I'm sure there is a burn rate that defines explosive combustion, but I'm more concerned with what's implied when one says that the external tank exploded: it implies that the intact ET was destroyed by explosive burning of its contents. In fact, the events occurred in the other order: the ET was already destroyed, or being destroyed, but not by burning fuel. The burning occurred as the fuel, no longer contained by the ET, dispersed in the atmosphere.
And no, I'm not saying that the popular press is lying to us, just that their understanding of science is at its usual abysmal level.
"The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded". Well, not really. Yeah, I know that most of you have probably been hearing that for most of your lives, and it's the popular "Time Magazine" version of what happened. But as true geeks you're supposed to be interested in the "hard science" version of what happened. So go to this site:
where you will find the text of the Rogers Commision report on what happened to the Challenger. Many of you have probably read Feynman's famous Appendix to the report, but you should also read Chapter III, "The Accident" and read it closely.
Nowhere in there will you find words like "the vehicle exploded" or "the external tank exploded". The closest you'll come is an "almost explosive" burning of fuel after the external tank comes apart. That's right, kids, the Challenger wasn't destroyed by an explosion like Peter Jennings has been telling you all these years. It and the external tank were torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the tank.
--Jim
Re:Filesystem inaccuracy
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 2
The article states that hfs (mac filesystem) is only available under PPC linux. This is false.
Furthermore, an HFS driver is already in the 2.2 kernels, and was available for the 2.0 kernels as a patch. I use the HFS driver on my 2.2 kernel, on my Intel Pentium II system, to mount old Syquest 40MB removables I still have from my old Mac days. Works like a charm.
Perhaps the reviewer was referring to HFS+, the newer Mac filesystem?
The 5000, which was on sale in 1999 when I was shopping for a laptop, has a max resolution of 1400x1050. Your 5000e is a more recent laptop. The two differ in other ways too, most notably size and heft. The old 5000 was 2.5" thick and nearly 10 lbs in weight, whereas the 5000e is more like 1.5" and 6 or 7 lbs. That size kept me away from the 5000, and I bought the 3700. I really like it, but when replacement time comes, the 5000e or its successor, is more likely what I'll get.
I think it's only fitting to take the junk they sent you, *all* of it, tear it into pieces, put the pieces back into the reply envelope, and send the lot of it back to them.
I still can't watch the replay of the explosion. It still tears at me every time I see the start of it. I have to leave the room or change the channel on the TV.
I know what you mean, dude. It still chills me just to hear the radio call "Roger, GO at throttle-up". You can still hear that call every mission, and it just makes my heart catch in my throat. And when those boosters separate at around T+2:00, around here we say "good riddance".
About the explosion: technically, there was none. The vehical was torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the ET. The large fireball you see in those old films is not an explosion, it's just the remaining fuel burning up following the destruction of the ET. That's what we were told at NASA training shortly after I started work here at USA.
Sequels are rarely as good as the original, and in the case of a truly unique movie like The Matrix, the sequel is almost certain to disappoint. So the sequels are now in trouble? Fine - let them die, and we'll keep the Matrix as top flick in a category of one.
Is there some open-source program you use that you think could be better? Or it works well, but you'd like it better if it had this one new feature? Or it's got this one really annoying bug?
Those are all opportunities to get involved. Improve the program, add the feature, or fix the bug. Start with small improvements, features, and bugs, and then work your way up. Before you know it, you'll be starting your own project and people will be coming to offering help.
which contains many pointers to discussions on the topic of "net voting". Also see issues 21.11 and 21.12, which contain some interesting comments on the current recounts going on in Florida and whether machine counting is more or less accurate than hand counting (spoiler: Peter Neuman and Lauren Weinstein disagree with the Bush campaign's contention that machine counting is more accurate).
As I understand it, grad students may technically be employees, but they are usually (always?) woefully underpaid. If your university is going to claim your software as a work-for-hire, then you should get fair market value for the work you putting into writing it. In other words, if they're not paying you what the market would demand, then you can argue that they're not actually hiring that work -- you're doing it, gratis, to support your research/teaching/studies.
This is the right way to do it -- not so much because of the original questions of permission and ownership -- but because of the content. In reading over this first chapter, I find that it doesn't sound like any book I've ever read -- it sounds like Slashdot. There's the voice of Hemos, the voice of Jon Katz, and there's the voices of his respondents. Maybe it would "sound" different in print, but I doubt it.
