The bizarre thing about the Mac Mini Server is that it's a $1000 hardware box, that if you want to upgrade the OS on it, a new version of OS X Server will cost you $500.
$500 to update a $1000 computer? That's more than a bit odd.
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment, since I was a sysadmin at the University of Minnesota during the later Gopher years (what I call "the pathetic self-pity era".) Highlights included being required to run a Gopher server (since until late '97 all official department content was supposed to made available on Gopher as well as HTTP, we had this bastard of a server called GN that would serve the same content to both), suffering through the "Gopher World Tour", listening to several of the Gopher team carp about how this WWW thing was overrated and people would come back to Gopher, etc.
I think the best is when, in 1996, someone from the computer lab told me I shouldn't be telling my users about Netscape, I should be showing them TurboGopher VR.
That's been my experience as well. Fairpoint has, sadly, shown me how good Comcast is.
My latest FP problem? My service goes out completely every time it rains. They insist it must be my internal wiring, even if I'm hooking up directly to the NID, so the problem is on their side of the demarc. But since my NID is inside, I have to agree to pay $65 for them to come out, and then if and when they come out, if it's not raining, there's no problem, and they refuse to troubleshoot.
Add to that the bizarre billing problems, and I'm thinking Vonage.
While I agree 100% that Fairpoint sucks (I've had no end of ridiculous billing problems from them since February...), Verizon sucked in a lot of ways as well, especially for those of us up in the rural parts of the state. Despite literally having a Verizon fiber bundle running over my land, I was never able to even get decent dialtone service from them, and as far as DSL or other high-speed service? Their official answer was that we'd never get it. Ever.
The phone companies are in the situation they are in since they didn't plan for the future. For more than a decade it's been clear that voice services were going to cell and VOIP, and they sat there and didn't figure out how to handle the infrastructure costs to stay competitive in the long run.
If comcast can run service to my place, so could Verizon and Fairpoint.
New Hampshire. No sales tax or use tax here. And the legislature is discussing a bill to ban businesses from collecting use tax for other states, since Massachusetts is trying to force retailers with presence in both MA and NH to collect use tax on all sales to MA residents from NH stores. (Disclaimer, we do have an 8% "Room and Meals Tax" on prepared food and hotel rooms...)
Montana, Oregon, Delaware, and Alaska have no sales/use tax either at the state level, but some of these have locally-applied sales taxes.
Several things both me about these proposals that occasionally get floated around:
1. They make the implicit assumption that everyone has a sales or use tax, and that people are avoiding it. That may be true in many cases, but not mine, since my state has neither. I don't
2. Similarly, it's unfair for businesses operating here. For a business located purely in my state, it's not a fair burden for them to have to calculate and collect use tax for any of the hundred (cities, counties, states, and various other revenue districts) that someone might be in when they click their mouse to order. I don't mind the "nexus" argument for sales tax (hey, the company chose to set up shop in a state? Then you can learn the tax rules and when to collect them), but extending it to use tax isn't fair. If a state really feels they need a use tax, it should be their responsibility to figure out how to collect it, and not involve companies that don't even have nexus in their state.
3. They talk about simplifying it, but there's already enough cases that I can this not working correctly (person in state A buys a gift from vendor in state B for shipment (from state C) to the recipient in State D).
I say get rid of the sales tax. They aren't necessary, we've got several states (including my own) that get along just fine without them.
95% of what I post to various photo sharing websites, under any license, is cropped. Mostly since it looks better cropped, but a nice secondary effect of this is that I have part of the image that no infringer can have.
I already have enough problems with images I post publicy
For work, I regularly spend time out at Yuma Proving Ground, and 50,000 lbs isn't that much larger than some of the other existing systems being tested by the military.
Para-Flite's MegaFly, for example, is a 30,000 lb payload guided parachute system (GPS-steered to land at a designated LZ), with a variant of it being tested up to, IIRC, 42,000 lbs, with 50,000 lbs being a goal. It's still basically a development system, but similar systems are regularly used for 8,000 and 10,000 lb payloads.
Granted, airdrop aerodynamic issues are different than booster recovery issues, but it's still worth noting that 50,000 lbs isn't necessarily as huge as it seems relative to the existing technology.
Well, I'm in a similar situation (rural NH). No DSL for at least the next several years. No cable (they quoted almost $10k last time, and even at that, I can't get them to do an install). Attempts at EVDO and the like have been spotty at best. And satellite was difficult due to line-of-sight issues and dish placement.
I ended up placing the dish well away from the main house (with a nice fence around it, you can't even see it from outside the property), and using a wireless repeater to get a decent signal at the house.
