The people who write these articles are stupid and contribute stupidity to IT in general.
1) Apple calls these beefier models "server-class" drives; you may also see terms like "RAID edition"
There is simply no data to back this up. The vendors themselves do NOT do sufficient testing to make these claims ergo Apple can not make these claims. This parallels the so-called better failure rates of SCSI/FC 'enterprise' drives and consumer SATA drives. In the FAST paper by Schroeder we see the following quote.
". . . we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, . . .."
2) Firmware - the closest thing to an argument here is "may prevent Server Monitor from being able to report on the drive's health"
3) Carrier - "Apple also told me that the rubber grommets that hold the drive to the ADM carrier are chosen specifically to match each drive's vibrational characteristics."
This leaves out the most important thing. "So what" - ok if the drives vibrational characteristics are not matched what happens. Is it significant? Where is the data to say so?
4) Extensive testing - Essentially arguing that Apple does burn-in testing (which you could easily do yourself) however...again from the FAST paper:
"Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive replacement rates do not enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead replacement rates seem to steadily increase over time."
Drives act like mechanical devices NOT electronic devices.
In general - have you EVER read an article with so many "may"'s and "possibly"'s? There's very little here that could be risk assessed (giving some kind of probability of some consequence) - which means it USELESS as advice. The parts that actually IMPLY some kind of probability/consequence are not well supported by the studies with the largest sample sizes.
Real programmers don`t do QA. They write unit tests. I would argue that even in a company of 40 people a software developer is still the wrong person to be doing that job. Better to roll your UAT in with your QA and have your users do it than have your developers do QA.
You're skewing things a bit (well more than a bit). You're implying that any any all evidence (as noted by your need for boldface) is the same as practicing EBM.
But EBM is not a substitute for good judgement
I don't see how it could be - since it includes clinical judgment.
you could say "due to evidence-based medicine, everyone should take medicine X"
No you couldn't. Not in any useful way. What you could say is "Studies indicate that most patients respond strongly/quickly to medicine X and therefore it is the most rational first-line response".
Honestly I don't know that they do but considering that they seem to want to cast that net based on the evidence they give. It seems like the title is equally appropriate.
For example: Pap smears sounds like a no-brainer but there are a couple of things that could easily account for this. Incomplete history and incomplete clinical agreement.
Incomplete history, so someone walks into your clinic and wants a physical (Ok, I mean makes an appointment and then after a while attends said appointment). Someone has taken a history but left out the hysterectomy. Doc doesn't see that and decides that they might as well do the test or perhaps they ask: "So have you had a hysterectomy" and the person answers "Yes". Doc responds with "Full or partial?". Person isn't sure. Doc does the test anyway.
The overarching point is that people like Sharon Begley and publications like Newsweek are obsolete. They are come from a place and time where the mildly informed feel like they can lecture the less informed.
The whole point of moving away from "THE TRUTH" was to suggest that no one editing on wikipedia has access to "THE TRUTH". I'm not an expert. You're not an expert. Sure, we probably have our areas of expertise, but they aren't verifiable in a pseudonymous editing environment. In the absence of that verification, we have to trust references,
Couple of things I'd say. "THE TRUTH" seems to be a bit of a red herring. An expert or even the general agreement of experts is not guaranteed to be "THE TRUTH". To me, the better idea is to talk about Wikipedia representing 'best and current evidence'.
I'm sure there are many reasons why this doesn't happen but two I notice on a regular basis are:
i) The evidence isn't available for free on the internet: This works in two interesting ways. The first is good and current evidence (One could even argue 'the best evidence') isn't available to feed the article and second it keeps references from being validated. I've personally corrected references which referred to data that did not exist and persisted for about a year just because nobody owned the textbook in question.
ii) The person reviewing the evidence is not competent to do so. To restate a mantra about textual criticism: "References must be weighed not counted". It's trivial to point to a study where the conclusion doesn't support the data. It's easy to find a book (textbook or otherwise) that makes a fallacious argument. Often due to (i) references are made on journal article abstracts alone. Abstracts often leave out important data (RR, P, n, error values, etc..) and again it's trivial to find one that makes a stronger case textually than it does experimentally. This is actually an important and separate case to the "nobody is an expert point". You do not need to be an expert in biophysics to spot a strawman argument even if it's about biophysics. You do not need to be an expert in the treatment of cancer to realize that a result set is more suggestive than conclusive. You *DO* need to have a background in logic, statistics and critical thinking. In my experience editing Wiki articles I'd say that these things are absent enough to deter me from much involvement.
I get that all organizations practice groupthink to some degree. Well known physicists have an easier time getting published in one of the Physical Review journals than I would. That said there's an interesting dichotomy between journal publishing and wiki editing when I want my article published (or my edits not revoked) in the first case I have to deal with someone who not only has some knowledge of logic, statistics and critical thinking but also someone who has access to a significant portion of the published work on the subject and quite possibly has worked in the field. On the second case I have to argue with someone who may not hold any of these qualifications (Imagine trying to explain a problem with the ANOVA on a study to someone with no statistics background?). Not only that but I can be refuted by terrible studies with lousy controls and plain stupid error margins because the reviewer can see those studies on the internet but can't see the ones I'm referring to. Worst, I send them a cite from the article or the entire thing in PDF (possibly jeopardizing my subscription to the database) and they still consider the former more authoritative because they are not fit to judge.
