Just a horrible thought! Making NASA accountable for what it spends!
So, what, you're going to do a failure analysis of an enterprise involved with accelerating expensive and sometimes living things to escape velocity in aluminum tubes with chemical propellants?
One wonders how well your analysis would hold up when evaluating the government's efforts to do virtually anything else. I quite frankly would like to see you do better.
It is expensive to do things right in such a dangerous endeavor, and the primary reason for the much-publicized recent failures with NASA missions is exactly the same as the reason for the recent.com failures - bean counters who don't understand the effort and who fail to trust those who do.
As for the other/.ers who are bemoaning the human value of space exploration, I pose the following historical analysis. DaVinci, Newton, Archimedes, and Edison were known for innovation and advancing human knowledge. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hilary Clinton were/are known for social concerns. You do the math.
Well, I just did packet traces, and the results are troubling.
It's for real. No error reporting, no background windows. Search with the button, info goes to Netscape. Search without it, and you don't see the spyware traffic. But it gets worse.
I haven't tested this with the Linux version of Mozilla, so this might be a weird code overlap issue, but Win32 Mozilla build 2002030403 does the same thing.
Planes hit the world trade center and it collapses, which cuts the space budget to nearly nothing.
In response to this crisis of public interest and outreach for funding space exploration, we go to the effort of determining the color of the universe, but get it wrong.
But public confidence in space research is restored when the scientists assure us that the universe is, in fact, beige.
Sagan's ashes must be accreting in anguish over this.
This has one of two possible meanings, and they are equally bad.
Taco thinks we are all profoundly stupid, and that despite being able to spout statistics about/. usage patterns, he honestly thinks we are capable of believing he doesn't know how much it costs.
He actually doesn't know how much it costs, and allowed probably the greatest Internet culture site to be sold out without having checked basic numbers to see if it was necessary to do so.
First they take away my command line and replace it with windoze. Then they take away my sexy jet-engnine-spin-up sounding RLL and MFM hard drives. And now no blinky lights?!
Sure, I can leave behind the days where troubleshooting Ethernet required a resistance meter, and when you could hear the memory counting up, and when a goddammed power switch was a goddammed power switch, but now I have to give up blinky lights? What is the world coming to where a computer geek can't proudly behold his array of blinky lights!?
Where's the joy? These evil led sniffing bastards simply must be stopped, that's all there is to it. I'll 3DES the signal going to the LEDs before I resort to covering my beloved LEDs. Duck tape be damned.
This even extends to protecting gun registration information of Al Qaeda suspects.
Are you suggesting that Al Qaeda went through a NICS check when they bought their AK-47s and RPG's?
The Brady Law specifically outlawed maintaining "registration" records on gun purchases cleared through NICS. The Clinton Justice Department had been breaking the law since the law began to be enforced, and the Bush administration has decided to obey that law, and destroy the purchase records of millions of legitimate gun owners hoarded by the Clintonistas in a case of gun registration by executive decree. Reno certainly used law enforcement as a matter of convenience and political expediency, and I realize it must be very shocking to see an Attorney General upholding the law.
If, however, you insist that it is the duty of the federal Justice Department to violate federal law, there's really not much more to say.
This reminds me of some great fun I had as a small child. We took a can of green slime (some of you may remember its glory barely contained in those little plastic garbage cans) and decided it would be fun to squish it out onto the carport.
I don't remember the details of this event progressing to the point of wetting down the entire carport floor and sliding across it, but the effect was to destroy any frictive capacity of the concrete. This was incredibly fun until dad arrived from work that day and attempted to park his car.
Actually, your analysis is correct, but the reason isn't what you think it is.
I've worked with other server software for years (mostly Novell) and tried to pick up Win2k. I approached the problem with an open mind, determined to figure out the right way to do things and to find a way to make Microsoft work.
This link gives some idea of the kind of Rube Goldberg nonsense you are subjected to in attempting to do very simple things with Microsoft, but really doesn't come close to describing the kind of scatterbrained, random, and poorly thought out crap that Microsoft software is.
Microsoft ultimately proved to be incompatible with my work ethic. I could not do my work in a duck tape and bubble gum environment. One may be tempted to consider that I was incompetent, and simply couldn't learn the new system.