Or do what I did for several years, which is accept that living in some nice but somewhat remote/restricted, has some downsides, 56k dialup being one of them.
Working in the aerospace field has exposed me to tons of interesting surplus. I have an F-14 canopy, various B-57 parts, and a ton of clothing and tools.
Same here. Amongst my collection of items gotten through legitimate surplus channels (DMRO, Govt Auctions, or auctions from government suppliers), I've got a rather healthy collection of geiger counters (Texas Department of Health surplus), kevlar vests, first aid kits in nice pelican cases, helmets, gas masks, tools (including a nice titanium crowbar), etc.
Sure, all sorts of stuff gets nicked from the military and ends up on ebay, but there are all sorts of legitimate channels for most of this stuff as well.
Indeed, Stirling is much more efficient than an RTG. However, there's more to it than just efficiency---Stirling engines are much heavier (for the same amount of power, it takes noticeably more weight in the generator). Sometimes the penalty for this extra weight in launch fuel overrides the reduced efficiency.
Although as Pu-238 gets more rare, the best solution drifts further towards the higher efficiency systems. However, at least in theory there are several other thermal generator techniques that have promise (I've personally worked on protoypes for radioisotope powered Brayton cycle systems and thermophotovoltaic power systems). Each of these has it's own efficiency, required support systems, reliability issues, and specific power.
Well, if you signed a contract[1] that says that even the stuff you wrote in your spare time is theirs, well, there's exactly one way forward....
You have to ask them for permission. But don't just ask, make a good case for it. Explain what the cost to them is (including lost opportunity cost, which sounds like nothing for this case). Explain the benefits (mostly soft and squishy stuff, like contributing to the community and giving your company a good name, etc). Really pitch it.
I know this works on occasion, since I've done this myself: asked for, and received permission, to release programs I've written both internally and for paying customers as free software (in the latter case, our agreement with the customer allows this). You can go download it yourself: JavaSock.
It was simply a matter of talking to our commercialization director, pointing out to him that realistically, we probably wouldn't make much revenue off of selling this code, but would make several people (including the client that paid for it) happy, and it might give us some good press in certain circles. They agreed, and we uploaded it to sourceforge.
But don't try to do an end-around. Many things can happen, and most of them aren't good.
I'm not being high and mighty here, my contract says the same. I don't mind, they compensate me well for it. If I didn't think this was a workable deal, well, I'd go find someplace else.
I'm a little surprised that they assert that "one cent" is their phrase, since, unlike US coinage, they actually use numeric denominations on their coins. The Canadian penny actually says "1 cent" on it.
Maybe the US Mint should insist they get paid instead...
Oh, and the Royal Canadian Mint isn't a "Federal Agency". It's a Crown Corporation (status similar to the US Post Office).
I've used these cameras for quite a few projects (including one for the Department of Homeland Security), and have found the same thing mentioned in this article: the security on them is pretty poor.
Before deploying these, we ended up disabling the wireless support, and coupling each camera with a Gumstix computer that was serving as both an image buffer and a nicely firewalled configuration that provided much more secure wireless communications.
So thats what I went through with a company that WANTED to hook up my cable. I paid them to do it.
That's the same problem I've been having. Starting three years ago, I finally decided that I'd fork over the $3500 that Adelphia wanted to string cable to my place. Today, Adelphia is now Comcast, and I'm still trying to get them to do an install for me.
They allegedly want to install cable at a hideously high price, but one that I'm willing to grit my teeth and pay (if I could VPN from home, I'd save a *lot* of money spent driving into town). But even at that, I can't get them to close the deal.
DSL is even worse, I've got the letter from Verizon thanking me for my query, and how it will be several years until they even think about installing DSL (meanwhile, Verizon is trying to sell their phone network up here).
It shouldn't be this bad. I live in a town of 4000 people that already has a fair amount of cable installed. I live half a mile from an interstate highway. And I'm willing to pay a lot of money to make this work. But nobody can deliver.
Back when I was an IT Manager, the very first thing I'd do when I went in the door in the morning was listen. The room had a particular sound, and if was even the slightest bit off, that usually meant that one of the servers was doing something bad (ranging from thrashing a disk to being completely dead).
Smell was a good indicator once, too...
I remember reading some research a couple of years ago that somethign similar was done using 100km of optical fibre and a router programmed to keep sending the same stuff around the loop, or it could read it/write it as it came around.
The basic technique is even older than that. Google "Mercury Delay Line" for early examples: they'd make a long thin tube of mercury with transponders at each ender. It was around 5 ft per K, IIRC.
