I remember a meme from long ago about how NYC demographers would buy data from (whoever manages the sewerage in NYC) in order to determine, from a time-series map of sewer line pressure fluctuations, just exactly when and where people got up to use the plumbing during prime-time television. With a slight staggering of commercial breaks amongst the various media and maybe a bit of curve filtering, you could then determine who is watching which program over the course of an evening.
I can't *believe* the number of straight lines in this post. Just stop now, ok?
Expect a lot of legal mire going forward. International standards work well for technology, but not too well for morality. In the end, the only ones who profit from any law that says "no you can't" will be folks with a few certs in international law. Ultimately it will devolve into local vigilantism and mob rule, if we can't sort this out.
Anybody want to codify a high-level legal system that is adaptable to local mores yet consistent enough to communicate across borders? Get your name in lights.
Yaaarrrr...Law ends with gravity, me bucko! I'll be out riding the solar wind guided by His Noodly Appendage. Ain't that right, Parroty Error? "Awwk, pieces of seven, pieces of seven"
The laws of physics work just as well for any nation.
I am convinced that Man will conquer space. Whether the dominant language is American-accented English, Mandarin, Spanish or Japanese is still uncertain, but your capability remains.
You have a brilliant track record, and a wonderful people. Your achievements have inspired me to a thousand times greater use of my potential, my career, than I would have ever reached without them.
However, from across the Pacific it looks like you're in a kind of perpetual Saturday afternoon over there. Might I diffidently suggest that you, as a country, get up off your arses and start doing what you were best known for again? Your beer is terrible, your automobiles are awful, your cuisine apalling, and your politicians are worse than the French.
But your aerospace engineering is utterly superb, and the hope of the race. Don't let the rest of us down.
What do you think a space elevator will use, fairy dust?
It can be largely self-powered due to the difference in potential from earth to orbit; think of a wire crossing magnetic field lines (hint - how do power tools work?) then think of that being a very large wire, with very large field lines. The wire can be straight, and the electrons will still move. The amount of power is huge, the real problem will be switching the unused volts. But I think inductive coupling will probably work, if it doesn't attempt to weld the car to the cable.
Well, then don't bring it down to the planet. Build something at L5 that uses it. Ship the finished products down to Earth with the carbon locked into the plastics you build. Oh, you don't use plastics? Sorry, use it to grow wood in orbit. And as far as getting it out of Jupiter's gravity well, no problem if you just skim the atmosphere at speed. There's a lot of methane and hydrogen at the edge.
BTW this wasn't my idea, I got it from Jerry Pournelle. But I like it and want it for my own now.
I've got a question, naiive though it may be. Came from thinking about the diamond straw discussions around the nanotech Jetson's car project, but has no relationship either to the Jetsons' car or nanotech -- ah well, that's associative thinking for you...
How much of the fuel load of an orbital booster is spent getting the rocket the first ten feet off the ground? The first hundred? Could some bloody big spring (or compressed air actuators of some sort) underneath the launch pad compensate for even a few thousand litres of fuel? Ok, maybe that's not practical except iconically. But is there any way we could use ground-based thrust to augment the fuel weight vs delta V penalty at takeoff in any practical way?
Want fuel? Dip-scoop the outer surface of Jupiter for enough "fossil fuel" to last us forever. Send one per year; might take 10 years to get the first balloon full back, but after then you'd have one per year -- a tank of arbitrary size, full of burnable, polymer-able methane.
Unless you really believe in voluntary population control, sustainable ecosystems and the Tooth Fairy to keep us alive as a planetary population, in which case I can't help you.
..but where are they now?
Their descendents became you. I wonder what went wrong.
Actually, what might work with the cubicle set would be to put an opposing two of their partition walls on motorised rails, linked to a database that moved them inward when their quotas went down, and outward when they went up. Give them inflatable chairs, too -- so when the walls move in too close, you can fire them directly through the roof.
