Yeah, I was not a fan either... you can't remove the chat pane, so far as I can tell (you can drop it below tags but that's it, in the older version you can blast it away completely), and if you chance to hover over it (even in its 'closed' state) you get a pop up showing you... yourself. Gee, useful, I forgot who i was:P
All the message headers get tabbed over a character or two to make space for the status of the sender - again, even if you have no desire to use chatting, and even in mailing list messages where theres a thread of 50 messages. Same thing if you happen to hover over a name in an email thread. Unless I'm missing something here...
Precisely. I have no more than $2000 in the bank at any point in time, my money is in my 401k, roth IRA, kids college funds, overfunded life insurance, home, etc. I do allright but I couldn't cough up more than a few hundred bucks at a time unless it was an emergency... the secret to being financially secure is not working for money, but making your money work for you.
Only helps the thief knowing where to go and what security level he has.
Not really, in my case anyways, I'm a contractor so I work in a mixed facility with a bunch of other companies on several projects. It's easy for a guard to flip over the badge and interrogate you. Knowing the contract and company name will not help you find my desk:) In a smaller company setting, which I guess you were percieving, you would have more limited data. to work with, but there is still data to be had. Title, tenure, etc.
I agree with you that some physical inspection by a person is the ONLY way this can be avoided. But try to convince a suit that they should hire new people for something a machine can do. Well, the machine can't, but it's good enough for standard situations.
Part of it is skewed, I guess, because I work on a military arsenal. Every car gets stopped with guys with guns, and everyone in the car hands over a badge to the guy with the gun. No badge, you turn around, and yes, they carefully inspect the badge.
I can see a small business having problems coughing up money for physical security, and large businesses trying to preserve the bottom line, but if you think about it, if your IP is truly valuable to you then spending some money on physical security is a requisite. Some people just have to learn the hard way.
I was working in a high security environment. You know, the whole thing with magnetic cards, guards sitting there and watching people going in and out of the building, timestamps everywhere, in short, the company knew down to a second where you've been all day.
A couple of things:
1) add a photo.
2) add name, company affiliation and division.
2) add personal information on the flipside. My badge has my height / eye color / hair color.
(Back when I worked for the Army, it also had things like the contract I was on, weight, etc.)
This requires either (a) modification of the card or (b) the thief to pick off someone very similar, and dress the part. Not to mention rote memorization. When I enter and leave where I work, I don't just have to wave the RFID over the door, there is a guard who physically inspects my badge, seeing if I look like the guy and match the description on the back.
That, IMO, is about as good as you can get, short of a DNA sample every time you come to work. You need to be able to match a keycard to a person, you need multiple facets to make a unique match.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
Not to mention data degradation as the needle passes over the groove for the hundredth time... it will wear on the groove.
The other advantage of a CD is that the data on a CD is precise, an exact copy of the original, and any functioning CD player will interpret the CD identically. Analog information on a vinyl LP, on the other hand, is subject to an analog input system (the needle) which will vary from player to player as to its mechanical properties, which will influence the sound it picks up from the record.
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why?
I buy video cards and computers for gaming because the console hasn't tackled my kind of game - at least not well yet - the MMORPG. Till then, it's computer gaming for me.
(and besides, the computer hardware doubles as a development platform - I do engineering programming and hardware-accelerated visualization. That card comes in handy. I really can't do that on a Wii)
While at first I hesitated to reply to "P3NIS_CLEAVER", there are a few reasons why:
1. the competition is to launch up, pitch over and translate, and land on another pad. Refuel and repeat. Good luck getting a solid engine to throttle nicely. Yes, the Army does it with pintle engines. But it is a far cry from uncomplicated.
2. Mechanics of a solid: thrust is (for a zeroth order analysis) proportional to the surface area burning. While you can make a flat burning solid (by having a cylinder with a moon or star shape cut out) and thus have a flat profile, it ain't easy - and if there is a crack in the grain, you have a thrust spike.
3. When you are trying to land by thrust vector you need precise control. Points 1 and 2, hopefully, help illuminate the reasons why it ain't easy and why the control just isn't there.
And who pays for this "free velocity"?
The earth rotates. Therefore, there is a tangental velocity at the surface of the earth due to the rotation of the earth. This velocity varies (roughly) with the cos(latitude). At the equator, if you launch due east, you get the full effect of the earth's rotation. At the poles, you get none of it. Launching due west actually introduces a penalty, as you must overcome the rotation of the earth on ascent. Now it is probably clear why virtually all missions launch due east from their respective sites (notable exceptions: shuttle to ISS, since it is at a higher inclination). There are rare exceptions, like polar orbits and retrograde orbits.
