# A significant percentage of the people at NASA research centers are contractors. (I've heard it's as much as 2:1 contractor:civil servant ratio)
Oh, I'm aware of this since I'm a contractor. If contractors create such fluid and dynamic disposable workforce that adjusts to changing budgets then perhaps all employees of NASA should be contractors so you don't have to deal with long and arduous RIF processes to downsize staff. I've watched hundreds of my fellow contractors get laid off so far due to budget problems and not one civil servant has left involuntarily. To be treated like nothing more than a glorified temp worker when you've worked along side these people as coworkers for decades is incredibly infuriating.
NASA really needs to get out of the business of micromanaging their research centers and let consortiums of universities and private industry run them like the DOE does. It'd probably be much more efficient to not have to employ expensive civil servants.
Now, when ever I go out and buy a drive, I'm leaning towards Maxtor simply because I have a lot of them and one hasn't failed me with crucial data on it.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. My Seagate, Hitachi, and WD drives are rock solid but my Maxtor drives tend to die an early death. I've got around 8 200GB Maxtor drives and so far I've had 4 failures within 18 months of purchasing them, 2 of those were within 6 months. Now, thankfully the ones that failed were all covered under warranty (one SATA drive had a 3 year warranty, 2 of the 200GB drives died within 6 months and had a 1 year warranty, and the last 200GB drive had a 3 year warranty). Since then I've made a decision to stick with companies that offer 5 year warranties on their drives since I have thousands of dollars invested in hard drives and can't afford to be replacing them every year when the goal is to grow my archive, not simply keep it in check.
If you were smart you'd invest in Microsoft. Whether or not you like them as a company, they are profitable and that's the only real goal of an investment... anything else is charity.
Prior to iTunes, if you wanted to buy the few good songs on a CD, you had to buy the whole CD. Now you can just buy those few good songs. The drop in sales, I'd bet, is largely affected by people no longer buying the music they really didn't want in the first place.
How do you know whether or not you would want to buy it before you hear it? Only a few tracks on a CD ever get aired on the radio and the snippet that iTunes allows you to listen to for free isn't enough to judge the quality of the song as a whole. Other than borrowing the CD from someone who has it (library/friend), how would you know the other songs are garbage? I've found plenty of pearls on CDs that would never get played on the radio because I bought the whole CD.
Why not just use one of the many P2P services available, and download MP3s of the CDs you already own?
Because that would be copyright infringement for one thing, and for another most of the tracks you'd get on P2P networks are crappy low-bitrate rips of the songs. I don't download MP3s anymore for two reasons: 1) fear of getting a huge fine for copyright infringement and 2) I want my music in a losslessly encoded format like FLAC or the Apple Lossless encoder format so I can re-burn a CD I own as a backup in case the original is destroyed without any loss in sound quality from the original.
This is also the reason I prefer to buy CDs rather than use iTunes Music Store... If I'm going to pay full retail price for songs (albums are commonly costing more than $9.99 now and there are tracks out there that cost more than $.99 or soon will be if the RIAA gets their way) I want a non-DRM, non-lossy-encoded version of the track that I can rip to FLAC.
Now, don't take this as bashing P2P networks or iTMS, they both have their places for their users, but I'm saying that I, personally, prefer to avoid them to retain superior audio quality from a clean CD rip. As for paying someone else to rip my CDs... I think that's silly, but I don't have as extensive a collection as some people do (less than 100 CDs) so I've done it over a weekend running in the background while web browsing or playing a game on another computer the last time I tried to rip the majority of my good CDs. It is just a matter of flipping CDs and hitting import. If I had 1000 CDs or more I might consider a service like this though, but I'm a relative cheapskate (not really, saving for a house has put immense constraints on my discretionary spending in the budget) so I may just do it in the background over the course of my free weekends.;-)
Actually if you want to get serious about it they should use a "Trusted" OS like Trusted Solaris or similar OS that uses mandatory access controls. OpenBSD does not have support for that in the base configuration the last time I checked, although it is probably sufficient for general purpose computing.
So explain to me again how "somewhat cheaper and notably more convenient" translates into "suckers"?
Simple, if I get the DVD I can rip it and make backup copies or convert to DivX and store it on my MythTV box, the Apple versions of these shows however are encumbered by DRM that make this impossible to view outside their proprietary environment.
The same thing that happens when your power goes out and the only phone in your house is cordless: you lose 911 service unless you have a charged cellphone handy.
