This is the same Barry Shein who used to deny his ISP was blocking emails and continued to deny such until incontrovertably proven so by his customers, then he got all pissy about it. Now he proclaims it as a service and takes credit, pardon me while I boggle at his self-serving duplicity; he's hardly a champion for customer service.
Was CUPS not present in earlier releases of Mac OS X?
CUPS was introduced to MacOS X in 10.2 - "Jaguar"
If it was present, will Apple release fixes for those, or just force everyone to buy the 10.2 upgrade?
It's irrelevant to folks prior to 10.2 (unless they've added it manually in which case they can update it the same way) and a free update to those with 10.2.n. Even comes in a combo patch so folks can skip intermediate releases.
No forcing, no extra cost, the patch was released at the same time as the vulnerability announced, got anything else you wanna try and pick on?
Insofar as I understand MS isn't under any court order to open their file formats, just not to continue with specific unethical tactics on others (wristslap.) So if MS claims they're using XML in Office v.11 (hey, didn't they claim that about Office v.10 too...) big whoop-de-doo, it's really their decision.
Actually it's remarkable MS is even going for XML at all. MS's own internal formats are a terrible mess, the code that produces it apparently such a tangle MS has terrible trouble keeping on top of it, now trying to put this all into a new format has got to be a monster. Doing all of this while keeping all of the MS'isms and editing features and not breaking every other part (both theirs & third-party) that uses these services & components has got to be daunting.
Yeah, it'll likely end up being idiosyncratic and quirky full of all the bugs MS is famous for but hell, a semi-legible format has gotta be better then the stuff MS pumps out now. Of course this whole "beta" process we're in right now has been pretty conclusively demonstrated to be a marketing sham with the significant decisions all made and the feature-set frozen long ago.
You wont be able to see them. Even the giant airships of the '3os were invisible when flying at altitude.
As to casting a shadow the brightness of the sky (much less the sun) quickly fades out any shadow; the same as high-flying planes don't cast visible shadows (unlike low-altitude ones near airports.)
Any environmental effects of these would be very minimal, far less then those of a conventional plane or helicopter.
Just to be a bit more realistic we're talking about one trail per minute or so. While that's nice to see when laying on one's back next to someone you like, or just for the thrill of it if you're into astronomy, it's not enough to get most folks off their couches. Considering also it's mid-winter in the northern hemisphere the viewership is likely somewhat limited.
As to "are there more of these?" Nope. We have had a few spectacular shows in the past few years but nothing statistically unusual or anything more then wider reporting and slightly more accurate predictions.
Usual tips apply: Get out of the city, away from parking-lot lights, hills help block glare, let your eyes adjust, remember that a clear sky is COLD, binoculars are useless for this but entertaining for looking at other things like nebula and Jupiter's moons, look up online for tips regarding astrophotography and no your camera flash won't help...
First off folks outside Canadia don't realize how HUGE Bell Canada is.
They own my long-distance service.
The own my local service.
They own my cellphone service.
They own my ISP.
They own my satellite TV service.
They own 1/2 the channels on the TV (Discovery, TLC, etc.)
They own umpteen other things I'm likely not aware of and use every day.
Basically, if Bell Canada (or their holding company) wants to do something price isn't a problem, gov't regulations aren't an issue, and they're already so in bed with municipalities they can pretty much plug in anything they want where they want for as long as they want. In short if they wanna go WiFi they've got everything in place to make it happen, happen big, and nobody can compete.
Profit? They don't need to worry about that for a long time. They could support this for a decade while the market matures and its cost would still be in with the round-off errors of their ledgers. In the meantime they'll OWN the whole deal across Canada and be damn attractive to US sites looking for a stable partner. Forget.bombs, deal with a megacorp with lots of technology already in place. Pretty attractive to a hotel, airport, or municipality.
Yeah, I think this really could bring a big change to North America. The Baby Bells in the US are fractured and hamstrung. But with the market opened up to foreign ownership and activity Bell Canada may well have found their entrée into the US market. Widespread 802.11, first domestically then in the US, that could well be their opportunity. Forget cellular or land-line, offer a last-mile wireless.
Accept that you can't just stick magnetic media on a shelf (in a vault, even climate-controlled) and expect it to last forever.
Bits rot. Under the most perfectly controlled environment the damn stuff still goes bad. Be realistic, anticipate this, do everything you can to slow it down, but plan for it and make provisions when you first put your archiving strategy in place. Tapes are likely more robust the platters as there's fewer critical parts to go wrong but nothing is perfect.
Accept that CD & DVD don't have 100-year lifespans, mebbe not 10 year, and possibly far less.
Yes they're cheap but we've far less experience with these media then we do with tape and studies are showing that they dyes may not be as stable as first thought. Heck, there's even a bug out there that eats some of these. There's also the question of long-term standards in some cases like DVDs.
Checksums and multiple-backups (that reinforce eachother) are a necessity.
Nothings worse then losing one part of an archive at one site, another part at a different site, and being unable to easily reconcile the two to get a good whole set. Make sure that however you archive things, same media or different media, that partial archives can be reconciled.
