"The instruments were recently shock tested in the New Mexico desert by firing them at high speed into 2 metres (6 feet) of plywood, where they experienced 1200 G's of shock and worked perfectly afterwards."
Is that 1200 Earth G's, or 1200 Lunar G's?
And after their other fiasco, you would expect them to use metric units only.
One of my neighbors had this operation after a massive car wreck. One day, after spending ten minutes trying to explain how to get to a particular store, I realized that he/she had absolutely no spacial skills at all, and I was wasting both of our time. I ended up writing turn-by-turn directions, and those worked pretty well for them.
Still, like you've found, they have no problems coordinating mouse movements with desktop navigation. I don't know how good they would be at a FPS game, but I suspect a larger monitor, higher framerates, and bumped-up gamma settings couldn't hurt.
My only beef with the book is that he didn't go further into why one pattern would be better than another in a given situation. For someone new to patterns, it can be like a chinese buffet with 100 different dishes on it - how to choose from among so many tasty items?
Of course, every situation is different. But there are common tasks (I won't use the phrase meta-patterns) that programmers do - write a e-commerce shopping site with shopping-cart, deal with nested objects like invoice-lineitem, etc. And I would have liked to have seen an example of when a certain pattern would be useful.
One of the other replies to this is actually quite valid, but since the poster was an AC it'll likely not been seen.
The ACM has this paper from 1997 regarding accreditation. A short extract:
2.1 The Computing Sciences Accreditation Board
In 1982 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-CS) formed a joint task force to plan an accreditation process for the computing sciences. Two years later draft documents for creation of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) were completed, and the two societies appointed a group of provisional representative directors from the two societies to the newly incorporated CSAB.
CSAB's scope includes post-secondary baccalaureate programs that prepare students for entry into the computing sciences professions. Programs may be found in the fifty states of the United States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, U.S. trust territories, and U.S. management areas. The Computer Science Accreditation Commission (C SAC) of the CSAB accredits programs in computer science.
The main purpose (from the ACM's viewpoint of 1997) is to provide recruiters with a way to be confident that an applicant is well-qualified to operate in a position that requires a Computer Science graduate. You could think of it as a certification in "well-roundedness" - the person has some knowledge about algorithms, processes, procedures, and is able to write far-better-than average code.
I myself am not in favor of the ACM becoming the Software Engineering Accreditation Body (and I graduated from one of the first ACM-accredited schools). They have a strong lean towards the academic side of software, and don't really address the issues encountered when writing shrink-wrap software that will be sold to end-users. Which is why I'm no longer a member.
I don't think that the various industry certifications are the answer either -- I've seen too many "Paper CNEs" (and MCSE's, Cisco certified, etc) being flaunted by people who merely had good short-term-memory skills.
Right now, I think the software industry is too immature for accreditation. The traditional engineering areas have had centuries of standards, procedures and customs to draw on. If mechanical engineering were like software, a 2" steel pipe would change it's diameter every 6 months.
The other poster is correct - I'm copying over to DVD MPEG-2 format. I'm capturing as AVI in order to maintain the original high quality image from the laserdisc. I'm using a S-Video cable to keep as much quality as I can -- AFAIK there are/were no Laserdisc players with component video output, and also, AFAIK, there are no consumer/prosumer video capture cards with component video input (I'm using a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV).
I've been working on doing this very same thing - transferring some 8" & 12" laserdiscs that will never be released on a modern format (80's music videos, mostly).
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small. I have twin 80gb drives spanned via RAID, and I filled them up with most of one side of a movie (about 50 minutes of video). Not only do I need more room for the 2nd side of the movie, I also need room for producing the final DVD MPEG files before burning them. Next paycheck I'm buying a couple of 200gb drives to replace them with, and I'm concerned that even they might not be large enough.
It also doesn't hurt to have the fastest CPU available. I'm on a Athlon XP 1800, and mastering/producing takes longer than the source material is (15min of material takes ~20min to produce). Don't think dual CPUs will help, as the production process is pretty much single-threaded.
