When Indian companies come up with globally game-changing software on the same timetable as a Silicon Valley start-up like Facebook or Google, we'll talk. When a Chinese company has the long-term track record of quality and maturity that IBM and Oracle exhibit, we'll talk.
Until then, the cowboy coder makes better software in less time at the beginning of their career, and matures into a more competent team player as the years roll by and experience piles up. This isn't a weakness, this is why we have an IT industry at all. H1B coders are generally useless until they learn to Cowboy Up... and once they do, there's not really much difference between them and the locals. (I wish more of them would apply for permanent residence and bring their families over. I like immigrants who want a better life, I don't like scabs.)
Engineers at Honda start out their career working for the racing division, designing high-performance parts. Engineers at the end of their careers are assigned to subcompacts and mini-vans. This is because Honda needs fresh insights and youthful eagerness and excitement, and if the engineer flubs it, the only ones who know are the racing team. More importantly, Honda needs experienced hands who know their craft inside-out and upside-down to engineer the components millions of their customers will be using everyday, and their senior engineers generally appreciate the stability and predictability of a long-term ongoing project.
so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.
Oh, don't be disingenuous. Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture. Kodachrome was successful because it offered fantastic color representation, at once vivid and subtle, and combined it with what was once considered razor-fine grain... but because it's an oddball process, Kodak has little incentive to continue its development now that sales of all film have tanked, and E6-process films have caught up with it in terms of grain, if not color representation*.
Color process film is devilishly hard to make, and requires complex photo processing to be developed right along with it, so as the mass market dries up, the "long tail" of products for the enthusiast gets lopped right off. Black and white film will be around forever, because it's (relatively) simple to make, and any hobbyist can concoct their own B&W developer and fixer at home with a little research. Color film will last only until the cost of a "disposable" digital camera comes in line with a film one, at which point color rollfilm becomes a hobbyist's toy, and as such, unprofitable and discontinued, right up and down the entire product line.
(*As an aside - Velvia sucks. Hard. Provia F is about the only game in town for top-tier chrome if you don't like slide film that turns blue skies purple. No, Velvia F, you still suck. Ektachrome is nice for studio product shots or something, I guess, but the only film that will make me go "Wow!" when I peer through the loupe is Provia F and 400.)
Wasila, Alaska? The killer app for this device is to put a set of high-heels on it and have it run as the GOP Veep candidate in 2012 - all puny mortals bow down before Mecha Palin, or be crushed!
This attitude of sneering condescension towards your meal-ticket is inexcusable in any industry. Not even Steve Jobs would be able to get away with going five years between iPods. Mr. Martin is no Steve Jobs.
SF/F lives and dies by the Fandom. They're not just smelly geeks... they're the entirety of your net income. You cannot gain or keep an audience except by word-of-mouth, and as we have seen, there are far fewer kind things said about ASOIAF today than there were five years ago.
Maybe he's hoping the HBO series will establish a fanbase that will free him from having to complete the novels to keep the franchise going. In any event, the sleazy imperiousness is a pretty sharp turn-off.
Any feelings of obligation I have are the writer's problem, and a problem entirely of his own making. A PR fiasco is a PR fiasco, no matter how badly the author wants to wish it all away or blame the customer, and his attempts at damage control have been shockingly stupid. His agent and publisher must have corresponding callouses on their palms and foreheads by now.
I would like it if writers stopped thinking of their customers as their bitch. If he does not understand the impatience and irritation of his paying customers in not delivering product according to a promised schedule, he's not going to have the franchise grow very much farther than it already has. A professional writer is an artist, true... but more importantly, a professional writer is a paid professional. It's a major disservice to the craft of writing to string your readers along the way he has.
It's one thing to say, "Hey, guys... I lost my mojo on this. I may come back to it in a few years or I may not." Hey, whatever, crap like that happens. Stick to single-volume novels, and your readers will give you another chance.
It's another thing to sneer at your readers and insult them for questioning your grandiose "art." That's not only rude, it's dishonest.
It's not the reader's fault you managed to paint yourself into a corner with your sub-plots. It's not the reader's fault you can't break the story down into novel-length chapters... it's your failing as an =artist=.
Entitlement? Demanding your readers adore you and your works uncritically after having failed them so spectacularly is probably one of the grossest examples of "sense of entitlement" I've come across.
They pioneered this with Lotus Sametime - it takes 20 minutes worth of screwing with the software to get screen-sharing to work, automatically reducing an hour meeting to 40 minutes.
Unencrypted data will always get you in trouble. There is no reason in the year two thousand and nine to send or receive anything over the internet without encapsulating it in a SSH or SSL tunnel. Whine all you like about performance hits, but if the technology has reached the point where your residential ISP can look inside every packet you send to see what's there - in real time - then the point has come to spend some processing power on protecting your data in mid-flight, or invest in some encryption hardware.
I'm more than half convinced that this is how everything =inside= a LAN should communicate with each other, too. The firewall should allow port 22, port 443, and drop the rest.
