I was wondering about this myself as it says right on the XCOR website about the EZ-Rocket: "The maximum altitude that can be attained is 1.91 miles (10,000 ft)." That's a pretty big stretch to sub-orbital. The Xerus plane (XCOR's next project) looks years away at best. This was clearly a publicity stunt for XCOR. Though it's good to see more people working on making safe and cheap rocket propelled vehicles. The more companies competing in this market the cheaper space filight we'll be someday.
I too would like to see the standard of living increase in the rest of the world but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. There are too many countries with corrupt governments or large quantities of religious extremists etc. Some countries like China, India and South Korea seem to be embracing technology and capitalism but I don't hold much hope (at least in the near future) for most of the Middle East, Africa and Central and South America. Granted these areas aren't exactly competing for IT jobs either.
Golfing is mulit-billion dollar industry (especially when you consider it's close ties to companies like Scotts, Toro, John Deer etc which provide chemicals and equipement for caring for grass). While I agree that research would be better spent focusing on feeding everyone (hell why not engineer some plants that can cheaply make hydrogen for fuel cells too while we're at it), I doubt the golf industry would be willing to spend it's money on food crop research. I guess we should be happy they are least looking for ways to reduce the amount of water these grasses use and the amount of chemicals it takes to keep them looking perfect etc (though the motivation to do so seems to be mostly cost). At least that will help to reduce the impact golfing has on the environment. And who knows maybe some of the techniques they're developing while engineering new turf grasses can be applied to food crops at some point.
Actually most new strains of commercial grass seed are much more resistant to insects and disease than before. With most modern bred turf grasses there's almost no need to use insecticides unless the grass is already in bad shape. Weeds are another problem though.
infinitely much easier on your feet, knees and back
I have to disagree with the back part...my wife is a cyclist and had a bulging disk in her back about a year ago. The doctor told her after she did some pt she would be able to start running in a couple of months but she couldn't bike for at least 6 months. The position most cyclists ride in puts a great deal of uneven pressure on the disks in your back which can lead to bulging disks and eventually even rupters. Those disks are better designed for up and down forces caused by activities like walking and running not for hunching over the handlebars of a bike.
Does Shockwave work on crossover office as well? I've had pretty good luck with the native Linux flash player from Macromedia but there isn't a shockwave one available.
There's no question that there are certain tasks that you still need a large datacenter or mainframe type machine. The question is are there enough of those type of customers left to keep a company like Sun afloat while Linux, Windows and x86 continue to eat their lunch at the low end. There are some old mainframes and datacenters around still doing just fine. It's not like desktops or even the lower end web servers and file servers where you can expect your customers to be coming back every 3 years or so. There's too many companies out there with over 2000 desktops and one datacenter server. The datacenter gets replaced every 10 years or so (more likely 15 or 20 years) but the desktops get replaced every 3.
Although didn't Apple also say that it will be like 2 more years before OS X is fully 64 bit. It seems silly to advertise how great the hardware is when it'll be years before the software can even take advantage of it. Having a 64 bit processor on your desk doesn't do you any good if the OS and apps are still running in 32 bit emulation.
Actually car manufacturers do make parts for each other and not just the ones that are owned by the same parent company (in your above example I know some of the Mazdas, Rovers, and Volvos now use quite a few Ford parts in them these days). GM made a pretty big deal with Honda (the two are independent companies) to provide engines for some or all of the Saturns: Saturn VUE uses Honda engine. Business is business I guess. In these cases I guess both Honda and Microsoft realize that the people that choose to buy a Saturn or Macintosh respectively probably aren't potential customers but both companies see the opportunity to still make some money of them.
Even if all the executables are.net binaries Windows itself will have to be compiled for each architecture and history has not shown the MS is very good at porting Windows (or that they can do it in a timely fashion).
Toyota has plants all over the US, just not in Detroit: toyota us plants. I know Honda has at least a few plants in the US (and Canada) probably many more than that as do most other Japanese Auto manufacturers. I think the parent post was referring to Japanese companies building in the US not US companies getting business back from the Japanese companies.
That's a great paper. The one thing that I didn't see mentioned in it though was the software...I believe the rovers run vmware for the OS. The rest of the software I assume is all custom stuff. Still would be great to get some NASA engineers on ask/. sometime though...what's their programming language of choice? How do they test all their software?
