I was first officer on a shakedown cruise of a vessel in a certain large exploration fleet. We encountered a wormhole with a big asteroid in it when our engines went into antimatter imbalance. The Captain was a real know-it-all, and wanted to blow up the asteroid using phasers. I had to belay his order and insist on using photon torpedoes instead (the idiot didn't even realize that the phasers were routed through the main engines, and were therefore put offline when the engines went into imbalance.) This was a guy with, like, 15 years senority on me. Not only that, he had to haul me into his quarters and dress me down about it. Petulant jerk.
Parallelism: Feynman's "Los Alamos From Below"
on
When Computers Were Human
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Feynman is credited with an early application of parallel processing in the way he divided up his "girls" to do the yield calculations for the first atomic bomb, while they were waiting for IBM machines to be set up at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Instead of each girl doing one whole equation herself, he divided the work so that one girl would only do a single kind of operation (such as cube roots.) In his memoir, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," he writes that with this scheme he was able to get the predicted speed of the IBM machines out of his human computers. "The difference was that the machine didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after awhile."
This development is so progressive, I must register my respect and admiration, as an American, for this forward thinking decision on the part of the Norwegian government.
I know it may come as a surprise to some Norwegians, but we Americans really do educate ourselves on the history and culturesof other nations.
...inspired by the late lamented interurban railways around metro London (I think),
a song by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. (This nostalgic and evocative song made me misty-eyed years before I set foot in England. The rhythm is very slow and pulses like the Slow Train of the title.)
During WWII, my grandfather was teaching physics to Navy cadets at Murray State College in western Kentucky, as part of the War Department's "90-Day Wonder" program. They'd take cadets out of basic training who'd had some college experience, and give them technical training before putting them in charge of engineering battallions, or other technical posts.
Grandfather (a civilian) actually wanted to enlist in the regular military, but was always told by the temporary military commander of this civilian school, "Uncle Sam needs you right here, teaching these cadets." Finally he gave up, decided they were right, and resigned himself to what he was best at, being a small-town physics teacher.
Immediately he starts getting draft notices in the mail. In frustration he showed the notices to the commander, who telephoned his own superiors and according to my grandfather, "Just started cussing." After five minutes, he hangs up.
The next thing my grandfather knows, he receives another notice, no return address, telling him to take a train from Murray to a town he'd never heard of near Knoxville, and not to tell anybody where he was going.
Grandfather arrived at Oak Ridge, which in his telling was hardly a town, with knee-deep mud in the streets. He asked where the town hall was (this is where he was supposed to meet his contact) but no one would say a word to him. Finally he joined in a boy's game of marbles, and found out from the children where the place was.
From the town hall, he was whisked into the nascent Oak Ridge plant, and interviewed for some hours about his background, and his knowledge of physics (which I remember was heavy on practical knowledge, but medium on sophisticated theory.)
After the meeting was over, they wouldn't let him leave the plant for several more hours, as his paperwork had gone missing during the interview.
Grandfather decided that Oak Ridge was no place to raise my three year-old father, took the train back to Murray, and went straight back to teaching those Navy cadets (and then the GI Bill veterans, after the war, and then their children.)
He died in 1996, without ever knowing the job description for which he'd been so meticulously interviewed.
Now the story about the class of graduating cadets "replacing" his entire set of "civilian" demonstration apparatus by standing at attention and presenting him with a chalkboard eraser tied to a piece of string will have to wait for another Offtopic post....
I run my home Debian on the bleeding edge (unstable), and as a business application I'm the first to scream for the very latest database features, it seems to me that DBMSs are justifiably moved along the upgrade path at a slower pace than web browsers, for a variety of reasons. A major point release upgrade of your database is something you want to do on your schedule, and not the Debian release schedule's.
Surely the envionment of all-new stable Debian packages will make it that much easier for someone who absolutely *must* have PostGres 8.0 to hand-roll a PG 8.0 under sarge than under woody, right?
(I'll admit this is a half-baked post. Mod me down -0.5, inane.)
I didn't say that, only that the energy required is a lot less than a dead-lift to orbit, if there's a counterweight (which could be by proxy, since space elevator discussions often involve recovering and storing energy from inbound (descending) loads for the benefit of outbound loads.)
Nearly free if you have a counterweight...
on
NPR Talks Skyhooks
·
· Score: 1
in which case all you have to overcome is friction. (a la Traction Elevators, Paternosters, Funicular Railways, etc.)
