I am not going to make any clever comment either about the difference of hosting vs tracking or any clever comment about the jurisdiction limits of country X against citizens of country Y.
Capital, money, power, oppression, violence, lethal viruses, data, information, DNA, encryption keys and hashes have no country because they belong to God.
This is about the real meaning of the primordial sin: You should not know, touch, consume or desire what God does. Repent as long you still have a soul, preferably before committing the sin, because desire is the real sin and God knows your desires.
Noone will be spared. Everybody is guilty in the eyes of God, even when proven mentally incapable or having a clever lawyer. And no, I will not make any clever comment about the difference between God and His Holy Church.
1. Opening MS Word or Excel in a Virtual Machine is at least 2x faster than opening it in the host.
2. Software size more than doubles every 18 months. Examples include last year's Roxio Creator installation DVD that sized 2.2 GB (just to burn the occasional CD or DVD!) or HP printer/scanner driver CDs, which include 100x the required stuff to operate your peripheral.
3. MS Operating systems. If you know where to search, you can find reduced size Windows XP, Vista and 7 at 1/5th to 1/10th of the original, all perfectly working and at least 2x faster than the original.
Do you know any one in the software industry that cares about improving the speed of every day (and commercial) computing? To me, they only care about adding "new" (mostly useless) features that often break compatibility and force the migration to the new version.
Call me an old school fart, or a Luddite, but I often think for me if it's not printed, it does not exist. Examples:
a) My daily to-do list. I cannot trust my PC for holding my appointments and errand lists. Moreover, when I'm on the move in the building, I cannot have my calendar with me. I cannot easily mirror my calendar on my smartphone, and I also tend to forget it behind during my trips. So the only solution that works is a printed calendar, which is bulky and easily lost, so the ideal solution is just a sheet of paper, handwritten or printed.
b) I have hundreds of research papers or pdf books that I can't seem to find the time to read. If I print them, they pile on my desk and their chances of being read increase a hundredfold.
c) Important emails and documents have to be printed so they stay on top of the pile of papers on my desk, or get into my bag when I go home. Otherwise they get buried to the point they are not important any more.
To summarise, my point of view is that for important tasks, the crucial information, if in digital form, gets buried under the tons of digital noise in my PC. IT is not suitable for critical tasks, at least for me. If I don't see in print, it can wait, and until it gets printed, it's just an avatar of the real necessity.
I have no obsession with non-angel white virgin paper - gray paper like the one used by the administration in Germany will do. So the answer for me is decentralised, small and efficient paper recycling facilities, that produce paper for the paper-hungry sectors, like education, administration etc.
1. There's a large industrial and scientific base using floppies because they rely on non-upgradeable DOS, Win 3.x, Win9x and WinXP proprietary/custom software and custom hardware combination. Many of them still use ISA bus motherboards and this is why there is a thriving market for ISA bus equipped so-called "industrial" motherboards.
2. USB sticks are so small they are easily lost, misplaced and mixed up with your colleagues'/coworkers' identical ones.
3. USB sticks are so small that one cannot adequately label them. Therefore it's hard to base a comprehensive versioning, roll-back or complete backup strategy (e.g. rotating grandfather-father-son strategies) on USB sticks.
4. Most current USB sticks don't have a write-protect switch and thus are an easy target for viruses, trojans and rootkits when inserted in a random PC. Many of my colleagues' and students' sticks get infected when they go to service bureaus or their friends to print decent color copies of their work. In turn these sticks infect their own desktops, laptops, even their colleagues' PCs, in case these are inadequately protected.
5. As a previous commenter said, USB sticks are not give-away friendly. Last January I searched the whole local market for 32/64/128 MB and cheap (under say 2-3 euros) USB sticks in order to provide my 16 students (which still didn't have email accounts) some Excel templates and teaching notes. In addition, the students would use the same stick during the semester to collect the experimental data from their labwork. The cheapest stick I could find was 7 euros, requiring a total budget of 112, which I can't afford. Giving away CDs (700 MB) for 1 MB of data for me is a perversion and an overkill, and since the lab PCs are not equipped with CD-R drives I cannot reuse them for multisession writing either.
I could go on and on an on. Just think: Have you ever seen any new desktop motherboard, from any manufacturer, not featuring a floppy connector? What does this fact tell you?
I concur to the already mentioned opinion that the Floppy-to-USB converter market will soon thrive.
Interesting effort. However I don't see any user model behind it - and in fact economics are a good way to get rid of human models since the process of using average economic behaviour actually marginalises all the unknown parameters that normally should be taken into account for each individual.
Users' perception of risk, to which the paper devotes only a small paragraph, is to me of paramount importance. For example, personally, I will decide to more security measures under only either of the two conditions:
1. If I already have had a security accident incident in the past (or if a friend/family/colleague of mine had one).
2. If the perceived by me risk of a particular attack is considered as "high".
Both these are purely experiential factors. Advice from webpages of magazines or my firm's list of security measures are irrelevant to me because I consider their probability of occurring low. But when an accident happens near me, it will raise my perceived probability of the specific threat, and force me to take precautions.
Therefore, the above two factors increase the (subjective) probability of attacks and thus then and only then become motives for me to educate myself (or convince my friends/family/colleagues that they should listen to me).
In conclusion, in my humble opinion, users' conceptions of PROBABILITY is the primary factor that should be researched and taken into account when trying to approach security-related user behaviour.
