'feel' might be the wrong word, however it is a good way to confuse 'best' product to market with the best product.
The prouct that wins in a competitive open market is rarely ever the product a human would 'feel' was best. Often they would 'feel' it was an inferior product.
As an example try to think of the best hamburger you ever ate. I know that this is a matter of opinion, but that's the judgment I want you to use. What was the hamburger you 'feel' was the best you ever ate? One that makes your mouth water just thinking about it. You're thinking of how you could plan a road trip right now so you can taste it again.
I know all the vegans reading are calling me an insensitive clod right now, but stay with this...
Was the hamburger you thought of a McDonald's brand plain hamburger? The plain regular McDonald's hamburger is clearly the market leader in hamburgers. It has complete market dominance and is the undisputed all time best seller in the market place. Billions and Billions served.
The product that the market place chooses as 'best' is rarely what a human would think of as 'best'. Market winners are usually best described as 'adequate'. They get the job done, and usually not much more. However the best to market is also cheaper. a product that functions adequately and costs less usually grows to dominate its market. More expensive products that offer more functionality can usually still carve out their own niche in a market, but they will not dominate.
Sony Beta was a superior product to VHS. It was also more expensive to license. VHS dominated the mass market, but Beta survives in the production studio where the extra cost is justified by the greater demands for sound and image quality.
Ford's Model T was inferior to other cars produced during its day. The other cars were hand made affairs. They were faster more comfortable and more powerful. Many were status symbols. The Stanley brothers would refuse to make a car for you if they 'felt' you were the wrong type of person to be seen in one of their vehicles. Ford however was the first to use complete mass production techniques to build his vehicles. This resulted in drastically reduced prices. His Model T was adequate and cheaper. Mass produced cars grew to dominate their market.
The IBM PC was about the worst PC you could purchase when it was introduced in the Early 1980's. It was under powered, had almost no software that would run on it, and was more expensive than almost anything else on the market (except for the Apple III and the Lisa). They would have been a tremendous flop if it weren't for IBM's existing corporate customers.
An Apple II, a Commodore, an Amiga, even the TRS 80 had more software and was cheaper. Their market share was also larger than IBM's. IBM sales were almost exclusively made to corporate customers who used the pc's as terminals for existing mainframe computers. Think about it, a $2400, 640K, green screen dumb terminal. (nice keyboards though).
But then came the clones. When the Bios was reversed engineered the market place was flooded with cheaper clones that ran that knockoff of CPM called MS-DOS. The cheaper, but adequate, clones gained dominance in their market. Just like the cheaper but adequate product always does.
A human would rarely choose the market winner based on how they 'feel' about the product. The market winner will need to perform adequately and to be cheaper. More expensive products can easily survive by offering more functionality or quality for their extra price (think gourmet hamburgers, Mercedes cars or Macintosh computers). Bill Gates knows his history and He knows the market place, and that is why he fears Linux. He knows that it is more than adequate and that it is cheaper. He will lose market dominance unless he can raise the cost of Linux (patent and copyright law suits that force license fees on Linux) or redefine what it means to be adequate (get enough corporation's documentation in patent encumbered formats that force a new mea
If you are an English major and a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, there is no sound.
Physicists define sound as compression waves traveling through a medium, like air. So a Physicist does not need an observer for the sound to exist. as long as the falling tree starts a series of compression waves in the compressible media around it (air, water, ground) there is sound.
Windows and Linux have market share that is on the same order of magnitude, in the server market place.
Windows may have just below 90% market share in the home user space, but how many home users have high bandwidth upload capability? Cable broadband providers block server ports upstream for home users and ADSL providers provide asynchronous bandwidth, broad download skinny upload, as well as blocking server ports upstream.
Because of this the target for spammers is the server space. There are a lot of people in medium and small businesses paying for high bandwidth connections and installing linux and MS Small Business server for themselves.
These guys don't have an IT department to configure things right, and they have business accounts for bandwidth that allow fast uploads with the ability to run a mail server.
This marketspace is where your spammers target. Linux and Windows have 26% and 38% marketshare respectively in the server market. I bet it is even closer in the small business market.
