$100 million to develop, but I fear the untold financial damage this game will do to the Korean economy:
"In other news, the Korean stock market dropped by 5000 points today. The massive drop coincided with the release of Blizzard's new game, StarCraft 2. Top economists are unsure if there is a correlation..."
I don't think methodology of execution has anything to do with the dignity of the condemned. Rather, it has everything to do with the feelings and emotions of those watching. When it was the medieval ages where God was all fire and brimstone; maximizing pain let spectators feel that spiritual justice was being properly meted out. Today, it seems to me, the apparent painlessness with lethal injection combined with the public need to still have the death penalty shows an obvious social ambivalence to the whole matter.
When you disagree with someone's opinion and wish to offer a rebuttal; most times, saying "You're a moronic shithead and your logic is atrociously sophomoric" will not garner a positive response. On the same token, surreptitiously infiltrating your school/company/organization's systems and offering a similar statement in hacker-terms isn't likely to get much praise: no matter how right you might be.
Yes, to us humans, the approach is almost as important as the idea.
I'm actually currently dealing with my company's legal department in regards to shipping data tapes from the EU to the US. Turns out, the EU considers the laws in the US as insufficient when it comes to guarding and protecting individual privacy (apparently, we're on a list of untrusted foreign entities when it comes to privacy protection). I believe there actually are laws in the US that requires encryption of this kind of data; but by no means are the requirements from the EU the same as anywhere else.
The article that points to this chart was mainly comparing Western countries to the US as that part of the world is closest to us culturally and economically. Besides, I don't think it's much to brag about if the US understands modern biology and evolution better than developing countries.
This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, it is a societal one. Year after year, administration after administration, we as a society have been saying "we don't really consider science/education/research all that important."
With the way we've been funding education and paying our teachers, we collectively give educators the big middle finger tipped with stinky poo every year. We're making these choices as individuals so we all have a hand in this appalling state of affairs.
...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.
If you can't have a frank conversation about communal resource usage with your own roommate than your have much bigger problems than mere router configuration will ever solve.
I'm sure you guys have laid down basic guidelines governing how you'll split up paying for and using shared stuff. Like, "Hey dude, if you insist on running that 20 node Beowulf cluster in your room to crunch SETI work units all day, you should pay more for electricity." Or if nothing that specific, at least rules along the lines of "neither of us should monopolize the common area on a consistent basis preventing the other from ever having guests over."
I don't think shared Internet usage should be any different. If you're the administrator of the network at home, it seems that what you're suggesting would be tantamount to setting up bear traps in the common area to discourage over foraging by your inconsiderate roommate. Of course, if he/she is that much of a boor, maybe you have no choice.
Bottom line though: it would probably be better to talk it over with your roommate rather than putting the smack down with filters and such... in the end, there'll be a lot less resentment from both ends.
Exactly!
Who would actually give credence to this 'star wars program'? I mean, this would be as ridiculous as striking down hypersonic projectiles down with a beam of light, or something...
This is only peripherally related to technology in that it refers to an online encyclopedia. Other than that though, I hardly consider work-site delinquency a hard-hitting subject for the community. "Your rights online:"? Not even close. This sounds like a bunch of employees improperly utilizing government resources - nothing more.
This is a marriage made in 'only convenient because we have no other choice but pretty ugly in every other sense' land. AT&T does and continues to do things that require the least amount of R&D expenditure from their revenues. Despite the fact that their entire infrastructure is generations past even medially-edged; they continue to squeeze their creaky old steam-powered communications lines to the last buffalo cent. The Intarweb boom left them in the dust and their cellular network is a collection of cans and strings compared to what countries in Asia and Europe are used to.
This, partnered with a leading development/IT company borne in the age of 'assimilate, ditch, reinvent, rinse, or die' company culture? Apple is a company all about rewriting itself (for better or worse)--constantly changing lest the market eat them alive; whereas AT&T is from an era of monolithic monopolistic control and change when they damn well feel like getting around to it.
