I to love how people have no problem with police videotaping you/preventing you from videotaping with an excuse of terrorism just to cover their asses while everyone panics over a google streetview of a public area.
The police don't (usually) put it on the internet where everyone can see it.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but it is different.
The War on Terror(TM) has become the War on Photographers.
I think more people are just aware of it now and the authorities are less tolerant of it.
A couple of years before 9/11 I went out to take some night shots with a tripod and old TLR camera. It was pretty late, area was dead. In one area a cop came up to me and told me I couldn't take photos there. There was a sign but I missed it. It wasn't a big deal and I just left. I think they might have seen me taking photos in other areas earlier.
Post 9/11 things might have been a bit different such as more thorough questioning. The area was fairly close to the WTC. You could actually see it from where I was taking photos but that's not what I was taking photos of. A number of officers in the area were lost in the attacks.
If I did it again, I don't know that they'd call SWAT. I think that's just more the small town places that got a bunch of new equipment as a result of the home land security spending and needing any excuse to justify it. I wouldn't have been surprised or upset if they asked for my ID or detained me for questioning.
As for the tripod thing, there are a lot of places you can't use a tripod without a permit and that was even before the war on terror. It can be a safety issue because you're blocking the path.
You can't just take pictures where you want either. I understand the frustration of being hassled taking photos in a public place when there is no posted warning, but taking a photo of two strangers filling a cash machine with money in a private store is not exactly the same thing.
I'm pro biofuels, but how are they going to know what technology will pan out?
Fuel Cell cars are still 15 years away. Bio fuels, and bio/petroleum mixes are here now as well as hybrids and electric cars that are coming out again.
In something Sun released about the merger recently, there were three parties interested in buying Sun. In addition to IBM and Oracle there was one more that isn't known and didn't make an offer. It was assumed to be HP, and that's most likely the case, but it would be interesting (and horrible) if it turned out to be MS.
There are some stockholders that will launch a class action given any opportunity and mergers are good opportunities.
I think Sun's technology and business can turn around but they would need a lot of capital to do it. With the economic downturn, loss of revenue, and difficulty they'll have raising cash, it would be tough.
If the stockholders thought the company was worth a lot more than $9.50 they should have bought when it was around $4 then when they get the proceeds from the merger buy Oracle stock.
Even IBM won't buy SAP and I think it's unlikely that MS would. Or at least I think it would be a bad idea.
SAP doesn't look like a good buy. SAP stockholders would want a premium over it's current share price and at 48 billion bucks it doesn't look attractive for a company that only has only $16 billion in annual revenue.
It's not a big discount like other companies, such as Sun, that really took a beating recently in the market.
The Oracle/Sun deal might hurt SAP but with their revenue and profit it's still good to be SAP, but with their market cap, it's not good to buy SAP in my opinion.
I don't think it's as cut and dry as you say. There are obviously differeing opinions. If there weren't we wouldn't need judges. We would all just know what was right and what was wrong.
The police didn't obtain a warrant, the prosecutor didn't have a problem presenting that evidence at trial and the judge allowed it into evidence. I'm assuming defense counsel opposed it.
IT's not just in your area. Milk and bread (as well as eggs, fruits and vegetables) are usually things that sell out fastest in most areas when there is an event that might keep people from going shopping.
Milk and bread are staples that almost everyone reading this has in their home.
They are also perishable so you're not likely to have a reserve in case of emergency like you might have steaks and chicken in the freezer or cans of tuna and tomato paste in the pantry. In fact things like milk, bread and eggs are things people buy more frequently than just their weekly shopping trips because they only buy enough to last a short while. That's why these items seem to do well at gas station convenience stores that people can pick up while their filling upa fter work.
Stores usually only stock a little more than a days supply of these items in most cases unlike something like Frosted Flakes that has a longer shelf life.
People don't buy 10x as much bread and milk before a storm. It's usually around twice as much but the stores don't have twice as much on hand so it looks like people are hoarding bread and milk.
