They could always fund the program the same way they do with SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). When NASA cut funding for SETI out of the budget in 1996, the administrators of the project simply formed a non-profit foundation and solicited donations to keep it going. Andy Grove, Paul Allen and a couple of other tech billionaires threw some money at the idea, and the thing snowballed into a well-funded, well-managed operation that is now doing quite well.
Full disclosure here: I'm not wealthy by any means, but I have maintained a Family membership in the SETI Foundation since it became a non-profit, and pay them a paltry $100 a year to keep informed of their progress.
If enough people feel strongly about Voyager, I'm sure this would work for that program as well.
Inexperience clearly explains your post. I started out as a NetWare 4.1 admin and was migrating servers to NetWare 5 when the suits at my office decided to migrate to an NT architecture. It was the biggest mistake they ever made. Not only was NT more costly (in terms of both seat licensing and staff overhead), it was incredibly unstable. It took twice as many admins to manage the same number of servers, and the servers had to be re-booted a minimum of every four weeks. Sometimes more often than that. Even when we upgraded to Win2K, things didn't improve all that much. Between February 2000 (when Win2K was launched) and December 2002, Microsoft released over 200 critical security patches for Win2K. During the same period of time, Novell released a total of 5 security patches for NetWare.
The demand never went away, Billly. You just have to market yourself and your sk1llz. As long as small businesses have Windows servers and Windows workstations, they're always going to need someone to take care of them. And those two certifications are gold (provided the customers understand what they mean and how hard you had to work to earn them).
Most of my clients' biggest headaches involve the integrity of their backup systems, preventing viruses and cleaning up spyware. I can automate a lot of this stuff, so I only have to go into the clients' offices once or twice a month, but it is always good to keep an eye on things. If you set up remote management on your clients' systems, and you monitor what's going on, you can see a problem before they call you in a panic.
There is plenty of business out there, but you need to network within user groups and small business organizations to build up a client base. Chambers of Commerce and local business associations (such as Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis clubs, etc.) are great opportunities for this. What often happens is one business will refer their partners to you, since they all face more or less the same IT problems. When a circle of small business owners get to know you by reputation, you will find you are in great demand and you may even have to turn down clients because there aren't enough hours in the day to service them all.
I started out my consulting business in 1999 by charging $40/hr. Then I obtained my certificationn and decided I could charge $60/hr. I stayed at that rate for 2 years, and then decided to test the market to see if my current clients would accept an increase to $75/hr. None of them objected and new clients feel that rate is quite competitive. As long as I prove my worth to them (and paying me as a consultant is cheaper than hiring someone full-time), they don't have any problem with that fee.
You make me feel very old. Yes other posters have explained that during the Cold War (from around 1948 through 1991) Radio Free Europe was a NATO effort to broadcast uncensored news and entertainment programming to communist countries in Eastern Europe who were under the control of the Soviet Union. Since the fall of the USSR, the term Radio Free XXXAnything has been used to describe any form of uncensored broadcasting.
One of the earliest pirate radio stations in the 1990s on the west coast was called Free Radio Berkeley. The FCC shut it down, and has tried to jail and fine the operators, but they are fighting in court and have now re-established the station. But these days, they call it Berkeley Liberation Radio.
In your run-down of favorite ZDTV/TechTV shows, you omitted one of my own personal favorites:
Big Thinkers
Sure, that one was gone before ZDTV became TechTV, but I sure did enjoy watching John Dvorak ask questions of some of the folks./ would interview online (e.g., Esther Dyson, John Gage, Steve Wozniak, Gilman Louie, Eric Schmidt, Jaron Lanier, etc.).
It's depressing to think that the audience for TechTV's really innovative programs was smaller than NPR, and so few people (even here in Silicon Valley) bothered to tune in. It truly sucks.
I'm a computer consultant and I deduct ALL of my computer expenses every year (on the advice of my tax accountant). Even my WIRED subscription, my ISP charges, and every piece of hardware and software I buy. Two of my clients are CPA firms, so I also get my taxes prepared by the experts as a "perk." Who the hell needs TurboTax when you have these kinds of resources?
Also, I have several systems that dual-boot between Windows and Linux (SuSE, Mandrake, Debian) so I can get the best of both worlds, as other posters have pointed out. All of my clients have Windows or NetWare environments, so I have to be able to work with multiple platforms.
If there were a Linux app that could prepare tax returns like Intuit's LaCerte, or ProTax (two of the packages used by the CPA firms I support), then they would jump to Open Source in a heartbeat, since they are so sick of the "overhead" aches caused by Windows (constant updating, virus attacks, spyware, etc.).
This reminded me of a fascinating article I read this week in the new issue of Reason Magazine (not yet online at http://www.reason.com/about how the Deputy CIO of the Office of Homeland Security (and former CIO of the Labor Department, who once worked in the Clinton Whitehouse) has been found to have purchased not only a Ph.D., but also her Masters Degree from a diploma factory located in an old Motel 6 in Wyoming. It turns out that this case provoked an audit of resumes by the GAO which discovered the Department of Defense has as many as 257 employees who bought their degrees from the same kind of "schools."
