What's going to happen to the 'relationship' when you bring home 100 metres of CAT5 and start stapling cable all over her flat? Or when you install linux on her computer? Or when you spend $1000 on new hardware in a day? Geeks routinely do things that non-geeks would have trouble living with (I've done all of the above in that last month, btw... albeit it's my flat too as I'm married).
Well, if its someone you love and you are only using CAT5 cable......:)
You're thinking of Western Australia.:p I'm still not convinced Perth actually exists. I mean, sure, it's on the maps, but when was the last time you ever heard anything about Perth on the news, or met anybody from Perth, or had Perth's existence validated in any other way?
Ok, I'll bite. As a card carring born again sand groper I think I have to validate my own existance.
Yes, Perth exists. Deal with it. Its (in my opinion) the best city in Australia, as far as actually being a place to live.
Whilst I know (as I was born in Melboune and went to high school in Sydney) that Western Australia was almost not on the map then, its getting hard to ignore now. It has the strongest economy in the country, just about the lowest unemployment (actually, Canberra is lower due to the large amount of government money there), and a city that has a future that doesn't depend on motor cars or even fossil fuels, so we aren't going to waste the economic benefits of having a strong economy.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm over reacting to a humourous statement, but I just had to...
I've always felt that these sorts of measures are alot better than the speed enforment that we have in Australia and many other places - The hidden multinova cameras that police now use here.
If you really want to stop speeding, this is the way to do it. All the time. Everywhere.
If it sounds radical, well at least it will mean that in the long run the speed limits themselves will have to be adjusted to something that is reasonable, rather than what has happened in most countries - speed limits that were set but which are only enforced a very tiny fraction of the time.
Also, getting done for doing too fast an average speed is far more important than getting unlucky for doing an instantaneous speed that is too fast at some random point in your trip. Almost everyone speeds a little at some time - unless you only use cruise control to drive with you will always run the risk of going too fast at some point when you aren't looking at your speedo. (And, its not exactly safe to drive the whole trip whilst looking only at your speed)
As for the privacy issues.
Well, I think its a little too late for anyone in the UK (maybe anywhere, really) to get worried about that. Look at the congestion tax in the UK (Automatic licence plate recognition). Look also at the ability to obtain a list of every base station that your mobile is associated with - the phone companies can do this if requested by a magistrate, although that usually only done in murder cases or similar. Look at the number of CCTV's that proliferate in every public place.
Unfortunatly, the invasion into our privacy has only just begun. There is no techonlogical way to avoid this - it will only get worse. Soon enough automatic facial recognition will be connected to all the CCTV's around and you will be trackable just for being visible. You can identify people by the way that they walk. Some systems now can identify potential suicides in the happening in train stations by the typical behaviour people make prior to jumping in front of trains.
The only solution to the privacy issues are legislative ones. You can't stop this level of data collection anymore, all we can do is ensure that only certain legitimate uses for it exist. This is the only way that any of us will have real protection in the future - if its in a constitution or in legislation.
From looking at the timestamps. Each time S'not has posted a "mod parent up" post it's come a few minutes after the Goo post. So even if somehow it is two people, Goo must be posting, then yelling out "Hey S'not, come see what I wrote! It's insightful as all get out! You should write that!"
I'm more going on the response - the general response is more of someone who has been caught out than that of a bemused housemate. Its unusual that slashnot is not embarrased that he posted as someone else by mistake, but rather is angry that someone noticed an association.
I still accept that it is possible that it might be a housemate, but to me it seems more likely that this is one person posting as two. I doubt that you can ever fully separate the two from our perspective. The evidence does point towards it only being one person at the moment.
I think that what happened with this post is that goombah99 made a post, then forgot to log out and back as slashnot007 before posting a reply to mod the parent up; this is a more effective technique than making an anonymous reply to your own post to get the parent modded up.
You stated that:
Since we share the same computer in the house I did not notice I was logged in as him when I posted the comment.
I don't think that what I said was far off the mark. From the point of view of the someone here on slashdot, the two situations would appear the same. I accept that your explanation is an equally valid way that this could occur, and I certainly didn't think of it. I still think that my explanation is a reaonable one for what happened. Others will decide for themselves.
You also said: Goombah99 is my housemate. I often read his posts and I second them calling for moderation of his intelligent comments. Did you find the one here not so?
I have made no statement on the Gombah99's comment moderation. I don't have an opinion on it.
You have now stated: However you have now given me my life's mission. I'm going to hunt you down every time I have moderator points and make sure you are moderated correctly.
I think that establishes what sort of person you are more than anything else.
In fact, I also note that you made a very similar comment to ParadisePete
Look at my post again - have I said you are a bad person? That this is illegal? I have noted an association between two slashdot ID's where one person has repeatedly tried to alter the moderation of another.
Personally I think that the only sad thing is that you have this relationship with goombah99 that is undeclered, and was only identified due to a log in error. I wasn't the only one who noticed, an AC post also noticed the same thing. Your response to the fact that this was noticed has been to promise to extract retaliation on me.
Lots of people moderate me, up and down, an it really doesn't matter that much to me - its your choice how you spend your mod points. For what its worth I have no intention of hunting you down and moderating you down - I'm more interested in moderating good comments up.
