"From an entrepreneurial standpoint, he has someone who has actually experienced what it is like to be on the other side of the table dealing with the government," he said. "We haven't had that before."
Of the ten NASA administrators (actually nine since Fletcher served twice) -- from Glennan (1958-1961) to O'Keefe (2001-2005) -- seven have come from the private sector. Two (O'Keefe and Frosch) came from academia and one (Truly) came up through the NASA ranks.
So, seven of nine (heh) of the men who headed up NASA also had either engineering or administrative roles at companies such as Sperry Gyroscope, General Electric, General Dynamics, Hughes, Aerojet, Westinghouse, and TRW. All have been major defense contrators and NASA vendors.
I'm not going to go so far as to imply a conflict of interest, but I would be hesitant to uphold defense contractors as shining examples of private sector management. TRW, in particular, has had its share of cost overrun problems with respect to NASA and DoD projects.
Griffin was on the short list for the job after Richard Truly left in '92 (Truly, by the way, was the only astronaut to head NASA).
While googling around for some background on Griffin, I found a rough transcript of a House Subcommittee hearing concerning NASA FY '93 appropriations on sci.space, which has an interesting exchange concerning a manned mission to the Moon and Mars:
(Griffin)...We think $400G is way beyond what can, needs to, will be spent.
Hall (committee chair): Can do it without sacrificing safety?
Griffin: We think so.
Hall: Can lower to under $100G?
Griffin: Industry estimate, we'll be enlarging, confirming over next 2 years. Suggests missions to Mars are not only feasible but quite robust.
Hall: Where are folks who did $400G estimate? Gone, in a nursing home?
Griffin: Different mission. I liked BMW a lot more, but Toyota gets me back and forth.
Hall: I'd prefer if you drove a Ford.
Griffin: My latest car is an Oldsmobile.
Obviously, $400G is $400 billion, not $400 grand.
He goes on to champion the "lighter, cheaper, smarter" ethos, mentions nuclear propulsion as a possible option, and at that time regarded the recent collapse of the Soviet Union as presenting the sort of opportunity similar to the one that brought Von Braun to the US (acknowledging their current lead in heavy lift capability). He even says "I'm not too proud to ride a Russian vehicle if it gets us there".
As for Griffin's private sector experience, that's been the rule rather than the exception for NASA's ten former administrators. Frosch and O'Keefe came from academia, Truly from the military (and NASA). The other seven had served as either engineers or administrators for aeronautics- or space-related companies.
Okay, I was in the meeting where the difference in calibration was discussed, and I was the one that suggested that the instrument packages should be marked so that the right package would be installed in the right lander.
I recommended that one package should be marked with an "O" for "Spirit" and the other with an "S" for "Opportunity". I even donated the Sharpie marker and masking tape for this purpose.
It's not my fault that the implementation was screwed up. It's those numbnuts in the Vehicle Assembly Department who can't read a bloody memo.
Fortunately, I've left NASA for a position at the Department of Defense. My team is tasked with identifying sites related to the constructon of weapons of mass destrucion in South Korea.
look, if you want to be able to drive your low gas mileage car, eat tacos and watch the super bowel (without breasts) then you bloody well better co-operate.
I already saw NBC's Katie Couric get her colonoscopy live on TV. I'm not watching any more super bowels, thank you very much.
How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.
From a First Amendment standpoint, banning political ads will never happen. Political speech is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Bill of Rights was drafted and these ads are, for better or worse, political speech.
Mudslinging is as old as politics, and it's not going away any time soon. There's a peculiar paradox in the US: voters tell pollsters that they abhor negative campaigning, yet negative campaigning wins elections every time. A politician that refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is a politician that's looking for work in the private sector come November.
Normal Joes do not play computer games. They use computers to do things like work and communicate with friends and family. When the time comes to have fun, normal Joes turn off their computers and play tennis or go camping or walk the dog.
Normal Joes Don't want to play elaborate 3D FPS, RTS, RPG, or MMORPG games on the computer. These are niche markets, appealing to a small but enthusiastic minority. The Normal Joes who do want to play 3D FPS games go out and buy a console.
Normal Joes Do want to play simple games like Minesweeper, Solitaire, Freecell, Bejewelled, and online Poker and Backgammon. These are the games that, for the most part, have real-world analogs that don't require a manual to understand, and don't require hours of your time to master or enjoy (unlike, say, Evercrack).
I think most Slashdotters think of the first species when the word "games" is mentioned, to the exclusion of the second species. By extension, I wonder if FOSS developers ignore the second species in favor of the first because the simple games just aren't sexy enough.
We're taking this bus, this plane, this shuttlecraft, to bring you the Federation's hottest Girls Gone Wild! Join The Man Show's Doug Stanhope and the Vulcan Show's Spock...
I think that you could ship enough DVD/VHS units of this to fund a perpetual Trek series and save Social Security with what's left over. Think of all those Trekkies curious to know what Klingon boobies look like (personally, I think they'd look like Janet Jackson's, but with a more badass piercing). And you know there's got to be some old Uhuru upskirt out-takes somewhere in the Paramount film vault...
Isn't it a crime to look at child pornography? If this is the case, are cops comitting a felony by looking at these pics to edit them?
