Having a deterrent is pretty pointless unless everyone knows that you have it. I'm sure they wouldn't have left this boat out in the open unless it was their intention for people to see it.
Yup. Leave them out in the open for all to see, until they put to sea. Then
they disappear, nobody knows where they are, and everybody gets nervous.
The British did this during the Falklands War: they made lots of noise about subs heading for the South Atlantic,
then shut up.
The mere fact that subs might be in the vicinity made the Argentine Navy a lot less effective. Knowing
that you might get hit by a torpedo at any time, with no warning, would rattle anybody...
If you look in other places you will find lots of subs tied up at docks in plain view.
Try the Russian naval bases north of Murmansk, for example.
Many moons ago Microsoft had a development group in Vancouver, the result
of their acquisition of a local software company that made a very
good email program, that evolved in to the pre-Outlook Microsoft Mail program. I was the
first Microsoft hire, post-acquisition. This was back when a 486/66 was a serious
computer, I felt privileged to have one on my desk, and even tried some
early betas of Windows NT on it.
Organizationally, we were a little piece of Redmond that wasn't in Redmond. Our
security cards opened doors there; the cards of the sales pukes a couple of floors down
didn't work in Redmond.
Looking back: decent money, great equipment, lots of toys. Some good perks.
Significant pressure not to have a life apart from one's work. The group
was eventually assimilated in to Redmond, and for a variety of reasons, I didn't go.
I sometimes toy with the idea of going to the various
used computer stores, buying a pallet of used computers and making
my very own Beowulf cluster. I've
seen pallets of fast P3 and low-end P4 boxes at interesting prices.
Boeing Surplus have large numbers of essentially identical computers
almost every time I go there. I remember once looking through a big bin for a particular size wrench and grumbling
to the sales person "Surely there is something bolted to a 747 with these size bolts!"
They laughed...
The alternative would be to do something with new motherboards and processors.
Might even get a break on the electricity.
Offer me the over-produced manufactured shit that passes for music nowadays and I'll
ignore it.
Offer me DRM-encumbered over-compressed downloads and I will walk away.
Offer me some decent new music and I'll have a listen.
Offer me some decent new music in an uncompressed, DRM-free format, and I'll buy it.
I don't want to be one of the curmudgeons grumbling about
all the new music being crap, but the fact remains that I tuned out in the
early 1990s, and have heard very little of interest since.
My latest (in terms of production date) music purchases
are Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno and
Drama by Bananarama, both released in 2006.
Hardly mainstream music, either of them.
It's important however to understand *why* gasoline won out however. External combustion cars required anywhere from half an hour upwards before they were ready to creep, and required considerable maintenance. Internal combustion cars were ready to go within a few minutes and required much less maintenance.
Yup. That advantage came with the development of kettering ignition. Prior to that most
internal combustion engines used glow ignition, where you had to heat the external part
of the ignition system with a blowtorch until it was hot enough. The same sort of system
is still used in model airplane engines, but their electric glow plugs make them a lot easier to start.
The local electric car club
have a
1912 Detroit, albeit with modern lead-acid batteries
replacing the original Edison cells. I've ridden in
it; it feels like a telephone booth on wheels. But except for a slight whirr from the driveline,
it's silent. These were the cars that made people like Henry Ford nervous.
Precisely why the internal combustion engine was developed.
The IC engine is far more efficient in comparison.
Back in Ye Olden Tymes (TM), it wasn't at all clear how those newfangled horseless
carriages were going to be powered. There were electric ones, steam ones, and gasoline powered
ones. Steam was a mature technology and well-understood, electric was silent
but had range issues, and gasoline was just plain dangerous. Steam was the initial leader.
Henry Ford selected gasoline for his Model T, and the rest was history.
With fossil fuels, greenhouse gases and all that, it doesn't matter how efficient
gasoline engines are, if what they run on is too expensive to be practical. Sure,
steam engines have thermodynamic limits. But they also have very nice emissions qualities, and
excellent torque characteristics. I'd be very interested in seeing what a modern
steam car could do.
The gasoline engine car makers actually ran FUD ads about how dangerous
electric cars were. They were so quiet that you couldn't hear them coming,
and risked getting run over!
The southern hemisphere sky has lots of goodies that us northern
types don't get to see, and the Eta Carinae region is one of them. The nebula
is slightly larger than the Orion Nebula as seen from Earth, but slightly dimmer. To me it looks
like a flower blooming in space. It is accompanied by zillions of other nebulae and
star clusters.
