Either you are a very experienced pilot or have never flown if you think landings are easy. It doesn't take a pitching carrier deck to complicate things quite a bit. Other air traffic and wind do pretty well just by themselves. I suppose that if you are at an airport out in the sticks you can just go around until conditions suite you but at any airport that is even semi-busy, there is a lot of stuff to do on landing.
This was the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. I had the exact same experience. Did some ground work and then it was off to the airplane for my first take-off, flight and landing. I asked the instructor several times, "Are you sure about this???" I thought for sure he would take off, get us to a safe altitude and then make a big production of handing me the controls. Nope. It was, strap that fucker on and fly it.
The airport that I fly out of (HEF) seems to have a regular cross-wind so takeoff wasn't very easy - you have to use a lot of rudder but I did it myself. The instructor did help with the landing as the cross-wind was pushing me off the centerline and slow-flight can be confusing (throttle for altitude deal) for a inexperienced pilot.
After about 4 landings, I'm pretty much making the landings myself.
I do a lot of consulting work for a local aviation firm so I'm at the airport quite a bit. After 3 lessons a guy who owns a diamond (think that's right) asked me if I wanted to go fly with him. Man, is that worlds different than the cessna.
Perhaps. Ever heard of a company called "CMGI"? They were worth billions too. Last I checked their stock was at about.25 They had grand plans too. They hired smart people too. The point I'm making is not that I am smarter than any of those guys. It is that there are many practical problems with this "Google's going to take over the world" idea.
I hope Google can pull off half of what I hear they are going to do. It might provide some practical competition to MS (and others) but MS has proved time and time again that they are damn difficult to defeat over the long run.
The web based office idea is pretty laughable. I consult for a living and I'm not about to take calls from customers who can't get to their word processor because Verizon (or comcast or....) has fucked something up. In general, that is all Verizon (or comcast or....) does. Anything that is productivity related needs to be available either on the local lan or a users computer.
The other items are probably doable but it will take some time. Bandwidth is still the problem. Buying all the dark fibre in the world doesn't get it to my house. As for Wifi coverage, we've had two companies in my City who have tried it and their antenna's are still on the water tower....unplugged.
However, aside from the online office idea, none of this is of any threat to MS's position in the world. Google could control all of the internet access in the country and what difference would it make to MS? I don't believe for a second that MS cares too much about their ISP biz as their money comes from Windows and Office and Servers and Great Plains and SQL Server and Exchange server, etc, etc etc,....
It just isn't going to happen. I don't understand why people think this. Sure, they do a great search engine, email, some screwy book project and a couple other things. Does anyone out there really think that "desktop search" is the next killer app? The amount of attention given this seems a bit ridiculous to me. I suppose that if you stuff all of your files in one directory it might be useful but anybody with any sense uses handy things likes "folders". I use the windows search function about twice a year.
Google doesn't create anything new. Google takes other ideas and perfects them. Granted, this is where the real money is to be made (look at MS) but can they compete with the breadth and depth of MS product offerings?? Only in their dreams. I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch but please. Surely Google will continue to bolt on more services that will have varying degrees of usefulness and they'll be succesful but, in the end, a company like MS simply has too many resources, too much installed base and their own ideas. Remember when MS was caught completely unprepared for that newfangled "internet" thing? How long did it take them to turn around and leverage the hell out of it? Not long.
For Google to "do to MS what MS did to IBM", they are going to have to compete directly with MS on things that don't have much to do with the web and they don't stand a chance. Now, Google can still be very successful running a business that doesn't have much to do with MS and their Office/windows divisions (they will compete with and whip MSN) but that's a far cry from the beating that IBM took from MS years ago. Also don't forget that IBM handed the keys to the kingdom to MS. I don't see MS doing this for Google.
I do a lot of work for a charter aviation company. 4 days after the first storm, I got them to donate a G-IV, fully fueled and staffed to fly to wherever on the Gulf coast someone might need to go. I tried the Red Cross and a couple of other places but couldn't get anyone to take me up on the offer. Don't know what the story was, maybe there wasn't a working airport in the area that could take the Gulfstream but it seemed like a good offer.
