My Russian friend used the colloquialism "every country is three meals away from a revolution" to describe the threshold for revolution, to make the case that nobody missed three meals during the Great Depression but did before the Russian Revolution.
I also read Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in which Heinlein asserted that revolutions are never started or run by ordinary people, but by well organized political factions.
There's also 1984, in which Orwell points out that revolutions always involve the middle class, and the proletariat never drives revolutions.
There's also the wild card of alleged CIA involvement, which was behind the Orange (Ukraine) and Rose (Georgia) revolutions.
The thing to remember is that these are the observations of writers. They may be true or they may not, being printed is no more proof of one than the other.
If you look at the American Revolution, it was organized and financed by a faction within the elite and most privileged class of society. The colonies had not been around long enough to have as firm a tradition of aristocracy as in England so most of the American aristocrats were new to their wealth, having earned it themselves rather than inheriting rank and position from father and he from his father before him. So there was a great belief in America that the intelligent and hard-working could win their place in society, that a common man could prove his merit. Of course, there was also scorn of the common man who did not prove his virtue and remained common.
With the French Revolution, by all accounts it did start as a spontaneous uprising and leadership positions were hewn out violently in the same fashion one would expect if a few thousand people were thrown together and dumped into an isolated wilderness.
The other thing we've seen historically is that a conspiracy might form to kick down the door to the halls of power but they lose control of the beast they created and different people gain control of it.
History seems to be a record not so much of grand conspiracies cunningly executed but people of greed and avarice settings events in motion that can sometimes turn out quite contrary to their expectations. WWII in Europe never would have happened if Hitler had not worked so diligently to bring it about but the results ran somewhat contrary to his expectations.
Owning movies really isn't worth it these days. First off, there's rarely a movie I'd want to see more than once. Second off, services like Netflix make it easy to get the movies I do want to see, first time or repeat, with very little delay. And as they're working out the legal kinks with the streaming service, it'd be just like owning the originals at home. Why clutter my life with all those discs? Let's not forget there's also the issue of format wars, buying all your movies again when the latest format drops. Who needs that? I'll stream the movie at HD resolution and when they come out with super-HD a few years from now, I'll stream it like that as well, no worries about buying new hardware.
Granted, there's still going to be the situations where you don't have broadband and want to bring your movies with you. If Netflix has good lawyers, they'll be able to let you operate in cache mode. Select the movies you want, plug in your thumb drive, you download them and are in cache mode and can watch them on the go wherever you want. If they don't have good lawyers and can't make that happen, I can still bittorrent what I want to watch offline.
To take the example of a DVD, only considering America and India. A film has a fixed cost of say $100 million to recoup from DVD sales, and each individual DVD has a cost of say $0.20 to produce and sell. If the DVD seller only sold at $19.99 in both countries then sales in India would be negligible, meaning that sales in America will need to cover the entire cost of both making the film and pressing the DVDs.
If they sold DVDs at $2.50 everywhere then the margin would be insufficient to cover their costs.
What you are ignoring is that the by selling the DVD in India at $2.50 the company knows it wont cover all the overhead costs, but it will cover some of them. If Indian sales generate $5 million then it lowers the amount they need to charge in America to make a profit by $5 million. If films etc weren't sold at a lower price in countries with lower wages then they would have higher prices in the countries where they are sold in order to cover the lost revenue.
If they sell it for $2.50 everywhere and only make back $50 mil on a $100 mil movie, then maybe they'll learn to make their movies more efficiently. The magic of the market in action.
The G1 is about $450 outright, which is still too high to be called 'reasonable', but it's a lot closer.
These new toys are expensive. Period.
They're sports cars. Sure, be nice to have, might fancy having one, but there's no way I could afford it. (yes, a sports care is a little less affordable than a Pre but if it's too much money for me, it may as well be a cell phone or that oil sheik's custom Airbus.)
This seems to be one of those things where sure, you can insist on your rights and you'll simply miss out on things. Want a Pre? Then submit. It's a free country, don't be a whiner, yadda yadda. You need a credit check to get a job. Hey, you know what? Someone who's been out of work a while in this economy might have bad credit! Well, we certainly can't let a filthy fucker like that get a head up!
