The LRAD is a highly directional speaker made of a flat array of piezoelectric transducers, producing intense beam of sound in a 30-degree cone. It can be used as a loudhailer, or deafen the target with a jarring, discordant noise. Some ships now carry LRAD as an anti-pirate measure: It was used to drive off an attack on the Seabourn Spirit off Somalia in 2005.
I recommend UK people carry rubber bungs to put in their ears, in the case of planetary destruction by Vogons and attack by insane police UAVs.
For a long time it looked like William Gibson had the wrong view of the future with the Sprawl series. But now we have duelling Russian botnets which fight for exploited systems and AI captcha crackers. Major corporations base their income on the reduction and on-sale of found information. Infrastructure is increasingly dependent on information technology, and likely to be connected to the Internet.
Science fiction writers tend to over estimate short term progress and under estimate long term progress. I think Neuromancer is coming back.
The charge? Conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence..
We are not Von Neumann computers. We don't have instructions, registers, memory, a CPU, and ALU, etc. We are a hard wired mish mash. Memory and behavior are the same. I am not as sure about the experience we have agreed to call consciousness. I can't exclude the possibility that things which don't function as "well" as us like (say) frogs and google do not experience consciousness. OTH I can't prove to myself than entities other than myself have the same experience.
Different subject: when I was 20 I had a case of epilepsy for which I took anticonvulsant drugs for six years. Then the problem went away and came back two months ago, 20 years later. So why did that happen? Nobody knows, not even my neurologist. I broke my right arm six months ago. Did that put more load on my left temporal lobe? Did the ketamine I was given when they set my arm retrain my brain to have seizures again? Again, nobody knows. All I know is the problem came back and might go away again if I follow past practices.
One might argue that the fact that the human species wastes so much money (and as a consequence, resources) on fulfilling carnal desires rather than advancing it's civilization, points out that we do not collectively really represent a very high standard of intelligence.
OMG my wife has a/. account. Better start watching myself.
Dunno. How about removing a few key components from a few key Government arseholes? Though I am interested in the possibilities of low volume point to point messaging, using UDP and crypto with a lightweight implementation for PCs and phones.
When I got my Droid, I paid for the whole thing ($539) in cash. I signed no contract and agreed to no terms.
YMMV.
In many countries you have to give your real name and proof of identity to connect to a telephone network. I am assuming that android can access that information from the SIM or by other manipulations of the network.
It just occurred to me that if I create a google account from a normal computer I can use any name for myself that I choose. But a phone running android must use my real name (its in the contract for the phone) so android may be a way to associate made up identities with real identities.
How recent? Which models? Are the old machines being made available on eBay?
I could have found you a dozen 11/84s and four or so 11/83s in Melbourne. They ran the traffic signal system. All I salvaged was one 19 inch rack. It holds servers at my place now.
I am not even talking about servers. How about when there is an actual person sitting in front of a screen which is attached to the system you are updating. If it is going down you need to move that actual person (and their infrastructure: communications, etc) to a different screen, or move their job to a different person; and all without interrupting the task at hand. Thats not easy.
I use Gnome but the window manager drives me nuts sometimes. Lets say my mailer takes up half the screen. I maximize it so that by restoring it I can later return it to its original state, I shut down and later start again. The mailer is restored to the original geometry but if it was maxmimised before the shutdown it is now unmaximised but filling the screen. The option to unmaximise the mailer is now lost.
Aren't most of the air traffic control servers still using hardware with tubes? I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't updated a kernel in the last 30 years.
Older hardware would be alphas or comparable hardware expected to run unix. Newer machines are more likely to be commodity servers. Kernels in use won't be cutting edge from Linus's git tree. They will be a few versions behind and integrated for the application.
Generally in ATC you can have downtime for maintenance but you have to be able to say when it will happen. As the other poster said you can reconfigure to hand off traffic to another center or another part of the same center, but it takes planning or people get upset.
Thats really a configuration management issue. I find the BSD startup scripts to be superior in this regard because the service won't start if it is not configured to start when the system starts.
Would someone smarter than me please explain what is so evil about rebooting now and then?
Some organizations who have operational requirements to provide a service continuously. For them there is no acceptable downtime. Having said that I think their safety managers would have a few things to say about software which auto updates kernels on the fly, but that is a different issue. Their preference would be to never update their systems.
Slashdot Mirror
throw in nuclear powered autonomous plains too...
Autonomous geographical features? Sounds like a slowly developing problem to me.
The LRAD is a highly directional speaker made of a flat array of piezoelectric transducers, producing intense beam of sound in a 30-degree cone. It can be used as a loudhailer, or deafen the target with a jarring, discordant noise. Some ships now carry LRAD as an anti-pirate measure: It was used to drive off an attack on the Seabourn Spirit off Somalia in 2005.
I recommend UK people carry rubber bungs to put in their ears, in the case of planetary destruction by Vogons and attack by insane police UAVs.
