however, getting to pluto from the moon is easier than getting there from earth. ( 1/6th the energy cost, more room for science, less requirement for propulsion)
I am violently in favor of any and all space exploration/science/travel/colonization.
we wont get to mars permanently, until we do it first on the moon.
we need a moon base. in the words of hienlein (I think), "once you are on the moon, you are halfway to anywhere"
I was born in 1967, by the time I was in kindergarten, we had been to the moon several times. by the time I was 10, we had driven dune buggies on the moon. now, 23 years later, we have sat around with our thumbs you know where, and we think Skylab++ is an amazing achievement, while we underfund or dont even try to fund the cool stuff which could lead to a truly spacefaring humanity.
look at the launchers that have been cancelled or delayed just in the last 5 years:
delta clipper (dc-x) (cancelled)
x-33 (delayed)
rotary rocket (died for lack of funding)
kistler k-1 (delayed - please don't kill it)
Beal BA-2 (killed by a concerted effort by 2 governments and enviro-weenies)
blackhorse (rocketplane) (lack of funding)
kellyspace (lack of funding)
most of these programs required no more than $100M to survive, but couldn't get even that, at a time when our gov't spends that much studying the effects of cow farts on the ozone layer every year.
are you pissed yet? you should be living on the moon by now, not in some crappy condo in cambridge.
from the ground up on SGI indy boxes with MIPS 4300 CPUs
pretty cool really, the first 3 weeks of the class are a team effort led by the prof to get a basic kernel up with threads and a serial port driver(no easy thing on SGI hardware, it's pretty fscked up)
then the rest of the class was spent in 3 person teams hacking 24/7 to add features (no porting of existing stuff from linux, had to be ground up)
we added dynamic memory, a VFS, a GUI, and attempted a scsi driver, but a wonky scsi floppy drive stopped that.
at least that was what they did when I was there.
I heard that some cheese head was trying to make them start using nachos..
what is all this junk with the fremen calling paul "maud dib" before he even goes to the desert? I don't remember any of that from the book.
and who the hell was harkonnen talking to at the end after leto screwed up with the poison tooth?
and why the hell, with millions of dollars worth of CGI can't anyone make a decent ornithopter?
how hard would it be to animate a decent set of flapping wings????????????????????
the thing looks like a freakin fly, but the wings don't flap.
money can buy the impossible, or the government..
on
SDMI Cracked Too Soon
·
· Score: 1
money can buy the impossible, or the government... whichever is cheaper (usually the government).
as much as i dislike M$ products, this story amazes me.
This morning I submitted a story about M$ releasing Win ME and the astoundingly uninterested press coverage even from MSNBC (who called it a waste of time for most people), and it was rejected in minutes.
suse adds a support for a port that has been out for a while and its front page news...
people used to joke that BeOS stood for Buzzword enabled Operating System.
they should have named this BePL, not C#
(the pound is what you'll do with your head learning Yet Another Not Quite C Syntax )
this interview was so full of buzzwords, it is hard to believe that hejlsberg is not a puppet sitting on the marketroid's (product manager's) knee or reading off a cue card.
of course he is biased, it is his baby, AFAIK it _MIGHT_BE_ a great PL, but buzzwords and fluff won't convince me.
the message I got out of this interview is that C# is sort of C+++ (third + intentional) and java, with all the dangers of C++ and new and different syntactic idiosyncrasies.
Russia put up alexander tupolev, son of 'the' tupolev who founded the tupolev design bureau about 3 days before gegarin. however, tupolev's orbiter landed in china, and the russians were embarrassed (this was at a time when china and russia were not getting along well. tupolev ended up spending several months in china.
the russians hurried up and popped gegarin up into space and when he landed in the right place, they publicized the hell out of it, while squashing the tupolev story.
this is all very nicely documented in a PBS documentary I saw about 3-4 months ago.
nothing will stop the FBI (or anyone else for that matter) doing this until federal legislation raises e-mail to the same privacy standard as telephones and snail-mail.
even then they won't stop, but at least they will need a warrant.
however, the likelyhood of such legislation ever being passed, especially with President V-Chip Jefferson Clipper in office is precisely zero.
the difference between the 16 way nodes in the ASCII white and a standard RS/6000 node is largely a matter of packaging. they are half-width 4u rackmount boxes instead of standalone or full width. you can buy the same (electrically) 16way smp node as a standalone webserver or workstation.
the switch is what puts the super in this supercomputer. but when you break it down, it is just a fast network. yes, orders of magnitude better in all ways than 10base-t but still just a fast network.
and as far as operating principles, it is just IBM's flavor of MPI. nothing special there. all the money went into the switch.
maybe the horsepower equation deserves the bicycle/car comparison, but the operating principle is the same. i.e: a bunch of standalone unix nodes, connected by a high speed network clustering software and MPI (or PVM).
simple, easy, works, lots of nice features and WAAAY retro.
