Why 40 hour week = 5 days of work per week * 8 hours per day is good while 60 hour week = 6 day of work per week * 10 hours per day is bad? Isn't the line always a bit arbitrary? We know a human cannot function well if required to work 16 hours per day. But, it is hard to say whether 12, 10, 8, or even 6 hours is too much. The two days-off per week practice is even more so. Do you think, for example, farmers work 5-day a week? If so, do the cattle go fasting for 2 days every week?
Officially, most developed countries defined 40 work hours per week as the norm. But, even in these countries, many professionals do work >40 hrs or even >60hrs (ask any person in investment banking, many medical doctors working for a hospital or many IT/programming people in US)...
I don't think the kinetic energy should be added here as a separated item. Say, the jet consist of 3.3TJ on the runway before take-off. When it gains speed and altitude, the PE and KE do increases. However, this is done in expense of the burning of the fuel. Therefore, once you calculated the energy content of the fuel, any potential/ kinetic energy calculation is duplicated.
Planet Earth has 6 billion of human. Why do anyone need robot research? 1. Some environment are just so hazardous that you want to minimise the human exposure to it (Mars, Moon, deep sea floor, or even welding production line for car production). 2. It is research and this serves as both the aim and goal. 3. Lower end robots can actually by consumer grade electronics (e.g. Sony Aibo the dog, Robosapien etc.).
I am curious to see their robot fish. I saw a video clip of that in a conference. It was really quite agile... I don't mind keeping a tank of those at home because I don't need to feed them and if I want to see action I can just press a button.
I came to England last year and is living in a 250,000 medium city. I was shocked with HSBC front line staff... Once upon a time, I checked my HSBC online account and noticed I had to talked to the bank staff directly in order to enable some service.
I went to one of the local branch next day and talked to the teller. She had not heard about that. Well, this is still forgivable. No one expects them to know every single product. Then, it came to the shocking bit. She yelled from the counter, asked if anyone knew anything about internet banking. The bank manager replied "Not a clue, I don't even have an internet account". Oh come on, it was 2005. Is it really that hard to organise some sort of internal staff training?
Yes, but Apple products are by no mean the cheapest around the town. In other words, most Apple customers eager to paid a premium for nearly perfectly built machine with the latest components now. Everyone uses contract manufacturer. No one has any doubt or problem with that. But, it is the responsiblity of the company who owns the brand to enforce the quality control (and improve the design). I can see no reason to allow Apple from escaping its responsibility.
The impact is not revolutionary but it is definitely a positive step. When a manufacturer commits to the idea of making a laptop which can preloaded with Linux, it will make more effort in selecting hardware component or forcing the component OEMs to provide (at least half ass working) driver. This can make the IT manager's life easier: buy a particular brand of laptop and you don't need to care whether the particular user at the end need a windows or linux config.
Peer group pressure is everything at the age of early teens. If the other kids think fast food is trendy and cool, you don't want to look like mother's boy by eating healthy food... When I looked back, our gang probably chose the utmost unhealthy food of the day. On one hand, we wanted to eat like a "real man". On the other hand, we fell prey to a sneaky local fast food shop. For almost 3 consecutive years, our ideal lunch was a rice dish with two cheap fried sausage + a slab of deep-fried chicken *skin*+ a glass of coke. (The chicken meat was sold to lunch boxes more popular with ordinary office worker in the region).
Comparison between kids can be a bad thing. Either letting them to choose whatever they want to eat or allowing the school to take over. The argument here is similar to that of school uniform. In a sense, the Sweden/Finland system of free and compulsory school lunch can solve a heck lot of problem for everyone.
In addition, it can provide an excuse to justify for the higher price tag in the case of ThinkPad. If with a half way decent reason, many companies allow their professional staff (surveyor, engineers, salesperson etc) to choose the "tool" that suits. Especially backed up by a decent Ti case, a good screen that is readable outdoor will be very suitable for any work that requires the laptop to take outside.
