Re:It doesn't matter anymore
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· Score: 2
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. But, remember, that was a unique circumstance. Those soldiers were in the western desert of Iraq, had been subjected to prolonged bombing and were isolated from the rest of the Iraqi Army. However, the air force and its smart bombs did not win that war. They made it easier for the ground pounder, but the guy on the ground won the war. Iraq wouldn't have said "uncle" just from the bombing, otherwise they would have done so without the ground war.
Re:It doesn't matter anymore
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The M1A1C and M1A2 armor is highly classified. But not because of some super secret surface coating. The surface coating, and this isn't classified, is designed to easily shed battlefield chemical weapons, like Sarin gas. The coating can actually withstand Sarin for up to 24 hours.
What's underneath that is so secret that if a tank crew breaches their armor and sees what's under the surface they are immediately quarantined until they can be debriefed by Army Intelligence types. They have to sign stringent non-disclosure agreements and could spend many long years in Leavenworth for disclosing what they saw.
There is no way that a surface coating would be effective against the primary tank killer, the long rod penetrator, since it is a kinetic energy weapon. That's pretty basic physics.
Re:Very Effective
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· Score: 4, Interesting
In order to be man portable (one soldier can carry the entire system himself) the weapon cannot carry effective tandem warheads. And the whole reason that the TOW II was designed (tandem warhead, top down attack) is that the TOW IB, which had the largest warhead of its generation of ATGM's, was not able to effectively penetrate the laminate style armor used on Challenger, the M1, and the Leopard II. An RPG hit to the rear or flank of the tank might get a mobility kill, although even that is questionable. The RPG hit my tank took was on the turret flank, no penetration, some minor damage to the sponson box on that side of the tank (tool stowage).
The new top down attack ATGM's like TOW II, Milan, etc. are quite effective against tanks, until the tank crew starts putting effective fire on the missile crew, since they have to hold their sites on the tank for as long as 15 seconds. A main gun round and several hundred machine gun rounds will just screw up your whole day.
Re:Very Effective
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· Score: 3, Informative
I thought it was pretty funny actually. I happen to love Quake, Doom and Duke Nukem. They are totally unreal and let me (when I was in the Army) escape from the reality of my job.
Speaking of computer games that deal with the military, I can see why a lot of folks have unrealistic notions of what a tank, for example can do, and survive, because most of the tactical level games I have seen are very unrealistic. An infantryman with an RPG cannot, repeat not, defeat a main battle tank. An M1 carries two 7.62 mm machine guns, one slaved to the ballistic computer, and 1 50 caliber (12.7 mm) heavy machine gun, in addition to the main gun. The crew of an M1A2 has three thermal imaging systems that all operate independently (driver, gunner and tank commander), and yes thermal imaging can "see" through walls, at night, in the day, raining, clear, yada yada. Dust and fog degrade thermal sights, but then again they degrade daylight sights even worse. A squad of infantry vs. a tank is a losing proposition, for the infantry. Unfortunately most tactical computer games that try to be realistic will make it very possible for that infantry squad to kill the tank.
Re:Another article stolen from Kuro5hin.
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Actually, I was thinking of the HEAT round fired by the M1, whose explosive charge is 2 KG. If that round is not effective then it should be obvious to all that no possible man portable missile/rocket will be effective.
I specifically mentioned heavy missiles like TOW, although TOW II is much more effective because of it's dual warhead top down attack.
Re:Another article stolen from Kuro5hin.
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· Score: 3, Informative
I read the article, and I responded to the folks talking about this armor and tanks. Read the original posts I responded to.
Reading... it's a useful thing.
Re:Drozd? Wasn't that a cartoon?
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· Score: 2
RPG's, even the newer generations like the US AT-4, PanzerFaust III, etc., are not effective against Main Battle Tanks and their armor. A man simply cannot carry a missile/warhead combo that is large enough. In theory he could get a flank or rear shot against the tank, but even then, unless perfectly placed the sloping will defeat the round. I do happen to know a bit about this. The reason that tanks and infantry work together (combined arms tactics) is to prevent such a thing from happening. The infantry ensures that the other guys infantry doesn't pull off such a trick and the tanks smash everything in their path, creating a hole for follow-on forces to exploit. It's called blitzkrieg and was originally created by the Wehrmacht. The US Army calls it Air-Land Battle.
