The "plastic white egg" is a good first-order approximation of Apple's design for their new campus, which they'll be building at the old HP facility off Tantau Ave. in Cupertino. Well, fried egg, anyway, since there's a hole in the center...
Yes, we need to get off the planet and out of the solar system before the Sun blows up 4 billion years from now. We've got time. We also need to get off the planet before the next dinosaur-killer asteroid hits, probably somewhere between 0-100 million years from now. We've got time for that too. Meanwhile, our first step needs to be Not Being Dead, which means we not only have to find ways to not have a major nuclear war or an interesting biological war, and our next step needs to be to avoid rendering Earth uninhabitable before then. Working on both at once is just fine.
Space technology is useful for building measurement systems to understand what's going on here on Earth. It's also useful for understanding what's going on in the rest of the solar system, so we can identify any dino-killer asteroids pointed at us and deflect them or blow them up, though even Tunguska-sized events are pretty rare - it'll be a much easier project if we let Moore's Law crank our electronics development for a couple of decades so we'll have much better and lighter-weight equipment. But to do anything serious out in space, or to terraform Mars into an emergency backup planet, we need to develop serious understanding of ecosystems, because we need to bring ecosystems anywhere we're going to bring humans. (You also need them even for robots, but they can use much simpler ecosystems.) All of that biology's a lot more difficult work than merely getting rockets that can go halfway across the solar system.
Meanwhile, getting to the Moon was a fun way to demonstrate our military-industrial complex's skills that are layered on top of the heavy industry business. But right now we have to figure out how to get the heavy industry folks to stop cranking up the planet's thermostat, get the military-industrial complex to stop drumming up new business for themselves, and get a bunch of farmers to have better technology than slash-and-burn agriculture or petro-business-based fertilizers, and it wouldn't hurt if we can find something productive for the 50% of humanity that are no longer farmers to do.
We started a project with a planet that was mostly habitable, found ways to make it habitable for far more humans, but did immense amounts of damage in the process, and it may not be able to support that many in the future. There are projects going on to adjust the atmosphere a bit, reducing the quantities of several simple gasses that we've been adding, and not only do lots of people think that doing so will be too expensive, some of the companies that have been providing the raw materials think it's worth convincing half the population that science is evil because letting other people mess with the thermostat may interfere with their business.
Basically, until terraforming Earth is profitable, it's not going to get done.
The most important technology you need for any serious space colonization is the ability to manage a closed ecosystem with no internal inputs except energy. If you can't do that, you might still be able to get to Mars using less complete recycling, and you can park in Earth orbit with occasional resupply, but you can't do anything significant out in asteroid belts and you certainly can't run a generation ship out to other star systems. Even Mars colonies are pretty sketchy - you've got spare CO2, sand, iron, and maybe water, but those are just the crude raw materials, not the fancy stuff like dirt or vitamins, and the Moon's got even less.
Running a terrarium like Biosphere 2 is something we don't know how to do without cheating yet. Terraforming a whole planet is much harder - we've done some experiments on one of our nearby planets which haven't been successful - we don't even know where the thermostat is yet, though we seem to keep turning up the heat, killing off the local vegetation, and making holes in the ozone and leaving big patches of desert where there used to be vegetation and planting monocultures in place of jungles and prairies. A spaceship's ecology is somewhere in between - simpler than a planet, so maybe we don't actually have to have figured out how to fix Earth before we build one, but out in the asteroid belt you can't mine for dirt - you have to know how to make your own.
The other way to colonize space is to radically simplify the ecosystem's requirements by sending robots instead of canned apes. That's useful for data collection and mining, but unless The Great Nanotech Singularity In The Future!! lets us all upload onto better hardware, that's not going to let humanity migrate off the planet in case of a dinosaur-killer asteroid or a nuclear winter. So we're going to need to do some serious work on this ecology stuff first.
