I agree -- imperial units are generally better for human perception and estimation. One of the worst metric units is pressure, which is measured in kilopascals (newtons per meter). Who the hell knows how big a newton is??:) Pounds-per-inch is way easier to wrap your head around.
I think the exception is Fahrenheit, which is not only annoying to spell, but nonlinear, and calibrated quite absurdly. (-10F is actually 22F! WTF!:)
I also find gallons and miles a bit unwieldy, but I suppose they are "chunkier", making it easier to do rough estimates.
I fear that opening the source will give MS grounds to complain about all those OSS projects that are "stealing" their code (assuming it gets leaked). What kind of trouble can they cause us? Microsoft is *very* crafty, who knows what they will do next!
This could acutally allow OSS developers to execute a crafty tactic which Microsoft themselves used a long long time ago. I'm talking about the way MS paid a 3rd party to reverse-engineer the IBM-PC's BIOS so they could write Quick'n'Dirty DOS, which Microsoft then bought and used to create MS-DOS, without having to pay anyone any licensing fees.
Wine, for example, could benefit hugely if they knew more about the API's they were reverse-engineering. Most of their effort goes towards figuring out MS DLL's, and debugging strange cases and "undocumented features" therein.
To duplicate the Microsoft tactic, some 3rd party could look at all of Microsoft's code, document every function in the API and explainin in detail what each one did, then publish the results. It would definitely cut down the time wasted on reverse-engineering and debugging.
I, personally, think it would be a great way to "compete" with Microsoft. Software is still the reason people still dual-boot to Windows. Wine could definitely give Linux/*BSD a competative edge.
I'm not sure if it's illegal to publish information about API's, however. Since Microsoft licenses certain ones privately, would it be illegal to publish information about them which you've gathered for yourself?
It seems like Microsoft has made a lot of news in the past two weeks. They announced WindowsXP, their new.NET-bundled platform that'll be sold as a subscription, their recent Java-bashing, which Sun had to respond to, constant.NET-hyping, their new instant messenger project called Hailstorm which they hope will give them instant-messenger dominance over AOL (by making the IM a development platform), and now open-source bashing!
It all seems to be tied to the future of peer-to-peer computing and online appliactions in some way. Instant Messengers,.NET, WindowsXP...
All this open-source and Java bashing made me think... could they have caught wind of a Sun project to open-source Java that's already underway? This seems like the way Microsoft would respond to such a development. Or, maybe they're just trying block any possibility of Sun succeeding if they did open-source it (which they've been considering doing for some time now).
Of course, you can never be sure of anything when Microsoft's PR-Department is involved. They're completely hypocritical. It's very tough to cut through the FUD, hype, and downright errors they're constantly spewing out. I guess Microsoft's tactic is to confuse the hell out of your competitors while you're crushing them.
At the very least, it's something to think about. Some big shit is gunna be goin' down in the internet software market, and right soon. A bunch of people who want to invent the most killer app since the web-browser are gunna be battling it out. It's gunna be a bloodbath!
Not using a piece of software just because it is from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what works. Evaluate windows media before you bust on it. I use it, and it does streaming pretty well.
Microsoft has this problem where they refuse to support other operating systems due to their anti-competative nature. Since this person obviously cares about Linux/Mac users, WMP is not the best choice.
The problem is that it doesn't have its own streamable file format. AVI files are the standard MPEG4 transport format, but you can't stream them because AVI files have headers at the very end of the stream.
Quicktime MOV files can have MPEG4 embedded in them, and can be streamed, but I don't know of the legal issues involved in that. I'd imagine that if you used a free codec, and a free.MOV creator, it shouldn't cost anything! And the Quicktime player can stream very well. So, maybe that's the best way?
Nobody's really going to be able to stop companies who make these boxes from tracking what shows you watch, especially when they're constantly dialing up some other computer to exchange information. I don't really mind if those TV executives know what show I'm watching either, as long as I'm anonymous. When they start attaching a name and other info to your statistics, then it's a bit of a privacy violation, but anonymous statistics are a good thing. It DOES help TV executives sculpt their programming better. There's only a very small fraction of the population who are Neilsen families. And, getting free service out of it would be good too.:)
Of course, as soon as IPv6 is implemented, super-high-quality MPEG4 internet-TV stations will take over, and TV will be a thing of the past, so enjoy it while it lasts.:)
The idea of writing a universal driver interface is doomed from the get-go, since the kernels of operating systems differ so severely in their implementation and usage of drivers, that major concessions in the speed and robustness would be made to implement universal drivers.
