I've been in the computer industry now going on 15 years, and the people I have seen excel in the computer science field (me included) were those who were in it because that is what they loved to do.
In the mid-late 90's, there were a lot of people in my computer scinece classes that just stood out as someone who's first real experience with a computer was when they started the undergraduate program in computer science. Then there were those who had been messing around with computers since the early 80's, and they are the ones who have always excelled beyond everyone else. I have even worked with several people who never went to college and were much better programmers than what some college grads in CS turn out to be.
I'm still working on my CS degree (took some time off), and the few remaining classes I'm taking now have most of the money-only-seekers gone.
A friend of mine in grad school years ago wrote this nice little poem about dihydrogen monoxide.
It can drown you, It can suffocate you, It can boil you, It can steam you, It can freeze you, It can crush you, It can tear you apart, And without it you'll die.
I've been in the IT arena now for 10+ years, and I have no certifications. With the four jobs I've had in those 10 years, certifications didn't matter. It was my knowledge that counted. I'm currently working on my CS degree and will have it in a few years (have to take it slow because I work full time plus have a family, et al, I only have 7 classes left).
Two jobs ago we were hiring a UNIX admin and we got a lot of applicants. The person we hired stated on his cover letter that he had *NO* certifications at all. It didn't matter because we hired him based on his knowledge. I've done basically the same thing when in interviews. The question invariably comes up about what kind of experience (school, certs, work) you have, and I'm honest - I don't have certs because I could probably teach most of the cert classes that relate to the job (I'm not talking about CCIE or oracle or other high-end stuff).
That said, though, I don't know anyone in management (above entry-level superviosr) who doesn't have a degree. I'm sure there are managers out there who don't have degrees, but in today's day and age, if you don't want to be a peon the rest of your career (read: peon = bottom of the employee-manager chain), a degree will serve you well, even more than certs. My current supervisor doesn't have a degree (and isn't currently working on one), and I have more experience than him. But its an entry-level supervisor. Two management rungs above him all have at least MBA's and most have PhD's in the areas they manage (such as the engineering fields). Neither him nor I will get much higher without a degree.
NASA TV is replaying the news conference from this morning. They have replayed it twice so far.
Its been reported that a signal was sent to Spirit this morning to try and figure out whether it was in fault mode or not, and preliminary results suggest that Spirit is in fault mode. This is preliminary data and was announced half way through the news conference.
There is as of yet no reliable information as to what the state of Spirit is.
Other posters have provided links to the famous 1984 advertisement, but I haven't seen anyone post the history of the ad. It almost wasn't shown at all because the board didn't like it at all.
Here is a good writeup on how the advertisement came about and what the initial internal reaction to the ad was in late 1983.
Its also interesting to note (and its been said in several of the media reports today), that Bush is asking that NASA's budget be increased by $1 Billion over 5 years. Lets see here... In 5 years Bush will not be president. Assuming he gets another 4 years, the $1 Billion over 5 year budget increase covers his term as president. It's going to be up to his successor(s) to actually fund the project.
Lets be realistic here. If we really wanted to return to the Moon, it shouldn't take 16+ years. Apollo didn't take nearly as long. And its yet to be seen if NASA can even handle this. Look at the major budget overruns on the ISS. Look at the several attempts at starting to plan a replacement for Shuttle.
I'm all for space exploration, and I think that we should have never abandoned the Moon. We should have continued to develop what we had going back in the 1970's - evolve the Apollo project into a permanent Moon base project, and so on.
Apparently there is a state mandated recount that has to happen. According to the article (towards the bottom):
Lieberman has asked ES&S, which also manufactured Miami-Dade County's voting machines, to provide some answers on the nonvotes by 1:30 p.m. today, when the canvassing board meets for a state-mandated recount.
Hows the recount going to be fair if they can't recount the individual votes? About all they can do is tabulate the total from each voting machine again.
As many people have already stated, this is exactly an audit trail is necessary with electronic voting.
