If we spot a rock, even a big one, 30 or 40 years out, we have the technology already to make a difference.
But I don't believe you have the technology to prove said rock is going to hit the Earth in 30-40 years ; even small inaccuracies in orbital measurements and simulation could cause massive variation in the predicted position decades later.
You could spend billions and billions of dollars to divert it, only to take it from a trajectory which would have missed the Earth and put it onto a trajectory which will hit us...
There is no advantage to detecting an incoming impactor if you do not have the means to prevent its impact.
So you'd prefer that the next time a Tunguska-style impact occurs, it hits New York with no warning at all, rather than having a few days' warning to evacuate the city?
It's somewhat ironic that this is only exploitable if you have selinux running.. (afaics)
AFAIK it's not SELinux, it's poorly-designed SELinux policies which allow any process to map pages at address zero even if they're not root or not otherwise allowed to do so.
ZFS performance is much better with a 64-bit CPU (partially due to the fact it likes having a lot of kernel address space, partly because it's very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic), which eliminates the Via chips and the low-end Atoms from consideration.
Desktop Atoms are 64-bit. I don't think you can buy a desktop motherboard with a low-end mobile Atom, which are the 32-bit chips.
Computers. Pretty much every desktop that is going to have a PC has one now. That business has gone to replacement only.
Odd. We now have five computers at home (not counting the Sinclair Spectrum), and I'm expecting to buy seven more in the next year or so.
Of course most of them will be low-power, low-cost appliances (MythTV frontend, etc) or servers, and all but one will be running Linux, but the cheaper computers become, the more uses I can find for them. IT isn't just about application software running on PCs.
Unless you're using some obsolete OS like Windows XP, screen DPI has nothing to do with text size.
The fact that I was talking about CRT monitors might have given you a hint that they weren't running Vista.
Personally I really, really hate GUIs that scale text with resolution, precisely because it eliminates the benefit of fitting lots of text on a big, high-resolution screen: if I wanted huge text I'd be running at 800x600. Why should I have to change all the font sizes just to get more text onto a 1920x1080 display than I would at 800x600?
Most netbooks have the Intel chipset which sucks a lot more power than the NVidia one. That might be a reason to want smaller screens, seeing as that would save *some* power...
I think you're confusing the desktop Intel Atom chipsets (which suck major ass) with the mobile Intel chipsets. I believe the Ion chipset takes less power than the desktop Intel chipset for the Atom, but more than the mobile Intel chipset for the Atom.
If I remember correctly, it's something like 22W for the Intel desktop chipset vs 6W for the mobile, with the Ion somewhere in between (I've seen claimed idle consumption around 20-25W for Ion-based desktop systems).
why have a 12" screen when you can pack all those pixels into 10" or 8"?
That might be fine when you're 18, but when you're 40 and your eyesight is starting to go you'll be glad of the larger pixels; I'm not sure about today with larger LCD screens but most of the old farts I know used to run at 800x600 on their 17" CRT monitor so that they could actually read the text.
If you're using a cut-down 'social networking' interface that's designed to show one web site at a time then a 10" display at 1024x600 is probably OK, but the 1280x800 display on my 15" laptop is already too small for programming in an IDE. For web-browsing, email and document processing (i.e. things which don't need much processing power) I'd really want 1280x800 or similar on a 12" display for a netbook. I've been looking at buying one so I could carry it around in my gear bag but finding a good compromise between resolution, display size and price is not easy.
At the other end of the scale I've noticed a few small netbooks appearing at work plugged into racks or manufacturing gear for intelligent equipment monitoring, and an 8" display should work well for those applications.
Emphasis mine. The older stuff was usefuf; the newer stuff is not. However, since the thrust of this story is "buying new stuff", unless somebody can find a source for 6 year old gear....
I bought a new Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse last week and I'm using it right now about eight feet from the MythTV box with no problems.
Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.
If only...
Far more likely it will be sitting there saying 'StupidTaskbarApp.exe did not shut down. Press 'OK' to close this application' or some similar shit.
One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.
And this isn't a flaw in Linux: it's a poorly-configured web-server that does stupid things as root. That's no more a flaw in Linux than logging into the console as root and getting the system infected by malware when someone sends you the latest 'naked hot chick' screensaver.
