"Big computer in Rockville, MD"... from the 70's... XDS Sigma series perhaps? Xerox had a big presence in Rockville way back then, and their computers were definitely big. Not particularly powerful, but they did have hardware interrupt and that was fairly new in the early 70's and they did a bit of traffic control work (generally via TRW). In the late 70's, it could have been a PDP-11 of some stripe or even a DEC 10. Anybody have any particulars?
Not that it isn't worthwhile as a human endeavour.
Sure, let's spend money on science, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that manned space flight is an efficient way to do space science.
Agree, especially your second line. The point of manned space flight isn't the science, the point of manned space flight is to get us out into space, where infinite resources are available for the patient race. Science will be done in service to this goal. The goal itself is one of very long term economics.
Larger in what way - radius or mass? Don't stars need to be at least three solar masses before they can implode into a black hole? And if so, are you describing a special case?
The distance from Earth to Mars varies between 3 and 22 light minutes.
Odd. If I remember correctly (I was at JPL on the day of the landing) the figure quoted was 40 minutes one-way light time for the distance from Viking1 to DSN receiver at the moment of landing. That was back in 1976, but I don't think the laws of physics have changed that much, and I believe radio signals still travel at the speed of light. And certain numbers do stand out in your memory.
To their defense, we do have safety bottles today because at some point a baby died eating pills thinking they were candies. It's all about protecting the incompetent from themselves.
/golfclap. Not true, however. Safety bottles and tamper-evident packaging came about because some dill poisoned a number of packages of Tylenol in an extortion scheme. This wasn't protecting people against themselves, this was protecting people against a malicious idiot, may he be reborn as a cockroach.
If I can see little further than others, it is because I have been standing on the shoulders of midgets.
I've seen a lot of developers who plow into a problem using libraries that look like they'll do the job, with no validation or verification that the libraries are themselves right. They just assume they are, and plow forward.
Sometimes, like exchanging flippers for feet, I wonder if we made the right decision to leave analog computers behind for this sort of thing. Old battleship and Nike missile systems used analog computers, and they (for all their majestic, neo-steampunk size) made a fairly decent ballistic trajectory.
Things like this can't be rushed, plain and simple. Carefully executed planning is what's needed to take on these types of projects.
What XPeter said.
On the gripping hand, they should see if there's anything left of the civil engineering group from the old Hydro-Electric Commission in Tasmania. The collapse of the bridge over the Derwent River when the ore ship Lake Illawara collided with it was repaired by them when the department of roads weren't up to the task. The old Hydro took their sweet time to fix it, but fix it they did and it's better than new (ship-repelling caissons were added). The size and type of that bridge and the treachery of the waters within which they worked make them similar cases.
If all you want is to insert a bit of notation in a readable way into a document, copy and paste is your friend. Pick a nice comprehensive page such as this Wiki page which may have most of what you need.
Make a static local copy of the HTML page for speed of access and copy the bits you need into a scratch pad, blank word processor page or paint program. (If you have a Microsoft OS use OneNote instead for its nice screen scraper - it's a reasonably nice virtual notebook by the way, used it for years, but be careful with it).
Once you have it right copy the lot as a drawing and plonk the lot into your document where you want it. It's not MathCad, it's not LaTex, but it's reasonably fast, there's no separate program environment to bring up, works and there's really nothing to learn.
I've always been a fan of simplicity, and sometimes your own hand-eye-brain interface is the best one for the job. But if you do this sort of thing a lot, survey the field and buy something purpose-built. I grew up on Fortran though and a bit of hack and slash is second nature to me, so your mileage may vary. TWAGOS.
Far too stealthily for my taste! Let's get lots of netbooks/notebooks with ARM so we have some choice!
Yes, a processor architecture guaranteed by the second amendment to the US constitution. You can't take my netbook away from me, no sir, you can pry it away from my cold dead hands.
Given that the popular literature is telling us that many cancers are caused by virii, what is the resistance to virus infection by these cells relative to the mouse cells?
Smart Grid - so the government can turn off your air conditioner on the hottest day of the year. No thanks.
More like Smart Grid - so the power companies know when and where to turn on the extra capacity on the hottest day of the year, instead of being surprised by it. Yes please.
Your situation may be different, I suspect we're not even in the same country. But that figure is one we got directly from a C-level exec in one of the power distribution businesses here. Part of the reason for a Smart Grid is to more effectively profile energy usage throughout the day, so they have facts instead of having to work from guesses. The infrastructure needs to be updated to provide that.
it's a stupid study made for marketing purposes. Should I understand that Slashdot is now in the "scyence of marketing"? wtf?
Well, marketing is basically applied behavioural psychology combined with math and $technology, so it's not totally off-topic.
