Actually not...I do stuff with intellectual property for a living, including replication management and licensing for music and film.
DVDs in retail packaging (cased, 4/0 cover, 4 color disc face, shrinked, top spine label, etc.) can cost well below 50 cents when produced in very large quantities. The last batch I had made came in at about $1.05 a disc, and was a short run for a small publisher.
As for old films: The publisher/studio is contractually bound to pay residuals/reuse on DVDs for the entire life of the copyright. SAG/DGA/WGA want their (pitifully small) cut. For the soundtrack, the AFM wants their cut. IATSE also gets a cut, which helps fund pension and health plans. This list goes on.
The point is, a certain amount of money does, in fact, flow to the original artists.
The one point of vulnerability in a wind farm is probably the power cable assembly...But if enough farms get developed, then a mesh network develops as well, insulating against single-point failures.
Unlike those major fibre chunks some captain was bribed to drag anchor over...
Another issue is that offshore oil platform are much more easily attacked by an enemy. If we are pumping 30% of our oil from offshore rigs, and we get attacked by an enemy, we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.
I use some very high end printer's inks...As in letterpress, woodblock printing, and whatnot. I've never payed more than $400/gallon equivalent. There are some specialty pigments that can seriously cost, and I've gotten those in 200 ml jars. A standard carbon black is dirt cheap, especially in bulk.
On the commercial side of things, offset litho inks can be had for less than $10/pound...Same ink that prints the world's magazines and books.
Inkjet ink is a ripoff, and yes, we are stupid.
There are some good laser printers...and some inkjet companies that tout cheap cartridges. It is time for people to smarten up.
Damn, did you just open one hell of a can of worms...Because there is a hell of a big world beyond Cubase and ProTools.
Cubase hasn't been considered a joke for a while, which is good. It's not a bad program.
A large number of the current DAW systems are very, very good, and have a place amongst serious musicians, mixers and composers.
Digital Performer still ranks supreme for a lot of music producers and film/TV composers (Zimmer, Elfman)...And it can utilize the PT audio system, cards and interfaces. It still has superior MIDI capabilities in some areas and does some nifty things with monophonic pitch detection.
Logic also has a place amongst the serious, though a smaller place.
And speaking of Steinberg, Nuendo is Cubase+everything needed for film, complex surround, specialized file formats etc. Cubase is the low-midgrade Steinberg product: Nuendo is, and always has been the flagship, dating back to its very, very brief days on the Irix platform (no, really).
Now, if we look at the very high end, we have some tools like Merging's Pyramix, Fairlight's impressive stuff, and for hardware, Euphonix, Harrison, Studer (yes, they make digital consoles), and even Otari for broadcast. But I digress.
Of course, the biggie DAW on Linux is Ardour. It supports CoreAudio (OS X) or ALSA/FFADO...No support for Windows users though. But why bother trying to program around Microsoft's inefficiencies? Ardour is very much a serious player. They had a partnership with Solid State Logic for a while, and put out a good package.
Cubase occupies a place in the market that I would describe as prosumer to pro...I wouldn't describe it as one of two 'serious' options. I would describe Cubase as the Honda of the audio production world: It does everything it needs to, but it's no Cadillac, no Rolls, and definitely no Oshkosh truck.
OK, instead of debating pot (Sched. 1), why don't we debate the equivalent, legal, pill. After all, your entire last sentence describes the symptoms of our war on drugs, NOT the symptoms of marijuana use.
Sure. People die from impairment. Pot, booze, opiates, Oxycontin...cell phones, pets or children in the back seat...dashboard TVs...but I digress.
Marinol (Pure THC) is a schedule 3 drug. What we have is a tacit acknowledgment by the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, the US government, and state governments across the nation that pure THC has a valid medical use and is of so little risk that it is a schedule 3 drug.
Yes, pot has problems. yes, it causes cognitive and memory loss issues...the problem that most people have is one of disproportionate response. THC is less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco, and that has been clinically shown.
When someone gets drunk, orders a pizza and masturbates in the privacy of their home, you don't automatically respond with a SWAT team. When someone smokes an 8th and drives, then we rightfully throw the DWI book at them...however, we also send them to jail for years, whereas a drunk gets probation.
It is a matter of proportionate response, and right now, we are seeing cancer patients getting tossed in jail, a mayor's dogs getting shot in a botched SWAT raid, and the symptoms of a war on drugs that are doing more harm than the drugs, per your last sentence.
In parting, a little trivia: MDMA (Ecstasy) was used clinically on and off for quite a while after its initial discovery in 1912 until its scheduling (I) in 1985. We are now studying this 'dangerous raver drug' as a possible treatment for PTSD. Our perceptions about an individual drug are rarely shaped by medicine, but routinely shaped by politics and FUD.
The point is if you don't file your plans the town will send a poor fucking co-op student out there to mark the fucking thing on the map.