As do I, and I just completed a backup review for a major retail chain. We buy external USB drives by the hundreds to handle the backup of our store back office servers, although we tend to use Seagate and LaCie rather than Maxtor. We use hardware RAID 5 in the servers for hardware fault tolerance, and the externals for archival and/or software fault tolerance. One thing we ran across with the Seagate drives that forced us to switch was the fact that our backups are scheduled, and mid-run the Seagate changed their power switch from a clicky to a soft switch, so we couldn't default the buggers to "on" if we had a power outage & the ups wasn't working right -- and with enough stores, that combination does come up once in a while (UPS batteries are a pain).
If you are a less ah, "distributed" than we are, block mirroring software may be the better choice. Have a look at LinkPro -- seems to be a software-based version of this and I don't think it costs the earth (FOSS version in the works anyone?)
So go for it!!! Who cares what you do? Heck, give yourself 10x the RAM and see if it actually makes any difference!!! (it won't)
In general, I approve of your philosophy. But remember there are addressing overheads to map all that disk space into memory, and all that page management can give you a bit of a performance hit too. It isn't the cost of disk, it's the cost of managing it that means you have to put a little bit of thought into it. I know the stuff is cheap, but you still have to compute with it.
Or to quote my favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is".
Pagefile and swapfile go back a bit further than W95 -- two separate entities in VMS. Paging was for small granularity swaps, on a least-recently-used basis. The swap file was for whole processes, where nothing but the process header was left in memory. Image activation was very efficient -- it didn't read the whole executable into RAM, it just marked where it was and demand-paged it in. Considering how expensive and limited memory was in the 1980's, it was a good system. I still like VMS, even after years of win/lin servers and desktops. The sucker just works, and I still dream of logical names coming back into favour. It didn't do quite as much for you as more modern implementations but if you organised it correctly, you were very much in control of things and you could keep it running and safe.
How much VM was safe? As GP said, it varies. But I do remember that extending the page or swap file was a bit overhead-intensive, so the hot tuning tip was to figure out a good max value and use it for both min and max values to keep the system from remapping it's page tables. I think the same technique works well on Win2K & upward (a fair bit of their memory models were derived from VMS, by agreement between MSFT and DEC), not sure about the efficiencies of unix* based systems but it might work as a tuning tip (YMMV, and remember Tuning Tip #1 -- MEASURE it!)
True, and the reason I stick with EQ after so many years of slow epic camps is because the pace changes. Some events are really intense (those monster Epic 2.0 raids) and some go glacially, like a long chess game played by mail. There are games that beat it in graphics, but a long, slow, comfortable game has a certain broad appeal. Having a strategy to discuss in the chat gives you the community of interest. And my toons never seem to run out of breath. Mana, perhaps (VoQ helps) but they can run all day without running out of breath. Wish I could do that.
A chain of discrete events where some modest reward is on the table is a big part of entertainment -- the running joke (thank you Monty Python), the long TV series, a series of novels from a favorite author -- all these things have long term continuity in their favour. Once the familiar is established you can do things with the characters and rules you've created. Think of how kids play -- many games consume half the time arguing about the rules, then you can play forever on the same concept. A good fantasy is a life experience too.
Plus it helps if one's geek-goddess wife has an L70 cleric with a clicky rez;)
Yep, it's mental. My characters in Everquest can run all day and night without pain and suffering or running out of breath on a couple of iron rations and a flask or two of water. I can't do that...
There's a lot of good science fiction that becomes science, just as good metaphysics eventually becomes physics. Every breakthrough begins with an idea, and the best ideas have their source in the imagination. A lot of kids who watched Star Trek grew up as engineers and scientists (um, and a few went wierd with golf ball retrievers, but hey -- we're an elite group here)
*"The Doctor is On", Firesign Theatre, "I think we're all Bozos on this bus".