Windows is not the king of marketshare most people believe it to be.
And besides even if they were its still no excuse for shipping a product full of holes.
dd was a term used on mainframes for defining a file name. A data definition I think.
Look at some of the JCL here and see all of the DD scattered everywhere. The name after the// on the left of a DD is being tied to the Data Set Name (DSN=) on the right of the DD in the JCL.
I always thought it was in common usage even before unix, but I was a wee child back then and was probably assuming what was not true.
Many Apple fans hated Apple under Skully's leadership.
He killed their most profitable platform the (Apple II) and almost destroyed their second most profitable platform (the Mac) with crap like the Performa boxes.
If not, why are they in the OOXML proposed standard. If the standard does not describe the OOXML format used by Microsoft, then what does it describe?
Why can't they just document the format that they use and get this over with? Or are they doing all this for show, and there is no real substance in OOXML?
I worked on the project to train employees to go from Windows 95 to Windows NT 4.0.
Then I managed a team that trained employees to go from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows XP.
Now we are budgeting the employee re-training program for the eventual move from Windows XP to Vista.
Each move has been much bigger and more costly.
If you choose to deploy Windows as a desktop OS you guarantee a high cost of re-training employees 2 to 3 times a decade. The argument that a switch to Linux would cost too much because you would have to re-train employees with the switch is a joke. With Windows you also incur the cost of re-training.
However the three top Linux GUIs (KDE, Gnome, and XFCE) are all highly customizable. Although they are upgraded and updated regularly it is easy for an IT department to deploy the upgraded interface in a way that minimizes the UI changes to staff.
One switch to Linux could probably pay for itself by avoiding the high cost incurred by choosing Windows and the forced upgrade/re-training cycle Microsoft imposes on its customers.
Thomas Edison used to give demonstrations of the evils of Alternating Current by electrocuting horses for crowds. He used it to create fear of George Westinghouse's AC versus Edison's Direct Current equipment.
You seem to have replied to some post other than mine, but attached it to my post.
I said nothing about patent protection for Novell or its users.
I did say:
"Microsoft and Novell have signed a 5 year deal that allows Novell to use some Microsoft patented code in their Linux Distro."
Are you saying that the interoperative software you speak of will not be part of the Novell Linux Distro? Or that it will not contain any code that users would need patent protection for using? If the interoperative software wasn't part of the distro or didn't use Microsoft owned patented techniques, why would the end users need patent protection.
I believe that the selling point of the deal is that the code will be available with the Novell distribution and that it will contain Microsoft patented techniques, thus requiring protection for Novell's users. I mean if it doesn't, then what is the point of the agreement?
The deal is ambiguous. It delivers unknown benefits and may or may not be extended beyond the original 5 year window. This ambiguity raises a cloud of uncertainty around the Novell Linux distro. It is better to avoid it than use it at this time.
I have decided not to waste my time condemning Novell over the deal, however I no longer recommend their distributions to clients.
When clients ask for SuSE or Novell Linux I usually explain that Microsoft and Novell have signed a 5 year deal that allows Novell to use some Microsoft patented code in their Linux Distro. There is no telling if the deal will be renewed at the end of the 5 years or if users will have to start paying a license fee to either Novell or Microsoft. Novell and Microsoft have kept details of the deal a secret, but these details could incur costs for users. It is impossible to know what will happen.
I tell them that because of this ambiguity over the deal I no longer recommend Novell SuSE Linux as this could leave my clients in a legally questionable situation.
So I recommend Red Hat because they indemnify their users against legal harm and debian because their commitment to open source guarantees that any legally questionable code will be removed or replaced
You have zeroed in on the heart of this problem with laser like precision. I couldn't agree more.
If you run a business on an OS you need to know the details of upgrades. You need to test all upgrades against your production machines before applying the upgrade.
I am not talking about a home desktop, or even a corporate desktop system here. Think about computers used to control water or fuel delivery. Maybe a system that reconciles ATM transactions at a bank, or adjusts inventory databases from sales at retail locations, or the automated system that routes calls to a city's 911 emergency center.
