While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally. I note that the oldest IIS webserver finally managed to rack up 2 years, just in time for Slammer - but that every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that. And XP is a reliability unimprovement. And Foghorn Leghorn - er, I mean, Longhorn, or BlackComb, or whatever it's called today is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too.
Meantime, I get plenty done and there are no Windows machines in the house at all to "do stuff" with. I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents, and each screen I face may have more than three things to click on, but my documents and programs do come out hot and on time.
If you ever come to visit Western Australia, call ahead. I can show you a bunch of kids doing video editing on their Linux boxes and a highly productive office kitted out with nothing but Linux. No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.
Look, I use Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Guess which one pays the bills.
The long and the short of it is: Windows is much more trouble to use than the others, so it keeps you in a job. You don't happen to have any tobacco farmers in your ancestry?
Open source has and will always be a toy for those of use with too much time on our hands.
take cluestick
/ME picks up a +4 cluestick
weild cluestick
/ME is now weilding a +4 cluestick
If that little piece of crackspeak were true, what are IBM doing supporting it? Why do Google use it exclusively? Why are Linux-based supercomputing clusters filling up the top 500? Why are Fortune 500s like Merryl Lynch contributing to it?
Thank you for playing, here's your gold-plated tie pin, now nick off.
They market and listen to people who BUY stuff.
That's right, and take them out to dinner to woo and weasel and promise (lie to) them whatever they need to promise to get more money out of them and stick more control into instead of spending that money and effort in making the whole computing scene better by letting go of their stranglehold. And funny you should mention Cisco, 'coz one of their products is a PC running Linux. And if FOSS is so useless and dangerous, why do Microsoft ship it? Gotcha gold pin, have you? Here's the door, have a nice life.
I have to deal OpenSource drones all the time. They can not get jobs!
The problem here is that most of them spend so much time working that they have none left for overt advocacy, writing up proposals, answering the queries from pollies etc (and the snowballing interest in FOSS). This in a country (Australia) that Microsoft are grooming as a showcase for their technology (part of why Stevie flew across to jolly Telstra along). We've just today had another meeting with a pollie falling over themselves to learn the best ways of integrating FOSS into government IT.
Microsoft claim to want a level playing field. We claim to not want an 800lb gorilla playing on it with us mere mortals ('coz it'll pound us level with the playing field politically and financially if it does). Regardless of the politics, the Open Source software job market is booming. Kids want to be more than a George Jetson reboot-button jockey, and FOSS is an unbeatable way to escape that dead end.
Maybe. If so, AD users will find themselves standing on thin air over a cesspit at the time. Either way, sooner ot later AD will be a dead end. Trust me on this one, Microsoft will obselete it one day, and force users into The Next Great White Hope<*>, whatevere that turns out to be.
Reality is that the ONLY LDAP directory out there that really is useful for Windows OS is... Active Directory.
He doesn't say that they're an all-Borg shop, or that they need to continue to be if they are.
Using OpenLDAP (any decent LDAP, really), he could be both an OU and a child domain at the same time, no worries, no major management hassles as long as no dweeb dicks with the LDAP directory by hand.
<*> read `Hope' as `Elephant' and there you have it. Microsoft sell a lot of Stone Soup.
Despite this, it can be made to run reasonably efficiently and reliably if you know how. I have a mate (Hi, Jeremy!) who does this regularly, and other things like rewrite the GDA (no shit, he did this) on his iPaq to not do stupidly pointless transforms, and to use integer arthmetic. The result is an eye-opening iPaq that displays maps in realtime instead of at plotter speeds.
Nevertheless, for your average gonzo it's too much work. And Microsoft products are a dead end anyway. As practically everyone else is saying, whack up an ODBC interface and hide whatever you like behind it by way of a real database. If you can make it web-based, that's an additional layer of useful abstraction that allows to to hotswap even more technologies.
