You could say exactly the same about every athlete out there, your career only lasts as long as your body is in tip top shape. Those that have played at the professional but not enough to retire go on to find other work when they're 30-40. I don't really see your point.
Even so, humans would be more efficient per kg of payload than the robot would.
I don't think you understand how much payload would be required just to support the human. For example, the rovers produce less than 1 kWh/day even under optimal conditions. In the winter when it goes into hibernation it's down to less than 0.16 kWh/day or like a 6-7 watt light bulb. How many solar panels do you think it'd take to sustain a human?
English makes the distinction, a lot of other countries don't. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany at least "europa" is both the continent and the Jovian moon. Took me a long time to get used to writing Europe...
That's an admittedly slim chance, but it's also 1/6th of your hourly pay up in smoke for work actually being done.
Look on the bright side, you won't have a bunch of coworkers that might have seen it. You're not going to get dragged into your supervisor's office for a talking to or even a write-up. You won't have some oversensitive women sue the company for a sexually hostile work environment and you'll be the fall guy. You won't even lose the opportunity to make that money if you work another ten minutes. And if you really manage to hit a porn popup doing work research more than once every leap year, you really can't be very smart about what you click.
There will be other things to measure performance. But one issue with teleworkers is making sure that they've actually worked the hours they say they worked. You don't get to pad the bill or double bill clients, the only thing we've made sure of is that if we paid you for 8 hours we wasted 8 hours of your life. Turns out shirking isn't so much fun if you must constantly babysit your machine to not get caught. And not just in the "wiggle the mouse and type some garbage into notepad" sense, but actually fake working. Don't forget that the culture and society also is different around the world, some places corruption and fraud is a lot more common than what you might be used to.
A student may be able to find problems almost identical to those on the exam and simply copy the answer verbatim.
Exactly this. In school you're being asked to do what thousands of other students have done before, you end up with fairly standardized curricula, questions and answers both across schools and from year to year. At work, of course I use references and Google but the exact situation is usually unique. If all you've learned is to search until you find something almost identical, you're going to fall through fast.
Yes, you get the same number of writes if you buy a much bigger disk. But if you have a fixed need like "I need 128GB for my OS disk, I'm just waiting for the price to come down" then you get lower prices - and lower write cycles. If I'm buying one 3TB disk instead of 3x1TB disks, it's very likely that 3TB disk will see 3x the data traffic that a 1 TB disk would. You are the idiot that keeps ignoring that.
Some clever people took a bit of time to think about this, and came up with some techniques which avoided any the risk of corrupting your data. One of the techniques is to dump the data to temporary files and then, after they succeed in saving the data, the old file is deleted/renamed to a backup file name and the newly created temporary file is renamed back to the original name. With this technique, even if the system dies then the only file which might have been corrupted is the newly created temporary file, while the original file is kept in its original state. With this approach, the programmer guarantees that the user's data is preserved.
Actually, you don't - this is what caused massive data corruption under the development of ext4. Write to temp file, rename over, crash, boom 0 byte file. There's no guarantee in POSIX that the data is written before the rename happens, even though this is a common technique and broke hundreds of applications. The "solution" was to call flush() before every rename(), which would put your application on hold until the file system returns every time. Eventually they realized everyone wasn't going to fix their application and implemented ordered mode like ext3 - if you rename it, the data is flushed before the rename. But that's not required behavior.
The problem with this "more frequent release" model is that it is going to push businesses to some other OS. The company I work for should have just about completed the process of preparing to migrate to Windows 7 by the time Windows 8 comes out.
Oh please, enough with the FUD. Microsoft guarantees a minimum 10 years of support on professional/enterprise versions. Check it out, extended support will end in 2020. What else are they going to move to that offers longer support? If your answer to that is "Linux, because they have the source code and can support it forever" you've been listening too much to RMS.
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents
Accidents, no. Criminal negligence, possibly. Which is not so unlikely when you deal with explosives or firearms. That said, they may have felt the destruction was evidence enough and saw no reason to waste a jail cell on him.
Put a slashdot poll up and ask the users if they'd be willing to pay $5 per year to get rid of all the ads, and eliminate 90% of the trolls (most trolls aren't willing to pay to troll).
Pay to get adfree or pay to post? Slashdot already has subscriptions for the former, so I assume you mean the latter. The main effect would be that you get a lot less comments of any type. Even though the S/N ratio might improve the useful comments/article ratio would likely go way down. And even more groupthink of the only people interested enough to pay. And without the comments, all the readers go away too because it's not exactly stunning as a news aggregator, it's a very mixed and incomplete mix.
streaming is the future BECAUSE it involves higher DRM than dvd's have. its just that simple and no need to look any further.
