Now LinuxWorld has an IBM add for their xServer! This is an intel-inside box! (There's even an official intelInside logo on the ad!) Clearly LinuxWorld is biased by accepting advertising from the original cause of the whole Wintel phenomenon - IBM! After all, you can't have PC-compatible without PC!
Exactly. If their content is unbiased journalism, who cares who's advertising? If a person doesn't like the advertising they see, spend the money to put something else up there.
Don't be so bloody obtuse. Did I not cite the example and then comment that it might be a bad one? Followed by an example that IS an application, not a driver? Sod off. Same goes for the mod that found Evo insightful.
Like my 7th & 8th grade algebra teacher used to say: "A little knowledge is dangerous."
Both the author in Bristol & the poster above need to do a very minor amount of research & find a solution using a sealed battery (see my post above). Sure its easier to swipe one off the spare motorbike (which the pictured battery looks like - not a car battery), but do you really want an unsealed box of acid strapped to your body?
I usually make about a week myself before my games-only XP box has to reboot. Might be nvidia's fault. Might be MS's. Hard to say.
It is NOT hard to say. It is MS's fault. Why should a bad video card require rebooting the entire OS? Maybe thats a bad example, but where I'm currently working we often have to reboot some of the development servers. Maybe the tool we're using is unstable - not cleaning up after itself, etc. But why should we have to reboot the whole machine because one application is crap? We should be able to kill that application, the OS should recover that memory, we restart it & keep going. But Windows doesn't work that way. That is a flaw.
Upgrade MS apps, something may in fact break. Upgrade an OSS app, and it's very likely to look and work mostly the same, with a few improvements.
This is the price paid for their proprietary system. By tying their tools so close to the OS & the browser being integrated into the OS, they've created a situation where they've successfully locked customers to their system (i.e. its difficult & expensive to migrate away), but its ALSO difficult to change the underlying OS! So they not only tie customers to Windows, they tie them to a specific version of Windows & the pain of upgrading is nearly equivalent to the pain of migrating to a whole new OS.
Microsoft could choose to compete solely on the merits of quality & total cost of ownership, instead they choose the lock-in strategy & end up locking customers out of Microsoft upgrades as well as competitors' products.
1) People will not be invigorated by watching three people, two billionaires and a pilot, take a joy ride. They will be invigorated by watching man walk on Mars, or at least having a leader who says we're going to go there.
Part true, part false. The cynical side of me says yes, you are right; Julia Roberts being pregnant with twins is more interesting to the public than the technical feat of affortable space flight. Where you're wrong is that we, at least 'we' in terms of US citizens, do have a leader who says we're going to Mars. An announcement also greeted, I might add, with less enthusiasm than that of Julia Roberts' twins.
2) We've had the technology to go to space for forty years. We've had the technology to do suborbital flight for longer. Hell, we could have landed on Mars before I was born, but we didn't have the economic or political balls to do so.
We have landed on mars, presumably before your birth (1976). Oh, did you mean land humans on mars? I'd argue we don't have the technology now, much less 15 years ago. From where does your statement come? I'd like to see how you're going to keep humans alive for the trip to mars (and back). How you're going to launch this project. How you're going to launch on Mars to get humans back into space from that planet before returning to this planet. Maybe this project needs a cheap way to get to space on this planet, and improved technology developed on this planet before we just toss a couple astronauts toward mars.
3) I don't think tourism is really helping the economic situation in Africa. I'm sure they would rather have people invest in their infrastructure. Same thing with space: We need an infrastructure to make space more than an alternative to the safari. We can't do that launching ~500 kg at a time.
I think tourism is helping the economic situation in Africa. Tourists demand things like food, running water, sanitary waste facilities, roads, airports, internet cafes & other things that will eventually improve locals' lives. In terms of needing an infrastructure to get to space, what do you think Scaled is doing? They're (im)proving the technology necessary to get there. While the gemini, mercury & apollo programs rapidly put the US ahead of the soviets in the space race, they did not leave us with affordable access to space. The people at Scaled Composites seem to be focusing on this goal. So what if they haul tourists with the proof-of concept craft? Its a way to fund future developments.