It's a crime to possess narcotics like cocaine or heroine, but the police evidence lockers are full of this stuff. It's a crime to possess certain weapons and high-capacity magazines, but police are issued these weapons by the government. It's a crime to exceed the speed limit and run through red lights, but police do this as part of their normal duties. It's a crime to shoot someone, but the police do this all the time.
Probably true, but right now I'm typing this on a Toshiba laptop running XP. And I'm drinking scotch.
The march from 6.0.0 to 6.0.7 was much, much more painful than dealing with 7.5.
Yeah, I remember that. But my point wasn't that 7.x was bad, it was that 7.x was around too long. I think that all of the development effort wasted on Copland could have made 8.x better than it was.
I had a MacRecorder (back in the days before builtin sound input) that used the ADB interface. I remember seeing some other odds and ends. It helps if you look at ADB more like USB than PS2.
Point taken, but I think that 90% of Mac users at the time could have benefitted more from cheaper mice and keyboards (or the choice of using cheap IBM-compatible peripherals). I have a box full of third-party ADB mice and keyboards. They're cheap, but they could have been cheaper.
As for non-mouse/keyboard ADB peripherals, in all my years using Macs, only once did I have an occasion where I needed to use a non-mouse/keyboard ADB peripheral (running a three-line BBS off of a Mac Classic II in 1992, with modems attached to the printer and modem ports, along with an ADB modem).
That said, you, like the original authors missed the Apple///. Major abomination, and could have pulled the whole mess down, coming right at the same time as Lisa.
I'm willing to give Apple a bye on the Apple/// and Lisa for one reason: the market for personal computing was in its infancy, and it's hard to find a price and feature set that the market could bear when there's really not much of a market to speak of (other than the Apple//).
To put things in context, a highend 486-based IBM PS/2 system cost around $8000 at the time.
Um, no.
The Quadra 950 was produced from 1992 to 1995. Street price was around $6,000 (which is roughly what my old company paid for its 950 in 1993). I bought that 950 for $250 when the company was acquired in 1999 (and the grandparent poster is correct -- it's a big, overbuilt beast of a machine).
In 1994, a Pentium 60 (32MB RAM, 1GB HD, 2MB VRAM, 17" monitor, SB16 audio, 10Base-T) was $4,200. An similarly equipped 486-DX2/66 was $3,500. A year later, you could substitute a 100 MHz Pentium for the 486 and pay the same $3,500.
Trust me on this. I still have the credit card receipts.
k.
My Top...err, Bottom Ten List.
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The osviews.com site is a smoking hole in the ground, so I have no idea what Thomas Hormby's list looks like. But I have my own list. It's been twenty years since I bought my first Mac (512K), and I'm probably going to order a Mac Mini this week; in between I've owned over a dozen different models. I love Apple, but I'd be the first to admit that they haven't been without problems over the years. So, here's my list of fuckups that came out of 1 Infinte Loop, Cupertino, CA:
128K in the original Mac - Even in a world where an operating system, a couple of applications, and all of your documents could fit on a 400K floppy, 128KB of RAM was still not enough. Fortunately, the Mac shipped with 512KB less than a year after its introduction.
Service problems in the early '90s - Quality problems, particularly with LaserWriters, were endemic for a while, and Apple's support during this period was less than stellar. It took years before Apple even began to shake off its reputation for poor customer service.
LCII - I didn't really want to single out one model, but the LCII was the only Mac I absolutely hated. It barely had enough power to run the Finder.
System 7.6 - A System that stayed around long past its sell-by date. All the dithering about Copeland as a potential replacement didn't help things much, and its replacement (System 8) was little more than a stop-gap measure (like Windows ME).
Holding on to ADB/NuBus too long - I never really saw what advantage ADB had over the PS/2 mouse/keyboard interface other than vendor lock-in (I think only one other peripheral - a modem - used this interface). NuBus did have advantages over ISA, but the move to PCI could have happened a year or two earlier.
Some outrageous prices during the '90s - This was where the Mac got its "overpriced" reputation. I recall that the list price for a Quadra 950 was close to $10,000. It wasn't always like this: I bought my first Mac 512K because it was nearly $1,000 less than the equivalent PC/XT clone (and the peripheral I needed, a MIDI interface, was less than $100, less than half what an MPU-401 for a PC cost).
Begun the Clone Wars Have. - Now you see 'em, now you don't. The conventional wisdom was that Apple wanted the clonemakers to stake out the low end of the market, leaving the high-margin high end market to Apple. But Radius and Power Computing had other ideas.
John Scully - 'nuff said.
Mutant Macs (Cube, 20th Anniversary Mac, Color Classic, Portable) - Not everything that emerges from 1 Infinite Loop is to die for. Well, some are to die for (Cube) but stink up the marketplace. I think every manufacturer is allowed to make an Edsel now and again.
Copeland - All that work for what?
What, you were expecting one button mouse to be here?
And while David doesn't know exactly what Chris's script for the reunion X Files film contains, he said it won't be picking up the storyline from the show's final episode.
"I think we're going back to the 'monster of the week' type feel, where if you're not an avid fan and don't understand the mythology you can still come to it and get the movie," the hunky actor revealed.
Amen.
The alien invasion arc was interesting and all, but sort of heavy-handed when you get down to it. Some of the best episodes were the self-contained ones, IMHO, especially in the later seasons.
