Why don't all those operating system providers get it right in the first place, or car makers, or hell, just about anything?
Operating systems tend to be far more complex than RAID controllers. Generally speaking there is a higher expectation of right-first-time when it comes to hardware/firmware.
Sure, cars have recalls, but they tend to be expensive and rare.
The pressure at which the water starts to boil is more of a practical limit than a true one. The problem is that as the water boils it produces gas at a rate greater than your pump can remove it, so you reach a steady state at greater than zero pressure. If your pump was REALLY strong you could get the pressure lower, though all the water would eventually boil away.
The other bit of kinetics going on is with heat. Boiling is endothermic, and thus either needs a flow of heat from the outside or it will lower the temperature of the water. Eventually the column of water will start to freeze (which is exothermic), and the rate of boiling/sublimation will steadily drop as the temperature of the ice approaches absolute zero (if the tube is perfectly insulated).
The maximum height of the rising leg of the siphon is, in fact, the same as the height the fluid would be in a barometer.
That makes sense to me. If you took a 100m tall u-tube and filled it with water, and then inverted it, the water would fall down on both sides of the tube, creating a vacuum on the top. If you moved the basin on one side of the tube lower than the other, the water level on that side of the tube would fall by the same distance, but the water level on the other side of the tube would not fall at all. Nothing connects the two columns of water capable of transferring a force from one to the other - only a near-vacuum exists between them (in reality it would be steam in equilibrium with both columns at the vapor pressure).
Mod Anon Informative... Siphoning works with all liquids within their vapor pressure limits regardless of surface tension or cohesion properties.
Is siphoning limited to liquids? Could you not siphon a gas as long as it were kept from leaking out of the apparatus, but the volumes of the upper and lower containers were not constrained?
For example, I would suspect that CO2 would follow the path of a siphon.
Heartbleed scanning broke some iLOs by freezing them up, requiring power cycle.
Lovely. I occasionally run vulnerability scans that freeze up printers and the like.
The correct solution to this problem is for vendors to actually correctly implement protocols. The device should accept arbitrary data without locking up, short of that data including a valid password and an instruction to do something that is supposed to cause it to lock up.
So, the server failure shouldn't be a big deal since everything is redundant in the first place. Then, anybody maintaining servers for which downtime is critical should have the necessary replacement parts just ready to go. They shouldn't be relying on other production servers to do configuration/etc work.
I don't think the solution to these problems is to just always keep reflashing firmware.
But plenty of admins would flash to the latest when they get a system to be deployed....
Sure, it only makes sense to start out with a current set of firmware if you haven't started testing the thing yet. If it breaks, I'd call that a warranty issue.
what happens is that if you get a bad hard drive or something routine like that HP will make a big deal if your RAID firmware or HD firmware is not up to date or too many versions behind. so i run these service packs once or twice a year
Well, that falls into the category of fixing things if they're broken (if you keep getting RAID failures, check your RAID firmware).
BUT...
Why the heck can't they get the firmware right in the first place? I appreciate the value in being able to update the firmware in the event of a rare problem. What I don't get is when the problems aren't rare. I ran into an HP server whose RAID kept failing drives until we updated the firmware on the RAID. For whatever reason the unpaid mdadm guys are able to build a software RAID controller that doesn't randomly fail drives.
I could see needing a firmware update to take advantage of some new SCSI standard that didn't exist when the controller was first made (though it would be optional since drives should support the older standards as well). There is really no excuse for buggy firmware.
If HP's firmware is buggy, and it causes HP to do unnecessary drive replacements, then that should be HP's problem. Sure, I can do them a favor and update the firmware, but there should be an acknowledgement that it was their initial incompetence that drove the need to do that.
Do admins routinely flash firmware updates in the absence of some identified need? I could see flashing an update if I was suffering from a known problem, or if the vendor identified a security flaw in a previous release. I could see flashing it if necessary to install new hardware.
I just don't see why a server admin would flash a firmware update as if it were Patch Tuesday. In the absence of a security vulnerability or production issue there is no reason to treat a firmware change as an expedited change and not perform full testing before deploying it. That isn't to say that doing some testing of security patches/etc isn't wise - but I can see why it would get rushed.
