Kraft also own a wide range of other chocolate brands, including Toblerone, Cote d'Or (one of my personal favourites, especially the one with pecans) and Suchard.
I would be interested to know how they've been costed. Would ending the missions actually reduce NASA's operating costs by $4m, or is that simply the share of their costs allocated to Voyager et al?
I suspect that something like BBC Radio 4 - my personal favourite - could survive with a subscription model similar to KCRW. It's got a very varied schedule and a loyal - often fanatical! - audience. And there's not really any competition for it nationally.
The problem comes when there *is* an alternative. Not many people would pay seperately for Radio 1 because there are commercial alternatives for most of its output.
I think that the TV channels would be the most difficult because of the sheer expense of running broadcast TV. You need a certain "critical mass" before it's viable.
In the long term, I think that the future of TV is with streaming video from the Internet. That could then remove the conventional TV station from the equation, so that consumers deal more directly with production companies. (I guess the station then becomes the internet host for the downloads.)
The BBC's charter is good for another ten years but when it comes up for renewal next time I wouldn't be surprised to see some major changes. The BBC are experimenting with a lot of Internet stuff; it'll be interesting to see what they come up with during that time.
I've taken a look at the KCRW site. It does appear to be an excellent undertaking and I'm sure if I was living in the area I'd subscribe. However, it's ONE radio station. And what's it's catchment area? What *is* "Greater LA"? If you mean what the outside world thinks of as LA then they have a comparable audience to the BBC, which broadcasts to about 60 million people.
KCRW is wonderful, I'm sure, but that funding model will not scale to support something the size of the BBC, particularly not in television, which is much, much more expensive than radio if you want to do it properly.
There are *very* few people in the UK who don't make some use of the BBC's services.
Whilst I recognise the political/philosophical disadvantages of the current funding method, I really doubt that voluntary contributions could fund the BBC's current budget - about 2bn GBP. So there would have to be a *major* cut-back in services. I wouldn't want to see that happen just because a few people find the TV Licence distasteful.
I'm also quite content to pay my TV Licence. I find that I don't watch a great deal of BBC TV these days but their radio output - particularly 3 & 4 - is still excellent, and their various web sites are outstanding - especially now that I've got broad band and can take advantage of all the streaming audio.
I struggle to see how any of this would be possible under a more conventional, commercial funding model.
A system builder can certainly manage to install Linux. They can tailor the configuration to the drivers that are available, just as they'd do with a Windows box.
But someone at home with an existing PC - running Win98, perhaps, and keen for something a bit better, or just to see what all the fuss was about - would probably still struggle to get Linux working seamlessly.
Drivers are a major issue. Certainly Windows doesn't always do a perfect job here, but I think it is better at telling you what you need.
(By contrast, when I try to confgure my wireless card under Linux it just doesn't work. If I look in the error log I can see some messages relating to it, but there's nothing which says "go and get such-and-such a driver".)
I don't think that anyone would disagree that if you're prepared to go to some effort and are slightly knowledgeable then you can get Linux running on almost anything, with nearly any hardware.
However, from the persepctive of a newcomer there is a very long way to go.
I recently installed Linux (SuSE 9.2) on my laptop - not for the first time. Despite doing some advance research there are still a few important things which don't work properly: trackpad/pointer combination and wireless PC card in particular. I can and will fix them, but the typical domestic user is not going to want anything to do with these sorts of problems.
Anybody who reckons Linux is ready for the non-enthusiast home-user is sadly mistaken.
Pensioners and some other groups are entitled to cheaper/free TV licenses.
Finding people without TV licenses is actually very cheap. The TV Licensing authority has a list of everybody who has a current license. They generally assume that every home has a TV, so they just cross reference it and send threatening letters to anyone without a license.
This can be a bit of a nuisance for anyone who doesn't actually have a TV, or whose TV is modified so that it can't pick up transmissions. (A friend of mine just had a TV to watch pre-recorded videos & DVDs, and for his own video-making, but no aerial. He had a bit of hassle being pestered to buy a license but did eventually get it sorted out.)
It probably doesn't make money to catch 300 people without licenses, but it's certainly worth it in terms of encouraging people to buy licenses in the first place, and not risk being caught.