My toxicology professor gave a lecture on the invention of DDT, he said it was the single most important development of the 20th century (more so than the atomic bomb). DDT was almost single-handedly responsible for the eradication of malaria in the US (malaria is still the number one killer world-wide). There's absolutely no question that DDT had a devastating effect on birds and probably has some long term effects on people as well but the reason we use many of these chemicals cannot be overlooked before we condemn them.
Exactly, Windows didn't have gui apps for doing many things until win2000 or ME. Heck even in 98 (which is still very much in use) you had to go to a dos prompt to format a new hard disk and assign it a drive letter, and that's a task the average user might want to do once or twice during the lifetime of a given computer (upgrade/add a new hard disk). Fix the installation/package dependency problem and Linux could be ready for the desktop right now.
The problem is from what I understand Mac OS X hasn't been compiled or optimized for 64 bits, it is still running in 32 bit mode. This is why Jobs has the sense to not market these as 64-bit workstations. There's no doubt that these are fast machines and great computers but until the software running on them actually takes advantage of the 64 bit processor these are no different than running Windows or Linux on the new Athlon64 in 32 bit mode (granted you can run Linux in 64-bit mode now and MS has some betas out than run in 64-bit mode as well but you could also run the 32-bit versions of both if you wanted).
Amen to that, that's why I finally got a satellite dish with a PVR...once they get some more selection on in demand pay-per-view I think the movie rental industry is going to be really hurting. Ultimately both cable and satellite are going to offer a large selection of movies streamed to your TV. If they don't someone else will. I think there will still be a market for purchasing DVDs but I think the movie rental business is in big trouble. NetFlix is cool, I did it for over a year but it really is just a temporary fix for the real problem...the ability to pick any movie you want and have it streamed to your TV for a nominal feeâ¦You get the convenience and the instant gratification.
That's because without the first three (the board, the shareholders, the customers) there won't be any employees. The worst thing you will ever have the opportunity to do as a manager is to look someone in the eye and tell them they have two weeks or to go clean out their desk...it's an unfortunate situation but as the post that started this thread pointed out it's not some mindless entity making these decisions, it's people. And many of these people making these decisions are probably laying awake every night trying to figure out how they're going to make it through another week without laying off any more people.
This makes the parent post even more relevant, as an employee you stand the best shot of resolving issues like this by being as open and honest about your needs with your employer as you can. At the same time the company can return the favor by being as open and honest with it's employees as possible. One of the best work experiences I had was working for a failing company that was very honest with it's employees. Nearly everyday we'd have these company-wide meetings with the CEO and he'd lay everything out for everyone...many of those meetings went something like: "We have enough funding to carry us for 4 weeks as is, if we make some changes we can extend that out x weeks...here's our options...". At least in those situations everyone knows exactly what's going on and everyone can make educated decisions about where they stand within that company and whether or not they'd better start making other plans for employment.
I think the issue is not everyone needs a PDA. It got to the point where everyone was buying them and then discovering that they didn't really need them. I'm just a programmer, for the most part I sit in a cubical all day tapping on a keyboard. I may have a few meetings every week but I certainly don't need a PDA to keep track of things. My wife owns her own business and has to deal with distributors, customers, employees etc all day. She uses her PDA and her cell phone to the hilt and they do actually make her life more effecient and easier. A few people do actually benefit from these things and use them for what they were intended. For the general public things like wireless networking, games, music playback, cameras are far more interesting and specific applications like data entry and hardened versions for field work and factory environments are going to be far more imortant in the long run for corporations than just having PDAs for all their execs. Trying to build a super PDA that can do everything is not going to be very usefull for anyone. I think it's good that Palm Source is getting a very diverse group of customers purchasing PalmOS for a wide range of devices. It's better than the one size fits all attitude that a certain other PDA/Smart Phone OS vendor has.
Microsoft is always pretty quick to recognize new products that could threaten windows dominance. In some ways platform independent languages (most scripting languages, Smalltalk, Java) already implement their own OS on top of the OS they're already running on.
Interesting that some of the most successful companies in the US use cheaper/better solutions. Take a look at companies like Google, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle, Sun. These are all companies that have seen the value that Linux and the *BSDs can provide and have based their businesses on them (some more than others). While Asia still has an advantage as far as labor costs are concerned I think more and more American companies will come around to looking at Linux and other open source products to save money. Especially with the US economy in the state it's in now and most companies looking for anyway they can to cut costs (including outsourcing overseas).
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That would provide a nice smoke screen for the few people who are actually intending to do some harmful act with the info.