I'm not defending the so-called experts who appeal to the "believe me" standard but I am pointing out that there are plenty of people in field who see the prospect of posting to the Wiki and it's naive ideas about references as an uphill battle with little payoff.
To put it in a Colbert-ish way: "When faced with the decision between putting a Wikipedia editor through Medical school and simply letting a Wikipedia article be inaccurate. I expect most experts choose the later."
I don't want to argue if they work or not.. I don't know, I'm not that smart..
But isn't that the key part of legally requiring anything for a child? Or are you saying that nothing no matter how beneficial should be legally required for children? If so, then it's easy to argue that there is by this standard no such thing as parental negligence.
What's with you anti-freedom Nazi's pushing vaccines on peoples children?
Freedom is a misunderstood concept I find. Freedom do to something is often touted as if it is intrinsically good. Which is stupid. The freedom to put people into wood-chippers is at least hard to argue as intrinsically good. At this point people retreat to a position of "I should be free to do something under the circumstance it is not harmful to someone else"
Oh hey...now go back an read the paragraph about effectiveness and you now understand why your argument is invalid.
...or simply look at it as a value function. Everyone's is different and it's difficult to vilify someone (objectively) for choosing X minutes of life for someone (even themselves) for Y dollars.
Sure the probabilities are small but the impacts are high. If IT people scoffed at every low probability/high impact case you might as well forget about IT security. From there it's just a matter of what risk your institution is willing to take to save some amount of money.
Life pigs may bother you but personally I think "stupid pigs" - those who spread ignorance - are worse. Try not to be part of that group.
We have exactly one production Postgres DB in our environment and we will migrate it to MySQL soon. There's a few things that are drivers to this:
i) DB support on Linux apps - if it runs on Linux it tends to support MySQL but not necessarily postgres (one app I recall running into with this difficulty was wordpress). Because of this the more Linux apps you run, the more you are likely to run a MySQL db which means that even if you standardize on Postgres you will probably break that standard frequently.
ii) Clustering: The landscape may have changed today but at the time we were trying to get a DB cluster running for failover and performance and although MySQL was ram based it was still better than just about every Postgres solution we looked at.
iii) MySQL isn't as bad as people think: Most of the time I hear complaints about MySQL they are things like "It isn't ACID compliant". Which is like 'Welcome to four years ago buddy!'. I'm not about to argue that MySQL is equivalent in every respect to Oracle but that for a wide variety of enterprise applications MySQL is sufficient. So much so that a lot of shops might do well do standardize on MySQL and drag Oracle out for that application that can't be moved to anything else.
Mind you I would like to migrate our MSSQL apps to MySQL as well but there we have the added driver of cost. Not only is the server expensive but clustering seems to, without exception require special more expensive versions of SqlServer and Windows Server. Because of that we are currently using a block-level replication solution for failover and during one of our fire-drill tests the DB was corrupted.
There's lots of comment that could be made about that diatribe too.
First off I'd say that some of this criticism is "Well it doesn't have *buzzword*" mixed with a few statements you are likely not in a position to argue along with a number of things you got wrong enough to betray some ignorance of the subject you are criticizing and at least one instance of "Well the default config doesn't suit what I'm doing". The fact that you have to reach all the way down to that makes me question the "I could go on for ages" bit.
Considering that you appear to have completely stupid amounts of emotion invested in your particular choice of tools I won't really bother arguing them all.
One that you mention twice is database abstraction. Personally I'd call DA a double-edged sword. Sure PDO doesn't achieve the level of abstraction that lots of frameworks do (but one might argue that it's not a framework so...) but at least if I hire someone who writes PHP I know they can write a simple join in SQL. I've met huge numbers of people - from professional developers to university students - so mentally locked into a platform that they couldn't do this.
As an aside one thing I will say about the developers I tend to hire is that they have to show proficiency in writing code in a few different languages and perhaps some aptitude in writing code in a language they've never seen before. One thing I find this cuts down on is the amount of time they spend complaining about language X lacking feature-they-love Y which tends to get in the way of doing actual development.
Sorry if I made the world more stupid, but I had about five minutes in between changing a diaper and going to work.
Point being is that all you gave is an unsupported opinion and if you thought the world was short on those well...
could just summarize what we found.
In a way that doesn't give anyone any terribly useful information. For example: You presented this as mutually exclusive to storing a cord sample which isn't necessarily the case (every cord is different). You posted advice that did not have any qualifiers but if the evidence you posted is what you used to make your decision is very much qualified and not a very good aid in decision making.
The first study is inapplicable to the vast majority of infants. If your child is VLBW you have my sympathies but it's unconscionably ignorant to post general advice on the basis of data that will apply to the minority.
The second study has a similar problem of the first study in this case we are talking about pre-term infants. Again you are citing a group that compared to the majority of children in developed countries are at risk for a huge number of problems and of course you might take special actions with a child like that but to spout this as general advice is akin to telling everyone to have their child admitted to the NCU. On top of that it has a pretty low n and even the authors seem to get that is more *suggestive* than conclusive. Again if your child was less than 37 weeks then you have my sympathies but posting this as general advice is pretty deceptive.
Your third study is the only one that was actually done on the general population and it has an n that is at least non-retarded (Personally I'd like to see ~200 for each clamping case though). That said it's RR wrt anemia seems low and although it references studies on infantile iron deficiency there's no mention of how this compares to any therapy. So again this is kind of useless in decision making except possibly when you are in an environment where you will not or can not have therapy.
