This got me wondering what would happpen if the flare hit the Moon directly while astronauts/moon base residents were there. The following story explains that any moon base would have to be built several meters beneath the surface to protect residents from cosmic rays and solar flares.http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5aaa88b.html Looks like the Police should have been singing about "Walking In the Moon"....
In my opinion, Stan deserves every nickel. His comic book series were the premier of the genre in their day. Spiderman was my all time favorite and I was very happy to see how well done the movies were.
Agreed! Fire their sorry butts: they've being phoning it in for years. My biggest problem with ST series has been the pompousness. The producers, writers, etc. take themselves and the story line so seriously. Just once I'd like a character to cut up a little.
I am attaching an article from the Wall Street Journal describing how although this is the first major failure of an Intelsat satellite, the other two major satellite manufacturers in the US have "seen their reputations tarnished by a spate of commercial-spacecraft malfunctions." Given that these are multimillion dollar products and are incredibly critical to the world these days, it is surprising to me that there would be such significant quality control problems. Also, I'm surprised that I don't see more technical discussion of this issue on/. I would have thought the slashdot crowd would have been all over this. Anyhow, here's the article:
Lockheed Faces Quality Concerns After Failure of Intelsat Satellite
By ANDY PASZTOR Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL January 18, 2005; Page A6
The sudden loss of a satellite operated by Intelsat Ltd. raises reliability concerns about spacecraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp., which until now managed to avoid the negative publicity over failures that has bedeviled its leading U.S. rivals.
The abrupt shutdown last weekend of Intelsat 804, an eight-year-old Lockheed Martin-built satellite serving the South Pacific, also is likely to prompt greater industrywide efforts to enhance outside insurance coverage or set aside larger in-house reserves to cope with significant malfunctions in orbit.
With the commercial satellite-services industry transitioning to control by various private-equity groups, the financial implications of technical problems are coming under increased scrutiny. "Potential failures clearly are going to be highlighted in the minds" of the new breed of investors, according to Armand Musey, a former Wall Street analyst who helps run Near Earth LLC, a boutique investment bank specializing in space.
Buying additional insurance -- or revising self-insurance plans to minimize the impact of further catastrophic equipment malfunctions -- are bound to be "at the top of the list of fixes," Mr. Musey said.
During the 1990s, U.S. commercial and military space projects costing more than $11 billion either failed to reach appropriate orbits because of rocket failures or didn't operate properly once they got to the correct orbit. More recently, Boeing Co. and Loral Space & Communications Ltd., the other big U.S. satellite makers, have seen their reputations tarnished by a spate of commercial-spacecraft malfunctions.
The causes of those problems range from improperly assembled solar arrays to electrical-power glitches to substandard propulsion systems installed on commercial-communications satellites, some of which carry price tags as high as $150 million. Launch and insurance costs can boost the final price to $250 million or more.
For Intelsat, the No. 2 global commercial-satellite operator, it is the second time since mid-December that a major satellite problem has held up its pending $3 billion takeover by a group of private-equity firms. Instead of anticipating final approval of the transaction this month, Intelsat executives now are being forced back to the negotiating table to hammer out new terms, according to company and industry officials.
Intelsat, which is incorporated in Bermuda but has its headquarters in Washington, is expected to need months to negotiate a revised agreement and then submit the terms for shareholder approval. If the negotiations turn contentious, some industry officials say that could prompt rival bidders to place their own offers.
The satellite that went dead wasn't insured, and Intelsat said it is working with its own fleet and other operators to restore service to customers. Many small Pacific islands relied on the Intelsat satellite for phone and data services. Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Md., has said only that it is working with Intelsat to determine the cause of the shutdown. Most satellites are manufactured to last for about 15 years.
For the broader satellite industry, the latest malfunctio
As I scanned through the posts, I didn't see any comments relating to the above subject so forgive me if this is redundant but:
I can't recall the names of the studies and/or books right now but I have heard that it is very likely that there is a fairly good correlation between ability at music and talent with math. Given this link Prof. Summers would be wrong as there are of course many, many top notch female musicians.
