Well, I'll admit to being wrong where if you want to haul hundreds of tons of coal you'd be crazy to use anything but a train.
But the cases where railroad transport is a profitable win are generally restricted to:
freight
heavy
not time critical delivery (like lettuce)
and some passenger lines between large cities that are not too far apart (though high-speed, light rail, maglev could lengthen the distance where rail wins over air)
In 1997, Amtrack received a $ 2.2 billion bailout from the federal government.
At the end of 1996:
Already receiving $1 billion a year in federal subsidies for operating costs, Amtrak now wants a trust fund established to cover capital needs. A new study from the Cato Institute rejects the passenger rail service company's plea.
Established 25 years ago, Amtrak was supposed to become solvent five years later -- but did not.
Amtrak has so far cost taxpayers $13 billion in federal monies.
Taxpayers subsidize each rider by an average of about $100 -- or about 40 percent of the total per passenger cost.
The round trip subsidy for a passenger going from New York to Los Angeles runs $1,275 -- more than three times a typical discount airfare.
Only 0.4 percent of Americans traveling between cities use Amtrak.
Cato's economists figure some of Amtrak's busier routes could be profitable if they were freed of red tape. (One rule requires that laid-off Amtrak workers get six years severance pay.) Routes which could be money-makers include Boston-Washington, Santa Barbara-Los Angeles-San Diego and Chicago-Seattle.
Many economists contend that the best solution is to privatize the system and get Amtrak out of taxpayers' wallets.
Source: Perspective, "Taken for a Ride," Investor's Business Daily, December 31, 1996.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see trains used more. I think they're the better choice. Planes, trucks and automobiles get huge subsidies that would make Amtrack's pale by comparison. But that's no excuse for not recognizing the problems of the current rail system and making it better.
Both Intel and AMD have been betting big on 64 bit computing and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Itanium 1 was a flop. Itanium 2 has respectable performance, but is not IA-32 backward compatible, where AMD x86-64 is backward compatible.
I will bet that backward compatibility will tilt the balance to Opteron and that Intel will scramble to introduce a new chip Yamhill(?) designed to provide the backward compatibility that IA64 lacks.
I guess it's probably just a reflex action against spam-like resume submission (he cites 3000 applicants for a PC support tech), but I have to cringe that resumes get pre-processed by machine.
Soon applicants will achieve homogeneity in resumes, devoid of any real persona...
PHP, 5 years experience
MySQL 6 years experience, senior project lead, architect
Apache 3.0pre9, principal developer, 9 years experience
.NET original architectural team, 15 years experience
An advanced rail system like this might be slightly ahead of its time for China if the marketplace alone were determining when some company would build it.
It's kind of sad, though, that here in the United States we probably won't see anything like this for many more years.
It's strange, though. The Peoples Republic of China is a mixture of a market-driven and command-driven economies.
Likewise in the United States, where heavy government subsidies in the 1950's built up the interstate highway system.
Now, of course, the automobile dominates passenger traffic and the trucking industry dominates freight and our potentially efficient rail infrastructure is a government-subsidized crumbling ruin that neither the auto, trucking or oil industry is interested in seeing re-emerge.
But railroads will re-emerge as the most efficient means of transportation for people and freight. Computer controls for regulating rail traffic will succeed sooner than they will for automobile and truck traffic.
All it will take for the re-emergence of rail in the United States is some painful increases in the price of oil. Then we can go to Europe, Japan and now China to learn the technology that we've been neglecting.
Sounds like you deserve a couple of things to happen:
take a 3 week vacation so people start to understand what value there is to your work when it's missing
your manager to be visited by some other company's manager who's impressed by how smoothly the IT infrastructure hums along because of what you have setup and how you maintain it.
Maybe in the latter case the other company's manager won't tell your manager just how excellent you are, but rather just make you an offer.
Back on topic, though, I think that setting up LANs for schools or non-profit organizations as a volunteer would get you some experience that could come in handy in any bid for a network admin position. Getting familiar with all the fundamentals of home-made low-cost routers (*NIX box with multiple network cards), firewalls, and proxies is important, even if the elementary school doesn't have nice expensive Cisco routers running the latest version of IOS.
