Never believe anything that starts with `of course'.
nobody would credibly assert that any of these 'interactive user-oriented' OSes are suited for that kind of high speed real time operation.
You wish.
That's what embedded controllers are in the mix for. Often tightly interfaced to a slower responding system that supervises everything.
Consider the USS Yorktown. I doubt the turbines were supposed to be running at jet speeds (frankly, the tip velocity of a ship-sized turbine cranking to those RPM is a frightening concept) but since the boat was sail-by-wire, when the Windows supervisory machines (and maybe `embedded' systems, we've all seen WinModems, we've all heard MS touting XP as embeddable, sorta) went down, it really didn't make any difference how close to the metal the failure was, that baby was a sitting duck for hours.
Now, if my F-22's display and controls go dead because of a display manager failure, am I any happier than if they go dead because of an engine failure or system-wide failure?
I guess I'm marginally happier than if the wings had simply fallen off, but only for a few more seconds. High in a clear sky, probably not a life-threatening issue provided that reboot is fast.
In combat, takeoff or hedge-hopping situations, not so good.
Please click on OK to rape, pillage, murder and destroy*. Oh, and get 14% better mileage and automatic crash avoidance. Er, but be prepared to copy your ROMs for anyone who asks.
IRL, I understand that one taxi has hopped into a bronze kangaroo (wet night, changing lanes in a hurry, overdid it) but I can't see any marks from it.
About 7 or 8 years ago, driving along the westbound lane of Canning Highway here in sunny Perth, Western Australia, I chanced to look up as I paused at the lights in Melville outside the KFC. A block away down the road, a Volvo station wagon began reversing out onto the Highway. Slowly. As the light went green, it halted astride the dotted line which separates the two westbound lanes. When I say `astride', I mean the line bisected the car's diff. It sat there. And sat there. The reversing lights went off. It sat there some more. The brake lights went off. Slooooowly, slowly it began to roll down the Highway towards Bicton. It would have been doing about 20-30km/h (in a 60km/h speed zone) by the time the traffic caught up with it, still perfectly aligned over the dividing line. As it nochalantly sidled towards the 40km/h mark on the way around the corner, it weaved a little left, then drifted across to the right until it finally sat in the right-hand lane (keep left in Oz, unless overtaking) at about 50km/h on the way up the hill, and the other traffic could finally begin to set about overtaking. The driver was an old Asian bloke wearing a tweed hat.
Despite some of my very good Asian friends being excellent drivers, and an Asian friend of Dad's being a good driving instructor, Asian drivers (at least in Oz) are generally hopeless. I've seen one tourist* accidentally put his rent-a-car sideways twenty feet onto a dry dirt road at about 30km/h, and a FoaF who repairs brick walls for an insurance company claims that around 2/3 to 3/4 of the damage he repairs is done by drivers with Asian names. You might be pleased to know that they tend to prefer Mercedes to Volvos. It must also be said that many more BMW drivers than Volvo drivers seem to have forgotten what the little orange lights are for.
* Yes, tourists really do expect to see kangaroos hopping down the main street of Perth, so the Council's put in some nice bronze ones for them; and yes, they really do hop into taxis and ask to be taken to Sydney (roughly 3000km).
Where else would you put systems that needed frequent booting? `How often do you boot your systems?' `Oh, permanently.'
* Note to yanks: this is what the rest of the English-speaking world calls that bit under the lid on the back of a sedan where luggage goes (-: A `trunk' is the hose thingy dangling from the front of an elephant.:-)
$550,000 (from the AP article) spread over 5,000 schools (Reuters article) in 4 years is $25 per school per year. Whoopee.
Reuters also mentions $10,000,000 for the gummint as a whole - still whoopee, that's around 30c a head for all of Peru, and little skin off Microsoft's nose since much of what's being donated costs peanuts to manufacture.
Full retail for Microsoft software in Latin America is criminal (read the comments from the Argentinos; and it's not so good even here in Oz: I can buy a new computer for AUD$600 (1.2GHz/128MB/40GB) but to add Windows XP and Office to it costs roughly AUD$400 and AUD$500 respectively). So make them `dirt-cheap' OEM versions and charge a miraculously low (for Peru) US$200 for the lot. Peru doesn't have much by way of anti-monopoly laws. For Peruvians to get access to their own gummint info, they'll need copies of this stuff; say one in ten eventually winds up with a computer and makes it Microsoft because they have to, equals roughly 3,000,000 sales, equals $600,000,000. Free, my ass.
