But Hubble is about 100 miles higher than the international space station which makes a misstep dangerous. That's a long way to fall. And on the way down they have to worry about a missing tool bag.
The EVA may not be too unusual compared to other EVAs, but an EVA isn't a walk in the park.
In addition, the preparation is very difficult. If you forget something or break something along the way, you can't run to Home Depot and if you drop a screw good luck getting those fat gloves in tight spaces isn't easy. With this being the last contact anyone will have with hubble until it crashes on their house, this is a very important mission.
Just because something similar has been done before doesn't make it any less difficult or impressive.
Here's the big problem I see with Wolfram Alpha. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what it looks like, they are assimilating data over the internet and using it in their AI to answer users' questions.
What is the benefit people that create that information to allow Wolfram Alpha to index it? It doesn't look like it will drive traffic or revenue to their sites. If anything it will take away.
I have a feeling Wolfram Alpha crawlers will be blocked by many webmasters.
I am admittedly not a mathematician, but I do have a good understanding of economics and finance, and I am not seeing how a pattern found in prime numbers could have any application to stock market analysis. Where is the interaction between prime numbers and the praxeology of buying and selling securities?
By understanding the patterns in prime numbers you can learn to spot them and avoid the sub-prime mortgage backed securities. Duh.
Elsevier is probably doing the same for Google's IP addresses, and maybe Google even pays for it.
That still violates Google's policies. The problem with cloaked pages is that google doesn't always catch them right away. It helps if people report stuff like that.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
If the law changes and requires software to offer a warranty then the GPL will be vulnerable. Even if the GPL didn't include that statement, a court could invalidated it because a contract that breaks the law is not legally binding.
Changing a license for a big project isn't always easy.
This will most likely hurt companies like Redhat, Canonical, Novell and other corporate open source contributors because they will have to stand by their products and you're bound to get a few cases where they have to pay up.
Chrome is missing a lot to make it feel like a full app.
The mouse wheel must not be implemented using the native features because it doesn't follow the settings in the mouse driver. I also can't click the mouse wheel to scroll quickly.
Find sucks compared to find in other browsers. Especially if you're trying to find text in a text area.
No Google toolbar and some other important plug ins.
That said, I wind up using it every day and am making this comment with it. I have firefox running as my main browser but I have chrome open and use that to do some quick browsing because of the way chrome separates tabs into different processes. When firefox picks up this model and does a better job of releasing memory back to the OS, I'll stop using Chrome.
Apparently people overseas are more interested in cash instead of hookers, blow, pot, strippers, rounds of golf, expensive lunches with multiple $300 bottles of wine, sports tickets, customer parties, info sessions at exclusive resorts or 5 star hotel like vendor facilities, and so on and so forth.
For those of you that won't RTFA, this may not be a big deal and is fairly common.
For example, in 2007, networking provider Alcatel-Lucent agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle charges that Lucent Technologies, before it was bought by Alcatel SA in 2006, illegally paid for hundreds of trips for Chinese officials to win contracts. In a separate case, IBM Corp. agreed in 2000 to pay $300,000 to settle allegations that its Argentina subsidiary was involved in bribing officials of a government-owned bank to win a contract to upgrade the bank's computer systems.
The argument wasn't that Oracle wouldn't do something stupid like kill or sell off the SPARC hardware division. It was that people that thought that was going to happen were stupid to think so.
Especially after hearing what oracle had said directly about the merger from day one.
Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"
Patents expire, but a lot of harm can be done until they do and IBM is no stranger to playing the patent extortion game.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
And whenever something about IBM and patents comes up someone giddy over how IBM fought SCO in court says something stupid like it's just a defensive patent. IBM has a long history of being offensive with patents.
IBM set the standard for patent licensing in the early '90s. While Big Blue was in a steep decline, veteran employee and lawyer Marshall Phelps got the company to raise the fees it charged others for piggybacking on its ubiquitous technology. Phelps recalls that incoming CEO Lou Gerstner was skeptical of the program; at RJR Nabisco, he had been involved in a patent dispute with Procter & Gamble over soft chocolate-chip cookies. Phelps changed Gerstner's mind by cracking open an IBM PC and showing him all the components that came from other companies. In other words: hardware companies were interdependent, and as the biggest fish in the sea, IBM should exploit that fact. A few years, later IBM was raking in $2 billion a year of almost pure profit from licensing revenue.
Come to think of it, I might be confusing it with the TYAN SMDC card or possibly with something I read about the N1 provisioning system. It's been a while since I looked into it.
Looking at the ILOM configuration docs the only reference I found about "same subnet" is that you need to be on a computer that has "access to the same subnet as the ILOM" which isn't the same as having to be on the same subnet.