No doubt I'll get a/. lameness filter message about too many syllables when I press this button... (-:
The 120kph came from (IIRC) a discussion with HighLiftSystems some time ago. I think the're being conservative for a number of reasons, including that the device flexes.
obviously MSFT ActiveDirectory was so important and ground-breaking it had to have it's own namespace.
Bitter, but true. After all, we can only consider `us' (the unsinkable Microsoft) and `them' (the mysterious `them' that Microsoft employees and syncophants chant about killing during their rallies).
True, but they can `break in'. Move the real files to/var but outside the jail(s), put symlinks in their places, and hardlink yourself silly. Of course, I habitually mount/var as nosuid,nodev, so I don't expect much joy from suidperl, for instance. (-:
Bind Apache to (say) port 8765 and NAT the incoming connections from port 80 to there.
And for an encore?
Change your user skeleton so public_html becomes a link to/var/www/users/$USERNAME (which useradd or whatever makes), add a group called ap_$USERNAME with each new user, add Apache to the group and chown said directory to $USERNAME:ap_$USERNAME and chmod it g+rx and make it sticky. Don't give Apache write access to anything. You still have a few issues left (if ap_$USERNAME isn't the users' default group, for example), but most of your problems are pushing up daisies. A bit cumbersome for a squillion users, but bearable for up to a few hundred.
In order to do Jurassic Park things, you need intact DNA, and DNA is extremely frail. On does wonder about conditions of interment that can somehow preserve intact DNA across sixty-plus million years, when the best technology we have wouldn't do much better than a few tens of thousands of years in the best of circumstances.
...is that critters have more than one gene, and they are often randomly mixed/expressed at mating. This means that selecting for one good feature may mean selecting against several other good features. Your only hope is to start with samples from lots of the animal, so expect Axel Heiburg Island to become a very busy place.
There is also some design input from the support machinery in and surrounding the nucleus, which means that your host animal is going to have an impact too. Your cloned critter won't be a pureblood in the strictest sense of the word. I'd be working hard to preserve whatever DNA I was able to recover, in the hope of having better techniques to apply later. But I guess the recovery they're doing is a lot better than nothing.
My only real complaint about the book is how poorly it was edited.
My first thought was: `and you posted this to SlashDot?' (-:
From what I know, he was in a hurry to get the book into print and had/has very little money with which to do it. One purpose of the book is to provide a wage or two to help keep the company afloat until serious investors happen. I guess the next edition will be better proofed.
Do you think they will hold up when exposed to solar flares?
You obviously have no clue what a solar flare is and does. One thing they produce very little of (almost the only thing) is light.
The jury's still out on that one, but it seems that even single-walled nanotubes would be pretty much immune when isolated from O2 (such as by the resin matrix LiftPort are planning to embed the fibres in as a part of joining individual strands). Really, all we can do is wait until the experiments have been done.
Uh...the crack you're smoking must be sub-standard.
I have enough trouble (and fun) stone cold sober, I don't need to pour drain cleaner into my system to make things weird.
Calculating that the cable reaches about one-third of the way to the moon (or about three times around the globe) and that speed at the end of the cable could be about 10 km per sec [howstuffworks.com], estimating with average speed at a conservative 3 kph the trip to the end of the cable will take about 12 hours.
I don't know about you, but your grammar is certainly on drugs...
Interpolating the first part of your missif, you're saying that the end of the cable is whipping around at 10km/s. More or less - it's actually about 7 1/2km/s, and...?
This is not a rocket, this is a monorail running on a very thin rail. 100,000km to end of cable, Enter, 120km/hr, Enter, DIV -> 833 hours, 24, DIV -> 35 days. Time to GEO (roughly 36,000km) is roughly 12.5 days. At 120 km/h relative to the ribbon.