Whatever chances he had of becoming Treasury secretary are now shot forever. This is the kind of gaffe that sticks with public figures for a long time(like Clinton saying he didn't inhale).
FYI: on ESPN at various times they have coverage of surfing, rock climbing, bass fishing, lumberjacking(seriously, it's on pretty late but it's there), world's strongest man(they throw 50kg barrels over walls), and others that I can't think of now. I am surprised ESPN hasn't done a bass fishing console game before; there are seriously a lot of bass fishermen out there that would buy it.
C'mon; how much more can be done with console-based football games. Maybe having a steroid selection screen, and you have to practice injecting yourself. Also, random drug testing so if you get busted, game over. How about the winter meetings, spring camp and the weight room?
The great thing about this article is that it is posted on IBM's website. I had no idea that they had this kind of stuff on their site. I get to like IBM more and more each day.
I was a little aggressive in my initial post; as of course the rise in fuel prices has caused problems. In my mind, there are four main cost segments in the airline business: fuel, employees, advertising, and equipment. I believe that the major airlines have similar costs for their planes and gates, fuel and advertising. During the dotcom boom, I believe that the airline unions negotiated for significant pay increases due to the incredible amount of demand for flights created by the boom. You can negotiate for management changes in addition to pay and benefits issues when those labor contracts come up.
Note those are hourly rates. Now I am not saying that pilots' pay should be reduced to something like that of the average programmer because pilots are holding peoples' lives in their hands; but their union-negotiated rates of pay are high because their contracts were signed at the height of the dot com boom when everyone was willing to pay top dollar to fly to Redmond or Austin on a moment's notice. I am saying that at this point, when businesses are watching their travel budgets much more closely, every stakeholder in a business needs to make concessions to keep that business stable for the long term.
This is why the mainline airlines are in trouble: not gas prices, not terrorism, not passenger counts. It is the unionized work force determined to keep its headcounts and exorbitant salaries from the dotcom boom in spite of the obvious shrinkage in the demand for high-priced walk up fares. The single biggest expense for these airlines is labor. Airline pilots are some of the highest paid people in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I support the right of unions to negotiate but when they keep their head in the sand as the airline unions are now doing I have little sympathy. Face it people, you will have to take pay cuts just like everyone else in America where your business model has changed.
So it wouldn't be possible for the authorities in the US to determine which machines were zombies and have local law enforcement show up at an unsuspecting computer owner's door and say: "Your computer has been compromised, we're here to shut it down and clean it up!"?
After reading the post on RP'S website, I thought he was concise and informative. It gave me the general idea without having to wade through the whole document from the original website. Also, the the methods of signaling between DNA and proteins haven't necessarily been understood very well. Given the complexity of a lot of genetic activity, the idea that a relatively simple signaling system might be used in a cell is news.
Frankly, I;m sick of people trashing this guy on/. If you don't want to click through, don't. I'm sure after I post this whoever it is that posts as snonymous coward with his big rant against RP whenever the editors put one of his stories will do it again. They ought to delete those posts as that individual fits the definition of "Anonymous Coward."
