I have an HP 48G since my freshman year in in High School like 10 years ago. It has served me well and it is now on its 4th set of 3 AAA batteries and going strong.
The HP 48GX is the replacement I am sure these days, it has 128k ram compared to the 32k in my plus I think its expandable to like 2MB or some number like that. Hell if your doing calculations on your HP 48 that need 2MB of mem, something's wrong.
Anyway, my HP lasted 4 years of high school, 4.5 years of college and 1.5 of "real world" expirance in backpacks and breif cases and still works. Best $130 I think my parents ever invested in my education. It did everything until my senior year in college when I had to break down and buy another HP calcuator for Finace class. The HP handled everything but Internal Rate of Return (if I remember correctly).
I didn't know HP still made calculators. I bought mine at Office Depot or Office Max (can't remember which they both look the same), but they don't handle them anymore. Guess I needed to look online. Anyway, HP calculator's are rugged little buggers. Even their business calc hasn't been redesigned since '93.
On a side note: my cousin has had her HP since like '90 and it has survived 3 years of high school, 4 years of college, 4 years of professional expirance and now is serving her in her MBA studies. Yeah, they cost a few dollars more than a TI, but they last a life time.
No system is 100% safe. There are some things one can do, like making sure everything is patched and another is to use odd systems.
I worked for an architecture firm that used several ALPHA server for rendering projects. Several of these boxes had True64 Unix. When a couple were retired from rendering duty, we reconfigured those boxes as our router and firewall in the office. Why? Well, True64Unix is an odd platform and not many know much about the system. Its an added measure against script kiddies. Is it fool proof, no I am sure, but as one admin put it, "If they know the exploits of True64 Unix, they're a pro and proably not much we can do to stop those types".
One of our boxes was attacked with the OpenSSH bug. If the attack would have been about 6 hours later, it proably would have been patched. Our other 17 boxes were patched without a problem and someone has tried to attack our OpenBSD boxes several times (hell I try once a month just to see how they react) with no luck. But hey, some bug with an FTP daemon or some PHP code and we're SOL.
Bottom line: Keep patches up to date, use odd and unusual systems on the in/outbound traffic if you can, and keep lots of backups...
People seem to confuse the issue of "Global Warming". The earth's average tempature is rising, anyone disputing that needs to really look at the resources. The answer: The tempature is rising.
The issue is "What, if any, effect has human industry had on the warming effect?" That is the question that people are attempting to answer and truefully we don't know. People point to a study that shows the average tempature rising at an increasing rate over the last 80 years or so when they began the study.
To me, 80 years in the scheme of things isn't enough to say one way or the other. Now we know that we caused the hole in the Ozone layer, and it looks as though the problem maybe starting to correct itself after banning the wide-spread use of CFC's, but its an important lesson: The earth is enduring until the sun gobbles it up in another 4 Billion years or so.
If the north pole ice cap melted, it would not raise the ocean 1 inch since it already displaces its own weight in water. I think the water in a cup and add ice example has been given, now the question is, how much ice is down there in the south pole? People predict horrid flooding of coastal cities, but I have read some documents that say that if all that water is realeased and dispursed throughout the world, it would raise the oceans by only a few inches. Sucks to be you if you own a beach house.
The biggest threat seems to be the breaking of the Atlantic Conveyer with a large influx of fresh water. I think there is some evidence of this happening about 60k years ago, but again I am not a geologist, just an avid reader of things. If that breaks, then a rapid global cooling may take place and the return to a new expansion of the polar caps.
Oh yeah, this would be a good point to note that WE ARE STILL IN AN ICE AGE. There is still ice, isn't there?
As far as weather goes, look at Europe circa 500 AD, a great cooling happened, if I remember my history correctly, that lead to many problems with farming and crop cycles. The other factor is Media. I mean, people really didn't here much about the weather around the world until the last 50 years. How do know that weather hasn't had these odd years with extremes before? Oh wait, I think it has, but there wasn't a media to record and have slow news days with nothing else to bitch about.
Endgame: we need more solid info besides some corralations. There is a famous Missourian named Mark Twain that once wrote, "There are lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" and that is the truth. Stats can be manipulated like markets. My first thought is usually ignore them as evidence and look at the raw data before drawing conclusions. After the Earth will survive: its mankind that is fucked. George Carlin stated that once, and you know, he's right....
get involved in the real world. One semester, myself and about half the floor on my dorm started to play a browser-based MMOG. We played kinda as a group calling themselves "The Borg Collective" and when one was attacked, about 15 of us world attack almost at the same time as we were doing homework someone would yell down the hall, "Hey Dude x in 2:17 attacked me, kill him!" and for the next day or so they would be attacked several hundred times and usually died. By the halfway point in the game we had formed an alliance that controlled about a 3rd of the top 100 list and 3 of the game's "official" alliance.
Well then after the take down of a couple of the game's premiere players, everyone in the game tried to hunt us down and got about 50% of our players, but by that time it was the towards the end of the semester and we were too busy with the real world to rejoin.
I came back about a year later to a game filled with "unofficial" rules of how the game was played. You know, crap like, "If someone twice your size attacks you, they get two retals for the land grab not 1. If you left your self open, no retals, and the entire game had turned into one bad genevea convention. Plus with hourly ticks, if you were not online like 18 hours a day, you had no real chance to win and most of the orginial players had left.
