Putting the Russians in the critical path or any project is unwise if you consider the ISS experience.
The ISS experience where their ability to launch when the shuttle was grounded saved the project? You're right, that was highly damaging. Much worse than deciding to leave a billion dollar science instrument on the ground.
As someone who worked partially on the CEV, it has been decided. it is in the requirements that Lockheed Martin furnish a vehicle that is capable of both.
The capability to be able to do both has been decided; the decision as to which they will preferably use on an ongoing basis has not been decided, and that is what TFA is about.
Just out of curiosity, do you expect the same unusual level of commitment from your staff? If you do, do you pay them substantially more than the going rate? Oh, and I hope if you do text in the meeting you mention it - "Let me check, I'll drop a message to one of my guys.". If you just went ahead and did it the impression I'd be left with is no one of someone who is connected with their happenings, but of someone who is rude and disinterested.
Hmm. Modded down for mentioning plasma cosmology. A similar thing happens on Wikipedia. I find the vigour with which plasma cosmology (small p,small s) is shouted down rather worrying. And it is almost always merely shouted down, I rarely see scientific arguments used against it, which is more than can be said for total bullshit like creationism. I'm not saying I believe everything proponents of Plasma Cosmology (big p, big s) have to say, just that the debate doesn't semm to be in the best traditions of science.
Personally, I get most of my TV shows (BSG/Dexter/The wire/Sopranos/the office/30 rock) from bittorent. And speaking as somebody who just recently gave up my cable TV, I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if the whole TV advertising industry went the way of the dodo.
Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. Not everybody can take the route of downloading TV from bittorrent because then nobody would be paying for the shows to be made so no shows would be made. If you want a real taste of an advertising-free world then buy the DVDs. OK, DVD is only a not-very-heavily-advertised-on medium, but it's the closest we've got.
Coasting to red lights only benefits YOU if you're in front. If there's a line of cars behind you, the accordion effect kicks in and everyone goes into stop-n-go mode.
The accordion effect kicks in with rapid changes in speed, not gradual ones. Now, if you don't make it to the lights before they change back to green you really are holding up traffic, but provided you do get to them before they change you're actually helping the traffic to flow more smoothly. The exception of course is lights which are operating with sensors rather than on a timer - the lights simply won't consider changing before you get close, so by unnecessarily delaying your arrival at them you're just slowing yourself down and harming your fuel economy. Oh, and while it may be economical to minimise you deceleration, it's most economical to get back up to speed quickly. All that time at intermediate speeds if you accelerate slowly hurts more than a quick burst at full throttle and the rest at your cruising speed - the engine is most economical at full throttle and the car is, till you approach motorway/highway speeds, more economical the faster you go.
the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes
Wow thats a lot of miles. This is a really good use of software engineering.
It is a lot of miles, but I can't see how the reduction in mileage could be down to the avoiding-left-turns aspect of the software. A reduction in time, absolutely. A reduction in fuel consumption, plausible - you're avoiding idling while waiting to turn. But assuming they could get close to a shortest path route if they chose to, avoiding left turns must sometimes mean going a block further over than the shortest path, or even doubling back right round a block. That may well be quicker and perhaps more fuel efficient too, but shorter? I can only assume whatever they were using before didn't get anywhere close to the shortest path.
Perhaps I'm giving the UPS software developers too much credit, but that sounds like an urban legend to me. The route planning is done by software, isn't it? I could understand "driving" in circles in the software as it avoided left turns while attempted to find the best route, but it would surely eventually have tried the left turn, found that to be better, discarded the route(s) with redundant right turns and presented the superior route with the left turn to the driver.
