The guy was lucky he wasn't a crusty, battle-hardened American consumer. Otherwise, here is what would have happened:
Man, I'm freezing... This brandy is good (Hiccup)...
Riiiinng...
Hello?
Hi, maybe I speak to Mister Diaz?
Leave me alone, you f&@*$%ing telemarketer bitch! Click. Hey, wait a sec... Hello? Hello? Oh crap...
That's right, boys and girls, telemarketers are not only a nuisance, they also create deeply ingrained reflexes that can hamper your survival if you happen to be drunk, stranded and out of minutes at the same time...
Did you hug a telemarketer today? Good! Keep hugging him until he chokes.
-- SysKoll
/dev/random not always an option
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Well, sometimes you want to run a simulation that needs a random stream of number that is also entirely repeatable. For example, you want to rerun the sim after changing one parm or, err, fixing a bug:-)
But/dev/random does not spit the same sequence twice on command. So for simulation, an RNG with a seed is often the only choice.
Note that simulation people demand, in the same breath, absolute randomness and absolute repeatability. And then, we sim freaks wonder why real-world physicists won't take us seriously...
It's a real shame that this gun-for-hire PR agency adorned itself with the glorious name of Alexis de Tocqueville, who couldn't stand double standards and intellectual dishonesty.
That said, just because despicable people breath does not mean you should not. Whatever these PR whores say, the V-22 is a great concept. Think of it: a plane taking off like a helicopter. It has all the advantages of a regular plane, especially the speed (much faster than a chopper), and it can land vertically.
Of course, it's quite some drain on the ol' budget. I remember a joke in 1989 that "22" in the name refered to the number of billions it had cost so much... I shudder at the thought of the total Osprey program cost nowadays. This thing has been in design and debug forever.
The reassuring thing is that the cause of the most recent crash was pretty mundane: a hydraulic line rubbing against a part each time the Osprey changed phase (pivoting its planes) and finally breaking. It's not like the design is fundamentally wrong.
I know little about the military deployment of the V-22, but I do know one thing: The V-22 is an ideal machine for all the small regional airlines who dream of having a turboprop plane land a handfull of commuters and businessmen in the heart of congested downtowns that are only serviced by ruinous choppers right now.
So, after all these years, we can hope that a civilian version will emerge, all paid by the Pentagone, and that the Japanese and European markets will order hundreds of V-22. Take off in downtown Paris, land in the London City? Heck, I know people who would gladly pay a fortune to avoid the torturous commuting La Defense-Orly-Heathrow-London. Not to mention the stinking tube or the bad-tempered taxi drivers. The market is huge.
Of course, Libertarians object that giving tax money to a private company (Boeing) for building a civilian plane is immoral. But it would not be the first time: The very successful 707 was developed as a military project.
So don't call the V-22 a bad name, chances are you'll ride it someday in 2010 when your customers want you to debug their Apache 6.1 config...
Guys, last time I was in a bunny suit (aka clean room jump suit), I was within spitting distance of a lot of extremely nasty chemicals. Sulfuric acid, heavy metals, arsenic, to name only a few.
This web site does not describe the process they used to fabricate the solar cells. If they use the same old cheap process as usual, their cells slowly release arsenic in the environment. In 10 to 15 years, the cells will be too porous to be useful and so worn out they'll have to be scrapped.
Which of course will release all the arsenic still trapped in them.
I really don't know what's this legend about the semicon industry not polluting. Between the huge water use and the nasty chemicals, any semicon plant is a drain on resources. And solar cells release contaminants, so it's not an environmentally acceptable power source either.
Between a nuclear plant and a field of solar cells of the equivalent power, the latter would be by far the worst source of pollution.
Well, this calls for action. This clueless lawyer is probably going to get an order from a kangaroo court, maybe from Kaplan, the judge who ruled that publishing a link on 2600.org was an act of DVD piracy. If this happens, Tom Murphy is going to face huge legal costs.
If the EFF starts getting donations each time these bozos fling the DMCA around, then maybe they'll understand.
Do you feel safe? Huh uh. Want to admire the handywork of Lewis Kaplan against your right to put a link (a freakin' link!) into your web site? Feel free to bask in his wisdom.
Got the message? Donate now.
Hodie mi, cras tibi - Today it's me, tomorrow it's you (famous last words of a Roman dragged to his execution by his tyrannic government.)
I totally agree, it's how I check my email from friends' machines when said friend does not want me to mess up with his POP account setup.
However, it is time consuming to view each message this way.
Small remark: the TOP command takes as arguments the message number and the number of lines (not the number of kilobytes) to display.
TOP 1 20
will display the first twenty lines of message 1.
The police department's ticket and arrest-warrant information is on the same IBM AS400 mainframe computer used by the tax office. The mainframe crashed more than a week ago. Since then, tax office employees have been entering the tax information in two personal computers.
This just in:
WILKES-BARRE - A move to replace a mainframe with PCs brings yet more savings.
Thanks to Mayor Tom McGroarty's brillant money-saving
move, the town's aging IBM AS-400 mainframe was replaced by a network
of two PCs running Windows ME. "The AS-400 replacement cost was about
$12,000, much more that the PCs." The savings do not include the cost
of three people entering data for 6 months, or about $120,000. "Who
cares, said McGroarty, they are the kids of local shopkeepers who
would vote for the opposition if their worthless brats, who don't have
any marketable skills, were not employed by me. And it's a different
budget anyway." He said the PCs also came with Deer Hunter III, a
valuable utility.
The AS-400 problems started appearing on April 12th, when a tax
data backup failed. McGroarty pointed out that the PC network was
already backed up frequently, and for free -- another money-saving
breakthrough that he is very proud of. "Last night, while browsing
for, hem, golf tips, I found that all the city's tax data was backed
up off-site by a bunch of nice guys who have volunteered and did it
for free," said McGroarty. "Their web site has all our data, easily
available to all visitors. I wasn't even aware of it, but they seem to
have installed their backup software on all our Windows machines. It
shows as a new wallpaper that says ``0wN3d by r00tKraCK3rz''. Must be
a new software company."
