How convinenet it must be for you that you can't make any specific comments.:)
So, you're telling me that a GPS guided missile has no other navigational sensors on board? None what so ever?
Google is our friend: Here is a general description of JDAM's guidance mode from FAS:
Once released, the bomb's INS/GPS will take over and guide the bomb to its target regardless of weather. Guidance is accomplished via the tight coupling of an accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) with a 3-axis Inertial Navigation System (INS). The Guidance Control Unit (GCU) provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation (13 meter (m) Circular Error Probable (CEP)) and INS-only modes of operation (30 m CEP). INS only is defined as GPS quality hand-off from the aircraft with GPS unavailable to the weapon (e.g. GPS jammed). In the event JDAM is unable to receive GPS signals after launch for any reason, jamming or otherwise, the INS will provide rate and acceleration measurements which the weapon software will develop into a navigation solution. The Guidance Control Unit provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation and INS-only modes of operation.
So. it turnes out that even JDAM, the "ultra-cheap, GPS smart bomb guidance system" is, primarily, inertial guided weapon, with GPS data only used to correct it's trajectory!
Go ahead, give me an example of one navigational system out there that uses GPS exclusively, from A to Z, without any initial data, without any reference points - just positional data from GPS.
Direction can be derived from multiple positions. It's easy. And thats kind of the point of having multiple satellites. You get your position lock. You move. You get your new position lock. Your difference is a vector. Guess what... that vector points... in a direction!
Suuuuure, it looks real well on paper or in a math class. But in real life NOBODY relies on GPS for directional readings. There is always some kind of other source: every sailboat has a compass, every hiker tries to maintain some direction relative to his surroundings, airplanes use radio beacons AND a compass, etc...
Oh, and BTW: typical serious marine GPS doesn't even have directional reading, because it wouldn't be reliable enough.
This does not bode well for our sources of travel...We have all depended on the compase on everything and with the movement it could cause catostrophic damages for plains, boats, and any other form of travle that depends widly on a compus.
Compasses always were imprecise because local variations in magnetic field can be quite conciderable. For example, every marine map has a special compass correction scale. Where I live the correction is about 15 degrees. The truth is that compass was never the exclusive naviogational tool - it is rather one of the more important ones, the one that can be used to maintain direction. But navigation based on compass alone is not possible - no matter how precise your compass is.
BTW, to all the "Who needs compass, there is GPS now!" people: Get a life! GPS is NOT a replacement for compass. it is a great tool for detection of POSITION, but it is completely useless for DIRECTION. GPS is always used in conjunction with a compass or some other direction finding tool.
i remember seeing this sort of thing done to power russian torpedos (and it failing badly)
You got it all wrong. Russian torpedoes use hydrogen peroxide for power. When metal is submerged in it it releases oxygen, and its' pressure is used to power the torpedo. You are correct that this kind of torpedo failed catastrophically once (the Kursk disaster). However besides this terrible accident these torpedoes have a very good record.
You are gleefully neglecting the one thing this thing was designed for.. audio! Very high quality audio components are NOT cheap.
I completely agree - hi quality audio components are not cheap. However, from the picture on Hifidelio's site, one can clearly see that this thing is very poorly desinged. Here, check for yourself:
Hey man, what better way to celebrate SysAdmin day than to be relieved of a "fscking job":)
Take it easy, there are plenty of fscking jobs out there.:)
Have you people read the actual patent description? It doesn't talk about patenting smileys, but only the method of creating custom smileys and addigning bitmaps to them. Basically, they are trying to patent a universal bitmap smiley distribution protocol.
Interesting that they focus on the non-lethal aspect. I'd suspect the military would also be interested on whether you could turn up the power a bit, and you have a lethal ray gun that can hit lots of people at once.
You people just crack me up! You think the military doesn't have the means to "hit many people at once" right now? Much more cheaper, effective, and morally depressing (for the enemy) means than some SciFi raygun?
