Too many people have been so burned in the last few years that there's virtually no investment forthcoming in anything remotely blue-sky. If it's not safe and can't turn a profit in the short term, nobody want's to know. We're doing a lot in the broadband wireless direction, of vital long-term importance, but in the short term there's negligible buy-in:(
The over-caution is only going to prolong the depression, but for many people there's no alternative -- R&D is going to be hurting for better part of a decade.
Active aerodynamic surfaces have long seemed to me to be the next big leap in aero technology, nice to see something publicly available -- most of the research into it is too classified to find much out about.
SEC. 106. STRENGTHENING PENALTIES. Section 1030(c) of title 18, United States Code, is amended-- `(B) if the offender knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death from conduct in violation of subsection (a)(5)(A)(i), a fine under this title or imprisonment for any term of years or for life, or both.'.
If you try to kill somebody you might get a life term, no different to recklessly or knowingly causing death any other way. So you try to crash air traffic control computers you get thrown in jail for life - sorry if I'm not too sympathetic.
Personally I'd reccommend this for novice to average people who's role is changing or who are changing job to sysadmin in a different company or environment.
A lot of the skills and behaviours people pick up will be heavily flavoured by the environment in which they picked them up; this book will help people to understand the common practices in sysadmining - what changes and what stays the same in different environments. Sysadmining in a university is very different to in an ISP or in a tech-corporation or in a non-tech-corporation.
Though security could easily be a nightmare, with auto-config and default settings providing excellent opportunities for things to go wrong, it isn't the only potential hole.
Almost all QOS issues are going to be a problem here - resilience for example (two NICs and a modem are nice, but I can't see "redundant power supply" written anywhere; or how about hardware support for RAID, even just mirroring). Also customisation/optimisation - nice that it does this automatically, but how easy is it to overide the automatic configuration (not an issue for many of the people who are buying these, but it will really limit there usefullness in big low-tech companies where you need to tie in with your corp-wan.
More detailed specs would be reassuring, the current descriptions are far too minimalist.
One of the most impressive things about the Eden Project is the simple proximity of such diverse environments to one another - you can walk from a sub-tropical jungle to a european woodland; the similarities and differences between the environments are highlighted, though the flora/fauna imbalance is noticeable.
They won't want to "crush" opengl, too big a market. This will provide a lot a leverage in that market, then they just "embrace and extend" the standards a little bit. Not like they've done that before!
This is an excellent choice for beginners who don't need to do "real" UML development work (eg students), for a more indepth look I'd advocate UML Distilled by Fowler and Scott for a more thorough grounding (and "The Unified Modeling Language User Guide" by Booch and Jacobson for the crunchier details of the language.
Interesting, but populist and agendad.
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Like the reviewer I wanted to like this, and it does manage to serve as a passable overview of evolution in complex systems, but only in the same way as "A Brief History of Time" serves as a passable introduction to cosmology.
The primary problem is that rather than being a popular science book, it comes accross as a populist one, picking easy pop-culture references rather than more appropriate ones. This would be more forgivable if the book was giving a more balanced view of the subject, but the author seems to have a definate agenda which he is trying to communicate rather than giving a solid, unbiased view of the topic.
A good book on the subject for people who have no knowledge of, or interest in, the topic.
It's essentially a popular science book though, so a disproportionately large weighting must be given to base 10, even if base 2, base 12 or base 30 may be "better" arithmetically or more likely practically, as most people's knowledge of the subjects concerned, and maths in particular, is very weak.
Assuming that you each have the same understanding of the laws of physics, start of with teaching each other counting, arithmetic and basic geometry, followed by the periodic table and more advanced maths and basic physics; hopefully you can assume that you both agree on the values of pi, e, G, h etc (excepting base differences); then nouns for various things (names are afterall just shorthand labels we attach to things that are too complicated to describe from first principles all the time), potentially moving on to diagramatic representation of more abstract concepts - but that could take some time.
Probably the single greatest challenge facing SETI-like projects is not the daunting task of acquiring and analysing the vaast ammounts of data, but the criticisms levelled at it by many politicians and scientists.
To date, most books on bioastronomy in general and seti in particular have been rather daunting and require a good grasp of not just physics and biology, but even philosophical issues such as anthropomorphsim and technical matters such as DSP; a popular book on the subject, such as this one, could go a long way to raising public knowledge of the subject past the "looking through telescopes for aliens" level.
Globalisation must be an effect, not a cause
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Too often people (governments, coporations, etc) attempt to employ the drive towards globalisation as a means to achieving particular ends, rather that accepting that stable globalisation only comes about as a consequence of other factors.
