Thanks for saying what I already was going to say. I have always been they guy who wants the best tool for the best job. If that was the way things worked with computers, Mainframes would definitely be used for Databases and all IO intensive processes and UNIX/Linux for Calculation intensive stuff and Windows for low end file sharing and print spooling as well as clients. By saying this, the states should use the best tool. Period. Mandating that Open Source be included should not be needed. Granted, this is a good thing for open source, but bad for everything else. We need to make LESS laws. IN fact we need to get rid of some (Total Awareness thingy is the big one that needs gotten rid of....why does the government need to look at my credit report before I ride in a airplane??)
AIX has not and shall probably never run on a mainframe. They DO call the racks that hold the servers frames. But then I did know what you meant!:) I would not mind finding a older workstation to mess around with. Also, I do believe that the AIX license is tied to the hardware so if they don' t have the disk with it you can probably call IBM and work out a deal for AIX 5.1 if the hardware handles it. Most anything that's beein out in the last few years will run 5.1 fine. Failing that, I think there is a PPC Linux distro that runs on these. They also have PCI slots in most of the ones since Micro Channel was ditched. If you find enough, you may even be able to setup a cluster with HA (if you can swing the cost of the license) or just run Beowulf or one of the Linux solutions on it. IBM has excellent hardware. Especially their RS/6000 boxes.
Ahh....my favorite time a year is here.....Dayton Hamvention starts soon and you usually can visit Mendelson's tent as well as procure many types of older hardware. I saw some GRID pen based computers there a couple years ago (running Pen Windows I think.....) and one year they had a COMPLETE AS/400 system w/OS, external DASD, and a 5250 dumb terminal. I even think they had a copy of Linux for the AS/400 also? I don't know. Then another year they had stacks of Sparc 2's and some Sparc 5's. The only thing about some of those....they had no hard drive and since they probably don't sell a SCSI drive you can use you were kind of screwed....unless you had one with a good HD and it needed a MB!:) But Hamvention and other hamfests you can find all sorts of neat crap. I am going to try my luck at finding a laptop battery there and for my major purchase (not surplus but still cool) a triband (2m, 70 cm and 6 m) handheld. Either the Yaesu or the Icom (or maybe Kenwood's Data HT....). I also am going to have the most tricked out Kampsite at the KOA! Laptop, cellphone's, Ham Gear, a PDA and a PS/one eith portable display and a AC/DC inverter ot power it all(just not at the same time). To some, it is crap but to us it's wonderful!
But the terms are unacceptable. The College has a mission that unfortunately has to include Microsoft products. Until there are better apps, they need to know Microsoft. There are ads for MCSE's and others related to Microsoft. Microsoft is the standard as much as you'd hate it. Tell the alum that they will try to expand into other products such as Linux and Unix, but due to mission of the College they could not guarantee that it would never be spent on Microsoft products.
You DID read my post did you not? I admitted that what you CAN do is limited by current technology. But THEORETICALLY you can increase frequency infinitely. Theoretically, given enough decimal places, there are infinite frequencies between any 2 given frequencies. I know that there would be no way to tell the difference between 24.567 and 24.5668 MHz, but if technology is refined, eventually you could tell the difference between 2 signals using this as a carrier wave......right now, it's impossible. In the future, you could (but why would ya want to?:)).
The radio spectrum isn't a finite resource. How much can you increase frequency? You can infinitely increase it. What is limited is usable frequency. Usable frequency is limited not just by technology, but also by the physics of the environment. I have always said that trying to implement 802.11b like what has been done with cellular tech cannot be done because of it's frequency. 802.11b uses 2.4 GHz band of frequency. The physics of the problem makes 2.4 GHz not suited for long haul. 2.4 GHz can go through buildings but can only go around 50 feet. You could extend that by using a beam or a better omnidirectional antenna, but your definitely not going to go miles in most current instalations. Now HF frequencies can go thousands of miles with current equipment. I am sure BOTH RF frequency bands can and do go thousands of miles and maybe even light years, but current technology limits that. If the signal is so low in strength that current recievers can't detect it, then it's not useful. It's finite. Theoretically, if you can develop a reciver that can recieve the very very low strength signal, then you could....possibly say that a RF wave can be infinite.....but conditions have to be perfect. No walls and a total vacuum. On the other hand, interference that we currently have comes from going for that extra buck. If one were to build proper recievers and transmitters, they would be very expensive, but they would not be susceptible to interference. Cheap devices absolutly breed interference.
Good! I like the way you think man. I am thinking about doing the exact same thing because I live less then 8 miles from work. It would take me as much time to ride to work probably as waiting for the bus, riding the bus, waiting for the bus, and riding the bus and then walking from the bus stop to work. All of that waiting time, I could be moving. All of that walking time, I would be moving faster. So I figure it would take me at least as much time to get to work by riding a bike as it would riding the bus. As always, I could still ride the bus when the weather is bad and soon, my cities bus company will be putting bike racks on the front of the bus. I can put my bike on there, ride the long distance from point a to b, then bike the rest of the way with less transfers (only have to ride to closet bus down town, then ride the bus to down town, then ride from the main bus stop downtown to work.....probably a couple miles both to and from work).
