If the technique works, its feasibility will depend on the strength of the shielding.
If we can reliably shield the radiation released by the high-speed decay, then we can dispose of waste in a maintainable facility over a few decades -- we can monitor the facility, make repairs, transfer waste from a damaged container to a new one, etc. -- instead of trying to build something and hope it doesn't leak over the next 1600 years.
So while the danger posed by a containment failure is greater (since more radiation would be released in such an event), the chance of a containment failure would be much smaller, because there would be less opportunity for it.
Because the client could give a rat's ass about whether their site complies with some standards ("They're more of guidelines anyways") from a group they've never heard of.... The client wants their site to work as designed, and to work the same way to as many of their clients as possible.
Of course, the whole purpose of the standards is for the site to work the same way on as many clients as possible. (Yes, I know I'm using a different definition of "client" here.) Generally speaking, if you build to the standards, you'll need a minimal amount of tweaking to get it to work on Firefox, Opera, and Safari (depending on which one you start with), a bit more to make it work with IE7, and still more to get it to work with IE6.
Or you can write off 10% or more (and growing) of your potential audience and write only for IE6.
When people complain, they "solve" the problem by printing in big letters on the front: "WARNING: cake may conceivably not be perfectly free of element number 33".
This sounds silly, but in the food industry it's pretty much exactly what most manufacturers are doing with allergy labeling. Instead of improving their factories to reduce the chance of, say, bits of peanuts from Snickers ending up in a Milky Way bar by accident, they put a warning on the Milky Way package to say, "Warning: manufactured in a facility that also uses peanuts, tree nuts, and might possibly have come into contact with air." (OK, I made up that last part.)
So instead of dealing with the problem (cross-contamination of allergens), they throw on a useless warning. It's useless because it doesn't provide information on which you can act beyond "don't buy prepared food, ever." By contrast, a useful warning would be one telling you that they've added peanuts to Almond Snickers.
I still think that if you can't get the new technology to look good you should fall back on the taditional stuff.
Of course, if every show followed that philosophy, we wouldn't have the really good CGI effects we have today.
As for Babylon 5 specifically, CGI was one of the compromises made to get the show on the air. (JMS was unwilling to compromise much on story -- and the show benefited from that -- so other things had to give.) One of the reasons there were so few ambitious space-based sci-fi shows in the early 1990s was the high budget needed to do special effects. The Star Trek shows had a built-in audience, so Paramount was willing to spend more on them than most studios were willing to spend on a series. Computer graphics enabled B5 to do ambitious effects while still coming in at a budget that networks were willing to spend on a no-name sci-fi show.
Tonight on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived... through something before, that what is happening now has... already... happened?
Okay, not really. Mentally substitute "for egzample" whenever you use "e.g." to see if it works.
I also like to think of "i.e." as "in effect" or "in essence." Not the exact meaning, but close enough to choose the right abbreviation.
On the other hand, I tend to remember the actual information better than mnemonics (I've actually found myself trying to reconstruct the standard mnemonics for, say, the names of the nine planets, or mathematical precedence), so maybe I'm not the best person to come up with one...
Similarly, I have a stack of maybe 8 or so movies I've borrowed from friends over the past...two years? I do mean to watch them, but the urgency isn't there.
Of course, part of the problem is that several of them are Kurosawa epics, so I need to set aside 4 hours per movie...
I've actually had worse problems with DVDs from my local video store (well, Blockbuster, actually). When I rent from the local Blockbusters (yes, that's plural), I have a 50/50 chance of getting a disc with some defect.
I've only had two problem discs from Netflix since I signed up ~9-10 months ago. Of those, one was a standard can't-play-these-30-seconds glitch, and the other was broken in half. That one is as likely to have been the post office's fault as Netflix's.
Maybe it's, as another poster suggested, the regional distribution centers, or maybe it's just the type of movies I tend to rent. (Mostly TV series or semi-obscure stuff, so it probably hasn't been viewed as many times. If it's popular and I wanted to see it, I probably caught it in the theaters, and if I want to see it more than once, I probably bought it already.)