Yeah that so totally explains iTunes and Spotify thriving and CD sales in sharp decline.
streaming is good FOR THEM. physical media is better FOR ME.
You may notice there's an 800lb gorilla in the room here, it's not legal but it mostly resembles streaming...
and as isp's put more and more caps on your bandwidth, I don't see being MORE dependant on the internet as being a good thing. not at all. its a drug dealer situation: they want you addicted to streaming so that they can control all the cards.
It's not my fault your country is going backwards technologically. Here's how a country with progress looks like, average = green, mean = blue. I'm on 60 Mbit uncapped for less than $100/mo and a BluRay costs about $30. Cue the Swede with 100 Mbit for $40. Delivering broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper, if you're not seeing it then you're getting ripped off.
I work for a public relations company that deals with large clients (can't say who) and I welcome this change. It should bring more interesting discussions to Slashdot. Those "omg astroturfer" guys heads are going to implode.:)
The questions is if we'll see more experts or more sales staff. I've seen some attempts at this before and the results have sounded more like a sales pitch than anything resembling a real discussion of pros and cons. Then again, many of the questions have been utterly lame in the past so I don't expect it to get much worse than it is. It's been on my "maybe" list of categories to block before, if it does then it's a checkbox away from being gone anyway.
To be fair I think figures like 10 lines/day usually mean that at the end of the entire process 10 lines that survived and are documented and survive testing account for a day of time. But still you really have to wonder about the people at the low end who managed to get the average down to 10 lines a day... were they producing code that was simply discarded wholesale? Were they producing negative lines of code, i.e., somehow intentionally or unintentionally sabotaging the efforts of others?
One of the reasons LoCs is a mindbogglingly stupid metric is that a good coder will add more lines and remove more lines. You add more function points and remove code that is copy-pasta, doesn't use the library functions available or is just 10x as long as it needs to be. You can have added 100 lines of functionality, removed 90 lines of crud and still end up with the same LoC as the guy who just added 10 lines of crud. The reason they're down to 10 LoCs is because their patches get rejected, rejected and then rejected some more in review...
Yes, but in the past oppressing a population has required help from large parts of the population. It's estimated that STASI employed 2.5% of the population and that possibly as much as 7% were regular and 25-30% occasional informers. Today you can put computers on the job, they track every call, every webpage, every cash transaction, analyze, mine, build patterns and dossiers. Almost all advanced weapon systems now come with IFF codes and remote kill switches, even if you could convince parts of the military to rebel you'd still have no tanks, no planes, no battleships as long as high command remains loyal. Any insurrection is best crushed in its infancy, make the government seem so big and you so alone because no one dares say anything because they'll be swiftly tracked down and neutralized.
There's a reason free speech is the first amendment, without enough people knowing where or why they should point their guns at the same time the second amendment won't help either. The point is that despite Internet and all while it's never been so easy to share information it's never been that easy to collect and use that information for mass surveillance and mass oppression either. Look at China, how many there are rebelling against the one-party state? They don't have to roll in the tanks anymore, they're already in solid control long before that. And even if it came to that, I doubt most of China would know or sympathize. The critical voices have mostly been silenced. And those at a safe distance outside China mostly kept from reaching those still in the country or discredited as foreign lapdogs trying to ruin the country.
Just look up "BSA Rat out your boss"... Seriously? Anybody who destroys some company because they have a chip on their shoulder and are greedy should be blacklisted
Considering how it seems US companies treat their workers, I'd say calling the BSA is many steps below going postal. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the same companies that do gross, systematic piracy are also equally willing to screw over their employees over pay and benefits. I figure the BSA are looking for disgruntled ex-workers with opinions ranging from "couldn't happen to a nicer company" to "f*ck you too". Besides while the BSA are a nasty bunch, having piracy-using companies undercut other companies ruins it for everybody else. I have a lot less sympathy for commercial users who use it to widen their profit margin...
(I can take over 1000 in RAW mode on my current DSLR and the way oversized Compact Flash card I have)
Sure, now but you're not winning any points for predicting this in 2011. I remember having a 512 MB card that could fit about 100 pictures, and for a weekend trip that was barely enough. Those before that sucked even worse. I remember thinking with a film I could at least just snap in another film and keep taking pictures, it wasn't anything like "snap as many pictures as you'd like" unless you felt like going through them on the tiny little LCD monitor on the camera. And it was very expensive. It's easy to say it afterwards but I don't think it was nearly as obvious back then. And when it was obvious, maybe they felt they were too late to the party.
