Offtopic, by why are the majority of aerospace projects painted in that hideous baby puke green?
I know there must be technical reason behind it, what is it?
Note that the picture shows the interior structure of the capsule, not the final external panels. I assume that it's probably a yellow-green zinc chromate coating that is commonly used to prevent corrosion on aluminum parts on aircraft and spacecraft.
Why bother coating the aluminum? Aluminum oxide does a pretty good job of preventing corrosion.
I'm not not a specialist of any kind, but I will repeat what my college professor told the class. The USA is consuming fertilizer at a rate a couple of magnitudes higher than it's being replaced. We use quarries to supply minerals to add nitrogen to the soil. We consume something like 60 cubic miles per year. Once it's all gone, our current ways of farming will crash.
That 60 cubic miles of earth is not spread out from all over. It mostly comes from a few select areas, so those areas are depleting relatively fast.
Again, this is coming from memory and that "60" number could be a large +- percentage of error, but the idea was conveyed that we were consuming the resource waaayyy too fast.
60 cubic miles? I do like your note that the number includes a large +- percentage of error - but still. 60 cubic miles is a heroically-large volume! That would be equivalent to about 11" of fertilizer across the entire country (the US is ~3.8m sq miles)
I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:
Why oh WHY would you need a mouse on a rack-mount server?!? I can see a keyboard for the installation phase or debugging (loss of network), but a MOUSE?
You've never had to administer a Windows rack-mount server, I see.
This is a marketing ploy to attract customers to a new data center. Ultimately cost will determine the layout. If a cube is cheaper then cubes it will be. If 100 degree hot aisles saves money vs an 85 degree hot aisle, then they'll run them hotter.
And who wants to invite visitors into a data center? What're they gonna see? Hundreds/thousands of das blinken lights?
Are they worth it?
I have 300 win mag with a gun loudener (muzzle break) and it seems no muffs I own are up to that challenge. I end up wearing plugs and muffs at the same time.
A "loudener"? Seriously? Muzzle breaks do not make the gun "louder" - they redirect exhaust gases in multiple directions for felt-recoil reduction, and to quieten the firearm somewhat.
If you port the emulator to plain vanilla ANSI C, then it should still run in 100 years unchanged.
My thoughts exactly.
What makes C so great is that it was born the way it is and does not change. I have been programming in C for about 25 years now and the first programs I wrote still compile and run unchanged today.
Compare this with other languages: Fortran, PHP, Perl, Python, all have gone through major redesigns from version to version. Moving a program from version n to version (n+1) means redesign, retesting, endless debugging.
I have been programming a lot in Python recently, but if I have to port a program from Python 2 to Python 3 I'd rather port it to C instead. Just think of checking every single division in every formula I ever used to see if I have to change '/' to '//' or not.
I don't want to do all that work again when Python 4 comes.
C has changed since the initial release, and a new standard is issued every so many years, incorporating new features/strictures to the language. Compared to many languages, C is [probably] the least-changing of all, but that doesn't mean that a new version of the standard doesn't bring improvements/changes/fixes to previous editions.
I would say it's more a vote of confidence in the ability of Oracle to mismanage Java into obscurity rather than any real confidence in JavaScript's longevity.
As bad as Oracle is going to screw the official Java pooch, the other branches will continue for years - there's simply too much invested in the platform to wholesale (or even halfsale) switch
Netcraft confirms it! Flash is dead!
Despite that 90% of the earliest net memes are still perfectly playable today due to their SWF composition, it's interesting that they're (indirectly) making the statement that html5 will beat flash. I can see why, flash is a bloated, update happy, buggy, insecure beast of a program, sort of like java through the years.
Carrying your comparison to its logical conclusion, Flash will become a secure beast as Java has through the years.
I just thought it was amusing to post a headline with decline and fall both in the same sentence, when they are clearly the same thing in this instance. Should it actually have been "the rise and fall of..." or "the decline of..."?
No - you can "decline" and not "fall", so the headline is fine.
"they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper."
From personal experience this is normally due to management jumping down our throats to simply "get it done" which unfortunately runs counter to our inquisitive desires to actually solve the problem.
I suspect it's the end result of pressure to get more bang for their bucks in a tight economy, but that's pure speculation. It really could be a trend of the times.
Having witnessed this type of behavior across myriad companies and industries, I can say the rebuild/clone/redeploy approach is used NOT because of "pressure to get more bang for their bucks" - it's that it is inherently easier to do this approach than to deep-dive perhaps for days to find The Answer(tm). In an environment of thousands of servers (or even dozens), deep-diving into a problem [generally] is a waste of time. While it is interesting intellectually, there is no other benefit.
