I'm not convinced that web-developers need a knowledge of HTTP.
My experience on that is mixed. If your site consists solely of nothing but static pages, then no, it's unlikely the intricacies of HTTP will ever come into play.
OTOH, if your site involves any sort of application with multiple trips between the server and the browser and you need to support multiple browsers, or you're running across a web farm (with or without load balancing), or your clients are using proxy servers,.... (Or any of a dozen other ORs I've overlooked).
If any of those conditions is true, then yes, sooner or later, you will need to deal with HTTP directly. Maybe something as simple as just viewing form data in a protocol sniffer, maybe something as complex as dealing with multiple vendors using slightly different interpretations of the protocol's minutae. Not every developer on the project will need to understand the protocol, but you'll be glad to have at least one person who does.
isn't the judge overdoing it a bit by making the spammer pay 250,000?
According to the article, Washington State law would have allowed the guy who filed the suit to receive 29 million dollars. He only asked for a quarter million. (Presumably because it was "enough.")
assuming he wasn't stupid enough to brag with verifiable details, how to prove it?
According to the Washington Post's latest update, it looks like, yeah, he's that dumb.
The person the FBI arrested is responsible for the Blaster.B variant and one of his changes was to have the worm register itself at his personal website so he could keep track of the infected machines. Seems to me that writing a worm that "phones home" directly to your own web site ought to qualify you for some sort of special "Idiot of the Year" award. (I suppose that's less expensive than renting a billboard.)
They should have been prepared for every foreseeable contingency. Sometimes there is no way to fix this. Why was there no MMU or airlock? These should be REQUIRED equipment....
Why no MMU? I don't know. Possibly because the mission profile didn't call for one and the cost of boosting what appears to be "extra" equipment into orbit is just too high. But I don't know.
Why no airlock? That's a bit easier. The adapter for docking to ISS is only useful for docking with ISS and this wasn't an ISS mission. Because Columbia was the first shuttle built, it had a lot of extra sensory equipment and just generally weighed more than the rest of the fleet. As a result, they couldn't get it into the same orbit as ISS along with enough other cargo to make the trip worthwhile. So instead, Columbia mainly did Hubble and other low orbit missions.
So now we're in a cycle of trying remove even more risk from something that's inherently risky. I wonder at what point the general public will decide the cost of reducing risk exceeds the value of reduction and will let flights resume.
If there is a perceived life-and-death situation there are a lot of makeshift solutions people would try that you wouldn't consider acceptable under ordinary circumstances...
Ah. There's the rub. We have the advantage of looking back on the accident and saying, "Well, they should have done such and such and they'd be OK." Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know there's a gaping big hole where the foam hit. They only know two things. (A) A piece of foam hit the shuttle during the ascent. (B) In the past, pieces of foam have hit the shuttle without doing significant damage. Knowing what they knew then, there was no perception of a life-and-death threat.
You know why we lost the Columbia? Because NASA regulations didn't allow anyone to go out and look at the damned wing in orbit without specific orders.
They didn't have the necessary maneuvering equipment (a "rocket pack" if you will) for an EVA that would allow them to look under the wing. An astronaut going outside without one would have no way of moving around to look at the shuttle's lower surfaces. An EVA under those circumstances would have been useless.
Another "obvious" options that wouldn't have worked would have been to go to the ISS for a lookover. The problem there are that ISS is in a different orbit and they didn't have enough fuel to make that orbital change. And even if they did, they'd still have had no way to get aboard the ISS - Columbia had no docking equipment and the lack of EVA equipment would have left them with no way of making the transit. (Jumping between ship and station is nicely dramatic for the movies, but not a terribly good idea in real life.)
The one option they could have used would have been to ask the Military to redirect one of their telescopes and take a look. Sadly, at the time, nobody seems to have thought the foam impact was likely to have caused significant damage.
what was special about Columbia that made it their pick for retrieving the Hubble?
Re-reading the article, it appears I was in error regarding Columbia specifically being required. However, the Columbia accident does make future Hubble servicing missions unlikely .:-(
So they would prefer to spend the money to take it down, then send up another... but if they don't spend money to take it down they can't afford another one?
As I understand it, the problem right now is that without a propulsion system, they have no control over where Hubble will come down. And in its current orbit, it will come down eventually. If they decided to let it come down, putting a propulsion system on it so that it's a controlled descent is just a matter of taking responsibility and making sure it doesn't land on someone's house.