Essentially, they didn't have enough data to produce an analysis so they inserted a fudge factor. This fudge factor is likely to have no connection to reality. The longterm records of temperature and precip from 1870 until about the middle of the 2oth century don't cover a statistically significant proportion of the Earth's surface(especially since the majority of the earth's surface is water and there were very few consistent measurements prior to satellite data). Also, there is the problem of measurement bias where the instruments used to make these temp/precip measurements may not have been maintained properly and changes in the immediate vicinity of the measuring stations cause microclimatic changes which would not be reflective of the full surrounding area. For example, studies of the Phoenix AZ metro have shown a significant increase in average tempurature over the last 50 years which is attributable to the formation of an urban "heat island" associated with all of the asphalt and concrete. This of course has nothing to do with global warming caused by increased CO2 levels. Then there is the fact that the meteorological community's computer models are not very accurate. There are very few large scale atmospheric variations that meteorologists can forecast at all. El Nino, for example, cannot be predicted more than a couple of months in advance. If you go to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center website, their discussion indicates that there is currently a weak El Nino but they have essentially no idea whether it will strengthen or weaken going forward. I would also refer you to discussions of the "butterfly effect" and chaos theory which has shown that very small changes in initial parameters of a complex model such as the atmosphere will lead to wildly varying results using the same model depending on the changes in the initial parameters. IMO, the climatological community has essentially discovered the proverbial golden goose in the concept of global warming and are using it to milk the government for all of the funding they can get. Don't get me wrong, I personally am very interested in climate and meteorological research but I believe that we need to get the facts straight before we as a society undertake radical restructuring to face a hypothetical threat.
Thanks for the information re the wheel of life. Wouldn't it be beneficial to have this separate compression chip until Intel or AMD (or whoever) speeds up their processors and thereby fold the compression function into the main chip?
The description of WOR mentions graphics processors as an example. Don't we have this situation now with ATI and Nvidia's GPU boards?
Would it be possible to produce a add on card with a dedicated processor that could handle the compression/decompression? Or perhaps an extra chip on motherboards dedicated to compression/decompression?
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of IBM's patents are related to hardware and the physics/chemistry research that their labs have done. If they figure out a way to increase HD capacity, no one expects them to give up that intellectual property; and this wouldn't be useful to OSS people anyway because there's no such thing as an open source hard drive factory.
So I don't think they are being particularly stingy with their open-sourcing here.
I plan to buy IBM stock and short Hewlett-Packard. I foresee HP disappearing in the next 5 years.
I have a P-4 and I run the Windows XP system monitor while I'm working (mostly text docs, spreadsheets, and web surfing) and the CPU usage graph generally stays somewhere south of 20% about 95% of the time. So your average user who isn't compiling/running simulations/calculating spreadsheets would probably see a similar graph.
Slashdot Mirror
This got me wondering what would happpen if the flare hit the Moon directly while astronauts/moon base residents were there. The following story explains that any moon base would have to be built several meters beneath the surface to protect residents from cosmic rays and solar flares.http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5aaa88b.html Looks like the Police should have been singing about "Walking In the Moon"....
I thought that's what holodecks were for....
See here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136636&cid=114 13880. I put the story there because I didn't want to wait to see if the editors would accept it. Scoop! :)
Speaking of lawsuits involving Marvel, here is some news from New York's Newsday:
Comics legend Stan Lee wins judgment worth potential millions
By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer
January 19, 2005, 5:08 PM EST
NEW YORK -- Stan Lee, the legendary cartoon hero creator who gifted Spider-Man with the powerful "spidey-sense," is feeling a tingling of his own _ in his wallet.
A Manhattan federal judge ruled that Lee is entitled to a potential multimillion-dollar payday from Marvel Enterprises off profits generated by the company's television and movie productions _ particularly the box-office smash "Spider-Man," which earned more than $800 million worldwide, and its hugely successful sequel.
"It could be tens of millions of dollars," Howard Graff, attorney for Lee, said Wednesday. "That's no exaggeration."
The Monday ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet found that Lee was entitled to a 10 percent share of the profits generated since November 1998 by Marvel productions involving the company's characters, including those created by the prolific cartoonist.
"I am gratified by the judge's decision although, since I am deeply fond of Marvel and the people there, I sincerely regret that the situation had to come to this," Lee said in a statement.
Sweet's decision didn't mention a dollar figure, although Graff was anticipating a windfall since the ruling also included DVD sales and certain merchandise. "The court essentially ruled in our favor virtually across the board," Graff said. "This is a sweeping victory for Mr. Lee."
