Today's systems are shipping with multicore cpu's. Even at one cpu per motherboard, that is not something that has been more than superficially addressed at the programming level.
I would almost think that an open-source video card could be developed if you move most of the processing into RAM. Move the card design back to just being an interface between the computer and the monitor that just tells the monitor what color to make what pixel. That's a $5 card functionality.
Hmm.. Addressable buses? Suppose you tie RAM into a system where the RAM and CPU can, on the fly, streamline I/O paths by allocating the most optimal I/O path for their functionality. They do something similar with hardware partitioning, but I am thinking you could dynamically change this on the fly, if you have the right sort of motherboard. Have the supervisor CPU isolate various buses are required.
The first TB RAM boxes are going to be multi-cpu/core boxes. BY the time this all filters down to the desktop level (which isn't that far away really) desktop cpu's will be multicore and there will be multiple cpu's per motherboard.
But, think a bit further about the implications of this. It isn't the OS that this is aimed at. From the OS side, it would be nice to run a lot of it in RAM, but the reality is that most of the important parts of the OS (shared libs, kernel, and whatnot) are resident in RAM most of the time anyway.
There are a couple ways to use this just off the top of my head that might make this a more interesting thing than is presented.
The first is simple: You could load the OS into RAM. You can then compare the image in RAM periodically against the flashed image on disk. OS related files where the binary has been exploited could be identified and isolated. Also, and here's another nice feature is that you can really maximize virtual machines. You have a single image loaded on disk for each type of OS you want to run. When you activate each partition, you need only pull from one source. The virtual machines would only worry about saving the specific info local to their configuration in their profile. (Kinda RAMDISK version of AIX's WPAR concept.)
Secondly, the real hogs are not the OS. A lot of databases do their own memory management. Say you could ramdisk an Oracle database. That would greatly speed its access. I do really sympathize with the fears of the users, but I think adding a flash drive for the journaled that is kept current as the system runs can address some of the problems and fears.
Hmm.. Now that I think about it, I think they missed another area completely. Why not a RAMDISK video card? Seems to me that you could start carving out chunks of RAM and cpu cycles in a multithreaded system to do the video.
I think the big difference is not anything they point out here.
1) Face it, computers are basically as intimidating as cash registers. They are tools. Nothing more, nothing less. There is a mind set in a lot of workers - of any age - to be intimidated by certain technologies. Younger workers are more likely to be less intimidated by computers as they are familiar with them. Stick a Gen-Y in front of the controls of a 747 and you get a different reaction. Basically, the Gen-Y's are being presented with a technology for which they have a framework to be able to approach the technology as a tool, not a roadblock.
Seriously.. in the IT field, we can tell who will be good at IT based upon how intimidated they are by the box coming in the door.
2) As to length of time at a job.. well, the days of going down and getting that job at the town mill/factory and working until retirement are gone. I recall my father working a couple years at one job, then moving to the next job, then the next trying to build up that resume so he could land a job at one of the major plants in the area. When you get down to it, I think a lot of the view of how-things-were is nothing more than mis-remembering how things were. Back then, the US was where the jobs were and the companies planned to stay around awhile and there were unions to act as a balance. Companies promoted from within. Usually.
Now? It was not the Gen-Y's who moved the garment industry to Central America and China in the 1970's. They weren't even born yet. They did not move the auto industry to Japan. They did not move the semi-conductor industry to Taiwan. They aren't the ones moving IT jobs to India now.
They are the ones who are going to have to deal with those moves. They are the ones who have to come up with a coping mechanism for the current state of business.
And, one of those realities is that there is no industry or company that there is a reasonable expectation of retirement in 30 years. Get a job in IT and, even if it looks good now, what will the new CEO do in 5 years?
While I think there is hope for the individuals that comprise Gen-Y and a lot of companies, I don't see too much overlap in their outlooks. Companies do *not* have much loyalty to their employees and will look at the bottom-line first. The employees need to do the same. Gen-Y seems to better adapted to this sort of reality as it is the one they grew up in.
I think the author missed a lot. Was pretty far off base in a lot of areas. I have mainly worked large corporations and *none* had anything resembling worker empowerment..
Take this phrase from the article:
"Apple's successes in the years since Jobs' return -- iMac, iPod, iPhone -- suggest an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In Cupertino, innovation doesn't come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people's feelings are irrelevant."
Umm.. I have yet to work anywhere where even technical merits win hard-fought processes.
And I have never seen the worker-is-always-right attitude *anywhere*. If you have technically literate management, you *might* get a chance to pitch your side. Mostly not though. Then you run it by 10, or more, people whom all have the ability to veto, but not approve, your proposal.
I would hazard a guess that large corporations tend towards "worker as cogs" as an overall style. Look at the number of people the last few years that have received notices that their jobs were going to India in 4 weeks. Not exactly worker as individual talent there, ya know. Some try to buck the trend, but they are the exception, not the rule. Smaller companies use different styles. Another line form the article said "More than anywhere else I've worked before or since, there's a lot of concern about being fired". Shoot, the author needs to get out more. A lot of larger corporations will lay off entire departments or outsource them. At least at Apple, the implication seems to be that doing a good job means you keep your job. Many people these days are working under far greater concern of being fired and there is no productivity or metrics for them to meet to change that outcome.
Jobs is good at what he does. He spots future development and goes for it. That isn't a management skill. That talent at the level of a CEO would work under most management styles. And, his vision works because he does not have anyone to veto his proposals. You stick Jobs 2-3 management layers down in any large corporation and you would have all the problems of dealing with someone with his management style, but most of his ideas would be shot down by people who either did not like him, or his ideas.