Most home router owners can't afford $$$ per year for an SSL certificate for their routers.
Which is good. Because if anyone ever feeds you a malicious https:/// URL trying to hack your router, you'll get a bunch of dialog boxes coming up telling you that the certificate can't be validated... and you'll know something bad is going on.
Basically, though, this is merely demonstrating again that web-based hardware admin is a really, really, really bad idea. It's an even worse flaw than my router which has a bug that allows any remote site to reconfigure DNS without a password by sending you a malicious URL (which, fortunately, can be worked around by not using the DNS server in the router).
It wasn't out of memory exceptions, it was 'failed to run all tasks in their timeslice' exceptions. The software was designed to use 95% of the processing power in the worst case, and would have run happily, but NASA procedure was to enable the rendezvous radar prior to landing in case of an abort. The simulator it was tested on didn't fully simulate that radar, so they only found out that processing the extra radar data took more than the spare 5% of CPU time when it was 'tested' for real on the first landing.
Fortunately it used priority-based scheduling, so this merely meant that the lowest-priority tasks were skipped if they couldn't all be completed in the time available but the guidance continued operating.
One of the more interesting aspects of the software was that it was designed so you could reset the computer at any time and it would come back in a fraction of a second and continue where it left off... one of the programmers said that he used to press the reset button at random during his testing to simulate power failures and the like, and it would just keep on running happily.
You see... right there is the cause of this crap. A "missing OOM check" IS A GOD DAMN BUFFER OVERFLOW.
No it's not: from what's been said here it's an out of memory error. In most cases if you run out of memory you get a NULL pointer back and you then access it and crash; it's possible that you allocate an 8GB buffer and then write 4GB into it which just happens to be where your stack is, but very, very few programs will do so... the vast majority will start writing at or near offset zero from the pointer they were allocated, and then the OS will kill the process if the pointer was NULL.
Now, not checking for null pointers from allocations in code where users can pass any old crap as a parameter is a significant bug that needs to be fixed, but trying to claim that it's some super-important buffer overflow flaw is silly. It's like claiming that shooting paper targets is suicide because shooting yourself in the head also involves firing a gun.
I'm finding a lot of sites now using javascript for simple image display. Not even progressively enhancing a basic grid with jQuery, just a simple 3x2 grid (or whatever) of images. Javascript for that, really?
Could be worse: I'm finding more and more sites using _Flash_ for simple image display. That makes even using Javashit look good in comparison.
Ubik, I think, was set in a world were even the doors were 'smart' so you had to pay a toll every time you went in and out of your apartment... unless, of course, you had a screwdriver handy. Somehow I doubt that any 'consumer' really wants to live in a world like that.
The deniers are crazy - a bit like religious fruitcakes!
The funny part is that the Apollo deniers can't even agree on what happened: some claim that the astronauts never left the Earth, others that they went into space but not to the Moon, and at least one that they landed on the Moon but it had an atmosphere and inhabitants.
So we can safely say that at least 90% of the deniers are wrong, which makes the assumption that the other 10% are wrong pretty easy to justify.
It's a fine idea, but people who are making it out to be an inviolable right up there with free speech or the bearing of arms are going a bit overboard.
There is precisely zero point in having a jury if they aren't judging the law as well as the defendant. If courts merely existed to ensure that every law was enforced, there would be no need for juries.
The reason our ancestors fought for the right to jury trials was to protect them against arbitrary laws by ensuring that only one person in twelve had to disagree before the government would be unable to get a conviction.
And yes, there is an abort mechanism on these vehicles. Except in a "human rated" one, abort means returning them safely to earth. Aborting a satellite launch means blowing it up into little pieces.
Which isn't an abort mechanism.
An abort mechanism would be a big parachute to return your satellite to Earth for relaunch, as you can do with a human crew in a capsule; if you have such a thing, then you need to ensure that your launcher will give you the opportunity to use it when something bad happens. If you don't, then you just blow it up because your payload is trash, anyway.
