Posts by Beachrider
369 posts • joined Monday 14th June 2010 18:05 GMT
Compare IBM storage to EMC, etc...
IBM has underperformed the market for large-scale disk storage. Their disk-enhancing software has been notably behind EMC and others for 8 years, particularly in the disk-voracious database segment.
Right now, the problem with working for IBM is that the workers really don't control the prioritization of service-deployment and the upper management has been screwing it up.
It really isn't "safe" for the elite workers to chose IBM anymore. What a shame...
Sometimes Gore show useful insight...
This guy is pretty smart, but he is losing his edge. He was always borderline superficial, yet he could be a good listen. It's clear that he doesn't understand how it reads when he speaks, anymore. He needs to think more and speak/wite more judiciously. He will be missed when he is done.
Payload...
The Ariane 5 rocket payload is 24,000 Kg. The ATV payload is 6590 Kg. 2500Kg is ATV propellant for boosting ISS. 860 is to refuel ISS propellant tanks. 2500 Kg is 'Dry Cargo'. 570 Kg is water (for the Russians?).
Falcon 9 lifts 60% of this payload. Falcon Heavy lifts 205% of this payload.
Dragon payload is 3300 Kg, but can return 2500 Kg to the ground.
Cygnus payload is 2700 Kg with no return (launch vehicle, Antares, was just tested)
MPCV loaded is a 21,000 Kg payload, that can be lifted on F9 or Atlas or Delta.
Just some numbers for comparison...
NASA and 'finding' Beagle 2...
I don't get the inference that NASA 'found' Beagle. They don't claim to have done that. Some British sources have offered that some NASA-released pictures could be of Beagle.
Fair enough.
NASA isn't sure enough to confirm that analysis, though. If you see the pictures, you would find it a 'reach' to offer it as confirmation.
Landing on Mars is hard. Beagle 2 tried to improve on what-Viking-did with much less money. They just didn't instrument it enough to track descent AND make it robust enough to survive. We should always try to do these things with less cost. Too much stuff got cut from the cost-matrix for Beagle.
It is a shame. It would have save USA taxpayers TONS of dough if it actually found a way to land, at that price.
He may end up 'serving' longer than his sentence would have been...
The Swedish prosecutor is waiting for JA. There is a valid European arrest warrant for JA. The UK Foreign Secretary might 'listen' to the Ecuadorian consulate, that is what diplomats do.
JA is going to Sweden, though. That isn't going to change. He can delay it, but that fact still looms before him. The Swedes are determined on that.
Re: I'm reassured but
I've got a dot to stick on the screen. There, fixed it. (perhaps there are already dots on the screen, anyways)
Re: Trip to Mars == Suicide, maybe just getting there.
There are a lot of interesting ideas for travel-to-Mars. Somehow, we have to broadly-tie costs to these ideas when we compare them to one another.
The attraction to Mars-One is that they put the first people on Mars for $6Bn. This is an amazingly lower number than NASA is planning ($30-100Bn). I don't care if you believe in Mars-One or not, you have to see IF their numbers are comparable and serious examine how-to-use the cost savings.
Minimal Mars-orbital support and not-bringing people home within 10 years are serious cost savings, if they are practical assumptions.
SLS is just a different thing...
I know that it is popular here to slam SLS. I am a USA taxpayer and I want all-this done as inexpensively as possible MORE than you. SLS is fundamentally a different platform from RP-1 stuff like F9-Heavy.
F9 Heavy needs to use ALL of its fuel within minutes of liftoff, the kerosene freezes within 100 minutes in space. SLS is based on cryogenic LH2 rockets that never-froze on the Moon trips, even after weeks. It also uses SRBs for the 'warm' launch to make up for LH2 weaknesses. LH2 is great-for-the-weight, but you need a LOT of it to lift big stuff out of Earth's gravity-well.
No matter what you choose, you would augment the lifting platform, so F9 H is far-from-useless. NASA is spending money on J2X, an enhanced second-stage rocket with LH2 propulsion. It is hopefully an improvement on the long-lived Centaur upper-stage devices.
