Here's an overview of the mission: Nasa is putting four gyroscopes up in orbit for a year. If, after a year, they end up pointing in a slightly different direction, then they believe they've proven the theory of relativity. (Omitting a lot of the details here.)
Here's the catch: this relies on Nasa designing four absolutely perfect gyroscopes. A quote from the site:
"We've tried very hard to design an absolutely perfect gyroscope," said Dr. Francis Everitt, the Principal Investigator at Stanford University. Even in an age of exquisite measurements, nothing is perfect. The GP-B gyros, though, are about as close as humans can get. The gyros and their support system are so precise that non-relativity effects will cause them to drift by no more than 1/3 milli-arc-second during a year.
So basically, if the gyros were NOT made perfectly, they will drift. Nasa making something that isn't perfect is pretty well a guaranteed bet these days. That leads me to predict that in 2003, when the year is over, Nasa will be celebrating jubilantly that they've "proven" the theory of relativity. Whoop-dee-doo.
They have an interesting point that you don't hear from the music industry or software industry:
"Second, and equally important, is the fact that our pay site is an adult site. It is for adults only and we mean it. We take the responsibility of limiting access to our site and our content to adults very seriously."
You have to give them some credit there: with that one sentence, they actually got the parents on their side. For once, the liberals and Bobby G are on the same side!
Isn't it funny how IBM is now unveiling versions of all its hardware that run Linux? All but their desktops, that is. Methinks the real big announcement will be the one about Thinkpads shipped with Linux preinstalled.
It smells kludgy because it is - we started with v3, and almost all of the expansion since has been restricted to be compliant with their older versions. It's great because I retain all my history, but not so great for new customers.
McAfee/NAI has a really slick setup called Total Help Desk that we've got installed at our company. It's much more cost-effective than you might think: sure, you're going to shovel $20k in up front, but the functionality is unbelievable.
It includes a lot of things you wouldn't be able to put together yourself. For example, it has a built-in knowledge base that you can search, and it automatically indexes all of the generated tickets. When you enter a ticket, or when you're working with a user, you can see all of their previous tickets at the click of a mouse, so you can see if some junior help desk flunky screwed up their system yesterday.
It has a lot of canned reports that show the average time to solve a problem, average hold time, and more.
It e-mails everyone involved when the status on a help ticket changes - for example, if I say that a ticket is fixed, that status update is emailed to me, to the user, and to the user's manager. It keeps our help desk staff from "hiding" tickets, and it keeps the users from whining that nobody has looked at their ticket recently.
It has an awesome "escalation" mechanism that can automatically escalate tickets to the right staff member based on their skill set. For example, I'm registered in the system with certain key words. If an FTP problem goes unsolved for more than 2 hours, I get an e-mail, and I know I should jump in. If a TCP/IP problem goes unsolved for more than 3 hours, our network admin is e-mailed, because she can probably help out - but I don't want to know about it. However, if any ticket is open for more than 16 hours, all of the key managers are e-mailed.
It even works as a development tracking utility. We track requests for enhancement in it, and we can see how long it takes for a bug to get fixed. The testing department loves it, because we can track how many times an issue gets bounced back to development because the coders can't code worth a damn. The contract programmers love it because they can work from home and still maintain full contact.
Before you start thinking about writing one of these, I'd strongly suggest looking at a demo of McAfee's solution. We looked at it and realized that we could put a talented coder to work for a year and not come out with a solution this hot. (The best thing is that it's all in SQL, so you can do your own PHP interface if you want. I wrote some addons in Drumbeat already.)
Somehow this harks back to OS2. The minor player in the market brings out "emulation" of the leader's last-generation platform. Sure, it works, but at that point, who really cares? People who buy Dreamcasts aren't going to get excited about the ability to play Playstation games when the Playstation 2 is already out.
(I know Bleem has nothing to do with Sega, so the IBM analogy doesn't really hold.)