If I take a hit on my karma because I described an association between two slashdot ID's then I take a hit. What would you have done in my situation? Ignored it? Or would you have posted your finding? I think that you would have done what I did, but I'm interested in what you would do if you saw things as I saw them.
I think he forgot to check the Post Anonymously box.
This took my interest, so I had a look at goombah99's recent post history:
One reply had a similar post from slashnot007 which suggested, much like goombah99 did to his own post, to moderate up the parent, so I followed slashnot's posting history
It would appear that Slashnot007 has on occasions posted to suggest modding up the parent post from goombah99
I think that what happened with this post is that goombah99 made a post, then forgot to log out and back as slashnot007 before posting a reply to mod the parent up; this is a more effective technique than making an anonymous reply to your own post to get the parent modded up.
Haven't we gone through this already? How many times have businesses floated this concept over the last couple of years? What on earth makes them think consumers will want self-destructing DVDs this time?
It misses the point. The next innovation is going to be an online, downloadable video librarly. Like iTunes, for video (maybe even iTunes itself).
Everything we need to do downloadable video has pretty much become available - the bandwidth, the processing power, the graphics capabilities of computers and the storage. We just need the innovation that apple did for music from someone for video.
At that point, nobobdy will care about disposable disks anyway.
While I agree, it's worth considering that the 3000 people that die every day in road accidents don't manage to upset the United States economy. September 11th closed the skys for 3 days.
I think you would find that both have an effect on the economy, one is just more obvious than the other, mostly because we don't hear about the vehicle stuff in the media.
My point is just about having a balance in what we deal with. Terrorism, yes, it needs to be dealt with. But an excessive response is more damaging than the actual threat, which might be as much an object of the attacts as the damage itself.
Yes, it's vulnerable to false positives -- for example, some construction workers are going to have to go through the slow way every time they fly.
That's okay, though -- the positive thing here is that the initial check can be made much much faster. Most luggage and most people can just be zipped through (they'll hardly need to stop walking!)... which leaves more resources available to help the inevitable false positives get processed in the old, slow way (with the little explosive-check tabs, or a search by hand) as efficiently as possible.
That's what matters, isn't it? Speeding the whole thing up, to make a reliable screening feasible.
Well, if it was used sensibly, that would be ok.
The risks are still two fold:
1) If the rate of false positives is low, alot of people will get through quickly. However, if you are one of the false positives, you may well get a very bad deal at the airport. Having been singled out on one trip to the US for no apparent reason (Probably because I took a "one way" flight so maybe they thought I was not planning to return!) I can assure you its no fun if you end up on the wrong end of a statistical test.
2) If there are too many false positives, people get blase. After all, how many people in the history of all plane flight have put explosives on a plane? A few dozen maybe, probably less than 100 all up. But any test will likely have many more false positives, and this will mean that these people get ignored.
3) You may still be using the wrong test, and get falsely reassured. After all, the September 11 hijackers would have passed a chemical detection test, so they would have been fine to board, no? Again, the real problem here wasn't that the test systems failed, it was the human management of the system - people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.
So, you end up putting alot of money into doing something that will help very few flights, incovenience a large total number of innocent people, and possibly not protect the public at all.
After all, 3000 people died on September 11 due to a rare incident that is unlikely to ever happen again. 3000 people die every day in road accidents around the world. Which do you think gets society the best return for its time and energy? Yes, we have to stop terrorists, but just how far is it worth going here?
Ok, here's something I've always wondered about. If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
Its worse than that. You have to look at the false positive and negative rates for detection. If you have a test that is 99.9% specific, it will still fail in practical use in an airport, as that means that 1/1000 people will come up positive. (I think I have the right statistical measure here, but apologies if not). If you have alot of people going through you will still have a big problem -London had 1 000 000 FLIGHTS last year, so the equivalent of 1000 plane loads of people will come up positive per year. This is the same issue as using automatic detection of terrorists - Its one thing to match/no match a known ID (eg biometric passport) to a person, its another to match every passer by to every known terrorist.
Coming back to chemical detection, this level of sensitivity will mean that every person who uses GTN for angina (commonly known as "Anginine" tablets or sprays) runs the risk of coming up positive. This amounts probably about a million people in US, and lots more elsewhere in the world. GTN (used in microgram doses in the treatment of poor blood supply to the heart; the precursor to a heart attack) is actually tri nitro glycerine, and is just a wee touch explosive in larger quantities.
ISTR that MS tried doing immediate free and it broke some programs that depend on the memory still being sround after being freed,
Sounds like those programs were broke from the start.
Yes, there were many broken programs that run under windows. I think this one was actually word perfect (or maybe lotus 123) and from memory, it simply didn't work under windows 95 due to this bug. Microsoft knew they would get the blame with the OS upgrade, even when it really wasn't their fault that a program released memory and still used it, which was possible under windows 3.11
(The exact details may be wrong but this really did happen).
In fact, M$ has a big problem of how to release a secure operating system. If they just start from scratch from say BSD, they lose compatibility. If they do this, they have to explain why you should use M$ BSD versus another version. Or why you wouldn't just port to apple, or linux.
Its the backwards compatibility that got them to be a market leader, and that is a two edged sword.
