I'm sorry, but the Peoria model of the solar system doesn't count. The Sun and possibly Mecury (it's hard to tell from the photo) are not truly modeled. The sun is just a partial yellow disc painted on a building and Mecury might be just a plaque. The winner should have to be a 3D, true to scale, physical model. It is cool that they include the Asteroid Belt, though.
I'm a recovery workaholic, but doing well... haven't worked a day in over a year! I'm so proud.
The nature of the "Nominations" is summed up in the statement [Quote] After careful deliberation, the Nominating Committee reached consensus on the following slates of Nominees, each of whom has agreed to accept the responsibility of the role. They will assume their duties during the ICANN meeting in Montreal. [/Quote]
The "Nominees" have already accepted their posts and "will assume their duties" (or else?).
The US Navy has used a CD-ROM tech library called ATIS for years. It is based on a Kubik 240 CD-ROM changer with an external controller called a Mediator. The mediator runs QNX. I worked on some ATIS systems and found the CD-ROM changer to be an extremely fragile and unreliable electromechanical beast, but NEVER saw a failure, glitch, or error on the QNX based mediator. This was a tribute to the hardware it ran on as much as well as the OS. Interestingly enough, I am intimately familiar with the inside of the Kubik changer, but have no idea what CPU, memory, or disk the Mediator ran on. This was simply because the changer was always broke and the Mediator never had to be touched from the day it was installed.
People in white lab coats are the primary cause of cancer in rats.
Had one come out and chase me around the lab a bit. An HP VL 400 low profile desktop with a quirk in the CD drive that if you pushed the eject button more than once, it stored the button actions. Pushing it twice quickly resulted in it opening about one centimeter and then closing again. Pushing it three times while the disk was spining full speed caused the tray to open without waiting for spin-down! The disk got air born (only for about half a meter) and skittered across the table after me as I back peddaled away from it in surprise.
The first time it surprised me, the next ten times, I did it on purpose! (Screwed that NT 4 WS disk up pretty well, IIRC).
The risk is accepted by the users, and has been for some time.
In the analogy of home fire insurance you missed the fact that homebuilders are not being sued for building flamable houses. Such a house could be built, but is considered too costly and impractical. The builder might be sued for using overly flamable materials, but no one expects a realy nonflamable structure, even if it is built to all local building codes.
Is ther a non-extremist position available? Maybe software producers would be liable for not meeting enacted "building codes" that included things like reasonable, but not necesarily perfect, checks for buffer overflow protection.
An independant lab had to certify that the brand of sheetrock in your house or apartment resisted burnthrough for a certain amount of time to meet code. Lab-tested fire resistance is accepted because fire proof is generaly believed impractical. Software QA code could require independant certification of reasonable security, without the irrational demand for perfect fire-proof-ness.
People in white lab coats are the number one cause of cancer in labratory mice!
Linux is too good at this stuff. It only has this advanced clustering capability because it jacked all the hard work over at SCO, right? Imagine a SCO Unix cluster of these things!
All seriousness aside, isn't that part of SCO's claim, that a bunch of suposed part-time amature hackers and script kiddies could never have produced a product that would work in this environment without stealing the "real" works from a big company?
A software analysis company has been choosen to review SCO's claims. The newly formed non-profit RAEL Corp will put their reputations on the line by assigning the task to their two best analysts (and largest contributors), Michael Guillen and Steve Ballmer.
An the winner of the 2000 System Engineer of the Millenium, in the Fictional Male category: Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor!
Dr. Watson here! Make way people... out of the way... I'm a doctor! Turn him over and let me look at him. MY GOD!!! Look at his skin color. This man's has a pacemaker BSOD! Quick, shove that LILO floppy down his throat while I hold his mouth open!
Cleaning out horse stables? It seems to come naturally to me after being laid off from the Trustworthy Computing Project...
You saved me from a terrible mistake! I was about to donate my millions to the EFF, but now I see this money MUST go the Coalition to Ban DHMO for sake of my children's futures. Please join me and send whatever you can spare to The Coalition.
I have to admit it is more than I know if a very small black hole is stable. If it is though, it would be catastrophic to have one on Earth. As I imagine it, the thing would be pulled by gravity toward the center of the earth, absorbing the matter and energy it encountered along the way, boring a very tiny tunnel in its path. It would overshoot the center an continue to the other side of the planet, then oscilate back and forth, getting bigger with every pass. It might take a long time, but it would eventually swallow the whole earth. Since it would have no more mass than the earth started with, I guess the moon would still be in stable orbit around it, and it would continue in Earth's stable orbit of the Sun.
