3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software.
Obviously never heard of Debian.
5.3 Incomplete or unstable drivers for some hardware.
Applies to every operating system ever written. Next thing you know, in hushed tones he's going to claim he has secret knowledge that there exists at least one bug somewhere in the software.
7. A galore of software bugs across all applications.
See above, I was right.
databases... which cost millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be open sourced
Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
Yes, they used to say the same thing about operating systems. and text editors. and compilers. Yes, certainly no one will EVER write an open source database (laughs) And then he mentions MySQL, which I guess he thinks is a closed source DB? (laugh harder) And Mysql (via Sun) cost Oracle $7.4 billion, not mere "millions of dollars".
No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing
I use Debian, everything works out of the box for me since like 1996. Classic example of I as an individual had a problem with one piece of hardware in one box, therefore the whole system "sucks and doesn't work" so everyone else in the world had better change until it works for me, or else... or else I'll write complaints on blogs... so you better get to work, you!
Choose a card that works, then, shockingly, it works. I don't complain because my TRS-80 orch-80 color computer sound cartridge didn't work on a C64 or my lawnmower uses a different type of oil than my car. As a corollary to the example, people whom don't know how to use google will always suffer horribly compared to people whom do know how to use google. in all and every area of life, unless they're very lucky, and that's just a fact of modern life that people need to get over.
Life's hard, but it's harder when you're... not researching your purchase first. And that applies to absolutely everything in life, not just sound cards.
Yeah man, and no GUI for the linker either. Just last week grandma really wanted to use the linker to check my wife's facebook, but no gui for the linker and it's slow anyway, not to mention the linker puts its error messages into a text window instead of putting each individual error into a separate popup gui box, so she was stuck using that "firefox" program instead of reimplementing wget in Fortran to use the linker like she really wanted to do. Yeah, totally not ready for grandma's desktop. Why a desktop without a linker is like a fish without a...
9.3 (Being resolved) Huge shutdown time.
Obviously no windows experience...
(Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity)
Good thing no one uses it for webservers or DNS servers or firewalls. Thanks for the warning dude, I'll be sure to let everyone know.
14.1 No software policies.
What is this peculiar and individualized definition of a software policy, and given that very peculiar and individualized answer, why in the world would you think that is the case?
If you have more than 65536 records or 256 fields, you really really shouldn't be using Excel.
Oh believe me, I hate when I see Excel used as a corporate database. At least it's a step up from using Word as a database (sadly I am not kidding about that).
That said, note that one sample per second, is 86400 samples, so this upgrade is moderately useful for extremely lightweight scientific type work.
MS products have always been kind of fisher-price... they look pretty and total noobs can flail around somewhat productively, but when you actually have to do something serious, they're impossible to scale beyond grade school level projects.
Is this a genuine proposition? Can it lend competitive advantage to one power bloc over another on a global scale? Probably not. Everyone is as smart as everyone else and the technology platform is relatively "flat". Throughout history, we have noticed that when something is discovered, it is often discovered almost simultaneously in multiple centres.
And only manufactured in China. So, does anyone benefit except some Chinese factory owners if the UK government re-invents OC-192 SONET from 1996 and gets Linksys to sell it?
Even 1080p video is only around 3Gbps. Are we suddenly talking about multiple HD streams batting their way around teh interwebs to consumers?
I have 3 cabletv settop boxes at home. I guess it would be nice to stream HD video to all three at the same time, however unlikely it is I'd need to do so. 3 Gigs seems a factor of 150 too high, since ATSC RF format (actually 8VSB) only sends about 19 megabits/second for our over the air HDTV in the US. Over the pond I believe you guys use DVB-T, which I know nothing about, but it probably does not transport 150 times the datastream.
We are starting to move into uncharted territory by discussing these kinds of capacity at the network edge. Small amounts of megabits are relatively easy to handle at the consumer level. Drop a 1Gbps trunk on the floor and you have a major problem. Putting 10Gbps to the edge makes the network more "nervous" and much harder to maintain and control.
Uh, what? Like the bits will leak all over the floor if you drop that trunk? You mean it's nervous like the CAT5 cable sweats alot and fidgets? Harder to maintain, like thar intertubes fill up so you don't get your internets for hours after they're sent? Sounds very authoritative but makes so sense.
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older.
Is this a dupe from Y2K? 2020 - 20 = 2000
And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets
... with screens the size of a postage stamp?
He has to be kidding. I won't play games on my phone because the screen is too small, and I'm a "young guy". My grandma uses a magnifying glass to operate her TV remote control. I have a 24 inch monitor for a reason, and its not to justify buying pants with 24 inch wide pockets. Similarly, my nice zillion watt surround sound subwoofer speaker system is not quite as portable as my phone. Without a mouse or trackball I would not be able to play FPS.
Trying to convince me to "upgrade" from my current system to a cellphone is about as likely as convincing me to "upgrade" back to msdos 3.3, CGA graphics, and a 40 MB pre-IDE era hardcard.
Maybe I should turn ads back on to get a laugh or two. Out of curiosity, was it just a karma threshold that I crossed to get the option to turn ads off or is it some sort of seniority thing?
Maybe if you have adblock on for too many years, they figure you'll never see them anyway, so why waste the bandwidth trying to?