NASA needs something to help it change, and providing it a vision besides LEO would be a vast improvement. I don't know how many times I read that NASA starts a project to design a replacement for the Shuttle and then it gets cancelled. The Shuttle was designed in the early 1970s. And they want to keep flying it for another 10+ years?
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
I used to work for one of VeriSign's competitors in the PKI world, and there are other options other than going to VeriSign. However, there were only two that I could find today on the net. Some of the others I knew about apparently don't exist anymore.
beTRUSTed, which recently purchased Baltimore's CyberTrust and OmniRoot businesses. I used Baltimore's certs all the time to avoid VeriSign.
Both of the above certificate authorities have their roots in the most current IE and Netscape/Mozilla browsers. Digital Signature Trust does a lot of stuff with banks (being owned by Identrus, which was created by a bunch of banks).
When Mars Express released Beagle-2 back on December 19th, Beagle-2 had no means of attitude control to make any course corrections nor ensure it entered the Mars atmosphere with its heat sheild pointed in the right direction and at an acceptable angle, and no means for contacting Earth until it landed and opened up. Mars Express provided all of this up until the release.
Beagle-2 then was in free-flight, from December 19th til December 25th. Thats 6 days of free flight with no way to really track Beagle-2 nor do anything about it if it were found to be off-course.
Usually a space probe is tracked via the radio signals that are sent to Earth. Speed and location are usually derived from measuring the Doppler effect on the radio singls. I haven't read anything to date about any methods the ESA was able to use after December 19th to verify that Beagle-2 was in the correct position for landing and all. I kept reading stuff saying that "Beagle-2 and Mars Express are now XXX kilometers away from each other", but I'm not sure how they deduced this other than calculating it based on the path and inclination that Beagle-2 *should have* been on. What if it started in an unexpected slow spin after release? What if its angle of attack was over the engineering limit?
Feel free to correct my knowledge if I am off-base here. I'm interested to know if/how ESA was able to contact Beagle-2 between Dec 19th and Dec 25th when it was in free flight.
.... which is a lot more power than the Hubble Space Telescope has. Hubble has the equivilant of a Intel 486 (it may be a real 486, not sure). And that was installed during the 1999 servicing mission.
I always visit this page and go down the sites they have listed where NASA TV is streamed. I usually have the best luck with either one of the KSC links, although a few times the Houston Cronicle stream has been reliable.
During high profile missions (like tonight), though, they tend to get swamped no matter where you go. I got kicked off a few times but was able to reconnected almost immediatly.
Beagle-2 and MER-A (Spirit) are not close enough together to do a search. MER-2 (Opportunity) also won't be close enough to Beagle-2.
You should consider downloading (for free) Mars24, which is a Java application that shows a map of Mars, and you can configure it to show you where all the successful landers (and Beagle-2) are located in relation to each other, plus where the Sun is shining, and other stuff.
Using nuclear power on a spacecraft, while it has been done before, faces many challenges. And the challenges really have nothing to do with the technical aspects. Its the enviornment.
I believe that the Cassini Saturn probe is using nuclear power (Saturn is too far away from the Sun to obtain enough power via solar panels). Enviornmentalists put up a big stink about Cassini having radioactive material on-board. Their argument was what if the stack blew up on launch and spewed the stuff around? I remember some sort of grass-roots effort to block its launch (which, of course, was unsuccessful, because Cassini is currently on its way to Saturn).
In watching the whole thing on NASA TV (realtime), the radio signal did disappear for about 10 minutes right after landing (and everyone at JPL was bitting their nails), but that was expected since the lander would be bounding all over the place until it came to rest.
Although the roughly 10 minutes was longer than anyone expected the signal to be gone, it wasn't all that unusual. When NASA's DSN locked back onto the signal, it was strong. It is then that NASA learned the lander landed right-side-up and the airbags were still inflated (which is very good news). Airbag deflation, petel opening, and the first survey of the landing site is up next. We might even have our first pictures within the next 12 hours or so.
And it probably doesn't help much that there are several Linux distros out there (both "free" and "commercial"), and they each have their own way of doing thigs.