They transcoded it a ton, don't expect FLAC or even mp3 v0. Seems more for publicity.
"...came from.ogg files that were encoded from.wav files that were created from.mp3 files that were encoded from the mastered.wav files which were generated from ProTools final mix.wav files that were created from 24-track analog tape."
Mod this insightful! I was tricked and thought that loadable kernel modules were going to be the music distribution format of the future... it seems so convenient! But it turns out that this was just about the publicity. How dissapointing!
Well, the next step is to add DRM. The next version of the album will disable all output so that you can't try to record the signal going to the speakers. The version after that will wipe your hard drive just in case you did manage to record it anyway.
If the slow lane is available and it's "sufficient", does it matter if certain fast lanes are unavailable to certain zip codes? Isn't Net Neutrality mostly satisfied if the slow lane can keep a good enough status?
If the slow lane is good enough, then nobody is going to pay the ISP to let them use the fast lane. That in turn means that the last thing the ISPs are going to do is allow the slow lane to be good enough.
The problem with IRV is that it fails at the point where it actually almost works. Once you get to a point where the alternative parties get close to the main parties everybody has incentive to vote strategically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The concept of ranking candidates is a good one. IRV has the advantage of being simple to explain, but once the third parties actually acumulate a significant number of votes it can fail to pick the "right" winner. That in turn leads people to not vote their true intention - eliminating their second-place choices, or listing their first-place choice in second-place, etc.
I get what you're saying but in the practical world it makes no difference. No one picks f/1.4 because they need that low-light performance. At that aperture the depth of field starts border-lining into alternative art. I know very few situations where you would benefit from the light capturing capabilities in a situation so dark where it would be almost impossible to accurately focus the hairline depth of field on your subject.
Depth of field is also a function of range. If you're taking picture of a school play from halfway back in the auditorium, a fast lens will help quite a bit. The subjects are moving, so you can't use longer exposures and image stabilization is useless - you need a somewhat fast shutter. Flash on its own won't do any good at that range unless you can stick remote flashes on the stage or you're using something fairly exotic (and high-intensity flashes during a play aren't exactly unobtrusive). At a distance of 100+ feet the depth of field will be fairly significant, and when you get out further than that you're approaching the hyperfocal distance. At that kind of distance you get multiple foot depth of field even with a 200mm lens (certainly at any aperture you'll find on such a lens).
Sure, a faster sensor also helps, but every sensor degrades with increases in ISO.
Now, if you're doing photography where you can control the composition/lighting/etc, then the aperture is mainly for the sake of minimizing depth of field.
> I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration.
Oh well, I stand corrected. I didn't know someone else had done it first! Well that fucking changes everything doesn't it? Who am I to question the traditional practices of our people?
> If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them
Yes the pot often does seem to spend a lot of energy calling the kettle black.
I wasn't suggesting that I agreed with the practice. I only wanted to point out that it isn't really a partisan issue.
TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.
The difference was that in the past they'd have to spend $5-10k and then they can watch one person for a period of an hour or two. Now they can spend $100/day and record everybody in a whole town, without targeting anybody in particular.
This isn't a camera with a zoom lens. This is a high-resolution wide-field camera, that effectively behaves like it is zoomed in on everybody everywhere at the same time.
This particular case was kept secret, but there is a NOVA episode about something similar being done in a DC suburb. They kept a drone aloft for a month recording literally everything that happened in a small city (well, everything visible from the air). The camera was wide-field high-resolution, so you could crop and zoom any part of the video and get an image comparable to what you might see on a news camera from a helicopter zoomed in. They recorded a whole month, so you could go back and look at what anybody was doing anywhere after the fact.
So, this isn't really news per-se, so much as news that the technology is becoming more ubiquitous.
> Even a full Republican Congress would not move to impeach Obama on the basis of targeting Americans that > are ALLEGED terrorist operatives hanging out with other ALLEGED terrorists in Yemen...
