First of all, you came up with a lossless encoding scheme. Stick to your guns and go with what you have proven to yourself will work.
Secondly. Navigation, MPU control, just about everything except video data aquisition, does not need to be speedy at all. Use low power, low clock speed micro-controllers for those. My guess is you are going to be making at most, maybe 5 knots? Keep in mind that MPU power increases at just about the CUBE of speed. Think about rate of change in any particular vector, its very very slow, if your depth excursions are more then say 1 meter over perhaps 15 seconds then your not building an observation platform, your building something else. I cannot imagine for even a moment that you need to sample ANY platform byte at say more then about every 1/10 of a second, and even then that is probably 10x over sampling.
Use the simplest bus architecture possible. PCI is crazy fast for everything except data aquisition and it will just suck your batteries dry. Keep video and audio where you really need sampling speed on a seperate micro controller or sub-miniature computer and shut it down when not in use. Remember this is a robot, its just piloting its way to point X in the ocean, makes its observation, then pilots someplace else.
Once again. This is that artists right to sign away what ever rights in return for a thing. That thing is any or all of the above things that I have mentioned, such as Production Cost, Reproduction Costs, Distribution Costs, etc.
No one is twisting an artists arm to sign the contract. No one is stopping the artist from negotiating the contract so that it gives them a larger share. If the record company wont agree to your terms, go elsewhere. If you cant find a record company willing to bet their cash on your popularity, then go borrow $20K from friends, relatives or wherever you can find it. Get 10K CD's stamped, advertise them, promote them, mail copies to every radio station you can find and get your stuff played. Make all the follow up phone calls, in other words, get on a tour as an opening act, get yourself out there. In other words, do EVERYTHING that any record company does, bet your hard found borrowed money and see how far you get. Just remember you have to pay that money back, more then likely, with interest.
Once again your very very weak argument still sends the message that just because a big record company owns the copyright to a an artistic work, its ok to rip them off. Well you know what, even if that record company only pays the artist 1 dollar for every CD sold, everytime you decide its OK to just burn a copy and give it to your pal, then you are stealing that 1 dollar from the artist. Your just a theif, its that simple.
Hey sounds like your having fun! Keep up the good work!
Developing your system of management of the various systems is not that daunting though. Consider using a prioritized message queue. Each subsystem passes its various status messages into you main control queue and then is handled via an escalatable priority system.
Setting up autonimous operation is not that hard. The basis for your model is an aircraft autopilot, since you are controlling a vehicle that can move in all axises, up-down, left-right, pitch and roll. The main navigational issue is one of either dead reconing or inertial. Since you wont have an antenna above the surface , you need to know the amount of time -v- acceleration in 4 axises. Depth is a simple matter of a pressure gause. +- 44 psi per 100 feet of depth.
You will find that your main problem is keeping everything dry as hull penetrations are notoriously leaky. Make sure every opening uses sea pressure to keep its closing cap or what-not against the sealing surface ( o-ring or whatever.)
Your MPU will be your main issue. Calculating battery run-time is always going to be a guess, an educated one, but a guess nevertheless. Make sure your ballast control system does not require power from the MPU power system as well as the navigational computer. A mechanical fail safe is a plus. You can use CO2 cartridges on a mechanical piercing system to be the last resort ballast blow system.
Nuetral boyancy will be your other problem. Hull squeeze will always make you go more negatively boyant the deeper you go. Its a race condition that will lead you past your degin depth to crush depth unless you compensate. If the hull is rigid enough you can use your MPU to drive to a shallower depth.
Ok.... So you are wrong. Sorry to say it but its true.
As per Reference.com and my own personal expirience ( 10 years in the United States Submarine Service ) , a submarine is ANY vessel that can navigate while submerged.
The fact that this submarines propulsion is the result of hydrodynamic forces on a "wing" makes no difference at all. A propeller, turned by an main propultion unit is a "wing" that hydrodynamic forces act upon, thereby resulting in movement in any plane of reference ( up, down, left, right ) satisfies the demand that this submarine have a mode of propulsion.
FTA and I quote:
Traditional gliders consume about half a watt of energy moving at a rate of half a knot. Deepglider's power consumption is about half that because of its exceptionally stiff hull that's resistant to pressure. When pressure compresses a hull in a traditional glider, it gains buoyancy and requires more energy to control.
On its face this is, well no other word for it, wrong. The principles of boyancy as described by Archimedes clearly indicate this. Boyancy is based upon a volume of water or gas that is displaced by a body or form and the pressure towards a lesser pressure with therefor lift the body or form towards the region of a lesser pressure.
The ONLY way for a bod or form to become more or less boyant is to either increase or decrease the volume of the water / gas being displaced. The only way to do this in any submersable device with a rigid hull form is to add or subtract water from a ballast tank.
Ohh thats a lovely line of thought. Lets see, a music artist signs with a record company, a book author signs with a publishing company for any or all of the following reasons:
To cover the production costs.
To cover the promototional Costs.
To cover the printing / stamping costs.
To cover the distribution costs.
In exchnage for fronting ALL of this money, which by the way no bank on the planet will loan you, The publishing company or record company writes a contract which specifies who makes what amount as a percentage of sales and for certain rights to publication. The artist can either sign it or not, thats the way it is. The artist can even try to get the contract drawn up with what they percieve to be more favorable terms. If the record / publishing compnay agrees, thats their business.
There is a HUGE amount of risk involved and the publisher / record company assumes these risks. For every Sting, or U2 or Cold Play, there are a hundred other artists who never sell, even though the publisher / record company still puts up the money for all the items as listed above. The record company takes their best guess at what they think wil sell, then bets a big wad of cash on that outcome.
So let me make really sure that I have your position correct? You personaly believe that you have the right to walk into a book store, buy a book for an agreed upon price, then you think that you have the right to legaly start making copies of it and distributing it in any manner you like?
Ohhh god yet another fool (YAF) that just doesn't get it.
I believe you misunderstand the purpose of copyright, its not to protect you or your labor but actually to promote production of creative work to in turn benefit the public. If there's another model that accomplishes the task more efficiently that should be the one adopted. Again its not about the producer of the content but the public. Compare the same to open source software. It benefits the public on the face of it, it flies against conventional wisdom, why should anyone give away the years of labor they put into something, yet as you I presume (being on slashdot) know its been a huge and growing positive in the world.
