I'm not freaked out. My choice to avoid GMO is quite logical. You have plants engineered to resist pesticide, in the sense that they themselves are one. I'll pass on that, thanks.
GMO corn has genes that create Bt toxin in it. In the corn, the Bt is in a protoxin form, and the human gut passes it through harmlessly. It's only in the gut of the corn borer (and other insects) that the Bt is activated.
I can understand a person having a reaction because their gut has some different chemistry going on than the rest of us. That's how allergies form in people -- an allergy is pretty much a person-specific toxin. So it would make sense to label GMO products as such, for that reason.
Unless you have an adverse reaction to peanuts, for example, you probably enjoy peanut butter. Unless you get sick from gluten, you probably eat that peanut butter on a slice of bread. Notice that the gluten and peanut allergic people don't run out and shout "YOU WILL ALL DIE FROM PEANUTS AND BREAD!" They just quietly read the labels and avoid peanuts and wheat products.
Unfortunately, the idiots you were quoting above are shouting exactly that: "YOU WILL ALL DIE FROM GMO!" And because those idiots have spread their ignorance, many healthy people are afraid of GMO crops for no reason. Labeling foods as GMO would cut sales in half. That's the simple reason GMO firms are opposed to labeling their product. And by avoiding GMO foods unnecessarily, you are propagating their lies.
In short, it's not the evolution of the crops that's in question, but of the environment around them and how it will respond.
It's only been the last few centuries where humans have had a large hand in terraforming. We've dammed rivers, ploughed fields, dug canals, drained lakes, and paved bogs. More recently we've carried all kinds of foreign species back and forth much faster than the winds can carry the seeds, or predators carry the diseases of their prey.
But don't forget that the world changes dramatically all the time all by itself. Geologically speaking, most of it happens too slow for us short-fuses to see. Glaciers come and go. Volcanoes cover old continents with ash and create new islands. Seas, rivers, lakes, all form, flow and dry up. On a more human time scale hurricanes and tornadoes scour landscapes. Earthquakes and ice destroy millennial-old rock formations in seconds. And Mother Nature gives no thought to the fragile native ecosystems or endangered species that are destroyed in the process. New species then fill in the old niches as they can, evolving along the way. When we see this happen we call it "natural selection."
Just because we hasten some change, or even tinker with it "unnaturally" in the labs, it doesn't mean that we're any more or less at risk than what Mother Nature herself would throw our way given enough time. Any fragile ecosystem is ultimately doomed, it's just a question of time. Whether or not we humans like the results is a different question, but environmental change is constant, and the dominant species will grow stronger as a result.
So, to the real GMO question: what could possibly go wrong? There's one answer staring us in the face. I'm personally unwilling to tell two billion people that we can't feed them all because we don't have the courage to improve our ability to grow food. I can hear the president addressing the U.N.: "Sorry, Africa and Asia, you gotta grow your own food this year. We rejected the 60 bushel/acre GMO wheat and the bugs are destroying our 10 bushel/acre heritage wheat, which leaves us barely enough to feed ourselves. We'd love to grow more, but we don't have the political testiculos, we've got these green-frankenfood people, organic farmers, no petro-chemicals, yadda yadda. I'm sure you know how it goes. Yep, we're really sorry about that. Maybe you can plow down a rain-forest or two, I hear that worked for Brazil."
And do you know who are you quoting? Here's a subtle hint: their home page has "GMFree" as a part of the URL. Painting "Institute for Responsible Technology" on the side of their building doesn't mean they are actually performing responsible scientific studies.
Their front page is filled with alarmist rhetoric like "Everything you HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods" and "Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the #1 GMO bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, presents shocking evidence why genetically modified crops may lead to health and environmental catastrophes, and what we can do about it." Does a responsible scientific organization use "Dangerous", "shocking", and "catastrophe" to frame the debate?
Every single paragraph on their site is devoted to anti-GMO propaganda such as "No GMOs" and "Healthy Eating Begins with Non GMO food!"