The association of smell with memory is a well known mechanism, though. Evoke certain memories via particular smells? Certainly, you have a valid point there. I do wonder if the study took smell's use as a memory trigger into account. I suppose I could RTFA but that would be cheating...
You've got the open source choice wrong here, I think. The best option is quite proprietary - it's a Sony Playstation 3 peripheral made by MegaTokyo Inc.
I just completed work on a major study around Smart Grids and there's a window of opportunity for home automation coming up from that direction. One of the initiatives the power companies are discussing will involve tools to let you not only see your house's power consumption on a circuit-by-circuit basis, but are meant to allow you to more directly control the electrical appliances in the home, remotely via the Internet. (It gives them better usage information too, which cuts the cost of power - they typically oversupply by 100% to handle peaks).
The way to influence what capabilities these things will have (and to voice any concerns you have over security etc.) is to find the email address of your local power company and send them your questions. Questions get a lot more air play than suggested solutions, but if you're careful about how you couch the questions you can steer them in the direction you want. I'd suggest a few like:
Q: What does "smart grid" mean and how will it relate to me?" - you'll get boilerplate response on this one, but it will flag your letter to the C-levels who are currently tracking this stuff hard.
Q: What sort of control over my usage will this give me? Can I control my house this way?
Q: How secure will it be? Would others be able to hack into my house and turn off my fridge?
Et very cetra. Make up your own. They won't really have any answers yet, because they're all very early on in the investment / infrastructure refresh cycle, but if you ask the questions you want them to answer and consider your needs and interests in them, you will get heard - this is that part of the build cycle where they're actually listening. Use your voice now while it counts. You might even get some nifty gear for effectively free, and it might be the stuff you want. And if enough of you ask for it, yes, it will run Linux.
I hate when marketing weasels trot this tired old line out. It's awfully convenient for them, because by saying 'There's no such thing as bad publicity!", they've effectively stated that no matter what they do or the outcome of their campaign, they were successful.
There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, and in my role as a marketing weasel I'm rather sensitive to it (hard to put the right spin on a turd fastball, eh?). Remember the old "Mustang II - Boredom 0" campaign before that car sank into oblivion? Someone omitted the detail of whether or not people remember numbers (Roman numeral or otherwise) as they drive past billboards. Textbook example of "bad publicity". And whenever someone mentions Exxon Valdez, I don't think of a shiny gas pump, I think of the suffering of sea birds. So yes, I can vouch for the existence of bad publicity. You don't want it.
That's what PowerPoint is for. You have to speak to them in their own language (i.e. pictures and text so simple as to be inaccurate);)p>
That's what PowerPoint is used badly for.
The best use is as a sort of wallpaper you use to give people a fixed visual link for the things you are saying. Think of it as an index to the stuff you want them to remember, a key phrase that your audience can use as an association for the stuff you want them to remember - you do the actual talking, the communicating. Use pictures a lot.
And if you really want people to remember, have popcorn popping or some other good smell happening, because the olfactory sense seems to be hardwired into wetware memory logic. (People buy more when they're hungry, too).
The worst use of PowerPoint is to use it as a way to present detailed information. Crowd the slides and you lose. A PP slide is something to talk about. It's no good trying to make it carry the whole message.
Oh, and use whitespace. Short messages are easier to read.
Ok, it's an acronym, possibly not a real word. But SCADA (jfgi) is the most likely target we need to defend against in any cyberattack. SCADA systems measure voltages, control levels and flip switches on industrial and civil infrastructure systems such as those controlling water and sewerage systems, and running petrochemical plants.
Most of the truly scary scenarios are being looked at by security experts now (disclosure: the company I work for is involved in this sort of work) and a lot of SCADA systems have enjoyed for years the security of simply not being on the net, or are now the subject of isolation efforts as people realise the potential for malice. However, there are a number of SCADA networks that are connected to the Internet, for reasons of cost and convenience.
Not all these systems have been secured, and some are still vulnerable. I'd call that a scary scenario. And yes, you can do damage by fiddling with the settings, to the point of damaging water mains or (quite literally) spreading crap over the landscape. So, any security pros out there with a civil infrastructure page in your portfolio, start asking those embarrassing questions. It's important.
I suspect the Nigerian police snarfed up the already useless sites and shut them down in a halfhearted show of being proactive even while on the take. Probably took the opportunity to get rid of a few competitors as well.
Never discount the possibility that a different organisation can offer a higher bribe.
Slashdot Mirror
"Big computer in Rockville, MD" ... from the 70's ... XDS Sigma series perhaps? Xerox had a big presence in Rockville way back then, and their computers were definitely big. Not particularly powerful, but they did have hardware interrupt and that was fairly new in the early 70's and they did a bit of traffic control work (generally via TRW). In the late 70's, it could have been a PDP-11 of some stripe or even a DEC 10. Anybody have any particulars?
