Oh look, the real world has expectations of the new medium. How tragic. Turns out there's some value-add we can't overlook in the over-priced, over-regulated, monopolized phone system. VoIP want's to compete with/replace POTS, it will have to meet the standard of POTS. Nothing to see here, please move along.
The question I have is whether VoIP will be expected to provide the same level of universal access that we have with the phone system. I doubt it. They'll probably just cherry pick their customers like the broadband carriers. The Slashdot crowd will grouse whenever the "legacy" system cries foul and tries to prevent this. Learn something here.
This naive attitude about regulation and competition ("This is the first step in regulating an industry that should have been left alone...") pisses me off. There are good reasons for the regulatory system. There were good reasons why, at one point, you couldn't connect anything other than genuine Ma-Bell gear to Ma-Bell's lines, and there were good reasons for changing that, and the reasons had nothing to do with keeping the proverbial fat cats fat, despite what you want to believe. In fact you, dear reader, most likely lack the knowledge and experience necessary to cope with the reasons, and I'd appreciate it if you would behave as such. The reasons have to do with reliability, ubiquity and stability (read: not neato geek fun) in an enterprise that involves hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that must survive decades of reality. We get all that cheap and have for a century. Take your file-pirating, selectively lazie-fare opinion and stuff it where the bits rot.
It's not a theory. All one need do is examine the history of the passenger car/light truck market in the US. Soccer moms used to buy station wagons based on passenger car chassis. Men used to by sedans. CAFE is the reason that changed. Simple as that.
The VAST MAJORITY of SUV drivers DO NOT NEED a vehicle that large.
Absolutely 100% correct. It is also true that the vast majority of SUV drivers do not want a passenger car that small.
A lot of the problems could be solved with true functional languages (Haskell, OCaml, etc) but the learning curve is too high.
A lot of problems are solved with functional languages. Functional advocates claim to have the answer to software correctness and they decry the present state of imperative logic programming. What I think they fail to realize is that functional programming is ubiquitous, solving problems on a scale that contemporary imperative tools will never approach.
Microsoft Excel is, in essence, a functional programming language. It is utilized by non-"programmers" planet wide every day to quickly, accurately and cheaply "solve" millions of problems. It has, effectively, no learning curve relative to typical coding. I have found it to be an invaluable software development tool. I take it a bit further than the typical spreadsheet task by using to model software systems.
It is especially helpful with business logic problems. I recently implemented a relatively complex web-based product configurator. I know that if I can model the complete problem in a stateless manner using a spreadsheet, writing bug-free, efficient client and server side imperative code becomes a simple matter of translation. For any given state of a collection of inputs there is exactly one atomic result. In this case the result is a (possibly lengthy) structured document computed dynamically from a collection of input forms, both on the client (because page refreshes suck) and on the server (because validation must not depend on an honest client.) Both independent implementations (in different languages) are "obviously" correct in the sense that they are derived from a clear, functional model, built in a spreadsheet.
You may substitute any contemporary spreadsheet product in place of Excel; I have no love of Excel specifically. It's just what I've happened to have handy in all cases. The fact is that modeling most software problems requires very little of what any reasonablely competent spreadsheet can accommodate. Feel free to lecture me on precisely why it is blasphemous to suggest that a spreadsheet qualifies for the designation "functional programming." I know the difference because I've studied LISP and used Scheme. The subset of true functional programming that provides the most value is clearly represented by the common spreadsheet.
I can't think of any reason why toilets can't be flushed with saltwater and lawns and plants watered with reclaimed graywater, can you?
Perhaps because a parallel plumbing and reclamation system would be necessary to keep the saltwater and freshwater separate? Is that really contributing a net gain or just shifting the damage? Another possible reason is that most fresh water is consumed in agriculture, not toilets, by a margin of about 15 to 1.
And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're idiots.
No, we don't, because we're increasingly immune to BAF bullshit and discount it automatically. The rest of the world is doing it's level best to emulate us in every conceivable manner and has been for the past century, regardless of what the worlds activists happen to be saying. Why are they flattering idiots?
Including this native-born American. It is just one more example of how subsidies create destructive incentives.
Would that include subsidies to car manufacturers to develop and market low-emission vehicles and power trains that run on renewables? It could be you're thinking of grant funded research that produces results similar as those we see here. Perhaps you are referring to subsidizing alternative energy sources for electricity, including offsetting operating costs. Or maybe you mean ITER or NIF... Is it really subsidies in general or just the subsidies you, in all your righteous genius, don't happen to think are proper, as you sit there well-fed in your heated dwelling writing messages in your spare time for distribution on a network initially developed using federal defense subsidies?
if we charged the cost of defending ourselves and the Middle East against oil-financed extremism via fuel taxes, we would not have had an SUV craze. At $3.50 or more per gallon...
