Bringing back the XServe ? No one expects it to happen, so that'd be pretty big.
They're about due for refresh on both the Mini and MacPro, so they might have something else there. I'd personally be happy with an i5 or i7 Mini... or a smaller chassis for the MacPro and redundant power, so we have something that's not crap for using as a server.
I don't think it's meant as a total diagnosis... just something to help in treatment once the problem's been identified.
Although, I'd love for better diagnostics stuff.... waking up with goop in my hair and wires wrapped around my neck wasn't my idea of a good time. (how that didn't set off some alarm, and no one noticed, I have no idea)
So, as I'm at one of the few enterprises that actually has an Apple Rep...
We've been told no more xServes, as they're convinced that everyone would be fine with either a MacPro mounted sideways (which doesn't have the same density per RU, or a bunch of minis (you can get shelves for 'em... I'd go for the 1U that holds two, as the 2U ones that hold 4 just doesn't have sufficient space for cables), which doesn't have sufficient cores to handle heavy loads.
I tried asking about when they'd release an i7 mini. (well, I had to leave early, I had one of my co-workers ask, and she's annoyed at me because our Rep gave her some rude answer about how they don't know anything about upcoming hardware).
The only good news we got was that in 10.7, 'OS X Server' will just be a pack that gets installed on top of any client install...
If all you need the Mac for is for authentication services, the Mini will probably do you... unfortunately, the group I work for does scientific computing, and the number of cores per rack matters, as do redundant power supplies and a crapload of memory for the database servers.
Um... no. First off, the $3 goes to the cable company, and odds are, they're not paying that full amount to the channel owner, and there's overhead in managing who gets what channel that the cable companies insist is the reason that they can't provide general alacarte channels.
And if I'm paying extra for a single channel, I'm not sure that I'd want to be putting up with commercials on top of that. Hell, if I were only interested in a single TV show, I'd be better off just buying the individual ones on iTunes, or waiting for it to come out on DVD.
Although I admit, some of it's the 'not invented here' problem, one of the big reasons there isn't better collaboration is that most scientists don't know that someone's working on something similar.
I deal with software that works on FITS files. The two main fields that use FITS -- medical imaging and astronomy. Do you think the two collaborate? Hell no.
And even if you do find out about some great new tool... it's after it's been released. Which might be two or more years after they started development, so you've been duplicating work for all of that time.
I'm of the opinion that we need some sort of a cross-discipline registry for science software. List all of the stuff that can make plots... what formats they read, what file formats they can export to, what special features they have, etc. Let me search for all of the software that can read NetCDF files... or rice-compressed FITS, etc.
And then we need to get people to list their software (and most would, because if people use their software, and give acknowledgements in peer-reviewed papers, they can use that to justify continued funding), and in the future, we need people to list projects striving to make new software, so we know about it, and rather than expend effort to make something new, we can contribute to a project working on something similar.
There's a few issues... the first of which is called 'Dual Use'... basically, there's software that can be used for miltary purposes, which will *never* be put into the public domain.
Then there's stuff that might be able to be licensed, and there's a whole gaggle of lawyers who we have to get our stuff cleared through, so we can get stuff ceritifed that our work has no value, and the government isn't going to make any money off of it.
And then there's the security concerns... your stuff runs on a server? If you release it, and something's wrong, could it make it easier to hack your system? Well, then it's safer not to release it.
Right now, it's a challenge to get anything released. I've heard of people having their code reviewed for *years* before they could release it under GPL or BSD.
And as for the issues in the quality of the software being released for re-use, there's been an effort in the earth sciences to rank software for re-use, in the Reuse Readiness Levels
I completely agree with the not being proficient in programming languages. And they should be required to take some security classes if they're going to be writing any significant code that runs as a CGI or acts as a service. For some reason they don't like it when I refuse to run their shell script CGIs.... but I'd argue that they don't 'shape [it]... so that they can modify the codes easily'... Unless 'easily' means an attempt at a find & replace in 40+ places when they should've used a function in the first place... but unfortunately introducing some mistake that results in team of people spending a week doing nothing, while a couple of people try to figure out what went wrong.