Re:It doesn't matter anymore
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· Score: 2
The best defense is simply not to be slow, or in the future, manned at all.
That's a load, as any soldier will tell you. There is no substitute for a soldier on the ground, although the air force has been trying to pretend that there is. However, bombs, smart bombs, drone aircraft, etc have yet to cause the enemy to surrender. Tanks and infantry, although possibly not recognizable by current standards, will be around for the foreseeable future. Until you design a system that can not only make accurate decisions rapidly in a high stress environment, but that can also take initiative and react to unforeseen circumstances you will have to have men on the battlefield. And, if you design such a machine it will be, in all but name, a man anyhow.
Re:Very Effective
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, tanks like the Challenger (British Army) and the M1 Abrams can withstand RPG hits now, 10 more hits would not be a major issue. My M1A1 Heavy was hit by an RPG during Desert Storm. I didn't even notice until we were recovering and rearming after that mission. This sort of armor would be a tremendous boon for infantry fighting vehicles, which are very vulnerable to RPG rounds and shaped charge HEAT type tank rounds.
Re:Another article stolen from Kuro5hin.
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· Score: 5, Informative
All this speculation is fine and dandy, but how bout some reality.
I was a tank crewman in the Army for 10 years. For the last 3 years I was a Master Gunner. Master Gunners are gunnery and ballistics experts. I was also a tank commander (meaning commander of a single tank and its crew) during Desert Storm.
Reality. The M1A1C, the last tank I served on, weights, with full combat load, 68 tons. An artillery shell, unless it is a direct hit, doesn't bother the tank. It may destroy the crews baggage, which is stowed on the outside of the tank. Possibly it may shatter some of the optics, although the gun sights are protected fairly well. A near miss by a high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round is no more effective than a near miss by a rifle bullet. HEAT is a shaped charge, it has a 2 kilogram warhead that fires its explosive in jet stream directly in front of the round.
Aside from aircraft, there are two killers of tanks on the battlefield. The main gun of another tank, firing sabot. Sabot (more officially armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot long rod penetrator) is a 2 kilogram, 40 mm in diameter, dart of depleted uranium or tungsten alloy steel. It strikes the armor of the tank at a speed in excess of 5000 feet per second (~1520 meters per second). Basic physics tells you that this is a huge amount of energy released in a 40 mm circle. However, if the penetrator is not made of DU or tungsten steel it will shatter rather than penetrate. The other main killer is heavy anti-tank guided missiles, which fire shaped charges from over top of the tank. These missiles fire two charges, one right after the other, in order to defeat reactive armor.
The M1 tank doesn't use reactive armor, it uses laminate armor. Laminate armor is made up of layers of steel and ceramic, and is much more effective than an equivalent thickness of steel alloy. With the M1A1 Heavy (the variant used in Desert Storm) even the main gun of another M1 had difficulty penetrating the M1's armor at 1000 meters (point blank range for a tank engagement) and the M1A1C and M1A2 have armor improved over the Heavy variant.
Shaped charges and artillery have proved extremely ineffective against the M1, which is why the quest for rail gun technology, providing an even more effective kinetic energy penetrator than the current chemical energy main gun.
Actually, I have been everything from the guy who administers the servers while sitting in an air-conditioned room eating Doritos to a desktop support manager to a technical lead for project teams to a consultant supporting external employees. In every case I interacted with clients.
As it stands, I'd rather keep my dignity and do a job that can be respected than sell my soul like that.
Funny, I haven't changed, I still have my dignity, and I have a hell of a lot of fun in my job. I usually wear Dockers and a polo shirt, my hair isn't particularly short, but it is well groomed. Currently I'm a senior technology consultant. My job can be respected, my customers save money and implement better systems because of me. Some of the implement Linux because of me. Or is it somehow not respectable to provide expertise to people who don't have it? What is the open source business model? It's about providing services rather than intellectual property.
As a consultant, I can understand how your appearance would make a difference, though.
My first job in IT was as a help desk technician for a small ISP. I did that part time while I went to college. The owner expected decent appearance as well as ability. It's been that way ever since. It's not "as a consultant" that appearance makes a difference, it's in general. It is a matter of perception by employers, co-workers and customers. No matter the old saw about not judging a book by it's cover, perception and appearance is reality.
