People have spent the past twenty plus years designing development tools for synchronous design. There's just a lot less groundwork covered for asychronous design because no one has spent the millions of dollars to create a (mostly) new tool chain.
Ditto tools for chip testing.
Chip testing of synchronous designs is easy, and there are automated tools to do it.
The common ones are based on fullscan or partial scan: You add a mux to each flop and use a test signal to string them into one or more shift registers. Pop into test mode, shift out the old state for examination and shift in a new state for the next steps of the test.
You can change the function of the pins on the chip to shift out a bunch of little chains quickly, or use one or a few long chains and shift through the JTAG port (which is really intended for "boundary scan", where you switch the pin drivers into a simialr scan mode controlled by the 4- or 5-pin JTAG port, and toss signals from chip to chip to see if all the chips got soldered onto the board correctly).
Scan works well on synchronous designs, where all the flops in each of several "clock domains" are clocked by a common signal. But in asynchronous designs, where each clock may be clocked by an arbitrary signal, this falls apart.
There IS a methodology - complete with automatic test program tools - that can test asynchronous designs as easily as synchronous. It's called the "Cross-Check Array". But it was never widely deployed in the United States and the company that did it has since been merged into another and by now may be gone. As far as I know, only Sony (which got an unlimited license as part of investing in Cross Check when it was a startup) is the only big user of it these days.
Then the designers would have to contend with accelerations in the 100's of G's range.
A hundred Gs is diddly-squat for a decent electronic hardware design. You get a lot more than that dropping your hifi onto the floor from desk high.
You won't launch any PEOPLE that way. (You'd have to submerge them in liquid and debubble their lungs, digestive system, and maybe their inner ears.) But for MIL spec electronics it's a walk in the park.
"Proximity fuses" on anti-aircraft shells in world war II were electronics using GLASS TUBES!
What would happen if NASA does reduce spending and the growth of the frontier of space travel becomes stunted accordingly?
A decade or so back, when several startups were trying to develop private enterprise launch systems, they couldn't get the aerospace manufacturers to sell them components (space-rated cryogenic-liquid valving, guidance components, etc.). One manufacturer's rep said (in confidence) that they had been told by NASA administrators that if they sold to the private launch companies they wouldn't sell to NASA again.
So they made do with NON-space rated components and other kludges.
Some of this worked really well. (For instance: The virtual control panel hacked up on a Mac was a LOT cheaper and more functional than the roomfull of one-of control equipment it replaced, much to the amazement of the NASA engineers who watched the engine test.)
But some of it was a disaster. (For instance: The liquid oxygen valve on a hybrid engine failed in a mode that created the second worst possible disaster {behind guidance failure} for a hybrid engine vehicle: It stuck at 10% during engine startup. Too little thrust to get off the pad, but they couldn't turn it off so the rocket burned itself up. The test was a failure and the company was unable to raise money for a second try and folded, taking the safest known rocket technology down with it.)
"What would happen if NASA does reduce spending...?" Well, for starters they wouldn't HAVE the kind of clout with suppliers to deny components to the private market, while the suppliers would have a big drop in sales until they found other customers.
It could be the best thing ever to happen to space technology.
Social Security is not a national ID card suitable for uniquely identifying a person as qualified to vote and voting only once.
There are circumstances where a Citizen qualifies to vote but does not have or need an SS number.
There are a few duplications - both multiple people under one number and people with more than one number.
Non-citizens have SS numbers legally.
Criminal conviction status and other issues that might affect eligibility to vote aren't attached to SS number (with the possible exception of military discharge status).
Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept.
If they ever DO mandate a national ID card/number I want it to be mandatory to provide it for registration in federal elections and to be collected federally and checked for uniqueness. That would go a long way toward eliminating election fraud.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said.
Which is why I almost didn't post this, for fear of turning more Republicans on to the idea of national ID cards than it turns Democrats off from it.
In case you haven't been following the issues, it's primarily Democratic legislators who have been in favor of a national ID card and other tightening of citizen tracking.
