I haven't met too many people who doubt that there is some warming happening. The debate is the cause and the severity. It's not unreasonable to ask those hard questions before dedicating resources to fix it. After all, wouldn't you prefer that we apply our limited resources in the best possible fashion?
The problem is all the arctic ice ABOVE the water level. Do they not teach logic in schools any more?
Seems to me that this would be pretty easy to test. Throw some water and ice in a cup, mark the water line, then come back in a couple of hours after the ice is melted. Let me know what you discover.
Further, the ice sheets reflect radiant heat back into space.
Hmm, half the year it's dark. The other 1/2 of the year the sun is at most 23.5% up on the horizon. With such a low angle of incidence of the radiation coming from the Sun, does the ice cap really reflect that much energy?
Fact is, you were duped and were too stupid to seek out the truth. The business was probably trying to get rid of you without firing you. Sounds like it worked!-))
Well, you're partly correct.;-)
I forget the model of the thing, but it was dubbed "the VAX killer". The deal was that my company got one free because we wrote software for VAX systems that they wanted to make available on their new box. All we had to do was to promise that we'd port our software and they'd do the rest. So picture this - I'm working in a VAX house and we've got one IBM machine in the whole place. Was I working on "the bleeding edge", or was I becoming an orphan? Well, if the project had been successful then I would have been king of the place. The sad fact was, however, that it was a beast to configure and set up, and our software sucked because the IBM system was better designed for batch work than interactive. (We sold inventory control software interfaced to material handling equipment that operated in real time.) I left the company before the project was done (for personal reasons), and they killed the project shortly thereafter. From what I hear, IBM threatened to come pick up the hardware because there was no progress on the project, and the manager told them that it would be waiting for them on the loading dock in the morning.:-)
I've been using this technique to read old receipts printed with that stupid ink that seems to fade away whenever it gets warm (in your pocket, in the sun, etc.) Like you, I wouldn't call this "news".
if IBM wants to make sure there are people to support/run/develop on their mainframes, then why don't they start providing more training?
Or what about a decent set of manuals? Way back in my VAX days, I got assigned to work on an IBM midrange system. The VAX had an entire library of manuals (remember the orange books?) while this piece of crap, overpriced IBM system came with something like two manuals. I was the only in-house guy assigned to the project, and spent tons of time trying to find answers to simple questions. When I finally asked our IBM rep how one learned their systems, his answer to me was that I needed to sit next to another experienced programmer for several years to learn the trade. So much for documentation!
That experience totally turned me off to working on high-end systems, and I suspect that the lack of good information is part of the reason why colleges don't teach anything IBM. That and the fact that PCs are so much cheaper to outfit. The only thing that IBM has going for it on the mainframe side is disk throughput, but other than that the mainframe doesn't offer anything that a cluster of PCs can't. Maybe someday some of these corporations will wake up and smell the coffee and start engineering solutions that don't revolve around a single computer system. And then maybe we'd also be able to live in a world where, when you call the airline for flight information, you won't be told that "the computers are down right now".
I'm running Linux and there wasn't a single error anywhere in the log file until the day it died. The way that I knew that it was dying was that every time I moved the laptop the drive would make a funny grinding sound. I figured it was the bearing that was going bad. RAID would have definitely saved me from the time and trouble to rebuild the system.
The company's growth has been off the charts and we've added a lot of new people
Ok, now you should really be scared. Very few companies can sustain massive growth spurts. More often than not, a company will get a bunch of new business and assume that more is coming, and they spend accordingly. If I were given this task, I'd focus on building a system that was extensible and forget about the looks. When they come in for a tour, tell your customers that while it doesn't look very sexy, you've chosen to build a solid system that can grow with their needs. Then put the money that you saved in a bank account for a rainy day.
I once was told that the best way to scare away a venture capitalist is to invite them to your posh office and serve them a catered lunch. Most VCs are bottom line folks and understand that any money spent on flashy stuff is just wasted cash. The same can be true of your customers - they'd rather get good service than see a cool data center.
I'm sure that you're right. As you point out, lots of stuff can go wrong, and the question is how far you go to prevent trouble. Looking at it realistically, I doubt many business travelers ever back up their data anyway, so for the "average Joe" this announcement is probably meaningless.
One thing about hard drives that I've found (I buy exclusively Toshiba) is that they give you lots of warning when they're going bad. My hard drive made strange noises for months before dying. If I'd had to travel, it would have been a tough call as to whether to bring along an extra drive, because we all know that hardware dies at the most inconvenient time. With a RAID solution the backup would already be on board.