Businesses and Governments depend on many customized pieces of software day in and day out. All software changes must be tested and shown to have no ill effects before thay are applied to enterprise production systems.
Any OS that does not allow the user to control the application of patches and updates, and instead updates systems by stealth, is not ready for the enterprise.
Even if lives are not involved businesses cannot tolerate amateur stunts like stealth patches from an OS vendor. They could lose billions of dollars trying to find out the cause of a problem.
This highlights how out of touch Microsoft is with the needs of enterprise level customers.
I work as a consultant doing programming. I have been a consultant for over a decade, and was a regular employee in the decade before that.
I got my Master's in Astro-Physics about 20 years ago.
In interviews clients always ask about my degree.
I always quip that: "majoring in Astro-Physics is like majoring in Art History. Only with a lot more Math, and a lot fewer jobs."
Many people with degrees in Physics find work outside of the field. The training you get in critical thinking and problem solving is useful in many fields.
Some people do work in physics. I have friends who started at Intel right out of undergrad, one is still there. Two went on to get Phd's. A few went to National labs. Most of the people I got my undergrad degree with are in fields that have their own tracks, and they are doing as well or better than their peers in the field.
Actually the winds were moderate when the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsed.
It could be said that the bridge was designed to collapse, but not intentionally. The designers failed to take in to account the effect of resonance. From the wikipedia article here:
"Preliminary construction plans had called for 25-foot-deep (7.6 m) girders to sit beneath the roadway and stiffen it. Moisseiff, respected designer of the famed Golden Gate Bridge, proposed shallower supports -- girders 8 feet (2.4 m) deep. His approach meant a slimmer, more elegant design and reduced construction costs. Moisseiff's design won out. On June 23, 1938, the PWA approved nearly $6 million for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Another $1.6 million was to be collected from tolls to cover the total $8 million cost.
The decision to use the shallower girders proved to be the first bridge's undoing. With the 8 foot (2.42 m) girders, the roadbed was insufficiently rigid and was easily moved about by winds. From the start, the bridge became notorious for its movement. A mild to moderate wind could cause alternate halves of the center span to visibly rise and fall several feet over 4 to 5 second intervals. This led to the bridge being referred to as "Galloping Gertie" by the local residents, due to the apparent "galloping" motion felt by the drivers on the roadway."
The winds were considered moderate for the day 40-42mph, however they were steady allowing the destructive resonance to build. The bridge was considered strong enough to withstand hurricane force winds. It was not the strength of the wind but the design of the bridge that led to the collapse.
White sands testing range is named after the state park, but no testing takes place there.
That part of New Mexico looks a lot like the scrub desert in west Texas.
Photos of the famous trinity site might help. This web site has some information on background radiation levels in the surronding area an a nice little bit of history.
Actually, back in the eighties, when we were testing our Ammonium Nitrate / Fuel Oil aerosol mega-tonnage explosives (what they called 'daisy cutters' in Iraq and Afghanastan) the tests blasts in White Sands New Mexico had positive environmental impact.
I was attending New Mexico Tech at the time and several teams from there were involved in the tests. Some were explosives researchers and some were atmospheric researchers. My advisor happened to be an atmospheric researcher and commented on the environmental impact study he had seen. The unburnt Fuel Oil was disperesed enough to not have too bad an affect on the native flaura and fauna, and the unburnt Ammonium nitrate is, well, fertilizer.
You wouldn't want to be at ground zero during the blast, but plant life in the area of the blast benefited from the fertilizer over the months following the tests.
Stellarvue offers high quality telescopes at reasonable prices.
To get into astrophotography, you will want a high quality equatorial mount with an accurate drive mechanism. Your telescope will have to accurately track stars and celestial objects in order to photograph them. Any irregularities will be magnified (pun intended). The best astrophotography for amateurs is with CCD cameras right now.
Orion has some mid-range equatorial mounts and CCD equipment. However a budget of under $1000 is extremely limiting.