I quit and since have never come back to the game and started some work developing a fork to the Promisance Game Engine and have run various BNT games on websites to a small scale, never more than about 100 players, but even in those small games, politics take a life of their own and as I go back to school to prosue a masters in International Relations, I can't help but think that one of these games would be an excellent study of possible political models.
And if anyone still play's SK, I was known as Unimatrix. If your ever around their forums, some of the old timers (if any are still there) may still remember me....
Last year I purchased a top of the line 14.1" ibook with 700Mhz G3 and 640MB ram, combo drive and Airport card. If I am using say iTunes, iMovie and Photoshop, the lower left hand corner will get a little warm and the fan kicks into overdrive, but that is after 3 or 4 hours of running all those apps.
I bought this to replace a Viao Z505 ultra thin. I loved the 1"thick and 3.5 pounds, but even with a pentium 233, the damn thing would almost burn me if I left it on for too long and windows would crash due to overheating.
I say someone saying how they had 1.3Ghz PIII laptop a while ago, that's nice, but can I tell a difference in say PowerPoint between my 700Mhz G3 and a 1 Ghz Althon? Not really and my mac has crashed twice in the last year. Once I was trying to see what it would take (photoshop, itunes, imovie, Golive, and FCP and then launch a classic app...that did it). I can close my laptop and reopen it without it crashing like on my old laptop. I reset my ibook only after downloading updates every two weeks or so. At one point it had an uptime of over 28 days. That's 28 days of open, close, open, close and the system began doing strange things. I guess 1 reset a month isn't that bad for a laptop.
Now I design webpages for living deployed on *iux based servers. Being able to develop in a *iux enviroment and still have tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver/flash is a tremendous advantage to me and a feature that I will pay a little more for. Another issue is TCO. One the clients I met with today does video production and he is still using a G3 500 and uses FCP and PS on a daily basis. He's had the machine almost 5 years and can still purchase new software. Will it run as fast as a G4, no, but as he said, if it takes 4 hours to render a video, I go fishing and come back. One other photographer switched to using Dell's, but quickly found that he was upgrading about every 18 months compared to 24 - 36 with Macs and even though the hardware costs are cheaper, but he said that he was losing a lot more time with system crashes and is considering going back to Mac's and getting a dual G5.
This laptop will proable last me another two years with proably a new battery needed in that time, but maybe at that time I will consider a powerbook and a g5 will be in it.
The Shuttle wasn't a huge leap forward
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The Return of Apollo?
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By the time the shuttle was designed, it became a tool that did a lot of things okay, but nothing all that great. It has always been more expensive than the rockets it replaced and now with no more Soviet Russia (no jokes) we may be able to co-develop better booster technology. Russia has always had more powerful rockets and seem to be able to hit orbits more accurately than the US.
Also, I honestly think this Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) idea is foolish and stupid. Most of what I have read seems to indicate that a dual stage system would lower the cost per pound from USD 100k to about $6k and one could have two pieces that are reusable. To me that makes a lot more sense and by all acounts more doable.
If we are serious about keeping the ISS up there, the next generation of space craft could save space to be a delivery and construction/repiar work on satelites and the ISS, then save expiraments for the ISS.
The biggest problem with the Shuttle, is by the time they designed the blasted thing, it did a lot of things okay, but nothing extremely well. Although I could argue we already have supply/cargo missions. Its called the Delta II/III/IV's and the Russian Progress supply modules.
Why NASA is so concerned about the Single Stage to Orbit config is beyond me. Having a dual stage with two reusable craft HAS to be cheaper than the shuttle now.
I wrote such a plan for a small/medium sized business not to long ago. Part of the plan included leasing 3 off-sitededicated servers for nothing but back up. Their databases would be dumped once a day at like 2AM and then the data uploaded to the three off site servers.
Their database is about 120MB, not that large, and those dedicated servers have dual Hard Drives between 80 and 120 GB SCSI harddrives in a raid configureation and those are also backed up on-site daily.
While not fool proof, this should save their ass in case of an emergancy.
But, its not the interface. Trust me, I am in the process of converting my boss over to linux for most of his work and getting Linux in place for a majority of our employees. Except for our graphics people that use Macs.
The reason why Linux has not made much in the way of maintream adoption in the home markets is the fact that there are hardly any major name-brand applications out there like Quicken, TurboTax, and others than many home users use. Hell, if Quickbooks Pro ran on Linux, we proably would only keep a windows box around to test website designs on in MSIE. There maybe OSS alternatives, but the average joe doesn't care and will go spend the $50 at Best Buy in order to get an easy to use product with tech support. Games are the same way. Some companies have made ports to linux, but the selection of popular games for linux is fewer than it is for Mac. And kids use computers more than adults and they use it to play games.
Now here comes the chicken or the egg paradox. Until more people use Linux, companies will not spend the money to port their popular software and Linux will not see an increase in home use until more name-brand applications are ported.
I know because at my last job, we switched to running Maya on Linux rather than Windows and the graphic artists at the company loved it since performance was a little better (only by about 2% on long renders) and it hardly ever crashed. So far I have all our servers switched to FreeBSD and trying to get Linux on white boxes at my new job. The news.com article about Ernie Ball was the kicker that conveniced my boss to give Linux a chance.
