This may be Slashdot Heresy, but isn't the Saturn V design actually kind of buggy? As I recall, the "pogo" issue (high-frequency, high-amplitude variations in thrust) occurred during several launches, was not solved during the program, and was later learned to be extremely serious. There were a few engine shut-downs during launches, which made orbit anyways, because the shut-downs were relatively late in the firing, and there were lots of engines.
Improved en-route traffic control is a fine idea, and should help save fuel and shorten flight times, but I seriously doubt if it will have a significant impact on delays.
Over at Salon (ad-view required for non-registered users), Patrick Smith has had a convincing couple of articles making the case that delays are a side-effect of airlines using more smaller airplanes to move passengers around with more flexibility. More operations (take-offs and landings) with fewer passengers per operation means airports operate near or at capacity, which makes the whole system react to what might otherwise be localized disruptions, like weather delays or mechanical problems.
The other driver is economics -- airlines aren't stupid, they've noticed that even if they make passengers uncomfortable, lock them in airplanes in the tarmac for hours, never tell them what's going on, and take away their snacks and pillows, the passengers will nevertheless keep coming back. The only thing that makes them go away is raising fares. As long as this is true, service will get worse, and fares will go down.
Don't forget that you're only seeing the survivors. It's possible that several variations of primeval life did arise, but one variation out-competed the others, or was the sole survivor of some catastrophe. The fossil record, fragmentary as it is, has numerous examples of whole species groups going extinct, and there's no reason to imagine that life was any less challenging or competitive before it could form fossils.
> Might it be possible that there are methods of living that do not require us to live distantly from useful and necessary services?
Possible, but improbable, especially in the US. The most significant problem is couples who want to live together, but who don't necessarily work in the same place, combined with the fact that, with dispersed land-use patterns for housing, mass transit has no hope of keeping up, because the population is widely spread out at a low density. So, if half of every working couple can't live near where they work (because if they moved there, their other half would have the same problem), and if these people can't use efficient, high-capacity transit (because they want to live in a low-density residential environment), you're left with figuring out a way to move a lot of individuals to dispersed destinations. And that's *before* you take into account transportation for shopping or recreation.
Maybe both you and your (future?) partner can both live and work near public transportation, for both of your entire careers. That's great, but it's not typical.
It sounds from the article (yes, I read it, no, I'm not new here...) like surfing to a malicious website will cause this BITS background downloader to then pull in additional firewall-bypassing malware right at that time.
If I only ever do manual updates on windows, by manually surfing to windowsupdate.com, am I at risk for this? It's not actually necessary to run BITS in order to keep a Windows system up to date.
Also, it's not clear from TFA whether this can be stopped by privilege separation -- if I'm surfing as a low-priority user and hit this malware, can it still make BITS do the more-malware download?
My fantasy strategy is to punish the owners of inaccurate personal information.
Legislation that provided a penalty for holding inaccurate personal data about someone would strongly discourage people from grabbing personal info just because they can. If bit-rot in personal-info databases had legal consequences, people would be more careful about what they collected, and would take the trouble to verify its integrity. It'd be harder to sell a database like that, too, since the buyer would want the means to keep it up to date. Also, you can bet that every personal-info-storing website would switch to an "opt-in" model about as fast as their lawyers could say "liability risk".
The major downside would be that it would disproportionately hurt small organizations. Sadly, I don't have a solution for that.
Lots of radio receivers use a technique called "heterodyning" for tuning. The RF signal from the antenna is combined with a local oscillator signal which is at a constant offset from the frequency being received. Typically the local oscillator is also an RF frequency. All the downstream electronics is then optimized for the difference between these frequencies, which is always the same. If the downstream electronics is optimized for frequency f, and you're listening to a signal at frequency f1, then your local oscillator is tuned to a frequency f2=f1-f.
Many RF receivers (certainly TVs and AM/FM radios, don't know about GPS) do this, and can "leak" local-oscillator noise, which is often in an adjacent RF band. This leakage is usually harmless.
I don't know if this is the actual reason, but it is something TVs and radios have that (wireless-free) computers don't.