To keep on budget, I would avoid looking for computer controlled telescopes. This would add nothing to your ability to photograph objects and also keep you from learning how to navigate the night sky on your own. I would recommend the book "The Stars" by H.A. Rey as a pleasant introduction to the night sky and how it apparently moves above us. After that get "Turn Left at Orion" by Guy Consolmagno.
A SkyView Pro mount with motor drive, but without computer goto technology and a Stellarvue Nighthawk 80mm refractor will go for under $1000. Add a relatively nice CCD imager for under $200 and you have a really nice quality starter scope.
None of this is really high end. The mount and the camera are reasonable and the scope is good quality (stellarvues are actually a bargain for their price!).
Many people will spend more than $1000 on the camera alone. don't be surprised to meet people with $7000 scopes and $2500 mounts! This is a hobby that can cost you your marriage.
I really recommend small scopes like the Stellarvues because you are more likely to take it out and set it up. If you were not on a budget, I would recommend a televue telescope. Stellarvue are American made and the owner stands behind his products.
If you were not interested in photography, I would suggest a really nice pair of binoculars. You can get really good optics for less money than with telescopes because the market for binoculars is greater, and the laws of economic mass production work in your favor. Binoculars are nice because if you find you don't like astronomy as much as you used to, you can still use the binos for sporting events, hunting, camping, or whatever.
I'm not joking about the binoculars. Until you've seen the moon through a nice par of binoculars, don't mock them!
Go online and find a local astronomy group. Go to a few star parties and check out scopes other people have set up. You may also have better luck finding quality used equipment if you develop a network of friends in the community in this way. Astronomy is a fun and challenging hobby, I wish you luck!
Slashdot Mirror
'feel' might be the wrong word, however it is a good way to confuse 'best' product to market with the best product.
The prouct that wins in a competitive open market is rarely ever the product a human would 'feel' was best. Often they would 'feel' it was an inferior product.
As an example try to think of the best hamburger you ever ate. I know that this is a matter of opinion, but that's the judgment I want you to use. What was the hamburger you 'feel' was the best you ever ate? One that makes your mouth water just thinking about it. You're thinking of how you could plan a road trip right now so you can taste it again.
I know all the vegans reading are calling me an insensitive clod right now, but stay with this...
Was the hamburger you thought of a McDonald's brand plain hamburger? The plain regular McDonald's hamburger is clearly the market leader in hamburgers. It has complete market dominance and is the undisputed all time best seller in the market place. Billions and Billions served.
The product that the market place chooses as 'best' is rarely what a human would think of as 'best'. Market winners are usually best described as 'adequate'. They get the job done, and usually not much more. However the best to market is also cheaper. a product that functions adequately and costs less usually grows to dominate its market. More expensive products that offer more functionality can usually still carve out their own niche in a market, but they will not dominate.
Sony Beta was a superior product to VHS. It was also more expensive to license. VHS dominated the mass market, but Beta survives in the production studio where the extra cost is justified by the greater demands for sound and image quality.
Ford's Model T was inferior to other cars produced during its day. The other cars were hand made affairs. They were faster more comfortable and more powerful. Many were status symbols. The Stanley brothers would refuse to make a car for you if they 'felt' you were the wrong type of person to be seen in one of their vehicles. Ford however was the first to use complete mass production techniques to build his vehicles. This resulted in drastically reduced prices. His Model T was adequate and cheaper. Mass produced cars grew to dominate their market.
The IBM PC was about the worst PC you could purchase when it was introduced in the Early 1980's. It was under powered, had almost no software that would run on it, and was more expensive than almost anything else on the market (except for the Apple III and the Lisa). They would have been a tremendous flop if it weren't for IBM's existing corporate customers. An Apple II, a Commodore, an Amiga, even the TRS 80 had more software and was cheaper. Their market share was also larger than IBM's. IBM sales were almost exclusively made to corporate customers who used the pc's as terminals for existing mainframe computers. Think about it, a $2400, 640K, green screen dumb terminal. (nice keyboards though). But then came the clones. When the Bios was reversed engineered the market place was flooded with cheaper clones that ran that knockoff of CPM called MS-DOS. The cheaper, but adequate, clones gained dominance in their market. Just like the cheaper but adequate product always does.