Basically.. "Jobs is Jobs. You aren't." should be the lessons here. He's a CEO. You aren't.
Just learning a language is somewhat pointless. What are you learning the language for? Some languages do some things better than others. Some languages have entire corners of uses that many people never use.
If you are just going out and writing the same app in a different language, who cares? A lot of web stuff, it is irrelevant whether you use php, java, or whatever.
My first answer to the question "What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?" would be "quit writing the same crap".
If you've been writing cgi scripts, write a device driver. And use a language appropriate for it. If you're been writing the newest game that will blow everyone's socks off, write a Database app. Push your goals out there and the rest will follow. Stretch your goals into looking at the end goal and weighing the options in languages to get there. If all you are doing is jumping language to language at the same playground level, you're wasting your time. Languages are just a tool to build something, so build something. Something you have never done before. Unless your compiler is less than 20k in size, odds are you haven't explored a fraction of the versatility of the language you are using.
This isn't the first time that software changes have caused problems. Software change freezes should be in place prior to certain mission segments to allow for this sort of problem to be sorted out prior to when it goes live. At least it did not result in vehicle loss.
Except, in this case, full discovery is not going to lead to a small win. If it is determined that they have knowingly engaged in illegal activity - and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that their investigation fits that category - then, they are in a pretty bad spot. A security company not licensed in a state can not engage in investigations in that state. That is illegal. They can not install root kits across state lines, that is illegal also. Hacking is illegal. While the RIAA can claim that they themselves did not commit these acts, it is a reasonable conclusion that they would have encountered any number of these questions in any due diligence prior to awarding security contracts. It is also reasonable that they are aware of the legal issues because of that whole Sony root-kit mess a few years back.
And lawyers who are providing legal advice how to break laws are called co-defendants, not attorneys and they do *not* have attorney-client confidentiality in conspiracy and RICO cases where they are named as co-conspirators.
The fear goes away if you know they have no evidence they can present in court.
The RIAA is a trade organization. If you can crack some of their larger members away - and that is quite possible - then the RIAA loses its ability to speak for the industry. The RIAA has not paid out a single penny from any settlement it has won. Add on a lot of punitive damages and criminal charges and the RIAA can be broken quite decisively.
The probe was going to be flying around the rings of Saturn, so they added the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, which can analyze dust particles. For the type of thing they are doing here, they can treat water as a dust particle as it will freeze. It is particulate matter.
They made a lot of weird design decisions, such as sharp corners, that would have been corrected over time had they just had a system that allowed them to track luggage and identify the bottlenecks. When this first went in, it had very little staff. No one was looking at losing a job. This was a new facility and did not displace any previous system. This really did fail in its implementation without any sort of sabotage.
I don't think it was uneducated people. I think it was educated ones who were the problem here. They had a nice drawing and flow chart as well as theory to support the system. Where they failed was in the nuts and bolts. This thing really screams "paper design". Just getting people involved who had a background in luggage movement would have helped at the early stages. They used an optical scanning system on paper barcodes that easily folded. They used lightweight plastic bins that luggage did not fit well into giving a high center of gravity. They had sharp corners. They had weird transitions between conveyor belts. They had buggy conveyor belts to the aircraft. They had no real-time tracking of traffic flow and had no means of determining where an blockage occurred or of stopping the conveyor belts before a huge pile-up occurred.
It was *all* technical reasons for its failure.
And yes.. you're right. There is no technical reason for a system like that to not work. They designed a system with a lot of flaws. The theory was relatively sound.
Basically, the "escape system" they describe is a series of small retro-rockets and some explosive charges that will detach the capsule from the launch vehicle in the event of an emergency. There is no separate escape module.
The overall launch vehicle differs in a few critical areas from the old Mercury/Gemini/Apollo setups in that all of those capsules were on rockets that could be shut off after ignition. If there was a problem on a Saturn, or Atlas, or whatever, they would tell the engines to shut off and the flight path would then become a ballistic flight. This is important in that the capsule and launch vehicle would then be traveling the same speed and have zero relative velocity. It becomes a simple matter to then have some rockets that would move the capsule away from the rocket. While rough on the occupants, from an engineering perspective, it is much easier to achieve separation between two bodies traveling at the same speed than if one of them remains accelerating.
With Orion and Ares, the issue is complicated by the use of a solid rocket. You can not shut down the rocket after ignition. It remains under constant thrust. The most likely failure mode in an SRB is loss of control. An SRB is not as likely to explode as the fuel burns at a fairly constant rate. But, loss of control is a different set of problems. You can not eject forward of the flight path as the rocket is still accelerating and will likely run into the capsule. Similarly, it can't just detach and have rockets kick it away a short distance either. It has to be ejected a certain distance away perpendicular to the flight path and far enough away that it would not be in the path of an out-of control SRB or its exhaust.
Tiger is put out by the USGS and it is the basis of many commercial mapping projects. They used to release DEM and other forms of data. It now seems to be publicly available as pdf files.
But, it is hit-or-miss. They try to incorporate planning and projection maps to keep ahead of the curve, but if someone changes a road after its originally projected survey, then Tiger will likely not receive that data. Also, there are a lot of roads that are roads only on paper. They have either fallen out of use, or were never actually built. Nor do they necessarily cover housing developments. Also, if you have a private driveway with about 6 or 8 houses sticking off it, the Tiger data will not show any of that.
I worked for the US Census in 1988 doing something they call a pre-census. They had crews in select counties taking the Tiger data and doing a canvas of an area. That was to give them an idea ahead of time of demographics for areas and to determine some baseline accuracy for their census maps. We had to X out roads that were not present, or draw in a lot. Was very ad hoc as some people were better at it than others.
