Thanks, but for some reason, RedHat includes the latest unstable release of Octave, rather than a stable release. When started, this version warns against using it for general purpose use and points to the stable release, which is not reassuring. I've found the same to be true for the version of Octave in the FreeBSD ports collection. I also have yet to find a reliable source of Octave binaries or rpm's.
Octave is a great idea, but also a gigantic pain in the ass. I don't think I have ever successfully compiled it without serious tweaking on any system I have ever owned. The Octave team needs to spend a little time improving their configuration and make files before that package can be considered a serious alternative to Matlab.
An abandoned airfield at Gimli, Manitoba, saved the lives of dozens of passengers in 1986, when a brand new Air Canada 767 on a flight from Ottawa to Edmonton glided to an emergency landing after running out of fuel in mid-air. The 767 calculated fuel in metric units, unlike most older aircraft, which confused the flight crew and resulted in an inadequate fuel load.
Ironically, the crew that Air Canada sent to recover the aircraft got lost on their way to Gimli and ended up running out of gas.
It's not exactly easy to create a vaccine -- it takes months or even years of testing to ensure that the vaccine is both effective and safe. And there are diseases that mutate quickly enough or cause other problems so as to render vaccines useless, such as the common cold.
For a large number of (mostly virus-borne) infections, there are no known treatments. All a hospital can do for you is keep you warm, keep your fluids up, and hope for the best.
Furthermore, we're hearing more and more about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so the "patches" for such diseases are becoming useless. It's quite possible that weaponized strains of anthrax or plague could be engineered to be resistant.
Sony is one of the world's largest producers of music, and is one of the largest manufacturers of CD copying/producing hardware. This would be a conflict of interest if cd copying had any effect on sales.
Don't read too much into that. Sony is a huge corporation, and like any huge organization there will be internal disagreements and personal empires which come into conflict. I'm sure you could find similar examples in virtually any large company.
Soyuz is characterized in the popular media as an aging, broken-down spacecraft, but the fact is that it is one of the most reliable and efficient manned spacecraft that has ever been produced. The Soyuz has a launch escape system which has been used once, in 1983, to blast the crew away from their exploding rocket (in the words of one site, "The crew landed close to the launch site, badly bruised after surviving nearly 20g acceleration, but they were still alive.") This is unlike the shuttle, in which escape is impossible for the first two minutes of flight, while the solid boosters (which can't be turned off) are firing. Soyuz has not had a fatal accident since 1971, and has had no major safety issue since 1988. Personally, given the choice between flying on the Shuttle and flying on Soyuz, I would pick the latter.
Spaceflight tends to reward simple and time-tested designs over new and complex. I have read at least one account suggesting that NASA resurrect the Gemini spacecraft for crew transfer to and from the ISS, since it was one of the most reliable spacecraft the US has ever flown.
Well, for one thing, Columbia had no docking collar, so it could not have docked at the ISS even if it had wanted to, nor could it have received supplies or a Soyuz. The only way to get from Columbia to a different spacecraft would have been to do a spacewalk, and there were only two suits on the shuttle, and no manipulator arm or propulsion device to move around with. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time an engineer probably would have been very unhappy with the risk tradeoff. In the words of one space observer, "spacewalks are one of the few things that are even more dangerous than they look".
The Apollo 1 fire occurred on January 27, 1967, killing three astronauts on the launchpad. The next flight was Apollo 7, which lifted off on October 11, 1968, a delay of one and a half years. Bear in mind that the US space program was under intense pressure to meet a December 31, 1969, deadline to land a man on the moon.
The Challenger disaster (STS-51L) occurred on January 28, 1986, killing seven astronauts shortly after launch. The next mission (Discovery, STS-26) took off on September 29, 1988, a delay of two and a half years.
At the present time there is pressure to continue construction of the International Space Station. Unless the ISS is to be mothballed, this will probably mean that at least one launch will have to happen within a year or so.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Well, I don't know about that. It's always dangerous to make comparisons between graded work at university and actual work in the real world... after all, when you design a bridge, they give you more than three hours to do it, and they let you talk to other engineers, unlike in an exam.
