The office in Longmont, CO, closed down, laying off some very experienced tape people in the process.
The Eindhoven folks are still there, and shipping new product, and it also looks like they've started a division in San Diego to deal with the tape manufacturing in Tijuana. This should help the quality of the tape.
ADR is not bad as a cheap solution. I once wrote an MP3 jukebox that used an OnStream drive as the main storage medium, and it worked quite well.
The problem is that low-Earth orbit (LEO) is getting to be very crowded, and it takes a lot longer for the orbit of a satellite at an altitude of 150 miles to decay than it does for the "standard orbit" of the Enterprise to do the same thing. I think this is caused by the fact that the plot of an LEO satellite doesn't need to be resolved in a one hour episode.
There are still bits of junk floating around in fairly low orbits from the '60's. A really useful cheap satellite would be something that sought out space junk, captured it, and then de-orbitted after collecting a couple hundred pounds. Anyone besides me remember Quark?
The real problem, of course, is that you were using Win2k, which comes with all sorts of hideous stuff on it that is just waiting to screw up the network.
There are plenty of heterogenous businesses out there (I work at one) that have networks that work well, even mixing Linux, WinNT and Win2k. Except when something like Code Red sweeps through. Which wouldn't be a problem if people exercised some common sense and avoided MSFT products like the plague that they are.
Along about the time Sir Paid Alot complains about his 5 cent royalty check, his lawyer looks at his contract:
"Lets see, your advance was $500,000, your touring cost was $1,000,000, the label gets 50% of the gate on your gigs, and your royalty rate on CD's is only half what it is for vinyl. Boy, you're lucky you got a whole nickel!"
NASA Watch led me to NASA Problems, which is an interesting read. After reading it, I became convinced a few things.
Its amazing that Goldin got anything done at all.
Manned flight should be cancelled.
Further explication. There has been no appreciable payoff in exchange for the risk in the manned program. None. The costs associated with maintaining the manned program consume over half of NASA's budget, starving aernonautical research and science programs.
The ISS is a complete waste. It appears that it will return very little science data, and cost, in the words of the immortal C. Everett Dirkson, "real money." A major component of the cost? STS launch costs, at $500 million+ a shot.
If STS and ISS were cancelled for real, and the budget chopped only by the direct STS and ISS charges, their would still be more money left in the budget in hidden costs to bring many really interesting aeronautical and scientific projects to completion, without having to cut their budgets to the point where integration and system testing are cut. Clearly, the manned program and its political consituency are what's holding NASA back, not Dan Goldin. It is perhaps true that Goldin has hurt the manned program itself, but in the view of many in the scientific community, he is to be applauded for that.
Seems to me that ability to attain high motherboard speeds isn't as much of an issues as getting one that is reasonably priced.
I think you're nuts. High motherboard and I/O speeds are exactly what's needed. With reasonably fast (by today's standards) mobos based on the SiS735 available at ~$60 street, I don't see why we need cheaper mobos. Fiber interconnects to main memory (provided they keep the latency down!) could make a real difference. Imagine if main memory behaved more like cache. I'd be willing to pay more for that, at least for a database and compute servers.
The problem with "The Big Bang Never Happened" (which I have read) and other alternative cosmologies is that they don't even attempt to go deep enough to prove their points. There's a reason for this. All of modern cosmology is based on General Relativity. If you are going to say that the Big Bang Never Happened, then your alternative cosmology has to not only come up with an alternative explanation for the Universe, but also explain everything that GR does without having a Big Bang. This is a very tall order.
It isn't enough to point out the contradictions in the standard model. It is also necessary to build a new model that explains all observations. To date, no one has been able to do this without having a Big Bang at the start.
As has been repeated innumerable times already, the Hindenburg fire was the result of combustion of the dope used on the skin, not combustion of the hydrogen tanks.
Not true! Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan.
Modern solar panels have 20 year warrantees.
Mirror/boiler schemes show more promise, but scraping togeter megawats from 22 watts per square meter is not easy and pilots worry they will be blinded flying over them!
The solar energy density at the Earth's surface is approximately 1000W/m^2, not 22W/m^2. The latter figure is for a particularly inefficient solar panel, say one from 20+ years ago.
Flying over a mirror/boiler facility shouldn't be much of an issue, because the mirrors are pointed at the boiler, not straight up.
You did not mention biomass conversion as an indirect solar, but corn was made for eating!