From Sparkfun.com you can get a GPS module for $40 and a quad-band GPS shield for $60, add $20-40 for Arduino/clones (or $10 for home-brew on the perfboard you were going to need to mount the GPS anyway.) You can do it under budget if you want, or everything from prefab for $150 with no trouble. But it's still going to cost a bit more than buying a used iPhone 3G (or an iPhone 1, if cellphone triangulation's good enough instead of GPS), and that'll cost more than buying some other used cellphones that have GPS and Java.
My 1971 and 1987 Chevy vans had similar problems. The 71's ignition system would crash (which took real creativity on Chevy's part, since it was a pre-computerization car), and I'd either have to pull off the road or else just put it in neutral while driving, turn off the ignition, and then reboot. It became easier after the neutral safety switch failed; I could reboot it while leaving it in drive. The 87 got a new engine after 100K miles, and it wasn't quite identical to the original. Under some driving conditions (typically accelerating up a hill), it would decide that the gas mixtures just looked wrong and light the Service Engine Soon idiot light. That didn't seem to affect engine behaviour, but I'd have to reboot it to make the light go away.
And my 2001 Chrysler had a recall about a year later - no hardware change, it was a firmware update that made the acceleration better.
You're dismissing the efficacy of tin foil hats because you've only tried using aluminum foil - they need real tin to work right.
But seriously, if you listen to the excuses they're giving for keeping smallpox, that's pretty much what they're saying (though the Americans only talk about crazy or corrupt Russians, not crazy or corrupt Americans, and vice versa), and both sides spread hype about terrorists. And those were also the excuses they gave for keeping anthrax. And if you don't remember Bush and Cheney giving out multiple sets of lies about why we had to invade Iraq, you must have had short-term memory problems back then.
Maybe you didn't notice the amount of complaint the Army had about being forced to accept anthrax vaccines that were known to be somewhat unsafe? I'm not talking "Jenny McCarthy Vaccine Paranoia" types of unsafe, I'm talking about the "risks of getting the disease that were higher with the relatively new anthrax vaccines and the lack of adequate testing on them" types of unsafe.
The US Military hasn't been willing to let go of biological warfare, and probably also hasn't been willing to let go of chemical warfare either. And the Ex-Soviet Cold Warriors haven't been willing to either, and neither side trusts the other, and they aren't going to let little events like the fall of the Soviet Empire calm them down. If you remember the late years of the Clinton Administration, the fearmonger types were busy ranting about Anthrax and Terrorism, so after 9/11 happened, it was US biowarfare weaponized anthrax they kept working on got used for terrorism, and Bush got to lie about Saddam making anthrax and force US soldiers to get relatively risky vaccines to keep his pharma and biowarfare friends happy. Bush and Cheney also tried to ramp up anti-Russian fear and push NATO to be aggressive toward them (and after all, fighting Russians is NATO's whole purpose, so if they didn't do it they'd be obsolete), and that helped Russia pick Putin as a tough-guy leader, who's happy to have a quasi-enemy to give him an excuse to get tougher, and both sides get to use terrorism as an excuse to pretend that they need to keep developing biowarfare capabilities in case terrorists or crazy employees steal the other side's smallpox*, while quietly telling their own political hardliners that they don't trust the other side's military hardliners.
It's especially egregious with smallpox, because you can make anti-smallpox vaccines the old-fashioned way, from cowpox, and don't have to keep smallpox itself around. There's no excuse for either side not to eradicate their stash, and by doing so, they can reduce the risk to themselves as well as the rest of the world, even if the other side cheats . But even with anthrax, there's no excuse for the US to be developing techniques to weaponize it, as opposed to just keeping it around for vaccine and antibiotic testing, and while Cipro's now out of patent, countries like Argentina which have occasional anthrax problems (from cattle ranching) generally just use penicillins.
( * And it turns out not to matter whether the FBI is right that Bruce Ivins was guilty, or the crazy conspiracy theorists who say Ivins was framed as a coverup by the spooks who really did it are right, or the FBI-is-incompetent theorists who say that Ivins was believable enough to get people off the FBI's case after they were wrong about Hatfill, because either way there can be another Bruce Ivins or Ivan Brewski around to flip out or frame. Only way to prevent it is to destroy it all.)