It's a lot easier to justify a D in engineering than it is to justify it in the humanities, because in engineering we can always fall back on the fact that the answer is wrong -- not much room for interpretation. The flip side of this is that it's a lot easier to get 100% on an engineering exam than on a history paper. I've found that the mark spread in my engineering courses is quite broad, with people scoring anywhere in the range from below 50% all the way up to the keeners at 100%. Humanities marks may be inflated, but they all seem to fall in a narrow range from C+ to A-.
Furthermore, since engineering is a professional degree program (meaning it's usually the student's final degree, and not a springboard to other programs, like law or medicine), there is less temptation for students to whine for marks, although it still happens to some extent.
As a teaching assistant I have had to mark my share of brutal engineering exams (which, incidentally, are no more fun to mark than they are to write). The philosophy seems to be that an easy exam results in a class where most people score very well, since the correct answers can be easily obtained, which doesn't give a good indication of knowledge. A hard exam will sort out the good students from the bad students, and if too many fail it can always be belled up later. Sort of a "kill-em-all" attitude.
I'm reminded of what mathematicians call "The Book". This is based on a quote from Paul Erdos, who said that God keeps a Book in which He writes the most elegant proofs -- as a mathematician, you don't have to believe in God, but you do have to believe in The Book, and strive to make your proofs Book-worthy. Maybe God keeps a Book of Hacks, too?
The problem is that you have plenty of places to go for all your football news needs. Why should/. become yet another generic news portal?
Well, given that there are 512 comments on this story so far, which is easily the maximum for today (even a story about shutting down Kazaa didn't do as well), there are plenty of nerds who are interested in hearing about the game, and talking about it with fellow nerds.
The other obvious problem with the solution is that all parties could agree now, with legally enforced use restrictions, then 14 years from now as the copyrights are about to expire, intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term to 20 years... then 30 years... and so on, without repealing the restrictions.
And this enhances education, or NASA's research program, or exploration of space, exactly how?
Exactly how does it enhance space exploration to have it done entirely by military test pilots and hard scientists? Not that I have anything against the military (I was in it once) or hard science (which is now my profession), but in my experience these people do not have the broadest range of attitudes and experiences that one could possibly bring to such a project.
The original seven Mercury astronauts were chosen as military pilots because they both had the right skills and were accustomed to following orders, so that they wouldn't publicly question the government's motives in pursuing a space program. Is that necessarily a good qualification as an explorer?
So yes, let's send up the teachers, authors, humanities professors, and so on. Exploration is at least as much about communication as it is about discovery, and we need a few more good communicators to go up and tell us what it's like.
Get one of these,
or one of these, both of which get over 50 MPG and have a hell of a lot more power than a Metro and its pipsqueak lawnmower engine. Plus, you get the added bonus of being an early adopter. Every geek should be driving one.
I read a book in which a guy from NASA was being quizzed on the benefits of manned space exploration. He said you cannot make a rational case for sending people rather than robots on scientific or economic grounds. But that's not the point. As long as it is possible to go, people will want to go. There's no scientific or economic reason to climb Everest, travel to the poles, or circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon either, but that's not stopping people.
You also can't beat the inspirational value of the Apollo program. There's something about spaceflight that galvanizes people like nothing else on Earth.
Within the next few decades, launch costs will decline by an order of magnitude. Within our lifetimes, I believe we will see the wealthiest tycoons finance (and possibly participate in) private space exploration, in much the same way that they financed earthly exploration in the past.
When the prez says the Mars ship uses "nukular" power, nobody will know what he's talking about. Problem solved.
Re:What's ultrasonic communitation?
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1
It means that they are using sound waves to simulate radio waves, becaue either the RF components or the computing machinery to operate at the required speeds do not exist.
Re:Blast?
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, this one appeared quite recently. It turns out that sparrows don't like to live near cellphone towers, and that fact is being blamed for a large reduction in the British sparrow population.
At the present time, the scientists who believe that cell phone radiation causes health effects in humans are a small minority. However, everyone agrees that cell phone use can be hazardous, for example, as a distraction while driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, but for some reason, RedHat includes the latest unstable release of Octave, rather than a stable release. When started, this version warns against using it for general purpose use and points to the stable release, which is not reassuring. I've found the same to be true for the version of Octave in the FreeBSD ports collection. I also have yet to find a reliable source of Octave binaries or rpm's.