Don't confuse the delivery mechanism with the product. The product is "What is going on?". It is delivered now via Newspapers, T.V., Radio, and the Web.
The product is eyeballs looking at advertisements. "What is going on?" is a byproduct, or at best, a marketing gimmick used to lure in the eyeballs. You cannot successfully analyze the situation without understanding this most important initial condition.
Sometimes things going the way of the dodo is capitalism as well. How many buggy whip manufacturers are there today? A more than few I imagine, for various equine sport but not the numbers that once existed.
Bad example of something other than restructuring, as whip manufacturers are an excellent example of restructuring out of equine purposes and into the, uh, adult entertainment business. Since pr0n drives technological advances in all other fields of human endeavor, possibly, naked news and similar publications are the future of the news publishing industry. Several cable news channels already employ women whom were apparently selected for appearance rather than journalistic ability.
Also, there may no longer be a need for "investigative reporting" since it has disappeared from the market due to advertiser pressure other than once in a generation Pulitzer Prize situations.
Comedy-News seems to be doing pretty well, or at least better than the main stream media Infotainment-News model. Also see Pr0n-News as discussed above.
Because the whole point of the exercise is to land something that might disintegrate.
Disintegrated parts always land short.
When the last one blew up, the parts luckily did not land in downtown Houston. Next time they may not be so lucky.
Why not pick a site where it won't fly over anyone? Well, if you fire the OMS retros on the opposite side of the planet from the landing site, and draw a line from there to the landing site at this orbital inclination, it probably passes over something sensitive. There's not many sites, and based on consumables there are not many orbits to try. Maybe one of them is least dangerous, but still too dangerous.
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
Won't work. The landing spots are generally near the takeoff spots. The takeoff spots were located so if it blows up on takeoff, the parts rain down on the dolphins and whales. Unfortunately (?) when it comes in to land, it arrives from the opposite direction, and no one selected landing sites that are empty to the west. Unfortunately gets a ? mark because back in the 70s when the shuttle was going to do everything for everyone, everywhere, it was occasionally claimed it would be able to land on commercial runways... so if you're coming in a bit short, just land at colorado international airport. That, along with most of the vehicles abilities, was all cut during development to save money.
The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via ground control) in an attempt to keep pilots from being made irrelevant. (Throwback to test-pilot days I guess).
Based on the faulty assumption that all pilots do is keep it straight and level and wait as patiently as the plane lands. The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks. They know their vehicle like a kernel hacker knows his kernel.
So, say the exhaust temperature of one APU is fluctuating. If the computer could "do something" to fix it, it would. The humans job is to invent new ideas of troubleshooting and fixing. Flip that switch see what happens, try this maneuver. The stuff the Apollo 13 guys did is not amazing or unlikely or lucky, despite what the general public thinks, it is in fact exactly what they were supposed to do...
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
One "horsepower", the obsolete power unit normally used for cars, equals 736 watts. This means that 110 MW is equal to 150,000 horsepower. I don't know exactly what would be the power needed to run that train
Giant diesel electrics generally run around a couple thousand HP per unit. More power just spins the wheels, or uses unrealistic quantities of sand for traction. The solution, is more driven wheels. Lets say we have a 5000 HP loco that is capable of spinning its 12 driven wheels. That seems realistic. So, you can push about 400 HP thru a steel wheel on steel rails without spinning, if you put a dozen tons of weight pressing down on each wheel. So, a 150000 HP total train draw only requires 375 driven wheels. Now putting 375 driven wheels on a train is going to be mighty tricky. 368 wheels (92 4 wheeled trucks) sounds much more realistic. I'm just not seeing it.
Another way of looking at it, is to get that power density out of steel wheels on steel rails, a quarter million pound engine with 5000 HP needs 20000 pounds of stuff on each driven wheel to push 400 HP out each wheel without spinning. So, that means with 368 driven wheels, the train will have to weigh at least 7.5 million pounds or the wheels will spin. Lets say 10 million pounds for some safety. Around a 15th the weight of the QE2, I think. I hope they have strong bridges there in AZ.
It's gotta be journalistic engineering. Confusing energy per trip and confusing energy vs power.
If they build it using bond money you will have to pay the interest as well. It would take 270,000,000 riders and that is without interest. So if you had a million riders a year it would only take 270 years to pay it off.
Does that count the cost of the real estate? They could put the stations near a major attraction, downtown center, etc, but that would be inconveniently noisy for the non-riders and the land would be really expensive. So, lets put the track and stations in the middle of nowhere. Weirdly, many mass transit projects are designed this way.
The situation is really pretty simple and depends entirely on contract law.
The cableco's sign one contract to redistribute live TV. They sign another contract (possibly involving another hefty fee) to redistribute video on demand, VOD. The revenue streams are separate starting at the contract and flowing all the way through the business to the customer's bill which has separate line items for HBO and HBO-On-Demand.
Obviously, the cableco's should want to scrap the extra contract and extra cost of the VOD contract and just give us all "virtual DVRs". Or perhaps they could scrap the VOD contract, and continue to charge the customers the same amount of money for their "DVR with infinite rewind", keeping the money that would have gone to the channel for VOD. Or perhaps, since VOD is kind of a pain, the cablecos would get to embrace and extinguish the entire product all at once by changing the numerous VOD relationships into an insourced DVR product which can later be scrapped.
