There is no "air" up there, so the only thing that slows you down is a balloon filled with a substance that is less dense than the surrounding air, which provides the bouyancy in the other direction (namely, up). So you don't need a parachute, you just need a big, light baloon filled with something that will still provide enough pull to slow you down. Once you get down to about 20-30 thousand feet, you can deploy the drogue chute... then at 7k feet the "real" parachute. It's all a matter of chosing a slowing method that meets with the surrounding environment.
The reason hydrogen or helium may not work is because the temprature up there is so low, they may partially liquify. This would have undesierable effects. Thus, the foam is being considered so that the negative impact the low tempratures have will be minimal.
Man.. I used to hang with Watson. He used to run a BBS called Starlight. I was a fellow sysop that used to run a BBS called Celestial Happenings. Props to Perry and the Ritual de lo Habitual creww, and Props to 'gazer and the rest of the DC WWiV crew.
Anyway, here's my question:
Security has traditionally been viewed as more of an architecture of denial than anything else -- stop people from getting where they are not supposed to get. However, these days security has more impetus because of the sheer amount of intellectual property that's being housed on publically accessable computers. Do you think's it's theoretically possible to ever build a 'crack proof' system? I'm famaliar with FreeBSD's track record, and use it for my firewall at home. But should the onus of security be placed on the sysadmins of the server, or on the people that make the operating system the server runs?
Can we get the judge to make people who write aimbots for FPS (Quake, HL, et al) games personally liable for wasting the time of everyone else who's playing?
The real trick is using LDAP to do single signon for both workstations, email accounts, corporate websites, etc. The breakdown occurs because the windows domain doesn't really want to sync with LDAP unless you install active directory and make it the de facto LDAP server. Of course when you install active directory for this, it also wants to be your DNS/DHCP/etc servers. Muck Ficrosoft.
If you want to run Netscape LDAP server or some Linux servers to do basic network services, you're going to need to find a utility that pushes data (on change) to the microsoft domain.
We've gotten single sign-on to work here, but it took a bit of effort and some really dedicated sys admins. So now we can use the same login/password for our desktops, our email account, and our corporate websites, all without having to manage more than one LDAP tree. I highly suggest this method as it can both cut administrative costs (by reducing the sheer amount of information), remove the microsoft takeover of your network, and increase job security (by making sure that you're the only one who knows how to maintain everything.;)
Our office has a coffee maker with a permanantly attached waterline. You put a filter in, put the coffee grounds in, push a button, and it drips into this large-ish thing (NOT a coffee pot). It holds about 30 cups, and you can interchange the "thing" so if you have a meeting you can make several beforehand. Works quite well.. and.. since it has it's own water supply, you don't ever need to fill it. It can make 30 cups in about 10 minutes. I can get you the brand/model # if you're interested.. I'm just not at work right now.:)
What about modifying an existing product that's made for racing games that comes with a gas and brake pedal? I've never used one of these, but the connect would have to be USB or PS/2. Get a USB mouse, and one of these guys, and you should be good to go. If the drivers let you bind things to keys, that is.
He's not a DJ. If he was he wouldn't buy a cluster of machines to do something he only needs to do once. I bet he's trying to set up some kind of business that needs encoded CDs for such things as streaming. If you buy a 20 machine cluster, once all the major ripping is done you can convert half or 75% of them to streaming machines and leave the other half or 25% for future ripping purposes and general stuff.
Screw the Plextor... use the Kenwood 72x True CD-ROM. Under windows 98 I can get rip speeds of about 60x-65x. The CD-ROM has a buffer of 2MB and it blocks if it's empty -- I've ripped about 300 or so CDs with it and not one of the rips has skips in it (even my scratchy old Led Zeppelin CDS).
Using this CD-ROM, the bottleneck on my p3-800 system is the encoding itself. It takes only 4 or 5 seconds to rip a 20 minute song, but more than a minute to encode it. This was your original question, though... I think the most specialized hardware you'll find for MP3 encoding (at this point in the technological timeline) is a hefty processor. Speed really counts, since it's just number crunching. I liken this to the good ole days of software compilation on 386-SX machines -- the faster your CPU the faster a program compiled. I'm sure you know, but the better quality encoding you do, the longer it takes to encode a given song. I usually use moderate/high VBR for all my songs (since I like post-processing using my equalizer) and have found that the only way to speed up the encoding is to lower the quality of the resulting MP3.
