I think we have to face facts that once the Shuttle program shuts down and the Russians lose interest in losing money and the ISS reaches the end of its service life that apart from the Chinese and Indians sending a few Nauts into orbit that manned spaceflight is going to take a VERY long break. Perhaps a century or more. Countries and societies seem to have almost no interest in it. Coupled with the enormous ignorance and misinformation about it e.g. a quarter of all Americans think NASA's budget is greater than the Pentagon, coupled with the increasing weaponization of space there just doesn't seem to be any future in it.
I'll self respond to the modding. I don't view my post as OT. Why? Because it's about service. And for an online vendor, service IS the website. If you can't understand why something happens or why something DOESN'T happen then that's the same thing as walking into a store and having not even a cashier there. Sorry, But it's a big deal. If Amazon wants to give 'better' service to 'better' customers then they have to figure out what precisely their customers believe better service consists of.
To me it's an elegant website that does only and exactly what I want with as few clicks as possible and with no wondering about why how when where what is happening. We've been buying stuff for about 8000 years. There's nothing really new to bring to that experience.
Oh well, I never really got into the whole full contact competitive shopping thing a-la eBay. It interests me zero. Moreover I don't bother with coupons that have 30 lines of microprint explaining all the things they DON'T cover. Not worth it, I'll go somewhere else. And unless the discount is MASSIVE in relation to the price, I don't bother with mail in rebates. Many never get processed, they take too long and it's too much work to do other people's jobs for them.
I order to different yet related items yesterday. For some reason one of them was eligible for free shipping. But the default order packaging is to ship the items together and charge me $15. I have to go in, tweak the order, separate it into 2 shipments and the shipping cost goes down by half, that is one of the items is free. They both come to me from the same place. I am scratching my head on this. It can't be good for Amazon to break up the order. And it irritates me to have to muck with their order. Plus - why is only one item eligible for free shipping? Both items are very similar, the cost nearly the same, they come from the same place, and are made by the same company. I'd feel better if they just lied to me and told me that they're giving me a 50% discount on the shipping cost. Or better yet - don't tell me anything at all and wrap it up and charge me the discounted price.
It's not cheaper than SanDisk players. It doesn't have more features than Apple. It's not physically distinct; e.g. is waterproof or shockproof. It's a mundane me-too product in a sea of mundane me-too products. It is a failure? I don't know, are any of them?
I have an old IBM PC300GL with 384MB RAM and a Pentium II-550. The BIOS can't handle a partition >8GB so I have my 30GB drive cut up into 5 equal sized pieces. The OS and all the apps I need on it occupy one half of one partition. The slowest aspect of the booting process is the amount of time the Orinoco PCCard inside the ISA adapter holster needs to establish a wireless connection. The slowest thing on the system, as one would guess, is starting Open Office. Otherwise the performance of the machine is entirely fine.
I've had PC300's of different types with Pentium-II's from 450Mhz and as little as 288MB RAM that ran acceptably well for their intended purpose.
Mostly SATA, with 1GB LAN interfaces, good reputation for solid firmware. You have to supply your own drive(s). Certain lower models have a reputation for running hot, but not to the point of failure.
You can't move an awful lot of government programming offsite. It's where it is. There is a gigantic amount of government work in MD so the state sees a big juicy way to tax the Federal government (and itself) to suck some money into their own pockets.
My own firm went the other way and wanted to get rid of real estate so they decided to double up people in offices, then move them to cubes, then move them to call centers. My last on site job was as a security consultant with an 'office' in the call center. The cube dividers were 1 foot higher than the desk so you and everyone else got to stare at each other all day. This became intolerable so as many of us who wanted just pulled up to work from home. They give you a cash allotment for your broadband, a one time allowance to buy some home office equipment, they pay for a VoIP phone line and a modicum of consumables like paper, ink etc. It's not ideal and my spouse is pissed about it because in her mind if I'm home I'm home for chores and to be interrupted whenever whatever for whoever. Plus the time zone thing for work is a bore when I wind up on calls early or late. But on the upside it's a lot more flexible, I don't have to drive, I can take a nap, eat lunch at home or somewhere else. My company though uses it as an excuse though to not give out increases with the thinking that they've saved me two thousand bucks. If they tried to round us all up and make us go back to the office, they have to rent some office space. Whereas as we are slowly picked off and our jobs leave the US, it's pretty simple for them. Just stop paying us and send out a shipping carton for our laptops, disconnect phone. Sayonara. I have never met any of my last 5 managers face to face.
