The NSA and NRO have always been military organizations headed by a serving officer, usually of the Navy or the Air Force. Most of the actual intelligence collection and analysis is done by uniformed specialists. They might be sailors on ships or in planes (remember the EP-3 incident?), soldiers in tactical vehicles or at strategic sites, or airmen aloft. (Indeed, all services have specialized intelligence-collection aircraft).
The US is no different in this than other nations. Given the volume of material you're looking at, the tough day-to-day work of intelligence -- at least the technical, vice human, intelligence -- gathering and processing, is and always will be done by enlisted service members under the command of uniformed officers. That's just the way it is.
Any military service that wasn't thinking about cyberwarfare now, would be like a service in 1938 that thought airplanes were a passing fad. So... even if you are right and cyberwarfare "should" be the province of intelligence agencies, it gets delegated back onto uniformed shoulders.
Now, where are we going to kick him? Better yet someone should get hold of his cell phone number and we should call him around the clock to thank him for the spam.
But only once each. After all, he's cool with that.
For an idea of what the UN did in the recent tsunami disaster (what they always do -- fly a bunch of drones in first class, to lounge around hotels and hold meeting congratulating themselves on their importance) check out http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
I guess having taken care of his son Kojo, Kofi Annan needs to have a cash cow for his grandchildren.
Re: But, last year there were ZERO deaths in US ariline flights.
If General Aviation operated under 14 CFR Part 121 (or even 135) they would have an equivalent level of safety. But it would be cost-prohibitive! The fact is that you are in an unnatural environment for the human organism anytime you are high enough (~10m) or fast enough (~50 kmh) to kill you. As the old pilot's saying goes, it is "unforgiving of any mistake."
All the light GA craft with PFD/MFD technology have backup instruments. For an example, check out Cirrus or Diamond. The Cirrus puts its backup steam gages below the PFD, the Diamond above.
You ask: What is being done for the almost 1000 GA pilots who died that year because of using ancient vaccum designs or >10 year old VORS
I disagree with your premise, that there is something inherently fatal in using this old technology. Most of the GA pilots who die in any particular year die not from equipment failure of any type, but from bad judgment. Just this last week, two planes spun in trying to return to a field they had taken off from -- your instructor warned you about that before you ever soloed, didn't he (or she)? Likewise, the #1 killer remains VFR flight into IMC.
Technology cannot improve your judgment. It can improve your situational awareness, and it can lighten your workload.
It is pretty clear that most of the people pontificating on this thread log their time in the cabin. That's why I'm replying to you -- you at least understand what we're talking about.
The Synthetic Vision that NASA has been working on is already available for both the experimental and certified market from Chelton (formerly Sierra) Flight Systems. http://www.sierraflightsystems.com/default.htm
When it was being developed, it was only $10k for the single display. (It's more now, especially for the certified version). But it can replace your six-pack and engine instruments.
What it does, far from confusing the pilot with more abstraction, is to put a virtual VFR display in its window. You see the terrain. You see obstructions like antennae. You see traffic, and the horizon. A flight path (such as an ILS, a STAR or SID, a hold or procedure turn) is displayed on the screen as a series of rectangles. Fly through the boxes, which most people find very instinctive, and you arrive where you expect to be.
As far as the guy who posits screens going black, engineers prevent this the same way they keep bridges from falling over, or systems from tanking: they engineer redundancy into the system. To begin with, the single AHRS unit and displays of the system are each much, much more reliable than any one of the steam-gages they replace. (Ever lose a vacuum pump? It powers the single artificial horizon in most single-engine aircraft, and it has an MTBF of about 700 hours). Means of redundancy include:
Usually multiple means of redundancy are fitted (belt and suspenders approach).
Glass panels are coming to general aviation. Every significant maker at Oshkosh this year was touting his Avidyne or Garmin glass panel. Blue Mountain and Chelton are other options (the Chelton is the only one with terrain or synthetic vision).
