Look at the casualties taken by American forces as they moved across the Pacific - the Japanese at that time were happy to sacrifice pilots in Kamikaze raids. The infantry on the ground refused to surrender and had to be burned out by Flamethrowers.
There is no doubt that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in casualties on all sides of well in excess of a million people - the Japanese government at the time would have ensured this.
Whilst the dropping of the bombs may seem a shameful act today, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Ask the populations of America [and Australia and the UK, whose soldiers suffered terribly in Prisoner of War camps at the hands of the Japanese Military] in 1945 what they would wish to do, the answer would have been quite clear - drop the bombs, stop the war and get our loved ones home. And yes, there was a political dimension - the weapsons use was an indicator to Stalin of the power America now posessed - remember that even prior to the fall of Berlin, relations between the Western Powers and Soviet Russia were worsening all the time.
Finally to even try to compare the genocidal tactics of the Nazis with the dropping of atomic weapons is shameful, and shows a poor and blinkered understanding of history.
I mentioned this to my wife, who is a Matron for a number of wards in a hospital in the UK. Staffing is a perennial problem, and even if you have all your job openings filled, you will always need cover now and then. When extra staff are needed, they use nurses from an internal agency which employs only internal staff who want to earn extra, and only in an absolute emergency are external agency staff used since they cost a huge amount - the whole reason is that there are minimum staffing levels that must be adhered to for legal reasons and if you are short-staffed, people become overstressed and thats when mistakes happen.
She thought it was an interesting idea, although she wasn't too sure about the lowest bidder concept. Then again, no-one is being forced to take these rates [the staff are normally employed anyway] and it would probably work in your favour if you took unsociable hours or very-last minute shifts.
If most of the equipment are servers etc, put them in a sealed server room with extracator fans ducted to outside the building. With remote access, you shouldn't need to go their very often:->
Anything that would be considered a desktop, bin it - you'll never get it smelling good enough. In the UK, if it smelt that bad, the Health and Safety people would not be impressed, and you would almost certainly be told to junk all of it as its a health hazard. Ultimately, the cost of a new desktop is buttons compared to all the time you will waste trying to clean it, and then you'll still have to bin it after every employee refuses to touch it !
Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around.
Sorry, but I think the oldest form of removable storage must be magnetic tape in all of its various forms. Ok, its not used in the domestic market, but its still there and in use in data centres etc.
The poster has made a valid comment about replacing Java apps with Perl. A lot of our 'maintenance' tasks could be done in Perl without all of the Java overhead/gubbins.
However, our organisation needs a scalable website, tied in to Oracle [in particular Oracle IFS], with a structured environment that can be deployed on Sun, Linux and Windows boxes [Note : Windows for development only !]. We're also developing two allied desktop applications which tie back into the same database for resale to large companies.
When you are talking about ENTERPRISE solutions, perl CGI, Python, Zope etc is not good enough. They might be great on a small scale or for 'hard-core' development, but then you have a development team of 20 people, with a website that is the organisations bread and butter, Java fits the bill.
Its not an issue in the UK as there are no medical bills of sorts, as the NHS picks up the bill. Having said that, there has been noises about picking up the cost of treatment from insurance companies.
In the UK I'm paying about 350 pounds a month to insure a 3 year-old 2 litre mondeo [4 door sedan for our cousins across the pond]. Thats covers me for any damage I may cause, including third party and also insures the car against damage [with a small excess]. I'm curious about how much it costs in the states.
The biggest problem in the UK is the amount of people driving with no insurance - one in ten in some studies. People with no insurance may tend to drive unroadworthy cars, they may not have a licence and they certainly won't have a tax disk. Traffic Police are as rare as hen's teeth now so your chances of being caught are much lower than usual and the penalties can be lower than the cost of insurance !
Insurance here is charged based on your location, age, occupation and licence history. The actual mileage is assumed almost. I would gladly sign up for this as my wife and I would save money - most of our trips are local 5-10 miles around Surrey.
