Before Chuck Yeager, everyone said the sound barrier was impenetrable.
No they didn't, people had been sending objects faster than the speed of sound once the first high powered rifle was developed. If you want to talk powered objects exceeding the speed of sound, the V-2 did that quite nicely.
In fact, they made the fuselage of the X-1 like a rifle bullet (30-06 maybe) because they knew they were shot a supersonic speeds.
The sound barrier was an engineering barrier, they weren't sure how the X-1 would control, and how much buffeting it would take when it penetrated it. They knew there wasn't any Physics reason it couldn't be done, unlike the Speed of Light.
Here's an idea, why doesn't someone put up an explicitly illustrated bible web page, and wait unitl it gets blocked by the censorware. Then you can make then out to be godless commies, or something.
Here's a few freebies, you'll have to find the pics, though:
How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of a craftsman's hands. 2 Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. 3 Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. 4 Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. 5 Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by its tresses. 6 How beautiful you are and how pleasing, O love, with your delights! 7 Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. 8 I said, "I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit." May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, 9 and your mouth like the best wine. May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. [1] 10 I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me.
and for the pervs out there:
Judges 19:24-29 "Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel."
Maybe he should have let the relevant people know abot the problem before putting the code in the public domain.
I'm curious how he was supposed to do this.
"Dear mega web site.
I am a high schooler how has written a program that..."
plonk
This sounds like Lopht all over again, people put up web sites, do a crappy job administering, and probably won't listen to an 18 year old who woudl warn them.
Also, would you have suggested he email the same warning to each of the 5 million sites running Apache?
I think the best he could have done was post it to a public, security oriented place and hope the web admins are doing their jobs by monitoring it.
Some of these problems sound (sorry) like they can be remedied by using active sound suppression, get a microphone that records the sound, have a chip invert the sound and play it back through a speaker in real time, the sound waves cancel each other out.
This is not quite a good time to rant about Boeing's reliability being superior to Airbus'. Ask Alaska Airlines guys.
Are you talking about the MD-83 that crashed near Los Angeles?
Here's a clue, the MD in MD-83 stands for McDonnell-Douglas. While technically the MD-83 is made by Boeing, it's only because of the merger of McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing.
I consider the MD-83 a Boeing plane about as much as I consider the Alpha a chip made my Compaq. Really, it's just an updated DC-9, and they suck, though not as much as the DC-10.
An other thing : Each and every market lost by Boeing to airbus in the past 15 years (and that's half of the world's sales) have been lost because of the inability of Boeing to adopt reliable fly-by-wire technology. This involves putting hundreds of passenger's lives in the hands of computer software, something I don't want to be done in the country that made Bill Gates a billionnaire.
I don't want anyone to use fly-by-wire for civilian aircraft, I don't trust, I've had too many computers crash on me, I've seen too many bugs in my testing days.
And Boeing's still scrambling to catch up with Airbus on it's "fly-by-wire" technology. And they can't even do that very well. How much has Boeing's flagship fly-by-wire plane, the 777, sold? Compared to Airbus? Hardly any. It's a failure for them.
Fly by wire scares the crap out of me. I've been working with computers for a decade, and I still haven't found an OS that I would trust my life to, no, not even Linux or Solaris.
Give me alloy cables directly connecting the control surfaces, make them triply redundant, and run them through the trailing edges of the wings (unlike the DC-10, where an engine dropping off tears up the leading edge, and the control cable).
Engineers that deal with material objects (ie. Aerospace, Mechanical, etc) plan for failure, tey assume things will go wrong, and make contingency plans. The only contingency plans for fly by wire I've heard of are the three flight computers in the Shuttle, where they vote and majority rules.
Are they waiting for Microsoft to write something, is NT invulnerable to this, or are they implicitly stating that NT servers aren't significant enough Web servers to deal with first, and Linux and Solaris are so important they must be dealt with first?
It depends on what they're measuring, but at least for me, I have four Linux machines at home, and counting the copies of Linux that I bought from cheapbytes, bought in books, bought retail, and got in my Cheerios, I probably have
most of the people working for these companies could afford $300 to get an old 486 and shove Linux on it. That is absolutely the dumbest thing I have read on slashdot all week.
No shit, if I could sell a 486 with Linux on it for $300, I'd be rich. Last computer show I went to I saw stacks of $486's for $9.
If other American companies adopted Ford's model, the technological gap looming between the middle-class and underclass would begin to close.
