Sourceforge lost track of what they were doing. They pursued ad revenue on their web pages, rather than quality of service and the business model of converting free open source and freeware software authors into paying customers.
So far, github has done very well at doing so and providing "5 9's" of reliable service. They've definitely been far more reliable than the in-house wikis and source repositories I've worked with in house and working with partner companies.And as much as I appreciate that Sourceforge has long-running CVS and Subversion projects, I genuinely wish they'd simply migrate and discard that technology. They're not reliable enough to use for the necessary 24x7 access to publish updates in a Subversion or CVS repository.
I'd not expect this for years. It tends to be destabilizing and makes changes in content processing far more expensive and lengthy to test. Flat text ASCII is perhaps uninteresting, but it makes code sanitizing far, safer.
As do I. They provide invaluable protection for comments that might be politically unsafe tied to your own name in a public venue, but nonetheless vital to the conversation. Even the US Supreme Court has agreed that anonymity is an invaluable right, grounded in the free speech rights of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Linus and the kernel developers had been using Bitkeeper for free when there was a licensing problem. _That_ was when Linus wrote git, to effectively use the style of good quality merges that Bitkeeper previously provided, in a free software way.
I've worked with source control since RCS very shortly after RCS was first published in 1982. If you don't have an admin, to at least ensure backups, consistent merging practices, and cleanups when someone stores huge binaries accidentally, your source control is in real danger. I'm afraid those are all typically human usage issues that require at least a slice of someone's time.
Debugging corrupt content on the back end of the service is its own issue. It's happened with every major source control system I've seen and used in more than 30 years. It can, and does, happen with git and mercurial and the other distributed systems, usually but not always due to human error.
No ability to use the automated build system that pulls updates or source code exports from git tags at github. No configuration publication or web content updates with github based branches. Sharing code between repositories locally is still feasible, but loses the insurance that the code submitted to production has been submitted somewhere accessible to other programmers.
Unless you also lock off the network pretty thoroughly, people _will_ leave remote access in place. Even more fun is when the people in HR have a modem plugged in at their desks, and the people in sales catch wind of it and submit a help request to get the same thing.
Yes, the ropes or ties would be very long. They'd also have to be extremely lightweight, in order to reduce the mass of the solar sail apparatus. I'd expect the solar sail to have a mesh of of light reels with space capable monofilament or extremely fine wires. And yes, indeed, I'd expect to be able to release or reel in and reel back out at least some of the leads for the combination solar sail and solar mirror.
It might be much easier and safer to do with smaller satellites, say 100 sails each 100 meters wide, rather than a single kilometer wide sail. That could reduce the complexity of managing kilometer long leads, at the expense of having to manage 100 times more sails..But in theory, this might be much safer.
But on Tuesday the court ruled that it was not "unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours"
I'm afraid that EU privacy laws and practices are widely misunderstood. They are not absolute, and they certainly do not protect employees from workplace monitoring of workpace resources.
The orbital maintenance is subtle, but feasible. There are many papers on it, including http://wiki.solarsails.info/im... . One has to "tack" the solar wind, using the consistent thrust from the sun, and manipulate the angle of the solar sail to the solar wind. With a relatively heavy satellite to which the sail is tethered, you can theoretically shorten the leads that connect one side of the sail to help create that slight angle. I'd also suggest keeping a slight electrical charge on the sail, to help it stay fully deployed even if it happens to orbit behind the Earth's shadow. But that kind of orbital maneuvering is vital to both earth-orbiting solar sails, and to asteroid mining solar sails, and it's reasonably well understood.
Note that this is all very gentle orbital control. No depletable thrusters would be needed in active service except, very possibly, for urgent emergencies such as time-sensitive decommissioning. The maneuvering is extremely low acceleration, and the entire structure except for the power transmitting central body is very light, very flimsy, and very cheap.
Most international and US domestic employees include clauses in the employee contract that explicitly permit company monitoring of content on work owned or devices, including work owned telephones and networks. There is effectively no "private communication" on your corporate laptop or machines you use for work.
It's potentially more dangerous, if tightly focused. That's why, for safety's sake, you make sure the power transmitter can't focus a beam narrow than, say, 100 yards wide.