You want to pay for defending ourselves against oil financed extremism by charging ~$2 a gallon more in taxes to end the SUV craze. I have a better idea; let's stop causing the market to buy vehicles based on truck chassis by allowing manufactures to build sufficiently sized vehicles based on passenger car chassis. I believe a small relaxation of CAFE and EPA standards on passenger cars would allow vehicle fleets to meet the expectations of the American market, but that the fleet average regulations prevent building appealing cars. Split the difference between 27.5mpg (cars) and 20.5mpg ("light" trucks) and we can start making cars again. The entire SUV episode the fault of these regulations because the market has been forced to choose between a car that's a couple hundred pounds too small/light (say, the difference between 3.4k and 4k lbs) and a truck that's a couple thousand pounds too heavy.
My Quake game is limited by physical distance. It takes 100ms to go across the country and back. Latency is the killer here.
Rough, napkin quality calculations here...
m = miles to server = 2000 (round figure for "across the country") c = miles covered by light in 1 sec
2m/c = 21ms round trip time
100ms - 21ms = time lost to switching hardware, mostly, given that (in my experience) a simple ICMP ping will usually show very similar results, we probably can't attribute it to server processing time.
So, as you can see, there is plenty of room for improvement. Faster/less switching between you and them means less latency. If you have 1/50 second latency, events are reported to you in the time it takes a good CRT to refresh twice.
They will. Authentication works. It wont take long either.
Unique email addresses to every sender. Simple, free, 100% effective. The pain of spam has reached the point where I would rather inconvenience some people than put up with spam. Thus, authentication is viable.
You don't know what you're talking about. Sun gives away [netbeans.org] Forte for Java under an Open Source branding (think Mozilla/Netscape). The real reason for this squabble......is because Eclipse is an order of magnitude better than Forte. Sun wants to use it's clout to get some control over it, and who can blame them? You were doing fine right up until there.
It requires very little effort to identify the reasons why Eclipse is better than Forte. Any fool can see this, so I won't waste time on it.
[IBM] used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
They created an entirely new GUI API because Swing sucks. A better GUI for Java was desperately needed. Swing does not approach the results of a native GUI application, while SWT does. The SWT GUI in Eclipse is better than the GUI provided by the native OS in most cases.
Eclipse and Forte aren't even in the same ballpark. The phrase "universal tools platform" actually means something with Eclipse.
The battle is over. Eclipse won. The result isn't due to some IBM conspiracy against Sun. It's due to Eclipse being a better product.
they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun
The character of your rival says much about you. Sun and IBM are competing rivals. Nothing more ugly than that. It's a credit to Sun than IBM should name their work in such a way. It's Sun's job to remain worthy of that credit.
That means all paths for you code heads out there.
Coverage tests don't impress me. Coverage statistics are cop-outs for testers. Boundary conditions are not detected or quantified by coverage statistics.
That said, even when you hit rubber to the road, there are always unexpected situations.
Novell once publicly demonstrated this by allowing one of two servers to slice both cables of the redundant pair when it was physically smashed. NASA and it's enormous plethora of subcontractors may play at a higher level, but they ultimately make the same mistakes.
VXWorks is actually very popular with the space program.
This is all the credibility I need to excuse VXWorks of whatever part of the fault for which they are responsible. People implementing these systems are not screwing around. They use they best they can find and afford.
So Pixar wanted a bigger cut and Disney wasn't willing? Is that the gist of this? A business deal. One bunch of staggeringly wealthy white guys bickering with another bunch of staggeringly wealthy white guys.
um, hoo ray and stuff. I'm so pleased.
Ya know, at some point Pixar is going to hook up with a firm from India and cut their labor costs about 80%...
Anyhow, I'm going back to Slashdot. They specialize in geek news, not this Forbes jet set play-by-play.
An elected official received the tape from ordinary citizens
Sure. "Ordinary" citizen, that cruises around town following cell towers with a microwave receiver tuning into and recording signals from a specific network user and shooting the results directly to Connelly's people. That sounds pretty damn ordinary. With ordinary citizen's like that who needs government spies or party apparatchiks?
In the past I believed that public resistance to power reactors was founded in ignorance, and therefore without merit. It is, but some knee-jerk reactions are healthy.
Last Friday the Tennessee reactor called WATTS BAR was SCRAM-ed. A SCRAM is an emergency procedure where the core's control rods are rapidly inserted to halt the reaction. SCRAMs are routine. Reactors SCRAM themselves and are manually SCRAM-ed under a large number of conditions.
Here is a quote from the WATTS BAR report to the NRC on this "event"; "The licensee also reported that all control rods inserted on the reactor trip, no primary or secondary system relief valves operated, and that reactor temperature is being maintained using steam dump to the condenser. Steam generator water levels are being maintained using auxiliary feedwater. The station electrical system is available and in a normal configuration. All ECCS equipment is available. The reactor is currently stable at 2230 psig, 559 degrees Fahrenheit."
Something about having to report the condition of control rods and water levels directly to the Federal Government makes me doubt exactly how safe this stuff actually is. That paragraph follows a template that varies based primarily on which parts of the back-up systems fail post SCRAM, and this is an unusual report in that none did.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. The consequences at a coal or gas power generating facility are localized deaths and equipment damage. The consequences at a fission reactor range from trivial to catastrophic, in a biblical sense. We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Also, last Friday, the DAVIS BESSE facility in Ohio reported that, according to their simulations, a steam line break could potentially compromise all low-voltage systems and battery backups available at the reactor by overpressuring some doors. That's a useful discovery. Too bad it took 27 years to notice. It probably isn't coincidental that this particlar facility is being scrutinized with a microscope and thus rendering interesting new discoveries like this. Two years ago refueling workers discovered that boric acid had eaten through the steam generator casing down to the stainless steel inner lining. 8" of low alloy steel gone and all of the pressure generated by the nuclear reaction retained by a 3/8" layer of stainless steel.
