It seems requiring a certain level of technical panache from vendors does not harm productivity, marketability, or profitability.
Who'd a thunk it!
On the other claw, in both businesses where I know for a fact that this has happened, there were many vendors clamoring for consideration. A less desireable client or a vendor with a monopoly might change the picture...
I'll take that bet... as long as we both start with dry gas tanks!
I drove my Prius at 60mph for several miles with an completely empty tank at one point. That was two years ago, and it doesn't seem to have taken any damage.
So the guy who points out that the fire from the Hindenburg was bright, like an aluminum fire, (hydrogen burns pale blue, almost invisibly) made the mistake of using shuttle motors and thermite as examples of things that also burn brightly because they contain aluminum.
And thus a generation of slashbots were born, yammering "the Hindenberg was painted with rocket fuel" and "no, it was painted with thermite"!.
The skin of the Hindenburg was cotton doped with aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate. That is NOT rocket fuel. Rocket fuel produces IMPULSE. Burning metallic aero dopes do not produce any significant impulse and thus are NOT USEFUL AS ROCKET PROPELLANTS. Therefore the Hindenburg's skin does not have the ESSENTIAL property of rocket fuel, therefore the Hindenberg was not "painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel".
Similarly, aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate on a cotton substrate cannot be used to weld steel. Thus it also lacks the ESSENTIAL properties of thermite.
I think I'm going to have to turn this one over the Babs Mikkelson.
Um, nobody's suggesting your dad stop reading Email sent to his AOL address.
If your dad has a vanity domain such as www.blugu64sdad.com he could easily have all mail sent to Dad@blugu64sdad.com automagically forwarded to his AOL account.
Then his business card would be much more impressive to anyone reading it, "Wow! He's internet-savvy, he has his own domain!" or "Wow! He's successful, he has an IT department to set up and run a domain for him!" instead of "Gee, he's got a lowbrow email addie, he must be technically incompetent".
Sorry to say but the real world actually does work like that. I know of several cases where vendors lost a sale simply for having an AOL or HotMail address.
Real thermite is aluminum powder and iron oxide, basement thermite is ground-up beer cans and rust (iron dioxide not iron oxide)... harder to ignite and not as effective, but still fun.
Aircraft dope is another thing entirely. Not rocket fuel, not thermite, but aircraft dope.
Aircraft dope is insanely flammable to start with, and when you add aluminum it burns very very brightly - and there's the only valid comparison to thermite and aluminum-based solid rocket fuels, which also burn brightly due to their aluminum content.
The Hindenberg's skin was cotton doped with aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate. Not at all unusual for the time period.
If the Hindenberg was "in effect,...coated with solid rocket fuel" then you are "in effect" the Atlantic Ocean.
After all, you contain somewhat salty, slighty brackish water. So you must be the Atlantic, right? Lie down, I want to ride a surfboard over you a few times!
I used work for Thiokol and tested solid fuel rocket motors for a living. There is little or no reasonable comparison to be made between solid rocket fuel and the metallized dopants on the Hindenberg's skin (which were commonly used on other aircraft of the period, incidentally). The burn characteristics and stability of solid fuels are extremely different from metallic wing dope.
Ten minutes of research will show you that the page you linked is bullshit. Those people do not have a very firm grip on basic Aristotelian logic, or reality for that matter.... just because something has a few elements in common with something else DOESN'T MAKE IT THE SAME THING!
Oh, I thought this was a reference to the ident protocol, already supported by sendmail, which would solve the problem in exactly the same way if firewall admins were willing to open up their AUTH ports and run identd daemons.
Nah, this is an elaboration of the same thing but on the email port instead.
Slap a few new buzzwords on it as it goes through the door, of course... PKI! WMD! Cryptographic keys! 40% more trunk room! Compassionately Conservative (Less liberal than the leading brand)! Microsoft Windows Compatible!
Now it's sure to sell. Won't stink up the room as bad as old dead identd I hope.
I get stuff from "surplus asset sales"
on
Surplus Lab Equipment?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
E. I. duPont Nemours Inc. has been dismantling itself for over a decade in a futile attempt to survive truly excrable management. The place is more Dilbert than Dilbert, basically, and so they are reduced to chopping off body parts and selling them on the street. They are not alone, either!
I got an 8-foot steel worktable wired for 120 VAC with 8 explosion-proof outlets and a 4-inch thick oil-impregnated maple butcherblock top for $20. (I got a propane-powered flamethrower and a softball-sized rheostat thrown in for free.) That was when they busted up the (awewsome) Wilmington Shops, which was where EDL used to have their custom robotics built.