Similarly, if you can still get your humans into a safe orbit if two engines fail, then having a two-engine-out capability on your human-rated launcher makes sense. If your satellite can't get to the correct orbit if two engines fail, then adding a two-engine-out capability is pointless... the payload will just become more space junk.
These are the kind of changes you might have to make to 'human-rate' an unmanned launcher: and they're essentially trivial compared to the cost and complexity of designing a 'human-rated' launcher from scratch.
Yes, I know, its good to make fun of NASA and its shuttle program.
I guess it doesn't take long for the public to remember that the space shuttle carries humans and thus is subject to a completely different set of requirements. Loose a Malaysian satellite - who cares, they are insured (BTW the insurance rate is of course based in part on the success/failure rate)
You just answered your own question: If a rocket isn't safe enough to carry humans, it's not safe enough to carry a billion-dollar satellite without paying a large fraction of a billion dollars in insurance premiums.
'Human-rating' is mostly bogus: the primary difference between a satellite launcher and a 'human-rated' launcher is that there's no abort system on a satellite launcher so if you're going to lose the payload anyway you might as well just crash and burn. A human-launching system needs to ensure that it will fail nicely so the crew can escape... something with the shuttle, of course, has singularly failed to do.
Lastly, I believe the total development cost of the Space-X launcher is a small fraction of the cost of a single shuttle launch, so they expected a few failures in development.
A while ago I was working in Italy: Google would then redirect me to Google in the Netherlands, and Facebook rather kindly switched automatically to displaying its pages in Dutch. Steam usually gets the location right, but won't then let me use my perfectly valid British credit card to buy games when I'm not in Britain.
This is one of the most user-unfriendly ideas to infest the web over the last few years.
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If we spot a rock, even a big one, 30 or 40 years out, we have the technology already to make a difference.
But I don't believe you have the technology to prove said rock is going to hit the Earth in 30-40 years ; even small inaccuracies in orbital measurements and simulation could cause massive variation in the predicted position decades later.
You could spend billions and billions of dollars to divert it, only to take it from a trajectory which would have missed the Earth and put it onto a trajectory which will hit us...
There is no advantage to detecting an incoming impactor if you do not have the means to prevent its impact.
So you'd prefer that the next time a Tunguska-style impact occurs, it hits New York with no warning at all, rather than having a few days' warning to evacuate the city?
It's somewhat ironic that this is only exploitable if you have selinux running.. (afaics)
AFAIK it's not SELinux, it's poorly-designed SELinux policies which allow any process to map pages at address zero even if they're not root or not otherwise allowed to do so.
ZFS performance is much better with a 64-bit CPU (partially due to the fact it likes having a lot of kernel address space, partly because it's very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic), which eliminates the Via chips and the low-end Atoms from consideration.
Desktop Atoms are 64-bit. I don't think you can buy a desktop motherboard with a low-end mobile Atom, which are the 32-bit chips.
Computers. Pretty much every desktop that is going to have a PC has one now. That business has gone to replacement only.
Odd. We now have five computers at home (not counting the Sinclair Spectrum), and I'm expecting to buy seven more in the next year or so.
Of course most of them will be low-power, low-cost appliances (MythTV frontend, etc) or servers, and all but one will be running Linux, but the cheaper computers become, the more uses I can find for them. IT isn't just about application software running on PCs.
Unless you're using some obsolete OS like Windows XP, screen DPI has nothing to do with text size.
The fact that I was talking about CRT monitors might have given you a hint that they weren't running Vista.
Personally I really, really hate GUIs that scale text with resolution, precisely because it eliminates the benefit of fitting lots of text on a big, high-resolution screen: if I wanted huge text I'd be running at 800x600. Why should I have to change all the font sizes just to get more text onto a 1920x1080 display than I would at 800x600?
Most netbooks have the Intel chipset which sucks a lot more power than the NVidia one. That might be a reason to want smaller screens, seeing as that would save *some* power...
I think you're confusing the desktop Intel Atom chipsets (which suck major ass) with the mobile Intel chipsets. I believe the Ion chipset takes less power than the desktop Intel chipset for the Atom, but more than the mobile Intel chipset for the Atom.
