Sort of depends on definition of "still running". If you mean in use when necessary and essentially an unchanged algorithm and logic, we have a lot of FORTRAN code written in the early 60's still running in daily use. I predates Fortran IV, but I would suspect that the same code started in ALGOL and They are generally math function routines (convert Euler Angles to Quaternions, that sort of thing). Originally it was on cards but then implemented into files. I still have some of the card decks. I would guess that with some work I can find some older than that (that is character-wise identical except for the comment cards).
Of course Rush isn't a centrist, nor does he claim to be. I am no fan of O'Reilly, but he *is* in fact a centrist/populist. And about 10% as clever as he thinks. That puts his cleverness/capability ratio about an order of magnitude above the average cablenews talking head. It's absolutely no accident that what is labelled "conservative talk" is wildly popular, and it's not because millions of American's listen in outrage! As opposed to Air America, currently leaving skid marks on the way down bowl.
Your utter lack of perspective - you know, the one I was commenting on - prevents you from seeing how far off into the bizzarro world/DU/Kos kiddies you all are. Some idiot modded my parent post "flamebait", proving my point perfectly (as was predictable).
But it definitely proves the point - mob rules end up enforcing conformity with the mainstream. What is so amusing about it is the inconcievable level of hipocracy in the liberal mindset. "We value diversity and we like the marketplace of ideas"- except for those we don't like, which have to be modded to oblivion. You can't even stand to listen to it honestly.
>Funny enough, I think Slashdot has the >most effective and elegant >user-moderation system I've seen. Sure, >it's not 100% perfect, but more times >than not, the random trolls and other >crap are already modded out of my >viewing range by the time I get to an >article.
You have a bit of a point in terms of trolling, etc. BUT, Slashdot has developed a *hyper*-liberal monoculture, where people moderate to death anything that doesn't meet the party line - valid or not.
Bringing Post-it notes to the digital age? I hear that someday it will also be possible to create your own optical storage disks at home and be able to watch television program and download using a thing called the "internet". I think the article really refers to MIT inventing a time machine and using it to travel to the mysterious mystical year of 1996! Or at least that's what you would get from reading the summary.
As almost everyone knows, "digital Post-it notes" have been a common application since Mac System 7.5 or so, so that part of the summary is very misleading. If you RTFA, the real new development is the features used to manage them. That seems rather uninteresting, since if you care that much about the information, there are plenty of other ways to store and manage them that are better than "managed Stickies'.
There have been very similar drives for at least 30 years. This is just a new model. I spent all day in a meeting discussing control system issues related to the use of a very similar engine on our spacecraft.
Xenon is a good propellant since it's easy to ionize.
The Progress isn't even the first automated Soviet freighter, so, no, this is far from the first automated transport spacecraft. They even used some Russian parts. Typical ESA over-statement (or outright lie). Just the latest in a long line - "first ion thruster" (although theirs was a Russian design that had been in use for 20+years) and NASA and some commercial entities has also used them), "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" (although numerous US missions have used gyroless control dating back close to 50 years), etc.
Completely unnecessary in this case, because they had a legitimate claim to an accomplishment this time. Their terminal guidance and overall control appeared to have been *far* superior to the typical Soviet system. Much smoother and neater and apparently much finer control.
Brett
Of course the US doesn't comply with rulings it doesn't agree with or are not considered to be in the best interests of the people or corporations of the US. That's the *job of government* - to act in the interests of the people of the United States. If they operated against our best interests in favor of other countries, they would quickly and quite deservedly get run out of office. Particularly if the consequences of not complying consist of a strongly worded letter from some toothless international body threatening that if we don't comply, we will receive another strongly worded letter.
Whether you like it or not, there is no world government nor should their be. EVERY sovereign country should act in it's own interests. And, individual examples aside, the US overall goes along with some pretty crazy nonsense in the interests of getting along. Maybe not enough to suit the typical slashdotter, but more than is probably warranted or necessary. How much money have we poured into the UN, just to get the world's most corrupt and intrinsically fraudlent organization? We are financing one of the most counter-productive, racist, anti-semetic, and needless to say, anti-American organizations outside al-Qaeda.
And need I note the double standard? When other countries defy US rules, everybody cheers and proclaims them to be heroes for standing up to the US. When we do the same, even in a ridiculously minor way, people response like we are the fourth reich.
