I'm not sure which builds exactly, but I know I tried three times, and failed three times to put Vista (Beta2 and RC1) on VPC and failed three times.
I'm not sure what you were doing wrong, then. I've installed every build since 5368 on MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 (Release, and with the SP Beta) and they all work. What they don't all support are the VM Extensions required to get any kind of decent performance out of it. Vista betas and the RC1 were slow enough as is; without the Extensions, it was pretty much a slideshow. There is a beta VM Extension available from Microsoft Connect which is free for all to download if you want. Those extensions worked for most pre-RC1 builds, but I don't think they've been updated for the actual RC1 yet.
Wow what scintillating logic a brilliant masterwork of a response, not.
Like yours is somehow equivalent to a sonnet from Shakespeare?
Have fun dropping white phosphorus on innocent little kids, ASSHOLE!
Sorry, I think you're thinking of the wrong war. See the 1960's and Viet Nam, not 2006 and Iraq. I'm sure you'd be happier if we were killing little kids, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. Now, go do something useful, mature, and demonstrative, like burn a flag or something. You've obviously got some amazing hangups (not to mention delusional misconceptions) about people in the U.S. military. I won't stoop to calling you an expletive, but you are amazingly ignorant of reality. I can only hope you grow up one day and realize just how foolish you're acting right now.
Pity there's no more room on my friend/foe list, for you'd fit in right at the top.
How do you know the civilians don't want to be involved? In Iraq almost no one wants the American invaders there and I suspect it's VERY easy for the resistance fighters to find people willing to shelter them.
Speaking as someone who's been there (which I doubt you can claim), your assessment is...incorrect, shall we say. There is a very active minority of insurgents running around making it difficult for everyone there, Iraqi's and coalition forces combined, but that by no means is the overwhelming majority you seem to indicate. I'm sure that if you just keep your eyes glued on CNN all the time that's what you'd think. However, you are seeing what the reporters want you to see. Iraqi kids playing around our Hummers and armored vehicles while trading food and candy doesn't make the news.
Sure, it's no bed of roses. We had to shoo the kids away too frequently because the terrorist bastards look for this kind of thing. It wasn't long ago that one of them waited for kids to come near a convoy before he drove his fucking carbomb into the column. He could've waited until we'd passed through and not killed a bunch of kids, but he didn't. He wanted those kids dead as well as us because that makes the news, and that furthers their agenda. They are not winning, but if they can make the American public think they're winning, political pressure will force us to quit. They know they can't defeat us militarily, so they're going for the political win. Read up on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. It was a military disaster for the NVA, they gained nothing and lost thousands of trrops, but Walter Cronkite basically said we'd lost the war in front of a live TV audience. Don't think Al Queada is too stupid to learn from that. They're not, and they're finding all kinds of help from Al Jazeera, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and just about everybody but Fox News.
Remember one mans "sub human scum terrorist" is another mans "freedom fighter" resisting imperialist foreign invasion.
Ah, the great moral relativist argument. Sorry, I'm not buying it. None of my Marines would ever grab a civilian to hide behind while advancing on an enemy position. We would never kidnap the children of a family and threaten to kill the kids if the family didn't allow a weapons or bomb cache to be located in the house. And we sure as hell would never drive a carbomb into a crowd of kids hoping to kill as many of them as we could just so it would make the evening news. This is the kind of shit your "freedom fighters" are engaging in. Is this somehow noble, just, and forthright in your eyes? If so, you have one of the most sickening definitions of morality I have ever heard of.
Wake up. These people are not deserving of your respect, and by apologizing for them you are tacitly excusing their actions. If they wish to behave in a barbaric fashion, they are barbarians. Hold a dying child, bleeding to death from a carbomb attack, in your arms and try to excuse them. Go ahead. Try. Still think these people are anything other than inhuman thugs?
Not shooting babies is your fucking job, not anybody else's. I shouldn't have to tell a Marine what I learned as a Boy Scout - when you point that gun, the responsibility for what that bullet hits is yours.
No fucking shit, dickhead. Any more earthshattering revelations you want to visit upon us?
Yeah. You're in an intractable situation - sit and take the hits, or take action and cause civilian deaths. In other words you're in the exact intractable situation that everybody with sense told you was going to happen when Iraq was invaded in the fucking first place. But, no. Apparently you thought you knew better, and were suprised to find out that there were risks to invading Iraq a little more serious than injuries from thrown roses.
So what's your solution, genius? Just sit back and do nothing? Yeah, that's the ticket. Let's let third-world dictators with nuclear ambitions just stand around thumbing their noses at us. That sends a real good message: the U.S. is a paper tiger with no teeth, no claws, and certainly no stomach to enforce what they say. Bin Laden has been quoted as saying that the pullout of U.S. troops from Somalia after the "Blackhawk Down" incident convinced him he had nothing to fear from us. When our enemies no longer fear us, you get things like Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and 9/11.
But, no. Apparently you think you know better. I'm sure if we just found every terrorist in the world and gave them a hug, they'd all love us and the world would be peaceful. You go try that. I'll make sure your head and your body gets picked up and packaged in the same box for the ride home.
My dad was a Marine.
Good for him despite the fact that he raised an idiot.
I've been proud of that my whole life.
You should be. He's a better man than you are for having done some service to the country.
I'm a little less proud, now.
Like I said, he obviously raised an idiot and never bothered to instill in you any idea of why we fight. It's not for bloodlust, greed, or fear. Saddam was the enemy. Islamic fascism and terrorism remains the enemy. This battle will be fought for many years on many lands. We will only lose if people like you have your way.
You go ahead and sneer at us serving in Iraq. Better men than you have died so you can have your little tantrum of self-important naivety. You go right ahead and enjoy it. We'll still be here when you're done.
If you're too stupid to see the difference between Nazi's invading Poland and the U.S. invading Iraq, there's no point in continuing this conversation. You're an absolute fool, and history will judge you as such.
Great! Instead you give them dead baby boiled to death by high power microwaves. Anything that does enough damage to severely incapacitate a grown person is likely to kill a baby.
Oh for god's sake! Try a little less idiocy and a bit more thinking. The "high power microwaves" you're so busily castigating can no more make a baby "boiled to death" than your little finger can. If you were half as quick to read the article as you are to hurl invective, you'd know the non-lethal microwave device causes no physical injuries. Dumb ass.
You also have dead marines because you didn't debate hard enough and killed innocent people and inspired more Iraqis to join the insurgency.
More stupidity from you, I see. The point of the non-lethal weapon is to allow us to reduce the probability of killing innocents. Or would you prefer we just set everything on full auto and spray down babies and old ladies with hot lead? What kind of monsters do you think we are? I don't know what kind of world you live in, bud, but the Marines I know and served with hate seeing innocent people hurt. They hate it so much that they willingly risk their lives on a daily basis just so that civilians don't die. After all, a single W-88 warhead in the center of Baghdad would pretty much end the insurgency in that city, wouldn't it? So would saturation bombing, nerve gas, or any other mass-killing weapon we have in our arsenal. It would do so with little or no risk of injury on our part. But we don't do that, do we? We have leathernecks on the ground, making targets of themselves, getting killed, all because we have more respect for civilian casualities than do the scum we're fighting.
