I've personally witnessed negative reviews falling down the memory hole when a product was put on sale. I had been considering the product for some months and had been monitoring the reviews regularly. I got the word that the product was on sale, so I decided to pounce, knowing that I could live with the shortcomings expressed in the bad reviews. One more scan of the reviews revealed that everything below three stars had been removed. I aborted my transaction and emailed Sears customer service to express my disgust.
IANATE, but I play one at work. You don't STEER a train/tram, but someone does control the alignment of the switches that govern the route. In large train networks, it's usually the central dispatcher.
It sounds as if the switches were controlled by some sort of wireless communication between the tram engineer's cab and the switch machine. The derailment was probably caused when the switch moved before the train cleared the switch. The front cars followed one path while the back car followed another. Eventually something gave way and the last car derailed.
A green datacenter solution that uses less energy by dumping heat pollution in to the bay? Does this not sit well with anybody else?
Also, it seems they have a rather narrow deployment plan as they specifically mention lowering "PG&E" energy costs. Isn't this a west coast energy company (known for rolling black-outs)?
Are real-estate costs and disaster-proofing really a problem? Find a higher altitude piece of land in the midwest far from any levies or rivers, build a concrete bunker, place a few generators and batteries, buy a fuel agreement and you're good to go! The result is high, dry, continually powered, and in no danger of sinking or being rammed by an out-of-control ship. My employer has built such a bunker for the dispatch and control of heavy and important commercial vehicles. It is rumored that a metal telephone pole hurled by a midwestern tornado will bounce off without interfering with operations. (They did build it right next to a river though.....do'h!)
My Dell Inspiron 1100 (I think it's 1100) has begun to shock me when I pick it up with both hands. Of course, placing the old clunker of a laptop on my lap requires two hands, so this happens often. I have discontinued using it, but it's my only windows machine at home and our corporate VPN requires windows.:(
This thing is so defeatable that it's likely to never be useful. The SK government will spend millions on them, deploy them, and the NKs will circumvent them with minimal effort.
1.) Paintballs. If the cameras can't see, the targeting software is crippled.
2.) One of these could render the barrel unfireable from beyond the autogun's effective range. It could probably also damage the optical sensor or mar it's lens enough to render it useless.
3.) Rectangular metal shields -- If the software is trained to not shoot at trees, make yourself look like a (slow moving) tree. The recognition software is probably focusing on the gangly and flapping arms and legs we humans have. If one hides his arms and legs, one will not get shot.
4.) Blind the sensors. Focus enough visible and infrared light on the sensors to render them useless.
I traded my real, hard-earned currency for an alternate currency before knowing just how much the alternate currency was worth! Poor me!"
Hey, WOW players, shoelaces are the next gold. Twice as valuable per ounce! If you want to be rich, collect shoelaces. I have a million of them and I'll sell them to you for only $3 per shoelace. This is a hot deal, so act quickly before the London stock exchange begins tracking the daily shoelace price.
Re:Not an alternative...
on
DIY Iris Scanning?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is merit in your argument. The basic idea of using biometics as a an additional level of security is unimpeachable. However, you miss two key issues in play here.
1.) A key and irreplaceable component of any authentication instrument is a revocation feature. You state that biometric passwords are not changeable. Biometrics are just as revokable as passwords. In both cases, the user must recognize that the instrument has been compromised and tell his keymaster. In the password case, you simply change the password. In the biometric case, you must remove that instrument from the authentication whitelist. I think what you're trying to get at here is that biometrics, once revoked, cannot be resued. However, your statement: "That person is me anywhere they do an iris scan." is false because the biometric instrument can be revoked. That person is you everywhere they use a password until that is revoked also....
2.) Biometrics are growing up. Soon the days of simple image processing will be gone. Additional checks like measuring pupil reaction time, eye movement characteristics, blink characteristics, eye pressure, peripheral vision, visual acuity, etc will be implemented. (Press the button when the line-drawing is in focus (using a new image and different focus path each time.); Press the button when the spot comes into your peripheral vision (same randomness, etc.)) Varying the algorithm by which the image processing software recognizes the eye will also harden iris scanning. All of this works to make biometrics an increasingly attractive ADDITIONAL layer of security. I've always been told that the best security check involves two things: something you have, and something you know. Biometrics can work quite well for the "something you have." part.