I think that if Linux is to really have inroads into the desktop market, the desktop has to standardize. Sure I can train my wife to use KDE, but what if she goes to work and they use Gnome, or what if she works on a Sun SPARC and uses CDE? It would be nice to get things more standardized.
In fact its this very reason why I run fvwm2 as my window manager under Gnome at work (I dumped metacity), because I use Linux at work/home, and a Sun SPARC Ultra60 at school, and the Sun doesn't have Gnome/KDE, and I'm a user of that system, not an admin (I take classes, not admin the network). I can run FVWM on Linux/Sun/HP-UX/SGI/BSD/AIX with little effort in compilation (doesn't require Gnome/KDE libs, et al), and have a common desktop that looks, feels, and behaves the same accross *nix platforms.
My boss at work uses RedHat9/KDE/sawfish on one machine and Fedora1/Gnome/metacity on his other one. I use Fedora1/Gnome/fvwm2 on mine. Another co-worker uses Knoppix/Gnome/metacity. All of our desktop window management systems behave differently. I have a hard time using my boss's computer because the windows management behaves differently than mine, et al. So how can I teach my family all of this? I can't. Thats why some sort of standardization would be helpful.
I do, though, give up some functionality that metacity or sawfish has. But I don't want to have to learn how to use X different X11 windows management systems. Thats partly what Microsoft does have going for it. I sit down at a WinNT/Win95/Win98/WinME/Win2000/WinXP machine and the windows management is the same. There is always a "start" menu, and its organized (by default) in the same way, and its easy to change some of its behavior - you change it the exact same way regardless of what version of Windows you are on.
I have to agree with incorporating digital signatures with the email system more tightly.
I don't think that PGP will cut it because its very easy for anyone to generate their own PGP keys - a spammer can simply generate one and use it to make their email look like its "authentic". But I can create a PGP key using any name and email address, thus, hiding my true identity.
I worked in the PKI industry for a few years not long ago and used S/MIME and all, but until the infrastructure gets into place and working and reliable where an email client can take a digital signature and verify with a trusted CA that the signature is real and belongs to a real person, et al, it isn't going to get widespread adoption.
For digital signatures to really work, the process of getting one is going to have to improve accross the board to make sure that John Doe can't apply for and get a digital signature that says he is Jack Smith. My former employer had some fairly stringent checks for doing this and it worked pretty good.
Upto the end of 2001, I didn't see a rush to adopt PKI in either business or individuals, and I still don't see it picking up much steam. And then there is the adoption problem. Sure I can get Outlook to work with S/MIME. But what about mh, what about rmail, what about Pine, what about Elm, what about all the other myrid of email readers out there? You could make adoption easier by forcing the SMTP server to check the digital signature, but that adds overhead there as well, and, you'll have to get everyone to adopt it (Sendmail, Exchange, Postfix, Exim, Oracle Corraboration Suite, Lotus Notes, etc....)
Where I work (a direct marketer) we do have a legitimate reason to send out large volumes of email, and we often do (on the order of 50,000+ messages a day at times).
And its all an opt-in type system, where the people (our associates) have indicated they want to receive our updates via email, and they can opt-out at any time, all on-line. There are occasions that we do get blacklisted because large ISPs sometimes will blacklist a domain when a large volume of email comes from it. So we have to un-blacklist ourselves by explaining that all of our email recipients are independant associates of our company and have opted-in to receive our email.
Slowing the system down to do only 8000 messages a day is not acceptable. And no, we don't use MSFT for it. We use a combination of Java, Apache, and Postfix on Linux.
Sending a authentication message back to the sender that requires the sender to do something can be nice, but...
Say I send out 5000 spam messages and specifically make sure that the message is crafted in such a way that it will get marked as spam, and I don't use my email address as the sender. Instead, I use your email address as the sender. You'll be the one getting 5000 authentication messages, not me.
