As for Apple providing a short time frame before dropping old tech that is rediculous to do if it is true. I for damn sure want hardware/software I buy to last more than 3-5 years, or at least let me have the option to use it. Sounds like a scam to get more money in my opinion.
This is no different than any other technology company. It is ridiculous to suggest that something is unusable as soon as it becomes officially unsupported by a company. Just because a system might be out of warranty doesn't mean you can't still get it fixed or use it on a day to day basis.
Apple's requirements change with new OS releases, some formerly supported Mac models are dropped. This happens mainly because those systems can't adequately handle newer features in later OS releases. Sure Apple could disable features to make it run better but why ask someone to pay $129 for a new OS when it will end up disabling features to the point they see little or no improvement over the previously installed version? Hey sweet, the Apple logo in the left corner looks different!
This is also good for third party developers. If there's a very specific range of systems supported by a particular OS, a developer need only target that version and above and be confident their software will run acceptably. If you support Jaguar (10.2) or newer, you only need to provide support for G3 and better processors as previous versions of OSX had limited support for 604e based Macs. Tiger's universal SDK is an even more salient point. If your software uses the 10.4u SDK barring any architecture specific problems it ought to compile and run without issue on either PowerPC or Intel Macs.
Why nobody is using PalmOS 6, I don't know; I imagine there is some good reason though.
There's only stupid reasons unfortunately. Palm's ridiculous licensing for PalmOS 6 was a big one for companies like Sony. The OS is also decidedly different on the back end from previous versions meaning taking full advantage of it requires rewriting a lot of software. Palm also announced they were going to ditch their kernel for Linux. No one wanted to jump on an OS that Palm had decided to obsolete before it was even available to licensees.
Think about replacing your entertainment appliances with a communal computer. A relatively low power PC hooked up to a decent LCD can play just about any sort of media type you can think of. It is also quite a bit more efficient than a bunch of individual devices in "sleep" mode sucking down 10Wh+. Turn off the sound system for such a computer when it isn't in use and place the system itself in sleep mode or hibernate or what have you when not in use.
Convince your house mates that switching to LCDs in going to save everyone even though they're relatively expensive up front. A 19" CRT sucking down 100W will cost a fortune compared to the operational cost of a good LCD. The less power used means the less heat generated which leads to lower home cooling costs in hotter months.
Turn the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter. In the summer wear shorts and short sleeve shirts, sweaters and thicker pants in the winter. Grab some cheap solar shades to go on the outsides of south facing windows, they keep a good 70% of solar radiation from entering the window and require next to maintenance. Do what you can to seal up the windows in the winter time to keep cold air out and warm air in. There's lots of thermal seals for windows available that don't require permenant changes to the structure of the windows thus being renter friendly.
Get a Watt meter. It's a little device you plug in between an appliance and the wall that can tell you the device's electrical load. Plug everything into one of these to figure out what is sucking down the most power when on and/or off. Grab some power strips or switch adapters for outlets to keep these power sinks from hiking up your electrical bill. You'd be surprised about how much power is used by appliances that look "off". Kitchens and living rooms are huge power sinks.
Replace incandescent bulbs with CF ones. CF bulbs costs a bit more than incandescents but last quite a bit longer and use a fraction of the power to produce the same amount of light. You don't save up front with CFBs, you save months down the road when the power savings and long life have paid for the bulb several times over. CFBs are also getting cheaper so price is even less of an issue than it was just a few years ago. Make sure people in the house get into the habit of turning off lights in unoccupied rooms.
Look into replacing a digital alarm clock with your cell phone. My cell wakes me up in the morning and has a clock that is always set. It works properly after an overnight power outtage.
Cook for everyone at once and pick up some heat trapping storage bags (the sort used for camping and picnics) to keep food warm for latecomers. Try not to cook too much or else you're going to need to store that extra food for later...
Get a small refrigerator and shop for only one or two days worth of meals. A smaller fridge is going to save on your electrical bill. Shopping on a smaller scale is a little less convenient than bulk shopping but can be done by a single person on the way home from work/school more easily than bulk shopping. It also means you tend to have fresher food and don't buy things you forget about that then go bad wasting the money.
Agree on a beer everyone enjoys and buy kegs or mini kegs rather than cases with bottles. Kegs are cheaper than cases and can be reused.
Recycle. I don't know about the UK but overhere in the Estats Unidos you can get a few bucks from every few pounds of aluminum and glass you recycle. This is nice after BYOB parties as you get a bunch of free change just by cleaning up and heading to a recycling center.
Carpool and/or ride a bike. If you're not too far from work or school ride a bike. You save on gas and have better parking options. A good bike will make for a comfortable ride and you'll stay in shape even drinking a college portion of beer.
Team up with your neighbors about high speed internet access. Split the bill between the households and share the bandw
The problem with the "we make the spec and you make the hardware" approach is that it has failed several times in several types of markets. 3DO tried to do this and it flopped because licensees all wanted different production deals and got pissed when another licensee got a better deal. NeXT and Be abandoned hardware to sell software and got edged out of the market by Microsoft.
It's quite a bit more efficient to have software and hardware people in the same set of buildings. Say a new iMac design is on the table, maybe with an integrated camera. The hardware people call up someone from software engineering to come over and see how plausible it would be to make said camera work just like external ones. Some marketing folks have the software people write a cool little app to go along with the camera everyone will now have on the computer. Voilà you've got the iMac with an iSight built in that comes with Photo Booth. That sort of product development isn't likelt to happen when you only make the software and define a spec for other people to implement.
Beeecause they have to pay people like Sorenson for use of their codecs. Remember not all of the codecs in Quicktime are developed by Apple, several are licensed from third parties (QualComm, QDesign, Sorenson). Quicktime Player doesn't need a paid license to view the content in a window but to encode that video or play it full screen the license agreements likely require a fee.
The Powerbook 5300 was the first model of Powerbook released with a PowerPC processor. Up until then the Powerbooks had used 68k chips that Classic Macs used (Macs before the PowerMac line). They were very powerful laptops but also pretty expensive, the fully loaded 5300ce 32/1.1GB model sold for $6,800. There's a lot of factors that contributed to the "disaster" moniker. The first was that a number of units shipped were simply DOA and had to be swapped out. There were also problems with the case and mouse button, problems shared with the Powerbook 190 which was the 5300's 68k powered sibling.
There were also qute a few problems with the 5300's Li-ion batteries. Due to Sony's manufacturing error the batteries would short and there were a couple reports of them actually catching on fire. Switching the Li-ion batteries out for NiMH ones solved the problem but seriously reduced the 5300's battery life. This was coupled with power supplies that couldn't power all of the expansion bays was quite a mess.
Performance wise the 5300 was very unimpressive. It used a 603e PowerPC chip but they didn't bother sticking an L2 cache on the machine. The clock speed wuld have been alright with a decent sized L2 cache but as it stood the machine was dog slow in most apps.