Everything evolves - Keep updating backups.
Years ago there was a big scramble to recover the US Govt's 1950 Census. It had been stored on steel tape and the required Unisys readers were no longer. (Much of the data was available but the entire raw set wasn't.) Eventually a working one was built from cannibalized parts in museum and private collections but the lesson was clear: Don't depend on the readers. The same goes for the recent BBC Domesday Book debacle - nobody could read the optical disks. Any good archive scheme will call for the material to be re-read and re-transcribed regularly in order to ensure the entire recovery-chain still works: Hardware, software, OS's, etc. If recovery becomes difficult migrate the material.
Be pragmatic about what you archive.
All too often folks archive everything 'cause they're too lazy to determine what is actually necessary and what isn't. Combine this with the difficulty of later having someone unfamiliar try to winnow down the material and this becomes a real problem. Even worse is later trying to find the useful material among all of the dross. Establish clear policies of what can be archived and make folks justify their material. Just as importantly make sure the costs are clear up front, even to the point of charging them a rate covering several years of storage initially. Suddenly some pack-rat deciding EVERYTHING they've ever typed is potentially a goldmine isn't so funny. Lastly, run everything past Legal: Some of this they don't want hanging around any longer then necessary.
Jay Samit, new media senior vice-president at EMI Recorded Music in Hollywood, explains how it works: 'You're listening to the radio in your car, you love the song but you don't know who it's by. Flick the Keychain and it instantly knows which radio station you're tuned into, and where you are on the planet. It connects to the station, finds out about the track and sends you an e-mail to tell you where you can buy it.
A good description of them with some background and an explanation of how they worked is here. They were never given away but sold for ~US$20 and just didn't catch on, at least never enough to recoup their support costs.
Accurracy, Confusion, and Quality
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Open Source Housing
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· Score: 4, Interesting
First off collaborative work does not make it "Open Source" however good a headline that makes (/. down on pageviews again?)
Second the article confuses two separate issues - construction and fittings. Construction is probably the harder of the two as the trades are resistant to change as are also insurers, building codes, and other consumers. There are literally hundreds of proposals and dozens of demonstration buildings out there showing off some "revolutionary" construction technique or another out there. Few have any success as individuals and society are (not suprisingly) just plain conservative when it comes to these things.
The flip side is the fittings. MS is on their umpteenth iteration of their "Smart Home", the electronic message-board 'fridge is a cliche, "wiring" one's home means something different to everybody and and all are likely to become obsolete in a decade anyway. Frankly the smartest investment is running conduit with room for more cables wherever possible and realizing one won't see much back on it in resale value. Most of the future services are only of interest to the tech-obsessed anyway or require complicated/expensive retrofit kluges to already pretty good systems.
Lastly the article is just plain crappy. Aside from being badly written it is poorly researched. For example their home listings is grossly incomplete and even then wrong (Disney's Monsanto home was not torn down in '67, it lasted much longer then that.) A term paper from any architecture student would be better then what's been passed of there.
It almost feels like you're trying to argue with me, don't bother. I'm not debating any of this.
We're barely exploring these objects. The current missions can be counted on one hand. The proposed missions can be counted on the other. All of them are stretched out over decades.
We're nowhere near making useful plans of the sort you're proposing. Heck, we're not even completely sure what a "typical" asteroidal object is like and just how much they diverge. Never mind not having anything that can get anywhere out there without several years of preparation and the possible targets limited to what gravity assists offer.
I'm all for research on this stuff, but before you plan on jumping in your rocketship you might want to become acquainted with what the current state of the art is and what can be realistically be anticipated in the near to mid term.
First lets figure out WHAT these are like and HOW to GET there BEFORE even starting working on diverting or demolishing 'em.
Maggard, you have a reference for that comment on there being multiple impacts at the K-T boundary?
No, I'm just an interested observer not a researcher. However a cursory seach on Google News pulled up a half dozen references.
I remember at least one fellow having a contest looking for any ammonite (I think it was ammonite) fossil above the iridium layer on the K-T boundary, an noone winning.
May not be relevant as different things died at different times. Organism "A" may well have died right around the time of the Yucutan impact but many other had died out before and many others lasted tens of millions of years after. My understanding is that the K/T boundery may only represent a single event and other significent impacts are only now being recognized.
The research indicating a possible "cluster" is fairly recent, only got lots of press this year. Lots of it was sparked by Shoemaker-Levy and the realization that solar-system dynamics make swarms rather more likely then previously assumed, particularly in cases of asteroid-belt material perturbed by Jupiter.
Anonymous Cowards filtered. If their words aren't worth so much as a pen name why should I value them any more?
When did "nom de plume" get the axe?
A while ago, because someone pointed out that pen name was about the same and more commonly understood. I live in Montreal with my francophone partner so french phrases are part of my daily life but they aren't so for everyone, particularly for many folks who are already reading in a second language.
if a large impact - such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs - happens again,
It appears there wasn't "A" dinosaur-killer hit, rather a series of impacts and a series of die-offs. If all are connected is open to question but current thinking is that the impact off the Yucatan wasn't a singular event and it corresponds to only one of a series of die-offs and craters. Indeed it's not even clear that impact-events were the only reason for the great die-offs.