Copyright was developed so that an author would have a legal mechinism to control their own work! Yes this does very much annure to the public benefit because the artist gets a finite amount of time in which their work cannot be duplicated, reproduced or sold without their expressed written ( contract with a book or music publisher ) consent! This allows them to make money from that published work to feed, clothe and house themselves and thier wives and children while they create their NEXT work, which typicaly takes quite a while to do. What kind of contract they enter into with anyone else to facilitate that is their business and NOT YOURS!!!!!!
If I want to write the great american novell and GIVE IT AWAY on street corners or on a web site, it is MY right to do so, it is also my right NOT to do so, but to sell it in any legal manner I choose!
If I want to write some really cool software program and GIVE it away, it is my right to do so, AS LONG as I dont give away something owned by someone else in the process.
The issue is as they innovate or die, the media producers can go head to head with piracy and win but they actually have to compete for that. For example if I could download HD torrents from abc / disney whatever on all their fare but with advertisements embedded , some people wouldnt forward (yes a small percentage) another smaller percentage of revenue would be realized by product placement so on and so forth. The point being it would be a model whereby some revenue would be generated even despite giving the product away for free and even without giving it away for free having it available at a low cost non DRM'd would cause widescale adoption. Why did the guy in the article start using UKNova cause it was easy to use and got him what it wanted, if there was a iTunes variant that offered him 10 cent uber fast downloads of anything and everything he wanted what're the chances of him going down the so called dark path?
I dont like copy protection schemes anymore then the next person, they are a pain in the ass, but that is NOT THE POINT here. Everything you say is an attempt to justify being a thief.
Ohhh so now its, "I am JUST ripping off the record company, so thats cool! Stick it to the man!!!!!!
Do you know why artists sign with record companies? So they can MAKE money you fool! Yes you can try to go it on your own, you can put up a website, pay the fee to get it built, pay the hosting fee and pay for that bandwith as people buy your music, book on PDF or whatever.
So now they have become a popular music group, author of whatever. How do does an artist protect their rights as the owner of the content, when some THIEF takes your entire CD or book or whatever and puts it on a Torrent Share? If its on a Torrent share, WHY would ANYONE go and PAY FOR SOMTHING THEY CAN PRETTY MUCH STEAL WITH IMPUNITY?!?
Ahhh so well spoken by someone who has probably never spent a few years of their life writing a book, or a screenplay, or a play or a dozen songs.
So lets see, according to you, if I spend a few years of my life generating a creative work, I should not have any protection at all! YOU should have the right to just rip me off, seel my work, or even give it away to whomever you desire?
Thats not even a socialist POV, thats just plain stealing from me. You, in your notions are nothing but a thief AND an asshole!
I shouldn't have to give up my rights to use media anywhere I want to ensure the author's right to get paid.
Nothing in what I said suggests that you do. The scheme I suggest allow you to play any content you have purchased on any player you have purchased.
I shouldn't have to give up my right to control how long I use my media to ensure the author's right to get paid.
Nothing I suggest has any timeout or drop-dead feature
No DRM (protection) scheme currently exists in which the user can be assured that their rights to use media as they wish, for as long as they wish, will ever be violated.
I do believe the one I suggest will do exactly as you ask.
It is likely that no DRM (protection) scheme that does these things can ever exist.
I do believe the one I suggest will do exactly as you ask.
It is highly unlikely that every person who has downloaded media illegally would purchase it even if they were so restricted, therefore increased DRM does not directly relate to increased profit.
I tacitly agree with this point; however, it does stop the person who steals my property from doing so, and then reselling it, thus depriving me of my right to profit from my own work.
No large media organizations have ever tried distributing unprotected media at low cost, so no fair comparisons between DRMed media and non-DRMed media can be made.
You are obvisouly not in the verticle software market. I know a company that sells optical design software, arguably an artisitic creation. The sold their first version unprotected, it was all over Hong Kong in a matter of days. The next version they sold came with a dongle.
Moreover, if I copy something you made, that neither deprives you of your original content nor your life, so making comparisons to direct theft or even murder is ludicrous.
If you copy something I made, and then give it to someone else you are most certainly depriving me of my rights and my rightfull income from my labor. You are in point of fact, stealing from me! Now having said that, if you make a copy for backup, thats fine. If you make a copy so you can listen to it when your in your car, thats fine with me. But if you put it on a website, or a torent share or anything like that, or you download my work from a website that is not specificaly authorized by me, the content owner, then yes the person who runs the website and you are stealing from me.
Lets examine this from the point of view of the artist. That person or person(s) works hard at making some form of art. It really makes no difference what the art is, it could be music, sculpture, painting, books, motion pictures it really does not matter, lets just assume the arguments.
Now how does that person make a living doing this?
A musician thinks up a melody, some words, fills it in and records it, then attempts to sell it to the masses. This is how that person or person(s) pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
A sculptor take a chuck of rock, clay or whatever the medium is and transforms it into a shape that is both appealing to the eye and makes some sort of artistic statement. The scupltor then tries to sell it for whatever they can get for it so they can pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
A takes a blank canvas or whatever the medium is and transforms it into an image that is both appealing to the eye and makes some sort of artistic statement. The painter then tries to sell it for whatever they can get for it so they can pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
Now I could go on and on but your all smart, I think you get the point. The {___________} {insert the appropriate moniker here }, does whatever they do so they can pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
The transportablity of the item by digital means seems to make the difference here. You cant download a sculpture or a painting, you can download an image of the sculture or painting, but not the actual item. A fine paitning or sculpture might very well sell for a very large amount of money. If you buy it, its yours, you own it, but not ALL the rights to it unless that is spelled out in the sales contract. Can you then set up shop, make a mold and make plaster casts of it and sell them? I dont think so. Can you hire another artist to duplicate the painting you purchased for a large amount of money then sell the copies, again I dont think so, that is if you are a law abiding person as I do beleive the original artist retains that right, well unless you purchased it from them I would imagine.
Let us now take the example or say, U2 or Cold Play. These are artists who create a of work of art, in this case its music. They are willing to sell you a copy, for your individual and personal use only, to enjoy their particular art form. Now most people are quite content with that, but there seem to be some people who believe they have the right to then give that to anyone they want to, en mass! I don't think any reasonable person would think that was ok.
So here is my proposal to solve this problem. I know that everyone wants to be able to do is play content, that they have purchased, on any device that they own. I think that a form of PGP is the answer.