BTW, the original plan was to bring it down in the shuttle and put it in the Smithsonian. But I believe that was dependent on having Columbia around.
A fourth option I recall hearing was to attach a propulsion system and boost Hubble into a higher orbit.
If they instead go with option 2 and use a propulsion system to control the descent, I hope this time they at least try to hit the Taco Bell target.:-)
In general*, I'd say Americans don't become too concerned with change until it becomes necessary for THEM.
For that matter, I can't help wondering how many of the countries who've already adopted it would have done so without a pressing need. For example, one post or another mentioned that India has nearly a billion people but only 2 million IP addresses. If 70% of the world's IP address space had been allocated to India, would we instead be talking about "India Shrugs Off World's IP Shortage"?
Much of the pressure exerted on governments and big business to adopt "Free" Software seems to hinge on the idea that you don't have to pay anyone in order to obtain the software. (The mistaken belief that zero acquisition cost equals no cost at all.)
Do you have any thoughts on what we, the Geek community, can do to educate the public about "Cost of Ownership" without driving them away from Free Software or unduly confusing them about what we mean by "Free" in the first place?
Steering and brakes do have mechanical reversion modes for the moment, but looking at the BMW iDrive one has to wonder how much longer this will be the case.
I'm not familar with the vehicle in question, though "drive by wire" sounds like s an interesting idea. It's probably a bit overkill though for the environment where most cars are operated. Maybe if we ever move in the direction of "smart cars" that drive themselves..... But for the cars on the road today (even my hybrid electric), the worst consequence of RFI is the engine runs less efficiently or perhaps stops altogether. As another poster commented, "Cars don't fall out of the sky" (not unless you're foolish enough to try imitating some of the commercials).
The primary difference is that the automakers have been dealing with EMI for a long time, since both the ignition systems and the early car radios generated scads of EMI
I'm not sure how it works with a jet turbine, but aircraft started off with internal combustion engines - spark plugs, distributors, etc. Even a jet is still going to use electricity to get the turbine started spinning and once the engine's running, it's used to generate electricity for all the in-flight systems. That's not a clean RF environment either, but it's something the engineers are able to plan for and shield against. OTOH, a GHz wireless LAN running between a half dozen laptop computers in somewhat random rows.... That would have been a bit more difficult to anticipate more than a few years ago.
Given the amount of electronics involved used in the automotive industry these days wouldn't the impact of cellphones have shown up here earlier?
Bear in mind that the critical systems in an automobile (steering and brakes) are primarily mechanical. There may be some motors involved, but nothing that's particularly vulnerable to RF interference. Even if your consumer electronic devices could cut off the power to the brakes and steering, you could still operate them mechanically.
OTOH, a modern aircraft is entirely "fly by wire," meaning that when the pilot moves the control, the movement generates an electrical signal which is interpreted by a computer. The computer is then responsible for triggering the motors, etc that move the control surfaces. There's no mechanical linkage between the cockpit controls and the aircraft control surfaces, so if the flight systems are disabled by RFI, there's no way for the pilot to override them.
It's vastly over-simplified, but the point is that RF inteference to an automobile isn't nearly as troublesome as with an aircraft.
being able to drop a spread sheet into a document or a presintation is great
Absolutely. But suppose you wanted to install just the word processor and were forced to install the spreadsheet at the same time? Perhaps Vendor A's word processor was the best one around, but their spreadsheet didn't have the advanced functionality you need. Vendor B on the other hand has a spreadsheet program that does everything you want.
Assuming Vendor B's spreadsheet can be dropped into Vendor A's word processor, would you want Vendor A to force you to install their spreadsheet too?
All too often these days, we get forced to install integrated tools we don't want. The last time I installed a Netscape browser, the only option was to install the full suite of tools, including email, news, AIM and WinAmp. So when I see that Mozilla is breaking out the diffent tools into separate efforts and the final products will be installed separately, I find myself wondering if perhaps the software industry in general is also going to move that way.
1.4 will the last version of Mozilla released as a suite, after that the switch to separate browser, e-mail etc. applications will take place."
So instead of monolithic systems that try to do everything, this sounds like a swing back in the direction of discrete programs that only do one thing. (And hopefully do it well.)
I very much like the idea of being able to install my web browser of choice without being forced to simultaneously fill my hard drive with "extras" that don't quite do what I want, but can't be removed either.
And browsers and office suites are just two places I'd like to see a little less of the "Swiss army knife" approach. (Sure, it's cool, but do you really need a telephone that can take pictures, program your VCR and mow the grass?)