This reminds me of a story I once heard about a scoutmaster who rigged up a miniature oven you could put on top of a car engine. He supposedly had recipes where the time had been converted to miles driven. On camping trips, the boy scouts would set up a meal before they left, and by the time they arrived at the campsite, dinner would be ready.
Mainly it's support (managers like having official channels better than posting on Ask Slashdot), but there's also issues of product lifecycle and (for those who want them) the inclusion of non-FOSS apps and drivers.
The lifecycle generally goes like this:
1. Test releases of the free version 2. Full release of the free version 3. Repeat 1-2 a couple of times. 4. Release of an enterprise version
Stability improves at each stage, so by the time you get to SUSE Enterprise, or RHEL, etc., you've got something much more stable than openSUSE or Fedora Core.
Then you get 5-7 years (depending on the company) of guaranteed updates without having to worry about upgrading your system. Sure, you can usually perform an online upgrade to a new release using apt-get or yum, but upgrading from Release N to Release N+1 is always more risky than updating components within a release.
I can think of one, and only one case where this would be more useful than a simple audio alarm: the shared laundry room.
If you've ever lived in a college dorm, or in an apartment complex that provides a communal laundry room (and extracts cash from you, either in the form of quarters or a reloadable card), SOP is to put your clothes in the washer, go back to your room/apartment/etc., then come back when they're done. Chances are you've encountered the fatal flaw: When your laundry is ready to go into the dryer, someone else's clothes have often been sitting there, dry, for 10 minutes, and it'll be another half hour before they remember to pop in and take them out.
The low-tech solution for the one with clothes in the dryer is this: Check your watch when you start the dryer, do a little math, and come back in 45 minutes. If you're really worried you'll forget, set an alarm. You've probably got a kitchen timer at worst, and if you're reading Slashdot, chances are your watch has 25 alarm settings anyway.
The low-tech solution for the one waiting to use the dryer is to open it up and move the other person's clothes out of the way. Ironically, the solution to lack of consideration by one person is... lack of consideration by the other. Which can escalate into a cycle of anger, and neighbor feuds, and next thing you know there'll be a neutral zone and Jimmy Carter will be coming in to make sure that your complex doesn't break into open warfare. *ahem* Sorry about that...
Anyway, something like this could work as a remote "Your laundry's done, doofus, get it the hell out of the way" alert. You could use single-use pagers like restaurants do for reservations, but this way you don't have to worry about range, or (since people are using their own phones) someone walking off with the pager after they're done.
Pity that the one place it would be useful is also the least likely place for it to be implemented.
The "confusion" I was referring to was in terms of spelling. FireFox is misspelled. Firefox is spelled correctly. When people are used to mixed case, they can get confused as to whether a particular name is spelled with conventional (just one capital) rules, camel case, rules from another language (as another poster pointed out, the original S.u.S.E. capitalization comes from German). "I know one of the letters in SUSE isn't capitalized, which one is it?"
When I'm writing formally, I still can't decide what to do with names like iMac, eBay, etc. at the beginning of a sentence -- and those are names I know how to spell.
So no, I'm not saying that people calling it "FireFox" get confused by people calling it "Firefox." You could probably write "Fyrefawkes" and still get the idea across. But the large number of mixed-case names in the computing field has led to confusion about how the name is spelled.
As it is, I think making the "open" part lowercase is still asking for trouble, but "openSUSE" is at least a bit more standard than "openSuSE." Me, I would have gone for "OpenSUSE" or even "Open SUSE."
Slashdot Mirror
If the technique works, its feasibility will depend on the strength of the shielding.
If we can reliably shield the radiation released by the high-speed decay, then we can dispose of waste in a maintainable facility over a few decades -- we can monitor the facility, make repairs, transfer waste from a damaged container to a new one, etc. -- instead of trying to build something and hope it doesn't leak over the next 1600 years.
