I agree with you completely. To declare the death of the software industry dead is utter nonsense.
To me, it would be like Southern Pacific (or any other 19th century railroad) declaring the transportation industry dead in 1890's because the continent had been crossed and the best days of growth were behind them. Little could they imagine the growth and innovation in the transportation industry over the next century.
Perhaps Larry Ellison suffers from the same myopic vision that afflicted the railroad tycoons of the 19th century. As smart and rich as they were, they failed to understand that they were in the transportation business and not just the railroad business. I would be very surprised if the same scenario doesn't play out again with the software industry in the 21st century.
I hate to stretch the analogy too far, but I would be very surprised if somewhere there isn't the modern day equivalent of Wilbur and Orville tinkering away in their bicycle shop in 1903.
that to work off their debt the RIAA would exploit these students in media campaign where they confess theirs sins against the recording industry and warn how P2P file swapping can ruin your life.
Probably wouldn't impact other kids, but scare the bejesus out of some parents who would have all the more reason to further restrict little Johnny's and Jane's Internet access.
It is pretty dark and wet in the small intestine as well and these seem to work there. Perhaps it would help you out if you flushed one of these down the toilet and picked it up at the waste treament plan several hours later where you can get pictures of it's journey.
Refuting the SBC patent claims in an article is one thing. Refuting the claims in a court of law is quite another. This is going to cost small sites like museumtour.com real money to fight. If they capitulate and pay the damn licensing fee to SBC then precedent will be set and it will cost that much more for the next round of victims. And so on, and so on...
The game SBC is playing creates a pretty pernicious circle that works to the benefit of those with deep pockets. The best we can hope for is that at some point the whole cycle gets absurd enough that lawmakers take notice and finally fix the situation once a for all.
Like everyone else, I'm absolutely against child pornography. However, I am also against laws that are unenforceable or even worse, where an individual or business cannot reasonably avoid breaking the law.
This law makes about as much sense as taking a law that says it is "illegal to walk on the grass" to the extreme that it is also "illegal to look at the grass". The only possible way to enforce such a law is to blind everyone.
Likewise, the only way to ensure compliance with this law is to simply shut down all ISPs in Pennsylvania. After all, ISPs have no control over the actions of those at either end of a web transaction and monitoring all potential transactions for violations of the law is virtually impossible.
I'm no lawyer and not familiar with the current status of ISPs, but I thought that it has generally been established that ISPs are to be regarded as "common carriers" and thus offered immunity from laws such as this. Obviously, Pennsylvania doesn't think so. Otherwise they would hold their regional phone companies to the same standard as the ISPs they connect to. It seems logical that a phone company would be just as culpable as an ISP in that the very same digitized bits of child pornography that traverse the ISP also traverses the phone companies DSL and phone lines? Sure, it would be horrendously expensive and inconvenient for the phone companies to monitor and stop the "bad bits", but it is technically possible.
Please. A link to the Washington Monthly? Best described as a farm club for would be liberal journalists. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Even liberals don't pretend the journal is unbiased. Some people really believe everything the neo-liberals spew...
Too bad the Syrians and Iranians weren't clandestinely smuggling these phones in to be used by the Iraqi military along with the night vision goggles and anti-tank weapons. It would have made the coalition's job of ferreting these guys out of civilian neighborhoods a tad bit easier.
An even more obscure Osborne computer was the Osborne 3 (on the left next to the Vixen prototypes). I saw the system demoed at a FOG meeting as the company was struggling to come out of bankruptcy -- circa ~1984. If I recall correctly, the Osborne 3 was a PC compatible system (8086 processor), ran MS-DOS and at that time it would have been one of the first portables to sport (gasp!) an LCD display.
Come on, give me a break. With regards to the Kyoto Accords Bush did nothing more than be intellectually honest enough to announce the demise of an already doomed treaty. In the three years after signing the treaty in 1997 Clinton did nothing to insure the implementation of the Kyoto Accord during his term in office. In fact, it was in 1999 while Clinton was still in office that the U.S. Senate (the legislative body that must actually must ratify treaties according to the U.S constitution) did consider the the treaty and voted against it 95 to 0 in a non-binding resolution. Even a liberal Democratic leader such as Senator John Kerry was quoted as saying the following about the treaty: "What we have here is not ratifiable in the Senate in my judgment." After this rejection, Clinton didn't have the political cojones to formally submit the Kyoto treaty for a formal vote in the U.S. Senate where it surely would have went down to defeat. How can Bush be held responsible for a treaty his predecessor ignored and was already overwhelmingly rejected in the U.S. Senate by both Republicans and Democrats alike?