They're relatively easy to overheat and crash/burn. Just because the fan sounds like a jet engine does not mean that it's doing a sufficient job cooling.
Again - have you used a Mac recently? With the G5 iMac series, I could agree with you. That was years ago.
In my case, the customer picked the hardware and we have to live with it. Sorry, I should have been more clear and stated something more general in addition to my example. The general case is that not all performance issues can be solved with faster/better hardware and hardware replacement is often not an option. I would argue that these conditions are more the rule than exception. As a 25+ year sysadmin and system/application programmer on almost every type of Unix system known in both production and research environments, I would also say that longer-running non-compute bound applications are more the rule as well and frequent hardware upgrades are uncommon. For example, at the NYT, we only replaced our big-iron HP systems every 3-5 years and at NASA we ran our Cray-2 and YMP for many years - after all, the C2 cost 22 million dollars in 1988.:-)
My interactions with the NYT in 2008 showed they were still actively provisioning Red Hat 9 machines. Scary thought that they had applications *that* old that they still relied-on!
\When I was starting out (30 years ago)... I prefer hiring smart, trainable younger talent because they are not set in their ways yet. I have nothing against aged & experienced talent, but let's face it, one stubborn inflexible dinosaur is usually more than enough.
but then my company sent me to a "how to interview" training session. That has been the single most useful training that any company has ever given me and it totally opened by eyes. The reason it was hard was that I didn't know how to interview.
We're all waiting with bated breath to hear the next part!! Do we get a discount for calling in the next 10 minutes to learn more? Is it going to be just 3 EASY payments of $13.33?
Did I mention that Windows Servers are so freakin easy that as A STUDENT at my college the asst director of IT spent five days with each student employee playing with a particular aspect of Windows Server 2003 each day? Yeah, that easy we were familiar with it in less than seven days, and a few of us trusted enough to be allowed to work on live servers.
These are the facts that delusional FOSS promoters still refuse to believe. LAMP solution cost way more because not that many people have that skill, and those who do have inflated ego that demanded high wages.
Not that many people have LAMP experience? Really? Then why does Apache run most of the world's websites?
"study and work hard" is the biggest lie we are told growing up
perhaps true on the "study" part - but not on the "work hard" bit. And even if you're some kind of savant, you still need to study - a.k.a. learn - what you will need to do. Even Mozart didn't start off perfect.
I recently hired a new grad who came into the interview with a sample website tied to a simple sql backend she had created. She walked me through the source code and spoke intelligently about the design and areas that she had trouble with and how she solved them. I pointed out places where alternative methods would have been better and she quickly grasped my concepts and spoke intelligently about them. She had no "real job experience" but she showed a knowledge and passion for the craft.
She's Chinese. I have never once, in 12 years in IT had an American do something like this.
From my interactions, it's always been the other way around: the foreigners have demanded high-level jobs almost exclusively. The Americans have been a mixed bag.
I do tend to see a lot of recent grads all wanting the cool jobs on day one. The long grind of working your way up seems a bit outdated to them. They don't come out and say it, but you can tell from job interviews or their time actually in the job that they're disappointed.
Can't tell you how many folks I've seen coming out of college with a four-year (or even graduate) degree who want to go straight into professional services, management, or senior dev/qa work. Seriously? How can you expect to be working at a mid-to-senior level position with no experience? How do you work in services without knowing the product? Who would take you seriously as a manager straight out of school when they've been with the company for 1, 3, or 10 years?
Also, had to love the guy who told me, "why do you have tech support? If the product is designed correctly, it doesn't need to be supported." His 'resume' didn't come back from the career fair.
while it's helpful advice about the soft skills, I'd say he's perfectly justified in feeling aggrieved that his abundance of hard skills is being ignored as everyone focuses on his lack of soft skills.
hard skills == important
soft skills == vital
if you can't relate to the rest of your coworkers or your customers, you're going to fail
No they are not, as they where not valid in the -80s, back then a smaller platform (by market share) had more viruses than the other platform what had almost 90% market share.
Yes it was the old champions Mac vs PC. And Mac had more Viruses in the -80, market share has been even less than now.
The point is invalid, but few accept the facts.
Disinfectant was the first antivirus program for the Mac. It was free, and was kept around until 1998.
Personally, I haven't seen any malware for the Mac since OS X
Slashdot Mirror
Offtopic, by why are the majority of aerospace projects painted in that hideous baby puke green?
I know there must be technical reason behind it, what is it?
