1998: 1800 sq ft single-family home 15 miles outside of Washington DC = $150,000 2005: 1800 sq ft single-family home 15 miles outside of Washington DC = $400,000
1998: barrel of oil = $15 2005: barrel of oil = $60+...
The only things that haven't gone up like this are prices at Wal-Mart and your wages. Good thing you can still buy cheap groceries, TVs and DVDs while living in your rented home and paying $2.50/gallon of gasoline for your car.
I'll probably get strung up on a length of Cat5 by enraged slashdotters for writing this, but there's a reason why people who have used MS Office products tend to continue using them: they're well-designed, and they work well enough for most purposes. I'm not talking about accountants and actuaries who try to shoehorn Excel + VB macros into acting like a Real Programming Language for financial calculations, but the mere fact that you have fax templates, that you can copy and paste easily from one app to another, and that you can run a decent little database using Access if you want. That as a manager running an office, you can put "skilled with MS Office applications" in a job ad for a secretary and find someone who can at least click through menus and generate the documents you need. That the applications look professional and clean and they come with a support number for a company that will not go out of business anytime soon. That the company will at least attempt to help you fix your problems and whom you can blame if something goes horribly wrong. ("It's not my fault, it's that damn Microsoft app!" you say to your VP who's pissed at the monthly reports being late again.)
OpenOffice is pretty good, and I use it exclusively on my work laptop running Ubuntu, but my choice in running Linux and other open-source applications is all about my freedom to use, redistribute and modify the application as I see fit, unencumbered by restrictive EULAs and software patents and all the baggage that goes along with shrink-wrapped commercial software. I'm willing to take the time and effort necessary to re-learn how to copy formulas instead of values in a spreadsheet app, where the default save locations live in the word processing app, and how to turn off the @#$(*! assistant. Most people don't care that much, and are willing to spend the money to use something they're familiar with and that is a de facto standard instead of taking the harder path. And don't get me wrong, it is harder to use even something as pretty and polished as Ubuntu + OpenOffice for a user familiar with Microsoft products, although it's a damn sight easier than it was 5 years ago.
Most people are lazy, and want to get things done as simply as possible. Big software companies take advantage of that, both at a personal and a corporate level. There's a reason why Microsoft is the gigantic software behemoth that it is, and that's because it understands this and understands how to sell products to individuals and organizations. That doesn't mean that its software is technologically superior, or more fun to hack on, or more free to use; but it makes people buy more stuff from them.
Complex civilizations often have too much invested in ongoing expenses (administration, bureaucracy, justice, environmental protection, etc) to react quickly to sudden changes that affect them. Looking back through history, it's often the smaller, more warlike societies that triumph over the larger, most sophisticated and complex ones in times of crisis. Around 1200AD, the average coastal Chinese citizen had a much higher quality of life, a more advanced society and a greater variety of food to eat than the average Mongol tribesman. That didn't stop the Mongols from rolling over northern China. The Western Roman Empire succumbed to barbarians, despite all the efforts of the centuries-old Imperial State to preserve itself against invasion through proscription of labor, its legions and roads and military technology.
Technology is a double-edged sword, merely having it guarantees nothing and the complexity it generates in a society creates unexpected costs and can limit the flexibility of a society to respond to changes. It takes careful use of technology and sane, rational responses to crisis to preserve a civilization, lest ye end up declaring "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" to an empty desert.
Dude, go play some World of Warcraft and then tell me if there hasn't been a decent PC game made in years.
I still play AoE2 and Civ II and I even loaded up the original Fallout last weekend, just for nostalgia's sake. But there are some killer games out there now, even if you have to wade through a lot of crap to find them. They're worth it.
I've been a happy paying customer on their budget-rate plan since '99 or so, and I have to say that their service rocks. Completely apart from their excellent technical capabilities (does your service provider offer IPv6 hosting?), my account's gotten bumped up as they've increased their budget-sized offering, and their technical support is great. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 service interruptions in the whole period of time that I've hosted my site there, and they're great about letting you know what's actually going on ("yes, the server blew up, we're restoring from backup, it'll be online in 2-3 hours") if there's a serious problem.
