The largest non-nuclear explosion in the free world was the 4,800 tons of ANFO (Ammunion Nitrate/Fuel Oil - ala Oklahoma City) for the Minor Scale event that simulated an 8 KTon Nuke from a blast perspective - why 4.8 HE is equal to 8 Nuke is left as an exercise for/.'ers...
As a participent/observer, I can attest that (ignoring some misc. issues), it blow'ed up real good!;-)
One of the first (and most tragic) cases of software screwups in medical equipment was the Therac-25 medical linear accelerator used to treat cancer here is one of many writeups on it but in summary, it took a couple of years and caused several deaths before it was pulled from the market... and software is much more complex these days, plus there are tons of interactions.
I.e. while one can build a simple manometer the reality is that blood pressure devices used today probably have all sorts of interdependancies that can cause a ripple effect, so one should be pretty darn careful before just applying patches licky-split... in a work discussion earlier today, we talked about how one of the recent Microsoft security patches broke one of our applications.
Yea, it was actually a "force" measurement (you did say Newtons and (I assume meant) pounds-force) - see attached snippet from one writeup... plus the incorrect deviations from the flight path weren't noticed, which is argueably a distance measurement (there was a fair amount of miscommunication going on too, so lotta blame/mistakes on this one unfortunately)... but I simplified to feet/meters in my attempt at humor. NASA has (obviously) done a GREAT job with the current Mars Landers, but boo-boo's happen.
Engineers on the ground calculated the size of the rocket-firing using feet-per-second of thrust, a value based on the English measure of feet and inches.
However, the spacecraft computer interpreted the instructions in Newtons-per-second, a metric measure of thrust. The difference is 1.3 metres a second.
Microsoft Corporation has finally decided to dump its struggling web portal, Google, to the South Korean-based Daum Communications Corp. Microsoft bought Google for $32.5 billion (shortly before their IPO) and they managed to sell if for $105 million.
In unrelated news, Bill Gates took out a second mortgage on his house and has a garage sale planned for the upcoming weekend.
I wonder if the 503 errors are perhaps related to more folks pulling RSS feeds from/. - even though they limit it, if enough folks have this on full-auto, it adds up.
I would also suggest that the Dutch Auction works "against" the financial firms bringing firms public.
For "classic" IPO's, the individual investor has a very hard time getting in on the ground floor - i.e. the folks getting most of the offerred shares at the actual IPO prices are the financial firms handling the offering... and their best buddies/clients - think Frank Quattrone.
So THEY are able to "flip" the shares first day and make a buncha money... whereas the individual investor typically can't get in until after the POP, when most of the movement is done... and as noted, the company only gets proceeds at the opening price, not the POP price... so it is in the financial firm's interest to price as low as possible.
This is why the offering firms aren't too keen about a Dutch Auction... and it takes someone like Google (who has broad interest) to pull it off. It does seem like they will get one heck of a premium for their stock - note that as often incorrectly noted, it is not the share price that really matters, but the company valuation - i.e. how many shares of stock (total, not offerred) times the share price that is significant - in this case, the number is on the order of 30+ billion dollars - lotta money for a search engine, even a darn good one!
Christmas Lights giant komar.org plans a 22,000 christmas lights migration away from Sun Solar power to Wind power, a confidential source told us yesterday. There's no word yet on how much the new Wind power deal could be worth or who the lucky vendor might be, although our source did throw out the name Santa Claus once.
Our source - a komar.org elf who is close to the transition - said the migration represents only a fraction of what the future could hold. Apparently those 22K christmas lights only represent a fraction stored in the basement crawl space and they may be poised to switch over all of the lights, and also their Halloween Decorations.
Cost is the reason behind komar.org's switch. The web site is moving away from expensive Sun Solar power, expecting to save a bundle by using Wind Power. Apparently Wind Power has no problem reliably running the fancy software use to run the Christmas Webcam.
However, Utah Unix company SCO could throw a monkey wrench into komar.org's Wind Power plans. According to our elf, komar.org's lights are brigher than "a deer in the headlights" because of concern over SCO's legal threats over Wind Power usage.
SCO of course is the company that made quite a name for itself by suing DalmerChryslerAG and AutoZone Inc for using electricity, claiming that it's owed licensing fees because they have used both AC and DC power. Our elf hinted that a SCO lawsuit against komar.org could be on the horizon, saying that komar.org was approaching "DalmerChrysler and AutoZone territory" in terms of KiloWatts used.
SCO has also sued IBM, accusing it of also using electricity. And SCO has sent letters to hundreds more companies, threatening to sue if they don't fork over $699 for a SCO AC license, and offering a discounted price of $999 if they also obtain an SCO DC license at the same time.