Emphasis on "might" -- TFA doesn't mention DRM one way or another, but a proprietary DRM-enabled browser plug-in to view the content (probably only available for Windows Vista) would not surprise me. The advertiser-supported free-as-in-beer part is nice, but it's not exactly a new business model for the TV industry.
> Diesels can achive better than 1/3 thermal efficiency. How does 56 percent sound? Thats a ship diesel, burning crappy fuel oil. Locomotive diesels achieve >40% (check out google, there are many loco diesel studies).
I'm a big fan of locomotive technology too, but keep in mind that the weight limits in locomotives (and ships) are very different from cars. Locomotives don't have to be especially nimble, and it's OK for the engine/generator/motor combo to be heavy.
Cars have much tighter weight and volume limits for extra equipment, which means you can't always use the energetically best materials. Cars also have to be much more nimble, have rapidly-varying power requirements (in response to traffic), and cruise at a small fraction of their power peak.
These features are also, incidentally, why turbines, hugely successful, efficient, and clean-burning in the aviation world, have never successfully made the jump to automotive power applications.
Also, I think the parent post's jab at high-pitched enviros is not altogether fair -- gas/electric hybrid cars take a pretty good stab at addressing the peak/cruise ratio requirement more efficiently, and most enviros seem to approve.
I think it's cool that there's an "i++" in both the loop body and in the for statement, making it be subtly incremented twice per iteration, but I must warn you that posting real Microsoft code on slashdot could get you in trouble.
The problem is, the FUD-nitpick attack really has no defense.
To wit, regarding your post:
You should have used a comma after the first "Now".
The article summary did not propose criminal sanctions against the actors it describes. Nobody is planning to cry "bloody murder", so your estimate of the number wanting to do this ("we all") is evidently inaccurate.
You describe "one company" as hoping for shortcomings and inaccuracies in the report, but the probable truth is that, while only one company was mentioned in the summary, several companies are hoping this. Your transparent attempt to minimize the scale of those who hope for inaccuracies and shortcomings has failed, and casts doubt on your credibility.
It is unfortunate that your central point, which certainly sounds reasonable and plausible, is marred by this lack of attention to detail. Plausibility and reasonableness are not enough to sustain your argument. In the absence of irrefutable data, and in light of your somewhat slipshot presentation, we cannot cry "bloody murder", but must admit that these scientists may, in fact, have been asked to lie, as you have failed to prove otherwise. Your conclusion is much too hasty, and more research is required before any adjustment can be made to the assertion that Exxon is evil.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...)
I can think of two, although there may be more. MSN (i.e. Bill Gates Himself) has a thing called "CinemaNow", and Amazon has "unbox". Both of these offer full-length feature films in high quality, but seem to only work on Windows. The Amazon player will only run on Win XP, and CinemaNow just scolds you for not using IE6 on Win2K or later when you go to their website. I presume there are DRM-ish restrictions (limits on transfers to another computer, content expiry, etc.) similar to or worse than iTMS, but I don't actually know what the restrictions are.
Consumers will want significant capacity once media-center PCs with downloaded video become common, and this day is coming very soon. People want a la carte TV, and Netflix and iTunes and amazon and whoever else are gearing up to deliver it. Your children's equivalent of your DVD collection is going on those disks.
> It really doesn't matter to what extent Global Warming is man's problem or nature's.
Of course it does, this is in fact the key question, because it tells us how much control we (theoretically) have over the process. We want to mitigate the damage, of course, but not to the degree that the cost of mitigation exceeds the expected cost of the damage. In which case, it absolutely does matter to what extent global warming is anthropogenic -- the greater the degree to which it's anthropogenic, particularly the degree to which it's driven by anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide, the more control we (theoretically) have over it.
On the other hand, if anthropogenic carbon dioxide doesn't drive global warming, then switching to a carbon-neutral economy won't strongly influence the process, and we as a society will then have to pay the costs of switching and the costs of mitigating the impact of climate change.