Also, it was not the parent that said this but others have said we only have 75 years of oil left.....BS! There is TONS of oil. There's alot of oil we just can't get to because it's not economical to get to. Current oil prices are also artificially high because the oil companies think that the war in Iraq might affect the oil supply. Watch this..after the war (this summer or 4 weeks....depends on the when we start the war), gas will drop to below a dollar a gallon (at least in the US). Gas is still, at current prices, cheaper then a gallon of bottled water. SO I am not complaining about the price much!:) The war in Iraq has never been about oil. France, Russia and others will still be able to get the oil currently in Iraq....in fact it may even be better priced under a new regime. The war with Iraq is because even after the Gulf War and Gulf War II, Iraq has still not disarmed. Plain and simple.
The EV1 was a failure because GM built it to fail. The fact that all EV1's "purchased" were leases (only thing allowed) and that they practically excluded 48 of the 50 states (I think it was only available in CA and AZ) did not help as well as their choice of using a heat pump for Heating and Air Conditioning. They did not even include a small bank of solar cells to help maintain charge during a sunny day trip! Also, the fact that the battery tech in the ev1 has now been superceded and the fact there was no real incentive for GM to sell the thing were just two more things on why the EV1 failed. With current electric motors, the best choice for a reduced emission car is a hybrid. It prolongs the use of Gas which makes all of the R&D that the automakers have done last longer and lets them make money while they can research making more efficient batterys and more efficient electronic and electrical parts. Eventually they can make a battery (or fuel cell) that will make operatining a electrical car econmical. I think that Fuel Cells will power electric cars eventually. Fuel Cells coudl even be made to run off of Gasoline, Diesel or Hydrogen. The first two could be used while the last one is developed. They could even include 2 tanks....one for gas and one for hydrogen in the same car. And I think since a electric motor and a fuel cell will take less space then a ICE engine, it would not even be a space issue to include a duel tank. The future will have different cars. Back in the 50's, they thought we'd all have air cars and be flying from point a to b. Boy were things wrong there!
Um...what chemicals? They have this neat device called a FREEZER! Frozen, most anything can easily last 3-4 Months(or even longer in a vacuum sealed package and frozen) In a freezer. And eating something that was in there longer isn't dangerous. It just does not taste as good as before. Also, I really doubt this is the truth. Sounds like you only read ONE source. If you were really concerned, you'd have taken the 5 minutes it took to do a google search and evidence to dispute it.
Good question. Dictionary checking should be standard(but isn't even thought of in Windows). Mixed case letters AND numerics should also be a part of a password. Too bad it's too tough for non admins to remember that their password is D0gG1E...not that that's a good password, it's just even if it's somethign simple as a lower case doggie, they still can't remember it. Bio based security is the next big thing for security. Only way you could beat it is to be extremely good or to kill someone.
And unbinding to the internet is kind of difficult to do if you have only one nic and do file sharing over it!:) If you follow this and only have one nic, then poofta.....your shares are gone. One more reason to have everything behind a firewall AND natted.
THANKS! I will be staying at a KOA for a few days coming up. I can try to use this when i am there. KOA's are cool. BTW, it will be teh Dayton Tall Timbers one for Dayton Hamvention 2003. I can't wait. 2.5 days of fun with radios and computer crap! I LOVE IT!
My cable is underground....at least the ones in my neighborhood. I suppose a surge coming down the cable or the power line (also underground) and fry it. Doesn't matter for me....I just call them up and they bring me a new modem! I have only had two since I have been on a cable modem. The first one I had was a old legacy cable modem. The one I have now is the docsis cable modem (Moto). I have had zero problems with the modem itself since switching to the docsis one. The legacy one was a true piece of crap. The one I have now is great. I even found a web page that points me to the IP (192.168.100.1 I think) of the modem on my side when the cable end takes a crap. I can restart the damn thing without having to crawl under my desk and yank a power cord.
I got better things to spend my money on. I would rather rent. That way when they require an upgrade, I get a new modem kind of free (but not really cuz I pay some money every month). Also, if they so try a screwy modem update, they can fix it for me.
We have several still in service as the monitors hooked up to a IBM Infowindow II 3270 Dumb Terminals. I imagine there are many that are still in service in Banks, Grocery stores...etc etc. Just because you as a slashdot geek upgrade hardware every year doesn't mean companies do too. Although these ARE getting long in the tooth. LCD's should last a bit longer in my opinion. They tend to run much cooler. We had some G54's loose horizontal size control and the image looks like it's pregnant or being viewed thru a fisheye lense. Now the Nec Multisync E1100+ I am typing this on is awesome....and quite LARGE!:)
Both providers I have in my area that use GSM/GPRS both SUCK. AT&T and T-Mobile are the only ones that use SE phones as well as Nokia's(Cingular carried Nokia's too) and their coverage SUCKS compared to CDMA and Verizon. When is SE going to make these? Or if were stuck with MOTO, when will Motorola make a Bluetooth enabled CDMA/1xRTT phone? And so what if you have GPRS if your only limited to 10 MB a month with out paying a exhorbitant fee? Call me when I can get a price slightly lower then broadband for data. Broadband will always be faster and I ain't paying what they want for something slightly faster then a modem.