But the Democrats are the main beneficiaries of the votes of illegal/undocumented non-citizen voters. So they have also been strong opponents of voter verification and proponents of unexamined registration and voting schemes such as "motor-voter" and always-absentee-without-reason voting.
In the People are Lazy theory, People tend to do only those things that are utterly important to them. This allows more ambitious folks a free hand.
But there is a COST to participating in a democracy: Eyeball time.
You only have so much life. If you spend it all in political wrangling over the rules of living it you don't have any left to enjoy. (Unless your favorite passtime is policical wrangling, of course.)
This is why there are Republics: So people can chose representatives they trust to spend the time coming up with a ruleset.
It's also part of why Anarchists and Nihilists simply ignore or work around those who "claim to make rules".
This also shuts out a lot more people that would other-wise be able to vote, I can name several people who probably would choose to vote yet this will cut them out.
Of course they COULD buy a domain registration and vote. It used to be $100/reg, but it's much lower now...
But perhaps that's what's intended. Can you IMAGINE the revenue for the registrars if there's ever an important and closely-split issue coming up and BOTH sides decide to buy votes?
I recall from one of the earlier movies that a Jedi Knight was supposed to make his own lightsaber near the end of his apprenticeship. (That's a convenient skill. Nobody else seems to have them. So being disarmed in a remote location would be a long-term problem if you had to visit a jedi armory to rearm.)
Perhaps the distinct color is supposed to be an artifact of the individual home-brew devices.
Fox News isn't even worth mentioning, do people serious watch that?
At least CNN has something going for it.
Yes people watch Fox News. This is because stories that can't be spun into a left-wing slant won't be aired on any other television medium in the US (except for a few that might air on the official outlets of certain religious organizations).
When it comes to constructing a propaganda machine the suppression of coverage of opposing points of view and news items giving them supporting evidence is a far more important piece than the promulgation of a Big Lie. This was known and used well by the Nazis, the Communists (European, Asian, and Central/South American), and every petty dictator with a population too poor to afford short wave radios. It's no less true in the meida-conglomerated "free world" today, despite the Newspeak-style renaming of "propaganda" as "spin".
Fox News makes a point of living its "fair and balanced" slogan - which it does by giving the top two political slants equal time, rather than one of them getting all the time and the other none. This still leaves number three downward with no outlet (though Fox News does give them a couple minutes from time to time).
So the Conservative position gets half a channel with Fox and none with anybody else (including CNN). The result is that heartland viewers watch it in drives (despite the laughably tiny headline segments). I hear Fox News has passed CNN in US viewership despite having far lower cable system penetration.
sure, it's nice that there's a software ARM emulator knocking around the internet, but it's in no way a substitute for a free processor core design, with which you may fabricate hardware ARM clones.
Correct.
But an emulator is very useful for hardware projects nontheless. It runs a lot faster than the verilog code in verification and can be used for a number of purposes.
How ironic that it only took two weeks after SonicBlue won a Technological/Engineering Emmy Award for the Advancement of Television for the big boys to crackdown on them.
That may not be a coincidence.
The Emmy will have attracted the attention of a lot of people in high places at the networks, and a lot of potential customers as well.
Two weeks seems about right for putting the filings together. And even if they were already working on it the publicity may have encouraged them to get off the dime and actually file, before their opposition's position was improved by an expanded customer base.
What about organic computers ?? [As an alternative to "mechanical rod" based nanocomputers]
I remember reading long ago about organic molecules being able to "switch" between two polarized states under the influence if an outer electronic field. This was supposed to be a future for nano registries...
It's a matter of size.
Electrons are big, light, fuzzy things, and the electric field goes out a long way. When you want to make circuitry REALLY small you don't want to use that for anything but holding your pieces together, because your gates and wiring would have to be very large to avoid crosstalk.
But atoms are effectively smaller than electrons. The nuclei are MUCH smaller, and they suck their electrons down, making most of the fields cancel out at after a very short distance. And they're heavier, so they don't shake around and flit around as much.
