Why is the Single Stage to Orbit (SSO) concept such a dominating factor in a shuttle replacement? I've been following this for quite a while as a space nut and discussed it in an honors class entitled "Design your own Space Mission" in college. It was fun being a business and german major working with all the physics and science students. Many were rooting for the X-33, which hadn't been cancelled yet, with its SSO and no waste.
Yet in report after report I kept reading that a Dual stage "piggy back" system was:
1) Was extremely feasable with existing technology. Some research need, but not as much as the X-33
2) Just as reusable as one plane would go up to 80k feet, then launch the orbiter from its back and both were 100% reusable (proably with quicker turn around
3) A hell of a lot cheaper to develop
4) Even more hellishly cheaper to operate than the Shuttle per mission (could increase launches by 50% on exiting budget or something like that
Yes I know a lot of space nuts like the SSO because, "its more technically challanging and cooler", but come on, let's get some common sense into the program. Yes, SSO maybe nice, but from a logical, business like thought process, wouldn't the DSO be much more plausable considering we need something by 2010 realistically speaking?
Maybe China will get agressive and it will spark us to be as well. A renewed space race could lead to a lot of funding for just basic research, which a lot of useful stuff we use everyday came from. That would benefit us more than anything...
KMOX 1120 is out of my home town of St. Louis and made St. Louis Cardinals baseball a mid-west tradition in the 1950's and 60's. Anyway, one time we were down in Florida later at night and was flipping through the stations and suddenly we got KMOX for about three or four minutes quite clear.
On cold, clear nights, I sometimes can get the station down here in the Ozarks when driving around.
But seriously, as I drive around I switch between three stations in Springfield: 91.1 KSMU (NPR), Newstalk 560AM (local/regional?) and 104.1/1260AM another newstalk station. I don't think I will be downloading MP3's or streaming movies to my 2003 Chevy Malibu anytime soon...
At least that's what the local weather guru said on the 10PM news. Said it should be sometime between 12PM and 2AM CST (GMT -6). Despite having an early meeting with clients tomorrow, I am staying up and a awaiting the show...
There was a story some months ago which raised questions about whether the GPL was exactly legal in Germany, because, if I remember correctly, any product you sell or distrubute must carry some kind of warrenty. Really it broke down to the "As-is" clause.
I may not be a Lawyer, but I have had several survey classes on Common (ie Anglo-Saxon, ie US & UK) Law Vs. Civil Law (like in Germany) especially regaurding technology issues including copyright laws and the EU.
The GPL needs to have this court case, because if the thing is shot down, it will put a serious damper on development in the Opensource community if not kill it.
As a technology consultant, this legal issue has stopped two of my larger clients, that actually have open-minded CIO's, from rejecting linux in favour of SUN because of these legal issues. While the risk is low, its enough for already embattled IT departments not to risk it when they know that with M$ or SUN they will not have these issues.
Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.
Either 1) I don't understand what your talking about, or 2) you don't know what your talking about.
I develop technology plans and consulting to small and medium sized businesses (Usually between 5 - 50 employees). Even in the smallest of companies, backups are mission critical, especially in sales, customers databases, accounting data, etc..
Unfortunately, most of these businesses rely on M$ products because in this area M$ has about 40% of the server market, 50% AS/400 (3 of the 10 largest AS/400 datacenters in the world are in this town), and the other 10% are other (mixture of Linux, Sun mainly).
Just take a small business that gets a virus or the cheap ass Maxtor in their Dell decides to quit. It costs them at least half a new machine to have someone come out or to take it to a computer repair shop to recover data. If they are lucky, they get back 80% of what they had and oftentimes, especially in the smaller businesses, that basically adds up to a day of inactivity. Its worse when its a server.
Now on those levels, having the fastest file system for recovery, proably won't mean much, but for an enterprise having to deal with terrabytes of data, its a big deal.
Banks, an area we focus in because my business partner's family has either controlling interest or a lot of money invested in 14 local banks, are backup nazi's. Usually they have their SAN, back-up SAN, and redundant SAN, with nightly backup's of the day's transactions on Optical drives.
The last 2 banks we worked with spent over 50% of their budget on storage and back-up systems, not processing power. While this may be a small market in terms of %, consider that each of these banks spent well over USD 4 Million on the new systems (1 was replacing ALPHA units, the other just expanding their server needs). So yes, its a small market, that spends a lot of money.
Same reason why OpenBSD is based in canada, the export laws on encryption are much less than in the united states.