In-car navigation system: $1800
Handheld GPS: $200
Paper map: $5
Again, the dead-tree edition proves to have hidden advantages, such as never needing batteries, not breaking when you drop it, and having consistent results during wartime.
A lot depends on where you plan to live and the weather conditions present (hurricanes in the South, earthquakes out west, mudslides in the Northwest, and massive snowstorms in the Northeast), but in general you can use these materials:
Autoclaved Aerated Concrete for the basic structure of your house. It insulates (both thermally and acoustically), and can be worked with ordinary wood-working tools.
For roofing, real slate is beautiful, but they're fragile. Try concrete roof tiles instead. They were used on a Hometime episode a few years ago where they built a log cabin using the material.
Electrical: You can combine the lighting circuits onto shared circuit breakers, but having each rooms outlets on their own breaker is very nice. Conduit is almost required when using the AAC blocks, so you get a freebie there.
Doors/Windows: You just can't beat the ones made in the scandinavian countries. Triple pane, low-e coatings, excellent hardware -- just plain solid operation.
2) Total aerial supremancy. As with AWACS, you'll need to dominate the skies to the point where SAMs are not making the plane suddenly jink and miss the shot at the wrong time.
The ABL is armed with a huge chemical laser that can knock an ICBM out of the sky at 500 miles. Tracking and burning an incoming enemy fighter should present no challenge.
There is/was an agreement between the former USSR and the US about use of lasers to blind troops (as in, we wouldn't do it if they didn't do it). I don't think that would apply in this case, as the laser's power is a couple of magnitudes greater than the target ranging lasers that were the initial concern. I imagine, however, that the adaptive optics used in the ABL could "defocus" the laser to cover a wider area for possible use against ground troops. Or maybe even an armor column.
The book/article mentions that the ribbon will initially wound on a mechanism in LEO, and then unwound during deployment to a floating platform on the equator. Just wondering what the minimum bend radius is for nanotubes. If you wind it too tightly, you'd fracture a lot of the tubes, significantly reducing the ribbon's strength (you'd be relying on the cross-tube adhesive more than before).
How much rock/dust would you have to process to produce that 1Kg of HE3?
If you're talking a million metric tons, the energy consumed in extraction & processing may exceed the energy you get from the fusion reaction. Of course, you could cover several thousand square meters of lunar surface with flexible solar cells to power your mining equipment. In which case, why not simply beam the power generated by the cells directly to the earth, bypassing the messy intermediate step of extracting the HE3?
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
Somehow, saving 512 bytes or less for license info doesn't seem like a real good reason for putting it in track 0 when the rest of the program is already several megabytes in size.
Agreed: Cooper S should have been on the list - more than 100hp per liter, one of the highest slalom speeds in recent history, and three computer networks.
These attacks defeat machines such as the Racal RG7000 and the IBM 4758/CCA which are commonly used to protect the PINs and keys used in automatic teller machines.
While the IBM 4758 has been cracked before, it's not something that someone can do on their lunch break. What I suspect is being cracked is the little desktop unit that the customer service rep spins around for you to enter your PIN when you sign up for ATM service.
The original poster made much of the fact that there were several keys that he never used - the back-quote (used in word processing) and the Scroll Lock (used by many KVMs). Maybe manufacturers need to produce specialized keyboards based on what tasks you regularly perform.
Accountant Keyboard - Prominent numeric keypad and shortcuts to Excel macros. No caps-lock and only one set of Ctrl and Alt keys.
MS Office Keyboard - Microsoft has already done this. Don't really care for the mouse wheel located on the keyboard, but I only use Word and Visio to draw up requirements documents anyway. Has no brace {}[] keys.
Software Development Keyboard - No numeric keypad, but has assignable keys down the left like the original Northgate keyboards. Arrow keys are in inverted "T" pattern like God intended.