I am a bit more pessimistic. I don't think AMD needs to support much at this moment. CPU manufacturers will have to show you the instruction set. There are not much to hide. They don't have an Intel style chipset at this moment. In other words, they don't really need to write, support or open their device driver...
By once ATI gets into the picture, the terrain changes. Arguably, ATI is bought by AMD not the other way round. But the expertise in supporting the chipset graphics card etc is in ATI. I believe it is more likely for the AMD to adopt the existing ATI support model... In other words, we can expect okay hardware with barely satisfactory software support..... I hope I am wrong.
If I were the China government and I wanted to carry out some industrial espionage, I will choose a server in India, Taiwan, or wherever not within my jurisdiction to relay the traffic. No one will be that stupid to use their own machine for serious operation, esp with this sort of sophisticated zero-date crack.
If you look up 8800.org (the one that the powerpoint crack sends keylog data to), you will know that it hosts free DNS forwarding service (excuse if my terminalogy is wrong). It provides the same sort of service as no-ip.com or dyndns.com. I can imagine the web traffic is forwarded to some cracked home machine with broadband connection. The real recipent behind this can really be anyone.
How do you tell and convicted hacker, also a programmer, that he can't use a computer?
Actually much worse than that.... That guy cannot even work for the local supermarket or warehouse as computer is used everywhere.
It makes sense to ban a convicted bank teller who collaborated with a bank robber (e.g. by supplying internal operation memos) from working for any financial institutes. Similarly, I don't mind making a convicted cracker suffer by affecting his chance to work as a programmer/ computer security professional. But, banning computer usage is just too much.
In most of these research result fabrication cases, the grant money were wasted to further extend the empire of the greedy professor (hiring more postdocs, buying more equipment etc). The big and never satisified ego of some of the professors at the end drive them to do stupid things...
Poehlman, a specialist in exercise physiology, changed and made up research in applications and papers on the effect of menopause on women's metabolism,...
I guess it is more like the soft and fluffy research about the benefit of exercising to various groups of people.
The exploding laptop probably wouldn't cause much harm to the flight but it will surely cause serious harm to the owner. Before the poor owner could drop his burning laptop to the ground and run around the narrow corridor, he got a left hook punch from the teen sitting next to him. Then the grandma in the next row jumped out from nowhere and gave him a fatal reverse kick. The poor owner declared KO and felt faint at that stage. Now, the aircrew + 8 muscular guys elsewhere on the plane came. He was tied on his back with 8 pairs on smelly feet stepped on top of him for the rest of the trip. OK, enough for now. Next chapter: the poor guy in police station being interrogated for possible terrorist related charges....
The submitter made a not-so-mild change to some fact. I hope that's not deliberate. It reads
Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food.
But, the original article reads:
Longhua's workers live in dormitories.... They earn £27 per month (ie about $50/month).
For the Suzhou factory,
The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 per month (ie about $100/month) - but they must pay for their accommodation and food
In other words, we should really based the discussion upon $100/month. This makes a hugh difference. For people who know a little bit about China, they know the figure is about right for a line worker... Of course, whoever wants to give our fellow workers a more decent pay is more than welcome.
In major cities, the Chinese government starts imposing minimum salary. It is $84/month in Tianjin (the city next to Beijing, with higher cost of living than either of the towns mentioned in the MacWorld article). The submitter is like complaining MacDonald pays its workers 1.2 times of the minimum salary. So, what the heck is the problem???
The concept is not new: basically the same as the Hall cell for aluminium production. But, I believe finding a suitable salt is not that easy. In the case of aluminium, cyrolite is used. In titanium, what's the suitable one? Suppose you mix Ti2O3 with another metal salt, you may get another metal instead of Ti. Needless to say, the whole electrolysis process gets quite messy at 1500+ degC.
Religion may help to keep selfish behaviour in check. But, I cannot see religion as an antidote for mob mentality. In fact, we can see many notorious mobs in history are linked closely to fringe religious group. I think the root of the mob mentality is the belief that "I know the truth" (or even "I am the truth") and try to impose that upon the other. Mutual respect and acceptance to difference may probably the key....