"This move also brought new businesses to our town", added the Mayor. "Executives from Anderson are moving into town because they are impressed by the efficiency of the local police.".
By Jolan Redsneck (who spent two hours trying to slalom between triple-parked cars when driving in downtown WB.)
On the other hand if, for example, Senator Disney gets his balls whacked (electorally-speaking), monstrosities like the DMCA will start getting bottled up in congressional committees. The NRA has been doing this for years and it works.
Funny, I was just watching TV when I came accross that post. The AIPAC is dining and wining Washington's political elite at the Hilton tonight and various pols are brownnosing their generous sponsor so hard they are growing warts on their nose.
(Note for non-US readers: AIPAC is the pro-Israel lobby dropping millions of soft-money every year onto grateful Congresscritters to influence the US foreign policy.)
The AIPAC is one of the most efficient lobbies in the world. I think we geeks should find inspiration in its mode of operation:
They carpet-bomb a few influent commission members with fat checks
Then they run press campaigns against election candidates who rub them the wrong way.
And you know what? It WORKS. Nobody in their right mind ever speaks against AIPAC in Washington.
Carrots and big sticks. That's the way to deal with Congress. Collateral damages include democracy and ethics, but nobody said politics was pretty.
If we want to nip the SSSCA insanity in the bud, we geeks have to forget about the artificial political divisions and make sure Mickey Hollings gets his testicles shoved up his big mouth at the next election. Whether his adversary is Ralph Nader or Rush Limbaugh is irrelevant, Hollings has to get his fat ass kicked and painted with "who's next?" in day-glow paint.
If we don't do that, we developers might as well try to find a job as a data entry clerk at the MPAA's headquaters, because life as a software creator is going to suck.
What parents really needs is a similar device that would work on their teenage daughters. That eeringly intelligent door-monitoring computer would work like this:
"Let's see, she's at the door, and she's holding something in her mouth. It looks like the zit-covered face of some boy who, frankly, looks and smells like he is half-dead. Access denied."
At this point, a good recognition algorithm would (a) lock the door, (b) drop four-pointed spikes on the sofa in case they break a window, (c) page dad, and (d) preload the shotgun.
I was outraged at the uncalled-for comparison contained in this half-baked press release. I sent Michelle Reen (author of the press release) an email. Here is an excerpt:
I am very glad to see that the City Manager recognizes Mr. Gulliver's positive role. It is a discredit to Lotus Corp that their Domino server exhibits the bug that caused you to think Orbz.org was harming your server, and it is entirely their fault.
But then, you offer a totally misleadling and uselessly aggressive analogy: "if I can draw the analogy that just because everyone should wear a computerized bulletproof vest doesn?t mean that shooting people to find out who isn?t wearing one is the best answer." Well, I am sorry, but you just cannot draw this far-fetched analogy. This is akin to present spam fighting -- a valuable cause -- to drive-by shooting, a misrepresentation that could be classified as libel.
Here is a more considerate analogy: Orbz.org periodically broadcast a public warning over its PA louspeakers, and your server had a fit thinking it was insulted.
The Internet is currently a community. Volunteers such as Orbz.org are doing their best to keep this community safe and clean, by fighting con artists and spammers. If misguided, overreacting organizations keep blasting volunteer efforts, then Internet users such as your organization will have to pay large sums to private companies in order to obtain similar services. I am sure such an outcome would outrage your taxpayers.
I hope her clue meter will soon go into positive numbers. Because she obviously lacks even the most basic Internet survival instinct.
Of course, a quick way to drive the point home would be to make sure her email address, gjstrand@ci.battle-creek.mi.us, gets spammed to death. Then maybe she'd start to appreciate spamfighters such as Orbz. Anyone wants to put this address in some newsgroup? How about alt.bestiality.hamsters-and-townhall-clerks?
EDF, the French state company that has the monopoly of electricity production and distribution, has operated the
Rance tide-power electric plant since 1966.
In these 35 years, turbine technology evolved a lot. However, a few lessons can be learned from the Rance test plant:
Tide power is awfully expensive to build and operated
Maintenance is a technical and financial headache
Profitability is more than questionable, it's virtually impossible to reach
The coast segment "blessed" with the tide power plant can be dramatically affected.
From an environmental point of view, let's just notice that the waves and currents are an essential factor of oxygenation. Mess up with it, and you'll end up with stinking, stagnant water à la Venice laguna.
So will this Scottish innovation ever be deployed on a large scale? Don't hold your breath.
We used to have the same problem when I joined my current project
in 1999 (yep, 4 versions later, we're still doing the same
product). We are using Lotus Notes (no choice), which has serious
drawbacks (no Linux client, buggy SMTP, weird shortcomings, very bad
help, crashes at odd times) but happens to work very well as a collaborative environment.
I suggest you get a good collaborative environment that allows its
users to:
easily author, edit, publish (share) and index documents
share remarks and notes
offer multiple "views" (indexed sorts) of the same database
Then create one or several databases containing "how-to"
documents. For instance, I see a few popular documents here: how to
reload our DB tables, how to set debugging options of a certain
product, how to configure SSL for our web server...
We have one of these little document for each procedure that has to
be done several times. One-off tasks are not documented. There is a
strong incentive to document a procedure when you've been asked to
perform it several times.
Random papers and drawings are scanned, but their use is
discouraged in favor of editable files.
Mostly, whatever collaborative system you use, train people
to use it and provide incentive for its use.
And don't think it will be free. It will start saving money after several
months, not next week.
I don't want to say that everything is fine and we don't have to worry. However, we should remember a detail before jumping to conclusion: 2000-2002 is the peak of the current solar cycle, during which there is a slight but definite increase in the downpour of solar energy.
Just ask the Mir station what it thinks about the effects of solar maximum on the high atmosphere layers. The extra energy expanded the outer atmosphere layers and increased the aerodynamic drag on low-orbiting satellites, sending a few of them to their burning death. Granted, Mir's orbit was in a bad shape to begin with.