Worth noting but not necessarily serious is that due to the nature of the procedure. All three studies have impediments to being performed double-blind.
All that said you make no useful formulation of overall relative risk and impact. I'm the first to admit that what you are betting against with cord blood storage is incredibly rare but so far the relative risks/impacts are either non-existent ( doing both procedures ) or based on your data hard to show for children born in a developed country.
All of this paints a very different picture than the rather strongly suggestive statements you made in the post I originally responded to. So unless you believe that giving people information that is easily misunderstood is "informing" people rather "misinforming" people. I'd call that a QED on your making people stupider rather than smarter.
*sigh* So you "found studies" which give "better blood pressure" and "lower risk of anemia". Somehow you think this is useful information. Despite not mentioning the studies (which would help people make an informed decision. Instead they have to take you on faith or reinvent the wheel). Nor mentioning what constitutes "better" or "lower risk".
Other phrasing like: "There are probably more benefits", "certain benefits" and "as a result" shows post-event justification at least and confirmation bias at worst.
When posting you had the choice between making the world more intelligent or more stupid and you chose the later.
My wife and I decided to go with inception. Although the diseases this prevents are pretty rare the impact of most of them are very very high. To us $1000 isn't a lot of money (a small percentage of what we will shovel into our child's education) so it seemed a reasonable idea. Especially since our child is of mixed race and would have a lower probability of a match from a bank.
"teleportation" always seems to lead people to the wrong conclusions. This is about transferring the informational content of a qubit. Which you can't perfectly represent with a classical system. I can see how this as the one commenting physicist claims is a "big deal" when it comes to building quantum computers. But it's not about instantaneous matter transport or superluminal communication.
I'm not sure what the article meant by ultra secure "quantum communication". Quantum teleportation *is* a quantum communication *channel* but it's unclear what kind of security they are talking about. Perhaps "Quantum Encryption" but that's another term that often sends people down the wrong track.
Had you followed the references sprinkled liberally throughout the peer reviewed paper I provided, you would find that the papers assertions are in fact backed up by research.
But not actual data recovery of any significant sort. Which still makes it not "in fact" but "in theory". Gutmann claims that this has actually been accomplished for MFM but as he points out that's irrelevant to EPRML.
So if you have any point at all (I doubt it though). The only thing Gutmann asserts as being factual is out of context for this article. Unless you assumed that this post (and the attached article) was actually entitled "One pass sufficient for drives circa 1990" if so I urge you to read it again.
Further, all that is needed to discard the assertion that a single overwrite is always adequate is a single plausible scenario where it would not be safe.
Now it's interesting that you took a general context and pretended it's a absolute context. That kind of erases any cred you had as someone who isn't being pedantic...also depending on whom you are attempting to refute is a strawman.
you would see that it in no way asserts that a single wipe will be adequate
But neither does it provide any evidence to support that either way.
Actually *I* just reread the new epilogue and boy have you (and a good portion of/.) missed it:
Sure Gutmann is arguing that his technique would still work on an MFM/RLL drive but even he says the following:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.
This is the author of the article YOU cited conceding not that his techniques are theoretical but actually incredibly unlikely in any practical sense.
First, please send me a peer reviewed paper showing experimentally that you exist.
Even if you weren't attempting (but not succeeding) to be humorous. Your point is irrelevant the argument stands on it's own regardless of the ontology of the writer. On the other hand you noted that someone's point was only true in a theoretical case however your counter was also only true theoretically as well.
But while we wait for the wave of pedantry to subside, have a look at
Yes where Gutmann argues that it is theoretically possible. (Very amusing since I referenced Gutmann in my original post)
Then consider that I was merely summarizing how a magnetic medium can, in fact
"in fact" would mean to me that this has been demonstrated. If you meant "in theory" then I agree but you would also be making my argument. Gutmann did not actually employ this technique. ( The way he argued in the epilogues makes this clear - if you actually read the paper ). So my argument still stands.
The only utility of Gutmann's paper to this slashdot article is that he maintains that his technique would still work by virtue of some differences in Wright's methodology. Which is why I didn't consider Wright's paper as gospel but to consider Gutmann's as "fact" is equally wrong.
It's always amusing to see people talk about the theory/practice dichotomy when the implied contrasting "reality" is also theoretical. Other than the cited article (which is unclear if it was peer reviewed) where exactly is the record these "higher resolution" scans and the results being as clear an unambiguous as you appear to claim?
Without that - YOUR OWN idea is the product of a "perfect theoretical world" where Guttmans hypothesis happens to be true.
Fact of the matter is other than this unverified article the idea of using some kind of electron microscope to recover data is pure theory. Even if this guy's article is verified your explanation is wrong. A '1' overwritten as a '0' has only a POTENTIAL of being detected. Therefore the more consecutive bits you want to recover the lower the probability of getting a complete picture. So for example a credit card number stored as twelve consecutive eight bit bytes is something like 1 in 2.3 * 10^-5.
But he revealed for the first time that cloud-based applications may be used alongside traditionally licensed software to make Microsoft-based tender proposals more attractive and cost-effective.
âoeNot everything has to run [locally] on the device,â said Watson.
âoeWeâ(TM)ll have software that runs on the device but also leverage Live Services and other applications that run in the cloud.â
If it's a common educational application that could be run locally on the machine anyway. How is it cheaper to run it in the cloud? Remember the context here seems to be about the purchase price of the laptop. It's conceivable that MS is reducing support load but I doubt by very much.