I sure hope so. I was one of the poor saps whose system was hosed by FC2 (because I installed it to dual-boot with Win XP on a separate partition). I didn't use my own computer (which dual-boots just dandy between WinXP and SuSE 9), and ended up using the "family" computer, which had been humming along quite nicely as a dual-boot system with WinXP on one partition and Mandrake 9 on the other. After the FC2 fiasco, XP would no longer boot except in safe mode, and when FC2 booted, it was so slow, no one could do anything much with it. I ended up just blowing away everything and re-installing XP by itself. It was only sometime later that I saw the post on/. about how FC2 can't dual-boot with Windows (despite what the installer led me to believe). I never had a problem dual-booting with RedHat 8 or 9, so I was confident that Fedora would work the same. Big Mistake.
Anyway, the wife and kids have almost forgiven me now, but if I do anything with Fedora again, it will be on a test system, and not on a computer I share with three other people. Strange, they all loved me when I put Mandrake on it. The games that were bundled with Mandrake 9 were awesome, and everyone loved me for that.
No, that's not how it is anymore. Before the Justice Department antitrust case, Microsoft pretty much required all OEMs to sell a Windows license with every PC they built, but the Justice Department put a stop to this practice. This is one of the things that helped accellerate the death of OS/2, since IBM caved in to pressure from Microsoft. At one time in the early to mid-1990s, IBM offered customers a choice of OS/2 Warp or Windows 3.1 on their computers, but Microsoft threatened to revoke their Windows reseller contract if they continued this offer. Since only geeks wanted OS/2 and everyone else in the world wanted Windows, IBM sheepishly withdrew this plan, and they had to sell OS/2 as a separate product, and ship all of their PCs with Win3.1 pre-installed. It was this behavior, just as much as the Netscape/IE browser battle, that convinced Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to rule against MS.
Now, you can purchase a PC without an OS if you wish (or one with LinSpire, Mandrake, Fedora, or any other linux distribution). But most retailers offer Windows XP as a default, because most customers want Windows pre-installed. Time's haven't changed that much, though. Even these days, only geeks want to buy computers without an OS pre-installed, or with Linux already built-in. You are not required to pay for a Windows license unless you want to run Windows on the box, but the vast majority of computer buyers out there still want Windows.
Nostalgic OS/2 Warp geek who still misses his favorite OS.
In California, we have a Green majority on the city council of Arcata, a 3-term Libertarian County Supervisor in Calaveras County, two Libertarian District Attorneys, dozens of Libertarians serving on City Councils, water district boards, school boards and hospital districts.
If things work out in November, Contra Costa County will elect a majority of Libertarian candidates to the Mount Diablo HealthCare District, whose stated goal is to Shut 'Em Down. The MDHD was created to run a county hospital, but they did such a lousy job that the hospital went bankrupt, and was saved only because a for-profit hospital corporation purchased it. For the past eight or so years, the Mt. Diablo Healthcare District has really served no purpose at all, except to elect and re-elect five board members who meet twice a month and draw a salary by trying to figure out how to spend their $800,000/year budget without having a hospital to run. Two Grand Jury investigations have concluded that the healthcare district should be dissolved, but the board members refuse to abolish themselves. That's why the three Libertarians decided to run for the open seats so that they can do what the sitting board refuses to do. Their first action upon being elected is going to be to start the process of amending the county charter to eliminate the healthcare district and save the taxpayers all that money.
Well, since I'm not a politician, I don't make a habit of lying, but as the top of the thread indicates, this may have all changed now that Kerry Conran is involved in the project. But think about it... The Rock as John Carter. Yeah, it might just work. And Burroughs frequently described with great eloquence John Carter opening up a can o' whoop-ass on Barsoom.
Alternatively, now that Stephen Sommers had such great success with Hugh Jackman as his new action hero in Van Helsing, can you picture our favorite Wolverine as John Carter?
I've been waiting just as long for a John Carter of Mars big screen adaptation, but while there have been many rumors, none have come to fruition. The last time I heard any solid information on it (probably from an earlier/. post), the word was that director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing, The Mummy/Mummy Returns/Scorpion King series) had obtained the rights from the Burroughs Estate and was preparing the project as a showcase for Duane Johnson (the Rock) to star as John Carter.
Ahem, RTFA. The point of the article is that the excess heat effect HAS been replicated now plenty of times, and the researchers are trying to figure out how it happens and why. Also, why they so rarely detect the generation of helium and tritium that one would expect from an actual fusion reaction. What is happening may not be fusion, but the point of the whole article is that it would be beneficial to understand what is going on here with the Pons/Fleischmann effect. If it isn't fusion, then what the hell is it? And can this really be developed into an inexpensive source of energy?