Agree, especially your second line. The point of manned space flight isn't the science, the point of manned space flight is to get us out into space, where infinite resources are available for the patient race. Science will be done in service to this goal. The goal itself is one of very long term economics.
I have known guys with a half dozen degrees after their names that were dumb as a stump when it came to common sense
That you, Will Rogers? Howzitgoin mate?
For blackholes largers than the sun,
Larger in what way - radius or mass? Don't stars need to be at least three solar masses before they can implode into a black hole? And if so, are you describing a special case?
The distance from Earth to Mars varies between 3 and 22 light minutes.
Odd. If I remember correctly (I was at JPL on the day of the landing) the figure quoted was 40 minutes one-way light time for the distance from Viking1 to DSN receiver at the moment of landing. That was back in 1976, but I don't think the laws of physics have changed that much, and I believe radio signals still travel at the speed of light. And certain numbers do stand out in your memory.
To their defense, we do have safety bottles today because at some point a baby died eating pills thinking they were candies. It's all about protecting the incompetent from themselves.
/golfclap. Not true, however. Safety bottles and tamper-evident packaging came about because some dill poisoned a number of packages of Tylenol in an extortion scheme. This wasn't protecting people against themselves, this was protecting people against a malicious idiot, may he be reborn as a cockroach.
If I can see little further than others, it is because I have been standing on the shoulders of midgets.
I've seen a lot of developers who plow into a problem using libraries that look like they'll do the job, with no validation or verification that the libraries are themselves right. They just assume they are, and plow forward.
Sometimes, like exchanging flippers for feet, I wonder if we made the right decision to leave analog computers behind for this sort of thing. Old battleship and Nike missile systems used analog computers, and they (for all their majestic, neo-steampunk size) made a fairly decent ballistic trajectory.
Who's that on my lawn?
Things like this can't be rushed, plain and simple. Carefully executed planning is what's needed to take on these types of projects.
What XPeter said.
On the gripping hand, they should see if there's anything left of the civil engineering group from the old Hydro-Electric Commission in Tasmania. The collapse of the bridge over the Derwent River when the ore ship Lake Illawara collided with it was repaired by them when the department of roads weren't up to the task. The old Hydro took their sweet time to fix it, but fix it they did and it's better than new (ship-repelling caissons were added). The size and type of that bridge and the treachery of the waters within which they worked make them similar cases.
If all you want is to insert a bit of notation in a readable way into a document, copy and paste is your friend. Pick a nice comprehensive page such as this Wiki page which may have most of what you need.
Make a static local copy of the HTML page for speed of access and copy the bits you need into a scratch pad, blank word processor page or paint program. (If you have a Microsoft OS use OneNote instead for its nice screen scraper - it's a reasonably nice virtual notebook by the way, used it for years, but be careful with it).
Once you have it right copy the lot as a drawing and plonk the lot into your document where you want it. It's not MathCad, it's not LaTex, but it's reasonably fast, there's no separate program environment to bring up, works and there's really nothing to learn.
I've always been a fan of simplicity, and sometimes your own hand-eye-brain interface is the best one for the job. But if you do this sort of thing a lot, survey the field and buy something purpose-built. I grew up on Fortran though and a bit of hack and slash is second nature to me, so your mileage may vary. TWAGOS.
"Nuclear engine develops YOU!"
Ok, that's finally funny again!
Far too stealthily for my taste! Let's get lots of netbooks/notebooks with ARM so we have some choice!
Yes, a processor architecture guaranteed by the second amendment to the US constitution. You can't take my netbook away from me, no sir, you can pry it away from my cold dead hands.
(Uh, can I get a rez please?)
Rodents of Unusual Resistances? I don't think they exist.
Oh please, stop it. My keyboard is full of Coke Zero now and my sinuses hurt.
ga;ty
Given that the popular literature is telling us that many cancers are caused by virii, what is the resistance to virus infection by these cells relative to the mouse cells?
Smart Grid - so the government can turn off your air conditioner on the hottest day of the year. No thanks.
More like Smart Grid - so the power companies know when and where to turn on the extra capacity on the hottest day of the year, instead of being surprised by it. Yes please.
Your situation may be different, I suspect we're not even in the same country. But that figure is one we got directly from a C-level exec in one of the power distribution businesses here. Part of the reason for a Smart Grid is to more effectively profile energy usage throughout the day, so they have facts instead of having to work from guesses. The infrastructure needs to be updated to provide that.
it's a stupid study made for marketing purposes. Should I understand that Slashdot is now in the "scyence of marketing"? wtf?