Of course, by your writings, I see you think we should just knuckle under and surrender to those who don't like us. It's a good goddammed thing people like you aren't running the country. With someone like you, the fucking French could invade and take us over.
Now, granted, even though sending American soldiers to their deaths is way down the list of things that Republicans care about...
You know what? The vast, huge, unbelievably overwhelming majority of those fighting in Iraq are (a) Republicans and (b) fully supportive of their mission. Quit thinking we're some kind of lamb being led to the slaughter by evil Republicans trying to line the pockets of Big Oil. We don't feel ourselves to be victims, we believe in our mission, even if you don't. It doesn't have one goddammed thing to do with SUV's or anything else so petty. Saddam was given an ultimatum. He chose to ignore it. We had a choice to either (a) do nothing and be viewed as a powerless paper tiger in world events or (b) follow through and kick his ass. I, for one, am damned glad the second option was followed.
For those that don't, the fact that this weapon could be used to prevent freedom of assembly may make them opppose this weapon.
Again, you must think the wielders of such a weapon are nothing but a bunch of crazed maniacs just aching to zap your liberal ass. I've got news for you, sonny. The first person to use this weapon indiscriminately on an otherwise-peaceful demonstration is going to find himself in jail -- jailed by the very government and laws you claim are so "out to get you." Now if the demonstration was a bunch of hooligans out smashing stores and burning cars, that's exactly what kind of thing this weapon is good for. If you want an effective demonstration, think "Ghandi" not "bin Laden." But I forget that, in your mind, the government is always assumed to be evil, and the demonstrators are always assumed to be noble. Wait unti you grow up a bit and then try re-examining that premise. You'll see just how silly and naive it is.
Anonymous Coward suits you well. I love how you insult and second guess those who are trying to defend this nation while hiding yourself. Your method of dealing with a potential adversary speaks volumes about how effective your ideas would be if put into practice.
If I'm a Marine, I'm all for this. Likewise Air Force MPs (who are often guarding facilities that get swamped with representatives from Unruly Crowd Central Casting), etc.
I am a Marine, one who's done a tour in Iraq already, and I can tell you we are literally dying to have something like this. The current ROE is such that you're severely limited in the action you can take when somebody starts shooting at you or your convoy. You basically can either choose not to respond at all (i.e. disengage) or you can choose to excercise deadly force. There is no option three.
With all the reporters crawling around just hoping for a dead baby with an M-16 bullet lodged in it just in time for the evening let's-bash-the-U.S.-military evening newscast, I can assure you we all spend far too much time debating about pulling that trigger. We have dead Marines because of it, and because our enemy chooses to hide amongst civilians hoping we'll kill some of them. These people are animals, barbarians, sub-human scum, but don't get me started.
With a reliable, ranged, non-lethal weapon of this type, we could be much more indiscriminate about how we apply it. Don't take that the wrong way; I don't mean we run around zapping everyone in sight. Instead, when a threat develops, we could "stun" the person without fear of wounding or killing non-combatants. Fewer dead Marines, fewer dead civilians, and (maybe) fewer dead terrorists (captured alive instead and then used as a useful source of intelligence). Only the stupidest Peacenik would oppose the availability of such a weapon. It would save lives no matter how you look at it.
I see why you are angry. Quirks - see any windoze GUI.
First off, it's "Windows" not "windoze." If the best you can do is engage in childlike namecalling, perhaps you should avoid contact with adults. Churlish behavior such as this makes you seem immature and purile...which probably isn't far from the truth to begin with. Typical Linux-head elitism.
As for quirks in the GUI, you need to be more specific. Hundreds of millions of people use the Windows GUI every day. If there's a quirk there, I think you'd hear more about them.
It's easier to take the live CD to the store and have it work forever than it is to try to use and keep up a windoze box.
Bullshit. A properly managed Windows XP SP2 box is every bit as easy to "keep up." Just like a Linux box, you need to keep up your patches. Just like a Linux box, you need to be careful about downloading and executing bizarre content. The only advantage of a live CD is that the base OS can't be corrupted (apps and home directories can, though). However, there are CD-based distros of Windows as well, so there goes that argument.
Re:why did it kill him?
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Steve Irwin Dead
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Plus Dale Snr wore an open faced helmet simply because he was too arrogant to wear a proper one like everyone else.
Arrogance had nothing to do with it. There was no rule in NASCAR requiring such a helmet, and Dale Sr. felt it restricted his vision and perception too much -- something that (in his opinion) could actually make driving more dangerous. In any event, a full helmet would have done nothing to save him, as it was his skull detaching from his spine due to rapid deceleration that killed him. A HANS device would have saved him, but that was also an "optional" safety device according to NASCAR rules. The rules have since been changed to make both safety devices mandatory.
Earnhart had been driving in NASCAR for decades with no full helmet, no HANS device, and 60's-era safety devices we wouldn't put on a minivan today. He'd survived countless violent crashes with such protection. He knew the risks and was comfortable with them, otherwise he wouldn't climb in the car. It wasn't arrogance, it was simply a matter of the odds catching up to him. Even with today's safety enhancements, drivers are killed every now and then. It's a regrettable -- but unavoidable -- part of the sport, but that's no different than other "safe" sports. Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in an equestrian accident, for crying out loud. You simply can't engage in most vigorous sports without at least a minor risk of injury.
They are, however, not optional. You can't get rid of them.
Very true for IE (not for OE, though, which is removable without consequences), but you can take amazingly effective steps to secure them nonetheless -- if you know how and if you feel like taking the time to do so. Using local policies, you can pretty much deactivate IE's naughty bits like ActiveX and Javascript as well as locking it down to the point where it really can't do anything. This would make it unusable for a typical user, but if you're using Firefox, who cares? It doesn't affect the OS's ability to use whatever bits and pieces of IE it needs in the slightest.
Sure, you can't excise IE from XP, but you can take steps that are every bit as effective, if a tad more time consuming than just doing an uninstall. We do this via Group Policies right now and our users use Firefox -- deployed via GPO using FrontMotion's MSI package and ADM templates. Outlook and Office in general are locked down via other ADM templates supplied in the Office 2003 Resource Kit. It's not hard, it just takes a little time and knowledge. The time is something anyone can take, and the knowledge is freely available on MS's TechNet sites in the form of whitepapers and Best Practices documents. The pity is that so few people bother to read them.
I've been at this particular company for roughly five years and we have yet to be hit with any worm or virus. Windows isn't insecure, it just has very insecure defaults. Change those and you'll find the platform to be robust and reliable, despite the "conventional wisdom" so frequently espoused on these pages.