Even if you think that this lock in works for M$, it also causes them problems as if you are locked into a standard (even a proprietiary one), how can you be convinced to buy the next new upgrade? M$'s install base is now so large that they cant easily change a standard, even if they really want to. They might bring out a new version of office, but if it doesn't support the old formats, nobody will buy it. If it does support the old formats, nobody will use the new ones. Same for operating systems, if the new one isn't backward compatible, nobody will use it. If it is, everybody will write code for the compatibility mode.
So in summary, there are many things about M$ code that is borked. Some of it is actually deliberate, to compensate for what other software vendors do, and it may be a better solution to maintain backward compatibility than to junk the existing code base.
I used to know all the memory locations in the Atari 800 and how to use them to do all sorts of things. I knew 6502 assembly and a slew of other languages for the Atari. It was a good platform at the time, but I wouldn't want to go back to the hardware or even the software of yesteryear.
Luxury, sheer luxury.
When I was a lad, I used to code my 2650[*] in hexadecimal. Assembly was a high level symbolic language.
Michael
[*] The 2650 was a 8 bit cpu with an orthogonal instruction set that could address 8 kB of memory (12 bit address space) which ran at a clock speed measured in the kilohertz range. Not to be confused with the much more upmarket 6502 cpu....
While I agree with the rest of your post, there is one factor you're forgetting: price. On average, a desktop costs half as much as its mobile counterpart, for similar specs. And in the corporate world, this is what the boss will look for above all else, particularly when you factor in lost, stolen, and damaged mobile devices. Speaking of theft, sensitive data is more likely to be stored in static locations, so there will always be a market for desktops.
I'd certainly agree with the theft issue - its certainly a problem today. It relates to the balance of value versus ease of theft. Having said that, as the cost falls the desire to steal them will probably decrease; but they will always be easier to steal so they are going to have to become alot cheaper than a desktop to become a lower theft risk. (Which I don't think will occur anytime soon)
The way I view price is that as the cost of production falls, alot of other factors (eg shipping, storage, marketing, etc) become a bigger and bigger part of the total cost. I don't think that the day is too far away when a very cheap laptop is about the same price as a very cheap desktop. I won't argue that the desktop will still probably have more power than the same priced laptop (you will need major economies of scale to change that). But if the price of both becomes low enough, the lower specs of the laptop may not be an issue, if it does what you want functionally.
This is where things are heading. A low end laptop is going to become (probably already is) good enough for most things. A low end desktop will do more for less. The price differential between the two will become less an less, even when the performance differential is still there. For alot of people, thats good enough.
Michael
P.S. I practise what I preach - I'm writing this at home on my G4 powerbook. We got rid of all the desktops at home 18 months ago, and haven't looked back. 3 Years ago the laptop was a compromise, now it doesn't feel that way. I am sure that for some it wouldn't be good enough, but for me and the wife, they do what we want.
But desktops can deliver a few things that mobiles can't....like not burning your laptop...and the best bang for the buck performance as well as upgradability...though mini-agp and soon to be mini-pcie (?) will help notebooks with some of that.:p
The main reason that laptops are being used more and more is that they are good enough. There are always going to be people who just want the most GigaFlops per second. The vast majority of users now dont. They want their computer to do a certain number of things. I'm sure that you don't need me to spell out the list, but email/web/word processing would be a good start.
Once you can do those things, and on a portable machine that doesn't dim every light in the house when you turn it on, the assessment changes. Its strange how you list heat generatiion/power consumption as a factor that counts in favour of desktops. For most people, a low power computer that is portable and doesn't dominate a room has alot of upside. The fact that they are designed to be low power is a big bonus.
And realistically, everything about desktop computers has gotten smaller over the last 20 years. Just look at the Mac Mini, or even the smaller form factor PC's. These weren't possible 20 years ago. Today, you can't buy anything in the original form factors of the IBM PC's (to my knowledge). Your choice is beoming between a small desktop or a laptop, with a big case system really being reserved for the top end.
Get used to it. 50% of users is just the beginning. It will be 90% soon enough, especially with the next increment in storage (particularly flash), CPU (Low leakage chips with ultra low power consumption) and portable networking speeds (WiMax in particular). Thats not even counting things like digital paper which will drive down power consumption even more. With all this, the number of people who will be saying that they need a desktop to provide some extra functionality they can't get in a laptop is going to fall to a very low percentage of users.
As for upgradeability, you only upgrade because you feel that your current machine doesn't do as much as you would like it to. If you feel that it does everything you want, the need to replace components becomes less compelling for the average user.
I hate to say it, but the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not.
No, its not quite like that. Ejecting terawatts of energy into the atmosphere doesn't cause global warming. CO2 doesn't cause global warming (directly).
The sun causes global warming. CO2 traps heat and changes the balance of heat loss. But nothing short of the sun can cause global warming. Compared to the daily solar energy input into the planet, our direct heat production is trivial. And even if we did put more heat in, it would just radiate away at night if it isn't trapped by the green house effect.
What is most sinister about this is that it means that we are on a slow bake in an oven called the solar system. And, as I've said before, if you think it takes a while to cook a large turkey, just wait till you realise the time scale for a whole planet. But the CO2 is in the atmosphere now, the oven door is closing, and the slow bake is beginning. The effects of this will take decades to be fully felt.