In the middle east and North Africa, the practice of baksheesh is standard. It's considered to be a tip or a thank you and there's nothing at all wrong with it. It's how things get done. In Africa it's even grander where the officials tell you what to pay them.
And I've never heard of anyone running even a piece of a datacenter on Vista. Everyone complains that outsourcing companies are too expensive, but honestly, we're a LOT smarter than the fools who implemented this. We would never have this mistake.
or kathatsung? Has your forum ever been invaded by this creep? I'm not even sure kathasung is a person, it might be a bot. But what it does is bombard you with hundreds or thousands of posts in serial order chronicling some massive US government conspiracy into practically everything.
First had phones. And God created the answering machine and voice mail and said it was good. And hence forth all people would not answer the phone and would not return calls. Then there was the email and people worshipped it verily. Till the spammers gushed from satan's bowels. And low did the email fall. 85 percent did go to the bitbucket unopened. And in the corporation (blessed be he) email distribution lists issued forth like a plague of locusts and verily didst thou receiveth the same email with the same 9MB attachment with a header that speaketh "Me Too!" 40 times.
So there beget the IM which permitteth thou to put DNC flags and "I'm not here" status lines. Behold it was a wonder. Till the day when thine fellows ignored the status line and sent messages forth, no matter. But the upper middle managers didst avoid this plague with their Blackberries - sending forth SMS and emails 'from the car'. And God saw what he had created and was overflowing with wrath.
I remember the last San Fran Earthquake and we had to get a warm site up and running using all the backup tapes from our offsite storage company. The storage vault was 100% ok, the warm site was 100% ok and I couldn't get anyone to drive the truck through a post apocalyptic thunder dome. I suspect that getting a bunch of nerds to work in an abandoned coal mine will be greeted by dumbstruck looks when you see a giant fire breathing dinosaur.
All our apps in house will soon be on Eclipse and by then we'll probably start skipping Windows altogether for Linux. We already have 20% Linux and that number is steadily climbing. There are a few key apps in the installed base which are not completely Java so we still have a requirement to run the base we have now (XP) but that's eventually going to change as well, or, they'll just get replaced.
Or as I believe they are called now, iSeries eServer machines. OS/400 is what's called an SLS architecture. There are no devices in the system nor are there file systems. It's simply one huge 64bit address space. The hardware and software abstraction layers intercept the call from an application or a hardware interface and pipe it to the SLS which just does one reach into the address table. An SSD would be ideal for that architecture. It would be essentially one huge non volatile RAM address space at bus speeds.
I leave it on all the time. It takes too long to boot. Sue me. My wife uses one desktop, likewise. Sue her too. My son, ditto. We have one wireless router, one MTA for Voip, one print server, one printer. If I save a few watts will that make up for my neighbors 60 inch home theater?
I'd like to put my vote on eBay and sell off parts of it in a conditional game. That is, if 'x' gets more than a given % of the vote then I will vote for candidate 'y' or bill 'z'. And since there's always more than one election going on I should be able to sell my votes to different races.
Until and unless no other options but the quickest dirtiest ones are possible. In 1973 the OPEC embargo should have convinced people that we needed to take another view at oil alternatives across the spectrum. Instead we had a brief emotional flirtation with some forms of conservation with the hope that soon things would just go back to the way they were. So we built down nuclear and after TMI practically outlawed it. Car companies driven to bankruptcy churned out cheap smaller cars for a few years but by the early '80's were back in gas guzzler mode. We built energy efficient homes for a few years and stopped. And we touched on replacement furnaces and boilers for homes and businesses that were 97% efficient but we never rolled them out in quantity so they remained expensive to the point where the economic breakeven point was beyond the operating life of the equipment.
Now too we have Green this and that on TV. Every car company claims to have a hybrid. Except most of them are 5% hybrids on 300hp trucks or E85 engines where you can't get E85 fuel. Or the Great Salvation, corn ethanol which is 1/7th as cost and energy efficient as Brazilian sugar beets. And we'll do this too for a few years until we're used to $6/gallon gas. After that recession/depression finally wanes, we'll be right back up there with Escalades and coal fired power plants.