Some guy got a vertical end mill that was less than five years old for $400 with all the bells and whistles. It cost him more to ship it and install it than he paid for it.
Google for "surplus asset sales" to find this sort of thing. For instance look at http://www.advancedlink.com/index.html which is a similar outfit in Woburn, MA (just outside Boston, basically. Good scallops.) or http://www.michaelfox.com/us/ which is a big-time reseller.
Or just wander around until you find the warehouse area with the lowest rent in your immediate neighborhood, that's where you will find the real deals!
Would you like a helping of straw man to go with that ad hominem? You chose the label lazy, not the poster you accuse. He stated that laziness might be one explanation for your complaints... read the post.
But personally I think you are a whining dittohead.
It scales just fine, more applicants, more searches, more fees.
Unless you are planning on increasing fees as the bulk of prior art to be searched increases, no it doesn't. However, if you do intend to "pass the cost on to the consumer", congratulations, you've just created a system that punishes the self-funded independent inventor even more than the current system does.
The design documentation of the Internet is globally available... wait for it.. on the Internet!
If you examine it, you will notice that
a) DNS is not part of the original design
b) as designed, it WON'T survive a nuke
c) nobody intended it to.
What it *was* designed for was a limited fault tolerance - based on the idea that phone companies suck and the guy that runs the next node is an idiot who can't be trusted to tie his own shoes.
Turns out they were right about those last two points, incidentally.
I agree. I also think that gravity SHOULD modify itself locally whenever I drop something breakable.
The amount of data that would have to be examined to implement your "SHOULD" grows exponentially with time. Or, to put it in geek terms, tax-funded prior art searches don't scale.
I guess your self-righteousness is slighly more feasible than mine, though. Damn gravity!!!
And you guys thought descending the moon's gravity well and coming back up was a stupid way to get to Mars!
See, we'll just deficit-spend a bajillion dollars in tax credits to Halliburton, to build our mighty Helium-3 mines on the moon (staffed with happy prisoners from the efficient corporate-franchised prison system) and the Mars rockets will have all the fuel they need right there on the lunar surface.
Although your comment can be applied to most forms of christianity, there are plenty of religions that don't require any specific belief system.
Read "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. Read the Unitarian Universalist Principles. Read "Introduction to Bhuddism". Read the Tao Te Ching and the Lieh Tzu. If you make it through all that and you aren't either convinced or sound asleep, read George Fraser's "Golden Bough" (which is a sure-fire soporific).
Saint Augustine's argument from faith is not the only Christian "proof" either. It's just the most popular these days. Some people prefer the famous ontological proof from Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" (which is a hell of a lot more readable than Fraser, Graves, or Augustine).
*** read the sources *** instead of asking some slashbot you don't even know to tell you what Descartes wrote!
There are many varieties of Bhuddhism. Some of them are religions (Tibetan Bhuddism comes to mind).
Bhuddhist philosophy (which is not a religion) does not require you believe anything without proof - in fact it encourages you to take a personal journey in order to prove to yourself, on your own terms, that the Eightfold Path does in fact lead to enlightenment.
You might be familiar with the Rinzai teaching, "If you meet the Bhuddha in the road, kill him!" or the more commonly used "the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon". Both of these are exhortations to the listener to directly experience Bhuddhism (in this case Zen flavor) rather than placing faith in teachers or teachings.
Naw, I wasn't. I meant solar panels in general, not specifically Astropower ones. However, see my post in reply.
Incidentally, the most common reasons for solar panels failing include the ones you mentioned. Extreme weather (atypical, 100-year hailstorms for example, and hurricanes) are probably the #1 cause of unrepairable damage... solar panels typically stay in use (though often with multiple owners) until they are physically destroyed.
I recommend Home Power Magazine if you are interested in this sort of thing - they are the experts in real-world implementation.
Solar panels are usually in service longer than 20 years. People don't throw them out when they get better ones; they keep using them, or else sell them in the back pages of "Home Power" and "Mother Jones" magazines.
Even the older, crappier solar panels that degrade to 40% efficiency in less than 20 years are still in service. Only physical damage (such as the dreaded hard-driven baseball) permanently takes them out of productive use.
Some of the earliest large-scale solar plants used focusing mirrors to concentrate sunlight on panels that were not designed for this, and those panels were severely damaged and now produce only a fraction of their original rated power. Nonetheless, they were eventually sold and are still in use all over the USA. You can occasionally see them for sale at solar swap meets to this day.