As direct marketing has become more intrusive into my life, I've taken to using my dog's name in various business dealings. She has name which was a popular name for girls about, oh, 80 years ago. (Like Brittany, Ashley and Nicole will be about 70 years from now.)
At any rate, I get this phone message for Violet from a retirement home in Phoenix.
They were "updating their records" and they "haven't heard from you in a while" and wanted to make sure she know about all the "wonderful plans they had" for their retirement community.
It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
the USA needs another political party; for 'the thinking citizen.'
I kind of agree, to some extent.
The big parties are pretty well sold out and their purchasers aren't interested in having to buy out a third major party in addition to laying out money for the big two.
Even looking at the minority parties, however, you'll find that many of them, while not yet corrupted by money, have caved into some kind of world view based on emotion or value judgements that are, from their perspective, non-negotiable.
I think the ingredients you mention have made production of software a better process over the past 25 years. Software applications can do more and can be built more quickly as result of those improved tools available to developers.
However, you still see a great deal of unreliability, bloated, and inefficient code because developers are trying to do much more than they did 25 years ago.
If all we needed to do was re-create the applications of 25 years ago, then the benefits of new techniques would be more evident. But people demand more and programmers want to create works up to their full personal potential and exceed what is currently possible.
Ragged-edge software is manifest evidence that we still are constantly crossing the barrier of human potential, that place where what is barely possible becomes what doesn't work. It's a good sign of innovation. And, it provides added impetus to keep trying to find more ways of improving the software development process.
I read the eWeek article about 2.6 and have surfed through the lkml to see what's going in and what's not.
I see Hans Reiser making an impassioned plea to get ReiserFS 4.0 into 2.5, the EVMS team nobly accepting temporary exile in userland, and others griping that LVM won't be in 2.6 and have to wait until 3.0
Given stuff that won't be in 2.6 and will be deferred until 3.0, what I want to know is:
"What useful feature WON'T be in Linux 3.0? Will the Linux of 2005 be practically finished as an operating system?"
OTOH, if you were in the business of providing a spoofed name service, then this would be the first step in doing so.
At any rate, it sure seems like access to a critical top level DNS should be filtered to a big white list of mirror machines, which could then handle general purpose inquiries.
That, or increase the number of TLDs, but that's already an insolubly bad political problem.
It doesn't say they'll stop making processors, just that smaller, faster, and cheaper is no longer the goal. Instead, they intend to focus on what their customers actually need.
If AMD traded some of the faster for more of the cheaper and smaller and hence, cooler they might make some customers more happy.
Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems like most CPUs don't work up much of a sweat these days. They're all bound by latency and bandwidth limitations to memory, disk and network more than they are by CPU processing speed.
As an aside, your concern about forest fires in northern New Mexico is a real one.
Drought the past few years has considerably weakened many of the trees as their moisture content has dropped.
A friend that drove through Los Alamos recently said that many (half, even!) of the pine trees in some areas were brown, because the drought had weakened them to the point where they were susceptiable to the pine bark beetle.
I've followed Mike Warren's earlier Linux clusters with interest: Loki (x86), mid-90's, and Avalon (Alpha) a few years ago.
The free software and low cost supercomputer are not so much news anymore since every intelligent consumer of compute cycles has at least one of these clusters available. No one has to "imagine" them anymore; they are real and commonplace.
What's a nice development here is that the Los Alamos team has not only brought down the ratio of
$/FLOP
but they've started looking to bring down the ratio of
Watt/FLOP
as well.
It represents an uncharastically appropriate use of resources at the Department of Energy and it also helps point the way for businesses looking to further minimize operational costs of racks of computers in air-conditioned rooms.
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
private,
rational, and
closely-based on reality.
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
If anything is obvious and plainly evident, it is that mankind has not done the most commendable job of managing the current set of life forms on planet earth.
"Be fruitful and multiply..." - check.
"Do not kill..." uhh...
If there are overly many human beings for our existing biosphere and too many of them are living unhappy lives, then producing other sentient life forms is not likely to improve things, unless they eat septic sludge and excrete something that counts as food to us.