So it's not impossible that this Antartica event is the result of the current solar peak. We lack data to compare. We'd need at least 4 or 5 cycles (1 cycle = 11 years) to have even a rough idea. Alas, satellite surveillance is too new, we don't have 55 years of Antartica ice shelf measurements. So let's be cautious.
Also, don't forget that weather patterns are widly fluctuating. Europe suffered a record cold wave this winter. The Parthenon was covered with snow, the Cote d'Azur had snowstorms. You'll have a hard time convincing the people living there that the solar maximum actually slightly warmed up the Earth.:-)
Remember that there is something that would be even worse than ignoring climate changes, and that would be misidentifying them and spending all our time and resources barking at the wrong tree.
Am I the only old timer around here? This Tap program for the Palm reminds me a lot of the
Dancing Demon program for TRS-80, written in Basic by Leo Christopherson.
Good (?) game concepts don't die. They just reappear in the weirdest places.
Accordingly, the NPR calls for new emphasis on developing such things as nuclear bunker-busters and surgical "warheads that reduce collateral damage," as well as weapons that could be used against smaller, more circumscribed targets--"possible modifications to existing weapons to provide additional yield flexibility," in the jargon-rich language of the review.
The Soviet have 150-mm nuclear tactical warhead to be fired from a regular 150-mm artillery gun. These warheads are supposed to have a yield of less than a kiloton. The Soviet forces also have nuclear landmines, presumably to blow up large infrastructures.
The US have 155-mm nuclear artillery, such as the W-48 warhead, with a very low yield (less than 0.1 kiloton).
So I fail to see what's so new, exciting and dangerous about deployment of tactical, low yield nukes. Such dangerous gadget have been deployed since the fifties. Just because the poster did not know about it does not make it new.
To be exhaustive, NATO claims that all nuclear artillery shells and tactical surface warheads
(anti-ship and anti-submarines) were
eliminated between 1991 and 1993. So this article merely suggest that these weapons are returning to the Western arsenal.
If you're Sony, and you're making $4.6 billion in music sales but taking in $40 billion in sales from electronics, who are you going to listen to: the music industry complaining about people downloading music without authorization, or the electronics executives trying to make better, more expensive CD burners and MP3 players?
If Senators keep selling off to Disney and the RIAA, and with the help of unbribed-but-clueless Representatives that can be brainwashed by any well-produced snowjob, the SSSCA can actually get voted.
If this danger materializes, Intel and other electronics giants could see their income squashed by this law that demands the death of the PC and of all digital electronics as we know it. So instead of letting this happen, the electronics company could buy a few major studios. After all, all the movies's box-office revenue for 2001 amount to less than a quarter of sales for Intel.
Let's hope it comes down to a pissing match between the electronics and the media industries. IBM or Intel can buy a blocking share in Disney with their paperclip budget, and the MPAA seems to have forgotten it. Or maybe they are trying to extort some money from the electronic industry? Afer all, it worked in Europe, where a tax is now levied on CD writers and blank media.
Are we talking about the Woodrow Wilson here? The guy was a walking disaster. He teamed with Frenchman Georges Clemenceau, another disastrous politician (seems that the French are producing bad pols on an industrial scale). To give you a small idea of the shortsightedness and sectarism of Clemenceau, consider this: He opposed Pasteur and his discoveries for years on the sound scientific basis that Pasteur was a Catholic and Clemenceau hated all Christians. Now that's an open mind.
So Wilson and Clemenceau, in cahoot with the Brits, managed to win WWI at a staggering cost in human lives, and then proceeded to wreck the Austro-Hungrian Empire -- the only thing that was preventing utter chaos in the Balkans -- and saddle Germany with impossibly high war damage tributes. This, as we know, cleared up the path for Uncle Adolph and his NSDAP, as well as the various Major Unpleasantness that followed up to this day.
Woodrow Wilson shares History's limelight as the Co-father of WWII and the Wrecker of the Balkans. Great job.
One should be worried about the works of a fundation that thinks Wilson was a great guy. Was are they going to simulate with this game? How to piss up as many dangerous people as possible and survive the ensuing nuclear winter?
Every racist should be able to have his opinion, and he should be able to share it with his fellow racists.
G-funk is right. First, if an opinion is dumb or unfounded, then its propponents should be encouraged to voice it, especially in writing on the Internet, where cold, methodical analysis and refutation is practical.
Granted, some opinions might make you cringe. You read that group/religion/race XYZ is slapped with attribute ABC and you don't like it. But if you shut the guy up, two interesting things happen:
The guy's opinion doesn't change. Actually, it's even reinforced. "Those stinkin' XYZ , they managed to shut me up 'cuz I blew the whistle on them for being ABC."
Politicians start figuring ways to use that new silencing weapon to smother criticism and opponents.
It is very easy to depict a political opponents as a thought
criminal. Especially when media concentration makes information control
easier and easier. When you start censoring in the name of fighting
hatred, you actually end up as a pawn of political censors who drape
themselves in the robe of the guardians of morality. The Romans were
already aware of this problem: "Who guards the guardians?"
Don't get me wrong, I don't like to read racist/hateful sites or post on the Net. But who knows what opinion will turn out to be hateful?
Example: you say Windows sucks. This means you believe a large population of engineers in Redmond have created a deficient contraption. Surely it cannot be voluntary. So these people are dumb. So you imply most Redmondians are dumbs. So this is racism against the state of Washington. Censor, please jail the man. Thanks.
So to avoid that, I think I'll let people say and write that race X
stinks, religion Y is mad, country Z is revolting. I'm so opposed to
censorship I'll even let them write that the Earth is flat, that Windows is stable and that English food is good!
OK, scratch the latter. Pretending English food is good is too hideous a
crime.:-)
Even if we AREN'T damaging things as badly as some say, it cant HURT us to be more eco-friendly.
Oh yes, it can. C'mon yourself. Don't you remember at least some of the recent debacles?
Benzene-based gasoline additives as a lead substiture, only (a) the lead in environment comes mostly from incinerators, not gas, and (b) the new additives are carcinogenic, but hey, (c)
Replacement of freon with untested, unstable, toxic compounds, but hey, the substitutes are patented and so much more profitable!
