The current new wave in naval thinking is that missiles and aircraft have rendered major warships with guns and defensive systems obsolete.
The Soviets were the first ones to realize that a $500,000 50' cutter (say a Namchuka class missile corvette) with a big anti-ship missile could disable or sink a $20 billion aircraft carrier. Of course a heavy machine gun could sink the ship, but Soviet sailors were just conscripts anyway.
As unsexy as it is, they have a point. A modern aircraft carrier battle groups is vulnerable to attack and has to stay as far as 500 miles offshore to avoid shore-based missile batteries. A single SCUD missile with a big nuke could disable an entire US CVG.
Quake, Halo, Everquest, Savage, Street Fighter, and many other games are multiplayer. Snowboarding, Rock-Climbing, Mountain Biking, and many other sports are solo. Multiplayer gaming should be encouraged at all times, but it generally doesn't need to be. People flock to multiplayer games.
These games are also almost entirely anonymous. The value of team sports is that it is a forum to develop leadership skills and social ability.
Running around Quake 2 shooting shit doesn't do any of that.
I've seen IBM proposals for a huge groupware solution that ran on the Linux mainframe that was very price competitive to running a traditional server farm. I think that the biggest competitive advantages in some places is that you can use mainframe IT staff to do some administration and you save a ton of money in overhead costs (power, rackspace, etc) over a gaggle of servers in racks.
In the case of the Sun servers I was talking about, we were using Sun 5000 series servers that offered some hot-swapability and were a hell of alot more reliable than what was available in the PC world circa 1996 or 1997. (Can't remember exactly)
And guess what, those blue haired old ladies probally made $25/k a year and were able to do whatever needed to be done because they had WELL WRITTEN DOCUMENTATION available to them.
Contrast this to a "modern" IT shop, where a few super-smart programmers string shit together and never bother to document a single thing.
The real problem is probally the remapping a complex hierarchical data model and recoding whatever tools they use. Not too many people really understand the old stuff and its probally cheaper to keep the old sytem shrugging around.
A buddy of mine develops vertical apps for public utilities.
One of his customers, a munipical water district, is running a two-node AS/400 cluster since 1989. The machine does payroll, billing and accounts and other financial crap. The machines have no external network connections (other than terminal emulators via serial) and have been up since 1993, when they were physically moved to another building.
He's been trying to migrate these folks to the newer, Unix-based system, but the customers are happy with their uber-reliable and utterly obsolete (in technical terms) AS/400.
If you're running an internet message board, who gives a shit.
If you're processing payroll for 2 million employees, scheduling flights or computing interest for 500,000 customers, you don't have time to swap motherboards.
When I worked on reservation systems, we were able to justify the purchase of $500,000 Sun servers because with 2,000 call agents at $8.00/hr, the cost of downtime is around $300/minute.
For busier contracts, there could be as many as 12,000 users on the system both inside and outside of our organization. An hour of unplanned downtime could cost thousands or even millions of dollars.
I know of a major IBM customer who pays about $3,000/yr per server in maintainance for over 200 Pentium-75 servers scattered over dozens of branch offices.
Good point. But if you want to play with the big boys and develop complex IT systems, you need to have the cash or the ability to quickly correct fuckups.
my commute is over 25 miles one way, with an average rush-hour time of 40 minutes by freeway
I used to live in a farm community about 25 miles south of Albany, NY... which is a city where "traffic" is defined as a long traffic light.
It took me about 30-40 minutes to get to work via country road and avenue, depending on the route that I took and red lights that I encountered.
Now I live closer and my commute is like 7 minutes. It takes longer to walk from the parking garage to my office than to get to the garage. (The trip via public transit is about 50 minutes)
40 minutes is an average commute. If that really poses a serious problem for you, figure out a way to work from home.
The mortgage deduction is the last deduction. Once upon a time ALL interest and lease payments were tax deductible. The theory was that since interest is a profit for the lender, the lender's income would be taxed at the corporate level... and taxing you would be double taxation.
What drove up housing costs was allowing multiple incomes to be used as a basis of a mortgage payment. Back in the day, only a single income per household could be used to back a mortgage loan.
Once the women's lib people had banking regulations changed, the income of working mothers could be applied towards a mortgage. Of course, as more women worked outside the home over time, this inflated household buying power and sent more people seeking out larger and larger homes.