The cloud hosted application is going to have an ongoing cost that the local application isn't.
To me this sounds like MS using a different delivery mechanism to justify a discount that would probably anger their other channel partners.
But really it seems much cheaper to simply send an OS image to the laptop maker.
"nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy"
It may be...but the problem with the article is that you are only given a snippet of the information. In fact since the reference isn't given in context of much - except what one infers from the tone of the article - it's unclear if even we are talking about the same generating capacity. In any case it's only one axis, yet the article claims that these technologies were evaluated on multiple variables. Should we assume that nuclear was equal to or better in everything else? Is so, why did it "lose"? Why were the other variables weighted so low? What was the weighting anyway? And do any of these figures have an error associated with them?
See the problem?
"coal and nuclear energy plants take much longer to plan, permit and construct than do most of the other new energy sources"
Rightfully ignored. Without a figure attached it's an empty statement. What if the construction time is only greater by a factor of 1.001? Again no error figure is mentioned.
So I'd say that, at least for the article the information is pretty incomplete wrt nuclear. Not enough to be convincing. Hopefully the actual study/paper was better done.
Weird... It's like you tried to read the article... but then just read a random paragraph from the middle and stopped.
Likewise you read the article but didn't appear to apply much critical thinking. Also wierd.
It's a MS talking point and it conveniently overlooks that most of the time with proprietary software you're paying for a steep license fee AND pay for support or a support contract separately.
Something the Dijkstra noted and is worth repeating. When people say you need to pay for an application and support. You are often saying "You are paying for an application that likely does not work as described in some way and us to come fix it".
This isn't maintenance in the classic sense. There is little in the way of wear and tear on software. It's insurance against a broken application.
That said it's often not even very good insurance. Unless you are in an organization with some real pull with your vendor (that is to say you are very big or they are very small). You are really paying for the vendor to fix it when and if they feel like it. Worse you are, in most cases absolutely forbidden to fix the software yourself.
This leaves me asking the question. Who would pay for this kind of "support". The answer seems to be "People who don't or can't hire skilled IT"
Again there is a kind of support (often lumped under the same name) that can be helpful and this is deployment support. However again if you are running a shop with skilled IT people. This is often a fifth wheel.
I can't count the number of times we have had some vendor in to "train" us and sat through a demo which was essentially "Clicking on this button does pretty much what you would expect". When it came time to ask questions ("What happens during a network failure", "That schema element is already used how do we reconfigure your app to use another") they were clueless.
In fact my team has spent more time helping vendors install their product into our environment than the other way around.....don't even get me started on vendors who resell another vendors product and have signed a contract to do all the first line support for it or third-party system integrators. Most of those people I've met could be thrown in a woodchipper and nobody would miss them.
No, you don't. A dedicated 10 Mbps link would run thousands of dollars a month (a T1, which is 1.5 each way, is ~$300 in the US) and most consumers can't swing that sort of dedicated line.
The OP starts with the following:
"If I pay for 10Mbps download speed, it should not matter to anyone how I use those bits."
To me this says that the person is decrying someone changing the agreement based on usage. That is the crux of the complaints against ISP's IMHO. In that light your comment is irrelevant.
"Instead, you paid for a connection that is 10 Mbps maximum"
Most of us in NA aren't even getting that. We are getting X Mbps maximum under certain protocols or only at certain times regardless of network congestion. I would agree with the thought of the OP that my ISP has no business whatsoever taking issue with the kind of protocols I'm using.
If my provider wants to cap me. I'm cool with that - caps have peaceably existed for years with bandwidth providers and their users . Shaping and throttling are needlessly preemptive and annoying.
The problem is that TCP self regulates and throttles itself back in the face of network congestion. UDP does not, it just blasts packets out as fast as you can feed it.
I think you are conflating congestion avoidance with flow control as well as mischaracterizing both what would happen on a UDP link in network congestion AND what kind of congestion that TCP is trying to avoid.
In a highly congested long link, assuming no other programmed network behavior is in place (i.e. you could implement TCP in UDP which would make your argument moot). Both TCP and UDP would experience packet loss. The difference is that TCP would retransmit packets. This behavior, in itself contributes to congestion collapse and that is what most of the TCP congestion protocols are trying to avoid. (i.e. by tracking unacknowledged packets).
UDP doesn't require complex congestion avoidance because, by itself it doesn't care if the packets got there or not.
Now you can assume that in a given implementation of some protocol a developer may implement some similar kind of packet retransmission but as I alluded to above there's little reason to assume that this uTorrent implementation is being done in a way that works worse than TCP does.
Without some sort of flow control, you could disproportionally hurt TCP flows (which are trying to be good and throttling themselves back when they hit a bottleneck) by your big ugly UDP stream.
Flow-control in TCP parlance isn't about congestion but rather the amount of data that the receiving application can buffer. Your example doesn't appear to apply well since as I mentioned above TCP applications aren't throttling back their data rate (TCP in one sense just 'blasts' packets too. It doesn't know what rate it's sending at). The TCP application is managing it's packet resends.
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The people who write these articles are stupid and contribute stupidity to IT in general.