Right - but the problem is that it's using ActiveX for something where it shouldn't be required. And then the ActiveX security checks bomb it out. At least you can give them some credit for attempting to overcome the train wreck that constitutes ActiveX but the real solution is to just *get rid of ActiveX* and make it work correctly without it.
>Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a >lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because >Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
Exactly! That's a basic fallacy of the test (or, more accurately, the interpretation that people are making of passing or failing the test). It's not intended to be comprehensive, so you can go in, run the test, see what fails, and just fix what it necessary to pass - not necessarily prove that your browser is 100% compliant.
>Because experts are never wrong. Infact, did you know experts >always completly agree
That's not much of an argument. Of course experts disagree - but either side knows far more about a given topic than the average Joe 12-pack on the internet. Unfortunately, experts don't have nearly the free time of Joe 12-pack. Meaning in many cases the well-meaning but uniformed will engage in editing wars with the true experts and there's no way to prevent someone from reposting the same crap over and over.
It has done that since at least Word 98 for Macintosh (and 97 for the PC). And it's Mathtype (the people who supply Equation Editor), not The Mathworks.
They don't need to blow it of the sky - it's already coming down somewhere. The only potential advantage to shooting it down would be to scatter the parts and maybe make more of them burn up on re-entry. Even then, the heavy metal parts (control moment gyros and deeply imbedded boxes) are still probably going to make it. It might be hypothetically possible but exceptionally difficult considering there probably won't be an good way of knowing where it will be to any degree of accuracy. The only reason you know where the shuttle is coming down is because you did a maneuver to make it come down. If you shot it down in orbit you create a debris field with even less chance of knowing when and where.
Realistically, there's exceedingly little danger to anyone on the ground. MOST spacecraft launched into low orbits, upper stages, etc, have burned in uncontrolled over the years, with negligible effect, even Skylab which was far larger.
BTW the likely "hazardous" materials are no different from the shuttle - hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and maybe a high-pressure gas bottle or two. If it has an RTG, the only danger is that its going to make it do the ground intact and become another heavy projectile. Typically they are designed to do exactly that, just so they have no chance of releasing radioactive materials. The chances are nearly *zero* that the containment will fail. It's more likely that a guy will get hit by a meteorite on the way to pick up his lotto winnings. The shuttle came down over the south-central US with no injuries on the ground, and it has 5x the parts.
How is it's classification level related to the chance of hitting someone? Oh, that's right - there's no relationship. And if it's really just dead (like both prime and redundant of some critical system both failed) they could publish the entire stack of schematics on the front page of the NYT and it wouldn't change a damn thing. Other than pointlessly revealing important secure information.
And, from having been involved in a satellite launch that failed and had the potential from burning in, everybody involved takes it very seriously indeed. In our case, our spacecraft was stuck in a low orbit that passed over 70% of the worlds population. The primary concern of all involved, including the government customer, was eliminating the possibility of coming down uncontrolled in a populated area. Even though the chances of parts of significant size and weight making it all the way to the ground were not very high at all, any hope of salvaging it for test purposes, etc, was not on the table as it raised the chances that it would come down uncontrolled in a few hundred years.
Regardless of the bizarre paranoia over 'The Government', everyone who works there is a person with just as much sense and concern for others as anyone else. If you would be concerned, so would they. Keeping secrets would not outweigh any significant risk to someone on the ground - it's that in this case you knowing more about it almost certainly wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. Whether you want to believe it or not, there are very legitimate reasons for most security decisions.
Now how can we argue with that? I think we are all indebted to AC here for clearly stating what had to be said. And I'm glad the children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, but it expressed a courage that is little seen in this day and age.
More like "Hello, Apple division that programs iWork?, this is Steve, get your asses in gear, we're not paying you to sit around not creating a alternative to VBA!"
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's some world-class kooking, there! Not surprising that it got modded "insightful".
Brett
Sort of depends on definition of "still running". If you mean in use when necessary and essentially an unchanged algorithm and logic, we have a lot of FORTRAN code written in the early 60's still running in daily use. I predates Fortran IV, but I would suspect that the same code started in ALGOL and They are generally math function routines (convert Euler Angles to Quaternions, that sort of thing). Originally it was on cards but then implemented into files. I still have some of the card decks. I would guess that with some work I can find some older than that (that is character-wise identical except for the comment cards).