I've been a sys admin for about 10 years now, and I've spent plenty of time in front of clients. Maybe it's just the companies I've worked in, since they are IT services and integrators, maybe not. It has ranged anywhere from executives and clients taking tours of the data center to being the technical lead on various projects for the clients to architecting the solution for contract bids. Just because you are a sys admin doesn't mean appearance and hygiene isn't important. I have yet to see a company, at least a traditional IT company, that would have found what you describe acceptable.
I personally don't use Mandrake, I prefer RedHat over all. This post actually wasn't in support of Mandrake but more trying to discuss what Joe User wants. Joe User doesn't give a flip what his PC runs. He does want it to work easy, like any other appliance. He will trust brand names, like he does with any other appliance. This is one area where Microsoft had an advantage. Right now there is a window of opportunity because Microsoft's brand name is working against them. My father, who has been a died in the wool supporter of MS products for years now is talking about Linux and MacOS and seriously considering them as an alternative to MS, as an example. He is a long time PC user, not an IT guy.
Joe User wants to be able to treat his computer like a TV. Turn it on, send an email, browse the web for naked girls, turn it off. The reason Joe User distrusts Microsoft these days is that MS has been promising that for years, and they haven't delivered it. Instead their prices keep going up, they get taken to court as a monopoly, and their operating systems and software still leave quite a bit to be desired. Now open source has its chance. But if the hardcore "compile or die" guys impose their view of computing on it, open source will fail fairly quickly and the proprietary software world will lock in Joe User forever.
It's a historic building. Static pictures of the interior should suffice. What's a live camera going to show? A live updated picture of a stuffed owl?
Why should static pictures suffice? And a live camera can show the entire interior of the room. Mount it on gymbals that are controlled by the web server, then set up an applet so that the web page user can rotate the camera. Show some imagination. One of the things I have loved about the Internet for a long time is that I can see, read, and hear things that I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. The Internet has the ability to break down barriers to information and communication. I would invite you to take a look at UC Davis' Veterinary Medicine cams so you could see what I mean, but you obviously didn't the first time I posted that link.
In what way should they interact with online visitors? Should they sit in a chat room?
Why not? Is the only way you can take a tour of a historic building by going there in person? Why not have Internet tours, with tour guides. Why not have the tour guides able to easily send and receive email. Why not make such things more easily accessible to people? Again, it's all about imagination. Chat rooms are not just for geeks to gather or people to have cybersex.
The best part is, if they have a DSL line for Internet access, and then connect the grounds together by wireless, none of this is all that expensive. For a relatively cheap price the opportunity to visit something historic could be extended to folks all over the world who may have no other opportunity.
Check out Computer Associate's portal product, CleverPath. It uses Tomcat as its application server. My company is testing CleverPath right now for deployment as a B2B portal for our customers.
If I were you I would let somebody else do the heavy lifting on benchmarks, where it's in production, etc. Contact CA, tell them you are thinking about deploying their portal and you want to know where it's in production and what the benchmarks are. Since CleverPath can be deployed with a third party app server (BEA, WebSphere, Sun ONE) you need to specify a native deployment for the reference customers. Since you know that the app server architecture is built on Tomcat you will have good references for Tomcat that you can use to demonstrate its abilities, or lack thereof.
I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head:
cams to allow Internet visitors to view the interior
The groundskeeper or caretaker ought to have Internet access
The people who give tours and such could interact with online visitors
A security system
Cause Sir Isaac would think it was really cool if he was alive today
For a demonstration of how internet cams work in a situation like this, check out VetLinc from University of California at Davis' School of Veterinary Medicine.
I think the line about anyone having access is telling, but not in the way many people seem to be taking it. The NSA isn't concerned with US citizens having access to SELinux, although I'm sure that some people within the NSA are. They are concerned that security technology developed by the NSA will be made available to other countries. The NSA is fighting the tide of knowledge. The Soviet Union used to do this, to an even more dramatic extent than our government does. Anything mailed or published outside the USSR was subject to censorship. Soviet scientists used to get around this in interesting ways. For example, a physics paper was published that started "Imagine the interior of a star.... ". The censor immediately decided that there was nothing of interest militarily and passed the paper through for publishing in Western Europe. The star described could not possibly exist, it was actually describing a third stage thermo-nuclear explosion and gave Western physicists insight into the sophistication of Soviet nuclear weapons technology.
