The shell company is in all likelihood only
necessary because you're selling your services as
that of a contractor.
If you turn the tables and sell a "product" instead, you will avoid the contractor's ball of wax but arrive at a different set of problems instead. You won't get paid until the product
is delivered (probably 30+ days after the product
is delivered - purchasing departments sometimes
specialize in pushing every term to its limit) and you will have a different set of purchasing
hurdles to overcome. I happen to think that in many cases the "selling a product" road is superior - especially for a project you know can
do in firm fixed price/firm fixed terms - but look closely at the disadvantages before jumping.
Tim.
it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases
Why should this be surprising? FC drives are
in every single case SCSI drives with a different, more expensive, interface. Although they tend to be cheaper on the surplus market, which I think is the *real* point.
There are several search-the-web-for-an-infringer-and-try-to-make-mo ney-on-it companies out there. They find an infringer, go to the company who owns the copyright, and then try to make money off of the deal.
I suspect the E-mail you got was related to this, but there are a few problems - or, at least, new twists to the game:
In its most obvious form, they make the most money by telling the copyright owner before the infringer. So I'm confused as to why they'd tell you first.
Of course, they also faked their E-mail address. Can they use this no-return-address warning to run up the penalties in a legal case? Can they use it to run up how much they charge the copyright owner?
In brief, I'm confused and worried by what you've witnessed. Can anybody enlighten me as to the motive? Goodness of heart, warning you with no monetary gain, is probably out of the question. I suspect it's probably more along the lines of the BSA where they want to charge you for an audit of your website.
moving from large centralised machines (mainframes with dumb terminals) to decentralised client/server systems (mainframes, minicomputers, and other servers talking to PCs and other smart terminals)
This shows a remarkable lack of insight into
how similar things today are to a few decades ago. A few decades ago we had IBM mainframes and
terminals with local blockmode editing; today we have web servers and PC's with web clients with form-filling capability. Are the PC's
capable of much more? Yes. Are they often used to do much more? No, not really. The only real difference (ignorning frilly graphics) is that Internet Exploder and Netscrape crash a whole lot more often than a 3270-type mainframe terminal:-)
Oh my god... they slashdotted Caltech!
on
Snowflake Photos
·
· Score: 1
Any regulary puny little website with a skinny pipe hooking to it I can see... but www.its.caltech.edu has been slashdotted!
That said, Ken Librecht is a really cool professor there who has done a lot of interesting stuff.
For the administration or IT department to enforce "no digital copying of copyright materials" is difficult, because it's not always clear what is copyright and what isn't. That *.mp3 file might be a music student's solo performance in a Beethoven - or it might be the latest hit tune from Sony or other RIAA memory. That text file might be a term paper - or it might be instructions on how to install DeCSS. That *.jpg picture might be an art project - or it could be a frame from some pirated movie. That *.c file might be source code for a first-year programming class - or it might be ripped off from Microsoft's driver database.
Just to be safe, college administrations have to assume that all files are copyright by Hollywood and the RIAA. No original work should be done on college campuses. It's just too risky - when big business, backed by jackbooted government thugs, will question every file that every student has.
Instead, colleges should buy all course materials straight from Hollywood and the RIAA, with (of course) Digital Rights Management software on every computer giving big business the right to monitor everything that goes on.
You say money is an object - but that doesn't rule out the telco approach to power distribution, with all the surplus telco equipment on the surplus market:
Convert incoming power (whatever form) to 42VDC.
Have a big bank of batteries charged by the 42 VDC.
Run all your equipment from power cables attached to big copper busbars with 42V between them.
Advantages: you get rid of your UPS's, you have
a very scalable power system (telcos never unplug
anything!), lots of big manly metal things.
Disadvantage: dropping a wrench across the 42V
busbars is a bad thing
If you don't have access to a lot of surplus rackmount PC's with 42VDC-in power supplies and are really on a budget, do it with 12VDC instead and use these servers that run off 12V very nicely.
No, you do not have permission to set up a spy cam in my living room.