In addition to accountant, there is another type of animal known as engineer in the jungle. In more traditional sectors, e.g. civil and chemical engineering, Excel rules.
Sometimes, Excel is used to do quick and dirty calculation (turn the cells into matrices....). Yes, it is not the most suitable tool... But, if you don't have specialist numerical package and you are *not* allowed (or able) to write program from scratch, Excel is the most powerful tool available around town (literally, if you have ever worked for chemical factory in the middle of nowhere)....
From a pure business centric point of view, it is okay to outsource the "low value" customer service (e.g. customers support for ISP, telemarketing, account management for supermarket loyality card etc). However, I cannot follow the logic of outsourcing inner network operation offsite, esp to a foreign country.
First, file server is a big no-no. For obvious reasons, but, many pro-outsoucing managing probably have not thought about this. But, there can be something more subtle. I worked for a beer brewery before for a process optimization project. Of course, I signed an NDA and it is easy to track me down if something is leaked.
The brewery consider their formulation a top trade secret. With a little bit of logical thinking, you can deduce a whole lot from their process flow (e.g. which ingredient and the amount is added, how long does that take for a fermentation to complete, holding temperature etc, all available from the remote data server). It also provides scope for insiders' trading (oh, firm A seems to accumulate a lot of stock. Let's do something.). It is not the end of the world if a beer formula is leaked. But, think about something more important...
Well, people still have legitimate trust issue when doing medical tour. For example, if a condition is life-threatening, e.g. coronary bypass surgery, and the treatment is not affordable (no medical insurance coverage, fail certain criteria in government funded medical scheme etc) back home in a developed country, then there is a motivation of taking the risk overseas.
However, if the condition is milder (say gall bladder removal) or have already been covered by insurance somehow, I doubt many will like to go through the hassle. First, the risk for infection/ lapsed safety measure in blood transfusion is higher. At the end of the day, developing countries still have something like infrastructure etc in development. Second, no one really want to travel after a major operation. It is no much fun even if you are in Taj Mahal. Third, if something goes wrong, you don't know how to deal with that... Your doctor is thousands of mile away. You cannot hold him into responsiblity easily. So, there is not much a certain for the medical doctors in the near future. Guys, care about us first.
I have just got some fun logged in to Zopa as a "potential" lender. The agreed lending rate is unrealistically low. Lending to the "A" grade borrowers for 6 months gives you only 4.5% AER (annual equivalent rate) and lending to the "B" grade ones will only give you 5.0%. And you are responsible for all the tax.
I would rather lend my money to HSBC. For one of the first standard online saving account, you can earn 4.75% AER (and it is not even fixed for 6 months).
The interest rate setting mechanism is kind of a double auction market. You, as either lender or borrower, can set your offer rate. The "market" rate is the one when both meeting somewhere in the middle. I mean most lenders are not really serious at this moment. They are likely to throw £10 in order to test how the system work. But, causually, you can see how people evaluate risk. For this type of unsecured loan via a potentially run-away-overnight "bank", my risk premium is way higher than 10%. Even if I trust the whole system, given a default rate of 3% quoted somewhere in their website, a risk-neutral lender will at least demand an interest rate of the "risk-less" rate (the return that you deposit in a reputable regular bank) + the default rate + their annual handling fee, which means at least 4.5+3+0.5=8%.
you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india,
You've forgetten an important fact: India is largely unaffected by the WW2 (when compare with most of the countries in Asia/ Europe). No major battle has broken out on her soil. So, the rebuilt effort after independence is more about how to revert to normal life after colonialism. (Well, the Bengal famine did kill many civilian, but it mainly affects the regions in where known as Bangladesh rather than India proper. ). India was in a much better starting line than most in the region.
The ridiculous fact after World War Two in Asia is the penality is inversely proportional to the suffering. The aggressor (Japan) was rebuilt with the help of US. Apart from token gesture (e.g. left the factories and machinery in occupied land) Japan did not compensate to anyone to any significant extend (Korea/ China/ Philipine/ Indonesia/ Vietnam just name a few, of which their countries were absolutely devastated by the invading Japanese army).
