How about making troubleshooting infinitely more difficult?
Before:
enter your outgoing mailserver as mail.provideeer.com
Result used to be "domain not found". Oh, well, obviously, you know where to look to fix that.
After:
enter your outgoing mailserver as mail.provideeer.com
Result is you'll connect, and it'll sit there. Or complain that port 25 isn't open. Who knows. One thing for sure, you won't get a "domain not found" error.
Similar amusement for people that believe "ping" is the official DNS testing tool. ping used to work... no longer.
I am with you. 11.6" is just too big. Lets get back to the 7" and 8" models please.
Today, we call those "Phones"
Not really. A phone with a 8 inch screen would be the size of my shoe... My current cellphone has an almost exactly 1 inch screen.
Re:beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
1280x1024...... is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago
Sure about that? I bought a nice CRT in the mid 90s with that res, maybe 1996 when the 1600x1200s came out and the price for the "old" 1280s started dropping. It was by no means top of the line at that time. I haven't owned a monitor below 1600x1200 since the turn of the millennium. And I've always bought new, and never spent more than $500 (always thought the $2000 monitor guys went a little overboard).
1280x1024 was first released in 1994 but I'm sure it's older than that. Wikipedia speculates it was available in the mid 80s, although I don't know if "available" means 5 figure technology demonstrators vs off the shelf at our dear, departed comp usa.
I have long wondered how it is that physicists can create ONE monstrous detector, and be completely certain that it works within spec... and within the design precisoin and accuracy.
Its not one detector, the whole point is its a zillion detectors operating in parallel, so you just calibrate them all relative to each other...
Check out the specs on just the tracker layer of the CMS detector... essentially a 76 megapixel ultra high speed movie camera. I suspect, if one channel fails, thats considered OK, they'll work around it. Or consider the calorimeter layer, which is built out of 61200 crystals, as long as 60K or so of them are working in spec, that's probably good enough for good data.
CERN does not have a majority of these under their belt. It might be a difference in how they are managed. Perhaps Fermilab has a better hierarchy, better safety rules and prioritizes work more efficiently. Maybe they actually triple check each wire before they press the On button and CERN cuts corners. This is all supposition, but reality is a harsh mistress and it is obvious they're doing something wrong.
Clearly you must me be a theoretical physicist, as opposed to a experimentalist, because that explanation was really complicated and stuff, although it did lack the required theoretical physicist collection of complicated equations.
The experimentalist physicist explanation is, as usual, much simpler, the LHC has more recent news reports about failures than the Tevatron, because the LHC was first run in late 2008, and the tevatron was completed in 1983, somewhat before the birth of a typical grad student, so all the news reports about tevatron teething problems were more than a quarter century ago, and long forgotten.
For about a month, we had a moron that was transmitting on ATC frequencies
My point here is that I do not see a reason why public transportation systems still rely on decades-old, non-encrypted technology.
How would adding encryption to your transmissions fix the RF problem of a doofus transmitting on top of the valid transmissions? The cure for a DOS attack is not making the protocol more complicated thus even easier to overload.
Also, inevitably, what happens when the JFK airport IT department loses or screws up the key, and all communication is lost? Seems that AM is much more failsafe.
You could set up your own caching DNS server and have it bypass your ISP altogether, instead drilling down the DNS from the DNS root servers.
Here is another useful thing you can do with your own server... because you probably have a large home lan, you can also set up the "caching" server to be authoritative for a tld like.home
So, now you can get to all your machines on the lan by pinging sshing httping something.home
You can also experiment with dynamic DNS updating the.home tld.
I would advise staying away from a tld like.local, that messes up the bonjour protocol or multicast DNS or whatever its called.
Printing them out and storing them (along with the legal folks) allows you to CYA because you can confirm in 10 years that the typo in your product was due to a typo pulled from JAMA a decade previous.
So does storing the original document electronically and printing out its SHA-256 value.
