Not with a link, no. Referential humor works best when everyone knows what's being talked about without having to say it explicitly. Clearly this didn't work for you.
It reminds me of Netscape Constellation. Netscape invented a pretty cool system where you could have a network-portable desktop - you could log into any computer anywhere, and all your stuff (programs, documents, desktop, everything) would come up for you. Think Chromebook, but more app-oriented, and in 1997.
One TINY feature of this was push content. Then the Netscape marketing department got wind of it and said "You mean we can use this to PUSH ADS?"
Then all the other stuff was ripped out, and the push content part of it got released as Netcaster, part of the Communicator suite.... And then was promptly ignored by everyone, because the only people interested in pushing content to you were advertisers.
Will you be providing metered or "all you can eat" bandwidth? If it's the former, people will bitch about unpredictable bills or quotas. If the latter, people will torrent as hard as they can and you had better get a lot of bandwidth.
I advocate metered bandwidth (at a reasonable price). It works out best for everyone, but you have to understand the reason why the industry has settled on the stupid "unlimited but not really" model.
Oh, I don't hate them! They're fine for what they are: a much less expensive, lighter duty laptop. But when you're comparing against a premium laptop like the MacBook Pro, the "real" Thinkpads are the proper match.
... Then the answer is probably no. I used to stack Dells floor to ceiling in the racks and never had a problem with power. Just interleave a PDU every so often and plug 'em all in.
Then I got a job at an HP shop. Started putting DL360s and DL380s in a rack. Breaker pops. Break out the clamp meter. No, the breaker's no defective. Those things GUZZLED. I have no idea what they did with the extra juice.
Anyway, if that's what they're using, they should forget about it. But perhaps their hardware has improved since then. People are paying more attention to power these days.
I must regretfully inform you that 2/3 of the surface of the planet in question is covered in water, and it's considerably more than that along the line of the equator. Please plan to install 8 or 9 of your data centers on ships.
For the ones on land you will be choosing from Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, Gabon, Congo, Kenya, Somalia and Indonesia. I suggest budgeting for a considerable number of guns.
I personally think people over-A/C most data centers (computers really don't care if it gets kind of warm; they only really care about temperatures that their human slaves would object to), but in these places... well, I hope you're friends with Carrier.
But all these problems can be overcome. I'm sure you'll do well with the abundant free sunshine!
... but it's a lot less damaging than listening to 6 conversations among people around me. Personally I like "earplug" style headphones which block out most of the noise; then I can use very quiet music to mask the rest.
I actually foresee the opposite: people are scared of radiation because they can't sense it directly - it's dangerous, but they have no idea of the magnitude of the radiation around them, other than some officials who promise them that it's too small to be worried about. Well, those officials are often full of shit, so why believe them now?
So give people a bunch of sensors. They'll watch them constantly for about a week, and pretty soon they'll discover that ambient radiation is negligible in everything they do. They'll amuse themselves watching it spike during flights and x-rays. And in the end, they'll realize that compared to even safe things like that, the amount that's around them in the rest of their lives is completely negligible, and they'll quit worrying about the "unseen killer".
As a bonus, we'll get some high resolution, wide-area radiation maps.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations that went like: "Whatever you do, do... push the red button!" / "Confirming, you want me to push the red button?" / "I c... hear what... SQUAWK red button!" / "OK, so are you saying not to push it?" / (dead air) / "Hello?"
I don't know if it was a technology problem with iDEN (how hard could it be to get a simple TDMA system right?) or if Nextel just woefully underdeployed cells, but a decade ago they definitely set the standard for how much a network could suck and still somehow attract business customers.
I'm pretty sure the other providers managed to add in comfort noise which you could hear cut out whenever a packet got dropped. Maybe that's where iDEN screwed up?
It is bad! But consider that a significant percentage of the fuel has already failed, likely a lot of it being completely melted. Breaking some more won't be a catastrophic "85 Chernobyls" release; it's just an incremental increase over what's already happened. It's also not likely to be a large increment: the catastrophic failure was not due not to the earthquake, but rather to the tsunami wiping out the generators which were critical for cooling. That's no longer a problem.