I have no animus towards the power companies. I am not an activist exaggerating to support an agenda. Paranoia about nuclear waste is nothing more than trumped up NIMBY. "Deregulation" isn't causing a degradation of safety. It's just the nature of any large industrial system; everything breaks eventually. Hell, everything is already broken and we have simply failed to notice, yet.
I now believe that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, including recent improved designs. It is the nature of a fission reactor to melt down unless prevented from doing so. We are very good at preventing this. We are not, however, perfect. We are people operating machines.
In contrast, fusion appears much safer. The challenge of fusion is getting more power out of the reaction than you put in. By definition the reaction will stop if the input fails. It is the nature of a fusion reactor to stop unless prevented from doing so. Unless some foul-up closes the loop it can't spiral out-of-control.
Have no idea how old it might be. I guessing it's late 80's gear. 12" mono, 10.3" viewable, according to IBM.com. Excellent for testing machines as it is light and tough. Free from a former employer who had it buried in a machine room for many years.
What the protesters didn't tell you--probably because they couldn't be bothered enough to research they'd know this-- is that (1) we'd been putting up reactors on spacecrafts for years and years and (2) the reactor was one of the most mind-bogglingly safe imaginable, if the entire reactor was blown up or disentigrated in the atmosphere the radioactive material would still be able to hold together well enough that at worst it would split together into a couple of chunks so solid you could pick them up and hold them...
My preference is to argue from the standpoint that these activities are worth the risk. Attempting to convince people that serious consequences are impossible is a fools errand. Making them realize what cowardly little twits they are seems like it ought to be far more productive. That craft did not represent enough danger, in my opinion, to outweigh the value of the mission. I would still say that after looking at pictures of children with cancerous thyroids after the ship self-immolated to dust over a Florida suburb. Risk is necessary.
My suspicion is that Nuclear technology will get nowhere in the United States until people stop calling it that, due to the huge political movement to make sure no one uses anything with "nuclear" in the name, regardless of the safety, degree of research, or degree of oversight. I'd propose scientists start using some other word, like "happytronic", but this would probably be seen through as "hollow PR from the nuclear industry". (That's another thing. People promoting nuclear energy are often derided as "Nuclear Industry Shills", but people attacking it are never successfully labelled as "Coal Industry Shills", despite the fact that's who they're primarily helping. How is this?)
Nuclear power is more expensive (in the US) than existing alternatives; coal and more recently, natural gas. That's a fact borne out over half a century of operating plants of all types. I think this is the real explanation for the stall in nuclear power generation in the US.
There is a term in the nuclear power industry; SCRAM. Supposedly it means "Safety Control Rod Axe Man," and is the designation for the guy who is supposed to cut the rope that drops the control rod(s) into the core to halt the reaction. Modern reactor cores involve no rope or axes, yet the term lives on because the basic physics are no different. The reality of operating a modern reactor is that SCRAMs are common; for all sorts of reasons operators find themselves in situations where it's imperative that the reactor stop RIGHT NOW. They smack the proverbial Big Red Button, if it doesn't smack itself automatically, and control rods rapidly descend into the core and stop the reaction. Nuclear "events", such as SCRAMs, are recorded by the NRC. The most recent reported SCRAM was Monday, at 12:30 ET, about 27 hours ago...
Speaking for myself, that's just too much drama. Fission cores in nuclear reactors are no joke. They are large piles and they do represent a large potential calamity. We've never, ever witnessed that potential. Chernobyl, much less Three Mile Island, did not approach the worst case. I don't have enough faith in humans and machines, operating over many decades amidst political and technological change to really believe in my heart of hearts, that existing power reactors are safe. I cannot tell you how much it pains me to admit that.
This is the primary promise Fusion offers IMHO-- because oh, it isn't nuclear, it's "Fusion", right? Which means people will actually use it.
The physics of sustaining a Fusion reaction might provide for inherent safety; without a huge amount of input power the reaction cannot be sustained. Fission cores can melt down due to residual heat even after you stop the reaction (this is essentially what happened to Reactor 2 at Three Mile Island, for example.) Fusion is a whole different kettle of fish.
Now listen. The change that's happenning in the new file selector is primarily that they're creating a new API. Got it? The programming API.
Good to know... very good.
Like you, I remember the last/. article on the new GTK file selector. I took it for granted that what I saw then represented work-in-progress and didn't really showcase the meaningful changes. While there were a number of flames, there were a few people who made the point that this is yet another reinvention of a wheel that's been invented correctly multiple times, except Gnome is about 5 years behind the curve... and ya know what? They're right. It is.
Ok, so the point of this exercise is the "new API". Outstanding. How long will this one last? I'll wager between 3-6 months before the almighty API designers get bored with their "new API" and decide to reinvent it again. I doubt it took that long to abandon the one this API is replacing.
