According to the UPS web site, international shipments are automatically insured for $100, and if you want more, you have to declare the shipment's value and pay an additional premium. This matches my experience shipping within the US (I recently shipped a PC to a friend and of course I bought the additional insurance).
So when you say that UPS doesn't insure, what you mean is that you neglected to ask for or buy insurance. Did you assume that you shipment was insured, or did you just forget to ask?
I'm sorry that your PC got busted up, dude, but face it: you screwed up.
It didn't invalidate the story, but it made Wu's remark about studying sunspots less dramatic. Niven might have changed Wu's remark... or maybe not. Ringworld was going to crash into its sun, and the shadow squares before that, regardless. What strikes me as odd is that, of all the things in that story that could be affected by technological progress in the real world, the study of sunspot interiors is probably one of the last I'd pick.
The point about Asimov's slide rule is a good one. I've always found it interesting that Asimov's people read books on "spools" of magnetized wire. How 1950's does that seem?
In Ringworld Engineers, when Louis Wu describes the Hindmost's fate aboard the unstable structure as the chance to "Study sunspots from underneath," the Puppeteer, instead of rolling up into a ball, could simply have replied "We already have that technology; your people invented it years ago." Of course that was hardly the point, as the Hindmost, Wu, Chmee, and all the Ringworld population appear to be doomed when it would crash into its sun. But it brings up the question: there any science fiction written during the sixties and seventies that hasn't been outdated or at least modified in some way by the constant march of science reality?
disinformation is also sent via coded messages on occasion, so you need to make sure that the message was accurate before you deploy forces.
That hadn't occurred to me - at least not in this context. My understanding is that the Germans were so confident in the security of Enigma that they would have considered disinformation unnecessary.
You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.
The Allies were very careful to disguise the source of their knowledge. A target was never struck without first sending out a reconnaissance mission and letting the Germans spot it. Or so the pop-history sources say. You can also read about this sort of thing in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
Where's EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System that Eric Raymond wrote about no too long ago? OppcOS sounds a lot like it - saves its entire state to disk periodically, has no "file systems" - but in a quick peruse of the OppcOS site, I couldn't find any mention of whether the two are/were related. EROS sounded very promising, and unless its development has been abandoned, should have been on this list. (EROS used to have a web site, whose URL I cannot remember - obvious guesses like www.eros.org seem to be pr0n sites.)
I have 100gigs of drive space.. about 95% used.. very little of it holding easy to restore stuff like installed programs.. backing up on Zip or cd-r isn't really an option with so much data.
So buy a couple more "60 giggers" and use them exclusively for backups. Devise a backup plan. Script it. Use cron to run it in the middle of the night every night. The odds of a disk and its backup failing simultaneously are small, unless maybe your house burns down. If you're worried about that, then get a second pair of drives for off-site backups. Swap the onsite and offsite drives once a month (mount each pair in an external enclosure to make this easier). If your data is really irreplaceable, then the cost of four new hard drives and enclosures shouldn't be that big a deal.
The hardest part is in not yielding to the temptation to use that 120 gigabytes for primary storage. But discipline is part of any successful backup strategy... get used to it.
This past January I had my main hard disk fail - a 9GB SCSI2 Quantum something or other. It wasn't very old and had shown no sign of trouble until one morning I got up and it was deader than Jacob Marley. I lost my main linux partition as well as over three years of digital photos of my wife, kids, and extended family. Fortunately, I had a backup on 8mm tape but restoring it was a major pain in the ass.
It was gratifying to be able to recover from the loss of a drive, but I wanted it to be a whole lot easier. So when I replaced my primary drive with an 18GB SCSI160 drive, I also bought a 40GB ATA-100 drive that I use exclusively for backups. I scripted a cron job to make a full backup the first of each month, and incrementals on other days. I also keep a "hot" copy of the linux partition - fully expanded and ready to boot.
I don't use hard drives for off-site backup. I still do an occasional backup on 8mm tape, take those to work, and lock them in my desk.
Yeah, but read IBM's report of the "benchmark". (It was a 400,000-user test; the 2 million quoted in the articles is an extrapolation of that number.) The test performed was to measure the overall system load, not just that of Sendmail. The IBM writeup says that the simulated users were accessing their e-mail via POP clients. The point was to demonstrate the scalability of the whole system, Sendmail included.
Yes, I remember that book, the first I ever read on a computer (an Apple Hypercard stack), and I'd love to find a copy somewhere.
As I remember it, the unpiloted planes in David's Sling were smaller craft more like the remotely piloted vehicles already in use by the US military. What made Steigler's unpiloted planes devastating in his book was that they were autonomous - using computer AI to find and attack their targets. I seem to remember they used analysis of battlefield radio transmissions to locate and take out the commanders.