On another note, having worked as a DOD civilian contractor in the past, this looks to be a move to secure the technology for its contractors, not internal use. The stuff they are running, from what little I do know about it, is lightyears ahead of what's in the public domain or even available...
I am a technology consultant have worked with four CEO's and several other high ups in several fortune 500 and a couple fourtune 1000 companies around here and this is what they need:
Datebook, email, view word & excell files and powerpoint from time to time. Many have gone to Palm, Blackbarry, or PocketPc's. Most started out with palms and have stuck with the platform.
To give you an example, one of my clients is the VP of a rather well known marketing company. He spends 2 days a week here and three running their main office in Chicago. (Their HQ is here). 90% of the time all he needs is a calander and to check email. He is on the airplane so much that a laptop is a hassle. So he chose the blackberry for its wireless connections and now is looking at a high end plam with wireless card built in.
Its not the "Keyboards are bad" thing or image, its the fact of what CEO's executives do: Make decisions. If they are looking over marketing data and other information to make decisions, they have to have others write the business letters etc.
My consulting company currently only has 3 employees. My partner and his family own a fairly large bank in the area. He had no clue how to run a business, but he's marketing/advertising genious and has a god given gift with words. I was brought on board as the business man to run the company. I meet with the clients and do technology and business management consulting to small businesses/temporarily running companies his family purchases. Right now I am at one business three days a week as acting COO until the President/CEO returns from rehab and the other 2 days a week I am running our consulting business.
Granted this interm COO position will only last another 3 weeks (about 6 in total), but just from that I know that 90% of the time, a laptop is waste. I have a Palm and use it for a glorified address book and calandar. I also now am using it for taking notes because its less annoying than my laptop and one can actually read what it says as my hand writing sucks.
And I know given the choice between a $200 palm or $2000 tablet, which am I going to choose?
For most companies, yes, but not all. Some have their Fiscal Year start in other months. Most make Jan 1st or 2nd just to make the accounting and calander cycles mesh. For example, my company's fiscal year begins November 1st each, so Nov, Dec, and Jan is our Q1.
This is why I try to say the hell away from the left coast...
I am orginally from St. Louis, where about 3 years ago they started the "Gateway Clean Air" program where your car is checked by a sensor crew while driving. If you don't make it past the check point, you have to take it to a test facility where it costs like $15 to get the emmissions checked so you can get a sticker.
Grant I now live in the Ozarks and just bought a new 2003 Chevy Malibu so I don't have to worry about inspections or anything until 2006. Yeah! I just have to pay taxes on the bloody thing.
Two things: I have worked before at DOD contractors where this the tracking is needed for security and often times have reduntant systems so that one cannot just steal an ID card and get in.
Second, now that I own my own business and have two employees, I use a similar fashion. Yes, I do monitor usage and mail is backed up on our server. Users cannot delete old email from the system just in case some was doing something that wasn't kosher and we needed evidence.
Granted, my method of tracking when employees comes in to work is to watch them come in and watch them leave. There are only 5 of us, so that's not too hard.
Corperations pay people to work. Our bookkeeper uses a linux box that has no browser or anything he doesn't need. Just our accounting & billing program, Open Office, and email. A little PHB, yes, but he is an accounting student in his 4 th year of college and works part-time. We need him to key in accounts receivable, payable, and do cash flow, balance and income statements once a month. He can surf the internet while's at school, not on my clock.
Most of my clients are still using Office 2000. Some have XP from when they purchased new machines, but for the most part they are asking me if it worth the upgrade, and 99% of the time, I can say "No". Office 2000 was a huge hit with the business world because of y2k and dot com buying sprees of the late 1990's and early 2000's. Maybe I am wrong, but from my point of view, Office XP has been pretty much a failure. Not one of my clients upgraded from 2000 unless they purchased new computers.
Most users will never use more than about 10% of Word's features and most HATE word's "Here, you are doing X, let me help and screw it all up with auto formating" tools that are enabled by default.
Frankly, the lack of support for Mac users (not surprising) has me a little worried as a Mac user, however most of my clients are small mom & pop shops that use Quickbooks more than office.
I did not use MS office for the first 6 months I had this iBook, I used appleworks that was bundled with it just fine until I needed Powerpoint and Keynotes was another 6 months away. All the tools I really need in a word processor arrived in MS Works 2.0. Since then, most of the features frankly get in my way and that of others as well. Although, MS Office for Mac is my favorite version of Office. PowerPoint still runs better on my Mac with cooler features, like QT transitions, than on Windows.
