Is this going to be relatively live, with data being mirrored onto it regularly, or is this going to be written once and accessed occasionally from then on? If you're only going to write to it a very small portion of the time, (or even WORM), journaling will be useless to you, since anything that takes out your data won't be stopped by it.
How far into the future are you going to need it? I understand the whole "not wanting to become unreadble," but honestly, no one's going to bother re-implementing a filesystem to look at their old vacation photos. Pick a popular filesystem, and you'll be sure of support down the line. FAT's still doing just fine for itself, and the ISO filesystems for CDs and DVDs will be readable as long as people are making drives for them.
All of the data integrity features on filesystems aren't going to protect against disk failure/media wearing out, and error correction on that scale is beyond the scope of any one disk to handle. Like the department jokingly advised, parity files and other methods can handle this in a robust, media-spanning manner, and protect against everything from a few flipped bits to a whole-disk data loss (assuming you have enough parity data).
I think the reason not much talk about filesystems has been going on is because they're mostly irrelevant for this task. They're designed to handle the issues of a live environment; the issues that archives face are beyond the capability of how you choose to store your data on each piece of media to solve.
The page was deleted because, as this discussion says, wikipedia is a tertiary source, and therefore has to be based on previously-published sources. There aren't any published guides to slashdot culture to base an article on, so it's a matter of "original research," where writers are basing the article on their own first-hand knowledge. No one else can verify that, so it can't be used.
Mainly because he has a long habit of being a douche about including the informative links only in his blog post, rather than in the slashdot story itself, where they should be, and often posting stories that only serve to refer readers back to his blog.
In Plastics Day in Surgery, Red Herring reports that an international team of U.S. and German researchers has developed a new kind of plastic that can shift between three different shapes when the temperature increases. Even if these polymeric triple-shape materials have not emerged from the lab, they could eventually be employed as removable stents and self-closing fasteners used by surgeons and more generally by the healthcare industry. But read more
This research work has been published online before print by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under the name "Polymeric triple-shape materials" (November 20, 2006). Here is a link to the abstract.
Shape-memory polymers represent a promising class of materials that can move from one shape to another in response to a stimulus such as heat. Thus far, these systems are dual-shape materials. Here, we report a triple-shape polymer able to change from a first shape (A) to a second shape (B) and from there to a third shape (C). Shapes B and C are recalled by subsequent temperature increases. Whereas shapes A and B are fixed by physical cross-links, shape C is defined by covalent cross-links established during network formation.
The triple-shape effect is a general concept that requires the application of a two-step programming process to suitable polymers and can be realized for various polymer networks whose molecular structure allows formation of at least two separated domains providing pronounced physical cross-links. These domains can act as the switches, which are used in the two-step programming process for temporarily fixing shapes A and B. It is demonstrated that different combinations of shapes A and B for a polymer network in a given shape C can be obtained by adjusting specific parameters of the programming process.
Below is a series of photographs illustrating this triple-shape effect. On the left is a tube which could be used as a stent and on the right is fastener consisting of a plate with anchors. From top to bottom, you can see the shape evolution when the temperature increases to 40C (in B) and 60C (in C). (Credit: MIT/GKSS Research Center). This image has been extracted from the PNAS paper mentioned above.
Lendlein says the key to the new structures was developing two types of polymers that have distinct melting points. At room temperature, the material holds its first shape. But when heated above a certain temperature, areas throughout the material soften, allowing it to change to an intermediate shape. At a yet higher transition temperature, the rest of the material softens, allowing the structure to take its final shape.
$9 of electricity is about 100 KWh at national average rates. Passing that in 9 minutes gives you an average rate of 1.2 megawatts. What the hell knid of household has the circuit to handle that?
I'd like to see what one of these explanations are, so I can actually evaluate his reasoning. The lack of a sample leaves this review with a big gaping hole of no examples to support its conclusions.
Maroon, in the phrase "what a maroon," was often used in Warner Brothers cartoons, especially by Bugs Bunny.
But some maroons just have no awareness of cultural context...
Perhaps if someone came up with a little more open version of it, that ran Linux and let people create homebrews and sell them cheaply through the service it could actually do pretty well?
...because, you know, molestors never meet their victims through such wholesome, all-american activities.
Seriously, anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that this is not a valid complaint against Xbox Live. Anywhere adults and minors can congregate and talk, adults who wish to take advantage of minors can find them. Crippling Xbox for the sake of those who fear pedos is no more sensible than the airline policy of not seating men next to children. Watch your kids, raise them well, and talk to them yourself to make sure they're not going to see some strange old man. Paranoia is no substitute for parenting.
