You hit on a couple of really important things. First off, Google is a Slashdot baby. It is one of those few for profit companies that the Slashdot community and specifically the editors has decided is 'good' and not 'evil' for whatever reason. Given that MSN is the first major change in the search market in several years this attention is not suprising. Although I agree it is totally unwarranted. Honestly this release s probably the first wave of many releases by many companies. This is simply the first results of their long term efforts (some of which we probably are not even aware of yet) to compete with Google. The problem is with all this initial attention on MSN we may well miss the critical potential 'Google Killer'
Second, the fact that it is Microsoft makes it all the bigger of a target. If it was Yahoo we would've seen a single article about the release of product. And I would bet A LOT of money on that statement.
This just another example of why we need the ability to moderate entire articles not just comments.
Well the intern made the single largest mistakes most newbie interns (I hope he's a newbie) make the first time they goto Bill's house. I think he'll learn though.:-)
Either way, I was a MS intern for 5 years, the first year I couldn't go but by my second party I had figured out that you don't talk to Bill for very long least for more than maybe 15 minutes. The reason? Because everyone else from MS, and then some is there, for example Tom Brokaw was at one of my parties because of MSNBC. I would ask you this question? When else in your life are you going to have a chance to talk one on one with a senior VP for MS for 4 hours, yes 4 hours. Or for that matter someone like David Cutler or Michael Kinsley (who was my choice as I am interested in politics) You can either do that or stand in the donut around Bill and ask two or three questions and get short one sentence answers.
I will admit that the house is quite impressive, when I was there I was informed by security that it's really two houses in one. The "conference center" part which is where you spend your time and a more intimate "living" part where the family actually spends thier time. I found the private little bungalow down by the beach with the adjacent boathouse the most interesting though, complete with lazy boys, a chess board and an interesting selection of books scattered around.
The US is predominately a technology and weapons system provider not a ship provider. There are exceptions. The US has provided either through construction or plans frigate class ships to Taiwan, Spain and Australia (O.H, Perry class frigates) in the 80's and early 90s when these designs were still "modern". Most US ships are "given" as you state through FMS.
As for manning requirements the US is behind the curve. In Europe several new ship classes a year are introduced, but they usually only number 5 or 6 ships. The US due to it's size may introduce a new class every 20 years, but it builds 40 of them.
The larger problem is that US shipyards are simply put to reliant on US defense contracts to build ships for other countries. This can be seen in that essentially no freighters, cruise ships et al built in the US. Simply put the DoD has them in thier pocket (or vice versa);-)
What exactly is stealth is a little debatable. I think the Slashdot community is focusing a little to much on radar. Fact is that sound is exceedingly important to naval engineers. Just look at submarines as the perfect example. But in regards to surface ships the Sea Shadow and Visby aside, there are numerous ships with "reduced observability" features in service. Much of this has focused on making anti-submarine vessels quieter so that they cannot be detected by the sub they are hunting but there has also been focus on radar and infrared signatures.
Many of these "features" have limitted to no realistic effect but they do none the less exist. Examples of ships with such technology include the US Navy's Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers and the United Kingdom's Type 23 (Duke) Class Frigates. Other navies I can think of that operate ships with similar features include the French, Japanese (spinoff of Burke class) and the Spanish.
Major european ship builders are even preparing to sell ships with such features as part of what I call thier modular 'kit' frigates that they often sell to 3rd world countries. We all love to wonder why the US loves to sell high-tech equipment to countries that have no need for it. (Military-industrial complex anyone?) Fact is that sadly, the Europeans are often times no better. Even the final aircraft carrier of the Nimitz class will incorporate reduced observability features. Although one wonders with the rather large vertical surfaces on a carrier exactly how much difference you can make.:-)
In my experience one of the best places to try to get cars is from repossession companies who are holding a car for whatever reason and the bank decides they just wanna get rid of it. This is especially good if you can buy it OFF the lot from the collection agency before it goes to auction. This little known habit of collection agencies netted me a 1998 Ford Escort in good condition for about $2050 about 2 years ago when the car was worth almost $6K. As long as you are willing to spend a day (or two if it's really bad) cleaning it out it can work out very well. Siezure auctions are also good but generally the cars sell a little higher due to more competitive bidders being present.
