And eating 60kt of hot death if they don't say 'Oh YES Sahib!" fast enough! BUUUHHHAHAHAAAA!
The Iron Fist of Freedom (Freedom (tm) a trademark of Globaldyne, Inc.)
This could be a viable business model. Military oligarchy controlling vast swarms of subject drones to produce wealth on demand by the threat of destruction! Just like...Rome!
iRATE sounds interesting, but it apparently excludes label artists. Not all labels are the same, and if you support the ones that support smaller artists, it would also broaden the music landscape.
Fact is, that if you get signed to a big label and they tell you "no more downloads", guess what, Mike? No more legal downloads for the fans that "indie" artists are always so concerned about, until they aren't indie anymore.
Supporting exposure of bands is all very well, but even 46,000 downloadable tracks from fringe bands isn't going to reform the music industry.
I have read everything by Neal except Cryptonomicon and the Bury stuff. I love his style, and he has great characters, albeit too many of them at times.
But the reason I haven't been able to bring myself to pick up Cryptonomicon is the horror of having Neal teach me cryptography the way he decided to teach me Sumerian mythology and Turing machines (I thank God everytime I pick up _Diamond Age_ that he didn't try to explain NP-completeness, too.)
To me, the effort he expends on these interludes contributes less to the story than to a feeling that Neal is demonstrating what a smart guy he is. I admit, it is Classicly Geek, but to me, these are the truly worthless pieces of his novels. It's perfectly admirable to wish to educate someone, and perhaps even to do it via a fictional route, but the clever way, or elegant way to do this is to reference the items such that those with an interest will do the research themselves. Instead of straitjacketing the reader into a chair and forcing it down their gullet.
The soliloquies I actually enjoy, he is a witty guy with an incisive eye, and where he expresses opinion, either his own or a character's, that's 'legitimate' if you will - because I can't determine someone's opinion from reading a 1965 National Geographic as I can the details of the religious practices in Sumer c. 4000 B.C.
Although at the rate he's sliding into historical fiction, I may soon get an entire 1500 page "cycle" set in ancient Sumeria. On the plus side, we may get some good bodice-ripping at last with this upcoming opus.
That's horrifying! Those early Soyuz were just excellent. Soyuz 1 Komarov dies when the parachutes tangle. The Salyut 1 crew suffocates after cabin depressurization during de-orbit. I didn't even know this story. Wow.
You should perhaps check out some these websites more closely yourself.
The only US manned spacecraft "in which almost everything that went up came down" was the tiny one-man Mercury capsule. And unlike the first Soviet Vostoks, all US manned capsules have had some aerodynamic steering capability, even the Mercury capsule. Ironically, the steerable blunt-body design was actually originally researched and developed for use on ICBM warheads.
The fundamental design charcteristic of ANY spacecraft launched with a chemically-fueled rocket is "minimizing the overall vehicle mass", I'd hardly say that was a great satori of the Russians. Read anything about the Apollo lunar module and you will see the immense lengths gone through to limit the mass of the lander, including having a skin so thin you could stick a pencil through it.
Both the Gemini and Apollo spececraft had jettisonable service modules.
Apollo:
Command Module Total mass: 5,806 kg Service Module Total mass: 24,523 kg Lunar Module Total mass: 14,696 kg Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 13%
Gemini:
Reentry module Total mass: 1,982 kg (2-person) Retro module Total mass: 591 kg Equipment module Total mass: 1,278 kg (Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 1,869 kg) Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 51%
Soyuz (original design):
Orbital Module Total mass: 1,200 kg Descent Module Total mass: 2,850 kg Service Module Total mass: 2,700 kg (Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 5,550 kg) Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 18%
The fact is that the vehicles are all optimized for different mission profiles and constraints, so it's really incorrect to generalize based on any one characteristic. The Shuttle for example, is a massive re-rentry object, but it can launch and return a crew of seven and a 14,000 kg Spacelab module. It's all based on what you want to do and how you want to do it.
All that said, I think that the Soyuz is an excellent design, and obeys one of the most fundamental tenets of engineering - refine a basic design. The Soyuz incorporates all of those years of operational experience and the Soyuz is definitely the most proven manned space vehicle design available.