New advances in space access are not going to come from governments. They are going to come from private sector innovators who develop ways to drive costs down & efficiencies up. You're totally correct that we need an infrastructure to make space more accessable from earth & thus make travel away from earth & earth orbit possible. Developing that technology in one shot is inefficient and expensive. Given the other costs that governments face I don't see them being able to dedicate the necessary resources to such a goal. However, the private sector may be able to create new markets that will provide the funding that will get payloads out of earth orbit sooner & cheaper.
But does putting the mass of 3 humans in suborbital flight really make a difference? This is akin to the Space Shuttle in the 1970s: It's designed to go somewhere, but there's nothing up there to go to. Are we going to continue launch satellites, or are we going storm heaven?
But does your comment really make a difference? I am certainly not knowledgeable enough to guess what the Rutan/Allen team's long-term goals are, but their efforts thus far seem to be more than adequately meeting their short term goals. As I understand them - based on Scaled press releases & seeing Rutan speak a couple times - they are to 1) reinvigorate the public's level of excitement in technology / space; 2) prove the technology necessary to get to space; 3) develop a source of revenue to fund further experimentation / R&D. So maybe a vehicle capable of a thrill-ride that 'goes nowhere' doesn't accomplish much of import. But in the big picture, its accomplishing quite a lot.
The interesting thing is that corporate IT people seem to be catching on already. As more & more companies are learning, proprietary = expensive. Thats why you see Sun trying to paint Red Hat with the proprietary label. The reality is that hardware is getting cheaper & cheaper and there is better non-proprietary software than MS & Sun are offering. The proprietary people have to find a new niche; it appears that they're looking to loss-lead with free hardware & try for vendor lock-in with proprietary software. The thoughtful customer can see that hardware is dirt cheap already & that better software already exists.
I thought the problem wasn't so much that the security went bad, but that they filled in missing chromosomes with strands from a frog that had the ability to change genders. A member of the all-female population changed genders & started breeding.
How does a guy get that job?
Which reminds me of something that happened years ago. A buddy of mine asked what kind of animal we wanted to be. My father's response:
Not true. Note the parent of your post explicitly says "fossil carbon". Biodiesel is returning the carbon to the air that it removed from the air during photosynthesis (i.e. when it was algae or soy or whatever). They call this net-ZERO emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Like the other nearby posts, I gotta say Verizon never let me down. Now have t-mobile which I am far from satisfied with. Driving from Arizona to Minnesota I had more dropped calls in 3 days than I ever had with Verizon in 4 years. The Verizon network covers non-interstate areas; driving across Wisconsin 2 weeks ago I couldn't get a signal 10 miles from (parallel to) the freeway. First impression: T-Mobile coverage is absolute crap.
Having said that, the verizon phone included analog & digital service. The t-mobile phone is digital only. So I don't pay roaming on t-mobile, but it has less coverage. Since analog service is being phased out (the question is: over what time period?), coverage for those phones will also be diminishing.
I wouldn't mod you a troll, but maybe a -1 DRTFA. One of the outstanding questions in the project is: "Can the vehicle accelerate to the Mach 25 necessary to reach orbit?" So whether its prior posters who didn't read, or yourself, it does clearly state that the blimp team is aware of the need for speed.
The speed is achieved through a bizarre combination of tech:
helium to maintain start altitude
ion drive for propulsion
aerodynamic shape for lift
slightly positive angle of attack
loads of time for ion drive to accelerate the vehicle
In theory, despite the extremely thin atmosphere, the airship will act like a lifting body as it accelerates to orbit velocity over several days. As it climbs, it relies less on aerodynamic lift & more on the propulsion from the ion drive. Certainly seems odd to me, but they claim there's a fairly wide window to be hit.
UFO type sightings often are precursors to Earthquakes. This is because the earth emits certain sub atomic radiation that appears as solid shiny balls/disks or fast moving ones. This appears to be related to the energy holding the structure of matter together.
You make quite a few interesting points in your post. Do you have any links / backup documentation available to support some of your statements?
Most companies aren't going to do anything about guarding privacy until they get bitten.
A former employer is in the data management business. The data consists of a global set of individuals & certain information about them, including, for some US individuals, their social security number, as well as address info. When I left we were not yet collecting credit card data, but the possibility of doing so in the future existed.