Don't get me wrong, I agree that interoperability is a Good Thing. I just don't want to be forced to take on the clutter of tools I won't use.
This sounds like the old bit about when you're given a hammer, suddenly everything looks like a nail.
In this case, it sounds like somebody got a GPS for their birthday and now they're looking for problems to apply it to. Along comes the "gas tax by any other name" and well gee, using a GPS would be the perfect solution.
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My experience on that is mixed. If your site consists solely of nothing but static pages, then no, it's unlikely the intricacies of HTTP will ever come into play.
OTOH, if your site involves any sort of application with multiple trips between the server and the browser and you need to support multiple browsers, or you're running across a web farm (with or without load balancing), or your clients are using proxy servers,.... (Or any of a dozen other ORs I've overlooked).
If any of those conditions is true, then yes, sooner or later, you will need to deal with HTTP directly. Maybe something as simple as just viewing form data in a protocol sniffer, maybe something as complex as dealing with multiple vendors using slightly different interpretations of the protocol's minutae. Not every developer on the project will need to understand the protocol, but you'll be glad to have at least one person who does.
As they say, just my two cents worth.
According to the article, Washington State law would have allowed the guy who filed the suit to receive 29 million dollars. He only asked for a quarter million. (Presumably because it was "enough.")
According to the Washington Post's latest update, it looks like, yeah, he's that dumb.
The person the FBI arrested is responsible for the Blaster.B variant and one of his changes was to have the worm register itself at his personal website so he could keep track of the infected machines. Seems to me that writing a worm that "phones home" directly to your own web site ought to qualify you for some sort of special "Idiot of the Year" award. (I suppose that's less expensive than renting a billboard.)
Why no MMU? I don't know. Possibly because the mission profile didn't call for one and the cost of boosting what appears to be "extra" equipment into orbit is just too high. But I don't know.
Why no airlock? That's a bit easier. The adapter for docking to ISS is only useful for docking with ISS and this wasn't an ISS mission. Because Columbia was the first shuttle built, it had a lot of extra sensory equipment and just generally weighed more than the rest of the fleet. As a result, they couldn't get it into the same orbit as ISS along with enough other cargo to make the trip worthwhile. So instead, Columbia mainly did Hubble and other low orbit missions.
So now we're in a cycle of trying remove even more risk from something that's inherently risky. I wonder at what point the general public will decide the cost of reducing risk exceeds the value of reduction and will let flights resume.
Ah. There's the rub. We have the advantage of looking back on the accident and saying, "Well, they should have done such and such and they'd be OK." Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know there's a gaping big hole where the foam hit. They only know two things. (A) A piece of foam hit the shuttle during the ascent. (B) In the past, pieces of foam have hit the shuttle without doing significant damage. Knowing what they knew then, there was no perception of a life-and-death threat.
They didn't have the necessary maneuvering equipment (a "rocket pack" if you will) for an EVA that would allow them to look under the wing. An astronaut going outside without one would have no way of moving around to look at the shuttle's lower surfaces. An EVA under those circumstances would have been useless.
Another "obvious" options that wouldn't have worked would have been to go to the ISS for a lookover. The problem there are that ISS is in a different orbit and they didn't have enough fuel to make that orbital change. And even if they did, they'd still have had no way to get aboard the ISS - Columbia had no docking equipment and the lack of EVA equipment would have left them with no way of making the transit. (Jumping between ship and station is nicely dramatic for the movies, but not a terribly good idea in real life.)
The one option they could have used would have been to ask the Military to redirect one of their telescopes and take a look. Sadly, at the time, nobody seems to have thought the foam impact was likely to have caused significant damage.
Re-reading the article, it appears I was in error regarding Columbia specifically being required. However, the Columbia accident does make future Hubble servicing missions unlikely . :-(
Here's a link to a white paper (PDF format) prepared by the Space Telescope Science Institute's Scientific Staff with their input to NASA on why they feel Hubble's mission should be extended.
As I understand it, the problem right now is that without a propulsion system, they have no control over where Hubble will come down. And in its current orbit, it will come down eventually. If they decided to let it come down, putting a propulsion system on it so that it's a controlled descent is just a matter of taking responsibility and making sure it doesn't land on someone's house.
BTW, the original plan was to bring it down in the shuttle and put it in the Smithsonian. But I believe that was dependent on having Columbia around.