What it needed was a button that said, "open the file, but don't run any macros." I know people who would have paid $500 bucks for that option.
Please refer them to me.
For $500 I'll show them how to hold down the shift key while they load up a file.
Not that I suggest that this is good programming practice on the part of microsoft... Its obscure to the average user, and is a gross over kill approach, as some macro's are very useful.
Look at what Google does with Javascript and Gmail. I've done something similar (as a quick and dirty) with Excel, where I was really just using it to display a grid.
The difference between Javascript and VBA? Well, one lets you take over the user's machine, the other is sandboxed much more appropriately.
I'll leave it to the/. reader to work out which is which.
This may be part of the reason Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard but another part is that France had a hand full of dollars and demanded the US exchange them for gold. Nixon gave them the gold then removed the gold standard.
The wealth of a nation relates to what goods (and services it produces). Unless you value money for itself as some form of small, rectangular artwork, its value is pretty low, except for what it buys.
Therefore, the value of currency has almost nothing to do with the currency, and alot to do with what everything that currency can buy.
The importance of this is that a gold standard locks you in to a strange ratio: the amount of gold you produce relative to the amount of other goods and services you produce. If one changes relative to the other, you have inflation or deflation of your gold currency.
You could replace gold with platinum, silver (the basis of the english pound was a pound of stirling silver), or big mac's (one measure of a countries worth is to index everything to the cost of a big mac in local currency - its called the big mac index and it is a serious economic study).
Notes have the advantage of being portable, hard to forge (much harder than a lump of gold), and relatively durable. You can make more of them or destroy them. The population of the world was 4.2 billion 30 years ago, today its 6.5 billion. Productivity of many countries has raced ahead during this period also. The amount of gold on the planet is fixed.
Hopefully this explains why a gold standard isn't of itself a useful way to preserve or increase the value of an economy. You can do what you want to the currency, it doesn't change the rest of the economy. Improve your economy, the currency will follow.
My 2c worth.
Michael
P.S. No, I'm not an economist, always happy to be educated if I have this wrong.
There's actually a specific internet connection license for that sort of setup, however it's interesting to note that Microsoft have said, for licensing purposes, dual core CPUs count as a single cpu.
Compare to Oracle; if you buy a licence for a dual core machine, the second core is only counted as.75 of a CPU, as is each succeeding core. However Oracle rounds all numbers up, so.75 = one for licensing, and 1.75 = two, roughly the same cost as if you bought two licences. And so on. It's only a saving if you have 3 dual core cpus or more.
Of course, microsoft used to allow you to have 4 cpu's for windows NT (this was back in the days when dual core stuff hadn't started).
Mostly, this is just about extorting as much money out of a paying customer as they can. If they charged a license per gigahertz of cpu speed, there would be an uproar when your software costs doubled when you upgraded your 1 GHz cpu to a 2GHz cpu.
When you look at it like this, you can see what a contrived concept that charging per core is.
Even if you argue that it takes more to write multithreaded code, that shouldn't make any difference between 2-4 cpu's. And in many cases the program utilisation might never even require that second core.
You are describing a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD). That's not what this is.
The Abiomed device is a Total Artificial Heart (TAH). They cut out your existing left and right ventricles and install this in their place. If the device fails, you die instantly.
For what it's worth, I participated in the first calf trial of this device at Louisville.
Fair enough, but you can usually get a similar effect by doing a BiVAD type approach. (in the less common situation where the right heart is failing).
For what its worth we have been putting alot of ventricor's in lately, and they seem to work really well as a LVAD device (they are a bit unusual as they are a non pulsatile device with a centrifugal drive similar to ECMO devices). They are still pretty experimental here - just trial status but the initial results look very good (including the longer term complication rates)
never understood 'cure for death' type devices getting shot down. Like, your heart is going to stop and you will die, but we could perform $risky_medical_proceedure and there's a 10% chance you'd live. That's pretty lousy survival for say, cough drops, but not all that bad when faced with certainty of death.
Actually, the decision is based on cost per year of life saved. The magic figure in the US is about $50000 per year of life saved. If it costs more than this its much less likely to get approval. This is the problem that most assist devices face - at around $100 000 or so to put in, they have to keep you alive a few years to make it worthwhile. (This is just a guesstimate for the US, I don't work there).
Some other treatments come close to this in cost. Dialysis, for example, isn't cheap, its around that figure. Some drug therapies are pretty close, too, in that if your number needed to treat (NNTT) is say 10 people to save one life (which would be pretty good drug, by the way) but it costs $5000 per year to be on it, well, that $50 000 per year of life saved.
Slashdot Mirror
What's going to happen to the 'relationship' when you bring home 100 metres of CAT5 and start stapling cable all over her flat? Or when you install linux on her computer? Or when you spend $1000 on new hardware in a day? Geeks routinely do things that non-geeks would have trouble living with (I've done all of the above in that last month, btw... albeit it's my flat too as I'm married).
...... :)
Well, if its someone you love and you are only using CAT5 cable
Michael
You're thinking of Western Australia. :p I'm still not convinced Perth actually exists. I mean, sure, it's on the maps, but when was the last time you ever heard anything about Perth on the news, or met anybody from Perth, or had Perth's existence validated in any other way?
...
Ok, I'll bite. As a card carring born again sand groper I think I have to validate my own existance.