You can send a bit, or several bits, by sliding or rotating a rod as you can by shoving electrons into and out of a wire (even a single-molecule wire), and the signal stays IN the rod except where you WANT it to "come out". At atomic scales moving a rod is nearly as fast as moving an electron (and comparable to moving a hole), so speed isn't a problem.
As for amplification there's not much that can beat an "interposer". That's a piece of matter that gets between a two moving parts and transfers a shove from the one supplying motion "power" to the one carrying a signal away as motion. Expend a little power to put the interposer into position and it will transfer shoves (with no further input) until you pull it away again.
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11?
First: Those were just the net outlets of the mainstream media - TV news networks, newspapers, etc. They do NOT represent the net news outlets.
Second: Some purely net news outlets stayed up. For instance, the Drudge Report had NO trouble the whole time - and even when a site Drudge cited got saturated you could usually get the thrust of the story from the headline on the link. Slashdot hung in there quite well. (I suspect others did, too, but I had no need for them given those two.)
Third: The operators of ALL the important sites, major media and pure net, were on the ball and upgraded the site's response within a few hours. The next time there's a major story like this they'll be ready. (History repeats: This is a recap of the development of modern TV disaster coverage, which was essentially invented and shaken out during the days after the John Kennedy assasination.)
Emacs does include some features that are equivalent to these sort of macros. They are disabled by default
And they used to be enabled by default - which was a big vulnerability if you used them as a mail reader or netnews reader. A simple string embedded in the letter or posting could do anything YOU could do in emacs - which means anything you could do from a shell, too.
Fortunately the first well-known public exploit was a netnews posting demoing the bug by popping up a window and telling you how to turn it off. The default was changed in the next release.
The days of the MIT AI lab were a more innocent time. To keep the students from crashing the machine they made it trivial - with a well-documented command to do it. The idea being that if there were no reputation points to be earned by "finding a way to crash the machine" but lots of negative ones to be had by annoying the other students, everybody would get bored with it quickly. Stallman continued the tradition later by having no root password on his personal machine for quite a while.
Unfortunately, about one person in a hundred (one in 50 to one in 200) is a psychopath - a person with a brain problem analogous to color blindness that amounts to "no concience". Some fraction of these don't compensate by learning that hurting others is bad for number one and becoming "good" by deliberate effort.
So when you have hundreds of millions of people on the internet, you end up with a few "black hat" hackers and a host of script kiddies. So the days of innocence (and Stallman's open root account) are long over.
Now internet-connected computers hold information of value that can be stolen and run mission-critical functions for businesses with cutthroat competitors. So a management order to install mass-market stoftware with a history of well-known major security holes has graduated from administrative cluelessness to a severe breach of fiduciary duty.
If you want to be successful on Linux (or any other free OS), you need to be libre/free.
That depends on how you define success.
This will never displace gcc as the compiler used by most people - because gcc is good enough, open, and free.
But it has a fine niche market as a "pay extra, get better performance" option for people with serious crunch to do - graphic games, scientific, financial modeling, etc. It will continue to hold this niche unless/until gcc or some other free&open compiler achieves comparable performance AND cross-platform ability to all game platforms, or some commercial competitor outdoes it - at which point the product's market would be in jepoarday regardless of whether it had been ported to Linux.
At a minimum it should be able to produce code to RUN on Linux. Otherwise it's not supporting the game authors who want to release a Linux version of their product.
But I think that a version that runs ON Linux, if not overpriced (or as an extra-cost extra on an existing non-Linux release) should pay for the port and make a tidy profit. At a minimum some game designers will want to work directly on the Linux platform rather than being limited to cross-platform development.
It's not the decoding of binhex files that's a problem. The Mac has been automagically uncompressing downloads for a long time, but the automatic launching of a new executable is a lovely new Microsoftism.
Sorry. What I meant was "why the HELL was the launching of the binaries turned on by default?".
I didn't read the post closely enough to realize that the workaround wasn't to turn off the autolaunch but to turn off a step, innoctuous in itself, that was a precursor to the launch.