This is just the sort of narrow-minded thinking I expect from this buggy (the horse kind) town after spending over a year here. This place is the smallest big town in america. The people are conservative. The city is lame. The tech market here is almost non-existent. What is here (aside from Server Beach, I hear) is weak and lacks challenge. Texans have the whole "it'll get done when it gets done" attitude about everything. This is perhaps why my last employer (who I dropped like it was hot) was 5 months late delivering a finished product to the state of Illinois. Combine the conservativeness with the weak tech workers and you get misguided tech policies.
Don't even get me started on Texas roads and highways. I'm leaving for the midwest next week. Seriously.
but what if he planned it out meticulously, to the point that he gets away clean?
That's like saying you've written test cases for every possible usage scenario. Nobody could ever plan a crime to the point at which no loose ends remain. In every crime, there is always an unknown variable: the other person (the person you're killing, stealing from, or injuring).
A person like Hans, who has the intelligence and persistence (no pun intended) to put together a complicated and successful OSS project is smart enough to know that there's no way in hell he's going to get away with murdering his wife with whom he is waging a custody battle. He is immediately flagged as the prime suspect. If he had time to plan, he had time to come to this realization. Ergo, he did not premeditate this murder. If it were a crime of passion, the cops would have a much better case against Hans already as he would have made more mistakes and left behind more evidence. Ergo, he did not commit this crime on a whim. No premediation, no crime of passion, not guilty.
Your comment is spot on. I think you missed my second-to-last paragraph (**rethinking here**) where I mentioned the weight of the container (aka: cargo ship container, which incidentally becomes your intermodal semi trailer) vs. the weight of the contents. I think the specific sentence you neglected to read is: "If the weight of a container's worth of nano boxes is insignificant in comparison to the weight of the actual container, then perhaps my previous argument is incorrect since the additional container weight will be saved." This sentence sums up your entire counter to my argument. Next time, RTWFCBR (Read The Whole Freakin Comment Before Replying).
Furthermore and lastly, the amount of fossil fuel required to source, produce, and deliver (to the assembly facility) said reduced packaging is greater than the fossil fuel required to deliver the finished nano to your door. Thus, a more significant reduction of weight would save a greater amount of fossil fuel before the nano even got put inside the box. (Since you're likely to be a software engineer, you should be familiar with the idea of applying the most optimization effort to the code that gets executed the most.) Steve's short-sighted view of how reducing the packaging volume will reduce his bottom line shows that this is less of a green-motivated action and more of a move to save himself a few $$.
Ok, I lied. This is the last paragraph. It appears that the new box the nano ships in (seen here is plastic, whereas the original box (here) was completely paper. Sure, it costs less to ship them now, but it costs so much more (in fossil fuel volume) to produce that plastic box! This isn't a green-motivated move at all! Heck, it probably weighs more than the original! That's why he used the bogus volume statistic!
The "52% less volume" nano packaging sounds like an impressive statistic, but if one takes a closer look, it will become clear that this is just an inflated number that was quoted to sound good.
1.) The Nano packaging is quite small as it is. Volume is not the major factor when calculating the fossil fuel required to ship these things from the asian sweatshops to the apple stores around the world. Weight is the key factor.
2.) The heaviest part of a nano package is the nano itself. I don't own a nano, but my shuffle (a gift from an employer) came with an overgrown instruction manual, which was actually the heaviest part of that package. I imagine that the nano contains a similar manual. The outer packaging materials were awfully light compared to the contents tiny contents.
3.) Volume and surface area (and thus, packaging weight) do not vary linearly. A 52% reduction in overall volume does not equal even half a reduction in packaging weight.
If the reduction in package weight due to this green-ification were even remotely significant, Jobs would have quoted that number. Instead, he got us all to ooh, and ah at a big, insignificant number.
