Not just that... different companies/universities work differently from others. For some universities, things like toner for those printers, servers, etc would come out at departmental/college level, with no real traceback to who is using what. If the prince professor of the department wants five servers and you are forced to take them out of your budget, server pool, etc. instead him or his team having to budget for them, chances are your boss is going to drop the pain on your shoulders as opposed to leave that prince professor screaming about how his vision is being thwarted. At others, the prince professor, like everyone else, submits budgets from which said items would come. Sure, it may just be a single line item by the time it reaches his boss or his boss's boss, but when that prince professor has spent $4000 on toner cartridges and either has to beg for more, or figure out where in his internal budget his next toner cartridges will be purchased...
Of course, right along with this is the stupidity of "if you don't spend it, you loose it next year" is pure southbound ejecta from a northbound male bovine. If partway through a year I realize that large expense will be needed next year, and I cut back on expenses somehow during the remainder of that year (maybe by using mass transit and staying at a much less expensive hotel instead of getting a room at the hotel where a conference is being held which was in my budget originally), I should not be penalized. But sadly, way too many universities, governmental agencies, etc. think that this should be the case.
Four words (which should be printed in blold letters, etc.) come to mind about similar situations - CompuServe - Lucent Bell Labs
While these were not IT spending per-say, in both cases, upper level management had their own inept vision of reality and agendas. The lower levels tried to get management to understand, management refused to listen, and the rest as they say is history. Sadly, folks at the upper levels of both of these were not entirely a bunch of idiots with sales, marketing, MBA or accounting folks. In the case of CompuServe, we were clearly tech heavy all the way to the top at the time. We just had management who had their own vision/plans, and could not be convinced of the fact that was was being done was wrong. In the other case, I don't remember how many of the upper level folks came from the more technical backgrounds, and how many were from backgrounds which were more in tune with the typical "business suit" mentality. But communications became more unidirectional, incorrect decisions were made, and these companies were gobbled up while many tech folks either left between the mind set in the work environment, or were later tossed overboard in management's attempts to lighten the load to keep from sinking (you don't throw those who are working on bailing out the ship overboard while you are sinking and expect to not sink).
At this point, the best course of action is to attempt to work your way up the ladder, convincing them with how your IT costs relate directly to making your company money. You don't say what sort of engineering firm, but tying those costs to directly to modeling stress/loads in an architecture engineering firm, the SQA of a software firm, etc... and then looking at options such continuing to use 3yr old (or what ever the figure is) computational systems, and tying the costs of doing so to what your firm does, listing all the pros/cons, and then presenting it up the ladder while addressing the issues raised at each level... While it does not guarantee success, but this is the way you win a battle like this. Lots of details, hard numbers, pros/cons, and facts. Periodically, each of you will be faced with making your own personal evaluations of stay/leave, but such is life. If you are lucky, you will either make it through the storm, or have a way off the ship which keeps you from swimming unexpectedly. If not, you just hope you can swim to shore or to be able to catch hold of a rope dangling off another ship. But regardless, such is life... not all ships can avoid the heavy weather, and you just hope that the ones you are on do not go down with you stuck onboard (and that those at the wheel are smart enough to take the advice of folks like you when you spot a storm off in the distance, or notice that the wind is coming at you from the wrong direction).
Good luck and may you never be faced with being on a ship where the captain refuses to point the bow off course as required by the weather you are in, and instead only listens to a navigator who continues to point you towards your next port (or worse, having to report through said navigator).
Not so easy... There are techniques to pick out such differences between different inks. Depending on the specifics of the ink/toner, it could come down having to print the page with a full background of the tagging color (yellow), then immediately printing on the same page the desired material. But even then, if I decided to use steganographic techniques, and mask out carefully selected areas where I will later be printing that info, given a state-of-the-art lab like those that DHS, the FBI or Secret Service have, the pattern could still be detected.
Yep. And you can have a managed 24 port 10/100/1000 switch for under $300 now, from a quick search on Newegg. Unmanaged will run you just over $100. Mind you, this is not the CPE which exists between my network and my ISP which they provided. This is one I purchased. And if you only need a few ports, the DGL-4500 wireless router from D-Link supports 4 RJ45 ports plus an uplink, all supporting GigE... and gives you 802.11N... I bought one of these back in 2008.
Gee... what third world country or year is the OP posting from??? My workstation, built in 2007, supports GigE and is capable of speeds nearing the theoretical limit, just as it can on a 100Mbps link. I also have several of my servers connected on the same GigE VLAN. As for 10Gig... my old employer had racks and racks of servers which we tested and found to be able to use a significant portion of a 10Gig link. Of course, these systems were using NICs which were at the time (about 2 years ago) running about $700 ea., and connected to switches running about $20K each... but when you build a super computing cluster (to which we had a dedicated 10Gbps connection to the NLR)... you don't skimp on your infrastructure.
True... but this is not just for HFA, AS, ADHD or similar students. I have seen such a room used with NTs as well (such as teens who get out of hand). I have no problems with that sort of thing, so long as it is across the board, and not used as an easy way to seclude a student who they don't want to deal with for other reasons.
After having read the original article and the comments made on it, I would like to share some comments about this, coming from a perspective which probably differs from what may be 74/75ths to perhaps 149/150ths of the rest of you who are Neurotypicals (NTs). You see, I have been diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD... God... how I hate that last word), such as those who who are being put into the enclosure. However, in my case, my childhood occurred before ASDs were widely known by teachers and doctors, and for the most part, a bright but reclusive and awkward child. It was not until I was in my 40s that I was diagnosed, at which point, I could look back at my life and see where various events, behaviours and tendencies may very likely have been the result of my being on the spectrum.
1) Nowhere was the size of this area indicated, nor sufficient details about the surroundings. If it is of a significant size, OK. But even then, it has been pointed out by folks in the area that it lacked adequate shade and was in other ways lacking when compared with another playground at the school, which was apparently featured on a pamphlet of some sort.
2) When possible, kids with ASDs, whether they are low functioning and in need of 24/7 care, or so high functioning that they generally appear normal, should be treated as much the same as NTs, doing the same activities on the same playgrounds and as much as possible in the same classes. Yes, we **may** need a bit less distraction in the classroom (no covering the walls with unnecessary maps, posters, etc.), **may** have issues with bright lights, the buzzing from the lights, etc., and **may** get upset at changes such as a substitute. We **may** also be subject to being bullied. But at the same time, we **may** act up because we may be bored with what the NTs have taken days to understand while we got it in no time flat. (And grades are not a good indicator here...) The list goes on... But all this is necessary, because by doing so, we learn to socialize as best we can, and people have a chance to learn that AS vs. NT is no different than where we were born, the color of our hair, our race or anything else.