I see your point, but it's just how I talk. I did not spend any particular time or effort making that up. At one point I tried to simplify my talking and it just ended up being condescending.
Some things you have to change, they're not important to who you are, other things are important and you should keep.
Classic geek example, geeks can sometimes ignore personal hygiene as unimportant or at least unimportant compared to the obsession of the moment. Being filthy hopefully isn't a core interest. That's the sort of thing you do something about. If you are intellectual, you may hold back on the geekiness when interacting with people at work, you don't strike up a conversation about the latest Linux distro, you don't insult people for liking pop television. But if you're interested in someone, feigning stupidity or feigning interest in things you cannot stand is lying to her and lying to yourself. That's not something to compromise on.
You said you're looking for a geek girl so at least you're not making the mistake of wanting the cheerleader when you have nothing in common with the cheerleader.
You have the right idea that you need to increase social interactions and increase contact in the right circles. The question is where and how. Some people live in good cities for this kind of thing, others don't. If you can surround yourself with like-minded people or simply compatible people, the law of averages says you should meet someone.
The thing to remember is you can't win them all. Not everyone will like you. But it's good to develop faking skills as a social lubrication. The jerk you have to work with on a project, learn to fake enjoyment or at least suppress your disgust, it'll make life easier, not rocking the boat. It only makes you a jerk if you do this sort of thing to ingratiate yourself to someone to get something out of them.
If you try something and it fails, you can always reload from a previous saved game. If only real life were like that... "Wow, that didn't go over well. ctrl-z! ctrl-z!"
Old Man Ray is also a flaming Republican. Sad to think of it since his work is so enjoyable but that's the long and the short of it. He went apeshit over Fahrenheit 9-11. "No. 1, he didn't ask (permission), and, No. 2, he took it - period," Bradbury tells PEOPLE. "Even if he did ask, what he has done is a crime."
Speaking from his Los Angeles home Wednesday, the 83-year-old author says he never would have allowed Moore to use the name, "because it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to me. I have several new editions of the book coming out this summer. I have a new film version of Fahrenheit 451 with Mel Gibson starring, and it is going into production sometime in the next six months."
Bradbury says that Moore, 50, contacted him only last Saturday - months after the controversial movie started making headlines.
"He was embarrassed because he didn't want to call me," says Bradbury, adding that he felt Moore was "forced into" making the call and that the filmmaker hasn't offered to screen the film for him.
"He didn't want to face me," says Bradbury. "He is supposedly a big fan of mine and read my work years ago. Now suddenly he has to call someone he has been reading for most of his life and apologize for what he did."
Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.
It's more like the Roman Catholic church sits between the Faith and its followers. And they did stifle any changes from the doctrine, by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.
The OP had to have been speaking ironically there or else he is dense as neutronium. The whole big argument with Martin Luther and the Church was about giving people access to their faith. When he nailed his Theses to the church door, the Bible was not written in the vulgate. The masses were conducted in Latin and Catholicism remained a giant mystery religion. The reforms he proposed were threatening to the Church because if people did not need priests to intercede for them with God, there would be no need to continue supporting the massive ecclesiarchy.
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
And you know how he likes to tinker with components before a launch date.
As I understand it, you don't really double your performance by putting two cards in. How many people seriously drop the coin to do this? Everything I've read says you'll get better bang for the buck by buying one good card, saving the money you would have spent on the second and then buying an equivalent card in three year's time that will kick the arse of the first card.
Given that Iran is operating under an authoritarian government, I would have thought that just shutting everything down would be quite possible. Cut all internet connections from the country save for a few government agencies, done. I can understand the difficulties in providing selective access across the board but I would have thought it would be simple enough for them to pull the plug. The only reason why they aren't must be because they are more reliant on the internet across their entire economy than I previously suspected -- they can't afford to pull the plug.
That even an authoritarian government run by unpleasant people have trouble with this is encouraging; I would hope censorship in western democracies would be even less successful.