Note that the picture shows the interior structure of the capsule, not the final external panels. I assume that it's probably a yellow-green zinc chromate coating that is commonly used to prevent corrosion on aluminum parts on aircraft and spacecraft.
Why bother coating the aluminum? Aluminum oxide does a pretty good job of preventing corrosion.
I'm not not a specialist of any kind, but I will repeat what my college professor told the class. The USA is consuming fertilizer at a rate a couple of magnitudes higher than it's being replaced. We use quarries to supply minerals to add nitrogen to the soil. We consume something like 60 cubic miles per year. Once it's all gone, our current ways of farming will crash.
That 60 cubic miles of earth is not spread out from all over. It mostly comes from a few select areas, so those areas are depleting relatively fast.
Again, this is coming from memory and that "60" number could be a large +- percentage of error, but the idea was conveyed that we were consuming the resource waaayyy too fast.
60 cubic miles? I do like your note that the number includes a large +- percentage of error - but still. 60 cubic miles is a heroically-large volume! That would be equivalent to about 11" of fertilizer across the entire country (the US is ~3.8m sq miles)
I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:
Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER
Why oh WHY would you need a mouse on a rack-mount server?!? I can see a keyboard for the installation phase or debugging (loss of network), but a MOUSE?
You've never had to administer a Windows rack-mount server, I see.
Of course, XP wasn't released till 6 years after the movie came out...
I used an Apple bluetooth keyboard with a friend's iPad last summer
This is a marketing ploy to attract customers to a new data center. Ultimately cost will determine the layout. If a cube is cheaper then cubes it will be. If 100 degree hot aisles saves money vs an 85 degree hot aisle, then they'll run them hotter.
And who wants to invite visitors into a data center? What're they gonna see? Hundreds/thousands of das blinken lights?
Are they worth it? I have 300 win mag with a gun loudener (muzzle break) and it seems no muffs I own are up to that challenge. I end up wearing plugs and muffs at the same time.
A "loudener"? Seriously? Muzzle breaks do not make the gun "louder" - they redirect exhaust gases in multiple directions for felt-recoil reduction, and to quieten the firearm somewhat.
The variant that exists as NetLogo does LOTS of cool stuff :)
If you port the emulator to plain vanilla ANSI C, then it should still run in 100 years unchanged.
My thoughts exactly.
What makes C so great is that it was born the way it is and does not change. I have been programming in C for about 25 years now and the first programs I wrote still compile and run unchanged today.
Compare this with other languages: Fortran, PHP, Perl, Python, all have gone through major redesigns from version to version. Moving a program from version n to version (n+1) means redesign, retesting, endless debugging.
I have been programming a lot in Python recently, but if I have to port a program from Python 2 to Python 3 I'd rather port it to C instead. Just think of checking every single division in every formula I ever used to see if I have to change '/' to '//' or not.
I don't want to do all that work again when Python 4 comes.
C has changed since the initial release, and a new standard is issued every so many years, incorporating new features/strictures to the language. Compared to many languages, C is [probably] the least-changing of all, but that doesn't mean that a new version of the standard doesn't bring improvements/changes/fixes to previous editions.
I would say it's more a vote of confidence in the ability of Oracle to mismanage Java into obscurity rather than any real confidence in JavaScript's longevity.
As bad as Oracle is going to screw the official Java pooch, the other branches will continue for years - there's simply too much invested in the platform to wholesale (or even halfsale) switch
Netcraft confirms it! Flash is dead! Despite that 90% of the earliest net memes are still perfectly playable today due to their SWF composition, it's interesting that they're (indirectly) making the statement that html5 will beat flash. I can see why, flash is a bloated, update happy, buggy, insecure beast of a program, sort of like java through the years.
Carrying your comparison to its logical conclusion, Flash will become a secure beast as Java has through the years.
I just thought it was amusing to post a headline with decline and fall both in the same sentence, when they are clearly the same thing in this instance. Should it actually have been "the rise and fall of ..." or "the decline of ..."?
No - you can "decline" and not "fall", so the headline is fine.
"they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper."
From personal experience this is normally due to management jumping down our throats to simply "get it done" which unfortunately runs counter to our inquisitive desires to actually solve the problem.
I suspect it's the end result of pressure to get more bang for their bucks in a tight economy, but that's pure speculation. It really could be a trend of the times.
Having witnessed this type of behavior across myriad companies and industries, I can say the rebuild/clone/redeploy approach is used NOT because of "pressure to get more bang for their bucks" - it's that it is inherently easier to do this approach than to deep-dive perhaps for days to find The Answer(tm). In an environment of thousands of servers (or even dozens), deep-diving into a problem [generally] is a waste of time. While it is interesting intellectually, there is no other benefit.