There's really nothing you can do to a panel-mount VOR receiver, for instance, to make it less costly. Most of the cost is in the required certification, the TSO. And the unit volume is too low for the maker to be able to spread that cost out a lot. That is why the design of these navigational devices has been frozen for so many years. We're lucky the FAA wasn't created before they decommissioned the A-N Radio ranges or we'd still be flying those beastly things.
If you are a major provider, it's quite possible to bugger up. Do NOT pass DNS traffic (udp originating at an arbitrary unprivileged port, terminating at port 53) across your peering points to arbitrary hosts.
You set up your own caching NS to never issue forwards to another NS. (but forwards go from 53 to 53).
Of course, the spammers will react to this by using non-standard ports, and probably by turning zombied machines into their DNS-poisoning faux servers. But that's no reason not to do it.
Of course, a certain large OS software vendor's inability/unwillingness to address security except as a PR problem for whitewashing, is why there are skillions of zombied boxes out there, and an important part of why spam is burgeoning. Still, they're doing better than the nineties when their 'security chief' was some bozo with a PR background.
The patents you cite (4200862 and 4638299) are not operative: interesting... but expired. Duration of a patent in the USA is 20 years from date of filing. 1977 and 1983 respectively (the patents were granted in 1980 and 1987).
Unless X10 has more arrows in its quiver, its technology is in the public domain.
There is a halfway point for retirement. The US Military is the only one that I know of that pays retirements to part-time soldiers (Reserve and National Guard). It makes more sense as a hobby (as I do) than as a living. If you complete 20 years in the Guard or Reserve, you get a retirement on a pro-rata basis at age 60 (62? I'm not that old yet). The amount you get depends on a points system.
Other side of the coin: if you are a small business owner, a deployment will damage your business, and back to back deployments will certainly kill it. In the GWOT, reserve and guard forces spend a lot of time in non-fun places. I bought a satphone out of my own pocket, but still couldn't run a business from where I was.
I would recommend that any techie interested in the military look at a job in signals intelligence instead. Because they need smart people, they fall over themselves to get you in and often pay bonuses for a four year hitch. Plus -- you get put in for the coveted clearance. You can spend your first year or so in language school, learning a language which will not be useful to you, probably, but will be fun and will keep your brain tuned up. The embuggerments of the position are considerably less than serving in combat arms (the rewards of which are intangible) but the benefits are greater than being an Army-issue half-baked Windoze admin.
As others in the thread have pointed out, most military IT people are classical bozos. Some of the junior ones come with credentials (or knowledge) from the outside but this is meaningless to the military -- if they didn't sit you in a class with a bunch of people, average IQ 90, and train you to 70% passing standard at the pace of the slowest man, they will never belive you know it! And you will undoubtedly run into the military phenomenon of a PHB who mistakes his rank for expertise. These are fewer in real life than in legend, but it only takes one to make an entire tour very tiresome.
The artists know what they are getting into, and yet they still sign the contracts.
That's only true if we are talking about peers, which we're not. There's no true equivalence here. The industry has many ways to tilt the playing field, one of the more indicative of their character is to require the artist to be represented by an attorney from an "approved list": these attorneys being the ones who derive most of their income from the label. Only established acts have the clout to negotiate, and that is declining (as today's hit act is likely to have been the product of a publicity barrage, and lack staying power. The labels can't count on making money on a five-disc contract any longer).
If the prices were so incredibly exorbitant, then consumers would not buy the CDs.
I am certain that many slashdotters have beaten me to the observation that, statistically speaking, consumers are not buying CDs, which is exactly why the labels are so scared.
I agree with your statement that the RIAA and its members not, strictly speaking, stealing. They are, however, making a lot of really stupid business decisions that will cost them a lot of money in the long run.
A point to bear in mind, as we try to educate consumers, is this: these popup ad-switchers are sold to advertizers as a way to lamprey on their competitors adverts for less money.
