There's more layers involved. If I make a widget that only costs me 10% of the retail price in materials, that doesn't mean I make 90% profit. I may not have the distribution might to sell it as broadly as I'd like, so I hire a distributor. I sell it to the distributor for 40% of retail price, he sells it to the retailers for 60% of MSRP. Everybody makes a profit.
Obviously these are approximate numbers an vary wildly, but they are sufficiently representative.
Amazon has a big advantage here. They are their own distributor and retailer, so they keep much more of the pie. But they still have their R&D costs, past and future, to cover, not to mention the bill they pay to Sprint to keep all of those Kindles connected to the mothership.
Off-hand, I know of five in Southern/Central New Mexico: Apache Point, National Solar Observatory at Sun Spot, Very Large Array, Magdalena Ridge, the former Liquid Mirror Telescope installation just outside of Cloudcroft. There's also New Mexico Skies east of Cloudcroft, but that's a for-profit venture with large amateur models.
In Arizona, you've got Kitt Peak, Mount Graham, Lowell Observatory (Pluto discoverer), there's at least 1 more in Southern AZ but I can't think of the name. And usually these have multiple telescopes: Apache Point has my wife's 3.5 meter, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2 meter, and 1 meter and a.75(IIRC) meter, but the point is it has two haard-core science-grade installations, and it could get a third.
The important thing is the site. The spend, just surveying the sky optical quality, over a year studying it. Then the soil/geology studies. Can we build a big enough road up to it? Is there close enough housing and facilities? And a huge list of etceteras. So there's a lot more telescopes than there area observatories.
And they also have a pretty good size IT infrastructure with LOTS of linux admin geekery and programming to be done in a lot of different environments because each instrument's controlling computer is created by that instrument's scientists, so they talk in a number of different crazy ways. Apparently it's quite a challenge being an admin up there, I certainly don't have the chops for it (I'm a database guy).
Very cool! Sorry to hear your scope got sorta snubbed, my wife just did the Apache Point segment. I don't know how many discoveries they've had, but they are also the home to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which was recently recognized (IIRC) as being the most used source for astronomy data for publications last year. But I'm probably somewhat off on that quote, been sick recently and just don't remember.
Well, she found me online. For the most part, by definition, astronomers live in pretty remote areas, and the dating pool was kind of limited. She expanded her search radius on the dating site that we used and she found me!
We were married about 18 months later, and we're celebrating our 4th anniversary in 3 months.
Amongst the many cool things, she's a gamer (she beat me to L80 in WoW because she has more free time with her work schedule), a movie buff, a foodie (lots of astronomers are, you can't call Papa John's when you're an hour and 30 miles away in twisty mountain roads) and I've corrupted her and she's punning occasionally.
She did Mythbusters' Apollo Landing Hoax episode last January (Dr. Russet McMillan, the APOLLO lunar laser stuff at the end) and now this! She's heading up the mountain this evening to do the Apache Point segment, but I understand they're having feed issues, so hard to say if the webcast portion is going to work very well. I'll probably wait and watch post-event streams.
(she did something else television-wise this January, but we can't talk about it and don't know when it will air)
Don't forget AS/400s and their children! The only time our 9402 has gone down in the last 2 years is when: we lost power to our entire data center (which hammered our mainframe big time!), our A/C went out and we had to turn off non-critical systems to keep our critical systems up longer, and we had to replace the battery on the SCSI controller recently (I think it's estimated at a 3-4 year life and the system tells you when it needs to be replaced). Otherwise we'd be looking at years of uptime, I don't think it has ever crashed.
My wife bounces a laser off the moon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Point_Observatory_Lunar_Laser-ranging_Operation, as featured on Mythbusters) and one of the two Russian probes can no longer be hit by laser. It was reachable initially, something happened. Theories are: the position was not actually accurately known, or that perhaps the bracket that supported the mirror failed. My personal theory is that the moon men picked up the rover and moved it a few hundred meters just to screw with us.
I can see an easy way to link your online and local purchase without storing your credit card number: store a hash of the credit card. Since they're not storing the true number, they don't have to be quite as paranoid about their PCI compliance.
Are you a member of the Rewards Zone thingie? Maybe they cross-referenced you there.
I have been reading Pratchett since shortly after the first three books were released in the US. You have done an amazing job of summarizing exactly why I like him, I just never had the breakdown of what my mind recognized.
