We have a story about two relatively insignificant companies switching their infrastructure over to Linux, despite what many people might say the plural of anecdote is not "data" and despite what michael thinks two companies is not several.
I worked at Amazon in 2001 when Amazon switched from Solaris/Tru64UNIX to HP Netservers running Redhat Linux, if Amazon hadn't done this the company probably would have gone out of business as the IT costs of the proprietary UNIX systems were too high. Were there problems with this transition? Well yes there were, we used to joke that the website for HP's technical support for RedHat on the Netservers was www.google.com, because God knows that HP was clueless about Linux at the time. But as time passed we killed off a lot of the bugs that the system had and ended up with a very reliable infrastructure.
Linux support is getting better and better thanks to companies such as IBM and Silicon Graphics who realize that if they want to compete in the Linux market that they have to sell real Linux solutions, they can't, as Sun does, and HPaq did, tell customers that they have Linux solutions available and then attempt to push them onto systems running their proprietary versions of UNIX, bait and switch just won't cut it.
For now Linux is cutting into sales of the proprietary UNIXes just as Microsoft Windows NT started to do 10 years ago, but as Microsoft continues to get bad press over security flaws in their OS, and as ship dates for Longhorn continue to slip, and as the price of Microsoft operating systems inches ever skyward while the licensing terms become ever more onerous (and as my sentences continue to run-on...) Linux is going to start taking over a lot of the server space that Microsoft currently owns. IT is becoming a commodity, if two IT vendors can both make the case that their product is going to work for a company then the vendor with the lower cost is going to get the contract, the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" which in the 90s became "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" are coming to a close. TCA is going to win the day and customers aren't going to care if the system is Longhorn, UNIX, Linux or the new BlargoVAX 666.
It's awesome, of course it's installed in my coffeemaker, but hey, it's still pretty cool.
Getting people into orbit and back
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After the X Prize
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· Score: 5, Insightful
is difficult but not as difficult as NASA would like you to believe. Yes, a lot of work and complex technology is involved, on the other hand the Space Shuttle is about the worst way to solve this problem that could be developed. Imagine how much air travel would cost if every time you flew a 747 from New York to London you had to basically do a frame off rebuild of the aircraft, this is one of the reasons why the shuttle is so goddamned expensive. Of course this huge army of contractors costs a lot of money and the people who get these contracts like getting this money and don't have any incentive to develop something that would screw up this revenue stream.
You may or may not agree with Dr. Pournelle, I sure don't, on a lot of things, but he's spot on about what happened to the SSTO concept, NASA got control of it, let a contract out to Lockheed to develop the X-33, spent a whole bunch of money and didn't produce any real hardware unlike the SSX project which spent 60 million dollars and produced a prototype that was able to take off and land twice with a 26 hour turnaround with a support crew of 14 and which also managed to land safely after a hydrogen explosion tore off part of the aeroshell.
When I worked at CompUSA it was great. I'd walk over to any of the Centrino laptops and look up some product spec on the internet.
I suspect either you had a cheap wireless hub, or someone left the microwave door open.
Actually I had the Linksys hub that I purchased at CompUSA. Strangely enough this hub works just fine with four different PCMCIA wireless cards and with the Linksys 802.11 bridge I have connected to my SliMP3 and to the wireless card built into my Squeezebox.
Of course if everyone on/. had a dollar for every time they heard a vendor say "it works just fine in the (shop, service center, our test lab)" we'd all be rich, have girlfriends and be doing more interesting things than debating 802.11 support on/.
My experience with Centrino was that it didn't work. I ended up installing PCMCIA cards to get wireless support. Maybe I didn't have the right drivers, in the commercials I saw people surfing the net in the Acropolis (perhaps it's now an 802.11x hotspot), I couldn't get consistent performance 15 feet from the access point with a clear line of sight.