Fortunately for komar.org elf's, the heart of SCO's case against DalmerChrysler was thrown out yesterday by Michigan judge Rae Lee Chabot. The only charge that will be heard in court is that the auto maker didn't respond quickly enough to a request from SCO for certification that it was not using SCO's patented AC and DC electricity. "It's a little unfortunate that it took a lawsuit for them to respond to what was a real simple letter asking them to certify," sniffed SCO spokesman Blake Stowell.
The Incredible Hulk, spokesmonster for komar.org, responded "Hulk SMASH Puny Human SCO - GGRRR!!!!"
Jeeez... 8 hours after posting the article... and *5* comments... I guess/. just isn't too interested in meteor showers?!?
For those that are interested in space stuff, I have some nifty Lunar Eclipse Pictures from last year and some Colorado Aurora Borealis... but sorry, nothing as cute/funny as the "farmer story" above from AC;-)
Ditto all of that from the AC parent - this is an extreme example (meant to be modded funny), but if people are shooting at you, which would you rather have - this hovercraft or this airboat;-)
PGP/GPG are on the client Email program side... and are good things in of themselves. But interesting that Microsoft is moving this fast... and the question is will the other large ISP's (ex: gmail!) and Fortune-50 companies enforce this also... could have a BIG impact on spam Email because would make using zombie PC's MUCH more difficult for the slimebags - The Hulk keeps trying to smash these guys, but they keep coming back!;-)
OK - how many/.'ers use mozilla products because this way their significant other (who uses IE) won't see the history bar or the cache showing the sites they were looking at.
I.e. I see a variety of comments about p0rn so I gotta believe this might be a factor for some of you!;-)
It's a pretty minor restatement - READ THE ARTICLE
on
Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 5, Informative
We're over 25 posts, and in the rush to be the first poster, it doesn't seem like anyone has actually READ THE ARTICLE (but this is/.)... so let me repeat the key point from the Press Release linked above:
... the Company determined it would be appropriate to stop recognizing revenue for subscription agreements on a monthly basis - a method it has consistently applied for the last five years Ð and start recognizing revenue on a daily basis over the particular contract term.
This isn't the typical "ooops, we recognized all the revenue of that 5-year contract this quarter" shin-an-igans that you typically read about - this isn't that huge of change - as referenced in the article, take a look at the restatement table and the net income/loss per share hardly changes.
While I don't have any direct evidence of browser hijacking causing this (yet), it would not surprise if the the scumbags of the world are using this approach. In brief, referrer log spamming is causing the spammer's site (typically an adult/porn one) to be listed as the referrer (via HTTP_REFERRER) with the hope that the target web site will publish their web logs and the spammer will benefit with a link and/or more traffic - read more about referrer log spamming here. And these guys are smart enough to have "zombie" PC's do all the work for them, so some sort of browser malware would be one approach they would try.
To be more exact, according to the NASA Hubble site, it cost $1.5 Billion to build and put it up into orbit, and has an annual operating budget (including data analysis, etc.) of $230-250 million.
And Hubble's second servicing mission cost $347 million plus another $448 million for the Shuttle flight - I believe that is in 1996 dollars.
So as a taxpayer, for all that dough, how 'bout some new satellite pictures of my house!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
As a participent/observer, I can attest that (ignoring some misc. issues), it blow'ed up real good! ;-)
BTW, it wasn't that long ago that /. reported about the Feds finally formally dropped DES.
Since this software helps grass roots, will it help my grass grow?
He put it there in the first place!
I.e. while one can build a simple manometer the reality is that blood pressure devices used today probably have all sorts of interdependancies that can cause a ripple effect, so one should be pretty darn careful before just applying patches licky-split ... in a work discussion earlier today, we talked about how one of the recent Microsoft security patches broke one of our applications.
Engineers on the ground calculated the size of the rocket-firing using feet-per-second of thrust, a value based on the English measure of feet and inches.
However, the spacecraft computer interpreted the instructions in Newtons-per-second, a metric measure of thrust. The difference is 1.3 metres a second.
This should help 'em convert feet to meters ... ;-)
Microsoft downloads Firefox 1.0, changes program and version number, compiles, and offers as Internet Explorer 7.0 - sure be a lot easier! ;-)
I'm tryin' Captain, but I'm not a magician, I'm an engineer!
In unrelated news, Bill Gates took out a second mortgage on his house and has a garage sale planned for the upcoming weekend.
Sun announces that some large Aerospace company, after replacing 10,000 of its Solaris seats with Liunx, will then replace those back with 10,000 Sun Ray machines.
I wonder if the 503 errors are perhaps related to more folks pulling RSS feeds from /. - even though they limit it, if enough folks have this on full-auto, it adds up.
For "classic" IPO's, the individual investor has a very hard time getting in on the ground floor - i.e. the folks getting most of the offerred shares at the actual IPO prices are the financial firms handling the offering ... and their best buddies/clients - think Frank Quattrone.
