Every industry goes through growing pains as a part of the maturation process. The IT industry and its associated hi-tech supporting matrix is not unique in terms of the phases of this process, but it is unique in the nature of how it rapidly evolves and mutates.
Early in the auto industry there was a fascination stage, a glitzy new technology (invention) stage followed by the utility stage. The romance with cars continues but the glitz of the industry is gone. The IT industry will follow these stages also. For many of the so-called politicos it's not a matter of the glitz phase being over it's more of a matter of trying to distance yourself from economic sector in a slump. The bandwagon left with many holding the bag or at least that is the picture that gets painted for IT at the moment. Things will change and a health steady-state stability will set in for the industry with a healthy and manageable growth rate.
The problem lies in the way that budgets for government agencies are determined and how the criteria for computing the following year's budget are applied. Waste will naturally occurs if you are penalized for being thrifty. If you don't spend the money you are allotted for the year, your budget will get smaller for the next year. The system does not lend itself to cost-cutting.
Huge government contracts are hard to administer and even more difficult to eliminate from abuse. You only have a few contract monitors. The NASA system is set up to where you have one contracting officer that has cognizance of multiple contracts (millions upon millions of dollars). The contracting officer has to rely on COTRs (contracting officer's technical representative) to monitor and administer the day-to-day execution of the contract. These people are engineers that move into project management positions. COTR training last less than a week. I know, I was a COTR for a few years for NASA. You really have a tough time just keeping track of the technical details of the project. Budgetary issues are easiest handled with large block line items without any kind of detailed itemization of expenses.
NASA is not the only government agency that has been the victim of contractor fraud and abuse. It is now and has been in the past much more prevalent in the DoD.
As far as employee abuse, any large organization is going to have that problem. There is a lot of freedom in the NASA environment and culture so abuse will naturally happen. I remember shortly after coming on board another engineer referring to "G-jobs". I came to find out that these were things like using NASA machine shops and laboratories for personal projects like building a home satellite dish and stuff. The more cool toys you have available at work the grander the abuse will sound. The article really makes it sound awful, but it really isn't anything new and the benefits gained from the money spent on NASA far outweigh any losses due to abuse.
IANAMF (read I am not a MS fan) but as I remember the other companies with competing OSs did not step up to the plate and court the PC clone companies like MS did in the early game. There is the reason for the present monopoly situation. If IBM had the foresight with their own product (the PC) everyone (except the Linux and Mac users) would be running OS2 right now with their bundled browser on every manufacturer's machine. If Sun had focussed on x86 platforms, Sun OS might have made some headway. The fact is the OS market was pretty much devoid of ANY competition really back then until now and look at what the competition is: an open-source OS which has already cut deeply into the server market and making nice headway into the desktop market.
The other guys have themselves only to blame for a lot of this.
Forth has never seemed to lend itself to mainstream application development. However it is found in a lot of special applications. My first introduction was in the programming of a special purpose computer for generating cellular automata. It was called the cellular automata machine (CAM) and it was a custom machine specifically designed for doing CA experiments. The simulations had to be programmed in Forth. This was way back in the late 80's/early nineties.
Most people who were weened on HP RPN calculators like Forth's postfix notation. I find it a bit unnatural but I was a FORTRAN man for a long time.
I guess if I left all my doors unlocked and you came in and stole my computer it would still be theft. I am sure the judge would say I damned well deserved what I got though for being stupid.
More software developers will take advantage of multi-threading. P4 users will run more of these apps. The hyperthreading technology which works well for one or two multithreaded apps will bottleneck trying to schedule too many threads. Result -> poorer perfomance than non-hyperthreading chip.
Java works just dandy on Linux and you could graphcially render your MD solutions quite nicely using the Java graphics APIs. There's existing code out there already for MD. You really wouldn't have to go to the trouble of learning game programming.
I thought Kartoo was a cool search engine when I first saw it. Then I started to try to understand the legend to the mapping. There really isn't an obvious legend which IMO diminishes the utility of the results. Also the number of relevant hits on Kartoo seems to be consistently less than Google.
Ceramics are not isolated to high-temperature engineering applications. High-dielectric materials such as the titanates for capacitors and many pizeoelectrics are used at room termperature just like other semiconductor materials.