The best prank I heard of in this vein was one a family friend pulled back during the old days @ Microsoft (late 80s). Seems developer XYZ went on his honeymoon and was gone for an unusually long period of time (like two months). The team proceeded to remove his office door from the hinges and take out the door frame. They then bribed facilities to get the paint code for the wall in that part of the building. A quick trip to Benjamin Moore, the local Eagle Hardware and they sheetrocked the door and painted the wall. You couldn't tell, it was completely perfect.
Other MS pranks I saw was turning an office into a putting green, complete with real sod and a few years ago a friend of mine converted his managers office into a beach with real sand and a corona.
An old manager of mine took this to the extreme. And built a custom tank to fit his small office window, filled it with water and put fish in it so it appeared that his office was full of water. He then proceeded to sit at his desk in scuba gear for part of the day, much to the consternation of his coworkers and casual passerbys.
You have a very good point. But it comes back to people niavely believing that the computer is going to be better than they are, so they shouldn't do the work. Who verifies that all the columns in their Excel spreadsheet actually added right? Most of us just assume they did....
Worry About This Every Day
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The next time you visit the doctor watch the workflow of the office staff. Increasingly chances are they will probably be entering your medical information, and I mean the clinical stuff, not your address into some type of computer system.
I currently work for a small Electronic Medical Records company. At some level I worry about potentially killing someone every day. In fact our bug tracking tool has a special category in it called "Patient Safety" which is the highest priority bug. We deal with things most of you probably wouldn't think of such as a tool for writing Prescriptions, which given the fact that many drugs interact ( potentially fatally) has to catch and alert the physician to such cases. I also deal with lab results which if reported incorrectly could lead to a potentially fatal decision by the doctor and so forth.
Consultants and pundits like to say that computer control reduces the chances of human error and failure, this is said IMO to comfort the masses. To state the obvious I suspect EVERYONE on Slashdot knows that in reality that statement is not true, the human error has just been moved to a different point in the chain. A tired programmer is just as likely to make a mistake as a tired machinery operator. The difference is that that software might be used by 5,000 machines, whearas that operator runs 1.
The issue is not the tonnage of the carrier but rather how many pounds the catapult can shoot to takeoff speeds.
The French Clemenceau or newer DeGaulle class carriers are entirely capable of operating F18s, although not particularly efficiently due to deck space limitations. However you'd have to refit them by upgrading the catapults and putting arresting gear in that can stop a 40,000 pound plane. And of course only one country in the world has a company that makes equipment capable of handling a F18 for arrested landing. So unless you know a guy who can build cats in his backyard shop you are SOL.
This isn't news when it comes to the ships for the navy. For years I have been a member of a small group of warship fans in the Seattle who have swapped emails for years about ship X being at location Y. It basically amounts to: "That new destroyer put into Bremerton last week. Go take a look at it!" Of course the only difference here is now that that information is available to the general public. Whoopee! Disaster! You might know something!
A nice realistic explanation is that the shots were probably taken over a period of hours (if not days) and the clouds don't match. So someone went in and fixed it up to make it look all pretty. No doubt the same was done for the ground (shadows, lighting level etc).
What would be much more interesting and informative is to see the "raw" pictures that originally made up the composite NASA has put together.
Doubtful these boxes are being used for development. He states these computers were being delivered to MSCopy (which is however also shipping and recieving). MSCopy does all internal large scale documentation work for MS.
In addition to Office Development and IE, which IIRC is done at the Silicon Valley campus anyways, perhaps that's just powerpoint. It's been a long time since I worked @ MS and things change. I have seen Macs used in prepress roles at Microsoft. A friend of mine had one on his desk for testing networking services. My bet though is that these computers will be being used for pre-press and graphics stuff and not development. Given that I think Microsoft should at least get kudos for picking the best platform for the job.
Unless it's because of facility cost I can't see why. Bellingham is about a 2 hour drive from Seattle, where most of the Linux users in the Northwest are anyways!. I'd pay $10 to have it at some campus in the Seattle area rather than pay $15 in gas to get to Bellingham. Oh well.
I grew up in Seattle and actually started working for Microsoft my Junior/Senior year of high school through their HS program. I then worked for the company for the three summers of my college years at the UW. All told I did 5 internships in 3 different divisions. In the end I decided not to work for Microsoft, opting for a smaller and highly profitable company in downtown Seattle.
