Don't feel too bad. It's already modded up to 4, so it clearly doesn't suck. But it reminds me of when you take your car in for service - I happen to have my odometer and trip odometer set to the same digits because, well a trip odometer is useless and I somehow just feel better when the two match. Anyhow, why in the world does the mechanic reset the trip odometer for you? It's almost as bad as my wife opening the microwave door early and letting the words 'p r e s s s t a r t' scroll repeatedly across the display instead of the clock. What was the question again?
Given the relatively low cost of a replacement handset, I can assure you that 99% of all phone owners who drop a handset into the toilet never find out one way or another if the handset survived the experience. But it brings up a question. Do you often talk on the phone at home while using the toilet, and if so do you flush mid-conversation, wait on the toilet until the conversation is over, or (hopefully remember to) come back later to flush?
And the problem is that fixed-length blocks don't play nice with backups, which tend to be big, long tar files or other similar entities. Once the first difference is encountered, all the bytes shift some random number. Normal data change doesn't often conveniently occur in fixed lengths. NetApp A-SIS is a classic example, and typically it would yield about 10-15% data reduction. For the mathematically challenged that's far less than 2:1. The obvious question is why even bother? Why not just compress on the fly? It's far easier. That's why NetApp switched to variable-length blocks for their VTL product, which has all of its own issues.
As for VM's, there is a bit of a misconception about their dedupe rates. With fixed-length blocks you are very likely to find much of the effect comes from deduplicating whitespace. Ten billion consecutive zeroes are pretty easy to condense. Fixed length dedupe of VM's tends to be in the single digit ratios, whereas variable length dedupe is often in the high double or low triple digit ratios.
This is exactly the reason sales are in decline. The market penetration of BD players and HD TV's is more of a trailing statistic. There is less than $.75 difference in the cost of producing a DVD versus a BD at scale the last time I checked, and this was even for a small order of 1000 units or so. So why when every DVD in the world starts off at $14.99 at Best Buy for the first few weeks do BD's have to be $26.99? Movie companies need to leave their margins on the table and try harder to attain market share. Unlike DVD, BD actually has competition in the form of multiple sources of good HD content. In addition to the edge providers, there are NetFlix and Amazon in the mainstream market, and now all the major pay channels (HBO, SHO, etc.) have multiple HD channels available. $15 for a movie is reasonable. $27 is not. It's that simple.
I prefer a dirty vodka martini. I think excessive UAC is the brine in this analogy.
BTW - Just upgraded Vista/64 to Windows 7/64 and had no issues. Windows 7 seems like a slightly cleaner OS overall. I wasn't really having issues with Vista either. In any case, I'm a big fan of quick launch, and very much appreciate how the task bar has merged quick launch with active tasks via the pin to taskbar feature. Overall, there's no compelling reason to stay on Vista IMO. Haven't tried out XP mode yet, but really don't have a need to at this point.
Yes, but 100% of all people who don't contract the flu subsequently don't die from the flu. And there is no doubt that people who have received the flu vaccine are less likely to contract the flu, and therefore less likely to spread the infection along. It's a simple measure to reduce the number of people who contract the disease. IMO Objecting to the flu vaccine is like objecting to Purell hand sanitizers. What's up with all this needless washing of hands? This is a pure case where percentages of *something* are being used to obfuscate a simple fact. The fact is that if no one was vaccinated for the flu, then a lot more people would become infected and a lot more people would die. H1N1 has the potential to spread to a larger population than a typical, seasonal flu and therefore we should do what is reasonable and prudent to prevent it. However the statistics are manipulated, if you draw the conclusion that people who receive the flu vaccine are just as likely to contract the flu as those who don't, then I simply disagree. There are no facts that support that claim in any but the most circuitous fashion.
The reasoning they give for this is that people who get vaccinated are already healthy, rich/insured, etc; and that, further, the vaccine is ineffective and/or dangerous for people with weak (elderly) or compromised (auto-immune deficiencies) immune systems who would actually die from the flu.
