Oh, and the other room for improvement is price of course
c) The Americans and the Russians have done the "Satellite, Moon Landing, have something survive to Mars" already. If China wants to impress the world, they need to do something different
If someone came up with a way to sent a Moon or even Mars probe with a budget that perhaps a singe university could afford for a scientific project that would also be pretty impressive, despite having technically been done before.
Not much else is interesting that hasn't been done that doesn't require some kind of FTL travel.
There is room for a lot of improvement even in the slower than light spectrum. Currently we are hovering around 1/30000 the speed of light, if we could get that up to maybe 1/2 the speed of light, it would cut travel time to some of the nearest stars down from millennia to decades. Basically bring the nearest stars as "near" as the planets of the solar system, at least for unmanned probes.
"..... and first known human artifact to enter outer space."
Werner Von Braun was a very special character. Absolutely focused on his goal, and absolutely ruthless in obtaining a way to reach it. He wanted to build something to go into space, no matter who he had to ally himself to, no matter how many people were killed in the process. His goal was never really to built a technical superior and/or more effective "weapon", though, that's just how he sold his project.
The German military wanted a weapon, so he convinced them to finance his program as a weapons project. Then the US wanted weapons, and he convinced them to finance his program. Then the US wanted to counter the Russian "Space Successes" and he again convinced them to finance his program.
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle.... built on German rocket technology.... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
When copyright "for a limited time" basically is getting closer and closer to be "for infinity minus one day" pretty soon, could you perhaps patent a "until-one-day-before-infinity-motion machine" as well, to get around that?
Corporate innovation is of course there. And I definitely only dismiss the short-sighted corporate planning of these days.
When say a hundred, fifty, or even thirty years ago an employee came up with an idea that didn't give short-term profit, but might have been a profitable thing 4-5 years from now, the chances were WAY bigger that a company developed something in that direction.
In the climate today, where everything has to turn a profit in 6-12 month or it isn't tried corporate research can of course make existing technology cheaper and/or better. But it can't really come up with really NEW stuff, because new stuff takes time before it turns a profit.
Of course market these days seems to be some sort of Massive Multiplayer Online Game played at Wall Street, which has absolutely no connection anymore to such pesky thinks like "customer" or "employee" or "reality" or stuff like that.
Pretty much. Of course, since nearly all hardware manufacturers probably also didn't bother to support DnyDNS *financially* for the feature they used to sell their product, DynDNS probably got more and more workload from those freeloaders and couldn't afford to keep the free service up. It would have been pretty trivial to have a "configuratble http request to a configurable host" in the router to update pretty much all dynamic dns providers out there. But router manufacturers seem to have chosen to cheap-skate.
(Although for 99% of people out there the one host name per router should still be enough, the few who absolutely *Need* more are most likely to also be able to pay for the better service.)
even if it is an internal app (perhaps especially so), that's just plain creepy.
It's not creepy, I have learned in the last decade that it is absolutely necessary. If you can't point to the log that user X at that specific date on that specific second on that specific machine did that specific action in your app, a lot of users will try to blame their mistakes on your app.
That's exactly why I stopped editing and adding to Wikipedia.
The problem is definitely not that the interface is hostile to people changing and adding things, it's that the entire environment has become hostile against changes and additions.
They will never bring in new people when 90% of the contributions get thrown out again anyway. If they only want a select circle of a few people contributing, then why not limit the ability to add new things to that select circle in the first place?
The original goal of the stock market would be to get *investors* to give their money that the company can *invest* in some future technology/whatever, so that the investors then get a share of that when the company makes money of that technology/whatever.
So, basically, Facebooks business plan is to take the investors money and go blow it away on toys? Yeah, that will be really great for the future value of their stock.
Yeah. It's always a better choice to just pay the guys that come along, look around, and say "Nice business you have there. Wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it?"
How exactly does one double-check, and in what way is it superior to single-checking?
Single-checking would be to check "do I have everything" before you leave home in the morning.
Double (or multiple-) checking would be to check when you leave home, before you get on the bus, before you get off the bus, before you leave the office, etc...
I'm that kind of paranoid after I lost the master key to a company I worked for for only a month ages ago.;-)
(Then of course I'm so "AH, I'm home" - relieved when I get home that I pretty much proceed to stuff the clothing with the USB drives right into the washing machine, but hey, at least no black hat gets at my data)
Oh, and the other case where this "problem" is happening all the time:
Customer has problems with a server. They clone a copy of the server into our test farm (Cloud is nice that way), but not of course when we test on that the installed certificates are not for the domain the server is now running in.
They are not "other peoples" certificates, they are certificates on test / development / experimental / management / etc... boxes in the local LAN network or private boxes of friends all over the place. No public access, you yourself access each box perhaps 2-3 times a year, and thus not a lot of people bother updating the certificates that got installed back in the days sometime. A quicker "Yeah I know what I'm doing" click-through in those cases would be *really* helpful.
But If I want a bugfix, I just want the bug fix not an almost complete UI change every month.