The thing about Northern Virginia is that the rules are different. Nobody wants to know, and nobody cares about random fibre lines. The local governments just want to ignore it.
Fort Belvoir, CIA, NDRO, Tyson's Corner complex, the multitudes of defense contractors linked to or serving active DoD operations (Lockheed, EADS, Boeing, SAIC, Northrop, Raytheon, GD, UT, L-3 Communications, ATT, etc.) all have 'off map' needs.
No Northern Virginian government just sends their poor co-op students out to map stuff. The local governments don't want to touch that mess. Better to just make it someone else's problem. Fairfax County doesn't care if 'black' lines get cut, because the Fairfax County voters don't care if lines get cut.
I know a guy at a datacenter in Reston who was bird watching. He had a pair of decent binoculars. After a few minutes on his lunch break outside his building, a black SUV shows up, and they pester him with questions before telling him to stop and go back inside. He still has no idea which of the dozen building visible from his the US government has interests in.
Not only have I played with a monotype, but I know some people who have computer controlled solenoids on the air tower. Basically, they can run their monotype via computer. A text document is rendered into a virtual paper tape, then spat out via the control board to a solenoid manifold on the air tower. Awesome stuff.
Newspaper Linotypes could be linked to a teletype, and could take wire service stories and cast them in real time while receiving. It ran the machines really, really hard.
Now, we could go back further: I have cast type the way Gutenberg did...With a hand mould and matrix. The first mass reproduction technology...
I didn't expect to see any typecasting comments in this article. It was a fun surprise.
Depends...do you count raw tonnage of servers, or do you include the ancillaries like cable runs, UPS, cooling etc?
Easy way to win:
My Eniac replica, combined with my replicas of Mayan and Egyptian pyramids (purportedly used as astronomical computers...you know, by the illuminati, etc;)) means that I win by sheer tonnage!
Take Google's Dalles datacenter in Oregon. They pay for their water by the diameter of the pipe. They have (iirc) two 6 inch pipes. It doesn't matter if a drop or a hurricane flows through them.
Same thing with the power for that datacenter. Bonneville Power charges them based on the peak monthly load, not the total consumed power. So 500 megawatt load for an hour is a lot more expensive than 250 megawatt load for a month.
It is the diameter of the pipe that is expensive, not how much goes through it.
So, the administration identified the 'drug' in question as ibuprofen...They knew what they were looking for. They knew what a student had previously gone to the hospital for taking.
The LD50 of that drug is something close to 636 mg/kg. The child (weighing about 45kg) would have had to take 28 GRAMS to OD. That's something like 40 tablets of the prescription strength stuff.
Both OTC and prescription painkillers in the Advil/Ibuprofen or Tylenol/Tylenol with codeine class are designed to be very hard to OD on. You will throw up most of the 40 pills long before they reach your kidneys and liver, which then cause a slow 2 week death without treatment.
If they were SO WORRIED about her 'health' or the health of other students, they should have called poison control or 911. They might have been able to address health concerns faster that way. The fact that they searched her indicates they had little care for her health, and only cared about discipline. They even lectured her about 'telling the truth' after the search.
It's simple: After searching her belongings, a legal representative should have been there before searching her person. The early teenage years are perhaps the most vulnerable years a human has psychologically. If anything, her age makes the search that much more egregious. Go back a few years and look at the "Voices from the Hellmouth" series that was on slashdot.
The fact that it happened 6 years ago is inconsequential. 6 years ago, a violation of a person was committed without consent, and allegedly without legal cause, which by any sane definition is assault. The fact that it is 6 years later has everything to do with our lengthy appellate process, and no bearing on the crime in question.
I was researching crime before a move as well. I was stuck using an absolutely horrible web-enabled wannabe GIS thing. Having used ArcGIS, I know what a decent GIS is capable of. Google Earth is well on its way to being able to display information the way ArcView does. A buffer wizard type tool would be a wonderful thing in Google Earth...The analytical side of things is not really suitable for the Google Earth architecture though.
Yeah, Google would do well to integrate even census data (which includes some crime, pollution and economic data) into Google Earth.
I have done a number of installs for recording studios. They tend to go with Macs because of TCO, the easy to administer OS, and in two cases, a love of Digital Performer. DP runs wonderfully on a ProTools HD setup, and is ideal for scoring TV shows. Anyway, the point is:
The clients trust the big aluminum box with the handles, and the dual Apple screens. The clients like seeing that a studio dropped cash for top of the line robust hardware. When I installed a PC to run Gigastudio, we went with a rackmount solution, partially for convenience, and partially because the clients like seeing what they don't see at home or at work.
It is an odd thing, but the clients like to see, and are willing to pay more for studios with higher end hardware.
A $7,000 mouse, otherwise known as a Digidesign Control|24, can be worth an additional $50/hr in billed time. That comes partially from efficiency and partially from clients who are willing to pay more for studios with the bigger, efficient tools. BTW: that Control|24 would pay for itself in a mere two months at some of the facilities I have done work for.