What do you think about the ethics of a company that markets its products through SaveNow? If they are ethically comfortable cheating competitors, and cheating publications out of ad revenue, it would be out of character for them to do anything but cheat their customers.
No one wants to say it, but in truth, any company that will advertise through these guys who install-by-fraud is untrustworthy.
Good points. And Apple pays the labels $0.65 per song, and gets $0.99. They have to do what they do in the $0.34 that's left -- develop the software, run the servers, negotiate with the oily lawyers for the labels, pay for the bandwidth.
They still have a way to go on the store yet, even for Mac users. Last night I tried to buy some Warren Zevon (RIP) and all they had was one album, and several partial albums. The annoying "partial album" results from the patchwork of rights -- they have permission for this and not for that. And you can forget about foreign material (I lived in Germany for years, and have favourite bands, whose stuff is probably on file-sharing but ain't here), and you can forget about small-time performers on indie labels.
If the RIAA members had been willing to attach a $0.99 download charge to Napster (which would have been possible) and distribute it on either a direct or a performing rights society type weighted basis, they would have made so much money. The irony is that their greed and determination to wring every farthing out of the consumer has blinded them to immense piles of dollars, begging to be picked up by whoever is first to the clue. When the class action lawyers figure this out -- which will take a while -- expect to see a bunch of class actions on behalf of the stockholders.
Let me get this straight: a Nazi in the crank-extension racket? How would a Nazi get involved in that? I mean, they're the Aryan race, perfect specimens, it says here... you know, tall blue-eyed Nordic blondes like Adolf was. Er...
A good rule of thumb is that anyone in business using a mail drop is a crook. Hence, it is good policy to always check mail drops when dealing with suspect individuals. This case instantiates the class perfectly.
Thing is, this is irrelevant. The mere presence of the same code in both the Linux kernel and any version of Sys V Unix proves nothing. The examples they have shown so far have come from prior art -- one of them is in Kernighan and Ritchie's C book (1973), for crying out loud.
Imagine yourself as a schoolteacher. Alice and Bob turn in the same paper. Who copied whom? Alice, Bob, or both of them from a third party? Now imagine Alice telling you Bob copied her paper, but she won't show you her paper, she just wants you to whack Bob one.
Put another way, who has built a completely "clean-room" unix-like system? There are thirty years of cross-pollination and code sharing here.
This PC magazine article will send SCOX higher, which is the objective of the whole game. Apart from this suit, SCO's fundamentals are entirely negative, but look at the stock. 1 year linear chart The rubes (and PC mag readers) buying it now will be shocked when the suit implodes and SCOX returns to the status quo ante.
Recognized revenue means income they booked. This is not necesssarily received. Indeed, it almost certainly isn't.
What we're looking at here is a bunch of receivables. Ever tried to collect on a bill? (or have someone try to collect from you!)
Some of it may be from MSFT and Sun, the only two known licence holders, and some may be paper shuffling with other Canopy group shell firms. "Three Card Monte" comes to tech.
Well, of course psychology place a role... that's almost tautological.
But... if Joe Windowsuser clicks on the EatMe.pif virus, the innate single-user nature of Windows means that that virus executes with all the juju it needs to steal the system. Every time. Whether Joe is the IT guru or the latest gormless area associate in marketing doesn't matter, because either way he can't protect his machine, except by not clicking on the malware.
If Suzy Opensource executes a Linux email virus, if such an animal existed in the wild for her to execute, it executes with Suzy's privileges. This means it most likely stays in its sandbox and doesn't make much trouble. Much less rewarding for the vandals that write these things, which leads to fewer vandals on this platform in a continuous spiral. The vandals go where the least effort makes the greatest splash.
It's no longer 1987 when everybody on the net was a good guy and I did everything as root. But all Windows users are de facto root all day, every day. If you run as root unnecessarily, you risk getting 0Wn3d. QED.
A balloon rises because it's lighter than the air it displaces.
