The Lego robots are incredibly useful for demonstrating how programs are written so if you can get a few take them along. Kids can take turns programming the robots to do simple tasks and then they can all watch the results.
What better course of study to accent your ability to deal with software than another course of study that teaches you just exactly *HOW* all those electrons make the magic happen? I generally advise students to begin with a BSEE and then get a Master's in CS but it works the other way around, too. The logic is inescapable: your job prospects are enhanced greatly by the BSEE and your prospects as an engineer are enhanced by your ability to program. So many CS majors are clueless about the hardware; I've had them demand that I teach them exactly why, for instance, they cannot control their dorm room's lights with the parallel port on their desktop. After all, the programming for such a task is trivial! The combination of software and hardware is a world-beater.
when I realized that living and working close to a large, urban area was no longer enjoyable and even dangerous. We moved to an agricultural area that is less risky from a terrorist standpoint just because of the paucity of victims and lack of headline material ("suicide bomber kills 3 pheasants, a rabbit, and 14 beetles"). It takes a bit more energy to make a living in rural America (or rural anywhere I expect) but the rewards are great even disregarding the enhanced safety. No crowded freeways, a lower noise threshold and abundant recreation (fishing, boating, hunting, bird watching, etc.). Plus, the advent of the Internet and high bandwidth has made moving to the country easier than ever. Overhead is less expensive too; I pay $350 a month for about 600 sq feet of office space in downtown and a 3-br/2bath house in a nice area is less than $100k!
Large ships no longer use lighthouses for their navigation. For the most part the lighthouses mark points of land and ships tend to avoid points of land. Navigators on ships use a combination of radar and GPS (often combined into one collision avoidance device) to stay within traffic "lanes" that are often only shown on charts (no buoys or anything).
While working on drill ships, tankers, fishing trawlers and other large vessels I can only remember using a lighthouse one time; to calibrate the compass on a drill ship for a USCG inspection (it had to be in the log).
On sailboats, in kayaks, and other small vessels I've used lighthouses a lot. But I don't think small vessels count. Shipping companies pay more taxes and donate more money to politicians than kayakers and yachties do, so my guess is that as soon as they are done with a technology it'll be on the blocks despite any possible uses for the small-boat seaman.
So lighthouses, along with sextants, will fall to the "I'll take two - one as a spare" GPS mentality (you would be amazed at the numbers of sailors who head for Tahiti with no knowledge of navigation other than reading their GPS). Not much use fighting it and, with any luck, they might even be right. Most lighthouses have been decommissioned anyway and the few that are active tend to be automated so it's not like any jobs are at stake.
Just that they are nice to look at and, in the fog in a kayak, they're nice to listen to. But governments don't much care about kayaks.
banks make money out of thin air? How does that work? Or are you just stupid?
Ok... you're an AC so you'll never read this, but I thought I'd tell you anyway. Banks "create" money under rigid rules that limit how much they can create (M2). It works like this:
You go to your bank and request a loan for a used (but nice) car. When it's approved you get a check which you deposit into your account. You write a check to the owner for the car and he deposits it in his bank. No money existed for this entire series of transactions. It was "created" by the bank not printed by the Treasury.
The only "real" money (M1) from this deal would be if the seller of the used car cashed that check and received the proceeds in currency. But it's more likely that he(she) would have written a check to pay off the remaining balance on the car and then written another check to buy another car.
"And I hope in 2021 I'm a billionaire and people are posting my yearbook pictures to take cheap shots at me too!"
You don't have until 2021; Bill Gates was a billionaire by 1987 - only 4 years from the day those pictures were taken. So... better get at it. Time's a-wasting.
Along with Discovery Channel and TLC; wtf happened to the Travel Channel? All Vegas, All The Time? And what's with the poker shows? I never thought anything could be more boring than watching golf on tv but, damn!, I was wrong.
PBS still draws me back, over and over. Too bad it runs commercials now.