They're every bit as neutral on the subject as Monsanto. You can bet that any study they quote has been cherry picked to support their position, and that no studies that might show contrary evidence are supported.
These guys ARE the radical greens who hate GMOs because "they're not natural", not because they understand it.
And just to be clear, I'm not employed in the agri-business, but my wife is. She works for an organic grain wholesaler, so I've learned a bit about the industry, and about the people who work in it. Their entire business model is built upon making sure people freak out when they hear the letters "GMO".
Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?
Turn that question around: What are the side effects of non-GMO crops? How do you know that this mushroom is safe to eat, and not that one? It's very simple: people tried them, and they discovered that this particular type made them sick and die. At least GMOs get tested for this in a lab before they're released into the environment.
Keep in mind that with GMO crops you're taking two things: corn and chrysanthemum, for example, and pasting them together to create corn with a borer-resistant root. It's not like that mix is going to result in corn that grows gills and glows in the dark. So you test the corn that comes out, and if there's no permethrin in the kernels, what difference does it make to you in the food chain? None.
The radical greens who try to scare people about GMOs play upon people's gullibility. They want us to not understand that we animals don't merge with the DNA of the foods we eat. Our stomach acids break the cells down, and our bodies collect and use only the raw nutrition components. If it didn't work this way, eating a cow could give you hooves, or eating corn might make a tassel grow out of your head. For those bits of food where the digestion process opens the cell walls, the same digestion process breaks up the DNA into amino acids. The undigestible bits come out the other end.
I do agree that the Terminator gene is as evil as DRM, but from a humanity/political point of view, not from a scientific view.
I know the "greens" love to worry about GMOs but what is your particular fear? Are you afraid the proteins or amino acids will make you sick? Left-over anti-pest traces? Or are you falling into the marketing trap of "ooh, scary Frankenfoods!"
please be sure to think critically for yourself.
A top-flight salesman can sell you something he knows is crap. That's what MS needs.
Nope, that's exactly what they don't need, and they know it. Microsoft's not completely hurting for sales. Their bread and butter comes from bundles and bundles of bundles, and corporations that need 100,000 desktops with Office 2007.
But they're losing everywhere else, because of the common (and not entirely untrue) perception that Microsoft = "virusy crashing computer".
They know they need to get customer service out in front of people, and make them accessible to ordinary folk. They've seen it work for Apple, and they want it too. It won't hurt that the stores will feature big screen TVs with kids lined up to blast things on the XBoxes. It will also give them an outlet to sell their peripheral hardware (which is actually not as mediocre as most of the crap out there*) and possibly a place to stock the complete line of Microsoft Press titles.
The big question is if they can do it well enough to beat Apple. Can they keep the line sizes manageable? Are they going to de-worm the machines right there on the countertop while you wait, which is good customer service? Or are they going to be a collection site who will send back the "repaired" PCs a week from Tuesday, which would be bad customer service.
They know they need these stores to freakin' *sparkle* with efficiency. The perception amongst the general public is that Apple stores do that today (even though the genius bars are sometimes lacking in actual geniuses.) The perception at Microsoft is that Apple store managers know how to do that. What they really should do is lure away the guy that designed the Apple store interiors and the guy who created the Apple store experience.
One other thing that Microsoft doesn't have that Apple does: cultists. Microsoft has never come close to building the same level of insane fervor in its customers (just its CEOs.) Perhaps by luring the Apple Store's top performers away, they're hoping to dress themselves up with happy people with happy infectious attitudes. Or maybe they're just hoping to water down the Apple pool.
Either way, it'll be interesting to see if this plays out as the next iteration of "Embrace and extend." (I'm not going to even suggest that "and extinguish" makes sense in this context.)
What exactly do they have to showcase that isn't at the big box stores?