I hear the comment already - you're saying, "But then I can upgrade and still keep all my Playstation games." What's the point, speedy - if you already have a Playstation, then you don't need the emulator. Why pay extra to play something you've already got?
You "didn't notice any of his songs available for download on his web site" because he's been locked in battle with his record label for years over that. Public Enemy tried to release a record for free on the internet, and their label made them remove it.
When he says he's all about free music, he's the only artist I know who really means it. He's trying to educate with his music, and he sees it as a soapbox, as free speech. For a brief period in the late 80's, a lot of people called it "edutainment" with a straight face. Chuck ended up feeling handcuffed to his record label, though, because:
If you give speeches for a living, and you decide that you want to stand on the corner and talk about politics to a group of people, you're allowed to do it.
But if you're a musician, and you make music for a living, your label doesn't allow you to create songs for fun (or whatever reason) and not give them a cut of the profits. It doesn't even matter if the label has nothing to do with the production or distribution of the music - they still want a piece of the action.
You can make a case for the labels: they have an investment in your success, and they put a lot of advertising dollars into getting your name out there. By releasing stuff for free, you're devaluing their investment and reducing their ability to recoup their costs.
So anyway, that's where Chuck is coming from. He sees the potential of Napster to distribute music as a real freedom-of-speech thing. He wants to bitch about the system, and this is the only way a lot of small artists are going to be able to do it. Of course, in reality, the small artists really just want to get paid....
All the original poster would have had to say was that it was a midi sequencer, and I would have been totally satisfied. But of course, that information is nowhere to be found in the post. People who love music don't necessarily love midis (I sure don't).
Hey, if this is going to be freshmeat.net, that's fine, I understand, but can we get a little more info on what the software does? This posting reads like all the spam e-mails that clutter my in-box.
Take a look at the article posted about Lego today, and notice how descriptive it is while still maintaining the same length. It's just a matter of exchanging one sentence of hype for one sentence of description about what the software does. Can we pull that off? Thanks!
Once again, Slashdot shows why all the geeks keep coming back. This whole thing was done with a classy sense of humor. Obviously, everyone expected weird stuff out of/. today, and this was a great way of being funny while not trying to fool anybody.
The sad part is that Segfault isn't this funny anymore even on its best of days!
Just because Yahoo isn't monitoring it doesn't mean they're not liable. That's why I talked about what happens when you actually TELL Yahoo what's going on, and they still don't do anything about it. For example, if I tell you that there's a guy selling cocaine on your front lawn, and you don't do anything about it, then you're an accomplice. (Especially if I turn around and call the police.)
I used to be roommates with a guy who sold bootleg concert CD's for a living. Ebay has a few employees that proactively search for illegal items like bootlegs, and they're so effective that the guy could only put bootlegs up for auction on the weekend, when the staff wasn't working. When a staff member finds you selling bootlegs, they can (and do) cancel all of your current auctions - not just the one auction they found.
In addition, Ebay lets you e-mail these "policemen" and tell them about illegal items, and they'll take action.
Yahoo doesn't do any proactive checking whatsoever. You can inform Yahoo that auction #123 is an illegal bootleg CD, and they don't stop it. Most of the time, they don't even acknowledge you. They never penalize you, and they certainly never cancel your account - he's been using the same one since auctions.yahoo.com got started.
I can see why Yahoo is doing it - they're trying to capture market share in any way possible, and let's face it, if they offer cool stuff that Ebay won't allow, then people will get interested. If you browse through Yahoo's auctions, you can find pretty much any bootleg on the planet, and a decent selection of pirated software.
Yahoo is getting hit up by these guys because they (Yahoo) are totally irresponsible about the legality of what they're allowing their users to auction off. Somebody could probably put slaves up there and sell them. Come to think of it...
I love it how CNN says that the two spacecraft cost a combined $320 million. Let's put that into perspective with numbers from the sister site, CNNFN:
Red Hat - market capitalization of $7,465 million VA Linux - market cap of $2,905 million Cobalt - market cap of $1,292 million
I could go on and on. Why isn't Nasa seen as a tech company instead of just another gubbermint agency? Maybe if we privatized it and put it on the Nasdaq, it would get more respect from the press - and some better mission success rates.
