First of all, this is Japan not San Francisco, so I doubt they are sending any "sailors" there.
Secondly, it's possible to create a moon base now, but it's probably not yet cost effective... JAXA doesn't have an unlimited budget, and AFAIK we don't have a definitive solution for the problem of microscopic lunar dust.
Considering all the reliability concerns of running an extraterrestrial habitat in vacuum, I'm glad they are using JAXA technology rather than AJAX!
Re:could this be lights out for slashdot?
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 1
The entire posting by the editor appears to be a single blockquote of the submitter. It seems unlikely that the editor wrote the last line, but perhaps we should ask ExE122.
The major problem isn't there little good software, but very few good software engineers... Code is inflated, buggy, a log of it written via trial & error, and if an actual review were to audit a sizeable fraction of code when prepared to be used, there'd be a lot of rewritten code or better coders who keep their jobs.
Having worked on "Class A" mission critical software for NASA, I can assure you that it is entirely possible to get code that does not have these problems (even if you do not exclusively use top-5% software developers), provided that companies are willing to pay, both in time and in money, for software to be developed in a more strict, reviewed and well-thought-out fashion.
The real problem is not that there are no good software engineers in Redmond or wherever, but that the end users are not willing to pay the premium that such well-crafted software would cost them - either because it is already "good enough" for them, or due to a sense of false economy. Either way, it does not make sense for a company, in the current market, to write this kind of program for anything except perhaps servers. If someone's WoW client crashes ever thousand hours, that isn't the kind of problem it would be for, say, a missile defense radar system.
If end users cared more about program stability and reliability (i.e. were willing to pay significantly more for it, and wait longer to buy a good piece of software) this would be much, much less of an issue. Software developed for the DoD, which is one such customer, is exactly what you want (and the price premium for that kind of development is almost absurd). Having the smartest/best engineers in world doesn't help if they are understaffed, underfunded, and rushed to market, like much software currently is.
Actually I think that Bayesian statistics is appropriate here, because the only alternative (at least that I know if) is frequentism, which makes no sense when talking about singular events - what is the probability that I am a good poster, for instance? Either I am, or I'm not, there's only one me.
I think one can take the view that probability reflects the degree of belief in an assertion (i.e. the odds one would be willing to bet) without rigorously using things like bayes views and priors... I am aware of the various paradoxes and conundrums associated with priors (especially Bertrand's Paradox), but I do think that Bayesian reasoning much more closely follows the approximate human inference used by people.
I would also say that, as a natural consequence of using the chain rule, a poverty of evidence requires one to put a lot of weight on information about the source, whereas more information on a subject will diminish this effect, which, I believe, is the correct behavior for maximizing utility when making decisions under uncertain conditions.
I will agree that more irrational people will tend to discard ample amounts of evidence because of putting too much weight to attacks on the credibility of a source or groups of sources, however this is logical under the belief that errors between multiple sources are correlated (read: conspiracy/groupthink/indoctrination).
I will say that ad hominem attacks by themselves are probably the least preferred method of persuasion, but considering the they are used in our justice system to great effect, I believe they are still vital when employed properly.
Do have an honest counter argument or is insulting him the best you can come up with?
Apart from insulting being fun, the ad-hominem attack is very effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? I've mentioned this earlier on slashdot, and I'd like you to think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
Entity A is a zealot/crackpot, therefore assertion X made by A is more likely to be incorrect.
Entity A is a well respected, unbiased source, therefore assertion X is likely to be correct.
Assertion X is known to conflict with deep laws of science/politics, or is a minority viewpoint which is considered to be "fringe thinking"/"crackpottery"/un-preferred worldview (i.e. over-unity devices, fascism, tinfoil-hat), therefore Entity A is likely to be an untrustworthy source.
Assertion X, Y, Z, etc have proven to be correct and are in-line with generally accepted theory, therefore Entity A is more likely to be a trustworthy source.
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.
That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or frequentism). Therefore ad-hominmen attacks are actually important - if you must extend "trust" to a source (you are trusting their reasoning or their data), you must first ascertain the level of trust you should extend. Ad-hominem attacks are therefore effective precisely because they provide evidence (often very unbiased, but sometimes not) that the data should not be trusted. This does not in any way prove that the data or reasoning is wrong, merely that is should have a reduced weighting in the final inference of belief.
Last time this was posted, there were a fewstupidposts that seem to assert that this type of thing is trivial.
There are three main problems in this area of research (or pretty much any other part of CS):
Defining the problem.
Getting an accurate result.