Don't forget to notarize the hash, either old fashioned print out, or an electronic signature, so you can prove it existed before the date of the notarization, rather than something you just made up today.
An option to minimize notary costs, to save time, is to make a document of hashes, hash it, and notarize the hash of hashes.
And to eliminate the ability to delete files or substitute in modified files, serialize your notarizations, and use the hash of the previous list of hashes, as the first hash on the new list of hashes. So, from last weeks notarized hash, you can simply step back in time thru lists of hashes, thus proving you didn't edit the old document.
It can get... complicated... but really no big deal. Unless someone gets really good at calculating hash collisions.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but everytime I read the very tired old slashdot cliche:
When you're reading very long articles/papers, sitting at your desktop and reading them isn't easy on the eyes (or the rest of your body)
I always envision a pimply slashdotter whom spent his last pennies on a thousand dollar brand new graphics card and a giant flatscreen best measured in square yards, and now can only afford to sit on a flipped over five gallon bucket with a bare incandescent bulb hanging by the wires from the ceiling reflecting off the screen like staring into a searchlight. With optional sunlight reflecting off half the screen.
I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".
My mother does volunteer work for a club she is in handling membership records. The entire thing is done in excel and they email the file back and forth to each other. Backups consist of saving the file to a different name. I've tried to get her to use an Access database, and even designed one for her, but she doesnt want to use it and the rest of the club is scared of it.
Look on the bright side, they were probably using a spreadsheet because they couldn't figure out how to use tabs -n- columns and such in their word processor. The ability to sort and delete by row is just an extra spreadsheet feature.
Several jobs ago, like in the mid 90s, I worked at a network operations center in a major financial services outsourcing company (back when outsourcing meant hiring Americans not Indians), and the customer database was a text document edited using the Lotus office suite word processor, whatever it was called. SQL INSERT and DELETE commands were emulated by coworker Ms. Patty typing in the new customer and then printing the file(s) out. SQL ORDER BY was emulated by Ms. Patty maintaining multiple text files, each sorted by hand into a different order, sort of like multiple SQL indexes. SQL SELECT was emulated by hand paging thru printouts, until you find what you needed. Our customer service database using such crude technology was often compared to our data center, which was one of the largest and most advanced in the region (think, machine room size measured in acres). Note this story was not set in 1905, but just a little over a decade ago.
The moral of the story, is that your Ma advanced from a "simple" word processor to a spreadsheet, probably because the word processor is simply too complicated to use, can't figure out how to make tables. So, if you want to get dear old mom to move from "simple" spreadsheets to a relational database, all you have to do is encourage the addition of useless features to the spreadsheet until its unusable, resulting in a forced move to a relational database.
Maybe add three (heck, four!) dimensional support instead of 2-D, maybe add help files in Klingon, etc. Eventually the spreadsheet program will be harder to use than a simple mysql prompt. Then you can have the conversation, "see ma, you need a semicolon at the end of your CREATE TABLE line.". And that, is how the non-free software world defines progress.
Back in the handwritten receipt era, they used to "demand" names and addresses for all purchases to add you to the catalog list.
I had relatives employed there, and address collection was a typical MBA tracking metric complete with graphs and goals and standards, you could be fired for not bothering, there was a minimum quota for data gathering, etc. If I recall around a quarter century ago you were expected to get the address at least 60% of the time. During christmas rush it was assumed you'd not bother, on the other hand, during the slowest football sunday it was assumed you'd gather all info since you have nothing better to do.
Crazy people usually had the intersection of two beliefs :
1) That anyone cares that you personally bought a headphone-RCA adapter cable.
2) That no one can tell a lie to a store clerk, or just plain ole make stuff up (Yes sir, I do in fact live at 1600 penn ave in DC). They never, ever, asked for picture ID.
"a" adapter? As if there has only been one model and mfgr of VGA to TV adapter since VGA became popular circa 1990?
Alternatively, I can't remember the last video card I owned that didn't have video out... Although I'm certain that cards like that do exist.