You would certainly need to focus the power. My concern is how _tightly_ you could, or should focus the power. A 1 meter wide beam from a one kilometer solar mirror is effectively a military death ray. By beaming the power to an open field with embedded microwave transmitters of, say, 100 meters squared, and by insisting that the transmitter be built with no capability of focusing more tightly, it's a high energy density but one that can be blocked.
That is why I used the description "solar sail based power collection" I didn't mean to confuse you by linking the concepts, but hey've often been mixed up in the literature. Ideally, they could use solar wind and solar light pressure for orbital guidance, and reflect solar radiation to a power converter of some sort. For control and aiming, that power center would convert the locally focused solar energy to a more manageable broadcast source, such as a microwave transmitter aimed at groundside collectors.
This is very distinct from a one kilometer orbiting photovoltaic array, which I've never seen suggested. That would be outlandishly expensive both to build and to orbit.
> . 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast.
It's vast, but not too bad if you use solar sail based power collection. They can keep station in non-geosynchronous orbital positions by using solar wind and light pressure to manipulate their orbits and maintain geo-synchronicity artificially. A single solar sail of one kilometer solar collects about 20 Gigawatts. It will irritate astronomers to block the sky at all, but the power can be sent down to Earth based microwave antenna arrays at a low enough power density to reduce its use as a weapon by simply not providing a good focusing mechanism.
Nuclear scales up better, and is more consistent than wind power. It also stands up to tropical storms much better, for those parts of the world that have them. The much larger difficulty for nuclear is its waste, which has never been handled well. Another is its limited supply: until and unless we can switch to thorium as a more plentiful nuclear fuel, uranium and similar high energy yield isotopes are rare. And refining "fuel grade" uranium is very awkward, and dangerous if misused to make weapons grade uranium. One can use breeder reactors to enhance low grade uranium, but it still consumes the low grade uranium.
I'm looking at the specs on that Tsar Bomb. Apparently, only one was made and actually tested. From the limited literature available, I've never seen any other design that used only a single A-bomb.
The uranium used for the tamper was not weapon grade U-235, it was the more stable and more plentiful U-238. But exposing it to an H-bomb sprays it in a very fine gas, with additional isotapes generated by the H-bomb: that's one of the big fallout problems with H-bombs, which was repeatedly understated by the US military after its development.
I have never seen any credible claim of an H-bomb triggered by anything other than an A-bomb. Have you seen anything to support the idea as practical?
If true, it's quite frightening. H bombs currently require multiple small A bombs to triggter, and the bomb casing is also typically made out of non-weapons grade uranium which reflects and focuses the A-bomb blasts onto the tritium and deuterium core. The result is far, far more radioactive uranium blown as vapor into the atmosphere than original US bomb designers were willing to admit, and a far larger radioactive fallout zone than the US was willing to admit before The Progressive published H-bomb details back in 1979.
I remember that article when published: it was quite frightening, and revealed a number of long-published lies about how H-bombs were "cleaner" than A-bombs.
It would seem a textbook use for voice controls for vehicle delivery for remote operators. I could easily picture such a tool used for low cost scouting of wildfires: the delivery vehicle wouldn't even have to stop moving. This also sounds like a military or security project: a casual search reveals several Navy projects for just such moving vehicle based drone launches. While a small pickup mounted drone wouldn't have enough power to loft large weapons, it seems just the vehicle for delivering a few targeted rounds to an urban target. It seems even more suitable for poison, tear gas, or incendiary attacks: Incendiary attacks on tall buildings are a security nightmare.
Targeted tear gas or incendiary gas delivery is a real security concern with modern drones. It's perhaps not as strange as the incendiary bat bombs of World War II. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., which were considered for igniting Japanese cities during WW II, but could not be aimed well.
> But it's the firewall that comes w/ NAT that does the defending - the same thing that can be done w/ a public IPv6 connection.
It is _possible_ to do many things. But NAT forces people to specifically select exposed ports for exposed services, and discourages simply opening up HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, and most especially CIFS and NFS by default or through careless settings on a default "just open up the ports for all addresses" simple firewall configuration.