Harry Diamond Labs used to have a place down near Albuquerque that they used for zapping things with lightning and other big electromagnetic pulses. If you needed to simulate what happened to an airplane, radio system, or telephone switch near a nuclear explosion, that was the place to go. I don't know if it's still operational - Wikipedia indicates that HDL got absorbed into the Army Research Labs in the 90s, but at least the equipment should be in better shape in dry New Mexico than in Russian climates.
Neither - he's gotten mature enough to decide to include the pictures of puppies and beige cars, instead of the pictures of him engaging in unacceptable behavior.
I've only got one Facebook account, and I don't use it very often. But I've got multiple Twitter accounts - one's named something like "dontfollowme", because some newspaper insisted on using Twitter logins for comments. If a bank really wants low-quality Facebook data, they'll find I have no friends, but I'm a fan of several random not-currently-produced TV programs or brands of cheese or something.
The story Cory's reporting about is the policies that BBC wants to set for its own programming, and is trying to force everybody else to support technically. It's especially obnoxious because the BBC's content is paid for by the license fees of British television and radio users, so it's trying to sell the public's own content back to the public. And it's especially frustrating because early on. the BBC announced that their policy towards the Internet would be to make everything available for free download, and they've gone back on that.
But then, Cory's one of those troublemaking immigrants from the ex-colonies, swooping down in his red cape and goggles to stop evildoers.
BogoMIPS is a measure of hardware performance. True, it's a benchmark mainly used by Linux, as opposed to WinBench or FPS-with-some-game, but that doesn't matter; we're not talking about the botnets exploiting a bug in the benchmarking program to get it to do work for them:-) But they're the current benchmark; I've also used machines during the years when we benchmarked in SPECints, in Dhrystones and Whetstones, and in MIPS, and before that (since "1 MIPS" was canonically the speed of a VAX 11/780, and I'd used a couple generations of PDP-11s, IBM mainframes, HP minicomputers, IBM System 34, and an IBM 403 whose speed was probably best measured in punch cards processed per hour), though these days I'm generally more interested in benchmarks like megabits/gigabits per second or packets per second, and in real Mbps vs. vendor-claimed Mbps.
Congratulations! The Botnet operators thought $3.50 (for them) was worth more than (probability you noticed a problem) * (all the effort and money it would take you to fix it.) Of course, if you're a typical botnet zombie host, the effort and cost were $0, plus a bit extra because your PC is running slower, but hey, you had lots of bogomips to spare.
There are only three ways this is going to end - you're going to stay at the sucky job until you die, or you're going to find a new job and leave them, or you're going to stay at the sucky job until the manipulative jerks you work for go out of business / fire you for disliking them / lay you off to save their own jobs. The first option means your entire life will suck, and the third one means your life will suck for a while and leave you unemployed in ways that make it even harder to get a new job. So you need to get your ass out of there pretty fast.
In this economy, it's not easy to find a new job, but it's a lot easier if you already have some job than if you don't. Interviewing is not only tough because it's the kind of social skill many people don't have, it's especially tough if you're under pressure from unemployment, and it's tough because there are almost always more people looking for a job than jobs available, so you're likely to get rejected unless it's an amazingly good match (and you know it going in.) But hey! you're getting dissed every day at work, so even a day of interviews where the people reject you is going to be better than a day at your current job, so it's a win, and it's practice for figuring out what you really want to do and what kinds of cool things other companies are doing so you can find the right one.
Meanwhile, yeah, go out and start something open source, or start playing with Arduino micro-controllers, or whatever. So what if the company you work for ends up owning the intellectual property for your proximity-activated Christmas-tree-light cat exerciser?