Information and knowledge cannot be prevented from spreading, as the Catholic Church in the middle ages learned, as the Soviet Union learned, and as the NSA keeps trying to forget.
I would be concerned with effectiveness, but I would also be concerned with what's next. No government ever gives back the power it takes to itself, and certainly ours doesn't. And I don't believe, legally, that a police officer can stop me on the street and interrogate me just because I "look suspicious". In fact there have been a large number of court cases dealing with this subject. So, in order to feel safe we are going to let rent-a-cops stop us in the airport and interrogate us because our brain emitted electrical signals that might indicate stress or anger? Does this sound like it is A. unconstitutional and B. unworkable.
I am unwilling to give up ANY of my rights, freedoms, privileges or privacy just so you can feel safer. None. Ultimately, if we follow that path we will be safe from terrorists and criminals..... except for the ones in the government. Think old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
The problem with what MS is doing is that they are managing to avoid the procurement process that most government agencies are subject to. Remember the outcry in California when the state sole-sourced a Master License Agreement with Oracle? And then, after a few months of people saying that the state shouldn't have done that, it turned out that there were some shady political contributions from Oracle to the Governor's office.
If you look at the history of government procurement, racketereering and corrruption laws you will see that they were almost all passed to prevent sole-source government procurement because it's bad for the citizens. This is pretty tricky on Microsoft's part. It certainly violates the spirit of the law, if not the actual letter.
Packetgeek said MS products are designed to function with as little user / administrator intervention as posible.
This is not the same as how much knowledge does it take to install the product. I took this sentence how you wrote it. Yes, you can indeed install an NT server with little to no knowledge of an OS. Unless there is something unusual (and this can be as simple as needing a RAID array driver that is not included on the install CD-ROM, a fairly common issue). However, user/admin intervention. Well, typically NT boxes are rebooted on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, they typically (especially ones set up by someone with little to no knowledge) need lots of intervention cause they function poorly, at best.
NT boxes that provide production services require baby sitting and handholding. Our standalone Sun servers function at 99.9% uptime, something we have never gotten from NT unless we clustered it, thus raising the number of sys admins, dba's and developers needed to support the server by a factor of 1.5, as a minimum. I have supported SCO, Linux, Solaris, AIX, NT and Novell, and I have to say that NT takes more system administration than any other OS by a factor of two. So what if the admin needs less knowledge/experience? A good UNIX admin only costs about 50% more than a half-assed NT admin. So I come out ahead in admin costs. And I come out way ahead when I'm trying to set up a multi-terabyte data warehouse that supports 1000+ users with a concurrency of 200 users. Why? Cause you can't do it on NT. And if you could it would cost more and perform worse.
The beauty of almost any commercial UNIX is that once it's set up it needs little to no admin intervention, it just functions. The beauty of Solaris is that scales linearly, from 1 CPU to hundreds. NT (or Win2K for that matter) scales on a curve of diminishing returns, around 8 CPU's you are costing yourself as much as you are gaining, performance wise. That's a combination of IA hardware limitations and the limitations inherent in the NT kernel.
Calling it Homeland Security feels like stirring up nationalist fervor. This is the sort of thing that Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin and Tojo did that we find reprehensible when we read about it in history books. Not to suggest that Bush is a secret disciple of Adolf Hitler but rather to point out the hypocrisy, double-speak and thought control of our current political culture.
Once upon a time we used to name organizations with a name that told us what the did. For example:
War Department
The Secret Service (they were secret *g*)
Department of Veterans Affairs
Now we name things to be misleading and politically correct, what George Orwell called double-speak. For example:
Department of Defense (still makes war, not defense)
Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA)
National Security Agency (they eavesdrop on everyone)
I don't really think that this is an attempt to put Fascist controls on the people. I do think it is an attempt, and a serious one, to gain more control over the citizens of this country and remove more of our freedom. I think that the Dept of Homeland Security is scary and a bad idea and doesn't represent what I want at all. Does no one else think gathering all the federal intelligence agencies and police forces into one organization is a seriously bad idea?
Just think about this, KGB stands for (translated to English) Committee for State Security. It's forerunner was the NKVD: People's Commissariat For Internal Affairs. In Nazi Germany you had the RSHA, Reich Main Security Office, which was the authority for the Gestapo, SicherHeitsDienst (Security Police), Criminal Police and Foreign Intelligence Service. It's not hard to imagine either of those countries having a Department of Homeland Security, especially when you consider that this Dept. will have authority over any Federal dept involved in protecting the mainland USA (FBI, NSA, Treasury, Justice, ATF, DEA, Border Patrol, Customs Service, US Marshals, Secret Service).