Also its a control issue. The channels want to control their product. Just because the SciFi channel used to broadcast science fiction a long time ago, does not mean they want to now. Now, they want to broadcast ghost hunters, wrestling, and horror flicks. They would not appreciate a cablecos "DVR with infinite rewind" messing up their current oh so carefully designed marketing message that they like the name, but no longer have any interest in scifi content.
Finally its liability. If CBS had the superbowel halftime on some cableco's virtual-infinite-rewind-DVR, who is liable when its played back over and over? CBS because the cableco didn't delete it? The cableco because they're a common carrier? The local franchise because they are easier to sue? If a channel screwed up and transmitted something they didn't pay for, can they force the big corporate virtual DVRs to delete it? Or if they screwed up their perfect record of bland mediocrity and accidentally broadcast something that generated complaints, could they force the big corporate virtual DVRs to delete it to limit complaints?
Gratis vs Libre fails, and is obsolete, because it doesn't subdivide Gratis into it's three subtypes.
First there is the fair and equitable trade, like trading software for patches, or software for your extensions to the software, etc. I give you this for free, you give me that for free, all is bartered and good, no karmic debt. Most folks are willing to take a wide ecosystem view, and if you contribute to some totally different project that I have nothing to do with, there is still no karmic debt as long as we all share alike. So the first form of Gratis is trade without money, so it's "free".
Second form of Gratis is the well known, end user pays nothing. Maybe because its junk, maybe because its common (yet another mp3 player?), maybe because its too simple to sell. The ever popular "free beer" definition. No karmic debt because its worth nothing, no point arguing about nothing. The second form of Gratis is the enduser pays nothing because as technology advances, its cost eventually rounds down to zero, so that is a fair price.
Finally, the third form of Gratis, is that it costs me nothing to digitally replicate an infinite number of times. So, the solution to deal with folks whom are too cheap or too antisocial to reciprocate in trade and it's too valuable to just "give away", is just give it to the cheap bastards at cost, which coincidentally happens to be free. It's not "who will pay you?" its "how exactly, do you, the noob, intend to stop me, the old wizard, from giving it away? ha ha ha" Lots of noobs can't comprehend this third Gratis subtype at all.
Please demonstrate a successful business model that relies on giving away the product for free.
The seemingly innumerable competitors to the official "telephone directory book" aka the trademarked phrases "yellow pages" and "white pages".
I used to keep them in a drawer thinking I need a phone book, and I'll get around to throwing out last years edition, uh, later. Some years later I realized I had never cracked open any of them... if the business can't be found by google, then for me it doesn't exist. I threw out well over two cubic feet of "old phone books" and now when I receive them they go right in the recycle bin. They might be useless, but they keep sending them to me, so either they make money or they have deep pockets.
Broadcast TV and radio? Of course the product they are giving away is your eyeballs watching someones advertisements...
How about church? Of course, conveniently, your soul won't be saved unless you donate, but technically they do not require it, and they are certainly a big business.
many of which just repost stories written by newspapers
newspapers don't write stories, unless you count the captions underneath pictures of kids, "human interest" stories about kittens rescued from trees, and complimentary (paid) copy about new business "grand openings" etc.
The real "stories" all come from yesterday's AP or Reuters news feed.
Don't forget to make sure it's difficult for the visually impaired to use, and impossible for those relying on screen readers to explore the interface as a sighted person could do! You're 99% of the way there already, I'm sure you can come up with the remaining 1%
Oh, theres a lot more than 1% of the way to go to make a totally useless GUI.
How about using unintelligible icons? That way you can make it impossible to teach anyone how to use it verbally, makes it only possible to describe operations visually. "now right click on the second icon from the left that looks like a squashed centipede, obviously everyone who centers text thinks of squishing a centipede". Bonus points if the icon is could be interpreted obscenely in a Freudian manner or is a swear word in some obscure ideographic script. After all, all of your users are experts at learning ideographic scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphics, so instead of typing "load" or "open" on a command line, make them memorize that a clovis arrowhead means open in this program, but a little star trek shuttle means open in this program.
Then too, make it graphically as utterly modal as possible. Pop up screens that come from pop up screens that come from menu bars on pop up screens. Make it as challenging as memorizing the knot and overlap structure of a bowl of spaghetti. Organize the pop ups and menus solely by programing team or by how the marketing gang declared how the tool would be used. Bonus points if its possible to open multiple different config windows simultanously, but only change things in one window at a time. And try to lock the screen so the user can't look at other windows (like a cheatsheet or notes or whatever) while a config window is open.
Don't ever use threads and don't worry about responsiveness. If clicking on the "wrong" thing appears to lock the machine up for seconds, even minutes, with no way to quickly stop it or go back, thats OK. You know you've succeeded if the user forums describe the best roll back technique as "quit and reload" or "easiest just to reboot and try again". If they complain that is slow, tell them to get a faster PC.
Can't get here from there... Lets say there is 20 step procedure to get from here to there. Make sure that the rollback procedure is a totally and utterly different 40 step procedure. Whatever you do, don't make a global "undo" button that works, or at least works reliably (its OK if it only works on 75% of the operations, then no one will expect it to ever work and thus will never use it). Forward should never equal or be equivalent to backward.
