The amount of coverage the media gives to an issue effects people's awareness to the issue -- so giving a scandal more coverage hurts the subject more in terms of the public's perception, and giving less coverage to a scandal, benefits.
Regardless, though, when you have mission critical data on a single drive you shut it down, put in a fire safe until you're ready to restore, whatever. But you don't just casually keep using it.
And I'm sure that the subject of this story knows that very well now, having made that mistake. Depending on the software involved and the quality of the written instructions that the subject was given, it may not have been obvious to a non-professional that there was a risk of losing existing data contained on that tape.
And who backs up a test database install anyway?
Someone who wants to make sure that the backups are being properly created and can be restored successfully before leaving it alone for an extended period of time.
the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
I call it a wash. Yes, it was a user error to back up the test database to a tape with valuable data on it. However, the article implies that the user requested a $35 tape from her employer to use for new backups (it only actually says that the employer didn't authorize $35 for a second tape... not that a request was actually made). If this request were to have been approved and the user used the new tape for all future backups (and kept the old one read-only to preserve historical data), then the problem would not have occurred.
At the time that WaroDaBeast posted "I'm afraid the franchise has reached its half-life," any posts made after it would be more than half dead, which is one acceptable criterion for "mostly dead."
Hypothetically, I am considering two identical job offers from two almost identical employers. The only difference between the employers is that only one of them has never pressed charges against an employee, leading to a 4-year jail sentence on top of the time served during a lengthy court case.
Even considering that I would plan on being reasonable and not plan on breaking any laws, I would still go with the offer from the employer who has not proven to be both capable and willing to take legal action against employees.
I think that you miss the point that barzok was making... here's how I interpreted it:
If she were "part of a crew casing the neighborhood", then her crew could easily use the lawn signs as markers. This would have the benefit of keeping others away (apparently, potential burglars don't try to rob houses with ADT lawn signs) while simultaneously serving as an indicator of who doesn't have real security systems (if you actually did have a security system, then you'd probably either have a lawn sign of your own or you almost certainly wouldn't accept one from them, and you wouldn't go out and get your own fake sign if you already have that one that the nice ADT people gave you, right?)
Assuming that this "crew" would be able to readily distinguish one of their lawn signs, this makes at least some amount of sense. She was probably legit (Occam's Razor), but the potential downside is big enough to use caution when faced with a situation like this.
the movies that do so well in 3D in the theater (Avatar, Clash of the Titans especially) are then released only in 2D on Blu-ray.
*sigh* It's released in 2D on Blu-ray so that people who want to see the movie at all buy it now. Then, at a later date, (probably when 3D TVs are more common) it'll be re-released in 3D to get as many people as possible to buy both versions of it, where they otherwise would have only bought the 3D version if it were available now.
After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely.
Grr, I hate sand traps. Whose bright idea was it to put one on Mars?
Suppose you live 5 minutes away (driving time) from your local shopping center, where you go to buy your groceries that won't fit on your bike. What do you do if you are going to a LAN party 5 minutes away (driving time) and you don't really feel like carrying a $1000 laptop or a 50-pound desktop for half an hour there and half an hour back, (coming back in the middle of the night)? Or what if that 5 minute drive involves a freeway, where that could easily translate to an otherwise prohibitively long trip, even on a bike, each way?
There are more reasons to use a car rather than an alternative than just distance and duration.
Squid sounds kind of like what you're trying to get at. It's a web proxy for HTTP/FTP. Frequently-requested pages are cached locally, so if an ISP runs it, then they can avoid querying out to the wider Internet and avoid all the extra hops associated with that.
It could probably be extended (heck, maybe some ISP privately has, or done similar work thereof) to include the BitTorrent protocol: each torrent has a unique identifying hash, so it's theoretically possible for an ISP to monitor a swarm and cache each piece and serve it back via a proxy if traffic on a particular torrent starts to get extremely high.
Now, if you were pirating Copyrighted Movie of the Year, would you really trust your ISP to be sitting there with:
The data contained in a file, to prove that its content is Copyrighted Movie of the Year,
A reliable link from a given hash to that data, and
Logs that could be used to prove that you downloaded that data from a torrent with that exact hash?
Most people probably wouldn't, even if the ISP did set it up for the pragmatic purpose of keeping their network snappy. Protocol Encryption (PE) was added to many clients primarily because of traffic-shaping ISPs, but this would give another really good reason for pirates to encrypt their streams. And if a study were to come out that suggests that an overwhelming majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of infringing content, there's an observable incentive to use PE, which would really mess with an ISP's BitTorrent proxy. (This story isn't so much a "study" as it is "silly", for reasons you only need to scroll up in the thread to find.)