Back in the 1990s, one of the most realistic-seeming depictions of the rise of private spacefaring was Michael Fynn's future history beginning with Firestar [amazon.com] . Flynn made it seem as if the biggest obstacle towards getting into space was not gravity and fuel costs as much as government hassles. If Spaceport America has successfully dealt with the FAA, then I would like to think that things are looking up from here (though Flynn suggested companies like FedEx would massively support the endeavour, which seems unlikely now in the age of the internet).
Scifi tends to attract people with a diverse libertarian bent. Socially liberal with dirty minds (looking at you, Heinlein), but also a lot of support for Randian concepts of scientific supermen who could work miracles if only they weren't held down by governments and the mediocre.
Spaceflight is hard. While FAA red tape can be daunting, the science is still the hard part. And just remember when you hear people arguing about government red tape, inspection and regulation is supposed to protect the public. If you want to see what deregulation brings, just look at our financial crisis. Government wasn't the problem, government abdication of responsibility was the problem.
For example, that Eccelson chap was a good first pick. When he sharted off to go do other things, Tennant was a good replacement. But now that Tennant is ready to pass the baton, the new pick they have looks like a total tit with his flock of seagulls hair. We might be stuck with a Doctor firmly entrenched in the 80's with all that entails. Simply naff.
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
IT is a support function, deal with it or find a different career field.
All depends on how the department is structured. In my situation, we've got a dedicated man-on-the-phone whose main job is to run around and do the every five minute interruption thing. The sysadmin is his backup but the whole point is he's supposed to be able to work on complicated stuff without getting his train of thought broken every time it gets on track. This is only sane. I'm more of a specialist helping userland their systems but am also available for routine helpdesk stuff when the need arises.
Any organization with a helpdesk bigger than one person should have a structure where one tech is available for putting out fires while the other tech can concentrate on the stuff that requires concentration.
IT is similar to accounting. In a small shop, one accountant does everything, every hat in the department sits on one head. Same with the one IT guy. As a business grows, the one accountant guy starts getting staff and offloading the work. This is the AP and AR person. Ok, now they're bigger. AR is one position, AP another. Wow, we're even bigger now. We have three or four people in AR now. And so it goes with IT. Grow big enough, you have staffers specializing in just one particular system. Here's the DBA, here's the Exchange admin, less hats to wear but they're very complicated hats.
What you're probably running into is a company whose need is growing beyond what they've staffed for but see no need to adjust the headcount to reflect that.
Second thought -- Palm doesn't want anyone talking about tethers.
Third thought after reading the article -- they're just releasing these balloons and letting them come down after a day in the air? Just hunting the damn things down will be a chore and a half. But this is precisely the market segment the UAV people were talking about. I think the name they were using was aerostat. Idea 1 is using a solar-powered aircraft to fly in U2 territory relaying data. Missions would last three or four months and then the plane is brought back down for maintenance. The idea is that the solar cells would charge during the day and the engines would operate off of batteries at night. The second idea is using some manner of unmanned dirigible where buoyancy is provided by hydrogen and the solar-powered engines are meant for station-keeping.
I guess this is really a matter of economics -- I guess it's cheaper to hire a guy and a jeep and hand him a map versus paying millions for air vehicles that aren't in production yet?
It's rare to see people in business with a passion for doing something -- something other than making obscene piles of cash, that is. In this environment, it's all about the fast buck and fuck the rest. Complain all you want about government inefficiency and waste, they seem to be the only ones with pockets deep enough and time-frames long enough to contemplate truly big projects. Something like the Panama Canal, it needed a government to make it happen; it also needed a government's military resources to knock together the right heads. Look at how many rockets we had to blow up with the early space program just to get the failure rate down to something approaching acceptable? If this were a purely private project, it would have been canceled years before success.
Companies are very good at addressing short-term concerns for short-term gain. Want paperclips? Companies can make you paperclips. Want fashion? Ipods? Flatscreen tv's? Companies can do that. Want a green economy? Government is going to have to lead the march and drag private industry along kicking and screaming.
Industry's only interest is self-interest. Maximize shareholder wealth, that's the imperative. Government's role is to do the people's will and make sure that social concerns are met. Companies doesn't care about pollution, doesn't care about poisoning the water and the sky. Any efforts by government to address these concerns will be actively lobbied against and subverted.