Thousands of tons of organic matter suitable for generating methanol or methane are produced and collected in our cities every day in the form of sewage and food waste. All we have to do is collect it.
They find the "wasteful" landscaping more beatiful.
A morally indefensible point in climates where water is more expensive than gasoline.
Their "wasteful" large vehicles are often safer than small, fuel-efficient vehicles (size remains the best single
indicator of vehicle safety), and often confer that most precious of goods: status.
Only safer in the sense that they have a tendency to inflict damage in a multi-car crash. Can you live with the realization that your "safety", which wouldn't be necessary if people drove the cars that they needed to drive, only comes at the expense of the lives of others?
SUV's have a higher incidence of injury to the occupant in single car crashes than smaller cars with lower centers of gravity, and a much higher incidence of solo rollover.
As for status, I'll leave that one to the truly religious.
Or consider war: who do you think will be better off between a country with huge
factories that produce new oversized vehicles for its citizens every few years, and a country which, through careful design, only produces a handful of
replacement parts for small cars that last practically forever?
Here we have a sterling example of a person who appears to believe that preparation for war is the highest good a society can strive for.
People never deliberately do things wastefully and stupidly, it's because they're busy with other things, haven't expended the effort to understand the
problem, or are simply not bright enough to understand it themselves and would have to hire someone else to do it for them.
I wish this were true, but it isn't. All you have to do is take a walk in any U.S. city, and you'll see people deliberately choosing wasteful vehicles, parking them in front of homes or offices with deliberately wasteful landscaping, living deliberately wasteful lifestyles. By now all Americans know how wasteful they are, but choose to do nothing about it. In fact, we have a tendency to stigmatize those who choose not to deliberately waste resources.
As far as intelligent choice and design not being free, that's true. Intelligent choices and designs are usually a win for the consumer because water wise landscaping, or sky-friendly/good neighbor lighting and efficient vehicles cost the same or less to install/acquire and cost far less to maintain.
My solution was pretty simple. I put most of my machines in the basement. A set of high-integrity KVM cables connects my monitor and keyboard to a KVM switch, which allows me access to all of my machines (except the Sun, which I only use through rsh). I also have a long parallel cable that runs from one of the Linux machines up to the printer in my office.
The big advantage of this approach is that I can keep adding machines as needed without making my office even hotter and noisier. During the summer the basement is about 30 degrees cooler than my office, so this is really important.
The only real problem is that I do go up and down the stairs a couple times a week when my one Windoze box crashes, but other than that it works great. The only machine in my office is a laptop that I would like to find a way to get out of here, because its fan is the loudest thing here.
Using a spare room could work too. Drill through the wall, and put a room air-conditioner in there to keep the temp down without overcooling the rest of the house/apartment.
I believe it to be a bit of a cop-out to just claim that your options are worthless. It is possible to get an idea of what your options might be worth by projecting out the possible market capitalization of your company by comparing it to companies in similar industries with similar market potentials.
For example, say your company has a leading product in a market that Dataquest (ha ha) claims will be worth $5B in 2005, from $500M today. Further, lets say you currently have a 10% market share (sales of $50M), but are gaining on your competitors, and may have as large as a 20% market share in 2005, which would put your sales at $1B, representing total growth of 2000%. From that you can project horrible problems growing the company, which it might not survive, and also the potential for large capital gains. You can also try to guestimate a market cap from looking at companies that have experienced similar growth. You would be pleasantly surprised. Or would have been 9 months ago, and maybe again 9 months from now.
Of course, this assumes that you work for a company that has an established position in an identified, growing market. Most people don't work for such companies. Instead, they seem to be working for people that have this great idea that no one wants to pay for. Companies like that really are worthless.
I used to sorta like the RBL as an idea. But it looks like Vixie is just going WAY to far now. SPAM email is one thing, but blocking all IP traffic just because you can is neither moral nor likely to be legal.
Re:Hoots mon on the Celtic Fringe...
on
Reviews:Shrek
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· Score: 2
As an American, the jab would be lost on me, simply because the culture of Canada (at least, the English-speaking part of it) is damn near identical to the culture of the US. We watch each other's TV shows, listen to each other's musicians, use the same word for our main unit of money, and have not had a serious political dispute since the old days of "54-40 or fight". Three of America's four "major-league" sports leagues (NBA, NHL, MLB & NFL) include Canadian cities.
Ahem.