When the local Public Utility District in Grant County (Central Washington State) invited local ISPs to partner with them to bring fiber to the home, we all thought it was a great idea. But after three years of broken promises we discovered that they were funelling public money to favored outside businesses via secret contracts in a scheme that appeared to many of us like an attempt to control the entire system; end-users and all. This would have been in direct violation of the legislation which allowed these Utilities (which are municipalities under Washington State law) to enter the telecommunications industry.
Expenses were hidden, extra employees hired, an expensive Network Operations Center was built, money from tax-free bonds was spent in a possibly unlawful way (an SEC investigation is underway), and business plans drawn up with very little regard to reality. Now they are in the middle of a bunch of lawsuits (one of which, strangely enough, is to recover money they practically forced onto the business that received it). Sooner or later there will be anti-trust litigation as well.
Somewhere around $160 million in public money was spent (no one knows exactly how much) to fiber up about 30% of a rural county (4300 customers so far) and now we discover that even 50 years wouldn't pay for this system unless the charges were around $80 a month.
The reality of this (to use a favorite phrase from one of the elected officials who allowed this to happen) is that bureaucrats don't make good businessmen. There is a reason the Soviet Union went bankrupt, folks, and that reason is "incompetence".
While it may seem unfair that private business fights the encroachment of municipalities into their turf, it seems unfair to the businesses to use their tax money to put them out of the game.
under the theory that traffic accidents are fewer if there are more cars stopped more often. So, while motorists think that traffic should move more smoothly, their local bureaucrats are thinking exactly the opposite. Plus it boosts revenue from all the red lights frustrated drivers run.
My wife and I spent 5 years on a 32 foot sailboat cruising around the Pacific with our two children (a girl 2-1/2 when we left and a boy who was born along the way). There is not much room for extras on a 32-foot sailboat but there was enough room for books and for legos. Our daughter would make elaborate constructions from her legos while we were anchored or in a port but then we would have to break them up and store them away when we went out to sea again. She hated this but there was no alternative if we didn't want things flying around the boat underway (you would be AMAZED at the amount of motion in a sailboat at sea... we had bruises everywhere). Then, safe in the next anchorage, she'd make something even better. Really, all the toy a kid needs because with legos and an imagination they can make almost any toy. But I would advise you to buy the standard legos and not the themed sets because the kids can do more with the regular blocks.
We have built a dozen RAID5 file servers running Linux and used a 3Ware Escalade hardware controller every time. Every machine has worked flawlessly and continues to work. This includes our off-site backup system. Nothing else has worked as well and, for the $150 or so the card costs, it's well worth using.
If Linux, Unix and Macintosh have a total of roughly 10% of all desktops, then the 90% that are left (all running some form of MS operating system) must all be infected. Hmm... not too farfetched from what I can tell.
National Public Radio has an audio link on this page http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=3&pr gDate=8-Oct-2004 ("Campaign Security Screening Crowds for Doubters) in which citizens were denied entrance to appearances by President Bush. In several of the cases people wearing Kerry t-shirts were told they could not enter because the "secret service" had "flagged" them. One man, who tried to vouch for his companions, was removed because he had also been flagged simply because he was with them. One woman was refused entry to a venue because she had a t-shirt over her arm (not wearing it) advocating abortion rights. Several of the people were threatened with arrest by the Secret Service. There was at least one arrest at a location by local police who said they were acting at the behest of the "White House" while the Mayor claimed that they were acting on a request by the Secret Service.
The Secret Service denies arresting people simply because they are wearing Kerry t-shirts but admit that they would question anyone who was being removed from a venue by security people. While it is lawful for a private function to deny entry to people on whatever grounds they choose, for a Presidential appearance which has been paid for by the taxpayers, it is unlawful (and un-American) to deny any citizen entry for simply wearing a t-shirt that indicates opposition to that President.
While the idea of public broadband has always been an attractive one for slashdotters, the incursion into this arena by Grant County PUD in central Washington State stands as an example of why we don't want bureaucrats meddling in business.