The thing to be concerned about (at least as far as earthquakes go) is whether the meltdown has left things more fragile inside. There's likely some small percentage of intact fuel that's precariously arranged and might suffer further damage in another quake, but again, that's a relatively small incremental increase, not a sudden jump of orders of magnitude.
Seconded, and further: Even if another 9.0 happened in the same place, it wouldn't magically release all the radioactive material. The scary problem was when it required huge amounts of very high pressure water to cool. At this point the reactors are in cold shutdown. The fuel might fall over and a few rods may break open. The situation might get a little worse, but no quake can release any significant percentage of the fuel at this point.
Also, Cringley's a fucking dumbass troll and should be ignored. Normally I hate taking the bait, but this issue's too easy to get people stirred up, so extra debunking is in order.
In a study around 2002, the natural sex ratio at birth was estimated to be close to 1.06 males/female.[2] In most populations, adult males tend to have higher death rates than adult females of the same age (even after allowing for causes specific to females such as breast cancer and death in childbirth), both due to natural causes such as heart attacks and strokes, which account for by far the majority of deaths and also to violent causes, such as homicide and warfare (for example, in the USA as of 2006, an adult non-elderly male is 3 to 6 times more likely to become a victim of a homicide and 2.5 to 3.5 times more likely to die in an accident than a female of the same age),[3] resulting in higher life expectancy of females. Consequently, the sex ratio tends to reduce as age increases, and among the elderly there is usually an excess of females. For example, the male to female ratio falls from 1.05 for the group aged 15 to 65 to 0.70 for the group over 65 in Germany, from 1.00 to 0.72 in the USA, from 1.06 to 0.91 in mainland China and from 1.07 to 1.02 in India, which has a smaller proportion of very old people.
Your challenge is to tell what sort of drink each of a swelling mob of customers wants by the expressions on their faces
That sounds to me like they want to filter out Aspergers / autism spectrum applicants, but they can't actually say that since it'd violate the ADA, so this test lets them accomplish that in a legally deniable way.
Counterpoint: Don't buy a MacBook Pro except if you want OS X. The EFI BIOS is a pain. I spent unreasonable amounts of time holding down magic "alt-apple-whatever" key combinations and rebooting trying to figure out WTF was wrong with the thing. It's MUCH nicer to have a computer that has a BIOS setup screen where you can just go tell it which drive to boot from and which simply gives you an error message when something is wrong. And the whole mess of conflicting partition tables... don't get me started.
I've also found the hardware to be not-so-good. All the components are great, of course, but Apple very much prefers to make the case pretty at the expense of repair. For example: on a thinkpad you open it up by removing five screws from the bottom and pulling off the palm rest and keyboard. Easy. On a MBP, I had to take out no fewer than two dozen screws and pry up a dozen little plastic clips around the edges where the metal top meets the metal side... And they never quite go back together again just right. And for documentation of the procedure? Thinkpads have a detailed service manual; the Mac has ZERO documentation and you're stuck reading online howtos which never seem to cover exactly your model. You're supposed to take it to the store if you want something fixed.
I'm also not happy with the all aluminum design. It looks good, but I'm pretty rough on laptops - I'm in a fabrication shop a lot and shit happens. My MacBook Pro was turning into a scraped and dented beater. My Thinkpad (metal frame, plastic skin) has taken just as many drops to the concrete floor and bangs into equipment, and it's in much better shape (almost like new) even after several years of abuse.
As implied above, I'm now very fond of Thinkpads. For the OP, here's the quick summary of Thinkpad models:
First character: X - Ultralight T - Standard size W - Workstation
There are two reasons you care: 1, this keyboard is great; 2, what's underneath is built like a Thinkpad, not an Ideapad dressed up in black and sold through business channels. Lenovo has done themselves a huge disservice by diluting the Thinkpad brand this way, but fortunately the real ones are very easy to spot once you recognize the keyboard. There are a bunch of other things that change too, but this one's the easiest to spot.