Je Souhaite and Fight Club, two episodes from Season 7, were on late last night on US cable TV (TNT). Not having seen these since their first run, I was impressed at the dark humor, a quality sadly lacking in broadcast television (though cable has it in spades -- Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under). Again, these were stand-alone episodes, unrelated to the Invasion story arc.
Where big news breaks, so does the internet. Take a look at the Sept 11 attacks. ALL major news outlets were down. Slashdot stayed up*, but offered limited info. When it came down to it, radio and TV were the only reliable sources. The internet just can't handle demand for broadcast content. Even newspapers were able to get info printed before the internet outlets began to respond again.
I was self-employed and working at home back in September 2001, and I did nothing that day but watch the TV news (mostly with the sound turned down and NPR on the radio) and try to get news online (over a DSL line).
CNN and news.bbc.co.uk were down for a while but came back up with static pages and low-bandwidth images by noon EDT. Slashdot was up, but I think that was only because people were hitting the more traditional media outlets.
"Reliable" is a word I would not use to describe that day's coverage, whether online or broadcast. There were reports of a car bomb in front of the State Department, as well as other claims that proved spurious (like 10,000 dead at the WTC). The first reports on NPR stated that a single private plane had hit the WTC (this was before the second airliner hit). As with any ongoing disaster coverage on broadcast media, the anchors just keep talking and talking, speculating, interviewing "experts", and just pulling shit out of their asses. Eventually, the story gets out, but only after hours and hours of "unconfirmed reports".
Example: the night before the WTC, Al Qaeda suicide bombers killed Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. On the evening of the 11th, the Northern Alliance launched a rocket and mortar attack against the Taliban in Kabul. In the US, this was treated as breaking news, and the news anchors speculated that this was the US retalliating. The actual US armed response wouldn't come for another seven weeks.
I know you used the term reliable as a synonym for "available" (as in uptime), but I think verifiable information is more important. No news is better than false news.
Print media have a 24-hour lag time, so I don't think that they're germane to this discussion. I will say that on September 12th, I had to hit about a dozen different places (newsstands, street boxes, convenience stores) before I could find a copy of my local paper (Boston Globe). It was pretty much sold out everywhere, a real world Slashdotting.
The Wall Street Journal had its offices near the WTC, which were evacuated, yet it managed to put out a skeleton edition on the 12th.
I keep a copy of the Sept. 11th edition of the Globe on file, just for the hell of it. For the record, we were all reading about Chandra Levy and shark attacks, and Michael Jordan had a press conference scheduled for that day (about his return to the NBA as a player).
Out of idle curiosity, do you know what the "right" way to record an organ with a rotating Leslie is?
I don't think there is a "right" way to record a Leslie. But I'll tell you how I did it anyway.
I had two basic techniques, close and distant. In a situation where the Hammond was the only instrument being recorded (overdub), I'd set up two AKG 451s in an XY pattern about 10 to 20 feet away (depending on the room), with their capsules about 6" apart. I'd also have a large diaphragm condenser on the low transducer and another mic, either a condenser or a bright-sounding dynamic like an SM57 on the horns. These four mics would be mixed to two tracks, with the XY pair panned hard LR and the high-low pair panned in between.
For situations where the Hammond was being played with other instruments, I'd try to get the Leslie in an isolation booth and just use the close mics, along with a direct feed. As above, the high-low pair would be panned (9 and 3 o'clock), with just enough direct in the center to give it depth.
And for those who don't know what the fuck a Hammond or Leslie is, these are Univac-era electronic instruments, a marvelous kludge. The Hammond organ generated sound electro-mechanically, with "tone wheels" driven by what was essentially a washing machine motor. The Leslie is a 2-way speaker with motor-driven rotating horns and paddles on the high and low transducers that would "swish" the sound before it left the cabinet (a walnut enclosure half the size of a refrigerator). Leslie speakers weren't for Hammond organs only: I worked with a guitar player who used a pair of them, something that was more common among '70s era stoner bands like Pink Floyd (David Gilmour used them on the Ummagumma album).
Why don't you dump it out to AU format instead of MIDI?
That's the equivalent of printing all of your word processing files to hardcopy. Your choice of typeface and choice of paper are set in stone, so to speak.
I recall that when MIDI sequencing was a new thing (back in the mid-'80s), I described it to people unfamiliar with this as word processing for music. The sequencer recorded what keys you pressed, when you pressed them, and how hard and how long you pressed them. Like changing a font in a AbiWord document, you could change sounds on a track. Like editing or cutting and pasting an OpenOffice document, you could edit or cut and paste notes in a MIDI sequence. Like adding Auto Text in a Word document, you could loop or import a sequence into another sequence.
Dumping a MIDI sequence to a sound file format loses this flexibility.
The sequencing package I used from 1985 to 1994 was written before a standard MIDI sequence file format was finalized. I probably should have upgraded rather than use the same piece of software for nine years, but I didn't. Not until 1994 did I start running on the Moore's Law treadmill, where everything, software and hardware, gets upgraded every 18 months.
I've done recordings where not a single piece of equipment in the signal chain, not a single instrument in the studio, was manufactured after 1965 (this was in 1990 or so). Recording is one of those industries where the legacy gear is prized -- vintage mics, pre-CBS Fender guitars, old drum kits, Hammond organs, tube compressors, etc.