Except with a regular line I have the option of keeping an cheap corded phone around for emergencies and it'll be powered from the central office. That's a BIG advantage for me and a reason I will never go entirely to VOIP. There's simply no major advantages for me since I need to keep my phone line around for DSL anyway.
Then you add exceptions for certain sites like, oh, Slashdot, Homestar Runner, JibJab, etc.
Why would you need to view Flash on Slashdot? The only time I've ever seen it used here was when I was over a friend's house using Internet Explorer and noticed a lot of articles have annoying Flash animated advertisements associated with them. Kind of ironic since Hemos once said to let him know if their ad provider ever snuck in flash ads.. I guess they've revised that policy.
But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.
Not really strange.. there's really no IPv4 address space crunch here in the USA. Most people have become accustomed to using NAT, but even if NAT hadn't taken off, the USA has a huge surplus of unused IPv4 address space compared to the allocations given to the rest of the world. Pull back some of the millions of addresses grandfathered to early adopting universities and government sites and you will have more than enough for the entire USA. Does GE really need 16 million addresses? Does the Army's Yuma Proving Grounds need 16 million addresses? How about HP? Do they need 16 million addresses? Force these kinds of groups to prove they are using that much address space, if not they should be forced to readdress their networks and give back all that unused classical A space so it can be subnetted into smaller CIDR blocks. Once you run out of that, start doing it with the old class B networks. Most companies can get by perfectly fine exposing only a handful of routable addresses on the Internet and NAT'ing the rest.
Let alone potential incompatibilities for Java code (I vaguely remember something about a MS JVM), applets just aren't usable. They're just too dang slow.
That's a fallacy caused by poor coding. I've run Java code that ran nearly as fast as compiled C executables. As for incompatibilities, that's another fallacy. Sun's JVM version 1.5 is the same JVM on Linux as it is on Windows. The incompatibility you're describing is from a third-party vendor's broken pseudo-Java virtual machine and they got slammed in court for it. Why do you think Windows XP doesn't even include it anymore? If you want Java in Windows they recommend you download Sun's real JVM.
As to scale to real applications- WTF? Google Maps is more or less the pared down version of Google Earth. It's useful because it scales down usefully on a browser. Google Maps is incredibly useful for small web apps, and isn't going to be replaced by a "real" application any time soon.
You just contradicted yourself though. The "real" application is Google Earth not Google Maps. There's a reason it uses a compiled program: the AJAX version isn't capable of doing the things they want Google Earth to do. AJAX is a hack... a nifty hack like I said, but it certainly has no place in replacing compiled code apps or even Java. I imagine if you look behind the scenes at Google Maps you'll find a ton of conditional statements to deal with the various browsers' quirky Javascript behavior. That's no way to efficiently code an application and hope to keep it maintainable.
The only reason it works for Google is they're writing a very targetted single-purpose web site app to display static content (maps). Imagine if you had to do that with your C code.. move all those preprocessor macros up into your actual code and use if/then/else statements instead. It'd be a bloated nightmare.
So, in summary, it works for Google Maps because what they're doing is simplistic, but people have these grandious ideas of using it to replace office suites or other major compiled applications on your computer and I just don't see it scaling to be able to accomplish that successfully. Anyway, you probably won't see this since my moderator fan will send this down to 0 or -1 in a minute or two.
All for a $45,000 a year salary offer. Don't forget you need to be their "network guy" and have a CCNP and MCSE with at least 6 years of Windows 2000 Server experience and 3 years of Windows 2003 Server experience.
Look at what Google Maps did for online mapping and tell me AJAX is "just a fad".
AJAX is just a fad. While it is a nifty trick to be able to scroll around the map, it doesn't scale well into real applications. They could've done it just as well, if not better, using an actual Java applet that your browser ran and connected to a server over a network socket. AJAX takes the portability of Java and subjects it to an even quirkier environment where you have to rely on a standard Javascript implementation across browsers... as you've probably seen, this fantasy world where all Javascript implementations and display engines are equal does not exist. Something that works fine and displays fine in IE will not necessarily work fine in Firefox and vice versa. A Java applet on the other hand would run exactly the same on Windows as it would on Linux and as it would on a Mac.
I guess you need to buy a $1000 Sony digital camera before you get CompactFlash support instead of being locked into that god awful proprietary memorystick crap.