Increase the scale of that example. Lets do 1 million messages. I'll be able to do a DoS via email to most anyone I want to.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 3, which fails after liftoff.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 4. First successful Mars fly-by in July 1965. The craft returns the first pictures of the Martian surface.
1964 Soviets launch Zond 2. Mars fly-by. Contact lost in May 1965.
1969 U.S. launches Mariner 6 and 7. The two spacecraft fly by Mars in July and August 1969 and send back images and data.
1971 Soviets launch Mars 2. Orbiter and lander reach Mars in November 1971. Lander crashes but orbiter sends back images and data.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 8, which fails during liftoff.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 9. Orbiter reaches Mars in November 1971, provides global mapping of Martian surface and studies atmosphere.
1973 Soviets launch Mars 5. Orbiter reaches Mars in February 1974 and collects data.
1975 U.S. launches Viking 1 and Viking 2. The two orbiter/lander sets reach Mars in 1976. Orbiters image Martian surface. Landers send back images and take surface samples.
1992 U.S. launches Mars Observer. Contact lost with orbiter in August 1993, three days before scheduled insertion into Martian orbit.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Global Surveyor. Orbiter reaches Mars in September 1997 and maps the planet. Still in operation.
1996 Soviets launch Mars 96, which fails after launch and falls back into Earth's atmosphere.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Pathfinder. Lander and rover arrive on Mars in July 1997, in the most-watched space event ever. Lander sends back thousands of images, and Sojourner rover roams the surface, sending back 550 images.
1998 Japan launches Nozomi. Orbiter suffers glitch in December 1998, forcing circuitous course correction. Mission fails in 2003.
1998 U.S. launches Mars Climate Orbiter. Spacecraft destroyed while entering Martian orbit in September 1999.
1999 U.S. launches Mars Polar Lander. Contact lost with lander during descent in December 1999. Two microprobes "hitchhiking" on lander also fail.
2001 U.S. launches Mars Odyssey. Orbiter reaches Mars in October 2001 to detect water and shallow buried ice and study the environment. It can also act as a communications relay for future Mars landers.
2003 European Space Agency launches Mars Express. Orbiter and lander to arrive at Mars in December 2003.
2003 U.S. launches Mars Expedition Rovers. Spirit and Opportunity rovers due to land on Mars in January 2004.
Unless AFS has changed signifigantly since the last time I used it (1998), I don't know if it would be the best solution.
AFS was a nice filesystem to work with, but it took more to maintain it than our regular NFS mounts. The local (client-side) caching of files was nice though. So was the concept of having a master read/write volume and being able to then replicate that volume to read-only volumes, and replicating them only when we wanted to. So we could put new programs on the read/write volumes, test them out, and, when it all was tested, "release" the volumes, et al.
Access permissions are definatly different than your samba/CIF/NFS filesystems though. Its akin to Kerberos where you have to have a "token", and your "token" has to have rights to the file in order to read the file. And "tokens" used to not be a obtain-once-and-use-forever thing. They expired every 24 hours, so every 24 hours you'd have to re-authenticate.
One thing that we found we didn't like (this was with AFS 3.3/3.4) was that the cache of files on the client machine was not encrypted. So if someone knew how the cache was structured, they could retreive the files in the cache without having any AFS tokens (the cache exists on local disk, not in AFS space). This may have changed.
One other thing we had a problem with is when the AFS volume(s) would disappear from the client, and/or if the client lost contact with the cell AFS servers. The machine would become useless until it came back. This was all on UNIX (Sun, HP, SGI, BSD, Linux). Part of the problem was that/usr/local was in AFS space and contained most userland programs used.
.... is
Here. Its gonna connect 250,000 homes to a 5.9 Tbyte switched network fabric.
A note about the funding for the project from the above web site:
The UTOPIA business case indicates that wholesale usage fees, charged to service providers based on their use of the network, will generate enough revenue to pay the capital investment costs, operating expenses, and debt service obligations associated with building and maintaing the network. No taxpayer money will be needed. However, in order to secure a competitive interest rate on the bonds that UTOPIA will issue to cover the cost of network construction, member cities may pledge to guarantee some of the debt.