As as an aside, the UK's biggest motor insurance claim comes from an incident when some idiot fell asleep at the wheel, came off a motorway and drove down and ebankment onto a railway line. His car caused a train to derail, which was then hit at high speed by another - 10 people killed. His insurance company is being hit for 11 million pounds, and thats just from company who owned the railway line. Claims from the two train companies involved for two very expensive wrecked train and locomotive sets, and worst of all, compensation claims for those killed in the crash itself. He survived and got a couple of years in jail - not enough.
Again, do submitters ever read the article they refer to ?
The problems had almost nothing to do with poor geography, and everything to do with some countries taking extreme exception to the representation of disputed territory.
C'mon Slashdot Editors - reject the submission if its as lame as this one - no doubt you accepted this one, but rejected 10 other submissions that were much more to the point.
When I made my original post, the submission clearly stated 'Abu Dhabi' as the location for BOTH facilities - chess computer and chess center. [Other posters pointed this out]. My comment was based on the submission on the chess center being wrong at that time. Don't believe everything you read !
Its NOT Abu Dhabi, its Dubai - very close to each other, but seperate soverign states (although they are often described as Gulf Emirates).
Dubai is in the midst of a massive tourism push, spending billions of pounds/dollars/whatever on tourism projects. They have some of the best hotels in the world there.
I've been to Dubai and its a cracking place - all the mystic and personality of the Gulf Arab world, without too much(yet) of the raving fundamentalism. [For some who lived for 3 years in Saudi Arabia, Dubai was the promised land - the enjoyment of living in the gulf with legal booze !]
The reason he asked the same question 14 times was that he wanted a straight answer and the politician concerned (as usual for all politicians) wouldn't give one.
If this is demo for Homeland Security in the United States, why do they appear to be looking at an aerial photo of St. Peters Square in Rome ? (it looks like it towards the right of the photo - the city is European by the look of it)
There is an island of the north west coast of Scotland called Gruinard Island. In 1942 the Governent carried out Anthrax Tests there. In 1990 it was 'declared safe' but I wouldnt be in a hurry to visit it.
It might have something to do with the fact that the entire chain is up for sale at the moment.
My wife and I went to the Cinema last week. The nearest one is an Odeon, so I went to the website using IE. After a lot of arsing about, I still wasn't quite the wiser about the start times, as it has a nasty habit of changing the APPARENT selection as you try to look at the start times.
Their website has been rubbish for a couple of years now and still is. For god sake, what do you need to provide ?
Cinema Locations
Movies showing
Start Times
On-Line Booking
Its not rocket science is it ? The marketing pillock who signed off on that layout should be sacked. Their competitors UCI is much simpler and easier to navigate.
While I'm on this, if anyone who works at Odeon reads this, please, please, please get a cleaning team to Epsom and give the carpets a good hoover and wash - they look filthy. Also, memo to the manager - if someone spills an entire tub of popcorn on the floor, why not get it cleaned up rather than leaving it there for a couple of hours ?
I can remember a bonded whisky warehouse, I think it was in Dumbarton, where they uses Geese as an intruder alarm. I saw quite a large group of them wandering around outside it. Rumour has it, they were the best theft prevention as they would attack ANYONE who went near them.
I don't think they have been used for a few years now but it was one of the stories that used to crop up in the 'Sunday Post' (that twee publication) every 10 years.
Maggie is a paragon of Socialist Virtue compared to the Sleaze and 'jobs for the boys' that Blair operates now. Lets flush even more taxpayers money away on wasted Private Finance Projects.
Maggie might have been a hard-nosed bitch, but her motivation was to STEM the flood of taxpayers money being wasted, not to increase it. I doubt if Thatchers government would have blown nearly a billion quid on the Millenium Dome.
Whatever wanker is moderating today needs his head examined. Look at the original post. Look at my post. Is it just possible I might be making a valid point. The original post has absolutely no reason to be put up on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
This page would tend to indicate that the rumours are not true. If they were, I'm sure by now the truth would have come out.
Look at the casualties taken by American forces as they moved across the Pacific - the Japanese at that time were happy to sacrifice pilots in Kamikaze raids. The infantry on the ground refused to surrender and had to be burned out by Flamethrowers.
There is no doubt that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in casualties on all sides of well in excess of a million people - the Japanese government at the time would have ensured this.