John Turitzin, general counsel for Marvel, promised an appeal. Turitzin noted that Sweet ruled Lee was not entitled to money from certain movie-based merchandise, and that the judge withheld judgment on money from joint-venture merchandise sales linked to the Spider-Man and Hulk movies.
"We intend to appeal those matter on which we did not prevail, and to continue to contest vigorously the claims on which the court did not rule," Turitzin said in a statement. The remaining issues could go before a jury if the two sides can't reach a settlement.
The lawsuit marks an acrimonious final chapter in the long and productive relationship between Marvel and Lee, who spent the last six decades working for the company. During a storied career, Lee created indelible Marvel fixtures such as the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil and The Fantastic Four.
"Mr. Lee did not begin this lawsuit without a lot of thought and reservation," Graff said. "He was not pleased to do it. He was saddened by the fact that things came to the point where he had to actually start a lawsuit against Marvel."
The 82-year-old Lee filed suit in November 2002, claiming an agreement he had signed four years earlier entitled him to 10 percent of Marvel's haul from its television and movie productions, as well as merchandising deals.
He already earns a $1 million a year salary from Marvel as part of the agreement, but felt he was getting stiffed on additional income due him under the deal.
The money involved was substantial, particularly involving the Spider-Man and Hulk movies. Spider-Man earned $114.8 million on its opening weekend, with Marvel eventually collecting more than $50 million in profits. "The Hulk" earned more than $125 million in the United States alone.
Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press
In my opinion, Stan deserves every nickel. His comic book series were the premier of the genre in their day. Spiderman was my all time favorite and I was very happy to see how well done the movies were.
Fooled me...
Agreed! Fire their sorry butts: they've being phoning it in for years. My biggest problem with ST series has been the pompousness. The producers, writers, etc. take themselves and the story line so seriously. Just once I'd like a character to cut up a little.
Nah, in the good old days the record co execs just bribed the DJ's to play certain songs-it was called "payola."
I am attaching an article from the Wall Street Journal describing how although this is the first major failure of an Intelsat satellite, the other two major satellite manufacturers in the US have "seen their reputations tarnished by a spate of commercial-spacecraft malfunctions." Given that these are multimillion dollar products and are incredibly critical to the world these days, it is surprising to me that there would be such significant quality control problems. /. I would have thought the slashdot crowd would have been all over this. Anyhow, here's the article:
Also, I'm surprised that I don't see more technical discussion of this issue on
Lockheed Faces Quality Concerns
After Failure of Intelsat Satellite
By ANDY PASZTOR
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 18, 2005; Page A6
The sudden loss of a satellite operated by Intelsat Ltd. raises reliability concerns about spacecraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp., which until now managed to avoid the negative publicity over failures that has bedeviled its leading U.S. rivals.
The abrupt shutdown last weekend of Intelsat 804, an eight-year-old Lockheed Martin-built satellite serving the South Pacific, also is likely to prompt greater industrywide efforts to enhance outside insurance coverage or set aside larger in-house reserves to cope with significant malfunctions in orbit.
With the commercial satellite-services industry transitioning to control by various private-equity groups, the financial implications of technical problems are coming under increased scrutiny. "Potential failures clearly are going to be highlighted in the minds" of the new breed of investors, according to Armand Musey, a former Wall Street analyst who helps run Near Earth LLC, a boutique investment bank specializing in space.
Buying additional insurance -- or revising self-insurance plans to minimize the impact of further catastrophic equipment malfunctions -- are bound to be "at the top of the list of fixes," Mr. Musey said.
During the 1990s, U.S. commercial and military space projects costing more than $11 billion either failed to reach appropriate orbits because of rocket failures or didn't operate properly once they got to the correct orbit. More recently, Boeing Co. and Loral Space & Communications Ltd., the other big U.S. satellite makers, have seen their reputations tarnished by a spate of commercial-spacecraft malfunctions.