Ah, I see. That does sound unusual, normally being in the right-turn lane at the normal stop line would be sufficient to trigger it (though it may not trigger as soon you expect, sometimes you have to wait an entire sequence). It would work fairly naturally for a native driver though, as its normal here when the main light goes green to advance from the line to the kind of position you'd take up when turning right at a junction with no lights, even when you can't immediately get across. I guess that habit developed from lights with no filter, where there is a bit of a dash to turn right as the lights change. It could also be that being beyond the line means you're technically past those lights and can thus go whenever it's safe - I don't know if that's the legal position, but it is fairly normal behaviour. When they don't want you to turn right when the main light goes green there will be there will be two full sets of lights rather than one set with just the additional green filter arrow.
Just being in the turn-right lane should be enough for what? I'm not exactly sure I followed what your problem with them was. Do lights where you live stop three directions at once, allowing just one of the four directions to go as they please? That's extremely rare in the UK, if you're expecting that I could see why you may not get the point. Generally in the UK it's green for one road, in both directions, at a time. If you want to turn right and there's no filter light (that's what the arrows are called), you have to wait for a green and a gap. Even when it's very busy, two or three cars can get through in the gap created by the interval between one set of lights turning red and the other set turning green. Having to wait for a gap can create a backup of traffic waiting to turn right, hence the presence of filter lights at junctions where quite a lot of people want to turn right. The green arrow means you have priority (it has stopped the oncoming traffic), no green arrow but a green on the main lights means you can go but do not have priority over oncoming traffic. Using filters means cars traveling in opposite directions can both have priority (and know they have priority) to turn right simultaneously, which I don't think you could manage without them, you'd have to do it one direction at a time.
Eye for an eye is from the Old Testament. Testament 2.0 is much friendlier. It's a pity that project keeps forking, the fighting between the various camps can get quite nasty - it's almost as bad as Vi vs Emacs. I think we should try and build One True Religion 4.0 around an open, democratic standards process with periodic revisions to keep up with changing technology. The "benevolent dictator" model just leads to inflexible dogma after the benevolent dictator has died.
It's machine time you're devoting and machine time is cheap. It takes the human a few minutes to start it going and the machine does the rest. I fairly recently had my NSLU2 (a tiny Linux box with a 266mHz ARM processor and 32 MiB of RAM) unzip a 57 GiB file. It took it five days. It took me less than 30 seconds.
John C Dvorak is a notorious professional troll. His MO is to post something which is carefully designed so it will be interpreted as highly inflammatory (like this story), but he's always careful to give himself a plausible "out" by never being absolute or explicit, so he can later claim he was misinterpreted. If you read this article, you'll see all the hallmarks - he never actually says that computers for the third world are a bad idea, or that education isn't better than food relief. He just wants people to think that's what he's saying because it's controversial and gets the hits.
Okay, it's easy to format a drive, but why it is pre-formatted to NTFS?
Consider the options for a moment - your choices are basically NTFS or FAT32, because it simply has to work out of the box on Windows to succeed in the market. FAT32 may be tolerable for memory cards and USB sticks where you're unlikely to store files over 4 GiB (though that may soon change as more and more cards and sticks are > 4 GiB), but large files (DVD images, backups in the form of zip files, digital video...) are increasingly commonly used by regular people. If their drive didn't work with large files they'd think it was broken. I bet Seagate are seeing the number of those support incidents steadily increasing.
It's worse for Mac users because they only get NTFS read support of of the box, but Mac users are used to having to reformat external drives anyway, because the two backup options commonly used with Macs (bootable clone or disk image) just don't work with FAT32. I know there is fairly decent NTFS read/write support available for Linux, but I don't know if it's on by default in most desktop distributions (and I know it's not verifiably reliable because MS won't release the specs).
NTFS may be a bad choice, but it's no worse than the other choices, its just a different set of tradeoffs. There simply isn't a good cross-platform filesystem and I doubt there will be unless Microsoft release the specs for NTFS. Microsoft aren't going to include support for anything else and even if they did it'd take the best part of a decade before it was widespread enough to be a sensible default.