I have PCs in my living room and rec room running mythtv, and the real problem is input devices. I can get a rechargeable RF wireless mouse that looks like a space aliens marital aid with a ten foot range assuming I unplug my wireless LAN and one hour battery life (its always discharged of course) that only works well on a non patterned mouse pad on a flat surface (where?), or one time I used long extension cables to hook up real peripherals by my chair. Eventually I found a good non-rechargeable integrated infrared keyboard/trackball with USB interface on amazon and bought a bunch of them. Works great because my universal remote can "learn" the IR keyboard signals. Supposedly wii-motes can be used via bluetooth but its not exactly a qwerty layout.
Generally speaking, for RF purposes, like AM band up to high radar frequencies, at power levels above a couple hundred watts, its cheaper to use a vacuum tube than a transistor. Generally in the vaguely multi-kilowatt range, tubes cost about 50 cents per watt, transistors cost about $1 per watt.
They are quite tolerant of modest overloads.
Replacement labor costs and even device costs are simply not an issue... Consider a typical tenth megawatt class TV station, at best 25% electrical efficiency, looking at maybe 4 cents per KWH contracted electrical price, you're looking at $16000 per hour of electricity... The station engineer simply doesn't cost very much compared to the electricity.
Process for the production of ethanol from algae United States Patent 7135308
Abstract: The present invention describes a process for the production of ethanol by harvesting starch-accumulating filament-forming or colony-forming algae to form a biomass, initiating cellular decay of the biomass in a dark and anaerobic environment, fermenting the biomass in the presence of a yeast, and the isolating the ethanol produced. The present invention further relates to processing of the biomass remaining after ethanol production to recovering biodiesel starting materials and/or generation of heat and carbon dioxide via combustion.
In southwest texas, 5 KWH per sq M is wildly pessimistic by around a factor of two. In western Washington state, it is wildly optimistic by a roughly equal factor of two.
Taking a wild guess based on my vast real world experience, a marketing weasel might just possibly use the "best obtainable" number available, and maybe round up all figures, giving around "ten" KWH per day and rounding up to about 16 or so MM KWH per year.
Give us (research groups) the freedom to set things up so they work for us, but offer help in achieving that.
But most of all, don't lock it down unless you really need to.
You need at least two classes of service.
Extremely clearly written demarcation points agreed to by the highest levels in the organization. If you don't know what a demarc is, find an old (or young?) bell-head and ask them to explain the concept. On an experimental best effort basis, your department / research group / whatever does anything they want using equipment purchased and maintained by non-IT personnel. This ethernet jack and upstream is IT's responsibility and the cable you plug into it and downstream is all yours to do whatever you want.
Also provide full end-to-end service and support to other groups, with clearly written expectations for both sides.
This works pretty well in the fortune 500, not just at schools.
IT groups are usually pretty good at generic "office productivity tools" and usually pretty awful at specialized vertical integration solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure others can come up with more examples.
How about making troubleshooting infinitely more difficult?
Before:
enter your outgoing mailserver as mail.provideeer.com
Result used to be "domain not found". Oh, well, obviously, you know where to look to fix that.
After:
enter your outgoing mailserver as mail.provideeer.com
Result is you'll connect, and it'll sit there. Or complain that port 25 isn't open. Who knows. One thing for sure, you won't get a "domain not found" error.
Similar amusement for people that believe "ping" is the official DNS testing tool. ping used to work... no longer.
NASA scientist measures 7 centimeters, accidentally writes 7 inches.
I am with you. 11.6" is just too big.
Lets get back to the 7" and 8" models please.
Today, we call those "Phones"
Not really. A phone with a 8 inch screen would be the size of my shoe... My current cellphone has an almost exactly 1 inch screen.
1280x1024 ...... is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago
Sure about that? I bought a nice CRT in the mid 90s with that res, maybe 1996 when the 1600x1200s came out and the price for the "old" 1280s started dropping. It was by no means top of the line at that time. I haven't owned a monitor below 1600x1200 since the turn of the millennium. And I've always bought new, and never spent more than $500 (always thought the $2000 monitor guys went a little overboard).