The Tiger data has nothing in terms of traffic flow or patterns. You'd need to cross-index that with other external data, which is where commercial entities make their money. Someone has to verify the data and provide sanity checks. You can tell the USGS about errors in their base maps, but they do not care, nor are they tasked with tracking which of those lines are one-way streets.
The observatory does not have to be directly opposite the Earth. Just behind the edge would work. You could then run a fibre-optic cable to a location nearby that is visible to Earth.
Because there is no stable geo-synchronous orbits around the Moon?
Also, for the wavelengths they are looking at, you need something that is kilometers wide and able to be effectively controlled.
They are not talking about some telescope with a mirror and camera. This is closer to a huge array of dish antennas that are linked together and point in a given direction. They actual dish can be fairly small and moved about to change the size of the baseline.
This type of observatory requires a lot of smaller units that add up to a total resolution of the receiving surface. The best resolution is directly overhead of the site. As you try to observe items that are low on the horizon, you lose a great deal of the quality of the observation as the effective size of the array is diminished.
For example:
**** (what you are observing)
^^^^ (The array).
The array is effectively as wide as its deployment diameter.
Now, suppose you are observing from a couple other angles:
****
^^^^
From that angle, the array is apparently smaller. You can angle them to make sure you have the same strength, but you have to increase the size of the array as a direct function of the observation angle to give equivalent baselines for the observation.
So, yes, you can see in any direction around the Moon, but placement on the Moon is not a simple matter.
Consider that you don't want it pointing towards the sun either. Or, maybe you do. That's an interesting argument right there. You'll get data from the sun, but you'll also have periods where you have nothing *but* data from the sun. Similarly, Jupiter kicks out a lot of radio signals. A lot of design decisions end up still needing a fairly complex shield to make sure that you're getting only the radio waves you are searching for.
Arguably, you would want to place it near the lunar poles. Not for any of the BS arguments about the potential for water there, but because they have the least interference from Earth and the Sun. It also means you can survey the same stretch of sky for longer periods as out-of-plane bodies there are a lot easier to track and remain in the same cone of observation irrespective of the current lunar position. (ie, something that is at zenith over the lunar pole is not going to vary more than about 6 degrees from being overhead over the course of a year. Even something 25 degrees, or so, would still be visible pretty much all the time). If you go to lower latitudes, then it gets closer to a 14-day non-observation lineup followed by a 14 day period of variable observation from minimal to optimal and back as the object traverses the sky. The closer you get to the lunar equator, the more of the sky you will see, but the less the observation time and the more variable the quality of the observation.
Ideally, they design a small inexpensive setup which can be done a few times on various areas of the Moon. Just choosing one set of criteria is going to be interesting. This is not like Hubble which can be pointed in any direction. There are a lot of rocks in the way.
Were they using 32 bit machines? Seems to me that 32 bit machines can only address 4GB of memory total. Allowing for the OS and other apps running in memory, you can't use that last bit in addressing anyway. (ie, the OS's and machines of the day maxed out at 4GB of RAM. You could make the whole thing of memory addressable, but it was not needed).
2GB is the limit on a lot of OS's. Right now, I can think of several filesystems that limit file sizes to 2GB. (FAT16, AIX's jfs). The first of those listed filesystems is the important one. They were externally limited to 2GB as that was the largest file size allowed on their platform.
Except, we are in the midst of people arguing about exactly how intelligent cephalopods and sea based mammals are.
The truth of the matter is that we have no real way to gauge the intelligence of other alien life forms. Almost all tests are based on a set of assumptions. It is only fairly recently that we have even defined classes of intelligences within humans (Linguistic, Spatial, Musical, Body-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Logical/Mathematical). It is entirely possible that intelligent life could evolve in aquatic environments that score extremely high in multiple categories there and we would have no real way of knowing. We know that there are a number of species that have highly evolved linguistic characteristics. But, what are they saying? Is it "See Spot Run"? Is it something profound? Is it elaborate fart jokes? It is entirely possible that the social structures are subtle enough that we have no means of determining how complex they are. When whale song can be heard from thousands of miles away, how do you determine the society that hears it and responds and the relationship between the one singing and the ones listening?
Someone once said that either we are alone, or we are not. Either answer is mind boggling.
My view is that we don't even know if we alone here on Earth, much less the universe.
You're misreading what ne is. It is not Earth. It is not defined as rocky planet with X amount of sunlight. It is "Conditions comparable to places where life has been found on Earth". Take the range of life supporting environments on Earth and apply them to planets and bodies we know about and you get a much wider range. Just in our solar system alone, we have 3 planets with less extreme environments than where we have discovered life existing on Earth and we have found a couple Moons with less extreme conditions.
Given that we can only identify specific types of planets in certain orbits and we are getting into the hundreds of known planets, then the whole picture changes a lot. We would not be able to identify our own solar system from those distances with current technology. What percentage of solar systems are we identifying planets in right now? Its a subset of those with planets, not a total. Given 221 current planets all of which match a single characteristic, it kinda begs the question of how many others our outside our observation range right now. "no indication of other to be found has been found" is as scientifically misleading as it is grammatically misleading. You find a planet close in to a Sun with a planetary disk also present, well.. that planet is not likely alone. And, in fact, we have discovered solar systems with as many as 5 planets. Shoot, let's take HD 142 b as an example. It is a jovian sized plantet, but it is located about 1AU away from that Sun and is in the habitable zone. That is a another planet for ne right there. Upsilon Andromedae d. Habitable zone. HD 28185 b is also in a habitable zone.