The Milky Way through Centaurus and Carina is why astronomers
often go to places like Australia for their vacations. I've taken a telescope
to Costa Rica several times myself, and while the view isn't as good as it is in
Australia, it's a lot less travel. The only thing we really miss out
on from Costa Rica are the Magellanic Clouds, which look far better from New South Wales
than they do from Guanacaste. The vague smudges down at the Tico horizon are
detached pieces of the Milky Way in the Aussie country sky.
My first view of the Eta Carinae region was with binoculars from St. Kilda
Beach in Melbourne. It's not something one quickly forgets.
Brew suffers from the usual cell network security
paranoia, and specifications written
by lawyers. It's really one for the pros - Qualcomm make it just
about impossible for a hobbyist to do anything with Brew on real hardware.
Any schmuck can download the SDK and play with the
emulator, but that's as far as you can go unless you're a company.
At runtime, Brew apps are reminiscent of really old Windows apps (i.e.
completely event driven), but with non-blocking I/O to make things interesting.
What looks like a function call, like ISocket_Write(), just starts the operation; you have to
check back later (or register a callback) to find out what really happened.
In a current project I found myself with a sufficiently flexible LED interface
(because I designed it:-) that I could do exactly that. And that's what it does.
It's not Linux, but Brew is so bizarrely idiosyncratic that it must count for something.
The other thing with embedded stuff is you have to get it right, because
the code is going to be burned in to lots of devices that are going to go out in the field,
and you can't get them back if you goof.
I do embedded systems for a living, and was asked this question
during my intervuiew. My answer: "a system that is the brains of
something else, and is not necessarily visible as a computer".
They thought that was an interesting answer, and I got the job.
I think embedded systems are interesting. The challenge is
obvious: it's easy to make a system with a multi-GHz processor,
gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of disk do something interesting
and/or useful. Can you make a computer the size of a stick of gum
do something interesting and/or useful? That is the challenge.
The other challenge is that your embedded system must be reliable.
People will not tolerate toasters that won't boot. The testing requirements
can be interesting, and nerve-wracking too. How do you report "I'm broken" when
all you can do is flash an LED?
This is where you get to find creative new abuses for mmap(), learn what those MTD
device drivers in the kernel do, find just what JFFS2 will (and won't)
do, and so on.
Smart have been on sale in Canada since 2004. There are zillions on the road here in Vancouver.
Once again the U.S. is behind the times, while us Canadians
are on top of things.:-)
The current fad (everything is a fad in Vancouver) is for older
Japanese imports. It started with Nissan Skylines,
but you also see lots of
Mitsubishi Delicas
and
Nissan S-Cargo
vans. I've even saw a Toyota Hi-Lux pickup, the same kind
Top Gear
failed to destroy...
If they're more than 15 years old you can privately import them, but in true
spoilsport fashion the Feds are talking about upping the minimum age to 25 years. Boo!
Right-hand drive makes parallel parking really easy, but they often have to fiddle a bit
with the mirrors for safe passing on two-lane roads.
..laura who would rather privately import a Citroën CX
...laura who actually watched Star Trek at the time
Un-hacked kernels (Slackware)
on
Fedora 7 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a lot more than the kernel devs. This is NOT anything new. The days of thinking you should go get "the latest kernel from Linus" and just expect everything to work properly went away years ago. Did I used to go re-compile my kernel from the vanilla source? Sure. Do I do it anymore? Hell no, and without a good reason to I never will. If you want that sort of thing, pick a distribution that values the vanilla kernel. Otherwise stop griping.
Slackware (my favourite distro) uses utterly vanilla kernels. Want a new one?
Download it from kernel.org, untar it, build it. No sweat.
I consider building
a custom kernel to be an integral part of an installation: all the distro kernel
does is bootstrap building the production one. All my systems run
kernels that are a precise match to the hardware and my needs, with no superfluous
junk. No superfluous security holes, either.
It does look easy in those video games but the real thing that is missing in those games are the G's and steering effort.
Top Gear tried a side-by-side comparison
a few years ago. Lap Laguna Seca in a Honda
NSX on a PlayStation. Then do it for real. Compare. Try not to shit yourself on the Corkscrew.:-)
Sigh. First computer I used with a hard drive stored a whopping 20 megabytes. And we
considered it huge. There were lots of mainframe drives in service at the time that
were only 100 megabytes (e.g. IBM 3330).