Yes, Perth exists. Deal with it. Its (in my opinion) the best city in Australia, as far as actually being a place to live.
Whilst I know (as I was born in Melboune and went to high school in Sydney) that Western Australia was almost not on the map then, its getting hard to ignore now. It has the strongest economy in the country, just about the lowest unemployment (actually, Canberra is lower due to the large amount of government money there), and a city that has a future that doesn't depend on motor cars or even fossil fuels, so we aren't going to waste the economic benefits of having a strong economy.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm over reacting to a humourous statement, but I just had to
Michael
I've always felt that these sorts of measures are alot better than the speed enforment that we have in Australia and many other places - The hidden multinova cameras that police now use here.
If you really want to stop speeding, this is the way to do it. All the time. Everywhere.
If it sounds radical, well at least it will mean that in the long run the speed limits themselves will have to be adjusted to something that is reasonable, rather than what has happened in most countries - speed limits that were set but which are only enforced a very tiny fraction of the time.
Also, getting done for doing too fast an average speed is far more important than getting unlucky for doing an instantaneous speed that is too fast at some random point in your trip. Almost everyone speeds a little at some time - unless you only use cruise control to drive with you will always run the risk of going too fast at some point when you aren't looking at your speedo. (And, its not exactly safe to drive the whole trip whilst looking only at your speed)
As for the privacy issues.
Well, I think its a little too late for anyone in the UK (maybe anywhere, really) to get worried about that. Look at the congestion tax in the UK (Automatic licence plate recognition). Look also at the ability to obtain a list of every base station that your mobile is associated with - the phone companies can do this if requested by a magistrate, although that usually only done in murder cases or similar. Look at the number of CCTV's that proliferate in every public place.
Unfortunatly, the invasion into our privacy has only just begun. There is no techonlogical way to avoid this - it will only get worse. Soon enough automatic facial recognition will be connected to all the CCTV's around and you will be trackable just for being visible. You can identify people by the way that they walk. Some systems now can identify potential suicides in the happening in train stations by the typical behaviour people make prior to jumping in front of trains.
The only solution to the privacy issues are legislative ones. You can't stop this level of data collection anymore, all we can do is ensure that only certain legitimate uses for it exist. This is the only way that any of us will have real protection in the future - if its in a constitution or in legislation.
Just my 2c worth,
Michael
From looking at the timestamps. Each time S'not has posted a "mod parent up" post it's come a few minutes after the Goo post. So even if somehow it is two people, Goo must be posting, then yelling out "Hey S'not, come see what I wrote! It's insightful as all get out! You should write that!"
I'm more going on the response - the general response is more of someone who has been caught out than that of a bemused housemate. Its unusual that slashnot is not embarrased that he posted as someone else by mistake, but rather is angry that someone noticed an association.
I still accept that it is possible that it might be a housemate, but to me it seems more likely that this is one person posting as two. I doubt that you can ever fully separate the two from our perspective. The evidence does point towards it only being one person at the moment.
Michael
My words were:
I think that what happened with this post is that goombah99 made a post, then forgot to log out and back as slashnot007 before posting a reply to mod the parent up; this is a more effective technique than making an anonymous reply to your own post to get the parent modded up.
You stated that:
Since we share the same computer in the house I did not notice I was logged in as him when I posted the comment.
I don't think that what I said was far off the mark. From the point of view of the someone here on slashdot, the two situations would appear the same. I accept that your explanation is an equally valid way that this could occur, and I certainly didn't think of it. I still think that my explanation is a reaonable one for what happened. Others will decide for themselves.
You also said:
Goombah99 is my housemate. I often read his posts and I second them calling for moderation of his intelligent comments. Did you find the one here not so?
I have made no statement on the Gombah99's comment moderation. I don't have an opinion on it.
You have now stated:
However you have now given me my life's mission. I'm going to hunt you down every time I have moderator points and make sure you are moderated correctly.
I think that establishes what sort of person you are more than anything else.
In fact, I also note that you made a very similar comment to ParadisePete
Look at my post again - have I said you are a bad person? That this is illegal? I have noted an association between two slashdot ID's where one person has repeatedly tried to alter the moderation of another.
Personally I think that the only sad thing is that you have this relationship with goombah99 that is undeclered, and was only identified due to a log in error. I wasn't the only one who noticed, an AC post also noticed the same thing. Your response to the fact that this was noticed has been to promise to extract retaliation on me.
Lots of people moderate me, up and down, an it really doesn't matter that much to me - its your choice how you spend your mod points. For what its worth I have no intention of hunting you down and moderating you down - I'm more interested in moderating good comments up.
If I take a hit on my karma because I described an association between two slashdot ID's then I take a hit. What would you have done in my situation? Ignored it? Or would you have posted your finding? I think that you would have done what I did, but I'm interested in what you would do if you saw things as I saw them.
Interested to hear your reply,
Michael
How can you request to mod yourself up
I think he forgot to check the Post Anonymously box.
This took my interest, so I had a look at goombah99's recent post history:
One reply had a similar post from slashnot007 which suggested, much like goombah99 did to his own post, to moderate up the parent, so I followed slashnot's posting history
It would appear that Slashnot007 has on occasions posted to suggest modding up the parent post from goombah99
Here we also see Slashnot promoting a post form Goombah99.