I think you're not understanding things. People don't want to drive or are worried about being able to buy during/after a storm as someone mentioned earlier.
The problem isn't that people are buying 10x more milk, it's that 10x more people came into the store. Or whatever the multiple is.
When there's a storm more people will go shopping in the day before the storm than after the storm. The market gets products delivered daily and sells it slowly throughout the week but when there's a rush to get emergency provisions, they get more people into the store than a usual day because people plan on not shopping for the next few days.
You have to understand the "ABC is dying/dead" mentality.
It doesn't matter how much market share you have, only that your market share is decreasing and some smaller technology which they favor has an increasing market share.
IE is dying because Firefox use is increasing in the market and IE is declining.
Unix is dying because Linux is growing and Unix is not.
It doesn't matter that at the rate of decline it would take 20 or more years for whatever it is to die. Or that the decline may be arrested. Saying something is dying is usually misinformed or more likely spreading FUD to hasten the decline.
Old technology with 80% market share drops down to 79% marketshare and new cool technology jumps up from 2% to 3% market share and old technology is declared dying. Here's a perfect example.
How does a rover on Mars cost 4 million per year to operate?
Long distance charges.
I don't think the $4million number is accurate anyway. It's likely higher. Last year they were going to cut the budget by $4 million and turn off one of the rovers but then changed their minds. IT looks like the budget for the program is actually $20 million according to this article.
Hmm... maybe they didn't change their minds and it's not really stuck.
I've just stored drives in anti-static bags for some of my test systems when I upgrade drives and want to keep the old drives for messing around with. Haven't run into any problems.
Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.
They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.
The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.
The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.
The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.
I don't know about you, I've never once seriously considered clicking on an ad.
I have, lots of times, and even wind up making a purchase from time to time after looking into things a bit more, but if it wasn't for advertising I might not have known about the product or sometimes even a particular merchant that offered a better deal.
Some advertising is bad, but on higher quality sites, you tend to have higher quality ads. There are exceptions to that though, but for the most part it seems to be true.
I don't know why people are so against advertising. When it's done right it can be beneficial. Not only to the publisher, but also to the viewer. Without advertising revenue, a lot of sites wouldn't be able to stay online. The problem is the sites that just exist to post ads.
Think of it like the Degree sponsorship of Eureka. Some people were put off by it, but I think they handled it well. How many times do you hear of some letter writing campaign to restart a canceled sci-fi series? They usually don't go anywhere. What Eureka did was smart, their keeping money coming into the series so it doesn't get canceled. Networks don't care how many fans like a series, they care how many advertisers like advertising on the series and while Degree and Eureka may seem like an odd choice, think of the huge market of sci fi fans that could definitely smell better.
By the way, I'm a fan of Eureka and I'm a fan of Degree. Not because of the show though but because out of nowhere I got a free sample of one of their deodorants and it smelled almost exactly like one of my favorite colognes. I could probably find something similar in another brand but since they sponsor a show I like I don't mind giving them my business.
The problem is that an operating system is just something you need to get the application to work on the hardware you choose. It might be a small part of the problem. If you decide to create your own custom distro for the purpose of running your application you're going to possibly run into problems getting your application stack to work correctly on top of it or may have problems getting support.
The OS they chose was RHEL and you can infer some of the rest of the stack from the requirements.
Looks like they went with an SOA architecture on top of a J2EE stack with an Oracle backend using Eclipse as the development platform.
I don't know why these stories turn into OS flame wars. It's like blaming the spark plug for poor engine performance. The OS is probably adding vulnerabilities (Don't know of any OS that doesn't have listed vulnerabilities) but you have to look at the whole stack. Any individual part of the stack could be fine on it's own, but in combination may create other problems. On top of that, this system isn't just a combination of off the shelf components, there is a lot of coding involved and for all we know that's where most of the issues may be.
The first browser I ever used was Mosaic on a Solaris workstation. I used it to preview the first site I ever built. After that, on Windows, Netscape Navigator became my browser of choice until about 4.6? It's been a while so I may be off on the version number.