I've never been to Massachusetts, but I did go to Central London and found that the rents were high there.
Of course, it's silly to compare Wyoming to Vermont, especially since the lack of taxes or labor unions make gas prices in New Jersey cheaper (and with full service too)
And even better, Google will be able to search your email to find out about your habits, friends (what do you think the point of Orkut is?), and who you purchase from!
What a great thing! Now Google can target advertising to college students who have redeemed free Pepsi iTunes and shop at Amazon.com who live in medium sized cities!
They're gaining social networking experience via Orkut and their computers will be reading your email, so targeted advertising will work great.
It's hilarious that/. privacy idiots have no problem with Google because they are so "cool". Personally, I don't trust my personal communications to a company as good at data mining as Google.
If you have a sensible reason for building from source, (ie. not "just because") modify source packages and build them on demand or build your own packages.
The problem with the tabbed Google interface was that too many clickable elements were in the same space. I frequently found myself clicking on something other than the "Groups" tag by mistake, for example.
No breakthrough transportation technologies in 150 years?
Hmm... In the last 150 or so years a few pretty revolutionary technologies have been devised: - Steam engine - Turbine - Internal Combustion engine
The fastest method of inland transport in the early 1800's were canal or riverboats that were either sail or mule-driven.
You also need to think outside of the box a bit. Nobody is going to haul iron from space to earth. Other elements like gold or giant diamonds that are too valuable for industrial applications suddenly become affordable.
Re:I'll say it first
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I certainly hope that his Physics research isn't as sloppy as the google news search that he ran as the basis of this article.
For one thing, the $1 trillion figure cited is an widely acknowledged misquote made (and retracted) by an AP reporter. Ten minutes of fact-checking would have revealed that.
Slashdot Mirror
The current new wave in naval thinking is that missiles and aircraft have rendered major warships with guns and defensive systems obsolete.
The Soviets were the first ones to realize that a $500,000 50' cutter (say a Namchuka class missile corvette) with a big anti-ship missile could disable or sink a $20 billion aircraft carrier. Of course a heavy machine gun could sink the ship, but Soviet sailors were just conscripts anyway.
As unsexy as it is, they have a point. A modern aircraft carrier battle groups is vulnerable to attack and has to stay as far as 500 miles offshore to avoid shore-based missile batteries. A single SCUD missile with a big nuke could disable an entire US CVG.
These games are also almost entirely anonymous. The value of team sports is that it is a forum to develop leadership skills and social ability.
Running around Quake 2 shooting shit doesn't do any of that.
I've seen IBM proposals for a huge groupware solution that ran on the Linux mainframe that was very price competitive to running a traditional server farm. I think that the biggest competitive advantages in some places is that you can use mainframe IT staff to do some administration and you save a ton of money in overhead costs (power, rackspace, etc) over a gaggle of servers in racks.
In the case of the Sun servers I was talking about, we were using Sun 5000 series servers that offered some hot-swapability and were a hell of alot more reliable than what was available in the PC world circa 1996 or 1997. (Can't remember exactly)
And guess what, those blue haired old ladies probally made $25/k a year and were able to do whatever needed to be done because they had WELL WRITTEN DOCUMENTATION available to them.
Contrast this to a "modern" IT shop, where a few super-smart programmers string shit together and never bother to document a single thing.
The real problem is probally the remapping a complex hierarchical data model and recoding whatever tools they use. Not too many people really understand the old stuff and its probally cheaper to keep the old sytem shrugging around.
A buddy of mine develops vertical apps for public utilities.
One of his customers, a munipical water district, is running a two-node AS/400 cluster since 1989. The machine does payroll, billing and accounts and other financial crap. The machines have no external network connections (other than terminal emulators via serial) and have been up since 1993, when they were physically moved to another building.
He's been trying to migrate these folks to the newer, Unix-based system, but the customers are happy with their uber-reliable and utterly obsolete (in technical terms) AS/400.
It depends on what you are doing.
If you're running an internet message board, who gives a shit.
If you're processing payroll for 2 million employees, scheduling flights or computing interest for 500,000 customers, you don't have time to swap motherboards.