While we're at it, everything should be firewalled right at the VLAN, on the switch.
It seemed to work OK, apart from the "Technician Headpace Error" with the landing gear hydraulics.
You need some more fuel, which adds weight... but not as much weight as would be required in turning it into a glider, along the lines of the shuttle or the X-33. You're lugging dead weight up into orbit either way, but you're actually lugging less with the DC-X.
A spaceplane is elegant, practical and probably a good idea for the future, if it can be made to work with commercial airstrips. That's not the point. The point is that the DC-X was flying with mid-'90s off-the-shelf systems, at under $50mil per each, and was a lot closer to success than failure.
Killing it for vastly more expensive and unproven theoretically-more-elegant craft (that never seem to even make it to the prototype stage) was pure idiocy. "Best is the enemy of good enough" as the good General Kalishnikov said - I'd take an inefficient, inelegant DC-X today over an idealized spaceplane tomorrow.
So. We're back to parachutes. While I suppose it's better than just letting the boosters crash, we're still not where we need to be. The age of the rocket is over, dammit, and serious work needs to be done on the next generation earth-to-orbit vehicles.
This means space planes (The X-prize made it out of the atmosphere, if not the gravity well, on a private sector budget) or cool stuff like the Delta Clipper.
Parachutes in the year 2009 is not a re-entry mechanism worthy of the manpower and money NASA has at its disposal.
No, the Russian admiral at Tsushima, Rozhestvensky was a very competent and disciplined officer, and not some clueless fop. His problem was a conscript crew on the verge of mutiny, poorly trained officers, outdated ships ill suited outside the Baltic and only a few colliers stationed along the way for resupply. The Emperor ignored all of his suggestions and concerns.
The Japanese had a volunteer navy, British-built warships of the latest design with British-trained officers, and a variety of home ports nearby for refit and resupply. Oh, it also had Togo, the most brilliant and aggressive naval commander of his generation.
The Baltic Fleet was doomed before it even set sail, despite the quality of its commander.
In New Jersey, they blame the bad driving on the bozos from New York. In NYC, it's clearly the idiots from Connecticut rampaging on the roads. In CT, they know it's the Rhode Island drivers that are the real menace. In Providence, we know it's the idiots from Massachusetts making a right hand turn from the left hand lane with the left blinker on.
In Massachusetts, they try to blame either Canadians or New Yorkers. No-one is buying.
People feel they have the worst drivers in the world. It takes the third exit in a row where someone is trying to back onto the highway after deciding they didn't want to get off it, you realize, "Hey, it might just be true here."
Airbus and Tupulev and Ilyushin would be surprised to hear of this monopoly. Perhaps they should stop making planes? (Actually, compared to Boeing, they really, really should stop making planes.)
In American industry, the more unreasonable the request, the better the engineers and workers assigned to the problem like it. American White and Blue collar labor loves and lives for the "moon shot" - we don't know how we'll do it, the current state-of-the-art says we can't do it, and we've got an irrationally short timeframe to do it in. Out of our way, we'll freakin' do it.
This is reflected in the Aerospace industry, in Silicon Valley, and even in Detroit. Ford asked their engineers and UAW workers to build a hybrid. They built one, then two hybrids that beat the everloving hell out of the Japanese models.
Here's the deal, tho... if Ford didn't have an "outsider" CEO, a guy who came from Boeing, it would never have been done.
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
Not the UAW line workers. Not the pencil-pusher engineers. The management. The MBA miracles who have, in concert, done their damndest to run the US auto industry into the ground.
The engineers love a challenge, and American engineering stands for itself - from the original Model T to the Apollo Program to the Apple II. The workers stand for themselves, Union or not - Ford (Union) and Honda (Not) get about the same productivity from their American factories, and at the same cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than even the Japanese factories. (The problem facing the Big Three is actually =overproduction= - their factories churn out too much product that no-one is buying, because the product is crap, as mandated by MBA Miracles.) The Unions take pride in their work... you don't hear much about "those shoddy Boeing Jets", despite being engineered and made by Union members.
The management, the "money-men" - they all suck. Universally. This is the same class of management pros who ran Wallstreet into the ground. Fire them all, and put an engineer or a union boss in charge - I can guarantee a better product at a lower cost.
Reading comprehension: Develop it. Read the things in parentheses, too - it may save you some embarrassment later.
Also, to derail a bit, the "proper" plural form of computer virus being computer viruses is a fairly late development. Virii was a bit of geek humor, like a collection of 8 bits becoming a byte, or the acronym GNU, that became more commonplace and mundane in everyday tech as the topic became more important. Virii was, for a while, in wider usage than viruses as it relates to tech (and remains easier to type). I can't really say why the term didn't stick around, apart from virii annoy my spellchecker, where viruses do not.