Many of us don't watch over-the-air signals anymore so we couldn't care less. The point is that regular cable channels should remain in SD. The FCC should have no jurisdiction over forcing private cable and satellite companies to switch their stations to the useless HDTV format, they regulate broadcast television.
I'm still trying to handle my own disconnect at the idea of someone watching baseball while they have their nails done in a salon.
Maybe it's the homophobe side of me, but I can't tell if the original poster was a homosexual man or a woman. I didn't think women drank beer and watched baseball, but why would a non-gay man got to a salon and get a manicure and massage?
My parents, being creatures of habit, and not traditionally technology-savvy pretty much can't tell the difference and seem to watch the SD versions of these channels 99% of the time.
And that just goes to show you how irrelevent "high definition" television is to the majority of Americans. I'm technology-savvy but I have no interest in buying a $3000 television set so I can watch television in HD. Higher resolution doesn't make these shows better, better scripts do. I don't watch any sports on television so I'll stick with my 32" Toshiba CRT until it goes on the blink and then if these 50" LCD TVs are under $800 I might consider one. DVDs look beautiful on my 32" CRT using an SVIDEO cable and if I really want a bigger screen I'll hook it up to my SVGA projector and watch them on that.
A good example is a piece of malware that changes the local DNS cache to point ebay to another server that does a man-in-the-middle attack? To the end user, it's completely invisible.
That's your problem though, not mine as a server admin. Besides, a simple SSL server would foil that attack and pop up a warning that the server names don't match the certificate. Again, if you as a user are so completely braindead that you ignore the warning then it's your own damn fault for getting your information compromised. Besides, what good is DNSSEC going to do if your machine is already compromised by malware installed on your machine!? Stop using Windows for Christ's sake before you point the finger at one of the most stable elements of the Internet architecture. 95% of the problems people have are their god damn Windows box having spyware or viruses on it.
... when they lock up some kind of deal with rhino to distribute mystery science theater 3000.
The problem with MST3k was that they only showed really horrible movies. They need to have an MST3K viewing of the AFI Top 100 Films list. Lets see them rip on the Godfather instead of the crappy movies they watched.
/I know, I know, it'd never happen.. the point is to rip on bad movies
n case you haven't noticed, the cost of videos from iTMS is £1.89 - almost twice the price of the American equivalent, for a more limited selection of content. This works out at just under 67 episodes for the cost of the license - and episodes recorded from the TV have no DRM.
My PVR records episodes for free with no DRM here in the USA too. People that pay $1.99 for a single television episode encumbered with DRM are suckers. If it would've been in MPEG2 format I might bite at that, but as it stands now it is much cheaper for me to wait until the season is over and simply purchase it on DVD for the series I want to watch (or just record them in first-run on my PVR).
It might narrow you down to a particular physical community, or at least to being within driving distance of a particular community. But otherwise it sounds pretty darn anonymous to me.
Try having someone send a death threat to the President from a library computer and you can quickly test how "anonymous" it really is when the Secret Service show up at your door. I'm betting it's not that anonymous.
That seems like a pretty ignorant stance your citizens are taking. The safest place to store nuclear waste is to put it back in the ground where you got it from. Why not just use old uranium mines to store the waste? It's not like anyone wants to live next to a uranium mine anyway.
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Oh, I'm aware of this since I'm a contractor. If contractors create such fluid and dynamic disposable workforce that adjusts to changing budgets then perhaps all employees of NASA should be contractors so you don't have to deal with long and arduous RIF processes to downsize staff. I've watched hundreds of my fellow contractors get laid off so far due to budget problems and not one civil servant has left involuntarily. To be treated like nothing more than a glorified temp worker when you've worked along side these people as coworkers for decades is incredibly infuriating.
NASA really needs to get out of the business of micromanaging their research centers and let consortiums of universities and private industry run them like the DOE does. It'd probably be much more efficient to not have to employ expensive civil servants.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. My Seagate, Hitachi, and WD drives are rock solid but my Maxtor drives tend to die an early death. I've got around 8 200GB Maxtor drives and so far I've had 4 failures within 18 months of purchasing them, 2 of those were within 6 months. Now, thankfully the ones that failed were all covered under warranty (one SATA drive had a 3 year warranty, 2 of the 200GB drives died within 6 months and had a 1 year warranty, and the last 200GB drive had a 3 year warranty). Since then I've made a decision to stick with companies that offer 5 year warranties on their drives since I have thousands of dollars invested in hard drives and can't afford to be replacing them every year when the goal is to grow my archive, not simply keep it in check.