Anyway, I look for MS to possibly strke out again in the "Its been 18 months, time for you businesses to pay us more money again for an "upgrade". Although I look for a new round of computer buying in the next year or two as I have seen more clients walking in the past few months with "Advise and Consult" request on what new PC's to purchase.
If that's the case then Office 2003 may see a few more users than XP.
This is why we just ordered several new dual G-4 machines. It came crunch time and we had to do something since we were hiring two new empolyees and it was time to replace some of our older G3 machines.
Until FCP can take advantage of the added power, it doesn't benefit us enough to warrent the huge early adoptor mark-up.
Yes, I have the lowly 48G since and I've had it now for almost if not just over 10 years. Its spent 9 of those years in high school and college back packs and lived to serve me to this day. I remember its built in equation solved was what saved the day in my HS AP Physics class back in the day.
But the question is, will it do IRR. My HP 48 served me as overkill up until my senior year of college and finace class when it wouldn't calculate IRR, or at least not correctly and I had to run out and get an HP17BII.
While this new calculator looks to be extremely cool, chances are so long as my 48G rolls along like a tank or AAA batteries become hard to find, I don't see myself spending the money.
Why I gave up on Linux and switched to Mac OS was so I could get the best of both worlds. Programs like Flash MX and Gimp. GoLive with PHP and MySQL locally on an apache server laptop.
I started on SuSE 6.4 and then gave up for FreeBSD on the server side and Mac OS X on the Desktop. It is still the best distro for beginners. YaST was an amazing tool. I had tried to install Redhat before and couldn't get RH 5 to work, but SuSE worked great without any problems, everything was detected except for my modem and this was 4 years ago.
After I under stood *iux more I switched to FreeBSD and fell in love with the ports tree and ease of maintaining an up to day server. I can't wait to ditch our last Linux hold out, not to be a troll, but trying to find working RPM's for common apps like php and mysql for RH 7.3 is like near impossible. No biggy, just install from source, but still...
If the pages states that it does track users browsing habits to determine what ads to run, then by all rights PC pitstop can call it what it really is. Gator can take them to court, but free speech will proably be honored. Hey, it might be a case the eff might actually win...
This actually makes a little sense. Such programs are a security and liablity risk. At our offices, I have the OpenBSD firewall configured to block limewire and other sharing ports because that increases risks of employees downloading virus loaded files. Its not as big a risk as we run exclusively OS X on our desktops and I am the only one with administrator access to install programs on the machines.
Same goes for IM. THe only port they can connect on is through the secure port 443. Of course none of the employees have quite figured this out so I am the only one that can IM with outside people. Rendevous only works on the internal network so they can only chat with other employees.
I guess I may be one of those "Pointy Haired Bosses", but we're a small shop and cannot afford to have someone download a warezed application then get busted by the software wannabe police & music police. One employee had about 6GB of mp3's they had downloaded on company time. Plus we're not paying people to chat with friends. Funny how project completion times went up after I disabled the port.
If we were not in graphics & printing, then I would have Linux thin clients that would give empolyees access to only what they need.
With such a warning, maybe some would heed it. I don't think many would, but some might think twice about it
Yes I am an ass about our technology policy, but coming from a technology security background, I am not going to take stupid risks when things can be made reasonably secure.
My business partner just got a brand new 12" powerbook about 3 weeks ago. More sleek that this 1 year old 14" 700Mhz G3 iBook, but overall, I must say that I cannot complain. Of course he bought his laptop a week before Panther's release date was announced. He didn't listen to me when I told him to wait another month. He gets the "I want it now attitude" and goes and buys anything the sales man will sell him.
I have all the attachments for the iBook to hook this up to TV's via RCA or Svideo, but since the iBook has the VGA output port and powerbooks DVI, they won't work with each other. I understand the reasoning, but still it doesn't make a lot of since.
I bought this laptop about 6 weeks before 10.2 was annouced, but I couldn't wait anylonger as I was getting ready to leave for a semester abroad and 10.2 wasn't shipping until after I would have left and I wanted a good month to make sure it all worked correctly before going.
This iBook will proably last me another 2 or 3 years at least, if not longer. Chances are my next purchase will be a G5 tower sometime after the first of the year. Honestly I am waiting for Final Cut Pro to add 64-bit extensions before buying a new tower.
Here why I use wireless at home: my fiance lives one story up, 2 apartments over. We have HSI into her apartment then I can access it with my Airport card down in my apartment. I then secure it by only allowing my ethernet card on to the WiFi network via MAC address and a WEP password.