The best solution I could see is standardizing the hardware, so only one driver would have to be written for kind of each device.
So, for example, you could have the Universal Sound Card Interface, with 3D Sound and MP3 Decoding Extensions (to satiate Creative Labs, for example). The "Sound Card" would have a standard driver, and the extensions would be dynamic pieces of that main driver. Video Cards, Network Cards, SCSI Cards, and any other hardware that's lived out its innovative life-cycle and is basically using the same design from model-to-model could have Universal Drivers written for them as well.
The only case where this would be a problem woud be in hardware that's constantly changing its hardware interface and is always implementing new features. The Universal Driver would be a nuisance and a slowdown for any hardware that wants to add a new feature, since some council would have to OK adding this new feature to the next version of the Universal Standard Interface. (I'm mainly thinking of 3D Accelerators here, since most hardware doesn't really change that much.)
It could be possible to allow anyone to write any extension they want for any interface, allowing them to add innovate new features while still providing a standardized base.
And, of course, if that isn't good enough for them, they could just write their own drivers for their own proprietary interface for every platform they intend to support, like they do now!
It seems like it could work if hardware vendors cared enough about the "fringe" operating systems to get along with eachother.:)
Could someone moderate-up the previous reply to my original article, the one titled "Better copy of Eudine Podkletnov's Paper..."? I feel that people should be able to see his diagrams as well, and be able to read a better-formatted PostScript or PDF copy as well. Thanks.
I found a better copy of Podkletnov's paper on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's e-print archive server. It's available in a bunch of formats, including PostScript, PDF, ASCII, and DVI. The previous link I posted didn't have the diagrams included with his paper.
It's better to actually read the paper and draw your own conclusions than to simply listen to what other people think about it and accept their views.
Here's a link to Eugine's paper that created quite a ruckuss in 1996.
Also, here's a 1998 Wired article that gives a good deal of background about Podkletnov, and why his paper was so badly recieved. It does meander a bit. I'd recommend skipping the boring parts where the writer recounts his visit with some other nut who thought he could duplicate Podkletnov's experiment. It is funny though, and it does show a lot about how a bad scientific method can produce erroneous results.
>Heck, with my vision, I could tear my eyeballs out and simply use these, at a fraction of the cost of new glasses.
This is to you, Hemos, if you're reading this. I've had it up to HERE [indicating invisible area above forehead] with your half-witted little comments at the end of your posts. If you don't have anything even remotely intelligent to say, just don't say anything at all, and spare us both the trouble. Your clever little quips are neither clever, nor humourous. Try to save a little face every once in a while.
If you don't understand why your comment deserves such derision, just think about this: It's a vision PROCESSING system. Your eyeballs are not vision PROCESSORS, they're the biological equivalent of CAMERAS. The front part of your brain is where the processing takes place. Therefore, putting a PROCESSOR in your eyesockets will not help you see better at all. I do imagine that replacing a part of your brain with it would help, however.
Also, this isn't very appropriate. We're not your buddies... We don't know all about your horrible eyesight. I'm sure you've got terrible eyesight, but there's no need to share it with us all. Try saying something relevant to the article. For example, "Those French sure can make some nice chips!"
I really thought that, from a large majority of the slashdot community, this needed to be said. Please try to think before you speak. If you can't do both, do neither.
I'd really like to know how you got your M13 stable, because I've gotten so fed up with Communicator that I've switched to Netscape v3.04 (IMHO, their most stable Linux browser so far.:)
I've tried the precompiled Mozilla, and I've tried building it with a recent version of all of its required libraries, and I still get an unstable version, even without compiler optimizations.
Now, I'm thinking that the instability is caused by the fact that I'm removing components in the hope of added stability (Mail & News, for example). I'm very interested in how you got your copy stable.
It may be that you're running a Windows copy, which I've noticed are much more stable than the Linux ones. Is this the case, or have I overlooked something?
I'd be very appreciative of some help, since I use Linux full time, and this browser fiasco has gone on long enough.