So long as the interface is GUI point and click and pretty straight forward, people won't care. Get major applications and games ported to Linux and Linux will sell to the masses.
Holy cow, I'm not the only one that does this! Hell I run Photoshop, Golive, BBedit, Itunes, Ichat, Sarfari, Fetch, word excell, and powerpoint on my 700Mhz G3 ibook. Yeah it slows like a bitch, but it all still runs without crashing X.2 ant that's with 640MB of ram installed.
Actully at work I do have a dual 1.25Ghz G4 with 1 GB of ram and the second processor really helps. Hopefully at the end of the year, as VP of Infromation Tech maybe I will get one of those new G5's after X.3 comes out and my current machine will become humble Intern fodder.
I went to a small liberal arts school and considered majoring in CIS or CS, however all the school had on campus were NT machines, except for the AS/400 that handled grades and payroll. About three years ago when I was a Junior the math/cs department got their first and to this date only Linux box to play with. Now some of the geekier students [sarcasm]which of course does not include me;)[/sarcasm] were playing around with linux by their jr/sr years, however by that time I was on to the BSD family of products.
Also, I noticed they switched from borland to visual C++ to teach programming courses during my stay at the college. Instead I went on to get a double major in German and International business and taught myself PERL, PHP, MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, DNS/BIND. It was scary that I knew more about databases than the CIS majors in the database programming class. I would ask simple questions about joins and other things and get a blank stare in return. The instructor was teaching them how to use Access for 90% of their work and had about one chapter over MSSQL. Most didn't even know what SQL even was let alone why it may just be important to know in the business world. I mean every other database package, except for Access, can use "SELECT * FROM table_name". Is SQL that hard to learn if one understands the theory of programming? No, not really, but I had already learned enough to be dangous. Did I know all the absolute nitty, gritty details of what queries would run the fastest and all that, no, but neither did the CIS students.
With my International Business degree and German I ended up working for a great little start-up firm that now is making about $500k in revenue and growing and hold the title of VP/IT Director and trying to get Linux on more than just our webservers and suceeding and my pay is proably more than what most are making as jr. level coders.
One thing I did notice when I spent a semester in Germany was that the German fochhochschule had two computer labs, one with XP, the other SuSE Linux. People were becoming familar with both MS Office and Star/Open Office.
I now work for a small company that sells public access kiosk systems and guess what, there is only one Linux based Kiosk system that we know of. Everything else runs ontop of of Win 2k or XP.
We are switching over to the Linux based system on our "sponsored" tables, however for our pay-per-use system, we have no choice. None of the bill collecters work on the Linux version as of yet. Until then, one some of our terminals, we have no choice.
Security is a problem, because for starters the kiosk program we have will not run on NTFS, only Fat 32 so we have to swap out harddrives with at least 1 terminal out of 10 a week and reghost it because dispite blocking software, people DL things they shouldn't be.
At work, I have a Powerbook and my boss now has a dual boot system with Windows XP pro and RH 9. He's trying to get used to Linux and Openoffice so that we can have all future employees either use Macs (for those needing photoshop/DW) and everyone can do billing and accounting from Linux terminals.
I wouldn't mind to see WP come back to Linux
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We had a copy of Corel Linux back in the day at the office I worked in and loved having WP running on Linux. There are still many people out there that still like WP instead of Word, I am one of them. WP does everything I need with out the annoying "We are detecting you are doing x, let us screw up all the margins and stuff!".
Star/Openoffice has come a LONG way, but its still not quite there yet. I wouldn't even mind to pay the retail for Corel office for Linux if it cost the what about $100 in the store.
Believe it or not, if Linux had more brand name programs ported to the OS, the more people I know would switch and abandon Windows in a heart beat. Up until this last month I worked in an architecture/graphics design firm and started to deploy MAYA on Linux and the two graphic artists loved it and the hardware was cheaper than Macs. (I have nothing against MAC, in fact my primary computer is a Powerbook).
I know the OpenSource Zeleots would like to see us all run 100% free software, but I much rather see good quality apps even if I do have to pay a reasonable amount of money for them. Until programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro make it to Linux, Mac's will proably continue to be my *iux box of choice, despite its high hardware cost. Sorry, while GIMP is great for the casual user, there are things that I can do in 3 steps that it takes 8 in GIMP (like beveled text) and time is money.
If we could get a major name brand office suite for Linux, like Corel Office and quickbooks, then at the company I work for today, we would use Linux on all further white boxes. Hell, we can get a 1.2Ghz white box with 128MB ram for like $200 that will last like 3 - 4 years if not more, which is more than enough for someone doing wordprocessing or basic spreadsheet jobs.
Linux maybe great, but until well known names run on the platform, you can forget it. I am not talking hardware, but software. I got so fed up with my Win98 box three years ago I switched to SuSE 6.4 and was happy.
Then a year ago, I bought my iBook when it became clear that while OS soultions were progressing, I still needed Photoshop and MS Office. I've been more than happy with my iBook and tell people if they are going to purchase a new desktop, especially just for checking email, surfing, basic word/excel stuff, to buy a mac. For desktop use, Apple has come to play and is beating Linux badly. I know more linux people that switched to OSX than from windows to X or Linux.