I hope this online book succeeds, and I hope it does so in ways that Stephen King and Fredrick Forsyth cannot -- by making a difference. All those publishing wonks out there who talk about the popular authors selling their wares on the net need have their attention called to this document, because it's real stuff about real people. This is the way the Internet changes the publishing world.
Find a candidate you like and vote for him... if you don't like either of the two major contenders, find another candidate you like. It doesn't matter if they're a "fringe" candidate -- hell, write in Joe Walsh if you have to -- just get out there and vote for somebody. The dark horses may not win but if other people feel the same way you do, then guess what: suddenly your guy may not be a fringe candidate anymore. He might become a viable candidate for the next election (it's not always just about this year). Just get out there and cast a vote.
Cute... but wrong. Frag is the sort of word that Strunk and White would love. It's a nice, short, single syllable that explodes out of the mouth. It's simple, unpretentious, and gets the meaning across with effect. It's slang, of course, but is not made up.
Flay is a nice word, too (remember Silence of the Lambs?), but doesn't mean the same thing.
What the hell does "causationally" mean? Is that a real word, or did you make it up? And even if it is a real word, someone once said that good writers never use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent word will do.
Don't bother unless... you start off with a virgin disk and encrypt your page files
Or buy enough memory that you don't need to set up swap.
But then you've got to worry about someone being able to suck the memory out of your machine while it's running. Does the kernel crypto patch zero and randomize pages after their contents are no longer needed? And what about the editor you're using to work on that sensitive file? After you close a file, does it zero or randomize the memory that was occupied by the file? And does it return the memory to the operating system so those pages can be reused -- and thus overwritten with other, different data? Does your editor keep a backup in/tmp?
Sound kinda paranoid doesn't it?
The level of security you need depend upon who's going to go after your information, what kinds of resources they have (both time and money) to expend breaking your crypto, and how valuable your secrets are to them. If you're a spy or you're committing other serious crimes that the federal government would be interested in, then you need to be worried about Big Brother's resources, and maybe the questions above aren't so paranoid.
Me, I'm more worried about the odd scuzzball swiping my laptop, and getting their hands on my credit card numbers, address, phone numbers, SSN, and that kind of thing. Even this might be overkill -- the average opportunist laptop thief is probably more interested in the value of my hardware than what's on my hard disk. To put it another way, my secrets aren't worth much to anybody with the resources to do any serious cracking.
That doesn't mean I don't want to protect my secrets. I keep a small encrypted partition on my drive and store my sensitive/personal stuff there, but I don't worry about my swap file or whether my editor flushes its memory. I'm comfortable with that level of protection.
Did anyone happen to catch John C. Dvorak's comments on the iBook and the minicontroversy that followed? The original article is at
http://www.zdne t.c om/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2302687,00.html
Do a google search on "john c dvorak" and "makeup case" to find some of the responses.
Say what you like about Dvorak, but I like reading him. He's wrong most of the time, and he sometimes pisses me off, but I like reading people that have something to say, know how to say it, and don't pull any punches.
He called the iBook a "girly machine", said that it looked like a "makeup case" and that no self-respecting man would carry one. Personally, I think the iBook looks more like a kid's toy -- where Dvorak thought it needed Barbie stickers, I think it would be better decorated with Big Bird and Cookie Monster.
But what about the new Vaio? The word that comes to mind is not "barf", but "blech." At least barf has texture. These boxes are void of personality. At least the iBooks have personality, albeit juvenile.
I wonder what Dvorak would say about the new Vaio; he'd probably say it looks like barf... but he'd take two pages to say it.
It seems that Intel now is trying to fight back against Transmeta with their new chips. Intel plans to have their new speed-step Pentium III's out in about a year...
That good life ended up when my boss grew tired of supporting 14 people in the company with his and my work...
Worked with a guy once in a shop with a few talented folks and a bunch of clueless incompetents (mostly former IBM big-iron programmers transplanted into a unix shop). My friend referred to the incompetents as "strap-ons". He'd say "Yeah, you get to work in the morning, strap on a couple, carry them all day, take 'em off before you go home."
What is my liability if someone else stores stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn or (gasp!) DeCSS source code on my drive?
Just speculating here, but if the blocks are encrypted before they're stored on your disk, then you can't be expected to know what's in them. You don't have the key (the system does), and even if you did, you can't encrypt your blocks without the IV from the previous blocks (assuming CBC mode or similar encryption) -- which are stored on someone else's computer.
