I wonder if any of the NASA dweebs tried to get Liv's number from her dad...
Seriously though, it's been a pretty good week for NASA so far, with Opportunity landing safely and Spirit slowly coming back to health.
My question is: When they locate a fix for Spirit, will they apply it to Opportunity as well? Are the two really identical, and if so wouldn't Opportunity run the risk of the same sort of major nervous breakdown that Spirit had? Or do they plan on leaving well enough alone?
At the start of this whole mess, I'd have thought that Linus would have just ignored it... Guess this one got under his skin a bit.
In the end, I think we'll all look back on this as the time where Linux went from sort of a fringe software in the minds of a lot of people to a mainstream player, where corporations learned they shouldn't mess with the OSS community and when the idea of open-source really started to make people ask "Why *am* I paying for this software?"
How on earth could they forget the AMC Gremlin? That's the only car I've ever heard of breaking down on its way home from the dealer.
My uncle had one of those bad boys for a while. He called it a motorized rollerskate for a while until he decided he was insulting rollerskates....
Seriously, if you pick the right sort of people for this sort of venture, you'd never get a message like that. The average/.er might find it easier to associate with someone who sits down and cries when death seems certain, but we want to send the type who will fight and work and innovate right up until their last breath, because they're the ones that'll survive.
Of course, it's also up to us to make sure it doesn't come to that. I'd want to design the mission so that even when stuff goes wrong, there's always a good fighting chance for the people on the surface. I wouldn't send people there with one oxygen generator or one inflatible crop dome or without some construction gear or anything.
I mean, Mars isn't the moon. There are resources and things to work with all over the place -- the ground, the atmosphere, etc. And compared to space or the moon, it's a really safe place to be.
Send construction gear. Send machine tools. With some basic gear, plenty of power and know-how, you can make all sorts of things on Mars -- shelters, oxygen, water, food, wire, plastics...
Give me 50 skilled people, a dependable nuclear reactor and enough gear to get started and I'll make Mars a safe place for human life inside of a decade. If something breaks, I'll fix it. If we run out of spare parts, we'll mill new ones. If a few of us die, well, we'll mourn them and move on.
Leave the weak and timid back on earth. This isn't a venture for people who aren't willing to take serious risks or who think real "work" is sitting in front of a CRT all day typing TPS reports. Give me people who know construction, farming, materials, mechanics, people who can think on their feet and who can make a round peg fit in a square hole when they need to. Give me people who will work every day to survive and I'll turn the red planet into humanity's second home.
This is looking worse and worse for Carmack and the crew at Armadillo Aerospace... Even though they've apparently solved their peroxide supply problems, they're nowhere near completing assembly of their full-size rocket and they have yet to have anything like a successful test flight on any scale (unless you count the hover tests).
I wish the other X-prize hopefuls would take after Carmack's blogs, though -- reading about the little engineering challenges is the highlight of my Monday/Tuesday mornings.
Is the use of the word "myth" really intended to indicate that a large cross-section of people actually believe these things?
I mean, does anyone really think that how they package their product won't effect how many people start using it? Are there really a lot of people out there who assume that they'll have an instant dedicated following of skilled developers spring from nowhere the moment they publish their source?
I really doubt it, somehow. Charitably, I'd file the advice in this article under the "Obvious but sometimes in need of restating" catagory in that sometimes people will lose the forest for the trees. Still, no real revelations here.
The cylon woman seducing baltar finally gave a good reason why somebody might betray their entire civilization.
The cylons shouldn't have bothered blowing up the planet. Simple mass-producing an army of Tricia Helfers and sending them in as kinky love goddesses would have ensured that humans having children together would be a thing of the past.
But I see what you mean. Hell, I'd have let her peek at my source. Or get root on my servers. Or, you know, kill the lot of you if I thought it might make her happy...
Back when Farscape was on every day, I actually caught myself using "frell" in everyday conversations.
And believe me, I'm not one of those geeks who walks around using "smeg" or "dren" or whatever because I think it makes me cool or something. I think you're right -- "frell" or "frellin'" just rolls of the tounge so satisfyingly that it seems natural...
the show's writer is the Executive producer and writer for HBO's Carnivale
That's actually the whole reason I tuned in to begin with. I found the original BSG kinda goofy.
If anyone out there still isn't watching Carnivale, I'd really recommend it. Definately the most worthwhile show on TV right now, and worth the price of HBO in and of itself...