I am now an IT director for a small company that owns several dozen public access terminals that currently run Win2Kpro with a custom kiosk app. In my first week, we pulled half the HD's and had to clone them with Norton Ghost because people DLed programs they should not have been in the first place.
I found a replacement in the Linux Based FirecastOS that we are testing over the next 30 days. If that doesn't work out, then I am going to begin to develop a custom solution using RH 9. (well it will proably be PHP or PERL based so should work on any *iux enviroment)
We bought the $40 copy of RH 9 from Best Buy so I could show it to him and the number of times I got the, "Are you sure we can install this on as many boxes as we want with having to buy any more licenses?"
In our case, Linux offers a great solution, but guess what, joe Q. public will be using Linux on our terminals and not know the difference. So long as they can surf the net and check their hotmail accounts, they don't give a *&#$9. We are in works to see about putting a "This terminal is powered by Linux" ad button.
We currently have one box in the field we are test marketing. And when users are asked if they knew they were using Linux, they mostly say no. Then when asked what they thought, its "Well I could check my email, its what agian?" If photoshop (Sorry GIMP doesn't cut it), Dreamweaver, and maybe a couple other widely used apps made it to Linux (like Maya has for 3D artists), then people might be willing to make the jump.
Ask most Mac users if they know that FreeBSD is under the hood, and they will say "Free what? It runs iMovie, and this iTunes is cool. Word and Powerpoint work better than on Windows."
Now as a server OS, I still deploy FreeBSD before Linux for most uses. I guess its a personal thing, but FreeBSD was designed as a Server Platform. While Linux still has that Desktop/Server dual personality issue to work out.
For a general office, Linux is not yet ready. Sorry, but Linux still lacks a great Office Suite. Star/Open Office has made great progress, but they are both slow and most, including myself, find the interface to still be a little clunky.
This week I started a new job as IT director at a small start-up. Before this I worked for an Arcitecture firm as the server admin. Before I left, we tested Maya on Linux. The artists loved it. We found that fact that Linux uses fewer resources, we could use that extra power to shave about 2%-5% off our rendering times compaired with XP pro.
One of my biggest complaints about Linux has been its lack of focus and how its developers attempt to make it a do all from a server to a Desktop all in one package: it ends up not doing either one as well as it could. Here that feature works in our favor because we can use the 10 or so Linux box as its own render-farm for large projects on the same box as the program. Lots of $$$ saved.
At the firm I work at, we upgrade 1/3 of our Render Farm about every year and its getting close to upgrading and phasing out the last of our Quad ALPHA 667 boxes. We were debating between going with IBM or SUN Blade servers and this SCO thing has pushed us to SUN's side.
Why? We are a small architecure firm with about 50 employees and the founder/owner doesn't even want to chace any legal problems with IBM. It doesn't matter if SCO's claims are FUD, crap, or valid, he's unable to risk it. We got a similar letter and a phone call from the sales rep we are working with. So we will be spending the $350,000 budgeted this year at Sun's store against my wishes/advice.
Maybe next year this thing will be resovled. I am personally a fan of IBM because I have worked with them in the past and their customer support and assistance has been outstanding. If there were any problems, the IBM repair team were there within hours. The Sun rep we've been dealing with has been more of the "High, we're sun. Take us or leave us, but if you use IBM and go down in flames, we told you so." type additude. This may just be the rep we are working with, but it just ticks me off. I still like ALPHA, but since we had some bad luck with some HP laptops about two years ago the boss refuese to even think about any HP products except for Printers.
This move does not surprise me. I work in an architecture/Graphics Desgin firm and we used to use Premiere on both Win and Apple platforms up to a year ago. Adobe Premiere 6.x was way too buggy that we had to go back to 5.2 on both platforms. We then purchased Final Cut Pro 3 and found that it did everything that Premiere will, or at least all the features which we need, without the program crashing on a constant basis.
Adobe lost the Apple market share because Apple produced a better product. That's called competition and competition is good! I just hope Apple doesn't slack off on their FCP software.
I just graduated about 2 weeks ago. I had a Sony Viao 233 with 64MB ram that was ultra thin and was about 4 pounds for my first two years in college. I bought it used from a friend for USD 500 and it was great for running office, which was all I needed it printed, checked email, and connected to the internet via a linksys USB adapter.
Before I studied abroad in Germany last fall, I purchased a high end iBook, 700Mhz 14.1" at the time with airport card, and it is great. The wireless internet was fantastic in both Germany and when I got back to the US. It was handy in the classrooms with wifi and I like to take notes on my computer because my hand righting is crap. Hell I can't even read it half the time.
Although listen to the post about getting a machine that games won't run on. I played too much Rouge Spear on my desktop one semester so when I moved off campus, I didn't get internet access or a land line so that I would actully do work. It worked.
But, the mac is well priced, comes with Apple Works 6, which has all the fancy functions in the spread sheet, such as IRR calcs as excell. The only program I would get seperate or "From a friend" is powerpoint. You will need powerpoint, I don't care what your major is and Keynotes and what ever the app is in Apple works 6 is named both suck.