Here's what Feynman had to say back in 1986. In response to a comment I read about 1/50 meaning that we're unlikely to have another shuttle accident before the fleet is retired, remember that there's two SRBs, so 1/50 failure rate translates to 1/25. STS-51L (the doomed 1986 Challenger flight) was the 25th launch.
See also the Gambler's Fallacy.
An estimate of the reliability of solid rockets was made by the range safety officer, by studying the experience of all previous rocket flights. Out of a total of nearly 2,900 flights, 121 failed (1 in 25). This includes, however, what may be called, early errors, rockets flown for the first few times in which design errors are discovered and fixed. A more reasonable figure for the mature rockets might be 1 in 50. With special care in the selection of parts and in inspection, a figure of below 1 in 100 might be achieved but 1 in 1,000 is probably not attainable with today's technology. (Since there are two rockets on the Shuttle, these rocket failure rates must be doubled to get Shuttle failure rates from Solid Rocket Booster failure.)
If your toaster runs on one of the supported architectures, you can still install Debian, even if the proposed policy change is implemented.
These *are* just glorified elevator controller chips we're talking about, you know. Just think of all those gazillions of poor unsung 1970s chips that are still pulling duty in the windowless corners of refuse-to-die hardware.
It's just a singular thing to think back once and a while to how it all got started. (calculi, cuneiform, Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, Hopper, Mauchly, Torvalds...)
Thank you for posting these links. I never knew Jon Postel, and I was a toddler whenever RFC #1 came out in the very early 1970's (and I'm just a plain old midwestern hacker-for-pay now.) But reading Cerf's remembrance of Jon Postel always make me cry, like right now.
What a strange beast, the Internet, which can be a vessel of human connection, understanding and sharing of feelings, aside from all the latching shift registers and so forth.
Mr. Morse transmitted over an early electronic network, "What hath God wrought?" Don't know the answer to that, but I do know what Morse, Cerf, Postel and others hath wrought.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit, I just found it. How'd we miss this before?
if (Password == "JOSHUA")
{
printf("Greetings Professor Falken");
godmode = true;
return;
}
So the back door works because people confuse strcmp() with == ?
I don't get it.
If anyone knows the answer, send it to me care of Goose Island, Oregon.
>Hmmm, I can't think of a more appropriate place to ask that question...
Next time, try drier humor.
I was first officer on a shakedown cruise of a vessel in a certain large exploration fleet. We encountered a wormhole with a big asteroid in it when our engines went into antimatter imbalance. The Captain was a real know-it-all, and wanted to blow up the asteroid using phasers. I had to belay his order and insist on using photon torpedoes instead (the idiot didn't even realize that the phasers were routed through the main engines, and were therefore put offline when the engines went into imbalance.) This was a guy with, like, 15 years senority on me. Not only that, he had to haul me into his quarters and dress me down about it. Petulant jerk.
Dude, giant squids don't live in space.
Feynman is credited with an early application of parallel processing in the way he divided up his "girls" to do the yield calculations for the first atomic bomb, while they were waiting for IBM machines to be set up at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Instead of each girl doing one whole equation herself, he divided the work so that one girl would only do a single kind of operation (such as cube roots.) In his memoir, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," he writes that with this scheme he was able to get the predicted speed of the IBM machines out of his human computers. "The difference was that the machine didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after awhile."
This development is so progressive, I must register my respect and admiration, as an American, for this forward thinking decision on the part of the Norwegian government.
I know it may come as a surprise to some Norwegians, but we Americans really do educate ourselves on the history and culturesof other nations.
Hats off, Norwegia!
...inspired by the late lamented interurban railways around metro London (I think), a song by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. (This nostalgic and evocative song made me misty-eyed years before I set foot in England. The rhythm is very slow and pulses like the Slow Train of the title.)
During WWII, my grandfather was teaching physics to Navy cadets at Murray State College in western Kentucky, as part of the War Department's "90-Day Wonder" program. They'd take cadets out of basic training who'd had some college experience, and give them technical training before putting them in charge of engineering battallions, or other technical posts.
Grandfather (a civilian) actually wanted to enlist in the regular military, but was always told by the temporary military commander of this civilian school, "Uncle Sam needs you right here, teaching these cadets." Finally he gave up, decided they were right, and resigned himself to what he was best at, being a small-town physics teacher.
Immediately he starts getting draft notices in the mail. In frustration he showed the notices to the commander, who telephoned his own superiors and according to my grandfather, "Just started cussing." After five minutes, he hangs up.