Who gives a rip about the command line utilities - just make NT as stable as Unix, and you can call it Grandma Pearl's Home-Brewed Operating System with Extra Apples, for all I care!
Seriously, while you're at it, you should ask exactly what Windows is. It's in the same boat - there's several flavors of a single OS that really don't have much in common. Windows CE and Windows NT don't share much except a start button, when it comes down to brass tacks.
Here is a much more detailed link of the story from Celera's site, talking about the similarities between our genes and the fruit fly's. (I've got a dollar that says their computers are all Celerons, ha ha ho ho.)
Re:What about the customers?
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 2
Your friend would be lucky to recoup anything. The company's been in financial trouble for months, and it was pretty widely known that they were in bankruptcy. It'd be somewhat akin to buying a Daewoo car and being surprised when you can't get parts at the local Napa store next year. (What, you didn't know they were $13b in the red either? Tssk tssk...)
Have you checked the stock prices on Linux stocks lately? Sure, a lot of people who got in quick made a great buck, but anybody who bought after the first month is really getting clobbered.
RedHat - opened at $7, rocketed to $151, now $68. VA Linux - opened at $30, rocketed to $320, now at $113. Cobalt - opened at $22, rocketed to $172, now $104.
This sends a message to Wall Street - get in fast on Linux IPO's, and then dump them on the unwitting public. It also sends a subliminal message about Linux as a whole - that it's not a long-term option, only a short-term one. (I'm not saying I agree, but that's the subliminal message.)
I'd bet that $100 that the girl mistyped her search and wound up looking for chocolate hips instead of chocolate chips.
Using MSN, search #40-#50 all lead to various Playboy sites, although none of them seem active. Lycos turned up a truly obscene page, however. (Don't ask me how it found 'chocolate' in there, but I can definitely see the hips.) Webcrawler gave me one that was slightly off-color, but no pictures.
"Bloor Research had both operating systems running on relatively old Pentium machines."
Uhhh, hello? Am I the only one who laughs at a study that purports to judge the reliability of two operating systems based on how they ran on two machines that aren't even new off-the-rack? Yeah, I know that we all use old machines to run Linux for all kinds of uses, but this isn't how we're going to win over the community.
If someone tested a cancer cure on two people, one who got a placebo and one who got the real thing, I wouldn't go by their "research." They'd be tossed out of the medical community.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but let's not go trumpeting this as a success for the Linux community. We'd look like idiots. All the Windoze people have to say is, "Great. Now let's try the same thing on six new identical machines with redundant power supplies and drive arrays, just like you would do with a critical server in the real world."
Pick up one of the AOL free offers here in the states. You'll get 500 free hours, which should be more than enough for your road trip. Plus they have access numbers just about everywhere on the planet.
Hey, I hate AOL as much as the next guy, but if a foreigner is going to come visit, he should experience America the way the rest of the folks do. (And for free, ha ha ho ho.)
My best experiences have been with a Motorola Montana PCMCIA modem hooked up to an analog cellular phone. I know digital is faster, but the availability just isn't there yet, especially when you're talking about a road trip. Analog seems to have better coverage, especially on rural highways.
And of course, as a plus, the analog minutes are cheap these days.
When you enter into a contract with a union, they do your collective bargaining for you. They agree to certain terms in exchange for a more favorable wage and benefits package.
One of the things they agree not to do is organize a sickout, where employees are directed to take time off with pay in an effort to cripple the employer. The employees signed the agreement saying they wouldn't do a sickout, and therefore, Northwest has a right to sue for breach of contract. In order for them to prove breach, they have to prove the sickout was organized, and this is a step along that line.
Here's a quarter, old man. Go getcher self an education.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an overview of the mission: Nasa is putting four gyroscopes up in orbit for a year. If, after a year, they end up pointing in a slightly different direction, then they believe they've proven the theory of relativity. (Omitting a lot of the details here.)
