That particular printer was a DeskJet 5600 series. Don't remember the specific model number, but HP drivers and software tends to be common across models in a series (e.g., 5650 and 5652 would use identical drivers). I believe that one of the 5600 series printers has a flash card reader for printing digital photos directly. This one didn't, but the HP software install loaded all that Imaging Center and Share-to-Web cruft anyway.
The Microsoft KB article that came out later that week mentioned that systems with HP scanners, digital cameras, and printers were affected. I think that this particular buggy shell extension added a "Share-to-Web" or "Open with HP Imaging Center" entry to a context menu.
I completely agree. HP really should make a lightweight drivers-only install available. I always end up whacking HP crapware that loads on startup with msconfig.
On the other hand, installing a business-class HP LaserJet printer is a breeze. Just the drivers, no crapware, no hidden updaters, no Imaging Center, no Share-to-Web bullshit.
On the day after Patch Tuesday, January 2006, I got a somewhat frantic call from a client. She's a lawyer, had a filing deadline, but could not save a document in MS Word. That's not all that this patch broke: you couldn't open My Computer or My Documents on the desktop (though you could navigate to them by typing the path in the Start -> Run box), and IE wouldn't let you type just "www.[website].com" in IE's address bar. You had to prepend the "http://".
I verified that "Save" and "Save As..." were not working in Word. Word would just hang and only Task Mangler could shut it down. I carry the Sysinternals utilities on CD and USB key, so I rebooted and ran FILEMON, REGMON, and PROCEXP to see what was happening when I tried to save a doc in Word. Sure enough, Word would spawn verclsid.exe as a child process and then hang.
I googled "verclsid" and "Explorer", got nothing on the web and about a dozen Usenet posts from people having the same problem. I played a hunch and renamed verclsid.exe to verclsid.exX. I do that when I'm manually hunting malware that leaves.exe and.dll files that are named just like Windows system files. Keeps my foot bullet-free.
Problem solved. When the patch for the patch came out, a working verclsid.exe was dropped in %system% and I deleted the.exX.
Oh, and the buggy third party shell extension came with a very common HP DeskJet printer. As for Google, the next day I googled "verclsid": there were hundreds of web results and Usenet hits. The day after, tens of thousands. This one bit a lot of people in the ass.
See this is another misconception. As for basic computing the ONLY big requirement of Vista is 512mb of RAM to run as fast as XP. This is not a big leap, considering even OSX wants 512mb for adequate performance, and even Linux running KDE or GNOME will run better with at least 512mb of RAM.
Something I've noticed, while administering desktop PCs for clients as well as my own XP laptop and desktops, is that the memory requirements of a Windows PC get larger over the life of the computer.
One cause of this is installation of drivers and add-on applets for various peripherals and software packages. A printer adds a status applet that takes 4MB. An accounting package adds a process that checks for updates, taking another 2MB. Over the life of a PC, these things add up, until the commit charge starts to exceed the amount of physical RAM. That's when the system starts sucking mud, especially on startup.
Another cause is Windows Update. Every patch increases the memory footprint of the OS, albeit in small increments. But over the 3-5 year lifespan of a computer, hundreds of updates are applied (yes, hundreds: my brand new HP workstation needed 68 updates to XP out of the box).
So that 512MB nominal minimum for Vista will double in a couple or three years. I know this because XP workstations that were delivered to a client with 256MB three years ago (and ran fast and responsive out of the box) now take four to five minutes to settle down into a usable state after startup or reboot. I had the same situation with my 256MB Toshiba laptop, sluggish until I added a 512MB DIMM.
Maybe it's because I remember the days when one could do useful things with a computer that had just 8 or 16 or 32MB of RAM, because the operating system wasn't taking up 50% to 66% of physical memory and paging things out to disk.
I don't mean to single out XP or Vista. My OS X workstation and my Red Hat server are the same way, though they're both running services that my XP workstations aren't. When I was doing computer animation, I kept a Win98 box around just for the DOS version of Autodesk 3DStudio. When booted into DOS mode, the OS and 3DS took just 3.2MB of the 512MB available, leaving the rest free for textures and meshes.
Imagine that, an OS and software taking less than 5% of the available RAM.
That's why giving up 50% of memory to housekeeping functions seems like an anathema to me.
The late E. H. Bronner was a rather eccentric man, but he made damn good soap. Each bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap would be covered with tiny text extolling the virtues of the product along with "healthy Hunza food" and somewhat off-beat religious proclamations.
Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life! Poetry, uniting All-One! All brave! All life! Who else but God! "Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!
Basically, Dr. Bronner's is the Time Cube of soaps.
Is that a familiar looking penguin I see in the upper left corner of screenshot #1? And if so, will Department of Defense be giving anything back to the open source community? I, for one, could surely use an M203 grenade launcher. Might come in handy during my next performance review.
I guess the official Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee web site is out of date. It was only after I posted this that I realized that Sen. Burns (R-MT) lost to John Tester and George "Macaca" Allen (R-VA) lost to James Webb.
As a former musician, songwriter, and label owner, I relied on getting paid through performance, mechanical, synchronization, and transcription royalties. It was a regular, dependable revenue stream.
But I've gotten so dependent on internet audio streams like Soma-FM's Indie Pop Rocks. Sometimes, it was the only thing keeping me going when I was working my dead end IT job. I'd have the shortcut to the 128kb stream on my desktop and it was the first thing I'd hit, even before checking my e-mail.