Is this a troll? It's the same as the difference between wikipedia and encarta--wikinews is written by the community, instead of by a reporter for the AP or Reuters or some other organization. Google News and Yahoo news are just search engines, this is a site where people actually write the news themselves.
If you'd looked at the picture, you could see that it's a credit card form factor, which means that you're dealing either with a smart-card type flash memory, or maybe even a mag stripe. It's probably a smart card, though, since you'd need the capacity.
...so it would probably be just silly to teach it without teaching to a specific program. If you're going to learn by doing, you have to do it as you go along, and to do that, it has to be taught to the program. You can't teach digital image editing in the abstract any more than you can teach painting without ever picking up a brush. Start off with a book for whatever program you feel comfortable with, and then go from there. It shouldn't be too hard to transtition from one to the other, but it's better to have a solid basis in one program than some abstract ideas with nothing to tie it to.
If they're good enough for the Space Shuttle...
on
Linus Says No to 'Specs'
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Reading this article brought to mind another one I saw mentioned on slashdot a while back, about the team that writes the code for the space shuttle's computers. They write what's considered to be the finest code in the world, which essential for running a rocket ship weighing several million pounds and moving at several thousand miles per hour. How do they do it? Specs, lots of specs. According to the article...
At the on-board shuttle group, about one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code. NASA and the Lockheed Martin group agree in the most minute detail about everything the new code is supposed to do -- and they commit that understanding to paper, with the kind of specificity and precision usually found in blueprints. Nothing in the specs is changed without agreement and understanding from both sides. And no coder changes a single line of code without specs carefully outlining the change. Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages.
Predictable code is good code. You want your code to do x when y happens, and everyone who relies on your code should know what to expect from your code under every circumstance. Kernels are supposed to be boring.
Specs may suck in some cases; if they do, they're badly written. It's an indictment of the person who wrote that spec, not the concept of specs in general. When I call a function, I expect it to do exactly what its documentation says, and it should comply with the documentation exactly.
I shouldn't have to read the code just to use it. That defeats the entire purpose of segmenting things out into separate pieces. You might as well be using gotos to write your spaghetti code.
Relatively speaking, we are. Practically every american has material wealth or income orders of magnitude above what 50% of the world lives on.
But it's still not anywhere close to being Bill Gates. Those devastated by tragedy are in need, and few really have the means to help themselves. Unfortunately, there are many people for whom horrible conditions are so routine that they don't recieve the same notice as the victims of a specific disaster.
You shouldn't start out accusatorily, because it's most likely that they're not the ones attempting the breakin. It's more likely that their box has been hijacked and is being used as a proxy to launch attacks against your computer for someone else.
After all, who uses an exchange server as their terminal to log in to other computers? If it was one of the desktops, then it would make sense that they were attacking.
The damned things were steel core, hollow point rounds designed to penetrate body armor.
That's impossible. The whole purpose of a hollowpoint is to deform on impact and spread out, which is why they have an exposed lead core. Hollowpoints suck at penetrating any sort of armor, but they're excellent at ripping up flesh. Steel cores are excellent at punching through armor, but they don't deform and don't do as much damage on the other side because of the smaller hole.
A steel core is always a full metal jacket, because the exposure of the core is only useful with a soft cored bullet. Steel core is legal, as it's not an expanding bullet.
Now that motherboards are supporting multiple video cards, wouldn't it just make more sense to put in two good dualhead cards, instead of struggling to find a single triple head card?
Just get a good PCI Express-based machine, and fit it with twin dualheads. You can even add a fourth monitor if you want it.
Well, Scott Adams once predicted that the Holodeck will be the last invention that humanity ever creates. Wouldn't surprise me if he turned out to be right.
3D viewing through spinning projections is nothing new. Viewers which utilize an upwards-facing projector and rotating screen in the center of a sphere have been around for a while. I can't find a link at the moment, but the concept is not new. It is cool to see LEDs and fiber-optics used, as well as a new real-time scanning method.
Freely available means less cause to pirate
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's no surprise to me why TV hasn't been popular with pirates. There's no incentive to pirate episodes of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Futurama when they can be seen, full-screen, full quality, in syndication, or, with the help of tivo, any time you want. Television is piped into one's home relatively free, with no download times, no partial/misnamed files, and no risk of prosecution.
The only real reason for piracy is convienence, since the average college student, for example, has a computer and broadband, but no TV. Also, collectors may want an entire series, or a show that is no longer being broadcast.