Other than economics I wonder why Intel just doesn't produce a kick-ass mini-PCI card that supports the various wireless standards and then flog the Hell out of it to the PC makers. The mini-PCI approach, combined with well designed internal antennas works very well for the Macintosh.
No, it is not. Ask any experimental scientist if their equipment is reliable to 0.5% of the measured quantity. Only the most well funded scientists with the best equipment could say yes. The elections system is not particularly well funded.
What are you talking about? We're not measuring something such as the value of G, which is somewhat difficult to measure, we're talking about counting votes. This isn't an experimental science, it's simple accounting, very simple accounting, count ballots. If ballot is marked for Bush make one tally mark for him, if marked for Gore mark one for him, repeat as necessary. For ballots that are incorrectly marked apply a consistent set of rules on how to deal with those ballots (which is not done anywhere unfortunately, but again, that's not science, it's accounting).
As far as 500,000+ votes out of 100,000,000 being statistically insignificant go to a bank or large business and tell them that for every 100,000,000 million dollars they collect that they're either going to be 500,000 over or 500,000 under and then tell them not to worry as this is statistically insignificant. I'm sure they'll find that very amusing.
Read the fucking post dickhead! What I said was that Gore won the popular vote, sure, he didn't win a majority, but he won more votes than George Walker Dingleberry Texas Fucktard Bush did, in any other kind of election, gubernatorial, senatorial, congressional, mayoral, this makes you the winning candidate. I suppose that if you're one of the useless asswhores who supports Bush then you can just pretend that having your guy lose by half a millon votes, roughly an amount equal to the population of Seattle, is statistically insignificant, the rest of us, who aren't sitting around jacking off over pictures of Bush in his flight suit recognize the reality that your guy lost the popular vote and he lost to a candidate, Al Gore, who had no personality, who had an incompetently run campaign, who failed to have an incredibly popular incumbent president campaign for him, who had to deal with systematic attempts to disenfranchise supporters in key states (Florida) and who had to deal with a third party spoiler campaign still managed to win more votes than Bush, thus providing more proof that despite is stupidity and incompetence that G.W. Bush is one of the luckiest men alive.
Then it would be impossible to get political change in the US. We have an electoral vote for many reasons, but one of them is that it makes the elections close. Neither Bush nor Kerry would pay any attention to my state if we had a popular vote. There's simply not enough population here.
This is one of those beliefs that I refer to as "crapthink". It's one of those things that's stated over and over and over again without being examined until people actually believe it, even though it is total crap. If you look at the one of the electoral vote counting sites, say www.electoral-vote.com you can see how electoral votes are distributed throughout the United States. Now, ignoring the whole Red/Blue thing look at states such as Texas, with 34 electoral votes versus states such as Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. So you have eight smaller states that between them have 34 electoral votes, and you have one large state, Texas, which has 34 electoral votes. Let's assume that all of these states are swing states, are you as a candidate going to spend your resources campaigning in eight states to get 34 electoral votes, or are you going to spend your resources in Texas to get 34 electoral votes? If you're a smart candidate you're going to marshall your resources in Texas and not spend your time fucking around in a bunch of flyover states in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Right now the way the system is set up George Bush has no incentive to go to California, why should be, the state's 55 electoral votes are going to go to John Kerry. Similarly John Kerry has no incentive to go to Texas, why should he, when Bush gets all 34 votes? Similarly in states that are strongly for one party, such as Illinois or New York, which historically go Democratic, there is less incentive for candidate of that party to go to the state, why should they if they know that they're going to get all of those votes. There's no incentive for George Bush to spend any time campaigning in the small red states because he knows he's going to win, if you live in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North or South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma or Alaska, states which went for Bush by percentages greater than 20 percent in 2000 you're SOL, Bush knows that he can take you for granted, despite the supposed advantages that the electoral college system gives you.
In effect the electoral college encourages candidates to completely ignore many states either because they can take them for granted or because they have no chance of winning any votes there. This is exactly the same criticism that is made of a direct popular vote.
