The problem with both power and resources from space is getting it back down to Earth at a cost that's less than that spent on going up to get them in the first place.
I'm all for mining asteroids, but it only seems plausible to be to do so to have raw materials available in orbit, for building things that will stay up there, or on the Moon.
Bringing a significant amount of material back to Earth, without losing most of it, is extremely expensive. Beaming down power, hell, setting up a franchise of nuclear plants would be cheaper and simpler.
I'm very PRO space, from exploration to colonization. I'd go up in a heart-beat given the chance. I just don't see it as a source of a whole hell of a lot of things right now. Reentry is a bitch until we build that silly elevator.
A Federal agency has to worry about costs much less than a business. And NASA certainly worries about costs. For a business to compete for a chance to go to space, cheaply, quickly, or any other "ly", there would have to be MONEY up there.
Science doesn't pay. The only reason the Russians launch cheaper is because if they didn't, nobody would use them. They'd get NO money, instead of LEAST money. The Russians are Wal-Mart in this respect.
The only money to be made in space right now is in the launching of satellites. So long as there's insurance for those, the Russian cost-cutting is not much of a problem.
Now, show me something up there to go an actually get, that is of worth, and I'll show you all the current aerospace contractors lobbying the government to be cut loose and allowed to leave NASA in the dust.
But until there's a money to be made, business isn't lifting a finger.
Note the point of that exchange between Winston and O'Brian.
To me it's not about hope at all - or rather, the lack of hope is just an excuse for what really happens. Winston, in his desire to rebel against Big Brother eagerly accepts an alternative master in The Brotherhood.
Did the nomenclature similarity between the choices go unnoticed?
Of course, your point in regards to the topic of this discussion stands as before, though maybe with a slightly even more paranoid twist - if that's possible when talking Orwell.
Sure, v.5 might be sleek and sexy, but just as with Carrie-Anne Moss, I won't know for sure until I get my hands on it - though it certainly looks it in the promo.
However, a few years ago they both looked sleek and sexy, and believe you me, WebSphere was none of those things. The WS of yore was less like Carrie-Anne Moss, and more like Roseanne Barr - bloated, offensive, unstable and just plain tedious after the novelty wore off in the first 10 minutes of interaction.
Not MY old keyboard. That thing was solid, and heavy enough to drive nails with, so it would go stright to the bottom. But I'll tell you what... When plate tectonics brought it back up in, oh, 300 million years, once future archeologists excavated it from the surrounding stone, it would work as well as today.
Everyone knows it's a joke. SCO's position is full of bull as it is - that suggesting that they would resort to a false rumor (as you so diligently point out) is the punchline here.
SCO just hired Al Gore as assistant CIO. With the newly acquired Intellectual Property rights, EVERYONE is hereby ordered to cease and dissist from using the Internet.
There is some truth to it.
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is some truth to the offending statement - but the statement itself is myopic.
It is true that younger techies work faster. It's obvious that they should, really, for the same reason that 16 year olds get more traffic tickets than people twice their age.
Us "old timers" have a decade+ of experience upon which to draw. It is true that to a degree the advancement of technology has mitigated the need for some of this experience. However, we are not automatons, and have abstracted the lessons we learned on old technology into general rules that apply in the modern context as well.
(Oh God, I'm actually making a "back in my day" post. Shoot me now!)
Anyway, kids do run fast around corners and such, because they've not fallen over very much, yet.
Now lets go and ask the HR drones who think this way about the amount of rework that bright-eyes and enthusiastic go-get'ers create. Let's talk about solutions that are not maintainable, and about implementation strategies that don't scale, that do not tolerate creeping features with grace.
There is a reason why jobs demand a degree, and there is a reason they demand "x years experience". Kids make great cannon fodder, in IT as well as in the military. They consider a death-march glorious, and have no wife or kids to rush home to.
But would you let a green officer, even from West Point, command your army? Would you send them on the elite and covert missions? If you would, you'll soon be flying someone else's flag.
Same with IT. If you choose the gung-ho, do-or-die punks to bring your mission critical product to market, you'll soon be sporting someone else's logo on your letterhead.
Kids have their place in IT. They can code like hell, and there is much to be gained from their stamina and fearlessness. But they need to be given clearly defined and well-contained tasks.
Hell, most of these kids can't write "Hello World" without the aid of their favorite IDE! Sure, they learn and grow and get wiser. But guess what?
By the time they've learned, grown and won their wisdom - they've become US, the old timers, who work slower, because they know better.
Yes, come Friday, sans license, AIX will still run as well as it ever did.