On top of this, once Microsoft has that much control over Peru, you can bet they won't be able to resist abusing it (they never have in the past, why start now?), which implies another zero or two after leverage has been applied. Will Microsoft care if its market is starving and over 20% of the workforce unemployed? Hey, business is business...
Shall we discuss bugs and security flaws and the cost of `free' updates in a country which was bankrupt before these leeches got at it?
Another big question is, why haven't Microsoft been charged with dumping yet?
In summary, unformed, here's some `free' software, for which you'll eventually pay $2000-$20000 and give up most of your rights; are you still interested?
Power is a design issue that they haven't spoken about, but if you want more volts just add more or bigger cells. As far as the actual 4WDing goes, this idea would be unbeatable. It has 4-wheel full time fully independent drive with anti-skid braking and acceleration designed in from scratch. Works just as well for a racing car as for a 4WD. Blowing up a motor 300km east-south-east of Wolfe Creek Crater is not a heart-stopping issue, since you still have 3 left. If they've been sensible and at least twinned the generation system (simplest way to get extra power for a 4WD), you could even get away with blowing up one of those, too.
I would like to scan the design specs for the drive-by-wire stuff though.
Venus covers enough volume that it should clean up a lot of the junk
Yah, starting with the Moon... oops.
If you could get Venus to flip the Moon away without a collision, you could wind up with a situation not unlike Robert L Forward's Rocheworld from Flight of the Dragonfly where the ocean sloshes between Earth and Venus (fsssssh!) - but I don't think we'd be very talented Flouwen; or Bob Shaw's Land and Overland from The Wooden Spaceships which involves hot-air ballooning from planet to planet and battles with muzzle-loading cannon and solid-fuel rockets in zero G (but in atmosphere).
PS, I've greatly enjoyed reading everything of Robert Forward's that I've laid hands on, especially the Dragon's Egg series. Bob Shaw not so, but I did like TWS.
BTW, we may know how to move planets, but that is probably the main reason for us not doing so. Our accountants forbid it. Like Archimedes, we `lever alone'.
NASA aren't the most efficient (the ants would more likely be a private enterprise trick), on the other hand, they built it on what for them is a shoestring, telling Congress the whole time that paring the budget back to a little below the bone was a bad idea... and lo! For it was indeed a bad idea.
Having knackered the project, Congress are now saying that NASA were silly to do it in the first place. In a way, they were: they didn't leave enough fat in it for Congress to lop off without cruelling Fred.
Well... goodbye, Fred. Goodbye, Grand Tour. Goodbye, anything else past the orbit of Mars. What are the USA going to do now, send a man up with a red flag to walk in front of each satellite?
Embark on a cardio training program. Try to run at least 1 mile per day to start with, building up to 3-4.
Throw out the carbs- no more bread, donuts, sweets, deserts etc.
Lift weights (but not like a pussy) Do the big lifts- bench, deadlift and squat.
OK - S T O P !
That's all you need. Ditch the low-fiber short-chain carbohydrates (ie, sugar, white bread and derivatives), and do some exercise. Amen.
Eating lots of protein will damage you, dropping the long-chain carbohydrates is also a bad idea.
It also bears mentioning that swimming is a safer, more effective (reaches more muscles, no load or impacts) exercise than running; if you do run, sandhills are good. And lift those weights carefully.
Our really big gas giants all (both) have planet-sized moons. This may imply likely habitable-sized moons orbiting a Jupiter or larger sized planet. In the case of the really big planets (say, six Jupiters on up) even a `planet' orbiting `too far' out may radiate enough heat to make a moon habitable.
Since we know next to nothing about other planetary systems, let's speculate freely. What about a planet of, say, ten or twenty Jupiters' mass, with a Saturn-sized `moon' around which a nominally habitable sub-moon orbits. Set the whole array within a multiple star-system (say, an ordinary star with a close-orbiting dense companion).
The sunsets would be fabulous (`and this clip shows the changing magneto-optical effects from Whitestar in Primary's rings and atmosphere, backlit by the rich hues of Redstar and offset by the brilliant blue orb of Secondary as we orbit past it, all framed by the spectacular Western Ringwall Mountains...'), and the almanacs would be collectors' items, all fourteen volumes of them. (-:
I like my idea for a planet better than theirs, and as you said, have just as much evidence for it... (-:
Um, it seems likely that of the 100 systems surveyed, zero of them have habitable planets due to `excess bomardment of' jupiter-sized and larger planets.