Anybody familiar with the pioneering (and Nobel prize-worthty) 30-year old work of Tversky & Kahnemann will find an abundance of well-established research results that will enable them and guide them to conduct research and publish at least 20 papers on users' (mis)perception of IT security and formulate highly predictive user models based on users' fallacies regarding the evaluation of probability.
I am giving away this tip for free, since IT security is not my field. I just kindly ask future authors to acknowledge the source of the idea.
In my third-world country (Greece) as well as in other states in Europe (e.g. Italy), the main trend since 20 years is to replace state workers in Universities, secondary schools, Municipalities and most other public sectors with the so-called fixed-term part-time workers. They are much cheaper, they get no additional or pension benefits and are as obedient as slaves because they are expendable - there are legions of them waiting in line eager to replace them.
Everybody accepted and still accepts to work under these terms, signing 19th century - style sweatshop contracts, with no real health or pension insurance and total insecurity, in the hope that someday (usually just before general elections), a law might pass allowing them to become permanent state workers.
Most of them actually are equally or more qualified than the respective permanent state co-workers - most have post-graduate degree and a significant percentage holds a PhD. Competition for these positions is so fierce that everybody strives for post-graduate studies.
However, the majority of them are living on 8-month or less contracts which are continually renewed, even when the recent (2004) state law strictly forbids them being employed in the same place for more than 24 months. There were even cases of people signing [b]daily[/b] contracts that started at 8am and finish at 4pm [b]every day[/b], 24/7/365.
The problem is so grave that in 1999 the EU issued the Council Directive 97/81/EC for the protection of part-time workers, which is still largely ignored by local governments who pass legislations that might seem legal but in reality severely distort the directive's intent. The Directive states that no-one in the public or the private sector should work under short-term contracts for more than 2 years when actually he is fulfilling a permanent and perpetual need of the employer.
It is estimated that at least 15-20% of the workforce in Greece (and to a lesser extent in Italy) lives on such contracts. They are fire-fighters, hospital nurses, ambulance drivers, school guards/guides, state building cleaners, administrative staff in public services, even teachers in state Universities, you name it. The "lowly" jobs are done usually via contractor firms, that borrow and lend the same people to the same institutions year after year.
For example, the cleaning ladies, guards, gardeners, receptionists in our University are the same 15-20 years now, just under a different contractor each year, the one placing the lowest bid. You can understand what that means for their salaries and benefits. Since this is./, the majority of our central IT and computung facilities developer, helpdesk and support staff are also under (illegally) recurring short-term contracts (no contractor firms though - yet).
Most of these short-term workers managed to live a life and make a family (not me), even have kids and are really living on the thin edge of the wedge, making frequent public protests and asking for more permanent and fair terms of work. Personally, I "work" in a major state University under these terms since 1991, together with several hundreds of colleagues in the same situation. Currently, until new contracts appear in a few months, I'm living on 5 euros per day. Hope never dies.
The EU Directive attempted to prevent what I see coming to you in the US, that is, the exploitation of part-time workers. The state thinks that by bypassing the Big Contractor Firms they'll do their job much cheaper, and they're damn right.
I hope your labor Unions over there are well aware of the pending dangers of this within-county outsourcing of state jobs. In the worst case scenario, the public sector will collapse (as is the case here), because no-one will be really willing to commit to his state work duties like a permanent state worker does (who usually works under oath, at least in Greece). All our public sector suffers from the indifference of both permanent worker
Being an owner of an S-IPS NEC 26" panel, and after having paid 3x the price of a "normal" monitor (plus shipping from Germany), I can attest that less than 2% of my colleagues/friends (even computer shop owners) know what an IPS panel is. They think I am a NEC fanboi.
And what does "better" in your context mean, when you cannot put side-to-side an Apple and a non-Apple device/computer/appliance and see for yourself, or interpret screen quality measurements?
It's all apples and oranges - oranges are just cheaper apples without the fairy dust.
IMHO an excellent introduction to genres and standards in each genre (which is very different from commercial radio playlists) is AOL Radio (http://music.aol.com/radioguide/bb), powered by CBS radio. It features more channels (genres) that you'd ever be interested to, and at least with regard to my fields of interest (Jazz Fusion, Progressive Rock, Ambient and Classic Rock) they are doing a hell of a job. While I specialise in these genres for some 35 years, I keep discovering new stuff.
They are currently trying to limit accessibility outside US using geolocation, but they're (thankfully still) doing it wrong (read recent Winamp support forum posts for a workaround).
The best in AOL radio is:
a) It's (still) completely subscription/registration-free. I'd never register to Last.fm - I want nobody to know what I'm listening to and profit from it.
b) It features minimal advertisement.
c) The song rotation model is optimal - there is some repetition from day to day, but it's songs you never get tired listening to.
d) Talking as an ex-amateur real radio producer, I couldn't have done it better myself if I were to introduce these genres to a general audience.
If they totally block access outside US using firewalls, I will seriously consider protests and petition models to bring it back.
According to a recent Globalpost article (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100225/silicon-sweatshops-apple), at least 62 workers are sick from toxic chemical exposure while handling hexane, which is used to clean the TFT screens used in Apple (and Nokia) products.
If Apple makes efforts to circumvent the Westerners' ethical problem of child labor, shouldn't they make hundredfold efforts to ensure that proper safety precautions are used in these factories?