Yes, there are parts that are still 'science' and have floating specifications... but then there's stuff like storing data in an archive and retrieving it. You might write some special cataloging system for it, but there is *no* reason for scientists who aren't archivists, and only barely programmers to be writing something from the ground up. It's a waste of effort, and it's a waste of tax payer's money that these things keep getting funded.
We've at least had some standardizations on file formats in the various disciplines. I'm hoping we can get some standardization in data systems to support data transport and mirroring as part of the NSF DataNet grants (although, I'm looking towards OODT, myself)
I'm looking forward to data browsing/ visualization standards (how many re-implementations do we really need to plot a few lines, map a grid onto an image, or allow someone to filter a table of data?).
Because really... if we make these tools universal, the scientists can get back to doing science, rather than wasting time re-implementing yet another tool that doesn't really do anything better than the other stuff out there. (but they just haven't surveyed what the other stuff is out there, as they haven't looked outside their discipline)
disclaimer: I'm a programmer, working at a science data archive, in case it wasn't clear. And I've given a few presentations about how scientists need to stop implementing stuff on their own without getting help from programmers/informaticians/archivists/etc.
He's not saying that he's planning on camping out in the store during the zombie apocalypse... just that'll be easier to resupply.
You won't have to smash in the windows, which (1) attracts zombies who hear the noise, (2) risks injury (getting cut on the glass), and (3) takes time & enercy if it's reinforced glass.
Of course, this also assumes that the power stays on, which might not be the case.
I'm guessing it's like the last 'humans should go the moon and then to mars' effort... a mandate with no funding attached.
The folks from Florida complain because they're seeing the shuttle program shutting down, and don't know what to do... but because of the requirement to keep the shuttle going, and no funding to cover it, many other NASA projects were shut down years ago to cover the costs.
Yes, there should be requirements to do interesting things, and that helps to drive people, but getting humans into space is expensive, and when there's no funding to cover it, lots of other programs are going to get cut in its place.
Or maybe that's the point -- more funding for manned space flight could mean less funding for climate change research and other politicized science.
(disclaimer : I'm a contractor at a NASA center, in an area that's human space flight, but is critical enough for human space flight that some of our tasks were classified as 'essential' for the possible budget related shutdown)
First off, I'm an elected official in PG County, Maryland, and if I hadn't had a long day at work, I'd be at the PGCMA (Prince George's County Municipal Association) tonight, instead of reading slashdot.
I haven't seen Forest Height's budget, so I don't know exactly how they have it in their budget; honestly, if they use the same auditors we do, we'd likely have to show 100% of the tickets as revenue, and 40% of the tickets as expense (to pay the company, assuming the rate in the article was accurate, which I don't know that it is, as it's my understanding that the practice isn't allowed under Maryland law), so the percentage might actually be effectively more than 50%, if you don't count the expenses because of the ticket systems. ($4.64M, so 62.5%) Also, you often break your budget down to operational vs. capital expense, so if you just look at it in terms of operational, it could be construed as even worse.
That being said, municipalities in Maryland and PG County have been screwed over in recent years. We're required to pass our budgets so they'll take effect by July 1st... and as you need enough time for an ordinance to take effect, it means we're passing budgets in early June... so when the state decides to cut state police aid and highway user fees in August, after we've passed our budgets, we got screwed. It was too late to raise real estate or property taxes, and we have limited ways to raise revenue other than that... it's basically tickets, parking meters, and whatever fees we might charge for services (in my town, parking permits for the lot we own, and that's it; oh... and speeding tickets on county or state roads? most of the money goes to who owns the road, not to who writes the ticket)
So, as we had no way to make up the shortfall, the state legislature last year gave municipalities the right to put up speed cameras near schools... which didn't help my town, as we don't have any schools in our limits, but it's looking like some towns have gone hog-wild with the program. It would've been their first year, and so they had would've had to make a guess as to how much money they'd make (likely based on 'estimates' from the 'vendor'). And notice it said 'expected $2.9 million'... it doesn't say how much they've actually made over 3/4 of the way through the fiscal year, which I'm guessing is *much* lower.