But Google doesn't go into your living room - it looks on the billboard you've erected on the top of your house for the whole world to see. If that billboard is live video of your living room, that's your right to put it up. But don't complain
because Google looks at your documents and the request strings you send to it along with everything else.
How can 10 years of Intel-x86-and-x86-clone
CPU's be considered "interesting"? Boring
uniformity and ass-backwards compatibility is
more appropriate.
Now for more vaguely interesting benchmarks
(extending back to the early 70's, and not a
single x86-clone in sight) see this
alt.folklore.computers thread. A real historical perspective would have to go back to the 1940's.
It is true that there isn't a whole lot about the scientists in Rhodes' book, it mostly concentrates on the science and engineering they're doing.
But one person does feature prominently: General Leslie R. Groves, the military director of the project. There are a few other biographies that concentrate specifically on Groves: one by Robert Norris and another by William Lawren. But read Rhodes' book first before going into either of these.
Will the recording process suffer due to the hurry?
During the early Lasnerian 80's, "Direct to Disk" (where Disk == 33 RPM vinyl) was proudly displayed on many classical album covers. The idea was to minimize re-mixing and intermediate
(mostly analog) processing to make the recording as authentic as possible.
In part this was in response to over-remixed records produced in the previous decade or two. It was also, in hindsight, mostly (but not entirely) a gimmick, a way to get someone to buy yet another copy of Beethoven's nth.
That said, the Clear Channel recordings will obviously be done with an audience, not in a "quiet" studio, etc. Exactly as advertised, in fact.
The correct poewr rating is 505 watts RMS [Root Mean Square], which is what the speakers can handle on a continuous basis.
I agree with you that PMPO is misleading. But your assumption that those teensy little speakers powered by their teensy little power supply can put out 505 watts continuous is completely ludicrous. Maybe 5 watts.
Your problem is that you took a completely fanciful peak power number and assumed it had anything to do with reality. Peak power ratings for a speaker have nothing to do with reality.
Anyone using FTP or Telnet for any password-protected account has been a damn fool for many years. Maybe the implementors left out secure versions like ssh and scp because of export restrictions?
I built a simpler cooler, able to dissipate the same heat flux of a normal heatsink
No, that's not what you did. The cooler you built was substantially more complex than a normal heatsink+fan. It was more expensive
in materials, took more time for you to make, and required you to make more mods to your case.
It's not quite that bad, if you're running Apache either chroot'ed or as 'nobody:nogroup'. Even then, all they need is a small hole in the armor of some other server (sshd? sendmail? gack!)
to knock that out or trojan it.
The overhead of invoking a CGI script in in the
ballpark of a tenth of a second on a oldish PII-based server. It's much much less if Apache is built with mod_perl. Can you type a command line in less than a tenth of a second? If not, you won't notice.
I appreciate your concern that once they know how to use computers, they can be lightning-fast and eliminate all the paperwork. But, realistically, will this ever happen?. If anything, the introduction of a computer system to any government agency only results in more copies of more pieces of paper flying around, not less.
(That's assuming that the computer system is ever put into production; 95% of government-procured systems are either never delivered or by the time they're delivered they've forgotten why they bought them.)
The Federal Government, like most behemoth agencies, is very good at over-reacting to a problem after it is far too late to do anything about it. What amazes me is that the Department of Homeland Security seems to be a much bigger beauracracy than any of the agencies that it is "swallowing", yet it's being built by an administration that sells itself as anti-big-government.
Ah, yet another committee or new beauracracy
created to fight terrorism. I bet those terrorists are really scared now.
The only good thing about the formation of the
Department of Homeland Security is that it will
set back by years the attempts of individual
government agencies to spy on US citizens.
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 1
I certainly didn't go as far as claiming that the papers he shows were fraudulent; I just believe that he's looking at his 12-year old idea with rose-colored glasses as to its viability.
He may also be misapplying modern devices (which didn't exist in 1991) to flesh out the sketched-out items in his 1991 drawing. Again, wishful or perhaps delusional thinking, but not fraud.