Those of you that are computer scientists should take a moment to consider that randomness is not the same as uniformity (as an insightful reader commented in TFA and triggered me to respond there).
Just because the only way to produce an algorithm for uniformity is via a random number generator, this does not mean that there aren't other non-statistical approaches. Here's one:
"The computer upon Windows installation contacts a MS site that uses a global installation counter - each new installation would increase the counter from N to (N+1) and then present a browser order according to (N modulo 5!). This is a totally deterministic process, with no randomness at all (statistical tests for randomness would fail because of the autocorrelation), which however would lead to perfect uniformity: at any given time instant, each browser would have been placed in each of the 5 positions with a percentage of precisely 20%, as required. The same kind of uniformity could be produced by using the installation serial number (licence) of Windows: since the licence key space is well-defined, the order of browsers could be also well (uniformly) defined from the serial number itself. There might be a problem with volume licences, but VLKs are a small percentage of total installations.
However, on a single offline computer, with no knowledge of history (what ballot was presented globally) or without a licence key, programmers have to resort to mathematics in order to produce uniform (not necessarily random) distributions. This is an application of the law of large numbers: if the ballot is uniform on the same computer, it will be uniform globally." (using quotes because I'm quoting myself).
In conclusion, we should not care if the distribution is not "random" but whether it is uniform (i.e. all possible permutations of 5 browsers appear with equal frequencies).
My intention was not to complain about WD not disclosing the information, but about editors/bloggers providing _only_ speed benchmarks. This is clearly misleading buyers, giving the impression that "the fastest is always the best".
IIRC, there is a handful of hardware sites that use HDD benchmarks that are much more meaningful, measuring noise (a partial answer to my point #1), temperatures when idle and under stress (point #2) and video-editing specific performance (point #3). Until I see such data, I'd be very hesitant to trust my data on a brand new technology like WD's new format and therefore I'll stick with the old one. Am I wrong?
I can't grasp why all (these specific and most) benchmarks are so much obsessed with speed. Regarding HDs, I'd like to see results relevant to:
1. Number of Read/Write operations per task: Does the new format result in fewer head movements, therefore less wear on the hardware, thus increasing HD's life expectancy and MTBF?
2. Energy efficiency: Does the new format have lower power consumption, leading to lower operating temperature and better laptop/netbook battery autonomy?
3. Are there differences in sustained read/write performance? E.g. is the new format more suitable for video editing than the old one?
For me, the first issue is the more important than all, given that owning huge 2T disks is in fact like playing Russian roulette: without proper backup strategies, you risk all your data at once.
After reading all the comments it emerged to me that I'm not much different from this project's aims.
I am synthetic form of life, made by my mom and dad (who btw did not plan having me, and who are not alive to benefit from my existence). I have a long-term kill switch embedded my DNA and several not-immediately-lethal switches embedded in my food, my environment, my education, my society, my government and my money.
You might argue that I am a 'human' and a 'citizen', I have freedoms and human rights and constitutions and laws protecting me (from what? the kill switches?), but these do not have any effect on my kill switches.
I should be glad they are trying to replicate me, I have no brothers or sisters.
"Big or not so big" corporations have always killed, directly or indirectly. It's thermodynamics, you can't make capital out of thin air.
The degree of "killing" varies, from physical death to genetic damage to poverty and famine to exploitation of the workers. The distance between "killing" and "harm" is not that large.
Google, in this or a future reincarnation will eventually invent a new kind of "killing" which now may not be obvious, because it would not necessarily involve financial capital. Capital is a means and not an end. Means for what, you may ask. Hint: there are other capitals too - freedom, privacy, information, thought, belief, emotion.
Big or small corporations should NOT participate in any kind of local or global "discussion" because precisely such participation makes them even bigger.
Just imagine you are the head of the tech dept in that hospital. Given the prices of all medical grade stuff, if the guy charged say $200, you'd think that he just plugged in a consumer HD. If he asked for $1000 you'd suppose he used a non-genuine or even used HD. With $6000 you can't think of anything - you just trust the man with the additional benefit in case of a court trial (assuming that e.g. the PC caused a patient death) you'd say that you did all that was humanly possible to make sure that no consumer grade, used or non-genuine parts were used on that PC.
+1 Insightful - I wonder why this was not the topic of the first comment.
I don't want to sound pessimistic or paranoid, but from the signs so far I firmly believe that soon the use of encryption will be reason enough for any obscure organisation to raid my house/office/computer.
This is the main reason I do not practice or even consider any kind of encryption. After 20+ years of being online, I think that any sudden change of online behaviour from my static IP will raise a flag on this or another continent. Therefore, I prefer obscurity through transparency: I take special care everyday to visit xxx sites, check new conspiracy theories, visit celeb and gov sites etc like any normal curious person. However I avoid the googleplex, facebook and all permanent records of any personal details on social networks.
Yes, I know about proxies, anonymizers, Tor etc, but I consider these as the orange flags because using them also can be interpreted as changes of online behaviour. There is no escape.