I see your point but disagree. If the Uni that you are going to grades a 70 as a low C then getting a 45 on a test means you failed. If the professor "designed" the test that way then he needs to have his ass kicked. That is a ridiculous approach to testing. In essence he's (or she) is throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. A good (or even average) teacher should be able to design a test that gives students who perform well an appropriate grade. Doing otherwise discourages students who might otherwise competent enough to pass.
Doing it by administering a test where the average is 40% is capricous, stupid and mean-spirited.
I encountered this at school. I got a 38 on a calculus exam. It was "graded" as a B. I dropped that fucker as fast as I could get to the right office. Found another prof who had a sane grading methodology and did just fine, thanks.
It is interesting you thought that. To me, it read like a piece straight from the MS PR department. Something couched in laymans terms but aimed directly at the executive level of every big company out there.
would allow us to use programmable calculators providing that we wrote the programs for them. This was in 1983 so pulling code off the net really wasn't an option so it was pretty legit.
Does anyone remember Scopus? A company I was working for several years ago was happily using Scopus for our CRM stuff and then they were bought by Siebel. What a disaster. I thought Scopus was kinda bloated but Siebel made it look like a miracle of engineering. I left about halfway through the migration. What a nightmare.
We work with a bunch of local phone vendors who always dictate that for site to site voip to be used, we need to setup a site to site VPN (or point to point circuit). It is my suspicion that they do this so that
1. they don't have to be bothered with trying to figure out what ports to forward on the firewall and
2. they have so much difficulty in troubleshooting their own systems that they love to blame everything on us.
In any event, I picked up the new o'reilly book on voip and they talk a lot about avoiding vpn as it creates lag. They also indicate that sending all of your QOS flagged traffic down a VPN tunnel eliminates the ability of the upstreams to "see" the QOS flags as they are encrypted. Anyone else have experience with this?
You have a valid point but there remain problems with the punish system. The continual punishing of engineers and commanders renders these classes almost useless. Case in point: I was an "assault" guy and my team only had one base left. I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, switch to engineer and lay some mines so we wouldn't get overrun. I even laid them down so team members could get between them.
You can guess what happened. Some idiot in a fast attack car runs over a mine I laid and punished me. He spawns again and does the same thing except this time he had 2 buddies with him. My score went to hell and I quit playing.
In general, I think the game does a lot to reign in idiots but they will always find a way.
Media absolutely works. Even in small town America or perhaps especially in small town America. I write an opinion column in our local paper and I can tell you that it gets results. I never "go after" individuals but if there is a problem and I rant about it, it gets cleared up.
We had a local developer who got a permit to tear down a building. He ripped the windows out, tore holes in the roof and left the building standing in that condition for a year. I wrote a column bitching about the eyesore (but not him in particular) and got an email from him the same day. The next day there was a bulldozer and a dumptruck onsite removing the building. He was pissed that I brought it up but admitted that I was right.
Media does work. Now if the media would do their fucking jobs and stop being so obssessed with the vapid idiots that we call "celebrities" we might get somewhere.
I don't know about all of that. Doesn't SBC still own the actual wires that your XO service runs over?
I know that around here, Verizon regularly botches install orders, people get pissed and cancel them. They are then surprised to learn that even though they are ordering a T-1 from some other company that everyone is still waiting on Verizon.
they are the suppliers. The wiring and maybe a card or two inside the cage are different. The voicemail systems are the same. The biggest problem with VOIP are the local phone guys that sell these systems. They don't have the technical chops to correctly install and configure VOIP.
I expect that I'll be an old man before this happens. The connectivity just isn't here on the WAN side. All of the companies who banked on an explosion of bandwidth are now or will shortly be bankrupt. I think that you'd have to have fibre connections to make this work. Cable connections are probably fast enough but most of them are seriously flakey. The ILEC's have no reason to spend money to upgrade network connections to fibre. Inside of a company on a local area net, sure.