FTFY
Sure, but doesn't change anything. I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration. If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them (what! there are still civilian structures standing in Yemen?!! why aren't there boots on the ground?).
Well, the one that always comes up is ForeFlight. It is in the App Store but not available on Android.
Then there is Garmin Pilot - which is on both, but the iOS app is always about a year or two ahead in terms of features (the Android one just got a big update which brings it up to where the iOS version was in 2012 I think).
Until that update the Garmin app on Android was actually inferior in most aspects to the FOSS Avare, which has about two volunteer devs. Discussion forums had users openly talking about switching to the biggest brand name in aviation navigation to FOSS software or start-ups. I'd say Garmin is now substantially ahead of Avare on Android, but Avare isn't standing still and could conceivably catch back up.
Exclusive applications drive me nuts in just about all cases. People shouldn't need to juggle devices just to run their favorite apps.
Maybe, but if anti-Obamacare, what are you in favor of? Are you in favor of just rolling things back to what they were? Or are you in favor of trying to fix it, or move to single-payer, or something like that?
Everybody can be anti-Obamacare but that doesn't mean that people agree on what comes next. Nobody could have gotten elected in 2008 without being anti-2008-healthcare.
Those questions weren't directed at you. My point is that being "anti-Obamacare" doesn't really tell you anything.
Granted that might be the strategy, but it'll surely fail if both are doing it... nobody (I'm probably wrong) would base the purchase of an iPad on the basis of a specific casual game.
Agree. I've seen pilots buy an extra iPad just to run some iOS-only application, but you're talking about an app that costs $150/yr to use, on a plane that costs $100/hr to run, that replaces a $5000 piece of dedicated hardware. So, if your alternative is to spend $5k on a hobby you already spend tons on, then buying a tablet you won't use for anything else isn't a big deal.
On the other hand, for the average person who is already integrated into the Apple or Google environment with iTunes, Google Music All Access, one or two mobile platforms, and so on, they're not going to buy a $500 device that isn't useful for anything else just so that they can play one more game. That isn't even counting incremental costs like a data plan (which somebody might already have on their existing tablet, but wouldn't have on a new one without a substantial cost).
The problem is with your scenario is that major plane failure disasters happen so infrequently. Where do you find a room full of 'seasoned' disaster recovery pilots to sit around 24/7 waiting for that to happen. And who pays for it?
They can afford to put them on every plane in the air right now. Paying to have two crews on standby for all the flights in progress won't be a problem. Plus, you'll need people to manage just routine route changes/etc while planes are in flight anyway (not that this would require full manual control or crisis response).
I'm on the same page as you. I use evernote for the cloud convenience, and it gets me automatic backup of all my documents for free.
I periodically dump everything locally. I usually use their xml export format, figuring that if they ever went out of business suddenly somebody else would come up with a way to transform it. In the more likely case that I have a sense that they're going out of business I can export to html as you suggest, but as a backup format a tree full of html isn't ideal.
I use an Echo (bought it before the Sky came out), and I'll echo all the above. I periodically export my evernote data and save it in case the service goes down.
With the Echo you're not limited to Adobe to listen to the recordings - you can also listen to them with the supplied client software. The Sky does not use client software as it just directly syncs to Evernote.
The only thing that makes me nervous about the Sky is that it is dependent on an outside service. In theory my Echo pen will work 10 years after Livescribe and Evernote goes out of business - I just can't upload my notes to Evernote. But, the Sky certainly seems more useful to me overall - perhaps I'll upgrade and donate my Echo to a college student.
I have a livescribe pen, which I use for exactly the reasons you state. It requires special paper, but the cost of the paper is cheap compared to the time I spend writing on it.
It captures everything written and can output in PDF, and can also do correlated audio recordinds, export to evernote, etc. Since it captures the path and not just the resulting image the OCR should be better than for scanned handwriting.
If I had a pen-based tablet I could see going electronic, but I doubt I could do handwriting on a standard touchscreen tablet very well (a pen-based tablet only detects input from the pen - you can touch the screen with your finger and nothing happens).
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Why don't all those operating system providers get it right in the first place, or car makers, or hell, just about anything?