At a corporate level, and as far as clients know, data security / privacy is contractually guaranteed. But the reality is that servers & desktops with all their data are unsecured (physically). Sure, the production machines are all in a secure location, but the data also exists in testing databases, test plans (i.e. documentation), developer databases, developer hard drives, etc. There was absolutely no effort whatsoever to protect the privacy of the individuals' data. We had no visibility to what level of confidentiality our clients' promised their customers, so we made no effort to meet their privacy requirements - which I would presume to be more strict than ours, as some clients were non-US companies.
At one point, a potential client sent a security audit team to our facilities to verify that we met their requirements. For that day, we locked the door to the server room, but otherwise left it open for maximum airflow. (too many systems in a closet designed to house a phone system) In any case, all their data was on the harddrive in my development box anyway, a system sitting on the floor about 8 feet from the back door to the office. A setup that I imagine would hardly have passed their audit, had they asked. That hard drive contains hundreds of thousands of individuals, their addresses and clear-text user ids & passwords to some websites. Since we all know that most users are lazy and use the same password for multiple purposes, the information on that system could be extremely valuable to certain people.
In the face of all this, management expressed essentially no concern for privacy of those individuals, or the potential liability associated with the lack of security.
I agree. Here in MN, the hog farmers are having community-relation problems from the aromas produced by their waste pools. You'd think there'd be a huge market for the methane collection systems. Plus the Hormel guys certainly produce enough waste to fire up a crude-oil production facility.
Huh? Why MUST he write a business plan at all? For whom? In my state (Minnesota), you go to the secretary of state with about 50 bucks (I don't exactly recall), fill out some paperwork & you're a business. Thats it. Now, if you're going to ask somebody for money, THEY might want a business plan. But I don't know how they'd know who wrote it; or really care either, as long as its well thought out the person presenting the plan (i.e. asking for their money) understands it and appears to have a reasonable chance of not defaulting on the loan / losing the investment. Of course, the stupider the person you're approaching for money, the less well thought out the businesss plan needs to be. A good salesman could doodle up a 'business plan' on a napkin & sell it to some people.
First, I'm rather amused by the 'N' number on the side of spaceshipone's fuselage. It somehow feels odd that some FAA inspector has to come out to scaled & inspect & signoff on a spacecraft. I'd love to see a pic of the required word EXPERIMENTAL in the cockpit.
Regarding the rather unconventional 'feathering' control surfaces on spaceshipone, I recall coverage some years ago of Burt examining a project called 'freewing'. I wonder how much influence that project had on the resulting design of ss1?
Its not a conspiracy, its stupidity. The general public doesn't have a friggin clue about how significant this or the Scaled Composites events are. When I was young and ignorant, I thought the round-the-world nonstop flight (i.e. Rutan's Voyager) would be huge news & possibly spark a new interest in aviation. But basically nothing happened. All the hoopla 6 months ago for the Wright 100th anniversary was largely unnoticed by the media. The SpaceShipOne launch last week & this amateur rocket are further examples of how science doesn't sell. If the thing had exploded on the ground & killed half the team, THAT would be news. If SpaceShipOne blows up or crashes into a trailer park, the media will be all over the story. But if they have another ho-hum flight where nothing goes wrong, it ain't news. Apollo XIII, anyone?
From the article:
Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear.
The technology of WhiteKnight / SpaceshipOne is radically different from that of the shuttle. Largely due to 2 things: 1) Burt et al are only going for 100,000 meters rather than orbit. 2) Advances in technology since the 70s, when the shuttle was designed.
Personally I expect that they'll be capable of relaunching within hours - well below the two weeks allowed by the contest organizers.
Slashdot Mirror
Now LinuxWorld has an IBM add for their xServer! This is an intel-inside box! (There's even an official intelInside logo on the ad!) Clearly LinuxWorld is biased by accepting advertising from the original cause of the whole Wintel phenomenon - IBM! After all, you can't have PC-compatible without PC!
Exactly. If their content is unbiased journalism, who cares who's advertising? If a person doesn't like the advertising they see, spend the money to put something else up there.
How about:
Don't be so bloody obtuse. Did I not cite the example and then comment that it might be a bad one? Followed by an example that IS an application, not a driver? Sod off. Same goes for the mod that found Evo insightful.