I have had a system together using OS2 boot loader which would boot to any of the following OSs
os/2 dos/win 3.11 win95 winNT linux
each OS was in it's own partition, but because of M$ stupidity, I had to play partition games, so that each of the M$ os's thought they were in C: this ofcourse meant I couldn't share apps between the various flavors of windows.
os/2 had no problem being in D: in an extended logical partition, and linux went in an extended partition too.
of course, linux could see all the partitions, but couldnt mount the winNT/NTFS or OS/2 HPFS partitions.
for about the third time in a year, MediaOne has just raised my rates, now $51 a month for standard cable. no hbo, no skinimax, nothing fancy, just networks, cnn, sports and discovery channel.
I guess they have to cover the cost of their merger lawyers.
"The difference between Theory and Practice, is greater in practice than it is in theory"
seriously though, if you want to get into OS development, take the hard, low-level bit-basher courses, the parallel and distributed systems courses and LOTS of theory and algorithms electives.
there are a lot of options out there besides M$, IBM, and RH. remember, 95% of all computers are embedded, and about half of those require an OS of some sort. in the embedded market, no single company owns more than about 5% (vxworks is about the biggest).
there are lots of companies that have their own OS ( including the company I work for ), and they all need talented engineers ( ditto ) (send me your resume)
the way it works is this: each sattelite broadcasts a signal wich contains its ID and it's idea of the time.
your receiver MUST track at least 4 sattelites to provide useful info.
your receiver grabs a frame from each of the four satellites simultaneously, and then performs basic trigonometry using the differences between the four time hacks and the known ephemeri of the sattelites.
so, with 4 satellites, you can get a precise 3D location, with the same accuracy in all dimensions.
...section 1201 detail what constitutes fair use......saying that any sort of technological access protection...removes the right to access the material except as specified by the copyright holder.
so, say I publish a hardcover book, which has a locking hasp ( like your sister's diary ), and I say in my licence, unlocking the hasp with any key other than the one that I sell you, is illegal and subject to DMCA provisions.
other than the specific implementation of the "technological measure" and the data storage device, there is no difference between this situation and the DVD situation.
the problem these days is that all Big Business has to do is yell "HACKER!" (which in the eyes of lawmakers is synonymous with thief, sexual deviant, all around bad person) and congress passes a law protecting the poor defenseless businessman from all those big bad 16 year olds with 28.8 modems.
can an API be GPL'd the same way that code is? that is to say, if I were to develop an API, called OpenXXX with a certain package of functions, could I GPL the API so that anyone who wants to can implement the underneath any way they want, but any development or extension to the API must also be GPL?
what I'm thinking about is M$ standard "embrace, extend, destroy" model for implementing standard APIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Using the same logic, the Authors Guild should logically be against public libraries.
what makes you think they aren't?
just like the record and movie industry, authors would like books to be pay-per-view.
this desire, by the way, is the one thing that is likely to insure the future of e-books.
and marianas trench is like 6 or 7 deep.
but I get your point, 31 miles is an awful tall building
I wasn't implying that we shouldn't go to pluto.
however, getting to pluto from the moon is easier than getting there from earth. ( 1/6th the energy cost, more room for science, less requirement for propulsion)
I am violently in favor of any and all space exploration/science/travel/colonization.
we wont get to mars permanently, until we do it first on the moon.
damnit.