3) If you are going to fence off an area, take advantage of the fact and fence off an area for all the kids to use, not just those diagnosed with an ASD. I know of many schools where this was done for younger kids, who NT, Aspie or Autie are prone to go running off under the right conditions (such as chasing off after a ball). Indeed, the entire playground areas at schools I attended were big enough to play baseball in, if not larger.
4) As for the "dirt floor" comment... ours were a mix of asphalt, grass and dirt covered with sand, pea gravel or wood chips, to cut down on puddles and mud while allowing a chance for the kids to work off excess energy. More recently, there has been a move to use the rubber "asphalt" which is springy and more forgiving than either the hard ground or asphalt... fewer injuries from falls. And no, this is not a fancy rich area, but rather rural Appalachia, where 90% of us fed the livestock both before and after school, and were used to seeing garbage cans in the halls to capture water from leaks in the roof.
Don't get me wrong... I am not saying all children should be treated in 100% the same way. That is one of the problems with NCLB as implemented in many schools, and perhaps symptomatic of trying to teach 30+ children in a single classroom with one teacher. If a child has a speech impediment, such as saying "ch" vs. "st" but otherwise has a large vocabulary and reads and does math several grade levels higher than their peers, you should have a speech pathologist work with the impediment and give them instruction at their advanced levels when ever possible. If, however, they have problems reading or doing math, but are otherwise doing fine, give them the extra instruction they need in those areas, and otherwise they are just like any other child. Perhaps by doing so can we reclaim what once put us on the Moon, and go beyond that to possibly fix many of the ills which we are presently suffering.
If you think about it... a single bang would be even more impressive than one with two, three or more. That would mean that you had an account on a machine like cbosgd or ucbvax.:)
Not Vax, but we ran a proprietary version of a pre-VMS OS (like a highly modified Tops-20 version IIRC) on systems which were descendent of the Dec Systems 20s, made by CompuServe and Systems Concepts. You get the other half of the Bingo!
1/2 the BINGO, and I will give you the rest for free. Not only are they octal, they are the octal representation of a 36-bit number which was the user ID. The first 24-bits (which would be like the 70004 in my PPN) were a group, to which things like privileges were granted. The last 12 bits (the 3304 in mine) were a user within the group. When you entered your PPN and password to login and had authenticated, the group part of the PPN determined whether you initially went to CIS, or if you went to some more select service such as for a company (say Reuters). Then when you said something like 'GO CB', your X.25 connection through the network would be torn down to your login node (where your modem connected) and be "Yo-Yo"ed to a node for that part of the service (such as CB, which was on nodes such as 'mhadp' IIRC).
As for ls671's question... how long did it take? Each individual agent, not that long. But one day it might be an agent from San Diego and the next an agent from Boston. Then looking at things like the USENET paths, it would take even longer.
The comma was indeed noted. I can also say with a 99.9% certainty that you are from Europe, and not a Cserve employee, given the project is in the 11K block.:) As for post AOL/WorldCom... I saw the stupidity on the wall more than 24 months before the acquisition/split, and have friends who are still working on both sides of that division, just as I have friends on both sides of the Avaya/Lucent split. But on the PPN... I have seen nobody mention what the underlying structure of the PPN is...
Now, back on the general thread... Generally, I would say that things like 'partyd00d420@foo' should not be considered. However, there are also just so many account names you can come up with on things like first initial and last name. So, then the question becomes how much can/do you deviate before you end up being considered as having a lame account ID? Here, I opted to go with my call-sign... is that lame? How about a name or nick-name which is not a typical spelling (in my case...Cinnion, which is the ancient welsh spelling for Kenyon)?
All-in-all..yes, it is a tricky matter. But at the same time, there is something to be said about getting 'tastefully creative' when you name is John Brown or Jane Smith (not the case here).
-1 or more about not thinking this through though. (and not funny at all)
As someone who has until recently done research in data centers and their operations, and personally dealt with the *NIX side of *NIX vs. NT years ago, I know the reality as opposed to the half-thought-out dreams some have. Yes, *NIX makes it much simpler to manage a machine, and increase the (servers/admin) ratio, among others, but it is not a solution which scales to where one person can administer 10K servers. As you add servers and applications, that ratio will reach a limit where you have to add yet another admin (operational, network, hardware, etc.). And should that site not be willing to do so, you end up with one of those "understaffed" data centers. Where that point is reached depends on a multitude of factors, including the behaviour of those using the data center (stupid developers, hands on users or workload characteristics cause that point to be reached sooner), the applications (a bunch of database servers will likely reach it before an equivalent amount of web servers), the amount of storage on those servers, and even the individual admins and how they are organized themselves. Throw in things like buying the cheapest hardware, or buying bleeding edge hardware (say 1.5TB drives when they first come out, or 10Gb ethernet cards), and it gets even worse as you try to deal with first generation drives failing or buggy drivers.
Can two people administer 500+ servers with 1.5PB of storage? I know personally that it is possible. But to do it and keep everyone 100% happy? No. And that precludes things like having people who are hard to satisfy, having to backup all that data, running it in a non-university production environment, etc. When I left CompuServe in 1997, the numbers were far different, with IIRC 25-30 operators of varying skill levels, about 10 of us in admin positions (who were called upon by the operators when they could not handle something), and around half a dozen or so network and hardware folks. Total number of servers? Around 1200 running BSD/OS, and around another 1000 running either our proprietary OS on systems which came out of the DecSystem 20 designs, or systems running a specialized NT 3.51 load, and perhaps a total data storage of around 1.5TB. And things were simplified by things such as having dozens of machines which were identical handling application X. Of course, we also had 3 data centers, and did backups of at least one of each machine in a given group. And then there is the fact that some applications required the developers to administer the application itself.
And looking forward... There were no regular 12 hour shifts at either of these. Yes, I was on call darn near 24*365 (I got vacation time off at my latest employer, but at CSI, I was on call even during vacation, and averaged 80hrs/week at the end). But when the fecal material hit the fan, and we had unusual problems like a computer room flooding or a critical server failing... it was possible to have to put in a 24 hour shift. Such is the life of a senior systems engineer in an operations group, which is one reason I try to avoid positions like these.
Not a valid email address, or at least it was not when I was a part of the operations team at CompuServe, and I seriously doubt it ever was, given that we were trying to move away from the numeric IDs and were going to disallow totally numeric email addresses unless they were the one internally assigned by our systems. I helped teach Secret Service and FBI agents how to recognize these sorts of "fake" IDs.
Bonus bragging points if you can explain the true source of CSI's PPNs.
As for TFA... While folks really should not throw out folks just because they have an email address at AOL, Hotmail, GMail, etc, I am quite sure it happened. Sad, considering that sites like this were good for getting a inexpensive or free permanent email address which did not change when you changed ISPs or employers.