A human would rarely choose the market winner based on how they 'feel' about the product. The market winner will need to perform adequately and to be cheaper. More expensive products can easily survive by offering more functionality or quality for their extra price (think gourmet hamburgers, Mercedes cars or Macintosh computers). Bill Gates knows his history and He knows the market place, and that is why he fears Linux. He knows that it is more than adequate and that it is cheaper. He will lose market dominance unless he can raise the cost of Linux (patent and copyright law suits that force license fees on Linux) or redefine what it means to be adequate (get enough corporation's documentation in patent encumbered formats that force a new mea
If you are an English major and a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, there is no sound.
Physicists define sound as compression waves traveling through a medium, like air. So a Physicist does not need an observer for the sound to exist. as long as the falling tree starts a series of compression waves in the compressible media around it (air, water, ground) there is sound.
Reading this story and the linked article at Georgia Tech made me flash back about 10 years to when I first discovered Slashdot.
Great article, classic Slashdot!
Windows and Linux have market share that is on the same order of magnitude, in the server market place.
Windows may have just below 90% market share in the home user space, but how many home users have high bandwidth upload capability? Cable broadband providers block server ports upstream for home users and ADSL providers provide asynchronous bandwidth, broad download skinny upload, as well as blocking server ports upstream.
Because of this the target for spammers is the server space. There are a lot of people in medium and small businesses paying for high bandwidth connections and installing linux and MS Small Business server for themselves.
These guys don't have an IT department to configure things right, and they have business accounts for bandwidth that allow fast uploads with the ability to run a mail server.
This marketspace is where your spammers target. Linux and Windows have 26% and 38% marketshare respectively in the server market. I bet it is even closer in the small business market.
Windows is not the king of marketshare most people believe it to be.
And besides even if they were its still no excuse for shipping a product full of holes.
dd was a term used on mainframes for defining a file name. A data definition I think.
Look at some of the JCL here and see all of the DD scattered everywhere. The name after the // on the left of a DD is being tied to the Data Set Name (DSN=) on the right of the DD in the JCL.
I always thought it was in common usage even before unix, but I was a wee child back then and was probably assuming what was not true.
Many Apple fans hated Apple under Skully's leadership.
He killed their most profitable platform the (Apple II) and almost destroyed their second most profitable platform (the Mac) with crap like the Performa boxes.
Those Performas made Packard Bell PC's look good!
Hate Apple? Been there, done that.
Do any of these flaws exist in Office 2007?
If not, why are they in the OOXML proposed standard. If the standard does not describe the OOXML format used by Microsoft, then what does it describe?
Why can't they just document the format that they use and get this over with? Or are they doing all this for show, and there is no real substance in OOXML?
We can only hope that JP Morgan's 105b-1 PrISM program to exploit loopholes in the law could become a PrISON program.
But if they are true loopholes, then the activity is probably not illegal. The laws need to be tightened up to close the loopholes.
You are absolutely correct.
I worked on the project to train employees to go from Windows 95 to Windows NT 4.0.
Then I managed a team that trained employees to go from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows XP.
Now we are budgeting the employee re-training program for the eventual move from Windows XP to Vista.
Each move has been much bigger and more costly.
If you choose to deploy Windows as a desktop OS you guarantee a high cost of re-training employees 2 to 3 times a decade. The argument that a switch to Linux would cost too much because you would have to re-train employees with the switch is a joke. With Windows you also incur the cost of re-training.
However the three top Linux GUIs (KDE, Gnome, and XFCE) are all highly customizable. Although they are upgraded and updated regularly it is easy for an IT department to deploy the upgraded interface in a way that minimizes the UI changes to staff.
One switch to Linux could probably pay for itself by avoiding the high cost incurred by choosing Windows and the forced upgrade/re-training cycle Microsoft imposes on its customers.
'Shrike' is the development name for Red Hat 9. Scroll down the distrowatch page to see the columns with release names.
