Temperatures have not flatlined since '99. That's simply a selective interpretation of the trend. The average temperature anomaly for '95-'99 was 0.468 degrees. For '00-'04 it was 0.572 degrees. For '05-'08 it was 0.665 degrees. How is that flatlined?
"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
What?
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders?:-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
Nobody is trying to deny that humans are part of nature. You are just arguing semantics for some unknown reason. Artificial selection is the human-controlled selection of human-desired traits. Natural selection is the selection of traits that improve survival. If you can't see the difference between those two definitions then I can't help you.
For instance, for some reason she thinks that I'll fill up the water bowl more often if she drops food in it. She's wrong, but she's done it for years now. There's always exactly 1 piece, no matter how far from the food bowl it is.
Perhaps she likes the taste better if there is a piece of food in it?
But since humans are part of nature, artificial selection is natural too. So that makes the title "Natural selection or natural selection?"
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer while "natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured. Just because humans are part of nature does not make the two terms synonymous.
Doing any single RAID level over 12 disks is just foolhardy, including RAID6. Multiple smaller arrays striped together is the way to go (RAID10, RAID50, RAID60,. Or is that multiple stripesets RAID'd together? I always get the terms backwards.
Better to do the redundancy at the lower level - it has better characteristics when degraded. For example if you have four disks arranged as a mirrored pair of 2 disk RAID0 arrays then losing any one disk will take down one of the mirrors and losing either of the two disks in the other mirror will bring down the array (though you may be able to recover the data if you've got the right two disks left). If you've got your array organised as a RAID 0 made out of two mirrored pairs then your array will stay up unless you lose both disks from the same mirror. So stripe your mirrors (or RAID5 arrays or whatever).
You'll also get better throughput, at the cost of a bit of storage space.
You certainly won't get better read performance. You might get better write performance, though it wouldn't surprise me if the write performance was much the same. You'd definitely be safer though.
RAID 5 will not protect your data. The odds are extremely high that if you lose a drive in a 12TB array, you *will* get an error during rebuild. RAID 5 on an array this large is for those people who don't do storage for a living.
RAID 0? Let me simply repeat what that 0 is for: the percentage of the data you will get back if anything goes wrong.
Exactly. The problem with RAID5 is that it degrades to RAID0. Doing RAID5 over 12 disks is very risky.
Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.
They screwed up the model number. They clearly state that they used the model with 16 internal ports and 4 external ports - which is the ARC-1680ix-16. If anything the WTF here is that Areca call their 20 port controller a...-16.
"Your honor, on the slight chance that this court does not accept either the termite mound or the truck-load of bottlecaps, I have also brought this bag containing a sufficient quantity of dead skin cells."
You'd be found in contempt. They're clearly looking for "300,000" written on a piece of paper.
I was appalled when I first moved here to find that the tyres on my recently bought car were OK as far as the WOF was concerned because they had tread on 80% of the surface (bald around the edges due to misaligned tracking) and passed just fine. The car would slide and aquaplane in the rain so I replaced the whole lot.
Did that happen recently? My car failed it's WOF a couple of months ago for exactly this issue (and it wasn't so bad as to cause any loss of grip in any conditions I'd driven in).
Thats really a small number though that could depend on multiple variables. How do we know that the same amount of cars passed through it? For all we know there could have been a road that was under construction that people use now. Also did the road get any more improvements? What about weather? There would be a big difference if last year there were lots of storms. Etc. Plus, for all we know, most of those 14 deaths could have happened with one or two cars. Its really too small of an amount of deaths to say with any certainty if they are working.
The 14 figure stated by the AC is wrong. The period that they are talking about was over Easter - 4.5 days approximately. According to this the Easter road toll for 2008 was 9 nationally so I have no idea where the 14 came from.
The point I was making is that imperial units are rooted in easy to visualize multiples and fractions. Look at a ruler and the inches side is divided by powers of two, while the metric side is in powers of ten. If powers of two are more intuitive (as per the "no ruler" scenario), why not use the system that uses that?
