the first time I clicked on the "Read More" link, I arrived at a page that said, "Nothing for you to see here, please move along." Anyone else having that problem?
I used to feel the same way - I'd bought an iBook just to check out OS X, but the one-button mouse and the track-pad drove me nuts. I missed my Think-Pad nipple! The iBook sat and gathered dust for a number of months. Eventually, I needed to send my Think-Pad in for repairs, so for about a week I was stuck with the iBook.
It was mostly just a matter of getting used to a different way of doing things. By the time the Think-Pad was returned, I had gotten used to the Mac. Now I can switch between the Think-Pad and the Mac seamlessly, without any mental clashing of gears.
"We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them," said NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired the review panel. "Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed."
In other words, threat of having their project canceled scared the team into getting their shit together and their project under control.
I've got to say, so far I'm impressed with Griffin's leadership. He does seem to have a knack of getting the results he's after.
The idea that tech innovation is dead implies that we will now recycle the same tech in slightly modified form, because we have discovered every useful thing. I THINK NOT. What is more likely is that Mr. Donofrio suffers from failure of the imagination.
I think his implication is that innovation will be more incremental than radical. And he might have a point. Think about it. From 1900 to 1950 you got the automobile, the airplane, the computer, space flight, nuclear power, the radio, the TV, etc. Most of those things would have been almost unimaginable 50 years earlier. OTOH, consider the period from 1950 to present. Most of the Next Big Things have been incremental improvements on existing technology. I don't see many technologies today that weren't foreseen when I was a kid in the 1960's, although some of them have materialized in unexpected ways. Lots of refinement and diversification, sure, but I don't think as radically disruptive as the car, the airplane or the atom bomb has emerged. The difference between 1950 and 2006 isn't anywhere near as drastic as the difference between 1900 and 1950.
There's nothing in 2006 that would have surprised me much as a kid in the 1960's. What would someone from 1900 think of a computer, or a rocket, or an airplane, or an atom bomb?
Don't know about in the Netherlands, but no treaty can supercede the US Constitution.
I wouldn't be too sure of that:
Article VI.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Apparently, treaties are at least co-equal with the Constitution, even according to the Constitution itself.
We should bump the Speaker of the House up to President.
You would make an idiot like Denny Hastert president?! The man is dumber than a mud fence! Before he was a congressman, he was a gym teacher.
I'm sorry, guy. Much as I don't like Bush, I'd rather hold my nose and put up with him for another three years before I gave the job to a knuckle-head like Hastert.
That fool would probably lose the country to the Chinese in a card game.
This isn't necessarily a shift. Linux is perfect for many, many applications but there are a lot of applications and installations out there that are still relying on AIX.
I'd agree. Linux is great for commodity x86 servers, but on IBM's high-end hardware AIX stands head and shoulders above it. I don't really see a shift here - actually, I'd say AIX has never been away. If you look at the last few releases, you can see IBM has been putting a lot of effort into improving it. The hard work is starting to pay off in increased market share.
It's frusterating for me to watch this sort of shit. Paranoids are making life less safe for us all, and why? Fear of the government seeing which mp3s and videos you've downloaded from kazaa? Please. This is -- was -- used to target terrorists.
Horseshit. The main use of the "Sneak and Peak" provision was for drug investigations.
Whatever you think of the drug laws, peddling dope is not a terrorist activity.
When asked how much notice I intend to give, my general response is "as much notice as I can expect from the company".
Unfortunately, a lot of companies (especially larger ones) want professional courtesy to be a one-way street.
While I agree with you 100%, it's also important to remember that another company may someday call up your current employer as a reference, while it's not likely many of their job candidates will call you for a reference for the company, so it isn't like it's exactly a reciprocal situation. The employer usually holds the bigger stick.
Also, there's always a chance you may need a job desperately some time, so you want to avoid pissing off anyone you really don't have to.
For instance, the President is a rocket scientist (quite literally) and the Prime Minister is a renowned economist (he was awarded his Ph.D. in economics from Oxford and has been a professor of economics).
Sounds like they're in the cat-bird seat. Maybe we should outsource our government to India?
