Someone was pushing the term "warstorming" for detecting wireless networks from the air (from the "war-" prefix + "barnstorming"). That sounds a little better than "warflying."
Incidentally, the "war-" prefix either comes from "wardialing" or is an acronym for "Wireless Access Reconaissance," depending on how politically-correct you feel like being.
It seems likely that this is at least partially a reaction on Microsoft's part to the fact that so many schools have taken up Java as their "language of choice" for CS students.
In earlier years, the language CS students usually programmed in first was Pascal.* Java has now largely supplanted that, probably because it's freely available, easy to get impressive-looking results with (due to the standard GUI toolkits included with it), and stands a better chance of being relevant. Sun may have had a hand in promoting Java for academic use, too.
So Microsoft's trying to even the score...hopefully, most schools will look at C# and decide "no, we already teach Java, how is this any different?" Of course, if M$ waves cash in their faces, all bets are off...
* - At least, this was the case in the late 80's, when I went through the CS curriculum at UCSB. Lower-division CS classes tended to use Pascal; upper-division ones used C. They've since switched to Java in lower-division courses.
Mozilla started in "mid-1994" from the best info I've been able to find.
In Jamie Zawinski's diaries from that period, he mentions the meeting where he first coined the term "Mozilla," and describes it as being "a week or two ago" in an entry dated August 5, 1994. Late July 1994 is a good "best estimate" for the origin of "Mozilla."
A week or two ago we all sat around and tried to think up a name for the client; we can't call it Mosaic, because that's the name of the company
[or was at the time -Erbo]. The marketroids had all kinds of silly suggestions like Cyber this and Power that and blah-blah Ware. Then someone said something about crushing NCSA Mosaic, and I blurted out ``Mozilla!'' Everyone seemed to like that, so I think that might end up being the official name of the browser.
Little did he know it was history in the making...
Then, of course, when Netscape decided to go open-source, he went and registered mozilla.org to house the new project.
I was thinking of those removable IDE drive adapters that have a tray that you bolt the drive into and a housing that fits in the computer's drive bay. If your backup drives were all fitted into those kind of trays, changing them in and out would be a breeze. In a pinch, you could unbolt the drive from its tray and connect it to a computer in the usual way. No doubt similar widgets exist for SCSI drives, should you be using those instead.
Another alternative might involve those external drives that use IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) interfaces. Just plug and copy...and plug them into any 1394-equipped computer for recovery. At that point, you might be going beyond the price of a tape drive...but not by much, and the 1394 drives offer easy random access to files in case you need to recover individual ones.
Solution: live backups. Put another machine on your LAN, with the same size drive. Set up a script to run that periodically copies the contents of your primary machine to the backup machine. If your primary machine's drive fails, you haven't lost anything.
Another solution: RAID-1, two drives mirroring one another. If one dies, the other one is still usable.
Of course, these don't provide the multiple-generation archiving you get with traditional backups. Still, it's a way of preventing data loss. (Now there's another solution...use multiple removable hard drives for multi-generation backup. Three big hard drives plus removable-disk trays will probably still cost less than one tape drive, and be more convenient besides.)
I just installed a Maxtor 80 Gb 5400 RPM drive in my PC, and it's very quiet...quieter than my old 13 Gb unit. In fact, it seems like I can't hear the new drive at all. Certainly not when the CD-ROM is spinning...now that makes a racket.
Remember, Maxtor used to be MiniScribe, who once stooped as far as shipping bricks instead of disk drives to book revenue. But since then, they've reformed and gotten their shit together.
I've been burned by the IBM drives recently, too. The reason Electric Minds is down right now is because the company that made our server put IBM DeskStar drives in it. Even a replacement drive I bought started failing mere months after I installed it, whereas I have Maxtor drives that have been in service for three years and longer, and have never failed once. The server disks are being replaced with new Maxtors now; I don't expect them to give any trouble...but it'll be a cold day in hell before I recommend anyone buy an IBM DeskStar.