Greenies are certainly well-meaning, if sometimes undiscerning. Unfortunately, their irrational attitude and lack of scientific training often make them easy to manipulate. As a result, large corporations have been using the legitimate concerns of misinformed green activists to push their own agendas. Said agendas are generally meant for profitability, not environment preservation. The two only meet accidentally.
In short: Emotional action without fact checking or a reality feedback loop almost invariably produces either a random disaster, or the exact opposite of the intended action. Environmentalism is no exception.
So a director of BSA has prepared the text that the eurocrats will rubberstamp after the required amount of backroom deals. Shock, horror.
Yaaawn.
Well, maybe this is new for some naive readers here, but it's unfortunately very common in Brussels. Here is how the lobbying process works in the EU. Now before you flame me with self-righteous indignation, let me disclaim:
No, I have no proof. Nobody wants to say anything on record.
Yes, the previous Commission (or non-elected bureaucrats) was fired for gros mismanagement and the new one is supposed to be under tighter rules. And if you believe that, I have a new appartment in the North tower of the World Trade Center that you should buy.
No, I do not claim that this apply to other political systems. Your country might be an actual democracy.
First, the context: once, I was sent to provide pre-sale tech expertise for an IT project that was discussed with France's representatives in Brussels. I was baffled about the politics of this project. So the sales engineer gave me a crash course in Brussels politics before seeing the customer. Her knowledge was apparently accurate, since she was quite successful in this market.
There are (or were, at this time) about 25,000 bureaucrats in Brussels. Surprisingly, a similar number of people are working for various consulting and PR cabinets around Brussels. These persons are paid by various corporations or affluent SIGs (special interest groups) to prepare and execure PR campaigns with a public and a bureaucratic facet. The latter is mandatory: You have to convince bureaucrats that they need to do something that will just happen to advance your agenda. The former (public aspect) is an optional media communication plan, complete with astroturfing (fake letters to the editor of major newspapers, etc.) where the goal is to convince EU lawmakers that the public is concerned about an issue.
More than 90% of the Commission's decisions are directives, not laws. These directives are supposed to be strictly technical decisions (e.g., standardizing the sizes of condoms and the labelling of banana, I kid you not). But some decisions pushed into directives are really dictatorial and are so broad they should require major laws with the requisite discussions. Directives are not supposed to be earth-shattering decision, but the EU processes are so opaque and so ill-defined that, in practice, you can make directives about abything. Once a directive has been published (without any debate or feedback), it has to be applied by the member countries, or else. There is no easy way out once a directive has been published.
That's why a good lobbying campaign should end up with the publishing of a directive.
Let's take a not-so-imaginary example. Let's say you are a big agro-food business. Your stance so far was to push for high-margin, high quality products, and you were supporting a law requiring chocolate to contain no fat matter other than expensive cocoa butter, like Lindt or French chocolote. But you've just acquired the largest industrial chocolate company in Europe. It spews forth huge amounts of a cheap, browish crap with less than 10% cocoa, in which cocoa butter is replaced with peanuts oil and lard. Even Americans would find disgusting. But it's very profitable. So you need to reverse your stance.
Now, the eurocrats are not going to accept money from PR agencies. They are not that dumb. So a good PR agency will walk in the offices of the Directorate in charge of food and will tell the manager, "Hey, we are organizing a training session about the chocolate industry in the Bahamas. It's one hour a day for 5 days. Here are invitations, hotel reservations and airplane tickets for you and 20 of your most important coworkers. See you there." It's not a boondoggle, it's a technical vitality training session. Who would object? And it doesn't cost anything.
Of course, if you want these training sessions to keep coming, you should do these companies a small favor from time to time. So you accept the documents they give you and turn it into a directive. As an added bonus, the document is already pre-written in the awful form required by the eurocratic process.
That's how it works, folks. So I am not surprised that BSA is submitting a text for rubberstamping by the Commissars.
In last week's EETimes, there was a good intro to UWB and its challenges, as well as a discussion about the (considerable) importance of the FCC ruling that just took place (in a front page story). The Web versions are:
The fundamental question is whether programmers see themselves as prima donna artists or as scientists.
Granted, the behavior of some fellow open source programmers could lead you to classify all of them as freakin' temperamental artists.:-)
But most programmers think of themselves as scientists. Scientists share their results and encourage their peers to review and comment their results. Scientists are motivated by recognition of their peers. The widest the exposure of their work, the most recognition they can get. Eric Raymond has written megabytes about the "gift culture" of open source programmers. But there is something else at work here: The scientific notion of showing what you have done, get your results (code) verified, and build on your predecessors' effort.
This obviously requires to publish your code in a way similar to scientific papers. Open source insures the largest possible distribution to code. You can write wonderfully elegant code in a closed-source product and nobody will ever know. Similarly, note that scientists in other branches are deeply concerned about the raising cost of scientific journal subscription and the barriers to accessing papers on the Internet once they have been accepted by some journals.
Publication and sharing is the key difference between the scientific approach and the artistic "prima donna" approach. Two examples:
Take the Renaissance painters. They jealously guarded the secrets of their surface preparations, their paint and pigment ingredients, their perspective techniques. Even today, each time a painting is restored or X-rayed, we see how little we know about these closely kept recipes.
Or take one of the Sacred Names of Science(TM), Galileo. Some scientist. He actually behaved like most alchemists and tinkerers of his time (which is normal): Galileo taunted other astronomers with his findings but didn't actually publish his observations, leaving other astronomers wondering where to point their instruments to find what he described and leading to a massive duplication of observation work.
Yep, the scientific behavior we take for granted took centuries to replace the "hide and boast" attitude.
So coders with several years' experience who crave for putting the "science" back into CS would naturally turn toward publishing some of their code. I don't think anyone but Microsoft's FUD-Spreading Department would be surprised.
--SysKoll
Large? HUMONGOUS! Is Intel daft?