The old MacOS had a free product that almost everyone used, Disinfectant, maintained by one guy who quit because the virus writers had completely given up with improvements to the Mac's OS, around when OS 8 came out. MacOS X is on a completely different plane, in terms of security. It would arguably be more useful to come up with software that would look into downloaded files for trojan profiling, maybe as part of a user-friendly HIDS, than worry too much about AV.
That said, AV on a Mac is useful for:
1) Self-modifying environments - What comes immediately to mind are MS Office macro viruses (or virii if you're a lazy typist, and I am). It's conceivable that Javascript may be the new way forward with this, with browsers suddenly a new platform all their own, and one that has access to your Mac's file system.
2) Being a good netizen - Stripping out virii from anything that crosses your file system is good manners, whether it can infect your box or not. Helps cut down on useless network traffic and DDOS attacks, even if just a very little bit.
I was never able to remember crap. I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast, and this is a condition I've had since I was 5, and continues strong to this day. I've got a Nearly-Fool-Proof system in place to make sure my fly is up when I leave the restroom. Shoelaces are still a challenge.
But, here's the deal, the real important stuff I know, and more importantly, =you= know, is still strong and undiminished, and this will be the way until you die or alzheimers eats your head.
You need to operate like the absentminded geek... and you know you know one...operates. The interesting stuff you know cold, because it's interesting. The stuff that isn't interesting, =WRITE THAT SHIT DOWN=. This was the hardest lesson I learned as a geek... some stuff just settles into my head. Usually the awesome small details of obscure systems. Other stuff does not. Usually who's on-call for this week, or who has to sign off on the change-review.
Write. It. Down.
More! Write it down in a way that you can figure out and trace back to any given project what's going on. Getting geek-obsessed in a writing instrument and paper really helps (.9mm lead mech pencils on moleskine: lovely figuration in a satin-smooth writing stroke, Pilot.9mm and Rotring 1mm leads being superior to Pentel's.9mm.)
So, the issue isn't age, but geek hyperfocus geting more hyperfocus as the years wind by. Recognize, and deal with it geek-style: lots of notes. Bonus? Doodling when they bullshit on the conf call goes unquestioned.
Your finger will likely not remain the size it is. You will lose or gain weight, so the ring will need to be resized. This will likely be a gigantic pain in the rear with an exotic metal like Iridium. It certainly is for titanium.
Any halfway competent jeweler can braze in a new segment of ring, even one with a complex pattern, if it's made of a precious metal commonly found in jewelry. Most large jewelry stores or store chains will also offer free size adjustment of the band for life as part of the deal, or for a small fee at the time of purchase.
Titanium is theoretically re-sizeable, but only smaller, as doing two small welds so close together are impractical: it needs to be welded in an oxygen-free environment. In reality, they're going to have to give you a new ring if (when) you need to re-size, as it's a lot cheaper to replace than repair. Likewise tungsten-carbide steel, which is also popular these days. I want to keep =this= ring, not have it replaced if something goes wrong. Stupid and sentimental, I know, but still...
There's also the issue of medical emergency. If your finger swells up abruptly, due to injury or allergy, the hospital will need to cut your ring off. They have tools to do this painlessly and quickly with silver/gold/platinum bands, but things get tricky with tougher stuff, like tool-grade steel, titanium, and, I'd imagine, iridium. What was a minor medical procedure is now a medical emergency requiring tools that the hospital may not have.
It was a hard choice, as there are a ton of cool carbon fiber and titanium wedding bands out there, but I found a two-tone gold band with a nice herringbone pattern. It's unusual, comfortable, and can be cut and resized as needed. It's not as cheap as titanium, carbon fiber or tool-grade tungsten-carbide, but it will be easier to maintain.
If you want =really= unusual, I have a friend who had his tattooed on. Now that's commitment.
The cold reality is that we're probably not going to send a manned mission to the moon. The cost of robotic probes drops by the day, at the same time their capabilities increase. By the time we're ready to send up more astronauts, we'll be able to send up probes that can stay longer and perform more tasks than a human in a rubber suit who has to live in a little tin can. This whole moon-shot thing was basically a PR stunt by the Bush administration - McCaine or Obama will probably kill it, as it's wasteful and frivolous.
Humans will only return when it's time to construct something permanent there, like a telescope or automated mining equipment. (Even then, it would probably be cheaper to send unmanned probes to small asteroids, directing them to fall in the middle of the desert for harvesting.
The realities of space exploration have changed - going just to go isn't a useful aim anymore, unless you're paying on your own hyper-rich dime for a vacation to orbit.
What do you mean "Worry?" About what? Running crappy shareware?
Trojans and phishing are pretty solidly entrenched in the minds of the Mac userbase with some sort of clue, and those without a clue are generally unaware that there's such a thing as F-Secure, and are unlikely to download dodgy shareware apps anyhow.
I keep hearing alarm bells rung, and it always turns out to be much ado about nothing. The Mac uses a modern privilege escalation model, and Apple's taken some pains to make sure their systems come configured with reasonable default settings, and seems to do a fair job of patching holes as they crop up. I'm not certain what else you expect of the platform or its users.