Most of our guild (Crusty Blades/Alliance/Kilrogg) live in or near Tucson, which has an annual science fiction convention, and we had our first guild party there last year and again this year. It was lots of fun, with WoW-themed food analogs. I made "Dragon Breath Chilli", which was Alton Brown's Pressure Cooker Chilli.
Lots of fun, lots of good food, and you got to put faces to names!
Haven't read Anthem yet, not sure that I will. Haven't read Wolfe. But one thing that I catch based on a variety of comments here and other reviews that I've seen is that Stephenson has achieved Rice/Clancy/King level in his profession: no publisher will edit him, and he needs a great editor to pare down his work.
I'll probably get around to Anthem, but I'm in no rush.
Be glad you have your job. At my local uni (New Mexico State), you can't get full-time employment for some $25k/annual positions without a four year degree.
When I went from PC to Mac, I bought a decent USB wireless mouse and it worked fine for a long time. Then I tried to use their "Mac" Bluetooth mouse: doesn't work worth **** with Macs, Best Buy said they get lots of returns on those. So I tried an Apple BT Mega-Mouse, was not impressed with that. Finally found one that was BT, had a decent feel, and good right click support, so I'm content.
But I am definitely troubled by this right-handedness. I can mouse with my right hand, but it's uncomfortable and I'll only do it if I'm briefly using someone else's PC. I don't mind if they do a mouse for righties, but they're ticking off lefties by cutting back on their ambi mice.
If your friend took the photo, they're going to upload it to their page, not yours. If you upload the photo to your page, it's your own fault. If your pages are linked, there's a chance it might be found, but chances are that college admission drones are so busy that they're not going to pursue multiple layers to dig for dirt.
And you could always do good by suggesting your friend either remove the photo or edit it so that you aren't in it.
Absolutely. My wife is an astronomer. At the observatory she's at (Apache Point, as recently featured on Mythbusters) most of the instruments that they mount on the telescope require cooling either through liquid nitrogen being poured into reservoirs twice a day or through electronic CryoTigers. They just came out of shutdown (an extended maintenance period when they close for most of August to perform heavy maintenance) and a month after coming out of shutdown one of the CryoTigers developed a fault, causing an instrument to warm.
When this happens, the instrument has to warm to ambient temperature (a full day), the CryoTiger has to be repaired (at least a day), then the instrument cooled again (another day). Instrument is out of commission for a good three days. The sad thing was that it was scheduled for a time-critical block, fortunately the weather was poor and they couldn't have used it anyway.
Monumental PITB. I can only imagine how much nastier it is with the LHC.
The trading day may be 8.5 hours, but I would imagine a lot of backend processing takes place after the trading day closes. I don't know if it's a 24/7 system, but I'm certain it's more than 8.5x5.
is my wife signed up two weeks ago. I'm going to contact Bliz and see if they'll retroactively count her as it's obvious we're logging in from the same IP address when we run.
But that being said, I go to bed and she's up all night, running both our laptops. Sort of hot boxing.
Former site, I should say. It's just outside of Cloudcroft, NM, and was decommissioned a few years ago. I've been there, the site is owned by NASA but reopening with a 1 meter remote-control telescope.
I've always thought LMT's were cool, but mercury can be dangerous stuff. It's good to see alternative liquids.
I haven't had a lot of time to play with Base, I really should take the time to explore it more. I've been doing MS SQL Server since the 4.2 version on top of OS/2 and quite like the product, not that I'm dissing Oracle: two different tools for two different applications.
I like Access, when done properly it's an excellent tool, but I've seen LOTS of abominations! One of my favorites was a form where they had what looked like buttons but they were labels, and the buttons looked like labels. Oh, and the forms? Purple and lime green.
But my favorite Access story was a multi-user applicant database. I get a frantic phone call one morning that half the applicants are gone, or at least a lot of their supplemental information was gone. Schmuck had changed the SSN field from char to integer and lost the leading zeros. At that time I couldn't turn them in to read-only systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope this causes them to upgrade their VirtualPC as it doesn't support USB devices currently.
"...consider the effects of all that we do unto the seventh generation."
~ Makwa Gaa Nii bawit -- Chippewa
http://74.6.146.127/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=tribe+%22unto+the+seventh+generation%22+seventh+generation&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501-s&u=www.p2pays.org/ref/37/36109.pdf&w=tribe+%22unto+the+seventh+generation%22+seventh+generation&d=MgVraUxISqAH&icp=1&.intl=us
The world would be such a different place if everyone thought this way.