Now to be fair, there are exceptions out there like SpaceX and Scaled Composites but they only underline how difficult it is to go it alone on such huge projects. Of course, when government sponsors things you end up getting defense conglomerates sucking at the teat and disasters like this new Constellation manned launch vehicle boondoggle. I hope they can pull it together but things sound pretty grim. It'd be nice if SpaceX can prove they have the chops and government can reinforce that success by steering business their way.
In related news, dial-up isn't as great as broadband.
Are we done comparing the latest-and-greatest version of an operating system to a 7-year-old model?
'For my next trick, I'll compare the state of Ubuntu circa 2002 to Windows 7.
Very good point. I could go through the upgrade treadmill from Ubuntu 2002 (what version was that, 3? Horribly old). But if I don't want to do that, I can download the latest edition, no problem. If I bought a legal copy of XP back when it first shipped, I have absolutely no recourse towards getting a more recent version of the media for reinstalls. If I want to get up to SP3 with all the bells and whistles, I'm going to be downloading what, a gig or two worth of data? There's absolutely no legal resource for me aside from buying the media again and hoping they're selling me a semi-recent build (which, as I understand it, is seldom the case. The XP 64-bit image you buy legally is supposed to be a year or two old at this point.)
Anecdotal observation time. I just built a new desktop and am planning on using it as a testbed. I have a homebrew distro of XP called XP 64-bit Ultimate which is intended to be a current, patched, up-to-date version of XP so you're not stuck downloading several hundred megs of patches and cruft when you do a new install. I also have Ubuntu 9.04 and the beta for Windows 7.
Ubuntu worked right out of the box, decent default viddy drivers, network card detected. Sound isn't working but I hadn't expected any of it to work since this is a newish motherboard with everything integrated so that's much better than I expected. XP had a worse default viddy driver and no networking. Of course, I managed to kill Ubuntu trying to get the full ATI drivers working but that's probably just a silly mistake made overlooking something.
Now I know that people will say "n00b, you can slipstream stuff into your custom build of xp your such a linux fanboy" etc etc but what's nice about Ubuntu is you don't have to dick with any of that stuff. Distros release very frequently and you can burn a new CD whenever you want. You can't even cheat with Windows and borrow someone's more recent CD because your legally-purchased key won't likely be compatible.
This is a roundabout way of saying that for all the unfamiliar quirks and different ways of doing things, open source is so much nicer to work with simply due to the lack of the licensing model.
Yeah they all have their flaws, honestly I got sick of how Microsoft has nickel and dimed me this generation: pay to play online, $60 wireless headsets, 20 GB HDDs for $100!, full game downloads with no discount, a disc check on games that you install every time, I would be happier if it was random, etc. They have pretty much guaranteed my return to PC gaming once they release their next system and stop supporting the 360.
Agreed. Console ships without a game, one controller. So when you buy an Xbox it's: $350 for the box (depending on when you bought it) $75 for wireless ethernet card that wasn't built-in $60 for additional controller $30 for the recharager battery pack designed to work with the controllers but doesn't leaving you stuck with conventional batteries $x for cabling if you need hdmi or whatever.
Wireless headphones are required in a household larger than one but I won't label that as equipment that should have come with the unit. Would be another $120 or something? Not required if you're pc-gaming at your desk but if the PC is a media center unit, you'd be spending the money anyway.
And as you mentioned, the default 20gb HD is small and you want to buy a bigger one for all the DLC and shit but wait, it has to be MS-branded, you can't save your stuff onto a conventional usb drive. And you'll have to buy a flash-based card to serve as backup to your HDD because you know the HDD could crash at any time. Don't want to lose a hundred hours worth of gaming to a dead disk.
And the worst part of all this is you know the peripherals will all change with the next system that comes out. Consoles were supposed to be for budget gaming and pc's for people with deep pockets. Console gaming remains extremely expensive.
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Hello? Anybody out there ever heard of Thomas Jefferson?
Geeky he may be, but he'll still be known first and foremost as our first slave-banger President.
(and incidentally, Idle formatting has been fucked up for how long now and still hasn't been fixed?)
Once he's in jail, we need to find out who his cellmate is, so we can send him inordinate amounts of penis enlargement ads.