Pressure should not be a problem, we have birds flying at >8km where the air pressure is 1/3rd of that on the surface all the way down to 11km of water. Even humans can sustain vast differences in pressure both in air and when diving. Actually, 2.4x surface gravity doesn't sound that bad either. A person of 80kg would be like 192kg here on Earth, a really obese person yes but bearable.
Given the situation Bing is in, even a 1% search share increase for a $100 million cost is nothing. Firefox has 500 million users and maybe 20% of them won't change the default from Bing.
Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they'll lose users to Chrome over it and many of the open-source developers won't be happy to help Microsoft. It might solve a money problem but I think they'll get a PR problem instead.
No, but given that there's usually quite a few admins for a large system, probabilities are pretty good at least one does. With 26% for one it's 60% for 3, 84% for 6 and 95% for 10 admins. And that includes everyone in IT with access to that system, not just those that are supposed to work on it. I don't care if 9 out of 10 admins don't peek, one is one too many...
Everybody would like a dictator that rules "their way" because everyone else is stupid and wrong, in fact it's a thinly veiled way of asking if you'd like to become that dictator yourself. Except that's not how it works, because everyone can take the blue pill and have their fair share of democracy but only one person gets to pick the red pill. So the question is, would you really take a lottery where one person gets to appoint a dictator for life? I mean you could get lucky, but you might also want a one-way plane ticket out of there before your new randomly-chosen overlord closes the border. Weird as it sounds, the politicians you have are actually moderates compared to what you could get.
Besides, if you want that dictatorship to not get overthrown in the first five minutes, that dictator has to cease control and keep it - people don't obey by magic. You might find that even if you are doing the "right thing" and have the people's best interest at heart, what you have to do to force it upon them actually makes the cure worse than the problem. It won't be long before your dictator passes mass surveillance laws of his own - for the people's own good, of course. Nothing like a government that's decided they're right and the people wrong, surely some reeducation camps will make people understand. That's worked so well in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
You could say exactly the same about every athlete out there, your career only lasts as long as your body is in tip top shape. Those that have played at the professional but not enough to retire go on to find other work when they're 30-40. I don't really see your point.
Even so, humans would be more efficient per kg of payload than the robot would.
I don't think you understand how much payload would be required just to support the human. For example, the rovers produce less than 1 kWh/day even under optimal conditions. In the winter when it goes into hibernation it's down to less than 0.16 kWh/day or like a 6-7 watt light bulb. How many solar panels do you think it'd take to sustain a human?
English makes the distinction, a lot of other countries don't. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany at least "europa" is both the continent and the Jovian moon. Took me a long time to get used to writing Europe...
That's an admittedly slim chance, but it's also 1/6th of your hourly pay up in smoke for work actually being done.
Look on the bright side, you won't have a bunch of coworkers that might have seen it. You're not going to get dragged into your supervisor's office for a talking to or even a write-up. You won't have some oversensitive women sue the company for a sexually hostile work environment and you'll be the fall guy. You won't even lose the opportunity to make that money if you work another ten minutes. And if you really manage to hit a porn popup doing work research more than once every leap year, you really can't be very smart about what you click.
There will be other things to measure performance. But one issue with teleworkers is making sure that they've actually worked the hours they say they worked. You don't get to pad the bill or double bill clients, the only thing we've made sure of is that if we paid you for 8 hours we wasted 8 hours of your life. Turns out shirking isn't so much fun if you must constantly babysit your machine to not get caught. And not just in the "wiggle the mouse and type some garbage into notepad" sense, but actually fake working. Don't forget that the culture and society also is different around the world, some places corruption and fraud is a lot more common than what you might be used to.
A student may be able to find problems almost identical to those on the exam and simply copy the answer verbatim.
Exactly this. In school you're being asked to do what thousands of other students have done before, you end up with fairly standardized curricula, questions and answers both across schools and from year to year. At work, of course I use references and Google but the exact situation is usually unique. If all you've learned is to search until you find something almost identical, you're going to fall through fast.
Yes, you get the same number of writes if you buy a much bigger disk. But if you have a fixed need like "I need 128GB for my OS disk, I'm just waiting for the price to come down" then you get lower prices - and lower write cycles. If I'm buying one 3TB disk instead of 3x1TB disks, it's very likely that 3TB disk will see 3x the data traffic that a 1 TB disk would. You are the idiot that keeps ignoring that.
