I don't think space is a true vacume. It is just considered one in relation to earths atmosphere. Anyways how do solar sails work? I think with the differences in gravitiy there might be enough friction material in space for this to work to some degree.
Space ships don't fly with "lift". There's barely any gravity to lift from even taking into account the miniscule amount of gas in space. In fact, the design of the Enterprise was chosen by Roddenberry precisely because it *wasn't* aerodynamic (as a respose to all the space shows and books that depicted space ships as being such). A mile-wide cube would have also sufficed (*ahem*).
Also, a solar sail would look nothing like the Enterprise. It would look like, er, a sail. A BIG one at that; bigger than the aforementioned mile-wide cube.
I've been uneasy about using their service despite the "convenience" it would offer me in the online world. The horror stories keep piling up, and I don't see an end to it.
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.
The 90 day mission is over... consider it the cost of doing business with Mars.
No seriously, if we consider the rover to be above the mission it was sent to do, then it will fail at the mission it was sent to do. If the crater looks awesome, then by all means send her in!
You are hereby forbidden watching any more recent science fiction movies whose initials are "The Time Machine". You must do this for the sake of all that is holy and precious.
For a typical tech support call center in the US, the estimated cost is anywhere between 20 dollars (the "wham bam, thank you ma'am" calls) and hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for issues that actually take research and manpower to solve.
Off-topic comment: places like India *are* cheaper in regards to total cost-per-call. It's not nearly as cheap as everyone makes it out to be though, since "hidden" costs like having to build a telephone network in a third-world country from scratch are sometimes comveniently left out of the PowerPoint presentation during the cost-analysis meetings.;^)
Back on-topic again: I don't know why the "center of gravity" thing is so important to Steve Ballmer. Truth be told, Microsoft is no better at being a center for Windows than IBM is for Unix (including Linux).
Something like this happened to me once. It was a comical chain of events, and admittedly the most embarrassing moment of my early career in things Unix-related.
I was charged with upgrading a kernel, remotely, over the weekend, at a customer site. I did so, and I even remembered to ask first if there was anything special I should consider before going through with the task. No, just use the old configuration file, upgrade and let her rip.
Ok, while I was kinda nervous about doing this, I felt balls-ey enough to do it anyways. I took the proper precautions. I reconfigured lilo to boot off the copied off old kernel by typing in "emergency" at the lilo prompt. Worse case scenario, I could call in, ask the local operator to walk over to the machine, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, type "emergency" at the promt, and all would be well. Remember the words "worst case scenario".
It happened. All went well during compilation, and I went ahead and hit "shutdown -r now" at the root prompt over my ssh connection. The connection was subsequently reset by peer. Ok, I expected that. I'll go grab a beer and wait for the ping to start responding again.
I waited, waited... um, okay it's still not responding over the internet. Okay, where's that number... um, where did I put that number?
You can see where this goes from here.
Two hours later, I had no way of reaching the operator. The number I had in hand disappeared somewhere, and I had no idea where it went. To this day, I have no idea where I put that little slip of paper. Did it get folded into the infinite nooks that existed in my old, torn up wallet? Did it go to the same place where half of a good number of pairs of socks have disappeared to over the years? Where, where, where, where, where?
Fortunately, all ended well. They had our number at least, and I apologized, gave them the emergency procedure, and everything was working again. Hooray for the forces of good!
To this day, my heart still skips a beat whenever I reboot a server remotely.
------
P.S. as it turned out I wasn't told that the kernel module for the network card being used wasn't officially supported by the official Linux kernel at the time, and that needed to be downloaded separately and recompiled along with the new kernel. It did boot successfully. It just did so without network support. D'oh!
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas.
Because it was a scientifically rich target. Besides, Opportunity would have spent that first half of its mission looking for a decent target with what happened to be in front of the rover when it landed in that mimi-crater. Besides, what is the hurry. In order to understand the stuff on the plain well, it pays to investigate the crater so that we have data to compare (control and variable in experimental contexts).
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time"...
They have done experiments on this in the past... it's challenging to do this. I would have said the team should have at least warmed up a couple of weeks on the new schedule.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings.
It's not like day-to-day operations are as demanding as they were. Practice makes perfect, and now they don't need as many people to run the rovers as they used to.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings...