Automagic bittorrent hosting is just the latest in a string of cool, useful features that they provide. (No, I'm not an employee, just a satisfied customer.)
A lot of commercial software packages could stand to learn from the better examples of 'newbie' tutorials included in complex games like World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. For example:
User: "Okay, so I finally got the new trouble ticket system installed. Now what?" [blinky little balloon pops up, says "Click me!"] Deep Impressive Announcer Voice: "Customer service, too long ignored in this land, can finally be obtained! Start by clicking here to open a ticket." [user clicks in the wrong place] Deep Impressive Announcer Voice: "Fool! You have erred greatly in your judgment. You will pay the price..."
Um, okay, maybe not like that, but how many folks here have dealt with the 'gee, now what do I do?' syndrome with new users?
This just means we need to find a good, cheap, effective way to get enough humans off of this rock and somewhere else. While a few astronauts aboard the ISS aren't going to continue the human race if Something Bad happens down below, a group of perhaps ten to twenty thousand colonists spread across the Moon, Mars and the inner solar system in self-sustaining outposts would have some hope of keeping the human race alive in case of severe catastrophe.
Um, you don't change human behavior. Instead, use all of the latent tendencies towards competition, xenophobia, racism, bloodlust and aggression built into every single flawed human being on this planet to work for your goal.
The European powers of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries certainly didn't all band together to explore and colonize and exploit Africa, India and the Americas; they did it to get a competitive advantage for themselves, their families, their peoples, their nations and their religions. The US and the Soviets certainly didn't send men and women into space because they got along.
Real manned space exploration, settlement and colonization will come, and it will come as soon as there's a real competitive advantage to be gained for the individuals, groups, companies and nations involved. Problem is, it's still waaaay too damn expensive to get into orbit. Humanity at this point is like the first people who looked out at the ocean, looked at the floating bundles of wood they used to travel up and down rivers, and wondered how far out they could travel in open water with them. We're nowhere close to the level that European powers were at in the late 1400's where oceangoing ships were relatively common and not prohibitively expensive.
Only a handful of the most powerful and prosperous nations can even think about tossing people into orbit with a fair reassurance that they'll come back down in one piece. Change that, and everything else will change too.
Make it as relatively inexpensive to get people into orbit as it was for Queen Isabella to give 3 ships to Chris Columbus for his wacky idea (something under, say, fifty million dollars now) and you've got a start. People will do this all on their own, without government intervention, because they come up with new ideas, new reasons, wacked out crazy notions about how to get ahead. Most of 'em won't work, but a few will; and those few would pave the way for a serious expansion of the human race off of this planet.
If you ask me, a manned mission to Mars would be great, but for 500 billion bucks, you could do a lot of R&D, testing and implementation on low-cost orbital delivery instead. That sort of spending could show a lot more benefits and would encourage commercial expansion in a way that a uber-massive national pride project would not.
Having done some work with SourceFire's products (I worked on a contract that accounted for a majority of their total deployed IDS boxes in existence at one point), I have mixed feelings about the company. Yeah, meeting Marty is cool, and the pink pig T-shirts are cute, and it's worth some amount of geek points to say that I've used their stuff. But the products they sell and the company itself suffer from the exact same problems that plague all other IT companies.
Even though the under-the-hood technology is k3wl and using Snort sigs is l33t, the admin and management tools are frankly not up to par compared to other offerings out there. I mean, it's not as bad as ManHunt, but it still takes waaay too many mouse clicks and unnecessary repetition by a human to get simple admin tasks done. I've seen gigs of sensor data lost to DB corruption (thankfully nothing critical) and have gone through the whole oh-crap we'll-get-that-critical-bug-fixed-next-release trip with them more than once. Support is a mixed bag, sometimes excellent, sometimes okay, sometimes really slow and annoying.
Bottom line is, companies are companies, there's nothing magical about open-source ones that make their products inherently better or more desirable for any other reason than to boost one's ego and to say that You Were There Back When. If I were recommending an IDS product line to a customer (which I probably wouldn't do anyway), I would encourage them to do some careful research before settling on SF.
"There are already four-port ethernet NICs out there."