> Can we just invest in what she's doing then and cut back on all the other social programs that are not addressing poverty?
I'm afraid not. It's not a "new paradigm of education science", it cuts corners on bureaucracy to fund staff and programs other than teachers, and it puts tenure at risk. Even if the district teachers are on board with it, middle management at the district and state level will attempt to fit it into their particular programs, and especially into federal funding guidelines. The discrepancies with federal and state guidelines can generate a whole crop of new middle managers to suck resources from local management and non-standard approaches like these.
> It gets funny when you realize that vigilantes are what appears when the government is not doing its job.
It appears when government is not doing the job that at least some people want. This also includes government agents operating outside the law, the KKK, and corporations hiring private security to beat union protesters. Vigilantism occurs when the government is unwilling to follow someone's policy, whether that policy is law or not.
It also includes most terrorists. The Taliban and ISIS themselves want Sharia law applied universally, and have killed many who refuse this religious law, despite the local government's clear rejection of murdering people for adultery or murdering women for speaking out for women's rights.
> One would think that in 2015, executives would digitally sign their e-mails
Unfortunately, building in digital signatures, means bundling good encryption into common email clients. They're tightly linked technologies, it's awkward if not impossible to have one without the other. That implies coping with the US Department of Commerce, whose regulations are at https://www.bis.doc.gov/index..... Note that similar versoins of those regulations were previously handled by US Customs, but suffered many legal challenges and wee simply transferred to the Dapartment of Commerce to avoid having to follow various legal decisions on their constitutionality and re-apply them as part of a different federal agency.
These regulations are onerous for businesses engaging in telecommunications. They have effectively hindered and prevented such encryption and digital signatures from becoming widespread for at least the last 30 years. They've also prevented the widespread use of encryption at the Ethernet card or "data link layer": the regulations create unmanagable burdens for companies that want to sell the appropriate switches and network devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Sourceforge lost track of what they were doing. They pursued ad revenue on their web pages, rather than quality of service and the business model of converting free open source and freeware software authors into paying customers.
So far, github has done very well at doing so and providing "5 9's" of reliable service. They've definitely been far more reliable than the in-house wikis and source repositories I've worked with in house and working with partner companies.And as much as I appreciate that Sourceforge has long-running CVS and Subversion projects, I genuinely wish they'd simply migrate and discard that technology. They're not reliable enough to use for the necessary 24x7 access to publish updates in a Subversion or CVS repository.
> - Unicode support
I'd not expect this for years. It tends to be destabilizing and makes changes in content processing far more expensive and lengthy to test. Flat text ASCII is perhaps uninteresting, but it makes code sanitizing far, safer.
As do I. They provide invaluable protection for comments that might be politically unsafe tied to your own name in a public venue, but nonetheless vital to the conversation. Even the US Supreme Court has agreed that anonymity is an invaluable right, grounded in the free speech rights of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
You _have_ been reading your Terry Pratchett.
It's time for the Glorious Revolution of the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road!
Oh, I see. You meant "if you need a dedicated admin whose sole task is source control, you're doing it wrong". Yes, I'd agree with that.
Linus and the kernel developers had been using Bitkeeper for free when there was a licensing problem. _That_ was when Linus wrote git, to effectively use the style of good quality merges that Bitkeeper previously provided, in a free software way.
I've worked with source control since RCS very shortly after RCS was first published in 1982. If you don't have an admin, to at least ensure backups, consistent merging practices, and cleanups when someone stores huge binaries accidentally, your source control is in real danger. I'm afraid those are all typically human usage issues that require at least a slice of someone's time.
Debugging corrupt content on the back end of the service is its own issue. It's happened with every major source control system I've seen and used in more than 30 years. It can, and does, happen with git and mercurial and the other distributed systems, usually but not always due to human error.
No ability to use the automated build system that pulls updates or source code exports from git tags at github. No configuration publication or web content updates with github based branches. Sharing code between repositories locally is still feasible, but loses the insurance that the code submitted to production has been submitted somewhere accessible to other programmers.
Unless you also lock off the network pretty thoroughly, people _will_ leave remote access in place. Even more fun is when the people in HR have a modem plugged in at their desks, and the people in sales catch wind of it and submit a help request to get the same thing.