But was it a successful design? According to its original mission, it's hard to say. It never carried a Hero of Socialist Labor to the lunar surface and back because the Soviets couldn't get the N-1 to work, so it never attempted its design mission.
Uh, no. Mark Hamill was in three of the most popular movies of all time, and will only get his Oscar if "Best Live-Action Video Game Cutscene By Former _Star Wars_ Actor" becomes a category.
Come to the light...[insert hot new language]
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: 1
Sigh. Being old and moldy, I have seen more "next great things" flow under the bridge than a lot of the slashdot crowd, and this stuff makes me tired. From the practical standpoint of "getting stuff done", I've come to the conclusion that all infrastructure is equivalent - database/coding language/operating system/etc. What these discussions always end up as is:
- You Have To Check Out 'X', EVERYBODY Is Using It - (My Preferred System) 'Y' Can Do Everything 'X' Can, AND Can Do 'Z'! - 'X' Can Do 'Z' Too, You Just Need (Long Kludge) - So What, 'Q' Could Do 'Z' Back In (Current Date Minus At Least Ten Years) - My Bad Experience With 'X' - My Bad Experience With 'Y' - My Bad Experience With 'Z' - Long Incomprehensible Story About 'Q' Being Used On A Nuclear Submarine
I have to say that the state of the computer science art has advanced since I went through my schooling, language design and implementation used to be a fairly abstruse topic, and now people knock out parsers at the drop of the hat. What it reminds me of is my experience in embedded systems. At one point, everybody working the field says to himself, "you know, I could write my own embedded OS, this isn't that hard, and I could put in this one feature..." I've whiled away many an hour deciphering some guy's brainchild to extract some tedious bug out of it, when any of four well-known solutions with known stable behavior could have been used instead and avoided the whole exercise.
I'm not knocking people trying to do new things, this is how the art advances. But spare us the "use X (you fools) Y is complete rubbish!" arguments.
Not to burst the ol' Machead bubble, but let's be realistic. Any OS can have problems. I've been using a Mac since the Fat Mac, and have never personally owned a Win box, but I love the platform in spite of its problems, not because it has none.
I updated 3 machines (BW G3, Pismo, iBook) to 10.2.4. Two went fine, the iBook gray screened at the OF prompt and I had to reload and reupdate the bitch from scratch, which took 4 hours. I was not feeling the Mac love on that one. And the XP box I use at work has been solid (except for a bad memory module) for the six months I've had it.
I frankly don't see a stability difference between the platforms.
Like the Amazon ad circular, only less attractive
on
Palm PDA Roundup
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Tthis is the most brutal page hit troll I've seen in a while. They couldn't even be bothered to put up a comparison chart of some kind.
The only way to improve on this would be to get Taco to dup it in the next hour or two.
The MMU was retired, it was too big and there really wasn't a mission for a free-flying astronaut that required it.
However, there is a manuevering system for use on suits. The SAFER jetpack was tested on STS-101 for use during EVA. It is only capable of generating a 3m/sec delta-v and 13 minutes of propulsion. It's intended to get an astronaut who somehow comes off a tether back to the shuttle or the ISS.
In a huge emergency, I would think it would be capable of getting an astronaut to the bottom of the shuttle, but what would they do when they got there? There is no repair kit for damaged tiles. Without a means to fix it, and no other way to get home, the only other option would be to die in space.
I remember way back at the beginning of the program NASA was working on a space caulk gun that could fill a tile hole with ablative material to prevent a burnthrough, but since they perfected the attachment process and no longer lost bottom tiles, the whole thing was dropped.
This poem is all the more poignant because John Magee was an American Spitfire pilot in the RCAF who was killed on a mission three months after writing this poem.
Jim Irwin carried a copy of it with him on his Apollo 15 mission.
I don't understand the bitching about Mozilla being "bloated". Most people are sporting 80GB+ drive capacities now, so disk space isn't the issue. It loads slower, but how many times do you launch the browser? On my machines, I run browser sessions for days. And the additional features of Mozilla amount to a few tiny icons near the bottom of the screen. I just ignore them.
I just don't understand this mass delusion that Chimera is "faster" than Mozilla, either. How can it be faster to render when it uses the exact same engine?? I've used both, and I see no perceptible difference in speed. There certainly is a difference in stability, Moz 1.2 has been golden for me.
