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Comment Re:apple has no principled stance on this (Score 1) 345

while apple's public action here is praiseworthy (imo), it does not seem to spring from a well articulated principled stance. it seems to have come from a combination of individual decisions, made in rather confused way, due to variety of motives .

that, in a nutshell, describes the complete history of mankind

Comment read "Command and Control" (Score 3, Interesting) 216

The posters here with the blase attitudes regarding nuclear weapons accidents ought to consider reading the book "Command and Control" and marvel at the fact we made it thru the cold war at all.

Regarding clean-up: when accidents happened on US territory we cleaned it up, even at Thule AFB, which is about as close to the end of the earth as you can get. We also contaminated the other end of the earth for good measure (leaky reactor at McMurdo Station Antarctica). In both cases the contaminated soil was 'disposed of' at the Savannah River Plant.

Comment Re:How is this different from an optimizer? (Score 1) 167

Basically its taking a "done" excecutable, reconstructing a form similar to the intermediate tree form the GCC backend uses, and then doing another optimization pass like GCC's backend does. What's new and unique here?

I think, and I'm not sure about this, that the original work is reconstructing an optimizable intermediate form. If anyone else has done it before I'm not aware of it, but I'm just a practitioner, not a CS researcher.

Comment Re:Just GBE everywhere! (Score 5, Insightful) 557

abso-fing-lutely. Cat 6 everywhere. Drop at least one in every room, and put one in every wall in the room you plan to use as you main media room.

The 2.4GHz band is totally congested and 5GHz doesn't go thru any kind of decent wall worth a shit. Leave wireless for mobile devices and wire everything that doesn't move. The idea that an 80" TV should be wireless is ridiculous.

Comment Re:Organizations are functional retards (Score 1) 222

Streets & Trips all the way. No need for a 10 ton web browser and shitloads of raster images.

Streets & Trips, hmmm... never heard of that. Let me google that:

Microsoft Streets & Trips
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fstre...
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Streets & Trips has been discontinued. We so appreciate the support of our dedicated users over the years. "The success of these products would ...

Any other suggestions? because the new google maps does well and truly blow

Comment Re:So basically we're finally catching up to Novel (Score 1) 125

sorry AC, I've got no mod points for you, but you are exactly right, except in the good old days of NW 3.x , netware admins would laugh at someone bragging about 300 days of uptime. I worked with NW sites that had servers with years of uptime. I've had unix servers that had years of uptime, not that that was a smart thing. It just meant they were running on reliable HW and hadn't been patched for years. With NW you could have servers with years of uptime and up to date SW.

The last NW site I worked at (late 90s maybe?) was shutting down NW servers that had been up non-stop since they were deployed years before to replace them with Windows servers as part of some lame-brained management driven "server consolidation" plan. Wonder how much money they "saved" with that?

Comment Re:I'm such a geek... (Score 1) 49

Anyhow, great video. The description makes it sound like it was a series of still images in video format, but it was very dynamic (maybe series of stills were turned into video or something - I have no idea).

yes, the video is made from a sequence of 4096x4096 stills. I don't know if the artifacts that you can see in some frames are because the detectors were saturated or they are a result of downsampling and the conversion to video.

Comment Re:I Am an Astrophysicist (but you do not salute m (Score 1) 234

agree 100%. It worked for me. I learned physics and astronomy OTJ. I already had the technical skills. Besides the skills mentioned in the parent post, real-time programming and controls can get you into the other end of the process, sensors, and their associated control and data acquisition systems. In addition to the places mentioned above, many universities, national labs and FFRDCs have space science programs. Also, while its totally obvious, but nobody else has mentioned it, there's NASA and its contractors. If you have the skills and you really want to do this you can. You need to use your imagination, keep your eyes and ears open and be willing to relocate.

Comment Re:Screw DARPA, give it to NASA (Score 1) 10

There has been a satellite servicing project at NASA/Goddard for about, uh, 3 decades. While for most of its existence it was focused on servicing performed by astronauts, there has always been some work going on in robotic servicing. One of the recent accomplishments was a robotic refueling demonstration

http://ssco.gsfc.nasa.gov/robo...

The only time the robotic effort was funded it a relatively high level was during the space station freedom era, and that only lasted for a couple of years before congress pulled the plug. To make matters worse, most of the money that was appropriated went to Martin-Marietta for concept studies

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

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