Here's the catch: this relies on Nasa designing four absolutely perfect gyroscopes. A quote from the site:
"We've tried very hard to design an absolutely perfect gyroscope," said Dr. Francis Everitt, the Principal Investigator at Stanford University. Even in an age of exquisite measurements, nothing is perfect. The GP-B gyros, though, are about as close as humans can get. The gyros and their support system are so precise that non-relativity effects will cause them to drift by no more than 1/3 milli-arc-second during a year.
So basically, if the gyros were NOT made perfectly, they will drift. Nasa making something that isn't perfect is pretty well a guaranteed bet these days. That leads me to predict that in 2003, when the year is over, Nasa will be celebrating jubilantly that they've "proven" the theory of relativity. Whoop-dee-doo.
Forget the first part of that equation: you can lop the firewall part right off, and it still holds true.
(THUS, mathematics tells me that Firewalls must be equal to 0....)
They have an interesting point that you don't hear from the music industry or software industry:
"Second, and equally important, is the fact that our pay site is an adult site. It is for adults only and we mean it. We take the responsibility of limiting access to our site and our content to adults very seriously."
You have to give them some credit there: with that one sentence, they actually got the parents on their side. For once, the liberals and Bobby G are on the same side!
Isn't it funny how IBM is now unveiling versions of all its hardware that run Linux? All but their desktops, that is. Methinks the real big announcement will be the one about Thinkpads shipped with Linux preinstalled.
It smells kludgy because it is - we started with v3, and almost all of the expansion since has been restricted to be compliant with their older versions. It's great because I retain all my history, but not so great for new customers.
McAfee/NAI has a really slick setup called Total Help Desk that we've got installed at our company. It's much more cost-effective than you might think: sure, you're going to shovel $20k in up front, but the functionality is unbelievable.
It includes a lot of things you wouldn't be able to put together yourself. For example, it has a built-in knowledge base that you can search, and it automatically indexes all of the generated tickets. When you enter a ticket, or when you're working with a user, you can see all of their previous tickets at the click of a mouse, so you can see if some junior help desk flunky screwed up their system yesterday.
It has a lot of canned reports that show the average time to solve a problem, average hold time, and more.
It e-mails everyone involved when the status on a help ticket changes - for example, if I say that a ticket is fixed, that status update is emailed to me, to the user, and to the user's manager. It keeps our help desk staff from "hiding" tickets, and it keeps the users from whining that nobody has looked at their ticket recently.
It has an awesome "escalation" mechanism that can automatically escalate tickets to the right staff member based on their skill set. For example, I'm registered in the system with certain key words. If an FTP problem goes unsolved for more than 2 hours, I get an e-mail, and I know I should jump in. If a TCP/IP problem goes unsolved for more than 3 hours, our network admin is e-mailed, because she can probably help out - but I don't want to know about it. However, if any ticket is open for more than 16 hours, all of the key managers are e-mailed.
It even works as a development tracking utility. We track requests for enhancement in it, and we can see how long it takes for a bug to get fixed. The testing department loves it, because we can track how many times an issue gets bounced back to development because the coders can't code worth a damn. The contract programmers love it because they can work from home and still maintain full contact.
Before you start thinking about writing one of these, I'd strongly suggest looking at a demo of McAfee's solution. We looked at it and realized that we could put a talented coder to work for a year and not come out with a solution this hot. (The best thing is that it's all in SQL, so you can do your own PHP interface if you want. I wrote some addons in Drumbeat already.)
Somehow this harks back to OS2. The minor player in the market brings out "emulation" of the leader's last-generation platform. Sure, it works, but at that point, who really cares? People who buy Dreamcasts aren't going to get excited about the ability to play Playstation games when the Playstation 2 is already out.
(I know Bleem has nothing to do with Sega, so the IBM analogy doesn't really hold.)
I hear the comment already - you're saying, "But then I can upgrade and still keep all my Playstation games." What's the point, speedy - if you already have a Playstation, then you don't need the emulator. Why pay extra to play something you've already got?