Everyone whom uses the program only wants to see your glorious program, right? Not their little data or whatever it is they are working on. So FLOOD the workspace with an infinite array of tool bars and buttons covering almost the entire workspace. After all, if they paid $500 for a bigger monitor, your program should get that screen area, not their data.
Now if you mean all-in-one-box, no plugging cables in allowed, I have seen those available for many years (although not quite 13 years). They are not terribly popular, since the ip cams have been moving toward PoE. Hard to do PoE w/o the ethernet cable, and there's little point in doing wireless if you are powering the cam using a perfectly good ethernet cable. There are wireless ip cams sold, I guess for use in parking lots and other locations where you can't run CAT-5 easily.
By definition any device operating in the 2.4GHZ UNLICENSED BAND is an unlicensed device!
Close, but not exactly correct. Technically if you get a amateur radio / ham radio license you can operate on a secondary basis in that band up to 1500 watts as per FCC 97.301 with special notice of 97.303(j)2(iv) and 97.303(j)2(B). Note that there is a heck of alot more to following FCC part 97 than just these two little sections. You probably mean any device operating under FCC unlicensed rules is an unlicensed device, but thats not saying much, more or less?
(B) Amateur stations operating in the 2400-2417 MHz segment must accept harmful interference that may be caused by the proper operation of industrial, scientific and medical equipment.
(iv) The 2417-2450 MHz segment is allocated to the amateur service on a co-secondary basis with the Federal Government radiolocation service. Amateur stations operating within the 2417-2450 MHz segment must accept harmful interference that may be caused by the proper operation of industrial, scientific, and medical devices operating within the band.
It's non unusual for multiple services to be allocated on one frequency or frequency band with some being licensed and some not being licensed and some being primary allocations and some secondary allocations.
Most places I looked treated a MS like a BS + 3 years experience.
From an ageism standpoint, that is not so good, if you got your MS in only 2 years. That means you just lost a year of your career.
Its really bad if you are going back to school at an older age. If you thought it was hard getting a job at 40, imagine being 42 and having the job search go as bad as if you are 45!
But he's 50 now with a Bachelor's and is passed up on every promotion and pay raise.
He must not be in computers/IT/etc, or he must be lucky, or he's really a "manager" instead of a "computer guy". Due to rampant ageism, and cruddy work-life balance issues, your career as a programmer is statistically over by the time you are maybe 35. So, you can earn big bucks from 22-35, or you can earn microscopically bigger bucks from 24-35.
To run the numbers, you're giving up 2 years of pay and probably paying high tuition for slightly more money in the remaining 11 years of your career. Meanwhile the industry shrinks every year as it moves out of the country, so even if you do get a job two (plus) years later, the end of the "American Programmer" is just two years closer. So you may not even get 11 years extra. On the other hand, the "second great depression" might be two years closer to being over in two years, maybe. Or maybe it'll just be two years worse.
I would think going for the degree would be worth it for 20% more pay. Can a masters swing 20% more pay over a bachelors? I think not, at least not here. You need to check the numbers where you live, of course.
Unless you are one of the odd public-spirited people who have highly marketable qualifications but want to teach in high schools. I have a lot of admiration for the few really knowledgeable and intelligent school teachers in technology and science fields - they really do make a difference - but I would not like to be on a teacher's pay scale myself.
I have relatives in the field. Multiple relatives in multiple districts. Generally, to teach HS and below, the only degree allowable is an education degree. A PHD in math will not be allowed to teach algebra, and a Nobel prive winning physicist will not be allowed to teach physics, unless of course they additionally have a BA in education. The HR drones would simply toss out any ex-college professor resume, unless they of course had the all important education degree. There are exceptions in areas of teacher shortage, like if you know Spanish or are willing to wear a bullet proof vest and teach in the worst inner city schools, preferably both, but even those exceptions require evidence of night school progress on an education degree. I cannot stress how much of a requirement an ed degree is... its not like programming where a degree gets you an interview but you can do just fine without one if you're good (err, good and lucky, I mean). No ed degree (or at least serious progress toward it) means no teaching job, period.
The teachers pay scale is actually pretty good in most areas, if you correct for legendarily good retirement and medical benefits, and historically high job security. Most "technical" teachers I knew, contracted during the summer for big bucks. Finally the odds of being outsourced as just a coding drone are somewhat higher than the odds of being outsourced as a kindergarten teacher. Also they get a lot of respect from most people below 18 and virtually all people above 18...
The main problems I hear, is the friction between getting retirement vs starting over in a good district, management so bad it would make a dilbert pointy haired boss blush, and the average IQ level of the "problem parents" must be single digits at best. I don't have relatives working with older kids... I guess they have a different set of problems to deal with, like drug use, pregnancies, drug dealing in school, gang problems, fights/shootouts, basically becoming the father/parents for the kids, basically they are social workers first, teachers second, and their skill area (computer guy, chemist, etc) third.
Slashdot Mirror
3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software.
Obviously never heard of Debian.
5.3 Incomplete or unstable drivers for some hardware.
Applies to every operating system ever written. Next thing you know, in hushed tones he's going to claim he has secret knowledge that there exists at least one bug somewhere in the software.