Ever heard of mortars? a single 120mm mortar hitting a crowd could probably take out tens of people. And one could fire them at a rate of 5-10 per minute with a single mortar
Ever heard of machine guns?
Ever heard of FAE bombs? What about FAE tipped RPGs (Russians use these out the wazu)?
Ever heard of flachette rounds? Very, very effective!
In short, take off your tinfoil hat, and realize one thing: if the military wanted to commit a massacre, they could do it without any technical difficulty. And they certainly don't need to design a futuristic microwave ray-gun so that they have a "massacre weapon".
The other year, there were hundreds if not thousands of protests against the war in Iraq going on around Europe. Many had record turnout. Almost no coverage of them in Europe after the first few, no coverage in the US.
I agree, media should have paid more attention to anti-war protests last year. These protests were very special: well timed, well organized and very well funded. If our media had any integrity at all we would have seen some very interesting investigations into the sources of that funding and the organizations that coordinated these protests.
Of course, speaking of "media integrity" is laughable nowadays (if it ever wasn't). All one has to do to see the face of modern journalism is to pass by a journalism faculty of any university, or pick up a copy of a student newspaper - 'nuff said!
After all, journalism is the second most ancient profession - the most ancient one being prostitution.:)
When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config.
if your xorg.conf is properly configured in the first place, then plugging in a USB mouse is a seamless process.
Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers.
Not anymore. I haven't had any trouble with copy paste for more than a year now. It's done.
The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life.
The productivity apps are waaay more advanced than MS Office. The only thing that I find lacking in OpenOffice is the spellchecker, and yes, it's a serious problem. One which is solved in StarOffice, which can be had for peanuts:)
Printer support is horrendous.
Again, not anymore. Most printers work very well, actually. In many cases, better than under Windows. Yes, there are a few that don't work, but they are mostly not worth the effort anyways (they just plain suck).
Thunderbird can't touch Outlook
I agree with you that Thunderbird is not the best email client out there - I'd take Sylpheed-claws over it any time. However, Outlook is just plain rediculous! Do you know that, for example, Outlook routinely cleans out the email's header when forwarding or even moving a meesage between IMAP folders? Yes, it's true! I had the displeasure of learning that little tidbit of information when I was setting up byasian filtering at the company I work for. An email deposited onto IMAP from Outlook lacks all the useful email headers and is completely useless for spam analysis! Basically, there is no way of getting an email out of Outlook in it's original form.
Another horror story about Outlook: You know what happens when a user has more than 2000 (or is it 3000?) messages in his POP mailbox? The first 2000 (or 3000?) messages are downloaded, and the rest are discarded for ever! Apparently, the idiot programmer that wrote this particular part of Outlook has used a fixed size array. MS never acknoledged that as a bug, and never fixed it!
Second, these are people living depressing lives in a country that's pretty screwed up. From their perspective, every westerner is super rich (makes 100 times more than they do).
Yes, an average Nigerian lives a pretty depressing life. For example, he has no access to a personal computer, the Internet, telephone or even electricity, for that matter.
But these scumbags are not average Nigerians, you see - they DO have access to all that. They are the Nigerian elite, so to speak.
Sure, they did more than just speed.. but I don't think it's right for people to be judging what punishment is appropriate for individuals without knowing the circumstances of the crime.
When the elected authorities do nothing to stop these criminals, it is only natural for the people to take the law in their own hands.
Who wants to bet that Michael and James have a room full of stinky unshowered nerds to thank for stumbling onto this innovation?
I would, but for a different reason. Notice how the article sais "Only three full time employees" and "Working on a PhD in chemistry" ?
Well, I bet they have a lot of graduate students assisting in the research.:)
I think that it would much more beneficial to go after the software vendors that unleash buggy software on everybody. All of these virii and worms are a result of substandard design of the software.
So, as the precedent setting act, I propose castrating all of Microsoft's executive board, starting with Bill Gates. That will show them!
... or they can be shipped off to someplace like Guantanamo Bay where you have exactly zero rights and are very deliberately dehumanized.