Those are not Linux problems, they are Sony problems.
And that's where you lost a potential Linux convert there, bud. Oh, it's not a Linux problem, it's a Sony problem! Hey, that makes the user feel sooooo much better about still not being able to get the widget to work the way he wants it to!
You see, this is the part that really torques me off about the hardcore Linux user. They assume the average user is willing to put up with the quirks, the kernel recompiles, the beta (or alpha!) drivers, and the hacked-support-for-my-Sony-special-widget issues. You just don't get it, do you? The user doesn't care why it won't work, he only cares that it doesn't work. You shifting the blame to the hardware maker is completely irrelevant to him because, at the end of the day, his hardware works fine with Windows but stumbles or won't work at all with Linux.
Sure, Sony not releasing specs or drivers for its whacked-out widgets is the real root cause here. But remind me again why Sony -- a company that must return a profit on its investments in R&D and support -- should spend an inordinate amount of internal resources working to support an OS that, statistically, less than 5% of its users are ever likely to use? Or for that matter, releasing specs on its whacked-out widget that a competitor could use to create a competing widget? This is not an altruistic world we live in, son. What's in it for Sony? Goodwill from a few thousand Linux users? That doesn't pay bills. Mind you, I'd love it if Sony either gave support or released specs, but I'm pragmatic enough to understand why it's not happening and fair enough not to castigate Sony for not doing something that has no benefit -- and several downsides -- to it.
But at the end of the day, what do we have? A widget that works under Windows and not on Linux. The user wants it to work, and Windows is already paid for and pre-installed on the laptop. Do you honestly think this is a compelling situation for switching to Linux? Don't be silly. Until everybody's favorite hardware widget is fully and completely supported in Linux just as it is in Windows, this is going to be a huge headache. It's not the fault of Linux, but don't think that shifting the blame makes this any less of a reason to avoid switching. There are plenty of reasons -- and good ones at that -- why desktop Linux is still on the fringe.
Microsoft is effectively doing this with Vista and yet... there still appear to be security flaws. Something wrong with that picture.
The same thing could be said for the contortions Apple has gone through to get to OSX and yet...there still appear to be security flaws. To be sure, Apple has had fewer issues than Microsoft, but there's more to it than that. If you remove things like IE, IIS, and Office from the mix, you find the core of Windows itself hasn't been hit that much, statistically not much worse (or better) than OSX core vulnerabilities. When you consider that Windows machines vastly outnumber OSX machines (and that Windows users tend to be less --ahem-- technically adept), you find Windows itself has been improving quite a bit. Even IIS has been dramatically tightened up. IE and Office (specifically Outlook) remain the big offenders, not the OS.
Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.
You are correct, but the sound in this case is generally pretty bottom-of-the-barrel. Granted, most folks only need beeps and boops, but it's still rather pathetic. And very CPU intensive as well. I'd consider it only slightly better than an old fashioned PC speaker.
I'll second your commont on the MS Terminal Services, though. We've seen it scale very well at some of our clients, and we use it as well. Citrix has the advantage in features and flexibility, though.
We do a lot of AutoCAD work, ergo it's not practical for us. Anybody doing anything very GUI- or visually-oriented (like Photoshop, or even PowerPoint) will notice the difference. Word and Excel users might not care that much, and green screen apps in a terminal emulator window won't care, but it's still enough of a pain that it's a rare case where it can be implemented universally.
First off, I don't think VM'ing your desktops is the answer. Current VM's really dumb down the hardware. You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native (some quite a bit slower). Couple that with the size of most VM images (my Vista image is about 12GB) and you're really looking at a poor solution.
Here's what you should be thinking about:
- Get some kind of desktop management suite like Altiris. You can push software deployments easily, and it's very easy to lock machines down to the point where users can't fsck them up. I've consulted for companies that do this with hundreds of desktops and it's a very robust, reliable system.
- Go with a thin client setup like Citrix or Terminal Server. Users run nothing on their local hardware. Instead, everything runs on the big server. Downsides are similar to VM's (thin clients are notorious for very lightweight support for anything but the most basic sound and graphics) but you are at least spared the massive network thrashing of hundreds of users logging on and pulling down VM images at 8AM every morning.
- If it's users messing up machines that you're worried about, you might want to consider a solution by Clearcube. They take away everything except the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The guts of the PC reside in a server rack in what is essentially a PC on a blade. The blades are load balanced and redundant, so swapping them out is a breeze. And users *can't* load software on them because there's no USB ports, no floppy drive...nothing! Unless you allow them to download it from the Internet, *nothing* is going to get on those machines if you don't want it to.
VM's make sense for server consolidation. I don't think they've yet gotten to the point where desktops run on them as a form of protection or reliability. There's too many other solutions that work better and have fewer downsides. The problem here isn't Windows per se, it's the fact that your workstations aren't locked down properly to prevent your users from doing stupid stuff in the first place. Fix that and suddenly you'll find a Windows workstation environment isn't the hassle it once was.
The best protection from this sort of attack is to not make someone hate you enough to want to attack you.
What part of the "we want to kill you because you're Jewish, or because you're an infidel" don't you understand here? Have you even read things like the Hezbollah Charter or Al-Queda's published mission?
At some point you have to understand that these people want to kill us because we're different from them. Much of this "we want back Jerusalem" or "we don't want you interfering with our affairs" is merely a way to put a face on the ugliest of all human reactions: xenophobia, the fear of that which is foreign or different.
33MB? Ouch, are all the Windows drivers that bloated?
Remember, this is a "Unified Driver." That means it has drivers for a huge variety of video cards in one big, tidy package. I also most likely includes stuff for multiple languages, only one of which you'll actually use. Also, with the 9x.xx release of nVidia drivers you get both the "new" display driver interface (based on a web browser motif) and the "classic" interface (what we all know and have loved for the last five years or more).
Add all that up and you get a 33MB installer. The actual driver code, however, is far smaller. Not all of that 33MB ends up on your hard drive after the install is done. It's not bloated, it's just aimed at a very wide array of possible applications, and nVidia wants to put all that in one installer to simplify things for the end user. Bloat implies there's a lot of cruft in there, and that's not the case.
Windows98 worked perfectly with my friend's hardware, then the retail version trashed the contents of his hard drive every time he tried to install it.
Probably because he tried to install the retail version over an earlier beta or release candidate. I'd bet good money he completely violated the beta/RC instructions when it came to upgrading, and that (not some nefarious install bug from Redmond) was the cause of his woes.
And then I discovered ClearType. Why ClearType isn't on in Windows XP by default (or even installed by default) I don't know. I had to go to a microsoft website to turn it on and download a control panel applet to let me tweak and configure it. But it made a great display even better... to much so that it was like getting glasses! I even use it on my CRT display at work, and it's better there too. It just seems odd to me that it's not the norm...