Office - we have 8 employees using 10 macs with airport and share a Cable internet connection into the office. We just moved in last week and it was $90 for a router and it would have been about $800 to have someone come out and wire the place with ethernet. We have an older 350Mhz G3 that we placed a couple massive SCSI drives in as our file server and use a Dlink USB pen like unit to connect it to the network for file sharing w/o any problems.
Yes, I could have wired it for us, but the oppertunity cost of the 2 days for me to do it vs. working would have been much more than $800.
Is that they get what, about 80% of their power from Nuclear reactors? While nuclear reactors pose a risk, the overall safety of these plants has been pretty good. How many are there arcoss the world and only two major incidents?
Yes, what to do with the spent fuel is a problem, but is the cost of storing the degrading material higher than what we pump into the air each year? Let's face it Solar and wind are not there yet. (Although if your looking to make a worth while investment in your home, consider adding solar cells if you live anywhere outside of the pacific northwest, my father did and uses it to heat water and some applices and its paid for itself in 3 years. Me I still rent, so someday)
I wish people would get over their nuclear phobias and NIMBY additudes because something needs to be done, and adding more gas turbines and coal plants are not the best solution.
Ever here of this company called International Business Machines (IBM)? They have Linux-based servers that come supported.
Trust me, everything in this town I live in (Springfield, Missouri) runs on one of two platforms: Windows and AS/400's. I know of at least two shops that opted for IBM Linux servers to replace their AS/400's and guess what, they still have their "If it breaks, we're there within 3 hours to fix it" garuntee.
Next question, why are larger finanicial insitiutions going with IBM and Linux? Bank of America, some of Deutsche Bank, and others are deploying Linux in their data centers, mainly through IBM.
Right now we are doing a feasablity study of switching a bank in NW arkansas from True64 Alpha's to a Linux solution for their next round of upgrades over the next few years. Both HP and IBM has been more than willing to provide the support they are looking for.
Most small shops that I do consulting with hire me because they are SICK of the "lets spend $1000's every 18 months to upgrade something" game and my last 6 clients either installed linux on their desktops (2 did) to extend existing hardware life, or switched to the Macintosh platform and after a quarter are glad they did even though the initial investment was about 25% more.
I have not seen anyone get fired for buying Microsoft, but I have seen two companies go out of business because they used it and their competitors developed solutions in PHP/PostgreSQL & MySQL and Linux and offered the product at 70% the cost.
The other company was selling internet Kiosk and someone else came in with one running FirecastOS (linux based) and but them out of business because of the high costs due to viruses and software failures.
Although putting in 4-5 months on a custom PHP/MySQL app. I know of half a dozen time sheet programs. Our own firm uses phpProjekt as our complete intranet system including web-based email, calandar, help-desk, et.al. Is it as complex as Exchange. No. Thank god too, because there is something to "KISS". It does everything we need and then some.
Is Linux the best thing since sliced bread? No. Our company has about 15 computers in all. 10 are running macs, 3 FreeBSD and 2 OpenBSD. right tool for the job, but there are supported versions of linux out there.
I fall into that "Pro" catagory. I use linux on several servers that host client's websites. While on a technical level, I prefer FreeBSD and even OpenBSD, for some tasks, often times I cannot justify the extra expense in leasing a dedicated Linux box @ USD 100 a month and about the same thing in a FreeBSD box for $400.
Just like why I choose Apple OSX has my desktop enviroment over Linux. I tried using Linux for three years on a desktop and at the end of the day Apple beat linux because OSX just works. In linux, I never did find drivers for my Arual 3D card worth a crap (i know company went belly up), Staroffice wasn't 100% MS office compatable back in the day (1999/2000), GIMP was a worthy effort, but then Adobe made some really good changes to PS that blew GIMP away, I could go on, but let's just say Linux wasn't quite user friendly yet.
I work as a consultant now and had two offices recently switch from Windows to Linux for about 80% of their employees. It was their accounting staff that was using specific payroll and accounting software that couldn't, or I should say it wouldn't have been cost effective to switch them. Why? Well they already had the hardware (PIII 700's - 1Ghz) machines and for $50 we installed Linux on all their hardware which should allow them to keep their existing units for at least another year or two. Then if they need to upgrade due to hardware failures, its pretty cheap for high performance white boxes.
Those were rare companies because they had been using linux on their servers for two years, and almost a year, and had at least 1 or 2 staff members familiar with linux. I guess they paid me the big bucks for a second opinion.