There's more layers involved. If I make a widget that only costs me 10% of the retail price in materials, that doesn't mean I make 90% profit. I may not have the distribution might to sell it as broadly as I'd like, so I hire a distributor. I sell it to the distributor for 40% of retail price, he sells it to the retailers for 60% of MSRP. Everybody makes a profit.
Obviously these are approximate numbers an vary wildly, but they are sufficiently representative.
Amazon has a big advantage here. They are their own distributor and retailer, so they keep much more of the pie. But they still have their R&D costs, past and future, to cover, not to mention the bill they pay to Sprint to keep all of those Kindles connected to the mothership.
Off-hand, I know of five in Southern/Central New Mexico: Apache Point, National Solar Observatory at Sun Spot, Very Large Array, Magdalena Ridge, the former Liquid Mirror Telescope installation just outside of Cloudcroft. There's also New Mexico Skies east of Cloudcroft, but that's a for-profit venture with large amateur models.
In Arizona, you've got Kitt Peak, Mount Graham, Lowell Observatory (Pluto discoverer), there's at least 1 more in Southern AZ but I can't think of the name. And usually these have multiple telescopes: Apache Point has my wife's 3.5 meter, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2 meter, and 1 meter and a .75(IIRC) meter, but the point is it has two haard-core science-grade installations, and it could get a third.
The important thing is the site. The spend, just surveying the sky optical quality, over a year studying it. Then the soil/geology studies. Can we build a big enough road up to it? Is there close enough housing and facilities? And a huge list of etceteras. So there's a lot more telescopes than there area observatories.
And they also have a pretty good size IT infrastructure with LOTS of linux admin geekery and programming to be done in a lot of different environments because each instrument's controlling computer is created by that instrument's scientists, so they talk in a number of different crazy ways. Apparently it's quite a challenge being an admin up there, I certainly don't have the chops for it (I'm a database guy).
Very cool! Sorry to hear your scope got sorta snubbed, my wife just did the Apache Point segment. I don't know how many discoveries they've had, but they are also the home to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which was recently recognized (IIRC) as being the most used source for astronomy data for publications last year. But I'm probably somewhat off on that quote, been sick recently and just don't remember.
Well, she found me online. For the most part, by definition, astronomers live in pretty remote areas, and the dating pool was kind of limited. She expanded her search radius on the dating site that we used and she found me!
We were married about 18 months later, and we're celebrating our 4th anniversary in 3 months.
Amongst the many cool things, she's a gamer (she beat me to L80 in WoW because she has more free time with her work schedule), a movie buff, a foodie (lots of astronomers are, you can't call Papa John's when you're an hour and 30 miles away in twisty mountain roads) and I've corrupted her and she's punning occasionally.
It's been very good for us.
She did Mythbusters' Apollo Landing Hoax episode last January (Dr. Russet McMillan, the APOLLO lunar laser stuff at the end) and now this! She's heading up the mountain this evening to do the Apache Point segment, but I understand they're having feed issues, so hard to say if the webcast portion is going to work very well. I'll probably wait and watch post-event streams.
(she did something else television-wise this January, but we can't talk about it and don't know when it will air)
Rats, I was hoping for a way to make my MacBook Pro less stable. Rebooting my Axim almost daily just isn't enough for me.
Don't forget AS/400s and their children! The only time our 9402 has gone down in the last 2 years is when: we lost power to our entire data center (which hammered our mainframe big time!), our A/C went out and we had to turn off non-critical systems to keep our critical systems up longer, and we had to replace the battery on the SCSI controller recently (I think it's estimated at a 3-4 year life and the system tells you when it needs to be replaced). Otherwise we'd be looking at years of uptime, I don't think it has ever crashed.
The GREATEST guild name in WoW EVAH!
My wife bounces a laser off the moon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Point_Observatory_Lunar_Laser-ranging_Operation, as featured on Mythbusters) and one of the two Russian probes can no longer be hit by laser. It was reachable initially, something happened. Theories are: the position was not actually accurately known, or that perhaps the bracket that supported the mirror failed. My personal theory is that the moon men picked up the rover and moved it a few hundred meters just to screw with us.
I can see an easy way to link your online and local purchase without storing your credit card number: store a hash of the credit card. Since they're not storing the true number, they don't have to be quite as paranoid about their PCI compliance.
Are you a member of the Rewards Zone thingie? Maybe they cross-referenced you there.