The Powerbook 5300 was responsible for many of the Apple build quality memes of the mid-90s.
What I find unfortunate about Digg is the stories that get moderated up to the front page tend towards rehashes of the same damn things: Ajax tutorials, running OSX-x86 on some random Dell junker, and lately how to rip videos onto a new iPod. Beyond the occasional link my RSS reader misses on the fifty some odd sites it trolls digg isn't terribly useful. I thought it might be for a while and had high hopes for it. When I started browsing it every day the cracks became apparent.
The comments are neigh worthless. People chime in to claim they "dugg" the story or in the case of Apple-related stories post to berate "Apple zealots" who have yet to actually post. Everyone reading digg hates iPods but owns them anyways and posts as such on every damn story. If I ever chance a click on the comments link I think to myself "why does it suddenly feel like September"? There's no moderation to speak of and no real way to reply to specific comments.
Digg's stories and links aren't nearly as good as digg fans would have you believe. Quite often people write a post on their blog and then link the digg story to the blog. The top stories tend to follow the same themes week to week. Every once in a while you'll find a really cool link in one of the sections or the main page but it happens about as often as such a cool link coming up on Del.icio.us. I've got an RSS reader that trawls the same sites as digg's readers so I end up seeing stuff about the same time as digg does, without links to someone's blog.
What I love about slashdot which simply does not exist on digg is the community. Rarely does the story interest me as much as the comments on it. There's a nice collection of really bright folks that read and post on slashdot which makes the site what it is. Sifting through troll posts is as hard as changing the moderation level to 3 or higher. Digg has a large number of people pointing at shit saying "that's cool".
The great benefit of Jabber is the fact it is designed from the start to be extensible. IRC can be hacked to do some interesting things but at the end of the day they're just hacks and may or may not be maintainable. I can write an IRC based RSS bot without too much trouble. I can also write an RSS Jabber component. With the IRC bot I don't have a really effective way of pointing new users to it. I can have the bot mass spam everyone notifying them of its existance or just have it run a greet message when someone enters a channel it's on. Unless I use some sort of RSS bot standard, some special purpose client isn't likely to be able to find or use my RSS bot.
The RSS Jabber component on the other hand is much easier for people to work with. If they send a browse request to the server my RSS component will show up. If their client asks my RSS component how to subscribe to it, it can give instructions in a structured fashion. Since the component is already going to be using Jabber, a client set up to handle Jabber messages of different types would be able to use my component since a "standard" has already been tacitly agreed upon.
I was working on a small app that I moved into beta testing. When errors cropped up I sent error logs back to me via e-mail. This scheme worked about half the time. It turned out that roughly half of the small group I had to beta test had ISPs blocking port 25. I had seen reports about Jabber before so I figured it might be worth a look as it supported message storing if a client was offline. I wrote two clients, one on my end to stick error reports in a database and the other on the beta test side to send a very simple error report. Both ends were little Perl scripts but they worked really well. Doing the same thing over IRC would have been a complete pain in the ass.
It's not that PHP can't do things Python and Perl can, PHP in my experience tends to get more difficult to deal with as your code's complexity increases. PHP wants a bunch of display code embeded within business logic, this works fine when your needs are simple and your code is basically acting as a pretty database front end. This sucks when you want a single back end to drive multiple front ends. You need to go back and make everything nice and friendly and layered. By the time you get this done you could have rewritten the whole project against a friendly web app framework like TurboGears or Maypole/Catalyst.
I'm definitely not an expert in Python, in fact I've only ever given it a cursory look. However that tutorial was damn impressive. Obviously he had some prior knowlege of Python and using TurboGears but it is really not all that difficult to build something like a Wiki using that framework. As far as web work I've slowly become disenchanted with PHP. It's a good language to be sure but it's simplicity is short-lived. As you want to do more complex things you end up having to work around PHP more than you get to benefit from it. A large web project in PHP ends up structured like a project of similar size in Perl or Python. Between TurboGears on Python and Ruby on Rails it looks like I have some reading to do.
In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.
This is part of the reason the ATA was built. It's design includes active interference mitigation which allows it to observe frequencies terrestrial emitters are using. It can also scan a huge field of view and a vast range of frequencies from 500MHz to 11.2GHz. The SETI portion of the ATA mission is going to scan about a million stars within 300pc (~978ly). The ATA is sensitive enough to pick up an Arecibo-power planetary imaging radar (500kW) at such distances. The ATA expands SETI beyond the neutral hydrogen band to a much larger spectrum. This would include harmonics of HI and even the HI band multiplied by pi (why does slashcode strip HTML entities like pi?).
Neutral hydrogen is theorized to be the band to transmit a deliberate signal on specifically because it is relatively dead in terms of interstellar interference. If you want to be seen you don't want to send out a broadcast over thousands of light years on a band with tons of natural interference no matter how locally useful it is to you. It's also going to be a fundamental band civilizations would study if they have any interest in interstellar cartography or galactic make-up.
SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating. In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth. We can't naturally detect radio waves so we don't hear a buzzing sound when talking on cell phones and we can't see it so we're not blinded by an FM reparter on a hilltop. Radio travels quite far in all sorts of media and can be generated and detected with relatively simple electronics. Lower frequencies are also much easier to broadcast omnidirectionally so multiple receivers can pick up a signal simulteneously. Suffice to say that radio is something a technological civilization is probably going to make good use of. Because of radio's propogation characteristics it is possible to detect signals at extreme distances.
Because of this our solar system is surrounded by a bubble of radio chatter about a hundred light years in diameter, expanding a bit farther every year. A technological civilization within this bubble of radio noise is quite likely to see us. A thousand years from now a technological civilization within a two thousand light year bubble could potentially see us. Therefore it is assumed that we could see another civilization's radio noise. This is SETI's general search criteria, evidense of a technological civilization outside of our solar system.
Now if a technological civilization were deliberately trying to send us a message. Maybe not us specifically but anyone out in the galaxy who might be able to find such a signal. How might that civilization send out a signal? There's lots of different ways but there's a really good chance they would send it via radio. As mentioned, it has excellent propogation characteristics. Radio signals reach us from the edges of the visible universe, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to get a signal a few hundred or thousand lightyears. It is also something the universe is teeming with. There's radio sources all over the place yet also quite a few empty bands. A civilization that figures out how radio works and happens to point an antenna at the sky will find this out quickly.
Now it is possible advanced civilizations might communicate via some extremely high tech means. SETI's notion is twofold, we will be able to see random noise generated by a civilization or we'll get a deliberate signal from one. Under premise one we might see radio traffic of some super technological civilization, they might be broadcasting gravity wave signals but we might be able to see their radar. Under the second premise a civilization wanting to be seen by others would attempt to communicate in the most fundamental way possible. Radio waves are pretty fundamental. It takes a modest command of physics and electronics to detect them and understand what you're actually seeing.