Geniuses. The complaining that goes on with PCs is that they have problems. Apples have problems too, but they have nice, friendly geniuses at every store. You don't whine about an Apple problem that lasts for six months, you bring it to the store and the genius fixes it for you right there, in the store. Microsoft needs to get support people in the field to do the same thing.
I don't know if it'll help, or if it's too little too late. People have 15 years of (mostly true) perceptions of PC's being "buggy". But the promise of quick fixes is going to keep a lot of customers happy, and that might be enough to get them to buy Windows 7, or Office 2007, or whatever they're pitching next.
The Enigma was one of the most advanced pre-modern cryptosystems. But it still treated letters as letters. To get to the next level, the separation of data (letters) from encryption into math operations was needed. This happened in parallel with the development of digital computers. Really, many of those advancements came from cryptanalysis of Enigma itself.
Fair question. I think it was the application of numerical theory, the idea that if you treated characters as numbers that you could encrypt them with math.
Your post is a great example of pre-modern crypto.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
Actually, storing data in a multiple data center / high availability environment is a completely related issue. The summary above talks of "entirely different paradigms." Cloud storage would be multiple data center based, which is entirely different from keeping the only copy on your local drives. In this concept, your machine would have enough OS to boot, and enough hard drive space to download the current version of whatever software you are leasing. Your personal info would always be maintained in the data centers, and only mirrored locally. Have a home failure? Drop in a new part or even a new PC, (possibly with an entirely different operating system, such as Chrome,) connect to the service, and you're 100% back.
It's no longer a novel concept for the home market. Consider Google Docs. It's not even being sold as "safer than RAID", it's being touted as "get it from anywhere" or "share with your friends". Safer than RAID is just a bonus.
So are we ready to move all our personal information to clouds? I certainly am not, but Google Docs are wildly popular and a lot of people are. I long ago learned that I can't look to myself to judge what the mainstream attitudes are in many things.
I'm not going to deny that on my most recent trip to the Bay we drove Highway 1 halfway to L.A. just for the pleasure of the drive. But that isn't the ordinary scenario where the nav systems are most heavily used. Come to Minnesota and drive the scenic 494/694 loop around the Twin Cities sometime, and savor the breathtaking vistas of the wood and concrete paneling lining the freeways; give yourself over to imagination that you're actually flying the trench scene from Star Wars for 80 whole miles! Or head to Detroit, and take in the incredible scenery on Warren St as your GPS efficiently guides you from strife-ridden Dearborn Heights to the post-war-ravaged downtown districts. But be sure to purchase additional insurance first!
For a similar adventure to yours, you'd likely do as well to turn the GPS receiver off, drive randomly until you run out of interesting roads, and then let it guide you back to civilization.
Is it really a bad thing, or is that just a visceral reaction to an idea that challenges old assumptions? Be honest with yourself. If you travel for pleasure, are you visiting a new city to see the sights, museums, beaches, restaurants and theaters, or is your trip there to learn all their exiting, history-filled roads, and drive their fabled five-lane freeways? I never once heard my dad say anything like "Look, John, it's mile marker 5! Elvis once flipped off your grandfather for driving slowly in the right lane near that very sign!"
And I don't know about you, but when I'm traveling on business I usually have a short time to get from the airport to my destination, find my way out of there late at night, get checked into my hotel, maybe find some overpriced restaurant to use up a few expense account dollars to make up for being stuck in some place I'd rather not be (no offense to anyone in Toledo was meant by that last statement), get back to the room and crash, fail to fall asleep in a crappy bed, groggily check out the next morning and head back to work, put in 10 more caffeine-fueled hours and then find my way back to the airport before the airline gives my seat away. I simply don't want to be glancing at an under-detailed Avis map that is bouncing around on the floor in front of the passenger seat, trying to figure out if I passed my exit. It's not safe. In that stressful environment, it's far more important to be able to focus my remaining two neurons strictly on driving.
In almost no case do I really need to learn the roads around a new place. The destinations hold my interest far more than the paved lanes that bring me there.