Like I said, we replaced Most of the boxes with Macs. The drafters still use Auto Cad to do the blueprints in Windows, but quite a few of the employees learned drafting on a program called Form-Z, then export to DXF. Form-Z has a Mac Version that we use. Then when they have to do Realistic animations for clients, Autocad works with 3D Max quite nicely, even though its mapped on Windows and then moved to Mac for texturing and animation, then post production. I let the graphic art majors' handle that department. I just try to keep things running, and please the people in the office.
me that Mac's have a lower TCO than anyother platform. I'm the tech geek for an architecture firm and we recently went through and replaced most of our Dell's with Macs. While the PC's were arguable faster in some applications, we had a problem with the systems crashing during long rendering periods. We use Autocad and 3D Studio MAX quite a bit, and the company lost a lot of productivity because the Windows boxes would crash four hours into a 10 hour rendering. And these were not cheap DELL's either and most were only 6 months old. When we switched to MAC, we found that productivity rose by 20% because we were not having to go back and rerender scenes as often. Granted the PC's were running off Windows 2000 Pro and not XP. I'm not sure if it would have much of an effect on what we are doing or not.
The other application is DV editing. We were using Adobe Premiere 6, but it was buggy to say the least. The editing people demanded that we get them Mac's and Final Cut Pro or else. So we bought them Macs switched to Final Cut Pro 3 and the editing guru's seem to be pretty content. Also the editing department, which also does contract work for clients outside the firm, increased their margins by 5% even after the purchase of new equipment. Accounting people were impressed.
Granted, we only use AE on rare occations, but Photoshop is used on an almost daily basis and most employees that griped at first because we replaced their PC's with MAC's have since quited down and some even like the new systems. Some say that its a bit slower than the PC's, but they have noticed that Photoshop doesn't crash as often and in some havn't had the program crash once. And we purchased mainly the entry level dual 866's with 512GB Ram each.
So PC's may buy you a few seconds in rendering, but might cost you a few hours in lost productivity.
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The HP 48GX is the replacement I am sure these days, it has 128k ram compared to the 32k in my plus I think its expandable to like 2MB or some number like that. Hell if your doing calculations on your HP 48 that need 2MB of mem, something's wrong.
Anyway, my HP lasted 4 years of high school, 4.5 years of college and 1.5 of "real world" expirance in backpacks and breif cases and still works. Best $130 I think my parents ever invested in my education. It did everything until my senior year in college when I had to break down and buy another HP calcuator for Finace class. The HP handled everything but Internal Rate of Return (if I remember correctly).
I didn't know HP still made calculators. I bought mine at Office Depot or Office Max (can't remember which they both look the same), but they don't handle them anymore. Guess I needed to look online. Anyway, HP calculator's are rugged little buggers. Even their business calc hasn't been redesigned since '93.
On a side note: my cousin has had her HP since like '90 and it has survived 3 years of high school, 4 years of college, 4 years of professional expirance and now is serving her in her MBA studies. Yeah, they cost a few dollars more than a TI, but they last a life time.
No system is 100% safe. There are some things one can do, like making sure everything is patched and another is to use odd systems. I worked for an architecture firm that used several ALPHA server for rendering projects. Several of these boxes had True64 Unix. When a couple were retired from rendering duty, we reconfigured those boxes as our router and firewall in the office. Why? Well, True64Unix is an odd platform and not many know much about the system. Its an added measure against script kiddies. Is it fool proof, no I am sure, but as one admin put it, "If they know the exploits of True64 Unix, they're a pro and proably not much we can do to stop those types". One of our boxes was attacked with the OpenSSH bug. If the attack would have been about 6 hours later, it proably would have been patched. Our other 17 boxes were patched without a problem and someone has tried to attack our OpenBSD boxes several times (hell I try once a month just to see how they react) with no luck. But hey, some bug with an FTP daemon or some PHP code and we're SOL. Bottom line: Keep patches up to date, use odd and unusual systems on the in/outbound traffic if you can, and keep lots of backups...
The issue is "What, if any, effect has human industry had on the warming effect?" That is the question that people are attempting to answer and truefully we don't know. People point to a study that shows the average tempature rising at an increasing rate over the last 80 years or so when they began the study.
To me, 80 years in the scheme of things isn't enough to say one way or the other. Now we know that we caused the hole in the Ozone layer, and it looks as though the problem maybe starting to correct itself after banning the wide-spread use of CFC's, but its an important lesson: The earth is enduring until the sun gobbles it up in another 4 Billion years or so.
If the north pole ice cap melted, it would not raise the ocean 1 inch since it already displaces its own weight in water. I think the water in a cup and add ice example has been given, now the question is, how much ice is down there in the south pole? People predict horrid flooding of coastal cities, but I have read some documents that say that if all that water is realeased and dispursed throughout the world, it would raise the oceans by only a few inches. Sucks to be you if you own a beach house.
The biggest threat seems to be the breaking of the Atlantic Conveyer with a large influx of fresh water. I think there is some evidence of this happening about 60k years ago, but again I am not a geologist, just an avid reader of things. If that breaks, then a rapid global cooling may take place and the return to a new expansion of the polar caps.
Oh yeah, this would be a good point to note that WE ARE STILL IN AN ICE AGE. There is still ice, isn't there?