I thought the miniseries was easily one of the best sci fi efforts I've seen. Not only was it well put together as a single episode, but they did a lot of things right that I find encouraging when considering a series:
Interesting Characters. The characters actually came off as human, as opposed to the goodie-two-shoes of Star Trek or the one-sided archetypes that plagued most of B5's run or the good-evil simplicity that exists in, well, George W. Bush's world. People do stupid, self-destructive things for delusional or illogical reasons, so it's nice to see that reflected. One event sums it up nicely: In just about any other series, the XO wouldn't have fished that bottle of booze out of the trash.
Excellent ship combat. The part where the Galactia climbs out of the nebula to cover the armada's retreat was excellent on a couple of levels. First, it wasn't just well rendered but also well filmed, by which I mean the staging and the "camera" positioning where very well done. I also liked the approach to combat -- too many series treat their huge capital ships like WW2 dogfighters.
Acting. Olmos and Laura Roslin carried the day, but the rest of the cast was competent, too. This is another one of my beefs with certain other series (coughBab5cough) where some of the cast couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. Granted, they were often bit, guest or supporting parts, but that didn't break the illusion any less.
The only part I didn't like so much was Starbuck. I don't mind that they made her a woman, but really I felt as if they'd written the role and her lines for a man and then changed a few details at the last second. She was believable in the cockpit (her "Nothing but the rain" comment was one of my favorite lines of the series), but had a hard time pulling it off elsewhere. I blame the writing for this.
Gah, that's a long-winded way of saying "thumbs up", eh?
If you're going to go to all the trouble to send a gigantic (length of a football field) probe all the way to Jupiter, I don't know how you could even consider doing so without sending a lander to get a up-close look at Europa. It'd be like Columbus sailing all the way to the new world and not getting off the ship...
I wonder, specifically, what instruments this thing'll have that will require their own little nuke plant as opposed to batteries. Articles were a bit sketchy on the details...
The author of this article is either purposely misleading the reader on how ClearCase works or has never actually used it himself.
Firstly, any system where you're checking items out in an unreserved state and then checking them in over other changes is poorly set up. Fire your administrator and get someone who understands more about source control than just reading the ClearCase Administrators Guide or Command Reference whenever a problem crops up. That said, even in the most poorly set up and administred system, ClearCase does not just neglect to check in files which require manual merging. It will do exactly what you'd want it to do: detect that a new version of the element has been created since the source was checked out and then provide the user with a reasonably nifty merge tool.
So much for "unsafe" behavior. Of course, it can be pain in the ass, but as I mentioned it can be entirely bypassed by merely competent administration using the sort of branching schemes you mentioned (which will be automated by a good admin). For the love of God, there's even a decent scheme which comes from Rational (er, IBM) out of the box: Unified Change Management.
Anyhow, this asshat's lack of understanding of these very elementary facts about a system which a developer interacts with on a daily basis demonstrates that his overall point is crap -- he *doesn't* understand as much as he thinks, and he's *not* as smart as he thinks he is (as if the fact that he thinks admins are unneeded fluf didn't illustrate that sufficiantly enough in the first place).
Creds: I spent a year working ClearCase support for Rational, so I've seen most everything that is wrong with it (and it's not perfect -- without a capable administrator, it's a time bomb just like CVS, Perforce or anybody else's source control product). I currently run a system for a Very Large and Heavily Regulated Company, which could not get products out the door without it due to our size and use of heavy parallel development.
Okay, I'll admit that having a Space Invaders cabinet in my home would be cool beyong the bounds of cool (using, of course, the geek definition of the word), but who the heck is going to drop 50 cents to play in a restaurant or bar?
Personally, I wish they'd reissue MK2 -- I kick *ass* when I'm playing on one of the cabinets. Nobody beatin' me when I'm driving Baraka....
- That crazy guy outside my office who plays a harmonica.
Actually, that's not the RIAA's area. That's the ASCAP (I swear I'm not making that up -- it stands for American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). They sue bars who have cover bands who don't pay for protectio... er, a performance license. If your crazy guy is playing anything remotely copyrighted, he'd better watch out or that wild paranoia may become justified.
Article in today's Chronicle about them (I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, too -- it's my "Jesus, I'm not really surprised, but Jesus..." item).
Their tactics are working all right.. I haven't downloaded one bit of music put out by a major label in the last several months.