Because it makes unit conversion much harder, and we perform unit conversion much more often that we perform division into thirds on the sorts of quantities where it actually helps to have imperial units. Yes, it is easier to divide one foot into thirds. But how often do you actually do that? What you normally do is to divide quantities like 11 5/8" in thirds. And that is no easier than dividing 29.5275 cm into thirds. Anyway I cannot remember the last time I had to divide any quantity into thirds.
to me the whole argument is which is more intuitive.
What exactly is intuitive about a system of measuring length that has 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, 220 yards to the furlong (not divisible by 3), 8 furlongs to the mile (again, not divisible by 3), 3 miles to the league, and then a completely different set of units if you're operating over water? Shall I talk about weights as well? You might have had a point if the system was consistently based on a factor of 3 or 12 but it is not.
I still think of things in imperial units.
You think in imperial units because you are used to them. I'm used to metric units and have no problems with them day to day. Actually there is one set of units I use often that I find quite annoying to work with: time. Converting between days, hours, minutes, and seconds is noticeably more difficult than any of the conversions I do on metric units. I'm not suggesting we adopt "metric" time, but it does make me glad I live in a society that did not find the conversion to metric units too hard.
Sounds a lot like, deep down, you don't really want to be there, or at least you don't want to be working on that project. Are you happy working as a coder? Do you like your particular technical area? Do you truly like your colleagues? Your employer?
It could be that, but it might not be anything so drastic. The problem I can have is starting projects (or starting major modifications like adding a big new feature). I think this is because most of the hard decisions that have big downsides are at the start. I'm reluctant to make those decisions because I know that if I make a mistake it will take a lot of effort to fix. One symptom of this is that I usually have no problem with starting refactoring jobs - as I can see what is wrong with the current architecture and what needs to change so there are no hard decisions to make. The solution varies, sometimes the big job can be broken down so that I'm starting with a smaller problem, sometimes I just have to make an attempt, sometimes I can concentrate more on formal design so that I have more confidence in the decisions I need to make.
1) If I look outside my office window, I can see about 48 office windows (without standing up) and all of them have the lights on and it's dusk outside. Give me a dSLR and a decent set of long distance lenses and I'll prove you wrong.
This could be a problem but usually isn't. Since the software designer/developer doesn't know if it's a problem and the user does why not leave it up to the user? Give them a checkbox to enable masking.
2) How many times have you typed in your password while somebody was looking at your screen eg. to show somebody something on a protected website. This happens a lot to tech people as we have to authenticate to solve an issue while somebody is standing next to me waiting for me to fix it.
Solved by a checkbox to enable masking.
3) How many times have you given a presentation where your screen view (but not your keyboard input) goes worldwide (eg. teleconference) or over a set of wires that you know haven't been tampered with (conference room) - again, logging in to your webmail or so to find a copy of your presentation.
Solved by a checkbox to enable masking.
4) How difficult is it to create a script that takes screenshots - how difficult is it to create a script that captures keyboard entry as well. Answer: the first can be done in userspace (and in the hands of an experienced script kiddie would be unnoticed), the latter usually has to go as a request to a driver, kernel or other layer that requires admin rights. This is true for Windows, Mac and (depending on your GUI) Linux
It's not that much more difficult to create a keyboard logger. If someone has gotten software onto your machine (user space or kernel space) you have no security at all.
If someone is shoulder surfing either ask them to leave or don't log in just then. It's not rocket science.
Why should I be inconvenienced just because the developer wants to save me from a situation that may not even apply? It's funny, usually the consensus on Slashdot is against trying to save people from themselves.
On the other hand any password that gets used much is going to be so well known that typos are very unlikely anyhow, so it's not like it's a big usability issue.
Same thing with email addresses in online forms, why do I always have to type those in twice?
That's to reduce the chances you have a typo. Some even explain that.