And again with the Horrible GULag of Guantanamo Bay. Tell me, how many US citizens can you name that have been shipped there?
And, in general, can't you people give it a rest already? Guantanamo Bay is a POW camp, plain and simple. POW camps are not pretty, but they are necessary in times of war.
It always amazes me how much more interesting and captivating a truthful and detailed account is, than any kind of "sexed up" hollywwod adaptation of it!
I'm not an end user you retard. I am a system admin, and have had the [dis]pleasure of dealing with Microsoft tech support on multiple occasions.
Good for you. I am also a sysadmin, who, a couple of years back, had the displeasure of workging in MS support. Can you imagine for a minute that somebody like me can have alittle MORE knowledge about how things work there than you? Or are you a universal know-it-all?
The time I reported a bug was when I was testing a beta product of theirs. I got a personal response from one of their managers, and one of their hired software testers.
So, you were testing beta software. This is a completely different case, and it doesn't apply to my experience. I didn't work in beta support and have no idea about the way it works.
I was talking about the support for RELEASED software, not beta.
Just out of curiosity, how much did you pay for your experience?
You shouldn't assume so much.
And you should take your head out of your ass, learn to communicate properly and, most of all, learn to behave towards your peers in a respectful and professional manner.
I got a personal response from the two Microsft employees the last time I submitted a bug report to Microsoft.
Of course you did. That's because what you submitted WAS NOT A BUG REPORT. You submitted a support request, and got responce from MS Support. In M$ world, end users certainly don't have authority to generate any bug reports.:)
Now, let me tell you how MS Support works. There are 3 levels of support: First level (the normal run of the mill telephone drones), Second level (so called "mentors") and Third level (that's where the actual M$ employees are) . First two levels ARE NOT M$ EMPLOYEES - they are outsourced. When a normal Joe wants support, he deals only with the first two levels - third level only trains and supervises (and drinks - my supervisor was a genuine alcoholic:) )
The support drones of both levels have acces to certain internal M$ tools, one of which is a bug report system. That system is there only to mislead the drones into believing that the bugs they find (and they do find - lots of them) get looked at by the programmers. Once upon a time, my suprviser slipped, and told me the bug report system is irrelevant, and the reports are discarded. And believe me, it fit the picture perfectly:)
Basically, if a user calls with a problem that is caused by a bug, he is either provided with a workaround, or gets his 35$ back (each support case is 35$). The only way a bug gets fixed is if it's discovered by a corporate ("pro") support client (we're talking millions of dollars here). Bug fixes generated for these clients also get distributed to the ordinary Joes.
I hope that explains the elightened M$ support phylosophy.
Having worked in MS Support (MS Word), I can tell you that you are 100% correct. Microsoft goes out of it's way to ignore ANY kind of input from users. THey even have a fake bug submitting system, which is directed to/dev/null at all times. They are de facto conning their own support agents.
All the bug fixes they put out are a result of corporate support packages (we're talking millions here). An ordinary Joe that calles MS tech support has ZERO influence.
Most of normal businesses, though, can't do it that way. We can't brutalize the clients, and give them ultimatums about which format they are allowed to use. Nor can we play BOFH with the users too much. Some of them are executive types that rotate through.pst files (yes, they like Outlook) once every couple of months. Imagine what they would do if we told them "You're not allowed to use Word anymore!".:)
I'm an ex-IDF soldier, and I'm telling you this: This story is COMPLETE CRAP. There is no basis to it. If there were, half of Israeli soldiers would be the ones frowned upon. D&D is extremely popular in Israel (at least it was 8 years ago), and nobody makes a secret out of it - coz there is no need.
Slashdot Mirror
How convinenet it must be for you that you can't make any specific comments. :)
So, you're telling me that a GPS guided missile has no other navigational sensors on board? None what so ever?
