Could it really have stopped it happening? Once the foam punched a hole in the craft, the Columbia was incapable of reentry. We were told back then (and I have heard nothing since which contradicts this) that the crew had no way of fixing that problem.
What I have always wondered is: if they had known, could they have hung out at the ISS and waited for NASA to send up a rescue craft? The Columbia will not have had enough food or oxygen for any extended period of time, but the ISS should have had. A rescue craft coming up a couple of weeks later could have replaced both and taken the crew home.
A free paper can only survive if it has pretty low overheads. 'Overheads' includes paying their contributors so they can spend enough time to do a decent job. I looked at that paper's website and saw the other classic symptom - not very many articles. At least what there was was reasonably well written.
In theory, a freebie should normally be inferior to a 'normal' newspaper with a decent circulation. However, we all know 'normal' newspapers which set out to disprove that:-)
Is 'The Salt Lake City Weekly' a freebie? It certainly looks like it. In that case, asking for 'Insights' is being rather optimistic - they did not write the Slashdot blurb on the article. What it does do quite well is to summarise what the two sides are claiming in terms that a non-technical can understand. If the whole story were completely and obviously cut-and-dried, SCO would be bankrupt already. SCO have at least made an attempt to make it look as though they have a case.
Around 20 years ago, there was a party in Germany called the EAP (Europaeisches Arbeiter Partei = European Workers Party) whose leader was LaRouche's wife. Their political platform was pretty xenophobic. That phase of LaRouche's plan for world domination came to an end when he was given a long sentence for tax evasion.
Without having looked at those tax-evasion charges in any detail, they did appear rather politically motivated - giving credence to his conspiracy theories. On the other hand, it probably could not have happened to a nicer man.
That is interesting. The Ozone problem was first noticed in the mid-80's and it took a year or so to work out the rate of deterioration.
As for running out of oil by 2000, I have just looked at an old report I have which was produced for President Carter. This report estimated that half of the world's oil reserves would have been consumed by the year 2000, this 'half' meant 'half of the oil reserves which had ever existed'.
The report is entitled 'The Global 2000 Report to the President' and was compiled in the late 70's. I can find no reference to ozone depletion there at all, the problem was considered pretty theoretical back then.
If IBM or one of their customers needed a study which benefitted IBM, then they could rely on Diebold.
Example: IBM pretty much have a monopoly in the mainframe world. Back when this mattered more, there used to be lists published showing which company had which percentage of the mainframe market. The Diebold lists set the 'mainframe' threshhold artificially low so it looked like there was more competition.
Example: Some people in a company I used to work for wanted to convince their top management that IBM was the way to go (we think we knew why and it was probably not bribery). They paid Diebold to produce a study demonstrating that they would save money that way. No idea about the running costs nowadays, but all in all, the conversion cost around $2000 Million. Things are rarely that simple though, the application which incurred the bulk of these costs needed to be rewritten anyway. The worst losses were caused by de-centralising to a client-server model where some - around 3% - of the server administrators lost their customer data. It took months to re-create them and this meant that many customers could not be billed for services rendered during this period. Heads probably did not roll.
note that SCOX is rated at 3 now (1=worst, 10=best) but was rated 1 a month ago. That most have been around the time IBM swatted them aside in the court apperance.
That nobody (that is very few) is simply wrong. Warren Buffett put it very well when he asked just how these companies were ever expected to make a profit. When one of the richest self-made men in the world - and one who made his zillions by investing - asks that question that loudly, it should be blindingly obvious that something is seriously wrong.
Shorting stocks is a very dangerous game. It can be blindingly obvious that a stock is overvalued and that one day the fit is going to hit the shan, but who can tell you when that is actually going to take place?
Also, shares often drop for totally irrational reasons.
Last point: who plans for something like 9/11 or a major catastrophe. Investors in Union Carbide had probably never heard of that factory in Bhopal (India) until the disaster a few years back.
It will not backfire on the evil men who started this mess, it will backfire on the idiots who have their (or their clients') money 'invested' in that company when the music stops.
