Price of putting the 2.5-meter Hubble Space Telescope in orbit, and installing its corrective glasses:
Somewhere on the order of $2-4 Billion.
Price of building both 10-meter Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea:
About $200 Million.
Soooo... for the cost of one orbiting telescope (and that wasn't even counting the later servicing missions), you could build 20-40 terrestrial telescopes, each with four times the diameter.
Oh, and as a data point... expected price of building the 30-meter Telescope:
About $1 Billion.
Launching stuff is way more expensive than getting it places on boats or trucks.:)
Arecibo Observatory is still the biggest single telescope, though there are even larger arrays.
Yep, like the Very Long Baseline Array. Nothin' like being 5,000 miles across to help you see things, I guess.
It's interesting to me that at 8.4 meters each, the mirrors will be tied with the Large Binocular Telescope's mirrors which were just installed last year in Arizona. I think the next largest after that may be the 8.3 meter one on the Subaru telescope (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) here in Hawaii.
adaptive optics requires that the mirrors have a modifiable geometry to properly compensate for the atmospheric interference
Hmm... AO typically uses a thin deformable mirror further down the light path, which has its shape altered a lot of times a second. Active supports like the "wiffle trees" used on Keck do move individual mirror segments to maintain the overall curve of the mirror as the telescope is moved throughout the course of the night, but they're (hopefully!) not actually deforming the mirror segments, and they're generally not correcting the alignment of the mirror segments anywhere near as rapidly as an AO mirror moves.
Hmmm... the GMT site seems to indicate that the mirrors either are hexagonal or are round but in hexagonal frames of a sort. I don't see how this would result in hexagonal holes, though. In the case of the Keck design, the hole to the cassegrain focus is hexagonal because there's one hexagonal segment "missing" to make the hole - but Keck's segments are only something like 1 meter each. In the case of the GMT, the segments are so large that it's simpler to just have a round hole in the middle of one.
Actually, the Thirty-Meter Telescope project might be a little easier to build than the OWL, given its smaller size.
And of course the GMT is being built as a single scope with one focus, while things like the VLT, Keck and LBT use interferometry to get sharper images.
(And adaptive optics! I want telescopes with frickin' laser beams strapped to their heads!)
First, I'll identify myself as having formerly handled the technical end of database marketing at a dot-com with a database of 20,000,000 customers - in a non-spammy way.
Secondly, I'll identify myself as having formerly been in a public-and-media-facing position at a(n inter)national anti-spam advocacy non-profit.
And now, the news.
The bad news is that no matter what measures you put in place, you are still going to have to handle bounces from dead addresses, full mailboxes, misconfigured spam-blocking, and so on. And to be quite honest, handling them any way other than by simply unsubscribing the addresses - even in the case of the misconfigured spam-blocking, when the person probably does want your mail - is simply not economically effective, and does not scale.
The further bad news is that no matter what measures you put in place, you are still going to get complaints, because ISP's re-allocate addresses almost immediately. If someone signs up from rudebunny@nekulturniyzaichik.ru, and a year later they change ISPs, someone else can get that address before you send your next mailing. You won't get a bounce, and the new user won't be expecting your mail.
The good news (to start with) is that you can mitigate these complaints a little bit, by including in each message a clear explanation of why recipients are getting it, how to stop getting it, etc.
You can further reduce complaints by making it impossible for people to be forge-subscribed. However they give you their address, send them a confirmation message that requires them to do something (go to a certain URL, reply with a certain ID in the subject) that a third party won't know to do.
I had a very hard time getting some executives to buy into the whole idea of confirmation, but I'll put it this way: addresses of people who you don't know want your mail are worth basically nothing to you from a marketing perspective.
Other thoughts: Offering plaintext and HTML options is good. Doing mixed-multipart is an option if you can get it right - and oh, if you do it? Put the plaintext first. For your own sanity, make unsubscribing as easy and automatic as possible - that way, folks won't have to bug you. Don't make them give a password or anything to unsusbcribe.
Those are the first few thoughts that come to mind.
So, people who are basically in the last three groups on Earth any of us would honestly expect to have an interest in protecting our civil liberties - politicians, lawyers, and the military - are required to claim that they're going to do just that.
On Windows, no less. And yeah, I've gotten some plain-black-on-white-NT-error web pages from there.
I'm pretty amazed that anybody would buy it. On the one hand, I'm a little curious about whether Fox will fix it, but on the other hand, given how annoying/clueless both MySpace and Fox are, I'm sure they'll get along just fine.