My issue is that this is just a theory, and there is absolutely no data presented to substantiate the connections between health, economic status, and vaccination. Furthermore, the overarching point is that if substantially fewer people contract the flu, then there is a much better chance that those who are weak and infirm, or are unable to get vaccinated will not be exposed in the first place. Saying that it's everyone for themselves and you don't care if you contract the flu because you're healthy and it won't kill *you* is irresponsible. Avoiding infection is everyone's responsibility unless you choose to voluntarily quarantine yourself at the first sign of illness. The notion that flu vaccination is a product of evil corporate greed and false marketing is an absurd conspiracy theory. The profits in the flu vaccine are trivial and break-even at best in most cases. Instead of "shut the fuck up and eating chicken soup", I say "shut the fuck up, pay your $15 and get a shot". If the flu isn't going to kill you, then the flu shot certainly isn't. But after the shot you are 99% more likely to *not* infect other people for the remainder of the flu season. Or, you could stay at home all winter and/. to your hearts content.
First of all, bacon is awesome. Second, I just got my H1N1 vaccine today and will report back promptly if it kills me. Third, it seems funny to me that people completely understand the horrors of widespread Microsoft plug-in for Firefox, i.e. (no pun) *surface area*, but they don't understand the issue with H1N1. H1N1 is about surface area. It's not about whether or not you'll die, it's about whether or not you'll contract it and pass it along. The number of people who will die as a percentage of infection will not differ greatly from regular flu. However *without widespread vaccination* an order of magnitude more people will catch it, and therefore an order of magnitude of people will die. It's simple. It's surface area.
...there's no reason why every rental car shuttle bus and parking shuttle bus at every airport shouldn't be converted post-haste. Then to prove a point, let's go ahead and power them with the dirtiest coal plant we can find to see if the claims are true.
Yeah, but the question is, did the flu vaccine stop you from dying? More importantly, does vaccination lower the overall mortality rate from anything during flu season?
No, the question is if no one in the United States (for example) takes the vaccine, what percentage of the population will contract H1N1 this year? (and whoever keeps correcting folks about H1N1 versus swine flu - enough already) The question isn't about mortality rates as a percentage of infected populations. The concern is that two hundred million H1N1 infections is a possibility - which is overwhelming in comparison to seasonal flu.
It really seems the data can be massaged to draw any conclusion that is desired. In my case, up until three years ago I had never had a flu shot. During a typical winter I would be sick at least twice on average, usually missing about four or five days of work in total. Since I've started having seasonal flu shots I have not had any winter illness and missed no time from work. While hardly scientific, it seems to me that the downside/upside in my personal case weighs heavily towards receiving the vaccine. There are clearly other viruses in human history where vaccination has had a profound and measurable effect which is beyond debate.
Adaptive difficulty should be implemented as a checkbox option. At that point, who cares? It's far more practical than having someone struggle for a few hours on the most difficult setting and then start all over at an easier setting. Developers still have the option of what the bounds of difficulty are. Difficulty can be adaptive without making the game a cakewalk.
True enough on the natural selection point. However, if there's a Tsunami heading to town and someone on the radio sarcastically suggests that today is a good day to surf, there's still an element of responsibility. Contributing to the death of stupid people is funny in theory, but tragic in practice.
I suppose all this goes to show is that you can torture cats and still have the correct stance on vaccination. I'm not pro-Frist by any stretch. I'm pro-vaccination.
Maher's a funny guy, and I like a lot of what he stands for. However, his stances on things like medicine and nutrition are total whack-job, and that's putting it kindly. I saw the Maher interview with Frist the other night. All I can say is that if even one person is influenced to NOT take the H1N1 vaccine based on Bill's foolish, uninformed, hippie opinion on the matter, and subsequently that person gets infected and dies, then IMO Bill is culpable. All available data strongly supports the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. Not vaccinating based on superstition is grossly irresponsible.