I remember the day I switched my default browser to IE. I felt very sad and let down. It was probably in early to mid '99. It didn't have anything to do with web standards though. The problem for me was that it would crash or hang frequently. Sometimes requiring a reboot. For someone who likes to leave there desktop up for days at a time to preserve my workspace, it was deal breaker.
I don't know if the Netscape developers/qa team got sloppy or if MS was messing with the API to create the instability, all I knew is my preference for NN died.
Thankfully, the long delay after open sourcing the code didn't prevent Mozilla Firefox from being released and it's now my default browser again.
I saw no mention of how they are using Windows or if they are using Windows at all. Under the recommendations, they made no recommendations to stop using Windows at all.
Actually, it looks like one of these FAA system (Traffic Flow Management System) is running RedHat Enterprise Linux on the servers and workstations with an Oracle backend. The system was migrated from HP/UX to Linux.
No. Not like that. You left out the important part of the sentence "but it allowed ads to be shown on MS sites or through their ad network." Which from what I have heard doesn't seem to favor Microsoft served ads over other advertising networks.
Slashdot Mirror
They're going to have to wear a black leotard with whit ping pong balls on it as they jump around....
and in many cases, people don't want to see that.
I to love how people have no problem with police videotaping you/preventing you from videotaping with an excuse of terrorism just to cover their asses while everyone panics over a google streetview of a public area.
The police don't (usually) put it on the internet where everyone can see it.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but it is different.
The War on Terror(TM) has become the War on Photographers.
I think more people are just aware of it now and the authorities are less tolerant of it.
A couple of years before 9/11 I went out to take some night shots with a tripod and old TLR camera. It was pretty late, area was dead. In one area a cop came up to me and told me I couldn't take photos there. There was a sign but I missed it. It wasn't a big deal and I just left. I think they might have seen me taking photos in other areas earlier.
Post 9/11 things might have been a bit different such as more thorough questioning. The area was fairly close to the WTC. You could actually see it from where I was taking photos but that's not what I was taking photos of. A number of officers in the area were lost in the attacks.
If I did it again, I don't know that they'd call SWAT. I think that's just more the small town places that got a bunch of new equipment as a result of the home land security spending and needing any excuse to justify it. I wouldn't have been surprised or upset if they asked for my ID or detained me for questioning.
As for the tripod thing, there are a lot of places you can't use a tripod without a permit and that was even before the war on terror. It can be a safety issue because you're blocking the path.
You can't just take pictures where you want either. I understand the frustration of being hassled taking photos in a public place when there is no posted warning, but taking a photo of two strangers filling a cash machine with money in a private store is not exactly the same thing.
That makes sense. The oil industry is already established and making tons in profits. They should be able to fund their own development.
Emerging technologies on the other hand sometimes need a boost.
I'm pro biofuels, but how are they going to know what technology will pan out?
Fuel Cell cars are still 15 years away. Bio fuels, and bio/petroleum mixes are here now as well as hybrids and electric cars that are coming out again.
8 Billion to buy Sun out from under Oracle.
The rest for the antitrust lawsuits.
In something Sun released about the merger recently, there were three parties interested in buying Sun. In addition to IBM and Oracle there was one more that isn't known and didn't make an offer. It was assumed to be HP, and that's most likely the case, but it would be interesting (and horrible) if it turned out to be MS.
There are some stockholders that will launch a class action given any opportunity and mergers are good opportunities.
I think Sun's technology and business can turn around but they would need a lot of capital to do it. With the economic downturn, loss of revenue, and difficulty they'll have raising cash, it would be tough.
If the stockholders thought the company was worth a lot more than $9.50 they should have bought when it was around $4 then when they get the proceeds from the merger buy Oracle stock.
The class action suits are non news.
Even IBM won't buy SAP and I think it's unlikely that MS would. Or at least I think it would be a bad idea.