Not terribly surprising that these differences manifest themselves even at the retail level
This idea certainly has merits based on the cost per sq. footage factor; however it fails to address the employee factor. Datacenters require skilled IT professionals to work there. Unfortunately, these people tend to be drawn to highly populated, urbanized, and consequently, expensive areas. I would imagine that it is much more difficult to find and retain these kinds of people in less than desirable locations as you have suggested. Hey man, IT people like their mocha lattes, Apple Stores, and hot geek chicks in baby-tees from thinkgeek.com
You touched on another point that's also quite valid: remote use/administration. While this is certainly a no-brainer and will become only more ubiquitous in the future, from what I've seen, it's still better to have a retinue of highly skilled staff who can actually 'touch' the hardware when it is needed. It sucks to have to call a remote datacenter and wait a couple hours for some guy to get on the console just because you fat-fingered an IP configuration on a remote box... it sucks even more when this is a production server.
Anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that we're not doing a good enough job of ensuring efficient energy consumption and helping to contribute to a greener world? Those of us in the tech industry in our clean, white collar business casual attire (or 'vintage' jeans and 'retro' button-ups if you work in 'frisco), working in air-conditioned offices on cutting edge silicon sometimes seem to forget (at least, I certainly do) that all this wonderful technology is humming along because we still burn millions of tons of rocks on a daily basis.
The datacenter I work at is probably typical for thousands across the world: rows and rows of servers producing enormous amounts of heat cooled by industrial-sized air-conditioning units that run on full blast 24/7/365. We're located in a nice neighborhood in one of the most beautifully lush locations in Oregon. Yet somewhere in the midwest, a belch of noxious carbon-laced smoke has just been emitted from a coal plant to allow the wonderful place I'm employed to calculate another terabyte of data for another second. Many of my co-workers drive Priuses and other hybrid vehicles so they can sleep easy at night knowing that they've done their part to help our environment. I wonder how many of us think about the emissions caused by our IT centers?
I'm environmentally aware but I'm no environmentalist. Hell, I don't even drive a hybrid. But I do find an inherent inconsistency with the perceived high-techy, 'clean' reputation IT elicits and the utter lack of realization of where this energy comes from. I only took a semester's worth of physics in college, but if I remember correctly, all this heat that is produced is a sign of inefficiency and just a waste of energy. Logging into servers at my company and often seeing 5% CPU usage doesn't exactly fill me with pride either. I like this liquid-cooling idea as it sounds like it'll help improve energy conservation; but it is yet another reminder to me that high-tech is still nothing without the decidedly low-tech intervention of a man and a canary in an underground shaft picking out fossilized remains of ancient vegetation to power our wonderful toys.
I could think of a million important questions to ask in a situation like this if I were a reporter:
"What specific systems were attacked?"
"Do we have an idea as to who the attackers were? Al Queda? The Chinese?"
"Were any intelligence reports lost? What steps are being taken to ensure the safety of individuals whose data may have been compromised
etc, etc, ad naseum....,
Instead, we get a single insipid question pondering the Secretary of Defense's private email habits and his moderately disturbing technophobic response. Sheesh.
Undoubtedly, Microsoft is waving a big bag of money in front of these vendors in order to entice them to sign. Turning away a deal with a devil that'll plop you tons of cash in your pocket to help fuel future R&D plus the promise of no future litigation from M$' army of lawyers so you can focus on said R&D might not be as easy to turn away as it seems.
I will say though, this makes my respect for those vendors who have refused to sign that much greater
secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.
The teacher is absolutely right in this assertion: students should be learning about concepts and ideas - not only about examples and instances. It's fine if an algebra student can derive the quadratic formula from rote memorization; but it is far more important that she develops the skills to think critically on how to attack this problem on her own.
In the best computer science programs and programming books; you walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the code. Learning should be focused on cultivating concepts and ideas that can be applied to a broad range of implementations; not churning out specifically Java or C# developers. Similarly, children should learn about core computer concepts and ideas - not on how to create flashing text in Microsoft Word.
TG Daily reports that Intel's showcasing of Turbo Memory included benchmarks that's anything but real-world applicable: "The benchmark appeared to slam several pictures at lightning speed into Photoshop, something that would play to the strengths of flash memory because the pictures would already be stored in flash for fast opening by Photoshop. Realistically though, we think the average user wouldn't capture dozens of pictures and then open them all in Photoshop in one fell swoop."