**rethinking here** i suppose that a 52% reduction in volume does mean that they can ship these things across the ocean in about half as many containers. If the weight of a container's worth of nano boxes is insignificant in comparison to the weight of the actual container, then perhaps my previous argument is incorrect since the additional container weight will be saved. However, if the weight of the nano boxes is significant, then we're still only seeing a fossil fuel efficiency increase of 20-30%. Don't get me wrong, that's nothing to sneeze at, but I wish they'd quote a number with REAL meaning, rather than the bigger, but insignificant, number.
This all reminds me of a car commercial in San Antonio (where dumb math rules) that advertises, "Did you know that for every mile per hour you drive over 60, your fuel prices go up by 13 cents per gallon." (Disclaimer: My memory of the quote probably suffers minor inconsistencies with the actual quote, but the I took care not to change the concept at all.) Everytime I see that commercial, I just want to call them up and ask how they arrived at that $0.13/gallon figure.
You want to know what I didn't see in a single one of those "neat & tidy" wiring photos? I didn't see a single service loop. Sure, anybody can wire-tie the heck out of something and make it look nice and neat on project completion day. Hell, I used to produce racks of similar tidiness when I was 19, working for a regional communications installer doing hospital and school networks. But it takes a real artisan to make something look that neat AND design it to stand up to five years of corporate changes and rearrangements. Just wait until one of your wires has to move from the top of the rack (near the entry point) to the bottom of the rack.
I think it was a previous comment that wrote: "Neat != Usable" That's so true. (Or Neat !== Usable for you PHP-tards)
How long before a group of 400 users covertly plans to shake their desktops at a precise time some day? What happens then? Is there a check against other clients running in the same geogrpahical area to determine if they are experiencing the same vibrations?
terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers huh? I'd take money launderers over murderers any day of the week! We're saying it's worse to cover up a bit of white collar crime than it is to kill someone?
An attendence policy will keep them from skipping class....not timing the release of the lecture videos. It sounds as if you're attempting to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow...April is coming early this year.
I've personally witnessed negative reviews falling down the memory hole when a product was put on sale. I had been considering the product for some months and had been monitoring the reviews regularly. I got the word that the product was on sale, so I decided to pounce, knowing that I could live with the shortcomings expressed in the bad reviews. One more scan of the reviews revealed that everything below three stars had been removed. I aborted my transaction and emailed Sears customer service to express my disgust.
s/Common/Outdated/
IANATE, but I play one at work. You don't STEER a train/tram, but someone does control the alignment of the switches that govern the route. In large train networks, it's usually the central dispatcher.
It sounds as if the switches were controlled by some sort of wireless communication between the tram engineer's cab and the switch machine. The derailment was probably caused when the switch moved before the train cleared the switch. The front cars followed one path while the back car followed another. Eventually something gave way and the last car derailed.
A green datacenter solution that uses less energy by dumping heat pollution in to the bay? Does this not sit well with anybody else?
Also, it seems they have a rather narrow deployment plan as they specifically mention lowering "PG&E" energy costs. Isn't this a west coast energy company (known for rolling black-outs)?
Are real-estate costs and disaster-proofing really a problem? Find a higher altitude piece of land in the midwest far from any levies or rivers, build a concrete bunker, place a few generators and batteries, buy a fuel agreement and you're good to go! The result is high, dry, continually powered, and in no danger of sinking or being rammed by an out-of-control ship. My employer has built such a bunker for the dispatch and control of heavy and important commercial vehicles. It is rumored that a metal telephone pole hurled by a midwestern tornado will bounce off without interfering with operations. (They did build it right next to a river though.....do'h!)
Dumbest.
Idea.
Today.
How long will it be before other professions start using the real-time billboards to beg other people to do their jobs for them?
<billboard>
Please for the helping me of sorting array in place in VB.NET. Have big client waiting for this code tomorrow.
Thanks in advance,
Ramesh^H^H^H^H^H^Hsteve@bangaloresoftware.co.in
</billboard>
I just remembered....it's an 8100.
My Dell Inspiron 1100 (I think it's 1100) has begun to shock me when I pick it up with both hands. Of course, placing the old clunker of a laptop on my lap requires two hands, so this happens often. I have discontinued using it, but it's my only windows machine at home and our corporate VPN requires windows. :(
This thing is so defeatable that it's likely to never be useful. The SK government will spend millions on them, deploy them, and the NKs will circumvent them with minimal effort.
