I'd actually like to see someone take the Onion's kids explanation [theonion.com] of why the Sept. terrorist attacks happened seriously.
Good point. This is actually a very serious introduction to some of the key points of modern Islamic fundamentalism. When I first read it I went looked up Qutb. No other major media outlet that I know of has bothered to give people the starting point to actually find out how and why bin Laden came to be.
Uh, excuse me? Yeah, Juicy Bananas covered it for Repo Man, but the song is from the early Lou Reed wannabe days of Jonathan Richmond. Who went on to pen such classics as "Ice Cream Man" and the immortal "I'm a Little Airplane."
The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of lusers out there have no idea whatsoever what a file format even is. They just write a document, or prepare a presentation and save it for later use and dissemination. If you tell someone at XYZ Corp to send you the file in a different format, they'll look at you like you're from Lalande 21185B or some other equally outlandish place.
Like it or not, Microsoft owns the document market right now, to the point where a book called Building Linux Virtual Private Networks was written using Microsoft Word.
Serial ATA will be a real boon to this particular form factor. If you leave out the floppy when building the box there will be no large ribbon cables inside at all, and cooling should be improved.
I'm including bulge stars in the billion to one. The thesis is that you need a certain metallicity, radiation level, etc... Rare earthers (gotta love that term;-) assume that complex life can only be supported on a planet exactly like Earth. Besides, there are more population I stars than pop II in a given spiral anyway.
The Milky Way has something on the order of 100-200 billion stars in it, and M31 has even more. There are so many stars that even if you toss out half or more, there's still a lot of territory to look at.
The fact is that we just plain don't know, and won't have any idea on this subject until we get a better handle on how to locate terrestrial planets. In the meantime, I think that its better to keep an open mind than to succumb to the small sample fallacy.
Guillermo is well known for the "Rare Earth" hypothesis, which boils down to the thesis that planets identical to Earth are extremely uncommon. This has even been covered on Slashdot before.
I don't entirely disagree with Guillermo, but he does make one major blunder, IMHO: He assumes that complex life can only develop on planets with all of the same characteristics as Earth. That sub-hypothesis is not proven.
Regardless, lets say that a exact Earth analogs occur around one out of a billion stars. That still leaves 100 Earth analogs in the Milky Way alone.
The real issue for finding ET, IMHO (that sure gets tossed out a lot when discussing life in the Universe;-) is that time is so much longer than we humans can perceive. Humans have been around in our present form for only a few thousand years, with only a couple of decades when we could be detected by extra terrestrial civilisations. In terms of the age of the Earth that is nothing, and compared to the age of the galaxy it is smaller than nothing. Our window in time is so narrow that it seems unlikely that it actually overlaps with other civilizations.
If you don't like their prices, change providers. If no provider has prices you like, then what you're asking for probably isn't financially viable.
The problem is that with the latest FCC
shenanigans it is unlikely that you will have a competing ISP to switch to. Certainly the cable market isn't open to competition. So once again we have government sponsored market failure, leading to abuse of the consumer
and degredation of service, all in the name of
marginally higer profits for a few monopolies.
Your problem isn't that you are too far from the CO, its that your line is provisioned in an incompatible manner, or was in the past. For instance, if you have a MUX (two lines on one pair) DSL won't work. If there ever was such a beast on your line, the phone company probably thinks its still there, because (regardless of your ILEC) they are notorious for their incompetence.
No cable ISP that I know of allows any kind of commercial use of their facilities. Contrary to what some of the above posters may think, some of the reasons are technical, going back to the infamous "shared bandwidth" issue. With the lack of competition from DSL, I don't see this changing any time soon.
There are other issues. If the rule is changed substantially where I live, I will be forced to go with MSN as my ISP, something I really don't want. If somehow the rules still allow competition on dry lines, then I suppose I could drop my voice service and only use cell for that. Gee, that would mean I wouldn't ever get a QWorst bill again;-).
So, if you are considering rolling out a notoriously insecure network architecture (such as 802.11[ab]), consider the fact that you may be personally liable for anything bad that a crook does with your network. Be afraid.
This is what Limited Liability Companies (LLC's) are for. You create an LLC to run the network, which can cost as little as $50 depending on what state you are in, and then the only thing anyone can go after for liability is the LLC and its assets, not you or yours.
Off the top of my head, I remember seeing stuff from sources that suggested that SGI was selling Indy workstations and later O2 at a loss. Look where SGI is now unlike Sun and IBM who have stated policies about not giving away hardware just to get people to write software.
Nope. Gross margins on Indy's were in line with SGI's traditional margins, although there were factions within SGI that wished they could have been sold at lower margins to raise volumes. I don't know about O2's, but I suspect the situation was the same.
The last company to buy into the "sell the blades" philosophy was 3DO, which was cool, but failed miserably. And the people who started 3DO were experienced game people, as opposed to MSFT, who apparently have no clue. It is interesting to see that some companies are willing to flog business models that are proven failures. Makes you wonder what value an MBA really is.