Probably not. However you're forgetting how big a company Sony is. Just think of IBM - on one hand they are fighting against Microsoft through Linux and their servers and services, but on the other hand they are manufacturing chips for Microsoft's brand new console.
Saying IBM or Sony is like saying United States of America. Are you talking about Texas or Hawaii or Massachusettes?
I'm adopted and I haven't had much luck using my birth parents' names. I'm now going to have to ponder whether I want to do somemthing like this, or whether I should. I don't know yet because I have no idea whether they would want to be contacted.
You might want to consider that one might work out the other way around. If you've ever heard the expression, "Sorry I asked...".
I was also adopted, and some of my birth father's relatives tracked me down (he himself is long since dead).
Turns out I'm related to a number of religious cranks who, to put it kindly, aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. My aunt made it a mission to fix me up with "a nice Christan girl" (not really my type). I have a cousin who seemed to feel a need to call me up constantly at all hours of the day and night for no particular reason. I made the mistake of giving him my work number, and he had a habit of calling me up at work to play me selections from Christian heavy metal bands over the phone several times a day. That was loads of fun if I happened to have a VP in my office in a funk over some application problem.
Eventually, I had the opportunity to move out of state, and needless to say, I didn't leave a forwarding address.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but as they say in driving school, "Always leave yourself an out!".
The Big Home Coming may not necessarily turn out to be all skittles and beer.
What I'm concerned about is this and subsequent administration's (US) take on this. Hopefully this may mean a new interest in space exploration and NASA?
If our government takes this seriously, then yes, I expect you'll see a butt-load of new funding heading NASA's way. If there's anything the US government can't stand, it's the idea that any other country can trump us in any way. At least in this case, there's a constructive end to it.
Our intent is to support both Intel architecture as well as AMD Architecture processors, but not Power.
So why not Power? If Sun is prepared to do the port and is going to be doing the OS support anyway, you'd think it would be in IBM's interest to provide as many options as possible for their hardware, and further establish the Power platform as a standard. It's not like it would take a disproportionately large investment on IBM's part.
Who knows? If it got popular, perhaps Sun would be inclined to develop some Power based servers themselves. It would certainly spare them the expense of continuing to develop Sparc.
It provides protections to the people who give their goods over for sale, as well as provides a link to the individual that is selling, and a person can prove that they are a bonded seller as well.
So is this a problem now? Is this addressing a problem that actually exists, or is this just politicians trying to cash in on people's businesses by forcing them to pay license fees? Looks like it's a solution in search of a problem to me.
And for once I drool over something I have only vaguely an idea of what it does.
What it does is allow reconfiguration of system resources, such as IO cards, memory or cpu's (or on Power 5 with AIX 5.3, portions of a cpu), etc. on the fly without having to reboot your server to acknowledge them. AIX has had this capability since 5.2.
It's great for being able to juggle your resources on the fly, but it really comes in handy for moving your DVD drive between partitions on a frame without having to reboot. Having to reboot 2 servers just for that is a royal PITA.
There HAS to be a better solution than these old 60s relics that doesnt cost a are and a leg like the flying deathtrap the shuttles are.
Well, we have the CEV in development, but that won't be ready until 2012. Why not buy from the Russians? They have an interim solution to our needs now, and truthfully, why waste the money to develop a spacecraft that's going to be performing what are now fairly routine missions? Our next generation is on the drawing board. Actually, it's refreshing that NASA is going to be taking the path of least resistance rather than reinventing the wheel because of a case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
It should be relatively easy to predict - this is a niche market. Always has been, even when Macintosh was PPC. Now that the major marketer for these chips is gone, the remaining market will still be what it was - a niche segment. Add into that the relatively low market share of Linux and I think we are all literate enough to read the writing on the wall.
You probably have a point there. While Power and PowerPC derivatives will certainly continue to be used in servers and embedded applications, you have to wonder how much R&D IBM will be willing to put into implementations suitable for desktops and notebooks. Even Apple didn't command enough of a market share to make the expense cost-effective for IBM. Somehow I doubt we're going to be seeing any exciting new PPC chips targeted at the consumer PC market.