As far as weather goes, look at Europe circa 500 AD, a great cooling happened, if I remember my history correctly, that lead to many problems with farming and crop cycles. The other factor is Media. I mean, people really didn't here much about the weather around the world until the last 50 years. How do know that weather hasn't had these odd years with extremes before? Oh wait, I think it has, but there wasn't a media to record and have slow news days with nothing else to bitch about.
Endgame: we need more solid info besides some corralations. There is a famous Missourian named Mark Twain that once wrote, "There are lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" and that is the truth. Stats can be manipulated like markets. My first thought is usually ignore them as evidence and look at the raw data before drawing conclusions. After the Earth will survive: its mankind that is fucked. George Carlin stated that once, and you know, he's right....
Well then after the take down of a couple of the game's premiere players, everyone in the game tried to hunt us down and got about 50% of our players, but by that time it was the towards the end of the semester and we were too busy with the real world to rejoin.
I came back about a year later to a game filled with "unofficial" rules of how the game was played. You know, crap like, "If someone twice your size attacks you, they get two retals for the land grab not 1. If you left your self open, no retals, and the entire game had turned into one bad genevea convention. Plus with hourly ticks, if you were not online like 18 hours a day, you had no real chance to win and most of the orginial players had left.
I quit and since have never come back to the game and started some work developing a fork to the Promisance Game Engine and have run various BNT games on websites to a small scale, never more than about 100 players, but even in those small games, politics take a life of their own and as I go back to school to prosue a masters in International Relations, I can't help but think that one of these games would be an excellent study of possible political models.
And if anyone still play's SK, I was known as Unimatrix. If your ever around their forums, some of the old timers (if any are still there) may still remember me....
Last year I purchased a top of the line 14.1" ibook with 700Mhz G3 and 640MB ram, combo drive and Airport card. If I am using say iTunes, iMovie and Photoshop, the lower left hand corner will get a little warm and the fan kicks into overdrive, but that is after 3 or 4 hours of running all those apps. I bought this to replace a Viao Z505 ultra thin. I loved the 1"thick and 3.5 pounds, but even with a pentium 233, the damn thing would almost burn me if I left it on for too long and windows would crash due to overheating. I say someone saying how they had 1.3Ghz PIII laptop a while ago, that's nice, but can I tell a difference in say PowerPoint between my 700Mhz G3 and a 1 Ghz Althon? Not really and my mac has crashed twice in the last year. Once I was trying to see what it would take (photoshop, itunes, imovie, Golive, and FCP and then launch a classic app...that did it). I can close my laptop and reopen it without it crashing like on my old laptop. I reset my ibook only after downloading updates every two weeks or so. At one point it had an uptime of over 28 days. That's 28 days of open, close, open, close and the system began doing strange things. I guess 1 reset a month isn't that bad for a laptop. Now I design webpages for living deployed on *iux based servers. Being able to develop in a *iux enviroment and still have tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver/flash is a tremendous advantage to me and a feature that I will pay a little more for. Another issue is TCO. One the clients I met with today does video production and he is still using a G3 500 and uses FCP and PS on a daily basis. He's had the machine almost 5 years and can still purchase new software. Will it run as fast as a G4, no, but as he said, if it takes 4 hours to render a video, I go fishing and come back. One other photographer switched to using Dell's, but quickly found that he was upgrading about every 18 months compared to 24 - 36 with Macs and even though the hardware costs are cheaper, but he said that he was losing a lot more time with system crashes and is considering going back to Mac's and getting a dual G5. This laptop will proable last me another two years with proably a new battery needed in that time, but maybe at that time I will consider a powerbook and a g5 will be in it.
Also, I honestly think this Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) idea is foolish and stupid. Most of what I have read seems to indicate that a dual stage system would lower the cost per pound from USD 100k to about $6k and one could have two pieces that are reusable. To me that makes a lot more sense and by all acounts more doable.
If we are serious about keeping the ISS up there, the next generation of space craft could save space to be a delivery and construction/repiar work on satelites and the ISS, then save expiraments for the ISS.
Why NASA is so concerned about the Single Stage to Orbit config is beyond me. Having a dual stage with two reusable craft HAS to be cheaper than the shuttle now.
I wrote such a plan for a small/medium sized business not to long ago. Part of the plan included leasing 3 off-sitededicated servers for nothing but back up. Their databases would be dumped once a day at like 2AM and then the data uploaded to the three off site servers. Their database is about 120MB, not that large, and those dedicated servers have dual Hard Drives between 80 and 120 GB SCSI harddrives in a raid configureation and those are also backed up on-site daily. While not fool proof, this should save their ass in case of an emergancy.
The reason why Linux has not made much in the way of maintream adoption in the home markets is the fact that there are hardly any major name-brand applications out there like Quicken, TurboTax, and others than many home users use. Hell, if Quickbooks Pro ran on Linux, we proably would only keep a windows box around to test website designs on in MSIE. There maybe OSS alternatives, but the average joe doesn't care and will go spend the $50 at Best Buy in order to get an easy to use product with tech support. Games are the same way. Some companies have made ports to linux, but the selection of popular games for linux is fewer than it is for Mac. And kids use computers more than adults and they use it to play games.
Now here comes the chicken or the egg paradox. Until more people use Linux, companies will not spend the money to port their popular software and Linux will not see an increase in home use until more name-brand applications are ported.