I wish that the Senators were better on these kinds of budgetary decisions, but they do appear to be listening to NASA. NASA is proposing SLS for at least SOME work. Their feet are being held to the fire for cost-effective results, too.
We will see...
you guys are just arguing...
NASA called it 'water' in their press release...
Radiation on Mars...
Curiousity already advised on the radiation-level on Mar's surface. It is roughly the same level experienced by people that work in the ISS. That level of shielding is much easier than protecting from the trip!
What is with ALL this fingering...
I hope that everyone is washing their hands, afterwards...
Re: talking about George Bush's TARP program
Three things on this 2008-topic:
1) TARP, in general still has outstanding receivables. The automobile aspect is closed and made a profit. There is NO doubt that automotive TARP rendered loans to companies that otherwise-wouldn't have gotten them. That WAS the point of the program.
2) Causality timeline. Obama wasn't elected until November 2008 He didn't take office until January 2009. TARP was constructed in the dark days of September/October 2008.
3) TARP was vastly for real-estate and banking interests. THOSE interests did NOT perform as well as the automotive ones. There is NOTHING particularly Democratic about real-estate or banking.
Interpret how you like, but don't get too dizzy spinning this...
Watching people wither on TV?
I don't know if that kind of outcome will sell in most places...
The hope is that they get this enormous thing to work (my book has it at <<50% for 2023 people-on-mars) and that it will record an understandable and high-achieving result.
Posted in Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi
Re: The Military governor of Guantanamo is pre-empting...
They have been handled true to military protocols, since they were 'acquired' through direct-movement or INS-deportation.
Nobody ever said that they were holiday camps. This is from the guys with guns. They don't play nice civilian rules. The soldiers have a different existence than police, by a LOT.
@Chaz
If you are talking about George Bush's TARP program (Obama expanded it), then the taxpayer made money on the Car companies.
That money was also paid back early with interest.
Clearly, the car companies wouldn't have been able to get ANY terms for money, other than the Gov't.
It did save jobs. Stock owners of the old companies took quite a haircut, though.
Posted in Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi
Re: Closing Gitmo
GTMO has received most of these prisoners under JAG rules, not the US legal system. Outside the USA, JAG rules differ substantially from civilian courts. Such prisoners were captured overseas and transferred without ever entering the USA. Even if they are American Citizens (fairly extreme stuff for citizens, but legit).
In the USA, non-Citizens can have their visiting credentials revoked (if they have any) and deported. If JAG wants these people, INS-Deporting will hand them over to JAG. JAG can then send them to GTMO.
For the life of me, I never understood how any American Citizen can be arrested in the USA and sent to GTMO, though. International law takes hold at some time, though. If JAG wants to prosecute and execute to their standards, that is legit. There are no clear JAG rules about overseas jailing without JAG process.
Posted in Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi
The Military governor of Guantanamo is pre-empting...
I decided to doublecheck the facts from the Register. The Miami Herald regularly presents Guantanamo topics. They did this topic with detail.
The military regularly does public visits to Gitmo to guest-military and civilians. There is public WIFI available to those guests (and workers) at the Base-Library, the base ice-cream shop, the base-bowling alley and a pub at the air-terminal. This is the WIFI that was shut down. Non-public WIFI continues.
Other non-public net activity is done to military standards. It has been blocked from some social media sites. There is less data on why this was done.
I don't like Gitmo either. So long as these offenses happen outside the USA, they aren't required to be treated by USA-law, though. These people probably should just have been treated in traditional ways and either be-dead-now or be-released.
Posted in Anonymous threat shutters Gitmo WiFi
The kid is NOT in Guantanamo...
Why is this on-topic for Guantanamo? The kid is being held in a state prison. He has lawyers. He isn't affected by the conditions at Guantanamo. This is a totally different thing than Guantanamo.
Open a new topic on this kid, if you like. Guantanamo is an important topic on its own.
Since Curiousity has resolved that Mars-surface radiation...
The Mars rover Curiousity has resolved that solar radiation (the kind that kills people) is the same onboard the ISS as on the surface of Mars. It kind of breathes life into the types of missions that can still be done by the ISS. So long as the arrival/departure costs go down with COTS, etc.