I agree that Pons and Fleischmann essentially sabotaged their careers with the ill-conceived press conference, rather than have their work peer-reviewed as most scientific research is done, but the point of the article (again RTFA) is that quite a few well-credentialed researchers have been working on this for the past decade and have come up with some startling results. And they are doing it right by presenting their peer-reviewed work at scientific conferences.
I do contract IT consulting for a number of small business clients. One company that called on my services late last year sells spas and other "outdoor living accessories" (e.g., high end custom-built barbeque grills and elaborate children's playground structures) to people with a lot more disposable income than I have. They had a lame consultant who sold them a way too expensive server, installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server on it, and didn't even bother to set up Active Directory. Here is a small company with only seven employees, yet the guy charged them $2300 for the Win2K advanced server license alone (with 25 client access licenses). For half that price, he could have set them up with a Win2K Small Business Server with a 10 CAL package. He gave all users Admin rights on their workstations and this caused no end of problems. On top of that, he downloaded the freeware version of Panda for virus protection, but never configured it properly. They called me in to clean up several virus-infected systems and to upgrade some computers after the original consultant stopped returning their calls for help.
They were so grateful for my assistance that they offered me a spa as payment. Now, I stop by every few weeks to check on things and monitor the system's performance and every month after I send an invoice, they deduct that amount from the balance I owe for the spa. It may take me four or five years to pay it off, but I'm paying in services rendered, rather than in cash out of pocket.
Not a bad deal at all, as I sit relaxing in my backyard amidst the swirling bubbles of my Grandee Hot Springs spa.
The short subject THX-4EB was shot at LAX when he was a student at USC. The Zoetrope financed feature film was shot in the San Francisco Bay area, utilizing the then brand new BART system and chase scene was shot in various tunnels (e.g., San Francisco's Broadway tunnel, the Caldecott tunnel in the East Bay, etc.)
I remember seeing a news report a few weeks ago about a French company that is marketing air compressor powered cars in Europe. They are very lightweight vehicles for one or two passengers, but they are testing a minibus size model that they hope to put into service as taxis. I did a Google and came up with this BBC story from 2002. Really interesting stuff, but this is from 2002 and I haven't really heard much more about it.
Of course we should dismantle the EPA! What the hell have they done to "save" the ozone layer? Nothing at all. They banned CFCs, but did that make the ozone layer healthier? If you believe them, it has only gotten worse. However, if you listen to climatologists, the latest ideas are that the "hole" over Antarctica has been there for a very long time, and we only discovered it in the 1960s and 70s when we began studying it from satellites. It appears to be a seasonal phenomenon, changing in size all the time. Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small, but it may have been doing this for centuries.
The EPA is just a tax-sucking bureaucracy that can hardly demonstrate any accomplishments of their own. At least the FCC claims to be keeping the airwaves "clean" by scolding CBS, Bono and Janet Jackson for talking dirty and flashing boobs.
You've got it backwards, dude. How the hell can a 50 Watt micropower transmitter broadcast "over the top" of commercial radio stations with 5000W transmitters? In fact, what Dunnifer and other microbroadcasters do is locate unused FM frequencies in the local area so they can be heard without interference from the giant commercial signals. Free Radio Berkeley can only be heard within a 2 mile radius of the transmitter at 104.1 FM, whereas the nearest commercial station on the dial can be picked up 50-100 miles away. That would be 105.3 FM, currently the home of Howard Stern in the mornings, who is waging his own war against the FCC.
If you prefer top 40 drivel, you are free to listen to it from more than a dozen sources in the major markets. I don't always listen to 104.1 when I'm in Berkeley, but it's nice to have a non-commercial alternative to NPR and Pacifica and all the ClearChannel and Infinity stations in the Bay Area.
Well, that's not exactly what the original poster was claming. He said Gates invested in the drug company for the same reason Martha invested in Imclone. The interesting thing about the Imclone deal is that if Martha had simply followed standard investor practice and ridden through the rough period, she would have not only never been charged with any crime, she would be even richer than she was before. The cancer drug that Imclone was testing has now been approved by the FDA and will be on the market in a matter of weeks. It is common practice to halt clinical trials at the halfway point and anlayze the data to see if the drug can be proven to already be overwhelmingly effective in treating the disease for which it was developed. If it does, the clinical trial is ended early and the drug immediately goes into the licensure procedure. If it doesn't, the clinical trial continues to its conclusion. The Imclone drug did not meet this criteria at the halfway point, and the stock fell when the FDA ordered the clinical trial continued. Two days before the announcement, Waksall and his family dumped their shares and Martha sold hers the next day.
Once the clinical trial concluded, however, the drug proved to actually work quite well at reducing specific tumors, and the FDA approved it for licensure. Imclone's stock has now risen much higher than it was when Martha dumped her shares. Had she just had faith in the company and its product and held onto her stocks, she could have avoided all this trouble, and made much more money in the bargain.
If you believe in the company, you buy and hold the investment to realize a profit in the long run. Martha used to work on Wall Street, and should have practiced whaat most investment advisors have been preaching for decades. Greed, and perhaps panic, clouded her judgment.