Bad movies are one big factor keeping me out of theaters. A bigger problem for me however is a bad movie coupled with paying absurd prices to listen to some asshole talk on his cell phone. I can understand every movie I go see won't be mind blowingly awesome, I might get a good story with bad acting or a bad story with awesome explosions. I don't mind sub par movies. I just don't want to have to take out a loan to go see one.
Remember when the PC was something that was really expensive and that no one really knew what to do with except it could be used as a fancy typewriter and play games?
You state that like PCs of today are anything more than fancy typewriters that play games. This is how they're seen by a huge percentage of the computer owning public. I'm sorry but Microsoft Windows didn't kick start the PC industry, DOS did. MS-DOS ran on everyone's PC clones, not just IBM's hardware. This put MS-DOS on just about every PC sold that didn't come from IBM. Compatibility with PC-DOS meant that people could buy a PC running MS-DOS from Compaq and run the same programs they had on their IBM PC at work. When Windows got to the point of general usability they simply rolled their DOS contracts with OEMs into Windows ones. Since Microsoft went out of its way to maintain backwards compatibility companies rolling out new PCs with Windows 3.1 could run their old versions of Lotus 123 or WordPerfect.
I'm not going to do anything catchy here, but lets face it, no one even really remember Word Perfect or Word Star or Star Office, or any of it. They use Microsoft Office...
Wow. You have got to be kidding. Maybe in recent years Microsoft Office has become the dominant productivity suite but for a long time it struggled against its competition. Years ago Lotus 123 has a monopoly on the spreadsheet market. It wasn't until Excel 4.0 came out that it really took off, it did so because it could do everything 123 did including write 123 files in addition to having its own featureset. Excel succeeded because it out 123'ed 123. WordPerfect had eaten Word Star's market and ruled PC desktops alongside Lotus 123 for years. Word for DOS was considered an also-ran. When Microsoft figured it was betting the company on Windows the Word team did a complete overhaul on Word. It got a lot of good reviews initially and the team did quite a bit of market research to find out what people hated about WordPerfect and then made those things simple in Word. In both cases Microsoft's Office products had to pry the market away from a monopoly competitor.
Google has gmail, which is pretty popular. Microsoft has hotmail, which is more popular. Google has gtalk (or whatever the hell its called). Microsoft has MSN, which is more popular. Google has google.com. Microsoft has the worlds most used internet browser that defaults itself to msn.com as its homepage.
Wow again. You're comparing Google's recent releases with Microsoft products and services that have been struggling for years. Hotmail has been around since 1996. Gmail has been around since 2004. Google Talk has been around a little over a month. The MSN homepage is seen by a lot of people but not used by many. Yahoo! is read by more people daily than MSN and as you mention MSN is the default homepage of just about everyone buying a new PC with Windows on it.
Palm is not quite out of the handheld market but it looks as if someone is fetching them their hat. I think their biggest problem has been their inability to move past the "basic user" market they ruled just a few years ago. When the Pilot was released in 1996 people were just beginning to replace their paper address books and calendars with software solutions on their PCs. The basic functionality of the original Pilot was plenty for these people, it was downright cutting edge. As these people started to do more Palm let them move onto the competition.
What I don't think Palm has ever realized is that deep down every geek wants a handheld computer. Such gadgets permeate science fiction and they've captured the geek imagination. Geeks however aren't going to settle for something that has the desired form factor with none of the desired functionality. PIM applications are not geeky. Reading web pages or running an SSH client over WiFi is geeky. Reading RSS feeds and connecting to Jabber servers over a built-in GPRS modem is geeky.
I just picked up a Tungsten T5 on the cheap. It lacks WiFi yet includes a web browser and e-mail client. I would not have bought it for full retail price. The T5 is replacing a Newton MessagePad 2000 for my PDA needs. I love my Newton but anymore it is a pain in the ass to connect it to anything and requires me hunting everywhere for old hardware to use with it. After using the T5 for a while and reading more reviews of PocketPC equipment I think I might hoc it for a PocketPC device. The T5 out of the box doesn't do the sort of geeky things I'd like and buying the extra equipment to do it is going to cost me what a more functional PDA would.
You need to go back and do some fact checking. The Network Associates case was ruled such because the wording of their EULA was deceptive. Their case suggested that Network World Fusion broke the law by violating a clause of the EULA. Under scrutiny the clause proved to be untenable legally and the judge told NA to get lost. That however has nothing in the slightest to do with non-disclosure agreements.
Signing an NDA is binding. If you go and post confidential information to your blog or someone else's blog and the NDA you signed specifically prohibits that, your employer not only has grounds to fire you but also sue you. If your signature is on a document that says "I won't talk about x, y, and z" and then a blog posting or e-mail is presented showing you talked about x, y, or z the judge is likely to rule in your employers favor. If your NDA says you will cut off your right ear if you talk about x, y, or z that clause of the NDA will likely be found unenforceable and you'll be able to keep your ear.
This differs entirely from situations where talking about x, y, or z benefits the public interest. If product X was made out of dolphin skin by child slaves in San Diego there's a public interest in that information. If you were sued by your employer over releasing that information it probably wouldn't be difficult to show that your whistleblowing served the public interest. Whistleblowing is protected when there is a viable public interest in the disclosed information. Clauses in an NDA or any other contract which require you to break the law (manage slave lavorers in San Diego) are unenforceable. Your employment contract can't require you to be a heroin mule for instance.
What you don't seem to understand is the first amendment only applies to government. It does not extend to private organizations or property. The government can't tell you that you can't post specs on as yet unreleased product Y but a contract can. You don't have a right to any particular job, if an employment contract is required to work there and you're unwilling to sign it you're not going to have that job.
Most computer users are not qualified administrators, in fact many of them are borderline computer illiterate. This isn't to say these people are dumb, they're just not very computer savvy. Such users tend to be able to use software they've been trained on or are familiar with but aren't likely to know exactly how it works. They click an icon, type in some values, and things happen. They don't need to know or care that the app is just a VB SOAP client talking to a web service via SSL hosted on the company's server farm. The guy down the hall in accounting needs to know how to do stuff in Excel, not how to write Excel.
That being said, these people aren't necessarily qualified to administer their own equipment. Some might have a bit of technical prowess but a majority of normal users are just that. So why are they put in charge of managing their own equipment and why are they able to take company information and property with them to get stolen or dropped down a flight of stairs? If they've got light communication needs how about Blackberries or Treos or some other connected devices. Quite a bit can be done through secured web interfaces or through web services with lightweight front ends. A little bit of well designed caching and users would be hard pressed to notice the company's database didn't exist on their little handheld device.
This approach isn't going to solve everyone's problems but it works for some in two major ways. The first is any single field employee can't take the sum of a company's data with them somewhere to have it hijacked by either action or omission. They're also not terribly likely to plug into an office machine and infect the whole network with some new Windows worm. A lost PDA might mean the company is out a few hundred dollars worth of equipment and maybe some confidential documents. A PDA that runs only application/web service front end software is really only out the value of the lost hardware.