From what I have read, it seems that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is a major factor driving the process, and a carbon-neutral economy is a long-term requirement anyways, since fossil fuel reserves are finite, so I'm with the enviros on this one. But it's asinine to pretend that environmentalism is an unalloyed virtue and that cost-benefit balances don't matter.
I got a lesson about the baggage bar-code system a few years ago. I was flying from Calgary to Washington DC via Toronto -- you have to retrieve your bags in Toronto so you can clear US customs in Canada, plus there's extra security for Washington-bound flights (special secure gate, mandatory hand-search of carryons, baggage matching), so if the bags don't show, you miss your connection.
Well, my bag didn't show. I asked the clerks to check the computer and find out where it was, and they said they couldn't. I eventually pressed them as to why, suggesting that the bar codes might be useful, and they said the bar codes were not actually ever scanned. Now, that may have been true, or they may have been trying to get rid of a pestering customer, but it was clear in any case that the computer did not know where my bag was. They could not even confirm that it had been loaded on the flight out of Calgary. They had no idea at all.
As it turned out, it had been mistakenly directed to the domestic arrivals carousel instead of the US connections carousel, and I was able to retrieve it and go on my way.
I would love it if some kind of actually-useful, actually-used baggage tracking system were implemented.
This sounds to me like the equivalent of hand-crafted piecework being replaced by mass production. If I understand you correctly, creators of content-for-pay are closing up shop, but there's still no shortage of content, because the bots are building stuff. And, just to carry on with my devil's advocacy, the "time and effort" (implying quality) complaint further enhances the idea that this is the craftsman's complaint against the factory.
If the analogy applies, then macroeconomically speaking, this is good -- now SLers can have in-game content and their money too, instead of having to choose one or the other, having been liberated from this choice by open-source development.
I'm not so sure this requires a new way to think about work and ownership, although it may require content creators to think of new ways to get at the money. You'll have to invent a new shiny to get it from them.
A month or so ago there was a similar article, making a qualitative comparison between a bigger screen versus a faster processor. This reinforces the idea that, really, processors and memory and other nuts-and-bolts features of computers have pretty much been "good enough" for a while, and high-value improvements will come from elsewhere.
I have a "safe" profile on my Firefox browser at home that I use for this sort of thing. That profile has its preferences set to not cache, keep cookies for session only and delete them at the end, has no bookmarks, doesn't run javascript, and so forth. "Browzar" would be better if it actually avoided writing to the disk at all, but apparently it writes and then deletes. Isn't that the same?
For anyone still following this story all these hours later, there's a new post on debian-news with a bit more detail about what happened here.
The short version is, it was a privilege-escalation exploit triggered from a compromised user account, the server in question is now restored, but several others are locked down pending inspection. Also, it says the regular and security archives were not in danger. The exploit was a known issue in the 2.6.16.18 kernel running on gluck at the time of the exploit.
Interestingly, the window between the compromise and the lockdown was less than two hours.
You're thinking about practical and effective anti-virus measures. Think stupider.
Some organizations have a high-level policy that says that all machines must have up-to-date anti-virus software, and until you can certify that this is the case, you can't use the corporate network, because your MAC address will not be on the router's whitelist.
You can bribe the IT guys (probably more than $60), you can hack your MAC to an allowed one (possible MAC collision, lose your job if you get caught), or you can buy AV for your Mac.
Agreed about the engine falling off in Chicago, but I believe the Iowa crash did involve some engineering issues. The design error I have heard about is not that a compressor disk can fail, but that a compressor-disk failure in the center engine can sever all the hydraulic systems, including the nominally-redundant ones, leading to complete loss of control.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be Slashdot Heresy, but isn't the Saturn V design actually kind of buggy? As I recall, the "pogo" issue (high-frequency, high-amplitude variations in thrust) occurred during several launches, was not solved during the program, and was later learned to be extremely serious. There were a few engine shut-downs during launches, which made orbit anyways, because the shut-downs were relatively late in the firing, and there were lots of engines.
Aha, found a link.
This caused a lot of problems for Apollo 6 and Apollo 13, the latter of which of course later had much more serious problems.
