In what universe are those rules true? Certainly not this one.
The closer we are to the galactic center of mass, as measured in terms of the centers attraction for us, the higher the gravitational pull toward the center, and the faster we have to go in order not to fall in in a few million years. The stars and other materiel 10x farther out, have required orbital speeds much lower to sustain a constant orbit. This is the reason that most galaxies are spiral shaped, and one can say with 100% certainty which way its spinning because the inward ends of the spirals always point in the direction of rotation.
Of course, if the density increases linearly until things are less than a light year apart near the center, conversely the majority of the gravitational mass is outside, and the orbital speeds can begin to fall.
That scenario is not for most galaxies, un-realizable due to most galaxies having a 50 to 2,000,000 sun mass black hole at the center, and for the Milky Way, we are no exception. I don't recall the mass estimates for the invisible Sag B, which 'Sag A' orbits at a good relativistic clip, but lets just say its a big one and let it go at that.
The article did not specify where in the galaxy that speed was measured, but it makes common sense that they were referring to our location 28k light years out from the center. Had they been referring to some location in an outer arm that was 10x farther out going that fast, then by the time it got inward to us, it would be a relativistic velocity indeed.
I don't think even starting with a decent basic starts low enough. IMO, CS should be started with an explanation of what a byte is and how it can be represented in several different notations. Then introduce the idea of adding 2 bytes, or'ing two bytes, and'ing two bytes, and xor'ing two bytes.
For this, assembly language on an old TRS-80 color computer is as good as anything. Once the kids know that 0x02+0x02=0x04, AND have a working knowledge of the original ascii character set, then you explain that regardless of the cpu or how fast it is, it is just doing more of the same, with wider pieces of data.
Then, when you have demonstrated that useful work can be done on the little machine, you introduce a higher level language just to make them understand that this higher level language is nothing more than a batch of code, full of canned procedures to do this or that consistently, just to get them closer to being able to understand that higher level language. Then, say after a year of this bit twiddling at the basic hardware level, is when to start discussing stuff that Tannenbaum might do as simple exercises. IMO the kids have got to understand what goes on under the hood, before they can figure out how to tweak the supercharger intelligently.
Someone mentioned C as an old language, and it is, but really, C isn't that far from assembler which is one of the larger reasons it has stood the test of time. All I see C as doing for the most part, is hiding the nuances of how this or that cpu actually does the job. I don't consider it to be superior over assembly, although a good compiler can emit assembly code as good as I can and have written. And its a heck of a lot more consistent when the hardware under it changes, you usually don't have to go back and revisit code you wrote 3 years ago just because you bought a faster box. Heck, I even run code, recompiled of course, that I wrote in C, on a TRS-80 Color Computer back in the 80's. It was also run on an Amiga. A C syntax checker, and it is still a valid piece of code to find your typo's with when something isn't doing what you wrote it to do.
CS, taught in that image, for K-12 seems like it might help to reverse the downhill trend our education system has taken over the last 75 years.
That is one old farts $.02. Adjust for inflation since that is 1934 money.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yield to Temptation... it may not pass your way again.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
I was wondering when someone would get around to mentioning Bob Pease. He used to do a column in the old McGraw-Hill 'Electronics' IIRC. This man understand analog better than almost anyone on the planet. If his columns have ever been compiled into a book, or he has written a book on Analog, that would be easily the most worn book on my shelves here. He was for many years, THE analog guru at National Semi. Hit your bookstore and have them do a search for his name. Something useful and entertaining has got to fall out.
Allowing Hitachi America to get away with exporting a multiaxis milling machine complete with the software to drive it. Up till then, the screws on russian subs were so noisy, and each sub had their own unique noise signature that our hydrophone listening devices scattered about the ocean could identify what sub was backing out of the docks on the russian north coast by the time it had moved 100 yards. This was in the height of the cold war. Our subs OTOH could move at classified speeds underwater so quietly that if their sonars didn't catch the ping, they never knew we were within miles, let alone the few yards away that we actually were. In one instance, we caught one of theirs off the Carolina coast, and he found he was 'made' so he went to the bottom to wait us out. But we had air recyclers they didn't. When he tried to blow the tanks and surface for air, he found our sub sitting on him. I don't think he heard it when the hulls made contact & we kept silent. Held him down for another bit of time just to make the point, then beat him to the surface. That sub captain probably went home to a firing squad because he allowed that to happen.
Within a year or two of that machines exportation by Hitachi America, the russian subs suddenly started getting as quiet as ours. So our hydrophones became worthless as we couldn't hear them anymore. But by then, the cold war was winding down. And that was just one of the reasons we won that war.
Hitachi? Got a slap on the wrist, where the actual act should have been treason charges & a trip to ACE Hardware for some new rope.
That seemed to take the heart out of any reason to keep Phil Zimmerman jailed, so he was released after a while, I suspect with instructions to add a back door to PGP, which is the reason I personally have never used a newer than 2.6.2 release. And haven't used that in years as I no longer care what my government thinks of me since its so plain they think I'm just another of the sheeple. All they have to do is wait for me to fall over (74 and diabetic now) and they won't be out a dime.
It all boils down to its not being who you know, its who you blow. Very abundantly proven by the facts. Sigh...
First I'll correct your spelling by removing the spurious t from photons.
Then there is the miss-use of the term black hole, at least according to my concept. From what you wrote, the proper term s/b "event horizon". You can see anything on this side of it, but whats inside it cannot be seen since the horizon diameter is in fact the distance from this object where the escape velocity equals C.