Also, specifically regarding Forest Heights -- they've just elected what I believe was a complete replacement of their board; they've been having problems for years. Any traffic cameras would've been installed under the previous commission.
This said it was to be unveiled on April 15th -- which this year is *not* tax day.
Due April 16th being a Saturday, Washington DC is celebrating Emancipation Day on April 15th... making it a holiday... so tax day got moved. With the 16th and 17th being a weekend, you have an extra 3 days this year to do your taxes, as they're not due 'til the 18th.
Or, if you don't want to sit at home listening to the radio, you can see if there is a Yuri's Night party near you. Most were over the weekend, but there are still a few the night of.
Also, it's the anniversary of the first US space shuttle launch.
In a way, this should fall under public outreach, so yes, I could see this falling under helping tenure. (assuming that he's maintaining pages in his field, and not just his favorite TV shows... unless his field is pop culture, of course)
The 'peer review' aspect requires it to have been judged by his peers, and I don't know that other wikipedia editors would be considered academic peers, even if there's a review process.
Now, there is a need for tenure to be granted on more than just writing journal articles; we (of the data informatics community) have been arguing for years that a scientist who dedicates their career to collecting really good observational data, or processing and curating it for the use of others, if given less credit than the person who writes a bad paper written using that same data.
And besides:
Michel expects his academic C.V. was strong enough to support his tenure without his Wikipedia contributions
We've been told to pull the plug on most websites.
No work means no sysadmins to monitor if we've been defaced / hacked / whatever, so we've been told to expect them being blocked at the external firewalls, unless we can provide a specific reason of why it has to remain online.
I don't know enough about this story, as I was out of town all last week. (I do IT support for the solar missions that were mentioned)
STEREO and SDO have 'space weather' feeds, where they get data in near-real time. As CMEs are slow moving (can take a day to reach earth), we actually *do* have advance warning about them, and many of the near-earth spacecraft can be told to go into some sort of a protective mode (eg, turn so they don't take the full brunt of it).
I have no idea if it was possible in this particular case, as I know nothing about what's required to communicate with Messanger, as most spacecraft that are out that far would require the DSN (Deep Space Network) for commanding, and that takes some time to lock on.
If the warning came down quickly, they might've had a few hours between the first alert and Messanger would've gotten hit, so if the CCMC (Community Coordinate Modeling Center) can get the predictions done, and if they had gotten some emergency time on the DSN (or if they had already had an appropriate commanding window), they might've been able to do something.... so I have no idea if it's an ambiguously written article, or if they really did do this as an exercise after the fact. (they might've still done it afterwards, as if it had been hit, they likely would've wanted to run comprehensive tests to make sure it didn't cause memory corruption, or other problems)
BBEdit will run for 30 days before you need to give it a serial number. And TextWrangler is flat out free, but it doesn't have all of the HTML goodies that BBEdit has... but for general programming costs, it'll probably do you.
Yes, it might seem strange to shell out $100 for a text editor, but it's like buying good power tools -- it lets me get the job done with less effort.
(disclaimer : I've been a beta tester for Bare Bones, and even have the 'it doesn't suck' t-shirt)
This issue's been brought up multiple times, and I've always asked the same question, and never gotten an answer --
Does the weight of the vehicles travelling affect road lifetime?
If so, those heavier vehicles, which naturally get worse gas mileage will contribute more based on a pure gas tax vs. a 'miles driven' tax.