But take a look at the sign right beside it, the face of the light assembly, etc... No matter what shape those hoods were, that snow (or what ever it happened to be) was going to be sticking, unless some process such as a warm surface kept it from doing so. Having lived in areas where this happens, and been a emergency responder, I know that snow sticks in wierd places in wierd ways.
The one thing I have noticed is that these authorities have forgotten one important fact... how many times are you going to be needing to heat the surface or do other measures of snow control? Even in places with lake effect snow, you only need to do these measures when it is snowing in a way to potentially cause the problem. Temp above say 35 degF... it stays off. 15th day of clear and sunny in a row... it stays off. Shoot, probably best to just have procedures where somebody activates it when snow crews are going out cleaning the streets, etc.
One of my biggest complaints about KVM is the fact that it requires CPUs which support the HVM CPU capabilities (i.e. Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V). For a site which has already has hundreds, if not thousands of systems running older P4/Xeon hardware, expecting them, or a small company with fewer systems to upgrade to get newer CPUs which can support KVM is not reasonable. Add this to the whole pile of fecal material surrounding the kernel team not putting the ParaVirtOps code into the kernel tree, and Xen Dom0 not being supported on things like Fedora Core since FC8, and RHEL/Centos lagging so far behind on kernels, it is enough to make even a normally mild mannered person want to Gibbs some developers, if not worse.
And yes, HVM is nice in that I could run pretty much any OS on it, with no modifications, be it the latest release of some Linux distro, NetBSD or other OS, or a legacy system running NetBSD 2.x, or (gack) WinXP or even Win95/98... but Xen could do that just as easily as KVM.
I used to work for Bell Labs in the messaging division (the team which created Audix, Conversant, and later Anypath), and we worked very closely with the folks who created the switches which run in those "Central Offices" with labels like AT&T, Verizon, SBC, etc., some of which have stood since before AT&T was split up into the baby-Bells. Let me say that those systems most definitely require power to even continue routing a call. Not only do those circuits (which are the FXS end of a FXS/FXO interface) provide the voltages for off hook detection, ringing (generally 90VAC at 20Hz, which as someone says elsewhere, has a bite), but they almost always handle the conversion of the analog signal from your phone line to a digital format (of 64Kbits/sec, since it is sampled at 8 bits/sample 8000 times a second) passed around the network, before even routing your call to the circuitry handling your next door neighbour's line. They use Signaling System 7 (SS7) to communicate between switches, and sometimes even within the same switch, as well as to other devices, such as voice mail systems. But even in the days of the old mechanical relay switches (which I got to see as a kid... my neighbour worked for what used to be GTE, maintaining the switches in SE Ohio), the COs would have lots and lots and LOTS of 48V batteries to not only provide those voltages still provided today, but to also move those relays with the click-click-click which was always audible (and driven by the pulses of the old rotary dial phones). One reason for why most COs have diesel generators (right along with running the cooling which is necessary at a CO).
So, yes, blackouts are anticipated and handled by the phone companies at the CO. Most folks just have not gotten used to the magic which went on behind the curtain/wire to provide that dialtone whenever the handset was lifted from the cradle. And so, they get scared when they hear about things like needing a UPS at home for phone over FiOS, Cable, or whatever.
Want to learn more... start with the O'Reilly book on Asterisk (the "starfish" book), and then look for things like "Lucent 5ESS" or "Lucent 7R/E" (where some of my team mates came from).
As for the fine article (which I will admit I have yet to read, but will be reading tonight)... given the fact that in all but very rare cases, once your call reaches a CO, it is in digital format, being transmitted around the rest of the network, there is no reason that they cannot switch all but the last mile to VoIP. But the B**** is going to be in the details, as it will require IPv6 (which will also allow them to locate you geographically), and the Telco's will have to provide some sort of dual-service transport or gateway between the current protocols and the VoIP protocols. Probably even more of a pain than the conversion from IPv4 to IPv6. So yea... I suspect that it will be a very long time in the doing.
Oh... and at folks like BubbaDave... you can get decent quality VoIP for data rates available on a good dialup. It can take as little as 8Kbps to do VoIP, and 16-32Kbps with good quality is possible (which is less than the current 64Kbps needed today). But I doubt you will be seeing that at your house until they get fairly far along the conversion. And they can also just drop a T1 line to your house to route things to your CO. Pretty much any phone line could be switched over to T1... the TELCOs just charge way too much for them, since they normally route the T1s through the CO to other providers, which means they have to provision a larger uplink to the network. (The CO where I grew up still uses copper to link to the next CO, and a T1 for my network there was going to be so expensive because it would use up a existing uplink channel, which they did not like).
Oh... you mean companies like Seagate, NetApp, Panasas, Intel, Google and Apple (those last three on the edge of CMU's campus alone, and the rest in the PGH metro area)... And how about all the salaries for those of us who work at CMU, Pitt, UPMC (which while affiliated with Pitt, most definitely is not a part of it) and the other "university" employers mentioned so far.
And while we speak of UPmC, just go to the UPMC web site and look at the pic of our skyline... that tall building standing out from the rest has four letters on it: UPMC. So that is alot of people working in Pittsburgh indirectly because of a university, instead of working for Aetna, CIGNA or some other health care organization. Yes, some work there and live in places like Wexford, North Hills, and elsewhere, but because those folks work downtown, there are establishments employing others for those employees to eat, park, etc. And so, the City of Pittsburgh proper benefits. Just as they do from the landlords who rent to students in Shadyside, Oakland, Squill, and elsewhere, and from the store owners, food establishments, including food carts and other stores on wheels I see in Oakland while I go to and from work every day..
One more thing to consider about UPMC... people come here from lots of places, either to do research, or to benefit from a top medical facility which is on top of leading research. And they in turn have transactions which are no doubt generating tax revenue for the city.
As for the bus pass which was mentioned and that I use every day to get to and from work? Paid for by CMU to PAT, and if not returned when one leaves CMU, it is considered to be taxable income, reported to the PTBs.
I think in this case, the boy mayor needs to get some major schooling himself and grow up a little, instead of being so naive to think that this is how you balance the city budget, especially in times like these.
Ya know... that is not always the case. Or to use your vernacular, with emphasis... BULLSHIT! I have administered systems which were secure enough that they would not boot up into single user mode and grant access without the root password, and the drives were secured in such a way that not even pulling the drive and putting it in another system would help... the boot loader required a password to decrypt the filesystem. Given that this machine was up for like 10 years last I knew, when it was finally taken out of commission... reboots were rare. As for exploiting holes in remote access routes, such as through sendmail, http, etc... the only active routes into the system were for Kerberos (e.g. ports like kerberos, kpasswd, and klogin) and considered at the time to be secure short of the resources of the likes of NSA, CIA or DOD.