According to
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/video-resolution.htm
1280x1024 was first released in 1994 but I'm sure it's older than that. Wikipedia speculates it was available in the mid 80s, although I don't know if "available" means 5 figure technology demonstrators vs off the shelf at our dear, departed comp usa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SXGA
I have long wondered how it is that physicists can create ONE monstrous detector, and be completely certain that it works within spec... and within the design precisoin and accuracy.
Its not one detector, the whole point is its a zillion detectors operating in parallel, so you just calibrate them all relative to each other...
Check out the specs on just the tracker layer of the CMS detector... essentially a 76 megapixel ultra high speed movie camera. I suspect, if one channel fails, thats considered OK, they'll work around it. Or consider the calorimeter layer, which is built out of 61200 crystals, as long as 60K or so of them are working in spec, that's probably good enough for good data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Muon_Solenoid
CERN does not have a majority of these under their belt. It might be a difference in how they are managed. Perhaps Fermilab has a better hierarchy, better safety rules and prioritizes work more efficiently. Maybe they actually triple check each wire before they press the On button and CERN cuts corners. This is all supposition, but reality is a harsh mistress and it is obvious they're doing something wrong.
Clearly you must me be a theoretical physicist, as opposed to a experimentalist, because that explanation was really complicated and stuff, although it did lack the required theoretical physicist collection of complicated equations.
The experimentalist physicist explanation is, as usual, much simpler, the LHC has more recent news reports about failures than the Tevatron, because the LHC was first run in late 2008, and the tevatron was completed in 1983, somewhat before the birth of a typical grad student, so all the news reports about tevatron teething problems were more than a quarter century ago, and long forgotten.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron
Is this really cutting-edge technology, or just a bigger circle?
From an engineering standpoint, scalability is always a cutting-edge type of problem. No different than .... IT stuff.
You'd in essence be forcing everyone in the Aviation field who uses comms for anything to upgrade their gear and not improving anything as a result.
I smell another economic stimulus plan brewing... All it needs is a catchy phrase, like "Cash 4 Crashers"
For about a month, we had a moron that was transmitting on ATC frequencies
My point here is that I do not see a reason why public transportation systems still rely on decades-old, non-encrypted technology.
How would adding encryption to your transmissions fix the RF problem of a doofus transmitting on top of the valid transmissions? The cure for a DOS attack is not making the protocol more complicated thus even easier to overload.
Also, inevitably, what happens when the JFK airport IT department loses or screws up the key, and all communication is lost? Seems that AM is much more failsafe.
You could set up your own caching DNS server and have it bypass your ISP altogether, instead drilling down the DNS from the DNS root servers.
Here is another useful thing you can do with your own server... because you probably have a large home lan, you can also set up the "caching" server to be authoritative for a tld like .home
So, now you can get to all your machines on the lan by pinging sshing httping something.home
You can also experiment with dynamic DNS updating the .home tld.
I would advise staying away from a tld like .local, that messes up the bonjour protocol or multicast DNS or whatever its called.
My question is why if this was granted in 1999 [google.com] is it not in production today?
In the boring commodity world of eyeglasses, "they" are smart enough not to fall for an obvious submarine patent, unlike the fast paced world of I.T.
Printing them out and storing them (along with the legal folks) allows you to CYA because you can confirm in 10 years that the typo in your product was due to a typo pulled from JAMA a decade previous.
So does storing the original document electronically and printing out its SHA-256 value.
Don't forget to notarize the hash, either old fashioned print out, or an electronic signature, so you can prove it existed before the date of the notarization, rather than something you just made up today.
An option to minimize notary costs, to save time, is to make a document of hashes, hash it, and notarize the hash of hashes.