You know, windows is the dominant business platform, and has some advantages there, but for "serious" computing, windows is FAR from dominant. "Serious" has a nebulous definition. I tend to define it as software that functions outside a broad consumer/business paradigm.
I am assuming you mean WinTel when refering to PCs. Windows is not dominant. Remember, Google's server farms might run on X86, but they use a custom Linux rollout with databasing software that is far removed from the limitations of MySQL.
I gave you two examples of LARGE scale Mac farms. Virginia Tech and COLSA are both thousand plus node supercomputers built with XServes. That is about the scale of a Google server farm. One farm tends to be between 2000 and 5000 processors. If you want web services, look no farther than Apple's website, store and.mac/mobileme service. Oh, and iTunes seems to be a fairly hefty service, requiring a LARGE backend.
Let's take CATIA, for example (not KATIA please). It isn't just a Windows program, and is a bad example for you to use if you want to claim that WinTel, or even X86 is dominant. It happens to run on MANY Unix platforms, including IBM RS/6000 with a Power PC 604 chip. You know, that happens to be the exact same chip Apple used in their high end workstations for quite a while. However, lets move to the present. CATIA also runs on Power 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 hardware, all the same PPC architecture Apple implemented for a decade, and quite successfully. If we move over to X86 hardware, CATIA runs on HP-UX. It also runs on a variety of RISC chips from SGI, and even UltraSPARC machines under SOLARIS.
Oh yes, CATIA also runs on a Windows machine. The point is, Windows is FAR from the exclusive platform for "Serious Computing". Linux, the specialty UNIX flavors, SOLARIS and OS X all have very, very "serious" places in the "serious" market. Windows ports are often done for the convenience of the customer, because you can bet the Dassault would rather their CATIA customers stick to the UNIX flavors rather than deal with Windows ports.
Oh, I almost forgot. A CATIA reader (eViewer) has been implemented for OS X by Dassault. Solidworks (another Dassault product, and complimentary software to CATIA has all sorts of software for the mac, and is developing an OS X version. Rhino3D is also coming to the mac.
By "serious", if you mean word, excel, some financial software, and some standard business productivity suites, then yes, windows dominates. However, to every windows productivity program, there is a Mac equivalent, and for every 'serious' computationally intensive windows program, there are equivalents that are often better, available for Unix/Linux platforms, of which OS X is one.
Since you are citing anecdotal evidence, so shall I. I am not a zealot. While I use and prefer a Macintosh, I have made use of windows machines quite often, even in the 'creative' fields. I set up a few Gigastudio computers in mac-only sound studios.
Let me see...while graphics are common, there are some other uses:
Gov't Agencies:
The Military Sea Lift Command used/uses Macs for inventory management. I bought some surplus G4s and a 9500 series server off them. I don't know their current system, but they tend to use some custom inventory code, so they still might be on macs.
Let's not forget the US Army contractor COLSA, which bought a 1,566 Xserve cluster to run aerodynamic simulations.
Small businesses:
I do hardware maintenance for some sound studios, all Mac based. This is expected. The contractor who did the build-out for one of the studios uses a Mac laptop. The company that handled the specialty double-pane window frames for the control room was Mac based. The Piano tuner used a windows computer though.
The video rental store near me uses Macs as their checkout platform.
Schools:
Go to any university where Macs and PCs share a lab. The macs almost always fill up faster than the PCs. I know that American University uses a couple XServes as part of their IT needs.
And you say Apple doesn't have a place in web servers, datacenters or programming? Let's go over to Virginia Tech, why don't we. Take a look at : http://www.top500.org/site/systems/2024. How does 1,100 Dual 2.3 GHz XServes on an Infiniband network sound? That sounds like the 280th fastest supercomputer in the world to me. When it was introduced in 2003, it was number 3. That, to me, looks like a pretty strong showing of the datacenter capability of the Mac.
----- Macs are not a total solution, but they work in FAR more areas than you give credit for. It is not based on zealotry either. If Linux or Windows could give me the same TCO, and the same ease of maintenance, I would switch in a second.
The myth that 'serious applications' only run on PCs is FAR from accurate. For financials, there is MYOB and Quicken. For graphics there is Vectorworks and BRL-CAD. The list goes on. When you start to talk about "serious functionality" and programs that require proficiency beyond the OS, you need to realize that the platform should aid in that functionality of that software, not hinder it. In my experience, and in that of many power users, Windows hinders, OS X helps, and Linux can go either way.
One of the reasons GOOG located there was because of cheap power. That cheap power used to supply aluminum mills. In fact, if you go to the actual data center (I have) and poke around a bit (I have), you notice the huge remnants of the aluminum plants, and the infrastructure required to run them.