I think it is a great idea but don't see where the financial incentives are and without those, it ain't going to happen. As it stands now, it's a nightmare just to get a DSL connection installed let alone fixed. Image how much more difficult this would be with fibre or wireless......
quickly figures out that the real place to make money is the corporate market and not the home market. With most companies, they aren't behind you with a stop watch to count your time. Also, you normally can get several hours of time in during one stop. You don't have to go all over hell's half acre to make your money. Sure, you can make money that way but it's too much work.
Also, going into people's houses all the time weirds me out. We quit doing that about 4 years ago.
I read an article about Geeks on Call and, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see that they are going to have much success in the corporate market. According to the article, the techs are not supposed to talk to any of their customers on the phone - every problem results in a service call. That might work with joe homeowner but a business that spends several $k a month on your service will expect phone support....
I don't know that removing money from politics will fix this problem. Apart from the philosophical debate, I think that practically even giving candidates free air time won't fix the problem. We recently had a pretty hotly contested election here. There was a sign in almost every yard, mailings about twice a week, computerized phone polls...would the government pay for all of that too?
In addition, I'm unsure that if you completely subsidize elections it actually removes the money. I suspect that the money would just move elsewhere. Take for example the recent spate of confessions of those on the hill about lobbyists paying for trips abroad for members of Congress. These kinds of activities are against the law but it took 5 or more years for the "truth" to come out and you can bet your bottom dollar that if nobody had "outed" Tom Delay that we wouldn't have heard about any of those trips.
No, the problem with our government isn't that there is too much money involved or that some people in the government are corrupt. That has always been true. The problem is that the citizens of our fair land don't give a flying fuck about what happens in Washington (or anywhere else for that matter). In our recent (off-year primary) election we had a 3% turnout!!! Fuck, Satan himself could get elected right now in that environment. In my city of 36,000 you'd have to get what, 1,000 loonies to show up at the polls?
Simply put, I blame the people for this fucked-up state of affairs. Our City council holds a meeting every week. Normally no more than 4 or 5 people show up. Point is that there is normally only one point of view being handed to our representatives - that of the people that want a particular piece of legislation passed. When there is only one voice in the room then that's all they will hear. Lacking any input from their constituents, they do a gut-check and cast their vote.
Money being thrown around like candy doesn't help but the absolute abdication by the people of their role in representative government is the real problem.
Well, we could allow Jack to do that but whatever information that procedure finds might be outside of the "protocol" that they are running. This would drive Jack to resign from CTU and the resulting body count would be a media field day.
What we should really do is send Jack to the middle east to find some of the bad guys. Sure, he'd kill half of the population with a pistol and a knife but, in the end, he'd get his man.
The last time was last year. It was called the "Virtual Case File". It was a complete failure. I think there was an article in the Washington Post last week about it.
lol, good point about the hippies. I used to work for a guy who participated in the marches on DC in the 60's. He told a story about he and a bunch of people had blocked the key bridge. He vividly remembers a cop walking up, looking at him and then spraying his face full of mace. He recalled being surprised that it had happened. He didn't mention how much weed he had smoked prior to this action but I suspect it was a fair amount....:)
I don't disagree but I do wonder how realistic this notion is. If things get too hot, are you going to round up some people and conduct an armed march on Washington?
I ask this in all seriousness. There were riots in DC in the 60's. The government flew fully-armed combat troops in to take care of it. I wonder, in this hyper-terrorism awareness state that the government is in, what would happen to you and your buddies when you conduct that march?
This isn't a bad point but between the two, an AWB or allowing the government to collect information w/o any oversight, which would you take? I would go for the AWB any day. I'm not crazy about either but at least with the AWB you could still have an array of guns of reasonable power. When your right to privacy and FOS are gone, they're just gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you are a very experienced pilot or have never flown if you think landings are easy. It doesn't take a pitching carrier deck to complicate things quite a bit. Other air traffic and wind do pretty well just by themselves. I suppose that if you are at an airport out in the sticks you can just go around until conditions suite you but at any airport that is even semi-busy, there is a lot of stuff to do on landing.