Much more about Hubble is available at the Space Telescope Science Institute's web site.
A fourth option I recall hearing was to attach a propulsion system and boost Hubble into a higher orbit.
If they instead go with option 2 and use a propulsion system to control the descent, I hope this time they at least try to hit the Taco Bell target. :-)
For that matter, I can't help wondering how many of the countries who've already adopted it would have done so without a pressing need. For example, one post or another mentioned that India has nearly a billion people but only 2 million IP addresses. If 70% of the world's IP address space had been allocated to India, would we instead be talking about "India Shrugs Off World's IP Shortage"?
Mr Perens,
Much of the pressure exerted on governments and big business to adopt "Free" Software seems to hinge on the idea that you don't have to pay anyone in order to obtain the software. (The mistaken belief that zero acquisition cost equals no cost at all.)
Do you have any thoughts on what we, the Geek community, can do to educate the public about "Cost of Ownership" without driving them away from Free Software or unduly confusing them about what we mean by "Free" in the first place?
I'm not familar with the vehicle in question, though "drive by wire" sounds like s an interesting idea. It's probably a bit overkill though for the environment where most cars are operated. Maybe if we ever move in the direction of "smart cars" that drive themselves..... But for the cars on the road today (even my hybrid electric), the worst consequence of RFI is the engine runs less efficiently or perhaps stops altogether. As another poster commented, "Cars don't fall out of the sky" (not unless you're foolish enough to try imitating some of the commercials).
The primary difference is that the automakers have been dealing with EMI for a long time, since both the ignition systems and the early car radios generated scads of EMI
I'm not sure how it works with a jet turbine, but aircraft started off with internal combustion engines - spark plugs, distributors, etc. Even a jet is still going to use electricity to get the turbine started spinning and once the engine's running, it's used to generate electricity for all the in-flight systems. That's not a clean RF environment either, but it's something the engineers are able to plan for and shield against. OTOH, a GHz wireless LAN running between a half dozen laptop computers in somewhat random rows.... That would have been a bit more difficult to anticipate more than a few years ago.
Bear in mind that the critical systems in an automobile (steering and brakes) are primarily mechanical. There may be some motors involved, but nothing that's particularly vulnerable to RF interference. Even if your consumer electronic devices could cut off the power to the brakes and steering, you could still operate them mechanically.
OTOH, a modern aircraft is entirely "fly by wire," meaning that when the pilot moves the control, the movement generates an electrical signal which is interpreted by a computer. The computer is then responsible for triggering the motors, etc that move the control surfaces. There's no mechanical linkage between the cockpit controls and the aircraft control surfaces, so if the flight systems are disabled by RFI, there's no way for the pilot to override them.
It's vastly over-simplified, but the point is that RF inteference to an automobile isn't nearly as troublesome as with an aircraft.
Absolutely. But suppose you wanted to install just the word processor and were forced to install the spreadsheet at the same time? Perhaps Vendor A's word processor was the best one around, but their spreadsheet didn't have the advanced functionality you need. Vendor B on the other hand has a spreadsheet program that does everything you want.
Assuming Vendor B's spreadsheet can be dropped into Vendor A's word processor, would you want Vendor A to force you to install their spreadsheet too?
All too often these days, we get forced to install integrated tools we don't want. The last time I installed a Netscape browser, the only option was to install the full suite of tools, including email, news, AIM and WinAmp. So when I see that Mozilla is breaking out the diffent tools into separate efforts and the final products will be installed separately, I find myself wondering if perhaps the software industry in general is also going to move that way.
So instead of monolithic systems that try to do everything, this sounds like a swing back in the direction of discrete programs that only do one thing. (And hopefully do it well.)
I very much like the idea of being able to install my web browser of choice without being forced to simultaneously fill my hard drive with "extras" that don't quite do what I want, but can't be removed either. And browsers and office suites are just two places I'd like to see a little less of the "Swiss army knife" approach. (Sure, it's cool, but do you really need a telephone that can take pictures, program your VCR and mow the grass?)
Don't get me wrong, I agree that interoperability is a Good Thing. I just don't want to be forced to take on the clutter of tools I won't use.
In this case, it sounds like somebody got a GPS for their birthday and now they're looking for problems to apply it to. Along comes the "gas tax by any other name" and well gee, using a GPS would be the perfect solution.
In a related story, Amazon.Com has filed for a preliminary injunction, claiming SCO's IP claim infringes Amazon's own supernova patent.