Turning it on for displays that don't respond well to ClearType results in blurrier text. This applies mostly to CRT's, and if you'll recall, flat panels weren't exactly popular back when XP was launched nearly five years ago.
As for fixing this, you can kind of institute this yourself. All you have to do is create a profile with the machine set up the way you want it (this applies to more than just display settings, but that's beyond the scope of this quick post). Then, log in as an administrator, go to the profile manager, select the profile you just configured, and click the "Copy to..." button. Copy the profile to the "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User" directory and tell XP to make the profile available to "Everyone".
What this will do is ensure than any new accounts created on the machine will automatically get all the customziations you put into the initial "seed" account you copied from. If you work in a networked environment like a corporation, you can extend this paradigm even further by copying the profile into a "Default User" directory inside the "NETLOGON" share of a domain controller. Any user who logs onto a machine without a profile for them will automatically download this default profile, ensuring your settings are propagated everywhere. Very handy, and fully documented on Microsoft's support site under KB article #168475.
I admit Microsoft doesn't make this overly easy, and the instructions aren't posted in obvious places, but this has been a tremendous help to us at my company, and I use it on my home network as well.
Space is expanding like this everywhere, but in small uneven pockets of gravity such as clusters of galaxies, or inside a galaxy, the expansion is less obvious, because of gravity's effects.
Note that this completely and totally explains the Oprah Effect, whereby a body continues to grow larger even though it denies gaining any mass. It could also explain the strange growth (but not the subsequent shrinkage) of portions of other bodies, such as the well-known Pamela Anderson Effect.
first of all, who the hell wants to spin down server hdd-s ? you can't cache hudred of gigabytes, and servers that would save any noticeable amount of power from that can't cache all the necessary data to the tiny dram or flash.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of how this would be applied. Currently, products are being developed that will spin down unused drives in something like a large SAN array, then spin them up once capacity (or performance) requires it. This could result in noticeable power savings.
second, there is no real "mega power save" here, intel makes cpu's that still float near 100W while they are at fullspeed, whereas a modern hdd goes under 10W in normal conditions while spinning normally.
Modern CPU's all have power saving circuitry built into them, and they can power themselves down to under 20W-30W. I'm not talking laptop CPU's here; Opteron's and (I think) Xeon's can do this, too. This is significant.
third, if it's mainly used as booting speedup, how many times do you really want to start your server (yeah ok, on windows, the update cycle needs you to boot once per month, but still...)
A good point, but there's still a huge upside: servers can take several minutes to boot off standard hard drives. Every minute a server is down, hundred or thousands of people cannot make use of the server. For a big company or website, that's a lot of lost money. If you can shave a minute or two off the total boot time, it is significant.
fourth, spinning any physical item down and up again will reduce it's lifetime, temperature changes in the oil and materials make it less resistable to damages.
Which is why you don't spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down all the time. If you had a big SAN array, it's very unlikely it's going to be at 100% capacity on day one. If you could spin down all the drives that aren't in use but still make it appear as if they were "up," why wouldn't you?
fifth, spinning up the hdd requires a lot more power than keeping it spinning.
That depends on how long it's spinning but not doing anything useful.
sixth, unless this works transparently (emulating some 'natural' disk operations will certainly make it slower than just disk access), who the hell is going to rework all the raid software that you have enhanced your boxes with ?
See prior comments. Folks like EMC are all over this already.
seventh, add all the things up from here, and althrough you find the disks inexpensive, the total cost will be expensive, may not save you a dime.
Since you're missing several key points, I think your conclusion is not...correct.
I still don't see why they can't put like a protective liner or coating on top of the fragile graphite/ceramic tiles to protect it.
I can think of one amazingly obvious reason why they don't do it: weight (or, more precisely, mass). Every pound of stuff you put on the tiles to protect them is a pound less the shuttle can carry into orbit. It already can't carry very much (compared to unmanned rockets that are far less expensive to operate), so slapping a few hundred (or perhaps thousand) pounds of stuff on the tiles to protect them is not going to work.
Now perhaps you'll say that such a coating wouldn't have to weigh much because it could be thin. I will remind you that the foam that brought down Columbia slammed into the wing at about 550mph relative to the shuttle's speed. Any coating that's going to do any good would have to be able to withstand such an impact or it's not worth the weight of the coating. I think you should now realize that any protective coating would have to be (a) very thick and (b) very heavy in order to do any good, which would therefore (c) make the shuttle's cargo-carrying capacity more pathetic than it already is.
It's a bad design. You can keep applying band-aids all you want, but having the heat tiles exposed to debris damage during ascent is a fundamentally bad design than can't readily be corrected. Ever see a Saturn V launch? Tons of ice shed from the ascent stages, crashing all over the place, yet no Apollo mission was ever in any danger whatsoever because of it. The "valuable" part of the stack was at the top, away from debris, and the heat shield itself was tucked away inside the stack. Until we come up with a way to launch things without cryogenic propellants, this is going to be the preferred arrangement for getting stuff into space.
Wasn't aware that I was, just saying that the Republican party (notice, the particular party, not a movement or an ideology) is doing a hell of a lot better at it. I mean, for gods sakes, the concept of "liberty" is a bad thing now.
I'm sure a neoconservative would disagree with you vehemently and say it's the other way around. Perhaps that's why I'm a Libertarian.
"Oh noes! That ideology shares concepts with what Cold War era propaganda taught me was teh devil!"
That has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly you're being silly. I personally dislike the very very ideology behind socialism and communism, although I certainly understand the draw they have for "the common people." What a pity that both ideologies require humans to go against human nature, which is why they are all doomed to failure. Capitalism in Republic is the only ideology that embraces and encourages human nature, which is why it's proven to be the most successful form of government thus far.
Just how freakin' black and white is your world?
Pretty freakin' black and white. You see, I don't bother trying to find moral equivalence or compassion for those who oppose me. People fall into three categories: those that are on "my" side, those that are against me, and those that are neutral. Those who are on my side deserve and receive whatever benefits I can give them. Those who are neutral receive neither favor nor opposition. Those who are against me are my enemies, and I seek to defeat them using whatever means are appropriate.
I'm sure this seems hopelessly Neanderthal to someone so cultured and nuanced as yourself. No doubt this kind of thinking is a complete enigma to you. The sad thing is that while people like you are so busy seeing shades of grey in every situation, people like me are actually taking action and getting things done and -- whether you like it or not -- looking out for your best interests. You won't recognize that, but there it is.
Imitation is the sincerest form of...well, you know. Since you're unable to come up with your own arguments, I really appreciate your attempts to ape my logical, rational thought process. Bravo! Perhaps next time you can use your own neurons, if that isn't too much of a stretch for you.
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I'm not sure which builds exactly, but I know I tried three times, and failed three times to put Vista (Beta2 and RC1) on VPC and failed three times.