Is it? In practice, with all else being equal, I mean. I can't say I've ever actually wanted to kill someone, but I do know that there's a part of my brain which has repressed the urge to punch someone in the face at times. If that part of my brain stopped working there would be a few people out there with bloody noses; I would be a more violent person (well, a violent person - I've not hit anybody in anger since I was about 10).
We as a society don't want to see your sex life. We have our own, and we're quite happy with it -- more so when we don't have to internally compare ours with yours.
Who made you spokesperson for the society? You certainly don't speak for me. I don't mean that I especially want to know about your sex life or that of the GP of course, but I find the repression of discussion about sex, erm, repressive. We'd all have better sex and feel better about it if it was more openly discussed and more truthfully represented in the media. Surely comparing sex lives with normal people is more healthy and less likely to lead to negative comparisons than comparing it with the main source of detailed representations of sex in our society - commercial porn. I talk to people about how I fix my car and put up shelves and they reciprocate. In turn we both learn something and get better at fixing cars and putting up shelves. Why not do the same for sex? It's not just about learning to have more fun, there are social benefits to being open about sex too, for example countries where sex is more openly discussed (scandinavian countries spring to mind) have lower rates of teen pregnancy.
I'll tell you, if Kryten or another polyhedrally-headed entity walked past just after "Dr Kawashima" made the same joke about the weather for the sixth day in a row and made me do some more acrostics before letting me get on with my training or sudoku, that unlucky fucker would see some violence. Oh yes.
They said they came fom a much larger organisation. That probably means they have never had to actually do anything themselves. They're probably a pure manager, totally non-technical. Managing your strategic planning is important, but I bet this CIO represents at least 20% of their IT salary budget, and it's just not that important.
Why not also mention that the 360 has the best warranty? Why not mention why (hint, red rings for the holidays)?
Perhaps because the 360 doesn't have the best warranty; the Wii has the best warranty (15 months if you register). Microsoft only offer the extension specifically for the red ring of death, the warranty for the whole device is 12 months.
I certainly don't lose any sleep over the risk of the FSF "going bad", it gets an appropriate level of concern - not much, not often. I never said it was a huge threat, but to suggest it deserves zero concern or that even discussing the possibility is silly is, to my mind, silly. Taking part in a discussion just to say that the discussion is pointless seems an even greater waste of time:)
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The ISS experience where their ability to launch when the shuttle was grounded saved the project? You're right, that was highly damaging. Much worse than deciding to leave a billion dollar science instrument on the ground.
The capability to be able to do both has been decided; the decision as to which they will preferably use on an ongoing basis has not been decided, and that is what TFA is about.
Just out of curiosity, do you expect the same unusual level of commitment from your staff? If you do, do you pay them substantially more than the going rate? Oh, and I hope if you do text in the meeting you mention it - "Let me check, I'll drop a message to one of my guys.". If you just went ahead and did it the impression I'd be left with is no one of someone who is connected with their happenings, but of someone who is rude and disinterested.
Hmm. Modded down for mentioning plasma cosmology. A similar thing happens on Wikipedia. I find the vigour with which plasma cosmology (small p,small s) is shouted down rather worrying. And it is almost always merely shouted down, I rarely see scientific arguments used against it, which is more than can be said for total bullshit like creationism. I'm not saying I believe everything proponents of Plasma Cosmology (big p, big s) have to say, just that the debate doesn't semm to be in the best traditions of science.
Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. Not everybody can take the route of downloading TV from bittorrent because then nobody would be paying for the shows to be made so no shows would be made. If you want a real taste of an advertising-free world then buy the DVDs. OK, DVD is only a not-very-heavily-advertised-on medium, but it's the closest we've got.
