I wish for a feature that is in Firefox... and that is the ability to set a master password and encrypt all password manager contents. That way, stored passwords and certificates are independently protected.
Incidentally, "improper animal handling procedures resulting in blood-to-blood contact" may include chopping up an infected animal for dinner (as most people envisage it), or digging bits of splattered bat out of the radiator of your car or from your clothing after the bat has become road kill. Which is certainly what worries us and our medical advisers as we travel near to infected areas.
We tend to make the assumption that an average lifespan of 30 means that nobody lives past 35 years old
We who? I doubt anyone thinks that.
To misquote someone, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the statistical ineptitude of the common man. Or something like that.
I wish it were true that nobody really thought that poorly. But I am realistic enough to recognise that there are significant numbers of people who really are that ignorant and incapable of basic maths.
But that might be the only thing keeping us from choosing between the Wal-Mart-A and Wal-Mart-B of online storage.
I carry 2x1TB drives around with me, and synchronise between them. No online storage for me.
Then again, with 1MBPS of public network link shared between 180 people, no online storage for anyone on this job either.
We're dumping centuries worth of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
Looking back into the rock record (I used to use the rocks associated with this event as steering information to earn my bread and butter ; I work in a different part of the world this year), we've released as much CO2 in under 2 centuries as the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) took around 6 millennia to release. Dull, boring fact - like I said, my bread and butter for over a decade.
(look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
s/clathrate gun hypothesis/PETM/ (or the interface between Forties / Andrew Sand Formation and the overlying Sele and Baldur Formations (spellings vary between countries and companies).
s/could/did/
Dull boring facts, again.
Global warming deniers can bullshit all they want. Here in the oil industry we've no doubt what is happening. If our managers (not being geologists) want to lie about geology (or pay shills to lie for them), that's politics, not geology.
I suppose I'd better go and drill my hole in the ground now.
Will it have time/fuel to "duck and cover" by getting to the far side of the planet before the close approach of the comet and the potential of a cometary dust storm that could wreck it?
While this is a non-zero probability event, it is a low probability event. I doubt that the mission planners are particularly worried about it.
Maybe if there's a mission-compatible way of sequencing things that will reduce this low probability even further, at little cost (which is what Hubble did during a predicted Leonid meteor shower ; but the Hubble Deep Field South was already planned, and the only real change was when the exposures were scheduled. Which by coincidence pointed the HST away from the radiant of the meteor shower.)
Incidentally I note that the mission is being monitored by the Indian Deep Space Network. Which either operates for a few hours a day (per mission, depending on direction to the spacecraft), or indicates that India has done some significant multi-national diplomacy to get their ground stations into a number of countries.
LMGTFY. There's a Wiki page that says it's one site near Bangalore. And that mentions the use of steerable antennae to " improve[s] the visibility duration". But this site says there are a number of other tracking sites. "ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) [...] has a network of ground stations at Bangalore, Lucknow, Sriharikota, Port Blair and Thiruvananthapuram in India besides stations at Mauritius, Bearslake (Russia), Brunei and Biak (Indonesia). " So, maybe several different organisations, with overlapping missions and facilities. Like Topsy, it's probably something that "just growed".
A short-wave transciever could come in mighty handy should disaster come.
Several people each having working and mutually compatible transceivers would be much more useful. So you need to have been, in practice, drilling with your local emergency services professionals to ensure that you know how to contact them, what to report and how to triage
Which is why, on the vessel I'm working on today, we spend about an hour a week on safety drills involving the whole crew (on-shift and those nominally asleep ; nobody sleeps through those alarms). An hour a week ; 52 hours a year, or 6 and a half working days a year. That's the sort of commitment you need to make to be significantly useful. For a less focussed "how to be effective in a major emergency" level of preparation, you'd probably still need to devote a full weekend a year. Which is do-able ; but it's a lot more than having some particular piece of equipment and then not really knowing how to effectively use it when the shit hits the fan.
you could argue that is only some 50% of the target audience, but it's still 50% who you're going to need to ship dozens or hundreds of km to decent skies.
Alternatively, allocate 20 or 30% of the budget to dark sky advocacy work. You could even use a "reduce waste" slogan like "why pay to light up the bottom of the clouds?" Which raises another point, always a bugbear of astronomy, the weather.
My concern about always-on storage is that if someone gets root, they can zero out the backup storage, purge all snapshots, then rsync the zeroed out changes.
