I live at approx 7000' in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and
very frequently spend time over 10,000'.
I've noticed that nearly everbody in our town has a cranky or dead ipod.
When a strong Sierra storm rolls through, the lowered air pressure gives
us an effective altitude of nearly 9000'. I've noticed a strong coorelation
between blizzards here and dead drives an iPods.
I spoke with a friend in Leadville, CO (12,500') and he claims they flat don't
work at his altitude. Also many reports can be found via google of people's
iPods not loving the tops of ski areas (Breckenridge goes to like 13,800').
I know most planes are pressurized... but... Would be nice if stock drives were
happy at 15,000' - there's no real way to locally increase the air pressure around
the drive, and the thinner air brings the head closer to the platters.
False. Get snow tires. The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road.
Snow tires (Bridgestone WS-50s outclass anything in existence) are far more useful than weight distribution within in the vehicle or even driver skill. I lived in Lake Tahoe, CA for 3 years. We received 1100" of snow last season, which is a moderate to good season. (skiier) Our roads are ice-covered for several months of the year.
My 2004 Dodge Grand Caravan (great car for a ski bum who camps/backpacks 150+ days a year, overpowered (3.8v6) and discreet on the road) has a disengagable traction control system. With stock tires on it, it was utterly unmanagable once the season started. Switching to the Blizzaks (tirerack.com) was an amazing change. On an iced parking lot with a dusting of snow on it I was not able to get the tail to come around at any sane speed. Drove along the Icefields Parkway in BC an hour after they opened it following a 4-day ice closure and was able to safely drive well over 100km/h.
They claim reduced preformance on dry pavement, but I also ran them up to central B.C. and back, along dry pavement at highway speeds, and felt very good about them. The only caveat is you MUST take them off once summer hits. Spring is OK, but when it started being 70degF+ and strong sun, the heat of the pavement will cause rapid wear.
I push these on all of my friends for their wives cars, and if I had kids I'd definately insist on them.
Safety: Tires, Brakes, Driver - in that order. Don't care how good your reflexes are if system innefficienes (poor grip in the caliper:tire:road chain anywhere), you're splat-o.
I'm an Electronics Engineer and I'd never trust a drive-by-wire car. Things go wrong; you have to have some sort of mechanical over-ride for a life-critical system like a car.
Good luck buying your next new car then. I have requirements that force me into a minivan and there are no new models that aren't drive by wire. It's really a thril trying to dodge potholes on forest service roads at 35-40mph WITH a 1/4sec delay on your steering input.
Having a computer between my inputs and the cars outputs scares the willies out of me...
As far as C) goes, yes, but I ask you, where would you store that much data? The Internet Archive brags about being able to use a "standard 8'x8'x20' shipping" containter to house just ONE petabyte. So maybe they grabbed a zillion bittorrent files, but hardly 200pb of data.
I don't know how big of an enclosure you'd need to house even ONE PENTABYTE of storage, but considering that it's 1000 times a TERABYTE, and I've got.. two full boxes here to hit a measley 900GB,.9 of a TB, or.0009 of a PENTABYTE.
I can't believe nobody over there is clueful enough to have corrected PB to TB.. I -might- believe 40TB. Maybe.. Probably not...
"Namesys seeks to raise the dead, and is willing to commit whatever unholy acts that requires."
Straight from the horses mouth - on their Visions of the Future page, which was directly linked from the main document. I'm sure you all read the links too, right?:)
He sure does seem to be on the defensive - maybe time to get out and get some fresh air, take the tinfoil hat off for a bit...
I do a lot of reading. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 folders on various topics. I am also a photographer. I have over 26000 digital shots from all around North America, plus scans of my analog shots. I plan my trips in excruciating detail; I have at least 10000 links to various online maps, logs, and trail descriptions.
It's neither brainless NOR fast for me to 'look in an appropriately named folder'; there are simply vastly too many. Even with the best heirarchy I could conceive, I have over 70 top level folders.
