Cool, so now you have a trillion dollars worth of raw material sitting in orbit, and your customers are all down on Earth, and they're never going to meet.
By all means, bet that we're never going to build stuff in space, and that space-based factories aren't going to be useful. I'll take odds on the other side.
Depends on your tongue. Since I was about 15 even a triple-filtered vodka will 'bite' my tongue, sort of like Pop Rocks' sting in feeling, just with better surface-area coverage..
So, I don't drink, and it's not for any sort of morality reasons. I blow my money on expensive coffee and chocolates instead. An occasional Kalibur is nice too.
An interesting study would be people like me vs. people who know if they drink they're going to hell. They seem more stressed out than me.
Someone is forgetting that one has to get in/out of EARTH's gravity well
You're answering your own question here...
What are you going to mine in any serious quantity that you can safely return to earth
Ah, here's where it goes wrong - you don't bring it back to Earth, you park it in orbit.
What could we possibly mine on an asteroid that could be worth the enormous cost of retrieving it from the asteroid belt?
Anything where it's cheaper to do that than to lift it from Earth.
The idea of mining asteroids is a romantic and cool idea but we would have to be SERIOUSLY in desperate need of something to make the economics of asteroid mining make any kind of sense.
Compare the costs of lifting an asteroid's weight in raw materials from Earth. Then go build you space stations and stuff out of asteroid raw materials.
So, the OP's answer is probably "figure out how to process asteroids in space". Aluminum might be a good place to start.
bill_mcgonigle -- what you're doing here is the very definition of FUD.
It's identifying a risk, from a known aggressive litigator, for the kinds of things said litigator has said they'll litigate. Does identifying any risk result in FUD?
Your comment wins the discussion. Dual-booting was for expensive systems before hardware virt support. You can even share the graphics adapter to the guest these days. There are few enough cases for raw dual-booting these days that having a second system makes more sense most of the time it's actually required.
It's funny how Java and dalvik are more compatible than different vendors' implementations of C++ when I was in college. Heck, even C or Pascal in the 80's.
That would have put the device on consumers' hands in the early- to mid-1990s. As it turned out, that was overly optimistic--but not by much!
Actually that's right. I was playing with an Apple QuickTake c. 1993 and that was second-generation unit (150 vs 100 maybe?), as I recall. I wound up getting a Ricoh digital camera a couple years later. It was NTSC-based just like the Kodak system, but pocket-sized. It ran on a PCMCIA-style memory card, same as the Bay routers at work used. It wasn't until I got a 1.3Mp Olympus P&S a few years later that the digital camera was truly of the current era.
That's also the first one my wife would use, so I think the story holds value... I should have brought my SLR on the honeymoon.
Am I missing some great strategic outcome Oracle is hoping for?
Yes, they need Google patents for their database product to not become obsolete in the next few years. Buying Sun got them two things - a) hardware fast enough to get them over the gap b) leverage for patent cross-licensing agreements.
But the Internet is no longer something you can just shut down or reboot to upgrade; you must operate on a live patient.
That's a really important point that often goes undiscussed - it's been suggested that if the Internet did go down (major solar storm, EMP, etc.) that it's not likely that it, or the interconnected systems (electrical grid, etc.) could come back up. Too many race conditions, mostly unknown/undocumented. Sure, eventually it would all get back on track, but it could be weeks-to-months. I'm planning to hike the Appalachian Trail while it gets straightened out.;)
Hopefully governments will decline to use this as a weapon - like poisoning the ocean.
That sounds like a major societal vulnerability that needs to be patched. Nuclear weapons marked an important turning point in history where governments became too dangerous to keep around.
Slashdot Mirror
Or a "National Security Letter" where you can't neither talk nor complain about?
Sure you can talk and complain, only you do so under the threat of theft, rapecages and torture.
Let's be clear where the action is here.
Oh, that's clever - do you recall the company?
Good illustration about the true costs of war, though.
Cool, so now you have a trillion dollars worth of raw material sitting in orbit, and your customers are all down on Earth, and they're never going to meet.
By all means, bet that we're never going to build stuff in space, and that space-based factories aren't going to be useful. I'll take odds on the other side.
It doesn't taste much at all.
Depends on your tongue. Since I was about 15 even a triple-filtered vodka will 'bite' my tongue, sort of like Pop Rocks' sting in feeling, just with better surface-area coverage..
So, I don't drink, and it's not for any sort of morality reasons. I blow my money on expensive coffee and chocolates instead. An occasional Kalibur is nice too.
An interesting study would be people like me vs. people who know if they drink they're going to hell. They seem more stressed out than me.
Let me guess, those nice ethical corporations should be in control instead and the free market will solve everything?