And what do you intend they eat on the way there? You see? This an important thing to know. Food takes weight. Of course soil does too. But soil could also grow multiple batches of food. Food can only feed you once. Also hydroponics will be extensively used here. Which means yes it's very important to know how tomatoes grow in a Zero G environment. This ain't a 4 day haul with a few days on the moon. This is a very expensive journey that needs every ounce it can just to get a human there. Might as well save some ounces by growing stuff both on planet and enroute so that once they get there, they can do science. Also, machines can't change the experiment halfway through. Humans can. Humans can notice something is changing and regulate things by adding more water, changing the amount it's fed.....things a machine can't do.
Where did I say that it was hard? I didn't. Sure without proper planning I could get a cluster up and running in teo hours . Now try and manage it....uh, yeah, I thought so. Sure, in the beginning it would not be too hard but as things progress, if you don't plan right, then things start to be problematic. And this really goes for ANY type of networking period. Not just clustering. Thats not to say that your plans will always go right. Sometimes, they don't. But you run more of a risk just throwing something together then doing proper planning before you even open the boxes. No, I think I am going to think of every poit up as I want HA for sure. Not HA may be down the ssible item that I might run into before setting road or HA at first and when you do a upgrade or swapout you have problems.
Linux clustering is not always easy to achieve. It can be done with alot of work. There are no premade packages unlike IBM's HACMP and Sun Clustering.....I am not saying that you can installed a IBM HA installation in an afternoon, but it's much easier thanks to tools IBM has and the excellent hardware. One example is IBM's SSA disks can be be shared between systems easing failover and reducing the need to mirror volumes across systems. You can mirror disks with in a SSA array and even setup RAID, but it's the fact that multiple systems can share the disks which makes IBM's HA shine. SSA mostly runs on copper, but is media independant. It can be made to run over fiber for low latency. You can also get a SSA gateway to SCSI and attach SSA disk to SCSI adapters. It's SSA that makes the IBM hardware one of the best BESIDES the excellent hardware integration and everything else.
Fault Resilient
Memory can go out and we can still reboot(if it goes down) and get back going in a degraded state. Alot of Intel boards can have trouble booting with a bad DIMM in it.
Diagnostic Tools
You can boot SMS mode and do things such as change the boot order (probably in AIX or Linux as it runs on these systems too), do hardware diagnostics, change date and time.....and these are on every system. On the some machines they come with the Service Processor and you can do even more. Even some workstations have Service Processors.
Management
SMIT is a powerful tool also, but not necessary to do Enterprise level stuff. The other tools it has are very good too. Of course alot of these are available in Linux, but some, including the LVM and their tools, and even the ODM are not. Some will match ODM up to the Windows Registry, but at least the ODM makes some sense!;)
More Robust In General
UNIX itself has been around for 30 years. Linux, well, has not. UNIX has a huge headstart. Linux has not. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Once Linux gets some of the features of AIX and other UNICES, it will have that stuff and things like Firewire and other support that the AIX kernel just does not have(yet). What Kernel supports as much hardware as the Linux kernel? I know, things such as USB and Nvidia Graphics cards aren't as important as server level stuff, but imagine that CAD stations could take advantage of those accelerators.
While I would have to agree with you on some points (ie the expense of each flight) I have to disagree on others. First, the shuttle is not and has not EVER been stripped to a bare air frame. Some of the shuttles have been (ie Columbia during it's refit) stripped, but never completely. Some tiles on the Columbia have been in place for it's entire lifetime. At most, they pull the engines. The ones that need more work get put somewhere and otehr engines brought in to replace the one that needs work. Some engines have flown on all of the orbiters. I think they definitely have more engines then they need for the the orbiters. They also inspect and replace the tiles, swap out electronics for the next planned mission(in case certain payloads need their own panel), insepct all of the shuttle inch by inch and once all of that is done, put it together then load the payloads in it and put it on a set of boosters. This costs alot. It would cost even more if the staff was big enough for my next point....
NASA's budget always seems to be the one that can be cut. I don't know entirely why, but it's almost always the first on the block. It also gets cut before military spending. If NASA had the budget to pay enough folks and for the spare parts to do it, they could launch 26 missions a year and they have launched many more then the current small number of launches per year. I believe that in 1986, there were more launches then there ever was in any year before that year. After Challenger, they discovered to increase safety, they have to lower the number of launches (big surprise there) in order to operate within budget. Sure they could launch 26 a year, but the money is just not there to do it safely.