Octave is a great idea, but also a gigantic pain in the ass. I don't think I have ever successfully compiled it without serious tweaking on any system I have ever owned. The Octave team needs to spend a little time improving their configuration and make files before that package can be considered a serious alternative to Matlab.
Here's my token plug for Canada ...
An abandoned airfield at Gimli, Manitoba, saved the lives of dozens of passengers in 1986, when a brand new Air Canada 767 on a flight from Ottawa to Edmonton glided to an emergency landing after running out of fuel in mid-air. The 767 calculated fuel in metric units, unlike most older aircraft, which confused the flight crew and resulted in an inadequate fuel load.
Ironically, the crew that Air Canada sent to recover the aircraft got lost on their way to Gimli and ended up running out of gas.
It's not exactly easy to create a vaccine -- it takes months or even years of testing to ensure that the vaccine is both effective and safe. And there are diseases that mutate quickly enough or cause other problems so as to render vaccines useless, such as the common cold.
For a large number of (mostly virus-borne) infections, there are no known treatments. All a hospital can do for you is keep you warm, keep your fluids up, and hope for the best.
Furthermore, we're hearing more and more about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so the "patches" for such diseases are becoming useless. It's quite possible that weaponized strains of anthrax or plague could be engineered to be resistant.
It's the same argument used to prevent security disclosures from being published.
It's a little different, though. It's much harder to issue a security patch for the human body.
If you're not a .com, you're not anybody.
Sony is one of the world's largest producers of music, and is one of the largest manufacturers of CD copying/producing hardware. This would be a conflict of interest if cd copying had any effect on sales.
Don't read too much into that. Sony is a huge corporation, and like any huge organization there will be internal disagreements and personal empires which come into conflict. I'm sure you could find similar examples in virtually any large company.
Soyuz is characterized in the popular media as an aging, broken-down spacecraft, but the fact is that it is one of the most reliable and efficient manned spacecraft that has ever been produced. The Soyuz has a launch escape system which has been used once, in 1983, to blast the crew away from their exploding rocket (in the words of one site, "The crew landed close to the launch site, badly bruised after surviving nearly 20g acceleration, but they were still alive.") This is unlike the shuttle, in which escape is impossible for the first two minutes of flight, while the solid boosters (which can't be turned off) are firing. Soyuz has not had a fatal accident since 1971, and has had no major safety issue since 1988. Personally, given the choice between flying on the Shuttle and flying on Soyuz, I would pick the latter.
Spaceflight tends to reward simple and time-tested designs over new and complex. I have read at least one account suggesting that NASA resurrect the Gemini spacecraft for crew transfer to and from the ISS, since it was one of the most reliable spacecraft the US has ever flown.
Well, for one thing, Columbia had no docking collar, so it could not have docked at the ISS even if it had wanted to, nor could it have received supplies or a Soyuz. The only way to get from Columbia to a different spacecraft would have been to do a spacewalk, and there were only two suits on the shuttle, and no manipulator arm or propulsion device to move around with. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time an engineer probably would have been very unhappy with the risk tradeoff. In the words of one space observer, "spacewalks are one of the few things that are even more dangerous than they look".
So certification involves actually educating people now?
The Apollo 1 fire occurred on January 27, 1967, killing three astronauts on the launchpad. The next flight was Apollo 7, which lifted off on October 11, 1968, a delay of one and a half years. Bear in mind that the US space program was under intense pressure to meet a December 31, 1969, deadline to land a man on the moon.
The Challenger disaster (STS-51L) occurred on January 28, 1986, killing seven astronauts shortly after launch. The next mission (Discovery, STS-26) took off on September 29, 1988, a delay of two and a half years.
At the present time there is pressure to continue construction of the International Space Station. Unless the ISS is to be mothballed, this will probably mean that at least one launch will have to happen within a year or so.
Perhaps it is because people's lives hang in the balance when they interact with the products and structures designed by science/engineering students.
Well, I don't know about that. It's always dangerous to make comparisons between graded work at university and actual work in the real world ... after all, when you design a bridge, they give you more than three hours to do it, and they let you talk to other engineers, unlike in an exam.