So THEY are able to "flip" the shares first day and make a buncha money ... whereas the individual investor typically can't get in until after the POP, when most of the movement is done ... and as noted, the company only gets proceeds at the opening price, not the POP price ... so it is in the financial firm's interest to price as low as possible.
This is why the offering firms aren't too keen about a Dutch Auction ... and it takes someone like Google (who has broad interest) to pull it off. It does seem like they will get one heck of a premium for their stock - note that as often incorrectly noted, it is not the share price that really matters, but the company valuation - i.e. how many shares of stock (total, not offerred) times the share price that is significant - in this case, the number is on the order of 30+ billion dollars - lotta money for a search engine, even a darn good one!
Our source - a komar.org elf who is close to the transition - said the migration represents only a fraction of what the future could hold. Apparently those 22K christmas lights only represent a fraction stored in the basement crawl space and they may be poised to switch over all of the lights, and also their Halloween Decorations.
Cost is the reason behind komar.org's switch. The web site is moving away from expensive Sun Solar power, expecting to save a bundle by using Wind Power. Apparently Wind Power has no problem reliably running the fancy software use to run the Christmas Webcam.
However, Utah Unix company SCO could throw a monkey wrench into komar.org's Wind Power plans. According to our elf, komar.org's lights are brigher than "a deer in the headlights" because of concern over SCO's legal threats over Wind Power usage.
SCO of course is the company that made quite a name for itself by suing DalmerChryslerAG and AutoZone Inc for using electricity, claiming that it's owed licensing fees because they have used both AC and DC power. Our elf hinted that a SCO lawsuit against komar.org could be on the horizon, saying that komar.org was approaching "DalmerChrysler and AutoZone territory" in terms of KiloWatts used.
SCO has also sued IBM, accusing it of also using electricity. And SCO has sent letters to hundreds more companies, threatening to sue if they don't fork over $699 for a SCO AC license, and offering a discounted price of $999 if they also obtain an SCO DC license at the same time.
Fortunately for komar.org elf's, the heart of SCO's case against DalmerChrysler was thrown out yesterday by Michigan judge Rae Lee Chabot. The only charge that will be heard in court is that the auto maker didn't respond quickly enough to a request from SCO for certification that it was not using SCO's patented AC and DC electricity. "It's a little unfortunate that it took a lawsuit for them to respond to what was a real simple letter asking them to certify," sniffed SCO spokesman Blake Stowell.
The Incredible Hulk, spokesmonster for komar.org, responded "Hulk SMASH Puny Human SCO - GGRRR!!!!"
Another possible typo correction: We are going to send The Incredible HULK over there and SMASH the Google Puny Human Search Engine! ;-)
Ummmm ... in case of Nuclear War, I think we should consult Wikipedia to see what it says about it! ;-)
For those that are interested in space stuff, I have some nifty Lunar Eclipse Pictures from last year and some Colorado Aurora Borealis ... but sorry, nothing as cute/funny as the "farmer story" above from AC ;-)
Ummmm ... one wonders what they are going to do about Google Girl ;-)
Ditto all of that from the AC parent - this is an extreme example (meant to be modded funny), but if people are shooting at you, which would you rather have - this hovercraft or this airboat ;-)
PGP/GPG are on the client Email program side ... and are good things in of themselves. But interesting that Microsoft is moving this fast ... and the question is will the other large ISP's (ex: gmail!) and Fortune-50 companies enforce this also ... could have a BIG impact on spam Email because would make using zombie PC's MUCH more difficult for the slimebags - The Hulk keeps trying to smash these guys, but they keep coming back! ;-)
So what type of FAA license do I need to drive/fly the Budweiser airboat
I.e. I see a variety of comments about p0rn so I gotta believe this might be a factor for some of you! ;-)
This isn't the typical "ooops, we recognized all the revenue of that 5-year contract this quarter" shin-an-igans that you typically read about - this isn't that huge of change - as referenced in the article, take a look at the restatement table and the net income/loss per share hardly changes.
While I don't have any direct evidence of browser hijacking causing this (yet), it would not surprise if the the scumbags of the world are using this approach. In brief, referrer log spamming is causing the spammer's site (typically an adult/porn one) to be listed as the referrer (via HTTP_REFERRER) with the hope that the target web site will publish their web logs and the spammer will benefit with a link and/or more traffic - read more about referrer log spamming here. And these guys are smart enough to have "zombie" PC's do all the work for them, so some sort of browser malware would be one approach they would try.
And Hubble's second servicing mission cost $347 million plus another $448 million for the Shuttle flight - I believe that is in 1996 dollars.
So as a taxpayer, for all that dough, how 'bout some new satellite pictures of my house! ;-)