You forget that this is for the Municipaliity of Turin. That is to say that it is not only government workers, but Italian government workers.
Having lived in Italy for several years, I can say that this is about as far from a for-profit industry as one can get, so cost is not really an issue. Nor does the government have a reputation for doing things quickly. The situation is perfect for OSS.
I dare say the changeover will give the workers something more interesting to do than just file papers. Sure there will be a lot of complaints, cursing, arguments and excited hand gesticulation about how the computer doesn't work like it should, but that is completely normal in Italy.
Linus is right, GCC is braindead. Its code is purposely opaque and has huge maintenance problems. This is not the first time GCC is the source of suffering. I remember the bug in 2.95 causing all sorts of grief.
It would be interesting if the kernel devs switched to clang like FreeBSD has done. Even just the threat of doing so could give at least a good rivalry and competition usually means the one who improves the fastest will survive.
defn: : strong belief or trust in someone or something.
Thus your ability to confirm is based upon a certain trust in the validity of the scientific process. It does not mean that it is unreasonable, but simply that it is of something that you cannot observe.
As far as the 'duplicated independently', certainly that increases the validity of the measurement. But the question arises: what if there is only one instrument that can measure the phenomenon [such as CERN] ? How much is this really duplicated independently? If the ruler is marked wrong, everyone will be measuring wrong. The foundation of science is more subtle than just the ability to duplicate observations.
The fact that you COULD observe it, doesn't mean you actually will. Thus, until you actually observe it yourself, your knowledge of reality is still coming through faith. For one, you believe that the person telling you these things actually knows what he is talking about, and also that he is not attempting to lie to you. I very much doubt that many could afford a telescope that could see Titan, and so their knowledge will never rise above a simple belief that the scientist knows better than he does and he is not deceptive.
Faith in a human being can go wrong, but, let's be honest, there just isn't enough time, nor talent, nor energy nor equipment to verify everything that the experts say. Our knowledge of these things comes through hearing them from others, and thus implies at least a rudimentary faith in their competence and veracity. I might add that the confidence we have in the findings of others is necessary for the progress of human knowledge. No one would get very far if each of us had to rediscover calculus or remeasure the basic physical constants of the universe. It is faith in the metaphysical assumptions of truth, veracity and verifiability that make science possible, but the large corpus of observation is largely based on confidence in another human being.
I might add that the criteria of 'duplication' in many of the most advanced areas of physics are close to impossible for all but a very select few. Not everyone can build a hadron collider in their backyard....
The article doesn't really specify how the 90% were spied upon. It could simply be as a consequence of recording a telephone from a known suspect. I imagine that even a terrorists normal activity consists of many mundane things that involve innocent people: they order pizza, they go to bars, they buy things in stores, etc. Of course if someone is under surveillance, all these innocent people also get involved by the simple fact that they become somehow possible accessories in his crime. I would imagine that 90% of the activity of any criminal, including organised crime, is fairly innocuous, and innocent people will be also recorded because of this.
What I would really like to know is how much of this gathering of information is a consequence of the gathering of information on a possible suspect or simply a mass gathering of data about everyone with the filter applied afterwards. If the suspect is already under surveillance, I imagine that the innocent population would tolerate a loss of privacy simply because that person is a threat. If it is the other way around, that is that information is gathered indiscriminately in order to search for possible suspects, then it is extremely dangerous.
The fact that the Post does not describe in detail these findings makes the article more sensational than useful in my opinion.
To be honest the game was not that extraordinary, but it had its appeal. I think however it was the music that really made the game popular. Seeing that the game was all about matching up blocks that fit together, it was very poetic that they used a Russian folk song that was about courtship.
Back then, programmers had a bit of culture. These hipsters are just faking it.
One thing about a human doctor though is that they often know what it feels like to be in pain. A robot doesn't as it only has an algorithm. A nurse, when she sticks the needle in, will notice how you react, whether you feel pain or not. I would think the robot would need to have some manner of sensing if it is doing something harmful or painful to the patient.
However, I have had doctors and nurses that are completely insensitive to their patients, so if the robot can get it right each time it might be a better alternative. I've had sessions where it took 4 tries for the nurse to get the intravenous in correctly. It was not a very pleasant experience. I'd let the robot give it a try after that.
before being streamed across 500 miles of Australia's National Broadband Network to the Pawsey Centre, which gets rid of most of it as quickly as possible.
Get rid of data? Don't you mean routing the data to its destination? And you would hope the Pawsey Centre actually DID something with the data and not just get rid of it.