I think the author is making a technical case about what is really a business matter. Most enterprises have legislative or regulatory requirements that prevent them from using the cloud. This is true here in the US (HIPPA, SarbOx, PCI-DSS, etc.), and even more true in Europe where it is a criminal offense to store certain types of data out-of-country. Companies simply must know where their data is and enforce strict controls upon it.
The article makes a few points that range from obvious to really obvious. First, backups are good. Second, offsite backups are good. The cloud isn't a big player in either from an enterprise perspective. In a traditional or legacy mode, a company backs up to tape and ships data offsite. Alternatively, some companies are using deduplication and WAN replication to move data offsite from one facility to either another facility of their own, or a 3rd party location hosting equivilent deduplication storage. The pricing and performance in the Cloud stop making sense in data measured in Gigabytes. Enterprises are surpassing hundreds of Terabytes, and moving deep into multiple Petabytes of storage. Cloud and Enterprise are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to storage on a security, capacity, and cost perspective.
...and good to know the hard working Samba team came away from Redmond feeling positive about the progress that was made. I don't think it's an earth moving change in the relationship between MS and the free world, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.
if you want to eliminate ie exploits in your system, you've got to remove it.
having ie get called by some os function from word/firefox/whatever is still bad.
That's true, and any extra software running on a system is extra surface area for attack. However, the question really isn't about IE being more or less secure than other code. It's certainly got history there, but what's the recent story? If you want to make that argument, then the question is why doesn't MS offer desktop OSes in the same packaging as server OSes, where you can really pare things back. All valid things to think about, but all completely different from the subject matter of monopoly and bundling.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't feel too bad. It's already modded up to 4, so it clearly doesn't suck. But it reminds me of when you take your car in for service - I happen to have my odometer and trip odometer set to the same digits because, well a trip odometer is useless and I somehow just feel better when the two match. Anyhow, why in the world does the mechanic reset the trip odometer for you? It's almost as bad as my wife opening the microwave door early and letting the words 'p r e s s s t a r t' scroll repeatedly across the display instead of the clock. What was the question again?
survived a drop in a toilet and kept on working
Given the relatively low cost of a replacement handset, I can assure you that 99% of all phone owners who drop a handset into the toilet never find out one way or another if the handset survived the experience. But it brings up a question. Do you often talk on the phone at home while using the toilet, and if so do you flush mid-conversation, wait on the toilet until the conversation is over, or (hopefully remember to) come back later to flush?
And the problem is that fixed-length blocks don't play nice with backups, which tend to be big, long tar files or other similar entities. Once the first difference is encountered, all the bytes shift some random number. Normal data change doesn't often conveniently occur in fixed lengths. NetApp A-SIS is a classic example, and typically it would yield about 10-15% data reduction. For the mathematically challenged that's far less than 2:1. The obvious question is why even bother? Why not just compress on the fly? It's far easier. That's why NetApp switched to variable-length blocks for their VTL product, which has all of its own issues.
As for VM's, there is a bit of a misconception about their dedupe rates. With fixed-length blocks you are very likely to find much of the effect comes from deduplicating whitespace. Ten billion consecutive zeroes are pretty easy to condense. Fixed length dedupe of VM's tends to be in the single digit ratios, whereas variable length dedupe is often in the high double or low triple digit ratios.
This is exactly the reason sales are in decline. The market penetration of BD players and HD TV's is more of a trailing statistic. There is less than $.75 difference in the cost of producing a DVD versus a BD at scale the last time I checked, and this was even for a small order of 1000 units or so. So why when every DVD in the world starts off at $14.99 at Best Buy for the first few weeks do BD's have to be $26.99? Movie companies need to leave their margins on the table and try harder to attain market share. Unlike DVD, BD actually has competition in the form of multiple sources of good HD content. In addition to the edge providers, there are NetFlix and Amazon in the mainstream market, and now all the major pay channels (HBO, SHO, etc.) have multiple HD channels available. $15 for a movie is reasonable. $27 is not. It's that simple.
i have been a father of two boys.