The electoral college was one of the necessary evils like the three-fifths compromise that was necessary to create the Constitution, it's not necessary any more.
The 2000 election was not a screwup, it was a coin toss. Neither candidate won a majority of the popular vote in either the nation or in Florida. In fact, in both the differences were statistically insignificant.
BULLSHIT! If you look at the vote totals at this website you can see that the vote totals were:
BUSH: Total: 50,456,002 - 47.87 percent
GORE: Total: 50,999,897 - 48.38 percent
NADER: Total: 2,882,955 - 2.74 percent
I don't know what cow college you studied math and statistics at but I'd say that a difference of 543,895 votes, or one half percent, is statistically significant. The Florida debacle aside Gore won the popular vote. If we had a direct popular vote, or if electors were allocated by percentage of votes won in each state rather than the winner take all system Gore would be president today.
I'm going to buy both versions of the trilogy, the theatrical release and the super-duper footage engorged versions. Sure, people will think I'm weird and obsessive, but then hey, I'm a 39 year old man who lives alone with a collection of guns and comic books who spends lots of time on/. so it's not like they don't think that already.
So far as I can tell, the HPC shops are largely shunning the Itanium.
I talked to an acquaintance of mine who is an Oracle database engineer at a company that purchased some Itaniums running HP/UX. His verdict? HP/UX for the Itanium is utter crap, the Oracle integration is nowhere near as good as it was on PA-RISC HP/UX, the performance of the systems is not up to the spec that HP claims and the operating system is full of bugs and missing drivers. We were joking that the development process for HP/UX Itanium was that they checked out the code tree and then ran two commands:
make ship to customer
and
make give Carly Fiorina more money
This is too bad as my experience with HP PA-RISC servers running HP/UX was for the most part favorable. It was a solid OS, the volume manager was very good and HP's N4000 and L2000 series systems had excellent TPC numbers and fantastic throughput. Of course HP is now offering an option so you can run Linux apps on Itanium HP/UX, leading me to wonder why they think that anyone is going to pay the premium price for HP/UX so they can have an inferior environment to run Linux apps. Maybe I need to smoke some of that HP marketing crack that Carly Fiorina is doing, then perhaps I'll understand.
but that wearing one around your neck identifies you as one of the techno-congniscenti, especially if you personalize it with stickers.
Ha! I mock your attempt at trying to look like one of the techno-cognoscenti by wearing a thumb drive around your neck. I wear an EMC Symmetrix around my neck so I can store several terabytes of data. Admittedly this has made certain things (eating, going to the bathroom, leaving the data center) difficult but when my friends come over they're all impressed at how 133t I am!
PBXs are expensive chunks of hardware, of course they're also pretty damned reliable, but for someone who isn't running a hospital switchboard or 911 call center this is a neat piece of software. I wonder if you could use this to set up some kind of free VoIP P2P phone network. You would have users who had an extra landline installed with long distance and 900 service blocked. They would then advertise this service on the net through the P2P network. If you wanted to call someone in the 425 area code who didn't have an IP phone you'd get on your IP connection, find someone with a system connected to a phone line in 425 and connect to their system. The phone number is dialed and the call is connected. It would cost 20 bucks or so for that extra landline but given that a lot of people are willing to make small sacrifices for collective projects, such as sharing their 802.11 access points, this might work. Or I might be on crack.
How many of you purchased an HDTV capable TV for watching over the air broadcasts? I have a nice Sony 42" LCD RPTV. I'm thinking about getting HD service through DirecTV but only to play around with it. My real reason for upgrading from my older set was that I wanted something that would do a better job displaying DVDs. I have friends with HDTV capable plasma displays who have purchased their sets for the same reason. Given the fact that most of what is aired on TV these days is utter crap I can't see that it would be improved if it suddenly all became high definition utter crap.
TV isn't a right. TV is for entertainment and education
I'll agree with you that TV isn't a right, but TV being educational? Let's face it, "educational television" is as much of an oxymoron as "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp".
