Four months ago, AT&T acquired Northpoint's
network but not their customers.
This forced Northpoint to shut down their network,
and forced all their partner ISPs to scramble
to get their customers online with Covad or Rhythms.
Now that Rhythms is bankrupt, I fear a similar
shutdown, putting a crushing burden on Covad,
which is already so weak financially that
NASDAQ delisted them two weeks ago.
If, as many expect, Covad dies in another
few months, that leaves the Baby Bells and
the cable companies.
Excite@Home is looking for a buyer
too. Maybe there's some truth
to that article after all.
Oh, help! Oh, bother! Oh, help and bother! - A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
Because LEIN machines are often left on and users are not assigned individual passwords to access the system, investigators frequently have trouble proving who violated the system....
Kathy Rector, executive director of the LEIN policy council, said individual passwords may soon be assigned to LEIN users to improve security by matching police to individual LEIN inquiries.
If...it was public record of which officer accessed the information
Would the police department voluntarily specify
such a requirement? The department, not the
legislature, is the customer the software
contractor wants to satisfy.
Even if there were such regulations, the
legislature would mess them up, and the
department would comply only minimally.
In a field like computer science why are we all recomending books almost twenty years old?
Because the average practice lags thirty
years behind the best practice. How many of you
know a "Senior Programmer" who is
unfamiliar with binary search trees?
It was painful to see them quote someone from
FAA as saying it might be a "meteor shower."
They'll quote anybody who answers the phone
in the first 10 minutes after the news breaks.
I'm glad Donald Yeomans set it straight.
I remember using his diagrams to plan my
observations of Comet Halley.
This nebula is also known as the Tarantula Nebula,
NGC 2070.
It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud;
a supernova appeared nearby in 1987.
Southern Hemisphere observers can see the nebula
with binoculars.
This story is not about space travel; it's about geology and climate change.
The scientists saw some terrain
features that looked like the result of glacial
processes, with a latitude distribution
suggesting a global advance and retreat
of ice.
Many planetary scientists think they can
learn more about Earth by studying other worlds.
They probably see manned missions only as a way
to get better observations.
Some of us astronaut wannabes should pump
some liquid water from the Earth's crust and
take a cold shower. Then the air within 3
meters will be a little cleaner, mitigating
the urge to evacuate the planet.
I remember hearing that about Europa,
another Jovian moon, but not Callisto.
Scientists do seem to get excited
about new indirect observations
of things they can't observe directly.
Most stars emit electromagnetic radiation with
peak intensity in the visible light band.
If eyes on Earth evolved/were created to be
sensitive to the peak of the Sun's emission
spectrum, why shouldn't the eyes of another
world be tuned to the peak emission of their sun?
It might be redder or bluer than ours,
but the wavelength would differ by less than
a factor of two.
I recently read that ARM is working on a JVM
that executes the most common bytecodes
in hardware. Could this mean a smaller, faster
JVM for PalmOS? I've held off developing Java
apps for the Palm because of the current
platform's limitations.
Maybe the wartime Navy training was too
simplistic.
If a dozing pilot pushed the plane into an uncoordinated maneuver in the first hour, hot coffee would definitely spill in his lap.
However, if he happened to put the plane into
a gentle downward spiral, as long as the rudder
and ailerons were properly coordinated,
the coffee would stay in the saucer until he
flew into the ocean.
You can verify this on any airline flight with
beverage service.
Coffee could work as a turn coordinator but
not as an attitude indicator.
I was about to post a refinement applied to
circular solar orbits, but it involved
retracting and redeploying the sail.
I realized that I was still thinking
in terms of coasting most of the time.
A solar sail's continuous acceleration
away from the sun would enable some new tricks.
For example, by flying near Mars and then
aiming the sail somewhere between Mars and
the Sun, you could remain stationary over
one of Mars's poles.
Then it's a bit more like flying a kite
than like sailing.