I sometimes wonder about using hard disks instead of tapes in a silo. Perhaps something like iMation's RDX, except with modern, high capacity drives, or maybe even a robotic mechanism that can handle bare bones disks, moving them from a storage part to a reader [1], and so on.
Hard disks are not as reliable as tapes, but if done right, could be used as a way to have backups that can't easily be dumped with a single command as backups stashed on an Avamar or other appliance could be. Plus, there is also the benefit of being able to offsite media as well and rotate it in and out.
[1]: I looked into making a prototype of this circa 2009, and what companies would do the robotics accurately enough to handle bare-bones drives. It is a lot easier if the drives are in an enclosure, but bare-bones means that there are no enclosure "standards" to deal with.
In the early 1990s, AIX allowed you to partition drives (physical volumes) where a logical volume could be residing on the inner or outer part of a drive. That way, DB indexes and critical tables could be placed where access was relatively fast, while the stash for archive logs, program files, and stuff not really accessed could be placed on the outer part. Not SSD speed, but it was a way to help with database performance, especially if one had a lot of spindles.
I wouldn't really call them a new spin on taxis. They're more like the remises in Argentina, and unlicensed (and technically illegal) taxis in many other countries. Basically, you have the licensed and regulated taxis, where you have a relatively strong assurance that you'll get where you want to go for a controlled/metered rate, in a reasonably safe and well maintained vehicle, and if you have a problem you can write down the cab number and make a complaint to a regulator. You also pay a fairly hefty fee for all this.
If you're willing to take a bit more risk, you can flag down a remis, pay a couple pesos per person, and they'll take you from where you are to downtown, or from downtown back out to the residential area you live in. The drivers make these trips all day, fill the car as full of people as it can possibly be filled (they pick up additional people along the way until the car is completely full and then some). They run on the cheapest fuel possible (in Argentina, typically LPG), and are not necessarily well-maintained. So there's risk. And, while you typically get where you want to be OK, there's plenty of opportunity for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of individual riders (or even groups if they're organized well and coordinating with someone else). So again... it's a risk.
There's a reason taxi cabs are regulated as heavily as they are, and in general it's probably a good thing for public safety even though they're freakishly expensive.
Actually more often I have seen the opposite: claims the new stuff is going to be faster, the compiler is not smart enough to figure out that they are the same, and thus you should use the new stuff.
There was a coworker who insisted that using C++ std::foreach for loops was faster because "the compiler knows you can't break out of it and thus can optimize the whole thing". I had two objections to this: first of all it would be a really stupid optimizing compiler that could not figure out there are no "break" statements inside the for loop. And second the C++ was still allowed to throw exceptions in both cases.
The other objection I had was that the functors were unreadable.
Yet another objection is my suspicion that the optimization would be far worse on the functors due to the enormous header files of templates they actually used and I expected the optimizer for the simple for loop to have fewer bugs in it. But I did not test this.
I'm clearly a beardy type despite cutting my teeth on Unix well after 1988. Apparently I did get the message where so many others did not.
I started seriously with Linux in 1999, after 5 years of WinNT4. And I do not like the systemd.
SystemD is a reinvention of Windows for Linux. It's even made the same way as the Windows: modular design with monolitic architecture. Just like a card house: pull one card, and the whole thing comes down.
That's why Linux back then was like a breath of fresh air to me. Coming from NT4 (which was hard to keep working) to Linux (which I could bring back from a fatal failure in under 15 minutes) pretty much exemplified to me how *NOT* to design the software.
SystemD is indeed the "second system effect" which (unknowingly?) implements many errors of the Windows. The errors which still hunt MS to this day!. (E.g. all embedded Windows attempts failed. Now they have a dedicated embedded system - WinPho - because porting the "card house" to another device built around different paradigms is hard and costly and error prone. It works like crap in the end, while providing no benefits to developers (making portable applications proved to be futile; with WinPho MS stopped promising it) and consequently users.)
... I come down on the systemd side when I want my laptop to correctly connect to the appropriate WiFi network (but only if not connected to a wired network).
The NetworkManager is written by literally the same people who work on the SystemD.
If it hadn't worked before, why you think it would work afterwards?
Not so rare if (A) you have full assortment of the
At the worst, on my Win7 I had about 5
(Plus, there were two "uninstallable"
The only solution is to uninstall the application which requires the uncommon
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