So while the danger posed by a containment failure is greater (since more radiation would be released in such an event), the chance of a containment failure would be much smaller, because there would be less opportunity for it.
Maybe, but the ones who do make up 100% of what you can pick up with just a TV set and an antenna (i.e. no cable/satellite service).
Since when is citing a conspiracy theory "informative?" I mean, this is Slash-- oh, wait. Never mind.
There's a coffee chain in my area (Kelly's Coffee and Fudge) that has T-shirts that say, "Instant human. Just add coffee."
Somehow, that phrase suddenly seems all the more appropriate.
Wesley: Blood. I don't... usually drink in front of humans.
Mr. Bryce: Don't insult me, go on. It's fresh.
Wesley: Dear God! That's... nummy!
Of course, the whole purpose of the standards is for the site to work the same way on as many clients as possible. (Yes, I know I'm using a different definition of "client" here.) Generally speaking, if you build to the standards, you'll need a minimal amount of tweaking to get it to work on Firefox, Opera, and Safari (depending on which one you start with), a bit more to make it work with IE7, and still more to get it to work with IE6.
Or you can write off 10% or more (and growing) of your potential audience and write only for IE6.
Gotta love the irony.
You don't believe his anecdotal evidence. Why should he believe your anecdotal evidence?
This sounds silly, but in the food industry it's pretty much exactly what most manufacturers are doing with allergy labeling. Instead of improving their factories to reduce the chance of, say, bits of peanuts from Snickers ending up in a Milky Way bar by accident, they put a warning on the Milky Way package to say, "Warning: manufactured in a facility that also uses peanuts, tree nuts, and might possibly have come into contact with air." (OK, I made up that last part.)
So instead of dealing with the problem (cross-contamination of allergens), they throw on a useless warning. It's useless because it doesn't provide information on which you can act beyond "don't buy prepared food, ever." By contrast, a useful warning would be one telling you that they've added peanuts to Almond Snickers.
Congratulations, you just won the award for the most subtle joke on this thread!
Mods, where are you?
Of course, if every show followed that philosophy, we wouldn't have the really good CGI effects we have today.
As for Babylon 5 specifically, CGI was one of the compromises made to get the show on the air. (JMS was unwilling to compromise much on story -- and the show benefited from that -- so other things had to give.) One of the reasons there were so few ambitious space-based sci-fi shows in the early 1990s was the high budget needed to do special effects. The Star Trek shows had a built-in audience, so Paramount was willing to spend more on them than most studios were willing to spend on a series. Computer graphics enabled B5 to do ambitious effects while still coming in at a budget that networks were willing to spend on a no-name sci-fi show.
Technically, no post on this article should be "Redundant."
Given the increasing number of Backslash posts, that doesn't seem too unlikely.
Tonight on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived... through something before, that what is happening now has... already... happened?
*runs*
At last, people can play Monopoly without tedious things like addition!
Well, until they run out of fresh batteries, anyway.
I also like to think of "i.e." as "in effect" or "in essence." Not the exact meaning, but close enough to choose the right abbreviation.
On the other hand, I tend to remember the actual information better than mnemonics (I've actually found myself trying to reconstruct the standard mnemonics for, say, the names of the nine planets, or mathematical precedence), so maybe I'm not the best person to come up with one...
Similarly, I have a stack of maybe 8 or so movies I've borrowed from friends over the past...two years? I do mean to watch them, but the urgency isn't there.
Of course, part of the problem is that several of them are Kurosawa epics, so I need to set aside 4 hours per movie...
I've actually had worse problems with DVDs from my local video store (well, Blockbuster, actually). When I rent from the local Blockbusters (yes, that's plural), I have a 50/50 chance of getting a disc with some defect.
I've only had two problem discs from Netflix since I signed up ~9-10 months ago. Of those, one was a standard can't-play-these-30-seconds glitch, and the other was broken in half. That one is as likely to have been the post office's fault as Netflix's.