Of course not, corporations don't exist without government strongmen backing them.
Someone is forgetting that one has to get in/out of EARTH's gravity well
You're answering your own question here...
What are you going to mine in any serious quantity that you can safely return to earth
Ah, here's where it goes wrong - you don't bring it back to Earth, you park it in orbit.
What could we possibly mine on an asteroid that could be worth the enormous cost of retrieving it from the asteroid belt?
Anything where it's cheaper to do that than to lift it from Earth.
The idea of mining asteroids is a romantic and cool idea but we would have to be SERIOUSLY in desperate need of something to make the economics of asteroid mining make any kind of sense.
Compare the costs of lifting an asteroid's weight in raw materials from Earth. Then go build you space stations and stuff out of asteroid raw materials.
So, the OP's answer is probably "figure out how to process asteroids in space". Aluminum might be a good place to start.
Oh, I thought HP was buying Amazon.
Fair point. I could have used BOOT.INI;(n-1) more than once in the day.
Hey, thanks for the support. Probably just a government worker reading Slashdot while on the clock. ;)
UNIX doesn't have ACL security.i
Take your pick: SELinux, GRSecurity, classic or new Solaris ACL's. Use a supporting filesystem with NFSv4.
You can even go MAC with SELinux if you're at a TLA or similar.
I have a machine running FreeBSD 8.1 which has been up a couple of months with a zfs filesystem
hey, great news. Thank you for the feedback.
is there anything in particular which could make it crash
I don't think 'zfstest' has been ported to anything (from Solaris) but zfsstress runs on Linux:
ftp://ftp.tummy.com/pub/tummy/zfsstress/
so probably getting it going under BSD has been done or would be straightforward. I haven't tried it myself yet.
bill_mcgonigle -- what you're doing here is the very definition of FUD.
It's identifying a risk, from a known aggressive litigator, for the kinds of things said litigator has said they'll litigate. Does identifying any risk result in FUD?
good to know.
Your comment wins the discussion. Dual-booting was for expensive systems before hardware virt support. You can even share the graphics adapter to the guest these days. There are few enough cases for raw dual-booting these days that having a second system makes more sense most of the time it's actually required.
I think their problems are on multiple fronts:
Or "they're not done re-inventing UNIX yet."
your metric will be lowered overtime
Is this by protocol or manually, by convention?
So, what you're saying is there's a huge market opportunity for a credible recruiting company that doesn't give their customers shoddy candidates?
It's funny how Java and dalvik are more compatible than different vendors' implementations of C++ when I was in college. Heck, even C or Pascal in the 80's.
Most days, if the dial lands on The Rush Limbaugh Program, he's having an iPhone love-in of some sort going on. There must be multitudes.
That would have put the device on consumers' hands in the early- to mid-1990s. As it turned out, that was overly optimistic--but not by much!
Actually that's right. I was playing with an Apple QuickTake c. 1993 and that was second-generation unit (150 vs 100 maybe?), as I recall. I wound up getting a Ricoh digital camera a couple years later. It was NTSC-based just like the Kodak system, but pocket-sized. It ran on a PCMCIA-style memory card, same as the Bay routers at work used. It wasn't until I got a 1.3Mp Olympus P&S a few years later that the digital camera was truly of the current era.
That's also the first one my wife would use, so I think the story holds value ... I should have brought my SLR on the honeymoon.
Am I missing some great strategic outcome Oracle is hoping for?
Yes, they need Google patents for their database product to not become obsolete in the next few years. Buying Sun got them two things - a) hardware fast enough to get them over the gap b) leverage for patent cross-licensing agreements.
This is a [software] patent (government) problem.
But the Internet is no longer something you can just shut down or reboot to upgrade; you must operate on a live patient.
That's a really important point that often goes undiscussed - it's been suggested that if the Internet did go down (major solar storm, EMP, etc.) that it's not likely that it, or the interconnected systems (electrical grid, etc.) could come back up. Too many race conditions, mostly unknown/undocumented. Sure, eventually it would all get back on track, but it could be weeks-to-months. I'm planning to hike the Appalachian Trail while it gets straightened out. ;)
Hopefully governments will decline to use this as a weapon - like poisoning the ocean.
That sounds like a major societal vulnerability that needs to be patched. Nuclear weapons marked an important turning point in history where governments became too dangerous to keep around.
Yes, that's why this talk of FreeBSD's ZFS being "production-ready" is disconcerting.
But, hey, your filesystem will be consistent when your OS hangs. ;)
What's intimidating?
Being a hobbyist OSS developer and getting hit with a patent infringement lawsuit from a large corporation.
Legal intimidation is a common tactic.