Which leads to an Anandtech article showing that in many cases, performance suffered as a result of Turbo Memory implementation - particularly with boot and hibernation times. Now these are cases where users are MOST likely to notice performance differences.
Finally, in the cases where Turbo Memory would seem useful, it appears that HP discovered that using far more versatile, ubitquitous flash solutions such as SD and USB drives (not to mention just adding regular system memory (what a concept!)) yielded similar and more economically sensible results: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6188522.html
Maybe if Vista didn't need such obscene amounts of memory, this wouldn't be an issue; but I digress.
The business units of most organizations typically make promises to their customers without comprehending or even considering the IT implications. Account Executive to customer: "Sure! We can provide you and your thousands of users seamless B2B connections from your network to ours wirelessly from any global location!" Account Executive to IT department: "Ok, you guys figure out how to do that."
So maybe this John Henry Browne deserves this rating? Perhaps he has a penchant for spectacularly losing cases for his clients thereby destroying the lives of hundreds of families. Or maybe not.
According to my rating system, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would get a rotten rating as well, but that's all this is, an opinion. Even though there are undoubtedly fancy-schmancy algorithms behind avvo.com's ratings, these functions and formulae are no more concrete than a set of rules and opinions developed by very human creators.
Don't like what a site is saying about you? Become a better lawyer... or better yet, find out how the scoring mechanism works and play it - this has worked wonders for the likes of Harvard and Princeton (ie US News and World Report). Either way, I find Mr. Browne's threat of a lawsuit in extremely poor taste and conduct - particularly for a practitioner of law.
Maybe avvo.com has a point.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot: we're less dumb than everywhere else!
$100 million to develop, but I fear the untold financial damage this game will do to the Korean economy: "In other news, the Korean stock market dropped by 5000 points today. The massive drop coincided with the release of Blizzard's new game, StarCraft 2. Top economists are unsure if there is a correlation..."
I don't think methodology of execution has anything to do with the dignity of the condemned. Rather, it has everything to do with the feelings and emotions of those watching. When it was the medieval ages where God was all fire and brimstone; maximizing pain let spectators feel that spiritual justice was being properly meted out. Today, it seems to me, the apparent painlessness with lethal injection combined with the public need to still have the death penalty shows an obvious social ambivalence to the whole matter.
When you disagree with someone's opinion and wish to offer a rebuttal; most times, saying "You're a moronic shithead and your logic is atrociously sophomoric" will not garner a positive response. On the same token, surreptitiously infiltrating your school/company/organization's systems and offering a similar statement in hacker-terms isn't likely to get much praise: no matter how right you might be.
Yes, to us humans, the approach is almost as important as the idea.
all your base are belong to the web.
That fluorinert-based cooling apparatus comes with a PC.
I'm actually currently dealing with my company's legal department in regards to shipping data tapes from the EU to the US. Turns out, the EU considers the laws in the US as insufficient when it comes to guarding and protecting individual privacy (apparently, we're on a list of untrusted foreign entities when it comes to privacy protection). I believe there actually are laws in the US that requires encryption of this kind of data; but by no means are the requirements from the EU the same as anywhere else.
That's a good point although Japan is in there! ;)
The article that points to this chart was mainly comparing Western countries to the US as that part of the world is closest to us culturally and economically. Besides, I don't think it's much to brag about if the US understands modern biology and evolution better than developing countries.
That was the whole point of me using the term "we". "We" includes you and me.
This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, it is a societal one. Year after year, administration after administration, we as a society have been saying "we don't really consider science/education/research all that important."
Just look at the trends: companies are increasingly seeking out technical professionals overseas because they're churning out greater and greater number of graduates with science/engineering degrees with China pushing out 600,000 such graduates compared to the US' 70,000 per year; and how can we compete in biotech when the majority of our citizens can't grasp genetics nor do they even believe in evolution (we beat Turkey though!)?
With the way we've been funding education and paying our teachers, we collectively give educators the big middle finger tipped with stinky poo every year. We're making these choices as individuals so we all have a hand in this appalling state of affairs.
...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.
Banks:
Stealing from customers one cent at a time.