Kind of like calling a Windows release 'Joliet', 'Chicago' or 'Cairo'.
Why all the cities in Illinois?
Training monkeys to choose red over blue?
The next step is to get them the right to vote.
Is this a new tactic by Diebold to guarantee the vote goes republican?
Oh wait the research was sponsored by M&M Mars. Its just a move to get monkeys hooked on chocolate.
The chocolate lobby has seen the success the cigarette companies have had.
Never mind.
The cables didn't make any difference in the sound from my stereo system.
But all the spoons in my house were mysteriously bent, and the front lawn has developed unexplained circular patterns cut into the grass.
Thomas Edison used to give demonstrations of the evils of Alternating Current by electrocuting horses for crowds. He used it to create fear of George Westinghouse's AC versus Edison's Direct Current equipment.
A little before 1920, but the same idea.
The GPL is about as communist as:
"We The people"
or
"E Pluribus Unum"
Ever here of an old fashioned frontier barn raising?
You seem to have replied to some post other than mine, but attached it to my post.
I said nothing about patent protection for Novell or its users.
I did say:
Are you saying that the interoperative software you speak of will not be part of the Novell Linux Distro? Or that it will not contain any code that users would need patent protection for using? If the interoperative software wasn't part of the distro or didn't use Microsoft owned patented techniques, why would the end users need patent protection.
I believe that the selling point of the deal is that the code will be available with the Novell distribution and that it will contain Microsoft patented techniques, thus requiring protection for Novell's users. I mean if it doesn't, then what is the point of the agreement?
The deal is ambiguous. It delivers unknown benefits and may or may not be extended beyond the original 5 year window. This ambiguity raises a cloud of uncertainty around the Novell Linux distro. It is better to avoid it than use it at this time.
I have decided not to waste my time condemning Novell over the deal, however I no longer recommend their distributions to clients.
When clients ask for SuSE or Novell Linux I usually explain that Microsoft and Novell have signed a 5 year deal that allows Novell to use some Microsoft patented code in their Linux Distro. There is no telling if the deal will be renewed at the end of the 5 years or if users will have to start paying a license fee to either Novell or Microsoft. Novell and Microsoft have kept details of the deal a secret, but these details could incur costs for users. It is impossible to know what will happen.
I tell them that because of this ambiguity over the deal I no longer recommend Novell SuSE Linux as this could leave my clients in a legally questionable situation.
So I recommend Red Hat because they indemnify their users against legal harm and debian because their commitment to open source guarantees that any legally questionable code will be removed or replaced
You have zeroed in on the heart of this problem with laser like precision. I couldn't agree more.
If you run a business on an OS you need to know the details of upgrades. You need to test all upgrades against your production machines before applying the upgrade.
I am not talking about a home desktop, or even a corporate desktop system here. Think about computers used to control water or fuel delivery. Maybe a system that reconciles ATM transactions at a bank, or adjusts inventory databases from sales at retail locations, or the automated system that routes calls to a city's 911 emergency center.
Businesses and Governments depend on many customized pieces of software day in and day out. All software changes must be tested and shown to have no ill effects before thay are applied to enterprise production systems.
Any OS that does not allow the user to control the application of patches and updates, and instead updates systems by stealth, is not ready for the enterprise.
Think about the problems that could result if people use an OS like Windows in misssion critical applications that involve lives.
Even if lives are not involved businesses cannot tolerate amateur stunts like stealth patches from an OS vendor. They could lose billions of dollars trying to find out the cause of a problem.
This highlights how out of touch Microsoft is with the needs of enterprise level customers.
No, the internet is built out of tubes, so the tubes are smaller units than the internets are.
If you have two internets, you have gazillions of tubes.
If I had mod points, you'd get a funny!
Are the moderators asleep today?