Now here is a conjecture for you, an expansion of your idea if you will.
Assume a large mass, whose gravity is so strong that its 'escape velocity' is within a few planks constants of C speed. We can still see it, and it is losing mass via its thermal radiation. Because its a large object, losing 1% of that mass via that mechanism would take many millions of years. During which time its gravity will be pulling in more material. This mass then sucks in another.000000001% of its own mass by gobbling up an ort cloud sized rock. Voila! An event horizon rises from its surface to that radius where the escape velocity is C. Then you have a black hole, because you cannot now see the object. This demarcation line might be only a fraction of a centimeter from the surface of the mass, which due to its gravity will be a perfect sphere, distorted only by the fattening effects caused by its rotation if any, and generally will be quite high according to the orbital mechanics, and determined by the transfer of the energy given it by the incoming material as its orbit decays.
In any event, this large mass turning into a black hole by the formation of an event horizon might be an interesting show to watch, but I suspect not very spectacular, and over shadowed by this objects obvious effects on its environment, and gravitational lensing of distant objects is probably what would lead to our discovering it anyway. We may be able to see a star that is very bright in the far ultraviolet and x-rays, and watch it blink out forever in just a microsecond when the event horizon forms.
Then you have a 'black hole'. And then you have the singularity because the only thing you can measure is the vector of its gravity, which will point to the exact center of the object, eg the 'singularity'.
We should handle this like the Romans did. Let the Scientologists plead their case for their "religion" in a Colosseum in front of a jury of their peers*.
*Slight change in programming, "a jury of your peers" will now be played by lions. Enjoy the show!
Chuckle. Little do they realize that the lions really are their peers, just without the costume. And like lions, no thinking person would ever come to the conclusion that there was anything this CoS group can supply that diligent work would not supply with far less damage to their psych.
Unfortunately, this planet is filled with people who are looking for something, anything, that gives them a leg up on the competition, whether it be collecting more money than their sweat earned them, or more (food, drink, sex - pick one or more) than they've earned.
As for the class action suit mentioned, that will need some pretty high powered legal people to prosecute. The EFF is such a group, but for this I believe they may have to hire additional help, and that costs mucho moola. I am already a member of the FSF, and if they should come hat in hand looking for help to stop these folks who hide behind a religious label, then we should all reach out and give them a handful of the current medium of exchange.
But if we do not, then don't complain, we are getting the government we deserve.
I love my country, but its government?, I don't trust.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I would hope that it won't take Dell too long top see the error of their ways in reduced sales. Being pig headed in the face of reality does not lead to a long corporate life. But as long as M$ keeps listening to their attorneys instead or their customers, it will continue to be downhill in Redmond. Dell will hopefully discover that this is an error much faster than Redmond will.
It appears they, Redmond, have only partially understood that the market is not totally theirs to abuse and exploit as they see fit. But make no mistake, it IS their problem to understand that there IS a choice available to those who aren't afraid to dip a toe in the water. Me? I never drank the koolaid in the first place, building my own machines, they've never see an M$ install cd.
Now, if M$ had ever given me, as a maintainer of many M$ boxes before I retired, anything but a headache, I might think differently. When that happens, I might even buy that bridge in Tucson that used to be over the Thames. OTOH, I don't think alzheimers has set in that badly just yet.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
-- Joe Walsh
Why should regular users need to understand their radial arm saw?
One of the dumber statements/. has accepted in recent history. Sheesh...
For exactly the same reason, safety. We have a tendency to call those who do not understand their tools by some moniker like "Lefty". I happen to own a radial arm saw, several power saws in fact, and I still, at 73, have all the attachments I was born with intact and mostly working, albeit pretty arthritic these days.
Those who ignore the basic warnings we preach cuz this site is a Kewl site, really do deserve to get the keyloggers and such installed on their toys, after all, there are hungry folks out there that really need your bank accounts passwords and such so they can eat tomorrow. And the moniker I apply to those folks? "Dumbass", or worse. And sympathy for when they do get cleaned out is in short supply even if I do have plenty of ammo to be used on the perps of such schemes.
Do I worry about it? Yes, thats why all my boxes run linux. Someday when we're a larger presence I expect the coders of such black hat stuff will start targeting linux too, but till then we're automaticly safer, and we tend to run more blockade and detection tools, like iptables than the M$ folks do. I had one of my kids hit me with satan's best tools a while back, and it never even made it to my logs. Satan was never able to determine if there was even a machine at my IP address. He does understand security, so I tapped his address with nmap, and he did have that XP box pretty well shuttered too.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) No one gets sick on Wednesdays.
If Newton had killed his wife, would we have given up on Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics?
First off, that would never have happened because newton was never married, in fact he is probably the single most famous virgin in history. No idea what became of any libido he might have had, but then I also understand that he was a difficult man, and that also may have had something to do with it.
Also, Thermodynamics wasn't Newtons most famous output, he put to paper the Laws of Motion.
I agree that there should be a clear demarcation line between MY computer, and the BANKS system, however that usually leaves a sizable amount of copper out in no mans land, and in the case if using a home based wifi in lieu of proper cables, the possibility that the wifi can be eavesdropped on is significant. In that wifi event, I'd hold the user responsible.
My bank at one time had an IE only policy, and when I walked in to close the account because I couldn't access it to pay my bills, they realized maybe that wasn't the smartest move cuz a the time, the account held a goodly portion of 5 digits. So we compromised, and the active x command that takes you to the login page was substituted by issuing me a direct link to the login page. After that, it all just works. Now they've gone to a double password, and you must get through both screens to get in, but the passwords are still limited to 8 characters each, a windows legacy I think.