However to answer your question properly would take more time then I'm willing to invest in a/. question. Doubtless there are plenty of folks more then willing to Google up some good references, or you can do so yourself, but I'm not interested in proving an impromptu overview of modern asteroid-strike catastrophe thinking.
Trust me when I say 1 big is better then n-smaller or go look it up for yourself:)
However its not like asteroids are particularly convenient to get to or anything. Right now there are a few spacecraft out there photographing asteroid & asteroid-like objects with plans to impact into one to see what happens, another to dig into one and further plans to bring back some material.
All of this is very basic science and none of it is particularly focused on how to deflect or break up an asteroid. That would come much later, decades considering the slow rate of progress in this area. The programs cost lots of money, the transit times are long, there's not much particular urgency and budgets are (relatively) small.
As many have noted the first step is just to get an idea of what we are dealing with, take a look around, figure out what the heck these things are even made of and exactly what history our planet has with these. Once we've got some ideas of what we're dealing with comes the stage of deciding how to do so.
Actually it's not friction that "burns up" incoming material, it's radiated heat from the bow shock (yes, your high school science teacher over-simplified.)
That aside unless you break up the pieces into very small bits they're gonna impact and n-medium sized craters is worse then ~1 big crater. Or, absolutely devastating some large radius is better then pretty-much devastating a number of somewhat smaller radiuses.
By the way - the worst? Ocean impact. Then you're not just talking an air blast and punching a hole into the surface with some ejecta spraying but doing all of that while vaporizing some megatons of water - much worse on a global scale.
Re:Answers to slews of dumb responses
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Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 1, Redundant
+5 leading with a GLARING error?! What kinds of so-called Nerds are on/. these days?
First, the MPEG-1 stream they're getting is VideoCD quality. VideoCD quality was designed to come from 1x CD-ROM drives which spit data at 150 kbytes/s which leaves plenty of bandwidth on the 1.2 mbytes/s USB.
USB 1.1 runs at 12Mbps (little "b" for bits, not big "B" for bytes) for full-speed hardware devices and at about 1.5Mbps for low-speed hardware devices.
Gee, a barrel-vaulted room in a library littered with busts, I can only think of, oh, a half dozen or so of those off the top of my head. Without getting the DVD or seeing the Imax version playing downtown its hard to compare them but from my recollection there doesn't seem to be anything unique about the Dublin room or the Coruscant one.
Furthermore, what kind of credit is expected? Few sets, digital or physical, are created ab novo. Need there be an attribution for every filmed space that was inspired by another? Should this be limited to notable public buildings or to parks too? Should I hound the film major who set a scene in what looks remarkably like my old apartment's living room in which he once got drunk?
Did Lucas Film "rip off" that library? Who knows. Certainly enough other library rooms look like it, need they all get plaques? Indeed I used to live down the street from a former fire station in Boston that was notable for having its hose-drying tower built like a Venetian campanile. When that was built it started a trend of lots of other fire stations being built soon thereafter looking similar - should all of them put up plaques attributing their inspiration?
This backup trick has been well known/well documented amongst Mac-folks for awhile now. It hasn't been earth-shaking news even though it has finally hit Slashdot. Doubtless Apple's folks have read the same reports and to date haven't changed anything.
However there likely will indeed be a change to the authentication in the future. As the hack's author writes Apple's current method really is pretty lame and better ones should have been used from the start. At that point it'll be stick with the old backup client or go with the current and more secure/featureful.
For all the sheep bleating on about Apple cease-&-desisting this etc. Apple has litigated to protect their trade dress, not this sort of material. After awhile repeating that same sort of foolishness just becomes trolling and unworthy of "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters"
While this is indeed a clever hack to make the backup function work to other servers it doesn't replicate.Mac, there's a whole lot more to it then that. Among other things it does offer WebDAV, software distribution, good website templates, virus-scanning, an excellent webmail client, superlative integration with their Mail client, IMAP, and of course ties throughout their OS. Whether or not it's worth what Apple is charging is worth suffering the limitations Apple has imposed (unannounced/uncontrollable email filtering, undefined bandwidth quotas, less-then-impressive availability, poorly implemented "family accounts") is open to question.
Also note that this whole thing is a bit of a pain to enable for a somewhat useful utility. It prevents the Mac(s) from connecting to Apple's.Mac and frankly there are equally good or better backup methods. Again, clever hack but hardly useful as a serious long-term solution.
Gotta recommend IBM's great little free Java-based P3P Policy Editor as a fast & straighforward way to create compact polcies.