Every single `sol-like' system so far described has a serious spoiler to it like a jupiter-sized planet orbiting about where Mercury is in our system. This doesn't fit any of our theories of planetary formation; if anything it implies that any solid bodies present would be orbiting within that star's corona... like living in a microwave full of flares.
Even if a solid planet did circle at earth-like distances, there's nothing like a brown dwarf crossing your orbital path to - sooner or later - ruin your whole day.
When life absorbs gamma radiation, that life is generally destroyed. The harmful mutations that exposure to gamma sometimes produces are basically a mild case of destruction.
Before anyone comments on consequent high mutation rates and speculates on rapid adaptation, it's worth pointing out that increasing the mutation rate increases the organism's genetic burden, or in other words reduces the organism's survivability. High replacement rates entail a high `genetic death' rate for the species.
Life consists of highly specific, nested, complex structures. Think of a lunar rover built from Lego bricks [looks like a fabulous place of employment!]. Units like the wheels represent a unique and specific structure by themselves; the whole rover represents a structure of structures. Doing something like bashing a chord or segment out of a wheel not only impairs the wheel's function, it also impairs the entire rover's function. What you're proposing is akin to suggesting that `improving' the rover's structure can be done by subjecting it to higher than normal levels of machinegun fire.
There's interesting circumstantial evidence that Earth's days were once longer. People and animals left to themselves in deep cave systems (ie completely isolated from sunlight) seem to all settle on a 25-hour day.
Velikovsky's cosmic ballet explains this rather well. It's a pity it's become such an albatross that nobody's spending any time reworking it these days, because it seems fairly obvious (especially after Shoemaker-Levy and in light of things like Saturn's very young rings) that our solar system ain't the peaceful celestial meadow that many people like to make it out to be.
I for one would be a lot more comfortable knowing how other objects in my solar system behaved under borderline situations, and fear of being branded a nutcase seems to be stopping science in general from investigating a lot of interesting stuff along these lines.
Do you think Google has become an Internet point of failure?
That didn't actually get answered.
I know Google's been somewhat Akamai'ed, which helps, but if for example your data warehouse had a 'plane land on it (this kind of thing has happened a lot elsewhere in recent days), how long would Google be off-air for?
Slashdot Mirror
You wish.
Consider the USS Yorktown. I doubt the turbines were supposed to be running at jet speeds (frankly, the tip velocity of a ship-sized turbine cranking to those RPM is a frightening concept) but since the boat was sail-by-wire, when the Windows supervisory machines (and maybe `embedded' systems, we've all seen WinModems, we've all heard MS touting XP as embeddable, sorta) went down, it really didn't make any difference how close to the metal the failure was, that baby was a sitting duck for hours.
Now, if my F-22's display and controls go dead because of a display manager failure, am I any happier than if they go dead because of an engine failure or system-wide failure?
I guess I'm marginally happier than if the wings had simply fallen off, but only for a few more seconds. High in a clear sky, probably not a life-threatening issue provided that reboot is fast.
In combat, takeoff or hedge-hopping situations, not so good.
* The existing control software.
Don't you speak semicolon?
IRL, I understand that one taxi has hopped into a bronze kangaroo (wet night, changing lanes in a hurry, overdid it) but I can't see any marks from it.
Both, with Microsoft involved, and probably with endangering national security as well.
Can't argue with that.
About 7 or 8 years ago, driving along the westbound lane of Canning Highway here in sunny Perth, Western Australia, I chanced to look up as I paused at the lights in Melville outside the KFC. A block away down the road, a Volvo station wagon began reversing out onto the Highway. Slowly. As the light went green, it halted astride the dotted line which separates the two westbound lanes. When I say `astride', I mean the line bisected the car's diff. It sat there. And sat there. The reversing lights went off. It sat there some more. The brake lights went off. Slooooowly, slowly it began to roll down the Highway towards Bicton. It would have been doing about 20-30km/h (in a 60km/h speed zone) by the time the traffic caught up with it, still perfectly aligned over the dividing line. As it nochalantly sidled towards the 40km/h mark on the way around the corner, it weaved a little left, then drifted across to the right until it finally sat in the right-hand lane (keep left in Oz, unless overtaking) at about 50km/h on the way up the hill, and the other traffic could finally begin to set about overtaking. The driver was an old Asian bloke wearing a tweed hat.