Sorry, I've digressed. But, apropos to the article, I think that someone's going to buy the Quantegy plant and keep producing analog tape.
Anyway, I'm out of the industry for good, so it's a moot point. Making good music requires a soul, and that's something I lost years ago. I'm in IT right now, where having a soul is an encumberance, a liability. I just like to keep my old gear around to remind me of a time when I could look in a mirror and see a reflection.
Having spent most of my teens, twenties, and thirties in recording studios (as a musician, engineer, producer, and owner), there's a lot I'm going to miss about analog recording on tape.
First of all, there's the act of opening a fresh reel of Ampex 456 tape -- the polymer scent, akin to the smell of a new car. You'd place the reel on the deck, thread it carefully, and then fast-forward to the end and rewind to the beginning. This would "seat" the tape so it would align with the transport. But it was almost a ritual act, the first step in recording a new project.
After each take, the tape would have to be rewound, either to the top of the track or to the punch point. It was an enforced pause, a chance to let your ears cool off for a few seconds or a minute, maybe take a sip of coffee or beer. I'm not the only engineer who missed this.
Flipping the reel: maybe once in a blue moon I'd lay a backwards guitar or piano track, or record some backwards reverb (one of my favorite effects). But when one of the channels on an old Ampex 24-track deck went south, flipping the tape and copying the track over to another track was our quick and dirty workaround (it was only a reference track anyway, and the deck was fixed the next day). Of course, nowadays we have hard drives and we all know that they never ever fail.
Splicing: okay, I'll readily admit that in the early '90s Digidesign Sound Designer made me hang up my razor blade and splicing block forever, but it was a hell of a useful skill at the time. I had a lot of fun in the pre-sampler days making 1/4" tape loops (some of them were 20 or 30 feet long and ran around the room, using microphone stands as tensioners).
The essential qualities of analog tape: head bump and tape compression. The first is really a quality of analog decks, a low-frequency emphasis between 60 and 200 Hz, where the belly of a kick drum sound lies. Tape compression allows you to selectively saturate certain tracks, like snare drum, where the effects of distortion actually work in your favor. Attempting the same thing with digital only leads to madness. Note that there's a DSP plug-in available for ProTools that simulates these qualities.
Longevity: properly stored and cared for, analog tape lasts decades. Perhaps even a century or more. Sure, there was that problem with 3M reels and flaking back in the '80s, but that was nothing that an hour in a convection oven at 200 degrees couldn't cure (heh). I have reels from the '70s that I can still listen to. Compare this with my own personal dead media problem: I have to keep a Mac 512K running if I want to be able to access MIDI sequences I wrote back in the mid-'80s. The software won't run on anything past System 3.2, and the file format is proprietary and not published anywhere (Opcode Sequencer 1.5). I've done straight-through conversions to a standard MIDI file format, but you lose certain features that way (named tracks, loops, etc.). Without a standard multi-track digital audio format that works across platforms and software packages, one that can be perpetuated for decades, musicians, producers, and record labels will find themselves in the same conundrum. Remember that a tape recorded on an Ampex deck will (theoretically) work on a Studer, an MCI, a Tascam, or an Otari. Think 20, 50, 100 years from now. Think reissue, remaster, box set.
I'm not about to start the analog vs. digital flamefest. I see more good about digital than bad, but there are a few qualities of analog (particularly the last point above) that are worth preserving.
Wish I still had that box, bet it would fetch some bling-bling on Ebay:)
The only 128K Mac I could find on eBay was priced at $406, which seems horribly overpriced to me (I've seen 128K Macs bundled with dot matrix printers in local want ad magazines for $25 to $50), even if it does still boot. Everymac.com says its list price was $2500, though the street price was closer to $1800, IIRC. I bought a 512K Mac (2nd generation) for $1299 in 1985. Comparable PC clones were $1500 to $2500.
Still have it, still boots, albeit from an external floppy drive (the internal Sony died after 12 years of use). For about 10 years it served in my recording studio doing MIDI sequencing and acting as a front end for an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard (via Digidesign Sound Designer I and an Opcode MIDI interface).
I've also managed to collect another 512K (free), a Plus (also free...plucked from a neighbor's garbage), an SE ($5 at a thrift shop), and an SE/30 ($10 at another thrift shop and now running NetBSD). Then there's my collection of Mac IIs, Quadras, and early PowerPCs, currently languishing in a storage facility in Boston.
Yeah, I'm a Mac zealot, even though I'm typing this on a Toshiba WinXP laptop (hey, it was cheap) and I work for a company that supports Windows desktops and servers (though we run Linux on Cobalt Raq4s and Acer beige boxes as our internal servers).
I work for a company that supports small to medium businesses and I have to take exception to your assertion about 2000.
Flaky hardware and third-party software aside, we've encountered a few situations where 2000 just crapped its pants. These were problems that were common enough that Microsoft had Knowledge Base articles about them:
As 2000 lacks the best feature of XP (namely System Restore), our current company policy is that a stripped-down XP (Classic GUI, minimal services) is preferable to 2000 SP4 for workstations.
On the server side, we actually prefer 2000 to subsequent operating systems (though we're transitioning to 2003 internally). For the record, our web and mail servers run Linux, and I've spent 20 years in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (my Mac 512K still boots).
