1. There are exceptions, but in general computers do simple things poorly and difficult things nowhere near that well. AI will likely be better in 30 years than it is now. But really has a LONG way to go.
2. Our primitive ancestors back in the 1950s thought lots of leisure was a good thing, not a bad thing. Perhaps having half or all of the human race unemployed will work out a bit better than the authors think.
I know perfectly well where Port Hueneme is. I lived much of my life on The Southern California coast.
You get 320 days of sunshine? Sure you do. And you're selling that bridge over there for only 5 bucks.
FWIW, Barstow in the Mojave Desert -- far from your marine layer -- gets a lot of sunshine. That's why it is surrounded with solar projects. It claims 260 clear days a year. (I'd have guessed more. Maybe they only count completely cloudless days.)
There's a table at https://books.google.com/books... that shows clear days for a number of California cities. None of them comes close to 320 days a year. I'd expect the Naval Base to come in around the same as San Diego -- i.e. 180 days a year.
Why sea water? Well, for one thing, it's the NAVY. For another if you were planning to actually use this in areas where there is plenty of sunshine (and I don't think Port Hueneme is one of those actually. Lots of overcast), fresh water is likely to be scarce.
> That is, if you're near a large supply of readily accessible water. Even with scavanging the water vapor off the fuel cells, there will be losses. And it's likely to use a lot of water to start up. Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.
I should think that saline, alkaline, brackish or waste water might work OK. They are, after all, using sea water in this installation (assuming that it works). And it's not clear that they need a lot of water.
One thing though about using it on military missions. There could be an itsy problem:
To: Attila the Hun Dear General Hun The weather here has been extremely cloudy this week and the wind has been noticably absent. We were wondering if you could put off the attack you seem to be preparing for a week or two until the weather has improved and we are able to recharge our Hydrogen supplies. Sincerely, Lt Col I.M.(sitting) Duck
> Nuclear "artillery" is costly beyond belief, extremely limited in usability,
I didn't say that nuclear artillery is a good idea. (In fact it strikes me as anything but... "You expect me to do what? Screw that, I'm going to go find an enemy and surrender") But I don't see how the artillery round can weigh much more than a few hundred kg and the system still be mobile. ie. within limits, shrinking a nuclear warhead once you have one that works probably is not anywhere near as difficult as building one in the first place.
I know next to nothing about nuclear or thermonuclear warheads other than that a modern thermonuclear warhead is pretty damn small. But I suspect that downsizing a bomb once you have one that works probably is not that big a deal. e.g. the US exploded its first nuclear weapon in July 1945. By 1953 the US was deploying a nuclear artillery system. I think it unlikely that the warhead for that was more than a few hundred kg. But what do I know?
Does this mean that we're going to see our senators and representatives doing Japanese style mass exercise sessions every morning with weights? After all, if there is one thing in this divided country that most folks agree on, it is that many of our elected representatives could use a few more brain cells.
Now and for decades to come, North Korea would be very unlikely to use an ICBM/IRBM to launch a nuclear bomb. The missile might not work and neither might the payload after being subjected to the stresses of lift-off and re-entry. Assuming they wanted to blow up Washington, DC, I should think that they would simply smuggle the warhead into the US using the same routes used by smugglers to import carload lots of Cannabis then deliver it using an elderly Toyota purchased on credit . (Be a bit difficult to repossess THAT one when the payments stop).
> Those of us who have been around long enough know damned well not to take a day-one update, because companies have become lazy and sloppy and don't find out what they've missed until some poor schmuck has it go wrong.
Probably the wrong diagnosis. It's not that (all) companies are lazy. It's that testing software is difficult at best and pretty much impossible if what you are testing is complicated.
=======
But the right prescription I think. Avoid this stuff if you possibly can. Given any luck the folks hoping to profit from it will all go broke and have to find jobs in some other sector of the economy. Something better suited to their talents and skill set. Something in food service perhaps...