In my opinion, the problem is that most of the gas taxes are 'per gallon' taxes, rather than a percentage tax... so as gas prices go up, people buy smaller cars or drive less, and there's less tax base to maintain the roads. With a standard sales tax based on percentage, as the gas prices go up, so do the taxes, and so there's still revenue to maintain the roads, even if the gas consumption goes down.
If there are concerns that the gas prices will go down too far, then you do a split system, where the total tax is per gallon + a percentage.
The only thing this doesn't deal with is pure electric vehicles or those that can act in that way; but you can either handle those in a separate system... if you go to a miles driven thing, you have to build out a whole new reporting system, and you'll have to deal with each individual vehicle, rather than just the points of sale. Some states have safety or emissions testing on a regular basis (every 1 to 3 years), so they might be able to take an odometer reading there, but then how do you handle farm vehicles where the majority of their miles driven aren't on the roads?
I'm guessing part of this is a protectionist move against electric vehicles and hybrids.
The Mozilla Foundation, Microsoft, Google and other firms rushed out patches to their Web browsers on Tuesday to block the fraudulent SSL certificates. In an incident report filed on March 15, Comodo said the nine certificates were issued to seven domains, but that no attacks using the certificates had been seen in the wild.
What, they don't support revocation lists already? This should be a non-issue, once someone realized it happened.
If you're looking at the McCumber cube, then yes, availability is one of the three aspects we're trying to protect in security (along with confidentiality and integrity).
Most "security" obsessed people these days come from the "keep the bad people out" mentality, even if it's at the expense of making it so obnoxious for the authorized users to actually be able to do their job, but a complete model of security is that people who are supposed to be able to use the system are able to use it when they want.
(but I wouldn't have said 'secure'... I'd have said 'reliable', as 'secure' has connotations of restrictiveness and secracy)
Actually, IDS is the main reason my organization doesn't use HTTPS. (and then the bandwidth lost from losing the ability to specify caching)
With HTTP, the IDS is handled at the firewall... with HTTPS, we'd have to do something per machine. Apache's mod_security might be enough, but we'd have to deal with the security department more often; I don't know if they'd want to audit our logs, or if they'd trust us to do it.... it's just easier to let them do their scanning and leave us alone... well, up until they detect someone probed us, and shut us down, and make us jump through hoops to get the machines allowed back online again.
(and you seem to be the only one of ~150 people so far who actually mentioned a downside of SSL other than cert cost, caching/bandwidth issues, ip allocation or cpu cost)
What you're looking for in general is either a repository (if you want it to manage the files) or a catalog (if you want it to just track info about the files). A catalog might also be called a 'registry' when dealing with sciences archives, where the term 'catalog' is used for something else.
For more options, see any of the following lists on wikipedia:
If it took him 3 months to write, you have to weigh that against the time to write a longer book. 9 months? 12 months?
I don't know what book royalties work out to be, but if it's 1/4 the time to write for 1/2 or 1/3 the paycheck, it's not bad... he just needs to find another cheap book to write to fill the rest of the time.
You have to find people willing to do these things.
I've organized a few video game days (even donated a Wii a few years ago when they were still hard to find), but we couldn't get enough people coming to make it worthwhile; They just had another one on Wednesday (but I had a conflicting meeting), so it's possible we might start back up again.
Most of our volunteers handle things like book repairs, helping with the re-shelving, stuff like that. There's then two of us who deal with processing donations for our book sales (no, we don't want your 30 year old set of encyclopedia that's growing mold... that's what we call 'mulch').
But our volunteers are aging (note, we have 100+ 'friends' but about 8 who come in regularly to volunteer)... there had been a time when I was the only one under 45. Now, after two families moved away, I think I'm the only one under 60. As we've got two out due to long-term injuries, we're really stretched thin... and I've heard we've got the most active group in the whole county.
Slashdot Mirror
Bringing back the XServe ? No one expects it to happen, so that'd be pretty big.