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 2
A wafer is a fixed size and costs the same to process, regardless of the number of functional die you actually get from it. So, the more die you fit on it, and the more die that actually work when you are finished processing, the lower your final selling price can be.
You're absolutely right. On top of that, the yield is going to be ridiculous. See, a wafer has defects. To get a good approximation, imagine a 6 or 8-inch target on which you shoot darts. The best wafer processes give you about half a dozen defects, and boy are these wafers expensive. Each time you have a defect, the chip that is engraved on this spot will be faulty and be rejected.
You can easily see that for a given defect density, the same wafer will have approximately the same number of bad chips (even if you split hair with the probability of getting two defects tiled by the same chip). With a small die, you can easily squeeze more good chips around defect spots. One more reason why a small die size is key to yield.
So this chip is going to cost a freaking fortune to manufacture, especially with the bleeding edge process they are boasting.
But wait, it does not stop here. 22 x 22 mm chips, huh? Assume that the clock tree (i.e., the tree-like circuit that distributes the clock signal in the chip) has a longest path of 10 mm. That's already the heck of a skew on the signal. And you can easily increase that longest path estimate by 30-50% because signals can't propagate in straigth lines, they have to be routed along structures. This alone guarantees the clock speed will never go as high as competing chip's frequencies.
This is a sheer waste of engineering resources. For a processor, such a size is just not practical.
Conclusion: This thing is a demonstrator. It will never fly. It's not meant to. And even for a demonstrator, it's too bulky.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy was lucky he wasn't a crusty, battle-hardened American consumer. Otherwise, here is what would have happened:
Man, I'm freezing... This brandy is good (Hiccup)...
Riiiinng...
Hello?
Hi, maybe I speak to Mister Diaz?
Leave me alone, you f&@*$%ing telemarketer bitch! Click. Hey, wait a sec... Hello? Hello? Oh crap...
That's right, boys and girls, telemarketers are not only a nuisance, they also create deeply ingrained reflexes that can hamper your survival if you happen to be drunk, stranded and out of minutes at the same time...
Did you hug a telemarketer today? Good! Keep hugging him until he chokes.
Well, sometimes you want to run a simulation that needs a random stream of number that is also entirely repeatable. For example, you want to rerun the sim after changing one parm or, err, fixing a bug :-)
But /dev/random does not spit the same sequence twice on command. So for simulation, an RNG with a seed is often the only choice.
Note that simulation people demand, in the same breath, absolute randomness and absolute repeatability. And then, we sim freaks wonder why real-world physicists won't take us seriously...
It's a real shame that this gun-for-hire PR agency adorned itself with the glorious name of Alexis de Tocqueville, who couldn't stand double standards and intellectual dishonesty.
That said, just because despicable people breath does not mean you should not. Whatever these PR whores say, the V-22 is a great concept. Think of it: a plane taking off like a helicopter. It has all the advantages of a regular plane, especially the speed (much faster than a chopper), and it can land vertically.
Of course, it's quite some drain on the ol' budget. I remember a joke in 1989 that "22" in the name refered to the number of billions it had cost so much... I shudder at the thought of the total Osprey program cost nowadays. This thing has been in design and debug forever.
The reassuring thing is that the cause of the most recent crash was pretty mundane: a hydraulic line rubbing against a part each time the Osprey changed phase (pivoting its planes) and finally breaking. It's not like the design is fundamentally wrong.
I know little about the military deployment of the V-22, but I do know one thing: The V-22 is an ideal machine for all the small regional airlines who dream of having a turboprop plane land a handfull of commuters and businessmen in the heart of congested downtowns that are only serviced by ruinous choppers right now.
So, after all these years, we can hope that a civilian version will emerge, all paid by the Pentagone, and that the Japanese and European markets will order hundreds of V-22. Take off in downtown Paris, land in the London City? Heck, I know people who would gladly pay a fortune to avoid the torturous commuting La Defense-Orly-Heathrow-London. Not to mention the stinking tube or the bad-tempered taxi drivers. The market is huge.
Of course, Libertarians object that giving tax money to a private company (Boeing) for building a civilian plane is immoral. But it would not be the first time: The very successful 707 was developed as a military project.
So don't call the V-22 a bad name, chances are you'll ride it someday in 2010 when your customers want you to debug their Apache 6.1 config...
This web site does not describe the process they used to fabricate the solar cells. If they use the same old cheap process as usual, their cells slowly release arsenic in the environment. In 10 to 15 years, the cells will be too porous to be useful and so worn out they'll have to be scrapped.
Which of course will release all the arsenic still trapped in them.
I really don't know what's this legend about the semicon industry not polluting. Between the huge water use and the nasty chemicals, any semicon plant is a drain on resources. And solar cells release contaminants, so it's not an environmentally acceptable power source either.
Between a nuclear plant and a field of solar cells of the equivalent power, the latter would be by far the worst source of pollution.
Well, this calls for action. This clueless lawyer is probably going to get an order from a kangaroo court, maybe from Kaplan, the judge who ruled that publishing a link on 2600.org was an act of DVD piracy. If this happens, Tom Murphy is going to face huge legal costs.
Since this is really bothering me a lot, I went to EFF's site and made a small donation. Come on, do it now! Do something for your rights now!
If the EFF starts getting donations each time these bozos fling the DMCA around, then maybe they'll understand.
Do you feel safe? Huh uh. Want to admire the handywork of Lewis Kaplan against your right to put a link (a freakin' link!) into your web site? Feel free to bask in his wisdom.
Got the message? Donate now.
Hodie mi, cras tibi - Today it's me, tomorrow it's you (famous last words of a Roman dragged to his execution by his tyrannic government.)
I totally agree, it's how I check my email from friends' machines when said friend does not want me to mess up with his POP account setup.
However, it is time consuming to view each message this way.
Small remark: the TOP command takes as arguments the message number and the number of lines (not the number of kilobytes) to display.
TOP 1 20
will display the first twenty lines of message 1.
This just in:
WILKES-BARRE - A move to replace a mainframe with PCs brings yet more savings.