If you've got responsible users you can probably trust them with full fledged laptops. For those that are almost more trouble than they're worth, give them cool gadgets they can work on but do limited amounts of damage with. This is of course in addition to better network security in and out of the office. If you've giving even advanced users a laptop to take home let them only take with them the data they absolutely need to get their job done. You don't want a laptop with 98,000 personal records on it stolen or something.
We have meteorites which are great but they can only tell us about an object that already hit us. Much of these objects burned up in the atmosphere which leaves us with only the densest and toughest parts of the object to actually study. Was the whole object the same as the remainder left? Was the object originally composed of entirely different and unexpected classes of materials? These are questions more easily answered by studying intact objects before they've had a chance to slam into us.
For instance, to date we have only imaged the nuclei of four comets: Halley, Borelly, Wild 2 and Tempel 1. We don't know far more about comets than we do know. The Stardust mission to Wild 2 found that quite a few ideas we had about the comet were completely wrong. The NEAR mission to 433 Eros was likewise very enlightening for planetary scientists. Asteroids like comets are objects we see often enough but don't have a deep understanding of.
Looking at meteorites is similar in many ways to looking at dinosaur fossils. There were a lot of assumptions made about the nature of dinosaurs because all we had to go on for a long time were fossils. When tracks and nests and other such remains were discovered (or rediscovered and known for what they were) our ideas about dinosaurs changed significantly. While there's a good deal a fossil or meteorite can tell us there's still plenty more that it cannot tell us. A fossil won't necessarily tell us that diplodocuses traveled in herds, a fossilized riverbed with diplodocus tracks will however. That's where missions like Hayabusa, Deep Impact, Stardust, and others come in. They can directly sample deep space objects to help us find the nature of them.
There's lots of good reasons to study deep space objects like asteroids and comets. Some of these are purely scientific while others are far more practical. Finding the exact composition of an asteroid for instance helps tell us where in the solar system it formed. Knowing where it began existance and comparing that position to its current one gives us clues on how the solar system has evolved from its accretion disk state. Studying asteroids up close also lets us test our theories on planetary formation, if an asteroid of a particular class is expected to have a particular composition and indeed does it lends weight to that formation theory. It also provides ground truth for other forms of observation and measurement.
From a practical standpoint it is highly beneficial to know what asteroids are made out of. They're prime targets for space mining ventures at some point. Unlike materials mined from the Moon or Mars there's very little surface gravity to fight to get the material from the asteroid back to Earth. Hence it would be far easier to grab raw silicon or some such off a NEA and return it to Earth than get it off the Moon.
It also pays off to practice sending craft to rendevous with deep space objects. While current missions are exploratory, at some point they might be defensive. If we see an Earth crossing comet or asteroid in enough time there's a good chance we can alter its trajectory or outright destroy it (if its small enough) if we can successfully put spacecraft in striking distance of it. It is desirable to have a lot of people well versed in that sort of mission. It's also another area where knowing the composition of such objects is useful. Knowing what would be needed to destroy or deflect such an object is much easier when you know how it is going to behave. A rocky dense asteroid will act far differently than a loosely clumped dustball when hit with a nuclear blast.
While not quite a million users, HEC Montréal switched from Netscape Messaging Server running on AIX to Postfix/Cyrus/SquirrelMail running on Linux. Linux Journal ran a really nice article and a follow-up about their transition.
One of the first things the school did was figure out how exactly their current system was failing them. Their old AIX boxes were being stressed just by the volume of mail coming through the system, they had little power left over to do any sort of filtering. This led to users getting drowned in unwanted e-mail which only exacerbated the existing load issues. This is one of the first things you need to do, figure out why your current system isn't working properly. You'll be better equipped to fix the problems when they've actually been identified.
HEC Montréal also went for heavy redundancy and specialization. Instead of a handful of servers sharing all of the tasks equally each node in the cluster has its own job with every class of job having a backup server. Every job is going to take a beating with so many users, even if only a fraction of them are using the system at any given time.
I'd say the most important part of what you're doing will be modeling your current use. Are you getting a ton of traffic from viruses and worms spreading over your internal network? Do you get huge amounts of spam traffic to users? In such cases filtering at your SMTP servers will relieve the rest of the system from extraneous traffic. While you might need really beefy external SMTP servers you won't need nearly as much storage space on a SAN or NAS.
If there was no NASA everyone would be clamoring for such an organization. While it might be mismanaged in peculiar ways as is expected of a government bureaucracy it is doing a job that private industry is not going to do. NASA funds and facilitates all sorts of blue sky research all over the country. Not only is this true of NASA but also NIST, the NSF, NIH, in some cases DARPA, and several other agencies. Open ended research is important because it expands our whole body of knowlege, it doesn't necessarily lead to marketable products. When Dupont and Pfizer fund research they're looking for a payoff because they're looking to drive a profit, government funded research doesn't even have to break even.
Private industry is only going to explore space if there's a dollar in it. Scaled Composites and Virgin envision space tourism while other companies are looking towards resource mining. Boeing isn't launching probes to the outer solar system for the benefit of all mandkind, they're building satellites for DirecTV to pump more channels of HD video into televisions. While Boeing or Scaled Composites might contract for NASA or other research organizations they're not going to initiate the explorations altruistically.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to generate a profit, it drives people to work harder and become more creative. There's also nothing wrong with diverting tax dollars into blue sky research. NASA needs to rethink the ISS and SST programs. The ISS is never going to do us any good if it's only manned by babysitters rather than researchers. The shuttles aren't terribly useful if they're only being used as extremely expensive construction rigs and aren't launching with any sort of regularity.
What NASA's spending $1bn a pop on can be done far more efficiently with heavy lift vehicles that don't need to use up payload weight on wings and crew compatments. Crews can be sent up in capsules that aren't wasting payload weight on empty cargo bays and unpowered engines. A larger fleet of cheap less flexible vehicles seems like a step backwards but in the long run it ends up being far cheaper. Say you need a large crew to do EVAs to put together a large habitat for the ISS. Two crew vehicles can be launched from different pads (say KSC and Vandenberg AFB) while the habitat module could be launched from another location entirely. A construction crew doesn't pack everyone and their equipment into a single huge truck that can barely fit on the road, they take a couple different specialized vehicles to the site and the crew shows up after picking up coffee.
Wow, the word processing features are coming along! That's...great...I guess. Word processor features were old last decade, Microsoft's been there and is way past it now. While some people have only glowing reviews of OOo I've always found it to be an "almost there" type of suite. Writer for instance does a decent job with Word files, even when you use styles and themes. It doesn't do such a good job when you use a text watermark or footers. My watermarks never display properly and footers tend to get cut off when they're printed. Basic features tend to work alright so it is indeed good enough for many people.