A friend recently got an iPod Photo, then took a bunch of photos, did some nice effects in Photoshop, made a presentation using... probably Keynote, I guess, but maybe PowerPoint - and then used a third-party program (maybe iPresent It from ZappTek, I'm not sure) to put his presentation, complete with audio and transitions and stuff like that, onto his iPod Photo. Very slick, and made me wonder just how much the existing iPods might be capable of in terms of animation or video.
In the internet age once the file is unencrypted once it's potentially available everywhere. So DRM has to be equally ubiquitous and very hard to crack - aka 'draconian'.
I don't see how this follows. If it only takes one cracked copy for something to spread worldwide in short order (which might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one, given the existence of P2P and BT and whatnot), and if the cat can't very well be put back into the bag (which is probably a valid assumption), you get into a very black-and-white world again, where DRM is either entirely unbreakable, or entirely worthless.
Basically, if you can't eliminate the small sliver of the population devoted to cracking DRM, or the small sliver devoted to piracy, or whatever, stuff is going to get cracked and distributed, and there's really nothing to be gained by making use difficult for the overwhelming majority who are largely law-abiding. And for that overwhelming majority, a little DRM is enough encouragement to behave.
I think Apple has pretty much found the happy medium here; I think the other players aren't too far off, but they tend to unnecessarily overcomplicate things by having things like songs you can only listen to streaming, songs you can download but not transfer to portable devices, etc. This falls into "making use difficult" IMHO.
I don't think the fate of DRM is as black-and-white as you seem to think it is. That's more likely to be true for the really draconian DRM systems, but "gentler" ones are, in my opinion, a lot more like a simple curb.
Yes, you can drive your car off, or over, a curb. But if there's a nice ramp cut in the curb where people intend for your car to go, it's easier to go that way, and most people will.
If someone is determined to defeat DRM - or any other technological solution to any perceived problem - they probably will. But people who have that mindset going in are a pretty small percentage of the population. Even on Slashdot, I don't think they're the overwhelming majority. And other people will acquire digital content by means other than grabbing DRMed versions and defeating the DRM, I think.
(Honestly, I can't imagine why someone would break DRM, since so many things are probably available in non-DRMed formats on P2P networks anyway.)
Well, hmm. Our DBA was easily top-5 in our state, president of the local 'Orrible users group, and so on. Backed up by some external conslutants who'd been working with the company for years before I even got there, and were total gurus.
To this day, I don't know whether they ever got it to work.
But yeah, similar things happened with other bits of software the company spent 7-figures on...
I am not a professional DBA, but I tend to wind up working with them. The one thing I remember from a big project where replication and whatnot came into play was that none of that stuff ever worked as well as the vendors said it would, and it all required a lot more work on the DBA's part (and typically lots more $$$ in general) than it was supposed to.
OS/2 is still the predominant OS for managing MVS systems (even the new Z series)
So... uh... "anything with a decent 3270 emulator" isn't the answer any more? My, how things have changed since I played with that 9377. I mean, what's not to like about a mainframe with 16MB of main RAM?;)
The last time I personally remember using it was in 1994, in a data-entry temp job. MCI, I think it was, in Iowa City. I don't even know whether it was "Warp" or an earlier version.
But some seriously crufty things live awfully long lives in data processing scenarios; in 1996 I was dealing with AOS/VS II. Yeah. Unfortunately, I didn't know about the undocumented "XYZZY" command in it back then. Shout outs to all the Slashdotters who've used AOS/VS II. I don't think I'm running out of fingers counting you.;)
I've been using Multiply, which does everything you described, and lets me specify my relationships to people, so I can have content that's only available to relatives, or to friends, or to colleagues (or to relatives, their relatives and their relatives, for example.)
We don't need Clarke to tell us what to do. We don't need analogies to the Antarctica treaty. Why? Because 38 years ago, the U.S. and a whole bunch of other countries signed and ratified the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
That basically says those countries won't:
Put nuclear weapons or other WMDs in space.
Put weapons on the moon or other heavenly bodies.
Going to put weapons at a LaGrange point? Go right ahead. Just make sure they're not nukes or WMDs. If this limits their usability (kinetic-energy weapons tend to be a one-time thing, for example), oh well.
Maybe a solar-powered laser/ion cannon, used very infrequently so it'd have time to charge up...?
I guess I just have to be really good that all the equipment I use has proper electrical wiring.
But yes... for those of you who're building your own system and have bare wires sticking out, I'd agree with the recommendation of non-conductive shelving. And insulated soles.
Yeah, wire shelving is pretty cool. Last time my wife was away at college, she had some like this, and it's now been integrated into our bedroom. It's rated for some obscene amount of weight per shelf, and of course since the shelves aren't solid cables can be run anywhere, there's good airflow, etc.
