Actually, while you're right about Wal-Mart being worse than Target, K-Mart, etc, the points you raise are effects of their policy to keep prices low, not the -cause- of why they have low prices.
Wal-Mart's practices are there because they need them to retain their low price leadership in an economy that has adapted to WM's first round of low price wars.
You also don't mention the biggest key to WM's forced price lowering... they are such a larger part of the economy that they are able to -force- manufacturers to sell at lower prices to WM that to other retailers. They have literally caused companies to move offices from across the country to Arkansas so that the companies can more efficiently "negotiate with" (read: cower in front of) WM. WM sets the hours and often has unofficial hiring authority over these Arkansan satellite offices. NO other retailer has ever had that kind of power.
However, even that is not the -cause-. The cause is the willingness of most Americans to sacrifice their community retailers and specialty chains for lower prices and "all under one roof" shopping, even if as a whole the selection of products is lower. That short sighted view in the end causes the community as a whole to lose value (monetarily as well as socially), making Wal-Mart the ONLY long-term winner in that situation.
The answer is as simple as telling an overweight person to diet and exercise... people have to stop low-price gouging and shopping at the cheapest possible place. And it is just as hard to -convince- a person of that as it is to convince them to stick to a diet.
BTW, yes it is true that K-Mart and Target -started- the concepts on a nationwide scale. However they never abuse their position (possibly because they never attained a position as strong as WM) like WM has.
Economics will eventually right the situation, but the damage that will have been done by that point (which won't occur until WM has completely exhausted it's growth capacity AND product development has stagnated due to lack of competition) will be horrendous to everyone's standard of living.
BTW, if you shop at "Sam's", you shop at Wal-Mart. Got a Costco or similar non-Sam's wholesaler? Go there.
"In reality" should be "In your reality". Perceieved reality is relative.
I regularly play older games on my PS2, and we'd be alot more interested in a GameCube if it could run my wife's N64 carts. I never owned a PS1, so backward compatibility was a big selling point, since there were game on the PS1 that I really wanted to play (I spent about 90% of my PS2 time for the first few months playing FFIX, which was a PS1 game and better than FFX in alot of aspects).
Of the few people I know with a PS2 (most of my friends are not console buffs), they also play PS1 games regularly. Probably 25% of the time.
The same is probably said by Audiophiles about Overclockers or people who own Hondarods. Ever have an extreme hobby that didn't make sense to other people? If yes, then welcome to the world of idiocy.
It only performed better in some circumstances, the compiler wasn't able to handle everything people wanted it to compile (though it did get most things without tweaking) and the x86 chips were starting to skyrocket in speed about that time (P3 was coming out and within a year or two was well past 1GHz along with known plans for the P4 to hit 2+ GHz) while Alpha was having a hard time keeping up on clock speeds.
And yeah, I know clock speeds aren't everything, but I'm not the market in general and you did ask whatever happened to it:)
JDS isn't targetted at "most end users". It is being developed as a distribution that fits well into the enterprise. The admin who runs the JDS desktops may very well remove those items from the menus anyway.
Additionally, remember that is a 1.0 product. It's going to be a couple of years before it is fully matured.
Also, Sun has a vested interest in a) showcasing the Java desktop apps and b) giving some meaning to the "Java" in Java Desktop System.
Yeah, and the world would be so much better if IBM had had a stranglehold on the PC from the get-go. Gates is a pain, but at least he took a few years (basically a decade) before he had a monopoly. IBM having DOS would have let it stay a monopoly. We -might- all be using Macs, but we might also be in the same boat or worse if IBM was still that type of player. Something tells me Big Blue's Linux support would never have happened.
I spent a few days debugging a linux box with modem problems (which turned out to partially be PBX problems) a few years ago (it was running Red Hat 3). It was the system that provided flight information to the LED displays throughout Huntsville International (Alabama, not Texas). The computer was in a closet below the main terminal. The room the closet was in happened to be the power plant and had all of the blowers, electricals, turbines, etc. Louder than hell and I was too stupid to bring a jacket or ear plugs the first day and forgot them once a couple days later.
Luckily it was my last few days with the company I worked for and I got to drop the problem in someone else's lap before it boondoggled.
When not working from home nowadays my 2nd most common work environment is in airports waiting for planes. Sometimes I'd rather be in the turbine closet than stuffed in with a few thousand folk, so I guess the closet wasn't -that- bad, but boy did it suck.
it could be many years before we ever see any new Star Trek outside of books.
ST is a series that passed through the innovative to the self-deprecating to the nostalgic. It's called a cycle. It happens to any set of shows that last long enough.