The first computer I owned in my own right had two 720k floppy drives. Then I moved
up to a 700 MB hard drive. Now I have several hundred gigs. The "little" external Firewire drive
I bought for my laptop is 80GB, and I have a 4GB thumb drive in my back pack.
True. "We don't like you" isn't part of the legislation. But
if what they really meant was "We don't rent to queers", or something
similar, you are protected.
The
B.C. Residential Tenancy Act allows for three sorts of
discrimination: age, when it's a property specifically for older folks. Disability,
when it's a property specifically for disabled folks. And just about anything
else (particularly gender and sexual orientation) when there are
shared kitchens and bathrooms involved.
Little else matters. If you can pay the rent (and come by the money
lawfully), they can't turn you down.
I must admit that I'm old enough to remember when Vulcan was
supposed to be a planet of Epsilon Eridani, not 40 Eridani. Epsilon is
much more Sun-like.
Of course, the Vulcans would have to argue with the Comporellon folks,
who also live in the Epsilon Eridani system.:-)
My favorite was when Disney tried to sue someone for putting the name "Alice In Wonderland" on a product of thiers when they didn't own the original copywrite for it. I think just about person in creation knows its Lewis Carroll's work, at least in passing have heard of lewis carroll.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was protected when it was published, but
such protection has long since expired. In particular, its publication pre-dates the Berne Convention,
which set out most of how our (admittedly flawed) copyright system works today.
While Disney can copyright a movie based on Lewis Carroll's book, they can't
claim copyright on the original source material, which is long since in the public domain.
The same goes for movies made from any public domain material, be it Hamlet
or Beowulf.
The question remains: if $30 a month is too much, just how much do
you want to spend?
I have, or have had, relationships with the various providers. Not necessarily for
cellphones.
Telus do my home phone and ADSL. I have no complaints. If I wanted a cellphone
I'd give them first right of refusal.
Bell Mobility are OK if you're a consumer wanting a cellphone, but
need to get their act together for anything else. I'm doing some Brew CDMA development at work and they
are somewhat less than cooperative. So I drive down to the border and test
things with Sprint.
Fido can go fuck themselves.
I've never gotten anything other than cable TV from Rogers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Leave them out in the open for all to see, until they put to sea. Then they disappear, nobody knows where they are, and everybody gets nervous. The British did this during the Falklands War: they made lots of noise about subs heading for the South Atlantic, then shut up. The mere fact that subs might be in the vicinity made the Argentine Navy a lot less effective. Knowing that you might get hit by a torpedo at any time, with no warning, would rattle anybody...
If you look in other places you will find lots of subs tied up at docks in plain view. Try the Russian naval bases north of Murmansk, for example.
...laura
Many moons ago Microsoft had a development group in Vancouver, the result of their acquisition of a local software company that made a very good email program, that evolved in to the pre-Outlook Microsoft Mail program. I was the first Microsoft hire, post-acquisition. This was back when a 486/66 was a serious computer, I felt privileged to have one on my desk, and even tried some early betas of Windows NT on it.
Organizationally, we were a little piece of Redmond that wasn't in Redmond. Our security cards opened doors there; the cards of the sales pukes a couple of floors down didn't work in Redmond.
Looking back: decent money, great equipment, lots of toys. Some good perks. Significant pressure not to have a life apart from one's work. The group was eventually assimilated in to Redmond, and for a variety of reasons, I didn't go.
FWIW: I'm not a Waterloo grad (UBC, UofT).
...laura
I sometimes toy with the idea of going to the various used computer stores, buying a pallet of used computers and making my very own Beowulf cluster. I've seen pallets of fast P3 and low-end P4 boxes at interesting prices. Boeing Surplus have large numbers of essentially identical computers almost every time I go there. I remember once looking through a big bin for a particular size wrench and grumbling to the sales person "Surely there is something bolted to a 747 with these size bolts!" They laughed...
The alternative would be to do something with new motherboards and processors. Might even get a break on the electricity.
...laura
Offer me the over-produced manufactured shit that passes for music nowadays and I'll ignore it.
Offer me DRM-encumbered over-compressed downloads and I will walk away.
Offer me some decent new music and I'll have a listen.