I work as a consultant doing programming. I have been a consultant for over a decade, and was a regular employee in the decade before that. I got my Master's in Astro-Physics about 20 years ago. In interviews clients always ask about my degree. I always quip that: "majoring in Astro-Physics is like majoring in Art History. Only with a lot more Math, and a lot fewer jobs." Many people with degrees in Physics find work outside of the field. The training you get in critical thinking and problem solving is useful in many fields. Some people do work in physics. I have friends who started at Intel right out of undergrad, one is still there. Two went on to get Phd's. A few went to National labs. Most of the people I got my undergrad degree with are in fields that have their own tracks, and they are doing as well or better than their peers in the field.
I commute by bike, and live in Chicago. While Chicago isn't as windy as Nebraska or Wyoming, we do OK.
I road home against 35mph winds just last week. Gusts were up to 50mph.
Actually the winds were moderate when the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsed.
It could be said that the bridge was designed to collapse, but not intentionally. The designers failed to take in to account the effect of resonance. From the wikipedia article here:
The winds were considered moderate for the day 40-42mph, however they were steady allowing the destructive resonance to build. The bridge was considered strong enough to withstand hurricane force winds. It was not the strength of the wind but the design of the bridge that led to the collapse.
White sands testing range is named after the state park, but no testing takes place there.
That part of New Mexico looks a lot like the scrub desert in west Texas.
Photos of the famous trinity site might help. This web site has some information on background radiation levels in the surronding area an a nice little bit of history.
Actually, back in the eighties, when we were testing our Ammonium Nitrate / Fuel Oil aerosol mega-tonnage explosives (what they called 'daisy cutters' in Iraq and Afghanastan) the tests blasts in White Sands New Mexico had positive environmental impact.
I was attending New Mexico Tech at the time and several teams from there were involved in the tests. Some were explosives researchers and some were atmospheric researchers. My advisor happened to be an atmospheric researcher and commented on the environmental impact study he had seen. The unburnt Fuel Oil was disperesed enough to not have too bad an affect on the native flaura and fauna, and the unburnt Ammonium nitrate is, well, fertilizer.
You wouldn't want to be at ground zero during the blast, but plant life in the area of the blast benefited from the fertilizer over the months following the tests.
Stellarvue offers high quality telescopes at reasonable prices.
To get into astrophotography, you will want a high quality equatorial mount with an accurate drive mechanism. Your telescope will have to accurately track stars and celestial objects in order to photograph them. Any irregularities will be magnified (pun intended). The best astrophotography for amateurs is with CCD cameras right now.
Orion has some mid-range equatorial mounts and CCD equipment. However a budget of under $1000 is extremely limiting.
To keep on budget, I would avoid looking for computer controlled telescopes. This would add nothing to your ability to photograph objects and also keep you from learning how to navigate the night sky on your own. I would recommend the book "The Stars" by H.A. Rey as a pleasant introduction to the night sky and how it apparently moves above us. After that get "Turn Left at Orion" by Guy Consolmagno.
A SkyView Pro mount with motor drive, but without computer goto technology and a Stellarvue Nighthawk 80mm refractor will go for under $1000. Add a relatively nice CCD imager for under $200 and you have a really nice quality starter scope.
None of this is really high end. The mount and the camera are reasonable and the scope is good quality (stellarvues are actually a bargain for their price!).
Many people will spend more than $1000 on the camera alone. don't be surprised to meet people with $7000 scopes and $2500 mounts! This is a hobby that can cost you your marriage.
I really recommend small scopes like the Stellarvues because you are more likely to take it out and set it up. If you were not on a budget, I would recommend a televue telescope. Stellarvue are American made and the owner stands behind his products.
If you were not interested in photography, I would suggest a really nice pair of binoculars. You can get really good optics for less money than with telescopes because the market for binoculars is greater, and the laws of economic mass production work in your favor. Binoculars are nice because if you find you don't like astronomy as much as you used to, you can still use the binos for sporting events, hunting, camping, or whatever.
I'm not joking about the binoculars. Until you've seen the moon through a nice par of binoculars, don't mock them!
Go online and find a local astronomy group. Go to a few star parties and check out scopes other people have set up. You may also have better luck finding quality used equipment if you develop a network of friends in the community in this way. Astronomy is a fun and challenging hobby, I wish you luck!