I remember ordering and building my Sinclair back before Timex became involved and it became the ZX81. Wow, what a memory trip it is to think about putting together that thing... I can almost smell the 60/40 now.
Unfortunately, I never got to do much programming on mine... it had a temperature problem. After a few minutes of running, the TV would lose horizontal sync. Turned out that my ROM chip ran way too hot, and as it warmed up the TV signal went out of sync. Sinclair must have saved money on components by interleaving the sync of the ROM with the video generator, instead of having separate clocks for each. My girlfriend's techhead brother figured this out for me -- never would have discovered it on my own.
We solved the problem by keeping a piece of ice on the ROM chip, in a little plastic bag. Every so often, when the ice had melted, I'd have change the bag for one with a fresh piece of ice. Talk about your cooling problems -- and I wasn't even overclocking!
It is not the fault of the kernel developers that Joe (L)user does not know how or have the time to patch the kernel.
That's an inexcusably elitist attitude. It's like saying that people shouldn't report a kernel bug if they're too stupid to fix it themselves. Or that people shouldn't ask for a new driver for device X if they're too stupid to write it for themselves.
If you expect stability out of a development kernel, you screwed up. Don't let that "2.4" in the name fool you, it's still a development kernel. If you want stability, use 2.2; reiserfs gets along very nicely with the other filesystems in the stable kernel series.
1) WTF is up with Karma? First, no cap, then a cap. Now I hear rumors of no cap, but only for some people.
You've heard something about a cap? I've heard nothing -- all I know is that my Karma (a large 2-digit number) hasn't been increasing, despite recent moderation to my posts. And personally, I like knowing my karma and seeing it increase -- it motivates me to post better comments, and let the half-assed stuff slide.
2) When you change things, please, for the love of GOD, TELL US
Slashdot Mirror
The URL you posted had a space in it.
Thanks for correcting it. That's what I get for using Mozilla.
--Jim
I'm sure there is a burn rate that defines explosive combustion, but I'm more concerned with what's implied when one says that the external tank exploded: it implies that the intact ET was destroyed by explosive burning of its contents. In fact, the events occurred in the other order: the ET was already destroyed, or being destroyed, but not by burning fuel. The burning occurred as the fuel, no longer contained by the ET, dispersed in the atmosphere.
And no, I'm not saying that the popular press is lying to us, just that their understanding of science is at its usual abysmal level.
--Jim
"The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded". Well, not really. Yeah, I know that most of you have probably been hearing that for most of your lives, and it's the popular "Time Magazine" version of what happened. But as true geeks you're supposed to be interested in the "hard science" version of what happened. So go to this site:
/ docs/rogers-commission/table-of-contents.html
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l
where you will find the text of the Rogers Commision report on what happened to the Challenger. Many of you have probably read Feynman's famous Appendix to the report, but you should also read Chapter III, "The Accident" and read it closely.
Nowhere in there will you find words like "the vehicle exploded" or "the external tank exploded". The closest you'll come is an "almost explosive" burning of fuel after the external tank comes apart. That's right, kids, the Challenger wasn't destroyed by an explosion like Peter Jennings has been telling you all these years. It and the external tank were torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the tank.
--Jim
The article states that hfs (mac filesystem) is only available under PPC linux. This is false.
Furthermore, an HFS driver is already in the 2.2 kernels, and was available for the 2.0 kernels as a patch. I use the HFS driver on my 2.2 kernel, on my Intel Pentium II system, to mount old Syquest 40MB removables I still have from my old Mac days. Works like a charm.
Perhaps the reviewer was referring to HFS+, the newer Mac filesystem?
--Jim
The 5000, which was on sale in 1999 when I was shopping for a laptop, has a max resolution of 1400x1050. Your 5000e is a more recent laptop. The two differ in other ways too, most notably size and heft. The old 5000 was 2.5" thick and nearly 10 lbs in weight, whereas the 5000e is more like 1.5" and 6 or 7 lbs. That size kept me away from the 5000, and I bought the 3700. I really like it, but when replacement time comes, the 5000e or its successor, is more likely what I'll get.
--Jim
I think it's only fitting to take the junk they sent you, *all* of it, tear it into pieces, put the pieces back into the reply envelope, and send the lot of it back to them.
--Jim
I still can't watch the replay of the explosion. It still tears at me every time I see the start of it. I have to leave the room or change the channel on the TV.