When I heard a song I really liked, I'd write down the name on a notepad, check the artist's site to see if an mp3 was available and if not I'd get it from iTMS. Just like radio, internet streams drive sales.
I had thought that ASCAP and BMI (the performing rights organizations that collect and disburse performance royalties) based royalty rates based on a radio or television station's potential audience, but it seems more complex than that, seeing as the Library of Congress is setting basic rates.
Tomorrow, I intend to research this issue and write my congressman (Rep. Delahunt) and senators (Sen. Kerry and Sen. Kennedy) and ask them to look into this issue. I urge everyone who is a constituent of a senator on the telecommunications subcommittee to do the same:
Conrad Burns, MT, Chairman Ted Stevens, AK (don't mention those "tubes", okay?) Trent Lott, MS Kay Bailey Hutchison, TX Olympia J. Snowe, ME Sam Brownback, KS Gordon Smith, OR Peter G. Fitzgerald, IL John Ensign, NV George Allen, VA John Sununu, NH Ernest Hollings, SC, Ranking Daniel K. Inouye, HI John D. Rockefeller, WV John F. Kerry, MA John Breaux, LA Byron Dorgan, ND Ron Wyden, OR Barbara Boxer, CA Bill Nelson, FL Maria Cantwell, WA
E-mail and faxes will probably be better received than snail mail, given the fact that mail to government offices gets delayed while it gets irradiated to ameliorate biological threats.
Me, I couldn't afford a DAT recorder when they first came out, but in 1989 I bought a Toshiba DX900 videocassette recorder. It recorded 14-bit PCM to video, along with Hi-Fi analog stereo and VHS mono. A steal at $899. Still have it, still works, after an overhaul 10 years ago.
As backup, I bought a Nakamichi converter that's functionally identical to a Sony F-1. When I can't get parts or service for the Toshiba, the Nak will work with any VHS deck.
I mixed hundreds of songs down to that Toshiba. Not quite 16-bit (the two extra bits were used for error correction), but it filled the gap before I could afford DAT (and a Mac that could run ProTools).
Don't know if you ever owned a Tascam DA-30 DAT recorder, but the owner's manual gave explicit instructions on how to circumvent the SCMS "copy code" copy protection. This basically involved opening the unit, snipping a wire jumper on the circuit board, and closing the unit. To the best of my knowledge, this did not even void the warranty.
This was pre-DMCA, of course.
Professionals have always considered copy protection damage, and have routed around it.
DAT might have flopped in the consumer sector (I blame CD for that), but it was the bee's knees for audio professionals, considering that it was the lowest cost and most convenient PCM format at the time. Prior to DAT, digital masters meant using a Sony 1630, PCM audio on a large videocassette. There were digital open-reel solutions, but these never caught on for mixdown and mastering.
As for the rest of this list, it seems to me that a lot of these entries (Newton, PC jr, VR, Qube) were just inadequate hardware/software implementations of valid concepts. Consider the Newton: ahead of its time, it just needed sufficient CPU/RAM/display tech to become the Palm/Blackberry/smartphone that it should have been. The IBM PC jr was unarguably a flop, but the concept of an affordable home PC lives on in the $299 Dell or $399 Mac Mini. VR was a whole lot of hype (and yes, I bought into it, seeing as I was a 3D animator back in the mid-'90s), but now look at WoW or Second Life. And Qube? One word: TiVo. I realize that Qube was meant to be a more interactive product/service, but the web co-opted the e-commerce aspect of the Qube. I think the only interactivity people want from their TV is to watch what they want when they want.
Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years.
As if Slashdot on April Fool's Day wasn't lame enough, the editors have to post another site's lameass AFD "prank" (see the credit to "Loof Lirpa" at the end of TFA).
It's doubly lame because casting Julianne Moore is somewhat credible. Now, if TFA was about Whoopi Goldberg or Judi Dench stepping in as Dana Scully, that might warrant a groggy Sunday morning chuckle (not from me, though -- too hungover).
Me, I'd rather see Jenna Jameson star in a new XXX-Files movie.
My company supports a few dozen small- to medium-sized companies, maybe a few hundred workstations and servers. Majority are Windows, with some Macs in design/graphics companies. Allow me to share some Windows Update tragedies...
Two Windows SP1 workstations were rendered useless by a Windows Update patch to the point that they couldn't even boot into safe mode. SP2 machines were unaffected. The reason that these PCs were still at SP1 was because SP2 broke a terminal client needed for 80% of this business's data processing needs (we found this out the hard way). Solution: wipe and reinstall, turn wupdate off.
A year ago, WU 908531 (which installed verclsid.exe, a program for validating COM objects) broke Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Word on any computer with an HP DeskJet or scanner installed. Documents would not open or save in Word. The My Documents folder would not open. Immediate workaround was to rename or delete verclsid.exe. Now with all the Windows PCs out there with HP peripherals, you'd think MS would catch this in QA, right? Nope.
Windows Genuine Advantage...'nuff said. No, wait. I spent too much time on the phone with Microsoft's Bangalore phone bank resolving this one. Even my own office PC got bit when I added a DVD burner; I had to reactivate over the phone.
Pushing Internet Explorer 7 as a critical patch. Stupid. Broke a lot of applications that depend on the underlying DLLs for their user interface, most notably recent versions of Quickbooks. Easy fix, uninstall IE7. But time is money for our clients. I will admit that it seems like MS took IE7 off the critical list, since the HP workstation I bought (probably the last to ship with XP) did not have IE7 among the 69 Windows Update critical patches I installed after bringing it up for the first time.
