It absolutely was a technical disaster. The bridge's construction presented too much resistance to predictable winds - instead of being designed to allow the wind to pass through. Consultants who were called in to examine the design of the bridge before construction wanted to make significant changes; one wanted to replace the stiffening trusses with a much lighter structure.
And its collapse was no freak of nature - it was predictable. Even during construction oscillations were noted and made some people questions the structure's stability. After construction, the bridge would sway noticably even during light winds (5 MPH if I remember correctly) and the locals nicknamed the bridge "Galloping Gertie".
Do a google search on "Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse" and you'll find all sorts of further information.
it seems like slanted towards computer stuff though.
That's probably because it's the ACM Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems. That's ACM, as in Association for Computing Machinery. So, yeah, it's a little computer slanted.
But the mention of RISKS is appropriate in relation to this article, as computers are (well duh) prevalent components of many currently emerging systems, and thus future technology disasters are increasingly likely to be computer-related failures.
You mean the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse? Didn't make the list, though it certainly could have. That's still one of my favorites - I always thought of concrete as an inflexible material until I saw that footage.
I saw another example one time in the 1980's: an NFL football game where the fans at... I think it was Buffalo... were stamping their feet in unison and the upper deck of the stadium was oscillating up and down with an amplitude of a couple of feet (as compared to the stationary points of reference beneath the deck). It was a bit scary when they showed it on TV - I was afraid I was about to see a stadium collapse on live TV. Fortunately, the only thing that collapsed was the Bills, and the fans soon stopped their rowdy and dangerous behavior.
Glad someone go to that distinction before I popped off. FMC lends to almost anybody.
Even if they did make loans just for Ford cars and trucks, you wouldn't have to be a Ford customer, just a potential customer, for the inquiry to appear valid. Taking the subway doesn't shield you from this kind of fraud.
On a related subject: there used to be a great site at http://torment.ntr.net/xdm/ that had all kinds of cool xdm themes - really slick, beautiful stuff. Typically these themes were full-screen background images, paired with a modified xdm that was transparent, so that the login text appear to float over the image. Some themes also used a transparent xconsole positioned over an appropriate part of the background image. The themes were very impressive.
But one day, before I got the chance to download some themes, the site disappeared... hard drive crash or something cratered it. Since then I've looked for a mirror, or similar themes, with no luck. There was an xdm section at themes.org, but it didn't have anything interesting in it. I've come across some versions of xdm like xdm-photo, but never full themes.
Am I looking in the wrong places? Does anybody know of a mirror of the old torment site hiding on the net somewhere? Does anybody have any of the themes from torment to upload to themes.freshmeat? I'd really like to add some spice to my login screen.
Make reading the ACM's RISKS digest a part of your regular routine, and you'll hear about these kind of software-related problems and many others - usually shortly after they happen. The RISKS digest is available on Usenet as comp.risks, as a mailing list, and on the WWW at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks. A new issue is published on a semiregular basis, every one to two weeks. It's not only informative but interesting too.
Well since it doesn't make sense to put an IDS or network monitoring into a network that's already get lots of security holes, I would bet that Counterpane either can conduct security audits and help fix up the network, or they know people who do. Remember Schneier's mantra: security is not a product, it's a process. Also remember his warnings about snake oil, particularly in the post-9/11 world.
Or he could actually be a total nutcase and can't hold a regular job
Which means he's perfectly qualified for Congress!
--Jim
Re:Nothing compared to mother nature
on
XFree86 10 Years Old
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Women encrypt with a one-time pad. Then they throw away the pad.
--Jim
Re:Nothing compared to mother nature
on
XFree86 10 Years Old
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Men and women have lived in millions of years and we're still compatible.