Of course, it wasn't really the lawsuits that dissuaded me so much as the utter crap the labels have been putting out. But still, effective tactics are effective tactics. Why, I'll bet they could stop music piracy completely in 2004 if the tunes continue to be as gut-wrenchingly terrible as, say, Britney's last album (or any of those that preceded it, come to think of it. She sure is hot, though).
On a related note, there's an interesting article in the SF Chronicle about how small local bars are getting hit with lawsuits because the bands they hire play covers of copyrighted songs. Wonder how far we are from surgical lobotomies for people who get copyrighted tunes stuck in their heads...
If you had demonstrated the common decency to be a large financial institution, as Wells Fargo so considerately did, then the police would have been more than happy to help you.
In fairness, this laptop represented a pretty serious amount of crime potential.
The laptop was stolen from a Wells Fargo contractor, and if contained a whole mess of Really Important customer data (social security numbers and what have you) that would have enabled any halfway competent identity thief to get all they needed to start opening credit lines.
The real issue here (which nobody's talking about) is how can Wells Fargo get away with this? Seriously, they left a mess of Real Important confidential customer data unencrypted on a highly mobile computer. Talk about negligence! This'd the the same as if they had customers dropping their night deposits into a large suitcase they left outside the front door of the bank (except in that situation all you stand to lose is one deposit).
Is it so much to ask that institutions who have our Really Import Data take some basic steps to protect it? This whole thing could have been rendered moot with something as simple and easy as an encrypted filesystem.
But nobody, nobody is talking about it. So they'll continue putting customer data on laptops, HMOs will keel putting patient records on tablet PCs or shipping it overseas for testing or whatever... I wonder what it'll take to change it...
While I can understand Red Hat's thinking on this one, I don't really agree with it.
I use Red Hat 9 at home. Because of this, when time came to roll out some Linux servers at work and my boss asked me which we should use, I told him "Red Hat Enterprise" (we wanted support and had the money to pay for it).
I suspect that for a reasonably significant portion of their market, Red Hat Linux (and cooresponding useful items like RHN) is the primary reason that their customers buy Enterprise. I hope they've considered this...
Re:Reminder of the original purpose of this holida
on
Assorted Bits of Halloween
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Pft, that ain't shit. Look up the origins of easter sometime.
Truth be told, the Christian holidays are all just swiped from preexisting pagan observances -- it's actually a fairly creative (and purposeful) way to stamp them out.
I completely, 100% disagree with you.
NASA's problems are not of the sort which can be solved by spending money. Rather, they are a loss of vision and sense of purpose.
Since the Apollo program, NASA's "vision" has been one of sustaining itself. That's led to programs like the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, huge money pits which don't do what they're supposed to do very well. And what's next? Er, how about another space plane to do the same things we've been doing for the last 30 years?
This should not be a big surprise to anyone.
The difference between NASA now and NASA in the '60s is that in the 60s, NASA *had* a vision statement, clearly enunciated from the highest level of government: Go to the moon by 1970.
So, managementspeak or not, a statement of vision is precicely what's needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, it's been a pretty good week for NASA so far, with Opportunity landing safely and Spirit slowly coming back to health.
My question is: When they locate a fix for Spirit, will they apply it to Opportunity as well? Are the two really identical, and if so wouldn't Opportunity run the risk of the same sort of major nervous breakdown that Spirit had? Or do they plan on leaving well enough alone?
In the end, I think we'll all look back on this as the time where Linux went from sort of a fringe software in the minds of a lot of people to a mainstream player, where corporations learned they shouldn't mess with the OSS community and when the idea of open-source really started to make people ask "Why *am* I paying for this software?"
After all, that which doesn't kill us, etc. etc.
How on earth could they forget the AMC Gremlin? That's the only car I've ever heard of breaking down on its way home from the dealer. My uncle had one of those bad boys for a while. He called it a motorized rollerskate for a while until he decided he was insulting rollerskates....
Of course, it's also up to us to make sure it doesn't come to that. I'd want to design the mission so that even when stuff goes wrong, there's always a good fighting chance for the people on the surface. I wouldn't send people there with one oxygen generator or one inflatible crop dome or without some construction gear or anything.
I mean, Mars isn't the moon. There are resources and things to work with all over the place -- the ground, the atmosphere, etc. And compared to space or the moon, it's a really safe place to be.