Well, if you're going to throw theories out about what the graphs mean, why not turn them around. What if the source of the reduction in temperature (another side-effect of solar energy) caused a reduction in CO2.
I would tend to agree with your prespective that one should be very cautious before determining causality from the graphs discussed in the parent posting. It seems to me that a giant icesheet smothering 1/3 of the Northern Hemisphere would tend to put a pretty good damper on CO2 emmissions from natural decay of plant matter in what today is largely forests and grasslands in Canada, Europe and Siberia.
Re:It now seems appropriate to mention....
on
The Linux Uprising
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· Score: 1
While I would not write Microsoft's obituary just yet, but I certainly agree that Microsoft is facing serious problems in the future. The basic problem is that open source software is either already or soon will be making a full frontal assault on the bulk of the areas where Microsoft makes it's largest profits. Major inroads have already been made in the server market and the desktop market will certainly follow sooner or later. I have a lot of doubt that Microsoft can innovate quick enough on the desktop to outpace the slow, but relentless progress that open source has demonstrated it can make over time.
Open source may not be too much of a competitor now on the desktop, but the Linux operating system and variety of desktop productivity applications such as Open Office, Ximian, and KOffice are just going to keep on getting better and better in terms of ease of use and functionality. How much better will Windows and MS Office be in three years? How much better will alternate open source solutions be in three years? I don't know if it will be two years or five years for open source to become a completely viable alternate solution for 75% of desktop users, but time is not on Microsoft's side. And, when this does occur, it will hurt Microsoft in the pocketbook.
Many have been commenting on the fact that any asteroid of major significance will likely be spotted decades, if not centuries, before impact. Clearly there is a reasonable expectation that we could muster the technology needed to divert a threatening object over such a long time span.
The real danger for our species is not from reasonably predictable asteroids in the inner solar system, but from comets coming from the Oort cloud in deep space. Comets can range anywhere from a few miles to 100's of miles in diameter - large enough to ruin anyone's day. At that size and traveling at 30,000+ mph it doesn't matter if it's made of rock or ice. What's worse, comets come from pretty much random directions, travel very fast through the inner solar system and we would likely have less than a year warning before impact. However, on the bright side such a comet would most certainly be seen by amateur astronomers who would sound the warning for the rest of us.
It should be pretty sobering to everyone that just within the last 10 years we saw an extinction level collision of a comet with Jupiter. These things are rare, but this shit does happen...
Perhaps a more modern day version of this hoax would have the following plaque turn up in an abandoned warehouse in Nevada. We can then sit back and enjoy watching the crackpots stumble over themselves yelling they told us so...
Any one know if plans to move forward with the Shuttle-C are being considered? Hopefully from the turmoil of the Columbia disaster decisions to move forward with an unmanned heavy lift vehicle will finally be made. Basing it on bought and paid for shuttle technology just makes too much sense. The only thing I'm not sure about is if the SSMEs are cheap enough to throw away after a single launch? I thought they were fairly expensive pieces of technology.
I certainly like the idea of a revised version of the Apollo capsule as well. Such a capsule could probably be made reusable and could be used to take people all the way to Lunar orbit if needed. I'm just afraid that NASA will want to strap wings to whatever they build and turn a $1B project in to $10B.
With these thing done, we could then seriously start talking about where we want to go beyond LEO.
At my company, Atomz, our focus is on a different segment of the search market than Google's -- hosted site search rather than Google's primary emphasis on Internet wide search. Therefore we most certainly have different technology requirements to satisfy our unique business needs. At Atomz we manage search and content management services for more than 50,000 web sites we are constantly examining issues that impact our gross margins.
From this perspective the overhead to maintain our server infrastructure has much more to do with maintaining proper hosting facilities (clean bandwidth, power, backups, etc...) and the cost of IT people to manage and maintain our systems rather than the cost differential between low-end and high-end CPU architectures. For us, fewer systems means lest costly data center real estate and a fewer number of people required to maintain the systems which directly impacts our margins. This tends to push us more towards a fewer number of servers with more powerful CPUs and better I/O performance than a larger number of bottom-end systems would provide us.