So Utah tax payers (me included) won't be paying for this from our taxes. I can't wait, however, until ISPs in Utah start passing the cost of the whole thing onto me (the consumer). Sure I can get Gbit speeds. The "basic" package may cost $28 (probably at speeds comparable to current cable), but wait until you ask for a full Gbit/s. I can get a DS3 (45 Mbits/sec) for about $20,000 per month right now. No thank you. I'm happy with my 640k/256k DSL at $50.
I live in Utah (no offence taken to those who would rather not live in Utah), and I don't see this happening anytime soon. In fact, this is the first I've heard of it (and I keep up with the news around here)
Given that Salt Lake City (where I live and work) is in a budget crunch like most everywhere else, I can't see where the money will come from to lay fiber everywhere. The cost of DSL is about $50 a month for 640down/256up, $40 for 256/256, and Comcast cable costs about $45 (without cable TV). While most peole I work with have DSL or cable, I don't see the masses demanding high speed.
There was another compnay based in American Fork (next to Lindon and SCO) that was a startup and was trying to implement something similar, but eventually found out the cost was just too high and not enough people were willing to pay for it.
Fiber could be laid to neighborhoods and then branch copper off from there to the actual homes, but even that's going to cost a bunch, not to talk about the maintenance.
And only $470 million to lay fiber directly to 248,000 homes? To me that sounds like an underestimate. What about the network equipment and customer support and..... to support those 248,000 homes?
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In the mid-late 90's, there were a lot of people in my computer scinece classes that just stood out as someone who's first real experience with a computer was when they started the undergraduate program in computer science. Then there were those who had been messing around with computers since the early 80's, and they are the ones who have always excelled beyond everyone else. I have even worked with several people who never went to college and were much better programmers than what some college grads in CS turn out to be.
I'm still working on my CS degree (took some time off), and the few remaining classes I'm taking now have most of the money-only-seekers gone.
Two jobs ago we were hiring a UNIX admin and we got a lot of applicants. The person we hired stated on his cover letter that he had *NO* certifications at all. It didn't matter because we hired him based on his knowledge. I've done basically the same thing when in interviews. The question invariably comes up about what kind of experience (school, certs, work) you have, and I'm honest - I don't have certs because I could probably teach most of the cert classes that relate to the job (I'm not talking about CCIE or oracle or other high-end stuff).
That said, though, I don't know anyone in management (above entry-level superviosr) who doesn't have a degree. I'm sure there are managers out there who don't have degrees, but in today's day and age, if you don't want to be a peon the rest of your career (read: peon = bottom of the employee-manager chain), a degree will serve you well, even more than certs. My current supervisor doesn't have a degree (and isn't currently working on one), and I have more experience than him. But its an entry-level supervisor. Two management rungs above him all have at least MBA's and most have PhD's in the areas they manage (such as the engineering fields). Neither him nor I will get much higher without a degree.
Its been reported that a signal was sent to Spirit this morning to try and figure out whether it was in fault mode or not, and preliminary results suggest that Spirit is in fault mode. This is preliminary data and was announced half way through the news conference.
There is as of yet no reliable information as to what the state of Spirit is.
Here is a good writeup on how the advertisement came about and what the initial internal reaction to the ad was in late 1983.
Lets be realistic here. If we really wanted to return to the Moon, it shouldn't take 16+ years. Apollo didn't take nearly as long. And its yet to be seen if NASA can even handle this. Look at the major budget overruns on the ISS. Look at the several attempts at starting to plan a replacement for Shuttle.
I'm all for space exploration, and I think that we should have never abandoned the Moon. We should have continued to develop what we had going back in the 1970's - evolve the Apollo project into a permanent Moon base project, and so on.
Hows the recount going to be fair if they can't recount the individual votes? About all they can do is tabulate the total from each voting machine again.
As many people have already stated, this is exactly an audit trail is necessary with electronic voting.