Slashdot Mirror
Try this insteadi nux-creating_a_cryptobook_uk/
http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/08/16/locking_up_l
Why 40 hour week = 5 days of work per week * 8 hours per day is good while 60 hour week = 6 day of work per week * 10 hours per day is bad? Isn't the line always a bit arbitrary? We know a human cannot function well if required to work 16 hours per day. But, it is hard to say whether 12, 10, 8, or even 6 hours is too much. The two days-off per week practice is even more so. Do you think, for example, farmers work 5-day a week? If so, do the cattle go fasting for 2 days every week?
Officially, most developed countries defined 40 work hours per week as the norm. But, even in these countries, many professionals do work >40 hrs or even >60hrs (ask any person in investment banking, many medical doctors working for a hospital or many IT/programming people in US)...
I don't think the kinetic energy should be added here as a separated item. Say, the jet consist of 3.3TJ on the runway before take-off. When it gains speed and altitude, the PE and KE do increases. However, this is done in expense of the burning of the fuel. Therefore, once you calculated the energy content of the fuel, any potential/ kinetic energy calculation is duplicated.
Planet Earth has 6 billion of human. Why do anyone need robot research?
1. Some environment are just so hazardous that you want to minimise the human exposure to it (Mars, Moon, deep sea floor, or even welding production line for car production). 2. It is research and this serves as both the aim and goal. 3. Lower end robots can actually by consumer grade electronics (e.g. Sony Aibo the dog, Robosapien etc.).
I am curious to see their robot fish. I saw a video clip of that in a conference. It was really quite agile... I don't mind keeping a tank of those at home because I don't need to feed them and if I want to see action I can just press a button.
I came to England last year and is living in a 250,000 medium city. I was shocked with HSBC front line staff... Once upon a time, I checked my HSBC online account and noticed I had to talked to the bank staff directly in order to enable some service.
I went to one of the local branch next day and talked to the teller. She had not heard about that. Well, this is still forgivable. No one expects them to know every single product. Then, it came to the shocking bit. She yelled from the counter, asked if anyone knew anything about internet banking. The bank manager replied "Not a clue, I don't even have an internet account". Oh come on, it was 2005. Is it really that hard to organise some sort of internal staff training?
Yes, but Apple products are by no mean the cheapest around the town. In other words, most Apple customers eager to paid a premium for nearly perfectly built machine with the latest components now. Everyone uses contract manufacturer. No one has any doubt or problem with that. But, it is the responsiblity of the company who owns the brand to enforce the quality control (and improve the design). I can see no reason to allow Apple from escaping its responsibility.
The impact is not revolutionary but it is definitely a positive step. When a manufacturer commits to the idea of making a laptop which can preloaded with Linux, it will make more effort in selecting hardware component or forcing the component OEMs to provide (at least half ass working) driver. This can make the IT manager's life easier: buy a particular brand of laptop and you don't need to care whether the particular user at the end need a windows or linux config.
Peer group pressure is everything at the age of early teens. If the other kids think fast food is trendy and cool, you don't want to look like mother's boy by eating healthy food... When I looked back, our gang probably chose the utmost unhealthy food of the day. On one hand, we wanted to eat like a "real man". On the other hand, we fell prey to a sneaky local fast food shop. For almost 3 consecutive years, our ideal lunch was a rice dish with two cheap fried sausage + a slab of deep-fried chicken *skin*+ a glass of coke. (The chicken meat was sold to lunch boxes more popular with ordinary office worker in the region).
Comparison between kids can be a bad thing. Either letting them to choose whatever they want to eat or allowing the school to take over. The argument here is similar to that of school uniform. In a sense, the Sweden/Finland system of free and compulsory school lunch can solve a heck lot of problem for everyone.
In addition, it can provide an excuse to justify for the higher price tag in the case of ThinkPad. If with a half way decent reason, many companies allow their professional staff (surveyor, engineers, salesperson etc) to choose the "tool" that suits. Especially backed up by a decent Ti case, a good screen that is readable outdoor will be very suitable for any work that requires the laptop to take outside.