All well and good, if your company and its shareholders can deal with the lost productivity and general hassle of fighting the BSA/MSFT. Most companies simply do not want to take the risks involved, unless the reward is substantial. In this case, there's no real reward, so the risk is unreasonable.
BTW, "BSA" is also the universal symbol for "oil leak."
Most system administrators do not know enough to be truly useful. Not coincidentally, many have not had formal training in Computer "Science" or Engineering. Go to college. Learn about how things really work, not the regurgitated pablum that is spread by corporate sponsored certifications.
Since it looks like you aren't planning on going to a university this fall, it wouldn't hurt to get a certification or two in the upcoming year. But definitely go to university. To go immediately into the work world out of high school seems like a complete waste of youth to me. There are many more entertaining ways to waste those precious years between 18 and 24 than slaving long hours as a sysadmin.
While I do enjoy KSR, and will probably continue to read his works, he does have a tendency to fall into preaching a bit much: he definitely has an axe to grind and is not at all afraid to hone it in public. This isn't a bad thing for a novelist, after all, large amounts of Huck Finn are written in this mode. KSR needs to develop a bit more subtlety about it. Some advanced irony courses would probably help him;-).
As for TYORAS (hey, a pronounceable acronym;-), he does a better job of staying away from the long omniscient passages of Blue Mars that so damaged that novel. It still could have been tighter, IMHO. But then, I didn't write the book. It does seem very, very difficult to paint a picture of a society using only the materials at hand, instead of relying on conversations and exposition that explain everything that a person in the society would already know. I really find novels that eschew exposition more satisfying, as the mental effort to understand the world is more enjoyable than having it spoon fed. Besides, if things are left somewhat ambiguous you can have endless arguments about what particular passages "mean", leading to endless flame wars on USENET;-).
But I'm also a taxpayer in the school district I teach in, and it makes me angry that our school district has also chosen to be a whore to the M$ brothel.
Technically, the role played by the district is of a "john" in the MSFT brothel: They pay money to get screwed, and possibly catch a dangerous virus.
Primestar dishes work with 802.11b just fine, and can be had for the hauling. I recommend getting a hold of as many as your spouse/fiance(e)/roommate will allow;-).
PR people consider that they've done their job if a movie opens big and then disappears the next weekend. This chart illustrates a good hype job. This
one
illustrates good word-of-mouth combined with poor
studio support.
So many suckers, so little time...
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Here's a story about a similar scam from the dot com era. This guy raised $20M, and spent $16M of that on a party in Las Vegas with entertainment provided by the Dixie Chicks and The Who.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a man with impeccable pro-life credentials, has actually come around on the stem cell question. Unlike most conservatives, he actually educated himself on the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. This is actually a very serious introduction to some of the key points of modern Islamic fundamentalism. When I first read it I went looked up Qutb. No other major media outlet that I know of has bothered to give people the starting point to actually find out how and why bin Laden came to be.
Ignore The Onion at your peril.
Uh, excuse me? Yeah, Juicy Bananas covered it for Repo Man, but the song is from the early Lou Reed wannabe days of Jonathan Richmond. Who went on to pen such classics as "Ice Cream Man" and the immortal "I'm a Little Airplane."
The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of lusers out there have no idea whatsoever what a file format even is. They just write a document, or prepare a presentation and save it for later use and dissemination. If you tell someone at XYZ Corp to send you the file in a different format, they'll look at you like you're from Lalande 21185B or some other equally outlandish place.
Like it or not, Microsoft owns the document market right now, to the point where a book called
Building Linux Virtual Private Networks was written using Microsoft Word.
Serial ATA will be a real boon to this particular form factor. If you leave out the floppy when building the box there will be no large ribbon cables inside at all, and cooling should be improved.
By replacing the file system with SQL Server!
I'm including bulge stars in the billion to one. The thesis is that you need a certain metallicity, radiation level, etc... Rare earthers (gotta love that term ;-) assume that complex life can only be supported on a planet exactly like Earth. Besides, there are more population I stars than pop II in a given spiral anyway.
The Milky Way has something on the order of 100-200 billion stars in it, and M31 has even more. There are so many stars that even if you toss out half or more, there's still a lot of territory to look at.
The fact is that we just plain don't know, and won't have any idea on this subject until we get a better handle on how to locate terrestrial planets. In the meantime, I think that its better to keep an open mind than to succumb to the small sample fallacy.
Guillermo is well known for the "Rare Earth" hypothesis, which boils down to the thesis that planets identical to Earth are extremely uncommon. This has even been covered on Slashdot before.
;-) is that time is so much longer than we humans can perceive. Humans have been around in our present form for only a few thousand years, with only a couple of decades when we could be detected by extra terrestrial civilisations. In terms of the age of the Earth that is nothing, and compared to the age of the galaxy it is smaller than nothing. Our window in time is so narrow that it seems unlikely that it actually overlaps with other civilizations.