Entering it twice makes sense for a password where you can't see what you are typing - if you make a typo there you won't realise and you'll never be able to log in. But you can see the email address you've typed. Why should I have to type it twice when I can clearly see that I got it right the first time?
If I gave you a 2x4 and asked you to cut it in half, in thirds or in quarters and didn't provide a ruler, you could do it fairly accurately.
How exactly is it any more difficult to cut something in half, thirds, or quarters in metric? Especially without a ruler? If you don't have a ruler it doesn't matter at all what units you like to use.
You may need little more mental math with the imperial system, but you are less reliant upon measurement devices.
There aren't many things you can really get away without measuring. Cooking, sure, if you're good at it. DIY projects? You'll make a mess of it more often than not.
The "mental math" argument might have been fairly important 40 or 50 years ago. But these days it's pretty weak. If the math is too hard use a calculator - most people carry one around in the form of a phone so they're not exactly hard to come by.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe, since temps have flatlined since '99
Temperatures have not flatlined since '99. That's simply a selective interpretation of the trend. The average temperature anomaly for '95-'99 was 0.468 degrees. For '00-'04 it was 0.572 degrees. For '05-'08 it was 0.665 degrees. How is that flatlined?
It's pretty clear on this graph.
[Rearranged]
"natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured.
It's producing offspring that's favoured, rather than survival.
What?
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer
Which therefore promotes the production of offspring in the environment that includes those human breeders (as opposed to dog breeders? :-) and so is still natural selection. The problem with the term artificial selection is that it misleadingly sets humans outside of the process as something standing above nature and controlling it rather than just as much a part of nature as everything else.
Nobody is trying to deny that humans are part of nature. You are just arguing semantics for some unknown reason. Artificial selection is the human-controlled selection of human-desired traits. Natural selection is the selection of traits that improve survival. If you can't see the difference between those two definitions then I can't help you.
There's no evolutionary pressure here
No one said it was. Neither the article nor the summary mention evolution at all.
For instance, for some reason she thinks that I'll fill up the water bowl more often if she drops food in it. She's wrong, but she's done it for years now. There's always exactly 1 piece, no matter how far from the food bowl it is.
Perhaps she likes the taste better if there is a piece of food in it?
But since humans are part of nature, artificial selection is natural too. So that makes the title "Natural selection or natural selection?"
Both "natural selection" and "artificial selection" have specific meanings. "Artificial selection" is a process by which human breeders arrange selection of traits they prefer while "natural selection" is the process by which traits that improve survival are favoured. Just because humans are part of nature does not make the two terms synonymous.
Doing any single RAID level over 12 disks is just foolhardy, including RAID6. Multiple smaller arrays striped together is the way to go (RAID10, RAID50, RAID60,. Or is that multiple stripesets RAID'd together? I always get the terms backwards.
Better to do the redundancy at the lower level - it has better characteristics when degraded. For example if you have four disks arranged as a mirrored pair of 2 disk RAID0 arrays then losing any one disk will take down one of the mirrors and losing either of the two disks in the other mirror will bring down the array (though you may be able to recover the data if you've got the right two disks left). If you've got your array organised as a RAID 0 made out of two mirrored pairs then your array will stay up unless you lose both disks from the same mirror. So stripe your mirrors (or RAID5 arrays or whatever).
You'll also get better throughput, at the cost of a bit of storage space.
You certainly won't get better read performance. You might get better write performance, though it wouldn't surprise me if the write performance was much the same. You'd definitely be safer though.
RAID 5 will not protect your data. The odds are extremely high that if you lose a drive in a 12TB array, you *will* get an error during rebuild. RAID 5 on an array this large is for those people who don't do storage for a living.
RAID 0? Let me simply repeat what that 0 is for: the percentage of the data you will get back if anything goes wrong.
Exactly. The problem with RAID5 is that it degrades to RAID0. Doing RAID5 over 12 disks is very risky.
hdparm can tell you the serial numbers of the drives that haven't failed.
Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.
They screwed up the model number. They clearly state that they used the model with 16 internal ports and 4 external ports - which is the ARC-1680ix-16. If anything the WTF here is that Areca call their 20 port controller a ...-16.
fine him or her 300,000 (according to the AFP)
"Your honor, on the slight chance that this court does not accept either the termite mound or the truck-load of bottlecaps, I have also brought this bag containing a sufficient quantity of dead skin cells."
You'd be found in contempt. They're clearly looking for "300,000" written on a piece of paper.
I was appalled when I first moved here to find that the tyres on my recently bought car were OK as far as the WOF was concerned because they had tread on 80% of the surface (bald around the edges due to misaligned tracking) and passed just fine. The car would slide and aquaplane in the rain so I replaced the whole lot.
Did that happen recently? My car failed it's WOF a couple of months ago for exactly this issue (and it wasn't so bad as to cause any loss of grip in any conditions I'd driven in).
Until someone crashes while gawking at the bleeding billboards?
Almost happened the other day: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sideswipe/news/article.cfm?c_id=702&objectid=10583035 (last paragraph in column).
Thats really a small number though that could depend on multiple variables. How do we know that the same amount of cars passed through it? For all we know there could have been a road that was under construction that people use now. Also did the road get any more improvements? What about weather? There would be a big difference if last year there were lots of storms. Etc. Plus, for all we know, most of those 14 deaths could have happened with one or two cars. Its really too small of an amount of deaths to say with any certainty if they are working.
The 14 figure stated by the AC is wrong. The period that they are talking about was over Easter - 4.5 days approximately. According to this the Easter road toll for 2008 was 9 nationally so I have no idea where the 14 came from.
If it was FireFox 3's memory utilization that bothered you then I'd recommend trying out 3.5 - it's much less memory hungry.
I didn't catch that in the original submission; thanks for seeing it.
Good job. The word "Twitter" should have been a sign to look for trouble. You've been here how long?
You might have had a point if twitter hadn't created that username about eight years before Twitter appeared.
The point I was making is that imperial units are rooted in easy to visualize multiples and fractions. Look at a ruler and the inches side is divided by powers of two, while the metric side is in powers of ten. If powers of two are more intuitive (as per the "no ruler" scenario), why not use the system that uses that?
Because it makes unit conversion much harder, and we perform unit conversion much more often that we perform division into thirds on the sorts of quantities where it actually helps to have imperial units. Yes, it is easier to divide one foot into thirds. But how often do you actually do that? What you normally do is to divide quantities like 11 5/8" in thirds. And that is no easier than dividing 29.5275 cm into thirds. Anyway I cannot remember the last time I had to divide any quantity into thirds.
to me the whole argument is which is more intuitive.
What exactly is intuitive about a system of measuring length that has 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, 220 yards to the furlong (not divisible by 3), 8 furlongs to the mile (again, not divisible by 3), 3 miles to the league, and then a completely different set of units if you're operating over water? Shall I talk about weights as well? You might have had a point if the system was consistently based on a factor of 3 or 12 but it is not.
I still think of things in imperial units.
You think in imperial units because you are used to them. I'm used to metric units and have no problems with them day to day. Actually there is one set of units I use often that I find quite annoying to work with: time. Converting between days, hours, minutes, and seconds is noticeably more difficult than any of the conversions I do on metric units. I'm not suggesting we adopt "metric" time, but it does make me glad I live in a society that did not find the conversion to metric units too hard.
Sounds a lot like, deep down, you don't really want to be there, or at least you don't want to be working on that project. Are you happy working as a coder? Do you like your particular technical area? Do you truly like your colleagues? Your employer?