McCain's measure would require broadcasters to air only digital television signals by 2009 and help consumers who rely on traditional television sets buy devices that would convert digital back into a format that they could watch.
"Consumers who rely on over-the-air television, particularly those of limited economic means, should be assisted," according to the draft obtained by Reuters.
OK, it seems to me that perhaps those of limited economic means, which is the PC way of saying "poor people" should watch less fucking television and spend more time at the fucking library reading books. And if you drive by the section 8 housing down the road from my house in lovely White Center, Washington (also known as "El Centro de la Blanca") you'll notice quite a few satellite dishes hanging off the sides of the subsidized low-income housing, indicating that they are somehow able to scrape up 30 - 40 bucks a month for satellite TV, which is not, despite what anyone might say to the contrary, a necessity of life.
This can't be any dumber of an idea than anything that Andrew Lloyd Webber has done. Look at Cats, a musical starring singing and dancing cats, or Starlight Express, a musical which features a bunch of people rollerskating back and forth pretending that they're all singing railroad trains. Cats has run for about four billion weeks on Broadway, proving that no one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American theatre-going public.
that no one would ever run into the 49.7 day bug on a Windows system because the chances of having that much uptime were slim to none. Having a system where you know that things are broken and you have to reboot it every 30 days to keep it from breaking down is a bad thing, deploying such a system into a production environment is even worse (but it's been done, I don't know how many times I wrote cron jobs to kill bad pieces of software and restart them) but deploying such a system in an environment where lives are at stake is completely inexcusable, regardless of whether or not it is closed or open source. This is similar to having a circuit in your house that overheats because occasionally too much load is placed on it. The idiot solution is to reset the breaker when it trips, the correct solution is to put in a bigger circuit that can handle the peak load. This vendor provided the idiot solution to this problem and should be punished for it, this never should have been deployed, I can only hope that they won't blame the technician for failing to do something that he wouldn't have had to do if the system had been designed properly.
I also love the statement that the system was upgraded from UNIX to Windows. Isn't this kind of like upgrading from being in very good health but not being good looking to being somewhat good looking but suffering from cancer, AIDS and heart disease?
could be wrong, but when I was a wee tot many moons ago, couldn't you buy a rocket from Estes that had a camera built-in, that would take a picture (or pictures?) during flight, or at least at apogee when the ejection charge would fire?
I remember those. I never had one but a friend did. As I recall Estes made two models, in the early to mid 70s they had a camera that would mount on a rocket using an A,B or C engine and which tripped the shutter when the ejection charge was fired. This camera used special film that was fairly expensive (a friend of mine had one of these), in the late 70s they had one that used a standard 110 film cartridge.
I never bought one of these because of the fact that I ended up losing a lot of rockets by having them blow away into the woods where they couldn't be found. Nowadays I have more money and digital cameras are cheap (I just bought a pair of cheap binoculars that have a 2.1 megapixel camera built in for $99), but alas I no longer have the time. Damn! If only I had the time now that I did as a kid or if only I had the money and technology that I do now when I was 13 years old.
Re:Rather quite expensive in the long term
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Antarctic Telescope?
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Even though the Hubble Space Telescope was expensive initially, you must admit that it has been cheap and easy to repair. This new telescope would be located all the way down in Antarctica. Has anyone priced flights to Antarctica lately?
This post is either ignorant or sarcastic. I'm not sure which. It costs about $500 million to launch a Shuttle. For that cost you could afford to purchase a 747, fly one mission a year down to Antarctica to work on the telescope, and assuming that the cost of maintenance was 100 million dollars still come out 200 million dollars ahead of what a Shuttle launch costs (cost of 747, 200 million, cost of maintenance 100 million, you do the math).
One of the reasons people post things such as this idiot post is that NASA does its level best to keep the figures for the costs of the Shuttle as obfuscated as possible. You can price a flight to Antarctica, you can't price a Shuttle launch as NASA's only customer is the government.