When did you ever stop being?
I prefer a dirty vodka martini. I think excessive UAC is the brine in this analogy.
BTW - Just upgraded Vista/64 to Windows 7/64 and had no issues. Windows 7 seems like a slightly cleaner OS overall. I wasn't really having issues with Vista either. In any case, I'm a big fan of quick launch, and very much appreciate how the task bar has merged quick launch with active tasks via the pin to taskbar feature. Overall, there's no compelling reason to stay on Vista IMO. Haven't tried out XP mode yet, but really don't have a need to at this point.
Yes, but 100% of all people who don't contract the flu subsequently don't die from the flu. And there is no doubt that people who have received the flu vaccine are less likely to contract the flu, and therefore less likely to spread the infection along. It's a simple measure to reduce the number of people who contract the disease. IMO Objecting to the flu vaccine is like objecting to Purell hand sanitizers. What's up with all this needless washing of hands? This is a pure case where percentages of *something* are being used to obfuscate a simple fact. The fact is that if no one was vaccinated for the flu, then a lot more people would become infected and a lot more people would die. H1N1 has the potential to spread to a larger population than a typical, seasonal flu and therefore we should do what is reasonable and prudent to prevent it. However the statistics are manipulated, if you draw the conclusion that people who receive the flu vaccine are just as likely to contract the flu as those who don't, then I simply disagree. There are no facts that support that claim in any but the most circuitous fashion.
The reasoning they give for this is that people who get vaccinated are already healthy, rich/insured, etc; and that, further, the vaccine is ineffective and/or dangerous for people with weak (elderly) or compromised (auto-immune deficiencies) immune systems who would actually die from the flu.
My issue is that this is just a theory, and there is absolutely no data presented to substantiate the connections between health, economic status, and vaccination. Furthermore, the overarching point is that if substantially fewer people contract the flu, then there is a much better chance that those who are weak and infirm, or are unable to get vaccinated will not be exposed in the first place. Saying that it's everyone for themselves and you don't care if you contract the flu because you're healthy and it won't kill *you* is irresponsible. Avoiding infection is everyone's responsibility unless you choose to voluntarily quarantine yourself at the first sign of illness. The notion that flu vaccination is a product of evil corporate greed and false marketing is an absurd conspiracy theory. The profits in the flu vaccine are trivial and break-even at best in most cases. Instead of "shut the fuck up and eating chicken soup", I say "shut the fuck up, pay your $15 and get a shot". If the flu isn't going to kill you, then the flu shot certainly isn't. But after the shot you are 99% more likely to *not* infect other people for the remainder of the flu season. Or, you could stay at home all winter and /. to your hearts content.
First of all, bacon is awesome. Second, I just got my H1N1 vaccine today and will report back promptly if it kills me. Third, it seems funny to me that people completely understand the horrors of widespread Microsoft plug-in for Firefox, i.e. (no pun) *surface area*, but they don't understand the issue with H1N1. H1N1 is about surface area. It's not about whether or not you'll die, it's about whether or not you'll contract it and pass it along. The number of people who will die as a percentage of infection will not differ greatly from regular flu. However *without widespread vaccination* an order of magnitude more people will catch it, and therefore an order of magnitude of people will die. It's simple. It's surface area.
...there's no reason why every rental car shuttle bus and parking shuttle bus at every airport shouldn't be converted post-haste. Then to prove a point, let's go ahead and power them with the dirtiest coal plant we can find to see if the claims are true.
Yeah, but the question is, did the flu vaccine stop you from dying? More importantly, does vaccination lower the overall mortality rate from anything during flu season?
No, the question is if no one in the United States (for example) takes the vaccine, what percentage of the population will contract H1N1 this year? (and whoever keeps correcting folks about H1N1 versus swine flu - enough already) The question isn't about mortality rates as a percentage of infected populations. The concern is that two hundred million H1N1 infections is a possibility - which is overwhelming in comparison to seasonal flu.