But that could all be wrong - it's been a very long time since I read the book. Would love a chance to read it again but it's out of print.
You're original statement said that/. didn't cover anything at all
Actually, I didn't say that. I said that Slashdot was missing in action during the planning of the protests - that they didn't follow the free-sklyarov list and that Hemos was waiting for someone else to submit a "good enough" story. Hemos made that comment Monday, long past the time that Slashdot should have been writing its own stories about the protests and when and where they were scheduled. They didn't have that information Friday because it was in flux over the weekend. I stand by what I said: Slashdot should have taken the lead on this story.
Stop bitching and become part of the solution.
I've already donated $100 to EFF to support their work on the case. I challenge you and everybody else posting here to give them at least as much. Give what you can, or give till it hurts, but give something. This is important.
Of course it's not wrong. If you're going to bitch about the quality of my posts, at least try to understand what I'm saying: Slashdot posted that the protests were on hold at the request of the EFF, and let that comment stand until eventually enough readers of the free-sklyarov mailing list wrote in to correct them.
Then they sat idle, waiting for someone else to cover the protest plans for them. Some members of the free-sklyarov mailing list submitted stories, but Hemos rejected them as "not good enough". Why didn't Slashdot have someone reading that list first-hand? Why didn't Slashdot post a Saturday or Sunday story describing where and when the protests were scheduled?
They dropped the ball on this one, especially for a site that claims to be about "Stuff that Matters".
If you would bother to READ those stories, you'd see the last thing Slashdot had to say on the matter was
Update: 07/20 11:25 PM by H : Thanks to all the folks who e-mailed me; the EFF is asking for the protests to be put on hold, but from what I've seen in my inbox, the protests are still being planned. To reinforce this: The EFF is asking to hold off on the protests, but planners are still moving ahead with this.
THREE DAYS AGO. Meanwhile, the organizers were desperately trying to get out the word that the protests were still on, while for several hours on Sunday, Slashdot's last word on the matter was "Protests on Hold". When they finally, correctly, pointed out that the protests were still on, they should have done so with a new story, new headline.
Where was the Slashdot story on "Free Dmitra / Anti-DMCA protests scheduled at the following times, following places..."? Where was the Slashdot headline "Protests Go On Without EFF"? Slashdot should have been out front on this one, not trailing along behind like the news services.
If you would bother to READ the free-sklyarov mailing list you'd see other people saying the same thing: "Where is Slashdot?"
It's ignorant morons like you that post kneejerk followups without bothering to actually READ anything that junk up slashdot with useless comments.
Where was Slashdot when these protests were
being planned on the free-sklyarov list, when
the Slashdot publicity might have generated
even greater turn-out? Hemos mailed one of the
list members to say that Slashdot wasn't covering it
because no one had submitted a good enough story.
Excuse me? Did I hear that right? The Slashdot
editorial staff that has enough free time to cover opening
day at every half-assed movie of the summer
doesn't have enough time to cover the organization
of the Anti-DMCA protests, and is just sitting
around waiting for someone else to submit
a "good enough" story?
What about "Stuff That Matters"? If this issue
doesn't matter - then what does? Are you guys
too busy planning your coverage if the opening
of "Planet of the Apes" later this week?
I beleive that was ripped from a Simpson's episode. Very funny, but you should have given some credit.
Of course, he DID say it was courtesy the Simpsons.
That Ape musical is one of the richest bits of parody the Simpsons has ever produced, and it's one I point to when I want to illustrate that the Simpsons isn't just comedy - it's social commentary.
If you're actually following the free-sklyarov list, you'll note that person after person has been writing to reject the idea of putting off the protests. If that's any indication, then they will go on as planned, though perhaps without the EFF. I can understand why the EFF chose to ask for the postponement, though I bet they're secretly hoping the protests will occur anyway.
Complacency over the space program is nothing new. Back in 1986, successful shuttle launches had become so commonplace that the major networks no longer covered them live. CNN was the only channel still giving launches live TV coverage, and as a consequence scooped their competition when STS-51L went tragically wrong and we lost the Challenger and her crew. Fifteen years later we're in the midst of one of the busiest years ever for shuttle launches... and how many of you know that we successfully launched Atlantis early this morning?
Slashdot Mirror
2. Needed fast sampling
Don't forget the sample-and-hold circuit!
--Jim
Decent origami paper and a couple of books on the subject.
h tml
r igami.html
Paper critters are indeed cool, but the well-rounded geek also needs to know how make unit origami:
http://www.pro.or.jp/~fuji/origami/unit.star-eng.