I've read quite a bit about Nikola Tesla and his inventions, and I'm certain he invented this system right after the turn of the century.
He invented radio, patented it, and in 1893 gave a lecture about it and published it free for everyone in the world to use. He was then totally ripped off by Marconi around the turn of the century when he made the first transatlantic broadcast using the exact same apparatus that Tesla had described in the paper he published.
At this time, Tesla was trying to push the government to adopt his system of wireless war machines that could do battle without having humans be sitting ducks inside them. He demonstrated a model boat at the world's fair that was not only wireless, but used spread spectrum techonology to encrypt its signal. Nobody, of course picked up on this.
He went on to invent radar and offered to build radar systems for the government in the late 1920's, but they refused, and were forced to play catchup in 1938 and develop their own radar system.
Tesla was not a crackpot, like a lot of people who know nothing about the man seem to think. This view was created by Thomas Edison who spent a large portion of his life trying to smash Tesla's image, and he ended up succeeding very well.
I was wondering if you've got any plans for what you're going to work on after Quake3Arena is finished, and bugfixed, and patched, and totally done with? Is Trinity still going to be the next release from id, or are you planning something else even cooler than Q3A?
Personally, I'm sick of SETI@home's problems. I've wasted CPU time analysing the same work units over and over, and I've wasted CPU time with an unoptimized client, but this isn't what I'm really sick of. What I don't like is the lack of any initiative on the part of the SETI@home management to allow the community to help them out, and judgung by these slashdot postings, the community is eager to help.
I understand that SETI@home is obviously overwhelmed by all the interest: Intel has written an optimized client, SGI has donated probably hundreds of extremely powerful machines which occupy at least 4 of the top 10 spots on the charts, and there's a million people also processing work units. However, that doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't made use of their vast resources, of raw CPU power, as well as the technical abilities of SETI@home's followers.
Many better techniques have been suggested here, and it would be wise if any SETI@home people would heed the advice.
That's funny. They are, indeed, blatantly wasting their computer power. It is unreasonable that anyone would send out CD data to encode, but the idea that in a single day, we could've encoded a great portion, if not all, of the CD's ever produced.
Someone made a good comment when they said that the main problem with SETI@home is their unwillingness to call on the community, just like the legendary PHB's of every major corporation. They manage out of fear, rather than by communicating with the people.
I think I agree with you on this, ethereal. I thought about that before, and it makes sense that having two people check one unit, then having a third or fourth person check the unit if they don't match is a good idea. Their server just has to be a lot smarter, and I think their main problem is that their software designers are either overburdened, or don't know what they're doing.:)
The combination of redundancy like this, as well as faster, optimized clients (which already have been written) are important steps to making the SETI@home project successful. They seem to lack any sort of ability to deviate from their original plan to scan the sky in 2 years, and check all the units in 6 years.
I believe you are right about them needing to increase their block-output and optimize the client. However, conscripting the clients to create work units would be very inefficient since they recieve 30-gigabyte tape-backups from Arecibo every day (I rememer this bit of info from their website somewhere). It would make more sense to do it on-site. However, I can't understand why writing out 30-gigs of data in one day is so hard! Can't you restore a 30-gig backup in a couple of hours?
I think their problem lies with their software designers, who, in my opinion, aren't all that clever. Since the SETI project is a volunteer effort, and they don't want to release the source code, I think their best solution is to conscript some volunteer open-source programmers to help with it. God knows they need help.:) They would still be able to keep the source code private, and end up with a better, more effucient client, and could probably get input on their server application as well.
I'm just afraid that people may lose interest in the project once they realize that they've been checking the same work units for weeks, and that they've been wasting CPU time checking them as well.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree -- imperial units are generally better for human perception and estimation. One of the worst metric units is pressure, which is measured in kilopascals (newtons per meter). Who the hell knows how big a newton is?? :) Pounds-per-inch is way easier to wrap your head around.
I think the exception is Fahrenheit, which is not only annoying to spell, but nonlinear, and calibrated quite absurdly. (-10F is actually 22F! WTF! :)
I also find gallons and miles a bit unwieldy, but I suppose they are "chunkier", making it easier to do rough estimates.
If you distributed the source publically, Microsoft's laywers would give you such a pinch!
The source is huge -- who would want to look at it?
FreeBSD is much nicer...