I doubt TV piracy will ever explode like, say, music downloads, since it's a product that's available for free, but there is a market of desire, and, as people discover the availability, TV downloading will grow just as music downloading has, leading to collections of more songs than most people could ever afford to buy on their own.
Glow in the Dark is phosphorescent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence
UV Reactive is flourescent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence
Just an FYI
Countries have sovereignty over their airspace, just as they do over their seas. They're free to withdraw overflight privileges and shoot down any plane that tries to enter, but to do so is likely to cause a diplomatic incident.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this going to be relatively live, with data being mirrored onto it regularly, or is this going to be written once and accessed occasionally from then on? If you're only going to write to it a very small portion of the time, (or even WORM), journaling will be useless to you, since anything that takes out your data won't be stopped by it.
How far into the future are you going to need it? I understand the whole "not wanting to become unreadble," but honestly, no one's going to bother re-implementing a filesystem to look at their old vacation photos. Pick a popular filesystem, and you'll be sure of support down the line. FAT's still doing just fine for itself, and the ISO filesystems for CDs and DVDs will be readable as long as people are making drives for them.
All of the data integrity features on filesystems aren't going to protect against disk failure/media wearing out, and error correction on that scale is beyond the scope of any one disk to handle. Like the department jokingly advised, parity files and other methods can handle this in a robust, media-spanning manner, and protect against everything from a few flipped bits to a whole-disk data loss (assuming you have enough parity data).
I think the reason not much talk about filesystems has been going on is because they're mostly irrelevant for this task. They're designed to handle the issues of a live environment; the issues that archives face are beyond the capability of how you choose to store your data on each piece of media to solve.
The page was deleted because, as this discussion says, wikipedia is a tertiary source, and therefore has to be based on previously-published sources. There aren't any published guides to slashdot culture to base an article on, so it's a matter of "original research," where writers are basing the article on their own first-hand knowledge. No one else can verify that, so it can't be used.
Mainly because he has a long habit of being a douche about including the informative links only in his blog post, rather than in the slashdot story itself, where they should be, and often posting stories that only serve to refer readers back to his blog.
In Plastics Day in Surgery, Red Herring reports that an international team of U.S. and German researchers has developed a new kind of plastic that can shift between three different shapes when the temperature increases. Even if these polymeric triple-shape materials have not emerged from the lab, they could eventually be employed as removable stents and self-closing fasteners used by surgeons and more generally by the healthcare industry. But read more
This research work has been done partially at the MIT in Professor Robert Langers research lab. Please note that Ive already covered a previous Langers project in "Light Used to Design Shape-Shifting Plastics" (April 14, 2005).
For this new kind of plastic, Langer worked with Professor Andreas Lendlein, director of the Institute of Polymer Research at the GKSS Research Center in Teltow, Germany, and his team.
This research work has been published online before print by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under the name "Polymeric triple-shape materials" (November 20, 2006). Here is a link to the abstract.
Below is a series of photographs illustrating this triple-shape effect. On the left is a tube which could be used as a stent and on the right is fastener consisting of a plate with anchors. From top to bottom, you can see the shape evolution when the temperature increases to 40C (in B) and 60C (in C). (Credit: MIT/GKSS Research Center). This image has been extracted from the PNAS paper mentioned above.
Picture
In "Morphing Materials Take On New Shapes," Technology Review describes this process in plain English.
But what would be these
er, 5 minutes. The calculation I did on 5 minutes.
$9 of electricity is about 100 KWh at national average rates. Passing that in 9 minutes gives you an average rate of 1.2 megawatts. What the hell knid of household has the circuit to handle that?
I'd like to see what one of these explanations are, so I can actually evaluate his reasoning. The lack of a sample leaves this review with a big gaping hole of no examples to support its conclusions.
From Wikipedia:
Bit rate = 44100 samples/s × 16 bit/sample × 2 channels = 1411.2 kbit/s (more than 10 MB per minute)
Maroon, in the phrase "what a maroon," was often used in Warner Brothers cartoons, especially by Bugs Bunny. But some maroons just have no awareness of cultural context...
Or, see the onion's take on it: I Can Write 600 Words About Anything
Perhaps if someone came up with a little more open version of it, that ran Linux and let people create homebrews and sell them cheaply through the service it could actually do pretty well?
Someone did. It failed.
...because, you know, molestors never meet their victims through such wholesome, all-american activities.
