I don't see the problem with being 50% more expensive than Chinese CFLs. We buy exclusively German-made CFLs, which are a lot more expensive. The difference is: they actually do work for years and years, just like it says on the package. The cheap CFLs don't last anywhere near their rated lifetime - they are a total ripoff.
I am very happy with KeePassX. It stores your passwords and related information in an encrypted file. You can copy a password out of it to paste into a web-form. This means
You don't have to remember your passwords - they can be randomly generated according to a wide set of rules.
You don't have to type your passwords - they transfer via the clipboard (which is automatically emptied after a few seconds)
Your passwords are (reasonably) secure, being stored in an encrypted file.
The obvious problem is that you need a password to open the KeePassX file. However, this at least does not go via browser, and I can manage to remember one complex, very secure password.
KeePassX is open-source, available for Windows/Mac/Linux, and compatible across all of these. Nice solution - give it a try!
p.s. I have no relation to the project - just a happy user!
Don't underestimate the degree of blatant hypocrisy in play here. Drinking and extramarital sex are absolutely forbidden in middle-eastern culture, which just makes them all the more attractive. Repress something, and all you do is drive it underground. Since the middle-east tries to repress everything, well...
Take Bahrain as an example. While Bahrain is pleasant enough, they are connected by a bridge to Saudia Arabia. When the weekend (Thursday) rolls around, the bridge is jammed with Saudi Arabians coming to to party - getting smashed and getting laid - which they can't get away with at home.
Of course there are holes in the firewall - how else can the upper classes get their porn?
Some products clearly have a geographical origin, and it makes sense to ensure that people cannot "lie" to consumers. For example, "Swiss cheese" really ought to be made in Switzerland.
On the other hand, the idea that there can be "only one" place sometimes leads to ridiculous results. There is a small town in Switzerland named "Champagne". That's been the town's name for hundreds of years, and they make an average-quality white wine. They are no longer allowed to label their white wine with the name of their town, because the name "Champagne" is reserved for the region in France that makes fizzy white wine.
What about the credit ratings agencies? Why do they have the right to record information about you without your consent? And to share this with random third parties who want to know something about you - again without your consent?
This would be illegal in most (if not all) other Western countries.
The only people who will be surprised by this study are the puritans on in the religious right. Unfortunately, they won't just be surprised, they will be offended and insist that this must be wrong, because drink is the devil's tool.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
We've had this discussion before, of course. I don't think the ratios are really different. Most kids fresh out of school do not "get it" - a maximum of maybe 20% ever will. That doesn't mean they can't work in programming, just that they will never be system architects. They may code under supervision, they may turn out to be excellent testers or QA people - but they will never be star programmers or system architects.
The same for old-timers, although it may vary a bit since many of us (good and bad) have gone off to do other things. I really miss doing serious development work, but I'm too busy doing other things that are also fun. Life happens, and you can't turn back the clock, however much you may want to.
Maybe a last comment about people re-inventing the wheel: it's more of a spiral. The same ideas come around again and again, but always in a slightly different form. With cloud computing I'm seeing my fourth iteration of cycle of centralized/distributed computing. Centralizing computing resources is nothing new, but the particular realization that we are seeing in the cloud is.
The point may be: those of us who have seen previous iterations do have wisdom to offer to those people inventing the new iterations - at least as long as we avoid becoming hide-bound. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that...
If the propagation speed of an electrical signal is.96C in an uninsulated chunk of copper and only.66C in a coaxial cable, what is it reduced to in an on-chip environment? On a computer bus? I have seen the figure.33C, but I can't find any primary source for this.
Let's assume the 0.33C for the moment, and consider what this means. A CPU contains some fairly large functional units that need to be run synchronously - meaning that all transistors within the unit switch are synchronized by a master clock signal. If this is to work, the propagation delay across the unit must be significantly less than 1/2 of a clock cycle. Taking.33C figure as correct, and limiting delay to 1/4 of a clock cycle, the maximum size of a functional unit is about 8mm. This is not far removed from the size of structure on modern CPU chips. You can make functional units accept larger delays (that's one application of pipelines), but this carries the price of complexity.
The point: power consumption is an important problem, but signal propagation is also very relevant. If 3GHz isn't the limit, from a signal propagation point of view, it is not so far away from that limit...
We have an e-ink reader - the form factor is great, but the lack of backlighting is surprisingly restrictive, and anyway you can't read documents that require color. I read e-books on my mobile phone, but the screen is really too small.
A 7" form factor with a backlit LCD "the size of a paperback" sounds just right. Big enough to be useful, small enough to still fit in a jacket pocket.
The last thing we want is every programmer inventing his or her own way to deal with this - imagine the mess of mutually incompatible implementations.