Yeah, its too bad RpK couldn't keep up with the COTS program... they had problems with investor confidence, among other things. But I suppose it's a Good Thing that NASA picked two companies to win the $500M in COTS money... not just RpK but also SpaceX. SpaceX is alive and kicking.
It is at least viable according to NASA. It has long been listed as one of many emergency landing sites for the space shuttle
Read carefully. Halifax International Airport is one of a handful of sites along eastern North America where the space shuttle could land if something went wrong during liftoff.
In other words, in powered flight in the atmosphere, the shuttle *could* maneuver to Halifax if necessary.
From orbit is an entirely different scenario. You can only land at a location with a latitude less than your orbital inclination. Now yes, for ISS return, Halifax could potentially work, since ISS is at a high latitude (51-some-odd-degrees) to accommodate for Russia. But in general you like to stay as low latitude as you can, especially when you start talking about space tourism, which implies regular occurring flights for maximum profit. Utilizing the 'free velocity' of the earths' rotation is a good thing...
polar orbits would be dumb for space tourism... space tourism implies regular occurring flights, in order to maximize profit you'd want to make the orbits as 'cheap' velocity wise as possible by using as much of the earths' rotation as possible. Lower latitudes make this possible.
What "long term investors" would prefer to have been sitting on MSFT?
Me, for one. I invest for life. I'm looking ahead to retirement, not a 1 year or 5 year return. That's short term in most investor's eyes. So far MSFT has given me a far better RoR than Apple has. (yes, I have both stocks in my portfolio).
Seriously, what "long term investors" have been holding Microsoft stock since 1986 apart from Bill Gates?
Had it in my portfolio since the early 90's. It has made a great many people rich, not just employees. Surely, you have heard of the the phrase "Microsoft Millionaires"?
1) release it to bit torrent, accidentally - what up-and-coming teenager isn't going to want to dabble in the OS that runs on 90+% of desktops on major businesses around the world? Might as well bone up and get some free experience.
2) there may be a perceived demand of integration between these laptops and the governments purchasing them.
75k, if I made it right this second, would finally allow me to have a disposable income of _any_ level. I don't know about you, but I owe craptons of money for school, and loan payments are insane. I need 65k at least to _meet bills_. So no. It does not offer disposible income.
I make just under 65k (2 years out of school)... I have a mortgage, 2 kids, two sets of student loans (mine and my wife, both of us have masters, she is a stay at home mom so we are paying both off of my income)... we pay our debts off faster than our debtors require, put a good percentage (double digits) of my income towards our 401k and have investments outside of work (Roth IRA, overinvesting in my VUL insurance policy, educational accounts for our children, etc.)... might want to take a good hard look at what you consider necessities...
Since going public, Microsoft's stock has increased by 31,848%. Apple's increased, in the same time period, by 5,500%.
Yes, the past few years have not been that good to be an investor in Microsoft stock, but for the long term investor Apple has a long way to go to catch up.
Then I would remind you that MANY more lives have been lost in the last 20 years of NASA than during the first 20.
Sure, Columbia failed a few years back and in the first 20 years we had Apollo 1, 7 compared to 3 is a lot more. But Challenger falls in neither pool, as it occured in 1986. Flight rates change. You are cherry picking dates. So let's compare Shuttle to everything prior (ie, capsules on a conventional rocket, the first 15 years of human space flight):
Now compare the two. 1/31 missions prior to shuttle resulted in death. ~1/60 Shuttle missions resulted in death.
Now, IMO, 1/60 isn't good enough, but it is better than we were doing prior to Shuttle. And I firmly believe Ares will improve on that: namely the two failure modes that doomed Columbia and Challenger will no longer exist, not to mention the pure oxygen cabin from the Apollo days.
The original designers of all that equipment have either retired or died.
Not completely - I work as a NASA subcontractor, and I work with a few people who were around for the tail end of Apollo (granted, most are looking to retire soon - but they are still very sharp). But the real problem is information rot. Think about it - all the designs and reports from the 1950's and 1960's are written in paper. Fourty year old paper and photographs. Even in the best of storage conditions, these things degrade. I've been shown original documentation from wind tunnel studies in the Apollo era, and you can't glean meaningful data anymore. The Schlieren photograps are so washed out, you can't discern the shock structures anymore. Printed plots are faded. So much data is lost. Not all of it though. A lot of it got scanned a number of years ago, and posted online. In fact, much of it is public, on the NASA Technical Reports Server.