And some of us expected this...one of the things that came to my mind after I heard about Entwistle's death was, "How long will it be before Rob puts this on Slashdot?" I thought of this because I knew Rob was a Who fan, because he's posted stories about them before, in which he acknowledged his fandom.
Quite frankly, he did nothing I wouldn't have done myself in the same type of situation. If/when Peter Gabriel dies, for instance, I'm publishing it to the front page of Electric Minds. I respect Rob's judgement, as I hope EMinders would respect mine.
"I like Insurrection because it is a 2 hour TNG episode."
Well, darn it, I did, too. Since there haven't been any new TNG episodes in a while, anytime they crank out a new movie with Picard's crew, it's a Good Thing. It just wasn't as strong a movie as First Contact, IMHO, is all. There were TNG episodes I liked that weren't as strong as the strongest ones, yet they were still good episodes, just not as strong.
There were problems with STV that started way before they went to the center of the galaxy. For instance, it looked like they were trying to shove Scotty and Uhura into a relationship, and that just doesn't make any sense to me. And don't get me started on Uhura's fandancing...
No, you've got it the wrong way round. Even-numbered Star Trek movies rock. Odd-numbered ones suck, or, at the very least, are kind of "ho hum."
Let's look at the evidence:
ST:TMP - Good to see the crew back again, after all these years, but a very slow movie and bo-ring in parts.
The Wrath of Khan - Kick ass! Ricardo Montalban and his rich Corinthian leather, chewing the scenery and quoting Moby Dick. And tons of action.
The Search for Spock - Ho hum. Nice flick, but couldn't measure up to the predecessor. And you kind of knew how it was going to turn out...
The Voyage Home - Funnier than hell. They were clearly out to have fun with the whole "time travel to the present day" gag, and did. My wife likes this one the best.
The Final Frontier - HEAVE! RETCH! What were they thinking? Were they thinking? Shatner couldn't direct his way out of a pay toilet, even if he had James Cameron in there to help him...
The Undiscovered Country - Tight and action-filled, with lots of present-day allegory. Laid some nice groundwork for later Klingon history as depicted on TNG. And Sulu gets to be a captain; he rocks.
Generations - Nice way to bridge the gap, but the story was nothing really spectacular. Gotta love the saucer-module crash scenes though.
First Contact - Borg, Borg Queen, time travel, the first warp flight, "Let's rock and roll!" (Cue up "Magic Carpet Ride.") Plenty of action, plenty of good scenes. I've used this movie to test out DVD players...
Insurrection - The best way I could describe this one is that it was basically like a 2-hour TNG episode. Other than that, it didn't stand out, really.
Nemesis - If the pattern holds, this movie should rock. Gotta check the trailers later today and see what they look like.
Personally, I think Troi looked better when she started wearing a real uniform instead of the "boob uniform." Getting rid of the cheerleader curls also helped...
For awhile there, I thought Star Trek was doing a good job in starting to portray its female characters more realistically, downplaying the "sex object" angle in favor of smart, tough female characters like Kira Nerys, Jadzia Dax, and Kathryn Janeway. Then I guess someone must have gotten scared that they were losing the 16-25 male demographic, because then we got Seven of Nine and her sprayed-on catsuit, and the "decontamination gel" shower scene on Enterprise. Oh well, win some, lose some...
The apps I was thinking of in my earlier post were some of the PFS: applications for the Apple II. I was exposed to those applications after I'd taken a high school course in Pascal (which used the p-System on HP micros). Some of the error messages listed in the manual were similar, and I remember the notation "All system errors cause the system to I)nitialize itself...", which I recognized as p-System terminology.
I never did get the p-Code interpreter card for my TI-99/4A, though; an environment like that might have run p-System programs a little faster. (There's an early example of "VMs implemented in hardware" for you...way ahead of the JavaChip.)
Another thing virtual machines have historically been used for is to assist in the development of new computers, by creating a perfect model of the new computer's hardware in software, so the microcode authors (and maybe the OS authors, too) can get their code working before the hardware's completely debugged. In this guise they're called "simulators," and there was mention of them in Tracy Kidder's seminal work The Soul of A New Machine. As the book says, "A simulator makes a slow computer, but a fast tool."