Also, if you look at just the shuttles that have gone up, yes, the record is bad. But if you look at the entire record....after the shuttle is dead and buried or dead and put on display in the Smithsonian, I bet the record would be lower. So would, if offered, I go up on one? In a heartbeat.
I think the point that really needs made here is that the Shuttle was made to fly through the atmosphere on landing as an airplane. It's this form factor that builds up alot of the expense. If they actually made the spacecraft to perform AS A SPACECRAFT primarily, you'd be back to the capsules. Why? Because as far as safety is concerned, that's the best from factor. You have no wings that could break off, you have nothing that could be compromised(well, the heat shield, but now it would be less complex). No control surfaces or anything. Basically you have a reversed and slightly misshapened bullet. The right tool to the right job applies here. They made the space shuttle the way the did because air force and navy pilots wanted to fly it. If they stuck to or made a redesigned capsule, we may have even had a cheaper system. I am not saying I know the answer. But what I want to know is why does everything else look like a morphed shuttle? Does it HAVE to be a lifting body or some other form of a airplane when it's being launched like a rocket anyway?
Actually, this sending tomatoes in orbit to see how they react is important. Just how do you think that the astronauts are going to eat on Mars? You would need a cargo hold the size of or bigger then a Saturn V to feed 3 astronauts for the YEARS the mission will take. Figure it takes a year to get to Mars (actually I think 18 months is the current estimate),a year back.....they aren't going to travel for a YEAR to just stay 3 days and leave. They would probably be there 3 months to one year. Then they have to travel back. Figure about 3 years worth of food. There's no way that they could carry that much food and most food, even in a freezer, would spoil before they get there. So, whats the best way to do it the cheapest? Carry maybe enough food for a year and maybe enough meats for most of the trip(either freeze dried or canned or made to last long enogh) and carry chickens for eggs and meat possibly. Vegan astronauts would be the best as they could have their food totally grown in orbit after the years supply is up. So, it IS important to know how Tomatoes grow in orbit as that's going to be an important source of food as well as other vegetables.
I beg to differ. NOW is exactly the time to do this. The US and Russia are in a unique position. They are the two countrys most able to afford multiple launches per year into orbit. This is as good of time as any to get Reagan's Star Wars satellites in orbit. There will be failures with these satellites. But with North Korea and Iraq causing trouble, we need the ability to stop these missiles and the best way to do this is from space. Sure I don't like having lasers in orbit any more then anyone else but just like Air Superiority is important, so is space superiority. If we have the sats in space to take out any scuds or Taipaidong (whatever the Korean missile is) they will think twice about having the remnants come down on themselves.
The cheap space plane could be done. The new material sounds intrguing. And as these would be smaller because the primary use would be as a ferry to the space station, there would be less stuff to inspect after touch down and I bet ya they could even do a new runway that would end near the launch pad and then they could recondition it on the run way, lift it atop of the rocket already on the pad and be ready to go in less then 3 days. The concept sounds alot like the concept Ben Bova had in The Kinsman Saga (I believe this was a couple books put together as one). Use cheap Atlas or Delta rockets. The only difference would be the tug they propose which probably means it only has a RCS system (no OMS) and if it has any engines, it only would have enough fuel for a deorbit burn. Wish I had seen the pictures. I bet they would be pretty similar to the Manta in the Bova book.
Driver support is already good for that stuff. Most robotic stuff is driven by a Serial Port. If worst comes to worse the could always use a USB-Serial cable to interface to the robotics if a Serial Port is not available. Failing that, you'd just need to use USB. Nothing strange or exotic. Robotics only need away to recieve and send codes. That's handled by the serial port. The specifics would be handled by userspace code.
Also, I don't think they would be making major modifications to the Kernel. Why would they need to since they could just use the serial port or TCP/IP? Am I missing something? I don't think they'd need to make kernel mods beyond maybe adding a kernel driver to interface to any machine based encryption they might use and that code would be useless to us.
NASCAR is nothing like the WWE. You can NEVER guess the winner with reliability. Prime example is Daytona this year. Dale Jr. won 3 races total that week and if he had won the 500, it would have made four races. That sounds too good to be true. I am kind of glad he did not win because now someone is not out there screaming FIX!:) Te best thing about NASCAR is that you have some of the highest tech carbs in the business. They kind of do things like the russians sometimes....a little backwards, but man does it work!
I should say most "good" drivers. Michael did not alway get a win. In fact, the first win ever at Daytona in 2001 was his first in over 500 races (forget the number but it was ALOT). Also, that list you point at is everyone. There are a great number of active dirvers with multiple wins. Also, Rookies are very capable of winning now where they used to hardly be able to get around the track for 200 laps at Daytona.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for saying what I already was going to say. I have always been they guy who wants the best tool for the best job. If that was the way things worked with computers, Mainframes would definitely be used for Databases and all IO intensive processes and UNIX/Linux for Calculation intensive stuff and Windows for low end file sharing and print spooling as well as clients. By saying this, the states should use the best tool. Period. Mandating that Open Source be included should not be needed. Granted, this is a good thing for open source, but bad for everything else. We need to make LESS laws. IN fact we need to get rid of some (Total Awareness thingy is the big one that needs gotten rid of....why does the government need to look at my credit report before I ride in a airplane??)
