As per Google's Usenet archives
[ http://groups.google.com/googlegroup...ounce_20.html], the
first discussion of the Y2K problem on the Usenet was on January 18
1985 [ http://groups.google.com/groups?thre...0%40reed.UUCP]. That
is a good 15 years before the problem manifested. Even then, it
turned out, we were scrambling for cover when the D-day was
approaching.
Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do have a
massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem. On Mon Jan
18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count will "roll-over".
After that, the time on the Unix systems will read as Fri Dec 13
14:45:52 1901.
IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable solutions
to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the consensus to be
built, and to come up with a solution that most (if not all) people
find acceptable. We also need considerable time to test out all
possible solutions in the real world, to decide if the solutions
really work as expected. We may also need to develop a suite of
recovery strategies should the problem manifest in some system on that
fateful Monday morning. All this takes time. So, as the late Todd
Beamer would have said: Let's roll.
Bhat
Nov 14 '05
248  10556 
Programmer Dude <Ch***@Sonnack. com> coughed up the following: Mark McIntyre writes:
You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it.
No you can't, and for goodness sake don't try this at home. Hydrogen
diffuses into the surrounding air VERY quickly, and burns almost
immediately. Did you never set fire to a test-tube of the stuff in
school?
Almost.
Had a fun/goofy JHS science teacher who once gave a demonstration on
cracking water. He collected the H in a test tube and then clicked a
Bunsen burner igniter near the mouth.
Made a nice, startling "POP!"
Then he decided to try collecting the H in a beaker.
He (and we!) were all VERY surprised.
I remember a similar experiment, but with different results. The POP
came from the O2.
{shrug} ymmv
--
Onedoctortoanot her:"Ifthisismy rectalthermomet er,wherethehell 'smypen???"
Dan Pop <Da*****@cern.c h> coughed up the following:
....[thwack]... If you're paranoid, thoday's Internet is not the right place for
you...
Today's internet requires /clinical/ paranoia...
--
Onedoctortoanot her:"Ifthisismy rectalthermomet er,wherethehell 'smypen???" Da*****@cern.ch (Dan Pop) writes: In <Hy********@app rove.se> ho*@invalid.inv alid (Goran Larsson) writes:
[...] Why should I accept TinyURLs, something created to con and deceive
web surfers?
Bullshit. This is not the primary purpose of TinyURL. Just because a
tool can be misused doesn't automatically mean that *any* use is a
misuse.
I agree, but the statement about affiliate links is on tinyurl.com's
main page:
Hide your affiliate URLs
Are you posting something that you don't want people to know what
the URL is because it might give away that it's an affiliate
link. Then you can enter a URL into TinyURL, and your affiliate
link will be hidden from the visitor, only the tinyurl.com address
and the ending address will be visible to your visitors.
I think it's unfortunate that they chose to advertise this "feature",
but I don't consider that sufficient reason to boycott the service.
YMM, of course, V.
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keit h) ks***@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*> <http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
On 2004-06-04, Paul E. Black <p.*****@acm.or g> wrote:
[snip]
If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.
If there still is backfill. Are you sure it won't be washed away in a
few centuries? Maybe even decades? Possibly the rains have gone even
more acid, possibly enough to burn through that kind of steel in a
century. After that, well, I'm sure nature will come up with something.
Since we're talking end-of-the-world scenarios and a timescale even
engineers usually don't think about, there's simply no telling what
will happen. I'm not willing to bet on ``seems okay'' with that kind of
stuff. If you can't expect people to make sure it won't be touched (you
can't, revolutions do happen) you can't expect nature to abide by the
``no trespassing'' signs.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l . ho*@invalid.inv alid (Goran Larsson) wrote: In article <cu************ *@zero-based.org>,
Martin Dickopp <ex************ ****@zero-based.org> wrote:
If you really must know the redirection destination in advance, just
make a TCP connection to port 80 of tinyurl.com, type two lines of
HTTP protocol, and read the HTTP headers coming back from the server.
I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.
FWIW, I agree with you. Apart from untrustworthy posters, there is
always the risk of typos; at least with a normal URL, you stand a
fighting chance of spotting it. Besides, why should I take extra trouble
to find out whether a link is worth following? If it doesn't _look_
worth the trouble, odds are that it isn't.