In this state the PUDs are treated as municipalities under the law and are given a set of rules under which they can operate. Broadband and electrical power are different services so it took an act of the Legislature to allow them to enter the market. The legislature, under some pressure from the big telecoms who were afraid that the PUDs would "cherry pick" the larger communities and leave the rural people to fend for themselves, allowed the PUDs to be "wholesale" only. The first thing Grant County PUD did was ignore that law.
Grant County PUD had first partnered up with two local ISPs which charged $20 to $25 per month for the broadband servoces back at the inception of the project in 1999. But at the same time the Manager of that PUD was trying to attract an outside competitor, also a utility provider, to enter the market in this county at a subsidized rate of $8 per month.
The PUD did attract that utility but only by entering into secret (and illegal) agreements to subsidize the program at cost plus 10%. So the new provider would risk nothing and could make 10% on the rate-payer's money even if they gave away their services for free. Then the PUD employees threw as many of the new customers to this new competitor as possible while their managers used their position as investors to pressure prices to a point where the commercial ISPs could no longer compete profitably.
It was only after the PUD had spent several million dollars propping up this outside provider that the story became known. Meanwhile, the PUD had raised the electrical rates to cover the $100 Million cost of fibering only 1/3 of the County but lied when asked about it. The Commissioners and Managers claimed that the rate increases were due to other factors. However their own emails, obtained under the State's public disclosure act, showed this to be untrue.
Agricultural interests were incensed because they use a lot of that electrical power. A large farm might have a $500k yearly power bill for their irrigation pumps. While 4% isn't much for my house, it's a chunk of money on a half-million dollars.
It took almost a year after the discovery of the secret contracts and a State Auditor's report which also found illegal and improper actions, to rid ourselves of the management team that led us into this debacle. The largest ISPs in the area, including the first two to partner up with the PUD, went out of business and were gobbled up by another outside competitor; costing jobs and an economic drain on the communities' resources. The Commissioners who were supposed to keep a rein on the PUD managers are now up for re-election and facing some tough questions.
The problem with bureaucrats going into business is that, essentially, they don't understand profit and loss. It's all other people's money and if they make a mistake they just raise the rates to cover it. We could have fibered this County up for the money they spent, had they spent that money wisely. Instead they created a NOC they thought they could make profitable (not at $3 million a year to operate they couldn't), they installed fiber to the areas where their managers lived regardless of population density (it turns out the telecoms fears of "cherry picking" were well-founded, but the managers weren't smart enough to do it that way), and they drove jobs and money out of the area.
Had they simply created the infrastructure for the product instead of getting involved in creating subsidies for favored businesses we would have been ok. But that's the problem. Bureaucrats don't make good business people.
So if you don't want to see jobs go away, money disappear and your power rates rise, treat the entrance of government into business with caution. These things are run by politicians, not business people. And it's not their money.
systems qualify as "fail-safe" not just for the (good) reasons you cite but because having a 5,000 lb airplane descend onto my house (or car or RV or whatever) at 25mph is not my idea of "fail-safe".
Yet another reason why "personal air-cars" are not likely in our future. Popular Mechanics notwithstanding.
Plus they would probably take all of the fun out of flying.:)
Coherant is one. I have the software and the book for this non-existant OS that I bought in the early 90s. Minix is another but has been used to "prove" that the first Linux kernel couldn't have been written by one person. So perhaps Minix exists after all.
Then there is Xenix. SCO sold that for years after Microsoft sent it their way. Bill Gates hasn't mentioned Xenix in a long time so it must not exist either.
But if Linux doesn't exist, what was Caldera selling all those years (before it became SCO)?
With over 30 years of experience as a pilot...
on
A Flying Leap for Cars?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
myself, I've become convinced that many pilots are incompetent much of the time and all pilots are incompetent occasionally. And this is after a rigorous training program. Real aircraft are much more difficult to fly in real time than MS Flight Simulator (or *any* simulator).