Everyone knows that in PGP you have a public and private key. Lets just take this one step further. The private key comes with the content. The public key is something you make up. The part that I think makes this work, is that each device, iPod, Zune, Your car radio, your whatever player all have a unique key of their own. That key gets mashed with your key and creates your personal key, for that device. You buy another device and you create another key for that device. At your computer or whatnot you can either have it read form the device electronicaly ( device is in the cradle ) or you can manualy type it in if the key comes from say your car stereo.
Whatever system you use to purchase digital content with, be it iTunes or whatever knows the Private Key and your Personal Key, but not the key from the iPod, Zune, Phone, whatever. The Private & Personal keys get embeded into the particular bit of music, video, book on tape, etc. Now all of your content will play on all o
When i was in HS ( '73 - '77 ) being a Computer Scientest was meaningfull because they were the guys creating what today we call a "computer" along side guys with "EE" degrees. The EE guys built logic circuits that the CS guys wrote, by todays standards, primitive code that made them work. Compliers were extremely rare and we barely had "high" or "mid" level languages. Most stuff was writtin in machine code.
Now contrast that with today. Compilers, good ones even, are really a dime a dozen. Linkers and assembler are the same. The very talented have created languages, structures and frameworks that take most of the "programming" out of what people do today. Look at Java, Delphi, C#, C++, Ruby, Python, Perl, C, VB, all of them. How much really guts low level programming to the vast majority of programmers really do?
There are libraries and frameworks for practicaly everything. You need a database? Go download MySQL, Firebird, Oracle, DB2, Interbase etc. You want to build a UI? There is the entire MS-Windows API, Gnome, Aqua, KDE and numerous others. Need to talk TCP/IP, there are libraries for that on every platform, with simple invocations for just about every language. Almost everything low level these days has had a wrapper for your favorite dialect put around it.
The vast majority of programmers these days are more or less scripters. Yes you use the vocabulary of your favorite language, but lets be real here for a moment. Lets say you want to represent a list of files to a user via some UI. Are you going to go out and write the very low level code that will determine, with a mathematical proof, that you are reading the file entires on the disk drive to make sure you are doing it as fast as possble? Nope. In windows you are going to use the FindFirst / FindNext API. In *nix you might just spawn off a find thread and get its results back through STDIO. Thats not what a lot of people would say is programming in its classicle sense of the word.
A lot of the first programs i wrote that had a user interface sent me into long nights of just handeling field input, because at that time I was programming in Turbo Pascal 3.x and there were no librairies or API's that did that for you. So I was writing loops, capturing keyboard input, checking to see if was a function key that was pressed and if not then, well most of you know the drill. I had to build it all myself. But the best thing about that was that I had total control of the user expirience and I had total control of the way the software worked. There was very little in between me and the hardware.
These days its hard to even find the hardware, much less interact with it. Everything is burried under virtual methods or its being controlled by the underlaying OS which cannot give you direct control over it, because 8 other programs are all trying to use the same bit of hardware. I used to be able to stuff the keyboard buffer, now I stuff the message queue and its harder to deal with then the keyboard buffer.
The market forces really have not changed, as others have asserted, the nature of the beast has changed. I am 48 years old and 25 years ago there was barely a thing called a network, these days its ubiquitous. 25 years ago you had to either be one very smart mofo or you had to have a degree in Computer Science to be able to do anything other then what you got on a floppy. I was not one of the latter, and I worked HARD to understand what was happening inside tht box. I spent many many nights laerning about interrupt controllers, about drive controllers ( MFM anyone? ) about starting drive diagnostics with debug and understanding what the hell I was doing. I cursed IBM daily for dropping all the memory mapped hardware into the TOP of the address space instead of the bottom, OHHHH how I cursed them. I learned the LIM spec and how to shuffle chucks of memory around. but I digress...
Business embraced the beast and the beast grew and matured. Todays business does not need a person with a CS d
Hmmmm let me see, cost you 30 million to make, you take in 185 million world wide, lets thats 150 million in profit? Ohh wait is that the Net, the Net Net, or the Net Net Net...?
I am seemingly unclear, you invest 30 make 185, lets see uhmmm 6 x 30 = 180... I guess 6 times your investment is not good enough.
Yeah you heard it here 1st. A new acronym, YAMN. CSS is becomming even more of a joke then it already is. And the worst part is that is a cruel joke.
As many have said in this string of posts, without the use of tables, it is no longer a job for the general web creator to create a three column lay out, without being a complete CSS guru and even for them it gives them headaches.
In my estimation, what the designers of CSS have managed to do is crush the life out of the promise that once was the a usable, if slightly clumsy, way to present information.
As an example. Using un-ordered lists to create menus. Its a complete and total hack, and I mean to use the word hack in the most derogitory manner possible. Instead of comming up with a menu framework that was designed from the ground up to be menus they used this stupid hack and think they are so cool. News for you, your not cool, your not smart nor are you clever.
There are elements of CSS that are quite functional and workable, but for the most part its just a cludge and a bad one at that. Lets take for example something that could make all of our lives easier, the basic ability to have include files. All you CSS lovers hate frames and you hate tables. Well with frames I can make ONE file contain the entire drop down menu section. I create it in one file and ONLY one file. I edit it in ONE file and ONE file only. So while you geniouses are comming up with HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS1, CSS2, etc. ad nausium, you cant seem to fit that simple part in there. Every freeking page has to have the complete menuing system in it and if anything has to be changed in it, like CONTENT someone has to go and edit 1 to n freeking html files, sorry, but for that you guys just plain SUCK.
Now I just know someone will think in regard to that last bit, that it should just be in a database! Well sure as shootin! Except why on fucking earth does a 10 page web site need to have a complete CRM system behind it? Why should it even have a database! Then you will say, but it is only 10 pages, you should write a VI or better yet an EMACS macro to handle that. Better yet anyone who would suggest that should get rectaly examined by the phalus of a donky. UL's twisted into menu's are not trivial and can be broken quite easily. Develop a MENU interface if you are determiend to turn something loosley associated with desktop publishing into a full on interactive bit of software.
The bottom line is this, if you want people to really embrace CSS then FIX IT. Get the venders to fix the browsers and if they wont fix it, then stop twisting CSS all over itself to accomodate them and just let it those browsers fail and the market will fix it.
If you look inside an SCSI,SAS,SATA or even plain old ATA you will not notice anything different physicaly at all. They all have the same haeds and platters.