This was the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. I had the exact same experience. Did some ground work and then it was off to the airplane for my first take-off, flight and landing. I asked the instructor several times, "Are you sure about this???" I thought for sure he would take off, get us to a safe altitude and then make a big production of handing me the controls. Nope. It was, strap that fucker on and fly it.
The airport that I fly out of (HEF) seems to have a regular cross-wind so takeoff wasn't very easy - you have to use a lot of rudder but I did it myself. The instructor did help with the landing as the cross-wind was pushing me off the centerline and slow-flight can be confusing (throttle for altitude deal) for a inexperienced pilot.
After about 4 landings, I'm pretty much making the landings myself.
I do a lot of consulting work for a local aviation firm so I'm at the airport quite a bit. After 3 lessons a guy who owns a diamond (think that's right) asked me if I wanted to go fly with him. Man, is that worlds different than the cessna.
Perhaps. Ever heard of a company called "CMGI"? They were worth billions too. Last I checked their stock was at about .25 They had grand plans too. They hired smart people too. The point I'm making is not that I am smarter than any of those guys. It is that there are many practical problems with this "Google's going to take over the world" idea.
I hope Google can pull off half of what I hear they are going to do. It might provide some practical competition to MS (and others) but MS has proved time and time again that they are damn difficult to defeat over the long run.
The web based office idea is pretty laughable. I consult for a living and I'm not about to take calls from customers who can't get to their word processor because Verizon (or comcast or....) has fucked something up. In general, that is all Verizon (or comcast or....) does. Anything that is productivity related needs to be available either on the local lan or a users computer.
The other items are probably doable but it will take some time. Bandwidth is still the problem. Buying all the dark fibre in the world doesn't get it to my house. As for Wifi coverage, we've had two companies in my City who have tried it and their antenna's are still on the water tower....unplugged.
However, aside from the online office idea, none of this is of any threat to MS's position in the world. Google could control all of the internet access in the country and what difference would it make to MS? I don't believe for a second that MS cares too much about their ISP biz as their money comes from Windows and Office and Servers and Great Plains and SQL Server and Exchange server, etc, etc etc,....
It just isn't going to happen. I don't understand why people think this. Sure, they do a great search engine, email, some screwy book project and a couple other things. Does anyone out there really think that "desktop search" is the next killer app? The amount of attention given this seems a bit ridiculous to me. I suppose that if you stuff all of your files in one directory it might be useful but anybody with any sense uses handy things likes "folders". I use the windows search function about twice a year.
Google doesn't create anything new. Google takes other ideas and perfects them. Granted, this is where the real money is to be made (look at MS) but can they compete with the breadth and depth of MS product offerings?? Only in their dreams. I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch but please. Surely Google will continue to bolt on more services that will have varying degrees of usefulness and they'll be succesful but, in the end, a company like MS simply has too many resources, too much installed base and their own ideas. Remember when MS was caught completely unprepared for that newfangled "internet" thing? How long did it take them to turn around and leverage the hell out of it? Not long.
For Google to "do to MS what MS did to IBM", they are going to have to compete directly with MS on things that don't have much to do with the web and they don't stand a chance. Now, Google can still be very successful running a business that doesn't have much to do with MS and their Office/windows divisions (they will compete with and whip MSN) but that's a far cry from the beating that IBM took from MS years ago. Also don't forget that IBM handed the keys to the kingdom to MS. I don't see MS doing this for Google.
I do a lot of work for a charter aviation company. 4 days after the first storm, I got them to donate a G-IV, fully fueled and staffed to fly to wherever on the Gulf coast someone might need to go. I tried the Red Cross and a couple of other places but couldn't get anyone to take me up on the offer. Don't know what the story was, maybe there wasn't a working airport in the area that could take the Gulfstream but it seemed like a good offer.