'man qe' and 'man qec' on a [Net|Open]BSD box gives you some details, but for years, Sun QuadEthernet and QuadFastEthernet cards have been a solid option for multi-port ethernet connectivity on SPARC and UltraSPARC boxes.
And heck, if this means my little 50Mhz SPARCclassic box can do BGP routing, that's great!
Second year at college, first day back, and I was setting up my room in the honors dorm. I got a tiny little single-bed room, but it was all mine. Threw up an Star Wars Episode IV and an Indiana Jones poster on the wall, sat down, hooked up my PC, and was happily downloading crap off the 'Net or wasting time on IRC or something.
Two new freshmen guys come down the hall, chattering back and forth, all excited. They set up shop four doors down on the right, and then one of them sticks their head in my room: "Hey! You're a Star Wars fan too?!"
I grunt or nod or something, a little taken aback by his excitement. At that point I had nearly forgotten the Star Wars poster hanging on my wall. His roomie comes by at that point and sticks his head in too, all smiling and happy.
"Who's your favorite character from the movies?" the first one asks. I think for a second, not quite sure since it had been a little bit since I sat down and watched all of 'em on VHS (maybe the previous Christmas or something), and come up with "Han Solo, I think."
The first one looks kind of disappointed - what a pedestrian choice! - but the other guy chimes in, "Oh, I like Greedo. And Muftak!" Greedo I recognized, but Muftak? Who the hell is Muftak? He kept grinning at me like some sort of deranged hyena, waiting for a response.
Realizing that I was talking to people who had spent more time involved with the movies than I spent on, say, my senior-year Computer Science class in high school, I nodded, said something polite, and smiled. They moved on, and I knew deep down that I wouldn't be winning the award for Biggest Star Wars Fan in Thomas Hall that year, despite the cardboard stand-up Yoda I still hadn't unpacked.
Check out Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered The World", website is http://www.1421.tv/. American readers may know the book's subtitle as "The Year China Discovered America".
I'd argue that it has the most probable (and certainly best-supported from actual evidence) explanation of the Piri Reis map - Chinese navigators circumnavigated the globe from 1421-1425, and drew up maps along the way.
Read the book if you have a chance, it's one of the most entertaining histories I've read in a while.
Dedicated Hpaq Proliant DL380 G3 server, Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU, 2+GB RAM. Multiple site-to-site tunnels up to about 130 sites across WAN links of varying speed, but mostly between 3-8Mbit/s. Handles about 1.2GB of 3DES/MD5 encrypted/authenticated traffic per day. Runs like a champ, the box barely notices the encryption overhead, it just takes a while (2-3 minutes) to rebuild all the tunnels when you restart FreeS/WAN.
... but to an administrator, there's a world of difference. Just having to remember prtconf, dmesg, ioscan and hinv (depending on your favorite or not-so-favorite flavor) starts to eat up those brain cells saved by using the Bourne shell and vi everywhere. Not to mention #@$(! hpux which has to do EVERYTHING different for the sake of being superior^W over-engineered^W made-by-hp^W different.
What is sorely needed is a public champion to advocate for private space exploration. Technological progress into space needs NASA like the American West needed the US government - only enough to open up the doors for anyone and everyone with money and a dream to set out and make the unexplored frontier their own.
See http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Rulers/merovingian. html for some historical details. They're a line of Frankish kings from the early Dark Ages, and became known for their long greasy hair, corruption and uselessness before Charles "The Hammer" Martel, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne cleaned house in Western Europe.
Privatizing NASA won't do a whole lot of good, as long as there's still some "official" agency that controls space access, competition will be stifled.
Until space travel is opened up to true competition, there won't be any growth. Did Espana only allow C. Columbus access to the New World? No, they sent over as many folks as they could, and other nations did as well.
Free markets and capitalist's greed have done more for exploration of new frontiers than anything else. The government's role should be limited to enforcing basic minimum standards ("Yes, you DO have a working life support system"), much as state governments enforce emissions and safety standards for cars & trucks, and to encourage further exploration & development.
Give tax breaks away to any company that gets ore mined from the asteroid belt back to Earth. Give away grants to fund the first Earth-to-Moon shuttle. Grant property rights to whoever sets foot on a previously unclaimed parcel of land on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, anything that's worth money. Once you get the gold prospectors out there, the wives and equipment-sellers and infrastructure will follow.