Automatic Windows Updates are like playing Russian Roulette with five rounds in the revolver. But hey, living dangerously is wicked fun.
Okay, in the interest of fairness, a couple of years ago an OS X Security Update broke Samba for me (though it only affected one of my home PCs). I worked it out eventually, recompiling Samba from source. But still, compare the percentage of Mac users who use Samba with the percentage of PC users who have HP printers and use Word (see verclsid.exe bullet above).
There are systems in place, albeit mainly fixed location (for the most part) that perform this task. Shotspotter is one that comes to mind, along with FireFinder for larger caliber weapons.
What caught my eye was that it was BU doing this research and development. I lived in Boston for a long time (Cape Cod resident now) and still read the Boston Globe. Just about two weeks ago there was an article (beware, Undertone pop-unders) about the Boston city government looking into deploying Shotspotter in Roxbury and Dorchester, neighborhoods that have seen an uptick in gun violence in the last couple of years (after about a decade of falling rates of shootings).
Now, despite the OP's write-up, I don't anticipate F-16s with LGBs loitering over Grove Hall, waiting to drop a 500 lb. smart bomb on a triple-decker on Blue Hill Ave. Nor do I think that this will happen in Sadr City, Baghdad. Iraqi insurgents would quickly adapt to this tactic and hold human shields.
Bottom line, speaking domestically, the police depend on citizens to call in with a report of "shots fired". Anything that takes the voluntary calls out of the loop can only decrease response time, and it's the sort of surveillance that's targeted to the transient sound of a gunshot, not a camera on a lamppost taking indiscriminent pictures of anyone who happens to be on a particular corner.
Silencers (suppressors) on rifles, though they exist, are of limited use.
First of all, the percussive sound of the powder detonating in the cartridge isn't what gives away a sniper. It's the sound of the round breaking the sound barrier. The solution is to use a subsonic round along with a suppressor, but then you're giving up velocity and kinetic energy, along with range and lethality.
Suppressors and subsonic rounds are more often used in pistols, and in close range work (e.g., killing someone in the same room...err, elevator as you are). In many cases, the sound of the pistol's action is louder than the sound of the shot.
Does knowing a programming language (or two) help? This wasn't addressed in the article, of course, but I'm curious. Also, I wonder if the ability to read musical notation would have the same (or some) effect.
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old.
Heresy! The Earth and everything else in God's universe was created 6,000 years ago.
Burn him!
"The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."
It is, however, going to be included in the Director's Cut, due for release December 21, 2012.
Well, I've been using Microsoft products for the last 15 years, and for the last three years I've been working for a company that does support for small- to medium-sized businesses that use Microsoft products. At my office we use a mix of Windows and Linux and at home there are Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes under my desk. I have issues with all of them, to be sure, but here's my Microsoft litany:
The Registry. Number One pain in the ass. Easily corrupted, hard to edit and restore.
Every point covered in the Findings of Fact released during the anti-trust litigation, including vendor lock-in, strong-arming the OEMs, and anti-competitive practices.
Windows Genuine Advantage, which is buggy as all hell. I added a DVD burner to my system at work and had to re-activate, which meant a call to their Bangalore call center ("Good gracious no, kind sir! I have not installed this on another computer!)
Lame disk management tools like scandisk and chkdsk that haven't progressed since the late '90s.
Word: I find myself fighting Word's formatting tools and eventually give up and end up using InDesign instead for something as simple as a letterhead template. I've been using Word since version 2.0. It has always sucked sweaty balls.
SBS2003: crippleware, what with its domain controller and non-workgroup restrictions (and yes, I know about that Registry hack. See #1).
Security: Arguments about being a big target aside, there are some security holes that just should not exist. That big 2002 code audit did nothing.
Patches that break things: The first that comes to mind is the verclsid.exe patch from earlier this year that broke Explorer for users with HP printers. Word and IE were also collateral damage. That patch needed more testing before release. Workaround was to rename verclsid.exe to verclsid.exx. That allowed the client to open Word documents and enter URLs in IE's address bar.
Let's go back in time: Windows ME. Worst. OS. Evar.
Back to the present day: logging and error reporting on XP (and the Server products) leave much to be desired. Tell me more. Give me more google-fodder. Don't tell me that "the data is in the packet" in the error message. That packet is long gone.
Heisenbugs. User settings that revert to something other than what you set. Bugs that can only be resolved by changing permissions on a single Registry key. See #1.
XP/2000 default settings: Let's mount every shared printer and folder by default. Let's hide extensions. Let's hide "hidden" and system files. Dumb.
Trivial shit, like that stupid animated dog in the Search function. Not professional, but I understand that this and Clippy are holdovers from Microsoft "Bob", which was Melinda Gates's project before she married Bill. Kill Clippy, kill the puppy.
Now, a list of what I like about Microsoft products:
Excel: It's done everything I've thrown at it, including some fairly hairy VBA scripts. I have zero problems with Excel. Im my opinion, it's their best product.
XP's (and ME's) System Restore. This actually works on occasion, but only if the problem is minor.
Server 2003 (full version, not SBS): I think MSFT finally got something right. Every Server 2003 install I've done has been behind a NAT router, so I haven't had security problems so far. Easy setup, fairly easy to configure, dead easy to integrate with an office full of XP boxes.