Much too easy a target. I can imagine competing
missile defense contractors taunting each other:
"Your kinetic kill vehicle couldn't hit the
broad side of a solar sail!"
I'd be impressed if they could spray-paint
some graffiti on the sail.
With the thrust due to the aerosol,
that would be a tricky bit of orbital maneuvering!
Thank you for that link. I wish I had a nickel
for every me-too GPL app that boasted a complete
rewrite. How is this supposed to impress me?
Rewrites only make it easier for programmers who are too lazy to understand someone else's code,
and too proud to believe that their own code
might be missing something important.
These are not the same as Larry Wall's virtues
of Laziness and Hubris.
Patchy old apps like sendmail, bind, and wu-ftpd
persist because they are mature. If they seem
buggy, it is partly because they've had lots of users finding bugs for several years.
The software matures through widespread use,
and the cycle continues.
When does it stop being refactoring and start being a re-write?
I think it's when programmers abandon
the goal of keeping the existing code working.
Refactoring extends the life of code by altering
its internals incrementally. A rewrite rejects
the old code and hopes that the new code will
be better. It's like the difference between working things out with one's partner and breaking up.
I worked on a project for a client who had
an inventory database which they allowed
public web users to search. The original code
was buggy and butt-ugly, written in Oracle Pro*C
by someone who seemed more comfortable with VB.
Its second maintainer courageously but carefully replaced a too-clever finite state machine
with a simpler way to build the SQL where-clause.
This move alone extended the life of that code by
three years. Other maintainers continued
the cleanup and enhancement process.
Another programmer decided that
the only way to add a certain feature was a
ground-up rewrite. He constructed a masterpiece
of orthogonality based on embedded systems tweak idioms and the Blob antipattern. It had the
new feature, but it also had new bugs. When
the author left, no one else could understand it,
so it got very few new features after that.
For about 10 seconds, the dark side of Venus
will be visible while the bright side is still
hidden.
In the same way that a total solar eclipse
allows observation of the corona,
some observers get a chance to see
whether the "ashen light" of Venus
actually exists or is an optical illusion like
the "canals" of Mars.
One would need to have a dark sky at
reappearance time and know exactly where to look.
I doubt that many would travel to a Pacific
island just for this, but you never know.
I like to ask chemists how they would measure
the strength of coffee. I get a surprising variety of answers, from chromatography or
spectrometry, to boiling it down and weighing
the dry solids. Some ask whether or not I'm
interested in the caffeine content.
One, who is now into patent law, suggested
optical density. I'll have to send her a link
to the article.
Obligatory personal preference remark:
The inventor seemed preoccupied with staleness.
I like my coffee best about an hour old.
Before you 250-psi espresso weenies start throwing stones, please consider that the coffee
I drink may be punishment enough.:)
In college I did a paper about climate modeling
for a class which real atmospheric scientists
might call "Meteorology for Dummies."
There are both positive and negative
feedback mechanisms. For example, suppose that
higher global temperatures increase the global
cloud cover. The clouds block heat from escaping
to space, tending to increase temperature further, but they also reflect sunlight, tending to limit the temperature increase.
At least in the previous generation of
research, simplified 2- or even 1-dimensional
models often outperformed 3-dimensional grid models. I don't remember the evaluation
criteria. Naturally they could run faster, enabling smaller time steps or more calculations per cell, but maybe they also reduced the impact of errors.
The present article made me wonder if an adaptive grid mesh would make difference by
modeling small features without requiring
high resolution around the globe.
An adaptive timestep might also be interesting.
Last week the wire services announced that MS would
shut down
ListBot
in August. They want people to start paying for List Builder instead.
Last month my boss thought it would be a good
idea for us to use MSN Messenger for quick
questions at work. He did not seem to mind that we would all have to register at Passport, nor that all our messages would go through MSN.
He wouldn't let me put up a local Jabber
server because of the time it would take to
configure and administer.
Slashdot Mirror
Rhythms NetConnections filed for bankruptcy this week. Here we go again.