We share some of the same co-location facilities with Google some I'm more than a bit familiar with the Google's approach to maintaining their Internet wide search service. In our segment of the search market we could not stay in business using the same approach of maintaining a massive number of very low-end servers. But then again, common sense would indicate this to be so because are in a different segment of the market with it's own unique needs.
The overall point I'm trying to make is that it is a gross oversimplification to assume "What's good for Google is necessarily good for the industry as a whole". The availability of more powerful CPUs and higher performance storage will have a more dramatic impact on some businesses than others and the continued role of Moores law for another decade will be welcomed and embraced by many businesses.
Nowadays CEOs/CFOs/CTOs are only interested in outsourcing to other companies, that in turn use close source software to keep "trade secrets" proprietary, so they can charge an arm and a leg for it.
Not entirely true. What you say may apply to large corporations, but I can tell you that there are 10,000's of technical managers at medium to small organizations who are looking for solutions that #1 work, and #2 are cost effective to implement and support. A book that builds a solid business case for open source software can go a long ways to helping technical managers introduce open source software technology into these organizations.
At my start-up company we use open source software extensively and I credit that decision as one of the reasons we can be considered one of the dot-com survivors rather than roadkill. For us, open source software allows a small team of engineers and IT staff to be in tight control over the software that delivers our services. We have access to every line of source code that runs our systems from the initial boot sequence to complex database operations. In the past I worked on projects that were at the mercy of Microsoft and Sun to deliver bug-free software technology in a timely manner. When you are small you don't have the respect or clout to get these companies to be responsive and your ability to fix things yourself are extremely limited. For instance, I went through a nail biting experience of being 2 weeks from shipping a major software product that was heavily dependent on major bugs in the MS and Sun Java VM being fixed before stability and uptime requirements of the product could be proven. In the end we had to punt and ship the product anyway hoping that it was good enough to meet customer requirements. Since mandating open source software at my new company such experiences are a thing of the past because if necessary we can roll up or sleeves and fix thing ourself. In practice this rarely happens, but it let's me sleep a liitle better at night.
We�re better off with coins and paper currency
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Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
I have no doubt that these smart cards will be very difficult, if not nearly impossible, to crack so that money can be surreptitiously added to them. However, I am very confident they will eventually be cracked and probably in a completely unexpected manner.
The same is true for paper currency. It is also very difficult, but possible, to make realistic looking conterfeit bills that can be passed for the real thing. The big difference here is that just because one person can successfully learn the skills and gather the equipment needed to create convincing counterfeit bills it is still very difficult to transfer the necessary skills to other people wishing to do the same thing. This is not true once smart cards containing cash are successfully cracked. It's a safe bet that knowledge of such a crack would spread like wildfire across the web. Hell, it will probably just be a 100k download and some parts bought from RadioShack.
It is easy to imagine the whole smart card system collapsing over night because millions of consumers could suddenly recharge their smart cards with cash using their home PC (unless of course we are all using government mandated Palladium systems).
If you think industry and government has headaches with DeCSS, it will be peanuts compared to DeSMARTCARD if these smart cards do succeed in replacing cash on a large scale. It will bring a whole new meaning to "script kiddie".
We're probably better off just sticking with low-tech coins and paper currency...
Yes, Enron and the whole power debacle had its role, but only a minor one. The real root of the problem is quite simple. While the Internet bubble was pushing California state income tax revenue to unsustainable levels the state government grew to consume every penny of revenue that came in. Now that the bubble burst the state is starved for revenue. Last year Gov. Davis signed a $75B budget. This year the proposed budget is $62B including $4B increase in income taxes and other fees. Roughly a 22% year to year decrease in revenue, but back to roughly what the budget was in 1999.
Virtually every tax paying citizen and business in California is seeing their incomes and revenues reduced in a similar manner. In many cases the reduction is MUCH greater than just 22%, but we are all dealing within it our own manner. It's time that both the federal and state governments learn to have the same basic fiscal responsibility asked of citizens and business in boom and bust cycles.
During the boom there were proposals to actually give tax rebates back to the taxpayers because we were simply paying more than the state government needed to run operations. In retrospect, this would have been the wise thing to do because it would have put some brakes on the state government growing to an unsustainable level. Instead, we are now seeing the politicians scramble to protect their favorite pork projects while funding for basic services such as schools, public safety and other public infrastructure are reduced to level less than they would have been had the boom never happened.
Too often it seems people are quick to criticize those who want to see smaller government or at least put severe limits on its growth. Often there are good reasons for doing so other than the accusation such people are stingy, selfish or worse.