Here Slashnot007 complains about moderator abuse when a post from goombah99 was modded down
I think that what happened with this post is that goombah99 made a post, then forgot to log out and back as slashnot007 before posting a reply to mod the parent up; this is a more effective technique than making an anonymous reply to your own post to get the parent modded up.
Michael
Haven't we gone through this already? How many times have businesses floated this concept over the last couple of years? What on earth makes them think consumers will want self-destructing DVDs this time?
It misses the point. The next innovation is going to be an online, downloadable video librarly. Like iTunes, for video (maybe even iTunes itself).
Everything we need to do downloadable video has pretty much become available - the bandwidth, the processing power, the graphics capabilities of computers and the storage. We just need the innovation that apple did for music from someone for video.
At that point, nobobdy will care about disposable disks anyway.
Michael
While I agree, it's worth considering that the 3000 people that die every day in road accidents don't manage to upset the United States economy. September 11th closed the skys for 3 days.
I think you would find that both have an effect on the economy, one is just more obvious than the other, mostly because we don't hear about the vehicle stuff in the media.
My point is just about having a balance in what we deal with. Terrorism, yes, it needs to be dealt with. But an excessive response is more damaging than the actual threat, which might be as much an object of the attacts as the damage itself.
Michael
Odd usage of 'two'. :)
.....
Yes, my mistake. Sometimes even when you preview you miss things
Michael
Yes, it's vulnerable to false positives -- for example, some construction workers are going to have to go through the slow way every time they fly.
That's okay, though -- the positive thing here is that the initial check can be made much much faster. Most luggage and most people can just be zipped through (they'll hardly need to stop walking!)... which leaves more resources available to help the inevitable false positives get processed in the old, slow way (with the little explosive-check tabs, or a search by hand) as efficiently as possible.
That's what matters, isn't it? Speeding the whole thing up, to make a reliable screening feasible.
Well, if it was used sensibly, that would be ok.
The risks are still two fold:
1) If the rate of false positives is low, alot of people will get through quickly. However, if you are one of the false positives, you may well get a very bad deal at the airport. Having been singled out on one trip to the US for no apparent reason (Probably because I took a "one way" flight so maybe they thought I was not planning to return!) I can assure you its no fun if you end up on the wrong end of a statistical test.
2) If there are too many false positives, people get blase. After all, how many people in the history of all plane flight have put explosives on a plane? A few dozen maybe, probably less than 100 all up. But any test will likely have many more false positives, and this will mean that these people get ignored.
3) You may still be using the wrong test, and get falsely reassured. After all, the September 11 hijackers would have passed a chemical detection test, so they would have been fine to board, no? Again, the real problem here wasn't that the test systems failed, it was the human management of the system - people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.
So, you end up putting alot of money into doing something that will help very few flights, incovenience a large total number of innocent people, and possibly not protect the public at all.
After all, 3000 people died on September 11 due to a rare incident that is unlikely to ever happen again. 3000 people die every day in road accidents around the world. Which do you think gets society the best return for its time and energy? Yes, we have to stop terrorists, but just how far is it worth going here?
Michael
Ok, here's something I've always wondered about. If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
Its worse than that. You have to look at the false positive and negative rates for detection. If you have a test that is 99.9% specific, it will still fail in practical use in an airport, as that means that 1/1000 people will come up positive. (I think I have the right statistical measure here, but apologies if not). If you have alot of people going through you will still have a big problem -London had 1 000 000 FLIGHTS last year, so the equivalent of 1000 plane loads of people will come up positive per year. This is the same issue as using automatic detection of terrorists - Its one thing to match/no match a known ID (eg biometric passport) to a person, its another to match every passer by to every known terrorist.
Coming back to chemical detection, this level of sensitivity will mean that every person who uses GTN for angina (commonly known as "Anginine" tablets or sprays) runs the risk of coming up positive. This amounts probably about a million people in US, and lots more elsewhere in the world. GTN (used in microgram doses in the treatment of poor blood supply to the heart; the precursor to a heart attack) is actually tri nitro glycerine, and is just a wee touch explosive in larger quantities.
Just my 2c worth.
Michael
ISTR that MS tried doing immediate free and it broke some programs that depend on the memory still being sround after being freed,
Sounds like those programs were broke from the start.
Yes, there were many broken programs that run under windows. I think this one was actually word perfect (or maybe lotus 123) and from memory, it simply didn't work under windows 95 due to this bug. Microsoft knew they would get the blame with the OS upgrade, even when it really wasn't their fault that a program released memory and still used it, which was possible under windows 3.11
(The exact details may be wrong but this really did happen).
In fact, M$ has a big problem of how to release a secure operating system. If they just start from scratch from say BSD, they lose compatibility. If they do this, they have to explain why you should use M$ BSD versus another version. Or why you wouldn't just port to apple, or linux.
Its the backwards compatibility that got them to be a market leader, and that is a two edged sword.
Even if you think that this lock in works for M$, it also causes them problems as if you are locked into a standard (even a proprietiary one), how can you be convinced to buy the next new upgrade? M$'s install base is now so large that they cant easily change a standard, even if they really want to. They might bring out a new version of office, but if it doesn't support the old formats, nobody will buy it. If it does support the old formats, nobody will use the new ones. Same for operating systems, if the new one isn't backward compatible, nobody will use it. If it is, everybody will write code for the compatibility mode.