Or you could donate a dollar to his enlargement fund.
My Russian friend used the colloquialism "every country is three meals away from a revolution" to describe the threshold for revolution, to make the case that nobody missed three meals during the Great Depression but did before the Russian Revolution.
I also read Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in which Heinlein asserted that revolutions are never started or run by ordinary people, but by well organized political factions.
There's also 1984, in which Orwell points out that revolutions always involve the middle class, and the proletariat never drives revolutions.
There's also the wild card of alleged CIA involvement, which was behind the Orange (Ukraine) and Rose (Georgia) revolutions.
The thing to remember is that these are the observations of writers. They may be true or they may not, being printed is no more proof of one than the other.
If you look at the American Revolution, it was organized and financed by a faction within the elite and most privileged class of society. The colonies had not been around long enough to have as firm a tradition of aristocracy as in England so most of the American aristocrats were new to their wealth, having earned it themselves rather than inheriting rank and position from father and he from his father before him. So there was a great belief in America that the intelligent and hard-working could win their place in society, that a common man could prove his merit. Of course, there was also scorn of the common man who did not prove his virtue and remained common.
With the French Revolution, by all accounts it did start as a spontaneous uprising and leadership positions were hewn out violently in the same fashion one would expect if a few thousand people were thrown together and dumped into an isolated wilderness.
The other thing we've seen historically is that a conspiracy might form to kick down the door to the halls of power but they lose control of the beast they created and different people gain control of it.
History seems to be a record not so much of grand conspiracies cunningly executed but people of greed and avarice settings events in motion that can sometimes turn out quite contrary to their expectations. WWII in Europe never would have happened if Hitler had not worked so diligently to bring it about but the results ran somewhat contrary to his expectations.
It's amazing. Sony are so bad at format wars that, even when they win, they lose.
A curious game where the only winning move is not to buy Sony.
Owning movies really isn't worth it these days. First off, there's rarely a movie I'd want to see more than once. Second off, services like Netflix make it easy to get the movies I do want to see, first time or repeat, with very little delay. And as they're working out the legal kinks with the streaming service, it'd be just like owning the originals at home. Why clutter my life with all those discs? Let's not forget there's also the issue of format wars, buying all your movies again when the latest format drops. Who needs that? I'll stream the movie at HD resolution and when they come out with super-HD a few years from now, I'll stream it like that as well, no worries about buying new hardware.
Granted, there's still going to be the situations where you don't have broadband and want to bring your movies with you. If Netflix has good lawyers, they'll be able to let you operate in cache mode. Select the movies you want, plug in your thumb drive, you download them and are in cache mode and can watch them on the go wherever you want. If they don't have good lawyers and can't make that happen, I can still bittorrent what I want to watch offline.
To take the example of a DVD, only considering America and India. A film has a fixed cost of say $100 million to recoup from DVD sales, and each individual DVD has a cost of say $0.20 to produce and sell. If the DVD seller only sold at $19.99 in both countries then sales in India would be negligible, meaning that sales in America will need to cover the entire cost of both making the film and pressing the DVDs.
If they sold DVDs at $2.50 everywhere then the margin would be insufficient to cover their costs.
What you are ignoring is that the by selling the DVD in India at $2.50 the company knows it wont cover all the overhead costs, but it will cover some of them. If Indian sales generate $5 million then it lowers the amount they need to charge in America to make a profit by $5 million. If films etc weren't sold at a lower price in countries with lower wages then they would have higher prices in the countries where they are sold in order to cover the lost revenue.
If they sell it for $2.50 everywhere and only make back $50 mil on a $100 mil movie, then maybe they'll learn to make their movies more efficiently. The magic of the market in action.
The G1 is about $450 outright, which is still too high to be called 'reasonable', but it's a lot closer.
These new toys are expensive. Period.
They're sports cars. Sure, be nice to have, might fancy having one, but there's no way I could afford it. (yes, a sports care is a little less affordable than a Pre but if it's too much money for me, it may as well be a cell phone or that oil sheik's custom Airbus.)