Brett
Of course Rush isn't a centrist, nor does he claim to be. I am no fan of O'Reilly, but he *is* in fact a centrist/populist. And about 10% as clever as he thinks. That puts his cleverness/capability ratio about an order of magnitude above the average cablenews talking head. It's absolutely no accident that what is labelled "conservative talk" is wildly popular, and it's not because millions of American's listen in outrage! As opposed to Air America, currently leaving skid marks on the way down bowl.
Your utter lack of perspective - you know, the one I was commenting on - prevents you from seeing how far off into the bizzarro world/DU/Kos kiddies you all are. Some idiot modded my parent post "flamebait", proving my point perfectly (as was predictable).
But it definitely proves the point - mob rules end up enforcing conformity with the mainstream. What is so amusing about it is the inconcievable level of hipocracy in the liberal mindset. "We value diversity and we like the marketplace of ideas"- except for those we don't like, which have to be modded to oblivion. You can't even stand to listen to it honestly.
Brett
>Funny enough, I think Slashdot has the
>most effective and elegant
>user-moderation system I've seen. Sure,
>it's not 100% perfect, but more times
>than not, the random trolls and other
>crap are already modded out of my
>viewing range by the time I get to an
>article.
You have a bit of a point in terms of trolling, etc. BUT, Slashdot has developed a *hyper*-liberal monoculture, where people moderate to death anything that doesn't meet the party line - valid or not.
Brett
Bringing Post-it notes to the digital age? I hear that someday it will also be possible to create your own optical storage disks at home and be able to watch television program and download using a thing called the "internet". I think the article really refers to MIT inventing a time machine and using it to travel to the mysterious mystical year of 1996! Or at least that's what you would get from reading the summary.
As almost everyone knows, "digital Post-it notes" have been a common application since Mac System 7.5 or so, so that part of the summary is very misleading. If you RTFA, the real new development is the features used to manage them. That seems rather uninteresting, since if you care that much about the information, there are plenty of other ways to store and manage them that are better than "managed Stickies'.
Brett
There have been very similar drives for at least 30 years. This is just a new model. I spent all day in a meeting discussing control system issues related to the use of a very similar engine on our spacecraft.
Xenon is a good propellant since it's easy to ionize.
Brett
The Progress isn't even the first automated Soviet freighter, so, no, this is far from the first automated transport spacecraft. They even used some Russian parts. Typical ESA over-statement (or outright lie). Just the latest in a long line - "first ion thruster" (although theirs was a Russian design that had been in use for 20+years) and NASA and some commercial entities has also used them), "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" (although numerous US missions have used gyroless control dating back close to 50 years), etc.
Completely unnecessary in this case, because they had a legitimate claim to an accomplishment this time. Their terminal guidance and overall control appeared to have been *far* superior to the typical Soviet system. Much smoother and neater and apparently much finer control.
Brett
Idiot troll. Epilepsy is absolutely *not* a psychological reaction. It's purely physiological - its no different in principle than a knee-tap reflex.
Brett
The detour is proving somewhat more suidical than we had originally hoped.
Brett
Imagine a world without zinc, er, molybdenum!
Brett
Of course the US doesn't comply with rulings it doesn't agree with or are not considered to be in the best interests of the people or corporations of the US. That's the *job of government* - to act in the interests of the people of the United States. If they operated against our best interests in favor of other countries, they would quickly and quite deservedly get run out of office. Particularly if the consequences of not complying consist of a strongly worded letter from some toothless international body threatening that if we don't comply, we will receive another strongly worded letter.
Whether you like it or not, there is no world government nor should their be. EVERY sovereign country should act in it's own interests. And, individual examples aside, the US overall goes along with some pretty crazy nonsense in the interests of getting along. Maybe not enough to suit the typical slashdotter, but more than is probably warranted or necessary. How much money have we poured into the UN, just to get the world's most corrupt and intrinsically fraudlent organization? We are financing one of the most counter-productive, racist, anti-semetic, and needless to say, anti-American organizations outside al-Qaeda.
And need I note the double standard? When other countries defy US rules, everybody cheers and proclaims them to be heroes for standing up to the US. When we do the same, even in a ridiculously minor way, people response like we are the fourth reich.
Brett
Right - but the problem is that it's using ActiveX for something where it shouldn't be required. And then the ActiveX security checks bomb it out. At least you can give them some credit for attempting to overcome the train wreck that constitutes ActiveX but the real solution is to just *get rid of ActiveX* and make it work correctly without it.