The company has only been around for barely 20 years. They could not have been mass producing recycled panels immediately thereafter. So I don't see how you can make a claim of "they usually last longer than 20 years."
Hey, that's a good call. I hate it when IBM tells me their memory chips last a hundred years.
However, in this case you don't have all the information. Astropower *was* producing these panels immediately, and in fact the same type of panels were in production *before* the company officially existed.
Dr. Alan Barnett, the founder of AstroPower, was a researcher at the University of Delaware's solar energy lab. That lab built "Solar One", the first modern solar-electric house, in the early 1970s. The building still stands, incidentally (on the outskirts of Newark, Delaware near where the old Continental Can works once stood) but it has since been stripped of its solar panels and now has only passive solar design.
Barnett invented the processes Astropower uses and I'm pretty sure there are 20-year-old panels of his design still in use today.
Despite all this, when I wrote that post, I meant that modern solar panels in general last longer than 20 years - I didn't mean Astropower's panels specifically. The fact that my statement was correct was just pure luck, not research or knowledge!
First of all, the Clean Air Act has little or nothing to do with Clinton. I don't understand the Clinton obsession, even though I never voted for him, and I never would, so let's just move on rather than get into an anti-Clinton diatribe. You are welcome to believe that Bill and Hillary are responsible for all evil in the world, they are no friends of mine.
As for the EPA, yes, absolutely they are charged with enforcing the Clean Air Act and an appropriate target for your ire.
But your example of Dynegy is a total bust. That company could easily sell off a tiny fraction of their enormous existing holdings, use the money to clean up their filth, and get return on investment in less than five years. Hell, they could have spent the money they wasted on their abortive attempt at getting into the communications industry to do it. The fines the EPA is charging, added to the additional costs of their outmoded and inefficient operations, make it economically unsound for them *not* to upgrade their systems.
It appears that Dynegy is a corrupt and badly managed organization, and that's why they pollute, and that's why the EPA fines them.
Now that it's legal for them to do partial upgrades, they still won't do it. They have the same attitude towards clean air that you have - that it's all a "hippy" plot, and real americans are perfectly willing to trade their children's health for cheap electricity.
...reason that coal plants spew acid rain is because your precious liberal idiot farms like the EPA, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club have consistently prevented old plants from upgrading...
Support that statement, please. My stockholder reports don't say anything like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Why yes, and doing quite well.
It seems requiring a certain level of technical panache from vendors does not harm productivity, marketability, or profitability.
Who'd a thunk it!
On the other claw, in both businesses where I know for a fact that this has happened, there were many vendors clamoring for consideration. A less desireable client or a vendor with a monopoly might change the picture...
I'll take that bet... as long as we both start with dry gas tanks!
I drove my Prius at 60mph for several miles with an completely empty tank at one point. That was two years ago, and it doesn't seem to have taken any damage.
So the guy who points out that the fire from the Hindenburg was bright, like an aluminum fire, (hydrogen burns pale blue, almost invisibly) made the mistake of using shuttle motors and thermite as examples of things that also burn brightly because they contain aluminum.
And thus a generation of slashbots were born, yammering "the Hindenberg was painted with rocket fuel" and "no, it was painted with thermite"!.
The skin of the Hindenburg was cotton doped with aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate. That is NOT rocket fuel. Rocket fuel produces IMPULSE. Burning metallic aero dopes do not produce any significant impulse and thus are NOT USEFUL AS ROCKET PROPELLANTS. Therefore the Hindenburg's skin does not have the ESSENTIAL property of rocket fuel, therefore the Hindenberg was not "painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel".
Similarly, aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate on a cotton substrate cannot be used to weld steel. Thus it also lacks the ESSENTIAL properties of thermite.
I think I'm going to have to turn this one over the Babs Mikkelson.
Um, nobody's suggesting your dad stop reading Email sent to his AOL address.
If your dad has a vanity domain such as www.blugu64sdad.com he could easily have all mail sent to Dad@blugu64sdad.com automagically forwarded to his AOL account.
Then his business card would be much more impressive to anyone reading it, "Wow! He's internet-savvy, he has his own domain!" or "Wow! He's successful, he has an IT department to set up and run a domain for him!" instead of "Gee, he's got a lowbrow email addie, he must be technically incompetent".
Sorry to say but the real world actually does work like that. I know of several cases where vendors lost a sale simply for having an AOL or HotMail address.
It was metallic aircraft dope.
Real thermite is aluminum powder and iron oxide, basement thermite is ground-up beer cans and rust (iron dioxide not iron oxide)... harder to ignite and not as effective, but still fun.