Thanks to Mayor Tom McGroarty's brillant money-saving move, the town's aging IBM AS-400 mainframe was replaced by a network of two PCs running Windows ME. "The AS-400 replacement cost was about $12,000, much more that the PCs." The savings do not include the cost of three people entering data for 6 months, or about $120,000. "Who cares, said McGroarty, they are the kids of local shopkeepers who would vote for the opposition if their worthless brats, who don't have any marketable skills, were not employed by me. And it's a different budget anyway." He said the PCs also came with Deer Hunter III, a valuable utility.
The AS-400 problems started appearing on April 12th, when a tax data backup failed. McGroarty pointed out that the PC network was already backed up frequently, and for free -- another money-saving breakthrough that he is very proud of. "Last night, while browsing for, hem, golf tips, I found that all the city's tax data was backed up off-site by a bunch of nice guys who have volunteered and did it for free," said McGroarty. "Their web site has all our data, easily available to all visitors. I wasn't even aware of it, but they seem to have installed their backup software on all our Windows machines. It shows as a new wallpaper that says ``0wN3d by r00tKraCK3rz''. Must be a new software company."
"This move also brought new businesses to our town", added the Mayor. "Executives from Anderson are moving into town because they are impressed by the efficiency of the local police.".
By Jolan Redsneck (who spent two hours trying to slalom between triple-parked cars when driving in downtown WB.)
Funny, I was just watching TV when I came accross that post. The AIPAC is dining and wining Washington's political elite at the Hilton tonight and various pols are brownnosing their generous sponsor so hard they are growing warts on their nose.
(Note for non-US readers: AIPAC is the pro-Israel lobby dropping millions of soft-money every year onto grateful Congresscritters to influence the US foreign policy.)
The AIPAC is one of the most efficient lobbies in the world. I think we geeks should find inspiration in its mode of operation:
And you know what? It WORKS. Nobody in their right mind ever speaks against AIPAC in Washington.
Carrots and big sticks. That's the way to deal with Congress. Collateral damages include democracy and ethics, but nobody said politics was pretty.
If we want to nip the SSSCA insanity in the bud, we geeks have to forget about the artificial political divisions and make sure Mickey Hollings gets his testicles shoved up his big mouth at the next election. Whether his adversary is Ralph Nader or Rush Limbaugh is irrelevant, Hollings has to get his fat ass kicked and painted with "who's next?" in day-glow paint.
If we don't do that, we developers might as well try to find a job as a data entry clerk at the MPAA's headquaters, because life as a software creator is going to suck.
The good news is that the advertorial stories will be served by an IIS server under Windows 2000.
That will keep us from seeing them too often.
What parents really needs is a similar device that would work on their teenage daughters. That eeringly intelligent door-monitoring computer would work like this:
"Let's see, she's at the door, and she's holding something in her mouth. It looks like the zit-covered face of some boy who, frankly, looks and smells like he is half-dead. Access denied."
At this point, a good recognition algorithm would (a) lock the door, (b) drop four-pointed spikes on the sofa in case they break a window, (c) page dad, and (d) preload the shotgun.
I was outraged at the uncalled-for comparison contained in this half-baked press release. I sent Michelle Reen (author of the press release) an email. Here is an excerpt:
I am very glad to see that the City Manager recognizes Mr. Gulliver's positive role. It is a discredit to Lotus Corp that their Domino server exhibits the bug that caused you to think Orbz.org was harming your server, and it is entirely their fault.
But then, you offer a totally misleadling and uselessly aggressive analogy: "if I can draw the analogy that just because everyone should wear a computerized bulletproof vest doesn?t mean that shooting people to find out who isn?t wearing one is the best answer." Well, I am sorry, but you just cannot draw this far-fetched analogy. This is akin to present spam fighting -- a valuable cause -- to drive-by shooting, a misrepresentation that could be classified as libel.
Here is a more considerate analogy: Orbz.org periodically broadcast a public warning over its PA louspeakers, and your server had a fit thinking it was insulted.
The Internet is currently a community. Volunteers such as Orbz.org are doing their best to keep this community safe and clean, by fighting con artists and spammers. If misguided, overreacting organizations keep blasting volunteer efforts, then Internet users such as your organization will have to pay large sums to private companies in order to obtain similar services. I am sure such an outcome would outrage your taxpayers.
I hope her clue meter will soon go into positive numbers. Because she obviously lacks even the most basic Internet survival instinct.
Of course, a quick way to drive the point home would be to make sure her email address, gjstrand@ci.battle-creek.mi.us, gets spammed to death. Then maybe she'd start to appreciate spamfighters such as Orbz. Anyone wants to put this address in some newsgroup? How about alt.bestiality.hamsters-and-townhall-clerks?
Naaah, don't do that, that would be evil...
EDF, the French state company that has the monopoly of electricity production and distribution, has operated the Rance tide-power electric plant since 1966.
In these 35 years, turbine technology evolved a lot. However, a few lessons can be learned from the Rance test plant:
From an environmental point of view, let's just notice that the waves and currents are an essential factor of oxygenation. Mess up with it, and you'll end up with stinking, stagnant water à la Venice laguna.
So will this Scottish innovation ever be deployed on a large scale? Don't hold your breath.
We used to have the same problem when I joined my current project in 1999 (yep, 4 versions later, we're still doing the same product). We are using Lotus Notes (no choice), which has serious drawbacks (no Linux client, buggy SMTP, weird shortcomings, very bad help, crashes at odd times) but happens to work very well as a collaborative environment. I suggest you get a good collaborative environment that allows its users to:
Then create one or several databases containing "how-to" documents. For instance, I see a few popular documents here: how to reload our DB tables, how to set debugging options of a certain product, how to configure SSL for our web server...
We have one of these little document for each procedure that has to be done several times. One-off tasks are not documented. There is a strong incentive to document a procedure when you've been asked to perform it several times.
Random papers and drawings are scanned, but their use is discouraged in favor of editable files.
Mostly, whatever collaborative system you use, train people to use it and provide incentive for its use.
And don't think it will be free. It will start saving money after several months, not next week.