Perfect! Sleeper was the first thing that came to mind. "Take a drag. It's nicotine. It's good for you."
It really seems the data can be massaged to draw any conclusion that is desired. In my case, up until three years ago I had never had a flu shot. During a typical winter I would be sick at least twice on average, usually missing about four or five days of work in total. Since I've started having seasonal flu shots I have not had any winter illness and missed no time from work. While hardly scientific, it seems to me that the downside/upside in my personal case weighs heavily towards receiving the vaccine. There are clearly other viruses in human history where vaccination has had a profound and measurable effect which is beyond debate.
Adaptive difficulty should be implemented as a checkbox option. At that point, who cares? It's far more practical than having someone struggle for a few hours on the most difficult setting and then start all over at an easier setting. Developers still have the option of what the bounds of difficulty are. Difficulty can be adaptive without making the game a cakewalk.
Your anecdote !> my data
Ok, you're kind of losing me on that one because Bill Maher is about as far left as you can get.
Great! Let's live in a country where speaking your mind can get you sued and or incarcerated. Way to land of the Free.
You're reading way too much into the word 'culpable'. I'm strictly speaking of personal accountability.
that is just natural selection.
True enough on the natural selection point. However, if there's a Tsunami heading to town and someone on the radio sarcastically suggests that today is a good day to surf, there's still an element of responsibility. Contributing to the death of stupid people is funny in theory, but tragic in practice.
I suppose all this goes to show is that you can torture cats and still have the correct stance on vaccination. I'm not pro-Frist by any stretch. I'm pro-vaccination.
Maher's a funny guy, and I like a lot of what he stands for. However, his stances on things like medicine and nutrition are total whack-job, and that's putting it kindly. I saw the Maher interview with Frist the other night. All I can say is that if even one person is influenced to NOT take the H1N1 vaccine based on Bill's foolish, uninformed, hippie opinion on the matter, and subsequently that person gets infected and dies, then IMO Bill is culpable. All available data strongly supports the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. Not vaccinating based on superstition is grossly irresponsible.
I think the author is making a technical case about what is really a business matter. Most enterprises have legislative or regulatory requirements that prevent them from using the cloud. This is true here in the US (HIPPA, SarbOx, PCI-DSS, etc.), and even more true in Europe where it is a criminal offense to store certain types of data out-of-country. Companies simply must know where their data is and enforce strict controls upon it.
The article makes a few points that range from obvious to really obvious. First, backups are good. Second, offsite backups are good. The cloud isn't a big player in either from an enterprise perspective. In a traditional or legacy mode, a company backs up to tape and ships data offsite. Alternatively, some companies are using deduplication and WAN replication to move data offsite from one facility to either another facility of their own, or a 3rd party location hosting equivilent deduplication storage. The pricing and performance in the Cloud stop making sense in data measured in Gigabytes. Enterprises are surpassing hundreds of Terabytes, and moving deep into multiple Petabytes of storage. Cloud and Enterprise are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to storage on a security, capacity, and cost perspective.
Good Lord man! Next thing, they'll start doing the same with hotel rooms and seats on planes. What's the world coming to?
...might I also recommend heating up a pot of chocolate fondue in preparation for the locust swarm?
...and good to know the hard working Samba team came away from Redmond feeling positive about the progress that was made. I don't think it's an earth moving change in the relationship between MS and the free world, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.
if you want to eliminate ie exploits in your system, you've got to remove it. having ie get called by some os function from word/firefox/whatever is still bad.
That's true, and any extra software running on a system is extra surface area for attack. However, the question really isn't about IE being more or less secure than other code. It's certainly got history there, but what's the recent story? If you want to make that argument, then the question is why doesn't MS offer desktop OSes in the same packaging as server OSes, where you can really pare things back. All valid things to think about, but all completely different from the subject matter of monopoly and bundling.