With one exception......viruses. Filter these suckers out at the server. This will cut your opps I clicked on something I should not have syndrome.
Older AIX mainframes
:) I would not mind finding a older workstation to mess around with. Also, I do believe that the AIX license is tied to the hardware so if they don' t have the disk with it you can probably call IBM and work out a deal for AIX 5.1 if the hardware handles it. Most anything that's beein out in the last few years will run 5.1 fine. Failing that, I think there is a PPC Linux distro that runs on these. They also have PCI slots in most of the ones since Micro Channel was ditched. If you find enough, you may even be able to setup a cluster with HA (if you can swing the cost of the license) or just run Beowulf or one of the Linux solutions on it. IBM has excellent hardware. Especially their RS/6000 boxes.
:) But Hamvention and other hamfests you can find all sorts of neat crap. I am going to try my luck at finding a laptop battery there and for my major purchase (not surplus but still cool) a triband (2m, 70 cm and 6 m) handheld. Either the Yaesu or the Icom (or maybe Kenwood's Data HT....). I also am going to have the most tricked out Kampsite at the KOA! Laptop, cellphone's, Ham Gear, a PDA and a PS/one eith portable display and a AC/DC inverter ot power it all(just not at the same time). To some, it is crap but to us it's wonderful!
AIX has not and shall probably never run on a mainframe. They DO call the racks that hold the servers frames. But then I did know what you meant!
Ahh....my favorite time a year is here.....Dayton Hamvention starts soon and you usually can visit Mendelson's tent as well as procure many types of older hardware. I saw some GRID pen based computers there a couple years ago (running Pen Windows I think.....) and one year they had a COMPLETE AS/400 system w/OS, external DASD, and a 5250 dumb terminal. I even think they had a copy of Linux for the AS/400 also? I don't know. Then another year they had stacks of Sparc 2's and some Sparc 5's. The only thing about some of those....they had no hard drive and since they probably don't sell a SCSI drive you can use you were kind of screwed....unless you had one with a good HD and it needed a MB!
But the terms are unacceptable. The College has a mission that unfortunately has to include Microsoft products. Until there are better apps, they need to know Microsoft. There are ads for MCSE's and others related to Microsoft. Microsoft is the standard as much as you'd hate it. Tell the alum that they will try to expand into other products such as Linux and Unix, but due to mission of the College they could not guarantee that it would never be spent on Microsoft products.
You DID read my post did you not? I admitted that what you CAN do is limited by current technology. But THEORETICALLY you can increase frequency infinitely. Theoretically, given enough decimal places, there are infinite frequencies between any 2 given frequencies. I know that there would be no way to tell the difference between 24.567 and 24.5668 MHz, but if technology is refined, eventually you could tell the difference between 2 signals using this as a carrier wave......right now, it's impossible. In the future, you could (but why would ya want to? :)).
The radio spectrum isn't a finite resource. How much can you increase frequency? You can infinitely increase it. What is limited is usable frequency. Usable frequency is limited not just by technology, but also by the physics of the environment. I have always said that trying to implement 802.11b like what has been done with cellular tech cannot be done because of it's frequency. 802.11b uses 2.4 GHz band of frequency. The physics of the problem makes 2.4 GHz not suited for long haul. 2.4 GHz can go through buildings but can only go around 50 feet. You could extend that by using a beam or a better omnidirectional antenna, but your definitely not going to go miles in most current instalations. Now HF frequencies can go thousands of miles with current equipment. I am sure BOTH RF frequency bands can and do go thousands of miles and maybe even light years, but current technology limits that. If the signal is so low in strength that current recievers can't detect it, then it's not useful. It's finite. Theoretically, if you can develop a reciver that can recieve the very very low strength signal, then you could....possibly say that a RF wave can be infinite.....but conditions have to be perfect. No walls and a total vacuum. On the other hand, interference that we currently have comes from going for that extra buck. If one were to build proper recievers and transmitters, they would be very expensive, but they would not be susceptible to interference. Cheap devices absolutly breed interference.
Good! I like the way you think man. I am thinking about doing the exact same thing because I live less then 8 miles from work. It would take me as much time to ride to work probably as waiting for the bus, riding the bus, waiting for the bus, and riding the bus and then walking from the bus stop to work. All of that waiting time, I could be moving. All of that walking time, I would be moving faster. So I figure it would take me at least as much time to get to work by riding a bike as it would riding the bus. As always, I could still ride the bus when the weather is bad and soon, my cities bus company will be putting bike racks on the front of the bus. I can put my bike on there, ride the long distance from point a to b, then bike the rest of the way with less transfers (only have to ride to closet bus down town, then ride the bus to down town, then ride from the main bus stop downtown to work.....probably a couple miles both to and from work).