I received several copies of the settlement letter at my office, but since I work for the state government, I wasn't sure how to go about filing a claim. I just assumed the all-knowing bureaucrats in Sacramento were going to take care of this themselves. Apparently, they don't have a clue either.
As someone who finally bought a home three years ago, I've discovered that paying off your balance is the last thing you want to do to build a good credit history. The credit analysts want to know how well you handle debt and if you pay your balance every month, you won't have any. Thus, your credit rating will be very low unless you have a large debt load and you pay it off on time and are reliable with your installments.
I couldn't even qualify for a VISA back in the 1980s until I bought a new car. I couldn't even have bought that car without someone with a credit history to co-sign the loan for me. Once we had paid half the car loan back, we were inundated with credit card offers. We had some of the best credit going, and naturally, ended up with a large credit card debt. Then, of course, we couldn't afford the down payment for a house.
Finally, after paying off three credit cards, we kind of balanced our debt load and got another credit check. That proved we were "credit worthy" and we finally qualified for a home loan. But our financial analyst said if we'd paid off all our credit cards, our credit rating would have gone down instead of up.
Sounds to me like both parties to the deal should have done more homework before agreeing to such a "good faith handshake" type of unwritten contract. The Sheriff's department could have reserved a.gov domain with the county at no charge at all, then the domain name would not be an issue. Mr. Richard should have known what his costs would be up front and could have negotiated "in-kind free publicity" compensation for a period of time, then re-negotiated if he felt it wasn't paying off adequately. In any event, what other client sites was he hosting that he would not have without the publicity from the Sheriff's site? The article doesn't go into that kind of detail. Are his other customers happy with his work? Are they rallying to his defense now that his business has been seized and their own sites are shut down as well?
Clearly, the Sheriff's office has over-reacted, just as Mr. Richard over-reacted. All of this could have been avoided (or settled amicably) if it had been done in a regular business-like manner (written contracts, well defined Service Level Agreements, etc.). Then, if the parties were unhappy with the terms of the agreement, the contract could be terminated or renegotiated and everyone (and their lawyers) would be relatively happy. As it is, the guy looks like a clueless jerk trying to extort money from the taxpayers, and the Sheriff's office looks like jackbooted thugs seizing private property and shutting down a local business.
It appears Mr. Richard was an amateur network admin/webmaster (and reserve deputy) who didn't really know how to run a business and the Sheriff's Department are amateur nazis who don't know how to maintain a website or have their county IT staff do the job they're supposed to do. Both parties have made serious mistakes and should have known better than to get themselves into such a mess.
Were you around when our manned moon missions were launced in the 1960's and 1970's? Apollo 8 took three days to get to Luna, and three days to return. Six days round trip. The missions that landed took longer because the landing crew spent about 18-24 hours on the lunar surface.
And the whole point of going to the moon was for military, rather than scientific, purposes. A base in orbit would have to be periodically boosted to maintain that orbit (remember when Mir tumbled back to Earth because Russia could no longer affort to maintain it), whereas the moon is pretty much stable, and isn't likely to come crashing down on us. But use a mass driver to throw rocks from the moon back to Earth, and you've got a very cheap, very destructive weapon on your hands.
Your next reading assignment is Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Your last paragraph is a bit misleading. The level of overhead in California's state government is greater than you even imagine. I work for the state government (as a contractor) and I see the colossal waste firsthand. Not only could we save millions of dollars by better implementing open source solutions, we could save even more by doing the same kind of belt-tightening that private businesses have to do in tough economic times.
Unionized state employees are exempt from layoffs, even though most of them are worthless layabouts who probably would be among the first sent packing if they were working in the private sector (assuming any private corporation would even hire them). They simply cannot be fired, no matter how poorly they perform.
It was the California State Employees Association that twisted Gray Davis' arm to give them a 5% pay raise in exchange for their endorsement just before the 2002 election, at a time when he knew damned well the state couldn't afford it. The Prison Guard union asked for even more payback, and he gladly gave it to them. Now that Arnold is in the governors' office, he's asking both unions to re-negotiate their contracts because he knows that when all other California citizens have had to forego raises (even the Teacher's Union, for chrissakes), only these two ended up getting more money out of the taxpayers. And he knows that the money still isn't there to pay them without borrowing it from somwhere else.
On the IT side (the one I work in), we were all informed that the State of California is an all Microsoft shop. We had a major project to migrate all our servers off Novell NetWare and move to Windows NT. We still have most of our infrastructure running on NT4 and only a few servers have been upgraded to Win2K/Win2K3. Imagine our surprise when the Oracle scandal broke and we found out that in exchange for a $25,000 campaign contribution, Gray Davis had purchase more seat licenses for Oracle database software than there were employees in the government! And at the time, most of us were training for Microsoft SQL2000 as our primary database platform.