1) Apple calls these beefier models "server-class" drives; you may also see terms like "RAID edition"
There is simply no data to back this up. The vendors themselves do NOT do sufficient testing to make these claims ergo Apple can not make these claims. This parallels the so-called better failure rates of SCSI/FC 'enterprise' drives and consumer SATA drives. In the FAST paper by Schroeder we see the following quote.
". . . we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, . . . ."
2) Firmware - the closest thing to an argument here is "may prevent Server Monitor from being able to report on the drive's health"
3) Carrier - "Apple also told me that the rubber grommets that hold the drive to the ADM carrier are chosen specifically to match each drive's vibrational characteristics."
This leaves out the most important thing. "So what" - ok if the drives vibrational characteristics are not matched what happens. Is it significant? Where is the data to say so?
4) Extensive testing - Essentially arguing that Apple does burn-in testing (which you could easily do yourself) however...again from the FAST paper:
"Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive replacement rates do not enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead replacement rates seem to steadily increase over time."
Drives act like mechanical devices NOT electronic devices.
In general - have you EVER read an article with so many "may"'s and "possibly"'s? There's very little here that could be risk assessed (giving some kind of probability of some consequence) - which means it USELESS as advice. The parts that actually IMPLY some kind of probability/consequence are not well supported by the studies with the largest sample sizes.
Real programmers don`t do QA. They write unit tests. I would argue that even in a company of 40 people a software developer is still the wrong person to be doing that job. Better to roll your UAT in with your QA and have your users do it than have your developers do QA.
You're skewing things a bit (well more than a bit). You're implying that any any all evidence (as noted by your need for boldface) is the same as practicing EBM.
But EBM is not a substitute for good judgement
I don't see how it could be - since it includes clinical judgment.
you could say "due to evidence-based medicine, everyone should take medicine X"
No you couldn't. Not in any useful way. What you could say is "Studies indicate that most patients respond strongly/quickly to medicine X and therefore it is the most rational first-line response".
Honestly I don't know that they do but considering that they seem to want to cast that net based on the evidence they give. It seems like the title is equally appropriate.
For example: Pap smears sounds like a no-brainer but there are a couple of things that could easily account for this. Incomplete history and incomplete clinical agreement.
Incomplete history, so someone walks into your clinic and wants a physical (Ok, I mean makes an appointment and then after a while attends said appointment). Someone has taken a history but left out the hysterectomy. Doc doesn't see that and decides that they might as well do the test or perhaps they ask: "So have you had a hysterectomy" and the person answers "Yes". Doc responds with "Full or partial?". Person isn't sure. Doc does the test anyway.
Incomplete clinical agreement. Possibly the Mayo clinic is part of the problem but according to them: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/pap-smear/AN00013
Just having no cervix is not the only criterion.
The overarching point is that people like Sharon Begley and publications like Newsweek are obsolete. They are come from a place and time where the mildly informed feel like they can lecture the less informed.
The whole point of moving away from "THE TRUTH" was to suggest that no one editing on wikipedia has access to "THE TRUTH". I'm not an expert. You're not an expert. Sure, we probably have our areas of expertise, but they aren't verifiable in a pseudonymous editing environment. In the absence of that verification, we have to trust references,
Couple of things I'd say. "THE TRUTH" seems to be a bit of a red herring. An expert or even the general agreement of experts is not guaranteed to be "THE TRUTH". To me, the better idea is to talk about Wikipedia representing 'best and current evidence'.
I'm sure there are many reasons why this doesn't happen but two I notice on a regular basis are:
i) The evidence isn't available for free on the internet: This works in two interesting ways. The first is good and current evidence (One could even argue 'the best evidence') isn't available to feed the article and second it keeps references from being validated. I've personally corrected references which referred to data that did not exist and persisted for about a year just because nobody owned the textbook in question.
ii) The person reviewing the evidence is not competent to do so. To restate a mantra about textual criticism: "References must be weighed not counted". It's trivial to point to a study where the conclusion doesn't support the data. It's easy to find a book (textbook or otherwise) that makes a fallacious argument. Often due to (i) references are made on journal article abstracts alone. Abstracts often leave out important data (RR, P, n, error values, etc..) and again it's trivial to find one that makes a stronger case textually than it does experimentally. This is actually an important and separate case to the "nobody is an expert point". You do not need to be an expert in biophysics to spot a strawman argument even if it's about biophysics. You do not need to be an expert in the treatment of cancer to realize that a result set is more suggestive than conclusive. You *DO* need to have a background in logic, statistics and critical thinking. In my experience editing Wiki articles I'd say that these things are absent enough to deter me from much involvement.
I get that all organizations practice groupthink to some degree. Well known physicists have an easier time getting published in one of the Physical Review journals than I would. That said there's an interesting dichotomy between journal publishing and wiki editing when I want my article published (or my edits not revoked) in the first case I have to deal with someone who not only has some knowledge of logic, statistics and critical thinking but also someone who has access to a significant portion of the published work on the subject and quite possibly has worked in the field. On the second case I have to argue with someone who may not hold any of these qualifications (Imagine trying to explain a problem with the ANOVA on a study to someone with no statistics background?). Not only that but I can be refuted by terrible studies with lousy controls and plain stupid error margins because the reviewer can see those studies on the internet but can't see the ones I'm referring to. Worst, I send them a cite from the article or the entire thing in PDF (possibly jeopardizing my subscription to the database) and they still consider the former more authoritative because they are not fit to judge.