So go to this web site. It's got daily updates with streaming video. So I have no idea what you're talking about there. At the very least you can take a look at the raw images there being downloaded from Spirit and Opportunity. It's easy to "make your own Mars images" with Photoshop or the GIMP with these pictures.:^)
You see, I have experience in escaping the IP Voltron Giant Robot. In its attempt to destroy the American Way(TM), I stepped in and saved the world from destruction from an anti-libertarian evil force bent on world domination.
Ya know, up until I saw this I was against blanket tort reform (ya know, the price of overreaction and such).
Screw it. I'm overreacting.
However, some little rational side of me asks this question: Do patent laws really have this much teeth? Some evidence I've been seeing lately implies it may not...
Bad context. It seems like you're referencing some kind of "round-robin" configuration, which isn't the standard. Round-robin is usually handled below the hostname-resolution level these days (though I definitely remember that that was the preferred methods not too long ago), so this example basically highlights an obsolete method for load balancing.
Of course, these days, with virtual clusters and the like, such hostname resolution "trickery" is not only unnecessary, but *ugly* as well.
I had to deal with this issue a lot while working as a system administrator at the last company I worked at.
I don't know about other domain name servers (like Microsoft's offerings, for instance), but I know in BIND, it's not only necessary to set up the forward resolution of a hostname, for instance:
www.slashdot.org => 66.35.250.151
It's also necessary to explicitly set this up too:
66.35.250.151 => www.slashdot.org
The reason it's necessary to define the reverse hostname resolution is because a hostname may resolve to the same IP address as several, or even hundreds of other hostnames. Rob Malda could have www.shashdot.org, my.slashdot.org, woohoo.slashdot.org all to the same IP address. But the IP address can only reverse-resolve to one hostname by definition. So, you define both the forward lookups and reverse lookups explicitly so that your company network can run smoothly without anyone knoiwing the major hack you just pulled to *get* the thing running.:^)
Sometimes, though, even seasoned admins forget to put in the reverse-lookup rules in there as a matter of oversight. For this reason you see a lot of automated scripts at ISP's that handle hostname maintanance for you.
And, unfortunately, they didn't have this set up at my last job.
(story, boss wants a new server set up, I have to make a phone call to set up the new IP address and hostname to our system adminsitrators at the data center)
Me: "Can you get hostname blah.blah.blah pointing to 10.0.0.123?" Other Guy: "Sure! Will be going in a few hours or so" Me: "No problem"
Three hours later...
Me: "Um, I wanted the reverse-lookup tables set up, too." Other Guy: "What? Why do you need reverse lookup tables?" Me: "Because half the network applications ever written since the inception of the internet require that be done *every time*. Just like the last 7 times I asked you to do this."
I kinda agree... between this guy, SCO, Microsoft, and everyone else these days, it seems like childish behavior in the courtroom is the order of the day.
Of course, sometimes I wonder if it's always been like this. The internet I think is bringing things into the sunlight that are normally hidden in darkness....
Maybe this publicity is having a positive effect. Few of the grown-ups I know approve of childish behavior, so stories on people like this ought to show the public their true faces: adults acting like spoiled rotten kids.
> Also, I'm on the page now where you can see a city, but it's so QUIET that people wat to get out ASAP after being there a few minutes. I totally want to go see this!
Can you say, "giant paintball game"?
For the love of all that is good and holy, man! There are some subjects never meant to be broached. Like paintball in an abandoned radioactive town.
The potential for evil is purely delicious. Horrible! I meant to say horrible!
Wow... the first web cartoon to ever cause me to spontaneously grow three new limbs.
My parents were mystified as to where those guys came from when they saw the Quizno's commerials... me being the regular FARK guy I am these days of course I had the explanation for them in full.
"Yeah the guy who did those animals really is a weird guy."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think space is a true vacume. It is just considered one in relation to earths atmosphere. Anyways how do solar sails work? I think with the differences in gravitiy there might be enough friction material in space for this to work to some degree.
Space ships don't fly with "lift". There's barely any gravity to lift from even taking into account the miniscule amount of gas in space. In fact, the design of the Enterprise was chosen by Roddenberry precisely because it *wasn't* aerodynamic (as a respose to all the space shows and books that depicted space ships as being such). A mile-wide cube would have also sufficed (*ahem*).
Also, a solar sail would look nothing like the Enterprise. It would look like, er, a sail. A BIG one at that; bigger than the aforementioned mile-wide cube.
Fortunately I avoided that whole fiasco by simply not signing up to begin with.
And somehow, I managed to survive to this day. Go figure.
I've been uneasy about using their service despite the "convenience" it would offer me in the online world. The horror stories keep piling up, and I don't see an end to it.