I did however really enjoy my time at MS. It's a fun intern program. Microsoft knows how to party and for a college person it's an ideal situation.
However I concluded that my internships really didn't help me in the end. Also because I had been at the company so long Microsoft assumed I was garunteed to work for them after graduation. When I interviewed for FT my senior year recruiting did not listen to my desires. I was lied to about position availability and after battling with them for some time about various things when I showed up I was interviewing for a position in a group I had specifically requested not to work in. This is not unexpected though. If you give someone the perception that they have control over you they will often times abuse it.
Fortunatly I am happier now and am being given a level of responsibility MS would have never given me.:-)
As a former contract xbox tester I can state with certainty that being a games tester is probably one of the MOST overrated jobs in the "tech sector".
The facts of games testing: 1) You will get bored. Think about it logically. Even with the games with high replay value you get bored of them. If I *EVER* had to play NFL Fever again I think I will get physically SICK. 2) You will almost never get to play a game through in it's entirety. You will play bits and pieces over and over and over. I have played the Assault the Control Room level(s) in Halo several HUNDRED times forward and back, some parts over and over and over and over... 3) You will be paid LESS than other people working in Quality Assurance for non games firms. 4) You will not learn useful skills for career advancement outside the games industry. If you work for a long time in Games QA be prepared to remain there. It is unlikely you will learn skills useful in the rest of the world, or even in games development. (perhaps design but thats it). Not much point in knowing SQL if you are going to play DOA all day.
Conclusion: Little room for advancement. Less money and sadly you aren't even sacraficing it for some altruistic cause such as fighting world hunger. You had better LIVE for games.
If you want to learn about the Navy's projects from a level that will actually be useful rather than the jokes and jabs that are mostly being posted here I suggest reading the United States' Naval Institutes monthly magazine Proceedings. In fact recently there was even an article written by an officer about the benefits of open source in the DoD. Also of interest to many people maybe the extensive automation being considered for the Coast Guard's new cutters which has been the topic of several articles.
Beginning this year and finishing in 2008 the Washington State Department of transportation will be building a second suspension bridge across the Tacoma Narrows. About 30 miles south of Seattle. This bridge will be adjacent to the more famous bridge that collapsed in a windstorm 1940's and was rebuilt.
It will be the first suspension bridge of any reasonable size (over 5000ft) built in the United States since I believe the early 1960s. In recent years the only country (that I know of) building large numbers of suspension bridges has been Japan.
*shrug* All a matter of opinion I guess. After all make that a 7.5+ and it could have flattened/severely damaged Silicon Valley. Besides given the # of techies in the area I suppose it is at least somewhat news worthy for the Slashdot community. Seattle's 6.8 last year wasn't news for more than a day or two. Of course normally when ever we have an earthquake in Seattle everyone starts darting thier eyes back and forth between Puget Sound (tsunamis) and Mt. Ranier (volcano). I loved my geology classes in college, the northwest, especially Alaska is geologically fascinating and has earthquakes every couple of hundred years that make the biggest ones in California look wussy. (think 9.0 +). There are entire underwater "forests" in Washington and Oregon that simply slid into the water in a massive slide or the land simply dropped 20 feet around 400 years ago. Very cool.
Yeah the biggest problem is that Washington residents have been in a "tax-revolt" for the last 5 or 6 years. They refuse to pay for anything. In addition the state has one of the most repressive tax structures in the country. No income tax and most of the progressive taxes, such as a motor vehicle excise tax have been eliminated via voter initiatives funded by two right wing wackos from Eastern Washington who found a frat-boy on the west half of the state to act as their front man. A friend who is fairly high up in the city of Seattle says his impression is that in addition to the usual political crap there is a legitimate fear that if they actually START something that the funding will get ripped out from underneath them before they even get it really started via a shortsighted initiative campaign.
I was a student in high school in the Lake Washington School district in the mid 90's. The "LWSD" is the school district which encompasses the Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue area which is of course home to MS. I did a lot of volunteer and paid work for the district, but mostly did sys-admin type work.
The district admirably resisted the MS juggernaught until around 1995 when PCs started to pop up in the schools.