Prices are out of whack for 1991
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Several of the prices mentioned are severely out of whack for 1991:
1 MB of memory for $5. Nope. Around 1993 or so it dropped to $30 per MB; in 1991 it was closer to $50 per MB.
Flash disk drive for $20. Flash disk didn't come along until 3 or 4 years later, and the low end ones were closer to $100.
It's always nice to play "woulda-coulda-shoulda" in the computer industry, but we may as well be postulating how the civil war would have gone if the Confederacy had nuclear weapons if you ignore
history.
First of all, it's mostly a given that AOL's name service is going to suck rocks. But the way you describe is the opposite of the problem they had a few years ago:
AOL would cache DNS lookups for much much longer than the expire time
Sometimes this cache would live on for weeks past expire time
Maybe the current situation is an over-reaction to the bad effects caused by the previous screwups.
The reason that "new" Windows releases still have a MS-DOS command line is backwards compatiblity. (And force of habit, by now.) Linux doesn't automatically offer that advantage (though the DOS emulators that run under Linux were useful to me in the mid-90's, and I'm sure they still exist now.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you turn the tables and sell a "product" instead, you will avoid the contractor's ball of wax but arrive at a different set of problems instead. You won't get paid until the product is delivered (probably 30+ days after the product is delivered - purchasing departments sometimes specialize in pushing every term to its limit) and you will have a different set of purchasing hurdles to overcome. I happen to think that in many cases the "selling a product" road is superior - especially for a project you know can do in firm fixed price/firm fixed terms - but look closely at the disadvantages before jumping. Tim.
Why should this be surprising? FC drives are in every single case SCSI drives with a different, more expensive, interface. Although they tend to be cheaper on the surplus market, which I think is the *real* point.
I suspect the E-mail you got was related to this, but there are a few problems - or, at least, new twists to the game:
-
In its most obvious form, they make the most money by telling the copyright owner before the infringer. So I'm confused as to why they'd tell you first.
-
Of course, they also faked their E-mail address. Can they use this no-return-address warning to run up the penalties in a legal case? Can they use it to run up how much they charge the copyright owner?
In brief, I'm confused and worried by what you've witnessed. Can anybody enlighten me as to the motive? Goodness of heart, warning you with no monetary gain, is probably out of the question. I suspect it's probably more along the lines of the BSA where they want to charge you for an audit of your website.Not having sendmail is like not having VD
This shows a remarkable lack of insight into how similar things today are to a few decades ago. A few decades ago we had IBM mainframes and terminals with local blockmode editing; today we have web servers and PC's with web clients with form-filling capability. Are the PC's capable of much more? Yes. Are they often used to do much more? No, not really. The only real difference (ignorning frilly graphics) is that Internet Exploder and Netscrape crash a whole lot more often than a 3270-type mainframe terminal :-)
That said, Ken Librecht is a really cool professor there who has done a lot of interesting stuff.
Just to be safe, college administrations have to assume that all files are copyright by Hollywood and the RIAA. No original work should be done on college campuses. It's just too risky - when big business, backed by jackbooted government thugs, will question every file that every student has. Instead, colleges should buy all course materials straight from Hollywood and the RIAA, with (of course) Digital Rights Management software on every computer giving big business the right to monitor everything that goes on.
- Convert incoming power (whatever form) to 42VDC.
- Have a big bank of batteries charged by the 42 VDC.
- Run all your equipment from power cables attached to big copper busbars with 42V between them.
Advantages: you get rid of your UPS's, you have a very scalable power system (telcos never unplug anything!), lots of big manly metal things.Disadvantage: dropping a wrench across the 42V busbars is a bad thing
If you don't have access to a lot of surplus rackmount PC's with 42VDC-in power supplies and are really on a budget, do it with 12VDC instead and use these servers that run off 12V very nicely.
What's wrong with the data center's UPS's? By definition, if it's really a data center then it's gotta have UPS's, right?
You do *not* get better reliability by putting two UPS's in series. You do get better reliability by getting rid of unreliable UPS's.