I use Usenet everyday. Also various web-forums and some simple mailing lists. Each has its advantages.
For me, one of the big advantages of Usenet is the ability to use it offline. I've operated for years with a simple dial-up connection. With usenet I can connect, download the latest posts to my favourite group then disconnect. Web forums require me to maintain a connection all of the time.
I also find that web-based forums are rather more plagued by arseholes. This is probably in part due to obscurity: a lot of the stupid little oiks don't know about Usenet but everybody's got a web browser.
I've used news.individual.net since it started, and news.cis.dfn.de before that. My current ISP runs a news server but it's not very good: lots of missing posts.
I'm in the process of changing ISP at the moment and the new one also provides a news server but if that's not up to scratch I will happily continue to use news.individual.net for the paltry annual charge of 10 Euros.
You need to start with the IT budget. If 90% of your costs are on hardware then obviously that's where you concentrate efforts.
It's likely that the major costs fall into three areas: hardware, software and staff.
Hardware and software costs may be tackled by consolidating servers, as has already been suggested. It also helps to standardise: don't have two applications doing the same job. Don't even have different versions of the same software if you can help it.
Have standard configurations. That makes installation of new servers/workstations and maintenance of existing ones much simpler.
For staff costs, one of the most useful things - though it may seem rather boring - is good change control and incident reporting. Once that's in place you can look back and see where your support staff are spending their time and concentrate your efforts there. It can also help you provide a better service and make your life easier.
Three years ago, when the company I work for was just getting started, in a typical week of on-call cover I could expect an average of about 10 calls outside normal hours. By analysing what those calls were, taking pro-active steps to deal with problems and improving our housekeeping I now expect an average of less than two calls per week, (from over one hundred servers).
I get to sleep more, the customers get a better service and I spend less of my time at work dealing with trivial problems so I can get on with work of real value to the company.
There are no cheats to reducing costs: just good standards and practices.
A choice of vendors could actually be a positive for Linux. My employer is always keen to get competitive quotes for any large purchase. Going with Windows makes that impossible. Choosing Linux means that we can actually look at two or more options, which would tend to keep the bean counters happy.
I've given that some thought myself. At the moment I think I prefer the Sony Vaio U71 (or the 50 or 70 if I have a fit of thriftyness).
I had looked at the Zaurus and similar PDAs - Sony Clie and not much else, to be honest - as a replacement for my old Psion 3a, (still giving good service). However, my current view is that my cell 'phone gives me everything I really need in a pocket-sized device - mainly contact and calendar. A PDA can do a lot more - especially if it's running Linux or Windows rather than PalmOS - but it's just too small: can't see enough on the screen and fiddly to enter data.
The oqo and the Uxx are easily portable in any sort of bag yet have a display which is usefully larger: I can envisage actually reading a page of text. And they have better data entry, although the oqo really needs handwriting recognition: I can't understand why they haven't sorted that out.
IBM are very good at memory management, stemming from OS/VS (predecessor of MVS) back in the '60s. I wouldn't be concerned about anything being able to hi-jack the server from within a partition.
The biggest risk is with the HMC, since that's what is used to configure new partitions. IBM recommend taking some care with this, (use of dedicated, private networks, for example). All of the links between the HMC and the servers it controls use strong encryption. The Power4 versions required a serial connection, but I think the new Power5 only needs ethernet. (I could be wrong: I haven't studied the manuals in detail, yet.)
The POWER5 chips also support SMT - IBM's version of hyperthreading.
When you couple this with CPU virtualization things can get really weird. You might give your partition 3.5 CPUs out of a pool of eight, but configured to appear to the server as six CPUs. Each of these will have SMT, so the OS thinks it's got 12 processors!
I don't think I'm going to fully grasp this until I can have one of these boxes to play with. (Early next year, I expect.)
On the Power4 hardware, you assign PCI slots to particular partitions. So each partition has its own ethernet card, SCSI adapter, FC adapter etc.
With Power5 IBM introduced mechanisms for shared network and I/O. Essentially, you run a dedicated partition which has all your network adapters, and another for your disks, (SCSI or FC) and the resources are then made available through shared memory. You can run multiple partitions for improved availability.