I am a bit more pessimistic. I don't think AMD needs to support much at this moment. CPU manufacturers will have to show you the instruction set. There are not much to hide. They don't have an Intel style chipset at this moment. In other words, they don't really need to write, support or open their device driver...
By once ATI gets into the picture, the terrain changes. Arguably, ATI is bought by AMD not the other way round. But the expertise in supporting the chipset graphics card etc is in ATI. I believe it is more likely for the AMD to adopt the existing ATI support model... In other words, we can expect okay hardware with barely satisfactory software support..... I hope I am wrong.
If I were the China government and I wanted to carry out some industrial espionage, I will choose a server in India, Taiwan, or wherever not within my jurisdiction to relay the traffic. No one will be that stupid to use their own machine for serious operation, esp with this sort of sophisticated zero-date crack.
If you look up 8800.org (the one that the powerpoint crack sends keylog data to), you will know that it hosts free DNS forwarding service (excuse if my terminalogy is wrong). It provides the same sort of service as no-ip.com or dyndns.com. I can imagine the web traffic is forwarded to some cracked home machine with broadband connection. The real recipent behind this can really be anyone.
Actually much worse than that.... That guy cannot even work for the local supermarket or warehouse as computer is used everywhere.
It makes sense to ban a convicted bank teller who collaborated with a bank robber (e.g. by supplying internal operation memos) from working for any financial institutes. Similarly, I don't mind making a convicted cracker suffer by affecting his chance to work as a programmer/ computer security professional. But, banning computer usage is just too much.
In most of these research result fabrication cases, the grant money were wasted to further extend the empire of the greedy professor (hiring more postdocs, buying more equipment etc). The big and never satisified ego of some of the professors at the end drive them to do stupid things...
I guess it is more like the soft and fluffy research about the benefit of exercising to various groups of people.
Please provide any evidence to support this. FUD does not help a single bit.
The exploding laptop probably wouldn't cause much harm to the flight but it will surely cause serious harm to the owner. Before the poor owner could drop his burning laptop to the ground and run around the narrow corridor, he got a left hook punch from the teen sitting next to him. Then the grandma in the next row jumped out from nowhere and gave him a fatal reverse kick. The poor owner declared KO and felt faint at that stage. Now, the aircrew + 8 muscular guys elsewhere on the plane came. He was tied on his back with 8 pairs on smelly feet stepped on top of him for the rest of the trip. OK, enough for now. Next chapter: the poor guy in police station being interrogated for possible terrorist related charges....
But, the original article reads:
For the Suzhou factory,
In other words, we should really based the discussion upon $100/month. This makes a hugh difference. For people who know a little bit about China, they know the figure is about right for a line worker... Of course, whoever wants to give our fellow workers a more decent pay is more than welcome.
In major cities, the Chinese government starts imposing minimum salary. It is $84/month in Tianjin (the city next to Beijing, with higher cost of living than either of the towns mentioned in the MacWorld article). The submitter is like complaining MacDonald pays its workers 1.2 times of the minimum salary. So, what the heck is the problem???
The concept is not new: basically the same as the Hall cell for aluminium production. But, I believe finding a suitable salt is not that easy. In the case of aluminium, cyrolite is used. In titanium, what's the suitable one? Suppose you mix Ti2O3 with another metal salt, you may get another metal instead of Ti. Needless to say, the whole electrolysis process gets quite messy at 1500+ degC.
Religion may help to keep selfish behaviour in check. But, I cannot see religion as an antidote for mob mentality. In fact, we can see many notorious mobs in history are linked closely to fringe religious group. I think the root of the mob mentality is the belief that "I know the truth" (or even "I am the truth") and try to impose that upon the other. Mutual respect and acceptance to difference may probably the key....
Q: Chicken or egg comes first?
A: On the same plate please. May I have some tea as well?
In addition to accountant, there is another type of animal known as engineer in the jungle. In more traditional sectors, e.g. civil and chemical engineering, Excel rules.