They're about due for refresh on both the Mini and MacPro, so they might have something else there. I'd personally be happy with an i5 or i7 Mini ... or a smaller chassis for the MacPro and redundant power, so we have something that's not crap for using as a server.
I don't think it's meant as a total diagnosis ... just something to help in treatment once the problem's been identified.
Although, I'd love for better diagnostics stuff .... waking up with goop in my hair and wires wrapped around my neck wasn't my idea of a good time. (how that didn't set off some alarm, and no one noticed, I have no idea)
So, as I'm at one of the few enterprises that actually has an Apple Rep ...
We've been told no more xServes, as they're convinced that everyone would be fine with either a MacPro mounted sideways (which doesn't have the same density per RU, or a bunch of minis (you can get shelves for 'em ... I'd go for the 1U that holds two, as the 2U ones that hold 4 just doesn't have sufficient space for cables), which doesn't have sufficient cores to handle heavy loads.
I tried asking about when they'd release an i7 mini. (well, I had to leave early, I had one of my co-workers ask, and she's annoyed at me because our Rep gave her some rude answer about how they don't know anything about upcoming hardware).
The only good news we got was that in 10.7, 'OS X Server' will just be a pack that gets installed on top of any client install ...
If all you need the Mac for is for authentication services, the Mini will probably do you ... unfortunately, the group I work for does scientific computing, and the number of cores per rack matters, as do redundant power supplies and a crapload of memory for the database servers.
$3/month for 1M users = $36M per year?
Um ... no. First off, the $3 goes to the cable company, and odds are, they're not paying that full amount to the channel owner, and there's overhead in managing who gets what channel that the cable companies insist is the reason that they can't provide general alacarte channels.
And if I'm paying extra for a single channel, I'm not sure that I'd want to be putting up with commercials on top of that. Hell, if I were only interested in a single TV show, I'd be better off just buying the individual ones on iTunes, or waiting for it to come out on DVD.
It's only 8.1 ZiB.
If they wanted to be impressive, they could've said it was more than 10^7 porn years.
Although I admit, some of it's the 'not invented here' problem, one of the big reasons there isn't better collaboration is that most scientists don't know that someone's working on something similar.
I deal with software that works on FITS files. The two main fields that use FITS -- medical imaging and astronomy. Do you think the two collaborate? Hell no.
And even if you do find out about some great new tool ... it's after it's been released. Which might be two or more years after they started development, so you've been duplicating work for all of that time.
I'm of the opinion that we need some sort of a cross-discipline registry for science software. List all of the stuff that can make plots ... what formats they read, what file formats they can export to, what special features they have, etc. Let me search for all of the software that can read NetCDF files ... or rice-compressed FITS, etc.
And then we need to get people to list their software (and most would, because if people use their software, and give acknowledgements in peer-reviewed papers, they can use that to justify continued funding), and in the future, we need people to list projects striving to make new software, so we know about it, and rather than expend effort to make something new, we can contribute to a project working on something similar.
Actually, no it's not.
There's a few issues ... the first of which is called 'Dual Use' ... basically, there's software that can be used for miltary purposes, which will *never* be put into the public domain.
Then there's stuff that might be able to be licensed, and there's a whole gaggle of lawyers who we have to get our stuff cleared through, so we can get stuff ceritifed that our work has no value, and the government isn't going to make any money off of it.
And then there's the security concerns ... your stuff runs on a server? If you release it, and something's wrong, could it make it easier to hack your system? Well, then it's safer not to release it.
Right now, it's a challenge to get anything released. I've heard of people having their code reviewed for *years* before they could release it under GPL or BSD.
And as for the issues in the quality of the software being released for re-use, there's been an effort in the earth sciences to rank software for re-use, in the Reuse Readiness Levels
I completely agree with the not being proficient in programming languages. And they should be required to take some security classes if they're going to be writing any significant code that runs as a CGI or acts as a service. For some reason they don't like it when I refuse to run their shell script CGIs. ... but I'd argue that they don't 'shape [it] ... so that they can modify the codes easily' ... Unless 'easily' means an attempt at a find & replace in 40+ places when they should've used a function in the first place ... but unfortunately introducing some mistake that results in team of people spending a week doing nothing, while a couple of people try to figure out what went wrong.