For what it's worth, I weigh in at 215, or about 30 lbs over my ideal weight. If I really cared about 8 extra ounces when traveling then I could find a lot of other places to get rid of it.:-)
I'd love to have RAID in a laptop, but I've always thought about the weight/power problem as well. What I like about RAID is being able to replace a bad drive without having to rebuild the entire machine. I had a drive go bad a while back and it took me four days to order a new part and a 1/2 day to rebuild the box. I've had RAIDed drives go bad on my desktop and I just order another drive and install it in no time flat.
I don't think that the loss of data argument is as compelling as the loss of use argument. Imagine traveling to overseas and your hard drive dies. Unless you can find a repair shop that you think you can trust, you could be out of a machine for several days. RAID would help mitigate that problem.
I'm not sure how long it's going to take, but I do see a day when you'll have a decent Internet connection in your car, at which point in time your argument goes away.
For what it's worth, I listen to virtually no music, but I do think that the Internet is having and will continue to have a tremendous impact on virtually any business that exercises control through limited distribution mechanisms. We've already seen this somewhat in the news industry (via blogging) and music/video (through mechanisms like BitTorrent). Even the commissions paid on home sales have dropped significantly since the Multiple Listing Service has been opened up on the web.
armchair engineers... provide advice without any actual knowledge.
If you've got something to add to the discussion then by all means jump in. If all you want to do is hurl insults then please find another place to do it. If you're concerned about someone's lack of knowledge on a topic then provide facts that you feel will prove them wrong, as your parent did. We can't have a reasonable discussion about a topic if it boils down to a name calling exercise. I'd be more than happy to have a real debate on this topic and provide links to references in order to defend my position. Would you be willing to do the same?
How about comparing length of service and overall cost in those figures? If I remember right, a shuttle launch costs around $500 million and a Soyuz is about $50 million. As long as you don't lose the crew, the important factor is total cost. I'd say that Soyuz delivers better value. Even if you factor in the number of crew killed, Soyuz comes out on top. According to this page, total crew loss on Soyuz is 4 and the Shuttle is 14. That means that Soyuz has one loss in 20 flights whereas the Shuttle is more on the order of 1 loss in every 8. I should also note that the last death in a Soyuz occurred in 1971.
(And the bird whose story you linked to hasn't in fact exceed it's engineered lifetime yet.)
According to
this page, the engineered lifetime was one year. The article I previously quoted said that they hoped to get three years. Given that PCSat launched on 9/29/01, either figure puts us beyond its expected lifetime.
[In passing I note Space Daily is about as reliable as the wind.]
I fully understand your concerns over the source. I suggest Google or Boeing if you're looking for better info. I had heard the number before on major news outlets and was looking for confirmation.
The truss... isn't a beam.
Whether you call it a truss or a beam, at the end of the day it's used to hook other elements of the station together. Can you explain how only one truss would cost $600 million? Even if you load it up with a bunch of gear, I just don't get the cost.
On a related note: On good thing about the Shuttle/ISS sucking up most of the space dollars is that it's forced us to fly deep space missions on a budget. For example, the two Viking landers in the 70's cost several billion because we made them powered landing systems. The airbag approach of the Mars landing systems has dramatically cut the expense, and we're getting really good science to go along with it. The great thing about flying less expensive, redundant systems is that if both survive the journey then you're ahead of where you would be with a single, more expensive system.
But I think the thing that's more pertinent is that they've not had the ability to see when the gap fillers had come out.
Don't you think that this says something about what they thought the risk was? For as much of a critic as I am of NASA today, I have to believe that even in the pre-Columbia days, if the risk of a problem was deemed to be greater than that of losing an entire mission that they would have done something to mitigate the problem. I can remember several times when they ripped apart a shuttle that had already gone out the pad because they found cracks in a fuel line that had the possibility of causing a problem at launch. I just think that they were so concerned with vibration and pogo that they really didn't think about foam. After all, if you paint that foam piece red and put some eyes on it then you've got Elmo, and we all know that Elmo would never hurt anyone.
I doubt you are a engineer, let alone an aerospace engineer.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I am an engineer. I'm an engineer who believes in redundant systems and simple solutions over "space hardened" systems. There are lots of examples of guys building working systems on shoestring budgets that last well beyond their engineered lifetimes. Check out http://www.hypocrites.com/article2897.html for just one example. I also cite a story from the Apollo days when Joe Shea vetoed a crazy design for measuring the remaining fuel in the fuel tanks of Apollo spacecraft. Instead of using a nuclear detector to measure fuel in a weightless environment (page 8), he chose a design based on one found in his Karman Ghia. They installed reserve fuel tanks capable of getting the crew home, and always made sure that they were within their limits.