I was thinking of the cooperative just becoming an ISP through purchasing one dedicated T1 land line link, rather than have each user becoming a gateway into their ISP piggybacking traffic from others.
Security is tough, though. I don't know enough about it except for rumours of how bad it is...
I live in an exurb area just beyond cable providers and where DSL hasn't arrived either.
I was interested in the recent Slashdot story about the 72 mile link obtained under excruciating circumstances (unlikely to be replicated in my neighborhood).
I've wondered whether it would be possible to use 802.11b for a neighborhood LAN cooperative where enough people could kick in subscriptions so that somewhere on the edge of civilization we could just buy a dedicated T1.
For that matter, please show me the copyright notice on a sales price.
In a jiffy:
"This Slashdot posting has a price of $0.02" Copyright (c) 2002 by 4of12. Reproduction without prior permission is prohibited. The FBI investigates felonies like the one you're contemplating and will whack you with a $250,000 fine. Fortunately for me, the penal code is not copyrighted, so I can tell you exactly how badly you're going to get whacked without violating any copyright on the $250,000 price for unauthorized viewing.
I agree it's ridiculous. It sure doesn't bode well for a free and informed marketplace that is purported to be a cornerstone of capitalism. It points to yet another misconception upon which the DMCA was based. I hope the DMCA is eventually just flushed entirely.
The only reason you think he has principles is that he agrees with your beliefs.
You're right - my knee-jerk reaction.
Forgive me, I'm just so conditioned to think that any politician that doesn't automatically climb into bed with money is somehow better and different from most.
It's responsible to warn users immediately that a vulnerability exists and to sketch out broadly what kind of vulnerability it is and how to recognize it.
It's irresponsible to post a working exploit prior to notifying the code maintainer of the existence of the problem.
At some point it becomes necessary and convenient for vulnerable users to have a tool they can use to test for the vulnerability and to see if they can protect themselves from the exploit. They should have the tool in a relatively short time frame, comparable to the same timeframe that crackers make tools from the exploit.
Too many companies (software vendors, security consultants) are financially vested in how bad the security blackeye looks in the marketplace and it colors their policies regarding security notification.
As far as I'm concerned, the interests of the software users should be the primary concern.
I would be interested in hearing opinions on this matter.
Alas, even you want opinions!
Many of the facts are out there already. It's up to you to find them and come to your own conclusions about what they mean.
Are you any better than most of the population when you ask for opinions to help you distill down the vast mass of facts into a bite-sized nugget?
I'm sympathetic to the immense task of digesting the information, culling the facts from the chaff of lies and spin that flow freely in the marketplace of ideas. It's no picnic, but it's what each person must do for themselves. If you don't, someone will do it for you and will thereby control what you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong.
Well, I'll admit to being wrong where if you want to haul hundreds of tons of coal you'd be crazy to use anything but a train.
But the cases where railroad transport is a profitable win are generally restricted to:
- freight
- heavy
- not time critical delivery (like lettuce)
and some passenger lines between large cities that are not too far apart (though high-speed, light rail, maglev could lengthen the distance where rail wins over air)In 1997, Amtrack received a $ 2.2 billion bailout from the federal government.
At the end of 1996:
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see trains used more. I think they're the better choice. Planes, trucks and automobiles get huge subsidies that would make Amtrack's pale by comparison. But that's no excuse for not recognizing the problems of the current rail system and making it better.
Both Intel and AMD have been betting big on 64 bit computing and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Itanium 1 was a flop. Itanium 2 has respectable performance, but is not IA-32 backward compatible, where AMD x86-64 is backward compatible.
I will bet that backward compatibility will tilt the balance to Opteron and that Intel will scramble to introduce a new chip Yamhill(?) designed to provide the backward compatibility that IA64 lacks.
I guess it's probably just a reflex action against spam-like resume submission (he cites 3000 applicants for a PC support tech), but I have to cringe that resumes get pre-processed by machine.
Soon applicants will achieve homogeneity in resumes, devoid of any real persona...