I see your point but disagree. If the Uni that you are going to grades a 70 as a low C then getting a 45 on a test means you failed. If the professor "designed" the test that way then he needs to have his ass kicked. That is a ridiculous approach to testing. In essence he's (or she) is throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. A good (or even average) teacher should be able to design a test that gives students who perform well an appropriate grade. Doing otherwise discourages students who might otherwise competent enough to pass.
Doing it by administering a test where the average is 40% is capricous, stupid and mean-spirited.
I encountered this at school. I got a 38 on a calculus exam. It was "graded" as a B. I dropped that fucker as fast as I could get to the right office. Found another prof who had a sane grading methodology and did just fine, thanks.
It is interesting you thought that. To me, it read like a piece straight from the MS PR department. Something couched in laymans terms but aimed directly at the executive level of every big company out there.
Maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age....
Who's going to watch the camera?
would allow us to use programmable calculators providing that we wrote the programs for them. This was in 1983 so pulling code off the net really wasn't an option so it was pretty legit.
Does anyone remember Scopus? A company I was working for several years ago was happily using Scopus for our CRM stuff and then they were bought by Siebel. What a disaster. I thought Scopus was kinda bloated but Siebel made it look like a miracle of engineering. I left about halfway through the migration. What a nightmare.
Ask the guys on the last shuttle....
We work with a bunch of local phone vendors who always dictate that for site to site voip to be used, we need to setup a site to site VPN (or point to point circuit). It is my suspicion that they do this so that
1. they don't have to be bothered with trying to figure out what ports to forward on the firewall and
2. they have so much difficulty in troubleshooting their own systems that they love to blame everything on us.
In any event, I picked up the new o'reilly book on voip and they talk a lot about avoiding vpn as it creates lag. They also indicate that sending all of your QOS flagged traffic down a VPN tunnel eliminates the ability of the upstreams to "see" the QOS flags as they are encrypted. Anyone else have experience with this?
You have a valid point but there remain problems with the punish system. The continual punishing of engineers and commanders renders these classes almost useless. Case in point: I was an "assault" guy and my team only had one base left. I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, switch to engineer and lay some mines so we wouldn't get overrun. I even laid them down so team members could get between them.
You can guess what happened. Some idiot in a fast attack car runs over a mine I laid and punished me. He spawns again and does the same thing except this time he had 2 buddies with him. My score went to hell and I quit playing.
In general, I think the game does a lot to reign in idiots but they will always find a way.
Media absolutely works. Even in small town America or perhaps especially in small town America. I write an opinion column in our local paper and I can tell you that it gets results. I never "go after" individuals but if there is a problem and I rant about it, it gets cleared up.
We had a local developer who got a permit to tear down a building. He ripped the windows out, tore holes in the roof and left the building standing in that condition for a year. I wrote a column bitching about the eyesore (but not him in particular) and got an email from him the same day. The next day there was a bulldozer and a dumptruck onsite removing the building. He was pissed that I brought it up but admitted that I was right.
Media does work. Now if the media would do their fucking jobs and stop being so obssessed with the vapid idiots that we call "celebrities" we might get somewhere.
I don't know about all of that. Doesn't SBC still own the actual wires that your XO service runs over?
I know that around here, Verizon regularly botches install orders, people get pissed and cancel them. They are then surprised to learn that even though they are ordering a T-1 from some other company that everyone is still waiting on Verizon.
they are the suppliers. The wiring and maybe a card or two inside the cage are different. The voicemail systems are the same. The biggest problem with VOIP are the local phone guys that sell these systems. They don't have the technical chops to correctly install and configure VOIP.
I expect that I'll be an old man before this happens. The connectivity just isn't here on the WAN side. All of the companies who banked on an explosion of bandwidth are now or will shortly be bankrupt. I think that you'd have to have fibre connections to make this work. Cable connections are probably fast enough but most of them are seriously flakey. The ILEC's have no reason to spend money to upgrade network connections to fibre.