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There are exceptions to every rule, of course. But, remember, that was a unique circumstance. Those soldiers were in the western desert of Iraq, had been subjected to prolonged bombing and were isolated from the rest of the Iraqi Army. However, the air force and its smart bombs did not win that war. They made it easier for the ground pounder, but the guy on the ground won the war. Iraq wouldn't have said "uncle" just from the bombing, otherwise they would have done so without the ground war.
The M1A1C and M1A2 armor is highly classified. But not because of some super secret surface coating. The surface coating, and this isn't classified, is designed to easily shed battlefield chemical weapons, like Sarin gas. The coating can actually withstand Sarin for up to 24 hours.
What's underneath that is so secret that if a tank crew breaches their armor and sees what's under the surface they are immediately quarantined until they can be debriefed by Army Intelligence types. They have to sign stringent non-disclosure agreements and could spend many long years in Leavenworth for disclosing what they saw.
There is no way that a surface coating would be effective against the primary tank killer, the long rod penetrator, since it is a kinetic energy weapon. That's pretty basic physics.
In order to be man portable (one soldier can carry the entire system himself) the weapon cannot carry effective tandem warheads. And the whole reason that the TOW II was designed (tandem warhead, top down attack) is that the TOW IB, which had the largest warhead of its generation of ATGM's, was not able to effectively penetrate the laminate style armor used on Challenger, the M1, and the Leopard II. An RPG hit to the rear or flank of the tank might get a mobility kill, although even that is questionable. The RPG hit my tank took was on the turret flank, no penetration, some minor damage to the sponson box on that side of the tank (tool stowage).
The new top down attack ATGM's like TOW II, Milan, etc. are quite effective against tanks, until the tank crew starts putting effective fire on the missile crew, since they have to hold their sites on the tank for as long as 15 seconds. A main gun round and several hundred machine gun rounds will just screw up your whole day.
I thought it was pretty funny actually. I happen to love Quake, Doom and Duke Nukem. They are totally unreal and let me (when I was in the Army) escape from the reality of my job.
Speaking of computer games that deal with the military, I can see why a lot of folks have unrealistic notions of what a tank, for example can do, and survive, because most of the tactical level games I have seen are very unrealistic. An infantryman with an RPG cannot, repeat not, defeat a main battle tank. An M1 carries two 7.62 mm machine guns, one slaved to the ballistic computer, and 1 50 caliber (12.7 mm) heavy machine gun, in addition to the main gun. The crew of an M1A2 has three thermal imaging systems that all operate independently (driver, gunner and tank commander), and yes thermal imaging can "see" through walls, at night, in the day, raining, clear, yada yada. Dust and fog degrade thermal sights, but then again they degrade daylight sights even worse. A squad of infantry vs. a tank is a losing proposition, for the infantry. Unfortunately most tactical computer games that try to be realistic will make it very possible for that infantry squad to kill the tank.
Actually, I was thinking of the HEAT round fired by the M1, whose explosive charge is 2 KG. If that round is not effective then it should be obvious to all that no possible man portable missile/rocket will be effective.
I specifically mentioned heavy missiles like TOW, although TOW II is much more effective because of it's dual warhead top down attack.
I read the article, and I responded to the folks talking about this armor and tanks. Read the original posts I responded to.
Reading ... it's a useful thing.
RPG's, even the newer generations like the US AT-4, PanzerFaust III, etc., are not effective against Main Battle Tanks and their armor. A man simply cannot carry a missile/warhead combo that is large enough. In theory he could get a flank or rear shot against the tank, but even then, unless perfectly placed the sloping will defeat the round. I do happen to know a bit about this. The reason that tanks and infantry work together (combined arms tactics) is to prevent such a thing from happening. The infantry ensures that the other guys infantry doesn't pull off such a trick and the tanks smash everything in their path, creating a hole for follow-on forces to exploit. It's called blitzkrieg and was originally created by the Wehrmacht. The US Army calls it Air-Land Battle.
The best defense is simply not to be slow, or in the future, manned at all.