ATA drives are far simpler to implement because everything is at the interface layer. There is no command queueing, there is not 16 levels of drive negotiation or anything like that happening. Remember the SCSI spec is for anything, hard drives, CD-ROMS, Tape drives, printers, you name it!
The ATA controler was extremely simple AND inexpensive to implement because it could only have TWO devides MAX and one was always the master, and if it died your slave drive was nowhere to be seen!
In terms of raw performance, there is no longer a big difference between drives, bascialy the data bus is the bottle neck. Where the difference begins to really show is when you put these things in a server and when you do that, SCSI or SAS just rips ATA or SATA a new one. The SCSI command set and interface logic was designed from the ground up to handle massive amounts of simultanious read and write requests. When your server is handling file and print requests for say, 300 people and hosting a database engine the system really needs to offload things to the SCSI controller. So the write commend is sent, along with the data block to the controller and the NOS can simply forget about it and move on to service the next disk request, since SCSI will start sending back error reports if something goes wrong with a particualr command.
That is the big difference. That is why SCSI or SAS is so much more expensive then ATA. They have tried to make ATA raids but not many people use them in servers, because they are more complex the SCSI raids and less robust.
Can you hook a SATA drive to a SAS controller, I have never seen it but i will take your word for it. You can buy a dual ported SATA controller at CompUSA for pretty cheep. The adaptec web site lists the Adaptec RAID 1220SA SATA controller for $75.00, 2 SATA ports, 2 drives, RAID levels 0 and 1.
SCSI or SAS RAID controllers start at around $400. bucks.
Who was so despondent after being laid off, she blew her brains out in the parking lot of the Bank of America IT facility in Concord California.
I think well remember that. The programers were offered severence packages ONLY if they would sit and teach their new Indian replacements their jobs. Who were flown here, from India, to learn their new jobs, and then flown back.
Lets see who desperately needs to reduce IT costs...
2006 - 3rd Quarter After Tax Income - Source Google Financials
Bank of America - 5.4 billion
Intel - 1.3 billion
Microsoft - 3.4 billion
Wells Fargo - 2.1 billion
IBM - 2.2 billion
Ohhh yeah, damn they are gonna go broke! Quick ship those IT jobs off to someplace where we can get shit code for pennies on the dollar that is nothing but slopped together cookie cutter trash based on Microsoft crap frameworks.
I actualy have to turn down work regularly because I am usualy working on 5 different projects at the same time.
Now subtext of your comment was quite clear. So listen up. You must surely be one of those "must be bleading edge" fanboys. You know WHY I get hired time after time? My projects come in ahead of schedule and under budget around 90% of the time. My bug fix cost is less then.01% of my revenue. Know why that is? I dont use buzword tech, I use proven and reliable tech. You know what business wants? Hmmmm, do you fanboy? They want a solution that just works from the day I install it, not after the 5th or 6th go 'round like most AJAX / Java / Ruby on Rails / whatever latest non-PTVT tech all you 20 something fanboys sing the praises of.
Ya know what else? I make a lot more money then you do, I would be willing to bet.
The other thing that amuses me is that when people like you attempt to insult someone, you always do it as Anonymous Coward because that is simply what you are.
Alternatively, you can begin teaching programming as a trade, much like plumbing, construction, etc.
Programming business processing is neither exciting, nor particularly fun, but it is however a pretty good way to make a living. You dont need the chops of someone who can write a TCP stack or a Kernel or a new Compression or Encryption algorithym to do so. What does it really take to say calculate the interest on someones savings account and post it to the acount transaction file, not much programming wise. There is no parsing involved, no tokenizing, nothing fancy at all.
I make a decent living writing custom applications and I rarely do anything very complicated. I write nice custom apps in Delphi, mostly against Oracle. Nothing earth shattering in the GUI, I stick to the basic control set and they just hum along either on windows or Linux ( Kylix ).
Business operations production coding can be tought to just about anyone with a logical mind that can understand the concepts of data flow, which as many have pointed out, things like VB, Delphi and the like support very well, even if they are pourly coded by people with no formal training.
Someone with business background ( mine came from banking and healthcare ), that can understand the concepts of programming in a logical progression to get from point A to point B can be trained in a given language like COBOL or TCL in a matter of a few months, possibly less, and can then function confidently in a business transaction production environment.
I went further and taught myself most of the very low levels of SE by reading many many books and experimenting. Programming anything is no magic, it is understanding the interaction of software with hardware. The first really difficult thing I ever wrote was an interupt driven serial I/O processor, back in uhmmm, around 1985, I wrote in a combination of 8086 assembler and Turbo Pascal 3.1.. Hmmm I think i am getting old.
I dont have a degree in anything except hard work and study.
Ever chased an else'less IF or a Case where someone forgot to put a "break" in C ?
Ever chased a very subtle bug in C++ where some moron overloaded the wrong operator?
Ever chased an End statement in Pascal where a ; was optional?
Ever chased a... in any language?
The bottom line is this. Every language has its pluses and minuses. COBAL was designed as a language to handle business operations. It does it well, it does it faithfully and its Proven, Tested, Validated an most of all Trusted (PTVT).
Ask K&R if they think C is a good business operation language, I bet they would reply in the negative.
As to other languages...
PHP - Wouldn't trust it, it hasn't been around long enough to be PTVT
Java - Not only no, but fuck no!
Perl - Not on your {[^/b/n-n]=--} life!
Ruby - Again not PTVT
C# - Again, not.PTVT
Lisp - Question Ask you would why do this?
ADA - Although this language IS PTVT, it would be ill-suited
FORTAN - Only if I was sending my bank ballance to Mars, but it is PTVT
The bottom line is COBAL was designed to do exactly what accountants and business need. Its been extended, but the basic functionality that it was designed to do is all still there.
If you don't like the wordiness of COBAL I can understand that, brevity has its place, so go spec a "modern" business transation orineted language, work the bugs out for about 30 years and I am sure banking will adopt it, provided it runs on an IBM Mainframe, since there is simply no way you are gonna handle the transactions on 400 million bank acounts in less then about 6 hours the way BofA or Wells Fargo does, night after night, after night.
Its one thing if your mashup of Perl, Python, Ruby on a rocket sled and javascript all come flying apart and someone cannot read Slashdot for a few hours or someone cannot place an on-line order for a while at Amazon. But just have several thousand ATM's go bonk because the Linux Cluster lost its mind or something like that so that people can't get cash, or make a deposit and see just how fast everyone comes after you with Tar, Feathers and a pitchfork!