My mistake. Somewhere along the lines I read a forum post that some of Sun's motherboards were manufactured by TYAN and used the same IPMI card. Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read online.
But why would you want to spent a lot of money, effort, and rack space for features that we give you for free?
With the ILOM card you need to have your controller on the same subnet. That's fine if you have the servers in your own data center or have a rack full of servers. If you're just colocating a couple of servers, you'd have to have an extra server to act as the controller on the same subnet that you can access remotely.
It doesn't make sense to have one of the working servers act as the controller because if it goes down, you can't access it. So you need a dedicated box.
In the servers where the ILOM hardware is a daughterboard, it looks like a regular IPMI slot.
The IP KVM IPMI cards aren't cheap but for a small server setup at a remote facility, it winds up being cheaper to get the card than it is to get another server and pay for the extra rackspace. Especially in the long run.
The ILOM card seems worthless to people that rent rackspace by the U and not by the cabinet or cage unless I'm mistaken.
Once you have more than 4 or 5 servers it makes sense to add your own switch and controller server because you'd be spending a lot for an extra port for each server to accommodate the IPMI network interface.
Sun has a lot of products and projects. Ellison can't go around saying which one is safe and which isn't. I'm sure not all will survive but with all the speculation that Oracle was going to kill SPARC or sell off the hardware business, he had to say something. Especially with IBM trying to capitalize by scaring people about the future of SPARC hardware and Solaris.
I could see Oracle selling off the x86 business more than SPARC but I don't think it's likely. Oracle has a number of customers on Linux and Windows on x86 hardware. The concept of offering a complete solution from "application to disk" should also apply and I would think that blade systems would work well with Oracle RAC.
With Sun's x86 and blade system revenue growing, it seems like a good thing to keep.
If that part of the business does get sold, hope it doesn't get sold to HP. I think it would be a smart buy for Dell though and work out better for you. That's if they decide to sell. I've never worked at Sun or Oracle though so I don't know.
By the way. I was curious. Do other IPMI cards work instead of the ILOM card like the Raritan IP KVM card?
The issue of storage was covered in the PDF linked in the summary.
There has been a lot of speculation in the press that Oracle is going to sell some or all of Sunâ(TM)s hardware businesses. From your previous answers it certainly seems like you are keeping the SPARC Solaris systems business. Are you keeping the disk storage and tape backup businesses? Yes, definitely. We believe the best user experience is when all the pieces in the system are engineered to work together. Disk storage and tape backup are critical components in highperformance, high-reliability, high-security database systems. So, we plan to design and deliver those pieces too. Clearly many Sun customers choose disk and tape systems from other vendors. Thatâ(TM)s what open systems are all about: providing customers with a choice. But Oracle expects to continue competing in both the disk and tape storage businesses after we buy Sun.
While Solaris/SPARC is no longer Oracle's recommended platform, it's still the platform customers choose more than other platforms according to Ellison on the conf call when the merger was announced.
Solaris/x86 is the combo that seems to be lagging.
Right now, Oracle 11g 11.1.0.7.0 download seems to only be available for Windows on Oracle's site.
Interesting choice of the word blitzkrieg to characterize the marketing campaign. I think it's very appropriate.
Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy, disregarding the flanks and trying to avoid the strong points.
It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks.
Lets not forget who won the war.
IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them
I don't think Sun has ever manufactured chips. They just design them and outsource the manufacturing. Ellison says they will continue to do that in the PDF linked in the summary.
We aren't talking about me slapping a bumper sticker on a car that I don't own, we are talking about the guy who created this website slapping an Oracle logo on a story about OpenOffice.org. Presumably he must think are somehow associated now.
And what does Oracle have to do with OpenOffice.org? They don't own Sun. They don't own OpenOffice.org they don't manage the project. The only connection is that sometime in the future they will purchase Sun and will own OpenOffice.org if the sale is finalized, which it hasn't yet.
Why are you having a hard time understanding the concept? Are you they type of guy that goes to the market, eats the food you're going to buy and then give the cashier the empty wrappers?
Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought.
I said highest margin products, meaning not software or services. The SPARC line of servers is higher margin than their x86 line.
Sun's services revenue has grown to be almost what their products revenue is over the years. While they're not as big as IBM Global Services, the combination of Sun's services and Oracle's will give them a leg up.
Slashdot Mirror
It could be worse. They could make it a subscription service for webmasters to participate in this or something like this.
That would definitely cross some moral, if not legal line.
Should be a 'W' not an 'H'
It seems stupid.
noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking
If the publisher desired their ads not to be seen, they wouldn't have put them on the site.
But Hubble is about 100 miles higher than the international space station which makes a misstep dangerous. That's a long way to fall. And on the way down they have to worry about a missing tool bag.