[RANT]
we need a moon base. in the words of hienlein (I think), "once you are on the moon, you are halfway to anywhere"
I was born in 1967, by the time I was in kindergarten, we had been to the moon several times. by the time I was 10, we had driven dune buggies on the moon. now, 23 years later, we have sat around with our thumbs you know where, and we think Skylab++ is an amazing achievement, while we underfund or dont even try to fund the cool stuff which could lead to a truly spacefaring humanity.
look at the launchers that have been cancelled or delayed just in the last 5 years:
delta clipper (dc-x) (cancelled)
x-33 (delayed)
rotary rocket (died for lack of funding)
kistler k-1 (delayed - please don't kill it)
Beal BA-2 (killed by a concerted effort by 2 governments and enviro-weenies)
blackhorse (rocketplane) (lack of funding)
kellyspace (lack of funding)
most of these programs required no more than $100M to survive, but couldn't get even that, at a time when our gov't spends that much studying the effects of cow farts on the ozone layer every year.
are you pissed yet? you should be living on the moon by now, not in some crappy condo in cambridge.
[/RANT]
from the ground up on SGI indy boxes with MIPS 4300 CPUs
pretty cool really, the first 3 weeks of the class are a team effort led by the prof to get a basic kernel up with threads and a serial port driver(no easy thing on SGI hardware, it's pretty fscked up)
then the rest of the class was spent in 3 person teams hacking 24/7 to add features (no porting of existing stuff from linux, had to be ground up)
we added dynamic memory, a VFS, a GUI, and attempted a scsi driver, but a wonky scsi floppy drive stopped that.
at least that was what they did when I was there.
I heard that some cheese head was trying to make them start using nachos..
what is all this junk with the fremen calling paul "maud dib" before he even goes to the desert? I don't remember any of that from the book.
and who the hell was harkonnen talking to at the end after leto screwed up with the poison tooth?
and why the hell, with millions of dollars worth of CGI can't anyone make a decent ornithopter?
how hard would it be to animate a decent set of flapping wings????????????????????
the thing looks like a freakin fly, but the wings don't flap.
money can buy the impossible, or the government... whichever is cheaper (usually the government).
also
kistler
and
beal
and they actually have funding (although I'm sure they could use more )
as much as i dislike M$ products, this story amazes me.
This morning I submitted a story about M$ releasing Win ME and the astoundingly uninterested press coverage even from MSNBC (who called it a waste of time for most people), and it was rejected in minutes.
suse adds a support for a port that has been out for a while and its front page news...
people used to joke that BeOS stood for Buzzword enabled Operating System.
they should have named this BePL, not C#
(the pound is what you'll do with your head learning Yet Another Not Quite C Syntax )
this interview was so full of buzzwords, it is hard to believe that hejlsberg is not a puppet sitting on the marketroid's (product manager's) knee or reading off a cue card.
of course he is biased, it is his baby, AFAIK it _MIGHT_BE_ a great PL, but buzzwords and fluff won't convince me.
the message I got out of this interview is that C# is sort of C+++ (third + intentional) and java, with all the dangers of C++ and new and different syntactic idiosyncrasies.
actually gagarin was not the first man in space.
Russia put up alexander tupolev, son of 'the' tupolev who founded the tupolev design bureau about 3 days before gegarin. however, tupolev's orbiter landed in china, and the russians were embarrassed (this was at a time when china and russia were not getting along well. tupolev ended up spending several months in china.
the russians hurried up and popped gegarin up into space and when he landed in the right place, they publicized the hell out of it, while squashing the tupolev story.
this is all very nicely documented in a PBS documentary I saw about 3-4 months ago.
[RANT]
every thing this guy thinks is a problem is what makes me happy I run X.
I don't want to use YOUR window manager, I want to use MINE!
I dont like YOUR widgets, I like MINE.
I HATE PEOPLE WHO THINK THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO DO THINGS!!!
X allows its users to do things however they want, not how some Ph-Freakin-D in ergonomics thinks we should.
[/RANT]
nothing will stop the FBI (or anyone else for that matter) doing this until federal legislation raises e-mail to the same privacy standard as telephones and snail-mail.
even then they won't stop, but at least they will need a warrant.
however, the likelyhood of such legislation ever being passed, especially with President V-Chip Jefferson Clipper in office is precisely zero.
the difference between the 16 way nodes in the ASCII white and a standard RS/6000 node is largely a matter of packaging. they are half-width 4u rackmount boxes instead of standalone or full width. you can buy the same (electrically) 16way smp node as a standalone webserver or workstation.
the switch is what puts the super in this supercomputer. but when you break it down, it is just a fast network. yes, orders of magnitude better in all ways than 10base-t but still just a fast network.
and as far as operating principles, it is just IBM's flavor of MPI. nothing special there. all the money went into the switch.
maybe the horsepower equation deserves the bicycle/car comparison, but the operating principle is the same. i.e: a bunch of standalone unix nodes, connected by a high speed network clustering software and MPI (or PVM).
since the other (first)thread of this story got shitcanned, I thought I'd repost this here.