In some ways I think we agree. My point is that if NASA embarks on a project to build a replacement for the shuttle that is every bit as complicated and as expensive as the shuttle there will not be any room in the budget to develop more interesting things like nuclear powered engines to get us to Mars in less than two months. Expecting to see a 2x or 3x increase in NASA's budget to afford to do everything is probably just wishful thinking.
Think of it this way. If you are a dragster racer and you have $200,000, are you going to spend $25,000 on the dragster to win the race (think Prometheus) and $175,000 on the truck and trailer that get you between the races (think shuttle). In my opinion that is exactly what NASA is doing with the shuttle and any plans to replace it. It just doesn't make sense when you are working with a constrained budget and there are bigger goals to be aiming for.
I'm not sure putting our priorities on designing the next shuttle is what's really needed since it is basically a truck to LEO. In retrospect, in the early 70's NASA would have been much better off ramping up production and building scores of Saturn V's, a hundred Saturn 1B's and a few dozen Skylabs. With 20/20 hindsight, big dumb boosters were probably the best way to go three decades ago and that probably still holds true today. Who knows, maybe we still would have lost 1 out of 50 Saturn launches as well, but at least would have a lot more interesting stuff everywhere between LEO and the Moon for the same money.
For me I'm much more interested in spending the bulk of NASA's limited budget on interesting payloads that leave LEO rather than developing trucks to deliver the payloads to LEO. After all, 60's technology was fine for getting us to LEO and the Shuttle isn't going to take NASA to Mars.
Since the beginning of the shuttle program there were plans for a shuttle derived unmanned heavy lift vehicle that basically looked like a huge boxcar strapped to the side of the external tank. The only recoverable parts were the engines themselves, which would parachute to Earth after entering the atmosphere with an ablative heat shield. I believe that with most of the weight of the shuttle structure, wings, and crew cabin removed, such a booster would have had nearly the capacity of the Saturn V. It seems that such plans could be resurrected and within a year or two we have a heavy lift vehicle that can take advantage of economies of scale for shuttle solid rocket boosters and external tanks which I believe, ironically, are the cheapest parts of the shuttle. NASA can then use the proven Soyuz (thank you very much Russia for keeping the rocket and capsule assembly lines going) to get human crews into orbit until some suitable replacement is made.
Once NASA again has heavy lift capability it can then concentrate on truly interesting payloads that can take us to Mars and beyond. I'll cry if NASA does get the go ahead for a Mars mission and comes up with a scheme where dozens of shuttle missions (either the remaining three vehicles or next generation shuttles) are required to build the spacecraft in orbit from small components.
Having been born in the mid-60's, I really don't have any memory of the golden era of space travel. For my generation it seems that NASA has always been struggling to keep it's budget and to find some purpose worthy of its original mission to get to the moon in one decade. The planetary missions of the late 70's and 80's were exciting to people like me who were interested in astronomy and space, but even these missions seem to be a fading memory.
Now that I have young children, I would truly love to see this nation embark on a bold adventure that will ignite and challenge their imagination. Even if NASA started planning a Mars mission tomorrow it would be at least a decade or more before the first landing. I would relish being able to raise my children against the backdrop of having such a mission planned and follow with them each step necessary to take the next giant leap for mankind. From such an ambitious mission perhaps my children and their generation will learn by example that with planning, courage and commitment this nation can continue to achieve great things. Perhaps, just perhaps, their generation would then be inspired to take the next leap beyond the inner solar system, and so on, and so on.
As I see it, we pay so much in taxes for things that are mundane and temporary. I would not object to a small sliver of my taxes going towards something that is not so much for us, but for the generations to come. Just as our generation does not lament the money and resources spent by our parents four decades ago to reach the moon, our children will not lament the money and resources it will take to reach Mars. They will only lament if our generation fails to have the vision and courage to take the next steps beyond those taken by our parent's generation.
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I agree with you completely. To declare the death of the software industry dead is utter nonsense.
To me, it would be like Southern Pacific (or any other 19th century railroad) declaring the transportation industry dead in 1890's because the continent had been crossed and the best days of growth were behind them. Little could they imagine the growth and innovation in the transportation industry over the next century.
Perhaps Larry Ellison suffers from the same myopic vision that afflicted the railroad tycoons of the 19th century. As smart and rich as they were, they failed to understand that they were in the transportation business and not just the railroad business. I would be very surprised if the same scenario doesn't play out again with the software industry in the 21st century.