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/pics/origami/o
And BTW, I'd love to know how to fold your Pierson's Puppeteer!
--Jim
Ginger. Yeah, that was IT.
Personally, I prefer Mary Ann.
Remember: every time you buy over the internet, an angel gets his wings.
Attaboy Clarence!
According to the UPS web site, international shipments are automatically insured for $100, and if you want more, you have to declare the shipment's value and pay an additional premium. This matches my experience shipping within the US (I recently shipped a PC to a friend and of course I bought the additional insurance).
So when you say that UPS doesn't insure, what you mean is that you neglected to ask for or buy insurance. Did you assume that you shipment was insured, or did you just forget to ask?
I'm sorry that your PC got busted up, dude, but face it: you screwed up.
--Jim
It didn't invalidate the story, but it made Wu's remark about studying sunspots less dramatic. Niven might have changed Wu's remark... or maybe not. Ringworld was going to crash into its sun, and the shadow squares before that, regardless. What strikes me as odd is that, of all the things in that story that could be affected by technological progress in the real world, the study of sunspot interiors is probably one of the last I'd pick.
The point about Asimov's slide rule is a good one. I've always found it interesting that Asimov's people read books on "spools" of magnetized wire. How 1950's does that seem?
--Jim
In Ringworld Engineers, when Louis Wu describes the Hindmost's fate aboard the unstable structure as the chance to "Study sunspots from underneath," the Puppeteer, instead of rolling up into a ball, could simply have replied "We already have that technology; your people invented it years ago." Of course that was hardly the point, as the Hindmost, Wu, Chmee, and all the Ringworld population appear to be doomed when it would crash into its sun. But it brings up the question: there any science fiction written during the sixties and seventies that hasn't been outdated or at least modified in some way by the constant march of science reality?
--Jim
Wouldn't the more appropriate name be "winux"?
--Jim
I totally agree about Dell Inspirons being total crap.
Which model? I have an Inspiron 3700. Other than a stuck pixel in the extreme upper-left corner of the display, it's worked flawlessly for two years.
--Jim
disinformation is also sent via coded messages on occasion, so you need to make sure that the message was accurate before you deploy forces.
That hadn't occurred to me - at least not in this context. My understanding is that the Germans were so confident in the security of Enigma that they would have considered disinformation unnecessary.
--Jim
You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.
The Allies were very careful to disguise the source of their knowledge. A target was never struck without first sending out a reconnaissance mission and letting the Germans spot it. Or so the pop-history sources say. You can also read about this sort of thing in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
--Jim
Where's EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System that Eric Raymond wrote about no too long ago? OppcOS sounds a lot like it - saves its entire state to disk periodically, has no "file systems" - but in a quick peruse of the OppcOS site, I couldn't find any mention of whether the two are/were related. EROS sounded very promising, and unless its development has been abandoned, should have been on this list. (EROS used to have a web site, whose URL I cannot remember - obvious guesses like www.eros.org seem to be pr0n sites.)
Little help?
--Jim
I have 100gigs of drive space.. about 95% used.. very little of it holding easy to restore stuff like installed programs.. backing up on Zip or cd-r isn't really an option with so much data.
So buy a couple more "60 giggers" and use them exclusively for backups. Devise a backup plan. Script it. Use cron to run it in the middle of the night every night. The odds of a disk and its backup failing simultaneously are small, unless maybe your house burns down. If you're worried about that, then get a second pair of drives for off-site backups. Swap the onsite and offsite drives once a month (mount each pair in an external enclosure to make this easier). If your data is really irreplaceable, then the cost of four new hard drives and enclosures shouldn't be that big a deal.
The hardest part is in not yielding to the temptation to use that 120 gigabytes for primary storage. But discipline is part of any successful backup strategy... get used to it.
This past January I had my main hard disk fail - a 9GB SCSI2 Quantum something or other. It wasn't very old and had shown no sign of trouble until one morning I got up and it was deader than Jacob Marley. I lost my main linux partition as well as over three years of digital photos of my wife, kids, and extended family. Fortunately, I had a backup on 8mm tape but restoring it was a major pain in the ass.
It was gratifying to be able to recover from the loss of a drive, but I wanted it to be a whole lot easier. So when I replaced my primary drive with an 18GB SCSI160 drive, I also bought a 40GB ATA-100 drive that I use exclusively for backups. I scripted a cron job to make a full backup the first of each month, and incrementals on other days. I also keep a "hot" copy of the linux partition - fully expanded and ready to boot.
I don't use hard drives for off-site backup. I still do an occasional backup on 8mm tape, take those to work, and lock them in my desk.
--Jim
Have your wife/Girlfriend/SO open it. She will remove a woman's sock that isn't hers, and disappear.