1.) Paintballs. If the cameras can't see, the targeting software is crippled.
2.) One of these could render the barrel unfireable from beyond the autogun's effective range. It could probably also damage the optical sensor or mar it's lens enough to render it useless.
3.) Rectangular metal shields -- If the software is trained to not shoot at trees, make yourself look like a (slow moving) tree. The recognition software is probably focusing on the gangly and flapping arms and legs we humans have. If one hides his arms and legs, one will not get shot.
4.) Blind the sensors. Focus enough visible and infrared light on the sensors to render them useless.
Other than the feedback on the RHS, how is this new and innovative?
I traded my real, hard-earned currency for an alternate currency before knowing just how much the alternate currency was worth! Poor me!"
Hey, WOW players, shoelaces are the next gold. Twice as valuable per ounce! If you want to be rich, collect shoelaces. I have a million of them and I'll sell them to you for only $3 per shoelace. This is a hot deal, so act quickly before the London stock exchange begins tracking the daily shoelace price.
There is merit in your argument. The basic idea of using biometics as a an additional level of security is unimpeachable. However, you miss two key issues in play here.
1.) A key and irreplaceable component of any authentication instrument is a revocation feature. You state that biometric passwords are not changeable. Biometrics are just as revokable as passwords. In both cases, the user must recognize that the instrument has been compromised and tell his keymaster. In the password case, you simply change the password. In the biometric case, you must remove that instrument from the authentication whitelist. I think what you're trying to get at here is that biometrics, once revoked, cannot be resued. However, your statement: "That person is me anywhere they do an iris scan." is false because the biometric instrument can be revoked. That person is you everywhere they use a password until that is revoked also....
2.) Biometrics are growing up. Soon the days of simple image processing will be gone. Additional checks like measuring pupil reaction time, eye movement characteristics, blink characteristics, eye pressure, peripheral vision, visual acuity, etc will be implemented. (Press the button when the line-drawing is in focus (using a new image and different focus path each time.); Press the button when the spot comes into your peripheral vision (same randomness, etc.)) Varying the algorithm by which the image processing software recognizes the eye will also harden iris scanning. All of this works to make biometrics an increasingly attractive ADDITIONAL layer of security. I've always been told that the best security check involves two things: something you have, and something you know. Biometrics can work quite well for the "something you have." part.
This is just the sort of narrow-minded thinking I expect from this buggy (the horse kind) town after spending over a year here. This place is the smallest big town in america. The people are conservative. The city is lame. The tech market here is almost non-existent. What is here (aside from Server Beach, I hear) is weak and lacks challenge. Texans have the whole "it'll get done when it gets done" attitude about everything. This is perhaps why my last employer (who I dropped like it was hot) was 5 months late delivering a finished product to the state of Illinois. Combine the conservativeness with the weak tech workers and you get misguided tech policies.
Don't even get me started on Texas roads and highways. I'm leaving for the midwest next week. Seriously.
That's like saying you've written test cases for every possible usage scenario. Nobody could ever plan a crime to the point at which no loose ends remain. In every crime, there is always an unknown variable: the other person (the person you're killing, stealing from, or injuring).
A person like Hans, who has the intelligence and persistence (no pun intended) to put together a complicated and successful OSS project is smart enough to know that there's no way in hell he's going to get away with murdering his wife with whom he is waging a custody battle. He is immediately flagged as the prime suspect. If he had time to plan, he had time to come to this realization. Ergo, he did not premeditate this murder. If it were a crime of passion, the cops would have a much better case against Hans already as he would have made more mistakes and left behind more evidence. Ergo, he did not commit this crime on a whim. No premediation, no crime of passion, not guilty.
Your comment is spot on. I think you missed my second-to-last paragraph (**rethinking here**) where I mentioned the weight of the container (aka: cargo ship container, which incidentally becomes your intermodal semi trailer) vs. the weight of the contents. I think the specific sentence you neglected to read is: "If the weight of a container's worth of nano boxes is insignificant in comparison to the weight of the actual container, then perhaps my previous argument is incorrect since the additional container weight will be saved." This sentence sums up your entire counter to my argument. Next time, RTWFCBR (Read The Whole Freakin Comment Before Replying).