Maybe it's, as another poster suggested, the regional distribution centers, or maybe it's just the type of movies I tend to rent. (Mostly TV series or semi-obscure stuff, so it probably hasn't been viewed as many times. If it's popular and I wanted to see it, I probably caught it in the theaters, and if I want to see it more than once, I probably bought it already.)
And this time, they won't need a disclaimer warning you not to eat it!
Well, if they linked to the actual article, they'd still be stuck linking to a blog...
This reminds me of a story I once heard about a scoutmaster who rigged up a miniature oven you could put on top of a car engine. He supposedly had recipes where the time had been converted to miles driven. On camping trips, the boy scouts would set up a meal before they left, and by the time they arrived at the campsite, dinner would be ready.
Good question. Why not ask the guy at PC Advisor who decided to title the original article, "Hackers learn from open source."
Hackers use CVS? Seriously, who cares where they get their drugs, anyway?
Mainly it's support (managers like having official channels better than posting on Ask Slashdot), but there's also issues of product lifecycle and (for those who want them) the inclusion of non-FOSS apps and drivers.
The lifecycle generally goes like this:
1. Test releases of the free version
2. Full release of the free version
3. Repeat 1-2 a couple of times.
4. Release of an enterprise version
Stability improves at each stage, so by the time you get to SUSE Enterprise, or RHEL, etc., you've got something much more stable than openSUSE or Fedora Core.
Then you get 5-7 years (depending on the company) of guaranteed updates without having to worry about upgrading your system. Sure, you can usually perform an online upgrade to a new release using apt-get or yum, but upgrading from Release N to Release N+1 is always more risky than updating components within a release.
I can think of one, and only one case where this would be more useful than a simple audio alarm: the shared laundry room.
If you've ever lived in a college dorm, or in an apartment complex that provides a communal laundry room (and extracts cash from you, either in the form of quarters or a reloadable card), SOP is to put your clothes in the washer, go back to your room/apartment/etc., then come back when they're done. Chances are you've encountered the fatal flaw: When your laundry is ready to go into the dryer, someone else's clothes have often been sitting there, dry, for 10 minutes, and it'll be another half hour before they remember to pop in and take them out.
The low-tech solution for the one with clothes in the dryer is this: Check your watch when you start the dryer, do a little math, and come back in 45 minutes. If you're really worried you'll forget, set an alarm. You've probably got a kitchen timer at worst, and if you're reading Slashdot, chances are your watch has 25 alarm settings anyway.
The low-tech solution for the one waiting to use the dryer is to open it up and move the other person's clothes out of the way. Ironically, the solution to lack of consideration by one person is... lack of consideration by the other. Which can escalate into a cycle of anger, and neighbor feuds, and next thing you know there'll be a neutral zone and Jimmy Carter will be coming in to make sure that your complex doesn't break into open warfare. *ahem* Sorry about that...
Anyway, something like this could work as a remote "Your laundry's done, doofus, get it the hell out of the way" alert. You could use single-use pagers like restaurants do for reservations, but this way you don't have to worry about range, or (since people are using their own phones) someone walking off with the pager after they're done.
Pity that the one place it would be useful is also the least likely place for it to be implemented.
The "confusion" I was referring to was in terms of spelling. FireFox is misspelled. Firefox is spelled correctly. When people are used to mixed case, they can get confused as to whether a particular name is spelled with conventional (just one capital) rules, camel case, rules from another language (as another poster pointed out, the original S.u.S.E. capitalization comes from German). "I know one of the letters in SUSE isn't capitalized, which one is it?"
When I'm writing formally, I still can't decide what to do with names like iMac, eBay, etc. at the beginning of a sentence -- and those are names I know how to spell.
So no, I'm not saying that people calling it "FireFox" get confused by people calling it "Firefox." You could probably write "Fyrefawkes" and still get the idea across. But the large number of mixed-case names in the computing field has led to confusion about how the name is spelled.
As it is, I think making the "open" part lowercase is still asking for trouble, but "openSUSE" is at least a bit more standard than "openSuSE." Me, I would have gone for "OpenSUSE" or even "Open SUSE."