Yes, the ropes or ties would be very long. They'd also have to be extremely lightweight, in order to reduce the mass of the solar sail apparatus. I'd expect the solar sail to have a mesh of of light reels with space capable monofilament or extremely fine wires. And yes, indeed, I'd expect to be able to release or reel in and reel back out at least some of the leads for the combination solar sail and solar mirror.
It might be much easier and safer to do with smaller satellites, say 100 sails each 100 meters wide, rather than a single kilometer wide sail. That could reduce the complexity of managing kilometer long leads, at the expense of having to manage 100 times more sails..But in theory, this might be much safer.
> And in much of Europe the employer would be breaking the law (wiretapping) if they did such monitoring.
There was a fairly clear recent EU case about just this sort of use of work resources for private communications.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...
Quoting the article:
But on Tuesday the court ruled that it was not "unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours"
I'm afraid that EU privacy laws and practices are widely misunderstood. They are not absolute, and they certainly do not protect employees from workplace monitoring of workpace resources.
The orbital maintenance is subtle, but feasible. There are many papers on it, including http://wiki.solarsails.info/im... . One has to "tack" the solar wind, using the consistent thrust from the sun, and manipulate the angle of the solar sail to the solar wind. With a relatively heavy satellite to which the sail is tethered, you can theoretically shorten the leads that connect one side of the sail to help create that slight angle. I'd also suggest keeping a slight electrical charge on the sail, to help it stay fully deployed even if it happens to orbit behind the Earth's shadow. But that kind of orbital maneuvering is vital to both earth-orbiting solar sails, and to asteroid mining solar sails, and it's reasonably well understood.
Note that this is all very gentle orbital control. No depletable thrusters would be needed in active service except, very possibly, for urgent emergencies such as time-sensitive decommissioning. The maneuvering is extremely low acceleration, and the entire structure except for the power transmitting central body is very light, very flimsy, and very cheap.
Most international and US domestic employees include clauses in the employee contract that explicitly permit company monitoring of content on work owned or devices, including work owned telephones and networks. There is effectively no "private communication" on your corporate laptop or machines you use for work.
It's potentially more dangerous, if tightly focused. That's why, for safety's sake, you make sure the power transmitter can't focus a beam narrow than, say, 100 yards wide.
You would certainly need to focus the power. My concern is how _tightly_ you could, or should focus the power. A 1 meter wide beam from a one kilometer solar mirror is effectively a military death ray. By beaming the power to an open field with embedded microwave transmitters of, say, 100 meters squared, and by insisting that the transmitter be built with no capability of focusing more tightly, it's a high energy density but one that can be blocked.
That is why I used the description "solar sail based power collection" I didn't mean to confuse you by linking the concepts, but hey've often been mixed up in the literature. Ideally, they could use solar wind and solar light pressure for orbital guidance, and reflect solar radiation to a power converter of some sort. For control and aiming, that power center would convert the locally focused solar energy to a more manageable broadcast source, such as a microwave transmitter aimed at groundside collectors.
This is very distinct from a one kilometer orbiting photovoltaic array, which I've never seen suggested. That would be outlandishly expensive both to build and to orbit.
> . 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast.
It's vast, but not too bad if you use solar sail based power collection. They can keep station in non-geosynchronous orbital positions by using solar wind and light pressure to manipulate their orbits and maintain geo-synchronicity artificially. A single solar sail of one kilometer solar collects about 20 Gigawatts. It will irritate astronomers to block the sky at all, but the power can be sent down to Earth based microwave antenna arrays at a low enough power density to reduce its use as a weapon by simply not providing a good focusing mechanism.
> Higher cost than nuclear?
Nuclear scales up better, and is more consistent than wind power. It also stands up to tropical storms much better, for those parts of the world that have them. The much larger difficulty for nuclear is its waste, which has never been handled well. Another is its limited supply: until and unless we can switch to thorium as a more plentiful nuclear fuel, uranium and similar high energy yield isotopes are rare. And refining "fuel grade" uranium is very awkward, and dangerous if misused to make weapons grade uranium. One can use breeder reactors to enhance low grade uranium, but it still consumes the low grade uranium.