The accordion effect kicks in with rapid changes in speed, not gradual ones. Now, if you don't make it to the lights before they change back to green you really are holding up traffic, but provided you do get to them before they change you're actually helping the traffic to flow more smoothly. The exception of course is lights which are operating with sensors rather than on a timer - the lights simply won't consider changing before you get close, so by unnecessarily delaying your arrival at them you're just slowing yourself down and harming your fuel economy. Oh, and while it may be economical to minimise you deceleration, it's most economical to get back up to speed quickly. All that time at intermediate speeds if you accelerate slowly hurts more than a quick burst at full throttle and the rest at your cruising speed - the engine is most economical at full throttle and the car is, till you approach motorway/highway speeds, more economical the faster you go.
It is a lot of miles, but I can't see how the reduction in mileage could be down to the avoiding-left-turns aspect of the software. A reduction in time, absolutely. A reduction in fuel consumption, plausible - you're avoiding idling while waiting to turn. But assuming they could get close to a shortest path route if they chose to, avoiding left turns must sometimes mean going a block further over than the shortest path, or even doubling back right round a block. That may well be quicker and perhaps more fuel efficient too, but shorter? I can only assume whatever they were using before didn't get anywhere close to the shortest path.
Perhaps I'm giving the UPS software developers too much credit, but that sounds like an urban legend to me. The route planning is done by software, isn't it? I could understand "driving" in circles in the software as it avoided left turns while attempted to find the best route, but it would surely eventually have tried the left turn, found that to be better, discarded the route(s) with redundant right turns and presented the superior route with the left turn to the driver.
Ah, I see. That does sound unusual, normally being in the right-turn lane at the normal stop line would be sufficient to trigger it (though it may not trigger as soon you expect, sometimes you have to wait an entire sequence). It would work fairly naturally for a native driver though, as its normal here when the main light goes green to advance from the line to the kind of position you'd take up when turning right at a junction with no lights, even when you can't immediately get across. I guess that habit developed from lights with no filter, where there is a bit of a dash to turn right as the lights change. It could also be that being beyond the line means you're technically past those lights and can thus go whenever it's safe - I don't know if that's the legal position, but it is fairly normal behaviour. When they don't want you to turn right when the main light goes green there will be there will be two full sets of lights rather than one set with just the additional green filter arrow.
Just being in the turn-right lane should be enough for what? I'm not exactly sure I followed what your problem with them was. Do lights where you live stop three directions at once, allowing just one of the four directions to go as they please? That's extremely rare in the UK, if you're expecting that I could see why you may not get the point. Generally in the UK it's green for one road, in both directions, at a time. If you want to turn right and there's no filter light (that's what the arrows are called), you have to wait for a green and a gap. Even when it's very busy, two or three cars can get through in the gap created by the interval between one set of lights turning red and the other set turning green. Having to wait for a gap can create a backup of traffic waiting to turn right, hence the presence of filter lights at junctions where quite a lot of people want to turn right. The green arrow means you have priority (it has stopped the oncoming traffic), no green arrow but a green on the main lights means you can go but do not have priority over oncoming traffic. Using filters means cars traveling in opposite directions can both have priority (and know they have priority) to turn right simultaneously, which I don't think you could manage without them, you'd have to do it one direction at a time.
That depends on whether you view the problem as the lights not working properly right now, or the lights not working properly on a regular basis.
AhAhhh, the days of getting pwned by LPBs with ISDN.
Yeah, it sucks that nobody has invented a way to access video content over the internet.
Eye for an eye is from the Old Testament. Testament 2.0 is much friendlier. It's a pity that project keeps forking, the fighting between the various camps can get quite nasty - it's almost as bad as Vi vs Emacs. I think we should try and build One True Religion 4.0 around an open, democratic standards process with periodic revisions to keep up with changing technology. The "benevolent dictator" model just leads to inflexible dogma after the benevolent dictator has died.
It's machine time you're devoting and machine time is cheap. It takes the human a few minutes to start it going and the machine does the rest. I fairly recently had my NSLU2 (a tiny Linux box with a 266mHz ARM processor and 32 MiB of RAM) unzip a 57 GiB file. It took it five days. It took me less than 30 seconds.