If they're announcing an archtecture this radical at next week's IDF, what are the chances that it will be available and running well in time for Apple's announced timeline for desktops?
If they're announcing a radical new architecture, why would Apple be coaxing it's developers over to x86? From the article:
Like the Transmeta devices, software will not run at it's full potential until it's been fully translated, you can pretty much bet Intel will make sure third party bench-markers will be made well aware of this. I suspect we may also see speculative translation running in the background so everything gets translated and saved as soon as possible. Once translated, the new binaries are saved to disc, they will run as native VLIW thereafter.
This being the case, why migrate their developers over to writing x86 code as an interum step, instead of waiting until after the VLIW architecture is available, and migrate directly to that? It's not like PPC was going to shimmy up a tree and vanish, after all. They could have stuck with PPC until Intel's VLIW arch was available.
I think I'd take this speculation with a grain of salt. If Apple knew a radical new architecture like this was going to be available, I doubt they'd be having developers cranking away on writing sub-optimal x86 code to run on it.
As far as optical fiber goes, how much "dark" fiber is already in the ground in the US from the 90's?
So your argument was kind of a red herring.
*snip!*
Now, my birth mother in Lance Creek, WY, well, they'd probably have to use satellite-based service. If you know where Lance Creek, WY, is, you'll understand why cable, telco DSL, 3G, et al., will NEVER reach a good third of the US physically (i.e., between the front range of the Rocky Mts and the Mississippi River, not withstanding major metropolitan areas like Denver or Kansas City.
Apparently that "dark" fiber isn't doing your mother much good. Which is exactly my point. Your not going to find much fiber in North Dakota, dark or otherwise. Due to the low population density of large parts of the United States, there's no way you could cost effectively provide broadband service to significant portions of the US. Compare that to Japan, which has a population about half the size of the US, and the distance from one major city to the next isn't more than a 20 minute drive. If you drive across the US, you can go for days without getting anywhere near a major metropolitan area. You don't think that has an effect on how infrastructure is designed?
Slashdot Mirror
the first time I clicked on the "Read More" link, I arrived at a page that said, "Nothing for you to see here, please move along." Anyone else having that problem?
I used to feel the same way - I'd bought an iBook just to check out OS X, but the one-button mouse and the track-pad drove me nuts. I missed my Think-Pad nipple! The iBook sat and gathered dust for a number of months. Eventually, I needed to send my Think-Pad in for repairs, so for about a week I was stuck with the iBook.
It was mostly just a matter of getting used to a different way of doing things. By the time the Think-Pad was returned, I had gotten used to the Mac. Now I can switch between the Think-Pad and the Mac seamlessly, without any mental clashing of gears.
Persistence is the key!
"We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them," said NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired the review panel. "Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed."
In other words, threat of having their project canceled scared the team into getting their shit together and their project under control.
I've got to say, so far I'm impressed with Griffin's leadership. He does seem to have a knack of getting the results he's after.
The idea that tech innovation is dead implies that we will now recycle the same tech in slightly modified form, because we have discovered every useful thing. I THINK NOT. What is more likely is that Mr. Donofrio suffers from failure of the imagination.
I think his implication is that innovation will be more incremental than radical. And he might have a point. Think about it. From 1900 to 1950 you got the automobile, the airplane, the computer, space flight, nuclear power, the radio, the TV, etc. Most of those things would have been almost unimaginable 50 years earlier. OTOH, consider the period from 1950 to present. Most of the Next Big Things have been incremental improvements on existing technology. I don't see many technologies today that weren't foreseen when I was a kid in the 1960's, although some of them have materialized in unexpected ways. Lots of refinement and diversification, sure, but I don't think as radically disruptive as the car, the airplane or the atom bomb has emerged. The difference between 1950 and 2006 isn't anywhere near as drastic as the difference between 1900 and 1950.
There's nothing in 2006 that would have surprised me much as a kid in the 1960's. What would someone from 1900 think of a computer, or a rocket, or an airplane, or an atom bomb?
I wouldn't be too sure of that:
Apparently, treaties are at least co-equal with the Constitution, even according to the Constitution itself.