If you can't have a frank conversation about communal resource usage with your own roommate than your have much bigger problems than mere router configuration will ever solve.
I'm sure you guys have laid down basic guidelines governing how you'll split up paying for and using shared stuff. Like, "Hey dude, if you insist on running that 20 node Beowulf cluster in your room to crunch SETI work units all day, you should pay more for electricity." Or if nothing that specific, at least rules along the lines of "neither of us should monopolize the common area on a consistent basis preventing the other from ever having guests over."
I don't think shared Internet usage should be any different. If you're the administrator of the network at home, it seems that what you're suggesting would be tantamount to setting up bear traps in the common area to discourage over foraging by your inconsiderate roommate. Of course, if he/she is that much of a boor, maybe you have no choice.
Bottom line though: it would probably be better to talk it over with your roommate rather than putting the smack down with filters and such... in the end, there'll be a lot less resentment from both ends.
Exactly! Who would actually give credence to this 'star wars program'? I mean, this would be as ridiculous as striking down hypersonic projectiles down with a beam of light, or something...
Unfortunate that this is used towards quantifying this as it's probably only good to gauge how well funded your army of lawyers is.
This is only peripherally related to technology in that it refers to an online encyclopedia. Other than that though, I hardly consider work-site delinquency a hard-hitting subject for the community. "Your rights online:"? Not even close. This sounds like a bunch of employees improperly utilizing government resources - nothing more.
This is a marriage made in 'only convenient because we have no other choice but pretty ugly in every other sense' land. AT&T does and continues to do things that require the least amount of R&D expenditure from their revenues. Despite the fact that their entire infrastructure is generations past even medially-edged; they continue to squeeze their creaky old steam-powered communications lines to the last buffalo cent. The Intarweb boom left them in the dust and their cellular network is a collection of cans and strings compared to what countries in Asia and Europe are used to.
This, partnered with a leading development/IT company borne in the age of 'assimilate, ditch, reinvent, rinse, or die' company culture? Apple is a company all about rewriting itself (for better or worse)--constantly changing lest the market eat them alive; whereas AT&T is from an era of monolithic monopolistic control and change when they damn well feel like getting around to it.
Not terribly surprising that these differences manifest themselves even at the retail level
This idea certainly has merits based on the cost per sq. footage factor; however it fails to address the employee factor. Datacenters require skilled IT professionals to work there. Unfortunately, these people tend to be drawn to highly populated, urbanized, and consequently, expensive areas. I would imagine that it is much more difficult to find and retain these kinds of people in less than desirable locations as you have suggested. Hey man, IT people like their mocha lattes, Apple Stores, and hot geek chicks in baby-tees from thinkgeek.com
You touched on another point that's also quite valid: remote use/administration. While this is certainly a no-brainer and will become only more ubiquitous in the future, from what I've seen, it's still better to have a retinue of highly skilled staff who can actually 'touch' the hardware when it is needed. It sucks to have to call a remote datacenter and wait a couple hours for some guy to get on the console just because you fat-fingered an IP configuration on a remote box... it sucks even more when this is a production server.
Anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that we're not doing a good enough job of ensuring efficient energy consumption and helping to contribute to a greener world? Those of us in the tech industry in our clean, white collar business casual attire (or 'vintage' jeans and 'retro' button-ups if you work in 'frisco), working in air-conditioned offices on cutting edge silicon sometimes seem to forget (at least, I certainly do) that all this wonderful technology is humming along because we still burn millions of tons of rocks on a daily basis.
The datacenter I work at is probably typical for thousands across the world: rows and rows of servers producing enormous amounts of heat cooled by industrial-sized air-conditioning units that run on full blast 24/7/365. We're located in a nice neighborhood in one of the most beautifully lush locations in Oregon. Yet somewhere in the midwest, a belch of noxious carbon-laced smoke has just been emitted from a coal plant to allow the wonderful place I'm employed to calculate another terabyte of data for another second. Many of my co-workers drive Priuses and other hybrid vehicles so they can sleep easy at night knowing that they've done their part to help our environment. I wonder how many of us think about the emissions caused by our IT centers?