Why bother to design a lander that runs off of sunlight and generates its own oxygen from waste products when it's going to be launched by people who can't tell the difference between yards and meters?
Even if what ruined the Mars Climate Orbiter mission can be overcome, it should not be forgotten. The analogies with the Challenger disaster are illuminating, as several direct participants in the flight have independently told Spectrum.
In that situation, managers chose to cling to assumptions of "goodness" even as engineers insisted the situation had strayed too far into untested conditions, too far "away from goodness." The engineers were challenged to "prove it ISN'T safe," when every dictum of sound flight safety teaches that safety is a quality that must be established--and reestablished under new conditions--by sound analysis of all hazards. "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" was the advice given to one wavering worker, who eventually went along with the launch decision.
Similarly, various versions of the trajectory debate in the final days of the flight indicate that in the face of uncertainty, decision-makers clung to the assumption of goodness; assertions of trajectory trouble had to be proved rigorously. Just the opposite attitude should have ruled the debate.
Other complaints about JPL go more directly to its existing style. One of Spectrum's chief sources for this story blamed that style on "JPL's process of 'cowboy' programming, and their insistence on using 30-year-old trajectory code that can neither be run, seen, or verified by anyone or anythin g external to JPL." He went on: "Sure, someone at Lockheed made a small error. If JPL did real software configuration and control, the error never would have gotten by the door." Other sources commented that this problem was particularly severe within the JPL navigation team, rather than being a JPL-wide complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was not a fan either ... you can't remove the chat pane, so far as I can tell (you can drop it below tags but that's it, in the older version you can blast it away completely), and if you chance to hover over it (even in its 'closed' state) you get a pop up showing you ... yourself. Gee, useful, I forgot who i was :P
...
All the message headers get tabbed over a character or two to make space for the status of the sender - again, even if you have no desire to use chatting, and even in mailing list messages where theres a thread of 50 messages. Same thing if you happen to hover over a name in an email thread. Unless I'm missing something here
Precisely. I have no more than $2000 in the bank at any point in time, my money is in my 401k, roth IRA, kids college funds, overfunded life insurance, home, etc. I do allright but I couldn't cough up more than a few hundred bucks at a time unless it was an emergency ... the secret to being financially secure is not working for money, but making your money work for you.
some people enjoy pain so much, they have to pay for it.
"please sir, may I have some more?"
Only helps the thief knowing where to go and what security level he has.
:) In a smaller company setting, which I guess you were percieving, you would have more limited data. to work with, but there is still data to be had. Title, tenure, etc.
Not really, in my case anyways, I'm a contractor so I work in a mixed facility with a bunch of other companies on several projects. It's easy for a guard to flip over the badge and interrogate you. Knowing the contract and company name will not help you find my desk
I agree with you that some physical inspection by a person is the ONLY way this can be avoided. But try to convince a suit that they should hire new people for something a machine can do. Well, the machine can't, but it's good enough for standard situations.
Part of it is skewed, I guess, because I work on a military arsenal. Every car gets stopped with guys with guns, and everyone in the car hands over a badge to the guy with the gun. No badge, you turn around, and yes, they carefully inspect the badge.
I can see a small business having problems coughing up money for physical security, and large businesses trying to preserve the bottom line, but if you think about it, if your IP is truly valuable to you then spending some money on physical security is a requisite. Some people just have to learn the hard way.
GoogleHancock
Too long, people will have to abbreviate it GooCock or gCock.
see++ is what Google web clip called it this morning :P
I was working in a high security environment. You know, the whole thing with magnetic cards, guards sitting there and watching people going in and out of the building, timestamps everywhere, in short, the company knew down to a second where you've been all day.
A couple of things:
1) add a photo.
2) add name, company affiliation and division.
2) add personal information on the flipside. My badge has my height / eye color / hair color.
(Back when I worked for the Army, it also had things like the contract I was on, weight, etc.)
This requires either (a) modification of the card or (b) the thief to pick off someone very similar, and dress the part. Not to mention rote memorization. When I enter and leave where I work, I don't just have to wave the RFID over the door, there is a guard who physically inspects my badge, seeing if I look like the guy and match the description on the back.
That, IMO, is about as good as you can get, short of a DNA sample every time you come to work. You need to be able to match a keycard to a person, you need multiple facets to make a unique match.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
... it will wear on the groove.