VPN and RDP. As long as you're connecting from Windows to Windows, these work pretty damned good. I depend on these and haven't been let down.
I could probably go on all night but I've had a few drinks and need to crash.
Every, and I mean every company has products under development that never see the light of day.
Case in point: mid-'90s, I did a lot of 3D animation and multimedia production. One of my clients was DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation. Some of the presentations I created for them were for products like the DEC Dove, a tablet/laptop that could use wireless to connect to other DEC Doves in a conference room (this was 1994, before wireless was a standard and about when tablet computing first appeared).
I was lent a prototype of the Dove (cost: $50,000, delivered by an armed guard) in order to digitize it and create a 3D model. The operating system was something akin to PalmOS, and the screen would automatically rotate from landscape to portrait mode when the screen was opened. I had only the one example, so I can't say how the wireless function worked, but it never crashed on me, which is a lot to say for a prototype.
There were other DEC projects, none of which got past the stage of painted foamcore models, like a network-attached storage appliance that was about the size of an abridged dictionary. Again, this was 1994, and I didn't see an equivalent product in the marketplace for another 7 or 8 years. That one was ahead of its time, since most of the networks I worked with back then were 10Base2, chugging along at 10Mbps. NAS at that speed would be all but useless for anything but small Word docs.
I could go on about what killed DEC, but I'd rather let DEC ex-employees tell that story.
Back in my twenties and thirties, I did the couch circuit, both pro and amateur.
I was a rock musician from 1978 to 1998 in unsigned bands, and there was an informal couch circuit among bands. An out-of-town band would play a club and make friends with the openers or headlining acts. Phone numbers would be exchanged, and when we hit their town we'd have couch space, maybe an extra bedroom or foam pad if we were lucky. Bands I was in would do three to six week tours and there wasn't room in the budget for a motel room every night. Given that all of us were riding in a van with all of our gear, sleeping in the van wasn't an option. Best case scenario was a couch five nights and a motel room or two for the rest of the week.
This sort of network could be a boon to unsigned bands, sort of an unofficial hostel system.
Then there's the amateur side: getting kicked out of apartments in Boston in the '80s because the landlord wanted to convert to condos, and not having the cash for first and last months rent plus security. The couch circuit was a way of making enough money to get that apartment. The alternatives were camping out in your band's rehearsal space (hey, cockroaches make wonderful pets!) or persuading your girlfriend to let you move in with her (hey, no farting in bed!).
First, the bullet-core arrangement you mention is not a hydrogen bomb. It's the simplest form of atomic weapon, a gun-type bomb like Little Boy, the weapon dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. And even that bomb wasn't so simple: in order to insure an airburst roughly 2000' over the city, the bomb used redundant radar and barometric triggers to determine altitude (the actual height of detonation was 1850').
Little Boy was simple but inefficient, given the amount of fissile material used.
Trinity and Fat Man (the first test shot and the Nagasaki weapon) were plutonium-based implosion weapons. A sphere of high explosive lenses was used to implode plutonium around a neutron-rich core (the initiator). This was a more efficient use of fissile materials but the engineering involved was complicated: each explosive lens had to be detonated at exactly the right time in order to achieve perfect implosion (and this was first done by engineers with slide rules, mind you). Even now, sixty years later, the dimensions of the initiator at the core of the weapon are still classified Top Secret.
A hydrogen weapon uses an implosion fission device as a primary, and is designed to channel its energy to a secondary fusion device consisting of polystyrene, uranium, and deuterium. The engineering involved in such a device is far beyond slide rules, since a difference of microseconds can mean a successful fusion reaction or a weapon blown apart by its own primary. A fizzle, in other words.
Enriching uranium and generating plutonium are solved problems, but they are energy- and material-intensive. In 1944-45, it took two massive industrial complexes at Hanford WA and Oak Ridge TN to produce enough fissile materials for three weapons.
There were 7 US fleet carriers afloat before the war broke out (Lexington, Saratoga, Enterprise, Wasp, Hornet, and Ranger), along with a couple of smaller carriers like USS Langely, mostly used for ferrying and training.
During the war, 29 "fleet" carriers were built (Essex and Midway classes). Fleet carriers (designated CV) were the largest, capable of carrying over 100 aircraft.
Eleven light carriers (CVL) were built. These were slightly smaller than fleet carriers and were based on excess light cruiser hulls (Independence and Saipan classes).
As for carrier escorts (CVE), 129 keels were laid down during the war (51 Long Island and Bogue classes, 51 Casablanca class, 27 Sangamon and Commencement Bay classes). True, the first were converted from merchant hulls, but the rest were designed by Henry Kaiser and based on a merchie plan, not converted. Kaiser revolutionized shipbuilding, eventually getting the process of building and launching a Liberty Ship down to something like 6 days per hull.
So my numbers were a bit low. Forty carriers capable of power projection were built and 129 escort keels were laid down. Japan's carrier production figure included carriers and hybrids built on unfinished battleship and cruiser hulls (like Shinano).
Anyway, from the Wikipedia page you referenced has a table that I'd love to quote but it trips the Slashdot Lameness Filter. Here's an example line:
The only line item on that table for which the Axis had an advantage was in submarine production, seeing as that was the bread and butter of Germany's Kriegsmarine. In every other category, the Allies had a 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1 edge.
I see your point about US/USSR production being unhindered by bombing, though a fair amount of US production did get torpedoed en route to Europe. Also, UK plants were getting bombed, but this didn't severely hinder production. Plus, US bombing of Japan wasn't really effective until 1944, when Gen. LeMay took over the command of B-29 squadrons and switched from high altitude carpet bombing to the more destructive low-level incendiary raids.
