Hey 100 lbs per car, that should almost enough to offset the extra weight caused by overweight Americans sitting inside the car! No more low carb for me, pass the Twinkies.
You make a good point about the structure of the units being important. In my experience as a US Marine I have found that the traditional organizational structure has been dictated by the chain of command. While lines of communication exist amongst parallel units there use is not encouraged. There is a though, fostered by those in command, that they are the wise men and should make the decisions, hence you should provide the data to them and they will send down what they feel you need to know.
As you might be able to imagine this causes several problems. The largest of these is the man (I say man because I served in an infantry battalion and women are not allowed to serve in such units, I do not recall any women in the Regimental organizational unit above us even though they were primarily a rear echelon group, circa early 1990s) at the top. Remember that this person generally has little or no experience in distributing information in any meaningful way, they are often not comfortable with technology and due to antiquated ideas of the traditional chain of command seem to feel that it is the job of subordinate units to provide information, whereas those at top do not seem the need to push data back down the chain. Or when they do decide to give data it is often colored or screwed to support only the version of reality that has the official stamp of approval.
Tradition dies hard in the military, but the inability to really communicate well continues to be a weakness that should have been removed along time ago. Admittedly this is not an easy task, but I sincerely believe that it is possible. As a whole our combat units will need to work on identifying those in their ranks that have developed a feel for handling data and identifying information of value within that data (preferable under a fair amount of stress) and nurture these skills and then get these people in the primary information flows and truly incentives them to work with parallel units as much or more then they do with upper echelon personnel.
Also it is a mistake to depend a fully as they do on live-time information. The description of units unable to get important maps and photos of towns that they are approaching is disturbing. It does not seem that it would have taken that much storage space to have several members of a combat unit to store maps of all likely targets on the road to Baghdad. I do not buy the answer that this would have been a security risk, everyone in the world knew are troops were coming, and if you happened to be in the vague path from Kuwait to Baghdad you were likely going to have a bad day. If they would have had the basic information with them already the inability to gain the up to the minute data would not have been such a blow. Also if your on hand maps were in an electronic data format it would not have been that difficult to devise a means of having any updated intelligence to download be only overlays that could be applied to their existing maps, which would cut down on bandwidth requirements significantly, and as an added bonus enhanced security, because if you are only transmitting an overlay it is of little value if it is intercepted by someone who does not have the baseline information to apply it to.
Well as with all things, exception can be made, take for instance that rumbling noise that is being made by those who want to modify the constitution so that Mr. Schwarzenegger would be eligible to be elected President of the United States.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20041008.html
Now weather anything actually comes of this who knows, but under the right circumstances I would not be shocked to be looking at a whole new shooting match in the upcoming years.
Man, I do not know if this is simply a diffrence in time (I am an old cout, by this boards standards), or in service (when I served I was in the Marine Corps), but I do not remember having the options for niceites like PS2 when I deployed to (insert nasty location here).
Heck, I remember I was one of the high speed low drag guys because I packed a battary (AA) powered electric shaver...
While I agree that this is a good idea, it is not a complete solution. Imagine if you will, as you are approaching the Holidays getting ready to put the finishing touches on your killer term paper, and poof your laptop is gone.
Flash forward to your friendly neighborhood insurance agent office, filling out your claim for your uber cool $3k laptop, they may well cut you a check, but I doubt they will provide you with the 20 pages of history term paper that you have already pounded out.
Hint, when backing up your work, start thinking multiple physical locations.... But then again what is an education without having to re-write a paper or two, so on second thought forget the backups and go have some fun....8)
The idea that a battery in a cell phone poses a considerable danger because of the current draw when receiving/answering/making a call seems rather odd to me. Last time that I checked most trips to gas stations are made in automobiles that have much larger, much more powerful batteries than any cell phone that I have ever seen (If you do not believe me go out to you automobile and look around, you will probably find it under the hood).
After arriving at the gas station and spending a boat load of money to fill-up your monster SUV, most people will take their lives into their own hands and start their vehicles, think of the current draw from the batteries, what if something sparks. Obviously we should all make a point of pushing our autos at least a quarter mile down the road before we take a chance of actually starting them.
Commercial software offerings are not exactly a shining beacon of quality documentation. I will admit that for many companies, things have gotten better in the last few years, but I frequently receive software that has incomplete and often factually wrong descriptions of their own installation process.