As it rises... it expands... but it ultimately hits a point of equilibrium. The mass of the balloon and its filling is a fixed, finite quantity. So is the degree to which it can expand, which in turn sets a fixed threshold on lowest-possible density. Therefore, there must be a point where the baloon just isn't going to rise any more. An absolute limiting altitude. The practical service ceiling of the balloon will be lower still than the absolute ceiling, because as you approach the ceiling your ascent decelerates slowly to zero all but asymptotically -- some point on that deceleration curve is all the waiting you can bear. And, for any balloon that current technology can build, it's long before any useful orbital altitude.
Now, what is possible, and I believe one startup is looking at this as a satellite launch technology, is to take the payload and booster part way up with a balloon. That reduces rocket-burn times, etc., but the cost is one that sensible people in aerospace only pay grudgingly: complexity. Occam's Razor is an important tool in aero engineering.
It might be a good thing to fly such a balloon-rocket hybrid with expendable payloads a few times before calling it man-rated, eh?
Adobe has only a creaking old version of Premiere, which sits uncomfortably amid three Apple offerings:
iMovie, which ships on every Mac, and is an entry-level video programme that is still quite good -- and completely locks Adobe out of the low-end. This was once Premiere's territory. Even iMovie supports a thriving third-party plug-in community.
Final Cut Express, which is FCP shorn of some of the true pro features, that only true pros need. This sits just about exactly where Premiere is in the market, but costs less and the interface skills you develop can be taken "upstairs." There's also the snob appeal of using the "lite" version of stuff the big Hollyweird boys are using.
Final Cut Pro itself, which as other/.ers have mentioned, is eating Avid's lunch.
Two of these have identical code bases, practically speaking, letting poor Premiere get beaten up from above and below at once. Apple also is extending FCP's reach (and Apple's money-making) with things such as add-on compositing software.
The bottom line is, Adobe's marketroids looked at Premiere on OS X and said, "Why would I buy this product instead of...?" and the answer they came up with... was curtains for Premiere.
Re:OK, so who's got a GOOD book on this topic?
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 1
Right now, most of the information is scattered across a galaxy of FAQs and HOW-TOs. To get the best out of these, you need an overview of clustering, IMHO. The really old and wise clustering greybeards got this knowledge from working on VAX clusters.
I'm not that old or that grey; I got mine in the forerunner of this course (http://www.clam.com/education/q1554.html) at CLAM. It was expensive (and I see by the link it still is) but it is excellent. No relationship with CLAM (Curly, Larry, And Moe?) except as a satisfied student. Also took their basic AIX.
Slashdot Mirror
The NSA and NRO have always been military organizations headed by a serving officer, usually of the Navy or the Air Force. Most of the actual intelligence collection and analysis is done by uniformed specialists. They might be sailors on ships or in planes (remember the EP-3 incident?), soldiers in tactical vehicles or at strategic sites, or airmen aloft. (Indeed, all services have specialized intelligence-collection aircraft). The US is no different in this than other nations. Given the volume of material you're looking at, the tough day-to-day work of intelligence -- at least the technical, vice human, intelligence -- gathering and processing, is and always will be done by enlisted service members under the command of uniformed officers. That's just the way it is. Any military service that wasn't thinking about cyberwarfare now, would be like a service in 1938 that thought airplanes were a passing fad. So... even if you are right and cyberwarfare "should" be the province of intelligence agencies, it gets delegated back onto uniformed shoulders.
What does the evidence show?
- He's a marketroid
- For Microsoft.
Now, where are we going to kick him? Better yet someone should get hold of his cell phone number and we should call him around the clock to thank him for the spam.But only once each. After all, he's cool with that.
For an idea of what the UN did in the recent tsunami disaster (what they always do -- fly a bunch of drones in first class, to lounge around hotels and hold meeting congratulating themselves on their importance) check out http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
I guess having taken care of his son Kojo, Kofi Annan needs to have a cash cow for his grandchildren.
The UN. The world's longest running 419 scam.