I'm not defending the so-called experts who appeal to the "believe me" standard but I am pointing out that there are plenty of people in field who see the prospect of posting to the Wiki and it's naive ideas about references as an uphill battle with little payoff.
To put it in a Colbert-ish way: "When faced with the decision between putting a Wikipedia editor through Medical school and simply letting a Wikipedia article be inaccurate. I expect most experts choose the later."
I don't want to argue if they work or not.. I don't know, I'm not that smart..
But isn't that the key part of legally requiring anything for a child? Or are you saying that nothing no matter how beneficial should be legally required for children? If so, then it's easy to argue that there is by this standard no such thing as parental negligence.
What's with you anti-freedom Nazi's pushing vaccines on peoples children?
Freedom is a misunderstood concept I find. Freedom do to something is often touted as if it is intrinsically good. Which is stupid. The freedom to put people into wood-chippers is at least hard to argue as intrinsically good. At this point people retreat to a position of "I should be free to do something under the circumstance it is not harmful to someone else"
Oh hey...now go back an read the paragraph about effectiveness and you now understand why your argument is invalid.
...or simply look at it as a value function. Everyone's is different and it's difficult to vilify someone (objectively) for choosing X minutes of life for someone (even themselves) for Y dollars.
Sure the probabilities are small but the impacts are high. If IT people scoffed at every low probability/high impact case you might as well forget about IT security. From there it's just a matter of what risk your institution is willing to take to save some amount of money.
Life pigs may bother you but personally I think "stupid pigs" - those who spread ignorance - are worse. Try not to be part of that group.
Maybe if this is successful NLP will start to mean more to people than a way to pick up members of the opposite-sex.
We have exactly one production Postgres DB in our environment and we will migrate it to MySQL soon. There's a few things that are drivers to this:
i) DB support on Linux apps - if it runs on Linux it tends to support MySQL but not necessarily postgres (one app I recall running into with this difficulty was wordpress). Because of this the more Linux apps you run, the more you are likely to run a MySQL db which means that even if you standardize on Postgres you will probably break that standard frequently.
ii) Clustering: The landscape may have changed today but at the time we were trying to get a DB cluster running for failover and performance and although MySQL was ram based it was still better than just about every Postgres solution we looked at.
iii) MySQL isn't as bad as people think: Most of the time I hear complaints about MySQL they are things like "It isn't ACID compliant". Which is like 'Welcome to four years ago buddy!'. I'm not about to argue that MySQL is equivalent in every respect to Oracle but that for a wide variety of enterprise applications MySQL is sufficient. So much so that a lot of shops might do well do standardize on MySQL and drag Oracle out for that application that can't be moved to anything else.
Mind you I would like to migrate our MSSQL apps to MySQL as well but there we have the added driver of cost. Not only is the server expensive but clustering seems to, without exception require special more expensive versions of SqlServer and Windows Server. Because of that we are currently using a block-level replication solution for failover and during one of our fire-drill tests the DB was corrupted.
There's lots of comment that could be made about that diatribe too.
First off I'd say that some of this criticism is "Well it doesn't have *buzzword*" mixed with a few statements you are likely not in a position to argue along with a number of things you got wrong enough to betray some ignorance of the subject you are criticizing and at least one instance of "Well the default config doesn't suit what I'm doing". The fact that you have to reach all the way down to that makes me question the "I could go on for ages" bit.
Considering that you appear to have completely stupid amounts of emotion invested in your particular choice of tools I won't really bother arguing them all.
One that you mention twice is database abstraction. Personally I'd call DA a double-edged sword. Sure PDO doesn't achieve the level of abstraction that lots of frameworks do (but one might argue that it's not a framework so...) but at least if I hire someone who writes PHP I know they can write a simple join in SQL. I've met huge numbers of people - from professional developers to university students - so mentally locked into a platform that they couldn't do this.
As an aside one thing I will say about the developers I tend to hire is that they have to show proficiency in writing code in a few different languages and perhaps some aptitude in writing code in a language they've never seen before. One thing I find this cuts down on is the amount of time they spend complaining about language X lacking feature-they-love Y which tends to get in the way of doing actual development.
Sorry if I made the world more stupid, but I had about five minutes in between changing a diaper and going to work.
Point being is that all you gave is an unsupported opinion and if you thought the world was short on those well...
could just summarize what we found.
In a way that doesn't give anyone any terribly useful information. For example: You presented this as mutually exclusive to storing a cord sample which isn't necessarily the case (every cord is different). You posted advice that did not have any qualifiers but if the evidence you posted is what you used to make your decision is very much qualified and not a very good aid in decision making.
The first study is inapplicable to the vast majority of infants. If your child is VLBW you have my sympathies but it's unconscionably ignorant to post general advice on the basis of data that will apply to the minority.
The second study has a similar problem of the first study in this case we are talking about pre-term infants. Again you are citing a group that compared to the majority of children in developed countries are at risk for a huge number of problems and of course you might take special actions with a child like that but to spout this as general advice is akin to telling everyone to have their child admitted to the NCU. On top of that it has a pretty low n and even the authors seem to get that is more *suggestive* than conclusive. Again if your child was less than 37 weeks then you have my sympathies but posting this as general advice is pretty deceptive.
Your third study is the only one that was actually done on the general population and it has an n that is at least non-retarded (Personally I'd like to see ~200 for each clamping case though). That said it's RR wrt anemia seems low and although it references studies on infantile iron deficiency there's no mention of how this compares to any therapy. So again this is kind of useless in decision making except possibly when you are in an environment where you will not or can not have therapy.