I picked up Linux and OpenBSD well enough in six months to make a living as a Linux networking and security consultant. I've never looked back.
I'm outraged at this egregious act of allowing advertising to impact upon the free exchange of information! Why MUST the Internet serve to support those who wish to use its power for their goals other than online community and information sharing?
I'd normally just overlook something like your inspired response, but you make a good example case as to why John Q. Public isn't going for the liberal agenda anymore, and I thought I might do you a service in explaining why.
There comes a point in debating ideology where someone overtly betrays that they have abandoned any pretense of the moral foundations for the positions they take. In a good faith ideological debate, the assumption is that both parties seek to do that which promotes the welfare of people, and that their differences result not from a breach in this fundamental understanding, but in the approach they wish to take in achieving that welfare.
By abandoning the concept of equality, you have demonstrated that your purposes are not directed at the public good, but at something entirely else. You demonstrate that you are foisting your beliefs about the way things should be onto the rest of us. You make the transition from being an advocate to an opressor.
When you cross that threshold, your shrill cries take on the character of a howling brawler in a bar fight. Everything you say from then on can be safely disregarded by reasonable people. You can never again shame us into following you, for we now KNOW you are wrong.
This site gets so pompus and smug about its so-called agenda, its very amusing. You can boil it down to one theme:ME ME ME ME
So, technologically capable young people are elitist oligarchy when they complain about taxes, and undeserving hypocritical scum when they stand in need.
I only hope all of us can aspire to your notions of equality.
$9K since April is not a lot of money. In fact, it's considerably less than homeless people can make on welfare.
If any of Todd's other contributors are like me, they are giving money because they have found themselves in his shoes recently and want to help out. I realize that computer geeks are not currently recognized as humans, and that if he were anyone else, the department of labor wouldn't have said a thing, and your post would not be here. While I believe you are entitled to your stereotype and bigotry (who the fuck is in the media? They guy has a computer! WTF?!), I take issue with anyone seeking to punish actual generosity and human compassion, even if it is directed toward someone you don't consider human.
Yes it costs less to make a CD than a cassette, but that does not mean that the CD should be cheaper
It's funny that Henry Ford somehow missed out on this economic wisdom.
Every day I read about how and why those on the supply side should be permitted special circumstances or protections just because none of us can see how Capitalism can survive in an age of free exhange of ideas. Perhaps Capitalism would be better served (as always) by embracing change rather than the ridiculous contortions we seem to think it needs to succeed.
My firm uses openBSD extensively as a firewall. Where Linux is flexible and versatile, *BSD is more logically put together and better documented. The clear advantage to *BSD, however, is security. Nothing can touch it.
"..What?! Okay, I must be on a bad ballon, hold on... okay, wait, I see something. Lemme just drive closer to it... Drat, it's just a carnival. Hello?! Hello?!"
This will be great fun until the anti-cellphone nazis figure out they can shoot the balloons down.
Excluding pate tectonics from a discussion of world climate would be valid only if tectonics were "finished" moving continents around. Tectonics still occur, therefore, they are a part of world climate.
Tectonics were also not a factor in the glacier-caused foothills I now behold outside my window in the Southern Appalachian mountains. Borrowing from the local vernacular, we ain't seen no glaciers in these parts for a while now. point - if global warming is occurring, it's been doing so since the last ice age.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not urinating in your ecological corn flakes out of a desire to belittle environmental concerns, but rather out of a desire to belittle humans in general and their outrageous esteem for their own knowledge in particular. Science has a very poor history regarding that which is later found to be absurd. My contribution to science is to make sure things like the four humors aren't forgotten.
We're on a planet that has a 3 billion year history in which the climate has changed dramatically enough to put dinosaur fossils on Antarctica, evidence of undersea life on top of Mt. Everest, strange enough to feature a 20 megaton blast in Siberia 50 years before atom bombs were invented, and random enough to prevent our ability to accuratly forecast tomorrow's weather, AND we conclude based on less than 100 years of weather data that global warming is happening?