The EVA may not be too unusual compared to other EVAs, but an EVA isn't a walk in the park.
In addition, the preparation is very difficult. If you forget something or break something along the way, you can't run to Home Depot and if you drop a screw good luck getting those fat gloves in tight spaces isn't easy. With this being the last contact anyone will have with hubble until it crashes on their house, this is a very important mission.
Just because something similar has been done before doesn't make it any less difficult or impressive.
Here's the big problem I see with Wolfram Alpha. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what it looks like, they are assimilating data over the internet and using it in their AI to answer users' questions.
What is the benefit people that create that information to allow Wolfram Alpha to index it? It doesn't look like it will drive traffic or revenue to their sites. If anything it will take away.
I have a feeling Wolfram Alpha crawlers will be blocked by many webmasters.
I am admittedly not a mathematician, but I do have a good understanding of economics and finance, and I am not seeing how a pattern found in prime numbers could have any application to stock market analysis. Where is the interaction between prime numbers and the praxeology of buying and selling securities?
By understanding the patterns in prime numbers you can learn to spot them and avoid the sub-prime mortgage backed securities. Duh.
Elsevier is probably doing the same for Google's IP addresses, and maybe Google even pays for it.
That still violates Google's policies. The problem with cloaked pages is that google doesn't always catch them right away. It helps if people report stuff like that.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
If the law changes and requires software to offer a warranty then the GPL will be vulnerable. Even if the GPL didn't include that statement, a court could invalidated it because a contract that breaks the law is not legally binding.
Changing a license for a big project isn't always easy.
This will most likely hurt companies like Redhat, Canonical, Novell and other corporate open source contributors because they will have to stand by their products and you're bound to get a few cases where they have to pay up.
But it's not a law yet.
Chrome is missing a lot to make it feel like a full app.
The mouse wheel must not be implemented using the native features because it doesn't follow the settings in the mouse driver. I also can't click the mouse wheel to scroll quickly.
Find sucks compared to find in other browsers. Especially if you're trying to find text in a text area.
No Google toolbar and some other important plug ins.
That said, I wind up using it every day and am making this comment with it. I have firefox running as my main browser but I have chrome open and use that to do some quick browsing because of the way chrome separates tabs into different processes. When firefox picks up this model and does a better job of releasing memory back to the OS, I'll stop using Chrome.
Apparently people overseas are more interested in cash instead of hookers, blow, pot, strippers, rounds of golf, expensive lunches with multiple $300 bottles of wine, sports tickets, customer parties, info sessions at exclusive resorts or 5 star hotel like vendor facilities, and so on and so forth.
Or maybe in addition to the above.
Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"
How did I miss that sarcasm? :(
For those of you that won't RTFA, this may not be a big deal and is fairly common.
For example, in 2007, networking provider Alcatel-Lucent agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle charges that Lucent Technologies, before it was bought by Alcatel SA in 2006, illegally paid for hundreds of trips for Chinese officials to win contracts. In a separate case, IBM Corp. agreed in 2000 to pay $300,000 to settle allegations that its Argentina subsidiary was involved in bribing officials of a government-owned bank to win a contract to upgrade the bank's computer systems.
The argument wasn't that Oracle wouldn't do something stupid like kill or sell off the SPARC hardware division. It was that people that thought that was going to happen were stupid to think so.
Especially after hearing what oracle had said directly about the merger from day one.
Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"
Patents expire, but a lot of harm can be done until they do and IBM is no stranger to playing the patent extortion game.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
IBM even tried to patent the patent protection racket.
And whenever something about IBM and patents comes up someone giddy over how IBM fought SCO in court says something stupid like it's just a defensive patent. IBM has a long history of being offensive with patents.
IBM set the standard for patent licensing in the early '90s. While Big Blue was in a steep decline, veteran employee and lawyer Marshall Phelps got the company to raise the fees it charged others for piggybacking on its ubiquitous technology. Phelps recalls that incoming CEO Lou Gerstner was skeptical of the program; at RJR Nabisco, he had been involved in a patent dispute with Procter & Gamble over soft chocolate-chip cookies. Phelps changed Gerstner's mind by cracking open an IBM PC and showing him all the components that came from other companies. In other words: hardware companies were interdependent, and as the biggest fish in the sea, IBM should exploit that fact. A few years, later IBM was raking in $2 billion a year of almost pure profit from licensing revenue.
Come to think of it, I might be confusing it with the TYAN SMDC card or possibly with something I read about the N1 provisioning system. It's been a while since I looked into it.
Looking at the ILOM configuration docs the only reference I found about "same subnet" is that you need to be on a computer that has "access to the same subnet as the ILOM" which isn't the same as having to be on the same subnet.