In today's environment where only a small number of scifi shows is allowed to exist with a real budget, I'm not going to be missing ST too much since it will leave a void. I would much rather see 13 episodes of a show like Firefly than any number of ST:Enterprise episodes. Plus I would much rather that the money going into ST:Enterprise were available for a new show to come into it's own.
Besides, we already know what the next 150 years after ST:E are going to come to. Earth survives, the Federation comes along, etc etc.
This is not a comment against ST:E's acting or writing. It has been at least on par with previous ST series. It is the series itself that has been worn out.
Greetings... alot of the folks who were counselors at the time I was there were also from MTSU (where I ended up living next to for awhile, too, even though I never attended either college).
Didn't know they had a new centrifuge. Does it at least still hit 3G or is it further limited? For the kids that was the best thing about the old one... hitting the same theoretical weight you'd hit on a shuttle launch.
If they didn't build the gantry and they still don't have the funds to restore the real SV, where did the money for it go? Probably never know. I know the tech crash hurt, but it's been awhile and I'm guessing that with Bush's new take on NASA/Moon/Mars that the place will be hopping with kids and tourists again in a year which means they may not need the additional funds anyway (the profit margin on a Space Camp kid's attendance is very good).
BTW, if you ever call the HiWAAY crew, tell them Geoff says hi... I've been gone almost as long as I worked there so they may have a blank stare but if not give my regards.
When flying to the NE US regularly a couple of years ago Northwest was the most comfortable and courteous airline around. Definitely my flight of choice from Nashville -> Philly or Detroit. Don't know much about their home rep, but I definitely liked their flights.
My other choice was usually Delta (to the SE US) or American. Delta is about the rudest airline to fly and even though American has a policy to expand passenger space, I was always getting stuck on TINY American Eagle flights (kinda like now where I always get stuck on a Frontier commuter instead of their much hyped Airbus flights).
Point? Not much, haven't flown on NW for awhile now (I think my miles expire this year).
Why, if the rocket is owned by the U.S. Government (I believe the rocket is owned by NASA and leased to the center) and the Rocket Center, which is owned by the State of Alabama on U.S. ground (Marshall SFC / Redstone Arsenal), are they going to private sources for funding of this restoration? There is a little thing called taxes which are already diverted to the center.
Also, it is largely the Rocket Center's fault that things got so bad. I worked there for 2 years as a counselor about a decade ago and the condition of the exhibit then was the same as it is now (minus another 10 layers of paint and mildew/moss/etc). Guess what their idea of maintaining the exhibit was to go out every year and paint over the past year's mildew with a new layer of paint. Anyone who knows about paint, mold and mildew will realize what decades of overpainting will do. I'm sure that covering the exhibit with a simple structure like a tent-roof, while expensive, would have cost less than $5m when they first set up the exhibit, even counting for inflation since then, especially if they had leveraged their relationship with the army engineers on Redstone Arsenal.
Of course, the USSRC had very short-sighted management throughout the time I worked there as well as for at least a few years before and after I left. They continuously had smaller exhibits break down and their maintenance was horrible. They had great exhibits, but didn't do a good job of keeping them up.
Other examples? Sure:
* The simulator used for Space Camp (elementary age... older kids went to "Space Academy") when I was there was the oldest piece on the training center floor. I kid you not, it was so badly wired that it caught fire inside the electrical panels (the structure was hand-built and mostly wood and wires). No, not just once... but at least 3 times just while I had kids in it (and I watched one of literally dozens of teams most weeks). The answer was always to evacuate the kids, put out the fire, replace any bad wires, and open it back up for the next time. I'm not kidding... the place should have been shut down by the fire marshall and sued by parents. And yes, we brought this to the attention of management on a regular basis as did the maintenance staff.
* Most of the other rockets in the park have a similar problem and undergo the same painting "refresh". The difference is they are mostly upright and so it is not as visible (and they're alot smaller). Except for their shuttle mockup, which is going to have the same issues in a few years as the SV exhibit.
* The Shuttle tank usually has pennies and pencils stuck in it from kids tossing them into it. They usually clean them out about once a year. Not sure what the solution for this would be, but even a sign saying "hey, please don't deface this exhibit" would have been useful.
* The "centrifuge" exhibit/ride continuously broke down. It sometimes was down for a week or more. It was very popular, but instead of getting a real overhaul one year they just shut it down and scrapped it.
Additionally...
- Space Camp programs, during the years I was there, brought in a tidy profit. However, the museum was in such disrepair that it was a loss center. So, instead of Space Camp programs being able to expand and fix things properly, money was diverted to the museum to keep it afloat.