Too hard to enforce. We get three or four robocalls plus one or two nuisance "surveys" every day. The robocallers almost never display a real phone number. How can the authorities track down and execute (robocalling is capital offense, right? If not, it should be) Rachel from Cardholder Services without her phone number?
> Don't you find it the least fucking bit odd that a camera made in 2015 will work with XP, works under Linux, Even works in OSX 10.4 or higher (I checked) yet it won't work in Windows 7?
After a decade plus of supporting Windows PCs, I ceased to find any Windows behavior odd. Windows is a humongous, amorphous, poorly documented, blob of code, trying to be all things to all people. I can't see any evidence that anybody inside or outside Microsoft understands it, and I can't think why anybody with a choice would voluntarily use it.
But faced with the problem, I think I'd try a VM with Windows XP or Linux. Might work and if it doesn't the OP might learn something useful from the effort. If linux is tried, look at dmesg,lsusb.and the like. Maybe there will be a clue there.
Is there anything that prevents code that really needs to write the UEFI from unmounting a default read/only file system and remounting it as read/write? Have the crazies deprecated mount and umount? And really now, how much need to write UEFI is there likely to be in any configuration not designed by complete lunatics?
"To my understanding, you can't boot anymore, at all. If we could simply boot to BIOS and reflash the firmware this wouldn't be such a big issue."
That's entirely too sane. I think you can probably scratch BIOS programming from your list of possible future occupations. You'd have to take a LOT of drugs and stay stoned in order to comply with modern practices
An even better answer would be to try the following concept: A BIOS is a simple and robust, non-writable boot system residing in Read ONLY Memory. BIOSes are small, simple, things that have to be written well since you only get one shot at doing them. Once your device goes into production, you are stuck with whatever the code does.
Note that doesn't preclude insane complexity in the layers of code that are loaded by the BIOS. Modern programming practices can live on.... just not in the lowest level of boot code.
BTW, why do folks think that a design that allows users to inadvertently irretrievably cripple hardware can possibly be secure? If you can accidentally brick the damn thing from a keyboard, what do you think hostile agents can do once they've penetrated your system?
"Total nonsense!!! The brilliant technical minds creating our computer software, firmware and hardware would NEVER (cough... sputter.. ) put users at risk"
Maybe if I practice that over and over maybe 50 or 100 times , I'll be able to get that out with a straight face.
"But the cablecos just made the Cablecards a pita to install..."
Exactly. And your cable company may simply pretend not to know what you're talking about when you try to order a cable card. And the satellite companies don't do cable cards although I've been told they are supposed to.
If CableCompanies etc drag their heels with the cards, what are the chances that their software interface is going to be reliable and comprehensible? Is it going to work with more than one OS.? Is it going to be in a constant state of flux? I'm sure the FCC means well, but this scheme better be so simple that even Comcast can't screw it up and there have to be legally binding, non-waivable financial penalties for non-compliance. And even then, my bet is that it probably won't work right or well.
"Though I would like to hear what their plans for the site are."
Plans? Why do you assume plans? For all you and I know, this is just ivy league MBAs shuffling properties with little or no knowledge of what the properties are.
Quite a lot of speculative fiction in this thread. In point of fact the US (and Russia and... probably others) had extensive experience with big telescopes in space pointed at the Earth by the time Hubble was launched. Heck Google maps satellite view can resolve cars in our driveway an a barbeque on our deck. It's a safe bet that the intelligence folk, now and then, could/can do better. Most likely lots better
(BTW, my understanding is that you need very complex adaptive optics to get clear views of small stuff on the surface from space. The optics correct for minor atmospheric issues. Same issues that make stars appear to twinkle.)
I didn't work on Hubble's optics (no one in their right mind would put me to work on optics) and it's not unlikely that I wouldn't be able to talk about exactly what went wrong even if I knew because of the probable overlap with highly classified stuff that is probably still classified. But I suspect it was probably a simple screwup. If you're interested in the official story -- which surely could be true -- see http://www.cio.com.au/article/... (Bottom line; a small procedural error during calibration resulted in the optical elements in Hubble being ever so slightly misaligned.)