As a volunteer administrator on the district's student run email system (LWO, which is now defunct and to be shut down) http://lwo.lkwash.wednet.edu I attempted to encourage the district to use a groupware solution other than Exchange (even though we were on a NT server ourselves). I felt something more appropriate to an educational environment (i.e lighter wieght) was needed. LWO was a fully functional and operating groupware solution already running to service students. A faculty system could have been easily integrated into the student system. Of course this was rejected and I feel it was largely because an exchange implementation was more or less subsidized by Microsoft and forced upon the district by MS employee parents as part of a mass migration to Windows everything.
Schools are interested in delivering the best education possible to thier students. If they can save money by switching to a cheaper solution (read subsidized by MS to suck you in) they will do it. By the time they realize what is going on it's too late. A large part of this is the repercussions of the tech boom of the 90's. A lot of GOOD tech people who would have gone to work in the education field instead went into the commercial sector. K-12 schools got stuck with the bottom of the barrel in terms of technical personnel, people who were really not up to the job or understood the long term ramifications of what they were advocating. Now you are seeing the results, total and complete Windows domination and little chance for inroads by anyone else.
During a LOTR showing in Seattle large parts of the audience actually laughed (and not in the "this is funny sense") during the trailer. There were numerous comments from people of all ages around me about how pathetic the trailer looked. Oh well the only person I know who liked EP1 was my 12 year old cousin. That's good for now but I doubt that EP1 will have the staying power in his mind that the original trilogy has in my generation.
Bingo Karma! I know people who have worked as a temp on X-box. All have reported that it's by no means a PC. All this "oh we are going to hack it!" stuff on Slashdot is unlikely to amount to much without some serious technical ability on the hackers part.
If you buy an Xbox to hack into a PC the average slashdotter, unless you have unusually advanced technical abilities is paying $299 for an 8gb HDD and a DVD drive and pretty piece of black plastic.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit on a couple of really important things. First off, Google is a Slashdot baby. It is one of those few for profit companies that the Slashdot community and specifically the editors has decided is 'good' and not 'evil' for whatever reason. Given that MSN is the first major change in the search market in several years this attention is not suprising. Although I agree it is totally unwarranted. Honestly this release s probably the first wave of many releases by many companies. This is simply the first results of their long term efforts (some of which we probably are not even aware of yet) to compete with Google. The problem is with all this initial attention on MSN we may well miss the critical potential 'Google Killer'
Second, the fact that it is Microsoft makes it all the bigger of a target. If it was Yahoo we would've seen a single article about the release of product. And I would bet A LOT of money on that statement.
This just another example of why we need the ability to moderate entire articles not just comments.
Well the intern made the single largest mistakes most newbie interns (I hope he's a newbie) make the first time they goto Bill's house. I think he'll learn though. :-)
Either way, I was a MS intern for 5 years, the first year I couldn't go but by my second party I had figured out that you don't talk to Bill for very long least for more than maybe 15 minutes. The reason? Because everyone else from MS, and then some is there, for example Tom Brokaw was at one of my parties because of MSNBC. I would ask you this question? When else in your life are you going to have a chance to talk one on one with a senior VP for MS for 4 hours, yes 4 hours. Or for that matter someone like David Cutler or Michael Kinsley (who was my choice as I am interested in politics) You can either do that or stand in the donut around Bill and ask two or three questions and get short one sentence answers.
I will admit that the house is quite impressive, when I was there I was informed by security that it's really two houses in one. The "conference center" part which is where you spend your time and a more intimate "living" part where the family actually spends thier time. I found the private little bungalow down by the beach with the adjacent boathouse the most interesting though, complete with lazy boys, a chess board and an interesting selection of books scattered around.
The US is predominately a technology and weapons system provider not a ship provider. There are exceptions. The US has provided either through construction or plans frigate class ships to Taiwan, Spain and Australia (O.H, Perry class frigates) in the 80's and early 90s when these designs were still "modern". Most US ships are "given" as you state through FMS.
;-)
As for manning requirements the US is behind the curve. In Europe several new ship classes a year are introduced, but they usually only number 5 or 6 ships. The US due to it's size may introduce a new class every 20 years, but it builds 40 of them.