Chimera is more Aquafied...ok, I run Pinstripe on Moz, done.
I agree Chimera is superior to Safari, at least in its current incarnation, but from my standpoint both could dry up and blow away and be no loss. If you want alternatives with different approaches and unique technology, as pointed out by someone, there is still Opera, there is still iCab. Apple's imprimatur in this area doesn't count for much, for those of us who remember CyberDog....
Maybe I'm missing something, but since the data volume sepends on the number of people on the server, and gamers are notoriously intolerant of lag, the attack will in effect kill its own datasource as well if it goes on for more than a few minutes. The players will just jump off and look for another server.
I actually agree with the comment on GNU grandstanding, I admire their philosophical, um, focus, but there is a definite "I am GEEK, hear me ROAR" element to the "cause".
That said, Tim my man, you gots MAD SKILLZ at grandstanding yourself! Ah, how good the pot is at finding the kettle black. Handwaving dismisses massive development efforts like gcc, which, um, is used to compile a couple of major operating systems, yet is "way behind" unspecified commercial compilers, autoconf is "boring" - this is some kind of software evaluation criteria?
I enjoy a good snipe when I see one, but please don't embellish further with this kind of argument or you are exposed as precisely the same kind of geek pedant you disparage.
Actually, in re-reading your follow-up post, maybe you were just trolling. In which case, carry on.
No, nothing, everyone knows that anyone who gets into a car is a visually impaired, drunken pothead with limited IQ. Do you ever drive a car, btw?
I consider a post about how stupid and drug addicted all car and truck drivers are to be off the topic of motorcycle safety, but it clearly was an effective strategy to get some d00d with a Katana and modpoints to say "right on!" and max that baby up. A post like "everyone should practice defensive driving" or even your reply is not nearly as entertaining.
Slashdot Mirror
And eating 60kt of hot death if they don't say 'Oh YES Sahib!" fast enough! BUUUHHHAHAHAAAA! The Iron Fist of Freedom (Freedom (tm) a trademark of Globaldyne, Inc.) This could be a viable business model. Military oligarchy controlling vast swarms of subject drones to produce wealth on demand by the threat of destruction! Just like...Rome!
Oui Oui Oui!
iRATE sounds interesting, but it apparently excludes label artists. Not all labels are the same, and if you support the ones that support smaller artists, it would also broaden the music landscape.
Fact is, that if you get signed to a big label and they tell you "no more downloads", guess what, Mike? No more legal downloads for the fans that "indie" artists are always so concerned about, until they aren't indie anymore.
Supporting exposure of bands is all very well, but even 46,000 downloadable tracks from fringe bands isn't going to reform the music industry.
I have read everything by Neal except Cryptonomicon and the Bury stuff. I love his style, and he has great characters, albeit too many of them at times.
But the reason I haven't been able to bring myself to pick up Cryptonomicon is the horror of having Neal teach me cryptography the way he decided to teach me Sumerian mythology and Turing machines (I thank God everytime I pick up _Diamond Age_ that he didn't try to explain NP-completeness, too.)
To me, the effort he expends on these interludes contributes less to the story than to a feeling that Neal is demonstrating what a smart guy he is. I admit, it is Classicly Geek, but to me, these are the truly worthless pieces of his novels. It's perfectly admirable to wish to educate someone, and perhaps even to do it via a fictional route, but the clever way, or elegant way to do this is to reference the items such that those with an interest will do the research themselves. Instead of straitjacketing the reader into a chair and forcing it down their gullet.
The soliloquies I actually enjoy, he is a witty guy with an incisive eye, and where he expresses opinion, either his own or a character's, that's 'legitimate' if you will - because I can't determine someone's opinion from reading a 1965 National Geographic as I can the details of the religious practices in Sumer c. 4000 B.C.
Although at the rate he's sliding into historical fiction, I may soon get an entire 1500 page "cycle" set in ancient Sumeria. On the plus side, we may get some good bodice-ripping at last with this upcoming opus.
Ok, the top-level reference shouldn't have mentioned SDI, but sheesh.
Source please!