But Google doesn't go into your living room - it looks on the billboard you've erected on the top of your house for the whole world to see. If that billboard is live video of your living room, that's your right to put it up. But don't complain because Google looks at your documents and the request strings you send to it along with everything else.
Now for more vaguely interesting benchmarks (extending back to the early 70's, and not a single x86-clone in sight) see this alt.folklore.computers thread. A real historical perspective would have to go back to the 1940's.
But one person does feature prominently: General Leslie R. Groves, the military director of the project. There are a few other biographies that concentrate specifically on Groves: one by Robert Norris and another by William Lawren. But read Rhodes' book first before going into either of these.
During the early Lasnerian 80's, "Direct to Disk" (where Disk == 33 RPM vinyl) was proudly displayed on many classical album covers. The idea was to minimize re-mixing and intermediate (mostly analog) processing to make the recording as authentic as possible.
In part this was in response to over-remixed records produced in the previous decade or two. It was also, in hindsight, mostly (but not entirely) a gimmick, a way to get someone to buy yet another copy of Beethoven's nth.
That said, the Clear Channel recordings will obviously be done with an audience, not in a "quiet" studio, etc. Exactly as advertised, in fact.
I agree with you that PMPO is misleading. But your assumption that those teensy little speakers powered by their teensy little power supply can put out 505 watts continuous is completely ludicrous. Maybe 5 watts.
Your problem is that you took a completely fanciful peak power number and assumed it had anything to do with reality. Peak power ratings for a speaker have nothing to do with reality.
Anyone using FTP or Telnet for any password-protected account has been a damn fool for many years. Maybe the implementors left out secure versions like ssh and scp because of export restrictions?
No, that's not what you did. The cooler you built was substantially more complex than a normal heatsink+fan. It was more expensive in materials, took more time for you to make, and required you to make more mods to your case.
It might have been quieter, though :-)
It's not quite that bad, if you're running Apache either chroot'ed or as 'nobody:nogroup'. Even then, all they need is a small hole in the armor of some other server (sshd? sendmail? gack!) to knock that out or trojan it.
The overhead of invoking a CGI script in in the ballpark of a tenth of a second on a oldish PII-based server. It's much much less if Apache is built with mod_perl. Can you type a command line in less than a tenth of a second? If not, you won't notice.
Security, yes, that's an issue. Speed isn't.
I appreciate your concern that once they know how to use computers, they can be lightning-fast and eliminate all the paperwork. But, realistically, will this ever happen?. If anything, the introduction of a computer system to any government agency only results in more copies of more pieces of paper flying around, not less. (That's assuming that the computer system is ever put into production; 95% of government-procured systems are either never delivered or by the time they're delivered they've forgotten why they bought them.)
Small hint: I work in downtown Washington DC.
The Federal Government, like most behemoth agencies, is very good at over-reacting to a problem after it is far too late to do anything about it. What amazes me is that the Department of Homeland Security seems to be a much bigger beauracracy than any of the agencies that it is "swallowing", yet it's being built by an administration that sells itself as anti-big-government.
The only good thing about the formation of the Department of Homeland Security is that it will set back by years the attempts of individual government agencies to spy on US citizens.
He may also be misapplying modern devices (which didn't exist in 1991) to flesh out the sketched-out items in his 1991 drawing. Again, wishful or perhaps delusional thinking, but not fraud.
It's always nice to play "woulda-coulda-shoulda" in the computer industry, but we may as well be postulating how the civil war would have gone if the Confederacy had nuclear weapons if you ignore history.
- AOL would cache DNS lookups for much much longer than the expire time
- Sometimes this cache would live on for weeks past expire time
Maybe the current situation is an over-reaction to the bad effects caused by the previous screwups.The reason that "new" Windows releases still have a MS-DOS command line is backwards compatiblity. (And force of habit, by now.) Linux doesn't automatically offer that advantage (though the DOS emulators that run under Linux were useful to me in the mid-90's, and I'm sure they still exist now.)