An advanced rail system like this might be slightly ahead of its time for China if the marketplace alone were determining when some company would build it.
It's kind of sad, though, that here in the United States we probably won't see anything like this for many more years.
It's strange, though. The Peoples Republic of China is a mixture of a market-driven and command-driven economies.
Likewise in the United States, where heavy government subsidies in the 1950's built up the interstate highway system.
Now, of course, the automobile dominates passenger traffic and the trucking industry dominates freight and our potentially efficient rail infrastructure is a government-subsidized crumbling ruin that neither the auto, trucking or oil industry is interested in seeing re-emerge.
But railroads will re-emerge as the most efficient means of transportation for people and freight. Computer controls for regulating rail traffic will succeed sooner than they will for automobile and truck traffic.
All it will take for the re-emergence of rail in the United States is some painful increases in the price of oil. Then we can go to Europe, Japan and now China to learn the technology that we've been neglecting.
So be carefull when you invent names. Like ghosts they may come when you call but not leave when not wellcome any more.
Ghosts? Quite so!
I remember hearing about someone that thought they had hit upon a sure-fire way to cut down on the amount of junk mail they were getting.
Simply write "Deceased" on the envelope and return it to sender.
Well this worked great most of the time.
Until, that is, an inadvertent name change got into the system of one direct marketer, as evidenced by a new mail to his address:
Sounds like you deserve a couple of things to happen:
- take a 3 week vacation so people start to understand what value there is to your work when it's missing
- your manager to be visited by some other company's manager who's impressed by how smoothly the IT infrastructure hums along because of what you have setup and how you maintain it.
Maybe in the latter case the other company's manager won't tell your manager just how excellent you are, but rather just make you an offer.Back on topic, though, I think that setting up LANs for schools or non-profit organizations as a volunteer would get you some experience that could come in handy in any bid for a network admin position. Getting familiar with all the fundamentals of home-made low-cost routers (*NIX box with multiple network cards), firewalls, and proxies is important, even if the elementary school doesn't have nice expensive Cisco routers running the latest version of IOS.
As direct marketing has become more intrusive into my life, I've taken to using my dog's name in various business dealings. She has name which was a popular name for girls about, oh, 80 years ago. (Like Brittany, Ashley and Nicole will be about 70 years from now.)
At any rate, I get this phone message for Violet from a retirement home in Phoenix.
They were "updating their records" and they "haven't heard from you in a while" and wanted to make sure she know about all the "wonderful plans they had" for their retirement community.
It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
the USA needs another political party; for 'the thinking citizen.'
I kind of agree, to some extent.
The big parties are pretty well sold out and their purchasers aren't interested in having to buy out a third major party in addition to laying out money for the big two.
Even looking at the minority parties, however, you'll find that many of them, while not yet corrupted by money, have caved into some kind of world view based on emotion or value judgements that are, from their perspective, non-negotiable.
I think the ingredients you mention have made production of software a better process over the past 25 years. Software applications can do more and can be built more quickly as result of those improved tools available to developers.
However, you still see a great deal of unreliability, bloated, and inefficient code because developers are trying to do much more than they did 25 years ago.
If all we needed to do was re-create the applications of 25 years ago, then the benefits of new techniques would be more evident. But people demand more and programmers want to create works up to their full personal potential and exceed what is currently possible.
Ragged-edge software is manifest evidence that we still are constantly crossing the barrier of human potential, that place where what is barely possible becomes what doesn't work. It's a good sign of innovation. And, it provides added impetus to keep trying to find more ways of improving the software development process.
Amen.
I read the eWeek article about 2.6 and have surfed through the lkml to see what's going in and what's not.
I see Hans Reiser making an impassioned plea to get ReiserFS 4.0 into 2.5, the EVMS team nobly accepting temporary exile in userland, and others griping that LVM won't be in 2.6 and have to wait until 3.0
Given stuff that won't be in 2.6 and will be deferred until 3.0, what I want to know is:
At least they're developing something useful!
For a while, I was afraid they were developing ways for studying tautology!
isn't that a bit counterproductive?
Absolutely.