Forgive me, but I'm feeling a little like a mayfly seeing its first (and only) sunrise and worrying about global sunlighting.
I don't see how you can blame Microsoft for what they are doing.
It's actually quite simple. They were found guilty of violating federal antitrust law.
As in leave them the f*ck alone.
I'm sure most criminals would go to any length to persuade government officials to "leave them alone". However noble may be the purpose of seeking to remain unmolested as they proceed to conquer the business information world, justice demands otherwise.
...there are cultural barriers between the kind of person who would be interested in OS research, and the kind of person who hangs out on Slashdot
Ever heard of Linux?
Furthermore, I attribute the lack of "yeah, we've got it" to the likelyhood that the license program in question probably amounts to membership in a beta testing group or free SDKs. I would imagine that they would be as surprised as the rest of us to discover that they have the "source code" for Windows.
Any numbers available for Sun's lobbying and contributions?
Was Sun contributing money while they were involved in legal action regarding their business practices?
The Microsoft situation is less a matter of corporate political contributions than it is a matter of historic antitrust precedent. That M$'s behavior was not technically illegal brings to mind the Nuremburg legal defense that a war of genocidal agression was not illegal.
Indeed, at the moment, it is not illegal to employ monopolistic activities on a scale without comparison in human history to turn the entire information industry into an oligarchy. As for myself, I find very little comfort in witholding my outrage based on this technicality.
SNMP is well known to be a security problem (at least in the networking community). The answer is to cut all of it off at your firewall, and make sure your internal networks are zoned appropriately. The best way to deal with it right now is to put all your equpiments' management addresses in a management VLAN, of which none of the user ports are members, and then control access to it via the router you'll use to get to the VLAN.
This has a LOT more business application that appears on the surface. And $20K for such a solution is comparable to paying $50 for Red Hat to run a server.
Back in my systems integration days, we had very many law firm clients who used document management to organize the truly prodigious quantity of information they had to deal with. Spending $50K on the solution was not unheard of even among small firms. In fact, they usually wound up spending $20K just on third party maintenance utilities to support their document management systems!
Slashdot Mirror
Just a horrible thought! Making NASA accountable for what it spends!
So, what, you're going to do a failure analysis of an enterprise involved with accelerating expensive and sometimes living things to escape velocity in aluminum tubes with chemical propellants?
One wonders how well your analysis would hold up when evaluating the government's efforts to do virtually anything else. I quite frankly would like to see you do better.
It is expensive to do things right in such a dangerous endeavor, and the primary reason for the much-publicized recent failures with NASA missions is exactly the same as the reason for the recent .com failures - bean counters who don't understand the effort and who fail to trust those who do.
As for the other /.ers who are bemoaning the human value of space exploration, I pose the following historical analysis. DaVinci, Newton, Archimedes, and Edison were known for innovation and advancing human knowledge. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hilary Clinton were/are known for social concerns. You do the math.
Well, I just did packet traces, and the results are troubling.
It's for real. No error reporting, no background windows. Search with the button, info goes to Netscape. Search without it, and you don't see the spyware traffic. But it gets worse.
I haven't tested this with the Linux version of Mozilla, so this might be a weird code overlap issue, but Win32 Mozilla build 2002030403 does the same thing.
Okay, let me get this straight...
Planes hit the world trade center and it collapses, which cuts the space budget to nearly nothing.
In response to this crisis of public interest and outreach for funding space exploration, we go to the effort of determining the color of the universe, but get it wrong.
But public confidence in space research is restored when the scientists assure us that the universe is, in fact, beige.
Sagan's ashes must be accreting in anguish over this.
Taco resonding to how much /. costs:
I really don't know.
This has one of two possible meanings, and they are equally bad.
Say it aint so, Taco.
First they take away my command line and replace it with windoze. Then they take away my sexy jet-engnine-spin-up sounding RLL and MFM hard drives. And now no blinky lights?!
Sure, I can leave behind the days where troubleshooting Ethernet required a resistance meter, and when you could hear the memory counting up, and when a goddammed power switch was a goddammed power switch, but now I have to give up blinky lights? What is the world coming to where a computer geek can't proudly behold his array of blinky lights!?