There are overheads, so if you've got a high I/O load it's better to have dedicated adapters.
Take a look at www.redbooks.ibm.com for more info.
If you're interested, IBM have already produced several books about virtualization in their Power5 iSeries and pSeries machines. You can find these (and many more) at www.redbooks.ibm.com.
"IBM e-server p5 Virtualization Performance Considerations, SG24-5768" looks to be the most relevant, but there are several others.
It was originally serialised in "Warrior", a UK monthly anthology title which also featured Alan Moore's "Marvelman", (later changed to "Miracleman" for US publication), and many other goodies. (Published by "Quality", who also did a horror title, which merged with Warrior after a while.)
Unfortunately, Warrior folded before "V" was complete! As you can imagine, that was something of a disaster.
DC eventually picked it up, after Moore got a bit of fame. They started from the beginning, so I had a tantalising wait for the completion of the tale.
For marketing reasons, DC were reluctant to produce it in B&W, but I think the pale colours that were used were actually pretty good. (I do think that B&W, used well, can be extremely effective. Consider Frank Miller's "Sin City".)
V for Vendetta is an even better comic than Watchmen, and actually could be done as a film. (It'd be great to see it in black and white, like the original comic!)
However, if you think it should have "Islamofascists" you're missing the point.
Last time I looked - last Christmas - they were still around over here, (UK). Loads of different sets in my local shops. For my nephew, anything with a motorbike in it goes down well.
You can still get the plain Lego. They do a few starter packs of various sizes, which contain just ordinary blocks in various colours, a couple of bases and a booklet of ideas. I bought a couple of them last year for my nephew.
I've also seen plastic buckets of assorted blocks: about a gallon (Imperial) or so.
My young nephew rather likes them. It makes it easy for me at Xmas and birthdays, too: I just have to walkinto the local toy shop and choose between Playmobil or Lego, (with the occasional toy car or motorbike for variety). All done in ten minutes.
I think Lego this year, as he's getting old enough to really appreciate it.
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Kraft also own a wide range of other chocolate brands, including Toblerone, Cote d'Or (one of my personal favourites, especially the one with pecans) and Suchard.
I would be interested to know how they've been costed. Would ending the missions actually reduce NASA's operating costs by $4m, or is that simply the share of their costs allocated to Voyager et al?
I suspect that something like BBC Radio 4 - my personal favourite - could survive with a subscription model similar to KCRW. It's got a very varied schedule and a loyal - often fanatical! - audience. And there's not really any competition for it nationally.
The problem comes when there *is* an alternative. Not many people would pay seperately for Radio 1 because there are commercial alternatives for most of its output.
I think that the TV channels would be the most difficult because of the sheer expense of running broadcast TV. You need a certain "critical mass" before it's viable.
In the long term, I think that the future of TV is with streaming video from the Internet. That could then remove the conventional TV station from the equation, so that consumers deal more directly with production companies. (I guess the station then becomes the internet host for the downloads.)
The BBC's charter is good for another ten years but when it comes up for renewal next time I wouldn't be surprised to see some major changes. The BBC are experimenting with a lot of Internet stuff; it'll be interesting to see what they come up with during that time.
I've taken a look at the KCRW site. It does appear to be an excellent undertaking and I'm sure if I was living in the area I'd subscribe. However, it's ONE radio station. And what's it's catchment area? What *is* "Greater LA"? If you mean what the outside world thinks of as LA then they have a comparable audience to the BBC, which broadcasts to about 60 million people.
KCRW is wonderful, I'm sure, but that funding model will not scale to support something the size of the BBC, particularly not in television, which is much, much more expensive than radio if you want to do it properly.
There are *very* few people in the UK who don't make some use of the BBC's services.
Whilst I recognise the political/philosophical disadvantages of the current funding method, I really doubt that voluntary contributions could fund the BBC's current budget - about 2bn GBP. So there would have to be a *major* cut-back in services. I wouldn't want to see that happen just because a few people find the TV Licence distasteful.
I'm also quite content to pay my TV Licence. I find that I don't watch a great deal of BBC TV these days but their radio output - particularly 3 & 4 - is still excellent, and their various web sites are outstanding - especially now that I've got broad band and can take advantage of all the streaming audio.
