I think our expectations on today's technology are too HIGH, not too low. My car doesn't have 99.9% uptime, and I paid a lot more for it than by blackberry.
Things break. Unforseen happens. Murphy Always Wins. Get used to it. Don't expect the world to provide you with perfect services.
I think it's fair to say to cut your downtime in half requires you to double your budget. Each time you cut it in half. I don't want to pay $400/mo for my internet service just to make sure I'm down less than 2 minutes per year.
Also with ISPs, they are better off PROMISING you 100% uptime, and then crediting you a month of service if you catch then down for 5 minutes at 4am one day of the year. Much cheaper all around isn't it?
but look at the fan. it's right there on the heat sink. If it was powering an exhaust fan I'd agree with you there, but it's not. It's blowing heat off the CPU and into the case, to do things like swirl around the "cool side" radiator of the engine, which is completely counterproductive. You don't want to heat up the cooler, that drops its efficiency greatly.
anytime you use a sterling engine to harvest energy you have to be affecting the temperature on the cooler or the hotter side. Sterling engines have to have radiators for the cool side, and that in turn will heat up, causing a local increase in temperature. Large scale practical sterling engines use a source of coolness, such as running water, but there's nothing like that in a PC. I don't see this as cooling anything unless you are leading the radiator ou the back of the computer. Energy is always conserved. If you are using energy to turn a fan around the heat sink, you're just pushing heat around, not removing it, and generating a small amount of heat by turning the fan too. That's all I see this gimmic as, is just pushing the heat around.
missing tag. AIDS is a master of the virus's trick of the trade, rapid mutation. To block something thoroughly and reliably requires blocking a key step in a way that is not trivial to circumvent, because mutation adapts to very simple blocks very rapidly.
I don't see anything here that even remotely sounds like this was a well-thought-out fix. These sorts of discoveries are usually by chance, try this, try that, and observe results. If it only takes one very minor change in the viruse's DNA (RNA?) to get around this, it won't take any time to work it out.
The more well-thought-out methods are more likely to succeed or at least to hold up longer. Now while Jurassic Park did find a way around it, the concept of stopping reproduction by making the entire population female, in theory is a very well thought out measure and is not trivial to bypass. You'd put a lot more stock in that than if they had say, injected the dinos with something that sterilized them. This looks more like a random attack with results that are not even remotely understood.
I was just thinking the same thing. The drive itself, spinning up the disk made my previous laptop NOT a LAPtop for playback of movies. It also vibrated pretty bad which you could not hear but certainly felt. That's changed in new laptops but is still an issue. Playing back DVDs always heats up the laptop.
I carry a couple DVDs around with me to watch, but I have a folder on my HD with several dozen video clips for entertainment on the road. Considering my HD is 200gb, (about par by today's standards for a laptop I suppose?) that's not a big deal. Obviously trying to watch something in 1080i etc would take more space, but do you really NEED that on a laptop? It's not a home entertainment center when it's on batteries. The homies can't all huddle around your "bigscreen" 17" laptop and really enjoy it. There's no real reason to even be trying to play blueray / HDDVD on a laptop.
Downsample it and store it on the HD. I get at least double the playback time from an AVI than I do from a DVD on my present laptop, and I don't have to deal with the craptastic "operation not permitted", "fbi warning", forced preview viewing, etc etc.
That raises an interesting idea... why not use the capchas to perform some useful work? Example... display a scanned line of text from a project that needs a large volume of text OCR'd for free/cheap. Compare the texts from several submitters, and assume groups with a high match rate are reading it correctly.
This accomplishes three goals: - fairly effective capchas - accomplishes something - causes OCR quality to improve (via the hard work of the botnet coders)
Not saying the above example is ideal, just trying to illustrate the idea. Take advantage of available resources (be they real people or botnets) and harvest it to accomplish something practical with it.
The fuel is expensive and I'm sure they go through a lot of it, but maybe they meant $9000 of fuel per minute, or that $9000 accounts for ALL the bombers at once?
that, and I assume NORMALLY there's always several of them in the air at once, continually refueling mid air? This just means they've stopped (or at least scaled back) their perpetual presence in the air.
A new version of itunes doesn't just come out for bug fixes and enhancements. Apple is well known for both passively and actively combating software that works against their DRM.
I had an itunes plugin awhile ago that mounted a second ipod on your itunes list, with an important difference. You could drag music FROM the second pod to your library. Very neat hack, using apple's built-in plugin architecture for itunes. It didn't break any of the rules.