I don't want to say that everything is fine and we don't have to worry. However, we should remember a detail before jumping to conclusion: 2000-2002 is the peak of the current solar cycle, during which there is a slight but definite increase in the downpour of solar energy.
Just ask the Mir station what it thinks about the effects of solar maximum on the high atmosphere layers. The extra energy expanded the outer atmosphere layers and increased the aerodynamic drag on low-orbiting satellites, sending a few of them to their burning death. Granted, Mir's orbit was in a bad shape to begin with.
So it's not impossible that this Antartica event is the result of the current solar peak. We lack data to compare. We'd need at least 4 or 5 cycles (1 cycle = 11 years) to have even a rough idea. Alas, satellite surveillance is too new, we don't have 55 years of Antartica ice shelf measurements. So let's be cautious.
Also, don't forget that weather patterns are widly fluctuating. Europe suffered a record cold wave this winter. The Parthenon was covered with snow, the Cote d'Azur had snowstorms. You'll have a hard time convincing the people living there that the solar maximum actually slightly warmed up the Earth. :-)
Remember that there is something that would be even worse than ignoring climate changes, and that would be misidentifying them and spending all our time and resources barking at the wrong tree.
Am I the only old timer around here? This Tap program for the Palm reminds me a lot of the Dancing Demon program for TRS-80, written in Basic by Leo Christopherson.
Good (?) game concepts don't die. They just reappear in the weirdest places.
The Soviet have 150-mm nuclear tactical warhead to be fired from a regular 150-mm artillery gun. These warheads are supposed to have a yield of less than a kiloton. The Soviet forces also have nuclear landmines, presumably to blow up large infrastructures.
The US have 155-mm nuclear artillery, such as the W-48 warhead, with a very low yield (less than 0.1 kiloton).
So I fail to see what's so new, exciting and dangerous about deployment of tactical, low yield nukes. Such dangerous gadget have been deployed since the fifties. Just because the poster did not know about it does not make it new.
To be exhaustive, NATO claims that all nuclear artillery shells and tactical surface warheads (anti-ship and anti-submarines) were eliminated between 1991 and 1993. So this article merely suggest that these weapons are returning to the Western arsenal.
If you're Sony, and you're making $4.6 billion in music sales but taking in $40 billion in sales from electronics, who are you going to listen to: the music industry complaining about people downloading music without authorization, or the electronics executives trying to make better, more expensive CD burners and MP3 players?
If Senators keep selling off to Disney and the RIAA, and with the help of unbribed-but-clueless Representatives that can be brainwashed by any well-produced snowjob, the SSSCA can actually get voted.
If this danger materializes, Intel and other electronics giants could see their income squashed by this law that demands the death of the PC and of all digital electronics as we know it. So instead of letting this happen, the electronics company could buy a few major studios. After all, all the movies's box-office revenue for 2001 amount to less than a quarter of sales for Intel.
Let's hope it comes down to a pissing match between the electronics and the media industries. IBM or Intel can buy a blocking share in Disney with their paperclip budget, and the MPAA seems to have forgotten it. Or maybe they are trying to extort some money from the electronic industry? Afer all, it worked in Europe, where a tax is now levied on CD writers and blank media.
Are we talking about the Woodrow Wilson here? The guy was a walking disaster. He teamed with Frenchman Georges Clemenceau, another disastrous politician (seems that the French are producing bad pols on an industrial scale). To give you a small idea of the shortsightedness and sectarism of Clemenceau, consider this: He opposed Pasteur and his discoveries for years on the sound scientific basis that Pasteur was a Catholic and Clemenceau hated all Christians. Now that's an open mind.
So Wilson and Clemenceau, in cahoot with the Brits, managed to win WWI at a staggering cost in human lives, and then proceeded to wreck the Austro-Hungrian Empire -- the only thing that was preventing utter chaos in the Balkans -- and saddle Germany with impossibly high war damage tributes. This, as we know, cleared up the path for Uncle Adolph and his NSDAP, as well as the various Major Unpleasantness that followed up to this day.
Woodrow Wilson shares History's limelight as the Co-father of WWII and the Wrecker of the Balkans. Great job.
One should be worried about the works of a fundation that thinks Wilson was a great guy. Was are they going to simulate with this game? How to piss up as many dangerous people as possible and survive the ensuing nuclear winter?
Every racist should be able to have his opinion, and he should be able to share it with his fellow racists.
G-funk is right. First, if an opinion is dumb or unfounded, then its propponents should be encouraged to voice it, especially in writing on the Internet, where cold, methodical analysis and refutation is practical.
Granted, some opinions might make you cringe. You read that group/religion/race XYZ is slapped with attribute ABC and you don't like it. But if you shut the guy up, two interesting things happen:
It is very easy to depict a political opponents as a thought criminal. Especially when media concentration makes information control easier and easier. When you start censoring in the name of fighting hatred, you actually end up as a pawn of political censors who drape themselves in the robe of the guardians of morality. The Romans were already aware of this problem: "Who guards the guardians?"
Don't get me wrong, I don't like to read racist/hateful sites or post on the Net. But who knows what opinion will turn out to be hateful?
Example: you say Windows sucks. This means you believe a large population of engineers in Redmond have created a deficient contraption. Surely it cannot be voluntary. So these people are dumb. So you imply most Redmondians are dumbs. So this is racism against the state of Washington. Censor, please jail the man. Thanks.
So to avoid that, I think I'll let people say and write that race X stinks, religion Y is mad, country Z is revolting. I'm so opposed to censorship I'll even let them write that the Earth is flat, that Windows is stable and that English food is good!
OK, scratch the latter. Pretending English food is good is too hideous a crime. :-)
In the previous comment, I meant to add: (c) MTBE was profitable to sell, and now it's profitable to remove
Sorry for the incomplete post.
Oh yes, it can. C'mon yourself. Don't you remember at least some of the recent debacles?
Greenies are certainly well-meaning, if sometimes undiscerning. Unfortunately, their irrational attitude and lack of scientific training often make them easy to manipulate. As a result, large corporations have been using the legitimate concerns of misinformed green activists to push their own agendas. Said agendas are generally meant for profitability, not environment preservation. The two only meet accidentally.