R* = The number of stars born each year. fp = the fraction of those stars which have a planetary system. ne = the number of "earth-like" planets in a solar system. fl = the fraction of these planets on which life arises. fi = the fraction of these life forms that evolve into intelligent civilisations like ours. fc = the fraction of these civilisations that choose to attempt to communicate across the Galaxy. L = the average time they have been trying to communicate.
The range of life forms found on Earth in extreme conditions have pushed the "ne" category into much higher ranges. You could make an argument for a lot bodies within our own solar system that have conditions less extreme than those found on Earth where life exists. We have found life in volcanic vents. We have found them in extreme cold areas. All of which really pushes "ne" closer to 1.0. And, solar systems seem to be more the rule than the exception.
Whether this planet can support life as we know it is a different proposition than what it means overall. The Drake Equation is getting pretty close to 1.0 in a lot of categories.
Honestly, I was not even aware that there were still wifi coffee shops that you had to pay for internet access. Is that a Bay Area thing? In the Fort Collins CO area, most coffee shops I have been around have free wifi with no time limits.
Seriously.. small shops have been doing this for years. DSL is down in the $20/month range and a wireless router is cheap. I suspect that the administrative overhead of managing a system like this one for Starbucks is not really worth the effort. Starbucks may have made their money on the T-Mobile deal, but I doubt it. IIRC, it was a $500 mill contract. And, a quick websearch shows a series of price cuts.
"In the original story regarding the price drop, Starbucks New Ventures Director Lovina McMurchy is quoted as saying that even the busiest Starbucks shops get about 20 Wi-Fi devices on the network per day. While T-Mobile doesn't release cost information for providing the hotspot, the revenue generated from so few customers is probably not enough to cover costs of a high speed line -- the T-Mobile Hotspots are served by costly T1 lines -- and the revenue sharing between T-Mobile, Starbucks, and HP, which provides some software for the services."
"All the mom-and-pop coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi. In fact, most everyone does except Starbucks. The Seattle-based coffee house gets its hotspot piped in by T-Mobile. It's been reported for years that store managers at Starbucks has been complaining to upper management for a while about losing business because customers don't want to pay for their Internet after forking out $4 on a foo-foo drink."
"FON, a community WiFi provider headquartered in Madrid, Spain, is offering wireless Internet access to Starbucks' latte-sipping surfers for just $2 a day--versus the $10 users pay to sign onto the 5,100 T-Mobile hotspots at U.S. Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ).
Just how does FON plan to steal away Starbucks Internet users? By offering FON wireless routers, also known as "La Foneras," free to anyone who lives above or next to a Starbucks. The routers, which usually cost $40, split an Internet broadband connection into two wireless signals--one for personal Internet use and the second for public use, which can be accessed by anyone within range for $2 per day. The routers' owners get to pocket half of the sign-on fee, and FON takes home the rest."
If you look at the timing of the original article, you'll find that it was posted on Friday. Basically, Microsoft caved in to pressure from that base. It was not something that was planned and the article is correct about the details when it was written. The link you provided is pointing to a timeframe after the first article was written.
Microsoft did not plan on releasing SP1 early to technet. The debate is accurately described and attributed. Microsoft's stance as described in the article is also accurate as of the time the article was written and posted. That Microsoft later reversed its position is something to be noted, but it is not "trivial or misleading" to post an *accurate* rundown of the argument which led to Microsoft's reversal. (Which had not even happened at the time the article was written).
Unless you can show that Microsoft had planned on an early release for this base, I think you might want to rethink your position. It was articles like the Computerworld article which led to the release, not any policy decision by Microsoft before there was a lot of backlash.
Here is the official announcement on the board that started the whole thing:
"Now that we've made Windows Server 2008 available to all TechNet Plus subscribers there is a firestorm of questions about when will SP1 also be available for subscribers.
The current plan is that it will be available in mid-March, if that changes I'll let you know. In the meantime, please check out Mike Nash's blog post to learn more about SP1 and the timing of the availability.
Have Feedback? Leave a comment - I looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks,
Kathy Dixon
TechNet Plus subscriptions"
It was not until the 11th - today - that a new policy was mentioned. Your own counterargument is based on a post made this morning - several days after the article you say is misleading was posted. How was the Computerworld article misleading? It was 100% accurate when written and anyone can follow the link provided in the article and verify that. How could they know that Microsoft was going to change their policy? It was a stupid policy and led to a backlash and that was the story. The story is now that Microsoft needed to be pressured to do what they should have done in the first place.
Well, Vista decided to perceive my DVD burner as a CD drive with no burn capability after one of their updates. So, I guess perception is not reality in that case.
I had to turn off those auto updates as they do as much damage to my box and cause me to waste as much time as not running them and running the risk of someone breaking in. I can't run the risk of not even knowing if my laptop will be compatible with hardware it shipped with on any given day. Not having drivers for scanner and printer was bad enough. Now, I have to worry about stuff it shipped with? Argue bloat all you want, but if the OS can't see something today that it saw yesterday, something is fundamentally wrong.
If your daily requirement on the Moon is roughly 100KWh, then you need a storage system capable of handling 1.4MWh to handle the lunar night cycle. You can't exactly power down over night to reduce the power requirements.
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Today's systems are shipping with multicore cpu's. Even at one cpu per motherboard, that is not something that has been more than superficially addressed at the programming level.
I would almost think that an open-source video card could be developed if you move most of the processing into RAM. Move the card design back to just being an interface between the computer and the monitor that just tells the monitor what color to make what pixel. That's a $5 card functionality.