Screw it. I'm just not interested any more. The 2D GUI problem was solved in the mid 90's. Today you have a small number of well understood and stable flavors of Windows GDI, very stable Swing, very stable QT and the new and likely to be stable OS-X GUI stuff... What exactly does Gnome bring to the table, other than being "new", yet again?
Nuclear power (standard fission processes) is efficient. The fuel, U-230something, is quite expensive, but will generate insane amounts of power, such that even after much safety-related overhead it is many times cheaper than the cheapest coal power.
U-235 is the something. Quoting from The Skeptical Environmentalist:
"Nuclear power, however, has barely been efficient in the production of energy and this is probably the major reason why its use has not been more widespread. It is difficult to find unequivocal estimates of the total costs that can affect the calculations, but typically the price hovers around 11-13 cents for one kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 1999 prices. This should be compared with an average energy price for fossil fuels of 6.23 cents."
The author cites three sources for this information.
I do not believe that plutonium in any form is has ever been used to generate electrical power... and I am rather sure that the only use for plutonium is in weapons systems.
Plutonium-239 can be consumed by a fast-breeder reactor. Never actually done, but possible.
Like many non-US citizens I get sick of Americans thinking that their country is the best and that other countries are less important.
Andy, man, you have issues. One of a very small number of man-made probes has managed to actually land on another planet, a rare event in history, and you find yourself wrapped up in this "America is best" nonsense. None of this American NASA vs. The Rest of the World BS even occurred to me until I saw your post. The last thing I would have done is lord over the Beagle failure with this landing. If you are actually experiencing such poor behavior you need to consider the quality of the people to which you have exposed yourself. In the meantime, chill out. You may rest assured that the bulk of Americans are a humble, respectful lot that wish you and yours the best.
Does anyone else get the feeling that these people are just saying "It's too hard. We give up" ?
Yes, I do, and this isn't the first time I've felt this way. I've thought the same thing when I hear the term "junk DNA."
This "book" was authored in antiquity, through great effort and expense. It represents lost knowledge. If it is ever understood I doubt it will actually matter; likely it's a book on botany as it was understood in it's time, replete with mysticism, fables and bad ideas, while managing to convey some credible facts had proved to be worthy of recording, and possibly encrypting, by a very obscure someone...
In biology the obscure someone it a few billion years of continuous adaptation in the severe cauldron of survival. It's not surprising that the "language" is beyond our immediate comprehension. What is surprising is how we dismiss that which we fail to understand as meaningless, rather than admit ignorance.
BTW over 90% of americans believe in god. If that's not a failure of science to act as a candle in the dark I don't know what is.
You believe this figure?
The topic of religion is very controversial. I have as little faith in the credibility of research in this area as I do for environmental research. There are simply too many funded activists involved to trust the results.
All sides of all controversies drum up research to support their foregone conclusions. It's common practice and it should be a given for anyone with a sound mind. The growth of skepticism is real "candle in the dark."
This isn't the first time authority has been questioned. It isn't the first time authority fought back with suppression. It is ironic to witness the institutions favored by those who would be first to don a "Question Authority" tee-shirt being questioned and reacting with hypocrisy. Religious activists pissed away their credibility long ago. Environmental activists are only beginning.
"He" wasn't the only one. Someone else already pointed out that your claim that Microsoft invented NetBIOS is incorrect. I'll point out that several other important protocols came to be without considering the Internet.
SNA would be the first on my list of important network systems. IBM created it to provide reliable networking in mainframe, and later minicomputer, environments. Have no doubt about it's importance; for many of the most significant financial institutions in the world there was simply no alternative.
IPX would be next on my list. For most of the corporate world, IPX was their first encounter with LANs. It's heritage is traced back to Xerox. Very large corporate networks have been created based on IPX.
NetBIOS, and other useless products like WINS... Abandoned them after 2001, when he found out the Internet could exist inspite of MS.
NetBIOS hasn't been abandoned. It's alive and well. CIFS is how Microsoft has repackaged most the old Windows network protocols for the Internet. It's hard to say this and mean it, however. It's hard to even define NetBIOS. It's part API, part protocol... what it isn't is abandoned.
It doesn't help your cause to attempt to mislead people. Your statement...
...excluding foreign nations...
...is a lie by omission. The US is excluding specific foreign nations for specific reasons, which is very different from your implication. Also, the exclusion applies to only part of the total available funds.
"Smart radio technology means smarter highways, safer roads and a more secure homeland," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said.
How, precisely, would a radio broadcast regulated to be useful no further than 100 meters away be useful in securing the "Homeland"? At first, I chalked that up to some sort of bureaucratic lemming syndrome where anything that happens needs to be connected to securing something. But then I put my brain in gear and figured it out; what a great way to create an industrial strength vehicle tracking system. Build out a collision avoidance system and, "discover" how useful it is in tracking bad people, and then...generalize!
Slashdot Mirror
That was me. It is here.