7. A galore of software bugs across all applications.
See above, I was right.
databases ... which cost millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be open sourced
Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
Yes, they used to say the same thing about operating systems. and text editors. and compilers. Yes, certainly no one will EVER write an open source database (laughs) And then he mentions MySQL, which I guess he thinks is a closed source DB? (laugh harder) And Mysql (via Sun) cost Oracle $7.4 billion, not mere "millions of dollars".
No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing
I use Debian, everything works out of the box for me since like 1996. Classic example of I as an individual had a problem with one piece of hardware in one box, therefore the whole system "sucks and doesn't work" so everyone else in the world had better change until it works for me, or else ... or else I'll write complaints on blogs ... so you better get to work, you!
Choose a card that works, then, shockingly, it works. I don't complain because my TRS-80 orch-80 color computer sound cartridge didn't work on a C64 or my lawnmower uses a different type of oil than my car. As a corollary to the example, people whom don't know how to use google will always suffer horribly compared to people whom do know how to use google. in all and every area of life, unless they're very lucky, and that's just a fact of modern life that people need to get over.
Life's hard, but it's harder when you're ... not researching your purchase first. And that applies to absolutely everything in life, not just sound cards.
9.1 Slow (libraries) linker. Braindead slow linker. Intolerably slow linker.
Yeah man, and no GUI for the linker either. Just last week grandma really wanted to use the linker to check my wife's facebook, but no gui for the linker and it's slow anyway, not to mention the linker puts its error messages into a text window instead of putting each individual error into a separate popup gui box, so she was stuck using that "firefox" program instead of reimplementing wget in Fortran to use the linker like she really wanted to do. Yeah, totally not ready for grandma's desktop. Why a desktop without a linker is like a fish without a ...
9.3 (Being resolved) Huge shutdown time.
Obviously no windows experience...
(Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity)
Good thing no one uses it for webservers or DNS servers or firewalls. Thanks for the warning dude, I'll be sure to let everyone know.
14.1 No software policies.
What is this peculiar and individualized definition of a software policy, and given that very peculiar and individualized answer, why in the world would you think that is the case?
If you have more than 65536 records or 256 fields, you really really shouldn't be using Excel.
Oh believe me, I hate when I see Excel used as a corporate database. At least it's a step up from using Word as a database (sadly I am not kidding about that).
That said, note that one sample per second, is 86400 samples, so this upgrade is moderately useful for extremely lightweight scientific type work.
MS products have always been kind of fisher-price... they look pretty and total noobs can flail around somewhat productively, but when you actually have to do something serious, they're impossible to scale beyond grade school level projects.
Is this a genuine proposition? Can it lend competitive advantage to one power bloc over another on a global scale? Probably not. Everyone is as smart as everyone else and the technology platform is relatively "flat". Throughout history, we have noticed that when something is discovered, it is often discovered almost simultaneously in multiple centres.
And only manufactured in China. So, does anyone benefit except some Chinese factory owners if the UK government re-invents OC-192 SONET from 1996 and gets Linksys to sell it?
Even 1080p video is only around 3Gbps. Are we suddenly talking about multiple HD streams batting their way around teh interwebs to consumers?
I have 3 cabletv settop boxes at home. I guess it would be nice to stream HD video to all three at the same time, however unlikely it is I'd need to do so. 3 Gigs seems a factor of 150 too high, since ATSC RF format (actually 8VSB) only sends about 19 megabits/second for our over the air HDTV in the US. Over the pond I believe you guys use DVB-T, which I know nothing about, but it probably does not transport 150 times the datastream.
We are starting to move into uncharted territory by discussing these kinds of capacity at the network edge. Small amounts of megabits are relatively easy to handle at the consumer level. Drop a 1Gbps trunk on the floor and you have a major problem. Putting 10Gbps to the edge makes the network more "nervous" and much harder to maintain and control.
Uh, what? Like the bits will leak all over the floor if you drop that trunk? You mean it's nervous like the CAT5 cable sweats alot and fidgets? Harder to maintain, like thar intertubes fill up so you don't get your internets for hours after they're sent? Sounds very authoritative but makes so sense.
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older.
Is this a dupe from Y2K? 2020 - 20 = 2000
And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets
... with screens the size of a postage stamp?
He has to be kidding. I won't play games on my phone because the screen is too small, and I'm a "young guy". My grandma uses a magnifying glass to operate her TV remote control. I have a 24 inch monitor for a reason, and its not to justify buying pants with 24 inch wide pockets. Similarly, my nice zillion watt surround sound subwoofer speaker system is not quite as portable as my phone. Without a mouse or trackball I would not be able to play FPS.
Trying to convince me to "upgrade" from my current system to a cellphone is about as likely as convincing me to "upgrade" back to msdos 3.3, CGA graphics, and a 40 MB pre-IDE era hardcard.
Maybe I should turn ads back on to get a laugh or two. Out of curiosity, was it just a karma threshold that I crossed to get the option to turn ads off or is it some sort of seniority thing?
Maybe if you have adblock on for too many years, they figure you'll never see them anyway, so why waste the bandwidth trying to?
Don't confuse the delivery mechanism with the product. The product is "What is going on?". It is delivered now via Newspapers, T.V., Radio, and the Web.
The product is eyeballs looking at advertisements. "What is going on?" is a byproduct, or at best, a marketing gimmick used to lure in the eyeballs. You cannot successfully analyze the situation without understanding this most important initial condition.