As to the rest of your figures... at 3km/h, it would take you over 33,000 hours (1390 days - or 3 years, 9 1/2 months) to transit the cable... or, alternately, you need to do over 8300km/h (2.3km/s) to transit the cable in 12 hours - at which point, yes, braking does become an issue. (-:
FAQ says 7.5kg/km, not sure if that is the average weight for the whole length of ribbon or the weight for a 1cm ribbon (bottom 10km is this size). If that's the average for the whole ribbon, it makes a total weight of roughly 270t, the first strand is of course much lighter. Not much for 60,000 km, is it?
Using the strand as a possible radiator is a nifty idea but I doubt its very viable. but I think that comparison to the fishing line gives you a sense of the scale of the line.. it would kind of like using a copper wire from a phone chord to serve as a radiator for your car.
Eh? If you make the ribbon skinnier, you make the heat uptake less as well. No worries. Self-solving problem.
A 7.5kg per klick cable that is capable of supporting 268,402.5kg is very impressive
As I understand it, the ribbon tapers as well. So the section near GEO would be a good deal heavier than the rest, but most of the ribbon would not. I think 7.5g/m is the average weight of the completed ribbon, not one strand. In terms of raw strength, it beats the crap out of fishing line (by at least two or three orders of magnitude).
Your concerns about how far we've got with nanotubes are valid. If we only do a tenth as well as we think we can, it would completely bugger LiftPort's economics but the elevator could still be conomically constructed. In fact, lopping the lift costs by a couple of orders of magnitude means that the second powersat you lofted using it would have paid for the entire project. If construction costs went up tenfold, it would take twenty powersats but would still pay for itself based on that revenue alone.
I imagine that quite a number of scientists would be overjoyed to have essentially permanent access to areas like the stratosphere (no more sounding rockets), and that providing same would be an immensely profitable sideline to actually orbiting stuff.
In practice, one of the first loads to orbit would be the start of the next ribbon. Can't have too much of a good thing. I imagine that a burgeoning mini metropolis like Broome or Port Hedland (both have small international airports) would be delighted to play home base to a ribbon of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
While W2k is an improvement over NT in terms of reliability, it still bluescreens occasionally. I note that the oldest IIS webserver finally managed to rack up 2 years, just in time for Slammer - but that every Unix and it's dog routinely exceeds that. And XP is a reliability unimprovement. And Foghorn Leghorn - er, I mean, Longhorn, or BlackComb, or whatever it's called today is gonna be all shiny new and with a fabulous and innovative range of unforeseen bugs too.
Meantime, I get plenty done and there are no Windows machines in the house at all to "do stuff" with. I may not have the latest frilly border on my documents, and each screen I face may have more than three things to click on, but my documents and programs do come out hot and on time.
If you ever come to visit Western Australia, call ahead. I can show you a bunch of kids doing video editing on their Linux boxes and a highly productive office kitted out with nothing but Linux. No Windows, no bluescreens, yes productivity.
Either CF is doing the arbitration for MS Excess, or it's doing Excess's own job for it. Either way, very clever of CF, hats off to them...
Make it Mandrake instead of RedHat, and tell me how blonde she is (or was, in her heyday).
...since July last year. Go fetch.
Hello? Is this brain on? (-:
The long and the short of it is: Windows is much more trouble to use than the others, so it keeps you in a job. You don't happen to have any tobacco farmers in your ancestry?
Actual data? On /.? You do realise that you're breaking a very strong tradition, don't you? (-:
take cluestick
weild cluestick
If that little piece of crackspeak were true, what are IBM doing supporting it? Why do Google use it exclusively? Why are Linux-based supercomputing clusters filling up the top 500? Why are Fortune 500s like Merryl Lynch contributing to it?
Thank you for playing, here's your gold-plated tie pin, now nick off.
That's right, and take them out to dinner to woo and weasel and promise (lie to) them whatever they need to promise to get more money out of them and stick more control into instead of spending that money and effort in making the whole computing scene better by letting go of their stranglehold. And funny you should mention Cisco, 'coz one of their products is a PC running Linux. And if FOSS is so useless and dangerous, why do Microsoft ship it? Gotcha gold pin, have you? Here's the door, have a nice life.
