Indeed. Storm surge reached 25 feeet some 100 miles from New Orleans. For those of you who don't know, a 25-foot storm surge would be phenomenal for a direct-hit by pretty much any hurricane, so this was no ordinary storm. There was nothing typical about Katrina - it was one of those rare storms that no one could have guessed at. For Heaven's sake, it make Camille look tame.
To the grandparent: If you're going to say the levees failed due to poor engineering, fine, but please do not, in the process, downplay the strength of the storm that brought them down. No reasonble person expected the levees to hold at all - the storm was simply too powerful; and yet they held through the storm. Anyway, don't pretend that it was just some little category 3 hurricane wandering through the Gulf of Mexico when it was, in fact, a massive hurricane that completely covered the Gulf.
Yes, practically every project I work on at my job depends on web services. Pretty much any time we want to expose internal capabilities or locally-stored data, we do it through a web service. Currently I am on a project to build a massive data management system with a Java Webstart user-side GUI (our "users" will be able to submit data into the system). The Java GUI posts the uploaded file and metadata to the management system by calling a web service. The GUI also discovers what types of data are supported and the required metadata for each type from a web service.
No, web services are not just a myth. They have been in wide use here for the past three years or so. I spent the first three months of my job learning all about SOAP, WS-I (or whatever it is), and all that sort of thing.
Not really. Depending on how they project from spheroid to rectangle, the scale should change. The distance between parallels is constant, but the distance between meridians decreases as you move further from the equator.
I guess it is actually odd, though, because the rectangle covers the same area at all times. Interesting.
I dunno, but it must be a nightmare having to get everything to work correctly. I've recently had the (dis)pleasure of doing coordinate conversions - not only between coordinate systems (lat/lon, UTM, SPCS), but also projections (LCC, NAD27/83, WGS84) and datums (NAD27/83, WGS84), and sometimes even spheroids (GRS80, Clarke66, WGS84).
They do it so well and so cleanly, I can't help but wonder if maybe some of the major GIS companies are starting to worry. Could ESRI be the next target? I know we've been investigating using Google Maps and Google Earth for our GIS applications, and that's quite a handful of contracts ESRI could lose...
As for the purple line floating over the highway, that's an active research area. The military is pumping a lot of dollars into augmented reality. I've gotten to see a few shots of some of their demo tech and it's pretty cool stuff. Now they just have to make it work correctly all the time and give proper depth queing... heheh
I dunno how often their maps are updated, but it is interesting to note that in certain areas, their map data is at least as old as their satellite data. A new bypass highway opened around my piddly hometown not too long ago. To no surprise, the completed highway doesn't show up on the satellite (though most of it is present). The map, however, shows none of it.
It's amazing how accurate the roads they do show are, though - most online mapping tools (MapQuest, MSN) aren't very close, especially on the local college campus. Google, however, has everything nailed. Well... at least until the college decided to rip up all the streets, but that's another story. I wonder where they get their data...
Wrong. The SI prefix for 10^3 is kilo, with a symbol of lowercase 'k'. It's been that way for quite a long time. The letters aren't capitalized until 10^6, mega, M.
Just to clarify to anyone reading this, you are incorrect on terminology (not exactly the right word?). The lowercase 'k' is the SI prefix for kilo. The capital 'K' is for degrees kelvin. I tend to note bits with a little 'b' and bytes with a big 'B', as in:
300kbps ~= 38kBps
Usually, I replace the 'p' with a '/' when dealing with bytes, too (i.e., "38kB/s"). By no means a standard notation, but it works for me. Though it isn't widely used, I've also recently taken to using the IEC's units. For example:
300kbps ~= 38KiBps (300 kilobits per second ~= 38 kibibytes per second)
Why? Because in a technical context, it's certainly much clearer. If I say I am transferring 1 kilobyte of data, does that mean 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes? It's ambiguous, and in design issues, it can be a critical difference.