I've been using the AudioCatalyst product for about two years now, and it has been (and continues to be) the fastest and best sounding (don't bore me with comparisons of audio plots -- it's not the data that's in the MP3 that matters, it's how it sounds) MP3 ripper/encoder that I've found. CDex (http://www.surf.to/cdex) is a close second since it fits nicely on top of any encoder that you want. I've gotten comprable speed out of Cdex as from AudioCatalyst (http://www.xingtech.com)
It's difficult to express how I felt when I saw the birds working out the details of moving around and adjusting. Now presumably the birds were not sitting in any particular order... they were just sitting. So the question becomes: how do we (as humans) build a device that can take arbitrary things and just stick them somewhere without having to find out the details of specifically where it goes, or if there is room. I think that's what I was really getting at -- not so much about how to improve sorting, but how to improve read-write access.
Another brain-bender: is it possible to know the size of a set S without counting it or counting the elements as they are added to the set?
I thought of a similar problem recently while driving along. There was a bunch of birds sitting on a telephone wire. It was pretty much a whole flock. A new bird would come along and sit on the wire, and if there wasn't room where he wanted to sit, he sat anyway -- the birds around him would shift appropriately, but it all happened so well.
Extrapolate: Take the birds on a wire problem and turn it into a sorting problem. Given n things, put them in order. The problem with comptuters is that everything is digital. It wouldn't be possible to move the elements of a semi-sorted list down a little -- you always have to shift them by some number of spaces.
I think the NP problem could be more easily solved if there was some analog way to do things like sort a list. Think of it... you want to put something in a particular location, you just place it there, and the "things" around it shift a little
The birds on the wire closest to the new bird have to shift the most.. the birds on the end of the wire don't have to shift at all. I want to be able to sort lists the same way --- it'd be much faster. Sure there's a physical limit to the number of birds that can be on the wire... but remember that they can overlap a bit.
There's an idea. An analog memory system that allows for overlaps of data points without data corruption. Build me that and I'll solve your NP vs P problem.
Actually, the mine field isn't even calculated until you click a square. Your mouse click causes the field to be generated on every square save the one you clicked.
I don't buy it. By picking a site in the South Pacific, the Russians *know* that there will be *something* left of the Mir even after re-entry. I can't imagine that every part of the space station will get hot enough to disentegrate every single spore of the critters. All it takes is one... and a whole new population would form.
Ever read "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes? He writes about this gigantic hurricane (and smaller offspring) that wipes out most of the civilized world. The hurricane was caused by Algae blooms over the Atlantic that caused temperature inversions that had never been experienced before.
There's just no way to tell what the impacts of introducing a new life form into an existing ecosystem will be. I say, strap a rocket on the b ack of the Mir and send it to play with Voyager.
Does anyone know the impact of bringing biological life back down to the planet that has existed in space for over 10 years? The/. article here talked about it -- but has it been studied?
So why can't the registry buy domains? I haven't seen it writtin anywhere that the holders of the keys aren't allowed to buy and or sell them. After all, as the unix saying goes, the admin has the keys to the kingdom.
Is there any evidence that they're not releasing them to the public, or did they make a legitimate purchase. All the three-letter.com domains are gone. It makes good business sense to hold on to them.
How much reverse-engineering is necessary, then, to "find" the closed Oscar protocol? I know AIM clients can be dynamically updated upon login, so figuring out the network protocol would only work until AOL noticed -- but is it possible that only so much network tweaking is done? Do the AOL clients get dynamically updated first when you login? If so, it's pretty smart on AOL's part -- protect the investment by allowing them to upgrade vital bits of networking code on the fly -- even to legacy clients.
There are two AIM servers. One is called Oscar and one is called TOC. AIM, and the AOL client software use TOC. The other one, Oscar, is "available" to the world. If AOL really really wanted to shut down 3rd part AIM clients, they'd have to shut down Oscar. This is not what they did.
They just started looking for a client string in the network protocol. This is similar to the HTTP request header, or the MP3 stream ACK, or whatever. Find a copy of QuckBuddy (AOL's Java client), or if you're developing a client, change the name of the connect string so Oscar thinks it's getting a valid client.
Flash forward x years.. humans have developed ways for any needed drug to be synthesized by the body. Let's say it works like this... you go to the doctor to take a pill. The pill itself is not the medication, but instructions for your body on how to actually produce the medication.
So your body receives the encoded messages, begins producing the medication, and you never have to take that medication again. The pills could be tuned -- 'produce y drug for z number of days, but only when you're awake'.