Google probably hired a larger portion of local HVAC, systems engineering and construction personnel then expected. The Dalles also plays host to a mid-sized UP facility that also makes railroad ties, several machine shops, and the Dalles dam. I bet some of the maintenance/engineering crew for the dam did some work for Google...
Also, farms and logging require some fairly intensive infrastructure. Even a Timberking takes a skilled operator and repair shop, especially if you have those adorable northwest hippies spiking trees.
A bit more than farms and logging, but yeah, that is most of the economy.
The GP is almost right, for some very specific applications. Though s/he should probably go back to excel. CICS runs very well on IBM big iron under Z/OS. The railroads also use old-style mainframes for routing and control. Transportation and financial processing both have fairly stringent realtime requirements that a Linux cluster can almost certainly meet. Almost is not acceptable though...
I think the difference comes not when you need a redundancy of computing, but when you need a redundancy of low-level hardware, coupled with rock-solid reliability. The ability to physically separate a single server into multiple elements thousands of miles apart is attractive to certain financial institution, for certain transactions. Think arbitrage transactions amongst multiple international exchanges. If the Berlin portion of the server goes down, the NY portion completes my transaction, albiet with some latency...
You are asking about maintenance per ton/mile, and also about carbon requirements? If you are asking about the carbon requirement of maintenance, the answer is simple: Roads are paved with carbon (asphalt), rails are rock, cement/wood ties and steel. Also, the carbon footprint for maintenance of a mode of transport is minuscule when compared to the carbon footprint of that modes use. If you are asking two different things, let me expound. Budget figures exist. Nobody can make a per ton/mile estimate of capital and regular maintenance costs for either truck or rail modes. However, cost per mile estimates do exist. VERY quick Google search would yield the following:
Highway:
South Carolina Department of Transportation Interstate Corridor Plan Fiscal Years 2008-2030: "In 2008, providing an additional lane in each direction on an interstate mainline is estimated to cost almost $20 million per mile for design, right of way acquisition, and construction."
Rail:
On existing rights-of way, rail costs around $2 million per mile per track, so the quad track CSX route down the eastern seaboard is costing $8 million a mile.
The point is, figures exist. At the very least, stroll over to teh Google. If you really want hard numbers, including the data to roughly calculate a ton/mile maintenance figure, start with Trains magazine, which had an industry cost breakdown a few months ago. Then move to the FRA and DOT websites. Ports planners are acutely aware of these issues, and are, perhaps, the most unbiased, since their only objective is moving cargo as quickly and efficiently as possible to and from their ports.
Now, you also asked about carbon requirements. The figures I cited are well-known and heavily vetted. For instance:
Property taxes are assessed on the land AND any improvements. The railroads pay taxes on the land, and then on the track, signaling equipment, bridges, ballast, ties, rail, etc. etc. etc. The railroads would have to pay massive taxes on the electrification equipment. Figure that electrification costs $1 million a mile, and imagine paying taxes on that.
Diesel locomotives, on the other hand, are a yearly tax write-off due to depreciation.
If the government were smart, they would tax the land and rail improvements only, and electrification would be tax-free. It would be better to get the improvements of electrification tax-free than let the tax stand and get nothing.
I was grabbing knowledge from an old Trains magazine I picked up at some point...Perhaps it was referring to a GP7 or something older? I knew someone who wrenched on a diesel would show up here...And by crap, I meant clean, filtered fuels with an inconsistent cetane rating, not used vegetable oil. I guess the railfan in me needs some more time in a locomotive shop. Thanks for the correction!
Two points: I agree that ethanol is the wrong way to go. ANY distilled biofuel is a bad idea. We need to start differentiating between distillates like corn or sugar ethanol and refined products like biodiesel. Biodiesel is best made from non-food sources like switchgrass. Incidentally, many biodiesel materials stocks are not grown on food-producing farmland.
Second point: Trains use (1/5) the fuel of trucks per ton-mile, barges (1/10) and the engines are far easier to convert to biodiesel. Each cylinder in a train engine is something like 2 liters, and there are 12 of them. The engines are tolerant of crap. In fact on EMD locomotives, one never changes the oil, just the oil filter. I agree though, that using fuel to move fuel is not good.
The point of mentioning trains though, is that railroads have to pay HUGE property taxes on the one best solution to their pollution. The railroads would see their property taxes TRIPLE on electrification improvements. That, coupled with high capital costs means that railroads won't touch electrification.
If they did electrify, rail transportation could potentially be carbon-neutral. They merely need to buy the power from a renewable source.
Yeah, DVCPro HD supports firewire. I shouldn't pan firewire as a prosumer transport bus, as I use it all the time. The Avid Adrenaline boxes use firewire too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called Silverlight.
Actually not...I do stuff with intellectual property for a living, including replication management and licensing for music and film.