USENET is the same, of course. In fact, ISPs often already do run their own NNTP servers for their customers to access, though many don't carry the alt.* hierarchy which contains a lot of the huge data files. For that, you can hit up third-party providers, and it's again up to the ISP to determine if it's worth caching via proxy, and it's up to the consumer to determine if the risk that the ISP is doing that is worth end-to-end encryption. Again, any third-party USENET provider worth their salt provides the option for SSL encryption.
There's a theme here: wherever an ISP could potentially step in and cache data a few hops closer to the user, the user has the option to encrypt traffic so that the ISP can do nothing but forward the data through, as it's pretty much useless to them.
This is a good thing, for so many reasons other than keeping pirated activity hidden, and that's why you will see the same huge data files getting transferred over the Internet multiple times over, and a contributing factor to why it might be a good idea to treat the ISPs like common carriers.
The bootloader is unlockable, and there are people (Cyanogen in particular) who make available quality builds of Android. These are two considerations that geeks like myself made when we bought the Nexus One - if Google doesn't provide updates, then we'll find someone who will.
The worst-case scenario here is that you would have do some work yourself to get a later version of Android not pushed out OTA to the Nexus One, or stick with the most recent official one. This is a much better scenario than other phones I considered buying at the time.
It's not going to turn out to be fairly seamless, no. That's a pretty big expectation. I've never had such an experience with any piece of technology more complicated than a coffee maker. This phone should, however, stay solid until you choose to go off the path of least resistance, and that's all I can ever ask for in technology.
the only reason humans can [insert thing here] is by [insert other thing here], which a computer program cannot do.
Plenty of other people have already responded to this already, but I feel that it bears mentioning that statements like this are pretty unfair to the efforts of researchers who are constantly trying to better understand the way that the brain works and model it appropriately.
Unless you think that humans are infused with supernatural material, a computer program can absolutely "do" anything that a human brain can, given enough time and effort. At the very least, emulating the chemical processes that occur in the brain can allow a computer program to hear human speech and derive "meaning" from it, in some context that can be converted to textual data. Don't overestimate physiology, and don't underestimate the potential of computation.
Beyond that, artificial intelligence is a possibility. Who needs a full brain emulator when you can just reverse-engineer the parts that do thinking?
When you say "a computer program cannot [x]", some people take that as a challenge to make a computer program or find an algorithm that does "x".
In Iran, rocks punish half of adulterers half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.
Bilbo Baggins'd that for you.
Re:Every windows application
on
Wine 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wine Doors (and the supporting website linked above) has had a lot of trouble in the past keeping the website running, probably due to its popularity climbing above the level of obscurity required to keep the webserver from melting. The app itself was a Ports-like system for Wine. They kept a repository of customized scripts that would help users install certain free applications, like Notepad++ or even the World of Warcraft Trial, with a click. I personally wasn't very impressed by the size of the repository, and the software was flaky even on the days when the online repository (hosted on the same server as their website) was running properly... but sometimes it worked, in controlled circumstances.
Wine proper has excellent technical merits. Most of my lasting complaints about Wine involve usability and desktop integration, and those complaints are at least addressed by the Vineyard project and/or Crossover's value-added products.
I believe that you may be confounding "the service provided by the company is not worth the cost" with "the company is eager to bend you over the barrel", "oligopoly" with "monopoly", "government-regulated" with "government-backed", and your entire post with something that replies to the parent it's attached to.
The post you replied to:
I would like to take this moment to give a shout out to T-Mobile, which actually offers a bring your own phone plan for less than the subsidize your phone plan.
No, they don't. There's nothing remotely resembling sorcery involved.
If you're being sarcastic... GP post is an appropriate response to this story, as the story seems to overlook the point that NevarMore is making: blocking spam by domain name is not the only way to do it.
However, when you combine this with non-static IP addresses, it can be an effective way to avoid filtering by source... though I cannot think of a good reason not to dock major points for an e-mail sent by a mail server with a non-static IP to begin with.
With such measures, you will only force the cheaters to be more creative.
In theory, as long as non-cheaters are not unduly impacted by the anti-cheating measure, this is a good thing. Some people will cheat anyway. At least the colleges are making them work harder at it. Some professors get all giddy at the idea of achieving results by a different path than "following the rules".