I reluctantly applied for one a few years ago, since the discounts meant I'd save over $100/year. In reality, I was off by a factor of two, saving close to $200/yr. off of the store's artificially inflated prices.
There are actually two types of discount cards: the first requires a real name and address and proof of identity. This one affords the user check cashing privileges. Since I do my banking business at an actual bank, I opted for the second, which doesn't require a real identity. Being a properly paranoid Slashbot who doesn't want The Powers That Be to track my aluminum foil purchasing habits (for the hats, you see), I gave my name as John Doe, 1234 Main St., Anytown, USA.
I'd been using the card for over five years before I realized that the cashier sees your name come up on her terminal when you use the card. About a month ago, the cashier asked me if my name was really "John Doe".
"Yeah, and it's a real bitch when I check into a hotel," I replied.
About a year after I got the card, the supermarket (Stop and Shop in Massachusetts) launched a web site that integrated your purchasing data. You'd log in by entering the serial number on the card and get a history of your purchases and discounts, along with "healthy" alternatives (which was pretty brain dead, offering mayonnaise as a "healthy" alternative to mustard).
The beauty part was that after you logged in you were presented with the option of password protecting your data. However, that meant that anyone who hadn't logged in had their purchase data unprotected (albeit with no identity attached). I tested this by entering numbers at random and viewing the purchase histories of random strangers ("Grape soda and rice cakes? What were you thinking?" "Oooh! KY Warming Jelly! Party on, dude!"). I was tempted to enter passwords for some of these but I didn't.
The store pulled the web site after a couple of weeks, citing "security concerns".
Gotta go. I have a craving for grape soda and rice cakes.
Not directly, perhaps. But there are reasons to believe that if they couldn't use this monopoly to shove this overpriced "junk" towards our collective throats, the business model would have to change towards lower prices, which would mean significant changes to current marketing practices (and business practices in general). For example, imagine that labels had to make profit on each and every artist to survive.
You know, nobody is forcing anyone to buy this shit. The existance of boy bands and Britney affects me not a whit. I prefer indie rock and have no problem finding radio and retail outlets that specialize in this genre. Oddly enough, the retail prices are often within $1 of RIAA product.
Actually, it's not that odd. Consider that of the $16 retail price of a CD, the retailer gets $7, the distributor gets $1, and the label gets the rest. Retailers have as much a stake in the price of a CD as the labels, yet I never hear anyone railing against their pricing and business practices.
As for labels having to make a profit on every band, that though should have been prefaced with the phrase "In a perfect world...". The truth is that the majors typically sign 100 acts, of which only one goes on to success. The rest are dropped.
Indie labels are somewhat better about this (and I should know, having run one during the '80s and '90s), since it costs money to sign a band, but business is business whether you're pulling in billions or thousands.
Of course, it's very hard to predict what changes would result from the destruction of this "cartel". And it's equally hard to even tell how it should be destroyed. What exactly the RIAA does that is so bad for the customers and the industry? I don't know, but I know that the industry is not healthy, it's outright rotten. Any change would be for the better and one consequence would be the ability of some labels to sell quality cheap music.
It will never be destroyed. It can, however, be managed like a chronic illness.
"Cheap" and "quality" are relative terms. We'll probably never see CDs fall below $10, but single songs for 99 cents are a start (45RPM vinyl singles were $1 when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, albeit with two songs each).
Quality is too subjective to address. Remember that there are millions of people out there who consider Britney or the Grateful Dead or Anal Cunt or Coltrane or Mozart to be "quality". Your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Of the ten NASA administrators (actually nine since Fletcher served twice) -- from Glennan (1958-1961) to O'Keefe (2001-2005) -- seven have come from the private sector. Two (O'Keefe and Frosch) came from academia and one (Truly) came up through the NASA ranks.
So, seven of nine (heh) of the men who headed up NASA also had either engineering or administrative roles at companies such as Sperry Gyroscope, General Electric, General Dynamics, Hughes, Aerojet, Westinghouse, and TRW. All have been major defense contrators and NASA vendors.
I'm not going to go so far as to imply a conflict of interest, but I would be hesitant to uphold defense contractors as shining examples of private sector management. TRW, in particular, has had its share of cost overrun problems with respect to NASA and DoD projects.
k.
While googling around for some background on Griffin, I found a rough transcript of a House Subcommittee hearing concerning NASA FY '93 appropriations on sci.space, which has an interesting exchange concerning a manned mission to the Moon and Mars:
Obviously, $400G is $400 billion, not $400 grand.
He goes on to champion the "lighter, cheaper, smarter" ethos, mentions nuclear propulsion as a possible option, and at that time regarded the recent collapse of the Soviet Union as presenting the sort of opportunity similar to the one that brought Von Braun to the US (acknowledging their current lead in heavy lift capability). He even says "I'm not too proud to ride a Russian vehicle if it gets us there".
As for Griffin's private sector experience, that's been the rule rather than the exception for NASA's ten former administrators. Frosch and O'Keefe came from academia, Truly from the military (and NASA). The other seven had served as either engineers or administrators for aeronautics- or space-related companies.
k.
Okay, I was in the meeting where the difference in calibration was discussed, and I was the one that suggested that the instrument packages should be marked so that the right package would be installed in the right lander.