We should bump the Speaker of the House up to President.
You would make an idiot like Denny Hastert president?! The man is dumber than a mud fence! Before he was a congressman, he was a gym teacher.
I'm sorry, guy. Much as I don't like Bush, I'd rather hold my nose and put up with him for another three years before I gave the job to a knuckle-head like Hastert.
That fool would probably lose the country to the Chinese in a card game.
This isn't necessarily a shift. Linux is perfect for many, many applications but there are a lot of applications and installations out there that are still relying on AIX.
I'd agree. Linux is great for commodity x86 servers, but on IBM's high-end hardware AIX stands head and shoulders above it. I don't really see a shift here - actually, I'd say AIX has never been away. If you look at the last few releases, you can see IBM has been putting a lot of effort into improving it. The hard work is starting to pay off in increased market share.
Of course, this President speaks about 'freedom', but does 'freedom' include not being able to openly discuss laws and policies?
Of course not. Every time I hear this president use the word "freedom", it's in conjunction with a military invasion of another country.
It's not a product intended for domestic consumption.
It's frusterating for me to watch this sort of shit. Paranoids are making life less safe for us all, and why? Fear of the government seeing which mp3s and videos you've downloaded from kazaa? Please. This is -- was -- used to target terrorists.
Horseshit. The main use of the "Sneak and Peak" provision was for drug investigations.
Whatever you think of the drug laws, peddling dope is not a terrorist activity.
When asked how much notice I intend to give, my general response is "as much notice as I can expect from the company".
Unfortunately, a lot of companies (especially larger ones) want professional courtesy to be a one-way street.
While I agree with you 100%, it's also important to remember that another company may someday call up your current employer as a reference, while it's not likely many of their job candidates will call you for a reference for the company, so it isn't like it's exactly a reciprocal situation. The employer usually holds the bigger stick.
Also, there's always a chance you may need a job desperately some time, so you want to avoid pissing off anyone you really don't have to.
For instance, the President is a rocket scientist (quite literally) and the Prime Minister is a renowned economist (he was awarded his Ph.D. in economics from Oxford and has been a professor of economics).
Sounds like they're in the cat-bird seat. Maybe we should outsource our government to India?
And what about Barney Google?
Probably not. However you're forgetting how big a company Sony is. Just think of IBM - on one hand they are fighting against Microsoft through Linux and their servers and services, but on the other hand they are manufacturing chips for Microsoft's brand new console.
Saying IBM or Sony is like saying United States of America. Are you talking about Texas or Hawaii or Massachusettes?
They're a little bit different.
I'm adopted and I haven't had much luck using my birth parents' names. I'm now going to have to ponder whether I want to do somemthing like this, or whether I should. I don't know yet because I have no idea whether they would want to be contacted.
You might want to consider that one might work out the other way around. If you've ever heard the expression, "Sorry I asked...".
I was also adopted, and some of my birth father's relatives tracked me down (he himself is long since dead).
Turns out I'm related to a number of religious cranks who, to put it kindly, aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. My aunt made it a mission to fix me up with "a nice Christan girl" (not really my type). I have a cousin who seemed to feel a need to call me up constantly at all hours of the day and night for no particular reason. I made the mistake of giving him my work number, and he had a habit of calling me up at work to play me selections from Christian heavy metal bands over the phone several times a day. That was loads of fun if I happened to have a VP in my office in a funk over some application problem.
Eventually, I had the opportunity to move out of state, and needless to say, I didn't leave a forwarding address.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but as they say in driving school, "Always leave yourself an out!".
The Big Home Coming may not necessarily turn out to be all skittles and beer.
What I'm concerned about is this and subsequent administration's (US) take on this. Hopefully this may mean a new interest in space exploration and NASA?
If our government takes this seriously, then yes, I expect you'll see a butt-load of new funding heading NASA's way. If there's anything the US government can't stand, it's the idea that any other country can trump us in any way. At least in this case, there's a constructive end to it.
Our intent is to support both Intel architecture as well as AMD Architecture processors, but not Power.
