I remember that ftp site with Mosaic back in 1993. There was another application there - Collage. The idea was pretty neat. It was a tool to *sensualize* scientific data. Not just visualize, but turn in into audio too. I wonder what happened to it. I am not sure if it later became Spyglass Transform. It could be that its development was discontinued. Does anyone know Collage fate?
Such tarrifs would be extremely difficult to enforce. The tangeable goods cross the border where customs can examine them. Software does not cross the border in a physical form. Thus it's very difficult to attribute the value added at the overseas office. If a US company wants to hide the cost of outsourcing, it would be extremely difficult to catch it. It would result in software companies paying in tarrifs as much as they see fit and government spending more money policing the tax than it's actually worth.
The article seems to be a new wrapping for a years-old idea of making the sender pay for each individual message mailed.
The article proposed to maintain a white list of trusted addresses. Anyone not on the white list would have to pay money and (manually) obtain a token allowing to send a message to a mail box. I would say this is too difficult.
I think obtaining a token manually is sufficient for all spam-fighting purposes. If it can be assured that the e-mail was sent to me individually by a human being, then it's worth my effort of looking at the subject line. So, if the sender is not on my white list, my server could reply with an automatic message something like "Your message has not been delivered. Visit the page http://.../?id=123456789, read the number in the image and enter it in the box". That would cut pretty much all spam.
I know at least one free e-mail vendor who implemented this technique. It's simple and easy and still not widely used. I bet the idea from the article would suffer the same fate.
Apparently IBM bought the formerly AT&T's later Lucent's Watson project. The web page is even called webtts.watson.ibm.com. Obviously the quality of TTS has not improved much since 1996.
Can someone please tell me why this 8 y.o. project is considered news?
The following is my personal opinion based on experience with MySQL 3.x, PgSQL 7.x and MS SQL 6.x-2000. YMMV.
-- MySQL MySQL's #1 feature is exceptionally simple use and administration. #2 is excellent read performance. If you are building a web site with a simple DB backend, a lot of reads, a few updates/deletes, no transactions, then MySQL is ideal. It may have an infrequent index corruption problem. A couple of versions had a problem of eating all CPU on occasion. But most of the time it just runs. Very easy to learn, nearly 0 maintanence.
The problems start when the database grows in size and complexity. DISTINCT sucks: if a query is large enough distinct just does not work. UPDATE/DELETE don't work with joins. No transactions. Yes, yes, I know, some things are addressed with another table format, some are patched up in 4.0. But it's done at the cost of what I listed above as #1 and #2.
-- PgSQL PgSQL is the #1 OS ACID-compliant DBMS. It has transactions out of the box. It works. It can be tuned to run as fast as MySQL. But the learning curve is steeper both for programmers and for DB admins. The first thing to learn is VACUUM ANALYSE. If the table has a lot of updates/deletes, do it often, otherwise performance would suck. And I mean really suck. When the the V/A is running, the table is pretty much unaccessible. Pg's aggregates are bizzare. MIN() and MAX() can be programmed around, but if you need COUNT() you are out of luck. Flat out can't use it on large tables because aggregates do not use indexes! Another surprize is difference in performance between queries WHERE... IN () and EXISTS. The difference is orders of magnitude.
Pg's query planner/optimizer is not too smart. It can be easily confused with variable types. It often chooses wrong indexes. It's about the same quality as the p/o in MS SQL 6.5. Be prepared to spend time tweaking the queries and indexes. On the other hand, the memory cache is too smart. You can't make it read the whole DB into RAM and keep it there. Pg is trying to behave nicely and releases RAM when the table is not used for a while. Which is a bad thing on a dedicated server.
Hopefully, the next release will have failover and replication. And maybe aggregates will be eventually fixed. Then PgSQL can be seriously considered for enterprise-scale projects.