Also, don't forget the UCSD P-System, which used a virtual machine to run code compiled in that environment. I know of at least one commercial product that used the P-System; I believe there were many.
Virtual machines have been around awhile; they're an interesting field, made newly relevant by the ascendancy of environments such as Java and the MS CLR. I just wish I had a good excuse to drop $50 on this book...:-)
Individual cellphones don't have very powerful transmitters; 1 watt or so is probably about right. The only reason cellphones work well is because those towers have (1) big antennas and very sensitive receivers to pick up those low-power handset signals, and (2) powerful transmitters of their own. A peer-to-peer cellphone system would likely be very limited in range. In order to complete a call when far away from a cell tower, you'd have to route the call through several, perhaps many, "peer" cellphones, and all that retransmission could cause delays on the line similar to what you get with international satellite calls.
In addition, there's the problem that many people have already pointed out, which is that, by keeping the transmitter powered up at all times, you'd run down the battery faster. Not to mention that it might be impossible to make a call of your own while your phone was relaying someone else's call...
In other words, nice thought, but it's not really practical. (Yet?)
Somebody from the SEC ought to have asked the people who got the consent decree out of Microsoft in its first antitrust case just how reliable Microsoft is at keeping its promises. Expect another SEC investigation in a couple of years or so.
I think it strange, that Dune is absent in this list
Probably because the version David Lynch released in theaters was a royal mess. Okay, it was visually stunning, but the plot was heavily hacked up to fit it into 2 hours, and contained bogosities of its own. ("Weirding modules?" Give me a break.)
The 4-hour version was less rushed but shared the plot bogosities of the original, and in many respects was too long for what it was doing. The Sci-Fi Channel miniseries did the best job of telling the story without hacking up the plot (the bits they did add were pretty reasonable...mostly, they found some extra stuff for Irulan to do so her character wasn't as superfluous), but it wasn't released as a theatrical motion picture, so it wouldn't count for the Wired list.
I'm sure they could do much better today with modern CGI, but an even bigger improvement would be to dig up the original screenplay by Nolan and Johnson (who wrote the novel in the first place) and film that. Much of what you see in the movie is heavily watered-down from the original. And don't even get me started on the TV show...
Kasparitis just ducked at the right time, letting Nolan sail over his back and flat onto the ice. Sometimes that's all it takes. (It was reminiscent of that attempted hit on Foote by Deadmarsh during Game 5 of the L.A. series, where Foote just stepped aside and let Deadmarsh run himself head-first into the boards. He missed Games 6 and 7 as a result.)
No, I'm thinking of the guys who do the Avs commentary for Fox Sports Rocky Mountains (both on cable and locally on UPN 20). Fox Sports West probably has different guys.
Fox Sports Net broadcasters John Kelly and Peter McNab sure felt that one from the broadcast booth of the Compaq Center (soon to be the "HP Pavilion") in San Jose, where the Colorado Avalanche were dueling with the San Jose Sharks in a hotly-contested playoff game (Game 6, Sharks led series 3-2).
The quake hit in the 3rd period, while the Avs and Sharks were tied 1-1 (both goals having come in the 2nd, within 30 seconds of one another). It may have jolted the announcers, but it sure didn't faze goaltenders Evgeni Nabokov or Patrick Roy, who never let anything through in that period. The game was finally decided in OT, on a goal by Avs forward Peter "The Great" Forsberg, winning the game 2-1 and sending the series back to Pepsi Center in Denver for Game 7.
Yeah. So many people think of NASA's budget as "all that money" being "wasted" on "a few rocks," they fail to see how the money invested in space can produce untold benefits for people on earth, in terms of new technology enhancements.