Offer me some decent new music in an uncompressed, DRM-free format, and I'll buy it.
I don't want to be one of the curmudgeons grumbling about all the new music being crap, but the fact remains that I tuned out in the early 1990s, and have heard very little of interest since. My latest (in terms of production date) music purchases are Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno and Drama by Bananarama, both released in 2006. Hardly mainstream music, either of them.
...laura
Yup. That advantage came with the development of kettering ignition. Prior to that most internal combustion engines used glow ignition, where you had to heat the external part of the ignition system with a blowtorch until it was hot enough. The same sort of system is still used in model airplane engines, but their electric glow plugs make them a lot easier to start.
The local electric car club have a 1912 Detroit, albeit with modern lead-acid batteries replacing the original Edison cells. I've ridden in it; it feels like a telephone booth on wheels. But except for a slight whirr from the driveline, it's silent. These were the cars that made people like Henry Ford nervous.
...laura
Back in Ye Olden Tymes (TM), it wasn't at all clear how those newfangled horseless carriages were going to be powered. There were electric ones, steam ones, and gasoline powered ones. Steam was a mature technology and well-understood, electric was silent but had range issues, and gasoline was just plain dangerous. Steam was the initial leader. Henry Ford selected gasoline for his Model T, and the rest was history.
With fossil fuels, greenhouse gases and all that, it doesn't matter how efficient gasoline engines are, if what they run on is too expensive to be practical. Sure, steam engines have thermodynamic limits. But they also have very nice emissions qualities, and excellent torque characteristics. I'd be very interested in seeing what a modern steam car could do.
The gasoline engine car makers actually ran FUD ads about how dangerous electric cars were. They were so quiet that you couldn't hear them coming, and risked getting run over!
...laura
The southern hemisphere sky has lots of goodies that us northern types don't get to see, and the Eta Carinae region is one of them. The nebula is slightly larger than the Orion Nebula as seen from Earth, but slightly dimmer. To me it looks like a flower blooming in space. It is accompanied by zillions of other nebulae and star clusters.
The Milky Way through Centaurus and Carina is why astronomers often go to places like Australia for their vacations. I've taken a telescope to Costa Rica several times myself, and while the view isn't as good as it is in Australia, it's a lot less travel. The only thing we really miss out on from Costa Rica are the Magellanic Clouds, which look far better from New South Wales than they do from Guanacaste. The vague smudges down at the Tico horizon are detached pieces of the Milky Way in the Aussie country sky.
My first view of the Eta Carinae region was with binoculars from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. It's not something one quickly forgets.
...laura
Brew suffers from the usual cell network security paranoia, and specifications written by lawyers. It's really one for the pros - Qualcomm make it just about impossible for a hobbyist to do anything with Brew on real hardware. Any schmuck can download the SDK and play with the emulator, but that's as far as you can go unless you're a company.
At runtime, Brew apps are reminiscent of really old Windows apps (i.e. completely event driven), but with non-blocking I/O to make things interesting. What looks like a function call, like ISocket_Write(), just starts the operation; you have to check back later (or register a callback) to find out what really happened.
...laura
In a current project I found myself with a sufficiently flexible LED interface (because I designed it :-) that I could do exactly that. And that's what it does.
It's not Linux, but Brew is so bizarrely idiosyncratic that it must count for something.
The other thing with embedded stuff is you have to get it right, because the code is going to be burned in to lots of devices that are going to go out in the field, and you can't get them back if you goof.
...laura
I do embedded systems for a living, and was asked this question during my intervuiew. My answer: "a system that is the brains of something else, and is not necessarily visible as a computer". They thought that was an interesting answer, and I got the job.
I think embedded systems are interesting. The challenge is obvious: it's easy to make a system with a multi-GHz processor, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of disk do something interesting and/or useful. Can you make a computer the size of a stick of gum do something interesting and/or useful? That is the challenge.
The other challenge is that your embedded system must be reliable. People will not tolerate toasters that won't boot. The testing requirements can be interesting, and nerve-wracking too. How do you report "I'm broken" when all you can do is flash an LED?
This is where you get to find creative new abuses for mmap(), learn what those MTD device drivers in the kernel do, find just what JFFS2 will (and won't) do, and so on.