I think you have hit an important issue here - one of the paradoxes of the modern way of doing science. In the past centuries, a significant or a breakthrough result had to be reproduced in all major research labs of the globe and the journals were more than happy to publish such validation studies. A corpus of such publications was necessary and sufficient to establish what we call a "scientific paradigm" or a "theory". Nowadays, if a respected research establishment declares a new "phenomenon", all the rest will certainly try to replicate, but the replication studies do not really interest the journals. Therefore all we see is a pile of papers all citing the "grand parent" paper which has first expressed the grand truth. Journals coordinate the game of credits and citations, their only dream being to cry "First!!!111" in each case they sense that might make the headlines of science blogs.
You'd think that this situation would be much more aggravated in research areas where you cannot actually replicate the phenomena. However, in e.g. astronomy, you have often the case of a single set of supernova explosion data and hundreds of papers analyzing it. Papers get published because it's both interesting and valuable, since we won't see such a supernova in a 100 years and most importantly because there is no political/economical agenda involved, just simple speculations on how the universe works.
Now, climate studies are a different beast. There are literally floods of data (not always relevant or significant) and both political and economical agendas. It's clearly a war and I guess no journal would ever consider to either pour oil on it or publish the view of a minority. The show must and will go on, heads must and will fall and lonely (non-PhD holder) scientists will again get burned on the bonfire of political correctness.
If the level of water in the funnel rises due to AGT (Anthropogenic Global Tampering), the water outflow will simply increase, and the water level in the funnel will rise a bit as the system reaches a new dynamic equilibrium. The water will overflow only at large AGT levels. This system is very deterministic and predictable.
If the mathematics of global warming were that simple, there would be no global debates. Unfortunately for us non-climate scientists, we are condemned to live in a State of Fear.
On the contrary, I am not envious at all of modern day kids. They may have all the information at their fingertips, but are lost in overinformation and there is no cure from that.
Just assume you are a teacher and that you want to assign students (elementary, primary, secondary, tertiary students, adults, it makes no difference) to compose something, like e.g. a short biography of Feynman or to design a one-hour science lesson using demonstration experiments, or to provide a 3-page summary of a book or any of the old-school type assignments. Students will definitely be lost in the data Matrix and either a) produce a vague copy of Wikipedia or b) copy each other's work or c) purchase/copy earlier work or d) produce inadequate work.
In our days, we had to look up our encyclopedia or our mates' books, visit the library or even ask our neighbors or other teachers for advice. This process taught us not only to research stuff, but also communication skills and most of all the differences between data and information, trusted and untrusted sources, which are the toughest things to teach (and very unlikely to be pursued by STEM).
After all, is Wikipedia trustworthy? Or, is there an authoritative estimate of the percentage of accurate information in the internets?
You (and many other commenters) seem to ignore that Microsoft's money is ultimately also tax-paying citizen's money. It's just not 'tax money' but the so-called 'income'.
I fail to see any difference between these two kinds of money. No further comments.
I admit I read TFA in a hurry, but I think I didn't see any mention of the decoder used or the driver/sound codec combination. These factors are critical for any listening test. Specifically, I'd like to know:
a) Did the soundcard/drivers used upsample 44.1 kHz to 48 KHz or not? Usually resampling is the norm with either Creative or with cheapo codecs/driver combinations. I never used Vista, but from what I've read, few people know precisely what happens at the OS lever regarding bit-accurate audio playback.
b) Was a garden variety mp3 decoder used, or a high-end one like libmad or MAD Winamp Plugin v.0.2b (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=60454) supporting 24/32-bit output, sophisticated dithering etc?
If the answer to a) is 'no' and the answer to b) is 'yes', then according to my experience, I find the results very reasonable, mp3 can indeed sound better than plain old CD 16/44.1 or lossless formats.
Half of my lifetime is dedicated to listening to music, as well as a significant percentage of my income is spent on LPs, CDs and audio-centered equipment. I can say with certainty that I do not envy today's teenagers that can have it all "for free". In my humble opinion, TFA expresses emotional and pseudo-economical musings, without addressing the key philosophical (and political) issues:
1. What is today (and what was in the past) the relation between quality and quantity? How is society, especially the young ones, to discriminate between trash and masterpieces of music (or books, movies, art, knowledge, "information", at that matter)?
2. Can there be value without scarcity? Can there be wisdom without suffering? If the author had that abundance of free choice when he was growing up, would he be the same person he is today?
3. Isn't the highlighted quote "there's no longer any past - just an endless present" the most frightening of all, signaling the end of history, the end of capitalism and the end of the world as we know it?
The key question today is whether and how an individual can survive the over abundance of "free" without alienating himself. Humanity has changed irreversibly thanks to the Internet and IT, making knowledge accessible to all (mostly for free), but is this really a good thing (TM)? Does free access to libraries make society better? Does (free) radio educate listener's ears? Do free books at school make better students? Or free grades?
I am not a luddite, nor a posthuman condition evangelist, but I firmly believe that Education must reform itself drastically to equip pupils with tools for learning to navigate through and past noise, against thermal death due to overinformation, fostering individual diversity and creativity against consumerism (especially the consumerism of free stuff). Otherwise "there will be no future, just an endless present".
Slashdot Mirror
I am not going to make any clever comment either about the difference of hosting vs tracking or any clever comment about the jurisdiction limits of country X against citizens of country Y.
Capital, money, power, oppression, violence, lethal viruses, data, information, DNA, encryption keys and hashes have no country because they belong to God.
This is about the real meaning of the primordial sin: You should not know, touch, consume or desire what God does. Repent as long you still have a soul, preferably before committing the sin, because desire is the real sin and God knows your desires.