Some clever people took a bit of time to think about this, and came up with some techniques which avoided any the risk of corrupting your data. One of the techniques is to dump the data to temporary files and then, after they succeed in saving the data, the old file is deleted/renamed to a backup file name and the newly created temporary file is renamed back to the original name. With this technique, even if the system dies then the only file which might have been corrupted is the newly created temporary file, while the original file is kept in its original state. With this approach, the programmer guarantees that the user's data is preserved.
Actually, you don't - this is what caused massive data corruption under the development of ext4. Write to temp file, rename over, crash, boom 0 byte file. There's no guarantee in POSIX that the data is written before the rename happens, even though this is a common technique and broke hundreds of applications. The "solution" was to call flush() before every rename(), which would put your application on hold until the file system returns every time. Eventually they realized everyone wasn't going to fix their application and implemented ordered mode like ext3 - if you rename it, the data is flushed before the rename. But that's not required behavior.
The problem with this "more frequent release" model is that it is going to push businesses to some other OS. The company I work for should have just about completed the process of preparing to migrate to Windows 7 by the time Windows 8 comes out.
Oh please, enough with the FUD. Microsoft guarantees a minimum 10 years of support on professional/enterprise versions. Check it out, extended support will end in 2020. What else are they going to move to that offers longer support? If your answer to that is "Linux, because they have the source code and can support it forever" you've been listening too much to RMS.
On the other end of the scale you have this. Why solve a problem the really, really hard way?
Nice call on the credibility attack. So you are an expert in such things. Please enlighten us as to the differences in population density.
sure
The density in Sweden is a little tighter than it is in the US.
No, it isn't. You could argue that it's more concentrated in cities, but I'm quite sure you'd be wrong there too.
People are not arrested and prosecuted for accidents
Accidents, no. Criminal negligence, possibly. Which is not so unlikely when you deal with explosives or firearms. That said, they may have felt the destruction was evidence enough and saw no reason to waste a jail cell on him.
Put a slashdot poll up and ask the users if they'd be willing to pay $5 per year to get rid of all the ads, and eliminate 90% of the trolls (most trolls aren't willing to pay to troll).
Pay to get adfree or pay to post? Slashdot already has subscriptions for the former, so I assume you mean the latter. The main effect would be that you get a lot less comments of any type. Even though the S/N ratio might improve the useful comments/article ratio would likely go way down. And even more groupthink of the only people interested enough to pay. And without the comments, all the readers go away too because it's not exactly stunning as a news aggregator, it's a very mixed and incomplete mix.
streaming is the future BECAUSE it involves higher DRM than dvd's have. its just that simple and no need to look any further.
Yeah that so totally explains iTunes and Spotify thriving and CD sales in sharp decline.
streaming is good FOR THEM. physical media is better FOR ME.
You may notice there's an 800lb gorilla in the room here, it's not legal but it mostly resembles streaming...
and as isp's put more and more caps on your bandwidth, I don't see being MORE dependant on the internet as being a good thing. not at all. its a drug dealer situation: they want you addicted to streaming so that they can control all the cards.
It's not my fault your country is going backwards technologically. Here's how a country with progress looks like, average = green, mean = blue. I'm on 60 Mbit uncapped for less than $100/mo and a BluRay costs about $30. Cue the Swede with 100 Mbit for $40. Delivering broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper, if you're not seeing it then you're getting ripped off.
I work for a public relations company that deals with large clients (can't say who) and I welcome this change. It should bring more interesting discussions to Slashdot. Those "omg astroturfer" guys heads are going to implode. :)
The questions is if we'll see more experts or more sales staff. I've seen some attempts at this before and the results have sounded more like a sales pitch than anything resembling a real discussion of pros and cons. Then again, many of the questions have been utterly lame in the past so I don't expect it to get much worse than it is. It's been on my "maybe" list of categories to block before, if it does then it's a checkbox away from being gone anyway.
To be fair I think figures like 10 lines/day usually mean that at the end of the entire process 10 lines that survived and are documented and survive testing account for a day of time. But still you really have to wonder about the people at the low end who managed to get the average down to 10 lines a day... were they producing code that was simply discarded wholesale? Were they producing negative lines of code, i.e., somehow intentionally or unintentionally sabotaging the efforts of others?
One of the reasons LoCs is a mindbogglingly stupid metric is that a good coder will add more lines and remove more lines. You add more function points and remove code that is copy-pasta, doesn't use the library functions available or is just 10x as long as it needs to be. You can have added 100 lines of functionality, removed 90 lines of crud and still end up with the same LoC as the guy who just added 10 lines of crud. The reason they're down to 10 LoCs is because their patches get rejected, rejected and then rejected some more in review...