I don't think OOo is all bad, quite the contrary in fact. I think OOo is an awesome effort that stands a pretty good chance of dislodging Office in a number of environments. The first and possibly largest is the education market. While Office can be had inexpensively at education prices OOo's pricetag of $0 can be really enticing for larger installations. It's also something that can legally be distributed for free to the student body. Outside of education there's the closely related government market. It's related because a large number of government (federal, state, and local) PCs are simply used to type some documents or fill in blanks in forms and then print them. The collaboration, versioning, and protection features don't mean a whole lot to the crowd using said PCs. Having a "good enough" productivity suite is fine for them in many cases.
If the project at large can get over its Microsoft chasing mentality it is poised to do some really interesting things with productivity software. Since the project doesn't have to promote another line of products there's a lot of flexibility. Take for instance the ability to link Base up to a MySQL database and from there hook Writer documents to Base. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to do that when they're trying to push SQL Server to the sorts of people that would even want to do that sort of thing.
A large part of Apples profits are from the iPod and iTunes. That won't go away. A signifigant portion of Apples current customers will stick with them, still buying Apple hardware, regardless of what they do.
The iPod is dominating the MP3 player market but eventually it's growth will plateau. It's going to take more work to keep their lead in the future than it was to get it in the first place. It is silly then to claim that Apple can go ahead and screw over it's computer hardware division by letting any old PC run OSX. The Mac still makes a lot of money for the company, consider not just hardware sales but software, hardware, and services sold for Macs.
Last quarter Apple made about $241m on iTMS, iPod accessories, and other assorted music services. They made $611m on peripherals, software, and other services. That is six hundred million dollars on non-music related stuff with Macs holding a much smaller portion of the computer market than the iPod and iTMS hold in the music market. The revenue from the iPod and other music-related products is nothing to sneeze at, in fact it is tremendous but it can't carry the whole company. It also can't be relied upon to be there in the future. This year the iPod has had phenomenal sales but next the market could completely crap out.
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This is no different than any other technology company. It is ridiculous to suggest that something is unusable as soon as it becomes officially unsupported by a company. Just because a system might be out of warranty doesn't mean you can't still get it fixed or use it on a day to day basis.
Apple's requirements change with new OS releases, some formerly supported Mac models are dropped. This happens mainly because those systems can't adequately handle newer features in later OS releases. Sure Apple could disable features to make it run better but why ask someone to pay $129 for a new OS when it will end up disabling features to the point they see little or no improvement over the previously installed version? Hey sweet, the Apple logo in the left corner looks different!
This is also good for third party developers. If there's a very specific range of systems supported by a particular OS, a developer need only target that version and above and be confident their software will run acceptably. If you support Jaguar (10.2) or newer, you only need to provide support for G3 and better processors as previous versions of OSX had limited support for 604e based Macs. Tiger's universal SDK is an even more salient point. If your software uses the 10.4u SDK barring any architecture specific problems it ought to compile and run without issue on either PowerPC or Intel Macs.
There's only stupid reasons unfortunately. Palm's ridiculous licensing for PalmOS 6 was a big one for companies like Sony. The OS is also decidedly different on the back end from previous versions meaning taking full advantage of it requires rewriting a lot of software. Palm also announced they were going to ditch their kernel for Linux. No one wanted to jump on an OS that Palm had decided to obsolete before it was even available to licensees.
The problem with the "we make the spec and you make the hardware" approach is that it has failed several times in several types of markets. 3DO tried to do this and it flopped because licensees all wanted different production deals and got pissed when another licensee got a better deal. NeXT and Be abandoned hardware to sell software and got edged out of the market by Microsoft.
It's quite a bit more efficient to have software and hardware people in the same set of buildings. Say a new iMac design is on the table, maybe with an integrated camera. The hardware people call up someone from software engineering to come over and see how plausible it would be to make said camera work just like external ones. Some marketing folks have the software people write a cool little app to go along with the camera everyone will now have on the computer. Voilà you've got the iMac with an iSight built in that comes with Photo Booth. That sort of product development isn't likelt to happen when you only make the software and define a spec for other people to implement.
Beeecause they have to pay people like Sorenson for use of their codecs. Remember not all of the codecs in Quicktime are developed by Apple, several are licensed from third parties (QualComm, QDesign, Sorenson). Quicktime Player doesn't need a paid license to view the content in a window but to encode that video or play it full screen the license agreements likely require a fee.
The Powerbook 5300 was the first model of Powerbook released with a PowerPC processor. Up until then the Powerbooks had used 68k chips that Classic Macs used (Macs before the PowerMac line). They were very powerful laptops but also pretty expensive, the fully loaded 5300ce 32/1.1GB model sold for $6,800. There's a lot of factors that contributed to the "disaster" moniker. The first was that a number of units shipped were simply DOA and had to be swapped out. There were also problems with the case and mouse button, problems shared with the Powerbook 190 which was the 5300's 68k powered sibling.
There were also qute a few problems with the 5300's Li-ion batteries. Due to Sony's manufacturing error the batteries would short and there were a couple reports of them actually catching on fire. Switching the Li-ion batteries out for NiMH ones solved the problem but seriously reduced the 5300's battery life. This was coupled with power supplies that couldn't power all of the expansion bays was quite a mess.
Performance wise the 5300 was very unimpressive. It used a 603e PowerPC chip but they didn't bother sticking an L2 cache on the machine. The clock speed wuld have been alright with a decent sized L2 cache but as it stood the machine was dog slow in most apps.
The Powerbook 5300 was responsible for many of the Apple build quality memes of the mid-90s.
that's extreme!
What I find unfortunate about Digg is the stories that get moderated up to the front page tend towards rehashes of the same damn things: Ajax tutorials, running OSX-x86 on some random Dell junker, and lately how to rip videos onto a new iPod. Beyond the occasional link my RSS reader misses on the fifty some odd sites it trolls digg isn't terribly useful. I thought it might be for a while and had high hopes for it. When I started browsing it every day the cracks became apparent.
The comments are neigh worthless. People chime in to claim they "dugg" the story or in the case of Apple-related stories post to berate "Apple zealots" who have yet to actually post. Everyone reading digg hates iPods but owns them anyways and posts as such on every damn story. If I ever chance a click on the comments link I think to myself "why does it suddenly feel like September"? There's no moderation to speak of and no real way to reply to specific comments.
Digg's stories and links aren't nearly as good as digg fans would have you believe. Quite often people write a post on their blog and then link the digg story to the blog. The top stories tend to follow the same themes week to week. Every once in a while you'll find a really cool link in one of the sections or the main page but it happens about as often as such a cool link coming up on Del.icio.us. I've got an RSS reader that trawls the same sites as digg's readers so I end up seeing stuff about the same time as digg does, without links to someone's blog.