Even though I'm a US citizen, I would dare say that your statement is made without any real understanding of Canada. Try listening to the CBC for a while, and you'll start to understand some of the differences. Most "Americans" (a term I've always hated) seem to think that just because someone watches American TV that they are "just like us."
You're not refering to the unified memory model are you?
No, I'm not. The earlier "PowerSeries" machines had a memory makeup like this. The latency on the O2 was quite short compared to those machines.
And actually the O2 was one of the first machines to use SDRAM (albeit on a different form factor). The latency on those systems wasn't all that bad, although it was definitely optimized for streaming video onto cubes. It also kicked butt (for its day) on GLQuake.
SGI tried something like this years ago. It wasn't RDRAM, but the memory system was optimized to move large chunks of data through quickly at the expense of latency. What they found was that most of their customers real applications simply didn't work that way.
Lesson? Don't attend standard setting committee meetings. Set your own standards.
This is only a problem if your business plan doesn't actually include making a product, as was
the case with RMBS. If you do make a product, then sitting on standards committees is vital. Unless you're MSFT.
Slashdot Mirror
The Eindhoven folks are still there, and shipping new product, and it also looks like they've started a division in San Diego to deal with the tape manufacturing in Tijuana. This should help the quality of the tape.
ADR is not bad as a cheap solution. I once wrote an MP3 jukebox that used an OnStream drive as the main storage medium, and it worked quite well.
Who says?
I don't have cable, and don't watch a lot of TV anyway. I find that I'm much happier that way. I'm even tempted to get rid of the TV entirely.
There are still bits of junk floating around in fairly low orbits from the '60's. A really useful cheap satellite would be something that sought out space junk, captured it, and then de-orbitted after collecting a couple hundred pounds. Anyone besides me remember Quark?
This sort of thing should have been obvious to any fan of Marvel Comics, so no No Prize for you!
There are plenty of heterogenous businesses out there (I work at one) that have networks that work well, even mixing Linux, WinNT and Win2k. Except when something like Code Red sweeps through. Which wouldn't be a problem if people exercised some common sense and avoided MSFT products like the plague that they are.
Along about the time Sir Paid Alot complains about his 5 cent royalty check, his lawyer looks at his contract:
"Lets see, your advance was $500,000, your touring cost was $1,000,000, the label gets 50% of the gate on your gigs, and your royalty rate on CD's is only half what it is for vinyl. Boy, you're lucky you got a whole nickel!"
Its amazing that Goldin got anything done at all.
Manned flight should be cancelled.
Further explication. There has been no appreciable payoff in exchange for the risk in the manned program. None. The costs associated with maintaining the manned program consume over half of NASA's budget, starving aernonautical research and science programs.
The ISS is a complete waste. It appears that it will return very little science data, and cost, in the words of the immortal C. Everett Dirkson, "real money." A major component of the cost? STS launch costs, at $500 million+ a shot.
If STS and ISS were cancelled for real, and the budget chopped only by the direct STS and ISS charges, their would still be more money left in the budget in hidden costs to bring many really interesting aeronautical and scientific projects to completion, without having to cut their budgets to the point where integration and system testing are cut. Clearly, the manned program and its political consituency are what's holding NASA back, not Dan Goldin. It is perhaps true that Goldin has hurt the manned program itself, but in the view of many in the scientific community, he is to be applauded for that.
I think you're nuts. High motherboard and I/O speeds are exactly what's needed. With reasonably fast (by today's standards) mobos based on the SiS735 available at ~$60 street, I don't see why we need cheaper mobos. Fiber interconnects to main memory (provided they keep the latency down!) could make a real difference. Imagine if main memory behaved more like cache. I'd be willing to pay more for that, at least for a database and compute servers.
The problem with "The Big Bang Never Happened" (which I have read) and other alternative cosmologies is that they don't even attempt to go deep enough to prove their points. There's a reason for this. All of modern cosmology is based on General Relativity. If you are going to say that the Big Bang Never Happened, then your alternative cosmology has to not only come up with an alternative explanation for the Universe, but also explain everything that GR does without having a Big Bang. This is a very tall order.
It isn't enough to point out the contradictions in the standard model. It is also necessary to build a new model that explains all observations. To date, no one has been able to do this without having a Big Bang at the start.
As has been repeated innumerable times already, the Hindenburg fire was the result of combustion of the dope used on the skin, not combustion of the hydrogen tanks.
Modern solar panels have 20 year warrantees.