Last time I tried to use one, I got lost. I had scroll around on its map to figure out where I was and a SANE way of getting where I wanted to be. I think I'll stick to paper maps, which actually help me get acquainted with where I'm going so I can concentrate on traffic more, thanks.
I beg to differ. In a new city, when the GPS receiver is handling the navigational duties, you get to focus lots more on the traffic because you aren't hunting for the one sign that says "Hwy 5 West" or trying to remember if you should be taking the west or east exit. It sounds like a small thing, but it really frees you up to watch the idiot in the left lane on his phone who likes to drift over the line, and the guy in your rear view mirror speeding up and weaving through the three cars behind you. The little voice saying "in one mile keep right, then exit right on Highway Five West" is timely and useful, and not nearly as distracting as the frantic search for the obscure sign, or wondering if you accidentally passed it.
The downside is that if you let the box navigate, you don't have to learn the route yourself, and you may never learn the new roads. It's up to you to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Or you could have it in your GPS that tells you to use exit ramp in "5 miles", "exit now".
Or, the driver could pay attention to the signs on the roadside that have the height clearance for the upcoming overpasses!
I saw a news article not long ago where a truck was driven under an overpass that was too low and peeled back the top of the trailer. The reporter was blaming GPS of course, not the idiot driver.
Both are true. The driver is responsible for following all posted regulations and restrictions. The navigation software is supposed to provide a "safe route" that avoids the relevant obstructions. This saves the trucker lots of money from wasting time going down roads that he can't pass, but it does not absolve the driver from ignoring a sign that reads Max Height 13'4" when his trailer is 13'5".
And yes, the reporter is the real idiot of the story. A GPS satellite doesn't care where you are. A GPS receiver can only tell you if you're on the route or not. The routing software (which may have nothing at all to do with GPS) is the bit that should give you the pass/fail, and even that is only as good as its input data. Without more information, we don't know if the road data was incorrect or out of date, if the low clearance was incorrectly marked, if the routing software was internally incorrect, or if the GPS receiver misinterpreted a parallel frontage road as the main highway. But it sure makes for a good sound bite to say "a GPS was wrong."
I meant an hour of labor cost to recover the failed drive, spent swapping the failed hardware and kicking off the rebuild. A human doesn't have to sit there for $75 per hour babysitting a rebuild, whether the rebuild takes one hour or five hundred hours. (One hour might be lowballing it, because there will obviously be followup checks to make sure the rebuilds are completing.
Where it's going to get interesting for him is when he loses two drives in an array simultaneously. At that time he's on the hook -- can he get both drives recovered before he loses a third, thus losing data? And I didn't go over the SATA expander to RAID map, but I'm assuming he's spread his risk across multiple expansion boards. It'd truly suck if one of those boards went out, corrupting three or more drives from the same array simultaneously!
I don't know. The guy says he has a lot of custom software to help with building and rebuilding the systems. Maybe he's got exactly what it takes.
A coworker's boss once hired a "programmer" while my buddy was on vacation (avoiding the technical interview in the process.) The guy's first task was a simple program, but it always core dumped. He made no progress trying to get it fixed, so my friend held a code review. Each and every function looked like this:
void foo() { ... some irrelevant but incomprehensibly bad code; ... main(); }
Yes. He called main() at the bottom of each function. When asked about it, the "programmer" said 'that's so it'll return back to main.'
I think the biggest mistake we made was not firing that stupid manager on the spot. But I suppose if we fired managers based solely on incompetent decisions,... well... you know.
Re:I was hoping there was a joke in there
on
How To Hire a Hacker
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· Score: 5, Funny
Slashdot Mirror
itll be 99% 0f the comments especially on slashdot
Actually it'll be "this sucks-beta".
I'm not freaked out. My choice to avoid GMO is quite logical. You have plants engineered to resist pesticide, in the sense that they themselves are one. I'll pass on that, thanks.