Also, the baud rate is the signal transition rate, not the bit rate. Maybe in modems the baud rate and bit rate were usually the same, but it isn't necessarily the case. It is possible (and common) to transmit more than one bit per transition.:)
The three sources of authentication were put to me like this, in order of increasing reliability:
1) Something you know - least reliable because someone else can guess what you know, or if you leave it written on a note they can simply read it
2) Something you have - less reliable because it can be stolen, but more reliable because an attacker probably can't fabricate a duplicate
3) Something you are - most reliable because it can't be easily duplicated and it is very unlikely to be stolen
Sure, it was brought up that someone could cut off your finger - that's why "Something You Are" is not a perfect authentication scheme. Anyway, I agree with your point. My ID card is combined with a PIN to get me into the building, my thumb gets me into my computer. In essence, it requires all three pieces to access my computer at work.:P
I abandoned Acrobat Reader after it decided it didn't like my PC anymore, for whatever reason. Rather than reinstall it, I dumped it in favor of Foxit PDF Reader (clicky). It's much smaller, loads faster, and is almost as good as Acrobat Reader. Lacks text search, which can be a pain in the ass, but generally a good replacement.
No, not really. While most of you might not be surprised that Mississippi State University didn't make the list, I am surprised that it wasn't even considered. They looked at two schools in the state: University of Mississippi, which is smaller and not exactly well-known for being a technical or engineering school, and Millsaps College, a very small private Christian school which isn't much known for anything except, I think, business.
Mississippi State University has an excellent engineering college and its Computer Science department (particularly its Center for Computer Security Research, headed by Dr. Ray Vaughn) is very well-known. MSU was one of the original NSA Centers of Academic Excellence and had the first accredited Software Engineering degree program in the United States. We also play host to an Engineering Research Center which, until recently I believe, was co-funded by NSF. "The" supercomputer at MSU (and I say "the" because there are actually several, though the others are smaller and parts of active research projects) is ranked 158 in the Top 500 (incidentally, my internship this summer was for the owner of #47, as well as a few others in the top 100).
Whether or not MSU would have made the list, I don't know, but I am very surprised that it wasn't even evaluated. A great study, indeed.
I don't claim to be a physics expert, so forgive me if my question is stupid, but I am curious. From your example, the lead weight in the center of the sheet causes a depression in the sheet and the lighter objects move towards it because of the depression. If gravity fits the same description, then we're left without an explanation of why celestial bodies move towards each other. For example, a large planet (let's use Earth, though it isn't really large) and a moon sit in space. The planet causes a depression. Why would the moon move into the depression? Something must be pulling it down - the simple existence of a depression would not cause the moon to move (that is, if you reject gravity as the pull between bodies).
As I said, I'm no physics expert. Your post just raised a question in my mind, and I figured I might as well ask it.:)
DoD 5220.22-M, 1995. This is probably outdated by now, but the standard at that time was to overwrite all addressable locations with a single character to clear the disk, or overwrite each address with a character, its compliment, and a random character to "sanitize" the disk.
Note that these procedures only apply(ed) to every-day harddrives, not anything containing sensitive information. For the drives with classified information, 5220.22-M gives you a list of things you can do: "Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or smelt." There is no acceptable method of sanitizing a disk with classified information on it.
And for the poster below who said that overwriting the data seven times would guarantee that the data was gone... not true, though the data is almost certainly out of reach for the average Joe. NSA is by no means the average Joe, of course, but they have successfully recovered data from a drive that has been overwritten at least a hundred times.
Exactly! Along the same lines, you pay for your phone service. In a roundabout way, you pay for telemarketers calling you. With junkmail, the sender covers all costs. I like to make the same argument about spam: they have no right to send it to me if I don't want it because I'M PAYING FOR IT.
Yay!:) You rock. The bit about the labels getting the majority of profits on album sales - the drummer for an up-and-coming band told me exactly that same thing: since they assume the risk and put up the money, he saw no problem having them take back a nice chunk of it.
Another way of equating "sharing" and "stealing" is that it steals a source of pride for musicians. Another drummer (I seem to know mostly drummers... weird, that) for a major, nation band said their latest record would probably be triple-platinum by now if not for downloaders. It's still double-platinum, but he said it would be so much cooler to have a triple-platinum album. Much like military men love getting medals or schoolkids love gold stars, musicians love getting platinum records - it's something to show to people and say, "Look what we did!"