The perfect scenario would be a system where cheating would take substantially more effort to get a good grade than actually learning the material, while those who actually learn the material are not inconvenienced by anti-cheating measures. At that point, the only cheaters will be those who do cheat for its own sake (i.e., the people who are not motivated by grades to begin with, but rather by the thrill of the chase / bragging rights / what have you). At that point, everybody wins.
It kind of sucks to ban chewing gum, though. I buy junktons of gum to keep saliva flowing so that I can drink bucketloads of Mountain Dew without completely destroying my teeth, and I have a much harder time on a test if it's too long since my last Mountain Dew. I imagine that I'm not alone in having legitimate reasons for chewing gum.
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: seek and destroy the 'anonymous coward' user on slashdot, while simultaneously engaging in direct warfare upon all clear definitions of the cyber command's mission statement so as to maximize the payout in future humoristic series" | md5sum e7af0759f645b6fe6e7994784bbfd407 -
There's more cash in other people's wallets than there is in mine, dollar-for-dollar.
However, spending my own cash is easier (it's in my wallet, rather than other people's wallets), it's more familiar (I've been doing it this way for years, whereas I've never spent other people's cash), and there are less negative externalities associated with it (spending other people's cash is illegal and immoral if I don't have their permission, and it's technically my cash anyways if I do have their permission).
More cash dollar-for-dollar doesn't necessarily mean that spending other people's cash is a better idea than spending my own. It could be, but there is more to consider than dollar-for-dollar. To relate this to the point it sounds like you're implying, more value pound-for-pound does not necessarily mean that recycling electronics is more viable than mining. It could be, but there is more to consider than pound-for-pound.
Of course, it's possible that you aren't implying that at all.
Technically the US is "one of four countries that haven't ratified", but technically it is also one of five countries that haven't ratified, and one of three, one of 12, one of 18 and one of 47 countries that haven't ratified.
Technically, of any subset of the 46 non-US countries that have not ratified, the US is not one. (So, the US is not one of four countries that haven't ratified, nor is it one of five,...)
Slashdot Mirror
The amount of coverage the media gives to an issue effects people's awareness to the issue --
so giving a scandal more coverage hurts the subject more in terms of the public's perception, and giving less coverage to a scandal, benefits.
I see what you did there...
Regardless, though, when you have mission critical data on a single drive you shut it down, put in a fire safe until you're ready to restore, whatever. But you don't just casually keep using it.
And I'm sure that the subject of this story knows that very well now, having made that mistake. Depending on the software involved and the quality of the written instructions that the subject was given, it may not have been obvious to a non-professional that there was a risk of losing existing data contained on that tape.
And who backs up a test database install anyway?
Someone who wants to make sure that the backups are being properly created and can be restored successfully before leaving it alone for an extended period of time.
the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
I call it a wash. Yes, it was a user error to back up the test database to a tape with valuable data on it.
However, the article implies that the user requested a $35 tape from her employer to use for new backups (it only actually says that the employer didn't authorize $35 for a second tape... not that a request was actually made). If this request were to have been approved and the user used the new tape for all future backups (and kept the old one read-only to preserve historical data), then the problem would not have occurred.
At least you haven't found the secret combination that turns you into Freakazoid. That one ended in Delete.
Crisis averted.
At the time that WaroDaBeast posted "I'm afraid the franchise has reached its half-life," any posts made after it would be more than half dead, which is one acceptable criterion for "mostly dead."
Thank you for this car analogy; rarely do they make so much sense in the context of the original topic.
Hypothetically, I am considering two identical job offers from two almost identical employers. The only difference between the employers is that only one of them has never pressed charges against an employee, leading to a 4-year jail sentence on top of the time served during a lengthy court case.
Even considering that I would plan on being reasonable and not plan on breaking any laws, I would still go with the offer from the employer who has not proven to be both capable and willing to take legal action against employees.
I think that you miss the point that barzok was making... here's how I interpreted it:
If she were "part of a crew casing the neighborhood", then her crew could easily use the lawn signs as markers. This would have the benefit of keeping others away (apparently, potential burglars don't try to rob houses with ADT lawn signs) while simultaneously serving as an indicator of who doesn't have real security systems (if you actually did have a security system, then you'd probably either have a lawn sign of your own or you almost certainly wouldn't accept one from them, and you wouldn't go out and get your own fake sign if you already have that one that the nice ADT people gave you, right?)
Assuming that this "crew" would be able to readily distinguish one of their lawn signs, this makes at least some amount of sense. She was probably legit (Occam's Razor), but the potential downside is big enough to use caution when faced with a situation like this.