- During the years I was there it was standard practice to lay off everyone they could during the holiday months. While this is practical it also had the add bonus (to the center) of marking all of us as Seasonal employees. This meant that we didn't have to be paid benefits.
- Along with no benefits, even though some counselors had been there for years, there was also no overtime. Think that being scheduled for 80+ hours a week (a few of us worked 2 programs, and I know of at least 4 people including myself who -averaged- 80 hours in the summer and sometimes hit 100 hours
to clarify: Space camp is at the US Space and Rocket Center (not the other way around)... which has a space that was either leased or gifted from Marshall. Marshall itself is resting on Redstone arsenal. You're not wrong, but it should be clear that the Arsenal is the superset, Marshall the subset and the Rocket Center the individual organization.
Since I didn't give a version number, I meant the first Windows NT product.
While not a complete rewrite, it was much more of one than the example than the thread parent's example of XP as a rewrite, which was what I responded to.
The court should order SCO and IBM to both put their codes into blind escrow and then release the code from both to the legal team for each so that no funny business can go on =and= so that both sides have equal footing for making their cases. Same for any other participants who have been accused by SCO.
May not be standard procedure, but this is a rather odd case. It would definitely help both companies show to their customers that they are playing fair.
Additional code discovery could happen, but it should always be under view of the court.
Vote with your wallet, don't go see them. They can't make you spend what you aren't willing to pay.
It's not just Lucas that is ripping you off... for instance AMC has decided to up their ticket price to $9 from $7 soon. I'm sure they are responding to a rising cost for screening movies, but at some point the responsibility is on we the folk who pay the cost.
We are a small town with a very good community theater built in an old elementary school auditorium. We get alot of first-run movies in the middle of the run (at about 4-6 weeks after initial screening when the theaters are returning some of the extra copies before the run is over that they use to screen multiple auditoriums). Sure, we only get them for 2 nights, but we only have 1,500 people in the town. It costs us a whopping $5/ticket for a Friday or Saturday 7:30pm showing. Concessions only cost... well... cost. I get a soda and a box of candy or popcorn for $1.50 and they let you bring it in.
While not feasible for -all- communities, we're only 15 miles away from "real" theaters (although if you're gonna see a movie in this area it will be in Broomfield or Westminster where the theaters are much nicer) in Boulder, Colorado and we are able to do this so the screening contracts must not be too restrictive. Make it a non-profit co-op and see if you can lower the costs for your community while creating a neighborhood social center.
Or just wait for Netflix to get it. Either way, send a message that quality is better than quantity and low cost is worth a little wait.
Or if you're sure it will be a true disappointment, just don't go. EVERYONE got faked out by Episode 1, but if you also didn't like Ep2 and you -still- pay close to $10 for a ticket to Ep3... who's fault is it (and notice I'm leaving out the obligatory Ep4 jedi quote:).
Although in that case alot of the core OS was not a rewrite but was an adoption of another OS. The OP makes a point about network stack mistakes for instance, but OSX doesn't have to worry about that because it adopted one of the most robust stacks out there from BSD.
I'm not saying you're wrong about OSX being the "right" thing to do, but rather that the right thing that Apple did was to -not- attempt everything from the ground up.
That's one of the nice things about rewriting in today's world... you can use an open source solidly tested base and only recreate those things (like Darwin/Cocoa/etc) that you -need- without adding bugs everywhere else. Rewriting today is -far- safer than it was 5-10 years ago as long as you make intelligent selections to start from.
And, not a counter point to you but rather to the OP... IPv4 -> IPv6 is not a fair case for "rewriting" since you are talking standards and not code. MUCH of the IPv6 -code- is going to be adopted IPv4 code. The OP seems to be against re-architecting just as much as re-writing. Sometimes you -have- to start from scratch if you're going to be able to continue future development.
Compared to rewriting NT/XP into Longhorn will be, no. but compared to something like DOS 2 to DOS 3 (or was DOS 2 the rewrite?), it was a HUGE undertaking at the time. Creating a 32bit kernel from a 16bit one was pretty big news at the time.
When you rewrite a project, it is obvious it is going to cause new issues. If you are paying attention, you make use of experience and/or at least view the patches and changelogs of the product you're replacing so that you don't incorporate too many of the old problems along the way.
What I've read seems like most who worked on Netscape 2.x through Netscape 4.x would agree it was time for new architecture. It was probably time for new architecture in the Netscape 3.x timeframe but corporate pressures were high to produce quantity instead of quality. The codebase was just too rigid, especially in the rendering engine, to keep up with emerging standards.
The point is that -not- rewriting may be safer in the short term, but often guarrantees your product is going to have feature lock and eventually obsolescence....