I'm not sure what you were doing wrong, then. I've installed every build since 5368 on MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 (Release, and with the SP Beta) and they all work. What they don't all support are the VM Extensions required to get any kind of decent performance out of it. Vista betas and the RC1 were slow enough as is; without the Extensions, it was pretty much a slideshow. There is a beta VM Extension available from Microsoft Connect which is free for all to download if you want. Those extensions worked for most pre-RC1 builds, but I don't think they've been updated for the actual RC1 yet.
Wow what scintillating logic a brilliant masterwork of a response, not.
Like yours is somehow equivalent to a sonnet from Shakespeare?
Have fun dropping white phosphorus on innocent little kids, ASSHOLE!
Sorry, I think you're thinking of the wrong war. See the 1960's and Viet Nam, not 2006 and Iraq. I'm sure you'd be happier if we were killing little kids, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. Now, go do something useful, mature, and demonstrative, like burn a flag or something. You've obviously got some amazing hangups (not to mention delusional misconceptions) about people in the U.S. military. I won't stoop to calling you an expletive, but you are amazingly ignorant of reality. I can only hope you grow up one day and realize just how foolish you're acting right now.
Pity there's no more room on my friend/foe list, for you'd fit in right at the top.
Here's how well loved you are in Iraq imperialist scum bag:
You are beyond reasoning with. I will waste no further time trying to convince someone who is so obviously stupid.
You go ahead and sneer. Far better men than you have died so you can have your sneer. You go right ahead and enjoy it.
How do you know the civilians don't want to be involved? In Iraq almost no one wants the American invaders there and I suspect it's VERY easy for the resistance fighters to find people willing to shelter them.
Speaking as someone who's been there (which I doubt you can claim), your assessment is...incorrect, shall we say. There is a very active minority of insurgents running around making it difficult for everyone there, Iraqi's and coalition forces combined, but that by no means is the overwhelming majority you seem to indicate. I'm sure that if you just keep your eyes glued on CNN all the time that's what you'd think. However, you are seeing what the reporters want you to see. Iraqi kids playing around our Hummers and armored vehicles while trading food and candy doesn't make the news.
Sure, it's no bed of roses. We had to shoo the kids away too frequently because the terrorist bastards look for this kind of thing. It wasn't long ago that one of them waited for kids to come near a convoy before he drove his fucking carbomb into the column. He could've waited until we'd passed through and not killed a bunch of kids, but he didn't. He wanted those kids dead as well as us because that makes the news, and that furthers their agenda. They are not winning, but if they can make the American public think they're winning, political pressure will force us to quit. They know they can't defeat us militarily, so they're going for the political win. Read up on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. It was a military disaster for the NVA, they gained nothing and lost thousands of trrops, but Walter Cronkite basically said we'd lost the war in front of a live TV audience. Don't think Al Queada is too stupid to learn from that. They're not, and they're finding all kinds of help from Al Jazeera, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and just about everybody but Fox News.
Remember one mans "sub human scum terrorist" is another mans "freedom fighter" resisting imperialist foreign invasion.
Ah, the great moral relativist argument. Sorry, I'm not buying it. None of my Marines would ever grab a civilian to hide behind while advancing on an enemy position. We would never kidnap the children of a family and threaten to kill the kids if the family didn't allow a weapons or bomb cache to be located in the house. And we sure as hell would never drive a carbomb into a crowd of kids hoping to kill as many of them as we could just so it would make the evening news. This is the kind of shit your "freedom fighters" are engaging in. Is this somehow noble, just, and forthright in your eyes? If so, you have one of the most sickening definitions of morality I have ever heard of.
Wake up. These people are not deserving of your respect, and by apologizing for them you are tacitly excusing their actions. If they wish to behave in a barbaric fashion, they are barbarians. Hold a dying child, bleeding to death from a carbomb attack, in your arms and try to excuse them. Go ahead. Try. Still think these people are anything other than inhuman thugs?
Not shooting babies is your fucking job, not anybody else's. I shouldn't have to tell a Marine what I learned as a Boy Scout - when you point that gun, the responsibility for what that bullet hits is yours.
No fucking shit, dickhead. Any more earthshattering revelations you want to visit upon us?
Yeah. You're in an intractable situation - sit and take the hits, or take action and cause civilian deaths. In other words you're in the exact intractable situation that everybody with sense told you was going to happen when Iraq was invaded in the fucking first place. But, no. Apparently you thought you knew better, and were suprised to find out that there were risks to invading Iraq a little more serious than injuries from thrown roses.
So what's your solution, genius? Just sit back and do nothing? Yeah, that's the ticket. Let's let third-world dictators with nuclear ambitions just stand around thumbing their noses at us. That sends a real good message: the U.S. is a paper tiger with no teeth, no claws, and certainly no stomach to enforce what they say. Bin Laden has been quoted as saying that the pullout of U.S. troops from Somalia after the "Blackhawk Down" incident convinced him he had nothing to fear from us. When our enemies no longer fear us, you get things like Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and 9/11.
But, no. Apparently you think you know better. I'm sure if we just found every terrorist in the world and gave them a hug, they'd all love us and the world would be peaceful. You go try that. I'll make sure your head and your body gets picked up and packaged in the same box for the ride home.
My dad was a Marine.
Good for him despite the fact that he raised an idiot.
I've been proud of that my whole life.
You should be. He's a better man than you are for having done some service to the country.
I'm a little less proud, now.
Like I said, he obviously raised an idiot and never bothered to instill in you any idea of why we fight. It's not for bloodlust, greed, or fear. Saddam was the enemy. Islamic fascism and terrorism remains the enemy. This battle will be fought for many years on many lands. We will only lose if people like you have your way.
You go ahead and sneer at us serving in Iraq. Better men than you have died so you can have your little tantrum of self-important naivety. You go right ahead and enjoy it. We'll still be here when you're done.
If you're too stupid to see the difference between Nazi's invading Poland and the U.S. invading Iraq, there's no point in continuing this conversation. You're an absolute fool, and history will judge you as such.
Great! Instead you give them dead baby boiled to death by high power microwaves. Anything that does enough damage to severely incapacitate a grown person is likely to kill a baby.
Oh for god's sake! Try a little less idiocy and a bit more thinking. The "high power microwaves" you're so busily castigating can no more make a baby "boiled to death" than your little finger can. If you were half as quick to read the article as you are to hurl invective, you'd know the non-lethal microwave device causes no physical injuries. Dumb ass.
You also have dead marines because you didn't debate hard enough and killed innocent people and inspired more Iraqis to join the insurgency.