I'm worried about what they're worried about. What they enjoy most is putting on a good show so the fans have a good time. Neither of these bands, as far as I can gather, is of the mindset of "making music for the sake of music." They're all about making music to entertain people. Good lighting makes the show more entertaining. At any rate, I see your point, but I'm not sure you see mine.:) I'm not worried about groupies or lighting or even music. I'm worried about the musicians, s'all.:)
I'm aware, but bands acting on their own have a hard time touring for financial reasons. I'd be willing to bet that a label-backed act has better lighting and sound systems and can book bigger venues than indie bands. The two bands I'm closest to, 3 Doors Down and Bad Charism, represent (to me) both ends of the spectrum. 3DD has label-backing and works with the best sound and lighting. They can book just about any venue they want, almost anywhere in the world. Bad Charism, on the other hand, has to use house-lighting (though they did just buy their own lighting rig) and sometimes they even fall back on the house sound (though they prefer to run their own sound, primarily because they've invested enough time and money into it to be able to produce better-than-house sound). But they don't travel much - they can't afford to. The gigs they get don't pay enough to justify travelling very far, so they don't. The gigs don't pay because Bad Charism isn't a very well known band. They would be, if they could reach the audiences (because everyone I've talked to who likes the genre of music thinks they're great), but without label-backing, they can't.
And that's really my whole point.:) I'd love to see the labels vanish and the bands be able to make it on their own, but I don't think very many of them would still be able to hit the big venues around the world. They would be very limited in where they could play. Ah, well...:)
I'd just assert here that the fear among many musicians is that when (not if, because it will happen) the recording industry flops, there won't be any money for touring, which the musicians I know love best. Sure, they can still put on local shows, but it's expensive travelling all over the world, and the labels currently foot that bill. The labels also provide "mainstream exposure" because there are so few major labels and they are each fairly selective (though lately it would appear they're selecting the worst they can find). In a case where there are tons of independent labels, there becomes a flood of different things available - all well and good for those of us who listen, but the musicians are far less likely to be distinguished and will have a hard time finding money to tour nationally or internationally.
I don't like the RIAA or the record labels, either. Neither do most of my musician friends. But they are all worried about what happens when the labels fail, and I can understand their concerns. There's no clear-cut path for what happens next, and they're musicians, after all, not businessmen. They just want to entertain. Whether the current system works or not, it does allow them to do that, and as long as they're still able to put on national and international tours, they're not likely to turn tail from the labels.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Storm surge reached 25 feeet some 100 miles from New Orleans. For those of you who don't know, a 25-foot storm surge would be phenomenal for a direct-hit by pretty much any hurricane, so this was no ordinary storm. There was nothing typical about Katrina - it was one of those rare storms that no one could have guessed at. For Heaven's sake, it make Camille look tame.
To the grandparent: If you're going to say the levees failed due to poor engineering, fine, but please do not, in the process, downplay the strength of the storm that brought them down. No reasonble person expected the levees to hold at all - the storm was simply too powerful; and yet they held through the storm. Anyway, don't pretend that it was just some little category 3 hurricane wandering through the Gulf of Mexico when it was, in fact, a massive hurricane that completely covered the Gulf.
The NOLA levees were designed to handle category 3 and below, not category 4.
Yes, practically every project I work on at my job depends on web services. Pretty much any time we want to expose internal capabilities or locally-stored data, we do it through a web service. Currently I am on a project to build a massive data management system with a Java Webstart user-side GUI (our "users" will be able to submit data into the system). The Java GUI posts the uploaded file and metadata to the management system by calling a web service. The GUI also discovers what types of data are supported and the required metadata for each type from a web service.
No, web services are not just a myth. They have been in wide use here for the past three years or so. I spent the first three months of my job learning all about SOAP, WS-I (or whatever it is), and all that sort of thing.
In no particular order [...]
:)
Alphabetical. That's particular!
Not really. Depending on how they project from spheroid to rectangle, the scale should change. The distance between parallels is constant, but the distance between meridians decreases as you move further from the equator.
I guess it is actually odd, though, because the rectangle covers the same area at all times. Interesting.
I dunno, but it must be a nightmare having to get everything to work correctly. I've recently had the (dis)pleasure of doing coordinate conversions - not only between coordinate systems (lat/lon, UTM, SPCS), but also projections (LCC, NAD27/83, WGS84) and datums (NAD27/83, WGS84), and sometimes even spheroids (GRS80, Clarke66, WGS84).
They do it so well and so cleanly, I can't help but wonder if maybe some of the major GIS companies are starting to worry. Could ESRI be the next target? I know we've been investigating using Google Maps and Google Earth for our GIS applications, and that's quite a handful of contracts ESRI could lose...
As for the purple line floating over the highway, that's an active research area. The military is pumping a lot of dollars into augmented reality. I've gotten to see a few shots of some of their demo tech and it's pretty cool stuff. Now they just have to make it work correctly all the time and give proper depth queing... heheh
Someday, though. Someday!