That's a load, as any soldier will tell you. There is no substitute for a soldier on the ground, although the air force has been trying to pretend that there is. However, bombs, smart bombs, drone aircraft, etc have yet to cause the enemy to surrender. Tanks and infantry, although possibly not recognizable by current standards, will be around for the foreseeable future. Until you design a system that can not only make accurate decisions rapidly in a high stress environment, but that can also take initiative and react to unforeseen circumstances you will have to have men on the battlefield. And, if you design such a machine it will be, in all but name, a man anyhow.
Actually, tanks like the Challenger (British Army) and the M1 Abrams can withstand RPG hits now, 10 more hits would not be a major issue. My M1A1 Heavy was hit by an RPG during Desert Storm. I didn't even notice until we were recovering and rearming after that mission. This sort of armor would be a tremendous boon for infantry fighting vehicles, which are very vulnerable to RPG rounds and shaped charge HEAT type tank rounds.
All this speculation is fine and dandy, but how bout some reality.
I was a tank crewman in the Army for 10 years. For the last 3 years I was a Master Gunner. Master Gunners are gunnery and ballistics experts. I was also a tank commander (meaning commander of a single tank and its crew) during Desert Storm.
Reality. The M1A1C, the last tank I served on, weights, with full combat load, 68 tons. An artillery shell, unless it is a direct hit, doesn't bother the tank. It may destroy the crews baggage, which is stowed on the outside of the tank. Possibly it may shatter some of the optics, although the gun sights are protected fairly well. A near miss by a high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round is no more effective than a near miss by a rifle bullet. HEAT is a shaped charge, it has a 2 kilogram warhead that fires its explosive in jet stream directly in front of the round.
Aside from aircraft, there are two killers of tanks on the battlefield. The main gun of another tank, firing sabot. Sabot (more officially armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot long rod penetrator) is a 2 kilogram, 40 mm in diameter, dart of depleted uranium or tungsten alloy steel. It strikes the armor of the tank at a speed in excess of 5000 feet per second (~1520 meters per second). Basic physics tells you that this is a huge amount of energy released in a 40 mm circle. However, if the penetrator is not made of DU or tungsten steel it will shatter rather than penetrate. The other main killer is heavy anti-tank guided missiles, which fire shaped charges from over top of the tank. These missiles fire two charges, one right after the other, in order to defeat reactive armor.
The M1 tank doesn't use reactive armor, it uses laminate armor. Laminate armor is made up of layers of steel and ceramic, and is much more effective than an equivalent thickness of steel alloy. With the M1A1 Heavy (the variant used in Desert Storm) even the main gun of another M1 had difficulty penetrating the M1's armor at 1000 meters (point blank range for a tank engagement) and the M1A1C and M1A2 have armor improved over the Heavy variant.
Shaped charges and artillery have proved extremely ineffective against the M1, which is why the quest for rail gun technology, providing an even more effective kinetic energy penetrator than the current chemical energy main gun.
Actually, I have been everything from the guy who administers the servers while sitting in an air-conditioned room eating Doritos to a desktop support manager to a technical lead for project teams to a consultant supporting external employees. In every case I interacted with clients.
As it stands, I'd rather keep my dignity and do a job that can be respected than sell my soul like that.
Funny, I haven't changed, I still have my dignity, and I have a hell of a lot of fun in my job. I usually wear Dockers and a polo shirt, my hair isn't particularly short, but it is well groomed. Currently I'm a senior technology consultant. My job can be respected, my customers save money and implement better systems because of me. Some of the implement Linux because of me. Or is it somehow not respectable to provide expertise to people who don't have it? What is the open source business model? It's about providing services rather than intellectual property.
As a consultant, I can understand how your appearance would make a difference, though.
My first job in IT was as a help desk technician for a small ISP. I did that part time while I went to college. The owner expected decent appearance as well as ability. It's been that way ever since. It's not "as a consultant" that appearance makes a difference, it's in general. It is a matter of perception by employers, co-workers and customers. No matter the old saw about not judging a book by it's cover, perception and appearance is reality.
I've been a sys admin for about 10 years now, and I've spent plenty of time in front of clients. Maybe it's just the companies I've worked in, since they are IT services and integrators, maybe not. It has ranged anywhere from executives and clients taking tours of the data center to being the technical lead on various projects for the clients to architecting the solution for contract bids. Just because you are a sys admin doesn't mean appearance and hygiene isn't important. I have yet to see a company, at least a traditional IT company, that would have found what you describe acceptable.