A bit of a push off-topic, but I think this is a lesson I think TiVo may be about to learn the hard way as most of their new versions are only new feature releases, not updates to improve the core of how the products work, which has begun to limit the efficiency of their product (ie, as the drives in the product get larger, the inefficiency of how the TiVo handles it's database becomes more apparent) and what types of features that they can add. I'm not saying they need to scrap everything, but rewriting some of the underlying system is going to have to happen at some point.
XP and 2003 are fairly minor tweaks of Windows NT, but they are missing some of the back-compatibility that was in Windows 2000 if I remember right.
Windows NT was as close to a complete rewrite (of Windows 3.1) as Microsoft has attempted for a long time. Since then there were 2 main branches that derivated... Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95 -> 98 -> ME and Windows NT 3.5 -> NT4 -> 2000 -> XP -> 2003.
XP was in no way "from scratch".
Longhorn sounds like it will use a NT-derivative kernel, but may end up being close to a rewrite. One would hope so given the time they are going to take for it.
Fair enough, I knew my method was not statistically correct but errs on the conservative side. From what I read, your method would be quite a bit worse.
You can probably tell I hated economics and statistics:)
Worse than uninteresting, using 4 drives cuts your MTBF down by a HUGE amount.
Let's say that the MTBF for each of the drives they are using is 500,000 hours/drive (which is what is rated for the Maxtor Diamondmax16... I have no idea if that is the drive they used) . That means you averaged 2 failures for every million hours a hard drive is run (more on that later). The MTBF being 1,000,000 / 2.
If you have 4 drives, you have an average of 8 failures in 1,000,000 hours. That is 1,000,000/8 = 125,000 hours average MTBF.
Note that that doesn't include failure rates for any of the other components including the enclosure (physical USB port, etc).
BTW, how can a hard drive last 500,000 hours? Easy. Sell 100,000 hard drives. Run them for 10 hours. See how many fail.
What's that? You've had MANY hard drives die on you in the past and there is no way that ANY of them ran 500,000 hours (that's only 57 years)? How many of them were past there warranty? Did you report the failure back to the company? Remember the 1 out of 10 rule... only 1 out of 10 people who experience a product problem will actual report it to the manufacturer. The rest just switch brands or replace with the same brand.
That fits with my experience in the last few years, I am lucky to average 50,000 (1/10th of the supposed norm under these assumptions) hours on a drive before death. That is assuming I have an average life of 4 years on a drive. I have a few drives that have -never- died, but in general I have to replace the inexpensive IDE drives in various machines every approximately 7 years on average (meaning some last only a few months and others have run for over 5 years before being upgraded into obsolescence which I will count as a "0" for # of failures).
That would put the average "real" MTBF at 12,500 hours. That's less than 18 months. Combine that with the horrible time for backing up such a box, the overhead of running over USB/Firewire (which in turn runs over PCI instead of attaching directly to PCI) along with the flakiness that alot of USB/Firewire devices have, and you have a LOT of reasons to spend extra money to build it yourself.
I would much rather buy a case with a low-end CPU, room for more than 4 drives, and build a RAID system with a hot-spare or two. Cost more? Yeah... in the short term.
I use a v1.5 vest regularly while riding on my motorcycle. Doesn't feel cheap, just "slim" (as in thin material, but I like the microfiber)... it fits good under another jacket without the sleeves. I use it to hold an MP3 player, PDA, keys, wallet, etc.
I bought an XXL size and at the time I was an XXL and rather than being too big (as in "fat geek") it was too small around the middle. I've lost weight and now it fits perfectly so it would appear their big sizes are too small and their small sizes are too big. Other than that, no complaints.
Of course, I bought it for $79 on close-out, so I'm alot happier than I would be if I'd paid $199. It looks like the 3.0 is going closeout soon in favor of the 3.0+... so check the discount geek outlets (I found mine at a PDA shop online).
If I had a way to test-fit the 3.0 without having to pay to return it I would be very seriously considering upgrading. Especially if I could find a way to fit motorcycle armor into the leather version.
Yes, but there is a huge difference between being an enthusiast who dedicates time to the inner workings and a tinkerer who plays when they can or a child who doesn't have access to the more complicated stuff.
I'm a computer enthusiast... I don't expect my family to know how to patch the hotplug service for an unknown USB device or remount a drive in readonly mode to recover an accidentally deleted file. But it would be a shame if they didn't still have access to a computer just because they didn't know the nuts and bolts (or bytes and bits).
Besides, I never said it would be the end of civilization, I just wondered if it would still be available in a form that was less complicated than a build it yourselfer.
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Actually, while you're right about Wal-Mart being worse than Target, K-Mart, etc, the points you raise are effects of their policy to keep prices low, not the -cause- of why they have low prices.