I fear that opening the source will give MS grounds to complain about all those OSS projects that are "stealing" their code (assuming it gets leaked). What kind of trouble can they cause us? Microsoft is *very* crafty, who knows what they will do next!
This could acutally allow OSS developers to execute a crafty tactic which Microsoft themselves used a long long time ago. I'm talking about the way MS paid a 3rd party to reverse-engineer the IBM-PC's BIOS so they could write Quick'n'Dirty DOS, which Microsoft then bought and used to create MS-DOS, without having to pay anyone any licensing fees.
Wine, for example, could benefit hugely if they knew more about the API's they were reverse-engineering. Most of their effort goes towards figuring out MS DLL's, and debugging strange cases and "undocumented features" therein.
To duplicate the Microsoft tactic, some 3rd party could look at all of Microsoft's code, document every function in the API and explainin in detail what each one did, then publish the results. It would definitely cut down the time wasted on reverse-engineering and debugging.
I, personally, think it would be a great way to "compete" with Microsoft. Software is still the reason people still dual-boot to Windows. Wine could definitely give Linux/*BSD a competative edge.
I'm not sure if it's illegal to publish information about API's, however. Since Microsoft licenses certain ones privately, would it be illegal to publish information about them which you've gathered for yourself?
AIMster doesn't just support AIM. It also supports ICQ, MSN, and has Napster and Gnutella plugins.
It's the universal Peer-to-Peer client!
If they ported this thing to Linux, I could delete all my IM's and P2P file sharing things!
It's so perfect.
It seems like Microsoft has made a lot of news in the past two weeks. They announced WindowsXP, their new .NET-bundled platform that'll be sold as a subscription, their recent Java-bashing, which Sun had to respond to, constant .NET-hyping, their new instant messenger project called Hailstorm which they hope will give them instant-messenger dominance over AOL (by making the IM a development platform), and now open-source bashing!
.NET, WindowsXP...
It all seems to be tied to the future of peer-to-peer computing and online appliactions in some way. Instant Messengers,
All this open-source and Java bashing made me think... could they have caught wind of a Sun project to open-source Java that's already underway? This seems like the way Microsoft would respond to such a development. Or, maybe they're just trying block any possibility of Sun succeeding if they did open-source it (which they've been considering doing for some time now).
Of course, you can never be sure of anything when Microsoft's PR-Department is involved. They're completely hypocritical. It's very tough to cut through the FUD, hype, and downright errors they're constantly spewing out. I guess Microsoft's tactic is to confuse the hell out of your competitors while you're crushing them.
At the very least, it's something to think about. Some big shit is gunna be goin' down in the internet software market, and right soon. A bunch of people who want to invent the most killer app since the web-browser are gunna be battling it out. It's gunna be a bloodbath!
---
Epitaph
Not using a piece of software just because it is from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what works. Evaluate windows media before you bust on it. I use it, and it does streaming pretty well.
Microsoft has this problem where they refuse to support other operating systems due to their anti-competative nature. Since this person obviously cares about Linux/Mac users, WMP is not the best choice.
...unfortunately it isn't yet. :)
.MOV creator, it shouldn't cost anything! And the Quicktime player can stream very well. So, maybe that's the best way?
The problem is that it doesn't have its own streamable file format. AVI files are the standard MPEG4 transport format, but you can't stream them because AVI files have headers at the very end of the stream.
Quicktime MOV files can have MPEG4 embedded in them, and can be streamed, but I don't know of the legal issues involved in that. I'd imagine that if you used a free codec, and a free
I know about MEMS, and they're obviously not millimeters in size. I'm guessing that the person who wrote this article thought m were mm.
Silly mistake.
.com -- of course. They're trying to make money out of this somehow. :)
---
Epitaph
It seems that www.spamrecycle.org has pre-emptively taken itself down to avoid being slashdotted!
---
Epitaph
Nobody's really going to be able to stop companies who make these boxes from tracking what shows you watch, especially when they're constantly dialing up some other computer to exchange information. I don't really mind if those TV executives know what show I'm watching either, as long as I'm anonymous. When they start attaching a name and other info to your statistics, then it's a bit of a privacy violation, but anonymous statistics are a good thing. It DOES help TV executives sculpt their programming better. There's only a very small fraction of the population who are Neilsen families. And, getting free service out of it would be good too. :)
:)
Of course, as soon as IPv6 is implemented, super-high-quality MPEG4 internet-TV stations will take over, and TV will be a thing of the past, so enjoy it while it lasts.