I dunno how often their maps are updated, but it is interesting to note that in certain areas, their map data is at least as old as their satellite data. A new bypass highway opened around my piddly hometown not too long ago. To no surprise, the completed highway doesn't show up on the satellite (though most of it is present). The map, however, shows none of it.
It's amazing how accurate the roads they do show are, though - most online mapping tools (MapQuest, MSN) aren't very close, especially on the local college campus. Google, however, has everything nailed. Well... at least until the college decided to rip up all the streets, but that's another story. I wonder where they get their data...
They added a scale since the last time I checked the maps, too! Halleluah!
But this is Slashdot. You're supposed to be mean and bitter. :)
Well shoot. Didn't mean it to sound like I was being snobbish. :P Your point is certainly correct, though. :)
Wrong. The SI prefix for 10^3 is kilo, with a symbol of lowercase 'k'. It's been that way for quite a long time. The letters aren't capitalized until 10^6, mega, M.
Just to clarify to anyone reading this, you are incorrect on terminology (not exactly the right word?). The lowercase 'k' is the SI prefix for kilo. The capital 'K' is for degrees kelvin. I tend to note bits with a little 'b' and bytes with a big 'B', as in:
:)
:P
300kbps ~= 38kBps
Usually, I replace the 'p' with a '/' when dealing with bytes, too (i.e., "38kB/s"). By no means a standard notation, but it works for me. Though it isn't widely used, I've also recently taken to using the IEC's units. For example:
300kbps ~= 38KiBps
(300 kilobits per second ~= 38 kibibytes per second)
Why? Because in a technical context, it's certainly much clearer. If I say I am transferring 1 kilobyte of data, does that mean 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes? It's ambiguous, and in design issues, it can be a critical difference.
Also, the baud rate is the signal transition rate, not the bit rate. Maybe in modems the baud rate and bit rate were usually the same, but it isn't necessarily the case. It is possible (and common) to transmit more than one bit per transition.
Anyway... that's all.
The three sources of authentication were put to me like this, in order of increasing reliability:
:P
1) Something you know - least reliable because someone else can guess what you know, or if you leave it written on a note they can simply read it
2) Something you have - less reliable because it can be stolen, but more reliable because an attacker probably can't fabricate a duplicate
3) Something you are - most reliable because it can't be easily duplicated and it is very unlikely to be stolen
Sure, it was brought up that someone could cut off your finger - that's why "Something You Are" is not a perfect authentication scheme. Anyway, I agree with your point. My ID card is combined with a PIN to get me into the building, my thumb gets me into my computer. In essence, it requires all three pieces to access my computer at work.
I abandoned Acrobat Reader after it decided it didn't like my PC anymore, for whatever reason. Rather than reinstall it, I dumped it in favor of Foxit PDF Reader (clicky). It's much smaller, loads faster, and is almost as good as Acrobat Reader. Lacks text search, which can be a pain in the ass, but generally a good replacement.
Wow, tax freedom day in Canada doesn't come until June or July? Geez. Tax freedom day in the US will be in April next year.
No, not really. While most of you might not be surprised that Mississippi State University didn't make the list, I am surprised that it wasn't even considered. They looked at two schools in the state: University of Mississippi, which is smaller and not exactly well-known for being a technical or engineering school, and Millsaps College, a very small private Christian school which isn't much known for anything except, I think, business.
Mississippi State University has an excellent engineering college and its Computer Science department (particularly its Center for Computer Security Research, headed by Dr. Ray Vaughn) is very well-known. MSU was one of the original NSA Centers of Academic Excellence and had the first accredited Software Engineering degree program in the United States. We also play host to an Engineering Research Center which, until recently I believe, was co-funded by NSF. "The" supercomputer at MSU (and I say "the" because there are actually several, though the others are smaller and parts of active research projects) is ranked 158 in the Top 500 (incidentally, my internship this summer was for the owner of #47, as well as a few others in the top 100).
Whether or not MSU would have made the list, I don't know, but I am very surprised that it wasn't even evaluated. A great study, indeed.
I don't claim to be a physics expert, so forgive me if my question is stupid, but I am curious. From your example, the lead weight in the center of the sheet causes a depression in the sheet and the lighter objects move towards it because of the depression. If gravity fits the same description, then we're left without an explanation of why celestial bodies move towards each other. For example, a large planet (let's use Earth, though it isn't really large) and a moon sit in space. The planet causes a depression. Why would the moon move into the depression? Something must be pulling it down - the simple existence of a depression would not cause the moon to move (that is, if you reject gravity as the pull between bodies).