Guess what Mr. CTO, you DO NOT need software with a "legally enforcible license" to keep your servers up and running.
Now, there's no point getting sued by the guys in Redmond, but software with lax licenses is now a really viable alternative.
It used to be that "Whom do you sue if things fail" was a convincing argument. Now "Who will sue you out of spite" proves to be the other side of the coin.
There is ONE safe bet that covers both contingencies. You know the one. It doesn't work for peanuts, but for herring, hell yeah!
Oh man, for a second there, I was sure I'd seen that IMDB reference number before. I thought it was "Eight Legged Freaks". Now THAT would have been funny!
This is great news! And I'm hoping it doesn't stop with software.
This needs to apply to the implicit suggestions in all advertisements. Drinking a particular brand of beer will not make you popular, and the suggestion should be punishable by law. Driving a certain car will not get you laid, and the suggestion should be punishable by law. And so forth and so on.
And MOST importantly, campaign reform! Politicians are the biggest source of vaporware there is. If you make promises during your campaign, and then fail to put up credible effort to make them reality, you should spend at least as long in jail as you did in the office.
Just wait. Soon as Microsoft strikes a deal with Hollywood, to produce the next online Matrix trailer (or whatever) in a DRM-only format, the exodus will begin.
But the hydrogen will still need to be transported somehow.
Quite right, but it will have to be transported regardless of how it is generated - same in either the nuclear or chemical case. My point was only to show the large scale difference between the methods of production.
For a well thought out, albeit superficial and non-technical, essay on the subject, check out this article in Wired.
FWIW, I think that a Federal Nuclear Power Infrastructure, to provide the bare minimum of energy needed by the nation, is long overdue. Think Gibson's "Eastern Seabord Fission Authority".
If the Fed were to provide a balanced Nuclear, Hydro, Renewable and yes, Fossil, Infrastructure for basic national need, "free market" and deregulation could thrive providing surplus power direct to the consumer.
By "infrastructure", of course, I mean barest essencials: minimal (USRDA-like) average consumption, municipal lighting and heating, hospitals, basic services, that sort of thing.
Yes, the energy required to get equal portions of H2 is less when dealing with methane. But consider the cost of this energy, and of the source of hydrogen.
Also, yes, the startup costs for the process are greater for the nuclear route, since building a reactor is more costly than building an equivalent methane processing chemical plant.
However, on the grand scale needed to provide hydrogen as a significant fuel source to the nation, the cost of the source of the hydrogen will be significantly greater than the cost of production.
With the nuclear route, the bulk of the costs is up-front, and semi-annual for nuclear fuel. With the chemical route, the costs are linear, and grow in proportion to production.
Water is infinitely cheaper, and more abundant, than natural gas.
Consider also the cost of the infrastructure needed to transport the source of the hydrogen. Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes. And you only need the pipelines when you can't drill for water. But you can, almost anywhere.
IIRC, the kilogram is the last basic unit of measure still expressed in terms of an artifact, as opposed to though an observable phenomenon + mathematics.
IM(H)O, we need to do away with this, because artifacts exist in only one place. They can be stolen, damaged, or suffer from flaws and natural processes like the one we're seeing right now.
Of course, the flip side of having everything in terms of observable phenomena creates the problem of measurement, and making tools sensitive enough to do that work. Philosophically, the problem goes circular here, for how do you make a set of calibration weights for a scale, if you have to measure things to the atom first...
But in practice, there is no problem, because the measurement technology exists, and we're talking about the "standard" or "reference" units here.
Imagine having to calibrate a scale on Mars, or Alpha Centauri. Getting that artifact to the "job site", to make sure the scale is true, would be a bit of a chore.
A kilogram should be expressed not in terms of the number of atoms in a particular crystal, but rather in terms of the mass of X moles of standard substance Y.
We can assume (if we can not, then all else is a lie) that a particular isotope of a particular element will have the same mass eveywhere in the Universe. We know the number of atoms in a mole. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with both power and resources from space is getting it back down to Earth at a cost that's less than that spent on going up to get them in the first place.
I'm all for mining asteroids, but it only seems plausible to be to do so to have raw materials available in orbit, for building things that will stay up there, or on the Moon.
Bringing a significant amount of material back to Earth, without losing most of it, is extremely expensive. Beaming down power, hell, setting up a franchise of nuclear plants would be cheaper and simpler.
I'm very PRO space, from exploration to colonization. I'd go up in a heart-beat given the chance. I just don't see it as a source of a whole hell of a lot of things right now. Reentry is a bitch until we build that silly elevator.
Yes, sure, but you forget one thing.