Also for folks using Windows IE (the majority) ATT&T offers up their free eternally-beta AT&T Privacy Bird which gives folks visual and auditory feedback (both controlled/turned off in Prefs) on site's P3P settings. Quite informative actually, I discovered just how awful Yahoo's policies are when I used their headline aggregator (just who are they selling my newsreading habits to?) [rhetorical question]
The P3P folks have put together a great website at P3P Public Overview which is chock-full of useful information. On the other hand here is an interesting critique and here another, suprisingly both by lawyers. Security guru Richard Smith also has an important (though hopefully now fixed?) page on supercookies and how MS IE 6's touted protections can be got around.
OK... The FBI may or may not be bugging libraries. The FBI is closely in alliance with the Secret Service. The Secret Service is run by the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department is run by Paul O'Neil, who used to run Alcoa. Alcoa is the largest producer in the world of Tin Foil.
The basic question is why the youth left the traditional education system.
If it's because of socialization issues then isolating them through an online curriculum isn't probably the best idea. Teen's social lives pretty much revolve around school and while it's not impossible for an outsider to gain a foothold it's harder, a lot more tenuous, and they'll likely be missing out on some valuable experiences interacting with classmates. It may be difficult, and a change of venues may be called for, but like it or not we learn as much about real life in the hallways of a school as in the classroom.
If quality-of-education or content-of-education (i.e. religious or ethical issues) are the reason then look into private schools. There are ones of almost every variety, they generally provide decent educations (some superlative others less so, watch out for the ones warehousing troubled-kids) and if not local then consider a residential program. If there's a subject that interests the youth one can almost always find a school catering to that interest, applying that subject as context across the curricula, etc.
If the youth is themselves a "troubled-kid" then the worst thing I can imagine is disconnecting them from the larger social-environment and the regular support of educational professionals. Not all schools are great places, nor are all faculties and administrations wonderful, but with a parent aggressively championing them a youth with problems can usually get good support from experienced and knowledgeable staff. Likely better then well-meaning but inexperienced parents can do alone or at home.
Having dealt with some home-schooled folks over the years I've found their interpersonal skills to be generally poor, especially when outside of their social niche, particularly in situations involving diverse folks. Also in each case their world-views were severely limited and they had great difficulty empathizing or even understanding people from other backgrounds or of differing lifestyles. Not only were they very intolerant but they were genuinely bewildered when confronted by "alien" ideas and people. Needless to say they usually led circumscribed lives and weren't very succesfull.
Personally I loathed my high school and ended up getting lots of extra credit for "independent study" and taking courses through the state and local universities. On the other hand I'm glad that 2 out of 3 of those offered exposure to lots of peers and near-peers, the by-mail state courses were academically pathetic* and would've been quite isolating. As it was I built a second social circle independent of my high school which provided me with the challenges and support it couldn't.
Talking to my friends who are now belatedly completing college degrees through online programs I hear a litany of complaints regarding the difficulties of asynchronous interaction and limited means of communication. These are difficult for 30-somethings spending large sums of money and with some perspective on life and delayed gratification; asking a less experienced/motivated person like a teenager to deal with these challenges seems doomed to failure. It's hard enough as youth to gain an education and pick up the skills one'll need all through life without serving them impersonally through a bandwidth-straw and browser-window.
-- Michael
* USA, 1985, State of Massachusetts, Department of Education's US-History-by-mail included things like "The first people in America were the Pilgrims". No reference to the natives who greeted them, or to my own ancestors in Jamestown 23 years prior, etc.
The only values you're using for Open Source are the estimate of 10% of a staffers time @ US$80,000/year. Twitch those numbers any way and the results swing with them, changing everything.
Now, I dunno what kinda search engine you're looking at but 10% of a staffers time (4 hours a week) seems high to monitor the relevant mailing lists just to "keep up". Particularly high if the staffer is just "keeping up" with security and compatibility issues and not regularly implementing extensive feature changes.
Aside from that there's the simple issue of someone riding herd on the commercial vendor's install. Depending on what kind of contract you've got generally someone in-house has to keep on top of things and make sure that the vendors is maintaining their install up to date and secure. That may well be about the same amount of time as the Open Source project may require, something I think you may not be accounting for.
Lastly there's the whole long-term viability/migration issues. We've all seen any number of projects get cut, killed, their vendors wither into uselessness, etc. As many have pointed out with Open Source at least you've got a copy of the source code to hand to someone else hired down the line and keep running. One can of course write in code escrow clauses into a commercial vendors contracts but generally they add a lot to the cost and it's a constant battle to keep them up-to-date. Plus in a decade when the whole thing is re-up for evaluation with Open Source at least you have the file formats identifiable, with closed you may have a dickens of a time pulling back out your data.
Frankly I don't think your evaluation is particularly useful, especially as a generalized one. It may well be that the Open Source project only requires a low-level staffer's yearly look-see to keep up to date. Or the commercial version may demand bringing in outside consultants to baby-sit as the entire environment evolves from today's assumptions. Or the other way round. Good topic, bad example.
It is much of the core of MaxcOS X but it lacks many of MacOS X's layers and services like Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, and of course Aqua.
If you don't know what those mean don't post the same damn lame question to/. asking for these to ONCE AGAIN be explained. There's a search function: Goddamn use it as the topic has been discussed NUMEROUS times on/.