As far as the sheer quantity of stuff... ours is kind of distributed. The DSL modem, switch/wireless router, VOIP box, etc. live by a phone line demarc I've set up in the center of the basement, with one Linux box down there as a "server" of sorts. Then there are a couple laptops that roam around on wireless, and my kid's computer is connected via a 50' cat5 cable.
At the shelf that serves as my "desk" I've got a 7-space plug strip, which typically has three to six spaces open.
Nothing like starting with a blanket statement about a set containing a huge number of vastly different elements, folks. There are somewhere around 25,000 public high schools alone in the U.S., and while I'm sure some of them certainly do suck pretty hard, there are going to be plenty of others that don't.
I went to a private ("faith-based," in modern lingo) school for grades 1-12, so my personal experience with public schools is a little limited, but my school was in the same town as a public school that routinely turned out kids with 1600s on the SAT. (I got a comparatively paltry 1450.)
How's that supposd to even begin to compare with a datacenter? Why, back in the day, our datacenters would go up and down several times at high speed, with a couple loops and corkscrews thrown in for good measure!
Slashdot Mirror
Price of putting the 2.5-meter Hubble Space Telescope in orbit, and installing its corrective glasses:
:)
Somewhere on the order of $2-4 Billion.
Price of building both 10-meter Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea:
About $200 Million.
Soooo... for the cost of one orbiting telescope (and that wasn't even counting the later servicing missions), you could build 20-40 terrestrial telescopes, each with four times the diameter.
Oh, and as a data point... expected price of building the 30-meter Telescope:
About $1 Billion.
Launching stuff is way more expensive than getting it places on boats or trucks.
Hmmm... the GMT site seems to indicate that the mirrors either are hexagonal or are round but in hexagonal frames of a sort. I don't see how this would result in hexagonal holes, though. In the case of the Keck design, the hole to the cassegrain focus is hexagonal because there's one hexagonal segment "missing" to make the hole - but Keck's segments are only something like 1 meter each. In the case of the GMT, the segments are so large that it's simpler to just have a round hole in the middle of one.
I'd love to see a comparison of the VLT and Hubble in the ultraviolet band, for example. ;)
And of course the GMT is being built as a single scope with one focus, while things like the VLT, Keck and LBT use interferometry to get sharper images.
(And adaptive optics! I want telescopes with frickin' laser beams strapped to their heads!)
First, I'll identify myself as having formerly handled the technical end of database marketing at a dot-com with a database of 20,000,000 customers - in a non-spammy way.
Secondly, I'll identify myself as having formerly been in a public-and-media-facing position at a(n inter)national anti-spam advocacy non-profit.
And now, the news.
The bad news is that no matter what measures you put in place, you are still going to have to handle bounces from dead addresses, full mailboxes, misconfigured spam-blocking, and so on. And to be quite honest, handling them any way other than by simply unsubscribing the addresses - even in the case of the misconfigured spam-blocking, when the person probably does want your mail - is simply not economically effective, and does not scale.
The further bad news is that no matter what measures you put in place, you are still going to get complaints, because ISP's re-allocate addresses almost immediately. If someone signs up from rudebunny@nekulturniyzaichik.ru, and a year later they change ISPs, someone else can get that address before you send your next mailing. You won't get a bounce, and the new user won't be expecting your mail.
The good news (to start with) is that you can mitigate these complaints a little bit, by including in each message a clear explanation of why recipients are getting it, how to stop getting it, etc.
You can further reduce complaints by making it impossible for people to be forge-subscribed. However they give you their address, send them a confirmation message that requires them to do something (go to a certain URL, reply with a certain ID in the subject) that a third party won't know to do.
I had a very hard time getting some executives to buy into the whole idea of confirmation, but I'll put it this way: addresses of people who you don't know want your mail are worth basically nothing to you from a marketing perspective.
Other thoughts: Offering plaintext and HTML options is good. Doing mixed-multipart is an option if you can get it right - and oh, if you do it? Put the plaintext first. For your own sanity, make unsubscribing as easy and automatic as possible - that way, folks won't have to bug you. Don't make them give a password or anything to unsusbcribe.
Those are the first few thoughts that come to mind.
So, people who are basically in the last three groups on Earth any of us would honestly expect to have an interest in protecting our civil liberties - politicians, lawyers, and the military - are required to claim that they're going to do just that.
;)
Nope, nope, I can't imagine why we're cynical.
Yeah. What you need to do is stick a Mac mini inside a PC tower case and then tell him it's running "Windows Longhorn." ;)
On Windows, no less. And yeah, I've gotten some plain-black-on-white-NT-error web pages from there.
;)
I'm pretty amazed that anybody would buy it. On the one hand, I'm a little curious about whether Fox will fix it, but on the other hand, given how annoying/clueless both MySpace and Fox are, I'm sure they'll get along just fine.