They're relatively easy to overheat and crash/burn. Just because the fan sounds like a jet engine does not mean that it's doing a sufficient job cooling.
Again - have you used a Mac recently? With the G5 iMac series, I could agree with you. That was years ago.
In my case, the customer picked the hardware and we have to live with it. Sorry, I should have been more clear and stated something more general in addition to my example. The general case is that not all performance issues can be solved with faster/better hardware and hardware replacement is often not an option. I would argue that these conditions are more the rule than exception. As a 25+ year sysadmin and system/application programmer on almost every type of Unix system known in both production and research environments, I would also say that longer-running non-compute bound applications are more the rule as well and frequent hardware upgrades are uncommon. For example, at the NYT, we only replaced our big-iron HP systems every 3-5 years and at NASA we ran our Cray-2 and YMP for many years - after all, the C2 cost 22 million dollars in 1988. :-)
My interactions with the NYT in 2008 showed they were still actively provisioning Red Hat 9 machines. Scary thought that they had applications *that* old that they still relied-on!
Heck even McDonalds employees have WEEKS of training
Really? None of the McD's employees I've ever known had more than a few hours per position in the kitchen/store.
\When I was starting out (30 years ago) ... I prefer hiring smart, trainable younger talent because they are not set in their ways yet. I have nothing against aged & experienced talent, but let's face it, one stubborn inflexible dinosaur is usually more than enough.
Says the Old Guy(tm) ;)
but then my company sent me to a "how to interview" training session. That has been the single most useful training that any company has ever given me and it totally opened by eyes. The reason it was hard was that I didn't know how to interview.
We're all waiting with bated breath to hear the next part!! Do we get a discount for calling in the next 10 minutes to learn more? Is it going to be just 3 EASY payments of $13.33?
Did I mention that Windows Servers are so freakin easy that as A STUDENT at my college the asst director of IT spent five days with each student employee playing with a particular aspect of Windows Server 2003 each day? Yeah, that easy we were familiar with it in less than seven days, and a few of us trusted enough to be allowed to work on live servers.
These are the facts that delusional FOSS promoters still refuse to believe. LAMP solution cost way more because not that many people have that skill, and those who do have inflated ego that demanded high wages.
Not that many people have LAMP experience? Really? Then why does Apache run most of the world's websites?
"study and work hard" is the biggest lie we are told growing up
perhaps true on the "study" part - but not on the "work hard" bit. And even if you're some kind of savant, you still need to study - a.k.a. learn - what you will need to do. Even Mozart didn't start off perfect.
I recently hired a new grad who came into the interview with a sample website tied to a simple sql backend she had created. She walked me through the source code and spoke intelligently about the design and areas that she had trouble with and how she solved them. I pointed out places where alternative methods would have been better and she quickly grasped my concepts and spoke intelligently about them. She had no "real job experience" but she showed a knowledge and passion for the craft. She's Chinese. I have never once, in 12 years in IT had an American do something like this.
From my interactions, it's always been the other way around: the foreigners have demanded high-level jobs almost exclusively. The Americans have been a mixed bag.
I do tend to see a lot of recent grads all wanting the cool jobs on day one. The long grind of working your way up seems a bit outdated to them. They don't come out and say it, but you can tell from job interviews or their time actually in the job that they're disappointed.
Can't tell you how many folks I've seen coming out of college with a four-year (or even graduate) degree who want to go straight into professional services, management, or senior dev/qa work. Seriously? How can you expect to be working at a mid-to-senior level position with no experience? How do you work in services without knowing the product? Who would take you seriously as a manager straight out of school when they've been with the company for 1, 3, or 10 years?
Also, had to love the guy who told me, "why do you have tech support? If the product is designed correctly, it doesn't need to be supported." His 'resume' didn't come back from the career fair.
while it's helpful advice about the soft skills, I'd say he's perfectly justified in feeling aggrieved that his abundance of hard skills is being ignored as everyone focuses on his lack of soft skills.
hard skills == important
soft skills == vital
if you can't relate to the rest of your coworkers or your customers, you're going to fail
No they are not, as they where not valid in the -80s, back then a smaller platform (by market share) had more viruses than the other platform what had almost 90% market share.
Yes it was the old champions Mac vs PC. And Mac had more Viruses in the -80, market share has been even less than now.
The point is invalid, but few accept the facts.
Disinfectant was the first antivirus program for the Mac. It was free, and was kept around until 1998.
Personally, I haven't seen any malware for the Mac since OS X