What I love about slashdot which simply does not exist on digg is the community. Rarely does the story interest me as much as the comments on it. There's a nice collection of really bright folks that read and post on slashdot which makes the site what it is. Sifting through troll posts is as hard as changing the moderation level to 3 or higher. Digg has a large number of people pointing at shit saying "that's cool".
The great benefit of Jabber is the fact it is designed from the start to be extensible. IRC can be hacked to do some interesting things but at the end of the day they're just hacks and may or may not be maintainable. I can write an IRC based RSS bot without too much trouble. I can also write an RSS Jabber component. With the IRC bot I don't have a really effective way of pointing new users to it. I can have the bot mass spam everyone notifying them of its existance or just have it run a greet message when someone enters a channel it's on. Unless I use some sort of RSS bot standard, some special purpose client isn't likely to be able to find or use my RSS bot.
The RSS Jabber component on the other hand is much easier for people to work with. If they send a browse request to the server my RSS component will show up. If their client asks my RSS component how to subscribe to it, it can give instructions in a structured fashion. Since the component is already going to be using Jabber, a client set up to handle Jabber messages of different types would be able to use my component since a "standard" has already been tacitly agreed upon.
I was working on a small app that I moved into beta testing. When errors cropped up I sent error logs back to me via e-mail. This scheme worked about half the time. It turned out that roughly half of the small group I had to beta test had ISPs blocking port 25. I had seen reports about Jabber before so I figured it might be worth a look as it supported message storing if a client was offline. I wrote two clients, one on my end to stick error reports in a database and the other on the beta test side to send a very simple error report. Both ends were little Perl scripts but they worked really well. Doing the same thing over IRC would have been a complete pain in the ass.
It's not that PHP can't do things Python and Perl can, PHP in my experience tends to get more difficult to deal with as your code's complexity increases. PHP wants a bunch of display code embeded within business logic, this works fine when your needs are simple and your code is basically acting as a pretty database front end. This sucks when you want a single back end to drive multiple front ends. You need to go back and make everything nice and friendly and layered. By the time you get this done you could have rewritten the whole project against a friendly web app framework like TurboGears or Maypole/Catalyst.
I'm definitely not an expert in Python, in fact I've only ever given it a cursory look. However that tutorial was damn impressive. Obviously he had some prior knowlege of Python and using TurboGears but it is really not all that difficult to build something like a Wiki using that framework. As far as web work I've slowly become disenchanted with PHP. It's a good language to be sure but it's simplicity is short-lived. As you want to do more complex things you end up having to work around PHP more than you get to benefit from it. A large web project in PHP ends up structured like a project of similar size in Perl or Python. Between TurboGears on Python and Ruby on Rails it looks like I have some reading to do.
This is part of the reason the ATA was built. It's design includes active interference mitigation which allows it to observe frequencies terrestrial emitters are using. It can also scan a huge field of view and a vast range of frequencies from 500MHz to 11.2GHz. The SETI portion of the ATA mission is going to scan about a million stars within 300pc (~978ly). The ATA is sensitive enough to pick up an Arecibo-power planetary imaging radar (500kW) at such distances. The ATA expands SETI beyond the neutral hydrogen band to a much larger spectrum. This would include harmonics of HI and even the HI band multiplied by pi (why does slashcode strip HTML entities like pi?).
Neutral hydrogen is theorized to be the band to transmit a deliberate signal on specifically because it is relatively dead in terms of interstellar interference. If you want to be seen you don't want to send out a broadcast over thousands of light years on a band with tons of natural interference no matter how locally useful it is to you. It's also going to be a fundamental band civilizations would study if they have any interest in interstellar cartography or galactic make-up.
SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating. In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth. We can't naturally detect radio waves so we don't hear a buzzing sound when talking on cell phones and we can't see it so we're not blinded by an FM reparter on a hilltop. Radio travels quite far in all sorts of media and can be generated and detected with relatively simple electronics. Lower frequencies are also much easier to broadcast omnidirectionally so multiple receivers can pick up a signal simulteneously. Suffice to say that radio is something a technological civilization is probably going to make good use of. Because of radio's propogation characteristics it is possible to detect signals at extreme distances.
Because of this our solar system is surrounded by a bubble of radio chatter about a hundred light years in diameter, expanding a bit farther every year. A technological civilization within this bubble of radio noise is quite likely to see us. A thousand years from now a technological civilization within a two thousand light year bubble could potentially see us. Therefore it is assumed that we could see another civilization's radio noise. This is SETI's general search criteria, evidense of a technological civilization outside of our solar system.
Now if a technological civilization were deliberately trying to send us a message. Maybe not us specifically but anyone out in the galaxy who might be able to find such a signal. How might that civilization send out a signal? There's lots of different ways but there's a really good chance they would send it via radio. As mentioned, it has excellent propogation characteristics. Radio signals reach us from the edges of the visible universe, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to get a signal a few hundred or thousand lightyears. It is also something the universe is teeming with. There's radio sources all over the place yet also quite a few empty bands. A civilization that figures out how radio works and happens to point an antenna at the sky will find this out quickly.
Now it is possible advanced civilizations might communicate via some extremely high tech means. SETI's notion is twofold, we will be able to see random noise generated by a civilization or we'll get a deliberate signal from one. Under premise one we might see radio traffic of some super technological civilization, they might be broadcasting gravity wave signals but we might be able to see their radar. Under the second premise a civilization wanting to be seen by others would attempt to communicate in the most fundamental way possible. Radio waves are pretty fundamental. It takes a modest command of physics and electronics to detect them and understand what you're actually seeing.
So yes it has been considered.
Bad movies are one big factor keeping me out of theaters. A bigger problem for me however is a bad movie coupled with paying absurd prices to listen to some asshole talk on his cell phone. I can understand every movie I go see won't be mind blowingly awesome, I might get a good story with bad acting or a bad story with awesome explosions. I don't mind sub par movies. I just don't want to have to take out a loan to go see one.
You state that like PCs of today are anything more than fancy typewriters that play games. This is how they're seen by a huge percentage of the computer owning public. I'm sorry but Microsoft Windows didn't kick start the PC industry, DOS did. MS-DOS ran on everyone's PC clones, not just IBM's hardware. This put MS-DOS on just about every PC sold that didn't come from IBM. Compatibility with PC-DOS meant that people could buy a PC running MS-DOS from Compaq and run the same programs they had on their IBM PC at work. When Windows got to the point of general usability they simply rolled their DOS contracts with OEMs into Windows ones. Since Microsoft went out of its way to maintain backwards compatibility companies rolling out new PCs with Windows 3.1 could run their old versions of Lotus 123 or WordPerfect.