The causes of those problems range from improperly assembled solar arrays to electrical-power glitches to substandard propulsion systems installed on commercial-communications satellites, some of which carry price tags as high as $150 million. Launch and insurance costs can boost the final price to $250 million or more.
For Intelsat, the No. 2 global commercial-satellite operator, it is the second time since mid-December that a major satellite problem has held up its pending $3 billion takeover by a group of private-equity firms. Instead of anticipating final approval of the transaction this month, Intelsat executives now are being forced back to the negotiating table to hammer out new terms, according to company and industry officials.
Intelsat, which is incorporated in Bermuda but has its headquarters in Washington, is expected to need months to negotiate a revised agreement and then submit the terms for shareholder approval. If the negotiations turn contentious, some industry officials say that could prompt rival bidders to place their own offers.
The satellite that went dead wasn't insured, and Intelsat said it is working with its own fleet and other operators to restore service to customers. Many small Pacific islands relied on the Intelsat satellite for phone and data services. Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Md., has said only that it is working with Intelsat to determine the cause of the shutdown. Most satellites are manufactured to last for about 15 years.
For the broader satellite industry, the latest malfunctio
As I scanned through the posts, I didn't see any comments relating to the above subject so forgive me if this is redundant but:
I can't recall the names of the studies and/or books right now but I have heard that it is very likely that there is a fairly good correlation between ability at music and talent with math. Given this link Prof. Summers would be wrong as there are of course many, many top notch female musicians.
Can anyone point me to research into this idea?
Whatever chances he had of becoming Treasury secretary are now shot forever. This is the kind of gaffe that sticks with public figures for a long time(like Clinton saying he didn't inhale).
FYI: on ESPN at various times they have coverage of surfing, rock climbing, bass fishing, lumberjacking(seriously, it's on pretty late but it's there), world's strongest man(they throw 50kg barrels over walls), and others that I can't think of now. I am surprised ESPN hasn't done a bass fishing console game before; there are seriously a lot of bass fishermen out there that would buy it.
C'mon; how much more can be done with console-based football games. Maybe having a steroid selection screen, and you have to practice injecting yourself.
Also, random drug testing so if you get busted, game over. How about the winter meetings, spring camp and the weight room?
The great thing about this article is that it is posted on IBM's website. I had no idea that they had this kind of stuff on their site. I get to like IBM more and more each day.
I was a little aggressive in my initial post; as of course the rise in fuel prices has caused problems. In my mind, there are four main cost segments in the airline business: fuel, employees, advertising, and equipment. I believe that the major airlines have similar costs for their planes and gates, fuel and advertising. During the dotcom boom, I believe that the airline unions negotiated for significant pay increases due to the incredible amount of demand for flights created by the boom. You can negotiate for management changes in addition to pay and benefits issues when those labor contracts come up.
Here is an analyis of major airlines' pilot pay from herehttp://www.fool.com/community/pod/2000/000522. htm:
Note those are hourly rates. Now I am not saying that pilots' pay should be reduced to something like that of the average programmer because pilots are holding peoples' lives in their hands; but their union-negotiated rates of pay are high because their contracts were signed at the height of the dot com boom when everyone was willing to pay top dollar to fly to Redmond or Austin on a moment's notice. I am saying that at this point, when businesses are watching their travel budgets much more closely, every stakeholder in a business needs to make concessions to keep that business stable for the long term.
Check American Airlines' latest financials from Edgar Online:http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/doctran s/finSys_main.asp?formfilename=0000006201-04-00006 2&nad=
You'll notice that wages, salaries and benefits are significantly higher than fuel costs. The numbers show that fuel costs have increased(not surprising) but they are still less than wages.
This is why the mainline airlines are in trouble: not gas prices, not terrorism, not passenger counts. It is the unionized work force determined to keep its headcounts and exorbitant salaries from the dotcom boom in spite of the obvious shrinkage in the demand for high-priced walk up fares. The single biggest expense for these airlines is labor. Airline pilots are some of the highest paid people in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I support the right of unions to negotiate but when they keep their head in the sand as the airline unions are now doing I have little sympathy. Face it people, you will have to take pay cuts just like everyone else in America where your business model has changed.