The idea of "an airplane in every garage" has been around at least since the 1940s judging by my recollections of Popular Mechanics articles alone. But it never got closer than the 1950s. I can remember airports with hundreds of private aircraft (Stinsons, Luscombes, Cessnas, Pipers, Beechcrafts, etc) tied down in lines. Those lines of airplanes are conspicuously absent at the few airports left which cater to private flyers. A testimony to the expense of building, maintaining and operating even the simplest flying machines.
The ubiquitous "air-car" could only work if there were strict control over both the air-car and the pathways it travels combined with fail-safe recovery techniques in the event of mechanical failure. In other words, give the "pilot" control only over what time he leaves and his destination. Everything else - altitude, speed, course - is controlled by a common system that can keep theat vehicle - and every other vehicle - on the path it's been assigned to.
The air-car would also have to be able to stop and maintain altitude and position in mid-air in order to reduce the chances of collisions.
This combination of control and mechanical reliability would be *very* expensive not even including the cost of fuel. It would take a society that was dedicated to the premise that some very rich people could free themselves of ground transportation while the rest of us paid for the infrastructure.
Which is basically what we do with helicopters and personal jets now.
You can get the same effect on IRC...
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 1
Except, of course, most of the "girls" are really guys. But since you're not gonna get laid anyway, wireless up your PDA and go for it.
There used to be more file servers. When we moved them to Linux file servers we would find that a critical software application would migrate to some server-side-critical application (like a run-time of MS SQL) and we would have to move the entire box to 2000 server.
Workstations are even harder. We migrate them and the users bitch about not being able to use their "favorite software". Only once, 2 weeks ago, did we find users overjoyed to get Linux. A local Aquatic Park had the lifegards surfing on their XP box until it was unusable. Since it had to be blown off anyway, I threw a Knoppix 3.4 disk into the CD and did the install, configured the users, their email, the printer and the network, and showed them where the apps were. So far they are still happy with the functionality. Plus no viruses and no spyware.
It is very difficult to move people away from even the "standard" apps (Office, etc.). When it comes to specialized applications it is impossible; for now.
on my (admittedly small) web site between May and (so far, at least) July. This, after a steady under-12% usage for the past year. The site is the "home page" for our ISP and featured a story about the problems of MSIE with links to Opera and Mozilla so perhaps this might account for some of the increase. Interesting, however.
for millions of US residents who happen to live in rural areas. The Feds have cleverly sold off the UHF frequencies above channel 50 and those areas which have been re-transmitting regular tv on those channels are effectively out of luck. In my area of central Washington state the retransmission of Spokane broadcast television channels ceased in January of 2004 when the owners of those repeaters simply turned them off rather than attempt to relicense. Of course, those who live in cities can get cable and there is satellite. But free tv in rural America is only a memory now for many and soon for most.
What is even more amazing is that no one seems that upset about it.
to an ISP I was working for several years ago. The upstream provider had not (unbeknownst to us) paid his bills to *his* backbone provider. The typical "we are contesting some of the bills" trick. When the backbone provider finally had enough (3 or 4 months down the road) they jerked the IP space. We received a telephone call saying that the IP space would be null-routed at 5pm that day!!! By this time our little uplink provider had secured bandwidth on another link but told us he had no IP address space (long story and it's still in court I think).
The net result was that we had to hire a lawyer to threaten the backbone provider if they jerked the IP space (all routed via BGP) until we could secure new addresses. It took about a week to find another system with enough IP space and then get our system rerouted and readdressed. Lots of long nights.
So if this is a similar case - and it appears that it is - my sympathies lay with the ISP that is trying to stay in business. They don't want the IP space permanently; just long enough to secure new addresses and re-route. I can't see how this will break the Internet as long as the temporary injunction is not permanent. We certainly would have done the same thing.
that the page for reading the responses included a large banner ad for Microsoft that claimed they take your security seriously and saying, "visit microsoft.com/it/security/IT today.