Worth noting but not necessarily serious is that due to the nature of the procedure. All three studies have impediments to being performed double-blind.
All that said you make no useful formulation of overall relative risk and impact. I'm the first to admit that what you are betting against with cord blood storage is incredibly rare but so far the relative risks/impacts are either non-existent ( doing both procedures ) or based on your data hard to show for children born in a developed country.
All of this paints a very different picture than the rather strongly suggestive statements you made in the post I originally responded to. So unless you believe that giving people information that is easily misunderstood is "informing" people rather "misinforming" people. I'd call that a QED on your making people stupider rather than smarter.
*sigh* So you "found studies" which give "better blood pressure" and "lower risk of anemia". Somehow you think this is useful information. Despite not mentioning the studies (which would help people make an informed decision. Instead they have to take you on faith or reinvent the wheel). Nor mentioning what constitutes "better" or "lower risk".
Other phrasing like: "There are probably more benefits", "certain benefits" and "as a result" shows post-event justification at least and confirmation bias at worst.
When posting you had the choice between making the world more intelligent or more stupid and you chose the later.
My wife and I decided to go with inception. Although the diseases this prevents are pretty rare the impact of most of them are very very high. To us $1000 isn't a lot of money (a small percentage of what we will shovel into our child's education) so it seemed a reasonable idea. Especially since our child is of mixed race and would have a lower probability of a match from a bank.
"teleportation" always seems to lead people to the wrong conclusions. This is about transferring the informational content of a qubit. Which you can't perfectly represent with a classical system. I can see how this as the one commenting physicist claims is a "big deal" when it comes to building quantum computers. But it's not about instantaneous matter transport or superluminal communication.
I'm not sure what the article meant by ultra secure "quantum communication". Quantum teleportation *is* a quantum communication *channel* but it's unclear what kind of security they are talking about. Perhaps "Quantum Encryption" but that's another term that often sends people down the wrong track.
Had you followed the references sprinkled liberally throughout the peer reviewed paper I provided, you would find that the papers assertions are in fact backed up by research.
But not actual data recovery of any significant sort. Which still makes it not "in fact" but "in theory". Gutmann claims that this has actually been accomplished for MFM but as he points out that's irrelevant to EPRML.
So if you have any point at all (I doubt it though). The only thing Gutmann asserts as being factual is out of context for this article. Unless you assumed that this post (and the attached article) was actually entitled "One pass sufficient for drives circa 1990" if so I urge you to read it again.
Further, all that is needed to discard the assertion that a single overwrite is always adequate is a single plausible scenario where it would not be safe.
Now it's interesting that you took a general context and pretended it's a absolute context. That kind of erases any cred you had as someone who isn't being pedantic...also depending on whom you are attempting to refute is a strawman.
you would see that it in no way asserts that a single wipe will be adequate
But neither does it provide any evidence to support that either way.
Actually *I* just reread the new epilogue and boy have you (and a good portion of /.) missed it:
Sure Gutmann is arguing that his technique would still work on an MFM/RLL drive but even he says the following:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.
This is the author of the article YOU cited conceding not that his techniques are theoretical but actually incredibly unlikely in any practical sense.
First, please send me a peer reviewed paper showing experimentally that you exist.
Even if you weren't attempting (but not succeeding) to be humorous. Your point is irrelevant the argument stands on it's own regardless of the ontology of the writer. On the other hand you noted that someone's point was only true in a theoretical case however your counter was also only true theoretically as well.
But while we wait for the wave of pedantry to subside, have a look at
Yes where Gutmann argues that it is theoretically possible. (Very amusing since I referenced Gutmann in my original post)
Then consider that I was merely summarizing how a magnetic medium can, in fact
"in fact" would mean to me that this has been demonstrated. If you meant "in theory" then I agree but you would also be making my argument.
Gutmann did not actually employ this technique. ( The way he argued in the epilogues makes this clear - if you actually read the paper ). So my argument still stands.
The only utility of Gutmann's paper to this slashdot article is that he maintains that his technique would still work by virtue of some differences in Wright's methodology. Which is why I didn't consider Wright's paper as gospel but to consider Gutmann's as "fact" is equally wrong.
It's always amusing to see people talk about the theory/practice dichotomy when the implied contrasting "reality" is also theoretical. Other than the cited article (which is unclear if it was peer reviewed) where exactly is the record these "higher resolution" scans and the results being as clear an unambiguous as you appear to claim?
Without that - YOUR OWN idea is the product of a "perfect theoretical world" where Guttmans hypothesis happens to be true.
Fact of the matter is other than this unverified article the idea of using some kind of electron microscope to recover data is pure theory. Even if this guy's article is verified your explanation is wrong. A '1' overwritten as a '0' has only a POTENTIAL of being detected. Therefore the more consecutive bits you want to recover the lower the probability of getting a complete picture. So for example a credit card number stored as twelve consecutive eight bit bytes is something like 1 in 2.3 * 10^-5.
http://www.actionfront.com/ts_dataremoval.aspx
Smashing the drive is likely less effective than overwriting and overwriting is almost impossible to recover from. Even with an STM!
But he revealed for the first time that cloud-based applications may be used alongside traditionally licensed software to make Microsoft-based tender proposals more attractive and cost-effective.