Sometimes things going the way of the dodo is capitalism as well. How many buggy whip manufacturers are there today? A more than few I imagine, for various equine sport but not the numbers that once existed.
Bad example of something other than restructuring, as whip manufacturers are an excellent example of restructuring out of equine purposes and into the, uh, adult entertainment business. Since pr0n drives technological advances in all other fields of human endeavor, possibly, naked news and similar publications are the future of the news publishing industry. Several cable news channels already employ women whom were apparently selected for appearance rather than journalistic ability.
Also, there may no longer be a need for "investigative reporting" since it has disappeared from the market due to advertiser pressure other than once in a generation Pulitzer Prize situations.
Comedy-News seems to be doing pretty well, or at least better than the main stream media Infotainment-News model. Also see Pr0n-News as discussed above.
DON'T DUMP, GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN
Huh?
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
apt-get install bind9 /etc/resolv.conf
echo nameserver 127.0.0.1 >
Trivial, takes about two minutes, easily scriptable, blah blah
Why can they not land on remote ?
Because the whole point of the exercise is to land something that might disintegrate.
Disintegrated parts always land short.
When the last one blew up, the parts luckily did not land in downtown Houston. Next time they may not be so lucky.
Why not pick a site where it won't fly over anyone? Well, if you fire the OMS retros on the opposite side of the planet from the landing site, and draw a line from there to the landing site at this orbital inclination, it probably passes over something sensitive. There's not many sites, and based on consumables there are not many orbits to try. Maybe one of them is least dangerous, but still too dangerous.
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
Won't work. The landing spots are generally near the takeoff spots. The takeoff spots were located so if it blows up on takeoff, the parts rain down on the dolphins and whales. Unfortunately (?) when it comes in to land, it arrives from the opposite direction, and no one selected landing sites that are empty to the west. Unfortunately gets a ? mark because back in the 70s when the shuttle was going to do everything for everyone, everywhere, it was occasionally claimed it would be able to land on commercial runways... so if you're coming in a bit short, just land at colorado international airport. That, along with most of the vehicles abilities, was all cut during development to save money.
The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via ground control) in an attempt to keep pilots from being made irrelevant. (Throwback to test-pilot days I guess).
Based on the faulty assumption that all pilots do is keep it straight and level and wait as patiently as the plane lands. The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks. They know their vehicle like a kernel hacker knows his kernel.
So, say the exhaust temperature of one APU is fluctuating. If the computer could "do something" to fix it, it would. The humans job is to invent new ideas of troubleshooting and fixing. Flip that switch see what happens, try this maneuver. The stuff the Apollo 13 guys did is not amazing or unlikely or lucky, despite what the general public thinks, it is in fact exactly what they were supposed to do...
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
Thats why you have humans onsite, in the loop.
One "horsepower", the obsolete power unit normally used for cars, equals 736 watts. This means that 110 MW is equal to 150,000 horsepower. I don't know exactly what would be the power needed to run that train
Giant diesel electrics generally run around a couple thousand HP per unit. More power just spins the wheels, or uses unrealistic quantities of sand for traction. The solution, is more driven wheels. Lets say we have a 5000 HP loco that is capable of spinning its 12 driven wheels. That seems realistic. So, you can push about 400 HP thru a steel wheel on steel rails without spinning, if you put a dozen tons of weight pressing down on each wheel. So, a 150000 HP total train draw only requires 375 driven wheels. Now putting 375 driven wheels on a train is going to be mighty tricky. 368 wheels (92 4 wheeled trucks) sounds much more realistic. I'm just not seeing it.
Another way of looking at it, is to get that power density out of steel wheels on steel rails, a quarter million pound engine with 5000 HP needs 20000 pounds of stuff on each driven wheel to push 400 HP out each wheel without spinning. So, that means with 368 driven wheels, the train will have to weigh at least 7.5 million pounds or the wheels will spin. Lets say 10 million pounds for some safety. Around a 15th the weight of the QE2, I think. I hope they have strong bridges there in AZ.
It's gotta be journalistic engineering. Confusing energy per trip and confusing energy vs power.
If they build it using bond money you will have to pay the interest as well. It would take 270,000,000 riders and that is without interest. So if you had a million riders a year it would only take 270 years to pay it off.
Does that count the cost of the real estate? They could put the stations near a major attraction, downtown center, etc, but that would be inconveniently noisy for the non-riders and the land would be really expensive. So, lets put the track and stations in the middle of nowhere. Weirdly, many mass transit projects are designed this way.
The situation is really pretty simple and depends entirely on contract law.
The cableco's sign one contract to redistribute live TV. They sign another contract (possibly involving another hefty fee) to redistribute video on demand, VOD. The revenue streams are separate starting at the contract and flowing all the way through the business to the customer's bill which has separate line items for HBO and HBO-On-Demand.
Obviously, the cableco's should want to scrap the extra contract and extra cost of the VOD contract and just give us all "virtual DVRs". Or perhaps they could scrap the VOD contract, and continue to charge the customers the same amount of money for their "DVR with infinite rewind", keeping the money that would have gone to the channel for VOD. Or perhaps, since VOD is kind of a pain, the cablecos would get to embrace and extinguish the entire product all at once by changing the numerous VOD relationships into an insourced DVR product which can later be scrapped.