And I also haven't seen any "positive differences" since 3.6. The only thing I noticed so far was "where is this thing I need because I use it all the time?" "Oh, they removed it, I now need to hunt through multiple extensions for stuff that was a basic functionality once, while they ram other crap I don't need in there without the ability to remove the bloat"
I went to 4, 5 and 6, and every time it took a few days to get things back into the way I need it. I then decided going through all that again wasn't worth the effort so I staid on 6 for now, and will only update when I update the entire machine again in a few months.
>I do wish Firefox would implement Chrome’s method of auto-updating in the background.
This is actually my major beef with the rapid update cycle. A rapid update cycle is OK if nothing much changes in how something works, and the update is not disruptive. Either the Chrome approach of updating without you noticing most of the time, or the old Firefox approach of infrequent major updates work quite OK for me.
But having a rapid update cycle that always disrupts your work all the time because things change around in the UI or in how stuff works is bad. I still like Firefox basically, so I just stay on one version, disable auto-update, and do an update when I do a global update of my system every 6 month or so.
Basically any system that you answer the question "so, waddaya wana backup of?" to truthfully, and then don't change your data layout around and put important things somewhere else.
Which means people need to thing about a backup BEFORE they start setting up / installing a new system. Then it's pretty easy. Anything that gets added as an afterthought is much more hassle and a lot more prone to breaking, because of "ooops, I forgot to include that config file over there on that other share that I use." things.
Also, set up an automated backup, and when possible an automated restore into a test environment. Once you have done that you can basically forget about your backup system, until you find that you test system doesn't work.
Perhaps for *very* small businesses with not much data, or where the restore time is not a critical factor.
Even with our 32Mbit connection at work it would take about 40 hours in transfer time alone to get our data "out of the cloud" in a disaster scenario. (And part of that bandwidth would still be needed to keep other operations running, so it might even take longer) You can perhaps make small, incremental backups into the cloud, but when you need the data in an emergency you need it as fast as possible. Restore from tape took two hours. (We had a chance to do it "for real" earlier this year;-P )
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and the other room for improvement is price of course
c) The Americans and the Russians have done the "Satellite, Moon Landing, have something survive to Mars" already. If China wants to impress the world, they need to do something different
If someone came up with a way to sent a Moon or even Mars probe with a budget that perhaps a singe university could afford for a scientific project that would also be pretty impressive, despite having technically been done before.
Not much else is interesting that hasn't been done that doesn't require some kind of FTL travel.
There is room for a lot of improvement even in the slower than light spectrum. Currently we are hovering around 1/30000 the speed of light, if we could get that up to maybe 1/2 the speed of light, it would cut travel time to some of the nearest stars down from millennia to decades. Basically bring the nearest stars as "near" as the planets of the solar system, at least for unmanned probes.
Also according to the article:
"..... and first known human artifact to enter outer space."
Werner Von Braun was a very special character. Absolutely focused on his goal, and absolutely ruthless in obtaining a way to reach it. He wanted to build something to go into space, no matter who he had to ally himself to, no matter how many people were killed in the process. His goal was never really to built a technical superior and/or more effective "weapon", though, that's just how he sold his project.
The German military wanted a weapon, so he convinced them to finance his program as a weapons project. Then the US wanted weapons, and he convinced them to finance his program. Then the US wanted to counter the Russian "Space Successes" and he again convinced them to finance his program.
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle .... built on German rocket technology .... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
When copyright "for a limited time" basically is getting closer and closer to be "for infinity minus one day" pretty soon, could you perhaps patent a "until-one-day-before-infinity-motion machine" as well, to get around that?
Corporate innovation is of course there. And I definitely only dismiss the short-sighted corporate planning of these days.
When say a hundred, fifty, or even thirty years ago an employee came up with an idea that didn't give short-term profit, but might have been a profitable thing 4-5 years from now, the chances were WAY bigger that a company developed something in that direction.
In the climate today, where everything has to turn a profit in 6-12 month or it isn't tried corporate research can of course make existing technology cheaper and/or better. But it can't really come up with really NEW stuff, because new stuff takes time before it turns a profit.
... where people need something new to fix a problem.
It will never really happen at places where people want to make a quick buck with it.
By making the suggestion at the owners meeting.
We have plans to put up thermal collectors when the central heating has to be replaced anyway in 2-3 years.
Well, it probably is "good for the market".
Of course market these days seems to be some sort of Massive Multiplayer Online Game played at Wall Street, which has absolutely no connection anymore to such pesky thinks like "customer" or "employee" or "reality" or stuff like that.
Pretty much. Of course, since nearly all hardware manufacturers probably also didn't bother to support DnyDNS *financially* for the feature they used to sell their product, DynDNS probably got more and more workload from those freeloaders and couldn't afford to keep the free service up. It would have been pretty trivial to have a "configuratble http request to a configurable host" in the router to update pretty much all dynamic dns providers out there. But router manufacturers seem to have chosen to cheap-skate.
(Although for 99% of people out there the one host name per router should still be enough, the few who absolutely *Need* more are most likely to also be able to pay for the better service.)
even if it is an internal app (perhaps especially so), that's just plain creepy.