:)
As I said, I'm no physics expert. Your post just raised a question in my mind, and I figured I might as well ask it.
Eh, the background music is from Planet of the Apes, the more recent one. Danny Elfman.
DoD 5220.22-M, 1995. This is probably outdated by now, but the standard at that time was to overwrite all addressable locations with a single character to clear the disk, or overwrite each address with a character, its compliment, and a random character to "sanitize" the disk.
Note that these procedures only apply(ed) to every-day harddrives, not anything containing sensitive information. For the drives with classified information, 5220.22-M gives you a list of things you can do: "Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or smelt." There is no acceptable method of sanitizing a disk with classified information on it.
And for the poster below who said that overwriting the data seven times would guarantee that the data was gone... not true, though the data is almost certainly out of reach for the average Joe. NSA is by no means the average Joe, of course, but they have successfully recovered data from a drive that has been overwritten at least a hundred times.
2-cents
Exactly! Along the same lines, you pay for your phone service. In a roundabout way, you pay for telemarketers calling you. With junkmail, the sender covers all costs. I like to make the same argument about spam: they have no right to send it to me if I don't want it because I'M PAYING FOR IT.
Yay! :) You rock. The bit about the labels getting the majority of profits on album sales - the drummer for an up-and-coming band told me exactly that same thing: since they assume the risk and put up the money, he saw no problem having them take back a nice chunk of it.
Another way of equating "sharing" and "stealing" is that it steals a source of pride for musicians. Another drummer (I seem to know mostly drummers... weird, that) for a major, nation band said their latest record would probably be triple-platinum by now if not for downloaders. It's still double-platinum, but he said it would be so much cooler to have a triple-platinum album. Much like military men love getting medals or schoolkids love gold stars, musicians love getting platinum records - it's something to show to people and say, "Look what we did!"
I'm worried about what they're worried about. What they enjoy most is putting on a good show so the fans have a good time. Neither of these bands, as far as I can gather, is of the mindset of "making music for the sake of music." They're all about making music to entertain people. Good lighting makes the show more entertaining. At any rate, I see your point, but I'm not sure you see mine. :) I'm not worried about groupies or lighting or even music. I'm worried about the musicians, s'all. :)
I'm aware, but bands acting on their own have a hard time touring for financial reasons. I'd be willing to bet that a label-backed act has better lighting and sound systems and can book bigger venues than indie bands. The two bands I'm closest to, 3 Doors Down and Bad Charism, represent (to me) both ends of the spectrum. 3DD has label-backing and works with the best sound and lighting. They can book just about any venue they want, almost anywhere in the world. Bad Charism, on the other hand, has to use house-lighting (though they did just buy their own lighting rig) and sometimes they even fall back on the house sound (though they prefer to run their own sound, primarily because they've invested enough time and money into it to be able to produce better-than-house sound). But they don't travel much - they can't afford to. The gigs they get don't pay enough to justify travelling very far, so they don't. The gigs don't pay because Bad Charism isn't a very well known band. They would be, if they could reach the audiences (because everyone I've talked to who likes the genre of music thinks they're great), but without label-backing, they can't.
:) I'd love to see the labels vanish and the bands be able to make it on their own, but I don't think very many of them would still be able to hit the big venues around the world. They would be very limited in where they could play. Ah, well... :)
And that's really my whole point.
I'd just assert here that the fear among many musicians is that when (not if, because it will happen) the recording industry flops, there won't be any money for touring, which the musicians I know love best. Sure, they can still put on local shows, but it's expensive travelling all over the world, and the labels currently foot that bill. The labels also provide "mainstream exposure" because there are so few major labels and they are each fairly selective (though lately it would appear they're selecting the worst they can find). In a case where there are tons of independent labels, there becomes a flood of different things available - all well and good for those of us who listen, but the musicians are far less likely to be distinguished and will have a hard time finding money to tour nationally or internationally.
I don't like the RIAA or the record labels, either. Neither do most of my musician friends. But they are all worried about what happens when the labels fail, and I can understand their concerns. There's no clear-cut path for what happens next, and they're musicians, after all, not businessmen. They just want to entertain. Whether the current system works or not, it does allow them to do that, and as long as they're still able to put on national and international tours, they're not likely to turn tail from the labels.