And try hooking 10,000 terminals up to your grid all banging against the same database, 24/7 from every time zone in the world and all the while its real time.
I dont know what version of GroupWise YOU were using, but I have been using since it was PerfectMail (c) Word Perfect Corp, but a GW server will NEVER lose its e-mail because the volume fills up. The server politely dismounts the volume, GW will just fail because it no longer has its database. Mount the volume back up ( without GW running ) do some cleanup, toss another drive into the server, extend the volume, and you are golden! Light it back up and your off an running. It may have to re-build a boat load of indecies, but that's about as far as it goes. I know, I have seen several GW systems run out of disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to worry, its all just tubes.
First of all, you came up with a lossless encoding scheme. Stick to your guns and go with what you have proven to yourself will work.
Secondly. Navigation, MPU control, just about everything except video data aquisition, does not need to be speedy at all. Use low power, low clock speed micro-controllers for those. My guess is you are going to be making at most, maybe 5 knots? Keep in mind that MPU power increases at just about the CUBE of speed. Think about rate of change in any particular vector, its very very slow, if your depth excursions are more then say 1 meter over perhaps 15 seconds then your not building an observation platform, your building something else. I cannot imagine for even a moment that you need to sample ANY platform byte at say more then about every 1/10 of a second, and even then that is probably 10x over sampling.
Use the simplest bus architecture possible. PCI is crazy fast for everything except data aquisition and it will just suck your batteries dry. Keep video and audio where you really need sampling speed on a seperate micro controller or sub-miniature computer and shut it down when not in use. Remember this is a robot, its just piloting its way to point X in the ocean, makes its observation, then pilots someplace else.
Once again. This is that artists right to sign away what ever rights in return for a thing. That thing is any or all of the above things that I have mentioned, such as Production Cost, Reproduction Costs, Distribution Costs, etc.
No one is twisting an artists arm to sign the contract. No one is stopping the artist from negotiating the contract so that it gives them a larger share. If the record company wont agree to your terms, go elsewhere. If you cant find a record company willing to bet their cash on your popularity, then go borrow $20K from friends, relatives or wherever you can find it. Get 10K CD's stamped, advertise them, promote them, mail copies to every radio station you can find and get your stuff played. Make all the follow up phone calls, in other words, get on a tour as an opening act, get yourself out there. In other words, do EVERYTHING that any record company does, bet your hard found borrowed money and see how far you get. Just remember you have to pay that money back, more then likely, with interest.
Once again your very very weak argument still sends the message that just because a big record company owns the copyright to a an artistic work, its ok to rip them off. Well you know what, even if that record company only pays the artist 1 dollar for every CD sold, everytime you decide its OK to just burn a copy and give it to your pal, then you are stealing that 1 dollar from the artist. Your just a theif, its that simple.
Hey sounds like your having fun! Keep up the good work!
Developing your system of management of the various systems is not that daunting though. Consider using a prioritized message queue. Each subsystem passes its various status messages into you main control queue and then is handled via an escalatable priority system.
Setting up autonimous operation is not that hard. The basis for your model is an aircraft autopilot, since you are controlling a vehicle that can move in all axises, up-down, left-right, pitch and roll. The main navigational issue is one of either dead reconing or inertial. Since you wont have an antenna above the surface , you need to know the amount of time -v- acceleration in 4 axises. Depth is a simple matter of a pressure gause. +- 44 psi per 100 feet of depth.
You will find that your main problem is keeping everything dry as hull penetrations are notoriously leaky. Make sure every opening uses sea pressure to keep its closing cap or what-not against the sealing surface ( o-ring or whatever.)
Your MPU will be your main issue. Calculating battery run-time is always going to be a guess, an educated one, but a guess nevertheless. Make sure your ballast control system does not require power from the MPU power system as well as the navigational computer. A mechanical fail safe is a plus. You can use CO2 cartridges on a mechanical piercing system to be the last resort ballast blow system.
Nuetral boyancy will be your other problem. Hull squeeze will always make you go more negatively boyant the deeper you go. Its a race condition that will lead you past your degin depth to crush depth unless you compensate. If the hull is rigid enough you can use your MPU to drive to a shallower depth.
ABOVE ALL ELSE, apply the KISS system liberaly!
Ok.... So you are wrong. Sorry to say it but its true.
As per Reference.com and my own personal expirience ( 10 years in the United States Submarine Service ) , a submarine is ANY vessel that can navigate while submerged.
The fact that this submarines propulsion is the result of hydrodynamic forces on a "wing" makes no difference at all. A propeller, turned by an main propultion unit is a "wing" that hydrodynamic forces act upon, thereby resulting in movement in any plane of reference ( up, down, left, right ) satisfies the demand that this submarine have a mode of propulsion.
FTA and I quote:
Traditional gliders consume about half a watt of energy moving at a rate of half a knot. Deepglider's power consumption is about half that because of its exceptionally stiff hull that's resistant to pressure. When pressure compresses a hull in a traditional glider, it gains buoyancy and requires more energy to control.On its face this is, well no other word for it, wrong. The principles of boyancy as described by Archimedes clearly indicate this. Boyancy is based upon a volume of water or gas that is displaced by a body or form and the pressure towards a lesser pressure with therefor lift the body or form towards the region of a lesser pressure.
The ONLY way for a bod or form to become more or less boyant is to either increase or decrease the volume of the water / gas being displaced. The only way to do this in any submersable device with a rigid hull form is to add or subtract water from a ballast tank.
Hey Doc, I think you might have actualy gotten the last word on this subject. Thanks for weighing in.
Ohh thats a lovely line of thought. Lets see, a music artist signs with a record company, a book author signs with a publishing company for any or all of the following reasons:
In exchnage for fronting ALL of this money, which by the way no bank on the planet will loan you, The publishing company or record company writes a contract which specifies who makes what amount as a percentage of sales and for certain rights to publication. The artist can either sign it or not, thats the way it is. The artist can even try to get the contract drawn up with what they percieve to be more favorable terms. If the record / publishing compnay agrees, thats their business.
There is a HUGE amount of risk involved and the publisher / record company assumes these risks. For every Sting, or U2 or Cold Play, there are a hundred other artists who never sell, even though the publisher / record company still puts up the money for all the items as listed above. The record company takes their best guess at what they think wil sell, then bets a big wad of cash on that outcome.