But I think the largest factor in the Allied production advantage was that the US and USSR were large nations, with manpower and natural resources that dwarfed the Japanese and Germans (who basically started WWII over natural resources). Germany had the industrial capacity, but Hitler didn't put Germany's civilians on a total war footing until very late in the war, too late to matter. Japan had a severe lack of resources: though the Japanese had started an atomic weapon program and had enriched uranium through the gaseous diffusion and calutron methods, the head of the program estimated that producing enough weapons-grade U235 would have taken 25% of the national electrical output and 75% of their silver reserves.
Finally, the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that aerial bombardment was not as effective as thought. For example, German factories were regularly bombed into rubble, but the machine tools inside proved to be rather robust and could be quickly repaired and moved into underground facilities.
Actually, no. Prior to 1940, when the US began mobilizing its armed forces, we were pretty weak. Part of the reason was the Depression, which hit our industrial base hard, and partly because of isolationist sentiment.
There were three aircraft carriers in our entire Pacific fleet; the Japanese had 6 carriers in the Pearl Harbor strike force alone, with more protecting the Home Islands and raiding the Philippines and European colonies. Our standing Army was number 17 in numerical terms, behind Czechoslovakia, and a number of new recruits were being rejected because they had suffered from malnutrition growing up during the Depression. Modern aircraft were just beginning production but a large portion were being supplied to Great Britain and the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Agreement.
We were losing the Pacific War for the first six months, until the Battle of Midway. Even then, until Guadalcanal was secured (well into 1943), keeping lines-of-communication open to Australia wasn't a sure thing, much less victory in the PTO.
Atom bombs aside, the US defeated Japan and the Axis by out-producing them. During the period from 1941-45, the Japanese produced 13 aircraft carriers of all sizes. The US produced 137.
Slashdot Mirror
That particular printer was a DeskJet 5600 series. Don't remember the specific model number, but HP drivers and software tends to be common across models in a series (e.g., 5650 and 5652 would use identical drivers). I believe that one of the 5600 series printers has a flash card reader for printing digital photos directly. This one didn't, but the HP software install loaded all that Imaging Center and Share-to-Web cruft anyway.
The Microsoft KB article that came out later that week mentioned that systems with HP scanners, digital cameras, and printers were affected. I think that this particular buggy shell extension added a "Share-to-Web" or "Open with HP Imaging Center" entry to a context menu.
k.
I completely agree. HP really should make a lightweight drivers-only install available. I always end up whacking HP crapware that loads on startup with msconfig.
On the other hand, installing a business-class HP LaserJet printer is a breeze. Just the drivers, no crapware, no hidden updaters, no Imaging Center, no Share-to-Web bullshit.
k.
On the day after Patch Tuesday, January 2006, I got a somewhat frantic call from a client. She's a lawyer, had a filing deadline, but could not save a document in MS Word. That's not all that this patch broke: you couldn't open My Computer or My Documents on the desktop (though you could navigate to them by typing the path in the Start -> Run box), and IE wouldn't let you type just "www.[website].com" in IE's address bar. You had to prepend the "http://".
.exe and .dll files that are named just like Windows system files. Keeps my foot bullet-free.
.exX.
I verified that "Save" and "Save As..." were not working in Word. Word would just hang and only Task Mangler could shut it down. I carry the Sysinternals utilities on CD and USB key, so I rebooted and ran FILEMON, REGMON, and PROCEXP to see what was happening when I tried to save a doc in Word. Sure enough, Word would spawn verclsid.exe as a child process and then hang.
I googled "verclsid" and "Explorer", got nothing on the web and about a dozen Usenet posts from people having the same problem. I played a hunch and renamed verclsid.exe to verclsid.exX. I do that when I'm manually hunting malware that leaves
Problem solved. When the patch for the patch came out, a working verclsid.exe was dropped in %system% and I deleted the
Oh, and the buggy third party shell extension came with a very common HP DeskJet printer. As for Google, the next day I googled "verclsid": there were hundreds of web results and Usenet hits. The day after, tens of thousands. This one bit a lot of people in the ass.
k.
Something I've noticed, while administering desktop PCs for clients as well as my own XP laptop and desktops, is that the memory requirements of a Windows PC get larger over the life of the computer.
One cause of this is installation of drivers and add-on applets for various peripherals and software packages. A printer adds a status applet that takes 4MB. An accounting package adds a process that checks for updates, taking another 2MB. Over the life of a PC, these things add up, until the commit charge starts to exceed the amount of physical RAM. That's when the system starts sucking mud, especially on startup.
Another cause is Windows Update. Every patch increases the memory footprint of the OS, albeit in small increments. But over the 3-5 year lifespan of a computer, hundreds of updates are applied (yes, hundreds: my brand new HP workstation needed 68 updates to XP out of the box).
So that 512MB nominal minimum for Vista will double in a couple or three years. I know this because XP workstations that were delivered to a client with 256MB three years ago (and ran fast and responsive out of the box) now take four to five minutes to settle down into a usable state after startup or reboot. I had the same situation with my 256MB Toshiba laptop, sluggish until I added a 512MB DIMM.
Maybe it's because I remember the days when one could do useful things with a computer that had just 8 or 16 or 32MB of RAM, because the operating system wasn't taking up 50% to 66% of physical memory and paging things out to disk.