I was wondering about this myself as it says right on the XCOR website about the EZ-Rocket: "The maximum altitude that can be attained is 1.91 miles (10,000 ft)." That's a pretty big stretch to sub-orbital. The Xerus plane (XCOR's next project) looks years away at best. This was clearly a publicity stunt for XCOR. Though it's good to see more people working on making safe and cheap rocket propelled vehicles. The more companies competing in this market the cheaper space filight we'll be someday.
I too would like to see the standard of living increase in the rest of the world but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. There are too many countries with corrupt governments or large quantities of religious extremists etc. Some countries like China, India and South Korea seem to be embracing technology and capitalism but I don't hold much hope (at least in the near future) for most of the Middle East, Africa and Central and South America. Granted these areas aren't exactly competing for IT jobs either.
Golfing is mulit-billion dollar industry (especially when you consider it's close ties to companies like Scotts, Toro, John Deer etc which provide chemicals and equipement for caring for grass). While I agree that research would be better spent focusing on feeding everyone (hell why not engineer some plants that can cheaply make hydrogen for fuel cells too while we're at it), I doubt the golf industry would be willing to spend it's money on food crop research. I guess we should be happy they are least looking for ways to reduce the amount of water these grasses use and the amount of chemicals it takes to keep them looking perfect etc (though the motivation to do so seems to be mostly cost). At least that will help to reduce the impact golfing has on the environment. And who knows maybe some of the techniques they're developing while engineering new turf grasses can be applied to food crops at some point.
Actually most new strains of commercial grass seed are much more resistant to insects and disease than before. With most modern bred turf grasses there's almost no need to use insecticides unless the grass is already in bad shape. Weeds are another problem though.
I have to disagree with the back part...my wife is a cyclist and had a bulging disk in her back about a year ago. The doctor told her after she did some pt she would be able to start running in a couple of months but she couldn't bike for at least 6 months. The position most cyclists ride in puts a great deal of uneven pressure on the disks in your back which can lead to bulging disks and eventually even rupters. Those disks are better designed for up and down forces caused by activities like walking and running not for hunching over the handlebars of a bike.
Does Shockwave work on crossover office as well? I've had pretty good luck with the native Linux flash player from Macromedia but there isn't a shockwave one available.
There's no question that there are certain tasks that you still need a large datacenter or mainframe type machine. The question is are there enough of those type of customers left to keep a company like Sun afloat while Linux, Windows and x86 continue to eat their lunch at the low end. There are some old mainframes and datacenters around still doing just fine. It's not like desktops or even the lower end web servers and file servers where you can expect your customers to be coming back every 3 years or so. There's too many companies out there with over 2000 desktops and one datacenter server. The datacenter gets replaced every 10 years or so (more likely 15 or 20 years) but the desktops get replaced every 3.
Although didn't Apple also say that it will be like 2 more years before OS X is fully 64 bit. It seems silly to advertise how great the hardware is when it'll be years before the software can even take advantage of it. Having a 64 bit processor on your desk doesn't do you any good if the OS and apps are still running in 32 bit emulation.
Actually car manufacturers do make parts for each other and not just the ones that are owned by the same parent company (in your above example I know some of the Mazdas, Rovers, and Volvos now use quite a few Ford parts in them these days). GM made a pretty big deal with Honda (the two are independent companies) to provide engines for some or all of the Saturns: Saturn VUE uses Honda engine. Business is business I guess. In these cases I guess both Honda and Microsoft realize that the people that choose to buy a Saturn or Macintosh respectively probably aren't potential customers but both companies see the opportunity to still make some money of them.
Actually if the robots were small enough they'd be perfect for reconnaissance, they proverbial fly on the wall...
Even if all the executables are .net binaries Windows itself will have to be compiled for each architecture and history has not shown the MS is very good at porting Windows (or that they can do it in a timely fashion).
Toyota has plants all over the US, just not in Detroit: toyota us plants. I know Honda has at least a few plants in the US (and Canada) probably many more than that as do most other Japanese Auto manufacturers. I think the parent post was referring to Japanese companies building in the US not US companies getting business back from the Japanese companies.
you're right that's what I meant...that's what you get for not reading your post through before you submit.
That's a great paper. The one thing that I didn't see mentioned in it though was the software...I believe the rovers run vmware for the OS. The rest of the software I assume is all custom stuff. Still would be great to get some NASA engineers on ask /. sometime though...what's their programming language of choice? How do they test all their software?