*nix Keyboard - Has no shift key (just kidding). Has the punctuation marks and numerics reversed on the keys along the top for easier shell script writing (must press Shift + $ to get a "4").
L33T 5p34k Keyboard - Looks remarkably like a cellphone, except the letters and numbers are randomly jumbled up.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is not trappable in any fashion by any userspace program and can be set to always transfer control to the system.
It's known as SAS - Secure Attention Sequence.
But if you have a program that looks like the NT/2K/XP login screen, your typical user will think: "Oh, someone already hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, so I don't have to.", and enters their info. Program then records info, and logs out. User then repeats sequence and gets in. (A drawback to the technique is it's a one-shot deal).
As Kevin Mitnick will tell you -- a big part of security in an organization is having trained users.
Chip H.
Re:The ./ obsession with a cashless society?
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 1
e-Gold is cool, until you realize you have to pay 6-7% to a market-maker to transfer goverment currency into and out of it's system.
In the PC world, if you have really important data, you won't buy anything but Compaq servers to store it on -- their hardware just plain works 24/7, and the support is there for the occasional "Oopsie".
The big question for Apple is...
Would you buy one for use in your production eCommerce site? Do you have enough trust in Apple's technology and support offerings to stake your business and your job on the Xserve and Xserve RAID?
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the Research Triangle area, so you never know if a neighbor is lurking.
Chip H.
As another poster has already pointed out, it's a magazine from a Dragunov
On a side note, how did a UK company get hold of one of those? Aren't they a disarmed nation now?
Chip H.
"The instruments were recently shock tested in the New Mexico desert by firing them at high speed into 2 metres (6 feet) of plywood, where they experienced 1200 G's of shock and worked perfectly afterwards."
Is that 1200 Earth G's, or 1200 Lunar G's?
And after their other fiasco, you would expect them to use metric units only.
Chip H.
One of my neighbors had this operation after a massive car wreck. One day, after spending ten minutes trying to explain how to get to a particular store, I realized that he/she had absolutely no spacial skills at all, and I was wasting both of our time. I ended up writing turn-by-turn directions, and those worked pretty well for them.
Still, like you've found, they have no problems coordinating mouse movements with desktop navigation. I don't know how good they would be at a FPS game, but I suspect a larger monitor, higher framerates, and bumped-up gamma settings couldn't hurt.
Chip H.
(they don't even want people to put up pictures on their websites---turning their nose up at free advertising!)
What if I'm the one who takes the pictures?
If I'm the photographer, then the copyright to the photos/images then belongs to me, right?
Chip H.
For all those slashdotters wondering why there's an article about a car on a computer news site --
I'd like to point out that it *is* water-cooled.
Chip H.
My only beef with the book is that he didn't go further into why one pattern would be better than another in a given situation. For someone new to patterns, it can be like a chinese buffet with 100 different dishes on it - how to choose from among so many tasty items?
Of course, every situation is different. But there are common tasks (I won't use the phrase meta-patterns) that programmers do - write a e-commerce shopping site with shopping-cart, deal with nested objects like invoice-lineitem, etc. And I would have liked to have seen an example of when a certain pattern would be useful.
Maybe in a forthcoming companion volume?
Chip H.
One of the other replies to this is actually quite valid, but since the poster was an AC it'll likely not been seen.
The ACM has this paper from 1997 regarding accreditation. A short extract:
2.1 The Computing Sciences Accreditation Board
In 1982 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-CS) formed a joint task force to plan an accreditation process for the computing sciences. Two years later draft documents for creation of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) were completed, and the two societies appointed a group of provisional representative directors from the two societies to the newly incorporated CSAB.
CSAB's scope includes post-secondary baccalaureate programs that prepare students for entry into the computing sciences professions. Programs may be found in the fifty states of the United States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, U.S. trust territories, and U.S. management areas. The Computer Science Accreditation Commission (C SAC) of the CSAB accredits programs in computer science.