Operating systems tend to be far more complex than RAID controllers. Generally speaking there is a higher expectation of right-first-time when it comes to hardware/firmware.
Sure, cars have recalls, but they tend to be expensive and rare.
You could have the gas in a flexible bladder, or my example of CO2 which is more dense than air.
The pressure at which the water starts to boil is more of a practical limit than a true one. The problem is that as the water boils it produces gas at a rate greater than your pump can remove it, so you reach a steady state at greater than zero pressure. If your pump was REALLY strong you could get the pressure lower, though all the water would eventually boil away.
The other bit of kinetics going on is with heat. Boiling is endothermic, and thus either needs a flow of heat from the outside or it will lower the temperature of the water. Eventually the column of water will start to freeze (which is exothermic), and the rate of boiling/sublimation will steadily drop as the temperature of the ice approaches absolute zero (if the tube is perfectly insulated).
The maximum height of the rising leg of the siphon is, in fact, the same as the height the fluid would be in a barometer.
That makes sense to me. If you took a 100m tall u-tube and filled it with water, and then inverted it, the water would fall down on both sides of the tube, creating a vacuum on the top. If you moved the basin on one side of the tube lower than the other, the water level on that side of the tube would fall by the same distance, but the water level on the other side of the tube would not fall at all. Nothing connects the two columns of water capable of transferring a force from one to the other - only a near-vacuum exists between them (in reality it would be steam in equilibrium with both columns at the vapor pressure).
Mod Anon Informative... Siphoning works with all liquids within their vapor pressure limits regardless of surface tension or cohesion properties.
Is siphoning limited to liquids? Could you not siphon a gas as long as it were kept from leaking out of the apparatus, but the volumes of the upper and lower containers were not constrained?
For example, I would suspect that CO2 would follow the path of a siphon.
Heartbleed scanning broke some iLOs by freezing them up, requiring power cycle.
Lovely. I occasionally run vulnerability scans that freeze up printers and the like.
The correct solution to this problem is for vendors to actually correctly implement protocols. The device should accept arbitrary data without locking up, short of that data including a valid password and an instruction to do something that is supposed to cause it to lock up.
So, the server failure shouldn't be a big deal since everything is redundant in the first place. Then, anybody maintaining servers for which downtime is critical should have the necessary replacement parts just ready to go. They shouldn't be relying on other production servers to do configuration/etc work.
I don't think the solution to these problems is to just always keep reflashing firmware.
But plenty of admins would flash to the latest when they get a system to be deployed....
Sure, it only makes sense to start out with a current set of firmware if you haven't started testing the thing yet. If it breaks, I'd call that a warranty issue.
once or twice a year
what happens is that if you get a bad hard drive or something routine like that HP will make a big deal if your RAID firmware or HD firmware is not up to date or too many versions behind. so i run these service packs once or twice a year
Well, that falls into the category of fixing things if they're broken (if you keep getting RAID failures, check your RAID firmware).
BUT...
Why the heck can't they get the firmware right in the first place? I appreciate the value in being able to update the firmware in the event of a rare problem. What I don't get is when the problems aren't rare. I ran into an HP server whose RAID kept failing drives until we updated the firmware on the RAID. For whatever reason the unpaid mdadm guys are able to build a software RAID controller that doesn't randomly fail drives.
I could see needing a firmware update to take advantage of some new SCSI standard that didn't exist when the controller was first made (though it would be optional since drives should support the older standards as well). There is really no excuse for buggy firmware.
If HP's firmware is buggy, and it causes HP to do unnecessary drive replacements, then that should be HP's problem. Sure, I can do them a favor and update the firmware, but there should be an acknowledgement that it was their initial incompetence that drove the need to do that.
...don't flash it.
Do admins routinely flash firmware updates in the absence of some identified need? I could see flashing an update if I was suffering from a known problem, or if the vendor identified a security flaw in a previous release. I could see flashing it if necessary to install new hardware.