I don't entirely disagree with Guillermo, but he does make one major blunder, IMHO: He assumes that complex life can only develop on planets with all of the same characteristics as Earth. That sub-hypothesis is not proven.
Regardless, lets say that a exact Earth analogs occur around one out of a billion stars. That still leaves 100 Earth analogs in the Milky Way alone.
The real issue for finding ET, IMHO (that sure gets tossed out a lot when discussing life in the Universe
The problem is that with the latest FCC shenanigans it is unlikely that you will have a competing ISP to switch to. Certainly the cable market isn't open to competition. So once again we have government sponsored market failure, leading to abuse of the consumer and degredation of service, all in the name of marginally higer profits for a few monopolies.
The trouble with a TAN is that too much exposure to ultraviolet can cause skin cancer.
I'll gladly trade all of the Iridium Flares I've seen (including a couple of -7's) for some clear spectrum for radio astronomy.
Your problem isn't that you are too far from the CO, its that your line is provisioned in an incompatible manner, or was in the past. For instance, if you have a MUX (two lines on one pair) DSL won't work. If there ever was such a beast on your line, the phone company probably thinks its still there, because (regardless of your ILEC) they are notorious for their incompetence.
No cable ISP that I know of allows any kind of commercial use of their facilities. Contrary to what some of the above posters may think, some of the reasons are technical, going back to the infamous "shared bandwidth" issue. With the lack of competition from DSL, I don't see this changing any time soon.
;-).
There are other issues. If the rule is changed substantially where I live, I will be forced to go with MSN as my ISP, something I really don't want. If somehow the rules still allow competition on dry lines, then I suppose I could drop my voice service and only use cell for that. Gee, that would mean I wouldn't ever get a QWorst bill again
This is what Limited Liability Companies (LLC's) are for. You create an LLC to run the network, which can cost as little as $50 depending on what state you are in, and then the only thing anyone can go after for liability is the LLC and its assets, not you or yours.
Librarians are the true modern heros. Go hug one today.
Nope. Gross margins on Indy's were in line with SGI's traditional margins, although there were factions within SGI that wished they could have been sold at lower margins to raise volumes. I don't know about O2's, but I suspect the situation was the same.
And no, this is not speculation.
The last company to buy into the "sell the blades" philosophy was 3DO, which was cool, but failed miserably. And the people who started 3DO were experienced game people, as opposed to MSFT, who apparently have no clue. It is interesting to see that some companies are willing to flog business models that are proven failures. Makes you wonder what value an MBA really is.
All well and good, if your company and its shareholders can deal with the lost productivity and general hassle of fighting the BSA/MSFT. Most companies simply do not want to take the risks involved, unless the reward is substantial. In this case, there's no real reward, so the risk is unreasonable.
BTW, "BSA" is also the universal symbol for "oil leak."
Most system administrators do not know enough to be truly useful. Not coincidentally, many have not had formal training in Computer "Science" or Engineering. Go to college. Learn about how things really work, not the regurgitated pablum that is spread by corporate sponsored certifications.
Since it looks like you aren't planning on going to a university this fall, it wouldn't hurt to get a certification or two in the upcoming year. But definitely go to university. To go immediately into the work world out of high school seems like a complete waste of youth to me. There are many more entertaining ways to waste those precious years between 18 and 24 than slaving long hours as a sysadmin.
While I do enjoy KSR, and will probably continue to read his works, he does have a tendency to fall into preaching a bit much: he definitely has an axe to grind and is not at all afraid to hone it in public. This isn't a bad thing for a novelist, after all, large amounts of Huck Finn are written in this mode. KSR needs to develop a bit more subtlety about it. Some advanced irony courses would probably help him ;-).
;-), he does a better job of staying away from the long omniscient passages of Blue Mars that so damaged that novel. It still could have been tighter, IMHO. But then, I didn't write the book. It does seem very, very difficult to paint a picture of a society using only the materials at hand, instead of relying on conversations and exposition that explain everything that a person in the society would already know. I really find novels that eschew exposition more satisfying, as the mental effort to understand the world is more enjoyable than having it spoon fed. Besides, if things are left somewhat ambiguous you can have endless arguments about what particular passages "mean", leading to endless flame wars on USENET ;-).
As for TYORAS (hey, a pronounceable acronym
Technically, the role played by the district is of a "john" in the MSFT brothel: They pay money to get screwed, and possibly catch a dangerous virus.
Primestar dishes work with 802.11b just fine, and can be had for the hauling. I recommend getting a hold of as many as your spouse/fiance(e)/roommate will allow ;-).
Here's a story about a similar scam from the dot com era. This guy raised $20M, and spent $16M of that on a party in Las Vegas with entertainment provided by the Dixie Chicks and The Who.
At least not around here, as most of the geeks are unemployed, and those with jobs are too scared to play hooky.