At that time there were three itunes updates in two weeks. The first two attempted to detect and deactivate the plugin, looking for strings of code from the plugin. Each time the author quickly released a newer version that got around the checks. The third release of itunes in that run looked specifically for the plugin by name, and deactivated it. The author at that point decided he was fighting a battle he wasn't going to win, and stopped releasing updates.
Now while I think he should have kept trying, as the mac users would not have tolerated a new itunes update every week, I see why he did it.
The problem with the torrent isn't that it's hard to distribute an old release, it's that it's hard to keep distributing new updates every week after apple breaks it again. That's why they had a web page for updates, and that's why apple CnD'd it.
The CnD is questionable, and it's very likely there was no legal teeth to it. The text of the CnD is usually just a formality covering up the sabor rattling of a large company that is ready to drag you into a meritless yet expensive lawsuit, to discourage your legal behavior.
Although this is not a purely NASA project, NASA and every other spacecraft agency severely over-engineer their hardware. Most systems are at least redundant if not double redundant, and they incorporate numerous failsafes, fallbacks, and keep as many options open as possible at all times. If something breaks, unless you have the ability to work around it or fix it remotely, you're done. You can't just send a tech out to fix it.
The rovers on mars almost died when their flash memory filled up, because they did not intend to survive long enough to gather so much data, that the capacity of their flash was deemed more than enough. This alone is good evidence that they aren't really intending for things to run this long, just sometime they do a really good job AND get really lucky. Go read about the Expensive Hardware Lobbing to get an idea of just how easy it is to make a mistake, and how catastrophic such mistakes are. Even with how much care goes into these things, we still don't keep terribly good odds.
I don't know all the reasons the rovers are still running, but I've heard several. The crippling flash space problem was averted because of an automatic reboot, in addition to an automatic failsafe mode, the combination of which allowed them to get in and clear disk space. The rover with the dead wheel, they were able to disengage its motor so it didn't eat up power and drag on the ground (not turning) and that again isn't something you'd necessarily ever expect to need to do, but they added that ability anyway and it paid off. I'd bet there are at least a dozen other "plan ahead" safeties that have saved their bacon too.
From Mariner 2's entry on EHL: On September 8 17:50 UT the spacecraft suddenly lost its attitude control, which was restored by the gyroscopes 3 minutes later. The cause was unknown but may have been a collision with a small object. Then, on November 15, one solar panel failed. However, the probe got within 34,773 km of the planet on December 14 19:59:28.
The odds of it hitting something out in space has to be incredibly slim, but they installed gyroscopes anyway, and as a result were able to continue the mission. You can't really factor that in when trying to calculate the life expectancy of a project like this. All you can do is build it the absolutely best you can, and hope you don't get mugged by too many problems at the same time.
Although the ppl at NASA are certainly skilled, I don't think we can call any of them "experts" at this space exploration thing. They may be the best we've got, but lets face it, there's a lot we still don't know, and we're not able to build experience very quickly. We're total n00bs in space. I don't think we over-estimate anything, we just get lucky now and then. Building in failsafes and options gives us one or two more extra chances sometimes when something we do doesn't work, and that can turn a single 5 year mission into four or five learning experiences before it finally breaks beyond hope, rather than one.
When Mariner 3 failed to eject its heat shield, that one mistake totally screwed the entire mission after a very long wait. Instead of tinkering with various ways to fix the problem remotely with your available options, Game Over. Wait another 5 years and try again. Those are the painful lessons they try to avoid by what is sometimes perceived as over-engineering or under-estimating.
Why is that? If all mass is attracted by gravity, it doesn't matter what's lighter and what's heavier, they're all attracted to some degree. Unless something is pushing them away from earth? Does helium reach 'escape velocity"? or is it just a matter of it being the lightest thing on the pile (of atmosphere) which makes it wind up on the outer envelope where there is only microgravity, and be more affected by other forces (like lunar gravity or solar wind) stripping it away?
Wouldn't the lighter gasses be found out in whatever you call that, the thinning layer around the outer atmosphere? A good place to find things like helium? Think of all those balloons that popped:)
You cannot extract power from gravity, but you CAN harvest the potential energy of two masses that are being attracted to each other BY gravity.
This is not a gravity-powered lamp, it's an "environmentally-conscious person moving weights"-powered lamp.
Calling it "gravity-powered" gives the less insightful the impression that it's free energy.
Set up their whole house this way. Put a big stack of 50 lb boxes in the basement, and tell them every evening when they come home from work to haul 30 of those boxes up to the attic and set them on the platform, all of which will be in the basement by this time tomorrow. Bet they change their mind about "free energy" right quick.