The problem here is that most of them spend so much time working that they have none left for overt advocacy, writing up proposals, answering the queries from pollies etc (and the snowballing interest in FOSS). This in a country (Australia) that Microsoft are grooming as a showcase for their technology (part of why Stevie flew across to jolly Telstra along). We've just today had another meeting with a pollie falling over themselves to learn the best ways of integrating FOSS into government IT.
Microsoft claim to want a level playing field. We claim to not want an 800lb gorilla playing on it with us mere mortals ('coz it'll pound us level with the playing field politically and financially if it does). Regardless of the politics, the Open Source software job market is booming. Kids want to be more than a George Jetson reboot-button jockey, and FOSS is an unbeatable way to escape that dead end.
Sorry, you're still here?
apply cluestick to luser; wield LART
Maybe. If so, AD users will find themselves standing on thin air over a cesspit at the time. Either way, sooner ot later AD will be a dead end. Trust me on this one, Microsoft will obselete it one day, and force users into The Next Great White Hope<*>, whatevere that turns out to be.
He doesn't say that they're an all-Borg shop, or that they need to continue to be if they are.
Using OpenLDAP (any decent LDAP, really), he could be both an OU and a child domain at the same time, no worries, no major management hassles as long as no dweeb dicks with the LDAP directory by hand.
<*> read `Hope' as `Elephant' and there you have it. Microsoft sell a lot of Stone Soup.
Despite this, it can be made to run reasonably efficiently and reliably if you know how. I have a mate (Hi, Jeremy!) who does this regularly, and other things like rewrite the GDA (no shit, he did this) on his iPaq to not do stupidly pointless transforms, and to use integer arthmetic. The result is an eye-opening iPaq that displays maps in realtime instead of at plotter speeds.
Nevertheless, for your average gonzo it's too much work. And Microsoft products are a dead end anyway. As practically everyone else is saying, whack up an ODBC interface and hide whatever you like behind it by way of a real database. If you can make it web-based, that's an additional layer of useful abstraction that allows to to hotswap even more technologies.
No doubt I'll get a /. lameness filter message about too many syllables when I press this button... (-:
(-:
The 120kph came from (IIRC) a discussion with HighLiftSystems some time ago. I think the're being conservative for a number of reasons, including that the device flexes.
Bitter, but true. After all, we can only consider `us' (the unsinkable Microsoft) and `them' (the mysterious `them' that Microsoft employees and syncophants chant about killing during their rallies).
Off topic? But we're on SlashDot! (-:
Given that AD is a dead end, toss it and manage the whole lot with LDAP.
Yes, I know it's almost certainly not practical for you, but it's what first came to mind. (-:
Mandrake have begun to.
True, but they can `break in'. Move the real files to /var but outside the jail(s), put symlinks in their places, and hardlink yourself silly. Of course, I habitually mount /var as nosuid,nodev, so I don't expect much joy from suidperl, for instance. (-:
Bind Apache to (say) port 8765 and NAT the incoming connections from port 80 to there.
/var/www/users/$USERNAME (which useradd or whatever makes), add a group called ap_$USERNAME with each new user, add Apache to the group and chown said directory to $USERNAME:ap_$USERNAME and chmod it g+rx and make it sticky. Don't give Apache write access to anything. You still have a few issues left (if ap_$USERNAME isn't the users' default group, for example), but most of your problems are pushing up daisies. A bit cumbersome for a squillion users, but bearable for up to a few hundred.
And for an encore?
Change your user skeleton so public_html becomes a link to
In order to do Jurassic Park things, you need intact DNA, and DNA is extremely frail. On does wonder about conditions of interment that can somehow preserve intact DNA across sixty-plus million years, when the best technology we have wouldn't do much better than a few tens of thousands of years in the best of circumstances.