Read "Venus on the Half-Shell" if you can find a copy -- Phil Farmer wrote it under the pseudonym "Kilgore Trout" (a classic Kurt Vonnegut character). There's a chapter on The Prison Planet where more and more people are incarcerated in prison due to stricter and stricter laws; eventually the prison walls expand beyond a planetary great circle and the prison walls become smaller and smaller, until eventually there's only a small circular prison wall with a lone prison guard inside. Swift -- Vonnegut -- Farmer; we're not the only ones to watch a tyranny develop, and satire is a potent weapon. Remember that, samizdat!
It's a clear sign that Gozira was here -- the lack of dissolved oxygen in the water is clearly Dr.Sarazawa's handiwork. Dive more deeply to find the bones. Bring your Geiger counter.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod this sucker up.
You forgot one: o List the number of journalists and Hewlett-Packard board members you've spoken to recently
I can't *believe* the number of straight lines in this post. Just stop now, ok?
Expect a lot of legal mire going forward. International standards work well for technology, but not too well for morality. In the end, the only ones who profit from any law that says "no you can't" will be folks with a few certs in international law. Ultimately it will devolve into local vigilantism and mob rule, if we can't sort this out.
Anybody want to codify a high-level legal system that is adaptable to local mores yet consistent enough to communicate across borders? Get your name in lights.
And larger scams have bigger still, and so ad infinitum
Can anyone say "social engineered virus on a Slashdot scale?"
Love the countdown timer. I'll be watching it.
Yaaarrrr...Law ends with gravity, me bucko! I'll be out riding the solar wind guided by His Noodly Appendage. Ain't that right, Parroty Error? "Awwk, pieces of seven, pieces of seven"
Man, I'm not sure the City Fathers would approve of all this.
The laws of physics work just as well for any nation.
I am convinced that Man will conquer space. Whether the dominant language is American-accented English, Mandarin, Spanish or Japanese is still uncertain, but your capability remains.
You have a brilliant track record, and a wonderful people. Your achievements have inspired me to a thousand times greater use of my potential, my career, than I would have ever reached without them.
However, from across the Pacific it looks like you're in a kind of perpetual Saturday afternoon over there. Might I diffidently suggest that you, as a country, get up off your arses and start doing what you were best known for again? Your beer is terrible, your automobiles are awful, your cuisine apalling, and your politicians are worse than the French.
But your aerospace engineering is utterly superb, and the hope of the race. Don't let the rest of us down.
It can be largely self-powered due to the difference in potential from earth to orbit; think of a wire crossing magnetic field lines (hint - how do power tools work?) then think of that being a very large wire, with very large field lines. The wire can be straight, and the electrons will still move. The amount of power is huge, the real problem will be switching the unused volts. But I think inductive coupling will probably work, if it doesn't attempt to weld the car to the cable.
BTW this wasn't my idea, I got it from Jerry Pournelle. But I like it and want it for my own now.
How much of the fuel load of an orbital booster is spent getting the rocket the first ten feet off the ground? The first hundred? Could some bloody big spring (or compressed air actuators of some sort) underneath the launch pad compensate for even a few thousand litres of fuel? Ok, maybe that's not practical except iconically. But is there any way we could use ground-based thrust to augment the fuel weight vs delta V penalty at takeoff in any practical way?
blugu64 has the right of it. Business 101 -- Dollars, target date, feature set. Pick any two.
Want fuel? Dip-scoop the outer surface of Jupiter for enough "fossil fuel" to last us forever. Send one per year; might take 10 years to get the first balloon full back, but after then you'd have one per year -- a tank of arbitrary size, full of burnable, polymer-able methane.
Unless you really believe in voluntary population control, sustainable ecosystems and the Tooth Fairy to keep us alive as a planetary population, in which case I can't help you.
Their descendents became you. I wonder what went wrong.
Actually, what might work with the cubicle set would be to put an opposing two of their partition walls on motorised rails, linked to a database that moved them inward when their quotas went down, and outward when they went up. Give them inflatable chairs, too -- so when the walls move in too close, you can fire them directly through the roof.