In short: Emotional action without fact checking or a reality feedback loop almost invariably produces either a random disaster, or the exact opposite of the intended action. Environmentalism is no exception.
So a director of BSA has prepared the text that the eurocrats will rubberstamp after the required amount of backroom deals. Shock, horror.
Yaaawn.
Well, maybe this is new for some naive readers here, but it's unfortunately very common in Brussels. Here is how the lobbying process works in the EU. Now before you flame me with self-righteous indignation, let me disclaim:
First, the context: once, I was sent to provide pre-sale tech expertise for an IT project that was discussed with France's representatives in Brussels. I was baffled about the politics of this project. So the sales engineer gave me a crash course in Brussels politics before seeing the customer. Her knowledge was apparently accurate, since she was quite successful in this market.
There are (or were, at this time) about 25,000 bureaucrats in Brussels. Surprisingly, a similar number of people are working for various consulting and PR cabinets around Brussels. These persons are paid by various corporations or affluent SIGs (special interest groups) to prepare and execure PR campaigns with a public and a bureaucratic facet. The latter is mandatory: You have to convince bureaucrats that they need to do something that will just happen to advance your agenda. The former (public aspect) is an optional media communication plan, complete with astroturfing (fake letters to the editor of major newspapers, etc.) where the goal is to convince EU lawmakers that the public is concerned about an issue.
More than 90% of the Commission's decisions are directives, not laws. These directives are supposed to be strictly technical decisions (e.g., standardizing the sizes of condoms and the labelling of banana, I kid you not). But some decisions pushed into directives are really dictatorial and are so broad they should require major laws with the requisite discussions. Directives are not supposed to be earth-shattering decision, but the EU processes are so opaque and so ill-defined that, in practice, you can make directives about abything. Once a directive has been published (without any debate or feedback), it has to be applied by the member countries, or else. There is no easy way out once a directive has been published.
That's why a good lobbying campaign should end up with the publishing of a directive.
Let's take a not-so-imaginary example. Let's say you are a big agro-food business. Your stance so far was to push for high-margin, high quality products, and you were supporting a law requiring chocolate to contain no fat matter other than expensive cocoa butter, like Lindt or French chocolote. But you've just acquired the largest industrial chocolate company in Europe. It spews forth huge amounts of a cheap, browish crap with less than 10% cocoa, in which cocoa butter is replaced with peanuts oil and lard. Even Americans would find disgusting. But it's very profitable. So you need to reverse your stance.
Now, the eurocrats are not going to accept money from PR agencies. They are not that dumb. So a good PR agency will walk in the offices of the Directorate in charge of food and will tell the manager, "Hey, we are organizing a training session about the chocolate industry in the Bahamas. It's one hour a day for 5 days. Here are invitations, hotel reservations and airplane tickets for you and 20 of your most important coworkers. See you there." It's not a boondoggle, it's a technical vitality training session. Who would object? And it doesn't cost anything.
Of course, if you want these training sessions to keep coming, you should do these companies a small favor from time to time. So you accept the documents they give you and turn it into a directive. As an added bonus, the document is already pre-written in the awful form required by the eurocratic process.
That's how it works, folks. So I am not surprised that BSA is submitting a text for rubberstamping by the Commissars.
In last week's EETimes, there was a good intro to UWB and its challenges, as well as a discussion about the (considerable) importance of the FCC ruling that just took place (in a front page story). The Web versions are:
The fundamental question is whether programmers see themselves as prima donna artists or as scientists.
Granted, the behavior of some fellow open source programmers could lead you to classify all of them as freakin' temperamental artists. :-)
But most programmers think of themselves as scientists. Scientists share their results and encourage their peers to review and comment their results. Scientists are motivated by recognition of their peers. The widest the exposure of their work, the most recognition they can get. Eric Raymond has written megabytes about the "gift culture" of open source programmers. But there is something else at work here: The scientific notion of showing what you have done, get your results (code) verified, and build on your predecessors' effort.
This obviously requires to publish your code in a way similar to scientific papers. Open source insures the largest possible distribution to code. You can write wonderfully elegant code in a closed-source product and nobody will ever know. Similarly, note that scientists in other branches are deeply concerned about the raising cost of scientific journal subscription and the barriers to accessing papers on the Internet once they have been accepted by some journals.
Publication and sharing is the key difference between the scientific approach and the artistic "prima donna" approach. Two examples:
Yep, the scientific behavior we take for granted took centuries to replace the "hide and boast" attitude.
So coders with several years' experience who crave for putting the "science" back into CS would naturally turn toward publishing some of their code. I don't think anyone but Microsoft's FUD-Spreading Department would be surprised.
You're absolutely right. On top of that, the yield is going to be ridiculous. See, a wafer has defects. To get a good approximation, imagine a 6 or 8-inch target on which you shoot darts. The best wafer processes give you about half a dozen defects, and boy are these wafers expensive. Each time you have a defect, the chip that is engraved on this spot will be faulty and be rejected.
You can easily see that for a given defect density, the same wafer will have approximately the same number of bad chips (even if you split hair with the probability of getting two defects tiled by the same chip). With a small die, you can easily squeeze more good chips around defect spots. One more reason why a small die size is key to yield.
So this chip is going to cost a freaking fortune to manufacture, especially with the bleeding edge process they are boasting.
But wait, it does not stop here. 22 x 22 mm chips, huh? Assume that the clock tree (i.e., the tree-like circuit that distributes the clock signal in the chip) has a longest path of 10 mm. That's already the heck of a skew on the signal. And you can easily increase that longest path estimate by 30-50% because signals can't propagate in straigth lines, they have to be routed along structures. This alone guarantees the clock speed will never go as high as competing chip's frequencies.
This is a sheer waste of engineering resources. For a processor, such a size is just not practical.
Conclusion: This thing is a demonstrator. It will never fly. It's not meant to. And even for a demonstrator, it's too bulky.