Furthermore and lastly, the amount of fossil fuel required to source, produce, and deliver (to the assembly facility) said reduced packaging is greater than the fossil fuel required to deliver the finished nano to your door. Thus, a more significant reduction of weight would save a greater amount of fossil fuel before the nano even got put inside the box. (Since you're likely to be a software engineer, you should be familiar with the idea of applying the most optimization effort to the code that gets executed the most.) Steve's short-sighted view of how reducing the packaging volume will reduce his bottom line shows that this is less of a green-motivated action and more of a move to save himself a few $$.
Ok, I lied. This is the last paragraph. It appears that the new box the nano ships in (seen here is plastic, whereas the original box (here) was completely paper. Sure, it costs less to ship them now, but it costs so much more (in fossil fuel volume) to produce that plastic box! This isn't a green-motivated move at all! Heck, it probably weighs more than the original! That's why he used the bogus volume statistic!
The "52% less volume" nano packaging sounds like an impressive statistic, but if one takes a closer look, it will become clear that this is just an inflated number that was quoted to sound good.
1.) The Nano packaging is quite small as it is. Volume is not the major factor when calculating the fossil fuel required to ship these things from the asian sweatshops to the apple stores around the world. Weight is the key factor.
2.) The heaviest part of a nano package is the nano itself. I don't own a nano, but my shuffle (a gift from an employer) came with an overgrown instruction manual, which was actually the heaviest part of that package. I imagine that the nano contains a similar manual. The outer packaging materials were awfully light compared to the contents tiny contents.
3.) Volume and surface area (and thus, packaging weight) do not vary linearly. A 52% reduction in overall volume does not equal even half a reduction in packaging weight.
If the reduction in package weight due to this green-ification were even remotely significant, Jobs would have quoted that number. Instead, he got us all to ooh, and ah at a big, insignificant number.
**rethinking here**
i suppose that a 52% reduction in volume does mean that they can ship these things across the ocean in about half as many containers. If the weight of a container's worth of nano boxes is insignificant in comparison to the weight of the actual container, then perhaps my previous argument is incorrect since the additional container weight will be saved. However, if the weight of the nano boxes is significant, then we're still only seeing a fossil fuel efficiency increase of 20-30%. Don't get me wrong, that's nothing to sneeze at, but I wish they'd quote a number with REAL meaning, rather than the bigger, but insignificant, number.
This all reminds me of a car commercial in San Antonio (where dumb math rules) that advertises, "Did you know that for every mile per hour you drive over 60, your fuel prices go up by 13 cents per gallon." (Disclaimer: My memory of the quote probably suffers minor inconsistencies with the actual quote, but the I took care not to change the concept at all.) Everytime I see that commercial, I just want to call them up and ask how they arrived at that $0.13/gallon figure.
Those photos of terminated 25-pair sure look like comm systems to me!
You want to know what I didn't see in a single one of those "neat & tidy" wiring photos? I didn't see a single service loop. Sure, anybody can wire-tie the heck out of something and make it look nice and neat on project completion day. Hell, I used to produce racks of similar tidiness when I was 19, working for a regional communications installer doing hospital and school networks. But it takes a real artisan to make something look that neat AND design it to stand up to five years of corporate changes and rearrangements. Just wait until one of your wires has to move from the top of the rack (near the entry point) to the bottom of the rack.
I think it was a previous comment that wrote: "Neat != Usable" That's so true. (Or Neat !== Usable for you PHP-tards)
Won't that just round the corners off the windows and smooth out the text so it doesn't look so BuMpY?
How long before a group of 400 users covertly plans to shake their desktops at a precise time some day? What happens then? Is there a check against other clients running in the same geogrpahical area to determine if they are experiencing the same vibrations?
terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers huh? I'd take money launderers over murderers any day of the week! We're saying it's worse to cover up a bit of white collar crime than it is to kill someone?
An attendence policy will keep them from skipping class....not timing the release of the lecture videos. It sounds as if you're attempting to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail.
I've seen it played once on Time Warner cable in San Antonio. I wanted to vomit.
And before anybody points it out, I do realize that flash memory does not contain read/write heads per se.