So who cares? We're stupid and selfish and there's no hope. Science and technology can't save us because no one wants to be 'saved'. I own a 4cyl Camry and a 4cyl Focus and when gas is $5/gal I'm getting a 125-150cc scooter that gets 85mpg. And one of the cars will not get used unless it's a real need. In fact with only one more kid at home for 2 years until college, one of those cars will go away and I'll just use the scooter for my main transport when the remaining car is out. I work at home and I suspect more people will too. Hell - just get a Bajaj power rickshaw - 2 wheels, a roof, 8.5hp, seats 4. Unless it's the dead of winter or bad weather it's fine. I'll get a big lock or chain for it or something.
Because waiting for America to get off its fat ass and do something is pointless. We'll all be freezing in the dark by the time anyone perks up their ears and by then it will be some draconian horrorshow of rations, forced relocations and law enforcement.
The Soviets understood what to do - they were missing the engineering of how to do it. Similarly while the Rosenbergs go down in history as the greatest traitors, even the Soviets admit that their information sped up the development of the H Bomb by less than 2 years. Sakharov came at the problem from a completely different direction than Teller-Ulam and essentially invented a brand new branch of nuclear physics on his own.
Just as Palm is crashing into the flaming volcano at Mach 3. Oh it's cheap enough and dumb yokels who want a PDA phone for $100 ($300-$200) but it's Palm. Not only is the company almost out of business but it's out of business because Palm OS is junk that can not multitask. For the $50 you can get a Moto-Q or a Blackberry.
I tell today's young tech people get stupider and stupider. You don't tell, they ask you say, "That's not the issue, thanks." But if you're going to brag all over the place then you're a retard.
I have recurring ink jet printer and fax machine problems. And thank God Epson et al are continually replacing models with newer incompatible ones that require new ink and often new software installed.
But that's nothing compared to my Sharp fax machine which has got to use the most expensive black ink carts on the planet and they regularly fail or randomly dry out.
If fixing helps those pesky problem than hell yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we have to face facts that once the Shuttle program shuts down and the Russians lose interest in losing money and the ISS reaches the end of its service life that apart from the Chinese and Indians sending a few Nauts into orbit that manned spaceflight is going to take a VERY long break. Perhaps a century or more. Countries and societies seem to have almost no interest in it. Coupled with the enormous ignorance and misinformation about it e.g. a quarter of all Americans think NASA's budget is greater than the Pentagon, coupled with the increasing weaponization of space there just doesn't seem to be any future in it.
I'll self respond to the modding. I don't view my post as OT. Why? Because it's about service. And for an online vendor, service IS the website. If you can't understand why something happens or why something DOESN'T happen then that's the same thing as walking into a store and having not even a cashier there. Sorry, But it's a big deal. If Amazon wants to give 'better' service to 'better' customers then they have to figure out what precisely their customers believe better service consists of.
To me it's an elegant website that does only and exactly what I want with as few clicks as possible and with no wondering about why how when where what is happening. We've been buying stuff for about 8000 years. There's nothing really new to bring to that experience.
Oh well, I never really got into the whole full contact competitive shopping thing a-la eBay. It interests me zero. Moreover I don't bother with coupons that have 30 lines of microprint explaining all the things they DON'T cover. Not worth it, I'll go somewhere else. And unless the discount is MASSIVE in relation to the price, I don't bother with mail in rebates. Many never get processed, they take too long and it's too much work to do other people's jobs for them.
I order to different yet related items yesterday. For some reason one of them was eligible for free shipping. But the default order packaging is to ship the items together and charge me $15. I have to go in, tweak the order, separate it into 2 shipments and the shipping cost goes down by half, that is one of the items is free. They both come to me from the same place. I am scratching my head on this. It can't be good for Amazon to break up the order. And it irritates me to have to muck with their order. Plus - why is only one item eligible for free shipping? Both items are very similar, the cost nearly the same, they come from the same place, and are made by the same company. I'd feel better if they just lied to me and told me that they're giving me a 50% discount on the shipping cost. Or better yet - don't tell me anything at all and wrap it up and charge me the discounted price.
It's not cheaper than SanDisk players. It doesn't have more features than Apple. It's not physically distinct; e.g. is waterproof or shockproof. It's a mundane me-too product in a sea of mundane me-too products. It is a failure? I don't know, are any of them?