Noone will be spared. Everybody is guilty in the eyes of God, even when proven mentally incapable or having a clever lawyer. And no, I will not make any clever comment about the difference between God and His Holy Church.
You have been warned.
I'd mod you +5 'insightful'. Some examples:
1. Opening MS Word or Excel in a Virtual Machine is at least 2x faster than opening it in the host.
2. Software size more than doubles every 18 months. Examples include last year's Roxio Creator installation DVD that sized 2.2 GB (just to burn the occasional CD or DVD!) or HP printer/scanner driver CDs, which include 100x the required stuff to operate your peripheral.
3. MS Operating systems. If you know where to search, you can find reduced size Windows XP, Vista and 7 at 1/5th to 1/10th of the original, all perfectly working and at least 2x faster than the original.
Do you know any one in the software industry that cares about improving the speed of every day (and commercial) computing? To me, they only care about adding "new" (mostly useless) features that often break compatibility and force the migration to the new version.
Better search for "external floppy", e.g. Sabrent 1.44MB External USB 2X Floppy Disk Drive $19.99 on Tigerdirect:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1489134&CatId=287
Call me an old school fart, or a Luddite, but I often think for me if it's not printed, it does not exist. Examples:
a) My daily to-do list. I cannot trust my PC for holding my appointments and errand lists. Moreover, when I'm on the move in the building, I cannot have my calendar with me. I cannot easily mirror my calendar on my smartphone, and I also tend to forget it behind during my trips. So the only solution that works is a printed calendar, which is bulky and easily lost, so the ideal solution is just a sheet of paper, handwritten or printed.
b) I have hundreds of research papers or pdf books that I can't seem to find the time to read. If I print them, they pile on my desk and their chances of being read increase a hundredfold.
c) Important emails and documents have to be printed so they stay on top of the pile of papers on my desk, or get into my bag when I go home. Otherwise they get buried to the point they are not important any more.
To summarise, my point of view is that for important tasks, the crucial information, if in digital form, gets buried under the tons of digital noise in my PC. IT is not suitable for critical tasks, at least for me. If I don't see in print, it can wait, and until it gets printed, it's just an avatar of the real necessity.
I have no obsession with non-angel white virgin paper - gray paper like the one used by the administration in Germany will do. So the answer for me is decentralised, small and efficient paper recycling facilities, that produce paper for the paper-hungry sectors, like education, administration etc.
Some of many more reasons:
1. There's a large industrial and scientific base using floppies because they rely on non-upgradeable DOS, Win 3.x, Win9x and WinXP proprietary/custom software and custom hardware combination. Many of them still use ISA bus motherboards and this is why there is a thriving market for ISA bus equipped so-called "industrial" motherboards.
2. USB sticks are so small they are easily lost, misplaced and mixed up with your colleagues'/coworkers' identical ones.
3. USB sticks are so small that one cannot adequately label them. Therefore it's hard to base a comprehensive versioning, roll-back or complete backup strategy (e.g. rotating grandfather-father-son strategies) on USB sticks.
4. Most current USB sticks don't have a write-protect switch and thus are an easy target for viruses, trojans and rootkits when inserted in a random PC. Many of my colleagues' and students' sticks get infected when they go to service bureaus or their friends to print decent color copies of their work. In turn these sticks infect their own desktops, laptops, even their colleagues' PCs, in case these are inadequately protected.
5. As a previous commenter said, USB sticks are not give-away friendly. Last January I searched the whole local market for 32/64/128 MB and cheap (under say 2-3 euros) USB sticks in order to provide my 16 students (which still didn't have email accounts) some Excel templates and teaching notes. In addition, the students would use the same stick during the semester to collect the experimental data from their labwork. The cheapest stick I could find was 7 euros, requiring a total budget of 112, which I can't afford. Giving away CDs (700 MB) for 1 MB of data for me is a perversion and an overkill, and since the lab PCs are not equipped with CD-R drives I cannot reuse them for multisession writing either.
I could go on and on an on. Just think: Have you ever seen any new desktop motherboard, from any manufacturer, not featuring a floppy connector? What does this fact tell you?
I concur to the already mentioned opinion that the Floppy-to-USB converter market will soon thrive.
Listening to Hawking speaking as if this has never happened before, I am now 120% sure it already has happened in the past.
All the above /. discussion concerns the reasons why they left.
The REAL question is whether and how precisely they intervened in our evolution. Unfortunately a physicist cannot answer that.
Interesting effort. However I don't see any user model behind it - and in fact economics are a good way to get rid of human models since the process of using average economic behaviour actually marginalises all the unknown parameters that normally should be taken into account for each individual.
Users' perception of risk, to which the paper devotes only a small paragraph, is to me of paramount importance. For example, personally, I will decide to more security measures under only either of the two conditions:
1. If I already have had a security accident incident in the past (or if a friend/family/colleague of mine had one).
2. If the perceived by me risk of a particular attack is considered as "high".
Both these are purely experiential factors. Advice from webpages of magazines or my firm's list of security measures are irrelevant to me because I consider their probability of occurring low. But when an accident happens near me, it will raise my perceived probability of the specific threat, and force me to take precautions.
Therefore, the above two factors increase the (subjective) probability of attacks and thus then and only then become motives for me to educate myself (or convince my friends/family/colleagues that they should listen to me).