The main purpose (from the ACM's viewpoint of 1997) is to provide recruiters with a way to be confident that an applicant is well-qualified to operate in a position that requires a Computer Science graduate. You could think of it as a certification in "well-roundedness" - the person has some knowledge about algorithms, processes, procedures, and is able to write far-better-than average code.
I myself am not in favor of the ACM becoming the Software Engineering Accreditation Body (and I graduated from one of the first ACM-accredited schools). They have a strong lean towards the academic side of software, and don't really address the issues encountered when writing shrink-wrap software that will be sold to end-users. Which is why I'm no longer a member.
I don't think that the various industry certifications are the answer either -- I've seen too many "Paper CNEs" (and MCSE's, Cisco certified, etc) being flaunted by people who merely had good short-term-memory skills.
Right now, I think the software industry is too immature for accreditation. The traditional engineering areas have had centuries of standards, procedures and customs to draw on. If mechanical engineering were like software, a 2" steel pipe would change it's diameter every 6 months.
Chip H.
"Where's my insurance agent," quipped her husband nearby.
;-)
Ummm, I don't think my homeowner's policy covers me against meteors.
It's probably excluded under the "Skylab" clause.
Chip H.
The other poster is correct - I'm copying over to DVD MPEG-2 format. I'm capturing as AVI in order to maintain the original high quality image from the laserdisc. I'm using a S-Video cable to keep as much quality as I can -- AFAIK there are/were no Laserdisc players with component video output, and also, AFAIK, there are no consumer/prosumer video capture cards with component video input (I'm using a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV).
Chip H.
I've been working on doing this very same thing - transferring some 8" & 12" laserdiscs that will never be released on a modern format (80's music videos, mostly).
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small. I have twin 80gb drives spanned via RAID, and I filled them up with most of one side of a movie (about 50 minutes of video). Not only do I need more room for the 2nd side of the movie, I also need room for producing the final DVD MPEG files before burning them. Next paycheck I'm buying a couple of 200gb drives to replace them with, and I'm concerned that even they might not be large enough.
It also doesn't hurt to have the fastest CPU available. I'm on a Athlon XP 1800, and mastering/producing takes longer than the source material is (15min of material takes ~20min to produce). Don't think dual CPUs will help, as the production process is pretty much single-threaded.
Chip H.
In-car navigation system: $1800
Handheld GPS: $200
Paper map: $5
Again, the dead-tree edition proves to have hidden advantages, such as never needing batteries, not breaking when you drop it, and having consistent results during wartime.
Chip H.
A lot depends on where you plan to live and the weather conditions present (hurricanes in the South, earthquakes out west, mudslides in the Northwest, and massive snowstorms in the Northeast), but in general you can use these materials:
;-)
Autoclaved Aerated Concrete for the basic structure of your house. It insulates (both thermally and acoustically), and can be worked with ordinary wood-working tools.
For roofing, real slate is beautiful, but they're fragile. Try concrete roof tiles instead. They were used on a Hometime episode a few years ago where they built a log cabin using the material.
Electrical: You can combine the lighting circuits onto shared circuit breakers, but having each rooms outlets on their own breaker is very nice. Conduit is almost required when using the AAC blocks, so you get a freebie there.
Doors/Windows: You just can't beat the ones made in the scandinavian countries. Triple pane, low-e coatings, excellent hardware -- just plain solid operation.
Obviously, I've given this some thought myself
Chip H.
2) Total aerial supremancy. As with AWACS, you'll need to dominate the skies to the point where SAMs are not making the plane suddenly jink and miss the shot at the wrong time.
The ABL is armed with a huge chemical laser that can knock an ICBM out of the sky at 500 miles. Tracking and burning an incoming enemy fighter should present no challenge.
There is/was an agreement between the former USSR and the US about use of lasers to blind troops (as in, we wouldn't do it if they didn't do it). I don't think that would apply in this case, as the laser's power is a couple of magnitudes greater than the target ranging lasers that were the initial concern. I imagine, however, that the adaptive optics used in the ABL could "defocus" the laser to cover a wider area for possible use against ground troops. Or maybe even an armor column.