I invest in shares on a fairly minor basis and was so appalled by the boom of the late 90's (Warren Buffett: 'how are these companies ever going to make money?') that I got out altogether for a while. I missed some massive profits - as we probably all have here - but totally missed the subsequent crash as well. I finally started coming back in at the end of 2001.
The problem back then was that shares were vastly overvalued but kept on rising because they were rising. The charts looked great and pension-funds managers who pulled their funds out of these overvalued stocks were sacked shortly afterwards because their funds were underperforming.
Then came the crash and we all got burnt. That is even forgetting companies like Enron or Worldcom. It even looks to me as though SCO have learnt from those two companies. They are filing their correct figures and their broken business-plan with the SEC. No fraud there. People who invest there will deserve all they get, the only question is the timescale.
Something has to be wrong with that. A 32-bit system can access 4GB of memory without kludges. Are you implying that every byte on a disc partition has to map to a byte im memory? I can't believe that is what you are saying and it would mean that you will always need more memory than disc-capacity.
I was at a Linuxworld talk around 14 months ago and someone from AMD (a VP?) held a keynote speech on this processor, one that was sufficiently convincing for me to go out and buy some shares in the company:-)
He could not understand what Intel were up to either. Linus made a similar point later around the time he left Transmeta and added the rider that the Itanium was based on bad design decisions, irrespective of compatability.
My impression was that AMD are shipping all they can produce for a pretty high price.
A marketing offensive under these circumstances would be counterproductive - they would be spending money creating a need for product they could not shift in those quantities. AMD have been there before and it hurt them.
As for Linux and x86-64 support, the German C't magazine tested this recently and had some pretty major problems with some MotherBoards. One of the changes between the last 2.6.0-test and official 2.6.0 kernels was a 'show stopper' with the x86-64. This is all bleeding-edge stuff, I'll probably wait until Q2 before making the plunge.
There was some show-stopping problem with the way HURD addressed discs which meant they could only support pathetically small discs. This was going to force a major rewrite and I have never heard anything of the project since.
Would this new architecture fix that problem? (possibly not, it may have been something along the lines of large discs needing a large memory footprint - something x86-64 would help with but would be too wasteful to be used)
DOSsing them sounds like the best idea, until spammers start carrying links like this one.
That The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! does not necessarily mean that it really was spam though, I recently had to turn my ISP's spam-protection off - too many false positives. With cable, it makes more sense to check for spam at my end using a Baysean filter.
The US Government essentially lost that one. The lawsuit ran for around a decade and finally died the death for political reasons when Reagan was elected, something that makes it look like the - much shorter - Microsoft case.
IBM was still all-powerful back then, their disaster with Bill Gates was 12 or so years on.
They made what they thought was a sensible commercial decision. They can be castigated for their stupidity, but a Slashdot-reader driven E-Mail flaming campaign is just a distraction.
You do not need to guess, several known analysts (one of whom is apparently the Deutsche Bank's investment arm) have been recomending SCOX.
The person who wrote that Globe article obviously also had expected things to go differently: IBM scored a surprise legal victory in that court case when a judge ruled on Friday in favour of IBM in SCO's trade-secret violation lawsuit against the computing giant.
I will be interested in the explanations the analysts offer when SCO finally bombs, why they saw that ruling as a 'surprise'.
a year ago, mozilla wasslow, ugly, and somehow much buggy. I use 1.5 and it is fine, so - on the whole - (there was a problem with font-sizes when printing) was 1.4.
Slashdot Mirror
Could it really have stopped it happening? Once the foam punched a hole in the craft, the Columbia was incapable of reentry. We were told back then (and I have heard nothing since which contradicts this) that the crew had no way of fixing that problem.
What I have always wondered is: if they had known, could they have hung out at the ISS and waited for NASA to send up a rescue craft? The Columbia will not have had enough food or oxygen for any extended period of time, but the ISS should have had. A rescue craft coming up a couple of weeks later could have replaced both and taken the crew home.