It's not creepy, I have learned in the last decade that it is absolutely necessary. If you can't point to the log that user X at that specific date on that specific second on that specific machine did that specific action in your app, a lot of users will try to blame their mistakes on your app.
That's exactly why I stopped editing and adding to Wikipedia.
The problem is definitely not that the interface is hostile to people changing and adding things, it's that the entire environment has become hostile against changes and additions.
They will never bring in new people when 90% of the contributions get thrown out again anyway. If they only want a select circle of a few people contributing, then why not limit the ability to add new things to that select circle in the first place?
Well. What should an "IPO" be about anyway?
The original goal of the stock market would be to get *investors* to give their money that the company can *invest* in some future technology/whatever, so that the investors then get a share of that when the company makes money of that technology/whatever.
So, basically, Facebooks business plan is to take the investors money and go blow it away on toys? Yeah, that will be really great for the future value of their stock.
Yeah. It's always a better choice to just pay the guys that come along, look around, and say "Nice business you have there. Wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to it?"
unimportant things
Right. Now if only someone could define what that means...
I'm onto it, but my database to catalog all catagories of "things" in existance has run out of space, and I can't seem to get any new harddrives.
So change your robots.txt so that Google doesn't index your site. Problem solved.
Single-checking would be to check "do I have everything" before you leave home in the morning.
Double (or multiple-) checking would be to check when you leave home, before you get on the bus, before you get off the bus, before you leave the office, etc...
I'm that kind of paranoid after I lost the master key to a company I worked for for only a month ages ago. ;-)
(Then of course I'm so "AH, I'm home" - relieved when I get home that I pretty much proceed to stuff the clothing with the USB drives right into the washing machine, but hey, at least no black hat gets at my data)
People who lose stuff are not necessarily more "stupid", but they are definitely more "careless"
And yes, people who care enough to double-check all their possessions lose less than people who don't.
And the people who double-check their possessions are probably also the ones who double-check their virus scanner and/or their encryption.
It has little to do with "stupid". In fact, one of the stereotypes of a careless person is the highly intelligent "absent minded professor"
*FINALLY* All the dorks vanishing into walled gardens, leaving the internet to the people who appreciate it and know how to use it.
This might actually be a good thing.
Oh, and the other case where this "problem" is happening all the time:
Customer has problems with a server. They clone a copy of the server into our test farm (Cloud is nice that way), but not of course when we test on that the installed certificates are not for the domain the server is now running in.
He probably is in the same boat I am in :
They are not "other peoples" certificates, they are certificates on test / development / experimental / management / etc... boxes in the local LAN network or private boxes of friends all over the place. No public access, you yourself access each box perhaps 2-3 times a year, and thus not a lot of people bother updating the certificates that got installed back in the days sometime. A quicker "Yeah I know what I'm doing" click-through in those cases would be *really* helpful.
But If I want a bugfix, I just want the bug fix not an almost complete UI change every month.
And I also haven't seen any "positive differences" since 3.6. The only thing I noticed so far was "where is this thing I need because I use it all the time?" "Oh, they removed it, I now need to hunt through multiple extensions for stuff that was a basic functionality once, while they ram other crap I don't need in there without the ability to remove the bloat"
I went to 4, 5 and 6, and every time it took a few days to get things back into the way I need it. I then decided going through all that again wasn't worth the effort so I staid on 6 for now, and will only update when I update the entire machine again in a few months.
>I do wish Firefox would implement Chrome’s method of auto-updating in the background.
This is actually my major beef with the rapid update cycle. A rapid update cycle is OK if nothing much changes in how something works, and the update is not disruptive. Either the Chrome approach of updating without you noticing most of the time, or the old Firefox approach of infrequent major updates work quite OK for me.
But having a rapid update cycle that always disrupts your work all the time because things change around in the UI or in how stuff works is bad. I still like Firefox basically, so I just stay on one version, disable auto-update, and do an update when I do a global update of my system every 6 month or so.
Basically any system that you answer the question "so, waddaya wana backup of?" to truthfully, and then don't change your data layout around and put important things somewhere else.
Which means people need to thing about a backup BEFORE they start setting up / installing a new system. Then it's pretty easy. Anything that gets added as an afterthought is much more hassle and a lot more prone to breaking, because of "ooops, I forgot to include that config file over there on that other share that I use." things.
Also, set up an automated backup, and when possible an automated restore into a test environment. Once you have done that you can basically forget about your backup system, until you find that you test system doesn't work.
Perhaps for *very* small businesses with not much data, or where the restore time is not a critical factor.
Even with our 32Mbit connection at work it would take about 40 hours in transfer time alone to get our data "out of the cloud" in a disaster scenario. (And part of that bandwidth would still be needed to keep other operations running, so it might even take longer) You can perhaps make small, incremental backups into the cloud, but when you need the data in an emergency you need it as fast as possible. Restore from tape took two hours. (We had a chance to do it "for real" earlier this year ;-P )