Moreover, just how do you propose to change time-validation code to accept 23:59:60? With leap-days, it is quite clear when February 29th is acceptable and when not (and look how many people still get it wrong!). With leap-seconds, there are no rules. Just imagine the myriad of ways creative people will be able to foul this up!
Leap seconds should be completely ignorable for everyone outside of physics and astronomy. They should disappear into routine time-corrections from the central time servers.
You are technically correct. However, "slack" is important.
If you are constantly under surveillance by the government, you are living in a police state. This does not make for good living.
It's no different at work. If you are constantly under surveillance, you are in a sweatshop, which does not make for a good working environment. Such working conditions are unacceptable.
If you cannot trust your employees to get their work done, then you either need to train them or fire them. If they get their work done, then it should not matter if they spend a bit of time dealing with personal matters while in the office.
Been there, done that. Analog computers existed 50 years ago because digital computers were too slow. Even then, they were a nice market. Calibration is a big issue, and even with a perfectly calibrated machine you don't have a lot of accuracy.
With the speed of today's digital computers, this is a (poor) solution in search of a problem.
On the positive side, it's good to see the fed's ducking out - even if for the wrong reason.
Why were they ever involved? This incident does not cross State or national boundaries, and is therefore none of the fed's business. It lies entirely within the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.
From a marketing perspective, Linux has the problem that no one really knows how widely it is used. The number of downloads does not help. This is a first attempt at solving the problem.
I applaud Canonical for the courage in carrying this through, given that the privacy freaks are going to, well, freak.
The jesuit monks said centuries ago: "Give me the child till the age of seven
and I will show you the man."
Frankly, this is also a great tip for dealing with people. If you want to understand someone better, try to imagine what they were like as a child. It almost always give you insight into how to deal with them as an adult.
The article implies that the low payscale is somehow a problem. But no one is forcing you to do the work - it's your choice. If Amazon had to pay more, the consequence is obvious: the work would just disappear.
This is the fallacy of minimum wage laws: low value work is either not offered, is off-shored, or disappears into the black market.
Silly you... It's not about giving money to the rights holders. It's about enriching whatever organizations put the system in place. Just ask any musician - even one reasonably well-known - how much money they receive from the fees on blank CDs. Then figure out how much money is paid. Then figure out where the difference went...
"...a piracy fee would better align the financial interests of internet service providers (ISPs) with rights holders..."
Of course, the correct alignment of interests is ISPs and their customers. The IP-holders don't pay the ISPs anything, so it's a mystery as to why should they expect any services or fees in return. They can't accept that, so why not get their government cronies to step in and "fix" things. Nice servers you have there, be a shame if anything happened to them...
As the parent says: "IQ tests still predict performance very well in many jobs. It's both fantastic and fantastically politically unacceptable". This is so well known as to be beyond any credible dispute. As an overall predictor of success, IQ is known to be quite good. Here's a nice summary. Note that the correlation between IQ and professional success is even stronger than the correlation in height between parents and children.
If China uses this policy widely, over a long period of time, it will be interesting to watch the media try to spin it. Such a test must somehow be evil, because there will undoubtedly be disparities in the gender and/or race and/or background of the people who pass the test. Yet everyone will know - whether or not they dare say it - that the test is purely economic: get the best people for the money.
The elephant in the room: what everyone knows but no one will admit. Shades of The Bell Curve.
Possibly because he feels that noting (politely) the race of the person is, in fact relevant? Perhaps, in that station or in that neighborhood, there is a crime problem largely associated with a particular race?
This would not be surprising. Looking at the national crime statistics, blacks commit robbery at a per-capita rate far higher than any other ethnic group. Not mentioning this information because it is politically incorrect only makes the underlying problems harder to address.
The fact that his remark may be politically incorrect does not necessarily make it wrong or irrelevant.
...what has that analogy got to do with filming a *public event* on public property and then subsequently filming *public servants* going about their *public duties*??
Well, you might embarrass them, or catch them doing something they shouldn't. Since they automatically have the advantage in any "he says, she says" kind of encounter, the solution from their perspective is obvious. Many places are making it
illegal to photograph or record police.
So this power will have to travel through such stable, well-governed countries as Algeria and Libya. I am certain that people like Gaddafi would never abuse the power this will give him...
It actually is a really good idea, from the point of view of power generation. But the political realities are a huge problem.
If Adobe had the brains of a hamster, it would prohibit executable content in PDF files. Anything fancier than a fill-in-the-blank form has no place in a document format. Business needs some sort of standardized format in which to exchange written documents electronically, and PDF has fulfilled this role until now (barring the dimwits who still send Word files around). Allowing PDF to include executable content is not only dumb - it will eventually destroy PDF as a trusted format.
Very few people need more than a dual-core - the cores just sit their twiddling their bits. Sacrifice a core or two for a good GPU, and you have massively simplified the design of the system, saved power and saved space.