Slashdot Mirror
The Lego robots are incredibly useful for demonstrating how programs are written so if you can get a few take them along. Kids can take turns programming the robots to do simple tasks and then they can all watch the results.
What better course of study to accent your ability to deal with software than another course of study that teaches you just exactly *HOW* all those electrons make the magic happen? I generally advise students to begin with a BSEE and then get a Master's in CS but it works the other way around, too. The logic is inescapable: your job prospects are enhanced greatly by the BSEE and your prospects as an engineer are enhanced by your ability to program. So many CS majors are clueless about the hardware; I've had them demand that I teach them exactly why, for instance, they cannot control their dorm room's lights with the parallel port on their desktop. After all, the programming for such a task is trivial! The combination of software and hardware is a world-beater.
He's been a twit for at least a decade. In this changing world, it's nice to know one thing is a constant.
when I realized that living and working close to a large, urban area was no longer enjoyable and even dangerous. We moved to an agricultural area that is less risky from a terrorist standpoint just because of the paucity of victims and lack of headline material ("suicide bomber kills 3 pheasants, a rabbit, and 14 beetles"). It takes a bit more energy to make a living in rural America (or rural anywhere I expect) but the rewards are great even disregarding the enhanced safety. No crowded freeways, a lower noise threshold and abundant recreation (fishing, boating, hunting, bird watching, etc.). Plus, the advent of the Internet and high bandwidth has made moving to the country easier than ever. Overhead is less expensive too; I pay $350 a month for about 600 sq feet of office space in downtown and a 3-br/2bath house in a nice area is less than $100k!
Large ships no longer use lighthouses for their navigation. For the most part the lighthouses mark points of land and ships tend to avoid points of land. Navigators on ships use a combination of radar and GPS (often combined into one collision avoidance device) to stay within traffic "lanes" that are often only shown on charts (no buoys or anything).
While working on drill ships, tankers, fishing trawlers and other large vessels I can only remember using a lighthouse one time; to calibrate the compass on a drill ship for a USCG inspection (it had to be in the log).
On sailboats, in kayaks, and other small vessels I've used lighthouses a lot. But I don't think small vessels count. Shipping companies pay more taxes and donate more money to politicians than kayakers and yachties do, so my guess is that as soon as they are done with a technology it'll be on the blocks despite any possible uses for the small-boat seaman.
So lighthouses, along with sextants, will fall to the "I'll take two - one as a spare" GPS mentality (you would be amazed at the numbers of sailors who head for Tahiti with no knowledge of navigation other than reading their GPS). Not much use fighting it and, with any luck, they might even be right. Most lighthouses have been decommissioned anyway and the few that are active tend to be automated so it's not like any jobs are at stake.
Just that they are nice to look at and, in the fog in a kayak, they're nice to listen to. But governments don't much care about kayaks.
banks make money out of thin air? How does that work? Or are you just stupid?
Ok... you're an AC so you'll never read this, but I thought I'd tell you anyway. Banks "create" money under rigid rules that limit how much they can create (M2). It works like this:
You go to your bank and request a loan for a used (but nice) car. When it's approved you get a check which you deposit into your account. You write a check to the owner for the car and he deposits it in his bank. No money existed for this entire series of transactions. It was "created" by the bank not printed by the Treasury.
The only "real" money (M1) from this deal would be if the seller of the used car cashed that check and received the proceeds in currency. But it's more likely that he(she) would have written a check to pay off the remaining balance on the car and then written another check to buy another car.
"And I hope in 2021 I'm a billionaire and people are posting my yearbook pictures to take cheap shots at me too!"
You don't have until 2021; Bill Gates was a billionaire by 1987 - only 4 years from the day those pictures were taken. So... better get at it. Time's a-wasting.
Along with Discovery Channel and TLC; wtf happened to the Travel Channel? All Vegas, All The Time? And what's with the poker shows? I never thought anything could be more boring than watching golf on tv but, damn!, I was wrong.
PBS still draws me back, over and over. Too bad it runs commercials now.