This is the kind of corruption that sparked the recall in the first place. I don't know if Arnold will be able to fix it, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
They could always fund the program the same way they do with SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). When NASA cut funding for SETI out of the budget in 1996, the administrators of the project simply formed a non-profit foundation and solicited donations to keep it going. Andy Grove, Paul Allen and a couple of other tech billionaires threw some money at the idea, and the thing snowballed into a well-funded, well-managed operation that is now doing quite well.
Full disclosure here: I'm not wealthy by any means, but I have maintained a Family membership in the SETI Foundation since it became a non-profit, and pay them a paltry $100 a year to keep informed of their progress.
If enough people feel strongly about Voyager, I'm sure this would work for that program as well.
Inexperience clearly explains your post. I started out as a NetWare 4.1 admin and was migrating servers to NetWare 5 when the suits at my office decided to migrate to an NT architecture. It was the biggest mistake they ever made. Not only was NT more costly (in terms of both seat licensing and staff overhead), it was incredibly unstable. It took twice as many admins to manage the same number of servers, and the servers had to be re-booted a minimum of every four weeks. Sometimes more often than that. Even when we upgraded to Win2K, things didn't improve all that much. Between February 2000 (when Win2K was launched) and December 2002, Microsoft released over 200 critical security patches for Win2K. During the same period of time, Novell released a total of 5 security patches for NetWare.
Do the math.
The demand never went away, Billly. You just have to market yourself and your sk1llz. As long as small businesses have Windows servers and Windows workstations, they're always going to need someone to take care of them. And those two certifications are gold (provided the customers understand what they mean and how hard you had to work to earn them).
Most of my clients' biggest headaches involve the integrity of their backup systems, preventing viruses and cleaning up spyware. I can automate a lot of this stuff, so I only have to go into the clients' offices once or twice a month, but it is always good to keep an eye on things. If you set up remote management on your clients' systems, and you monitor what's going on, you can see a problem before they call you in a panic.
There is plenty of business out there, but you need to network within user groups and small business organizations to build up a client base. Chambers of Commerce and local business associations (such as Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis clubs, etc.) are great opportunities for this. What often happens is one business will refer their partners to you, since they all face more or less the same IT problems. When a circle of small business owners get to know you by reputation, you will find you are in great demand and you may even have to turn down clients because there aren't enough hours in the day to service them all.
I started out my consulting business in 1999 by charging $40/hr. Then I obtained my certificationn and decided I could charge $60/hr. I stayed at that rate for 2 years, and then decided to test the market to see if my current clients would accept an increase to $75/hr. None of them objected and new clients feel that rate is quite competitive. As long as I prove my worth to them (and paying me as a consultant is cheaper than hiring someone full-time), they don't have any problem with that fee.
You make me feel very old. Yes other posters have explained that during the Cold War (from around 1948 through 1991) Radio Free Europe was a NATO effort to broadcast uncensored news and entertainment programming to communist countries in Eastern Europe who were under the control of the Soviet Union. Since the fall of the USSR, the term Radio Free XXXAnything has been used to describe any form of uncensored broadcasting.
One of the earliest pirate radio stations in the 1990s on the west coast was called Free Radio Berkeley. The FCC shut it down, and has tried to jail and fine the operators, but they are fighting in court and have now re-established the station. But these days, they call it Berkeley Liberation Radio.
In your run-down of favorite ZDTV/TechTV shows, you omitted one of my own personal favorites:
./ would interview online (e.g., Esther Dyson, John Gage, Steve Wozniak, Gilman Louie, Eric Schmidt, Jaron Lanier, etc.).
Big Thinkers
Sure, that one was gone before ZDTV became TechTV, but I sure did enjoy watching John Dvorak ask questions of some of the folks
It's depressing to think that the audience for TechTV's really innovative programs was smaller than NPR, and so few people (even here in Silicon Valley) bothered to tune in. It truly sucks.
I'm a computer consultant and I deduct ALL of my computer expenses every year (on the advice of my tax accountant). Even my WIRED subscription, my ISP charges, and every piece of hardware and software I buy. Two of my clients are CPA firms, so I also get my taxes prepared by the experts as a "perk." Who the hell needs TurboTax when you have these kinds of resources?
Also, I have several systems that dual-boot between Windows and Linux (SuSE, Mandrake, Debian) so I can get the best of both worlds, as other posters have pointed out. All of my clients have Windows or NetWare environments, so I have to be able to work with multiple platforms.
If there were a Linux app that could prepare tax returns like Intuit's LaCerte, or ProTax (two of the packages used by the CPA firms I support), then they would jump to Open Source in a heartbeat, since they are so sick of the "overhead" aches caused by Windows (constant updating, virus attacks, spyware, etc.).
This reminded me of a fascinating article I read this week in the new issue of Reason Magazine (not yet online at http://www.reason.com/about how the Deputy CIO of the Office of Homeland Security (and former CIO of the Labor Department, who once worked in the Clinton Whitehouse) has been found to have purchased not only a Ph.D., but also her Masters Degree from a diploma factory located in an old Motel 6 in Wyoming. It turns out that this case provoked an audit of resumes by the GAO which discovered the Department of Defense has as many as 257 employees who bought their degrees from the same kind of "schools."