But why did they process serve in Connecticut, while PJ is supposed to be in Hartsdale, New York? And why is it the entire SCO legal team can't seem to find her when Moggie O' Gara found it so easy? Maybe they should hire her on to find PJ.
From my personal experience the times I've been subpeonaed (did contract work for a company that was suing another contractor working on the same project, so I got subpoenaed several times for both my records and testimony), most process servers don't appear to be very bright. In my case, the plaintiff's lawyers complained to the court that I had been avoiding being served, and that I was "difficult to locate". Meanwhile, the entire two weeks they were allegedly trying to serve me, I had been (a) getting up at 7am, (b) walking to work via the exact same route, (c) working my normal day, (d) coming home. Sometimes I'd go out during the evening. During that entire time, they never showed up at my apartment or my workplace, both of which were plainly on both my website and the contract I had signed with the plaintiff. A week after explaining this to them on the phone (during the phone call I even said "hey, I'm at home, and I'll be here for the next four hours if you want to send someone over") they finally got ahold of me.
(I got them back, since they subpoenaed "printed copies of all correspondence and source code conveyed between you and defendant", which with all the CVS versions and the MIME-encoded attachements, worked out to around 16 filesbox of printed material, which I made them supply the paper for...)
For those of you that don't know, Hubble still has two working instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) and NICMOS.
Indeed, having some peripheral involvement with NICMOS (our company designed the replacement cryocooler for it), we get very regular status updates. When the ACS system safed, NICMOS and it's cooling systems went into safe mode as well, but on monday afternoon they restarted the NICMOS cooling system, and, as of yesterday noon, the NICMOS system was almost back down to operating temperature.
I always thought aerogel was some pretty cool stuff. If you insulated your house with it, you would only need one candle to keep the entire house warm.:)
It's not quite that magical. A two inch layer of aerogel will keep things about as insulated as a really good vacuum thermos, however.
Sadly the U of MN (where Gopher was written) no longer has a Gopher node.
Sadly? Heck no. Having been a systems administrator at the U of MN for several years during Gopher's declining years, I had to suffer through entirely too much Gopher-related nonsense:
For several years they wouldn't let us run a web server unless we made the same content available via Gopher.
An entire year of internal bickering about whether or not the University should charge licensing fees for Gopher.
If you weren't at the "Gopher World Tour", circa '93 or '94, hearing about how Gopher wasn't yet dead, and how graphical browsing was over-rated, but at the same timing hearing how Gopher+ and GopherVR 3D were going to show those web snobs how information exchange was really done, you haven't yet seen what the meaning of "beating a dead horse" is.
Much bickering between the Gopher Development Team, the web folks, and Campus Wide Information System groups about stealing resources from each other, with the Gopher people proclaiming "we invented the Internet!"
Oy. By the time they finally pulled the plugs on their Gopher servers I was ready to pound nails in the coffin myself.
I'm underwhelmed by the actual article, since it's just a bunch of overlays of historical data. Google Earth has had these (at least for San Francisco) since the early betas of Google Earth 4.
More interesting, and more 4D (in that it gives you an actual slider you can play with) is Google Earth 4 Beta's timeline feature. I was hoping the article would've been something along those lines (since I've been having lots of fun displaying aircraft tracking data in Google Earth with their timeline slider activated).
That's the problem I regularly have. Scan item. Place item in bagging area like it tells me to. It still asks me to place the item in the bagging area. Wait for clerk. Have clerk tell me I'm stupid.
That routine was old the first time. Seeing that happens about half the time I attempt to use self checkout, I've since written it off as unreliable technology.
A year-and-a-half ago, pricing of DSL and cable modem service was roughly the same. But over the past year, the phone companies have launched an aggressive assault by dropping prices.
I only wish it was happening here (western NH). Verizon doesn't even attempt to compete with Adelphia, and doesn't even offer DSL in many areas. Kind of odd, since they already have most of the expensive infrastructure in place, but they just don't offer DSL. According to my last discussion with them, they plan on rolling out DSL in my area... in 2012.
Adelphia isn't much better, since they aren't very willing to invest in infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
The bizarre thing about the Mac Mini Server is that it's a $1000 hardware box, that if you want to upgrade the OS on it, a new version of OS X Server will cost you $500.
$500 to update a $1000 computer? That's more than a bit odd.