-- MS SQL Microsoft went a long way from MSSQL 6.5 to 2000. 7.0 and 2000 are pretty much the same. If it were an OS project, 2000 would have been called 7.1 or 7.2. The MSSQL 2000 is a pretty solid product. For an all-Windows shop it works. But the price! The MS SQL server license, The NT Server license, a license for each connection. If you need to access it from a FreeBSD or Linux box, then FreeTDS is needed. FreeTDS has its own issues. MS SQL has a problem with scalability because it's tied up to NT and NT is not available (yet) on massive hardware.
In conclusion I would say that MySQL is certainly no threat to big boys, not now, not in the near future. PgSQL may become a real contender in the next two years. It is already eating into the lower end of the MS SQL market. Unless MS ports the SQL Server to other platforms, it's going to be sqeezed really hard.
I believe there is a subtle flaw in your argument. I can see RIAA giving the following argument against you.
You bought a CD, which is a piece of plastic. It can get scratched, broken, lost, stolen. You own that piece of plastic, not a recording it holds. When you buy other types of IP, like paper books, the physical medium has a natural life span. For example, a paperback is pretty much destroyed after 20 or 30 people read it. If CD can be copied, it becomes permanent. The cost of making a copy is negligeable.
So, they could say you have to choose just one:
1. You really own the physical CD with recording, but you own it completely, including all the problems associated with the physical medium.
2. You own the license to use the recording itself, which is separate from the physical medium. But then you are subject to the terms of the license, whatever they are.
To moderators: I know that this opinion is different from the opinion held by the majority. I am not trolling, just trying to have a discussion.
Blocking outbound traffic on port 25 is a totally useless measure these days. It could have been effective 2 years ago, but no more. Major spam-operators like Ralsky use open proxies and jeem-infected boxes on dsl lines. Open relays are no longer the #1 method for sending spam. Their use continues to decline.
By the way, it's spam, not SPAM. SPAM is Hormel's trademark.
Your right to live is the most basic right. No one should be able to take it away from you.
What you think is your right to have your e-mail accepted by others is not a right (see - not to send e-mail, but to have it accepted by others). It's a curtesy other people extend to you. You associate with scum and see this curtesy revoked. Seems fair to me.
An analogy for you again:-). You have a right to speak, but you have no right to force others to listen to you.
As for SPEWS would be blocking indiscriminately, there is no evidence of that at all. There is plenty of evidence that they list only when an ISP repeatedly refuses to terminate a spamming customer. There is evidence of SPEWS not listing spamer's associates when doing so would affect large groups of users, who have no possibility of jumping off.
Modding down the top parent just because you disagree with what it sais is a herd mentality.
Moderators, why are you scared to mod up a controversial message? What do you have to loose?
> > "Listen to him complain about collateral > > damage - collateral damage is the point of > > blackhole lists!" > > And this is a good thing?
Yes, it is a good thing. Hit the spamers where it hurts. Hit them financially.
> Killing US citizens is the solution, not the > problem. If we didn't punish these ignorant > civilians they would continue supporting > Israel. Every citizen of an Israel-friendly > country...
Wrong analogy. Even if you are a vocal supporter of Palestinians, you would still be just as likely target of a terrorist attack as the next person. Do you think those who organized 9/11 cared about political views of the victims?
In case of spam support things are different. You have your choice. You can continue to support your spamming ISP, or you can go elsewhere.
> The ends do not justify the means. Innocent > until proven guilty unless spam is involved? No > thanks.
Wrong again. You are not accused of sending spam. You are accused of giving your money to an ISP who supports spamers. And if you give your money to scum, then, well, you are guilty of it. Don't be upset if some people do not want to associate with you because of it.
You like analogies. So, here is one for you. Give money to KKK. Do it publicly. Then whatch what happens.
No one is taking your choice from you. If you are against the block lists, vote with your money. Don't use an ISP who blocks by SPEWS.ORG. If you are for block lists, do the reverse - use the ISP who has a strong anti-spam history. It's that simple.