So let me make really sure that I have your position correct? You personaly believe that you have the right to walk into a book store, buy a book for an agreed upon price, then you think that you have the right to legaly start making copies of it and distributing it in any manner you like?
Ohhh god yet another fool (YAF) that just doesn't get it.
I believe you misunderstand the purpose of copyright, its not to protect you or your labor but actually to promote production of creative work to in turn benefit the public. If there's another model that accomplishes the task more efficiently that should be the one adopted. Again its not about the producer of the content but the public. Compare the same to open source software. It benefits the public on the face of it, it flies against conventional wisdom, why should anyone give away the years of labor they put into something, yet as you I presume (being on slashdot) know its been a huge and growing positive in the world.Copyright was developed so that an author would have a legal mechinism to control their own work! Yes this does very much annure to the public benefit because the artist gets a finite amount of time in which their work cannot be duplicated, reproduced or sold without their expressed written ( contract with a book or music publisher ) consent! This allows them to make money from that published work to feed, clothe and house themselves and thier wives and children while they create their NEXT work, which typicaly takes quite a while to do. What kind of contract they enter into with anyone else to facilitate that is their business and NOT YOURS!!!!!!
If I want to write the great american novell and GIVE IT AWAY on street corners or on a web site, it is MY right to do so, it is also my right NOT to do so, but to sell it in any legal manner I choose!
If I want to write some really cool software program and GIVE it away, it is my right to do so, AS LONG as I dont give away something owned by someone else in the process.
The issue is as they innovate or die, the media producers can go head to head with piracy and win but they actually have to compete for that. For example if I could download HD torrents from abc / disney whatever on all their fare but with advertisements embedded , some people wouldnt forward (yes a small percentage) another smaller percentage of revenue would be realized by product placement so on and so forth. The point being it would be a model whereby some revenue would be generated even despite giving the product away for free and even without giving it away for free having it available at a low cost non DRM'd would cause widescale adoption. Why did the guy in the article start using UKNova cause it was easy to use and got him what it wanted, if there was a iTunes variant that offered him 10 cent uber fast downloads of anything and everything he wanted what're the chances of him going down the so called dark path?I dont like copy protection schemes anymore then the next person, they are a pain in the ass, but that is NOT THE POINT here. Everything you say is an attempt to justify being a thief.
Ohhh so now its, "I am JUST ripping off the record company, so thats cool! Stick it to the man!!!!!!
Do you know why artists sign with record companies? So they can MAKE money you fool! Yes you can try to go it on your own, you can put up a website, pay the fee to get it built, pay the hosting fee and pay for that bandwith as people buy your music, book on PDF or whatever.
So now they have become a popular music group, author of whatever. How do does an artist protect their rights as the owner of the content, when some THIEF takes your entire CD or book or whatever and puts it on a Torrent Share? If its on a Torrent share, WHY would ANYONE go and PAY FOR SOMTHING THEY CAN PRETTY MUCH STEAL WITH IMPUNITY?!?
Ahhh so well spoken by someone who has probably never spent a few years of their life writing a book, or a screenplay, or a play or a dozen songs.
So lets see, according to you, if I spend a few years of my life generating a creative work, I should not have any protection at all! YOU should have the right to just rip me off, seel my work, or even give it away to whomever you desire?
Thats not even a socialist POV, thats just plain stealing from me. You, in your notions are nothing but a thief AND an asshole!
Nothing in what I said suggests that you do. The scheme I suggest allow you to play any content you have purchased on any player you have purchased.
Nothing I suggest has any timeout or drop-dead feature
I do believe the one I suggest will do exactly as you ask.
I do believe the one I suggest will do exactly as you ask.
I tacitly agree with this point; however, it does stop the person who steals my property from doing so, and then reselling it, thus depriving me of my right to profit from my own work.
You are obvisouly not in the verticle software market. I know a company that sells optical design software, arguably an artisitic creation. The sold their first version unprotected, it was all over Hong Kong in a matter of days. The next version they sold came with a dongle.
Moreover, if I copy something you made, that neither deprives you of your original content nor your life, so making comparisons to direct theft or even murder is ludicrous.
If you copy something I made, and then give it to someone else you are most certainly depriving me of my rights and my rightfull income from my labor. You are in point of fact, stealing from me! Now having said that, if you make a copy for backup, thats fine. If you make a copy so you can listen to it when your in your car, thats fine with me. But if you put it on a website, or a torent share or anything like that, or you download my work from a website that is not specificaly authorized by me, the content owner, then yes the person who runs the website and you are stealing from me.
Lets examine this from the point of view of the artist. That person or person(s) works hard at making some form of art. It really makes no difference what the art is, it could be music, sculpture, painting, books, motion pictures it really does not matter, lets just assume the arguments.
Now how does that person make a living doing this?
Now I could go on and on but your all smart, I think you get the point. The {___________} {insert the appropriate moniker here }, does whatever they do so they can pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
The transportablity of the item by digital means seems to make the difference here. You cant download a sculpture or a painting, you can download an image of the sculture or painting, but not the actual item. A fine paitning or sculpture might very well sell for a very large amount of money. If you buy it, its yours, you own it, but not ALL the rights to it unless that is spelled out in the sales contract. Can you then set up shop, make a mold and make plaster casts of it and sell them? I dont think so. Can you hire another artist to duplicate the painting you purchased for a large amount of money then sell the copies, again I dont think so, that is if you are a law abiding person as I do beleive the original artist retains that right, well unless you purchased it from them I would imagine.
Let us now take the example or say, U2 or Cold Play. These are artists who create a of work of art, in this case its music. They are willing to sell you a copy, for your individual and personal use only, to enjoy their particular art form. Now most people are quite content with that, but there seem to be some people who believe they have the right to then give that to anyone they want to, en mass! I don't think any reasonable person would think that was ok.
So here is my proposal to solve this problem. I know that everyone wants to be able to do is play content, that they have purchased, on any device that they own. I think that a form of PGP is the answer.
Everyone knows that in PGP you have a public and private key. Lets just take this one step further. The private key comes with the content. The public key is something you make up. The part that I think makes this work, is that each device, iPod, Zune, Your car radio, your whatever player all have a unique key of their own. That key gets mashed with your key and creates your personal key, for that device. You buy another device and you create another key for that device. At your computer or whatnot you can either have it read form the device electronicaly ( device is in the cradle ) or you can manualy type it in if the key comes from say your car stereo.