Whilst the dropping of the bombs may seem a shameful act today, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Ask the populations of America [and Australia and the UK, whose soldiers suffered terribly in Prisoner of War camps at the hands of the Japanese Military] in 1945 what they would wish to do, the answer would have been quite clear - drop the bombs, stop the war and get our loved ones home. And yes, there was a political dimension - the weapsons use was an indicator to Stalin of the power America now posessed - remember that even prior to the fall of Berlin, relations between the Western Powers and Soviet Russia were worsening all the time.
Finally to even try to compare the genocidal tactics of the Nazis with the dropping of atomic weapons is shameful, and shows a poor and blinkered understanding of history.
I mentioned this to my wife, who is a Matron for a number of wards in a hospital in the UK. Staffing is a perennial problem, and even if you have all your job openings filled, you will always need cover now and then. When extra staff are needed, they use nurses from an internal agency which employs only internal staff who want to earn extra, and only in an absolute emergency are external agency staff used since they cost a huge amount - the whole reason is that there are minimum staffing levels that must be adhered to for legal reasons and if you are short-staffed, people become overstressed and thats when mistakes happen.
She thought it was an interesting idea, although she wasn't too sure about the lowest bidder concept. Then again, no-one is being forced to take these rates [the staff are normally employed anyway] and it would probably work in your favour if you took unsociable hours or very-last minute shifts.
If most of the equipment are servers etc, put them in a sealed server room with extracator fans ducted to outside the building. With remote access, you shouldn't need to go their very often :->
Anything that would be considered a desktop, bin it - you'll never get it smelling good enough. In the UK, if it smelt that bad, the Health and Safety people would not be impressed, and you would almost certainly be told to junk all of it as its a health hazard. Ultimately, the cost of a new desktop is buttons compared to all the time you will waste trying to clean it, and then you'll still have to bin it after every employee refuses to touch it !
Quote from the article :
Sorry, but I think the oldest form of removable storage must be magnetic tape in all of its various forms. Ok, its not used in the domestic market, but its still there and in use in data centres etc.
I like the bit at the bottom:
I think the hardware support has moved on a bit from then....[My linux is currently running on a dual-processor pentium with SCSI raid array].
However, our organisation needs a scalable website, tied in to Oracle [in particular Oracle IFS], with a structured environment that can be deployed on Sun, Linux and Windows boxes [Note : Windows for development only !]. We're also developing two allied desktop applications which tie back into the same database for resale to large companies.
When you are talking about ENTERPRISE solutions, perl CGI, Python, Zope etc is not good enough. They might be great on a small scale or for 'hard-core' development, but then you have a development team of 20 people, with a website that is the organisations bread and butter, Java fits the bill.
Java is a tool - just like every other programming language.
People do/don't use Java for many reasons - the choice of a programming language in a commercial environment depends on many different factors.
I work in Java - I can't say it excites me but it does the job.
I've already pointed out that its a mistake - I meant 350 a YEAR, not a month
Sorry, that should have read 350 a YEAR, not a month - I should read the f***ing post before I submit it.
Sorry, I'm a bit of a twat - that should read 350 a YEAR, not a month.
Its not an issue in the UK as there are no medical bills of sorts, as the NHS picks up the bill. Having said that, there has been noises about picking up the cost of treatment from insurance companies.
In the UK I'm paying about 350 pounds a month to insure a 3 year-old 2 litre mondeo [4 door sedan for our cousins across the pond]. Thats covers me for any damage I may cause, including third party and also insures the car against damage [with a small excess]. I'm curious about how much it costs in the states.
The biggest problem in the UK is the amount of people driving with no insurance - one in ten in some studies. People with no insurance may tend to drive unroadworthy cars, they may not have a licence and they certainly won't have a tax disk. Traffic Police are as rare as hen's teeth now so your chances of being caught are much lower than usual and the penalties can be lower than the cost of insurance !
Insurance here is charged based on your location, age, occupation and licence history. The actual mileage is assumed almost. I would gladly sign up for this as my wife and I would save money - most of our trips are local 5-10 miles around Surrey.