Despite some of my very good Asian friends being excellent drivers, and an Asian friend of Dad's being a good driving instructor, Asian drivers (at least in Oz) are generally hopeless. I've seen one tourist* accidentally put his rent-a-car sideways twenty feet onto a dry dirt road at about 30km/h, and a FoaF who repairs brick walls for an insurance company claims that around 2/3 to 3/4 of the damage he repairs is done by drivers with Asian names. You might be pleased to know that they tend to prefer Mercedes to Volvos. It must also be said that many more BMW drivers than Volvo drivers seem to have forgotten what the little orange lights are for.
* Yes, tourists really do expect to see kangaroos hopping down the main street of Perth, so the Council's put in some nice bronze ones for them; and yes, they really do hop into taxis and ask to be taken to Sydney (roughly 3000km).
Will they be bringing out an AI version with it's own set of driver disks? (-: Will it support plug and play within the vehicle? :-)
Where else would you put systems that needed frequent booting? `How often do you boot your systems?' `Oh, permanently.'
:-)
* Note to yanks: this is what the rest of the English-speaking world calls that bit under the lid on the back of a sedan where luggage goes (-: A `trunk' is the hose thingy dangling from the front of an elephant.
...is a whole new approach - a whole new, er, depth of meaning - to the phrase `embedded systems' ...and of course...
...thought that perhaps the caravan which this entailed spoiled the look and handling of the vehicle.
Behold, a joke in none of the above categories... and here comes another one!
It's not free, it's a loss-leader.
$550,000 (from the AP article) spread over 5,000 schools (Reuters article) in 4 years is $25 per school per year. Whoopee.
Reuters also mentions $10,000,000 for the gummint as a whole - still whoopee, that's around 30c a head for all of Peru, and little skin off Microsoft's nose since much of what's being donated costs peanuts to manufacture.
Full retail for Microsoft software in Latin America is criminal (read the comments from the Argentinos; and it's not so good even here in Oz: I can buy a new computer for AUD$600 (1.2GHz/128MB/40GB) but to add Windows XP and Office to it costs roughly AUD$400 and AUD$500 respectively). So make them `dirt-cheap' OEM versions and charge a miraculously low (for Peru) US$200 for the lot. Peru doesn't have much by way of anti-monopoly laws. For Peruvians to get access to their own gummint info, they'll need copies of this stuff; say one in ten eventually winds up with a computer and makes it Microsoft because they have to, equals roughly 3,000,000 sales, equals $600,000,000. Free, my ass.
On top of this, once Microsoft has that much control over Peru, you can bet they won't be able to resist abusing it (they never have in the past, why start now?), which implies another zero or two after leverage has been applied. Will Microsoft care if its market is starving and over 20% of the workforce unemployed? Hey, business is business...
Shall we discuss bugs and security flaws and the cost of `free' updates in a country which was bankrupt before these leeches got at it?
Another big question is, why haven't Microsoft been charged with dumping yet?
In summary, unformed, here's some `free' software, for which you'll eventually pay $2000-$20000 and give up most of your rights; are you still interested?
Clearance then won't be a problem. (-:
Power is a design issue that they haven't spoken about, but if you want more volts just add more or bigger cells. As far as the actual 4WDing goes, this idea would be unbeatable. It has 4-wheel full time fully independent drive with anti-skid braking and acceleration designed in from scratch. Works just as well for a racing car as for a 4WD. Blowing up a motor 300km east-south-east of Wolfe Creek Crater is not a heart-stopping issue, since you still have 3 left. If they've been sensible and at least twinned the generation system (simplest way to get extra power for a 4WD), you could even get away with blowing up one of those, too.
I would like to scan the design specs for the drive-by-wire stuff though.
Yah, starting with the Moon... oops.
If you could get Venus to flip the Moon away without a collision, you could wind up with a situation not unlike Robert L Forward's Rocheworld from Flight of the Dragonfly where the ocean sloshes between Earth and Venus (fsssssh!) - but I don't think we'd be very talented Flouwen; or Bob Shaw's Land and Overland from The Wooden Spaceships which involves hot-air ballooning from planet to planet and battles with muzzle-loading cannon and solid-fuel rockets in zero G (but in atmosphere).
PS, I've greatly enjoyed reading everything of Robert Forward's that I've laid hands on, especially the Dragon's Egg series. Bob Shaw not so, but I did like TWS.
BTW, we may know how to move planets, but that is probably the main reason for us not doing so. Our accountants forbid it. Like Archimedes, we `lever alone'.
NASA aren't the most efficient (the ants would more likely be a private enterprise trick), on the other hand, they built it on what for them is a shoestring, telling Congress the whole time that paring the budget back to a little below the bone was a bad idea... and lo! For it was indeed a bad idea.