It's not obvious that you would want to reproduce this, necessarily.
Improved en-route traffic control is a fine idea, and should help save fuel and shorten flight times, but I seriously doubt if it will have a significant impact on delays.
Over at Salon (ad-view required for non-registered users), Patrick Smith has had a convincing couple of articles making the case that delays are a side-effect of airlines using more smaller airplanes to move passengers around with more flexibility. More operations (take-offs and landings) with fewer passengers per operation means airports operate near or at capacity, which makes the whole system react to what might otherwise be localized disruptions, like weather delays or mechanical problems.
The other driver is economics -- airlines aren't stupid, they've noticed that even if they make passengers uncomfortable, lock them in airplanes in the tarmac for hours, never tell them what's going on, and take away their snacks and pillows, the passengers will nevertheless keep coming back. The only thing that makes them go away is raising fares. As long as this is true, service will get worse, and fares will go down.
Don't forget that you're only seeing the survivors. It's possible that several variations of primeval life did arise, but one variation out-competed the others, or was the sole survivor of some catastrophe. The fossil record, fragmentary as it is, has numerous examples of whole species groups going extinct, and there's no reason to imagine that life was any less challenging or competitive before it could form fossils.
> (Bonus points if you can identify the major US university I'm referring to.)
Northwestern.
Either that, or there's more than one of those.
> Might it be possible that there are methods of living that do not require us to live distantly from useful and necessary services?
Possible, but improbable, especially in the US. The most significant problem is couples who want to live together, but who don't necessarily work in the same place, combined with the fact that, with dispersed land-use patterns for housing, mass transit has no hope of keeping up, because the population is widely spread out at a low density. So, if half of every working couple can't live near where they work (because if they moved there, their other half would have the same problem), and if these people can't use efficient, high-capacity transit (because they want to live in a low-density residential environment), you're left with figuring out a way to move a lot of individuals to dispersed destinations. And that's *before* you take into account transportation for shopping or recreation.
Maybe both you and your (future?) partner can both live and work near public transportation, for both of your entire careers. That's great, but it's not typical.
It sounds from the article (yes, I read it, no, I'm not new here...) like surfing to a malicious website will cause this BITS background downloader to then pull in additional firewall-bypassing malware right at that time.
If I only ever do manual updates on windows, by manually surfing to windowsupdate.com, am I at risk for this? It's not actually necessary to run BITS in order to keep a Windows system up to date.
Also, it's not clear from TFA whether this can be stopped by privilege separation -- if I'm surfing as a low-priority user and hit this malware, can it still make BITS do the more-malware download?
My fantasy strategy is to punish the owners of inaccurate personal information.
Legislation that provided a penalty for holding inaccurate personal data about someone would strongly discourage people from grabbing personal info just because they can. If bit-rot in personal-info databases had legal consequences, people would be more careful about what they collected, and would take the trouble to verify its integrity. It'd be harder to sell a database like that, too, since the buyer would want the means to keep it up to date. Also, you can bet that every personal-info-storing website would switch to an "opt-in" model about as fast as their lawyers could say "liability risk".
The major downside would be that it would disproportionately hurt small organizations. Sadly, I don't have a solution for that.
Lots of radio receivers use a technique called "heterodyning" for tuning. The RF signal from the antenna is combined with a local oscillator signal which is at a constant offset from the frequency being received. Typically the local oscillator is also an RF frequency. All the downstream electronics is then optimized for the difference between these frequencies, which is always the same. If the downstream electronics is optimized for frequency f, and you're listening to a signal at frequency f1, then your local oscillator is tuned to a frequency f2=f1-f.
Many RF receivers (certainly TVs and AM/FM radios, don't know about GPS) do this, and can "leak" local-oscillator noise, which is often in an adjacent RF band. This leakage is usually harmless.
I don't know if this is the actual reason, but it is something TVs and radios have that (wireless-free) computers don't.
There are a couple of cool success stories involving guerilla marketing by Nike and Mountain Dew.
This is a favorite topic of Thomas Frank, author of the aptly-named "Conquest of Cool".