Even major companies with large budgets and full "tech support" staffs are often completely unprepared to handle basic issues with any level of constancy. Just last week I had the Compaq/HP tech staff stumped on why their SAN Array configuration software was not behaving as it should (according to the documentation), luckily I hot upon someone on a community tech board who had suggestions that helped me resolve my issue.
Just because the support that is available does not have the look and feel of that you are used to (30 - 60 minutes of easy listening music and a demand for a credit card) it does not mean that it does not exist. While finding answers through "non-traditional" channels is far from a guarantee of success, I have often been pleasantly surprised by its quality and thoroughness, and in most cases would gladly pit the two against each other.
Considering that Google has been rather upfront with their intentions of searching the email that is sitting in your inbox. Would it be that much of a stretch to think that they would look at attachments that are received and compare them to other matches sitting in other gmail accounts, and when it finds matches, simply make a link to a master file. With a large enough user group I am sure that there will be tens of thousands of common files (weather they be tax forms in pdf, or an Areosmith song in mp3). By only linking to a master file.
If your search and index process are fast enough you can save significant amount of space.
True, 14 days in not exactly record shattering, but it is a laptop. I cannot recall the last time that I bothered keeping my laptop up and running for more than a few days at a shot. If you are using it as a mobile workstation, not a server, 14 days should be fine for most people.
Back when I dealt with a large number of windows machines I held to the notion of running patches our test network immediately, if that went for a day without noticly blowing up I would start installing on a select number of low priority boxes in IT and a few brave soles that worked closely with us. Then after another two days of observation (and a lot of reading to see if anyone else has had significant problems) then we would start a blitz on the whole of the network.
Historically Unix has not been about open standards, it has been about petty differences and silly squabbling. It is hard to imagine a more fragmented market, with each competitor doing their own thing, often for no apparent reason other than being different then the rest of the crowd.
You make a good point. And honestly I have nothing against the scientist in Britain, my early comment was a intended as humor (or humour, if you prefer), but either people are just a little overly sensitive, or I need to be sure to put ascii smiley faces on post intended to bring levity.
Wait a second, didnâ(TM)t British scientist also tell us that Iraq had huge stockpiles of WMD, which pose an immediate threat to both the UK and the US?
I also experimented with the University of Phoenix. I was disappointed with the poor feedback that I received from the professor. The assignments due in the final week made up over 50% of the course grade, and I received no feedback whatsoever on the assignment. While I am happy with the grade that I received, for the $1,266 that I paid for the course, I simply expected more.
What really bothered me is that the school has billed my credit card for over $3,000 in billing mistakes. While they have refunded all this money, I have spent more time on the phone with them then I care to think about.
While odomoter fraud is a real issue, if someone is willing to take the chance at getting caught at this (admitidly it is not a great riak), why not just remove the GPS device and leaving it attached to your riding lawn mower while you are out in your car racking up the big miles?
They have no apparent advantage over a bicycle for the vast majority of people. Especially when you take cost into consideration.
Re:it is VERY trollish
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well Oracle may opt to disagree with you. All you have to do is go to their home page [no link, if you can not find it you need help]. They are pushing running Oracle on Linux in a big way. When it comes to corporate databases there is Oracle and a bunch of companies that no one cares about.
Or if you would like another example, how about the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). This is a Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used by the FAA to handle flow control, redirecting traffic around severe weather and other fun things along those lines. Currently the system is running mostly on HP-UX servers. But people have realized that they are paying far to much for what they get, so they have started replacing these HP Servers with cheap Intel boxes running Red Hat. No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with. [The FAA pays for 4 hour response time on the HP machines and I can not recall a single instance in the last two years that HP has made the time slot at any site in the nation, occasionally taking MULTIPLE DAYS]. With the cheaper boxes you can simple keep extra spares lying around and swap out as needed, still saving large amounts of money.
Sure SUN can take the lion's share of the really big boxes, but there is not enough demand to justify a company anywhere near SUN's current size. And even that will not go uncontested, IBM wants their share of that market so does HP. But if that is all that is left for SUN, they will starve to death.
Although I wish them the best, I do agree that they need to do something and do it quickly.
Your argument is weak. I do not care about the principles or reasons why our government [or for that matter any other government] makes for the war. Government policy is not why men fight wars, and your assumption that it is tells me that you have never been in the infantry or you would now better.
The reason that a solider fights is for the men that he serves with. Americans do not have a monopoly on bravery, there are plenty of examples from nations all around the globe. By the same note most people who served in any battle are not heroes, it is those who stepped forward in the face of immediate overwhelming odds that are heroes.