Though if you REALLY think about it, people complain about not getting enough exercise, AND complain about their electric bill, and this looks like a nice way to take care of two problems at once. It'd be interesting to try to compare the two monetarily - compare the average salary of someone that works at rent-a-center or U-haul, figure out how much he'd make moving that mass during the day, and compare that with how much of the electrical bill such a mass in a similar gadget could produce. Unfortunately, electricity is relatively cheap compared to labor, and I'd bet lighting up the dinosaurs is a lot more economical in the short run.
along those lines, I know very little about astrophysics but I'm always reading about satellites that come down. Think skylab. Surely that was not in the atmosphere, so why did its orbit decay? Is it just that there is atmosphere, but it's very very thin, getting thinner and thinner as you get farther from earth?
~~Behold the flying cow with a railgun!~~ [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Mission accomplished! (Score:5, Funny) by contraba55 (1217056) on Tuesday February 19, @08:27AM (#22474412) That remains to be seen.
Sorry but that particular combination of sig and followup comment was just too good to overlook...
I wonder what they mean by "shoot down"? It's not like an airplane, that if damaged, can't stay flying and falls to earth. If you blow up a big satellite, you end up with a bunch of little satellites, and that doesn't make them de-orbit much faster does it? I was under the understanding that blowing up stuff in space is BAD and creates a major headache more of space debris. I suppose if you really wanted to de-orbit a dead satellite you'd want to shoot a missile at it that would attach, and fire retro rockets to slow it down so it would degrade its orbit enough to hit atmosphere were it would be pulled down on its own from there.
I wish there were some coverage of this by my local weather channels, there's no mention of an eclipse and usually they feature these when they're coming up. The weather report is partly cloudy, maybe they're waiting for their crystal ball to clear up a bit before saying whether or not we're going to miss it here in Iowa.
No doubt! This will last less than 24 hrs (if that) before china's censorship kicks into high gear. All it should take is oh, one picture of a picture of an entrant taken as he participated in Tiananmen Square...
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I think our expectations on today's technology are too HIGH, not too low. My car doesn't have 99.9% uptime, and I paid a lot more for it than by blackberry.
Things break. Unforseen happens. Murphy Always Wins. Get used to it. Don't expect the world to provide you with perfect services.
I think it's fair to say to cut your downtime in half requires you to double your budget. Each time you cut it in half. I don't want to pay $400/mo for my internet service just to make sure I'm down less than 2 minutes per year.
Also with ISPs, they are better off PROMISING you 100% uptime, and then crediting you a month of service if you catch then down for 5 minutes at 4am one day of the year. Much cheaper all around isn't it?
but look at the fan. it's right there on the heat sink. If it was powering an exhaust fan I'd agree with you there, but it's not. It's blowing heat off the CPU and into the case, to do things like swirl around the "cool side" radiator of the engine, which is completely counterproductive. You don't want to heat up the cooler, that drops its efficiency greatly.
anytime you use a sterling engine to harvest energy you have to be affecting the temperature on the cooler or the hotter side. Sterling engines have to have radiators for the cool side, and that in turn will heat up, causing a local increase in temperature. Large scale practical sterling engines use a source of coolness, such as running water, but there's nothing like that in a PC. I don't see this as cooling anything unless you are leading the radiator ou the back of the computer. Energy is always conserved. If you are using energy to turn a fan around the heat sink, you're just pushing heat around, not removing it, and generating a small amount of heat by turning the fan too. That's all I see this gimmic as, is just pushing the heat around.
missing tag. AIDS is a master of the virus's trick of the trade, rapid mutation. To block something thoroughly and reliably requires blocking a key step in a way that is not trivial to circumvent, because mutation adapts to very simple blocks very rapidly.
I don't see anything here that even remotely sounds like this was a well-thought-out fix. These sorts of discoveries are usually by chance, try this, try that, and observe results. If it only takes one very minor change in the viruse's DNA (RNA?) to get around this, it won't take any time to work it out.
The more well-thought-out methods are more likely to succeed or at least to hold up longer. Now while Jurassic Park did find a way around it, the concept of stopping reproduction by making the entire population female, in theory is a very well thought out measure and is not trivial to bypass. You'd put a lot more stock in that than if they had say, injected the dinos with something that sterilized them. This looks more like a random attack with results that are not even remotely understood.
I was just thinking the same thing. The drive itself, spinning up the disk made my previous laptop NOT a LAPtop for playback of movies. It also vibrated pretty bad which you could not hear but certainly felt. That's changed in new laptops but is still an issue. Playing back DVDs always heats up the laptop.