Getting it as fast as possible.
Their research seems to deal mostly with the third problem, which is one of the biggest barriers to use in real life. Many of the algorithms used on these types of problems are NP, or require ridiculous amounts of (expensive) labeled data to train from. Also there are problems with generalization and overfitting. There is no freeware software that can compete with this type of algorithm under these conditions - over 300,000 articles in just a few hours.
Another thing is that UCI is well known for hosting the UCI Machine Learning Repository. This has become the gold standard for testing new machine learning algorithms in the accademic community; these guys really know what they are about. Back when I was a grad student at Cornell, my research used their data sets to evaluate new ways of creating ensemble classifiers from pre-trained classifiers according to modified bayesian reasoning, and the sets are useful because they contain a large, diverse set of problems that need to be modeled.
All that being said, I'm waiting for the paper, along with more technical specifics, to be released so I can really see what this is about - the press release did not contain enough technical data, but rest assured, freeware and/or adwords does not use this kind of technique, and this is a big step towards mining the massive amount of human and biologically generated data out there.
Stereotypes are part of human psychology because, more often than not, they are statistically the right thing to think. If you buy into Bayesian reasoning, every statement has a "prior" value - a degree of belief assigned to it before any actual information on that statement has been gathered.
It is the experience of most individuals that true computer 'geeks' are rare among females, and therefore it is especially surprising to find one. Many of the few female CS majors I knew while doing my degree were anything but computer geeks (indeed I think they were very much bothered by them).
In most situations these stereotypes help an individual because a male geek is less likely to start spouting unappreciated computer nonsense out to a random female until and unless he has reason to believe (sometimes incredulously) that she would "get" it.
Another factor is that it seems (though this is a bit contraversial) that while the average intelligences of males and females are the same, that the standard deviation is somewhat higher for males. So there are fewer "genius" level females, but also fewer "idiot" level males. There is a hypothesis that this may be explained by X chromosome-linked genetic factors, which have much higher variation when a single gene is present (in males) than in females. Another explaination is that males are born in a ratio that's totally unnecessary, which explains why males are much more likely to engage in risky behavior, and possibly even express genetic traits in a more risky fashion. This article has a bit more along those lines, though I cannot vouch for its authority.
I really hate how political correctness has surpressed studies of these types of things - I'm very much a feminist and believe it is important to continue to advance the rights of females, after all even conservatives should see that it's important to make the best use out of your population. I really hate seeing someone get in trouble for saying these things are issues that should be studied.
As long as you're treating your staff correctly, you should really be concerned about what's on their laptop. VPNs help with this, as does keeping critical data on the server side only (this may be one of the biggest benefits of webapps). You should also make sure they do not insert suspicious media or give passwords to others.
I used to be a DDR freak, well not a master but definitely very much into it. I think this was mostly because it was the only way to get girls to come to my apartment (and that it did, very well I might add). It was my exercise, my passion, but then one day I decided to go all the way - TWO MATS BABY! Long story short, it's nine months later and my big toe has still not recovered from that "experience". With each step I'm reminded why the game comes with injury warnings...
It is the perhaps unfortunate nature of the english language that two, entirely separate concepts are both given the same name - free. The target audience of this distribution does not care about source code or software politics. They want a tool that they can use to get work done, and they want it on the cheap. For them, the name Freespire is good, as the point of the distribution is that it does not cost money. Whether or not it is Stallman approved means less to them than if it is "kid tested and mother approved."
I originally intended it to be 100% informative/insightful, then I realized that I couldn't really find anywhere well-known other than Yucca Mountain (and I didn't want to do an hour of research for a single comment), so I picked the next best thing:)
I read that web page, and it's completely correct, but only under its ridiculously restrictive assumptions about the nature of the tests and how they can be combined.
A standard Bayesian network combining the results of tests which have continuous (rather than boolean) outputs, something which many algorithms for facial recognition, fingerprints, etc, will, on average, give strictly better results than the use of either tests alone - this is not only simple to prove, but the basis of many modern classification systems, for things such as spam detection and data mining.
Of course this all assumes that the system has been properly calibrated, which should be agiven.
In order to get the radiation down to safe levels, you have to out-radiate everything up to that level. Same radiation, doesn't matter if it takes the normal amount of time or less.
Actually it matters quite a bit. There are plenty of places where all that radiation would be hardly noticed, and if the timescale is lessened to something managable by today's governments, we will be able to avoid the monumental task of warning future generations.