Security seems to refer to this from a distance. And, while it may have changed in the 25 years since, too many times the folks running things and allocating resources for security, completely miss the main point of the word security.
To give you a furinstance, I was out riding on my motorcycle one Sunday afternoon, basically touring the areas back roads to see what might be around over the next hill. I won't name the area although it can be found on google maps if you know where to look. Anyway, I came across a side road, with an open wire gate laying in the weeds, and both the road and the fence looked as if they had had very little traffic or maintenance since they had been erected decades back. Turning in and puttering along, smelling the roses, the trail went over a small rise & then descended a hundred feet or so into a valley about half a mile across, and I could see at the top of the rise on the other side where this road seemed to continue to, what looked like a small building not much bigger than one of the outhouses we had when I was a child. Getting to the bottom of the valley I was able to see that it was covered with long piles of dirt. Approaching close there was a heavy door, and a rad sign on it. Then it went ding as to where I was, so I left back up that trail just as slowly as I came in since I didn't want to raise a dust cloud. Knowing where it was on the main road, I drove the bike down there the next sunday to check my memory of the little building and found it occupied by 2 guards whose eyes were carefully scanning the traffic. And never, ever, looking behind them at what it was they were supposed to be guarding. I would have thought that our repositories would have had more sophisticated alarm systems than what they obviously didn't have, and which allowed me to ride into the place from the backside, apparently completely un-observed.
I don't call that security, in fact I'd call it totally incompetant on the part of whomever was in charge.
I should have been spreadeagled with a few carbines cocked and locked while they 'checked me out'. I have been that scene too since I use to do maintenance at a few of our titan sites back in the day. Sometimes whoever requested my services at the site would forget to tell the guards I was coming...
Gee, I hope the closet that server is in is fireproof, I think it has been/.'d.
Cheers Gene.
Re:Note that Mapmakers make intentional mistakes..
on
Open US GPS Data?
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· Score: 1
I have to agree that even the US Census folks are well into this move something copyright scheme. Furinstance:
Here at the house, my Garmin 12 consistently places me several hundred feet from where its laying in the windowsill according to roadnav, and roadnav, running on TIGER line maps, has always placed the street in front of my house only a few feet from the alley going behind the houses across the street from me while leaving a quite nice wide back yard between me and the neighbors across the fence. Similarly, at the end of a trip to go say goodbye to a daughter dying of cancer recently I punched in her address in Iowa into roadnav, and again the TIGER maps were off, by nearly half a mile. I don't think my old Garmin 12 is off that much.
Reading the full thread, it also appears this 'upgrade' isn't the official one, or M$ has put it out a month early. The latter would be a 2nd in a 30 year history. As for safe mode, if you'll read the thread, that won't boot either, so those folks are truly hosed. Only if they have the install disks, can they recover.
I fibbed a little when I said there aren't any windows here, there is a lappy I bought about 2 years ago, and I left xp a 25GB partition when I installed Fedora on it. The xp hasn't been booted in nearly a year, but if it should upchuck, I did make the imaging disks for it when I bought it. I suppose now the question is, will they work? Dunno, haven't tried. OPtical disk media seems to be getting shittier and shittier, I'm a Cash fan, and the last disk I bought a year ago, American IV, is now unrecognizable in this machines drive. So if I should lose the ripped copy, I'll have to go buy another, if I can find one. It is in great shape, only been in this drive twice & no other drive at all, stored in the case, out of the sunlight, but its faded away. I wonder if this is the RIAA's latest attempt at extorting even more money, by making disks that only last a few months? Given their track record and legendary greed, it wouldn't surprise me.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?
-- Joel Chandler Harris, proverbs of Uncle Remus
The problem is clearly your imagination. MS has a complete and total grasp on the situation. Their sales rep told me so.
Thank you for my first giggle of the day, I needed that. BTW, I know where there is a toll bridge for sale, it used to cross the Thames, could I interest you?
Seriously folks, I run linux here and we too have an occasional bump in the road, but I've only had 2 situations since RH5.1 in '98, ten years ago, where the only recourse was to boot from an install cd or dvd and start from scratch. Nothing can boot if the drives partition table is gone. I did that in early January because something wiped LSN0 of my only bootable drive absolutely clean. Even in the kernels you boot, linux always leaves you a backup to an older version path right on the boot screen. FWIW, that was not a catastrophic loss of data since I had it all on another drive courtesy of my every night run of amanda, so all my pix and music were only half an hour away once F8 was installed again.
Microsoft could take a few lessons from that, but they've never been a fan of redundancy, I suppose because it makes piracy even easier in their imagination, or maybe its another copy they want you to pay for, damned if I know. So enjoy your perceived supremacy cuz "windows runs everything worth turning on", but that image is fading, and will continue to fade until the sunset finally arrives, and linux then becomes the favorite target for the virus writers. There will be a difference in effectiveness of the viri though, because when linux catches a cold, its rare that the fix is more than a day away. We don't waste a lot of time on logistics of rolling out a patch because its as simple as heading out to the sources and downloading the patch, or the already patched version. All the programmer had to do was put it on the net, you are expected to do the rest. And if you don't, well... Then you are still a winderz user at heart, expecting someone else to do what really is your job in the first place but of course M$ won't allow you access to do that!
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?