Whilst the dimmishment of the powers of centralised national governments, in favour of more decentralised power structures, may be a positive factor in the continuing development of advanced liberal democracies, for weaker and less prosperous nations it can be disasterous and is too easily perceived as an attack on their sovereignty. Similarly, the enforced acceleration of the economic development of weaker nations, without regard for the resources and equity of those nations can have terrible consequences on their lon term ability to survive independently of the international community (ie - for poorer nations the journey to a globalised community is one way).
You only have to consider the different manners in which Russia and China have responded to the West-driven globalism to see (relatively) how much better (stable, prosperous) China will be in the near future than Russia; Russia dove headfirst into westernised democracy without the social and economic infrastructure to support such liberalised globalism, China however, though it's record in many areas is wretched, has been focusing more on developing it's social and economic infrastructure, so that as it progresses a culture that can support liberal globalism will arrise naturally.
It comes down to senior management, and most execs are non-techie. Much microsoft advocacy is down from a primarily business perspective, much nix advocacy (especially Linux) is done from a primarily technical perspective; until nix vendors do a better job fighting Windows on the finance, marketing and media battlefield they'll keep losing ground to Microsoft, irrespective of the technical merits of the products involved.
It's not just the country that's young, it's government as a whole is relatively young with lots of senior ministers in their early-mid 40s. This combined with, as you say, Slovenia being so young a state, means that you've got a fairly young and visionary government and a people who aren't afraid of change - two things that most western nations lack.
It's been a couple of years since I did any stellar or plasma physics, but from what I remember in order to retain cohesion as they rise through the convective layers of the solar atmosphere magnetic flux tubes twist, and if the twisted tube rises through a rotating convection region it will be deflected preferentially poleward. The combination of which will either cause the flux tube to disperse relatively quickly or lock it into the described whirlpool behaviour depending on the direction of rotation (ie clockwise in one hemisphere, counterclockwise in the other).
Licensing their intellectual property is key to ARM's work, so they're far more likely to get all pit-bull over clones than a company that relies more on actual production of the hardware.
I'm not saying that mars is micro-g, but rather that you've got micro-g during earth-mars transit, followed by a period of higher-g followed by another period of micro-g, the effects of this on musculature and, particularly, bone aren't known.
It's not the weight of the spun module, or the energy cost of spinning it that would be the problem, but the structure that would be required to support the spun module and connect it to the rest of the craft; having a spun hab module would be far more complex than any spinning currently used in satellites.
I don't think it will become more practical 20-30 years from now if all we do is wait
My point exactly - work needs doing in the meantime, but it's looking more and more likely that it won't be.
The main benefits will, I suspect, arrise not directly out of IBM becoming an open source player, but rather out if the improvement in OS's image among the many senior execs of major companies who grew up when IBM was almost a synonym for reliable, business-class computing, particularly many CIOs and CEOs have passed through the AIX-laden finance sector.
It appears I wasn't clear - whilst we do have lots of information on some microgravity scenarios, there's little available for the specific case that will be experience in a mars mission of several months micro-g followed by a short period of high-g (during landing/take-off at mars) followed by several more months at micro gravity.
Also, there are very significant technical issues which would restrict the usefullness of a spun habitat module - not crippling, but aside from complicating stability (particularly as the module would be single spun, the torque would heavily conflict with the gravitational torque and radiation pressure torques occuring during transfer between earth and mars) the weight cost of a spun module is very high, and this I suspect would be crippling to the viability of a spun habitat module.
> Believe it or not, you CAN do astrogation on a rotating platform like this.
I do believe it, I did a degree in it.
I strongly support manned exploration of space, however long term desireability must be balanced against short term practicality - whilst we could initiate a manned mars mission program today it wouldn't be practical, and I doubt it will be practical for another 20-30 years.
One thing I've noticed over the last year or so when talking to non-techie friends/family is that many people with relatively little knowledge of IT as a whole are starting to realise that the processor speed, however it's being measured, is far less important than the vendors want them to think.
The end result of Intel and AMDs battle of "my processor's faster than your processor" seems to be that people are saying "I don't care" - as they realise that there 'obsolete' PII is actually perfectly capable of doing all the things they use their PC for and that only graphics people and the hardest of hardcore gamers actually need 1.5 to 2GHz.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh... and my prediction is that /. will become more infested with idiots like you, until everyone decides to kill all the anonymous cowards.
Humblest apologies for the offending tpyo. Now go away, tidy your bedroom and wipe the drool off your chin.
(must remember to stop feeding the trolls...)