For a long time it looked like William Gibson had the wrong view of the future with the Sprawl series. But now we have duelling Russian botnets which fight for exploited systems and AI captcha crackers. Major corporations base their income on the reduction and on-sale of found information. Infrastructure is increasingly dependent on information technology, and likely to be connected to the Internet.
Science fiction writers tend to over estimate short term progress and under estimate long term progress. I think Neuromancer is coming back.
The charge? Conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence..
I deserved the woosh then.
Four legs bad.
And two legs?
We are not Von Neumann computers. We don't have instructions, registers, memory, a CPU, and ALU, etc. We are a hard wired mish mash. Memory and behavior are the same. I am not as sure about the experience we have agreed to call consciousness. I can't exclude the possibility that things which don't function as "well" as us like (say) frogs and google do not experience consciousness. OTH I can't prove to myself than entities other than myself have the same experience.
Different subject: when I was 20 I had a case of epilepsy for which I took anticonvulsant drugs for six years. Then the problem went away and came back two months ago, 20 years later. So why did that happen? Nobody knows, not even my neurologist. I broke my right arm six months ago. Did that put more load on my left temporal lobe? Did the ketamine I was given when they set my arm retrain my brain to have seizures again? Again, nobody knows. All I know is the problem came back and might go away again if I follow past practices.
I hear its buggy.
I have my doubts that we will ever MEET the power of a single human brain without a massive and over the top amount hardware.
Maybe not, but if you talk about simulating or replicating human personalities you don't have to do it in real time.
I don't believe consciousness exists (at least as anything unique to intelligence) and I don't believe we are as smart as we think we are.
One might argue that the fact that the human species wastes so much money (and as a consequence, resources) on fulfilling carnal desires rather than advancing it's civilization, points out that we do not collectively really represent a very high standard of intelligence.
OMG my wife has a /. account. Better start watching myself.
This is just a telling blow against their own people.
Dunno. How about removing a few key components from a few key Government arseholes? Though I am interested in the possibilities of low volume point to point messaging, using UDP and crypto with a lightweight implementation for PCs and phones.
When I got my Droid, I paid for the whole thing ($539) in cash. I signed no contract and agreed to no terms.
YMMV.
In many countries you have to give your real name and proof of identity to connect to a telephone network. I am assuming that android can access that information from the SIM or by other manipulations of the network.
I feel that Buzz is a sign that the Google Mail team is losing touch. Most people, myself included, use Google Mail for.....
Wow, you've queried other Gmail users? Please publish your findings!
Ironically, Google Buzz would be an ideal way to do that.
It just occurred to me that if I create a google account from a normal computer I can use any name for myself that I choose. But a phone running android must use my real name (its in the contract for the phone) so android may be a way to associate made up identities with real identities.
In the ATC application I support the workstations are very important. They are used 100% of the time and unanticipated downtime is a critical problem.
How recent? Which models? Are the old machines being made available on eBay?
I could have found you a dozen 11/84s and four or so 11/83s in Melbourne. They ran the traffic signal system. All I salvaged was one 19 inch rack. It holds servers at my place now.
I am not even talking about servers. How about when there is an actual person sitting in front of a screen which is attached to the system you are updating. If it is going down you need to move that actual person (and their infrastructure: communications, etc) to a different screen, or move their job to a different person; and all without interrupting the task at hand. Thats not easy.
I use Gnome but the window manager drives me nuts sometimes. Lets say my mailer takes up half the screen. I maximize it so that by restoring it I can later return it to its original state, I shut down and later start again. The mailer is restored to the original geometry but if it was maxmimised before the shutdown it is now unmaximised but filling the screen. The option to unmaximise the mailer is now lost.
I am not talking about web servers.
Aren't most of the air traffic control servers still using hardware with tubes? I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't updated a kernel in the last 30 years.
Older hardware would be alphas or comparable hardware expected to run unix. Newer machines are more likely to be commodity servers. Kernels in use won't be cutting edge from Linus's git tree. They will be a few versions behind and integrated for the application.
Generally in ATC you can have downtime for maintenance but you have to be able to say when it will happen. As the other poster said you can reconfigure to hand off traffic to another center or another part of the same center, but it takes planning or people get upset.
Yeah but how do you make your user interface redundant and load balancing? It is the most important part of the system.
Thats really a configuration management issue. I find the BSD startup scripts to be superior in this regard because the service won't start if it is not configured to start when the system starts.
Would someone smarter than me please explain what is so evil about rebooting now and then?
Some organizations who have operational requirements to provide a service continuously. For them there is no acceptable downtime. Having said that I think their safety managers would have a few things to say about software which auto updates kernels on the fly, but that is a different issue. Their preference would be to never update their systems.
I loved it. I'm sure it still works. I also have the acoustic (300 baud) coupler for the built-in modem.
For a moment there I thought you were talking about the edubook.