DVDs in retail packaging (cased, 4/0 cover, 4 color disc face, shrinked, top spine label, etc.) can cost well below 50 cents when produced in very large quantities. The last batch I had made came in at about $1.05 a disc, and was a short run for a small publisher.
As for old films: The publisher/studio is contractually bound to pay residuals/reuse on DVDs for the entire life of the copyright. SAG/DGA/WGA want their (pitifully small) cut. For the soundtrack, the AFM wants their cut. IATSE also gets a cut, which helps fund pension and health plans. This list goes on.
The point is, a certain amount of money does, in fact, flow to the original artists.
Yeah, tankers are vulnerable.
The one point of vulnerability in a wind farm is probably the power cable assembly...But if enough farms get developed, then a mesh network develops as well, insulating against single-point failures.
Unlike those major fibre chunks some captain was bribed to drag anchor over...
Another issue is that offshore oil platform are much more easily attacked by an enemy. If we are pumping 30% of our oil from offshore rigs, and we get attacked by an enemy, we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.
Related to that:
I use some very high end printer's inks...As in letterpress, woodblock printing, and whatnot. I've never payed more than $400/gallon equivalent. There are some specialty pigments that can seriously cost, and I've gotten those in 200 ml jars. A standard carbon black is dirt cheap, especially in bulk.
On the commercial side of things, offset litho inks can be had for less than $10/pound...Same ink that prints the world's magazines and books.
Inkjet ink is a ripoff, and yes, we are stupid.
There are some good laser printers...and some inkjet companies that tout cheap cartridges. It is time for people to smarten up.
Damn, did you just open one hell of a can of worms...Because there is a hell of a big world beyond Cubase and ProTools.
Cubase hasn't been considered a joke for a while, which is good. It's not a bad program.
A large number of the current DAW systems are very, very good, and have a place amongst serious musicians, mixers and composers.
Digital Performer still ranks supreme for a lot of music producers and film/TV composers (Zimmer, Elfman)...And it can utilize the PT audio system, cards and interfaces. It still has superior MIDI capabilities in some areas and does some nifty things with monophonic pitch detection.
Logic also has a place amongst the serious, though a smaller place.
And speaking of Steinberg, Nuendo is Cubase+everything needed for film, complex surround, specialized file formats etc. Cubase is the low-midgrade Steinberg product: Nuendo is, and always has been the flagship, dating back to its very, very brief days on the Irix platform (no, really).
Now, if we look at the very high end, we have some tools like Merging's Pyramix, Fairlight's impressive stuff, and for hardware, Euphonix, Harrison, Studer (yes, they make digital consoles), and even Otari for broadcast. But I digress.
Of course, the biggie DAW on Linux is Ardour. It supports CoreAudio (OS X) or ALSA/FFADO...No support for Windows users though. But why bother trying to program around Microsoft's inefficiencies? Ardour is very much a serious player. They had a partnership with Solid State Logic for a while, and put out a good package.
Cubase occupies a place in the market that I would describe as prosumer to pro...I wouldn't describe it as one of two 'serious' options. I would describe Cubase as the Honda of the audio production world: It does everything it needs to, but it's no Cadillac, no Rolls, and definitely no Oshkosh truck.
Shut yer analog pie hole...yeah...or something.
OK, instead of debating pot (Sched. 1), why don't we debate the equivalent, legal, pill. After all, your entire last sentence describes the symptoms of our war on drugs, NOT the symptoms of marijuana use.
Sure. People die from impairment. Pot, booze, opiates, Oxycontin...cell phones, pets or children in the back seat...dashboard TVs...but I digress.
Marinol (Pure THC) is a schedule 3 drug. What we have is a tacit acknowledgment by the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, the US government, and state governments across the nation that pure THC has a valid medical use and is of so little risk that it is a schedule 3 drug.
Yes, pot has problems. yes, it causes cognitive and memory loss issues...the problem that most people have is one of disproportionate response. THC is less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco, and that has been clinically shown.
When someone gets drunk, orders a pizza and masturbates in the privacy of their home, you don't automatically respond with a SWAT team. When someone smokes an 8th and drives, then we rightfully throw the DWI book at them...however, we also send them to jail for years, whereas a drunk gets probation.
It is a matter of proportionate response, and right now, we are seeing cancer patients getting tossed in jail, a mayor's dogs getting shot in a botched SWAT raid, and the symptoms of a war on drugs that are doing more harm than the drugs, per your last sentence.
In parting, a little trivia: MDMA (Ecstasy) was used clinically on and off for quite a while after its initial discovery in 1912 until its scheduling (I) in 1985. We are now studying this 'dangerous raver drug' as a possible treatment for PTSD. Our perceptions about an individual drug are rarely shaped by medicine, but routinely shaped by politics and FUD.