Send construction gear. Send machine tools. With some basic gear, plenty of power and know-how, you can make all sorts of things on Mars -- shelters, oxygen, water, food, wire, plastics...
Give me 50 skilled people, a dependable nuclear reactor and enough gear to get started and I'll make Mars a safe place for human life inside of a decade. If something breaks, I'll fix it. If we run out of spare parts, we'll mill new ones. If a few of us die, well, we'll mourn them and move on.
Leave the weak and timid back on earth. This isn't a venture for people who aren't willing to take serious risks or who think real "work" is sitting in front of a CRT all day typing TPS reports. Give me people who know construction, farming, materials, mechanics, people who can think on their feet and who can make a round peg fit in a square hole when they need to. Give me people who will work every day to survive and I'll turn the red planet into humanity's second home.
In short, give me pioneers.
...I wonder how long the commute is to the Bay Area from there? Maybe I could talk my boss into letting me telecommute a couple of days a month...
Actually, according to Christian mythology, Jesus was a bastard (given that Mary and God weren't married at the time).
I noticed last night that Frodo seemed to have all of his fingers when he was hugging everyone goodbye at the harbor...
I wish the other X-prize hopefuls would take after Carmack's blogs, though -- reading about the little engineering challenges is the highlight of my Monday/Tuesday mornings.
I mean, does anyone really think that how they package their product won't effect how many people start using it? Are there really a lot of people out there who assume that they'll have an instant dedicated following of skilled developers spring from nowhere the moment they publish their source?
I really doubt it, somehow. Charitably, I'd file the advice in this article under the "Obvious but sometimes in need of restating" catagory in that sometimes people will lose the forest for the trees. Still, no real revelations here.
The cylons shouldn't have bothered blowing up the planet. Simple mass-producing an army of Tricia Helfers and sending them in as kinky love goddesses would have ensured that humans having children together would be a thing of the past.
But I see what you mean. Hell, I'd have let her peek at my source. Or get root on my servers. Or, you know, kill the lot of you if I thought it might make her happy...
And believe me, I'm not one of those geeks who walks around using "smeg" or "dren" or whatever because I think it makes me cool or something. I think you're right -- "frell" or "frellin'" just rolls of the tounge so satisfyingly that it seems natural...
That's actually the whole reason I tuned in to begin with. I found the original BSG kinda goofy.
If anyone out there still isn't watching Carnivale, I'd really recommend it. Definately the most worthwhile show on TV right now, and worth the price of HBO in and of itself...
Interesting Characters. The characters actually came off as human, as opposed to the goodie-two-shoes of Star Trek or the one-sided archetypes that plagued most of B5's run or the good-evil simplicity that exists in, well, George W. Bush's world. People do stupid, self-destructive things for delusional or illogical reasons, so it's nice to see that reflected. One event sums it up nicely: In just about any other series, the XO wouldn't have fished that bottle of booze out of the trash.
Excellent ship combat. The part where the Galactia climbs out of the nebula to cover the armada's retreat was excellent on a couple of levels. First, it wasn't just well rendered but also well filmed, by which I mean the staging and the "camera" positioning where very well done. I also liked the approach to combat -- too many series treat their huge capital ships like WW2 dogfighters.
Acting. Olmos and Laura Roslin carried the day, but the rest of the cast was competent, too. This is another one of my beefs with certain other series (coughBab5cough) where some of the cast couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. Granted, they were often bit, guest or supporting parts, but that didn't break the illusion any less.
The only part I didn't like so much was Starbuck. I don't mind that they made her a woman, but really I felt as if they'd written the role and her lines for a man and then changed a few details at the last second. She was believable in the cockpit (her "Nothing but the rain" comment was one of my favorite lines of the series), but had a hard time pulling it off elsewhere. I blame the writing for this.
Gah, that's a long-winded way of saying "thumbs up", eh?
Maybe the contrails weren't gas. It the chemical reaction used to propel the rockets produced, say, water droplets, you'd see it as such.
I wonder, specifically, what instruments this thing'll have that will require their own little nuke plant as opposed to batteries. Articles were a bit sketchy on the details...
Firstly, any system where you're checking items out in an unreserved state and then checking them in over other changes is poorly set up. Fire your administrator and get someone who understands more about source control than just reading the ClearCase Administrators Guide or Command Reference whenever a problem crops up. That said, even in the most poorly set up and administred system, ClearCase does not just neglect to check in files which require manual merging. It will do exactly what you'd want it to do: detect that a new version of the element has been created since the source was checked out and then provide the user with a reasonably nifty merge tool.