What the fsck are you talking about? Yes, we may be compatible at the lowest Physical layer, but for those same millions of years you speak of, we (men) have also been trying to reverse engineer their (women's) higher-level protocols. We've barely broken the Data-Link layer and even our understanding there is only minimal. Compatible? We can barely keep our sockets connected. Hell, the last time I tried to ping my wife she gave me a protocol mismatch error! My Session layer with my her has been working reasonably well for many years now, but you ought to see the Presentation layer break down, especially on birthdays and anniversaries! I'm afraid, my friend, that we've got a long way to go to achieve full compatibility.
It seems... quaint. Like an abacus or a flow chart. But the reason I mention it is that people who work with paper tend to like the lights on and don't understand those of use who prefer to work with them off, or dimmed.
And if my colleagues think I'm an oddball, well, it's not the worst thing anyone's ever called me!
That's a very good idea; I had thought of trying something like that, like putting up a bead curtain or some other kind of non-door cue, but objects on the desk sounds simpler.
I hope that sphere has flat spots to make stacking easier, otherwise I'm very impressed. Even more impressive would be if he could stack the cube on the sphere on the point of the pyramid!
I find that the zone is primarily a matter of having reasonably good tools to work with (I get irritable if I'm not given a fairly recent version of XEmacs, for example) and the chance to work with few interruptions. I don't multitask well and having to constantly context switch to handle questions asked by others really ruins my zone. As I have become a senior member of staff and project lead, these interruptions have grown dramatically.
The best answer to my zone problem would be to have a door that I could shut when I'm working on something that requires intense focus, and open when I feel like I can handle a question (think of the door as a literal interrupt mask). Sadly, I don't have a door; I live in cubeland. I'm senior enough to rate a door, but there aren't enough doors to go around.
As for the lesser important elements to establishing the zone, I like a comfortable chair, a decent set of speakers or headphones, and a carpeted floor so I can take my shoes off. I hate shoes and kick mine off as the first step to getting to work. I'd go barefoot if I could.
I like to keep the lighting low, and my preference is to work with the lights off, with only natural light through my window and my pair of flat-panel monitors to light the room. Again, because I live in cubeland, it's hard to work with the lights off; even getting to work at 6 AM doesn't help because some of my lights-on coworkers also arrive early and don't understand why I want to work in the dark (these coworkers include one fellow who analyses code by printing it out and coloring the paper with many different colors of highlighter).
You laugh, but I do have a couple pictures I've gotten of people over the years... that are small (res wise).JPGs, about 400-600kb each.
Reminds me of the friend who wanted to know why his page of family photo thumbnails was taking so long to load. He was using JPEG files, and was shrinking them down to 128x128, but the page was still taking many minutes to load. I took a look at his HTML, and saw that each thumbnail was specified as <img src="p000001.jpg" width="128" height="96">, etc. The trouble was that p0000001.jpg was the full-resolution image! Each one weighed about 500K. He had "shrunk" them by changing the width and height in the img tag - in other words, the browsers were downloading twelve or so full-size images then scaling them into thumbnails. The good part was that clicking on a thumbnail, to see the full image, was instantaneous as the full image was already in the browser's cache.
I didn't have the heart to tell him how clueless his page was.
I would also like the ability to fly, bend metal objects with my mind, and understand women.
To bastardize the words of the late great Douglas Adams:
There is a theory which states that if men ever succeed in understanding women, they will instantly disappear and be replaced with something even more bizarre inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
As I said, it's a nitpick, but Redstone is not technically part of Huntsville, though it is cheek-to-jowl up against it. I think of Redstone as being largely to the west of town, at least the parts of town I used to frequent; it's also south of the area you mention: UAH and the research park. Gates to the Arsenal are distributed all across the city. I used to use the gate on south parkway, down near the river, back in my co-op days at what was then called the MICOM Research Directorate.
NASA is located on Redstone Arsenal and is technically not part of Huntsville, but that would be nitpicking. (Redstone is also home to the US Army's Missile Command, MICOM). One of the early rockets developed at MSFC was the Redstone Rocket, named for the arsenal and developed by Wernher von Braun and his team. A version of the Redstone called the Jupiter C launched the USA's first satellite into orbit, and Mercury Redstones launched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into suborbital flights prior to John Glenn's first orbital flight.