Robert Heinlein wrote a good essay, "Spinoff" (you can find it in Expanded Universe), which was adapted from testimony he gave before a Congressional committee on "applications of space technology for the elderly and handicapped." In it, he details how his own life was saved, at least in part because the doctors treating him used the latest available technologies, which were ultimately derived from the space program.
However, I would agree with some of the other posters here in that at least part of the problem is not only NASA, but the current aerospace industry. They're all making too much money the way things are to really want to change; promising projects like X-38 and DC-X have been killed because, ultimately, they couldn't support the bureaucracy that the Shuttle does, and manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin aren't willing to sink R&D costs into better launcher systems because their 70's-vintage (or even earlier) launchers provide them with a guaranteed rate of return. So we may be stuck with STS and expendable rockets for the next decade, if not longer.
It may take something like The Millennial Project (see here) to develop new space technologies to the point where we can finally begin to really get off this rock. But get off it we must eventually; our species has basically one chance to spread beyond the bounds of a single planet, and, if we squander it, we won't get a second.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, the "war-" prefix either comes from "wardialing" or is an acronym for "Wireless Access Reconaissance," depending on how politically-correct you feel like being.
In earlier years, the language CS students usually programmed in first was Pascal.* Java has now largely supplanted that, probably because it's freely available, easy to get impressive-looking results with (due to the standard GUI toolkits included with it), and stands a better chance of being relevant. Sun may have had a hand in promoting Java for academic use, too.
So Microsoft's trying to even the score...hopefully, most schools will look at C# and decide "no, we already teach Java, how is this any different?" Of course, if M$ waves cash in their faces, all bets are off...
* - At least, this was the case in the late 80's, when I went through the CS curriculum at UCSB. Lower-division CS classes tended to use Pascal; upper-division ones used C. They've since switched to Java in lower-division courses.
Then, of course, when Netscape decided to go open-source, he went and registered mozilla.org to house the new project.
And then they nail you under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and you go to jail. End of story.
There was a Senator once who said something along the lines of, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."
Another alternative might involve those external drives that use IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) interfaces. Just plug and copy...and plug them into any 1394-equipped computer for recovery. At that point, you might be going beyond the price of a tape drive...but not by much, and the 1394 drives offer easy random access to files in case you need to recover individual ones.
Another solution: RAID-1, two drives mirroring one another. If one dies, the other one is still usable.
Of course, these don't provide the multiple-generation archiving you get with traditional backups. Still, it's a way of preventing data loss. (Now there's another solution...use multiple removable hard drives for multi-generation backup. Three big hard drives plus removable-disk trays will probably still cost less than one tape drive, and be more convenient besides.)
I just installed a Maxtor 80 Gb 5400 RPM drive in my PC, and it's very quiet...quieter than my old 13 Gb unit. In fact, it seems like I can't hear the new drive at all. Certainly not when the CD-ROM is spinning...now that makes a racket.
I've been burned by the IBM drives recently, too. The reason Electric Minds is down right now is because the company that made our server put IBM DeskStar drives in it. Even a replacement drive I bought started failing mere months after I installed it, whereas I have Maxtor drives that have been in service for three years and longer, and have never failed once. The server disks are being replaced with new Maxtors now; I don't expect them to give any trouble...but it'll be a cold day in hell before I recommend anyone buy an IBM DeskStar.
Quite frankly, he did nothing I wouldn't have done myself in the same type of situation. If/when Peter Gabriel dies, for instance, I'm publishing it to the front page of Electric Minds. I respect Rob's judgement, as I hope EMinders would respect mine.
Well, darn it, I did, too. Since there haven't been any new TNG episodes in a while, anytime they crank out a new movie with Picard's crew, it's a Good Thing. It just wasn't as strong a movie as First Contact, IMHO, is all. There were TNG episodes I liked that weren't as strong as the strongest ones, yet they were still good episodes, just not as strong.
There were problems with STV that started way before they went to the center of the galaxy. For instance, it looked like they were trying to shove Scotty and Uhura into a relationship, and that just doesn't make any sense to me. And don't get me started on Uhura's fandancing...
All my opinion, of course.