Now in the particulars of this case, Child's practice of not committing configurations to NVRAM complicates the problem, and makes it even more impossible for the passwords to be recovered. Ever spent some time configuring a router, holding off on the saving to NVRAM to test the configuration, and then lost power? If the scripts to configure the routers were some place only he knew (such as on a USB key, or hidden away some place on a 300GB drive, perhaps in an encrypted file), it was no problem for him if a unit rebooted. But try to reboot to gain access... guess what, you just lost what you were looking to find. And since we are talking about a router, even if he had committed the configuration (and associated password) to NVRAM, how would having physical access help you? Most routers I have seen, the best you can do is to reset to factory defaults with a little magic button, and provide no way to boot off of other media and still access the configuration on the switch. Nor can you pull the drive and put it in another PC and go that route. As someone who helped write the firmware for networking gear, I know. Only those of us who did that work even had a clue on how to get at a shell like environment to get at the stored configuration. But again, we are bitten by the lack of writing to non-volatile storage in this case. And if you are going to try to brute force a password... it would not help if the password for the console access is "KGToNBhChA2ayofcVL1voA". Granted, using such a password on quite a few switches/routers would be stupid, unless you scripted that access (something I have done). But then there are the countermeasures against such brute force attacks, such as delaying login re-attempts for 5-15 seconds, locking accounts after so many failed logins, etc.
So, with all this said, someone needing to try to gain access to some machines had better either hope they have the configurations stored someplace off the switch to enable restoration, or hope that they only have to assume a position of humility (e.g. the mayor asking Childs) in having to ask for the administrator password which has hopefully not been locked down. Because, if that is not the case, they are going to soon be assuming the same position a ex-LEO or child rapist is said to be forced to assume in prison...
Oh... and as for resigning (can one say he was really given a chance to do so properly) and giving the passwords to someone who was not supposed to get them, he could quite possibly be held responsible for the resulting damages if it was contrary to procedures. And given that this has all the appearances of being one pissing match of a turf war... I would be very afraid that that would be the case were I in his position, and as such, the case is IMO totally absurd, and perhaps just has some folks wanting to make a name for themselves...
Written authorization from the city? Does this mean that some idiot department manager in the sanitation department should be able to write up some letter, hand it to him, and get the passwords? I doubt it, but that would still be fulfilling what you wrote. At a minimum, it would have to be someone in his chain of command, and if the SOP at the time was to only turn them over to the mayor, then he would almost certainly be legally liable even if he turned them over to say the DA. While IANAL, I have in the past been the owner of those "golden passwords" and had very through lawyers advise me of this in the past when I have left previous employers, and any lawyers he speaks to are no doubt advising him of the same. He cannot be expected to know changes in policy, and if the DA (who may or may not be elected in SFO) or some city councilman was not in that group before... well...
I will say this... First, if all it takes is the mayor asking for them and receiving them, then at a minimum the mayor is being something I cannot say politely here, if not perhaps negligent., if that is all it took to regain control of the network. And secondly, having worked at places such as CompuServe (which carried high security DOD traffic over our network when I was there), if there was not a policy of putting critical (non-personal) passwords in a sealed and clearly labeled envelope, which was locked in a secure safe (such as the mayor's office), then someone was at least a fool. We called this the "incase you are hit by a bus" envelope, because sometimes, folks are hit by a bus or BART train. Crap happens, and if I had been such a person and they had needed one of my golden passwords which only I knew... well, they could get it. And each time I changed it, I put the new one into sealed envelope, put what the password was for (e.g. "Kerberos Server"), along with my name, date, and who could access it (e.g. "CEO, President, EVP of Operations") and took a trip upstairs to put it in the corporate admin's safe. And the old envelope was retrieved, verified to be secure, and shredded.
Others have pointed out that vacuum tubes are used for high power. This is so true, and I don't find it funny at all. Your local radio/tv stations use large water-cooled tubes which have cabinets the size of several stacked dishwashers, if not larger, and they will often actively use several at a time in circuits such as a class AB (class B push-pull) amplifier configuration, sometimes even putting the units in parallel. This is especially true for the high power FM stations (which can be at 100kW ERP, per47CFR73.211 ) or TV stations (which can be at 150kW ERP, per 47CFR74.735), since you can only pull so much waste heat out of the amplifier, and amplifier efficiencies are always less than roughly 75% (so for 150kW, you have 50kW of wasted energy, mostly as heat).
Other common applications where tubes are still used: MRI units (which have huge RF amps, just like TV/radio stations), radar, and microwave ovens (the Klystron is still the best way to generate the energy used to nuke your food). And your local HAM radio operators who work at the 1500W PEP limits, and sometimes even down at the 100W level will use sometimes still use tubes as well. An example of this is the Kenwood TS-520S, which uses the 6146B. A lovely unit I have used in the past, and with the tube finals, I have seen it tune at a SWR of 3:1 (could practically tune to a kitchen sink). Try doing this even with a TO-3 and you generally have a bit of a design headache.
So no, tubes are not dead, and are at times far superior to transistors, regardless of the type of transistor. Unfortunately, even major engineering universities neglect even having a section in a class to teach about them anymore.
One of those areas of R&D dual use... there has been work in the area of Robotics to see if there are better ways to have semi-autonomous robots (just like the rovers) in situations like Iraq, to help in cases of IEDs (and yes, this time I do mean IED, not AED...LOL) and other attacks. The foundation for this work is R&D done for NASA, not the DoD, though the DoD, DHS and other agencies are now doing their own funding of branchoff work.
Ummm... AED... Those lovely external defibrilators. I had earlier read a paper summary about ways to improve using robotics to help with the IED threat in Iraq and elsewhere, and I guess my fingers were still on that train of thought.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
Well, frankly, it does not matter if we are talking free market or not. Humanity has a horrible record at killing the environment, with to the behavior of corporations and governments being the worst offenders because of the scale.
As for suspending NASA...besides the "bad management decision" reply later in this thread, people seem to forget that all the research that NASA does shows up in other beneficial ways. It shows up in medicine in better diagnostic tools and items like the IEDs which are showing up in public locations everywhere (and which some of us may unfortunately need some day). It is showing up in ways which improve our crop yields in more sustainable ways, so that more people may be fed per acre, and so that less productive locations can even grow food on a limited basis. It goes towards energy efficiency of devices (be they lights or engines on a jumbo jet). And then it also shows up in understanding how the environment works, in part by providing access to other environments to compare our own against. This means that we can better understand things such as global warming, which should be treated just like a gun pointed to your head. Loaded or not, it deserves respect, because if it is loaded, there is no redo, second chance or what ever... Pfft... you are history. (A lesson many on this planet should learn and remember.)