-- Joel Chandler Harris, proverbs of Uncle Remus
And it couldn't happen to a nicer outfit.:) I've been burnt bad on the last two things I've bought with the Sony brand on them. A tv for about 280 bucks that lost the green gun about 2 weeks out of warranty and the replacement crt, which I could install, was about 488 bucks. Needless to say the whole thing went in the landfill & got replaced by a $120 monkey ward tv that still works 22 years later. 5 years before that, a fawncy $220 metal tape audio casette deck, dual transports etc, had a hum level of about -35db from normal playback level. I took it back and got another in a sealed box 3 times & finally gave up. And 2 or 3 times I've gone out and bought a Sony labeled cd based on what I was hearing on the radio, and when I got it home, it was all stranger than a 3 dollar bill. Oh, same tunes, but the mix on the cd was nothing resembling what they were sending the radio stations. Scroom, and the camel that road in on them too.
I don't. Anyone involved in the music business should know that the first rule of business is Don't piss off the customer, and when they do that, that customer will think long and hard as to whether the hassling he's getting is worth the effort required to do it their way.
Has anyone in the board room ever considered that for 50 cents a track, minimum download of say 20 tracks just to make it worthwhile for the CC people to process the resultant charge card transaction, might do for overall sales? Particularly if they were made available in the format of our choice, which for me is sonicly very clear, ogg at Q7 or above.
The Prime rule of any business is to get a decent, fair to all involved, price for the product the customer wants. Treat him right, and the customer will treat the sales agent right, by not doing near as much 'sharing' because the product is then considered to belong to the customer. The present attitude of the RIAA is that you are allowed to play a copy once, and must pay for that right to play it again, you only bought a ticket for one performance. When I bought that cd, AFAIAC I bought the right to play the cd any time I stick it in the slot/drawer. That is exactly why I paid over a buck a track for a nickels worth of plastic.
Its no damned wonder we share, its our revenge for the screwing we are getting, and being treated like the slave girl, to be screwed again and again regardless of our wishes.
But, I'm honest enough too, I've visited TPB to see what was there, but to date I have not downloaded a single track from them. Frankly, most of whats there, you couldn't pay me enough to listen through a whole track of. Very poor quality mp3's for the most part.
Ok, show me a screenshot on pastebin.ca, showing what htop thinks of it when its running on your box. The last time I installed it, it was an unmitigatable cpu hog, rendering my xp-2800 athlon down to a simmering pile of silicon on the floor. I screwed with it a week and finally ripped it out, I got tired of having to user htop to reset its niceness a couple of times a day.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas.
-- Kingfish
I did, and it worked till that packet was done that it was running when I started it, but the next session it started was right back at nice=0 and 99.99% of the cpu. I couldn't even type a message in kmail unless I waited for each character to echo to the screen before I typed the next one. Which was often a several second delay.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Veni, Vidi, VISA:
I came, I saw, I did a little shopping.
Only if BOINC has learned to be a good neighbor. I took it off my machine about 2 years ago because it thought it had an unlimited right to every cycle my cpu had. Setiathome NEVER ran that piggish. The planetary folks have so far ignored all pleas to run it at about nice 20 so we could have our machines back. The old setiathome client always ran at a high niceness.
I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Wishing without work is like fishing without bait.
-- Frank Tyger
20 degrees F is actually pretty balmy. Many years ago I got up at 4:45 am to go put a tv station on the air, and found only one of the 3 vehicles in the drive would start, the thermometer nailed to a pine tree in the front yard confirmed the extra nip in the air was caused by a -39F reading. OTOH, I'm not hankerin to move back to that country in my dotage either. But, living where one might find a deer grazing in your yard, and fish jumping into the boat, did have its upsides at the time. Unforch, that was 40 years ago, and that country has doubled or tripled in population density since, so its true, you can never truly 'go home' again. That 'home' doesn't exist anymore.
Have a Happy New Year, for the whole year.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
ISTR that card did run at 1600x1200 during an earlier install of Brain Dead Install, but this has worked moderately well.
The main impediment to doing it right now is my age & diabetes, by the time I'd get it done now, my feet would be screaming cuz there's no heat in the shop, at least not enough to be comfortable. There is a heater, a small electric set to keep it above freezing if it can and which is currently attempting to also dry some 3x8 white ash planks I have clamped to a steel framework so they won't curl up like a swatted spider as they dry from native cut stuffs that has been laying out in the weather for about 2 years now. The building itself wasn't really built to be insulated and only has any over about 15% of its inside surface. When I built, it was from a kit, quick and warm weather.:( Once again hindsight is 20/10.:) So it will wait till warmer weather now...
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.
That assumes I have a card that I can deplete by a mid 4 digit amount just for transport. Retired, with SS as the main income, that is not the case.
Thanks.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.
The Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.06 installs are, as far as emc is concerned, equivalent. Xubuntu/Kubuntu will probably work just as well too.
I happen to like KDE, but if push comes to shove I could probably learn to tolerate and ignore gnomes &^%$# holier than thou attitude and use it. But it has nowhere near the configurability facilities that KDE has. In my case, the gfx card is as much a limiting factor as anything else, its your basic 4 megabyte elderly Diamond Speedstar, an oxymoron on a par with military intelligence. But its stable and it works, just at not over 1024x756. The monitor can do 1600x1200.
If and when I re-install for the next LTS, I will probably switch that card to a 9250 SE I have laying about as that will allow me to run at a higher screen resolution more closely matching what the monitor, a Samsung Synchmaster can do.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.
Slashdot Mirror
In what universe are those rules true? Certainly not this one.