OTOH, if you were in the business of providing a spoofed name service, then this would be the first step in doing so.
At any rate, it sure seems like access to a critical top level DNS should be filtered to a big white list of mirror machines, which could then handle general purpose inquiries.
That, or increase the number of TLDs, but that's already an insolubly bad political problem.
It doesn't say they'll stop making processors, just that smaller, faster, and cheaper is no longer the goal. Instead, they intend to focus on what their customers actually need.
If AMD traded some of the faster for more of the cheaper and smaller and hence, cooler they might make some customers more happy.
Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems like most CPUs don't work up much of a sweat these days. They're all bound by latency and bandwidth limitations to memory, disk and network more than they are by CPU processing speed.
As an aside, your concern about forest fires in northern New Mexico is a real one.
Drought the past few years has considerably weakened many of the trees as their moisture content has dropped.
A friend that drove through Los Alamos recently said that many (half, even!) of the pine trees in some areas were brown, because the drought had weakened them to the point where they were susceptiable to the pine bark beetle.
I've followed Mike Warren's earlier Linux clusters with interest: Loki (x86), mid-90's, and Avalon (Alpha) a few years ago.
The free software and low cost supercomputer are not so much news anymore since every intelligent consumer of compute cycles has at least one of these clusters available. No one has to "imagine" them anymore; they are real and commonplace.
What's a nice development here is that the Los Alamos team has not only brought down the ratio of
but they've started looking to bring down the ratio of as well.It represents an uncharastically appropriate use of resources at the Department of Energy and it also helps point the way for businesses looking to further minimize operational costs of racks of computers in air-conditioned rooms.
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
Your caution is well advised.
If anything is obvious and plainly evident, it is that mankind has not done the most commendable job of managing the current set of life forms on planet earth.
If there are overly many human beings for our existing biosphere and too many of them are living unhappy lives, then producing other sentient life forms is not likely to improve things, unless they eat septic sludge and excrete something that counts as food to us.
You forgot the GPS tracking collars with remote control shocks for inappropriate behavior.
If they work for Fido and for felons, they can work for you!
Dealing with your ISP
I was thinking of the cooperative just becoming an ISP through purchasing one dedicated T1 land line link, rather than have each user becoming a gateway into their ISP piggybacking traffic from others.
Security is tough, though. I don't know enough about it except for rumours of how bad it is...
I live in an exurb area just beyond cable providers and where DSL hasn't arrived either.
I was interested in the recent Slashdot story about the 72 mile link obtained under excruciating circumstances (unlikely to be replicated in my neighborhood).
I've wondered whether it would be possible to use 802.11b for a neighborhood LAN cooperative where enough people could kick in subscriptions so that somewhere on the edge of civilization we could just buy a dedicated T1.
Has anyone else done this already?
For that matter, please show me the copyright notice on a sales price.
In a jiffy:
I agree it's ridiculous. It sure doesn't bode well for a free and informed marketplace that is purported to be a cornerstone of capitalism. It points to yet another misconception upon which the DMCA was based. I hope the DMCA is eventually just flushed entirely.
The only reason you think he has principles is that he agrees with your beliefs.
You're right - my knee-jerk reaction.
Forgive me, I'm just so conditioned to think that any politician that doesn't automatically climb into bed with money is somehow better and different from most.
Dammit, who let a man of principle become highly placed in government?
This would never have happened back here in the good ole U.S. of A!
Too many companies (software vendors, security consultants) are financially vested in how bad the security blackeye looks in the marketplace and it colors their policies regarding security notification.
As far as I'm concerned, the interests of the software users should be the primary concern.
Tsk, tsk.
I would be interested in hearing opinions on this matter.Alas, even you want opinions!
Many of the facts are out there already. It's up to you to find them and come to your own conclusions about what they mean.
Are you any better than most of the population when you ask for opinions to help you distill down the vast mass of facts into a bite-sized nugget?
I'm sympathetic to the immense task of digesting the information, culling the facts from the chaff of lies and spin that flow freely in the marketplace of ideas. It's no picnic, but it's what each person must do for themselves. If you don't, someone will do it for you and will thereby control what you think.