I know because at my last job, we switched to running Maya on Linux rather than Windows and the graphic artists at the company loved it since performance was a little better (only by about 2% on long renders) and it hardly ever crashed. So far I have all our servers switched to FreeBSD and trying to get Linux on white boxes at my new job. The news.com article about Ernie Ball was the kicker that conveniced my boss to give Linux a chance.
So long as the interface is GUI point and click and pretty straight forward, people won't care. Get major applications and games ported to Linux and Linux will sell to the masses.
Actully at work I do have a dual 1.25Ghz G4 with 1 GB of ram and the second processor really helps. Hopefully at the end of the year, as VP of Infromation Tech maybe I will get one of those new G5's after X.3 comes out and my current machine will become humble Intern fodder.
Also, I noticed they switched from borland to visual C++ to teach programming courses during my stay at the college. Instead I went on to get a double major in German and International business and taught myself PERL, PHP, MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, DNS/BIND. It was scary that I knew more about databases than the CIS majors in the database programming class. I would ask simple questions about joins and other things and get a blank stare in return. The instructor was teaching them how to use Access for 90% of their work and had about one chapter over MSSQL. Most didn't even know what SQL even was let alone why it may just be important to know in the business world. I mean every other database package, except for Access, can use "SELECT * FROM table_name". Is SQL that hard to learn if one understands the theory of programming? No, not really, but I had already learned enough to be dangous. Did I know all the absolute nitty, gritty details of what queries would run the fastest and all that, no, but neither did the CIS students.
With my International Business degree and German I ended up working for a great little start-up firm that now is making about $500k in revenue and growing and hold the title of VP/IT Director and trying to get Linux on more than just our webservers and suceeding and my pay is proably more than what most are making as jr. level coders.
One thing I did notice when I spent a semester in Germany was that the German fochhochschule had two computer labs, one with XP, the other SuSE Linux. People were becoming familar with both MS Office and Star/Open Office.
We are switching over to the Linux based system on our "sponsored" tables, however for our pay-per-use system, we have no choice. None of the bill collecters work on the Linux version as of yet. Until then, one some of our terminals, we have no choice.
Security is a problem, because for starters the kiosk program we have will not run on NTFS, only Fat 32 so we have to swap out harddrives with at least 1 terminal out of 10 a week and reghost it because dispite blocking software, people DL things they shouldn't be.
At work, I have a Powerbook and my boss now has a dual boot system with Windows XP pro and RH 9. He's trying to get used to Linux and Openoffice so that we can have all future employees either use Macs (for those needing photoshop/DW) and everyone can do billing and accounting from Linux terminals.
Star/Openoffice has come a LONG way, but its still not quite there yet. I wouldn't even mind to pay the retail for Corel office for Linux if it cost the what about $100 in the store.
Believe it or not, if Linux had more brand name programs ported to the OS, the more people I know would switch and abandon Windows in a heart beat. Up until this last month I worked in an architecture/graphics design firm and started to deploy MAYA on Linux and the two graphic artists loved it and the hardware was cheaper than Macs. (I have nothing against MAC, in fact my primary computer is a Powerbook).
I know the OpenSource Zeleots would like to see us all run 100% free software, but I much rather see good quality apps even if I do have to pay a reasonable amount of money for them. Until programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro make it to Linux, Mac's will proably continue to be my *iux box of choice, despite its high hardware cost. Sorry, while GIMP is great for the casual user, there are things that I can do in 3 steps that it takes 8 in GIMP (like beveled text) and time is money.
If we could get a major name brand office suite for Linux, like Corel Office and quickbooks, then at the company I work for today, we would use Linux on all further white boxes. Hell, we can get a 1.2Ghz white box with 128MB ram for like $200 that will last like 3 - 4 years if not more, which is more than enough for someone doing wordprocessing or basic spreadsheet jobs.
Damn I guess I just gave away where I live...
Linux maybe great, but until well known names run on the platform, you can forget it. I am not talking hardware, but software. I got so fed up with my Win98 box three years ago I switched to SuSE 6.4 and was happy. Then a year ago, I bought my iBook when it became clear that while OS soultions were progressing, I still needed Photoshop and MS Office. I've been more than happy with my iBook and tell people if they are going to purchase a new desktop, especially just for checking email, surfing, basic word/excel stuff, to buy a mac. For desktop use, Apple has come to play and is beating Linux badly. I know more linux people that switched to OSX than from windows to X or Linux. I am now an IT director for a small company that owns several dozen public access terminals that currently run Win2Kpro with a custom kiosk app. In my first week, we pulled half the HD's and had to clone them with Norton Ghost because people DLed programs they should not have been in the first place. I found a replacement in the Linux Based FirecastOS that we are testing over the next 30 days. If that doesn't work out, then I am going to begin to develop a custom solution using RH 9. (well it will proably be PHP or PERL based so should work on any *iux enviroment) We bought the $40 copy of RH 9 from Best Buy so I could show it to him and the number of times I got the, "Are you sure we can install this on as many boxes as we want with having to buy any more licenses?" In our case, Linux offers a great solution, but guess what, joe Q. public will be using Linux on our terminals and not know the difference. So long as they can surf the net and check their hotmail accounts, they don't give a *&#$9. We are in works to see about putting a "This terminal is powered by Linux" ad button. We currently have one box in the field we are test marketing. And when users are asked if they knew they were using Linux, they mostly say no. Then when asked what they thought, its "Well I could check my email, its what agian?" If photoshop (Sorry GIMP doesn't cut it), Dreamweaver, and maybe a couple other widely used apps made it to Linux (like Maya has for 3D artists), then people might be willing to make the jump. Ask most Mac users if they know that FreeBSD is under the hood, and they will say "Free what? It runs iMovie, and this iTunes is cool. Word and Powerpoint work better than on Windows." Now as a server OS, I still deploy FreeBSD before Linux for most uses. I guess its a personal thing, but FreeBSD was designed as a Server Platform. While Linux still has that Desktop/Server dual personality issue to work out.