When the local Public Utility District in Grant County (Central Washington State) invited local ISPs to partner with them to bring fiber to the home, we all thought it was a great idea. But after three years of broken promises we discovered that they were funelling public money to favored outside businesses via secret contracts in a scheme that appeared to many of us like an attempt to control the entire system; end-users and all. This would have been in direct violation of the legislation which allowed these Utilities (which are municipalities under Washington State law) to enter the telecommunications industry.
Expenses were hidden, extra employees hired, an expensive Network Operations Center was built, money from tax-free bonds was spent in a possibly unlawful way (an SEC investigation is underway), and business plans drawn up with very little regard to reality. Now they are in the middle of a bunch of lawsuits (one of which, strangely enough, is to recover money they practically forced onto the business that received it). Sooner or later there will be anti-trust litigation as well.
Somewhere around $160 million in public money was spent (no one knows exactly how much) to fiber up about 30% of a rural county (4300 customers so far) and now we discover that even 50 years wouldn't pay for this system unless the charges were around $80 a month.
The reality of this (to use a favorite phrase from one of the elected officials who allowed this to happen) is that bureaucrats don't make good businessmen. There is a reason the Soviet Union went bankrupt, folks, and that reason is "incompetence".
While it may seem unfair that private business fights the encroachment of municipalities into their turf, it seems unfair to the businesses to use their tax money to put them out of the game.
under the theory that traffic accidents are fewer if there are more cars stopped more often. So, while motorists think that traffic should move more smoothly, their local bureaucrats are thinking exactly the opposite. Plus it boosts revenue from all the red lights frustrated drivers run.
My wife and I spent 5 years on a 32 foot sailboat cruising around the Pacific with our two children (a girl 2-1/2 when we left and a boy who was born along the way). There is not much room for extras on a 32-foot sailboat but there was enough room for books and for legos. Our daughter would make elaborate constructions from her legos while we were anchored or in a port but then we would have to break them up and store them away when we went out to sea again. She hated this but there was no alternative if we didn't want things flying around the boat underway (you would be AMAZED at the amount of motion in a sailboat at sea... we had bruises everywhere). Then, safe in the next anchorage, she'd make something even better. Really, all the toy a kid needs because with legos and an imagination they can make almost any toy. But I would advise you to buy the standard legos and not the themed sets because the kids can do more with the regular blocks.
We have built a dozen RAID5 file servers running Linux and used a 3Ware Escalade hardware controller every time. Every machine has worked flawlessly and continues to work. This includes our off-site backup system. Nothing else has worked as well and, for the $150 or so the card costs, it's well worth using.
If Linux, Unix and Macintosh have a total of roughly 10% of all desktops, then the 90% that are left (all running some form of MS operating system) must all be infected. Hmm... not too farfetched from what I can tell.
National Public Radio has an audio link on this page http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=3&pr gDate=8-Oct-2004 ("Campaign Security Screening Crowds for Doubters) in which citizens were denied entrance to appearances by President Bush. In several of the cases people wearing Kerry t-shirts were told they could not enter because the "secret service" had "flagged" them. One man, who tried to vouch for his companions, was removed because he had also been flagged simply because he was with them. One woman was refused entry to a venue because she had a t-shirt over her arm (not wearing it) advocating abortion rights. Several of the people were threatened with arrest by the Secret Service. There was at least one arrest at a location by local police who said they were acting at the behest of the "White House" while the Mayor claimed that they were acting on a request by the Secret Service.
The Secret Service denies arresting people simply because they are wearing Kerry t-shirts but admit that they would question anyone who was being removed from a venue by security people. While it is lawful for a private function to deny entry to people on whatever grounds they choose, for a Presidential appearance which has been paid for by the taxpayers, it is unlawful (and un-American) to deny any citizen entry for simply wearing a t-shirt that indicates opposition to that President.
Now there's a good idea.
While the idea of public broadband has always been an attractive one for slashdotters, the incursion into this arena by Grant County PUD in central Washington State stands as an example of why we don't want bureaucrats meddling in business.