Four months ago, AT&T acquired Northpoint's network but not their customers. This forced Northpoint to shut down their network, and forced all their partner ISPs to scramble to get their customers online with Covad or Rhythms.
Now that Rhythms is bankrupt, I fear a similar shutdown, putting a crushing burden on Covad, which is already so weak financially that NASDAQ delisted them two weeks ago. If, as many expect, Covad dies in another few months, that leaves the Baby Bells and the cable companies.
Excite@Home is looking for a buyer too. Maybe there's some truth to that article after all.
Oh, help! Oh, bother! Oh, help and bother!
- A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
Would the police department voluntarily specify such a requirement? The department, not the legislature, is the customer the software contractor wants to satisfy. Even if there were such regulations, the legislature would mess them up, and the department would comply only minimally.
It looks like Scott McNealy was right.
In a field like computer science why are we all recomending books almost twenty years old?
Because the average practice lags thirty years behind the best practice. How many of you know a "Senior Programmer" who is unfamiliar with binary search trees?
It was painful to see them quote someone from FAA as saying it might be a "meteor shower." They'll quote anybody who answers the phone in the first 10 minutes after the news breaks. I'm glad Donald Yeomans set it straight. I remember using his diagrams to plan my observations of Comet Halley.
This nebula is also known as the Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070. It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud; a supernova appeared nearby in 1987. Southern Hemisphere observers can see the nebula with binoculars.
This story is not about space travel; it's about geology and climate change. The scientists saw some terrain features that looked like the result of glacial processes, with a latitude distribution suggesting a global advance and retreat of ice.
Many planetary scientists think they can learn more about Earth by studying other worlds. They probably see manned missions only as a way to get better observations.
Some of us astronaut wannabes should pump some liquid water from the Earth's crust and take a cold shower. Then the air within 3 meters will be a little cleaner, mitigating the urge to evacuate the planet.
I remember hearing that about Europa, another Jovian moon, but not Callisto. Scientists do seem to get excited about new indirect observations of things they can't observe directly.
Most stars emit electromagnetic radiation with peak intensity in the visible light band. If eyes on Earth evolved/were created to be sensitive to the peak of the Sun's emission spectrum, why shouldn't the eyes of another world be tuned to the peak emission of their sun? It might be redder or bluer than ours, but the wavelength would differ by less than a factor of two.
What counts as a FP? Any one-liner posted in the first quarter hour after the article? ;)
is a good fifty-dollar, two-hundred-pound car radio.
I recently read that ARM is working on a JVM that executes the most common bytecodes in hardware. Could this mean a smaller, faster JVM for PalmOS? I've held off developing Java apps for the Palm because of the current platform's limitations.
Maybe the wartime Navy training was too simplistic. If a dozing pilot pushed the plane into an uncoordinated maneuver in the first hour, hot coffee would definitely spill in his lap. However, if he happened to put the plane into a gentle downward spiral, as long as the rudder and ailerons were properly coordinated, the coffee would stay in the saucer until he flew into the ocean. You can verify this on any airline flight with beverage service. Coffee could work as a turn coordinator but not as an attitude indicator.
I was about to post a refinement applied to circular solar orbits, but it involved retracting and redeploying the sail. I realized that I was still thinking in terms of coasting most of the time. A solar sail's continuous acceleration away from the sun would enable some new tricks. For example, by flying near Mars and then aiming the sail somewhere between Mars and the Sun, you could remain stationary over one of Mars's poles. Then it's a bit more like flying a kite than like sailing.
Much too easy a target. I can imagine competing missile defense contractors taunting each other: "Your kinetic kill vehicle couldn't hit the broad side of a solar sail!" I'd be impressed if they could spray-paint some graffiti on the sail. With the thrust due to the aerosol, that would be a tricky bit of orbital maneuvering!