Economics.
A Federal agency has to worry about costs much less than a business. And NASA certainly worries about costs. For a business to compete for a chance to go to space, cheaply, quickly, or any other "ly", there would have to be MONEY up there.
Science doesn't pay. The only reason the Russians launch cheaper is because if they didn't, nobody would use them. They'd get NO money, instead of LEAST money. The Russians are Wal-Mart in this respect.
The only money to be made in space right now is in the launching of satellites. So long as there's insurance for those, the Russian cost-cutting is not much of a problem.
Now, show me something up there to go an actually get, that is of worth, and I'll show you all the current aerospace contractors lobbying the government to be cut loose and allowed to leave NASA in the dust.
But until there's a money to be made, business isn't lifting a finger.
The OCR software that came with WinFAX-95 was remarkably accurate and fast, especially given a 486 CPU running at 33 Mhz.
Does your employer know about this?
What ever happened to OCR software in recent years anyway? One minute it was there, and then it wasn't. It's like some sort of conspiracy...
Note the point of that exchange between Winston and O'Brian.
To me it's not about hope at all - or rather, the lack of hope is just an excuse for what really happens. Winston, in his desire to rebel against Big Brother eagerly accepts an alternative master in The Brotherhood.
Did the nomenclature similarity between the choices go unnoticed?
Of course, your point in regards to the topic of this discussion stands as before, though maybe with a slightly even more paranoid twist - if that's possible when talking Orwell.
You've never had to admin WebSphere, I take it?
Sure, v.5 might be sleek and sexy, but just as with Carrie-Anne Moss, I won't know for sure until I get my hands on it - though it certainly looks it in the promo.
However, a few years ago they both looked sleek and sexy, and believe you me, WebSphere was none of those things. The WS of yore was less like Carrie-Anne Moss, and more like Roseanne Barr - bloated, offensive, unstable and just plain tedious after the novelty wore off in the first 10 minutes of interaction.
I'm sure that to them, we're just "ugly bags of mostly-water".
Seriously, you have to appreciate the evolutionary aesthetics at play here.
Not MY old keyboard. That thing was solid, and heavy enough to drive nails with, so it would go stright to the bottom. But I'll tell you what... When plate tectonics brought it back up in, oh, 300 million years, once future archeologists excavated it from the surrounding stone, it would work as well as today.
I do.
JBuilder, and now increasingly Eclipse.
Oracle.
WebSphere.
Because that's what the company has bought.
Just resting.
I'm your Thai love slave.
I'm a 46 year old white dude. I weigh in at 332 lbs, and I sell pig manure to soy bean farmers for a living.
Without selling hardware, you'd have to give Unix away for FREE??? Damn! Microsoft better not hear about this.
Everyone knows it's a joke. SCO's position is full of bull as it is - that suggesting that they would resort to a false rumor (as you so diligently point out) is the punchline here.
Look a bit past the obvious.
Dateline - Jun-23-03, Santa Cruz
SCO just hired Al Gore as assistant CIO. With the newly acquired Intellectual Property rights, EVERYONE is hereby ordered to cease and dissist from using the Internet.
There is some truth to the offending statement - but the statement itself is myopic.
It is true that younger techies work faster. It's obvious that they should, really, for the same reason that 16 year olds get more traffic tickets than people twice their age.
Us "old timers" have a decade+ of experience upon which to draw. It is true that to a degree the advancement of technology has mitigated the need for some of this experience. However, we are not automatons, and have abstracted the lessons we learned on old technology into general rules that apply in the modern context as well.
(Oh God, I'm actually making a "back in my day" post. Shoot me now!)
Anyway, kids do run fast around corners and such, because they've not fallen over very much, yet.
Now lets go and ask the HR drones who think this way about the amount of rework that bright-eyes and enthusiastic go-get'ers create. Let's talk about solutions that are not maintainable, and about implementation strategies that don't scale, that do not tolerate creeping features with grace.
There is a reason why jobs demand a degree, and there is a reason they demand "x years experience". Kids make great cannon fodder, in IT as well as in the military. They consider a death-march glorious, and have no wife or kids to rush home to.
But would you let a green officer, even from West Point, command your army? Would you send them on the elite and covert missions? If you would, you'll soon be flying someone else's flag.
Same with IT. If you choose the gung-ho, do-or-die punks to bring your mission critical product to market, you'll soon be sporting someone else's logo on your letterhead.
Kids have their place in IT. They can code like hell, and there is much to be gained from their stamina and fearlessness. But they need to be given clearly defined and well-contained tasks.