The larger problem is that US shipyards are simply put to reliant on US defense contracts to build ships for other countries. This can be seen in that essentially no freighters, cruise ships et al built in the US. Simply put the DoD has them in thier pocket (or vice versa)
What exactly is stealth is a little debatable. I think the Slashdot community is focusing a little to much on radar. Fact is that sound is exceedingly important to naval engineers. Just look at submarines as the perfect example. But in regards to surface ships the Sea Shadow and Visby aside, there are numerous ships with "reduced observability" features in service. Much of this has focused on making anti-submarine vessels quieter so that they cannot be detected by the sub they are hunting but there has also been focus on radar and infrared signatures.
:-)
Many of these "features" have limitted to no realistic effect but they do none the less exist. Examples of ships with such technology include the US Navy's Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers and the United Kingdom's Type 23 (Duke) Class Frigates. Other navies I can think of that operate ships with similar features include the French, Japanese (spinoff of Burke class) and the Spanish.
Major european ship builders are even preparing to sell ships with such features as part of what I call thier modular 'kit' frigates that they often sell to 3rd world countries. We all love to wonder why the US loves to sell high-tech equipment to countries that have no need for it. (Military-industrial complex anyone?) Fact is that sadly, the Europeans are often times no better. Even the final aircraft carrier of the Nimitz class will incorporate reduced observability features. Although one wonders with the rather large vertical surfaces on a carrier exactly how much difference you can make.
In my experience one of the best places to try to get cars is from repossession companies who are holding a car for whatever reason and the bank decides they just wanna get rid of it. This is especially good if you can buy it OFF the lot from the collection agency before it goes to auction. This little known habit of collection agencies netted me a 1998 Ford Escort in good condition for about $2050 about 2 years ago when the car was worth almost $6K. As long as you are willing to spend a day (or two if it's really bad) cleaning it out it can work out very well. Siezure auctions are also good but generally the cars sell a little higher due to more competitive bidders being present.
That is provided you do not live IN Washington state in which case you have to pay a 8 to 9% sales tax. :-)
The best prank I heard of in this vein was one a family friend pulled back during the old days @ Microsoft (late 80s). Seems developer XYZ went on his honeymoon and was gone for an unusually long period of time (like two months). The team proceeded to remove his office door from the hinges and take out the door frame. They then bribed facilities to get the paint code for the wall in that part of the building. A quick trip to Benjamin Moore, the local Eagle Hardware and they sheetrocked the door and painted the wall. You couldn't tell, it was completely perfect.
Other MS pranks I saw was turning an office into a putting green, complete with real sod and a few years ago a friend of mine converted his managers office into a beach with real sand and a corona.
An old manager of mine took this to the extreme. And built a custom tank to fit his small office window, filled it with water and put fish in it so it appeared that his office was full of water. He then proceeded to sit at his desk in scuba gear for part of the day, much to the consternation of his coworkers and casual passerbys.
You have a very good point. But it comes back to people niavely believing that the computer is going to be better than they are, so they shouldn't do the work. Who verifies that all the columns in their Excel spreadsheet actually added right? Most of us just assume they did....
The next time you visit the doctor watch the workflow of the office staff. Increasingly chances are they will probably be entering your medical information, and I mean the clinical stuff, not your address into some type of computer system.
I currently work for a small Electronic Medical Records company. At some level I worry about potentially killing someone every day. In fact our bug tracking tool has a special category in it called "Patient Safety" which is the highest priority bug. We deal with things most of you probably wouldn't think of such as a tool for writing Prescriptions, which given the fact that many drugs interact ( potentially fatally) has to catch and alert the physician to such cases. I also deal with lab results which if reported incorrectly could lead to a potentially fatal decision by the doctor and so forth.
Consultants and pundits like to say that computer control reduces the chances of human error and failure, this is said IMO to comfort the masses. To state the obvious I suspect EVERYONE on Slashdot knows that in reality that statement is not true, the human error has just been moved to a different point in the chain. A tired programmer is just as likely to make a mistake as a tired machinery operator. The difference is that that software might be used by 5,000 machines, whearas that operator runs 1.
The issue is not the tonnage of the carrier but rather how many pounds the catapult can shoot to takeoff speeds.