... they are such a larger part of the economy that they are able to -force- manufacturers to sell at lower prices to WM that to other retailers. They have literally caused companies to move offices from across the country to Arkansas so that the companies can more efficiently "negotiate with" (read: cower in front of) WM. WM sets the hours and often has unofficial hiring authority over these Arkansan satellite offices. NO other retailer has ever had that kind of power.
... people have to stop low-price gouging and shopping at the cheapest possible place. And it is just as hard to -convince- a person of that as it is to convince them to stick to a diet.
Wal-Mart's practices are there because they need them to retain their low price leadership in an economy that has adapted to WM's first round of low price wars.
You also don't mention the biggest key to WM's forced price lowering
However, even that is not the -cause-. The cause is the willingness of most Americans to sacrifice their community retailers and specialty chains for lower prices and "all under one roof" shopping, even if as a whole the selection of products is lower. That short sighted view in the end causes the community as a whole to lose value (monetarily as well as socially), making Wal-Mart the ONLY long-term winner in that situation.
The answer is as simple as telling an overweight person to diet and exercise
BTW, yes it is true that K-Mart and Target -started- the concepts on a nationwide scale. However they never abuse their position (possibly because they never attained a position as strong as WM) like WM has.
Economics will eventually right the situation, but the damage that will have been done by that point (which won't occur until WM has completely exhausted it's growth capacity AND product development has stagnated due to lack of competition) will be horrendous to everyone's standard of living.
BTW, if you shop at "Sam's", you shop at Wal-Mart. Got a Costco or similar non-Sam's wholesaler? Go there.
"In reality" should be "In your reality". Perceieved reality is relative.
I regularly play older games on my PS2, and we'd be alot more interested in a GameCube if it could run my wife's N64 carts. I never owned a PS1, so backward compatibility was a big selling point, since there were game on the PS1 that I really wanted to play (I spent about 90% of my PS2 time for the first few months playing FFIX, which was a PS1 game and better than FFX in alot of aspects).
Of the few people I know with a PS2 (most of my friends are not console buffs), they also play PS1 games regularly. Probably 25% of the time.
The same is probably said by Audiophiles about Overclockers or people who own Hondarods. Ever have an extreme hobby that didn't make sense to other people? If yes, then welcome to the world of idiocy.
It only performed better in some circumstances, the compiler wasn't able to handle everything people wanted it to compile (though it did get most things without tweaking) and the x86 chips were starting to skyrocket in speed about that time (P3 was coming out and within a year or two was well past 1GHz along with known plans for the P4 to hit 2+ GHz) while Alpha was having a hard time keeping up on clock speeds.
:)
And yeah, I know clock speeds aren't everything, but I'm not the market in general and you did ask whatever happened to it
JDS isn't targetted at "most end users". It is being developed as a distribution that fits well into the enterprise. The admin who runs the JDS desktops may very well remove those items from the menus anyway.
Additionally, remember that is a 1.0 product. It's going to be a couple of years before it is fully matured.
Also, Sun has a vested interest in a) showcasing the Java desktop apps and b) giving some meaning to the "Java" in Java Desktop System.
Yeah, and the world would be so much better if IBM had had a stranglehold on the PC from the get-go. Gates is a pain, but at least he took a few years (basically a decade) before he had a monopoly. IBM having DOS would have let it stay a monopoly. We -might- all be using Macs, but we might also be in the same boat or worse if IBM was still that type of player. Something tells me Big Blue's Linux support would never have happened.
I spent a few days debugging a linux box with modem problems (which turned out to partially be PBX problems) a few years ago (it was running Red Hat 3). It was the system that provided flight information to the LED displays throughout Huntsville International (Alabama, not Texas). The computer was in a closet below the main terminal. The room the closet was in happened to be the power plant and had all of the blowers, electricals, turbines, etc. Louder than hell and I was too stupid to bring a jacket or ear plugs the first day and forgot them once a couple days later.
Luckily it was my last few days with the company I worked for and I got to drop the problem in someone else's lap before it boondoggled.
When not working from home nowadays my 2nd most common work environment is in airports waiting for planes. Sometimes I'd rather be in the turbine closet than stuffed in with a few thousand folk, so I guess the closet wasn't -that- bad, but boy did it suck.
ST is a series that passed through the innovative to the self-deprecating to the nostalgic. It's called a cycle. It happens to any set of shows that last long enough.
In today's environment where only a small number of scifi shows is allowed to exist with a real budget, I'm not going to be missing ST too much since it will leave a void. I would much rather see 13 episodes of a show like Firefly than any number of ST:Enterprise episodes. Plus I would much rather that the money going into ST:Enterprise were available for a new show to come into it's own.