If General Aviation operated under 14 CFR Part 121 (or even 135) they would have an equivalent level of safety. But it would be cost-prohibitive! The fact is that you are in an unnatural environment for the human organism anytime you are high enough (~10m) or fast enough (~50 kmh) to kill you. As the old pilot's saying goes, it is "unforgiving of any mistake."
All the light GA craft with PFD/MFD technology have backup instruments. For an example, check out Cirrus or Diamond. The Cirrus puts its backup steam gages below the PFD, the Diamond above.
You ask: What is being done for the almost 1000 GA pilots who died that year because of using ancient vaccum designs or >10 year old VORS
I disagree with your premise, that there is something inherently fatal in using this old technology. Most of the GA pilots who die in any particular year die not from equipment failure of any type, but from bad judgment. Just this last week, two planes spun in trying to return to a field they had taken off from -- your instructor warned you about that before you ever soloed, didn't he (or she)? Likewise, the #1 killer remains VFR flight into IMC.
Technology cannot improve your judgment. It can improve your situational awareness, and it can lighten your workload.
The Synthetic Vision that NASA has been working on is already available for both the experimental and certified market from Chelton (formerly Sierra) Flight Systems. http://www.sierraflightsystems.com/default.htm
When it was being developed, it was only $10k for the single display. (It's more now, especially for the certified version). But it can replace your six-pack and engine instruments.
What it does, far from confusing the pilot with more abstraction, is to put a virtual VFR display in its window. You see the terrain. You see obstructions like antennae. You see traffic, and the horizon. A flight path (such as an ILS, a STAR or SID, a hold or procedure turn) is displayed on the screen as a series of rectangles. Fly through the boxes, which most people find very instinctive, and you arrive where you expect to be.
As far as the guy who posits screens going black, engineers prevent this the same way they keep bridges from falling over, or systems from tanking: they engineer redundancy into the system. To begin with, the single AHRS unit and displays of the system are each much, much more reliable than any one of the steam-gages they replace. (Ever lose a vacuum pump? It powers the single artificial horizon in most single-engine aircraft, and it has an MTBF of about 700 hours). Means of redundancy include:
- dual electrical systems
- dual display units
- backup steam gages (limited set: AH, DG, airspeed).
- Usually multiple means of redundancy are fitted (belt and suspenders approach).
Glass panels are coming to general aviation. Every significant maker at Oshkosh this year was touting his Avidyne or Garmin glass panel. Blue Mountain and Chelton are other options (the Chelton is the only one with terrain or synthetic vision).There's really nothing you can do to a panel-mount VOR receiver, for instance, to make it less costly. Most of the cost is in the required certification, the TSO. And the unit volume is too low for the maker to be able to spread that cost out a lot. That is why the design of these navigational devices has been frozen for so many years. We're lucky the FAA wasn't created before they decommissioned the A-N Radio ranges or we'd still be flying those beastly things.
You set up your own caching NS to never issue forwards to another NS. (but forwards go from 53 to 53).
Of course, the spammers will react to this by using non-standard ports, and probably by turning zombied machines into their DNS-poisoning faux servers. But that's no reason not to do it.
Of course, a certain large OS software vendor's inability/unwillingness to address security except as a PR problem for whitewashing, is why there are skillions of zombied boxes out there, and an important part of why spam is burgeoning. Still, they're doing better than the nineties when their 'security chief' was some bozo with a PR background.
The patents you cite (4200862 and 4638299) are not operative: interesting... but expired. Duration of a patent in the USA is 20 years from date of filing. 1977 and 1983 respectively (the patents were granted in 1980 and 1987). Unless X10 has more arrows in its quiver, its technology is in the public domain.
Other side of the coin: if you are a small business owner, a deployment will damage your business, and back to back deployments will certainly kill it. In the GWOT, reserve and guard forces spend a lot of time in non-fun places. I bought a satphone out of my own pocket, but still couldn't run a business from where I was.