...is that critters have more than one gene, and they are often randomly mixed/expressed at mating. This means that selecting for one good feature may mean selecting against several other good features. Your only hope is to start with samples from lots of the animal, so expect Axel Heiburg Island to become a very busy place.
There is also some design input from the support machinery in and surrounding the nucleus, which means that your host animal is going to have an impact too. Your cloned critter won't be a pureblood in the strictest sense of the word. I'd be working hard to preserve whatever DNA I was able to recover, in the hope of having better techniques to apply later. But I guess the recovery they're doing is a lot better than nothing.
Picture of a server crushed underneath a /. logo?
Picture of a rack with a huge bulge in the data cable rushing toward it?
Picture of a thousand geeks all jumping on a single 1RU box at once?
Yes, ffor the humour-impaired, that was indeed a pun.
My first thought was: `and you posted this to SlashDot?' (-:
From what I know, he was in a hurry to get the book into print and had/has very little money with which to do it. One purpose of the book is to provide a wage or two to help keep the company afloat until serious investors happen. I guess the next edition will be better proofed.
Oh, that's right, I forgot. We're on SlashDot... (-:
You obviously have no clue what a solar flare is and does. One thing they produce very little of (almost the only thing) is light.
The jury's still out on that one, but it seems that even single-walled nanotubes would be pretty much immune when isolated from O2 (such as by the resin matrix LiftPort are planning to embed the fibres in as a part of joining individual strands). Really, all we can do is wait until the experiments have been done.
I have enough trouble (and fun) stone cold sober, I don't need to pour drain cleaner into my system to make things weird.
I don't know about you, but your grammar is certainly on drugs...
Interpolating the first part of your missif, you're saying that the end of the cable is whipping around at 10km/s. More or less - it's actually about 7 1/2km/s, and...?
This is not a rocket, this is a monorail running on a very thin rail. 100,000km to end of cable, Enter, 120km/hr, Enter, DIV -> 833 hours, 24, DIV -> 35 days. Time to GEO (roughly 36,000km) is roughly 12.5 days. At 120 km/h relative to the ribbon.
As to the rest of your figures... at 3km/h, it would take you over 33,000 hours (1390 days - or 3 years, 9 1/2 months) to transit the cable... or, alternately, you need to do over 8300km/h (2.3km/s) to transit the cable in 12 hours - at which point, yes, braking does become an issue. (-:
FAQ says 7.5kg/km, not sure if that is the average weight for the whole length of ribbon or the weight for a 1cm ribbon (bottom 10km is this size). If that's the average for the whole ribbon, it makes a total weight of roughly 270t, the first strand is of course much lighter. Not much for 60,000 km, is it?
Eh? If you make the ribbon skinnier, you make the heat uptake less as well. No worries. Self-solving problem.
As I understand it, the ribbon tapers as well. So the section near GEO would be a good deal heavier than the rest, but most of the ribbon would not. I think 7.5g/m is the average weight of the completed ribbon, not one strand. In terms of raw strength, it beats the crap out of fishing line (by at least two or three orders of magnitude).
Your concerns about how far we've got with nanotubes are valid. If we only do a tenth as well as we think we can, it would completely bugger LiftPort's economics but the elevator could still be conomically constructed. In fact, lopping the lift costs by a couple of orders of magnitude means that the second powersat you lofted using it would have paid for the entire project. If construction costs went up tenfold, it would take twenty powersats but would still pay for itself based on that revenue alone.
I imagine that quite a number of scientists would be overjoyed to have essentially permanent access to areas like the stratosphere (no more sounding rockets), and that providing same would be an immensely profitable sideline to actually orbiting stuff.
In practice, one of the first loads to orbit would be the start of the next ribbon. Can't have too much of a good thing. I imagine that a burgeoning mini metropolis like Broome or Port Hedland (both have small international airports) would be delighted to play home base to a ribbon of their own.