The closer we are to the galactic center of mass, as measured in terms of the centers attraction for us, the higher the gravitational pull toward the center, and the faster we have to go in order not to fall in in a few million years. The stars and other materiel 10x farther out, have required orbital speeds much lower to sustain a constant orbit. This is the reason that most galaxies are spiral shaped, and one can say with 100% certainty which way its spinning because the inward ends of the spirals always point in the direction of rotation.
Of course, if the density increases linearly until things are less than a light year apart near the center, conversely the majority of the gravitational mass is outside, and the orbital speeds can begin to fall.
That scenario is not for most galaxies, un-realizable due to most galaxies having a 50 to 2,000,000 sun mass black hole at the center, and for the Milky Way, we are no exception. I don't recall the mass estimates for the invisible Sag B, which 'Sag A' orbits at a good relativistic clip, but lets just say its a big one and let it go at that.
The article did not specify where in the galaxy that speed was measured, but it makes common sense that they were referring to our location 28k light years out from the center. Had they been referring to some location in an outer arm that was 10x farther out going that fast, then by the time it got inward to us, it would be a relativistic velocity indeed.
I don't think even starting with a decent basic starts low enough. IMO, CS should be started with an explanation of what a byte is and how it can be represented in several different notations. Then introduce the idea of adding 2 bytes, or'ing two bytes, and'ing two bytes, and xor'ing two bytes.
For this, assembly language on an old TRS-80 color computer is as good as anything. Once the kids know that 0x02+0x02=0x04, AND have a working knowledge of the original ascii character set, then you explain that regardless of the cpu or how fast it is, it is just doing more of the same, with wider pieces of data.
Then, when you have demonstrated that useful work can be done on the little machine, you introduce a higher level language just to make them understand that this higher level language is nothing more than a batch of code, full of canned procedures to do this or that consistently, just to get them closer to being able to understand that higher level language. Then, say after a year of this bit twiddling at the basic hardware level, is when to start discussing stuff that Tannenbaum might do as simple exercises. IMO the kids have got to understand what goes on under the hood, before they can figure out how to tweak the supercharger intelligently.
Someone mentioned C as an old language, and it is, but really, C isn't that far from assembler which is one of the larger reasons it has stood the test of time. All I see C as doing for the most part, is hiding the nuances of how this or that cpu actually does the job. I don't consider it to be superior over assembly, although a good compiler can emit assembly code as good as I can and have written. And its a heck of a lot more consistent when the hardware under it changes, you usually don't have to go back and revisit code you wrote 3 years ago just because you bought a faster box. Heck, I even run code, recompiled of course, that I wrote in C, on a TRS-80 Color Computer back in the 80's. It was also run on an Amiga. A C syntax checker, and it is still a valid piece of code to find your typo's with when something isn't doing what you wrote it to do.
CS, taught in that image, for K-12 seems like it might help to reverse the downhill trend our education system has taken over the last 75 years.
That is one old farts $.02. Adjust for inflation since that is 1934 money.
-- ... it may not pass your way again.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yield to Temptation
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
I was wondering when someone would get around to mentioning Bob Pease. He used to do a column in the old McGraw-Hill 'Electronics' IIRC. This man understand analog better than almost anyone on the planet. If his columns have ever been compiled into a book, or he has written a book on Analog, that would be easily the most worn book on my shelves here. He was for many years, THE analog guru at National Semi. Hit your bookstore and have them do a search for his name. Something useful and entertaining has got to fall out.
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Cheers, Gene
Allowing Hitachi America to get away with exporting a multiaxis milling machine complete with the software to drive it. Up till then, the screws on russian subs were so noisy, and each sub had their own unique noise signature that our hydrophone listening devices scattered about the ocean could identify what sub was backing out of the docks on the russian north coast by the time it had moved 100 yards. This was in the height of the cold war. Our subs OTOH could move at classified speeds underwater so quietly that if their sonars didn't catch the ping, they never knew we were within miles, let alone the few yards away that we actually were. In one instance, we caught one of theirs off the Carolina coast, and he found he was 'made' so he went to the bottom to wait us out. But we had air recyclers they didn't. When he tried to blow the tanks and surface for air, he found our sub sitting on him. I don't think he heard it when the hulls made contact & we kept silent. Held him down for another bit of time just to make the point, then beat him to the surface. That sub captain probably went home to a firing squad because he allowed that to happen.
Within a year or two of that machines exportation by Hitachi America, the russian subs suddenly started getting as quiet as ours. So our hydrophones became worthless as we couldn't hear them anymore. But by then, the cold war was winding down. And that was just one of the reasons we won that war.
Hitachi? Got a slap on the wrist, where the actual act should have been treason charges & a trip to ACE Hardware for some new rope.
That seemed to take the heart out of any reason to keep Phil Zimmerman jailed, so he was released after a while, I suspect with instructions to add a back door to PGP, which is the reason I personally have never used a newer than 2.6.2 release. And haven't used that in years as I no longer care what my government thinks of me since its so plain they think I'm just another of the sheeple. All they have to do is wait for me to fall over (74 and diabetic now) and they won't be out a dime.
It all boils down to its not being who you know, its who you blow. Very abundantly proven by the facts. Sigh...
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Cheers, Gene
First I'll correct your spelling by removing the spurious t from photons.
Then there is the miss-use of the term black hole, at least according to my concept. From what you wrote, the proper term s/b "event horizon". You can see anything on this side of it, but whats inside it cannot be seen since the horizon diameter is in fact the distance from this object where the escape velocity equals C.