I recommended that one package should be marked with an "O" for "Spirit" and the other with an "S" for "Opportunity". I even donated the Sharpie marker and masking tape for this purpose.
It's not my fault that the implementation was screwed up. It's those numbnuts in the Vehicle Assembly Department who can't read a bloody memo.
Fortunately, I've left NASA for a position at the Department of Defense. My team is tasked with identifying sites related to the constructon of weapons of mass destrucion in South Korea.
k.
I already saw NBC's Katie Couric get her colonoscopy live on TV. I'm not watching any more super bowels, thank you very much.
k.
From a First Amendment standpoint, banning political ads will never happen. Political speech is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Bill of Rights was drafted and these ads are, for better or worse, political speech.
Mudslinging is as old as politics, and it's not going away any time soon. There's a peculiar paradox in the US: voters tell pollsters that they abhor negative campaigning, yet negative campaigning wins elections every time. A politician that refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is a politician that's looking for work in the private sector come November.
k.
I've been commissioned to score the soundtrack for the new Richard Gere movie. This will really come in handy. Thanks, Slashdot!
k.
Normal Joes Don't want to play elaborate 3D FPS, RTS, RPG, or MMORPG games on the computer. These are niche markets, appealing to a small but enthusiastic minority. The Normal Joes who do want to play 3D FPS games go out and buy a console.
Normal Joes Do want to play simple games like Minesweeper, Solitaire, Freecell, Bejewelled, and online Poker and Backgammon. These are the games that, for the most part, have real-world analogs that don't require a manual to understand, and don't require hours of your time to master or enjoy (unlike, say, Evercrack).
I think most Slashdotters think of the first species when the word "games" is mentioned, to the exclusion of the second species. By extension, I wonder if FOSS developers ignore the second species in favor of the first because the simple games just aren't sexy enough.
k.
I predict that this story will appear again on the front page of Slashdot within the next 48 hours.
Regards,
Karnak the Magnificent
We're taking this bus, this plane, this shuttlecraft, to bring you the Federation's hottest Girls Gone Wild! Join The Man Show's Doug Stanhope and the Vulcan Show's Spock...
I think that you could ship enough DVD/VHS units of this to fund a perpetual Trek series and save Social Security with what's left over. Think of all those Trekkies curious to know what Klingon boobies look like (personally, I think they'd look like Janet Jackson's, but with a more badass piercing). And you know there's got to be some old Uhuru upskirt out-takes somewhere in the Paramount film vault...
k.
It's a crime to possess narcotics like cocaine or heroine, but the police evidence lockers are full of this stuff. It's a crime to possess certain weapons and high-capacity magazines, but police are issued these weapons by the government. It's a crime to exceed the speed limit and run through red lights, but police do this as part of their normal duties. It's a crime to shoot someone, but the police do this all the time.
Shit, where do I sign up?
k.
Probably true, but right now I'm typing this on a Toshiba laptop running XP. And I'm drinking scotch.
Yeah, I remember that. But my point wasn't that 7.x was bad, it was that 7.x was around too long. I think that all of the development effort wasted on Copland could have made 8.x better than it was.
Point taken, but I think that 90% of Mac users at the time could have benefitted more from cheaper mice and keyboards (or the choice of using cheap IBM-compatible peripherals). I have a box full of third-party ADB mice and keyboards. They're cheap, but they could have been cheaper.
As for non-mouse/keyboard ADB peripherals, in all my years using Macs, only once did I have an occasion where I needed to use a non-mouse/keyboard ADB peripheral (running a three-line BBS off of a Mac Classic II in 1992, with modems attached to the printer and modem ports, along with an ADB modem).
I'm willing to give Apple a bye on the Apple
k.
Um, no.
The Quadra 950 was produced from 1992 to 1995. Street price was around $6,000 (which is roughly what my old company paid for its 950 in 1993). I bought that 950 for $250 when the company was acquired in 1999 (and the grandparent poster is correct -- it's a big, overbuilt beast of a machine).
In 1994, a Pentium 60 (32MB RAM, 1GB HD, 2MB VRAM, 17" monitor, SB16 audio, 10Base-T) was $4,200. An similarly equipped 486-DX2/66 was $3,500. A year later, you could substitute a 100 MHz Pentium for the 486 and pay the same $3,500.
Trust me on this. I still have the credit card receipts.
k.
What, you were expecting one button mouse to be here?
k.
You just landed on Park Place, which has 2 Hell Knights, a Cyberdemon, 8 Imps, and a hotel. You owe me $1750 and a case of shotgun shells.
k.
Amen.
The alien invasion arc was interesting and all, but sort of heavy-handed when you get down to it. Some of the best episodes were the self-contained ones, IMHO, especially in the later seasons.
Frank Spotnitz is slated to co-write with Carter, though I wouldn't mind it if Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan were the co-writers.
Je Souhaite and Fight Club, two episodes from Season 7, were on late last night on US cable TV (TNT). Not having seen these since their first run, I was impressed at the dark humor, a quality sadly lacking in broadcast television (though cable has it in spades -- Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under). Again, these were stand-alone episodes, unrelated to the Invasion story arc.
k.
I was self-employed and working at home back in September 2001, and I did nothing that day but watch the TV news (mostly with the sound turned down and NPR on the radio) and try to get news online (over a DSL line).