I just don't see why a server admin would flash a firmware update as if it were Patch Tuesday. In the absence of a security vulnerability or production issue there is no reason to treat a firmware change as an expedited change and not perform full testing before deploying it. That isn't to say that doing some testing of security patches/etc isn't wise - but I can see why it would get rushed.
They transcoded it a ton, don't expect FLAC or even mp3 v0. Seems more for publicity.
"...came from .ogg files that were encoded from .wav files that were created from .mp3 files that were encoded from the mastered .wav files which were generated from ProTools final mix .wav files that were created from 24-track analog tape."
Mod this insightful! I was tricked and thought that loadable kernel modules were going to be the music distribution format of the future... it seems so convenient! But it turns out that this was just about the publicity. How dissapointing!
Well, the next step is to add DRM. The next version of the album will disable all output so that you can't try to record the signal going to the speakers. The version after that will wipe your hard drive just in case you did manage to record it anyway.
If the slow lane is available and it's "sufficient", does it matter if certain fast lanes are unavailable to certain zip codes? Isn't Net Neutrality mostly satisfied if the slow lane can keep a good enough status?
If the slow lane is good enough, then nobody is going to pay the ISP to let them use the fast lane. That in turn means that the last thing the ISPs are going to do is allow the slow lane to be good enough.
The problem with IRV is that it fails at the point where it actually almost works. Once you get to a point where the alternative parties get close to the main parties everybody has incentive to vote strategically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The concept of ranking candidates is a good one. IRV has the advantage of being simple to explain, but once the third parties actually acumulate a significant number of votes it can fail to pick the "right" winner. That in turn leads people to not vote their true intention - eliminating their second-place choices, or listing their first-place choice in second-place, etc.
I get what you're saying but in the practical world it makes no difference. No one picks f/1.4 because they need that low-light performance. At that aperture the depth of field starts border-lining into alternative art. I know very few situations where you would benefit from the light capturing capabilities in a situation so dark where it would be almost impossible to accurately focus the hairline depth of field on your subject.
Depth of field is also a function of range. If you're taking picture of a school play from halfway back in the auditorium, a fast lens will help quite a bit. The subjects are moving, so you can't use longer exposures and image stabilization is useless - you need a somewhat fast shutter. Flash on its own won't do any good at that range unless you can stick remote flashes on the stage or you're using something fairly exotic (and high-intensity flashes during a play aren't exactly unobtrusive). At a distance of 100+ feet the depth of field will be fairly significant, and when you get out further than that you're approaching the hyperfocal distance. At that kind of distance you get multiple foot depth of field even with a 200mm lens (certainly at any aperture you'll find on such a lens).
Sure, a faster sensor also helps, but every sensor degrades with increases in ISO.
Now, if you're doing photography where you can control the composition/lighting/etc, then the aperture is mainly for the sake of minimizing depth of field.
> I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration.
Oh well, I stand corrected. I didn't know someone else had done it first! Well that fucking changes everything doesn't it? Who am I to question the traditional practices of our people?
> If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them
Yes the pot often does seem to spend a lot of energy calling the kettle black.
I wasn't suggesting that I agreed with the practice. I only wanted to point out that it isn't really a partisan issue.
TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.
The difference was that in the past they'd have to spend $5-10k and then they can watch one person for a period of an hour or two. Now they can spend $100/day and record everybody in a whole town, without targeting anybody in particular.
This isn't a camera with a zoom lens. This is a high-resolution wide-field camera, that effectively behaves like it is zoomed in on everybody everywhere at the same time.
This particular case was kept secret, but there is a NOVA episode about something similar being done in a DC suburb. They kept a drone aloft for a month recording literally everything that happened in a small city (well, everything visible from the air). The camera was wide-field high-resolution, so you could crop and zoom any part of the video and get an image comparable to what you might see on a news camera from a helicopter zoomed in. They recorded a whole month, so you could go back and look at what anybody was doing anywhere after the fact.
So, this isn't really news per-se, so much as news that the technology is becoming more ubiquitous.
> Even a full Republican Congress would not move to impeach Obama on the basis of targeting Americans that
> are ALLEGED terrorist operatives hanging out with other ALLEGED terrorists in Yemen...