The solar energy density at the Earth's surface is approximately 1000W/m^2, not 22W/m^2. The latter figure is for a particularly inefficient solar panel, say one from 20+ years ago.
Flying over a mirror/boiler facility shouldn't be much of an issue, because the mirrors are pointed at the boiler, not straight up.
Thousands of tons of organic matter suitable for generating methanol or methane are produced and collected in our cities every day in the form of sewage and food waste. All we have to do is collect it.
More tits, or more plot?
Its nice to see that kids today still listen to the classics.
The comparison was of al Queda to pedophile rings. Which frankly is an insult to the pedophiles.
A morally indefensible point in climates where water is more expensive than gasoline.
Only safer in the sense that they have a tendency to inflict damage in a multi-car crash. Can you live with the realization that your "safety", which wouldn't be necessary if people drove the cars that they needed to drive, only comes at the expense of the lives of others?
SUV's have a higher incidence of injury to the occupant in single car crashes than smaller cars with lower centers of gravity, and a much higher incidence of solo rollover.
As for status, I'll leave that one to the truly religious.
Here we have a sterling example of a person who appears to believe that preparation for war is the highest good a society can strive for.
I pity you, I really do.
I wish this were true, but it isn't. All you have to do is take a walk in any U.S. city, and you'll see people deliberately choosing wasteful vehicles, parking them in front of homes or offices with deliberately wasteful landscaping, living deliberately wasteful lifestyles. By now all Americans know how wasteful they are, but choose to do nothing about it. In fact, we have a tendency to stigmatize those who choose not to deliberately waste resources.
As far as intelligent choice and design not being free, that's true. Intelligent choices and designs are usually a win for the consumer because water wise landscaping, or sky-friendly/good neighbor lighting and efficient vehicles cost the same or less to install/acquire and cost far less to maintain.
I can make my Joan Greenwood answering machine!
The big advantage of this approach is that I can keep adding machines as needed without making my office even hotter and noisier. During the summer the basement is about 30 degrees cooler than my office, so this is really important. The only real problem is that I do go up and down the stairs a couple times a week when my one Windoze box crashes, but other than that it works great. The only machine in my office is a laptop that I would like to find a way to get out of here, because its fan is the loudest thing here.
Using a spare room could work too. Drill through the wall, and put a room air-conditioner in there to keep the temp down without overcooling the rest of the house/apartment.
For example, say your company has a leading product in a market that Dataquest (ha ha) claims will be worth $5B in 2005, from $500M today. Further, lets say you currently have a 10% market share (sales of $50M), but are gaining on your competitors, and may have as large as a 20% market share in 2005, which would put your sales at $1B, representing total growth of 2000%. From that you can project horrible problems growing the company, which it might not survive, and also the potential for large capital gains. You can also try to guestimate a market cap from looking at companies that have experienced similar growth. You would be pleasantly surprised. Or would have been 9 months ago, and maybe again 9 months from now.
Of course, this assumes that you work for a company that has an established position in an identified, growing market. Most people don't work for such companies. Instead, they seem to be working for people that have this great idea that no one wants to pay for. Companies like that really are worthless.
I used to sorta like the RBL as an idea. But it looks like Vixie is just going WAY to far now. SPAM email is one thing, but blocking all IP traffic just because you can is neither moral nor likely to be legal.
Ahem.
Even though I'm a US citizen, I would dare say that your statement is made without any real understanding of Canada. Try listening to the CBC for a while, and you'll start to understand some of the differences. Most "Americans" (a term I've always hated) seem to think that just because someone watches American TV that they are "just like us."
Probably Olsen.
XFS has been used by sgi for their MIPS and Cray machines ever since 1984
You mean 1994. At I can assure you that using XFS in 1994 was a thrill a minute ;-).
No, I'm not. The earlier "PowerSeries" machines had a memory makeup like this. The latency on the O2 was quite short compared to those machines. And actually the O2 was one of the first machines to use SDRAM (albeit on a different form factor). The latency on those systems wasn't all that bad, although it was definitely optimized for streaming video onto cubes. It also kicked butt (for its day) on GLQuake.
SGI tried something like this years ago. It wasn't RDRAM, but the memory system was optimized to move large chunks of data through quickly at the expense of latency. What they found was that most of their customers real applications simply didn't work that way.
This is only a problem if your business plan doesn't actually include making a product, as was the case with RMBS. If you do make a product, then sitting on standards committees is vital. Unless you're MSFT.