Thank you.
the movies that do so well in 3D in the theater (Avatar, Clash of the Titans especially) are then released only in 2D on Blu-ray.
*sigh*
It's released in 2D on Blu-ray so that people who want to see the movie at all buy it now. Then, at a later date, (probably when 3D TVs are more common) it'll be re-released in 3D to get as many people as possible to buy both versions of it, where they otherwise would have only bought the 3D version if it were available now.
Right?
If one argues one's argument predicated on an unsaid fact, then said unsaid fact is, in fact, assumed to be assumed.
To put it differently, you can assume that they are assuming that, because their argument doesn't make sense without it.
After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely.
Grr, I hate sand traps. Whose bright idea was it to put one on Mars?
Did they try whacking at it with a sand wedge?
the fourth person to whole-heartedly agree
I think you mean that you're the fourth person who whole-heartedly agrees and either had mod points at the time of reading that post or is you.
Suppose you live 5 minutes away (driving time) from your local shopping center, where you go to buy your groceries that won't fit on your bike.
What do you do if you are going to a LAN party 5 minutes away (driving time) and you don't really feel like carrying a $1000 laptop or a 50-pound desktop for half an hour there and half an hour back, (coming back in the middle of the night)?
Or what if that 5 minute drive involves a freeway, where that could easily translate to an otherwise prohibitively long trip, even on a bike, each way?
There are more reasons to use a car rather than an alternative than just distance and duration.
I don't know what you're talking about. I see one on my screen, and it even says "frist psot" in it.
Squid sounds kind of like what you're trying to get at. It's a web proxy for HTTP/FTP. Frequently-requested pages are cached locally, so if an ISP runs it, then they can avoid querying out to the wider Internet and avoid all the extra hops associated with that.
It could probably be extended (heck, maybe some ISP privately has, or done similar work thereof) to include the BitTorrent protocol: each torrent has a unique identifying hash, so it's theoretically possible for an ISP to monitor a swarm and cache each piece and serve it back via a proxy if traffic on a particular torrent starts to get extremely high.
Now, if you were pirating Copyrighted Movie of the Year, would you really trust your ISP to be sitting there with:
Most people probably wouldn't, even if the ISP did set it up for the pragmatic purpose of keeping their network snappy. Protocol Encryption (PE) was added to many clients primarily because of traffic-shaping ISPs, but this would give another really good reason for pirates to encrypt their streams. And if a study were to come out that suggests that an overwhelming majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of infringing content, there's an observable incentive to use PE, which would really mess with an ISP's BitTorrent proxy. (This story isn't so much a "study" as it is "silly", for reasons you only need to scroll up in the thread to find.)
USENET is the same, of course. In fact, ISPs often already do run their own NNTP servers for their customers to access, though many don't carry the alt.* hierarchy which contains a lot of the huge data files. For that, you can hit up third-party providers, and it's again up to the ISP to determine if it's worth caching via proxy, and it's up to the consumer to determine if the risk that the ISP is doing that is worth end-to-end encryption. Again, any third-party USENET provider worth their salt provides the option for SSL encryption.
There's a theme here: wherever an ISP could potentially step in and cache data a few hops closer to the user, the user has the option to encrypt traffic so that the ISP can do nothing but forward the data through, as it's pretty much useless to them.
This is a good thing, for so many reasons other than keeping pirated activity hidden, and that's why you will see the same huge data files getting transferred over the Internet multiple times over, and a contributing factor to why it might be a good idea to treat the ISPs like common carriers.
The bootloader is unlockable, and there are people (Cyanogen in particular) who make available quality builds of Android. These are two considerations that geeks like myself made when we bought the Nexus One - if Google doesn't provide updates, then we'll find someone who will.
The worst-case scenario here is that you would have do some work yourself to get a later version of Android not pushed out OTA to the Nexus One, or stick with the most recent official one. This is a much better scenario than other phones I considered buying at the time.
It's not going to turn out to be fairly seamless, no. That's a pretty big expectation. I've never had such an experience with any piece of technology more complicated than a coffee maker. This phone should, however, stay solid until you choose to go off the path of least resistance, and that's all I can ever ask for in technology.
the only reason humans can [insert thing here] is by [insert other thing here], which a computer program cannot do.
Plenty of other people have already responded to this already, but I feel that it bears mentioning that statements like this are pretty unfair to the efforts of researchers who are constantly trying to better understand the way that the brain works and model it appropriately.