Alexander Fleming either through brilliance or dumb luck is credited with discovering Penicillin. Should the world be greatful for his efforts? Of course we should [although the over use of antibiotics will likely be a kick in the crotch, but that is another story]. But the processes of this discovery is not a demonstration of extreme courage, which is the definition that I apply to the term hero.
So I stand by my statement that riding a rocket ship into orbit does not make the cut for heroes. I am sure that it is a hell of a ride, and if given the opportunity to make it I would go without thinking twice, but I am no hero.
A tragic event that did have a hero is Air Florida flight 90 which crashed into the Potomac River shortly after taking off from National Airport (DCA) on January 13, 1982. Six survivors got off the plane. Rescue crews approached one of them, but he refused to be pulled out of the near freezing river. Instead he opted to go aide the other survivors, due in part to his actions the other five survived this ordeal, but this display of heroism cost this man his life.
Can you honestly tell me that the actions of the crew of the Columbia place them on the same tier as the aforementioned passenger?
Re:Condolances Can Be Sent Here
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"HEROES" you must be kidding. This people are not heroes, I have seen this reference far to many times in the last few days. Does it stink for the people who died? Yes, also for their families and friends. But just because you happen to catch a bad break in a very public location is not an automatic ticket to the exulted status of hero.
The United States of America has collected its fair share of those who have justifiable earned the title of hero, without the need to inflate the ranks with random people every time a tragedy has occurred. Think for a moment of the Marines who fought in the Pacific Theater during WWII. Those that landed on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Most of these men did not want to be there, they knew going in that their odds stank and many got to see bodies stack up all around them yet most still charged forward to what must have seemed certain deaths. That earns you the right to be called a hero. In countless battles by many different forces, there are examples of those who have exposed themselves to heavy fire in effort to save a someone else, they have earned the rights to be called a hero.
The person who catches a bad break and has their office building fall down upon them, their car crushed by a tractor trailer, or their bus explode on them are indeed people who have faced tragedy, but that in itself does not a hero make.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey 100 lbs per car, that should almost enough to offset the extra weight caused by overweight Americans sitting inside the car! No more low carb for me, pass the Twinkies.
You make a good point about the structure of the units being important. In my experience as a US Marine I have found that the traditional organizational structure has been dictated by the chain of command. While lines of communication exist amongst parallel units there use is not encouraged. There is a though, fostered by those in command, that they are the wise men and should make the decisions, hence you should provide the data to them and they will send down what they feel you need to know.
As you might be able to imagine this causes several problems. The largest of these is the man (I say man because I served in an infantry battalion and women are not allowed to serve in such units, I do not recall any women in the Regimental organizational unit above us even though they were primarily a rear echelon group, circa early 1990s) at the top. Remember that this person generally has little or no experience in distributing information in any meaningful way, they are often not comfortable with technology and due to antiquated ideas of the traditional chain of command seem to feel that it is the job of subordinate units to provide information, whereas those at top do not seem the need to push data back down the chain. Or when they do decide to give data it is often colored or screwed to support only the version of reality that has the official stamp of approval.
Tradition dies hard in the military, but the inability to really communicate well continues to be a weakness that should have been removed along time ago. Admittedly this is not an easy task, but I sincerely believe that it is possible. As a whole our combat units will need to work on identifying those in their ranks that have developed a feel for handling data and identifying information of value within that data (preferable under a fair amount of stress) and nurture these skills and then get these people in the primary information flows and truly incentives them to work with parallel units as much or more then they do with upper echelon personnel.
Also it is a mistake to depend a fully as they do on live-time information. The description of units unable to get important maps and photos of towns that they are approaching is disturbing. It does not seem that it would have taken that much storage space to have several members of a combat unit to store maps of all likely targets on the road to Baghdad. I do not buy the answer that this would have been a security risk, everyone in the world knew are troops were coming, and if you happened to be in the vague path from Kuwait to Baghdad you were likely going to have a bad day. If they would have had the basic information with them already the inability to gain the up to the minute data would not have been such a blow. Also if your on hand maps were in an electronic data format it would not have been that difficult to devise a means of having any updated intelligence to download be only overlays that could be applied to their existing maps, which would cut down on bandwidth requirements significantly, and as an added bonus enhanced security, because if you are only transmitting an overlay it is of little value if it is intercepted by someone who does not have the baseline information to apply it to.
And don't forget their outstanding cat walking service...