While the idea of public broadband has always been an attractive one for slashdotters, the incursion into this arena by Grant County PUD in central Washington State stands as an example of why we don't want bureaucrats meddling in business.
No, it doesn't. It stands as an example of how Grant County fucked up the development of a locally owned telecommunications infrastructure. The city of Tacoma, in the very same state, has had a very successul deployment of publicly owned telecommunications infrastructure as part of Tacoma City Light. Also if you're going to bitch about the government being involved in business then you should realize that if it weren't for government intervention in the market (the creation of the Bonneville Power Administration and the construction of the Columbia and Snake river dams in Eastern Washington and Idaho) that no one would live in Grant County because it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, colder than Hell in the winter and in the summer it's so damned hot that nothing would grow were it not for the water provided by government owned dams and the electricity to pump that water out to the fields over there.
Right now in Washington state we're trying to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal charges from Enron because the business people there were very good at running a business, so they shipped power out of state and manipulated the market to fuck as many consumers as they could, and their phone calls are on tape admitting to this. Bureaucrats might not make good business people, but a lot of business people are amoral, sociopathic fucks who care for nothing more than the bottom line of their companies and for some reason Telecomms have attracted a lot of these types into their ranks.
and timothy is probably one of the worst/. editors out there for mindlessly replicating his swill onto the site. Here's my backup solution, firewire cards in everything, the Macs already have them and they cost about $30 for one that will work in PCs running Windows or Linux, two LaCie 160Gb firewire drives these are about the size of a thick paperback and can be had for $160. A small Pelican case, #1400.
Put one hard drive power supply in the Pelican case, use the other one with the hard drives to back your systems up. Even with my MP3 collection, I can still use one of these drives to back up my Macintosh and quite a bit of other stuff. Use the other drive to back up Windows and UNIX boxes, nothing fancy, mount the drive and drag entire filesystems over or tar them up and copy them over. Unmount drives from system, put into Pelican case, put Pelican case in gun safe. Backup systems as needed. I figure that if shit goes down and I need to bail on my house that I'm going to make a stop at the gun safe for a few items, so it's the natural place to put the hard drive case.
In case of bad things happening to to gun safe, retrieve weapons, passport, emergency cash and hard drives. Head out to car and head to safety. No fuss, no muss. Much easier than the idiocy that Cringely describes.
Although Korolev was brilliant the Russian program wasn't all that much more advanced than the US program. In fact the US could have put a satellite into orbit in 1956 had they wanted to. However President Eisenhower wanted the first satellite to be launched by a civilian agency. On April 23rd 1956 the Army informed the office of the Secretary of Defense that a Jupiter missile could be fired in an effort to orbit a small satellite in January of 1957. The Army then backed up this claim by launching a Jupiter missile on September 20th 1956 that flew 3,335 miles downrange, acheived an altitude of 682 miles and a velocity of Mach 18, which would have been sufficient to place a small satellite in orbit. You can check this out at the Army in Space page at the Redstone Arsenal website.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked at Amazon in 2001 when Amazon switched from Solaris/Tru64UNIX to HP Netservers running Redhat Linux, if Amazon hadn't done this the company probably would have gone out of business as the IT costs of the proprietary UNIX systems were too high. Were there problems with this transition? Well yes there were, we used to joke that the website for HP's technical support for RedHat on the Netservers was www.google.com, because God knows that HP was clueless about Linux at the time. But as time passed we killed off a lot of the bugs that the system had and ended up with a very reliable infrastructure.
Linux support is getting better and better thanks to companies such as IBM and Silicon Graphics who realize that if they want to compete in the Linux market that they have to sell real Linux solutions, they can't, as Sun does, and HPaq did, tell customers that they have Linux solutions available and then attempt to push them onto systems running their proprietary versions of UNIX, bait and switch just won't cut it.