This implies that there isn't an easy way to turn off the launch. Even worse...
You can turn off the automatic decoding of bin.hex files...
But why the HELL was it on by DEFAULT?
Oh, right.
It's a Microsoft program.
Never mind.
(The fact that it's for use on a non-Microsoft platform, and thus could make that platform vulnerable to malicious cracking, probably wasn't even a factor.)
The article about nuclear bunker hosting got me thinking. We all know that back in the early days of the Net, when it was run by the US military/govt, it WAS designed to survive a nuclear attack, especially in terms of topology/redundancy.
But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?
Much of that redundancy went out the window due to two factors:
The move from a generalized net (most sites talk to a random minimum of two others, the routers figure out the shortest route) to a backbone-plus-ISPs with lots of fixed routing and most sites as singly-connected leaves.
If you lose (all) your connection(s) to your ISP, or your ISP loses any single-point-of-failure or all N of a set of n-points-of-failure between you and the backbone, you're cut off. Running an ethernet cable to a neighbor's LAN that's still connected via another ISP will not get you the packets that were trying to reach your IP address.
Your ISP's connection with the rest of the backbone might have some nice self-healing characteristics. So the net-of-ISPs might still have that kind of survivability. But your packets are at the mercy of your ISP's survival and internals. (And if you're paying home rather than business rates I bet your ISP didn't spend many bux to make things redundant on their way to you.)
With the explosion of hosts the full routing tables are now WAY too big to be held in every router on the net. So we can't go back to the old style even if we wanted to - or at least not without a LOT of engineering.
According to the press release, these little units only have a 1500 hour lifetime too.
If you then throw it away and buy another it's bad. If you unscrew a few bolts and swap in an inexpensive fresh membrane module it's no big deal. Do it every Nth gas cylinder change.
Also: That may be a guaranteed minimum time before output has dropped 10% or so, rather than "it suddenly dies". Or it could be how long they've tested the prototypes, so far. B-) We'll just have to wait and see.
But where does one get hydrogen refills from these days?
You make it on the spot from hydrocarbon gasses or liquids:
methane (natural gas as piped to houses)
propane (LPG canisters - typically used for country houses, RVs, barbercues).
butane (Another LPG - typically used for smaller stuff like cigarette lighters. more energy per volume but prefers room temperature to come out of the tank.)
methanol (rubbing alcohol - very toxic)
ethanol (drinking alcohol - very regulated and taxed)
other higher alcohols
gasoline (pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane, etc. plus miscelaneous branched chains and additives)
We don't know yet whether this puppy has its own hydrogen-from-hydrocarbon generator built in or if you need an external one if you want to run it on hidey-carbons rather than hydrogen gas.
Of course you COULD feed it hydrogen gas from a tank of compressed hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, or hydrogen-disolved-in-metal-powder. But a hydrogen-gas system with a large amount of stored gas (rather than enough to make a small popping sound at any one instant) is a major explosion and fire hazard.
Gaseous hydrogen leaks through VERY tiny holes (including the space between metal atoms in solid metal) and burns with an invisible, super-hot ultraviolet flame. If you have a leak big enough to support a flame it WILL have a flame on it within a very short time. You'll find the flame by walking into it and having your clothes, hair, or skin start burning, if it doesn't set something nearby on fire first.
"correlated"... means they seem to occur at the same time and to the same degree.
Well, that's an oversimplified and slightly misleading characterization. But I don't remember the exact formula for correlation at the moment.
It's essentially a normalized measure of the product of the deviations from their individual means of measurements of two variables (typically the amount of two phenomena). Positive correlation implies that when one goes up the other also tends to be up (either more likely to be up or occasionally way up), negative means that one up implies the other tends down.
Slashdot Mirror
People have spent the past twenty plus years designing development tools for synchronous design. There's just a lot less groundwork covered for asychronous design because no one has spent the millions of dollars to create a (mostly) new tool chain.
Ditto tools for chip testing.