Ugh. Unless you're running on a particular model of Dell's PowerVault FC storage line and it zonks out on you, causing four critical failures of your SAN & Win2K cluster within three weeks.
Fault tolerance my ass. Maybe it works better on Compaq's gear, but Dell's non-EMC gear isn't worth the power it sucks up in my experience. The Win2K clustering services seem to work well for what they're worth, and it probably isn't fair to blame Microsoft for crappy vendor hardware, but be careful about the gear you buy.
You need to colonize space to start making a profit. The current obey-the-international-treaties-and-don't-step-on- anyone's-feet attitude towards space exploration will only serve to get the US and anyone else who follows along waaaay behind the first screw-the-treaties-and-full-speed-ahead nation to exploit space. When Tajikstan (or whomever else) starts using their leftover space-race-era hardware to push entrepreneurs into orbit to exploit the resources and opportunity out there, everyone else will have to play catch-up.
Europeans from 1492 until 1945 colonized and exploited the rest of the planet, and ensured their continued prosperity and survival at the expense of the other peoples they ran into. Despite the centuries of intra-European warfare, the average European (or American colonial:) citizen is still better off than anyone else in the world. It's a nasty brutish world out there, and the nations who don't take advantage of growth and opportunity will pay the price in centuries to come.
The best way to start getting commerce and industry up above our atmosphere is to grant rights to things that governments have no rights to grant. Ths US government colonized the American West by giving property rights to anyone who could stand up a building, farm an acre, or build a railroad, regardless of the treaties it had with the Native American tribes who lived on that land.
Grant 50 years of tax exemption to the first company to establish Earth-to-Moon shuttle service. Give away property rights to whatever asteroids you can land on and mine. Auction off parcels of land complete with rights to whatever resources are present within that parcel on the Moon, mars and venus. Build military outposts to protect YOUR citizens' interests and make sure that nobody else interferes with their rightfully stolen gains. That's how you get companies and individuals into a new frontier.
I remember seeing a Lockheed Martin ad a number of years back, in National Geographic Magazine I believe, that made a comparison between 13th century China and the modern US. The Chinese didn't colonize beyond their historical borders, and never set their ships to cross the Pacific to the Americas. As a result, their best inventions (gunpowder, moveable type) were exploited and used against them by their enemies to enslave and cripple their kingdom, their economy and their culture. Since then, it's taken almost 300 years for China to recover from British, and then Japanese domination.
The US and Western civilization faces the same fate if we don't grab those resources and that opportunity first. Our governments have a duty to protect our citizens' future and prevent such a fate.
It'd be nice if our government was more direct in owning up to its actions ("Yes, we send troops to the Middle East every five to eight years to defend our strategic oil interests, and we will continue to do so as long as we rely upon that oil."), but that's not how you play the game in public at the international level. The military becomes a tool of foreign policy, and gets sent to do whatever random mission is important to our interests. And hey, what's Mr Zinni doing now? Trying his hand at shuttle diplomacy between Pakistan and India.
Clinton ran into the same problem with Somalia as JFK did with the Bay of Pigs - his predecessor had planned and organized the operation, but with the change in administrations, not all the loose ends got picked up. JFK's blunder was nicely compensated for by how the government handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Clinton never really recovered. If anything, Somalia showed the necessity for better planning and inter-agency cooperation within the US government & military.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the hidden inflation in the US economy that the administration isn't talking about.
...
1998: mid-level graphics card = $150
2005: mid-level graphics card = $450
1998: 1800 sq ft single-family home 15 miles outside of Washington DC = $150,000
2005: 1800 sq ft single-family home 15 miles outside of Washington DC = $400,000
1998: barrel of oil = $15
2005: barrel of oil = $60+
The only things that haven't gone up like this are prices at Wal-Mart and your wages. Good thing you can still buy cheap groceries, TVs and DVDs while living in your rented home and paying $2.50/gallon of gasoline for your car.
Running World of Warcraft at 1600x1200x32 @ 85Hz with all options on and no slowdowns... garrrrgh.... drool.... gurgle....
pH34r T3h w4R10cK!