The novotes (134) was 1.3% of the vote. Re-read the article. If you do the math you can figure out how many people voted, roughly 13,000.
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
beTRUSTed, which recently purchased Baltimore's CyberTrust and OmniRoot businesses. I used Baltimore's certs all the time to avoid VeriSign.
Digital Signature Trust, a subsidiary of Identrus. I've used their TrustID certs to avoid giving money to VeriSign as well.
Both of the above certificate authorities have their roots in the most current IE and Netscape/Mozilla browsers. Digital Signature Trust does a lot of stuff with banks (being owned by Identrus, which was created by a bunch of banks).
Beagle-2 then was in free-flight, from December 19th til December 25th. Thats 6 days of free flight with no way to really track Beagle-2 nor do anything about it if it were found to be off-course.
Usually a space probe is tracked via the radio signals that are sent to Earth. Speed and location are usually derived from measuring the Doppler effect on the radio singls. I haven't read anything to date about any methods the ESA was able to use after December 19th to verify that Beagle-2 was in the correct position for landing and all. I kept reading stuff saying that "Beagle-2 and Mars Express are now XXX kilometers away from each other", but I'm not sure how they deduced this other than calculating it based on the path and inclination that Beagle-2 *should have* been on. What if it started in an unexpected slow spin after release? What if its angle of attack was over the engineering limit?
Feel free to correct my knowledge if I am off-base here. I'm interested to know if/how ESA was able to contact Beagle-2 between Dec 19th and Dec 25th when it was in free flight.
.... which is a lot more power than the Hubble Space Telescope has. Hubble has the equivilant of a Intel 486 (it may be a real 486, not sure). And that was installed during the 1999 servicing mission.
64 bytes from spirit.mars.solarsystem: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=960000 ms
--- spirit.mars.solarsystem ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 960000 ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 960000/960000/960000/960000 ms, pipe 2
During high profile missions (like tonight), though, they tend to get swamped no matter where you go. I got kicked off a few times but was able to reconnected almost immediatly.
Beagle-2 and MER-A (Spirit) are not close enough together to do a search. MER-2 (Opportunity) also won't be close enough to Beagle-2.
You should consider downloading (for free) Mars24, which is a Java application that shows a map of Mars, and you can configure it to show you where all the successful landers (and Beagle-2) are located in relation to each other, plus where the Sun is shining, and other stuff.
I believe that the Cassini Saturn probe is using nuclear power (Saturn is too far away from the Sun to obtain enough power via solar panels). Enviornmentalists put up a big stink about Cassini having radioactive material on-board. Their argument was what if the stack blew up on launch and spewed the stuff around? I remember some sort of grass-roots effort to block its launch (which, of course, was unsuccessful, because Cassini is currently on its way to Saturn).
Although the roughly 10 minutes was longer than anyone expected the signal to be gone, it wasn't all that unusual. When NASA's DSN locked back onto the signal, it was strong. It is then that NASA learned the lander landed right-side-up and the airbags were still inflated (which is very good news). Airbag deflation, petel opening, and the first survey of the landing site is up next. We might even have our first pictures within the next 12 hours or so.
I think that if Linux is to really have inroads into the desktop market, the desktop has to standardize. Sure I can train my wife to use KDE, but what if she goes to work and they use Gnome, or what if she works on a Sun SPARC and uses CDE? It would be nice to get things more standardized.
In fact its this very reason why I run fvwm2 as my window manager under Gnome at work (I dumped metacity), because I use Linux at work/home, and a Sun SPARC Ultra60 at school, and the Sun doesn't have Gnome/KDE, and I'm a user of that system, not an admin (I take classes, not admin the network). I can run FVWM on Linux/Sun/HP-UX/SGI/BSD/AIX with little effort in compilation (doesn't require Gnome/KDE libs, et al), and have a common desktop that looks, feels, and behaves the same accross *nix platforms.
