Our main floor is 682, and that's enough for 2 good-sized bedrooms, a good-sized living room, kitchen, and bathroom. We've had the dining area either in the kitchen or at the kitchen end of the living room, it works both ways.
But I'm in agreement. Yes, I want infrastructure. Yes, I want integration. The thing I don't want is a bunch of extra space full of clutter. We've got enough of that already. So my wish list would look something like this:
1. Top-notch systems. Water, electrical, communications, etc. should all be modern and efficient. 2. Autonomy where possible. Hook me to the grid, but give me photovoltaic exterior materials. 3. Redundancy where possible. Terrestrial broadband and fixed wireless/satellite. 4. Smart design (okay, I was an architecture major, briefly). No wasted space. Lots of built-in storage. 5. Good materials choices. Locally-sourced, sustainable, durable things.
And as far as a setting, I'd like the house to blend into its environment.
Since this IS slashdot, getting back to the systems bit, I'd want plenty of twisted-pair in the walls, and plenty of fiber. In fact, I'd want extra "dark" fiber in the walls just in case.:) And I'd like the design/build process to be done with wireless in mind, so that the best positions for wireless APs would be known and taken into consideration.
Having worked in a big corp or two, I think a big part of the problem is that out-of-the-ass figures like "three-year TCO" are actually relevant, because companies try to swap out major pieces of critical software like Oracle or SAP about that often (or in some cases even more often). One dot-com I worked for, in less than three years:
1. Decided to stop using an outsourced system for e-commerce and back-end stuff 2. Blew millions of bucks on a content-management/app-development framework
("Look, a CD! And it only cost us 2 million dollars!") 3. Sunk millions more into hardware, developers, etc. to build a super-duper next-generation thing 4. Merged with another company that had a division working on its own thing to do the same task 5. Found out that the multi-million-dollar framework wasn't up to the task 6. Wound up canceling *both* pre-merger programs and starting from scratch.
Oh, what did they wind up using, you ask? Well, I suspect there was some Oracle somewhere on the back end. The front end was Tomcat, JSP, stuff like that.
I've got personal accounts on various boxen with various quotas, but they all bounce to Gmail.
My work mail also bounces to Gmail.
My not-exactly-work mail (at a nonprofit) lives on an Exchange server. It's the only account I have that can't be *trivially* bounced to Gmail... and it's also got a stupidly small quota, about 250MB if I recall. This is "stupidly small" in part because my role within the organization involves dealing with large digital images, and also because it's not at all uncommon to be sent PDFs of a document in three different languages every night for a week...
For example, if you want to optimize operating system startup, then you need some way to specify that the operating system is what you want in the flash memory, instead of some other data.
Still sounds pretty much like disk caching. During bootup, the system's going to be asking for the OS anyway*, so if you've got a big enough amount of RAM to load it into, you can just do that, can't you?
*I realize that this does not explain current boot times. Windows, Mac OS X et cetera are obviously spending some amount of time subjecting our hard drives to "bible code"-style analysis to see if they can come up with anything amusing, or something.
Yeah. (Well, um, the Sun is magnitude -26.7 for us... but anyway!)
The brighest non-sun star we can see, Sirius, is a +1.4 magnitude; in the city anything beyond about +4 to +5 isn't going to be visible, but with properly dark skies you can get to +6 or +7 naked-eye. So this comet should be visible to the naked eye under dark skies.
Oh, and obviously, these are all apparent magnitude - how bright things appear to be. There's also absolute magnitude, or luminosity, which is basically how bright things actually are, but since they're at all different distances from us, that's not terribly useful if you're just trying to find a given star in the sky.:)
I wonder whether it'll be visible here in Hawaii...
Having discovered more than one comet is a reasonably big thing, yeah. Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel and David Levy each discovered or co-discovered 21, but that's an uncommonly large number. I suspect Fabrizio Bernardi, a postdoc where I work, is happy to have recently discovered Comet P/2005 V1 Bernardi, since he wasn't even looking for comets at the time.
Yup, that's Kecks on the left, NASA IRTF on the right.
$25,000 of funding might leave you a bit short of a night of Keck time, though, depending on what time of year. The general rule of thumb there is to figure $1 per second.:) After all, they're spending $40,000 a month on air conditioning alone...
By way of comparison, the U. of Hawaii 2.2-meter scope costs maybe $2,500 a night to run.
I'm pretty sure (based on earlier Groklaw coverage of these attempted depositions) that the things SCO was asking for included information on dealings between the other parties and... the companies to which they claim to be successors in interest - the old SCO, Caldera, etc.