Inside of a company on a local area net, sure.
I think it is a great idea but don't see where the financial incentives are and without those, it ain't going to happen. As it stands now, it's a nightmare just to get a DSL connection installed let alone fixed. Image how much more difficult this would be with fibre or wireless......
quickly figures out that the real place to make money is the corporate market and not the home market. With most companies, they aren't behind you with a stop watch to count your time. Also, you normally can get several hours of time in during one stop. You don't have to go all over hell's half acre to make your money. Sure, you can make money that way but it's too much work.
Also, going into people's houses all the time weirds me out. We quit doing that about 4 years ago.
I read an article about Geeks on Call and, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see that they are going to have much success in the corporate market. According to the article, the techs are not supposed to talk to any of their customers on the phone - every problem results in a service call. That might work with joe homeowner but a business that spends several $k a month on your service will expect phone support....
I don't know that removing money from politics will fix this problem. Apart from the philosophical debate, I think that practically even giving candidates free air time won't fix the problem. We recently had a pretty hotly contested election here. There was a sign in almost every yard, mailings about twice a week, computerized phone polls...would the government pay for all of that too?
In addition, I'm unsure that if you completely subsidize elections it actually removes the money. I suspect that the money would just move elsewhere. Take for example the recent spate of confessions of those on the hill about lobbyists paying for trips abroad for members of Congress. These kinds of activities are against the law but it took 5 or more years for the "truth" to come out and you can bet your bottom dollar that if nobody had "outed" Tom Delay that we wouldn't have heard about any of those trips.
No, the problem with our government isn't that there is too much money involved or that some people in the government are corrupt. That has always been true. The problem is that the citizens of our fair land don't give a flying fuck about what happens in Washington (or anywhere else for that matter). In our recent (off-year primary) election we had a 3% turnout!!! Fuck, Satan himself could get elected right now in that environment. In my city of 36,000 you'd have to get what, 1,000 loonies to show up at the polls?
Simply put, I blame the people for this fucked-up state of affairs. Our City council holds a meeting every week. Normally no more than 4 or 5 people show up. Point is that there is normally only one point of view being handed to our representatives - that of the people that want a particular piece of legislation passed. When there is only one voice in the room then that's all they will hear. Lacking any input from their constituents, they do a gut-check and cast their vote.
Money being thrown around like candy doesn't help but the absolute abdication by the people of their role in representative government is the real problem.
Well, we could allow Jack to do that but whatever information that procedure finds might be outside of the "protocol" that they are running. This would drive Jack to resign from CTU and the resulting body count would be a media field day.
What we should really do is send Jack to the middle east to find some of the bad guys. Sure, he'd kill half of the population with a pistol and a knife but, in the end, he'd get his man.
The last time was last year. It was called the "Virtual Case File". It was a complete failure. I think there was an article in the Washington Post last week about it.
lol, good point about the hippies. I used to work for a guy who participated in the marches on DC in the 60's. He told a story about he and a bunch of people had blocked the key bridge. He vividly remembers a cop walking up, looking at him and then spraying his face full of mace. He recalled being surprised that it had happened. He didn't mention how much weed he had smoked prior to this action but I suspect it was a fair amount....:)
I don't disagree but I do wonder how realistic this notion is. If things get too hot, are you going to round up some people and conduct an armed march on Washington?
I ask this in all seriousness. There were riots in DC in the 60's. The government flew fully-armed combat troops in to take care of it. I wonder, in this hyper-terrorism awareness state that the government is in, what would happen to you and your buddies when you conduct that march?
I expect it would be suicide.
This isn't a bad point but between the two, an AWB or allowing the government to collect information w/o any oversight, which would you take? I would go for the AWB any day. I'm not crazy about either but at least with the AWB you could still have an array of guns of reasonable power. When your right to privacy and FOS are gone, they're just gone.