SAP doesn't look like a good buy. SAP stockholders would want a premium over it's current share price and at 48 billion bucks it doesn't look attractive for a company that only has only $16 billion in annual revenue.
It's not a big discount like other companies, such as Sun, that really took a beating recently in the market.
The Oracle/Sun deal might hurt SAP but with their revenue and profit it's still good to be SAP, but with their market cap, it's not good to buy SAP in my opinion.
I don't think it's as cut and dry as you say. There are obviously differeing opinions. If there weren't we wouldn't need judges. We would all just know what was right and what was wrong.
The police didn't obtain a warrant, the prosecutor didn't have a problem presenting that evidence at trial and the judge allowed it into evidence. I'm assuming defense counsel opposed it.
IT's not just in your area. Milk and bread (as well as eggs, fruits and vegetables) are usually things that sell out fastest in most areas when there is an event that might keep people from going shopping.
Milk and bread are staples that almost everyone reading this has in their home.
They are also perishable so you're not likely to have a reserve in case of emergency like you might have steaks and chicken in the freezer or cans of tuna and tomato paste in the pantry. In fact things like milk, bread and eggs are things people buy more frequently than just their weekly shopping trips because they only buy enough to last a short while. That's why these items seem to do well at gas station convenience stores that people can pick up while their filling upa fter work.
Stores usually only stock a little more than a days supply of these items in most cases unlike something like Frosted Flakes that has a longer shelf life.
People don't buy 10x as much bread and milk before a storm. It's usually around twice as much but the stores don't have twice as much on hand so it looks like people are hoarding bread and milk.
I think you're not understanding things. People don't want to drive or are worried about being able to buy during/after a storm as someone mentioned earlier.
The problem isn't that people are buying 10x more milk, it's that 10x more people came into the store. Or whatever the multiple is.
When there's a storm more people will go shopping in the day before the storm than after the storm. The market gets products delivered daily and sells it slowly throughout the week but when there's a rush to get emergency provisions, they get more people into the store than a usual day because people plan on not shopping for the next few days.
You have to understand the "ABC is dying/dead" mentality.
It doesn't matter how much market share you have, only that your market share is decreasing and some smaller technology which they favor has an increasing market share.
IE is dying because Firefox use is increasing in the market and IE is declining.
Unix is dying because Linux is growing and Unix is not.
It doesn't matter that at the rate of decline it would take 20 or more years for whatever it is to die. Or that the decline may be arrested. Saying something is dying is usually misinformed or more likely spreading FUD to hasten the decline.
Old technology with 80% market share drops down to 79% marketshare and new cool technology jumps up from 2% to 3% market share and old technology is declared dying. Here's a perfect example.
How does a rover on Mars cost 4 million per year to operate?
Long distance charges.
I don't think the $4million number is accurate anyway. It's likely higher. Last year they were going to cut the budget by $4 million and turn off one of the rovers but then changed their minds. IT looks like the budget for the program is actually $20 million according to this article.
Hmm... maybe they didn't change their minds and it's not really stuck.
daisy chained in my basement
That's just so wrong.
Newegg has Hard Drive Protectors http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990010
I've just stored drives in anti-static bags for some of my test systems when I upgrade drives and want to keep the old drives for messing around with. Haven't run into any problems.
They should get Opportunity to come by and fire it's grappling hook to tow it out with its winch.
What?!?! We launched a bunch of space robots to an unknown, rocky terrain without a grappling hook and winch?
They probably didn't include the lasers either. Good thing the people that carved the face are long dead.
The best thing SGI ever sold though (back in 1997) ran Solaris. Too bad they didn't realize what they were selling.
I mean SGI is or was an icon in high-end graphics and workstations, not a web-hosting company.
Rackable isn't a web hosting company, you are likely confusing them with RackSpace.
Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.
They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.
The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.
In 2007 Rackable's 4 biggest clients were Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.
The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.
The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.
I don't know about you, I've never once seriously considered clicking on an ad.