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
Ya know, I have doubts to this story, since A) I've never heard of it, and B) it looks like a bad attempt at humor. "Insightful", my posterior.
Gee, I've never seen a web page get TICKED OFF at me for blocking pop-ups.
:^)
Well, ticked-offedness is a two-way street.
I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.
The 90 day mission is over... consider it the cost of doing business with Mars.
No seriously, if we consider the rover to be above the mission it was sent to do, then it will fail at the mission it was sent to do. If the crater looks awesome, then by all means send her in!
You are hereby forbidden watching any more recent science fiction movies whose initials are "The Time Machine". You must do this for the sake of all that is holy and precious.
No, I mean it.
Ha.
If you don't want to run by my rules, don't use my intellectual property. It's that simple. :^)
For a typical tech support call center in the US, the estimated cost is anywhere between 20 dollars (the "wham bam, thank you ma'am" calls) and hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for issues that actually take research and manpower to solve.
;^)
Off-topic comment: places like India *are* cheaper in regards to total cost-per-call. It's not nearly as cheap as everyone makes it out to be though, since "hidden" costs like having to build a telephone network in a third-world country from scratch are sometimes comveniently left out of the PowerPoint presentation during the cost-analysis meetings.
Back on-topic again: I don't know why the "center of gravity" thing is so important to Steve Ballmer. Truth be told, Microsoft is no better at being a center for Windows than IBM is for Unix (including Linux).
From a "guy off the street example" point of view it made sense.
:)
:^P
And, finally before I go to bed:
> If it makes you feel any better, I'm probably a lousier programmer than you are.
That's not possible. I code in PERL. Beat that, sucka
I don't think that was the point he was trying to make.
:).
If I tried to submit a patch to Microsoft, they would probably wonder where the hell I got the code from and sue me for everything I'm worth.
On the other hand, if I submitted a patch to Linus Torvalds, the worst I can expect is to have him humiliate me in public for sloppy code.
(and he would, too... turns out I'm a lousy coder FYI
Something like this happened to me once. It was a comical chain of events, and admittedly the most embarrassing moment of my early career in things Unix-related.
I was charged with upgrading a kernel, remotely, over the weekend, at a customer site. I did so, and I even remembered to ask first if there was anything special I should consider before going through with the task. No, just use the old configuration file, upgrade and let her rip.
Ok, while I was kinda nervous about doing this, I felt balls-ey enough to do it anyways. I took the proper precautions. I reconfigured lilo to boot off the copied off old kernel by typing in "emergency" at the lilo prompt. Worse case scenario, I could call in, ask the local operator to walk over to the machine, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, type "emergency" at the promt, and all would be well. Remember the words "worst case scenario".
It happened. All went well during compilation, and I went ahead and hit "shutdown -r now" at the root prompt over my ssh connection. The connection was subsequently reset by peer. Ok, I expected that. I'll go grab a beer and wait for the ping to start responding again.
I waited, waited... um, okay it's still not responding over the internet. Okay, where's that number... um, where did I put that number?
You can see where this goes from here.
Two hours later, I had no way of reaching the operator. The number I had in hand disappeared somewhere, and I had no idea where it went. To this day, I have no idea where I put that little slip of paper. Did it get folded into the infinite nooks that existed in my old, torn up wallet? Did it go to the same place where half of a good number of pairs of socks have disappeared to over the years? Where, where, where, where, where?
Fortunately, all ended well. They had our number at least, and I apologized, gave them the emergency procedure, and everything was working again. Hooray for the forces of good!
To this day, my heart still skips a beat whenever I reboot a server remotely.
------
P.S. as it turned out I wasn't told that the kernel module for the network card being used wasn't officially supported by the official Linux kernel at the time, and that needed to be downloaded separately and recompiled along with the new kernel. It did boot successfully. It just did so without network support. D'oh!
Not quite... they're talking in strictly spacial terms. When they say the Universe is shaped like a trumpet, they mean literally like a trumpet.
Yours was my first impression too until I read the first few paragraphs.
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas.
Because it was a scientifically rich target. Besides, Opportunity would have spent that first half of its mission looking for a decent target with what happened to be in front of the rover when it landed in that mimi-crater. Besides, what is the hurry. In order to understand the stuff on the plain well, it pays to investigate the crater so that we have data to compare (control and variable in experimental contexts).
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time"...
They have done experiments on this in the past... it's challenging to do this. I would have said the team should have at least warmed up a couple of weeks on the new schedule.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings.