Yes, there are parts that are still 'science' and have floating specifications ... but then there's stuff like storing data in an archive and retrieving it. You might write some special cataloging system for it, but there is *no* reason for scientists who aren't archivists, and only barely programmers to be writing something from the ground up. It's a waste of effort, and it's a waste of tax payer's money that these things keep getting funded.
We've at least had some standardizations on file formats in the various disciplines. I'm hoping we can get some standardization in data systems to support data transport and mirroring as part of the NSF DataNet grants (although, I'm looking towards OODT, myself)
I'm looking forward to data browsing/ visualization standards (how many re-implementations do we really need to plot a few lines, map a grid onto an image, or allow someone to filter a table of data?).
Because really ... if we make these tools universal, the scientists can get back to doing science, rather than wasting time re-implementing yet another tool that doesn't really do anything better than the other stuff out there. (but they just haven't surveyed what the other stuff is out there, as they haven't looked outside their discipline)
disclaimer: I'm a programmer, working at a science data archive, in case it wasn't clear. And I've given a few presentations about how scientists need to stop implementing stuff on their own without getting help from programmers/informaticians/archivists/etc.
He's not saying that he's planning on camping out in the store during the zombie apocalypse ... just that'll be easier to resupply.
You won't have to smash in the windows, which (1) attracts zombies who hear the noise, (2) risks injury (getting cut on the glass), and (3) takes time & enercy if it's reinforced glass.
Of course, this also assumes that the power stays on, which might not be the case.
I'm guessing it's like the last 'humans should go the moon and then to mars' effort ... a mandate with no funding attached.
The folks from Florida complain because they're seeing the shuttle program shutting down, and don't know what to do ... but because of the requirement to keep the shuttle going, and no funding to cover it, many other NASA projects were shut down years ago to cover the costs.
Yes, there should be requirements to do interesting things, and that helps to drive people, but getting humans into space is expensive, and when there's no funding to cover it, lots of other programs are going to get cut in its place.
Or maybe that's the point -- more funding for manned space flight could mean less funding for climate change research and other politicized science.
(disclaimer : I'm a contractor at a NASA center, in an area that's human space flight, but is critical enough for human space flight that some of our tasks were classified as 'essential' for the possible budget related shutdown)
First off, I'm an elected official in PG County, Maryland, and if I hadn't had a long day at work, I'd be at the PGCMA (Prince George's County Municipal Association) tonight, instead of reading slashdot.
I haven't seen Forest Height's budget, so I don't know exactly how they have it in their budget; honestly, if they use the same auditors we do, we'd likely have to show 100% of the tickets as revenue, and 40% of the tickets as expense (to pay the company, assuming the rate in the article was accurate, which I don't know that it is, as it's my understanding that the practice isn't allowed under Maryland law), so the percentage might actually be effectively more than 50%, if you don't count the expenses because of the ticket systems. ($4.64M, so 62.5%) Also, you often break your budget down to operational vs. capital expense, so if you just look at it in terms of operational, it could be construed as even worse.
That being said, municipalities in Maryland and PG County have been screwed over in recent years. We're required to pass our budgets so they'll take effect by July 1st ... and as you need enough time for an ordinance to take effect, it means we're passing budgets in early June ... so when the state decides to cut state police aid and highway user fees in August, after we've passed our budgets, we got screwed. It was too late to raise real estate or property taxes, and we have limited ways to raise revenue other than that ... it's basically tickets, parking meters, and whatever fees we might charge for services (in my town, parking permits for the lot we own, and that's it; oh ... and speeding tickets on county or state roads? most of the money goes to who owns the road, not to who writes the ticket)
So, as we had no way to make up the shortfall, the state legislature last year gave municipalities the right to put up speed cameras near schools ... which didn't help my town, as we don't have any schools in our limits, but it's looking like some towns have gone hog-wild with the program. It would've been their first year, and so they had would've had to make a guess as to how much money they'd make (likely based on 'estimates' from the 'vendor'). And notice it said 'expected $2.9 million' ... it doesn't say how much they've actually made over 3/4 of the way through the fiscal year, which I'm guessing is *much* lower.