If you were smart you'd invest in Microsoft. Whether or not you like them as a company, they are profitable and that's the only real goal of an investment... anything else is charity.
How do you know whether or not you would want to buy it before you hear it? Only a few tracks on a CD ever get aired on the radio and the snippet that iTunes allows you to listen to for free isn't enough to judge the quality of the song as a whole. Other than borrowing the CD from someone who has it (library/friend), how would you know the other songs are garbage? I've found plenty of pearls on CDs that would never get played on the radio because I bought the whole CD.
Because that would be copyright infringement for one thing, and for another most of the tracks you'd get on P2P networks are crappy low-bitrate rips of the songs. I don't download MP3s anymore for two reasons: 1) fear of getting a huge fine for copyright infringement and 2) I want my music in a losslessly encoded format like FLAC or the Apple Lossless encoder format so I can re-burn a CD I own as a backup in case the original is destroyed without any loss in sound quality from the original.
This is also the reason I prefer to buy CDs rather than use iTunes Music Store... If I'm going to pay full retail price for songs (albums are commonly costing more than $9.99 now and there are tracks out there that cost more than $.99 or soon will be if the RIAA gets their way) I want a non-DRM, non-lossy-encoded version of the track that I can rip to FLAC.
Now, don't take this as bashing P2P networks or iTMS, they both have their places for their users, but I'm saying that I, personally, prefer to avoid them to retain superior audio quality from a clean CD rip. As for paying someone else to rip my CDs... I think that's silly, but I don't have as extensive a collection as some people do (less than 100 CDs) so I've done it over a weekend running in the background while web browsing or playing a game on another computer the last time I tried to rip the majority of my good CDs. It is just a matter of flipping CDs and hitting import. If I had 1000 CDs or more I might consider a service like this though, but I'm a relative cheapskate (not really, saving for a house has put immense constraints on my discretionary spending in the budget) so I may just do it in the background over the course of my free weekends. ;-)
Actually if you want to get serious about it they should use a "Trusted" OS like Trusted Solaris or similar OS that uses mandatory access controls. OpenBSD does not have support for that in the base configuration the last time I checked, although it is probably sufficient for general purpose computing.
Simple, if I get the DVD I can rip it and make backup copies or convert to DivX and store it on my MythTV box, the Apple versions of these shows however are encumbered by DRM that make this impossible to view outside their proprietary environment.
Except with a regular line I have the option of keeping an cheap corded phone around for emergencies and it'll be powered from the central office. That's a BIG advantage for me and a reason I will never go entirely to VOIP. There's simply no major advantages for me since I need to keep my phone line around for DSL anyway.
Why would you need to view Flash on Slashdot? The only time I've ever seen it used here was when I was over a friend's house using Internet Explorer and noticed a lot of articles have annoying Flash animated advertisements associated with them. Kind of ironic since Hemos once said to let him know if their ad provider ever snuck in flash ads.. I guess they've revised that policy.
Not really strange.. there's really no IPv4 address space crunch here in the USA. Most people have become accustomed to using NAT, but even if NAT hadn't taken off, the USA has a huge surplus of unused IPv4 address space compared to the allocations given to the rest of the world. Pull back some of the millions of addresses grandfathered to early adopting universities and government sites and you will have more than enough for the entire USA. Does GE really need 16 million addresses? Does the Army's Yuma Proving Grounds need 16 million addresses? How about HP? Do they need 16 million addresses? Force these kinds of groups to prove they are using that much address space, if not they should be forced to readdress their networks and give back all that unused classical A space so it can be subnetted into smaller CIDR blocks. Once you run out of that, start doing it with the old class B networks. Most companies can get by perfectly fine exposing only a handful of routable addresses on the Internet and NAT'ing the rest.
That's a fallacy caused by poor coding. I've run Java code that ran nearly as fast as compiled C executables. As for incompatibilities, that's another fallacy. Sun's JVM version 1.5 is the same JVM on Linux as it is on Windows. The incompatibility you're describing is from a third-party vendor's broken pseudo-Java virtual machine and they got slammed in court for it. Why do you think Windows XP doesn't even include it anymore? If you want Java in Windows they recommend you download Sun's real JVM.
As to scale to real applications- WTF? Google Maps is more or less the pared down version of Google Earth. It's useful because it scales down usefully on a browser. Google Maps is incredibly useful for small web apps, and isn't going to be replaced by a "real" application any time soon.