(I'll happily take my flamebait mod now.)
Like my 7th & 8th grade algebra teacher used to say: "A little knowledge is dangerous."
Both the author in Bristol & the poster above need to do a very minor amount of research & find a solution using a sealed battery (see my post above). Sure its easier to swipe one off the spare motorbike (which the pictured battery looks like - not a car battery), but do you really want an unsealed box of acid strapped to your body?
A sealed battery would definitely be a better option.
It is NOT hard to say. It is MS's fault. Why should a bad video card require rebooting the entire OS? Maybe thats a bad example, but where I'm currently working we often have to reboot some of the development servers. Maybe the tool we're using is unstable - not cleaning up after itself, etc. But why should we have to reboot the whole machine because one application is crap? We should be able to kill that application, the OS should recover that memory, we restart it & keep going. But Windows doesn't work that way. That is a flaw.
This is the price paid for their proprietary system. By tying their tools so close to the OS & the browser being integrated into the OS, they've created a situation where they've successfully locked customers to their system (i.e. its difficult & expensive to migrate away), but its ALSO difficult to change the underlying OS! So they not only tie customers to Windows, they tie them to a specific version of Windows & the pain of upgrading is nearly equivalent to the pain of migrating to a whole new OS.
Microsoft could choose to compete solely on the merits of quality & total cost of ownership, instead they choose the lock-in strategy & end up locking customers out of Microsoft upgrades as well as competitors' products.
But does your comment really make a difference? I am certainly not knowledgeable enough to guess what the Rutan/Allen team's long-term goals are, but their efforts thus far seem to be more than adequately meeting their short term goals. As I understand them - based on Scaled press releases & seeing Rutan speak a couple times - they are to 1) reinvigorate the public's level of excitement in technology / space; 2) prove the technology necessary to get to space; 3) develop a source of revenue to fund further experimentation / R&D. So maybe a vehicle capable of a thrill-ride that 'goes nowhere' doesn't accomplish much of import. But in the big picture, its accomplishing quite a lot.
The interesting thing is that corporate IT people seem to be catching on already. As more & more companies are learning, proprietary = expensive. Thats why you see Sun trying to paint Red Hat with the proprietary label. The reality is that hardware is getting cheaper & cheaper and there is better non-proprietary software than MS & Sun are offering. The proprietary people have to find a new niche; it appears that they're looking to loss-lead with free hardware & try for vendor lock-in with proprietary software. The thoughtful customer can see that hardware is dirt cheap already & that better software already exists.
I thought the problem wasn't so much that the security went bad, but that they filled in missing chromosomes with strands from a frog that had the ability to change genders. A member of the all-female population changed genders & started breeding.
How does a guy get that job?
Which reminds me of something that happened years ago. A buddy of mine asked what kind of animal we wanted to be. My father's response:
Not true. Note the parent of your post explicitly says "fossil carbon". Biodiesel is returning the carbon to the air that it removed from the air during photosynthesis (i.e. when it was algae or soy or whatever). They call this net-ZERO emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Like the other nearby posts, I gotta say Verizon never let me down. Now have t-mobile which I am far from satisfied with. Driving from Arizona to Minnesota I had more dropped calls in 3 days than I ever had with Verizon in 4 years. The Verizon network covers non-interstate areas; driving across Wisconsin 2 weeks ago I couldn't get a signal 10 miles from (parallel to) the freeway. First impression: T-Mobile coverage is absolute crap.
Having said that, the verizon phone included analog & digital service. The t-mobile phone is digital only. So I don't pay roaming on t-mobile, but it has less coverage. Since analog service is being phased out (the question is: over what time period?), coverage for those phones will also be diminishing.
I wouldn't mod you a troll, but maybe a -1 DRTFA. One of the outstanding questions in the project is: "Can the vehicle accelerate to the Mach 25 necessary to reach orbit?" So whether its prior posters who didn't read, or yourself, it does clearly state that the blimp team is aware of the need for speed.
The speed is achieved through a bizarre combination of tech:
In theory, despite the extremely thin atmosphere, the airship will act like a lifting body as it accelerates to orbit velocity over several days. As it climbs, it relies less on aerodynamic lift & more on the propulsion from the ion drive. Certainly seems odd to me, but they claim there's a fairly wide window to be hit.