Sorry 'bout that. Just getting all, um, warm and fuzzy thinking about it.
I'll probably get strung up on a length of Cat5 by enraged slashdotters for writing this, but there's a reason why people who have used MS Office products tend to continue using them: they're well-designed, and they work well enough for most purposes. I'm not talking about accountants and actuaries who try to shoehorn Excel + VB macros into acting like a Real Programming Language for financial calculations, but the mere fact that you have fax templates, that you can copy and paste easily from one app to another, and that you can run a decent little database using Access if you want. That as a manager running an office, you can put "skilled with MS Office applications" in a job ad for a secretary and find someone who can at least click through menus and generate the documents you need. That the applications look professional and clean and they come with a support number for a company that will not go out of business anytime soon. That the company will at least attempt to help you fix your problems and whom you can blame if something goes horribly wrong. ("It's not my fault, it's that damn Microsoft app!" you say to your VP who's pissed at the monthly reports being late again.)
OpenOffice is pretty good, and I use it exclusively on my work laptop running Ubuntu, but my choice in running Linux and other open-source applications is all about my freedom to use, redistribute and modify the application as I see fit, unencumbered by restrictive EULAs and software patents and all the baggage that goes along with shrink-wrapped commercial software. I'm willing to take the time and effort necessary to re-learn how to copy formulas instead of values in a spreadsheet app, where the default save locations live in the word processing app, and how to turn off the @#$(*! assistant. Most people don't care that much, and are willing to spend the money to use something they're familiar with and that is a de facto standard instead of taking the harder path. And don't get me wrong, it is harder to use even something as pretty and polished as Ubuntu + OpenOffice for a user familiar with Microsoft products, although it's a damn sight easier than it was 5 years ago.
Most people are lazy, and want to get things done as simply as possible. Big software companies take advantage of that, both at a personal and a corporate level. There's a reason why Microsoft is the gigantic software behemoth that it is, and that's because it understands this and understands how to sell products to individuals and organizations. That doesn't mean that its software is technologically superior, or more fun to hack on, or more free to use; but it makes people buy more stuff from them.
Complex civilizations often have too much invested in ongoing expenses (administration, bureaucracy, justice, environmental protection, etc) to react quickly to sudden changes that affect them. Looking back through history, it's often the smaller, more warlike societies that triumph over the larger, most sophisticated and complex ones in times of crisis. Around 1200AD, the average coastal Chinese citizen had a much higher quality of life, a more advanced society and a greater variety of food to eat than the average Mongol tribesman. That didn't stop the Mongols from rolling over northern China. The Western Roman Empire succumbed to barbarians, despite all the efforts of the centuries-old Imperial State to preserve itself against invasion through proscription of labor, its legions and roads and military technology.
Technology is a double-edged sword, merely having it guarantees nothing and the complexity it generates in a society creates unexpected costs and can limit the flexibility of a society to respond to changes. It takes careful use of technology and sane, rational responses to crisis to preserve a civilization, lest ye end up declaring "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" to an empty desert.
Dude, go play some World of Warcraft and then tell me if there hasn't been a decent PC game made in years.
I still play AoE2 and Civ II and I even loaded up the original Fallout last weekend, just for nostalgia's sake. But there are some killer games out there now, even if you have to wade through a lot of crap to find them. They're worth it.
And *why*, exactly, would you expect better from Slashdot? :)
I've been a happy paying customer on their budget-rate plan since '99 or so, and I have to say that their service rocks. Completely apart from their excellent technical capabilities (does your service provider offer IPv6 hosting?), my account's gotten bumped up as they've increased their budget-sized offering, and their technical support is great. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 service interruptions in the whole period of time that I've hosted my site there, and they're great about letting you know what's actually going on ("yes, the server blew up, we're restoring from backup, it'll be online in 2-3 hours") if there's a serious problem.
Automagic bittorrent hosting is just the latest in a string of cool, useful features that they provide. (No, I'm not an employee, just a satisfied customer.)
A lot of commercial software packages could stand to learn from the better examples of 'newbie' tutorials included in complex games like World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. For example:
User: "Okay, so I finally got the new trouble ticket system installed. Now what?"