The guy is proposing a subscription system, not a micropayments system. The only thing which can be remotely seen as novel is the idea of charging for the consumed bandwidth instead of the usual monthly or annual fee. This is not what I would call a micropayments system. You still pay in one lump sum to the site owner.
The exploits can be used for monetary gain. In that case the virus creator tries to keep things as quiet as possible.
A virus called jeem.pv is widely spread among those, who use P2P clients from kazaa and morpheus. By various estimates up to 100K clients are infected. But the epidemics does not get much attention. Why? Because the virus is not doing anything noticeably bad to the infected computer. All it does is serves as a relay for spam. Spamer, who created this virus, got tens of thousands of stealth open relays which are largely not known to block lists.
I am 35 now (DOB July 1967). I still remember some patches from the late Fall of 1969. My sister bought candy and I lost them, I cried bitterly, I remember my dad taking me to a photographer. I remember snow banks in Winter, a street light. I remember building a garden for bunnies in the snow, remember the house layout, the cat, bird food outside. I remember early Spring of 1970, when my sister lifter me to a corner of a well. I was scared witless.
The memories are definitely attributed to that year beacause in the Summer of 1970 my dad got a new job and we moved to another town. Which I remember quite well too.
The theory of relation between language and memory holds in my case. I was told that I started talking clearly when I 15 months old.
The non-CDs are clearly labeled as such. They carry the BMG logo. If the box has the BMG on it, then the thing in the box is not a CD. Don't buy it. It's that simple.
I don't know what drawbacks he was talking about, but one drawback which stopped our group from working with PGSQL was lack of support for indexes in aggregates. Aggregates like MIN(), MAX() in PGSQL can't use indexes. Performance of "SELECT MAX(id) FROM example" sucks even if id is the primary key. There are workarounds, but they are (1) non-standard and (2) can't be used easily in complex queries. This has been discussed multiple times in postrgres developers mailing lists. No fix.
I had seen a 10kW IR laser in action at a Russian research facility in Moscow back in the late 80s. I think it was a chemical laser. The guys used a brick for a beam stop. The side of the brick facing the laser was covered with glassy sports. The temperature at the spot was reaching 1500-2000 C.
I would guess a 100kW sucker would burn through a brick wall in a matter of seconds.
Tetris is an amaizing achievement considering what Electonica 60 was.
Electronica was a Soviet clone of one of DEC's RSX minis. I worked with one back in the 80s. It was a box 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep. It had two 8" floppy drives and 64KB RAM, no hard drive, monochrome video. One floppy held the OS (CP/M) and the other everything else. Its average time between failures was something like 1 week.
It's not as bad as it sounds. The Russian media reports that the vehicle landed as expected, it's just can't be found so far. The search continues.
The previous launches ware worse. In Summer 2000 tt did not inflate completely and hard-crashed. In Summer 2001 it did not separate from the first stage. So, this time it's half-way successful.
Kamchatka peninsula is not the nicest place on Earth. Very thin population, a lot of mountains, forests.
Here is the original in Russian: http://www.spacenews.ru/spacenews/src/sp acenews/fu ll_news.cfm?id=90403
Because Antarctica is already the subject of one of these idiotic UN treaties.
So, you are saying the Space Treaty can be broken, but Antarctic Treaty cannot be. Right? Care to explain your reasoning?
That's why it's still a wasteland
No, it's a wasteland because there is no money to be made there. It has near-zero economic potential. Even if oil is found there, drilling would be too costly because Antarctics is covered with 1-2 miles of ice. A barrel of Antarctic oil would cost upward from $100.
Mars is a lot worse than Antarctics. It has 0 (zero) economic potential at present level of technology. It will have no economic potential for at least another 50 years. National sovereignity is only important for social and economic reasons. There will be no large settlement on Mars for as long as there is no way to make money there. Mars mission has primarily political (we spend public money on cool things, vote for us next time) and to lesser degree scientific interest. Both of these do not require a claim of sovereignity.
I think $50 billion is better be spent on building a cheaper space transport.