The next thing my grandfather knows, he receives another notice, no return address, telling him to take a train from Murray to a town he'd never heard of near Knoxville, and not to tell anybody where he was going.
Grandfather arrived at Oak Ridge, which in his telling was hardly a town, with knee-deep mud in the streets. He asked where the town hall was (this is where he was supposed to meet his contact) but no one would say a word to him. Finally he joined in a boy's game of marbles, and found out from the children where the place was.
From the town hall, he was whisked into the nascent Oak Ridge plant, and interviewed for some hours about his background, and his knowledge of physics (which I remember was heavy on practical knowledge, but medium on sophisticated theory.)
After the meeting was over, they wouldn't let him leave the plant for several more hours, as his paperwork had gone missing during the interview.
Grandfather decided that Oak Ridge was no place to raise my three year-old father, took the train back to Murray, and went straight back to teaching those Navy cadets (and then the GI Bill veterans, after the war, and then their children.)
He died in 1996, without ever knowing the job description for which he'd been so meticulously interviewed.
Now the story about the class of graduating cadets "replacing" his entire set of "civilian" demonstration apparatus by standing at attention and presenting him with a chalkboard eraser tied to a piece of string will have to wait for another Offtopic post....
RIP, Granddaddy.
Am I the only one who got the Far Out Space Nuts reference? I thought so. And you people say you love Adam Quark.
...misattribution than Mark Twain have been greatly exaggerated. -- Benjamin Franklin
That's brilliant, invading aliens would never think of looking for you in the HILLS.
"Yes, but eatable ants. I found that out." -- Orson Wells
That confused me too. If you want to see the parent article, click the child's article number so you're just viewing that, and hit the "parent" link.
Parent comment is a slap in the face of human culture, Jewish or no, religious or no, and it has no place on Slashdot.
--An 'If I Were a Rich Man'-singing " non-Jew.
Don't feed this troll, just mod them down, please.
I run my home Debian on the bleeding edge (unstable), and as a business application I'm the first to scream for the very latest database features, it seems to me that DBMSs are justifiably moved along the upgrade path at a slower pace than web browsers, for a variety of reasons. A major point release upgrade of your database is something you want to do on your schedule, and not the Debian release schedule's.
Surely the envionment of all-new stable Debian packages will make it that much easier for someone who absolutely *must* have PostGres 8.0 to hand-roll a PG 8.0 under sarge than under woody, right?
(I'll admit this is a half-baked post. Mod me down -0.5, inane.)
I didn't say that, only that the energy required is a lot less than a dead-lift to orbit, if there's a counterweight (which could be by proxy, since space elevator discussions often involve recovering and storing energy from inbound (descending) loads for the benefit of outbound loads.)
in which case all you have to overcome is friction. (a la Traction Elevators, Paternosters, Funicular Railways, etc.)
And get a brand new one for the price of a Windows Longhorn III license.
Mod parent up, informative.
"I used to think that the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized, look who's telling me that."
>> Moller has acres and acres of pecan trees, which he eats as a staple of his diet
>He should try just eating the nuts, then he wouldn't need so much space for all those trees.
Read the comment...it's eating the trees which slows the aging.
Man, grandparent's joke was so obscure (to a Kentuckian, that is. Thank Providence for Wikipedia.)
If your toaster runs on one of the supported architectures, you can still install Debian, even if the proposed policy change is implemented.
These *are* just glorified elevator controller chips we're talking about, you know. Just think of all those gazillions of poor unsung 1970s chips that are still pulling duty in the windowless corners of refuse-to-die hardware.
It's just a singular thing to think back once and a while to how it all got started. (calculi, cuneiform, Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, Hopper, Mauchly, Torvalds...)
Roughly,
Intel 4004->8086->IA-32
Motorola 6502->61080->PowerPC
"The more they overthink the plumbing,
the easier it is to stop up the drain."
-- Scotty, in "Star Trek III: The Seach for Spock"
What about them? What's the corresponding case with the rats?
Thank you for posting these links. I never knew Jon Postel, and I was a toddler whenever RFC #1 came out in the very early 1970's (and I'm just a plain old midwestern hacker-for-pay now.) But reading Cerf's remembrance of Jon Postel always make me cry, like right now.
What a strange beast, the Internet, which can be a vessel of human connection, understanding and sharing of feelings, aside from all the latching shift registers and so forth.
Mr. Morse transmitted over an early electronic network, "What hath God wrought?" Don't know the answer to that, but I do know what Morse, Cerf, Postel and others hath wrought.
Thanks for reminding us.