I didn't say it applies only to GE. It applies to any case where you have a highly inbred crop. GE, and the business and farming practices surrounding it, are just a case where it encourages particularly bad practices.
I've said repeatedly in these threads: I don't have a problem with GE; I only object to irresponsible practices, which are unfortunately what get encouraged with the current business model for GE seed companies.
By "red herring" I don't mean health issues aren't a problem; they're just a much smaller one. Those problems only apply to some GE crops, and can be addressed, risks scientifically quantified, and a very plausible case can be made that the benefits are worthwhile.
It's a red herring because it's distracting from the bigger problems. The end result will be "See, it isn't going to give you cancer", but I'm asking a more difficult question: will this benefit everyone in the end, or just leave us dependent on GE crops?
computers are evil because there is Microsoft. Then why do you use computers?
Microsoft software sucks because of it's in Microsoft's interest to make sucky software. I use Linux.:)
I don't inherently have a problem with GE crops. I only have a problem with the companies making them, whose financial incentives are not aligned with everyone else's well being. Responsible genetic engineering would be a win for everyone, but the business model doesn't reward responsibility.
I don't reject genetic engineering, just the poor business and farming practices that come with it. It could be done responsibly, but right now Monsanto's business incentives don't align well with sustainable practices.
Yes, this applies to any case where you greatly reduce genetic diversity. GE is not the only cause of monocultures; but it does result in particularly widespread and homogenous monocultures.
Short-term (5 years) the farmers benefit growing GE crops. They get greater yields with less effort, and can sell their crops at a lower price for more profit than the other guys. Anyone who doesn't get in on the GE crops ends up out of business (their margins go below zero), or a niche player (selling to the few people willing to pay extra for non-GE crops, for whatever reason). But the bulk of the crops end up as a part of the GE monoculture.
Long term (50 years), the farmers who tried to hold out because it was in their long-term interest are either out of business or confined to that small niche. They never got to break out because guys using GE seeds will keep buying this year's model that performs slightly better, never mind the fact that it's only performing better because of the problems created ten years ago.
I don't quite think it is fair to single out GE crops
There are two problems: 1, monoculture - this isn't inherently a GE problem, but the farming practices surrounding (and encouraged by) GE crops ARE a problem; 2, once the farmers are hooked on GE crops, the guys selling the seeds have them by the balls.
The case you describe about the cost, as far as I know, is not true. I'm fairly certain they are of net economic benefit to the farmers.
In the short term, yes! That's how they get the farmers hooked. But then two things happen: 1, once they have ALL the farmers in an area dependent on their seeds they can jack the prices up, and the farmers can't say no; 2, eventually some new species of bug or weed moves in which starts thriving, diminishing the benefit, and creating the need for a NEW GE line that can cope with the new pest. So now you head back to Monsanto to get your next fix.
Long term you're better off with the less specialized crops that have evolved over thousands of years to handle the full range of bugs and weeds, and manually weeding... But all the farmers are caught playing a 10 year game by Monsanto's rules instead of the 50 year game where everyone else would win if they didn't get put out of business first.
Slashdot Mirror
Not with a link, no. Referential humor works best when everyone knows what's being talked about without having to say it explicitly. Clearly this didn't work for you.
... is measured only by success. --Bruce Feirstein
It reminds me of Netscape Constellation. Netscape invented a pretty cool system where you could have a network-portable desktop - you could log into any computer anywhere, and all your stuff (programs, documents, desktop, everything) would come up for you. Think Chromebook, but more app-oriented, and in 1997.
One TINY feature of this was push content. Then the Netscape marketing department got wind of it and said "You mean we can use this to PUSH ADS?"
Then all the other stuff was ripped out, and the push content part of it got released as Netcaster, part of the Communicator suite.... And then was promptly ignored by everyone, because the only people interested in pushing content to you were advertisers.