I find it interesting that NASA always talks about how they fly the most complex systems in the world, yet somehow its the Russians with their 40 year old designs that have the most reliable systems.
I heard a news report that said that gap fillers had been known to come loose in the past and no one worried about it too much. We're now hyper-sensitive to any damage to the tile system, probably way beyond what we should be. The fact that it took them so long to decide whether to go out and fix the problem shows that the associated risk was low, especially when compared to the risk of screwing something up if they accidentally pulled off a tile during the repair.
Ham radio operators are opposed to those that are bad.
I would agree with this statement, but the same can't be said of the ARRL. The League's approach to this was to cry foul, and then they attempted to produce evidence to back up their claims. The problem is that they put their stake in the ground too early with not enough research, and made it an "us vs. them" argument. I got so sick of all the hype that I finally dropped my membership. It's really too bad, because I strongly believe that there's a need for representation in the ham community, but the current bunch running the League aren't doing enough to promote new technologies, whether they're ham related or just have possible impact on ham operations.
Or perhaps it's because there's high-quality research going on in garages and dorm rooms across the country. Back when a "cheap" computer costs thousands of dollars, people had to cooperate because of resource constraints. Now I can pull a used PC out of the trash and create the world's best software with virtually no investment other than my time.
It's tough to say goodbye to an old friend, but I'd never want to go back to the "good old days" that spawned those conditions.
The current threat level is brown - meaning that I don't give a shit. Just patch your systems when the patches are available and you should be good to go. Your users are a much bigger threat than the new exploits based on vulnerabilities that have already been patched.
We recently did a project for a company, and we simply said "It doesn't cost any more to support the top two browsers than IE alone". We write the code on Firefox, and then run our full test passes on IE. Our experience has been that only a few minor issues will crop up, even when writing lots of Javascript. Once you understand the few important differences, you should be able to write apps for both platforms with virtually no extra effort. For the record, the app we wrote was AJAX, so it was a non-trivial app.
It is interesting to see things big money can't control.
Why do you assume that "big money" is involved and that there's a conspiracy to keep ideas like this off the market? There could be many reasons not to push a technology like this, including:
Difficulty in finding places to plug in. This has always been a problem. I doubt that most companies (large or small) will want to allow you to plug in your car when you get to work to recharge it. There are huge liability issues to contend with, which is also the same reason most employers don't want to deal with daycare for their employees.
The technology generates a whole new set of issues. I don't know how much those batteries weigh, but I'm sure that they would have a big impact on safety testing for the vehicle. Detroit doesn't control safety laws for cars. Blame that on Washington DC.
The technology isn't necessarily "green". We assume that electricity comes without an environmental impact, but it's gotta come from somewhere. Dams, nuclear plants, coal, or cogeneration. All of these have an impact on the environment.
And that's the reason people hate software patents. I can patent a whole bunch of really obvious stuff, and when someone tries to build virtually any piece of software then they're sure to run afoul of at least on of them. I swoop in, and either offer to license my technology for way more than it's worth or maybe, just maybe if you're nice then I'll offer to buy your company.
Yeah, we all understand the concept of defensive patents. We just don't agree with it.
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I haven't met too many people who doubt that there is some warming happening. The debate is the cause and the severity. It's not unreasonable to ask those hard questions before dedicating resources to fix it. After all, wouldn't you prefer that we apply our limited resources in the best possible fashion?
Seems to me that this would be pretty easy to test. Throw some water and ice in a cup, mark the water line, then come back in a couple of hours after the ice is melted. Let me know what you discover.
Further, the ice sheets reflect radiant heat back into space.
Hmm, half the year it's dark. The other 1/2 of the year the sun is at most 23.5% up on the horizon. With such a low angle of incidence of the radiation coming from the Sun, does the ice cap really reflect that much energy?
Well, you're partly correct. ;-)
I forget the model of the thing, but it was dubbed "the VAX killer". The deal was that my company got one free because we wrote software for VAX systems that they wanted to make available on their new box. All we had to do was to promise that we'd port our software and they'd do the rest. So picture this - I'm working in a VAX house and we've got one IBM machine in the whole place. Was I working on "the bleeding edge", or was I becoming an orphan? Well, if the project had been successful then I would have been king of the place. The sad fact was, however, that it was a beast to configure and set up, and our software sucked because the IBM system was better designed for batch work than interactive. (We sold inventory control software interfaced to material handling equipment that operated in real time.) I left the company before the project was done (for personal reasons), and they killed the project shortly thereafter. From what I hear, IBM threatened to come pick up the hardware because there was no progress on the project, and the manager told them that it would be waiting for them on the loading dock in the morning. :-)
I've been using this technique to read old receipts printed with that stupid ink that seems to fade away whenever it gets warm (in your pocket, in the sun, etc.) Like you, I wouldn't call this "news".