Where's the joy? These evil led sniffing bastards simply must be stopped, that's all there is to it. I'll 3DES the signal going to the LEDs before I resort to covering my beloved LEDs. Duck tape be damned.
This even extends to protecting gun registration information of Al Qaeda suspects.
Are you suggesting that Al Qaeda went through a NICS check when they bought their AK-47s and RPG's?
The Brady Law specifically outlawed maintaining "registration" records on gun purchases cleared through NICS. The Clinton Justice Department had been breaking the law since the law began to be enforced, and the Bush administration has decided to obey that law, and destroy the purchase records of millions of legitimate gun owners hoarded by the Clintonistas in a case of gun registration by executive decree. Reno certainly used law enforcement as a matter of convenience and political expediency, and I realize it must be very shocking to see an Attorney General upholding the law.
If, however, you insist that it is the duty of the federal Justice Department to violate federal law, there's really not much more to say.
This reminds me of some great fun I had as a small child. We took a can of green slime (some of you may remember its glory barely contained in those little plastic garbage cans) and decided it would be fun to squish it out onto the carport.
I don't remember the details of this event progressing to the point of wetting down the entire carport floor and sliding across it, but the effect was to destroy any frictive capacity of the concrete. This was incredibly fun until dad arrived from work that day and attempted to park his car.
Actually, your analysis is correct, but the reason isn't what you think it is.
I've worked with other server software for years (mostly Novell) and tried to pick up Win2k. I approached the problem with an open mind, determined to figure out the right way to do things and to find a way to make Microsoft work.
This link gives some idea of the kind of Rube Goldberg nonsense you are subjected to in attempting to do very simple things with Microsoft, but really doesn't come close to describing the kind of scatterbrained, random, and poorly thought out crap that Microsoft software is.
Microsoft ultimately proved to be incompatible with my work ethic. I could not do my work in a duck tape and bubble gum environment. One may be tempted to consider that I was incompetent, and simply couldn't learn the new system.
I picked up Linux and OpenBSD well enough in six months to make a living as a Linux networking and security consultant. I've never looked back.
I'm outraged at this egregious act of allowing advertising to impact upon the free exchange of information! Why MUST the Internet serve to support those who wish to use its power for their goals other than online community and information sharing?
I, uh... oh. Wait, I thought I was posting on the Slashdot subscription topic.
My bad.
I'd normally just overlook something like your inspired response, but you make a good example case as to why John Q. Public isn't going for the liberal agenda anymore, and I thought I might do you a service in explaining why.
There comes a point in debating ideology where someone overtly betrays that they have abandoned any pretense of the moral foundations for the positions they take. In a good faith ideological debate, the assumption is that both parties seek to do that which promotes the welfare of people, and that their differences result not from a breach in this fundamental understanding, but in the approach they wish to take in achieving that welfare.
By abandoning the concept of equality, you have demonstrated that your purposes are not directed at the public good, but at something entirely else. You demonstrate that you are foisting your beliefs about the way things should be onto the rest of us. You make the transition from being an advocate to an opressor.
When you cross that threshold, your shrill cries take on the character of a howling brawler in a bar fight. Everything you say from then on can be safely disregarded by reasonable people. You can never again shame us into following you, for we now KNOW you are wrong.
This site gets so pompus and smug about its so-called agenda, its very amusing. You can boil it down to one theme:ME ME ME ME
So, technologically capable young people are elitist oligarchy when they complain about taxes, and undeserving hypocritical scum when they stand in need.
I only hope all of us can aspire to your notions of equality.
$9K since April is not a lot of money. In fact, it's considerably less than homeless people can make on welfare.
If any of Todd's other contributors are like me, they are giving money because they have found themselves in his shoes recently and want to help out. I realize that computer geeks are not currently recognized as humans, and that if he were anyone else, the department of labor wouldn't have said a thing, and your post would not be here. While I believe you are entitled to your stereotype and bigotry (who the fuck is in the media? They guy has a computer! WTF?!), I take issue with anyone seeking to punish actual generosity and human compassion, even if it is directed toward someone you don't consider human.