BTW since no one else is likely to mention it, the Webb observatory is about a decade late and 400% or so over budget. Moreover, it's not clear that its imaging in the visual spectrum will be much if any better than the big ground based telescopes like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scheduled for about a decade from now. If nothing else the EELT is likely to be a good deal easier to tweak/repair/improve than a telescope meandering around hundreds of thousands of km from earth.
(The IR portion of the Webb device is clearly worthwhile although one might question if it is eight billion dollars worth of worthwhile).
I apologize for being grumpy. But I'm kind of tired of listening to hype, fiction and misrepresentation, and of folks continuing to buy into it.
But,but,but... Java runs in a sandbox and can't possibly be a security risk. I know that because experts told me so in the 1990s and experts are NEVER wrong.
There's surely zero chance of my changing your mind, but you might do that yourself eventually. I submit that The_Simplest_Tool_That_Will_Do_The_Job on average produces better results than One_Size_Fits_All. Think about it from time to time when you're stuck in an airport waiting for a flight that never left Albuquerque or in a traffic jam waiting for tow-trucks to clear the 97 car pileup in front of you on the motorway and have nothing better to do.
Some people seem to experience a great feeling of disharmony when data is not stored in a relational database. Never made much sense to me, but what the hell. Maybe they know something we don't.
Slashdot Mirror
1. There are exceptions, but in general computers do simple things poorly and difficult things nowhere near that well. AI will likely be better in 30 years than it is now. But really has a LONG way to go.
2. Our primitive ancestors back in the 1950s thought lots of leisure was a good thing, not a bad thing. Perhaps having half or all of the human race unemployed will work out a bit better than the authors think.
I know perfectly well where Port Hueneme is. I lived much of my life on The Southern California coast.
You get 320 days of sunshine? Sure you do. And you're selling that bridge over there for only 5 bucks.
FWIW, Barstow in the Mojave Desert -- far from your marine layer -- gets a lot of sunshine. That's why it is surrounded with solar projects. It claims 260 clear days a year. (I'd have guessed more. Maybe they only count completely cloudless days.)
There's a table at https://books.google.com/books...
that shows clear days for a number of California cities. None of them comes close to 320 days a year. I'd expect the Naval Base to come in around the same as San Diego -- i.e. 180 days a year.
Why sea water? Well, for one thing, it's the NAVY. For another if you were planning to actually use this in areas where there is plenty of sunshine (and I don't think Port Hueneme is one of those actually. Lots of overcast), fresh water is likely to be scarce.
> That is, if you're near a large supply of readily accessible water. Even with scavanging the water vapor off the fuel cells, there will be losses. And it's likely to use a lot of water to start up. Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.
I should think that saline, alkaline, brackish or waste water might work OK. They are, after all, using sea water in this installation (assuming that it works). And it's not clear that they need a lot of water.
One thing though about using it on military missions. There could be an itsy problem:
To: Attila the Hun
Dear General Hun
The weather here has been extremely cloudy this week and the wind has been noticably absent. We were wondering if you could put off the attack you seem to be preparing for a week or two until the weather has improved and we are able to recharge our Hydrogen supplies.
Sincerely,
Lt Col I.M.(sitting) Duck
As an experiment, try navigating without the GPS in Japan or China.
That'll separate the men from the boys. (at least from the boys who don't read Chinese characters).
> Nuclear "artillery" is costly beyond belief, extremely limited in usability,
I didn't say that nuclear artillery is a good idea. (In fact it strikes me as anything but ... "You expect me to do what? Screw that, I'm going to go find an enemy and surrender") But I don't see how the artillery round can weigh much more than a few hundred kg and the system still be mobile. ie. within limits, shrinking a nuclear warhead once you have one that works probably is not anywhere near as difficult as building one in the first place.