In conclusion, in my humble opinion, users' conceptions of PROBABILITY is the primary factor that should be researched and taken into account when trying to approach security-related user behaviour.
Anybody familiar with the pioneering (and Nobel prize-worthty) 30-year old work of Tversky & Kahnemann will find an abundance of well-established research results that will enable them and guide them to conduct research and publish at least 20 papers on users' (mis)perception of IT security and formulate highly predictive user models based on users' fallacies regarding the evaluation of probability.
I am giving away this tip for free, since IT security is not my field. I just kindly ask future authors to acknowledge the source of the idea.
"Temporary state worker" status is the Plague.
In my third-world country (Greece) as well as in other states in Europe (e.g. Italy), the main trend since 20 years is to replace state workers in Universities, secondary schools, Municipalities and most other public sectors with the so-called fixed-term part-time workers. They are much cheaper, they get no additional or pension benefits and are as obedient as slaves because they are expendable - there are legions of them waiting in line eager to replace them.
Everybody accepted and still accepts to work under these terms, signing 19th century - style sweatshop contracts, with no real health or pension insurance and total insecurity, in the hope that someday (usually just before general elections), a law might pass allowing them to become permanent state workers.
Most of them actually are equally or more qualified than the respective permanent state co-workers - most have post-graduate degree and a significant percentage holds a PhD. Competition for these positions is so fierce that everybody strives for post-graduate studies.
However, the majority of them are living on 8-month or less contracts which are continually renewed, even when the recent (2004) state law strictly forbids them being employed in the same place for more than 24 months. There were even cases of people signing [b]daily[/b] contracts that started at 8am and finish at 4pm [b]every day[/b], 24/7/365.
The problem is so grave that in 1999 the EU issued the Council Directive 97/81/EC for the protection of part-time workers, which is still largely ignored by local governments who pass legislations that might seem legal but in reality severely distort the directive's intent. The Directive states that no-one in the public or the private sector should work under short-term contracts for more than 2 years when actually he is fulfilling a permanent and perpetual need of the employer.
It is estimated that at least 15-20% of the workforce in Greece (and to a lesser extent in Italy) lives on such contracts. They are fire-fighters, hospital nurses, ambulance drivers, school guards/guides, state building cleaners, administrative staff in public services, even teachers in state Universities, you name it. The "lowly" jobs are done usually via contractor firms, that borrow and lend the same people to the same institutions year after year.
For example, the cleaning ladies, guards, gardeners, receptionists in our University are the same 15-20 years now, just under a different contractor each year, the one placing the lowest bid. You can understand what that means for their salaries and benefits. Since this is ./, the majority of our central IT and computung facilities developer, helpdesk and support staff are also under (illegally) recurring short-term contracts (no contractor firms though - yet).
Most of these short-term workers managed to live a life and make a family (not me), even have kids and are really living on the thin edge of the wedge, making frequent public protests and asking for more permanent and fair terms of work. Personally, I "work" in a major state University under these terms since 1991, together with several hundreds of colleagues in the same situation. Currently, until new contracts appear in a few months, I'm living on 5 euros per day. Hope never dies.
The EU Directive attempted to prevent what I see coming to you in the US, that is, the exploitation of part-time workers. The state thinks that by bypassing the Big Contractor Firms they'll do their job much cheaper, and they're damn right.
I hope your labor Unions over there are well aware of the pending dangers of this within-county outsourcing of state jobs. In the worst case scenario, the public sector will collapse (as is the case here), because no-one will be really willing to commit to his state work duties like a permanent state worker does (who usually works under oath, at least in Greece). All our public sector suffers from the indifference of both permanent worker
Being an owner of an S-IPS NEC 26" panel, and after having paid 3x the price of a "normal" monitor (plus shipping from Germany), I can attest that less than 2% of my colleagues/friends (even computer shop owners) know what an IPS panel is. They think I am a NEC fanboi.
And what does "better" in your context mean, when you cannot put side-to-side an Apple and a non-Apple device/computer/appliance and see for yourself, or interpret screen quality measurements?
It's all apples and oranges - oranges are just cheaper apples without the fairy dust.
IMHO an excellent introduction to genres and standards in each genre (which is very different from commercial radio playlists) is AOL Radio (http://music.aol.com/radioguide/bb), powered by CBS radio. It features more channels (genres) that you'd ever be interested to, and at least with regard to my fields of interest (Jazz Fusion, Progressive Rock, Ambient and Classic Rock) they are doing a hell of a job. While I specialise in these genres for some 35 years, I keep discovering new stuff.
They are currently trying to limit accessibility outside US using geolocation, but they're (thankfully still) doing it wrong (read recent Winamp support forum posts for a workaround).
The best in AOL radio is:
a) It's (still) completely subscription/registration-free. I'd never register to Last.fm - I want nobody to know what I'm listening to and profit from it.
b) It features minimal advertisement.
c) The song rotation model is optimal - there is some repetition from day to day, but it's songs you never get tired listening to.
d) Talking as an ex-amateur real radio producer, I couldn't have done it better myself if I were to introduce these genres to a general audience.
If they totally block access outside US using firewalls, I will seriously consider protests and petition models to bring it back.
According to a recent Globalpost article (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100225/silicon-sweatshops-apple), at least 62 workers are sick from toxic chemical exposure while handling hexane, which is used to clean the TFT screens used in Apple (and Nokia) products.