The thing about Northern Virginia is that the rules are different. Nobody wants to know, and nobody cares about random fibre lines. The local governments just want to ignore it. Fort Belvoir, CIA, NDRO, Tyson's Corner complex, the multitudes of defense contractors linked to or serving active DoD operations (Lockheed, EADS, Boeing, SAIC, Northrop, Raytheon, GD, UT, L-3 Communications, ATT, etc.) all have 'off map' needs. No Northern Virginian government just sends their poor co-op students out to map stuff. The local governments don't want to touch that mess. Better to just make it someone else's problem. Fairfax County doesn't care if 'black' lines get cut, because the Fairfax County voters don't care if lines get cut. I know a guy at a datacenter in Reston who was bird watching. He had a pair of decent binoculars. After a few minutes on his lunch break outside his building, a black SUV shows up, and they pester him with questions before telling him to stop and go back inside. He still has no idea which of the dozen building visible from his the US government has interests in.
I've done it...
Not only have I played with a monotype, but I know some people who have computer controlled solenoids on the air tower. Basically, they can run their monotype via computer. A text document is rendered into a virtual paper tape, then spat out via the control board to a solenoid manifold on the air tower. Awesome stuff.
Newspaper Linotypes could be linked to a teletype, and could take wire service stories and cast them in real time while receiving. It ran the machines really, really hard.
Now, we could go back further: I have cast type the way Gutenberg did...With a hand mould and matrix. The first mass reproduction technology...
I didn't expect to see any typecasting comments in this article. It was a fun surprise.
Depends...do you count raw tonnage of servers, or do you include the ancillaries like cable runs, UPS, cooling etc?
Easy way to win:
My Eniac replica, combined with my replicas of Mayan and Egyptian pyramids (purportedly used as astronomical computers...you know, by the illuminati, etc ;)) means that I win by sheer tonnage!
Except you don't pay by volume.
Take Google's Dalles datacenter in Oregon. They pay for their water by the diameter of the pipe. They have (iirc) two 6 inch pipes. It doesn't matter if a drop or a hurricane flows through them.
Same thing with the power for that datacenter. Bonneville Power charges them based on the peak monthly load, not the total consumed power. So 500 megawatt load for an hour is a lot more expensive than 250 megawatt load for a month.
It is the diameter of the pipe that is expensive, not how much goes through it.
So, the administration identified the 'drug' in question as ibuprofen...They knew what they were looking for. They knew what a student had previously gone to the hospital for taking.
The LD50 of that drug is something close to 636 mg/kg. The child (weighing about 45kg) would have had to take 28 GRAMS to OD. That's something like 40 tablets of the prescription strength stuff.
Both OTC and prescription painkillers in the Advil/Ibuprofen or Tylenol/Tylenol with codeine class are designed to be very hard to OD on. You will throw up most of the 40 pills long before they reach your kidneys and liver, which then cause a slow 2 week death without treatment.
If they were SO WORRIED about her 'health' or the health of other students, they should have called poison control or 911. They might have been able to address health concerns faster that way. The fact that they searched her indicates they had little care for her health, and only cared about discipline. They even lectured her about 'telling the truth' after the search.
It's simple: After searching her belongings, a legal representative should have been there before searching her person. The early teenage years are perhaps the most vulnerable years a human has psychologically. If anything, her age makes the search that much more egregious. Go back a few years and look at the "Voices from the Hellmouth" series that was on slashdot.
The fact that it happened 6 years ago is inconsequential. 6 years ago, a violation of a person was committed without consent, and allegedly without legal cause, which by any sane definition is assault. The fact that it is 6 years later has everything to do with our lengthy appellate process, and no bearing on the crime in question.
I was researching crime before a move as well. I was stuck using an absolutely horrible web-enabled wannabe GIS thing. Having used ArcGIS, I know what a decent GIS is capable of. Google Earth is well on its way to being able to display information the way ArcView does. A buffer wizard type tool would be a wonderful thing in Google Earth...The analytical side of things is not really suitable for the Google Earth architecture though.
Yeah, Google would do well to integrate even census data (which includes some crime, pollution and economic data) into Google Earth.
I have done a number of installs for recording studios. They tend to go with Macs because of TCO, the easy to administer OS, and in two cases, a love of Digital Performer. DP runs wonderfully on a ProTools HD setup, and is ideal for scoring TV shows. Anyway, the point is:
The clients trust the big aluminum box with the handles, and the dual Apple screens. The clients like seeing that a studio dropped cash for top of the line robust hardware. When I installed a PC to run Gigastudio, we went with a rackmount solution, partially for convenience, and partially because the clients like seeing what they don't see at home or at work.
It is an odd thing, but the clients like to see, and are willing to pay more for studios with higher end hardware.
A $7,000 mouse, otherwise known as a Digidesign Control|24, can be worth an additional $50/hr in billed time. That comes partially from efficiency and partially from clients who are willing to pay more for studios with the bigger, efficient tools. BTW: that Control|24 would pay for itself in a mere two months at some of the facilities I have done work for.