<conceptualLeap>
What has been one of the leading end goals that technology has been stirving towards? The answer is 'understanding of the human body'. There's a market here.. imagine recording your dreams. Possible once we figure out how the brain works. Stephenson, Heinlein, Dick, et. al. have been writing about this stuff for years.
The other thing we're working towards is being able to replicate the human body's potential inside an artifical environment. I think this is a natural thing to do.. to want to better understand yourself and your environment. So if we were going to create a new race of things, of beings, of robots, of organisms, we'd want them to have the same capabilities we did.
So how can we preclude the fact that it hasn't happened already? How can we say for sure that we, ourselves, are not just by-products of similar beings... beings who studied themselves until they understood... and were finally able to recreate themselves. </conceptualLeap>
The workings of our bodies is nothing more than an operating system. Once we understand how it works, we'll be able to replicate it, just as we may have already been.
In order for JINI to become a success, every device needs to implement the same spec -- a spec they can't help shape. So what if you're the first JINI enabled device?... You need a second device and maybe a third for your product to become useful. On top of that, you also need the infrastructure to provide the connectivity. So what can JINI do that a Microsoft server can't? Printer sharing? Already done. Information exchange? Maybe.. but why would my VCR care what my refrigerator's temprature is?
I think the value of JINI is not that it enables devices to be connected together... but that it would provide a way to monitor all those connected devices from a central (or many) locations. The 'SmartHouse of the future' doesn't rely on the fact that everything's networked... it relies on the fact that everything can be managed from as many locations as you can think of.
I see value not in being able to connect devices together, but in putting web servers inside everyday products. Once your house is networked, you plug the device into the cat-5 outlet and hit an IP address -- the device itself provides the web server and interface.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand..
... then at 7k feet the "real" parachute. It's all a matter of chosing a slowing method that meets with the surrounding environment.
There is no "air" up there, so the only thing that slows you down is a balloon filled with a substance that is less dense than the surrounding air, which provides the bouyancy in the other direction (namely, up). So you don't need a parachute, you just need a big, light baloon filled with something that will still provide enough pull to slow you down. Once you get down to about 20-30 thousand feet, you can deploy the drogue chute
The reason hydrogen or helium may not work is because the temprature up there is so low, they may partially liquify. This would have undesierable effects. Thus, the foam is being considered so that the negative impact the low tempratures have will be minimal.
anacron
Man .. I used to hang with Watson. He used to run a BBS called Starlight. I was a fellow sysop that used to run a BBS called Celestial Happenings. Props to Perry and the Ritual de lo Habitual creww, and Props to 'gazer and the rest of the DC WWiV crew.
Anyway, here's my question:
Security has traditionally been viewed as more of an architecture of denial than anything else -- stop people from getting where they are not supposed to get. However, these days security has more impetus because of the sheer amount of intellectual property that's being housed on publically accessable computers. Do you think's it's theoretically possible to ever build a 'crack proof' system? I'm famaliar with FreeBSD's track record, and use it for my firewall at home. But should the onus of security be placed on the sysadmins of the server, or on the people that make the operating system the server runs?
anacron (aka Surface)
Can we get the judge to make people who write aimbots for FPS (Quake, HL, et al) games personally liable for wasting the time of everyone else who's playing?
anacron
trolling for a troll
The real trick is using LDAP to do single signon for both workstations, email accounts, corporate websites, etc. The breakdown occurs because the windows domain doesn't really want to sync with LDAP unless you install active directory and make it the de facto LDAP server. Of course when you install active directory for this, it also wants to be your DNS/DHCP/etc servers. Muck Ficrosoft.
;)
If you want to run Netscape LDAP server or some Linux servers to do basic network services, you're going to need to find a utility that pushes data (on change) to the microsoft domain.