Yes it costs less to make a CD than a cassette, but that does not mean that the CD should be cheaper
It's funny that Henry Ford somehow missed out on this economic wisdom.
Every day I read about how and why those on the supply side should be permitted special circumstances or protections just because none of us can see how Capitalism can survive in an age of free exhange of ideas. Perhaps Capitalism would be better served (as always) by embracing change rather than the ridiculous contortions we seem to think it needs to succeed.
At the risk of feeding the trolls...
My firm uses openBSD extensively as a firewall. Where Linux is flexible and versatile, *BSD is more logically put together and better documented. The clear advantage to *BSD, however, is security. Nothing can touch it.
"..What?! Okay, I must be on a bad ballon, hold on... okay, wait, I see something. Lemme just drive closer to it... Drat, it's just a carnival. Hello?! Hello?!"
This will be great fun until the anti-cellphone nazis figure out they can shoot the balloons down.
Excluding pate tectonics from a discussion of world climate would be valid only if tectonics were "finished" moving continents around. Tectonics still occur, therefore, they are a part of world climate.
Tectonics were also not a factor in the glacier-caused foothills I now behold outside my window in the Southern Appalachian mountains. Borrowing from the local vernacular, we ain't seen no glaciers in these parts for a while now. point - if global warming is occurring, it's been doing so since the last ice age.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not urinating in your ecological corn flakes out of a desire to belittle environmental concerns, but rather out of a desire to belittle humans in general and their outrageous esteem for their own knowledge in particular. Science has a very poor history regarding that which is later found to be absurd. My contribution to science is to make sure things like the four humors aren't forgotten.
We're on a planet that has a 3 billion year history in which the climate has changed dramatically enough to put dinosaur fossils on Antarctica, evidence of undersea life on top of Mt. Everest, strange enough to feature a 20 megaton blast in Siberia 50 years before atom bombs were invented, and random enough to prevent our ability to accuratly forecast tomorrow's weather, AND we conclude based on less than 100 years of weather data that global warming is happening?
Forgive me, but I'm feeling a little like a mayfly seeing its first (and only) sunrise and worrying about global sunlighting.
Hmm... I see an idea here for an Internet outreach program for seniors... I have to admit, that's what got me online.
82 years old. I guess this proves that becoming a crotchety cyberphobe is a matter of choice rather than age.
It's actually quite simple. They were found guilty of violating federal antitrust law.
I'm sure most criminals would go to any length to persuade government officials to "leave them alone". However noble may be the purpose of seeking to remain unmolested as they proceed to conquer the business information world, justice demands otherwise.
Ever heard of Linux?
Furthermore, I attribute the lack of "yeah, we've got it" to the likelyhood that the license program in question probably amounts to membership in a beta testing group or free SDKs. I would imagine that they would be as surprised as the rest of us to discover that they have the "source code" for Windows.
Was Sun contributing money while they were involved in legal action regarding their business practices?
The Microsoft situation is less a matter of corporate political contributions than it is a matter of historic antitrust precedent. That M$'s behavior was not technically illegal brings to mind the Nuremburg legal defense that a war of genocidal agression was not illegal.
Indeed, at the moment, it is not illegal to employ monopolistic activities on a scale without comparison in human history to turn the entire information industry into an oligarchy. As for myself, I find very little comfort in witholding my outrage based on this technicality.
SNMP is well known to be a security problem (at least in the networking community). The answer is to cut all of it off at your firewall, and make sure your internal networks are zoned appropriately. The best way to deal with it right now is to put all your equpiments' management addresses in a management VLAN, of which none of the user ports are members, and then control access to it via the router you'll use to get to the VLAN.
This has a LOT more business application that appears on the surface. And $20K for such a solution is comparable to paying $50 for Red Hat to run a server.
Back in my systems integration days, we had very many law firm clients who used document management to organize the truly prodigious quantity of information they had to deal with. Spending $50K on the solution was not unheard of even among small firms. In fact, they usually wound up spending $20K just on third party maintenance utilities to support their document management systems!
Most all computer parts and/or related electronics make great targets.
You haven't lived until you've seen a 1 ounce 12 gauge shotgun slug slam into an external exabyte 8500 tape drive.