The French Clemenceau or newer DeGaulle class carriers are entirely capable of operating F18s, although not particularly efficiently due to deck space limitations. However you'd have to refit them by upgrading the catapults and putting arresting gear in that can stop a 40,000 pound plane. And of course only one country in the world has a company that makes equipment capable of handling a F18 for arrested landing. So unless you know a guy who can build cats in his backyard shop you are SOL.
This isn't news when it comes to the ships for the navy. For years I have been a member of a small group of warship fans in the Seattle who have swapped emails for years about ship X being at location Y. It basically amounts to: "That new destroyer put into Bremerton last week. Go take a look at it!" Of course the only difference here is now that that information is available to the general public. Whoopee! Disaster! You might know something!
A nice realistic explanation is that the shots were probably taken over a period of hours (if not days) and the clouds don't match. So someone went in and fixed it up to make it look all pretty. No doubt the same was done for the ground (shadows, lighting level etc).
What would be much more interesting and informative is to see the "raw" pictures that originally made up the composite NASA has put together.
Doubtful these boxes are being used for development. He states these computers were being delivered to MSCopy (which is however also shipping and recieving). MSCopy does all internal large scale documentation work for MS.
In addition to Office Development and IE, which IIRC is done at the Silicon Valley campus anyways, perhaps that's just powerpoint. It's been a long time since I worked @ MS and things change. I have seen Macs used in prepress roles at Microsoft. A friend of mine had one on his desk for testing networking services. My bet though is that these computers will be being used for pre-press and graphics stuff and not development. Given that I think Microsoft should at least get kudos for picking the best platform for the job.
Unless it's because of facility cost I can't see why. Bellingham is about a 2 hour drive from Seattle, where most of the Linux users in the Northwest are anyways!. I'd pay $10 to have it at some campus in the Seattle area rather than pay $15 in gas to get to Bellingham. Oh well.
http://www.sciencefictionexperience.com/
With thier major media outlet biases that are ingrained even though people don't realize it they forget to check those slightly "smaller" sources.
The Seattle PI
Seattle Times
Vulcan Ventures.
Hmm.. Perhaps Mr. Allen's own COMPANY might have a little use.
I grew up in Seattle and actually started working for Microsoft my Junior/Senior year of high school through their HS program. I then worked for the company for the three summers of my college years at the UW. All told I did 5 internships in 3 different divisions. In the end I decided not to work for Microsoft, opting for a smaller and highly profitable company in downtown Seattle.
:-)
I did however really enjoy my time at MS. It's a fun intern program. Microsoft knows how to party and for a college person it's an ideal situation.
However I concluded that my internships really didn't help me in the end. Also because I had been at the company so long Microsoft assumed I was garunteed to work for them after graduation. When I interviewed for FT my senior year recruiting did not listen to my desires. I was lied to about position availability and after battling with them for some time about various things when I showed up I was interviewing for a position in a group I had specifically requested not to work in. This is not unexpected though. If you give someone the perception that they have control over you they will often times abuse it.
Fortunatly I am happier now and am being given a level of responsibility MS would have never given me.
As a former contract xbox tester I can state with certainty that being a games tester is probably one of the MOST overrated jobs in the "tech sector".
The facts of games testing:
1) You will get bored. Think about it logically. Even with the games with high replay value you get bored of them. If I *EVER* had to play NFL Fever again I think I will get physically SICK.
2) You will almost never get to play a game through in it's entirety. You will play bits and pieces over and over and over. I have played the Assault the Control Room level(s) in Halo several HUNDRED times forward and back, some parts over and over and over and over...
3) You will be paid LESS than other people working in Quality Assurance for non games firms.
4) You will not learn useful skills for career advancement outside the games industry. If you work for a long time in Games QA be prepared to remain there. It is unlikely you will learn skills useful in the rest of the world, or even in games development. (perhaps design but thats it). Not much point in knowing SQL if you are going to play DOA all day.
Conclusion: Little room for advancement. Less money and sadly you aren't even sacraficing it for some altruistic cause such as fighting world hunger. You had better LIVE for games.
If you want to learn about the Navy's projects from a level that will actually be useful rather than the jokes and jabs that are mostly being posted here I suggest reading the United States' Naval Institutes monthly magazine Proceedings. In fact recently there was even an article written by an officer about the benefits of open source in the DoD. Also of interest to many people maybe the extensive automation being considered for the Coast Guard's new cutters which has been the topic of several articles.