And they charge too much, too...
Oh, wait
You realize that the cicadas only want...
... sex with one another. This isn't an opportunity for personal romance...
So there isn't a substantial Black Market?
it's not that...they got lucky and found a store, or a black marketer...
I don't know the size of ANY marketing in DPRK, but this article (and others) indicate that black marketing is important in DPRK.
What is a North Korean NGO?
DPRK is pretty much a centrally managed business deployment, no?
What qualifies as an NGO there? It cannot be very big...
Sooo do you feel the same about Science?
A lot of Scientific effects are due to subtle causes. Avoidance of those effects often involves equally subtle changes.
If it wasn't done, I'll bet that a collision would have impressed you...
Re: Hmmmmmm.
IBM agrees that they want to be 'in storage' did you see something that say it's gone?
Re: Beachrider IBM is about high margins...
You can disagree about IBM's mission being successful, but that is their mission.
They will not go the way of Sun. There are other ways. Remember that IBM got into the business machine business by making clocks. All the other clockmakers went commodity. IBM might fail, but they will fail with a novel approach (unless..)
IBM is about high margins...
Telling IBM to be content with everyday stuff that has low margins isn't listening to the company's goals. Higher margin products can be a good value ONLY IF they have special features or exist in special markets.
Of course, such product ARE poor values, otherwise
Sales margins are KEY at IBM...
IBM really doesn't want to be in low-margin businesses. Margins have dropped significantly on desktop PC several years ago. The ascendency of non-PC desktop devices and the 'levelness' of the product field probably did most of that.
Now the margins are being drained out of the servers. IBM doesn't have a high-margin blade product profile. It isn't surprising to see them exit from the low-margin part of this field.
Just like UNISYS has with its Clearpath Intel Super-Boxes (with help from Dell), IBM will find SOME KIND of ongoing exploitation of Intel Architecture. They will do it on a lesser-volume, higher-margin basis.
public prosecutions...
Investigations can too easily turn into public prosecutions.
The family was certainly put through some tough stuff.
The search really had nothing to do with his death, though.
Does he also stop people from READING porn or other such?
...nothwithstanding the valid discussion about WHO'S porn we are talking about...
I take it that carrying a 'pornographic' magazine in public isn't illegal, it isn't in the USA...
If the WIFI is somehow provided by the government, then official concern about filtering is completely legit.
Since coffee-shop WIFI is NOT being provided by the government, then filtering content is just like filtering whatever magazines, clothes or accessories a person has with them.
Is the UK government willing to go far down that slippery-slope?
Re: Well done
Greenhouse gasses certainly aren't ZERO towards global warming.
The major question is...
How much do they contribute? How much value is there in significant efforts to reduce it? How sure are we that NOTHING else contributes to the observed warming?
This Euro-Zeitgeist needs these answers before we follow it into the woods...
FWIW 100 Million Dollars...
100 Million US Dollars would fill a grocery store pallet to about 6 feet.
22 MM is less than two feet.
Is that a huge mound?
Not that I wouldn't stop to pick it up...
Re: to answer the headline question
Connecting Biofuels to CO2 reduction is tenuous, at best.
In the USA (where we didn't sign the Kyoto or Copenhagen accords) it was seen as an immediate insulation against volatile world oil prices, more than anything else. USA gasoline is ~10% alcohol in most places and ~85% alcohol in 37 of 50 states. Where it supplants diesel, other non-CO2 pollution is controlled, too.
I know that most readers here are European. Euro-Zeitgeist is that manmade CO2 is heavily involved in global warming. It just isn't nearly as prevalent in the USA. Aggressive ripostes harden established positions, not sway changeable opinions.
Global warming is not only something in ONE lifetime...
Global warming is a long term thing. It doesn't mean that the next TWENTY years will be perceptibly hotter. It means that the coming centuries will be hotter. New England had a massive, late winter this year. That doesn't change the overall perception that there is global warming.