Or show some minimal level of initiative and look it up for yourself (hint: World Wide Web) where it's all well detailed in ways even the lamest "explain-this-to-me" poster would get in a dozen places online.
Next, yes, there is an x86 port of MacOS X inside Apple. Will it ever see the light of day? Not likely (sorry PC fanboys).
Does this mean Apple plans to use MacOS X'86?
Yes, they use it every day to make sure that MacOS X remains true to the portability of it's predecessor Openstep (which was on 5 platforms.) Undoubtedly Apple figures if MacOS X can be kept running on the very different PPC & x86 platforms then they're good for about anything.
Why x86 over some other processor? First off Openstep (or whatever you want to call/capitalize it) was updated by Apple as part of their aborted "Rhapsody" strategy to both PPC & x86 so it was little effort to keep it going to MacOS X. Furthermore this helps keep Apple from getting caught in any PPC-isms in the future. Cross-porting helps show up any problems early, keeps everyone honest, provides valuable insight into many problems.
What good is Darwin? Well, it does run a lot of code, including things like Apple's free streaming media server. It gives MacOS X developers a look into the heart of MacOS X. That it comes out for x86 just lets that many more folks play with it.
Finally, to respond to the next half-dozen whinges that come up every time:
Yes Darwin is Open Source.
No Apple isn't going to give away the rest of MacOS X. As much as many folks go gimme-gimme-gimme-for-free Apple's management has fiduciary responsibility to keep the company profitable; giving away MacOS X in its entirety will not further that goal.
No QuickTime does not lockout Linux or any other users. QuickTime is a file-format and some libraries, not a codec (clue phone ringing!) Yes Apple licensed a codec, you want access to it find someone willing to pony up the cash like Apple did. That other folks use that codec is lovely but there's no gun to their head preventing them from using any of the other codecs.
No Apple would not do well selling or giving away MacOS X'86. If you think you've got some novel bit of reasoning that makes this a good strategy for Apple go pitch it to their board, don't bleat about it on/. again where nobody well-informed is buying it.
Is Darwin "better" then XYZ? Who knows, depends entirely on for what to whom with which criteria.
Do PPC/Mach/micro-kernels/aesthetics/etc matter? Well as Apple seems to be one of the few PC vendors doing well and MacOS X is now the best-selling Unix then yeah, apparently Apple is doing something right.
Last, but not least, love 'em or hate 'em Apple makes waves and does interesting things. None of the other vendors constantly do as interesting things or generate so much controversy, gotta love 'em for that.
Isn't magnesium pretty flammable? I mean, I know in a high-oxy atmosphere nearly any metal will burn but I recall Magnesium being one of the easier-to-get-going ones. That combined with a faulty Lion battery could be kinda fun...
"My Best Buy / Porsche laptop just crashed & burned!"
Kinda makes we wanna go out and get one now... Naw, still drooling over Apple's TiBook.
There is a country (Japan) that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on train design research and has hands down by far the most effective rail network in the world from everything from technical efficiency of trains to timeliness.
Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden...
However none of their vehicles can run in the US. Electrical power isn't the problem, its weight requirements. The US's passenger rails are actually freight rails. Thus passenger vehicles must be contructed to withstand impact with freight vehicles. Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, none of their vehicles are built to this extraordinary requirement and so it's simply not possible to buy an off-the-shelf design for the US market.
There are a few Spanish Talgos operating under grandfathered dispensations in the PNW but that is it. Even the Swedish X-2000 Amtrak tried out a few years ago was on a limited permit. If there's gonna be a high-speed rail in the US (and Acela isn't most other nations's idea of "high speed") then it's a custom job. Say "they did it" all you want, the requirements are so different it's all apples to oranges. Get the specs changed it'd be a different story, but for now nobody else's trains can be certified for US interstate rail or on US freight rail.
Slashdot Mirror
Mention his name on news://ne.internet.services to hear his history...
No forcing, no extra cost, the patch was released at the same time as the vulnerability announced, got anything else you wanna try and pick on?
Insofar as I understand MS isn't under any court order to open their file formats, just not to continue with specific unethical tactics on others (wristslap.) So if MS claims they're using XML in Office v.11 (hey, didn't they claim that about Office v.10 too...) big whoop-de-doo, it's really their decision.
Actually it's remarkable MS is even going for XML at all. MS's own internal formats are a terrible mess, the code that produces it apparently such a tangle MS has terrible trouble keeping on top of it, now trying to put this all into a new format has got to be a monster. Doing all of this while keeping all of the MS'isms and editing features and not breaking every other part (both theirs & third-party) that uses these services & components has got to be daunting.
Yeah, it'll likely end up being idiosyncratic and quirky full of all the bugs MS is famous for but hell, a semi-legible format has gotta be better then the stuff MS pumps out now. Of course this whole "beta" process we're in right now has been pretty conclusively demonstrated to be a marketing sham with the significant decisions all made and the feature-set frozen long ago.
As to casting a shadow the brightness of the sky (much less the sun) quickly fades out any shadow; the same as high-flying planes don't cast visible shadows (unlike low-altitude ones near airports.)