Not to mention data degradation as the needle passes over the groove for the hundredth time
The other advantage of a CD is that the data on a CD is precise, an exact copy of the original, and any functioning CD player will interpret the CD identically. Analog information on a vinyl LP, on the other hand, is subject to an analog input system (the needle) which will vary from player to player as to its mechanical properties, which will influence the sound it picks up from the record.
Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but that's just no YouTube killer at all.
Obvious to you, me, and 99.9% of slashdot. Apparently not obvious to Wired or ScuttleMonkey.
geforce 6800. A good card for its time, still serves me well in one of my home gaming machines.
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why?
I buy video cards and computers for gaming because the console hasn't tackled my kind of game - at least not well yet - the MMORPG. Till then, it's computer gaming for me.
(and besides, the computer hardware doubles as a development platform - I do engineering programming and hardware-accelerated visualization. That card comes in handy. I really can't do that on a Wii)
While at first I hesitated to reply to "P3NIS_CLEAVER", there are a few reasons why:
1. the competition is to launch up, pitch over and translate, and land on another pad. Refuel and repeat. Good luck getting a solid engine to throttle nicely. Yes, the Army does it with pintle engines. But it is a far cry from uncomplicated.
2. Mechanics of a solid: thrust is (for a zeroth order analysis) proportional to the surface area burning. While you can make a flat burning solid (by having a cylinder with a moon or star shape cut out) and thus have a flat profile, it ain't easy - and if there is a crack in the grain, you have a thrust spike.
3. When you are trying to land by thrust vector you need precise control. Points 1 and 2, hopefully, help illuminate the reasons why it ain't easy and why the control just isn't there.
in addition to the above: operator overloading, unsafe{} blocks where yes Virginia, you can use pointers.
And who pays for this "free velocity"? The earth rotates. Therefore, there is a tangental velocity at the surface of the earth due to the rotation of the earth. This velocity varies (roughly) with the cos(latitude). At the equator, if you launch due east, you get the full effect of the earth's rotation. At the poles, you get none of it. Launching due west actually introduces a penalty, as you must overcome the rotation of the earth on ascent. Now it is probably clear why virtually all missions launch due east from their respective sites (notable exceptions: shuttle to ISS, since it is at a higher inclination). There are rare exceptions, like polar orbits and retrograde orbits.
a more thorough (albeit basic) explanation
Yeah, its too bad RpK couldn't keep up with the COTS program... they had problems with investor confidence, among other things. But I suppose it's a Good Thing that NASA picked two companies to win the $500M in COTS money ... not just RpK but also SpaceX. SpaceX is alive and kicking.
And, men in kilts working the tourist stops ... Perhaps adding rocket ships to the mix will fix that.
kilts in space **shudder**
It is at least viable according to NASA. It has long been listed as one of many emergency landing sites for the space shuttle
...
Read carefully. Halifax International Airport is one of a handful of sites along eastern North America where the space shuttle could land if something went wrong during liftoff.
In other words, in powered flight in the atmosphere, the shuttle *could* maneuver to Halifax if necessary.
From orbit is an entirely different scenario. You can only land at a location with a latitude less than your orbital inclination. Now yes, for ISS return, Halifax could potentially work, since ISS is at a high latitude (51-some-odd-degrees) to accommodate for Russia. But in general you like to stay as low latitude as you can, especially when you start talking about space tourism, which implies regular occurring flights for maximum profit. Utilizing the 'free velocity' of the earths' rotation is a good thing
polar orbits would be dumb for space tourism... space tourism implies regular occurring flights, in order to maximize profit you'd want to make the orbits as 'cheap' velocity wise as possible by using as much of the earths' rotation as possible. Lower latitudes make this possible.
What "long term investors" would prefer to have been sitting on MSFT?
Me, for one. I invest for life. I'm looking ahead to retirement, not a 1 year or 5 year return. That's short term in most investor's eyes. So far MSFT has given me a far better RoR than Apple has. (yes, I have both stocks in my portfolio).
Seriously, what "long term investors" have been holding Microsoft stock since 1986 apart from Bill Gates?
Had it in my portfolio since the early 90's. It has made a great many people rich, not just employees. Surely, you have heard of the the phrase "Microsoft Millionaires"?
1) release it to bit torrent, accidentally - what up-and-coming teenager isn't going to want to dabble in the OS that runs on 90+% of desktops on major businesses around the world? Might as well bone up and get some free experience.
2) there may be a perceived demand of integration between these laptops and the governments purchasing them.