In this state the PUDs are treated as municipalities under the law and are given a set of rules under which they can operate. Broadband and electrical power are different services so it took an act of the Legislature to allow them to enter the market. The legislature, under some pressure from the big telecoms who were afraid that the PUDs would "cherry pick" the larger communities and leave the rural people to fend for themselves, allowed the PUDs to be "wholesale" only. The first thing Grant County PUD did was ignore that law.
Grant County PUD had first partnered up with two local ISPs which charged $20 to $25 per month for the broadband servoces back at the inception of the project in 1999. But at the same time the Manager of that PUD was trying to attract an outside competitor, also a utility provider, to enter the market in this county at a subsidized rate of $8 per month.
The PUD did attract that utility but only by entering into secret (and illegal) agreements to subsidize the program at cost plus 10%. So the new provider would risk nothing and could make 10% on the rate-payer's money even if they gave away their services for free. Then the PUD employees threw as many of the new customers to this new competitor as possible while their managers used their position as investors to pressure prices to a point where the commercial ISPs could no longer compete profitably.
It was only after the PUD had spent several million dollars propping up this outside provider that the story became known. Meanwhile, the PUD had raised the electrical rates to cover the $100 Million cost of fibering only 1/3 of the County but lied when asked about it. The Commissioners and Managers claimed that the rate increases were due to other factors. However their own emails, obtained under the State's public disclosure act, showed this to be untrue.
Agricultural interests were incensed because they use a lot of that electrical power. A large farm might have a $500k yearly power bill for their irrigation pumps. While 4% isn't much for my house, it's a chunk of money on a half-million dollars.
It took almost a year after the discovery of the secret contracts and a State Auditor's report which also found illegal and improper actions, to rid ourselves of the management team that led us into this debacle. The largest ISPs in the area, including the first two to partner up with the PUD, went out of business and were gobbled up by another outside competitor; costing jobs and an economic drain on the communities' resources. The Commissioners who were supposed to keep a rein on the PUD managers are now up for re-election and facing some tough questions.
The problem with bureaucrats going into business is that, essentially, they don't understand profit and loss. It's all other people's money and if they make a mistake they just raise the rates to cover it. We could have fibered this County up for the money they spent, had they spent that money wisely. Instead they created a NOC they thought they could make profitable (not at $3 million a year to operate they couldn't), they installed fiber to the areas where their managers lived regardless of population density (it turns out the telecoms fears of "cherry picking" were well-founded, but the managers weren't smart enough to do it that way), and they drove jobs and money out of the area.
Had they simply created the infrastructure for the product instead of getting involved in creating subsidies for favored businesses we would have been ok. But that's the problem. Bureaucrats don't make good business people.
So if you don't want to see jobs go away, money disappear and your power rates rise, treat the entrance of government into business with caution. These things are run by politicians, not business people. And it's not their money.
systems qualify as "fail-safe" not just for the (good) reasons you cite but because having a 5,000 lb airplane descend onto my house (or car or RV or whatever) at 25mph is not my idea of "fail-safe".
:)
Yet another reason why "personal air-cars" are not likely in our future. Popular Mechanics notwithstanding.
Plus they would probably take all of the fun out of flying.
Coherant is one. I have the software and the book for this non-existant OS that I bought in the early 90s. Minix is another but has been used to "prove" that the first Linux kernel couldn't have been written by one person. So perhaps Minix exists after all.
Then there is Xenix. SCO sold that for years after Microsoft sent it their way. Bill Gates hasn't mentioned Xenix in a long time so it must not exist either.
But if Linux doesn't exist, what was Caldera selling all those years (before it became SCO)?
myself, I've become convinced that many pilots are incompetent much of the time and all pilots are incompetent occasionally. And this is after a rigorous training program. Real aircraft are much more difficult to fly in real time than MS Flight Simulator (or *any* simulator).