Now here is a conjecture for you, an expansion of your idea if you will.
Assume a large mass, whose gravity is so strong that its 'escape velocity' is within a few planks constants of C speed. We can still see it, and it is losing mass via its thermal radiation. Because its a large object, losing 1% of that mass via that mechanism would take many millions of years. During which time its gravity will be pulling in more material. This mass then sucks in another .000000001% of its own mass by gobbling up an ort cloud sized rock. Voila! An event horizon rises from its surface to that radius where the escape velocity is C. Then you have a black hole, because you cannot now see the object. This demarcation line might be only a fraction of a centimeter from the surface of the mass, which due to its gravity will be a perfect sphere, distorted only by the fattening effects caused by its rotation if any, and generally will be quite high according to the orbital mechanics, and determined by the transfer of the energy given it by the incoming material as its orbit decays.
In any event, this large mass turning into a black hole by the formation of an event horizon might be an interesting show to watch, but I suspect not very spectacular, and over shadowed by this objects obvious effects on its environment, and gravitational lensing of distant objects is probably what would lead to our discovering it anyway. We may be able to see a star that is very bright in the far ultraviolet and x-rays, and watch it blink out forever in just a microsecond when the event horizon forms.
Then you have a 'black hole'. And then you have the singularity because the only thing you can measure is the vector of its gravity, which will point to the exact center of the object, eg the 'singularity'.
We should handle this like the Romans did. Let the Scientologists plead their case for their "religion" in a Colosseum in front of a jury of their peers*.
*Slight change in programming, "a jury of your peers" will now be played by lions. Enjoy the show!
Chuckle. Little do they realize that the lions really are their peers, just without the costume. And like lions, no thinking person would ever come to the conclusion that there was anything this CoS group can supply that diligent work would not supply with far less damage to their psych.
Unfortunately, this planet is filled with people who are looking for something, anything, that gives them a leg up on the competition, whether it be collecting more money than their sweat earned them, or more (food, drink, sex - pick one or more) than they've earned.
As for the class action suit mentioned, that will need some pretty high powered legal people to prosecute. The EFF is such a group, but for this I believe they may have to hire additional help, and that costs mucho moola. I am already a member of the FSF, and if they should come hat in hand looking for help to stop these folks who hide behind a religious label, then we should all reach out and give them a handful of the current medium of exchange.
But if we do not, then don't complain, we are getting the government we deserve.
I love my country, but its government?, I don't trust.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I would hope that it won't take Dell too long top see the error of their ways in reduced sales. Being pig headed in the face of reality does not lead to a long corporate life. But as long as M$ keeps listening to their attorneys instead or their customers, it will continue to be downhill in Redmond. Dell will hopefully discover that this is an error much faster than Redmond will.
It appears they, Redmond, have only partially understood that the market is not totally theirs to abuse and exploit as they see fit. But make no mistake, it IS their problem to understand that there IS a choice available to those who aren't afraid to dip a toe in the water. Me? I never drank the koolaid in the first place, building my own machines, they've never see an M$ install cd.
Now, if M$ had ever given me, as a maintainer of many M$ boxes before I retired, anything but a headache, I might think differently. When that happens, I might even buy that bridge in Tucson that used to be over the Thames. OTOH, I don't think alzheimers has set in that badly just yet.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
-- Joe Walsh
Why should regular users need to understand their radial arm saw?
/. has accepted in recent history. Sheesh...
One of the dumber statements
For exactly the same reason, safety. We have a tendency to call those who do not understand their tools by some moniker like "Lefty". I happen to own a radial arm saw, several power saws in fact, and I still, at 73, have all the attachments I was born with intact and mostly working, albeit pretty arthritic these days.
Those who ignore the basic warnings we preach cuz this site is a Kewl site, really do deserve to get the keyloggers and such installed on their toys, after all, there are hungry folks out there that really need your bank accounts passwords and such so they can eat tomorrow. And the moniker I apply to those folks? "Dumbass", or worse. And sympathy for when they do get cleaned out is in short supply even if I do have plenty of ammo to be used on the perps of such schemes.
Do I worry about it? Yes, thats why all my boxes run linux. Someday when we're a larger presence I expect the coders of such black hat stuff will start targeting linux too, but till then we're automaticly safer, and we tend to run more blockade and detection tools, like iptables than the M$ folks do. I had one of my kids hit me with satan's best tools a while back, and it never even made it to my logs. Satan was never able to determine if there was even a machine at my IP address. He does understand security, so I tapped his address with nmap, and he did have that XP box pretty well shuttered too.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
No one gets sick on Wednesdays.
If Newton had killed his wife, would we have given up on Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics?
First off, that would never have happened because newton was never married, in fact he is probably the single most famous virgin in history. No idea what became of any libido he might have had, but then I also understand that he was a difficult man, and that also may have had something to do with it.
Also, Thermodynamics wasn't Newtons most famous output, he put to paper the Laws of Motion.
I agree that there should be a clear demarcation line between MY computer, and the BANKS system, however that usually leaves a sizable amount of copper out in no mans land, and in the case if using a home based wifi in lieu of proper cables, the possibility that the wifi can be eavesdropped on is significant. In that wifi event, I'd hold the user responsible.
My bank at one time had an IE only policy, and when I walked in to close the account because I couldn't access it to pay my bills, they realized maybe that wasn't the smartest move cuz a the time, the account held a goodly portion of 5 digits. So we compromised, and the active x command that takes you to the login page was substituted by issuing me a direct link to the login page. After that, it all just works. Now they've gone to a double password, and you must get through both screens to get in, but the passwords are still limited to 8 characters each, a windows legacy I think.