My toxicology professor gave a lecture on the invention of DDT, he said it was the single most important development of the 20th century (more so than the atomic bomb). DDT was almost single-handedly responsible for the eradication of malaria in the US (malaria is still the number one killer world-wide). There's absolutely no question that DDT had a devastating effect on birds and probably has some long term effects on people as well but the reason we use many of these chemicals cannot be overlooked before we condemn them.
Exactly, Windows didn't have gui apps for doing many things until win2000 or ME. Heck even in 98 (which is still very much in use) you had to go to a dos prompt to format a new hard disk and assign it a drive letter, and that's a task the average user might want to do once or twice during the lifetime of a given computer (upgrade/add a new hard disk). Fix the installation/package dependency problem and Linux could be ready for the desktop right now.
HGH test to be tried at Pan Am Games and World Track and Field Champs summer 2003
The problem is from what I understand Mac OS X hasn't been compiled or optimized for 64 bits, it is still running in 32 bit mode. This is why Jobs has the sense to not market these as 64-bit workstations. There's no doubt that these are fast machines and great computers but until the software running on them actually takes advantage of the 64 bit processor these are no different than running Windows or Linux on the new Athlon64 in 32 bit mode (granted you can run Linux in 64-bit mode now and MS has some betas out than run in 64-bit mode as well but you could also run the 32-bit versions of both if you wanted).
Amen to that, that's why I finally got a satellite dish with a PVR...once they get some more selection on in demand pay-per-view I think the movie rental industry is going to be really hurting. Ultimately both cable and satellite are going to offer a large selection of movies streamed to your TV. If they don't someone else will. I think there will still be a market for purchasing DVDs but I think the movie rental business is in big trouble. NetFlix is cool, I did it for over a year but it really is just a temporary fix for the real problem...the ability to pick any movie you want and have it streamed to your TV for a nominal feeâ¦You get the convenience and the instant gratification.
That's because without the first three (the board, the shareholders, the customers) there won't be any employees. The worst thing you will ever have the opportunity to do as a manager is to look someone in the eye and tell them they have two weeks or to go clean out their desk...it's an unfortunate situation but as the post that started this thread pointed out it's not some mindless entity making these decisions, it's people. And many of these people making these decisions are probably laying awake every night trying to figure out how they're going to make it through another week without laying off any more people.
This makes the parent post even more relevant, as an employee you stand the best shot of resolving issues like this by being as open and honest about your needs with your employer as you can. At the same time the company can return the favor by being as open and honest with it's employees as possible. One of the best work experiences I had was working for a failing company that was very honest with it's employees. Nearly everyday we'd have these company-wide meetings with the CEO and he'd lay everything out for everyone...many of those meetings went something like: "We have enough funding to carry us for 4 weeks as is, if we make some changes we can extend that out x weeks...here's our options...". At least in those situations everyone knows exactly what's going on and everyone can make educated decisions about where they stand within that company and whether or not they'd better start making other plans for employment.
You can always use Kaffe if it bothers you to have any Sun code in your Java VM. Lot's of choices with Java...
I think the issue is not everyone needs a PDA. It got to the point where everyone was buying them and then discovering that they didn't really need them. I'm just a programmer, for the most part I sit in a cubical all day tapping on a keyboard. I may have a few meetings every week but I certainly don't need a PDA to keep track of things. My wife owns her own business and has to deal with distributors, customers, employees etc all day. She uses her PDA and her cell phone to the hilt and they do actually make her life more effecient and easier. A few people do actually benefit from these things and use them for what they were intended. For the general public things like wireless networking, games, music playback, cameras are far more interesting and specific applications like data entry and hardened versions for field work and factory environments are going to be far more imortant in the long run for corporations than just having PDAs for all their execs. Trying to build a super PDA that can do everything is not going to be very usefull for anyone. I think it's good that Palm Source is getting a very diverse group of customers purchasing PalmOS for a wide range of devices. It's better than the one size fits all attitude that a certain other PDA/Smart Phone OS vendor has.
Microsoft is always pretty quick to recognize new products that could threaten windows dominance. In some ways platform independent languages (most scripting languages, Smalltalk, Java) already implement their own OS on top of the OS they're already running on.
Interesting that some of the most successful companies in the US use cheaper/better solutions. Take a look at companies like Google, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle, Sun. These are all companies that have seen the value that Linux and the *BSDs can provide and have based their businesses on them (some more than others). While Asia still has an advantage as far as labor costs are concerned I think more and more American companies will come around to looking at Linux and other open source products to save money. Especially with the US economy in the state it's in now and most companies looking for anyway they can to cut costs (including outsourcing overseas).