Information which, as the successor in interest to those companies, they really ought to have filed somewhere.
Sorry, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any audio-recording format or technology that doesn't become obsolete.
Off the top of my head, I've only been able to think of wax cylinders, vinyl, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, CD, miniDisc, DVD-audio, then various digital formats stored on hard disks, flash memory, or whatever.
Every single thing I listed suffers from degradation over time. Most of ones toward the start of the list have already suffered from reduced availability of playback equipment.
So... it seems that anyone who builds a music library is doing so "in a format that could be obsolete in the future."
Is there some obsolescence-proof format I'm forgetting?
Within the last few months, there was a nice supernova (SN2005cs) in the Whirlpool Galaxy (spiral galaxy M51) which was quite visible at night using typical amateur reflecting telescopes of 16 or fewer inches aperture - in fact, it was discovered by an amateur! - hardly requiring anything near the size of Keck.:)
Keck and the other scopes on Mauna Kea will, though, sometimes try to sneak a peek at a "high-priority" target like this, if they can find the time in their busy schedules.
Speaking as a sysadmin, we're lazy bastards. We don't replace people with very small shell scripts out of spite; we do it because it makes our lives easier.
"How will this make my life easier?" is probably the top question a Sysadmin asks about everything he or she encounters, even ahead of "How will this help me crush my lusers, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women?"
So the number one thing I can suggest is to find ways of making their lives easier/better - ideally ones which make it clear that (1) you're on their side, and (2) perhaps more importantly, you're not getting in their way.
I totally agree. Oft-conservative outdoorsmen and oft-liberal environmentalists make strange, strange bedfellows, but they both recognize the importance of keeping natural resources (at least the edible ones) around for future generations.
Alternately, people could just eat the fish that's actually found near where they live. It'd be fresher and in most cases better for them. Of course, that does mean no Tuna for Nebraska. So sorry.
While sharks, as apex predators, are a good indicator of overall biodiversity / availability of tasty biomass in the oceans, figures on some other species are probably at least as alarming.
I've seen (at things like the UN informal consultative process on oceans and the law of the sea, and the 3rd global conference on oceans, coasts and islands just last month) presentations showing fisheries catch decade-by-decade worldwide, and the trends are just plain scary.
So many things are being done in totally unsustainable ways that popular tasty species have come close to being wiped out over large areas. Cod around Canada, for example. Tuna in some other areas.
I like tasty fish and don't want them to all go away. (Yes, here I am subscribing to sustainability defined as "making sure your grandkids get to hunt Bambi, too.")
But there's stitching, and then there's stacking... while a single exposure is obviously superior to a stitched set, nobody (if they can help it) makes do with a single exposure of something, right?:)
Personally, I'm looking at a bunch of control apps and the guider output. Such is the life of a technological sort who supports the scientists doing the actual research.:)
The observer I'm working with for the first half of the night, on the other hand, is looking at a star formation region. In the second half, I'll have different observers, hunting for type 1A supernovae.
And as an addendum, "optical" applies of course to not only visible light, but infrared as well. This seems obvious to you and me, but a lot of people don't make the connection right away.
This is a well-timed story for me, since I'm at the controls of a 2.2-meter optical scope right now, with a 2048x2048 CCD as the main instrument for the first half of the night, and a 512x512 CCD on the guider camera.:)
Yes, of course. And I meant ahead of themselves. Sorry for not being clear there. My daughter's more advanced academically than she is socially, and that imbalance is challenging for her. But the gap between where she is socially and where her classmates are socially is smaller and less concerning than her own internal gap between social skills and academic skills.
Is that a crime now? Using the Internet to setup a meeting with a teenager?
I haven't checked the Hawaii Revised Statutes, but it's entirely possible that it would be something that isn't the crime itself, but gets you in more trouble. Like conspiracy is. Whether it's a crime would tend to vary by jurisdiction, I'm sure.
Yeah. Apple basically has no involvement in this. Their stuff isn't SysVish, it's BSDish. They're not exactly "for" or "against" IBM or Microsoft, and have basically had no dealings with USL, Novell, OldSCO, Caldera or NewSCO.
Kinda weird to think of Apple as being "neutral" on something, since their followers so rarely are.:) Even now, I bet there are few Apple users rooting for SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
But aren't the video-capable iPods intended for watching broadband penetration?
Our main floor is 682, and that's enough for 2 good-sized bedrooms, a good-sized living room, kitchen, and bathroom. We've had the dining area either in the kitchen or at the kitchen end of the living room, it works both ways.