I'm environmentally aware but I'm no environmentalist. Hell, I don't even drive a hybrid. But I do find an inherent inconsistency with the perceived high-techy, 'clean' reputation IT elicits and the utter lack of realization of where this energy comes from. I only took a semester's worth of physics in college, but if I remember correctly, all this heat that is produced is a sign of inefficiency and just a waste of energy. Logging into servers at my company and often seeing 5% CPU usage doesn't exactly fill me with pride either. I like this liquid-cooling idea as it sounds like it'll help improve energy conservation; but it is yet another reminder to me that high-tech is still nothing without the decidedly low-tech intervention of a man and a canary in an underground shaft picking out fossilized remains of ancient vegetation to power our wonderful toys.
I could think of a million important questions to ask in a situation like this if I were a reporter:
"What specific systems were attacked?"
"Do we have an idea as to who the attackers were? Al Queda? The Chinese?"
"Were any intelligence reports lost? What steps are being taken to ensure the safety of individuals whose data may have been compromised
etc, etc, ad naseum....,
Instead, we get a single insipid question pondering the Secretary of Defense's private email habits and his moderately disturbing technophobic response. Sheesh.
I'm sure it's a bigger deal than that.
Undoubtedly, Microsoft is waving a big bag of money in front of these vendors in order to entice them to sign. Turning away a deal with a devil that'll plop you tons of cash in your pocket to help fuel future R&D plus the promise of no future litigation from M$' army of lawyers so you can focus on said R&D might not be as easy to turn away as it seems.
I will say though, this makes my respect for those vendors who have refused to sign that much greater
Here was the most tragic line in the piece for me
secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.
The teacher is absolutely right in this assertion: students should be learning about concepts and ideas - not only about examples and instances. It's fine if an algebra student can derive the quadratic formula from rote memorization; but it is far more important that she develops the skills to think critically on how to attack this problem on her own.
In the best computer science programs and programming books; you walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the code. Learning should be focused on cultivating concepts and ideas that can be applied to a broad range of implementations; not churning out specifically Java or C# developers. Similarly, children should learn about core computer concepts and ideas - not on how to create flashing text in Microsoft Word.
According to several articles regarding this subject, the questionable utility of Turbo Memory is not the fault of MS alone:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31976/135/TG Daily reports that Intel's showcasing of Turbo Memory included benchmarks that's anything but real-world applicable: "The benchmark appeared to slam several pictures at lightning speed into Photoshop, something that would play to the strengths of flash memory because the pictures would already be stored in flash for fast opening by Photoshop. Realistically though, we think the average user wouldn't capture dozens of pictures and then open them all in Photoshop in one fell swoop."
Which leads to an Anandtech article showing that in many cases, performance suffered as a result of Turbo Memory implementation - particularly with boot and hibernation times. Now these are cases where users are MOST likely to notice performance differences.
Finally, in the cases where Turbo Memory would seem useful, it appears that HP discovered that using far more versatile, ubitquitous flash solutions such as SD and USB drives (not to mention just adding regular system memory (what a concept!)) yielded similar and more economically sensible results: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6188522.html
Maybe if Vista didn't need such obscene amounts of memory, this wouldn't be an issue; but I digress.
The business units of most organizations typically make promises to their customers without comprehending or even considering the IT implications. Account Executive to customer: "Sure! We can provide you and your thousands of users seamless B2B connections from your network to ours wirelessly from any global location!" Account Executive to IT department: "Ok, you guys figure out how to do that."
So maybe this John Henry Browne deserves this rating? Perhaps he has a penchant for spectacularly losing cases for his clients thereby destroying the lives of hundreds of families. Or maybe not. According to my rating system, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would get a rotten rating as well, but that's all this is, an opinion. Even though there are undoubtedly fancy-schmancy algorithms behind avvo.com's ratings, these functions and formulae are no more concrete than a set of rules and opinions developed by very human creators. Don't like what a site is saying about you? Become a better lawyer... or better yet, find out how the scoring mechanism works and play it - this has worked wonders for the likes of Harvard and Princeton (ie US News and World Report). Either way, I find Mr. Browne's threat of a lawsuit in extremely poor taste and conduct - particularly for a practitioner of law. Maybe avvo.com has a point.