So much for "unsafe" behavior. Of course, it can be pain in the ass, but as I mentioned it can be entirely bypassed by merely competent administration using the sort of branching schemes you mentioned (which will be automated by a good admin). For the love of God, there's even a decent scheme which comes from Rational (er, IBM) out of the box: Unified Change Management.
Anyhow, this asshat's lack of understanding of these very elementary facts about a system which a developer interacts with on a daily basis demonstrates that his overall point is crap -- he *doesn't* understand as much as he thinks, and he's *not* as smart as he thinks he is (as if the fact that he thinks admins are unneeded fluf didn't illustrate that sufficiantly enough in the first place).
Creds: I spent a year working ClearCase support for Rational, so I've seen most everything that is wrong with it (and it's not perfect -- without a capable administrator, it's a time bomb just like CVS, Perforce or anybody else's source control product). I currently run a system for a Very Large and Heavily Regulated Company, which could not get products out the door without it due to our size and use of heavy parallel development.
Personally, I wish they'd reissue MK2 -- I kick *ass* when I'm playing on one of the cabinets. Nobody beatin' me when I'm driving Baraka....
Actually, that's not the RIAA's area. That's the ASCAP (I swear I'm not making that up -- it stands for American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). They sue bars who have cover bands who don't pay for protectio... er, a performance license. If your crazy guy is playing anything remotely copyrighted, he'd better watch out or that wild paranoia may become justified.
Article in today's Chronicle about them (I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, too -- it's my "Jesus, I'm not really surprised, but Jesus..." item).
ASCAP. Ass cap. Huh huh.
Of course, it wasn't really the lawsuits that dissuaded me so much as the utter crap the labels have been putting out. But still, effective tactics are effective tactics. Why, I'll bet they could stop music piracy completely in 2004 if the tunes continue to be as gut-wrenchingly terrible as, say, Britney's last album (or any of those that preceded it, come to think of it. She sure is hot, though).
On a related note, there's an interesting article in the SF Chronicle about how small local bars are getting hit with lawsuits because the bands they hire play covers of copyrighted songs. Wonder how far we are from surgical lobotomies for people who get copyrighted tunes stuck in their heads...
In fairness, this laptop represented a pretty serious amount of crime potential.
The laptop was stolen from a Wells Fargo contractor, and if contained a whole mess of Really Important customer data (social security numbers and what have you) that would have enabled any halfway competent identity thief to get all they needed to start opening credit lines.
The real issue here (which nobody's talking about) is how can Wells Fargo get away with this? Seriously, they left a mess of Real Important confidential customer data unencrypted on a highly mobile computer. Talk about negligence! This'd the the same as if they had customers dropping their night deposits into a large suitcase they left outside the front door of the bank (except in that situation all you stand to lose is one deposit).
Is it so much to ask that institutions who have our Really Import Data take some basic steps to protect it? This whole thing could have been rendered moot with something as simple and easy as an encrypted filesystem.
But nobody, nobody is talking about it. So they'll continue putting customer data on laptops, HMOs will keel putting patient records on tablet PCs or shipping it overseas for testing or whatever... I wonder what it'll take to change it...
I gotta drive all the way down to Fremont to get my gear.
Once again, I will point out that the best thing about this article is the icons they use to denote the various levels of suckage.
I use Red Hat 9 at home. Because of this, when time came to roll out some Linux servers at work and my boss asked me which we should use, I told him "Red Hat Enterprise" (we wanted support and had the money to pay for it).
I suspect that for a reasonably significant portion of their market, Red Hat Linux (and cooresponding useful items like RHN) is the primary reason that their customers buy Enterprise. I hope they've considered this...
Truth be told, the Christian holidays are all just swiped from preexisting pagan observances -- it's actually a fairly creative (and purposeful) way to stamp them out.
Since the Apollo program, NASA's "vision" has been one of sustaining itself. That's led to programs like the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, huge money pits which don't do what they're supposed to do very well. And what's next? Er, how about another space plane to do the same things we've been doing for the last 30 years?
This should not be a big surprise to anyone. The difference between NASA now and NASA in the '60s is that in the 60s, NASA *had* a vision statement, clearly enunciated from the highest level of government: Go to the moon by 1970.
So, managementspeak or not, a statement of vision is precicely what's needed.