Well as with all things, exception can be made, take for instance that rumbling noise that is being made by those who want to modify the constitution so that Mr. Schwarzenegger would be eligible to be elected President of the United States.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20041008.html
Now weather anything actually comes of this who knows, but under the right circumstances I would not be shocked to be looking at a whole new shooting match in the upcoming years.
Man, I do not know if this is simply a diffrence in time (I am an old cout, by this boards standards), or in service (when I served I was in the Marine Corps), but I do not remember having the options for niceites like PS2 when I deployed to (insert nasty location here).
Heck, I remember I was one of the high speed low drag guys because I packed a battary (AA) powered electric shaver...
While I agree that this is a good idea, it is not a complete solution. Imagine if you will, as you are approaching the Holidays getting ready to put the finishing touches on your killer term paper, and poof your laptop is gone.
Flash forward to your friendly neighborhood insurance agent office, filling out your claim for your uber cool $3k laptop, they may well cut you a check, but I doubt they will provide you with the 20 pages of history term paper that you have already pounded out.
Hint, when backing up your work, start thinking multiple physical locations.... But then again what is an education without having to re-write a paper or two, so on second thought forget the backups and go have some fun....8)
The idea that a battery in a cell phone poses a considerable danger because of the current draw when receiving/answering/making a call seems rather odd to me. Last time that I checked most trips to gas stations are made in automobiles that have much larger, much more powerful batteries than any cell phone that I have ever seen (If you do not believe me go out to you automobile and look around, you will probably find it under the hood).
After arriving at the gas station and spending a boat load of money to fill-up your monster SUV, most people will take their lives into their own hands and start their vehicles, think of the current draw from the batteries, what if something sparks. Obviously we should all make a point of pushing our autos at least a quarter mile down the road before we take a chance of actually starting them.
Commercial software offerings are not exactly a shining beacon of quality documentation. I will admit that for many companies, things have gotten better in the last few years, but I frequently receive software that has incomplete and often factually wrong descriptions of their own installation process.
Even major companies with large budgets and full "tech support" staffs are often completely unprepared to handle basic issues with any level of constancy. Just last week I had the Compaq/HP tech staff stumped on why their SAN Array configuration software was not behaving as it should (according to the documentation), luckily I hot upon someone on a community tech board who had suggestions that helped me resolve my issue.
Just because the support that is available does not have the look and feel of that you are used to (30 - 60 minutes of easy listening music and a demand for a credit card) it does not mean that it does not exist. While finding answers through "non-traditional" channels is far from a guarantee of success, I have often been pleasantly surprised by its quality and thoroughness, and in most cases would gladly pit the two against each other.
Considering that Google has been rather upfront with their intentions of searching the email that is sitting in your inbox. Would it be that much of a stretch to think that they would look at attachments that are received and compare them to other matches sitting in other gmail accounts, and when it finds matches, simply make a link to a master file. With a large enough user group I am sure that there will be tens of thousands of common files (weather they be tax forms in pdf, or an Areosmith song in mp3). By only linking to a master file.
If your search and index process are fast enough you can save significant amount of space.
True, 14 days in not exactly record shattering, but it is a laptop. I cannot recall the last time that I bothered keeping my laptop up and running for more than a few days at a shot. If you are using it as a mobile workstation, not a server, 14 days should be fine for most people.
Remeber, it is leap year, we have 365 other days this year...
What?!?
I didn't get any vaseline.
Well, this is an urban legend, but as many urban legends it is lacking in accuracy. I think snopes provides a nice summary.
a sp
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.
Back when I dealt with a large number of windows machines I held to the notion of running patches our test network immediately, if that went for a day without noticly blowing up I would start installing on a select number of low priority boxes in IT and a few brave soles that worked closely with us. Then after another two days of observation (and a lot of reading to see if anyone else has had significant problems) then we would start a blitz on the whole of the network.
It appears to come up on my office Windows 2000 Pro box. Go figure.
Historically Unix has not been about open standards, it has been about petty differences and silly squabbling. It is hard to imagine a more fragmented market, with each competitor doing their own thing, often for no apparent reason other than being different then the rest of the crowd.
You make a good point. And honestly I have nothing against the scientist in Britain, my early comment was a intended as humor (or humour, if you prefer), but either people are just a little overly sensitive, or I need to be sure to put ascii smiley faces on post intended to bring levity.
Wait a second, didnâ(TM)t British scientist also tell us that Iraq had huge stockpiles of WMD, which pose an immediate threat to both the UK and the US?