For now Linux is cutting into sales of the proprietary UNIXes just as Microsoft Windows NT started to do 10 years ago, but as Microsoft continues to get bad press over security flaws in their OS, and as ship dates for Longhorn continue to slip, and as the price of Microsoft operating systems inches ever skyward while the licensing terms become ever more onerous (and as my sentences continue to run-on...) Linux is going to start taking over a lot of the server space that Microsoft currently owns. IT is becoming a commodity, if two IT vendors can both make the case that their product is going to work for a company then the vendor with the lower cost is going to get the contract, the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" which in the 90s became "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" are coming to a close. TCA is going to win the day and customers aren't going to care if the system is Longhorn, UNIX, Linux or the new BlargoVAX 666.
It's awesome, of course it's installed in my coffeemaker, but hey, it's still pretty cool.
In the early 1990s research was done on quick turn around vehicles for low cost space access. Two very good articles by Dr. Jerry Pournelle are The SSX Concept and SSTO Revisited.
You may or may not agree with Dr. Pournelle, I sure don't, on a lot of things, but he's spot on about what happened to the SSTO concept, NASA got control of it, let a contract out to Lockheed to develop the X-33, spent a whole bunch of money and didn't produce any real hardware unlike the SSX project which spent 60 million dollars and produced a prototype that was able to take off and land twice with a 26 hour turnaround with a support crew of 14 and which also managed to land safely after a hydrogen explosion tore off part of the aeroshell.
I suspect either you had a cheap wireless hub, or someone left the microwave door open. Actually I had the Linksys hub that I purchased at CompUSA. Strangely enough this hub works just fine with four different PCMCIA wireless cards and with the Linksys 802.11 bridge I have connected to my SliMP3 and to the wireless card built into my Squeezebox.
Of course if everyone on /. had a dollar for every time they heard a vendor say "it works just fine in the (shop, service center, our test lab)" we'd all be rich, have girlfriends and be doing more interesting things than debating 802.11 support on /.
Other than economics I wonder why Intel just doesn't produce a kick-ass mini-PCI card that supports the various wireless standards and then flog the Hell out of it to the PC makers. The mini-PCI approach, combined with well designed internal antennas works very well for the Macintosh.
What are you talking about? We're not measuring something such as the value of G, which is somewhat difficult to measure, we're talking about counting votes. This isn't an experimental science, it's simple accounting, very simple accounting, count ballots. If ballot is marked for Bush make one tally mark for him, if marked for Gore mark one for him, repeat as necessary. For ballots that are incorrectly marked apply a consistent set of rules on how to deal with those ballots (which is not done anywhere unfortunately, but again, that's not science, it's accounting).
As far as 500,000+ votes out of 100,000,000 being statistically insignificant go to a bank or large business and tell them that for every 100,000,000 million dollars they collect that they're either going to be 500,000 over or 500,000 under and then tell them not to worry as this is statistically insignificant. I'm sure they'll find that very amusing.
Read the fucking post dickhead! What I said was that Gore won the popular vote, sure, he didn't win a majority, but he won more votes than George Walker Dingleberry Texas Fucktard Bush did, in any other kind of election, gubernatorial, senatorial, congressional, mayoral, this makes you the winning candidate. I suppose that if you're one of the useless asswhores who supports Bush then you can just pretend that having your guy lose by half a millon votes, roughly an amount equal to the population of Seattle, is statistically insignificant, the rest of us, who aren't sitting around jacking off over pictures of Bush in his flight suit recognize the reality that your guy lost the popular vote and he lost to a candidate, Al Gore, who had no personality, who had an incompetently run campaign, who failed to have an incredibly popular incumbent president campaign for him, who had to deal with systematic attempts to disenfranchise supporters in key states (Florida) and who had to deal with a third party spoiler campaign still managed to win more votes than Bush, thus providing more proof that despite is stupidity and incompetence that G.W. Bush is one of the luckiest men alive.