Seriously, anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that this is not a valid complaint against Xbox Live. Anywhere adults and minors can congregate and talk, adults who wish to take advantage of minors can find them. Crippling Xbox for the sake of those who fear pedos is no more sensible than the airline policy of not seating men next to children. Watch your kids, raise them well, and talk to them yourself to make sure they're not going to see some strange old man. Paranoia is no substitute for parenting.
Is this a troll? It's the same as the difference between wikipedia and encarta--wikinews is written by the community, instead of by a reporter for the AP or Reuters or some other organization. Google News and Yahoo news are just search engines, this is a site where people actually write the news themselves.
If you'd looked at the picture, you could see that it's a credit card form factor, which means that you're dealing either with a smart-card type flash memory, or maybe even a mag stripe. It's probably a smart card, though, since you'd need the capacity.
...so it would probably be just silly to teach it without teaching to a specific program. If you're going to learn by doing, you have to do it as you go along, and to do that, it has to be taught to the program. You can't teach digital image editing in the abstract any more than you can teach painting without ever picking up a brush. Start off with a book for whatever program you feel comfortable with, and then go from there. It shouldn't be too hard to transtition from one to the other, but it's better to have a solid basis in one program than some abstract ideas with nothing to tie it to.
Predictable code is good code. You want your code to do x when y happens, and everyone who relies on your code should know what to expect from your code under every circumstance. Kernels are supposed to be boring.
Specs may suck in some cases; if they do, they're badly written. It's an indictment of the person who wrote that spec, not the concept of specs in general. When I call a function, I expect it to do exactly what its documentation says, and it should comply with the documentation exactly.
I shouldn't have to read the code just to use it. That defeats the entire purpose of segmenting things out into separate pieces. You might as well be using gotos to write your spaghetti code.
Relatively speaking, we are. Practically every american has material wealth or income orders of magnitude above what 50% of the world lives on. But it's still not anywhere close to being Bill Gates. Those devastated by tragedy are in need, and few really have the means to help themselves. Unfortunately, there are many people for whom horrible conditions are so routine that they don't recieve the same notice as the victims of a specific disaster.
You shouldn't start out accusatorily, because it's most likely that they're not the ones attempting the breakin. It's more likely that their box has been hijacked and is being used as a proxy to launch attacks against your computer for someone else.
After all, who uses an exchange server as their terminal to log in to other computers? If it was one of the desktops, then it would make sense that they were attacking.
The damned things were steel core, hollow point rounds designed to penetrate body armor.
That's impossible. The whole purpose of a hollowpoint is to deform on impact and spread out, which is why they have an exposed lead core. Hollowpoints suck at penetrating any sort of armor, but they're excellent at ripping up flesh. Steel cores are excellent at punching through armor, but they don't deform and don't do as much damage on the other side because of the smaller hole.
A steel core is always a full metal jacket, because the exposure of the core is only useful with a soft cored bullet. Steel core is legal, as it's not an expanding bullet.
Now that motherboards are supporting multiple video cards, wouldn't it just make more sense to put in two good dualhead cards, instead of struggling to find a single triple head card?
Just get a good PCI Express-based machine, and fit it with twin dualheads. You can even add a fourth monitor if you want it.
Well, Scott Adams once predicted that the Holodeck will be the last invention that humanity ever creates. Wouldn't surprise me if he turned out to be right.
3D viewing through spinning projections is nothing new. Viewers which utilize an upwards-facing projector and rotating screen in the center of a sphere have been around for a while. I can't find a link at the moment, but the concept is not new. It is cool to see LEDs and fiber-optics used, as well as a new real-time scanning method.
The really cool ones, though, are the hologram techinques that use reflected light to produce an image in space. Here's a short piece from wired and an over view of some other technology.
Actually, it's no surprise to me why TV hasn't been popular with pirates. There's no incentive to pirate episodes of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Futurama when they can be seen, full-screen, full quality, in syndication, or, with the help of tivo, any time you want. Television is piped into one's home relatively free, with no download times, no partial/misnamed files, and no risk of prosecution. The only real reason for piracy is convienence, since the average college student, for example, has a computer and broadband, but no TV. Also, collectors may want an entire series, or a show that is no longer being broadcast. I doubt TV piracy will ever explode like, say, music downloads, since it's a product that's available for free, but there is a market of desire, and, as people discover the availability, TV downloading will grow just as music downloading has, leading to collections of more songs than most people could ever afford to buy on their own.
Glow in the Dark is phosphorescent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence UV Reactive is flourescent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence Just an FYI
Countries have sovereignty over their airspace, just as they do over their seas. They're free to withdraw overflight privileges and shoot down any plane that tries to enter, but to do so is likely to cause a diplomatic incident.