I am not buying in to AGW as being a primary (or even major) cause, though. I think that sustainability argues for controlling carbon-loading, I just don't buy into AGW causing global warming, yet!
Re: What kind of documentation exists of the Damages?
Lawyers in this area often do the work on contigency, if the proof is there.
No or little cost to the person...
Re: Maybe Collusion!
antitrust division is busy all the time. You have some favorites that haven't been pursued, perhaps?
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
I have a picture of Steve Jobs in my pocket...
Do you WANT to see it?
What about Cache from Intersystems?
There is a database that can run on your desktop that is an OODB. Does that help?
Maybe Collusion!
In the USA, an individual is certainly allowed to simultaneously present his record for employment at multiple places. IF you sign a 'no compete clause', then you surrender that right (for a price).
The USA antitrust laws would seemingly cause commercial companies to not-enter into such collusion without appropriate 'no compete clause' agreements.
What kind of documentation exists of the Damages?
In the USA, this kind of tort can take several forms. The accusers choose the tort-style that best fits their proof. The number of people damaged and the aggregate size of the provable damage is critical to success.
Class action is very powerful (although Bush ameliorated it in 2005), but the level of proof is high for maximal result.
Other kinds of individual actions can be started at a lower level. If they are effective, then the corporations BEG for a class action to limit their total damage.
The USA has PLENTY of attorneys that can gauge the optimal level to get these off-the-ground. If no one does take it, then the proof is likely not strong enough.
If you have more data than memory...
The more data than memory problem is hard to solve without nearline-media. Since Big Data typically has non-relational data as a large component, perhaps they do lossless compression or invoke some kind of minimally lossy compression.
Lossy stuff can be novel compression or somehow suppressing duplicate (or near-duplicate) information, without losing any analytical capability. That is working rather well in many enterprise backup approaches...
Re: We need a relay
How about something in Solar Polar orbit. Isn't something doing that today?
Oracle needs to get these results published when the processor is available...
The point to these benchmarks is to publish results that others can check. The very-interesting T5-8 result is for a machine that won't be available to the public for 6 months.
The base numbers lead one to think that Oracle has somehow conquered their memory-starving issue that had relegated Sparc to Webservers in past years.
Comparisons to 3-6 year old machines isn't fair at all. Everyone does it with TPCC, though.
Not Free Speech (1st Amendment), but Freedom of Information Act...
In the USA context, this has NOTHING to do with free speech.
FOIA is an act that concerns actions taken by the USA Government. It can include certain court proceedings. It really has NOTHING to do private contracts, unless they were filed in response to a court decision.
Posted in Voyager goes off a (helio) cliff
It is only operational for a few more years...
Voyagers probably won't make it to 2020. They still use fuel to keep that antenna pointed back at earth AND they use power to keep the 'brains' going. Both of which will exhaust in the next 7 years (they say).
And then it inexorably goes on quietly into nothingness for centuries...
Re: Testing...
The notorious anecdote about metric conversion issues for the low-budget 20-years-ago Mars Observer ring like an extremist politician trying to be relevant with no-longer-correct info.
TMO was lost during a pressurization sequence. If Apollo13 history reads correctly, these sequences occasionally result in pressurization problems. There was no rocket-fire activity that was done in feet-vs-meters in play.
http://klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/Failure_Reports/mars_observer/mars_observer_11_93.pdf
MSFT invented what?
NASA has been using the term fail-safe mode since the 1960s. They also cut it down to safe mode back in the early 1990s for Space Station stuff...
Testing...
They can be called to task for the problem. They did have the safety-net, though.
NASA does have a tremendous record on these robotic missions for recovery and commensurate cost issues.
I don't want to be predictable, BUT...
Hmmmmmmm....
A bunch of Europeans complaining about American taxpayer funding of its space program. Exquisitely ironic. Owwwww, but it makes me smile!
Ariane 5 is operational, but...
It is in a different league than F9. A5 lifts twice as much for 4x the price. It is more in the cost structure of Delta IV Heavy. Ariane 5 is more cost effective than the Delta. NASA chooses ULA-Delta or ULA-Atlas for NASA research or NASA planetary payloads.