Beginning this year and finishing in 2008 the Washington State Department of transportation will be building a second suspension bridge across the Tacoma Narrows. About 30 miles south of Seattle. This bridge will be adjacent to the more famous bridge that collapsed in a windstorm 1940's and was rebuilt.
It will be the first suspension bridge of any reasonable size (over 5000ft) built in the United States since I believe the early 1960s. In recent years the only country (that I know of) building large numbers of suspension bridges has been Japan.
Wash. State DOT Project Page
*shrug* All a matter of opinion I guess. After all make that a 7.5+ and it could have flattened/severely damaged Silicon Valley. Besides given the # of techies in the area I suppose it is at least somewhat news worthy for the Slashdot community. Seattle's 6.8 last year wasn't news for more than a day or two. Of course normally when ever we have an earthquake in Seattle everyone starts darting thier eyes back and forth between Puget Sound (tsunamis) and Mt. Ranier (volcano). I loved my geology classes in college, the northwest, especially Alaska is geologically fascinating and has earthquakes every couple of hundred years that make the biggest ones in California look wussy. (think 9.0 +). There are entire underwater "forests" in Washington and Oregon that simply slid into the water in a massive slide or the land simply dropped 20 feet around 400 years ago. Very cool.
Yeah the biggest problem is that Washington residents have been in a "tax-revolt" for the last 5 or 6 years. They refuse to pay for anything. In addition the state has one of the most repressive tax structures in the country. No income tax and most of the progressive taxes, such as a motor vehicle excise tax have been eliminated via voter initiatives funded by two right wing wackos from Eastern Washington who found a frat-boy on the west half of the state to act as their front man. A friend who is fairly high up in the city of Seattle says his impression is that in addition to the usual political crap there is a legitimate fear that if they actually START something that the funding will get ripped out from underneath them before they even get it really started via a shortsighted initiative campaign.
I was a student in high school in the Lake Washington School district in the mid 90's. The "LWSD" is the school district which encompasses the Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue area which is of course home to MS. I did a lot of volunteer and paid work for the district, but mostly did sys-admin type work.
The district admirably resisted the MS juggernaught until around 1995 when PCs started to pop up in the schools.
As a volunteer administrator on the district's student run email system (LWO, which is now defunct and to be shut down) http://lwo.lkwash.wednet.edu I attempted to encourage the district to use a groupware solution other than Exchange (even though we were on a NT server ourselves). I felt something more appropriate to an educational environment (i.e lighter wieght) was needed. LWO was a fully functional and operating groupware solution already running to service students. A faculty system could have been easily integrated into the student system. Of course this was rejected and I feel it was largely because an exchange implementation was more or less subsidized by Microsoft and forced upon the district by MS employee parents as part of a mass migration to Windows everything.
Schools are interested in delivering the best education possible to thier students. If they can save money by switching to a cheaper solution (read subsidized by MS to suck you in) they will do it. By the time they realize what is going on it's too late. A large part of this is the repercussions of the tech boom of the 90's. A lot of GOOD tech people who would have gone to work in the education field instead went into the commercial sector. K-12 schools got stuck with the bottom of the barrel in terms of technical personnel, people who were really not up to the job or understood the long term ramifications of what they were advocating. Now you are seeing the results, total and complete Windows domination and little chance for inroads by anyone else.
During a LOTR showing in Seattle large parts of the audience actually laughed (and not in the "this is funny sense") during the trailer. There were numerous comments from people of all ages around me about how pathetic the trailer looked. Oh well the only person I know who liked EP1 was my 12 year old cousin. That's good for now but I doubt that EP1 will have the staying power in his mind that the original trilogy has in my generation.
Bingo Karma! I know people who have worked as a temp on X-box. All have reported that it's by no means a PC. All this "oh we are going to hack it!" stuff on Slashdot is unlikely to amount to much without some serious technical ability on the hackers part.
If you buy an Xbox to hack into a PC the average slashdotter, unless you have unusually advanced technical abilities is paying $299 for an 8gb HDD and a DVD drive and pretty piece of black plastic.