Google is our friend: Here is a general description of JDAM's guidance mode from FAS:
Once released, the bomb's INS/GPS will take over and guide the bomb to its target regardless of weather. Guidance is accomplished via the tight coupling of an accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) with a 3-axis Inertial Navigation System (INS). The Guidance Control Unit (GCU) provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation (13 meter (m) Circular Error Probable (CEP)) and INS-only modes of operation (30 m CEP). INS only is defined as GPS quality hand-off from the aircraft with GPS unavailable to the weapon (e.g. GPS jammed). In the event JDAM is unable to receive GPS signals after launch for any reason, jamming or otherwise, the INS will provide rate and acceleration measurements which the weapon software will develop into a navigation solution. The Guidance Control Unit provides accurate guidance in both GPS-aided INS modes of operation and INS-only modes of operation.
So. it turnes out that even JDAM, the "ultra-cheap, GPS smart bomb guidance system" is, primarily, inertial guided weapon, with GPS data only used to correct it's trajectory!
Go ahead, give me an example of one navigational system out there that uses GPS exclusively, from A to Z, without any initial data, without any reference points - just positional data from GPS.
Well, as previously working for an airborne survey company, I'd have to disagree completely. We used GPS to fly pre-planned survey lines.
So, you want to tell me that your airplane had NO OTHER instruments on board besides GPS?
Direction can be derived from multiple positions. It's easy. And thats kind of the point of having multiple satellites. You get your position lock. You move. You get your new position lock. Your difference is a vector. Guess what... that vector points... in a direction!
Suuuuure, it looks real well on paper or in a math class. But in real life NOBODY relies on GPS for directional readings. There is always some kind of other source: every sailboat has a compass, every hiker tries to maintain some direction relative to his surroundings, airplanes use radio beacons AND a compass, etc...
Oh, and BTW: typical serious marine GPS doesn't even have directional reading, because it wouldn't be reliable enough.
This does not bode well for our sources of travel...We have all depended on the compase on everything and with the movement it could cause catostrophic damages for plains, boats, and any other form of travle that depends widly on a compus.
Compasses always were imprecise because local variations in magnetic field can be quite conciderable. For example, every marine map has a special compass correction scale. Where I live the correction is about 15 degrees. The truth is that compass was never the exclusive naviogational tool - it is rather one of the more important ones, the one that can be used to maintain direction. But navigation based on compass alone is not possible - no matter how precise your compass is.
BTW, to all the "Who needs compass, there is GPS now!" people: Get a life! GPS is NOT a replacement for compass. it is a great tool for detection of POSITION, but it is completely useless for DIRECTION. GPS is always used in conjunction with a compass or some other direction finding tool.
When will it end? :(
i remember seeing this sort of thing done to power russian torpedos (and it failing badly)
You got it all wrong. Russian torpedoes use hydrogen peroxide for power. When metal is submerged in it it releases oxygen, and its' pressure is used to power the torpedo. You are correct that this kind of torpedo failed catastrophically once (the Kursk disaster). However besides this terrible accident these torpedoes have a very good record.
You are gleefully neglecting the one thing this thing was designed for.. audio! Very high quality audio components are NOT cheap.
h ifidelio/hifidelio_inside_bl.jpg
I completely agree - hi quality audio components are not cheap. However, from the picture on Hifidelio's site, one can clearly see that this thing is very poorly desinged. Here, check for yourself:
http://www.hermstedt.com/downlds/images/products/
This is not what I'd call a hi quality design.
Hey man, what better way to celebrate SysAdmin day than to be relieved of a "fscking job" :) :)
Take it easy, there are plenty of fscking jobs out there.
Have you people read the actual patent description? It doesn't talk about patenting smileys, but only the method of creating custom smileys and addigning bitmaps to them. Basically, they are trying to patent a universal bitmap smiley distribution protocol.
Interesting that they focus on the non-lethal aspect. I'd suspect the military would also be interested on whether you could turn up the power a bit, and you have a lethal ray gun that can hit lots of people at once.
You people just crack me up! You think the military doesn't have the means to "hit many people at once" right now? Much more cheaper, effective, and morally depressing (for the enemy) means than some SciFi raygun?