John C Dvorak is a notorious professional troll. His MO is to post something which is carefully designed so it will be interpreted as highly inflammatory (like this story), but he's always careful to give himself a plausible "out" by never being absolute or explicit, so he can later claim he was misinterpreted. If you read this article, you'll see all the hallmarks - he never actually says that computers for the third world are a bad idea, or that education isn't better than food relief. He just wants people to think that's what he's saying because it's controversial and gets the hits.
Consider the options for a moment - your choices are basically NTFS or FAT32, because it simply has to work out of the box on Windows to succeed in the market. FAT32 may be tolerable for memory cards and USB sticks where you're unlikely to store files over 4 GiB (though that may soon change as more and more cards and sticks are > 4 GiB), but large files (DVD images, backups in the form of zip files, digital video...) are increasingly commonly used by regular people. If their drive didn't work with large files they'd think it was broken. I bet Seagate are seeing the number of those support incidents steadily increasing.
It's worse for Mac users because they only get NTFS read support of of the box, but Mac users are used to having to reformat external drives anyway, because the two backup options commonly used with Macs (bootable clone or disk image) just don't work with FAT32. I know there is fairly decent NTFS read/write support available for Linux, but I don't know if it's on by default in most desktop distributions (and I know it's not verifiably reliable because MS won't release the specs).
NTFS may be a bad choice, but it's no worse than the other choices, its just a different set of tradeoffs. There simply isn't a good cross-platform filesystem and I doubt there will be unless Microsoft release the specs for NTFS. Microsoft aren't going to include support for anything else and even if they did it'd take the best part of a decade before it was widespread enough to be a sensible default.
Is it? In practice, with all else being equal, I mean. I can't say I've ever actually wanted to kill someone, but I do know that there's a part of my brain which has repressed the urge to punch someone in the face at times. If that part of my brain stopped working there would be a few people out there with bloody noses; I would be a more violent person (well, a violent person - I've not hit anybody in anger since I was about 10).
Who made you spokesperson for the society? You certainly don't speak for me. I don't mean that I especially want to know about your sex life or that of the GP of course, but I find the repression of discussion about sex, erm, repressive. We'd all have better sex and feel better about it if it was more openly discussed and more truthfully represented in the media. Surely comparing sex lives with normal people is more healthy and less likely to lead to negative comparisons than comparing it with the main source of detailed representations of sex in our society - commercial porn. I talk to people about how I fix my car and put up shelves and they reciprocate. In turn we both learn something and get better at fixing cars and putting up shelves. Why not do the same for sex? It's not just about learning to have more fun, there are social benefits to being open about sex too, for example countries where sex is more openly discussed (scandinavian countries spring to mind) have lower rates of teen pregnancy.
I'll tell you, if Kryten or another polyhedrally-headed entity walked past just after "Dr Kawashima" made the same joke about the weather for the sixth day in a row and made me do some more acrostics before letting me get on with my training or sudoku, that unlucky fucker would see some violence. Oh yes.
They said they came fom a much larger organisation. That probably means they have never had to actually do anything themselves. They're probably a pure manager, totally non-technical. Managing your strategic planning is important, but I bet this CIO represents at least 20% of their IT salary budget, and it's just not that important.
Well, the articles are written by and for CIOs. When bullshitters are your target market ...
Perhaps because the 360 doesn't have the best warranty; the Wii has the best warranty (15 months if you register). Microsoft only offer the extension specifically for the red ring of death, the warranty for the whole device is 12 months.
I certainly don't lose any sleep over the risk of the FSF "going bad", it gets an appropriate level of concern - not much, not often. I never said it was a huge threat, but to suggest it deserves zero concern or that even discussing the possibility is silly is, to my mind, silly. Taking part in a discussion just to say that the discussion is pointless seems an even greater waste of time :)
Your whole argument seems to be "something else is more important, so you're wrong". That just doesn't make any sense.