So all this history has me wondering: do the UAH students call it the "Graystone" rocket?
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film).
But this sounds like a situation where a digital camera is better suited. The purpose of this is not to create single great photos, where film is still much better suited, but to create a series of photos to be strung together and viewed as an animation or hypermedia/nonlinear form.
Connect the digital camera to a laptop, and let the laptop monitor the odometer. The computer can click off the photos at the appropriate intervals, download them, and rescale them on the fly (for f in *.jpg; do djpeg $f | pnmscale -xy 640 480 | cjpeg -q 85 > s-$f && rm $f; done). Or with sufficient disk space, you might not need to rescale the photos. At any rate, let the computer manage the image acquisition - never stop to change film, never fill up the camera's flash memory, and stop only for gas and Dr Pepper.
As someone who loves to make timelapses with my Kodak DC290, I have actually though of doing something like this - mounting the camera in the car and programming it to take photos every 30 to 60 seconds. Syncing to the odometer is a cool touch!
I stand corrected, and gladly so! I knew that it had gone out of print some time back, but I didn't know it had been resurrected. Very good news, indeed. I don't spend much time browsing the newsstands these days, but I may stop at one on my way home today.
bash$ telnet www.wehavethewayout.com 80 Trying 130.94.214.143... Connected to www.wehavethewayout.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.wehavethewayout.com
Slashdot Mirror
It absolutely was a technical disaster. The bridge's construction presented too much resistance to predictable winds - instead of being designed to allow the wind to pass through. Consultants who were called in to examine the design of the bridge before construction wanted to make significant changes; one wanted to replace the stiffening trusses with a much lighter structure.
And its collapse was no freak of nature - it was predictable. Even during construction oscillations were noted and made some people questions the structure's stability. After construction, the bridge would sway noticably even during light winds (5 MPH if I remember correctly) and the locals nicknamed the bridge "Galloping Gertie".
Do a google search on "Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse" and you'll find all sorts of further information.
--Jim
it seems like slanted towards computer stuff though.
That's probably because it's the ACM Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems. That's ACM, as in Association for Computing Machinery. So, yeah, it's a little computer slanted.
But the mention of RISKS is appropriate in relation to this article, as computers are (well duh) prevalent components of many currently emerging systems, and thus future technology disasters are increasingly likely to be computer-related failures.
--Jim
but does it have that bridge on the list
You mean the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse? Didn't make the list, though it certainly could have. That's still one of my favorites - I always thought of concrete as an inflexible material until I saw that footage.
I saw another example one time in the 1980's: an NFL football game where the fans at... I think it was Buffalo... were stamping their feet in unison and the upper deck of the stadium was oscillating up and down with an amplitude of a couple of feet (as compared to the stationary points of reference beneath the deck). It was a bit scary when they showed it on TV - I was afraid I was about to see a stadium collapse on live TV. Fortunately, the only thing that collapsed was the Bills, and the fans soon stopped their rowdy and dangerous behavior.
--Jim
...you can sure i wont be voting for that bastard when his term runs up...
Not voting for Lott could mean that you're voting for an opponent or that you're not voting at all. I hope you choose the former over the latter.
--Jim
Glad someone go to that distinction before I popped off. FMC lends to almost anybody.
Even if they did make loans just for Ford cars and trucks, you wouldn't have to be a Ford customer, just a potential customer, for the inquiry to appear valid. Taking the subway doesn't shield you from this kind of fraud.
--Jim
I never exactly thought Trinity was too hot. I just don't go for the anorexic chick look...
It's not the look, dude, it's the attitude. It's the attitude.
There is no spoon.
--Jim
On a related subject: there used to be a great site at http://torment.ntr.net/xdm/ that had all kinds of cool xdm themes - really slick, beautiful stuff. Typically these themes were full-screen background images, paired with a modified xdm that was transparent, so that the login text appear to float over the image. Some themes also used a transparent xconsole positioned over an appropriate part of the background image. The themes were very impressive.
