23 tons of TNT. Not a world-ender, but not something you want to have land nearby. And that's just a 100 ton rock. Economies of scale would suggest you go get the biggest rock you can find, and a 5 x 5 x 5 meter rock is pretty piddly......
The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split,
Split where? The NBN fibres in my town here in Tassie end up in your house. There's a 4-port distributor on the power pole outside, and when a person connects a fibre goes from there to the NTD. The distributor isn't powered, it's just a weatherproof connector.
They do get aggregated further upstream somewhere, so I guess there could eventually be some congestion there.
We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.
Funny, everything after your first sentence describes early trans-oceanic seafaring exactly.
I'm not grumping about the system as such, just the vendor's claims.
"95% accuracy" sucks when you're scanning "thousands per hour" as you have to deal with at least one or two incorrect plates a minute. If "deal with" in this case means "officer isn't hassled by a beeping machine" it's ok.
I just hate the description of high throughput systems with a "xx%!" accuracy claim. Unless its up there in the 5 x 9's (like site availability), it's pitiful.
According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy.
Just a little grumble....
Two thousand an hour at 95-98 percent accuracy gives 40 to 100 wrongly-read plates.
Just like dictation software, where they say "99% accurate!" - a hundred words is pretty easy to clock up and then you seem to be forever correcting it.
And then the limitations of whether or not I can deliver something great will be on my own talent and the talent of the people that are part of the studio.
Oh yeah, I suppose, there'll be some cash needed to pay for all that compute time to render it like the big boys. Great big stinking wads of cash. But yeah, it's totally levelled the playing field now.
*rolls eyes*
HVDC is OK.
DC for homes is not - it's quite difficult to arc-proof a switch for 110/220VDC. In the late 1930's, when DC was being phased out here in Australia a couple of relatives of mine experienced arcs in DC light switches that progressed out of the switch and up the cabling feeding them. Only way to stop them was to go and find the next breaker upstream.....
Oh they're not idiots.
They're very smart.
It's just that they have different goals to what you would like.
Check out EnOcean sometime.
Wireless, kinetically powered switches, with up to 300 metres open-air range.