Oh look, the real world has expectations of the new medium. How tragic. Turns out there's some value-add we can't overlook in the over-priced, over-regulated, monopolized phone system. VoIP want's to compete with/replace POTS, it will have to meet the standard of POTS. Nothing to see here, please move along.
The question I have is whether VoIP will be expected to provide the same level of universal access that we have with the phone system. I doubt it. They'll probably just cherry pick their customers like the broadband carriers. The Slashdot crowd will grouse whenever the "legacy" system cries foul and tries to prevent this. Learn something here.
This naive attitude about regulation and competition ("This is the first step in regulating an industry that should have been left alone...") pisses me off. There are good reasons for the regulatory system. There were good reasons why, at one point, you couldn't connect anything other than genuine Ma-Bell gear to Ma-Bell's lines, and there were good reasons for changing that, and the reasons had nothing to do with keeping the proverbial fat cats fat, despite what you want to believe. In fact you, dear reader, most likely lack the knowledge and experience necessary to cope with the reasons, and I'd appreciate it if you would behave as such. The reasons have to do with reliability, ubiquity and stability (read: not neato geek fun) in an enterprise that involves hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that must survive decades of reality. We get all that cheap and have for a century. Take your file-pirating, selectively lazie-fare opinion and stuff it where the bits rot.
I am calling BS on your SUV theory.
It's not a theory. All one need do is examine the history of the passenger car/light truck market in the US. Soccer moms used to buy station wagons based on passenger car chassis. Men used to by sedans. CAFE is the reason that changed. Simple as that.
The VAST MAJORITY of SUV drivers DO NOT NEED a vehicle that large.
Absolutely 100% correct. It is also true that the vast majority of SUV drivers do not want a passenger car that small.
A lot of the problems could be solved with true functional languages (Haskell, OCaml, etc) but the learning curve is too high.
A lot of problems are solved with functional languages. Functional advocates claim to have the answer to software correctness and they decry the present state of imperative logic programming. What I think they fail to realize is that functional programming is ubiquitous, solving problems on a scale that contemporary imperative tools will never approach.
Microsoft Excel is, in essence, a functional programming language. It is utilized by non-"programmers" planet wide every day to quickly, accurately and cheaply "solve" millions of problems. It has, effectively, no learning curve relative to typical coding. I have found it to be an invaluable software development tool. I take it a bit further than the typical spreadsheet task by using to model software systems.
It is especially helpful with business logic problems. I recently implemented a relatively complex web-based product configurator. I know that if I can model the complete problem in a stateless manner using a spreadsheet, writing bug-free, efficient client and server side imperative code becomes a simple matter of translation. For any given state of a collection of inputs there is exactly one atomic result. In this case the result is a (possibly lengthy) structured document computed dynamically from a collection of input forms, both on the client (because page refreshes suck) and on the server (because validation must not depend on an honest client.) Both independent implementations (in different languages) are "obviously" correct in the sense that they are derived from a clear, functional model, built in a spreadsheet.
You may substitute any contemporary spreadsheet product in place of Excel; I have no love of Excel specifically. It's just what I've happened to have handy in all cases. The fact is that modeling most software problems requires very little of what any reasonablely competent spreadsheet can accommodate. Feel free to lecture me on precisely why it is blasphemous to suggest that a spreadsheet qualifies for the designation "functional programming." I know the difference because I've studied LISP and used Scheme. The subset of true functional programming that provides the most value is clearly represented by the common spreadsheet.
I can't think of any reason why toilets can't be flushed with saltwater and lawns and plants watered with reclaimed graywater, can you?
Perhaps because a parallel plumbing and reclamation system would be necessary to keep the saltwater and freshwater separate? Is that really contributing a net gain or just shifting the damage? Another possible reason is that most fresh water is consumed in agriculture, not toilets, by a margin of about 15 to 1.
And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're idiots.
No, we don't, because we're increasingly immune to BAF bullshit and discount it automatically. The rest of the world is doing it's level best to emulate us in every conceivable manner and has been for the past century, regardless of what the worlds activists happen to be saying. Why are they flattering idiots?
Including this native-born American. It is just one more example of how subsidies create destructive incentives.
Would that include subsidies to car manufacturers to develop and market low-emission vehicles and power trains that run on renewables? It could be you're thinking of grant funded research that produces results similar as those we see here. Perhaps you are referring to subsidizing alternative energy sources for electricity, including offsetting operating costs. Or maybe you mean ITER or NIF... Is it really subsidies in general or just the subsidies you, in all your righteous genius, don't happen to think are proper, as you sit there well-fed in your heated dwelling writing messages in your spare time for distribution on a network initially developed using federal defense subsidies?
if we charged the cost of defending ourselves and the Middle East against oil-financed extremism via fuel taxes, we would not have had an SUV craze. At $3.50 or more per gallon...
You want to pay for defending ourselves against oil financed extremism by charging ~$2 a gallon more in taxes to end the SUV craze. I have a better idea; let's stop causing the market to buy vehicles based on truck chassis by allowing manufactures to build sufficiently sized vehicles based on passenger car chassis. I believe a small relaxation of CAFE and EPA standards on passenger cars would allow vehicle fleets to meet the expectations of the American market, but that the fleet average regulations prevent building appealing cars. Split the difference between 27.5mpg (cars) and 20.5mpg ("light" trucks) and we can start making cars again. The entire SUV episode the fault of these regulations because the market has been forced to choose between a car that's a couple hundred pounds too small/light (say, the difference between 3.4k and 4k lbs) and a truck that's a couple thousand pounds too heavy.