I wonder how the growing pressures of the mobile market will be on the OpenGL framework, especially with Khronos at the reins. Perhaps there will be more emphasis on procedural methods (to deal with the small VRAM sizes of mobile chips), or better resource usage for power conservation?
I don't understand why this is referred to as a "jet" pack, when it is in fact powered by a rocket engine. Of course that doesn't stop me from wanting one to avoid commutes/exes...
These types of compatability layers don't really help developers to port their applications to Linux, but they remove a significant amount of the incentive to do so, as there will be less demand for a linux port when the game can be run (at least on some machines) through the compatability layer.
I expect that effect this may kill, or at least stifle the development of mainstream games on Macintel.
While I do agree that we, as a nation, have overreacted quite a bit to terrorist actions, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work on security precautions. Prevention and mitigation are two of our strongest weapons that can help people avoid the need to worry.
On the other hand, I'm not all that convinced that these new security measures are really doing that much to make things like air travel safer. I know someone who accidentally took firecrackers in his pocket on an flight across the US once (after 9/11). The security people x-rayed and felt through all of his on-person possessions, but so much junk had accumulated in his pockets that they did not notice the presence of explosives.
Servers that don't access much of the disk (say, less than 1GB or whatever the size of the flash cache is) the majority of the time would benefit from this the same as laptops, by letting their disks spin down.
Also fast restart is especially good for critical servers as a method of reducing both planned and unplanned downtime. I know at lylix.net, we will be getting one of these as soon as Gentoo Linux properly supports it - you don't want an Asterisk box down longer than it has to be.
My question is - what kinds of support can/will the linux kernel have for this? We run Gentoo Linux as our host OS, and I cannot see us migrating to Windows for the forseeable future. I searched a bit online, and found this ask slashdot story, but no authoritative answer. Anyone?
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer? When I was working at JPL, all systems were required by law to show a message indicating that all use was being tracked, as it was a secure government facility. (this could not be turned off even when it was interfering with the functioning of certain scripts)
I didn't have a problem with this - if you really want to have a private conversation or IM, use a cell phone that you own. AFAIK, they can't monitor that.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know the Java API for XML Aeronautics was ready yet.
And when it is, we're all screwed!
First of all, this is Japan not San Francisco, so I doubt they are sending any "sailors" there.
Secondly, it's possible to create a moon base now, but it's probably not yet cost effective... JAXA doesn't have an unlimited budget, and AFAIK we don't have a definitive solution for the problem of microscopic lunar dust.
Considering all the reliability concerns of running an extraterrestrial habitat in vacuum, I'm glad they are using JAXA technology rather than AJAX!
The entire posting by the editor appears to be a single blockquote of the submitter. It seems unlikely that the editor wrote the last line, but perhaps we should ask ExE122.
The major problem isn't there little good software, but very few good software engineers... Code is inflated, buggy, a log of it written via trial & error, and if an actual review were to audit a sizeable fraction of code when prepared to be used, there'd be a lot of rewritten code or better coders who keep their jobs.
Having worked on "Class A" mission critical software for NASA, I can assure you that it is entirely possible to get code that does not have these problems (even if you do not exclusively use top-5% software developers), provided that companies are willing to pay, both in time and in money, for software to be developed in a more strict, reviewed and well-thought-out fashion.
The real problem is not that there are no good software engineers in Redmond or wherever, but that the end users are not willing to pay the premium that such well-crafted software would cost them - either because it is already "good enough" for them, or due to a sense of false economy. Either way, it does not make sense for a company, in the current market, to write this kind of program for anything except perhaps servers. If someone's WoW client crashes ever thousand hours, that isn't the kind of problem it would be for, say, a missile defense radar system.
If end users cared more about program stability and reliability (i.e. were willing to pay significantly more for it, and wait longer to buy a good piece of software) this would be much, much less of an issue. Software developed for the DoD, which is one such customer, is exactly what you want (and the price premium for that kind of development is almost absurd). Having the smartest/best engineers in world doesn't help if they are understaffed, underfunded, and rushed to market, like much software currently is.
Actually I think that Bayesian statistics is appropriate here, because the only alternative (at least that I know if) is frequentism, which makes no sense when talking about singular events - what is the probability that I am a good poster, for instance? Either I am, or I'm not, there's only one me.
I think one can take the view that probability reflects the degree of belief in an assertion (i.e. the odds one would be willing to bet) without rigorously using things like bayes views and priors... I am aware of the various paradoxes and conundrums associated with priors (especially Bertrand's Paradox), but I do think that Bayesian reasoning much more closely follows the approximate human inference used by people.