Finally I can replace this candle wax and stamp sealer from the 1500's!
For a general office, Linux is not yet ready. Sorry, but Linux still lacks a great Office Suite. Star/Open Office has made great progress, but they are both slow and most, including myself, find the interface to still be a little clunky. This week I started a new job as IT director at a small start-up. Before this I worked for an Arcitecture firm as the server admin. Before I left, we tested Maya on Linux. The artists loved it. We found that fact that Linux uses fewer resources, we could use that extra power to shave about 2%-5% off our rendering times compaired with XP pro. One of my biggest complaints about Linux has been its lack of focus and how its developers attempt to make it a do all from a server to a Desktop all in one package: it ends up not doing either one as well as it could. Here that feature works in our favor because we can use the 10 or so Linux box as its own render-farm for large projects on the same box as the program. Lots of $$$ saved.
But the NSA can slap "TOP SECERT" onto any code and SCO be Damned if they can view it with out a level 4 security clearance.
Why? We are a small architecure firm with about 50 employees and the founder/owner doesn't even want to chace any legal problems with IBM. It doesn't matter if SCO's claims are FUD, crap, or valid, he's unable to risk it. We got a similar letter and a phone call from the sales rep we are working with. So we will be spending the $350,000 budgeted this year at Sun's store against my wishes/advice.
Maybe next year this thing will be resovled. I am personally a fan of IBM because I have worked with them in the past and their customer support and assistance has been outstanding. If there were any problems, the IBM repair team were there within hours. The Sun rep we've been dealing with has been more of the "High, we're sun. Take us or leave us, but if you use IBM and go down in flames, we told you so." type additude. This may just be the rep we are working with, but it just ticks me off. I still like ALPHA, but since we had some bad luck with some HP laptops about two years ago the boss refuese to even think about any HP products except for Printers.
Adobe lost the Apple market share because Apple produced a better product. That's called competition and competition is good! I just hope Apple doesn't slack off on their FCP software.
OpenBSD 3.3 .... $40
Router w/NAT.... $100
Portsentry set on Anal mode....free
Sending Script Kiddies to /Dev/Null....Priceless
For everyone trying to Crack, there's jail time.
I just graduated about 2 weeks ago. I had a Sony Viao 233 with 64MB ram that was ultra thin and was about 4 pounds for my first two years in college. I bought it used from a friend for USD 500 and it was great for running office, which was all I needed it printed, checked email, and connected to the internet via a linksys USB adapter.
Before I studied abroad in Germany last fall, I purchased a high end iBook, 700Mhz 14.1" at the time with airport card, and it is great. The wireless internet was fantastic in both Germany and when I got back to the US. It was handy in the classrooms with wifi and I like to take notes on my computer because my hand righting is crap. Hell I can't even read it half the time.
Although listen to the post about getting a machine that games won't run on. I played too much Rouge Spear on my desktop one semester so when I moved off campus, I didn't get internet access or a land line so that I would actully do work. It worked.
But, the mac is well priced, comes with Apple Works 6, which has all the fancy functions in the spread sheet, such as IRR calcs as excell. The only program I would get seperate or "From a friend" is powerpoint. You will need powerpoint, I don't care what your major is and Keynotes and what ever the app is in Apple works 6 is named both suck.
That is my humble
Like I said, we replaced Most of the boxes with Macs. The drafters still use Auto Cad to do the blueprints in Windows, but quite a few of the employees learned drafting on a program called Form-Z, then export to DXF. Form-Z has a Mac Version that we use. Then when they have to do Realistic animations for clients, Autocad works with 3D Max quite nicely, even though its mapped on Windows and then moved to Mac for texturing and animation, then post production. I let the graphic art majors' handle that department. I just try to keep things running, and please the people in the office.
512 MB not GB.
The other application is DV editing. We were using Adobe Premiere 6, but it was buggy to say the least. The editing people demanded that we get them Mac's and Final Cut Pro or else. So we bought them Macs switched to Final Cut Pro 3 and the editing guru's seem to be pretty content. Also the editing department, which also does contract work for clients outside the firm, increased their margins by 5% even after the purchase of new equipment. Accounting people were impressed.
Granted, we only use AE on rare occations, but Photoshop is used on an almost daily basis and most employees that griped at first because we replaced their PC's with MAC's have since quited down and some even like the new systems. Some say that its a bit slower than the PC's, but they have noticed that Photoshop doesn't crash as often and in some havn't had the program crash once. And we purchased mainly the entry level dual 866's with 512GB Ram each.
So PC's may buy you a few seconds in rendering, but might cost you a few hours in lost productivity.