I struggle to see how any of this would be possible under a more conventional, commercial funding model.
A system builder can certainly manage to install Linux. They can tailor the configuration to the drivers that are available, just as they'd do with a Windows box.
But someone at home with an existing PC - running Win98, perhaps, and keen for something a bit better, or just to see what all the fuss was about - would probably still struggle to get Linux working seamlessly.
Drivers are a major issue. Certainly Windows doesn't always do a perfect job here, but I think it is better at telling you what you need.
(By contrast, when I try to confgure my wireless card under Linux it just doesn't work. If I look in the error log I can see some messages relating to it, but there's nothing which says "go and get such-and-such a driver".)
I don't think that anyone would disagree that if you're prepared to go to some effort and are slightly knowledgeable then you can get Linux running on almost anything, with nearly any hardware.
However, from the persepctive of a newcomer there is a very long way to go.
I recently installed Linux (SuSE 9.2) on my laptop - not for the first time.
Despite doing some advance research there are still a few important things which don't work properly: trackpad/pointer combination and wireless PC card in particular. I can and will fix them, but the typical domestic user is not going to want anything to do with these sorts of problems.
Anybody who reckons Linux is ready for the non-enthusiast home-user is sadly mistaken.
Pensioners and some other groups are entitled to cheaper/free TV licenses.
Finding people without TV licenses is actually very cheap. The TV Licensing authority has a list of everybody who has a current license. They generally assume that every home has a TV, so they just cross reference it and send threatening letters to anyone without a license.
This can be a bit of a nuisance for anyone who doesn't actually have a TV, or whose TV is modified so that it can't pick up transmissions. (A friend of mine just had a TV to watch pre-recorded videos & DVDs, and for his own video-making, but no aerial. He had a bit of hassle being pestered to buy a license but did eventually get it sorted out.)
It probably doesn't make money to catch 300 people without licenses, but it's certainly worth it in terms of encouraging people to buy licenses in the first place, and not risk being caught.
I use Usenet everyday. Also various web-forums and some simple mailing lists. Each has its advantages.
For me, one of the big advantages of Usenet is the ability to use it offline. I've operated for years with a simple dial-up connection. With usenet I can connect, download the latest posts to my favourite group then disconnect. Web forums require me to maintain a connection all of the time.
I also find that web-based forums are rather more plagued by arseholes. This is probably in part due to obscurity: a lot of the stupid little oiks don't know about Usenet but everybody's got a web browser.
I've used news.individual.net since it started, and news.cis.dfn.de before that. My current ISP runs a news server but it's not very good: lots of missing posts.
I'm in the process of changing ISP at the moment and the new one also provides a news server but if that's not up to scratch I will happily continue to use news.individual.net for the paltry annual charge of 10 Euros.
This is, of course, the first thing to find out.
You need to start with the IT budget. If 90% of your costs are on hardware then obviously that's where you concentrate efforts.
It's likely that the major costs fall into three areas: hardware, software and staff.
Hardware and software costs may be tackled by consolidating servers, as has already been suggested. It also helps to standardise: don't have two applications doing the same job. Don't even have different versions of the same software if you can help it.
Have standard configurations. That makes installation of new servers/workstations and maintenance of existing ones much simpler.
For staff costs, one of the most useful things - though it may seem rather boring - is good change control and incident reporting. Once that's in place you can look back and see where your support staff are spending their time and concentrate your efforts there. It can also help you provide a better service and make your life easier.
Three years ago, when the company I work for was just getting started, in a typical week of on-call cover I could expect an average of about 10 calls outside normal hours. By analysing what those calls were, taking pro-active steps to deal with problems and improving our housekeeping I now expect an average of less than two calls per week, (from over one hundred servers).
I get to sleep more, the customers get a better service and I spend less of my time at work dealing with trivial problems so I can get on with work of real value to the company.
There are no cheats to reducing costs: just good standards and practices.
A choice of vendors could actually be a positive for Linux. My employer is always keen to get competitive quotes for any large purchase. Going with Windows makes that impossible. Choosing Linux means that we can actually look at two or more options, which would tend to keep the bean counters happy.