Wow. You have got to be kidding. Maybe in recent years Microsoft Office has become the dominant productivity suite but for a long time it struggled against its competition. Years ago Lotus 123 has a monopoly on the spreadsheet market. It wasn't until Excel 4.0 came out that it really took off, it did so because it could do everything 123 did including write 123 files in addition to having its own featureset. Excel succeeded because it out 123'ed 123. WordPerfect had eaten Word Star's market and ruled PC desktops alongside Lotus 123 for years. Word for DOS was considered an also-ran. When Microsoft figured it was betting the company on Windows the Word team did a complete overhaul on Word. It got a lot of good reviews initially and the team did quite a bit of market research to find out what people hated about WordPerfect and then made those things simple in Word. In both cases Microsoft's Office products had to pry the market away from a monopoly competitor.
Wow again. You're comparing Google's recent releases with Microsoft products and services that have been struggling for years. Hotmail has been around since 1996. Gmail has been around since 2004. Google Talk has been around a little over a month. The MSN homepage is seen by a lot of people but not used by many. Yahoo! is read by more people daily than MSN and as you mention MSN is the default homepage of just about everyone buying a new PC with Windows on it.
Palm is not quite out of the handheld market but it looks as if someone is fetching them their hat. I think their biggest problem has been their inability to move past the "basic user" market they ruled just a few years ago. When the Pilot was released in 1996 people were just beginning to replace their paper address books and calendars with software solutions on their PCs. The basic functionality of the original Pilot was plenty for these people, it was downright cutting edge. As these people started to do more Palm let them move onto the competition.
What I don't think Palm has ever realized is that deep down every geek wants a handheld computer. Such gadgets permeate science fiction and they've captured the geek imagination. Geeks however aren't going to settle for something that has the desired form factor with none of the desired functionality. PIM applications are not geeky. Reading web pages or running an SSH client over WiFi is geeky. Reading RSS feeds and connecting to Jabber servers over a built-in GPRS modem is geeky.
I just picked up a Tungsten T5 on the cheap. It lacks WiFi yet includes a web browser and e-mail client. I would not have bought it for full retail price. The T5 is replacing a Newton MessagePad 2000 for my PDA needs. I love my Newton but anymore it is a pain in the ass to connect it to anything and requires me hunting everywhere for old hardware to use with it. After using the T5 for a while and reading more reviews of PocketPC equipment I think I might hoc it for a PocketPC device. The T5 out of the box doesn't do the sort of geeky things I'd like and buying the extra equipment to do it is going to cost me what a more functional PDA would.
You need to go back and do some fact checking. The Network Associates case was ruled such because the wording of their EULA was deceptive. Their case suggested that Network World Fusion broke the law by violating a clause of the EULA. Under scrutiny the clause proved to be untenable legally and the judge told NA to get lost. That however has nothing in the slightest to do with non-disclosure agreements.
Signing an NDA is binding. If you go and post confidential information to your blog or someone else's blog and the NDA you signed specifically prohibits that, your employer not only has grounds to fire you but also sue you. If your signature is on a document that says "I won't talk about x, y, and z" and then a blog posting or e-mail is presented showing you talked about x, y, or z the judge is likely to rule in your employers favor. If your NDA says you will cut off your right ear if you talk about x, y, or z that clause of the NDA will likely be found unenforceable and you'll be able to keep your ear.
This differs entirely from situations where talking about x, y, or z benefits the public interest. If product X was made out of dolphin skin by child slaves in San Diego there's a public interest in that information. If you were sued by your employer over releasing that information it probably wouldn't be difficult to show that your whistleblowing served the public interest. Whistleblowing is protected when there is a viable public interest in the disclosed information. Clauses in an NDA or any other contract which require you to break the law (manage slave lavorers in San Diego) are unenforceable. Your employment contract can't require you to be a heroin mule for instance.
What you don't seem to understand is the first amendment only applies to government. It does not extend to private organizations or property. The government can't tell you that you can't post specs on as yet unreleased product Y but a contract can. You don't have a right to any particular job, if an employment contract is required to work there and you're unwilling to sign it you're not going to have that job.
That would be a Beowulf squadron.
Most computer users are not qualified administrators, in fact many of them are borderline computer illiterate. This isn't to say these people are dumb, they're just not very computer savvy. Such users tend to be able to use software they've been trained on or are familiar with but aren't likely to know exactly how it works. They click an icon, type in some values, and things happen. They don't need to know or care that the app is just a VB SOAP client talking to a web service via SSL hosted on the company's server farm. The guy down the hall in accounting needs to know how to do stuff in Excel, not how to write Excel.
That being said, these people aren't necessarily qualified to administer their own equipment. Some might have a bit of technical prowess but a majority of normal users are just that. So why are they put in charge of managing their own equipment and why are they able to take company information and property with them to get stolen or dropped down a flight of stairs? If they've got light communication needs how about Blackberries or Treos or some other connected devices. Quite a bit can be done through secured web interfaces or through web services with lightweight front ends. A little bit of well designed caching and users would be hard pressed to notice the company's database didn't exist on their little handheld device.
This approach isn't going to solve everyone's problems but it works for some in two major ways. The first is any single field employee can't take the sum of a company's data with them somewhere to have it hijacked by either action or omission. They're also not terribly likely to plug into an office machine and infect the whole network with some new Windows worm. A lost PDA might mean the company is out a few hundred dollars worth of equipment and maybe some confidential documents. A PDA that runs only application/web service front end software is really only out the value of the lost hardware.
If you've got responsible users you can probably trust them with full fledged laptops. For those that are almost more trouble than they're worth, give them cool gadgets they can work on but do limited amounts of damage with. This is of course in addition to better network security in and out of the office. If you've giving even advanced users a laptop to take home let them only take with them the data they absolutely need to get their job done. You don't want a laptop with 98,000 personal records on it stolen or something.
We have meteorites which are great but they can only tell us about an object that already hit us. Much of these objects burned up in the atmosphere which leaves us with only the densest and toughest parts of the object to actually study. Was the whole object the same as the remainder left? Was the object originally composed of entirely different and unexpected classes of materials? These are questions more easily answered by studying intact objects before they've had a chance to slam into us.
For instance, to date we have only imaged the nuclei of four comets: Halley, Borelly, Wild 2 and Tempel 1. We don't know far more about comets than we do know. The Stardust mission to Wild 2 found that quite a few ideas we had about the comet were completely wrong. The NEAR mission to 433 Eros was likewise very enlightening for planetary scientists. Asteroids like comets are objects we see often enough but don't have a deep understanding of.
Looking at meteorites is similar in many ways to looking at dinosaur fossils. There were a lot of assumptions made about the nature of dinosaurs because all we had to go on for a long time were fossils. When tracks and nests and other such remains were discovered (or rediscovered and known for what they were) our ideas about dinosaurs changed significantly. While there's a good deal a fossil or meteorite can tell us there's still plenty more that it cannot tell us. A fossil won't necessarily tell us that diplodocuses traveled in herds, a fossilized riverbed with diplodocus tracks will however. That's where missions like Hayabusa, Deep Impact, Stardust, and others come in. They can directly sample deep space objects to help us find the nature of them.