If I remember correctly, it's something like 22W for the Intel desktop chipset vs 6W for the mobile, with the Ion somewhere in between (I've seen claimed idle consumption around 20-25W for Ion-based desktop systems).
why have a 12" screen when you can pack all those pixels into 10" or 8"?
That might be fine when you're 18, but when you're 40 and your eyesight is starting to go you'll be glad of the larger pixels; I'm not sure about today with larger LCD screens but most of the old farts I know used to run at 800x600 on their 17" CRT monitor so that they could actually read the text.
If you're using a cut-down 'social networking' interface that's designed to show one web site at a time then a 10" display at 1024x600 is probably OK, but the 1280x800 display on my 15" laptop is already too small for programming in an IDE. For web-browsing, email and document processing (i.e. things which don't need much processing power) I'd really want 1280x800 or similar on a 12" display for a netbook. I've been looking at buying one so I could carry it around in my gear bag but finding a good compromise between resolution, display size and price is not easy.
At the other end of the scale I've noticed a few small netbooks appearing at work plugged into racks or manufacturing gear for intelligent equipment monitoring, and an 8" display should work well for those applications.
Emphasis mine. The older stuff was usefuf; the newer stuff is not. However, since the thrust of this story is "buying new stuff", unless somebody can find a source for 6 year old gear....
I bought a new Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse last week and I'm using it right now about eight feet from the MythTV box with no problems.
> fastest version of Windows to shut down,
Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.
If only...
Far more likely it will be sitting there saying 'StupidTaskbarApp.exe did not shut down. Press 'OK' to close this application' or some similar shit.
One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.
And your competitor can use its fancy GUI as a bullet point against your product.
And then your bank account details get stolen due to their flawed GUI and suddenly their product don't look too good anymore.
Then how do you get past the dialog boxes when you are trying to legitimately manage your router?
You, uh, go through the dialog boxes and set a temporary exception for that session, then restart your web browser afterwards.
What protocol for administration of a home-office network appliance would you recommend, if not HTTP or HTTPS?
Anything that isn't hooked into a web browser by default: SNMP, for example. Firefox, at least, doesn't support snmp:// URLs.
there is no such thing as a "flaw" in Linux.
And this isn't a flaw in Linux: it's a poorly-configured web-server that does stupid things as root. That's no more a flaw in Linux than logging into the console as root and getting the system infected by malware when someone sends you the latest 'naked hot chick' screensaver.
Most home router owners can't afford $$$ per year for an SSL certificate for their routers.
Which is good. Because if anyone ever feeds you a malicious https:/// URL trying to hack your router, you'll get a bunch of dialog boxes coming up telling you that the certificate can't be validated... and you'll know something bad is going on.
Basically, though, this is merely demonstrating again that web-based hardware admin is a really, really, really bad idea. It's an even worse flaw than my router which has a bug that allows any remote site to reconfigure DNS without a password by sending you a malicious URL (which, fortunately, can be worked around by not using the DNS server in the router).
It wasn't out of memory exceptions, it was 'failed to run all tasks in their timeslice' exceptions. The software was designed to use 95% of the processing power in the worst case, and would have run happily, but NASA procedure was to enable the rendezvous radar prior to landing in case of an abort. The simulator it was tested on didn't fully simulate that radar, so they only found out that processing the extra radar data took more than the spare 5% of CPU time when it was 'tested' for real on the first landing.
Fortunately it used priority-based scheduling, so this merely meant that the lowest-priority tasks were skipped if they couldn't all be completed in the time available but the guidance continued operating.
One of the more interesting aspects of the software was that it was designed so you could reset the computer at any time and it would come back in a fraction of a second and continue where it left off... one of the programmers said that he used to press the reset button at random during his testing to simulate power failures and the like, and it would just keep on running happily.
You see... right there is the cause of this crap. A "missing OOM check" IS A GOD DAMN BUFFER OVERFLOW.
No it's not: from what's been said here it's an out of memory error. In most cases if you run out of memory you get a NULL pointer back and you then access it and crash; it's possible that you allocate an 8GB buffer and then write 4GB into it which just happens to be where your stack is, but very, very few programs will do so... the vast majority will start writing at or near offset zero from the pointer they were allocated, and then the OS will kill the process if the pointer was NULL.