I have, lots of times, and even wind up making a purchase from time to time after looking into things a bit more, but if it wasn't for advertising I might not have known about the product or sometimes even a particular merchant that offered a better deal.
Some advertising is bad, but on higher quality sites, you tend to have higher quality ads. There are exceptions to that though, but for the most part it seems to be true.
I don't know why people are so against advertising. When it's done right it can be beneficial. Not only to the publisher, but also to the viewer. Without advertising revenue, a lot of sites wouldn't be able to stay online. The problem is the sites that just exist to post ads.
Think of it like the Degree sponsorship of Eureka. Some people were put off by it, but I think they handled it well. How many times do you hear of some letter writing campaign to restart a canceled sci-fi series? They usually don't go anywhere. What Eureka did was smart, their keeping money coming into the series so it doesn't get canceled. Networks don't care how many fans like a series, they care how many advertisers like advertising on the series and while Degree and Eureka may seem like an odd choice, think of the huge market of sci fi fans that could definitely smell better.
By the way, I'm a fan of Eureka and I'm a fan of Degree. Not because of the show though but because out of nowhere I got a free sample of one of their deodorants and it smelled almost exactly like one of my favorite colognes. I could probably find something similar in another brand but since they sponsor a show I like I don't mind giving them my business.
The problem is that an operating system is just something you need to get the application to work on the hardware you choose. It might be a small part of the problem. If you decide to create your own custom distro for the purpose of running your application you're going to possibly run into problems getting your application stack to work correctly on top of it or may have problems getting support.
The OS they chose was RHEL and you can infer some of the rest of the stack from the requirements.
Looks like they went with an SOA architecture on top of a J2EE stack with an Oracle backend using Eclipse as the development platform.
I don't know why these stories turn into OS flame wars. It's like blaming the spark plug for poor engine performance. The OS is probably adding vulnerabilities (Don't know of any OS that doesn't have listed vulnerabilities) but you have to look at the whole stack. Any individual part of the stack could be fine on it's own, but in combination may create other problems. On top of that, this system isn't just a combination of off the shelf components, there is a lot of coding involved and for all we know that's where most of the issues may be.
Very true.
The first browser I ever used was Mosaic on a Solaris workstation. I used it to preview the first site I ever built. After that, on Windows, Netscape Navigator became my browser of choice until about 4.6? It's been a while so I may be off on the version number.
I remember the day I switched my default browser to IE. I felt very sad and let down. It was probably in early to mid '99. It didn't have anything to do with web standards though. The problem for me was that it would crash or hang frequently. Sometimes requiring a reboot. For someone who likes to leave there desktop up for days at a time to preserve my workspace, it was deal breaker.
I don't know if the Netscape developers/qa team got sloppy or if MS was messing with the API to create the instability, all I knew is my preference for NN died.
Thankfully, the long delay after open sourcing the code didn't prevent Mozilla Firefox from being released and it's now my default browser again.
I saw no mention of how they are using Windows or if they are using Windows at all. Under the recommendations, they made no recommendations to stop using Windows at all.
Actually, it looks like one of these FAA system (Traffic Flow Management System) is running RedHat Enterprise Linux on the servers and workstations with an Oracle backend. The system was migrated from HP/UX to Linux.
Oh, you mean like InPrivate Filtering?
No. Not like that. You left out the important part of the sentence "but it allowed ads to be shown on MS sites or through their ad network." Which from what I have heard doesn't seem to favor Microsoft served ads over other advertising networks.
When VALinux release a browser or a plugin that I use then I won't mind it displaying only its own ads.
Imagine MS put in ad blocking in a release of IE but it allowed ads to be shown on MS sites or through their ad network.
You don't mind because of who they are, not because of what they are doing. If you don't understand why that's wrong, I don't know what to say.
Regardless, the proposal sucks.
A good portion of ad revenue comes from non-regular visitors. People who land on the site read a page, then find an interesting ad to click off on.
Regular visitors tend to become ad blind. Giving regular visitors the option to see ads isn't a big plus for webmasters.