I don't mean to single out XP or Vista. My OS X workstation and my Red Hat server are the same way, though they're both running services that my XP workstations aren't. When I was doing computer animation, I kept a Win98 box around just for the DOS version of Autodesk 3DStudio. When booted into DOS mode, the OS and 3DS took just 3.2MB of the 512MB available, leaving the rest free for textures and meshes.
Imagine that, an OS and software taking less than 5% of the available RAM.
That's why giving up 50% of memory to housekeeping functions seems like an anathema to me.
k.
Basically, Dr. Bronner's is the Time Cube of soaps.
k.
Is that a familiar looking penguin I see in the upper left corner of screenshot #1? And if so, will Department of Defense be giving anything back to the open source community? I, for one, could surely use an M203 grenade launcher. Might come in handy during my next performance review.
k.
I guess the official Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee web site is out of date. It was only after I posted this that I realized that Sen. Burns (R-MT) lost to John Tester and George "Macaca" Allen (R-VA) lost to James Webb.
Pretty fucking Web 0.9 if you ask me.
k.
As a former musician, songwriter, and label owner, I relied on getting paid through performance, mechanical, synchronization, and transcription royalties. It was a regular, dependable revenue stream.
But I've gotten so dependent on internet audio streams like Soma-FM's Indie Pop Rocks. Sometimes, it was the only thing keeping me going when I was working my dead end IT job. I'd have the shortcut to the 128kb stream on my desktop and it was the first thing I'd hit, even before checking my e-mail.
When I heard a song I really liked, I'd write down the name on a notepad, check the artist's site to see if an mp3 was available and if not I'd get it from iTMS. Just like radio, internet streams drive sales.
I had thought that ASCAP and BMI (the performing rights organizations that collect and disburse performance royalties) based royalty rates based on a radio or television station's potential audience, but it seems more complex than that, seeing as the Library of Congress is setting basic rates.
Tomorrow, I intend to research this issue and write my congressman (Rep. Delahunt) and senators (Sen. Kerry and Sen. Kennedy) and ask them to look into this issue. I urge everyone who is a constituent of a senator on the telecommunications subcommittee to do the same:
Conrad Burns, MT, Chairman
Ted Stevens, AK (don't mention those "tubes", okay?)
Trent Lott, MS
Kay Bailey Hutchison, TX
Olympia J. Snowe, ME
Sam Brownback, KS
Gordon Smith, OR
Peter G. Fitzgerald, IL
John Ensign, NV
George Allen, VA
John Sununu, NH
Ernest Hollings, SC, Ranking
Daniel K. Inouye, HI
John D. Rockefeller, WV
John F. Kerry, MA
John Breaux, LA
Byron Dorgan, ND
Ron Wyden, OR
Barbara Boxer, CA
Bill Nelson, FL
Maria Cantwell, WA
E-mail and faxes will probably be better received than snail mail, given the fact that mail to government offices gets delayed while it gets irradiated to ameliorate biological threats.
k.
Sweet.
Me, I couldn't afford a DAT recorder when they first came out, but in 1989 I bought a Toshiba DX900 videocassette recorder. It recorded 14-bit PCM to video, along with Hi-Fi analog stereo and VHS mono. A steal at $899. Still have it, still works, after an overhaul 10 years ago.
As backup, I bought a Nakamichi converter that's functionally identical to a Sony F-1. When I can't get parts or service for the Toshiba, the Nak will work with any VHS deck.
I mixed hundreds of songs down to that Toshiba. Not quite 16-bit (the two extra bits were used for error correction), but it filled the gap before I could afford DAT (and a Mac that could run ProTools).
k.
Not quite.
Don't know if you ever owned a Tascam DA-30 DAT recorder, but the owner's manual gave explicit instructions on how to circumvent the SCMS "copy code" copy protection. This basically involved opening the unit, snipping a wire jumper on the circuit board, and closing the unit. To the best of my knowledge, this did not even void the warranty.
This was pre-DMCA, of course.
Professionals have always considered copy protection damage, and have routed around it.
k.
DAT might have flopped in the consumer sector (I blame CD for that), but it was the bee's knees for audio professionals, considering that it was the lowest cost and most convenient PCM format at the time. Prior to DAT, digital masters meant using a Sony 1630, PCM audio on a large videocassette. There were digital open-reel solutions, but these never caught on for mixdown and mastering.
As for the rest of this list, it seems to me that a lot of these entries (Newton, PC jr, VR, Qube) were just inadequate hardware/software implementations of valid concepts. Consider the Newton: ahead of its time, it just needed sufficient CPU/RAM/display tech to become the Palm/Blackberry/smartphone that it should have been. The IBM PC jr was unarguably a flop, but the concept of an affordable home PC lives on in the $299 Dell or $399 Mac Mini. VR was a whole lot of hype (and yes, I bought into it, seeing as I was a 3D animator back in the mid-'90s), but now look at WoW or Second Life. And Qube? One word: TiVo. I realize that Qube was meant to be a more interactive product/service, but the web co-opted the e-commerce aspect of the Qube. I think the only interactivity people want from their TV is to watch what they want when they want.
Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years.
k.
As if Slashdot on April Fool's Day wasn't lame enough, the editors have to post another site's lameass AFD "prank" (see the credit to "Loof Lirpa" at the end of TFA).