To be frank, it sounds like Platform Wars baloney: "Nuh-uh your Mac's more secure than Windows XP, F-Secure knows a guy who knows a guy who once heard of someone who made a proof-of-concept crack, so you need to be aware you're no better than a Dell fresh outta the box!"
OK guy, we'll lose a lot of sleep over it, 'K? Have fun with your two AV platforms and three malware checkers, because one of each will =not= do the trick to keep XP clean.
Taking care to download positively reviewed software from vetted locations is all it takes to stay safe on the Mac at the moment, and this is unlikely to alter much in the foreseeable future.
No, they believed in a Creator. "Intelligent Design" is quasi-religious nut-baggery that at once offends scientists and people of faith. Scientists on the one hand because it proposes that "God intended it to be so" is a good enough answer to any given question of sufficient complexity. People of faith on the other, as it diminishes the glory of God and His creation by cramming Him into little gaps in our knowledge and pointing a finger to say "There He is!"
Now know this, you newly minted Mac users - if you use Apple equipment for any length of time, you wind up with the same hobby: predicting Apple's market strategy.
It's fun and easy to do, and you soon learn that you can do just as good a job as Forrester or Gartner or Cringley, and do a lot better than Metcalf, Michael Dell or Dvorak (not the keyboard layout, as even a keyboard layout can provide better market analysis than that guy).
Bold predictions! You can make bold predictions -
"Steve Jobs will buy Adobe!" "Steve Wozniak will mary a famous comedienne!" "iPhone will be the first earth technology bough by alien visitors as it's superior to their own!" "Apple will shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders!"
- Ok, I admit that it's unlikely Woz will marry a famous comedienne, but other than that, as long as it's outlandish and over-the-top, there's a one-in-a-million chance it might come true, and as Terry Pratchett readers, we know one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Articles like this are just the encouragement newly fledged Apple pundits need to start rolling their own... and it's a small step from speculation to rumor-mongering! That's where the action's really at.
(And, you didn't hear it from me, but the next rev of iTunes will knock your socks clean off, employing bayesian fuzzy-logic heuristic inference engines to predict with 89% accuracy what you want to hear before you hear it, or so I heard from a little bird who's working on "Project BHA-II")
There are small shops. Then there are small shops. The whole point is that the Unix Guy needs to be able to run everything from Juniper Netscreens to the beat up old Cobalt Qube that's been running the departmental NIS server since the first Clinton was President.
Unfamiliar, new tech happens to your server room, and some of it is decidedly user-hostile. (AIX's ODM comes to mind, or IPSO's clish) - you cannot and should not just write it off because it's not as smoothly polished for admins as it is for the developers or applications who need to make money with the damn thing. Unix wonks get paid what they're paid because this stuff is hard. Admins who 1) get to dictate the type of tech they deal with and 2) dictating the tech because it's slightly easier, or worse, somewhat more familiar, is alien to me.
Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust - this is good.
Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust because they don't know how to cope with what's already in place - this is bad.
(At least we can all agree that Debian-based Linux distros have a very nice userland.)
Umm. I'm more than a little dismayed that you gave up containers, ZFS, SMF, dtrace and JumpStart for... GNU shell tools and apt?
As a cross-platform sysadmin with a decade-plus of experience, dude. Just... dude. My "Ineptitude" sense is tingling.
I mean, how much messing around on the command line do you really need to do on a daily basis? If the answer is "A Lot" - then I can sort of see Linux taking the advantage. Kinda. Yet, most, if not all, command line wrangling on modern servers is to munge shell scripts, and that's mostly been supplanted by python and ruby these days, anyhow. You've never even heard of JumpStart? "pkgadd -d" is too hard for you? You can't find anything on Solaris administration by googling the problem keywords with "sun Solaris administration" appended after? Really? Wow.
Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game. Only OpenBSD us easier for Unix wonks to tinker with. Stuff like AIX and NonStop would =break= you into a quivering pile of goop. Based on your post, I have doubts you'd be able to hack the more challenging Linux distros, too, like Slack or Debian.
There are good reasons to go with Linux on Sun hardware - pure speed, cross-platform compatibility (esp. with LAMP stack stuff), the need to tinker with the kernel to meet project objectives, or stripping down the OS to a bare minimum for performance or security advantages, re-purposing old hardware with an up-to-date OS that demands fewer resources. Then there are the reasons you gave.
I suppose if you really wanted to re-orient your entire computing platform around the needs of the sysadmins to play with the shell rather than the needs of the project to utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.
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When Indian companies come up with globally game-changing software on the same timetable as a Silicon Valley start-up like Facebook or Google, we'll talk. When a Chinese company has the long-term track record of quality and maturity that IBM and Oracle exhibit, we'll talk.