But one day, before I got the chance to download some themes, the site disappeared... hard drive crash or something cratered it. Since then I've looked for a mirror, or similar themes, with no luck. There was an xdm section at themes.org, but it didn't have anything interesting in it. I've come across some versions of xdm like xdm-photo, but never full themes.
Am I looking in the wrong places? Does anybody know of a mirror of the old torment site hiding on the net somewhere? Does anybody have any of the themes from torment to upload to themes.freshmeat? I'd really like to add some spice to my login screen.
--Jim
Make reading the ACM's RISKS digest a part of your regular routine, and you'll hear about these kind of software-related problems and many others - usually shortly after they happen. The RISKS digest is available on Usenet as comp.risks, as a mailing list, and on the WWW at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks. A new issue is published on a semiregular basis, every one to two weeks. It's not only informative but interesting too.
--Jim
What's so special about the cheese makers?
It's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
-- Monty Python, Life of Brian
I don't know if counterpane.com does audits...
Well since it doesn't make sense to put an IDS or network monitoring into a network that's already get lots of security holes, I would bet that Counterpane either can conduct security audits and help fix up the network, or they know people who do. Remember Schneier's mantra: security is not a product, it's a process. Also remember his warnings about snake oil, particularly in the post-9/11 world.
--Jim
Or he could actually be a total nutcase and can't hold a regular job
Which means he's perfectly qualified for Congress!
--Jim
Women encrypt with a one-time pad. Then they throw away the pad.
--Jim
Men and women have lived in millions of years and we're still compatible.
What the fsck are you talking about? Yes, we may be compatible at the lowest Physical layer, but for those same millions of years you speak of, we (men) have also been trying to reverse engineer their (women's) higher-level protocols. We've barely broken the Data-Link layer and even our understanding there is only minimal. Compatible? We can barely keep our sockets connected. Hell, the last time I tried to ping my wife she gave me a protocol mismatch error! My Session layer with my her has been working reasonably well for many years now, but you ought to see the Presentation layer break down, especially on birthdays and anniversaries! I'm afraid, my friend, that we've got a long way to go to achieve full compatibility.
--Jim
What, that seems weird to you?
It seems... quaint. Like an abacus or a flow chart. But the reason I mention it is that people who work with paper tend to like the lights on and don't understand those of use who prefer to work with them off, or dimmed.
And if my colleagues think I'm an oddball, well, it's not the worst thing anyone's ever called me!
--Jim
That's a very good idea; I had thought of trying something like that, like putting up a bead curtain or some other kind of non-door cue, but objects on the desk sounds simpler.
I hope that sphere has flat spots to make stacking easier, otherwise I'm very impressed. Even more impressive would be if he could stack the cube on the sphere on the point of the pyramid!
--Jim
I find that the zone is primarily a matter of having reasonably good tools to work with (I get irritable if I'm not given a fairly recent version of XEmacs, for example) and the chance to work with few interruptions. I don't multitask well and having to constantly context switch to handle questions asked by others really ruins my zone. As I have become a senior member of staff and project lead, these interruptions have grown dramatically.
The best answer to my zone problem would be to have a door that I could shut when I'm working on something that requires intense focus, and open when I feel like I can handle a question (think of the door as a literal interrupt mask). Sadly, I don't have a door; I live in cubeland. I'm senior enough to rate a door, but there aren't enough doors to go around.
As for the lesser important elements to establishing the zone, I like a comfortable chair, a decent set of speakers or headphones, and a carpeted floor so I can take my shoes off. I hate shoes and kick mine off as the first step to getting to work. I'd go barefoot if I could.
I like to keep the lighting low, and my preference is to work with the lights off, with only natural light through my window and my pair of flat-panel monitors to light the room. Again, because I live in cubeland, it's hard to work with the lights off; even getting to work at 6 AM doesn't help because some of my lights-on coworkers also arrive early and don't understand why I want to work in the dark (these coworkers include one fellow who analyses code by printing it out and coloring the paper with many different colors of highlighter).