Now, don't you feel safer?
I sure hope so. I was one of the poor saps whose system was hosed by FC2 (because I installed it to dual-boot with Win XP on a separate partition). I didn't use my own computer (which dual-boots just dandy between WinXP and SuSE 9), and ended up using the "family" computer, which had been humming along quite nicely as a dual-boot system with WinXP on one partition and Mandrake 9 on the other. After the FC2 fiasco, XP would no longer boot except in safe mode, and when FC2 booted, it was so slow, no one could do anything much with it. I ended up just blowing away everything and re-installing XP by itself. It was only sometime later that I saw the post on /. about how FC2 can't dual-boot with Windows (despite what the installer led me to believe). I never had a problem dual-booting with RedHat 8 or 9, so I was confident that Fedora would work the same. Big Mistake.
Anyway, the wife and kids have almost forgiven me now, but if I do anything with Fedora again, it will be on a test system, and not on a computer I share with three other people. Strange, they all loved me when I put Mandrake on it. The games that were bundled with Mandrake 9 were awesome, and everyone loved me for that.
No, that's not how it is anymore. Before the Justice Department antitrust case, Microsoft pretty much required all OEMs to sell a Windows license with every PC they built, but the Justice Department put a stop to this practice. This is one of the things that helped accellerate the death of OS/2, since IBM caved in to pressure from Microsoft. At one time in the early to mid-1990s, IBM offered customers a choice of OS/2 Warp or Windows 3.1 on their computers, but Microsoft threatened to revoke their Windows reseller contract if they continued this offer. Since only geeks wanted OS/2 and everyone else in the world wanted Windows, IBM sheepishly withdrew this plan, and they had to sell OS/2 as a separate product, and ship all of their PCs with Win3.1 pre-installed. It was this behavior, just as much as the Netscape/IE browser battle, that convinced Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to rule against MS.
Now, you can purchase a PC without an OS if you wish (or one with LinSpire, Mandrake, Fedora, or any other linux distribution). But most retailers offer Windows XP as a default, because most customers want Windows pre-installed. Time's haven't changed that much, though. Even these days, only geeks want to buy computers without an OS pre-installed, or with Linux already built-in. You are not required to pay for a Windows license unless you want to run Windows on the box, but the vast majority of computer buyers out there still want Windows.
Nostalgic OS/2 Warp geek who still misses his favorite OS.
In California, we have a Green majority on the city council of Arcata, a 3-term Libertarian County Supervisor in Calaveras County, two Libertarian District Attorneys, dozens of Libertarians serving on City Councils, water district boards, school boards and hospital districts.
If things work out in November, Contra Costa County will elect a majority of Libertarian candidates to the Mount Diablo HealthCare District, whose stated goal is to Shut 'Em Down . The MDHD was created to run a county hospital, but they did such a lousy job that the hospital went bankrupt, and was saved only because a for-profit hospital corporation purchased it. For the past eight or so years, the Mt. Diablo Healthcare District has really served no purpose at all, except to elect and re-elect five board members who meet twice a month and draw a salary by trying to figure out how to spend their $800,000/year budget without having a hospital to run. Two Grand Jury investigations have concluded that the healthcare district should be dissolved, but the board members refuse to abolish themselves. That's why the three Libertarians decided to run for the open seats so that they can do what the sitting board refuses to do. Their first action upon being elected is going to be to start the process of amending the county charter to eliminate the healthcare district and save the taxpayers all that money.
Well, since I'm not a politician, I don't make a habit of lying, but as the top of the thread indicates, this may have all changed now that Kerry Conran is involved in the project. But think about it... The Rock as John Carter. Yeah, it might just work. And Burroughs frequently described with great eloquence John Carter opening up a can o' whoop-ass on Barsoom.
Alternatively, now that Stephen Sommers had such great success with Hugh Jackman as his new action hero in Van Helsing, can you picture our favorite Wolverine as John Carter?
I've been waiting just as long for a John Carter of Mars big screen adaptation, but while there have been many rumors, none have come to fruition. The last time I heard any solid information on it (probably from an earlier /. post), the word was that director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing, The Mummy/Mummy Returns/Scorpion King series) had obtained the rights from the Burroughs Estate and was preparing the project as a showcase for Duane Johnson (the Rock) to star as John Carter.
Ahem, RTFA. The point of the article is that the excess heat effect HAS been replicated now plenty of times, and the researchers are trying to figure out how it happens and why. Also, why they so rarely detect the generation of helium and tritium that one would expect from an actual fusion reaction. What is happening may not be fusion, but the point of the whole article is that it would be beneficial to understand what is going on here with the Pons/Fleischmann effect. If it isn't fusion, then what the hell is it? And can this really be developed into an inexpensive source of energy?