So it wouldn't be possible for the authorities in the US to determine which machines were zombies and have local law enforcement show up at an unsuspecting computer owner's door and say: "Your computer has been compromised, we're here to shut it down and clean it up!"?
After reading the post on RP'S website, I thought he was concise and informative. It gave me the general idea without having to wade through the whole document from the original website.
/. If you don't want to click through, don't. I'm sure after I post this whoever it is that posts as snonymous coward with his big rant against RP whenever the editors put one of his stories will do it again. They ought to delete those posts as that individual fits the definition of "Anonymous Coward."
Also, the the methods of signaling between DNA and proteins haven't necessarily been understood very well. Given the complexity of a lot of genetic activity, the idea that a relatively simple signaling system might be used in a cell is news.
Frankly, I;m sick of people trashing this guy on
Essentially, they didn't have enough data to produce an analysis so they inserted a fudge factor. This fudge factor is likely to have no connection to reality. The longterm records of temperature and precip from 1870 until about the middle of the 2oth century don't cover a statistically significant proportion of the Earth's surface(especially since the majority of the earth's surface is water and there were very few consistent measurements prior to satellite data). Also, there is the problem of measurement bias where the instruments used to make these temp/precip measurements may not have been maintained properly and changes in the immediate vicinity of the measuring stations cause microclimatic changes which would not be reflective of the full surrounding area.
For example, studies of the Phoenix AZ metro have shown a significant increase in average tempurature over the last 50 years which is attributable to the formation of an urban "heat island" associated with all of the asphalt and concrete. This of course has nothing to do with global warming caused by increased CO2 levels.
Then there is the fact that the meteorological community's computer models are not very accurate.
There are very few large scale atmospheric variations that meteorologists can forecast at all. El Nino, for example, cannot be predicted more than a couple of months in advance. If you go to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center website, their discussion indicates that there is currently a weak El Nino but they have essentially no idea whether it will strengthen or weaken going forward.
I would also refer you to discussions of the "butterfly effect" and chaos theory which has shown that very small changes in initial parameters of a complex model such as the atmosphere will lead to wildly varying results using the same model depending on the changes in the initial parameters.
IMO, the climatological community has essentially discovered the proverbial golden goose in the concept of global warming and are using it to milk
the government for all of the funding they can get. Don't get me wrong, I personally am very interested in climate and meteorological research but I believe that we need to get the facts straight before we as a society undertake radical restructuring to face a hypothetical threat.
Thanks for the information re the wheel of life. Wouldn't it be beneficial to have this separate compression chip until Intel or AMD (or whoever) speeds up their processors and thereby fold the compression function into the main chip?
The description of WOR mentions graphics processors as an example. Don't we have this situation now with ATI and Nvidia's GPU boards?
Would it be possible to produce a add on card with a dedicated processor that could handle the compression/decompression? Or perhaps an extra chip on motherboards dedicated to compression/decompression?
Good story; this is what I like to see from Slashdot is links to interesting products.
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of IBM's patents are related to hardware and the physics/chemistry research that their labs have done. If they figure out a way to increase HD capacity, no one expects them to give up that intellectual property; and this wouldn't be useful to OSS people anyway because there's no such thing as an open source hard drive factory.
So I don't think they are being particularly stingy with their open-sourcing here.
I plan to buy IBM stock and short Hewlett-Packard. I foresee HP disappearing in the next 5 years.
I have a P-4 and I run the Windows XP system monitor while I'm working (mostly text docs, spreadsheets, and web surfing) and the CPU usage graph generally stays somewhere south of 20% about 95% of the time. So your average user who isn't compiling/running simulations/calculating spreadsheets would probably see a similar graph.