90% of my clients are small mom & pop shops and most of the time I tell them to spend the extra money on an iMac and in some cases an emac and the only complaint after 6 months I have heard is, "It doesn't have solitare". Overall they have been extremely happy with their ablity to say buy a digital camara, plug it in, iPhoto pops up and away they go, or that it doesn't crash like windows did.
The very fact that Apple really beat Linux as a desktop OS has many people in the Linux community pissed. The fact that Macromedia and adobe writes programs for OSX and avid OSX users can run 90% of the OSS applications out there really caused a sore spot.
Its not hard to convence CIO/CTO's of how linux can help save their business money. Now CEO's and COO's are a different story. (I get hired because I am nerd by hobby and have degrees in International Business, German, and International Affairs and "speak business speak") They read the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, and other publications as their bibles. Often times one bad article about Linux in one of those publications and there is no amount of TCO or any numbers you can throw at them to get them to change. Especially when businessmen read of Opensource's "Dotcommunism" like appeal. *Communism, *socalism, or whatever scares the bejesus out of business folk, especially older bosses that lived in the cold war era.
If it wasn't for IBM, I don't think that any of the offices down here would have given Linux a chance. The same lands crediablity to the platform and DELL (although they are backing off of Linux now) and HP comming in offering Linux products has helped make Linux a creditable platform on the server side, no body has for desktop use.
If the community continues to have the over-vocal 1% that bitch how Linux is the next OS for the next century and the ONLY OS, how is that different than Microsoft? For starters, until some of the "freedom" of linux is removed and distro's are standardized to where program X will run on Linux distro A, B, and C without a lot of differnces in programming, forget commerical vendors supporting the platform. Because if they do, it will be for RH or SuSE. And that is something that also irks the zealots, that the CEO of SUSE may just be correct when he said that there is room for 2 commerical distros in the market.
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I live in the Ozarks, Arkansas is shortened to Ark. in newspapers and the like quite often.
Yet in report after report I kept reading that a Dual stage "piggy back" system was:
1) Was extremely feasable with existing technology. Some research need, but not as much as the X-33
2) Just as reusable as one plane would go up to 80k feet, then launch the orbiter from its back and both were 100% reusable (proably with quicker turn around
3) A hell of a lot cheaper to develop
4) Even more hellishly cheaper to operate than the Shuttle per mission (could increase launches by 50% on exiting budget or something like that
Yes I know a lot of space nuts like the SSO because, "its more technically challanging and cooler", but come on, let's get some common sense into the program. Yes, SSO maybe nice, but from a logical, business like thought process, wouldn't the DSO be much more plausable considering we need something by 2010 realistically speaking?
Maybe China will get agressive and it will spark us to be as well. A renewed space race could lead to a lot of funding for just basic research, which a lot of useful stuff we use everyday came from. That would benefit us more than anything...
On cold, clear nights, I sometimes can get the station down here in the Ozarks when driving around.
But seriously, as I drive around I switch between three stations in Springfield: 91.1 KSMU (NPR), Newstalk 560AM (local/regional?) and 104.1/1260AM another newstalk station. I don't think I will be downloading MP3's or streaming movies to my 2003 Chevy Malibu anytime soon...
At least that's what the local weather guru said on the 10PM news. Said it should be sometime between 12PM and 2AM CST (GMT -6). Despite having an early meeting with clients tomorrow, I am staying up and a awaiting the show...
I may not be a Lawyer, but I have had several survey classes on Common (ie Anglo-Saxon, ie US & UK) Law Vs. Civil Law (like in Germany) especially regaurding technology issues including copyright laws and the EU.
The GPL needs to have this court case, because if the thing is shot down, it will put a serious damper on development in the Opensource community if not kill it.
As a technology consultant, this legal issue has stopped two of my larger clients, that actually have open-minded CIO's, from rejecting linux in favour of SUN because of these legal issues. While the risk is low, its enough for already embattled IT departments not to risk it when they know that with M$ or SUN they will not have these issues.
Either 1) I don't understand what your talking about, or 2) you don't know what your talking about.
I develop technology plans and consulting to small and medium sized businesses (Usually between 5 - 50 employees). Even in the smallest of companies, backups are mission critical, especially in sales, customers databases, accounting data, etc..
Unfortunately, most of these businesses rely on M$ products because in this area M$ has about 40% of the server market, 50% AS/400 (3 of the 10 largest AS/400 datacenters in the world are in this town), and the other 10% are other (mixture of Linux, Sun mainly).
Just take a small business that gets a virus or the cheap ass Maxtor in their Dell decides to quit. It costs them at least half a new machine to have someone come out or to take it to a computer repair shop to recover data. If they are lucky, they get back 80% of what they had and oftentimes, especially in the smaller businesses, that basically adds up to a day of inactivity. Its worse when its a server.