And to eliminate the ability to delete files or substitute in modified files, serialize your notarizations, and use the hash of the previous list of hashes, as the first hash on the new list of hashes. So, from last weeks notarized hash, you can simply step back in time thru lists of hashes, thus proving you didn't edit the old document.
It can get... complicated... but really no big deal. Unless someone gets really good at calculating hash collisions.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but everytime I read the very tired old slashdot cliche:
When you're reading very long articles/papers, sitting at your desktop and reading them isn't easy on the eyes (or the rest of your body)
I always envision a pimply slashdotter whom spent his last pennies on a thousand dollar brand new graphics card and a giant flatscreen best measured in square yards, and now can only afford to sit on a flipped over five gallon bucket with a bare incandescent bulb hanging by the wires from the ceiling reflecting off the screen like staring into a searchlight. With optional sunlight reflecting off half the screen.
I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".
My mother does volunteer work for a club she is in handling membership records. The entire thing is done in excel and they email the file back and forth to each other. Backups consist of saving the file to a different name. I've tried to get her to use an Access database, and even designed one for her, but she doesnt want to use it and the rest of the club is scared of it.
Look on the bright side, they were probably using a spreadsheet because they couldn't figure out how to use tabs -n- columns and such in their word processor. The ability to sort and delete by row is just an extra spreadsheet feature.
Several jobs ago, like in the mid 90s, I worked at a network operations center in a major financial services outsourcing company (back when outsourcing meant hiring Americans not Indians), and the customer database was a text document edited using the Lotus office suite word processor, whatever it was called. SQL INSERT and DELETE commands were emulated by coworker Ms. Patty typing in the new customer and then printing the file(s) out. SQL ORDER BY was emulated by Ms. Patty maintaining multiple text files, each sorted by hand into a different order, sort of like multiple SQL indexes. SQL SELECT was emulated by hand paging thru printouts, until you find what you needed. Our customer service database using such crude technology was often compared to our data center, which was one of the largest and most advanced in the region (think, machine room size measured in acres). Note this story was not set in 1905, but just a little over a decade ago.
The moral of the story, is that your Ma advanced from a "simple" word processor to a spreadsheet, probably because the word processor is simply too complicated to use, can't figure out how to make tables. So, if you want to get dear old mom to move from "simple" spreadsheets to a relational database, all you have to do is encourage the addition of useless features to the spreadsheet until its unusable, resulting in a forced move to a relational database.
Maybe add three (heck, four!) dimensional support instead of 2-D, maybe add help files in Klingon, etc. Eventually the spreadsheet program will be harder to use than a simple mysql prompt. Then you can have the conversation, "see ma, you need a semicolon at the end of your CREATE TABLE line.". And that, is how the non-free software world defines progress.
Could you please elaborate on this?
Back in the handwritten receipt era, they used to "demand" names and addresses for all purchases to add you to the catalog list.
I had relatives employed there, and address collection was a typical MBA tracking metric complete with graphs and goals and standards, you could be fired for not bothering, there was a minimum quota for data gathering, etc. If I recall around a quarter century ago you were expected to get the address at least 60% of the time. During christmas rush it was assumed you'd not bother, on the other hand, during the slowest football sunday it was assumed you'd gather all info since you have nothing better to do.
Crazy people usually had the intersection of two beliefs :
1) That anyone cares that you personally bought a headphone-RCA adapter cable.
2) That no one can tell a lie to a store clerk, or just plain ole make stuff up (Yes sir, I do in fact live at 1600 penn ave in DC). They never, ever, asked for picture ID.
There is a PC-to-TV adapter
"a" adapter? As if there has only been one model and mfgr of VGA to TV adapter since VGA became popular circa 1990?
Alternatively, I can't remember the last video card I owned that didn't have video out... Although I'm certain that cards like that do exist.