Sure, it's not a new idea - in IT we seem to progress in spirals. It's time this idea came around again...
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another great reason to avoid twitter.
I don't see the problem with being 50% more expensive than Chinese CFLs. We buy exclusively German-made CFLs, which are a lot more expensive. The difference is: they actually do work for years and years, just like it says on the package. The cheap CFLs don't last anywhere near their rated lifetime - they are a total ripoff.
I am very happy with KeePassX. It stores your passwords and related information in an encrypted file. You can copy a password out of it to paste into a web-form. This means
The obvious problem is that you need a password to open the KeePassX file. However, this at least does not go via browser, and I can manage to remember one complex, very secure password.
KeePassX is open-source, available for Windows/Mac/Linux, and compatible across all of these. Nice solution - give it a try!
p.s. I have no relation to the project - just a happy user!
Don't underestimate the degree of blatant hypocrisy in play here. Drinking and extramarital sex are absolutely forbidden in middle-eastern culture, which just makes them all the more attractive. Repress something, and all you do is drive it underground. Since the middle-east tries to repress everything, well...
Take Bahrain as an example. While Bahrain is pleasant enough, they are connected by a bridge to Saudia Arabia. When the weekend (Thursday) rolls around, the bridge is jammed with Saudi Arabians coming to to party - getting smashed and getting laid - which they can't get away with at home.
Of course there are holes in the firewall - how else can the upper classes get their porn?
Some products clearly have a geographical origin, and it makes sense to ensure that people cannot "lie" to consumers. For example, "Swiss cheese" really ought to be made in Switzerland.
On the other hand, the idea that there can be "only one" place sometimes leads to ridiculous results. There is a small town in Switzerland named "Champagne". That's been the town's name for hundreds of years, and they make an average-quality white wine. They are no longer allowed to label their white wine with the name of their town, because the name "Champagne" is reserved for the region in France that makes fizzy white wine.
What about the credit ratings agencies? Why do they have the right to record information about you without your consent? And to share this with random third parties who want to know something about you - again without your consent?
This would be illegal in most (if not all) other Western countries.
Where are mod points when you want them?
The only people who will be surprised by this study are the puritans on in the religious right. Unfortunately, they won't just be surprised, they will be offended and insist that this must be wrong, because drink is the devil's tool.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
We've had this discussion before, of course. I don't think the ratios are really different. Most kids fresh out of school do not "get it" - a maximum of maybe 20% ever will. That doesn't mean they can't work in programming, just that they will never be system architects. They may code under supervision, they may turn out to be excellent testers or QA people - but they will never be star programmers or system architects.
The same for old-timers, although it may vary a bit since many of us (good and bad) have gone off to do other things. I really miss doing serious development work, but I'm too busy doing other things that are also fun. Life happens, and you can't turn back the clock, however much you may want to.
Maybe a last comment about people re-inventing the wheel: it's more of a spiral. The same ideas come around again and again, but always in a slightly different form. With cloud computing I'm seeing my fourth iteration of cycle of centralized/distributed computing. Centralizing computing resources is nothing new, but the particular realization that we are seeing in the cloud is.
The point may be: those of us who have seen previous iterations do have wisdom to offer to those people inventing the new iterations - at least as long as we avoid becoming hide-bound. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that...
If the propagation speed of an electrical signal is .96C in an uninsulated chunk of copper and only .66C in a coaxial cable, what is it reduced to in an on-chip environment? On a computer bus? I have seen the figure .33C, but I can't find any primary source for this.
Let's assume the 0.33C for the moment, and consider what this means. A CPU contains some fairly large functional units that need to be run synchronously - meaning that all transistors within the unit switch are synchronized by a master clock signal. If this is to work, the propagation delay across the unit must be significantly less than 1/2 of a clock cycle. Taking .33C figure as correct, and limiting delay to 1/4 of a clock cycle, the maximum size of a functional unit is about 8mm. This is not far removed from the size of structure on modern CPU chips. You can make functional units accept larger delays (that's one application of pipelines), but this carries the price of complexity.
The point: power consumption is an important problem, but signal propagation is also very relevant. If 3GHz isn't the limit, from a signal propagation point of view, it is not so far away from that limit...
Here's a chart showing how the race to ever-faster processors came to a screeching halt a few years ago.
We have an e-ink reader - the form factor is great, but the lack of backlighting is surprisingly restrictive, and anyway you can't read documents that require color. I read e-books on my mobile phone, but the screen is really too small.
A 7" form factor with a backlit LCD "the size of a paperback" sounds just right. Big enough to be useful, small enough to still fit in a jacket pocket.