Short of dewey-decimal, heirarchial folder systems simply do not scale from the user's perspective.
I find it impossible to believe that the author of these documents is employed at either Harvard or Mass. These are incredibly competitive institutions; they would NOT bring onboard someone with that kind of spelling and grammar.
Someone want to call the Harvard Bio department and make some inquiries?
Re:As if there weren't already enough evidence...
on
Pop Up Ads in Space
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sorry, Philip K. Dick got this one decades ago (Sales Pitch, 1954). I'm always suprised at the lack of sci-fi exploration out of the 'top 5', even by slashdot readers.
Fascinating that they didn't provide an image of a properly-addressed envelope in their FAQ. Or for that matter, thumbnails of all sorts of envelopes/packages, correctly addressed.
It's sort of like a high-school educational film.. Show a badly-addressed piece of mail, put the red circle with a slash[dot] over it. Then show a smiling housewive with the same piece, correctly filled out.
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Well, I know that for all of us telecommuters in ski towns, it's the end of the world.
I ski almost daily in Lake Tahoe, California with a buddy who's theoretically logged in, doing design for a firm half way across the country. When his phone rings now, he answers it in mid-ski run, and the boss is none the wiser.
Given a service like that, I'd have to find myself a new ski buddy! Never!
I'm amazed that I haven't seen a single poster bring this up yet so...
The key to quality software; flexible, extensible, fault-tolerant, maintainable, and all of those other adjectives that 'good' software is supposed to have is very, very simple. It's called Unit Testing. It's not brain surgery. I have worked on several medium to large scale projects (500k-3.5m lines) in several languages and environments, and I've yet to bomb one hard using this methodology, despite the usual client shenanigans.
Every time I write a functional subunit, I start by writing a series of tests (based on the spec, hopefully) that define 'doneness' for that subunit. Every object in the system has it's own set of tests. The test harnesses are chained together, so I can hit a button, so to speak, and run all of the hundreds to thousands of tests at once.
Whenever I check in new code changes, I run the test suite. If a test fails that previously worked, then I broke something. This plus good OOP practices (low coupling, high cohesion) allows you to make changes on the fly without the kind of 'The Money Pit' syndrome (fix one thing, another breaks) that is described in the article.
I am certain that the system in question was NOT developed with these methods. Most development organizations that I come into contact with pay lip service to the concept, but don't want to spent the perceived extra $ up front. The thought of all those developers writing TESTS when they could be writing CODE scares the willies out of them. But it pays for itself. It really does, every single time. Don't tell your boss, and try it on your next project. This is old news - google has a ton of info on it, and there are some good but unnecessary books also.
In the dot.com glory days, we had a huge system, running several hundred transasctions per second on a geographically distributed system of clients. We made fundamental architectural changes without a hitch, switched servers live without a hitch etc, and made a zillion little changes, all live, and all without a hitch (well, other than really stupid human errors, like locking out the client upgrade system with a bad password... oops). We had zero budget, and 2.5 developers. Unit tests are the Way, and if any company that doesn't mention them in your first meeting, run like hell.
The real question for me (I log about 50,000 driving miles annually as a nature photographer) is whether I can check out a DVD from the Walmart in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and return in four days later to the Walmart in Missoula, Montana...
Listening?
Slashdot Mirror
I live at approx 7000' in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and very frequently spend time over 10,000'. I've noticed that nearly everbody in our town has a cranky or dead ipod. When a strong Sierra storm rolls through, the lowered air pressure gives us an effective altitude of nearly 9000'. I've noticed a strong coorelation between blizzards here and dead drives an iPods. I spoke with a friend in Leadville, CO (12,500') and he claims they flat don't work at his altitude. Also many reports can be found via google of people's iPods not loving the tops of ski areas (Breckenridge goes to like 13,800'). I know most planes are pressurized... but... Would be nice if stock drives were happy at 15,000' - there's no real way to locally increase the air pressure around the drive, and the thinner air brings the head closer to the platters.