I know next to nothing about nuclear or thermonuclear warheads other than that a modern thermonuclear warhead is pretty damn small. But I suspect that downsizing a bomb once you have one that works probably is not that big a deal. e.g. the US exploded its first nuclear weapon in July 1945. By 1953 the US was deploying a nuclear artillery system. I think it unlikely that the warhead for that was more than a few hundred kg. But what do I know?
Does this mean that we're going to see our senators and representatives doing Japanese style mass exercise sessions every morning with weights? After all, if there is one thing in this divided country that most folks agree on, it is that many of our elected representatives could use a few more brain cells.
Now and for decades to come, North Korea would be very unlikely to use an ICBM/IRBM to launch a nuclear bomb. The missile might not work and neither might the payload after being subjected to the stresses of lift-off and re-entry. Assuming they wanted to blow up Washington, DC, I should think that they would simply smuggle the warhead into the US using the same routes used by smugglers to import carload lots of Cannabis then deliver it using an elderly Toyota purchased on credit . (Be a bit difficult to repossess THAT one when the payments stop).
> Those of us who have been around long enough know damned well not to take a day-one update, because companies have become lazy and sloppy and don't find out what they've missed until some poor schmuck has it go wrong.
Probably the wrong diagnosis. It's not that (all) companies are lazy. It's that testing software is difficult at best and pretty much impossible if what you are testing is complicated.
=======
But the right prescription I think. Avoid this stuff if you possibly can. Given any luck the folks hoping to profit from it will all go broke and have to find jobs in some other sector of the economy. Something better suited to their talents and skill set. Something in food service perhaps ...
Too hard to enforce. We get three or four robocalls plus one or two nuisance "surveys" every day. The robocallers almost never display a real phone number. How can the authorities track down and execute (robocalling is capital offense, right? If not, it should be) Rachel from Cardholder Services without her phone number?
Warrants? Why can't the brits just hack everyone's computers like other civilized countries do?
> Don't you find it the least fucking bit odd that a camera made in 2015 will work with XP, works under Linux, Even works in OSX 10.4 or higher (I checked) yet it won't work in Windows 7?
After a decade plus of supporting Windows PCs, I ceased to find any Windows behavior odd. Windows is a humongous, amorphous, poorly documented, blob of code, trying to be all things to all people. I can't see any evidence that anybody inside or outside Microsoft understands it, and I can't think why anybody with a choice would voluntarily use it.
But faced with the problem, I think I'd try a VM with Windows XP or Linux. Might work and if it doesn't the OP might learn something useful from the effort. If linux is tried, look at dmesg,lsusb.and the like. Maybe there will be a clue there.
"I have no idea what you are saying."
Proof that the scheme works.
"Wow, all this time I could have been running "rm -rf /" with reckless abandon ..."
You mean that you don't have a "rm -fr /" line in your /etc/crontab file? If you wish to have a secure system i think you need to add it.
Immediately
Security is too important to procrastinate about.
(And yes, I'm joking .. I think)
Is there anything that prevents code that really needs to write the UEFI from unmounting a default read/only file system and remounting it as read/write? Have the crazies deprecated mount and umount? And really now, how much need to write UEFI is there likely to be in any configuration not designed by complete lunatics?
"To my understanding, you can't boot anymore, at all. If we could simply boot to BIOS and reflash the firmware this wouldn't be such a big issue."
That's entirely too sane. I think you can probably scratch BIOS programming from your list of possible future occupations. You'd have to take a LOT of drugs and stay stoned in order to comply with modern practices
An even better answer would be to try the following concept: A BIOS is a simple and robust, non-writable boot system residing in Read ONLY Memory. BIOSes are small, simple, things that have to be written well since you only get one shot at doing them. Once your device goes into production, you are stuck with whatever the code does.