I'm not convinced. If you can get a job at Ford, or GM, you're probably not part of the underclass. Factory workers may be blue collar, but I think the jobs are relatively well paying, with the occasional worker with lots of overtime getting the high 5 figures.
I thought part of the problem of the "underclass" was that there weren't as many blue collar, factory type jobs any more.
Now, if McDonalds were to make this kind of announcement, and apply to all their part time help, then some of the "underclass" might benefit.
Many people work and go to school and get A's on their papers without touching a computer. It may very well be a necessary convenience someday, but not today.
Respectfully, I disagree, though I suppose my field of work gives me a different viewpoint.
I could not have written my book, the Samba Administrator's Handbook, without web access. While there was good material in hard copy, to finish it up I needed to do research on the web ( in addition to my own research at home).
Now, maybe if your child is doing a term paper on the Age of Jackson they wouldn't need net access, but for almost anything that has happened in the last 5 years, I'd turn to the web first, instead of a 15 year old Encyclopedia that talks about Western and Easter Germany.
No I'm wondering why people get all in arms about people complaining about taxpayer money going to subsidize someone's porn surfing habit at a library.
Have you read the articles?
First, no one has proved that people are surfing for porn at the library, since the librarians are right there, maybe less then 1% of the patrons are surfing for porn.
Second, it's not the fact that SurfWatch blocks porn, it's that SurfWatch blocks other sites that are mislabeled as porn (ie. biology sites talking about sexual reproduction), and sites that run counter to their philisophies (ie. the Gay/Lesbian and feminist sites for starters).
Third, the screening techniques that Surfwatch uses are hidden.
The town is saying to the library, hey , you can only visit these sites which agree with out political views, and you can't see how we pick who gets excluded.
explaining how they got a failing grade on a term paper because netwatch blocked a site they were researching.
And you can do the Abbie Hoffman thing, dress up like Revolutionary War Heroes, bring an American flag, and talk about how many people died for freedom of speech.
Then maybe some poor, earnest children talking about how surfwatching the library shuts them off from information they need to better themselves, since they're poor orphans and can't afford to have their own computers. But they'll try to make a go at it, pumping gas for a living, guvnor.
There are a number of clever and subtle ways to bias the discussion and some of them include the way you choose the people that will get the moderation points, without touching the editorial part of the news.
Lets say that the administrator is interested in putting out more articles about "enterprise computing" (something VA could possibly be interested in doing, if they where unethical) as opposed to "civil rights disscusion":
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
My only question about this would be who picks the moderators?
If it's a program (implied by the word algorithm), wouldn't it show up in the Slashdot code? It if showed up on the code the AC's with axes to grind would be posting it immediately.
It's it's a personal preference of the editor's, well then we're back to bias again.
Slashdot Mirror
Before Chuck Yeager, everyone said the sound barrier was impenetrable.
No they didn't, people had been sending objects faster than the speed of sound once the first high powered rifle was developed. If you want to talk powered objects exceeding the speed of sound, the V-2 did that quite nicely.
In fact, they made the fuselage of the X-1 like a rifle bullet (30-06 maybe) because they knew they were shot a supersonic speeds.
The sound barrier was an engineering barrier, they weren't sure how the X-1 would control, and how much buffeting it would take when it penetrated it. They knew there wasn't any Physics reason it couldn't be done, unlike the Speed of Light.
George
I'm interested in hearing how people who pull 60+ hour weeks and have families manage to get in enough family time.
I don't see how they do that.
I work 40 hours a week, and rarely stay late or go in on the weekends or holidays (except y2k) because I want to spend time with my wife and daughter.
I end up doing a lot of my writing late at night, after 10, when my wife goes to bed.
So how do these 60+ hour a week people have a family life?
George
But then things are a little slow right now.
At home, maybe 10-15 hours a week working on my computers, my network and writing.
That's not counting independent time when I'm reading Linux books.
George
Know your users and potential users, not everyone who is a potential Linux user is willing to eat, drink and breathe Linux.
Know your history, otherwise you may end up in a musuem, like DEC.
George
Here's an idea, why doesn't someone put up an explicitly illustrated bible web page, and wait unitl it gets blocked by the censorware. Then you can make then out to be godless commies, or something.
Here's a few freebies, you'll have to find the pics, though:
How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of a craftsman's hands.
2
Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies.
