pointyhat

Yes it has but "it ain't that good". There's a lot of RF noise up there, so they still use air-based platforms such as Raytheon ASTOR/Sentinel. They're cheaper as well, even if you need a couple of Tornados to follow it.

I'm not saying any more otherwise I'll probably get bagged and tagged.

Or so they'd like you to think.

Pretty cool. I was going to get a GUID tattooed to my arm :)

KH-8 resolution is "0.5m". That is analogue as well as they used photographic film in them.

This is "0.5m" resolution (from GeoSat-1).

http://geoeyemediaportal.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/gall...

2-3 feet per pixel. Google earth uses that for imaging at very high scales. They use aerial photography for the rest. Per-pixel, it's definitely mainly aerial photography TBH.

That was their theoretical ground resolution. I doubt they ever achieved anything near that in reality.

I worked for a couple of nefarious organisations over the years.

I doubt there is nothing much greater in resolution. There are so many technical challenges such as diffusion due to moisture in the atmosphere that limit things practically. The resolution is basically shite from space. Certain non-visible light bandwidth applications are better as they don't suffer from the same effects however they have to then deal with cosmic radiation (which is terrible apparently) and corresponding gaps in the magnetosphere which screw up the equipment.

It's a bit hit and miss really and costs lots of money for no real good.

If they had anything significantly better, they'd have decommissioned all the Lockheed U2's by now.

Sounds very much like the GreenArray devices ( http://greenarraychips.com/ )

This in electrical engineering at least is SNR (signal to noise ratio). Noise is filtered, however the intent is to recover the signal cleanly.

Anything which is self-detrimental is likely to be part of the signal, not the noise.

batman -> coffeescript -> javascript. I don't get it.

Too many layers of abstraction.

I'm having serious trouble with even jQuery (with IE7,8 for example) on some of the stuff I'm working on, particularly on older machines.

tl;dr: "PostgreSQL is still my weapon of choice — it doesn’t keep us up at night."

I agree with the guy. PostgreSQL (and SQL server ironically) have kept me up less than any other piece of software out there.

I'm watching a turd occuring with MongoDB at the minute. Every time something breaks, I hear the team saying "it'll be fixed in the next version" or "feature X works around it for now". Grr. Too much marketing, not enough reliability study.

True. Also consider most of the world of Nokia Series 40, which by far destroys any other mobile operating system:

"Analyst estimates place the total number of devices shipped with S40 close to 1.5 billion, as of the end of 2010" [1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Series_40

Still works though; a thing that many people don't consider!

+1 for J2ME. Some of us will not let our Nokia 6303's go :)

More context = higher probability of tripping any algorithms?

Some bits buried in here: http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/02/sizing-vms-and-numa-nodes/

Sometimes you DO have to rewrite your application, particularly if you build it on proprietary software which has support agreements and EOLs which get hit. For example, look at all the crocks of shit hanging around on COM/VB6. They need to be completely replaced.

Some exaggeration for you...

You buy a Casio watch, a camping knife and a plane ticket to New York on September the 11th 2021 [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainee...

That's what I was thinking. Need some analysis on it really. We throw money at the problem at the moment and it goes away :)

If it's anything like the 300s or the 35s reissue, it's going to be crap. Just about anything coming out of HP since the HP48 is utter shit.

For ref the 300s buttons don't work properly and the OS is simply 100% stolen from Casio FX-series which are 1/3 the price. The 35s is buggy as anything and can't even display a single FP value accurately without having to scroll. The HP49G is better but still to expensive.

Save some cash: buy a TI89 or a second hand TI-92+ if you can be bothered to carry it around.

The issue is x86/x64 being a turd. Throughput of just about everything drops when you go over the 36Gb boundary for some reason. I have no idea why. It can drop by as much as 30%. This is from experience operating VMware on the physically the same type of kit (except with FC SAN / NetApp).

I'd personally rather buy high end SPARC64 kit which has linear performance scalability but we all know what happened to Sun, plus it doesn't run Windows anyway :( whimpers a little

Fair point - I'll give you that. Ironically I did a spot with Intermec barcode scanners and printers for asset management on top of Oracle so I understand where you are coming with.

I actually quit because I was the only one who did care. Everyone else was just after vendor backhanders.

Having done a LOT of work in that space (historically), I can assure you it's all SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, AS400 and epic quantities of turds. The largest turd being EDI and all sorts of nastyness.

It's not fun. It's actually painful. It takes a special kind of person to do it: Someone who doesn't care about what they do, just the money.

That's a fair statistical analysis so I get your point. With respect to Usenet, I'd fully expect that the endpoint logs, but not every intermediatary who happens to have an agreement with another intermediatary, which is the issue with tracking on the web. Distribution of information is no longer controlled by the endpoint or by contract, but rather by coincidence via any nefarious method possible.

If I did something naughty, I'd expect to get caught. This is not about anonymity, but about the assumptions that people draw about you based on unrelated information tracked from multiple sources.

However, I'd rather be an obvious objector than annoyed by donkey porn adverts :)

I don't see ads either (Firefox+Adblock+ghostery+noscript).

It's not about aggregate behavior with millions of others at all. It's about profiling.

Consider the case of clicking a link in an email someone sent me for a joke. My google account thereafter managed to associate me with bestality [1]. Fun eh?

Now ironically, over a year later, I was still getting rather awful targeted Google Ads advertising and SPAM to a supposedly unrelated email account (on Windows Live with no associated Google account). The persistent google cookie from hell dragged that information and my three static IP addresses across multiple sites and managed to basically bombard me with shit.

Something somewhere managed to make the associations and send directed advertising. They had me profiled.

That in my mind is unacceptable, which is why I don't want to sign up for another profiling account.

It's not paranoia or conspiracy crap - it's fact.

Regarding usenet: there's no reliable way to profile people on it due to its architecture.

[1] I accept some responsibility for clicking a link in an email of course.

They exclude transactions because an ORM maintains a stateful copy of the data on another tier. Once a copy is made of the data, the guarantee that a transaction can succeed or the data remains correct is no longer valid.

Considering Fowler spent years pushing ORM's, isn't it a little ironic that his first law, directly from PoEAA is [1] "Don't distribute your objects" yet an ORM encourages distribution via the Unit of Work pattern and local stateful copies.

Technically, the only thing that is possible to work for a Object-oriented database is a shared heap, which comes with its own bag of concurrency problems.

Relational databases however, have first class concepts within mathematics such as sets and all operations take place in one place against one true source always so transactions can be guaranteed.

ORM's are a recent invention and for some of the really big stuff out there, they just don't cut it.

I'll post some example cases where transactions and OO falls over if anyone is interested. I've watched enough concurrency and transaction isolation issues raised from ORMs to be intimately aware of them now.

[1] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FirstLaw.html

Functional programming maps perfectly. Consider first class sets in a language.

It's at the detriment of the user when the iPad is no longer vogue and they wish to retain their books, movies and music.

Thank you for saving me the words.

The reason I don't have a Google account is that I don't like being profiled and tracked as I go around the Internet and I believe that pay-walls should not be in front of free information.

A Google account is a pay-wall. You pay by providing them with some information about you.

Thank you - much appreciated :)