:) The war in Iraq has never been about oil. France, Russia and others will still be able to get the oil currently in Iraq....in fact it may even be better priced under a new regime. The war with Iraq is because even after the Gulf War and Gulf War II, Iraq has still not disarmed. Plain and simple.
Also, it was not the parent that said this but others have said we only have 75 years of oil left.....BS! There is TONS of oil. There's alot of oil we just can't get to because it's not economical to get to. Current oil prices are also artificially high because the oil companies think that the war in Iraq might affect the oil supply. Watch this..after the war (this summer or 4 weeks....depends on the when we start the war), gas will drop to below a dollar a gallon (at least in the US). Gas is still, at current prices, cheaper then a gallon of bottled water. SO I am not complaining about the price much!
The EV1 was a failure because GM built it to fail. The fact that all EV1's "purchased" were leases (only thing allowed) and that they practically excluded 48 of the 50 states (I think it was only available in CA and AZ) did not help as well as their choice of using a heat pump for Heating and Air Conditioning. They did not even include a small bank of solar cells to help maintain charge during a sunny day trip! Also, the fact that the battery tech in the ev1 has now been superceded and the fact there was no real incentive for GM to sell the thing were just two more things on why the EV1 failed. With current electric motors, the best choice for a reduced emission car is a hybrid. It prolongs the use of Gas which makes all of the R&D that the automakers have done last longer and lets them make money while they can research making more efficient batterys and more efficient electronic and electrical parts. Eventually they can make a battery (or fuel cell) that will make operatining a electrical car econmical. I think that Fuel Cells will power electric cars eventually. Fuel Cells coudl even be made to run off of Gasoline, Diesel or Hydrogen. The first two could be used while the last one is developed. They could even include 2 tanks....one for gas and one for hydrogen in the same car. And I think since a electric motor and a fuel cell will take less space then a ICE engine, it would not even be a space issue to include a duel tank. The future will have different cars. Back in the 50's, they thought we'd all have air cars and be flying from point a to b. Boy were things wrong there!
Um...what chemicals? They have this neat device called a FREEZER! Frozen, most anything can easily last 3-4 Months(or even longer in a vacuum sealed package and frozen) In a freezer. And eating something that was in there longer isn't dangerous. It just does not taste as good as before. Also, I really doubt this is the truth. Sounds like you only read ONE source. If you were really concerned, you'd have taken the 5 minutes it took to do a google search and evidence to dispute it.
Good question. Dictionary checking should be standard(but isn't even thought of in Windows). Mixed case letters AND numerics should also be a part of a password. Too bad it's too tough for non admins to remember that their password is D0gG1E...not that that's a good password, it's just even if it's somethign simple as a lower case doggie, they still can't remember it. Bio based security is the next big thing for security. Only way you could beat it is to be extremely good or to kill someone.
And unbinding to the internet is kind of difficult to do if you have only one nic and do file sharing over it! :) If you follow this and only have one nic, then poofta.....your shares are gone. One more reason to have everything behind a firewall AND natted.
THANKS! I will be staying at a KOA for a few days coming up. I can try to use this when i am there. KOA's are cool. BTW, it will be teh Dayton Tall Timbers one for Dayton Hamvention 2003. I can't wait. 2.5 days of fun with radios and computer crap! I LOVE IT!
My cable is underground....at least the ones in my neighborhood. I suppose a surge coming down the cable or the power line (also underground) and fry it. Doesn't matter for me....I just call them up and they bring me a new modem! I have only had two since I have been on a cable modem. The first one I had was a old legacy cable modem. The one I have now is the docsis cable modem (Moto). I have had zero problems with the modem itself since switching to the docsis one. The legacy one was a true piece of crap. The one I have now is great. I even found a web page that points me to the IP (192.168.100.1 I think) of the modem on my side when the cable end takes a crap. I can restart the damn thing without having to crawl under my desk and yank a power cord.
I got better things to spend my money on. I would rather rent. That way when they require an upgrade, I get a new modem kind of free (but not really cuz I pay some money every month). Also, if they so try a screwy modem update, they can fix it for me.
We have several still in service as the monitors hooked up to a IBM Infowindow II 3270 Dumb Terminals. I imagine there are many that are still in service in Banks, Grocery stores...etc etc. Just because you as a slashdot geek upgrade hardware every year doesn't mean companies do too. Although these ARE getting long in the tooth. LCD's should last a bit longer in my opinion. They tend to run much cooler. We had some G54's loose horizontal size control and the image looks like it's pregnant or being viewed thru a fisheye lense. Now the Nec Multisync E1100+ I am typing this on is awesome....and quite LARGE! :)
Both providers I have in my area that use GSM/GPRS both SUCK. AT&T and T-Mobile are the only ones that use SE phones as well as Nokia's(Cingular carried Nokia's too) and their coverage SUCKS compared to CDMA and Verizon. When is SE going to make these? Or if were stuck with MOTO, when will Motorola make a Bluetooth enabled CDMA/1xRTT phone? And so what if you have GPRS if your only limited to 10 MB a month with out paying a exhorbitant fee? Call me when I can get a price slightly lower then broadband for data. Broadband will always be faster and I ain't paying what they want for something slightly faster then a modem.