Although the article doesn't really elaborate you can see that the savings are in the choice of hardware. The article did not reveal what previous hardware was used however the mention of unix implies that it was probably and SGI cluster. A quick little search on google revealed an article where Chrysler had previously using a SGI cluster consisting of a 126 node MIPS R14000 architecture running a 600 MHz. SGI is notoriously expensive and the custom hardware that is described in the article would represent a considerable cost savings.
Declassify on: OADR (this is obsolete now, replaced by 10 year rule or other)
Once this is on there the classfication authority is legally responsible for what is contained in that document and how it is handled and whether it should be classified at all. Not so with "sensitive but unclassified" -> no responsibility.
I remember at my duty station we had a bunch of tempested IBM PC XT machines in the 80s. These could be used for processing classified information outside of a regular SCIF. To have these things tempested (which was a legacy of the NAVY's procedure for minimizing compromising electronic emmisions from computers) the PC ended up costing about $50k. Then after all that it usually didn't work. All the copper foil encasing the innerds of the monitor caused them to overheat after about 10 minutes. You had to turn them off, let them cool down and then start up again. Those were the days !
You have hit upon a point that begs some further analysis. You are absolutely right in your statement that the "sensitive but unclassified" caveat (that's what those things are called by classification authorites) is indeed a defacto means of classifying information. The problem is more insidious than you might think. Under regular classified information (confidential, secret and top secret) and their associated caveats, a prescribed level of protection and rules must be applied to the information. This translates to security containers, custodial inventories and legal bounds about what can and cannot be classified (meaning you can't just classify something to avoid FOIA requests). Additionally the handling procedures and custodial involvement gets pretty expensive.
Now the "sensitive but unclassified" caveat has none of those requirement and hence none of the traditional restrictions which prevent abuse on the side of classification authorities. Now information can be withheld with impunity without any real accountability.
I guess a cartographer is a cartographer regardless of what era you live in and the explorers also had the spirit of scientists as well. It amazes me that the coastlines of some regions such as Cuba have all the little nooks and crannies included. It amazes me how this was done without the aid of aerial observation. It may not be entirely accurate, but it was a grand attempt.
... the method of modulation employed is amplitude shift keying.
The article being low on content no explanation for ASK other than its simplicity. Isn't this method very susceptible to interference and noise ? Could this performance be achieved with MSK or QPSK ?
This is the way I understand it. It is Linux. It is open source. It started as one guy's desire to have a unix-like OS run on his PC and minix wasn't going to fullfill his needs. Then came the big parade of contributers which made it what it is today. You can be a big distributer like Red Hat and Mandrake or SuSe or whoever and try to get fancy with marketing and even do things to try to make Linux look like MS Windows, but you still have Linux. The point is that the strength of the OS is in it's bugs ! They are there for all to see and to improve upon. Not just some tiny team of geeks up in Redmond writing patches to fix bugs and calling them updates.
There is no more fun in playing with an OS than hacking the kernel trying to make something a little better.
The way this article posting on the front pages reads it leads you to believe that the spammers haven't figured this out yet. I get at least 3 or 4 of these every few days.
I believe that the framers of The Constitution probably had more of an idea of a declaration of war being made against an enemy with well-defined borders like a nation. Just who do you declare war on this day and age ? Granted Iraq is a nation with clear borders but that is not our current war.
The problem we face is defending our life and liberty in the face of new threats. It would seem that we have been wholly unprepared for the current terrorist threat and as expected our government has had to resort to reactionary measures. If this bothers you well then it should. Yes, some things have to change and something had to be done but not any cost. I would think that the next great champion of liberty will be the person who devises a system to deal with current threats without infringing on existing rights
... would be like a day without UNIX (or at least a UNIX-like OS). Even with all of its shortcomings (which I think are being exaggerated here) I still like the X-Windowing system. It is probably more of a sentimental thing than a technical preference.
I agree in spirit however with this kind of thing I usually look at the practical side. For a country such as India with almost 800 dialects, the better solution that will serve the most (granted not everyone) would be English. The argument often comes to practical considerations. This has been true in the world of scientific research for many years. If you want to be a player, then you had better publish in English. I think that the same thing probably holds now and will hold in the future for software development also.