Sometimes, Excel is used to do quick and dirty calculation (turn the cells into matrices....). Yes, it is not the most suitable tool... But, if you don't have specialist numerical package and you are *not* allowed (or able) to write program from scratch, Excel is the most powerful tool available around town (literally, if you have ever worked for chemical factory in the middle of nowhere)....
So, it is a good news...
From a pure business centric point of view, it is okay to outsource the "low value" customer service (e.g. customers support for ISP, telemarketing, account management for supermarket loyality card etc). However, I cannot follow the logic of outsourcing inner network operation offsite, esp to a foreign country.
First, file server is a big no-no. For obvious reasons, but, many pro-outsoucing managing probably have not thought about this. But, there can be something more subtle. I worked for a beer brewery before for a process optimization project. Of course, I signed an NDA and it is easy to track me down if something is leaked.
The brewery consider their formulation a top trade secret. With a little bit of logical thinking, you can deduce a whole lot from their process flow (e.g. which ingredient and the amount is added, how long does that take for a fermentation to complete, holding temperature etc, all available from the remote data server). It also provides scope for insiders' trading (oh, firm A seems to accumulate a lot of stock. Let's do something.). It is not the end of the world if a beer formula is leaked. But, think about something more important...
Well, people still have legitimate trust issue when doing medical tour. For example, if a condition is life-threatening, e.g. coronary bypass surgery, and the treatment is not affordable (no medical insurance coverage, fail certain criteria in government funded medical scheme etc) back home in a developed country, then there is a motivation of taking the risk overseas.
However, if the condition is milder (say gall bladder removal) or have already been covered by insurance somehow, I doubt many will like to go through the hassle. First, the risk for infection/ lapsed safety measure in blood transfusion is higher. At the end of the day, developing countries still have something like infrastructure etc in development. Second, no one really want to travel after a major operation. It is no much fun even if you are in Taj Mahal. Third, if something goes wrong, you don't know how to deal with that... Your doctor is thousands of mile away. You cannot hold him into responsiblity easily. So, there is not much a certain for the medical doctors in the near future. Guys, care about us first.
I have just got some fun logged in to Zopa as a "potential" lender. The agreed lending rate is unrealistically low. Lending to the "A" grade borrowers for 6 months gives you only 4.5% AER (annual equivalent rate) and lending to the "B" grade ones will only give you 5.0%. And you are responsible for all the tax.
I would rather lend my money to HSBC. For one of the first standard online saving
account, you can earn 4.75% AER (and it is not even fixed for 6 months).
The interest rate setting mechanism is kind of a double auction market. You, as either lender or borrower, can set your offer rate. The "market" rate is the one when both meeting somewhere in the middle. I mean most lenders are not really serious at this moment. They are likely to throw £10 in order to test how the system work. But, causually, you can see how people evaluate risk. For this type of unsecured loan via a potentially run-away-overnight "bank", my risk premium is way higher than 10%. Even if I trust the whole system, given a default rate of 3% quoted somewhere in their website, a risk-neutral lender will at least demand an interest rate of the "risk-less" rate (the return that you deposit in a reputable regular bank) + the default rate + their annual handling fee, which means at least 4.5+3+0.5=8%.
You've forgetten an important fact: India is largely unaffected by the WW2 (when compare with most of the countries in Asia/ Europe). No major battle has broken out on her soil. So, the rebuilt effort after independence is more about how to revert to normal life after colonialism. (Well, the Bengal famine did kill many civilian, but it mainly affects the regions in where known as Bangladesh rather than India proper. ). India was in a much better starting line than most in the region.
The ridiculous fact after World War Two in Asia is the penality is inversely proportional to the suffering. The aggressor (Japan) was rebuilt with the help of US. Apart from token gesture (e.g. left the factories and machinery in occupied land) Japan did not compensate to anyone to any significant extend (Korea/ China/ Philipine/ Indonesia/ Vietnam just name a few, of which their countries were absolutely devastated by the invading Japanese army).