I hate to stretch the analogy too far, but I would be very surprised if somewhere there isn't the modern day equivalent of Wilbur and Orville tinkering away in their bicycle shop in 1903.
that to work off their debt the RIAA would exploit these students in media campaign where they confess theirs sins against the recording industry and warn how P2P file swapping can ruin your life.
Probably wouldn't impact other kids, but scare the bejesus out of some parents who would have all the more reason to further restrict little Johnny's and Jane's Internet access.
It is pretty dark and wet in the small intestine as well and these seem to work there. Perhaps it would help you out if you flushed one of these down the toilet and picked it up at the waste treament plan several hours later where you can get pictures of it's journey.
Refuting the SBC patent claims in an article is one thing. Refuting the claims in a court of law is quite another. This is going to cost small sites like museumtour.com real money to fight. If they capitulate and pay the damn licensing fee to SBC then precedent will be set and it will cost that much more for the next round of victims. And so on, and so on...
The game SBC is playing creates a pretty pernicious circle that works to the benefit of those with deep pockets. The best we can hope for is that at some point the whole cycle gets absurd enough that lawmakers take notice and finally fix the situation once a for all.
Like everyone else, I'm absolutely against child pornography. However, I am also against laws that are unenforceable or even worse, where an individual or business cannot reasonably avoid breaking the law.
This law makes about as much sense as taking a law that says it is "illegal to walk on the grass" to the extreme that it is also "illegal to look at the grass". The only possible way to enforce such a law is to blind everyone.
Likewise, the only way to ensure compliance with this law is to simply shut down all ISPs in Pennsylvania. After all, ISPs have no control over the actions of those at either end of a web transaction and monitoring all potential transactions for violations of the law is virtually impossible.
I'm no lawyer and not familiar with the current status of ISPs, but I thought that it has generally been established that ISPs are to be regarded as "common carriers" and thus offered immunity from laws such as this. Obviously, Pennsylvania doesn't think so. Otherwise they would hold their regional phone companies to the same standard as the ISPs they connect to. It seems logical that a phone company would be just as culpable as an ISP in that the very same digitized bits of child pornography that traverse the ISP also traverses the phone companies DSL and phone lines? Sure, it would be horrendously expensive and inconvenient for the phone companies to monitor and stop the "bad bits", but it is technically possible.
Please. A link to the Washington Monthly? Best described as a farm club for would be liberal journalists. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Even liberals don't pretend the journal is unbiased. Some people really believe everything the neo-liberals spew...
What would a sentient machine think of "reality television"?
Too bad the Syrians and Iranians weren't clandestinely smuggling these phones in to be used by the Iraqi military along with the night vision goggles and anti-tank weapons. It would have made the coalition's job of ferreting these guys out of civilian neighborhoods a tad bit easier.
Yes, it was known as the Vixen. The specs I was able to dig up are:
Osborne Vixen
Built in 1984
Price: $1,300 USD
CPU: Z80A 4 MHz
Memory: 64KB RAM
Interfaces: RS232C, parallel
Monitor: 7" Amber
Text Resolution: 80x24
Graphics Resolution: 640x240
OS:CP/M 2.2
FDD: 2 x 360 KB FDD (DS, DD)
Keyboard: 61 Keys
Size: (WxDxH) 32cm x 41cm x 16cm
Weight: 8.2 Kg
Languages: MBasic
Options: 10 MB HDD ($1,500 USD)
An even more obscure Osborne computer was the Osborne 3 (on the left next to the Vixen prototypes). I saw the system demoed at a FOG meeting as the company was struggling to come out of bankruptcy -- circa ~1984. If I recall correctly, the Osborne 3 was a PC compatible system (8086 processor), ran MS-DOS and at that time it would have been one of the first portables to sport (gasp!) an LCD display.
For those interested, the Vixen is the system that was pre-announced and caused the demise of Osborne Computer due to the ensuing cash flow crunch.
Having an Osborne 1 at the time and active in FOG I remember lusting over the Vixen. How times have changed...