This is one of those beliefs that I refer to as "crapthink". It's one of those things that's stated over and over and over again without being examined until people actually believe it, even though it is total crap. If you look at the one of the electoral vote counting sites, say www.electoral-vote.com you can see how electoral votes are distributed throughout the United States. Now, ignoring the whole Red/Blue thing look at states such as Texas, with 34 electoral votes versus states such as Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. So you have eight smaller states that between them have 34 electoral votes, and you have one large state, Texas, which has 34 electoral votes. Let's assume that all of these states are swing states, are you as a candidate going to spend your resources campaigning in eight states to get 34 electoral votes, or are you going to spend your resources in Texas to get 34 electoral votes? If you're a smart candidate you're going to marshall your resources in Texas and not spend your time fucking around in a bunch of flyover states in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Right now the way the system is set up George Bush has no incentive to go to California, why should be, the state's 55 electoral votes are going to go to John Kerry. Similarly John Kerry has no incentive to go to Texas, why should he, when Bush gets all 34 votes? Similarly in states that are strongly for one party, such as Illinois or New York, which historically go Democratic, there is less incentive for candidate of that party to go to the state, why should they if they know that they're going to get all of those votes. There's no incentive for George Bush to spend any time campaigning in the small red states because he knows he's going to win, if you live in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North or South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma or Alaska, states which went for Bush by percentages greater than 20 percent in 2000 you're SOL, Bush knows that he can take you for granted, despite the supposed advantages that the electoral college system gives you.
In effect the electoral college encourages candidates to completely ignore many states either because they can take them for granted or because they have no chance of winning any votes there. This is exactly the same criticism that is made of a direct popular vote.
The electoral college was one of the necessary evils like the three-fifths compromise that was necessary to create the Constitution, it's not necessary any more.
BULLSHIT! If you look at the vote totals at this website you can see that the vote totals were:
BUSH: Total: 50,456,002 - 47.87 percent
GORE: Total: 50,999,897 - 48.38 percent
NADER: Total: 2,882,955 - 2.74 percent
I don't know what cow college you studied math and statistics at but I'd say that a difference of 543,895 votes, or one half percent, is statistically significant. The Florida debacle aside Gore won the popular vote. If we had a direct popular vote, or if electors were allocated by percentage of votes won in each state rather than the winner take all system Gore would be president today.
I talked to an acquaintance of mine who is an Oracle database engineer at a company that purchased some Itaniums running HP/UX. His verdict? HP/UX for the Itanium is utter crap, the Oracle integration is nowhere near as good as it was on PA-RISC HP/UX, the performance of the systems is not up to the spec that HP claims and the operating system is full of bugs and missing drivers. We were joking that the development process for HP/UX Itanium was that they checked out the code tree and then ran two commands:
make ship to customer
and
make give Carly Fiorina more money
This is too bad as my experience with HP PA-RISC servers running HP/UX was for the most part favorable. It was a solid OS, the volume manager was very good and HP's N4000 and L2000 series systems had excellent TPC numbers and fantastic throughput. Of course HP is now offering an option so you can run Linux apps on Itanium HP/UX, leading me to wonder why they think that anyone is going to pay the premium price for HP/UX so they can have an inferior environment to run Linux apps. Maybe I need to smoke some of that HP marketing crack that Carly Fiorina is doing, then perhaps I'll understand.
Ha! I mock your attempt at trying to look like one of the techno-cognoscenti by wearing a thumb drive around your neck. I wear an EMC Symmetrix around my neck so I can store several terabytes of data. Admittedly this has made certain things (eating, going to the bathroom, leaving the data center) difficult but when my friends come over they're all impressed at how 133t I am!
I'll agree with you that TV isn't a right, but TV being educational? Let's face it, "educational television" is as much of an oxymoron as "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp".
McCain's measure would require broadcasters to air only digital television signals by 2009 and help consumers who rely on traditional television sets buy devices that would convert digital back into a format that they could watch.