:) And I'd like the design/build process to be done with wireless in mind, so that the best positions for wireless APs would be known and taken into consideration.
But I'm in agreement. Yes, I want infrastructure. Yes, I want integration. The thing I don't want is a bunch of extra space full of clutter. We've got enough of that already. So my wish list would look something like this:
1. Top-notch systems. Water, electrical, communications, etc. should all be modern and efficient.
2. Autonomy where possible. Hook me to the grid, but give me photovoltaic exterior materials.
3. Redundancy where possible. Terrestrial broadband and fixed wireless/satellite.
4. Smart design (okay, I was an architecture major, briefly). No wasted space. Lots of built-in storage.
5. Good materials choices. Locally-sourced, sustainable, durable things.
And as far as a setting, I'd like the house to blend into its environment.
Since this IS slashdot, getting back to the systems bit, I'd want plenty of twisted-pair in the walls, and plenty of fiber. In fact, I'd want extra "dark" fiber in the walls just in case.
Having worked in a big corp or two, I think a big part of the problem is that out-of-the-ass figures like "three-year TCO" are actually relevant, because companies try to swap out major pieces of critical software like Oracle or SAP about that often (or in some cases even more often). One dot-com I worked for, in less than three years:
1. Decided to stop using an outsourced system for e-commerce and back-end stuff
2. Blew millions of bucks on a content-management/app-development framework
("Look, a CD! And it only cost us 2 million dollars!")
3. Sunk millions more into hardware, developers, etc. to build a super-duper next-generation thing
4. Merged with another company that had a division working on its own thing to do the same task
5. Found out that the multi-million-dollar framework wasn't up to the task
6. Wound up canceling *both* pre-merger programs and starting from scratch.
Oh, what did they wind up using, you ask? Well, I suspect there was some Oracle
somewhere on the back end. The front end was Tomcat, JSP, stuff like that.
Yeah! How much would it cost to have two designer mice, one brilliant and the other insane, trained to take over the world?
I've got personal accounts on various boxen with various quotas, but they all bounce to Gmail.
My work mail also bounces to Gmail.
My not-exactly-work mail (at a nonprofit) lives on an Exchange server. It's the only account I have that can't be *trivially* bounced to Gmail... and it's also got a stupidly small quota, about 250MB if I recall. This is "stupidly small" in part because my role within the organization involves dealing with large digital images, and also because it's not at all uncommon to be sent PDFs of a document in three different languages every night for a week...
For example, if you want to optimize operating system startup, then you need some way to specify that the operating system is what you want in the flash memory, instead of some other data.
Still sounds pretty much like disk caching. During bootup, the system's going to be asking for the OS anyway*, so if you've got a big enough amount of RAM to load it into, you can just do that, can't you?
*I realize that this does not explain current boot times. Windows, Mac OS X et cetera are obviously spending some amount of time subjecting our hard drives to "bible code"-style analysis to see if they can come up with anything amusing, or something.
Yeah. (Well, um, the Sun is magnitude -26.7 for us... but anyway!)
:)
The brighest non-sun star we can see, Sirius, is a +1.4 magnitude; in the city anything beyond about +4 to +5 isn't going to be visible, but with properly dark skies you can get to +6 or +7 naked-eye. So this comet should be visible to the naked eye under dark skies.
Oh, and obviously, these are all apparent magnitude - how bright things appear to be. There's also absolute magnitude, or luminosity, which is basically how bright things actually are, but since they're at all different distances from us, that's not terribly useful if you're just trying to find a given star in the sky.
I wonder whether it'll be visible here in Hawaii...
Having discovered more than one comet is a reasonably big thing, yeah. Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel and David Levy each discovered or co-discovered 21, but that's an uncommonly large number. I suspect Fabrizio Bernardi, a postdoc where I work, is happy to have recently discovered Comet P/2005 V1 Bernardi, since he wasn't even looking for comets at the time.
Yup, that's Kecks on the left, NASA IRTF on the right.
:) After all, they're spending $40,000 a month on air conditioning alone...
$25,000 of funding might leave you a bit short of a night of Keck time, though, depending on what time of year. The general rule of thumb there is to figure $1 per second.
By way of comparison, the U. of Hawaii 2.2-meter scope costs maybe $2,500 a night to run.
I'm pretty sure (based on earlier Groklaw coverage of these attempted depositions) that the things SCO was asking for included information on dealings between the other parties and... the companies to which they claim to be successors in interest - the old SCO, Caldera, etc.