Brett
>Safari is doing well on Acid tests because the developers put a
>lot of effort into making Safari do well on Acid tests, not because
>Safari is "ahead of the game" on standards.
Exactly! That's a basic fallacy of the test (or, more accurately, the interpretation that people are making of passing or failing the test). It's not intended to be comprehensive, so you can go in, run the test, see what fails, and just fix what it necessary to pass - not necessarily prove that your browser is 100% compliant.
Brett
They ALL score less than 20. That's essentially random response to the test - so it's just a matter of luck if one scores better than another.
Brett
>Because experts are never wrong. Infact, did you know experts
>always completly agree
That's not much of an argument. Of course experts disagree - but either side knows far more about a given topic than the average Joe 12-pack on the internet. Unfortunately, experts don't have nearly the free time of Joe 12-pack. Meaning in many cases the well-meaning but uniformed will engage in editing wars with the true experts and there's no way to prevent someone from reposting the same crap over and over.
Brett
Consider the audience, then repent your heresy!
Brett
You keep using the word "illegal". I do not think you know what it means.
Brett
It has done that since at least Word 98 for Macintosh (and 97 for the PC). And it's Mathtype (the people who supply Equation Editor), not The Mathworks.
Brett
Whoever tagged this "pompouswanker" should get a lifetime supply of mod points!
Brett
They don't need to blow it of the sky - it's already coming down somewhere. The only potential advantage to shooting it down would be to scatter the parts and maybe make more of them burn up on re-entry. Even then, the heavy metal parts (control moment gyros and deeply imbedded boxes) are still probably going to make it. It might be hypothetically possible but exceptionally difficult considering there probably won't be an good way of knowing where it will be to any degree of accuracy. The only reason you know where the shuttle is coming down is because you did a maneuver to make it come down. If you shot it down in orbit you create a debris field with even less chance of knowing when and where.
Realistically, there's exceedingly little danger to anyone on the ground. MOST spacecraft launched into low orbits, upper stages, etc, have burned in uncontrolled over the years, with negligible effect, even Skylab which was far larger.
BTW the likely "hazardous" materials are no different from the shuttle - hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and maybe a high-pressure gas bottle or two. If it has an RTG, the only danger is that its going to make it do the ground intact and become another heavy projectile. Typically they are designed to do exactly that, just so they have no chance of releasing radioactive materials. The chances are nearly *zero* that the containment will fail. It's more likely that a guy will get hit by a meteorite on the way to pick up his lotto winnings. The shuttle came down over the south-central US with no injuries on the ground, and it has 5x the parts.
Brett
How is it's classification level related to the chance of hitting someone? Oh, that's right - there's no relationship. And if it's really just dead (like both prime and redundant of some critical system both failed) they could publish the entire stack of schematics on the front page of the NYT and it wouldn't change a damn thing. Other than pointlessly revealing important secure information.
And, from having been involved in a satellite launch that failed and had the potential from burning in, everybody involved takes it very seriously indeed. In our case, our spacecraft was stuck in a low orbit that passed over 70% of the worlds population. The primary concern of all involved, including the government customer, was eliminating the possibility of coming down uncontrolled in a populated area. Even though the chances of parts of significant size and weight making it all the way to the ground were not very high at all, any hope of salvaging it for test purposes, etc, was not on the table as it raised the chances that it would come down uncontrolled in a few hundred years.
Regardless of the bizarre paranoia over 'The Government', everyone who works there is a person with just as much sense and concern for others as anyone else. If you would be concerned, so would they. Keeping secrets would not outweigh any significant risk to someone on the ground - it's that in this case you knowing more about it almost certainly wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. Whether you want to believe it or not, there are very legitimate reasons for most security decisions.
Brett
Now how can we argue with that? I think we are all indebted to AC here for clearly stating what had to be said. And I'm glad the children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, but it expressed a courage that is little seen in this day and age.
More like "Hello, Apple division that programs iWork?, this is Steve, get your asses in gear, we're not paying you to sit around not creating a alternative to VBA!"
Brett
I just hope the word "insert" doesn't appear in the instructions.
Brett
Does this mean I can get a new simulated job as a simulated chartered accountant or simulated banking regulator! Oh goody, where do I sign up?
Brett