This journalist is writing bool-sheet aiming to grab attention with his nut-case theories. He says US should settle Mars because it has a lot of water ice and becuase the first trip to Mars would cost just $50 billion, not $500 billion as previously estimated. By that argument Antarctics is a lot better to settle. The trip there would cost literally several million times cheaper, it also has a lot of water ice, and the climat is a a great deal warmer too:-). No nation has sovereignity over Antarctics, why not advise to claim it? I know why. Because it would be immediately obvious that the idea is stupid. Writing about Mars is fashionable, the stupidity is not as aparent.
1. The post humans will loose the body and emotional attachment to the body. Bodies will be like cars. The human body and human mind will become separable. It does not mean just that the the minds would be able to possess bodies of the others. Bodies will become something like X-servers for minds acting as X-clients. I.e. a mind you be able to see through someone's eyes if permissions are set right. This advance alone would change the human nature. There will be biological designer bodies, software-only bodies for VR worlds, and cybernetic robot-like bodies. Not having a permanent body would make us non-human.
2. We will become a kind of Borg. Not the ST borg, where individual is nothing but a part of the collective. We will retain individuality while being a part of the whole at the same time. It's impossible to imagine this state of mind right now, like it's impossible to imagine 4D world for a 3D creature. Invividual posthumans would be like Internet nodes, sharing as much as they wish with the collective. Individual mind would know as much as whole humanity knows.
3. Of course there will be no death, unless something drastic happens, like passing of a blackhole through Solar system.
4. The distinction between past and future, and passing of time will become generally irrelevant. Right now the past is felt as something we remember and which cannot be brought back or changed. The past will be recorded perfectly and will be available for instant replay and altereation through simulation at will. The playback and simulation will be indistingushable from new recording. The future (i.e. a state of an individual mind) will be what we want it to be. Thus, the passing of time will be irrelevant. The time won't stop, it just won't be important.
5. This future is the reason why we see no extraterrestrial intelligence. It's there, we are just not advanced enough to tell it from nature.
6. Some of us, reading/. will become a part of this new world.
A DMCA-equivalent bill was introduced to Russian parlament (Duma) a couple weeks ago. The bill is even worse than DMCA. The first reading is scheduled for this month. The law cannot be applied retroactively, so maybe they will not be prosecuted in Russia, but won't be allowed to continue.
This DMCA madness got to stop. I hope EU is smarter than US or Russia and does not turn corporate greed into law.
By the way, Elcomsoft is no freedom fighter. The company is a bunch of scambags who make a living by selling spam tools. It they go bancrupt, the amount of spam will be reduced.
company be Snake Oil Merchants Inc? If not, they should really consider changing the name since what they are selling is pure 100% Grade A snake oil.
It's possible that these "Prescient International" are really just uneducated morons, but being cynical as I am, I would rather believe that this is an attempt by another sleazy business to get investment from gullible VCs.
This is not ment as a flaimbait. This is now we did it. YMMV.
First you need to decide what you want to do with your system, then how much you are willing to pay for deployment, and then how much you want to pay for maintanence and expansion.
We evaluated a number of CM systems back in 1999. arsDigita requires Oracle (expensive), OpenACS was not ready for real world deployment, CMS based on JBoss is relatively expensive due to cost of programmers. Zope uses its own programming language which translates in to problems with finding qualified programmers.
We had one more requirement. We wanted to have human-readable URLs
We ended up choosing Midgard. It's a GPL-ed Apache+PHP-based CMS running on top of MySQL. It has its share of quirks, but three years after deployment we do not regret the choice. Midgard is suitable for running a small to medium-size web farm. It's based on PHP, thus the programming has the same limits as any programming in PHP. Another shortcoming is exclusive use of MySQL.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that ftp site with Mosaic back in 1993. There was another application there - Collage. The idea was pretty neat. It was a tool to *sensualize* scientific data. Not just visualize, but turn in into audio too. I wonder what happened to it. I am not sure if it later became Spyglass Transform. It could be that its development was discontinued. Does anyone know Collage fate?
Such tarrifs would be extremely difficult to enforce. The tangeable goods cross the border where customs can examine them. Software does not cross the border in a physical form. Thus it's very difficult to attribute the value added at the overseas office. If a US company wants to hide the cost of outsourcing, it would be extremely difficult to catch it. It would result in software companies paying in tarrifs as much as they see fit and government spending more money policing the tax than it's actually worth.
The article seems to be a new wrapping for a years-old idea of making the sender pay for each individual message mailed.
The article proposed to maintain a white list of trusted addresses. Anyone not on the white list would have to pay money and (manually) obtain a token allowing to send a message to a mail box. I would say this is too difficult.
I think obtaining a token manually is sufficient for all spam-fighting purposes. If it can be assured that the e-mail was sent to me individually by a human being, then it's worth my effort of looking at the subject line. So, if the sender is not on my white list, my server could reply with an automatic message something like "Your message has not been delivered. Visit the page http://.../?id=123456789, read the number in the image and enter it in the box". That would cut pretty much all spam.
I know at least one free e-mail vendor who implemented this technique. It's simple and easy and still not widely used. I bet the idea from the article would suffer the same fate.
Apparently IBM bought the formerly AT&T's later Lucent's Watson project. The web page is even called webtts.watson.ibm.com. Obviously the quality of TTS has not improved much since 1996.
Can someone please tell me why this 8 y.o. project is considered news?
The following is my personal opinion based on experience with MySQL 3.x, PgSQL 7.x and MS SQL 6.x-2000. YMMV.
... IN () and EXISTS. The difference is orders of magnitude.
-- MySQL
MySQL's #1 feature is exceptionally simple use and administration. #2 is excellent read performance. If you are building a web site with a simple DB backend, a lot of reads, a few updates/deletes, no transactions, then MySQL is ideal. It may have an infrequent index corruption problem. A couple of versions had a problem of eating all CPU on occasion. But most of the time it just runs. Very easy to learn, nearly 0 maintanence.
The problems start when the database grows in size and complexity. DISTINCT sucks: if a query is large enough distinct just does not work. UPDATE/DELETE don't work with joins. No transactions. Yes, yes, I know, some things are addressed with another table format, some are patched up in 4.0. But it's done at the cost of what I listed above as #1 and #2.
-- PgSQL
PgSQL is the #1 OS ACID-compliant DBMS. It has transactions out of the box. It works. It can be tuned to run as fast as MySQL. But the learning curve is steeper both for programmers and for DB admins. The first thing to learn is VACUUM ANALYSE. If the table has a lot of updates/deletes, do it often, otherwise performance would suck. And I mean really suck. When the the V/A is running, the table is pretty much unaccessible. Pg's aggregates are bizzare. MIN() and MAX() can be programmed around, but if you need COUNT() you are out of luck. Flat out can't use it on large tables because aggregates do not use indexes! Another surprize is difference in performance between queries WHERE
Pg's query planner/optimizer is not too smart. It can be easily confused with variable types. It often chooses wrong indexes. It's about the same quality as the p/o in MS SQL 6.5. Be prepared to spend time tweaking the queries and indexes. On the other hand, the memory cache is too smart. You can't make it read the whole DB into RAM and keep it there. Pg is trying to behave nicely and releases RAM when the table is not used for a while. Which is a bad thing on a dedicated server.
Hopefully, the next release will have failover and replication. And maybe aggregates will be eventually fixed. Then PgSQL can be seriously considered for enterprise-scale projects.
-- MS SQL
Microsoft went a long way from MSSQL 6.5 to 2000. 7.0 and 2000 are pretty much the same. If it were an OS project, 2000 would have been called 7.1 or 7.2. The MSSQL 2000 is a pretty solid product. For an all-Windows shop it works. But the price! The MS SQL server license, The NT Server license, a license for each connection. If you need to access it from a FreeBSD or Linux box, then FreeTDS is needed. FreeTDS has its own issues. MS SQL has a problem with scalability because it's tied up to NT and NT is not available (yet) on massive hardware.
In conclusion I would say that MySQL is certainly no threat to big boys, not now, not in the near future. PgSQL may become a real contender in the next two years. It is already eating into the lower end of the MS SQL market. Unless MS ports the SQL Server to other platforms, it's going to be sqeezed really hard.
I believe there is a subtle flaw in your argument. I can see RIAA giving the following argument against you.
You bought a CD, which is a piece of plastic. It can get scratched, broken, lost, stolen. You own that piece of plastic, not a recording it holds. When you buy other types of IP, like paper books, the physical medium has a natural life span. For example, a paperback is pretty much destroyed after 20 or 30 people read it. If CD can be copied, it becomes permanent. The cost of making a copy is negligeable.
So, they could say you have to choose just one:
1. You really own the physical CD with recording, but you own it completely, including all the problems associated with the physical medium.
2. You own the license to use the recording itself, which is separate from the physical medium. But then you are subject to the terms of the license, whatever they are.
To moderators: I know that this opinion is different from the opinion held by the majority. I am not trolling, just trying to have a discussion.
Blocking outbound traffic on port 25 is a totally useless measure these days. It could have been effective 2 years ago, but no more. Major spam-operators like Ralsky use open proxies and jeem-infected boxes on dsl lines. Open relays are no longer the #1 method for sending spam. Their use continues to decline.
By the way, it's spam, not SPAM. SPAM is Hormel's trademark.
You are missing the point.
:-). You have a right to speak, but you have no right to force others to listen to you.
Your right to live is the most basic right. No one should be able to take it away from you.
What you think is your right to have your e-mail accepted by others is not a right (see - not to send e-mail, but to have it accepted by others). It's a curtesy other people extend to you. You associate with scum and see this curtesy revoked. Seems fair to me.
An analogy for you again
As for SPEWS would be blocking indiscriminately, there is no evidence of that at all. There is plenty of evidence that they list only when an ISP repeatedly refuses to terminate a spamming customer. There is evidence of SPEWS not listing spamer's associates when doing so would affect large groups of users, who have no possibility of jumping off.
Modding down the top parent just because you disagree with what it sais is a herd mentality.
...
Moderators, why are you scared to mod up a controversial message? What do you have to loose?
> > "Listen to him complain about collateral
> > damage - collateral damage is the point of
> > blackhole lists!"
>
> And this is a good thing?
Yes, it is a good thing. Hit the spamers where it hurts. Hit them financially.
> Killing US citizens is the solution, not the
> problem. If we didn't punish these ignorant
> civilians they would continue supporting
> Israel. Every citizen of an Israel-friendly
> country
Wrong analogy. Even if you are a vocal supporter of Palestinians, you would still be just as likely target of a terrorist attack as the next person. Do you think those who organized 9/11 cared about political views of the victims?
In case of spam support things are different. You have your choice. You can continue to support your spamming ISP, or you can go elsewhere.
> The ends do not justify the means. Innocent
> until proven guilty unless spam is involved? No
> thanks.
Wrong again. You are not accused of sending spam. You are accused of giving your money to an ISP who supports spamers. And if you give your money to scum, then, well, you are guilty of it. Don't be upset if some people do not want to associate with you because of it.
You like analogies. So, here is one for you. Give money to KKK. Do it publicly. Then whatch what happens.
No one is taking your choice from you. If you are against the block lists, vote with your money. Don't use an ISP who blocks by SPEWS.ORG. If you are for block lists, do the reverse - use the ISP who has a strong anti-spam history. It's that simple.
The guy is proposing a subscription system, not a micropayments system. The only thing which can be remotely seen as novel is the idea of charging for the consumed bandwidth instead of the usual monthly or annual fee. This is not what I would call a micropayments system. You still pay in one lump sum to the site owner.