GMO corn has genes that create Bt toxin in it. In the corn, the Bt is in a protoxin form, and the human gut passes it through harmlessly. It's only in the gut of the corn borer (and other insects) that the Bt is activated.
I can understand a person having a reaction because their gut has some different chemistry going on than the rest of us. That's how allergies form in people -- an allergy is pretty much a person-specific toxin. So it would make sense to label GMO products as such, for that reason.
Unless you have an adverse reaction to peanuts, for example, you probably enjoy peanut butter. Unless you get sick from gluten, you probably eat that peanut butter on a slice of bread. Notice that the gluten and peanut allergic people don't run out and shout "YOU WILL ALL DIE FROM PEANUTS AND BREAD!" They just quietly read the labels and avoid peanuts and wheat products.
Unfortunately, the idiots you were quoting above are shouting exactly that: "YOU WILL ALL DIE FROM GMO!" And because those idiots have spread their ignorance, many healthy people are afraid of GMO crops for no reason. Labeling foods as GMO would cut sales in half. That's the simple reason GMO firms are opposed to labeling their product. And by avoiding GMO foods unnecessarily, you are propagating their lies.
In short, it's not the evolution of the crops that's in question, but of the environment around them and how it will respond.
It's only been the last few centuries where humans have had a large hand in terraforming. We've dammed rivers, ploughed fields, dug canals, drained lakes, and paved bogs. More recently we've carried all kinds of foreign species back and forth much faster than the winds can carry the seeds, or predators carry the diseases of their prey.
But don't forget that the world changes dramatically all the time all by itself. Geologically speaking, most of it happens too slow for us short-fuses to see. Glaciers come and go. Volcanoes cover old continents with ash and create new islands. Seas, rivers, lakes, all form, flow and dry up. On a more human time scale hurricanes and tornadoes scour landscapes. Earthquakes and ice destroy millennial-old rock formations in seconds. And Mother Nature gives no thought to the fragile native ecosystems or endangered species that are destroyed in the process. New species then fill in the old niches as they can, evolving along the way. When we see this happen we call it "natural selection."
Just because we hasten some change, or even tinker with it "unnaturally" in the labs, it doesn't mean that we're any more or less at risk than what Mother Nature herself would throw our way given enough time. Any fragile ecosystem is ultimately doomed, it's just a question of time. Whether or not we humans like the results is a different question, but environmental change is constant, and the dominant species will grow stronger as a result.
So, to the real GMO question: what could possibly go wrong? There's one answer staring us in the face. I'm personally unwilling to tell two billion people that we can't feed them all because we don't have the courage to improve our ability to grow food. I can hear the president addressing the U.N.: "Sorry, Africa and Asia, you gotta grow your own food this year. We rejected the 60 bushel/acre GMO wheat and the bugs are destroying our 10 bushel/acre heritage wheat, which leaves us barely enough to feed ourselves. We'd love to grow more, but we don't have the political testiculos, we've got these green-frankenfood people, organic farmers, no petro-chemicals, yadda yadda. I'm sure you know how it goes. Yep, we're really sorry about that. Maybe you can plow down a rain-forest or two, I hear that worked for Brazil."
And do you know who are you quoting? Here's a subtle hint: their home page has "GMFree" as a part of the URL. Painting "Institute for Responsible Technology" on the side of their building doesn't mean they are actually performing responsible scientific studies.
Their front page is filled with alarmist rhetoric like "Everything you HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods" and "Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the #1 GMO bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, presents shocking evidence why genetically modified crops may lead to health and environmental catastrophes, and what we can do about it." Does a responsible scientific organization use "Dangerous", "shocking", and "catastrophe" to frame the debate?
Every single paragraph on their site is devoted to anti-GMO propaganda such as "No GMOs" and "Healthy Eating Begins with Non GMO food!"
They're every bit as neutral on the subject as Monsanto. You can bet that any study they quote has been cherry picked to support their position, and that no studies that might show contrary evidence are supported.