I personally don't use Mandrake, I prefer RedHat over all. This post actually wasn't in support of Mandrake but more trying to discuss what Joe User wants. Joe User doesn't give a flip what his PC runs. He does want it to work easy, like any other appliance. He will trust brand names, like he does with any other appliance. This is one area where Microsoft had an advantage. Right now there is a window of opportunity because Microsoft's brand name is working against them. My father, who has been a died in the wool supporter of MS products for years now is talking about Linux and MacOS and seriously considering them as an alternative to MS, as an example. He is a long time PC user, not an IT guy.
Joe User wants to be able to treat his computer like a TV. Turn it on, send an email, browse the web for naked girls, turn it off. The reason Joe User distrusts Microsoft these days is that MS has been promising that for years, and they haven't delivered it. Instead their prices keep going up, they get taken to court as a monopoly, and their operating systems and software still leave quite a bit to be desired. Now open source has its chance. But if the hardcore "compile or die" guys impose their view of computing on it, open source will fail fairly quickly and the proprietary software world will lock in Joe User forever.
It's a historic building. Static pictures of the interior should suffice. What's a live camera going to show? A live updated picture of a stuffed owl?
Why should static pictures suffice? And a live camera can show the entire interior of the room. Mount it on gymbals that are controlled by the web server, then set up an applet so that the web page user can rotate the camera. Show some imagination. One of the things I have loved about the Internet for a long time is that I can see, read, and hear things that I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. The Internet has the ability to break down barriers to information and communication. I would invite you to take a look at UC Davis' Veterinary Medicine cams so you could see what I mean, but you obviously didn't the first time I posted that link.
In what way should they interact with online visitors? Should they sit in a chat room?
Why not? Is the only way you can take a tour of a historic building by going there in person? Why not have Internet tours, with tour guides. Why not have the tour guides able to easily send and receive email. Why not make such things more easily accessible to people? Again, it's all about imagination. Chat rooms are not just for geeks to gather or people to have cybersex.
The best part is, if they have a DSL line for Internet access, and then connect the grounds together by wireless, none of this is all that expensive. For a relatively cheap price the opportunity to visit something historic could be extended to folks all over the world who may have no other opportunity.
Check out Computer Associate's portal product, CleverPath. It uses Tomcat as its application server. My company is testing CleverPath right now for deployment as a B2B portal for our customers.
If I were you I would let somebody else do the heavy lifting on benchmarks, where it's in production, etc. Contact CA, tell them you are thinking about deploying their portal and you want to know where it's in production and what the benchmarks are. Since CleverPath can be deployed with a third party app server (BEA, WebSphere, Sun ONE) you need to specify a native deployment for the reference customers. Since you know that the app server architecture is built on Tomcat you will have good references for Tomcat that you can use to demonstrate its abilities, or lack thereof.
That's pretty funny. :-)
I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head:
- cams to allow Internet visitors to view the interior
- The groundskeeper or caretaker ought to have Internet access
- The people who give tours and such could interact with online visitors
- A security system
- Cause Sir Isaac would think it was really cool if he was alive today
For a demonstration of how internet cams work in a situation like this, check out VetLinc from University of California at Davis' School of Veterinary Medicine.I think the line about anyone having access is telling, but not in the way many people seem to be taking it. The NSA isn't concerned with US citizens having access to SELinux, although I'm sure that some people within the NSA are. They are concerned that security technology developed by the NSA will be made available to other countries. The NSA is fighting the tide of knowledge. The Soviet Union used to do this, to an even more dramatic extent than our government does. Anything mailed or published outside the USSR was subject to censorship. Soviet scientists used to get around this in interesting ways. For example, a physics paper was published that started "Imagine the interior of a star .... ". The censor immediately decided that there was nothing of interest militarily and passed the paper through for publishing in Western Europe. The star described could not possibly exist, it was actually describing a third stage thermo-nuclear explosion and gave Western physicists insight into the sophistication of Soviet nuclear weapons technology.
Information and knowledge cannot be prevented from spreading, as the Catholic Church in the middle ages learned, as the Soviet Union learned, and as the NSA keeps trying to forget.