Besides, we already know what the next 150 years after ST:E are going to come to. Earth survives, the Federation comes along, etc etc.
This is not a comment against ST:E's acting or writing. It has been at least on par with previous ST series. It is the series itself that has been worn out.
Greetings ... alot of the folks who were counselors at the time I was there were also from MTSU (where I ended up living next to for awhile, too, even though I never attended either college).
... hitting the same theoretical weight you'd hit on a shuttle launch.
... I've been gone almost as long as I worked there so they may have a blank stare but if not give my regards.
Didn't know they had a new centrifuge. Does it at least still hit 3G or is it further limited? For the kids that was the best thing about the old one
If they didn't build the gantry and they still don't have the funds to restore the real SV, where did the money for it go? Probably never know. I know the tech crash hurt, but it's been awhile and I'm guessing that with Bush's new take on NASA/Moon/Mars that the place will be hopping with kids and tourists again in a year which means they may not need the additional funds anyway (the profit margin on a Space Camp kid's attendance is very good).
BTW, if you ever call the HiWAAY crew, tell them Geoff says hi
When flying to the NE US regularly a couple of years ago Northwest was the most comfortable and courteous airline around. Definitely my flight of choice from Nashville -> Philly or Detroit. Don't know much about their home rep, but I definitely liked their flights.
My other choice was usually Delta (to the SE US) or American. Delta is about the rudest airline to fly and even though American has a policy to expand passenger space, I was always getting stuck on TINY American Eagle flights (kinda like now where I always get stuck on a Frontier commuter instead of their much hyped Airbus flights).
Point? Not much, haven't flown on NW for awhile now (I think my miles expire this year).
Why, if the rocket is owned by the U.S. Government (I believe the rocket is owned by NASA and leased to the center) and the Rocket Center, which is owned by the State of Alabama on U.S. ground (Marshall SFC / Redstone Arsenal), are they going to private sources for funding of this restoration? There is a little thing called taxes which are already diverted to the center.
... older kids went to "Space Academy") when I was there was the oldest piece on the training center floor. I kid you not, it was so badly wired that it caught fire inside the electrical panels (the structure was hand-built and mostly wood and wires). No, not just once ... but at least 3 times just while I had kids in it (and I watched one of literally dozens of teams most weeks). The answer was always to evacuate the kids, put out the fire, replace any bad wires, and open it back up for the next time. I'm not kidding ... the place should have been shut down by the fire marshall and sued by parents. And yes, we brought this to the attention of management on a regular basis as did the maintenance staff.
...
Also, it is largely the Rocket Center's fault that things got so bad. I worked there for 2 years as a counselor about a decade ago and the condition of the exhibit then was the same as it is now (minus another 10 layers of paint and mildew/moss/etc). Guess what their idea of maintaining the exhibit was to go out every year and paint over the past year's mildew with a new layer of paint. Anyone who knows about paint, mold and mildew will realize what decades of overpainting will do. I'm sure that covering the exhibit with a simple structure like a tent-roof, while expensive, would have cost less than $5m when they first set up the exhibit, even counting for inflation since then, especially if they had leveraged their relationship with the army engineers on Redstone Arsenal.
Of course, the USSRC had very short-sighted management throughout the time I worked there as well as for at least a few years before and after I left. They continuously had smaller exhibits break down and their maintenance was horrible. They had great exhibits, but didn't do a good job of keeping them up.
Other examples? Sure:
* The simulator used for Space Camp (elementary age
* Most of the other rockets in the park have a similar problem and undergo the same painting "refresh". The difference is they are mostly upright and so it is not as visible (and they're alot smaller). Except for their shuttle mockup, which is going to have the same issues in a few years as the SV exhibit.
* The Shuttle tank usually has pennies and pencils stuck in it from kids tossing them into it. They usually clean them out about once a year. Not sure what the solution for this would be, but even a sign saying "hey, please don't deface this exhibit" would have been useful.
* The "centrifuge" exhibit/ride continuously broke down. It sometimes was down for a week or more. It was very popular, but instead of getting a real overhaul one year they just shut it down and scrapped it.
Additionally
- Space Camp programs, during the years I was there, brought in a tidy profit. However, the museum was in such disrepair that it was a loss center. So, instead of Space Camp programs being able to expand and fix things properly, money was diverted to the museum to keep it afloat.
- During the years I was there it was standard practice to lay off everyone they could during the holiday months. While this is practical it also had the add bonus (to the center) of marking all of us as Seasonal employees. This meant that we didn't have to be paid benefits.