These guys ARE the radical greens who hate GMOs because "they're not natural", not because they understand it.
And just to be clear, I'm not employed in the agri-business, but my wife is. She works for an organic grain wholesaler, so I've learned a bit about the industry, and about the people who work in it. Their entire business model is built upon making sure people freak out when they hear the letters "GMO".
Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?
Turn that question around: What are the side effects of non-GMO crops? How do you know that this mushroom is safe to eat, and not that one? It's very simple: people tried them, and they discovered that this particular type made them sick and die. At least GMOs get tested for this in a lab before they're released into the environment.
Keep in mind that with GMO crops you're taking two things: corn and chrysanthemum, for example, and pasting them together to create corn with a borer-resistant root. It's not like that mix is going to result in corn that grows gills and glows in the dark. So you test the corn that comes out, and if there's no permethrin in the kernels, what difference does it make to you in the food chain? None.
The radical greens who try to scare people about GMOs play upon people's gullibility. They want us to not understand that we animals don't merge with the DNA of the foods we eat. Our stomach acids break the cells down, and our bodies collect and use only the raw nutrition components. If it didn't work this way, eating a cow could give you hooves, or eating corn might make a tassel grow out of your head. For those bits of food where the digestion process opens the cell walls, the same digestion process breaks up the DNA into amino acids. The undigestible bits come out the other end.
I do agree that the Terminator gene is as evil as DRM, but from a humanity/political point of view, not from a scientific view.
I know the "greens" love to worry about GMOs but what is your particular fear? Are you afraid the proteins or amino acids will make you sick? Left-over anti-pest traces? Or are you falling into the marketing trap of "ooh, scary Frankenfoods!" please be sure to think critically for yourself.
A top-flight salesman can sell you something he knows is crap. That's what MS needs.
Nope, that's exactly what they don't need, and they know it. Microsoft's not completely hurting for sales. Their bread and butter comes from bundles and bundles of bundles, and corporations that need 100,000 desktops with Office 2007.
But they're losing everywhere else, because of the common (and not entirely untrue) perception that Microsoft = "virusy crashing computer".
They know they need to get customer service out in front of people, and make them accessible to ordinary folk. They've seen it work for Apple, and they want it too. It won't hurt that the stores will feature big screen TVs with kids lined up to blast things on the XBoxes. It will also give them an outlet to sell their peripheral hardware (which is actually not as mediocre as most of the crap out there*) and possibly a place to stock the complete line of Microsoft Press titles.
The big question is if they can do it well enough to beat Apple. Can they keep the line sizes manageable? Are they going to de-worm the machines right there on the countertop while you wait, which is good customer service? Or are they going to be a collection site who will send back the "repaired" PCs a week from Tuesday, which would be bad customer service.
They know they need these stores to freakin' *sparkle* with efficiency. The perception amongst the general public is that Apple stores do that today (even though the genius bars are sometimes lacking in actual geniuses.) The perception at Microsoft is that Apple store managers know how to do that. What they really should do is lure away the guy that designed the Apple store interiors and the guy who created the Apple store experience.
* Zune excluded.
One other thing that Microsoft doesn't have that Apple does: cultists. Microsoft has never come close to building the same level of insane fervor in its customers (just its CEOs.) Perhaps by luring the Apple Store's top performers away, they're hoping to dress themselves up with happy people with happy infectious attitudes. Or maybe they're just hoping to water down the Apple pool.
Either way, it'll be interesting to see if this plays out as the next iteration of "Embrace and extend." (I'm not going to even suggest that "and extinguish" makes sense in this context.)
What exactly do they have to showcase that isn't at the big box stores?
Geniuses. The complaining that goes on with PCs is that they have problems. Apples have problems too, but they have nice, friendly geniuses at every store. You don't whine about an Apple problem that lasts for six months, you bring it to the store and the genius fixes it for you right there, in the store. Microsoft needs to get support people in the field to do the same thing.