Also, specifically regarding Forest Heights -- they've just elected what I believe was a complete replacement of their board; they've been having problems for years. Any traffic cameras would've been installed under the previous commission.
This said it was to be unveiled on April 15th -- which this year is *not* tax day.
Due April 16th being a Saturday, Washington DC is celebrating Emancipation Day on April 15th ... making it a holiday ... so tax day got moved. With the 16th and 17th being a weekend, you have an extra 3 days this year to do your taxes, as they're not due 'til the 18th.
Or, if you don't want to sit at home listening to the radio, you can see if there is a Yuri's Night party near you. Most were over the weekend, but there are still a few the night of.
Also, it's the anniversary of the first US space shuttle launch.
In a way, this should fall under public outreach, so yes, I could see this falling under helping tenure. (assuming that he's maintaining pages in his field, and not just his favorite TV shows ... unless his field is pop culture, of course)
The 'peer review' aspect requires it to have been judged by his peers, and I don't know that other wikipedia editors would be considered academic peers, even if there's a review process.
Now, there is a need for tenure to be granted on more than just writing journal articles; we (of the data informatics community) have been arguing for years that a scientist who dedicates their career to collecting really good observational data, or processing and curating it for the use of others, if given less credit than the person who writes a bad paper written using that same data.
And besides:
We've been told to pull the plug on most websites.
No work means no sysadmins to monitor if we've been defaced / hacked / whatever, so we've been told to expect them being blocked at the external firewalls, unless we can provide a specific reason of why it has to remain online.
I don't know enough about this story, as I was out of town all last week. (I do IT support for the solar missions that were mentioned)
STEREO and SDO have 'space weather' feeds, where they get data in near-real time. As CMEs are slow moving (can take a day to reach earth), we actually *do* have advance warning about them, and many of the near-earth spacecraft can be told to go into some sort of a protective mode (eg, turn so they don't take the full brunt of it).
I have no idea if it was possible in this particular case, as I know nothing about what's required to communicate with Messanger, as most spacecraft that are out that far would require the DSN (Deep Space Network) for commanding, and that takes some time to lock on.
If the warning came down quickly, they might've had a few hours between the first alert and Messanger would've gotten hit, so if the CCMC (Community Coordinate Modeling Center) can get the predictions done, and if they had gotten some emergency time on the DSN (or if they had already had an appropriate commanding window), they might've been able to do something. ... so I have no idea if it's an ambiguously written article, or if they really did do this as an exercise after the fact. (they might've still done it afterwards, as if it had been hit, they likely would've wanted to run comprehensive tests to make sure it didn't cause memory corruption, or other problems)
BBEdit will run for 30 days before you need to give it a serial number. And TextWrangler is flat out free, but it doesn't have all of the HTML goodies that BBEdit has ... but for general programming costs, it'll probably do you.
Yes, it might seem strange to shell out $100 for a text editor, but it's like buying good power tools -- it lets me get the job done with less effort.
(disclaimer : I've been a beta tester for Bare Bones, and even have the 'it doesn't suck' t-shirt)
This issue's been brought up multiple times, and I've always asked the same question, and never gotten an answer --
Does the weight of the vehicles travelling affect road lifetime?
If so, those heavier vehicles, which naturally get worse gas mileage will contribute more based on a pure gas tax vs. a 'miles driven' tax.