Richard
In <m5************ ****@tombstone. sdct.nist.gov> p.*****@acm.org (Paul E. Black) writes: Da*****@cern.c h (Dan Pop) writes:
In <40************ ***@yahoo.com> CBFalconer <cb********@yah oo.com> writes: >Should
>any posted signs survive, the language in which they are written
>probably will not.
No one expects any posted signs to survive, merely to be carefully
maintained. This would also take care of the language issue.
Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic
destruction of the current civilisation and its replacement by the
descendants of a few tribes of bushmen that survived the catastrophe
by chance.
If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.
The idea was that that those few tribes of bushmen would eventually
repopulate the world and create a civilisation with no "memory" of the
previous one.
Dan
--
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email: Da*****@ifh.de
Goran Larsson <ho*@invalid.in valid> coughed up the following: In article <cu************ *@zero-based.org>,
Martin Dickopp <ex************ ****@zero-based.org> wrote:
If you really must know the redirection destination in advance, just
make a TCP connection to port 80 of tinyurl.com, type two lines of
HTTP protocol, and read the HTTP headers coming back from the server.
I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.
Completely agree----I don't think I'd ever click on something without
knowing where I was going to land. Whenever there is an anchor with
text replacing the link, I always hover over it. In fact, in many spam
messages I've discovered that the text is often another link than the
link itself. Sneaky.
--
Onedoctortoanot her:"Ifthisismy rectalthermomet er,wherethehell 'smypen???"
In <I6************ **@nwrdny03.gni link.net> "Thomas G. Marshall" <tg************ ****@replacetex twithnumber.hot mail.com> writes: Programmer Dude <Ch***@Sonnack. com> coughed up the following:
Mark McIntyre writes:
You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it.
No you can't, and for goodness sake don't try this at home. Hydrogen
diffuses into the surrounding air VERY quickly, and burns almost
immediately. Did you never set fire to a test-tube of the stuff in
school?
Almost.
Had a fun/goofy JHS science teacher who once gave a demonstration on
cracking water. He collected the H in a test tube and then clicked a
Bunsen burner igniter near the mouth.
Made a nice, startling "POP!"
Then he decided to try collecting the H in a beaker.
He (and we!) were all VERY surprised.
I remember a similar experiment, but with different results. The POP
came from the O2.
You're misremembering it. It was the H2 that POPed, while the O2 turned
a slowly burning thingie into a first class flame. It's O2 (at sea level
pressure) that was responsible for the Apollo 1 tragedy (some sparks
ignited violently things that don't burn in ordinary air or even in the
lower O2 pressure the capsule was supposed use on orbit).
Dan
--
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email: Da*****@ifh.de Da*****@cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote in message news:<ca******* ****@sunnews.ce rn.ch>... In <m5************ ****@tombstone. sdct.nist.gov> p.*****@acm.org (Paul E. Black) writes:
Da*****@cern.c h (Dan Pop) writes:
In <40************ ***@yahoo.com> CBFalconer <cb********@yah oo.com> writes:
>Should
>any posted signs survive, the language in which they are written
>probably will not.
No one expects any posted signs to survive, merely to be carefully
maintained. This would also take care of the language issue.
Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic
destruction of the current civilisation and its replacement by the
descendants of a few tribes of bushmen that survived the catastrophe
by chance.
If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.
The idea was that that those few tribes of bushmen would eventually
repopulate the world and create a civilisation with no "memory" of the
previous one.
Whatever happened you can be sure that, eventually, Charlton Heston
would arrive, see evidence of the previous civilisation and say "my
god it's true....", ... maybe ...
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.unix.misc.] In article <cu************ *@zero-based.org>,
Martin Dickopp <ex************ ****@zero-based.org> wrote:
> If you really must know the redirection destination in advance, just
> make a TCP connection to port 80 of tinyurl.com, type two lines of
> HTTP protocol, and read the HTTP headers coming back from the server.
lynx -head
--
Simulations are like miniskirts, they show a lot and hide the essentials.
-- Hubert Kirrman This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion. |