Note that doesn't preclude insane complexity in the layers of code that are loaded by the BIOS. Modern programming practices can live on .... just not in the lowest level of boot code.
BTW, why do folks think that a design that allows users to inadvertently irretrievably cripple hardware can possibly be secure? If you can accidentally brick the damn thing from a keyboard, what do you think hostile agents can do once they've penetrated your system?
"So, which is it .. UEFI is catastrophically broken, or the way it's implemented is clueless and naive?"
Why do you believe those options are mutually exclusive?
"Total nonsense!!! The brilliant technical minds creating our computer software, firmware and hardware would NEVER (cough ... sputter .. ) put users at risk"
Maybe if I practice that over and over maybe 50 or 100 times , I'll be able to get that out with a straight face.
"But the cablecos just made the Cablecards a pita to install..."
Exactly. And your cable company may simply pretend not to know what you're talking about when you try to order a cable card. And the satellite companies don't do cable cards although I've been told they are supposed to.
If CableCompanies etc drag their heels with the cards, what are the chances that their software interface is going to be reliable and comprehensible? Is it going to work with more than one OS.? Is it going to be in a constant state of flux? I'm sure the FCC means well, but this scheme better be so simple that even Comcast can't screw it up and there have to be legally binding, non-waivable financial penalties for non-compliance. And even then, my bet is that it probably won't work right or well.
"Though I would like to hear what their plans for the site are."
Plans? Why do you assume plans? For all you and I know, this is just ivy league MBAs shuffling properties with little or no knowledge of what the properties are.
Quite a lot of speculative fiction in this thread. In point of fact the US (and Russia and ... probably others) had extensive experience with big telescopes in space pointed at the Earth by the time Hubble was launched. Heck Google maps satellite view can resolve cars in our driveway an a barbeque on our deck. It's a safe bet that the intelligence folk, now and then, could/can do better. Most likely lots better
(BTW, my understanding is that you need very complex adaptive optics to get clear views of small stuff on the surface from space. The optics correct for minor atmospheric issues. Same issues that make stars appear to twinkle.)
I didn't work on Hubble's optics (no one in their right mind would put me to work on optics) and it's not unlikely that I wouldn't be able to talk about exactly what went wrong even if I knew because of the probable overlap with highly classified stuff that is probably still classified. But I suspect it was probably a simple screwup. If you're interested in the official story -- which surely could be true -- see http://www.cio.com.au/article/... (Bottom line; a small procedural error during calibration resulted in the optical elements in Hubble being ever so slightly misaligned.)
Here's a link to two decade old intelligence photos leaked in 1997. http://fas.org/irp/imint/kh-12...
BTW since no one else is likely to mention it, the Webb observatory is about a decade late and 400% or so over budget. Moreover, it's not clear that its imaging in the visual spectrum will be much if any better than the big ground based telescopes like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scheduled for about a decade from now. If nothing else the EELT is likely to be a good deal easier to tweak/repair/improve than a telescope meandering around hundreds of thousands of km from earth.
(The IR portion of the Webb device is clearly worthwhile although one might question if it is eight billion dollars worth of worthwhile).
I apologize for being grumpy. But I'm kind of tired of listening to hype, fiction and misrepresentation, and of folks continuing to buy into it.
I appear to be surrounded by slow learners.
But,but,but ... Java runs in a sandbox and can't possibly be a security risk. I know that because experts told me so in the 1990s and experts are NEVER wrong.
There's surely zero chance of my changing your mind, but you might do that yourself eventually. I submit that The_Simplest_Tool_That_Will_Do_The_Job on average produces better results than One_Size_Fits_All. Think about it from time to time when you're stuck in an airport waiting for a flight that never left Albuquerque or in a traffic jam waiting for tow-trucks to clear the 97 car pileup in front of you on the motorway and have nothing better to do.
Some people seem to experience a great feeling of disharmony when data is not stored in a relational database. Never made much sense to me, but what the hell. Maybe they know something we don't.