Chip H.
The book/article mentions that the ribbon will initially wound on a mechanism in LEO, and then unwound during deployment to a floating platform on the equator. Just wondering what the minimum bend radius is for nanotubes. If you wind it too tightly, you'd fracture a lot of the tubes, significantly reducing the ribbon's strength (you'd be relying on the cross-tube adhesive more than before).
Chip H.
How much rock/dust would you have to process to produce that 1Kg of HE3?
If you're talking a million metric tons, the energy consumed in extraction & processing may exceed the energy you get from the fusion reaction. Of course, you could cover several thousand square meters of lunar surface with flexible solar cells to power your mining equipment. In which case, why not simply beam the power generated by the cells directly to the earth, bypassing the messy intermediate step of extracting the HE3?
Chip H.
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
Somehow, saving 512 bytes or less for license info doesn't seem like a real good reason for putting it in track 0 when the rest of the program is already several megabytes in size.
Chip H.
Agreed: Cooper S should have been on the list - more than 100hp per liter, one of the highest slalom speeds in recent history, and three computer networks.
Chip H.
These attacks defeat machines such as the Racal RG7000 and the IBM 4758/CCA which are commonly used to protect the PINs and keys used in automatic teller machines.
While the IBM 4758 has been cracked before, it's not something that someone can do on their lunch break. What I suspect is being cracked is the little desktop unit that the customer service rep spins around for you to enter your PIN when you sign up for ATM service.
Chip H.
Well, they carry L. Neil Smith's books (or at least have a listing for him), so looks like I might be switching booksellers.
I had a look around their site - anyone know what their out-of-state shipping policy is?
Chip H.
The original poster made much of the fact that there were several keys that he never used - the back-quote (used in word processing) and the Scroll Lock (used by many KVMs). Maybe manufacturers need to produce specialized keyboards based on what tasks you regularly perform.
Accountant Keyboard - Prominent numeric keypad and shortcuts to Excel macros. No caps-lock and only one set of Ctrl and Alt keys.
MS Office Keyboard - Microsoft has already done this. Don't really care for the mouse wheel located on the keyboard, but I only use Word and Visio to draw up requirements documents anyway. Has no brace {}[] keys.
Software Development Keyboard - No numeric keypad, but has assignable keys down the left like the original Northgate keyboards. Arrow keys are in inverted "T" pattern like God intended.
*nix Keyboard - Has no shift key (just kidding). Has the punctuation marks and numerics reversed on the keys along the top for easier shell script writing (must press Shift + $ to get a "4").
L33T 5p34k Keyboard - Looks remarkably like a cellphone, except the letters and numbers are randomly jumbled up.
Chip H.
Everyone got your Homeland-Defense(TM) poly sheeting and duct tape? If not, you'll want some after reading this book.
(For the clueless: the same materials can be used to prevent the infiltration of fallout particles into your home)
Chip H.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is not trappable in any fashion by any userspace program and can be set to always transfer control to the system.
It's known as SAS - Secure Attention Sequence.
But if you have a program that looks like the NT/2K/XP login screen, your typical user will think: "Oh, someone already hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, so I don't have to.", and enters their info. Program then records info, and logs out. User then repeats sequence and gets in. (A drawback to the technique is it's a one-shot deal).
As Kevin Mitnick will tell you -- a big part of security in an organization is having trained users.
Chip H.
e-Gold is cool, until you realize you have to pay 6-7% to a market-maker to transfer goverment currency into and out of it's system.
Chip H.
In the PC world, if you have really important data, you won't buy anything but Compaq servers to store it on -- their hardware just plain works 24/7, and the support is there for the occasional "Oopsie".
The big question for Apple is...
Would you buy one for use in your production eCommerce site? Do you have enough trust in Apple's technology and support offerings to stake your business and your job on the Xserve and Xserve RAID?
Chip H.