Too many people have been so burned in the last few years that there's virtually no investment forthcoming in anything remotely blue-sky. If it's not safe and can't turn a profit in the short term, nobody want's to know. We're doing a lot in the broadband wireless direction, of vital long-term importance, but in the short term there's negligible buy-in :(
The over-caution is only going to prolong the depression, but for many people there's no alternative -- R&D is going to be hurting for better part of a decade.
Active aerodynamic surfaces have long seemed to me to be the next big leap in aero technology, nice to see something publicly available -- most of the research into it is too classified to find much out about.
SEC. 106. STRENGTHENING PENALTIES.
Section 1030(c) of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
`(B) if the offender knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death from conduct in violation of subsection (a)(5)(A)(i), a fine under this title or imprisonment for any term of years or for life, or both.'.
If you try to kill somebody you might get a life term, no different to recklessly or knowingly causing death any other way. So you try to crash air traffic control computers you get thrown in jail for life - sorry if I'm not too sympathetic.
Personally I'd reccommend this for novice to average people who's role is changing or who are changing job to sysadmin in a different company or environment.
A lot of the skills and behaviours people pick up will be heavily flavoured by the environment in which they picked them up; this book will help people to understand the common practices in sysadmining - what changes and what stays the same in different environments. Sysadmining in a university is very different to in an ISP or in a tech-corporation or in a non-tech-corporation.
Interesting watching the share prices of HP (NYSE:HWP) and Compaq (NYSE:CPQ) - makes it clear what the markets/analysts think of this!
Though security could easily be a nightmare, with auto-config and default settings providing excellent opportunities for things to go wrong, it isn't the only potential hole.
Almost all QOS issues are going to be a problem here - resilience for example (two NICs and a modem are nice, but I can't see "redundant power supply" written anywhere; or how about hardware support for RAID, even just mirroring). Also customisation/optimisation - nice that it does this automatically, but how easy is it to overide the automatic configuration (not an issue for many of the people who are buying these, but it will really limit there usefullness in big low-tech companies where you need to tie in with your corp-wan.
More detailed specs would be reassuring, the current descriptions are far too minimalist.
One of the most impressive things about the Eden Project is the simple proximity of such diverse environments to one another - you can walk from a sub-tropical jungle to a european woodland; the similarities and differences between the environments are highlighted, though the flora/fauna imbalance is noticeable.
They won't want to "crush" opengl, too big a market. This will provide a lot a leverage in that market, then they just "embrace and extend" the standards a little bit. Not like they've done that before!
This is an excellent choice for beginners who don't need to do "real" UML development work (eg students), for a more indepth look I'd advocate UML Distilled by Fowler and Scott for a more thorough grounding (and "The Unified Modeling Language User Guide" by Booch and Jacobson for the crunchier details of the language.
A comprehensive list of which packages were included and which were rejected is at http://people.debian.org/~joey/2.2r5/full.html
Like the reviewer I wanted to like this, and it does manage to serve as a passable overview of evolution in complex systems, but only in the same way as "A Brief History of Time" serves as a passable introduction to cosmology.
The primary problem is that rather than being a popular science book, it comes accross as a populist one, picking easy pop-culture references rather than more appropriate ones. This would be more forgivable if the book was giving a more balanced view of the subject, but the author seems to have a definate agenda which he is trying to communicate rather than giving a solid, unbiased view of the topic.
A good book on the subject for people who have no knowledge of, or interest in, the topic.
It's essentially a popular science book though, so a disproportionately large weighting must be given to base 10, even if base 2, base 12 or base 30 may be "better" arithmetically or more likely practically, as most people's knowledge of the subjects concerned, and maths in particular, is very weak.
Assuming that you each have the same understanding of the laws of physics, start of with teaching each other counting, arithmetic and basic geometry, followed by the periodic table and more advanced maths and basic physics; hopefully you can assume that you both agree on the values of pi, e, G, h etc (excepting base differences); then nouns for various things (names are afterall just shorthand labels we attach to things that are too complicated to describe from first principles all the time), potentially moving on to diagramatic representation of more abstract concepts - but that could take some time.
Probably the single greatest challenge facing SETI-like projects is not the daunting task of acquiring and analysing the vaast ammounts of data, but the criticisms levelled at it by many politicians and scientists.
To date, most books on bioastronomy in general and seti in particular have been rather daunting and require a good grasp of not just physics and biology, but even philosophical issues such as anthropomorphsim and technical matters such as DSP; a popular book on the subject, such as this one, could go a long way to raising public knowledge of the subject past the "looking through telescopes for aliens" level.