Come on, give me a break. With regards to the Kyoto Accords Bush did nothing more than be intellectually honest enough to announce the demise of an already doomed treaty. In the three years after signing the treaty in 1997 Clinton did nothing to insure the implementation of the Kyoto Accord during his term in office. In fact, it was in 1999 while Clinton was still in office that the U.S. Senate (the legislative body that must actually must ratify treaties according to the U.S constitution) did consider the the treaty and voted against it 95 to 0 in a non-binding resolution. Even a liberal Democratic leader such as Senator John Kerry was quoted as saying the following about the treaty: "What we have here is not ratifiable in the Senate in my judgment." After this rejection, Clinton didn't have the political cojones to formally submit the Kyoto treaty for a formal vote in the U.S. Senate where it surely would have went down to defeat. How can Bush be held responsible for a treaty his predecessor ignored and was already overwhelmingly rejected in the U.S. Senate by both Republicans and Democrats alike?
Well, if you're going to throw theories out about what the graphs mean, why not turn them around. What if the source of the reduction in temperature (another side-effect of solar energy) caused a reduction in CO2.
I would tend to agree with your prespective that one should be very cautious before determining causality from the graphs discussed in the parent posting. It seems to me that a giant icesheet smothering 1/3 of the Northern Hemisphere would tend to put a pretty good damper on CO2 emmissions from natural decay of plant matter in what today is largely forests and grasslands in Canada, Europe and Siberia.
While I would not write Microsoft's obituary just yet, but I certainly agree that Microsoft is facing serious problems in the future. The basic problem is that open source software is either already or soon will be making a full frontal assault on the bulk of the areas where Microsoft makes it's largest profits. Major inroads have already been made in the server market and the desktop market will certainly follow sooner or later. I have a lot of doubt that Microsoft can innovate quick enough on the desktop to outpace the slow, but relentless progress that open source has demonstrated it can make over time.
Open source may not be too much of a competitor now on the desktop, but the Linux operating system and variety of desktop productivity applications such as Open Office, Ximian, and KOffice are just going to keep on getting better and better in terms of ease of use and functionality. How much better will Windows and MS Office be in three years? How much better will alternate open source solutions be in three years? I don't know if it will be two years or five years for open source to become a completely viable alternate solution for 75% of desktop users, but time is not on Microsoft's side. And, when this does occur, it will hurt Microsoft in the pocketbook.
Many have been commenting on the fact that any asteroid of major significance will likely be spotted decades, if not centuries, before impact. Clearly there is a reasonable expectation that we could muster the technology needed to divert a threatening object over such a long time span.
The real danger for our species is not from reasonably predictable asteroids in the inner solar system, but from comets coming from the Oort cloud in deep space. Comets can range anywhere from a few miles to 100's of miles in diameter - large enough to ruin anyone's day. At that size and traveling at 30,000+ mph it doesn't matter if it's made of rock or ice. What's worse, comets come from pretty much random directions, travel very fast through the inner solar system and we would likely have less than a year warning before impact. However, on the bright side such a comet would most certainly be seen by amateur astronomers who would sound the warning for the rest of us.
It should be pretty sobering to everyone that just within the last 10 years we saw an extinction level collision of a comet with Jupiter. These things are rare, but this shit does happen...
Perhaps a more modern day version of this hoax would have the following plaque turn up in an abandoned warehouse in Nevada. We can then sit back and enjoy watching the crackpots stumble over themselves yelling they told us so...
Any one know if plans to move forward with the Shuttle-C are being considered? Hopefully from the turmoil of the Columbia disaster decisions to move forward with an unmanned heavy lift vehicle will finally be made. Basing it on bought and paid for shuttle technology just makes too much sense. The only thing I'm not sure about is if the SSMEs are cheap enough to throw away after a single launch? I thought they were fairly expensive pieces of technology.
I certainly like the idea of a revised version of the Apollo capsule as well. Such a capsule could probably be made reusable and could be used to take people all the way to Lunar orbit if needed. I'm just afraid that NASA will want to strap wings to whatever they build and turn a $1B project in to $10B.
With these thing done, we could then seriously start talking about where we want to go beyond LEO.
Unfortunately I can imagine the ads. Still a pain in the ass, just fuzzier.
At my company, Atomz, our focus is on a different segment of the search market than Google's -- hosted site search rather than Google's primary emphasis on Internet wide search. Therefore we most certainly have different technology requirements to satisfy our unique business needs. At Atomz we manage search and content management services for more than 50,000 web sites we are constantly examining issues that impact our gross margins.