It's doubly lame because casting Julianne Moore is somewhat credible. Now, if TFA was about Whoopi Goldberg or Judi Dench stepping in as Dana Scully, that might warrant a groggy Sunday morning chuckle (not from me, though -- too hungover).
Me, I'd rather see Jenna Jameson star in a new XXX-Files movie.
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Automatic pain in the ass is more like it.
My company supports a few dozen small- to medium-sized companies, maybe a few hundred workstations and servers. Majority are Windows, with some Macs in design/graphics companies. Allow me to share some Windows Update tragedies...
Automatic Windows Updates are like playing Russian Roulette with five rounds in the revolver. But hey, living dangerously is wicked fun.
Okay, in the interest of fairness, a couple of years ago an OS X Security Update broke Samba for me (though it only affected one of my home PCs). I worked it out eventually, recompiling Samba from source. But still, compare the percentage of Mac users who use Samba with the percentage of PC users who have HP printers and use Word (see verclsid.exe bullet above).
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There are systems in place, albeit mainly fixed location (for the most part) that perform this task. Shotspotter is one that comes to mind, along with FireFinder for larger caliber weapons.
What caught my eye was that it was BU doing this research and development. I lived in Boston for a long time (Cape Cod resident now) and still read the Boston Globe. Just about two weeks ago there was an article (beware, Undertone pop-unders) about the Boston city government looking into deploying Shotspotter in Roxbury and Dorchester, neighborhoods that have seen an uptick in gun violence in the last couple of years (after about a decade of falling rates of shootings).
Now, despite the OP's write-up, I don't anticipate F-16s with LGBs loitering over Grove Hall, waiting to drop a 500 lb. smart bomb on a triple-decker on Blue Hill Ave. Nor do I think that this will happen in Sadr City, Baghdad. Iraqi insurgents would quickly adapt to this tactic and hold human shields.
Bottom line, speaking domestically, the police depend on citizens to call in with a report of "shots fired". Anything that takes the voluntary calls out of the loop can only decrease response time, and it's the sort of surveillance that's targeted to the transient sound of a gunshot, not a camera on a lamppost taking indiscriminent pictures of anyone who happens to be on a particular corner.
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Silencers (suppressors) on rifles, though they exist, are of limited use.
First of all, the percussive sound of the powder detonating in the cartridge isn't what gives away a sniper. It's the sound of the round breaking the sound barrier. The solution is to use a subsonic round along with a suppressor, but then you're giving up velocity and kinetic energy, along with range and lethality.
Suppressors and subsonic rounds are more often used in pistols, and in close range work (e.g., killing someone in the same room...err, elevator as you are). In many cases, the sound of the pistol's action is louder than the sound of the shot.
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Does knowing a programming language (or two) help? This wasn't addressed in the article, of course, but I'm curious. Also, I wonder if the ability to read musical notation would have the same (or some) effect.
k.
Heresy! The Earth and everything else in God's universe was created 6,000 years ago.
Burn him!
It is, however, going to be included in the Director's Cut, due for release December 21, 2012.
k.
Well, I've been using Microsoft products for the last 15 years, and for the last three years I've been working for a company that does support for small- to medium-sized businesses that use Microsoft products. At my office we use a mix of Windows and Linux and at home there are Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes under my desk. I have issues with all of them, to be sure, but here's my Microsoft litany:
Now, a list of what I like about Microsoft products:
I could probably go on all night but I've had a few drinks and need to crash.
Welcome to my world.
k.
It's just a glitch in the Matrix.
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Every, and I mean every company has products under development that never see the light of day.
Case in point: mid-'90s, I did a lot of 3D animation and multimedia production. One of my clients was DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation. Some of the presentations I created for them were for products like the DEC Dove, a tablet/laptop that could use wireless to connect to other DEC Doves in a conference room (this was 1994, before wireless was a standard and about when tablet computing first appeared).
I was lent a prototype of the Dove (cost: $50,000, delivered by an armed guard) in order to digitize it and create a 3D model. The operating system was something akin to PalmOS, and the screen would automatically rotate from landscape to portrait mode when the screen was opened. I had only the one example, so I can't say how the wireless function worked, but it never crashed on me, which is a lot to say for a prototype.
There were other DEC projects, none of which got past the stage of painted foamcore models, like a network-attached storage appliance that was about the size of an abridged dictionary. Again, this was 1994, and I didn't see an equivalent product in the marketplace for another 7 or 8 years. That one was ahead of its time, since most of the networks I worked with back then were 10Base2, chugging along at 10Mbps. NAS at that speed would be all but useless for anything but small Word docs.
I could go on about what killed DEC, but I'd rather let DEC ex-employees tell that story.
k.
Back in my twenties and thirties, I did the couch circuit, both pro and amateur.
I was a rock musician from 1978 to 1998 in unsigned bands, and there was an informal couch circuit among bands. An out-of-town band would play a club and make friends with the openers or headlining acts. Phone numbers would be exchanged, and when we hit their town we'd have couch space, maybe an extra bedroom or foam pad if we were lucky. Bands I was in would do three to six week tours and there wasn't room in the budget for a motel room every night. Given that all of us were riding in a van with all of our gear, sleeping in the van wasn't an option. Best case scenario was a couch five nights and a motel room or two for the rest of the week.
This sort of network could be a boon to unsigned bands, sort of an unofficial hostel system.