I also experimented with the University of Phoenix. I was disappointed with the poor feedback that I received from the professor. The assignments due in the final week made up over 50% of the course grade, and I received no feedback whatsoever on the assignment. While I am happy with the grade that I received, for the $1,266 that I paid for the course, I simply expected more.
What really bothered me is that the school has billed my credit card for over $3,000 in billing mistakes. While they have refunded all this money, I have spent more time on the phone with them then I care to think about.
At the moment I am looking for other options.
While odomoter fraud is a real issue, if someone is willing to take the chance at getting caught at this (admitidly it is not a great riak), why not just remove the GPS device and leaving it attached to your riding lawn mower while you are out in your car racking up the big miles?
They have no apparent advantage over a bicycle for the vast majority of people. Especially when you take cost into consideration.
Well Oracle may opt to disagree with you. All you have to do is go to their home page [no link, if you can not find it you need help]. They are pushing running Oracle on Linux in a big way. When it comes to corporate databases there is Oracle and a bunch of companies that no one cares about.
Or if you would like another example, how about the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). This is a Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used by the FAA to handle flow control, redirecting traffic around severe weather and other fun things along those lines. Currently the system is running mostly on HP-UX servers. But people have realized that they are paying far to much for what they get, so they have started replacing these HP Servers with cheap Intel boxes running Red Hat. No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with. [The FAA pays for 4 hour response time on the HP machines and I can not recall a single instance in the last two years that HP has made the time slot at any site in the nation, occasionally taking MULTIPLE DAYS]. With the cheaper boxes you can simple keep extra spares lying around and swap out as needed, still saving large amounts of money.
Sure SUN can take the lion's share of the really big boxes, but there is not enough demand to justify a company anywhere near SUN's current size. And even that will not go uncontested, IBM wants their share of that market so does HP. But if that is all that is left for SUN, they will starve to death.
Although I wish them the best, I do agree that they need to do something and do it quickly.
Your argument is weak. I do not care about the principles or reasons why our government [or for that matter any other government] makes for the war. Government policy is not why men fight wars, and your assumption that it is tells me that you have never been in the infantry or you would now better.
The reason that a solider fights is for the men that he serves with. Americans do not have a monopoly on bravery, there are plenty of examples from nations all around the globe. By the same note most people who served in any battle are not heroes, it is those who stepped forward in the face of immediate overwhelming odds that are heroes.
Alexander Fleming either through brilliance or dumb luck is credited with discovering Penicillin. Should the world be greatful for his efforts? Of course we should [although the over use of antibiotics will likely be a kick in the crotch, but that is another story]. But the processes of this discovery is not a demonstration of extreme courage, which is the definition that I apply to the term hero.
So I stand by my statement that riding a rocket ship into orbit does not make the cut for heroes. I am sure that it is a hell of a ride, and if given the opportunity to make it I would go without thinking twice, but I am no hero.
A tragic event that did have a hero is Air Florida flight 90 which crashed into the Potomac River shortly after taking off from National Airport (DCA) on January 13, 1982. Six survivors got off the plane. Rescue crews approached one of them, but he refused to be pulled out of the near freezing river. Instead he opted to go aide the other survivors, due in part to his actions the other five survived this ordeal, but this display of heroism cost this man his life.
Can you honestly tell me that the actions of the crew of the Columbia place them on the same tier as the aforementioned passenger?
"HEROES" you must be kidding. This people are not heroes, I have seen this reference far to many times in the last few days. Does it stink for the people who died? Yes, also for their families and friends. But just because you happen to catch a bad break in a very public location is not an automatic ticket to the exulted status of hero.
The United States of America has collected its fair share of those who have justifiable earned the title of hero, without the need to inflate the ranks with random people every time a tragedy has occurred. Think for a moment of the Marines who fought in the Pacific Theater during WWII. Those that landed on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Most of these men did not want to be there, they knew going in that their odds stank and many got to see bodies stack up all around them yet most still charged forward to what must have seemed certain deaths. That earns you the right to be called a hero. In countless battles by many different forces, there are examples of those who have exposed themselves to heavy fire in effort to save a someone else, they have earned the rights to be called a hero.
The person who catches a bad break and has their office building fall down upon them, their car crushed by a tractor trailer, or their bus explode on them are indeed people who have faced tragedy, but that in itself does not a hero make.
Then again I thought that the Micheal Vick was full of it when he predicted that he was going into Lambeau Field in January and beat the Packers.
Now I still do not think that we are going to see the end to Moore's Law in the near future. But as I have stated, I have been wrong before.