Publisher's promotional page here.
I am not affiliated one way or another, I just enjoyed the book, along with some of his others.
Emphasis on "might" -- TFA doesn't mention DRM one way or another, but a proprietary DRM-enabled browser plug-in to view the content (probably only available for Windows Vista) would not surprise me. The advertiser-supported free-as-in-beer part is nice, but it's not exactly a new business model for the TV industry.
> Diesels can achive better than 1/3 thermal efficiency. How does 56 percent sound? Thats a ship diesel, burning crappy fuel oil. Locomotive diesels achieve >40% (check out google, there are many loco diesel studies).
I'm a big fan of locomotive technology too, but keep in mind that the weight limits in locomotives (and ships) are very different from cars. Locomotives don't have to be especially nimble, and it's OK for the engine/generator/motor combo to be heavy.
Cars have much tighter weight and volume limits for extra equipment, which means you can't always use the energetically best materials. Cars also have to be much more nimble, have rapidly-varying power requirements (in response to traffic), and cruise at a small fraction of their power peak.
These features are also, incidentally, why turbines, hugely successful, efficient, and clean-burning in the aviation world, have never successfully made the jump to automotive power applications.
Also, I think the parent post's jab at high-pitched enviros is not altogether fair -- gas/electric hybrid cars take a pretty good stab at addressing the peak/cruise ratio requirement more efficiently, and most enviros seem to approve.
I think it's cool that there's an "i++" in both the loop body and in the for statement, making it be subtly incremented twice per iteration, but I must warn you that posting real Microsoft code on slashdot could get you in trouble.
There are several shortcomings in your post.
The problem is, the FUD-nitpick attack really has no defense.
To wit, regarding your post:
You should have used a comma after the first "Now".
The article summary did not propose criminal sanctions against the actors it describes. Nobody is planning to cry "bloody murder", so your estimate of the number wanting to do this ("we all") is evidently inaccurate.
You describe "one company" as hoping for shortcomings and inaccuracies in the report, but the probable truth is that, while only one company was mentioned in the summary, several companies are hoping this. Your transparent attempt to minimize the scale of those who hope for inaccuracies and shortcomings has failed, and casts doubt on your credibility.
It is unfortunate that your central point, which certainly sounds reasonable and plausible, is marred by this lack of attention to detail. Plausibility and reasonableness are not enough to sustain your argument. In the absence of irrefutable data, and in light of your somewhat slipshot presentation, we cannot cry "bloody murder", but must admit that these scientists may, in fact, have been asked to lie, as you have failed to prove otherwise. Your conclusion is much too hasty, and more research is required before any adjustment can be made to the assertion that Exxon is evil.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...)
I can think of two, although there may be more. MSN (i.e. Bill Gates Himself) has a thing called "CinemaNow", and Amazon has "unbox". Both of these offer full-length feature films in high quality, but seem to only work on Windows. The Amazon player will only run on Win XP, and CinemaNow just scolds you for not using IE6 on Win2K or later when you go to their website. I presume there are DRM-ish restrictions (limits on transfers to another computer, content expiry, etc.) similar to or worse than iTMS, but I don't actually know what the restrictions are.
Consumers will want significant capacity once media-center PCs with downloaded video become common, and this day is coming very soon. People want a la carte TV, and Netflix and iTunes and amazon and whoever else are gearing up to deliver it. Your children's equivalent of your DVD collection is going on those disks.
Mandatory rebuttal, even though I know it was a joke.
> It really doesn't matter to what extent Global Warming is man's problem or nature's.
Of course it does, this is in fact the key question, because it tells us how much control we (theoretically) have over the process. We want to mitigate the damage, of course, but not to the degree that the cost of mitigation exceeds the expected cost of the damage. In which case, it absolutely does matter to what extent global warming is anthropogenic -- the greater the degree to which it's anthropogenic, particularly the degree to which it's driven by anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide, the more control we (theoretically) have over it.