Hmm.. Addressable buses? Suppose you tie RAM into a system where the RAM and CPU can, on the fly, streamline I/O paths by allocating the most optimal I/O path for their functionality. They do something similar with hardware partitioning, but I am thinking you could dynamically change this on the fly, if you have the right sort of motherboard. Have the supervisor CPU isolate various buses are required.
The first TB RAM boxes are going to be multi-cpu/core boxes. BY the time this all filters down to the desktop level (which isn't that far away really) desktop cpu's will be multicore and there will be multiple cpu's per motherboard.
You could do it now.
But, think a bit further about the implications of this. It isn't the OS that this is aimed at. From the OS side, it would be nice to run a lot of it in RAM, but the reality is that most of the important parts of the OS (shared libs, kernel, and whatnot) are resident in RAM most of the time anyway.
There are a couple ways to use this just off the top of my head that might make this a more interesting thing than is presented.
The first is simple: You could load the OS into RAM. You can then compare the image in RAM periodically against the flashed image on disk. OS related files where the binary has been exploited could be identified and isolated. Also, and here's another nice feature is that you can really maximize virtual machines. You have a single image loaded on disk for each type of OS you want to run. When you activate each partition, you need only pull from one source. The virtual machines would only worry about saving the specific info local to their configuration in their profile. (Kinda RAMDISK version of AIX's WPAR concept.)
Secondly, the real hogs are not the OS. A lot of databases do their own memory management. Say you could ramdisk an Oracle database. That would greatly speed its access. I do really sympathize with the fears of the users, but I think adding a flash drive for the journaled that is kept current as the system runs can address some of the problems and fears.
Hmm.. Now that I think about it, I think they missed another area completely. Why not a RAMDISK video card? Seems to me that you could start carving out chunks of RAM and cpu cycles in a multithreaded system to do the video.
I think the big difference is not anything they point out here.
1) Face it, computers are basically as intimidating as cash registers. They are tools. Nothing more, nothing less. There is a mind set in a lot of workers - of any age - to be intimidated by certain technologies. Younger workers are more likely to be less intimidated by computers as they are familiar with them. Stick a Gen-Y in front of the controls of a 747 and you get a different reaction. Basically, the Gen-Y's are being presented with a technology for which they have a framework to be able to approach the technology as a tool, not a roadblock.
Seriously.. in the IT field, we can tell who will be good at IT based upon how intimidated they are by the box coming in the door.
2) As to length of time at a job.. well, the days of going down and getting that job at the town mill/factory and working until retirement are gone. I recall my father working a couple years at one job, then moving to the next job, then the next trying to build up that resume so he could land a job at one of the major plants in the area. When you get down to it, I think a lot of the view of how-things-were is nothing more than mis-remembering how things were. Back then, the US was where the jobs were and the companies planned to stay around awhile and there were unions to act as a balance. Companies promoted from within. Usually.
Now? It was not the Gen-Y's who moved the garment industry to Central America and China in the 1970's. They weren't even born yet. They did not move the auto industry to Japan. They did not move the semi-conductor industry to Taiwan. They aren't the ones moving IT jobs to India now.
They are the ones who are going to have to deal with those moves. They are the ones who have to come up with a coping mechanism for the current state of business.
And, one of those realities is that there is no industry or company that there is a reasonable expectation of retirement in 30 years. Get a job in IT and, even if it looks good now, what will the new CEO do in 5 years?
While I think there is hope for the individuals that comprise Gen-Y and a lot of companies, I don't see too much overlap in their outlooks. Companies do *not* have much loyalty to their employees and will look at the bottom-line first. The employees need to do the same. Gen-Y seems to better adapted to this sort of reality as it is the one they grew up in.
I think the author missed a lot. Was pretty far off base in a lot of areas. I have mainly worked large corporations and *none* had anything resembling worker empowerment..
Take this phrase from the article:
"Apple's successes in the years since Jobs' return -- iMac, iPod, iPhone -- suggest an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In Cupertino, innovation doesn't come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people's feelings are irrelevant."
Umm.. I have yet to work anywhere where even technical merits win hard-fought processes.
And I have never seen the worker-is-always-right attitude *anywhere*. If you have technically literate management, you *might* get a chance to pitch your side. Mostly not though. Then you run it by 10, or more, people whom all have the ability to veto, but not approve, your proposal.
I would hazard a guess that large corporations tend towards "worker as cogs" as an overall style. Look at the number of people the last few years that have received notices that their jobs were going to India in 4 weeks. Not exactly worker as individual talent there, ya know. Some try to buck the trend, but they are the exception, not the rule. Smaller companies use different styles. Another line form the article said "More than anywhere else I've worked before or since, there's a lot of concern about being fired". Shoot, the author needs to get out more. A lot of larger corporations will lay off entire departments or outsource them. At least at Apple, the implication seems to be that doing a good job means you keep your job. Many people these days are working under far greater concern of being fired and there is no productivity or metrics for them to meet to change that outcome.
Jobs is good at what he does. He spots future development and goes for it. That isn't a management skill. That talent at the level of a CEO would work under most management styles. And, his vision works because he does not have anyone to veto his proposals. You stick Jobs 2-3 management layers down in any large corporation and you would have all the problems of dealing with someone with his management style, but most of his ideas would be shot down by people who either did not like him, or his ideas.
Basically.. "Jobs is Jobs. You aren't." should be the lessons here. He's a CEO. You aren't.
I will agree with the wait until after the next auto-update. That tended to be when it deleted my DVD every month.
There is another aspect to this.
Just learning a language is somewhat pointless. What are you learning the language for? Some languages do some things better than others. Some languages have entire corners of uses that many people never use.
If you are just going out and writing the same app in a different language, who cares? A lot of web stuff, it is irrelevant whether you use php, java, or whatever.