What I want to know is when the Linux/FOSS code in the MS clustering code will show up.
The beauty of closed source is: when you steal open source, nobody finds out!
You make quite a few interesting points in your post. Do you have any links / backup documentation available to support some of your statements?
Most companies aren't going to do anything about guarding privacy until they get bitten.
A former employer is in the data management business. The data consists of a global set of individuals & certain information about them, including, for some US individuals, their social security number, as well as address info. When I left we were not yet collecting credit card data, but the possibility of doing so in the future existed.
At a corporate level, and as far as clients know, data security / privacy is contractually guaranteed. But the reality is that servers & desktops with all their data are unsecured (physically). Sure, the production machines are all in a secure location, but the data also exists in testing databases, test plans (i.e. documentation), developer databases, developer hard drives, etc. There was absolutely no effort whatsoever to protect the privacy of the individuals' data. We had no visibility to what level of confidentiality our clients' promised their customers, so we made no effort to meet their privacy requirements - which I would presume to be more strict than ours, as some clients were non-US companies.
At one point, a potential client sent a security audit team to our facilities to verify that we met their requirements. For that day, we locked the door to the server room, but otherwise left it open for maximum airflow. (too many systems in a closet designed to house a phone system) In any case, all their data was on the harddrive in my development box anyway, a system sitting on the floor about 8 feet from the back door to the office. A setup that I imagine would hardly have passed their audit, had they asked. That hard drive contains hundreds of thousands of individuals, their addresses and clear-text user ids & passwords to some websites. Since we all know that most users are lazy and use the same password for multiple purposes, the information on that system could be extremely valuable to certain people.
In the face of all this, management expressed essentially no concern for privacy of those individuals, or the potential liability associated with the lack of security.
I agree. Here in MN, the hog farmers are having community-relation problems from the aromas produced by their waste pools. You'd think there'd be a huge market for the methane collection systems. Plus the Hormel guys certainly produce enough waste to fire up a crude-oil production facility.
Huh? Why MUST he write a business plan at all? For whom? In my state (Minnesota), you go to the secretary of state with about 50 bucks (I don't exactly recall), fill out some paperwork & you're a business. Thats it. Now, if you're going to ask somebody for money, THEY might want a business plan. But I don't know how they'd know who wrote it; or really care either, as long as its well thought out the person presenting the plan (i.e. asking for their money) understands it and appears to have a reasonable chance of not defaulting on the loan / losing the investment. Of course, the stupider the person you're approaching for money, the less well thought out the businesss plan needs to be. A good salesman could doodle up a 'business plan' on a napkin & sell it to some people.
First, I'm rather amused by the 'N' number on the side of spaceshipone's fuselage. It somehow feels odd that some FAA inspector has to come out to scaled & inspect & signoff on a spacecraft. I'd love to see a pic of the required word EXPERIMENTAL in the cockpit.
Regarding the rather unconventional 'feathering' control surfaces on spaceshipone, I recall coverage some years ago of Burt examining a project called 'freewing'. I wonder how much influence that project had on the resulting design of ss1?
Its not a conspiracy, its stupidity. The general public doesn't have a friggin clue about how significant this or the Scaled Composites events are. When I was young and ignorant, I thought the round-the-world nonstop flight (i.e. Rutan's Voyager) would be huge news & possibly spark a new interest in aviation. But basically nothing happened. All the hoopla 6 months ago for the Wright 100th anniversary was largely unnoticed by the media. The SpaceShipOne launch last week & this amateur rocket are further examples of how science doesn't sell. If the thing had exploded on the ground & killed half the team, THAT would be news. If SpaceShipOne blows up or crashes into a trailer park, the media will be all over the story. But if they have another ho-hum flight where nothing goes wrong, it ain't news. Apollo XIII, anyone?
From the article: Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear.
Try armadillo aerospace.
The technology of WhiteKnight / SpaceshipOne is radically different from that of the shuttle. Largely due to 2 things: 1) Burt et al are only going for 100,000 meters rather than orbit. 2) Advances in technology since the 70s, when the shuttle was designed.
Personally I expect that they'll be capable of relaunching within hours - well below the two weeks allowed by the contest organizers.