More stupidity from you, I see. The point of the non-lethal weapon is to allow us to reduce the probability of killing innocents. Or would you prefer we just set everything on full auto and spray down babies and old ladies with hot lead? What kind of monsters do you think we are? I don't know what kind of world you live in, bud, but the Marines I know and served with hate seeing innocent people hurt. They hate it so much that they willingly risk their lives on a daily basis just so that civilians don't die. After all, a single W-88 warhead in the center of Baghdad would pretty much end the insurgency in that city, wouldn't it? So would saturation bombing, nerve gas, or any other mass-killing weapon we have in our arsenal. It would do so with little or no risk of injury on our part. But we don't do that, do we? We have leathernecks on the ground, making targets of themselves, getting killed, all because we have more respect for civilian casualities than do the scum we're fighting.
Of course, by your writings, I see you think we should just knuckle under and surrender to those who don't like us. It's a good goddammed thing people like you aren't running the country. With someone like you, the fucking French could invade and take us over.
Now, granted, even though sending American soldiers to their deaths is way down the list of things that Republicans care about...
You know what? The vast, huge, unbelievably overwhelming majority of those fighting in Iraq are (a) Republicans and (b) fully supportive of their mission. Quit thinking we're some kind of lamb being led to the slaughter by evil Republicans trying to line the pockets of Big Oil. We don't feel ourselves to be victims, we believe in our mission, even if you don't. It doesn't have one goddammed thing to do with SUV's or anything else so petty. Saddam was given an ultimatum. He chose to ignore it. We had a choice to either (a) do nothing and be viewed as a powerless paper tiger in world events or (b) follow through and kick his ass. I, for one, am damned glad the second option was followed.
For those that don't, the fact that this weapon could be used to prevent freedom of assembly may make them opppose this weapon.
Again, you must think the wielders of such a weapon are nothing but a bunch of crazed maniacs just aching to zap your liberal ass. I've got news for you, sonny. The first person to use this weapon indiscriminately on an otherwise-peaceful demonstration is going to find himself in jail -- jailed by the very government and laws you claim are so "out to get you." Now if the demonstration was a bunch of hooligans out smashing stores and burning cars, that's exactly what kind of thing this weapon is good for. If you want an effective demonstration, think "Ghandi" not "bin Laden." But I forget that, in your mind, the government is always assumed to be evil, and the demonstrators are always assumed to be noble. Wait unti you grow up a bit and then try re-examining that premise. You'll see just how silly and naive it is.
Anonymous Coward suits you well. I love how you insult and second guess those who are trying to defend this nation while hiding yourself. Your method of dealing with a potential adversary speaks volumes about how effective your ideas would be if put into practice.
If I'm a Marine, I'm all for this. Likewise Air Force MPs (who are often guarding facilities that get swamped with representatives from Unruly Crowd Central Casting), etc.
I am a Marine, one who's done a tour in Iraq already, and I can tell you we are literally dying to have something like this. The current ROE is such that you're severely limited in the action you can take when somebody starts shooting at you or your convoy. You basically can either choose not to respond at all (i.e. disengage) or you can choose to excercise deadly force. There is no option three.
With all the reporters crawling around just hoping for a dead baby with an M-16 bullet lodged in it just in time for the evening let's-bash-the-U.S.-military evening newscast, I can assure you we all spend far too much time debating about pulling that trigger. We have dead Marines because of it, and because our enemy chooses to hide amongst civilians hoping we'll kill some of them. These people are animals, barbarians, sub-human scum, but don't get me started.
With a reliable, ranged, non-lethal weapon of this type, we could be much more indiscriminate about how we apply it. Don't take that the wrong way; I don't mean we run around zapping everyone in sight. Instead, when a threat develops, we could "stun" the person without fear of wounding or killing non-combatants. Fewer dead Marines, fewer dead civilians, and (maybe) fewer dead terrorists (captured alive instead and then used as a useful source of intelligence). Only the stupidest Peacenik would oppose the availability of such a weapon. It would save lives no matter how you look at it.
I see why you are angry. Quirks - see any windoze GUI.
First off, it's "Windows" not "windoze." If the best you can do is engage in childlike namecalling, perhaps you should avoid contact with adults. Churlish behavior such as this makes you seem immature and purile...which probably isn't far from the truth to begin with. Typical Linux-head elitism.
As for quirks in the GUI, you need to be more specific. Hundreds of millions of people use the Windows GUI every day. If there's a quirk there, I think you'd hear more about them.
It's easier to take the live CD to the store and have it work forever than it is to try to use and keep up a windoze box.
Bullshit. A properly managed Windows XP SP2 box is every bit as easy to "keep up." Just like a Linux box, you need to keep up your patches. Just like a Linux box, you need to be careful about downloading and executing bizarre content. The only advantage of a live CD is that the base OS can't be corrupted (apps and home directories can, though). However, there are CD-based distros of Windows as well, so there goes that argument.
Plus Dale Snr wore an open faced helmet simply because he was too arrogant to wear a proper one like everyone else.
Arrogance had nothing to do with it. There was no rule in NASCAR requiring such a helmet, and Dale Sr. felt it restricted his vision and perception too much -- something that (in his opinion) could actually make driving more dangerous. In any event, a full helmet would have done nothing to save him, as it was his skull detaching from his spine due to rapid deceleration that killed him. A HANS device would have saved him, but that was also an "optional" safety device according to NASCAR rules. The rules have since been changed to make both safety devices mandatory.
Earnhart had been driving in NASCAR for decades with no full helmet, no HANS device, and 60's-era safety devices we wouldn't put on a minivan today. He'd survived countless violent crashes with such protection. He knew the risks and was comfortable with them, otherwise he wouldn't climb in the car. It wasn't arrogance, it was simply a matter of the odds catching up to him. Even with today's safety enhancements, drivers are killed every now and then. It's a regrettable -- but unavoidable -- part of the sport, but that's no different than other "safe" sports. Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in an equestrian accident, for crying out loud. You simply can't engage in most vigorous sports without at least a minor risk of injury.
They are, however, not optional. You can't get rid of them.
Very true for IE (not for OE, though, which is removable without consequences), but you can take amazingly effective steps to secure them nonetheless -- if you know how and if you feel like taking the time to do so. Using local policies, you can pretty much deactivate IE's naughty bits like ActiveX and Javascript as well as locking it down to the point where it really can't do anything. This would make it unusable for a typical user, but if you're using Firefox, who cares? It doesn't affect the OS's ability to use whatever bits and pieces of IE it needs in the slightest.
Sure, you can't excise IE from XP, but you can take steps that are every bit as effective, if a tad more time consuming than just doing an uninstall. We do this via Group Policies right now and our users use Firefox -- deployed via GPO using FrontMotion's MSI package and ADM templates. Outlook and Office in general are locked down via other ADM templates supplied in the Office 2003 Resource Kit. It's not hard, it just takes a little time and knowledge. The time is something anyone can take, and the knowledge is freely available on MS's TechNet sites in the form of whitepapers and Best Practices documents. The pity is that so few people bother to read them.