I don't think Stonehenge can claim that it is operating though. They still don't know what it was used for. The Pantheon on the other hand is still used as a church. It's a very impressive structure - a dome with a hole in the roof. I'm really curious how they pulled off that engineering trick without heavy machinery,
Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks standing in a field. It's like comparing CPM with a Symbolics Lisp Machine, no comparison.
Well one good thing this shows is that gas economy is at least seen as an attractive quality. They wouldn't falsify it if they didn't think their customers valued such things. I remember not long ago when people didn't care anything about gas mileage. But now it is important, so in this sense there is some progress.
But human nature is what it is - so much easier to cheat than to work at making something good. Hopefully the government steps in and punishes the offenders.
I believe it is from the fact that the first Pope was originally called 'Simon' and was renamed 'Peter' when he received his appointment ("on this rock (petrum) I will build my Church" Mt 16). So when the Pope is chosen his name is also changed, but strangely he gets to choose it.
Even better - how about for sports athletes and even every person of adult age goes to the doctor for a scan, and his skeleton is profiled and kept in a database for future use.
Imagine what we could do if we could 3d print organs.
An enormous difference, actually. I have a friend who works with prosthetics and the construction of the mold is often a large part of the cost in making things like joint replacements for hips. In some situations the mold is very costly, and it can only be done once - if it doesn't work they have to do the whole thing over. This is a huge leap forward.
I once had to fix a server some 6000 km away due to a corrupted disk. Doing pdisk and modifying fstab over ssh and then a reboot. You just check and recheck to make sure you did it right and just hope you get a ping a few minutes later.
Can't imagine how these guys feel. 45 min ping and it isn't like they could ask someone to go turn it off and on again.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget that this is for the Municipaliity of Turin. That is to say that it is not only government workers, but Italian government workers.
Having lived in Italy for several years, I can say that this is about as far from a for-profit industry as one can get, so cost is not really an issue. Nor does the government have a reputation for doing things quickly. The situation is perfect for OSS.
I dare say the changeover will give the workers something more interesting to do than just file papers. Sure there will be a lot of complaints, cursing, arguments and excited hand gesticulation about how the computer doesn't work like it should, but that is completely normal in Italy.
Linus is right, GCC is braindead. Its code is purposely opaque and has huge maintenance problems. This is not the first time GCC is the source of suffering. I remember the bug in 2.95 causing all sorts of grief.
It would be interesting if the kernel devs switched to clang like FreeBSD has done. Even just the threat of doing so could give at least a good rivalry and competition usually means the one who improves the fastest will survive.
*casualty
"In war, the first casuality is truth".
Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC)
Res eo magis mutant quo manent.
Actually, by definition, faith is:
defn: : strong belief or trust in someone or something.
Thus your ability to confirm is based upon a certain trust in the validity of the scientific process. It does not mean that it is unreasonable, but simply that it is of something that you cannot observe.
As far as the 'duplicated independently', certainly that increases the validity of the measurement. But the question arises: what if there is only one instrument that can measure the phenomenon [such as CERN] ? How much is this really duplicated independently? If the ruler is marked wrong, everyone will be measuring wrong. The foundation of science is more subtle than just the ability to duplicate observations.
The fact that you COULD observe it, doesn't mean you actually will. Thus, until you actually observe it yourself, your knowledge of reality is still coming through faith. For one, you believe that the person telling you these things actually knows what he is talking about, and also that he is not attempting to lie to you. I very much doubt that many could afford a telescope that could see Titan, and so their knowledge will never rise above a simple belief that the scientist knows better than he does and he is not deceptive.
Faith in a human being can go wrong, but, let's be honest, there just isn't enough time, nor talent, nor energy nor equipment to verify everything that the experts say. Our knowledge of these things comes through hearing them from others, and thus implies at least a rudimentary faith in their competence and veracity. I might add that the confidence we have in the findings of others is necessary for the progress of human knowledge. No one would get very far if each of us had to rediscover calculus or remeasure the basic physical constants of the universe. It is faith in the metaphysical assumptions of truth, veracity and verifiability that make science possible, but the large corpus of observation is largely based on confidence in another human being.
I might add that the criteria of 'duplication' in many of the most advanced areas of physics are close to impossible for all but a very select few. Not everyone can build a hadron collider in their backyard....
The article doesn't really specify how the 90% were spied upon. It could simply be as a consequence of recording a telephone from a known suspect. I imagine that even a terrorists normal activity consists of many mundane things that involve innocent people: they order pizza, they go to bars, they buy things in stores, etc. Of course if someone is under surveillance, all these innocent people also get involved by the simple fact that they become somehow possible accessories in his crime. I would imagine that 90% of the activity of any criminal, including organised crime, is fairly innocuous, and innocent people will be also recorded because of this.