---
Epitaph
The idea of writing a universal driver interface is doomed from the get-go, since the kernels of operating systems differ so severely in their implementation and usage of drivers, that major concessions in the speed and robustness would be made to implement universal drivers.
:)
The best solution I could see is standardizing the hardware, so only one driver would have to be written for kind of each device.
So, for example, you could have the Universal Sound Card Interface, with 3D Sound and MP3 Decoding Extensions (to satiate Creative Labs, for example). The "Sound Card" would have a standard driver, and the extensions would be dynamic pieces of that main driver. Video Cards, Network Cards, SCSI Cards, and any other hardware that's lived out its innovative life-cycle and is basically using the same design from model-to-model could have Universal Drivers written for them as well.
The only case where this would be a problem woud be in hardware that's constantly changing its hardware interface and is always implementing new features. The Universal Driver would be a nuisance and a slowdown for any hardware that wants to add a new feature, since some council would have to OK adding this new feature to the next version of the Universal Standard Interface. (I'm mainly thinking of 3D Accelerators here, since most hardware doesn't really change that much.)
It could be possible to allow anyone to write any extension they want for any interface, allowing them to add innovate new features while still providing a standardized base.
And, of course, if that isn't good enough for them, they could just write their own drivers for their own proprietary interface for every platform they intend to support, like they do now!
It seems like it could work if hardware vendors cared enough about the "fringe" operating systems to get along with eachother.
---
Epitaph
Could someone moderate-up the previous reply to my original article, the one titled "Better copy of Eudine Podkletnov's Paper..."? I feel that people should be able to see his diagrams as well, and be able to read a better-formatted PostScript or PDF copy as well. Thanks.
---
Epitaph
I found a better copy of Podkletnov's paper on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's e-print archive server. It's available in a bunch of formats, including PostScript, PDF, ASCII, and DVI. The previous link I posted didn't have the diagrams included with his paper.
It's better to actually read the paper and draw your own conclusions than to simply listen to what other people think about it and accept their views.
---
Epitaph
Here's a link to Eugine's paper that created quite a ruckuss in 1996.
Also, here's a 1998 Wired article that gives a good deal of background about Podkletnov, and why his paper was so badly recieved. It does meander a bit. I'd recommend skipping the boring parts where the writer recounts his visit with some other nut who thought he could duplicate Podkletnov's experiment. It is funny though, and it does show a lot about how a bad scientific method can produce erroneous results.
Enjoy!
---
Epitaph
>Heck, with my vision, I could tear my eyeballs out and simply use these, at a fraction of the cost of new glasses.
This is to you, Hemos, if you're reading this. I've had it up to HERE [indicating invisible area above forehead] with your half-witted little comments at the end of your posts. If you don't have anything even remotely intelligent to say, just don't say anything at all, and spare us both the trouble. Your clever little quips are neither clever, nor humourous. Try to save a little face every once in a while.
If you don't understand why your comment deserves such derision, just think about this: It's a vision PROCESSING system. Your eyeballs are not vision PROCESSORS, they're the biological equivalent of CAMERAS. The front part of your brain is where the processing takes place. Therefore, putting a PROCESSOR in your eyesockets will not help you see better at all. I do imagine that replacing a part of your brain with it would help, however.
Also, this isn't very appropriate. We're not your buddies... We don't know all about your horrible eyesight. I'm sure you've got terrible eyesight, but there's no need to share it with us all. Try saying something relevant to the article. For example, "Those French sure can make some nice chips!"
I really thought that, from a large majority of the slashdot community, this needed to be said. Please try to think before you speak. If you can't do both, do neither.
Thank you.
---
Epi "Flamebait" Taph
I'd really like to know how you got your M13 stable, because I've gotten so fed up with Communicator that I've switched to Netscape v3.04 (IMHO, their most stable Linux browser so far. :)
I've tried the precompiled Mozilla, and I've tried building it with a recent version of all of its required libraries, and I still get an unstable version, even without compiler optimizations.