When I worked on reservation systems, we were able to justify the purchase of $500,000 Sun servers because with 2,000 call agents at $8.00/hr, the cost of downtime is around $300/minute.
For busier contracts, there could be as many as 12,000 users on the system both inside and outside of our organization. An hour of unplanned downtime could cost thousands or even millions of dollars.
Everyone whom I've ever met who was a tape jockey/mainframe operator described the job as one of the best periods of their lives.
Prepend the word "useful" before "data".
Where do you think tax, banking, airline and similar data is kept?
Case in point:
I know of a major IBM customer who pays about $3,000/yr per server in maintainance for over 200 Pentium-75 servers scattered over dozens of branch offices.
Good point. But if you want to play with the big boys and develop complex IT systems, you need to have the cash or the ability to quickly correct fuckups.
Forget about a mean boss. Dumb underlings are 10x worse.
Backup software doesn't suck, people who implement backup software suck. Universally.
I've probally seen two good deployments of backup software, one was IBM TSM/ADSM and the other Legato.
#1 problem with backups:
Nobody tests/attempts/documents a restore.
I used to live in a farm community about 25 miles south of Albany, NY... which is a city where "traffic" is defined as a long traffic light.
It took me about 30-40 minutes to get to work via country road and avenue, depending on the route that I took and red lights that I encountered.
Now I live closer and my commute is like 7 minutes. It takes longer to walk from the parking garage to my office than to get to the garage. (The trip via public transit is about 50 minutes)
40 minutes is an average commute. If that really poses a serious problem for you, figure out a way to work from home.
The mortgage deduction is the last deduction. Once upon a time ALL interest and lease payments were tax deductible. The theory was that since interest is a profit for the lender, the lender's income would be taxed at the corporate level... and taxing you would be double taxation.
What drove up housing costs was allowing multiple incomes to be used as a basis of a mortgage payment. Back in the day, only a single income per household could be used to back a mortgage loan.
Once the women's lib people had banking regulations changed, the income of working mothers could be applied towards a mortgage. Of course, as more women worked outside the home over time, this inflated household buying power and sent more people seeking out larger and larger homes.
I've never been to Massachusetts, but I did go to Central London and found that the rents were high there.
Of course, it's silly to compare Wyoming to Vermont, especially since the lack of taxes or labor unions make gas prices in New Jersey cheaper (and with full service too)
And even better, Google will be able to search your email to find out about your habits, friends (what do you think the point of Orkut is?), and who you purchase from!
What a great thing! Now Google can target advertising to college students who have redeemed free Pepsi iTunes and shop at Amazon.com who live in medium sized cities!
What a revolution!
They are going to be making a shitload of money.
/. privacy idiots have no problem with Google because they are so "cool". Personally, I don't trust my personal communications to a company as good at data mining as Google.
They're gaining social networking experience via Orkut and their computers will be reading your email, so targeted advertising will work great.
It's hilarious that
If you have a sensible reason for building from source, (ie. not "just because") modify source packages and build them on demand or build your own packages.
Why would a /. editor include a mailto link to an OpenBSD developer in a story?
The poor bastard is going to be flooded with spam ad crap now.
Most people aren't idiots with 5 TVs & Tivos, so they would save money.
If your life is so empty that you need multiple Tivos, your problems extend well beyond cable rates.
The problem with the tabbed Google interface was that too many clickable elements were in the same space. I frequently found myself clicking on something other than the "Groups" tag by mistake, for example.
Dude, it's sarcasm.
Apple and Linux fanboys go crazy when you criticize their religion.
No breakthrough transportation technologies in 150 years?
Hmm... In the last 150 or so years a few pretty revolutionary technologies have been devised:
- Steam engine
- Turbine
- Internal Combustion engine
The fastest method of inland transport in the early 1800's were canal or riverboats that were either sail or mule-driven.
You also need to think outside of the box a bit. Nobody is going to haul iron from space to earth. Other elements like gold or giant diamonds that are too valuable for industrial applications suddenly become affordable.
I certainly hope that his Physics research isn't as sloppy as the google news search that he ran as the basis of this article.
For one thing, the $1 trillion figure cited is an widely acknowledged misquote made (and retracted) by an AP reporter. Ten minutes of fact-checking would have revealed that.