CNN and news.bbc.co.uk were down for a while but came back up with static pages and low-bandwidth images by noon EDT. Slashdot was up, but I think that was only because people were hitting the more traditional media outlets.
"Reliable" is a word I would not use to describe that day's coverage, whether online or broadcast. There were reports of a car bomb in front of the State Department, as well as other claims that proved spurious (like 10,000 dead at the WTC). The first reports on NPR stated that a single private plane had hit the WTC (this was before the second airliner hit). As with any ongoing disaster coverage on broadcast media, the anchors just keep talking and talking, speculating, interviewing "experts", and just pulling shit out of their asses. Eventually, the story gets out, but only after hours and hours of "unconfirmed reports".
Example: the night before the WTC, Al Qaeda suicide bombers killed Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. On the evening of the 11th, the Northern Alliance launched a rocket and mortar attack against the Taliban in Kabul. In the US, this was treated as breaking news, and the news anchors speculated that this was the US retalliating. The actual US armed response wouldn't come for another seven weeks.
I know you used the term reliable as a synonym for "available" (as in uptime), but I think verifiable information is more important. No news is better than false news.
Print media have a 24-hour lag time, so I don't think that they're germane to this discussion. I will say that on September 12th, I had to hit about a dozen different places (newsstands, street boxes, convenience stores) before I could find a copy of my local paper (Boston Globe). It was pretty much sold out everywhere, a real world Slashdotting.
The Wall Street Journal had its offices near the WTC, which were evacuated, yet it managed to put out a skeleton edition on the 12th.
I keep a copy of the Sept. 11th edition of the Globe on file, just for the hell of it. For the record, we were all reading about Chandra Levy and shark attacks, and Michael Jordan had a press conference scheduled for that day (about his return to the NBA as a player).
k.
I don't think there is a "right" way to record a Leslie. But I'll tell you how I did it anyway.
I had two basic techniques, close and distant. In a situation where the Hammond was the only instrument being recorded (overdub), I'd set up two AKG 451s in an XY pattern about 10 to 20 feet away (depending on the room), with their capsules about 6" apart. I'd also have a large diaphragm condenser on the low transducer and another mic, either a condenser or a bright-sounding dynamic like an SM57 on the horns. These four mics would be mixed to two tracks, with the XY pair panned hard LR and the high-low pair panned in between.
For situations where the Hammond was being played with other instruments, I'd try to get the Leslie in an isolation booth and just use the close mics, along with a direct feed. As above, the high-low pair would be panned (9 and 3 o'clock), with just enough direct in the center to give it depth.
And for those who don't know what the fuck a Hammond or Leslie is, these are Univac-era electronic instruments, a marvelous kludge. The Hammond organ generated sound electro-mechanically, with "tone wheels" driven by what was essentially a washing machine motor. The Leslie is a 2-way speaker with motor-driven rotating horns and paddles on the high and low transducers that would "swish" the sound before it left the cabinet (a walnut enclosure half the size of a refrigerator). Leslie speakers weren't for Hammond organs only: I worked with a guitar player who used a pair of them, something that was more common among '70s era stoner bands like Pink Floyd (David Gilmour used them on the Ummagumma album).
More information can be found here.
k.
That's the equivalent of printing all of your word processing files to hardcopy. Your choice of typeface and choice of paper are set in stone, so to speak.
I recall that when MIDI sequencing was a new thing (back in the mid-'80s), I described it to people unfamiliar with this as word processing for music. The sequencer recorded what keys you pressed, when you pressed them, and how hard and how long you pressed them. Like changing a font in a AbiWord document, you could change sounds on a track. Like editing or cutting and pasting an OpenOffice document, you could edit or cut and paste notes in a MIDI sequence. Like adding Auto Text in a Word document, you could loop or import a sequence into another sequence.
Dumping a MIDI sequence to a sound file format loses this flexibility.
The sequencing package I used from 1985 to 1994 was written before a standard MIDI sequence file format was finalized. I probably should have upgraded rather than use the same piece of software for nine years, but I didn't. Not until 1994 did I start running on the Moore's Law treadmill, where everything, software and hardware, gets upgraded every 18 months.
I've done recordings where not a single piece of equipment in the signal chain, not a single instrument in the studio, was manufactured after 1965 (this was in 1990 or so). Recording is one of those industries where the legacy gear is prized -- vintage mics, pre-CBS Fender guitars, old drum kits, Hammond organs, tube compressors, etc.
Sorry, I've digressed. But, apropos to the article, I think that someone's going to buy the Quantegy plant and keep producing analog tape.
Anyway, I'm out of the industry for good, so it's a moot point. Making good music requires a soul, and that's something I lost years ago. I'm in IT right now, where having a soul is an encumberance, a liability. I just like to keep my old gear around to remind me of a time when I could look in a mirror and see a reflection.
k.
Having spent most of my teens, twenties, and thirties in recording studios (as a musician, engineer, producer, and owner), there's a lot I'm going to miss about analog recording on tape.
I'm not about to start the analog vs. digital flamefest. I see more good about digital than bad, but there are a few qualities of analog (particularly the last point above) that are worth preserving.
k.
The only 128K Mac I could find on eBay was priced at $406, which seems horribly overpriced to me (I've seen 128K Macs bundled with dot matrix printers in local want ad magazines for $25 to $50), even if it does still boot. Everymac.com says its list price was $2500, though the street price was closer to $1800, IIRC. I bought a 512K Mac (2nd generation) for $1299 in 1985. Comparable PC clones were $1500 to $2500.