I would also say that, as a natural consequence of using the chain rule, a poverty of evidence requires one to put a lot of weight on information about the source, whereas more information on a subject will diminish this effect, which, I believe, is the correct behavior for maximizing utility when making decisions under uncertain conditions.
I will agree that more irrational people will tend to discard ample amounts of evidence because of putting too much weight to attacks on the credibility of a source or groups of sources, however this is logical under the belief that errors between multiple sources are correlated (read: conspiracy/groupthink/indoctrination).
I will say that ad hominem attacks by themselves are probably the least preferred method of persuasion, but considering the they are used in our justice system to great effect, I believe they are still vital when employed properly.
Apart from insulting being fun, the ad-hominem attack is very effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? I've mentioned this earlier on slashdot, and I'd like you to think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
- Entity A is a zealot/crackpot, therefore assertion X made by A is more likely to be incorrect.
- Entity A is a well respected, unbiased source, therefore assertion X is likely to be correct.
- Assertion X is known to conflict with deep laws of science/politics, or is a minority viewpoint which is considered to be "fringe thinking"/"crackpottery"/un-preferred worldview (i.e. over-unity devices, fascism, tinfoil-hat), therefore Entity A is likely to be an untrustworthy source.
- Assertion X, Y, Z, etc have proven to be correct and are in-line with generally accepted theory, therefore Entity A is more likely to be a trustworthy source.
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or frequentism). Therefore ad-hominmen attacks are actually important - if you must extend "trust" to a source (you are trusting their reasoning or their data), you must first ascertain the level of trust you should extend. Ad-hominem attacks are therefore effective precisely because they provide evidence (often very unbiased, but sometimes not) that the data should not be trusted. This does not in any way prove that the data or reasoning is wrong, merely that is should have a reduced weighting in the final inference of belief.
There are three main problems in this area of research (or pretty much any other part of CS):
- Defining the problem.
- Getting an accurate result.
- Getting it as fast as possible.
Their research seems to deal mostly with the third problem, which is one of the biggest barriers to use in real life. Many of the algorithms used on these types of problems are NP, or require ridiculous amounts of (expensive) labeled data to train from. Also there are problems with generalization and overfitting. There is no freeware software that can compete with this type of algorithm under these conditions - over 300,000 articles in just a few hours.Another thing is that UCI is well known for hosting the UCI Machine Learning Repository. This has become the gold standard for testing new machine learning algorithms in the accademic community; these guys really know what they are about. Back when I was a grad student at Cornell, my research used their data sets to evaluate new ways of creating ensemble classifiers from pre-trained classifiers according to modified bayesian reasoning, and the sets are useful because they contain a large, diverse set of problems that need to be modeled.
All that being said, I'm waiting for the paper, along with more technical specifics, to be released so I can really see what this is about - the press release did not contain enough technical data, but rest assured, freeware and/or adwords does not use this kind of technique, and this is a big step towards mining the massive amount of human and biologically generated data out there.
I just don't see how this could be possible...
Stereotypes are part of human psychology because, more often than not, they are statistically the right thing to think. If you buy into Bayesian reasoning, every statement has a "prior" value - a degree of belief assigned to it before any actual information on that statement has been gathered.
It is the experience of most individuals that true computer 'geeks' are rare among females, and therefore it is especially surprising to find one. Many of the few female CS majors I knew while doing my degree were anything but computer geeks (indeed I think they were very much bothered by them).
In most situations these stereotypes help an individual because a male geek is less likely to start spouting unappreciated computer nonsense out to a random female until and unless he has reason to believe (sometimes incredulously) that she would "get" it.
Another factor is that it seems (though this is a bit contraversial) that while the average intelligences of males and females are the same, that the standard deviation is somewhat higher for males. So there are fewer "genius" level females, but also fewer "idiot" level males. There is a hypothesis that this may be explained by X chromosome-linked genetic factors, which have much higher variation when a single gene is present (in males) than in females. Another explaination is that males are born in a ratio that's totally unnecessary, which explains why males are much more likely to engage in risky behavior, and possibly even express genetic traits in a more risky fashion. This article has a bit more along those lines, though I cannot vouch for its authority.
I really hate how political correctness has surpressed studies of these types of things - I'm very much a feminist and believe it is important to continue to advance the rights of females, after all even conservatives should see that it's important to make the best use out of your population. I really hate seeing someone get in trouble for saying these things are issues that should be studied.