I carry a couple DVDs around with me to watch, but I have a folder on my HD with several dozen video clips for entertainment on the road. Considering my HD is 200gb, (about par by today's standards for a laptop I suppose?) that's not a big deal. Obviously trying to watch something in 1080i etc would take more space, but do you really NEED that on a laptop? It's not a home entertainment center when it's on batteries. The homies can't all huddle around your "bigscreen" 17" laptop and really enjoy it. There's no real reason to even be trying to play blueray / HDDVD on a laptop.
Downsample it and store it on the HD. I get at least double the playback time from an AVI than I do from a DVD on my present laptop, and I don't have to deal with the craptastic "operation not permitted", "fbi warning", forced preview viewing, etc etc.
Don't bonuses have to be approved by a board or something? Who would continue to approve bonuses for the captain of a ship clearly about to go under?
That raises an interesting idea... why not use the capchas to perform some useful work? Example... display a scanned line of text from a project that needs a large volume of text OCR'd for free/cheap. Compare the texts from several submitters, and assume groups with a high match rate are reading it correctly.
This accomplishes three goals:
- fairly effective capchas
- accomplishes something
- causes OCR quality to improve (via the hard work of the botnet coders)
Not saying the above example is ideal, just trying to illustrate the idea. Take advantage of available resources (be they real people or botnets) and harvest it to accomplish something practical with it.
it's what you need, when you need it!
We should be grateful.
The fuel is expensive and I'm sure they go through a lot of it, but maybe they meant $9000 of fuel per minute, or that $9000 accounts for ALL the bombers at once?
because when you're in the evesdropping business, everything is important. Every minute you've missed invading someone's privacy is a travesty!
that, and I assume NORMALLY there's always several of them in the air at once, continually refueling mid air? This just means they've stopped (or at least scaled back) their perpetual presence in the air.
A new version of itunes doesn't just come out for bug fixes and enhancements. Apple is well known for both passively and actively combating software that works against their DRM.
I had an itunes plugin awhile ago that mounted a second ipod on your itunes list, with an important difference. You could drag music FROM the second pod to your library. Very neat hack, using apple's built-in plugin architecture for itunes. It didn't break any of the rules.
At that time there were three itunes updates in two weeks. The first two attempted to detect and deactivate the plugin, looking for strings of code from the plugin. Each time the author quickly released a newer version that got around the checks. The third release of itunes in that run looked specifically for the plugin by name, and deactivated it. The author at that point decided he was fighting a battle he wasn't going to win, and stopped releasing updates.
Now while I think he should have kept trying, as the mac users would not have tolerated a new itunes update every week, I see why he did it.
The problem with the torrent isn't that it's hard to distribute an old release, it's that it's hard to keep distributing new updates every week after apple breaks it again. That's why they had a web page for updates, and that's why apple CnD'd it.
The CnD is questionable, and it's very likely there was no legal teeth to it. The text of the CnD is usually just a formality covering up the sabor rattling of a large company that is ready to drag you into a meritless yet expensive lawsuit, to discourage your legal behavior.
Although this is not a purely NASA project, NASA and every other spacecraft agency severely over-engineer their hardware. Most systems are at least redundant if not double redundant, and they incorporate numerous failsafes, fallbacks, and keep as many options open as possible at all times. If something breaks, unless you have the ability to work around it or fix it remotely, you're done. You can't just send a tech out to fix it.
The rovers on mars almost died when their flash memory filled up, because they did not intend to survive long enough to gather so much data, that the capacity of their flash was deemed more than enough. This alone is good evidence that they aren't really intending for things to run this long, just sometime they do a really good job AND get really lucky. Go read about the Expensive Hardware Lobbing to get an idea of just how easy it is to make a mistake, and how catastrophic such mistakes are. Even with how much care goes into these things, we still don't keep terribly good odds.
I don't know all the reasons the rovers are still running, but I've heard several. The crippling flash space problem was averted because of an automatic reboot, in addition to an automatic failsafe mode, the combination of which allowed them to get in and clear disk space. The rover with the dead wheel, they were able to disengage its motor so it didn't eat up power and drag on the ground (not turning) and that again isn't something you'd necessarily ever expect to need to do, but they added that ability anyway and it paid off. I'd bet there are at least a dozen other "plan ahead" safeties that have saved their bacon too.
From Mariner 2's entry on EHL: On September 8 17:50 UT the spacecraft suddenly lost its attitude control, which was restored by the gyroscopes 3 minutes later. The cause was unknown but may have been a collision with a small object. Then, on November 15, one solar panel failed. However, the probe got within 34,773 km of the planet on December 14 19:59:28.