This seems to be one of those things where sure, you can insist on your rights and you'll simply miss out on things. Want a Pre? Then submit. It's a free country, don't be a whiner, yadda yadda. You need a credit check to get a job. Hey, you know what? Someone who's been out of work a while in this economy might have bad credit! Well, we certainly can't let a filthy fucker like that get a head up!
I see your point, but it's just how I talk. I did not spend any particular time or effort making that up. At one point I tried to simplify my talking and it just ended up being condescending.
Some things you have to change, they're not important to who you are, other things are important and you should keep.
Classic geek example, geeks can sometimes ignore personal hygiene as unimportant or at least unimportant compared to the obsession of the moment. Being filthy hopefully isn't a core interest. That's the sort of thing you do something about. If you are intellectual, you may hold back on the geekiness when interacting with people at work, you don't strike up a conversation about the latest Linux distro, you don't insult people for liking pop television. But if you're interested in someone, feigning stupidity or feigning interest in things you cannot stand is lying to her and lying to yourself. That's not something to compromise on.
You said you're looking for a geek girl so at least you're not making the mistake of wanting the cheerleader when you have nothing in common with the cheerleader.
You have the right idea that you need to increase social interactions and increase contact in the right circles. The question is where and how. Some people live in good cities for this kind of thing, others don't. If you can surround yourself with like-minded people or simply compatible people, the law of averages says you should meet someone.
The thing to remember is you can't win them all. Not everyone will like you. But it's good to develop faking skills as a social lubrication. The jerk you have to work with on a project, learn to fake enjoyment or at least suppress your disgust, it'll make life easier, not rocking the boat. It only makes you a jerk if you do this sort of thing to ingratiate yourself to someone to get something out of them.
If you try something and it fails, you can always reload from a previous saved game. If only real life were like that... "Wow, that didn't go over well. ctrl-z! ctrl-z!"
Old Man Ray is also a flaming Republican. Sad to think of it since his work is so enjoyable but that's the long and the short of it. He went apeshit over Fahrenheit 9-11.
"No. 1, he didn't ask (permission), and, No. 2, he took it - period," Bradbury tells PEOPLE. "Even if he did ask, what he has done is a crime."
Speaking from his Los Angeles home Wednesday, the 83-year-old author says he never would have allowed Moore to use the name, "because it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to me. I have several new editions of the book coming out this summer. I have a new film version of Fahrenheit 451 with Mel Gibson starring, and it is going into production sometime in the next six months."
Bradbury says that Moore, 50, contacted him only last Saturday - months after the controversial movie started making headlines.
"He was embarrassed because he didn't want to call me," says Bradbury, adding that he felt Moore was "forced into" making the call and that the filmmaker hasn't offered to screen the film for him.
"He didn't want to face me," says Bradbury. "He is supposedly a big fan of mine and read my work years ago. Now suddenly he has to call someone he has been reading for most of his life and apologize for what he did."
Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.
It's more like the Roman Catholic church sits between the Faith and its followers. And they did stifle any changes from the doctrine, by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.
The OP had to have been speaking ironically there or else he is dense as neutronium. The whole big argument with Martin Luther and the Church was about giving people access to their faith. When he nailed his Theses to the church door, the Bible was not written in the vulgate. The masses were conducted in Latin and Catholicism remained a giant mystery religion. The reforms he proposed were threatening to the Church because if people did not need priests to intercede for them with God, there would be no need to continue supporting the massive ecclesiarchy.
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
And you know how he likes to tinker with components before a launch date.
As I understand it, you don't really double your performance by putting two cards in. How many people seriously drop the coin to do this? Everything I've read says you'll get better bang for the buck by buying one good card, saving the money you would have spent on the second and then buying an equivalent card in three year's time that will kick the arse of the first card.
Given that Iran is operating under an authoritarian government, I would have thought that just shutting everything down would be quite possible. Cut all internet connections from the country save for a few government agencies, done. I can understand the difficulties in providing selective access across the board but I would have thought it would be simple enough for them to pull the plug. The only reason why they aren't must be because they are more reliant on the internet across their entire economy than I previously suspected -- they can't afford to pull the plug.
That even an authoritarian government run by unpleasant people have trouble with this is encouraging; I would hope censorship in western democracies would be even less successful.