The idea of "an airplane in every garage" has been around at least since the 1940s judging by my recollections of Popular Mechanics articles alone. But it never got closer than the 1950s. I can remember airports with hundreds of private aircraft (Stinsons, Luscombes, Cessnas, Pipers, Beechcrafts, etc) tied down in lines. Those lines of airplanes are conspicuously absent at the few airports left which cater to private flyers. A testimony to the expense of building, maintaining and operating even the simplest flying machines.
The ubiquitous "air-car" could only work if there were strict control over both the air-car and the pathways it travels combined with fail-safe recovery techniques in the event of mechanical failure. In other words, give the "pilot" control only over what time he leaves and his destination. Everything else - altitude, speed, course - is controlled by a common system that can keep theat vehicle - and every other vehicle - on the path it's been assigned to.
The air-car would also have to be able to stop and maintain altitude and position in mid-air in order to reduce the chances of collisions.
This combination of control and mechanical reliability would be *very* expensive not even including the cost of fuel. It would take a society that was dedicated to the premise that some very rich people could free themselves of ground transportation while the rest of us paid for the infrastructure.
Which is basically what we do with helicopters and personal jets now.
Except, of course, most of the "girls" are really guys. But since you're not gonna get laid anyway, wireless up your PDA and go for it.
to move clients from MS to Linux on their workstations and servers. My score so far:
Internal Mail Servers: 6
Firewall/Routers: 8
File Servers: 5
Workstations: 1
There used to be more file servers. When we moved them to Linux file servers we would find that a critical software application would migrate to some server-side-critical application (like a run-time of MS SQL) and we would have to move the entire box to 2000 server.
Workstations are even harder. We migrate them and the users bitch about not being able to use their "favorite software". Only once, 2 weeks ago, did we find users overjoyed to get Linux. A local Aquatic Park had the lifegards surfing on their XP box until it was unusable. Since it had to be blown off anyway, I threw a Knoppix 3.4 disk into the CD and did the install, configured the users, their email, the printer and the network, and showed them where the apps were. So far they are still happy with the functionality. Plus no viruses and no spyware.
It is very difficult to move people away from even the "standard" apps (Office, etc.). When it comes to specialized applications it is impossible; for now.
on my (admittedly small) web site between May and (so far, at least) July. This, after a steady under-12% usage for the past year. The site is the "home page" for our ISP and featured a story about the problems of MSIE with links to Opera and Mozilla so perhaps this might account for some of the increase. Interesting, however.
for millions of US residents who happen to live in rural areas. The Feds have cleverly sold off the UHF frequencies above channel 50 and those areas which have been re-transmitting regular tv on those channels are effectively out of luck. In my area of central Washington state the retransmission of Spokane broadcast television channels ceased in January of 2004 when the owners of those repeaters simply turned them off rather than attempt to relicense. Of course, those who live in cities can get cable and there is satellite. But free tv in rural America is only a memory now for many and soon for most.
What is even more amazing is that no one seems that upset about it.
to an ISP I was working for several years ago. The upstream provider had not (unbeknownst to us) paid his bills to *his* backbone provider. The typical "we are contesting some of the bills" trick. When the backbone provider finally had enough (3 or 4 months down the road) they jerked the IP space. We received a telephone call saying that the IP space would be null-routed at 5pm that day!!! By this time our little uplink provider had secured bandwidth on another link but told us he had no IP address space (long story and it's still in court I think).
The net result was that we had to hire a lawyer to threaten the backbone provider if they jerked the IP space (all routed via BGP) until we could secure new addresses. It took about a week to find another system with enough IP space and then get our system rerouted and readdressed. Lots of long nights.
So if this is a similar case - and it appears that it is - my sympathies lay with the ISP that is trying to stay in business. They don't want the IP space permanently; just long enough to secure new addresses and re-route. I can't see how this will break the Internet as long as the temporary injunction is not permanent. We certainly would have done the same thing.
that the page for reading the responses included a large banner ad for Microsoft that claimed they take your security seriously and saying, "visit microsoft.com/it/security/IT today.