I agree that Pons and Fleischmann essentially sabotaged their careers with the ill-conceived press conference, rather than have their work peer-reviewed as most scientific research is done, but the point of the article (again RTFA) is that quite a few well-credentialed researchers have been working on this for the past decade and have come up with some startling results. And they are doing it right by presenting their peer-reviewed work at scientific conferences.
I do contract IT consulting for a number of small business clients. One company that called on my services late last year sells spas and other "outdoor living accessories" (e.g., high end custom-built barbeque grills and elaborate children's playground structures) to people with a lot more disposable income than I have. They had a lame consultant who sold them a way too expensive server, installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server on it, and didn't even bother to set up Active Directory. Here is a small company with only seven employees, yet the guy charged them $2300 for the Win2K advanced server license alone (with 25 client access licenses). For half that price, he could have set them up with a Win2K Small Business Server with a 10 CAL package. He gave all users Admin rights on their workstations and this caused no end of problems. On top of that, he downloaded the freeware version of Panda for virus protection, but never configured it properly. They called me in to clean up several virus-infected systems and to upgrade some computers after the original consultant stopped returning their calls for help.
They were so grateful for my assistance that they offered me a spa as payment. Now, I stop by every few weeks to check on things and monitor the system's performance and every month after I send an invoice, they deduct that amount from the balance I owe for the spa. It may take me four or five years to pay it off, but I'm paying in services rendered, rather than in cash out of pocket.
Not a bad deal at all, as I sit relaxing in my backyard amidst the swirling bubbles of my Grandee Hot Springs spa.
The short subject THX-4EB was shot at LAX when he was a student at USC. The Zoetrope financed feature film was shot in the San Francisco Bay area, utilizing the then brand new BART system and chase scene was shot in various tunnels (e.g., San Francisco's Broadway tunnel, the Caldecott tunnel in the East Bay, etc.)
I remember seeing a news report a few weeks ago about a French company that is marketing air compressor powered cars in Europe. They are very lightweight vehicles for one or two passengers, but they are testing a minibus size model that they hope to put into service as taxis. I did a Google and came up with this BBC story from 2002. Really interesting stuff, but this is from 2002 and I haven't really heard much more about it.
Of course we should dismantle the EPA! What the hell have they done to "save" the ozone layer? Nothing at all. They banned CFCs, but did that make the ozone layer healthier? If you believe them, it has only gotten worse. However, if you listen to climatologists, the latest ideas are that the "hole" over Antarctica has been there for a very long time, and we only discovered it in the 1960s and 70s when we began studying it from satellites. It appears to be a seasonal phenomenon, changing in size all the time. Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small, but it may have been doing this for centuries.
The EPA is just a tax-sucking bureaucracy that can hardly demonstrate any accomplishments of their own. At least the FCC claims to be keeping the airwaves "clean" by scolding CBS, Bono and Janet Jackson for talking dirty and flashing boobs.
You've got it backwards, dude. How the hell can a 50 Watt micropower transmitter broadcast "over the top" of commercial radio stations with 5000W transmitters? In fact, what Dunnifer and other microbroadcasters do is locate unused FM frequencies in the local area so they can be heard without interference from the giant commercial signals. Free Radio Berkeley can only be heard within a 2 mile radius of the transmitter at 104.1 FM, whereas the nearest commercial station on the dial can be picked up 50-100 miles away. That would be 105.3 FM, currently the home of Howard Stern in the mornings, who is waging his own war against the FCC.
If you prefer top 40 drivel, you are free to listen to it from more than a dozen sources in the major markets. I don't always listen to 104.1 when I'm in Berkeley, but it's nice to have a non-commercial alternative to NPR and Pacifica and all the ClearChannel and Infinity stations in the Bay Area.
Well, that's not exactly what the original poster was claming. He said Gates invested in the drug company for the same reason Martha invested in Imclone. The interesting thing about the Imclone deal is that if Martha had simply followed standard investor practice and ridden through the rough period, she would have not only never been charged with any crime, she would be even richer than she was before. The cancer drug that Imclone was testing has now been approved by the FDA and will be on the market in a matter of weeks. It is common practice to halt clinical trials at the halfway point and anlayze the data to see if the drug can be proven to already be overwhelmingly effective in treating the disease for which it was developed. If it does, the clinical trial is ended early and the drug immediately goes into the licensure procedure. If it doesn't, the clinical trial continues to its conclusion. The Imclone drug did not meet this criteria at the halfway point, and the stock fell when the FDA ordered the clinical trial continued. Two days before the announcement, Waksall and his family dumped their shares and Martha sold hers the next day.
Once the clinical trial concluded, however, the drug proved to actually work quite well at reducing specific tumors, and the FDA approved it for licensure. Imclone's stock has now risen much higher than it was when Martha dumped her shares. Had she just had faith in the company and its product and held onto her stocks, she could have avoided all this trouble, and made much more money in the bargain.
If you believe in the company, you buy and hold the investment to realize a profit in the long run. Martha used to work on Wall Street, and should have practiced whaat most investment advisors have been preaching for decades. Greed, and perhaps panic, clouded her judgment.