In the (phenomenally-awfull) movie version of Battlefield Earth, the Cyclo's planet is destroyed by sending a Nuke to their planet to explode the (appearantly very unstable)atmosphere. But IIRC, having read the book about two decades ago, the original storyline was that very tiny black hole gets sent back, and gradually destroys their planet in the manner described above.
None of this changes the fact that every day we get out of bed we agreed to accept a certain amount of risk. Risks that are vanishingly smaller that that of a planet-killer astoroid impact can be reasonably ignored in our day-to-day decision making!
Mr. Rees obviously ate too much pizza before falling asleep during the Star Trek Marathon. With a little pulling out of context, imagine CDR Data saying these things:
"...micro- robots that could reproduce out of control..."
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
"The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, far smaller than a single atom, that could infect surrounding matter and transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
"...subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a phase transition like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could rip the fabric of space itself."
But this line could not have come from our plucky android, as this kind of pessimism would be the death nell of any TV series, political movement, or other public activity: "It's just that the more I have followed science and its potential, the more I have been aware of both the exciting hopes and the unintended downsides." From which he concludes with his own mid-life crisis version of the stupid Precautionary Principle, that if we couldn't guarantee safety, then we should'a stood in bed!
No references, no details, no names, no dates, no credibility. This is a troll.... no I mean THAT is troll... no,no,no! I mean the original thing was a troll!!!
I copied this sig without clicking on the ad links - I'm a criminal!
"It doesn't really make sense to actually deliver on such a threat unless you really do want to destroy the place."
The ones who are to be 'shocked and awed' are the military troops and their leaders, not the general population of Bagdad. Even if we bring the volume all the way up on the shock-and-awe tactic, the targets will be Republican Guard and CCC sites, not whole cities. The kind of bombing some people imagine (like London or Berlin in WWII) is counter productive and not even contemplated today.
My sig? It's a Sig-Saur 9mm with a SWEEEET little laser sight on it!
I don't think you want relays to control the colors. That will only give you on/off for each color. What you want is variable intensity for each color, and that means more sophisticated control.
In the Navy, I used to work on tactical consoles that used LEDs for control panel illumination. I always thought the brightness control for panel illumination was pretty slick. It was just an oscilator firing a RC time constant (adjustable by a pot on the panel) that determined the duty cycle of the LEDs (the ratio between on and off time). If you put an o-scope on the power to the LEDs, you saw a 5vdc square wave at a fixed frequency (about 1KHz). Turning the panel dimmer pot just changed the duty cycle for each period. With the pot all the way down, there was little or no up time in the cycle. With the pot all the way up, there was almost continuous up time with short down spikes. The effect on the panel illumination was smooth easy control of the LED intensity.
This should be an easy circuit to build. A 1KHz oscilator drives a variable RC (resitor-capacitor, not radio controlled) time circuit, which controls the transistor that provides Vcc to the LED. The RC circuit is constantly being triggered by the oscilator, but the duration of the RC signal to the power transistor depends on the variable resistance (0-1000us).
For a digital control to replace the mechanical pot, use an off the shelf programable one-shot (monostable multivibrator). Use one of these circuits for each color and you can get a wide range of variable colors and combination colors in your glow ball.
Personal: Incredibly good looking young sexy guy seeks blind gulible girl...
Seems to me you are ignoring the duality principle, that photons are described by BOTH wave and particle principles. The term "wavicle" was coined to describe this, if I recall correctly. Photons at lower frequencies (lower energies, like RF) express much more of their wave functions than their particle ones. While at higher frequencies (higher energies, like light) the particle functions predominate. Mass-carrying things do the same. An electron has very significant wave functions, while a neutron or proton have much less, because the neutron has more mass (more energy). As the mass/energy gets higher, the wave functions become even less significant than the particle functions. By the time you bind a few atoms together the mass/energy is so high that wave functions disappear below the noise level and only the particle nature shows.
In the sites with screen shots of the setup process: What is the easiest way to get these screen shots? The PrtScrn button doesn't work at that point in the OS load, so what is the best way to get these shots? Digital camera? Video out to another computer's video capture card? Or am I missing an even easier way?