Whatever system you use to purchase digital content with, be it iTunes or whatever knows the Private Key and your Personal Key, but not the key from the iPod, Zune, Phone, whatever. The Private & Personal keys get embeded into the particular bit of music, video, book on tape, etc. Now all of your content will play on all o
When i was in HS ( '73 - '77 ) being a Computer Scientest was meaningfull because they were the guys creating what today we call a "computer" along side guys with "EE" degrees. The EE guys built logic circuits that the CS guys wrote, by todays standards, primitive code that made them work. Compliers were extremely rare and we barely had "high" or "mid" level languages. Most stuff was writtin in machine code.
Now contrast that with today. Compilers, good ones even, are really a dime a dozen. Linkers and assembler are the same. The very talented have created languages, structures and frameworks that take most of the "programming" out of what people do today. Look at Java, Delphi, C#, C++, Ruby, Python, Perl, C, VB, all of them. How much really guts low level programming to the vast majority of programmers really do?
There are libraries and frameworks for practicaly everything. You need a database? Go download MySQL, Firebird, Oracle, DB2, Interbase etc. You want to build a UI? There is the entire MS-Windows API, Gnome, Aqua, KDE and numerous others. Need to talk TCP/IP, there are libraries for that on every platform, with simple invocations for just about every language. Almost everything low level these days has had a wrapper for your favorite dialect put around it.
The vast majority of programmers these days are more or less scripters. Yes you use the vocabulary of your favorite language, but lets be real here for a moment. Lets say you want to represent a list of files to a user via some UI. Are you going to go out and write the very low level code that will determine, with a mathematical proof, that you are reading the file entires on the disk drive to make sure you are doing it as fast as possble? Nope. In windows you are going to use the FindFirst / FindNext API. In *nix you might just spawn off a find thread and get its results back through STDIO. Thats not what a lot of people would say is programming in its classicle sense of the word.
A lot of the first programs i wrote that had a user interface sent me into long nights of just handeling field input, because at that time I was programming in Turbo Pascal 3.x and there were no librairies or API's that did that for you. So I was writing loops, capturing keyboard input, checking to see if was a function key that was pressed and if not then, well most of you know the drill. I had to build it all myself. But the best thing about that was that I had total control of the user expirience and I had total control of the way the software worked. There was very little in between me and the hardware.
These days its hard to even find the hardware, much less interact with it. Everything is burried under virtual methods or its being controlled by the underlaying OS which cannot give you direct control over it, because 8 other programs are all trying to use the same bit of hardware. I used to be able to stuff the keyboard buffer, now I stuff the message queue and its harder to deal with then the keyboard buffer.
The market forces really have not changed, as others have asserted, the nature of the beast has changed. I am 48 years old and 25 years ago there was barely a thing called a network, these days its ubiquitous. 25 years ago you had to either be one very smart mofo or you had to have a degree in Computer Science to be able to do anything other then what you got on a floppy. I was not one of the latter, and I worked HARD to understand what was happening inside tht box. I spent many many nights laerning about interrupt controllers, about drive controllers ( MFM anyone? ) about starting drive diagnostics with debug and understanding what the hell I was doing. I cursed IBM daily for dropping all the memory mapped hardware into the TOP of the address space instead of the bottom, OHHHH how I cursed them. I learned the LIM spec and how to shuffle chucks of memory around. but I digress...
Business embraced the beast and the beast grew and matured. Todays business does not need a person with a CS d
Hmmmm let me see, cost you 30 million to make, you take in 185 million world wide, lets thats 150 million in profit? Ohh wait is that the Net, the Net Net, or the Net Net Net...?
I am seemingly unclear, you invest 30 make 185, lets see uhmmm 6 x 30 = 180... I guess 6 times your investment is not good enough.
Am I missing something here?
Ok show me the Include tag in html?
Yeah you heard it here 1st. A new acronym, YAMN. CSS is becomming even more of a joke then it already is. And the worst part is that is a cruel joke.
As many have said in this string of posts, without the use of tables, it is no longer a job for the general web creator to create a three column lay out, without being a complete CSS guru and even for them it gives them headaches.
In my estimation, what the designers of CSS have managed to do is crush the life out of the promise that once was the a usable, if slightly clumsy, way to present information.
As an example. Using un-ordered lists to create menus. Its a complete and total hack, and I mean to use the word hack in the most derogitory manner possible. Instead of comming up with a menu framework that was designed from the ground up to be menus they used this stupid hack and think they are so cool. News for you, your not cool, your not smart nor are you clever.
There are elements of CSS that are quite functional and workable, but for the most part its just a cludge and a bad one at that. Lets take for example something that could make all of our lives easier, the basic ability to have include files. All you CSS lovers hate frames and you hate tables. Well with frames I can make ONE file contain the entire drop down menu section. I create it in one file and ONLY one file. I edit it in ONE file and ONE file only. So while you geniouses are comming up with HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS1, CSS2, etc. ad nausium, you cant seem to fit that simple part in there. Every freeking page has to have the complete menuing system in it and if anything has to be changed in it, like CONTENT someone has to go and edit 1 to n freeking html files, sorry, but for that you guys just plain SUCK.
Now I just know someone will think in regard to that last bit, that it should just be in a database! Well sure as shootin! Except why on fucking earth does a 10 page web site need to have a complete CRM system behind it? Why should it even have a database! Then you will say, but it is only 10 pages, you should write a VI or better yet an EMACS macro to handle that. Better yet anyone who would suggest that should get rectaly examined by the phalus of a donky. UL's twisted into menu's are not trivial and can be broken quite easily. Develop a MENU interface if you are determiend to turn something loosley associated with desktop publishing into a full on interactive bit of software.
The bottom line is this, if you want people to really embrace CSS then FIX IT. Get the venders to fix the browsers and if they wont fix it, then stop twisting CSS all over itself to accomodate them and just let it those browsers fail and the market will fix it.
Some enlightenment for you.
If you look inside an SCSI,SAS,SATA or even plain old ATA you will not notice anything different physicaly at all. They all have the same haeds and platters.
ATA drives are far simpler to implement because everything is at the interface layer. There is no command queueing, there is not 16 levels of drive negotiation or anything like that happening. Remember the SCSI spec is for anything, hard drives, CD-ROMS, Tape drives, printers, you name it!