Will you be providing metered or "all you can eat" bandwidth? If it's the former, people will bitch about unpredictable bills or quotas. If the latter, people will torrent as hard as they can and you had better get a lot of bandwidth.
I advocate metered bandwidth (at a reasonable price). It works out best for everyone, but you have to understand the reason why the industry has settled on the stupid "unlimited but not really" model.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, matters more at winning wars than logistics
Says who? Morale is #1, even in conventional war, but even more so in the unconventional combat that's been popular lately.
I used to use cloud sync, but I found that none of them were robust enough for my abusive ways. Most required periodic manual merges.
I switched to Synkron syncing to a network drive (VPNed when I'm on the road) and I've been happy ever since.
Oh, I don't hate them! They're fine for what they are: a much less expensive, lighter duty laptop. But when you're comparing against a premium laptop like the MacBook Pro, the "real" Thinkpads are the proper match.
1. I'm a disposable cog, but my employeer may make waves... ... and if those waves compete with Oracle's, they may start an IP pissing match.
2.
Suing users is completely plausible for Oracle. The case would be meritless, but I don't have the time and money to go up against Oracle in court.
... Then the answer is probably no. I used to stack Dells floor to ceiling in the racks and never had a problem with power. Just interleave a PDU every so often and plug 'em all in.
Then I got a job at an HP shop. Started putting DL360s and DL380s in a rack. Breaker pops. Break out the clamp meter. No, the breaker's no defective. Those things GUZZLED. I have no idea what they did with the extra juice.
Anyway, if that's what they're using, they should forget about it. But perhaps their hardware has improved since then. People are paying more attention to power these days.
I must regretfully inform you that 2/3 of the surface of the planet in question is covered in water, and it's considerably more than that along the line of the equator. Please plan to install 8 or 9 of your data centers on ships.
For the ones on land you will be choosing from Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, Gabon, Congo, Kenya, Somalia and Indonesia. I suggest budgeting for a considerable number of guns.
I personally think people over-A/C most data centers (computers really don't care if it gets kind of warm; they only really care about temperatures that their human slaves would object to), but in these places... well, I hope you're friends with Carrier.
But all these problems can be overcome. I'm sure you'll do well with the abundant free sunshine!
... but it's a lot less damaging than listening to 6 conversations among people around me. Personally I like "earplug" style headphones which block out most of the noise; then I can use very quiet music to mask the rest.
I actually foresee the opposite: people are scared of radiation because they can't sense it directly - it's dangerous, but they have no idea of the magnitude of the radiation around them, other than some officials who promise them that it's too small to be worried about. Well, those officials are often full of shit, so why believe them now?
So give people a bunch of sensors. They'll watch them constantly for about a week, and pretty soon they'll discover that ambient radiation is negligible in everything they do. They'll amuse themselves watching it spike during flights and x-rays. And in the end, they'll realize that compared to even safe things like that, the amount that's around them in the rest of their lives is completely negligible, and they'll quit worrying about the "unseen killer".
As a bonus, we'll get some high resolution, wide-area radiation maps.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations that went like: "Whatever you do, do ... push the red button!" / "Confirming, you want me to push the red button?" / "I c... hear what ... SQUAWK red button!" / "OK, so are you saying not to push it?" / (dead air) / "Hello?"
I don't know if it was a technology problem with iDEN (how hard could it be to get a simple TDMA system right?) or if Nextel just woefully underdeployed cells, but a decade ago they definitely set the standard for how much a network could suck and still somehow attract business customers.
I'm pretty sure the other providers managed to add in comfort noise which you could hear cut out whenever a packet got dropped. Maybe that's where iDEN screwed up?
It is bad! But consider that a significant percentage of the fuel has already failed, likely a lot of it being completely melted. Breaking some more won't be a catastrophic "85 Chernobyls" release; it's just an incremental increase over what's already happened. It's also not likely to be a large increment: the catastrophic failure was not due not to the earthquake, but rather to the tsunami wiping out the generators which were critical for cooling. That's no longer a problem.