I know what you mean, dude. It still chills me just to hear the radio call "Roger, GO at throttle-up". You can still hear that call every mission, and it just makes my heart catch in my throat. And when those boosters separate at around T+2:00, around here we say "good riddance".
About the explosion: technically, there was none. The vehical was torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the ET. The large fireball you see in those old films is not an explosion, it's just the remaining fuel burning up following the destruction of the ET. That's what we were told at NASA training shortly after I started work here at USA.
--Jim
Sequels are rarely as good as the original, and in the case of a truly unique movie like The Matrix, the sequel is almost certain to disappoint. So the sequels are now in trouble? Fine - let them die, and we'll keep the Matrix as top flick in a category of one.
--Jim
Find your itch and then scratch it.
Is there some open-source program you use that you think could be better? Or it works well, but you'd like it better if it had this one new feature? Or it's got this one really annoying bug?
Those are all opportunities to get involved. Improve the program, add the feature, or fix the bug. Start with small improvements, features, and bugs, and then work your way up. Before you know it, you'll be starting your own project and people will be coming to offering help.
Look for these opportunities, they're everywhere.
--Jim
The ACM Risks Forum ("Risks Digest") has lately been full of talk about elections, vote-counting, and electronic voting. Most notable is this item:
Security of electronic voting in public elections
which contains many pointers to discussions on the topic of "net voting". Also see issues 21.11 and 21.12, which contain some interesting comments on the current recounts going on in Florida and whether machine counting is more or less accurate than hand counting (spoiler: Peter Neuman and Lauren Weinstein disagree with the Bush campaign's contention that machine counting is more accurate).
--Jim
As I understand it, grad students may technically be employees, but they are usually (always?) woefully underpaid. If your university is going to claim your software as a work-for-hire, then you should get fair market value for the work you putting into writing it. In other words, if they're not paying you what the market would demand, then you can argue that they're not actually hiring that work -- you're doing it, gratis, to support your research/teaching/studies.
--Jim
This is the right way to do it -- not so much because of the original questions of permission and ownership -- but because of the content. In reading over this first chapter, I find that it doesn't sound like any book I've ever read -- it sounds like Slashdot. There's the voice of Hemos, the voice of Jon Katz, and there's the voices of his respondents. Maybe it would "sound" different in print, but I doubt it.
I hope this online book succeeds, and I hope it does so in ways that Stephen King and Fredrick Forsyth cannot -- by making a difference. All those publishing wonks out there who talk about the popular authors selling their wares on the net need have their attention called to this document, because it's real stuff about real people. This is the way the Internet changes the publishing world.
--Jim
Find a candidate you like and vote for him... if you don't like either of the two major contenders, find another candidate you like. It doesn't matter if they're a "fringe" candidate -- hell, write in Joe Walsh if you have to -- just get out there and vote for somebody. The dark horses may not win but if other people feel the same way you do, then guess what: suddenly your guy may not be a fringe candidate anymore. He might become a viable candidate for the next election (it's not always just about this year). Just get out there and cast a vote.
--Jim
ROFL! Now this is funny!
--Jim
Cute... but wrong. Frag is the sort of word that Strunk and White would love. It's a nice, short, single syllable that explodes out of the mouth. It's simple, unpretentious, and gets the meaning across with effect. It's slang, of course, but is not made up.
Flay is a nice word, too (remember Silence of the Lambs?), but doesn't mean the same thing.
--Jim
What the hell does "causationally" mean? Is that a real word, or did you make it up? And even if it is a real word, someone once said that good writers never use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent word will do.
Strunk and White would frag you where you stand.
--Jim
Don't bother unless... you start off with a virgin disk and encrypt your page files
/tmp?
Or buy enough memory that you don't need to set up swap.
But then you've got to worry about someone being able to suck the memory out of your machine while it's running. Does the kernel crypto patch zero and randomize pages after their contents are no longer needed? And what about the editor you're using to work on that sensitive file? After you close a file, does it zero or randomize the memory that was occupied by the file? And does it return the memory to the operating system so those pages can be reused -- and thus overwritten with other, different data? Does your editor keep a backup in
Sound kinda paranoid doesn't it?
The level of security you need depend upon who's going to go after your information, what kinds of resources they have (both time and money) to expend breaking your crypto, and how valuable your secrets are to them. If you're a spy or you're committing other serious crimes that the federal government would be interested in, then you need to be worried about Big Brother's resources, and maybe the questions above aren't so paranoid.