We've gotten single sign-on to work here, but it took a bit of effort and some really dedicated sys admins. So now we can use the same login/password for our desktops, our email account, and our corporate websites, all without having to manage more than one LDAP tree. I highly suggest this method as it can both cut administrative costs (by reducing the sheer amount of information), remove the microsoft takeover of your network, and increase job security (by making sure that you're the only one who knows how to maintain everything.
anacron
That's the one we have. Works very well.
anacron
Our office has a coffee maker with a permanantly attached waterline. You put a filter in, put the coffee grounds in, push a button, and it drips into this large-ish thing (NOT a coffee pot). It holds about 30 cups, and you can interchange the "thing" so if you have a meeting you can make several beforehand. Works quite well .. and .. since it has it's own water supply, you don't ever need to fill it. It can make 30 cups in about 10 minutes. I can get you the brand/model # if you're interested .. I'm just not at work right now. :)
What about modifying an existing product that's made for racing games that comes with a gas and brake pedal? I've never used one of these, but the connect would have to be USB or PS/2. Get a USB mouse, and one of these guys, and you should be good to go. If the drivers let you bind things to keys, that is.
anacron
This kid is probably smart enough to do whatever he wants after college. By the time he's 30 he'll be a billionaire.
anacron
He's not a DJ. If he was he wouldn't buy a cluster of machines to do something he only needs to do once. I bet he's trying to set up some kind of business that needs encoded CDs for such things as streaming. If you buy a 20 machine cluster, once all the major ripping is done you can convert half or 75% of them to streaming machines and leave the other half or 25% for future ripping purposes and general stuff.
anacron.
Screw the Plextor ... use the Kenwood 72x True CD-ROM. Under windows 98 I can get rip speeds of about 60x-65x. The CD-ROM has a buffer of 2MB and it blocks if it's empty -- I've ripped about 300 or so CDs with it and not one of the rips has skips in it (even my scratchy old Led Zeppelin CDS).
... I think the most specialized hardware you'll find for MP3 encoding (at this point in the technological timeline) is a hefty processor. Speed really counts, since it's just number crunching. I liken this to the good ole days of software compilation on 386-SX machines -- the faster your CPU the faster a program compiled. I'm sure you know, but the better quality encoding you do, the longer it takes to encode a given song. I usually use moderate/high VBR for all my songs (since I like post-processing using my equalizer) and have found that the only way to speed up the encoding is to lower the quality of the resulting MP3.
Using this CD-ROM, the bottleneck on my p3-800 system is the encoding itself. It takes only 4 or 5 seconds to rip a 20 minute song, but more than a minute to encode it. This was your original question, though
I've been using the AudioCatalyst product for about two years now, and it has been (and continues to be) the fastest and best sounding (don't bore me with comparisons of audio plots -- it's not the data that's in the MP3 that matters, it's how it sounds) MP3 ripper/encoder that I've found. CDex (http://www.surf.to/cdex) is a close second since it fits nicely on top of any encoder that you want. I've gotten comprable speed out of Cdex as from AudioCatalyst (http://www.xingtech.com)
Yah. DC would be a good meeting. I know of a few ppl that would come.
It's difficult to express how I felt when I saw the birds working out the details of moving around and adjusting. Now presumably the birds were not sitting in any particular order ... they were just sitting. So the question becomes: how do we (as humans) build a device that can take arbitrary things and just stick them somewhere without having to find out the details of specifically where it goes, or if there is room. I think that's what I was really getting at -- not so much about how to improve sorting, but how to improve read-write access.
Another brain-bender: is it possible to know the size of a set S without counting it or counting the elements as they are added to the set?
anacron.
I thought of a similar problem recently while driving along. There was a bunch of birds sitting on a telephone wire. It was pretty much a whole flock. A new bird would come along and sit on the wire, and if there wasn't room where he wanted to sit, he sat anyway -- the birds around him would shift appropriately, but it all happened so well.
... you want to put something in a particular location, you just place it there, and the "things" around it shift a little
.. the birds on the end of the wire don't have to shift at all. I want to be able to sort lists the same way --- it'd be much faster. Sure there's a physical limit to the number of birds that can be on the wire ... but remember that they can overlap a bit.
Extrapolate: Take the birds on a wire problem and turn it into a sorting problem. Given n things, put them in order. The problem with comptuters is that everything is digital. It wouldn't be possible to move the elements of a semi-sorted list down a little -- you always have to shift them by some number of spaces.
I think the NP problem could be more easily solved if there was some analog way to do things like sort a list. Think of it
The birds on the wire closest to the new bird have to shift the most
There's an idea. An analog memory system that allows for overlaps of data points without data corruption. Build me that and I'll solve your NP vs P problem.
anacron.
Actually, the mine field isn't even calculated until you click a square. Your mouse click causes the field to be generated on every square save the one you clicked.
anacron.
I don't buy it. By picking a site in the South Pacific, the Russians *know* that there will be *something* left of the Mir even after re-entry. I can't imagine that every part of the space station will get hot enough to disentegrate every single spore of the critters. All it takes is one ... and a whole new population would form.