So why not Power? If Sun is prepared to do the port and is going to be doing the OS support anyway, you'd think it would be in IBM's interest to provide as many options as possible for their hardware, and further establish the Power platform as a standard. It's not like it would take a disproportionately large investment on IBM's part.
Who knows? If it got popular, perhaps Sun would be inclined to develop some Power based servers themselves. It would certainly spare them the expense of continuing to develop Sparc.
He sounds genuine but he doesn't say very much of substance
Well, he's not exactly known for being the sharpest tool in the shed.
But AIX is hardly an expanding market.
It's not?
It provides protections to the people who give their goods over for sale, as well as provides a link to the individual that is selling, and a person can prove that they are a bonded seller as well.
So is this a problem now? Is this addressing a problem that actually exists, or is this just politicians trying to cash in on people's businesses by forcing them to pay license fees? Looks like it's a solution in search of a problem to me.
And for once I drool over something I have only vaguely an idea of what it does.
What it does is allow reconfiguration of system resources, such as IO cards, memory or cpu's (or on Power 5 with AIX 5.3, portions of a cpu), etc. on the fly without having to reboot your server to acknowledge them. AIX has had this capability since 5.2.
It's great for being able to juggle your resources on the fly, but it really comes in handy for moving your DVD drive between partitions on a frame without having to reboot. Having to reboot 2 servers just for that is a royal PITA.
There HAS to be a better solution than these old 60s relics that doesnt cost a are and a leg like the flying deathtrap the shuttles are.
Well, we have the CEV in development, but that won't be ready until 2012. Why not buy from the Russians? They have an interim solution to our needs now, and truthfully, why waste the money to develop a spacecraft that's going to be performing what are now fairly routine missions? Our next generation is on the drawing board. Actually, it's refreshing that NASA is going to be taking the path of least resistance rather than reinventing the wheel because of a case of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
List them, please. And show why they couldn't be reverse-engineered.
The Stradavarius violin. Nobody's managed to reverse engineer it yet.
It should be relatively easy to predict - this is a niche market. Always has been, even when Macintosh was PPC. Now that the major marketer for these chips is gone, the remaining market will still be what it was - a niche segment. Add into that the relatively low market share of Linux and I think we are all literate enough to read the writing on the wall.
You probably have a point there. While Power and PowerPC derivatives will certainly continue to be used in servers and embedded applications, you have to wonder how much R&D IBM will be willing to put into implementations suitable for desktops and notebooks. Even Apple didn't command enough of a market share to make the expense cost-effective for IBM. Somehow I doubt we're going to be seeing any exciting new PPC chips targeted at the consumer PC market.
Which is a shame, really. It's a great chip.
If they're announcing a radical new architecture, why would Apple be coaxing it's developers over to x86? From the article:
This being the case, why migrate their developers over to writing x86 code as an interum step, instead of waiting until after the VLIW architecture is available, and migrate directly to that? It's not like PPC was going to shimmy up a tree and vanish, after all. They could have stuck with PPC until Intel's VLIW arch was available.
I think I'd take this speculation with a grain of salt. If Apple knew a radical new architecture like this was going to be available, I doubt they'd be having developers cranking away on writing sub-optimal x86 code to run on it.
As far as optical fiber goes, how much "dark" fiber is already in the ground in the US from the 90's?
So your argument was kind of a red herring.
*snip!*
Now, my birth mother in Lance Creek, WY, well, they'd probably have to use satellite-based service. If you know where Lance Creek, WY, is, you'll understand why cable, telco DSL, 3G, et al., will NEVER reach a good third of the US physically (i.e., between the front range of the Rocky Mts and the Mississippi River, not withstanding major metropolitan areas like Denver or Kansas City.
Apparently that "dark" fiber isn't doing your mother much good. Which is exactly my point. Your not going to find much fiber in North Dakota, dark or otherwise. Due to the low population density of large parts of the United States, there's no way you could cost effectively provide broadband service to significant portions of the US. Compare that to Japan, which has a population about half the size of the US, and the distance from one major city to the next isn't more than a 20 minute drive. If you drive across the US, you can go for days without getting anywhere near a major metropolitan area. You don't think that has an effect on how infrastructure is designed?