I received several copies of the settlement letter at my office, but since I work for the state government, I wasn't sure how to go about filing a claim. I just assumed the all-knowing bureaucrats in Sacramento were going to take care of this themselves. Apparently, they don't have a clue either.
As someone who finally bought a home three years ago, I've discovered that paying off your balance is the last thing you want to do to build a good credit history. The credit analysts want to know how well you handle debt and if you pay your balance every month, you won't have any. Thus, your credit rating will be very low unless you have a large debt load and you pay it off on time and are reliable with your installments.
I couldn't even qualify for a VISA back in the 1980s until I bought a new car. I couldn't even have bought that car without someone with a credit history to co-sign the loan for me. Once we had paid half the car loan back, we were inundated with credit card offers. We had some of the best credit going, and naturally, ended up with a large credit card debt. Then, of course, we couldn't afford the down payment for a house.
Finally, after paying off three credit cards, we kind of balanced our debt load and got another credit check. That proved we were "credit worthy" and we finally qualified for a home loan. But our financial analyst said if we'd paid off all our credit cards, our credit rating would have gone down instead of up.
Sounds to me like both parties to the deal should have done more homework before agreeing to such a "good faith handshake" type of unwritten contract. The Sheriff's department could have reserved a .gov domain with the county at no charge at all, then the domain name would not be an issue. Mr. Richard should have known what his costs would be up front and could have negotiated "in-kind free publicity" compensation for a period of time, then re-negotiated if he felt it wasn't paying off adequately. In any event, what other client sites was he hosting that he would not have without the publicity from the Sheriff's site? The article doesn't go into that kind of detail. Are his other customers happy with his work? Are they rallying to his defense now that his business has been seized and their own sites are shut down as well?
Clearly, the Sheriff's office has over-reacted, just as Mr. Richard over-reacted. All of this could have been avoided (or settled amicably) if it had been done in a regular business-like manner (written contracts, well defined Service Level Agreements, etc.). Then, if the parties were unhappy with the terms of the agreement, the contract could be terminated or renegotiated and everyone (and their lawyers) would be relatively happy. As it is, the guy looks like a clueless jerk trying to extort money from the taxpayers, and the Sheriff's office looks like jackbooted thugs seizing private property and shutting down a local business.
It appears Mr. Richard was an amateur network admin/webmaster (and reserve deputy) who didn't really know how to run a business and the Sheriff's Department are amateur nazis who don't know how to maintain a website or have their county IT staff do the job they're supposed to do. Both parties have made serious mistakes and should have known better than to get themselves into such a mess.
Were you around when our manned moon missions were launced in the 1960's and 1970's? Apollo 8 took three days to get to Luna, and three days to return. Six days round trip. The missions that landed took longer because the landing crew spent about 18-24 hours on the lunar surface.
And the whole point of going to the moon was for military, rather than scientific, purposes. A base in orbit would have to be periodically boosted to maintain that orbit (remember when Mir tumbled back to Earth because Russia could no longer affort to maintain it), whereas the moon is pretty much stable, and isn't likely to come crashing down on us. But use a mass driver to throw rocks from the moon back to Earth, and you've got a very cheap, very destructive weapon on your hands.
Your next reading assignment is Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Your last paragraph is a bit misleading. The level of overhead in California's state government is greater than you even imagine. I work for the state government (as a contractor) and I see the colossal waste firsthand. Not only could we save millions of dollars by better implementing open source solutions, we could save even more by doing the same kind of belt-tightening that private businesses have to do in tough economic times.
Unionized state employees are exempt from layoffs, even though most of them are worthless layabouts who probably would be among the first sent packing if they were working in the private sector (assuming any private corporation would even hire them). They simply cannot be fired, no matter how poorly they perform.
It was the California State Employees Association that twisted Gray Davis' arm to give them a 5% pay raise in exchange for their endorsement just before the 2002 election, at a time when he knew damned well the state couldn't afford it. The Prison Guard union asked for even more payback, and he gladly gave it to them. Now that Arnold is in the governors' office, he's asking both unions to re-negotiate their contracts because he knows that when all other California citizens have had to forego raises (even the Teacher's Union, for chrissakes), only these two ended up getting more money out of the taxpayers. And he knows that the money still isn't there to pay them without borrowing it from somwhere else.
On the IT side (the one I work in), we were all informed that the State of California is an all Microsoft shop. We had a major project to migrate all our servers off Novell NetWare and move to Windows NT. We still have most of our infrastructure running on NT4 and only a few servers have been upgraded to Win2K/Win2K3. Imagine our surprise when the Oracle scandal broke and we found out that in exchange for a $25,000 campaign contribution, Gray Davis had purchase more seat licenses for Oracle database software than there were employees in the government! And at the time, most of us were training for Microsoft SQL2000 as our primary database platform.
This is the kind of corruption that sparked the recall in the first place. I don't know if Arnold will be able to fix it, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.