You "didn't notice any of his songs available for download on his web site" because he's been locked in battle with his record label for years over that. Public Enemy tried to release a record for free on the internet, and their label made them remove it.
When he says he's all about free music, he's the only artist I know who really means it. He's trying to educate with his music, and he sees it as a soapbox, as free speech. For a brief period in the late 80's, a lot of people called it "edutainment" with a straight face. Chuck ended up feeling handcuffed to his record label, though, because:
If you give speeches for a living, and you decide that you want to stand on the corner and talk about politics to a group of people, you're allowed to do it.
But if you're a musician, and you make music for a living, your label doesn't allow you to create songs for fun (or whatever reason) and not give them a cut of the profits. It doesn't even matter if the label has nothing to do with the production or distribution of the music - they still want a piece of the action.
You can make a case for the labels: they have an investment in your success, and they put a lot of advertising dollars into getting your name out there. By releasing stuff for free, you're devaluing their investment and reducing their ability to recoup their costs.
So anyway, that's where Chuck is coming from. He sees the potential of Napster to distribute music as a real freedom-of-speech thing. He wants to bitch about the system, and this is the only way a lot of small artists are going to be able to do it. Of course, in reality, the small artists really just want to get paid....
All the original poster would have had to say was that it was a midi sequencer, and I would have been totally satisfied. But of course, that information is nowhere to be found in the post. People who love music don't necessarily love midis (I sure don't).
Hey, if this is going to be freshmeat.net, that's fine, I understand, but can we get a little more info on what the software does? This posting reads like all the spam e-mails that clutter my in-box.
Take a look at the article posted about Lego today, and notice how descriptive it is while still maintaining the same length. It's just a matter of exchanging one sentence of hype for one sentence of description about what the software does. Can we pull that off? Thanks!
Once again, Slashdot shows why all the geeks keep coming back. This whole thing was done with a classy sense of humor. Obviously, everyone expected weird stuff out of /. today, and this was a great way of being funny while not trying to fool anybody.
The sad part is that Segfault isn't this funny anymore even on its best of days!
Just because Yahoo isn't monitoring it doesn't mean they're not liable. That's why I talked about what happens when you actually TELL Yahoo what's going on, and they still don't do anything about it. For example, if I tell you that there's a guy selling cocaine on your front lawn, and you don't do anything about it, then you're an accomplice. (Especially if I turn around and call the police.)
I used to be roommates with a guy who sold bootleg concert CD's for a living. Ebay has a few employees that proactively search for illegal items like bootlegs, and they're so effective that the guy could only put bootlegs up for auction on the weekend, when the staff wasn't working. When a staff member finds you selling bootlegs, they can (and do) cancel all of your current auctions - not just the one auction they found.
In addition, Ebay lets you e-mail these "policemen" and tell them about illegal items, and they'll take action.
Yahoo doesn't do any proactive checking whatsoever. You can inform Yahoo that auction #123 is an illegal bootleg CD, and they don't stop it. Most of the time, they don't even acknowledge you. They never penalize you, and they certainly never cancel your account - he's been using the same one since auctions.yahoo.com got started.
I can see why Yahoo is doing it - they're trying to capture market share in any way possible, and let's face it, if they offer cool stuff that Ebay won't allow, then people will get interested. If you browse through Yahoo's auctions, you can find pretty much any bootleg on the planet, and a decent selection of pirated software.
Yahoo is getting hit up by these guys because they (Yahoo) are totally irresponsible about the legality of what they're allowing their users to auction off. Somebody could probably put slaves up there and sell them. Come to think of it...
I love it how CNN says that the two spacecraft cost a combined $320 million. Let's put that into perspective with numbers from the sister site, CNNFN:
Red Hat - market capitalization of $7,465 million
VA Linux - market cap of $2,905 million
Cobalt - market cap of $1,292 million
I could go on and on. Why isn't Nasa seen as a tech company instead of just another gubbermint agency? Maybe if we privatized it and put it on the Nasdaq, it would get more respect from the press - and some better mission success rates.