That's horrifying! Those early Soyuz were just excellent. Soyuz 1 Komarov dies when the parachutes tangle. The Salyut 1 crew suffocates after cabin depressurization during de-orbit. I didn't even know this story. Wow.
You should perhaps check out some these websites more closely yourself.
The only US manned spacecraft "in which almost everything that went up came down" was the tiny one-man Mercury capsule. And unlike the first Soviet Vostoks, all US manned capsules have had some aerodynamic steering capability, even the Mercury capsule. Ironically, the steerable blunt-body design was actually originally researched and developed for use on ICBM warheads.
The fundamental design charcteristic of ANY spacecraft launched with a chemically-fueled rocket is "minimizing the overall vehicle mass", I'd hardly say that was a great satori of the Russians. Read anything about the Apollo lunar module and you will see the immense lengths gone through to limit the mass of the lander, including having a skin so thin you could stick a pencil through it.
Both the Gemini and Apollo spececraft had jettisonable service modules.
Apollo:
Command Module Total mass: 5,806 kg
Service Module Total mass: 24,523 kg
Lunar Module Total mass: 14,696 kg
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 13%
Gemini:
Reentry module Total mass: 1,982 kg (2-person)
Retro module Total mass: 591 kg
Equipment module Total mass: 1,278 kg
(Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 1,869 kg)
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 51%
Soyuz (original design):
Orbital Module Total mass: 1,200 kg
Descent Module Total mass: 2,850 kg
Service Module Total mass: 2,700 kg
(Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 5,550 kg)
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 18%
The fact is that the vehicles are all optimized for different mission profiles and constraints, so it's really incorrect to generalize based on any one characteristic. The Shuttle for example, is a massive re-rentry object, but it can launch and return a crew of seven and a 14,000 kg Spacelab module. It's all based on what you want to do and how you want to do it.
All that said, I think that the Soyuz is an excellent design, and obeys one of the most fundamental tenets of engineering - refine a basic design. The Soyuz incorporates all of those years of operational experience and the Soyuz is definitely the most proven manned space vehicle design available.
But was it a successful design? According to its original mission, it's hard to say. It never carried a Hero of Socialist Labor to the lunar surface and back because the Soviets couldn't get the N-1 to work, so it never attempted its design mission.
Uh, no. Mark Hamill was in three of the most popular movies of all time, and will only get his Oscar if "Best Live-Action Video Game Cutscene By Former _Star Wars_ Actor" becomes a category.
Yes, because it's on Slate.
Actually, it's Nutrageous(tm)!
Sigh. Being old and moldy, I have seen more "next great things" flow under the bridge than a lot of the slashdot crowd, and this stuff makes me tired. From the practical standpoint of "getting stuff done", I've come to the conclusion that all infrastructure is equivalent - database/coding language/operating system/etc. What these discussions always end up as is:
- You Have To Check Out 'X', EVERYBODY Is Using It
- (My Preferred System) 'Y' Can Do Everything 'X' Can, AND Can Do 'Z'!
- 'X' Can Do 'Z' Too, You Just Need (Long Kludge)
- So What, 'Q' Could Do 'Z' Back In (Current Date Minus At Least Ten Years)
- My Bad Experience With 'X'
- My Bad Experience With 'Y'
- My Bad Experience With 'Z'
- Long Incomprehensible Story About 'Q' Being Used On A Nuclear Submarine
I have to say that the state of the computer science art has advanced since I went through my schooling, language design and implementation used to be a fairly abstruse topic, and now people knock out parsers at the drop of the hat. What it reminds me of is my experience in embedded systems. At one point, everybody working the field says to himself, "you know, I could write my own embedded OS, this isn't that hard, and I could put in this one feature..." I've whiled away many an hour deciphering some guy's brainchild to extract some tedious bug out of it, when any of four well-known solutions with known stable behavior could have been used instead and avoided the whole exercise.
I'm not knocking people trying to do new things, this is how the art advances. But spare us the "use X (you fools) Y is complete rubbish!" arguments.
Mod parent up. Should be a separate JWZ +modifier.
Not to burst the ol' Machead bubble, but let's be realistic. Any OS can have problems. I've been using a Mac since the Fat Mac, and have never personally owned a Win box, but I love the platform in spite of its problems, not because it has none.