Or what about a decent set of manuals? Way back in my VAX days, I got assigned to work on an IBM midrange system. The VAX had an entire library of manuals (remember the orange books?) while this piece of crap, overpriced IBM system came with something like two manuals. I was the only in-house guy assigned to the project, and spent tons of time trying to find answers to simple questions. When I finally asked our IBM rep how one learned their systems, his answer to me was that I needed to sit next to another experienced programmer for several years to learn the trade. So much for documentation!
That experience totally turned me off to working on high-end systems, and I suspect that the lack of good information is part of the reason why colleges don't teach anything IBM. That and the fact that PCs are so much cheaper to outfit. The only thing that IBM has going for it on the mainframe side is disk throughput, but other than that the mainframe doesn't offer anything that a cluster of PCs can't. Maybe someday some of these corporations will wake up and smell the coffee and start engineering solutions that don't revolve around a single computer system. And then maybe we'd also be able to live in a world where, when you call the airline for flight information, you won't be told that "the computers are down right now".
I'm running Linux and there wasn't a single error anywhere in the log file until the day it died. The way that I knew that it was dying was that every time I moved the laptop the drive would make a funny grinding sound. I figured it was the bearing that was going bad. RAID would have definitely saved me from the time and trouble to rebuild the system.
Ok, now you should really be scared. Very few companies can sustain massive growth spurts. More often than not, a company will get a bunch of new business and assume that more is coming, and they spend accordingly. If I were given this task, I'd focus on building a system that was extensible and forget about the looks. When they come in for a tour, tell your customers that while it doesn't look very sexy, you've chosen to build a solid system that can grow with their needs. Then put the money that you saved in a bank account for a rainy day.
If I could only find a way to embed a system in my gut. I could run it on one of those pee powered batteries.
I once was told that the best way to scare away a venture capitalist is to invite them to your posh office and serve them a catered lunch. Most VCs are bottom line folks and understand that any money spent on flashy stuff is just wasted cash. The same can be true of your customers - they'd rather get good service than see a cool data center.
I'm sure that you're right. As you point out, lots of stuff can go wrong, and the question is how far you go to prevent trouble. Looking at it realistically, I doubt many business travelers ever back up their data anyway, so for the "average Joe" this announcement is probably meaningless.
One thing about hard drives that I've found (I buy exclusively Toshiba) is that they give you lots of warning when they're going bad. My hard drive made strange noises for months before dying. If I'd had to travel, it would have been a tough call as to whether to bring along an extra drive, because we all know that hardware dies at the most inconvenient time. With a RAID solution the backup would already be on board.
For what it's worth, I weigh in at 215, or about 30 lbs over my ideal weight. If I really cared about 8 extra ounces when traveling then I could find a lot of other places to get rid of it. :-)
I don't think that the loss of data argument is as compelling as the loss of use argument. Imagine traveling to overseas and your hard drive dies. Unless you can find a repair shop that you think you can trust, you could be out of a machine for several days. RAID would help mitigate that problem.
For what it's worth, I listen to virtually no music, but I do think that the Internet is having and will continue to have a tremendous impact on virtually any business that exercises control through limited distribution mechanisms. We've already seen this somewhat in the news industry (via blogging) and music/video (through mechanisms like BitTorrent). Even the commissions paid on home sales have dropped significantly since the Multiple Listing Service has been opened up on the web.
If you've got something to add to the discussion then by all means jump in. If all you want to do is hurl insults then please find another place to do it. If you're concerned about someone's lack of knowledge on a topic then provide facts that you feel will prove them wrong, as your parent did. We can't have a reasonable discussion about a topic if it boils down to a name calling exercise. I'd be more than happy to have a real debate on this topic and provide links to references in order to defend my position. Would you be willing to do the same?
How about comparing length of service and overall cost in those figures? If I remember right, a shuttle launch costs around $500 million and a Soyuz is about $50 million. As long as you don't lose the crew, the important factor is total cost. I'd say that Soyuz delivers better value. Even if you factor in the number of crew killed, Soyuz comes out on top. According to this page, total crew loss on Soyuz is 4 and the Shuttle is 14. That means that Soyuz has one loss in 20 flights whereas the Shuttle is more on the order of 1 loss in every 8. I should also note that the last death in a Soyuz occurred in 1971.