[blinky little balloon pops up, says "Click me!"]
Deep Impressive Announcer Voice: "Customer service, too long ignored in this land, can finally be obtained! Start by clicking here to open a ticket."
[user clicks in the wrong place]
Deep Impressive Announcer Voice: "Fool! You have erred greatly in your judgment. You will pay the price..."
Um, okay, maybe not like that, but how many folks here have dealt with the 'gee, now what do I do?' syndrome with new users?
This just means we need to find a good, cheap, effective way to get enough humans off of this rock and somewhere else. While a few astronauts aboard the ISS aren't going to continue the human race if Something Bad happens down below, a group of perhaps ten to twenty thousand colonists spread across the Moon, Mars and the inner solar system in self-sustaining outposts would have some hope of keeping the human race alive in case of severe catastrophe.
Um, you don't change human behavior. Instead, use all of the latent tendencies towards competition, xenophobia, racism, bloodlust and aggression built into every single flawed human being on this planet to work for your goal.
The European powers of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries certainly didn't all band together to explore and colonize and exploit Africa, India and the Americas; they did it to get a competitive advantage for themselves, their families, their peoples, their nations and their religions. The US and the Soviets certainly didn't send men and women into space because they got along.
Real manned space exploration, settlement and colonization will come, and it will come as soon as there's a real competitive advantage to be gained for the individuals, groups, companies and nations involved. Problem is, it's still waaaay too damn expensive to get into orbit. Humanity at this point is like the first people who looked out at the ocean, looked at the floating bundles of wood they used to travel up and down rivers, and wondered how far out they could travel in open water with them. We're nowhere close to the level that European powers were at in the late 1400's where oceangoing ships were relatively common and not prohibitively expensive.
Only a handful of the most powerful and prosperous nations can even think about tossing people into orbit with a fair reassurance that they'll come back down in one piece. Change that, and everything else will change too.
Make it as relatively inexpensive to get people into orbit as it was for Queen Isabella to give 3 ships to Chris Columbus for his wacky idea (something under, say, fifty million dollars now) and you've got a start. People will do this all on their own, without government intervention, because they come up with new ideas, new reasons, wacked out crazy notions about how to get ahead. Most of 'em won't work, but a few will; and those few would pave the way for a serious expansion of the human race off of this planet.
If you ask me, a manned mission to Mars would be great, but for 500 billion bucks, you could do a lot of R&D, testing and implementation on low-cost orbital delivery instead. That sort of spending could show a lot more benefits and would encourage commercial expansion in a way that a uber-massive national pride project would not.
Having done some work with SourceFire's products (I worked on a contract that accounted for a majority of their total deployed IDS boxes in existence at one point), I have mixed feelings about the company. Yeah, meeting Marty is cool, and the pink pig T-shirts are cute, and it's worth some amount of geek points to say that I've used their stuff. But the products they sell and the company itself suffer from the exact same problems that plague all other IT companies.
Even though the under-the-hood technology is k3wl and using Snort sigs is l33t, the admin and management tools are frankly not up to par compared to other offerings out there. I mean, it's not as bad as ManHunt, but it still takes waaay too many mouse clicks and unnecessary repetition by a human to get simple admin tasks done. I've seen gigs of sensor data lost to DB corruption (thankfully nothing critical) and have gone through the whole oh-crap we'll-get-that-critical-bug-fixed-next-release trip with them more than once. Support is a mixed bag, sometimes excellent, sometimes okay, sometimes really slow and annoying.
Bottom line is, companies are companies, there's nothing magical about open-source ones that make their products inherently better or more desirable for any other reason than to boost one's ego and to say that You Were There Back When. If I were recommending an IDS product line to a customer (which I probably wouldn't do anyway), I would encourage them to do some careful research before settling on SF.
"There are already four-port ethernet NICs out there."
'man qe' and 'man qec' on a [Net|Open]BSD box gives you some details, but for years, Sun QuadEthernet and QuadFastEthernet cards have been a solid option for multi-port ethernet connectivity on SPARC and UltraSPARC boxes.
And heck, if this means my little 50Mhz SPARCclassic box can do BGP routing, that's great!