I've given that some thought myself. At the moment I think I prefer the Sony Vaio U71 (or the 50 or 70 if I have a fit of thriftyness).
I had looked at the Zaurus and similar PDAs - Sony Clie and not much else, to be honest - as a replacement for my old Psion 3a, (still giving good service). However, my current view is that my cell 'phone gives me everything I really need in a pocket-sized device - mainly contact and calendar. A PDA can do a lot more - especially if it's running Linux or Windows rather than PalmOS - but it's just too small: can't see enough on the screen and fiddly to enter data.
The oqo and the Uxx are easily portable in any sort of bag yet have a display which is usefully larger: I can envisage actually reading a page of text. And they have better data entry, although the oqo really needs handwriting recognition: I can't understand why they haven't sorted that out.
IBM are very good at memory management, stemming from OS/VS (predecessor of MVS) back in the '60s. I wouldn't be concerned about anything being able to hi-jack the server from within a partition.
The biggest risk is with the HMC, since that's what is used to configure new partitions. IBM recommend taking some care with this, (use of dedicated, private networks, for example). All of the links between the HMC and the servers it controls use strong encryption. The Power4 versions required a serial connection, but I think the new Power5 only needs ethernet. (I could be wrong: I haven't studied the manuals in detail, yet.)
The POWER5 chips also support SMT - IBM's version of hyperthreading.
When you couple this with CPU virtualization things can get really weird. You might give your partition 3.5 CPUs out of a pool of eight, but configured to appear to the server as six CPUs. Each of these will have SMT, so the OS thinks it's got 12 processors!
I don't think I'm going to fully grasp this until I can have one of these boxes to play with. (Early next year, I expect.)
There are several options.
On the Power4 hardware, you assign PCI slots to particular partitions. So each partition has its own ethernet card, SCSI adapter, FC adapter etc.
With Power5 IBM introduced mechanisms for shared network and I/O. Essentially, you run a dedicated partition which has all your network adapters, and another for your disks, (SCSI or FC) and the resources are then made available through shared memory. You can run multiple partitions for improved availability.
There are overheads, so if you've got a high I/O load it's better to have dedicated adapters.
Take a look at www.redbooks.ibm.com for more info.
As with all such questions, "it depends..."
If you're interested, IBM have already produced several books about virtualization in their Power5 iSeries and pSeries machines. You can find these (and many more) at www.redbooks.ibm.com.
"IBM e-server p5 Virtualization Performance Considerations, SG24-5768" looks to be the most relevant, but there are several others.
Actually, it's the tonne, equal to 1000kg and fairly closs to the Imperial ton.
It was originally serialised in "Warrior", a UK monthly anthology title which also featured Alan Moore's "Marvelman", (later changed to "Miracleman" for US publication), and many other goodies. (Published by "Quality", who also did a horror title, which merged with Warrior after a while.)
Unfortunately, Warrior folded before "V" was complete! As you can imagine, that was something of a disaster.
DC eventually picked it up, after Moore got a bit of fame. They started from the beginning, so I had a tantalising wait for the completion of the tale.
For marketing reasons, DC were reluctant to produce it in B&W, but I think the pale colours that were used were actually pretty good. (I do think that B&W, used well, can be extremely effective. Consider Frank Miller's "Sin City".)
V for Vendetta is an even better comic than Watchmen, and actually could be done as a film. (It'd be great to see it in black and white, like the original comic!)
However, if you think it should have "Islamofascists" you're missing the point.
Last time I looked - last Christmas - they were still around over here, (UK). Loads of different sets in my local shops.
For my nephew, anything with a motorbike in it goes down well.
You can still get the plain Lego. They do a few starter packs of various sizes, which contain just ordinary blocks in various colours, a couple of bases and a booklet of ideas. I bought a couple of them last year for my nephew.
I've also seen plastic buckets of assorted blocks: about a gallon (Imperial) or so.
My young nephew rather likes them. It makes it easy for me at Xmas and birthdays, too: I just have to walkinto the local toy shop and choose between Playmobil or Lego, (with the occasional toy car or motorbike for variety). All done in ten minutes.
I think Lego this year, as he's getting old enough to really appreciate it.
Check out the coverage at the Register. The Beeb have got it wrong this time.