In my opinion, the problem is that most of the gas taxes are 'per gallon' taxes, rather than a percentage tax ... so as gas prices go up, people buy smaller cars or drive less, and there's less tax base to maintain the roads. With a standard sales tax based on percentage, as the gas prices go up, so do the taxes, and so there's still revenue to maintain the roads, even if the gas consumption goes down.
If there are concerns that the gas prices will go down too far, then you do a split system, where the total tax is per gallon + a percentage.
The only thing this doesn't deal with is pure electric vehicles or those that can act in that way; but you can either handle those in a separate system ... if you go to a miles driven thing, you have to build out a whole new reporting system, and you'll have to deal with each individual vehicle, rather than just the points of sale. Some states have safety or emissions testing on a regular basis (every 1 to 3 years), so they might be able to take an odometer reading there, but then how do you handle farm vehicles where the majority of their miles driven aren't on the roads?
I'm guessing part of this is a protectionist move against electric vehicles and hybrids.
What, they don't support revocation lists already? This should be a non-issue, once someone realized it happened.
If you're looking at the McCumber cube, then yes, availability is one of the three aspects we're trying to protect in security (along with confidentiality and integrity).
Most "security" obsessed people these days come from the "keep the bad people out" mentality, even if it's at the expense of making it so obnoxious for the authorized users to actually be able to do their job, but a complete model of security is that people who are supposed to be able to use the system are able to use it when they want.
(but I wouldn't have said 'secure' ... I'd have said 'reliable', as 'secure' has connotations of restrictiveness and secracy)
Actually, IDS is the main reason my organization doesn't use HTTPS. (and then the bandwidth lost from losing the ability to specify caching)
With HTTP, the IDS is handled at the firewall ... with HTTPS, we'd have to do something per machine. Apache's mod_security might be enough, but we'd have to deal with the security department more often; I don't know if they'd want to audit our logs, or if they'd trust us to do it. ... it's just easier to let them do their scanning and leave us alone ... well, up until they detect someone probed us, and shut us down, and make us jump through hoops to get the machines allowed back online again.
(and you seem to be the only one of ~150 people so far who actually mentioned a downside of SSL other than cert cost, caching/bandwidth issues, ip allocation or cpu cost)
Just use what the libraries use:
Fedora
What you're looking for in general is either a repository (if you want it to manage the files) or a catalog (if you want it to just track info about the files). A catalog might also be called a 'registry' when dealing with sciences archives, where the term 'catalog' is used for something else.
For more options, see any of the following lists on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_institutional_repository_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Digital_library_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_next-generation_library_catalogs
You mentioned Galazy Zoo, but there's actually a larger effort called Zooniverse, which includes:
... and the other astronomy like stuff.
Besides that, a number of science agencies have various educational resources. From NASA, for 5th to 8th grade:
Other agencies have stuff too, but I don't know where it all is off the top of my head.
If it took him 3 months to write, you have to weigh that against the time to write a longer book. 9 months? 12 months?
I don't know what book royalties work out to be, but if it's 1/4 the time to write for 1/2 or 1/3 the paycheck, it's not bad ... he just needs to find another cheap book to write to fill the rest of the time.
You have to find people willing to do these things.
I've organized a few video game days (even donated a Wii a few years ago when they were still hard to find), but we couldn't get enough people coming to make it worthwhile; They just had another one on Wednesday (but I had a conflicting meeting), so it's possible we might start back up again.
Most of our volunteers handle things like book repairs, helping with the re-shelving, stuff like that. There's then two of us who deal with processing donations for our book sales (no, we don't want your 30 year old set of encyclopedia that's growing mold ... that's what we call 'mulch').
But our volunteers are aging (note, we have 100+ 'friends' but about 8 who come in regularly to volunteer)... there had been a time when I was the only one under 45. Now, after two families moved away, I think I'm the only one under 60. As we've got two out due to long-term injuries, we're really stretched thin ... and I've heard we've got the most active group in the whole county.