Ever heard of mortars? a single 120mm mortar hitting a crowd could probably take out tens of people. And one could fire them at a rate of 5-10 per minute with a single mortar
Ever heard of machine guns? Ever heard of FAE bombs? What about FAE tipped RPGs (Russians use these out the wazu)?
Ever heard of flachette rounds? Very, very effective!
In short, take off your tinfoil hat, and realize one thing: if the military wanted to commit a massacre, they could do it without any technical difficulty. And they certainly don't need to design a futuristic microwave ray-gun so that they have a "massacre weapon".
The other year, there were hundreds if not thousands of protests against the war in Iraq going on around Europe. Many had record turnout. Almost no coverage of them in Europe after the first few, no coverage in the US.
:)
I agree, media should have paid more attention to anti-war protests last year. These protests were very special: well timed, well organized and very well funded. If our media had any integrity at all we would have seen some very interesting investigations into the sources of that funding and the organizations that coordinated these protests.
Of course, speaking of "media integrity" is laughable nowadays (if it ever wasn't). All one has to do to see the face of modern journalism is to pass by a journalism faculty of any university, or pick up a copy of a student newspaper - 'nuff said!
After all, journalism is the second most ancient profession - the most ancient one being prostitution.
When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config.
:)
if your xorg.conf is properly configured in the first place, then plugging in a USB mouse is a seamless process.
Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers.
Not anymore. I haven't had any trouble with copy paste for more than a year now. It's done.
The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life.
The productivity apps are waaay more advanced than MS Office. The only thing that I find lacking in OpenOffice is the spellchecker, and yes, it's a serious problem. One which is solved in StarOffice, which can be had for peanuts
Printer support is horrendous.
Again, not anymore. Most printers work very well, actually. In many cases, better than under Windows. Yes, there are a few that don't work, but they are mostly not worth the effort anyways (they just plain suck).
Thunderbird can't touch Outlook
I agree with you that Thunderbird is not the best email client out there - I'd take Sylpheed-claws over it any time. However, Outlook is just plain rediculous! Do you know that, for example, Outlook routinely cleans out the email's header when forwarding or even moving a meesage between IMAP folders? Yes, it's true! I had the displeasure of learning that little tidbit of information when I was setting up byasian filtering at the company I work for. An email deposited onto IMAP from Outlook lacks all the useful email headers and is completely useless for spam analysis! Basically, there is no way of getting an email out of Outlook in it's original form.
Another horror story about Outlook: You know what happens when a user has more than 2000 (or is it 3000?) messages in his POP mailbox? The first 2000 (or 3000?) messages are downloaded, and the rest are discarded for ever! Apparently, the idiot programmer that wrote this particular part of Outlook has used a fixed size array. MS never acknoledged that as a bug, and never fixed it!
Second, these are people living depressing lives in a country that's pretty screwed up. From their perspective, every westerner is super rich (makes 100 times more than they do).
.. but I don't think it's right for people to be judging what punishment is appropriate for individuals without knowing the circumstances of the crime.
Yes, an average Nigerian lives a pretty depressing life. For example, he has no access to a personal computer, the Internet, telephone or even electricity, for that matter.
But these scumbags are not average Nigerians, you see - they DO have access to all that. They are the Nigerian elite, so to speak.
Sure, they did more than just speed
When the elected authorities do nothing to stop these criminals, it is only natural for the people to take the law in their own hands.
Who wants to bet that Michael and James have a room full of stinky unshowered nerds to thank for stumbling onto this innovation?
:)
I would, but for a different reason. Notice how the article sais "Only three full time employees" and "Working on a PhD in chemistry" ?
Well, I bet they have a lot of graduate students assisting in the research.
I think that it would much more beneficial to go after the software vendors that unleash buggy software on everybody. All of these virii and worms are a result of substandard design of the software.
So, as the precedent setting act, I propose castrating all of Microsoft's executive board, starting with Bill Gates. That will show them!
And again with the Horrible GULag of Guantanamo Bay.
Tell me, how many US citizens can you name that have been shipped there?