I realized this myself 8 years ago.
Second year at college, first day back, and I was setting up my room in the honors dorm. I got a tiny little single-bed room, but it was all mine. Threw up an Star Wars Episode IV and an Indiana Jones poster on the wall, sat down, hooked up my PC, and was happily downloading crap off the 'Net or wasting time on IRC or something.
Two new freshmen guys come down the hall, chattering back and forth, all excited. They set up shop four doors down on the right, and then one of them sticks their head in my room: "Hey! You're a Star Wars fan too?!"
I grunt or nod or something, a little taken aback by his excitement. At that point I had nearly forgotten the Star Wars poster hanging on my wall. His roomie comes by at that point and sticks his head in too, all smiling and happy.
"Who's your favorite character from the movies?" the first one asks. I think for a second, not quite sure since it had been a little bit since I sat down and watched all of 'em on VHS (maybe the previous Christmas or something), and come up with "Han Solo, I think."
The first one looks kind of disappointed - what a pedestrian choice! - but the other guy chimes in, "Oh, I like Greedo. And Muftak!" Greedo I recognized, but Muftak? Who the hell is Muftak? He kept grinning at me like some sort of deranged hyena, waiting for a response.
Realizing that I was talking to people who had spent more time involved with the movies than I spent on, say, my senior-year Computer Science class in high school, I nodded, said something polite, and smiled. They moved on, and I knew deep down that I wouldn't be winning the award for Biggest Star Wars Fan in Thomas Hall that year, despite the cardboard stand-up Yoda I still hadn't unpacked.
Check out Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered The World", website is http://www.1421.tv/. American readers may know the book's subtitle as "The Year China Discovered America".
I'd argue that it has the most probable (and certainly best-supported from actual evidence) explanation of the Piri Reis map - Chinese navigators circumnavigated the globe from 1421-1425, and drew up maps along the way.
Read the book if you have a chance, it's one of the most entertaining histories I've read in a while.
Dedicated Hpaq Proliant DL380 G3 server, Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU, 2+GB RAM. Multiple site-to-site tunnels up to about 130 sites across WAN links of varying speed, but mostly between 3-8Mbit/s. Handles about 1.2GB of 3DES/MD5 encrypted/authenticated traffic per day. Runs like a champ, the box barely notices the encryption overhead, it just takes a while (2-3 minutes) to rebuild all the tunnels when you restart FreeS/WAN.
Only headache is deciding which open-source VPN/ipv6 software to use now that FreeS/WAN is at end-of-life.
Have you ever even *looked* at Cisco PIX firewall rules or ACLs on a Cisco router? They don't use iptables, pf, or ipfilter.
Some links as examples (took <1 minute on Google):
ACLs - http://www.pasadena.net/cisco/secure.html
PIX command reference - http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/ia abu/pix/pix_sw/v_63/cmdref/index.htm
... but to an administrator, there's a world of difference. Just having to remember prtconf, dmesg, ioscan and hinv (depending on your favorite or not-so-favorite flavor) starts to eat up those brain cells saved by using the Bourne shell and vi everywhere. Not to mention #@$(! hpux which has to do EVERYTHING different for the sake of being superior^W over-engineered^W made-by-hp^W different.
Rant over.
I wrote up some notes on my experience with the Treo 600 - no photos, just lotsa text.
They're available here (part I) and here (part II).
What is sorely needed is a public champion to advocate for private space exploration. Technological progress into space needs NASA like the American West needed the US government - only enough to open up the doors for anyone and everyone with money and a dream to set out and make the unexplored frontier their own.
s/Merelvengian/Merovingian/g
See http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Rulers/merovingian. html for some historical details. They're a line of Frankish kings from the early Dark Ages, and became known for their long greasy hair, corruption and uselessness before Charles "The Hammer" Martel, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne cleaned house in Western Europe.
[karma-whoring]
Odell Lake.
See http://www.pittstate.edu/ssas/software.html for a software inventory including Odell Lake for the Apple ][ or http://www.cssjournal.com/caftori.html for a neat article about educational software.
Privatizing NASA won't do a whole lot of good, as long as there's still some "official" agency that controls space access, competition will be stifled.