My first answer to the question "What would your choice be for programmers extending beyond their normal boundaries?" would be "quit writing the same crap".
If you've been writing cgi scripts, write a device driver. And use a language appropriate for it. If you're been writing the newest game that will blow everyone's socks off, write a Database app. Push your goals out there and the rest will follow. Stretch your goals into looking at the end goal and weighing the options in languages to get there. If all you are doing is jumping language to language at the same playground level, you're wasting your time. Languages are just a tool to build something, so build something. Something you have never done before. Unless your compiler is less than 20k in size, odds are you haven't explored a fraction of the versatility of the language you are using.
Bite off more than you can chew.
Read about the war in New Jersey and the Carolinas sometime. They did target civilians, especially in the Carolinas where it was very vicious.
This isn't the first time that software changes have caused problems. Software change freezes should be in place prior to certain mission segments to allow for this sort of problem to be sorted out prior to when it goes live. At least it did not result in vehicle loss.
Except, in this case, full discovery is not going to lead to a small win. If it is determined that they have knowingly engaged in illegal activity - and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that their investigation fits that category - then, they are in a pretty bad spot. A security company not licensed in a state can not engage in investigations in that state. That is illegal. They can not install root kits across state lines, that is illegal also. Hacking is illegal. While the RIAA can claim that they themselves did not commit these acts, it is a reasonable conclusion that they would have encountered any number of these questions in any due diligence prior to awarding security contracts. It is also reasonable that they are aware of the legal issues because of that whole Sony root-kit mess a few years back.
And lawyers who are providing legal advice how to break laws are called co-defendants, not attorneys and they do *not* have attorney-client confidentiality in conspiracy and RICO cases where they are named as co-conspirators.
The fear goes away if you know they have no evidence they can present in court.
The RIAA is a trade organization. If you can crack some of their larger members away - and that is quite possible - then the RIAA loses its ability to speak for the industry. The RIAA has not paid out a single penny from any settlement it has won. Add on a lot of punitive damages and criminal charges and the RIAA can be broken quite decisively.
The probe was going to be flying around the rings of Saturn, so they added the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, which can analyze dust particles. For the type of thing they are doing here, they can treat water as a dust particle as it will freeze. It is particulate matter.
They made a lot of weird design decisions, such as sharp corners, that would have been corrected over time had they just had a system that allowed them to track luggage and identify the bottlenecks. When this first went in, it had very little staff. No one was looking at losing a job. This was a new facility and did not displace any previous system. This really did fail in its implementation without any sort of sabotage.
I don't think it was uneducated people. I think it was educated ones who were the problem here. They had a nice drawing and flow chart as well as theory to support the system. Where they failed was in the nuts and bolts. This thing really screams "paper design". Just getting people involved who had a background in luggage movement would have helped at the early stages. They used an optical scanning system on paper barcodes that easily folded. They used lightweight plastic bins that luggage did not fit well into giving a high center of gravity. They had sharp corners. They had weird transitions between conveyor belts. They had buggy conveyor belts to the aircraft. They had no real-time tracking of traffic flow and had no means of determining where an blockage occurred or of stopping the conveyor belts before a huge pile-up occurred.
It was *all* technical reasons for its failure.
And yes.. you're right. There is no technical reason for a system like that to not work. They designed a system with a lot of flaws. The theory was relatively sound.
DIA used an optical system of identification.
I suspect that DIA could have modified their infrastructure to handle RFID tags and it would have worked.
Basically, the "escape system" they describe is a series of small retro-rockets and some explosive charges that will detach the capsule from the launch vehicle in the event of an emergency. There is no separate escape module.
The overall launch vehicle differs in a few critical areas from the old Mercury/Gemini/Apollo setups in that all of those capsules were on rockets that could be shut off after ignition. If there was a problem on a Saturn, or Atlas, or whatever, they would tell the engines to shut off and the flight path would then become a ballistic flight. This is important in that the capsule and launch vehicle would then be traveling the same speed and have zero relative velocity. It becomes a simple matter to then have some rockets that would move the capsule away from the rocket. While rough on the occupants, from an engineering perspective, it is much easier to achieve separation between two bodies traveling at the same speed than if one of them remains accelerating.
With Orion and Ares, the issue is complicated by the use of a solid rocket. You can not shut down the rocket after ignition. It remains under constant thrust. The most likely failure mode in an SRB is loss of control. An SRB is not as likely to explode as the fuel burns at a fairly constant rate. But, loss of control is a different set of problems. You can not eject forward of the flight path as the rocket is still accelerating and will likely run into the capsule. Similarly, it can't just detach and have rockets kick it away a short distance either. It has to be ejected a certain distance away perpendicular to the flight path and far enough away that it would not be in the path of an out-of control SRB or its exhaust.
Tiger is put out by the USGS and it is the basis of many commercial mapping projects. They used to release DEM and other forms of data. It now seems to be publicly available as pdf files.
But, it is hit-or-miss. They try to incorporate planning and projection maps to keep ahead of the curve, but if someone changes a road after its originally projected survey, then Tiger will likely not receive that data. Also, there are a lot of roads that are roads only on paper. They have either fallen out of use, or were never actually built. Nor do they necessarily cover housing developments. Also, if you have a private driveway with about 6 or 8 houses sticking off it, the Tiger data will not show any of that.
I worked for the US Census in 1988 doing something they call a pre-census. They had crews in select counties taking the Tiger data and doing a canvas of an area. That was to give them an idea ahead of time of demographics for areas and to determine some baseline accuracy for their census maps. We had to X out roads that were not present, or draw in a lot. Was very ad hoc as some people were better at it than others.