My Quake game is limited by physical distance. It takes 100ms to go across the country and back. Latency is the killer here.
Rough, napkin quality calculations here...
m = miles to server = 2000 (round figure for "across the country")
c = miles covered by light in 1 sec
2m/c = 21ms round trip time
100ms - 21ms = time lost to switching hardware, mostly, given that (in my experience) a simple ICMP ping will usually show very similar results, we probably can't attribute it to server processing time.
So, as you can see, there is plenty of room for improvement. Faster/less switching between you and them means less latency. If you have 1/50 second latency, events are reported to you in the time it takes a good CRT to refresh twice.
Light is fast.
They will. Authentication works. It wont take long either.
Unique email addresses to every sender. Simple, free, 100% effective. The pain of spam has reached the point where I would rather inconvenience some people than put up with spam. Thus, authentication is viable.
You don't know what you're talking about. Sun gives away [netbeans.org] Forte for Java under an Open Source branding (think Mozilla/Netscape). The real reason for this squabble... ...is because Eclipse is an order of magnitude better than Forte. Sun wants to use it's clout to get some control over it, and who can blame them? You were doing fine right up until there.
It requires very little effort to identify the reasons why Eclipse is better than Forte. Any fool can see this, so I won't waste time on it.
[IBM] used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
They created an entirely new GUI API because Swing sucks. A better GUI for Java was desperately needed. Swing does not approach the results of a native GUI application, while SWT does. The SWT GUI in Eclipse is better than the GUI provided by the native OS in most cases.
Eclipse and Forte aren't even in the same ballpark. The phrase "universal tools platform" actually means something with Eclipse.
The battle is over. Eclipse won. The result isn't due to some IBM conspiracy against Sun. It's due to Eclipse being a better product.
they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun
The character of your rival says much about you. Sun and IBM are competing rivals. Nothing more ugly than that. It's a credit to Sun than IBM should name their work in such a way. It's Sun's job to remain worthy of that credit.
That means all paths for you code heads out there.
Coverage tests don't impress me. Coverage statistics are cop-outs for testers. Boundary conditions are not detected or quantified by coverage statistics.
That said, even when you hit rubber to the road, there are always unexpected situations.
Novell once publicly demonstrated this by allowing one of two servers to slice both cables of the redundant pair when it was physically smashed. NASA and it's enormous plethora of subcontractors may play at a higher level, but they ultimately make the same mistakes.
VXWorks is actually very popular with the space program.
This is all the credibility I need to excuse VXWorks of whatever part of the fault for which they are responsible. People implementing these systems are not screwing around. They use they best they can find and afford.
So Pixar wanted a bigger cut and Disney wasn't willing? Is that the gist of this? A business deal. One bunch of staggeringly wealthy white guys bickering with another bunch of staggeringly wealthy white guys.
um, hoo ray and stuff. I'm so pleased.
Ya know, at some point Pixar is going to hook up with a firm from India and cut their labor costs about 80%...
Anyhow, I'm going back to Slashdot. They specialize in geek news, not this Forbes jet set play-by-play.
Perl, king of scripts
Alas the guard has changed
Type safety matters
An elected official received the tape from ordinary citizens
Sure. "Ordinary" citizen, that cruises around town following cell towers with a microwave receiver tuning into and recording signals from a specific network user and shooting the results directly to Connelly's people. That sounds pretty damn ordinary. With ordinary citizen's like that who needs government spies or party apparatchiks?
In the past I believed that public resistance to power reactors was founded in ignorance, and therefore without merit. It is, but some knee-jerk reactions are healthy.
Last Friday the Tennessee reactor called WATTS BAR was SCRAM-ed. A SCRAM is an emergency procedure where the core's control rods are rapidly inserted to halt the reaction. SCRAMs are routine. Reactors SCRAM themselves and are manually SCRAM-ed under a large number of conditions.
Here is a quote from the WATTS BAR report to the NRC on this "event"; "The licensee also reported that all control rods inserted on the reactor trip, no primary or secondary system relief valves operated, and that reactor temperature is being maintained using steam dump to the condenser. Steam generator water levels are being maintained using auxiliary feedwater. The station electrical system is available and in a normal configuration. All ECCS equipment is available. The reactor is currently stable at 2230 psig, 559 degrees Fahrenheit."
Something about having to report the condition of control rods and water levels directly to the Federal Government makes me doubt exactly how safe this stuff actually is. That paragraph follows a template that varies based primarily on which parts of the back-up systems fail post SCRAM, and this is an unusual report in that none did.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. The consequences at a coal or gas power generating facility are localized deaths and equipment damage. The consequences at a fission reactor range from trivial to catastrophic, in a biblical sense. We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Also, last Friday, the DAVIS BESSE facility in Ohio reported that, according to their simulations, a steam line break could potentially compromise all low-voltage systems and battery backups available at the reactor by overpressuring some doors. That's a useful discovery. Too bad it took 27 years to notice. It probably isn't coincidental that this particlar facility is being scrutinized with a microscope and thus rendering interesting new discoveries like this. Two years ago refueling workers discovered that boric acid had eaten through the steam generator casing down to the stainless steel inner lining. 8" of low alloy steel gone and all of the pressure generated by the nuclear reaction retained by a 3/8" layer of stainless steel.