Too often people (governments, coporations, etc) attempt to employ the drive towards globalisation as a means to achieving particular ends, rather that accepting that stable globalisation only comes about as a consequence of other factors.
Whilst the dimmishment of the powers of centralised national governments, in favour of more decentralised power structures, may be a positive factor in the continuing development of advanced liberal democracies, for weaker and less prosperous nations it can be disasterous and is too easily perceived as an attack on their sovereignty. Similarly, the enforced acceleration of the economic development of weaker nations, without regard for the resources and equity of those nations can have terrible consequences on their lon term ability to survive independently of the international community (ie - for poorer nations the journey to a globalised community is one way).
You only have to consider the different manners in which Russia and China have responded to the West-driven globalism to see (relatively) how much better (stable, prosperous) China will be in the near future than Russia; Russia dove headfirst into westernised democracy without the social and economic infrastructure to support such liberalised globalism, China however, though it's record in many areas is wretched, has been focusing more on developing it's social and economic infrastructure, so that as it progresses a culture that can support liberal globalism will arrise naturally.
It comes down to senior management, and most execs are non-techie. Much microsoft advocacy is down from a primarily business perspective, much nix advocacy (especially Linux) is done from a primarily technical perspective; until nix vendors do a better job fighting Windows on the finance, marketing and media battlefield they'll keep losing ground to Microsoft, irrespective of the technical merits of the products involved.
It's not just the country that's young, it's government as a whole is relatively young with lots of senior ministers in their early-mid 40s. This combined with, as you say, Slovenia being so young a state, means that you've got a fairly young and visionary government and a people who aren't afraid of change - two things that most western nations lack.
It's been a couple of years since I did any stellar or plasma physics, but from what I remember in order to retain cohesion as they rise through the convective layers of the solar atmosphere magnetic flux tubes twist, and if the twisted tube rises through a rotating convection region it will be deflected preferentially poleward. The combination of which will either cause the flux tube to disperse relatively quickly or lock it into the described whirlpool behaviour depending on the direction of rotation (ie clockwise in one hemisphere, counterclockwise in the other).
Licensing their intellectual property is key to ARM's work, so they're far more likely to get all pit-bull over clones than a company that relies more on actual production of the hardware.
I'm not saying that mars is micro-g, but rather that you've got micro-g during earth-mars transit, followed by a period of higher-g followed by another period of micro-g, the effects of this on musculature and, particularly, bone aren't known.
It's not the weight of the spun module, or the energy cost of spinning it that would be the problem, but the structure that would be required to support the spun module and connect it to the rest of the craft; having a spun hab module would be far more complex than any spinning currently used in satellites.
I don't think it will become more practical 20-30 years from now if all we do is wait
My point exactly - work needs doing in the meantime, but it's looking more and more likely that it won't be.
The main benefits will, I suspect, arrise not directly out of IBM becoming an open source player, but rather out if the improvement in OS's image among the many senior execs of major companies who grew up when IBM was almost a synonym for reliable, business-class computing, particularly many CIOs and CEOs have passed through the AIX-laden finance sector.
It appears I wasn't clear - whilst we do have lots of information on some microgravity scenarios, there's little available for the specific case that will be experience in a mars mission of several months micro-g followed by a short period of high-g (during landing/take-off at mars) followed by several more months at micro gravity.
Also, there are very significant technical issues which would restrict the usefullness of a spun habitat module - not crippling, but aside from complicating stability (particularly as the module would be single spun, the torque would heavily conflict with the gravitational torque and radiation pressure torques occuring during transfer between earth and mars) the weight cost of a spun module is very high, and this I suspect would be crippling to the viability of a spun habitat module.
> Believe it or not, you CAN do astrogation on a rotating platform like this.
I do believe it, I did a degree in it.
I strongly support manned exploration of space, however long term desireability must be balanced against short term practicality - whilst we could initiate a manned mars mission program today it wouldn't be practical, and I doubt it will be practical for another 20-30 years.
One thing I've noticed over the last year or so when talking to non-techie friends/family is that many people with relatively little knowledge of IT as a whole are starting to realise that the processor speed, however it's being measured, is far less important than the vendors want them to think.
The end result of Intel and AMDs battle of "my processor's faster than your processor" seems to be that people are saying "I don't care" - as they realise that there 'obsolete' PII is actually perfectly capable of doing all the things they use their PC for and that only graphics people and the hardest of hardcore gamers actually need 1.5 to 2GHz.
There's a list of which packages did/didn't make it in available at http://people.debian.org/~joey/2.2r4/full.html