Me, I'm more worried about the odd scuzzball swiping my laptop, and getting their hands on my credit card numbers, address, phone numbers, SSN, and that kind of thing. Even this might be overkill -- the average opportunist laptop thief is probably more interested in the value of my hardware than what's on my hard disk. To put it another way, my secrets aren't worth much to anybody with the resources to do any serious cracking.
That doesn't mean I don't want to protect my secrets. I keep a small encrypted partition on my drive and store my sensitive/personal stuff there, but I don't worry about my swap file or whether my editor flushes its memory. I'm comfortable with that level of protection.
--Jim
Did anyone happen to catch John C. Dvorak's comments on the iBook and the minicontroversy that followed? The original article is at http://www.zdne t.c om/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2302687,00.html Do a google search on "john c dvorak" and "makeup case" to find some of the responses.
Say what you like about Dvorak, but I like reading him. He's wrong most of the time, and he sometimes pisses me off, but I like reading people that have something to say, know how to say it, and don't pull any punches.
He called the iBook a "girly machine", said that it looked like a "makeup case" and that no self-respecting man would carry one. Personally, I think the iBook looks more like a kid's toy -- where Dvorak thought it needed Barbie stickers, I think it would be better decorated with Big Bird and Cookie Monster.
But what about the new Vaio? The word that comes to mind is not "barf", but "blech." At least barf has texture. These boxes are void of personality. At least the iBooks have personality, albeit juvenile.
I wonder what Dvorak would say about the new Vaio; he'd probably say it looks like barf... but he'd take two pages to say it.
--JimIt seems that Intel now is trying to fight back against Transmeta with their new chips. Intel plans to have their new speed-step Pentium III's out in about a year...
Yeah, but will they look like barf?.
--Jim
That good life ended up when my boss grew tired of supporting 14 people in the company with his and my work...
Worked with a guy once in a shop with a few talented folks and a bunch of clueless incompetents (mostly former IBM big-iron programmers transplanted into a unix shop). My friend referred to the incompetents as "strap-ons". He'd say "Yeah, you get to work in the morning, strap on a couple, carry them all day, take 'em off before you go home."
--Jim
What is my liability if someone else stores stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn or (gasp!) DeCSS source code on my drive?
Just speculating here, but if the blocks are encrypted before they're stored on your disk, then you can't be expected to know what's in them. You don't have the key (the system does), and even if you did, you can't encrypt your blocks without the IV from the previous blocks (assuming CBC mode or similar encryption) -- which are stored on someone else's computer.
--Jim
I remember ordering and building my Sinclair back before Timex became involved and it became the ZX81. Wow, what a memory trip it is to think about putting together that thing... I can almost smell the 60/40 now.
Unfortunately, I never got to do much programming on mine... it had a temperature problem. After a few minutes of running, the TV would lose horizontal sync. Turned out that my ROM chip ran way too hot, and as it warmed up the TV signal went out of sync. Sinclair must have saved money on components by interleaving the sync of the ROM with the video generator, instead of having separate clocks for each. My girlfriend's techhead brother figured this out for me -- never would have discovered it on my own.
We solved the problem by keeping a piece of ice on the ROM chip, in a little plastic bag. Every so often, when the ice had melted, I'd have change the bag for one with a fresh piece of ice. Talk about your cooling problems -- and I wasn't even overclocking!
--Jim
It is not the fault of the kernel developers that Joe (L)user does not know how or have the time to patch the kernel.
That's an inexcusably elitist attitude. It's like saying that people shouldn't report a kernel bug if they're too stupid to fix it themselves. Or that people shouldn't ask for a new driver for device X if they're too stupid to write it for themselves.
--Jim
If you expect stability out of a development kernel, you screwed up. Don't let that "2.4" in the name fool you, it's still a development kernel. If you want stability, use 2.2; reiserfs gets along very nicely with the other filesystems in the stable kernel series.
--Jim
1) WTF is up with Karma? First, no cap, then a cap. Now I hear rumors of no cap, but only for some people.
You've heard something about a cap? I've heard nothing -- all I know is that my Karma (a large 2-digit number) hasn't been increasing, despite recent moderation to my posts. And personally, I like knowing my karma and seeing it increase -- it motivates me to post better comments, and let the half-assed stuff slide.
2) When you change things, please, for the love of GOD, TELL US
Agreed!
--Jim