...laura, embedded Linux on 68k and StrongARM
Smart have been on sale in Canada since 2004. There are zillions on the road here in Vancouver. Once again the U.S. is behind the times, while us Canadians are on top of things. :-)
The current fad (everything is a fad in Vancouver) is for older Japanese imports. It started with Nissan Skylines, but you also see lots of Mitsubishi Delicas and Nissan S-Cargo vans. I've even saw a Toyota Hi-Lux pickup, the same kind Top Gear failed to destroy...
If they're more than 15 years old you can privately import them, but in true spoilsport fashion the Feds are talking about upping the minimum age to 25 years. Boo!
Right-hand drive makes parallel parking really easy, but they often have to fiddle a bit with the mirrors for safe passing on two-lane roads.
..laura who would rather privately import a Citroën CX
It was on here (Canada), but I didn't watch it. Never got in to it.
The series finale that had me gibbering "What the fuck?! What the fuck?! What the fuck?!" was Life on Mars. That was fun.
...laura who was 12 in 1973
I've always had more of a chuckle over what Napoleon told his bigwig Talleyrand: Vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie!
...laura
Brain and brain! What is Brain?!
Another sad bit of Star Trek geekdom.
...laura who actually watched Star Trek at the time
Slackware (my favourite distro) uses utterly vanilla kernels. Want a new one? Download it from kernel.org, untar it, build it. No sweat.
I consider building a custom kernel to be an integral part of an installation: all the distro kernel does is bootstrap building the production one. All my systems run kernels that are a precise match to the hardware and my needs, with no superfluous junk. No superfluous security holes, either.
...laura
Top Gear tried a side-by-side comparison a few years ago. Lap Laguna Seca in a Honda NSX on a PlayStation. Then do it for real. Compare. Try not to shit yourself on the Corkscrew. :-)
...laura
In Soviet Russia the clod insensitives YOU.
(I think I need more coffee...)
Yeah, but this is Slashdot. Few slashdotters are familiar with such esoteric concepts as girls. Fewer still are familiar with how girls are shaped.
This is not the specialized knowledge you are looking for...
...laura
Sigh. First computer I used with a hard drive stored a whopping 20 megabytes. And we considered it huge. There were lots of mainframe drives in service at the time that were only 100 megabytes (e.g. IBM 3330).
The first computer I owned in my own right had two 720k floppy drives. Then I moved up to a 700 MB hard drive. Now I have several hundred gigs. The "little" external Firewire drive I bought for my laptop is 80GB, and I have a 4GB thumb drive in my back pack.
...laura
Don't. Use a broadcast distribution like BitTorrent. Individuals broadcast portions of the keyspace, and others pick up the pieces they want.
Yeah, I know it's stupid and useless. But then so is AACS.
...laura
True. "We don't like you" isn't part of the legislation. But if what they really meant was "We don't rent to queers", or something similar, you are protected.
...laura
The B.C. Residential Tenancy Act allows for three sorts of discrimination: age, when it's a property specifically for older folks. Disability, when it's a property specifically for disabled folks. And just about anything else (particularly gender and sexual orientation) when there are shared kitchens and bathrooms involved.
Little else matters. If you can pay the rent (and come by the money lawfully), they can't turn you down.
...laura
I must admit that I'm old enough to remember when Vulcan was supposed to be a planet of Epsilon Eridani, not 40 Eridani. Epsilon is much more Sun-like.
Of course, the Vulcans would have to argue with the Comporellon folks, who also live in the Epsilon Eridani system. :-)
...laura
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was protected when it was published, but such protection has long since expired. In particular, its publication pre-dates the Berne Convention, which set out most of how our (admittedly flawed) copyright system works today.
While Disney can copyright a movie based on Lewis Carroll's book, they can't claim copyright on the original source material, which is long since in the public domain. The same goes for movies made from any public domain material, be it Hamlet or Beowulf.
...laura
The question remains: if $30 a month is too much, just how much do you want to spend?
I have, or have had, relationships with the various providers. Not necessarily for cellphones.
Telus do my home phone and ADSL. I have no complaints. If I wanted a cellphone I'd give them first right of refusal.
Bell Mobility are OK if you're a consumer wanting a cellphone, but need to get their act together for anything else. I'm doing some Brew CDMA development at work and they are somewhat less than cooperative. So I drive down to the border and test things with Sprint.
Fido can go fuck themselves.
I've never gotten anything other than cable TV from Rogers.
...laura