Any environmental effects of these would be very minimal, far less then those of a conventional plane or helicopter.
As to "are there more of these?" Nope. We have had a few spectacular shows in the past few years but nothing statistically unusual or anything more then wider reporting and slightly more accurate predictions.
Usual tips apply: Get out of the city, away from parking-lot lights, hills help block glare, let your eyes adjust, remember that a clear sky is COLD, binoculars are useless for this but entertaining for looking at other things like nebula and Jupiter's moons, look up online for tips regarding astrophotography and no your camera flash won't help...
- They own my long-distance service.
- The own my local service.
- They own my cellphone service.
- They own my ISP.
- They own my satellite TV service.
- They own 1/2 the channels on the TV (Discovery, TLC, etc.)
- They own umpteen other things I'm likely not aware of and use every day.
Basically, if Bell Canada (or their holding company) wants to do something price isn't a problem, gov't regulations aren't an issue, and they're already so in bed with municipalities they can pretty much plug in anything they want where they want for as long as they want. In short if they wanna go WiFi they've got everything in place to make it happen, happen big, and nobody can compete.Profit? They don't need to worry about that for a long time. They could support this for a decade while the market matures and its cost would still be in with the round-off errors of their ledgers. In the meantime they'll OWN the whole deal across Canada and be damn attractive to US sites looking for a stable partner. Forget .bombs, deal with a megacorp with lots of technology already in place. Pretty attractive to a hotel, airport, or municipality.
Yeah, I think this really could bring a big change to North America. The Baby Bells in the US are fractured and hamstrung. But with the market opened up to foreign ownership and activity Bell Canada may well have found their entrée into the US market. Widespread 802.11, first domestically then in the US, that could well be their opportunity. Forget cellular or land-line, offer a last-mile wireless.
Bits rot. Under the most perfectly controlled environment the damn stuff still goes bad. Be realistic, anticipate this, do everything you can to slow it down, but plan for it and make provisions when you first put your archiving strategy in place. Tapes are likely more robust the platters as there's fewer critical parts to go wrong but nothing is perfect.
Yes they're cheap but we've far less experience with these media then we do with tape and studies are showing that they dyes may not be as stable as first thought. Heck, there's even a bug out there that eats some of these. There's also the question of long-term standards in some cases like DVDs.
Nothings worse then losing one part of an archive at one site, another part at a different site, and being unable to easily reconcile the two to get a good whole set. Make sure that however you archive things, same media or different media, that partial archives can be reconciled.
Years ago there was a big scramble to recover the US Govt's 1950 Census. It had been stored on steel tape and the required Unisys readers were no longer. (Much of the data was available but the entire raw set wasn't.) Eventually a working one was built from cannibalized parts in museum and private collections but the lesson was clear: Don't depend on the readers. The same goes for the recent BBC Domesday Book debacle - nobody could read the optical disks. Any good archive scheme will call for the material to be re-read and re-transcribed regularly in order to ensure the entire recovery-chain still works: Hardware, software, OS's, etc. If recovery becomes difficult migrate the material.
All too often folks archive everything 'cause they're too lazy to determine what is actually necessary and what isn't. Combine this with the difficulty of later having someone unfamiliar try to winnow down the material and this becomes a real problem. Even worse is later trying to find the useful material among all of the dross. Establish clear policies of what can be archived and make folks justify their material. Just as importantly make sure the costs are clear up front, even to the point of charging them a rate covering several years of storage initially. Suddenly some pack-rat deciding EVERYTHING they've ever typed is potentially a goldmine isn't so funny. Lastly, run everything past Legal: Some of this they don't want hanging around any longer then necessary.
A good description of them with some background and an explanation of how they worked is here. They were never given away but sold for ~US$20 and just didn't catch on, at least never enough to recoup their support costs.
Now gone the way of the iTag, the CueCat and the Modo.
Second the article confuses two separate issues - construction and fittings. Construction is probably the harder of the two as the trades are resistant to change as are also insurers, building codes, and other consumers. There are literally hundreds of proposals and dozens of demonstration buildings out there showing off some "revolutionary" construction technique or another out there. Few have any success as individuals and society are (not suprisingly) just plain conservative when it comes to these things.
The flip side is the fittings. MS is on their umpteenth iteration of their "Smart Home", the electronic message-board 'fridge is a cliche, "wiring" one's home means something different to everybody and and all are likely to become obsolete in a decade anyway. Frankly the smartest investment is running conduit with room for more cables wherever possible and realizing one won't see much back on it in resale value. Most of the future services are only of interest to the tech-obsessed anyway or require complicated/expensive retrofit kluges to already pretty good systems.
Lastly the article is just plain crappy. Aside from being badly written it is poorly researched. For example their home listings is grossly incomplete and even then wrong (Disney's Monsanto home was not torn down in '67, it lasted much longer then that.) A term paper from any architecture student would be better then what's been passed of there.
We're barely exploring these objects. The current missions can be counted on one hand. The proposed missions can be counted on the other. All of them are stretched out over decades.