I'm looking at the specs on that Tsar Bomb. Apparently, only one was made and actually tested. From the limited literature available, I've never seen any other design that used only a single A-bomb.
The uranium used for the tamper was not weapon grade U-235, it was the more stable and more plentiful U-238. But exposing it to an H-bomb sprays it in a very fine gas, with additional isotapes generated by the H-bomb: that's one of the big fallout problems with H-bombs, which was repeatedly understated by the US military after its development.
I have never seen any credible claim of an H-bomb triggered by anything other than an A-bomb. Have you seen anything to support the idea as practical?
If true, it's quite frightening. H bombs currently require multiple small A bombs to triggter, and the bomb casing is also typically made out of non-weapons grade uranium which reflects and focuses the A-bomb blasts onto the tritium and deuterium core. The result is far, far more radioactive uranium blown as vapor into the atmosphere than original US bomb designers were willing to admit, and a far larger radioactive fallout zone than the US was willing to admit before The Progressive published H-bomb details back in 1979.
I remember that article when published: it was quite frightening, and revealed a number of long-published lies about how H-bombs were "cleaner" than A-bombs.
It would seem a textbook use for voice controls for vehicle delivery for remote operators. I could easily picture such a tool used for low cost scouting of wildfires: the delivery vehicle wouldn't even have to stop moving. This also sounds like a military or security project: a casual search reveals several Navy projects for just such moving vehicle based drone launches. While a small pickup mounted drone wouldn't have enough power to loft large weapons, it seems just the vehicle for delivering a few targeted rounds to an urban target. It seems even more suitable for poison, tear gas, or incendiary attacks: Incendiary attacks on tall buildings are a security nightmare.
Targeted tear gas or incendiary gas delivery is a real security concern with modern drones. It's perhaps not as strange as the incendiary bat bombs of World War II. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., which were considered for igniting Japanese cities during WW II, but could not be aimed well.
> But it's the firewall that comes w/ NAT that does the defending - the same thing that can be done w/ a public IPv6 connection.
It is _possible_ to do many things. But NAT forces people to specifically select exposed ports for exposed services, and discourages simply opening up HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, and most especially CIFS and NFS by default or through careless settings on a default "just open up the ports for all addresses" simple firewall configuration.
> Can we just invest in what she's doing then and cut back on all the other social programs that are not addressing poverty?
I'm afraid not. It's not a "new paradigm of education science", it cuts corners on bureaucracy to fund staff and programs other than teachers, and it puts tenure at risk. Even if the district teachers are on board with it, middle management at the district and state level will attempt to fit it into their particular programs, and especially into federal funding guidelines. The discrepancies with federal and state guidelines can generate a whole crop of new middle managers to suck resources from local management and non-standard approaches like these.
> It gets funny when you realize that vigilantes are what appears when the government is not doing its job.
It appears when government is not doing the job that at least some people want. This also includes government agents operating outside the law, the KKK, and corporations hiring private security to beat union protesters. Vigilantism occurs when the government is unwilling to follow someone's policy, whether that policy is law or not.
It also includes most terrorists. The Taliban and ISIS themselves want Sharia law applied universally, and have killed many who refuse this religious law, despite the local government's clear rejection of murdering people for adultery or murdering women for speaking out for women's rights.
> One would think that in 2015, executives would digitally sign their e-mails
Unfortunately, building in digital signatures, means bundling good encryption into common email clients. They're tightly linked technologies, it's awkward if not impossible to have one without the other. That implies coping with the US Department of Commerce, whose regulations are at https://www.bis.doc.gov/index..... Note that similar versoins of those regulations were previously handled by US Customs, but suffered many legal challenges and wee simply transferred to the Dapartment of Commerce to avoid having to follow various legal decisions on their constitutionality and re-apply them as part of a different federal agency.
These regulations are onerous for businesses engaging in telecommunications. They have effectively hindered and prevented such encryption and digital signatures from becoming widespread for at least the last 30 years. They've also prevented the widespread use of encryption at the Ethernet card or "data link layer": the regulations create unmanagable burdens for companies that want to sell the appropriate switches and network devices.