Why should the various vendors have a database of CC#s at all? Sorry if this is a dim question, but I don't see it. Many financial transactions, like using your ATM card at the grocery store, get one-time-use transaction numbers that presumably include some encryption. The grocery store doesn't record my ATM card number and PIN (...at least, I don't think so...) all they want is that transaction number, which is only good once for exactly the ammount of sale. Even if you give the vendor's computer your CC# (via web or phone), they only need it long enough to get a valid transaction number from the CCCorp. Why should they keep it longer than that? Maybe this is the next generation of abstraction for these account numbers, a law that says a vendor can only use and store the CC# until they get a transaction/confirmation from the bank, then they have to drop it. I don't have a problem with refusing to do credit business with a vendor who insists on using one of those absurd hardcopy embossing machines to make a CC sale. Most resturants, stores, and gas pumps already print only the last four digits, or an abstract transaction number, on the receipt already.
This kind of thing is why I simply refuse to get the Fake Visa, a checking account debit card that has a Visa logo with none of the credit fraud protections of a real credit card, and no PIN like a real debit card.
If your credit card is misused, then a debt is recorded against you that you have not paid yet, and can refuse to pay, with laws to back you up. To misuse a regular debit (ATM) card, the PIN must be known. But the Fake Visa leaves you completly twisting in the wind. If it is misused your money is already gone. You can begin the process of trying to get it back, but any leagal eagle can tell you that getting money back is a completly different universe from refusing to pay it in the first place!
In short, we take comfort in reading this story that we all know the law protects these card owners fairly well. But I am afraid people get these Fake Visa debit cards thinking they have the same protection AND THEY DON'T! - - Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, my hero and nomination for Greatest System Engineer Of All Time!
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I'm sorry, but the Peoria model of the solar system doesn't count. The Sun and possibly Mecury (it's hard to tell from the photo) are not truly modeled. The sun is just a partial yellow disc painted on a building and Mecury might be just a plaque. The winner should have to be a 3D, true to scale, physical model. It is cool that they include the Asteroid Belt, though.
I'm a recovery workaholic, but doing well... haven't worked a day in over a year! I'm so proud.
The nature of the "Nominations" is summed up in the statement [Quote] After careful deliberation, the Nominating Committee reached consensus on the following slates of Nominees, each of whom has agreed to accept the responsibility of the role. They will assume their duties during the ICANN meeting in Montreal. [/Quote]
The "Nominees" have already accepted their posts and "will assume their duties" (or else?).
Sigarette: A short sig.
The US Navy has used a CD-ROM tech library called ATIS for years. It is based on a Kubik 240 CD-ROM changer with an external controller called a Mediator. The mediator runs QNX. I worked on some ATIS systems and found the CD-ROM changer to be an extremely fragile and unreliable electromechanical beast, but NEVER saw a failure, glitch, or error on the QNX based mediator. This was a tribute to the hardware it ran on as much as well as the OS. Interestingly enough, I am intimately familiar with the inside of the Kubik changer, but have no idea what CPU, memory, or disk the Mediator ran on. This was simply because the changer was always broke and the Mediator never had to be touched from the day it was installed.
People in white lab coats are the primary cause of cancer in rats.
Had one come out and chase me around the lab a bit. An HP VL 400 low profile desktop with a quirk in the CD drive that if you pushed the eject button more than once, it stored the button actions. Pushing it twice quickly resulted in it opening about one centimeter and then closing again. Pushing it three times while the disk was spining full speed caused the tray to open without waiting for spin-down! The disk got air born (only for about half a meter) and skittered across the table after me as I back peddaled away from it in surprise.
The first time it surprised me, the next ten times, I did it on purpose! (Screwed that NT 4 WS disk up pretty well, IIRC).
The risk is accepted by the users, and has been for some time.
In the analogy of home fire insurance you missed the fact that homebuilders are not being sued for building flamable houses. Such a house could be built, but is considered too costly and impractical. The builder might be sued for using overly flamable materials, but no one expects a realy nonflamable structure, even if it is built to all local building codes.
Is ther a non-extremist position available? Maybe software producers would be liable for not meeting enacted "building codes" that included things like reasonable, but not necesarily perfect, checks for buffer overflow protection.
An independant lab had to certify that the brand of sheetrock in your house or apartment resisted burnthrough for a certain amount of time to meet code. Lab-tested fire resistance is accepted because fire proof is generaly believed impractical. Software QA code could require independant certification of reasonable security, without the irrational demand for perfect fire-proof-ness.
People in white lab coats are the number one cause of cancer in labratory mice!
Linux is too good at this stuff. It only has this advanced clustering capability because it jacked all the hard work over at SCO, right? Imagine a SCO Unix cluster of these things!