It's not like day-to-day operations are as demanding as they were. Practice makes perfect, and now they don't need as many people to run the rovers as they used to.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings...
So go to this web site. It's got daily updates with streaming video. So I have no idea what you're talking about there. At the very least you can take a look at the raw images there being downloaded from Spirit and Opportunity. It's easy to "make your own Mars images" with Photoshop or the GIMP with these pictures. :^)
You see, I have experience in escaping the IP Voltron Giant Robot. In its attempt to destroy the American Way(TM), I stepped in and saved the world from destruction from an anti-libertarian evil force bent on world domination.
Ya, really, I did that. Really. I swear.
Ya know, up until I saw this I was against blanket tort reform (ya know, the price of overreaction and such).
Screw it. I'm overreacting.
However, some little rational side of me asks this question: Do patent laws really have this much teeth? Some evidence I've been seeing lately implies it may not...
Bad context. It seems like you're referencing some kind of "round-robin" configuration, which isn't the standard. Round-robin is usually handled below the hostname-resolution level these days (though I definitely remember that that was the preferred methods not too long ago), so this example basically highlights an obsolete method for load balancing.
Of course, these days, with virtual clusters and the like, such hostname resolution "trickery" is not only unnecessary, but *ugly* as well.
I had to deal with this issue a lot while working as a system administrator at the last company I worked at.
:^)
:^)
I don't know about other domain name servers (like Microsoft's offerings, for instance), but I know in BIND, it's not only necessary to set up the forward resolution of a hostname, for instance:
www.slashdot.org => 66.35.250.151
It's also necessary to explicitly set this up too:
66.35.250.151 => www.slashdot.org
The reason it's necessary to define the reverse hostname resolution is because a hostname may resolve to the same IP address as several, or even hundreds of other hostnames. Rob Malda could have www.shashdot.org, my.slashdot.org, woohoo.slashdot.org all to the same IP address. But the IP address can only reverse-resolve to one hostname by definition. So, you define both the forward lookups and reverse lookups explicitly so that your company network can run smoothly without anyone knoiwing the major hack you just pulled to *get* the thing running.
Sometimes, though, even seasoned admins forget to put in the reverse-lookup rules in there as a matter of oversight. For this reason you see a lot of automated scripts at ISP's that handle hostname maintanance for you.
And, unfortunately, they didn't have this set up at my last job.
(story, boss wants a new server set up, I have to make a phone call to set up the new IP address and hostname to our system adminsitrators at the data center)
Me: "Can you get hostname blah.blah.blah pointing to 10.0.0.123?"
Other Guy: "Sure! Will be going in a few hours or so"
Me: "No problem"
Three hours later...
Me: "Um, I wanted the reverse-lookup tables set up, too."
Other Guy: "What? Why do you need reverse lookup tables?"
Me: "Because half the network applications ever written since the inception of the internet require that be done *every time*. Just like the last 7 times I asked you to do this."
Yeah, I hated my last job.
When I saw the Authur Andersen page, the first thought to enter my mind is "Oh how the mighty have fallen." Very sobering.
I kinda agree... between this guy, SCO, Microsoft, and everyone else these days, it seems like childish behavior in the courtroom is the order of the day.
Of course, sometimes I wonder if it's always been like this. The internet I think is bringing things into the sunlight that are normally hidden in darkness....
Maybe this publicity is having a positive effect. Few of the grown-ups I know approve of childish behavior, so stories on people like this ought to show the public their true faces: adults acting like spoiled rotten kids.
> Also, I'm on the page now where you can see a city, but it's so QUIET that people wat to get out ASAP after being there a few minutes. I totally want to go see this!
Can you say, "giant paintball game"?
For the love of all that is good and holy, man! There are some subjects never meant to be broached. Like paintball in an abandoned radioactive town.
The potential for evil is purely delicious. Horrible! I meant to say horrible!
Wow... the first web cartoon to ever cause me to spontaneously grow three new limbs.
:)
My parents were mystified as to where those guys came from when they saw the Quizno's commerials... me being the regular FARK guy I am these days of course I had the explanation for them in full.
"Yeah the guy who did those animals really is a weird guy."
End of story.
Examples must first be found before we can meaningfully talk about these forms of life from a biological standpoint.
I worry about arguments like yours because it implies I am guilty of the crime *by default*, which is not the case here.
I don't recall sending out any orders to Russian terrorists to infiltrate our internet with a misleading computer worm.
But he runs the risk of running a configuration not covered by the support contract.