I have PCs in my living room and rec room running mythtv, and the real problem is input devices. I can get a rechargeable RF wireless mouse that looks like a space aliens marital aid with a ten foot range assuming I unplug my wireless LAN and one hour battery life (its always discharged of course) that only works well on a non patterned mouse pad on a flat surface (where?), or one time I used long extension cables to hook up real peripherals by my chair. Eventually I found a good non-rechargeable integrated infrared keyboard/trackball with USB interface on amazon and bought a bunch of them. Works great because my universal remote can "learn" the IR keyboard signals. Supposedly wii-motes can be used via bluetooth but its not exactly a qwerty layout.
No need, there are lots of naturally occuring yellow foods. Some tomatos, some potatos, squash, egg yolk, corn...
Yellow snow... no, wait, scratch that off the list.
The voiceover said they couldn't give away the recipe since it would tank the ruby market. I've googled for this magic recipe, but nothing's come up.
Sounds like the kind of BS you'd see advertised in spam.
http://www.answers.com/topic/synthetic-ruby
The "ruby market" was tanked (at least the first time) in 1885.
Ordinary vacuum tubes do this.
Do "ordinary vacuum" tubes even exist any more?
http://www.rfparts.com/tubetran.html
Generally speaking, for RF purposes, like AM band up to high radar frequencies, at power levels above a couple hundred watts, its cheaper to use a vacuum tube than a transistor. Generally in the vaguely multi-kilowatt range, tubes cost about 50 cents per watt, transistors cost about $1 per watt.
They are quite tolerant of modest overloads.
Replacement labor costs and even device costs are simply not an issue... Consider a typical tenth megawatt class TV station, at best 25% electrical efficiency, looking at maybe 4 cents per KWH contracted electrical price, you're looking at $16000 per hour of electricity... The station engineer simply doesn't cost very much compared to the electricity.
Dang it! Surprise!
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7135308.html
Process for the production of ethanol from algae
United States Patent 7135308
Abstract:
The present invention describes a process for the production of ethanol by harvesting starch-accumulating filament-forming or colony-forming algae to form a biomass, initiating cellular decay of the biomass in a dark and anaerobic environment, fermenting the biomass in the presence of a yeast, and the isolating the ethanol produced. The present invention further relates to processing of the biomass remaining after ethanol production to recovering biodiesel starting materials and/or generation of heat and carbon dioxide via combustion.
suppose that it is ethanol
With respect toward biofuel production, yeasts ferment ethanol in the dark, algaes photosynthesize oil in the light.
A direct photosynthesis route to make alcohol would be really cool. The longer the beer lays in the sunlight, the stronger it becomes...
5kwh per m^2 per day? At what latitude? If that is on the high side, they are back on the theoretical impossible part of the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg
In southwest texas, 5 KWH per sq M is wildly pessimistic by around a factor of two. In western Washington state, it is wildly optimistic by a roughly equal factor of two.
Taking a wild guess based on my vast real world experience, a marketing weasel might just possibly use the "best obtainable" number available, and maybe round up all figures, giving around "ten" KWH per day and rounding up to about 16 or so MM KWH per year.
Give us (research groups) the freedom to set things up so they work for us, but offer help in achieving that.
But most of all, don't lock it down unless you really need to.
You need at least two classes of service.
Extremely clearly written demarcation points agreed to by the highest levels in the organization. If you don't know what a demarc is, find an old (or young?) bell-head and ask them to explain the concept. On an experimental best effort basis, your department / research group / whatever does anything they want using equipment purchased and maintained by non-IT personnel. This ethernet jack and upstream is IT's responsibility and the cable you plug into it and downstream is all yours to do whatever you want.
Also provide full end-to-end service and support to other groups, with clearly written expectations for both sides.
This works pretty well in the fortune 500, not just at schools.
IT groups are usually pretty good at generic "office productivity tools" and usually pretty awful at specialized vertical integration solutions.
with the end result looking like it was designed by a committee of monkeys
Get the students involved. At least the MIS-IT/CS students. That would be excellent real world experience.
They assume that anything open source will be arcane, virus-ridden, and completely impossible for the average user to understand.
So, in other words, they think the open source software experience will be exactly the same as the non-free software experience?