Until space travel is opened up to true competition, there won't be any growth. Did Espana only allow C. Columbus access to the New World? No, they sent over as many folks as they could, and other nations did as well.
Free markets and capitalist's greed have done more for exploration of new frontiers than anything else. The government's role should be limited to enforcing basic minimum standards ("Yes, you DO have a working life support system"), much as state governments enforce emissions and safety standards for cars & trucks, and to encourage further exploration & development.
Give tax breaks away to any company that gets ore mined from the asteroid belt back to Earth. Give away grants to fund the first Earth-to-Moon shuttle. Grant property rights to whoever sets foot on a previously unclaimed parcel of land on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, anything that's worth money. Once you get the gold prospectors out there, the wives and equipment-sellers and infrastructure will follow.
Ugh. Unless you're running on a particular model of Dell's PowerVault FC storage line and it zonks out on you, causing four critical failures of your SAN & Win2K cluster within three weeks.
Fault tolerance my ass. Maybe it works better on Compaq's gear, but Dell's non-EMC gear isn't worth the power it sucks up in my experience. The Win2K clustering services seem to work well for what they're worth, and it probably isn't fair to blame Microsoft for crappy vendor hardware, but be careful about the gear you buy.
Anyone want some used PV660's?
You need to colonize space to start making a profit. The current obey-the-international-treaties-and-don't-step-on- anyone's-feet attitude towards space exploration will only serve to get the US and anyone else who follows along waaaay behind the first screw-the-treaties-and-full-speed-ahead nation to exploit space. When Tajikstan (or whomever else) starts using their leftover space-race-era hardware to push entrepreneurs into orbit to exploit the resources and opportunity out there, everyone else will have to play catch-up.
:) citizen is still better off than anyone else in the world. It's a nasty brutish world out there, and the nations who don't take advantage of growth and opportunity will pay the price in centuries to come.
Europeans from 1492 until 1945 colonized and exploited the rest of the planet, and ensured their continued prosperity and survival at the expense of the other peoples they ran into. Despite the centuries of intra-European warfare, the average European (or American colonial
The best way to start getting commerce and industry up above our atmosphere is to grant rights to things that governments have no rights to grant. Ths US government colonized the American West by giving property rights to anyone who could stand up a building, farm an acre, or build a railroad, regardless of the treaties it had with the Native American tribes who lived on that land.
Grant 50 years of tax exemption to the first company to establish Earth-to-Moon shuttle service. Give away property rights to whatever asteroids you can land on and mine. Auction off parcels of land complete with rights to whatever resources are present within that parcel on the Moon, mars and venus. Build military outposts to protect YOUR citizens' interests and make sure that nobody else interferes with their rightfully stolen gains. That's how you get companies and individuals into a new frontier.
I remember seeing a Lockheed Martin ad a number of years back, in National Geographic Magazine I believe, that made a comparison between 13th century China and the modern US. The Chinese didn't colonize beyond their historical borders, and never set their ships to cross the Pacific to the Americas. As a result, their best inventions (gunpowder, moveable type) were exploited and used against them by their enemies to enslave and cripple their kingdom, their economy and their culture. Since then, it's taken almost 300 years for China to recover from British, and then Japanese domination.
The US and Western civilization faces the same fate if we don't grab those resources and that opportunity first. Our governments have a duty to protect our citizens' future and prevent such a fate.
It'd be nice if our government was more direct in owning up to its actions ("Yes, we send troops to the Middle East every five to eight years to defend our strategic oil interests, and we will continue to do so as long as we rely upon that oil."), but that's not how you play the game in public at the international level. The military becomes a tool of foreign policy, and gets sent to do whatever random mission is important to our interests. And hey, what's Mr Zinni doing now? Trying his hand at shuttle diplomacy between Pakistan and India.
Clinton ran into the same problem with Somalia as JFK did with the Bay of Pigs - his predecessor had planned and organized the operation, but with the change in administrations, not all the loose ends got picked up. JFK's blunder was nicely compensated for by how the government handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Clinton never really recovered. If anything, Somalia showed the necessity for better planning and inter-agency cooperation within the US government & military.