On the other hand, if anthropogenic carbon dioxide doesn't drive global warming, then switching to a carbon-neutral economy won't strongly influence the process, and we as a society will then have to pay the costs of switching and the costs of mitigating the impact of climate change.
From what I have read, it seems that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is a major factor driving the process, and a carbon-neutral economy is a long-term requirement anyways, since fossil fuel reserves are finite, so I'm with the enviros on this one. But it's asinine to pretend that environmentalism is an unalloyed virtue and that cost-benefit balances don't matter.
I got a lesson about the baggage bar-code system a few years ago. I was flying from Calgary to Washington DC via Toronto -- you have to retrieve your bags in Toronto so you can clear US customs in Canada, plus there's extra security for Washington-bound flights (special secure gate, mandatory hand-search of carryons, baggage matching), so if the bags don't show, you miss your connection.
Well, my bag didn't show. I asked the clerks to check the computer and find out where it was, and they said they couldn't. I eventually pressed them as to why, suggesting that the bar codes might be useful, and they said the bar codes were not actually ever scanned. Now, that may have been true, or they may have been trying to get rid of a pestering customer, but it was clear in any case that the computer did not know where my bag was. They could not even confirm that it had been loaded on the flight out of Calgary. They had no idea at all.
As it turned out, it had been mistakenly directed to the domestic arrivals carousel instead of the US connections carousel, and I was able to retrieve it and go on my way.
I would love it if some kind of actually-useful, actually-used baggage tracking system were implemented.
This sounds to me like the equivalent of hand-crafted piecework being replaced by mass production. If I understand you correctly, creators of content-for-pay are closing up shop, but there's still no shortage of content, because the bots are building stuff. And, just to carry on with my devil's advocacy, the "time and effort" (implying quality) complaint further enhances the idea that this is the craftsman's complaint against the factory.
If the analogy applies, then macroeconomically speaking, this is good -- now SLers can have in-game content and their money too, instead of having to choose one or the other, having been liberated from this choice by open-source development.
I'm not so sure this requires a new way to think about work and ownership, although it may require content creators to think of new ways to get at the money. You'll have to invent a new shiny to get it from them.
A month or so ago there was a similar article, making a qualitative comparison between a bigger screen versus a faster processor. This reinforces the idea that, really, processors and memory and other nuts-and-bolts features of computers have pretty much been "good enough" for a while, and high-value improvements will come from elsewhere.
Link.
I have a "safe" profile on my Firefox browser at home that I use for this sort of thing. That profile has its preferences set to not cache, keep cookies for session only and delete them at the end, has no bookmarks, doesn't run javascript, and so forth. "Browzar" would be better if it actually avoided writing to the disk at all, but apparently it writes and then deletes.
Isn't that the same?
For anyone still following this story all these hours later, there's a new post on debian-news with a bit more detail about what happened here.
The short version is, it was a privilege-escalation exploit triggered from a compromised user account, the server in question is now restored, but several others are locked down pending inspection. Also, it says the regular and security archives were not in danger. The exploit was a known issue in the 2.6.16.18 kernel running on gluck at the time of the exploit.
Interestingly, the window between the compromise and the lockdown was less than two hours.
> Or am I missing something?
You're thinking about practical and effective anti-virus measures. Think stupider.
Some organizations have a high-level policy that says that all machines must have up-to-date anti-virus software, and until you can certify that this is the case, you can't use the corporate network, because your MAC address will not be on the router's whitelist.
You can bribe the IT guys (probably more than $60), you can hack your MAC to an allowed one (possible MAC collision, lose your job if you get caught), or you can buy AV for your Mac.
Agreed about the engine falling off in Chicago, but I believe the Iowa crash did involve some engineering issues. The design error I have heard about is not that a compressor disk can fail, but that a compressor-disk failure in the center engine can sever all the hydraulic systems, including the nominally-redundant ones, leading to complete loss of control.
Disclaimer; IANAAE (Aeronautical Engineer)
From page two of TFA:
> Instead, Microsoft is focused on casting off its yolk as the industry's security whipping boy.
Emphasis added. Just in case you thought Slashdot was the only site whose editors were asleep.