We're nowhere near making useful plans of the sort you're proposing. Heck, we're not even completely sure what a "typical" asteroidal object is like and just how much they diverge. Never mind not having anything that can get anywhere out there without several years of preparation and the possible targets limited to what gravity assists offer.
I'm all for research on this stuff, but before you plan on jumping in your rocketship you might want to become acquainted with what the current state of the art is and what can be realistically be anticipated in the near to mid term.
First lets figure out WHAT these are like and HOW to GET there BEFORE even starting working on diverting or demolishing 'em.
The research indicating a possible "cluster" is fairly recent, only got lots of press this year. Lots of it was sparked by Shoemaker-Levy and the realization that solar-system dynamics make swarms rather more likely then previously assumed, particularly in cases of asteroid-belt material perturbed by Jupiter.
However to answer your question properly would take more time then I'm willing to invest in a /. question. Doubtless there are plenty of folks more then willing to Google up some good references, or you can do so yourself, but I'm not interested in proving an impromptu overview of modern asteroid-strike catastrophe thinking.
Trust me when I say 1 big is better then n-smaller or go look it up for yourself :)
However its not like asteroids are particularly convenient to get to or anything. Right now there are a few spacecraft out there photographing asteroid & asteroid-like objects with plans to impact into one to see what happens, another to dig into one and further plans to bring back some material.
All of this is very basic science and none of it is particularly focused on how to deflect or break up an asteroid. That would come much later, decades considering the slow rate of progress in this area. The programs cost lots of money, the transit times are long, there's not much particular urgency and budgets are (relatively) small.
As many have noted the first step is just to get an idea of what we are dealing with, take a look around, figure out what the heck these things are even made of and exactly what history our planet has with these. Once we've got some ideas of what we're dealing with comes the stage of deciding how to do so.
That aside unless you break up the pieces into very small bits they're gonna impact and n-medium sized craters is worse then ~1 big crater. Or, absolutely devastating some large radius is better then pretty-much devastating a number of somewhat smaller radiuses.
By the way - the worst? Ocean impact. Then you're not just talking an air blast and punching a hole into the surface with some ejecta spraying but doing all of that while vaporizing some megatons of water - much worse on a global scale.
Furthermore, what kind of credit is expected? Few sets, digital or physical, are created ab novo. Need there be an attribution for every filmed space that was inspired by another? Should this be limited to notable public buildings or to parks too? Should I hound the film major who set a scene in what looks remarkably like my old apartment's living room in which he once got drunk?
Did Lucas Film "rip off" that library? Who knows. Certainly enough other library rooms look like it, need they all get plaques? Indeed I used to live down the street from a former fire station in Boston that was notable for having its hose-drying tower built like a Venetian campanile. When that was built it started a trend of lots of other fire stations being built soon thereafter looking similar - should all of them put up plaques attributing their inspiration?
Extending "Trade Dress" to spaces - Feh.
Also for folks using Windows IE (the majority) ATT&T offers up their free eternally-beta AT&T Privacy Bird which gives folks visual and auditory feedback (both controlled/turned off in Prefs) on site's P3P settings. Quite informative actually, I discovered just how awful Yahoo's policies are when I used their headline aggregator (just who are they selling my newsreading habits to?) [rhetorical question]
The P3P folks have put together a great website at P3P Public Overview which is chock-full of useful information. On the other hand here is an interesting critique and here another, suprisingly both by lawyers. Security guru Richard Smith also has an important (though hopefully now fixed?) page on supercookies and how MS IE 6's touted protections can be got around.
Mozilla of course supports P3P and it's useful to understand just how MS IE 6 suppports and applies P3P and cookies.
Umm, where does Kevin Bacon fit in?
If it's because of socialization issues then isolating them through an online curriculum isn't probably the best idea. Teen's social lives pretty much revolve around school and while it's not impossible for an outsider to gain a foothold it's harder, a lot more tenuous, and they'll likely be missing out on some valuable experiences interacting with classmates. It may be difficult, and a change of venues may be called for, but like it or not we learn as much about real life in the hallways of a school as in the classroom.
If quality-of-education or content-of-education (i.e. religious or ethical issues) are the reason then look into private schools. There are ones of almost every variety, they generally provide decent educations (some superlative others less so, watch out for the ones warehousing troubled-kids) and if not local then consider a residential program. If there's a subject that interests the youth one can almost always find a school catering to that interest, applying that subject as context across the curricula, etc.
If the youth is themselves a "troubled-kid" then the worst thing I can imagine is disconnecting them from the larger social-environment and the regular support of educational professionals. Not all schools are great places, nor are all faculties and administrations wonderful, but with a parent aggressively championing them a youth with problems can usually get good support from experienced and knowledgeable staff. Likely better then well-meaning but inexperienced parents can do alone or at home.
Having dealt with some home-schooled folks over the years I've found their interpersonal skills to be generally poor, especially when outside of their social niche, particularly in situations involving diverse folks. Also in each case their world-views were severely limited and they had great difficulty empathizing or even understanding people from other backgrounds or of differing lifestyles. Not only were they very intolerant but they were genuinely bewildered when confronted by "alien" ideas and people. Needless to say they usually led circumscribed lives and weren't very succesfull.