I updated 3 machines (BW G3, Pismo, iBook) to 10.2.4. Two went fine, the iBook gray screened at the OF prompt and I had to reload and reupdate the bitch from scratch, which took 4 hours. I was not feeling the Mac love on that one. And the XP box I use at work has been solid (except for a bad memory module) for the six months I've had it.
I frankly don't see a stability difference between the platforms.
Tthis is the most brutal page hit troll I've seen in a while. They couldn't even be bothered to put up a comparison chart of some kind.
The only way to improve on this would be to get Taco to dup it in the next hour or two.
> No, I'm not good both at graphics and html.
/.
Or posts to
Try a mirror. One of the three-sided ones is nice, so you can check your butt out from all angles.
The MMU was retired, it was too big and there really wasn't a mission for a free-flying astronaut that required it.
However, there is a manuevering system for use on suits. The SAFER jetpack was tested on STS-101 for use during EVA. It is only capable of generating a 3m/sec delta-v and 13 minutes of propulsion. It's intended to get an astronaut who somehow comes off a tether back to the shuttle or the ISS.
In a huge emergency, I would think it would be capable of getting an astronaut to the bottom of the shuttle, but what would they do when they got there? There is no repair kit for damaged tiles. Without a means to fix it, and no other way to get home, the only other option would be to die in space.
I remember way back at the beginning of the program NASA was working on a space caulk gun that could fill a tile hole with ablative material to prevent a burnthrough, but since they perfected the attachment process and no longer lost bottom tiles, the whole thing was dropped.
This poem is all the more poignant because John Magee was an American Spitfire pilot in the RCAF who was killed on a mission three months after writing this poem.
Jim Irwin carried a copy of it with him on his Apollo 15 mission.
I don't understand the bitching about Mozilla being "bloated". Most people are sporting 80GB+ drive capacities now, so disk space isn't the issue. It loads slower, but how many times do you launch the browser? On my machines, I run browser sessions for days. And the additional features of Mozilla amount to a few tiny icons near the bottom of the screen. I just ignore them.
I just don't understand this mass delusion that Chimera is "faster" than Mozilla, either. How can it be faster to render when it uses the exact same engine?? I've used both, and I see no perceptible difference in speed. There certainly is a difference in stability, Moz 1.2 has been golden for me.
Chimera is more Aquafied...ok, I run Pinstripe on Moz, done.
I agree Chimera is superior to Safari, at least in its current incarnation, but from my standpoint both could dry up and blow away and be no loss. If you want alternatives with different approaches and unique technology, as pointed out by someone, there is still Opera, there is still iCab. Apple's imprimatur in this area doesn't count for much, for those of us who remember CyberDog....
Maybe I'm missing something, but since the data volume sepends on the number of people on the server, and gamers are notoriously intolerant of lag, the attack will in effect kill its own datasource as well if it goes on for more than a few minutes. The players will just jump off and look for another server.
Geek porn on /.
I actually agree with the comment on GNU grandstanding, I admire their philosophical, um, focus, but there is a definite "I am GEEK, hear me ROAR" element to the "cause".
That said, Tim my man, you gots MAD SKILLZ at grandstanding yourself! Ah, how good the pot is at finding the kettle black. Handwaving dismisses massive development efforts like gcc, which, um, is used to compile a couple of major operating systems, yet is "way behind" unspecified commercial compilers, autoconf is "boring" - this is some kind of software evaluation criteria?
I enjoy a good snipe when I see one, but please don't embellish further with this kind of argument or you are exposed as precisely the same kind of geek pedant you disparage.
Actually, in re-reading your follow-up post, maybe you were just trolling. In which case, carry on.
No, nothing, everyone knows that anyone who gets into a car is a visually impaired, drunken pothead with limited IQ. Do you ever drive a car, btw?
I consider a post about how stupid and drug addicted all car and truck drivers are to be off the topic of motorcycle safety, but it clearly was an effective strategy to get some d00d with a Katana and modpoints to say "right on!" and max that baby up. A post like "everyone should practice defensive driving" or even your reply is not nearly as entertaining.
Who modded this OT troll up? Looks like Biker-Cager topics can be added to the lengthy list of guaranteed Slashdot flamewars.
Link not workee.