Yep, with the caveat that steering inputs are also filtered through the tire:road interface, so the less control lost to slippage, the better.
False. Get snow tires. The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road.
Snow tires (Bridgestone WS-50s outclass anything in existence) are far more useful than weight distribution within in the vehicle or even driver skill. I lived in Lake Tahoe, CA for 3 years. We received 1100" of snow last season, which is a moderate to good season. (skiier) Our roads are ice-covered for several months of the year.
My 2004 Dodge Grand Caravan (great car for a ski bum who camps/backpacks 150+ days a year, overpowered (3.8v6) and discreet on the road) has a disengagable traction control system. With stock tires on it, it was utterly unmanagable once the season started. Switching to the Blizzaks (tirerack.com) was an amazing change. On an iced parking lot with a dusting of snow on it I was not able to get the tail to come around at any sane speed. Drove along the Icefields Parkway in BC an hour after they opened it following a 4-day ice closure and was able to safely drive well over 100km/h.
They claim reduced preformance on dry pavement, but I also ran them up to central B.C. and back, along dry pavement at highway speeds, and felt very good about them. The only caveat is you MUST take them off once summer hits. Spring is OK, but when it started being 70degF+ and strong sun, the heat of the pavement will
cause rapid wear.
I push these on all of my friends for their wives cars, and if I had kids I'd definately insist on them.
Safety: Tires, Brakes, Driver - in that order. Don't care how good your reflexes are if system innefficienes (poor grip in the caliper:tire:road chain anywhere), you're splat-o.
Martin Fowler, Refactoring
Literally the textbook on the subject.
I'm an Electronics Engineer and I'd never trust a drive-by-wire car. Things go wrong; you have to have some sort of mechanical over-ride for a life-critical system like a car.
Good luck buying your next new car then. I have requirements that force me into a minivan and there are no new models that aren't drive by wire. It's really a thril trying to dodge potholes on forest service roads at 35-40mph WITH a 1/4sec delay on your steering input.
Having a computer between my inputs and the cars outputs scares the willies out of me...
From lower down the list: "Consider that at current hard drive capacities, 40 PB would be 160,000 250GB drives. It wasn't 40 PB."
As far as C) goes, yes, but I ask you, where would you store that much data? The Internet Archive brags about being able to use a "standard 8'x8'x20' shipping" containter to house just ONE petabyte. So maybe they grabbed a zillion bittorrent files, but hardly 200pb of data.
Now wait a second. Look at THIS, the Internet Archive's 'PETABOX'.
They found 200 of these?? Who's got their terminology wrong.
Sheesh.. Ok, sure.. PETAbyte not PENTAbyte..
What kind of unit is that? Probably came from the same great folks who gave us decimeters...
Hey, am I the only one who saw that go by?
.. two full boxes here to hit a measley 900GB, .9 of a TB, or .0009 of a PENTABYTE.
I don't know how big of an enclosure you'd need to house even ONE PENTABYTE of storage, but considering that it's 1000 times a TERABYTE, and I've got
I can't believe nobody over there is clueful enough to have corrected PB to TB.. I -might- believe 40TB. Maybe.. Probably not...
ffp w00t
Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.
Umm... Pentabytes? Come on.. who has a friggin PENTABYTE??
"Namesys seeks to raise the dead, and is willing to commit whatever unholy acts that requires."
:)
Straight from the horses mouth - on their Visions of the Future page, which was directly linked from the main document. I'm sure you all read the links too, right?
He sure does seem to be on the defensive - maybe time to get out and get some fresh air, take the tinfoil hat off for a bit...
I do a lot of reading. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 folders on various topics. I am also a photographer. I have over 26000 digital shots from all around North America, plus scans of my analog shots. I plan my trips in excruciating detail; I have at least 10000 links to various online maps, logs, and trail descriptions.
It's neither brainless NOR fast for me to 'look in an appropriately named folder'; there are simply vastly too many. Even with the best heirarchy I could conceive, I have over 70 top level folders.