I used to keep a couple of honeypot open servers on the DSL line in my lab in the late 90s. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 box, but the unpatched Red Hat 6.x box was broken into and brutally killed enough weeks in a row I ended up naming it "Kenny". It got attacked by some machine in Sweden and was pinging home to check in and receive further commands, so I and the admin there cleaned up our machines. I forget if the attack on the wu-ftpd daemon came from Washington University or was used to attack them. The bad guy thought they had covered their tracks by replacing the ps and ls commands, but I noticed their extra directories with "find", and their processes with "echo/proc/*":-)
So one week the attack was coming from MIT. I tried going through mit.edu's website to find a sysadmin to talk to, didn't get a response, so I sent email to a security researcher I knew there, who already knew about the problem. It turns out that the attack wasn't actually from MIT - it was from somebody in Japan who was using a compromised Sun server, and there was a byte order problem in the attack code. So the attacker wanted my machine to be pinging him at x.y.z.18, but instead my responses were going to 18.z.y.x at MIT.
Back in the 80s, my credit union was low-tech and really lame, and I kept a small amount of money in it in case so I'd be an active member in case I ever needed a loan from them, but had a commercial bank I was really happy with - it even had a telephone-based version of on-line bill paying, before the web was around.
In the early 90s, I moved to Silicon Valley, and while I did join a credit union, I also opened an account at a small commercial bank which had recently expanded to having four branches. The week after I opened the account, I came in to deposit my paycheck and they greeted me by name. After a year or two of great service, they got bought by a large regional bank and started jacking up fees, and I'd moved across the bay - their most convenient cash machine was in Denver Airport:-) My credit union didn't have an account near me, but had a cooperative agreement with several other credit unions so I could go to a nearby office, and I moved my money and haven't looked back. Since then my CU's opened a nearby office, set up their website to make paying bills convenient, and I can use ATMs at 7-11 for free.
Feel free to use barter instead, or declare leaves to be your preferred currency if you'd like, or cigarettes with dollar signs printed on them in gold or whatever.
It is illegal. If the check is drafted on that bank, and you ask the bank manager "Are you refusing to honor a check drafted on your bank?", he's supposed to get very embarrassed and apologize, assuming the check's not signed by the account holder or the account not having money in it. Other banks don't have to honor the check, but the bank it's written on does.
George Washington's portrait is on the US $1 bill. He was the leading general in the US revolution, and was the first president under the current system of government (though not actually the first US president - there were several under the Articles of Confederation government before the current US constitution was adopted.)
George W. Bush was a recent US president, and a real loser who was often on vacation, typically at his farm in Texas instead of in Washington, and there were people who thought this was a bad idea. (I'm not one of them - since just about everything he did was evil, incompetent, or both, the less of it he did, the better:-) A popular rant at the time went "___some_event___ happened - where was George?".
Some years ago, somebody set up a "Where's George" website to track dollar bills by serial number, and stamping "Where was George" on them. You can type in the serial numbers and see where that bill has been, and watch how money flows around the economy.
Yes, some of those companies are doing IT projects (and of course, even physical work is becoming increasingly IT-based.) But most of them are designing and building weapons or other military hardware - it's not the kind of work the government could or should be doing themselves. Look at the list - it's Boeing and other aircraft companies at the top.
A purely separate question is whether the US should still be paying billions of dollars a year for weapons that are designed to beat the Soviet Evil Empire in the next phase of the Cold War, or whether Eisenhower's comments about the military-industrial complex apply here. (My answers would be that no, it's a scam, and Ike was right.) But that's not the question here.
Also, a large fraction of the military-contracting system is that the government wants lots of specialized weird stuff tested to badly-written specs in ways that don't get economies of scale. Sometimes the $600 hammer is just an accounting issue - the customer's buying a jet engine and a jet engine hammer, and the $1000 in administrative costs gets split 50-50 between the $10m engine and the $10 hammer, and maybe it costs $90 to express-mail the $10 hammer to Diego Garcia. Sometimes it's because the military wants a hand-milled-titanium hammer with a carbon fiber handle for no good reason. But sometimes it's because they only want two hammers, and it costs $1000 in labor to set up the machinery to make this shape hammer and $200 to buy a batch of the right kind of metal, and if they wanted 100 hammers instead of two they'd amortize out to $12-$15 each.
Slashdot Mirror
The "plastic white egg" is a good first-order approximation of Apple's design for their new campus, which they'll be building at the old HP facility off Tantau Ave. in Cupertino. Well, fried egg, anyway, since there's a hole in the center...
