I used to work at Houston City Hall and I took it upon myself to convince my boss (a councilmember) to use the net as a communication tool for her office. It wasn't exactly an easy task to accomplish, but once I got her to accept the simple fact that more of her constituents could participate in our forums and neighborhood meetings, she had no problems with me implementing the idea. I know that I was very fortunate to have worked for her because of her open mind towards technology, but, at the same time, other councilmembers who I thought weren't as open towards the idea were asking me how they could set something like that up in their offices.
All it takes is one person to get the ball rolling, and others will follow. Anyone out there who is working in a governmental office needs to work on getting their offices to embrace the technology we have available to us because the net is a wonderful way for local government to become less of an ethereal object and more of a tangible leadership.
Involvement is all that's missing from the political arena here in the US. Something like net-based forums would help get people involved in their local governments, and from there, it can only grow. One of the biggest problems facing all governments here is that people are too afraid to get lost in the bureaucracy. The office I worked in took some of that bureaucracy away by letting our constituents get in direct contact with our councilmember. If we start locally, I think it would logically follow up to the state and (eventually) national levels.
It's really another of the potato powered servers. Except that this one's potatoes are powering a TI-85. Congratulations, we still have hot potatoes in the server room.
SysAdmin: Bob, quit eating the power plant for the server!
Bob: Sorry, maybe you should give me a lunch break!
Before you all go bashing on AMD, realize that this article is *NOT* AMD PR. This article was posted by one of the brothers who run amdzone.com. Look at the whois information on amdzone.com and you will see that it has *nothing* to do with AMD corporate. True, amdzone does post very substantial stuff, but this particular article isn't up to their standards imho.
NASA is cool even though they've had some failures lately.
You'd have some failures too if you were being mandated to take the lowest bid on equipment that is being sent off to alien environments. If NASA had just spent the extra money up front on the first Mars mission, we wouldn't be having the Martian problems.
Back to the topic, though... It's awesome that NASA is getting extra use out of a probe that was supposed to be written off three years ago. Hopefully, this joint mission will help us in our endeavour to better understand our solar system (which should give us a better idea of how the gazillion other ones out there work, too).
For what it's worth, I don't really think that HP has hit a gold mine either. Since they have decided to GPL the backbone of e-speak, the vast majority of small-time, enterprising users will be making their own versions of the product, custom tailored for their needs. But, if HP does something exciting with it that is not easily reproducable, then the product will sell.
I think it's great that HP has gone GNU, but this probably wasn't their best business (read profitability) decision in this case because of what you have said and what I just said.
HP wants to make money with this product by, "HP will make money not by selling e-speak directly, but rather by selling gussied-up e-speak software packages such as its "broker-in-a-box." How long would that last? If the software is open source I would imagine that somone would descide to add to it at one point or another, adding the features that HP wants to charge you for. I don't really see how long HP can hope to make money this way.
OK, you wonder how HP's going to make money on this. Take this example: Red Hat. They make a decent amount of money by packaging/augmenting/selling Linux. If HP decides to work e-speak in a similar fashion to Red Hat Linux, then they will get those people who love the idea of the open source community but are unwilling to do the compilation work themselves.
How well this concept is going to work is fully dependant on HP's stragety on how to work with the open source code and what they're going to release.
I'm really glad to see that more companies are making the change to Apache's web server... If nothing else, it brings to light the blatantly obvious fact that *nix is the superior network OS.
What's the big deal with non-Intel processors and chipsets? Sure, I'll grant that early AMD's weren't that great (ie, their 486's and earlier) but AMD has come a long way since then. They've been making significant advances and when their proc's come out to the market, they're cheaper than Intel and faster. I have several K6-2 systems and a Athlon system. I also have a P3/450 that just loves crashing out in Win98 (not my OS of choice, but...) and it runs slower than a street sweeper under Linux, where my Athlon just roasts everything I can find to compete with it.
Cyrix on the other hand just plain sucks. I got suckered into buying some of their 6x86's and that was the worst processor I've ever seen.
Cyrix is definately on my sh*t list, but I think AMD has the jump on Intel as far as speed and price goes.