I have been reading Pratchett since shortly after the first three books were released in the US. You have done an amazing job of summarizing exactly why I like him, I just never had the breakdown of what my mind recognized.
Thank you, sir.
He will be on the Western side of the pond in Tempe, Arizona at the first North American Discworld Convention, September 4-7, 2009. Get in line now!
Sadly, due to his condition, this will probably be the last American convention that he attends.
http://www.nadwcon.org/
Most of our guild (Crusty Blades/Alliance/Kilrogg) live in or near Tucson, which has an annual science fiction convention, and we had our first guild party there last year and again this year. It was lots of fun, with WoW-themed food analogs. I made "Dragon Breath Chilli", which was Alton Brown's Pressure Cooker Chilli.
Lots of fun, lots of good food, and you got to put faces to names!
Haven't read Anthem yet, not sure that I will. Haven't read Wolfe. But one thing that I catch based on a variety of comments here and other reviews that I've seen is that Stephenson has achieved Rice/Clancy/King level in his profession: no publisher will edit him, and he needs a great editor to pare down his work.
I'll probably get around to Anthem, but I'm in no rush.
Be glad you have your job. At my local uni (New Mexico State), you can't get full-time employment for some $25k/annual positions without a four year degree.
It will absolutely be reliable and robust. Just ask the London Stock Exchange!
Five Nines! Or was that nine fives?
When I went from PC to Mac, I bought a decent USB wireless mouse and it worked fine for a long time. Then I tried to use their "Mac" Bluetooth mouse: doesn't work worth **** with Macs, Best Buy said they get lots of returns on those. So I tried an Apple BT Mega-Mouse, was not impressed with that. Finally found one that was BT, had a decent feel, and good right click support, so I'm content.
But I am definitely troubled by this right-handedness. I can mouse with my right hand, but it's uncomfortable and I'll only do it if I'm briefly using someone else's PC. I don't mind if they do a mouse for righties, but they're ticking off lefties by cutting back on their ambi mice.
If your friend took the photo, they're going to upload it to their page, not yours. If you upload the photo to your page, it's your own fault. If your pages are linked, there's a chance it might be found, but chances are that college admission drones are so busy that they're not going to pursue multiple layers to dig for dirt.
And you could always do good by suggesting your friend either remove the photo or edit it so that you aren't in it.
Absolutely. My wife is an astronomer. At the observatory she's at (Apache Point, as recently featured on Mythbusters) most of the instruments that they mount on the telescope require cooling either through liquid nitrogen being poured into reservoirs twice a day or through electronic CryoTigers. They just came out of shutdown (an extended maintenance period when they close for most of August to perform heavy maintenance) and a month after coming out of shutdown one of the CryoTigers developed a fault, causing an instrument to warm.
When this happens, the instrument has to warm to ambient temperature (a full day), the CryoTiger has to be repaired (at least a day), then the instrument cooled again (another day). Instrument is out of commission for a good three days. The sad thing was that it was scheduled for a time-critical block, fortunately the weather was poor and they couldn't have used it anyway.
Monumental PITB. I can only imagine how much nastier it is with the LHC.
The trading day may be 8.5 hours, but I would imagine a lot of backend processing takes place after the trading day closes. I don't know if it's a 24/7 system, but I'm certain it's more than 8.5x5.
is my wife signed up two weeks ago. I'm going to contact Bliz and see if they'll retroactively count her as it's obvious we're logging in from the same IP address when we run.
But that being said, I go to bed and she's up all night, running both our laptops. Sort of hot boxing.
Former site, I should say. It's just outside of Cloudcroft, NM, and was decommissioned a few years ago. I've been there, the site is owned by NASA but reopening with a 1 meter remote-control telescope.
I've always thought LMT's were cool, but mercury can be dangerous stuff. It's good to see alternative liquids.
I haven't had a lot of time to play with Base, I really should take the time to explore it more. I've been doing MS SQL Server since the 4.2 version on top of OS/2 and quite like the product, not that I'm dissing Oracle: two different tools for two different applications.
I like Access, when done properly it's an excellent tool, but I've seen LOTS of abominations! One of my favorites was a form where they had what looked like buttons but they were labels, and the buttons looked like labels. Oh, and the forms? Purple and lime green.
But my favorite Access story was a multi-user applicant database. I get a frantic phone call one morning that half the applicants are gone, or at least a lot of their supplemental information was gone. Schmuck had changed the SSN field from char to integer and lost the leading zeros. At that time I couldn't turn them in to read-only systems.