- Along with no benefits, even though some counselors had been there for years, there was also no overtime. Think that being scheduled for 80+ hours a week (a few of us worked 2 programs, and I know of at least 4 people including myself who -averaged- 80 hours in the summer and sometimes hit 100 hours
to clarify: Space camp is at the US Space and Rocket Center (not the other way around) ... which has a space that was either leased or gifted from Marshall. Marshall itself is resting on Redstone arsenal. You're not wrong, but it should be clear that the Arsenal is the superset, Marshall the subset and the Rocket Center the individual organization.
Since I didn't give a version number, I meant the first Windows NT product.
While not a complete rewrite, it was much more of one than the example than the thread parent's example of XP as a rewrite, which was what I responded to.
Owwwww. I hate it when sarcasm hits home twice in one thread.
I'll buy that, I should have prefaced my original with "assuming the court orders IBM to disclose their source to SCO".
Exactly.
The court should order SCO and IBM to both put their codes into blind escrow and then release the code from both to the legal team for each so that no funny business can go on =and= so that both sides have equal footing for making their cases. Same for any other participants who have been accused by SCO.
May not be standard procedure, but this is a rather odd case. It would definitely help both companies show to their customers that they are playing fair.
Additional code discovery could happen, but it should always be under view of the court.
Vote with your wallet, don't go see them. They can't make you spend what you aren't willing to pay.
... for instance AMC has decided to up their ticket price to $9 from $7 soon. I'm sure they are responding to a rising cost for screening movies, but at some point the responsibility is on we the folk who pay the cost.
... well ... cost. I get a soda and a box of candy or popcorn for $1.50 and they let you bring it in.
... who's fault is it (and notice I'm leaving out the obligatory Ep4 jedi quote :).
It's not just Lucas that is ripping you off
We are a small town with a very good community theater built in an old elementary school auditorium. We get alot of first-run movies in the middle of the run (at about 4-6 weeks after initial screening when the theaters are returning some of the extra copies before the run is over that they use to screen multiple auditoriums). Sure, we only get them for 2 nights, but we only have 1,500 people in the town. It costs us a whopping $5/ticket for a Friday or Saturday 7:30pm showing. Concessions only cost
While not feasible for -all- communities, we're only 15 miles away from "real" theaters (although if you're gonna see a movie in this area it will be in Broomfield or Westminster where the theaters are much nicer) in Boulder, Colorado and we are able to do this so the screening contracts must not be too restrictive. Make it a non-profit co-op and see if you can lower the costs for your community while creating a neighborhood social center.
Or just wait for Netflix to get it. Either way, send a message that quality is better than quantity and low cost is worth a little wait.
Or if you're sure it will be a true disappointment, just don't go. EVERYONE got faked out by Episode 1, but if you also didn't like Ep2 and you -still- pay close to $10 for a ticket to Ep3
Although in that case alot of the core OS was not a rewrite but was an adoption of another OS. The OP makes a point about network stack mistakes for instance, but OSX doesn't have to worry about that because it adopted one of the most robust stacks out there from BSD.
... you can use an open source solidly tested base and only recreate those things (like Darwin/Cocoa/etc) that you -need- without adding bugs everywhere else. Rewriting today is -far- safer than it was 5-10 years ago as long as you make intelligent selections to start from.
... IPv4 -> IPv6 is not a fair case for "rewriting" since you are talking standards and not code. MUCH of the IPv6 -code- is going to be adopted IPv4 code. The OP seems to be against re-architecting just as much as re-writing. Sometimes you -have- to start from scratch if you're going to be able to continue future development.
I'm not saying you're wrong about OSX being the "right" thing to do, but rather that the right thing that Apple did was to -not- attempt everything from the ground up.
That's one of the nice things about rewriting in today's world
And, not a counter point to you but rather to the OP
Compared to rewriting NT/XP into Longhorn will be, no. but compared to something like DOS 2 to DOS 3 (or was DOS 2 the rewrite?), it was a HUGE undertaking at the time. Creating a 32bit kernel from a 16bit one was pretty big news at the time.
When you rewrite a project, it is obvious it is going to cause new issues. If you are paying attention, you make use of experience and/or at least view the patches and changelogs of the product you're replacing so that you don't incorporate too many of the old problems along the way.
...
What I've read seems like most who worked on Netscape 2.x through Netscape 4.x would agree it was time for new architecture. It was probably time for new architecture in the Netscape 3.x timeframe but corporate pressures were high to produce quantity instead of quality. The codebase was just too rigid, especially in the rendering engine, to keep up with emerging standards.
The point is that -not- rewriting may be safer in the short term, but often guarrantees your product is going to have feature lock and eventually obsolescence.