It could be that, but it might not be anything so drastic. The problem I can have is starting projects (or starting major modifications like adding a big new feature). I think this is because most of the hard decisions that have big downsides are at the start. I'm reluctant to make those decisions because I know that if I make a mistake it will take a lot of effort to fix. One symptom of this is that I usually have no problem with starting refactoring jobs - as I can see what is wrong with the current architecture and what needs to change so there are no hard decisions to make. The solution varies, sometimes the big job can be broken down so that I'm starting with a smaller problem, sometimes I just have to make an attempt, sometimes I can concentrate more on formal design so that I have more confidence in the decisions I need to make.
1) If I look outside my office window, I can see about 48 office windows (without standing up) and all of them have the lights on and it's dusk outside. Give me a dSLR and a decent set of long distance lenses and I'll prove you wrong.
This could be a problem but usually isn't. Since the software designer/developer doesn't know if it's a problem and the user does why not leave it up to the user? Give them a checkbox to enable masking.
2) How many times have you typed in your password while somebody was looking at your screen eg. to show somebody something on a protected website. This happens a lot to tech people as we have to authenticate to solve an issue while somebody is standing next to me waiting for me to fix it.
Solved by a checkbox to enable masking.
3) How many times have you given a presentation where your screen view (but not your keyboard input) goes worldwide (eg. teleconference) or over a set of wires that you know haven't been tampered with (conference room) - again, logging in to your webmail or so to find a copy of your presentation.
Solved by a checkbox to enable masking.
4) How difficult is it to create a script that takes screenshots - how difficult is it to create a script that captures keyboard entry as well. Answer: the first can be done in userspace (and in the hands of an experienced script kiddie would be unnoticed), the latter usually has to go as a request to a driver, kernel or other layer that requires admin rights. This is true for Windows, Mac and (depending on your GUI) Linux
It's not that much more difficult to create a keyboard logger. If someone has gotten software onto your machine (user space or kernel space) you have no security at all.
Shoulder surfing.
If someone is shoulder surfing either ask them to leave or don't log in just then. It's not rocket science.
Why should I be inconvenienced just because the developer wants to save me from a situation that may not even apply? It's funny, usually the consensus on Slashdot is against trying to save people from themselves.
On the other hand any password that gets used much is going to be so well known that typos are very unlikely anyhow, so it's not like it's a big usability issue.
Same thing with email addresses in online forms, why do I always have to type those in twice?
That's to reduce the chances you have a typo. Some even explain that.
Entering it twice makes sense for a password where you can't see what you are typing - if you make a typo there you won't realise and you'll never be able to log in. But you can see the email address you've typed. Why should I have to type it twice when I can clearly see that I got it right the first time?
If I gave you a 2x4 and asked you to cut it in half, in thirds or in quarters and didn't provide a ruler, you could do it fairly accurately.
How exactly is it any more difficult to cut something in half, thirds, or quarters in metric? Especially without a ruler? If you don't have a ruler it doesn't matter at all what units you like to use.
You may need little more mental math with the imperial system, but you are less reliant upon measurement devices.
There aren't many things you can really get away without measuring. Cooking, sure, if you're good at it. DIY projects? You'll make a mess of it more often than not.
The "mental math" argument might have been fairly important 40 or 50 years ago. But these days it's pretty weak. If the math is too hard use a calculator - most people carry one around in the form of a phone so they're not exactly hard to come by.
Frankly, and without trying to be insulting, you're so ignorant of what the issue is that it's laughable that you even have an opinion on it.
You must be new here.
When the hell is he going to need to convert to ounces or pounds?
E.g. He might need to know how many tons his 200 10 pounds bags are to ensure his truck is not overloaded.
That is just the seller trying to cheat you into selling you almost 10% less than what you pay for!
2 lbs = 0.907 kg.
Alternatively, 'that's two pounds sir', might have been a statement of the price and not a correction of the units.
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7330/picture1uo4.png
Firefox is still my browser of choice, due to the plug-ins I use daily. I have to wonder how Flash intensive the sites loaded were.
Was that 3.5 or 3.0? 3.0 has a terrible memory footprint...