So in summary, there are many things about M$ code that is borked. Some of it is actually deliberate, to compensate for what other software vendors do, and it may be a better solution to maintain backward compatibility than to junk the existing code base.
My 2c worth
Michael
I used to know all the memory locations in the Atari 800 and how to use them to do all sorts of things. I knew 6502 assembly and a slew of other languages for the Atari. It was a good platform at the time, but I wouldn't want to go back to the hardware or even the software of yesteryear.
Luxury, sheer luxury.
When I was a lad, I used to code my 2650[*] in hexadecimal. Assembly was a high level symbolic language.
Michael
[*] The 2650 was a 8 bit cpu with an orthogonal instruction set that could address 8 kB of memory (12 bit address space) which ran at a clock speed measured in the kilohertz range. Not to be confused with the much more upmarket 6502 cpu....
While I agree with the rest of your post, there is one factor you're forgetting: price. On average, a desktop costs half as much as its mobile counterpart, for similar specs. And in the corporate world, this is what the boss will look for above all else, particularly when you factor in lost, stolen, and damaged mobile devices. Speaking of theft, sensitive data is more likely to be stored in static locations, so there will always be a market for desktops.
I'd certainly agree with the theft issue - its certainly a problem today. It relates to the balance of value versus ease of theft. Having said that, as the cost falls the desire to steal them will probably decrease; but they will always be easier to steal so they are going to have to become alot cheaper than a desktop to become a lower theft risk. (Which I don't think will occur anytime soon)
The way I view price is that as the cost of production falls, alot of other factors (eg shipping, storage, marketing, etc) become a bigger and bigger part of the total cost. I don't think that the day is too far away when a very cheap laptop is about the same price as a very cheap desktop. I won't argue that the desktop will still probably have more power than the same priced laptop (you will need major economies of scale to change that). But if the price of both becomes low enough, the lower specs of the laptop may not be an issue, if it does what you want functionally.
This is where things are heading. A low end laptop is going to become (probably already is) good enough for most things. A low end desktop will do more for less. The price differential between the two will become less an less, even when the performance differential is still there. For alot of people, thats good enough.
Michael
P.S. I practise what I preach - I'm writing this at home on my G4 powerbook. We got rid of all the desktops at home 18 months ago, and haven't looked back. 3 Years ago the laptop was a compromise, now it doesn't feel that way. I am sure that for some it wouldn't be good enough, but for me and the wife, they do what we want.
But desktops can deliver a few things that mobiles can't....like not burning your laptop...and the best bang for the buck performance as well as upgradability...though mini-agp and soon to be mini-pcie (?) will help notebooks with some of that. :p
The main reason that laptops are being used more and more is that they are good enough. There are always going to be people who just want the most GigaFlops per second. The vast majority of users now dont. They want their computer to do a certain number of things. I'm sure that you don't need me to spell out the list, but email/web/word processing would be a good start.
Once you can do those things, and on a portable machine that doesn't dim every light in the house when you turn it on, the assessment changes. Its strange how you list heat generatiion/power consumption as a factor that counts in favour of desktops. For most people, a low power computer that is portable and doesn't dominate a room has alot of upside. The fact that they are designed to be low power is a big bonus.
And realistically, everything about desktop computers has gotten smaller over the last 20 years. Just look at the Mac Mini, or even the smaller form factor PC's. These weren't possible 20 years ago. Today, you can't buy anything in the original form factors of the IBM PC's (to my knowledge). Your choice is beoming between a small desktop or a laptop, with a big case system really being reserved for the top end.
Get used to it. 50% of users is just the beginning. It will be 90% soon enough, especially with the next increment in storage (particularly flash), CPU (Low leakage chips with ultra low power consumption) and portable networking speeds (WiMax in particular). Thats not even counting things like digital paper which will drive down power consumption even more. With all this, the number of people who will be saying that they need a desktop to provide some extra functionality they can't get in a laptop is going to fall to a very low percentage of users.
As for upgradeability, you only upgrade because you feel that your current machine doesn't do as much as you would like it to. If you feel that it does everything you want, the need to replace components becomes less compelling for the average user.
Michael
MS-ACCESS is the worst DB app EVER!!!
Actually, MS-EXCEL is probably the worst database.
Michael
*** Yes, I am aware of the difference ***
I hate to say it, but the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not.
No, its not quite like that. Ejecting terawatts of energy into the atmosphere doesn't cause global warming. CO2 doesn't cause global warming (directly).
The sun causes global warming. CO2 traps heat and changes the balance of heat loss. But nothing short of the sun can cause global warming. Compared to the daily solar energy input into the planet, our direct heat production is trivial. And even if we did put more heat in, it would just radiate away at night if it isn't trapped by the green house effect.
What is most sinister about this is that it means that we are on a slow bake in an oven called the solar system. And, as I've said before, if you think it takes a while to cook a large turkey, just wait till you realise the time scale for a whole planet. But the CO2 is in the atmosphere now, the oven door is closing, and the slow bake is beginning. The effects of this will take decades to be fully felt.
Michael
What it needed was a button that said, "open the file, but don't run any macros." I know people who would have paid $500 bucks for that option.