Now on those levels, having the fastest file system for recovery, proably won't mean much, but for an enterprise having to deal with terrabytes of data, its a big deal.
Banks, an area we focus in because my business partner's family has either controlling interest or a lot of money invested in 14 local banks, are backup nazi's. Usually they have their SAN, back-up SAN, and redundant SAN, with nightly backup's of the day's transactions on Optical drives.
The last 2 banks we worked with spent over 50% of their budget on storage and back-up systems, not processing power. While this may be a small market in terms of %, consider that each of these banks spent well over USD 4 Million on the new systems (1 was replacing ALPHA units, the other just expanding their server needs). So yes, its a small market, that spends a lot of money.
On another note, having worked as a DOD civilian contractor in the past, this looks to be a move to secure the technology for its contractors, not internal use. The stuff they are running, from what little I do know about it, is lightyears ahead of what's in the public domain or even available...
Datebook, email, view word & excell files and powerpoint from time to time. Many have gone to Palm, Blackbarry, or PocketPc's. Most started out with palms and have stuck with the platform.
To give you an example, one of my clients is the VP of a rather well known marketing company. He spends 2 days a week here and three running their main office in Chicago. (Their HQ is here). 90% of the time all he needs is a calander and to check email. He is on the airplane so much that a laptop is a hassle. So he chose the blackberry for its wireless connections and now is looking at a high end plam with wireless card built in.
Its not the "Keyboards are bad" thing or image, its the fact of what CEO's executives do: Make decisions. If they are looking over marketing data and other information to make decisions, they have to have others write the business letters etc.
My consulting company currently only has 3 employees. My partner and his family own a fairly large bank in the area. He had no clue how to run a business, but he's marketing/advertising genious and has a god given gift with words. I was brought on board as the business man to run the company. I meet with the clients and do technology and business management consulting to small businesses/temporarily running companies his family purchases. Right now I am at one business three days a week as acting COO until the President/CEO returns from rehab and the other 2 days a week I am running our consulting business.
Granted this interm COO position will only last another 3 weeks (about 6 in total), but just from that I know that 90% of the time, a laptop is waste. I have a Palm and use it for a glorified address book and calandar. I also now am using it for taking notes because its less annoying than my laptop and one can actually read what it says as my hand writing sucks.
And I know given the choice between a $200 palm or $2000 tablet, which am I going to choose?
For most companies, yes, but not all. Some have their Fiscal Year start in other months. Most make Jan 1st or 2nd just to make the accounting and calander cycles mesh. For example, my company's fiscal year begins November 1st each, so Nov, Dec, and Jan is our Q1.
I am orginally from St. Louis, where about 3 years ago they started the "Gateway Clean Air" program where your car is checked by a sensor crew while driving. If you don't make it past the check point, you have to take it to a test facility where it costs like $15 to get the emmissions checked so you can get a sticker.
Grant I now live in the Ozarks and just bought a new 2003 Chevy Malibu so I don't have to worry about inspections or anything until 2006. Yeah! I just have to pay taxes on the bloody thing.
I'm still waiting for the option .50 calibur mahcine gun or 40mm gernade launcher on the hummers...
Second, now that I own my own business and have two employees, I use a similar fashion. Yes, I do monitor usage and mail is backed up on our server. Users cannot delete old email from the system just in case some was doing something that wasn't kosher and we needed evidence.
Granted, my method of tracking when employees comes in to work is to watch them come in and watch them leave. There are only 5 of us, so that's not too hard.
Corperations pay people to work. Our bookkeeper uses a linux box that has no browser or anything he doesn't need. Just our accounting & billing program, Open Office, and email. A little PHB, yes, but he is an accounting student in his 4 th year of college and works part-time. We need him to key in accounts receivable, payable, and do cash flow, balance and income statements once a month. He can surf the internet while's at school, not on my clock.
Most users will never use more than about 10% of Word's features and most HATE word's "Here, you are doing X, let me help and screw it all up with auto formating" tools that are enabled by default.
Frankly, the lack of support for Mac users (not surprising) has me a little worried as a Mac user, however most of my clients are small mom & pop shops that use Quickbooks more than office.
I did not use MS office for the first 6 months I had this iBook, I used appleworks that was bundled with it just fine until I needed Powerpoint and Keynotes was another 6 months away. All the tools I really need in a word processor arrived in MS Works 2.0. Since then, most of the features frankly get in my way and that of others as well. Although, MS Office for Mac is my favorite version of Office. PowerPoint still runs better on my Mac with cooler features, like QT transitions, than on Windows.