From this perspective the overhead to maintain our server infrastructure has much more to do with maintaining proper hosting facilities (clean bandwidth, power, backups, etc...) and the cost of IT people to manage and maintain our systems rather than the cost differential between low-end and high-end CPU architectures. For us, fewer systems means lest costly data center real estate and a fewer number of people required to maintain the systems which directly impacts our margins. This tends to push us more towards a fewer number of servers with more powerful CPUs and better I/O performance than a larger number of bottom-end systems would provide us.
We share some of the same co-location facilities with Google some I'm more than a bit familiar with the Google's approach to maintaining their Internet wide search service. In our segment of the search market we could not stay in business using the same approach of maintaining a massive number of very low-end servers. But then again, common sense would indicate this to be so because are in a different segment of the market with it's own unique needs.
The overall point I'm trying to make is that it is a gross oversimplification to assume "What's good for Google is necessarily good for the industry as a whole". The availability of more powerful CPUs and higher performance storage will have a more dramatic impact on some businesses than others and the continued role of Moores law for another decade will be welcomed and embraced by many businesses.
Nowadays CEOs/CFOs/CTOs are only interested in outsourcing to other companies, that in turn use close source software to keep "trade secrets" proprietary, so they can charge an arm and a leg for it.
Not entirely true. What you say may apply to large corporations, but I can tell you that there are 10,000's of technical managers at medium to small organizations who are looking for solutions that #1 work, and #2 are cost effective to implement and support. A book that builds a solid business case for open source software can go a long ways to helping technical managers introduce open source software technology into these organizations.
At my start-up company we use open source software extensively and I credit that decision as one of the reasons we can be considered one of the dot-com survivors rather than roadkill. For us, open source software allows a small team of engineers and IT staff to be in tight control over the software that delivers our services. We have access to every line of source code that runs our systems from the initial boot sequence to complex database operations. In the past I worked on projects that were at the mercy of Microsoft and Sun to deliver bug-free software technology in a timely manner. When you are small you don't have the respect or clout to get these companies to be responsive and your ability to fix things yourself are extremely limited. For instance, I went through a nail biting experience of being 2 weeks from shipping a major software product that was heavily dependent on major bugs in the MS and Sun Java VM being fixed before stability and uptime requirements of the product could be proven. In the end we had to punt and ship the product anyway hoping that it was good enough to meet customer requirements. Since mandating open source software at my new company such experiences are a thing of the past because if necessary we can roll up or sleeves and fix thing ourself. In practice this rarely happens, but it let's me sleep a liitle better at night.
I have no doubt that these smart cards will be very difficult, if not nearly impossible, to crack so that money can be surreptitiously added to them. However, I am very confident they will eventually be cracked and probably in a completely unexpected manner.
The same is true for paper currency. It is also very difficult, but possible, to make realistic looking conterfeit bills that can be passed for the real thing. The big difference here is that just because one person can successfully learn the skills and gather the equipment needed to create convincing counterfeit bills it is still very difficult to transfer the necessary skills to other people wishing to do the same thing. This is not true once smart cards containing cash are successfully cracked. It's a safe bet that knowledge of such a crack would spread like wildfire across the web. Hell, it will probably just be a 100k download and some parts bought from RadioShack.
It is easy to imagine the whole smart card system collapsing over night because millions of consumers could suddenly recharge their smart cards with cash using their home PC (unless of course we are all using government mandated Palladium systems).
If you think industry and government has headaches with DeCSS, it will be peanuts compared to DeSMARTCARD if these smart cards do succeed in replacing cash on a large scale. It will bring a whole new meaning to "script kiddie".
We're probably better off just sticking with low-tech coins and paper currency...
Yes, Enron and the whole power debacle had its role, but only a minor one. The real root of the problem is quite simple. While the Internet bubble was pushing California state income tax revenue to unsustainable levels the state government grew to consume every penny of revenue that came in. Now that the bubble burst the state is starved for revenue. Last year Gov. Davis signed a $75B budget. This year the proposed budget is $62B including $4B increase in income taxes and other fees. Roughly a 22% year to year decrease in revenue, but back to roughly what the budget was in 1999.
Virtually every tax paying citizen and business in California is seeing their incomes and revenues reduced in a similar manner. In many cases the reduction is MUCH greater than just 22%, but we are all dealing within it our own manner. It's time that both the federal and state governments learn to have the same basic fiscal responsibility asked of citizens and business in boom and bust cycles.