Then there's the amateur side: getting kicked out of apartments in Boston in the '80s because the landlord wanted to convert to condos, and not having the cash for first and last months rent plus security. The couch circuit was a way of making enough money to get that apartment. The alternatives were camping out in your band's rehearsal space (hey, cockroaches make wonderful pets!) or persuading your girlfriend to let you move in with her (hey, no farting in bed!).
Damn, I wish I had an internets back in 1982.
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You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, the bullet-core arrangement you mention is not a hydrogen bomb. It's the simplest form of atomic weapon, a gun-type bomb like Little Boy, the weapon dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. And even that bomb wasn't so simple: in order to insure an airburst roughly 2000' over the city, the bomb used redundant radar and barometric triggers to determine altitude (the actual height of detonation was 1850').
Little Boy was simple but inefficient, given the amount of fissile material used.
Trinity and Fat Man (the first test shot and the Nagasaki weapon) were plutonium-based implosion weapons. A sphere of high explosive lenses was used to implode plutonium around a neutron-rich core (the initiator). This was a more efficient use of fissile materials but the engineering involved was complicated: each explosive lens had to be detonated at exactly the right time in order to achieve perfect implosion (and this was first done by engineers with slide rules, mind you). Even now, sixty years later, the dimensions of the initiator at the core of the weapon are still classified Top Secret.
A hydrogen weapon uses an implosion fission device as a primary, and is designed to channel its energy to a secondary fusion device consisting of polystyrene, uranium, and deuterium. The engineering involved in such a device is far beyond slide rules, since a difference of microseconds can mean a successful fusion reaction or a weapon blown apart by its own primary. A fizzle, in other words.
Enriching uranium and generating plutonium are solved problems, but they are energy- and material-intensive. In 1944-45, it took two massive industrial complexes at Hanford WA and Oak Ridge TN to produce enough fissile materials for three weapons.
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Here's the breakdown from hazegray.org:
There were 7 US fleet carriers afloat before the war broke out (Lexington, Saratoga, Enterprise, Wasp, Hornet, and Ranger), along with a couple of smaller carriers like USS Langely, mostly used for ferrying and training.
During the war, 29 "fleet" carriers were built (Essex and Midway classes). Fleet carriers (designated CV) were the largest, capable of carrying over 100 aircraft.
Eleven light carriers (CVL) were built. These were slightly smaller than fleet carriers and were based on excess light cruiser hulls (Independence and Saipan classes).
As for carrier escorts (CVE), 129 keels were laid down during the war (51 Long Island and Bogue classes, 51 Casablanca class, 27 Sangamon and Commencement Bay classes). True, the first were converted from merchant hulls, but the rest were designed by Henry Kaiser and based on a merchie plan, not converted. Kaiser revolutionized shipbuilding, eventually getting the process of building and launching a Liberty Ship down to something like 6 days per hull.
So my numbers were a bit low. Forty carriers capable of power projection were built and 129 escort keels were laid down. Japan's carrier production figure included carriers and hybrids built on unfinished battleship and cruiser hulls (like Shinano).
Anyway, from the Wikipedia page you referenced has a table that I'd love to quote but it trips the Slashdot Lameness Filter. Here's an example line:
Merchant shipping tonnage: Allies 33,993,230 Axis 5,000,000+
The only line item on that table for which the Axis had an advantage was in submarine production, seeing as that was the bread and butter of Germany's Kriegsmarine. In every other category, the Allies had a 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1 edge.
That's a pretty definitive production advantage.
k.
More OT...
I see your point about US/USSR production being unhindered by bombing, though a fair amount of US production did get torpedoed en route to Europe. Also, UK plants were getting bombed, but this didn't severely hinder production. Plus, US bombing of Japan wasn't really effective until 1944, when Gen. LeMay took over the command of B-29 squadrons and switched from high altitude carpet bombing to the more destructive low-level incendiary raids.
But I think the largest factor in the Allied production advantage was that the US and USSR were large nations, with manpower and natural resources that dwarfed the Japanese and Germans (who basically started WWII over natural resources). Germany had the industrial capacity, but Hitler didn't put Germany's civilians on a total war footing until very late in the war, too late to matter. Japan had a severe lack of resources: though the Japanese had started an atomic weapon program and had enriched uranium through the gaseous diffusion and calutron methods, the head of the program estimated that producing enough weapons-grade U235 would have taken 25% of the national electrical output and 75% of their silver reserves.
Finally, the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that aerial bombardment was not as effective as thought. For example, German factories were regularly bombed into rubble, but the machine tools inside proved to be rather robust and could be quickly repaired and moved into underground facilities.
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Actually, no. Prior to 1940, when the US began mobilizing its armed forces, we were pretty weak. Part of the reason was the Depression, which hit our industrial base hard, and partly because of isolationist sentiment.
There were three aircraft carriers in our entire Pacific fleet; the Japanese had 6 carriers in the Pearl Harbor strike force alone, with more protecting the Home Islands and raiding the Philippines and European colonies. Our standing Army was number 17 in numerical terms, behind Czechoslovakia, and a number of new recruits were being rejected because they had suffered from malnutrition growing up during the Depression. Modern aircraft were just beginning production but a large portion were being supplied to Great Britain and the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Agreement.
We were losing the Pacific War for the first six months, until the Battle of Midway. Even then, until Guadalcanal was secured (well into 1943), keeping lines-of-communication open to Australia wasn't a sure thing, much less victory in the PTO.
Atom bombs aside, the US defeated Japan and the Axis by out-producing them. During the period from 1941-45, the Japanese produced 13 aircraft carriers of all sizes. The US produced 137.
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