The ATA controler was extremely simple AND inexpensive to implement because it could only have TWO devides MAX and one was always the master, and if it died your slave drive was nowhere to be seen!
In terms of raw performance, there is no longer a big difference between drives, bascialy the data bus is the bottle neck. Where the difference begins to really show is when you put these things in a server and when you do that, SCSI or SAS just rips ATA or SATA a new one. The SCSI command set and interface logic was designed from the ground up to handle massive amounts of simultanious read and write requests. When your server is handling file and print requests for say, 300 people and hosting a database engine the system really needs to offload things to the SCSI controller. So the write commend is sent, along with the data block to the controller and the NOS can simply forget about it and move on to service the next disk request, since SCSI will start sending back error reports if something goes wrong with a particualr command.
That is the big difference. That is why SCSI or SAS is so much more expensive then ATA. They have tried to make ATA raids but not many people use them in servers, because they are more complex the SCSI raids and less robust.
Can you hook a SATA drive to a SAS controller, I have never seen it but i will take your word for it. You can buy a dual ported SATA controller at CompUSA for pretty cheep. The adaptec web site lists the Adaptec RAID 1220SA SATA controller for $75.00, 2 SATA ports, 2 drives, RAID levels 0 and 1.
SCSI or SAS RAID controllers start at around $400. bucks.
Who was so despondent after being laid off, she blew her brains out in the parking lot of the Bank of America IT facility in Concord California.
I think well remember that. The programers were offered severence packages ONLY if they would sit and teach their new Indian replacements their jobs. Who were flown here, from India, to learn their new jobs, and then flown back.
Lets see who desperately needs to reduce IT costs...
2006 - 3rd Quarter After Tax Income - Source Google Financials
Ohhh yeah, damn they are gonna go broke! Quick ship those IT jobs off to someplace where we can get shit code for pennies on the dollar that is nothing but slopped together cookie cutter trash based on Microsoft crap frameworks.
Hmmmmm "Web & Programming" a new oxymoron!
I actualy have to turn down work regularly because I am usualy working on 5 different projects at the same time.
Now subtext of your comment was quite clear. So listen up. You must surely be one of those "must be bleading edge" fanboys. You know WHY I get hired time after time? My projects come in ahead of schedule and under budget around 90% of the time. My bug fix cost is less then .01% of my revenue. Know why that is? I dont use buzword tech, I use proven and reliable tech. You know what business wants? Hmmmm, do you fanboy? They want a solution that just works from the day I install it, not after the 5th or 6th go 'round like most AJAX / Java / Ruby on Rails / whatever latest non-PTVT tech all you 20 something fanboys sing the praises of.
Ya know what else? I make a lot more money then you do, I would be willing to bet.
The other thing that amuses me is that when people like you attempt to insult someone, you always do it as Anonymous Coward because that is simply what you are.
Alternatively, you can begin teaching programming as a trade, much like plumbing, construction, etc.
Programming business processing is neither exciting, nor particularly fun, but it is however a pretty good way to make a living. You dont need the chops of someone who can write a TCP stack or a Kernel or a new Compression or Encryption algorithym to do so. What does it really take to say calculate the interest on someones savings account and post it to the acount transaction file, not much programming wise. There is no parsing involved, no tokenizing, nothing fancy at all.
I make a decent living writing custom applications and I rarely do anything very complicated. I write nice custom apps in Delphi, mostly against Oracle. Nothing earth shattering in the GUI, I stick to the basic control set and they just hum along either on windows or Linux ( Kylix ).
Business operations production coding can be tought to just about anyone with a logical mind that can understand the concepts of data flow, which as many have pointed out, things like VB, Delphi and the like support very well, even if they are pourly coded by people with no formal training.
Someone with business background ( mine came from banking and healthcare ), that can understand the concepts of programming in a logical progression to get from point A to point B can be trained in a given language like COBOL or TCL in a matter of a few months, possibly less, and can then function confidently in a business transaction production environment.
I went further and taught myself most of the very low levels of SE by reading many many books and experimenting. Programming anything is no magic, it is understanding the interaction of software with hardware. The first really difficult thing I ever wrote was an interupt driven serial I/O processor, back in uhmmm, around 1985, I wrote in a combination of 8086 assembler and Turbo Pascal 3.1.. Hmmm I think i am getting old.
I dont have a degree in anything except hard work and study.
Ever chased an else'less IF or a Case where someone forgot to put a "break" in C ?
Ever chased a very subtle bug in C++ where some moron overloaded the wrong operator?
Ever chased an End statement in Pascal where a ; was optional?
Ever chased a ... in any language?
The bottom line is this. Every language has its pluses and minuses. COBAL was designed as a language to handle business operations. It does it well, it does it faithfully and its Proven, Tested, Validated an most of all Trusted (PTVT).
Ask K&R if they think C is a good business operation language, I bet they would reply in the negative.
As to other languages...
The bottom line is COBAL was designed to do exactly what accountants and business need. Its been extended, but the basic functionality that it was designed to do is all still there.
If you don't like the wordiness of COBAL I can understand that, brevity has its place, so go spec a "modern" business transation orineted language, work the bugs out for about 30 years and I am sure banking will adopt it, provided it runs on an IBM Mainframe, since there is simply no way you are gonna handle the transactions on 400 million bank acounts in less then about 6 hours the way BofA or Wells Fargo does, night after night, after night.
Its one thing if your mashup of Perl, Python, Ruby on a rocket sled and javascript all come flying apart and someone cannot read Slashdot for a few hours or someone cannot place an on-line order for a while at Amazon. But just have several thousand ATM's go bonk because the Linux Cluster lost its mind or something like that so that people can't get cash, or make a deposit and see just how fast everyone comes after you with Tar, Feathers and a pitchfork!
You forgot to add the this part..
And try hooking 10,000 terminals up to your grid all banging against the same database, 24/7 from every time zone in the world and all the while its real time.
I dont know what version of GroupWise YOU were using, but I have been using since it was PerfectMail (c) Word Perfect Corp, but a GW server will NEVER lose its e-mail because the volume fills up. The server politely dismounts the volume, GW will just fail because it no longer has its database. Mount the volume back up ( without GW running ) do some cleanup, toss another drive into the server, extend the volume, and you are golden! Light it back up and your off an running. It may have to re-build a boat load of indecies, but that's about as far as it goes. I know, I have seen several GW systems run out of disk space.