I've been at this particular company for roughly five years and we have yet to be hit with any worm or virus. Windows isn't insecure, it just has very insecure defaults. Change those and you'll find the platform to be robust and reliable, despite the "conventional wisdom" so frequently espoused on these pages.
Those are not Linux problems, they are Sony problems.
And that's where you lost a potential Linux convert there, bud. Oh, it's not a Linux problem, it's a Sony problem! Hey, that makes the user feel sooooo much better about still not being able to get the widget to work the way he wants it to!
You see, this is the part that really torques me off about the hardcore Linux user. They assume the average user is willing to put up with the quirks, the kernel recompiles, the beta (or alpha!) drivers, and the hacked-support-for-my-Sony-special-widget issues. You just don't get it, do you? The user doesn't care why it won't work, he only cares that it doesn't work. You shifting the blame to the hardware maker is completely irrelevant to him because, at the end of the day, his hardware works fine with Windows but stumbles or won't work at all with Linux.
Sure, Sony not releasing specs or drivers for its whacked-out widgets is the real root cause here. But remind me again why Sony -- a company that must return a profit on its investments in R&D and support -- should spend an inordinate amount of internal resources working to support an OS that, statistically, less than 5% of its users are ever likely to use? Or for that matter, releasing specs on its whacked-out widget that a competitor could use to create a competing widget? This is not an altruistic world we live in, son. What's in it for Sony? Goodwill from a few thousand Linux users? That doesn't pay bills. Mind you, I'd love it if Sony either gave support or released specs, but I'm pragmatic enough to understand why it's not happening and fair enough not to castigate Sony for not doing something that has no benefit -- and several downsides -- to it.
But at the end of the day, what do we have? A widget that works under Windows and not on Linux. The user wants it to work, and Windows is already paid for and pre-installed on the laptop. Do you honestly think this is a compelling situation for switching to Linux? Don't be silly. Until everybody's favorite hardware widget is fully and completely supported in Linux just as it is in Windows, this is going to be a huge headache. It's not the fault of Linux, but don't think that shifting the blame makes this any less of a reason to avoid switching. There are plenty of reasons -- and good ones at that -- why desktop Linux is still on the fringe.
Microsoft is effectively doing this with Vista and yet... there still appear to be security flaws. Something wrong with that picture.
The same thing could be said for the contortions Apple has gone through to get to OSX and yet...there still appear to be security flaws. To be sure, Apple has had fewer issues than Microsoft, but there's more to it than that. If you remove things like IE, IIS, and Office from the mix, you find the core of Windows itself hasn't been hit that much, statistically not much worse (or better) than OSX core vulnerabilities. When you consider that Windows machines vastly outnumber OSX machines (and that Windows users tend to be less --ahem-- technically adept), you find Windows itself has been improving quite a bit. Even IIS has been dramatically tightened up. IE and Office (specifically Outlook) remain the big offenders, not the OS.
Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.
You are correct, but the sound in this case is generally pretty bottom-of-the-barrel. Granted, most folks only need beeps and boops, but it's still rather pathetic. And very CPU intensive as well. I'd consider it only slightly better than an old fashioned PC speaker.
I'll second your commont on the MS Terminal Services, though. We've seen it scale very well at some of our clients, and we use it as well. Citrix has the advantage in features and flexibility, though.
We do a lot of AutoCAD work, ergo it's not practical for us. Anybody doing anything very GUI- or visually-oriented (like Photoshop, or even PowerPoint) will notice the difference. Word and Excel users might not care that much, and green screen apps in a terminal emulator window won't care, but it's still enough of a pain that it's a rare case where it can be implemented universally.
First off, I don't think VM'ing your desktops is the answer. Current VM's really dumb down the hardware. You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native (some quite a bit slower). Couple that with the size of most VM images (my Vista image is about 12GB) and you're really looking at a poor solution.
Here's what you should be thinking about:
- Get some kind of desktop management suite like Altiris. You can push software deployments easily, and it's very easy to lock machines down to the point where users can't fsck them up. I've consulted for companies that do this with hundreds of desktops and it's a very robust, reliable system.
- Go with a thin client setup like Citrix or Terminal Server. Users run nothing on their local hardware. Instead, everything runs on the big server. Downsides are similar to VM's (thin clients are notorious for very lightweight support for anything but the most basic sound and graphics) but you are at least spared the massive network thrashing of hundreds of users logging on and pulling down VM images at 8AM every morning.
- If it's users messing up machines that you're worried about, you might want to consider a solution by Clearcube. They take away everything except the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The guts of the PC reside in a server rack in what is essentially a PC on a blade. The blades are load balanced and redundant, so swapping them out is a breeze. And users *can't* load software on them because there's no USB ports, no floppy drive...nothing! Unless you allow them to download it from the Internet, *nothing* is going to get on those machines if you don't want it to.
VM's make sense for server consolidation. I don't think they've yet gotten to the point where desktops run on them as a form of protection or reliability. There's too many other solutions that work better and have fewer downsides. The problem here isn't Windows per se, it's the fact that your workstations aren't locked down properly to prevent your users from doing stupid stuff in the first place. Fix that and suddenly you'll find a Windows workstation environment isn't the hassle it once was.
The best protection from this sort of attack is to not make someone hate you enough to want to attack you.
What part of the "we want to kill you because you're Jewish, or because you're an infidel" don't you understand here? Have you even read things like the Hezbollah Charter or Al-Queda's published mission?
At some point you have to understand that these people want to kill us because we're different from them. Much of this "we want back Jerusalem" or "we don't want you interfering with our affairs" is merely a way to put a face on the ugliest of all human reactions: xenophobia, the fear of that which is foreign or different.
33MB? Ouch, are all the Windows drivers that bloated?
Remember, this is a "Unified Driver." That means it has drivers for a huge variety of video cards in one big, tidy package. I also most likely includes stuff for multiple languages, only one of which you'll actually use. Also, with the 9x.xx release of nVidia drivers you get both the "new" display driver interface (based on a web browser motif) and the "classic" interface (what we all know and have loved for the last five years or more).
Add all that up and you get a 33MB installer. The actual driver code, however, is far smaller. Not all of that 33MB ends up on your hard drive after the install is done. It's not bloated, it's just aimed at a very wide array of possible applications, and nVidia wants to put all that in one installer to simplify things for the end user. Bloat implies there's a lot of cruft in there, and that's not the case.
Windows98 worked perfectly with my friend's hardware, then the retail version trashed the contents of his hard drive every time he tried to install it.
Probably because he tried to install the retail version over an earlier beta or release candidate. I'd bet good money he completely violated the beta/RC instructions when it came to upgrading, and that (not some nefarious install bug from Redmond) was the cause of his woes.
RTFM. Live it, learn it, love it.
And then I discovered ClearType. Why ClearType isn't on in Windows XP by default (or even installed by default) I don't know. I had to go to a microsoft website to turn it on and download a control panel applet to let me tweak and configure it. But it made a great display even better... to much so that it was like getting glasses! I even use it on my CRT display at work, and it's better there too. It just seems odd to me that it's not the norm...