The thing to be concerned about (at least as far as earthquakes go) is whether the meltdown has left things more fragile inside. There's likely some small percentage of intact fuel that's precariously arranged and might suffer further damage in another quake, but again, that's a relatively small incremental increase, not a sudden jump of orders of magnitude.
Seconded, and further: Even if another 9.0 happened in the same place, it wouldn't magically release all the radioactive material. The scary problem was when it required huge amounts of very high pressure water to cool. At this point the reactors are in cold shutdown. The fuel might fall over and a few rods may break open. The situation might get a little worse, but no quake can release any significant percentage of the fuel at this point.
Also, Cringley's a fucking dumbass troll and should be ignored. Normally I hate taking the bait, but this issue's too easy to get people stirred up, so extra debunking is in order.
citation please
How about from the article you linked?
In a study around 2002, the natural sex ratio at birth was estimated to be close to 1.06 males/female.[2] In most populations, adult males tend to have higher death rates than adult females of the same age (even after allowing for causes specific to females such as breast cancer and death in childbirth), both due to natural causes such as heart attacks and strokes, which account for by far the majority of deaths and also to violent causes, such as homicide and warfare (for example, in the USA as of 2006, an adult non-elderly male is 3 to 6 times more likely to become a victim of a homicide and 2.5 to 3.5 times more likely to die in an accident than a female of the same age),[3] resulting in higher life expectancy of females. Consequently, the sex ratio tends to reduce as age increases, and among the elderly there is usually an excess of females. For example, the male to female ratio falls from 1.05 for the group aged 15 to 65 to 0.70 for the group over 65 in Germany, from 1.00 to 0.72 in the USA, from 1.06 to 0.91 in mainland China and from 1.07 to 1.02 in India, which has a smaller proportion of very old people.
Follow the cites if you want the root sources.
Your challenge is to tell what sort of drink each of a swelling mob of customers wants by the expressions on their faces
That sounds to me like they want to filter out Aspergers / autism spectrum applicants, but they can't actually say that since it'd violate the ADA, so this test lets them accomplish that in a legally deniable way.
Counterpoint: Don't buy a MacBook Pro except if you want OS X. The EFI BIOS is a pain. I spent unreasonable amounts of time holding down magic "alt-apple-whatever" key combinations and rebooting trying to figure out WTF was wrong with the thing. It's MUCH nicer to have a computer that has a BIOS setup screen where you can just go tell it which drive to boot from and which simply gives you an error message when something is wrong. And the whole mess of conflicting partition tables... don't get me started.
I've also found the hardware to be not-so-good. All the components are great, of course, but Apple very much prefers to make the case pretty at the expense of repair. For example: on a thinkpad you open it up by removing five screws from the bottom and pulling off the palm rest and keyboard. Easy. On a MBP, I had to take out no fewer than two dozen screws and pry up a dozen little plastic clips around the edges where the metal top meets the metal side... And they never quite go back together again just right. And for documentation of the procedure? Thinkpads have a detailed service manual; the Mac has ZERO documentation and you're stuck reading online howtos which never seem to cover exactly your model. You're supposed to take it to the store if you want something fixed.
I'm also not happy with the all aluminum design. It looks good, but I'm pretty rough on laptops - I'm in a fabrication shop a lot and shit happens. My MacBook Pro was turning into a scraped and dented beater. My Thinkpad (metal frame, plastic skin) has taken just as many drops to the concrete floor and bangs into equipment, and it's in much better shape (almost like new) even after several years of abuse.
As implied above, I'm now very fond of Thinkpads. For the OP, here's the quick summary of Thinkpad models:
First character:
X - Ultralight
T - Standard size
W - Workstation
Second:
2 - 12"
4 - 14"
5 - 15"
7 - 17"
So a T5xx is a standard-frame 15" laptop.