The exploits can be used for monetary gain. In that case the virus creator tries to keep things as quiet as possible.
A virus called jeem.pv is widely spread among those, who use P2P clients from kazaa and morpheus. By various estimates up to 100K clients are infected. But the epidemics does not get much attention. Why? Because the virus is not doing anything noticeably bad to the infected computer. All it does is serves as a relay for spam. Spamer, who created this virus, got tens of thousands of stealth open relays which are largely not known to block lists.
Search google for jeem.pv, see for yourself.
I am 35 now (DOB July 1967). I still remember some patches from the late Fall of 1969. My sister bought candy and I lost them, I cried bitterly, I remember my dad taking me to a photographer. I remember snow banks in Winter, a street light. I remember building a garden for bunnies in the snow, remember the house layout, the cat, bird food outside. I remember early Spring of 1970, when my sister lifter me to a corner of a well. I was scared witless.
The memories are definitely attributed to that year beacause in the Summer of 1970 my dad got a new job and we moved to another town. Which I remember quite well too.
The theory of relation between language and memory holds in my case. I was told that I started talking clearly when I 15 months old.
> While SPAM may no be trespassing, it is often
> fraud and that is against the law.
Canned meat cannot trespass. It's never fraud and it's certainly not against the law.
Hormel is nice enough not to persue its trademark violation. Have a little courtesy, call it spam, not SPAM.
http://www.spam.com/
The non-CDs are clearly labeled as such. They carry the BMG logo. If the box has the BMG on it, then the thing in the box is not a CD. Don't buy it. It's that simple.
> What drawbacks are you talking about?
I don't know what drawbacks he was talking about, but one drawback which stopped our group from working with PGSQL was lack of support for indexes in aggregates. Aggregates like MIN(), MAX() in PGSQL can't use indexes. Performance of "SELECT MAX(id) FROM example" sucks even if id is the primary key. There are workarounds, but they are (1) non-standard and (2) can't be used easily in complex queries. This has been discussed multiple times in postrgres developers mailing lists. No fix.
I had seen a 10kW IR laser in action at a Russian research facility in Moscow back in the late 80s. I think it was a chemical laser. The guys used a brick for a beam stop. The side of the brick facing the laser was covered with glassy sports. The temperature at the spot was reaching 1500-2000 C.
I would guess a 100kW sucker would burn through a brick wall in a matter of seconds.
Tetris is an amaizing achievement considering what Electonica 60 was.
Electronica was a Soviet clone of one of DEC's RSX minis. I worked with one back in the 80s. It was a box 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep. It had two 8" floppy drives and 64KB RAM, no hard drive, monochrome video. One floppy held the OS (CP/M) and the other everything else. Its average time between failures was something like 1 week.
It's not as bad as it sounds. The Russian media reports that the vehicle landed as expected, it's just can't be found so far. The search continues.
p acenews/fu ll_news.cfm?id=90403
The previous launches ware worse. In Summer 2000 tt did not inflate completely and hard-crashed. In Summer 2001 it did not separate from the first stage. So, this time it's half-way successful.
Kamchatka peninsula is not the nicest place on Earth. Very thin population, a lot of mountains, forests.
Here is the original in Russian:
http://www.spacenews.ru/spacenews/src/s
So, you are saying the Space Treaty can be broken, but Antarctic Treaty cannot be. Right? Care to explain your reasoning?
That's why it's still a wasteland
No, it's a wasteland because there is no money to be made there. It has near-zero economic potential. Even if oil is found there, drilling would be too costly because Antarctics is covered with 1-2 miles of ice. A barrel of Antarctic oil would cost upward from $100.
Mars is a lot worse than Antarctics. It has 0 (zero) economic potential at present level of technology. It will have no economic potential for at least another 50 years. National sovereignity is only important for social and economic reasons. There will be no large settlement on Mars for as long as there is no way to make money there. Mars mission has primarily political (we spend public money on cool things, vote for us next time) and to lesser degree scientific interest. Both of these do not require a claim of sovereignity.