All seriousness aside, isn't that part of SCO's claim, that a bunch of suposed part-time amature hackers and script kiddies could never have produced a product that would work in this environment without stealing the "real" works from a big company?
THIS JUST IN...
A software analysis company has been choosen to review SCO's claims. The newly formed non-profit RAEL Corp will put their reputations on the line by assigning the task to their two best analysts (and largest contributors), Michael Guillen and Steve Ballmer.
An the winner of the 2000 System Engineer of the Millenium, in the Fictional Male category: Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor!
That link helped me out a lot! Daisy = Linux. Now I know why I always wanted to see Tux in a high cut pair of short shorts!!!
Tux has the same nice round cheeks that Opus had... Does he hail from Bloom County by any chance?
We are SCO. We are one hive mind running on newly licenced SCOX. Resistance is futile (and bad for inovation). You will be assimilated... or sued...
MANN! Would these guys be in trouble if Morgan Freeman gave ME all his powers!
You mean this thing brings in slashdot?
:-)
My employer made me use this OS, what's your excuse?
A worried crowd gathers on Main Street:
Dr. Watson here! Make way people... out of the way... I'm a doctor! Turn him over and let me look at him. MY GOD!!! Look at his skin color. This man's has a pacemaker BSOD! Quick, shove that LILO floppy down his throat while I hold his mouth open!
Cleaning out horse stables? It seems to come naturally to me after being laid off from the Trustworthy Computing Project...
You saved me from a terrible mistake! I was about to donate my millions to the EFF, but now I see this money MUST go the Coalition to Ban DHMO for sake of my children's futures. Please join me and send whatever you can spare to The Coalition.
Quote: "What will they do next week? Put Pol Pot in charge of the Human Rights Commission?"
No. It was not the US, but the UN, that put Libya in charge of Human Rights, and put Iraq in charge of Disarmerment!
Karma: Low - Moderation bullies keep stealing my lunch money.
I have to admit it is more than I know if a very small black hole is stable. If it is though, it would be catastrophic to have one on Earth. As I imagine it, the thing would be pulled by gravity toward the center of the earth, absorbing the matter and energy it encountered along the way, boring a very tiny tunnel in its path. It would overshoot the center an continue to the other side of the planet, then oscilate back and forth, getting bigger with every pass. It might take a long time, but it would eventually swallow the whole earth. Since it would have no more mass than the earth started with, I guess the moon would still be in stable orbit around it, and it would continue in Earth's stable orbit of the Sun.
In the (phenomenally-awfull) movie version of Battlefield Earth, the Cyclo's planet is destroyed by sending a Nuke to their planet to explode the (appearantly very unstable)atmosphere. But IIRC, having read the book about two decades ago, the original storyline was that very tiny black hole gets sent back, and gradually destroys their planet in the manner described above.
None of this changes the fact that every day we get out of bed we agreed to accept a certain amount of risk. Risks that are vanishingly smaller that that of a planet-killer astoroid impact can be reasonably ignored in our day-to-day decision making!
Mr. Rees obviously ate too much pizza before falling asleep during the Star Trek Marathon. With a little pulling out of context, imagine CDR Data saying these things:
"...micro- robots that could reproduce out of control..."
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
"The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, far smaller than a single atom, that could infect surrounding matter and transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
"...subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a phase transition like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could rip the fabric of space itself."
But this line could not have come from our plucky android, as this kind of pessimism would be the death nell of any TV series, political movement, or other public activity: "It's just that the more I have followed science and its potential, the more I have been aware of both the exciting hopes and the unintended downsides." From which he concludes with his own mid-life crisis version of the stupid Precautionary Principle, that if we couldn't guarantee safety, then we should'a stood in bed!
In Soviet Russia, spam reads YOU!
It's YOUR fault I posted this. You didn't mod me low enough last time!
Quote: "EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive."
So, EFI is just a motherboard driver called by the BIOS... that the motherboard supposedly doesn't have...
If it doesn't have a BIOS, what are you running when you setup a new HDD, and what process puts the EFI on the 'special reserved area'???
Karma: Very High - Due to good looks, wit, charm... Oh, wait... It's going down... WHAT HAPPENED?!
No references, no details, no names, no dates, no credibility. This is a troll.... no I mean THAT is troll... no,no,no! I mean the original thing was a troll!!!
I copied this sig without clicking on the ad links - I'm a criminal!
"It doesn't really make sense to actually deliver on such a threat unless you really do want to destroy the place."