Still have it, still boots, albeit from an external floppy drive (the internal Sony died after 12 years of use). For about 10 years it served in my recording studio doing MIDI sequencing and acting as a front end for an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard (via Digidesign Sound Designer I and an Opcode MIDI interface).
I've also managed to collect another 512K (free), a Plus (also free...plucked from a neighbor's garbage), an SE ($5 at a thrift shop), and an SE/30 ($10 at another thrift shop and now running NetBSD). Then there's my collection of Mac IIs, Quadras, and early PowerPCs, currently languishing in a storage facility in Boston.
Yeah, I'm a Mac zealot, even though I'm typing this on a Toshiba WinXP laptop (hey, it was cheap) and I work for a company that supports Windows desktops and servers (though we run Linux on Cobalt Raq4s and Acer beige boxes as our internal servers).
k.
I work for a company that supports small to medium businesses and I have to take exception to your assertion about 2000.
Flaky hardware and third-party software aside, we've encountered a few situations where 2000 just crapped its pants. These were problems that were common enough that Microsoft had Knowledge Base articles about them:
KB266668 - Add/Remove Programs Tool Displays Installed Programs Incorrecly. The workaround was to install IE 6 over IE 5.5.
Opening Certain Programs Causes Repair of Journal Viewer to Start. The solution involved installing Journal Viewer 1.5, a Tablet PC program that's not needed on a Windows 2000 workstation.
As 2000 lacks the best feature of XP (namely System Restore), our current company policy is that a stripped-down XP (Classic GUI, minimal services) is preferable to 2000 SP4 for workstations.
On the server side, we actually prefer 2000 to subsequent operating systems (though we're transitioning to 2003 internally). For the record, our web and mail servers run Linux, and I've spent 20 years in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (my Mac 512K still boots).
k.
HARTMAN
What's this server's name, Private Pyle?
PYLE
Sir, the server's name is Charlene, sir!
HARTMAN
Private Pyle, you are definitely born again
hard! Hell, I may even allow you to serve as a
sysadmin in my beloved Corps.
k.
The Senate never heard of /.
"The Select Senate Subcommittee on Slashdot Addiction calls its first witness. Ms. Portman, would you please stand and raise your right hand..."
k.
I reluctantly applied for one a few years ago, since the discounts meant I'd save over $100/year. In reality, I was off by a factor of two, saving close to $200/yr. off of the store's artificially inflated prices.
There are actually two types of discount cards: the first requires a real name and address and proof of identity. This one affords the user check cashing privileges. Since I do my banking business at an actual bank, I opted for the second, which doesn't require a real identity. Being a properly paranoid Slashbot who doesn't want The Powers That Be to track my aluminum foil purchasing habits (for the hats, you see), I gave my name as John Doe, 1234 Main St., Anytown, USA.
I'd been using the card for over five years before I realized that the cashier sees your name come up on her terminal when you use the card. About a month ago, the cashier asked me if my name was really "John Doe".
"Yeah, and it's a real bitch when I check into a hotel," I replied.
About a year after I got the card, the supermarket (Stop and Shop in Massachusetts) launched a web site that integrated your purchasing data. You'd log in by entering the serial number on the card and get a history of your purchases and discounts, along with "healthy" alternatives (which was pretty brain dead, offering mayonnaise as a "healthy" alternative to mustard).
The beauty part was that after you logged in you were presented with the option of password protecting your data. However, that meant that anyone who hadn't logged in had their purchase data unprotected (albeit with no identity attached). I tested this by entering numbers at random and viewing the purchase histories of random strangers ("Grape soda and rice cakes? What were you thinking?" "Oooh! KY Warming Jelly! Party on, dude!"). I was tempted to enter passwords for some of these but I didn't.
The store pulled the web site after a couple of weeks, citing "security concerns".
Gotta go. I have a craving for grape soda and rice cakes.
k.
You know, nobody is forcing anyone to buy this shit. The existance of boy bands and Britney affects me not a whit. I prefer indie rock and have no problem finding radio and retail outlets that specialize in this genre. Oddly enough, the retail prices are often within $1 of RIAA product.
Actually, it's not that odd. Consider that of the $16 retail price of a CD, the retailer gets $7, the distributor gets $1, and the label gets the rest. Retailers have as much a stake in the price of a CD as the labels, yet I never hear anyone railing against their pricing and business practices.
As for labels having to make a profit on every band, that though should have been prefaced with the phrase "In a perfect world...". The truth is that the majors typically sign 100 acts, of which only one goes on to success. The rest are dropped.
Indie labels are somewhat better about this (and I should know, having run one during the '80s and '90s), since it costs money to sign a band, but business is business whether you're pulling in billions or thousands.
It will never be destroyed. It can, however, be managed like a chronic illness.
"Cheap" and "quality" are relative terms. We'll probably never see CDs fall below $10, but single songs for 99 cents are a start (45RPM vinyl singles were $1 when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, albeit with two songs each).
Quality is too subjective to address. Remember that there are millions of people out there who consider Britney or the Grateful Dead or Anal Cunt or Coltrane or Mozart to be "quality". Your mileage may vary.
k.