Anyway, I look for MS to possibly strke out again in the "Its been 18 months, time for you businesses to pay us more money again for an "upgrade". Although I look for a new round of computer buying in the next year or two as I have seen more clients walking in the past few months with "Advise and Consult" request on what new PC's to purchase. If that's the case then Office 2003 may see a few more users than XP.
Until FCP can take advantage of the added power, it doesn't benefit us enough to warrent the huge early adoptor mark-up.
But the question is, will it do IRR. My HP 48 served me as overkill up until my senior year of college and finace class when it wouldn't calculate IRR, or at least not correctly and I had to run out and get an HP17BII.
While this new calculator looks to be extremely cool, chances are so long as my 48G rolls along like a tank or AAA batteries become hard to find, I don't see myself spending the money.
I started on SuSE 6.4 and then gave up for FreeBSD on the server side and Mac OS X on the Desktop. It is still the best distro for beginners. YaST was an amazing tool. I had tried to install Redhat before and couldn't get RH 5 to work, but SuSE worked great without any problems, everything was detected except for my modem and this was 4 years ago.
After I under stood *iux more I switched to FreeBSD and fell in love with the ports tree and ease of maintaining an up to day server. I can't wait to ditch our last Linux hold out, not to be a troll, but trying to find working RPM's for common apps like php and mysql for RH 7.3 is like near impossible. No biggy, just install from source, but still...
If the pages states that it does track users browsing habits to determine what ads to run, then by all rights PC pitstop can call it what it really is. Gator can take them to court, but free speech will proably be honored. Hey, it might be a case the eff might actually win...
I'm not only the sysadmin, I'm also the company president...
Same goes for IM. THe only port they can connect on is through the secure port 443. Of course none of the employees have quite figured this out so I am the only one that can IM with outside people. Rendevous only works on the internal network so they can only chat with other employees.
I guess I may be one of those "Pointy Haired Bosses", but we're a small shop and cannot afford to have someone download a warezed application then get busted by the software wannabe police & music police. One employee had about 6GB of mp3's they had downloaded on company time. Plus we're not paying people to chat with friends. Funny how project completion times went up after I disabled the port.
If we were not in graphics & printing, then I would have Linux thin clients that would give empolyees access to only what they need.
With such a warning, maybe some would heed it. I don't think many would, but some might think twice about it
Yes I am an ass about our technology policy, but coming from a technology security background, I am not going to take stupid risks when things can be made reasonably secure.
I have all the attachments for the iBook to hook this up to TV's via RCA or Svideo, but since the iBook has the VGA output port and powerbooks DVI, they won't work with each other. I understand the reasoning, but still it doesn't make a lot of since.
I bought this laptop about 6 weeks before 10.2 was annouced, but I couldn't wait anylonger as I was getting ready to leave for a semester abroad and 10.2 wasn't shipping until after I would have left and I wanted a good month to make sure it all worked correctly before going.
This iBook will proably last me another 2 or 3 years at least, if not longer. Chances are my next purchase will be a G5 tower sometime after the first of the year. Honestly I am waiting for Final Cut Pro to add 64-bit extensions before buying a new tower.
...is becoming self-aware...
Office - we have 8 employees using 10 macs with airport and share a Cable internet connection into the office. We just moved in last week and it was $90 for a router and it would have been about $800 to have someone come out and wire the place with ethernet. We have an older 350Mhz G3 that we placed a couple massive SCSI drives in as our file server and use a Dlink USB pen like unit to connect it to the network for file sharing w/o any problems.
Yes, I could have wired it for us, but the oppertunity cost of the 2 days for me to do it vs. working would have been much more than $800.
Yes, what to do with the spent fuel is a problem, but is the cost of storing the degrading material higher than what we pump into the air each year? Let's face it Solar and wind are not there yet. (Although if your looking to make a worth while investment in your home, consider adding solar cells if you live anywhere outside of the pacific northwest, my father did and uses it to heat water and some applices and its paid for itself in 3 years. Me I still rent, so someday)
I wish people would get over their nuclear phobias and NIMBY additudes because something needs to be done, and adding more gas turbines and coal plants are not the best solution.
Trust me, everything in this town I live in (Springfield, Missouri) runs on one of two platforms: Windows and AS/400's. I know of at least two shops that opted for IBM Linux servers to replace their AS/400's and guess what, they still have their "If it breaks, we're there within 3 hours to fix it" garuntee.