Short of dewey-decimal, heirarchial folder systems simply do not scale from the user's perspective.
Umm... 1/4 lightspeed? In atmosphere?
:)
Wouldn't you vaporize your projectile just from the frictional heating alone?
I think maybe you dropped an exponent or two
So how do they justify Lance Armstrong? That bike must cost a lot of stamps...
I find it impossible to believe that the author of these documents is employed at either Harvard or Mass. These are incredibly competitive institutions; they would NOT bring onboard someone with that kind of spelling and grammar. Someone want to call the Harvard Bio department and make some inquiries?
Sorry, Philip K. Dick got this one decades ago (Sales Pitch, 1954). I'm always suprised at the lack of sci-fi exploration out of the 'top 5', even by slashdot readers.
Fascinating that they didn't provide an image of a properly-addressed envelope in their FAQ. Or for that matter, thumbnails of all sorts of envelopes/packages, correctly addressed.
It's sort of like a high-school educational film.. Show a badly-addressed piece of mail, put the red circle with a slash[dot] over it. Then show a smiling housewive with the same piece, correctly filled out.
I can't believe I'm getting paid right now...
Mail that weighs over one pound has to be brought in person to a post office.
Well thank god for that. I'm sure that I'm safe if my mailmain only delivers 15 ounces of RDX instead of a full pound.
How could anyone make a profit at $.37 per piece when they sponsor a Tour de France team?
Why the heck is the Post Office allowed to do that anyway?
We should have to buy a special $.03 'support Lance Armstrong' stamp for that.
http://www.sinclairc5.com
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Well, I know that for all of us telecommuters in ski towns, it's the end of the world. I ski almost daily in Lake Tahoe, California with a buddy who's theoretically logged in, doing design for a firm half way across the country. When his phone rings now, he answers it in mid-ski run, and the boss is none the wiser. Given a service like that, I'd have to find myself a new ski buddy! Never!
I'm amazed that I haven't seen a single poster bring this up yet so...
The key to quality software; flexible, extensible, fault-tolerant, maintainable, and all of those other adjectives that 'good' software is supposed to have is very, very simple.
It's called Unit Testing. It's not brain surgery. I have worked on several medium to large scale projects (500k-3.5m lines) in several languages and environments, and I've yet to bomb one hard using this methodology, despite the usual client shenanigans.
Every time I write a functional subunit, I start by writing a series of tests (based on the spec, hopefully) that define 'doneness' for that subunit. Every object in the system has it's own set of tests. The test harnesses are chained together, so I can hit a button, so to speak, and run all of the hundreds to thousands of tests at once.
Whenever I check in new code changes, I run the test suite. If a test fails that previously worked, then I broke something. This plus good OOP practices (low coupling, high cohesion) allows you to make changes on the fly without the kind of 'The Money Pit' syndrome (fix one thing, another breaks) that is described in the article.
I am certain that the system in question was NOT developed with these methods. Most development organizations that I come into contact with pay lip service to the concept, but don't want to spent the perceived extra $ up front. The thought of all those developers writing TESTS when they could be writing CODE scares the willies out of them. But it pays for itself. It really does, every single time. Don't tell your boss, and try it on your next project. This is old news - google has a ton of info on it, and there are some good but unnecessary books also.
In the dot.com glory days, we had a huge system, running several hundred transasctions per second on a geographically distributed system of clients. We made fundamental architectural changes without a hitch, switched servers live without a hitch etc, and made a zillion little changes, all live, and all without a hitch (well, other than really stupid human errors, like locking out the client upgrade system with a bad password... oops). We had zero budget, and 2.5 developers. Unit tests are the Way, and if any company that doesn't mention them in your first meeting, run like hell.
The real question for me (I log about 50,000 driving miles annually as a nature photographer) is whether I can check out a DVD from the Walmart in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and return in four days later to the Walmart in Missoula, Montana... Listening?