As long as you're treating your staff correctly, you should really be concerned about what's on their laptop. VPNs help with this, as does keeping critical data on the server side only (this may be one of the biggest benefits of webapps). You should also make sure they do not insert suspicious media or give passwords to others.
I used to be a DDR freak, well not a master but definitely very much into it. I think this was mostly because it was the only way to get girls to come to my apartment (and that it did, very well I might add). It was my exercise, my passion, but then one day I decided to go all the way - TWO MATS BABY! Long story short, it's nine months later and my big toe has still not recovered from that "experience". With each step I'm reminded why the game comes with injury warnings...
DDR, you're a real bastard!
It is the perhaps unfortunate nature of the english language that two, entirely separate concepts are both given the same name - free. The target audience of this distribution does not care about source code or software politics. They want a tool that they can use to get work done, and they want it on the cheap. For them, the name Freespire is good, as the point of the distribution is that it does not cost money. Whether or not it is Stallman approved means less to them than if it is "kid tested and mother approved."
I originally intended it to be 100% informative/insightful, then I realized that I couldn't really find anywhere well-known other than Yucca Mountain (and I didn't want to do an hour of research for a single comment), so I picked the next best thing :)
I read that web page, and it's completely correct, but only under its ridiculously restrictive assumptions about the nature of the tests and how they can be combined.
A standard Bayesian network combining the results of tests which have continuous (rather than boolean) outputs, something which many algorithms for facial recognition, fingerprints, etc, will, on average, give strictly better results than the use of either tests alone - this is not only simple to prove, but the basis of many modern classification systems, for things such as spam detection and data mining.
Of course this all assumes that the system has been properly calibrated, which should be agiven.
I hear it's the minimum requirements for the imminent release of Duke Nukem Forever.
In order to get the radiation down to safe levels, you have to out-radiate everything up to that level. Same radiation, doesn't matter if it takes the normal amount of time or less.
Actually it matters quite a bit. There are plenty of places where all that radiation would be hardly noticed, and if the timescale is lessened to something managable by today's governments, we will be able to avoid the monumental task of warning future generations.
I'd say that's quite a big win, if this pans out.
I wonder how the growing pressures of the mobile market will be on the OpenGL framework, especially with Khronos at the reins. Perhaps there will be more emphasis on procedural methods (to deal with the small VRAM sizes of mobile chips), or better resource usage for power conservation?
I don't understand why this is referred to as a "jet" pack, when it is in fact powered by a rocket engine. Of course that doesn't stop me from wanting one to avoid commutes/exes...
These types of compatability layers don't really help developers to port their applications to Linux, but they remove a significant amount of the incentive to do so, as there will be less demand for a linux port when the game can be run (at least on some machines) through the compatability layer.
I expect that effect this may kill, or at least stifle the development of mainstream games on Macintel.
While I do agree that we, as a nation, have overreacted quite a bit to terrorist actions, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work on security precautions. Prevention and mitigation are two of our strongest weapons that can help people avoid the need to worry.
On the other hand, I'm not all that convinced that these new security measures are really doing that much to make things like air travel safer. I know someone who accidentally took firecrackers in his pocket on an flight across the US once (after 9/11). The security people x-rayed and felt through all of his on-person possessions, but so much junk had accumulated in his pockets that they did not notice the presence of explosives.
Servers that don't access much of the disk (say, less than 1GB or whatever the size of the flash cache is) the majority of the time would benefit from this the same as laptops, by letting their disks spin down.
Also fast restart is especially good for critical servers as a method of reducing both planned and unplanned downtime. I know at lylix.net, we will be getting one of these as soon as Gentoo Linux properly supports it - you don't want an Asterisk box down longer than it has to be.
Well, I guess we know why the preview button's there... good thing I code better than I post, otherwise I'd be fired!
At we host many Asterisk VPSes, and because our customers rely on us for their phone service, any downtime, even planned well in advance, is something we try very hard to avoid. Because downtime from security patches is inevitable, this would be a big win for us, and a good selling point, so using it seems to be a no brainer.
My question is - what kinds of support can/will the linux kernel have for this? We run Gentoo Linux as our host OS, and I cannot see us migrating to Windows for the forseeable future. I searched a bit online, and found this ask slashdot story, but no authoritative answer. Anyone?
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer? When I was working at JPL, all systems were required by law to show a message indicating that all use was being tracked, as it was a secure government facility. (this could not be turned off even when it was interfering with the functioning of certain scripts)
I didn't have a problem with this - if you really want to have a private conversation or IM, use a cell phone that you own. AFAIK, they can't monitor that.