One other important fact to consider...the reality check of just how much is really spent on NASA. $17.3B for 2008, which is less than 2.5% of the bailout just passed, and about 0.6% of the $2.9T budget for FY2008. Far down from the historical percentage of 5% during the Apollo project. Yes, every little bit would help reduce the budget deficit, but with removing money from NASA's budget, you are really just hurting things in the both the short and long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just that... different companies/universities work differently from others. For some universities, things like toner for those printers, servers, etc would come out at departmental/college level, with no real traceback to who is using what. If the prince professor of the department wants five servers and you are forced to take them out of your budget, server pool, etc. instead him or his team having to budget for them, chances are your boss is going to drop the pain on your shoulders as opposed to leave that prince professor screaming about how his vision is being thwarted. At others, the prince professor, like everyone else, submits budgets from which said items would come. Sure, it may just be a single line item by the time it reaches his boss or his boss's boss, but when that prince professor has spent $4000 on toner cartridges and either has to beg for more, or figure out where in his internal budget his next toner cartridges will be purchased...
Of course, right along with this is the stupidity of "if you don't spend it, you loose it next year" is pure southbound ejecta from a northbound male bovine. If partway through a year I realize that large expense will be needed next year, and I cut back on expenses somehow during the remainder of that year (maybe by using mass transit and staying at a much less expensive hotel instead of getting a room at the hotel where a conference is being held which was in my budget originally), I should not be penalized. But sadly, way too many universities, governmental agencies, etc. think that this should be the case.
Four words (which should be printed in blold letters, etc.) come to mind about similar situations
- CompuServe
- Lucent Bell Labs
While these were not IT spending per-say, in both cases, upper level management had their own inept vision of reality and agendas. The lower levels tried to get management to understand, management refused to listen, and the rest as they say is history. Sadly, folks at the upper levels of both of these were not entirely a bunch of idiots with sales, marketing, MBA or accounting folks. In the case of CompuServe, we were clearly tech heavy all the way to the top at the time. We just had management who had their own vision/plans, and could not be convinced of the fact that was was being done was wrong. In the other case, I don't remember how many of the upper level folks came from the more technical backgrounds, and how many were from backgrounds which were more in tune with the typical "business suit" mentality. But communications became more unidirectional, incorrect decisions were made, and these companies were gobbled up while many tech folks either left between the mind set in the work environment, or were later tossed overboard in management's attempts to lighten the load to keep from sinking (you don't throw those who are working on bailing out the ship overboard while you are sinking and expect to not sink).
At this point, the best course of action is to attempt to work your way up the ladder, convincing them with how your IT costs relate directly to making your company money. You don't say what sort of engineering firm, but tying those costs to directly to modeling stress/loads in an architecture engineering firm, the SQA of a software firm, etc... and then looking at options such continuing to use 3yr old (or what ever the figure is) computational systems, and tying the costs of doing so to what your firm does, listing all the pros/cons, and then presenting it up the ladder while addressing the issues raised at each level... While it does not guarantee success, but this is the way you win a battle like this. Lots of details, hard numbers, pros/cons, and facts. Periodically, each of you will be faced with making your own personal evaluations of stay/leave, but such is life. If you are lucky, you will either make it through the storm, or have a way off the ship which keeps you from swimming unexpectedly. If not, you just hope you can swim to shore or to be able to catch hold of a rope dangling off another ship. But regardless, such is life... not all ships can avoid the heavy weather, and you just hope that the ones you are on do not go down with you stuck onboard (and that those at the wheel are smart enough to take the advice of folks like you when you spot a storm off in the distance, or notice that the wind is coming at you from the wrong direction).
Good luck and may you never be faced with being on a ship where the captain refuses to point the bow off course as required by the weather you are in, and instead only listens to a navigator who continues to point you towards your next port (or worse, having to report through said navigator).
Not so easy... There are techniques to pick out such differences between different inks. Depending on the specifics of the ink/toner, it could come down having to print the page with a full background of the tagging color (yellow), then immediately printing on the same page the desired material. But even then, if I decided to use steganographic techniques, and mask out carefully selected areas where I will later be printing that info, given a state-of-the-art lab like those that DHS, the FBI or Secret Service have, the pattern could still be detected.
Yep. And you can have a managed 24 port 10/100/1000 switch for under $300 now, from a quick search on Newegg. Unmanaged will run you just over $100. Mind you, this is not the CPE which exists between my network and my ISP which they provided. This is one I purchased. And if you only need a few ports, the DGL-4500 wireless router from D-Link supports 4 RJ45 ports plus an uplink, all supporting GigE... and gives you 802.11N... I bought one of these back in 2008.
Gee... what third world country or year is the OP posting from??? My workstation, built in 2007, supports GigE and is capable of speeds nearing the theoretical limit, just as it can on a 100Mbps link. I also have several of my servers connected on the same GigE VLAN. As for 10Gig... my old employer had racks and racks of servers which we tested and found to be able to use a significant portion of a 10Gig link. Of course, these systems were using NICs which were at the time (about 2 years ago) running about $700 ea., and connected to switches running about $20K each... but when you build a super computing cluster (to which we had a dedicated 10Gbps connection to the NLR)... you don't skimp on your infrastructure.
True... but this is not just for HFA, AS, ADHD or similar students. I have seen such a room used with NTs as well (such as teens who get out of hand). I have no problems with that sort of thing, so long as it is across the board, and not used as an easy way to seclude a student who they don't want to deal with for other reasons.
After having read the original article and the comments made on it, I would like to share some comments about this, coming from a perspective which probably differs from what may be 74/75ths to perhaps 149/150ths of the rest of you who are Neurotypicals (NTs). You see, I have been diagnosed with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD... God... how I hate that last word), such as those who who are being put into the enclosure. However, in my case, my childhood occurred before ASDs were widely known by teachers and doctors, and for the most part, a bright but reclusive and awkward child. It was not until I was in my 40s that I was diagnosed, at which point, I could look back at my life and see where various events, behaviours and tendencies may very likely have been the result of my being on the spectrum.
1) Nowhere was the size of this area indicated, nor sufficient details about the surroundings. If it is of a significant size, OK. But even then, it has been pointed out by folks in the area that it lacked adequate shade and was in other ways lacking when compared with another playground at the school, which was apparently featured on a pamphlet of some sort.
2) When possible, kids with ASDs, whether they are low functioning and in need of 24/7 care, or so high functioning that they generally appear normal, should be treated as much the same as NTs, doing the same activities on the same playgrounds and as much as possible in the same classes. Yes, we **may** need a bit less distraction in the classroom (no covering the walls with unnecessary maps, posters, etc.), **may** have issues with bright lights, the buzzing from the lights, etc., and **may** get upset at changes such as a substitute. We **may** also be subject to being bullied. But at the same time, we **may** act up because we may be bored with what the NTs have taken days to understand while we got it in no time flat. (And grades are not a good indicator here...) The list goes on... But all this is necessary, because by doing so, we learn to socialize as best we can, and people have a chance to learn that AS vs. NT is no different than where we were born, the color of our hair, our race or anything else.
3) If you are going to fence off an area, take advantage of the fact and fence off an area for all the kids to use, not just those diagnosed with an ASD. I know of many schools where this was done for younger kids, who NT, Aspie or Autie are prone to go running off under the right conditions (such as chasing off after a ball). Indeed, the entire playground areas at schools I attended were big enough to play baseball in, if not larger.
4) As for the "dirt floor" comment... ours were a mix of asphalt, grass and dirt covered with sand, pea gravel or wood chips, to cut down on puddles and mud while allowing a chance for the kids to work off excess energy. More recently, there has been a move to use the rubber "asphalt" which is springy and more forgiving than either the hard ground or asphalt... fewer injuries from falls. And no, this is not a fancy rich area, but rather rural Appalachia, where 90% of us fed the livestock both before and after school, and were used to seeing garbage cans in the halls to capture water from leaks in the roof.
Don't get me wrong... I am not saying all children should be treated in 100% the same way. That is one of the problems with NCLB as implemented in many schools, and perhaps symptomatic of trying to teach 30+ children in a single classroom with one teacher. If a child has a speech impediment, such as saying "ch" vs. "st" but otherwise has a large vocabulary and reads and does math several grade levels higher than their peers, you should have a speech pathologist work with the impediment and give them instruction at their advanced levels when ever possible. If, however, they have problems reading or doing math, but are otherwise doing fine, give them the extra instruction they need in those areas, and otherwise they are just like any other child. Perhaps by doing so can we reclaim what once put us on the Moon, and go beyond that to possibly fix many of the ills which we are presently suffering.
If you think about it... a single bang would be even more impressive than one with two, three or more. That would mean that you had an account on a machine like cbosgd or ucbvax. :)
Not Vax, but we ran a proprietary version of a pre-VMS OS (like a highly modified Tops-20 version IIRC) on systems which were descendent of the Dec Systems 20s, made by CompuServe and Systems Concepts. You get the other half of the Bingo!
1/2 the BINGO, and I will give you the rest for free. Not only are they octal, they are the octal representation of a 36-bit number which was the user ID. The first 24-bits (which would be like the 70004 in my PPN) were a group, to which things like privileges were granted. The last 12 bits (the 3304 in mine) were a user within the group. When you entered your PPN and password to login and had authenticated, the group part of the PPN determined whether you initially went to CIS, or if you went to some more select service such as for a company (say Reuters). Then when you said something like 'GO CB', your X.25 connection through the network would be torn down to your login node (where your modem connected) and be "Yo-Yo"ed to a node for that part of the service (such as CB, which was on nodes such as 'mhadp' IIRC).
As for ls671's question... how long did it take? Each individual agent, not that long. But one day it might be an agent from San Diego and the next an agent from Boston. Then looking at things like the USENET paths, it would take even longer.
The comma was indeed noted. I can also say with a 99.9% certainty that you are from Europe, and not a Cserve employee, given the project is in the 11K block. :) As for post AOL/WorldCom... I saw the stupidity on the wall more than 24 months before the acquisition/split, and have friends who are still working on both sides of that division, just as I have friends on both sides of the Avaya/Lucent split. But on the PPN... I have seen nobody mention what the underlying structure of the PPN is...
Now, back on the general thread... Generally, I would say that things like 'partyd00d420@foo' should not be considered. However, there are also just so many account names you can come up with on things like first initial and last name. So, then the question becomes how much can/do you deviate before you end up being considered as having a lame account ID? Here, I opted to go with my call-sign... is that lame? How about a name or nick-name which is not a typical spelling (in my case...Cinnion, which is the ancient welsh spelling for Kenyon)?
All-in-all..yes, it is a tricky matter. But at the same time, there is something to be said about getting 'tastefully creative' when you name is John Brown or Jane Smith (not the case here).
Too true... I remember mine as well... ...!cbosgd!ernie!stargazr
-1 or more about not thinking this through though. (and not funny at all)
As someone who has until recently done research in data centers and their operations, and personally dealt with the *NIX side of *NIX vs. NT years ago, I know the reality as opposed to the half-thought-out dreams some have. Yes, *NIX makes it much simpler to manage a machine, and increase the (servers/admin) ratio, among others, but it is not a solution which scales to where one person can administer 10K servers. As you add servers and applications, that ratio will reach a limit where you have to add yet another admin (operational, network, hardware, etc.). And should that site not be willing to do so, you end up with one of those "understaffed" data centers. Where that point is reached depends on a multitude of factors, including the behaviour of those using the data center (stupid developers, hands on users or workload characteristics cause that point to be reached sooner), the applications (a bunch of database servers will likely reach it before an equivalent amount of web servers), the amount of storage on those servers, and even the individual admins and how they are organized themselves. Throw in things like buying the cheapest hardware, or buying bleeding edge hardware (say 1.5TB drives when they first come out, or 10Gb ethernet cards), and it gets even worse as you try to deal with first generation drives failing or buggy drivers.
Can two people administer 500+ servers with 1.5PB of storage? I know personally that it is possible. But to do it and keep everyone 100% happy? No. And that precludes things like having people who are hard to satisfy, having to backup all that data, running it in a non-university production environment, etc. When I left CompuServe in 1997, the numbers were far different, with IIRC 25-30 operators of varying skill levels, about 10 of us in admin positions (who were called upon by the operators when they could not handle something), and around half a dozen or so network and hardware folks. Total number of servers? Around 1200 running BSD/OS, and around another 1000 running either our proprietary OS on systems which came out of the DecSystem 20 designs, or systems running a specialized NT 3.51 load, and perhaps a total data storage of around 1.5TB. And things were simplified by things such as having dozens of machines which were identical handling application X. Of course, we also had 3 data centers, and did backups of at least one of each machine in a given group. And then there is the fact that some applications required the developers to administer the application itself.
And looking forward... There were no regular 12 hour shifts at either of these. Yes, I was on call darn near 24*365 (I got vacation time off at my latest employer, but at CSI, I was on call even during vacation, and averaged 80hrs/week at the end). But when the fecal material hit the fan, and we had unusual problems like a computer room flooding or a critical server failing... it was possible to have to put in a 24 hour shift. Such is the life of a senior systems engineer in an operations group, which is one reason I try to avoid positions like these.
Not a valid email address, or at least it was not when I was a part of the operations team at CompuServe, and I seriously doubt it ever was, given that we were trying to move away from the numeric IDs and were going to disallow totally numeric email addresses unless they were the one internally assigned by our systems. I helped teach Secret Service and FBI agents how to recognize these sorts of "fake" IDs.