Yes, we need to get off the planet and out of the solar system before the Sun blows up 4 billion years from now. We've got time. We also need to get off the planet before the next dinosaur-killer asteroid hits, probably somewhere between 0-100 million years from now. We've got time for that too. Meanwhile, our first step needs to be Not Being Dead, which means we not only have to find ways to not have a major nuclear war or an interesting biological war, and our next step needs to be to avoid rendering Earth uninhabitable before then. Working on both at once is just fine.
Space technology is useful for building measurement systems to understand what's going on here on Earth. It's also useful for understanding what's going on in the rest of the solar system, so we can identify any dino-killer asteroids pointed at us and deflect them or blow them up, though even Tunguska-sized events are pretty rare - it'll be a much easier project if we let Moore's Law crank our electronics development for a couple of decades so we'll have much better and lighter-weight equipment. But to do anything serious out in space, or to terraform Mars into an emergency backup planet, we need to develop serious understanding of ecosystems, because we need to bring ecosystems anywhere we're going to bring humans. (You also need them even for robots, but they can use much simpler ecosystems.) All of that biology's a lot more difficult work than merely getting rockets that can go halfway across the solar system.
Meanwhile, getting to the Moon was a fun way to demonstrate our military-industrial complex's skills that are layered on top of the heavy industry business. But right now we have to figure out how to get the heavy industry folks to stop cranking up the planet's thermostat, get the military-industrial complex to stop drumming up new business for themselves, and get a bunch of farmers to have better technology than slash-and-burn agriculture or petro-business-based fertilizers, and it wouldn't hurt if we can find something productive for the 50% of humanity that are no longer farmers to do.
We started a project with a planet that was mostly habitable, found ways to make it habitable for far more humans, but did immense amounts of damage in the process, and it may not be able to support that many in the future. There are projects going on to adjust the atmosphere a bit, reducing the quantities of several simple gasses that we've been adding, and not only do lots of people think that doing so will be too expensive, some of the companies that have been providing the raw materials think it's worth convincing half the population that science is evil because letting other people mess with the thermostat may interfere with their business.
Basically, until terraforming Earth is profitable, it's not going to get done.
The most important technology you need for any serious space colonization is the ability to manage a closed ecosystem with no internal inputs except energy. If you can't do that, you might still be able to get to Mars using less complete recycling, and you can park in Earth orbit with occasional resupply, but you can't do anything significant out in asteroid belts and you certainly can't run a generation ship out to other star systems. Even Mars colonies are pretty sketchy - you've got spare CO2, sand, iron, and maybe water, but those are just the crude raw materials, not the fancy stuff like dirt or vitamins, and the Moon's got even less.
Running a terrarium like Biosphere 2 is something we don't know how to do without cheating yet. Terraforming a whole planet is much harder - we've done some experiments on one of our nearby planets which haven't been successful - we don't even know where the thermostat is yet, though we seem to keep turning up the heat, killing off the local vegetation, and making holes in the ozone and leaving big patches of desert where there used to be vegetation and planting monocultures in place of jungles and prairies. A spaceship's ecology is somewhere in between - simpler than a planet, so maybe we don't actually have to have figured out how to fix Earth before we build one, but out in the asteroid belt you can't mine for dirt - you have to know how to make your own.
The other way to colonize space is to radically simplify the ecosystem's requirements by sending robots instead of canned apes. That's useful for data collection and mining, but unless The Great Nanotech Singularity In The Future!! lets us all upload onto better hardware, that's not going to let humanity migrate off the planet in case of a dinosaur-killer asteroid or a nuclear winter. So we're going to need to do some serious work on this ecology stuff first.
From Sparkfun.com you can get a GPS module for $40 and a quad-band GPS shield for $60, add $20-40 for Arduino/clones (or $10 for home-brew on the perfboard you were going to need to mount the GPS anyway.) You can do it under budget if you want, or everything from prefab for $150 with no trouble. But it's still going to cost a bit more than buying a used iPhone 3G (or an iPhone 1, if cellphone triangulation's good enough instead of GPS), and that'll cost more than buying some other used cellphones that have GPS and Java.