I would be concerned with effectiveness, but I would also be concerned with what's next. No government ever gives back the power it takes to itself, and certainly ours doesn't. And I don't believe, legally, that a police officer can stop me on the street and interrogate me just because I "look suspicious". In fact there have been a large number of court cases dealing with this subject. So, in order to feel safe we are going to let rent-a-cops stop us in the airport and interrogate us because our brain emitted electrical signals that might indicate stress or anger? Does this sound like it is A. unconstitutional and B. unworkable.
I am unwilling to give up ANY of my rights, freedoms, privileges or privacy just so you can feel safer. None. Ultimately, if we follow that path we will be safe from terrorists and criminals ..... except for the ones in the government. Think old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
The problem with what MS is doing is that they are managing to avoid the procurement process that most government agencies are subject to. Remember the outcry in California when the state sole-sourced a Master License Agreement with Oracle? And then, after a few months of people saying that the state shouldn't have done that, it turned out that there were some shady political contributions from Oracle to the Governor's office.
If you look at the history of government procurement, racketereering and corrruption laws you will see that they were almost all passed to prevent sole-source government procurement because it's bad for the citizens. This is pretty tricky on Microsoft's part. It certainly violates the spirit of the law, if not the actual letter.
Packetgeek said MS products are designed to function with as little user / administrator intervention as posible.
This is not the same as how much knowledge does it take to install the product. I took this sentence how you wrote it. Yes, you can indeed install an NT server with little to no knowledge of an OS. Unless there is something unusual (and this can be as simple as needing a RAID array driver that is not included on the install CD-ROM, a fairly common issue). However, user/admin intervention. Well, typically NT boxes are rebooted on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, they typically (especially ones set up by someone with little to no knowledge) need lots of intervention cause they function poorly, at best.
NT boxes that provide production services require baby sitting and handholding. Our standalone Sun servers function at 99.9% uptime, something we have never gotten from NT unless we clustered it, thus raising the number of sys admins, dba's and developers needed to support the server by a factor of 1.5, as a minimum. I have supported SCO, Linux, Solaris, AIX, NT and Novell, and I have to say that NT takes more system administration than any other OS by a factor of two. So what if the admin needs less knowledge/experience? A good UNIX admin only costs about 50% more than a half-assed NT admin. So I come out ahead in admin costs. And I come out way ahead when I'm trying to set up a multi-terabyte data warehouse that supports 1000+ users with a concurrency of 200 users. Why? Cause you can't do it on NT. And if you could it would cost more and perform worse.
The beauty of almost any commercial UNIX is that once it's set up it needs little to no admin intervention, it just functions. The beauty of Solaris is that scales linearly, from 1 CPU to hundreds. NT (or Win2K for that matter) scales on a curve of diminishing returns, around 8 CPU's you are costing yourself as much as you are gaining, performance wise. That's a combination of IA hardware limitations and the limitations inherent in the NT kernel.
Calling it Homeland Security feels like stirring up nationalist fervor. This is the sort of thing that Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin and Tojo did that we find reprehensible when we read about it in history books. Not to suggest that Bush is a secret disciple of Adolf Hitler but rather to point out the hypocrisy, double-speak and thought control of our current political culture.
Once upon a time we used to name organizations with a name that told us what the did. For example:
- War Department
- The Secret Service (they were secret *g*)
- Department of Veterans Affairs
Now we name things to be misleading and politically correct, what George Orwell called double-speak. For example:- Department of Defense (still makes war, not defense)
- Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA)
- National Security Agency (they eavesdrop on everyone)
I don't really think that this is an attempt to put Fascist controls on the people. I do think it is an attempt, and a serious one, to gain more control over the citizens of this country and remove more of our freedom. I think that the Dept of Homeland Security is scary and a bad idea and doesn't represent what I want at all. Does no one else think gathering all the federal intelligence agencies and police forces into one organization is a seriously bad idea?Just think about this, KGB stands for (translated to English) Committee for State Security. It's forerunner was the NKVD: People's Commissariat For Internal Affairs. In Nazi Germany you had the RSHA, Reich Main Security Office, which was the authority for the Gestapo, SicherHeitsDienst (Security Police), Criminal Police and Foreign Intelligence Service. It's not hard to imagine either of those countries having a Department of Homeland Security, especially when you consider that this Dept. will have authority over any Federal dept involved in protecting the mainland USA (FBI, NSA, Treasury, Justice, ATF, DEA, Border Patrol, Customs Service, US Marshals, Secret Service).