There's lots of good reasons to study deep space objects like asteroids and comets. Some of these are purely scientific while others are far more practical. Finding the exact composition of an asteroid for instance helps tell us where in the solar system it formed. Knowing where it began existance and comparing that position to its current one gives us clues on how the solar system has evolved from its accretion disk state. Studying asteroids up close also lets us test our theories on planetary formation, if an asteroid of a particular class is expected to have a particular composition and indeed does it lends weight to that formation theory. It also provides ground truth for other forms of observation and measurement.
From a practical standpoint it is highly beneficial to know what asteroids are made out of. They're prime targets for space mining ventures at some point. Unlike materials mined from the Moon or Mars there's very little surface gravity to fight to get the material from the asteroid back to Earth. Hence it would be far easier to grab raw silicon or some such off a NEA and return it to Earth than get it off the Moon.
It also pays off to practice sending craft to rendevous with deep space objects. While current missions are exploratory, at some point they might be defensive. If we see an Earth crossing comet or asteroid in enough time there's a good chance we can alter its trajectory or outright destroy it (if its small enough) if we can successfully put spacecraft in striking distance of it. It is desirable to have a lot of people well versed in that sort of mission. It's also another area where knowing the composition of such objects is useful. Knowing what would be needed to destroy or deflect such an object is much easier when you know how it is going to behave. A rocky dense asteroid will act far differently than a loosely clumped dustball when hit with a nuclear blast.
While not quite a million users, HEC Montréal switched from Netscape Messaging Server running on AIX to Postfix/Cyrus/SquirrelMail running on Linux. Linux Journal ran a really nice article and a follow-up about their transition.
One of the first things the school did was figure out how exactly their current system was failing them. Their old AIX boxes were being stressed just by the volume of mail coming through the system, they had little power left over to do any sort of filtering. This led to users getting drowned in unwanted e-mail which only exacerbated the existing load issues. This is one of the first things you need to do, figure out why your current system isn't working properly. You'll be better equipped to fix the problems when they've actually been identified.
HEC Montréal also went for heavy redundancy and specialization. Instead of a handful of servers sharing all of the tasks equally each node in the cluster has its own job with every class of job having a backup server. Every job is going to take a beating with so many users, even if only a fraction of them are using the system at any given time.
I'd say the most important part of what you're doing will be modeling your current use. Are you getting a ton of traffic from viruses and worms spreading over your internal network? Do you get huge amounts of spam traffic to users? In such cases filtering at your SMTP servers will relieve the rest of the system from extraneous traffic. While you might need really beefy external SMTP servers you won't need nearly as much storage space on a SAN or NAS.
If there was no NASA everyone would be clamoring for such an organization. While it might be mismanaged in peculiar ways as is expected of a government bureaucracy it is doing a job that private industry is not going to do. NASA funds and facilitates all sorts of blue sky research all over the country. Not only is this true of NASA but also NIST, the NSF, NIH, in some cases DARPA, and several other agencies. Open ended research is important because it expands our whole body of knowlege, it doesn't necessarily lead to marketable products. When Dupont and Pfizer fund research they're looking for a payoff because they're looking to drive a profit, government funded research doesn't even have to break even.
Private industry is only going to explore space if there's a dollar in it. Scaled Composites and Virgin envision space tourism while other companies are looking towards resource mining. Boeing isn't launching probes to the outer solar system for the benefit of all mandkind, they're building satellites for DirecTV to pump more channels of HD video into televisions. While Boeing or Scaled Composites might contract for NASA or other research organizations they're not going to initiate the explorations altruistically.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to generate a profit, it drives people to work harder and become more creative. There's also nothing wrong with diverting tax dollars into blue sky research. NASA needs to rethink the ISS and SST programs. The ISS is never going to do us any good if it's only manned by babysitters rather than researchers. The shuttles aren't terribly useful if they're only being used as extremely expensive construction rigs and aren't launching with any sort of regularity.
What NASA's spending $1bn a pop on can be done far more efficiently with heavy lift vehicles that don't need to use up payload weight on wings and crew compatments. Crews can be sent up in capsules that aren't wasting payload weight on empty cargo bays and unpowered engines. A larger fleet of cheap less flexible vehicles seems like a step backwards but in the long run it ends up being far cheaper. Say you need a large crew to do EVAs to put together a large habitat for the ISS. Two crew vehicles can be launched from different pads (say KSC and Vandenberg AFB) while the habitat module could be launched from another location entirely. A construction crew doesn't pack everyone and their equipment into a single huge truck that can barely fit on the road, they take a couple different specialized vehicles to the site and the crew shows up after picking up coffee.
Wow, the word processing features are coming along! That's...great...I guess. Word processor features were old last decade, Microsoft's been there and is way past it now. While some people have only glowing reviews of OOo I've always found it to be an "almost there" type of suite. Writer for instance does a decent job with Word files, even when you use styles and themes. It doesn't do such a good job when you use a text watermark or footers. My watermarks never display properly and footers tend to get cut off when they're printed. Basic features tend to work alright so it is indeed good enough for many people.
I don't think OOo is all bad, quite the contrary in fact. I think OOo is an awesome effort that stands a pretty good chance of dislodging Office in a number of environments. The first and possibly largest is the education market. While Office can be had inexpensively at education prices OOo's pricetag of $0 can be really enticing for larger installations. It's also something that can legally be distributed for free to the student body. Outside of education there's the closely related government market. It's related because a large number of government (federal, state, and local) PCs are simply used to type some documents or fill in blanks in forms and then print them. The collaboration, versioning, and protection features don't mean a whole lot to the crowd using said PCs. Having a "good enough" productivity suite is fine for them in many cases.
If the project at large can get over its Microsoft chasing mentality it is poised to do some really interesting things with productivity software. Since the project doesn't have to promote another line of products there's a lot of flexibility. Take for instance the ability to link Base up to a MySQL database and from there hook Writer documents to Base. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to do that when they're trying to push SQL Server to the sorts of people that would even want to do that sort of thing.
The iPod is dominating the MP3 player market but eventually it's growth will plateau. It's going to take more work to keep their lead in the future than it was to get it in the first place. It is silly then to claim that Apple can go ahead and screw over it's computer hardware division by letting any old PC run OSX. The Mac still makes a lot of money for the company, consider not just hardware sales but software, hardware, and services sold for Macs.
Last quarter Apple made about $241m on iTMS, iPod accessories, and other assorted music services. They made $611m on peripherals, software, and other services. That is six hundred million dollars on non-music related stuff with Macs holding a much smaller portion of the computer market than the iPod and iTMS hold in the music market. The revenue from the iPod and other music-related products is nothing to sneeze at, in fact it is tremendous but it can't carry the whole company. It also can't be relied upon to be there in the future. This year the iPod has had phenomenal sales but next the market could completely crap out.