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment, since I was a sysadmin at the University of Minnesota during the later Gopher years (what I call "the pathetic self-pity era".) Highlights included being required to run a Gopher server (since until late '97 all official department content was supposed to made available on Gopher as well as HTTP, we had this bastard of a server called GN that would serve the same content to both), suffering through the "Gopher World Tour", listening to several of the Gopher team carp about how this WWW thing was overrated and people would come back to Gopher, etc. I think the best is when, in 1996, someone from the computer lab told me I shouldn't be telling my users about Netscape, I should be showing them TurboGopher VR.
That's been my experience as well. Fairpoint has, sadly, shown me how good Comcast is.
My latest FP problem? My service goes out completely every time it rains. They insist it must be my internal wiring, even if I'm hooking up directly to the NID, so the problem is on their side of the demarc. But since my NID is inside, I have to agree to pay $65 for them to come out, and then if and when they come out, if it's not raining, there's no problem, and they refuse to troubleshoot.
Add to that the bizarre billing problems, and I'm thinking Vonage.
The phone companies are in the situation they are in since they didn't plan for the future. For more than a decade it's been clear that voice services were going to cell and VOIP, and they sat there and didn't figure out how to handle the infrastructure costs to stay competitive in the long run.
If comcast can run service to my place, so could Verizon and Fairpoint.
Montana, Oregon, Delaware, and Alaska have no sales/use tax either at the state level, but some of these have locally-applied sales taxes.
1. They make the implicit assumption that everyone has a sales or use tax, and that people are avoiding it. That may be true in many cases, but not mine, since my state has neither. I don't
2. Similarly, it's unfair for businesses operating here. For a business located purely in my state, it's not a fair burden for them to have to calculate and collect use tax for any of the hundred (cities, counties, states, and various other revenue districts) that someone might be in when they click their mouse to order. I don't mind the "nexus" argument for sales tax (hey, the company chose to set up shop in a state? Then you can learn the tax rules and when to collect them), but extending it to use tax isn't fair. If a state really feels they need a use tax, it should be their responsibility to figure out how to collect it, and not involve companies that don't even have nexus in their state.
3. They talk about simplifying it, but there's already enough cases that I can this not working correctly (person in state A buys a gift from vendor in state B for shipment (from state C) to the recipient in State D).
I say get rid of the sales tax. They aren't necessary, we've got several states (including my own) that get along just fine without them.
I already have enough problems with images I post publicy
Para-Flite's MegaFly, for example, is a 30,000 lb payload guided parachute system (GPS-steered to land at a designated LZ), with a variant of it being tested up to, IIRC, 42,000 lbs, with 50,000 lbs being a goal. It's still basically a development system, but similar systems are regularly used for 8,000 and 10,000 lb payloads.
Granted, airdrop aerodynamic issues are different than booster recovery issues, but it's still worth noting that 50,000 lbs isn't necessarily as huge as it seems relative to the existing technology.
I ended up placing the dish well away from the main house (with a nice fence around it, you can't even see it from outside the property), and using a wireless repeater to get a decent signal at the house.
Or do what I did for several years, which is accept that living in some nice but somewhat remote/restricted, has some downsides, 56k dialup being one of them.
Same here. Amongst my collection of items gotten through legitimate surplus channels (DMRO, Govt Auctions, or auctions from government suppliers), I've got a rather healthy collection of geiger counters (Texas Department of Health surplus), kevlar vests, first aid kits in nice pelican cases, helmets, gas masks, tools (including a nice titanium crowbar), etc.
Sure, all sorts of stuff gets nicked from the military and ends up on ebay, but there are all sorts of legitimate channels for most of this stuff as well.
Although as Pu-238 gets more rare, the best solution drifts further towards the higher efficiency systems. However, at least in theory there are several other thermal generator techniques that have promise (I've personally worked on protoypes for radioisotope powered Brayton cycle systems and thermophotovoltaic power systems). Each of these has it's own efficiency, required support systems, reliability issues, and specific power.
You have to ask them for permission. But don't just ask, make a good case for it. Explain what the cost to them is (including lost opportunity cost, which sounds like nothing for this case). Explain the benefits (mostly soft and squishy stuff, like contributing to the community and giving your company a good name, etc). Really pitch it.
I know this works on occasion, since I've done this myself: asked for, and received permission, to release programs I've written both internally and for paying customers as free software (in the latter case, our agreement with the customer allows this). You can go download it yourself: JavaSock.
It was simply a matter of talking to our commercialization director, pointing out to him that realistically, we probably wouldn't make much revenue off of selling this code, but would make several people (including the client that paid for it) happy, and it might give us some good press in certain circles. They agreed, and we uploaded it to sourceforge.