Things you should never do, part 1
Thank you for that link. I wish I had a nickel for every me-too GPL app that boasted a complete rewrite. How is this supposed to impress me? Rewrites only make it easier for programmers who are too lazy to understand someone else's code, and too proud to believe that their own code might be missing something important. These are not the same as Larry Wall's virtues of Laziness and Hubris. Patchy old apps like sendmail, bind, and wu-ftpd persist because they are mature. If they seem buggy, it is partly because they've had lots of users finding bugs for several years. The software matures through widespread use, and the cycle continues.
When does it stop being refactoring and start being a re-write?
I think it's when programmers abandon the goal of keeping the existing code working. Refactoring extends the life of code by altering its internals incrementally. A rewrite rejects the old code and hopes that the new code will be better. It's like the difference between working things out with one's partner and breaking up.
I worked on a project for a client who had an inventory database which they allowed public web users to search. The original code was buggy and butt-ugly, written in Oracle Pro*C by someone who seemed more comfortable with VB. Its second maintainer courageously but carefully replaced a too-clever finite state machine with a simpler way to build the SQL where-clause. This move alone extended the life of that code by three years. Other maintainers continued the cleanup and enhancement process.
Another programmer decided that the only way to add a certain feature was a ground-up rewrite. He constructed a masterpiece of orthogonality based on embedded systems tweak idioms and the Blob antipattern. It had the new feature, but it also had new bugs. When the author left, no one else could understand it, so it got very few new features after that.
Guess what? Both programs are still in use.
Some folks have posted their observations to sci.astro.amateur.
For about 10 seconds, the dark side of Venus will be visible while the bright side is still hidden. In the same way that a total solar eclipse allows observation of the corona, some observers get a chance to see whether the "ashen light" of Venus actually exists or is an optical illusion like the "canals" of Mars. One would need to have a dark sky at reappearance time and know exactly where to look. I doubt that many would travel to a Pacific island just for this, but you never know.
Since you clarified the distinction, I meant "variable density grid."
I like to ask chemists how they would measure the strength of coffee. I get a surprising variety of answers, from chromatography or spectrometry, to boiling it down and weighing the dry solids. Some ask whether or not I'm interested in the caffeine content. One, who is now into patent law, suggested optical density. I'll have to send her a link to the article.
Obligatory personal preference remark: The inventor seemed preoccupied with staleness. I like my coffee best about an hour old. Before you 250-psi espresso weenies start throwing stones, please consider that the coffee I drink may be punishment enough. :)
In college I did a paper about climate modeling for a class which real atmospheric scientists might call "Meteorology for Dummies."
There are both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. For example, suppose that higher global temperatures increase the global cloud cover. The clouds block heat from escaping to space, tending to increase temperature further, but they also reflect sunlight, tending to limit the temperature increase.
At least in the previous generation of research, simplified 2- or even 1-dimensional models often outperformed 3-dimensional grid models. I don't remember the evaluation criteria. Naturally they could run faster, enabling smaller time steps or more calculations per cell, but maybe they also reduced the impact of errors.
The present article made me wonder if an adaptive grid mesh would make difference by modeling small features without requiring high resolution around the globe. An adaptive timestep might also be interesting.
Successive orbits of the parent comets leave more meteorites
meteorite: an object which reaches the ground
meteor: an object which enters the atmosphere
meteoroid: an object which is still in space
Some people theorize that the very seeds of life are left in these trails.
Planets themselves are made of the same stuff; these bits just happen to accrete later.
Last week the wire services announced that MS would shut down ListBot in August. They want people to start paying for List Builder instead.
Last month my boss thought it would be a good idea for us to use MSN Messenger for quick questions at work. He did not seem to mind that we would all have to register at Passport, nor that all our messages would go through MSN.
He wouldn't let me put up a local Jabber server because of the time it would take to configure and administer.
The FAQ is very informative. Don't all visit the image gallery at once!
Hyperion... bursts into the office of Scott McNealy... monotonically repeating, "Must follow Sun, must follow Sun!" ... Maybe a 'C' grade flick?
Definitely a 'D' grade pun!