The Tiger data has nothing in terms of traffic flow or patterns. You'd need to cross-index that with other external data, which is where commercial entities make their money. Someone has to verify the data and provide sanity checks. You can tell the USGS about errors in their base maps, but they do not care, nor are they tasked with tracking which of those lines are one-way streets.
The observatory does not have to be directly opposite the Earth. Just behind the edge would work. You could then run a fibre-optic cable to a location nearby that is visible to Earth.
Because there is no stable geo-synchronous orbits around the Moon?
Also, for the wavelengths they are looking at, you need something that is kilometers wide and able to be effectively controlled.
They are not talking about some telescope with a mirror and camera. This is closer to a huge array of dish antennas that are linked together and point in a given direction. They actual dish can be fairly small and moved about to change the size of the baseline.
Well, not quite.
This type of observatory requires a lot of smaller units that add up to a total resolution of the receiving surface. The best resolution is directly overhead of the site. As you try to observe items that are low on the horizon, you lose a great deal of the quality of the observation as the effective size of the array is diminished.
For example:
**** (what you are observing)
^^^^ (The array).
The array is effectively as wide as its deployment diameter.
Now, suppose you are observing from a couple other angles:
****
^^^^
From that angle, the array is apparently smaller. You can angle them to make sure you have the same strength, but you have to increase the size of the array as a direct function of the observation angle to give equivalent baselines for the observation.
So, yes, you can see in any direction around the Moon, but placement on the Moon is not a simple matter.
Consider that you don't want it pointing towards the sun either. Or, maybe you do. That's an interesting argument right there. You'll get data from the sun, but you'll also have periods where you have nothing *but* data from the sun. Similarly, Jupiter kicks out a lot of radio signals. A lot of design decisions end up still needing a fairly complex shield to make sure that you're getting only the radio waves you are searching for.
Arguably, you would want to place it near the lunar poles. Not for any of the BS arguments about the potential for water there, but because they have the least interference from Earth and the Sun. It also means you can survey the same stretch of sky for longer periods as out-of-plane bodies there are a lot easier to track and remain in the same cone of observation irrespective of the current lunar position. (ie, something that is at zenith over the lunar pole is not going to vary more than about 6 degrees from being overhead over the course of a year. Even something 25 degrees, or so, would still be visible pretty much all the time). If you go to lower latitudes, then it gets closer to a 14-day non-observation lineup followed by a 14 day period of variable observation from minimal to optimal and back as the object traverses the sky. The closer you get to the lunar equator, the more of the sky you will see, but the less the observation time and the more variable the quality of the observation.
Ideally, they design a small inexpensive setup which can be done a few times on various areas of the Moon. Just choosing one set of criteria is going to be interesting. This is not like Hubble which can be pointed in any direction. There are a lot of rocks in the way.
Were they using 32 bit machines? Seems to me that 32 bit machines can only address 4GB of memory total. Allowing for the OS and other apps running in memory, you can't use that last bit in addressing anyway. (ie, the OS's and machines of the day maxed out at 4GB of RAM. You could make the whole thing of memory addressable, but it was not needed).
2GB is the limit on a lot of OS's. Right now, I can think of several filesystems that limit file sizes to 2GB. (FAT16, AIX's jfs). The first of those listed filesystems is the important one. They were externally limited to 2GB as that was the largest file size allowed on their platform.
Except, we are in the midst of people arguing about exactly how intelligent cephalopods and sea based mammals are.
The truth of the matter is that we have no real way to gauge the intelligence of other alien life forms. Almost all tests are based on a set of assumptions. It is only fairly recently that we have even defined classes of intelligences within humans (Linguistic, Spatial, Musical, Body-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Logical/Mathematical). It is entirely possible that intelligent life could evolve in aquatic environments that score extremely high in multiple categories there and we would have no real way of knowing. We know that there are a number of species that have highly evolved linguistic characteristics. But, what are they saying? Is it "See Spot Run"? Is it something profound? Is it elaborate fart jokes? It is entirely possible that the social structures are subtle enough that we have no means of determining how complex they are. When whale song can be heard from thousands of miles away, how do you determine the society that hears it and responds and the relationship between the one singing and the ones listening?
Someone once said that either we are alone, or we are not. Either answer is mind boggling.
My view is that we don't even know if we alone here on Earth, much less the universe.
You're misreading what ne is. It is not Earth. It is not defined as rocky planet with X amount of sunlight. It is "Conditions comparable to places where life has been found on Earth". Take the range of life supporting environments on Earth and apply them to planets and bodies we know about and you get a much wider range. Just in our solar system alone, we have 3 planets with less extreme environments than where we have discovered life existing on Earth and we have found a couple Moons with less extreme conditions.
Given that we can only identify specific types of planets in certain orbits and we are getting into the hundreds of known planets, then the whole picture changes a lot. We would not be able to identify our own solar system from those distances with current technology. What percentage of solar systems are we identifying planets in right now? Its a subset of those with planets, not a total. Given 221 current planets all of which match a single characteristic, it kinda begs the question of how many others our outside our observation range right now. "no indication of other to be found has been found" is as scientifically misleading as it is grammatically misleading. You find a planet close in to a Sun with a planetary disk also present, well.. that planet is not likely alone. And, in fact, we have discovered solar systems with as many as 5 planets. Shoot, let's take HD 142 b as an example. It is a jovian sized plantet, but it is located about 1AU away from that Sun and is in the habitable zone. That is a another planet for ne right there. Upsilon Andromedae d. Habitable zone. HD 28185 b is also in a habitable zone.
These are not 0's.