I have an old IBM PC300GL with 384MB RAM and a Pentium II-550. The BIOS can't handle a partition >8GB so I have my 30GB drive cut up into 5 equal sized pieces. The OS and all the apps I need on it occupy one half of one partition. The slowest aspect of the booting process is the amount of time the Orinoco PCCard inside the ISA adapter holster needs to establish a wireless connection. The slowest thing on the system, as one would guess, is starting Open Office. Otherwise the performance of the machine is entirely fine.
I've had PC300's of different types with Pentium-II's from 450Mhz and as little as 288MB RAM that ran acceptably well for their intended purpose.
Mostly SATA, with 1GB LAN interfaces, good reputation for solid firmware. You have to supply your own drive(s). Certain lower models have a reputation for running hot, but not to the point of failure.
You can't move an awful lot of government programming offsite. It's where it is. There is a gigantic amount of government work in MD so the state sees a big juicy way to tax the Federal government (and itself) to suck some money into their own pockets.
My own firm went the other way and wanted to get rid of real estate so they decided to double up people in offices, then move them to cubes, then move them to call centers. My last on site job was as a security consultant with an 'office' in the call center. The cube dividers were 1 foot higher than the desk so you and everyone else got to stare at each other all day. This became intolerable so as many of us who wanted just pulled up to work from home. They give you a cash allotment for your broadband, a one time allowance to buy some home office equipment, they pay for a VoIP phone line and a modicum of consumables like paper, ink etc. It's not ideal and my spouse is pissed about it because in her mind if I'm home I'm home for chores and to be interrupted whenever whatever for whoever. Plus the time zone thing for work is a bore when I wind up on calls early or late. But on the upside it's a lot more flexible, I don't have to drive, I can take a nap, eat lunch at home or somewhere else. My company though uses it as an excuse though to not give out increases with the thinking that they've saved me two thousand bucks. If they tried to round us all up and make us go back to the office, they have to rent some office space. Whereas as we are slowly picked off and our jobs leave the US, it's pretty simple for them. Just stop paying us and send out a shipping carton for our laptops, disconnect phone. Sayonara. I have never met any of my last 5 managers face to face.
In the middle east and North Africa, the practice of baksheesh is standard. It's considered to be a tip or a thank you and there's nothing at all wrong with it. It's how things get done. In Africa it's even grander where the officials tell you what to pay them.
Congress is 0-23 in attempts to do anything at all about Iraq. Good thing they're spending their attention on this subject of vital national interest.
And I've never heard of anyone running even a piece of a datacenter on Vista. Everyone complains that outsourcing companies are too expensive, but honestly, we're a LOT smarter than the fools who implemented this. We would never have this mistake.
or kathatsung? Has your forum ever been invaded by this creep? I'm not even sure kathasung is a person, it might be a bot. But what it does is bombard you with hundreds or thousands of posts in serial order chronicling some massive US government conspiracy into practically everything.
First had phones. And God created the answering machine and voice mail and said it was good. And hence forth all people would not answer the phone and would not return calls. Then there was the email and people worshipped it verily. Till the spammers gushed from satan's bowels. And low did the email fall. 85 percent did go to the bitbucket unopened. And in the corporation (blessed be he) email distribution lists issued forth like a plague of locusts and verily didst thou receiveth the same email with the same 9MB attachment with a header that speaketh "Me Too!" 40 times.
So there beget the IM which permitteth thou to put DNC flags and "I'm not here" status lines. Behold it was a wonder. Till the day when thine fellows ignored the status line and sent messages forth, no matter. But the upper middle managers didst avoid this plague with their Blackberries - sending forth SMS and emails 'from the car'. And God saw what he had created and was overflowing with wrath.
I remember the last San Fran Earthquake and we had to get a warm site up and running using all the backup tapes from our offsite storage company. The storage vault was 100% ok, the warm site was 100% ok and I couldn't get anyone to drive the truck through a post apocalyptic thunder dome. I suspect that getting a bunch of nerds to work in an abandoned coal mine will be greeted by dumbstruck looks when you see a giant fire breathing dinosaur.
All our apps in house will soon be on Eclipse and by then we'll probably start skipping Windows altogether for Linux. We already have 20% Linux and that number is steadily climbing. There are a few key apps in the installed base which are not completely Java so we still have a requirement to run the base we have now (XP) but that's eventually going to change as well, or, they'll just get replaced.