Until then, the cowboy coder makes better software in less time at the beginning of their career, and matures into a more competent team player as the years roll by and experience piles up. This isn't a weakness, this is why we have an IT industry at all. H1B coders are generally useless until they learn to Cowboy Up... and once they do, there's not really much difference between them and the locals. (I wish more of them would apply for permanent residence and bring their families over. I like immigrants who want a better life, I don't like scabs.)
Engineers at Honda start out their career working for the racing division, designing high-performance parts. Engineers at the end of their careers are assigned to subcompacts and mini-vans. This is because Honda needs fresh insights and youthful eagerness and excitement, and if the engineer flubs it, the only ones who know are the racing team. More importantly, Honda needs experienced hands who know their craft inside-out and upside-down to engineer the components millions of their customers will be using everyday, and their senior engineers generally appreciate the stability and predictability of a long-term ongoing project.
so the story here is that Kodak got rid of the bottom selling film of their line. companies do that all the time, and this has nothing to do with digital cameras. film is still sold pervasively and easy developed at dozens of establishments in most towns.
Oh, don't be disingenuous. Digital is clearly killing off niche photographic product development and manufacture. Kodachrome was successful because it offered fantastic color representation, at once vivid and subtle, and combined it with what was once considered razor-fine grain... but because it's an oddball process, Kodak has little incentive to continue its development now that sales of all film have tanked, and E6-process films have caught up with it in terms of grain, if not color representation*.
Color process film is devilishly hard to make, and requires complex photo processing to be developed right along with it, so as the mass market dries up, the "long tail" of products for the enthusiast gets lopped right off. Black and white film will be around forever, because it's (relatively) simple to make, and any hobbyist can concoct their own B&W developer and fixer at home with a little research. Color film will last only until the cost of a "disposable" digital camera comes in line with a film one, at which point color rollfilm becomes a hobbyist's toy, and as such, unprofitable and discontinued, right up and down the entire product line.
(*As an aside - Velvia sucks. Hard. Provia F is about the only game in town for top-tier chrome if you don't like slide film that turns blue skies purple. No, Velvia F, you still suck. Ektachrome is nice for studio product shots or something, I guess, but the only film that will make me go "Wow!" when I peer through the loupe is Provia F and 400.)
Wasila, Alaska? The killer app for this device is to put a set of high-heels on it and have it run as the GOP Veep candidate in 2012 - all puny mortals bow down before Mecha Palin, or be crushed!
Only the Obamabot can save us!
This attitude of sneering condescension towards your meal-ticket is inexcusable in any industry. Not even Steve Jobs would be able to get away with going five years between iPods. Mr. Martin is no Steve Jobs.
SF/F lives and dies by the Fandom. They're not just smelly geeks... they're the entirety of your net income. You cannot gain or keep an audience except by word-of-mouth, and as we have seen, there are far fewer kind things said about ASOIAF today than there were five years ago.
Maybe he's hoping the HBO series will establish a fanbase that will free him from having to complete the novels to keep the franchise going. In any event, the sleazy imperiousness is a pretty sharp turn-off.
Any feelings of obligation I have are the writer's problem, and a problem entirely of his own making. A PR fiasco is a PR fiasco, no matter how badly the author wants to wish it all away or blame the customer, and his attempts at damage control have been shockingly stupid. His agent and publisher must have corresponding callouses on their palms and foreheads by now.
I would like it if writers stopped thinking of their customers as their bitch. If he does not understand the impatience and irritation of his paying customers in not delivering product according to a promised schedule, he's not going to have the franchise grow very much farther than it already has. A professional writer is an artist, true... but more importantly, a professional writer is a paid professional. It's a major disservice to the craft of writing to string your readers along the way he has.
It's one thing to say, "Hey, guys... I lost my mojo on this. I may come back to it in a few years or I may not." Hey, whatever, crap like that happens. Stick to single-volume novels, and your readers will give you another chance.
It's another thing to sneer at your readers and insult them for questioning your grandiose "art." That's not only rude, it's dishonest.
It's not the reader's fault you managed to paint yourself into a corner with your sub-plots. It's not the reader's fault you can't break the story down into novel-length chapters... it's your failing as an =artist=.
Entitlement? Demanding your readers adore you and your works uncritically after having failed them so spectacularly is probably one of the grossest examples of "sense of entitlement" I've come across.
They pioneered this with Lotus Sametime - it takes 20 minutes worth of screwing with the software to get screen-sharing to work, automatically reducing an hour meeting to 40 minutes.
Unencrypted data will always get you in trouble. There is no reason in the year two thousand and nine to send or receive anything over the internet without encapsulating it in a SSH or SSL tunnel. Whine all you like about performance hits, but if the technology has reached the point where your residential ISP can look inside every packet you send to see what's there - in real time - then the point has come to spend some processing power on protecting your data in mid-flight, or invest in some encryption hardware.
I'm more than half convinced that this is how everything =inside= a LAN should communicate with each other, too. The firewall should allow port 22, port 443, and drop the rest.