The odds of it hitting something out in space has to be incredibly slim, but they installed gyroscopes anyway, and as a result were able to continue the mission. You can't really factor that in when trying to calculate the life expectancy of a project like this. All you can do is build it the absolutely best you can, and hope you don't get mugged by too many problems at the same time.
Although the ppl at NASA are certainly skilled, I don't think we can call any of them "experts" at this space exploration thing. They may be the best we've got, but lets face it, there's a lot we still don't know, and we're not able to build experience very quickly. We're total n00bs in space. I don't think we over-estimate anything, we just get lucky now and then. Building in failsafes and options gives us one or two more extra chances sometimes when something we do doesn't work, and that can turn a single 5 year mission into four or five learning experiences before it finally breaks beyond hope, rather than one.
When Mariner 3 failed to eject its heat shield, that one mistake totally screwed the entire mission after a very long wait. Instead of tinkering with various ways to fix the problem remotely with your available options, Game Over. Wait another 5 years and try again. Those are the painful lessons they try to avoid by what is sometimes perceived as over-engineering or under-estimating.
Why is that? If all mass is attracted by gravity, it doesn't matter what's lighter and what's heavier, they're all attracted to some degree. Unless something is pushing them away from earth? Does helium reach 'escape velocity"? or is it just a matter of it being the lightest thing on the pile (of atmosphere) which makes it wind up on the outer envelope where there is only microgravity, and be more affected by other forces (like lunar gravity or solar wind) stripping it away?
Wouldn't the lighter gasses be found out in whatever you call that, the thinning layer around the outer atmosphere? A good place to find things like helium? Think of all those balloons that popped :)
You cannot extract power from gravity, but you CAN harvest the potential energy of two masses that are being attracted to each other BY gravity.
This is not a gravity-powered lamp, it's an "environmentally-conscious person moving weights"-powered lamp.
Calling it "gravity-powered" gives the less insightful the impression that it's free energy.
Set up their whole house this way. Put a big stack of 50 lb boxes in the basement, and tell them every evening when they come home from work to haul 30 of those boxes up to the attic and set them on the platform, all of which will be in the basement by this time tomorrow. Bet they change their mind about "free energy" right quick.
Though if you REALLY think about it, people complain about not getting enough exercise, AND complain about their electric bill, and this looks like a nice way to take care of two problems at once. It'd be interesting to try to compare the two monetarily - compare the average salary of someone that works at rent-a-center or U-haul, figure out how much he'd make moving that mass during the day, and compare that with how much of the electrical bill such a mass in a similar gadget could produce. Unfortunately, electricity is relatively cheap compared to labor, and I'd bet lighting up the dinosaurs is a lot more economical in the short run.
along those lines, I know very little about astrophysics but I'm always reading about satellites that come down. Think skylab. Surely that was not in the atmosphere, so why did its orbit decay? Is it just that there is atmosphere, but it's very very thin, getting thinner and thinner as you get farther from earth?
~~Behold the flying cow with a railgun!~~
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Mission accomplished! (Score:5, Funny)
by contraba55 (1217056) on Tuesday February 19, @08:27AM (#22474412)
That remains to be seen.
Sorry but that particular combination of sig and followup comment was just too good to overlook...
I wonder what they mean by "shoot down"? It's not like an airplane, that if damaged, can't stay flying and falls to earth. If you blow up a big satellite, you end up with a bunch of little satellites, and that doesn't make them de-orbit much faster does it? I was under the understanding that blowing up stuff in space is BAD and creates a major headache more of space debris. I suppose if you really wanted to de-orbit a dead satellite you'd want to shoot a missile at it that would attach, and fire retro rockets to slow it down so it would degrade its orbit enough to hit atmosphere were it would be pulled down on its own from there.
We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.'
Damn that blood-brain barrier Hope those nanobots are packing drills.
In a just world we'd be able to sue the ISP for breech of privacy.
I wish there were some coverage of this by my local weather channels, there's no mention of an eclipse and usually they feature these when they're coming up. The weather report is partly cloudy, maybe they're waiting for their crystal ball to clear up a bit before saying whether or not we're going to miss it here in Iowa.
(I know, meteorologists don't study meteors)
No doubt! This will last less than 24 hrs (if that) before china's censorship kicks into high gear. All it should take is oh, one picture of a picture of an entrant taken as he participated in Tiananmen Square...
look out here come the ipod killers!
(pause)
ok... look out here come the iphone killers!
because featuring two aif's on slashdot is clearly not going to go well.