During the boom there were proposals to actually give tax rebates back to the taxpayers because we were simply paying more than the state government needed to run operations. In retrospect, this would have been the wise thing to do because it would have put some brakes on the state government growing to an unsustainable level. Instead, we are now seeing the politicians scramble to protect their favorite pork projects while funding for basic services such as schools, public safety and other public infrastructure are reduced to level less than they would have been had the boom never happened.
Too often it seems people are quick to criticize those who want to see smaller government or at least put severe limits on its growth. Often there are good reasons for doing so other than the accusation such people are stingy, selfish or worse.
Any one actually interested in seeing the numbers may be interested in this link. Check out the Chart A, Historical Data, General Fund Balance document.
In some ways I think we agree. My point is that if NASA embarks on a project to build a replacement for the shuttle that is every bit as complicated and as expensive as the shuttle there will not be any room in the budget to develop more interesting things like nuclear powered engines to get us to Mars in less than two months. Expecting to see a 2x or 3x increase in NASA's budget to afford to do everything is probably just wishful thinking.
Think of it this way. If you are a dragster racer and you have $200,000, are you going to spend $25,000 on the dragster to win the race (think Prometheus) and $175,000 on the truck and trailer that get you between the races (think shuttle). In my opinion that is exactly what NASA is doing with the shuttle and any plans to replace it. It just doesn't make sense when you are working with a constrained budget and there are bigger goals to be aiming for.
I'm not sure putting our priorities on designing the next shuttle is what's really needed since it is basically a truck to LEO. In retrospect, in the early 70's NASA would have been much better off ramping up production and building scores of Saturn V's, a hundred Saturn 1B's and a few dozen Skylabs. With 20/20 hindsight, big dumb boosters were probably the best way to go three decades ago and that probably still holds true today. Who knows, maybe we still would have lost 1 out of 50 Saturn launches as well, but at least would have a lot more interesting stuff everywhere between LEO and the Moon for the same money.
For me I'm much more interested in spending the bulk of NASA's limited budget on interesting payloads that leave LEO rather than developing trucks to deliver the payloads to LEO. After all, 60's technology was fine for getting us to LEO and the Shuttle isn't going to take NASA to Mars.
Since the beginning of the shuttle program there were plans for a shuttle derived unmanned heavy lift vehicle that basically looked like a huge boxcar strapped to the side of the external tank. The only recoverable parts were the engines themselves, which would parachute to Earth after entering the atmosphere with an ablative heat shield. I believe that with most of the weight of the shuttle structure, wings, and crew cabin removed, such a booster would have had nearly the capacity of the Saturn V. It seems that such plans could be resurrected and within a year or two we have a heavy lift vehicle that can take advantage of economies of scale for shuttle solid rocket boosters and external tanks which I believe, ironically, are the cheapest parts of the shuttle. NASA can then use the proven Soyuz (thank you very much Russia for keeping the rocket and capsule assembly lines going) to get human crews into orbit until some suitable replacement is made.
Once NASA again has heavy lift capability it can then concentrate on truly interesting payloads that can take us to Mars and beyond. I'll cry if NASA does get the go ahead for a Mars mission and comes up with a scheme where dozens of shuttle missions (either the remaining three vehicles or next generation shuttles) are required to build the spacecraft in orbit from small components.
Having been born in the mid-60's, I really don't have any memory of the golden era of space travel. For my generation it seems that NASA has always been struggling to keep it's budget and to find some purpose worthy of its original mission to get to the moon in one decade. The planetary missions of the late 70's and 80's were exciting to people like me who were interested in astronomy and space, but even these missions seem to be a fading memory.
Now that I have young children, I would truly love to see this nation embark on a bold adventure that will ignite and challenge their imagination. Even if NASA started planning a Mars mission tomorrow it would be at least a decade or more before the first landing. I would relish being able to raise my children against the backdrop of having such a mission planned and follow with them each step necessary to take the next giant leap for mankind. From such an ambitious mission perhaps my children and their generation will learn by example that with planning, courage and commitment this nation can continue to achieve great things. Perhaps, just perhaps, their generation would then be inspired to take the next leap beyond the inner solar system, and so on, and so on.
As I see it, we pay so much in taxes for things that are mundane and temporary. I would not object to a small sliver of my taxes going towards something that is not so much for us, but for the generations to come. Just as our generation does not lament the money and resources spent by our parents four decades ago to reach the moon, our children will not lament the money and resources it will take to reach Mars. They will only lament if our generation fails to have the vision and courage to take the next steps beyond those taken by our parent's generation.