My 1971 and 1987 Chevy vans had similar problems. The 71's ignition system would crash (which took real creativity on Chevy's part, since it was a pre-computerization car), and I'd either have to pull off the road or else just put it in neutral while driving, turn off the ignition, and then reboot. It became easier after the neutral safety switch failed; I could reboot it while leaving it in drive. The 87 got a new engine after 100K miles, and it wasn't quite identical to the original. Under some driving conditions (typically accelerating up a hill), it would decide that the gas mixtures just looked wrong and light the Service Engine Soon idiot light. That didn't seem to affect engine behaviour, but I'd have to reboot it to make the light go away.
And my 2001 Chrysler had a recall about a year later - no hardware change, it was a firmware update that made the acceleration better.
You're dismissing the efficacy of tin foil hats because you've only tried using aluminum foil - they need real tin to work right.
But seriously, if you listen to the excuses they're giving for keeping smallpox, that's pretty much what they're saying (though the Americans only talk about crazy or corrupt Russians, not crazy or corrupt Americans, and vice versa), and both sides spread hype about terrorists. And those were also the excuses they gave for keeping anthrax. And if you don't remember Bush and Cheney giving out multiple sets of lies about why we had to invade Iraq, you must have had short-term memory problems back then.
Maybe you didn't notice the amount of complaint the Army had about being forced to accept anthrax vaccines that were known to be somewhat unsafe? I'm not talking "Jenny McCarthy Vaccine Paranoia" types of unsafe, I'm talking about the "risks of getting the disease that were higher with the relatively new anthrax vaccines and the lack of adequate testing on them" types of unsafe.
The US Military hasn't been willing to let go of biological warfare, and probably also hasn't been willing to let go of chemical warfare either. And the Ex-Soviet Cold Warriors haven't been willing to either, and neither side trusts the other, and they aren't going to let little events like the fall of the Soviet Empire calm them down. If you remember the late years of the Clinton Administration, the fearmonger types were busy ranting about Anthrax and Terrorism, so after 9/11 happened, it was US biowarfare weaponized anthrax they kept working on got used for terrorism, and Bush got to lie about Saddam making anthrax and force US soldiers to get relatively risky vaccines to keep his pharma and biowarfare friends happy. Bush and Cheney also tried to ramp up anti-Russian fear and push NATO to be aggressive toward them (and after all, fighting Russians is NATO's whole purpose, so if they didn't do it they'd be obsolete), and that helped Russia pick Putin as a tough-guy leader, who's happy to have a quasi-enemy to give him an excuse to get tougher, and both sides get to use terrorism as an excuse to pretend that they need to keep developing biowarfare capabilities in case terrorists or crazy employees steal the other side's smallpox*, while quietly telling their own political hardliners that they don't trust the other side's military hardliners.
It's especially egregious with smallpox, because you can make anti-smallpox vaccines the old-fashioned way, from cowpox, and don't have to keep smallpox itself around. There's no excuse for either side not to eradicate their stash, and by doing so, they can reduce the risk to themselves as well as the rest of the world, even if the other side cheats . But even with anthrax, there's no excuse for the US to be developing techniques to weaponize it, as opposed to just keeping it around for vaccine and antibiotic testing, and while Cipro's now out of patent, countries like Argentina which have occasional anthrax problems (from cattle ranching) generally just use penicillins.
( * And it turns out not to matter whether the FBI is right that Bruce Ivins was guilty, or the crazy conspiracy theorists who say Ivins was framed as a coverup by the spooks who really did it are right, or the FBI-is-incompetent theorists who say that Ivins was believable enough to get people off the FBI's case after they were wrong about Hatfill, because either way there can be another Bruce Ivins or Ivan Brewski around to flip out or frame. Only way to prevent it is to destroy it all.)