FTFY
Sure, but doesn't change anything. I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration. If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them (what! there are still civilian structures standing in Yemen?!! why aren't there boots on the ground?).
Well, the one that always comes up is ForeFlight. It is in the App Store but not available on Android.
Then there is Garmin Pilot - which is on both, but the iOS app is always about a year or two ahead in terms of features (the Android one just got a big update which brings it up to where the iOS version was in 2012 I think).
Until that update the Garmin app on Android was actually inferior in most aspects to the FOSS Avare, which has about two volunteer devs. Discussion forums had users openly talking about switching to the biggest brand name in aviation navigation to FOSS software or start-ups. I'd say Garmin is now substantially ahead of Avare on Android, but Avare isn't standing still and could conceivably catch back up.
Exclusive applications drive me nuts in just about all cases. People shouldn't need to juggle devices just to run their favorite apps.
Maybe, but if anti-Obamacare, what are you in favor of? Are you in favor of just rolling things back to what they were? Or are you in favor of trying to fix it, or move to single-payer, or something like that?
Everybody can be anti-Obamacare but that doesn't mean that people agree on what comes next. Nobody could have gotten elected in 2008 without being anti-2008-healthcare.
Those questions weren't directed at you. My point is that being "anti-Obamacare" doesn't really tell you anything.
Granted that might be the strategy, but it'll surely fail if both are doing it... nobody (I'm probably wrong) would base the purchase of an iPad on the basis of a specific casual game.
Agree. I've seen pilots buy an extra iPad just to run some iOS-only application, but you're talking about an app that costs $150/yr to use, on a plane that costs $100/hr to run, that replaces a $5000 piece of dedicated hardware. So, if your alternative is to spend $5k on a hobby you already spend tons on, then buying a tablet you won't use for anything else isn't a big deal.
On the other hand, for the average person who is already integrated into the Apple or Google environment with iTunes, Google Music All Access, one or two mobile platforms, and so on, they're not going to buy a $500 device that isn't useful for anything else just so that they can play one more game. That isn't even counting incremental costs like a data plan (which somebody might already have on their existing tablet, but wouldn't have on a new one without a substantial cost).
The problem is with your scenario is that major plane failure disasters happen so infrequently. Where do you find a room full of 'seasoned' disaster recovery pilots to sit around 24/7 waiting for that to happen. And who pays for it?
They can afford to put them on every plane in the air right now. Paying to have two crews on standby for all the flights in progress won't be a problem. Plus, you'll need people to manage just routine route changes/etc while planes are in flight anyway (not that this would require full manual control or crisis response).
I'm on the same page as you. I use evernote for the cloud convenience, and it gets me automatic backup of all my documents for free.
I periodically dump everything locally. I usually use their xml export format, figuring that if they ever went out of business suddenly somebody else would come up with a way to transform it. In the more likely case that I have a sense that they're going out of business I can export to html as you suggest, but as a backup format a tree full of html isn't ideal.
I use an Echo (bought it before the Sky came out), and I'll echo all the above. I periodically export my evernote data and save it in case the service goes down.
With the Echo you're not limited to Adobe to listen to the recordings - you can also listen to them with the supplied client software. The Sky does not use client software as it just directly syncs to Evernote.
The only thing that makes me nervous about the Sky is that it is dependent on an outside service. In theory my Echo pen will work 10 years after Livescribe and Evernote goes out of business - I just can't upload my notes to Evernote. But, the Sky certainly seems more useful to me overall - perhaps I'll upgrade and donate my Echo to a college student.
I have a livescribe pen, which I use for exactly the reasons you state. It requires special paper, but the cost of the paper is cheap compared to the time I spend writing on it.
It captures everything written and can output in PDF, and can also do correlated audio recordinds, export to evernote, etc. Since it captures the path and not just the resulting image the OCR should be better than for scanned handwriting.
If I had a pen-based tablet I could see going electronic, but I doubt I could do handwriting on a standard touchscreen tablet very well (a pen-based tablet only detects input from the pen - you can touch the screen with your finger and nothing happens).