Also its a control issue. The channels want to control their product. Just because the SciFi channel used to broadcast science fiction a long time ago, does not mean they want to now. Now, they want to broadcast ghost hunters, wrestling, and horror flicks. They would not appreciate a cablecos "DVR with infinite rewind" messing up their current oh so carefully designed marketing message that they like the name, but no longer have any interest in scifi content.
Finally its liability. If CBS had the superbowel halftime on some cableco's virtual-infinite-rewind-DVR, who is liable when its played back over and over? CBS because the cableco didn't delete it? The cableco because they're a common carrier? The local franchise because they are easier to sue? If a channel screwed up and transmitted something they didn't pay for, can they force the big corporate virtual DVRs to delete it? Or if they screwed up their perfect record of bland mediocrity and accidentally broadcast something that generated complaints, could they force the big corporate virtual DVRs to delete it to limit complaints?
Any time there is a call for:
enabling legislation,
it always seems to turn out like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
Gratis vs. Libre
Gratis vs Libre fails, and is obsolete, because it doesn't subdivide Gratis into it's three subtypes.
First there is the fair and equitable trade, like trading software for patches, or software for your extensions to the software, etc. I give you this for free, you give me that for free, all is bartered and good, no karmic debt. Most folks are willing to take a wide ecosystem view, and if you contribute to some totally different project that I have nothing to do with, there is still no karmic debt as long as we all share alike. So the first form of Gratis is trade without money, so it's "free".
Second form of Gratis is the well known, end user pays nothing. Maybe because its junk, maybe because its common (yet another mp3 player?), maybe because its too simple to sell. The ever popular "free beer" definition. No karmic debt because its worth nothing, no point arguing about nothing. The second form of Gratis is the enduser pays nothing because as technology advances, its cost eventually rounds down to zero, so that is a fair price.
Finally, the third form of Gratis, is that it costs me nothing to digitally replicate an infinite number of times. So, the solution to deal with folks whom are too cheap or too antisocial to reciprocate in trade and it's too valuable to just "give away", is just give it to the cheap bastards at cost, which coincidentally happens to be free. It's not "who will pay you?" its "how exactly, do you, the noob, intend to stop me, the old wizard, from giving it away? ha ha ha" Lots of noobs can't comprehend this third Gratis subtype at all.
Please demonstrate a successful business model that relies on giving away the product for free.
The seemingly innumerable competitors to the official "telephone directory book" aka the trademarked phrases "yellow pages" and "white pages".
I used to keep them in a drawer thinking I need a phone book, and I'll get around to throwing out last years edition, uh, later. Some years later I realized I had never cracked open any of them... if the business can't be found by google, then for me it doesn't exist. I threw out well over two cubic feet of "old phone books" and now when I receive them they go right in the recycle bin. They might be useless, but they keep sending them to me, so either they make money or they have deep pockets.
Broadcast TV and radio? Of course the product they are giving away is your eyeballs watching someones advertisements...
How about church? Of course, conveniently, your soul won't be saved unless you donate, but technically they do not require it, and they are certainly a big business.
many of which just repost stories written by newspapers
newspapers don't write stories, unless you count the captions underneath pictures of kids, "human interest" stories about kittens rescued from trees, and complimentary (paid) copy about new business "grand openings" etc.
The real "stories" all come from yesterday's AP or Reuters news feed.
They have to do something.
.. so they do the wrong thing. Bright future in politics there.
Don't forget to make sure it's difficult for the visually impaired to use, and impossible for those relying on screen readers to explore the interface as a sighted person could do! You're 99% of the way there already, I'm sure you can come up with the remaining 1%
Oh, theres a lot more than 1% of the way to go to make a totally useless GUI.
How about using unintelligible icons? That way you can make it impossible to teach anyone how to use it verbally, makes it only possible to describe operations visually. "now right click on the second icon from the left that looks like a squashed centipede, obviously everyone who centers text thinks of squishing a centipede". Bonus points if the icon is could be interpreted obscenely in a Freudian manner or is a swear word in some obscure ideographic script. After all, all of your users are experts at learning ideographic scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphics, so instead of typing "load" or "open" on a command line, make them memorize that a clovis arrowhead means open in this program, but a little star trek shuttle means open in this program.
Then too, make it graphically as utterly modal as possible. Pop up screens that come from pop up screens that come from menu bars on pop up screens. Make it as challenging as memorizing the knot and overlap structure of a bowl of spaghetti. Organize the pop ups and menus solely by programing team or by how the marketing gang declared how the tool would be used. Bonus points if its possible to open multiple different config windows simultanously, but only change things in one window at a time. And try to lock the screen so the user can't look at other windows (like a cheatsheet or notes or whatever) while a config window is open.
Don't ever use threads and don't worry about responsiveness. If clicking on the "wrong" thing appears to lock the machine up for seconds, even minutes, with no way to quickly stop it or go back, thats OK. You know you've succeeded if the user forums describe the best roll back technique as "quit and reload" or "easiest just to reboot and try again". If they complain that is slow, tell them to get a faster PC.
Can't get here from there... Lets say there is 20 step procedure to get from here to there. Make sure that the rollback procedure is a totally and utterly different 40 step procedure. Whatever you do, don't make a global "undo" button that works, or at least works reliably (its OK if it only works on 75% of the operations, then no one will expect it to ever work and thus will never use it). Forward should never equal or be equivalent to backward.