If Apple makes efforts to circumvent the Westerners' ethical problem of child labor, shouldn't they make hundredfold efforts to ensure that proper safety precautions are used in these factories?
Those of you that are computer scientists should take a moment to consider that randomness is not the same as uniformity (as an insightful reader commented in TFA and triggered me to respond there).
Just because the only way to produce an algorithm for uniformity is via a random number generator, this does not mean that there aren't other non-statistical approaches. Here's one:
"The computer upon Windows installation contacts a MS site that uses a global installation counter - each new installation would increase the counter from N to (N+1) and then present a browser order according to (N modulo 5!). This is a totally deterministic process, with no randomness at all (statistical tests for randomness would fail because of the autocorrelation), which however would lead to perfect uniformity: at any given time instant, each browser would have been placed in each of the 5 positions with a percentage of precisely 20%, as required. The same kind of uniformity could be produced by using the installation serial number (licence) of Windows: since the licence key space is well-defined, the order of browsers could be also well (uniformly) defined from the serial number itself. There might be a problem with volume licences, but VLKs are a small percentage of total installations.
However, on a single offline computer, with no knowledge of history (what ballot was presented globally) or without a licence key, programmers have to resort to mathematics in order to produce
uniform (not necessarily random) distributions. This is an application of the law of large numbers: if the ballot is uniform on the same computer, it will be uniform globally." (using quotes because I'm quoting myself).
In conclusion, we should not care if the distribution is not "random" but whether it is uniform (i.e. all possible permutations of 5 browsers appear with equal frequencies).
It's not modulo 5, it's modulo 5! (the number of possible permutations of N items is N!=1.2.3...N)
Thanks for clarifying some issues.
My intention was not to complain about WD not disclosing the information, but about editors/bloggers providing _only_ speed benchmarks. This is clearly misleading buyers, giving the impression that "the fastest is always the best".
IIRC, there is a handful of hardware sites that use HDD benchmarks that are much more meaningful, measuring noise (a partial answer to my point #1), temperatures when idle and under stress (point #2) and video-editing specific performance (point #3). Until I see such data, I'd be very hesitant to trust my data on a brand new technology like WD's new format and therefore I'll stick with the old one. Am I wrong?
I can't grasp why all (these specific and most) benchmarks are so much obsessed with speed. Regarding HDs, I'd like to see results relevant to:
1. Number of Read/Write operations per task: Does the new format result in fewer head movements, therefore less wear on the hardware, thus increasing HD's life expectancy and MTBF?
2. Energy efficiency: Does the new format have lower power consumption, leading to lower operating temperature and better laptop/netbook battery autonomy?
3. Are there differences in sustained read/write performance? E.g. is the new format more suitable for video editing than the old one?
For me, the first issue is the more important than all, given that owning huge 2T disks is in fact like playing Russian roulette: without proper backup strategies, you risk all your data at once.
After reading all the comments it emerged to me that I'm not much different from this project's aims.
I am synthetic form of life, made by my mom and dad (who btw did not plan having me, and who are not alive to benefit from my existence). I have a long-term kill switch embedded my DNA and several not-immediately-lethal switches embedded in my food, my environment, my education, my society, my government and my money.
You might argue that I am a 'human' and a 'citizen', I have freedoms and human rights and constitutions and laws protecting me (from what? the kill switches?), but these do not have any effect on my kill switches.
I should be glad they are trying to replicate me, I have no brothers or sisters.
"Big or not so big" corporations have always killed, directly or indirectly. It's thermodynamics, you can't make capital out of thin air.
The degree of "killing" varies, from physical death to genetic damage to poverty and famine to exploitation of the workers. The distance between "killing" and "harm" is not that large.
Google, in this or a future reincarnation will eventually invent a new kind of "killing" which now may not be obvious, because it would not necessarily involve financial capital. Capital is a means and not an end. Means for what, you may ask. Hint: there are other capitals too - freedom, privacy, information, thought, belief, emotion.
Big or small corporations should NOT participate in any kind of local or global "discussion" because precisely such participation makes them even bigger.
Disclaimer: I'm not a commie, just a philosopher.
Just imagine you are the head of the tech dept in that hospital. Given the prices of all medical grade stuff, if the guy charged say $200, you'd think that he just plugged in a consumer HD. If he asked for $1000 you'd suppose he used a non-genuine or even used HD. With $6000 you can't think of anything - you just trust the man with the additional benefit in case of a court trial (assuming that e.g. the PC caused a patient death) you'd say that you did all that was humanly possible to make sure that no consumer grade, used or non-genuine parts were used on that PC.
+1 Insightful - I wonder why this was not the topic of the first comment.
I don't want to sound pessimistic or paranoid, but from the signs so far I firmly believe that soon the use of encryption will be reason enough for any obscure organisation to raid my house/office/computer.
This is the main reason I do not practice or even consider any kind of encryption. After 20+ years of being online, I think that any sudden change of online behaviour from my static IP will raise a flag on this or another continent. Therefore, I prefer obscurity through transparency: I take special care everyday to visit xxx sites, check new conspiracy theories, visit celeb and gov sites etc like any normal curious person. However I avoid the googleplex, facebook and all permanent records of any personal details on social networks.
Yes, I know about proxies, anonymizers, Tor etc, but I consider these as the orange flags because using them also can be interpreted as changes of online behaviour. There is no escape.