Or as I believe they are called now, iSeries eServer machines. OS/400 is what's called an SLS architecture. There are no devices in the system nor are there file systems. It's simply one huge 64bit address space. The hardware and software abstraction layers intercept the call from an application or a hardware interface and pipe it to the SLS which just does one reach into the address table. An SSD would be ideal for that architecture. It would be essentially one huge non volatile RAM address space at bus speeds.
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries/overview/overview.html
I leave it on all the time. It takes too long to boot. Sue me. My wife uses one desktop, likewise. Sue her too. My son, ditto. We have one wireless router, one MTA for Voip, one print server, one printer. If I save a few watts will that make up for my neighbors 60 inch home theater?
I'd like to put my vote on eBay and sell off parts of it in a conditional game. That is, if 'x' gets more than a given % of the vote then I will vote for candidate 'y' or bill 'z'. And since there's always more than one election going on I should be able to sell my votes to different races.
Beets or cane same thermodynamics. Corn is a stupid program to pursue.
Until and unless no other options but the quickest dirtiest ones are possible. In 1973 the OPEC embargo should have convinced people that we needed to take another view at oil alternatives across the spectrum. Instead we had a brief emotional flirtation with some forms of conservation with the hope that soon things would just go back to the way they were. So we built down nuclear and after TMI practically outlawed it. Car companies driven to bankruptcy churned out cheap smaller cars for a few years but by the early '80's were back in gas guzzler mode. We built energy efficient homes for a few years and stopped. And we touched on replacement furnaces and boilers for homes and businesses that were 97% efficient but we never rolled them out in quantity so they remained expensive to the point where the economic breakeven point was beyond the operating life of the equipment.
Now too we have Green this and that on TV. Every car company claims to have a hybrid. Except most of them are 5% hybrids on 300hp trucks or E85 engines where you can't get E85 fuel. Or the Great Salvation, corn ethanol which is 1/7th as cost and energy efficient as Brazilian sugar beets. And we'll do this too for a few years until we're used to $6/gallon gas. After that recession/depression finally wanes, we'll be right back up there with Escalades and coal fired power plants.
So who cares? We're stupid and selfish and there's no hope. Science and technology can't save us because no one wants to be 'saved'. I own a 4cyl Camry and a 4cyl Focus and when gas is $5/gal I'm getting a 125-150cc scooter that gets 85mpg. And one of the cars will not get used unless it's a real need. In fact with only one more kid at home for 2 years until college, one of those cars will go away and I'll just use the scooter for my main transport when the remaining car is out. I work at home and I suspect more people will too. Hell - just get a Bajaj power rickshaw - 2 wheels, a roof, 8.5hp, seats 4. Unless it's the dead of winter or bad weather it's fine. I'll get a big lock or chain for it or something.
Because waiting for America to get off its fat ass and do something is pointless. We'll all be freezing in the dark by the time anyone perks up their ears and by then it will be some draconian horrorshow of rations, forced relocations and law enforcement.
Hand to God when I go to Wal*Mart I am the only Anglo in the store.
The Soviets understood what to do - they were missing the engineering of how to do it. Similarly while the Rosenbergs go down in history as the greatest traitors, even the Soviets admit that their information sped up the development of the H Bomb by less than 2 years. Sakharov came at the problem from a completely different direction than Teller-Ulam and essentially invented a brand new branch of nuclear physics on his own.
Just as Palm is crashing into the flaming volcano at Mach 3. Oh it's cheap enough and dumb yokels who want a PDA phone for $100 ($300-$200) but it's Palm. Not only is the company almost out of business but it's out of business because Palm OS is junk that can not multitask. For the $50 you can get a Moto-Q or a Blackberry.
I tell today's young tech people get stupider and stupider. You don't tell, they ask you say, "That's not the issue, thanks." But if you're going to brag all over the place then you're a retard.
I have recurring ink jet printer and fax machine problems. And thank God Epson et al are continually replacing models with newer incompatible ones that require new ink and often new software installed.
But that's nothing compared to my Sharp fax machine which has got to use the most expensive black ink carts on the planet and they regularly fail or randomly dry out.
If fixing helps those pesky problem than hell yeah.