Back in the 1990s, one of the most realistic-seeming depictions of the rise of private spacefaring was Michael Fynn's future history beginning with Firestar [amazon.com] . Flynn made it seem as if the biggest obstacle towards getting into space was not gravity and fuel costs as much as government hassles. If Spaceport America has successfully dealt with the FAA, then I would like to think that things are looking up from here (though Flynn suggested companies like FedEx would massively support the endeavour, which seems unlikely now in the age of the internet).
Scifi tends to attract people with a diverse libertarian bent. Socially liberal with dirty minds (looking at you, Heinlein), but also a lot of support for Randian concepts of scientific supermen who could work miracles if only they weren't held down by governments and the mediocre.
Spaceflight is hard. While FAA red tape can be daunting, the science is still the hard part. And just remember when you hear people arguing about government red tape, inspection and regulation is supposed to protect the public. If you want to see what deregulation brings, just look at our financial crisis. Government wasn't the problem, government abdication of responsibility was the problem.
"Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task."
I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!
I never got why people liked the Hoarse Whisperer. So creepy, it's almost German.
For example, that Eccelson chap was a good first pick. When he sharted off to go do other things, Tennant was a good replacement. But now that Tennant is ready to pass the baton, the new pick they have looks like a total tit with his flock of seagulls hair. We might be stuck with a Doctor firmly entrenched in the 80's with all that entails. Simply naff.
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
IT is a support function, deal with it or find a different career field.
All depends on how the department is structured. In my situation, we've got a dedicated man-on-the-phone whose main job is to run around and do the every five minute interruption thing. The sysadmin is his backup but the whole point is he's supposed to be able to work on complicated stuff without getting his train of thought broken every time it gets on track. This is only sane. I'm more of a specialist helping userland their systems but am also available for routine helpdesk stuff when the need arises.
Any organization with a helpdesk bigger than one person should have a structure where one tech is available for putting out fires while the other tech can concentrate on the stuff that requires concentration.
IT is similar to accounting. In a small shop, one accountant does everything, every hat in the department sits on one head. Same with the one IT guy. As a business grows, the one accountant guy starts getting staff and offloading the work. This is the AP and AR person. Ok, now they're bigger. AR is one position, AP another. Wow, we're even bigger now. We have three or four people in AR now. And so it goes with IT. Grow big enough, you have staffers specializing in just one particular system. Here's the DBA, here's the Exchange admin, less hats to wear but they're very complicated hats.
What you're probably running into is a company whose need is growing beyond what they've staffed for but see no need to adjust the headcount to reflect that.
Second thought -- Palm doesn't want anyone talking about tethers.
Third thought after reading the article -- they're just releasing these balloons and letting them come down after a day in the air? Just hunting the damn things down will be a chore and a half. But this is precisely the market segment the UAV people were talking about. I think the name they were using was aerostat. Idea 1 is using a solar-powered aircraft to fly in U2 territory relaying data. Missions would last three or four months and then the plane is brought back down for maintenance. The idea is that the solar cells would charge during the day and the engines would operate off of batteries at night. The second idea is using some manner of unmanned dirigible where buoyancy is provided by hydrogen and the solar-powered engines are meant for station-keeping.
I guess this is really a matter of economics -- I guess it's cheaper to hire a guy and a jeep and hand him a map versus paying millions for air vehicles that aren't in production yet?
It's rare to see people in business with a passion for doing something -- something other than making obscene piles of cash, that is. In this environment, it's all about the fast buck and fuck the rest. Complain all you want about government inefficiency and waste, they seem to be the only ones with pockets deep enough and time-frames long enough to contemplate truly big projects. Something like the Panama Canal, it needed a government to make it happen; it also needed a government's military resources to knock together the right heads. Look at how many rockets we had to blow up with the early space program just to get the failure rate down to something approaching acceptable? If this were a purely private project, it would have been canceled years before success.
Companies are very good at addressing short-term concerns for short-term gain. Want paperclips? Companies can make you paperclips. Want fashion? Ipods? Flatscreen tv's? Companies can do that. Want a green economy? Government is going to have to lead the march and drag private industry along kicking and screaming.