>Identical research also doesn't get published.
I think you have hit an important issue here - one of the paradoxes of the modern way of doing science. In the past centuries, a significant or a breakthrough result had to be reproduced in all major research labs of the globe and the journals were more than happy to publish such validation studies. A corpus of such publications was necessary and sufficient to establish what we call a "scientific paradigm" or a "theory". Nowadays, if a respected research establishment declares a new "phenomenon", all the rest will certainly try to replicate, but the replication studies do not really interest the journals. Therefore all we see is a pile of papers all citing the "grand parent" paper which has first expressed the grand truth. Journals coordinate the game of credits and citations, their only dream being to cry "First!!!111" in each case they sense that might make the headlines of science blogs.
You'd think that this situation would be much more aggravated in research areas where you cannot actually replicate the phenomena. However, in e.g. astronomy, you have often the case of a single set of supernova explosion data and hundreds of papers analyzing it. Papers get published because it's both interesting and valuable, since we won't see such a supernova in a 100 years and most importantly because there is no political/economical agenda involved, just simple speculations on how the universe works.
Now, climate studies are a different beast. There are literally floods of data (not always relevant or significant) and both political and economical agendas. It's clearly a war and I guess no journal would ever consider to either pour oil on it or publish the view of a minority. The show must and will go on, heads must and will fall and lonely (non-PhD holder) scientists will again get burned on the bonfire of political correctness.
If the level of water in the funnel rises due to AGT (Anthropogenic Global Tampering), the water outflow will simply increase, and the water level in the funnel will rise a bit as the system reaches a new dynamic equilibrium. The water will overflow only at large AGT levels. This system is very deterministic and predictable.
If the mathematics of global warming were that simple, there would be no global debates. Unfortunately for us non-climate scientists, we are condemned to live in a State of Fear.
On the contrary, I am not envious at all of modern day kids. They may have all the information at their fingertips, but are lost in overinformation and there is no cure from that.
Just assume you are a teacher and that you want to assign students (elementary, primary, secondary, tertiary students, adults, it makes no difference) to compose something, like e.g. a short biography of Feynman or to design a one-hour science lesson using demonstration experiments, or to provide a 3-page summary of a book or any of the old-school type assignments. Students will definitely be lost in the data Matrix and either a) produce a vague copy of Wikipedia or b) copy each other's work or c) purchase/copy earlier work or d) produce inadequate work.
In our days, we had to look up our encyclopedia or our mates' books, visit the library or even ask our neighbors or other teachers for advice. This process taught us not only to research stuff, but also communication skills and most of all the differences between data and information, trusted and untrusted sources, which are the toughest things to teach (and very unlikely to be pursued by STEM).
After all, is Wikipedia trustworthy? Or, is there an authoritative estimate of the percentage of accurate information in the internets?
You (and many other commenters) seem to ignore that Microsoft's money is ultimately also tax-paying citizen's money. It's just not 'tax money' but the so-called 'income'.
I fail to see any difference between these two kinds of money. No further comments.
Not all mp3 decoding listening is equal.
I admit I read TFA in a hurry, but I think I didn't see any mention of the decoder used or the driver/sound codec combination. These factors are critical for any listening test. Specifically, I'd like to know:
a) Did the soundcard/drivers used upsample 44.1 kHz to 48 KHz or not? Usually resampling is the norm with either Creative or with cheapo codecs/driver combinations. I never used Vista, but from what I've read, few people know precisely what happens at the OS lever regarding bit-accurate audio playback.
b) Was a garden variety mp3 decoder used, or a high-end one like libmad or MAD Winamp Plugin v.0.2b (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=60454) supporting 24/32-bit output, sophisticated dithering etc?
If the answer to a) is 'no' and the answer to b) is 'yes', then according to my experience, I find the results very reasonable, mp3 can indeed sound better than plain old CD 16/44.1 or lossless formats.
Half of my lifetime is dedicated to listening to music, as well as a significant percentage of my income is spent on LPs, CDs and audio-centered equipment. I can say with certainty that I do not envy today's teenagers that can have it all "for free". In my humble opinion, TFA expresses emotional and pseudo-economical musings, without addressing the key philosophical (and political) issues:
1. What is today (and what was in the past) the relation between quality and quantity? How is society, especially the young ones, to discriminate between trash and masterpieces of music (or books, movies, art, knowledge, "information", at that matter)?
2. Can there be value without scarcity? Can there be wisdom without suffering? If the author had that abundance of free choice when he was growing up, would he be the same person he is today?
3. Isn't the highlighted quote "there's no longer any past - just an endless present" the most frightening of all, signaling the end of history, the end of capitalism and the end of the world as we know it?
The key question today is whether and how an individual can survive the over abundance of "free" without alienating himself. Humanity has changed irreversibly thanks to the Internet and IT, making knowledge accessible to all (mostly for free), but is this really a good thing (TM)? Does free access to libraries make society better? Does (free) radio educate listener's ears? Do free books at school make better students? Or free grades?
I am not a luddite, nor a posthuman condition evangelist, but I firmly believe that Education must reform itself drastically to equip pupils with tools for learning to navigate through and past noise, against thermal death due to overinformation, fostering individual diversity and creativity against consumerism (especially the consumerism of free stuff). Otherwise "there will be no future, just an endless present".