I don't need a set list to know how to ROCK!
/dons the Foreigner belt
75k, if I made it right this second, would finally allow me to have a disposable income of _any_ level. I don't know about you, but I owe craptons of money for school, and loan payments are insane. I need 65k at least to _meet bills_. So no. It does not offer disposible income. I make just under 65k (2 years out of school) ... I have a mortgage, 2 kids, two sets of student loans (mine and my wife, both of us have masters, she is a stay at home mom so we are paying both off of my income) ... we pay our debts off faster than our debtors require, put a good percentage (double digits) of my income towards our 401k and have investments outside of work (Roth IRA, overinvesting in my VUL insurance policy, educational accounts for our children, etc.) ... might want to take a good hard look at what you consider necessities...
Since going public, Microsoft's stock has increased by 31,848%. Apple's increased, in the same time period, by 5,500%.
Yes, the past few years have not been that good to be an investor in Microsoft stock, but for the long term investor Apple has a long way to go to catch up.
Then I would remind you that MANY more lives have been lost in the last 20 years of NASA than during the first 20.
Sure, Columbia failed a few years back and in the first 20 years we had Apollo 1, 7 compared to 3 is a lot more. But Challenger falls in neither pool, as it occured in 1986. Flight rates change. You are cherry picking dates. So let's compare Shuttle to everything prior (ie, capsules on a conventional rocket, the first 15 years of human space flight):
1962-1975:
6 mercury missions - 6 astronauts.
10 gemini missions - 20 astronauts.
11 apollo missions - 33 astronauts. 1 accident, 3 deaths.
3 Skylab missions - 6 astronauts.
1 Apollo-Soyuz mission - 3 astronauts.
STS - 1981 - Present:
119 Shuttle missions - ? hundred astronauts. 2 accidents, 14 deaths.
Now compare the two. 1/31 missions prior to shuttle resulted in death. ~1/60 Shuttle missions resulted in death.
Now, IMO, 1/60 isn't good enough, but it is better than we were doing prior to Shuttle. And I firmly believe Ares will improve on that: namely the two failure modes that doomed Columbia and Challenger will no longer exist, not to mention the pure oxygen cabin from the Apollo days.
The original designers of all that equipment have either retired or died.
Not completely - I work as a NASA subcontractor, and I work with a few people who were around for the tail end of Apollo (granted, most are looking to retire soon - but they are still very sharp). But the real problem is information rot. Think about it - all the designs and reports from the 1950's and 1960's are written in paper. Fourty year old paper and photographs. Even in the best of storage conditions, these things degrade. I've been shown original documentation from wind tunnel studies in the Apollo era, and you can't glean meaningful data anymore. The Schlieren photograps are so washed out, you can't discern the shock structures anymore. Printed plots are faded. So much data is lost. Not all of it though. A lot of it got scanned a number of years ago, and posted online. In fact, much of it is public, on the NASA Technical Reports Server.
Why bother to design a lander that runs off of sunlight and generates its own oxygen from waste products when it's going to be launched by people who can't tell the difference between yards and meters?
Please, now. Read this report from IEEE Spectrum. It was as much an organizational problem as a units one. FTA:
Even if what ruined the Mars Climate Orbiter mission can be overcome, it should not be forgotten. The analogies with the Challenger disaster are illuminating, as several direct participants in the flight have independently told Spectrum.
In that situation, managers chose to cling to assumptions of "goodness" even as engineers insisted the situation had strayed too far into untested conditions, too far "away from goodness." The engineers were challenged to "prove it ISN'T safe," when every dictum of sound flight safety teaches that safety is a quality that must be established--and reestablished under new conditions--by sound analysis of all hazards. "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" was the advice given to one wavering worker, who eventually went along with the launch decision.
Similarly, various versions of the trajectory debate in the final days of the flight indicate that in the face of uncertainty, decision-makers clung to the assumption of goodness; assertions of trajectory trouble had to be proved rigorously. Just the opposite attitude should have ruled the debate.
Other complaints about JPL go more directly to its existing style. One of Spectrum's chief sources for this story blamed that style on "JPL's process of 'cowboy' programming, and their insistence on using 30-year-old trajectory code that can neither be run, seen, or verified by anyone or anythin g external to JPL." He went on: "Sure, someone at Lockheed made a small error. If JPL did real software configuration and control, the error never would have gotten by the door." Other sources commented that this problem was particularly severe within the JPL navigation team, rather than being a JPL-wide complaint.