A bit of a push off-topic, but I think this is a lesson I think TiVo may be about to learn the hard way as most of their new versions are only new feature releases, not updates to improve the core of how the products work, which has begun to limit the efficiency of their product (ie, as the drives in the product get larger, the inefficiency of how the TiVo handles it's database becomes more apparent) and what types of features that they can add. I'm not saying they need to scrap everything, but rewriting some of the underlying system is going to have to happen at some point.
XP and 2003 are fairly minor tweaks of Windows NT, but they are missing some of the back-compatibility that was in Windows 2000 if I remember right.
... Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95 -> 98 -> ME and Windows NT 3.5 -> NT4 -> 2000 -> XP -> 2003.
Windows NT was as close to a complete rewrite (of Windows 3.1) as Microsoft has attempted for a long time. Since then there were 2 main branches that derivated
XP was in no way "from scratch".
Longhorn sounds like it will use a NT-derivative kernel, but may end up being close to a rewrite. One would hope so given the time they are going to take for it.
Fair enough, I knew my method was not statistically correct but errs on the conservative side. From what I read, your method would be quite a bit worse.
:)
You can probably tell I hated economics and statistics
Worse than uninteresting, using 4 drives cuts your MTBF down by a HUGE amount.
... I have no idea if that is the drive they used) . That means you averaged 2 failures for every million hours a hard drive is run (more on that later). The MTBF being 1,000,000 / 2.
... only 1 out of 10 people who experience a product problem will actual report it to the manufacturer. The rest just switch brands or replace with the same brand.
... in the short term.
Let's say that the MTBF for each of the drives they are using is 500,000 hours/drive (which is what is rated for the Maxtor Diamondmax16
If you have 4 drives, you have an average of 8 failures in 1,000,000 hours. That is 1,000,000/8 = 125,000 hours average MTBF.
Note that that doesn't include failure rates for any of the other components including the enclosure (physical USB port, etc).
BTW, how can a hard drive last 500,000 hours? Easy. Sell 100,000 hard drives. Run them for 10 hours. See how many fail.
What's that? You've had MANY hard drives die on you in the past and there is no way that ANY of them ran 500,000 hours (that's only 57 years)? How many of them were past there warranty? Did you report the failure back to the company? Remember the 1 out of 10 rule
That fits with my experience in the last few years, I am lucky to average 50,000 (1/10th of the supposed norm under these assumptions) hours on a drive before death. That is assuming I have an average life of 4 years on a drive. I have a few drives that have -never- died, but in general I have to replace the inexpensive IDE drives in various machines every approximately 7 years on average (meaning some last only a few months and others have run for over 5 years before being upgraded into obsolescence which I will count as a "0" for # of failures).
That would put the average "real" MTBF at 12,500 hours. That's less than 18 months. Combine that with the horrible time for backing up such a box, the overhead of running over USB/Firewire (which in turn runs over PCI instead of attaching directly to PCI) along with the flakiness that alot of USB/Firewire devices have, and you have a LOT of reasons to spend extra money to build it yourself.
I would much rather buy a case with a low-end CPU, room for more than 4 drives, and build a RAID system with a hot-spare or two. Cost more? Yeah
I use a v1.5 vest regularly while riding on my motorcycle. Doesn't feel cheap, just "slim" (as in thin material, but I like the microfiber) ... it fits good under another jacket without the sleeves. I use it to hold an MP3 player, PDA, keys, wallet, etc.
... so check the discount geek outlets (I found mine at a PDA shop online).
I bought an XXL size and at the time I was an XXL and rather than being too big (as in "fat geek") it was too small around the middle. I've lost weight and now it fits perfectly so it would appear their big sizes are too small and their small sizes are too big. Other than that, no complaints.
Of course, I bought it for $79 on close-out, so I'm alot happier than I would be if I'd paid $199. It looks like the 3.0 is going closeout soon in favor of the 3.0+
If I had a way to test-fit the 3.0 without having to pay to return it I would be very seriously considering upgrading. Especially if I could find a way to fit motorcycle armor into the leather version.
Yes, but there is a huge difference between being an enthusiast who dedicates time to the inner workings and a tinkerer who plays when they can or a child who doesn't have access to the more complicated stuff.
... I don't expect my family to know how to patch the hotplug service for an unknown USB device or remount a drive in readonly mode to recover an accidentally deleted file. But it would be a shame if they didn't still have access to a computer just because they didn't know the nuts and bolts (or bytes and bits).
I'm a computer enthusiast
Besides, I never said it would be the end of civilization, I just wondered if it would still be available in a form that was less complicated than a build it yourselfer.