My boss at work uses RedHat9/KDE/sawfish on one machine and Fedora1/Gnome/metacity on his other one. I use Fedora1/Gnome/fvwm2 on mine. Another co-worker uses Knoppix/Gnome/metacity. All of our desktop window management systems behave differently. I have a hard time using my boss's computer because the windows management behaves differently than mine, et al. So how can I teach my family all of this? I can't. Thats why some sort of standardization would be helpful.
I do, though, give up some functionality that metacity or sawfish has. But I don't want to have to learn how to use X different X11 windows management systems. Thats partly what Microsoft does have going for it. I sit down at a WinNT/Win95/Win98/WinME/Win2000/WinXP machine and the windows management is the same. There is always a "start" menu, and its organized (by default) in the same way, and its easy to change some of its behavior - you change it the exact same way regardless of what version of Windows you are on.
I don't think that PGP will cut it because its very easy for anyone to generate their own PGP keys - a spammer can simply generate one and use it to make their email look like its "authentic". But I can create a PGP key using any name and email address, thus, hiding my true identity.
I worked in the PKI industry for a few years not long ago and used S/MIME and all, but until the infrastructure gets into place and working and reliable where an email client can take a digital signature and verify with a trusted CA that the signature is real and belongs to a real person, et al, it isn't going to get widespread adoption.
For digital signatures to really work, the process of getting one is going to have to improve accross the board to make sure that John Doe can't apply for and get a digital signature that says he is Jack Smith. My former employer had some fairly stringent checks for doing this and it worked pretty good.
Upto the end of 2001, I didn't see a rush to adopt PKI in either business or individuals, and I still don't see it picking up much steam. And then there is the adoption problem. Sure I can get Outlook to work with S/MIME. But what about mh, what about rmail, what about Pine, what about Elm, what about all the other myrid of email readers out there? You could make adoption easier by forcing the SMTP server to check the digital signature, but that adds overhead there as well, and, you'll have to get everyone to adopt it (Sendmail, Exchange, Postfix, Exim, Oracle Corraboration Suite, Lotus Notes, etc....)
And its all an opt-in type system, where the people (our associates) have indicated they want to receive our updates via email, and they can opt-out at any time, all on-line. There are occasions that we do get blacklisted because large ISPs sometimes will blacklist a domain when a large volume of email comes from it. So we have to un-blacklist ourselves by explaining that all of our email recipients are independant associates of our company and have opted-in to receive our email.
Slowing the system down to do only 8000 messages a day is not acceptable. And no, we don't use MSFT for it. We use a combination of Java, Apache, and Postfix on Linux.
Say I send out 5000 spam messages and specifically make sure that the message is crafted in such a way that it will get marked as spam, and I don't use my email address as the sender. Instead, I use your email address as the sender. You'll be the one getting 5000 authentication messages, not me.
Increase the scale of that example. Lets do 1 million messages. I'll be able to do a DoS via email to most anyone I want to.
Beagle 2's official site.
Space.com's Mars Rover section.
European Space Agency's Mars Express website.
Major Mars missions, 1964 to 2004:
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 3, which fails after liftoff.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 4. First successful Mars fly-by in July 1965. The craft returns the first pictures of the Martian surface.
1964 Soviets launch Zond 2. Mars fly-by. Contact lost in May 1965.
1969 U.S. launches Mariner 6 and 7. The two spacecraft fly by Mars in July and August 1969 and send back images and data.
1971 Soviets launch Mars 2. Orbiter and lander reach Mars in November 1971. Lander crashes but orbiter sends back images and data.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 8, which fails during liftoff.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 9. Orbiter reaches Mars in November 1971, provides global mapping of Martian surface and studies atmosphere.
1973 Soviets launch Mars 5. Orbiter reaches Mars in February 1974 and collects data.
1975 U.S. launches Viking 1 and Viking 2. The two orbiter/lander sets reach Mars in 1976. Orbiters image Martian surface. Landers send back images and take surface samples.
1992 U.S. launches Mars Observer. Contact lost with orbiter in August 1993, three days before scheduled insertion into Martian orbit.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Global Surveyor. Orbiter reaches Mars in September 1997 and maps the planet. Still in operation.