(And the bird whose story you linked to hasn't in fact exceed it's engineered lifetime yet.)
According to this page, the engineered lifetime was one year. The article I previously quoted said that they hoped to get three years. Given that PCSat launched on 9/29/01, either figure puts us beyond its expected lifetime.
[In passing I note Space Daily is about as reliable as the wind.]
I fully understand your concerns over the source. I suggest Google or Boeing if you're looking for better info. I had heard the number before on major news outlets and was looking for confirmation.
The truss ... isn't a beam.
Whether you call it a truss or a beam, at the end of the day it's used to hook other elements of the station together. Can you explain how only one truss would cost $600 million? Even if you load it up with a bunch of gear, I just don't get the cost.
On a related note: On good thing about the Shuttle/ISS sucking up most of the space dollars is that it's forced us to fly deep space missions on a budget. For example, the two Viking landers in the 70's cost several billion because we made them powered landing systems. The airbag approach of the Mars landing systems has dramatically cut the expense, and we're getting really good science to go along with it. The great thing about flying less expensive, redundant systems is that if both survive the journey then you're ahead of where you would be with a single, more expensive system.
Don't you think that this says something about what they thought the risk was? For as much of a critic as I am of NASA today, I have to believe that even in the pre-Columbia days, if the risk of a problem was deemed to be greater than that of losing an entire mission that they would have done something to mitigate the problem. I can remember several times when they ripped apart a shuttle that had already gone out the pad because they found cracks in a fuel line that had the possibility of causing a problem at launch. I just think that they were so concerned with vibration and pogo that they really didn't think about foam. After all, if you paint that foam piece red and put some eyes on it then you've got Elmo, and we all know that Elmo would never hurt anyone.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-02d.html
I doubt you are a engineer, let alone an aerospace engineer.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I am an engineer. I'm an engineer who believes in redundant systems and simple solutions over "space hardened" systems. There are lots of examples of guys building working systems on shoestring budgets that last well beyond their engineered lifetimes. Check out http://www.hypocrites.com/article2897.html for just one example. I also cite a story from the Apollo days when Joe Shea vetoed a crazy design for measuring the remaining fuel in the fuel tanks of Apollo spacecraft. Instead of using a nuclear detector to measure fuel in a weightless environment (page 8), he chose a design based on one found in his Karman Ghia. They installed reserve fuel tanks capable of getting the crew home, and always made sure that they were within their limits.
I find it interesting that NASA always talks about how they fly the most complex systems in the world, yet somehow its the Russians with their 40 year old designs that have the most reliable systems.
I heard a news report that said that gap fillers had been known to come loose in the past and no one worried about it too much. We're now hyper-sensitive to any damage to the tile system, probably way beyond what we should be. The fact that it took them so long to decide whether to go out and fix the problem shows that the associated risk was low, especially when compared to the risk of screwing something up if they accidentally pulled off a tile during the repair.
When a single ISS beam costs $600 million, you gotta ask what they're spending their cash on.
I would agree with this statement, but the same can't be said of the ARRL. The League's approach to this was to cry foul, and then they attempted to produce evidence to back up their claims. The problem is that they put their stake in the ground too early with not enough research, and made it an "us vs. them" argument. I got so sick of all the hype that I finally dropped my membership. It's really too bad, because I strongly believe that there's a need for representation in the ham community, but the current bunch running the League aren't doing enough to promote new technologies, whether they're ham related or just have possible impact on ham operations.
Wouldn't an ISP protect its customers. Or maybe they really like their costumes.
It's tough to say goodbye to an old friend, but I'd never want to go back to the "good old days" that spawned those conditions.
The current threat level is brown - meaning that I don't give a shit. Just patch your systems when the patches are available and you should be good to go. Your users are a much bigger threat than the new exploits based on vulnerabilities that have already been patched.
We recently did a project for a company, and we simply said "It doesn't cost any more to support the top two browsers than IE alone". We write the code on Firefox, and then run our full test passes on IE. Our experience has been that only a few minor issues will crop up, even when writing lots of Javascript. Once you understand the few important differences, you should be able to write apps for both platforms with virtually no extra effort. For the record, the app we wrote was AJAX, so it was a non-trivial app.
Why do you assume that "big money" is involved and that there's a conspiracy to keep ideas like this off the market? There could be many reasons not to push a technology like this, including:
Yeah, we all understand the concept of defensive patents. We just don't agree with it.