I don't know if it'll help, or if it's too little too late. People have 15 years of (mostly true) perceptions of PC's being "buggy". But the promise of quick fixes is going to keep a lot of customers happy, and that might be enough to get them to buy Windows 7, or Office 2007, or whatever they're pitching next.
The Enigma was one of the most advanced pre-modern cryptosystems. But it still treated letters as letters. To get to the next level, the separation of data (letters) from encryption into math operations was needed. This happened in parallel with the development of digital computers. Really, many of those advancements came from cryptanalysis of Enigma itself.
Fair question. I think it was the application of numerical theory, the idea that if you treated characters as numbers that you could encrypt them with math. Your post is a great example of pre-modern crypto.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
Half a holiday is overrated. Buy the SSD! :-)
Actually, storing data in a multiple data center / high availability environment is a completely related issue. The summary above talks of "entirely different paradigms." Cloud storage would be multiple data center based, which is entirely different from keeping the only copy on your local drives. In this concept, your machine would have enough OS to boot, and enough hard drive space to download the current version of whatever software you are leasing. Your personal info would always be maintained in the data centers, and only mirrored locally. Have a home failure? Drop in a new part or even a new PC, (possibly with an entirely different operating system, such as Chrome,) connect to the service, and you're 100% back.
It's no longer a novel concept for the home market. Consider Google Docs. It's not even being sold as "safer than RAID", it's being touted as "get it from anywhere" or "share with your friends". Safer than RAID is just a bonus.
So are we ready to move all our personal information to clouds? I certainly am not, but Google Docs are wildly popular and a lot of people are. I long ago learned that I can't look to myself to judge what the mainstream attitudes are in many things.
I'm not going to deny that on my most recent trip to the Bay we drove Highway 1 halfway to L.A. just for the pleasure of the drive. But that isn't the ordinary scenario where the nav systems are most heavily used. Come to Minnesota and drive the scenic 494/694 loop around the Twin Cities sometime, and savor the breathtaking vistas of the wood and concrete paneling lining the freeways; give yourself over to imagination that you're actually flying the trench scene from Star Wars for 80 whole miles! Or head to Detroit, and take in the incredible scenery on Warren St as your GPS efficiently guides you from strife-ridden Dearborn Heights to the post-war-ravaged downtown districts. But be sure to purchase additional insurance first!
For a similar adventure to yours, you'd likely do as well to turn the GPS receiver off, drive randomly until you run out of interesting roads, and then let it guide you back to civilization.
The european swallows what?
Loads.
It's a bad thing.
Is it really a bad thing, or is that just a visceral reaction to an idea that challenges old assumptions? Be honest with yourself. If you travel for pleasure, are you visiting a new city to see the sights, museums, beaches, restaurants and theaters, or is your trip there to learn all their exiting, history-filled roads, and drive their fabled five-lane freeways? I never once heard my dad say anything like "Look, John, it's mile marker 5! Elvis once flipped off your grandfather for driving slowly in the right lane near that very sign!"
And I don't know about you, but when I'm traveling on business I usually have a short time to get from the airport to my destination, find my way out of there late at night, get checked into my hotel, maybe find some overpriced restaurant to use up a few expense account dollars to make up for being stuck in some place I'd rather not be (no offense to anyone in Toledo was meant by that last statement), get back to the room and crash, fail to fall asleep in a crappy bed, groggily check out the next morning and head back to work, put in 10 more caffeine-fueled hours and then find my way back to the airport before the airline gives my seat away. I simply don't want to be glancing at an under-detailed Avis map that is bouncing around on the floor in front of the passenger seat, trying to figure out if I passed my exit. It's not safe. In that stressful environment, it's far more important to be able to focus my remaining two neurons strictly on driving.
In almost no case do I really need to learn the roads around a new place. The destinations hold my interest far more than the paved lanes that bring me there.