Chip testing of synchronous designs is easy, and there are automated tools to do it.
The common ones are based on fullscan or partial scan: You add a mux to each flop and use a test signal to string them into one or more shift registers. Pop into test mode, shift out the old state for examination and shift in a new state for the next steps of the test.
You can change the function of the pins on the chip to shift out a bunch of little chains quickly, or use one or a few long chains and shift through the JTAG port (which is really intended for "boundary scan", where you switch the pin drivers into a simialr scan mode controlled by the 4- or 5-pin JTAG port, and toss signals from chip to chip to see if all the chips got soldered onto the board correctly).
Scan works well on synchronous designs, where all the flops in each of several "clock domains" are clocked by a common signal. But in asynchronous designs, where each clock may be clocked by an arbitrary signal, this falls apart.
There IS a methodology - complete with automatic test program tools - that can test asynchronous designs as easily as synchronous. It's called the "Cross-Check Array". But it was never widely deployed in the United States and the company that did it has since been merged into another and by now may be gone. As far as I know, only Sony (which got an unlimited license as part of investing in Cross Check when it was a startup) is the only big user of it these days.
Then the designers would have to contend with accelerations in the 100's of G's range.
A hundred Gs is diddly-squat for a decent electronic hardware design. You get a lot more than that dropping your hifi onto the floor from desk high.
You won't launch any PEOPLE that way. (You'd have to submerge them in liquid and debubble their lungs, digestive system, and maybe their inner ears.) But for MIL spec electronics it's a walk in the park.
"Proximity fuses" on anti-aircraft shells in world war II were electronics using GLASS TUBES!
This isn't rocket science! B-)
Following the link "proof of Osama's guilt. [mmm.com.au]" in the previous posting casts a vote in an online poll.
What would happen if NASA does reduce spending and the growth of the frontier of space travel becomes stunted accordingly?
A decade or so back, when several startups were trying to develop private enterprise launch systems, they couldn't get the aerospace manufacturers to sell them components (space-rated cryogenic-liquid valving, guidance components, etc.). One manufacturer's rep said (in confidence) that they had been told by NASA administrators that if they sold to the private launch companies they wouldn't sell to NASA again.
So they made do with NON-space rated components and other kludges.
Some of this worked really well. (For instance: The virtual control panel hacked up on a Mac was a LOT cheaper and more functional than the roomfull of one-of control equipment it replaced, much to the amazement of the NASA engineers who watched the engine test.)
But some of it was a disaster. (For instance: The liquid oxygen valve on a hybrid engine failed in a mode that created the second worst possible disaster {behind guidance failure} for a hybrid engine vehicle: It stuck at 10% during engine startup. Too little thrust to get off the pad, but they couldn't turn it off so the rocket burned itself up. The test was a failure and the company was unable to raise money for a second try and folded, taking the safest known rocket technology down with it.)
"What would happen if NASA does reduce spending...?" Well, for starters they wouldn't HAVE the kind of clout with suppliers to deny components to the private market, while the suppliers would have a big drop in sales until they found other customers.
It could be the best thing ever to happen to space technology.
There are circumstances where a Citizen qualifies to vote but does not have or need an SS number.
There are a few duplications - both multiple people under one number and people with more than one number.
Non-citizens have SS numbers legally.
Criminal conviction status and other issues that might affect eligibility to vote aren't attached to SS number (with the possible exception of military discharge status).
Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept.
If they ever DO mandate a national ID card/number I want it to be mandatory to provide it for registration in federal elections and to be collected federally and checked for uniqueness. That would go a long way toward eliminating election fraud.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said.
Which is why I almost didn't post this, for fear of turning more Republicans on to the idea of national ID cards than it turns Democrats off from it.
In case you haven't been following the issues, it's primarily Democratic legislators who have been in favor of a national ID card and other tightening of citizen tracking.
But the Democrats are the main beneficiaries of the votes of illegal/undocumented non-citizen voters. So they have also been strong opponents of voter verification and proponents of unexamined registration and voting schemes such as "motor-voter" and always-absentee-without-reason voting.