Well, marketing is basically applied behavioural psychology combined with math and $technology, so it's not totally off-topic.
The association of smell with memory is a well known mechanism, though. Evoke certain memories via particular smells? Certainly, you have a valid point there. I do wonder if the study took smell's use as a memory trigger into account. I suppose I could RTFA but that would be cheating...
Sure you can. "Archvillain gets his hands on submerged puppies for unknown purposes."
You've got the open source choice wrong here, I think. The best option is quite proprietary - it's a Sony Playstation 3 peripheral made by MegaTokyo Inc.
I just completed work on a major study around Smart Grids and there's a window of opportunity for home automation coming up from that direction. One of the initiatives the power companies are discussing will involve tools to let you not only see your house's power consumption on a circuit-by-circuit basis, but are meant to allow you to more directly control the electrical appliances in the home, remotely via the Internet. (It gives them better usage information too, which cuts the cost of power - they typically oversupply by 100% to handle peaks).
The way to influence what capabilities these things will have (and to voice any concerns you have over security etc.) is to find the email address of your local power company and send them your questions. Questions get a lot more air play than suggested solutions, but if you're careful about how you couch the questions you can steer them in the direction you want. I'd suggest a few like:
Q: What does "smart grid" mean and how will it relate to me?" - you'll get boilerplate response on this one, but it will flag your letter to the C-levels who are currently tracking this stuff hard.
Q: What sort of control over my usage will this give me? Can I control my house this way?
Q: How secure will it be? Would others be able to hack into my house and turn off my fridge?
Et very cetra. Make up your own. They won't really have any answers yet, because they're all very early on in the investment / infrastructure refresh cycle, but if you ask the questions you want them to answer and consider your needs and interests in them, you will get heard - this is that part of the build cycle where they're actually listening. Use your voice now while it counts. You might even get some nifty gear for effectively free, and it might be the stuff you want. And if enough of you ask for it, yes, it will run Linux.
I hate when marketing weasels trot this tired old line out. It's awfully convenient for them, because by saying 'There's no such thing as bad publicity!", they've effectively stated that no matter what they do or the outcome of their campaign, they were successful.
There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity, and in my role as a marketing weasel I'm rather sensitive to it (hard to put the right spin on a turd fastball, eh?). Remember the old "Mustang II - Boredom 0" campaign before that car sank into oblivion? Someone omitted the detail of whether or not people remember numbers (Roman numeral or otherwise) as they drive past billboards. Textbook example of "bad publicity". And whenever someone mentions Exxon Valdez, I don't think of a shiny gas pump, I think of the suffering of sea birds. So yes, I can vouch for the existence of bad publicity. You don't want it.
That's what PowerPoint is for. You have to speak to them in their own language (i.e. pictures and text so simple as to be inaccurate) ;)p>
That's what PowerPoint is used badly for.
The best use is as a sort of wallpaper you use to give people a fixed visual link for the things you are saying. Think of it as an index to the stuff you want them to remember, a key phrase that your audience can use as an association for the stuff you want them to remember - you do the actual talking, the communicating. Use pictures a lot.
And if you really want people to remember, have popcorn popping or some other good smell happening, because the olfactory sense seems to be hardwired into wetware memory logic. (People buy more when they're hungry, too).
The worst use of PowerPoint is to use it as a way to present detailed information. Crowd the slides and you lose. A PP slide is something to talk about. It's no good trying to make it carry the whole message.
Oh, and use whitespace. Short messages are easier to read.
Ok, it's an acronym, possibly not a real word. But SCADA (jfgi) is the most likely target we need to defend against in any cyberattack. SCADA systems measure voltages, control levels and flip switches on industrial and civil infrastructure systems such as those controlling water and sewerage systems, and running petrochemical plants.
Most of the truly scary scenarios are being looked at by security experts now (disclosure: the company I work for is involved in this sort of work) and a lot of SCADA systems have enjoyed for years the security of simply not being on the net, or are now the subject of isolation efforts as people realise the potential for malice. However, there are a number of SCADA networks that are connected to the Internet, for reasons of cost and convenience.
Not all these systems have been secured, and some are still vulnerable. I'd call that a scary scenario. And yes, you can do damage by fiddling with the settings, to the point of damaging water mains or (quite literally) spreading crap over the landscape. So, any security pros out there with a civil infrastructure page in your portfolio, start asking those embarrassing questions. It's important.
Never show a child or a fool a thing half-finished.
I suspect the Nigerian police snarfed up the already useless sites and shut them down in a halfhearted show of being proactive even while on the take. Probably took the opportunity to get rid of a few competitors as well.
Never discount the possibility that a different organisation can offer a higher bribe.