My mistake. Somewhere along the lines I read a forum post that some of Sun's motherboards were manufactured by TYAN and used the same IPMI card. Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read online.
But why would you want to spent a lot of money, effort, and rack space for features that we give you for free?
With the ILOM card you need to have your controller on the same subnet. That's fine if you have the servers in your own data center or have a rack full of servers. If you're just colocating a couple of servers, you'd have to have an extra server to act as the controller on the same subnet that you can access remotely.
It doesn't make sense to have one of the working servers act as the controller because if it goes down, you can't access it. So you need a dedicated box.
In the servers where the ILOM hardware is a daughterboard, it looks like a regular IPMI slot.
The IP KVM IPMI cards aren't cheap but for a small server setup at a remote facility, it winds up being cheaper to get the card than it is to get another server and pay for the extra rackspace. Especially in the long run.
The ILOM card seems worthless to people that rent rackspace by the U and not by the cabinet or cage unless I'm mistaken.
Once you have more than 4 or 5 servers it makes sense to add your own switch and controller server because you'd be spending a lot for an extra port for each server to accommodate the IPMI network interface.
Actually.. what's concerning to me is that David Stewart hasn't put out a new OpenSolaris on Intel video in a couple of months.
Sun has a lot of products and projects. Ellison can't go around saying which one is safe and which isn't. I'm sure not all will survive but with all the speculation that Oracle was going to kill SPARC or sell off the hardware business, he had to say something. Especially with IBM trying to capitalize by scaring people about the future of SPARC hardware and Solaris.
I could see Oracle selling off the x86 business more than SPARC but I don't think it's likely. Oracle has a number of customers on Linux and Windows on x86 hardware. The concept of offering a complete solution from "application to disk" should also apply and I would think that blade systems would work well with Oracle RAC.
With Sun's x86 and blade system revenue growing, it seems like a good thing to keep.
If that part of the business does get sold, hope it doesn't get sold to HP. I think it would be a smart buy for Dell though and work out better for you. That's if they decide to sell. I've never worked at Sun or Oracle though so I don't know.
By the way. I was curious. Do other IPMI cards work instead of the ILOM card like the Raritan IP KVM card?
The issue of storage was covered in the PDF linked in the summary.
There has been a lot of speculation in the press that
Oracle is going to sell some or all of Sunâ(TM)s hardware
businesses. From your previous answers it certainly
seems like you are keeping the SPARC Solaris systems
business. Are you keeping the disk storage and tape
backup businesses?
Yes, definitely. We believe the best user experience is when
all the pieces in the system are engineered to work together.
Disk storage and tape backup are critical components in highperformance,
high-reliability, high-security database systems.
So, we plan to design and deliver those pieces too. Clearly many
Sun customers choose disk and tape systems from other vendors.
Thatâ(TM)s what open systems are all about: providing customers
with a choice. But Oracle expects to continue competing in
both the disk and tape storage businesses after we buy Sun.
Odd, since Jobs had left the company (ie. been fired) by then.
That's why it was safe to start talking about it.
Sun isn't Oracle's recommended software platform.
While Solaris/SPARC is no longer Oracle's recommended platform, it's still the platform customers choose more than other platforms according to Ellison on the conf call when the merger was announced.
Solaris/x86 is the combo that seems to be lagging.
Right now, Oracle 11g 11.1.0.7.0 download seems to only be available for Windows on Oracle's site.
I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?
Interesting choice of the word blitzkrieg to characterize the marketing campaign. I think it's very appropriate.
Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy, disregarding the flanks and trying to avoid the strong points.
It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks.
Lets not forget who won the war.
IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them
I don't think Sun has ever manufactured chips. They just design them and outsource the manufacturing. Ellison says they will continue to do that in the PDF linked in the summary.
We aren't talking about me slapping a bumper sticker on a car that I don't own, we are talking about the guy who created this website slapping an Oracle logo on a story about OpenOffice.org. Presumably he must think are somehow associated now.
And what does Oracle have to do with OpenOffice.org? They don't own Sun. They don't own OpenOffice.org they don't manage the project. The only connection is that sometime in the future they will purchase Sun and will own OpenOffice.org if the sale is finalized, which it hasn't yet.
Why are you having a hard time understanding the concept? Are you they type of guy that goes to the market, eats the food you're going to buy and then give the cashier the empty wrappers?
Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought.
I said highest margin products, meaning not software or services. The SPARC line of servers is higher margin than their x86 line.
Sun's services revenue has grown to be almost what their products revenue is over the years. While they're not as big as IBM Global Services, the combination of Sun's services and Oracle's will give them a leg up.