Industry's only interest is self-interest. Maximize shareholder wealth, that's the imperative. Government's role is to do the people's will and make sure that social concerns are met. Companies doesn't care about pollution, doesn't care about poisoning the water and the sky. Any efforts by government to address these concerns will be actively lobbied against and subverted.
Now to be fair, there are exceptions out there like SpaceX and Scaled Composites but they only underline how difficult it is to go it alone on such huge projects. Of course, when government sponsors things you end up getting defense conglomerates sucking at the teat and disasters like this new Constellation manned launch vehicle boondoggle. I hope they can pull it together but things sound pretty grim. It'd be nice if SpaceX can prove they have the chops and government can reinforce that success by steering business their way.
In related news, dial-up isn't as great as broadband.
Are we done comparing the latest-and-greatest version of an operating system to a 7-year-old model?
'For my next trick, I'll compare the state of Ubuntu circa 2002 to Windows 7.
Very good point. I could go through the upgrade treadmill from Ubuntu 2002 (what version was that, 3? Horribly old). But if I don't want to do that, I can download the latest edition, no problem. If I bought a legal copy of XP back when it first shipped, I have absolutely no recourse towards getting a more recent version of the media for reinstalls. If I want to get up to SP3 with all the bells and whistles, I'm going to be downloading what, a gig or two worth of data? There's absolutely no legal resource for me aside from buying the media again and hoping they're selling me a semi-recent build (which, as I understand it, is seldom the case. The XP 64-bit image you buy legally is supposed to be a year or two old at this point.)
Anecdotal observation time. I just built a new desktop and am planning on using it as a testbed. I have a homebrew distro of XP called XP 64-bit Ultimate which is intended to be a current, patched, up-to-date version of XP so you're not stuck downloading several hundred megs of patches and cruft when you do a new install. I also have Ubuntu 9.04 and the beta for Windows 7.
Ubuntu worked right out of the box, decent default viddy drivers, network card detected. Sound isn't working but I hadn't expected any of it to work since this is a newish motherboard with everything integrated so that's much better than I expected. XP had a worse default viddy driver and no networking. Of course, I managed to kill Ubuntu trying to get the full ATI drivers working but that's probably just a silly mistake made overlooking something.
Now I know that people will say "n00b, you can slipstream stuff into your custom build of xp your such a linux fanboy" etc etc but what's nice about Ubuntu is you don't have to dick with any of that stuff. Distros release very frequently and you can burn a new CD whenever you want. You can't even cheat with Windows and borrow someone's more recent CD because your legally-purchased key won't likely be compatible.
This is a roundabout way of saying that for all the unfamiliar quirks and different ways of doing things, open source is so much nicer to work with simply due to the lack of the licensing model.
Yeah they all have their flaws, honestly I got sick of how Microsoft has nickel and dimed me this generation: pay to play online, $60 wireless headsets, 20 GB HDDs for $100!, full game downloads with no discount, a disc check on games that you install every time, I would be happier if it was random, etc. They have pretty much guaranteed my return to PC gaming once they release their next system and stop supporting the 360.
Agreed. Console ships without a game, one controller. So when you buy an Xbox it's:
$350 for the box (depending on when you bought it)
$75 for wireless ethernet card that wasn't built-in
$60 for additional controller
$30 for the recharager battery pack designed to work with the controllers but doesn't leaving you stuck with conventional batteries
$x for cabling if you need hdmi or whatever.
Wireless headphones are required in a household larger than one but I won't label that as equipment that should have come with the unit. Would be another $120 or something? Not required if you're pc-gaming at your desk but if the PC is a media center unit, you'd be spending the money anyway.
And as you mentioned, the default 20gb HD is small and you want to buy a bigger one for all the DLC and shit but wait, it has to be MS-branded, you can't save your stuff onto a conventional usb drive. And you'll have to buy a flash-based card to serve as backup to your HDD because you know the HDD could crash at any time. Don't want to lose a hundred hours worth of gaming to a dead disk.
And the worst part of all this is you know the peripherals will all change with the next system that comes out. Consoles were supposed to be for budget gaming and pc's for people with deep pockets. Console gaming remains extremely expensive.
I told them to say warship instead of worship. Stupid spiders.
(will be downmodded before anyone gets the reference.)