1996 Soviets launch Mars 96, which fails after launch and falls back into Earth's atmosphere.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Pathfinder. Lander and rover arrive on Mars in July 1997, in the most-watched space event ever. Lander sends back thousands of images, and Sojourner rover roams the surface, sending back 550 images.
1998 Japan launches Nozomi. Orbiter suffers glitch in December 1998, forcing circuitous course correction. Mission fails in 2003.
1998 U.S. launches Mars Climate Orbiter. Spacecraft destroyed while entering Martian orbit in September 1999.
1999 U.S. launches Mars Polar Lander. Contact lost with lander during descent in December 1999. Two microprobes "hitchhiking" on lander also fail.
2001 U.S. launches Mars Odyssey. Orbiter reaches Mars in October 2001 to detect water and shallow buried ice and study the environment. It can also act as a communications relay for future Mars landers.
2003 European Space Agency launches Mars Express. Orbiter and lander to arrive at Mars in December 2003.
2003 U.S. launches Mars Expedition Rovers. Spirit and Opportunity rovers due to land on Mars in January 2004.
AFS was a nice filesystem to work with, but it took more to maintain it than our regular NFS mounts. The local (client-side) caching of files was nice though. So was the concept of having a master read/write volume and being able to then replicate that volume to read-only volumes, and replicating them only when we wanted to. So we could put new programs on the read/write volumes, test them out, and, when it all was tested, "release" the volumes, et al.
Access permissions are definatly different than your samba/CIF/NFS filesystems though. Its akin to Kerberos where you have to have a "token", and your "token" has to have rights to the file in order to read the file. And "tokens" used to not be a obtain-once-and-use-forever thing. They expired every 24 hours, so every 24 hours you'd have to re-authenticate.
One thing that we found we didn't like (this was with AFS 3.3/3.4) was that the cache of files on the client machine was not encrypted. So if someone knew how the cache was structured, they could retreive the files in the cache without having any AFS tokens (the cache exists on local disk, not in AFS space). This may have changed.
One other thing we had a problem with is when the AFS volume(s) would disappear from the client, and/or if the client lost contact with the cell AFS servers. The machine would become useless until it came back. This was all on UNIX (Sun, HP, SGI, BSD, Linux). Part of the problem was that /usr/local was in AFS space and contained most userland programs used.
A note about the funding for the project from the above web site:
The UTOPIA business case indicates that wholesale usage fees, charged to service providers based on their use of the network, will generate enough revenue to pay the capital investment costs, operating expenses, and debt service obligations associated with building and maintaing the network. No taxpayer money will be needed. However, in order to secure a competitive interest rate on the bonds that UTOPIA will issue to cover the cost of network construction, member cities may pledge to guarantee some of the debt.
So Utah tax payers (me included) won't be paying for this from our taxes. I can't wait, however, until ISPs in Utah start passing the cost of the whole thing onto me (the consumer). Sure I can get Gbit speeds. The "basic" package may cost $28 (probably at speeds comparable to current cable), but wait until you ask for a full Gbit/s. I can get a DS3 (45 Mbits/sec) for about $20,000 per month right now. No thank you. I'm happy with my 640k/256k DSL at $50.
Given that Salt Lake City (where I live and work) is in a budget crunch like most everywhere else, I can't see where the money will come from to lay fiber everywhere. The cost of DSL is about $50 a month for 640down/256up, $40 for 256/256, and Comcast cable costs about $45 (without cable TV). While most peole I work with have DSL or cable, I don't see the masses demanding high speed.
There was another compnay based in American Fork (next to Lindon and SCO) that was a startup and was trying to implement something similar, but eventually found out the cost was just too high and not enough people were willing to pay for it.
Fiber could be laid to neighborhoods and then branch copper off from there to the actual homes, but even that's going to cost a bunch, not to talk about the maintenance.
And only $470 million to lay fiber directly to 248,000 homes? To me that sounds like an underestimate. What about the network equipment and customer support and..... to support those 248,000 homes?