... Its obscure to the average user, and is a gross over kill approach, as some macro's are very useful.
/. reader to work out which is which.
Please refer them to me.
For $500 I'll show them how to hold down the shift key while they load up a file.
Not that I suggest that this is good programming practice on the part of microsoft
Look at what Google does with Javascript and Gmail. I've done something similar (as a quick and dirty) with Excel, where I was really just using it to display a grid.
The difference between Javascript and VBA? Well, one lets you take over the user's machine, the other is sandboxed much more appropriately.
I'll leave it to the
Michael
Er, unless the alchemists have made a startingly discovery recently, forging a lump of gold remains pretty difficult.
Of course, if you could really make gold, that would affect the gold standard even more than a forgery.
However, I was referring to the ability that the average person at the counter of a Burger King food chain to tell gold from an impure or plated fake.
Michael
This may be part of the reason Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard but another part is that France had a hand full of dollars and demanded the US exchange them for gold. Nixon gave them the gold then removed the gold standard.
The wealth of a nation relates to what goods (and services it produces). Unless you value money for itself as some form of small, rectangular artwork, its value is pretty low, except for what it buys.
Therefore, the value of currency has almost nothing to do with the currency, and alot to do with what everything that currency can buy.
The importance of this is that a gold standard locks you in to a strange ratio: the amount of gold you produce relative to the amount of other goods and services you produce. If one changes relative to the other, you have inflation or deflation of your gold currency.
You could replace gold with platinum, silver (the basis of the english pound was a pound of stirling silver), or big mac's (one measure of a countries worth is to index everything to the cost of a big mac in local currency - its called the big mac index and it is a serious economic study).
Notes have the advantage of being portable, hard to forge (much harder than a lump of gold), and relatively durable. You can make more of them or destroy them. The population of the world was 4.2 billion 30 years ago, today its 6.5 billion. Productivity of many countries has raced ahead during this period also. The amount of gold on the planet is fixed.
Hopefully this explains why a gold standard isn't of itself a useful way to preserve or increase the value of an economy. You can do what you want to the currency, it doesn't change the rest of the economy. Improve your economy, the currency will follow.
My 2c worth.
Michael
P.S. No, I'm not an economist, always happy to be educated if I have this wrong.
Just wish it was in english -- Hearing Klingon in Finnish is interesting, even though you can still tell its Klingon ....
Michael
There's actually a specific internet connection license for that sort of setup, however it's interesting to note that Microsoft have said, for licensing purposes, dual core CPUs count as a single cpu.
.75 of a CPU, as is each succeeding core. However Oracle rounds all numbers up, so .75 = one for licensing, and 1.75 = two, roughly the same cost as if you bought two licences. And so on. It's only a saving if you have 3 dual core cpus or more.
Compare to Oracle; if you buy a licence for a dual core machine, the second core is only counted as
Of course, microsoft used to allow you to have 4 cpu's for windows NT (this was back in the days when dual core stuff hadn't started).
Mostly, this is just about extorting as much money out of a paying customer as they can. If they charged a license per gigahertz of cpu speed, there would be an uproar when your software costs doubled when you upgraded your 1 GHz cpu to a 2GHz cpu.
When you look at it like this, you can see what a contrived concept that charging per core is.
Even if you argue that it takes more to write multithreaded code, that shouldn't make any difference between 2-4 cpu's. And in many cases the program utilisation might never even require that second core.
My 2c
Michael
From the article, the only protection was limiting the allowable sources to video.google.com and adding a new mime type.
Not to undermine Jon, just noting why it took him 24 hours to break this - It was not designed to withstand much of an attack.
Nontheless, most users won't patch, so it will work anyway.
Michael
You are describing a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD). That's not what this is.
The Abiomed device is a Total Artificial Heart (TAH). They cut out your existing left and right ventricles and install this in their place. If the device fails, you die instantly.
For what it's worth, I participated in the first calf trial of this device at Louisville.
Fair enough, but you can usually get a similar effect by doing a BiVAD type approach. (in the less common situation where the right heart is failing).
For what its worth we have been putting alot of ventricor's in lately, and they seem to work really well as a LVAD device (they are a bit unusual as they are a non pulsatile device with a centrifugal drive similar to ECMO devices). They are still pretty experimental here - just trial status but the initial results look very good (including the longer term complication rates)
Michael
never understood 'cure for death' type devices getting shot down. Like, your heart is going to stop and you will die, but we could perform $risky_medical_proceedure and there's a 10% chance you'd live. That's pretty lousy survival for say, cough drops, but not all that bad when faced with certainty of death.
Actually, the decision is based on cost per year of life saved. The magic figure in the US is about $50000 per year of life saved. If it costs more than this its much less likely to get approval. This is the problem that most assist devices face - at around $100 000 or so to put in, they have to keep you alive a few years to make it worthwhile. (This is just a guesstimate for the US, I don't work there).
Some other treatments come close to this in cost. Dialysis, for example, isn't cheap, its around that figure. Some drug therapies are pretty close, too, in that if your number needed to treat (NNTT) is say 10 people to save one life (which would be pretty good drug, by the way) but it costs $5000 per year to be on it, well, that $50 000 per year of life saved.
Just my 2c worth
Michael