3
Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.
4
Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus.
5
Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by its tresses.
6
How beautiful you are and how pleasing, O love, with your delights!
7
Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.
8
I said, "I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit." May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples,
9
and your mouth like the best wine. May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. [1]
10
I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me.
and for the pervs out there:
Judges 19:24-29 "Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel."
Thanks mostly to the XXX-rated Bible.
George
Maybe he should have let the relevant people know abot the problem before putting the code in the public domain.
I'm curious how he was supposed to do this.
"Dear mega web site.
I am a high schooler how has written a program that..."
plonk
This sounds like Lopht all over again, people put up web sites, do a crappy job administering, and probably won't listen to an 18 year old who woudl warn them.
Also, would you have suggested he email the same warning to each of the 5 million sites running Apache?
I think the best he could have done was post it to a public, security oriented place and hope the web admins are doing their jobs by monitoring it.
George
Sound is vibration, or rather vibrations that are air-coupled to your ear (or microphone) are sounds.
Right, I should have clarified.
I meant that even with active sound cancellation, fans and ventilators will still send vibrations through the metal of the space station.
Was this story ever posted on Slashdot's main page?
Let's see, no grits, no trolls, no ninja posts, not a single natalie
just eleven on-topics posts, here on taco's island
Nope, it never made, which is neat, it keeps hte level of discourse a little higher.
George
Some of these problems sound (sorry) like they can be remedied by using active sound suppression, get a microphone that records the sound, have a chip invert the sound and play it back through a speaker in real time, the sound waves cancel each other out.
There's still the vibration, though.
George
> The only contingency plans for fly by
wire I've heard of are the three flight computers
> in the Shuttle, where they vote and majority
rules.
Airbus uses the same idea...
Really, multiple computers, multiple networks, multiple NICs on the control elements, and UPS's for each system?
I still like the idea of having 19th century cable and pulleys to fall back on in emergency.
George
This is not quite a good time to rant about Boeing's reliability being superior to Airbus'.
Ask Alaska Airlines guys.
Are you talking about the MD-83 that crashed near Los Angeles?
Here's a clue, the MD in MD-83 stands for McDonnell-Douglas. While technically the MD-83 is made by Boeing, it's only because of the merger of McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing.
I consider the MD-83 a Boeing plane about as much as I consider the Alpha a chip made my Compaq. Really, it's just an updated DC-9, and they suck, though not as much as the DC-10.
An other thing : Each and every market lost by Boeing to airbus in the past 15 years (and that's half of the world's sales) have been lost because of the inability of Boeing to adopt reliable fly-by-wire technology. This involves putting hundreds of passenger's lives in the hands of computer software, something I don't want to be done in the country that made Bill Gates a billionnaire.
I don't want anyone to use fly-by-wire for civilian aircraft, I don't trust, I've had too many computers crash on me, I've seen too many bugs in my testing days.
George
And Boeing's still scrambling to catch up with Airbus on it's "fly-by-wire" technology. And they can't even do that very well. How much has Boeing's flagship fly-by-wire plane, the 777, sold? Compared to Airbus? Hardly any. It's a failure for them.
Fly by wire scares the crap out of me. I've been working with computers for a decade, and I still haven't found an OS that I would trust my life to, no, not even Linux or Solaris.
Give me alloy cables directly connecting the control surfaces, make them triply redundant, and run them through the trailing edges of the wings (unlike the DC-10, where an engine dropping off tears up the leading edge, and the control cable).
Engineers that deal with material objects (ie. Aerospace, Mechanical, etc) plan for failure, tey assume things will go wrong, and make contingency plans. The only contingency plans for fly by wire I've heard of are the three flight computers in the Shuttle, where they vote and majority rules.
George
You bought all those copies of Linux last year?
About half of them last year, and about a third this year, I was doing book research (the Samba Administrator's Handbook).
George
Why is that?
Are they waiting for Microsoft to write something, is NT invulnerable to this, or are they implicitly stating that NT servers aren't significant enough Web servers to deal with first, and Linux and Solaris are so important they must be dealt with first?
If Ballmer-tongue were here, he could explain it.
True, but I'll wait for Tordalf to return.