And now I have yet another reason to leave.
A friend recently got an iPod Photo, then took a bunch of photos, did some nice effects in Photoshop, made a presentation using... probably Keynote, I guess, but maybe PowerPoint - and then used a third-party program (maybe iPresent It from ZappTek, I'm not sure) to put his presentation, complete with audio and transitions and stuff like that, onto his iPod Photo. Very slick, and made me wonder just how much the existing iPods might be capable of in terms of animation or video.
Basically, if you can't eliminate the small sliver of the population devoted to cracking DRM, or the small sliver devoted to piracy, or whatever, stuff is going to get cracked and distributed, and there's really nothing to be gained by making use difficult for the overwhelming majority who are largely law-abiding. And for that overwhelming majority, a little DRM is enough encouragement to behave.
I think Apple has pretty much found the happy medium here; I think the other players aren't too far off, but they tend to unnecessarily overcomplicate things by having things like songs you can only listen to streaming, songs you can download but not transfer to portable devices, etc. This falls into "making use difficult" IMHO.
I don't think the fate of DRM is as black-and-white as you seem to think it is. That's more likely to be true for the really draconian DRM systems, but "gentler" ones are, in my opinion, a lot more like a simple curb.
Yes, you can drive your car off, or over, a curb. But if there's a nice ramp cut in the curb where people intend for your car to go, it's easier to go that way, and most people will.
If someone is determined to defeat DRM - or any other technological solution to any perceived problem - they probably will. But people who have that mindset going in are a pretty small percentage of the population. Even on Slashdot, I don't think they're the overwhelming majority. And other people will acquire digital content by means other than grabbing DRMed versions and defeating the DRM, I think.
(Honestly, I can't imagine why someone would break DRM, since so many things are probably available in non-DRMed formats on P2P networks anyway.)
To this day, I don't know whether they ever got it to work.
But yeah, similar things happened with other bits of software the company spent 7-figures on...
I am not a professional DBA, but I tend to wind up working with them. The one thing I remember from a big project where replication and whatnot came into play was that none of that stuff ever worked as well as the vendors said it would, and it all required a lot more work on the DBA's part (and typically lots more $$$ in general) than it was supposed to.
But some seriously crufty things live awfully long lives in data processing scenarios; in 1996 I was dealing with AOS/VS II. Yeah. Unfortunately, I didn't know about the undocumented "XYZZY" command in it back then. Shout outs to all the Slashdotters who've used AOS/VS II. I don't think I'm running out of fingers counting you. ;)
Wait... does this mean McBride and Bush aren't the same person? Has anyone seen them together?
I've been using Multiply, which does everything you described, and lets me specify my relationships to people, so I can have content that's only available to relatives, or to friends, or to colleagues (or to relatives, their relatives and their relatives, for example.)
</snarky>
That basically says those countries won't:
- Put nuclear weapons or other WMDs in space.
- Put weapons on the moon or other heavenly bodies.
Going to put weapons at a LaGrange point? Go right ahead. Just make sure they're not nukes or WMDs. If this limits their usability (kinetic-energy weapons tend to be a one-time thing, for example), oh well.Maybe a solar-powered laser/ion cannon, used very infrequently so it'd have time to charge up...?
Well, gosh.
I guess I just have to be really good that all the equipment I use has proper electrical wiring.
But yes... for those of you who're building your own system and have bare wires sticking out, I'd agree with the recommendation of non-conductive shelving. And insulated soles.
As far as the sheer quantity of stuff... ours is kind of distributed. The DSL modem, switch/wireless router, VOIP box, etc. live by a phone line demarc I've set up in the center of the basement, with one Linux box down there as a "server" of sorts. Then there are a couple laptops that roam around on wireless, and my kid's computer is connected via a 50' cat5 cable.
At the shelf that serves as my "desk" I've got a 7-space plug strip, which typically has three to six spaces open.
I went to a private ("faith-based," in modern lingo) school for grades 1-12, so my personal experience with public schools is a little limited, but my school was in the same town as a public school that routinely turned out kids with 1600s on the SAT. (I got a comparatively paltry 1450.)
Newsweek magazine publishes a periodic list of the "best" high schools, measured by how many Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests are given at the school each year, divided by the number of graduating seniors. The theory is that schools administering those tests are exposing their students to a more rigorous academic experience that will better prepare them for university.
The top schools in any given year have ratios of something like 6-10 AP/IB tests per graduate. That's a lot... and I doubt they suck.
How's that supposd to even begin to compare with a datacenter? Why, back in the day, our datacenters would go up and down several times at high speed, with a couple loops and corkscrews thrown in for good measure!