Next question, why are larger finanicial insitiutions going with IBM and Linux? Bank of America, some of Deutsche Bank, and others are deploying Linux in their data centers, mainly through IBM.
Right now we are doing a feasablity study of switching a bank in NW arkansas from True64 Alpha's to a Linux solution for their next round of upgrades over the next few years. Both HP and IBM has been more than willing to provide the support they are looking for.
Most small shops that I do consulting with hire me because they are SICK of the "lets spend $1000's every 18 months to upgrade something" game and my last 6 clients either installed linux on their desktops (2 did) to extend existing hardware life, or switched to the Macintosh platform and after a quarter are glad they did even though the initial investment was about 25% more.
I have not seen anyone get fired for buying Microsoft, but I have seen two companies go out of business because they used it and their competitors developed solutions in PHP/PostgreSQL & MySQL and Linux and offered the product at 70% the cost.
The other company was selling internet Kiosk and someone else came in with one running FirecastOS (linux based) and but them out of business because of the high costs due to viruses and software failures.
Although putting in 4-5 months on a custom PHP/MySQL app. I know of half a dozen time sheet programs. Our own firm uses phpProjekt as our complete intranet system including web-based email, calandar, help-desk, et.al. Is it as complex as Exchange. No. Thank god too, because there is something to "KISS". It does everything we need and then some.
Is Linux the best thing since sliced bread? No. Our company has about 15 computers in all. 10 are running macs, 3 FreeBSD and 2 OpenBSD. right tool for the job, but there are supported versions of linux out there.
Just like why I choose Apple OSX has my desktop enviroment over Linux. I tried using Linux for three years on a desktop and at the end of the day Apple beat linux because OSX just works. In linux, I never did find drivers for my Arual 3D card worth a crap (i know company went belly up), Staroffice wasn't 100% MS office compatable back in the day (1999/2000), GIMP was a worthy effort, but then Adobe made some really good changes to PS that blew GIMP away, I could go on, but let's just say Linux wasn't quite user friendly yet.
I work as a consultant now and had two offices recently switch from Windows to Linux for about 80% of their employees. It was their accounting staff that was using specific payroll and accounting software that couldn't, or I should say it wouldn't have been cost effective to switch them. Why? Well they already had the hardware (PIII 700's - 1Ghz) machines and for $50 we installed Linux on all their hardware which should allow them to keep their existing units for at least another year or two. Then if they need to upgrade due to hardware failures, its pretty cheap for high performance white boxes.
Those were rare companies because they had been using linux on their servers for two years, and almost a year, and had at least 1 or 2 staff members familiar with linux. I guess they paid me the big bucks for a second opinion.
90% of my clients are small mom & pop shops and most of the time I tell them to spend the extra money on an iMac and in some cases an emac and the only complaint after 6 months I have heard is, "It doesn't have solitare". Overall they have been extremely happy with their ablity to say buy a digital camara, plug it in, iPhoto pops up and away they go, or that it doesn't crash like windows did.
The very fact that Apple really beat Linux as a desktop OS has many people in the Linux community pissed. The fact that Macromedia and adobe writes programs for OSX and avid OSX users can run 90% of the OSS applications out there really caused a sore spot.
Its not hard to convence CIO/CTO's of how linux can help save their business money. Now CEO's and COO's are a different story. (I get hired because I am nerd by hobby and have degrees in International Business, German, and International Affairs and "speak business speak") They read the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, and other publications as their bibles. Often times one bad article about Linux in one of those publications and there is no amount of TCO or any numbers you can throw at them to get them to change. Especially when businessmen read of Opensource's "Dotcommunism" like appeal. *Communism, *socalism, or whatever scares the bejesus out of business folk, especially older bosses that lived in the cold war era.
If it wasn't for IBM, I don't think that any of the offices down here would have given Linux a chance. The same lands crediablity to the platform and DELL (although they are backing off of Linux now) and HP comming in offering Linux products has helped make Linux a creditable platform on the server side, no body has for desktop use.
If the community continues to have the over-vocal 1% that bitch how Linux is the next OS for the next century and the ONLY OS, how is that different than Microsoft? For starters, until some of the "freedom" of linux is removed and distro's are standardized to where program X will run on Linux distro A, B, and C without a lot of differnces in programming, forget commerical vendors supporting the platform. Because if they do, it will be for RH or SuSE. And that is something that also irks the zealots, that the CEO of SUSE may just be correct when he said that there is room for 2 commerical distros in the market.