But don't try to do an end-around. Many things can happen, and most of them aren't good.
I'm not being high and mighty here, my contract says the same. I don't mind, they compensate me well for it. If I didn't think this was a workable deal, well, I'd go find someplace else.
Maybe the US Mint should insist they get paid instead...
Oh, and the Royal Canadian Mint isn't a "Federal Agency". It's a Crown Corporation (status similar to the US Post Office).
If I re-did it now, I'd probably use a different camera system, although the 207W does have some very good features.
Before deploying these, we ended up disabling the wireless support, and coupling each camera with a Gumstix computer that was serving as both an image buffer and a nicely firewalled configuration that provided much more secure wireless communications.
That's the same problem I've been having. Starting three years ago, I finally decided that I'd fork over the $3500 that Adelphia wanted to string cable to my place. Today, Adelphia is now Comcast, and I'm still trying to get them to do an install for me.
They allegedly want to install cable at a hideously high price, but one that I'm willing to grit my teeth and pay (if I could VPN from home, I'd save a *lot* of money spent driving into town). But even at that, I can't get them to close the deal.
DSL is even worse, I've got the letter from Verizon thanking me for my query, and how it will be several years until they even think about installing DSL (meanwhile, Verizon is trying to sell their phone network up here).
It shouldn't be this bad. I live in a town of 4000 people that already has a fair amount of cable installed. I live half a mile from an interstate highway. And I'm willing to pay a lot of money to make this work. But nobody can deliver.
That T1 is looking better and better.
Back when I was an IT Manager, the very first thing I'd do when I went in the door in the morning was listen. The room had a particular sound, and if was even the slightest bit off, that usually meant that one of the servers was doing something bad (ranging from thrashing a disk to being completely dead). Smell was a good indicator once, too...
The basic technique is even older than that. Google "Mercury Delay Line" for early examples: they'd make a long thin tube of mercury with transponders at each ender. It was around 5 ft per K, IIRC.
From my personal experience the times I've been subpeonaed (did contract work for a company that was suing another contractor working on the same project, so I got subpoenaed several times for both my records and testimony), most process servers don't appear to be very bright. In my case, the plaintiff's lawyers complained to the court that I had been avoiding being served, and that I was "difficult to locate". Meanwhile, the entire two weeks they were allegedly trying to serve me, I had been (a) getting up at 7am, (b) walking to work via the exact same route, (c) working my normal day, (d) coming home. Sometimes I'd go out during the evening. During that entire time, they never showed up at my apartment or my workplace, both of which were plainly on both my website and the contract I had signed with the plaintiff. A week after explaining this to them on the phone (during the phone call I even said "hey, I'm at home, and I'll be here for the next four hours if you want to send someone over") they finally got ahold of me.
(I got them back, since they subpoenaed "printed copies of all correspondence and source code conveyed between you and defendant", which with all the CVS versions and the MIME-encoded attachements, worked out to around 16 filesbox of printed material, which I made them supply the paper for...)
Indeed, having some peripheral involvement with NICMOS (our company designed the replacement cryocooler for it), we get very regular status updates. When the ACS system safed, NICMOS and it's cooling systems went into safe mode as well, but on monday afternoon they restarted the NICMOS cooling system, and, as of yesterday noon, the NICMOS system was almost back down to operating temperature.
It's not quite that magical. A two inch layer of aerogel will keep things about as insulated as a really good vacuum thermos, however.
I know, I work with the stuff on a regular basis, we use it as insulation, by the 400 liter barrel. See some of my pics of some of the solid slabs I have in the office.
Sadly? Heck no. Having been a systems administrator at the U of MN for several years during Gopher's declining years, I had to suffer through entirely too much Gopher-related nonsense:
Oy. By the time they finally pulled the plugs on their Gopher servers I was ready to pound nails in the coffin myself.
More interesting, and more 4D (in that it gives you an actual slider you can play with) is Google Earth 4 Beta's timeline feature. I was hoping the article would've been something along those lines (since I've been having lots of fun displaying aircraft tracking data in Google Earth with their timeline slider activated).
That routine was old the first time. Seeing that happens about half the time I attempt to use self checkout, I've since written it off as unreliable technology.
I only wish it was happening here (western NH). Verizon doesn't even attempt to compete with Adelphia, and doesn't even offer DSL in many areas. Kind of odd, since they already have most of the expensive infrastructure in place, but they just don't offer DSL. According to my last discussion with them, they plan on rolling out DSL in my area... in 2012.
Adelphia isn't much better, since they aren't very willing to invest in infrastructure.