While we're at it, everything should be firewalled right at the VLAN, on the switch.
It seemed to work OK, apart from the "Technician Headpace Error" with the landing gear hydraulics.
You need some more fuel, which adds weight... but not as much weight as would be required in turning it into a glider, along the lines of the shuttle or the X-33. You're lugging dead weight up into orbit either way, but you're actually lugging less with the DC-X.
A spaceplane is elegant, practical and probably a good idea for the future, if it can be made to work with commercial airstrips. That's not the point. The point is that the DC-X was flying with mid-'90s off-the-shelf systems, at under $50mil per each, and was a lot closer to success than failure.
Killing it for vastly more expensive and unproven theoretically-more-elegant craft (that never seem to even make it to the prototype stage) was pure idiocy. "Best is the enemy of good enough" as the good General Kalishnikov said - I'd take an inefficient, inelegant DC-X today over an idealized spaceplane tomorrow.
Yeah, and get rid of wheels and the printing press as well!
Maglev trains don't need wheels, and modern Print-on-Demand systems do not require a press.
Just sayin'.
So. We're back to parachutes. While I suppose it's better than just letting the boosters crash, we're still not where we need to be. The age of the rocket is over, dammit, and serious work needs to be done on the next generation earth-to-orbit vehicles.
This means space planes (The X-prize made it out of the atmosphere, if not the gravity well, on a private sector budget) or cool stuff like the Delta Clipper.
Parachutes in the year 2009 is not a re-entry mechanism worthy of the manpower and money NASA has at its disposal.
No, the Russian admiral at Tsushima, Rozhestvensky was a very competent and disciplined officer, and not some clueless fop. His problem was a conscript crew on the verge of mutiny, poorly trained officers, outdated ships ill suited outside the Baltic and only a few colliers stationed along the way for resupply. The Emperor ignored all of his suggestions and concerns.
The Japanese had a volunteer navy, British-built warships of the latest design with British-trained officers, and a variety of home ports nearby for refit and resupply. Oh, it also had Togo, the most brilliant and aggressive naval commander of his generation.
The Baltic Fleet was doomed before it even set sail, despite the quality of its commander.
In New Jersey, they blame the bad driving on the bozos from New York. In NYC, it's clearly the idiots from Connecticut rampaging on the roads. In CT, they know it's the Rhode Island drivers that are the real menace. In Providence, we know it's the idiots from Massachusetts making a right hand turn from the left hand lane with the left blinker on.
In Massachusetts, they try to blame either Canadians or New Yorkers. No-one is buying.
People feel they have the worst drivers in the world. It takes the third exit in a row where someone is trying to back onto the highway after deciding they didn't want to get off it, you realize, "Hey, it might just be true here."
Airbus and Tupulev and Ilyushin would be surprised to hear of this monopoly. Perhaps they should stop making planes? (Actually, compared to Boeing, they really, really should stop making planes.)
In American industry, the more unreasonable the request, the better the engineers and workers assigned to the problem like it. American White and Blue collar labor loves and lives for the "moon shot" - we don't know how we'll do it, the current state-of-the-art says we can't do it, and we've got an irrationally short timeframe to do it in. Out of our way, we'll freakin' do it.
This is reflected in the Aerospace industry, in Silicon Valley, and even in Detroit. Ford asked their engineers and UAW workers to build a hybrid. They built one, then two hybrids that beat the everloving hell out of the Japanese models.
Here's the deal, tho... if Ford didn't have an "outsider" CEO, a guy who came from Boeing, it would never have been done.
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
Not the UAW line workers. Not the pencil-pusher engineers. The management. The MBA miracles who have, in concert, done their damndest to run the US auto industry into the ground.
The engineers love a challenge, and American engineering stands for itself - from the original Model T to the Apollo Program to the Apple II. The workers stand for themselves, Union or not - Ford (Union) and Honda (Not) get about the same productivity from their American factories, and at the same cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than even the Japanese factories. (The problem facing the Big Three is actually =overproduction= - their factories churn out too much product that no-one is buying, because the product is crap, as mandated by MBA Miracles.) The Unions take pride in their work... you don't hear much about "those shoddy Boeing Jets", despite being engineered and made by Union members.
The management, the "money-men" - they all suck. Universally. This is the same class of management pros who ran Wallstreet into the ground. Fire them all, and put an engineer or a union boss in charge - I can guarantee a better product at a lower cost.
Reading comprehension: Develop it. Read the things in parentheses, too - it may save you some embarrassment later.
Also, to derail a bit, the "proper" plural form of computer virus being computer viruses is a fairly late development. Virii was a bit of geek humor, like a collection of 8 bits becoming a byte, or the acronym GNU, that became more commonplace and mundane in everyday tech as the topic became more important. Virii was, for a while, in wider usage than viruses as it relates to tech (and remains easier to type). I can't really say why the term didn't stick around, apart from virii annoy my spellchecker, where viruses do not.