Everyone whom uses the program only wants to see your glorious program, right? Not their little data or whatever it is they are working on. So FLOOD the workspace with an infinite array of tool bars and buttons covering almost the entire workspace. After all, if they paid $500 for a bigger monitor, your program should get that screen area, not their data.
So who will be the first to make baby monitors that work on your WiFi network?
Oh that's easy... Axis communications 1996 cam, crossover cable plugged into a wireless bridge adapter, so I guess just wait negative thirteen years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_video_surveillance
Now if you mean all-in-one-box, no plugging cables in allowed, I have seen those available for many years (although not quite 13 years). They are not terribly popular, since the ip cams have been moving toward PoE. Hard to do PoE w/o the ethernet cable, and there's little point in doing wireless if you are powering the cam using a perfectly good ethernet cable. There are wireless ip cams sold, I guess for use in parking lots and other locations where you can't run CAT-5 easily.
By definition any device operating in the 2.4GHZ UNLICENSED BAND is an unlicensed device!
Close, but not exactly correct. Technically if you get a amateur radio / ham radio license you can operate on a secondary basis in that band up to 1500 watts as per FCC 97.301 with special notice of 97.303(j)2(iv) and 97.303(j)2(B). Note that there is a heck of alot more to following FCC part 97 than just these two little sections. You probably mean any device operating under FCC unlicensed rules is an unlicensed device, but thats not saying much, more or less?
(B) Amateur stations operating in the 2400-2417 MHz segment must accept harmful interference that may be caused by the proper operation of industrial, scientific and medical equipment.
(iv) The 2417-2450 MHz segment is allocated to the amateur service on a co-secondary basis with the Federal Government radiolocation service. Amateur stations operating within the 2417-2450 MHz segment must accept harmful interference that may be caused by the proper operation of industrial, scientific, and medical devices operating within the band.
http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/news/part97/
It's non unusual for multiple services to be allocated on one frequency or frequency band with some being licensed and some not being licensed and some being primary allocations and some secondary allocations.
Most places I looked treated a MS like a BS + 3 years experience.
From an ageism standpoint, that is not so good, if you got your MS in only 2 years. That means you just lost a year of your career.
Its really bad if you are going back to school at an older age. If you thought it was hard getting a job at 40, imagine being 42 and having the job search go as bad as if you are 45!
But he's 50 now with a Bachelor's and is passed up on every promotion and pay raise.
He must not be in computers/IT/etc, or he must be lucky, or he's really a "manager" instead of a "computer guy". Due to rampant ageism, and cruddy work-life balance issues, your career as a programmer is statistically over by the time you are maybe 35. So, you can earn big bucks from 22-35, or you can earn microscopically bigger bucks from 24-35.
To run the numbers, you're giving up 2 years of pay and probably paying high tuition for slightly more money in the remaining 11 years of your career. Meanwhile the industry shrinks every year as it moves out of the country, so even if you do get a job two (plus) years later, the end of the "American Programmer" is just two years closer. So you may not even get 11 years extra. On the other hand, the "second great depression" might be two years closer to being over in two years, maybe. Or maybe it'll just be two years worse.
I would think going for the degree would be worth it for 20% more pay. Can a masters swing 20% more pay over a bachelors? I think not, at least not here. You need to check the numbers where you live, of course.
Unless you are one of the odd public-spirited people who have highly marketable qualifications but want to teach in high schools. I have a lot of admiration for the few really knowledgeable and intelligent school teachers in technology and science fields - they really do make a difference - but I would not like to be on a teacher's pay scale myself.
I have relatives in the field. Multiple relatives in multiple districts. Generally, to teach HS and below, the only degree allowable is an education degree. A PHD in math will not be allowed to teach algebra, and a Nobel prive winning physicist will not be allowed to teach physics, unless of course they additionally have a BA in education. The HR drones would simply toss out any ex-college professor resume, unless they of course had the all important education degree. There are exceptions in areas of teacher shortage, like if you know Spanish or are willing to wear a bullet proof vest and teach in the worst inner city schools, preferably both, but even those exceptions require evidence of night school progress on an education degree. I cannot stress how much of a requirement an ed degree is... its not like programming where a degree gets you an interview but you can do just fine without one if you're good (err, good and lucky, I mean). No ed degree (or at least serious progress toward it) means no teaching job, period.
The teachers pay scale is actually pretty good in most areas, if you correct for legendarily good retirement and medical benefits, and historically high job security. Most "technical" teachers I knew, contracted during the summer for big bucks. Finally the odds of being outsourced as just a coding drone are somewhat higher than the odds of being outsourced as a kindergarten teacher. Also they get a lot of respect from most people below 18 and virtually all people above 18...
The main problems I hear, is the friction between getting retirement vs starting over in a good district, management so bad it would make a dilbert pointy haired boss blush, and the average IQ level of the "problem parents" must be single digits at best. I don't have relatives working with older kids... I guess they have a different set of problems to deal with, like drug use, pregnancies, drug dealing in school, gang problems, fights/shootouts, basically becoming the father/parents for the kids, basically they are social workers first, teachers second, and their skill area (computer guy, chemist, etc) third.