You know, windows is the dominant business platform, and has some advantages there, but for "serious" computing, windows is FAR from dominant. "Serious" has a nebulous definition. I tend to define it as software that functions outside a broad consumer/business paradigm.
I am assuming you mean WinTel when refering to PCs. Windows is not dominant. Remember, Google's server farms might run on X86, but they use a custom Linux rollout with databasing software that is far removed from the limitations of MySQL.
I gave you two examples of LARGE scale Mac farms. Virginia Tech and COLSA are both thousand plus node supercomputers built with XServes. That is about the scale of a Google server farm. One farm tends to be between 2000 and 5000 processors. If you want web services, look no farther than Apple's website, store and .mac/mobileme service. Oh, and iTunes seems to be a fairly hefty service, requiring a LARGE backend.
Let's take CATIA, for example (not KATIA please). It isn't just a Windows program, and is a bad example for you to use if you want to claim that WinTel, or even X86 is dominant. It happens to run on MANY Unix platforms, including IBM RS/6000 with a Power PC 604 chip. You know, that happens to be the exact same chip Apple used in their high end workstations for quite a while. However, lets move to the present. CATIA also runs on Power 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 hardware, all the same PPC architecture Apple implemented for a decade, and quite successfully. If we move over to X86 hardware, CATIA runs on HP-UX. It also runs on a variety of RISC chips from SGI, and even UltraSPARC machines under SOLARIS.
Oh yes, CATIA also runs on a Windows machine. The point is, Windows is FAR from the exclusive platform for "Serious Computing". Linux, the specialty UNIX flavors, SOLARIS and OS X all have very, very "serious" places in the "serious" market. Windows ports are often done for the convenience of the customer, because you can bet the Dassault would rather their CATIA customers stick to the UNIX flavors rather than deal with Windows ports.
Oh, I almost forgot. A CATIA reader (eViewer) has been implemented for OS X by Dassault. Solidworks (another Dassault product, and complimentary software to CATIA has all sorts of software for the mac, and is developing an OS X version. Rhino3D is also coming to the mac.
By "serious", if you mean word, excel, some financial software, and some standard business productivity suites, then yes, windows dominates. However, to every windows productivity program, there is a Mac equivalent, and for every 'serious' computationally intensive windows program, there are equivalents that are often better, available for Unix/Linux platforms, of which OS X is one.
Since you are citing anecdotal evidence, so shall I. I am not a zealot. While I use and prefer a Macintosh, I have made use of windows machines quite often, even in the 'creative' fields. I set up a few Gigastudio computers in mac-only sound studios.
Let me see...while graphics are common, there are some other uses:
Gov't Agencies:
The Military Sea Lift Command used/uses Macs for inventory management. I bought some surplus G4s and a 9500 series server off them. I don't know their current system, but they tend to use some custom inventory code, so they still might be on macs.
Let's not forget the US Army contractor COLSA, which bought a 1,566 Xserve cluster to run aerodynamic simulations.
Small businesses:
I do hardware maintenance for some sound studios, all Mac based. This is expected. The contractor who did the build-out for one of the studios uses a Mac laptop. The company that handled the specialty double-pane window frames for the control room was Mac based. The Piano tuner used a windows computer though.
The video rental store near me uses Macs as their checkout platform.
Schools:
Go to any university where Macs and PCs share a lab. The macs almost always fill up faster than the PCs. I know that American University uses a couple XServes as part of their IT needs.
And you say Apple doesn't have a place in web servers, datacenters or programming? Let's go over to Virginia Tech, why don't we. Take a look at : http://www.top500.org/site/systems/2024. How does 1,100 Dual 2.3 GHz XServes on an Infiniband network sound? That sounds like the 280th fastest supercomputer in the world to me. When it was introduced in 2003, it was number 3. That, to me, looks like a pretty strong showing of the datacenter capability of the Mac.
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Macs are not a total solution, but they work in FAR more areas than you give credit for. It is not based on zealotry either. If Linux or Windows could give me the same TCO, and the same ease of maintenance, I would switch in a second.
The myth that 'serious applications' only run on PCs is FAR from accurate. For financials, there is MYOB and Quicken. For graphics there is Vectorworks and BRL-CAD. The list goes on. When you start to talk about "serious functionality" and programs that require proficiency beyond the OS, you need to realize that the platform should aid in that functionality of that software, not hinder it. In my experience, and in that of many power users, Windows hinders, OS X helps, and Linux can go either way.
You forget...
One of the reasons GOOG located there was because of cheap power. That cheap power used to supply aluminum mills. In fact, if you go to the actual data center (I have) and poke around a bit (I have), you notice the huge remnants of the aluminum plants, and the infrastructure required to run them.
Google probably hired a larger portion of local HVAC, systems engineering and construction personnel then expected. The Dalles also plays host to a mid-sized UP facility that also makes railroad ties, several machine shops, and the Dalles dam. I bet some of the maintenance/engineering crew for the dam did some work for Google...