Personally I loathed my high school and ended up getting lots of extra credit for "independent study" and taking courses through the state and local universities. On the other hand I'm glad that 2 out of 3 of those offered exposure to lots of peers and near-peers, the by-mail state courses were academically pathetic* and would've been quite isolating. As it was I built a second social circle independent of my high school which provided me with the challenges and support it couldn't.
Talking to my friends who are now belatedly completing college degrees through online programs I hear a litany of complaints regarding the difficulties of asynchronous interaction and limited means of communication. These are difficult for 30-somethings spending large sums of money and with some perspective on life and delayed gratification; asking a less experienced/motivated person like a teenager to deal with these challenges seems doomed to failure. It's hard enough as youth to gain an education and pick up the skills one'll need all through life without serving them impersonally through a bandwidth-straw and browser-window.
-- Michael
* USA, 1985, State of Massachusetts, Department of Education's US-History-by-mail included things like "The first people in America were the Pilgrims". No reference to the natives who greeted them, or to my own ancestors in Jamestown 23 years prior, etc.
Now, I dunno what kinda search engine you're looking at but 10% of a staffers time (4 hours a week) seems high to monitor the relevant mailing lists just to "keep up". Particularly high if the staffer is just "keeping up" with security and compatibility issues and not regularly implementing extensive feature changes.
Aside from that there's the simple issue of someone riding herd on the commercial vendor's install. Depending on what kind of contract you've got generally someone in-house has to keep on top of things and make sure that the vendors is maintaining their install up to date and secure. That may well be about the same amount of time as the Open Source project may require, something I think you may not be accounting for.
Lastly there's the whole long-term viability/migration issues. We've all seen any number of projects get cut, killed, their vendors wither into uselessness, etc. As many have pointed out with Open Source at least you've got a copy of the source code to hand to someone else hired down the line and keep running. One can of course write in code escrow clauses into a commercial vendors contracts but generally they add a lot to the cost and it's a constant battle to keep them up-to-date. Plus in a decade when the whole thing is re-up for evaluation with Open Source at least you have the file formats identifiable, with closed you may have a dickens of a time pulling back out your data.
Frankly I don't think your evaluation is particularly useful, especially as a generalized one. It may well be that the Open Source project only requires a low-level staffer's yearly look-see to keep up to date. Or the commercial version may demand bringing in outside consultants to baby-sit as the entire environment evolves from today's assumptions. Or the other way round. Good topic, bad example.
It is much of the core of MaxcOS X but it lacks many of MacOS X's layers and services like Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, and of course Aqua.
If you don't know what those mean don't post the same damn lame question to /. asking for these to ONCE AGAIN be explained. There's a search function: Goddamn use it as the topic has been discussed NUMEROUS times on /.
Or show some minimal level of initiative and look it up for yourself (hint: World Wide Web) where it's all well detailed in ways even the lamest "explain-this-to-me" poster would get in a dozen places online.
Next, yes, there is an x86 port of MacOS X inside Apple. Will it ever see the light of day? Not likely (sorry PC fanboys).
Does this mean Apple plans to use MacOS X'86?
Yes, they use it every day to make sure that MacOS X remains true to the portability of it's predecessor Openstep (which was on 5 platforms.) Undoubtedly Apple figures if MacOS X can be kept running on the very different PPC & x86 platforms then they're good for about anything.
Why x86 over some other processor? First off Openstep (or whatever you want to call/capitalize it) was updated by Apple as part of their aborted "Rhapsody" strategy to both PPC & x86 so it was little effort to keep it going to MacOS X. Furthermore this helps keep Apple from getting caught in any PPC-isms in the future. Cross-porting helps show up any problems early, keeps everyone honest, provides valuable insight into many problems.
What good is Darwin? Well, it does run a lot of code, including things like Apple's free streaming media server. It gives MacOS X developers a look into the heart of MacOS X. That it comes out for x86 just lets that many more folks play with it.
Finally, to respond to the next half-dozen whinges that come up every time:
Kinda makes we wanna go out and get one now... Naw, still drooling over Apple's TiBook.
However none of their vehicles can run in the US. Electrical power isn't the problem, its weight requirements. The US's passenger rails are actually freight rails. Thus passenger vehicles must be contructed to withstand impact with freight vehicles. Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, none of their vehicles are built to this extraordinary requirement and so it's simply not possible to buy an off-the-shelf design for the US market.
There are a few Spanish Talgos operating under grandfathered dispensations in the PNW but that is it. Even the Swedish X-2000 Amtrak tried out a few years ago was on a limited permit. If there's gonna be a high-speed rail in the US (and Acela isn't most other nations's idea of "high speed") then it's a custom job. Say "they did it" all you want, the requirements are so different it's all apples to oranges. Get the specs changed it'd be a different story, but for now nobody else's trains can be certified for US interstate rail or on US freight rail.