In short: get off my lawn! Whippersnapper.
The old MacOS had a free product that almost everyone used, Disinfectant, maintained by one guy who quit because the virus writers had completely given up with improvements to the Mac's OS, around when OS 8 came out. MacOS X is on a completely different plane, in terms of security. It would arguably be more useful to come up with software that would look into downloaded files for trojan profiling, maybe as part of a user-friendly HIDS, than worry too much about AV.
That said, AV on a Mac is useful for:
1) Self-modifying environments - What comes immediately to mind are MS Office macro viruses (or virii if you're a lazy typist, and I am). It's conceivable that Javascript may be the new way forward with this, with browsers suddenly a new platform all their own, and one that has access to your Mac's file system.
2) Being a good netizen - Stripping out virii from anything that crosses your file system is good manners, whether it can infect your box or not. Helps cut down on useless network traffic and DDOS attacks, even if just a very little bit.
I was never able to remember crap. I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast, and this is a condition I've had since I was 5, and continues strong to this day. I've got a Nearly-Fool-Proof system in place to make sure my fly is up when I leave the restroom. Shoelaces are still a challenge.
But, here's the deal, the real important stuff I know, and more importantly, =you= know, is still strong and undiminished, and this will be the way until you die or alzheimers eats your head.
You need to operate like the absentminded geek... and you know you know one...operates. The interesting stuff you know cold, because it's interesting. The stuff that isn't interesting, =WRITE THAT SHIT DOWN=. This was the hardest lesson I learned as a geek... some stuff just settles into my head. Usually the awesome small details of obscure systems. Other stuff does not. Usually who's on-call for this week, or who has to sign off on the change-review.
Write. It. Down.
More! Write it down in a way that you can figure out and trace back to any given project what's going on. Getting geek-obsessed in a writing instrument and paper really helps (.9mm lead mech pencils on moleskine: lovely figuration in a satin-smooth writing stroke, Pilot .9mm and Rotring 1mm leads being superior to Pentel's .9mm.)
So, the issue isn't age, but geek hyperfocus geting more hyperfocus as the years wind by. Recognize, and deal with it geek-style: lots of notes. Bonus? Doodling when they bullshit on the conf call goes unquestioned.
Your finger will likely not remain the size it is. You will lose or gain weight, so the ring will need to be resized. This will likely be a gigantic pain in the rear with an exotic metal like Iridium. It certainly is for titanium.
Any halfway competent jeweler can braze in a new segment of ring, even one with a complex pattern, if it's made of a precious metal commonly found in jewelry. Most large jewelry stores or store chains will also offer free size adjustment of the band for life as part of the deal, or for a small fee at the time of purchase.
Titanium is theoretically re-sizeable, but only smaller, as doing two small welds so close together are impractical: it needs to be welded in an oxygen-free environment. In reality, they're going to have to give you a new ring if (when) you need to re-size, as it's a lot cheaper to replace than repair. Likewise tungsten-carbide steel, which is also popular these days. I want to keep =this= ring, not have it replaced if something goes wrong. Stupid and sentimental, I know, but still...
There's also the issue of medical emergency. If your finger swells up abruptly, due to injury or allergy, the hospital will need to cut your ring off. They have tools to do this painlessly and quickly with silver/gold/platinum bands, but things get tricky with tougher stuff, like tool-grade steel, titanium, and, I'd imagine, iridium. What was a minor medical procedure is now a medical emergency requiring tools that the hospital may not have.
It was a hard choice, as there are a ton of cool carbon fiber and titanium wedding bands out there, but I found a two-tone gold band with a nice herringbone pattern. It's unusual, comfortable, and can be cut and resized as needed. It's not as cheap as titanium, carbon fiber or tool-grade tungsten-carbide, but it will be easier to maintain.
If you want =really= unusual, I have a friend who had his tattooed on. Now that's commitment.
The cold reality is that we're probably not going to send a manned mission to the moon. The cost of robotic probes drops by the day, at the same time their capabilities increase. By the time we're ready to send up more astronauts, we'll be able to send up probes that can stay longer and perform more tasks than a human in a rubber suit who has to live in a little tin can. This whole moon-shot thing was basically a PR stunt by the Bush administration - McCaine or Obama will probably kill it, as it's wasteful and frivolous.
Humans will only return when it's time to construct something permanent there, like a telescope or automated mining equipment. (Even then, it would probably be cheaper to send unmanned probes to small asteroids, directing them to fall in the middle of the desert for harvesting.
The realities of space exploration have changed - going just to go isn't a useful aim anymore, unless you're paying on your own hyper-rich dime for a vacation to orbit.
What do you mean "Worry?" About what? Running crappy shareware?
Trojans and phishing are pretty solidly entrenched in the minds of the Mac userbase with some sort of clue, and those without a clue are generally unaware that there's such a thing as F-Secure, and are unlikely to download dodgy shareware apps anyhow.