Having knackered the project, Congress are now saying that NASA were silly to do it in the first place. In a way, they were: they didn't leave enough fat in it for Congress to lop off without cruelling Fred.
Well... goodbye, Fred. Goodbye, Grand Tour. Goodbye, anything else past the orbit of Mars. What are the USA going to do now, send a man up with a red flag to walk in front of each satellite?
OK - S T O P !
That's all you need. Ditch the low-fiber short-chain carbohydrates (ie, sugar, white bread and derivatives), and do some exercise. Amen.
Eating lots of protein will damage you, dropping the long-chain carbohydrates is also a bad idea.
It also bears mentioning that swimming is a safer, more effective (reaches more muscles, no load or impacts) exercise than running; if you do run, sandhills are good. And lift those weights carefully.
Our really big gas giants all (both) have planet-sized moons. This may imply likely habitable-sized moons orbiting a Jupiter or larger sized planet. In the case of the really big planets (say, six Jupiters on up) even a `planet' orbiting `too far' out may radiate enough heat to make a moon habitable.
Since we know next to nothing about other planetary systems, let's speculate freely. What about a planet of, say, ten or twenty Jupiters' mass, with a Saturn-sized `moon' around which a nominally habitable sub-moon orbits. Set the whole array within a multiple star-system (say, an ordinary star with a close-orbiting dense companion).
The sunsets would be fabulous (`and this clip shows the changing magneto-optical effects from Whitestar in Primary's rings and atmosphere, backlit by the rich hues of Redstar and offset by the brilliant blue orb of Secondary as we orbit past it, all framed by the spectacular Western Ringwall Mountains...'), and the almanacs would be collectors' items, all fourteen volumes of them. (-:
I like my idea for a planet better than theirs, and as you said, have just as much evidence for it... (-:
Um, it seems likely that of the 100 systems surveyed, zero of them have habitable planets due to `excess bomardment of' jupiter-sized and larger planets.
Every single `sol-like' system so far described has a serious spoiler to it like a jupiter-sized planet orbiting about where Mercury is in our system. This doesn't fit any of our theories of planetary formation; if anything it implies that any solid bodies present would be orbiting within that star's corona... like living in a microwave full of flares.
Even if a solid planet did circle at earth-like distances, there's nothing like a brown dwarf crossing your orbital path to - sooner or later - ruin your whole day.
When life absorbs gamma radiation, that life is generally destroyed. The harmful mutations that exposure to gamma sometimes produces are basically a mild case of destruction.
Before anyone comments on consequent high mutation rates and speculates on rapid adaptation, it's worth pointing out that increasing the mutation rate increases the organism's genetic burden, or in other words reduces the organism's survivability. High replacement rates entail a high `genetic death' rate for the species.
Life consists of highly specific, nested, complex structures. Think of a lunar rover built from Lego bricks [looks like a fabulous place of employment!]. Units like the wheels represent a unique and specific structure by themselves; the whole rover represents a structure of structures. Doing something like bashing a chord or segment out of a wheel not only impairs the wheel's function, it also impairs the entire rover's function. What you're proposing is akin to suggesting that `improving' the rover's structure can be done by subjecting it to higher than normal levels of machinegun fire.
There's interesting circumstantial evidence that Earth's days were once longer. People and animals left to themselves in deep cave systems (ie completely isolated from sunlight) seem to all settle on a 25-hour day.
Velikovsky's cosmic ballet explains this rather well. It's a pity it's become such an albatross that nobody's spending any time reworking it these days, because it seems fairly obvious (especially after Shoemaker-Levy and in light of things like Saturn's very young rings) that our solar system ain't the peaceful celestial meadow that many people like to make it out to be.
I for one would be a lot more comfortable knowing how other objects in my solar system behaved under borderline situations, and fear of being branded a nutcase seems to be stopping science in general from investigating a lot of interesting stuff along these lines.
That didn't actually get answered.
I know Google's been somewhat Akamai'ed, which helps, but if for example your data warehouse had a 'plane land on it (this kind of thing has happened a lot elsewhere in recent days), how long would Google be off-air for?
The `of magnitude' is the implied default. With three orders of fries, and shakes all 'round.
Plug it in and see if it blows up the PSU! (-:
If you're cheap enough to use an XBox, you'd use chopped-down COTS before you bought Sun.
It's running my gateway machine as I type, and has been for 3 years. Wanna buy it? (-: