Rockets have blasted off into space since Sputnik1 and with all the communication satellites, we know alot about high-radiation electronics. We've had sun flares corrupting electronic equipment for decades and ASIC companies have entire lines of chips for high-radiation resistance, partly for military applications.
So I think the rovers electronics are well protected from at least the Suns radiation. I think Mars is 1.3AUs from the Earth, making it 2.3AUs from the Sun, so it should receive less than a quarter of the radiation per square inch the earth gets, but I strongly feel I could be wrong there. Martian dust getting into the compartments IMHO can be a more likely reason.
If electronics break on Mars, I'd put the highest chance on the initial impact on landing. Beside that its just sitting on barren land, under full solar radiation, exposed to some dust but in close-to-vacuum. Its a simpler environment we have to deal with compared to say sending a rover to a planet like Earth where it must be able to swim and walk through the forests.
I will never understand why Linux and NetBSD are currently looked down upon in the embedded corporations currently. QNX does a great job too, but of these four, why WxWorks?
I'm sure the NASA engineers have computers at home, mostly running either Windows 98, 2000 or XP. They should know the way a crash in Windows 98 brings the whole system down and Windows 2000 doesnt always do that. I wouldnt count on them to have had lots of experience with BSD or Linux because they didnt use that.
I think just like that NASA's pathfinder sailplane, these rovers should have at least 2 computers on board with each CPU+OS constantly checking the state of the other and being able to take over. Perhaps just building in a really smart BIOS like they did is a cleaner solution.
A new stock dreamcast can be bought for $99 from dealers who still carry it. Running Linux or BSD on any game console is cool and dramatically increases its usefulness. It also brings a good OS on good hardware for much cheaper than an eMachines computer.
Does anyone know the current prices of a gamecube? Does anyone know if linux or BSD can be run on the first playstation (which is cheaper than dreamcast?).
Ive read all the comments and most are centered around 'certs arent worth jack' and that degree and experience count far more. Some swear they will never consider certs.
However think about it. Anyone serious about this line of work will get a CS or CE 4-year degree. So you have 70% of all CS people with their degrees, how will you differentiate between them. Most of the unemployed ones might have less than 3 years experience and probably not in the technologies your company will use. So what criteria will you use to fish out the better ones among all the degree holders who know the technologies you use?
Most tech cert organizations wanted to make money, so they made the exams too easy the most notorious being the MCSE. There are a few certs however that do have their value. There are SAP certifications which can prove you know that ERP software at least in theory, which strongly differentiates you from someone with 7 years of industry experience with no SAP experience. The highest cert in networking has been the CCIE whose eliteness is being maintained by cisco to keep its value in the market. I have seen job posts asking for nothing more than a CCIE, and if you really start studying for it, youll respect that certification and its holders.
I think you can seperate all certs in two groups... the basic run-of-the-mill certs like the CCNA, CNE, MCSE, A+ etc which will mean you are not completely clueless in front of computers despite the lack of experience (which would otherwise cost the employer more), and the better certs like SCSA/SCNA, RHCE, CCIE, CISSP which are better suited on top of 4-year degrees to compensate for the lack of your experience and show your specialization to the employer.
I know many HR managers look for the academics only, and several slashdot posters enjoy completely trampling certs because they put their time and money into degrees and cant stand competing with others who didnt invest so much.
Tech-savvy companies know that University programs focus too much on Java/ADA/Pascal and sometimes too much on Microsoft or some other specific vendor and arent really better than certs in developing PRACTICAL skills. Most companies have a specific set of requirements, say, Lotus Domino, Win2k active directory, linux firewall, some html+CGI, perl, SNMP tools, IBM xSeries hardware etc, and they couldnt have cared less about 4-year degree holders who know everything theoretically, or cert holders who know something else really well. If youre ambitious and can afford college, dont stop till you have a degree + the right certs + a couple years of experience. Oh yeah, make sure you make plenty of 'contacts' and friends at University.
XFree86 should be for x86 versions of X, or X thats generally run on x86-based OSes shouldnt it? Ideally it should be named XFree which will mean a certain implementation of X, yet architecture-free. XFree86 is already used on almost as many architectures as NetBSD supports.
And if x.org is uniting with XFree86, maybe we can keep it simple and just call it X. I know there are other implementations of X, but since x.org owns the copyright, might as well keep the name simple.
We've been using the Ultra5 here for a little while. The IDE is of crap speed, but I have an adaptec card and 9gb SCSI disk thats doing a good job. Memory for this thing is expensive and I'm still stuck with the original 128MB which doesnt do you wonders with Solaris 9.
Ive been trying to justify buying a 333MHz cpu with 2MB cache for it, but I'd rather spend the money buying lotsa ram for my 6 sparcstation5s. Theyre cheap, perform real well with the SCSI disks and with netbsd runs blazingly fast.
Sure the Ultra5 is 64-bit but beside high-precision numbers you cant use it in any way to beat a Pentium2. Vamp it up for lots of money to equal a Pentium2 300MHz, and youve spent enough to buy a Pentium4. This is in addition to the fact that most PCI cards are useless in the Ultra5 including VGA cards.
To be fair, I DID run doom, quake2, scummvm and genesis/neogeo emulators under it, and it HAS been my home firewall and web server for the past year.
I am one of 5 siblings only 1 of whom is a girl. This is a very geeky house with 20+ computers run mostly by 3 brothers and a dad. One brother and one sister are the least tech-oriented. Now scroll back to my college, we had about 50% boys in the class, but only 2 students seriously interested in computer science. The rest were in because it was the tech boom days and spent their free time driving around and partying. Both the 2 students were guys.
To put things quite simply, I have never personally met a female who can distinguish a PCI card from an ISA. I know damn well they exist out there, only in miniscule numbers. I work as IT Support in a manufacturing company, and did 1 year helpdesk tech support in my college, so Ive helped many people with technical things. I'm usually very careful about putting anyone down unlike some ISP support helpdesks where they will only help if youre running Windows 98 or 2000 (I have to switch my OpenVMS minivax with a win98 just for the call).
So although I really hate to seem like I'm on that salesrep's side, I have to tell you getting away from this stereotype is extremely difficult. Being a good salesrep or plumber and just shutting up and listening is easy, so he didnt have an excuse there. But I would probably BEGIN with assuming you were sent out on an errand to fetch a card but I'd be very careful about showing it.
Recently we needed to discuss a complex VPN solution using Active Directory authentication with our ISP, Telus here in Toronto. The salesrep, technician, network designer were all female and understood me perfectly on the first description. I have never been so impressed. I'll give anything to run into one of them somewhere, and try to get one into a date.
See, there are millions of geek guys around the world pushing the frontiers of science, supporting companies or building weapons, yet theyre mostly alone and have to struggle to find things to discuss with their girls. Geek chicks are such a hot commodity they should be cloned.
the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine...
It was never supposed to compete there, else they would market it like Apple. These workstations are awesome for companies that NEED something to run their solaris/sparc apps faster. Ive heard of many engineering and visualization apps that still run on SGI and Sun workstations and those apps alone can run these two companies.
Sun has been open about trying to move to Operton and possibly Linux for later platforms. But just like Microsoft has complete dominance due to the sheer number of win32-only apps out there, Sun can bring out sub-P4 workstations, sell them at $5k and pay their employees with just that. I believe the sparc/solaris platform still has some kick to it and some developers will even continue to develop for that platform.
Heck OpenVMS and the OS/400 are still alive and are being released on newer hardware all the time despite their companies trying to wash their hands from it. Too many companies are greedy about that mainstream win32/wintel market and arent realizing the niche markets where they can support themselves through tech busts. Sun is getting smart.
I agree absolutely. Mars IS boring compared to this. When I saw the story I thought this must be a joke, in fact I didnt know anything had landed on Venus yet.. I thought NASA should head there next.
Amazing is the fact that they landed 10 (!) landers and 4 of them transmitted data back, a better rate than the Euro-American attempts at Mars. Those pictures are truly an enormous feat and I dont know why I never saw those in history books. Mars is a lot more like Earth, but Venus is something very unknown, extremely hot and extremely acidic and talk about atmospheric pressure. And they landed over 30 (!) years ago, before the Intel 4004 processor, and brought back such high res pictures with success.
Soviet scientists must see NASA cheering and they must yawn. Think of the success of the Mir stations and the Soyuz capsules. Now that the cold war is over and the US has better interests being Russias friends than competitors, they should really put NASA's efforts and money behind the Russian space program. Its time to let go of the "It has to be all american" idea, and go with whats efficient and works.
I believe the money that is spent at NASA can support many more and much bigger space programs if other countries are let in in the proper capitalistic spirit. A lot has NOT happened in the last 30 years.
You're right. I wouldnt hire anyone except 2 former students of my class knowing whats available out there and the market situation. This is the only reason I'm happy about the tech bust. Just like theoretical physicists, only the dedicated and interested geeks enter the market, not that joe who couldnt choose a major in the first year and decided to go with CS because it was lucrative and he could format his C drive.
Certs have gained great importance in this industry for a reason. I know many with 3.8+ GPA fresh out of college, but they know only the Java/ADA/Pascal/Microsoft Office/Visio that was taught to them. IT is too fast a moving target for professors to properly tailor courses for the job.
2004 will be better than 2003. In the last two months in 2003, I received two calls from employers, but received none during the 16 months before that. Another interesting thing is the prices of used cisco 2924 switches and 2600 routers have increased by 30% all of a sudden. People are geared up for studying harder and competing, and this attitude will lift the market. The energy in the IT and geek circles in itself will improve things a little... and then both the effects of Sept 11 and Iraq War are over.
I should so get back to advanced BGP routes and leave slashdot worship. Its killing my future the way Everquest almost did.
Do they really have to look up and try to compete with enterprise databasen? Theyre really in a good niche where some deem postgresql to be too big and complex, yet where basic SQL is a requirement and db4 doesnt work.
Mysql's strength has been in web backends and simple applications that outgrow hash databases, and small databases that require multiplatform database connections. Them trying to outgrow their niche and join the crowded markets is like shooting themselves in the foot. They should spend time refining, debugging, adding more functions and features suitable at that scale, speeding it up, standardizing the source code and porting it to hell and back.
I remember LEGOs were getting more toy-like with bigger atomic pieces that were more specialized and you couldnt do much with it. In my castle set, there was a shark with just two pieces.. the shark and the upper jaw... so wheres the creativity about that?
The technic sets were more creative, with little gears and small unspecific atomic pieces I could do neat things with. I never made what the original box intended.. but always had my own ideas usually a giant combined robot.. like transformers which could transform into a car.
I saw that harry potter set and thought you really cant do much with that. That was a doll set not a building block set. The markets kicked some sense into their heads now and I hope they dont just build bricks but atomic mechanical pieces... like that perforated metal set I forgot the name of.
Gears, cogs, motors, rods, bearings, pulleys, screws.. things like that will help kids and motivate them to buy more sets for more pieces. Kids really REALLY dont want to build showsets of various movie themes unless they fall on the wrong side of the gender preference.
This is one of the undocumented features of the Homo Sapiens (not really Homo). Its like the nice 'to be discovered' things that come with DVDs. Unfortunately, someones now documenting it
Here in Canada, we're relatively lucky. Instead of the military, we have corporations like RIM, Nortel and dominating research. Its lucky because the students can then go on and join those companies, compared to the US where the tech can be snatched and shelved and classified, and youre not employed if youre Pakistani:)
You can put two desktop machines with good frontside busses side by side, and use etherchannel using the new 10gbit ethernet chips by Intel, and you theoretically have 20gbit. I'm pretty sure upper-end Juniper and cisco ATM switches can do it much better using loadbalancing of interfaces.
So do two systems side by side and connected to the net qualify as 'across the Internet', or is the rule to use only standard consumer ISPs?
When you buy bandwidth, its like you have at your disposal that whole bandwidth for the period you paid for. If you cant use that bandwidth, then you DONT have that bandwidth at your disposal.
An ISP buys a 100-mbit usage permanent connection with some backbone and resells it. They sell 1-mbit DSL connections to 300 customers (considering on the average, a customer uses his Internet for 8 hours a day). But the ISP realizes theres no shortage of people who will only use the connection for 1 hour a day but will pay for the full connection, so they figure, scare away the heavy users and keep the 1-hour users, and you can have 2400 customers. Now THATS profit.
The major problem is even those customers wont buy the service if you advertise 1 hour Internet per day, you HAVE to advertise unlimited high speed.
So what are they left with? Threaten the ones with P2P software and servers, block port 25 and 80, and use QoS to slow down the gamers. Tell them its all for security. Another possibility is to reset their connections after several hours and give them a new IP... the DHCP leases expire rediculously fast.
And of course, implement bandwidth caps, after sending out one email warnings. Then charge them up the wazoo. That sure beats getting more customers... just overcharge the current ones.
The Internet was cheaper mbit for mbit 4 years ago in Toronto. Rogers and Sympatico have paired up to royally screw the populations, and whats troubling, all those smaller ISPs have to buy their bandwidth from Bell, owner of Sympatico.
So my friends, as soon as this monopoly is broken, in any city or country, you can imagine the bandwidth costs just plummeting. Over time just like moores law, we get more cables laid, better cisco and Juniper routers installed, more chinese satellites launched, and more bandwidth available, so theres all the reason for the costs to come down in a smooth curve. Seeing Internet prices jacked up for 4 years straight means someones getting filthy rich, and as soon as that monopoly goes, competition will make it all that much cheap.
is that people will know they bought a PC, and will do hacks to get it to run Windows and Linux. It will be more of an XBox with a harddrive then. Give them a playstation, and even though you can boot Linux, its all specialized playstation hardware and will be used as such. If you use generic hardware, people will try to use it for generic purposes.
I read about the theory of Gravastars in 1999, these ideas were started at Oxford quite a while ago along with the silly parallel universes theory. Physics news sure takes long to hit slashdot.
In fact, its not like someone just COMES up with an idea, and the next day the news carries the story. These ideas are started as among many theoretical possibilities, and various scientists elevate it until the people reading scientific journals consider it important enough to be fodder for the news. Nothing is completely uncertain, and like the parallel universes, you can expect the Gravastar ideas to quitely and gradually die down along the years.
I have exactly the same prob, and beside getting my mom to wake me up, what works is a radio on a timer for me. Its tuned to a news channel, and constant babble gets more of my attention and wakes me up much better than an alarm that I get USED to over time. The radio channel should be a news channel and not music, so theres some kind of talk that grabs your attention.
Try this, else a clock with multiple alarms paced at 15 minutes. If you get up regularly daily for several months, you DO get tuned to that time and will awake even without a clock, but a single long weekend puts an end to it.
When you have driver troubles, BSOD and spyware, in most cases a full reinstall of Windows fixes it. Theres little else you can do with a trashed Windows98 install since it doesnt really give processes their own closed space like Windows2000 and any other REAL OS.
So would you want to pay Microsoft for solutions they dont provide?
As an operating system after some 7 years (it came out first in 97), its pretty mature and most major fixable bugs have been fixed, and its unlikely in the next 3 years people will NEED a new version of IE or libraries. If they do anyway, any support for WindowsME will also likely work on Windows98, like most drivers made for WinME.
I believe Windows 2000 is mature enough now for people to switch away from Windows98, after Service Pack 4. I also support XP as a usable OS now, after Service Pack 2, but for most cases where stability is required, I go with Windows2000. A cheap ECS computer with a Duron 1.4GHz can easily run Windows 2000/XP so I wouldnt consider hardware to be the problem for switching.
For older hardware, this is good news. People will finally HAVE to use Linux and the likes. For cheaper hardware and poorer countries, Microsoft is actually shooting themselves in the foot.
Death and Maiming are critical parts of any video game. In fact Sex and Violence form the basis of human psyche. Even in Chess, the sense of competition comes from the enormous pleasure of defeating the enemy, same in soccer.
Now you can change the graphics in counterstrike to replace the players with cylinders and remove the blood, but thats not really gonna make it any less violent. Youre still out hunting people and taking them down for pleasure.
The horsemen of Afghanistan play Buzkashi... where they fight over a goat carcass.. and the players whip each other. If the california govt existed there thousands of years ago to block that game, they would invent something new and just as bloody to replace the mens sport and bring back the spirit of competition.
Games really are no more violent than Rugby or Boxing. It is the extreme narrowmindedness that connects games with Columbine, but not with the general human history of competition and survival psychology. I've seen toddlers smack each other a good one, and thats all instict. You cant iron out people into good law abiding citizens. Surround them in a cucoon of peace and happiness, and they'll look desperately for Marilyn Manson and listen to Eminem.
Violence in video games is a reflection of us, not something that can affect us. Banning it is a bit like banning sex.
For under a grand I (or most of the slashdotters) could assemble a kickass hardware and do alot more with a bunch of scripts. Why would ANYONE pay $14,000 for a nice GUI?
I guess the company figured, if you put a big price tag, people will buy it thinking it must be good enough (think Microsoft). Unfortunately for them, the story reached slashdot..
Slashdot Mirror
Rockets have blasted off into space since Sputnik1 and with all the communication satellites, we know alot about high-radiation electronics. We've had sun flares corrupting electronic equipment for decades and ASIC companies have entire lines of chips for high-radiation resistance, partly for military applications.
So I think the rovers electronics are well protected from at least the Suns radiation. I think Mars is 1.3AUs from the Earth, making it 2.3AUs from the Sun, so it should receive less than a quarter of the radiation per square inch the earth gets, but I strongly feel I could be wrong there. Martian dust getting into the compartments IMHO can be a more likely reason.
If electronics break on Mars, I'd put the highest chance on the initial impact on landing. Beside that its just sitting on barren land, under full solar radiation, exposed to some dust but in close-to-vacuum. Its a simpler environment we have to deal with compared to say sending a rover to a planet like Earth where it must be able to swim and walk through the forests.
I will never understand why Linux and NetBSD are currently looked down upon in the embedded corporations currently. QNX does a great job too, but of these four, why WxWorks?
I'm sure the NASA engineers have computers at home, mostly running either Windows 98, 2000 or XP. They should know the way a crash in Windows 98 brings the whole system down and Windows 2000 doesnt always do that. I wouldnt count on them to have had lots of experience with BSD or Linux because they didnt use that.
I think just like that NASA's pathfinder sailplane, these rovers should have at least 2 computers on board with each CPU+OS constantly checking the state of the other and being able to take over. Perhaps just building in a really smart BIOS like they did is a cleaner solution.
A new stock dreamcast can be bought for $99 from dealers who still carry it. Running Linux or BSD on any game console is cool and dramatically increases its usefulness. It also brings a good OS on good hardware for much cheaper than an eMachines computer.
Does anyone know the current prices of a gamecube? Does anyone know if linux or BSD can be run on the first playstation (which is cheaper than dreamcast?).
Ive read all the comments and most are centered around 'certs arent worth jack' and that degree and experience count far more. Some swear they will never consider certs.
However think about it. Anyone serious about this line of work will get a CS or CE 4-year degree. So you have 70% of all CS people with their degrees, how will you differentiate between them. Most of the unemployed ones might have less than 3 years experience and probably not in the technologies your company will use. So what criteria will you use to fish out the better ones among all the degree holders who know the technologies you use?
Most tech cert organizations wanted to make money, so they made the exams too easy the most notorious being the MCSE. There are a few certs however that do have their value. There are SAP certifications which can prove you know that ERP software at least in theory, which strongly differentiates you from someone with 7 years of industry experience with no SAP experience. The highest cert in networking has been the CCIE whose eliteness is being maintained by cisco to keep its value in the market. I have seen job posts asking for nothing more than a CCIE, and if you really start studying for it, youll respect that certification and its holders.
I think you can seperate all certs in two groups... the basic run-of-the-mill certs like the CCNA, CNE, MCSE, A+ etc which will mean you are not completely clueless in front of computers despite the lack of experience (which would otherwise cost the employer more), and the better certs like SCSA/SCNA, RHCE, CCIE, CISSP which are better suited on top of 4-year degrees to compensate for the lack of your experience and show your specialization to the employer.
I know many HR managers look for the academics only, and several slashdot posters enjoy completely trampling certs because they put their time and money into degrees and cant stand competing with others who didnt invest so much.
Tech-savvy companies know that University programs focus too much on Java/ADA/Pascal and sometimes too much on Microsoft or some other specific vendor and arent really better than certs in developing PRACTICAL skills. Most companies have a specific set of requirements, say, Lotus Domino, Win2k active directory, linux firewall, some html+CGI, perl, SNMP tools, IBM xSeries hardware etc, and they couldnt have cared less about 4-year degree holders who know everything theoretically, or cert holders who know something else really well. If youre ambitious and can afford college, dont stop till you have a degree + the right certs + a couple years of experience. Oh yeah, make sure you make plenty of 'contacts' and friends at University.
XFree86 should be for x86 versions of X, or X thats generally run on x86-based OSes shouldnt it? Ideally it should be named XFree which will mean a certain implementation of X, yet architecture-free. XFree86 is already used on almost as many architectures as NetBSD supports.
And if x.org is uniting with XFree86, maybe we can keep it simple and just call it X. I know there are other implementations of X, but since x.org owns the copyright, might as well keep the name simple.
At the least, I would lose the '86'.
We've been using the Ultra5 here for a little while. The IDE is of crap speed, but I have an adaptec card and 9gb SCSI disk thats doing a good job. Memory for this thing is expensive and I'm still stuck with the original 128MB which doesnt do you wonders with Solaris 9.
Ive been trying to justify buying a 333MHz cpu with 2MB cache for it, but I'd rather spend the money buying lotsa ram for my 6 sparcstation5s. Theyre cheap, perform real well with the SCSI disks and with netbsd runs blazingly fast.
Sure the Ultra5 is 64-bit but beside high-precision numbers you cant use it in any way to beat a Pentium2. Vamp it up for lots of money to equal a Pentium2 300MHz, and youve spent enough to buy a Pentium4. This is in addition to the fact that most PCI cards are useless in the Ultra5 including VGA cards.
To be fair, I DID run doom, quake2, scummvm and genesis/neogeo emulators under it, and it HAS been my home firewall and web server for the past year.
for when you'll get slashdotted. Just make sure its not straight on top of ya.
What bothers me is that you'll lose connection in a storm. Thats when you need communication technologies the most.
I guess I'll just jump into the sea of replies.
I am one of 5 siblings only 1 of whom is a girl. This is a very geeky house with 20+ computers run mostly by 3 brothers and a dad. One brother and one sister are the least tech-oriented. Now scroll back to my college, we had about 50% boys in the class, but only 2 students seriously interested in computer science. The rest were in because it was the tech boom days and spent their free time driving around and partying. Both the 2 students were guys.
To put things quite simply, I have never personally met a female who can distinguish a PCI card from an ISA. I know damn well they exist out there, only in miniscule numbers. I work as IT Support in a manufacturing company, and did 1 year helpdesk tech support in my college, so Ive helped many people with technical things. I'm usually very careful about putting anyone down unlike some ISP support helpdesks where they will only help if youre running Windows 98 or 2000 (I have to switch my OpenVMS minivax with a win98 just for the call).
So although I really hate to seem like I'm on that salesrep's side, I have to tell you getting away from this stereotype is extremely difficult. Being a good salesrep or plumber and just shutting up and listening is easy, so he didnt have an excuse there. But I would probably BEGIN with assuming you were sent out on an errand to fetch a card but I'd be very careful about showing it.
Recently we needed to discuss a complex VPN solution using Active Directory authentication with our ISP, Telus here in Toronto. The salesrep, technician, network designer were all female and understood me perfectly on the first description. I have never been so impressed. I'll give anything to run into one of them somewhere, and try to get one into a date.
See, there are millions of geek guys around the world pushing the frontiers of science, supporting companies or building weapons, yet theyre mostly alone and have to struggle to find things to discuss with their girls. Geek chicks are such a hot commodity they should be cloned.
the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine ...
It was never supposed to compete there, else they would market it like Apple. These workstations are awesome for companies that NEED something to run their solaris/sparc apps faster. Ive heard of many engineering and visualization apps that still run on SGI and Sun workstations and those apps alone can run these two companies.
Sun has been open about trying to move to Operton and possibly Linux for later platforms. But just like Microsoft has complete dominance due to the sheer number of win32-only apps out there, Sun can bring out sub-P4 workstations, sell them at $5k and pay their employees with just that. I believe the sparc/solaris platform still has some kick to it and some developers will even continue to develop for that platform.
Heck OpenVMS and the OS/400 are still alive and are being released on newer hardware all the time despite their companies trying to wash their hands from it. Too many companies are greedy about that mainstream win32/wintel market and arent realizing the niche markets where they can support themselves through tech busts. Sun is getting smart.
I agree absolutely. Mars IS boring compared to this. When I saw the story I thought this must be a joke, in fact I didnt know anything had landed on Venus yet.. I thought NASA should head there next.
Amazing is the fact that they landed 10 (!) landers and 4 of them transmitted data back, a better rate than the Euro-American attempts at Mars. Those pictures are truly an enormous feat and I dont know why I never saw those in history books. Mars is a lot more like Earth, but Venus is something very unknown, extremely hot and extremely acidic and talk about atmospheric pressure. And they landed over 30 (!) years ago, before the Intel 4004 processor, and brought back such high res pictures with success.
Soviet scientists must see NASA cheering and they must yawn. Think of the success of the Mir stations and the Soyuz capsules. Now that the cold war is over and the US has better interests being Russias friends than competitors, they should really put NASA's efforts and money behind the Russian space program. Its time to let go of the "It has to be all american" idea, and go with whats efficient and works.
I believe the money that is spent at NASA can support many more and much bigger space programs if other countries are let in in the proper capitalistic spirit. A lot has NOT happened in the last 30 years.
Build an RFID Speedpass-charging reception watch and attach it to the hacked cellphone in your pocket to connect to the Speedpass merchant network.
Next shake hands with as MANY people as you can before cashing it all and heading to Mexico.
A lotta empty cars will be abandoned at a lotta gas stations with their owners on busses heading for banks.
You're right. I wouldnt hire anyone except 2 former students of my class knowing whats available out there and the market situation. This is the only reason I'm happy about the tech bust. Just like theoretical physicists, only the dedicated and interested geeks enter the market, not that joe who couldnt choose a major in the first year and decided to go with CS because it was lucrative and he could format his C drive.
Certs have gained great importance in this industry for a reason. I know many with 3.8+ GPA fresh out of college, but they know only the Java/ADA/Pascal/Microsoft Office/Visio that was taught to them. IT is too fast a moving target for professors to properly tailor courses for the job.
2004 will be better than 2003. In the last two months in 2003, I received two calls from employers, but received none during the 16 months before that. Another interesting thing is the prices of used cisco 2924 switches and 2600 routers have increased by 30% all of a sudden. People are geared up for studying harder and competing, and this attitude will lift the market. The energy in the IT and geek circles in itself will improve things a little... and then both the effects of Sept 11 and Iraq War are over.
I should so get back to advanced BGP routes and leave slashdot worship. Its killing my future the way Everquest almost did.
Do they really have to look up and try to compete with enterprise databasen? Theyre really in a good niche where some deem postgresql to be too big and complex, yet where basic SQL is a requirement and db4 doesnt work.
Mysql's strength has been in web backends and simple applications that outgrow hash databases, and small databases that require multiplatform database connections. Them trying to outgrow their niche and join the crowded markets is like shooting themselves in the foot. They should spend time refining, debugging, adding more functions and features suitable at that scale, speeding it up, standardizing the source code and porting it to hell and back.
I remember LEGOs were getting more toy-like with bigger atomic pieces that were more specialized and you couldnt do much with it. In my castle set, there was a shark with just two pieces.. the shark and the upper jaw... so wheres the creativity about that?
... like that perforated metal set I forgot the name of.
The technic sets were more creative, with little gears and small unspecific atomic pieces I could do neat things with. I never made what the original box intended.. but always had my own ideas usually a giant combined robot.. like transformers which could transform into a car.
I saw that harry potter set and thought you really cant do much with that. That was a doll set not a building block set. The markets kicked some sense into their heads now and I hope they dont just build bricks but atomic mechanical pieces
Gears, cogs, motors, rods, bearings, pulleys, screws.. things like that will help kids and motivate them to buy more sets for more pieces. Kids really REALLY dont want to build showsets of various movie themes unless they fall on the wrong side of the gender preference.
This is one of the undocumented features of the Homo Sapiens (not really Homo). Its like the nice 'to be discovered' things that come with DVDs. Unfortunately, someones now documenting it
Here in Canada, we're relatively lucky. Instead of the military, we have corporations like RIM, Nortel and dominating research. Its lucky because the students can then go on and join those companies, compared to the US where the tech can be snatched and shelved and classified, and youre not employed if youre Pakistani :)
You can put two desktop machines with good frontside busses side by side, and use etherchannel using the new 10gbit ethernet chips by Intel, and you theoretically have 20gbit. I'm pretty sure upper-end Juniper and cisco ATM switches can do it much better using loadbalancing of interfaces.
So do two systems side by side and connected to the net qualify as 'across the Internet', or is the rule to use only standard consumer ISPs?
When you buy bandwidth, its like you have at your disposal that whole bandwidth for the period you paid for. If you cant use that bandwidth, then you DONT have that bandwidth at your disposal.
An ISP buys a 100-mbit usage permanent connection with some backbone and resells it. They sell 1-mbit DSL connections to 300 customers (considering on the average, a customer uses his Internet for 8 hours a day). But the ISP realizes theres no shortage of people who will only use the connection for 1 hour a day but will pay for the full connection, so they figure, scare away the heavy users and keep the 1-hour users, and you can have 2400 customers. Now THATS profit.
The major problem is even those customers wont buy the service if you advertise 1 hour Internet per day, you HAVE to advertise unlimited high speed.
So what are they left with? Threaten the ones with P2P software and servers, block port 25 and 80, and use QoS to slow down the gamers. Tell them its all for security. Another possibility is to reset their connections after several hours and give them a new IP... the DHCP leases expire rediculously fast.
And of course, implement bandwidth caps, after sending out one email warnings. Then charge them up the wazoo. That sure beats getting more customers... just overcharge the current ones.
The Internet was cheaper mbit for mbit 4 years ago in Toronto. Rogers and Sympatico have paired up to royally screw the populations, and whats troubling, all those smaller ISPs have to buy their bandwidth from Bell, owner of Sympatico.
So my friends, as soon as this monopoly is broken, in any city or country, you can imagine the bandwidth costs just plummeting. Over time just like moores law, we get more cables laid, better cisco and Juniper routers installed, more chinese satellites launched, and more bandwidth available, so theres all the reason for the costs to come down in a smooth curve. Seeing Internet prices jacked up for 4 years straight means someones getting filthy rich, and as soon as that monopoly goes, competition will make it all that much cheap.
is that people will know they bought a PC, and will do hacks to get it to run Windows and Linux. It will be more of an XBox with a harddrive then. Give them a playstation, and even though you can boot Linux, its all specialized playstation hardware and will be used as such. If you use generic hardware, people will try to use it for generic purposes.
I read about the theory of Gravastars in 1999, these ideas were started at Oxford quite a while ago along with the silly parallel universes theory. Physics news sure takes long to hit slashdot.
In fact, its not like someone just COMES up with an idea, and the next day the news carries the story. These ideas are started as among many theoretical possibilities, and various scientists elevate it until the people reading scientific journals consider it important enough to be fodder for the news. Nothing is completely uncertain, and like the parallel universes, you can expect the Gravastar ideas to quitely and gradually die down along the years.
I have exactly the same prob, and beside getting my mom to wake me up, what works is a radio on a timer for me. Its tuned to a news channel, and constant babble gets more of my attention and wakes me up much better than an alarm that I get USED to over time. The radio channel should be a news channel and not music, so theres some kind of talk that grabs your attention.
Try this, else a clock with multiple alarms paced at 15 minutes. If you get up regularly daily for several months, you DO get tuned to that time and will awake even without a clock, but a single long weekend puts an end to it.
When you have driver troubles, BSOD and spyware, in most cases a full reinstall of Windows fixes it. Theres little else you can do with a trashed Windows98 install since it doesnt really give processes their own closed space like Windows2000 and any other REAL OS.
So would you want to pay Microsoft for solutions they dont provide?
As an operating system after some 7 years (it came out first in 97), its pretty mature and most major fixable bugs have been fixed, and its unlikely in the next 3 years people will NEED a new version of IE or libraries. If they do anyway, any support for WindowsME will also likely work on Windows98, like most drivers made for WinME.
I believe Windows 2000 is mature enough now for people to switch away from Windows98, after Service Pack 4. I also support XP as a usable OS now, after Service Pack 2, but for most cases where stability is required, I go with Windows2000. A cheap ECS computer with a Duron 1.4GHz can easily run Windows 2000/XP so I wouldnt consider hardware to be the problem for switching.
For older hardware, this is good news. People will finally HAVE to use Linux and the likes. For cheaper hardware and poorer countries, Microsoft is actually shooting themselves in the foot.
Death and Maiming are critical parts of any video game. In fact Sex and Violence form the basis of human psyche. Even in Chess, the sense of competition comes from the enormous pleasure of defeating the enemy, same in soccer.
Now you can change the graphics in counterstrike to replace the players with cylinders and remove the blood, but thats not really gonna make it any less violent. Youre still out hunting people and taking them down for pleasure.
The horsemen of Afghanistan play Buzkashi... where they fight over a goat carcass.. and the players whip each other. If the california govt existed there thousands of years ago to block that game, they would invent something new and just as bloody to replace the mens sport and bring back the spirit of competition.
Games really are no more violent than Rugby or Boxing. It is the extreme narrowmindedness that connects games with Columbine, but not with the general human history of competition and survival psychology. I've seen toddlers smack each other a good one, and thats all instict. You cant iron out people into good law abiding citizens. Surround them in a cucoon of peace and happiness, and they'll look desperately for Marilyn Manson and listen to Eminem.
Violence in video games is a reflection of us, not something that can affect us. Banning it is a bit like banning sex.
And have the martians think we're sending nukes crashing into their crust?
If Greenpeace wont let you pollute Earth, pollute Mars!
For under a grand I (or most of the slashdotters) could assemble a kickass hardware and do alot more with a bunch of scripts. Why would ANYONE pay $14,000 for a nice GUI?
I guess the company figured, if you put a big price tag, people will buy it thinking it must be good enough (think Microsoft). Unfortunately for them, the story reached slashdot..