--Jim
You laugh, but I do have a couple pictures I've gotten of people over the years ... that are small (res wise) .JPGs, about 400-600kb each.
Reminds me of the friend who wanted to know why his page of family photo thumbnails was taking so long to load. He was using JPEG files, and was shrinking them down to 128x128, but the page was still taking many minutes to load. I took a look at his HTML, and saw that each thumbnail was specified as <img src="p000001.jpg" width="128" height="96">, etc. The trouble was that p0000001.jpg was the full-resolution image! Each one weighed about 500K. He had "shrunk" them by changing the width and height in the img tag - in other words, the browsers were downloading twelve or so full-size images then scaling them into thumbnails. The good part was that clicking on a thumbnail, to see the full image, was instantaneous as the full image was already in the browser's cache.
I didn't have the heart to tell him how clueless his page was.
--Jim
Google's defense: I know NOTH-ing. I see NOTH-ing. I hear NOTH-ing...
Germans will believe that, right?
To bastardize the words of the late great Douglas Adams:
--Jim
As I said, it's a nitpick, but Redstone is not technically part of Huntsville, though it is cheek-to-jowl up against it. I think of Redstone as being largely to the west of town, at least the parts of town I used to frequent; it's also south of the area you mention: UAH and the research park. Gates to the Arsenal are distributed all across the city. I used to use the gate on south parkway, down near the river, back in my co-op days at what was then called the MICOM Research Directorate.
--Jim
OK, so it's been twenty years since I worked there as a co-op, so maybe a few things have changed.
"Huntsvegas"... I love it. We used to called it Huntspatch - probably bastardized from Lil Albert.
I considered going to UAH, but for me UAH would have been the University At Home.
--Jim
NASA is located on Redstone Arsenal and is technically not part of Huntsville, but that would be nitpicking. (Redstone is also home to the US Army's Missile Command, MICOM). One of the early rockets developed at MSFC was the Redstone Rocket, named for the arsenal and developed by Wernher von Braun and his team. A version of the Redstone called the Jupiter C launched the USA's first satellite into orbit, and Mercury Redstones launched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into suborbital flights prior to John Glenn's first orbital flight.
So all this history has me wondering: do the UAH students call it the "Graystone" rocket?
--Jim
The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film).
But this sounds like a situation where a digital camera is better suited. The purpose of this is not to create single great photos, where film is still much better suited, but to create a series of photos to be strung together and viewed as an animation or hypermedia/nonlinear form.
Connect the digital camera to a laptop, and let the laptop monitor the odometer. The computer can click off the photos at the appropriate intervals, download them, and rescale them on the fly (for f in *.jpg; do djpeg $f | pnmscale -xy 640 480 | cjpeg -q 85 > s-$f && rm $f; done). Or with sufficient disk space, you might not need to rescale the photos. At any rate, let the computer manage the image acquisition - never stop to change film, never fill up the camera's flash memory, and stop only for gas and Dr Pepper.
As someone who loves to make timelapses with my Kodak DC290, I have actually though of doing something like this - mounting the camera in the car and programming it to take photos every 30 to 60 seconds. Syncing to the odometer is a cool touch!
--Jim
Games Magazine is still going strong
I stand corrected, and gladly so! I knew that it had gone out of print some time back, but I didn't know it had been resurrected. Very good news, indeed. I don't spend much time browsing the newsstands these days, but I may stop at one on my way home today.
--Jim
On the other hand:
bash$ telnet www.wehavethewayout.com 80
Trying 130.94.214.143...
Connected to www.wehavethewayout.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wehavethewayout.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
Content-Location: http://www.wehavethewayout.com/index.html
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 14:16:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 22:54:12 GMT
ETag: "575c4824d0d9c11:4a6b5"
Content-Length: 9766
Is Netcraft returning cached information?
--Jim