What I would really like to know is how much of this gathering of information is a consequence of the gathering of information on a possible suspect or simply a mass gathering of data about everyone with the filter applied afterwards. If the suspect is already under surveillance, I imagine that the innocent population would tolerate a loss of privacy simply because that person is a threat. If it is the other way around, that is that information is gathered indiscriminately in order to search for possible suspects, then it is extremely dangerous.
The fact that the Post does not describe in detail these findings makes the article more sensational than useful in my opinion.
To be honest the game was not that extraordinary, but it had its appeal. I think however it was the music that really made the game popular. Seeing that the game was all about matching up blocks that fit together, it was very poetic that they used a Russian folk song that was about courtship.
Back then, programmers had a bit of culture. These hipsters are just faking it.
Did you know you can actually use COBOL to write iOS apps ?
Having a beard even makes programming hotter.... seriously, in summertime, the beard is a no go.
Best random number generators are impervious to statistics
Well, either he's created the mother of all LISP macros, or it's simply vaporware. Love to see it when they publish it. Code or it didn't happen.
Here is the obligatory xkcd, panel two.
One thing about a human doctor though is that they often know what it feels like to be in pain. A robot doesn't as it only has an algorithm. A nurse, when she sticks the needle in, will notice how you react, whether you feel pain or not. I would think the robot would need to have some manner of sensing if it is doing something harmful or painful to the patient.
However, I have had doctors and nurses that are completely insensitive to their patients, so if the robot can get it right each time it might be a better alternative. I've had sessions where it took 4 tries for the nurse to get the intravenous in correctly. It was not a very pleasant experience. I'd let the robot give it a try after that.
From the article:
Get rid of data? Don't you mean routing the data to its destination? And you would hope the Pawsey Centre actually DID something with the data and not just get rid of it.
The phenomenon is not just restricted to IT companies. It's the borken part of human nature. Te Greeks calledit 'hubris'.
And every window manager wishing it was a terminal. That damn mouse is one of the most inefficient things for input.
This new terminal thing looks great. I wonder if emacs -nw would display images in it.
Hope you aren't running BIND without patches, or that you have a good firewall keeping it off the net.
I don't think Stonehenge can claim that it is operating though. They still don't know what it was used for. The Pantheon on the other hand is still used as a church. It's a very impressive structure - a dome with a hole in the roof. I'm really curious how they pulled off that engineering trick without heavy machinery,
Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks standing in a field. It's like comparing CPM with a Symbolics Lisp Machine, no comparison.
It works fine in FreeBSD, just don't use the proprietary drivers.
Here is the magic link: http://masterofpc.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/brother-mfc-7420-under-linux-without-the-proprietary-brother-drivers/
Well one good thing this shows is that gas economy is at least seen as an attractive quality. They wouldn't falsify it if they didn't think their customers valued such things. I remember not long ago when people didn't care anything about gas mileage. But now it is important, so in this sense there is some progress.
But human nature is what it is - so much easier to cheat than to work at making something good. Hopefully the government steps in and punishes the offenders.
I believe it is from the fact that the first Pope was originally called 'Simon' and was renamed 'Peter' when he received his appointment ("on this rock (petrum) I will build my Church" Mt 16). So when the Pope is chosen his name is also changed, but strangely he gets to choose it.
Well it seems that they at least use it:
curl -I -L -A 'Mozilla' http://www.vatican.va/ | grep 'Server'
gives Server: Apache
The html source uses tons of functions from Lytebox, a CC 3.0 license. So it looks like they use it.
Seriously guys, don't rely on third parties. If something is important to you, make it yourself!
I thought all serious slashdotters used GNUS for RSS feeds. Works great and you can customize it.
Even better - how about for sports athletes and even every person of adult age goes to the doctor for a scan, and his skeleton is profiled and kept in a database for future use.
Imagine what we could do if we could 3d print organs.
An enormous difference, actually. I have a friend who works with prosthetics and the construction of the mold is often a large part of the cost in making things like joint replacements for hips. In some situations the mold is very costly, and it can only be done once - if it doesn't work they have to do the whole thing over. This is a huge leap forward.
I once had to fix a server some 6000 km away due to a corrupted disk. Doing pdisk and modifying fstab over ssh and then a reboot. You just check and recheck to make sure you did it right and just hope you get a ping a few minutes later.
Can't imagine how these guys feel. 45 min ping and it isn't like they could ask someone to go turn it off and on again.
Good luck to the guys working on this.