Let's look at the evidence:
For awhile there, I thought Star Trek was doing a good job in starting to portray its female characters more realistically, downplaying the "sex object" angle in favor of smart, tough female characters like Kira Nerys, Jadzia Dax, and Kathryn Janeway. Then I guess someone must have gotten scared that they were losing the 16-25 male demographic, because then we got Seven of Nine and her sprayed-on catsuit, and the "decontamination gel" shower scene on Enterprise. Oh well, win some, lose some...
I never did get the p-Code interpreter card for my TI-99/4A, though; an environment like that might have run p-System programs a little faster. (There's an early example of "VMs implemented in hardware" for you...way ahead of the JavaChip.)
Eric
Also, don't forget the UCSD P-System, which used a virtual machine to run code compiled in that environment. I know of at least one commercial product that used the P-System; I believe there were many.
Virtual machines have been around awhile; they're an interesting field, made newly relevant by the ascendancy of environments such as Java and the MS CLR. I just wish I had a good excuse to drop $50 on this book...:-)
Eric
In addition, there's the problem that many people have already pointed out, which is that, by keeping the transmitter powered up at all times, you'd run down the battery faster. Not to mention that it might be impossible to make a call of your own while your phone was relaying someone else's call...
In other words, nice thought, but it's not really practical. (Yet?)
Eric
Somebody from the SEC ought to have asked the people who got the consent decree out of Microsoft in its first antitrust case just how reliable Microsoft is at keeping its promises. Expect another SEC investigation in a couple of years or so.
Probably because the version David Lynch released in theaters was a royal mess. Okay, it was visually stunning, but the plot was heavily hacked up to fit it into 2 hours, and contained bogosities of its own. ("Weirding modules?" Give me a break.)
The 4-hour version was less rushed but shared the plot bogosities of the original, and in many respects was too long for what it was doing. The Sci-Fi Channel miniseries did the best job of telling the story without hacking up the plot (the bits they did add were pretty reasonable...mostly, they found some extra stuff for Irulan to do so her character wasn't as superfluous), but it wasn't released as a theatrical motion picture, so it wouldn't count for the Wired list.
Eric
Eric
Kasparitis just ducked at the right time, letting Nolan sail over his back and flat onto the ice. Sometimes that's all it takes. (It was reminiscent of that attempted hit on Foote by Deadmarsh during Game 5 of the L.A. series, where Foote just stepped aside and let Deadmarsh run himself head-first into the boards. He missed Games 6 and 7 as a result.)
Eric
The quake hit in the 3rd period, while the Avs and Sharks were tied 1-1 (both goals having come in the 2nd, within 30 seconds of one another). It may have jolted the announcers, but it sure didn't faze goaltenders Evgeni Nabokov or Patrick Roy, who never let anything through in that period. The game was finally decided in OT, on a goal by Avs forward Peter "The Great" Forsberg, winning the game 2-1 and sending the series back to Pepsi Center in Denver for Game 7.
GO AVS!
Robert Heinlein wrote a good essay, "Spinoff" (you can find it in Expanded Universe), which was adapted from testimony he gave before a Congressional committee on "applications of space technology for the elderly and handicapped." In it, he details how his own life was saved, at least in part because the doctors treating him used the latest available technologies, which were ultimately derived from the space program.
However, I would agree with some of the other posters here in that at least part of the problem is not only NASA, but the current aerospace industry. They're all making too much money the way things are to really want to change; promising projects like X-38 and DC-X have been killed because, ultimately, they couldn't support the bureaucracy that the Shuttle does, and manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin aren't willing to sink R&D costs into better launcher systems because their 70's-vintage (or even earlier) launchers provide them with a guaranteed rate of return. So we may be stuck with STS and expendable rockets for the next decade, if not longer.
It may take something like The Millennial Project (see here) to develop new space technologies to the point where we can finally begin to really get off this rock. But get off it we must eventually; our species has basically one chance to spread beyond the bounds of a single planet, and, if we squander it, we won't get a second.
Eric