Hell, most of these kids can't write "Hello World" without the aid of their favorite IDE! Sure, they learn and grow and get wiser. But guess what?
By the time they've learned, grown and won their wisdom - they've become US, the old timers, who work slower, because they know better.
Yes, come Friday, sans license, AIX will still run as well as it ever did.
Guess what Mr. CTO, you DO NOT need software with a "legally enforcible license" to keep your servers up and running.
Now, there's no point getting sued by the guys in Redmond, but software with lax licenses is now a really viable alternative.
It used to be that "Whom do you sue if things fail" was a convincing argument. Now "Who will sue you out of spite" proves to be the other side of the coin.
There is ONE safe bet that covers both contingencies. You know the one. It doesn't work for peanuts, but for herring, hell yeah!
Oh man, for a second there, I was sure I'd seen that IMDB reference number before. I thought it was "Eight Legged Freaks". Now THAT would have been funny!
The bright red uniforms of the visitors suggested something else entirely to me.
That's right! The Bush Family Outing photos!
If *my* Blockbusters has it, so does yours.
This is great news! And I'm hoping it doesn't stop with software.
This needs to apply to the implicit suggestions in all advertisements. Drinking a particular brand of beer will not make you popular, and the suggestion should be punishable by law. Driving a certain car will not get you laid, and the suggestion should be punishable by law. And so forth and so on.
And MOST importantly, campaign reform! Politicians are the biggest source of vaporware there is. If you make promises during your campaign, and then fail to put up credible effort to make them reality, you should spend at least as long in jail as you did in the office.
Fuck them all. And then fuck them again!
And if, after thinking, you still hold the same view, please promptly uninstall your Operating System of choice.
Just wait. Soon as Microsoft strikes a deal with Hollywood, to produce the next online Matrix trailer (or whatever) in a DRM-only format, the exodus will begin.
But the hydrogen will still need to be transported somehow.
Quite right, but it will have to be transported regardless of how it is generated - same in either the nuclear or chemical case. My point was only to show the large scale difference between the methods of production.
For a well thought out, albeit superficial and non-technical, essay on the subject, check out this article in Wired.
FWIW, I think that a Federal Nuclear Power Infrastructure, to provide the bare minimum of energy needed by the nation, is long overdue. Think Gibson's "Eastern Seabord Fission Authority".
If the Fed were to provide a balanced Nuclear, Hydro, Renewable and yes, Fossil, Infrastructure for basic national need, "free market" and deregulation could thrive providing surplus power direct to the consumer.
By "infrastructure", of course, I mean barest essencials: minimal (USRDA-like) average consumption, municipal lighting and heating, hospitals, basic services, that sort of thing.
Right. And don't forget how dangerous DiHydrogen Monoxide can be.
Yes, the energy required to get equal portions of H2 is less when dealing with methane. But consider the cost of this energy, and of the source of hydrogen.
Also, yes, the startup costs for the process are greater for the nuclear route, since building a reactor is more costly than building an equivalent methane processing chemical plant.
However, on the grand scale needed to provide hydrogen as a significant fuel source to the nation, the cost of the source of the hydrogen will be significantly greater than the cost of production.
With the nuclear route, the bulk of the costs is up-front, and semi-annual for nuclear fuel. With the chemical route, the costs are linear, and grow in proportion to production.
Water is infinitely cheaper, and more abundant, than natural gas.
Consider also the cost of the infrastructure needed to transport the source of the hydrogen. Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes. And you only need the pipelines when you can't drill for water. But you can, almost anywhere.
IIRC, the kilogram is the last basic unit of measure still expressed in terms of an artifact, as opposed to though an observable phenomenon + mathematics.
IM(H)O, we need to do away with this, because artifacts exist in only one place. They can be stolen, damaged, or suffer from flaws and natural processes like the one we're seeing right now.
Of course, the flip side of having everything in terms of observable phenomena creates the problem of measurement, and making tools sensitive enough to do that work. Philosophically, the problem goes circular here, for how do you make a set of calibration weights for a scale, if you have to measure things to the atom first...
But in practice, there is no problem, because the measurement technology exists, and we're talking about the "standard" or "reference" units here.
Imagine having to calibrate a scale on Mars, or Alpha Centauri. Getting that artifact to the "job site", to make sure the scale is true, would be a bit of a chore.
A kilogram should be expressed not in terms of the number of atoms in a particular crystal, but rather in terms of the mass of X moles of standard substance Y.
We can assume (if we can not, then all else is a lie) that a particular isotope of a particular element will have the same mass eveywhere in the Universe. We know the number of atoms in a mole. Problem solved.