I think $50 billion is better be spent on building a cheaper space transport.
This journalist is writing bool-sheet aiming to grab attention with his nut-case theories. He says US should settle Mars because it has a lot of water ice and becuase the first trip to Mars would cost just $50 billion, not $500 billion as previously estimated. By that argument Antarctics is a lot better to settle. The trip there would cost literally several million times cheaper, it also has a lot of water ice, and the climat is a a great deal warmer too :-). No nation has sovereignity over Antarctics, why not advise to claim it? I know why. Because it would be immediately obvious that the idea is stupid. Writing about Mars is fashionable, the stupidity is not as aparent.
1. The post humans will loose the body and emotional attachment to the body. Bodies will be like cars. The human body and human mind will become separable. It does not mean just that the the minds would be able to possess bodies of the others. Bodies will become something like X-servers for minds acting as X-clients. I.e. a mind you be able to see through someone's eyes if permissions are set right. This advance alone would change the human nature. There will be biological designer bodies, software-only bodies for VR worlds, and cybernetic robot-like bodies. Not having a permanent body would make us non-human.
/. will become a part of this new world.
2. We will become a kind of Borg. Not the ST borg, where individual is nothing but a part of the collective. We will retain individuality while being a part of the whole at the same time. It's impossible to imagine this state of mind right now, like it's impossible to imagine 4D world for a 3D creature. Invividual posthumans would be like Internet nodes, sharing as much as they wish with the collective. Individual mind would know as much as whole humanity knows.
3. Of course there will be no death, unless something drastic happens, like passing of a blackhole through Solar system.
4. The distinction between past and future, and passing of time will become generally irrelevant. Right now the past is felt as something we remember and which cannot be brought back or changed. The past will be recorded perfectly and will be available for instant replay and altereation through simulation at will. The playback and simulation will be indistingushable from new recording. The future (i.e. a state of an individual mind) will be what we want it to be. Thus, the passing of time will be irrelevant. The time won't stop, it just won't be important.
5. This future is the reason why we see no extraterrestrial intelligence. It's there, we are just not advanced enough to tell it from nature.
6. Some of us, reading
Win98, MSIE4.0 (4.72.3110) - none of the tests worked
A DMCA-equivalent bill was introduced to Russian parlament (Duma) a couple weeks ago. The bill is even worse than DMCA. The first reading is scheduled for this month. The law cannot be applied retroactively, so maybe they will not be prosecuted in Russia, but won't be allowed to continue.
This DMCA madness got to stop. I hope EU is smarter than US or Russia and does not turn corporate greed into law.
By the way, Elcomsoft is no freedom fighter. The company is a bunch of scambags who make a living by selling spam tools. It they go bancrupt, the amount of spam will be reduced.
company be Snake Oil Merchants Inc? If not, they should really consider changing the name since what they are selling is pure 100% Grade A snake oil.
It's possible that these "Prescient International" are really just uneducated morons, but being cynical as I am, I would rather believe that this is an attempt by another sleazy business to get investment from gullible VCs.
This is not ment as a flaimbait. This is now we did it. YMMV.
First you need to decide what you want to do with your system, then how much you are willing to pay for deployment, and then how much you want to pay for maintanence and expansion.
We evaluated a number of CM systems back in 1999. arsDigita requires Oracle (expensive), OpenACS was not ready for real world deployment, CMS based on JBoss is relatively expensive due to cost of programmers. Zope uses its own programming language which translates in to problems with finding qualified programmers.
We had one more requirement. We wanted to have human-readable URLs
We ended up choosing Midgard. It's a GPL-ed Apache+PHP-based CMS running on top of MySQL. It has its share of quirks, but three years after deployment we do not regret the choice. Midgard is suitable for running a small to medium-size web farm. It's based on PHP, thus the programming has the same limits as any programming in PHP. Another shortcoming is exclusive use of MySQL.