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Cheers, Gene
Security seems to refer to this from a distance. And, while it may have changed in the 25 years since, too many times the folks running things and allocating resources for security, completely miss the main point of the word security.
To give you a furinstance, I was out riding on my motorcycle one Sunday afternoon, basically touring the areas back roads to see what might be around over the next hill. I won't name the area although it can be found on google maps if you know where to look. Anyway, I came across a side road, with an open wire gate laying in the weeds, and both the road and the fence looked as if they had had very little traffic or maintenance since they had been erected decades back. Turning in and puttering along, smelling the roses, the trail went over a small rise & then descended a hundred feet or so into a valley about half a mile across, and I could see at the top of the rise on the other side where this road seemed to continue to, what looked like a small building not much bigger than one of the outhouses we had when I was a child. Getting to the bottom of the valley I was able to see that it was covered with long piles of dirt. Approaching close there was a heavy door, and a rad sign on it. Then it went ding as to where I was, so I left back up that trail just as slowly as I came in since I didn't want to raise a dust cloud. Knowing where it was on the main road, I drove the bike down there the next sunday to check my memory of the little building and found it occupied by 2 guards whose eyes were carefully scanning the traffic. And never, ever, looking behind them at what it was they were supposed to be guarding. I would have thought that our repositories would have had more sophisticated alarm systems than what they obviously didn't have, and which allowed me to ride into the place from the backside, apparently completely un-observed.
I don't call that security, in fact I'd call it totally incompetant on the part of whomever was in charge.
I should have been spreadeagled with a few carbines cocked and locked while they 'checked me out'.
I have been that scene too since I use to do maintenance at a few of our titan sites back in the day. Sometimes whoever requested my services at the site would forget to tell the guards I was coming...
Gee, I hope the closet that server is in is fireproof, I think it has been /.'d.
Cheers Gene.
I have to agree that even the US Census folks are well into this move something copyright scheme. Furinstance:
Here at the house, my Garmin 12 consistently places me several hundred feet from where its laying in the windowsill according to roadnav, and roadnav, running on TIGER line maps, has always placed the street in front of my house only a few feet from the alley going behind the houses across the street from me while leaving a quite nice wide back yard between me and the neighbors across the fence. Similarly, at the end of a trip to go say goodbye to a daughter dying of cancer recently I punched in her address in Iowa into roadnav, and again the TIGER maps were off, by nearly half a mile. I don't think my old Garmin 12 is off that much.
Cheers, Gene
Reading the full thread, it also appears this 'upgrade' isn't the official one, or M$ has put it out a month early. The latter would be a 2nd in a 30 year history.
As for safe mode, if you'll read the thread, that won't boot either, so those folks are truly hosed. Only if they have the install disks, can they recover.
I fibbed a little when I said there aren't any windows here, there is a lappy I bought about 2 years ago, and I left xp a 25GB partition when I installed Fedora on it. The xp hasn't been booted in nearly a year, but if it should upchuck, I did make the imaging disks for it when I bought it. I suppose now the question is, will they work? Dunno, haven't tried. OPtical disk media seems to be getting shittier and shittier, I'm a Cash fan, and the last disk I bought a year ago, American IV, is now unrecognizable in this machines drive. So if I should lose the ripped copy, I'll have to go buy another, if I can find one. It is in great shape, only been in this drive twice & no other drive at all, stored in the case, out of the sunlight,
but its faded away. I wonder if this is the RIAA's latest attempt at extorting even more money, by making disks that only last a few months? Given their track record and legendary greed, it wouldn't surprise me.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?
-- Joel Chandler Harris, proverbs of Uncle Remus
The problem is clearly your imagination. MS has a complete and total grasp on the situation. Their sales rep told me so.
Thank you for my first giggle of the day, I needed that. BTW, I know where there is a toll bridge for sale, it used to cross the Thames, could I interest you?
Seriously folks, I run linux here and we too have an occasional bump in the road, but I've only had 2 situations since RH5.1 in '98, ten years ago, where the only recourse was to boot from an install cd or dvd and start from scratch. Nothing can boot if the drives partition table is gone. I did that in early January because something wiped LSN0 of my only bootable drive absolutely clean. Even in the kernels you boot, linux always leaves you a backup to an older version path right on the boot screen. FWIW, that was not a catastrophic loss of data since I had it all on another drive courtesy of my every night run of amanda, so all my pix and music were only half an hour away once F8 was installed again.
Microsoft could take a few lessons from that, but they've never been a fan of redundancy, I suppose because it makes piracy even easier in their imagination, or maybe its another copy they want you to pay for, damned if I know. So enjoy your perceived supremacy cuz "windows runs everything worth turning on", but that image is fading, and will continue to fade until the sunset finally arrives, and linux then becomes the favorite target for the virus writers. There will be a difference in effectiveness of the viri though, because when linux catches a cold, its rare that the fix is more than a day away. We don't waste a lot of time on logistics of rolling out a patch because its as simple as heading out to the sources and downloading the patch, or the already patched version. All the programmer had to do was put it on the net, you are expected to do the rest. And if you don't, well... Then you are still a winderz user at heart, expecting someone else to do what really is your job in the first place but of course M$ won't allow you access to do that!
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?
-- Joel Chandler Harris, proverbs of Uncle Remus
You left out the smiley.