Turning it on for displays that don't respond well to ClearType results in blurrier text. This applies mostly to CRT's, and if you'll recall, flat panels weren't exactly popular back when XP was launched nearly five years ago.
As for fixing this, you can kind of institute this yourself. All you have to do is create a profile with the machine set up the way you want it (this applies to more than just display settings, but that's beyond the scope of this quick post). Then, log in as an administrator, go to the profile manager, select the profile you just configured, and click the "Copy to..." button. Copy the profile to the "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User" directory and tell XP to make the profile available to "Everyone".
What this will do is ensure than any new accounts created on the machine will automatically get all the customziations you put into the initial "seed" account you copied from. If you work in a networked environment like a corporation, you can extend this paradigm even further by copying the profile into a "Default User" directory inside the "NETLOGON" share of a domain controller. Any user who logs onto a machine without a profile for them will automatically download this default profile, ensuring your settings are propagated everywhere. Very handy, and fully documented on Microsoft's support site under KB article #168475.
I admit Microsoft doesn't make this overly easy, and the instructions aren't posted in obvious places, but this has been a tremendous help to us at my company, and I use it on my home network as well.
Space is expanding like this everywhere, but in small uneven pockets of gravity such as clusters of galaxies, or inside a galaxy, the expansion is less obvious, because of gravity's effects.
Note that this completely and totally explains the Oprah Effect, whereby a body continues to grow larger even though it denies gaining any mass. It could also explain the strange growth (but not the subsequent shrinkage) of portions of other bodies, such as the well-known Pamela Anderson Effect.
first of all, who the hell wants to spin down server hdd-s ? you can't cache hudred of gigabytes, and servers that would save any noticeable amount of power from that can't cache all the necessary data to the tiny dram or flash.
...)
I think you misunderstand the meaning of how this would be applied. Currently, products are being developed that will spin down unused drives in something like a large SAN array, then spin them up once capacity (or performance) requires it. This could result in noticeable power savings.
second, there is no real "mega power save" here, intel makes cpu's that still float near 100W while they are at fullspeed, whereas a modern hdd goes under 10W in normal conditions while spinning normally.
Modern CPU's all have power saving circuitry built into them, and they can power themselves down to under 20W-30W. I'm not talking laptop CPU's here; Opteron's and (I think) Xeon's can do this, too. This is significant.
third, if it's mainly used as booting speedup, how many times do you really want to start your server (yeah ok, on windows, the update cycle needs you to boot once per month, but still
A good point, but there's still a huge upside: servers can take several minutes to boot off standard hard drives. Every minute a server is down, hundred or thousands of people cannot make use of the server. For a big company or website, that's a lot of lost money. If you can shave a minute or two off the total boot time, it is significant.
fourth, spinning any physical item down and up again will reduce it's lifetime, temperature changes in the oil and materials make it less resistable to damages.
Which is why you don't spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down all the time. If you had a big SAN array, it's very unlikely it's going to be at 100% capacity on day one. If you could spin down all the drives that aren't in use but still make it appear as if they were "up," why wouldn't you?
fifth, spinning up the hdd requires a lot more power than keeping it spinning.
That depends on how long it's spinning but not doing anything useful.
sixth, unless this works transparently (emulating some 'natural' disk operations will certainly make it slower than just disk access), who the hell is going to rework all the raid software that you have enhanced your boxes with ?
See prior comments. Folks like EMC are all over this already.
seventh, add all the things up from here, and althrough you find the disks inexpensive, the total cost will be expensive, may not save you a dime.
Since you're missing several key points, I think your conclusion is not...correct.
I still don't see why they can't put like a protective liner or coating on top of the fragile graphite/ceramic tiles to protect it.
I can think of one amazingly obvious reason why they don't do it: weight (or, more precisely, mass). Every pound of stuff you put on the tiles to protect them is a pound less the shuttle can carry into orbit. It already can't carry very much (compared to unmanned rockets that are far less expensive to operate), so slapping a few hundred (or perhaps thousand) pounds of stuff on the tiles to protect them is not going to work.
Now perhaps you'll say that such a coating wouldn't have to weigh much because it could be thin. I will remind you that the foam that brought down Columbia slammed into the wing at about 550mph relative to the shuttle's speed. Any coating that's going to do any good would have to be able to withstand such an impact or it's not worth the weight of the coating. I think you should now realize that any protective coating would have to be (a) very thick and (b) very heavy in order to do any good, which would therefore (c) make the shuttle's cargo-carrying capacity more pathetic than it already is.
It's a bad design. You can keep applying band-aids all you want, but having the heat tiles exposed to debris damage during ascent is a fundamentally bad design than can't readily be corrected. Ever see a Saturn V launch? Tons of ice shed from the ascent stages, crashing all over the place, yet no Apollo mission was ever in any danger whatsoever because of it. The "valuable" part of the stack was at the top, away from debris, and the heat shield itself was tucked away inside the stack. Until we come up with a way to launch things without cryogenic propellants, this is going to be the preferred arrangement for getting stuff into space.
Wasn't aware that I was, just saying that the Republican party (notice, the particular party, not a movement or an ideology) is doing a hell of a lot better at it. I mean, for gods sakes, the concept of "liberty" is a bad thing now.
I'm sure a neoconservative would disagree with you vehemently and say it's the other way around. Perhaps that's why I'm a Libertarian.
"Oh noes! That ideology shares concepts with what Cold War era propaganda taught me was teh devil!"
That has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly you're being silly. I personally dislike the very very ideology behind socialism and communism, although I certainly understand the draw they have for "the common people." What a pity that both ideologies require humans to go against human nature, which is why they are all doomed to failure. Capitalism in Republic is the only ideology that embraces and encourages human nature, which is why it's proven to be the most successful form of government thus far.
Just how freakin' black and white is your world?
Pretty freakin' black and white. You see, I don't bother trying to find moral equivalence or compassion for those who oppose me. People fall into three categories: those that are on "my" side, those that are against me, and those that are neutral. Those who are on my side deserve and receive whatever benefits I can give them. Those who are neutral receive neither favor nor opposition. Those who are against me are my enemies, and I seek to defeat them using whatever means are appropriate.
I'm sure this seems hopelessly Neanderthal to someone so cultured and nuanced as yourself. No doubt this kind of thinking is a complete enigma to you. The sad thing is that while people like you are so busy seeing shades of grey in every situation, people like me are actually taking action and getting things done and -- whether you like it or not -- looking out for your best interests. You won't recognize that, but there it is.
Imitation is the sincerest form of...well, you know. Since you're unable to come up with your own arguments, I really appreciate your attempts to ape my logical, rational thought process. Bravo! Perhaps next time you can use your own neurons, if that isn't too much of a stretch for you.