Aircraft dope is another thing entirely. Not rocket fuel, not thermite, but aircraft dope.
Aircraft dope is insanely flammable to start with, and when you add aluminum it burns very very brightly - and there's the only valid comparison to thermite and aluminum-based solid rocket fuels, which also burn brightly due to their aluminum content.
The Hindenberg's skin was cotton doped with aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate. Not at all unusual for the time period.
If the Hindenberg was "in effect, ...coated with solid rocket fuel" then you are "in effect" the Atlantic Ocean.
After all, you contain somewhat salty, slighty brackish water. So you must be the Atlantic, right? Lie down, I want to ride a surfboard over you a few times!
I used work for Thiokol and tested solid fuel rocket motors for a living. There is little or no reasonable comparison to be made between solid rocket fuel and the metallized dopants on the Hindenberg's skin (which were commonly used on other aircraft of the period, incidentally). The burn characteristics and stability of solid fuels are extremely different from metallic wing dope.
Ten minutes of research will show you that the page you linked is bullshit. Those people do not have a very firm grip on basic Aristotelian logic, or reality for that matter.... just because something has a few elements in common with something else DOESN'T MAKE IT THE SAME THING!
usermode linux runs linux on linux.
So, the answer is yes.
Oh, I thought this was a reference to the ident protocol, already supported by sendmail, which would solve the problem in exactly the same way if firewall admins were willing to open up their AUTH ports and run identd daemons.
Nah, this is an elaboration of the same thing but on the email port instead.
Slap a few new buzzwords on it as it goes through the door, of course... PKI! WMD! Cryptographic keys! 40% more trunk room! Compassionately Conservative (Less liberal than the leading brand)! Microsoft Windows Compatible!
Now it's sure to sell. Won't stink up the room as bad as old dead identd I hope.
These scientists have only two asses!!!
They are of no use to me.
Now this is more like it...
E. I. duPont Nemours Inc. has been dismantling itself for over a decade in a futile attempt to survive truly excrable management. The place is more Dilbert than Dilbert, basically, and so they are reduced to chopping off body parts and selling them on the street. They are not alone, either!
I got an 8-foot steel worktable wired for 120 VAC with 8 explosion-proof outlets and a 4-inch thick oil-impregnated maple butcherblock top for $20. (I got a propane-powered flamethrower and a softball-sized rheostat thrown in for free.) That was when they busted up the (awewsome) Wilmington Shops, which was where EDL used to have their custom robotics built.
Some guy got a vertical end mill that was less than five years old for $400 with all the bells and whistles. It cost him more to ship it and install it than he paid for it.
Google for "surplus asset sales" to find this sort of thing. For instance look at http://www.advancedlink.com/index.html
which is a similar outfit in Woburn, MA (just outside Boston, basically. Good scallops.) or http://www.michaelfox.com/us/ which is a big-time reseller.
Or just wander around until you find the warehouse area with the lowest rent in your immediate neighborhood, that's where you will find the real deals!
Open Source software gets critical fixes within days or hours because anyone running the code can potentially fix the problem.
As Micro$oft's ratio of programmers to supported lines of code decreases, their time to fix bugs will increase.
To put it another way, bloat breeds torpor.
Would you like a helping of straw man to go with that ad hominem? You chose the label lazy, not the poster you accuse. He stated that laziness might be one explanation for your complaints... read the post.
But personally I think you are a whining dittohead.
The design documentation of the Internet is globally available... wait for it.. on the Internet!
If you examine it, you will notice that
a) DNS is not part of the original design
b) as designed, it WON'T survive a nuke
c) nobody intended it to.
What it *was* designed for was a limited fault tolerance - based on the idea that phone companies suck and the guy that runs the next node is an idiot who can't be trusted to tie his own shoes.
Turns out they were right about those last two points, incidentally.
I agree. I also think that gravity SHOULD modify itself locally whenever I drop something breakable.
The amount of data that would have to be examined to implement your "SHOULD" grows exponentially with time. Or, to put it in geek terms, tax-funded prior art searches don't scale.
I guess your self-righteousness is slighly more feasible than mine, though. Damn gravity!!!
Are you trying to imply that there are conservatives or maybe even neo-conservatives among the slashdot press corps?
Why, next you'll be saying there are racist trolls! Have you no decency?
And you guys thought descending the moon's gravity well and coming back up was a stupid way to get to Mars!