Now, I'm thinking that the instability is caused by the fact that I'm removing components in the hope of added stability (Mail & News, for example). I'm very interested in how you got your copy stable.
It may be that you're running a Windows copy, which I've noticed are much more stable than the Linux ones. Is this the case, or have I overlooked something?
I'd be very appreciative of some help, since I use Linux full time, and this browser fiasco has gone on long enough.
- Epitaph
I certainly hope not.
I've read quite a bit about Nikola Tesla and his inventions, and I'm certain he invented this system right after the turn of the century.
He invented radio, patented it, and in 1893 gave a lecture about it and published it free for everyone in the world to use. He was then totally ripped off by Marconi around the turn of the century when he made the first transatlantic broadcast using the exact same apparatus that Tesla had described in the paper he published.
At this time, Tesla was trying to push the government to adopt his system of wireless war machines that could do battle without having humans be sitting ducks inside them. He demonstrated a model boat at the world's fair that was not only wireless, but used spread spectrum techonology to encrypt its signal. Nobody, of course picked up on this.
He went on to invent radar and offered to build radar systems for the government in the late 1920's, but they refused, and were forced to play catchup in 1938 and develop their own radar system.
If you'd like some more information about Tesla, go check out this short article about his major achievements: http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/ tesla/tesla.html.
Tesla was not a crackpot, like a lot of people who know nothing about the man seem to think. This view was created by Thomas Edison who spent a large portion of his life trying to smash Tesla's image, and he ended up succeeding very well.
- Chris
woz.com has already been slashdotted it seems. It's frequently dropping HTTP packets, and the user-controllable woz-cam is going crazy. :)
I was wondering if you've got any plans for what you're going to work on after Quake3Arena is finished, and bugfixed, and patched, and totally done with? Is Trinity still going to be the next release from id, or are you planning something else even cooler than Q3A?
Personally, I'm sick of SETI@home's problems. I've wasted CPU time analysing the same work units over and over, and I've wasted CPU time with an unoptimized client, but this isn't what I'm really sick of. What I don't like is the lack of any initiative on the part of the SETI@home management to allow the community to help them out, and judgung by these slashdot postings, the community is eager to help.
I understand that SETI@home is obviously overwhelmed by all the interest: Intel has written an optimized client, SGI has donated probably hundreds of extremely powerful machines which occupy at least 4 of the top 10 spots on the charts, and there's a million people also processing work units. However, that doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't made use of their vast resources, of raw CPU power, as well as the technical abilities of SETI@home's followers.
Many better techniques have been suggested here, and it would be wise if any SETI@home people would heed the advice.
That's funny. They are, indeed, blatantly wasting their computer power. It is unreasonable that anyone would send out CD data to encode, but the idea that in a single day, we could've encoded a great portion, if not all, of the CD's ever produced.
Someone made a good comment when they said that the main problem with SETI@home is their unwillingness to call on the community, just like the legendary PHB's of every major corporation. They manage out of fear, rather than by communicating with the people.
I think I agree with you on this, ethereal. I thought about that before, and it makes sense that having two people check one unit, then having a third or fourth person check the unit if they don't match is a good idea. Their server just has to be a lot smarter, and I think their main problem is that their software designers are either overburdened, or don't know what they're doing. :)
The combination of redundancy like this, as well as faster, optimized clients (which already have been written) are important steps to making the SETI@home project successful. They seem to lack any sort of ability to deviate from their original plan to scan the sky in 2 years, and check all the units in 6 years.
Alas.
I believe you are right about them needing to increase their block-output and optimize the client. However, conscripting the clients to create work units would be very inefficient since they recieve 30-gigabyte tape-backups from Arecibo every day (I rememer this bit of info from their website somewhere). It would make more sense to do it on-site. However, I can't understand why writing out 30-gigs of data in one day is so hard! Can't you restore a 30-gig backup in a couple of hours?
:) They would still be able to keep the source code private, and end up with a better, more effucient client, and could probably get input on their server application as well.
:)
I think their problem lies with their software designers, who, in my opinion, aren't all that clever. Since the SETI project is a volunteer effort, and they don't want to release the source code, I think their best solution is to conscript some volunteer open-source programmers to help with it. God knows they need help.
I'm just afraid that people may lose interest in the project once they realize that they've been checking the same work units for weeks, and that they've been wasting CPU time checking them as well.