As do I, and I just completed a backup review for a major retail chain. We buy external USB drives by the hundreds to handle the backup of our store back office servers, although we tend to use Seagate and LaCie rather than Maxtor. We use hardware RAID 5 in the servers for hardware fault tolerance, and the externals for archival and/or software fault tolerance. One thing we ran across with the Seagate drives that forced us to switch was the fact that our backups are scheduled, and mid-run the Seagate changed their power switch from a clicky to a soft switch, so we couldn't default the buggers to "on" if we had a power outage & the ups wasn't working right -- and with enough stores, that combination does come up once in a while (UPS batteries are a pain).
If you are a less ah, "distributed" than we are, block mirroring software may be the better choice. Have a look at LinkPro -- seems to be a software-based version of this and I don't think it costs the earth (FOSS version in the works anyone?)
Another R.A.Heinlein idea independently arrived, heh .. his idea was to form a third house of Congress whose job was simply to repeal laws.
In general, I approve of your philosophy. But remember there are addressing overheads to map all that disk space into memory, and all that page management can give you a bit of a performance hit too. It isn't the cost of disk, it's the cost of managing it that means you have to put a little bit of thought into it. I know the stuff is cheap, but you still have to compute with it.
Or to quote my favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is".
How much VM was safe? As GP said, it varies. But I do remember that extending the page or swap file was a bit overhead-intensive, so the hot tuning tip was to figure out a good max value and use it for both min and max values to keep the system from remapping it's page tables. I think the same technique works well on Win2K & upward (a fair bit of their memory models were derived from VMS, by agreement between MSFT and DEC), not sure about the efficiencies of unix* based systems but it might work as a tuning tip (YMMV, and remember Tuning Tip #1 -- MEASURE it!)
*Bite me, SCO -- I'll call it what I want.
True, and the reason I stick with EQ after so many years of slow epic camps is because the pace changes. Some events are really intense (those monster Epic 2.0 raids) and some go glacially, like a long chess game played by mail. There are games that beat it in graphics, but a long, slow, comfortable game has a certain broad appeal. Having a strategy to discuss in the chat gives you the community of interest. And my toons never seem to run out of breath. Mana, perhaps (VoQ helps) but they can run all day without running out of breath. Wish I could do that.
A chain of discrete events where some modest reward is on the table is a big part of entertainment -- the running joke (thank you Monty Python), the long TV series, a series of novels from a favorite author -- all these things have long term continuity in their favour. Once the familiar is established you can do things with the characters and rules you've created. Think of how kids play -- many games consume half the time arguing about the rules, then you can play forever on the same concept. A good fantasy is a life experience too.
Plus it helps if one's geek-goddess wife has an L70 cleric with a clicky rez ;)
Yep, it's mental. My characters in Everquest can run all day and night without pain and suffering or running out of breath on a couple of iron rations and a flask or two of water. I can't do that...
There's a lot of good science fiction that becomes science, just as good metaphysics eventually becomes physics. Every breakthrough begins with an idea, and the best ideas have their source in the imagination. A lot of kids who watched Star Trek grew up as engineers and scientists (um, and a few went wierd with golf ball retrievers, but hey -- we're an elite group here)
*"The Doctor is On", Firesign Theatre, "I think we're all Bozos on this bus".
Read "Venus on the Half-Shell" if you can find a copy -- Phil Farmer wrote it under the pseudonym "Kilgore Trout" (a classic Kurt Vonnegut character). There's a chapter on The Prison Planet where more and more people are incarcerated in prison due to stricter and stricter laws; eventually the prison walls expand beyond a planetary great circle and the prison walls become smaller and smaller, until eventually there's only a small circular prison wall with a lone prison guard inside. Swift -- Vonnegut -- Farmer; we're not the only ones to watch a tyranny develop, and satire is a potent weapon. Remember that, samizdat!
It's a clear sign that Gozira was here -- the lack of dissolved oxygen in the water is clearly Dr.Sarazawa's handiwork. Dive more deeply to find the bones. Bring your Geiger counter.
Please, someone come up with another use for quixoticity? I REALLY want this one in general use.
Of course, I could be tilting at windmills here...