Last time I tried to use one, I got lost. I had scroll around on its map to figure out where I was and a SANE way of getting where I wanted to be. I think I'll stick to paper maps, which actually help me get acquainted with where I'm going so I can concentrate on traffic more, thanks.
I beg to differ. In a new city, when the GPS receiver is handling the navigational duties, you get to focus lots more on the traffic because you aren't hunting for the one sign that says "Hwy 5 West" or trying to remember if you should be taking the west or east exit. It sounds like a small thing, but it really frees you up to watch the idiot in the left lane on his phone who likes to drift over the line, and the guy in your rear view mirror speeding up and weaving through the three cars behind you. The little voice saying "in one mile keep right, then exit right on Highway Five West" is timely and useful, and not nearly as distracting as the frantic search for the obscure sign, or wondering if you accidentally passed it.
The downside is that if you let the box navigate, you don't have to learn the route yourself, and you may never learn the new roads. It's up to you to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Or you could have it in your GPS that tells you to use exit ramp in "5 miles", "exit now".
Or, the driver could pay attention to the signs on the roadside that have the height clearance for the upcoming overpasses!
I saw a news article not long ago where a truck was driven under an overpass that was too low and peeled back the top of the trailer. The reporter was blaming GPS of course, not the idiot driver.
Both are true. The driver is responsible for following all posted regulations and restrictions. The navigation software is supposed to provide a "safe route" that avoids the relevant obstructions. This saves the trucker lots of money from wasting time going down roads that he can't pass, but it does not absolve the driver from ignoring a sign that reads Max Height 13'4" when his trailer is 13'5".
And yes, the reporter is the real idiot of the story. A GPS satellite doesn't care where you are. A GPS receiver can only tell you if you're on the route or not. The routing software (which may have nothing at all to do with GPS) is the bit that should give you the pass/fail, and even that is only as good as its input data. Without more information, we don't know if the road data was incorrect or out of date, if the low clearance was incorrectly marked, if the routing software was internally incorrect, or if the GPS receiver misinterpreted a parallel frontage road as the main highway. But it sure makes for a good sound bite to say "a GPS was wrong."
Will Telkom play fair? Or will they throw resources at the problem to ensure they win?
If by "resources" you mean "peregrine falcons", I wouldn't be surprised.
I meant an hour of labor cost to recover the failed drive, spent swapping the failed hardware and kicking off the rebuild. A human doesn't have to sit there for $75 per hour babysitting a rebuild, whether the rebuild takes one hour or five hundred hours. (One hour might be lowballing it, because there will obviously be followup checks to make sure the rebuilds are completing.
Where it's going to get interesting for him is when he loses two drives in an array simultaneously. At that time he's on the hook -- can he get both drives recovered before he loses a third, thus losing data? And I didn't go over the SATA expander to RAID map, but I'm assuming he's spread his risk across multiple expansion boards. It'd truly suck if one of those boards went out, corrupting three or more drives from the same array simultaneously!
I don't know. The guy says he has a lot of custom software to help with building and rebuilding the systems. Maybe he's got exactly what it takes.
They're trying to prevent a crime-wave of armless people writing bad checks.
Obligatory Douglas Adams update: "Mostly 'armless."
For the multi-million dollar ADA compliance lawsuit they just handed this guy.
"Here, I'll hand you this lawsuit! Oops, missed. Sorry, missed again. Oh, too bad!"
A coworker's boss once hired a "programmer" while my buddy was on vacation (avoiding the technical interview in the process.) The guy's first task was a simple program, but it always core dumped. He made no progress trying to get it fixed, so my friend held a code review. Each and every function looked like this:
Yes. He called main() at the bottom of each function. When asked about it, the "programmer" said 'that's so it'll return back to main.'
I think the biggest mistake we made was not firing that stupid manager on the spot. But I suppose if we fired managers based solely on incompetent decisions, ... well... you know.
Here's a really lame joke about recursion.