ASCI white is basically a bunch of rack mounted, 16 way SMP RS/6000's running a (slightly)special version of AIX with a proprietary network switch.
the operating principals are very similar to beowulf, as well as the concept of a "commodity" workstation making up the base computing node.
the major difference is the power of the individual nodes and the speed of the network.
shouldn't this story really have the Bill of Borg Icon?
it is, after all about another fine company being assimilated.
have a bishop identify item 7 in wizardry for the Apple][+ ( each char could only carry 6 items )
the result was enough experience points to get 200+ levels, all spells, cleric and mage,
1000+ hit points etc etc.
then you cross trained to a level 1 ninja, kept many of the spells and all the hit points, plus got critical hits _AWESOME_
simple, easy, works, lots of nice features and WAAAY retro.
I have had a system together using OS2 boot loader which would boot to any of the following OSs
os/2
dos/win 3.11
win95
winNT
linux
each OS was in it's own partition, but because of M$ stupidity, I had to play partition games, so that each of the M$ os's thought they were in C:
this ofcourse meant I couldn't share apps between the various flavors of windows.
os/2 had no problem being in D: in an extended logical partition, and linux went in an extended partition too.
of course, linux could see all the partitions, but couldnt mount the winNT/NTFS or OS/2 HPFS partitions.
for about the third time in a year, MediaOne has just raised my rates, now $51 a month for standard cable. no hbo, no skinimax, nothing fancy, just networks, cnn, sports and discovery channel.
I guess they have to cover the cost of their merger lawyers.
51 FREAKING DOLLARS.
monopolies suck.
"What's strange is that they are trying to get people to put Linux/*BSD on machines, when I had thought that's what they were trying to *stop* before"
look at their project goals:
1. a linux/gui combon in 8mb of flash vs the 10mb that QNX uses
2. a linux browser in 7.5mb flash (equal to their current product)
clearly, they want to be able to insert linux and stop paying QNX licensing fees.
"The difference between Theory and Practice, is greater in practice than it is in theory"
seriously though, if you want to get into OS development, take the hard, low-level bit-basher courses, the parallel and distributed systems courses and LOTS of theory and algorithms electives.
there are a lot of options out there besides M$, IBM, and RH. remember, 95% of all computers are embedded, and about half of those require an OS of some sort. in the embedded market, no single company owns more than about 5% (vxworks is about the biggest).
there are lots of companies that have their own OS ( including the company I work for ), and they all need talented engineers ( ditto ) (send me your resume)
the way it works is this:
each sattelite broadcasts a signal wich contains its ID and it's idea of the time.
your receiver MUST track at least 4 sattelites to provide useful info.
your receiver grabs a frame from each of the four satellites simultaneously, and then performs basic trigonometry using the differences between the four time hacks and the known ephemeri of the sattelites.
so, with 4 satellites, you can get a precise 3D location, with the same accuracy in all dimensions.
...and a biotelemeter "Trisponder" to read the data...
I suppose you need a Tricorder to record the data from the Trisponder.
...section 1201 detail what constitutes fair use... ...saying that any sort of technological
access protection...removes the right to access the material except as specified by the copyright holder.
so, say I publish a hardcover book, which has a locking hasp ( like your sister's diary ), and I say in my licence, unlocking the hasp with any key other than the one that I sell you, is illegal and subject to DMCA provisions.
other than the specific implementation of the "technological measure" and the data storage device, there is no difference between this situation and the DVD situation.
the problem these days is that all Big Business has to do is yell "HACKER!" (which in the eyes of lawmakers is synonymous with thief, sexual deviant, all around bad person) and congress passes a law protecting the poor defenseless businessman from all those big bad 16 year olds with 28.8 modems.
sombody get the ACLU on the horn.
can an API be GPL'd the same way that code is? that is to say, if I were to develop an API, called OpenXXX with a certain package of functions, could I GPL the API so that anyone who wants to can implement the underneath any way they want, but any development or extension to the API must also be GPL?
what I'm thinking about is M$ standard "embrace, extend, destroy" model for implementing standard APIs.