Who gives a rip about the command line utilities - just make NT as stable as Unix, and you can call it Grandma Pearl's Home-Brewed Operating System with Extra Apples, for all I care!
Seriously, while you're at it, you should ask exactly what Windows is. It's in the same boat - there's several flavors of a single OS that really don't have much in common. Windows CE and Windows NT don't share much except a start button, when it comes down to brass tacks.
Here is a much more detailed link of the story from Celera's site, talking about the similarities between our genes and the fruit fly's. (I've got a dollar that says their computers are all Celerons, ha ha ho ho.)
Your friend would be lucky to recoup anything. The company's been in financial trouble for months, and it was pretty widely known that they were in bankruptcy. It'd be somewhat akin to buying a Daewoo car and being surprised when you can't get parts at the local Napa store next year. (What, you didn't know they were $13b in the red either? Tssk tssk...)
I thought it was an amusing cross between Corel and Disney the first time I saw it, as if Mickey is leaning over into the C in Corel.
Have you checked the stock prices on Linux stocks lately? Sure, a lot of people who got in quick made a great buck, but anybody who bought after the first month is really getting clobbered.
RedHat - opened at $7, rocketed to $151, now $68.
VA Linux - opened at $30, rocketed to $320, now at $113.
Cobalt - opened at $22, rocketed to $172, now $104.
This sends a message to Wall Street - get in fast on Linux IPO's, and then dump them on the unwitting public. It also sends a subliminal message about Linux as a whole - that it's not a long-term option, only a short-term one. (I'm not saying I agree, but that's the subliminal message.)
For a more in-depth look at the IPO, click here for IPO.com's filing.
I'd bet that $100 that the girl mistyped her search and wound up looking for chocolate hips instead of chocolate chips.
Using MSN, search #40-#50 all lead to various Playboy sites, although none of them seem active. Lycos turned up a truly obscene page, however. (Don't ask me how it found 'chocolate' in there, but I can definitely see the hips.) Webcrawler gave me one that was slightly off-color, but no pictures.
From the article:
"Bloor Research had both operating systems running on relatively old Pentium machines."
Uhhh, hello? Am I the only one who laughs at a study that purports to judge the reliability of two operating systems based on how they ran on two machines that aren't even new off-the-rack? Yeah, I know that we all use old machines to run Linux for all kinds of uses, but this isn't how we're going to win over the community.
If someone tested a cancer cure on two people, one who got a placebo and one who got the real thing, I wouldn't go by their "research." They'd be tossed out of the medical community.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but let's not go trumpeting this as a success for the Linux community. We'd look like idiots. All the Windoze people have to say is, "Great. Now let's try the same thing on six new identical machines with redundant power supplies and drive arrays, just like you would do with a critical server in the real world."
Pick up one of the AOL free offers here in the states. You'll get 500 free hours, which should be more than enough for your road trip. Plus they have access numbers just about everywhere on the planet.
Hey, I hate AOL as much as the next guy, but if a foreigner is going to come visit, he should experience America the way the rest of the folks do. (And for free, ha ha ho ho.)
My best experiences have been with a Motorola Montana PCMCIA modem hooked up to an analog cellular phone. I know digital is faster, but the availability just isn't there yet, especially when you're talking about a road trip. Analog seems to have better coverage, especially on rural highways.
And of course, as a plus, the analog minutes are cheap these days.
Not so fast, speedy.
When you enter into a contract with a union, they do your collective bargaining for you. They agree to certain terms in exchange for a more favorable wage and benefits package.
One of the things they agree not to do is organize a sickout, where employees are directed to take time off with pay in an effort to cripple the employer. The employees signed the agreement saying they wouldn't do a sickout, and therefore, Northwest has a right to sue for breach of contract. In order for them to prove breach, they have to prove the sickout was organized, and this is a step along that line.
Here's a quarter, old man. Go getcher self an education.