No idea if this was feasable.
A free paper can only survive if it has pretty low overheads. 'Overheads' includes paying their contributors so they can spend enough time to do a decent job. I looked at that paper's website and saw the other classic symptom - not very many articles. At least what there was was reasonably well written.
:-)
In theory, a freebie should normally be inferior to a 'normal' newspaper with a decent circulation. However, we all know 'normal' newspapers which set out to disprove that
Is 'The Salt Lake City Weekly' a freebie? It certainly looks like it. In that case, asking for 'Insights' is being rather optimistic - they did not write the Slashdot blurb on the article.
What it does do quite well is to summarise what the two sides are claiming in terms that a non-technical can understand.
If the whole story were completely and obviously cut-and-dried, SCO would be bankrupt already. SCO have at least made an attempt to make it look as though they have a case.
Around 20 years ago, there was a party in Germany called the EAP (Europaeisches Arbeiter Partei = European Workers Party) whose leader was LaRouche's wife. Their political platform was pretty xenophobic. That phase of LaRouche's plan for world domination came to an end when he was given a long sentence for tax evasion.
Without having looked at those tax-evasion charges in any detail, they did appear rather politically motivated - giving credence to his conspiracy theories. On the other hand, it probably could not have happened to a nicer man.
Lyndon LaRouche is a Democrat? Since when?
That is interesting. The Ozone problem was first noticed in the mid-80's and it took a year or so to work out the rate of deterioration.
As for running out of oil by 2000, I have just looked at an old report I have which was produced for President Carter. This report estimated that half of the world's oil reserves would have been consumed by the year 2000, this 'half' meant 'half of the oil reserves which had ever existed'.
The report is entitled 'The Global 2000 Report to the President' and was compiled in the late 70's. I can find no reference to ozone depletion there at all, the problem was considered pretty theoretical back then.
Diebold used to be famous for that.
If IBM or one of their customers needed a study which benefitted IBM, then they could rely on Diebold.
Example: IBM pretty much have a monopoly in the mainframe world. Back when this mattered more, there used to be lists published showing which company had which percentage of the mainframe market. The Diebold lists set the 'mainframe' threshhold artificially low so it looked like there was more competition.
Example: Some people in a company I used to work for wanted to convince their top management that IBM was the way to go (we think we knew why and it was probably not bribery). They paid Diebold to produce a study demonstrating that they would save money that way. No idea about the running costs nowadays, but all in all, the conversion cost around $2000 Million. Things are rarely that simple though, the application which incurred the bulk of these costs needed to be rewritten anyway. The worst losses were caused by de-centralising to a client-server model where some - around 3% - of the server administrators lost their customer data. It took months to re-create them and this meant that many customers could not be billed for services rendered during this period. Heads probably did not roll.
It can be called a pyramid scheme when someone organised it. Pump and Dump is very similar.
The point about that particular time is that virtually all shares were going up at the same time.
With financial figures being released every quarter nowadays, 'long term' is anything exceeding that limit.
Funds which underperform over a 3-month period can expect to see investors heading for the hills. So much for long-term planning.
IBM have made it very very clear that they have no intention of going down that road. SCO even suggested it to them.
Who else would be that stupid? Don't say M$ because that would expose them to all kinds of monopoly accusations.
nice site, that!
note that SCOX is rated at 3 now (1=worst, 10=best) but was rated 1 a month ago. That most have been around the time IBM swatted them aside in the court apperance.
That nobody (that is very few) is simply wrong.
Warren Buffett put it very well when he asked just how these companies were ever expected to make a profit. When one of the richest self-made men in the world - and one who made his zillions by investing - asks that question that loudly, it should be blindingly obvious that something is seriously wrong.
Shorting stocks is a very dangerous game. It can be blindingly obvious that a stock is overvalued and that one day the fit is going to hit the shan, but who can tell you when that is actually going to take place?
Also, shares often drop for totally irrational reasons.