Bonus bragging points if you can explain the true source of CSI's PPNs.
As for TFA... While folks really should not throw out folks just because they have an email address at AOL, Hotmail, GMail, etc, I am quite sure it happened. Sad, considering that sites like this were good for getting a inexpensive or free permanent email address which did not change when you changed ISPs or employers.
- Doug (one time 70004.3304@compuserve.com)
But take a look at the sign right beside it, the face of the light assembly, etc... No matter what shape those hoods were, that snow (or what ever it happened to be) was going to be sticking, unless some process such as a warm surface kept it from doing so. Having lived in areas where this happens, and been a emergency responder, I know that snow sticks in wierd places in wierd ways.
The one thing I have noticed is that these authorities have forgotten one important fact... how many times are you going to be needing to heat the surface or do other measures of snow control? Even in places with lake effect snow, you only need to do these measures when it is snowing in a way to potentially cause the problem. Temp above say 35 degF... it stays off. 15th day of clear and sunny in a row... it stays off. Shoot, probably best to just have procedures where somebody activates it when snow crews are going out cleaning the streets, etc.
One of my biggest complaints about KVM is the fact that it requires CPUs which support the HVM CPU capabilities (i.e. Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V). For a site which has already has hundreds, if not thousands of systems running older P4/Xeon hardware, expecting them, or a small company with fewer systems to upgrade to get newer CPUs which can support KVM is not reasonable. Add this to the whole pile of fecal material surrounding the kernel team not putting the ParaVirtOps code into the kernel tree, and Xen Dom0 not being supported on things like Fedora Core since FC8, and RHEL/Centos lagging so far behind on kernels, it is enough to make even a normally mild mannered person want to Gibbs some developers, if not worse.
And yes, HVM is nice in that I could run pretty much any OS on it, with no modifications, be it the latest release of some Linux distro, NetBSD or other OS, or a legacy system running NetBSD 2.x, or (gack) WinXP or even Win95/98... but Xen could do that just as easily as KVM.
I read this and got a giggle. Good one ByOhTek.
I used to work for Bell Labs in the messaging division (the team which created Audix, Conversant, and later Anypath), and we worked very closely with the folks who created the switches which run in those "Central Offices" with labels like AT&T, Verizon, SBC, etc., some of which have stood since before AT&T was split up into the baby-Bells. Let me say that those systems most definitely require power to even continue routing a call. Not only do those circuits (which are the FXS end of a FXS/FXO interface) provide the voltages for off hook detection, ringing (generally 90VAC at 20Hz, which as someone says elsewhere, has a bite), but they almost always handle the conversion of the analog signal from your phone line to a digital format (of 64Kbits/sec, since it is sampled at 8 bits/sample 8000 times a second) passed around the network, before even routing your call to the circuitry handling your next door neighbour's line. They use Signaling System 7 (SS7) to communicate between switches, and sometimes even within the same switch, as well as to other devices, such as voice mail systems. But even in the days of the old mechanical relay switches (which I got to see as a kid... my neighbour worked for what used to be GTE, maintaining the switches in SE Ohio), the COs would have lots and lots and LOTS of 48V batteries to not only provide those voltages still provided today, but to also move those relays with the click-click-click which was always audible (and driven by the pulses of the old rotary dial phones). One reason for why most COs have diesel generators (right along with running the cooling which is necessary at a CO).
So, yes, blackouts are anticipated and handled by the phone companies at the CO. Most folks just have not gotten used to the magic which went on behind the curtain/wire to provide that dialtone whenever the handset was lifted from the cradle. And so, they get scared when they hear about things like needing a UPS at home for phone over FiOS, Cable, or whatever.
Want to learn more... start with the O'Reilly book on Asterisk (the "starfish" book), and then look for things like "Lucent 5ESS" or "Lucent 7R/E" (where some of my team mates came from).
As for the fine article (which I will admit I have yet to read, but will be reading tonight)... given the fact that in all but very rare cases, once your call reaches a CO, it is in digital format, being transmitted around the rest of the network, there is no reason that they cannot switch all but the last mile to VoIP. But the B**** is going to be in the details, as it will require IPv6 (which will also allow them to locate you geographically), and the Telco's will have to provide some sort of dual-service transport or gateway between the current protocols and the VoIP protocols. Probably even more of a pain than the conversion from IPv4 to IPv6. So yea... I suspect that it will be a very long time in the doing.
Oh... and at folks like BubbaDave... you can get decent quality VoIP for data rates available on a good dialup. It can take as little as 8Kbps to do VoIP, and 16-32Kbps with good quality is possible (which is less than the current 64Kbps needed today). But I doubt you will be seeing that at your house until they get fairly far along the conversion. And they can also just drop a T1 line to your house to route things to your CO. Pretty much any phone line could be switched over to T1... the TELCOs just charge way too much for them, since they normally route the T1s through the CO to other providers, which means they have to provision a larger uplink to the network. (The CO where I grew up still uses copper to link to the next CO, and a T1 for my network there was going to be so expensive because it would use up a existing uplink channel, which they did not like).
Oh... you mean companies like Seagate, NetApp, Panasas, Intel, Google and Apple (those last three on the edge of CMU's campus alone, and the rest in the PGH metro area)... And how about all the salaries for those of us who work at CMU, Pitt, UPMC (which while affiliated with Pitt, most definitely is not a part of it) and the other "university" employers mentioned so far.
And while we speak of UPmC, just go to the UPMC web site and look at the pic of our skyline... that tall building standing out from the rest has four letters on it: UPMC. So that is alot of people working in Pittsburgh indirectly because of a university, instead of working for Aetna, CIGNA or some other health care organization. Yes, some work there and live in places like Wexford, North Hills, and elsewhere, but because those folks work downtown, there are establishments employing others for those employees to eat, park, etc. And so, the City of Pittsburgh proper benefits. Just as they do from the landlords who rent to students in Shadyside, Oakland, Squill, and elsewhere, and from the store owners, food establishments, including food carts and other stores on wheels I see in Oakland while I go to and from work every day..
One more thing to consider about UPMC... people come here from lots of places, either to do research, or to benefit from a top medical facility which is on top of leading research. And they in turn have transactions which are no doubt generating tax revenue for the city.
As for the bus pass which was mentioned and that I use every day to get to and from work? Paid for by CMU to PAT, and if not returned when one leaves CMU, it is considered to be taxable income, reported to the PTBs.
I think in this case, the boy mayor needs to get some major schooling himself and grow up a little, instead of being so naive to think that this is how you balance the city budget, especially in times like these.