Now, not checking for null pointers from allocations in code where users can pass any old crap as a parameter is a significant bug that needs to be fixed, but trying to claim that it's some super-important buffer overflow flaw is silly. It's like claiming that shooting paper targets is suicide because shooting yourself in the head also involves firing a gun.
I'm finding a lot of sites now using javascript for simple image display. Not even progressively enhancing a basic grid with jQuery, just a simple 3x2 grid (or whatever) of images. Javascript for that, really?
Could be worse: I'm finding more and more sites using _Flash_ for simple image display. That makes even using Javashit look good in comparison.
This is a clumsy way to solve a social ill
No, giving people jobs because of their race is not clumsy... it's outright, blatant racism.
Ubik, I think, was set in a world were even the doors were 'smart' so you had to pay a toll every time you went in and out of your apartment... unless, of course, you had a screwdriver handy. Somehow I doubt that any 'consumer' really wants to live in a world like that.
The deniers are crazy - a bit like religious fruitcakes!
The funny part is that the Apollo deniers can't even agree on what happened: some claim that the astronauts never left the Earth, others that they went into space but not to the Moon, and at least one that they landed on the Moon but it had an atmosphere and inhabitants.
So we can safely say that at least 90% of the deniers are wrong, which makes the assumption that the other 10% are wrong pretty easy to justify.
Roughly half the games I've bought on Steam don't require Steam in order to run... Fallout 3, for example, will run whether or not Steam is running.
However, I mostly buy games from gog.com these days: cheap and DRM-free.
It's a fine idea, but people who are making it out to be an inviolable right up there with free speech or the bearing of arms are going a bit overboard.
There is precisely zero point in having a jury if they aren't judging the law as well as the defendant. If courts merely existed to ensure that every law was enforced, there would be no need for juries.
The reason our ancestors fought for the right to jury trials was to protect them against arbitrary laws by ensuring that only one person in twelve had to disagree before the government would be unable to get a conviction.
And yes, there is an abort mechanism on these vehicles. Except in a "human rated" one, abort means returning them safely to earth. Aborting a satellite launch means blowing it up into little pieces.
Which isn't an abort mechanism.
An abort mechanism would be a big parachute to return your satellite to Earth for relaunch, as you can do with a human crew in a capsule; if you have such a thing, then you need to ensure that your launcher will give you the opportunity to use it when something bad happens. If you don't, then you just blow it up because your payload is trash, anyway.
Similarly, if you can still get your humans into a safe orbit if two engines fail, then having a two-engine-out capability on your human-rated launcher makes sense. If your satellite can't get to the correct orbit if two engines fail, then adding a two-engine-out capability is pointless... the payload will just become more space junk.
These are the kind of changes you might have to make to 'human-rate' an unmanned launcher: and they're essentially trivial compared to the cost and complexity of designing a 'human-rated' launcher from scratch.
Yes, I know, its good to make fun of NASA and its shuttle program.
I guess it doesn't take long for the public to remember that the space shuttle carries humans and thus is subject to a completely different set of requirements. Loose a Malaysian satellite - who cares, they are insured (BTW the insurance rate is of course based in part on the success/failure rate)
You just answered your own question: If a rocket isn't safe enough to carry humans, it's not safe enough to carry a billion-dollar satellite without paying a large fraction of a billion dollars in insurance premiums.
'Human-rating' is mostly bogus: the primary difference between a satellite launcher and a 'human-rated' launcher is that there's no abort system on a satellite launcher so if you're going to lose the payload anyway you might as well just crash and burn. A human-launching system needs to ensure that it will fail nicely so the crew can escape... something with the shuttle, of course, has singularly failed to do.
Lastly, I believe the total development cost of the Space-X launcher is a small fraction of the cost of a single shuttle launch, so they expected a few failures in development.
A while ago I was working in Italy: Google would then redirect me to Google in the Netherlands, and Facebook rather kindly switched automatically to displaying its pages in Dutch. Steam usually gets the location right, but won't then let me use my perfectly valid British credit card to buy games when I'm not in Britain.
This is one of the most user-unfriendly ideas to infest the web over the last few years.