Also, farms and logging require some fairly intensive infrastructure. Even a Timberking takes a skilled operator and repair shop, especially if you have those adorable northwest hippies spiking trees.
A bit more than farms and logging, but yeah, that is most of the economy.
The GP is almost right, for some very specific applications. Though s/he should probably go back to excel. CICS runs very well on IBM big iron under Z/OS. The railroads also use old-style mainframes for routing and control. Transportation and financial processing both have fairly stringent realtime requirements that a Linux cluster can almost certainly meet. Almost is not acceptable though...
I think the difference comes not when you need a redundancy of computing, but when you need a redundancy of low-level hardware, coupled with rock-solid reliability. The ability to physically separate a single server into multiple elements thousands of miles apart is attractive to certain financial institution, for certain transactions. Think arbitrage transactions amongst multiple international exchanges. If the Berlin portion of the server goes down, the NY portion completes my transaction, albiet with some latency...
Due Consideration strikes again!!
You are asking about maintenance per ton/mile, and also about carbon requirements? If you are asking about the carbon requirement of maintenance, the answer is simple: Roads are paved with carbon (asphalt), rails are rock, cement/wood ties and steel. Also, the carbon footprint for maintenance of a mode of transport is minuscule when compared to the carbon footprint of that modes use. If you are asking two different things, let me expound. Budget figures exist. Nobody can make a per ton/mile estimate of capital and regular maintenance costs for either truck or rail modes. However, cost per mile estimates do exist. VERY quick Google search would yield the following:
Highway:
South Carolina Department of Transportation Interstate Corridor Plan Fiscal Years 2008-2030:
"In 2008, providing an additional lane in each direction on an
interstate mainline is estimated to cost almost $20 million per mile for design, right of
way acquisition, and construction."
Rail:
On existing rights-of way, rail costs around $2 million per mile per track, so the quad track CSX route down the eastern seaboard is costing $8 million a mile.
The point is, figures exist. At the very least, stroll over to teh Google. If you really want hard numbers, including the data to roughly calculate a ton/mile maintenance figure, start with Trains magazine, which had an industry cost breakdown a few months ago. Then move to the FRA and DOT websites. Ports planners are acutely aware of these issues, and are, perhaps, the most unbiased, since their only objective is moving cargo as quickly and efficiently as possible to and from their ports.
Now, you also asked about carbon requirements. The figures I cited are well-known and heavily vetted. For instance:
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/info/estimatesoffuelconsumption.htm
and a nice, plain, simple graph:
http://www.irpt.net/irpt.nsf/LinksView/EnvironmentalAdvantages?Opendocument
What's that? It seems like figures to me...and they even allow one to make a value judgment about the carbon requirement of rail vs. road.
Property taxes are assessed on the land AND any improvements. The railroads pay taxes on the land, and then on the track, signaling equipment, bridges, ballast, ties, rail, etc. etc. etc. The railroads would have to pay massive taxes on the electrification equipment. Figure that electrification costs $1 million a mile, and imagine paying taxes on that.
Diesel locomotives, on the other hand, are a yearly tax write-off due to depreciation.
If the government were smart, they would tax the land and rail improvements only, and electrification would be tax-free. It would be better to get the improvements of electrification tax-free than let the tax stand and get nothing.
I was grabbing knowledge from an old Trains magazine I picked up at some point...Perhaps it was referring to a GP7 or something older? I knew someone who wrenched on a diesel would show up here...And by crap, I meant clean, filtered fuels with an inconsistent cetane rating, not used vegetable oil. I guess the railfan in me needs some more time in a locomotive shop. Thanks for the correction!
Two points: I agree that ethanol is the wrong way to go. ANY distilled biofuel is a bad idea. We need to start differentiating between distillates like corn or sugar ethanol and refined products like biodiesel. Biodiesel is best made from non-food sources like switchgrass. Incidentally, many biodiesel materials stocks are not grown on food-producing farmland.
Second point: Trains use (1/5) the fuel of trucks per ton-mile, barges (1/10) and the engines are far easier to convert to biodiesel. Each cylinder in a train engine is something like 2 liters, and there are 12 of them. The engines are tolerant of crap. In fact on EMD locomotives, one never changes the oil, just the oil filter. I agree though, that using fuel to move fuel is not good.
The point of mentioning trains though, is that railroads have to pay HUGE property taxes on the one best solution to their pollution. The railroads would see their property taxes TRIPLE on electrification improvements. That, coupled with high capital costs means that railroads won't touch electrification.
If they did electrify, rail transportation could potentially be carbon-neutral. They merely need to buy the power from a renewable source.
Yeah, DVCPro HD supports firewire. I shouldn't pan firewire as a prosumer transport bus, as I use it all the time. The Avid Adrenaline boxes use firewire too.