See, we'll just deficit-spend a bajillion dollars in tax credits to Halliburton, to build our mighty Helium-3 mines on the moon (staffed with happy prisoners from the efficient corporate-franchised prison system) and the Mars rockets will have all the fuel they need right there on the lunar surface.
The man's a visionary, I tell you!
Although your comment can be applied to most forms of christianity, there are plenty of religions that don't require any specific belief system.
Read "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. Read the Unitarian Universalist Principles. Read "Introduction to Bhuddism". Read the Tao Te Ching and the Lieh Tzu. If you make it through all that and you aren't either convinced or sound asleep, read George Fraser's "Golden Bough" (which is a sure-fire soporific).
Saint Augustine's argument from faith is not the only Christian "proof" either. It's just the most popular these days. Some people prefer the famous ontological proof from Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" (which is a hell of a lot more readable than Fraser, Graves, or Augustine).
*** read the sources *** instead of asking some slashbot you don't even know to tell you what Descartes wrote!
There are many varieties of Bhuddhism. Some of them are religions (Tibetan Bhuddism comes to mind).
Bhuddhist philosophy (which is not a religion) does not require you believe anything without proof - in fact it encourages you to take a personal journey in order to prove to yourself, on your own terms, that the Eightfold Path does in fact lead to enlightenment.
You might be familiar with the Rinzai teaching, "If you meet the Bhuddha in the road, kill him!" or the more commonly used "the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon". Both of these are exhortations to the listener to directly experience Bhuddhism (in this case Zen flavor) rather than placing faith in teachers or teachings.
Look in CVS HEAD. It'll be in the nightly compile, too.
Next time read the damn patch log!
Naw, I wasn't. I meant solar panels in general, not specifically Astropower ones. However, see my post in reply.
Incidentally, the most common reasons for solar panels failing include the ones you mentioned. Extreme weather (atypical, 100-year hailstorms for example, and hurricanes) are probably the #1 cause of unrepairable damage... solar panels typically stay in use (though often with multiple owners) until they are physically destroyed.
I recommend Home Power Magazine if you are interested in this sort of thing - they are the experts in real-world implementation.
Solar panels are usually in service longer than 20 years. People don't throw them out when they get better ones; they keep using them, or else sell them in the back pages of "Home Power" and "Mother Jones" magazines.
Even the older, crappier solar panels that degrade to 40% efficiency in less than 20 years are still in service. Only physical damage (such as the dreaded hard-driven baseball) permanently takes them out of productive use.
Some of the earliest large-scale solar plants used focusing mirrors to concentrate sunlight on panels that were not designed for this, and those panels were severely damaged and now produce only a fraction of their original rated power. Nonetheless, they were eventually sold and are still in use all over the USA. You can occasionally see them for sale at solar swap meets to this day.
However, in this case you don't have all the information. Astropower *was* producing these panels immediately, and in fact the same type of panels were in production *before* the company officially existed.
Dr. Alan Barnett, the founder of AstroPower, was a researcher at the University of Delaware's solar energy lab. That lab built "Solar One", the first modern solar-electric house, in the early 1970s. The building still stands, incidentally (on the outskirts of Newark, Delaware near where the old Continental Can works once stood) but it has since been stripped of its solar panels and now has only passive solar design.
Barnett invented the processes Astropower uses and I'm pretty sure there are 20-year-old panels of his design still in use today.
Despite all this, when I wrote that post, I meant that modern solar panels in general last longer than 20 years - I didn't mean Astropower's panels specifically. The fact that my statement was correct was just pure luck, not research or knowledge!
First of all, the Clean Air Act has little or nothing to do with Clinton. I don't understand the Clinton obsession, even though I never voted for him, and I never would, so let's just move on rather than get into an anti-Clinton diatribe. You are welcome to believe that Bill and Hillary are responsible for all evil in the world, they are no friends of mine.
As for the EPA, yes, absolutely they are charged with enforcing the Clean Air Act and an appropriate target for your ire.
But your example of Dynegy is a total bust. That company could easily sell off a tiny fraction of their enormous existing holdings, use the money to clean up their filth, and get return on investment in less than five years. Hell, they could have spent the money they wasted on their abortive attempt at getting into the communications industry to do it. The fines the EPA is charging, added to the additional costs of their outmoded and inefficient operations, make it economically unsound for them *not* to upgrade their systems.
It appears that Dynegy is a corrupt and badly managed organization, and that's why they pollute, and that's why the EPA fines them.
Now that it's legal for them to do partial upgrades, they still won't do it. They have the same attitude towards clean air that you have - that it's all a "hippy" plot, and real americans are perfectly willing to trade their children's health for cheap electricity.