I would recommend that any techie interested in the military look at a job in signals intelligence instead. Because they need smart people, they fall over themselves to get you in and often pay bonuses for a four year hitch. Plus -- you get put in for the coveted clearance. You can spend your first year or so in language school, learning a language which will not be useful to you, probably, but will be fun and will keep your brain tuned up. The embuggerments of the position are considerably less than serving in combat arms (the rewards of which are intangible) but the benefits are greater than being an Army-issue half-baked Windoze admin.
As others in the thread have pointed out, most military IT people are classical bozos. Some of the junior ones come with credentials (or knowledge) from the outside but this is meaningless to the military -- if they didn't sit you in a class with a bunch of people, average IQ 90, and train you to 70% passing standard at the pace of the slowest man, they will never belive you know it! And you will undoubtedly run into the military phenomenon of a PHB who mistakes his rank for expertise. These are fewer in real life than in legend, but it only takes one to make an entire tour very tiresome.
That's only true if we are talking about peers, which we're not. There's no true equivalence here. The industry has many ways to tilt the playing field, one of the more indicative of their character is to require the artist to be represented by an attorney from an "approved list": these attorneys being the ones who derive most of their income from the label. Only established acts have the clout to negotiate, and that is declining (as today's hit act is likely to have been the product of a publicity barrage, and lack staying power. The labels can't count on making money on a five-disc contract any longer).
If the prices were so incredibly exorbitant, then consumers would not buy the CDs.
I am certain that many slashdotters have beaten me to the observation that, statistically speaking, consumers are not buying CDs, which is exactly why the labels are so scared.
I agree with your statement that the RIAA and its members not, strictly speaking, stealing. They are, however, making a lot of really stupid business decisions that will cost them a lot of money in the long run.
What do you think about the ethics of a company that markets its products through SaveNow? If they are ethically comfortable cheating competitors, and cheating publications out of ad revenue, it would be out of character for them to do anything but cheat their customers.
No one wants to say it, but in truth, any company that will advertise through these guys who install-by-fraud is untrustworthy.
They still have a way to go on the store yet, even for Mac users. Last night I tried to buy some Warren Zevon (RIP) and all they had was one album, and several partial albums. The annoying "partial album" results from the patchwork of rights -- they have permission for this and not for that. And you can forget about foreign material (I lived in Germany for years, and have favourite bands, whose stuff is probably on file-sharing but ain't here), and you can forget about small-time performers on indie labels.
If the RIAA members had been willing to attach a $0.99 download charge to Napster (which would have been possible) and distribute it on either a direct or a performing rights society type weighted basis, they would have made so much money. The irony is that their greed and determination to wring every farthing out of the consumer has blinded them to immense piles of dollars, begging to be picked up by whoever is first to the clue. When the class action lawyers figure this out -- which will take a while -- expect to see a bunch of class actions on behalf of the stockholders.
Let me get this straight: a Nazi in the crank-extension racket? How would a Nazi get involved in that? I mean, they're the Aryan race, perfect specimens, it says here... you know, tall blue-eyed Nordic blondes like Adolf was. Er...
Mail Boxes Etc. #732
3867 W MARKET ST, AKRON, 44333 Ohio
Tel. (330)666-5451
Fax. (330)666-5379
CORNER OF WEST MARKET/CLEVE.MASS.
http://www.maildropguide.com/go/SearchPage.asp?sta te=Ohio&IDsearch=1
A good rule of thumb is that anyone in business using a mail drop is a crook. Hence, it is good policy to always check mail drops when dealing with suspect individuals. This case instantiates the class perfectly.
You spelled ScheiB wrong, Kumpel. (Scheiss, if my ess-et doesn't come through properly... HTML is Scheiss indeed...)
Thing is, this is irrelevant. The mere presence of the same code in both the Linux kernel and any version of Sys V Unix proves nothing. The examples they have shown so far have come from prior art -- one of them is in Kernighan and Ritchie's C book (1973), for crying out loud.