Real Thinkpads ALWAYS have this keyboard: http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/mobile/lenovo-thinkpad-t61/keyboard.jpg . Note, seven rows counting up the left side; three volume buttons; round power button; pgup/pgdn above and below each other. Here's a fake Thinkpad: http://www.unitedgadget.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ThinkPad-X100e-Keyboard.jpg - chiclet keys, six rows, no dedicated volume buttons, etc.
There are two reasons you care: 1, this keyboard is great; 2, what's underneath is built like a Thinkpad, not an Ideapad dressed up in black and sold through business channels. Lenovo has done themselves a huge disservice by diluting the Thinkpad brand this way, but fortunately the real ones are very easy to spot once you recognize the keyboard. There are a bunch of other things that change too, but this one's the easiest to spot.
Just make sure you stop at all the checkpoints frequently enough that we can keep our records up to date.
I didn't say it applies only to GE. It applies to any case where you have a highly inbred crop. GE, and the business and farming practices surrounding it, are just a case where it encourages particularly bad practices.
I've said repeatedly in these threads: I don't have a problem with GE; I only object to irresponsible practices, which are unfortunately what get encouraged with the current business model for GE seed companies.
By "red herring" I don't mean health issues aren't a problem; they're just a much smaller one. Those problems only apply to some GE crops, and can be addressed, risks scientifically quantified, and a very plausible case can be made that the benefits are worthwhile.
It's a red herring because it's distracting from the bigger problems. The end result will be "See, it isn't going to give you cancer", but I'm asking a more difficult question: will this benefit everyone in the end, or just leave us dependent on GE crops?
computers are evil because there is Microsoft. Then why do you use computers?
Microsoft software sucks because of it's in Microsoft's interest to make sucky software. I use Linux. :)
I don't inherently have a problem with GE crops. I only have a problem with the companies making them, whose financial incentives are not aligned with everyone else's well being. Responsible genetic engineering would be a win for everyone, but the business model doesn't reward responsibility.
I don't reject genetic engineering, just the poor business and farming practices that come with it. It could be done responsibly, but right now Monsanto's business incentives don't align well with sustainable practices.
Yes, this applies to any case where you greatly reduce genetic diversity. GE is not the only cause of monocultures; but it does result in particularly widespread and homogenous monocultures.
Short-term (5 years) the farmers benefit growing GE crops. They get greater yields with less effort, and can sell their crops at a lower price for more profit than the other guys. Anyone who doesn't get in on the GE crops ends up out of business (their margins go below zero), or a niche player (selling to the few people willing to pay extra for non-GE crops, for whatever reason). But the bulk of the crops end up as a part of the GE monoculture.
Long term (50 years), the farmers who tried to hold out because it was in their long-term interest are either out of business or confined to that small niche. They never got to break out because guys using GE seeds will keep buying this year's model that performs slightly better, never mind the fact that it's only performing better because of the problems created ten years ago.
I don't quite think it is fair to single out GE crops
There are two problems: 1, monoculture - this isn't inherently a GE problem, but the farming practices surrounding (and encouraged by) GE crops ARE a problem; 2, once the farmers are hooked on GE crops, the guys selling the seeds have them by the balls.
The case you describe about the cost, as far as I know, is not true. I'm fairly certain they are of net economic benefit to the farmers.
In the short term, yes! That's how they get the farmers hooked. But then two things happen: 1, once they have ALL the farmers in an area dependent on their seeds they can jack the prices up, and the farmers can't say no; 2, eventually some new species of bug or weed moves in which starts thriving, diminishing the benefit, and creating the need for a NEW GE line that can cope with the new pest. So now you head back to Monsanto to get your next fix.
Long term you're better off with the less specialized crops that have evolved over thousands of years to handle the full range of bugs and weeds, and manually weeding... But all the farmers are caught playing a 10 year game by Monsanto's rules instead of the 50 year game where everyone else would win if they didn't get put out of business first.