The last thing we want is every programmer inventing his or her own way to deal with this - imagine the mess of mutually incompatible implementations. Moreover, just how do you propose to change time-validation code to accept 23:59:60? With leap-days, it is quite clear when February 29th is acceptable and when not (and look how many people still get it wrong!). With leap-seconds, there are no rules. Just imagine the myriad of ways creative people will be able to foul this up! Leap seconds should be completely ignorable for everyone outside of physics and astronomy. They should disappear into routine time-corrections from the central time servers.
You are technically correct. However, "slack" is important.
If you are constantly under surveillance by the government, you are living in a police state. This does not make for good living.
It's no different at work. If you are constantly under surveillance, you are in a sweatshop, which does not make for a good working environment. Such working conditions are unacceptable.
If you cannot trust your employees to get their work done, then you either need to train them or fire them. If they get their work done, then it should not matter if they spend a bit of time dealing with personal matters while in the office.
Been there, done that. Analog computers existed 50 years ago because digital computers were too slow. Even then, they were a nice market. Calibration is a big issue, and even with a perfectly calibrated machine you don't have a lot of accuracy. With the speed of today's digital computers, this is a (poor) solution in search of a problem.
On the positive side, it's good to see the fed's ducking out - even if for the wrong reason.
Why were they ever involved? This incident does not cross State or national boundaries, and is therefore none of the fed's business. It lies entirely within the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.
From a marketing perspective, Linux has the problem that no one really knows how widely it is used. The number of downloads does not help. This is a first attempt at solving the problem.
I applaud Canonical for the courage in carrying this through, given that the privacy freaks are going to, well, freak.
The jesuit monks said centuries ago: "Give me the child till the age of seven and I will show you the man."
Frankly, this is also a great tip for dealing with people. If you want to understand someone better, try to imagine what they were like as a child. It almost always give you insight into how to deal with them as an adult.
The article implies that the low payscale is somehow a problem. But no one is forcing you to do the work - it's your choice. If Amazon had to pay more, the consequence is obvious: the work would just disappear.
This is the fallacy of minimum wage laws: low value work is either not offered, is off-shored, or disappears into the black market.
Silly you... It's not about giving money to the rights holders. It's about enriching whatever organizations put the system in place. Just ask any musician - even one reasonably well-known - how much money they receive from the fees on blank CDs. Then figure out how much money is paid. Then figure out where the difference went...
"...a piracy fee would better align the financial interests of internet service providers (ISPs) with rights holders..."
Of course, the correct alignment of interests is ISPs and their customers. The IP-holders don't pay the ISPs anything, so it's a mystery as to why should they expect any services or fees in return. They can't accept that, so why not get their government cronies to step in and "fix" things. Nice servers you have there, be a shame if anything happened to them...
As the parent says: "IQ tests still predict performance very well in many jobs. It's both fantastic and fantastically politically unacceptable". This is so well known as to be beyond any credible dispute. As an overall predictor of success, IQ is known to be quite good. Here's a nice summary. Note that the correlation between IQ and professional success is even stronger than the correlation in height between parents and children.
If China uses this policy widely, over a long period of time, it will be interesting to watch the media try to spin it. Such a test must somehow be evil, because there will undoubtedly be disparities in the gender and/or race and/or background of the people who pass the test. Yet everyone will know - whether or not they dare say it - that the test is purely economic: get the best people for the money.
The elephant in the room: what everyone knows but no one will admit. Shades of The Bell Curve.
Possibly because he feels that noting (politely) the race of the person is, in fact relevant? Perhaps, in that station or in that neighborhood, there is a crime problem largely associated with a particular race?
This would not be surprising. Looking at the national crime statistics, blacks commit robbery at a per-capita rate far higher than any other ethnic group. Not mentioning this information because it is politically incorrect only makes the underlying problems harder to address.
The fact that his remark may be politically incorrect does not necessarily make it wrong or irrelevant.
Well, you might embarrass them, or catch them doing something they shouldn't. Since they automatically have the advantage in any "he says, she says" kind of encounter, the solution from their perspective is obvious. Many places are making it illegal to photograph or record police.
So this power will have to travel through such stable, well-governed countries as Algeria and Libya. I am certain that people like Gaddafi would never abuse the power this will give him...
It actually is a really good idea, from the point of view of power generation. But the political realities are a huge problem.
If Adobe had the brains of a hamster, it would prohibit executable content in PDF files. Anything fancier than a fill-in-the-blank form has no place in a document format. Business needs some sort of standardized format in which to exchange written documents electronically, and PDF has fulfilled this role until now (barring the dimwits who still send Word files around). Allowing PDF to include executable content is not only dumb - it will eventually destroy PDF as a trusted format.
Very few people need more than a dual-core - the cores just sit their twiddling their bits. Sacrifice a core or two for a good GPU, and you have massively simplified the design of the system, saved power and saved space.
Sure, it's not a new idea - in IT we seem to progress in spirals. It's time this idea came around again...