I have no animus towards the power companies. I am not an activist exaggerating to support an agenda. Paranoia about nuclear waste is nothing more than trumped up NIMBY. "Deregulation" isn't causing a degradation of safety. It's just the nature of any large industrial system; everything breaks eventually. Hell, everything is already broken and we have simply failed to notice, yet.
I now believe that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, including recent improved designs. It is the nature of a fission reactor to melt down unless prevented from doing so. We are very good at preventing this. We are not, however, perfect. We are people operating machines.
In contrast, fusion appears much safer. The challenge of fusion is getting more power out of the reaction than you put in. By definition the reaction will stop if the input fails. It is the nature of a fusion reactor to stop unless prevented from doing so. Unless some foul-up closes the loop it can't spiral out-of-control.
Have no idea how old it might be. I guessing it's late 80's gear. 12" mono, 10.3" viewable, according to IBM.com. Excellent for testing machines as it is light and tough. Free from a former employer who had it buried in a machine room for many years.
What the protesters didn't tell you--probably because they couldn't be bothered enough to research they'd know this-- is that (1) we'd been putting up reactors on spacecrafts for years and years and (2) the reactor was one of the most mind-bogglingly safe imaginable, if the entire reactor was blown up or disentigrated in the atmosphere the radioactive material would still be able to hold together well enough that at worst it would split together into a couple of chunks so solid you could pick them up and hold them...
My preference is to argue from the standpoint that these activities are worth the risk. Attempting to convince people that serious consequences are impossible is a fools errand. Making them realize what cowardly little twits they are seems like it ought to be far more productive. That craft did not represent enough danger, in my opinion, to outweigh the value of the mission. I would still say that after looking at pictures of children with cancerous thyroids after the ship self-immolated to dust over a Florida suburb. Risk is necessary.
My suspicion is that Nuclear technology will get nowhere in the United States until people stop calling it that, due to the huge political movement to make sure no one uses anything with "nuclear" in the name, regardless of the safety, degree of research, or degree of oversight. I'd propose scientists start using some other word, like "happytronic", but this would probably be seen through as "hollow PR from the nuclear industry". (That's another thing. People promoting nuclear energy are often derided as "Nuclear Industry Shills", but people attacking it are never successfully labelled as "Coal Industry Shills", despite the fact that's who they're primarily helping. How is this?)
Nuclear power is more expensive (in the US) than existing alternatives; coal and more recently, natural gas. That's a fact borne out over half a century of operating plants of all types. I think this is the real explanation for the stall in nuclear power generation in the US.
There is a term in the nuclear power industry; SCRAM. Supposedly it means "Safety Control Rod Axe Man," and is the designation for the guy who is supposed to cut the rope that drops the control rod(s) into the core to halt the reaction. Modern reactor cores involve no rope or axes, yet the term lives on because the basic physics are no different. The reality of operating a modern reactor is that SCRAMs are common; for all sorts of reasons operators find themselves in situations where it's imperative that the reactor stop RIGHT NOW. They smack the proverbial Big Red Button, if it doesn't smack itself automatically, and control rods rapidly descend into the core and stop the reaction. Nuclear "events", such as SCRAMs, are recorded by the NRC. The most recent reported SCRAM was Monday, at 12:30 ET, about 27 hours ago...
Speaking for myself, that's just too much drama. Fission cores in nuclear reactors are no joke. They are large piles and they do represent a large potential calamity. We've never, ever witnessed that potential. Chernobyl, much less Three Mile Island, did not approach the worst case. I don't have enough faith in humans and machines, operating over many decades amidst political and technological change to really believe in my heart of hearts, that existing power reactors are safe. I cannot tell you how much it pains me to admit that.
This is the primary promise Fusion offers IMHO-- because oh, it isn't nuclear, it's "Fusion", right? Which means people will actually use it.
The physics of sustaining a Fusion reaction might provide for inherent safety; without a huge amount of input power the reaction cannot be sustained. Fission cores can melt down due to residual heat even after you stop the reaction (this is essentially what happened to Reactor 2 at Three Mile Island, for example.) Fusion is a whole different kettle of fish.
1. Generally speaking digital watches are fugly
Are these the fugly digital watches you had in mind?
I second that.
Now listen. The change that's happenning in the new file selector is primarily that they're creating a new API. Got it? The programming API.
/. article on the new GTK file selector. I took it for granted that what I saw then represented work-in-progress and didn't really showcase the meaningful changes. While there were a number of flames, there were a few people who made the point that this is yet another reinvention of a wheel that's been invented correctly multiple times, except Gnome is about 5 years behind the curve... and ya know what? They're right. It is.
Good to know... very good.