N = ( R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc) x L
R* = The number of stars born each year.
fp = the fraction of those stars which have a planetary system.
ne = the number of "earth-like" planets in a solar system.
fl = the fraction of these planets on which life arises.
fi = the fraction of these life forms that evolve into intelligent civilisations like ours.
fc = the fraction of these civilisations that choose to attempt to communicate across the Galaxy.
L = the average time they have been trying to communicate.
The range of life forms found on Earth in extreme conditions have pushed the "ne" category into much higher ranges. You could make an argument for a lot bodies within our own solar system that have conditions less extreme than those found on Earth where life exists. We have found life in volcanic vents. We have found them in extreme cold areas. All of which really pushes "ne" closer to 1.0. And, solar systems seem to be more the rule than the exception.
Whether this planet can support life as we know it is a different proposition than what it means overall. The Drake Equation is getting pretty close to 1.0 in a lot of categories.
Honestly, I was not even aware that there were still wifi coffee shops that you had to pay for internet access. Is that a Bay Area thing? In the Fort Collins CO area, most coffee shops I have been around have free wifi with no time limits.
Seriously.. small shops have been doing this for years. DSL is down in the $20/month range and a wireless router is cheap. I suspect that the administrative overhead of managing a system like this one for Starbucks is not really worth the effort. Starbucks may have made their money on the T-Mobile deal, but I doubt it. IIRC, it was a $500 mill contract. And, a quick websearch shows a series of price cuts.
Here's one from 2003:
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/1855971
"In the original story regarding the price drop, Starbucks New Ventures Director Lovina McMurchy is quoted as saying that even the busiest Starbucks shops get about 20 Wi-Fi devices on the network per day. While T-Mobile doesn't release cost information for providing the hotspot, the revenue generated from so few customers is probably not enough to cover costs of a high speed line -- the T-Mobile Hotspots are served by costly T1 lines -- and the revenue sharing between T-Mobile, Starbucks, and HP, which provides some software for the services."
http://www.lockergnome.com/mobile/2006/03/09/t-mobile-answers-the-cries-of-starbucks-owners/
"All the mom-and-pop coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi. In fact, most everyone does except Starbucks. The Seattle-based coffee house gets its hotspot piped in by T-Mobile. It's been reported for years that store managers at Starbucks has been complaining to upper management for a while about losing business because customers don't want to pay for their Internet after forking out $4 on a foo-foo drink."
Here's my favorite:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/23/fonbucks-wifi-starbucks-ent_cx_mc_0226fonbucks.html
"FON, a community WiFi provider headquartered in Madrid, Spain, is offering wireless Internet access to Starbucks' latte-sipping surfers for just $2 a day--versus the $10 users pay to sign onto the 5,100 T-Mobile hotspots at U.S. Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ).
Just how does FON plan to steal away Starbucks Internet users? By offering FON wireless routers, also known as "La Foneras," free to anyone who lives above or next to a Starbucks. The routers, which usually cost $40, split an Internet broadband connection into two wireless signals--one for personal Internet use and the second for public use, which can be accessed by anyone within range for $2 per day. The routers' owners get to pocket half of the sign-on fee, and FON takes home the rest."
If you look at the timing of the original article, you'll find that it was posted on Friday. Basically, Microsoft caved in to pressure from that base. It was not something that was planned and the article is correct about the details when it was written. The link you provided is pointing to a timeframe after the first article was written.
Microsoft did not plan on releasing SP1 early to technet. The debate is accurately described and attributed. Microsoft's stance as described in the article is also accurate as of the time the article was written and posted. That Microsoft later reversed its position is something to be noted, but it is not "trivial or misleading" to post an *accurate* rundown of the argument which led to Microsoft's reversal. (Which had not even happened at the time the article was written).
Unless you can show that Microsoft had planned on an early release for this base, I think you might want to rethink your position. It was articles like the Computerworld article which led to the release, not any policy decision by Microsoft before there was a lot of backlash.
Here is the official announcement on the board that started the whole thing:
http://blogs.technet.com/technetplussubscriptions/archive/2008/02/04/technet-plus-sp1-availability-plan-of-record.aspx
"Now that we've made Windows Server 2008 available to all TechNet Plus subscribers there is a firestorm of questions about when will SP1 also be available for subscribers.
The current plan is that it will be available in mid-March, if that changes I'll let you know. In the meantime, please check out Mike Nash's blog post to learn more about SP1 and the timing of the availability.
Have Feedback? Leave a comment - I looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks,
Kathy Dixon
TechNet Plus subscriptions"
It was not until the 11th - today - that a new policy was mentioned. Your own counterargument is based on a post made this morning - several days after the article you say is misleading was posted. How was the Computerworld article misleading? It was 100% accurate when written and anyone can follow the link provided in the article and verify that. How could they know that Microsoft was going to change their policy? It was a stupid policy and led to a backlash and that was the story. The story is now that Microsoft needed to be pressured to do what they should have done in the first place.
Well, Vista decided to perceive my DVD burner as a CD drive with no burn capability after one of their updates. So, I guess perception is not reality in that case.
I had to turn off those auto updates as they do as much damage to my box and cause me to waste as much time as not running them and running the risk of someone breaking in. I can't run the risk of not even knowing if my laptop will be compatible with hardware it shipped with on any given day. Not having drivers for scanner and printer was bad enough. Now, I have to worry about stuff it shipped with? Argue bloat all you want, but if the OS can't see something today that it saw yesterday, something is fundamentally wrong.
If your daily requirement on the Moon is roughly 100KWh, then you need a storage system capable of handling 1.4MWh to handle the lunar night cycle. You can't exactly power down over night to reduce the power requirements.
Not exactly small change.