Yes, but in the past oppressing a population has required help from large parts of the population. It's estimated that STASI employed 2.5% of the population and that possibly as much as 7% were regular and 25-30% occasional informers. Today you can put computers on the job, they track every call, every webpage, every cash transaction, analyze, mine, build patterns and dossiers. Almost all advanced weapon systems now come with IFF codes and remote kill switches, even if you could convince parts of the military to rebel you'd still have no tanks, no planes, no battleships as long as high command remains loyal. Any insurrection is best crushed in its infancy, make the government seem so big and you so alone because no one dares say anything because they'll be swiftly tracked down and neutralized.
There's a reason free speech is the first amendment, without enough people knowing where or why they should point their guns at the same time the second amendment won't help either. The point is that despite Internet and all while it's never been so easy to share information it's never been that easy to collect and use that information for mass surveillance and mass oppression either. Look at China, how many there are rebelling against the one-party state? They don't have to roll in the tanks anymore, they're already in solid control long before that. And even if it came to that, I doubt most of China would know or sympathize. The critical voices have mostly been silenced. And those at a safe distance outside China mostly kept from reaching those still in the country or discredited as foreign lapdogs trying to ruin the country.
Just look up "BSA Rat out your boss"... Seriously? Anybody who destroys some company because they have a chip on their shoulder and are greedy should be blacklisted
Considering how it seems US companies treat their workers, I'd say calling the BSA is many steps below going postal. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the same companies that do gross, systematic piracy are also equally willing to screw over their employees over pay and benefits. I figure the BSA are looking for disgruntled ex-workers with opinions ranging from "couldn't happen to a nicer company" to "f*ck you too". Besides while the BSA are a nasty bunch, having piracy-using companies undercut other companies ruins it for everybody else. I have a lot less sympathy for commercial users who use it to widen their profit margin...
(I can take over 1000 in RAW mode on my current DSLR and the way oversized Compact Flash card I have)
Sure, now but you're not winning any points for predicting this in 2011. I remember having a 512 MB card that could fit about 100 pictures, and for a weekend trip that was barely enough. Those before that sucked even worse. I remember thinking with a film I could at least just snap in another film and keep taking pictures, it wasn't anything like "snap as many pictures as you'd like" unless you felt like going through them on the tiny little LCD monitor on the camera. And it was very expensive. It's easy to say it afterwards but I don't think it was nearly as obvious back then. And when it was obvious, maybe they felt they were too late to the party.
Like the difference in atmospheric pressure
Pressure should not be a problem, we have birds flying at >8km where the air pressure is 1/3rd of that on the surface all the way down to 11km of water. Even humans can sustain vast differences in pressure both in air and when diving. Actually, 2.4x surface gravity doesn't sound that bad either. A person of 80kg would be like 192kg here on Earth, a really obese person yes but bearable.
Pretty sure you mean "seize" control there, as "cease" in this context would mean to give up control.
Actually it was "cheese" ;) he who controls the edamer, controls the world.
Given the situation Bing is in, even a 1% search share increase for a $100 million cost is nothing. Firefox has 500 million users and maybe 20% of them won't change the default from Bing.
Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they'll lose users to Chrome over it and many of the open-source developers won't be happy to help Microsoft. It might solve a money problem but I think they'll get a PR problem instead.
No, but given that there's usually quite a few admins for a large system, probabilities are pretty good at least one does. With 26% for one it's 60% for 3, 84% for 6 and 95% for 10 admins. And that includes everyone in IT with access to that system, not just those that are supposed to work on it. I don't care if 9 out of 10 admins don't peek, one is one too many...
Everybody would like a dictator that rules "their way" because everyone else is stupid and wrong, in fact it's a thinly veiled way of asking if you'd like to become that dictator yourself. Except that's not how it works, because everyone can take the blue pill and have their fair share of democracy but only one person gets to pick the red pill. So the question is, would you really take a lottery where one person gets to appoint a dictator for life? I mean you could get lucky, but you might also want a one-way plane ticket out of there before your new randomly-chosen overlord closes the border. Weird as it sounds, the politicians you have are actually moderates compared to what you could get.
Besides, if you want that dictatorship to not get overthrown in the first five minutes, that dictator has to cease control and keep it - people don't obey by magic. You might find that even if you are doing the "right thing" and have the people's best interest at heart, what you have to do to force it upon them actually makes the cure worse than the problem. It won't be long before your dictator passes mass surveillance laws of his own - for the people's own good, of course. Nothing like a government that's decided they're right and the people wrong, surely some reeducation camps will make people understand. That's worked so well in the past.