And, in general, can't you people give it a rest already? Guantanamo Bay is a POW camp, plain and simple. POW camps are not pretty, but they are necessary in times of war.
The evil penguin did it!
Mua-ha-ha-ha-haaaa!
These wookies are uncut and uncensored. You've never seen wookies like this before!
You probably meant to say they are cut and uncensored. I mean, can you seen anything beneath all that fur?
It always amazes me how much more interesting and captivating a truthful and detailed account is, than any kind of "sexed up" hollywwod adaptation of it!
My GOD, you are an ass.
And you, sir, just have very bad manners.
I'm not an end user you retard. I am a system admin, and have had the [dis]pleasure of dealing with Microsoft tech support on multiple occasions.
Good for you. I am also a sysadmin, who, a couple of years back, had the displeasure of workging in MS support. Can you imagine for a minute that somebody like me can have alittle MORE knowledge about how things work there than you? Or are you a universal know-it-all?
The time I reported a bug was when I was testing a beta product of theirs. I got a personal response from one of their managers, and one of their hired software testers.
So, you were testing beta software. This is a completely different case, and it doesn't apply to my experience. I didn't work in beta support and have no idea about the way it works.
I was talking about the support for RELEASED software, not beta.
Just out of curiosity, how much did you pay for your experience?
You shouldn't assume so much.
And you should take your head out of your ass, learn to communicate properly and, most of all, learn to behave towards your peers in a respectful and professional manner.
I got a personal response from the two Microsft employees the last time I submitted a bug report to Microsoft. Of course you did. That's because what you submitted WAS NOT A BUG REPORT. You submitted a support request, and got responce from MS Support. In M$ world, end users certainly don't have authority to generate any bug reports. :) :) ) :)
Now, let me tell you how MS Support works. There are 3 levels of support: First level (the normal run of the mill telephone drones), Second level (so called "mentors") and Third level (that's where the actual M$ employees are) . First two levels ARE NOT M$ EMPLOYEES - they are outsourced. When a normal Joe wants support, he deals only with the first two levels - third level only trains and supervises (and drinks - my supervisor was a genuine alcoholic
The support drones of both levels have acces to certain internal M$ tools, one of which is a bug report system. That system is there only to mislead the drones into believing that the bugs they find (and they do find - lots of them) get looked at by the programmers. Once upon a time, my suprviser slipped, and told me the bug report system is irrelevant, and the reports are discarded. And believe me, it fit the picture perfectly
Basically, if a user calls with a problem that is caused by a bug, he is either provided with a workaround, or gets his 35$ back (each support case is 35$). The only way a bug gets fixed is if it's discovered by a corporate ("pro") support client (we're talking millions of dollars here). Bug fixes generated for these clients also get distributed to the ordinary Joes.
I hope that explains the elightened M$ support phylosophy.
Having worked in MS Support (MS Word), I can tell you that you are 100% correct. Microsoft goes out of it's way to ignore ANY kind of input from users. THey even have a fake bug submitting system, which is directed to /dev/null at all times. They are de facto conning their own support agents.
All the bug fixes they put out are a result of corporate support packages (we're talking millions here). An ordinary Joe that calles MS tech support has ZERO influence.
Tommorrow's Headline: Googlebot declares self world ruler, buys Graceland
And I, for one, welcome our new GoogleBot overlord.....
Ah, the joy of working for the government!
.pst files (yes, they like Outlook) once every couple of months. Imagine what they would do if we told them "You're not allowed to use Word anymore!". :)
Most of normal businesses, though, can't do it that way. We can't brutalize the clients, and give them ultimatums about which format they are allowed to use. Nor can we play BOFH with the users too much. Some of them are executive types that rotate through
I'm an ex-IDF soldier, and I'm telling you this: This story is COMPLETE CRAP. There is no basis to it. If there were, half of Israeli soldiers would be the ones frowned upon. D&D is extremely popular in Israel (at least it was 8 years ago), and nobody makes a secret out of it - coz there is no need.