And what do you intend they eat on the way there? You see? This an important thing to know. Food takes weight. Of course soil does too. But soil could also grow multiple batches of food. Food can only feed you once. Also hydroponics will be extensively used here. Which means yes it's very important to know how tomatoes grow in a Zero G environment. This ain't a 4 day haul with a few days on the moon. This is a very expensive journey that needs every ounce it can just to get a human there. Might as well save some ounces by growing stuff both on planet and enroute so that once they get there, they can do science. Also, machines can't change the experiment halfway through. Humans can. Humans can notice something is changing and regulate things by adding more water, changing the amount it's fed.....things a machine can't do.
Where did I say that it was hard? I didn't. Sure without proper planning I could get a cluster up and running in teo hours . Now try and manage it....uh, yeah, I thought so. Sure, in the beginning it would not be too hard but as things progress, if you don't plan right, then things start to be problematic. And this really goes for ANY type of networking period. Not just clustering. Thats not to say that your plans will always go right. Sometimes, they don't. But you run more of a risk just throwing something together then doing proper planning before you even open the boxes. No, I think I am going to think of every poit up as I want HA for sure. Not HA may be down the ssible item that I might run into before setting road or HA at first and when you do a upgrade or swapout you have problems.
Clustering....
;)
Linux clustering is not always easy to achieve. It can be done with alot of work. There are no premade packages unlike IBM's HACMP and Sun Clustering.....I am not saying that you can installed a IBM HA installation in an afternoon, but it's much easier thanks to tools IBM has and the excellent hardware. One example is IBM's SSA disks can be be shared between systems easing failover and reducing the need to mirror volumes across systems. You can mirror disks with in a SSA array and even setup RAID, but it's the fact that multiple systems can share the disks which makes IBM's HA shine. SSA mostly runs on copper, but is media independant. It can be made to run over fiber for low latency. You can also get a SSA gateway to SCSI and attach SSA disk to SCSI adapters. It's SSA that makes the IBM hardware one of the best BESIDES the excellent hardware integration and everything else.
Fault Resilient
Memory can go out and we can still reboot(if it goes down) and get back going in a degraded state. Alot of Intel boards can have trouble booting with a bad DIMM in it.
Diagnostic Tools
You can boot SMS mode and do things such as change the boot order (probably in AIX or Linux as it runs on these systems too), do hardware diagnostics, change date and time.....and these are on every system. On the some machines they come with the Service Processor and you can do even more. Even some workstations have Service Processors.
Management
SMIT is a powerful tool also, but not necessary to do Enterprise level stuff. The other tools it has are very good too. Of course alot of these are available in Linux, but some, including the LVM and their tools, and even the ODM are not. Some will match ODM up to the Windows Registry, but at least the ODM makes some sense!
More Robust In General
UNIX itself has been around for 30 years. Linux, well, has not. UNIX has a huge headstart. Linux has not. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Once Linux gets some of the features of AIX and other UNICES, it will have that stuff and things like Firewire and other support that the AIX kernel just does not have(yet). What Kernel supports as much hardware as the Linux kernel? I know, things such as USB and Nvidia Graphics cards aren't as important as server level stuff, but imagine that CAD stations could take advantage of those accelerators.
While I would have to agree with you on some points (ie the expense of each flight) I have to disagree on others. First, the shuttle is not and has not EVER been stripped to a bare air frame. Some of the shuttles have been (ie Columbia during it's refit) stripped, but never completely. Some tiles on the Columbia have been in place for it's entire lifetime. At most, they pull the engines. The ones that need more work get put somewhere and otehr engines brought in to replace the one that needs work. Some engines have flown on all of the orbiters. I think they definitely have more engines then they need for the the orbiters. They also inspect and replace the tiles, swap out electronics for the next planned mission(in case certain payloads need their own panel), insepct all of the shuttle inch by inch and once all of that is done, put it together then load the payloads in it and put it on a set of boosters. This costs alot. It would cost even more if the staff was big enough for my next point....
NASA's budget always seems to be the one that can be cut. I don't know entirely why, but it's almost always the first on the block. It also gets cut before military spending. If NASA had the budget to pay enough folks and for the spare parts to do it, they could launch 26 missions a year and they have launched many more then the current small number of launches per year. I believe that in 1986, there were more launches then there ever was in any year before that year. After Challenger, they discovered to increase safety, they have to lower the number of launches (big surprise there) in order to operate within budget. Sure they could launch 26 a year, but the money is just not there to do it safely.