Your social security number is already a national id card. Link it with a driver's license and you're set.
They allowed that, then mandated it, several years ago.
If you didn't have to provide your SS number the last time you renewed, expect to have to produce it next time.
In the People are Lazy theory, People tend to do only those things that are utterly important to them. This allows more ambitious folks a free hand.
But there is a COST to participating in a democracy: Eyeball time.
You only have so much life. If you spend it all in political wrangling over the rules of living it you don't have any left to enjoy. (Unless your favorite passtime is policical wrangling, of course.)
This is why there are Republics: So people can chose representatives they trust to spend the time coming up with a ruleset.
It's also part of why Anarchists and Nihilists simply ignore or work around those who "claim to make rules".
This also shuts out a lot more people that would other-wise be able to vote, I can name several people who probably would choose to vote yet this will cut them out.
Of course they COULD buy a domain registration and vote. It used to be $100/reg, but it's much lower now...
But perhaps that's what's intended. Can you IMAGINE the revenue for the registrars if there's ever an important and closely-split issue coming up and BOTH sides decide to buy votes?
(And can you imagine a Beo... naw!)
I recall from one of the earlier movies that a Jedi Knight was supposed to make his own lightsaber near the end of his apprenticeship. (That's a convenient skill. Nobody else seems to have them. So being disarmed in a remote location would be a long-term problem if you had to visit a jedi armory to rearm.)
Perhaps the distinct color is supposed to be an artifact of the individual home-brew devices.
Fox News isn't even worth mentioning, do people serious watch that?
At least CNN has something going for it.
Yes people watch Fox News. This is because stories that can't be spun into a left-wing slant won't be aired on any other television medium in the US (except for a few that might air on the official outlets of certain religious organizations).
When it comes to constructing a propaganda machine the suppression of coverage of opposing points of view and news items giving them supporting evidence is a far more important piece than the promulgation of a Big Lie. This was known and used well by the Nazis, the Communists (European, Asian, and Central/South American), and every petty dictator with a population too poor to afford short wave radios. It's no less true in the meida-conglomerated "free world" today, despite the Newspeak-style renaming of "propaganda" as "spin".
Fox News makes a point of living its "fair and balanced" slogan - which it does by giving the top two political slants equal time, rather than one of them getting all the time and the other none. This still leaves number three downward with no outlet (though Fox News does give them a couple minutes from time to time).
So the Conservative position gets half a channel with Fox and none with anybody else (including CNN). The result is that heartland viewers watch it in drives (despite the laughably tiny headline segments). I hear Fox News has passed CNN in US viewership despite having far lower cable system penetration.
sure, it's nice that there's a software ARM emulator knocking around the internet, but it's in no way a substitute for a free processor core design, with which you may fabricate hardware ARM clones.
Correct.
But an emulator is very useful for hardware projects nontheless. It runs a lot faster than the verilog code in verification and can be used for a number of purposes.
How ironic that it only took two weeks after SonicBlue won a Technological/Engineering Emmy Award for the Advancement of Television for the big boys to crackdown on them.
That may not be a coincidence.
The Emmy will have attracted the attention of a lot of people in high places at the networks, and a lot of potential customers as well.
Two weeks seems about right for putting the filings together. And even if they were already working on it the publicity may have encouraged them to get off the dime and actually file, before their opposition's position was improved by an expanded customer base.
What about organic computers ?? [As an alternative to "mechanical rod" based nanocomputers]
I remember reading long ago about organic molecules being able to "switch" between two polarized states under the influence if an outer electronic field. This was supposed to be a future for nano registries...
It's a matter of size.
Electrons are big, light, fuzzy things, and the electric field goes out a long way. When you want to make circuitry REALLY small you don't want to use that for anything but holding your pieces together, because your gates and wiring would have to be very large to avoid crosstalk.