The ones who are to be 'shocked and awed' are the military troops and their leaders, not the general population of Bagdad. Even if we bring the volume all the way up on the shock-and-awe tactic, the targets will be Republican Guard and CCC sites, not whole cities. The kind of bombing some people imagine (like London or Berlin in WWII) is counter productive and not even contemplated today.
My sig? It's a Sig-Saur 9mm with a SWEEEET little laser sight on it!
I don't think you want relays to control the colors. That will only give you on/off for each color. What you want is variable intensity for each color, and that means more sophisticated control.
In the Navy, I used to work on tactical consoles that used LEDs for control panel illumination. I always thought the brightness control for panel illumination was pretty slick. It was just an oscilator firing a RC time constant (adjustable by a pot on the panel) that determined the duty cycle of the LEDs (the ratio between on and off time). If you put an o-scope on the power to the LEDs, you saw a 5vdc square wave at a fixed frequency (about 1KHz). Turning the panel dimmer pot just changed the duty cycle for each period. With the pot all the way down, there was little or no up time in the cycle. With the pot all the way up, there was almost continuous up time with short down spikes. The effect on the panel illumination was smooth easy control of the LED intensity.
This should be an easy circuit to build. A 1KHz oscilator drives a variable RC (resitor-capacitor, not radio controlled) time circuit, which controls the transistor that provides Vcc to the LED. The RC circuit is constantly being triggered by the oscilator, but the duration of the RC signal to the power transistor depends on the variable resistance (0-1000us).
For a digital control to replace the mechanical pot, use an off the shelf programable one-shot (monostable multivibrator). Use one of these circuits for each color and you can get a wide range of variable colors and combination colors in your glow ball.
Personal: Incredibly good looking young sexy guy seeks blind gulible girl...
Seems to me you are ignoring the duality principle, that photons are described by BOTH wave and particle principles. The term "wavicle" was coined to describe this, if I recall correctly. Photons at lower frequencies (lower energies, like RF) express much more of their wave functions than their particle ones. While at higher frequencies (higher energies, like light) the particle functions predominate. Mass-carrying things do the same. An electron has very significant wave functions, while a neutron or proton have much less, because the neutron has more mass (more energy). As the mass/energy gets higher, the wave functions become even less significant than the particle functions. By the time you bind a few atoms together the mass/energy is so high that wave functions disappear below the noise level and only the particle nature shows.
In the sites with screen shots of the setup process: What is the easiest way to get these screen shots? The PrtScrn button doesn't work at that point in the OS load, so what is the best way to get these shots? Digital camera? Video out to another computer's video capture card? Or am I missing an even easier way?
At the suggestions from various repected people in the industry,...
...most of which were anatomicly impossible anyway,...
Is this where the sig goes?
Why should the various vendors have a database of CC#s at all? Sorry if this is a dim question, but I don't see it. Many financial transactions, like using your ATM card at the grocery store, get one-time-use transaction numbers that presumably include some encryption. The grocery store doesn't record my ATM card number and PIN (...at least, I don't think so...) all they want is that transaction number, which is only good once for exactly the ammount of sale. Even if you give the vendor's computer your CC# (via web or phone), they only need it long enough to get a valid transaction number from the CCCorp. Why should they keep it longer than that? Maybe this is the next generation of abstraction for these account numbers, a law that says a vendor can only use and store the CC# until they get a transaction/confirmation from the bank, then they have to drop it. I don't have a problem with refusing to do credit business with a vendor who insists on using one of those absurd hardcopy embossing machines to make a CC sale. Most resturants, stores, and gas pumps already print only the last four digits, or an abstract transaction number, on the receipt already.
This kind of thing is why I simply refuse to get the Fake Visa, a checking account debit card that has a Visa logo with none of the credit fraud protections of a real credit card, and no PIN like a real debit card.
If your credit card is misused, then a debt is recorded against you that you have not paid yet, and can refuse to pay, with laws to back you up. To misuse a regular debit (ATM) card, the PIN must be known. But the Fake Visa leaves you completly twisting in the wind. If it is misused your money is already gone. You can begin the process of trying to get it back, but any leagal eagle can tell you that getting money back is a completly different universe from refusing to pay it in the first place!
In short, we take comfort in reading this story that we all know the law protects these card owners fairly well. But I am afraid people get these Fake Visa debit cards thinking they have the same protection AND THEY DON'T!
-
-
Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, my hero and nomination for Greatest System Engineer Of All Time!