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I used to work at Houston City Hall and I took it upon myself to convince my boss (a councilmember) to use the net as a communication tool for her office. It wasn't exactly an easy task to accomplish, but once I got her to accept the simple fact that more of her constituents could participate in our forums and neighborhood meetings, she had no problems with me implementing the idea. I know that I was very fortunate to have worked for her because of her open mind towards technology, but, at the same time, other councilmembers who I thought weren't as open towards the idea were asking me how they could set something like that up in their offices.
All it takes is one person to get the ball rolling, and others will follow. Anyone out there who is working in a governmental office needs to work on getting their offices to embrace the technology we have available to us because the net is a wonderful way for local government to become less of an ethereal object and more of a tangible leadership.
Involvement is all that's missing from the political arena here in the US. Something like net-based forums would help get people involved in their local governments, and from there, it can only grow. One of the biggest problems facing all governments here is that people are too afraid to get lost in the bureaucracy. The office I worked in took some of that bureaucracy away by letting our constituents get in direct contact with our councilmember. If we start locally, I think it would logically follow up to the state and (eventually) national levels.
Just my $0.02 on the issue.
djx
people scan the whois databases for email addresses. yes, it sucks. i've gotten tons of crapmail from people that do that crap.
It's really another of the potato powered servers. Except that this one's potatoes are powering a TI-85. Congratulations, we still have hot potatoes in the server room.
SysAdmin: Bob, quit eating the power plant for the server!
Bob: Sorry, maybe you should give me a lunch break!
Before you all go bashing on AMD, realize that this article is *NOT* AMD PR. This article was posted by one of the brothers who run amdzone.com. Look at the whois information on amdzone.com and you will see that it has *nothing* to do with AMD corporate. True, amdzone does post very substantial stuff, but this particular article isn't up to their standards imho.
djx.
NASA is cool even though they've had some failures lately.
You'd have some failures too if you were being mandated to take the lowest bid on equipment that is being sent off to alien environments. If NASA had just spent the extra money up front on the first Mars mission, we wouldn't be having the Martian problems.
Back to the topic, though... It's awesome that NASA is getting extra use out of a probe that was supposed to be written off three years ago. Hopefully, this joint mission will help us in our endeavour to better understand our solar system (which should give us a better idea of how the gazillion other ones out there work, too).
djx.
For what it's worth, I don't really think that HP has hit a gold mine either. Since they have decided to GPL the backbone of e-speak, the vast majority of small-time, enterprising users will be making their own versions of the product, custom tailored for their needs. But, if HP does something exciting with it that is not easily reproducable, then the product will sell.
I think it's great that HP has gone GNU, but this probably wasn't their best business (read profitability) decision in this case because of what you have said and what I just said.
HP wants to make money with this product by, "HP will make money not by selling e-speak directly, but rather by selling gussied-up e-speak software packages such as its "broker-in-a-box." How long would that last? If the software is open source I would imagine that somone would descide to add to it at one point or another, adding the features that HP wants to charge you for. I don't really see how long HP can hope to make money this way.
OK, you wonder how HP's going to make money on this. Take this example: Red Hat. They make a decent amount of money by packaging/augmenting/selling Linux. If HP decides to work e-speak in a similar fashion to Red Hat Linux, then they will get those people who love the idea of the open source community but are unwilling to do the compilation work themselves.
How well this concept is going to work is fully dependant on HP's stragety on how to work with the open source code and what they're going to release.
One decently sized leap for Apache.
I'm really glad to see that more companies are making the change to Apache's web server... If nothing else, it brings to light the blatantly obvious fact that *nix is the superior network OS.
It's great that people are starting to bundle the app suites with distros...
Kudos to walnut creek.
djx
What's the big deal with non-Intel processors and chipsets? Sure, I'll grant that early AMD's weren't that great (ie, their 486's and earlier) but AMD has come a long way since then. They've been making significant advances and when their proc's come out to the market, they're cheaper than Intel and faster. I have several K6-2 systems and a Athlon system. I also have a P3/450 that just loves crashing out in Win98 (not my OS of choice, but...) and it runs slower than a street sweeper under Linux, where my Athlon just roasts everything I can find to compete with it.
Cyrix on the other hand just plain sucks. I got suckered into buying some of their 6x86's and that was the worst processor I've ever seen.
Cyrix is definately on my sh*t list, but I think AMD has the jump on Intel as far as speed and price goes.
Just my $0.02.
djx.