Unless you think that humans are infused with supernatural material, a computer program can absolutely "do" anything that a human brain can, given enough time and effort. At the very least, emulating the chemical processes that occur in the brain can allow a computer program to hear human speech and derive "meaning" from it, in some context that can be converted to textual data. Don't overestimate physiology, and don't underestimate the potential of computation.
Beyond that, artificial intelligence is a possibility. Who needs a full brain emulator when you can just reverse-engineer the parts that do thinking?
When you say "a computer program cannot [x]", some people take that as a challenge to make a computer program or find an algorithm that does "x".
In Iran, rocks punish half of adulterers half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.
Bilbo Baggins'd that for you.
Wine Doors (and the supporting website linked above) has had a lot of trouble in the past keeping the website running, probably due to its popularity climbing above the level of obscurity required to keep the webserver from melting. The app itself was a Ports-like system for Wine. They kept a repository of customized scripts that would help users install certain free applications, like Notepad++ or even the World of Warcraft Trial, with a click. I personally wasn't very impressed by the size of the repository, and the software was flaky even on the days when the online repository (hosted on the same server as their website) was running properly... but sometimes it worked, in controlled circumstances.
Wine proper has excellent technical merits. Most of my lasting complaints about Wine involve usability and desktop integration, and those complaints are at least addressed by the Vineyard project and/or Crossover's value-added products.
I believe that you may be confounding "the service provided by the company is not worth the cost" with "the company is eager to bend you over the barrel", "oligopoly" with "monopoly", "government-regulated" with "government-backed", and your entire post with something that replies to the parent it's attached to.
The post you replied to:
I would like to take this moment to give a shout out to T-Mobile, which actually offers a bring your own phone plan for less than the subsidize your phone plan.
How is this not a good thing?
No, they don't. There's nothing remotely resembling sorcery involved.
If you're being sarcastic... GP post is an appropriate response to this story, as the story seems to overlook the point that NevarMore is making: blocking spam by domain name is not the only way to do it.
However, when you combine this with non-static IP addresses, it can be an effective way to avoid filtering by source... though I cannot think of a good reason not to dock major points for an e-mail sent by a mail server with a non-static IP to begin with.
With such measures, you will only force the cheaters to be more creative.
In theory, as long as non-cheaters are not unduly impacted by the anti-cheating measure, this is a good thing. Some people will cheat anyway. At least the colleges are making them work harder at it. Some professors get all giddy at the idea of achieving results by a different path than "following the rules".
The perfect scenario would be a system where cheating would take substantially more effort to get a good grade than actually learning the material, while those who actually learn the material are not inconvenienced by anti-cheating measures. At that point, the only cheaters will be those who do cheat for its own sake (i.e., the people who are not motivated by grades to begin with, but rather by the thrill of the chase / bragging rights / what have you). At that point, everybody wins.
It kind of sucks to ban chewing gum, though. I buy junktons of gum to keep saliva flowing so that I can drink bucketloads of Mountain Dew without completely destroying my teeth, and I have a much harder time on a test if it's too long since my last Mountain Dew. I imagine that I'm not alone in having legitimate reasons for chewing gum.
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: seek and destroy the 'anonymous coward' user on slashdot, while simultaneously engaging in direct warfare upon all clear definitions of the cyber command's mission statement so as to maximize the payout in future humoristic series" | md5sum
e7af0759f645b6fe6e7994784bbfd407 -
There's more cash in other people's wallets than there is in mine, dollar-for-dollar.
However, spending my own cash is easier (it's in my wallet, rather than other people's wallets), it's more familiar (I've been doing it this way for years, whereas I've never spent other people's cash), and there are less negative externalities associated with it (spending other people's cash is illegal and immoral if I don't have their permission, and it's technically my cash anyways if I do have their permission).
More cash dollar-for-dollar doesn't necessarily mean that spending other people's cash is a better idea than spending my own. It could be, but there is more to consider than dollar-for-dollar.
To relate this to the point it sounds like you're implying, more value pound-for-pound does not necessarily mean that recycling electronics is more viable than mining. It could be, but there is more to consider than pound-for-pound.
Of course, it's possible that you aren't implying that at all.
Technically the US is "one of four countries that haven't ratified", but technically it is also one of five countries that haven't ratified, and one of three, one of 12, one of 18 and one of 47 countries that haven't ratified.
Technically, of any subset of the 46 non-US countries that have not ratified, the US is not one. (So, the US is not one of four countries that haven't ratified, nor is it one of five, ...)
This is fun!