Also, if you look at just the shuttles that have gone up, yes, the record is bad. But if you look at the entire record....after the shuttle is dead and buried or dead and put on display in the Smithsonian, I bet the record would be lower. So would, if offered, I go up on one? In a heartbeat.
I think the point that really needs made here is that the Shuttle was made to fly through the atmosphere on landing as an airplane. It's this form factor that builds up alot of the expense. If they actually made the spacecraft to perform AS A SPACECRAFT primarily, you'd be back to the capsules. Why? Because as far as safety is concerned, that's the best from factor. You have no wings that could break off, you have nothing that could be compromised(well, the heat shield, but now it would be less complex). No control surfaces or anything. Basically you have a reversed and slightly misshapened bullet. The right tool to the right job applies here. They made the space shuttle the way the did because air force and navy pilots wanted to fly it. If they stuck to or made a redesigned capsule, we may have even had a cheaper system. I am not saying I know the answer. But what I want to know is why does everything else look like a morphed shuttle? Does it HAVE to be a lifting body or some other form of a airplane when it's being launched like a rocket anyway?
Actually, this sending tomatoes in orbit to see how they react is important. Just how do you think that the astronauts are going to eat on Mars? You would need a cargo hold the size of or bigger then a Saturn V to feed 3 astronauts for the YEARS the mission will take. Figure it takes a year to get to Mars (actually I think 18 months is the current estimate),a year back.....they aren't going to travel for a YEAR to just stay 3 days and leave. They would probably be there 3 months to one year. Then they have to travel back. Figure about 3 years worth of food. There's no way that they could carry that much food and most food, even in a freezer, would spoil before they get there. So, whats the best way to do it the cheapest? Carry maybe enough food for a year and maybe enough meats for most of the trip(either freeze dried or canned or made to last long enogh) and carry chickens for eggs and meat possibly. Vegan astronauts would be the best as they could have their food totally grown in orbit after the years supply is up. So, it IS important to know how Tomatoes grow in orbit as that's going to be an important source of food as well as other vegetables.
I beg to differ. NOW is exactly the time to do this. The US and Russia are in a unique position. They are the two countrys most able to afford multiple launches per year into orbit. This is as good of time as any to get Reagan's Star Wars satellites in orbit. There will be failures with these satellites. But with North Korea and Iraq causing trouble, we need the ability to stop these missiles and the best way to do this is from space. Sure I don't like having lasers in orbit any more then anyone else but just like Air Superiority is important, so is space superiority. If we have the sats in space to take out any scuds or Taipaidong (whatever the Korean missile is) they will think twice about having the remnants come down on themselves.
The cheap space plane could be done. The new material sounds intrguing. And as these would be smaller because the primary use would be as a ferry to the space station, there would be less stuff to inspect after touch down and I bet ya they could even do a new runway that would end near the launch pad and then they could recondition it on the run way, lift it atop of the rocket already on the pad and be ready to go in less then 3 days. The concept sounds alot like the concept Ben Bova had in The Kinsman Saga (I believe this was a couple books put together as one). Use cheap Atlas or Delta rockets. The only difference would be the tug they propose which probably means it only has a RCS system (no OMS) and if it has any engines, it only would have enough fuel for a deorbit burn. Wish I had seen the pictures. I bet they would be pretty similar to the Manta in the Bova book.
Driver support is already good for that stuff. Most robotic stuff is driven by a Serial Port. If worst comes to worse the could always use a USB-Serial cable to interface to the robotics if a Serial Port is not available. Failing that, you'd just need to use USB. Nothing strange or exotic. Robotics only need away to recieve and send codes. That's handled by the serial port. The specifics would be handled by userspace code.
Also, I don't think they would be making major modifications to the Kernel. Why would they need to since they could just use the serial port or TCP/IP? Am I missing something? I don't think they'd need to make kernel mods beyond maybe adding a kernel driver to interface to any machine based encryption they might use and that code would be useless to us.
Bring the ragtag fugitive fleet back! Just keep the psy stuff out of it. Make it SciFi not Fantasy.
Me and my bro had all of the toys. We had the Vipers that actually shot the missile. YEAH! Of course with in a day we had lost them!
NASCAR is nothing like the WWE. You can NEVER guess the winner with reliability. Prime example is Daytona this year. Dale Jr. won 3 races total that week and if he had won the 500, it would have made four races. That sounds too good to be true. I am kind of glad he did not win because now someone is not out there screaming FIX! :) Te best thing about NASCAR is that you have some of the highest tech carbs in the business. They kind of do things like the russians sometimes....a little backwards, but man does it work!
I should say most "good" drivers. Michael did not alway get a win. In fact, the first win ever at Daytona in 2001 was his first in over 500 races (forget the number but it was ALOT). Also, that list you point at is everyone. There are a great number of active dirvers with multiple wins. Also, Rookies are very capable of winning now where they used to hardly be able to get around the track for 200 laps at Daytona.