Ya know... that is not always the case. Or to use your vernacular, with emphasis... BULLSHIT! I have administered systems which were secure enough that they would not boot up into single user mode and grant access without the root password, and the drives were secured in such a way that not even pulling the drive and putting it in another system would help... the boot loader required a password to decrypt the filesystem. Given that this machine was up for like 10 years last I knew, when it was finally taken out of commission... reboots were rare. As for exploiting holes in remote access routes, such as through sendmail, http, etc... the only active routes into the system were for Kerberos (e.g. ports like kerberos, kpasswd, and klogin) and considered at the time to be secure short of the resources of the likes of NSA, CIA or DOD.
Now in the particulars of this case, Child's practice of not committing configurations to NVRAM complicates the problem, and makes it even more impossible for the passwords to be recovered. Ever spent some time configuring a router, holding off on the saving to NVRAM to test the configuration, and then lost power? If the scripts to configure the routers were some place only he knew (such as on a USB key, or hidden away some place on a 300GB drive, perhaps in an encrypted file), it was no problem for him if a unit rebooted. But try to reboot to gain access... guess what, you just lost what you were looking to find. And since we are talking about a router, even if he had committed the configuration (and associated password) to NVRAM, how would having physical access help you? Most routers I have seen, the best you can do is to reset to factory defaults with a little magic button, and provide no way to boot off of other media and still access the configuration on the switch. Nor can you pull the drive and put it in another PC and go that route. As someone who helped write the firmware for networking gear, I know. Only those of us who did that work even had a clue on how to get at a shell like environment to get at the stored configuration. But again, we are bitten by the lack of writing to non-volatile storage in this case. And if you are going to try to brute force a password... it would not help if the password for the console access is "KGToNBhChA2ayofcVL1voA". Granted, using such a password on quite a few switches/routers would be stupid, unless you scripted that access (something I have done). But then there are the countermeasures against such brute force attacks, such as delaying login re-attempts for 5-15 seconds, locking accounts after so many failed logins, etc.
So, with all this said, someone needing to try to gain access to some machines had better either hope they have the configurations stored someplace off the switch to enable restoration, or hope that they only have to assume a position of humility (e.g. the mayor asking Childs) in having to ask for the administrator password which has hopefully not been locked down. Because, if that is not the case, they are going to soon be assuming the same position a ex-LEO or child rapist is said to be forced to assume in prison...
Oh... and as for resigning (can one say he was really given a chance to do so properly) and giving the passwords to someone who was not supposed to get them, he could quite possibly be held responsible for the resulting damages if it was contrary to procedures. And given that this has all the appearances of being one pissing match of a turf war... I would be very afraid that that would be the case were I in his position, and as such, the case is IMO totally absurd, and perhaps just has some folks wanting to make a name for themselves...
Written authorization from the city? Does this mean that some idiot department manager in the sanitation department should be able to write up some letter, hand it to him, and get the passwords? I doubt it, but that would still be fulfilling what you wrote. At a minimum, it would have to be someone in his chain of command, and if the SOP at the time was to only turn them over to the mayor, then he would almost certainly be legally liable even if he turned them over to say the DA. While IANAL, I have in the past been the owner of those "golden passwords" and had very through lawyers advise me of this in the past when I have left previous employers, and any lawyers he speaks to are no doubt advising him of the same. He cannot be expected to know changes in policy, and if the DA (who may or may not be elected in SFO) or some city councilman was not in that group before... well...
I will say this... First, if all it takes is the mayor asking for them and receiving them, then at a minimum the mayor is being something I cannot say politely here, if not perhaps negligent., if that is all it took to regain control of the network. And secondly, having worked at places such as CompuServe (which carried high security DOD traffic over our network when I was there), if there was not a policy of putting critical (non-personal) passwords in a sealed and clearly labeled envelope, which was locked in a secure safe (such as the mayor's office), then someone was at least a fool. We called this the "incase you are hit by a bus" envelope, because sometimes, folks are hit by a bus or BART train. Crap happens, and if I had been such a person and they had needed one of my golden passwords which only I knew... well, they could get it. And each time I changed it, I put the new one into sealed envelope, put what the password was for (e.g. "Kerberos Server"), along with my name, date, and who could access it (e.g. "CEO, President, EVP of Operations") and took a trip upstairs to put it in the corporate admin's safe. And the old envelope was retrieved, verified to be secure, and shredded.
Other common applications where tubes are still used: MRI units (which have huge RF amps, just like TV/radio stations), radar, and microwave ovens (the Klystron is still the best way to generate the energy used to nuke your food). And your local HAM radio operators who work at the 1500W PEP limits, and sometimes even down at the 100W level will use sometimes still use tubes as well. An example of this is the Kenwood TS-520S, which uses the 6146B. A lovely unit I have used in the past, and with the tube finals, I have seen it tune at a SWR of 3:1 (could practically tune to a kitchen sink). Try doing this even with a TO-3 and you generally have a bit of a design headache.
So no, tubes are not dead, and are at times far superior to transistors, regardless of the type of transistor. Unfortunately, even major engineering universities neglect even having a section in a class to teach about them anymore.
One of those areas of R&D dual use... there has been work in the area of Robotics to see if there are better ways to have semi-autonomous robots (just like the rovers) in situations like Iraq, to help in cases of IEDs (and yes, this time I do mean IED, not AED...LOL) and other attacks. The foundation for this work is R&D done for NASA, not the DoD, though the DoD, DHS and other agencies are now doing their own funding of branchoff work.
Ummm... AED... Those lovely external defibrilators. I had earlier read a paper summary about ways to improve using robotics to help with the IED threat in Iraq and elsewhere, and I guess my fingers were still on that train of thought.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
Well, frankly, it does not matter if we are talking free market or not. Humanity has a horrible record at killing the environment, with to the behavior of corporations and governments being the worst offenders because of the scale.
As for suspending NASA...besides the "bad management decision" reply later in this thread, people seem to forget that all the research that NASA does shows up in other beneficial ways. It shows up in medicine in better diagnostic tools and items like the IEDs which are showing up in public locations everywhere (and which some of us may unfortunately need some day). It is showing up in ways which improve our crop yields in more sustainable ways, so that more people may be fed per acre, and so that less productive locations can even grow food on a limited basis. It goes towards energy efficiency of devices (be they lights or engines on a jumbo jet). And then it also shows up in understanding how the environment works, in part by providing access to other environments to compare our own against. This means that we can better understand things such as global warming, which should be treated just like a gun pointed to your head. Loaded or not, it deserves respect, because if it is loaded, there is no redo, second chance or what ever... Pfft... you are history. (A lesson many on this planet should learn and remember.)
One other important fact to consider...the reality check of just how much is really spent on NASA. $17.3B for 2008, which is less than 2.5% of the bailout just passed, and about 0.6% of the $2.9T budget for FY2008. Far down from the historical percentage of 5% during the Apollo project. Yes, every little bit would help reduce the budget deficit, but with removing money from NASA's budget, you are really just hurting things in the both the short and long run.