Like you, I remember the last
Ok, so the point of this exercise is the "new API". Outstanding. How long will this one last? I'll wager between 3-6 months before the almighty API designers get bored with their "new API" and decide to reinvent it again. I doubt it took that long to abandon the one this API is replacing.
Screw it. I'm just not interested any more. The 2D GUI problem was solved in the mid 90's. Today you have a small number of well understood and stable flavors of Windows GDI, very stable Swing, very stable QT and the new and likely to be stable OS-X GUI stuff... What exactly does Gnome bring to the table, other than being "new", yet again?
Nuclear power (standard fission processes) is efficient. The fuel, U-230something, is quite expensive, but will generate insane amounts of power, such that even after much safety-related overhead it is many times cheaper than the cheapest coal power.
U-235 is the something. Quoting from The Skeptical Environmentalist:
"Nuclear power, however, has barely been efficient in the production of energy and this is probably the major reason why its use has not been more widespread. It is difficult to find unequivocal estimates of the total costs that can affect the calculations, but typically the price hovers around 11-13 cents for one kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 1999 prices. This should be compared with an average energy price for fossil fuels of 6.23 cents."
The author cites three sources for this information.
I do not believe that plutonium in any form is has ever been used to generate electrical power... and I am rather sure that the only use for plutonium is in weapons systems.
Plutonium-239 can be consumed by a fast-breeder reactor. Never actually done, but possible.
Like many non-US citizens I get sick of Americans thinking that their country is the best and that other countries are less important.
Andy, man, you have issues. One of a very small number of man-made probes has managed to actually land on another planet, a rare event in history, and you find yourself wrapped up in this "America is best" nonsense. None of this American NASA vs. The Rest of the World BS even occurred to me until I saw your post. The last thing I would have done is lord over the Beagle failure with this landing. If you are actually experiencing such poor behavior you need to consider the quality of the people to which you have exposed yourself. In the meantime, chill out. You may rest assured that the bulk of Americans are a humble, respectful lot that wish you and yours the best.
Does anyone else get the feeling that these people are just saying "It's too hard. We give up" ?
Yes, I do, and this isn't the first time I've felt this way. I've thought the same thing when I hear the term "junk DNA."
This "book" was authored in antiquity, through great effort and expense. It represents lost knowledge. If it is ever understood I doubt it will actually matter; likely it's a book on botany as it was understood in it's time, replete with mysticism, fables and bad ideas, while managing to convey some credible facts had proved to be worthy of recording, and possibly encrypting, by a very obscure someone...
In biology the obscure someone it a few billion years of continuous adaptation in the severe cauldron of survival. It's not surprising that the "language" is beyond our immediate comprehension. What is surprising is how we dismiss that which we fail to understand as meaningless, rather than admit ignorance.
BTW over 90% of americans believe in god. If that's not a failure of science to act as a candle in the dark I don't know what is.
You believe this figure?
The topic of religion is very controversial. I have as little faith in the credibility of research in this area as I do for environmental research. There are simply too many funded activists involved to trust the results.
All sides of all controversies drum up research to support their foregone conclusions. It's common practice and it should be a given for anyone with a sound mind. The growth of skepticism is real "candle in the dark."
This isn't the first time authority has been questioned. It isn't the first time authority fought back with suppression. It is ironic to witness the institutions favored by those who would be first to don a "Question Authority" tee-shirt being questioned and reacting with hypocrisy. Religious activists pissed away their credibility long ago. Environmental activists are only beginning.
He pretended it didn't exist...
"He" wasn't the only one. Someone else already pointed out that your claim that Microsoft invented NetBIOS is incorrect. I'll point out that several other important protocols came to be without considering the Internet.
SNA would be the first on my list of important network systems. IBM created it to provide reliable networking in mainframe, and later minicomputer, environments. Have no doubt about it's importance; for many of the most significant financial institutions in the world there was simply no alternative.
IPX would be next on my list. For most of the corporate world, IPX was their first encounter with LANs. It's heritage is traced back to Xerox. Very large corporate networks have been created based on IPX.
NetBIOS, and other useless products like WINS... Abandoned them after 2001, when he found out the Internet could exist inspite of MS.
NetBIOS hasn't been abandoned. It's alive and well. CIFS is how Microsoft has repackaged most the old Windows network protocols for the Internet. It's hard to say this and mean it, however. It's hard to even define NetBIOS. It's part API, part protocol... what it isn't is abandoned.
It doesn't help your cause to attempt to mislead people. Your statement...
...excluding foreign nations...
...is a lie by omission. The US is excluding specific foreign nations for specific reasons, which is very different from your implication. Also, the exclusion applies to only part of the total available funds.
From the blurb:
"Smart radio technology means smarter highways, safer roads and a more secure homeland," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said.
How, precisely, would a radio broadcast regulated to be useful no further than 100 meters away be useful in securing the "Homeland"? At first, I chalked that up to some sort of bureaucratic lemming syndrome where anything that happens needs to be connected to securing something. But then I put my brain in gear and figured it out; what a great way to create an industrial strength vehicle tracking system. Build out a collision avoidance system and, "discover" how useful it is in tracking bad people, and then...generalize!