It's a lot easier to justify a D in engineering than it is to justify it in the humanities, because in engineering we can always fall back on the fact that the answer is wrong -- not much room for interpretation. The flip side of this is that it's a lot easier to get 100% on an engineering exam than on a history paper. I've found that the mark spread in my engineering courses is quite broad, with people scoring anywhere in the range from below 50% all the way up to the keeners at 100%. Humanities marks may be inflated, but they all seem to fall in a narrow range from C+ to A-.
Furthermore, since engineering is a professional degree program (meaning it's usually the student's final degree, and not a springboard to other programs, like law or medicine), there is less temptation for students to whine for marks, although it still happens to some extent.
As a teaching assistant I have had to mark my share of brutal engineering exams (which, incidentally, are no more fun to mark than they are to write). The philosophy seems to be that an easy exam results in a class where most people score very well, since the correct answers can be easily obtained, which doesn't give a good indication of knowledge. A hard exam will sort out the good students from the bad students, and if too many fail it can always be belled up later. Sort of a "kill-em-all" attitude.
I'm reminded of what mathematicians call "The Book". This is based on a quote from Paul Erdos, who said that God keeps a Book in which He writes the most elegant proofs -- as a mathematician, you don't have to believe in God, but you do have to believe in The Book, and strive to make your proofs Book-worthy. Maybe God keeps a Book of Hacks, too?
The problem is that you have plenty of places to go for all your football news needs. Why should /. become yet another generic news portal?
Well, given that there are 512 comments on this story so far, which is easily the maximum for today (even a story about shutting down Kazaa didn't do as well), there are plenty of nerds who are interested in hearing about the game, and talking about it with fellow nerds.
The other obvious problem with the solution is that all parties could agree now, with legally enforced use restrictions, then 14 years from now as the copyrights are about to expire, intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term to 20 years ... then 30 years ... and so on, without repealing the restrictions.
... because it just might come true.
"I hereby declare that The White House will no longer be boring "beige", it shall be painted "Lickable Blueberry".
Bah! You do that, and first thing the next morning us Canadians will come and burn the place down again. Don't make us come down there!
And this enhances education, or NASA's research program, or exploration of space, exactly how?
Exactly how does it enhance space exploration to have it done entirely by military test pilots and hard scientists? Not that I have anything against the military (I was in it once) or hard science (which is now my profession), but in my experience these people do not have the broadest range of attitudes and experiences that one could possibly bring to such a project.
The original seven Mercury astronauts were chosen as military pilots because they both had the right skills and were accustomed to following orders, so that they wouldn't publicly question the government's motives in pursuing a space program. Is that necessarily a good qualification as an explorer?
So yes, let's send up the teachers, authors, humanities professors, and so on. Exploration is at least as much about communication as it is about discovery, and we need a few more good communicators to go up and tell us what it's like.
Get one of these, or one of these, both of which get over 50 MPG and have a hell of a lot more power than a Metro and its pipsqueak lawnmower engine. Plus, you get the added bonus of being an early adopter. Every geek should be driving one.
is there a similar guide to turning my geforce2 into a geforce4 ti 4600?
Yes:
This will probably work about as well as the procedure in the article.
I read a book in which a guy from NASA was being quizzed on the benefits of manned space exploration. He said you cannot make a rational case for sending people rather than robots on scientific or economic grounds. But that's not the point. As long as it is possible to go, people will want to go. There's no scientific or economic reason to climb Everest, travel to the poles, or circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon either, but that's not stopping people.
You also can't beat the inspirational value of the Apollo program. There's something about spaceflight that galvanizes people like nothing else on Earth.
Within the next few decades, launch costs will decline by an order of magnitude. Within our lifetimes, I believe we will see the wealthiest tycoons finance (and possibly participate in) private space exploration, in much the same way that they financed earthly exploration in the past.
When the prez says the Mars ship uses "nukular" power, nobody will know what he's talking about. Problem solved.
It means that they are using sound waves to simulate radio waves, becaue either the RF components or the computing machinery to operate at the required speeds do not exist.
Well, this one appeared quite recently. It turns out that sparrows don't like to live near cellphone towers, and that fact is being blamed for a large reduction in the British sparrow population.
At the present time, the scientists who believe that cell phone radiation causes health effects in humans are a small minority. However, everyone agrees that cell phone use can be hazardous, for example, as a distraction while driving.
Problem is I can't tell where the smell is coming from.
Damn it Jim, that's my sphincter, not a jelly donut!!!
Problem solved.