Last point: who plans for something like 9/11 or a major catastrophe. Investors in Union Carbide had probably never heard of that factory in Bhopal (India) until the disaster a few years back.
It will not backfire on the evil men who started this mess, it will backfire on the idiots who have their (or their clients') money 'invested' in that company when the music stops.
I invest in shares on a fairly minor basis and was so appalled by the boom of the late 90's (Warren Buffett: 'how are these companies ever going to make money?') that I got out altogether for a while. I missed some massive profits - as we probably all have here - but totally missed the subsequent crash as well. I finally started coming back in at the end of 2001.
The problem back then was that shares were vastly overvalued but kept on rising because they were rising. The charts looked great and pension-funds managers who pulled their funds out of these overvalued stocks were sacked shortly afterwards because their funds were underperforming.
Then came the crash and we all got burnt. That is even forgetting companies like Enron or Worldcom.
It even looks to me as though SCO have learnt from those two companies. They are filing their correct figures and their broken business-plan with the SEC. No fraud there. People who invest there will deserve all they get, the only question is the timescale.
well, this one is virtually unchanged so that work will still be valid.
what 'work'?
how long does it take you to prepare a kernel-upgrade?
Something has to be wrong with that.
A 32-bit system can access 4GB of memory without kludges. Are you implying that every byte on a disc partition has to map to a byte im memory? I can't believe that is what you are saying and it would mean that you will always need more memory than disc-capacity.
That would be the mother of all design-errors.
I was at a Linuxworld talk around 14 months ago and someone from AMD (a VP?) held a keynote speech on this processor, one that was sufficiently convincing for me to go out and buy some shares in the company :-)
He could not understand what Intel were up to either.
Linus made a similar point later around the time he left Transmeta and added the rider that the Itanium was based on bad design decisions, irrespective of compatability.
My impression was that AMD are shipping all they can produce for a pretty high price.
A marketing offensive under these circumstances would be counterproductive - they would be spending money creating a need for product they could not shift in those quantities. AMD have been there before and it hurt them.
As for Linux and x86-64 support, the German C't magazine tested this recently and had some pretty major problems with some MotherBoards.
One of the changes between the last 2.6.0-test and official 2.6.0 kernels was a 'show stopper' with the x86-64.
This is all bleeding-edge stuff, I'll probably wait until Q2 before making the plunge.
That rings a bell.
There was some show-stopping problem with the way HURD addressed discs which meant they could only support pathetically small discs. This was going to force a major rewrite and I have never heard anything of the project since.
Would this new architecture fix that problem? (possibly not, it may have been something along the lines of large discs needing a large memory footprint - something x86-64 would help with but would be too wasteful to be used)
DOSsing them sounds like the best idea, until spammers start carrying links like this one.
That The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! does not necessarily mean that it really was spam though, I recently had to turn my ISP's spam-protection off - too many false positives. With cable, it makes more sense to check for spam at my end using a Baysean filter.
The US Government essentially lost that one. The lawsuit ran for around a decade and finally died the death for political reasons when Reagan was elected, something that makes it look like the - much shorter - Microsoft case.
IBM was still all-powerful back then, their disaster with Bill Gates was 12 or so years on.
They made what they thought was a sensible commercial decision. They can be castigated for their stupidity, but a Slashdot-reader driven E-Mail flaming campaign is just a distraction.
You do not need to guess, several known analysts (one of whom is apparently the Deutsche Bank's investment arm) have been recomending SCOX.
The person who wrote that Globe article obviously also had expected things to go differently: IBM scored a surprise legal victory in that court case when a judge ruled on Friday in favour of IBM in SCO's trade-secret violation lawsuit against the computing giant.
I will be interested in the explanations the analysts offer when SCO finally bombs, why they saw that ruling as a 'surprise'.
a year ago, mozilla was slow, ugly, and somehow much buggy. I use 1.5 and it is fine, so - on the whole - (there was a problem with font-sizes when printing) was 1.4.