As as an aside, the UK's biggest motor insurance claim comes from an incident when some idiot fell asleep at the wheel, came off a motorway and drove down and ebankment onto a railway line. His car caused a train to derail, which was then hit at high speed by another - 10 people killed. His insurance company is being hit for 11 million pounds, and thats just from company who owned the railway line. Claims from the two train companies involved for two very expensive wrecked train and locomotive sets, and worst of all, compensation claims for those killed in the crash itself. He survived and got a couple of years in jail - not enough.
The problems had almost nothing to do with poor geography, and everything to do with some countries taking extreme exception to the representation of disputed territory.
C'mon Slashdot Editors - reject the submission if its as lame as this one - no doubt you accepted this one, but rejected 10 other submissions that were much more to the point.
When I made my original post, the submission clearly stated 'Abu Dhabi' as the location for BOTH facilities - chess computer and chess center. [Other posters pointed this out]. My comment was based on the submission on the chess center being wrong at that time. Don't believe everything you read !
Do the submitters ever check what they type ?
Its NOT Abu Dhabi, its Dubai - very close to each other, but seperate soverign states (although they are often described as Gulf Emirates).
Dubai is in the midst of a massive tourism push, spending billions of pounds/dollars/whatever on tourism projects. They have some of the best hotels in the world there.
I've been to Dubai and its a cracking place - all the mystic and personality of the Gulf Arab world, without too much(yet) of the raving fundamentalism. [For some who lived for 3 years in Saudi Arabia, Dubai was the promised land - the enjoyment of living in the gulf with legal booze !]
What a spanner.
The reason he asked the same question 14 times was that he wanted a straight answer and the politician concerned (as usual for all politicians) wouldn't give one.
If this is demo for Homeland Security in the United States, why do they appear to be looking at an aerial photo of St. Peters Square in Rome ? (it looks like it towards the right of the photo - the city is European by the look of it)
From what my wife tells me (She is Ward Matron), you'd better off being treated by the nurses rather than the doctors most of the time.
There is an island of the north west coast of Scotland called Gruinard Island. In 1942 the Governent carried out Anthrax Tests there. In 1990 it was 'declared safe' but I wouldnt be in a hurry to visit it.
My wife and I went to the Cinema last week. The nearest one is an Odeon, so I went to the website using IE. After a lot of arsing about, I still wasn't quite the wiser about the start times, as it has a nasty habit of changing the APPARENT selection as you try to look at the start times.
Their website has been rubbish for a couple of years now and still is. For god sake, what do you need to provide ?
Its not rocket science is it ? The marketing pillock who signed off on that layout should be sacked. Their competitors UCI is much simpler and easier to navigate.
While I'm on this, if anyone who works at Odeon reads this, please, please, please get a cleaning team to Epsom and give the carpets a good hoover and wash - they look filthy. Also, memo to the manager - if someone spills an entire tub of popcorn on the floor, why not get it cleaned up rather than leaving it there for a couple of hours ?
I can remember a bonded whisky warehouse, I think it was in Dumbarton, where they uses Geese as an intruder alarm. I saw quite a large group of them wandering around outside it. Rumour has it, they were the best theft prevention as they would attack ANYONE who went near them.
I don't think they have been used for a few years now but it was one of the stories that used to crop up in the 'Sunday Post' (that twee publication) every 10 years.
Concorde could attain FL600 and pass through it - I flew across the Red Sea once at Mach 2 and FL620
Maggie is a paragon of Socialist Virtue compared to the Sleaze and 'jobs for the boys' that Blair operates now. Lets flush even more taxpayers money away on wasted Private Finance Projects.
Maggie might have been a hard-nosed bitch, but her motivation was to STEM the flood of taxpayers money being wasted, not to increase it. I doubt if Thatchers government would have blown nearly a billion quid on the Millenium Dome.
Whatever wanker is moderating today needs his head examined. Look at the original post. Look at my post. Is it just possible I might be making a valid point. The original post has absolutely no reason to be put up on Slashdot.
What spanner put this on on Slashdot ?
Is it news for nerds ? no.
Is it stuff that matters ? no.
What next ? Links to a detailed treatise on the physics of having a piss ?