Most all of the major newspapers in India are written in English. Most Indian universities hold lectures exclusively in English. Most high schools are in English --> Translates to most of the people that would be using IT in India will be able to speak and understand English
I don't think that genesis of WINE had anything to do with trying to convince anyone of the viability of Linux as a replacement for windows. The development of WINE began around 1993 when Linux was still at version 0.99. I remember when the big milestone when WINE was finally able to halfway run solitare. It was a development project basically just to show it could be done without having to prove anything. I am sure there are those that would love to act like the big time marketing man to say "see we can do anything you can do with your apps" but that was never the original intent
The Commodore was not considered a PC even though it looked like one and served as one. The PC was the IBM "PC". I don't know why the Commodore was not credited for really being the first. You never heard of Commodore clones.
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Early in the auto industry there was a fascination stage, a glitzy new technology (invention) stage followed by the utility stage. The romance with cars continues but the glitz of the industry is gone. The IT industry will follow these stages also. For many of the so-called politicos it's not a matter of the glitz phase being over it's more of a matter of trying to distance yourself from economic sector in a slump. The bandwagon left with many holding the bag or at least that is the picture that gets painted for IT at the moment. Things will change and a health steady-state stability will set in for the industry with a healthy and manageable growth rate.
Huge government contracts are hard to administer and even more difficult to eliminate from abuse. You only have a few contract monitors. The NASA system is set up to where you have one contracting officer that has cognizance of multiple contracts (millions upon millions of dollars). The contracting officer has to rely on COTRs (contracting officer's technical representative) to monitor and administer the day-to-day execution of the contract. These people are engineers that move into project management positions. COTR training last less than a week. I know, I was a COTR for a few years for NASA. You really have a tough time just keeping track of the technical details of the project. Budgetary issues are easiest handled with large block line items without any kind of detailed itemization of expenses.
NASA is not the only government agency that has been the victim of contractor fraud and abuse. It is now and has been in the past much more prevalent in the DoD.
As far as employee abuse, any large organization is going to have that problem. There is a lot of freedom in the NASA environment and culture so abuse will naturally happen. I remember shortly after coming on board another engineer referring to "G-jobs". I came to find out that these were things like using NASA machine shops and laboratories for personal projects like building a home satellite dish and stuff. The more cool toys you have available at work the grander the abuse will sound. The article really makes it sound awful, but it really isn't anything new and the benefits gained from the money spent on NASA far outweigh any losses due to abuse.
The other guys have themselves only to blame for a lot of this.
Most people who were weened on HP RPN calculators like Forth's postfix notation. I find it a bit unnatural but I was a FORTRAN man for a long time.
Any classified document will have at the bottom of each page at least two lines:
Classified by:(classification authority inserted here)
Declassify on: OADR (this is obsolete now, replaced by 10 year rule or other)
Once this is on there the classfication authority is legally responsible for what is contained in that document and how it is handled and whether it should be classified at all. Not so with "sensitive but unclassified" -> no responsibility.
I remember at my duty station we had a bunch of tempested IBM PC XT machines in the 80s. These could be used for processing classified information outside of a regular SCIF. To have these things tempested (which was a legacy of the NAVY's procedure for minimizing compromising electronic emmisions from computers) the PC ended up costing about $50k. Then after all that it usually didn't work. All the copper foil encasing the innerds of the monitor caused them to overheat after about 10 minutes. You had to turn them off, let them cool down and then start up again. Those were the days !
Now the "sensitive but unclassified" caveat has none of those requirement and hence none of the traditional restrictions which prevent abuse on the side of classification authorities. Now information can be withheld with impunity without any real accountability.
The article being low on content no explanation for ASK other than its simplicity. Isn't this method very susceptible to interference and noise ? Could this performance be achieved with MSK or QPSK ?
There is no more fun in playing with an OS than hacking the kernel trying to make something a little better.
Celebrate the bugs !
The problem we face is defending our life and liberty in the face of new threats. It would seem that we have been wholly unprepared for the current terrorist threat and as expected our government has had to resort to reactionary measures. If this bothers you well then it should. Yes, some things have to change and something had to be done but not any cost. I would think that the next great champion of liberty will be the person who devises a system to deal with current threats without infringing on existing rights