Harry Diamond Labs used to have a place down near Albuquerque that they used for zapping things with lightning and other big electromagnetic pulses. If you needed to simulate what happened to an airplane, radio system, or telephone switch near a nuclear explosion, that was the place to go. I don't know if it's still operational - Wikipedia indicates that HDL got absorbed into the Army Research Labs in the 90s, but at least the equipment should be in better shape in dry New Mexico than in Russian climates.
Neither - he's gotten mature enough to decide to include the pictures of puppies and beige cars, instead of the pictures of him engaging in unacceptable behavior.
I've only got one Facebook account, and I don't use it very often. But I've got multiple Twitter accounts - one's named something like "dontfollowme", because some newspaper insisted on using Twitter logins for comments. If a bank really wants low-quality Facebook data, they'll find I have no friends, but I'm a fan of several random not-currently-produced TV programs or brands of cheese or something.
The story Cory's reporting about is the policies that BBC wants to set for its own programming, and is trying to force everybody else to support technically. It's especially obnoxious because the BBC's content is paid for by the license fees of British television and radio users, so it's trying to sell the public's own content back to the public. And it's especially frustrating because early on. the BBC announced that their policy towards the Internet would be to make everything available for free download, and they've gone back on that.
But then, Cory's one of those troublemaking immigrants from the ex-colonies, swooping down in his red cape and goggles to stop evildoers.
BogoMIPS is a measure of hardware performance. True, it's a benchmark mainly used by Linux, as opposed to WinBench or FPS-with-some-game, but that doesn't matter; we're not talking about the botnets exploiting a bug in the benchmarking program to get it to do work for them :-) But they're the current benchmark; I've also used machines during the years when we benchmarked in SPECints, in Dhrystones and Whetstones, and in MIPS, and before that (since "1 MIPS" was canonically the speed of a VAX 11/780, and I'd used a couple generations of PDP-11s, IBM mainframes, HP minicomputers, IBM System 34, and an IBM 403 whose speed was probably best measured in punch cards processed per hour), though these days I'm generally more interested in benchmarks like megabits/gigabits per second or packets per second, and in real Mbps vs. vendor-claimed Mbps.
RadioTV is correct - this was under the earlier numbering system.
Congratulations! The Botnet operators thought $3.50 (for them) was worth more than (probability you noticed a problem) * (all the effort and money it would take you to fix it.) Of course, if you're a typical botnet zombie host, the effort and cost were $0, plus a bit extra because your PC is running slower, but hey, you had lots of bogomips to spare.
There are only three ways this is going to end - you're going to stay at the sucky job until you die, or you're going to find a new job and leave them, or you're going to stay at the sucky job until the manipulative jerks you work for go out of business / fire you for disliking them / lay you off to save their own jobs. The first option means your entire life will suck, and the third one means your life will suck for a while and leave you unemployed in ways that make it even harder to get a new job. So you need to get your ass out of there pretty fast.
In this economy, it's not easy to find a new job, but it's a lot easier if you already have some job than if you don't. Interviewing is not only tough because it's the kind of social skill many people don't have, it's especially tough if you're under pressure from unemployment, and it's tough because there are almost always more people looking for a job than jobs available, so you're likely to get rejected unless it's an amazingly good match (and you know it going in.) But hey! you're getting dissed every day at work, so even a day of interviews where the people reject you is going to be better than a day at your current job, so it's a win, and it's practice for figuring out what you really want to do and what kinds of cool things other companies are doing so you can find the right one.
Meanwhile, yeah, go out and start something open source, or start playing with Arduino micro-controllers, or whatever. So what if the company you work for ends up owning the intellectual property for your proximity-activated Christmas-tree-light cat exerciser?
Guess Who was on second. The Band was on third.