You just contradicted yourself though. The "real" application is Google Earth not Google Maps. There's a reason it uses a compiled program: the AJAX version isn't capable of doing the things they want Google Earth to do. AJAX is a hack... a nifty hack like I said, but it certainly has no place in replacing compiled code apps or even Java. I imagine if you look behind the scenes at Google Maps you'll find a ton of conditional statements to deal with the various browsers' quirky Javascript behavior. That's no way to efficiently code an application and hope to keep it maintainable.
The only reason it works for Google is they're writing a very targetted single-purpose web site app to display static content (maps). Imagine if you had to do that with your C code.. move all those preprocessor macros up into your actual code and use if/then/else statements instead. It'd be a bloated nightmare.
So, in summary, it works for Google Maps because what they're doing is simplistic, but people have these grandious ideas of using it to replace office suites or other major compiled applications on your computer and I just don't see it scaling to be able to accomplish that successfully. Anyway, you probably won't see this since my moderator fan will send this down to 0 or -1 in a minute or two.
All for a $45,000 a year salary offer. Don't forget you need to be their "network guy" and have a CCNP and MCSE with at least 6 years of Windows 2000 Server experience and 3 years of Windows 2003 Server experience.
AJAX is just a fad. While it is a nifty trick to be able to scroll around the map, it doesn't scale well into real applications. They could've done it just as well, if not better, using an actual Java applet that your browser ran and connected to a server over a network socket. AJAX takes the portability of Java and subjects it to an even quirkier environment where you have to rely on a standard Javascript implementation across browsers... as you've probably seen, this fantasy world where all Javascript implementations and display engines are equal does not exist. Something that works fine and displays fine in IE will not necessarily work fine in Firefox and vice versa. A Java applet on the other hand would run exactly the same on Windows as it would on Linux and as it would on a Mac.
I guess you need to buy a $1000 Sony digital camera before you get CompactFlash support instead of being locked into that god awful proprietary memorystick crap.
It means there is no honor among thieves. Without enforced ratios on pirate torrents you'd just have people leeching all the time.
Many of us don't watch over-the-air signals anymore so we couldn't care less. The point is that regular cable channels should remain in SD. The FCC should have no jurisdiction over forcing private cable and satellite companies to switch their stations to the useless HDTV format, they regulate broadcast television.
Maybe it's the homophobe side of me, but I can't tell if the original poster was a homosexual man or a woman. I didn't think women drank beer and watched baseball, but why would a non-gay man got to a salon and get a manicure and massage?
And that just goes to show you how irrelevent "high definition" television is to the majority of Americans. I'm technology-savvy but I have no interest in buying a $3000 television set so I can watch television in HD. Higher resolution doesn't make these shows better, better scripts do. I don't watch any sports on television so I'll stick with my 32" Toshiba CRT until it goes on the blink and then if these 50" LCD TVs are under $800 I might consider one. DVDs look beautiful on my 32" CRT using an SVIDEO cable and if I really want a bigger screen I'll hook it up to my SVGA projector and watch them on that.
That's your problem though, not mine as a server admin. Besides, a simple SSL server would foil that attack and pop up a warning that the server names don't match the certificate. Again, if you as a user are so completely braindead that you ignore the warning then it's your own damn fault for getting your information compromised. Besides, what good is DNSSEC going to do if your machine is already compromised by malware installed on your machine!? Stop using Windows for Christ's sake before you point the finger at one of the most stable elements of the Internet architecture. 95% of the problems people have are their god damn Windows box having spyware or viruses on it.
The problem with MST3k was that they only showed really horrible movies. They need to have an MST3K viewing of the AFI Top 100 Films list. Lets see them rip on the Godfather instead of the crappy movies they watched.
My PVR records episodes for free with no DRM here in the USA too. People that pay $1.99 for a single television episode encumbered with DRM are suckers. If it would've been in MPEG2 format I might bite at that, but as it stands now it is much cheaper for me to wait until the season is over and simply purchase it on DVD for the series I want to watch (or just record them in first-run on my PVR).
Try having someone send a death threat to the President from a library computer and you can quickly test how "anonymous" it really is when the Secret Service show up at your door. I'm betting it's not that anonymous.
That seems like a pretty ignorant stance your citizens are taking. The safest place to store nuclear waste is to put it back in the ground where you got it from. Why not just use old uranium mines to store the waste? It's not like anyone wants to live next to a uranium mine anyway.