But, of course, her disappearance is far more conventional and easy to explain.
--Jim
Yeah, but read IBM's report of the "benchmark". (It was a 400,000-user test; the 2 million quoted in the articles is an extrapolation of that number.) The test performed was to measure the overall system load, not just that of Sendmail. The IBM writeup says that the simulated users were accessing their e-mail via POP clients. The point was to demonstrate the scalability of the whole system, Sendmail included.
--Jim
Yes, I remember that book, the first I ever read on a computer (an Apple Hypercard stack), and I'd love to find a copy somewhere.
As I remember it, the unpiloted planes in David's Sling were smaller craft more like the remotely piloted vehicles already in use by the US military. What made Steigler's unpiloted planes devastating in his book was that they were autonomous - using computer AI to find and attack their targets. I seem to remember they used analysis of battlefield radio transmissions to locate and take out the commanders.
But that could all be wrong - it's been a very long time since I read the book. Would love a chance to read it again but it's out of print.
--Jim
Oh, sure, Blame It On Cain .
You're original statement said that /. didn't cover anything at all
Actually, I didn't say that. I said that Slashdot was missing in action during the planning of the protests - that they didn't follow the free-sklyarov list and that Hemos was waiting for someone else to submit a "good enough" story. Hemos made that comment Monday, long past the time that Slashdot should have been writing its own stories about the protests and when and where they were scheduled. They didn't have that information Friday because it was in flux over the weekend. I stand by what I said: Slashdot should have taken the lead on this story.
Stop bitching and become part of the solution.
I've already donated $100 to EFF to support their work on the case. I challenge you and everybody else posting here to give them at least as much. Give what you can, or give till it hurts, but give something. This is important.
--Jim
An interesting point, except that its wrong.
Of course it's not wrong. If you're going to bitch about the quality of my posts, at least try to understand what I'm saying: Slashdot posted that the protests were on hold at the request of the EFF, and let that comment stand until eventually enough readers of the free-sklyarov mailing list wrote in to correct them.
Then they sat idle, waiting for someone else to cover the protest plans for them. Some members of the free-sklyarov mailing list submitted stories, but Hemos rejected them as "not good enough". Why didn't Slashdot have someone reading that list first-hand? Why didn't Slashdot post a Saturday or Sunday story describing where and when the protests were scheduled?
They dropped the ball on this one, especially for a site that claims to be about "Stuff that Matters".
--Jim
Where was the Slashdot story on "Free Dmitra / Anti-DMCA protests scheduled at the following times, following places..."? Where was the Slashdot headline "Protests Go On Without EFF"? Slashdot should have been out front on this one, not trailing along behind like the news services.
If you would bother to READ the free-sklyarov mailing list you'd see other people saying the same thing: "Where is Slashdot?"
It's ignorant morons like you that post kneejerk followups without bothering to actually READ anything that junk up slashdot with useless comments.
Asshole.
Where was Slashdot when these protests were
being planned on the free-sklyarov list, when
the Slashdot publicity might have generated
even greater turn-out? Hemos mailed one of the
list members to say that Slashdot wasn't covering it
because no one had submitted a good enough story.
Excuse me? Did I hear that right? The Slashdot
editorial staff that has enough free time to cover opening
day at every half-assed movie of the summer
doesn't have enough time to cover the organization
of the Anti-DMCA protests, and is just sitting
around waiting for someone else to submit
a "good enough" story?
What about "Stuff That Matters"? If this issue
doesn't matter - then what does? Are you guys
too busy planning your coverage if the opening
of "Planet of the Apes" later this week?
--Jim
I beleive that was ripped from a Simpson's episode. Very funny, but you should have given some credit.
Of course, he DID say it was courtesy the Simpsons.
That Ape musical is one of the richest bits of parody the Simpsons has ever produced, and it's one I point to when I want to illustrate that the Simpsons isn't just comedy - it's social commentary.
--Jim
If you're actually following the free-sklyarov list, you'll note that person after person has been writing to reject the idea of putting off the protests. If that's any indication, then they will go on as planned, though perhaps without the EFF. I can understand why the EFF chose to ask for the postponement, though I bet they're secretly hoping the protests will occur anyway.
--Jim
Complacency over the space program is nothing new. Back in 1986, successful shuttle launches had become so commonplace that the major networks no longer covered them live. CNN was the only channel still giving launches live TV coverage, and as a consequence scooped their competition when STS-51L went tragically wrong and we lost the Challenger and her crew. Fifteen years later we're in the midst of one of the busiest years ever for shuttle launches... and how many of you know that we successfully launched Atlantis early this morning?
--Jim
Why don't they just call it the K'ustrator?
--Jim