"Consumers who rely on over-the-air television, particularly those of limited economic means, should be assisted," according to the draft obtained by Reuters.
OK, it seems to me that perhaps those of limited economic means, which is the PC way of saying "poor people" should watch less fucking television and spend more time at the fucking library reading books. And if you drive by the section 8 housing down the road from my house in lovely White Center, Washington (also known as "El Centro de la Blanca") you'll notice quite a few satellite dishes hanging off the sides of the subsidized low-income housing, indicating that they are somehow able to scrape up 30 - 40 bucks a month for satellite TV, which is not, despite what anyone might say to the contrary, a necessity of life.
I also love the statement that the system was upgraded from UNIX to Windows. Isn't this kind of like upgrading from being in very good health but not being good looking to being somewhat good looking but suffering from cancer, AIDS and heart disease?
I remember those. I never had one but a friend did. As I recall Estes made two models, in the early to mid 70s they had a camera that would mount on a rocket using an A,B or C engine and which tripped the shutter when the ejection charge was fired. This camera used special film that was fairly expensive (a friend of mine had one of these), in the late 70s they had one that used a standard 110 film cartridge.
I never bought one of these because of the fact that I ended up losing a lot of rockets by having them blow away into the woods where they couldn't be found. Nowadays I have more money and digital cameras are cheap (I just bought a pair of cheap binoculars that have a 2.1 megapixel camera built in for $99), but alas I no longer have the time. Damn! If only I had the time now that I did as a kid or if only I had the money and technology that I do now when I was 13 years old.
Scope Clock
Nixie Clock
This post is either ignorant or sarcastic. I'm not sure which. It costs about $500 million to launch a Shuttle. For that cost you could afford to purchase a 747, fly one mission a year down to Antarctica to work on the telescope, and assuming that the cost of maintenance was 100 million dollars still come out 200 million dollars ahead of what a Shuttle launch costs (cost of 747, 200 million, cost of maintenance 100 million, you do the math).
One of the reasons people post things such as this idiot post is that NASA does its level best to keep the figures for the costs of the Shuttle as obfuscated as possible. You can price a flight to Antarctica, you can't price a Shuttle launch as NASA's only customer is the government.
No, it doesn't. It stands as an example of how Grant County fucked up the development of a locally owned telecommunications infrastructure. The city of Tacoma, in the very same state, has had a very successul deployment of publicly owned telecommunications infrastructure as part of Tacoma City Light. Also if you're going to bitch about the government being involved in business then you should realize that if it weren't for government intervention in the market (the creation of the Bonneville Power Administration and the construction of the Columbia and Snake river dams in Eastern Washington and Idaho) that no one would live in Grant County because it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, colder than Hell in the winter and in the summer it's so damned hot that nothing would grow were it not for the water provided by government owned dams and the electricity to pump that water out to the fields over there.
Right now in Washington state we're trying to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal charges from Enron because the business people there were very good at running a business, so they shipped power out of state and manipulated the market to fuck as many consumers as they could, and their phone calls are on tape admitting to this. Bureaucrats might not make good business people, but a lot of business people are amoral, sociopathic fucks who care for nothing more than the bottom line of their companies and for some reason Telecomms have attracted a lot of these types into their ranks.
Put one hard drive power supply in the Pelican case, use the other one with the hard drives to back your systems up. Even with my MP3 collection, I can still use one of these drives to back up my Macintosh and quite a bit of other stuff. Use the other drive to back up Windows and UNIX boxes, nothing fancy, mount the drive and drag entire filesystems over or tar them up and copy them over. Unmount drives from system, put into Pelican case, put Pelican case in gun safe. Backup systems as needed. I figure that if shit goes down and I need to bail on my house that I'm going to make a stop at the gun safe for a few items, so it's the natural place to put the hard drive case.
In case of bad things happening to to gun safe, retrieve weapons, passport, emergency cash and hard drives. Head out to car and head to safety. No fuss, no muss. Much easier than the idiocy that Cringely describes.