But atoms are effectively smaller than electrons. The nuclei are MUCH smaller, and they suck their electrons down, making most of the fields cancel out at after a very short distance. And they're heavier, so they don't shake around and flit around as much.
You can send a bit, or several bits, by sliding or rotating a rod as you can by shoving electrons into and out of a wire (even a single-molecule wire), and the signal stays IN the rod except where you WANT it to "come out". At atomic scales moving a rod is nearly as fast as moving an electron (and comparable to moving a hole), so speed isn't a problem.
As for amplification there's not much that can beat an "interposer". That's a piece of matter that gets between a two moving parts and transfers a shove from the one supplying motion "power" to the one carrying a signal away as motion. Expend a little power to put the interposer into position and it will transfer shoves (with no further input) until you pull it away again.
Most of the language of the bill refers to "protected machines" (machines belonging to the government or financial institutions)
Protected machines includes machines used in interstate commerece.
So buy something on e-bay and your machine is a "protected machine".
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11?
First: Those were just the net outlets of the mainstream media - TV news networks, newspapers, etc. They do NOT represent the net news outlets.
Second: Some purely net news outlets stayed up. For instance, the Drudge Report had NO trouble the whole time - and even when a site Drudge cited got saturated you could usually get the thrust of the story from the headline on the link. Slashdot hung in there quite well. (I suspect others did, too, but I had no need for them given those two.)
Third: The operators of ALL the important sites, major media and pure net, were on the ball and upgraded the site's response within a few hours. The next time there's a major story like this they'll be ready. (History repeats: This is a recap of the development of modern TV disaster coverage, which was essentially invented and shaken out during the days after the John Kennedy assasination.)
Emacs does include some features that are equivalent to these sort of macros. They are disabled by default
And they used to be enabled by default - which was a big vulnerability if you used them as a mail reader or netnews reader. A simple string embedded in the letter or posting could do anything YOU could do in emacs - which means anything you could do from a shell, too.
Fortunately the first well-known public exploit was a netnews posting demoing the bug by popping up a window and telling you how to turn it off. The default was changed in the next release.
The days of the MIT AI lab were a more innocent time. To keep the students from crashing the machine they made it trivial - with a well-documented command to do it. The idea being that if there were no reputation points to be earned by "finding a way to crash the machine" but lots of negative ones to be had by annoying the other students, everybody would get bored with it quickly. Stallman continued the tradition later by having no root password on his personal machine for quite a while.
Unfortunately, about one person in a hundred (one in 50 to one in 200) is a psychopath - a person with a brain problem analogous to color blindness that amounts to "no concience". Some fraction of these don't compensate by learning that hurting others is bad for number one and becoming "good" by deliberate effort.
So when you have hundreds of millions of people on the internet, you end up with a few "black hat" hackers and a host of script kiddies. So the days of innocence (and Stallman's open root account) are long over.
Now internet-connected computers hold information of value that can be stolen and run mission-critical functions for businesses with cutthroat competitors. So a management order to install mass-market stoftware with a history of well-known major security holes has graduated from administrative cluelessness to a severe breach of fiduciary duty.
If you want to be successful on Linux (or any other free OS), you need to be libre/free.
That depends on how you define success.
This will never displace gcc as the compiler used by most people - because gcc is good enough, open, and free.
But it has a fine niche market as a "pay extra, get better performance" option for people with serious crunch to do - graphic games, scientific, financial modeling, etc. It will continue to hold this niche unless/until gcc or some other free&open compiler achieves comparable performance AND cross-platform ability to all game platforms, or some commercial competitor outdoes it - at which point the product's market would be in jepoarday regardless of whether it had been ported to Linux.
At a minimum it should be able to produce code to RUN on Linux. Otherwise it's not supporting the game authors who want to release a Linux version of their product.
But I think that a version that runs ON Linux, if not overpriced (or as an extra-cost extra on an existing non-Linux release) should pay for the port and make a tidy profit. At a minimum some game designers will want to work directly on the Linux platform rather than being limited to cross-platform development.