I keep hearing alarm bells rung, and it always turns out to be much ado about nothing. The Mac uses a modern privilege escalation model, and Apple's taken some pains to make sure their systems come configured with reasonable default settings, and seems to do a fair job of patching holes as they crop up. I'm not certain what else you expect of the platform or its users.
To be frank, it sounds like Platform Wars baloney: "Nuh-uh your Mac's more secure than Windows XP, F-Secure knows a guy who knows a guy who once heard of someone who made a proof-of-concept crack, so you need to be aware you're no better than a Dell fresh outta the box!"
OK guy, we'll lose a lot of sleep over it, 'K? Have fun with your two AV platforms and three malware checkers, because one of each will =not= do the trick to keep XP clean.
Taking care to download positively reviewed software from vetted locations is all it takes to stay safe on the Mac at the moment, and this is unlikely to alter much in the foreseeable future.
No, they believed in a Creator. "Intelligent Design" is quasi-religious nut-baggery that at once offends scientists and people of faith. Scientists on the one hand because it proposes that "God intended it to be so" is a good enough answer to any given question of sufficient complexity. People of faith on the other, as it diminishes the glory of God and His creation by cramming Him into little gaps in our knowledge and pointing a finger to say "There He is!"
Now know this, you newly minted Mac users - if you use Apple equipment for any length of time, you wind up with the same hobby: predicting Apple's market strategy.
It's fun and easy to do, and you soon learn that you can do just as good a job as Forrester or Gartner or Cringley, and do a lot better than Metcalf, Michael Dell or Dvorak (not the keyboard layout, as even a keyboard layout can provide better market analysis than that guy).
Bold predictions! You can make bold predictions -
"Steve Jobs will buy Adobe!"
"Steve Wozniak will mary a famous comedienne!"
"iPhone will be the first earth technology bough by alien visitors as it's superior to their own!"
"Apple will shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders!"
- Ok, I admit that it's unlikely Woz will marry a famous comedienne, but other than that, as long as it's outlandish and over-the-top, there's a one-in-a-million chance it might come true, and as Terry Pratchett readers, we know one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Articles like this are just the encouragement newly fledged Apple pundits need to start rolling their own... and it's a small step from speculation to rumor-mongering! That's where the action's really at.
(And, you didn't hear it from me, but the next rev of iTunes will knock your socks clean off, employing bayesian fuzzy-logic heuristic inference engines to predict with 89% accuracy what you want to hear before you hear it, or so I heard from a little bird who's working on "Project BHA-II")
There are small shops. Then there are small shops. The whole point is that the Unix Guy needs to be able to run everything from Juniper Netscreens to the beat up old Cobalt Qube that's been running the departmental NIS server since the first Clinton was President.
Unfamiliar, new tech happens to your server room, and some of it is decidedly user-hostile. (AIX's ODM comes to mind, or IPSO's clish) - you cannot and should not just write it off because it's not as smoothly polished for admins as it is for the developers or applications who need to make money with the damn thing. Unix wonks get paid what they're paid because this stuff is hard. Admins who 1) get to dictate the type of tech they deal with and 2) dictating the tech because it's slightly easier, or worse, somewhat more familiar, is alien to me.
Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust - this is good.
Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust because they don't know how to cope with what's already in place - this is bad.
(At least we can all agree that Debian-based Linux distros have a very nice userland.)
Umm. I'm more than a little dismayed that you gave up containers, ZFS, SMF, dtrace and JumpStart for... GNU shell tools and apt?
As a cross-platform sysadmin with a decade-plus of experience, dude. Just... dude. My "Ineptitude" sense is tingling.
I mean, how much messing around on the command line do you really need to do on a daily basis? If the answer is "A Lot" - then I can sort of see Linux taking the advantage. Kinda. Yet, most, if not all, command line wrangling on modern servers is to munge shell scripts, and that's mostly been supplanted by python and ruby these days, anyhow. You've never even heard of JumpStart? "pkgadd -d" is too hard for you? You can't find anything on Solaris administration by googling the problem keywords with "sun Solaris administration" appended after? Really? Wow.
Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game. Only OpenBSD us easier for Unix wonks to tinker with. Stuff like AIX and NonStop would =break= you into a quivering pile of goop. Based on your post, I have doubts you'd be able to hack the more challenging Linux distros, too, like Slack or Debian.
There are good reasons to go with Linux on Sun hardware - pure speed, cross-platform compatibility (esp. with LAMP stack stuff), the need to tinker with the kernel to meet project objectives, or stripping down the OS to a bare minimum for performance or security advantages, re-purposing old hardware with an up-to-date OS that demands fewer resources. Then there are the reasons you gave.
I suppose if you really wanted to re-orient your entire computing platform around the needs of the sysadmins to play with the shell rather than the needs of the project to utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.
In a stunning follow up, our investigation uncovers that a full 50% of IT workers are at or below average. Sports highlights to follow.