George
It depends on what they're measuring, but at least for me, I have four Linux machines at home, and counting the copies of Linux that I bought from cheapbytes, bought in books, bought retail, and got in my Cheerios, I probably have
1 RedHat 4
3 Redhat 5
3 RedHat 6
2 Caldera 1
3 Caldera 2
2 Mandrakes
2 SUSe
2 Debian
3 Slackware
for about a 5:1 ratio of OSes to machines.
For FreeBSD, I have 1 FreeBSd server, and
3 FreeBSD
1 NetBSD
1 OpenBSD
for about the same ratio.
Hmm, sounds like a good slashdot poll, just how many Linux CD's do you have?
George
most of the people working for these companies could afford $300 to get an old 486 and shove Linux on it. That is absolutely the dumbest thing I have read on slashdot all week.
No shit, if I could sell a 486 with Linux on it for $300, I'd be rich. Last computer show I went to I saw stacks of $486's for $9.
George
If other American companies adopted Ford's model, the technological gap looming between the middle-class and underclass would begin to close.
I'm not convinced. If you can get a job at Ford, or GM, you're probably not part of the underclass. Factory workers may be blue collar, but I think the jobs are relatively well paying, with the occasional worker with lots of overtime getting the high 5 figures.
I thought part of the problem of the "underclass" was that there weren't as many blue collar, factory type jobs any more.
Now, if McDonalds were to make this kind of announcement, and apply to all their part time help, then some of the "underclass" might benefit.
George
That's nice of Ford, are they going to put controls on the browsers to keep them from looking at competitors web pages?
George
I'm wondering why both my home and work computers are viewing the NYT links without registration...
I usually can do that also, I just assume my browser has a cookie for whatever registration I last used.
George
Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?
Well, you could search on Aurora.
I also recall reading somewhere about huge tanks of liguid methane at Lockheed, and plans for a small, hypersonic wave rider (maybe mach 5).
All useless conjecture, though.
George
Many people work and go to school and get A's on their papers without touching a computer. It may very well be a necessary convenience someday, but not today.
Respectfully, I disagree, though I suppose my field of work gives me a different viewpoint.
I could not have written my book, the Samba Administrator's Handbook, without web access. While there was good material in hard copy, to finish it up I needed to do research on the web ( in addition to my own research at home).
Now, maybe if your child is doing a term paper on the Age of Jackson they wouldn't need net access, but for almost anything that has happened in the last 5 years, I'd turn to the web first, instead of a 15 year old Encyclopedia that talks about Western and Easter Germany.
George
No I'm wondering why people get all in arms about people complaining about taxpayer money going to subsidize someone's porn surfing habit at a library.
Have you read the articles?
First, no one has proved that people are surfing for porn at the library, since the librarians are right there, maybe less then 1% of the patrons are surfing for porn.
Second, it's not the fact that SurfWatch blocks porn, it's that SurfWatch blocks other sites that are mislabeled as porn (ie. biology sites talking about sexual reproduction), and sites that run counter to their philisophies (ie. the Gay/Lesbian and feminist sites for starters).
Third, the screening techniques that Surfwatch uses are hidden.
The town is saying to the library, hey , you can only visit these sites which agree with out political views, and you can't see how we pick who gets excluded.
George
explaining how they got a failing grade on a term paper because netwatch blocked a site they were researching.
And you can do the Abbie Hoffman thing, dress up like Revolutionary War Heroes, bring an American flag, and talk about how many people died for freedom of speech.
Then maybe some poor, earnest children talking about how surfwatching the library shuts them off from information they need to better themselves, since they're poor orphans and can't afford to have their own computers. But they'll try to make a go at it, pumping gas for a living, guvnor.
George
There are a number of clever and subtle ways to bias the discussion and some of them include the way you choose the people that will get the moderation points, without touching the editorial part of the news.
Lets say that the administrator is interested in putting out more articles about "enterprise computing" (something VA could possibly be interested in doing, if they where unethical) as opposed to "civil rights disscusion":
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
My only question about this would be who picks the moderators?
If it's a program (implied by the word algorithm), wouldn't it show up in the Slashdot code? It if showed up on the code the AC's with axes to grind would be posting it immediately.
It's it's a personal preference of the editor's, well then we're back to bias again.
George
If VA/Andover screws them up, all the Slashdot folks need to do is to just resign and take Slashdot somewhere else.
Hmm, are there any non-compete clauses in the Slashdot crews contracts? If so, they might not be able to do that.
George
And is Laura your animated receptionist is as hot as she sounds?
And what's up with Ben?
Sincerely,
George