I used to keep a couple of honeypot open servers on the DSL line in my lab in the late 90s. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 box, but the unpatched Red Hat 6.x box was broken into and brutally killed enough weeks in a row I ended up naming it "Kenny". It got attacked by some machine in Sweden and was pinging home to check in and receive further commands, so I and the admin there cleaned up our machines. I forget if the attack on the wu-ftpd daemon came from Washington University or was used to attack them. The bad guy thought they had covered their tracks by replacing the ps and ls commands, but I noticed their extra directories with "find", and their processes with "echo /proc/*" :-)
So one week the attack was coming from MIT. I tried going through mit.edu's website to find a sysadmin to talk to, didn't get a response, so I sent email to a security researcher I knew there, who already knew about the problem. It turns out that the attack wasn't actually from MIT - it was from somebody in Japan who was using a compromised Sun server, and there was a byte order problem in the attack code. So the attacker wanted my machine to be pinging him at x.y.z.18, but instead my responses were going to 18.z.y.x at MIT.
Back in the 80s, my credit union was low-tech and really lame, and I kept a small amount of money in it in case so I'd be an active member in case I ever needed a loan from them, but had a commercial bank I was really happy with - it even had a telephone-based version of on-line bill paying, before the web was around.
In the early 90s, I moved to Silicon Valley, and while I did join a credit union, I also opened an account at a small commercial bank which had recently expanded to having four branches. The week after I opened the account, I came in to deposit my paycheck and they greeted me by name. After a year or two of great service, they got bought by a large regional bank and started jacking up fees, and I'd moved across the bay - their most convenient cash machine was in Denver Airport :-) My credit union didn't have an account near me, but had a cooperative agreement with several other credit unions so I could go to a nearby office, and I moved my money and haven't looked back. Since then my CU's opened a nearby office, set up their website to make paying bills convenient, and I can use ATMs at 7-11 for free.
Feel free to use barter instead, or declare leaves to be your preferred currency if you'd like, or cigarettes with dollar signs printed on them in gold or whatever.
It is illegal. If the check is drafted on that bank, and you ask the bank manager "Are you refusing to honor a check drafted on your bank?", he's supposed to get very embarrassed and apologize, assuming the check's not signed by the account holder or the account not having money in it. Other banks don't have to honor the check, but the bank it's written on does.
George Washington's portrait is on the US $1 bill. He was the leading general in the US revolution, and was the first president under the current system of government (though not actually the first US president - there were several under the Articles of Confederation government before the current US constitution was adopted.)
George W. Bush was a recent US president, and a real loser who was often on vacation, typically at his farm in Texas instead of in Washington, and there were people who thought this was a bad idea. (I'm not one of them - since just about everything he did was evil, incompetent, or both, the less of it he did, the better :-) A popular rant at the time went "___some_event___ happened - where was George?".
Some years ago, somebody set up a "Where's George" website to track dollar bills by serial number, and stamping "Where was George" on them. You can type in the serial numbers and see where that bill has been, and watch how money flows around the economy.
Yes, some of those companies are doing IT projects (and of course, even physical work is becoming increasingly IT-based.) But most of them are designing and building weapons or other military hardware - it's not the kind of work the government could or should be doing themselves. Look at the list - it's Boeing and other aircraft companies at the top.
A purely separate question is whether the US should still be paying billions of dollars a year for weapons that are designed to beat the Soviet Evil Empire in the next phase of the Cold War, or whether Eisenhower's comments about the military-industrial complex apply here. (My answers would be that no, it's a scam, and Ike was right.) But that's not the question here.
Also, a large fraction of the military-contracting system is that the government wants lots of specialized weird stuff tested to badly-written specs in ways that don't get economies of scale. Sometimes the $600 hammer is just an accounting issue - the customer's buying a jet engine and a jet engine hammer, and the $1000 in administrative costs gets split 50-50 between the $10m engine and the $10 hammer, and maybe it costs $90 to express-mail the $10 hammer to Diego Garcia. Sometimes it's because the military wants a hand-milled-titanium hammer with a carbon fiber handle for no good reason. But sometimes it's because they only want two hammers, and it costs $1000 in labor to set up the machinery to make this shape hammer and $200 to buy a batch of the right kind of metal, and if they wanted 100 hammers instead of two they'd amortize out to $12-$15 each.
Does anybody know if there are pre-built VMware appliances with the new OpenBSD and VMware tools on them? Or will I need to do that from scratch?