It's not the decoding of binhex files that's a problem. The Mac has been automagically uncompressing downloads for a long time, but the automatic launching of a new executable is a lovely new Microsoftism.
Sorry. What I meant was "why the HELL was the launching of the binaries turned on by default?".
I didn't read the post closely enough to realize that the workaround wasn't to turn off the autolaunch but to turn off a step, innoctuous in itself, that was a precursor to the launch.
This implies that there isn't an easy way to turn off the launch. Even worse...
You can turn off the automatic decoding of bin.hex files ...
But why the HELL was it on by DEFAULT?
Oh, right.
It's a Microsoft program.
Never mind.
(The fact that it's for use on a non-Microsoft platform, and thus could make that platform vulnerable to malicious cracking, probably wasn't even a factor.)
But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?
Much of that redundancy went out the window due to two factors:
The move from a generalized net (most sites talk to a random minimum of two others, the routers figure out the shortest route) to a backbone-plus-ISPs with lots of fixed routing and most sites as singly-connected leaves.
If you lose (all) your connection(s) to your ISP, or your ISP loses any single-point-of-failure or all N of a set of n-points-of-failure between you and the backbone, you're cut off. Running an ethernet cable to a neighbor's LAN that's still connected via another ISP will not get you the packets that were trying to reach your IP address.
Your ISP's connection with the rest of the backbone might have some nice self-healing characteristics. So the net-of-ISPs might still have that kind of survivability. But your packets are at the mercy of your ISP's survival and internals. (And if you're paying home rather than business rates I bet your ISP didn't spend many bux to make things redundant on their way to you.)
With the explosion of hosts the full routing tables are now WAY too big to be held in every router on the net. So we can't go back to the old style even if we wanted to - or at least not without a LOT of engineering.
Noise...72 dba at 1 meter. Where is all this noise coming from? Hydrogen leakes.
That sort of number implies they're using a cooling fan (and chose a noisy-but-efficient one).
According to the press release, these little units only have a 1500 hour lifetime too.
If you then throw it away and buy another it's bad. If you unscrew a few bolts and swap in an inexpensive fresh membrane module it's no big deal. Do it every Nth gas cylinder change.
Also: That may be a guaranteed minimum time before output has dropped 10% or so, rather than "it suddenly dies". Or it could be how long they've tested the prototypes, so far. B-) We'll just have to wait and see.
You make it on the spot from hydrocarbon gasses or liquids:
methane (natural gas as piped to houses)
propane (LPG canisters - typically used for country houses, RVs, barbercues).
butane (Another LPG - typically used for smaller stuff like cigarette lighters. more energy per volume but prefers room temperature to come out of the tank.)
methanol (rubbing alcohol - very toxic)
ethanol (drinking alcohol - very regulated and taxed)
other higher alcohols
gasoline (pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane, etc. plus miscelaneous branched chains and additives)
We don't know yet whether this puppy has its own hydrogen-from-hydrocarbon generator built in or if you need an external one if you want to run it on hidey-carbons rather than hydrogen gas.
Of course you COULD feed it hydrogen gas from a tank of compressed hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, or hydrogen-disolved-in-metal-powder. But a hydrogen-gas system with a large amount of stored gas (rather than enough to make a small popping sound at any one instant) is a major explosion and fire hazard.
Gaseous hydrogen leaks through VERY tiny holes (including the space between metal atoms in solid metal) and burns with an invisible, super-hot ultraviolet flame. If you have a leak big enough to support a flame it WILL have a flame on it within a very short time. You'll find the flame by walking into it and having your clothes, hair, or skin start burning, if it doesn't set something nearby on fire first.
"correlated" ... means they seem to occur at the same time and to the same degree.
Well, that's an oversimplified and slightly misleading characterization. But I don't remember the exact formula for correlation at the moment.
It's essentially a normalized measure of the product of the deviations from their individual means of measurements of two variables (typically the amount of two phenomena). Positive correlation implies that when one goes up the other also tends to be up (either more likely to be up or occasionally way up), negative means that one up implies the other tends down.