And it couldn't happen to a nicer outfit. :) I've been burnt bad on the last two things I've bought with the Sony brand on them. A tv for about 280 bucks that lost the green gun about 2 weeks out of warranty and the replacement crt, which I could install, was about 488 bucks. Needless to say the whole thing went in the landfill & got replaced by a $120 monkey ward tv that still works 22 years later. 5 years before that, a fawncy $220 metal tape audio casette deck, dual transports etc, had a hum level of about -35db from normal playback level. I took it back and got another in a sealed box 3 times & finally gave up. And 2 or 3 times I've gone out and bought a Sony labeled cd based on what I was hearing on the radio, and when I got it home, it was all stranger than a 3 dollar bill. Oh, same tunes, but the mix on the cd was nothing resembling what they were sending the radio stations. Scroom, and the camel that road in on them too.
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Cheers, gene
I really feel quite sorry for them.
I don't. Anyone involved in the music business should know that the first rule of business is Don't piss off the customer, and when they do that, that customer will think long and hard as to whether the hassling he's getting is worth the effort required to do it their way.
Has anyone in the board room ever considered that for 50 cents a track, minimum download of say 20 tracks just to make it worthwhile for the CC people to process the resultant charge card transaction, might do for overall sales? Particularly if they were made available in the format of our choice, which for me is sonicly very clear, ogg at Q7 or above.
The Prime rule of any business is to get a decent, fair to all involved, price for the product the customer wants. Treat him right, and the customer will treat the sales agent right, by not doing near as much 'sharing' because the product is then considered to belong to the customer. The present attitude of the RIAA is that you are allowed to play a copy once, and must pay for that right to play it again, you only bought a ticket for one performance. When I bought that cd, AFAIAC I bought the right to play the cd any time I stick it in the slot/drawer. That is exactly why I paid over a buck a track for a nickels worth of plastic.
Its no damned wonder we share, its our revenge for the screwing we are getting, and being treated like the slave girl, to be screwed again and again regardless of our wishes.
But, I'm honest enough too, I've visited TPB to see what was there, but to date I have not downloaded a single track from them. Frankly, most of whats there, you couldn't pay me enough to listen through a whole track of. Very poor quality mp3's for the most part.
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Cheers, Gene
Ok, show me a screenshot on pastebin.ca, showing what htop thinks of it when its running on your box. The last time I installed it, it was an unmitigatable cpu hog, rendering my xp-2800 athlon down to a simmering pile of silicon on the floor. I screwed with it a week and finally ripped it out, I got tired of having to user htop to reset its niceness a couple of times a day.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard,
ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas.
-- Kingfish
I did, and it worked till that packet was done that it was running when I started it, but the next session it started was right back at nice=0 and 99.99% of the cpu. I couldn't even type a message in kmail unless I waited for each character to echo to the screen before I typed the next one. Which was often a several second delay.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Veni, Vidi, VISA:
I came, I saw, I did a little shopping.
Only if BOINC has learned to be a good neighbor. I took it off my machine about 2 years ago because it thought it had an unlimited right to every cycle my cpu had. Setiathome NEVER ran that piggish. The planetary folks have so far ignored all pleas to run it at about nice 20 so we could have our machines back. The old setiathome client always ran at a high niceness.
I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait.
-- Frank Tyger
20 degrees F is actually pretty balmy. Many years ago I got up at 4:45 am to go put a tv station on the air, and found only one of the 3 vehicles in the drive would start, the thermometer nailed to a pine tree in the front yard confirmed the extra nip in the air was caused by a -39F reading. OTOH, I'm not hankerin to move back to that country in my dotage either. But, living where one might find a deer grazing in your yard, and fish jumping into the boat, did have its upsides at the time. Unforch, that was 40 years ago, and that country has doubled or tripled in population density since, so its true, you can never truly 'go home' again. That 'home' doesn't exist anymore.
Have a Happy New Year, for the whole year.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
ISTR that card did run at 1600x1200 during an earlier install of Brain Dead Install, but this has worked moderately well.
:( Once again hindsight is 20/10. :) So it will wait till warmer weather now...
The main impediment to doing it right now is my age & diabetes, by the time I'd get it done now, my feet would be screaming cuz there's no heat in the shop, at least not enough to be comfortable. There is a heater, a small electric set to keep it above freezing if it can and which is currently attempting to also dry some 3x8 white ash planks I have clamped to a steel framework so they won't curl up like a swatted spider as they dry from native cut stuffs that has been laying out in the weather for about 2 years now. The building itself wasn't really built to be insulated and only has any over about 15% of its inside surface. When I built, it was from a kit, quick and warm weather.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.
That assumes I have a card that I can deplete by a mid 4 digit amount just for transport. Retired, with SS as the main income, that is not the case.
Thanks.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.
The Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.06 installs are, as far as emc is concerned, equivalent. Xubuntu/Kubuntu will probably work just as well too.
I happen to like KDE, but if push comes to shove I could probably learn to tolerate and ignore gnomes &^%$# holier than thou attitude and use it. But it has nowhere near the configurability facilities that KDE has. In my case, the gfx card is as much a limiting factor as anything else, its your basic 4 megabyte elderly Diamond Speedstar, an oxymoron on a par with military intelligence. But its stable and it works, just at not over 1024x756. The monitor can do 1600x1200.
If and when I re-install for the next LTS, I will probably switch that card to a 9250 SE I have laying about as that will allow me to run at a higher screen resolution more closely matching what the monitor, a Samsung Synchmaster can do.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.