âoeNot everything has to run [locally] on the device,â said Watson.
âoeWeâ(TM)ll have software that runs on the device but also leverage Live Services and other applications that run in the cloud.â
If it's a common educational application that could be run locally on the machine anyway. How is it cheaper to run it in the cloud? Remember the context here seems to be about the purchase price of the laptop. It's conceivable that MS is reducing support load but I doubt by very much.
The cloud hosted application is going to have an ongoing cost that the local application isn't.
To me this sounds like MS using a different delivery mechanism to justify a discount that would probably anger their other channel partners.
But really it seems much cheaper to simply send an OS image to the laptop maker.
"nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy"
It may be...but the problem with the article is that you are only given a snippet of the information. In fact since the reference isn't given in context of much - except what one infers from the tone of the article - it's unclear if even we are talking about the same generating capacity. In any case it's only one axis, yet the article claims that these technologies were evaluated on multiple variables. Should we assume that nuclear was equal to or better in everything else? Is so, why did it "lose"? Why were the other variables weighted so low? What was the weighting anyway? And do any of these figures have an error associated with them?
See the problem?
"coal and nuclear energy plants take much longer to plan, permit and construct than do most of the other new energy sources"
Rightfully ignored. Without a figure attached it's an empty statement. What if the construction time is only greater by a factor of 1.001? Again no error figure is mentioned.
So I'd say that, at least for the article the information is pretty incomplete wrt nuclear. Not enough to be convincing. Hopefully the actual study/paper was better done.
Weird... It's like you tried to read the article... but then just read a random paragraph from the middle and stopped.
Likewise you read the article but didn't appear to apply much critical thinking. Also wierd.
It's a MS talking point and it conveniently overlooks that most of the time with proprietary software you're paying for a steep license fee AND pay for support or a support contract separately.
Something the Dijkstra noted and is worth repeating. When people say you need to pay for an application and support. You are often saying "You are paying for an application that likely does not work as described in some way and us to come fix it".
This isn't maintenance in the classic sense. There is little in the way of wear and tear on software. It's insurance against a broken application.
That said it's often not even very good insurance. Unless you are in an organization with some real pull with your vendor (that is to say you are very big or they are very small). You are really paying for the vendor to fix it when and if they feel like it. Worse you are, in most cases absolutely forbidden to fix the software yourself.
This leaves me asking the question. Who would pay for this kind of "support". The answer seems to be "People who don't or can't hire skilled IT"
Again there is a kind of support (often lumped under the same name) that can be helpful and this is deployment support. However again if you are running a shop with skilled IT people. This is often a fifth wheel.
I can't count the number of times we have had some vendor in to "train" us and sat through a demo which was essentially "Clicking on this button does pretty much what you would expect". When it came time to ask questions ("What happens during a network failure", "That schema element is already used how do we reconfigure your app to use another") they were clueless.
In fact my team has spent more time helping vendors install their product into our environment than the other way around.....don't even get me started on vendors who resell another vendors product and have signed a contract to do all the first line support for it or third-party system integrators. Most of those people I've met could be thrown in a woodchipper and nobody would miss them.
No, you don't. A dedicated 10 Mbps link would run thousands of dollars a month (a T1, which is 1.5 each way, is ~$300 in the US) and most consumers can't swing that sort of dedicated line.
The OP starts with the following:
"If I pay for 10Mbps download speed, it should not matter to anyone how I use those bits."
To me this says that the person is decrying someone changing the agreement based on usage. That is the crux of the complaints against ISP's IMHO. In that light your comment is irrelevant.
"Instead, you paid for a connection that is 10 Mbps maximum"
Most of us in NA aren't even getting that. We are getting X Mbps maximum under certain protocols or only at certain times regardless of network congestion. I would agree with the thought of the OP that my ISP has no business whatsoever taking issue with the kind of protocols I'm using.
If my provider wants to cap me. I'm cool with that - caps have peaceably existed for years with bandwidth providers and their users . Shaping and throttling are needlessly preemptive and annoying.
The problem is that TCP self regulates and throttles itself back in the face of network congestion. UDP does not, it just blasts packets out as fast as you can feed it.
I think you are conflating congestion avoidance with flow control as well as mischaracterizing both what would happen on a UDP link in network congestion AND what kind of congestion that TCP is trying to avoid.
In a highly congested long link, assuming no other programmed network behavior is in place (i.e. you could implement TCP in UDP which would make your argument moot). Both TCP and UDP would experience packet loss. The difference is that TCP would retransmit packets. This behavior, in itself contributes to congestion collapse and that is what most of the TCP congestion protocols are trying to avoid. (i.e. by tracking unacknowledged packets).
UDP doesn't require complex congestion avoidance because, by itself it doesn't care if the packets got there or not.
Now you can assume that in a given implementation of some protocol a developer may implement some similar kind of packet retransmission but as I alluded to above there's little reason to assume that this uTorrent implementation is being done in a way that works worse than TCP does.
Without some sort of flow control, you could disproportionally hurt TCP flows (which are trying to be good and throttling themselves back when they hit a bottleneck) by your big ugly UDP stream.
Flow-control in TCP parlance isn't about congestion but rather the amount of data that the receiving application can buffer. Your example doesn't appear to apply well since as I mentioned above TCP applications aren't throttling back their data rate (TCP in one sense just 'blasts' packets too. It doesn't know what rate it's sending at). The TCP application is managing it's packet resends.