Imagine yourself as a schoolteacher. Alice and Bob turn in the same paper. Who copied whom? Alice, Bob, or both of them from a third party? Now imagine Alice telling you Bob copied her paper, but she won't show you her paper, she just wants you to whack Bob one.
Put another way, who has built a completely "clean-room" unix-like system? There are thirty years of cross-pollination and code sharing here.
This PC magazine article will send SCOX higher, which is the objective of the whole game. Apart from this suit, SCO's fundamentals are entirely negative, but look at the stock. 1 year linear chart The rubes (and PC mag readers) buying it now will be shocked when the suit implodes and SCOX returns to the status quo ante.
What we're looking at here is a bunch of receivables. Ever tried to collect on a bill? (or have someone try to collect from you!)
Some of it may be from MSFT and Sun, the only two known licence holders, and some may be paper shuffling with other Canopy group shell firms. "Three Card Monte" comes to tech.
But... if Joe Windowsuser clicks on the EatMe.pif virus, the innate single-user nature of Windows means that that virus executes with all the juju it needs to steal the system. Every time. Whether Joe is the IT guru or the latest gormless area associate in marketing doesn't matter, because either way he can't protect his machine, except by not clicking on the malware.
If Suzy Opensource executes a Linux email virus, if such an animal existed in the wild for her to execute, it executes with Suzy's privileges. This means it most likely stays in its sandbox and doesn't make much trouble. Much less rewarding for the vandals that write these things, which leads to fewer vandals on this platform in a continuous spiral. The vandals go where the least effort makes the greatest splash.
It's no longer 1987 when everybody on the net was a good guy and I did everything as root. But all Windows users are de facto root all day, every day. If you run as root unnecessarily, you risk getting 0Wn3d. QED.
As it rises... it expands... but it ultimately hits a point of equilibrium. The mass of the balloon and its filling is a fixed, finite quantity. So is the degree to which it can expand, which in turn sets a fixed threshold on lowest-possible density. Therefore, there must be a point where the baloon just isn't going to rise any more. An absolute limiting altitude. The practical service ceiling of the balloon will be lower still than the absolute ceiling, because as you approach the ceiling your ascent decelerates slowly to zero all but asymptotically -- some point on that deceleration curve is all the waiting you can bear. And, for any balloon that current technology can build, it's long before any useful orbital altitude.
Now, what is possible, and I believe one startup is looking at this as a satellite launch technology, is to take the payload and booster part way up with a balloon. That reduces rocket-burn times, etc., but the cost is one that sensible people in aerospace only pay grudgingly: complexity. Occam's Razor is an important tool in aero engineering.
It might be a good thing to fly such a balloon-rocket hybrid with expendable payloads a few times before calling it man-rated, eh?
- iMovie, which ships on every Mac, and is an entry-level video programme that is still quite good -- and completely locks Adobe out of the low-end. This was once Premiere's territory. Even iMovie supports a thriving third-party plug-in community.
- Final Cut Express, which is FCP shorn of some of the true pro features, that only true pros need. This sits just about exactly where Premiere is in the market, but costs less and the interface skills you develop can be taken "upstairs." There's also the snob appeal of using the "lite" version of stuff the big Hollyweird boys are using.
- Final Cut Pro itself, which as other
/.ers have mentioned, is eating Avid's lunch.
Two of these have identical code bases, practically speaking, letting poor Premiere get beaten up from above and below at once. Apple also is extending FCP's reach (and Apple's money-making) with things such as add-on compositing software.The bottom line is, Adobe's marketroids looked at Premiere on OS X and said, "Why would I buy this product instead of...?" and the answer they came up with... was curtains for Premiere.
I'm not that old or that grey; I got mine in the forerunner of this course (http://www.clam.com/education/q1554.html) at CLAM. It was expensive (and I see by the link it still is) but it is excellent. No relationship with CLAM (Curly, Larry, And Moe?) except as a satisfied student. Also took their basic AIX.