Ever read "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes? He writes about this gigantic hurricane (and smaller offspring) that wipes out most of the civilized world. The hurricane was caused by Algae blooms over the Atlantic that caused temperature inversions that had never been experienced before.
There's just no way to tell what the impacts of introducing a new life form into an existing ecosystem will be. I say, strap a rocket on the b ack of the Mir and send it to play with Voyager.
Does anyone know the impact of bringing biological life back down to the planet that has existed in space for over 10 years? The /. article here talked about it -- but has it been studied?
The ppl replying to my orig. post are missing the point. NSI could probably claim two things that would be impossible to prove.
1. They indend to use the expired domains internally for future expansion of the company and for whatever reason did not register them.
2. The software handling the expiration of domain names has a bug.
You prove to me that they did it on purpose. I say it was either bad code, good business, or a combination of both.
So why can't the registry buy domains? I haven't seen it writtin anywhere that the holders of the keys aren't allowed to buy and or sell them. After all, as the unix saying goes, the admin has the keys to the kingdom.
Is there any evidence that they're not releasing them to the public, or did they make a legitimate purchase. All the three-letter .com domains are gone. It makes good business sense to hold on to them.
1. Do you believe the Internet needs more regulation? 2. Does the government want information to be free?
How much reverse-engineering is necessary, then, to "find" the closed Oscar protocol? I know AIM clients can be dynamically updated upon login, so figuring out the network protocol would only work until AOL noticed -- but is it possible that only so much network tweaking is done? Do the AOL clients get dynamically updated first when you login? If so, it's pretty smart on AOL's part -- protect the investment by allowing them to upgrade vital bits of networking code on the fly -- even to legacy clients.
There are two AIM servers. One is called Oscar and one is called TOC. AIM, and the AOL client software use TOC. The other one, Oscar, is "available" to the world. If AOL really really wanted to shut down 3rd part AIM clients, they'd have to shut down Oscar. This is not what they did.
They just started looking for a client string in the network protocol. This is similar to the HTTP request header, or the MP3 stream ACK, or whatever. Find a copy of QuckBuddy (AOL's Java client), or if you're developing a client, change the name of the connect string so Oscar thinks it's getting a valid client.
Flash forward x years .. humans have developed ways for any needed drug to be synthesized by the body. Let's say it works like this ... you go to the doctor to take a pill. The pill itself is not the medication, but instructions for your body on how to actually produce the medication.
.. imagine recording your dreams. Possible once we figure out how the brain works. Stephenson, Heinlein, Dick, et. al. have been writing about this stuff for years.
.. to want to better understand yourself and your environment. So if we were going to create a new race of things, of beings, of robots, of organisms, we'd want them to have the same capabilities we did.
... beings who studied themselves until they understood ... and were finally able to recreate themselves.
So your body receives the encoded messages, begins producing the medication, and you never have to take that medication again. The pills could be tuned -- 'produce y drug for z number of days, but only when you're awake'.
<conceptualLeap>
What has been one of the leading end goals that technology has been stirving towards? The answer is 'understanding of the human body'. There's a market here
The other thing we're working towards is being able to replicate the human body's potential inside an artifical environment. I think this is a natural thing to do
So how can we preclude the fact that it hasn't happened already? How can we say for sure that we, ourselves, are not just by-products of similar beings
</conceptualLeap>
The workings of our bodies is nothing more than an operating system. Once we understand how it works, we'll be able to replicate it, just as we may have already been.
I wonder what the IRQ is for creativity?
In order for JINI to become a success, every device needs to implement the same spec -- a spec they can't help shape. So what if you're the first JINI enabled device? ... You need a second device and maybe a third for your product to become useful. On top of that, you also need the infrastructure to provide the connectivity. So what can JINI do that a Microsoft server can't? Printer sharing? Already done. Information exchange? Maybe .. but why would my VCR care what my refrigerator's temprature is?
... but that it would provide a way to monitor all those connected devices from a central (or many) locations. The 'SmartHouse of the future' doesn't rely on the fact that everything's networked ... it relies on the fact that everything can be managed from as many locations as you can think of.
I think the value of JINI is not that it enables devices to be connected together
I see value not in being able to connect devices together, but in putting web servers inside everyday products. Once your house is networked, you plug the device into the cat-5 outlet and hit an IP address -- the device itself provides the web server and interface.
I'd buy it just for Metroid. Hell, I bought N64 just for MarioKart and Zelda.