Information which, as the successor in interest to those companies, they really ought to have filed somewhere.
Oops.
Sorry, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any audio-recording format or technology that doesn't become obsolete.
Off the top of my head, I've only been able to think of wax cylinders, vinyl, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, CD, miniDisc, DVD-audio, then various digital formats stored on hard disks, flash memory, or whatever.
Every single thing I listed suffers from degradation over time. Most of ones toward the start of the list have already suffered from reduced availability of playback equipment.
So... it seems that anyone who builds a music library is doing so "in a format that could be obsolete in the future."
Is there some obsolescence-proof format I'm forgetting?
Keck and the other scopes on Mauna Kea will, though, sometimes try to sneak a peek at a "high-priority" target like this, if they can find the time in their busy schedules.
Oh, along with Rochester Astronomy, a couple other cool sources for announcements of newly found supernovae and such are the IAU Circulars (subscription required) and Astronomer's Telegram. For gamma ray bursts, check out NASA's Gamma ray bursts Coordinates Network, too.
Speaking as a sysadmin, we're lazy bastards. We don't replace people with very small shell scripts out of spite; we do it because it makes our lives easier.
"How will this make my life easier?" is probably the top question a Sysadmin asks about everything he or she encounters, even ahead of "How will this help me crush my lusers, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women?"
So the number one thing I can suggest is to find ways of making their lives easier/better - ideally ones which make it clear that (1) you're on their side, and (2) perhaps more importantly, you're not getting in their way.
Wait... and you're saying they got something done? That's not how it's supposed to happen!
(cynic)
I totally agree. Oft-conservative outdoorsmen and oft-liberal environmentalists make strange, strange bedfellows, but they both recognize the importance of keeping natural resources (at least the edible ones) around for future generations.
Alternately, people could just eat the fish that's actually found near where they live. It'd be fresher and in most cases better for them. Of course, that does mean no Tuna for Nebraska. So sorry.
While sharks, as apex predators, are a good indicator of overall biodiversity / availability of tasty biomass in the oceans, figures on some other species are probably at least as alarming.
I've seen (at things like the UN informal consultative process on oceans and the law of the sea, and the 3rd global conference on oceans, coasts and islands just last month) presentations showing fisheries catch decade-by-decade worldwide, and the trends are just plain scary.
So many things are being done in totally unsustainable ways that popular tasty species have come close to being wiped out over large areas. Cod around Canada, for example. Tuna in some other areas.
I like tasty fish and don't want them to all go away. (Yes, here I am subscribing to sustainability defined as "making sure your grandkids get to hunt Bambi, too.")
FVO "worthwhile" that encompass posting to Slashdot? Damn straight. ;)
But there's stitching, and then there's stacking... while a single exposure is obviously superior to a stitched set, nobody (if they can help it) makes do with a single exposure of something, right? :)
Personally, I'm looking at a bunch of control apps and the guider output. Such is the life of a technological sort who supports the scientists doing the actual research. :)
The observer I'm working with for the first half of the night, on the other hand, is looking at a star formation region. In the second half, I'll have different observers, hunting for type 1A supernovae.
I occasionally also stare at the sky over at this other place around the corner from the first one, but in a much less significant capacity. :(
We likes the big shiny toys, my preciousss...
And as an addendum, "optical" applies of course to not only visible light, but infrared as well. This seems obvious to you and me, but a lot of people don't make the connection right away.
:)
This is a well-timed story for me, since I'm at the controls of a 2.2-meter optical scope right now, with a 2048x2048 CCD as the main instrument for the first half of the night, and a 512x512 CCD on the guider camera.
CCDs are my friends!
Yes, of course. And I meant ahead of themselves. Sorry for not being clear there. My daughter's more advanced academically than she is socially, and that imbalance is challenging for her. But the gap between where she is socially and where her classmates are socially is smaller and less concerning than her own internal gap between social skills and academic skills.
Is that a crime now? Using the Internet to setup a meeting with a teenager?
I haven't checked the Hawaii Revised Statutes, but it's entirely possible that it would be something that isn't the crime itself, but gets you in more trouble. Like conspiracy is. Whether it's a crime would tend to vary by jurisdiction, I'm sure.
Yeah. Apple basically has no involvement in this. Their stuff isn't SysVish, it's BSDish. They're not exactly "for" or "against" IBM or Microsoft, and have basically had no dealings with USL, Novell, OldSCO, Caldera or NewSCO.
:) Even now, I bet there are few Apple users rooting for SCO.
Kinda weird to think of Apple as being "neutral" on something, since their followers so rarely are.